Why now?

I Fear for My Life is designed to be a resource for people who are looking to learn, to engage diverse voices and perspectives, and to prepare for personal and social action in the on-going change movements to improve policing and criminal justice outcomes, especially for communities of color in the U.S.

Communities of color have for decades named the fear that we experience when any encounter with law enforcement is required.

The Black experience, from slavery to freedom, has largely been informed by encounters with law enforcement. From the infamous slave patrols before the Civil War to efforts to strictly control the movement of African Americans after the war in the form of the Black Codes; and from stop-and-frisk to the war on drugs to broken-windows policing strategies, officers of the law often have been used as tools of social control and repression. 

African Americans carry that historical trauma forward in our perceptions of police.  Whether we are the ones in need of help or the ones about whom calls are being made, whether the encounter is routine or high stakes, whether we are innocent or not, we are all too aware of the danger that accompanies such interactions.  We have had to cultivate that knowledge and pass it to others as a mode of survival.  It is an everyday experience of policing—a seeming disregard for the sanctity of black life—that has come to national attention again in powerful, visible ways over the last decade.  

That kind of persistent, intergenerational fear of the very people who are charged with serving and protecting our communities makes people jittery and distrustful. It makes them suspicious and more likely to withhold their assistance from legitimate and desirable efforts to improve safety and security in black and brown communities. It makes them avoid contact rather than risk a conversation with a police officer.  It makes them angry. 

I Fear for My Life is also language officers use, often in the context of a shooting or use of force that has garnered public scrutiny or outrage. But it is a phrase, nonetheless, that reveals an emotional truth of the professional lives of our law enforcement public servants. Their fear is rooted in training and experience, the psychological toll of a stressful job and the anxiety of families and friends.  The fear is not unreasonable.

Officers are trained to be vigilant, even hypervigilant, of possible threats that could result in the loss of life.  Officers fear that they could encounter a scene of escalating violence at any moment: a domestic call where they encounter someone wielding a weapon; a drug arrest where they become the target, a traffic stop where a gun is aimed at them.  Those fears may seem extreme, but they are real, and they have been perpetuated for much the same reason that black and brown communities continue to call attention to the violence they experience at the hands of law enforcement officer: survival.

As a society we have cultivated fear and exchanged it like currency, using it to explain and  justify the actions of some, disregarding it as a legitimate explanation for behavior of others. And like currency, the fear of some people has more value than others. We judge some fear more important and deem it more legitimate, and in the process, we all feel less safe than we should.

The real question we should be asking is how do we decrease the fear that we feel as a society, so that our connections to and interactions with each other can be built on firmer ground.

I Fear for My Life comes from a place that we imagine could be “common ground” for candid dialogue among citizens who want to see less fear in our criminal justice system. That fear, rather than being the end of a tragic story, is used in this project as a place to start the conversation, and hopefully, the healing.

We encourage people to use #commonground and #IFear4MyLife to continue the conversation in your communities and online. In addition, throughout the website we’ve included other hashtags for you to use to continue the dialogue in virtual spaces.