I am a documentary filmmaker and a community artist. A community artist is a creator, responsible to the people they live among. They work beyond just the aesthetic. Our art has an impact on the way people live, and the way they dream and imagine they could live. Community artists engage systems and structures to disrupt inequities. They teach and learn. —D.A. Bullock

Chicago, Southside

The South Shore and Chatham neighborhoods of Chicago’s south side are middle and working class and majority Black. That was my growing up experience. In 1970, when I was born, the Great Migration was coming to an end. Blacks were the majority of the city, but until Harold Washington (Mayor, 1983-87) they didn’t have political power.

In the 80s, Black people were trying to grab the American Dream, trying to make it — that Reagan, supply-side nonsense. It didn’t work out for most people. There was a lot of unrest among young folks. Gangs and drug addiction were reaching their height. I found myself in the middle of that.

My mother and father got divorced when I was nine. My mom, grandmother and aunts, raised me and my two brothers. They were very keen on making sure we were educated. The Chicago public schools at the time were in terrible condition. My mom sent us to Catholic schools, not because of Catholicism, but for the education. I thank her for that every day. That set me on a path to choose my own way in life, not be caught in the pathology that was going on.

When I was little I thought Catholicism was Black. I had no idea it was a worldwide religion. The Catholic Schools were 99.9 percent Black — a common phenomenon on the Southside of Chicago. There were many Catholic Churches with all black parishioners, though the administrators and priests were White and didn’t live in our neighborhood. That was normal. Some would say there was a missionary quality to it. But in terms of education it was one of our only resorts.

Learning the Power of Community

I loved my community. I had all these Black icons, artists, intellectuals and professionals who had not made that flight to the suburbs, who influenced me. Three blocks away lived Dr. Margaret Burroughs, who designed and curated the internationally renowned DuSable African-American History museum. To me she was just Ms. Burroughs, but when I grew older I realized what a gift she was. So while we had dangerous challenges we also had these folks who would look out for you. Anyone of them could tell you, “It’s time to go inside.” We learned to listen to them pretty early on. They earned our respect.

My grandmother had an apartment building, occupied by my entire family. I learned that family were supposed to live together and chip in. Childcare was handled in the community. If there was a TV to be purchased we all got it together, including me. It was empowering, in a way. We were all involved in these big decisions. We were living in poverty, but it didn’t feel that way. It wasn’t a democracy, but as a kid I had an impact, a voice. It was a way of valuing, loving and caring for each other. Knowing how to be resilient. I try to instill that in my own kids. Perspective about value — not just material value. How we take care of each other, how we love each other. I learned that in Chicago with my family environment.

Police Brutality in Chicago

Stop and Frisk was just general practice in Chicago in the 1980s. The police were gearing up for what they called a “war against the gangs.” They started to treat us all as potential gang members. Everything we were doing as kids became suspect. The police they would stop us, pat us down. It was so common we came up with our own satire about it. I’d be coming home from school in my Catholic uniform and the police would stop me and ask me where the drugs were…

While the police and gangs were real challenges in our lives, there were things that balanced those dangers out, ways that community held you up. Chicago today has a reputation for extreme gun violence. I looked at the statistics. There were more shootings the year I was 21, then in the last five years combined, yet today the storytelling focuses on the violence. So, though there were more challenges when I was young, it didn’t seem like it. We had a different understanding around it. A rich alchemy of good and bad, love and hate. Extremes. That was Chicago.

Banking on College

I went to U of Illinois in Urbana/Champagne on a presidential scholarship. If I hadn’t gotten the scholarship I would have gone to the local community college. Out of me and my brothers I was the one who was supposed to go to college, have a career, help the family. Again, the American Dream thing. People in my educational career had identified me as someone who would succeed. I tested well, had a good memory. School was not difficult for me.

The summer before college, I got an internship at Northern Trust Bank. There was a competition to get these jobs—a program for “inner city kids” — so it was a big deal. Since I got this job that was highly sought after, I thought, “I guess I gotta be a banker.”

