Featured guests in this episode include Nick Buckingham (Co-Executive Director, Michigan Liberation), Curtis Renee (Founder, Detroit Safety Team), Tawana Petty (social justice organizer, poet, and Senior Policy Advisor at Algorithmic Justice League), PG Watkins (organizer and facilitator extraordinaire), Angel McKissic (Founder, Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network), Monica Lewis-Patrick (President & CEO, We the People Detroit), and Nate Mullen (artist, educator and founder of People in Education).

In a far off future Detroit, a Great Flood has transformed our landscape. Belle Isle, our beloved island park, no longer exists. The shoreline of the Detroit River has crept in to overtake it. We live with water differently in this Detroit. Floating markets, water-bound transit, and a network of Water Stewards, people who manage filtration of a distributed water harvesting and conservation system—are fixtures. In a home in this future, flung over the back of an armchair, a faded bluish uniform jacket lays limp. It’s unremarkable, besides the light dancing off the decal on the back — an iridescent silhouette of Sankofa, the Adinkra symbol that reminds us to look back in order to move forward. On the mirrored table at its side, a worn textbook, notes littered with coffee stains and a jumbled collection of water samples bear evidence of someone’s careful study to become certified as a steward themselves, a role we all fill at some point. In this world, water belongs to all of us and in return, our collective labor keeps it that way.

Denying connectedness is alienating

Abolition really does require that we change one thing, which is everything.

So, when Ruth Wilson Gilmore says everything, she really does mean every-single-thing. And for a lot of people, this is probably overwhelming in a way that inspires fear, conjures doubt or reeks of impossibility. But, for me and for many abolitionists I know, the imperative that everything must change is also an invitation to imagine and practice new ways of being in every aspect of our lives; it’s a reminder that the range of opportunities we have to cultivate something different are just as overwhelmingly abundant as the things we need to change. It offers more chances to get it right.  

What I find more overwhelming than the scale of this challenge is the sheer absurdity of what we’ve got now and the fictions that uphold it. In a country that boasts about being the so-called free-est nation on the planet, we have police who operate with absolute impunity; police who escalate violence rather than prevent it; police budgets that rise year over year even after the uprisings of 2020; we have the largest share of incarcerated people in the world; people who can’t afford water, food, rent, and other basic necessities getting jailed for just being poor; and then we’ve got the richest billionaires on the planet; and everyone else fashioning ourselves as so-called “middle class” by way of conspicuous consumption; and then we have civil rights and protections once upheld by the Supreme Court being rolled back on a regular basis; and at the same time, countless other contradictions.  

We are living in the most abundant time human history has ever seen, we have more resources than ever before at our disposal, and yet, so much suffering still persists. And so many of us are sick and tired of living in these incessantly unprecedented times.  

So, yeah, we really do have to change everything.

I take this refrain that everything must change as a reminder of interdependence and enmeshment of both systems and people: abolition can’t just be about prisons and jails and police because it concerns aspects of our lives that are so intertwined that they cannot be separated from one another. I take it as a challenge to the ways in which capitalism would have us believe that safety —which we’re taught the prison industrial complex is designed to produce and preserve—can be isolated from any other human need: 

And so like that's also true for our movements is that like there is no education liberation if there is no water liberation and there's no water liberation, if there's no abolition of prisons, there is no abolition of prisons until we acknowledge the atrocities that have happened on this land. 

You're hearing from Nate Mullen, an educator, artist and founder of People in Education, whose work in Detroit Public Schools has clarified the extent to which public systems that serve our needs are interrelated: 

...in a world— in a capitalist world where we love to commodify everything we also like to put everything in silos. Right. We like to say like, Oh, that's that's a school problem or like, oh, like that's a that's a water problem, right? And it's even it's it's so insidious. 

The fiction that we can isolate our basic needs for survival, like water, food, care, safety, and love from one another operates much in the same way that capitalism alienates workers from themselves, other workers, the means of production, and labor itself, to borrow from Karl Marx. Bear with me for a second, in Marx’s view, under capitalism, workers are estranged from our basic human nature  because competition pits us against each other, brings down wages, and enriches capitalists. As a result, we internalize the fiction that we don’t need each other to survive; that we are disconnected:  

Oh, it's that house's problem. THEY didn't pay for THEIR water, so THEY shouldn't have water, right? Ignoring the fact that we are all intricately connected to one another. Right. That that's like the foundational function and one of the best— one of the best tricks that, like the world that we live in, is is that it really gets us lost on the idea that we are disconnected, right? It really tries to sell us that we're disconnected rather than understanding that flourishing is something that we all do together. It actually can't happen by yourself.  

In practice, this kind of alienation Nate’s speaking to prevents us from building class consciousness and drives workers to be good little capitalists, and privilege profits and self-interest above collective well-being. 

