“Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.”   – Lyndon Johnson

Our Vision

As an organization, our vision is aspirational and inspirational. It is our north star.

We envision a society, free from racial oppression.

Our Mission

To build a platform that educates, advocates, and collaborates in order to end racially-biased policing in Iowa.

Our Values

In addition, our values guide our work.  Our work is about justice. Our work is about truth. Our work is about equity. We operate with these core values.

  • Police are our partners, not our enemies. The police have an incredibly hard job and provide protection, safety, and security in an unpredictable and divided country. Their jobs are risky and often thankless. We appreciate and respect them. We are not anti-police, we are anti-racial profiling.
  • Black people should be treated equally by law enforcement. The legacy of America, her greatest sin of slavery, has led us to a boiling point of disparity in policing Black people today. In America, Black skin color means you’re more likely to be stopped, ticketed, jailed, and you’ll experience longer sentences and heavier penalties than the white majority.
  • Skin color is not reasonable suspicion.
  • Everyone bias and bias is everywhere. But implicit bias are the thoughts and feelings that we are unaware of or mistaken about their nature. We have a bias when, rather than being neutral, we have a preference for (or aversion to) a person or group of people. But when police, or otherwise well-meaning citizens, act on their implicit bias, or aren’t aware of their implicit bias, the results for communities of color are disastrous.
  • Denial is not productive. James Baldwin, award-winning author, once said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”  We have the stories. We have the data. Racial profiling happens in Des Moines, IA, far too often and it is causing emotional and financial trauma to Black and Brown people. Let’s face it so we can fix it.
  • The punishment should fit the crime.
  • We get it. It’s complicated.