By my sophomore year I realized that Finance was not for me. I wanted to do something creative. I wanted to write stories, though I didn’t know how to apply that. And I still felt the pressure to succeed financially. My family was expecting me to help everybody out. I was trying to figure out how I could do both.

During the summer after my third year, I decided I wanted to write a screenplay. So I read all these books by Spike Lee about how he made his films, especially the one about making She’s Gotta Have It. It was the first time I read anything voraciously. I was fascinated by his process and the sacrifice he had to have. I also saw Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, the documentary about the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. I was inspired by Coppola’s creative process, the extreme challenges he faced and the idea of giving your all to make a film. I got hooked on cinema.

I wrote the screenplay quickly and I did a large casting call with my friends, had people audition for it. I was forcing myself to follow through with it, though I had no idea what I was doing. I was surprised at how many people came out. I felt like I had to tell them. “I don’t know how to make a film.” It was a mad dash to create.

The cinematography department at my college was small. My advisers were dead set against me changing majors. “You only have a little bit to go. Finish this out.” There was a certain amount of shame: “Don’t waste your education.” That brought me down.

A Life-changing Encounter on an Airplane

During Spring break I was going to visit a lady I was dating on and off, who lived in Seattle. On the flight I ended up sitting next to this older Black man. I sat down and put on my headphones to listen to my music, but he tapped me on the shoulder and shook his head. “You are not going to do that. You have to talk to me young man. It’s a four-hour flight.”

I’m an introverted guy, but he had a way of pulling things out of me. I’m telling him everything, about this lady who doesn’t want me anymore, about my parents breaking up, about how my dog died. By the time we got toward the end of the flight I got to telling him about wanting to be a filmmaker and how stupid that was. I repeated that script I heard from my advisors about “wasting opportunity.”

As we were getting off the plane, he handed me his card: Jim Taylor, Community Film Workshop. Chicago. “I run this little film workshop. We’ve been around for a while, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. We teach young people film making. Come visit.”

I said, “Yes, of course!” But I came back and didn’t go! I put the card on the corner of my desk and stared at it for months. I was scared.

One day, distraught about my relationship, I left campus, drove to Chicago, and ended up at the address on the card. Jim Taylor was there with a big smile on his face. His wife, Margaret Caples was there too. It was literally a mom and pop operation. They ran it together. There was a class in session. Jim gave me this thing called a “changing bag” and said, “I want you to put this film in this camera for me.”

I had no idea what to do. At least five times I wanted to just get up and run out. I made a complete mess of it, ruined the film. I figured that was it. I failed the test.

But he didn’t care. He said, “Listen, I don’t care about this film. This wasn’t about you doing it right. It was about you sitting there for this whole time, trying. You have to do this.”

I took their 16 millimeter film course, driving back and forth trying to manage it and college. The other students were mostly young adult learners — all minority students, but from different backgrounds. It was fantastic. I was ignited like I had never been before, voracious about learning and unstoppable. I knew I had to do this if I was going to be a person who was engaged and living life.

I have been a professional filmmaker of some sort from that point on. I might have done some temp work, but my life work has been filming. When I told my mentor at the bank that I wasn’t coming back she said, “I know. You don’t belong here.” She was great. At first I did jobs for free. Internships. I met fantastic people and those contacts evolved into directing commercial and music video work in Chicago. I started a film company with a lifelong friend of mine. Started to gain some success.

Correcting the Frame

We tend to have this idea of how you gain mastery of things. My filmmaking journey has not been traditional. Some of it was self-taught, some taught by community — which is fantastic and rare. The non-traditional route might take a little longer, but it’s worth it.

It wasn’t smooth sailing. There were lots of really down low points. I had to adapt, be resilient. I was doing commercial work that was more well-paying, but it did not satisfy my artistic needs or social practice.

