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“We Are We”—Police Propaganda vs Community Accountability for Youth Crime · Political Commentary Corner

• 0:27
  SPEAKER_06: Hello and welcome back to Political Commentary Corner.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_06: I'm your host, Lawrence Grand Prix, and we do a lot of analysis of other media here.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_06: And it's funny, getting some feedback from some previous shows, I never thought of what we were going to do here as any sort of reporting.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_06: But looking up data, exposing data, especially around the incident in Northwest Baltimore, where the accused Senator Dahlia Tar and just showing connections between people and her network, people say, Oh, thank you for the reporting.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_06: And it's like I didn't think of myself as a reporter, right?
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_06: But the idea of producing new knowledge as well as speaking back to what other people produce or using new knowledge to speak back to what other institutions produce, I think is interesting and important.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_06: So this is going to be an episode where we're going to do what we do here, which is from a specific context of black folk doing work in Baltimore speak back to the political media environment in a way that gives folks the tools they need to be able to advocate effectively for black folks.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_06: But from the perspective of a specific event, a specific event that was covered by mainstream media, but not covered in a way, for the most part, with one exception, that for really reflects the intent and depth of analysis that is deserved when you actually respect people as not just a two-minute segment on the nightly news, but as generators of political and intellectual philosophies about how to relate to in this incident a community tragedy, an elder who was attacked.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_06: So we went to a protest a few weeks ago that was the community responding to an elder who was intact in front of 7-Eleven.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_06: You may have remember seeing the video.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_06: And this incident was covered in a way that reflects mainstream media's obsession with policing and incarceration as accountability.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_06: But this is going to present the full context of that protest and really expose the nuance and diversity of opinions and the reality that the opinion on the ground of the black community, even in the face of what feels like incredible tragedy, is not what the mainstream media, be it Sinclair, Fox News, or even other, more theoretically aligned media, would be able to accommodate.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_06: So with that again, we thank you for continuing to engage this here in Political Commentary Corner.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_06: Please like and subscribe.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_06: Please share this with folks who you know maybe saw someone share the video and said this is crazy, lock them up, and you can say, hey, this is what actually happened.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_06: This is what people were actually calling for.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_06: And once again, please check out all the other great shows here on the Black Liberation Media Media Network.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_06: And with that, let's get to it.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_05: Drew, the community is calling on those suspects they told you to turn themselves in.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they want those kids held accountable after they attacked that older man at the 7-Eleven, leaving him with multiple cracked ribs and broken teeth.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: For Queen Mother Victoria Smith, the corner of Liberty Heights Avenue where this 7-Eleven sits is personal.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_10: The reason we're here is because one of our community elders was brutally beaten by six youth in front of this 7-Eleven.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_10: In front of the same 7-Eleven was where my youngest child, Victoria Swift, was brutally murdered in 2017.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's why when she and other organizers saw this video of an older man being attacked by multiple young people, they knew they needed to act.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_10: Because I knew what it would have meant to my direct family, and I knew what it would mean to the city to see an elder beat to death.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: In the video, you can see the suspects hitting the victim with a rifle and several crates.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: One suspect is shown repeatedly pointing a gun at the man's face.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: He continually gets up and at times confronts one of the armed attackers.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: People marched from the mall to the 7-Eleven where the attack occurred back on July 7th.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: Organizers say they want better from young people in the area and brought the community together to call for those suspects caught on camera to turn themselves in.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_06: Now, before we go any further, it may be useful to level set just a bit.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_06: Because there are two intersecting tragic stories that require a bit of expedition.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_06: If you're from Baltimore, you know what Mondomin Mall is.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_06: It is a large mall in West Baltimore, in a part of town that is not the most uh populated by people of middle class or upper middle class.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_06: It's more working class, and you know, there's some nice houses around there, but it's Copenhagen University, but it's also very close to North Avenue, just some neighborhoods that have abandoned homes.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_06: It has a reputation of being a mall where it's a large hub of young people going to or from school and became an epicenter of the 2015 uprising because the young people were stopped from going in the subway, because police um manufactured a claim that the young people were going to riot, and by blocking them from getting home from going to school basically caused the very ri quote unquote riot that they were trying to quote unquote stop.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_06: But beyond that, given that it's black folks in West Baltimore, it's seen as a space that is producing of uh violence, and unfortunately, sometimes empirically that's been the case.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_06: So there are two incidences.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_06: One is in 2017.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_06: There was a young man who happened to be a member of the Baltimore Aldra Project, so we know of him, and this incident sticks out in our memory because we shared the office with the Baltimore Aldra Project, which is the organization of this organizing activism around education as well as teaching math.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_06: So the young brother Victoria Swift was at the 7-Eleven, which is across the street from Mont Domin Mall.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_06: And this 7-Eleven, as stated, has become notorious because it is seen as a spot where the owner could do more in terms of lighting, security, to prevent people from hanging out outside of it, you know, selling loose cigarettes, you know, doing what folks do, but creating an environment that leads to violence that people say that the owner ignores because they're just trying to make money off the community.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_06: It's not someone from the community.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_06: They make money from the community and then just keep it moving.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_06: And so the parking lot becomes a space where again people are just hanging out, um, posted up, so you can have incidences where people engage each other and violence happens.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_06: So one incident happened in 2017, where the young brother Victoria Swift died, was murdered.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_06: And this is his mother seeing a separate incident happen in 2026, where in this case, an elder, 70 plus years old, he's known as Baba O'Day, and he had an African name because it's someone who was formerly in the Baltimore Black Panther Party, and it's part of Pan-African movement work here in Baltimore City, was trying to get into the 7-Eleven in 2026 at night.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_06: It was actually closed, but he didn't know it was closed.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_06: It wasn't well publicized what the hours were.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_06: And again, very lack security.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_06: Uh he's outside trying to get in, trying to get something, and people, young people with masks on, see him at the 7-Eleven trying to get in but can't get in, and use this as an opportunity to basically wild out.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_06: And so it does have a video camera.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_06: And this video camera footage, black and white, grainy uh footage goes viral.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_06: Young people with masks uh uh hitting the brother, kicking the brother, one of them appears to have a gun, one of them appears to have a sword.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_06: So this is very salacious footage that goes heavily viral and it's framed as these young kids, through the lens of Fox News' obsession with youth violence, feeds the rumor mill around lack of accountability, especially because it happens to an elder who is known for doing positive work in community.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_06: So a group of mamas have a protest, including the mama of the young man who died in 2017, after the Baba is hurt by these young folks to say, we as a community don't accept this, we need to do something.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_06: So one of the biggest complaints uh folks in community is that folks show up when something is going wrong, but folks don't show up when we respond.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_06: And this is uh WJZ showing up for the community response, which is laudable.