And then beyond distancing us from each other, capitalism also alienates workers from the products of their labor, which further enriches  the capitalist class and even precludes workers from enjoying meaningful fulfillment from the act of production. And then on top of that, workers are further alienated from the act of labor itself, having no control over what they produce or the nature and quality of their working conditions. And finally, Marx has argued that labor under capitalism alienates workers from themselves, because, taken together, these other dispossessions mean that work becomes simply a necessary means by which to earn wages to survive. And in all of these ways, capitalism fundamentally dehumanizes workers because it prevents us from freely realizing our full humanity.

At this point, you might be wondering why I’m talking about Marxist critiques of capitalism in an essay about carcerality and abolition. As a quick aside, here’s why: I understand that all capitalism is racial capitalism, a concept that interprets the history of capitalism as one that requires theft, exploitation and exclusion from racialized people in order to function. Carcerality—this systemic practice of capturing people, throwing people away in prisons full of cages that prop up rural economies, and then extracting free labor from them to uphold the system itself—is a tool that makes racial capitalism possible. 

Bumper

Welcome to Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities, a series of audio essays about making room for abolition. “Making Room for Abolition” first appeared at Red Bull Arts in Detroit in October of 2021 as a month-long installation of speculative artifacts set in a home in a future without police and prisons. The excerpt you heard in the beginning offers a glimpse into the worlds materialized in that installation.

This series reflects on conversations from that space with Detroit-based organizers and futurists committed to food justice, water access, educational equity, restorative justice, and Black liberation more broadly. When Black folks in Detroit manufacture better lives for ourselves—whether that means healthier food, safer neighborhoods, new technologies for moving through conflict—it's usually described as an act of survival or desperation, rather than being classified as an act of resistance or future-making or speculative design. Each and every one of them is practicing a future that especially poor Black Detroiters have been told is impossible. 

In each episode, we’ll look closely at the kinds of fictions that shape our current attachments to policing, prisons, and punishment to examine where they come from and how they affect us. At the same time, you’ll hear us propose abolitionist realities that counter these fictions and open up other ways of being. 

My name is Lauren Williams. I’m an artist and designer based in Detroit, MI and I work with visual and interactive media to understand, critique, and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power. 

About This Episode

Today’s episode is about safety and interdependence, and the fictions that teach us that we thrive by alienating ourselves from each other, our needs, and ourselves. This is the first part of a two-part episode. It’s about the mythologies that privilege individualism over collective well-being. We’ll explore how, within capitalist and carceral logics, this kind of separation gets applied to both relationships and institutions, and how it deprives us of our humanity. We’ll look at where these fictions come from, how they get codified into policy and practice in the context of the neoliberal city and state, and set us up for a conversation about what others are already doing to escape the trance that convinces us to abandon our own collective interest. 

Alienating human needs and siloing the systems that meet them

_{Neoliberal Myths that Separate}

Alright, so let’s get into it. I want to start by talking about some foundational capitalist fictions that separate us from ourselves  and each other are also operative in and further exacerbated by neoliberal mythologies.

I’ll explain neoliberalism in a minute, but, to start—it’s important to note that: Much in the way capitalism dehumanizes workers, the neoliberal social systems and policies shaped by capitalism that we might assume meet foundational human needs for stuff like care and safety—here I’m talking about schools, policing, incarceration, to name a few—these systems also become severed from each other in ways that rely on further dehumanization of the people they’re supposed to serve: 

...when I think about a school system, essentially what its role is inside our society, is it a space? It is the space where in which we care for our young people. It is the space that plays the role of care for our most vulnerable people. And we have created an institution and as a society said, OK, cool, you go do that, right? Y'all go take care of this care. This thing called care, you can go take care of that, right? But that's not something that one institution can take care of. Right. They can't do it. So in some ways, that institution is forced to do what is the most efficient and maybe what they would now call like the most effective, which inherently means you have to kind of dehumanize the people that are within its walls because you've been tasked with something that you actually can't do. And the same thing is actually true, I think, of like the police state, is that we created an institution that was like, "Yo, you take care of safety." ‍

‍
In other words, it’s a trap; a fool’s errand. As Nate points out, you fundamentally can’t take care of safety without talking about water and food and education and care and family and harm and poverty and.. and.. and. I reference neoliberal social systems here because neoliberalism does capitalism’s bidding. Neoliberalism is a set of beliefs and policies put into practice which contend that our economy and society are better off if run by capitalist markets and uninhibited by government intervention. Its central belief—according to George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison as written in the Invisible Doctrine—is that “competition is the defining feature of humankind” and that buying and selling things will somehow lead to social improvement for everyone who deserves it, because again— capitalism is a competition and people who “lose” don’t deserve to succeed or survive. In this way, neoliberalism presumes that our world is a meritocracy, that those who struggle or fail to succeed amid capitalism  are inherently weak or incompetent, and that the wealth accumulated by the extremely wealthy will miraculously trickle down to the poor of its own volition. It individualizes survival and mythologizes wealth redistribution in a way that denies our connectedness and, again, alienates us from one another. Worst of all, it naturalizes these myths and teaches us to internalize them. Here’s George Monbiot in conversation with Owen Jones:  

So just as the rich are told by neoliberalism you are rich because you're brilliant regardless of whether you inherited your money, you stole your money, regardless of your advantages of education, of class, of race, of whatever that you start off with. You know you might start in your 100 meter race at 90 meters. 90 meters down the track but it's still all down to you that you've become so rich. This self-attribution fallacy is at the heart of neoliberalism. Just as the rich are congratulated for their wealth, the poor are blamed for their poverty, and if you are poor it's because you're unenterprising, it's because you're feckless. your kid is fat is not because corporations are pushing junk food and the school has sold off its playing fields it's because you're a bad parent you're constantly sort of urged to internalize this this notion of blame and structural failure systemic failure these things are simply denied they're simply airbrushed out of the picture. It's all about the individual..

