Rethink Community Safety Campaign

As we’re reaching the month of May, at the Reclaim Mass Liberation Taskforce, the defund team, now the Rethink Community Safety Campaign, has been cultivating a lot of important updates. These updates help us understand and emphasize the need to rethink how we look at community safety.

The city of Philadelphia is currently experiencing a gun violence epidemic that has been exacerbated by decades of neglect and under funding of schools, libraries and rec centers, housing programs, and various other public resources in favor of tax cuts for the rich and a bloated police department budget. When seeing Mayor Jim Kenney’s proposed flatline budget for the Philadelphia Police Department, we know that it still does not center anti violence resources without law enforcement.

We envision a Philadelphia where we're no longer the Poorest Big City because we have leadership that has prioritized long term investment in our communities. Where our most vulnerable are out of survival mode. A community that can finally thrive instead of getting caught up in the carceral system that separates families, worsens poverty, and perpetuates violence in Black, brown, and poor communities. 

The fight does not stop at defunding the police. We are asking communities to rethink what safety really means. We're doing the outreach and political education to communities outside of the movement asking folks to envision community safety as educational, healing, and restorative. Not carceral.