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_06: I think, however, by focusing on the organizers in a particular story of Queen Mother Victorious talking about her son dying and her fear for the elder, please don't kill him.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_06: What it should be framed as a positive event is still framed through the lens of it being merely reactive to a tragic event.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_06: And very importantly, the conceptual framework of accountability is turning yourself in the young people turning themselves in.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_06: Now later in the story they do say turn yourselves in to us, the community, and we'll guide you through the process, but that's five seconds of, you know, a two-minute, thirty-second story that continues to center the violent attack and some of the more salacious imagery of the violent attack as the center for the response.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_06: This isn't framed as it really was as an extension of a larger community social movement like we've talked about ad nauseum, it's decreased uh murder and violence in the city forty to sixty percent over the past decade, really starting from the twenty fifteen uprising.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_06: And because of that lack of framing from what is supposed to be WJZ trying to be a more positive alternative to Fox News, the story then continues to function within the conceptual political framework of Fox News' coverage.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_06: So let's actually listen to Fox News.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_06: They did not cover the community response to the violence, because of course they didn't.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_06: But they did cover a few days after the initial event the response to the event that they're trying to manufacture a political response.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_06: So let's actually listen to what Fox News is doing with this footage of this elder being beat up.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_06: I think that exposes the limitations to what Jay-Z is doing.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_06: So let's listen to Fox News' follow-up story after their initial story of the elder being assaulted.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you recall that surveillance video continues to spark questions and outrage online.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: You can see those six suspects surround the elderly man.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: One person has what looks like a sword, and another has what appears to be an assault style rifle.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: The 74-year-old man knocked to the ground, and the group even repeatedly kicks him while he is still on the ground.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Friday, we send several questions to Governor Wes Moore, Senate President Bill Ferguson, and House Speaker Jocelyn Penyumelnick.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: We wanted to know the reaction to the video.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: If any juvenile justice issues will be brought up during the upcoming special session, we also asked, do you believe the Department of Juvenile Services is adequately addressing these ongoing problems?
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: And several community members argue enough is not being done to get this under control.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: What's your message to them?
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: She says she has confidence that Baltimore City leaders will uh find those responsible.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: She says that anyone who was involved, especially in that attack of that elderly man, need to be held accountable.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_06: So we talk about Sinclair, owned by David Smith, an avowed Republican, told Trump when he was elected, we're here to carry your message.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_06: People know about the stuff with Sinclair trying to kick Jimmy Kimmel off the air for what they said was an improper joke about the right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk, who was shot in Utah and died.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_06: This is an example of them executing a political agenda.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_06: Because in Maryland, we were going to have a special session on reding.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_06: And they're literally trying to force what something they know is not going to happen.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_06: They're saying, because we're coming back into session, we only have a hundred-day session where state government is in session here in Maryland.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_06: They're saying, hey, look at this elder being beat up.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_06: You're going to come back into session to do redistricting.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_06: Are you going to take up youth justice?
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_06: These youth are out of control.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_06: Where's the accountability?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_06: And when, of course, the lawmakers don't, because that's ridiculous.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_06: Their session starts in January.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_06: They're not going to randomly take up youth, a very complex issue of youth justice in August.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_06: Then Sinclair says, there they go, doing nothing in the face of community, demanding, begging for some response to elders being assaulted.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_06: And that's the political nuance of Sinclair.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_06: They're trying to create like a ledger where every time they can manufacture the illusion of politicians not acting, it's like another strike against them, another strike against them, where politicians feel like, oh, we gotta do something.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_06: Because Sinclair keeps playing these strikes on us.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_06: And they keep pumping it out over and over again.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_06: Do nothing, politicians do nothing.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_06: It's community begs for something to be done in the face of their pain.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_06: And just by manufacturing, by explicitly tying it to special session.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_06: And because Jay-Z did not include more stories from the actual protest, expanding the vision of what accountability actually looks like from the perspective of community, Fox News can hijack the narrative because accountability in Jay-Z's story, and of course in Fox News' story, is still tied only or centrally into a police response, an increased police response.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_06: While Jay-Z is trying to be like community calls and to turn themselves in, we all know Fox 45 is going to say expand the ability of police and prosecutors to put youth in jail for longer sentences, repeal the rights they have against protections from interrogation without a lawyer being present.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_06: Increase the ability to charge them as adults.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_06: It's really only because we decrease the ability to charge them as adults that they felt empowered to do this in the first place.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_06: So there's all these consistent, nonstop attacks on youth that Sinclair is being explicit as making a political attack to force Democrats to move more to the right on criminal justice issues.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_06: Studies have shown from people at the Sentencing Project that of stories where the news coverage mentions the age of the offender, over 52% of the time it is a juvenile.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_06: So they're trying to carve out an explicit focus on juvenile crime because they're kind of they're trying to make it like, oh, it's compassionate.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_06: We love these youths.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_06: We have to bring them in and hold them accountable, but the only way to do that is to charge them as adults and to use the pain of community when incidents like this happen to push in an offender narrative that says we have to charge these youths.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_06: But what's missing from this story?
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_06: In any other story just about from Fox News, there's going to be the words of the victim or someone speaking directly on behalf of the victim.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_06: And it's conspicuous in an absence because of who this victim is in this incident.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_06: Because typically this is just a regular person in the community that says someone gotta be held accountable, police need to do their job, you gotta lock them up, but this is not a regular victim.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_06: This is a former member of the Baltimore Black Panther Party, Baba O'Day.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_06: So to correct some of the limitations of WEJZ's 13's coverage of the protest, I want to play for you some of Baba O'Day, what he actually said at the protest, and it was very emotional.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_06: So I didn't get everything I wanted to get because I was too busy listening and responding to the emotion in the crowd.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_06: So again, this is a large crowd.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_06: The organizers are predominantly elder women, but the speakers were middle-aged and older black men.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_06: So we're gonna have mostly black men speaking because it's the mamas who are organizing the protest.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_06: And when Baba O'Day stands up to speak, he provides some context and nuance that does not allow him to neatly fall into the narrative of Fox 45, which is these kids are wild, lock them up, which is why they don't cover him.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_06: Or Jay-Z doesn't cover him, because his vision is too expansive for them to easily fit him in a two-minute, three-minute segment.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_06: So let's actually listen to Baba O'Day.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_06: Because we keep always hearing about what about the victims, what about the victims?
