Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police," Mariame Kaba's New York Times op-ed blared.
The
debate over defunding the police was underway and Kaba, the godmother
of police defunding, wanted to make her position clear. Essence had
called Kaba a "modern day abolitionist". Black Lives Matter Chicago
traces its roots to her. Every lefty media outlet from NBC News to The
Intercept had promoted her. And now Kaba was taking her message of
getting rid of prisons and police, and turning over the streets to the
criminals, to the Times.
But what would replace prisons and the
police? That's the question that media talking heads, intrigued by this
exciting new political program of not enforcing the law, were asking.
"Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people in prison," Kaba briefly noted.
Kaba
didn't bother to define what "restorative justice" meant, but sensing
that the only crime that the Times' liberal readers could ideologically
care about was rape, dismissed the idea that the justice system could
stop rapists, and then urged more subsidized housing and food spending,
as if the average mugger was looking to buy a meal or a home in the
suburbs. Questions about how the needs of rapists would be met under
Kaba’s redistribution program went unanswered.
Pro-crime activists like talking about restorative justice, but they don’t like defining it.
There’s
a very good reason for that. Imagine you get beaten to a pulp outside a
bank by three muggers. After you’re released from the hospital, the
muggers, who were out all this time, are called in to a restorative
justice session in which they apologize for breaking your nose in three
places, and you’re told to apologize for your role in perpetuating
capitalism, and then they leave.
Until they do it again.
Five
years ago, Kaba had tested her theory when a leader of the Black Youth
Project 100, a black nationalist group set up in the wake of the Trayvon
Martin case, was accused of rape.
BYP100 has been at the forefront of the pro-crime and police defunding movement.
“We
do not have a criminal justice system,” BYP100 leader D’atra Jackson
recently claimed. “We have a capitalist system that provides a process
for deciding who gets punished.”
Malcolm London was a co-chair of
BYP100, and a successful community organizer, who had been arrested for
assaulting a police officer, and
was then released by Chicago Democrats.
His victim, "Kyra", another Chicago activist,
was working
as a sexual assault educator on campus. According to Kyra, he "told me
sexual violence prevention was something he was really passionate
about".
And then he sexually assaulted her.
BYP100
quickly
announced that it had been "made aware of a sexual assault allegation
involving a BYP100 leader" and that it was launching "a transformative
and restorative justice process, rooted in compassion, accountability
and a belief that no one is disposable."
These terms are
euphemisms for a process in which all the perpetrator really needs to do
is apologize because he’s not “disposable” and he needs “compassion”
for his crimes.
That’s when BYP100 brought in Mariame Kaba to lead the process.
At the end of the 15 month "restorative justice" process, everyone involved decided to make
public statements to show how this alternative to prisons and police could work in the real world.
Kaba
sniffed at the "uninformed takes and commentaries” about “CA and
transformative justice” while stating that among the things that
mattered to her was making “sure that Malcolm was supported in making
personal changes”. Malcolm’s statement hailed the “engaging” bi-weekly
conversations that allowed him to discuss his toxic masculinity problem
and occasionally cry.
“I was already indebted to Mariame Kaba
before I began this process and will forever be thankful for her
commitment to community,” Malcolm concluded.
Then Malcolm was accused of rape. Again.
"After
a year and a half long accountability process, Malcolm made the choice
to continue raping Black women," Kyra complained in a
follow-up
statement last month. “The process had many goals, but the main hope
was that at the very least Malcolm wouldn’t rape anyone else.”
So much for that.
"In
the coming months and years after our process ended, other people came
forward to share their own stories of sexual harm involving Malcolm,"
Kaba noted in
her own statement.
Instead
of warning other potential victims, Malcolm's restorative justice
process was treated as a success story. And then the black nationalist
activist allegedly raped a woman in 2018.
“Accountability is not
only about self-reflection, apology and repair for a particular
incident. It is also making sure not to repeat the same behavior. On
that front, he has failed,” Kaba griped.
Two months earlier, Kaba
had accused “white people” of being unable to imagine that a world
without police would be less violent than one with it. “As a society, we
have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by
policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than
prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm,” she argued.
Malcolm’s case showed just how important caging criminals to reduce violence and harm is.
There
is a reason why we lock up criminals. Especially career criminals. It’s
to protect victims. When you insist, as BYP100 did, that criminals
aren’t disposable, their victims then become disposable.
