"Safety" Over Everything

What will happen when you become what those in power don't feel safe around?

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Evan J. Mastronardi and Karina Maria Write about patriarchy, politics, race, culture, music, and ruminations. The goal is to discuss important issues in a digestible and relatable way because nobody wants to read a Ted Talk.

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TRIGGER WARNING: This Post will be discussing violence, and government funded mass murder.

I sometimes wonder what “Safety” means in America, because it could mean different things depending on who you’re asking, who/what they perceive as a threat, and who defines it. For example, in 1985, the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a bomb on the residence of MOVE, A non-violent political and religious organization whose philosophy was  “Each life is dependent on every other life, and all life has a purpose.” The organization pushed for a return to nature, homeschooling, and collective liberation. Like most Black lead organizations, MOVE had their fair share of run-ins with the police.

That tension led them to leave their old home and move to a row house in the Black middle-class neighborhood of West Philadelphia. After complaints from a few residents about litter around the home and the “blaring of political speech through bullhorns,” Wilson Goode, Philadelphia’s first Black Mayor, ordered to have the group evicted from their headquarters. 

It’s funny the way that safety works when Black and Brown people are the ones perceived as the threat; what could be resolved through conversation and understanding is instead escalated. When MOVE refused to leave, the city-backed police response was violent and excessive. First, they told residents they would need to leave their homes, and then they arrived in front of the MOVE headquarters with 500+ officers demanding, it led to a standoff.

According to reports from officers on the ground, someone from inside the house shot at the police, so they responded in kind, sending “10,000 rounds of ammunition at the MOVE compound over the next 90 minutes.” After the police failed for several hours to force MOVE members out, Mayor Goode gave police the green light to drop a bomb on MOVE’s homemade bunker. Philadelphia PD didn’t hesitate at the opportunity to use weapons of war against tax-paying citizens, dropping a “satchel bomb, a demolition device typically used in combat, laced with Tovex and C-4 explosives. The bomb failed to break the bunker but started a fire that destroyed 60 homes and left more than 200 citizens homeless. Along with the property damage and dispossession, 11 people died, including the founder and five children. All of this happened in the name of “safety” and order. 

 While many people outside of Philadelphia have forgotten about this tragedy, it is one of the darkest moments in the city's history. While most people agree that what the City did was terrible, the only person who went to prison was Ramona Africa, the sole adult survivor from the house. Although I wasn’t alive when the MOVE tragedy occurred, it feels like such a good reflection of what we’re facing today. It’s a story about senseless violence inflicted by the state and justified with a need for order; instead of using this tragedy as a painful lesson of what happens when power trumps humanity, our leaders have allowed it to collect dust in the ever-growing stack of atrocities inflicted on Black people by the U.S. government.

I learned about the event while reading Erica R. Edwards Forward in Cedric Robinson’s book “The Terms of Order.” In it, he asks the question, “Do we live in a ‘safe’ society, or are we in a system where those in power use violence and military force to create the facade?” Erica uses the MOVE bombing to make an argument that is against the idea of “order,” describing the actions of elected leaders that day as the “most gruesome evidence that politics could hardly solve the problems that politics itself had caused.” I saw it as another example of those with power gaslighting with talks of “safety” and fear only to overreact with force to avoid accountability for their continued failures. Take, for example, the massacre happening in Gaza.

While Benjamin Netanyahu rolls his eyes at the cries for a ceasefire, and the images of dead children flood our timelines, elected leaders from both sides of the aisle and their mouthpieces in the U.S. are gaslighting voters with accusations of antisemitism, comparisons to the criminals from Jan 6th and weaponized police violence to silence the cries of their citizens. Our political interests are too closely aligned with Israel to call them out for apparent atrocities; our hands might be even dirtier than theirs, so the only viable option is to double down on suppression in the name of “safety” and “freedom.” 

According to them, demands to “Free Palestine” or a “Ceasefire Now” is a much more significant threat to everyone’s safety than 30,000+ Palestinian deaths and counting. The energy expended to silence college students has been significantly more intense than any effort has been made to shut down white supremacist groups who are actively organizing and marching with permits in city streets every day.

During the George Floyd Protest of 2020, we watched as the New York Police Department drove through protestors, trapped people on a bridge, then attacked them for “not disbanding” and encouraged each other to “shoot protestors.” Yet the takeaway from that experience was that police “morale was low” and reducing the police budget was an “attack on public safety.” When failed policy decisions before, during, and after the COVID pandemic led to a significant increase in homelessness, many of those same elected leaders chose the easy route, blaming undocumented people, criminal justice, and police reform, instead of the wholesale giveaway of land, power, and access to the ultra-rich. So, we're doubling down on it after taking steps to move away from our failures around the crime bill. 

The theory is that if we put more people in prisons and jails, it will keep the rest of us safe. We know through extensive research and generations of criminalization that over-policing and incarceration don’t make communities safer. Yet, we’re still going down this path because decision-making through fear and ignorance is easier than accountability.

Think about it: A cop “fears for his safety” and shoots a Black person, an elected official cites the “safety” of their community while fighting to stop the construction of a homeless shelter, then complains about the number of people sleeping in the streets; a parent cites safety when fighting to keep their school from integrating. Despite this, it seems that only one version of safety matters, the one with power or the support from those in power; if those conditions are met, there seems to be no limit to what we will allow or do to protect that “Safety.” 

The people of Israel deserve to be safe; they should not fear for their lives or be targeted by anyone, and any loss of life should be considered a tragedy; the same should apply to the people of Palestine. But for some reason, while President Biden and the American Political establishment blindly support a right-wing government “protecting itself from terrorists,” they seem to find no issue with Israel killing over 30,000 Palestinians, forcing them into Rafah, and then now bombing them as they hide in their tents.

This realization brings new questions to light: if all it took to justify dropping a bomb on tax-paying Americans was an irrational fear of Black people and a “desire for safety,” and there is no limit to what we will allow Israel to do to the people of Palestine, what will happen when you become the threat?