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_06: And here's the actual victim and what he actually has to say.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_09: And they need to know that this is what needs to be done.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_09: This is my family.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_06: That audio is actually from news coverage from the Progressive Real News Network.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_06: And we'll talk a little bit about them, more about them later.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_06: But just to focus on his comments, because it's always a mixture of the black community when we talk about incidents like this, as Bob O'Day says, we don't believe this behavior can be tolerated.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_06: But the solution is not incarceration.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_06: Bob O'Day specifically says it's political education.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_06: An education that this behavior is not to be tolerated or respected.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_06: But it only truly makes sense if you understand it from the context of what he says afterwards, which is that he is a veteran of the Black Panther Party and a descendant of someone who was in Marcus Garvey's UNIA.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_06: Because when we talk about education in our current environment, it's very easy for individuals to believe what we're talking about is condescending, moralizing, beating young people over the head about how bad they are and how negative the behavior is and why they failed and why they're not good and why they need to do better.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_06: But within the context of Baba O'Day calling himself a veteran of the Black Panther Party and descendants of the UNIA is to say that this sort of gangsterism, hoodland behavior, hoodrat behavior, as he calls it, is not acceptable because it is an extension, as the Black Panther Party would often say is they organized the lump and proletariat, the hustlers, the pimps, the army veterans who came home being cre became criminals into Panzer Cadre.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_06: That's the system of white supremacy that teaches you to pray on your own people.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_06: In the world we don't have power for ourselves for ourselves, we seek lateral aggression, power over people who are powerless like us, because there are no consequences to attacking them.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_06: And because the consequences of attacking vertically, the true forces of oppression that make us feel powerless are seen as so devastating.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_06: A lesson inculcated by incarceration, a lesson taught to us by things like the counterintelligence program.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_06: Baltimore's Black Pancer Party was one of the very few that was infiltrated from its very inception.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_06: One of the founding members, Warren Hart, was an FBI informant.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_06: And it's that lesson that politically you cannot attack the forces above you.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_06: You can only feel power by striking out around you.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_06: This is why we talk about youth incarceration, increasing violence recidivism.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_06: Because these youth incarceration environments are designed to make you feel powerless.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_06: And folks don't come out accepting powerlessness, accepting being broken.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_06: They come out and they feel powerful the only way they know how, attacking those around them.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_06: So we as a community, we bear the consequences of the failed juvenile justice system.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_06: And what do we get for that failure?
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_06: We get our quotes abstracted, our pain weaponized by Fox News, and the world gets the message that accountability means the community is demanding people be locked up.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_06: When this elder, this veteran of the Black Panther Party, is telling you explicitly that it is the power to create a family and to enforce the rules of the family by giving power to the community to re-socialize these young people.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_06: His victimhood is illegitimate and silenced by being excluded from Fox News and unfortunately even being excluded from WJZ 13.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_06: And it's because it is messy and complicated and comes from a political philosophy that does not neatly fit into the infotainment framework of our news environment, which is why.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_06: We need spaces like this, but also spaces like the real news network from which this audio is pulled.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_06: So we'll talk more about their story later.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_06: One thing the real news story did capture was the some of the demands from the protest.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_06: And again, we're gonna get to the speakers and the context behind how we should interpret what people are truly asking for.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_06: But in light of not just this incident, but as we gave the explanation, another incident almost 10 years ago, where another young man lost his life in this very parking lot.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_06: In a manner that might surprise some people, the demands were actually targeted not at the police, but at the 7-Eleven owner.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_06: And let's actually listen to some of those demands.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_06: Let's have a conversation about why these demands may come out the way they come out, because they challenge so many assumptions about what community wants in response to crime.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_08: This location has witnessed a brutal assault of a 74-year-old man, elder, an overnight break-in, and years of prior tragedy at the same address, including the loss of a young man's life in March 2017.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_08: We believe you want this corner to be safe as much as we do.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_08: It is in that spirit cordial return that we present the following list of demands.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_08: Number one, we are giving you a 72-hour notice to post your hours of operation in lettering large enough to be read clearly from the street.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_08: Number two, cut down the overgrown bushes that create a hidden look where the perpetrators can wait and hide to attack unsuspecting customers and install brighter lighting throughout the parking lot.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_08: Number three, we urge you to donate towards the community reward fund, establish your help of preping the assailants, and toward the medical course of the 74-year-old elder who was attacked.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_08: Number four, invest in stronger security measures, including low-down security grades when the store is closed to deter further break-ins.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_08: And number five, acquire off-duty police presence to enforce a no-ordering policy and help assure the safety of your customers and this community.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_08: This is not a request made lightly, and it is not one we intend to let go unanswered.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_08: We ask for a response and a plan of action within a reasonable time, and we will report back to the Wii.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_08: Until then, we will continue to stand on this corner in agreement until this community is safe.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_08: Respectfully, but we So why?
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_06: Why would community present this as part of their demands?
