Gadgetory

I'm DeRay a civil rights activist two years ago there are people who thought that there was a problem with Ferguson they did not yet accept there was a problem across the country and we've won that battle the next part of the work is to create a critical mass of people who know what the solutions aren't have the skills to implement them so in five years and I'm hopeful that I'd be in a place as an organizer but we have created that critical mass but I'm also hopeful that we'll be celebrating some of the accomplishments around the criminal justice reform and we were figuring out how to use technology to build community differently I think that the movement is a testament to the power of Twitter you know in Missouri most people don't realize that the reason that you didn't see aerial footage in those early days and August September October 2014 is because they declared a no-fly zone so if it were not for Twitter and Facebook and Instagram Missouri would have convinced you that we didn't exist and we saw that we saw those tools be powerful tools help us build a different type of community and I think that we have to be open to new ways of organizing and new ways of building community you know I'm mindful that we aren't born woke something wakes us up ever so many people woke them up with a tweet or a Facebook post an Instagram post a picture so I'll never criticize people who people deemed to be Twitter activists or hashtag activists because I know that telling the truth is often a tough act no matter where you tell that truth and that there is no one way to do this work there's no one way to be someone who cares about justice equity there's no one way to use the tech platforms I think about us that we had used Twitter the way that all the articles said that you use Twitter we will ever be here I think that one of the things that we've learned is that there's no one solution that body cameras can be implemented effectively as a part of a comprehensive set of solutions but alone that they are not the win the White House has actually done some interesting research on body cameras around body cameras about can we use the audio from body cameras to detect aggression in officers before the trauma happened so right now we think about body cameras it is post-trauma it's like something bad happens we look at the video but could we use the audio I think that's fascinating that we'll see many more things like that start to start to come to the fore or how we can use technology to hold people accountable and the other thing is about data there are some huge questions about how we use data if I could create one thing in the next five years it would be like a massive crowd-sourced Big Data project that got volunteers from all across the world to sift through some of these issues so there are some towns and don't have newspapers if the police kills somebody in that town like they designed the data set there are some places in Texas for instance where it looks like white people are being disappeared more than people of color and we think that in those communities and Latinos are actually being miscoded is white because it's just their names that people are using you know most people don't realize that the homicide rate in cities actually includes the people that the police kill some places like Albuquerque one in three people killed in Albuquerque is actually killed by the police but if you just look at the homicide rate you don't know that have you heard any number about police violence at all ever it is all from local media reports that means that if you get killed in them if you kill by a police officer in American a newspaper does not write about it you are not in the data set that is wild I worry sometimes that we forgot how to imagine what is possible that you think about things like slavery took a lot of imagination rather till it took some real mental leaves to be like these people are just like worthless these people worth more gonna put them in Chains and so in concocting the problems people were really imaginative in the worst ways and when we're in these moments we're like okay the problems are bad and like let's figure out how to undo them people all of a sudden are like unimaginative you you say something like give every kid in born in the city and poverty give them a library and people like we could never do that we could never afford it it's like that is just so mind-blowing to me that like people just lost their imagination at scale and you think about how we got here took real leaps of imagination and commitments in the worst possible ways my sense of hope is rooted so much in my time as a teacher I taught six math and Easter of Brooklyn and I think every day about fighting for Bill in a world that is worthy of the kids that I taught and that is real to me in protest I've met incredible people and I met so many people across the country who did not understand their own power who did not believe that the sound of their own voice and they found it over the last two years and every time me another person like that it reminds me that that the people are there we just have to figure out how to organize and we have to figure out how to activate and mobilize but the people exist the passion exists that we can do this you