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POSITION STATEMENT
The following is a living declaration of our collective values and legacies, reflecting our ongoing growth and evolving understanding. We acknowledge that it may change shape over time as our coalition continues to learn, adapt, and build.
As a coalition committed to the liberation and empowerment of Detroiters and all oppressed people, we ground our work in deep respect for the legacies of social justice and abolitionist movements. Our collective understanding of harm, resistance, and liberation is informed by a living legacy of historical and contemporary figures, ideologies, and movements that challenge systems of oppression.
Our approach is heavily influenced by the Black Radical Tradition, Black feminist thought, and the intergenerational wisdom of activists who have fought for justice across race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. Figures such as Grace Lee Boggs, Mariame Kaba, Angela Davis, Sojourner Truth, Marsha P. Johnson, Silvia Rivera, Ida B. Wells, and so many others have profoundly shaped our analyses and strategies, emphasizing the importance of centering the most marginalized voices, fostering deep interconnectivity, and maintaining a relentless commitment to abolition and collective care.
We honor the stories and lessons passed down from older generations, recognizing the critical need for healing justice and the interconnectedness of global liberation movements. Our work is further guided by the solidarity between Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color across the world and the imperative to dismantle anti-Blackness, capitalism, and all forms of structural violence.
In envisioning the future of liberation movements, we are committed to nurturing spaces of care, mutual aid, and community-based safety. We reject the reliance on carceral solutions with a firm belief in the power of transformative justice. Instead, we strive to create communities rooted in justice, accountability, and repair. Our roles in this ongoing struggle are multi-dimensional. We recognize that each individual holds their own unique purpose in our movements, and it is through the crossing of our differences that we can unite and sustain what we seek to build. Together, we gather as caregivers, strategists, and builders of resilient, decentralized networks that honor the wisdom of past movements while forging new paths toward collective liberation.
Members of the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network
Community Engagement Committee
Angel McKissic
Zee St. James
Triniti Watson
Aisa Villarosa
Catherine Holub-Ward
Kourtney Newberry
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
In the wake of the 2020 uprisings catalyzed by George Floyd’s murder and countless other cases of police murder of Black people, some American cities have begun cautiously examining how to respond to demands to address police brutality, excessive force, and murder, and in some cases, to reexamine public safety more broadly.
Community-led movements—many predating 2020— have rallied around calls to defund police and encouraged cities to restructure how budgets are deployed to cultivate safety. Some local governments, however, including the City of Detroit, have doubled down on their investments in policing, surveillance, and prisons since then. Even among cities and states that have made commitments to respond to these uprisings, many have focused on regulating police conduct that leads to disproportionate rates of police brutality against Black Americans: use of force, duty to render medical aid, and misconduct reporting. A smaller number have developed programs focused on strengthening public safety responses that minimize contact with law enforcement or the wider carceral system at all, such as programs that funnel people away from the criminal legal system into community-based services that attempt to address the root cause behind their involvement.
Developing non-carceral responses to harm is the central focus of the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network (MDRJN), a special project of the Just Cities Lab at the Detroit Justice Center (DJC). In MDRJN’s view, traditional approaches to addressing harm disregard the interests of those most directly affected by harm and fail to deliver substantive accountability that responds to the needs of all parties involved. To this end, this study responds to these wider calls for transformation and a growing tradition of abolitionist imagination in the city by gathering input from residents through surveys and interviews. By exploring and uplifting the lived experiences of Metro Detroiters—especially Black Metro Detroiters—this study aims to inform the development of resources they want in the aftermath of harm and the conditions and processes of accountability—outside the carceral system—they would be willing to engage with. These findings also necessarily incorporate participants’ reflections on experiences with policing and incarceration, as pillars of the prevailing criminal legal system. Our findings identify four major thematic areas that illuminate key dimensions of Metro Detroiters’ experiences of harm, safety, and accountability and four major implications, with more specific recommendations outlined at the end of this report:
1We need to cultivate better skills and support among residents and professional service providers for identifying experiences of harm and disrupting the normalization of harm in Detroit communities.
Difficulty defining harm obstructs and delays people’s ability to identify it as such, which consequently impairs their capacity to respond to, heal from, or seek accountability for harm. This difficulty is informed by a predisposition to define harm exclusively as physical violence and the ubiquity and normalization of harm, which may cloud participants’ capacity to interpret it as noteworthy. Contained within this theme is also delayed identification of harm: a pattern among participants who struggled to identify harm, recognize its impacts, or articulate the nature of the harm they experienced until long after it had occurred. This theme is formative because perceptions about what constitutes harm also influence participants’ perceptions in later sections about what can be done to heal from or seek accountability after harm.
2
We need different tools, services, and public institutions for navigating and recovering from harm that prioritize survivors’ healing, interrupt intergenerational cycles of harm and address the persistent emotional, psychological and material consequences of harm.
In the aftermath of harm, participants seek to make sense of their experiences and come to terms with the consequences that unfold over time. By sharing their experiences grappling with the fallout of harm, participants surfaced the ways in which intergenerational trauma informed cycles of harm in their own lives; how they sought to explain or decipher the “why” of the harm they experienced; and the means by which they made sense of persistent emotional, psychological and material consequences of harm.
Participants pursued various strategies to recover or heal from harm, namely turning inward and seeking support through community and kinship networks. Professional mental health services, which some desired to support recovery, have been elusive for most. When seeking support from others, having their experience of harm validated or acknowledged is of paramount concern.
3 We need to nurture a culture that encourages accountability and develop better tools and systems for seeking accountability after harm.
In addition to seeking self-directed healing, support from community, and professional support, respondents also desired accountability after experiencing harm. Within this theme, we examined how participants conceive of and seek accountability after harm: most agree that accountability requires a person who caused harm to first acknowledge the harm occurred and its impact, apologize, change their behavior, and offer some form of repair or restitution. The degree to which accountability is truly delivered depends, for some, on the survivor’s control over defining the terms of satisfaction. For some participants, accountability also requires that harm-doers experience consequences for their actions and some conceive of appropriate consequences as purely carceral, such as arrest, imprisonment. For most, the nature and grievousness of harm informs how they imagine accountability might be delivered.
4We need to lower our reliance on police and develop non-carceral responses to harm in our communities.
In the wake of certain kinds of harm, some participants rely on police, but attitudes toward police were mixed across both survey and interview respondents: some expressed unwavering trust while others held deep skepticism and fear. Of note, this section examines the ways participants’ expectations for policing contradict their experiences of policing and exposes the careful considerations they make when contemplating whether or not to engage with police after harm. Relatedly, while many participants are curious about methods for seeking accountability beyond the carceral system, their willingness to rely on these kinds of interventions varies and some have doubts largely attributable to uncertainty about what non-carceral approaches might involve.
Our Definition of Harm
Harm might look like an event or situation that made you or others around you feel unsafe, threatened, or otherwise violated. Harm can fall into many categories.
Here are some examples of common types of harm:
Physical (e.g. violence)
Sexual (e.g. abuse, assault)
Verbal/Emotional (e.g. abuse, manipulation)
Financial (e.g. control)
Mental/Psychological (e.g. manipulation)
Cultural/Racial
Slander/Reputation/Gossip
Abandonment
Neglect Discrimination
Organizational/Institutional
The context or setting in which harm took place could be professional, personal, or at the community level.
It’s okay if you didn’t recognize the experience as harm at the time it occurred; even if you came to understand it as harm after the fact, it still counts as harm.
The experience(s) of harm you have in mind do not need to have been externally validated by police / courts or others around you. In other words, your experience doesn’t have to be something classified as a “crime” in order for it to qualify as harm.
The experience(s) you bring to mind could be from your time in Detroit or elsewhere, where it took place doesn’t matter.
ABOUT THIS REPORT
This study combines survey responses from 77 Metro Detroit residents and 90-minute interviews with five Black Detroiters who have experienced harm.
ABOUT THE SURVEY
Seventy-seven (77) survey respondents completed the “Community Insights on Safety, Accountability, and Resources Questionnaire” between November 2021 and December 2022. Participants were recruited primarily through email and social media outreach performed by Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network (MDRJN) and Detroit Justice Center (DJC) staff; a small number of surveys were completed on paper at a regional domestic violence support center; and some participants may have found the survey through paper fliers distributed around the city. As an incentive, five participants were randomly drawn from those who provided contact information to receive $50 Visa gift cards. Compared to the interviews—which began with participants identifying an experience of harm around which to center the conversation—the survey focuses more on safety, accountability, and resources.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWS
Interview participants were recruited through the researchers’ networks between October - November 2022; ten interviews were conducted in November and December of 2022; and five interviews were selected for analysis. The sample is intentionally small and all participants are Black Detroiters; the intention of this focus was to enable us to identify patterns of interest from an in-depth exploration of a small set of cases. Potential interviewees were first screened over the phone to confirm they could identify an experience of harm to share with the researcher.
Participants provided verbal informed consent to participate upon confirming their eligibility and signed a written copy of the same consent form upon initiating the interview itself. Interviews lasted approximately 90-120 minutes and interviewees received $100 for participating. We used semi-structured, open interview format to create space for participants to surface qualities they considered significant to or constitutive of their experiences of harm. Each interview began by asking participants to react to a definition of harm and identify an experience of harm that aligns with that definition. We then posed questions about the nature of their feelings in the immediate and long-term wakes of harm and the types of support they sought to recover from harm.
While participants were not asked to divulge explicit accounts of their experiences of harm, many did opt to share details in the course of responding to these questions. The second half of each interview focused on their experiences with police, alternatives to policing and perceptions about safety more broadly. In this segment, we offered narrative examples of non-carceral responses to harm—in the form of one short video and short written story—and invited reactions to these models. Participant names are replaced with pseudonyms throughout this report.
ABOUT SURVEY RESPONDENTS
Of all 77 respondents, more than half identify as Black: 49% are African American, 4% are African, and 1% is Afro-Caribbean and more than half fall between the ages of 25-44 (54%). Of those who provided data on gender (71/77), the majority (62%) are women, (19%) are men, a smaller share are 6.5% non-binary or gender-fluid, 3% are trans men / transmasculine, and 1 respondent is a trans woman. About a third (36%) of respondents have a disability, which most commonly included mental health issues, learning disabilities, and mobility issues. Of those who are employed, 22% work in the nonprofit sector, 12% are self-employed, 11% work in health care or social services, respectively, and 9% work in education. What
is your age?
What is your gender?*
71 OF 77 RESPONDENTS
*4 participants indicated that they identify as transwomen or transmen. To reflect the reality that trans men are men and trans women are women, we categorized their responses accordingly and make note of those who identify as trans here.
What is your racial and/or ethnic identity?*
77 OF 77 RESPONDENTS
* The survey form actually phrased this question as follows: “What is your nationality?” In reality, in part because of the multiple-choice answers available, most participants responded with their race and/or ethnicity, not their nationality.
More than one third of respondents have a disability.
Do you have a disability?
77 OF 77 RESPONDENTS
Type of Disability
28 OF 77 RESPONDENTS
If employed, what sector do you work in?
ABOUT INTERVIEWEES
Because of the nature of this analysis method, the interview findings drove the shaping of this report and frame the bulk of our findings. While participants’ stories are revealed throughout the narrative section of the findings, more in-depth profiles of each participant’s backstories are inserted throughout this book.
To help you navigate the report, whenever you see a quote from an interviewee appear in text, you’ll also see one of the following iconic identifiers adjacent to their quote. Full interviewee profiles are available on the following pages.
Bianca (she/her) is a thirty-year old transwoman and former sex worker. She now works for a grassroots organization that provides social services. In her time there, she has grown to take on more responsibility and expand programs in a way that she’s really proud of. She has strong familial support and a deep bench of support from her chosen family, her trans sisters.
Denise (she/her) is a Black entrepreneur, artist, block club member, and mother of adult children in her sixties who has lived in Detroit her whole life. Denise’s role as a mother who prioritizes protecting and caring for family—especially her children—colored her reflections and informed many of the decisions she made surrounding her experiences of harm.
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Jamaal (he/him) is a Black trade worker, father and college student in his forties who was raised mostly in Detroit. He spent over ten years incarcerated in Michigan. He was born and raised primarily in Detroit, with a few stints elsewhere as a child. He lost both his parents young and was raised by grandparents. p. 48
100
Jonathan (he/him) is a Black creative worker and administrator in his fifties who came to Detroit as a child after losing his mother. He spent over thirty years incarcerated in Michigan. As a young child, he lived with his mother in another state. When she died young, he was sent to live with his father and stepmother in Michigan.
Sharon (she/her) is a long-time elder Detroiter in her 80s: a mother, grandmother and widow who now lives alone in her family home. Throughout her life, she worked various jobs in factories and hospitals. She feels somewhat isolated since her husband’s death and since some of her adult children live in other states. She’s deeply faithful and has close ties with her church, which definitely shaped how she navigated her experiences of harmand sought safety and healing afterward.