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_06: There were other demands as well, including the offering of a reward for people with information that would lead to the young people being apprehended.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_06: But it wasn't what you would expect watching Fox News or even from the WJZ story talking about quote unquote accountability.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_06: It wasn't we demand the police arrest these youth.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_06: Part of the framework of this is again this understanding that they don't want to target their demands towards the police, but you also can't completely ignore the reality that this parking lot has empirically been unsafe.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_06: So as opposed to making demands on the police, they make demands to the store owner, who in the minds of the community is reaping profit from the community and choosing not to reinvest that profit in a manner that might make the service they provide safe.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_06: So lighting, being able to have a uh bring down great to make it very clear the store is closed, being able to post the hours, all this would prevent people from because some 7-Elevens are open 24 hours, which is the whole point of like 7-Eleven open till 11 in a lot of places 7 days a week.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_06: This apparently is not one of those 7-Elevens, so people get confused, they come in the parking lot, people are doing the things they do at night in empty parking lots, and confusion happens.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_06: So we hear a lot on corporate radio, talk radio about user-friendly communities.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_06: So this is someone from the community saying we don't want our communities to be user-friendly for people who may be planning harm for our elders, but we also don't want to make them user-friendly for the police.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_06: We don't want to make our demands user-friendly for media that we know is going to take them and directly leverage them towards incarcerating our youth.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_06: And looking at the police violence, looking at the mass incarceration of youth that is driving some of these dynamics, we're going to target our demands towards something we feel can provide concrete short-term increases in public safety to prevent what feels like this frustrating cycle, where this hot spot continues to be an incident of violence, so we don't, as a community, keep having to come back to this parking lot when something tragic happens.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_06: But we're not going to use it as an opportunity to bash our youth.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_06: And I think that's a lesson here, not only for people who have misconceptions about our community being so beaten down by crime that they actually love the police and demand the police.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_06: That's not what's happening here.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_06: But it's also a lesson to folks who may have a very simplistic, abstracted view about police abolition.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_06: That you can't have short-term mechanisms that ignore people's fundamental demand for safety.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_06: So we need to think strategically about public safety investments that meet people's concrete needs short-term that are not the police.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_06: I don't hear abolitionists talking about the built environment in ways that can improve it to prevent police investment, because the police are co-opting these demands to say we will be the ones to do the police substation, we'll be the ones to do the lighting, we'll do the ones that shift the built environment to prevent these hotspots from happening, and we'll bring more police presence.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_06: It's not an accident they say we want off-duty police because we don't want you coming in here with your police powers, putting every shoplifter into the system.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_06: We want to be able to have a sense that this hotspot can stop being a space where we have these gut-wrenching memorials, but not feed the carcassarial policing machine.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_06: And it's that specificity and nuance that I feel actually folks on the left could learn from our community that we're not going to accept just long-term solutions like redistribution of wealth.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_06: We're going to need short-term solutions because we feel the pain of seeing these incidents of crime happen to us over and over again because of the way the built environment makes some spaces hotspots for crime.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_06: And there is something to be said about smoothing out those hotspots.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_06: I was robbed in the hotspot.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_06: There was like a little nook.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_06: I went in there, God pulled a gun on me, and that was that.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_06: And as much as I don't want the hotspots argument to justify more policing, now they have a gate around that hotspot.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_06: I'm like, well, that's probably a good idea.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_06: Because with the gate, you don't need a police to be stationed there because the gate is there.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_06: These can be co-opted into abolitionist frameworks, anti-policing frameworks.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_06: But we need to know enough about how crime actually happens to have the sophistication that people in community have if we if leftists want to make this argument against Rutnik Police.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_06: Within that spirit of listening to community, I again want to forefront and center the voices of some of the women who organized this march.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_06: We're going to get to the speakers.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_06: One of the ones you're going to hear from is Mama Gwen, who is someone who was formerly incarcerated, goes to a lot of political testimony in Annapolis, a lot of events in Baltimore City representing the interest of formerly incarcerated people, formerly incarcerated women, and also generally a supporter of LBS and police reform, incarceration reform.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_06: So actually hearing her give the full context for what brought her to want to help organize this protest.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_06: I help give even more clarity to what people are actually demanding, and actually hearing how some of the things we talked about before, about recognizing our young people, loving on them, recognizing the pain and suffering they face, and also countering one of the critical arguments we hear about what about the family.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_06: So here are the mamas of the protest in a story presented by the Real News Network, giving more explanation.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_11: I think one of the most significant things about this gathering that we had today is that it was not retaliatory or or negative.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_11: It was not uh we against them or pointing fingers.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_11: Pointing fingers.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_11: It was to say we are here.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_11: We didn't point fingers at our young people because we know we got some good young people in the city, many of them that were out here with us today.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_11: But we all go got some trouble, young people.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_11: Sister said it best when she said it earlier.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_11: Some are broken, some are just bent.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_11: Hopefully, we can get to the bent once before they get broken.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_11: That's what this cry is about.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_11: That's what the query and cry was for all organizations to say, hey, we are here for our young people, we are here for our elders, we are here for our neighbors in the community.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_11: We are here.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_11: All you gotta do is just look around your community.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_11: If you don't see us in your community, call one of our orders.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_11: We'll come.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_11: We got brothers who can walk the streets with us.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_11: We got brothers who can go up in the alleys with us.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_11: We got sisters who know that our young sisters who are running up in stores and just grabbing stuff.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_11: No, no, no.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_11: You don't have to do that.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_11: We know how to go get your nails done.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_11: We can get your hair done.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_11: Come see us.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_11: Come see us.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_11: That's what we're saying to our young people.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_11: We are here for them.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_11: And yes, you must be held accountable for your actions.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_11: I did.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_11: I served 16 years of a sentence.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_11: Guess how many years I was supposed to serve?
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_11: How many?
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_11: 400 months.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_11: I'm gonna let you all edit up.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_11: And the ones who can't edit up, that's why we need to change our board education.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_11: That's a whole nother story.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_11: But I'm not gonna tell you how many next 400 months is figured out.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_11: But I did 16 years of a 400 month sentence.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_11: I was transformed.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_11: And if old as I was can transform, I know we can help these young people who have a whole life ahead of themselves.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_11: And that's what we're trying to do.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_11: Save our youngsters mainly before they get into the system.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_11: But even the ones that get into the system, we're here to help you so that when you come out of that system, you will come out and do what we're doing.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_11: Do with the 10 day family, do with some of these other young or the crowd organizations, do what they're doing, help each other.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_11: Tell your story.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_11: Your story is impactful.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_11: Your story can help somebody.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_11: You have a story, young man, you have a story, young lady.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_11: And I know some of you might be mad, not mad at me.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_11: Look in the mirror, tell yourself who you're mad at, and address that situation before you come out here and get into some trouble that you really don't want to get into.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_11: We are here.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_11: For the six men who assaulted my brother, we are here.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_11: All one of us.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_11: Yes, you have to be held accountable, but in that accountability, you will have support.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_11: You will have support so that you won't become broken.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_11: We don't need more broken kids in our house.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_11: This is a healing city.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_11: This is a city that can be healed.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_11: And we are here to say that the healing has begun by the week.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_10: Like mama said earlier, we're not blaming anybody.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_10: There are no finger pointing.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_10: This is not anyone's fault.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_10: If it is, it's all of our fault.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_10: There's no one person we can blame for this situation.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_10: I heard someone say we need to lock them up and throw away the key.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_10: I think, I hope, and I believe that we've had enough of that.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_10: There's a system set up that eats, that sets up retirement funds, that sets up vacation time for our children being incarcerated, being in a system where they're abused, where they're raped, where they're tormented, where their lives literally stop.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_10: That has to stop.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_10: That has to stop.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_10: We can no longer accept our children being put into these systems and saying, lock them up and throw away the key.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_08: I want to say one important thing.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_08: People say that things start in the home.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_08: Some people don't have a home.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_08: We have so many people who are homeless, families that are living out here in these woods.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_08: Um people who have no resources whatsoever, no family in foster care.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_08: We have the largest number of foster care um people in the um system, youth in the system, but we're only 13% of this whole national population.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_08: So if you keep saying that it begins at the home, did you check out whose home life you're talking about?
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_08: Because everybody don't have a home.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_08: We don't even know if these young men had a home.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_08: Right, we don't know where they come from, and we don't know that if their home is safe and protected and wholesome.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_08: How do we know if they're not being abused or abandoned or neglected or molested?
