50 signatures reached
To: Members of Norfolk City Council, Mayor Alexander, and Norfolk City Manager:
Norfolk City Council: Release Use-of-Force Records Now!
I demand that the following policies are discussed and adopted at your next council meeting on July 14th, 2020.
First and foremost, I ask that members of City Council require the Norfolk Police Department to process lethal and non-lethal force reports in order of how recent they are. These records should be released DIRECTLY to the public (i.e. should not first be vetted by social scientists, and Police Chief Boone mentioned he would do.) The public is capable of doing its own analysis of the data. NPD should also release data that makes plain to the public which police officers have the greatest number of excessive force reports on record so that oversight of patterns of excessive use of force can be conducted by civilians.
Additional demands include, but are not limited to:
1. FREE PEOPLE FROM JAILS. Marijuana is now decriminalized in Virginia. Norfolk jails must release all those held on charges of possession or sale of marijuana within a month of July 14th.
2 NO INCREASE IN FUNDING TO THE POLICE. Reject any proposed expansion to police budgets. This should include, no hiring of new officers or replacement of fired or resigned officers in addition to fully cut funding for public relations.
3. DEMILITARIZE COMMUNITIES. Remove cops from hospitals. End the militarization of Black and Brown neighborhoods by ending broken windows policing and all iterations of community policing. This includes the use of surveillance technologies to develop in-house surveillance systems.
4. END CIVIL ASSET FORFEITURE. Police should no longer be able to keep seized property.
5. MAKE ALL CITY COMMUNICATION ACCESSIBLE. Documents, minutes, and all other communications from the city must be available in Spanish, Tagalog, and ASL in addition to English. Audio versions should also be available for all documentation.
Why is this important?
As of 2016, Norfolk police have killed twice as many people as any other agency in Virginia since 2010, according to a Virginian Pilot investigation. According to The Guardian newspaper, out of the 19 people shot and killed by police in the state of Virginia in 2016, seven of those were killed in the Hampton Roads area, with 5 of those deaths being in Norfolk alone.
These issues are not "another place's problem." Members of Norfolk City Council have the ability to make concrete change and address the systematic abuse Black and Brown people experience everyday here in Norfolk.