ANALYSIS
We used Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to process interviews, which allows us to describe the essence of experiences of harm, healing, safety and accountability from the perspectives of those who have experienced them. In this way, we can orient our observations around what participants perceive, how they arrive at those perceptions and how they extract meaning from their experiences. In this context, perception is significant since how we make sense of these experiences is so deeply informed by our wider social and cultural contexts and our nuanced ethnic and familial norms. Further, we often talk about harm only in the context of crime that can be prosecuted within the prevailing criminal legal system. But, harm is pervasive and not all forms of harm are recognized by or addressed through policing, the courts, or incarceration. Since this study seeks to inform the development of restorative justice practices, understanding these phenomena beyond the constraints of a presumed criminal context was crucial. To this end, our analysis examines the ways we make meaning of, identify and attempt to recover from harm whether or not it has been categorized as crime; the ways we cultivate and preserve safety with or without the criminal legal system; the ways we conceive of and seek accountability from those who have caused harm; and the affective dimensions underlying people’s trust and skepticism in carceral and non-carceral approaches alike.
In the first phase of IPA, the researcher reviewed interview transcripts and recorded emergent questions or observations concerning the interview and, in particular, what we noticed about the participant’s experiences and perceptions of the phenomena in question. The phenomena of focus in this study include experiences of harm and the attendant healing or recovery from harm; the practice of seeking or cultivating safety; the nature of encounters with and attitudes toward policing; and attitudes toward alternatives to policing. In a second reading of transcripts, the researcher highlighted key units of meaning—words, phrases, or sentences that describe participants’ experiences—relevant to central research questions. In a third review, she articulated experiential statements that succinctly summarize the central concepts underlying units of meaning in ways that capture the substance of their meaning while remaining grounded in participants’ responses. Each interviewee’s experiential statements
were then grouped into clusters and labeled as themes before pursuing a cross-case analysis in which those themes were reorganized across all interviews and reexamined, searching for common patterns and idiosyncratic differences. This produced higher-level thematic statements and sub-themes cutting across all five interviews. After reviewing and reconfiguring this thematic material with a co-researcher, the lead researcher began composing this report. The report writing, itself, presented a final opportunity to reexamine, reinterpret, and redescribe the themes and relationships between them. To compose this report, we interwove the survey results with interview findings in ways that enhance or expound on themes defined through IPA.
For open-ended survey questions, we used inductive coding to identify patterns in participants’ responses. This approach served as a useful complement to IPA interview analysis, as it allowed for concepts and categories to emerge from the survey data in ways that revealed aspects of the inquiry that might have been unanticipated or otherwise overlooked. Closed-ended questions were analyzed quantitatively.
Trouble Identifying and Interpreting Experiences of Harm
Difficulty defining harm obstructs and delays people’s ability to identify it as such, which consequently impairs their capacity to respond to, heal from, or seek accountability for harm. This difficulty is informed by a predisposition to define harm exclusively as physical violence and the ubiquity and normalization of harm, which may cloud participants’ capacity to interpret it as noteworthy. Contained within this theme is also delayed identification of harm: a pattern among participants who struggled to identify harm, recognize its impacts, or articulate the nature of the harm they experienced until long after it had occurred. This theme is formative because perceptions about what constitutes harm also influence participants’ perceptions in later sections about what can be done to heal from or seek accountability after harm.
Among survey respondents whose definitions of harm revolve around its impacts or results, the vast majority (74%) defined harm as actions or incidents that result in some form of pain, hurt, injury or damage. Of those definitions constituted primarily on the nature or type of harm, physical violence (83%) was the most commonly described type, followed by emotional harm (41%), mental or psychological harm (32%), and inhibiting or depriving someone of their basic needs (20%).
This tendency for survey respondents to define harm as physical violence is further reflected in our interview findings: When asked to recount an experience of harm, four of five interviewees named at least one (if not more) incident of physical violence—and the fifth discussed the threat of physical violence as a substantial underlying presence in their experiences of other forms of harm.
When explaining a series of incidents involving financial manipulation, Jamaal seems to downplay or cast doubt on the validity of financial manipulation as a form of harm or as something that renders him unsafe. He qualifies that “direct remarks” were never made to make him feel unsafe:
“...the person I’m referring to never like directly made any direct remarks or anything that would make me feel unsafe. But
they would make remarks that made me feel like my financial situation could be kind of took [from] under under me. So in that way. So not physically unsafe, but financially unsafe, maybe.”
This passage also conveys a perceived hierarchy of harm, one in which Jamaal perceives “physical unsafety” as more substantial or credible a form of harm than financial unsafety. In the same thread, Jamaal mentions that this person used to ”for lack of better words, ‘twist my arm’ to continue in that space.” That he began with the phrase “for lack of better words,” further elucidates his struggle to find a more precise or accurate term to describe his experience. The comparison to a physical maneuver here—twisting his arm—reinforces one way in which Jamaal can more easily conceive of harm as physical violence than financial manipulation, so he leans on that metaphor to communicate how he came to understand this kind of manipulation as harm.
For multiple participants, harm was so commonplace that they struggled to choose a single incident to discuss during the interview. Jamaal had such difficulty choosing and was so certain he could identify an experience of harm in any category, that he asked the interviewer to, instead, select a category of harm for him to narrow down his options: “Can I ask you to...Pick out one of the categories and I’ll just talk about—tell you about the first thing that comes to my mind with the category that you picked out.” Denise spoke to the normalization of harm among Black Detroiters, specifically:
“And I hate to say it, but I’ve experienced every one of these on this list and it’s really unfortunate because we kind of normalize it. And I was thinking about it the other day, I’m like, why are we so poised for... to make this normal or poised for the struggle, or whatever. I’m like, this is not cool, I’ve experienced every one of these.”
The notion that Black people in Detroit are “poised for the struggle” is informed by a long history of forced “struggle” to overcome oppression characteristic of the “normative” Black American experience shaped by anti-Blackness and systemic violences of disenfranchisement, exploitation, and dispossession that lead Black people to struggle through disproportionate poverty, incarceration, and premature death. This normalization is even more pronounced for subgroups like Black women and Black trans women. One of Denise’s experiences of harm, for example, was framed as an inevitability because of her identity and context. Denise was made to feel by others that the harm she experienced was her fault because of who she is—at the time, a poor, Black, single mother—and where she lived at the time. After her utilities were stolen repeatedly by a neighbor, she was asked by family and friends “Don’t you know where you live?” as if to say she should have expected to experience harm because of where she was situated or should have known better than to live there and expect safety. In other words, she was blamed for the harm she experienced. While she rejected this framing, Bianca came to internalize a similar admonition about her plight as a transwoman. In her words:
“I felt like every trans woman gonna go through it, and I didn’t go through it yet…because all the girls told me that as they’re coming into, you know, this world. I had older girls tell me, ‘Oh girl, you gonna go through it.’”
Bianca received these warnings about the perceived inevitability of abuse through anecdotes from elder trans women who warned her before she experienced intimate partner abuse herself.
The struggle to identify harm seems particularly pronounced for those who experienced prolonged, durational, repeated forms of harm like domestic violence (Bianca), financial manipulation and control (Jamaal), abuse (Jonathan), and utility theft (Denise). In each of these situations, participants described a period of bewilderment or confusion in which they tried to make sense of what they were experiencing, find language to describe it, and determine whether the experience was, in fact, something that qualifies as harm. Bianca, for example, sensed that something was “off” about her relationship with a new boyfriend over time, but it took longer for her to articulate her experience as abusive. For Jamaal, it wasn’t until years after his experience of financial manipulation that he recognized what had happened. His language suggests a sense of doubt or difficulty finding the words to articulate his experience to begin with, noting that he doesn’t “know how to really explain it,” an uncertainty that surely shaped his capacity to name his experience at the time. In essence, the realization that he was being financially controlled came “all too late” for him to change the path of his life and avoid incarceration.
In some cases—particularly when a survivor has a close relationship with the person who harmed them—the tendency to assign blame to themselves for the outcome clouds their ability to identify harm. Jamaal’s comment that the person who manipulated him financially wanted to keep him “under his wing” points to the nature of their relationship: he perceives this person as a mentor whose role carries an expectation of protection, benevolence and care, an expectation that he summarily betrays. Their proximity seemingly obscures his interpretation of the experience, leading him to assume that this person was operating with his best interest in mind and slowing his identification of the pattern of harm. Bianca’s account of intimate partner abuse simi-
larly situates her in tension: she vacillates between acknowledging the complexity of her predicament and blaming herself for not recognizing the nature and gravity of the harm she encountered sooner as she processes her experience of domestic abuse.
What these participants reveal about the ubiquity and normalization of harm is noteworthy because it also seems to obscure their ability to recognize and respond to harm when it does occur.
Bianca Bianca (she/her) is a thirty-year-old transwoman and former sex worker. She now works for a grassroots organization that provides social services.
In her time there, she has grown to take on more responsibility and expand programs in a way that she’s really proud of. She has strong familial support and a deep bench of support from her chosen family, her trans sisters.
Bianca shared one primary experience of harm: physical and emotional domestic partner abuse and manipulation that took place over about a year and a half. Throughout the time they were together, her boyfriend threatened her with murder and transphobic epithets; he hit and choked her; he threatened her family with arson; and he got her into legal trouble that left her with a criminal record. Along the way, he also controlled who she could spend time with and what kind of work she could do. This pattern of abuse put both Bianca’s housing and transportation at risk, not to mention her physical safety and survival. These experiences of abuse and her responses to them were deeply shaped by her identity and experiences as a trans woman and the messages she’d come to internalize about her own safety. Bianca touched on a few other experiences of harm throughout the interview, being robbed at gunpoint while walking through her neighborhood; having the police called on her after a group of friends dined-and-dashed and left her at the restaurant; and a drunk driving incident where the driver crashed into her home and left the car on her property.
Bianca has relied on the police in the past, but didn’t share any examples of experiences where they had addressed her needs: recovering stolen belongings, addressing a mental health crisis. Still, she sees police as necessary to prevent chaos and disorder, so she’s pretty skeptical of alternatives.
“I felt like every trans woman gonna go through it…because all the girls told me that as they’re coming into, you know, this world. I had older girls tell me,
‘Oh girl, you gonna go through it.’”
BIANCA
In the Wake: UNRAVELING
AND UNDERSTANDING HARM
THEME 2
In the aftermath of harm, participants seek to make sense of their experiences and come to terms with the consequences that unfold over time. By sharing their experiences grappling with the fallout of harm, participants surfaced the ways in which intergenerational trauma informed cycles of harm in their own lives; how they sought to explain or decipher the “why” of the harm they experienced; and the means by which they made sense of persistent emotional, psychological and material consequences of harm.
Across surveys and interviews, the most common question raised after experiencing harm is some variation of “Why?”
Further, when asked “What did you need from the people / systems that harmed you?” 13% of respondents who answered indicated that they wanted some explanation of why the harm occurred. In order to make sense of events that survivors might interpret as inexplicable tragedies, traumas, or misfortune, respondents searched for explanations of the incidents they named; faults in the harm-doer’s character or mental well-being that would explain their actions; ways that upbringing or past experiences might offer rationale for their behavior; or faults within themselves and their own behavior for some culpability, sometimes leading to self-blame. Beneath this meaning-making seems to be a perception that if an ostensibly acceptable rationale motivated someone to commit harm, it might help survivors make peace with their experience in a way that supports healing overall.
What questions did you have after harm?
77 OF 77 RESPONDENTS
Why did it happen? What was the motivation? Why me?
What next? What now?
How do I restore or find safety?
Why is it so unsafe?
How do I heal or recover?
How could it have been prevented?
How can I protect others?
Who else has experienced this?
Do they understand the harm they caused?
What did I do to cause this?
After harm, most respondents simply wanted to know some variation of “Why?”
Some participants could make sense of their experiences of harm as symptomatic of generational inheritances. Several interviewees experienced trauma in early childhood or inherited trauma from previous generations that informed cycles of harm experienced throughout their lives, the ways in which people went on to cause harm to others throughout their own lives, and the ways in which they made sense of harm-doers’ behavior. In psychology literature, intergenerational trauma is defined as “the transmission of trauma or its legacy, in the form of a psychological consequence of an injury or attack, poverty, and so forth, from the generation experiencing the trauma to subsequent generations” (APA Dictionary of Psychology).
Bianca, for example, identified intergenerational trauma as instrumental in shaping her abusive partner’s behavior. His story was that “his mother gave him away at five. He’d been in and out of foster cares ever since he got up until about 23 and just now meeting her [his mother] from years later. That was some—that would fuck me up.” Bianca also understands a gendered dimension of his abuse as uniquely shaped by the foundational experience of his mother’s abandonment:
“I get it now. Your mama fucked you up growing up. Now you want to fuck up every woman that come across your path? That’s not right, baby. You got to heal yourself.”
That he wanted to “fuck up every woman” seems to help Bianca separate herself from the harm she experienced. Further, this language foreshadows the fact that—following the end of their relationship—he went on to murder another transwoman he was dating. While Bianca’s understanding of her partner’s story shaped the way she interpreted and responded to his abuse at the time, Jonathan and Jamaal’s understanding of intergenerational harm informed how they made sense of their own harm-doing later in life.