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_08: We don't know what that is, it's in the body.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_08: It's in the body.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_08: And so what we're gonna teach them is something called clean talk.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_08: We're gonna teach them about facts, feelings, judgments, and outcomes.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_08: We are going to change the dynamic of how we communicate with these people, with our babies.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_08: And that is where we're going with this clarion call, Baltimore.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_06: So, in order, that was Mama Gwen, Mama Victory, and Mama Ujima talking about the incident.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_06: And I want to give them space for you to actually hear what they're saying, because in our sound by economy, part of the reason we do this podcast is these are not issues that can always even fit in our op-ed.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_06: To feel the pain, but also the context behind these issues.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_06: It's not something that can be easily conveyed in the two-minute evening news segment.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_06: And again, the precision and sophistication with which these folks are addressing this horrific incident, but still foregrounding the humanity of the young people who committed this heinous crime, is something we all need to learn from.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_06: So we need to hear from these women because they're not going to be on Fox News.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_06: They're not going to be, unfortunately, sometimes even on WJZ in their full context.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_06: All these people were interviewed in the first story, you heard.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_06: But did you hear that?
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_06: Did you hear the humanity and the we don't want to bring a carcereal system in which people are abused, sexually abused, empirically, black youths are abused in these systems, and then they come out, and then we have to deal with these ramifications of the abuse.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_06: So Mama Gwen at the beginning, I think, brilliantly talks about things like you don't need to go in and smash and grab.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_06: We got food.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_06: You don't need to feel like you need to rob to get money to get your nails done.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_06: We can get your nails done.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_06: These things feel petty, but within the context of the psychological violence that makes young people feel worthless, being able to give people context where we can help you materially meet your material needs, but also your psychological needs for status.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_06: Beyond feeling like attacking your elder is a way to achieve some sort of status.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_06: Again, it wasn't about robbing the elder.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_06: It was about a sense of power and a sense of status, shared status about being perceived as someone who could do that to someone in that environment.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_06: And by explicitly calling that out and saying you have to turn yourself in.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_06: We do not accept this behavior, but turn yourself into us.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_06: And we will figure out a way, if possible, that you won't be left alone in this violent system.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_06: But also your behavior is not acceptable.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_06: We want to get you before you get in there.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_06: But if you you have to go into the system, when you come out, we want to be able to take care of you.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_06: That is a level of sophistication that explicitly says we do not accept the violent carcassorial system, and folks have to be accountable in a way that you're not going to hear almost anywhere else in the media.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_06: And I want to focus on the last point about Mama Ojima.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_06: Because we're hearing this talking point more and more.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_06: And this is something very common in black communities.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_06: What about the parents, the family, where they're learning at home?
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_06: Getting again this desire for the community to socialize our youth to be productive members of the village.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_06: And when that fails, many people feel so frustrated and angry they then want to punish people who they feel have failed to replicate the cultural and communal norms of the village in their youths.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_06: Well, if your youth is out here wild and you need to go to jail.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_06: And Mammo Gmek brilliantly counters that narrative that we're hearing more and more by saying some of these people may not have a family.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_06: It starts at home.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_06: They may not have a home.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_06: We don't know what's happening in their home.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_06: Abuse, neglect, violence, this might be the context, the reality of the home, so it doesn't make sense to focus on criminalizing the home.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_06: That's just going to give people less capacity to do the forms of social replication of norms that we need.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_06: The way you get people to have better norms is not to criminalize people who are struggling to use the home as a way to help replicate the norms of the village.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_06: That just makes it even harder for that household to do that work.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_06: But in our pain, in our frustration, basic logical arguments like, oh, these people are hurt.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, this home might need some help, just gets lost in the sauce.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_06: Not in terms of excusing the behavior, but literally if we want to be safe as a community, we do not want to destroy the capacity of the home that we're looking to help produce good members of the village by locking up people who are struggling with the young people in their household.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_06: It makes no logical sense.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_06: But in the face of pain, logic goes out the window.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_06: In the face of the humanity of black people and black families and black households, we lose the ability to think about them rationally because we just get angry and blame them when they become the visible piece of the iceberg for the reality of white supremacist capitalism, which is making all of our lives difficult, making all of us feel unsafe.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_06: Knowing we're not going to ever truly have safety until we deal with the system of violence, and by the very least, not replicating it in our response to the violence caused by the very system that's asking us to turn to it when it caused the problem in the first place.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_06: So with that, now we can continue to get into some of the voices from the protests that were not heard in any of the media pieces.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_06: So these are actually recordings that I did of people at the protest.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_06: So the first thing I want to do, because it's so essential, is what is the solution?
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_06: And so these are three different speakers talking about different forms of programming that they see as solutions, upstream, preventative solutions and rehabilitative solutions to some of the problems that young people are facing.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_06: And again, that these voices were not included in the news story, I think is part of the frustration because it's so easy to say no one's doing anything.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_06: And unfortunately, that was even some of the speakers at the rally.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_06: No one's doing anything.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_06: We've been telling you about this for years, no one's doing anything.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_06: Here are the people actually doing the work, explaining some of the difficulties doing the work, but also explaining to you some of the successes that have been coming from the consistent work that you're not seeing on the news, you're not seeing on the media.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_06: So here are three speakers giving three perspectives on different forms of programming that can rehabilitate young people but also prevent them from getting in these situations in the first place.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_03: When we were inside the institutions, they used to bring youth from the public juvenile services inside the institution for us to mentor and counsel.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_03: Now how ironic is that?
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_03: We in prison serving life for murder, but they bringing you from the street in the prison for us to counsel.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_03: Mercy.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_03: So they know that the real has to be you popping out there is return to citizens, man.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_03: Ain't no other way around it, man.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_03: We expanded, we went through what they went through.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_03: We went through what they go, what they going through we know what they're getting through.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_03: So who best to teach them?
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_03: Who best is showing the way, man?
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_03: We don't believe in throwing out people's way.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_03: No, because I'm telling you, what I see out here is love.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_03: What is love?
