Cat Brooks on Police Terror, Trauma, and the Rationality of the Defund Movement
Interview by Marquis Terrell
We spoke with Oakland based activist, playwright, poet, radio host, and former mayoral candidate, Cat Brooks. Brooks talked about her work with the Anti-Police Terror Project — a coalition dedicated to the eradication of police terror in communities of color — the trauma that police terror and unjust systems inflict on people and communities, and why she believes so-called radical policies like defunding the police are in reality rational.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
RIFT Magazine: Hi, this Marquis and welcome to Rift Radio. Today we’re speaking to Cat Brooks who is an Oakland based activist, playwright, poet, radio host, and former mayoral candidate. Cat helped to co-found the Anti-Police Terror Project, which is a coalition dedicated to eradicating police terror in communities of color. Cat, thank you so much for joining me. It’s a pleasure to meet you!
Cat Brooks: I’m thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah.
RIFT: First, let’s start with the Anti-Police Terror Project. What's the history behind it? You’re the co-founder, correct?
CB: I am. I'm one of the co-founders of the Anti-Police Terror Project. There are three of us: TurHa Ak, Asantewaa Boykin and myself. We've been in existence for about eight years. The three of us, along with Carroll Fife, were all organizing with the Black August Organizing committee, which is a mutual aid support group for our relatives on the inside. And around that time, Oscar Grant was murdered. And so we responded to that and then we just kept organizing specifically around state violence. Actually, we formed the Onyx organizing committee and our intention was to be a black liberation organization. But the state just kept killing us. At that point in time, OPD (Oakland Police Department) was the most murderous police department in Northern California. The Vallejo police department holds that title now. So we were doing lots of protests and then we ended up having a conversation around being visionary and not just reactionary. Right. So reactionary is important. Protest is important. Rage is important. But visionary matters too, right? Like how do we stop state violence from happening in the first place? How do we disentangle our lives from state violence? How do we heal our communities from the impact of state violence and how do we support families?
RIFT: Yeah, yeah definitely. Is there a way to eliminate state violence entirely? What kinds of changes do we need to make to make sure that happens?
CB: Eliminating state violence entirely. We're talking about the elimination of white supremacy, right? And its violent nature. We're talking about the elimination of institutional, systemic racism. But in the immediate…And those are goals, right? Those are all long-term goals. And it's why a lot of us get up and fight every single day. But in the immediate, what we can do is begin to disentangle our lives from the ways in which they've been a mess with law enforcement. So this country has created a law enforcement paradigm where they're the answer to every single social ill. And I say, answer in air quotes, right. But they don't just fight air quotes again, the bad guys. They're not, they don't solve violent crime and they certainly don't prevent it or interrupt it. They respond to it. In addition to responding to violent crime, they respond to mental health crises. They respond to domestic violence. They respond to substance abuse issues. If your neighbor spills milk on your driveway, and you're mad, you call the police. We call the police for everything. A lot of our work is about creating alternative models and pathways and also redefining public safety. Right. We're really clear that militarized police and a violent carceral state does not, and will never get us to a place where all of us live in communities where we feel safe and can thrive.
RIFT: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. So you started talking about the mental health side of the project. Can you speak a little bit more about that? I was reading that your program, Mental Health First was launched in both Oakland and in Sacramento, correct?
CB: Yeah. So I always want to start with the data, right? And the biggest data point is that upwards of 50% of all people that are murdered by law enforcement are in the middle of a mental health crisis. Literally mental health crisis, law enforcement, and black bodies are a deadly cocktail and the police don't want to do the job. They're not qualified to do the job and even more so why are we criminalizing a situation that needs care and compassion? Why are we sending a badge and a gun to someone who needs help? And why are we sending someone inside of a uniform that particularly for people who may not be sharing our reality at the moment, right, is just going to escalate things. And why are we spending the tens of thousands of dollars per person every single year to incarcerate someone as opposed to heal that person?
