Regional Conferences January 2016

From the Stop Mass Incarceration Network

In Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area, Charlotte, NC

Updated January 25, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

New York City, Rescheduled to February 6, 12 pm-8 pm
Project Reach, 39 Eldridge Street, 4th floor, between Hester & Canal
Los Angeles, Saturday, January 30, 2 pm
Echo Park United Methodist Church, 1226 N. Alvarado Street
San Francisco Bay Area, Sunday, January 31, 2 pm-5 pm
2501 Harrison Street @ 28th Street, Oakland
Charlotte, NC to be announced
Rise Up! Get Organized to STOP Police Terror and Mass Incarceration!
COME TO REGIONAL CONFERENCES OF THE STOP MASS INCARCERATION NETWORK & BE PART OF BUILDING THE ORGANIZATION AND FORGING THE PLANS TO TAKE THE MOVEMENT OF RESISTANCE TO POLICE TERROR TO A HIGHER LEVEL!
Police continue to murder people all across the country without letup and the whole system continues to go into motion to exonerate these killer cops. The more the truth of how widespread this horror is gets brought out into the open, the more it calls into question the whole way this system carries out policing and law enforcement. The horror of police getting away with murder concentrates the genocidal assault of mass incarceration, police terror and the criminalization of whole sections of people. All this is illegitimate and unacceptable. It must be STOPPED! Stopping this is going to take a movement of mass, defiant and determined resistance, one that ultimately numbers in the millions.
Rise Up October contributed significantly to building this kind of movement, impacting society in a major way, shining a spotlight on police terror in the U.S. Quentin Tarantino spoke the truth at Rise Up October and didn’t back down when police unions across the country went on a rampage with threats targeting him. People stepped out to support Tarantino and his exposure of murders done by police spread the reverberations of Rise Up October nationally and internationally. The storm of protests that followed the release of the videos of police murdering people in Chicago point to what needs to be done—People taking to the streets and defiantly calling for these horrors to STOP! This has forced the authorities there to defend the legitimacy of their system and its brutality. We need to make these regional conferences a big step toward forging the kind of resistance that can call into question the whole criminal “injustice” system in this country.
In the 1960s, massive movements of resistance developed opposing the oppression of Black people, the war in Vietnam, the oppression of women, etc. A key element in the rise of those movements were students throwing themselves into the struggles on these fronts. The same needs to happen today to make the movement to STOP police terror powerful enough to end this horror. The struggles against racism that erupted on the campus of the University of Missouri and swept all across the country shows the potential for this happening. We have to take the campuses by storm, enlisting students in the fight to stop murder by police.
Our regional conferences will bring together the forces who want to act to STOP police terror. A key focus has to be everyone who participated in RiseUpOctober (RUO) and everyone who was impacted by it. The conferences will put before people the need to take the movement to STOP police terror to a higher level and that taking this struggle to the campuses is a key part of doing that. AND the conferences will forge the organization and make the plans, including fundraising plans, to take these critical steps. This means forming SMIN chapters on campuses, joining SMIN chapters where they exist or, in the case of organizations, affiliating with SMIN.
Each conference will develop a plan for the No More Stolen Lives tour in their area which will include the following elements. (See accompanying letter on the tour.)
* who will be on the tour,
* what campuses the tour will go to,
* other events that can be done as part of this tour (speaking in communities, at religious institutions, media, etc.),
* how these tours will be led,
* how to generate the funds needed to make these tours happen, and
* how to leave organization in the wake of the tour—SMIN chapters formed on campuses, people joining SMIN chapters where they already exist and organizations affiliating with SMIN.
The conferences will also make beginning plans for the National Student Strike/Day of Action in April and determine how to build up to making that as powerful as possible.
Each conference also has to assess the situation in their region to determine what struggles need to be taken up as part of taking the movement of resistance to police terror to a higher level.
And each conference will develop plans to raise the funds necessary to make all this happen and form a working group to spearhead the fundraising efforts and coordinate with the national office to make this happen.