Despite the community’s rallying emails, calls, public hearing comments, and protests asking the city council and mayor to defund our police department, they failed to listen. This open letter was written in response to the city’s failure to adopt the community’s demands.
Thank you for calling, e-mailing and participating in the public hearing on the city council budget. It was inspiring to hear a resounding demand to #DefundSLCPD with folks sharing their personal stories and ideas to transform our beloved city. We came together with a unified message of anti-racism, and our voices were amplified: over 200 comments were recorded over the course of a six hour meeting! Mayor Mendenhall claims it may have been the longest City Council work session in Utah history.
Incarceration is harmful to the health of everyone in jails, prisons, and detention centers, and not only during times of global health crisis. Read our open letter we sent to Salt Lake County officials to free inmates being held at the Oxbow and Metro Jails while there were active cases of COVID-19.
Find out more about our campaign and sign our petition to release inmates being held in the Salt Lake County Jails. Resources for who to call, including scripts and email templates, are included with a form to fill out your responses.
It’s time to re-imagine how we structure our economy and promote our well-being, as this crisis reveals the gaps where our systems we’ve created do not meet our needs when it matters the most.
Read about our workshop held in December about the history of policing. Find resources for an overview of policing Critical Resistance compiled that traces the evolution of policing in the US, and people's resistance to it.
