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Friday, March 29, 2024

A conversation with Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change

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Collision is one of the world’s biggest tech conferences connecting people and ideas that change the world. Each year, tens of thousands of professionals from across North America and beyond gather to analyze the intersection between modern society and technology, and ask: Whatā€™s next?

Ahmed El-Banna is producer and speaker director at Web Summit, RISE and Collision Conference.

Rashad Robinson is the president of Color Of Change, a leading racial justice organization driven by more than 7 million members who are building power for Black communities.

On April 21, InnoPowerā€™s Jason Williams joined a special Collision media interview with Robinson.

By JASON WILLIAMS

AHMED EL-BANNA: Collision is a place for us all to come together to share our thoughts and ideas. Today, weā€™re going to be talking about the conviction of Derrick Chauvin and what it means to Mr. Rashad Robinson, President of Color Change. Rashad, thank you for joining us. Itā€™s been quite a hectic 24 hours.

RASHAD ROBINSON: Absolutely. It’s been something. You prepare and know it’s going to be a lot when the verdict comes down, but then once you’re in it, you’re still having to navigate the things that you expected, the things that you didn’t expect and sort of the path forward.

AEB: So, I want to start with something from the news that came off the verdict from the trial. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Wednesday morning that the Department of Justice will open an investigation into the policing practices of law enforcement in Minneapolis. ā€œYesterday’s verdict in the state criminal trial does not address potentially systemic policing issues in Minneapolis,ā€ said Garland. Do you agree? Do you think this is kind of the best next step forward for Minneapolis specifically?

RR: This is one of the best steps forward that we currently have at our disposal, given the nature of the laws under the Trump administration. But before that, there were investigations through the Obama administration on police departments in Cleveland, in Baltimore, in Chicago and in Ferguson. Weā€™ve had these investigations. These investigations, that once again, happened after the fact, and they deal with the range of things that the federal government can actually involve. It doesn’t mean that they actually get to everything because so much of policing happens at the local level. And so, yes, this is important that the Department of Justice is using what’s at their disposal, but part of the challenge we have is a structural challenge. We have to deal with a whole set of laws that are actually not designed for us to deal with the fundamental challenges that we have in policing.

That’s why we have to build power. That’s why we have to change rules. It’s important to have the leaders like Merrick Garland doing everything within their current power, but we also need the legislative branches, we also need activism to spur and drive us to actually get the rules that will supercharge the changes that we actually deserve.

AEB: OK. When you say there are structural changes that we need, what is it that we need to do? What kind of structural changes are the most tangible and that people in the audience can do together? You said that the work ahead is building the power to change the rules. So, I was just wondering if there’s maybe two or three key takeaways that we can use to help drive the structural changes.

RR: I’m so glad you asked, because that is what we’re all about at Color of Change ā€” translating presence into power, changing the rules and hoping to drive action. I think whatā€™s really important here is a couple of things.

One is that because policing is such a local issue, people all around the country have something at stake here, and we have to deal with the issue of police budgets. Police budgets have swelled in cities and municipalities all around the country. And at the same time, police departments are not actually being held accountable. There is a deep lack of transparency and a deep level of accountability. And so, we are very much a part of an invest-divest framework, recognizing that we have to downsize the level of policing. And that means not sending a police officer to someone who’s passed a bad check, or to someone who’s having a mental health episode. We invest in other things. That means not sending someone with a gun to deal with issues where someone with a gun is not needed. Budgets are moral documents. They say more about what you care about than any speech.

Number two is that we need to end things like qualified immunity. Qualified immunity shields police officers from actually being held civilly liable for things that they do on the job. It has been one of the vehicles that’s been used. As police officers have skirted the rules of criminal accountability, they will also not be held accountable from a civil perspective as well.

Number three is that we have to deal with the most powerful actors in the criminal justice space, the most powerful actors as it relates to holding police officers accountable, as well as driving justice and fairness in our communities, and that’s locally elected prosecutors. There are 2,400 locally elected prosecutors ā€” 80% of them run unopposed, 90% of prosecutors are white. We have built the only searchable database of all 2,400 prosecutors. Winningjustice.org is a platform weā€™ve designed that goes hand in hand with our advocacy work to hold prosecutors accountable.

Folks might be asking, ā€œWell they got a conviction in Hennepin County of Derrick Chauvin,ā€ but actually if it wasn’t for the political pressure on the governor to actually take the case away from the locally elected district attorney in Hennepin County and give it to Attorney General Keith Ellison, we might not even be seeing any type of trial or case because locally elected prosecutors, over and over again, take police officersā€™ words. The Hennepin County district attorney has never successfully prosecuted a white police officer for killing anyone in Hennepin County. In fact, the only time they’ve gotten a conviction of a police officer was a Black police officer for killing a white woman a couple of years ago. This is what weā€™re actually dealing with.

