Taking Action for George Floyd, Tony McDade and Protestors

If you haven’t taken action yet re: all of the racially-charged killings and police brutality around the country yet, I’m sharing the list of actions that I’m personally taking to hopefully help serve as a blueprint. I know that for me personally, a lot of the compiled list of resources are pretty overwhelming, so I hope that having a smaller list will be more approachable.

Lower Effort Activities:

• Set up a recurring donation to NAACP
• Set up recurring donations to ATL and MA bail funds — check out this Google Doc for your own location’s
• Educate yourself — this syllabus for Asian-American and white allies is pretty dense but thorough, but eventually I’d like to have some time to sit down and maybe have a silent reading group for this on Discord.

Higher Effort Activities:
Personally, I feel a little uncomfortable contacting Minneapolis and Tallahassee representatives directly since I’m out of state. However, I do want to speak up about the overly brutal police action against protestors in Boston and Atlanta where I feel more comfortable speaking up, so I’m modifying the calls to action from these docs which are for MN and George Floyd + FL and Tony McDade in particular.

For me in particular, I’m focusing on Atlanta and Boston. I’d like to contact the following people to say that “The authorization of lethal force or any type of harm against protestors is not acceptable”, especially tear gas, smoke bombs, rubber bullets, etc. on peaceful protesters or uninvolved bystanders fighting against excessive police force in the first place.

• the mayor
• the county attorney
• the governor
• the FBI field office for each state
• the city police department

I need to do more investigation into what the governing structure is for Atlanta, Decatur, Boston, Cambridge and Somerville, but these demands to city council to decrease police budgets in order to compensate for COVID shortfalls seem very strong:

• Do not increase police funding or the police department’s budget; protect and expand current investment in community-led health and safety strategies instead.
• Propose and vote for a $45 million cut from MPD’s budget as the City responds to projected COVID-19 shortfalls.
• Pressure MPD and all law enforcement agencies to immediately cease enacting violence on community members, including those who are protesting.

The MN document recommends going to the city council website and contacting each council member individually.

For more specific cases to press on as case studies in the call, I’m going to cite:

• ATL police officers dragging and tasing two people sitting in their car
• Boston police officers using tear gas to end a 3 hour peaceful protest, a chemical agent banned by the Geneva Convention for warfare

Hope this is helpful for y’all.