The Black Panther Party: Deund The Police

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In 2024, the phrase “defund the police” will often spark heated political discourse due to its ideological and emotional charge; but many Americans, regardless of partisan allegiance or philosophical alignment, often misconstrue the actual meaning and implications of the phrase. Rather than the common misconception that defunding the police merely involves removing their financial backing, it actually calls for the divestment and reallocation of funds from modern police departments to mutual aid, community organizing, harm reduction, housing, healthcare, and education, all of which prevent crime and therefore alleviate the need for law enforcement in the first place. Many of those who advocate for the defunding or abolition of police do so because of the gruesome, racist history of policing in America. As a …show more content…

The Black Panther Party, formed by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California, was a Black power group whose main objective was to monitor the police and document acts of brutality. Although they were typically armed, the Panthers rarely used methods of violence to protect their communities; however, framing tactics used by the government and media to depict activist groups including the Black Panther Party as criminals and deviants legitimized state-sanctioned repression such as the FBI counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO, developed by J. Edgar Hoover to target and subdue radicals. This organization is heavily responsible for the imprisonment and assassination of several leaders and activists central to the Civil Rights Movement. Notably, after the 2021 exoneration of both men initially convicted of murdering Malcolm X back in 1965, both the FBI and the CIA have been speculated to have played a part in his death because of the threat he posed to racially oppressive

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