Members of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Harrisburg are pushing for the Episcopal Church to adopt several criminal justice reforms it outlined in a June statement, including sweeping policy proposals at every level of government.
The church’s anti-racism committee, created shortly after George Floyd’s murder, spoke with Bishop Audrey Scanlan recently about the process for getting the General Convention of the Episcopal Church to adopt the reforms, which include using unarmed specialists instead of police in non-violent situations and more community policing.
“There’s dialogue in terms of how to raise our statement to a national level, how to work it through the diocese and move it to a national platform,” Mary Powell, lawyer and chair of the anti-racism committee said. “Obviously, there’s awareness and actions that we would like to happen within the Episcopalian community. But that’s only part of it. We also want to go outside of the Episcopalian community, and that means going into the broader world. That means going into the legislative realm, the political realm. Not that we’re looking to be political, but that we’re looking to work to help move things forward in a concrete manner that impacts the day-to-day lives of African Americans.”
The movement began in early June following a discussion at St. Paul’s after the death of George Floyd and the treatment by police of the younger members of the church who had attended protests. The congregation decided to create the anti-racism committee as a commitment to racial equality.
Several criminal justice reforms were adopted by the committee and approved by the congregation, and St. Paul’s released A Call for United States Criminal Justice Epiphany soon after.
The statement calls for eight cultural and legislative policies to be adopted at the local, state and federal levels of government in order to combat institutional racism in the criminal justice system:
- building public trust in law enforcement through transparent police policies and a more diverse workforce
- increasing accountability of law enforcement through the collection of data on bias and building community oversight systems
- using unarmed civilian specialists in place of law enforcement to handle nonviolentsituations
- repealing the stand-your-ground laws
- pushing the U.S. Department of Justice to make standard technology that collects data during the interaction with law enforcement, like body cameras, as well as less-than-lethal technology
- seeing further collaboration between law enforcement and the communities they police
- advancing gun-control reform
- renaming of the new federal courthouse in Harrisburg to be the Barack H. Obama Federal Courthouse.
You can see the full statement below.
These policy initiatives are based on successful and necessary examples of legislation and reforms that have worked in places all over the country, Powell said. And athough public opinion is shifting in favor of progressive reform, she says legislative change is a necessary first step toward racial equality.
“Rather than there being real advancement, what we’re doing is simply attempting to recover ground that has been lost over the last 20 years ‘Epiphany’ is a term that means to change. The need for legislative transformation cannot wait for a cultural transformation,” Powell said. “Chattel slavery has been America’s Achilles’ heel. It’s been our original sin We can’t wait for a cultural reformation because sometimes it takes moving forward to understand that moving forward is not so bad. You can’t wait until the medicine tastes good in order to decide, ‘Yes, I should take the medicine.‘”
The next step for St. Paul’s is for the Epiphany statement to be discussed at the Episcopal General Convention, said Sheila Dow Ford, executive director of Impact Harrisburg and who was present on the call with Bishop Scanlan.
“I would hope it will move up to a national platform. The document itself is impressive enough and compelling enough to be viewed as a true call to action, not only for the Episcopal Church but for leaders once again across the spectrum,” Dow Ford said.
“We’re giving direction on how to actually move up and outward and embrace other communities, and really find a way for faith leaders to be at the table when it comes to the issue of criminal justice reform as one component of the whole approach to really bring to fruition the notion of a multiracial democracy. Without that America fails. Trust me, how do I know that? It’s not just my gut that tells me that, it’s what we have seen. We cannot continue along the same pathway. So the question is, how do faith leaders respond to this?”
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