2001 came to represent for many the taliban intolerance of other people's beliefs. although there's a growing sense, this time is different to be who come with that and the emory now has more experience and knows the value of heritage that it's not just about religion. so it's totally different this time. i mean, well yeah, just as the international community is holding the taliban to account for its future actions in so many aspects of government and to that list, how it preserves the past. robert bride al jazeera couple. ah, this is i just, yeah. these are the top stories now left wing politician gabriel boy has been elected. she lives next president bush, 156 percent of the vote in the run off on sunday fall right candidate. jose antonio

cast, congratulate the voice and urged his supporters to put political differences aside in the civil, you know, our government has the conviction to look forward at the challenges that we have before us. it cannot be just changed by talking to the mirror. i'm not yours to only speak to people who think like me to change the way people who think differently. we are here to ensure that once and for all the, our course is sufficient for all chileans. and we can achieve a wonderful life and more protests against october's military takeover in sudan are expected in the coming hours on sunday. thousands marched the presidential palace and cartoon security forces fire to gas and stung grenades to disperse the super typhoon. rye and the philippines is left more than $200.00 people dead, thousands more are still missing. the military has been flying into remote towns to help survivors who in urgent need of food and drinking water. heavy rains, displace tens of thousands of people in malaysia, 21000,

and have been evacuated since the flooding started on friday. while rain is common during monsoon season is much heavier than usual. this year. new york state has reported its highest number of covered 19 cases for the 2nd successive day. but state leaders are resisting another lockdown as almost 22000 cases were reporting chinese tennis play. a punch. why has denied ever accusing a senior government official of sexually assaulting her comments were part of a video interview with a singapore a newspaper. but the women's tennis association says it doesn't believe pangs able to communicate without censorship or coercion. hong kong lead a kerry lamb has praise the outcome of sunday's legislative election despite low turn out probation. candidates swept to victory, winning a seat in every district about 30 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots. those are the headlines right now,

and i just either it's upfront i've come back to san diego to reduce it the fascinating part to pulse me in history. they were crazy, creative, even visionary. they were top lesta not to realistic. it was them as a child during and just pops into people still love them. it was basically too bad to be true. what they were predicting can commitee heal ethnic divisions and national tensions exist in both. yesterday, once upon a time in san diego, on algae is in 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 geo, 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 calls for abolition are not new. oh, in 1970 political activist and 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, enlisted by j edgar hoover on the f. b i's. 10 most wanted fugitive lists 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 date with angela davis. thank you so much for joining me on up front. the past couple of

years have revealed to many american 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 do you son, 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, then 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 man and a radical abolitionists 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 a triumphant moment of abolition when 12345 occurs it is a process and we learn on the way. and d,

fun 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 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 that so. 2 can really assist us in a producing new modes of safety and security. so instead of having the funding to this maya institution called the police, you know, from mental health care, fun, housing plan, education, fun, free health care for everyone. what do you say are 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 in 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. and 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 saw, 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 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 it 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, mark 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 a predicament set it all over time since the aftermath of slavery. and if we think that there is one simple solution, if we think we're going to get rid of these problems to morrow, or then i will never get anywhere. are 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, you know, the prison abolition conversation was actually much louder than the police abolition a conversation. and so i wanna talk to you a little bit about that. ah, as of 2019, there were 2000000 people in prison in the united states. that's a 500 percent increase over 40 years. ah, 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 stunning 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 bars. 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 that 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 gone 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 apps of harm and violence that have 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 violence. so the larger question is, how do we address the ideology that encourages people to, to take out their frustrations and their fears up by attacking 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 are 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've imagine it 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 in 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, what. 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. ringback 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 on up front and thank you for inviting me. everybody that is our show up front will be back. excellent. ah. from the al jazeera london broadcast intact to people in thoughtful conversation with no host and no limitations. what is even more urgently needed now is system innovation? systems design and system transformation? part one of human rights activists. q me, ny, too, and environmentally window. nicky. i lived as you have a fossil fuel arrow my entire life and i'm looking for a graceful transition out of it. studio b unscripted on out his era. they travelled thousands of columbus, it from time to pick berries. but do tie workers exploitation in the forest

swayed in one or when aisd investigates one out there. ah al jazeera with so i and you, year for chilly. the former student leader becomes the nation's youngest. ever president. ah. hello, i'm has, i'm seeking, this is edge. is it a live from the also coming up facing off against stun grenades in tig asked thousands, call for change in sudan, demanding the military pulls out of politics. the death toll in the hundred's and

likely to rise the philippines scrambles to help victims of super typhoon right.