Jonathan experienced repeated abuse at the hands of a sibling. When he reported the abuse to his parents and wasn’t believed, he “took to running away.” Later, as a young teen, he shoplifted on a dare in an attempt to fit in at school. When he was arrested
for shoplifting, his parents refused to appear for his hearings and abandoned him to the state, amplifying his experience of neglect and isolating him further at home. At thirteen, he became a ward of the state and was sent to live in a group home. He eventually went to college, and during his time there, he was made to feel like a burden by his parents. Jonathan ultimately ended up serving over thirty years in prison for second degree murder, harm that he ties directly to his childhood experience. Referring to his desire for his abuser to acknowledge the harm he caused and how that abuse shaped his behavior later in life, he said:
“Because then we can have a conversation about how that [abuse]...how that forged my self identity. How I made choices that were specifically directed at that particular harm…it’s an unravel— unpeeling of an onion, so to speak. You were harmed in one way, but you, you chose to hurt other people in your circle—”
Jonathan understands himself as fundamentally composed of his experiences of harm as layers of his selfhood. He acknowledges his responsibility in causing harm to others, but also interprets the harm he caused and his core self-identity as emerging directly from the abuse he experienced as a child. Similarly, Jamaal identifies a direct relationship between his early childhood experiences of poverty and his involvement in the drug conspiracy that landed him in prison.
“I believe my early childhood— being very, very, very uh poor growing up, uh, and kind of always wanting and needing— and also being scared to not have any money, uh, for the rest of my life, as I witnessed, uh, you know, my family members and most of my friends, uh, being impoverished as well, uh: I started to, um, sell drugs.”
Later, he also names the impact of his generational inheritances, “I dealt with the incarcerated father, a absent father…I’m not oblivious to that whole reality and I know the harm of not having a father around.” Jamaal started selling drugs in order to avoid the threat of structural harm inflicted by poverty, which coincidentally led him to experience another kind of structural harm by way of incarceration. In the passage above, he references a constant yearning for—“wanting and needing”—a better life. It bears noting that the two experiences of harm Jamaal shared during the interview both occurred as direct fallout from his experience selling drugs: financial manipulation by his boss and slander / reputational harm while incarcerated.
In addition to searching for an explanation of why harm occurred, some participants were able to articulate the emotional, psychological and material consequences of harm; the nature / duration of those consequences. Several participants also noted the ways in which those consequences may not be identified until long after the incident itself and seem to persist and evolve over time. When survey respondents were asked “What made you feel unsafe after an incident of harm?” their responses echoed this observation among interviewees: They named emotional or mental health challenges because of trauma (19%), repeated harm or the threat of future harm (15%), the environment—either in the environment where harm occurred or feeling unsafe generally in surroundings that remind them of harm (12%), and the presence of the harm-doer around them (7%).
When Denise’s neighbor broke into her cable box to steal her phone service, she felt a combination of emotions that shifted over time from confusion and incredulity to vulnerability and helplessness to indignation. Her sense of disbelief at realizing that “people can get away with this?” is illuminated by the fact that her report to police was dismissed and she was told there was nothing they could do to help her. Her sense of vulnerability and helplessness was escalated by her role as a mother and concern for her kids, whom she is charged with protecting from harm:
“Because I was living by myself with my two kids, I felt vulnerable, and I felt like um, yeah, just vulnerable—almost like a target.”
“Because I was living by myself with my two kids, I felt vulnerable
just vulnerable — almost like a target .”
DENISE
Denise Denise (she/her) is a Black entrepreneur, artist, block club member, and mother of adult children in her sixties who has lived in Detroit her whole life.
Denise’s role as a mother who prioritizes protecting and caring for family—especially her children—colored her reflections and informed many of the decisions she made surrounding her experiences of harm. At the time of our interview, she was active in her community, particularly her immediate neighborhood and block club.
Denise named multiple experiences of harm, all of which took place in Detroit, expounding most on two incidents—utility theft and a botched police raid on her home—and mentioning a few others in passing, like witnessing people selling drugs on her block and teenagers in her neighborhood vandalizing her car. The first experience that came to mind was a utility theft incident from about three decades ago: when she was a young single mother living with her two small kids in a neighborhood where she felt her values and priorities differed from her neighbors’, she suddenly stopped receiving phone calls on her landline and began investigating. After weeks of this, she finally realized that her neighbor had come up with a way to run a cable through his window into her box, stealing her phone service and rerouting all her calls. They went back and forth for weeks, Denise placing locks on the box, the neighbor cutting them off. Denise felt isolated, she got no support from her other neighbors at the time and ended up calling the police to
attempt to press charges instead, but was treated like a nuisance and dismissed. She also witnessed that same neighbor abuse his girlfriend and reported the incident to police.
Later, Denise recounted another incident from around the same time she was living in that apartment, when her home was mistakenly raided by police. Police broke down her door, held her and her two young children at gunpoint, and interrogated them about drug dealing. There were no drugs in the house. When they showed her the warrant, she realized officers had the wrong address. They eventually left with no apology and without repairing the damage to her home. She sued the police department and was encouraged to settle, in part because she was warned by lawyers that the city would attempt to discredit her because she was a single parent living in a poor neighborhood. It’s worth noting that, in spite of the way this incident affected Denise and her children, it didn’t completely inform her attitudes toward police.
She ultimately went on to work in direct partnership with the police department through a community organization where she was employed. Denise straddles the line about policing and alternatives: she questions bad behavior by bad actors within the police, but doesn’t interpret that as an indictment on the institution of policing itself and is tentatively interested in alternatives to police.
Feeling “like a target” communicates a sense of exposure and susceptibility to this theft, manipulation and subsequent intimidation by her neighbor, who repeatedly broke into her cable box even after she discovered what was happening and locked it with a padlock. Denise’s sense of vulnerability was further amplified by her inability to intervene or simply stop it from happening herself. This helplessness was also a feature of Jonathan’s experience of abuse.
“Physically,
I felt extremely small—. Uh, unable to do anything
about what
was happening
all around me and to me. Emotionally, I was extremely—[long pause] vulner— I felt vulnerable. And I did not feel like there was anyone who could protect me.”
In Jonathan’s case, the feeling that no one around him could protect him was likely exacerbated by his experiences of abandonment by his parents and his sense of isolation at home. That he felt “extremely small” physically reflects his sense of disempowerment and the way in which this dynamic and his experience of harm shifted his entire sense of self. Jonathan’s vulnerability persisted long after the harm ended: “...it’s difficult for me to see my abuser even now,” he noted, decades since the incidents of abuse occurred.
Jamaal, Jonathan and Denise’s experiences all involve repeated incidents of harm as part of a larger pattern of abuse or manipulation over time. But, even in cases where participants experienced isolated incidents of harm, they may still report persistent fear akin to the vulnerability described above. Sharon, for example, felt fearful long after the various isolated incidents of harm she shared during the interview: a smash and grab incident where a man broke her car window and stole her purse while she sat idling at a stop light; a home invasion and burglary while she was away; and her car being stolen from her driveway. While these incidents were years—in some cases, decades—apart, they stuck with her long after and while they were not connected directly, the fact that Sharon lived, worked, worshiped, and traveled in the same parts of Detroit for years likely cultivated a sense of fear that colored her experience of her environment, broadly.
In addition to the long-term emotional impacts of harm, many participants presented examples of the ways in which their material well-being—impacts on their housing stability, finances or income, transportation, and entanglements with the criminal legal system—was affected by the harm they experienced. Both Jamaal and Jonathan, for example, ended up in prison serving thirteen and thirty years, respectively, after experiencing harm in childhood. Both men named direct ties between the harm they caused (and were incarcerated for) and the harm they experienced as children. Beyond the physical violence and emotional abuse Bianca endured, she was forced to move multiple times because of her abusive partner’s behavior; was prevented from earning money through sex work because of his restrictions on her activity; lost friendships; lost multiple cars; and suffered legal consequences because of her relationship with him. Bianca perceives this lasting effect of her experience with her abuser as holding her back, still, and preventing her from living her life freely. That she wants to live her life “instead of keep looking behind my back” encapsulates the lingering feelings of danger and unsafety that lingered long after she left the relationship.
Some participants described a delay in recognizing the lasting consequences of harm that later surfaced as trauma. Several participants described a need or drive to move on quickly after harm, to get past it, in a sense, without getting through it. After Denise’s home was violently raided by police, for example, she pursued a legal case for compensation and sought counseling for her children, but didn’t seek any kind of emotional support for herself. It wasn’t until she found herself jumping “at every turn” and having dreams about the incident that she realized how impacted she had been by the experience: “I didn’t even know I was so traumatized till I would jump at every turn. And then I start having stupid dreams about the police.” The thought of seeking support to heal from the trauma of this incident was outside the realm of possibility at the time: “We’re not even socialized to think like that. It’s like, okay, this happened, this happened. I got to get up and go to work tomorrow.” There was no time to process her experience.
In referring to the other incident of harm she experienced—utility theft by a neighbor—Denise similarly noted that she simply didn’t have time to stop and worry about the incident, characterizing it as a “nuisance” and an “annoyance”—“I had stuff that I was doing,” she said. “So I didn’t have time to linger. The police let me
know what their response was, the neighbors let me know what their response was. I’m like, ‘I still got to go to school, I still got to work at Best Buy at night. I still got to take my kids to school. I don’t have time for this. This is this way. This is that way. ((emphasis, decisively)) Got it.’” She came to interpret experiences of harm as distractions, interruptions, or impositions that disrupted her life and chief concerns of parenting and providing for her family—not incidents that would warrant the inconvenience of addressing their impacts. Denise’s responses to both experiences of harm reflect her earlier comments about the ways in which Black people have been socialized to normalize harm and how being “poised for the struggle” might prevent them from pausing to examine the full depth of the impact of an experience of harm.
“Physically, I felt extremely small—
—unable to do anything about what was happening all around me and to me.
Emotionally, I was extremely— I felt vulnerable... I did not feel like there was anyone who could protect me.”
JONATHAN
Jonathan Jonathan (he/him) is a Black creative worker and administrator in his fifties who came to Detroit as a child after losing his mother. He spent over thirty years incarcerated in Michigan.
As a young child, he lived with his mother in another state. When she died young, he was sent to live with his father and stepmother in Michigan. Jonathan shared two primary incidences of harm, both of which were recurring, involved his immediate family, and became part of a wider cycle of harm: abuse by a sibling and neglect and abandonment by his father and stepmother. Throughout his childhood and early adulthood in his blended family with siblings from his father’s new marriage, he felt isolated and alone; he was repeatedly made to feel like a burden by the very people he expected to help him. Jonathan seemed to struggle to reconcile the nature of his experience at home with the fact that his family—at least on the surface—seemed perfectly fine, “upper middle class,” with shelter and access to the things he needed materially. Throughout his childhood, Jonathan also experienced re -
peated abuse at the hands of a sibling in his household. When he approached his parents, he wasn’t believed. He proceeded to act out—running away, shoplifting with friends at school— in ways that brought him into contact with police. He interprets what happened next as another act of abandonment by his parents: at 13, because his parents didn’t appear at his hearings, he became a ward of the state. He ultimately went to college, but ended up serving over thirty years in prison for second degree murder. He struggled to get the services he needed to heal from the harm he experienced throughout his life, especially while incarcerated. But, he describes many key relationships—teachers, mentors, groups he formed while inside—as instrumental in his own transformation over time.
As a child, Jonathan saw police as protectors: when he ran away the first time, he ran to a police station. Now, having been incarcerated, he is cautious about his engagements with police because he doesn’t want to create unnecessary contact with them in ways that would endanger his freedom again. In part because he’s had some experience learning about restorative justice and mediation, he seems open to alternatives, but he does believe that police have a responsibility to the public to “do their jobs.”
Strategies for Navigating and Recovering from Harm:
THE INTERPLAY OF SELFRELIANCE, VALIDATION, COMMUNITY AND PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
Participants pursued various strategies to recover or heal from harm, namely turning inward and seeking support through community and kinship networks. Professional mental health services, which some desired to support recovery, have been elusive for most. When seeking support from others, having their experience of harm validated or acknowledged is of paramount concern.
In many cases, interview participants initially or eventually resigned to take matters into their own hands to ensure their own safety or pursue healing going forward. This orientation to handling the fallout from harm belies the notion that the current system for navigating experiences of harm—primarily the police and the courts—can, in fact, protect people from experiencing harm or navigating its impacts in the first place. Instead, it implies that we are already responsible for our own safety and healing. Denise’s experiences of harm were defined by a deep sense of isolation and the resolve to fend for herself. Her experience of utility theft characterizes this feeling best, as all the people she anticipated would support her left her out to dry: her neighbors, the police, and her family. As she made sense of the situation, she realized that many of her other neighbors had been aware she was being taken advantage of by the one stealing her phone service and none intervened or offered support. “Yeah, nobody said anything. And they just kind of, you know, kind of looked the other way.” Her children’s fathers, who she looked to for help, offered no more support. Instead, they cast blame on her for being in the predicament she was in, implying that she had made a poor decision by locating her family in that neighborhood: “‘Well, you shouldn’t even be over here anyway. Why are you over here anyway? Bla bla bla bla bla.’ I’m like, ‘Are you going to help out or not?’” On top of this, when she reported the utility theft to police “they act like I was a nuisance or they didn’t want to be bothered— like I was a hassle.” She was dismissed by the authority she thought would be able to intervene. The true “hassle,” in her view, was the theft itself—but to be treated as if she were the hassle by the one authority she thought could intervene seemed to be the last straw. “I don’t have any support,” she concluded, decisively.