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_03: The highest form of understanding.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_04: That's right.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_03: We understand even a lot of times we react to situations and conditions that we have been placed in.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_03: Because if it was jobs for our young men, opportunities for our young men, and they wouldn't be out here in the streets at four or five o'clock in the morning creating myths.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_03: So we have to begin to also meet those needs and start wrapping our arms around these young men.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, what it was doing absolutely wrong.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_03: Because, like the brother said, doing our time of coming up, it was things that were off limits.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_03: Elders, limits, limits, elders, elders, elders.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_03: They had a past, and I'm not saying nothing morally right about the street life.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_03: Please don't misunderstand me what I'm saying.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_03: It was a code and what how we conducted ourselves in the street.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_03: We as a community have to come together and wrap around these coming.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_04: That's right.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_03: And each point, each one, yeah, we have to let them know that it was easy, everybody will be doing it.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_03: It was easy, everybody will be doing my always say what you do off the YouTube.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_04: That's right.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_03: So we have to get out of here, not just what's coming out, and we have to do all that if not reactive all the time.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_03: Like I said, we have us, we have all kinds of different resources.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_03: We got twenty-four hours a day to mediate conflict on both sides of the wall.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_03: That's what I mean for us before they even come out of the system.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_03: So they don't come out here and bring that foolish this packet to our community.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_03: That's what also mediates these situations.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_03: So when they go behind those walls, they don't have to suffer for the stuff that they did out here in their own ignorance.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_04: That's right.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_03: But we've got a 24-hour hotline, no police involved.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_03: And I just go give y'all a number and I'ma step down.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_03: And it's 443-522-7848 243-431-3705.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_03: You can follow us up.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_03: We are us, because we all we got.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_04: We all we've got to be a man.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_07: It became proof that kindness is a different kind of field.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_07: A place where differences weren't flaws we had to disguise, but pieces of ourselves we learned to recognize.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_07: The mentor saw potential before he could see it too, reminding us that growth begins when fear stops leading.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_07: They taught us that leadership isn't being the latter smaller.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_07: It's helping others find their light and giving away to the world.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_07: At the heart's of Miss Lisa, Steb throw it on, with tough love and open arms catching us from the fall.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_07: A poet with her own dreams, her own path to pursue.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_07: Never making it about herself, never creating a fuss.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_07: Yet she still showed up each day and put her best into us.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_07: She turned doubt into direction and helped us understand that real leaders lift others with a firm but caring.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_07: Through every lesson, every laugh, every challenge we faced, we became stronger versions of ourselves at our own pace.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_07: Not perfect, not finished, but wiser than before, than the students who first walked through the door.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_07: Now the school year closes and the final bell draws near, and we're not who we were at the beginning of the year.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_07: We'll carry these lessons wherever life decides to go.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_07: Because B-Spur gave us more than memories.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_07: It taught us how to go.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_06: So again, we have We Are Us, someone we've talked about consistently here, talking about the work they do preemptively, weekly, doing walks and food giveaways.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_06: But also connecting people to services and providing people with a squash the beef hotline that can prevent these conflicts from escalating.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_06: We have a young person talking about a mentoring program that she went to where she wrote this poem that explains how, again, we're not perfect, but just gives us the ability to learn and grow with actual credible adults, trusted adults, being able to guide us through that process.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_06: But it's the comments from the first brother I want to focus on.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_06: Because we've talked about repeatedly the attacks Fox News has placed against not just all the violence adventure program, not just we are us, but specifically programming that they're accusing the individuals of running the programs of not just formally being uh in a criminal lifestyle, but continuing that criminal lifestyle when they get out.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_06: So it's not just can they do stories on all the nonprofits saying, oh, 7% of nonprofits are delinquent?
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_06: Knowing that in general money going to nonprofits will go to black communities or increasingly black run nonprofits, but they explicitly want to single out nonprofits that are run by people who are formerly incarcerated, accusing them of wrongdoing, corruption, or those folks still being in a criminal lifestyle.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_06: So when the young brother says, We have the most experience, we know where they've been, he they need to fund us to do the work.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_06: And they did it in the past, but now we might be seeing less of that.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_06: This is why.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_06: The very solution to the crime problem Fox News claims to be obsessed with is also the things Fox News is pathologizing and criminalizing with their narratives on transparency and corruption.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_06: Money going to people in community who are formally incarcerated to work with individuals who are adjacent to the street life.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_06: And it's very pernicious because even some of the progressives fall into this trap around, oh, we need good governance, we need to make sure all your paperwork is in order, and if you don't have good paperwork, you can't get public money.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_06: But these folks that stay there are formally incarcerated.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_06: They have been through the trauma of incarceration.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_06: They've been through an environment where that socialization wasn't coming up in college, but coming up through the School of Heart Knocks on the street.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_06: There should be investment in expanding the capacity of those people to be able to do the work necessary to be able to get the infrastructure necessary to get public dials.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_06: That's the youth fund.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_06: That's operations for the war on drugs.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_06: That's the commission that we are in the process of setting up here in Baltimore.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_06: And what's going to happen is that Fox News is going to viciously attack all of that infrastructure that folks like us are building up to get folks like this the money they need to prevent incidents like this from happening as corruption.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_06: So when you see it, be sure to be able to explain to people around you that the real solution to this problem is exactly the thing that Fox News is going to call corruption, which is getting investment in institutions run by people from community, as opposed to the traditional mainstream nonprofits.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_06: The individual I wasn't recording because I was listening before the part I was able to get, he talked about these people getting the money.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_06: He says he sees them seeing recidivism as part of their business model, because they're getting money to fix the problem.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_06: But if they fix the problem, they don't get no more money.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_06: And that may be true or not.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_06: We're not trying to do conspiracy theories here, but the reality is we've talked at Nazium about the mediocrity and failure of the white nonprofit industrial complex that's tasked with meeting the needs of our community.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_06: They failed so repeatedly that what's happened over the past ten years is a real demand to shift resources.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_06: The people outside of the mainstream nonprofits that do, you know, traditional mentoring, that actually tie people with near peers that share experiences growing up in these neighborhoods, but that decenters mainstream nonprofits.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_06: So many of those people are left progressive, mainstream left progressives.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_06: So there's this weird horseshoe between some folks in the so-called left who are used to getting the money, and some folks in the so-called right, who don't want any of the money to go to Blackgrass or his orgs, around demonizing and questioning the competency of folks on the ground doing this work.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_06: One of those folks on the ground, who I believe got money from the Baltimore State Children and Youth Fund, is challenged to change, and the person most associated with that organization is Uncle T.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_06: I just want to play a short clip of what Uncle T did when he brought his young people to the protest, because again, it's kind of amazing it wasn't in the story, given how powerful it was, and given it being an example of the kinds of things that happen when you invest in people from community who actually care about young people but also care about our elder being assaulted.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_06: So to actually listen to what happened when Uncle T brought his young people to the protest.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah! They are a part of the other young people.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_06: And it's one of those things where mainstream right-wing media screams at community.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_06: Where is the outpouring?
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_06: Where's the protest?
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_06: Where's the care and the love when someone gets hit by a crime?
