#Motiontober DAY 1: Louisville, K.Y., Ella Fitzgerald
I have always loved my hometown. I love being from Louisville. I love being from the same city as The Greatest. When I started thinking about this project set to this song months ago, I intended it to be a love letter to my city.
But I am angry. The same city that celebrates Ali as one of their own cannot fail Breonna Taylor. We cannot continue to celebrate black lives when it is convenient and ignore them when they are being killed at the hands of those whose job it is to “serve and protect” them.
I am disgusted by Attorney General Daniel Cameron. I am disgusted by what I have seen LMPD officers do and heard them say over the past few months.
But even if the three officers WERE charged and convicted with her murder (OR AT LEAST ALL FIRED FROM THEIR JOBS AT LMPD), this did not happen simply as a result of 3 individual people’s actions. The issue is also with the system that ended up allowing them to be at her house that night in the first place.
It is time to defund the police. Not for the purpose of “punishing the police,” but to protect our community and work to establish a better form of public safety. I am begging those of you who hear “abolish the police” and immediately think “ridiculous! Who will protect us from all the bad people??” to take a moment, take a breath, realize that no one is saying there won’t be someone to come help you when you call 911 in an emergency, and then consider that a system that was founded for the purpose of keeping slaves in line perhaps is not the best system for everyone in our community, and maybe there are other ways of building a safe community.
Maybe the “bad people” wouldn’t have grown up to be that way had more of their basic needs been met throughout their life (better public education, affordable housing, access to healthcare including mental health services, substance abuse treatment, etc. etc. ETC.) Funneling more money into actual community needs would keep the ones whose job it is to “protect us” safer too! People who have been supporting cops throughout this whole thing talk about how their loved one who is a cop “puts his/ her life on the line every day/ is so overworked”— THEN YOU SHOULD WANT THIS TOO. Defunding the police is also about making it so that police don’t have to respond to situations they are not trained or equipped to handle, and working at the root of the problem so that there are less “situations” for them to handle in the first place.
I am sure there are people who joined the police force with good intentions. I don’t understand how those people’s voices aren’t the loudest ones we’re hearing speaking out against the violence of their coworkers and against the police system placing them into unnecessary situations where violence is much more likely to occur (i.e. a no knock raid in the middle of the night). If there are good police who truly want safer neighborhoods, surely they can see this current system isn’t working.
I am inspired by all the people who have been working so hard to change the things that seem so ingrained in our communities that it’s tough to imagine how it could be different. But humans can be smart and creative and imaginative! There are well thought out plans for defunding the police, and rebuilding a new system for public safety. They can work.
Anywho, Louisville I love you & that’s why I think we can use this time to propel our city forward and become a leader in the fight for safer communities in Breonna’s name, while also honoring the legacy of another Great Louisvillian.
*I do not own the rights to this song nor the clips of Ali*