So we've created mental health first, which is a participant centered and participant determined non-911 response to mental health crisis. When you call MH First you get a trained volunteer. Our volunteers are everyone from people that have been adversely impacted by the medical industrial complex, all the way to doctors, psychologists, mental health workers, et cetera. When they dispatch, it's a three person team: a mental health professional, an EMT, or a nurse and a security liaison whose sole job it is to deal with law enforcement if, and when they do show up. And yeah, like you said, we were doing that in Sacramento and in Oakland. The response has been overwhelming. And we celebrated our one year of the Sacramento program in December of last year. And we're coming up on the one year anniversary of the program in Oakland here in August.
RIFT: Awesome. Congratulations. Yeah. Is the local government in both of these places sympathetic to it? Do they help with it? What's their role in the process?
CB: So Oakland and Sacramento are different stories as they're different cities. Oakland and Sacramento are both adopting a model of response to mental health crises that don't sit in the police department. Unfortunately you still have to go through 911 to access those programs which we know is going to immediately knock out a bunch of our folks from being able to engage the program because a lot of our folks will never call 911 no matter what. We've been able to work closely with Oakland city council to ensure that there's going to be a community advisory board that the city will be accountable to. We're figuring out how our two programs talk to each other, because the reality is that you're going to need the MH first that the community trusts at the grassroots level, as well as the city program. And the city should be putting skin in the game.
Right? And so how do we communicate and support these programs so that we're serving the broadest swath of community as possible. So they haven't put any skin in the game for MH First and we remain volunteer and running on the dime of foundations that get it. And also individual donors. Very loved and supported by people in that way who believe in the work that we're doing, we want to see more connection. And at the same time we want to maintain our autonomy, right. Because we don't want to be told we have to engage forces that we don't want to engage.
RIFT: Right. Right. Are there particular politicians that you all work with in both cities? Like, council members specifically? I've read some of your thoughts on Mayor Libby Shaf, but...
CB: Libby is a nightmare, and a whole entire mess. So not her. But we are working with our city council members, right. It's because of our work with council members Nikki Fortunato Bas and Carroll Fife and Dan Kalb, I have to give him his credit where we got the directive that there has to be a community advisory board. And that advisory board has to be made up of vetted community organizations that have worked with the unhoused, worked with the folks in mental health crises and work with survivors of state violence. Working with the fire department, right, to expand what we mean by mental health crisis. Mental health crises are not always a schizophrenic or bipolar, or manic episode. It's the black mom with four kids working six jobs that still can't pay her rent. Right. She's having a mental health crisis.
Right. But who does she talk to? Who does she go to? We are told to shut up to take it and be grateful we have a job and barrel through, particularly black folks and particularly black women. Right. the person that's here without papers. The strain of their lives; folks going through the impacts of COVID. You may have heard, well, you work in Oakland, so I'm sure you did. You heard about the Juneteenth shooting where Deshaun Rhodes was killed. That wasn't an MH first day, but we opened up our phone line So community could talk and the community called. Right? They called, we had a father call with their nine year old kid because they needed a place to process. These are the kinds of things that I think of as prevention, right? Pre-Violence, interrupters, right? People need places to process the trauma. And so we exist just as much for that reason as we do to respond to acute crises when it comes to mental health, domestic violence or substance abuse issues.
RIFT: Yeah. Yeah. The processing side is so important. You mentioned the Juneteenth shooting. Just a quick story, I was there and relatively close to where it happened, and when I was telling my coworkers, they were all kind of shocked at how nonchalant I was about it. How do you bridge the gap with people who may not understand or who may not be as desensitized to these types of incidents?
Cat Brooks: Wow. There's a lot inside of that question. The first thing that I thought of was what support do you need, right? And how are you taking care of yourself? Because yes, for us, black folks, brown folks, indigenous folks, who grow up in communities where violence is a part of our daily life we are often... I hate the word desensitized though, because it almost insinuates that we don't feel it. And even if we're not aware of those feelings, we're feeling it right. Like there is a physical, emotional, psychological thing that happens to us, to anybody when we hear gunshots, right. It's a violent experience. Hearing about another black body dead is a violent experience. So that's one. Two. I really feel like I've been banging my head against a wall around this issue to the point where we're literally, it brings me to tears because the answer to me is so clear, right?
