Policing isn’t just police officers. There’s family policing, including foster care, Child Protective Services, courts, and more. Grassroots organization Black Families Love and Unite (BLU) released a new report “Families Belong Together, Families Demand Repair.” And it pulls no punches.
According to the report, “over half of young people in foster care will be arrested, convicted, or detained, and 70% of youth in foster care experience at least one arrest before turning 26.” The foster care-to-prison pipeline begins with the 53% of Black children who face child welfare investigations before their 18th birthday.
In the 1960s, activists demanded more governmental aid to support Black families. Instead, the state weaponized narratives of “child safety” to criminalize parents and rob children of their childhoods. Think about the myth of the “crack baby,” medical racism, racial profiling, the school-to-prison pipeline, systemic poverty, and environmental racism. Clearly, reparations are in order. But how?
BLU pulled from the United Nations’ 2005 structure, including stages of restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition. Tangible reparations could look like drug rehabilitation, and financial support for individuals—but also transformative changes to all of our conditions, like free education and universal healthcare.
State institutions could have prioritized those approaches from the beginning. But they chose to harm Black families instead. We need efforts like BLU’s to keep up the pressure.