Even though most people couldn't tell you what it is, neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of our time. 

As a policymaking framework, it encourages privatizing public resources like schools, loosening regulation on private markets, curtailing the power of unions and collective bargaining, and other tactics that shrink government, and free up the market and fundamentally driving the kinds of alienation from one another, the products of our labor, and ourselves that Marx warned about.  

But, neoliberalism wasn’t the first to do it. There were other doctrines like “classical liberalism” and “laissez-faire economics” that promoted free markets in the same way neoliberalism does long before, but what sets it apart—according to Stephen Metcalf as cited in the Invisible Doctrine—is that the purportedly natural mechanisms of free market forces actually need to be very heavily administered, it takes a lot of work, they have to be controlled and enforced by the state. They don’t just happen naturally as the myth would have you believe. And this is especially true in the context of policing and incarceration, as they become tools to make sure  markets keep running with as little obstruction as possible.  

Manufactured emergency 

Another sinister reality about the way neoliberalism operates is that it often capitalizes on crisis in order to implement its policies. Naomi Klein has written about this concept of disaster capitalism quite a bit—here she is on the Big Think in 2012, discussing the history of the advancement of neoliberal policies: 

… privatizing key state assets, deep cuts to these key social spending areas that people tend to protect, like health care and education, or these reforms to labor laws that take away protections, take away pensions, take away the safety net. What we know is that when politicians try to do this during normal circumstances, people tend to organize and resist, because they like their health care systems, and they actually like having labor protections. So the use of crisis for political-- ends has been a part of the advancement of this ideology in many lesser ways.

Detroit is no stranger to crisis: in the wake of the 2013 bankruptcy, the state of Michigan appointed an Emergency Manager named Kevin Orr and placed him in control of the majority Black city. When that happened, the state denied the entire city a quote “equal share of the financial support needed for essential public services.” In a book called Detroit after Bankruptcy, published in 2023, the author Joe Darden, calls out that this support was denied even though it was clear that Black students “in Detroit were attending grossly unequal schools compared to white students in the suburbs.” In that moment, he writes, “the Emergency Manager  representing the Governor focused less on the inequity and instead advocated more charter schools as the solution, combined with a limited amount of choice o ver schools” . In line with a 1978 Amendment, called the Headlee Amendment, the state of Michigan continued to cut revenue sharing in order to balance its own budget. These reductions disproportionately impacted Detroit (which is a high-poverty, majority-Black municipality) much more than its surrounding suburbs.  

The individualizing, silo-ing of neoliberalism was active even in the state’s decision to appoint an emergency manager in the first place—because it pinned the blame for  the city’s troubles on incapacity and personal failure in spite of the fact that evidence didn’t support that theory: 

The major premise of the Emergency Manager Law from the State of Michigan’s perspective was that Detroit’s fiscal distress was due to mismanagement and not a lack of financial support from the State. The State law makers who supported the law argued that Detroit should have cut pension obligations, cut personnel, and contracted out services traditionally provided by the City of Detroit. The law makers believed that the revenue side of the solution was adequate to provide for public safety and debt payment if only the city had competent management. Instead of assuming that there was mismanagement, some researchers have suggested that Michigan law makers should have paid more attention to monitoring the city early on— that is, before the crisis— and that they should have allowed the city to take the leading role in the path toward recovery.

These moves by the state, like pushing charter schools and withholding public funding from a high-poverty city on the basis of a perverse assessment of worthiness, are emblematic of a shift toward privatization: it’s a means by which neoliberalism constructs these silos, further alienates people from each other and the resources they need to survive, and manifests its fiction that we should privilege individualized, market-driven solutions for collective needs. This kind of disregard for people’s self-assessment of their own needs happens at the level of individual residents, too. 

One way that shows up in Detroit is around water.

“They charge you like three times more than the water. If you use a hundred cubic feet of water…” 

“Every year, the water department has been raising rates for at least 30 years now. Some people are paying up to 20% of their limited income just in water alone.”

Privatizing basic necessities

I shouldn't have to say this, but water is a necessity for human survival. To state the obvious, beyond needing water to drink, having access to water is also a sanitation issue, a public health issue and it’s  fundamentally a collective problem. People should have access to water irrespective of their ability to pay for it: water should be a human right. According to the UN, water is a human right. Privatization and the commodification of public resources we require to live, like water, is a means by which capitalist logics construct silos around interdependent needs and the resources that meet them. 

