This question was posed to me in 2017 by a community organizer in Durham, North Carolina. She asked everyone in the room to close their eyes and search our memories for a vision of what a safer city could look like. The question was a challenging one. At the time, our collective thoughts were still colored by the litany of unarmed Black people losing their lives at the hands of law enforcement.
Eric Garner in New York, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Walter Scott in North Charleston, Sandra Bland in Texas, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Philando Castile in St. Paul, and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge were all stolen from their respective families and communities over the prior three years. Some were stolen under the cover of darkness – others on camera in broad daylight. In each of these cases, Black people were taken by law enforcement under sworn oath to keep us safe.
So any question about safety, at least for a Black man like myself, is not one with a clean or simple answer. The question asks me where I would invest governmental resources. The question asks me who I would call first if my safety were threatened. The question asks me if I felt safe in my Black body in the moment – and if not, why?
To be honest, my deepest recollections of safety stem from childhood. Going to fishing trips and high school football games with my dad. Sunday morning church services watching my mom sing in the choir. Watching cartoons and reruns of Sanford and Son in my room on an old black-and-white television with bunny ear antennas. My greatest pressures in life were maintaining good grades and wondering if Michael Jordan would ever win his first championship. The only things I needed for safety were my family and community. My people kept me safe.
Maybe there’s a dash of naivete baked into my youthful nostalgia, but the safety I felt growing up in rural North Carolina never needed any investment in prisons or police. As long as my community was thriving and intact, my needs were taken care of. Now that I’m an adult, I’ve learned that public investment in an anti-racist community has never been as easy as my childhood memories may have implied, especially when competing against “tough on crime” politics and rhetoric.
Today, a fear-based narrative fuels public policy where Black children are seen as something closer to “super-predators” deserving of discipline than kids deserving of love. Perceived child villainy then justifies school suspension and expulsion, which are strongly correlated to school dropout. Children who drop out of school are over three times more likely to be arrested as adults later in life. Incarcerated adults then have a much harder time securing employment and housing opportunities – important factors needed to avoid recidivating back into the system. Our country’s prison population has swelled to 1.2 million people, with Black incarceration rates at five times more than our white counterparts. This could be a measure of failure or success depending on how you define community safety.
If your definition of safety is built on Black paranoia, or the need to profit financially off of incarcerated people, then the system’s design is probably working perfectly. But for those who define safety as the vision of a thriving, anti-racist, well-resourced community free of societal barriers, things must change with all deliberate speed.
If we learn nothing else from the first sentence of this essay: In order to get different answers regarding community safety, we may need to ask different questions.
Do the billions we’ve invested in prisons and police make us feel any safer? Would a comparable investment in schools, job creation, affordable housing, and mental health care be just as strong of a crime deterrent? Can we change a political culture to reward Black success over Black incarceration?
The answers for a safer world that’s not dependent on incarceration are there if we work for them, invest in them, and have the energy to maintain them. A safe Black community is always worth that work.
Delvin Davis is the Interim Policy Director with the Southern Poverty Law Center where, since 2018, he has conducted research to promote progressive public policy for criminal legal reform. His most recent work includes a five-part series titled “Only Young Once,” which details the dynamics of youth incarceration in the Deep South. Before SPLC, he was a Senior Researcher at the Center for Responsible Lending, where he did similar work in the field of economic justice – promoting regulation for predatory lenders and shrinking the racial wealth gap.