I'm DeRay, a civil rights activist.
Two years ago there were people that thought there was a problem at Ferguson they did not
yet accept that there is a problem across the country and we won that battle.
The next part of the work is to create a critical mass of people who know what the solutions
are and have the skills to implement them. So in five years I’m hopeful that I'll be
in a place as an organizer where we’ve created that critical mass but I’m also hopeful
we’ll be celebrating some of the accomplishments around criminal justice reform and we will
have figured out how to use technology to build community differently.
I think that the movement is a testament to the power of Twitter you know in Missouri
most people don’t realize the reason you didn’t see aerial footage in those early
days in August and September, October, 2014 is because they declared a no fly zone.
So if it were not for Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, Missouri would have convinced
you that we didn’t exist.
And we saw that we saw those tools be powerful.
Tools help us build a different type of community.
I think that we have to be open to new ways of organizing and new ways of new building community.
You know I’m mindful that we aren’t born woke, something wakes us up and for so many
people what woke them up was a Tweet or a Facebook post or Instagram post or picture.
So I never criticize people who people deem to be Twitter activists or hashtag activists
because I know that telling the truth is often a tough act no matter where you tell that
truth.
And that there is no one way way to do this work there is no one way to be someone who
cares about justice or equality there is no one to use the tech platforms.
I think of us...
If we had used twitter the way that all the articles said that you used twitter we wouldn’t
be here.
I think that one of the things that we’ve learned is that there’s no one solution.
That body cameras can be implemented effectively as part of a comprehensive set of solutions
but alone that they are not the win.
The white house is actually doing interesting research about body cameras around body cameras
about can we use the audio from body cameras to detect aggression in officers before the
trauma happens.
Right now when we think about body cameras it is post trauma it’s like something bad
happens we look at the video but could we use the audio, I think that’s fascinating.
That we’ll see many more things like that start to come start to come to the fore about
how we can use technology to hold people accountable and the other thing is about data I think
that there’s some huge questions about how we use data.
If I could create one thing in the next five years it would be like a massive crowd sourced
big data project that got volunteers from all across the world to sift through some
of these issues.
So there is towns that don’t have newspapers if the police kill someone in that town they
just aren’t in the data set.
There’s some places in Texas for instance where it looks like white people are being
disproportionately killed more than people of color and we think that in those communities
that latinos are actually being miscoded as white because it’s just their names that
people are using.
You know most people don’t realize that the homicide rates in cities actually
includes the people that the police kill.
Some places like Albuquerque one in three people killed in Albuquerque is actually killed
by the police but if you just look at the homicide rate you don’t know that.
If you've heard any number about police violence at all ever it is all from local
media reports that means if you get killed in America, you get killed by a police officer
in America and a newspaper does not write about it you are not in the data set.
That is wild.
I worry sometimes that we have forgot how to imagine what is possible.
That you think about things like slavery… took a lot of imagination.
Right like took a some real mental leaps to be like these people are just like worthless,
these people are worth more we’re gonna put them in chains and that.
So in concocting the problems people were really imaginative in the worst ways.
And we’re in these moments where like okay the problems are bad and like let’s figure
how to undo them people all of a sudden are like unimaginative you you say something like
give every kid in born in the city in poverty give them a library and people are like we
could never do that we could never afford and it’s like that is just so mind blowing
to me that like people just like lost their imagination at scale. And you think about how
we got here took real leaps of imagination and commitments in the worst possible ways.
My sense of hope is rooted so much in my times as a teach I taught sixth grade math in
Brooklyn and I think every day about about fighting for and building a world that is
worthy of the kids that I taught and that is real to me.
In protest I met incredible people and I met so many people across the country who did
not understand their own power, who did not believe at the sound of their own voice and
they found it over the last two years and everytime I meet another person like that
it reminds me that the people are there. We just have figure out how to organize and we
have to figure how to activate and mobilize but that people exist that passion exist and
we can do this.