is involved with agreed the time is of the essence to try and get all those parties to revive the nuclear deal door. such a worry al jazeera, vienna, thousands of tunisians have been protesting on the 11th anniversary of the uprising, which triggered the ab spring revolution. o crowds rallied both for and against present k side. he recently announced the constitutional referendum for next july, that comes a year after he sees widespread powers or more 1st been criticized by some assa. ah, no, again, i'm so the battle with the headlines on al jazeera us grown of iris cases and hospital admissions are surging on average. more than a 120000 infections are being reported every day. an increase of 40 per cent on last month. i'm a crown is increasing rapidly and we expect it to become the dominant strain in the

united states as it has in other countries. in the coming weeks, we've seen cases of armor crime among those wearables, vaccinated, and boosted. and we believe these cases are milder or is symptomatic because of vaccine protection. the u. k has seen a record number of covered 19 cases for the 3rd day in a row. more than $93000.00 infections were registered on friday, around 4 percent are only con cases. total numbers nationwide have increased by around night, not 39 percent in just a week, but the death rates remains relatively low. france has announced that major public parties and fireworks will be banned or new year's eve as corn of ice infections rise by mister john cack fix says all citizens, even a vaccinated should take a self test before attending social events. then mark will implement new restrictions to curb the rapids spread of the army corn variant which now counts for

a 5th of its reported cases. daily infection spoke another record on friday with more than $11000.00 cases detected. and the new c u. n. human weiss council has agreed to set up a commission to examine abuses in ethiopia. conflict. investigators say they've received credible reports at all sides, are committing violations against civilians. the 7th round of talks aimed at reviving the 2015 iran nuclear deal has concluded in austria's capital. the parties to the talks are hoping to resurrect the agreement that says, yvonne limit its nuclear activity in exchange for sanctions relief and in the us swarming. yeah, police police officer, kim potter has apologize in court for the fatal shooting of a 20th back ran during a traffic stop. she's facing charges of manslaughter for the death of dante. right . those are the headlines on al jazeera up next it's studio be unscripted. stay with us stories of determination and joy. ah, will, i hope to be luck. thou, indeed, quito,

gina duke. i remained goodness in v. i don't get into the cup. short documentary by african filmmakers from molly, wanda, and cameron, desert libraries. the young cyclist and happy africa direct on al jazeera the united states as the world's current leader in incarceration with almost 2000000 people serving time in u. s. jails and prisons. that's an increase of 500 percent over 40 years. according to the sentencing project in india, working to promote humane responses to crime. in recent years, voice is calling for police and prison. abolition have grown louder, making them an inexhaustible part of mainstream discourse on how to confront police brutality and racism in the u. s. criminal justice system. but the cause for abolition are not new. oh,

in 1970 political activists then university professor angela davis was jailed for 16 months with the early part of her incarceration spent in solitary confinement. the case against davis, who was once called a terrorist by former president richard nixon and listened by j edgar hoover. on the f, b i's 10 most wanted fugitives list for heretical politics. lead to a global outcry, calling for her freedom. 2 years later, she was acquitted of all charges and began a movement to abolish the prison industrial complex. but as abolition really possible, and what would take place instead of police and prisons this week in upfront special with angela angela davis. thank you so much for joining me on up front. the past couple of years have revealed to many americans and much of the rest of the world. what people of color have long known, the u. s. criminal legal system is racist and attempts at incremental reform have

failed. you and others have called for the abolition of police. why? well, we've known for a very long time that the structure of racism. it's such that it invades virtually all of the existing institutions in our society and especially the penal institutions and law enforcement institutions. one cannot study the history of the police without also studying the history of racism. and so i would say that since the aftermath of slavery, a, people have been aware of the role that police play and producing and reproducing racism. and you know, but i think that over the years we focus largely on