No matter where you live in the country, you have a locally elected prosecutor. And chances are your prosecutor is driving up convictions for Black and brown people.

We just celebrated 4/20 yesterday. For those folks who lit up, they should recognize that marijuana has been legal for white people for years. It’s been legal for rich people for years, but our jails and our prisons are full of Black, brown, and poor people who have been convicted and had their lives ruined for the very same thing that has been legal for folks; that people are now building whole empires off of. We must recognize that prosecutors in some places where marijuana laws have been decriminalized are still driving up convictions.

So those are just some of the things. They all require political power, and all of them require people organizing and forcing those in power to be nervous about disappointing us.

AEB: Yes, brilliantly said. That was Winningjustice.org if you want to check it out. There is a lot to be learned about transparency in databases, about educating society, about knowing the rights, and about knowing who to hold accountable within our communities.

I have one more question, and we have a question from the media. Vice President Kamala Harris urged lawmakers to pass the George Floyd Bill aimed at reforming police in the U.S. Itā€™s called H.R. 7120: George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. It has been passed in the House and sold in the Senate. What do you think? Does it go far enough?

RR: It does not go far enough, but we don’t expect federal legislation to go as far as we need in this era where we have a United States Senate with so many obstructionists to justice. Does the legislation do some good things? Yes, it does. Does it deal with some issues that we want to be dealt with? Yes. Does it have some challenges? Absolutely. And you know, I fundamentally believe that we actually have to divest money from police, and this bill does put more money in the hands of policing. Iā€™m being transparent about all these things to say that I still think that the Senate needs to take it up, that we need progress, that we need to actually move work at the federal level around this.

But I don’t want us to be confused. The George Floyd Act probably would not have saved George Floyd. So much of the work that’s actually going to have to be done is at the local level. There is going to be a ballot measure in Minneapolis, Amendment 4, that will actually deal with policing and police budgets. My organization and others will be engaged in a fight with local organizations on the ground to actually bring that type of change there.

All around the country there are local activists fighting around police budgets, fighting around transparency, fighting around policing, and fighting for issues around more community control. All of those things are going to be just as important as any federal legislation. It’s good that the president and the vice president are putting energy around passing this. We need the Senate to take it up, but it’s going to require things like the filibuster to be ended in order for us to see any type of change at this scale.

AEB: OK. Thank you for saying that. We have a question from Mr. Jason Williams related to the quite insane news about the late Maā€™Khia Bryant, which happened nearly a few hours after the Chauvin trial.

JASON WILLIAMS: Thank you Ahmed and thank you Rashad. We are starting to see news over another police shooting in Columbus, Ohio, that happened as the Chauvin verdict was being read. Details are still emerging, but there is a sense of one step forward, two steps back. What should we be celebrating right now? And where should the focus remain?

RR: I think this is important. This past summer racial justice became a majoritarian issue. More Americans speaking out than ever before, taking to the streets, raising their voice is incredibly important, but no single trial is going to deliver justice. Twelve people in a jury box are not going to deliver justice. It’s going to take millions of us, millions of people raising their voices to ensure that this country divests from racist policing that has put communities in harmā€™s way. To hold corporations to actually stop investing in police foundations, which has skirted the rules and provided militarized equipment, even in jurisdiction where the people have voted to not have it. It’s going to take all of us to make sure that we hold politicians accountable for using racist rhetoric and racist policies to advance their political careers.

Part of these challenges that we will continue to see is a deep recognition that these trials in and of themselves do not deliver the type of structural change. We have to deliver the structural change by changing the rules. And until we do that, we will continue to see Black and brown people, young people, people of all ages, being killed by police, and a lack of accountability. You will see it being done in your name with your tax dollars. We will always lose in the back rooms of politics, unless we have millions of people lined up at the front door.

And that is why we need people to join us. We need people to sign up at Color of Change. We need people to raise their voice. We need people to invite allies and other folks into this work. That’s going to be the work to building the power to change the rules. We absolutely should be clapping about accountability on Derrick Chauvin, but we also need to redouble our efforts for justice, for a structural change, because that will actually be the thing that allows us to look back at this moment by 10, 15 years from now and be able to talk about the changes that we’ve actually achieved. The kind of change environment that we all get to experience.

More information on Collision Conference can be found at www.collisionconf.com. For more information on Color of Change, please visit www.colorofchange.org.

Winning Justice: The Prosecutor Project is powered by Color of Change. The prosecutor accountability movement has developed a winning approach to ending the most unjust, unconstitutional, destructive and racist practices of prosecutors: money bail, over-charging, over-sentencing, over-policing, the drug war, attacking immigrants, sending our kids to adult prisons and keeping secrets about whatā€™s really happening in their offices and in police departments. Learn more at www.winningjustice.org.

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