Lol. Glad hawk has tabs on me. I might disappear entirely otherwise. A lot of people believe what they say, but won't act on it. That's likely how we reached this moment.

I did quit playing a couple weeks before I began organizing, getting gassed/shot by police with children in my arms (you should see the bruises), setting up autonomous Revolution zones, going viral and getting my voice heard.

I've spoke at 3 or 4 city council meetings this week including a board meeting today at 3pm.

Ironically, when the national guard showed up and there was trained military pointing an M16 at me everyday, everyone started to behave. Seems the cops still wanna "dominate" us but the national guard is held to a higher standard. I enjoy the irony.

In any case, Philly has a long tradition of mental health problems stemming from having the largest institutions in the country in the 1950s. When we de-institutionalized in the late 60s and early 70s, all those people were released on to the street and homeless. So in Philly proper, you'd be hard pressed to walk a single block without seeing at least 2 or 3 extremely mentally I'll street dwellers.

Our new budget, presented by a Democrat mayor and a 14/17 democrat city council, contained several cuts to social programs due to coronavirus restricting the budget a bit. Our cities response? Cut/end the entire adult literacy program. Defund the arts and endowment funds that generate $40b for the city annually, cut behavioral health services in half, cuts to the CARE fund which provides learning materials to over 11,000 area children, and give a $14m increase to the PD.

Not to hijack someone's movement, but I found my views regarding this very opposite to my more positive experience growing up. I lived in a community with brand new education facilities, brand new mental health facilities and a police force totalling 3 cars for the whole county. Our crime rate was extremely low because people were very educated and able to get decent paying jobs. And in the event they did suffer a mental break, help was all but already on the way.

Here we have seen budget increases of around 150m for police in the last decade to draw them to about $800m or about a 6th of our total operating budget. For comparison sake, we spend about 1/4 of that on education($220m), and 1/7 or just over $100m on behavioral health.

I don't believe in defunding the police entirely, I just believe that if more money was spent on education and behavioral health, you wind up needing the police less. Looking practically at our operating budget, there's a pretty clear path to redistributing about $120-130m to the arts to generate more economic growth, education to provide a more robust workforce, and behavioral health. According to research released from our dispatch, over 85% of calls to 911 are for fire, EMT or behavioral health problems here in Philly.

I hope we learn in this moment that democrats blindly supporting unions have led to a degradation in academies, and created an environment of police force impunity, and lower quality officers. It's a moment where the same folks calling for change are the ones who created the problem.

So we have to force them to change their ideology by bankrupting our PD in a sense. They can't afford to pay all this overtime to have people pointing their guns at me every day. As long as there is hundreds with me everyday, we can show that long term the way we police currently in our city is non-sustainable.

Annnnnnd that's the news with me. City council rejected the aforementioned budget yesterday and has begun working with protest leaders such as The Workers Revolutionary Collective, and MOVE (a black power group that was the only people ever to get actually bombed by the government in May of 1985) to find a solution where we agree to give the city back. If nothing improves by July 1, you'll see the riots begin again I believe. Ideally we won't hit that moment.