What does a city and a world without police look like? A panel discussion on police abolition and the terrain of struggle ahead of us all.
Join this panel discussion among organizers and scholars on police abolition and the terrain of struggle opened up in the wake of the 2020 summer rebellion. The event will offer vision analysis, tools for political education, and reports from the frontlines of police abolition work in Philadelphia.
We'll also honor Mumia Abu-Jamal, connect the deep organizing and resistance in Philly to police and prisons before and since his capture forty years ago (on December 9, 1981), and reflect upon the lessons and renew the vision of police abolition for the days to come.
Advance Registration required. Click here.
Nikki Grant is Amistad Law Project’s Policy Director and cofounder. She is the proud daughter of Jamaican immigrants and grew up in a tightly-knit, working class West Indian community in Orlando, Florida. As a young person, she witnessed poverty, racial segregation and inequitable schools in her community, as well as her father’s disabling chronic illness. She was inspired by the demonstration of care by primarily Black women neighbors and church family to work towards social equity through a Black feminist lens. Nikki is a movement lawyer and a founding member of the Coalition to Abolish Death by Incarceration. She is also a board member of the Abortion Liberation Fund of PA, where she serves on the Community Organizing committee.
Christopher R. Rogers is an organizer with Police Free Penn (PFP) and graduate worker at the University of Pennsylvania. He also serves as Program Director with The Paul Robeson House & Museum and National Curriculum Co-Chair with Black Lives Matter At School. PFP has just started a mutual aid effort to invest in addressing survival needs, and seeding abolitionist institution-building in Philadelphia. To learn more about our partners and to donate, visit https://opencollective.com/police-free-penn-mutual-aid
Krystal Strong is an organizer and a scholar from Philadelphia whose political work, research, and teaching focus on student and community activism, preserving Black Philadelphia, and the role of education as a site of struggle in Africa and the diaspora. Krystal is a core organizer with Black Lives Matter Philly, Black Philly Radical Collective, and is an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.
Geo Maher is author of A World without Police as well as several other published or forthcming books, including We Created Chavez, Decolonizing Dialectics, Building the Commune, Anticolonial Eruptions and Spirals of Revolt. Geo has taught at Vassar College, San Quentin State Prison, and the Venezuelan School of Planning in Caracas.
Please note: Out of concern for everyone’s well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic, this event requires proof of vaccination for entry. We also require attendees of our in-person events to wear masks at all times.
Advance registration via eventbrite is required for all events. Seating is limited so that we may safely gather according to a social distancing protocol. Event registrations will be honored until 15 mins after start time of the event; afterwards, availabilty will be on a first-come basis.