Bianca, similarly, expressed an expectation or sense of responsibility that it was up to her to protect herself throughout her abusive relationship. Bianca talks about the abuse she experienced in a way that suggests she sees herself as in control of her partner’s behavior. Describing her reaction to the news, years after they broke up, that he had murdered another trans woman—a threat he also explicitly leveled at her when they were together—she said: — “It’s just so, like, to the point of even when he told me then, I just knew in my mind who I am, I won’t let you. You know what I’m saying? I won’t— I won’t even take you to that point or even to that step to even think in your head—”. That she “won’t let” him hurt her both belies the reality of her experience, as he
For most respondents, the presence of others and care from those in their communities, like friends, family, loved ones, comrades etc. helped them feel safer after an incident of harm.
What helped you feel safe after an incident of harm?
66 OF
RESPONDENTS
injured her severely multiple times, and implies a level of control that seems incongruous with the reality of her that seems incongruous with the reality of her predicament and his capability, as demonstrated by his murder of another girlfriend years later. Sharon took matters into her own hands after the smash-and-grab incident where a man stole her purse at a stoplight, including her wallet with her ID in it. She didn’t report the incident to police or seek services to address the trauma. Instead, she became more vigilant at stoplights while driving at night: “Because uh, because of that happening I— for a long time, I was cautious about stopping at red lights, you know, because that happened when I was stopped at a light.” She installed protection around her home out of fear they would find her home since they had identifying information: “I had bars put around my windows, my windows at my house at that time because I was afraid, because they knowing my address and everything.” And, she prayed: “No, I didn’t go to no, I didn’t try to get no support or anything after that. Like I said, I just goes to the Lord. I pray…And uh, trust him and believe that, you know, he going to take care of me. So I just goes on.” Though her faith may be understood of as supported by her church community—a dimension we will explore in a later section—it can also be understood as a resource she was able to draw on through her own action, through prayer.
Interviewees often sought and received support after harm from some combination of family, friends, and community members—which might include neighbors or groups to which people belong by way of affinity, shared belief systems, or identity. Overwhelmingly, when asked “What helped you feel safe after an incident of harm?” in the survey, most respondents named the presence of others / care from others in their communities, like friends, family, loved ones, or comrades.
“Sharing my story with close contacts and having my feelings validated in their responses. Sharing the harm incident with the network of colleagues so that others could be warned of his boundary crossing and harmful practices.”
Survey Respondent
When asked “What helped you feel safer after an incident of harm?” many participants said “presence and care from others.” Within that category, most respondents want someone to listen and someone to validate and/or acknowledge the harm they experienced.
15 OF 77 RESPONDENTS
If you have experienced harm, what made you feel supported? 28 OF
PEOPLE CHECKING IN / EXPRESSING CONCERN COMFORT REMOVING HARM-DOER FROM SPACE OR LEAVING UNSAFE SPACE ACTION IS TAKEN AFFIRMATION / REASSURANCE HOLDING HARM-DOER
ACKNOWLEDGMENT / VALIDATION OF HARM
BEING LISTENED TO / HEARD
Some respondents indicated specific actions friends, family, loved ones, and comrades can take to help them feel supported after harm.
*Although 73 of 77 respondents answered this question, the percentages in this chart refer to the 28 respondents who speifically indicated what actions people can take that make them feel supported. Because the question was open-ended, other responses articulated sources of support or types of support than specific actions.
Many interviewees—including Sharon, Denise and Bianca—found material or emotional support from family and friends after incidents of harm. As articulated by survey findings, survivors are often seeking accompaniment, presence or a willingness to listen. Bianca felt supported by both her biological and chosen family’s commitment to listening to her throughout her experience of abuse, whether or not they understood her experiences: “family, trans sisters. Yeah.” For her, to be heard was enough:
“They understand me. Mm hmm. They understand. Or if I am going through those type of things, they understand. Or just even they don’t understand it, I know they— they are listening.”
She also felt supported by other close friends—specifically other trans women—encouraging her to leave her abusive relationship, too, “I had girlfriends telling me “Girl, if you don’t leave him now.”
While in prison, Jonathan cultivated relationships that could support his long-term healing with other incarcerated men. While inside, he started two different groups—a self-run active listening class and another peer support group—aimed at helping himself and others develop better communication strategies. He initiated both groups, at least partially, as a response to being barred from receiving professional mental health services because of his status serving a life sentence. While the groups weren’t a direct response to the harm he experienced as a child, he also understands them as tools for healing from the long-term ripple effects that harm created in his life.
The degree to which people can rely on their communities for support, broadly, depends on the depth and quality of their relationships. For example, Denise felt isolated after her experience of utility theft, when her other neighbors “looked the other way” and avoided intervening in a way that would’ve made her feel safer. She attributes her neighbors’ silence as bystanders and lack of support to her perception of herself as an outsider. She didn’t feel like she belonged in the neighborhood—rather, she felt ”outside of the culture”—and sensed “mistrust” and “resentment” from the people around her. She actually describes herself as part of the group but outside of it, at the same time: though she and her
neighbors shared a block, racial identity, and many common lived experiences, she sees herself as holding different “values” and living a “different life.” In her view, to have acknowledged that her neighbor was stealing her utilities would have positioned her other neighbors “outside of the group.” “And people want to be accepted and good, you know people don’t want to be outside of the group. And people want to be accepted. And that discomfort makes people be quiet, go along to get along instead of— instead of saying ‘That’s not cool.’” Without belonging, she felt unsafe and uncared for. She expects that her current neighborhood would have responded very differently to the same incident because of the strength of her relationships and the sense of belonging she experiences there.
“Had I been on this block, it would have been different. Because people are not— I mean, because people over here know me. I hope because I have a— better relationships over here. And that makes a difference. Relationships…”
Each of these examples from interviewees is reinforced by survey respondents, who indicated that, irrespective of the source, there are certain desired actions people can take that demonstrate support after harm—many of these align with what they found in community and kinship: The top three actions include being listened to or heard; receiving acknowledgment or validation of harm; and people actively checking in or expressing concern. The survey highlighted the need for validation most clearly in the way participants responded to what makes them feel unsupported after harm. By a large margin, people felt most unsupported when their experiences were invalidated, which might include questioning, dismissing, downplaying, doubting or minimizing one’s experience of harm. The next three most common reactions might also be interpreted as nuanced forms of invalidation: shaming or blaming the survivor, a form of invalidation of one’s experience that places the onus on the survivor for their own experience of harm; ignoring them, a form of invalidation that discounts the significance of their experience of harm overall; and judgment or the threat of judgment, a form of invalidation that, again, turns the onus back on the survivor.
What support did you need after harm but couldn’t access?
38 OF 77 RESPONDENTS
“Not being listened to, being interrupted while speaking, not being believed, having what I said questioned or denied, being gaslit, and overall being disregarded.”
Survey Respondent
As explored earlier, Denise was left feeling isolated and vulnerable, in large part because of repeated experiences of invalidation: After her phone service was stolen by a neighbor and she realized her other neighbors were aware but “kind of looked the other way,” she hoped they would have intervened more actively, but at minimum she wanted them to simply acknowledge that what was happening was, in fact, happening nad was wrong: “If they just would’ve said ‘He’s a jerk,’ which was my neighbor that was living downstairs, that would have made me feel some kind of support.” The police response further invalidated her experience, as they downplayed the gravity of the situation and discouraged her from pursuing a case against the neighbor. Retelling it, she puts on a patronizing tone to emulate the officers, who said the situation was “silly” and gave the impression that she was a nuisance for seeking help—rather than acknowledging that the source of the problem was her neighbor’s behavior.
At the core of this desire for validation seems to be a need to be believed about one’s experience as a demonstration of compassion and empathy. In Jonathan’s case, this is patently clear:
“[W]ell, first of all, to be believed. Absolutely believed. — Instead of having to prove anything, but rather desiring that we’re going to huddle up and we’re going to find out what’s going on and we’re going to get to the bottom of this the same way that you would have done if it was something that was on your mind or heart.”
To be validated means to be believed without reservation or “absolutely,” which would have signaled a sense of solidarity with his experience as a survivor and a commitment to his care and well-being above all else.
The drive to address harm on their own, as described above, is at least partially informed by this difficulty accessing the needed professional mental health support. Community- and kinship-derived support often filled the gaps left by the absence of professional mental health support. When asked “What kinds of resources/supports did you need or would have liked to receive to support your recovery/healing?” nearly 80% of survey respondents said mental health/therapy followed by over 60% who said peer support groups.
Survey results illuminate some of the barriers that prevent people from seeking support after harm. When asked “After an experience of harm/violence, did you seek services? Why or why not?” half the respondents said no. Of those who said they didn’t seek out services and explained why, the majority—about one third—said they didn’t because they lacked the necessary information and/or didn’t know where to turn [29%]. Others found the support they needed through family, friends, or other community members [18%] and some felt too overwhelmed by the harm or lacked time and capacity to seek out services [14%].
Mental health support was the most common source of professionally-facilitated support survey participants had sought out after harm: 80% of those who received professional services had received counseling or therapy and 30% had participated in a support group of some kind. When survey respondents were asked “What support did you need after harm but couldn’t access?” the vast majority of those who responded said either (1) forms of comfort and care (both professional, as in mental health services or counseling, time to be alone, so on) (2) support from community members—to include family and friends—and (3) some action to address the harm and/or redress damage caused by harm. Others needed support from the criminal legal system, like police, prosecutors, and laws; others needed material support, things to help them meet their basic needs, like money, food, housing and so on. In smaller numbers, some needed information or guidance about how to find the right support; time off school or work; freedom of expression; and freedom from retaliation.
Interviewees, in large part, named that professional care—particularly mental health support or counseling—was lacking throughout their lives. Jamaal, for example, remarked that he has experienced barriers to care throughout his life: “That’s [mental health services] just a lifelong thing that I’ve, that I’ve always wished was available.”
Both Jamaal and Jonathan faced structural barriers to accessing mental health services once incarcerated. On one hand, the stigma associated with seeking mental healthcare served as a disincentive to seeking help while inside:
“...when you’re incarcerated it’s actually counted against you as a negative to receive counseling…Because the way they’re going to paint it is that. You are basically psycho or some type of detriment to society or you too— like you’re not able to just come out in regular society because you have all these mental problems. But it might just be, ‘Hey, I’ve been attacked and somebody stabbed me and so on and so forth. But now I’m having nightmares.’ But the way they’re going to paint it is like…You know, this person needs some type of psychiatric help, treatment and or like, say, for instance, came to [glitchy audio, inaudible] medications, psychedelics or something like that. Like, yeah, I want to take that medication now that’s going to be marked against you, it’d be a whole rabbit hole you go through because of it.”
In contrast, because Jonathan was serving a life sentence, he was effectively barred from receiving services aimed at supporting reentry—including counseling—because of the assumption that he would never be reintroduced to society at large.
Toward Restoration:
A DESIRE FOR ACCOUNTABILITY IN PURSUIT OF HEALING AND JUSTICE
In addition to seeking self-directed healing, support from community, and professional support, respondents also desired accountability after experiencing harm. Within this theme, we examined how participants conceive of and seek accountability after harm: most agree that accountability requires a person who caused harm to first acknowledge the harm occurred and its impact, apologize, change their behavior, and offer some form of repair or restitution. The degree to which accountability is truly delivered depends, for some, on the survivor’s control over defining the terms of satisfaction. For some participants, accountability also requires that harm-doers experience consequences for their actions and some conceive of appropriate consequences as purely carceral, such as arrest, imprisonment. For most, the nature and grievousness of harm informs how they imagine accountability might be delivered.
Examples of Restorative Justice Processes
During interviews, we offered participants two examples of restorative justice processes . Their reactions revealed their beliefs about what constitutes accountability.
AN EXAMPLE OF RESTORATIVE JUSTICE WITH SUJATHA BALIGA
The first was “An Example of Restorative Justice with Sujatha Baliga,” a video in which Sujatha Baliga—a lawyer and practitioner—retells the story of a process in which a young man stole a car and the woman from whom he stole were enrolled in a restorative justice process. During the process, it was made clear that the young man and his family were unable to compensate her financially for the value of the car, but through a conversation with the victim’s friend—an older man who accompanied her to the meeting and could identify with the young man’s story—they eventually agreed to a reparative exchange: The young man would paint a commissioned work for the victim.
A
CULTURAL ORGANIZATION DEALS WITH SEXUAL ASSAULT
The second story was a short written narrative about an incident of sexual assault at a Korean cultural center in Oakland, “A Cultural Organization Deals with Sexual Assault.” In this case, a drumming teacher who was invited to teach a course at the community center sexually assaulted a student during the course of his two-week visit from South Korea. The next day, the teacher made a show of remorse and begged for the organization not to tell his school back home, but they insisted. The organization in Oakland attempted to initiate a community accountability response without involving police: they told his home organization about his behavior, required sexual assault courses for all the members of their group and his home group, required the school to send a woman teacher in the future, and required the teacher to step down from his role for a period of time. Ultimately, not everyone was satisfied with the outcomes of the process, the victim never returned to the cultural center. In retrospect, the director said, “I wish we could have spent more time to just embrace her and bring her in closer.”
Of
When asked “In cases of harm/violence, what does accountability mean to you?” most (58%) survey respondents pointed to actions the person who caused harm could take. Some (12%) equated accountability with “responsibility,” another 12% interpreted accountability as a response from the criminal legal system, and 8% defined accountability as some form of retribution or punishment.
