Join co-host Emma Lugo with guests Esther and Buckley of Critical Resistance PDX about strategies to interrupt the police as first responders to people experiencing mental health crisis. Critical Resistance Portland (CR-PDX) is developing a campaign to interrupt the use of police as mental health first responders in Portland.
We have seen how policing escalates everyday mental health needs or instances of crisis that can result in violence on our communities. It's crucial that Portland disrupt this pattern and invest in community care. CR Portland wants to impact protocol and funding of mental health crisis services and is enlisting organizations and individuals who could be partners or stake holders in this campaign. This includes social service providers, mental health service users, communities targeted by the police, and other racial and economic justice organizations.
Critical Resistance is a prison industrial complex abolitionist organization which means that to do this work we must work to end racism, white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, homophobia and transphobia, anti-blackness, imperialism, and all systems of power that contribute to the caging, separation, harm, surveillance, policing, and killing of ourselves and loved ones, and specifically recognizing that these systems target those in black & brown & queer & trans communities.
For Part 2 of the show, we will be joined by Christina VanOrder to talk about theft of wages in the context of the prison-industrial complex and what efforts are being made to bring redress to the millions of workers in the prison system who are being paid slave wages.
- KBOO