#cherelle parker

[whenweallvote]

Just some of last night’s historic wins 🥳

[strawberryblondebutch]

Fellas, is it racist to hate the mayor who:

Is pro stop-and-frisk

Wants to make the school year universal when half our K12 buildings lack air conditioning

Has all but killed needle exchanges despite being told this would cause outbreaks of hepatitis and HIV/AIDS

Wanted to bring in the National Guard to sweep homeless encampments

Cut funding for Vision Zero, which aimed to stop cyclists and pedestrians getting pancaked by reckless and drunk drivers, then defended that decision after a highly publicized incident where a pediatric oncologist was killed in Center City?

[africanamericanreports]

Cherelle Parker won the Philadelphia Democratic primary for mayor, the Associated Press called the race Tuesday night.

[trendynewsnow]

Election Day in Philadelphia: Voter Turnout and Tensions Rise

Election Day in Philadelphia: A Tale of Two Perspectives On election day, a wave of reports surfaced highlighting unprecedented voter turnout in Philadelphia, the largest city in Pennsylvania and a critical battleground state. Traditionally a Democratic stronghold, the city saw particularly high enthusiasm among Hispanic voters, especially those of Puerto Rican descent. This surge was a source…

[subsidystadium]

Yet another "historic" community benefits agreement...this time in Chattanooga

In July, the Chattanooga Lookouts, a minor league baseball team, reached an agreement with the city to build a new ballpark. Although the price was originally going to be $79.5 million, the final price tag was actually $120 million. Not to worry, though, as the public contribution amount is capped at…$112 million? Anyway, ever since 2022, local groups in Chattanooga have been pressuring local…

[reasonsforhope]

"Research on a police diversion program implemented in 2014 shows a striking 91% reduction in in-school arrests over less than 10 years.

Across the United States, arrest rates for young people under age 18 have been declining for decades. However, the proportion of youth arrests associated with school incidents has increased.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, K–12 schools referred nearly 230,000 students to law enforcement during the school year that began in 2017. These referrals and the 54,321 reported school-based arrests that same year were mostly for minor misbehavior like marijuana possession, as opposed to more serious offenses like bringing a gun to school.

School-based arrests are one part of the school-to-prison pipeline, through which students—especially Black and Latine students and those with disabilities—are pushed out of their schools and into the legal system.

Getting caught up in the legal system has been linked to negative health, social, and academic outcomes, as well as increased risk for future arrest.

Given these negative consequences, public agencies in states like Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania have looked for ways to arrest fewer young people in schools. Philadelphia, in particular, has pioneered a successful effort to divert youth from the legal system.

Philadelphia Police School Diversion Program

In Philadelphia, police department leaders recognized that the city’s school district was its largest source of referrals for youth arrests. To address this issue, then–Deputy Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel developed and implemented a school-based, pre-arrest diversion initiative in partnership with the school district and the city’s department of human services. The program is called the Philadelphia Police School Diversion Program, and it officially launched in May 2014.

Mayor-elect Cherelle Parker named Bethel as her new police commissioner on Nov. 22, 2023.

Since the diversion program began, when police are called to schools in the city for offenses like marijuana possession or disorderly conduct, they cannot arrest the student involved if that student has no pending court case or history of adjudication. In juvenile court, an adjudication is similar to a conviction in criminal court.

Instead of being arrested, the diverted student remains in school, and school personnel decide how to respond to their behavior. For example, they might speak with the student, schedule a meeting with a parent, or suspend the student.

A social worker from the city also contacts the student’s family to arrange a home visit, where they assess youth and family needs. Then, the social worker makes referrals to no-cost community-based services. The student and their family choose whether to attend.

Our team—the Juvenile Justice Research and Reform Lab at Drexel University—evaluated the effectiveness of the diversion program as independent researchers not affiliated with the police department or school district. We published four research articles describing various ways the diversion program affected students, schools, and costs to the city.

Arrests Dropped

In our evaluation of the diversion program’s first five years, we reported that the annual number of school-based arrests in Philadelphia decreased by 84%: from nearly 1,600 in the school year beginning in 2013 to just 251 arrests in the school year beginning in 2018.

