Police brutality is a manifestation of a culture of violence, structural violence, and a failure to uphold the basic rights of safety and security. The human rights project is one working towards a positive peace, which means dismantling the systems that reproduce violence in ways that address the psychology and cultural sensitivities of the community context. Part of changing a culture of violence is changing how people think and by advancing proposals for community control over police (CCOP), Max Rameau is doing just that, while also undermining the legitimacy of existing policing structures by pointing out their connections to slave catching. Changing how the police operate in the US, at the local level and beyond, means addressing the lasting…show more content… He identifies the police as an occupying force, one that cannot be reformed through existing channels, and one that cannot be merely reviewed for abuses after the fact. Rameau began writing about communities taking back control of the police several years before the murder of George Floyd helped fuel that summer of resistance in 2020 when Black Lives Matter directed national and international attention at police brutality in the US. Rameau’s mission to change the structures of systemic racism has only become more relevant, not less, as time goes on, rooted as they are in hundreds of years of slavery and racial oppression. Rameau’s proposal to put the power of policing in the hands of the community is strongly rooted in human rights. Particularly, the proposal (Adams and Rameau, 2016) rests on language shared by both the International Covenant of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant of Civil and Political…show more content… Because the proposals for community control over police are necessarily focused on the local scale, and emphasize heavily the aspect of a community sortition board deciding matters of finance, funding, and spending, there is limited space to inject the precepts of modern monetary theory. While modern monetary theory could be used to argue for the federal capacity to fund initiatives directed by the local sortition boards, sharing that control or being forced to dance as congressional pursestrings get pulled might compromise the pursuit of freedom under CCOP, diluting the preferred concentration of community control. At the same time, however, modern monetary theory could be applied to achieve complementary goals of racial equity. For example, rather than diverting money from the police to fund public education, the federal government could do more to take care of the public education side of the equation so that local taxes could go further to support the financial independence and viability of
