Kneeling Is Not Enough!

 Chicago Hospitals and Universities Must Invest in Black Lives and Dismantle the Police

Sign this statement as an individual or organization here

#PolicingIsAPandemic #NoCureForCops #MoveWealthIntoBlackHealth

The Chicago Health Coalition for Black Lives (CHC4BL) condemns the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, David McAtee and countless other Black people before them. As physicians, health workers, and health students, we demand that police violence against Black communities be recognized as a centuries-old epidemic in our country. Over the past few weeks, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) has acted with impunity, brutalizing civilians that are demanding justice for those whom the police have murdered. The persistent militarized police brutality, including that of the National Guard, against protesters comes at a time when Black and other minoritized communities are already facing the overwhelming burden of COVID-19 in our city. Mr. Floyd himself tested positive for COVID-19 in April 2020 and then again a month later on autopsy. We are facing a compounded public health disaster, centuries in the making.

As health professionals, the protestors’ concerns for Black lives are our own.^[1] The demonstrators that the police attack with tear gas and rubber bullets are our patients, our colleagues, and us.^[2] The street medics targeted by police for providing aid to injured protestors are our heroes and often coworkers.^[3] Breonna Taylor herself was an Emergency Medical Technician who, like us, responded to medical emergencies and cared for the health of others. Still, as we see time and time again, the health profession is implicated rather than absolved from police murders of Black lives. Our emergency responders have been unsuccessful in resuscitating victims’ lives and our pathology reports have repeatedly pardoned police officers of murder.^[4] Our university and hospital systems have increased police presence in their neighborhoods. For example, the University of Chicago has one of the largest private police forces in the world and Rush University, Northwestern University, Loyola University, and University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System leadership are currently both contradictorily enhancing hospital and/or CPD policing while performing empty gestures of solidarity with Black lives.^[5]

In the wake of these horrific events, we heed the call of Black activists and honor the oath we made to inflict no harm. Healthcare does not exist in a vacuum. It’s not enough to improve the treatment of our Black patients within the walls of our clinics and hospitals, only for them to return to their communities where the police terrorize and kill them. Our actions must attend to the wounds of the oppressive systems that directly impact the safety and well-being of our Black patients.

Relentless investment in policing combined with severe divestment in public health has brought us to the brutality of this moment. Chicago spends over 4.6 million dollars on policing daily through the CPD, in comparison to only $600,000 towards public health infrastructure. That’s close to 8 times more to policing than health every day. This is not new. Chicago had 19 public mental health centers in the 1970s and now has only 5 following a series of budget cuts beginning in the 1990s.^[6] Meanwhile, the CPD has seen near consistent increases in their budget every year over the past decade.^[7] You, your loved ones, and your patients currently have “access” to over 11,000 full-time police officers (patrol alone) and only 24 full-time behavioral health providers through your city taxes.^[8] 

While CPD has stockpiled millions worth of “excess” military equipment through the 1033 Department of Defense Act for decades, we have been forced to wear garbage bags as contact isolation gowns, and scramble to find N95 masks to protect ourselves from COVID-19.^[9] Black and Latina/o/x populations throughout the city have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19, further exposing social and systemic inequities.^[10] The sharp contrast between rapid militarization of police and the slow, sub-par response to the pandemic lays bare the priorities of local government.^[11] 

Though police can’t keep the public safe, prioritizing public health can.^[12] Often, when people demand systemic change and public health services they confront a narrative of scarcity of resources. However, we live in a world of abundance that only seems scarce because resources are mined through the exploitation of oppressed peoples and allocated to racist institutions like the police. If we’re truly committed to doing no harm, we must actively work to defund and disband police.^[13] We must combat complicity in systemic violence against Black people. To achieve this, it’s imperative that we demand health justice that’s intrinsically linked to all other forms of justice.^[14]

Policing itself cannot be reformed. From its inception, it was designed to protect white people and their claims to wealth and property.^[15] Researchers have argued for over a century that police reform exacerbates rather than reduces violent crime, incarceration, and is ineffective at reducing police brutality.^[16] Strict regulations have not stopped police from turning off their body cameras and covering up their badge numbers. Countless implicit bias trainings have not stopped officers from targeting Black and other minoritized communities.^[17] Racial diversification within police forces has not led to the elimination of police killings. Each of these reform efforts have only worked to leverage police authority, make their brutalizers more colorful, and cushion their budgets while draining crucial support for social service and mutual aid systems that have the potential to offer expert care and response to a multitude of incidents.^[18] 

We need behavioral health teams responding to mental health and substance use crises, not Special Weapons and Tactics teams. We need community-based trauma-informed crisis intervention teams de-escalating interpersonal conflicts and addressing intimate partner violence, not police. We need city employees that connect homeless people to permanent, safe places to live, healthy food, clean water, and healthcare. We need all of these things without an increasingly militarized police force. We can achieve them through the elimination of police budgets and with public determination for social transformation.^[19] We can no longer tolerate performative police reforms when just models for community safety are already in practice.