And I can sum it up in one sentence. Healthy, well adjusted, happy people don't hurt people. Wounded, traumatized, desperate folks do. And I don't understand why it's so hard to get the people that control our tax dollars to understand that if we would invest those dollars on the front end for our people, we wouldn't be investing in coffins on the backend. The third thing that I guess that I want to say, you know, there was a lot of hullabaloo and a lot of white anti-black horrible things said about our children who were seen dancing on the side of an ambulance. Two things about that. One, is there's actually been a lot of stuff that has come up to suggest that that ambulance was actually completely on the other side of the park and not near, and was not responding to the shooting.
And two, how quickly and easy it is to demonize and criminalize our children. And then we wonder why they don't believe in themselves. And then we wonder why they can kill people that look like them. But then the final thing is before I had that information, my whole thing was this is a cry for help. This is a reflection of how, to use your word, desensitized our children are to the loss of life. And of course they are because it happens every single day. And yet we're not addressing that trauma. We're not addressing the PTSD. We're not addressing the wounded. We can do nothing but produce people with trauma and wounding and rage and violent tendencies as a way to deal with it. Right? Our society that we've created is creating people that harm themselves at harm each other.
RIFT: Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, So my educational background is in Psychology and when I was reading through a lot of the work that you all do, it was just fascinating. It's one thing to learn in school about how to reach people on the ground level. But it's another thing to see it in action and to to see it in work by people who are organizing in those spaces and activating those spaces.
CB: Funny because I actually want to go the opposite direction. I've been doing this work for, for over two decades, right. Working with other people, working for our people. And I've never been so clear in my life about what the answer is. And so I'm actually thinking, as I transition out of frontline work and out of leading APTP, which I believe all founders of all organizations should leave I'm really thinking about how do I take what I've learned from working with families with impacted communities on the streets, with what I understand, what mental health and I want to go back to school and I want to do that. I think it's so critical
RIFT: So what's next? I know that you mentioned school, but what's next in particular for you?
CB: I'm also an activist and I'm doing a lot more art. I'm a playwright. I've got some pieces coming out this August. I'm getting ready to launch a national podcast. I host a radio show on KPFA. Insight with Cat Brooks will be coming in August. You know, there's a lot of talk around the Oakland budget. It was not a defund budget. The cops got 30 million more dollars. However, we are celebrating the $18 million investment into violence prevention, strategies, and programs. And so working closely on the ground. We have requests from all over the country to consult cities and organizations as they try to implement their versions of MH first. APTP is going to buy a building so we can institutionalize our work. Yeah, lots of stuff on the horizon. We're busy, I'm busy.
RIFT: Congratulations. That's awesome. So is the building going to be in Oakland?
CB: Absolutely. Oakland is our home; that's APTP central. It will always be our home. We need institutionalized work and we feel like it's a campaign that the town will get around. The dream is that it'll house our programs. And it'll also have housing, right? Particularly for survivors of state violence in all of its forms. So we're about to kick off the capital campaign for that, and I imagine it's going to take up a lot of my time.
RIFT: Yeah, yeah. So, I was watching an interview you did with Harvard. I can't remember the exact name. Re-Imagining something or other, I forget the name of the series, but it was on YouTube. You had this phrase that stuck with me. You said radical is rational or radical equals rational.
CB: Yeah. That's actually from my mayoral campaign. Right. Because I was framed as the radical and what it sort of brought to mind is the radical is rational. Actually, it's rational to expect cops to not shoot children in broad daylight, unarmed. It's rational to believe that everybody should have housing, food, clothing, and education. You know what I mean? It's rational to feel like we ought to be able to have clean air and water. Like, these are things that we say is radical, which would imply that they're these fringe far off ideas, and I posit that actually that's logical, rational and humane.
RIFT: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So in that same vein too a lot of people were up in arms about the Defund the Police narrative. You spoke a little bit about how Oakland did not defund the police, and how there was kind of this misrepresentation or, or…
CB: We can call them lies. They were lies. Or I can call them lies. Maybe you can't, I can. The mayor and the chief lied. That's what they did.