When I was coming up in the film world, there were all these “hood” films about Black pathology, about young Black men as gang members. My first script was about young Black men in college, and their nuanced struggle. Dark (2003) was semi-autobiographical, a Catcher in the Rye type story about a Black kid growing up in the south side of Chicago, going to the University of Chicago. The University and the South side are physically right next door to each other, but they are worlds apart. There all these imaginary lines between them where you can and can not go. The film depicted a lot of the code switching I had to do, working at the bank, living in the south side, going to college.

Part of my life has been figuring out how to thrive and live authentically in both worlds and not have to assimilate. That’s a difficult balance. You could go a whole lifetime and not get it right. Sometimes the rules change. Sometimes the implication of the narrative outside of you changes and speaks for you.

As a young man people would look at me and say, “The loading dock is in the back” and I would say, “I’m here to teach the course.” And vice-versa. When I talk to young men in the gun violence life, they think I don’t know what they are living. They’ll tell me “You’re corny.” I say, “You don’t know what I have seen. I have lived enough of the life you’re living to know.”

I value the ability to be authentic in different spaces.

My second script was a modern-day adaptation of Julius Caesar, set in Chicago with the iambic pentameter of hip hop. I was making this intentional mash, putting hip hop up there with Shakespeare. The script was well read and well received, and at some point it got the attention of Jeffrey Wright, (best known for his award-winning role in Angels in America), Jeffrey wanted to be in the film. While the producers were trying to get financing locked down, they asked,“Could you set it in New Orleans?”

That was right after Hurricane Katrina. I said, “Sure”.

I went down to New Orleans to write, but then Jeffrey asked me if I wanted to take a detour to do a documentary project. At that time I didn’t have a family. I could just go — off to Sierra Leone.

The fight against Extractive Industries in Sierra Leone

Jeffrey had created an organization named after a river in Sierra Leone called Taia Peace Foundation. He wanted to tell the story of the aftermath of the civil war when chiefdoms were taking the struggle against extractive industries into their own hands, taking local control of resources to build infrastructure. He wanted his film to help them fund their grassroots, community based development work.

I lived there for about 8 months working on the film, traveling throughout the country, into tiny communities and big cities. I met all these wonderful people. I would go days when I would only hear Mende—no English. I was blown away, especially being in West Africa because that is where my ancestral lineage is from. It was life changing.

For a filmmaker it was a fascinating moment. A time of transition. Chinese investors were coming in, taking over industries and migrating to parts of Freetown.

When people heard I was going to Sierra Leone they would say to me, “Isn’t it dangerous?” Their only frame was the civil war. They didn’t realize that, while there were still the residual effects, people in Sierra Leone were moving on.

A young man who drove me around, named Jonathan, helped me understand how this worked. He told me one day that he had seen the person who killed his father in Freetown. He never approached the man. He was not interested in conflict or confrontation. He just wanted to heal his family.

People in Sierra Leone had a deeper understanding of forgiveness, the kind that is necessary to bring their nation together. They had lived together, warred against each other, and now they were working on a psychological level, on the truth and reconciliation they needed to rebuild.

We put together parts of the film, presented it to the Clinton Global initiative and they funded several of the projects. I saw the power of that kind of documentary work, where you can actually change the framing of a story.

Documenting the Human Cost of BP Oil Spill in New Orleans

I returned to New Orleans to finish writing my script, but ended up doing another documentary. The BP oil spill happened while I was there. A director asked me to be the cinematographer for a film documenting how the oil spill impacted people in the fishing village of Pointe à la Hache, an unincorporated community in Plaquemines Parish below New Orleans, on the east bank of the Mississippi River. You have to take a ferry to get out there. There were some old plantations and some White families who became rich over oil and mineral rights living there, but most of the residents were impoverished Black and Vietnamese fishers who made a living harvesting oysters and shrimp. They were still recovering from Katrina when 500,000 barrels of crude oil poured into the Gulf.