In the wake of the bankruptcy in Detroit, the city  also came under fire for shutting off access to water for residents who were two months behind on their payments. This wasn’t new, but it spiked during Emergency Management and in the years following. The UN declared these acts a violation of the human right to water. That’s Monica Lewis-Patrick, President & CEO of We the People—also known as the Water Warrior—talking about the city’s policies on water access as foreshadowing moves to privatize water worldwide:  

…there was coming a time where water was going to be privatized and there would be be wars fought over water…But then what you saw happen is then Gary Brown. Along with Kym Worthy, the prosecutor got together and decided that even as we were seeing tens of thousands of Detroiters shut off from access to water, even though we knew water calls had gone up over 438 percent over two decades and 40 percent of the population in the city lives in abject poverty. Gary Brown and Kym Worthy went and actually moved from it being a misdemeanor to it being a felony if you in an emergency actually turned your water back on. And it was in that moment that we recognized that it was connected to what my mother told me after I told her about the massive settled and about the death of Charity Hicks. She's a retired master sergeant from the U.S. Army. She is a retired nurse, army and from the VA administration. And she told me in 2014, she said she quoted the Geneva Convention. She said, you can't even shut off your enemy in times of war from access to water. So if the American government and if municipalities have decided that they can shut off water from the American public domestically, then you must understand you have stepped into what is called a water war. And it was in that moment that I realized that they will criminalize, they will vilify, they will use everything at their disposal. 

In what Monica’s saying here, we can see this same brutal definition of meritocracy underlying these kinds of policies, that if a person can’t afford the basic necessities to live on their own—water, food, shelter—they don’t deserve to live. Detroit is, an 80% Black city where nearly 40% of residents are living in poverty and it’s surrounded by a majority white and not nearly as poor state that took control of the city government and instituted an Emergency Manager in 2013, after which these shutoffs were highest. Considering this context, the tone of this underlying belief about who deserves to live and who doesn’t is undeniably racialized. Put plainly, it’s racist—it’s discrimination against poor, Black people. It’s a form of power that’s been termed “necropolitics” by Achille Mbembe, “the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”  

It's it's abusive, it's ..it's and the quality, if you look at it internationally, it's a form of genocide. 

That’s the voice of Charity Hicks, a beloved Detroit community leader and water justice advocate in an interview with documentary filmmaker Kate Levy from 2014. 

It is a way to get people out of their homes. 

Kate Levy: It criminalizes you for being alive.  

So technically, we have to pay for our infrastructure, right? So there's cost associated with it. And I think the people's water board position is we collectively, collectively, all of us pay for our water system. The problem is, is when you massive shut off and you throw people out, so you take two, 300,000 meters out of service, what you're effectively doing is raising the rates on everyone else left. So you become it's a tailspin. It's like we're going to shut you off and then transfer the costs onto a smaller base of payers. And that's partially why the increase in water rates have been going up, because we're constantly throwing people out. So in 2006, Michigan welfare rights, crafted with some attorneys and some consultants, a water affordability access plan because we can't continue to deny people water, we just can’t. It’s a sanitation, It's a health. It's all types of things wrapped up in it. If you don't have running water, it's a form of neglect on children, minor children. It creates it's exacerbates health conditions. It's also a human dignity thing, too. The city council approved it, but the water board refused to implement it.

Back in May of 2014, Charity was arrested for protesting water shutoffs in her neighborhood in Detroit. If you’re wondering why we’re talking about water shutoffs from ten years ago—it’s because this particular moment, in the wake of the bankruptcy, was a central moment in which neoliberal logics could take over, as Naomi Klein explained. But also, it’s because water shutoffs haven’t stopped. The start of the COVID pandemic offered some brief pause in shutoffs, but the city resumed shutoffs for nonpayment in 2023. And, these shutoffs are also entangled with questions of safety, policing and incarceration in some disturbing but crucial ways.  

But when Charity got arrested for just alerting her neighbors and her friends, 

There’s Mama Monica again. 

there was a mother that had just come home with a newborn baby just a few weeks old, and that baby required a certain amount of water and care. And when she just told them that there was a demolition company outside that was fully prepared to cut the whole block off. Not everybody, even owed a water debt. And they arrested Charity and Charity was actually taken not to jail, but directly to Mound Correctional Facility. She was taken to prison and held there for over two and a half days. I mean, nobody even knew where she was for over a day and a half. And then you had to send clergy, white clergy, and there had to be Alice Jennings, an attorney, going just to check on Charity just to make sure she was safe because she had injured her foot. She was bleeding. She also was diabetic, so she was having some other issues. But Charity came out and told the story of how the people were corralled in these cages and how they were sitting in their own waste and feces. And women had menstrual cycles and there was no water or anything to address these conditions. 