Since then, school district data indicates the annual number of school-based arrests in Philadelphia has continued to decline—dropping to just 147 arrests in the school year that began in 2022. That’s a 91% reduction from the year before the program started.

We also investigated the number of serious behavioral incidents recorded in the school district in the program’s first five years. Those fell as well, suggesting that the diversion program effectively reduced school-based arrests without compromising school safety.

Additionally, data showed that city social workers successfully contacted the families of 74% of students diverted through the program during its first five years. Nearly 90% of these families accepted at least one referral to community-based programming, which includes services like academic support, job skill development, and behavioral health counseling...

Long-Term Outcomes

To evaluate a longer follow-up period, we compared the 427 students diverted in the program’s first year to the group of 531 students arrested before the program began. Results showed arrested students were significantly more likely to be arrested again in the following five years...

Finally, a cost-benefit analysis revealed that the program saves taxpayers millions of dollars.

Based on its success in Philadelphia, several other cities and counties across Pennsylvania have begun replicating the Police School Diversion Program. These efforts could further contribute to a nationwide movement to safely keep kids in their communities and out of the legal system."

-via Yes! Magazine, December 5, 2023

[liberalsarecool]

Congratulations, Cherelle Parker! 💙

[allhailthe70shousewife]

Congratulations!!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Imagine this: It’s exactly one year from today, Memorial Day weekend, 2025. It’s 94 degrees in the shade, but the fact that the world keeps shattering monthly temperature records isn’t even making the news — and that’s not what has Philadelphians so hot and bothered. It’s been about two months since Donald Trump, the 47th president of the United States, announced Operation Purify America in an Oval Office address, and about a week since a stunned Philadelphia watched an endless convoy of militarized vehicles and federalized troops from the Texas and South Dakota National Guards roll up I-95. After a week of setting up a base camp at the Air National Guard base in Horsham, the actual operation began at midnight the day before, as a parade of Humvees and armored personal carriers cornered off a wide area in Philadelphia’s Hunting Park section and supported federal immigration agents who went door-to-door in the predawn chaos, bursting into homes and asking Latino residents for their papers. Journalists who’d been kept blocks away by the troops now search for anyone who could confirm the rumors of screaming, scuffling, and dozens of arrests. As the hot sun rises, Mayor Cherelle L. Parker, Gov. Josh Shapiro, and several hundred angry protesters gather outside the Horsham gate to denounce the raids. A phalanx of helmeted troops pushes the throng back, firing tear gas to clear the road for the first busload of detained migrants. They are bound for the hastily erected Camp Liberty, an already overcrowded and decrepit holding center on the Texas-Mexico border that Amnesty International calls “a concentration camp.” This might sound like a page from the script of Alex Garland’s next near-future dystopian movie, but it’s actually a realistic preview of the America Trump himself, his cartoonishly sinister immigration guru Stephen Miller, and the right-wing functionaries crafting the 900-page blueprint for a Trump 47 presidency called Project 2025 are fervently wishing for. As polls show Trump in a dead heat nationally with President Joe Biden, and poised to win at least some of the battleground states where Biden was victorious in 2020, the presumptive GOP nominee is making no secret of his scheme for what he calls “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History.” The audacious goal of tracking down and deporting all 11 million or so undocumented immigrants living and working within the United States is, experts agree, all but impossible. But even the forced removal of hundreds of thousands, or one million, would require a massive internal military operation on a scale not seen since the Civil War and Reconstruction. [...] What’s changed in 2024? Everything. Despite the Hannibal Lecter-ized outward chaos of Trump’s rallies, behind the scenes, Team Trump is focused and determined not only to name the most rabid Trump loyalists to key political posts but also todramatically strip civil service protections andremove recalcitrant midlevel government employees. And this time around, Republicans in Congress are going to be on board with whatever Trump wants. [...] It was somewhat amazing to watch the furious debate online and on cable news this week over the weird incident in which small text about a “unified Reich” found its way into a Trump promo video the ex-and-wannabe president posted on Truth Social. The perplexing part, for me, is that this was discussed as some kind of Sherlock-Holmes-magnifying-glass a-ha moment, revealing Trump’s secret plan for Nazi-style rule. Folks, he is screaming his plan out loud at his rallies! The Trump deportation scheme is really Trump’s blueprint for dictatorship.

Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer on how Donald Trump's proposed deportation plan is a pretext for a fascist MAGA dictatorship (05.23.2024).

Will Bunch nails it in this Philly Inquirer column on how Donald Trump's fascistic plan for mass deportations is a speed-run for a MAGA dictatorship.

[beardedmrbean]

Thousands of Philadelphia city employees are back in their offices full time after a judge rejected a union's request to block Mayor Cherelle Parker’s requirement that they return.

District Council 47 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees had sued the city, claiming the mandate violates its contract and would harm city workers. The union, which represents 6,000 administrative and supervisory employees, has also filed an unfair-practices complaint with the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board, which is still pending.

A two-day hearing held last week on the lawsuit concluded when the judge ruled Friday night that the city could impose the mandate, so the workers had to return to the office Monday.

Parker announced the mandate in May, saying she wanted to create a more visible and accessible government. The decision ended the city’s virtual work policy, put in place in 2021, and essentially returns employee scheduling to what it was before the coronavirus pandemic.

About 80% of the city’s 26,000 employees have been working fully on site since last year, while the rest had worked on site 31 to 75 hours per pay period, Parker said. Former Mayor Jim Kenney had left hybrid work decisions up to department heads.

The union sharply criticized the decision when it was announced, saying it was unilaterally imposed instead of going through collective bargaining. It also believes the policy will worsen the worker shortage the city has suffered since the pandemic.

It also argues that the city lacks enough office space to bring all employees back and that making the change over the summer, when children are out of school, complicates schedules for parents.

Parker, a Democrat, has said her administration does not believe the new policy is subject to collective bargaining. She also noted changes that were made to be more worker friendly, such as extending paid parental leave from six to eight weeks and designating the Friday after Thanksgiving as a holiday. Officials have also said there will be relaxed restrictions on sick leave to care for family members.

Business leaders have welcomed the announcement, saying it will benefit workers and the vibrancy of Philadelphia’s downtown.

[afro-elf]

really appreciate seeing another person in philly who fucking hates cherelle parker

hated her the moment i saw her, vibes are rancid and her policies aren't much better lol, lmao even

[spirkkock]

Today I went to Spiral Q’s annual PEOPLEHOOD Parade and Pageant in West Philadelphia.

This parade is annual, and it has been planned for months, with community builds having taken place for weeks leading up to today, when hundreds of community members took to the streets and embraced one another and reaffirmed our commitment to solidarity with our neighbors and dedication to fight back against greed and corruption in our city.

I wanted to share this with you all, because I think it's important in this time of strife to remember that community organizing and fighting back takes place all the time, regardless of who is in the white house or who controls the senate. Philadelphians in particular have been fighting against the administration of DEMOCRATIC Mayor Cherelle Parker, who has implemented violent policies meant to displace both the housed and unhoused population in Kensington (one of Philly's poorest neighborhoods) to benefit greedy developers. These policies have resulted in the rounding up up of the unhoused population and has led to several of our community members dying in lock-up because they were denied access to life saving care from harm reduction specialists and medical professionals. She's also working very hard to approve the new 76ers arena, a construction project that would result in the catastrophic displacement of the residents of Center City, including those that live in Historic Chinatown and the Gayborhood, a historically queer community, both of which have been systematically shrunk over the years by corporate development.

Spiral Q used PEOPLEHOOD to hold a teach in about the Nakba, the connections between policing in Philadelphia and the IDF's violence in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, about how policies supporting cyclist and pedestrian safety has been defunded, voter suppression, the struggles in Chinatown, displacement in Kensington, police brutality against our homeless neighbors, and the banning of harm reduction and needle exchange programs.