The state, under Governor Bobby Jindahl, worked with the industry to cover it up. They did remediation things that were harmful for oyster fishers, like a fresh water diversion to make it look more pristine, that destroyed the salt water balance oysters need to spawn. And they used chemical dispersants to sink the oil to the bottom. A massive, evolving, man-made disaster on so many levels.

BP had offered them a small settlement if they signed immediately and rescinded their rights to pursue further remediation. They didn’t know how much time they had, if the oysters would come back to spawn. Through organization they were able to resist that first deal and demand a larger settlement.

People invited me into their house. I would miss the ferry and end up sleeping on someone’s couch for the night. They were so giving to me in their most vulnerable time. Theirs was a David and Goliath story, of villagers who banded together and organized. They had a history of organizing around civil rights issues, so they knew how to do it. They had campaigned to get indoor plumbing in the 1980s. Earlier they fought Judge Perez, a staunch segregationist of the South whose power structure was still visible in southern Louisiana when I was there.

The film, Vanishing Pearls ,went through the festival circuit and got picked up by Ava Duverney’s company Array Now, which was great. It had a small theatrical release in the US, and then went places films don’t usually go, like community groups and museums. And it was on Netflix.

The film helped to galvanize the voices of oystermen like Byron Encalade, who testified to the US Congress. They won a suit in federal court. To me, that is impact.

In social struggles that have a long arc, storytelling keeps us moving in the right direction. When another disaster happens (and it will) they will know how people fought and won in the past.

There are other stories of New Orleans I would like to tell. I don’t think people understand the impact of Katrina unless you spend some time there. Even if things look like they are back — they’re not back. The city was under water. It is like returning from a war. Just the mass of people who had to leave who want to return —that is an ongoing story that has not been told, that I would like to tell. It is a story about being a refugee in your own country.

We respond to natural disasters by repeating mistakes. We aren’t dealing with the human causes and the indigenous solutions.We are not learning the lessons.

In New Orleans I also saw the dehumanization of redevelopment. The city is becoming more gentrified. I know musicians who work in New Orleans. They are why tourists visit the city. But these artists, who give the city its character, can’t afford to live there.

On Documentary Filmmaking

After that, I started to view projects, not by whether something gets into the theater, but by the impact it has on communities. I decided to focus on documentary filmmaking, a kind of storytelling that allowed me to plug into communities in a way that wasn’t individual-centered.

My documentary work is about building relationships and asking folks to trust you with their real lives, which is extraordinary and important. The weight of that is compelling to me. I still manipulate world events to tell a story, but I have this added responsibility to unveil stock stories and reveal truths, especially about people like myself, people who are constantly faced with narratives that are false.

That is what I am doing in my documentary essay on Terrance Franklin in Minneapolis, Killing Mookie.

Getting to Minneapolis, Northside

I came to Minneapolis for love.

I met my wife April in New Orleans. She was working on a film. She had a daughter from a former marriage. We were going to stay, but the schools in New Orleans were challenging, so we came to Minnesota—where she grew up—for the schools.

We wanted to buy a house. Some of the realtors didn’t want to show us North Minneapolis. I said,“Tell me what you are saying. Are you seeing me?” My wife is white. I think they were trying to figure out where she would fit, where our family would fit into the Midwestern idea of where people ought to live. Minnesota has a very nice polite way of not saying what they are saying.

I wanted to live in North Minneapolis where the roots and the culture were strong. Clearly I was not afraid to live among Black folks. Walking the neighborhood, I was struck by how beautiful the houses were. I met people and thought, who wouldn’t want to live next to this woman or this gentleman? Yet the realtors’ assumption was, you only live in North because you’re stuck there. No-one chooses it.