Denying people water is a necropolitical move if I ever saw one: we need water to survive. Beyond that, Charity’s story exemplifies how this death-making logic pervades the American state and, in this case, is carried out by a water authority responsible for providing a life-making resource to people’s homes and the police, as enforcers. When Charity saw that these workers were about to shut off the water on her block, she came running out of her home to ask if they’d just let people draw some water in their tubs. In an act of civil disobedience, she and at least eight of her neighbors were arrested for blocking the entrance of the private company hired to cut people’s water off.

These arrests demonstrate the interconnectedness of both our human needs and the systems that manage safety and water. It exposes how the commodification of water, criminalization of poverty, and expansion of the prison industrial complex are intertwined. Being able to care for yourself and your family in your home—which requires access to clean, affordable water—is a matter of safety. We’re sold the myth that the systems of policing and incarceration are charged with serving, protecting, and maintaining safety. Instead, in this case, police apprehended and incarcerated a woman for demanding safety, for demanding water for herself and her neighbors. Before that, the Department of Water and Sewerage punished people who couldn’t afford exorbitant water bills by refusing them access to water: pay-to-play neoliberalism at work. It begs the question: what is ‘safety’, anyways?

people just want to be seen...particularly from women or people who are viewed as women, are like, "I want to be able to walk down the street and feel, OK, you know what I mean—feel like people have my back if something happened. I want to feel like, you know, safety to me means that I don't have to think about where I'm getting my next meal. You know, safety for me means that I don't have to worry about my neighbors taking from me, you know," whatever it is.

That’s my dear friend PG Watkins. In 2020 and 2021, PG was part of Green Light Black Futures, a coalition led by young, queer Black folks who mobilized neighbors, created media to shift harmful pro-Project Green Light narratives, and hosted community events, trainings and workshops about safety, justice, and abolition across Detroit. Members of the coalition launched a survey to better understand community needs around safety and harm that was published in 2022: 

I think if we get to the root of it it's really about being seen it's really about being appreciated. It's really about feeling loved and supported. And like this collectivity that capitalism has taken from us. It's taken the collective priorities that, I mean, it's taken away the priority of the collective and instead called us to prioritize our individual experiences, our individual needs. And that means that when somebody else needs something, I shouldn't have to give up anything that I have to meet this need, right? Folks without homes who make homes on the street are criminalized for doing that when the solution is actually OK, can some of the tax dollars that we pay go to making sure that folks without homes have a place to stay? That actually is not the hardest thing to do in a huge ass city with a bunch of property. 

Curtis: With a bunch of land and homes.

Lauren: Excess, excess... 

PG: Excess land, right? This is not an impossible concept. But it feels impossible. You talk to people about abolition and you say, "The solution is housing everybody. The solution is feeding everybody without any questions." You tell people that and they're like, "Nah, that's too wild. That's never going to happen." You know, and there's this belief that that's never going to happen because some people aren't as important as other people. And also this idea that there's not enough of anything for all of us to have exactly what we want.

Lauren: Right, the scarcity... 

Curtis: It is just not true.

PG: Which is not true at all, actually. You know, when we think about, I mean, one thing that the uprisings last summer in 2020 really forced so many folks who didn't have to think about this to reckon with is: the Detroit Police Department has a budget of 300-some-million dollars that just increases every year. And when people hear that number—when we were doing the work for the Coalition for a People's Budget and just were talking to people about how much money the police have, you know, we're doing these actions and we're just yelling out to the crowds "333 million dollars!" You know, people hear that number, they're like "What? That's wild!". [00:39:25][38.7]

Curtis: That's a lot of money. 

PG: You know what I mean? Then you start having the conversations and it's like, yeah "Defund means we need to take some of that money away so that people can have houses. So that people can have what they need so that we don't have to shut off people's water." So anyways, I feel like so many of my conversations have been trying to get to the root of what people want. And again, I think I said this earlier, but just this curiosity about "why" and "what could provide that safety outside of the police." Can we imagine it? Can we get it in our minds that it's possible? And can we believe in ourselves and each other enough to fight for it, to work for it, to make that thing real? 

So, PG is an organizer and facilitator and, as they point out here, having access to water, housing, and other basic needs is safety. At its core, for many people, actual safety at least begins with having your basic needs met: having shelter, having what you need to eat and drink—including water—and having people around you who can make you feel cared for and seen. In “Reclaiming Safety,” an article by Andrea Ritchie and Mariame Kaba, they remind us that we need to redefine safety in order to escape our carceral conditioning: 

Abolition…requires us to unpack the notion of safety itself. While safety is a basic and universal human need, it doesn’t have a universal and singular definition. No individual or society can be “perfectly safe” at all times and under all conditions. All of us are vulnerable — to the elements, to natural threats like earthquakes or hurricanes, to harm  caused by other inhabitants of this planet, to the uncertainty of human existence in a vast universe. Of course, we are not all equally at risk. Our vulnerability to natural disaster, violence, trauma — and our access to opportunities to heal from them — are structured by relations of racial capitalism. 

