S1E13: Danielle Purifoy & AJ Williams on winning alternatives to policing in Durham NC

In our Season One finale, we hear about how Durham marches responding to police murders and inaction by City Council members led to a successful 2015 effort to elect a local activist (10:56), and then a vote to build a new police headquarters gave rise to a rapid response campaign (12:45) and direct actions educating the public about the municipal budget process (18:57), and then a mini-campaign to deepen the new group's understanding of how to use the budget as a campaign tool (20:47), how other organizers focused on electing more "champions" to the Council (29:18), ending a campaign quiet period to respond to a new push for more police funding (33:13), with a visionary proposal for investment in community safety programs (34:28) learning how to work within and support the "inside game" of municipal government (39:59), dealing with setbacks (39:46) and the current initiatives to stand up even more safety programs rooted in neighborhoods, not city government (44:26).

You can read a writeup of this episode on our website and at The Forge.

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AJ Williams is Durham Beyond Policing’s Co-Director of People & Organizing. His political work has included bailing out Black women, femmes, and gender non-conforming caretakers, striving to end the cash bail system and pre-trial detention with Southerners on New Ground (SONG); and organizing with BYP100 to address gender-based violence and interpersonal harm. In 2021, he ran for Durham City Council, Ward 3, as the first trans candidate in the history of the city, on an abolitionist platform. He served two terms as an appointed member of The City of Durham’s Participatory Budgeting Steering Committee and is on the movement board of The Cypress Fund. 

Danielle Purifoy is a Black queer lawyer and geographer at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on the racial politics and legal dimensions of development in Black towns and communities. She is an alum of Black Youth Project 100 and has been a member of Durham Beyond Policing since 2016. She is the former Race and Place editor of Scalawag a media organization devoted to Southern storytelling, journalism, and the arts.

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