As abolitionist organizers on the ground in Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco, we are appalled and angered by the announcement by three district attorneys (DAs) — in partnership with Shaun King’s “Grassroots Law Project” — to pilot “Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commissions” (TJRC) in our cities. These commissions, according to the announcement, will hold hearings on state violence committed in these cities in the hopes of moving toward community healing. Yet placing district attorneys — those leading offices that helped to imprison large swaths of people in those cities — at the head of these TJRCs ensures that they will fail to produce the change which harmed parties seek.
The racism and violence of law enforcement demands a community-led quest for reparations, not a prosecutor-led quest for reconciliation. The model of truth and reconciliation is fundamentally opposed to prosecution at its root — it is an entirely different notion of justice. And we take issue with these DAs modeling their TJRC after South Africa’s, where some (but not all) people addressed harms done to them under apartheid in front of a tribunal. While the process aimed to heal apartheid’s violence to enable South Africa to move forward, police violence, among other inequities, persists today and is still distributed on the basis of race. In short, the South African TJRC did not transform the root causes of harm (and, in many cases, it did not provide the optimal compensation for victims, leading some to form a People’s Tribunal). It is not a model that we should even be trying to replicate, and certainly not with law enforcement in control.
As we and our partners have articulated countless times elsewhere, DAs are top cops: Police hand DAs the baton after an arrest so that the DA can continue enacting state violence on the person who was arrested, from charging to sentencing. The police are the DAs’ star witnesses in their grand juries and trials; they are the anchor of their credibility in court. DAs shield police from scrutiny and they insulate police from consequences. Further, prosecuting offices sanction racist policing by prosecuting criminal cases that disproportionately target Black and Brown people, by appealing cases to make law that expands the power and scope of policing, and by litigating in ways that restrict or undermine the rights of people who are criminalized. The fundamental role of the prosecuting office is to collaborate with police to take cases from arrest to sentencing, to send people to and keep people in jail and prison, to break up families, to cut off sources of stability, and to erect permanent barriers to health, housing, education and employment.
Elias Rodriques is a core organizer of the Philadelphia Community Bail Fund. His first novel is forthcoming from Norton.
Melonie Griffiths is a member of Families for Justice in Boston and interim co-director of Freedom to Thrive.
Ralowe Ampu is a member of San Francisco’s Gay Shame collective.
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