Tech Won't Save Us - Tech Giants Don't Care About Black Lives w/ Edward Ongweso Jr.

Episode Date: June 11, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Edward Ongweso Jr. to discuss how the labor practices, tech products, and global supply chains of tech companies prove they don't care about Black lives — regardless of what they've said in recent statements. Edward also explains why we should defund the police.Edward Ongweso Jr. is a staff writer at Vice. He recently wrote about tech companies' response to Black Lives Matter and what it would mean to defund the police.  Follow Edward on Twitter as @bigblackjacobin.Tech Won't Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter.Support the show

It fits their business model more to say that they care about Black Lives so that they can capitalize on the sort of PR that that would give them than to challenge what has been making them a juggernaut in almost every industry. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast that wonders if tech companies that are exploiting Black Lives really think that they matter. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm joined by Edward Angueso Jr. Edward is a staff writer at Vice and recently wrote an article about the tech company's response to Black Lives Matter and the hypocrisy in their statements.

If you like the podcast, please leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and share it with anyone who you think would be interested in our conversation or the podcast in general. And if you want to support the work that I put into the podcast, you can do so by going to patreon.com slash Paris Marks and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy the conversation. Edward, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Great to speak with you today. So obviously, I wanted to have you on because there are Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the United States, and they have grown into, I would say,

a much larger kind of global movement against police brutality, against systemic racism, and all the forms that that takes in our societies. And so there are a lot of companies responding to these protests with really nice statements, acting as though they are allies to this broader movement, and that they believe that Black Lives Matter as well. But when we actually dig into what many of these companies are doing, especially these major tech giants, which is kind of the focus of this podcast in particular, and a lot of your writing advice, they don't actually demonstrate that in their actions, right? And so I wanted to touch on multiple ways that that plays out and where they show a disregard for Black lives or even explicitly hurt Black people, right? So when it comes to the labor question and how tech companies treat

their workers, are they really treating Black workers with the respect that you would expect from companies saying that Black lives matter? I think at the end of the day, when you look at all the statements, they're, you know, essentially bullshit. These companies, maybe they treat, you know, their full time employee as well, you know, but that's also part of the hook to keep people in. But there's also the fact that, you know, a lot of these tech companies take advantage of pretty horrible and weak labor law in the United States. So who are the content moderators for the social networks? Who are the drivers for the ride-hailing platforms? Who are the grocery shoppers, the gig workers for large companies where you're only supposed to interface with a narrow part of

the process? It's disproportionately Black and brown people. And they are subject to misclassification. So they're denied minimum wages. They're denied the right to collectively bargain. They're denied basic benefits. They're denied all the sorts of things that would make employment dignified and that you would expect from a company that talks about care about Black lives, you would do everything you can in your own workforce to ensure that they're not suffering, that they're not going through poverty, that they're properly compensated, that they have health care. And that in one way or another, they're not being subjected to, you know, forms of violence from poverty. But instead, you know, these companies have business models that require them to exploit those communities for their workforces. And they also exploit them for revenue with a lot of these products. It's not a coincidence that companies like Amazon and Uber, for example, have horrible labor standards, but their products also undermine the public infrastructure that's supposed to help out everybody. And that disproportionately hurts,

again, Black and brown people in communities who, you know, rely on that to get to work to get things that they need to go about, you know, their daily life or to survive. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Before I was speaking to you, I was even thinking about how it's not even just what they do to their workforces, right? Like when I think about Amazon, obviously, it is not a friend to black people in many ways. And many of its black workers are in the warehouses and they're being mistreated there. But another way that that plays out that I was thinking about was obviously Amazon is

trying to build its own delivery network. And in doing so, it's degrading the wages and the working conditions of delivery workers. And as we know, the USPS in the United States provides a lot of good union jobs to black people around the country, right? And so it's like, it's not even just what they're doing to their workers directly, but by moving into these new areas, they're also potentially kind of degrading the working conditions or removing jobs that would have been good jobs that would have gone to black people in, you know, in the case of the post office, just to give one example. But as they make working conditions worse, you know, just in