RIFT: Let's get to that a little bit. So they, as you said, they did not defund the police. What did they do? Let's start there.
CB: So what happened was Libby put forth her budget as is the process every year. Now, mind you, because this is important to document. She put it out late. She helped write a city resolution. I think it's the fiscal transparency law. Fact check me, but it's around budgeting. So the budget has to be out by a particular date. She held it because the re-imagined public safety task force vote was coming up. She held it in hopes that she wouldn't get backlash. She held it for seven days giving city council and community just 48 hours, 72 hours I believe to review the whole thing - hundreds of pages and respond. That's a really important part of this process, right? Because it demonstrates how from jump Libby Schaaf has been disingenuous about this being a democratic process about doing what's best for Oakland.
This is really about her ego and neo-liberal agenda. That all said city council did respond, and they upheld. I feel they did their job. Right? I get to be very one-sided on all of my comments and thinking. I believe in as much data and research as possible. It's got a heavy dose of my opinion. Yes? I feel our city council did a really good job actually of hearing Oaklanders when they say they're scared, right? Because like the rest of the country, we've seen this surge in violent homicide and hearing the other part of Oakland, and sometimes these are the same people, saying we are tired of the only pathway to public safety being more cops. That's clearly not working. We have cops now nothing's been defunded and they've been able to do little to nothing to interrupt this wave of violence.
And so what happened was Libby proposed a $48 million increase to law enforcement. They got 30 million of that. Eighteen million of it was sent to violence prevention programs. The department of violence prevention got $17 million. That's a city department. You would think we want the department of violence prevention to be funded. So they got money, violence interrupters got money, trauma responders got money. While we'll still have police and actually increased police will actually start paying attention to people before they're in positions to perpetrate harm or become victims of harm. And then immediately the Chief and Libby came out and lied and said that the police department had been defunded, that the budget had been decimated, that they were going to lose cops, that there was no way to keep the city safe without this money.
I mean, it was unbelievable, and that's what we're pushing back on right now is on that narrative. And the last thing I'll say, and then I'll stop is... Really and truly, when you tell me that investment in my people is not going to make things better, that means that you just believe my people can't be made whole, right? That you believe things about my people that are untrue and stereotypical. And that the only way to deal with my people is through control surveillance and incarceration. And part of me just wishes they'd just say that.
RIFT: Yeah. Gotcha. Gotcha. So what does defund the police mean to you?
CB: It means redirecting way more than, clearly anything, but for us, 50% away from the bloated budgets of law enforcement and investing in things that the data show keep us safe. People that graduate high school and access higher education and can obtain living wage employment, don't commit crime. People who can deal with their anger and their wounding and their trauma don't commit crime. People who aren't numbing themselves from the pain and sorrow of being black, brown, indigenous, and poor in this country don't commit crime. You see where I'm going with this, right? Education, employment opportunity, mental health supports, trauma supports; that's what we need that is going to interrupt violence. And the way that I put it often and people who listen to me are probably like, God could she find another way to say it? I want to get to the gun before the bullet flies. I'm tired of standing with moms and watching moms from afar put their children in the ground. That's what I mean by rational. That to me makes sense. And yet direct quote from our mayor: "Violence prevention is going to make our city less safe. Direct quote from our police chief, "Violence prevention would not have stopped the Juneteenth incident." I don't even know what that means.
RIFT: I guess the next kind of thing that I'm, that I'm curious about as well from you is do you believe, do you believe in abolition? Do you think that that's too far?
CB: I don't. I do call myself an abolitionist light mostly because I'm still figuring some stuff out. For a long time, I didn't call myself an abolitionist at all because I got stuck on dealing with people who perpetrate sexual assault and pedophilia. I'm a survivor of both. For a long time, I didn't care where you put pedophiles or what happened to them. And that took a lot of work on my part, work that I chose to do. I still believe, greatly, that we need something. Right? I also believe that there are some people that shouldn't be walking among us. I don't believe that what we put in place needs to look as violent, as harmful, and as inhumane as what we have currently does. And it's also important for people to remember that the vast majority of people that are languishing in American prisons are not the violent boogeyman that they put in your head. They're actually people that were unhoused with mental health issues, dealing with substance abuse issues or making a living in the underground economy, because we've effectively locked them out of the above one.
