A Declaration of Independence from Racist Policing
[A first draft based on a transcription of the Declaration of Independence found in the Rotunda at the National Archives Museum. Archaic grammar, spelling, and punctuation carried over from the original text.]
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the police departments to which have they have been subject, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the fair, just, and equal treatment to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people regardless of race are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, police departments are instituted among societies, deriving their just powers from the people, — That whenever any police department becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new form of policing, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that police departments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that people are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and unjustified killings, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such policing, and to provide new guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of black people and other people of color; and such is now the necessity which constrains Americans seeking justice to alter their former systems of policing. The history of the present policing systems is a history of repeated injuries and unjustified killings, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over black people and other people of color. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
Police have too often refused to follow the laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
Police have opposed and stymied policing reforms of immediate and pressing importance; and when reforms have been established, they have often utterly neglected to abide by them.
Police have too often obstructed the administration of equal justice for all.
Police have too often viewed themselves as standing armies without the consent of the people.
Police actions have too often, by brutality and murder, deprived black people the benefits of trial by jury.
Police have too often abdicated government by declaring black people without protection by the rule of law and waging war against black people.
Police have too often destroyed the lives of black people.
In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Police departments whose characters are thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, are unfit to police a free people.
Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our police departments. We have warned them from time to time of their unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow brutality and unjustified killing. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity.
We, therefore, call on the U.S. Congress to deliver black people and other people of color’s independence from racist policing.