Of those 58% who defined accountability in terms of the actions a harm-doer can take, the vast majority—89%—expected accountability to include acknowledgment, 31% expected a change in behavior, 17% expected an offer of repair or restoration to those harmed, and 11% expected an apology or demonstration of remorse. A smaller share, 9%, said accountability must involve support to help the person who caused harm transform their behavior.
those who indicated that accountability involves specific actions a harm-doer can take, respondents first and foremost want them to acknowledge and own the harm they caused.
35 OF 77 RESPONDENTS
HARM-DOER ACKNOWLEDGING / OWNING HARM
“That is one of the greatest things that I think I was seeking was acknowledgment that you, you destroyed part of me.”
JONATHAN
Broadly, when asked “How can people/institutions best support survivors during a process of accountability with the harm doer and/or others (e.g. community, friends, family)? survey participants indicated a desire for three things: offers of concern, care and comfort to survivors; actions to address or prevent further harm; and helping survivors navigate the fallout from the harm. In line with the desire for validation, survivors seek acknowledgement as a demonstration that the person who caused them harm takes ownership for the actions and impact of their behavior.
Jonathan, for example, held the same desire for validation from his abuser as he did for those around him, like parents and counselors. “That is one of the greatest things that I think I was seeking was acknowledgment that you, you destroyed part of me.” Here, he names that the core of what he wants his abuser to acknowledge acknowledge is the impact of the abuse: a recognition that it “destroyed” part of him goes beyond simply admitting the harm occurred, but recognizes the depth of devastation it caused, the gravity of that devastation, and perhaps most importantly, the perceived permanence of the devastation. That a part of him is destroyed implies that it cannot be wholly recovered: while he may have sought healing on his own, the destruction of a part of himself and his identity conveys a perception of ruination that can never be returned to its previous state. As described in both “Self-Reliance” and “Community and Kinship,” Jonathan pursued as much healing as he could through introspection and group engagements. “When I talk about that acknowledgement being all I needed, I’ve done the rest.” While he may have found ways to reconstruct a new sense of self in the wake of his abuse, the final missing piece for his own healing was this acknowledgment from his abuser.
For Jonathan—like many participants—acknowledgment is just the beginning of moving toward accountability: “And I think that acknowledgment isn’t the same as accountability, but acknowledgment is part of accountability.” In his experience, the timeliness of the acknowledgment played a part in its ability to help him heal after harm. As described earlier, he was unable to deal with the harm he experienced until he had been incarcerated for years: “I think it would have been a faster recovery if um joint conversations were held and uh acknowledgments were made back then.”
In Bianca’s case, she desired her abuser to acknowledge not only the harm he caused her, but also his wider pattern of behavior: “Owning up to, like, you know, like, damn, you know, not just— not even me, because you, you did it to other girls, too, that I had to hear...under the table.”
When asked “What did you need from the people/systems that harmed you?” 21% of survey respondents who answered said they wanted an apology. In apologies, people seem to be seeking another type of acknowledgment—beyond the sheer fact of the harm’s occurrence, they want to know that the person who harmed them knows what they did was wrong, identifies or empathizes with their experience, and feels remorseful about it. In Jamaal’s words, accountability requires a “general acknowledgment that it [harm] was happening and that they were wrong for it—maybe a little empathy. So, you know, other than, you know, ‘my bad’ or ‘it wont happen again’ was sufficed for me for me but anything other than denial and showing no accountability, you know, at all.” In naming “my bad” or “it won’t happen again,” he points to the need for an apology and, as described later, a commitment to change behavior going forward.
Several interviewees also sought a sense of genuineness or sincerity of remorse as a necessary condition of “true” accountability, but acknowledged that discerning a person’s true intentions could be difficult. Sharon, for example, said she wanted a person apologizing to “be remorseful about it,” but questions how one could verify the sincerity of a person’s remorse:
“You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t. [laughter] I wouldn’t know. I would just— I can only go by his reaction. Their reaction, whether they were— whether I would think that they are sincere or not, because I wouldn’t know for sure.”
Denise, similarly, described sincerity as a fuzzy feeling, one that eludes one’s grasp: “...you may never get that. You may never see it. A person could feel it, but I might never see it. You know what I’m saying? Internally, you don’t know. But it makes me feel like when a person gets it, it’s like when you’re raising kids and you know, the kid got it. Then you say, okay, they got that lesson, they got it. It’s the same thing because then the behavior is like different afterwards or something, you know, you just know they got and we, we still do that as adults.”
When asked “What did you need from the people/systems that harmed you?” 13% of survey respondents who answered said they wanted a commitment or demonstration of changed behavior.
What did you want from the person who caused you harm?
“[G]eneral acknowledgment that [harm] was happening and that they were wrong for it
maybe a little empathy. So... anything other than denial and
showing no accountability, you know, at all.”
JAMAAL
Interviewees agreed. Beyond acknowledging harm done, Bianca sought some evidence of transformation or changed behavior within her partner: “Admitted his wrongs, his wrongdoings of, you know sitting there—I don’t know—like ‘I know If’— you know, even though it happened a few times but still as in moving forward, but showing the progress within yourself.”
When reacting to the story about the young man who stole a car and participated in a transformative justice process, Sharon felt like this process would have demonstrated accountability if she could be sure that his behavior was changed for the long-term: “Yes. If he if he changed, if he realized that he was wrong and he, he, uh turned his life around and wasn’t, uh participating in that type of thing anymore. Yes!” Reflecting, later, on her own experiences of harm and what she wished for from those who caused her harm—Sharon noted that there was, at this rate, nothing they could do to be held accountable. She calls attention to the fact that she doesn’t know these people—so perhaps a component of her response is colored by the fact that they have no continued relationship, unlike Bianca or Jonathan and their abusers: “They don’t even know me. But anybody that they have harmed, they, they would— I don’t know if they know me or not!” Accordingly, her sole wish is for them to change and not cause harm to others: “What I wish, that people would look at life in a different way than to to prey on other people…just that they change their life, change their lifestyle, and live a, live a, live a better lifestyle. You know, change—Like I said— change their lifestyle and be accountable for themselves and not, not doing something to hurt somebody else, you know?”
In a similar vein, Jonathan, who indicated that there was nothing he expected or wished of his abuser beyond an acknowledgment of the harm he caused, was most interested in his abuser’s healing “Not for me to feel whole, but I would want them to have therapy again with that knowledge [of the harm they caused] so that they can feel whole.”
Jamaal echoed these sentiments in reflecting on his own efforts to atone for being absent from his son’s life while incarcerated: “as far as taking accountability, I’ve tried to set, demonstrate in my behavior my sincereness to kind of correct or right those wrongs. Not only him, but to my entire community. Uh, and I— more than anything as pertaining to my son, I just try to be a living example as opposed to like talking him to death about certain things.” His commitment to “be a living example” implies
committing to action, above and beyond the verbal commitment to change by being more present in his son’s life. He describes himself here as culpable to his “entire community,” as well—an acknowledgment that the actions that led him to prison affected both his immediate family and those in his community. In this case, particularly, to change his behavior seems to constitute a recurring act of repair toward his relationship with his son.
Some interviewees desire a solid guarantee that a person who has caused harm will change their behavior and seem skeptical that their word is sufficient. In responding to the case of sexual assault at the Korean cultural center, Denise voiced this skepticism: “I’m not sure, even though they put all these things in place to make sure what’s happened— didn’t happen again. It was like, where was the real accountability on his part. I don’t know.” It is worth noting, here, that the same uncertainty Denise expresses about whether this process delivered “real accountability” is echoed later in discussions about the extent to which incarceration or other carceral penalties deliver any true guarantee of remorse or changed behavior.
When asked “What did you need from the people/systems that harmed you?” 25% of respondents named some kind of restitution or compensation. Some interview participants echoed this, as well.
Denise imagined that her neighbor who stole her utility service could have made things right by paying her back for the expenses she incurred as a result of the theft, in addition to apologizing: “After he apologized, he should have said, how much is your lock? How much you pay for the lock? —He could have paid me for the lock and, um, apology.” When responding to the story about a young man who stole a car, Bianca indicated that—had she been in this situation—she would have wanted him to find a way to sell his artwork to earn the money to repay her for the loss.
For some participants, it was important that the precise terms of accountability were defined by the person who experienced harm. The need to center survivors’ needs was supported by survey findings: When asked “How can people/institutions best support survivors during a process of accountability with the harm doer and/or others (e.g., community members, friends, family)?” the most common responses—28%—could be described as “offering support that centers survivors’ needs.”
In interviews, this often emerged as participants reacted to the stories we shared of the transformative justice process. When
responding to the story of the Korean cultural center, several participants expressed concern that the girl who experienced the sexual assault was not centered in the process designed to address the harm. In Denise’s view, the survivor was not in control in the accountability process that was set forth by the cultural organization where it occurred: “...the emphasis was on to make sure that this never happens again. But and— ultimately the community was healed…She was kind of, I don’t know, maybe a pawn. I hate to say it.” That Denise saw her as a “pawn” implies that she was being exploited for someone else’s gain—in this case, the wider community—or that the process occurred at her expense, without caring for her needs. Jonathan agreed, noting that “it was almost like he [the abuser] was not made to re— he was not required to make the victim whole.” From his perspective, it was imperative that the survivor be engaged from the beginning of the process: “I, I think that, um, involving the victim from the very beginning beyond the fact of just getting the information so that we can take our actions—um, would have been important.” In his view, she should have been afforded a more active role in guiding the process beyond the simple fact of reporting the harm.
For some, accountability also requires the person who caused harm to face consequences for their actions. While consequences are not inherently punitive, some participants define consequences in purely carceral terms, meaning they expect those who cause harm to be incarcerated in order to change their behavior and believe in the rehabilitative capacity of imprisonment. Others, however, interpret the wider prison industrial complex as causing more harm than good and express a deep interest in models like restorative or transformative justice (explored further in the following section).
When reacting to the story of sexual assault at the Korean cultural center, Sharon wondered if the consequences the abuser faced would be transformative for him: He was required to step down from his teaching role temporarily, attend sexual assault education courses, and his home community was notified of the incident of harm. “So hopefully he he did realize that what he did was wrong and he did uh— because he couldn’t keep a job, didn’t have a job and lost his job and everything. I, hope I hope it helped him to see what he did was wrong.” In this reaction, Sharon explores the idea that the gravity of losing his job might help him change his behavior. But, she goes on to insist that he should have to spend time in prison for this assault based on the belief that serving time constitutes rehabilitation:
“And he probably he needs to be rehabilitated...for his crime. And that’s what, that’s what— that’s all I know! Is there are, the police is for that— to re-, to help people when they commit crimes, to take them out of society so they maybe won’t do it, you know, and if they hope they get rehabilitated when they are locked away or whatever.”
Sharon believes that “rather than taking matters into their own hands, I think they should have reported it and called the police,” so that he could truly have been held accountable for this assault. In the following statement, she reveals that her definition of accountability rests on “standing accountable” to some outside authority to which the incident can be reported: “Because he didn’t he, he, he wasn’t— he didn’t take accountability of what he had done. And they didn’t report it that he could stand accountable for what he had done.” That he should “stand accountable,” seems to subtly reflect the idea that the only way someone to be held accountable is to stand trial, reinforcing the perception that accountability can only be delivered through carceral systems. The fact that Sharon thinks he “didn’t take accountability of what he had done” further demonstrates her belief that events in the story and the consequences he faced do not constitute accountability. But, even in explaining why she believes a carceral response would have been more appropriate, the number of times Sharon says “maybe” exposes the uncertainty of the rehabilitative capacity of incarceration: “Because he maybe if he had gotten arrested and charged with the crime, maybe he wouldn’t do it again.” The reality, however, is that serving time in prison offers no guarantee that a person will not cause harm again than a verbal promise.
When Sharon says “And he probably…needs to be rehabilitated… for his crime…that’s all I know!” she makes it clear that the realm of possible pathways to accountability is limited by what she has been taught about policing and prison. In her own words, she contradicts her initial assertion that prison will guarantee rehabilitation: “Some of them. No, they go there and then they go right back in. No, they don’t get rehabilitated. Some of them do. Some of them don’t.”
Denise also interprets incarceration as rehabilitative and similarly searches for a way to guarantee that he will learn that his behavior was unacceptable: “...don’t they have anger management classes in prison? Don’t they have sexual assault classes or whatever in prison, too? You need to learn that this is not okay. So when you come out, it’s not perpetrated again, you don’t do it again.” As both Jonathan and Jamaal have revealed elsewhere, however, the rehabilitative capacity of imprisonment is minimal: accessing the kinds of mental health resources that might help a person transform in prison is not as easy as Denise and Sharon imagine. Both Sharon and Denise seek some guarantee that those who cause harm will transform and refrain from causing more harm in the future, but the carceral system does not promise that—by Sharon’s own admission.
Denise’s response to this particular instance of harm is further informed by her belief—shared by others—that certain, more grievous, kinds of harm can only be addressed through the carceral system: “But you start raping people and beating people up and shooting people—Your ass need to go to jail.” In contrast, Denise found the other example we shared with her—a situation of a restorative process after car theft—more appealing than incarcerating the young man who stole the car, in part because she sees it as a lesser offense.