addressing specific cases and we called for justice for specific individuals. and we called for specific police offices to be brought to justice. and in recent years, it's become clear that that isn't going to solve the problem. and i, i want to point out to the fact that the coming together of, of movements against racism in the us and movements against the occupation of palestine and the gun to make it clear how the structures of racism insinuate themselves into the police. and to the very nature of policing, and especially recently through the militarization of policing. so in recent years we've been looking at structural issues more so than the notion of

bringing individuals to justice. and you know, certainly the call to de fun, the police which emerged in relation to that campaign against police racism unleashed by the police lynching of george floyd. you know, certainly that, that movement begin to make it clear that, that we, what we need, we need, we need different forms of guaranteeing safety security. so the call to div son, the police was really actually a call to imagine new ways of guaranteeing the safety and security of our community. some people haven't made arguments, that gesture toward abolition,

but don't maybe go all the way there. for example, some people have argued to disarm the police. but why is that insufficient in the minds of abolitionists? well, you know, i don't think we need to be so intransigent that we can also embrace some approaches that don't go nearly as far as we think. they should. now i personally think that the call to disarm the police is, is a radical car. as a matter of fact, in connection with efforts to um, address, the fat said there are more guns in this country than there are people. oh. and the call to disarm the country also has to include a call to disarm the police. i think that it, it's possible to,

i'm afraid that a demand in a radical abolitionist way, in with the same or can be made for di funding. because again, some people say the funding stopped short, but do you see the funding as a stop on the way to abolition or can it be something that prevents us from ultimately getting to an abolitionist world? you know, there's no easy way to design abolition and, and my, my abolition is a process a and i don't think that we can at this point say that we would, we will have reached the triumphant moment of abolition when 12345 occurs it is a process and we learn on the way and didn't son of the police, of course it's a short cut. you know, all these demands

a short cut so we can simply focus on isolated issues isolated to have phenomena. we can't say defined the police. take all the funds away from the police, but leave everything else and tapped her. the whole nature of that demand is to shift the resources and to institutions. but so can't really assist us in a way of producing new modes of safety and security. so instead of hearing the funding to this mile institution called the police, you know, from mental health care, fun, housing plan, education, fun, free health care for everyone. what do you say some of the primary reasons why people oppose abolition? i mean there's, of course, there are the died in the wall races who just want to see, ah, police terrorism right there, there,

those people. and there are people who might be uninformed about the issue. but there are also people who have a general sense of what abolitionists are asking for and still say, i don't buy this. i don't, i don't believe it. 15 percent of americans a support about about in the police. that means 85 percent don't. and the majority of black people believe that the police presence should remain the same. what are some of the reasons for that? why are people still in this position? well, you know, 1st of all, mark, let me say that the very fact that we can say that 15 percent of the population is in favor of abolition is kind of amazing because for so long. abolitionists perspectives have been considered so marginalized that they did not even merit a discussion was in the public sphere. and, and so as someone who has been thinking and talking and organizing around

abolition since the 19 seventy's, i would say, since the adequate rebellion in 1971. i'm actually surprised and i continued to be surprised that we are having this conversation now in the way that we are. i always thought, as i've said many times that we were doing work that would allow generations in the future to have this conversation, you know, but of course history doesn't unfold in that way. and, and, and the kind of confluence of events that occurred when george floyd and brianna taylor were killed. and the recognition of the nature of racism as structural in connection with the coven, 19 pandemic sort of fast forwarded us to a point where we are now having serious conversations about abolition. so i'm

excited that that many people racing and which now i, i do understand that most people are afraid of the new of the unknown and, and the police have always represented themselves as those who protect and serve. and so i think that particularly black people who have really, really has the opportunity to be protected and served by the police are still, you know, want to feel safety and security. and the problem is that the police have kind of, in an ideological sense, have, have represented themselves as the only possibility of safety and security. so i think it's our job to begin to urge people to think differently about the very meaning of safety and security. and what would it mean to have real safety,

real security? what would it mean to have education available to everyone free education? what would it mean to have health care? what would it mean not to have to call the police if someone is in, in, in, in, and in the, someone who has a psychiatric episode, what would it mean not to have to call the police, but rather to took, took to call a different kind of agency or institution or where people are compassionate and understand of the nature of, of, of psychic difficulties and would, would, would. 2 would not trouts the person with guns, but rather with the sense of rescuing them and assisting them to find some piece. one of the things that i've encountered is that when i talk about abolition

