In Spring 2022, I took a course on Freedom Dreaming, the idea of imagining a world where marginalized bodies are free from the current police and carceral systems. All semester, I was pushed to imagine what abolition looked like, what it meant to me, and what it would take as a society to reach a point where police are abolished.
I have many thoughts, musings, and new things I learned from Freedom Dreaming, however, I wanted to share the one I explored in my final project.
As a child, I grew up playing basketball at my local Police Athletic League (PAL)—think Boys & Girls club except is all run by police. The PAL provides a little bit of everything to the community: athletics, food, enrichment, academic help, keeping "at-risk" kids off the streets, etc. This is all well and good, but Freedom Dreaming pushed me to question: why are all of these resources run by the police? Why are all PALs in over-policed, majority black areas? What makes these kids so "at-risk?"
I decided to do some digging to answer these questions in my final project (linked below). All of it taught me to question the things people taught me as a kid, a lesson that has been a central theme of my life in the last two years.