Jamaal, in response to this notion that certain types of harm are more grievous than others, believes that satisfaction for survivors of harm is elusive regardless of the severity of carceral punishment delivered to those who caused harm. Jamaal interprets the system of corrections as both “failed” and racist, noting that “most of it don’t benefit people of color.” Moreover, he has witnessed the inability of the system to deliver satisfying healing or justice to survivors even with particularly grievous incidents of harm, like murder or rape. He sees restorative justice as a better model for seeking accountability, acknowledging that they must be “tweaked on a case-by-case basis.”
“So I’ve seen people get life in prison for a crime…and then the family members aren’t happy, they’re not satisfied. I’ve seen people—uh, or have heard of people uh getting um the death penalty, people still not satisfied or, you
know, people getting a lot of years based on whether it was a sexual crime and so on and so forth. Those type of offenses, they’re just not going to be won over well with any type of system… And then…even if a person is happy with this sentencing, they’re still not whole or happy from the situation. They still haven’t healed or haven’t had any— So there is still an emptiness. There’s still a unfulfilling prognostication, I guess, about the whole situation. But you wouldn’t be— so, like if somebody said, ‘Well, you know, restorative justice, how can, how can uh— it really work when somebody has been killed, lets just say, like somebody is going to be left feeling shorthanded?’ People still left shorthanded, all the time in the penal situation anyway. So it’s not about, for me anyway, it’s not about, what is perfect for what’s going fit everything its just, what best. [laughs] You know what I mean? It’s all we have to work with.”
Here, Jamaal notes that sentencing someone who causes harm to prison does little to support healing of survivors and their families. That survivors are left “shorthanded” anyway suggests that the impact of imprisonment is inadequate, it fails to meet the task of addressing the needs of those who have experienced harm, and that non-carceral paths to justice are worth a try.
Reconciling Trust and Skepticism:
POLICING AND NON-CARCERAL RESPONSES TO HARM
In the wake of certain kinds of harm, some participants rely on police, but attitudes toward police were mixed across both survey and interview respondents: some expressed unwavering trust while others held deep skepticism and fear. Of note, this section examines the ways participants’ expectations for policing contradict their experiences of policing and exposes the careful considerations they make when contemplating whether or not to engage with police after harm. Relatedly, while many participants are curious about methods for seeking accountability beyond the carceral system, their willingness to rely on these kinds of interventions varies and some have doubts largely attributable to uncertainty about what they might involve.
“...it’s just that, that that this society we live in and and that that that is the the role that they supposed to be fulfilling, that they are— the position that they have .” SHARON
Sharon and Denise both hold a deep, enduring trust in police that is seemingly undisturbed by the knowledge of police brutality, prejudice, or the reality that police have never resolved any of the harm they experienced. Sharon, for example, explained that she would always call the police if she experienced or witnessed harm:
“No, no matter— if it’s something wrong, I’m gone call the police, no matter what it is. Well, if it’s a family member, what it is, it is something wrong that they need, I need to to call somebody— I would call the police…Oh, I trust them. All I can say is I trust them.”
Here, Sharon doubles down on her unequivocal trust in police: “no matter what it is,” she will call on them. And, that this is “all [she] can say” seems to operate as a placeholder for a more substantial rationale; she can’t explain it, but she knows it to be true that she trusts them without reservation. Most interview participants—Bianca, Denise, and Sharon—believe police are absolutely necessary in spite of their acknowledgments of the ways in which they fail to meet their material needs in the wake of harm.
Sharon, for example, called police in a few situations: after her home was burglarized; after her car was stolen; and when her home alarm system was triggered. In all three cases, they arrived and their presence helped her feel safer, but they did not resolve the harm she experienced, locate those who harmed her, or return her stolen property. In the case of the home burglary, she called them after she had called her daughter first for accompaniment and comfort. When asked to articulate why or what they did to make her feel safer, she didn’t identify an action, but reiterated that simply seeing them is reassuring: “Their presence. They have weapons and it’s their presence. That’s, that’s why.” What Sharon describes here is textbook “security theater,” measures designed to make people feel safer without functionally enhancing safety. In the end, however, Sharon reveals that her trust in police is predicated on the sheer expectation that they are supposed to fulfill a particular role—whether they do fulfill that role or not is immaterial. The expectation alone is enough to lead her to rely on them, always:
Sharon
Sharon (she/her) is a long-time elder Detroiter in her 80s: a mother, grand- mother and widow who now lives alone in her family home. Throughout her life, she worked various jobs in factories and hospitals.
She feels somewhat isolated since her husband’s death and since some of her adult children live in other states. She’s deeply faithful and has close ties with her church, which definitely shaped how she navigated her experiences of harmand sought safety and healing afterward. During the interview itself, her pastor called just to check in on her, a reminder of how central her church community is in her care.
Sharon recounted a few incidents of harm from throughout her time living in Detroit. First, decades ago, she had experienced a smash-and-grab at a stoplight, where a man broke her car’s passenger side window, grabbed her purse and ran before she could figure out what was going on. Her wallet, emptied of its valuables, was later recovered in a dumpster near her church, and other parishioners found and returned it to her. Sharon also shared a few other incidents: just a few months before our interview, her car had been stolen from her driveway. And, years prior, when her husband was still living,
her home had been broken into and robbed while she was away. In the course of our conversation, she shared about a racist incident with a coworker at one of her jobs from decades before, but didn’t seem to categorize it as harm in the same way she did these other examples that can more easily be understood as “crime.”
Sharon reiterated that she emphatically trusts the police and seemed quite skeptical of alternative responses to harm, but in the final moments of our conversation, remarked on some misgivings she’s had throughout her life about police conduct: her son’s experiences of racial profiling and incidences in which police have used excessive force and murdered Black people.
“...it’s just that, that that this society we live in and and that that that is the the role that they supposed to be fulfilling, that they are— the position that they have.”
Similarly, when asked whether he would call on police if he witnessed violence, Jonathan noted that he would, if only because responding to harm is their duty: “Well, we identified that as their job. Do your job. I’m out here doing mine. Do yours…That’s what I’m paying all these high taxes for.” Here, Jonathan’s willingness to call on police in situations of harm comes across as more of a resignation to the presumed function of a public service to which we are bound because we pay for it than Sharon’s vehement declaration of trust in police. In essence, Sharon’s trust in police is derived from the belief that we are “supposed” to be able to rely on police, they are “supposed” to fulfill a role in which they protect and serve, and we are “supposed to call [them] for protection.” She trusts them because she is supposed to, not because they are trustworthy or because they have helped her address harm in the past.
“Even though there have been some times that I can see what happens, that I think they were wrong at times. But, but, but I have to trust them I don’t have nothing else— but God! And I know he is above all of them. But uh, but I still trust the police.”
When Sharon says “I have to trust them,” she suggests that her trust emerges not from a demonstration of trustworthiness but from a lack of options: in essence, she is forced to rely on police simply because she’s not aware of any other strategies for addressing harm. Having mentioned the significance of her faith many times throughout the interview, she also implies here that she essentially places police second only to God—as authority “above all of them”—a belief that corresponds with the unwavering faith she places in them, in spite of their inability to address most of her needs in her experiences of harm.
Later, after sharing a revelation that her son had been the survivor of racist police profiling since his teen years and throughout his life, she reiterated the sense—and the phrase, “I have to trust them”—that trusting the police is essentially a forced non-choice:
“Don’t
have nothing else to trust. I don’t have nowhere else to go. I have to trust them. And what else am I gone...? I, I have to trust them because when things happen: Who else to call? You… You ain’t got nobody else to call...”
At this point in the conversation, she is almost exasperated by the thought exercise around alternatives, around wondering “what if?” and “who else?” as if it’s so far beyond the realm of possibility that it’s an absurd line of questioning to follow. The fact of her—and our—reality, is that there is no other centralized, reliable responder to call on or go to in case of emergency, when in need of support, when your safety is threatened. Right now, police are a catchall for every kind of harm we experience, even though they cannot remedy most harm we experience.
Sharon, Denise and Bianca all acknowledge an awareness of patterns of police misbehavior, prejudice, or brutality. When Denise says calling the police “makes sense…on paper,” she reinforces the idea that relying on police is something she does because she expects to be able to rely on police based on how they have been purported to operate—in theory, not in practice. She then goes on to explain the many ways in which police might fail to address people’s needs. Her insistence that we need some kind of entity to “help to make things right” is a clear plea to meet a need that— as Sharon implied, we expect police to meet—but is not substantiated by her own experiences with police in the instances of harm she shared during the interview. In the cases she shared with us, police have never actually “helped to make things right.”
When she says “we need some type of law enforcement entity,” Denise expresses a sense of inevitability—that policing is the only way forward—reiterated by both Bianca and Sharon. Both Bianca and Sharon hold a belief that a world without police would be one full of chaos and disorder (explored later), informed again by a set of expectations: that police exist to create and enforce order and safety.
Every interviewee acknowledged several problems or misgivings about the current state of policing—some commented on the wider legal system and prisons, too—but they arrived at different conclusions about why those problems exist or whether
those problems necessitate a different system altogether. Some had survived police harm themselves or had witnessed others being harmed by police; others simply see the ways the system has failed people around them repeatedly; some spelled out the ways in which police failed to meet their needs, but still did not conclude that alternatives are needed. Sharon, Bianca, and Denise all conveyed a belief that bad behavior like racist profiling, police brutality or excessive force is an aberration—a few bad apples—rather than a fundamental issue with the premise and nature of policing as a system. She seems to attribute it to the bad behavior of a few bad officers because “in [her] heart they gone do what’s right,” pointing once again to a deep belief in the true purpose of policing being to protect and serve and an enduring faith in their capacity to do so.
How likely are you to call the police after harm has occurred?
76 OF 77 RESPONDENTS
For some interviewees, decisions about when to call on police follow a careful calculus informed by various inputs: past experiences with police, beliefs about how police interaction can affect peoples’ lives, the nature and severity of harm, and their own capacities to resolve conflict or navigate harm.
When asked to identify on a scale of 1 (very unlikely) to 5 (very likely) “How likely are you to call the police after harm has occurred?” more than half (57%) of survey respondents ranked their likelihood at 3 or below.
More than half of survey respondents (63%) noted that they have chosen not to call police when they experienced or witnessed violence. The vast majority (74%) of those who responded to this question and explained their rationale had refrained from calling because of fear or mistrust of police. This fear or mistrust includes: disbelief that police will help; doubt that police will arrive at all or on time; fear of criminalization as a result of police intervention; fear that police will escalate or exacerbate harm; and fear that survivors will not be believed.
Jamaal echoed this sentiment: “I typically find it more harm than good to call the police.” In his experience, as reinforced by many survey respondents, police have not produced resolutions to conflict or harm or solved problems. On the contrary, he has witnessed situations worsen when police arrive:
“...or the police come to the scene and whatever the situation was that the police were called for uh they either like victim blame and or become distracted with something that I would consider minor or insignificant other than the event that’s taking place. Uh, so I’ve, I’ve seen several instances when the police get called and things turn out just worse.”
Having witnessed police “victim blame” reflects a violation of a fundamental need for acknowledgment after harm explored earlier in this report. Jamaal’s misgivings about how police exacerbate harm when called are, again, echoed by survey respondents: 70% indicated that they had called police before and police either did not respond, responded too late, or responded appropriately. Of those, only 34% were able to find an alternative response. Those who did primarily turned to trusted community members (42%) or resolved the issue on their own (32%).
At this point, Jamaal would only call police as a last resort: “If I got into a car accident, and I had to file the insurance report…”—a situation in which insurance-based compensation requires a police report—or in “certain life or death situations.” This administrative function also emerged as rationale for why others would call police: Bianca once called police after a drunk driver jumped
the curb and hit the gate surrounding her home. In this case, her motivation for calling was to address property damage.
Though others may have expectations for police support, they still engaged in a careful calculation to evaluate risks and benefits when contemplating involving police. For example, Denise considers the severity and violence of harm before calling police: “Now, if somebody got shot or raped, if somebody’s screaming out, I’m calling the police.” Bianca, similarly contemplates the grievousness of harm before involving police: the one and only time she called the police on her abusive partner—though he was violent toward her multiple times—was when he threatened to burn her house down. In that situation, the fear of the damage he would cause to her home and family by burning her house down drove her to call the police: “But any other time it was violence, I just ch— wasn’t a point of me calling them especially like dealing with the situation with him.” That there “wasn’t a point of me calling them” underlines her belief that there was nothing they could do to intervene in her experience of harm.
Most participants across both the surveys and interviews are curious—some more cautiously than others—about non-carceral approaches to seeking accountability, like restorative or transformative justice. Some participants worry about what would happen in a world without police and struggle to imagine how a non-carceral intervention would work in practice. Participants’ openness to alternatives is informed by the nature and gravity of the harm in question, their beliefs about what police can and can’t do, and their comfort with and exposure to conflict resolution themselves.
Overwhelmingly, survey respondents (77%) found alternatives to policing appealing. Among them, the most common underlying reason was fear or mistrust of police, followed by a desire to better match service provision to survivors’ needs or a belief that alternatives seem more helpful, safe or trustworthy. It seems notable that a small group of respondents were also conscious of the effect of harm on those who cause harm, stating a desire to help (or at least avoid criminalizing) those who cause harm.
