Dear Joe Biden, Why?

First, some context. I am a 21-year-old white student. My life is as drenched in privilege as any other early twenties woman going to school online on a scholarship and living with her parents for the summer. I have been attending protests in my city, Austin, Texas, for the past week or so. I am (and have been, for a long time) outraged at the state of this country, and seeing that Biden pledged to add money to our police system sent me into a frenzied hour or so of typing, deleting, and retyping, until I was able to form my emotional turmoil into something intelligible and, I hope, compelling. As I am almost certain Biden will never see one pixel of this emotionally charged word-vomit, I am sharing it with you all, so that I might gain at least some sense of community from the effort it took to tame and present my thoughts and feeling in a consumable form.

The email I sent to Joe Biden's campaign, through the only contact page I could find (which I'm fairly certain was meant for those who wanted to "Get Involved," as I immediately received an automated text asking for my "FULL NAME to get started"), reads as follows:

Hi there, and thank you for taking the time to read this message.

While I am sure your campaign and your candidate are aware of the recent backlash against his pledge to add money to policing in the United States, I would like to take a moment to express my opinion.

The decision to provide additional funding to the police is not only detrimental to the work of many Black citizens and allies to those citizens but is blind to the systematic and ingrained racism that has been and is now so apparent in our policing system. I would urge Biden to reconsider the idea of defunding the police.

I feel that education is needed in this situation. It seems impossible to me that Biden would distance himself from defunding the police if he had given the idea its due diligence as far as research goes. Let me provide a brief explanation: to defund the police is to refund our communities. Not all cries to defund imply complete abolition of the police, although that is my hope. The idea behind this movement is that the police are wildly overfunded, and our public services woefully underfunded. Consider, for a moment, my city of Austin. Our police have a $400 million budget. That is about 40% of my city's general fund. This is appalling. We are unable to provide homes, social services, mental health services, and physical health services to many of our citizens. I have personally heard stories from friends who instead of receiving mental health care for severe mental illness where they were not a threat but were in massive distress, were arrested. People experiencing mental distress are far more likely to encounter violence in the policing system because our policing system does not train its officers to approach these people with empathy and de-escalation tactics at the forefront of their minds, but rather with guns drawn. What we need in this instance is trained professionals, not law enforcement, who can handle this situation with the nuance and skills required to peacefully resolve issues of this sort.

I can imagine the response to this may be "well, we should allocate more funds to police training to remedy the obvious violence caused by the lack of education in this system." I would reply that that is a solution for a system that is not irreparably broken and without hope of remedy. Notice that I have yet to touch on race. Our policing system evolved from patrols of white, newly emancipated indentured servants. These were people who were only freed from enslavement to quiet unrest in the enslaved communities and drive a wedge between the races so that landowners could more properly subjugate the people of color, overwhelmingly Black people, who were ripped from their home and forced to serve brutal strangers in a new and foreign land. Because they did not speak the language or know the culture of this new land, they were an easier target than the white enslaved people who were familiar with the language, culture, and laws of their home. So they give these newly elevated white people, with more rights than Black people but lesser than the ruling class, guns. They tell them to patrol the streets and check each Black person they encounter for papers. If they have no papers, they are to be captured by any means necessary. Chattel slavery must persist, and no Black person is allowed to be free unless given express permission (in theory. In practice, many 'freed' Black people were forced back into slavery, regardless of their status). From these standards, our policing system arises not with the health and safety of the public in mind, but with the intent to protect white landowners' "property" and perpetuate the oppression of Black people. Need I remind you that the KKK has been deeply ingrained in our police system from its emergence? Need I remind you police unions mimic this heinous terrorist group in their policy decisions and oppositions? Need I remind you that most police departments are far from representative of the communities they "serve" and are overwhelmingly white? How could it be possible to ignore the obvious lineage of this outdated model of "protecting" our communities?

This email is already quite long, so I will take up only a few more moments of your time. I urge Biden (if he ever hears of this email, which I hope to God he does) to take some time to read about this issue. Research different forms of defunding the police and the role of racism and bigotry in the development of our policing system. Meditate on these facts. If he has not shed a tear yet over the rampant violence and brutality in this country, perpetrated by those we are told are supposed to be our protectors, I urge him to ponder why. This is a rage that we should all feel, and a hurt that we should all be doing our part to heal.

I thank you for your time and hope that I have helped to sway you towards public opinion.

Your constituent and fellow citizen,

Kassandra Pulsifer