Derecka Purnell

 is a human rights lawyer, author, abolitionist, and columnist living in the USA.

Interview with NPR (2021)

 * we called 911 because it was often the default response to a lot of harm that we were facing in our homes, in our families when fights broke out, when someone needed medical assistance. It was the only resource, and so it became the default resource. There were no clinics in my neighborhood, no grocery stores. The last grocery store in that neighborhood closed down in the year 2000. There hasn't been a fresh food source since, right? And so there were all these unhealthy, toxic pieces of our environment that made us sick that - there were stressors that made us fight. So 911 became the go-to response to solve a lot of these crises that could have been prevented.


 * why do we have to run from cops in our neighborhood and then go to school and run from, quote, "school resource officers," unquote, in order to learn, in order to get an education?...I watched that from sixth grade all the way until I graduated high school.


 * I envy the students who were called bad students, who chose not to run during the flight-and-fury time in between classes, who just walked very slowly in defiance of the entire system because they knew that it was wrong. And I was like, oh, man, these students - like, they're going to always get in-school suspension. But they were subtly critiquing the system itself. And I wish I had been more understanding of that when I was younger, instead of judgmental.


 * it's going to class, learning about other kinds of Christians, learning about James Cone and Howard Thurman, reading texts like "Jesus And The Disinherited," that teaches that God is on the side of the oppressed, meeting other kinds of Christians who are making sense of their faith through justice and - right? And so it's - I was so grateful to be to be pushed to think about these ideas through, you know, the Children's Defense Fund and Marian Wright Edelman and their invocation of Ella Baker and Martin Luther King. And so now I see myself in the tradition of people of faith who are much more like them and less like, you know, the people who I found myself finding refuge with early on.


 * Every year, someone from my high school gets killed from gun violence. It's one of the scariest statistics that I live with on a daily basis. Like, who is it going to be this year?


 * That's what law school allowed me to have - was time to actually read abolitionist literature - you know, read "Abolition Democracy" by Angela Davis, read her other book "Are Prisons Obsolete?" - the more time I had to study, you know, works from, like, Naomi Murakawa. I mean, I just had so much time to start learning the history of police, the function of police, how this word crime is a social construct, how there's so much sexual violence in this world - in this country, in particular - and it's not all reducible to what to do with a rapist - right? - because most people who commit sexual violence will never see a day in prison. And so police and prisons are currently inadequate responses to the sexual violence that we have right now. They're currently inadequate responses to the homicides that we have right now - right? - the harms of our nightmares. You look across the country - the police clearance rate for murders is something like 40-50%, which means that 40-50% of people accused of murdering someone are just arrested and charged - not even convicted, right?


 * I had to understand the history of police inadequacy to these harms and then learn that, well, the police weren't created to respond to these harms in


 * A lot of the times the people who make the decision to kill people - if they make that decision, it's because of patriarchy. It's because they're trying to control someone else's sexuality, especially if it's a woman, and they are concerned about, she's going to sleep with someone else - or if they're concerned someone else is going to try to sleep with her. So then that leads to a homicide. Or it's two men who are fighting or going back and forth, and one feels as if their manhood has been disrespected. And so we see the No. 1 reason for certain kind of homicides is a petty argument that escalates.


 * The police can't fight patriarchy. They perpetuate it in so many circumstances.


 * why all these killings happening in the first place? Why are people conditioned to kill each other? Why is it true in the United States but not true in other parts of the world?


 * if we truly want to undermine and reduce homicides, we have to reduce our reliance on police.


 * as a trained lawyer, what I try to do is use my legal skills to help organizers figure out how to wage campaigns against oppressive institutions. Sometimes that means reducing power for the police. Sometimes it means trying to close a jail or a prison.


 * writing, to me, is so important 'cause it allows me to think publicly about ideas that I'm working through as a lawyer or I'm working through as an organizer or as I'm working through as a parent, for example.


 * police abolition is not mere police absence, all right? It's not just the disappearance of police. Just like slavery abolition just didn't mean that slaves would disappear, it means that we will fight to create a society where Black people can live with dignity and freedom and peace and justice and build the kind of relationships and communities that they deserve, right? So that's a complete restructuring of what we understand the United States to mean at that time.


 * I don't think I'm going to see the total eradication of police presence in my lifetime. I don't think my baby's going to see it in their lifetime. But what can happen in all of our lifetimes is the will and the commitment and the courage - right? - to have the courage to make sure that it does happen in the future.


 * If you receive a medical diagnosis that was harmful and scary and you - and a doctor had to give you an answer in two minutes, that would be insufficient, right?


 * One thing that we can do is make sure we have an avenue that prevents that violence from happening in the first place. Police do not prevent that violence. They make people more precarious. And then once they exit jail if they are arrested, they go back to the same circumstances where they then have to protect themselves.


 * (The police) arrest people. They give them gun charges. They put them in jail. The people go to jail or prison for a couple of years. They come back out; they have a record; they can't get a job; they're in the same set of circumstances. They need a gun to protect themselves because they can be robbed or they can be killed. And so you create a cycle of people who are going in and out of jail based on gun charges or homicide charges who ultimately never get to the root of the problem, right?


 * One avenue is prevention, right? We need gun buyback programs. We need people doing street violence interruption programs. A second set of avenue is responding. So we have prevention and we have response. And response really is a local - is really a local endeavor. Sometimes it happens through these formal restorative justice processes. Sometimes it happens informally - right? - with the families trying to come together and mediate the conflict between those people, right? And then a lot of times it's not the case that they want people to go to prison. What victims and survivors often want is some measure for them to be heard, some level of accountability. And when we have more options than prison and police, that the survivors of harm and violence choose that - you know, for sexual violence and for homicides and attempted homicides, right?


 * One reason why I love defund the police is because it's a policy demand. It's actually a policy demand. One critique of Black Lives Matter from people who are sympathetic to its cause is that it didn't mean anything. Where is the policy? Where is the plan? What are you really asking for? Black Lives Matter is just a slogan. And so then, you know, six years later, in 2020, instead of saying Black Lives Matter, people started saying take away resources from the police as a very specific policy demand, well, now that's much harder to co-opt. We're hearing people say, well, this is the policy that we want. We want you to take away resources from the police, and we want you to invest it in all of the other resources that make us safe. We want better schools. We want better housing. We want health care. We want quality jobs. We want to be able to work with dignity. We want child care. We want our student debt canceled. So we want to remove resources from the carceral state and pour into all of these other avenues that make us live healthy lives full of dignity and joy.


 * I hope that more people are being called to be molders of that society, molders of that consensus, instead of just reflecting the current consensus that we have - because that's where all the oppression lives.