To reiterate PG’s point from earlier, making water or housing available to people who need it is viable, in spite of the capitalist fictions that would convince us these are commodities or that there’s not enough of them  to go around:

We also need to let go of the idea that safety is a state of being that can be personally or permanently achieved. Safety isn’t a commodity that can be manufactured and sold to us by the carceral state or private corporations. Nor is safety a static state of being. Safety is dependent on social relations and operates relative to conditions: We are more or less safe depending on our relationship to others and our access to the resources we need to survive. In her short film The Giverny Document, Ja’Tovia Gary asks Black women passing a subway station in Harlem whether they feel safe in their bodies, in their communities, in society. Their answers were equivocal and relative: It depends, they said, on conditions like who they are with, whether their health aide is nearby, where they are, what time of day it is, or if they believe God is with them.

In contemporary discourse about policing and safety, the ways we usually hear of safety described are actually security theater, a term coined to describe hyper-visible security measures that give an illusion of safety without actually protecting people. Surveillance is a prime example of this. 

And the belief that surveillance produces safety is another central carceral fiction.    

Privatizing public safety

Surveilling the City + Commodifying Protection: Project Green Light

Ishmael Saleh is the manager of a Mobil gas station in Detroit. Like most stations in the city, Saleh rings up his customers from behind a wall of bulletproof glass. And that's just one of the safety measures taken here. The station is also a member of Detroit's Project Green Light program. That means the business has upgraded its lighting and installed security cameras that feed directly into Detroit's police department. 

You’re listening to Laura Herberg on an episode of WDET’s “Tracked and Traced,” an investigation of Project Green Light. 

Carceral logics would have us believe that more surveillance equals more safety and in neoliberalism’s drive to privatize public resources, safety is no exception. 

Signage and a flashing green light atop the mobile sign outside are meant to tell potential customers and criminals that the gas station is involved in the program. Installation of required cameras, signs, and lights cost business owners around $5,000. On top of that, initial investment businesses have to pay for high powered Wi-Fi to transmit video.

And yeah, you heard that right, business owners pay extra for this service. Surveillance technologies like Project Green Light are sold to the public on the belief that they prevent or reduce harm or violence, but there is no evidence to support that they do. Fear-mongering about crime and violence predicated on a foundation of very real fears and experiences of harm has convinced countless cities—Detroit included—to invest heavily in them, funneling more money to police departments and discriminately focusing their attention on poor, Black residents in the process.  

And Project Green Light really takes it a step further, by literally selling these security measures becomes emblematic of the neoliberal obsession with commodifying things that should be public resources.    

As you heard in that excerpt from Tracked and Traced, Project Green Light’s selling point is that police will respond when something happens, which might sound odd because.. well, that’s literally what they’re supposed to do in the first place.

what Curtis and Tawana have said: "safety is more police safety is, you know, police responding quicker, right? Which, I think, to talk about the trauma that folks are experiencing, Project Greenlight really is out of the trauma of Detroiters for decades, not getting any response when something happened or getting a response that was hella delayed and just disrespectful, you know, in the ways that—if the police are doing what they're "supposed to do," air quotes, you know, they weren't doing what they were supposed to do, right. You're actually not even meeting the expectation of this community. You're taking days to respond to 9-1-1 calls. Project Greenlight is like, "Yeah, pay a few hundred dollars to us... 

Lauren: "For a small fee...". 

PG: "...and we promise. We promise we will come right away, you know, you'll see us in just a couple of minutes!" And that feels good for folks. They're like, "Wow, I'm seen!" Right? I pointed to Tawana and looked at Tawana because she's been doing all this work around being "seen not watched" and people just want to be seen.

As PG points out, the fear that was capitalized on to make the case for Project Green Light comes from a very real place. Project Green Light  quite literally profits from a failure of the existing carceral system to address people’s actual desires for safety and people’s rightful fears of living in a city that has abandoned so many of its residents' basic needs that constitute safety. Call it “Policing Prime,” Amazon-like on-demand delivery of a timely police response. 

Project Green Light convinces businesses and residents of the farce that more surveillance will produce more safety and then it charges them exorbitantly to deliver a service police were supposed to be providing all along. By charging businesses an extra fee for faster response times and then installing a surveillance system plugged directly into the department’s monitoring system and facial recognition software, it also renders private enterprises concerned with protecting capital and property—not people—into the primary beneficiaries of police intervention, while purporting to make everyone safer. Not to mention, this arrangement also allows DPD to skirt public oversight and regulation: according to Eric Williams, a managing attorney at the Detroit Justice Center, Project Green Light’s cameras—since they’re placed on private property—aren’t subject to the same kinds of regulations they would if they were on government property.

If you remember  only one thing from today’s episode: let it be that Project Green Light doesn’t prevent harm or reduce crime. And, even if it did make it easier to identify and incarcerate people for so-called “crimes,” they’d more than likely be crimes of poverty—like petty theft from gas stations. And at the end of the day, disappearing people won’t fix what drove them to commit harm in the first place. 

This obsession with surveillance isn’t limited to Project Green Light in Detroit, it also happens at home.

Surveillance at Home: Enabling the Cops in All of Us 

Oh my God, I hate Next Door, ugh, I hate Next Door so much. Next Door is the absolute worst.