with people, one of the issues that comes up is that the people who are often most vulnerable to police violence and the people are most likely abused by police are also the people most vulnerable to violent crime, and there's a concern that if police aren't there, and i live in a neighborhood with his high amounts of crime and violence, that there might be either an immediate period during abolition, one especially vulnerable, or a long term period where i don't have that a crime will be reduced, absent a police presence. what? how do we go about thinking about deterring violent crimes? there's a psychiatric piece. there's that piece of it. but what about the violent crime that we see are in community the harm that's done? how do we think about deterring that? well, 1st of all, of the developments that have led to the explosive character of violence and our communities have taken a very long time. this this situation is developed over years and

decades. and i would say hundreds of years. and i don't think that there is one simple solution of the problem is that the police and the prison are constantly propose as the immediate solutions for problems that require long term examination and, and long term strategies. if you know, we were looking at predicaments that evolve over time since the aftermath of slavery. and if we think that there is one simple solution, or if we think we're going to get rid of these problems tomorrow, and then we'll never get anyone. you talked about prison as well, and that's another key part of the abolition movement. and in fact, prior to a few years ago, i would argue the prison abolition conversation was actually much louder than the

police abolition conversation. and so i want to talk to you a little bit about that. as of 2019, there were 2000000 people in prison in the united states. that's a 500 percent increase over 40 years. that's the highest incarceration rate in the world. and all the black people make up 13 percent of the u. s. population. we still account for 40 percent of the incarcerated population. how do we go about putting a dent in those kinds of standing numbers? well 1st of all, i think it might be important to recall that for many years and decades, it was very difficult to bring attention to the crisis within the prison system. as a matter of fact that, you know, i can remember in the seventy's we were talking about the numbers of people who bind bars and it was, you know, few 100000 people. but that to us seemed. 2 to be

a major crisis, but people were prepared to hear about it because the nature of the institution is itself requires a kind of climb destin operation that it is hidden from view and people are made to feel ashamed about having relatives behind mars. and so i think we tend to focus more on the prison system than on the police because at least there were campaigns against police violence. you know, i can remember in the seventy's we held hearings and i was working with an organization called the national alliance against racism, political repression. and we held hearings about police races, police violence all over the country. so there was some attention,

even though it wasn't the kind of attention that the issue has received in, in the last few years, especially since the emergence of black lives matter. where as very few people were even thinking about the vast numbers of people who are hidden away in these dungeons. but i will argue that the 2 issues have always gone hand in hand. abolition requires a much a broader understanding and a view that doesn't focus my off quickly on the particular issue, but one that calls for transformations of throughout the society and, and therefore prison abolition involve a police abolition as well. now, the abolition movement was so important and continues to be important

because the underlying analysis links the racism in, in, in, in the criminal justice system and the vast numbers of people of color, not only black people, but indigenous people probably have suffered even greater to a greater extent because indigenous people are per capita the, the, the largest population in relation to the population of indigenous people behind bars us. so. so i think that what was critical about that movement is that in the link the, the vast numbers of people who are going to prison, to the rise of global capitalism and to the breakdown of

the welfare state. and so there was an anti capitalist dimension present in the prison abolitionist movement that encouraged people to think more broadly, not only about the prison, but about all the other related institutions and about the structural racism inherently and about the impact of global capitalism and the rise of of prisons all over the world, not, not only in the developed world but, but also in africa and in latin america. i think the most asked question to the abolitionist is, and i think it's a fair question, is, but what about the people who pose an immediate threat to others? what do we do with the child molesters? what do we do with the rapist? what do we do with the serial killers? how do we, in the absence of the current prison as we understand it, deal with people who pose an immediate threat to communities? oh no, it's so interesting, isn't it marks that people always go to the worst possible