general, that tends to hit black people most of all. But then the concerns about Amazon and what's happening with Amazon, what Amazon is doing to its workers are longstanding. But as we've seen during this pandemic, it's really not paying attention to kind of the safety, health concerns, all of these things. You know, what have you been seeing with what Amazon has been doing to its workers during this pandemic? And how specifically is that affecting Black workers at its warehouses? Amazon is an interesting example, one, because like you said, the fulfillment center disrupts traditionally union jobs that did employ a lot of black workers. They also set up the warehouses in a way where sometimes they have contractors that also end up relying predominantly on black and brown workers. And there, what you see is a sort of race to the bottom for cutting down costs, operating on the bare minimum, especially in a pandemic,

fucking around with people's wages and benefits in ways that make everyone more insecure and concerned, I guess, about whether or not they're going to be fired or whether they're going to be exposed to vulnerability in the pandemic. But also this, I think, fits into the larger pattern of Amazon disregarding any sort of barrier to its perpetual growth. You know, Amazon undermines labor standards, like you said. Amazon undermines safety in its warehouses. Dozens of warehouses were affected and had COVID-19 before a response was formulated. And even when a response was formulated, it was such a bare bones implementation that it felt more like a PR move at the time.

You know, I reported on how this one delivery service partner was expecting its drivers to share one rag for 50 trucks. Unimaginable. Yeah, really though. Maths were at one point being made and sold by people who worked there because they weren't getting them. One Lysol bottle for the fleet of trucks, being fired for asking questions or being shunned or having communication shut down for that. And it's easy to look at that and say, that's a lone actor. That's a one company. But that's a result of this model that Amazon has rolled out, where it tries to push as much responsibility and burden of costs onto these contractors while still technically

running and owning everything that's going on in the operation itself. But it allows them to avoid liability. And it leaves these contractors unable to actually meet safety concerns or even provide for their workers adequately. And Amazon knows what it's doing. This is part of a conscious march towards monopolization where everyone else is expendable. Black workers are expendable. Black workers are expendable, especially because already in society at large, they're disadvantaged by almost every metric. And then when you're coming into a workplace where the explicit business model and strategy is to turn humans into replaceable robots, then you're shit out

of luck on that. And if they really did care about Black Lives, there would be real concrete steps to change that part of their business model. But there isn't, because it's not going to matter. It fits their business model more to say that they care about Black Lives so that they can capitalize on the sort of PR that that would give them than to challenge what has been making them a juggernaut in almost every industry, which is disregard everything except returns and market power and user adoption and all the sorts of things that turn people into numbers and turn people into productivity charts instead of human beings that deserve dignity in their job. I think that's a great point. I can't remember

who wrote it, but I read an article last week where someone was like, we've had the pink washing, we've had the green washing. Now we have like the black power washing, right? Like they're all coming in just trying to claim that, you know, they care about black lives so they can get this positive PR that comes from it. And I think it's really interesting that you mentioned the Amazon business model and their reliance on contractors as well. Because obviously, Uber was very inspired by Amazon's original business model, but then kind of pushed this kind of contractor model out to many other industries after they kind of blew up, right? And now we see Amazon kind of like taking in pieces of that with its delivery service and

all these sorts of things as well, right? And you wrote about that in your piece. So with Uber in particular, when it comes to labor questions, how is that affecting Black people? There's this book by Alex Rosenblath, a researcher at Dayland Society called Uberland, which I think maps out really well how Uber has had and is going to have a permanent effect and lift to on labor standards and that the gig economy isn't a significant portion of the economy in the sense of total numbers of people working in it, right? But it has a disproportionate influence on how companies then decide to offload burdens and costs.

And Uber's key innovation, the misclassification scheme has been, in some cases, murderous. It's killed a lot of people who have ended up either killing themselves in New York City, for example, where there were a string of driver suicides, or sleeping in their cars, or having to choose between meals and medicine, or which bill they're going to be late on, because this scheme is concerned with trying to make a broken business model work. And the people who are dealing with that sort of experimentation on Uber's part, you know, in New York City, it's predominantly immigrants. You know, most of the drivers in the city are immigrants. It's, you know, also Black people who are disproportionately

represented in those jobs, you know, same in all their largest markets, whether San Francisco, Los Angeles, you know, New York, Boston, DC. This is a business model that lures you in with the promise of making ends meet in an economy where most people are not able to or in a precarious state, and then pulls the rug out from under you because it's a constantly moving goalpost where they're constantly trying to become profitable in an unprofitable industry. And when you look at the unit economics, the only way that they can improve, for example, profitability is by cutting wages or increasing fares. So we can cut the wages of drivers who are going to come into this industry thinking that they're going to be able to make

