Interview with Dallas City Wire
From our interview with Juliette Fairley
Dallas Justice NOW is organizing Black and Brown communities, seeking the city of Dallas to be more just and fair and to abolish police unions, which it perceives as functioning to protect bad officers.
“We want to be free from White supremacy, police brutality, failing schools and institutionalized racism,” Michele Washington, founder of Dallas Justice NOW, told Dallas City Wire. “We demand justice.”
The call for change comes after Black Lives Matter protests swept the world in response to the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, on May 25 by Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer.
“The police unions allow bad cops, brutal cops, racist cops to remain cops without any kind of punishment,” Washington said. “Most of the cops who murder innocent people in our communities have had complaints against them which were not investigated because of the unions and city leadership.”
Dallas Justice NOW also wants to abolish qualified immunity.
“Qualified immunity makes it impossible to put cops in jail when they hurt our brothers and sisters,” Washington said.
The U.S. Supreme Court issued the Qualified Immunity doctrine in 1967, limiting the effectiveness of 42 USC Section 1983, which followed the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1871 to provide newly freed African-American slaves a remedy to sue when government workers violated their rights, according to the Institute of Justice in Arlington, Virginia.
“Why does Dallas need helicopters, tanks, and planes?” Washington said. “The answer is they are fighting a war against people of color in our city. We need to build our community up, not oppress us with vehicles of war.”
Regarding the crime rate in Dallas, Washington said children of color are set up to fail and be sent to jail.
“People of color are victims of the Dallas Independent School District (DISD) where teacher's unions, racist board members and lack of school choice set up the schools to be a prison pipeline,” she said. “Then, Dallas police oppress our kids by racist stop-and-search and shootings. We are victims of an awful cycle that must be stopped now.”
Dallas Justice NOW claims on its website that White children in the suburbs are given a better education than children of color in Dallas and that school board members are denying children of color access to school choice while sending their kids to elite private schools.
“They put children of color in failing schools and fail to give our kids the same opportunities granted to white kids in the suburbs,” Washington said. “We are disproportionately impacted by being stuck in failing schools and being harassed by the police.”
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