So, if you don’t know, Nextdoor is one of many neighborhood-based digital platforms that allegedly helps build intra-community relationships. As described by two researchers Armando Lara-Millán and Melissa Guzman-Garcia in a study on “Digital Platforms and the Maintenance of the Urban Order,” the defining features of these platforms are that first, participation is restricted to residents in neighborhoods; second, the apps enable residents to make posts—things like video, live stream, photos, text, and reactions—about issues of neighborhood concern; and lastly, that they notify residents of potential security issues in real-time and allow them to see incidents mapped visually.  

It's a terrible, terrible, terrible place.  And it feels like such an important place to be aware of and stay present to because community is on there deep. You know, like there's — I don't know that there is another way that I could have felt so connected to my neighbors in a pandemic. You know, like literally the people who live on my block, as somebody who's a renter who moves every couple of years and hasn't been able to really solidify neighborhood relationships, you know, I get to know the person right next to me and that's pretty much it. Next Door is an opportunity to see each other and be with each other to support each other, and that shit is wild!

It's also a platform that creates space for conversation and connection that otherwise wouldn’t happen. That said, it’s also a platform that, especially when paired with home surveillance systems like Ring cameras, can “amplify paranoia, racism, and carceral impulses of American homeowners.” Most importantly, perhaps, they have significant partnerships with police departments and facilitate sharing home surveillance footage with them. They extend the long arm of policing and surveillance through people’s private residences and essentially allow residents to operate as agents of the state, knowingly or not: 

PG: They be on this app—and this is why I'm saying the carcerality at home thing—they be on this app sharing their Ring camera footage.  [00:15:30][7.7]

Lauren: Oh wow. 

PG: Talking about "This person came up to my door and left. I should have called the cops on them." There was this whole thread that was probably like a hundred plus comments about these young kids playing ding dong ditch and the woman being so upset by the inconvenience of this game that kids have played for decades, maybe centuries, even, people have been playing. 

Curtis: We was doing it in caves!  

PG: OK! When we had doors as soon as anybody had something to knock on or ring to annoy their neighbors. I feel like it's always been a thing, but they were literally playing ding dong ditch: you could tell they were, right. It's the Ring camera footage. You can see them running up, laughing, running away. It was clearly some kids playing, right. But the way that the folks on these threads were so violently saying what should be done to these young kids for playing a game in their neighborhood was so hard to read. And I mean, I didn't read all of it, but it was just like, "Is this real?" I was really scrolling trying to see if there was going to be anybody with some sense on the thread, like if I needed to comment or somebody else had already said the things. But that's some of it, right? It's like: we have these opportunities to connect, to get curious about each other, to support each other, to assume the best about each other. Andinstead, we kind of go to the absolute worst and say, you know, they should know better. And because they don't know better, they deserve to be locked up. And even if, you know, it’s a game but getting locked up will teach them not to do xyz again. It’s just wild kind of the narratives we create that restrict kids from being able to play and that restrict us from being able to be more trusting and feel more safe in our neighborhoods. And I think that those types of narratives get perpetuated and it creates this lack of safety on our blocks and in our homes for sure. 

At the end of the day, these platforms have the capacity to bring us closer, as PG described of the potential they saw in the context of COVID 19, but because of the ways we internalize the carceral fictions about the notion that, for example, surveillance and policing produce safety, so often they end up being co-opted to perpetuate those social fictions and reproduce  state surveillance through individual households. 

Corporate Surveillance

Alright, so we’ve touched on two ways that surveillance becomes privatized: Project Green Light and Surveillance at home. Finally, another way we see the privatization of public safety at work is in the ways surveillance is employed by private corporations to police public spaces and how those private corporations intersect with regional police forces to control people in urban space, for example. This came up in my conversation with Nick Buckingham of Michigan Liberation: 

safety for gentrification means the criminalization of poor Black people.

That's Nick Buckingham, the co-founder and co-executive director of Michigan Liberation:

To see homeless folks get arrested now for sleeping outside in a park. To see, you know, these different institutions around high populated homeless areas, start to close their doors, or be limited with the amount of resources that they're able to have. Ironically, like you only see this in Gilbert-town. Right? As Gilbert comes into Detroit and starts to put up this invisible fence around his property now. Right? Property that, you know, one has belonged to, you know, many Black Detroiters. But before that, the indigenous population of Michigan. Now he gets to put up these invisible fences. He gets to set, you know, the standard of law within his invisible parameters. He doesn't need DPD anymore, Detroit Police, he has his own, you know, Dan Gilbert force that you know, they act as the police. They have laws and policies that they're able to follow just like the police, you know, they're able to to remove a person off of the street and like literally criminalize this person, you know, for being poor, for being homeless, things like that. So to see you know, to see that happening is a disgrace.  [00:11:45][81.1]

