We Need Your Voice: Demand Divestment from the PPB

Every year, the City of Portland readjusts or “monitors” its budget in the fall. The Fall Budget Monitoring Process (Fall BMP, pronounced bump) is usually a technical meeting without much public participation. 

Due to COVID-19 budget shortfalls and continued police violence against Black people, activists, organizations, and organizers realize that the Fall BMP is a place for us to further demand divestment from the Portland Police Bureau and reinvestment in non-punitive programming.

Our current public safety model relies on oppressive values and structures to exile and eliminate “undesirables.” From non-consensual hysterectomies of ICE detainees, the destruction of houseless encampments by the Portland Police Bureau (PPB), and the racial profiling of Black Portlanders by PPB’s Gun Violence Reduction Team, we know that the violence of policing is not a bug, but a feature.  

As an abolition organization, we understand that police and the prison industrial complex cannot be reformed. 

Policing is inherently violent and feeds on violence against Black bodies in particular, and those living at the intersections of mental illness and poverty. Abolition has a 400-year history beginning with the struggle to abolish chattel slavery, to the abolition of Jim Crow, to our current struggle to abolish the prison industrial complex. 

We appreciate your commitment to reimagining our society, one in which we are all safe. 

A new world is waiting.