“We have an opportunity right now in this country to reevaluate the ways in which Black communities and poor communities have been engaged with, for the last 50 years, 100 years, 400 years. We have an opportunity to really ask ourselves serious questions about the police’s role in Black communities in particular. We don’t actually have to argue anymore, that most Black people are saying, ‘Hey, we need something different. This structure does not work for us.’ In fact, it is incredibly dangerous, it is incredibly harmful.”—Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network

“What we do know is that, the same kind of data that we know about what happens to Black people outside of school, happens in the school. Young Black boys are known to be perceived as older than they are, this is Dr. Phil Goff’s research. So that means that they are held to be more culpable and responsible for their actions. Black girls are seen as less innocent. So therefore, they are arrested more often. There have been lots of incidents of excessive use of force in schools, and so we’ve got to be thinking about something different.”—Judith Browne Dianis, Executive Director of Advancement Project National Office

“We have to be able to invest and scale up a community response network that can respond when the residents of these cities are requesting some type of resolution to their issue. Thirty percent of the time, that’s a non-criminal thing that they’re calling for. If we can eliminate that entirely…that’s a good chunk of the current work. Then you add to that, cold calls … if you add all of that up, you have a significant amount of time that police are engaged in work that can readily be responded to, by community trained community responders.”—David Muhammad, executive director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform

“Allow for local elected officials to look at budgets, and really get to a place where they’re saying, what is it that really keeps our young people and our families and Black families, safe, healthy and hopeful? And how do we allocate resources for that? And how do we move quickly to get to that place? Because that’s the demand that’s on the streets, and that’s the call that people are asking for.”—Anthony Smith, CEO of Cities United