Note: If you have experienced racism, domestic violence, or violence from police, you do not need to watch or listen to footage to understand a situation that many of us have been living our entire lives. Take care of yourself. Stay grounded. There are resources available to help you stay safe, including NAACP guidance (useful for our entire community) on what to do in interactions with law enforcement.
NAACP Eugene-Springfield’s Statement on Policing and Community Safety
The police body cam footage recently released is disturbing, if unsurprising. The casual, mundane, joking tone of the phone call is more troubling even than the racism as expressed through stale, Civil-war era stereotypes. Violence is discussed as an everyday matter, including harm against partners and children. It shows how dehumanization works as a normalized pattern that creates violence across identities — but it also creates an open door for all of us to unite in our fights for justice.
When violence like this becomes something to laugh about, it reveals a system that grants extraordinary authority to police who are given the right to kill and commit human rights violations against whomever they choose. Witnessing moral boundaries around violence so eroded signals real danger, and brings a deeper sadness to know there are people in our community who have bartered their souls in exchange for a uniform that grants them that power.
This conversation also took place in the context of a protest connected to immigrant rights, where dismissive language toward immigrants was expressed alongside anti-Black racism. It’s a reminder that systems that treat some people as less deserving of safety and dignity rely on the same logic, whether the target is Black communities, immigrant communities, or families experiencing violence at home.
When an officer speaks about harming a partner or a child without pause, or relies on racial stereotypes that have circulated for generations, it signals a training ground, formal or informal, where certain lives are treated as less valuable, less protected, and more expendable. That is why justice will not be found in the consequences that one or two people receive, even though that’s an important place to start.
We recommend the following three strategies to guide our community forward:
- End police lawlessness, brutality, and racism.
- Culture change through connection that overcomes division.
- Collective organizing around domestic violence prevention, racial justice, and immigrant rights.
1. End police lawlessness, brutality, and racism.
As the NAACP has long documented, the origins of modern policing in the United States can be traced to systems designed to establish terror, including the use of excessive force in “slave patrols” and subsequent militia-style groups who were empowered to control and deny access to equal rights to freed people. By the 1900s, local municipalities began to establish police departments to enforce local laws in the East and Midwest, including Jim Crow laws. Today, a Black person is five times more likely to be stopped without just cause than a white person. On average, Black Americans are exposed to four police killings of other unarmed Black Americans in the same state each year.
This system has always been driven by racial disparities and the Black community continues to be a target, including in Oregon. That history does not stay in the past unless it is actively dismantled in the present. In 2020, the NAACP called on the United Nations to step up and classify the mistreatment of Black people in the U.S. by the police as a human rights violation, aggressively call out the U.S. government in the process, and impose sanctions if necessary. The NAACP recommends the following: “Police agencies without the policies, training, and databases in place should not be able to receive grants and other funding. Other practices to increase police accountability include an end to qualified immunity and a national database to document violent and fatal encounters with police.”
The NAACP works nationally and within our local communities to dismantle the ways that discrimination, policing, prosecutions, and incarceration practices impact Black communities. In practice, that means changing standards, practices, and culture towards real justice
2. Culture change through connection that overcomes division.
What we are seeing in this footage is what happens when people are intentionally separated from one another by systems of power that are based on difference. When entire groups are reduced to stereotypes, when violence becomes ordinary, and when power is exercised without accountability or connection, the response cannot be further division. It must be connection.
We have to get closer to one another. Closer across race, across identity, across lived experience, and closer in how we understand that our fights are connected by the same underlying conditions: dehumanization, isolation, and the normalization of harm. The NAACP is here for that connection and will continue to support community members, provide resources, and advocate for accountability. We will work alongside others to change culture, strengthen policy, and build relationships that make our community safer for everyone. Our membership is open to people of all races who want to get closer and get involved.
3. Collective organizing around domestic violence prevention, racial justice, and immigrant rights.
When we organize together, we interrupt the patterns that are present in the body cam footage. When we build relationships across our differences, we make it harder for any system to treat people as disposable. When we fight for protections for women, children, and families, when we fight for immigrant rights, when we fight for Black lives, when we fight for LGBTQ2SIA+ rights, we are building a shared foundation of safety and dignity that strengthens all of us.
Let’s combine our efforts and continue to create the kind of community where conversations like the one we heard are no longer familiar, no longer acceptable, and no longer possible.
We will always be stronger together than we are apart.