We live in the Cleveland neighborhood. It is the most diverse I have ever lived in. Across the street from me are two older white couples. There is a Hmong family down the street, several Black families, and our multiracial family. You don’t see that in American cities. Isn’t that a beautiful thing? Isn’t that an asset? We have a beautiful house–high ceilings, well-built, mid-century, great value — why wouldn’t we want it?

People say they value diversity, but they don’t want to live it.

Community Artists of Minneapolis Northside

When we moved in I didn’t know anyone. I started doing my exploration. I met the Cottman family. Kenna is a dance instructor, Beverly is a teacher and artist, and Bill is a photographer. I found Juxtaposition Arts, this jewel on West Broadway, a coop for artists. DeAnna and Roger Cummings invited me to join. I said of course. Just the medicine I needed.

I’ve been here since 2011. It has challenges. I’m not a Pollyanna about it. But Minneapolis and North Minneapolis are small enough, and community-centered enough, that we can take on those challenges, whereas a place like Chicago is bigger than we can get our hands around. It keeps me inspired, focusing on how we can do things differently around community violence, housing, employment and education. There is a new spirit around finding solutions. I am happy to be a part of it, using the power I have as a storyteller, a filmmaker and a community artist.

When I say “community artist”, I mean a creator who is responsible to those people they live among. They work beyond just the aesthetic. Our art has an impact on the way people live, and the way they dream and imagine they could live. Community artists engage systems and structures to disrupt inequities. They teach and learn.

I teach a documentary film class for HECUA. I want to share with young folks what I have learned — do what Jim Taylor did for me, for someone, to offer that to who ever wants to take that up. It’s authentic. We need to learn together.

I am serving on a new committee with the city of Minneapolis —the Racial Equity Advisory Committee. Our charge is to advise the Mayor and City Council. Racial equity is broad. I am focusing on housing and policing/criminal justice.

Housing: We have a shortage of rental properties.

An equity approach means the entire city should take part in creating affordable housing. It means wealthy people need to redefine what it means to live in a city. It means, for example, that if you want to enjoy the restaurants you think are so great, you need to be willing to live near the renters who work in these restaurants. Many of the people in service jobs are people of color. They are underpaid, struggling for minimum wage increases and livability standards that other folks take for granted.

The 2040 proposal has galvanized the push and pull around how affordable housing in the city is currently designed and zoned. There has been pushback from single family home owners in southwest that have more expensive homes, concerned about the specter of them being pushed out. That is not the reality, we know that. In the history of America it is poor folks who get pushed out. People need to get out of their fear.

For too long all the affordable housing has been in North Minneapolis, exclusively. That is the literal definition of the word ghetto. If people in wealthy neighborhoods are fearful of having low-income neighbors, then they don’t get to have all the benefits of living in a city. They can go live in the suburbs.

Liberal Minneapolitans still have dog whistles, and often they are about affordable housing. They don’t want people parking on their streets — the same concerns that created white flight to the suburbs decades ago.

There are specific things we can do as a city to create a better synergy in that thinking. 1. Don’t invest in current developers. We have common ground around that — both NIMBYs and advocates for affordable housing don’t like the current developers.

2. We need to create a new class of developers. Build fourplexes with people of color as owner-occupiers in mind. If I live where I rent, as a working class person, I’m going to be a different kind of manager and caretaker. Zoned mom and pop fourplexes around the city, owned my people of color, would redress redlining.

3. We also need to provide credit to people who have historically faced discrimination in banking, who don’t have family resources, so they can buy a fourplex and build wealth.

I interviewed Blong Yang when he was Ward 5 council member, about a year after the fire on West Broadway. I asked him what he thought was the responsibility of the city for development. He said “Oh no, the city is not a developer.” Which is not true. The city does intervene to create things like the Upper Harbor Terminal.

Blong Yang had a limited view of what was possible, which was why he was voted out. The city is us, but he didn’t have that vision. Now the city is starting to move in that direction. They have a pilot program to buy off slumlords.