ends meet and won't. Or we can hike the fares in places where we've displaced traditional transportation, public transit, which Black people rely on more than other communities and are underserved by. So it ends up at every part of the right-hand business model hurting the same people that they're now saying that they help. And maybe at these companies individually, there are surely people who do care, but the company in of itself, its structure, its business model, its institutional form, the way it actually exists and moves in the world is incompatible with the idea that they have solidarity with Black Lives Matter, with the George Floyd protests. I completely agree. And I think

another really important point there is not only are a lot of these drivers immigrants and black people, but the people who are mainly being served by the service are often upper class, college educated, disproportionately white people. So you really see that kind of disproportionate benefit from the service as well, not just who is being used as drivers. And that's also, I think, been a contributing factor to why it stayed along for so long. There is the fact that it services these people, they're going to pay for it no matter what price point they're at. But also, a lot of the interactions people have with their Uber Lyft drivers, with their Instacart shoppers are so fleeting and usually forced because they're within the constraints of rating systems that you

are rarely going to get a real picture of what's going on unless you actually ask and push. If you do, drivers are eager to tell you. When I was in New York City and I worked as an organizer with drivers, you just had to ask them, pass the polite conversation, and they would at length tell you what was wrong with the job and what they hated about it. But I think most people don't do that, or most people haven't done that. And so it helps perpetuate this veneer, even now when we should be aware of what's going on, that some drivers, it works out well for them. Some drivers enjoy it.

Some drivers benefit from it. Some drivers are doing it part-time and not full-time, when the reality is it just causes a lot of suffering and misery for those who are trapped in it. Yeah, I completely agree. So obviously, the way that tech companies affect Black people is not just through labor, hiring, all these sorts of things, right? They also make a lot of products which will affect Black people in different ways. And one of the key areas, which is obviously very relevant to the protests that are going on now, is these tech companies' relationships with law enforcement and with the police, right? And so you've written about how a lot of these tech companies, and Amazon is, I think, the worst, but you can correct me if you think there's a worse

one, are creating products that benefit law enforcement, giving a lot of information to law enforcement. So how does that play out? How does this relationship between tech and law enforcement work? And who are the big companies that are involved in this? Amazon definitely is one of the worst. It, for example, provides Amazon Web Services to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, you know, and Palantir, allowing them to host their data on there. So it's the backbone of their terrorizing efforts, their detaining and their deporting. And that alone would lead us to suspect Amazon or, you know, be skeptical of any claims that they stand in solidarity with any community undergoing police brutality. But then you also add in, they have contracts with police departments to lease out the recognition

software, which is a facial recognition tool, which is just known to be racially biased. And multiple tests has been found to be unable to correctly distinguish between members of Congress and people's mugshots or athletes and people's mugshots. It's just a tool that shouldn't, you know, facial recognition in itself shouldn't exist. But Amazon specifically is one that's rife with racial bias. And there's also the fact that, you know, it rolls out Ring, which is it's like home security system, a surveillance network that allows Amazon to, you know, basically turn people in neighborhoods into cops. They take the video, they can share it with the

police department, or the police department can just take it. They sell the ring cameras to police departments or do promotional events with them. They also use them to sell fear and paranoia, which just fuels also this racial profiling and the racist paranoia that's in suburbs in the first place. So Amazon here is profiting off of racist fears, and it's also accelerating their spread and exaggerating them further with this nationwide surveillance network. It's hard when you hear all that stuff to not laugh when they talk about opposing police brutality, or when you have Jeff Bezos, for example, he went on Instagram to post an email from a customer and rebuked it where they were talking about All Lives Matter. And he said that

he'd be happy to lose that customer. But at the same time, the customers he will never abandon are police departments, ICE, Palantir, the sort of people who are really terrorizing people, who are killing people, who are hurting people, not the angry racist who emailed you thinking you would see it and you for some reason did. That tells me where the priorities are. Action's always going to speak louder than words. And if he's not willing to part with or his company's not willing to part with the tens of millions of dollars to get from those places, they don't care. And I feel like this plays into a broader issue of when you talk about the facial recognition software that Amazon is offering and how it's really inaccurate and