What Nick is describing is neoliberalism’s public-private partnership wet dream. He’s right, Gilbert doesn’t need DPD, but he definitely still partners with them. In Brett Story’s book, Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power, she describes the material relationships between downtown corporations’ surveillance systems and local police forces through a passage about what some Detroiters non-affectionately call Gilbertville: the sprawling expanses of downtown Detroit owned by billionaire Dan Gilbert, who made his fortune on Quicken Loans, now known as Rocket Mortgage: 

In Gilbert’s billion-­dollar downtown, a Rock Ventures security force patrols the streets twenty-­four hours per day, reinforcing the unflinching gaze of hundreds of high-­tech security cameras affixed to the buildings purchased by his companies. Meanwhile, a model of downtown Detroit in miniature sits in the boardroom of the Quicken Loans headquarters, with Gilbert’s properties illuminated in a bright orange glow once he acquires them. Situated in one of those buildings, the Bedrock-­owned Chase Tower, is a command center where dozens of computer screens monitored by security guards link to live feeds from the arsenal of video cameras planted downtown. The monitors connect to approximately 1,000 different cameras in the streets and sidewalks surrounding Rock Ventures properties in seven different states, with over 300 of those cameras located in metro Detroit alone. The camera program is a collaborative effort that includes most of the big downtown property owners, including General Motors, Ilitch Holdings, and Compuware. Once a month, the representatives of those companies meet in a boardroom at the Compuware headquarters, the same building that hosts Quicken Loans, along with members of the DPD, Wayne County Sheriff, Wayne State University Police and representatives of the numerously deployed private security forces.

Brett Story goes on, writing, “The private-­public security partnership is insidious, not only because it indicates the privileging of corporate property over ordinary residents—” much like Project Green Light, “but also because the limits of public law enforcement are offset by the private security guards, and vice versa. For example, the Guardsmark Inc. security guards employed by Gilbert’s companies are under no legal obligation to read detainees their Miranda rights, but they do have the power to use force. They tag team with Detroit police forces when removing unwanted people from the downtown, communicating via radio and sharing video feed from the multimillion-­dollar surveillance system.” In 2015, Bedrock—Gilbert’s real estate company—was accused of placing security cameras on buildings they don’t own: Detroit Beer Company and American Coney. While it turned out it wasn’t Bedrock, it was Compuware, another corporation with whom they share surveillance footage and private policing resources: the distinction feels moot. 

There’s a common refrain in anti-surveillance advocacy that focuses on the desire to be seen—validated, acknowledged, affirmed—not watched. In the space between these experiences, a contradiction exists between the ways in which surveillance makes us hyper-visible, targets its gaze at specific kinds of people—poor, Black, immigrants, and so on—and the ways in which disappearance functions to remove those same people from view through incarceration.  

And it’s not just about surveillance, either. Dan Gilbert and his corporations have massive financial stakes in the broader scheme of policing and incarceration in Detroit: Bedrock was brought on to build a new jail and court complex with a major county investment and land swap as part of the deal.  

Nick: You know, schools closed down and we built a $500 million jail, right? And we, the jail isn't being built in like a rural community, right?

Lauren: Oh no.

Nick: It's not being built in a area where, you know, the average child that's traveling through Detroit wouldn't see it. It's being built right where it's visible.

Lauren: It's like a monument!

Nick: Yeah, it's like a monument. It's literally like right there... 

It’s a monument all right, but it’s also a threat. It’s a hyper-visible reminder of the punishment that awaits folks who disrupt the capitalist order; the ones we would disappear. 

Closing + Acknowledgments

Alright, so to sum things up: capitalism turns the public resources we need to live into commodities we can’t afford; folks are being criminalized for just demanding things like water; and the neoliberal impulse to privatize collective needs has us convinced that safety can be bought and surveillance at every imaginable level equates to safety. So, where does that leave us? It leaves me, at least, with more questions about how these fictions become reality: what are the mechanics of these mythologies that keep us so.. Entranced? Delusional? Stay tuned for Part 2, where we’ll talk more about these delusions and several others.

Thanks for joining us for this episode of Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities on silos, alienation, safety and interdependence. Until next time, remember what’s real: capital isn’t productive, people are; neoliberalism requires a ton  of heavy-handed intervention from government—including police and prisons—to carry on the way it does; police, they don’t serve or protect anything other than capital; and, for the love of God, surveillance is not safety.  

Acknowledgments

So, thank you to the many people who’ve made this show and the wider body of work possible over the last three years: Thank you to all the futurists featured in this episode who participated in this project three long years ago: Nick Buckingham, Curtis Renee, Tawana Petty, PG Watkins, Angel McKissic, Monica Lewis-Patrick, Nate Mullen. Thank you especially, to PG for helping me facilitate these conversations. 

And rest in power to Charity Hicks, who was killed in a hit and run in New York City in 2014.

This limited series was dreamed up, written and produced by me, Lauren Williams; essays were co-edited by my dear friend Ayinde Jean-Baptiste; and the audio was engineered by Conor Anderson. Excerpts from several references were read by voice actors Joy Vandervort-Cobb and Jastin Artis. Our theme music is the instrumentals from a song called Detroit Summer by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.