RIFT: Yup. Yeah, it's interesting too. We talked a little about how police use their time earlier. Let's get into that a little bit. I know that you all commissioned a report on their time use. Can you talk a little bit more about that? How do they use their time and how could it be better spent?
CB: I can. Actually, I'll pull it up. The commissioning of the report was the genius of James Birch, our policy director. We hired the experts who looked at 2019 call data all of their call data. And what we found was only 4% of the calls that came in were for violent crime. I'm looking at it right now. Here we go: 4% for violent crime, 10% for medical 12% for traffic, 7%, almost, for property, 25% other. I don't know what that means. They're certainly not spending that time interrupting or preventing violent crime. There's some response to it, now, my guess is that that number may have gone up in 2020 and 2021. That's just one year data. That said, we're guessing that that's probably a trend. Actually defund means that cops stopped being the answer to every social ill. And they focus on the things that I think people really want them to focus on. People who believe cops have a purpose, right... They want violent crime stopped. That's what they want. They want violent crimes solved. That's just not what they're doing because they're being, you know, therapists, counselors, Et cetera.
RIFT: And that's what they want to do. Why put so much money and energy into…
CB: Yes! They become cops because they want to play cops and robbers and chase bad guys. That's why they become cops. Right? That's a problem in itself. Yes, we need to tear this whole thing down and rebuild something else that's rooted in humanity and morality and transformative justice, but real talk like they're already in whatever mood they're in and they're already the type of people that they are. And then you add on top of that, they're doing stuff they don't want to do with people they don't want to do it with.
RIFT: Are there other organizations in the local bay area that you guys work with to kind of take this on or...
CB: Oh yeah, for sure. So we started the de-fund OPD campaign six years ago. And then in the last year we formed the defund police coalition. And that is comprised of 13 BIPOC organizations in the flatlands. It's everybody from Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice to Oakland Rising, which represents many organizations, to Community Ready CORP, Critical Resistance, Causa Justa Just Cause...I mean, I could go on. That's the other thing, right? You, you hear folks like Loren Taylor, or others say, "these people don't represent the people that are impacted." Well, dude live in the Hills? We live in the flatlands. Who represents who, homie, you know? It's this false narrative, right? That these aren't impacted people. We are the most impacted.
RIFT: People seem to make their own, their own ideas up without actually learning what people are doing on the ground floor, on the ground, you know?
CB: Yeah, I mean, that's not Lauren's excuse, he knows exactly who we are and what we're doing. People also create narratives to justify their trash-ass policies. Sorry. But people eat up that narrative. Right? Because we don't, as a society, do deep dive research. We see a headline, and we're like, oh, well that's what that is. Right? People went, went off and running with the defund narrative. That was absolutely false.
RIFT: Yeah. Yeah. So let's get back to that a little bit. What's your, what would be your message to people who say that that's a bad slogan? So, the defund narrative or the abolish narrative, and we kind of got into it, but what would you say specifically to people who said, you know, we don't need to defund the police or we don't need to abolish the police. They're here to protect us. What would you say to them?
CB: Prove it. Really. Prove it. Show me the data, show me the metrics. I think white people definitely feel that way and they're probably right. The police are there to protect them. They're not going to protect me or people who look like me. You can't prove to me that it reduces crime, because it doesn't. If we could police or incarcerate our way to public safety, we would be the safest country in the world. Because we do that more than any other country in the world. It doesn't matter if you like police or not. The fundamental premise of what I'm saying makes sense. If we heal our community members, they will not harm themselves or each other. That's what makes sense. That's, what's logical, and if people could get out of their feelings and sit with the data and the logic for a minute. We'd make a lot more progress. It's fascinating to me how addicted we are to the "Copaganda” and how embedded the story of the cop that saves the day is into the archetypes of this country.
RIFT: Yeah. What has been your experience with the media? Does the media take what you and what APTP are saying and doing seriously? What are they like?