often really doesn't know what it's looking at. It's not just Amazon that has that problem, right? There's so many of these facial recognition softwares that, especially when it comes to black people, really can't tell what it's looking at. And then when we also look at these other tools that help law enforcement that these tech companies are creating, I know that there have been predictive policing softwares that are rolled out in more and more cities around the United States, I'm sure the world as well. And it's biased software because it uses this data from this kind of racist over-policing of Black neighborhoods. And so then it just assumes that more and more of the crime is going to come from Black people and Black neighborhoods. And so it just leads to the perpetuation of the over-policing of these people in these neighborhoods as well, right?

Right. PredPol, if you are someone who is interested in preventing crime by preempting it, deterring it, it might be an attractive piece of tech. But really, if you look at it, it shouldn't be. The idea of a predictive policing algorithm is really just taking already racially biased data that it's ignorant of why certain communities have crime in the first place, whether it's poverty, whether it's segregation, whether it's longstanding looting by the rest of the area of that community, ignoring all that and then kind of baking in the biased data, the realities there into further policing. Instead of treating the social problems that might be underlying crime in some

area, it just signs more police, which leads to antagonism, and they'll sign more police to protect the police that they believe are being antagonized. These systems are conveniently constructed in some cases in ways that just end up perpetuating and re-justifying the systems that they're supposed to be getting rid of. It always ends up justifying more crime prevention and more police and more deployment and more criminalization, right? And I think that's one reason why these technocratic fixes are always concerning because they are not interested in the underlying social realities. They're just interested in finding a piece of technology, constructing a contract, getting some money to

solve it, and not ending the contract, but extending it further and further, making new tools, making it more effective, making it more perceptive, expanding its reach, making it more granular. One example, you can have a transfusion of tech with ankle bracelets, where if people violate parole in some way, or if they leave their house when they're on house arrest, instead of previously going to prison, they'll just fine them. And they'll fine them more and more. And then if they're unable to pay the fine, they go to prison again. These sorts of technologies and practices don't actually solve the social problems. They make them worse. But these institutions, they really just don't care because they're concerned with extraction and meeting arbitrary objectives that don't really

reflect the needs they profess to care about. Definitely. And it feels like a broader issue in the whole worldview of tech, right? As you say, it's focused on these really narrow technological solutions and kind of ignores the broader As you say, it's focused on these really narrow technological solutions and kind of ignores the broader political, social, economic relations that are happening around that technology, right? And so instead of actually solving the problems that some of them I'm sure legitimately would like to solve, there are a lot of people in tech who actually think that they're doing a good thing and trying to contribute positively to the world, right? But then when you don't pay attention to this whole broader framework and everything that's going on around your tech solution, you just end up making

the problem worse, as you say, or perpetuating the problem instead of actually arriving at a solution that we clearly desperately need right now. Right. Especially with how tech has begun to infiltrate every part of our lives, from the homes to conceptions of governance to regimentation of yourself and your health, the reluctance or the shortcomings of critiques or analyses that don't look at that political economy that's behind tech, that can lead us down a dangerous path. Because if we lose sight of who's advancing something, and what they have to gain from it, and what it actually solves, and how it's actually being used, then we fall into the delusion that tech is a neutral thing that can be used to solve any problem. And not that a technology is a device or a process or something

that is consciously chosen and some possibilities are avoided and others are chosen. And there's rationales and reasons and assumptions and value judgments that are embedded at each step of this process. The belief that tech is a sort of neutral thing with theology that will lead us towards progress, I think does a lot of work and carries a lot of water for tech we wouldn't otherwise want. I remember reading arguments in favor of facial recognition with the idea that it'd be able to preempt crime, it'd be able to also help out in workplaces if someone is having a bad day or if someone's in a bad mood or if they wanted to make workers more productive, it would be able to help also students in schools and be

able to keep them safe. But it also ignores that facial recognition for the most part is also used in surveillance. It's also kept in data sets that are usually able to be accessed or hacked relatively easily. And it's also used within the confines of a criminal justice system, a police system, a punitive system that is racially biased. It's racist, it's sexist, that uses violence when it doesn't need to. And so if you believe that tech is neutral, you believe those outcomes are just like, you know, natural outcomes and not extensions of the fucked up system that we have and need to get rid of instead of beautifying with technological fixes. I completely agree.