We need to stop inviting developers from Golden Valley to come in with their money-making scheme. They build and leave and don’t care about the long-term results. The city can invest in community members instead of displacing them. The city can take an empty lot and say to the people on the block, “You live on this block.How would you like to be the developer of this property? You know what you want.”

Moving toward Police Abolition

I’ve evolved, in my understanding of the role of the police. I used to believe in community policing and police reform. What I have seen in the last three years has convinced me that the police as a system is an intractable thing. Now I am in the abolitionist camp.

Our entire city can come together and design something different, demanding accountability from those we give power to enforce laws. We can redesign from scratch, a new way to mete out justice.

The majority of the things we do with each other are ruled by a social contract. We are largely self-governing. In the history of human beings, we have shown that we can move closer to where it is the social contract and not guns that protect us.

But the police don’t recognize that. They start the discussion from the point that their 400 officers are protecting 400,000 people and without them there would be mayhem.

If I were a police officer that would be my aspiration. Instead of demanding more cops to solve problems. I would love to hear Arradondo say, “I’m working for the day when I don’t have to do this anymore.” Instead we get the opposite: ‘You need more of us. You need us under your beds to be safe.’

People have told me when they legalized conceal and carry and they got a gun, they suddenly became focused on their safety all the time. You don’t want to live like that. You want to have a life. Unfortunately the police view the community that way. They go to work thinking they are in mortal danger. Every time they have an interaction with a community member it is defensive.

Behind the intent of the police is always, to increase the force and increase the ability to do what they want to do, that is extrajudicial — more surveillance, more fire-power, more power beyond the law. That is a failure of imagination.

I’m friends with current Chicago police officers. I have had family who were police officers. They are all great individuals. The system extracts that greatness and puts that aside. It’s not about the individual, it’s about the system. Some people who are great—like the former 4th Precinct commander Mike Friestleben—are pushed out.

The first step to ending policing is to start analyzing our investment in resources. We spend 170 million on MPD a year. We’ve spent two billion on public safety in ten years. What else could we be doing with that money that would increase public safety?

Let’s take resources and shift them; let the police know we will be cutting their budget. Tell them, if you want to build other skills, please do. There are hundreds of ways you can serve the community without carrying a gun. We can hire healers with that money. Perhaps some of the former police will become healers. We can pay community leaders to create public safety.

Investing in Kids

We can invest in jobs. We can invest in gyms and other resources for teenagers.

We have a problem on 5th and Hennepin because kids are taking the first bus to a place that is fun. We need to provide them with fun in their neighborhood. Roller rinks, etc. We are at a point now where we won’t build a gym because we are afraid of bringing kids together to play basketball will lead them to fight and shoot each other. That is a backward construction. We have a water slide in North Commons that is never open because we don’t know how to manage the kids there. Young adults need outlets for fun, and they need ways to express anger.

There was a shooting the other night, at the Convenience store on Emerson Ave. Young men full of bravado and machismo and they all had guns. We can prevent such tragedies by investing in ten different strategies for accessing power as an 18-year-old in North Minneapolis that doesn’t involve buying a gun. One of those would be to pay them to get out of that life. It’s just a small number of people doing the killing. We can reach them. They are doing that in Richmond, California.

The current framework is to say to communities “These are your kids, it’s your responsibility. Go to your job, take care of your own kids and then solve the problems in your neighborhood, absent of resources. We have bought into that. We bought into the idea that it is a deficiency on the part of the people of North Minneapolis. That needs to shift entirely. Part of the reason that I am not a gang banger is because people who were on my block had the resources to take responsibility for me. I attended classes from Dr. Margaret Burroughs at the DuSable Museum. Those paths have to be there and they have to be resourced.

In the meantime, we should want more from the police. They are not preventing crime. People don’t have to be abolitionist to join in this conversation. We should all want a better return on our investment.

