Highlights from 2024: Racialised Policing and State Violence

Thursday, 26 December 2024 - 7:00am to 8:30am

Acknowledgement of Country//

 

Hamid Khan and Matyos Kidane - Stop LAPD Spying Coalition

Priya caught up with Stop LAPD Spying Coalition's Hamid Khan and Matyos Kidane in July 2024 to talk about organising with unhoused community in downtown Los Angeles' Skid Row and beyond against militarised policing and surveillance by the Los Angeles Police Department. In this wide-ranging conversation about the group's work, broadcast in three parts across August 2024, Hamid and Matyos also discuss Stop LAPD Spying Coalition's abolitionist ethos, the importance of a structural analysis of police violence, and emphasise why it is crucial to resist liberal reformism and academic and non-profit complicity in state violence.//

 

Tamar Hopkins and Ilo Diaz - Centre Against Racial Profiling

We replay a conversation from October 2024 with Tamar Hopkins and Ilo Diaz of the Centre Against Racial Profiling, who joined us to speak about the launch of the Racial Profiling Data Monitoring Project. The project's website, racialprofilingresearch.org, hosts important data showing the extent of racial profiling in Victoria Police during street searches obtained via Freedom of Information requests covering four years worth of police search records. Tamar has been working in the area of police accountability and racism since 2005. She was the founding lawyer of the Police Accountability Project at Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre in Melbourne Australia in 2009. She has a PhD from UNSW on racial profiling, and has appeared as an expert witness at inquests and commissions investigating police accountability and racial profiling. Ilo has worked directly with communities experiencing human rights abuses in Melbourne, South America and Palestine. His background is in Human Rights observing in areas of conflict. Ilo also volunteers with Melbourne Activist Legal Support, providing his expertise to Legal Observer teams that observe police actions in protests.//

 

Justice for Sonya Massey Oakland Rally

The Anti Police Terror Project joined organisations around the United States to coordinate a rally calling for Justice for Sonya Massey on the 29th of July 2024 in Oakland, California. Sonya Massey was a 36-year-old Black mother who was shot and killed by Deputy Sean Grayson of the Illinois Police Department on 6 July, 2024, after she called the police with concerns about an intruder entering her home. The rally was MC'd by APTP's Cat Brooks, and the recording we played in today’s show (originally broadcast in August 2024) features poetry by Oakland's first Poet Laureate Dr Ayodele 'WordSlanger' Nzinga, as well as reflections from Uncle Bobby and Big Oscar, the uncle and father of Oscar Grant, who was killed on New Year's Day 2009 by Bay Area Rapid Transit Police Officer Johannes Mehserle in Oakland.//