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_06: And here it is.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_06: And they're literally not there to show it.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_06: Which is why I felt I needed to show it.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_06: So it's important.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_06: Again, we don't want to do guilt by association.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_06: We all hear people in the protest saying not all young people are doing this.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_06: These are folks in Uncle T's program trying to make their lives better.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_06: But just the outpouring of care and the demonstration of community solidarity that ask from Uncle T showed, and even the young people's ability to go ahead with it and offer the apology, show something very powerful.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_06: And again, something you're not going to show on mainstream media.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_06: So to conclude, I again want to recenter things I heard from the protest that fundamentally challenged narratives about our community not caring about crime, our community falling into simplistic narratives about advocates for social justice, the things we're saying being used to replicate narratives about not cooperating with police and not doing any form of accountability.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_06: So I want to leave with Mama Gwen and one of the brothers from Pan-African Liberation Movement, PLM, talking about his experience, talking directly to youth in the crowd, about why we need to listen to calls to actually care about this incident, care about elders being assaulted.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_06: Because again, I just think it so deeply challenges the assumption that we're not holding youths accountable and we're not thinking strategically and deeply about the relationship between our critiques of the police and the need for accountability.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_06: So here's Mama Gwen and the brother from Pan-African Liberation Movement, aka PLM.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_06: And just for some added context, this is after a conversation talking about the call for the young people to come forward and for people in the community who know who these young people are to come to the community and tell us who they are so that we can figure out how to hold them accountable.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_06: This is in the context of the so-called stop snitching culture, which views that sort of telling who did a crime as a form of quote-unquote snitching that should be denigrated as working with the police and culturally is seen as anatoma in many neighborhoods in Baltimore.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_06: So here's Mama Gwynn and the brothers from PLL directly countering that narrative, but from a unique perspective.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_10: But we will never let them go.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_11: We need to teach our community the difference between snitching and protecting our community.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_11: There is a difference.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_11: That's protecting your community.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_11: That's protecting your loved ones.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_11: If you see something, say something.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_11: That's not snitching.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_11: Snitching is when you and I go wrong and let me not go tell all you.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_11: We need to know what snitching is.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_11: This is not snitching.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_11: This is helping ourselves.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_03: You're young.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_03: You haven't lived enough life to understand anything.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_03: So when you hear elder up here talk about snitching and all this, I see your face is twisting up.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_03: Because you're not intellectually understanding that this thing's gonna be a sad.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_03: I got young men in front of me right now, right?
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_03: You're young.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_03: You haven't lived enough life to understand anything.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_03: So when you hear elder up here talk about snitching and all this, I see your face is twisting up.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_03: Because you're not intellectually understanding that this thing's gonna be a sad.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_12: Put it on black.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_12: Come on.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_04: That's right.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_03: Arrogance in who you are as a person, right?
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_03: Don't allow you to listen to the truth until you're old enough to have a job and somebody takes it from you.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_03: And never give justice.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_03: I used to be your age.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_03: You never been my age.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_03: My job and responsibility is to guide you.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_12: Uh-huh.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_03: So I see the future.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_12: That's right.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_03: And I fear for the future because I see the indifference in your own thinking.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_10: That's right.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_03: Y'all never standing here confused.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if I want to go with it.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know what I'm gonna do against it.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_03: I'm looking at my brother next to me.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_03: I gotta do something that he's gonna keep socially accepting me.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_04: Right, right.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_03: That's what you fall into.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_03: I came back up when I was 17.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_03: I came home when I was 35.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_03: I did a large part of my life in prison, right?
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_03: And if it wasn't for older men's pouring into me like Bob Emotep, I wouldn't be up here doing what I'm doing.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_12: That's right.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_03: With righteous rage, unafraid of any of our people.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_12: Hello.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_03: These organizations out here are to help you.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_06: That's right.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_03: What are you gonna do?
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_06: So again, all I hear on mainstream conservative radio is the community doesn't show up when a community elders violate it.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_06: They don't talk about the need to have accountability.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_06: But all I heard at the protest was people talking about accountability.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_06: But our version of accountability, which doesn't fit their template, doesn't fit their model, doesn't fit what they see as accountability, so we don't count.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_06: So we have to foreground the community's conception of accountability, and it's nuanced and it's complex.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_06: And unfortunately, there are some people on the left who don't think in nuanced, complex ways about crime.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_06: It's just give people UBI, give people services, crime will go away magically.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_06: It's more complex than that.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_06: So in the moments where people are violated, are hurt deeply by crime in the community, we have to have a conversation.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_06: We do not want to work with police because we know they are racist and violent.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_06: But there are things that happen in our community that violate moral norms of the community that cannot be accepted.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_06: So what do we do?
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_06: We have a conversation about what those things are, and when something violates community norms, we again have a conversation to strategically teach our community, not beat them over the head, this is wrong, yeah, I go to the police, but teach them about the difference between snitching and telling as Mama Gwyn knows.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_06: Snitching is when we both do dirt and I tell the police you did it so I can go stop free.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_06: That's not what this is.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_06: Coming to the police, coming to the community, not the police, coming to the community saying we know the brothers who did this, when you need to pull them up and tell them that was wrong.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_06: That's not snitching.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_06: That is telling, and that's specifically telling on behavior that it's a harm to people in your community, your grandmothers, your nieces, your aunties, your people, that if this behavior is allowed to continue, that can be a detriment to the entire community.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_06: So we have to address it in the holistic way.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_06: Communities asking to address it through services, but yes, if necessary, through those people not being in community, if they are committed to being predators, as was previously stated by Mama Gwynn.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_06: Some people are bent, some people are broken.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_06: We as the communities need to be able to determine the difference.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_06: And right now, the only tool we have for people who are predators who are continuously harming community is incarceration.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_06: But we want to build the capacity, be it to home arrest, be it to actual restorative justice, not what we call restorative justice.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_06: For a lot of people, that's a white nonprofit hustle that displaces genuine community accountability and restoration.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_06: We need to build up the capacity for these alternative tools to be able to meet those needs.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_06: But in the interim, when that 70-year-old elder is beaten, what do we do?
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_06: We say, come to us.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_06: Don't go to the police, come to us, and then we can figure out maybe not all of them were the ringleaders, maybe some people just followed up, maybe some people just got peer pressured, but maybe some people are continuous predators on our community and they're not going to stop.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_06: So we need to be able to figure out the distinctions between those folks and figure out appropriate responses for the individuals involved, which is lost when we have universal charging of all youth as adults.