And so obviously, one of these pieces is, you know, we're all on these video platforms, these social media platforms, and they have a really powerful ability to kind of control and manage what we see, the types of things that we interact with. Facebook obviously is massive for this, YouTube, and they are platforms that have been criticized for spreading right-wing views in the case of YouTube, having algorithms that lead people down a path toward radicalization. And obviously, when people say radicalization, what they really mean is often white supremacy and things like that, right? So what are the problems that you see with how these platforms that we all depend on or

run that create outcomes that can potentially or even really, affect Black people and make Black people's lives worse. There's always a concern when you have institutions that control your access to information or control the way in which your experience on the internet is mediated, that there's going to be bias, especially given our past discussions of racial bias. And I think that, you know, with these platforms, already they've shown a lot of problems, for example, with Facebook, with misinformation, with the ability to be manipulated or to inflame violence in Rohingyas, as an example, or failure to take into account their own power to mediate these things and instead let it flourish. But I don't know what the immediate solution looks like beyond figuring out

what to do with the underlying political economy. It doesn't make sense for communication to be privately owned by a large corporation in the way Facebook does. At the moment, Facebook is free. At the moment, Facebook is something that we can all freely access and is a way to keep in touch with people, for example, overseas. You know, I keep in touch with a lot of my family on WhatsApp as an example of which they own. used in ways that make us in a more amenable or profitable subject for the company or that allow it to harness more and more control over other avenues of life and increase its market concentration. Maybe the solution is to break it up into different communication platforms or to nationalize it entirely. But if we are concerned with Black voices, Black lives, we have to look at larger structural fixes versus the, I think, the instinct that some people might have, which is to put more

Black workers in as a fix, right? More Black executives, more Black software engineers, more Black workforce, because what is that going to do to change the profit incentives and the data incentives and the actual structure movers that push these companies to act in ways which have an undue influence on how we think and how we experience the world. And I think that with all these platforms, but especially the internet ones, we need to take a serious look at whether or not they should exist as a concentrated thing. There are benefits to having everybody on one social media website or maybe one platform for transportation, but what do we lose in exchange for that? And what do we have to guard against because of that?

Take an example like Uber, which calls itself a platform. We're not interested in private transportation. We're interested in free transportation for people. We're also interested in people being able to access transportation wherever they are, no matter the reason, right? And that's not possible with a private transportation system. It's not possible also with a private transportation system and a public transportation system. So the solution ends up becoming, break it up to undermine its power, its resistance to regulations or interventions by the state or community so that we can then subsume it, make it public or make it municipalized. And I think something similar needs to happen with the internet companies in that we need to

decide, do we want communication to be free forever and to be a public good? Or do we want it to be like a good and service provided by private entity in exchange for X, Y, and Z? I completely agree. I feel like the pandemic and everyone being forced to work at home has really, hopefully, opened a lot of people's eyes to why internet should be a public service and not just something that's offered by these big private monopolies. Now, I'd say a lot of our focus thus far has been on the way that tech companies are affecting people in the United States, in Canada. But the tentacles of this system extend much further out from the United States where many of these tech companies are headquartered because the resources that are in all of our smartphones and all of our computers

and all of our tech products come from all around the world. And a lot of those come from the global South where the labor standards might not be as great. And there And a lot of those come from the global South, where the labor standards might not be as great. And there are a lot of reasons for that. And obviously, colonialism and imperialism are a huge piece of that. So when we take a broader view, outside of our Western countries, outside of the United States, how do we see that tech companies are affecting Black lives elsewhere in the world as well? Yeah, you know, I think overseas, it's more clear, I think, the disregard that these companies and their models have for humans, you know, for black lives in particular, because a lot of these

companies, they are extracting resources in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example. So they're using child minors, or they're sourcing it to people who are sourcing it to people who are sourcing it to child miners. But at the end of the day, a large part of our economy relies on ensuring that a large number of people, children, are exposed to toxic chemicals and are mining them, are getting paid pennies a day, likely dying, horrific and gruesome accidents, or remained and lose limbs or ability to walk or move or care for themselves. And that is where you see, I think, more clearly the sort of things that companies are willing to excuse and what we should judge them by.