CB: I think the first thing is to give it context. So part of what we wanted to do when we started APTP was to impact the public debate around policing. I have a Comms background, so communications have always been a strategy for us, not just a tactic, right? We're really intentional about part of how we wanted to do that was to end the way mainstream media talked about people who were murdered by police because it went a little like, "A black suspect was shot and killed by police on the corner of 26th and Adeline." No, a father, a husband, a plumber who loved music, who went to church, you know a human being was killed today. And so being really intentional with language and holding the media accountable for how they talk to and about our communities. We've built solid relationships with, with the media, I would say for the most part, we're taken pretty seriously.
I hear a lot of folks don't like to talk to the media around our issues. I feel like, at least here in the bay area, we've set some standards and some principles of engagement that people abide by. We had an incident recently where that didn't happen and unfortunately we're currently boycotting that publication because they harmed a family that we work with. But for the most part, I feel like they come to us for the other side. They definitely still report the state's narrative, but I do feel that for the most part, they come get the people's story too.
RIFT: Gotcha. Gotcha. How do you as a person deal with the very real trauma that happens in our communities? What do you do day to day to make sure you are all good? What do you have in place for yourself to make sure that you're able to continue doing the work but also able to continue being you?
CB: It's exhausting. And it's actually something that I'm in the process of figuring out with my partner because we've made a commitment to get healthy. And we're clear that one of the barriers to that for me is literally the intensity of my work. I exercise a lot. I smoke way too much. I spend time with my daughter; I take time out. And I think for me the biggest thing is I have an exit plan. I'm not doing this forever. I've given 20 plus years of my life to the movement. Probably gets another 10 developing up leadership to come behind me and, and I'm really intrigued that since I made that decision, I can't explain it. Something shifted in me. I think that we're trained and we're taught as organizers that this is your life's work and you kill yourself to do it. And if you leave or you transition and you do something, you sell out. You sold out the movement and the people. I vehemently disagree. We get to breathe and live and love and laugh too. I imagine I'll always have my finger on some political pulse, but this 24 hours a day, seven days a week...I'm going to retire. And I'm excited to turn this over to young people. That for me, I think has been the biggest shift in my mental and emotional health.
RIFT: Gotcha. Gotcha. Does the exit plan include another mayoral run? Or is that off the table?
CB: I don't know. I don't know yet. We'll see. The political conditions will dictate. I know people are announcing candidacies or lining up now. But, you know, Oakland asked me to run last time and so I did. If Oakland asks again, I'll consider it.
RIFT: Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah. I mean, we're, we're coming closer to the end, but I’d love to hear some of the things that you’d like to signal boost. We’ve talked about a few of them, but what are some of the projects that you're working on? And they could be with different orgs, or they could be your projects...
CB: Sure. Well, let's start with APTP. So at the policy level, we're working on a decertification bill that - I think I just got a message - passed through committee which is great. California is one of five states that doesn't have a decertification bill. That just means that if you rape or kill someone, you can't be a cop anymore. You would think that'd be hard criteria. We're working on something called the crisis act which would divert some state funding to pilot programs like MH first and other grassroots programs across the state to create non-911 responses to community crisis. We clearly did not defund and lost the defund, that work continues. Our next target is going to be measure Z. Part of why we won't be able to defund very much is because measure Z, which is violence prevention money, has a staffing floor built into it.
So the city can not go below a set amount of officers. So, we want to get that rewritten. So, that'll go on the ballot. Like I said, we're going to launch the capital campaign for the building. We're going through a strategic plan. And I think we might have staff for the first time at the APTP. Yeah, excited and scared for that. Continuing to support our families and expanding MH First. Like I said, for me personally, I'm doing a lot of writing and acting and directing. Getting ready to launch this podcast. And then I got a year and a half. I got to get my kid into college. So that's gonna take some time and energy.
RIFT: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, yeah, I mean that, that, that'll, that'll pretty much wrap it up. Thank you so much, Cat. It was nice to meet you. You can find all the necessary links to support APTP on our website. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Rift_Mag. And finally, consider supporting us at patreon.com/riftmag so that we can make more content like this! Thanks for tuning in!
