LVEJO Statement on Violence, Policing, and Immigration

Executive Summary

The Little Village Environmental Justice Organization releases this statement as a background and framework of our organizational and community-based approach to  Environmental Justice as it pertains to violence, policing, and immigration. It is based in the reality of how these systems exist in the Little Village community and how these systems deeply impact our neighborhood alongside Black and Brown communities across Chicago, the United States, and the world.

 

Violence, policing, and immigration detention and deportation systems in Little Village are harmful at best and deadly at worst:

Little Village is over-policed, with very high burdens of police violence falling on youth. Policing has also served to criminalize poverty in the Little Village community. The policing, immigration detention and deportation systems work together to criminalize community members that leads to higher levels of detention and deportation.

 

Policing, immigration detention and deportation is Environmental Injustice

Environmental harms are a form of immediate and slow violence where communities of color are devalued, extracted from, poisoned through exposure, and systematically deprived of access to resources and health needed for surviving and thriving. Much more land and resources are dedicated to policing and incarceration than to green space in Little Village, a demonstration of how environmental injustice and violence intersect. On an emergency scale,  natural disasters, large infrastructure projects with harmful impacts on people and resources, failure of environmental protections, and other scenarios can become a vehicle to a police state and further denial of human rights.

 

Key to any meaningful change is Self- Determination

The Little Village community and its members should not be met with gatekeeping when attempting to change what happens in Little Village.  Current programs that encourage surveillance and vigilantism at a community level increase existing power differences and continue to criminalize our youth, poverty and participants in street-based economy. These are not ways to respect self determination. In order to do so the voice of the community and its members is needed in decision-making about violence and policing in Little Village.

Creating access to justice and working towards the goal of Liberation are the solutions to violence in Little Village

Solutions to violence must place the most affected community members in the center as experts of what community needs. Solutions must acknowledge Black leadership in anti-police brutality and liberation from policing.  They must be intersectional and expand sanctuary policies and be built on the assets of community. As well as ground our policies and practices that address multiple and all undocumented communities.

 

It is an ongoing process of Little Village Environmental Justice Organization to firmly root in restorative and transformative practices. By following the Principles of Environmental Justice and the Jemez Principles of Democratic Organizing, we center community members instead of upholding policing and detention/deportation strategies that only serve to criminalize black, brown, and indigenous communities.

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