BYP 100
is currently running a "She Safe, We Safe" campaign to put an end to
violence against "black women, girls, femmes and gender non-conforming
people". It might want to start at home.
In Unapologetic: A
Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements, Charlene
Carruthers, a key BYP100 and anti-police figure, described this process
as embodying black queer feminism. The embodiment of black queer
feminism is letting rapists rape black women.
Around the same
time that Kaba’s op-ed calling for the elimination of the police ran in
the New York Times, Carruthers was pushing police defunding
and a shift to “community solutions” on PBS without caring how badly the “community accountability” process for Malcolm London had ended.
Malcolm
London, the accused rapist, is still listed as a TED talk speaker, and
involved with a variety of organizations. He’s also available for
corporate events, birthdays, and fundraisers.
The whole point of community accountability is its lack of accountability.
The
criminal justice system has countless flaws, but offers accountability.
Restorative justice and the entire portfolio of euphemisms attached to
it is little more than a struggle session for rapists. And when those
rapists are members of oppressed groups, it’s even easier for them to
play the game.
Confess to your toxic masculinity, invent a legacy of abuse, apologize, and then do it again.
The
purpose of the criminal justice system is not, despite a common
misunderstanding, to rehabilitate criminals. Only people can
rehabilitate themselves. And they need a reason to do it. Engaging
biweekly conversations on toxic masculinity for 15 months is a free
therapy session for sociopaths that does nothing to prevent a serial
sexual abuser from doing the same thing again.
Kaba’s process proved that some people really do need to be caged. Or everyone ends up caged.
How
many people are afraid to leave the houses because of Black Lives
Matter riots? How many families, mostly black, are afraid to let their
children play outside because of how many children have already been
shot by gang members in Democrat cities where they no longer have to
fear prison?
That’s what being caged is actually like.
Public
safety is a binary. You cage gang members or you cage 8-year-olds at
risk of being hit by a stray bullet. You cage muggers or you cage the
grandmother lying on the pavement with a bloodied head. You cage rapists
or you cage the women they rape. It comes down to who matters more.
“No one should be discarded or disowned, and we had to decide to stick with both Kyra and Malcolm,” Carruthers wrote.
But you can’t choose both the rapist and his victim.
“Many
people have invested countless hours and emotional labor to support
Malcolm in taking full accountability. Unfortunately, he has let them
down. He has also given critics of CA processes fodder which is
enraging,” Kaba complained.
It’s a shame when letting a sexual predator go on doing his thing makes abolishing police look bad.
The
world that Kaba would make is laid out on her site which is funded by
George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. The site, Transform Harm, rails
against what it calls Carceral Feminism
One article complains
that, “our country has an ugly history of using police and prisons to
stop sexual violence”, another falsely insists that, “locking people up
won’t help combat sexual violence.”
A Brooklyn sociologist talks up having rapists write apology letters.
Aya Gruber, a feminist legal theorist, insists that police shouldn’t arrest domestic abusers.
“Sexual
harassment and assault are pervasive in our society because extravagant
wealth and absolute poverty are pervasive,” a Jacobin editor argues.
Alison
Phipps, a professor of gender studies at the University of Sussex,
claims that sending Larry Nassar, who had sexually abused some 250
girls, to prison and throwing away the key embodies "political
whiteness" which is the belief that "rape is perpetrated by ‘bad men’
who should be exposed. That police exist to catch these men, and courts
to do justice on them."
If you think rapists are bad people who
should be locked up, you’re guilty of “political whiteness”. And if
you’re a black woman who wants her rapist to go to jail, you’re a white
supremacist.
It’s easy for most people to dismiss these views,
but they have the backing of a billionaire who finances much of the
activist Left, and has planted his own DAs in major cities across
America.
The world that Soros’ DAs, that the various Black Lives
Matter groups, and their Democrat backers are determined to bring into
being is a place where women have no rights, and where criminals enjoy
the utter freedom to do anything they want to anyone, as long as they
don’t use hate speech.
And it would be one long unrelenting nightmare for women.
Among
all its utter horrors, the pro-crime policies of restorative justice
would roll back much of modern feminism which relies on the criminal
justice system to punish everyone from wife-beaters to rapists, while
insisting that the solution to the abuse of women is in higher taxes and
more welfare.
Daniel
Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an
investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and
Islamic terrorism.