If you are willing to let customers and clients brutalize people in the United States with tech you provide to police, then you don't really care about police brutality. If you're allowing contractors to get child laborers and child minors, then you don't really care about dignity and sanctity of human life, and especially you don't care about African lives, you don't care about Black lives. It's a rhetorical statement and position. And I think it also kind of speaks to how warped and hypocritical and perverse morality is here that also speaking that or trying to name it, I don't think it draws the same sort of ire in some cases or tension because we should not be taking seriously any company in tech. Also,

most companies, if they say Black Lives Matter, when, again, they profit off of Black suffering and Black exploitation. Your tech company, when you use red earth minerals, really have no business speaking about commitment to making sure that people are safe from brutality. If you did that, you would find another business, a lot of business to get into. And I don't think it's so much that people themselves are compromised so much as there's really no ethical consumption in the system and there's no interest in creating it because the whole point is to be involved with whatever expense, whether that means using child minors, whether that means working with the police, whether that means, you know, using child minors, whether that means working with the police, you know, whether that means paying your black employees less or not giving them health care,

whatever, it doesn't matter. So long as you can get away with it, it's fine. Yeah, I completely agree with that. And when I read Tim Cook's like statement, and you know, I'm not saying that this is just Apple, it's all the major tech companies. But there has been a particular focus on like Apple supply chain and what they are doing. And then when I read Tim Cook's statement, and I was like, how can you say that when like, we know that you're relying on child labor in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, right? You know, they're getting sued right now. Yeah. And one thing I also really hate about the way that these things are handled in the global south is like these big extravagant lawsuits that end with a settlement that carefully obfuscates whether they had liability or not.

But at the end of the day, you know what you're doing. And it's a game to put as many barriers and levels of deniability between you and the exploitation that's going on. It's like with Chevron. Chevron's not a tech company, but Chevron said Black Lives Matter. And Chevron has allegedly, because they beat the law to, helped Nigerian militias and military kidnap, kill, torture dissidents and people who lived in places they were extracting oil from. If you go down the list of these large global companies, almost all of them have in one way or another done something horrendous or profited from something horrendous and kind of wave it away because it happens there, not here. Yeah, definitely. Now, one of the big demands that has emerged from the Black Lives Matter protests has been to defund or abolish the police, right?

And I know that you have a new article that is on that specific topic. So to end off our episode, I think it would be really great if you could explain why defunding or abolishing the police is the right way to go. And I guess give us an idea of what that would look like. Right. There's Campaign Zero, which is this, you know, sort of liberal reform group advocating for eight procedural rules that would reduce police killing by 54 to 72%. And I think that we should step back and one, ask, what can we do to get it to zero? And two, police killings are not the only type of violence that police do to us.

So how do we end the other ways that are non-lethal but still violent? You know, Stop and Frisk was a horrible, unconstitutional program, terrorized communities for the purpose of racial profiling and had permanent social and psychological effects on Black communities that are terrorized. That's a form of non-lethal violence that doesn't exactly get critiqued or examined or addressed by these reforms. And I think defunding and abolishing the police gets to the heart of the matter, which is that, one, most of the institutions and public goods and services have been radically defunded while police budgets have soared and continue to soar, even as they're killing people, even as police brutality becomes more and more of a widespread acknowledged problem because of the prevalence of body cameras or video recordings. So as a first step, what if we simply got the police out of places where it doesn't really make sense for

them to be? It doesn't make sense for officers to be in school where they are then leading to the arrest of kids or punishing them. It doesn't make sense for police officers to be in school where they are then leading to the arrest of kids or punishing them. It doesn't make sense for police officers to be using the sorts of technologies that we talked about because they just perpetuate racial biases. It doesn't make sense for them to be able to get their hands on military equipment and to do trainings with foreign militaries. It doesn't make sense for a lot of the ways we throw money at them to solve problems that they don't really have a business solving. You know, we don't need soldiers.