All of this was planned before we knew the election results. Philly organizations like Spiral Q, Homies Helping Homies, Food not Bombs, Philadelphia Anarchist Black Cross, and many others have been on the streets doing mutual aid for years, throughout the pandemic and before, during the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, and will continue doing work long after. Many of these organizations have chapters across the U.S. and beyond!

Hope is not lost - hope is in the people around you, who are dedicated to helping one another, who will show up for you and your neighbors to offer a helping hand when times get tough.

Become one of those people! Kill the cop in your head! Volunteer at a Mutual Aid Org! Unlearn your prejudices! Join a reading group! Spend time talking to your neighbors, both housed and unhoused! Learn how to administer Narcan! Join a tenants union! Go to city council meetings! Create a plan in case you need to take a friend out of state to access reproductive care! Talk to a stranger! Love one another! Trust one another!

[strawberryblondebutch]

Please. God. Let Cherelle Parker be next

[housecatclawmarks]

How do we get more people on the ground in Philadelphia to stop these sweeps?

I wish I had the answer to that. I’m just one person on the ground reporting what I see-and a big part of why I made those posts about the situation is because I didn’t know what to do and was desperate to at least tell people what was happening and not let Cherelle Parker and the media succeed with their cover up. I’ve been organizing since I was about 18-19 and there’s still a lot that’s new to me same as everyone else. Also, I’m not some kind of leader or anything-I’m an anarchist, high school dropout without a ton of wisdom or specialized skillsets. ANYONE can be involved in the ways that I am, I’m not doing anything special I’m just showing up and doing the work that im able to.

That being said, what I personally am trying to do as a starting point on the situation in Kensington is this:

1) spread information on the facts of the situation to everyone you can think of. People in your neighborhood, coworkers, family members, people who aren’t necessarily politically aligned with you. Right now a lot of mainstream media coverage is trying to go along with the lies that the displacement of unhoused people in Kensington is helpful + that its led by outreach workers. Spread the article by the kensington voice & the testimonies posted by sol collective on instagram and any other accurate reporting and first hand accounts by unhoused people and harm reductionists that you can find.

2) get involved with harm reduction & mutual aid in your area. Even if you’re just joining a group like food not bombs that isn’t directly connected, doing so will help you get tapped into other resistance efforts AND you’ll be doing direct mutual aid and getting people fed as you go.

3) bring friends!!! this one is hard for me tbh. It is very difficult to get even your politically aligned friends to show up sometimes. But some of them will & do, and they’ll talk to their other friends and get people involved as well, both in small ways and in big ones-and any way you or anyone else can show up helps, from putting your body on the line to jail support for those who do to just making some sandwiches to give out to people being displaced. I don’t have answers about building a large, publicly accessible protest & physical resistance right now, but getting involved and building long term strength and numbers makes it a LOT easier to do rapid response community defense. These sweeps in kensington have happened before and they are going to happen again, and the Parker administration is definitely not done finding ways to fuck with drug users and harm reduction efforts.

We can’t necessarily all do the same things but we can all do SOMETHING and the more you take the initiative to reach out to groups doing work in your area and get involved the more opportunities you’ll find to see what you can do from where you’re at.

[popculturelib]

In honor of Juneteenth, we are featuring four books in our collection by queer Black and African authors. Descriptions of the books are below the read more.

Lez Talk: A Collection of Black Lesbian Short Fiction (2016) ed. by S. Andrea Allen & Lauren Cherelle.

Black Love Matters: Real Talk on Romance, Being Seen, and Happy Ever Afters (2022) ed. by Jessica P. Pryde

The Black Imagination: Science Fiction, Futurism and the Speculative (2011) ed. by Sandra Jackson and Julie E. Moody-Freeman

Meanwhile: Graphic Short Stories about Everyday Queer Life in Southern and East Africa (2019) by the Qintu Collab

The Browne Popular Culture Library (BPCL), founded in 1969, is the most comprehensive archive of its kind in the United States.  Our focus and mission is to acquire and preserve research materials on American Popular Culture (post 1876) for curricular and research use. Visit our website at https://www.bgsu.edu/library/pcl.html.

