A Progress 2025 Vision of Race and Policing

Listen to story:

Download: mp3 (Duration: 17:30)

FEATURING ANGÉLICA CHÁZARO - The rightwing Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 justifies the racist impact of policing by empowering the Department of Justice to focus on violent crime, in spite of the fact that violent crime has fallen dramatically. Its authors denounce criminal justice reform efforts, and promote federal oversight of jurisdictions where police divestment efforts have had some success. 

The “tough-on-crime” approach has champions both among Republicans and Democrats, in spite of the fact that in 2020, many elites claiming to support racial justice vowed changes to violent policing in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. 

What would a progressive vision of racial justice and policing look like? There has been for decades an active movement to divest from policing with an eye toward abolishing police and prisons altogether. That movement offers some answers to the question.