Below is my testimony I intend to give at the next MPD Oversight Hearing.
Thank you Chair Pinto and members of the Public Safety and Judiciary Committee for allowing me to testify. My name is Bill Mefford and I am with the Festival Center, a faith-based community center dedicated to building movements for justice.
As we gather once again as me and my friends and colleagues demand accountability for the Metropolitan Police Department I would like to use my time today to look at the larger context in which we are making this repeated request. The need for accountability for MPD is not made in a vacuum and I believe it would do us well to see this in context.
This year marks 25 years since the beginning of the War on Terror. In 2020, researchers at Brown University released a study of the War on Terror that found that at that time, this failed war had cost 900,000 people their lives and cost the United States over $8 trillion. And this was five years ago. In just Afghanistan at that time, the US spent over $300 million a day for 20 years. In Iraq and Syria, the US spent over $2.1 trillion. And in several African countries the US spent close to $400 billion. Of course, these numbers do not cover the environmental degradation done to natural resources, the immense healthcare costs inflicted on civilians, veterans, and their families, or even the moral and spiritual erosion that results in such blatant collective sin. This is just a global glance at what being tough on crime can entail. And it does not work.
Indeed, twenty five years is only a small sample when we lay this against the history of this country’s use of the police in controlling people of color which were first organized out of slave patrols as early as the 1830s. It is not hyperbole to say that countless lives and untold costs have been spent in exerting white control over people of color. Our foreign and domestic policies have time and time again entrenched the wealth of this country into the hands of the few while dehumanizing poor people and people of color. And at the forefront of ensuring social, political, and economic power remaining entrenched in the hands of a few has been armed forces internationally and the police domestically.
The twenty five years of the War on Terror and the 190 years since the police were first formed in this country from slave patrols both show us that armed force has been utilized to maintain control of people of color and to deepen concentration of power and wealth into the hands of a few. It is against this backdrop of these two failed experiments that I urge the Council to reflect on this budget and the necessary oversight of the Metropolitan Police Department. Some of the relevant takeaways that we should easily surmise is that there are consequences to repeatedly choosing to invest in the police instead of local communities. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year into the current iteration of slave patrols is money that cannot be spent for things that actually help people such as preventing violence, aiding victims, supporting reentry programs, making healthcare affordable for all residents, making housing affordable, and so many other necessary programs that allow people to live into abundance.
The greatest form of accountability that can be shown to MPD is to stop funding what for almost two hundred years has not only not worked, but has brought such immense harm and devastation. I appreciate the chance to testify and urge that this moment might be one for greater reflection so that we do not continue to make the same mistakes that our ancestors have made.