Among those who were uncertain about alternatives to police (18%), most hesitation comes from having doubts or questions about the nature and quality of alternatives available. For survey respondents, most of these questions relate to a desire to make sure the alternatives would be entirely disconnected from police (e.g. not social workers with mandatory reporting requirements).
“I have a well-founded mistrust of police, as individuals and as a system. There are other resources available to provide appropriate and effective formal and informal support and services for people who are experiencing harm [and] violence and for those who have
harmed. The police and criminal response systems were designed for social control and to protect the property ‘rights’ of people who own and control wealth and resources, not for the safety of people and communities nor to uphold and protect the rights of all citizens.”
SURVEY RESPONDENT
Among interviewees, reactions to alternatives to policing were mixed and most expressed some uncertainty. Some voiced extreme resistance to the possibility of alternatives taking the place of police wholecloth. For example, after her comments acknowledging police brutality and excessive force, Sharon quickly pivoted, asking “But uh, in another, in another sense: What we do without the police? It would just be like the wild, wild west! You know, if we didn’t have protection of the policeman, so I still believe in the protection of the policemans.” In this way, she almost snaps herself out of wondering what could be different, because a world without them is simply so unfathomable that she cannot allow herself the frivolous luxury of musing about a different reality. Referring to the “wild, wild west!” she envisions without police “protection,” Sharon uses language that forecasts a kind of lawlessness. Bianca felt similarly:
INTERVIEWER: What do you think would happen if we didn’t have them?
BIANCA: Oh this world would be a World War III.
Imagining “World War III,” Bianca compares a world without police to a warzone—implying a vision of lawlessness, chaos, disorder, rampant violence and destruction. In these comparisons to war and frontier zones, interviewees are surfacing a fear of the unknown: the fact that the prison industrial complex is a catchall for all forms of harm today leaves them convinced that, without it, chaos and unrest would ensue. If anything, this supports the case for developing more robust restorative and transformative justice alternatives that meet the needs people have expressed without exacerbating the harms of carceral systems.
In general, interviewees’ reactions to the two cases of restorative justice practice we shared revealed a perception that the nature and severity of harm informs their willingness to explore non-carceral responses to harm and accountability. On the whole, most interviewees were curious and open—some were even enthusiastic—when presented with the case of car theft and the restorative process facilitated between the person whose car was stolen and the young person who stole her car but was unable to compensate her financially. In contrast, most were hesitant about, if not outright displeased by, the outcome of the story
involving sexual assault. Denise, for example, was hopeful about the possibility of addressing non-violent harm through alternative processes: “I mean, in violent cases, I’m calling the police—in non violent cases. I want to see other ways to deal with it.” As an active member of her block club, restorative justice approaches appeal to Denise in part because they would help address root issues behind conflict and harm:
“it’d get more to the root of the problem, you could understand better what’s going on with the situation and deal with that versus just locking somebody up and putting them in jail…so if we can figure out and we have this conversation often, me and my sister, if we can figure out how to, you know, kind of address what’s causing the person not to be engaged and not just blow everybody off as apathetic or whatever and really engage them, I said ‘That— That’s the that’s the work right there.’”
Though she expresses resistance to employing alternatives in cases of violent harm, that Denise sees “engaging” with people who cause harm as “the work” demonstrates that she is already actively exploring these kinds of approaches in conversation with her family members around how to intervene in ways that address root issues in cases of conflict or nonviolent harm in her neighborhood. She acknowledges this engagement as preferential to “just locking somebody up and putting them in jail.” When presented with the case of the young man who stole a car, Denise most appreciated the way in which the process considered the needs of both the young man and the woman whose car he stole: “she wanted to resolve the issue, but...she wanted to resolve the issue on ((emphasis)) both sides.”
Similarly, other respondents seem to regard the process detailed in this story as a heartwarming exemplar of accountability and repair. Even if they might have desired a different form of repair than a commissioned painting, they recognize and appreciate the young man’s remorse and interest in repairing the
harm and the woman’s willingness to compromise in a way that aligns with his capacity to do so. Bianca, for example, would have desired a different outcome, one that more directly contributed to replacing or compensating her for the value of the car than the painting. Still, she found the example “powerful,” largely because of the young man’s willingness to make “a whole life change” and noted that accountability was “definitely delivered in this situation.” Sharon similarly liked this example because of the focus on the young man’s transformation: “I felt good about it! Because it helped him. It helped him to turn his life around. So it wasn’t... she, the victim didn’t think it was about the money. She just wanted to help him turn his life around.”
When asked directly about her willingness to entertain alternatives to police, Sharon was skeptical. Her doubts about alternatives to police are certainly informed by her unwavering trust in them, her beliefs about the purpose of policing, and her beliefs about the reasons why people respond to police deferentially. Alternatives, she argues, would not be able to operate with the necessary “authority:”
“They don’t— they have the authority over some things, but not, not the authority to arrest the person, or lock them up or whatever, to take them out of society. They don’t have that authority to do that. But they— I agree with them, as far as somebody that’s trained to handle a mental person to be available in a situation where it is needed to, for that person, this trained to handle a mental person to be there to help. But I still think the police should be there too...”
That she believes non-police responder would not have the authority to “take them out of society” further demonstrates Sharon’s belief in the logics behind our prevailing carceral systems, that—as she has mentioned elsewhere—removing people from society is rehabilitative. She goes on to say that the reason people defer to police authority is because they operate with impunity and instill fear: “the police have authority to harm them
or whatever. That’s why they, that’s why they would listen more so than somebody else, I think. That’s what I think.” Similarly, Denise believes that people respond to police because the threat of being incarcerated deters them from continuing to cause harm: “So people respond when the police get involved, when it starts to get real violent. Like ‘I don’t want to be bothered’ because they understand you could go away.” At the end of the day, this observation begs the question of whether we want to continue betting on a system whose primary operative tool for social control is fear mongering and violence.
Jamaal, who has participated in restorative justice trainings, was comparatively enthusiastic about the potential for healing he sees in restorative practices in nearly any scenario:
“So, like, it’s like really the only thing that I know that addresses the healing of both parties or all parties because it’s more than just two. So, you know, community that the people that’s initially involved in the situation uh, so the stakeholders that are represented and treated for their harm. And the repair is a communal thing. It’s not like an individual thing…it addresses in a holistic, kind of well-rounded way to all parties involved. And it also, um‚ I like the healing aspect of it, and I also like the accountability aspect of it. And I like the fact that it’s not just uh kind of what I would refer to as like a seek and destroy type thing. It’s like a build up, everybody get involved. Nobody is left behind, every community, uh victim, uh perpetrator, for lack of a better terms, and— um, I like that. I like that concept.”
Jamaal
Jamaal (he/him) is a Black trade worker, father and college student in his forties who was raised mostly in Detroit. He spent over ten years incarcerated in Michigan.
He was born and raised primarily in Detroit, with a few stints elsewhere as a child. He lost both his parents young and was raised by grandparents. He has close relationships with siblings, is in the process of repairing his relationship with his child, and recognizes that he is navigating some generational trauma because of his father’s absence and other unresolved traumas from throughout his life.
Because of his upbringing in poverty, Jamaal was led to seek out financial security—this is, in part, what led him to selling drugs, which ultimately led to his incarceration. During our interview, Jamaal had such difficulty identifying an experience of harm that he asked the interviewer to pick categories at random from the list to narrow down his options. He ultimately shared an experience of financial control / manipulation by his mentor and boss for whom he worked as a drug dealer and an incident of slander / reputational harm / gossip he experienced while incarcerated.
He struggled to define his experience of financial control definitively as harm, but recounted how this person—who he looked up to as a friend and mentor—created conditions that kept him indebted and, consequently, entrapped in his role as a dealer. He also shared an incident from his time inside, where slander, reputational harm and gossip from multiple sides put his safety at risk: as he prepared to come before the parole board, his peers inside spread lies about his behavior to the corrections officers that landed him in solitary confinement and obstructed his release. The corrections officers began to taunt him about whether or not he’d make parole, and when he was eventually released, people in his community outside spread rumors about whether or not he had snitched while inside. All of these situations left him open to both physical attacks and extended incarceration.
Jamaal has a comparatively favorable view of restorative justice and other non-carceral approaches to addressing harm. In part, this comes from his upbringing in a context where calling the police just wasn’t the norm because people had witnessed police either escalate problems or fail to arrive, period. He and his community resolved conflicts themselves rather than relying on police. In part, his belief in the potential of non-carceral approaches to harm also likely comes from his recent experience studying restorative justice processes, and he also understands the level of nuance required for repair to really take hold.
“[Restorative Justice is] the only thing that I know that addresses the healing of both parties or all parties because it’s more than just two...
And the repair is a communal thing. It’s not like an individual thing… it addresses in a holistic, kind of well-rounded way to all parties involved.”
Contrary to other interviewees, however, Jamaal described growing up in a community where conflict was mediated internally and police were rarely called on. He rarely relied on police growing up, but instead learned to intervene from his community when harm occurred:
“...partly out of just necessity and trial and error part of it— out of my community atmosphere, that’s kind of how my community was in the city of Detroit uh, even with the circle of people that um I— were involved with street activities with, um, one thing that they taught me was like, if there’s a problem going on, like, we’ll take care of it so like, even if it was like, “Oh, somebody’s house got broken into,” uh one— cause this was like my community. We’ll find out who was probably try to get the people that did the things to return the items and so on and so forth.”
That Jamaal learned these skills “out of just necessity and trial and error” suggests that he and his community were filling a gap or responding to an unmet collective need. This is notable because it means Jamaal was already acculturated to the premise that he and his community members have the capacity to address their own needs and cultivate their own sense of safety.
Survey respondents offered additional insight into the types of professional support people might want to after harm. When asked “What should be available to survivors after harm?” the vast majority of responses (49%) name counseling / therapy or support that meets basic / immediate needs like housing, money, food, or jobs (37%). In short, people want services that help them address immediate injuries or damage, recover from the impacts of harm, protect themselves from future harm, and seek accountability.
It is worth noting that nearly a quarter of participants also indicated that they would want these services provided through a central wrap-around service provider where those who need it could access a one-stop-shop after experiencing harm.
The vast majority of responses name counseling and therapy or support that meets basic, immediate needs for things like housing, money, food, jobs.
I’m imagining a tall building with several floors where you can go and get literally whatever you need. I’m imagining a space, where, depending on the harm, you might have a 6-monthto-one-year pass to get access to therapy. There would be a studio where you could take yoga, dance,
somatics, or self-defense classes. There would be free childcare. There would be a wellness center where you could consult with an herbalist, get acupuncture, a massage, or reiki. There would also be group therapy rooms so that people would know they’re not alone struggling. ”
SURVEY RESPONDENT
The findings surfaced in this report have implications for policy making, funding, social service program delivery and community engagement aimed at cultivating safety and accountability that meet the needs of Metro Detroiters who have experienced harm.
We need to cultivate better skills and support among residents and professional service providers for identifying experiences of harm and disrupting the normalization of harm in Detroit communities.
The nuances about how people interpret harm uncovered in Theme 1: Trouble Identifying and Interpreting Experiences of Harm are significant because they reveal that while people may cognitively understand that harm occurs in various categories beyond physical violence, the tools at our disposal and our capacities for identifying and responding to other forms of harm beyond physical violence are severely constrained.
Further, this theme surfaces the extent to which Black Metro Detroiters, women, and transwomen, especially, are socially conditioned to experience, withstand and rebound from harm on their own by the very nature of how racism operates, how gendered expectations function, and how the absence of healing support for these specific populations leaves them to fend for themselves. This suggests a role for cultural interventions that disrupt these normalizations and reshape our definitions of harm, shifting away from strictly “criminal” categorizations of harm and toward a more comprehensive understanding of how harm manifests in everyday life. Interviewees made it clear that the normalization of harm occurs at various levels of society and culture—at home, at school, in communities—which is especially pronounced in the context of Detroit, a city whose residents face rampant disinvestment and municipal abandonment in terms of infrastructure and
services. In a sense, Metro Detroiters have become acculturated to experiencing various kinds of interpersonal and institutional harm as a product of these kinds of public failure to meet residents’ needs for safety and care.
Disrupting this normalization might require intervening in schools, communities, cultural institutions, businesses, social service providers, and public discourse to educate the public about harm— including emotional, psychological, and structural violence—and promote collective healing and resistance. Outside of formal educational institutions, public campaigns that raise consciousness about the broad spectrum of harm and grassroots movements organizing for radical change and community-led solutions to harm could offer community-led teach-ins, workshops, and discussion groups that inform residents about the different forms of harm and how to resist and heal from them collectively and encouraging community members to share their stories and experiences, fostering a culture of solidarity and mutual support. Within social service providers, we could ensure that workers have the tools to recognize and address various forms of harm by providing mandatory training for all public service workers, emphasizing community-led and non-punitive responses.
We need different tools, services, and public institutions for navigating and recovering from harm that prioritize survivors’ healing, interrupt intergener- ational cycles of harm and address the persistent emotional, psychological and material con- sequences of harm.