Following The Movement for Black Lives and Black Lives Matter nationally as well as Assata’s Daughters, We Charge Genocide, and #NoCopAcademy locally, we call on our academic and community institutions to take a public stance against the racist police force by disbanding campus police and working to defund CPD by cutting all ties and contracts with them. Our hospitals, clinics, and university campuses must be police-free zones.^[20] We must entrust the safety of our universities and hospitals in unarmed, specialized mediation and intervention teams with third-party oversight. We demand that universities and hospitals be places where harm and crises are not handled punitively, but through transformative and healing values. Many public school systems, universities, and cities across the nation have defunded and/or vowed to dismantle their police departments.^[21] Chicago universities and hospitals, in alliance with Chicago Public Schools and local activists, must do the same to stand on the side of justice during this public health disaster and crucial social movement.

As clinical providers, we must no longer hide behind euphemisms of “underserved patient populations” or “underrepresented minorities in healthcare.” These euphemisms displace our own culpability in the oppression of Black people while simultaneously disassociating the “underserved” and “underrepresented” from their reality of facing genocide from the police. We must raise our voices and pressure the health and medical field to end its relationship with the police and to enact an immediate, permanent moratorium on all policing of universities and hospitals that administrators have only heightened in response to current protests.

Health and medicine can be used as a means to enact state-sanctioned violence or they can be liberatory practices for healing and justice. In making this statement, CHC4BL demands that our hospitals and academic institutions choose the latter. We demand that we show up for ourselves, our Black colleagues, our Black patients, and our Black students. We do so particularly to show up for and honor our colleague, Breonna.

Detailed Demands

(AS SET FORTH BY WHITECOATS4BLACKLIVES NATIONAL)

MEDICAL SCHOOLS

Policing is incompatible with education. This means that medical schools must:

1. End their university relationships with local law enforcement.
2. Publicly commit not to collaborate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions.
3. Publicly release data on the race of students, faculty/staff, and community members involved in interactions with campus police officers and develop a clear action plan to address racist inequities in campus police interactions.
4. Eliminate the budget for campus policing and reallocate those funds to programs supporting BIPOC (Black, indigenous, and people of color) students, staff, individuals in crisis.

Black people make up 13% of the U.S. population, but only 5% of physicians. To create a representative physician workforce, medical schools would need to admit classes made up only of Black, Latina/o/x, and American Indian students for the next 10 years. Medical schools must therefore commit to admitting incoming classes in 2021 with over-representation of Black, Latina/o/x, and American Indian students. (At least 26% Black, 34% Latina/o/x, and 2% American Indian.) This means that medical schools must:

1. Publicly release a detailed plan about how they will create a first year class in 2021 with an overrepresentation of Black, Latina/o/x, and American Indian students.

Medical Schools must fully support their BIPOC (Black, indigenous, people of color) students. This means that they must:

1. Publicly release data on the preclinical/clinical grades and rates of AOA election for students of different races and develop a plan to immediately address any inequities. This plan would likely include the abolition of AOA.
2. Increase by at least 50% the funding dedicated specifically to supporting BIPOC students, including mentorship, scholarships, and dedicated support staff.
3. As a part of a broader project of reckoning with medicine’s troubling history of racism, undertake research into the ideologies and activities of individuals featured on their campuses, and remove the names and images of those found to have supporting eugenics or other white supremacist causes. This must extend not only to donors who have engaged in practices such as weapons manufacturing, exploitation of low-wage workers, and employment discrimination.

HOSPITALS

Policing is incompatible with health. This means that hospitals must: 

1. End their relationships with local and university law enforcement.
2. Publicly commit not to collaborate with ICE actions.
3. Publicly release data on the race of staff, patients, and family members involved in interactions with hospital security officers and develop a clear action plan to address racist inequities in security interactions.
4. Eliminate the budget for hospital security, and reallocate those funds to programs supporting BIPOC (Black, indigenous, and people of color) patients and staff, and to alternative strategies for supporting people in crisis (e.g. trauma-informed social work and mental health services).

Although racial segregation of medical care is illegal, most health systems effectively segregate patient care through triage decision-making, discrimination based on insurance status, and use of trainees to care for marginalized patients. This means hospitals must:

1. Publicly release data on the racial demographics, primary language, and insurance status of patients seen in each hospital practice and hospital within a health system.
2. Publicly release data on the demographics of patients seen by providers of different training levels within the health system (residents, NPs, PAs, fellows, attendings).
3. Develop a clear action plan to address inequities in access to comprehensive care by fully trained providers.

Over 1 million healthcare workers and their children live in poverty, and these workers are disproportionately Black women. This means that hospitals must:

1. Publicly release data on the minimum wages paid to hospital and subcontracted staff.
2. Develop a plan to immediately increase the minimum wage for all hospital and subcontracted staff to the local living wage.

We further support the demands to defund and disband policing set forth by constituencies at our respective institutions:

“UIC Student Demands”

Link here

“Call for Northwestern to invest in Black students, divest from law enforcement”

Link here

“A CALL TO LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO: CUT TIES WITH THE CPD!”

Link here

“ABOLISH UCPD! — DEFUND, DISARM, DISCLOSE, DISBAND” (University of Chicago’s 2020 #CareNotCops Email Campaign)

Link here

P.S. Lori Lightfoot is a Cop