example and then use that as a justification for the treatment of millions of people who. 1 have not engaged in that kind of handful of activity. now, you know, no one is denying that there are serious acts of harm and violence that are produced by individuals who are a threat, a threat to others and to themselves. but if we simply argued that, because there is this relatively small population of people, then we lock up more than 2000000 people that i mean to me, that is illogical. that's that, that, that's the 1st point. the 2nd point is that imprisonment

reproduces those very problems. and so the violent individual will goes to prison is, is in a situation where she or he or they become even more violent as a result of the structural violence of the institution. then they were when they went in. so, in my opinion, and i think this is what most abolitionists would argue. it's, it's, it's necessary to pull back and ask larger questions, not only how we deal with this a media issue, but rather how to deal with it. in the long term, how can we understand and get rid of the conditions that produce such violence in individuals?

you know, i think gender violence is, is, is probably a really good example for this larger problem simply by m, imprisoning of people who engage and gender violence. has not had an impact at all on the incidence of gender violence in the world. it is still the most pandemic form of violence so that it seems to me what would a signal that we have to figure out how to deal with the problem itself. rather than simply incarcerating people who commit to violence, how can we deal with the conditions that that, that produce individuals that are. 2 a prime to engage in these kinds of violent acts against women against

a o l, g, b, g to people against trans people, all of the forms of violence that we would categorize under the term gender miles. so the larger question is, how do we address the ideology that encourages people to, to take out their frustrations and their fears or a by attacking of others in that way. and it seems that there is a very narrow idea of what restraint can look like. what separation can look like? the quakers i talked about in that book instead of prisons, they talk about this idea of restraint of the few saying that there might be some people who need before that of society because they posed an immediate threat. but it seems that the challenge might also be that the only way we imagine that is through caging. and that there might be other ways whether it's mental health support, whether it's some other structure that can allow someone who is

a serial killer or someone who is a child molester to be pulled out of the space where they're doing harm without using the cage is the primary mechanism, but that requires a new kind of imagination. and it seems that there might be a crisis of imagination in the policy realm and the academic realm, the in the activist realm. so i'm going to ask you to help us imagine a little bit before we go. when you think about an affirmative vision of the world, not just what we don't want police and prisons, but what we do want. what does that look like for angela davis? what does the abolitionist future look like? well, i've always linked evolution with socialism. so i would say that in imagining the future, it cannot be a capital, this future. it cannot be a future that is based on the exploitation of others. and

this future would be one in which the necessities of life are not commodified and which one's capacity to live. a fruitful life is not dependent on one's capacity to pay for those services. so, you know, the, the point that i'm making is that we have to go further than these 2 discrete institutions that we have to think about really reorganizing our entire world. and i think that the, the, the danger of, of positing, evolution has a narrow strategy that only addresses particular individuals is, is,

is one that will prevent us from understanding that this is about revolution. this is about, this is about environmental justice. this is about workers' rights, this is the, this is about eradicating gender violence. you know, this is about making education free for everyone. and so i could continue with that, you know, kind of imagining of the future. but i do think that the abolitionists imagination is central to the since envisioning a new world and developing the strategies for challenging the correct one. angela davis. thank you so much for joining me. not for thank you for inviting me. everybody bet is our show up front. we'll be back

with talk to, i'll just see. oh, are you a while to warm? is we listen, design is are making serious efforts in order to in t m to stop the trend of those. here we meet with global news makers and talk about the stories on how to see the 20th centuries 1st, genocide thought to have set the blueprint for the holocaust is too often overlooked. the sand will come in very everything. but for some reason, the sand refused to bury these people. they want this story to be taught over a century on the injustice still echoes down the generation and the path to reparation is nelson, easy. one, namibia, the price of genocide,

people and power on al jazeera ah covered 19 infections and death search in the u. s. in europe as the oma kron variance is found to be 5 times more likely to re infect people. ah lot hasn't think of this as you see that live from the also coming up. the un human rights council will investigate the abuses committed by all sides in ethiopia is more i remember yelling. these are teaser teaser.