US- Wichita, Kansas officials and police show no respect for freedom of assembly

By SJ Otto

It is sad that a city as Wichita can’t tolerate simple dissent. For some time a group calling itself Project Justice ICT have been conducting marches. They have been having those marches regularly. In the last few days the Wichita Police have had leaders and members of this under surveillance. Just a few days ago, two people were arrested. Despite all the publicity the city police has gained from arresting members of this group, they have not released the names of these people.

For the most part, Project Justice ICT is about Black Lives Matter and Defunding the Wichita Police Department. The last marches they held were in solidarity with the protesters in Portland Oregon.

Just recently there were arguments by right-wing people on Facebook against the idea that Wichita is a fascist state. They, as many middle of the road people have said, claim that calling this city fascist is ridiculous and there is no reason to call Wichita that. But this is a city that has shown it does not respect the beliefs and actions of those who protest the policies of this city.

 

For more information on Project Justice ICT:

 · 

***IMPORTANT INFORMATION. PLEASE READ***

A letter to The People,

Over the course of the last two-and-a-half weeks, Project Justice has seen the Wichita community come together like never before. We started this movement in order to give direction and focus to the protests we saw in our streets, with the hope of creating concrete and radical change to the way policing is done in Wichita, the state of Kansas, and the United States as a whole. Since Monday, June 1st when we first came together, we have listened carefully to the concerns of the Wichita community and have paid attention to the state of affairs as protests continue throughout America.

The debate around policing in this country goes far deeper than just mere questions of which reform policies to implement. In fact, the greater question is should we reform the police, or should we seek out a world in which policing is no longer necessary? Indeed, in a country where some 800,000 people are employed as officers of the law, where The Police and The Prison are made into award-winning comedy spectacles, and whose prison population outmatches that of the whole populations of many nations throughout the world, a United States without police is almost impossible to imagine. But it is simply that: almost impossible. In Wichita alone, $98 million in City funding goes to the Wichita Police Department, yet social services such as public transportation, homelessness assistance, childcare programs, and drug and alcohol treatment are starkly underfunded comparatively. The people who crowd our prisons are largely people who have been touched by poverty in some way. They are people whose school teachers and principals told them they were no longer worth the effort. They are people who have faced addiction and homelessness. They are people who have had to choose between thievery and hunger. They are people; and they are people who were failed so fully by society as to believe they had no alternative but to turn to crime to survive. But what if that $98 million was used to house and employ the homeless in our community? What if that $98 million was used to treat those affected by the disease of addiction? What if that $98 million, rather than being used to fund a force that criminalizes our society’s “undesirables” – the homeless, the poor, the failed and forgotten – was used to keep them from ever having to be incriminated in the first place?

We have asked ourselves is reform enough? Can a system built from the remains of runaway slave patrols – and which continues to disproportionately incriminate, imprison, and disenfranchise our communities of color – truly be changed? Are we challenging the notion that police increase safety in our communities when we have so often seen that they do not? We have already passed laws that require body cameras, yet somehow body camera footage during fatal interactions with police winds up indiscernible, erased, or was simply never recorded. We have instituted policies that ban chokeholds and strangleholds, yet somehow police officers choke and strangle people in the streets to their deaths. We have changed the law to illegalize racial profiling, yet somehow in a country where Black and Latino people make up only a combined 25% of the population, Black and Latino people make up 77% of fatal police shootings.

As we have watched, waited, read, and listened, Project Justice has determined that mere reform policies are not enough to address the systemic issues that plague police forces around this country, and indeed, our own police force here in Wichita. We have taken time, we have educated ourselves, and we are prepared now more than ever to choose real change over mere reforms. We ask that those of you who have stood by us as we promoted reform please do not discount our altered views, but rather engage with us, educate yourselves, and hopefully continue to stand by us as we fight for real, radical change.

In solidarity,

Project Justice ICT

****

Surveillance and arresting leaders for illegal assembly, is something we can not tolerate in this town. We need to oppose this and pressure the Wichita City Councils to respect the political rights of protesters in this town. We have been told that the city plans to increase spending on the police department while they plan to cut spending in most other departments. Much of the spending is because of the coronavirus pandemic. They have even considered cutting the spending that allows people to put stray cats and dogs in the local animal shelter. Without a dog pound, where will people send these lost animals? –SJ Otto