Lez Talk

A necessary and relevant addition to the Black LGBTQ literary canon, which oftentimes over looks Black lesbian Writing, Lez Talk is a collection of short stories that embraces the fullness of Black lesbian experiences. The contributors operate under the assumption that "lesbian" is not a dirty word, and have written stories that amplify the diversity of Black lesbian lives. At once provocative, emotional, adventurous, and celebratory, Lez Talk crosses a range of fictional genres, including romance, speculative, and humor. The writers explore new subjects and aspects of their experiences, and affirm their gifts as writers and lesbian women.

Black Love Matters

An incisive, intersectional essay anthology that celebrates and examines romance and romantic media through the lens of Black readers, writers, and cultural commentators, edited by Book Riot columnist and librarian Jessica Pryde. Romantic love has been one of the most essential elements of storytelling for centuries. But for Black people in the United States and across the diaspora, it hasn't often been easy to find Black romance joyfully showcased in entertainment media. In this collection, revered authors and sparkling newcomers, librarians and academicians, and avid readers and reviewers consider the mirrors and windows into Black love as it is depicted in the novels, television shows, and films that have shaped their own stories. Whether personal reflection or cultural commentary, these essays delve into Black love now and in the past, including topics from the history of Black romance to social justice and the Black community to the meaning of desire and desirability. Exploring the multifaceted ways love is seen--and the ways it isn't--this diverse array of Black voices collectively shines a light on the power of crafting happy endings for Black lovers. Jessica Pryde is joined by Carole V. Bell, Sarah Hannah Gomez, Jasmine Guillory, Da'Shaun Harrison, Margo Hendricks, Adriana Herrera, Piper Huguley, Kosoko Jackson, Nicole M. Jackson, Beverly Jenkins, Christina C. Jones, Julie Moody-Freeman, and Allie Parker in this collection.

The Black Imagination

This critical collection covers a broad spectrum of works, both literary and cinematic, and issues from writers, directors, and artists who claim the science fiction, speculative fiction, and Afro-futurist genres. The anthology extends the discursive boundaries of science fiction by examining iconic writers like Octavia Butler, Walter Mosley, and Nalo Hopkinson through the lens of ecofeminist veganism, post-9/11 racial geopolitics, and the effect of the computer database on human voice and agency. Contributors expand what the field characterizes as speculative fiction by examining for the first time the vampire tropes present in Audre Lorde’s poetry, and by tracing her influence on the horror fiction of Jewelle Gomez. The collection moves beyond exploration of literary fiction to study the Afro-futurist representations of Blacks in comic books, in the Star Trek franchise, in African films, and in blockbuster films like Independence Day, I Robot, and I Am Legend.

Meanwhile

The lived realities of young queer people in African contexts are not well documented. On the one hand, homophobic political discourse tends to portray queer people as 'deviant' and 'unAfrican', and on the other, public health research and advocacy often portrays them as victims of violence and HIV. Of course, young queer lives are far more diverse, rich and complex. For this reason, the Qintu Collab was formed to allow young queer people from a few African countries to come together, share experiences and create context-specific, queer-positive media that documents relatable stories about and for queer African youth. We see this as a necessary step in developing a complex archive of queer African life, whilst also personalising queer experiences and challenging prejudicial stereotypes. The Collab is made up of eighteen queer youth from Botswana, Kenya and Zimbabwe, two academics, three artists and a journalist. We first worked in small groups in each country through a range of creative participatory methods that focused on personal reflection and story-telling. Young people created personal timelines, and made visual maps of their bodies, relationships, and spaces. We then had group discussions about themes that emerged to help decide what to include in the comic works. At the end of 2018, we all came together in Nairobi, Kenya, for a week to collaborate on this comic book, and a set of podcasts on similar topics. We worked through various ways of telling stories, and developed significant themes, including family, religion and spirituality, social and online queer spaces, sex, and romantic relationships. Each young person created a script and laid out the scenes for a comic that told a short story from their lives. They then worked one-on-one with an artist to finesse those ideas into a workable comic, and the artists thereafter developed each story through multiple rounds of feedback from the story's creator and the rest of the group