We don't need them to have guns or bring guns to every situation. If you start with that and you cut the funding there and you reallocate it to services that have been underfunded, with schools, with mental health programs, that's a good first step. Then we can keep cutting it even further because what we can do is we can decriminalize now things that are needlessly criminalized, usually for historical reasons that are racist or sexist or classist. And if we can fight the criminalization of those things, whether it's homelessness, whether it's drugs, whether it's sex work, we can then again have another retreat of the police and their interference in our communities and in our lives and the ability for violence to happen. And we can continue to attack the social roots of crime in our society. We can attack poverty, attack homelessness. We can attack all the causes that don't get addressed in the system where the solution is to throw people into a cage. We can also work on scaling back the prison system and eventually ending it. Putting people in prison already

increases the chance of them going back to it, locks them away from getting support from society, most jobs, public housing, public assistance. It kind of introduces and locks them into a path or a cycle where the state preys on them again, extracts revenue from them again in fees or in free labor in the prison system. If we were to lop that off and lop off the incentives for just throwing people in jail, criminalizing poverty, criminalizing our walks of life, you know, that's another step where we can then peel back the police. And I think we can keep doing that until we get to, you know, the core concern that people have, which is, you know, what are we going to do with

violent crime? And at that point, I think we need to speak to the fact that we don't do much about violent crime. You know, a lot of murders go unsolved. Police don't solve what? About 40% of murders. Rapes are underreported, or they don't do much to find justice for the survivor. And, you know, furthermore, they also like will criminalize survivors, you know, if there are people who survived an abusive household, you know, there's someone who was a mother to an abused child that didn't, you know, for some period of time report the abuse that was happening to the child, they can go to jail. There are all sorts of ways in which the system that we have already fails us deeply and makes things worse. And we should abandon it if we really are concerned with public safety. And if those

people who may have concerns about defunding and abolishing the police are truly concerned with reducing crime, solving murder, and making sure that there's no violence, then they need to recognize this system does not work at all. And we need to either be open to other alternatives or start experimenting with them. And I think that we would find if we cut away the police, the prisons, by building up, sustaining relationships, institutions to displace them and take care of one another. It would be an expansion of the responsibility we all have as individuals in the community, but it would be an affirmation in our power because we are recognizing that we are the ones who can save each other, we can help each other, we can remake each other, and it falls on us and not

people with guns who live in the suburbs, 30 miles away from the city that they're supposed to protect and serve or the community to protect and serve. It should be us. And if we can get to that point, I think that people would find police violence goes away, but also the capacity for justice and the capacity for healing and the capacity for reversing harms that come from crimes would radically expand. And that world where we are all taking care of each other, where we are not throwing people in cells and cages and where we are addressing social problems and where justice is healing as well as restoration is a much better world than a world where we just have rules for cops to make them

nicer. I think there's such a huge divide between those two worlds. We should want a radically different world and not just one with nicer people holding the guns. Yeah. I've not only been really inspired by seeing so many people turn out in the streets, not just in the United States, but around the world to really try to take on and tackle racism and finally address these really brutal policing systems once and for all, right? And just seeing how quickly the idea of defunding and abolishing the police has gone from this kind of radical concept that like only these crazy lefties were talking about to now all of a sudden it's in like all of the mainstream media getting like a somewhat fair hearing at least you know yeah it's really been good to watch i've seen a lot of people

talk about how i think the police precinct burning in minneapolis and then the one that they just took and turned into an autonomous zone in Seattle, have evaporated. A hundred plus years of ideology we had about the police, that they are this sort of permanent feature of our lives. They need to be there, and we need to feed them in terms of budget. And we have to always organize ourselves and our society around. And I think the fact of the matter is we don't. As they exist, they're involved in way too many things and intervening too much in our lives. And if we're being honest with ourselves, the world that we say we want when we talk about public safety and community health and well-being is fundamentally incompatible with an armed force of people who throw individuals into cages for social offenses, nonviolent crimes, and for all sorts of criminalized behavior. And if we're

going to make this world better, this really at times miserable world, then that is a great way to do it by abolishing the police and trusting one another to take care of one another. I completely agree. And I think that's a fantastic place to leave it. Edward, I thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your perspective. Thank you for having me. It's great talking. Edward Onweso Jr. is a staff writer at Vice. You can follow him on Twitter at BigBlackJacobin. If you liked our conversation, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at TechWon'tSaveUs, and you can follow me, Paris Marks, on Twitter at Paris Marks. TechWon'tSaveUs is part of the Ricochet Podcast

Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. Thanks for listening.