Participants surfaced several critical needs surrounding their experiences of harm, capacity to heal or recover from harm. The dearth of accessible mental health services and the fact that so many interviewees turn inward to seek safety, deal with the immediate fallout from harm, and navigate its long-term consequences suggests an unmet need for restoring safety after harm, as explored in Theme 3. Strategies for Navigating and Recovering from Harm: The Interplay of Self-Reliance, Validation, Community and Professional Services. People—especially those in underserved communities—need accessible professional mental health services like counseling and therapy that are trauma-informed and address both immediate and long-term emotional and psychological impacts of harm as explored in Theme 2; do not involve the police or judicial system; and include community-led counseling and support services. No one should go without care because they can’t afford it. These service providers also need to provide services in a way that meets clients’ greatest needs: to
this end, we may need mandatory staff training to impress upon service providers the importance of validation and acknowledgment in supporting individuals recovering from harm. To make these kinds of service delivery widely available to Metro Detroiters, we need policies and funding that will ensure these kinds of mental health services are available and affordable for all residents, including those who are incarcerated. Finally, integrating these kinds of trauma-informed care among existing programs where harm is even more present—such as substance abuse treatment programs—is particularly important in order to address underlying trauma that may contribute to harmful substance use without involving punitive measures. In these settings, services should tackle both substance use and the emotional fallout of harm, emphasizing healing and community support.
The nature of intergenerational trauma and the ways it creates cycles that perpetuate harm explored in Theme 2. In the Wake: Unraveling and Understanding Harm further suggest a need to look long before and after incidents of harm to interrupt those cycles. Participants’ revelations about the durational impacts of harm imply that the kinds of services articulated here need to be available not just in the immediate wake of harm, but long after, for example. This might include services that break the cycle of intergenerational trauma through family therapy, support groups, and community-based interventions.
As discussed in Theme 3, people’s predisposition to seek support after harm from community members and family makes the case for cultivating stronger community-centered networks and collective skills around navigating the aftermath of harm and supporting survivors with validation and care to help them recover. In our communities, we need to foster a culture of empathy and understanding, where individuals feel supported in their journey to make sense of and recover from harm. To this end, public education campaigns to raise awareness about the importance of validating and acknowledging individuals’ experiences of harm could help inform the general public about how best to support survivors after harm. We need to create initiatives that foster strong community networks to support individuals in crisis and promote healing: We can cultivate stronger networks by encouraging community resilience-building activities, such as art therapy, mindfulness practices, and storytelling events, to help individuals and collectives process and heal from trauma. Further, community-based peer support groups that provide
emotional and material assistance to individuals recovering from harm—through mutual aid and solidarity networks, for example— would also help strengthen relationships that could aid people recovering from harm. Public and private funding could support this kind of programming.
As described in Theme 2, some participants also faced material costs after or in the course of experiencing harm: job or income loss, losing cars or access to safe housing, getting entangled with the criminal legal system, and so on. To address the material costs of harm, people need safe and supportive housing environments that are sensitive to the needs of trauma survivors, with staff trained to validate and support residents’ experiences; material support to address basic living needs; and legal support to navigate the criminal legal system.
3
We need to nurture a culture that encourages accountability and develop better tools and systems for seeking accountability after harm.
As surfaced in Theme 4. Toward Restoration: A Desire for Accountability in Pursuit of Healing and Justice, respondents broadly want accountability after harm: this includes acknowledgment, an apology, changed behavior, and reparation or restitution. In large part, however, the systems we have at our disposal simply don’t support seeking accountability. While some hold the belief that arrest and/or incarceration are required for a person to change their behavior, even those interviewees seemed open to exploring other pathways to accountability so long as they could be assured that the harm-doer would participate earnestly and change their behavior.
To get to a place where people have the tools to navigate accountability differently, we need more initiatives that explore and implement restorative and transformative justice practices as non-carceral to traditional punitive measures for accountability and justice. As a starting point, we need to build our collective capacity for seeking accountability rather than punishment by promoting an understanding of non-carceral forms of accountability in mental health and adjacent professional services and amongst community members.
Among service providers, this might look like fostering a culture of accountability that prioritizes the needs and voices of survivors without resorting to punitive measures, by:
Integrating restorative practices into organizational policies;
Integrating restorative and transformative justice practices into social service programs, focusing on healing and accountability.
Implementing harm reduction and trauma-informed care models that address the underlying causes of substance use without criminalizing individuals.
Adopting restorative justice practices in operations internally and with clients.
Ensuring that services geared toward accountability center the needs of the person who experienced harm while also offering support to the person who caused harm as they transform their behavior.
Among community members, we need to:
Foster a community culture that prioritizes acknowledgment, behavior change, and reparations as key components of accountability:
Train community safety teams to recognize signs of trauma and provide appropriate, non-punitive support and referrals to mental health services.
Develop community-based support networks prioritizing peer support and collective care over traditional punitive measures.
Organize and participate in educational workshops and restorative and transformative justice training sessions.
Encourage community dialogue and collective decision-making processes to address harm and support survivors.
Advocate for and engage in restorative and transformative justice practices that center survivors’ needs and voices, while working towards systemic change and liberation.
4
We need to lower our reliance on police and develop non-carceral approaches to respond to harm and cultivate accountability in our communities.
In Theme 5, Reconciling Trust and Skepticism: Policing and Non-Carceral Approaches to Addressing Harm, participants revealed a complex web of feelings around police, who often serve as the first responders after a person experiences harm. But, participants’ experiences revealed that police aren’t unique: Many of the roles they perform could be (better) fulfilled by non-carceral service providers who don’t bring with them lethal weapons, threats of violence or escalation or institutional legacies of harm. While some people do rely on police after experiencing harm, many do so because of a belief that there is no other way. Even those who voice an unwavering trust in police acknowledge that they have done little to earn that trust or demonstrate their capacity to address harm. For the most, people’s trust in police is derived from a set of expectations about what police are supposed to do based on cultural and social narratives about their function in society as public servants tasked with “protecting and serving.” Even with tangible examples to the contrary—personal experiences with police prejudice, police violence, or police incompetence—some participants insist on relying on them because they don’t know anything else or because they interpret those failures as bugs in the system rather than issues with the wider institution of policing altogether. Further, many of the roles that police fill that help people feel safe after harm—like accompaniment, offering validation or acknowledgment or harm, or providing administrative documentation to substantiate insur-
ance claims for property damage, car accidents, or theft—are not unique to policing and, in fact, are not typically framed as the primary activities or function of police. In contemplating non-carceral responses to, one takeaway from this observation is that a set of services that are fundamentally based on cultivating safety in tangible, responsive ways is certainly preferable to rehabilitating or enhancing an institution that operates on theater and false promises.
People are curious about yet skeptical of non-carceral responses to harm for valid reasons. The uncertainty participants feel reflects a fear of the unknown and suggests a need for more experimentation. At present, non-carceral approaches simply do not exist in enough number or scope for participants to know what to expect. Of note, however, this same uncertainty surrounds our current system: Many of the same people who are unsure of alternatives are also unsure of the efficacy of policing or the rehabilitative capacity of incarceration. This presents as a bit of a chicken or egg problem, meaning: the longer we don’t have non-carceral approaches and the more indoctrinated and acculturated we become toward believing in policing and incarceration, the harder it remains for people to imagine and believe in them. At minimum, this—along with the genuine sense of curiosity about alternatives—offers encouragement and an imperative to develop, test, and refine non-carceral approaches now in ways that allow us to work through the various nuances of experiences of harm that new interventions must account for (e.g. grievousness of harm, violence).
To this end, as discussed in the previous implication, there is a role for the development of restorative justice programs that operate independently from the carceral system and transformative justice initiatives that address the root causes of harm and provide long-term solutions would both help provide non-carceral responses. This might require new legislation to redistribute funds from policing and carceral systems to community-based support networks and resources that address harm holistically. For example, we might redirect funding from police departments, prisons, jails, probation services, and the constellation of adjunctive surveillance programs toward community-led safety programs and rapid response teams. These non-carceral responses ought to establish and fund community councils to oversee public safety and conflict resolution, ensuring these processes are democratic and community-centered.
Existing social service providers working with people who have
experienced harm also have a role to play: They could integrate restorative or transformative justice practices into programming, focusing on healing and accountability, in ways that might reduce our reliance on police today by:
Advocating for legal diversion of mental health and non-violent incidents to community-based service providers qualified to respond to the needs of acute crises effectively.Creating community spaces for support and healing free from surveillance and punitive oversight.
Providing resources for community mediation and conflict resolution within housing communities, ensuring these processes are accessible and non-punitive.
Incorporating restorative justice principles into schools, colleges, hospitals, libraries, housing developments, job training programs, emphasizing skills in conflict resolution, collective responsibility, and mutual aid.
Community members could build autonomous community networks that create and support neighborhood-based safety networks that operate independently of the police. These kinds of networks could support both experimentation and work toward long-term solutions and systemic change. Collectively, communities could:
Replace traditional law enforcement with trained community safety teams focused on de-escalation, harm reduction, and non-violent intervention.
Establish protocols for community responders to address harm in ways that prioritize healing and accountability without criminalization.
Establish crisis response teams of mental health professionals, social workers, and community advocates to handle emergencies without police involvement.
Develop community resource hubs that offer various forms of assistance, including food, housing, legal aid, and mental health support.
survivor
As researchers and organizers committed to understanding and amplifying the lived experiences of our communities, we have chosen to use the language of “survivor” instead of “victim” in our research reporting.
This decision is rooted in the principles of Black feminist thought, which prioritizes the agency, resilience, and strength of Black women and all marginalized groups. Black feminist scholars have long emphasized the importance of language in shaping our understanding of oppression and resistance. The term “victim” often carries connotations of passivity, helplessness, and a lack of agency. It frames individuals primarily in terms of their suffering, potentially overshadowing their capacity for resilience and resistance.
In contrast, the term “survivor” acknowledges the active role that individuals play in navigating and overcoming trauma and adversity. It recognizes their strength, agency, and the strategies they employ to resist and thrive despite systemic oppression. Still, we acknowledge each individual’s right to self-identify and appreciate
that often neoliberal “survivor” based frameworks overemphasize individual responsibility and abandon the role of systemic and political transformation in ending violence.
By using “survivor” instead of “victim,” we aim to:
1. Center Agency and Resilience: Reflect the strength and agency of individuals who have faced adversity, highlighting their ability to survive and resist.
2. Affirm Dignity and Humanity: Honor the dignity and humanity of those we research with, recognizing them as active participants in their lives rather than passive recipients of harm.
3. Challenge Stereotypes: Counteract harmful stereotypes that portray marginalized individuals solely as helpless or passive, instead highlighting their dynamic and active roles in their communities and healing processes.
4. Promote Empowerment: Foster a narrative that empowers individuals and communities by acknowledging their resilience and the strategies they use to navigate systemic injustices.
This linguistic choice is a deliberate effort to align our research practices with the values of
Black feminist thought and contribute to a body of work that respects and uplifts the voices and experiences of those most affected by social injustices. Through this approach, we strive to produce research that both documents harm and its adverse consequences and celebrates the survival, resilience, creativity, and innovation of those directly impacted.
Transformative Justice and Restorative Justice
Restorative justice and transformative justice are both approaches to harm that seek alternatives to traditional, punitive methods of justice. However, they differ significantly in scope and goals. Restorative justice focuses on repairing harm through cooperative processes that include those directly and indirectly impacted. This approach aims to reconcile the victim, the harm-doer, and the community. Restorative justice processes happen within and without the legal system.
Transformative justice addresses the immediate harm and the underlying social conditions that contribute to such harm. It aims
to transform the social relationships and power structures that enable violence and injustice. Unlike restorative justice, transformative justice works outside of and seeks to dismantle existing legal and institutional frameworks that perpetuate harm.
“non-carceral responses to harm and accountability” vs. “alternatives to policing”
In our ongoing efforts to redefine and reconstruct the mechanisms of justice and community safety within Detroit, our language must reflect our commitment to a society free from the carceral system’s grasp. Our organization, grounded in carceral abolitionist principles, firmly rejects the notion that police and prisons are the inherent solutions to community harm and violence.
The prevalent discourse surrounding “alternatives to police” or “alternatives to incarceration” inherently suggests that policing and incarceration are the default or natural options for addressing harm. Such language inadvertently upholds the legitimacy
of a system we are committed to dismantling. It implies that community-based solutions are merely secondary or backup options rather than foundational to a new vision of justice.
In contrast, “non-carceral pathways” explicitly centers community-based solutions as primary and legitimate responses to harm. This term does not merely position these approaches as alternatives to an existing system but as the fundamental framework through which safety, accountability, and healing are pursued. By adopting “non-carceral pathways,” we emphasize our commitment to systems rooted in restoration, healing, and genuine safety—values absent in traditional carceral settings.
Our use of “non-carceral pathways” declares our vision for a future where community empowerment and preventive strategies replace punitive systems. It is a commitment to fostering environments where accountability is not equated with punishment but with the opportunity for growth, restitution, and reconciliation.
As we present the findings from this study, we advocate for a profound shift in discourse and practice. We invite our community members, policymakers, and fellow organizations to join us in embracing “non-carceral pathways” as the cornerstone of our collective journey towards a truly just and equitable society.
That said, you will find instances in this report where the phrase “alternatives to policing” remains, which we retained to preserve the integrity of the study, since this was the language used in the survey and interviews with participants.