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_06: Because the brother from PLM said, he got put on an adult sentence, 20-year bid, when he was a minor, and we lose the ability to figure out distinctions between young people as to the actual mindset culpability and ability to actually receive uh treatment.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_06: Because they're just putting years on everybody, trying to get them to flip on each other, trying to get them to plea out so they don't have to actually go to trial.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_06: This is not justice, this is not accountability, but also something has to be done.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_06: So the brother from PLM directly challenging the young people in the crowd, being like, I don't know what the sister's saying.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_06: It's like, listen, this is behavior that's gonna put you in a position where you're gonna be on the shelf for 20 years, and you're not gonna be able to be part of the community.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_06: And we need to be able to deal with it now before you get in the position that I was in.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_06: Because I literally was you, and they put me on the shelf for 20 years, and you don't want to go through that.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_06: Similarly, the brother E.B.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_06: from the peace team continuously tells folks stories about the reality of incarceration, how it's not, you know, you just get in, get out, slap on the wrist, that you can get charged for stuff you do inside just to survive, and that adds years to your sentence.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_06: The people you think are gonna take care of your family in the street game often don't, and so now your family is left without anyone to provide for them.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_06: We are having conversations about the reality of crime and incarceration, but the media has abstracted that into the lie that we don't care when someone gets hurt, we only want to yell at police when someone gets killed.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_06: That is absolutely flagrantly wrong, and we need to listen.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_06: Because not everybody can come to protest like this, but it's important that we share this information so people hear the reality of what community is asking for, or else we're gonna be continuing to subject to people strategically co-opting, people in the worst moments of their lives who are in pain, saying, Ain't nobody show up for my family.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_06: But police gotta do something.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_06: We community are here, and the frame we are we is from the African concept of Ubuntu I am because we are.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_06: But you don't hear that as a conceptual framework to deal with crime.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_06: You hear policing, sentencing, district attorneys, states attorneys, but we as a community have our own indigenous systems to both socialize our young people, teach them about the realities of crime, and the realities of how we respond to crime as a community.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_06: And the question is, what are we gonna do?
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_06: Are we gonna continue to let Fox News and the corporate media that does not care about the reality of what crime is doing to our community and the nuances and complexities about how we respond to it dominate the narrative?
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_06: Are we actually gonna stand up and foreground the reality that our community is responding, that crime is at an all-time low, that people like we are also strategically, preemptively on the ground before incidents like this happen, which you just don't see on the news.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_06: We know the corporate media is here to bring us the bad news about our community.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_06: And I want to foreground this action because it's an example of the good news, of the we actually showing up to both hold our youth accountable, but also love on them in a way that denies the mainstream media the right to speak death over our city and produce narratives that make death seem natural when this is a life-giving movement, a caring movement, and it's achieving fantastic results if we but have the ability to listen to what people on the ground are actually doing and saying about their real life experiences with crime.
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_03: Will you help me say?
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_06: Come on, come on The songs of freedom is alive in the hand Redemption songs Redemption Songs So of course that's uh one last piece of audio from the protest Brother stringing a guitar playing Bob Marley's redemption song and wanting to leave on a positive note because we get so much negative information about our community, the reality of the positive community affirming, life-affirming events that we see all around us, because we make it our job to support and go to these events when we want more people to see what we see about the movement that's happening in Baltimore, but also take seriously the institutional forces that have been organizing themselves to fight back against that movement.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_06: So in Annapolis, there were multiple bills called nonprofit transparency, in quote, bills, that were clearly targeted at grassroots balance I mentioned organizations, the Republican sponsors of the bill, literally just cited Fox News stories attacking institutions like we are us.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_06: And we were able to testify against those bills, and none of them uh passed, none of them got through committee.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_06: And it's our ability to directly engage in the political process, to engage in the political warfare necessary to affirm the institutional capacity we as a community need to preemptively prevent crime, but also have the capacity to respond to things that could escalate.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_06: To more severe violence that can be squashed by a stop to beef hotline, that can be squashed by elders wrapping their arms around young people, giving them food on Mama Gwen's terms, getting their nails done.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_06: Things that feel abstract but reflect African concepts of grooming as a form of communal bonding that have been empirically deployed by people on the ground for decades as part of a violence prevention toolkit that we're trying to expand into an ecosystem.
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_06: So be that the Reparations Commission, be that reparations for slavery, the commission statewide that we're hopingly involved in, is your ability to support us, us not being a nonprofit, us not being subject to the white savior funding dynamics of the foundation world.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_06: Because we have people like you who give us money every month to be politically independent and bring you these stories and not just bring them to you, but to do the political work necessary to expand the capacity of the people we are commenting on and in some cases maybe reporting on to be able to support them and do their work.
• 1:07:00
  SPEAKER_06: So again, we call them sustainers, people give us money every month, just like Patreon, but you're supporting a graspers, black political organization, doing the work on the ground to be able to build communities' response, to increase our ability to both respond to these incidences, but also the preventative work.
• 1:07:16
  SPEAKER_06: So we're actually going on the offensive, building institutions, building funding ecosystems, so that a constellation of these sort of youth-serving organizations can flourish even when people aren't paying attention, even when the cameras aren't around, doing the work to keep us safe.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_06: So again, go to lbsbaltimore.com slash sustain.
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_06: That's like Netflix or Amazon Prime.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_06: Give us starting at 10, we give people give up to$50 a month so we can independently deploy those funds to be able to go to Annapolis, to go to protests, to support these kind of efforts that are grassroots in community, so we don't have to do the grant applications and do the grant reporting that oftentimes prevent institutions that are in that nonprofit model to respond nimbly the way community did when this incident happened.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_06: So again, thank you to all the sustainers out there.
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_06: Thank you to all the folks who have listened this far.
• 1:08:06
  SPEAKER_06: Please continue to like and subscribe to the podcast.
• 1:08:08
  SPEAKER_06: It really helps us in the algorithms.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_06: Continue to like and subscribe to other podcasts in the Black Liberation Media ecosystem.
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_06: Please also continue to like and subscribe to In Search of Black Power, our other podcasts where we talk more in-depth about the academic institutional forces involved in trying to co-op some of the violence prevention work.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_06: So beyond just Baltimore specific and Maryland specific, this is a nationwide battle for the soul of this burgeoning multi-billion dollar industry of violence intervention.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_06: And we talk about servicing our perceived deviancy of black people as a multi-billion dollar business in America.
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_06: And it's one that we need to dominate and control.
• 1:08:47
  SPEAKER_06: But oftentimes there's our so-called liberal or progressive, so-called allies that are seeking to take credit for our work, co-opt and obfuscate our work.
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_06: And places like Insert of Black Powers, where we go in depth being able to tear away some of the obfuscation and expose that it's people like this on the ground actually doing the real work of keeping us safe.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_06: So again, thank you, and please come back next time for political commentary corner.
• 1:09:11
  SPEAKER_06: See you soon.