Changing False Narratives about Black People in Chicago and Minneapolis

After Sierra Leone I spent a couple of months in Chicago canvassing in Northwest Indiana for the Obama campaign. I was knocking on doors in an old rust belt white working class enclave that had a shining false narrative of Chicago, as the most dangerous and most Black place they could ever dream of. Most of them had never been there. They were amazed by the way I talked. I told them, yes I come from Chicago, and I’m not changing my vernacular. This is how I talk.

I saw this huge separation among people who live in close proximity. I told them I’m tired of unemployed folks in Chicago being pitted against unemployed folks in Indiana —we are fighting for the same thing. The same people who are exploiting my uncle and your uncle have us fighting each other. They talked a lot about welfare. They were confused about the amount of taxes that go to welfare as opposed to funding foreign wars and the rest.

We had a chance to open up a dialogue. I asked one lady “Have you ever had a Black person over to your house before? — I’m not trying to embarrass you — but it’s hard to form an honest opinion of someone without knowing them.”

Minneapolis is not much better when it comes to stereotypes about Black people from Chicago. There is this perception that there has been this massive migration of people coming for welfare and services. When people first meet me, I get that. When they get to know me the attitude changes. Hopefully it starts to change how much they rely on that false information that was given to them. They don’t even know where they got it from. They might not even know anybody who moved from Chicago but they think they know what that means. It’s amazing the way the imagination can take a narrative like that and run with it.

Chicago has influenced Minneapolis in many positive ways. You can see it when you go to hear music at the Dakota. The Minneapolis sound, Corn Bread Harris, and Jimmy Jam, were influenced by Chicago jazz, for example. And Chicago has the potential to influence this city in more positive ways, if we change the narrative. Chicago has a huge Black middle class that Minneapolis doesn’t have. It would be great to have that here. We could recruit that talent. Now people come, don’t find opportunities and they leave.

Culturally, you don’t ever want to be homogenous. At least I don’t. I want to be somewhere that is livened by different cultural elements.

We have this same misinformation about Black spaces within Minneapolis. I am shocked by the number of people who live in the city who have never been to North Minneapolis. It is a great divide. And the stories people tell about this place they don’t know, are all negative. That is incredible to me, because it’s just not that big of a city.

When we first moved here, they were rebuilding Lowry Bridge, and I started hearing all these stories from people about how crime had gone down in Northeast because the bridge was out. I did a bit of research and it turns out — not true! Yet I heard this several times, as an aside, by people not realizing the damage they were doing spreading innuendo. And then the new bridge went up and nothing changed.

Imagine how much policy is based on fearful innuendo like that — not developing a piece of land because “we don’t want a certain element coming into it.”

It goes both ways. Now I’ve been to Fargo and discovered it’s not just like the movie.

Some of these false narratives are built out of fear. My way of dealing with fear is relationships. Once you meet someone and have a great relationship with them, chances are you won’t put other people in the same bucket. Understanding each other should be one of our main goals in life. We should never be satisfied with impressions based on limited knowledge.

Aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and Minneapolis Uprising: on Defunding Police

This might be counter intuitive to some, but follow me. Where trust never bloomed, trust is not reclaimable. It is lost. That is what we have in my neighborhood currently. Folks do not trust the law and its enforcement, the police and the justice system, so they take it upon themselves. Our current condition is not an analog to a world without police, it is a violent condition of a world with them.

Our current condition is perverse. We are in a perverted state of mind, beholden and limited to a criminal justice system that makes us into better and more dangerous criminals, a system that hardly delivers justice.

The only way to create a trusting environment where we rely on one another for social safety, where we are not dependent strong arm or gun strength, where we don’t feel like aiding justice is snitching, and where this aid is in the service of restorative and transformative justice—is to design and build to that end.

So when you find yourself saying or hearing “See this is what you get in an imaginary world without police” examine the condition. This is what you get in the current world with police. You get no true justice and no actual peace. And your resources are spent.

There is a whole lotta work to do. And we have to do it

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Minneapolis Interview Project Explained