Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback who launched the anthem protest movement in the NFL, is now launching a movement aimed at ending what he calls the “scourge of police terrorism.”
The former 49er made the announcement on Twitter Tuesday afternoon.
Kaepernick partnered with Medium shortly after announcing his plans to release a memoir. Editors from LEVEL, which is a part of Medium, described “Abolition for the People’s” goal of ending both policing and prisons.
The announcement says:
‘Abolition for the People,’ a project produced by Kaepernick Publishing in partnership with LEVEL, seeks to end that debate once and for all. Over the next four weeks, the project will publish 30 stories from organizers, political prisoners, scholars, and advocates — all of which point to the crucial conclusion that policing and prisons do not serve as catch-all solutions for the issues and people the state deems social problems.
Not only do police and prisons fail to make us safer, but reform has only strengthened their most toxic ingrained practices. The only answer is abolition, a full dismantling of the carceral state and the institutions that support it. Instead, we need to invest in a future that puts justice and the needs of the community first. A future that, as Colin Kaepernick himself says in his introductory essay, makes us safer, healthier, and truly free.
The need for abolition is rooted in the anti-Blackness intrinsic to policing and incarceration — phenomena which will be amply proven over the coming days — but the realization of it offers justice for all people in all communities and global liberation from systemic oppression. We invite you to read and learn along with us.
Kaepernick is no stranger to criticizing the police. In September of 2016, photos surfaced of Kaepernick wearing socks depicting police officers as pigs. He also called for the abolition of police after Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron did not charge any of the officers involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor, with murder.