Policed Bodies: A Community Conversation on Race, Disability, and Justice

Yusuf Abdul-Qadir is a lead organizer with the Syracuse Police Accountability and Reform Coalition, a member of the Black Freedom Project, and the 13th Forward Campaign to end New York’s 13th amendment exemption to the abolition of slavery. He works at Facebook as a Product Policy Manager.

Prior to joining Facebook, Abdul-Qadir was the Inaugural Senior Strategist for Racial Justice at the New York Civil Liberties Union (ACLU of New York), where he worked to advance and integrate an intersectional racial justice lens across departments within the NYCLU, and managed a docket that included environmental/climate justice, indigenous rights, marijuana justice, and reparations among other racial justice issue areas, He was a co-chair of the Racial Justice Working Group, a core member of the Privacy and Technology Working Group and a member of the DEI Committee.

He previously served as the Director of the Central New York Chapter of the NYCLU from 2015 to November 2020, where he led the organization’s work in Central New York and supported the NYCLU’s advocacy and litigation to end juvenile solitary in Onondaga County’s Justice Center; build and lead a coalition that changed Syracuse’s use of force policy, helped hold officers who engaged in misconduct accountable, defended the Syracuse Citizens’ Review Board, secured privacy protections from surveillance technologies, advanced the passage of the Syracuse Right to Know Act, and other police reform areas; worked to pass and defend bail reform; and created the Syracuse I-81 project to address environmental racism, economic exclusion and segregation in Syracuse and Onondaga County, in the replacement of I-81 in Syracuse’s Southside.

Abdul-Qadir is a social commentator who has spoken on an array of racial justice issues. In 2020, he supported the advancement of a national vision in defense of defunding the police. Abdul-Qadir is also an activist scholar and Afrofuturist whose research sits at the intersection of climate/environmental justice, racial equity and emerging technology. In 2018, he was appointed as an Adjunct Faculty at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University where he teaches information policy to graduate students.

Abdul-Qadir holds a dual Executive Masters of Public Administration and Executive Masters in International Relations from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, as well as Certificates of Advanced Studies in National Security and Counterterrorism Studies, Sustainable Enterprise and is pursuing a CAS in Information Security Management.

A Black queer abolitionist, organizer, and third-generation military veteran, Brandon D. Anderson was born and raised in Oklahoma City during the 1980’s crack epidemic and the 1990’s global HIV pandemic. After losing his life partner to police violence during a routine traffic stop, Anderson founded Raheem — the independent service for reporting police violence in the United States, working to end police terror against Black people.

Raheem builds tools for communities to report police and use the open complaint data to advance policies that shrink the role of police by investing in long-term solutions that respond to conflict with care. Headquartered in Oakland, CA, Raheem has helped thousands of people report police in over 200 US cities and tied more than 275 officers to cases of police misconduct.

Prior to founding Raheem, Anderson served five years in the U.S. Army, completing two tours in Iraq as a satellite engineer before graduating from Georgetown University with a BA in Sociology and Philosophy. Anderson has been a Guest Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Claremont McKenna College. He was named in Out Magazine’s Out100 List in 2020 and is a 2019 TED Fellow and 2018 Echoing Green Fellow. Brandon’s work has been featured by The Atlantic, The Economist, Fast Company, CNBC, Axios, Inc Magazine, and The San Francisco Chronicle.

Ashley Gantt’s lived experience as a Black woman coping with homelessness, mass incarceration, and poverty lies at the heart of her relentless pursuit for equity and justice. Ashley works as a political strategist and civil rights organizer for the New York Civil Liberties Union, writing and advocating for critical legislation in New York State. Formerly the Western, NY organizer for Just Leadership USA, Ashley led the FreeNY campaign and was instrumental in passing bail and discovery reforms in 2019.

Best known for her work as co-founder of Free The People Roc, Ashley is keeping issues like police brutality, mass incarceration, the school to prison pipeline, and the eviction crisis in the public consciousness. She also serves as chair of the Advisory Board for the YWCA and as Co-leader for Action Together Rochester, a local progressive advocacy group. Ashley lives in Rochester with her daughter, Katelynn, who keeps her laughing and always keeps her humble.

Talina Jones is an advocate for families who have children with disabilities. She is the Chair of the NYS Early Intervention Coordinating Council, a trainer for the Early Intervention Partners Training Project and serves on the board of CNY NYCLU. Her master’s research centered on a black womanist understanding of disability and how that lens might impact the creation of future advocacy programs created for families of color.

Shukri Mohamed is an alum from the Syracuse city school district and a youth community organizer. She is a part of CuseYouthBLM, a youth organization that hosted and participated in marches, protests, and panels in support of the BlackLivesMovement in Syracuse. Additionally, she is also part of the Alliances of Communities Transforming Syracuse Youth Council who helps youth recognize the issues they face and tackling them, such issues include issues of preparing students for their post-high school endeavors. Currently, Shukri is a senior at Le Moyne college double majoring in history and peace and global studies.

Sarhia Rahim is currently a senior enrolled at Syracuse Academy of Science. They have been heavily involved in the push to remove SRO’s from schools and the justice for victims of police brutality. They have helped start an organization called Raha Syracuse with the goal to bring relief and uplift to their community. Other ways they have been active in the community is by sitting on the Youth Boards for both the Common Council and for Senator Rachel May.

Federico Waitoller is an associate professor at the department of special education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Fulbright fellow professor at the Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona. His research focuses on urban inclusive education and examines market-driven educational reforms and teacher learning and pedagogies. His latest book is titled Excluded by choice: Urban Students with disabilities in the education marketplace, published in 2020 by Teachers College Record. In 2019 he was the recipient of the Researcher of the Year 2018, Raising Star in Social Sciences award at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and in 2020 he received a Fulbright fellowship.

Prior to her doctoral studies, Subini Ancy Annamma was a special education teacher in both public schools and youth prisons. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Her research critically examines the ways students are criminalized and resist that criminalization via processes that animate entrenched inequities while recognizing the mutually constitutive nature of racism and ableism, the interlocking with other marginalizing oppressions, and how these intersections impact youth education trajectories in urban schools and youth prisons. Further, she positions students as knowledge generators, exploring how their narratives and ingenuity can inform teacher and special education. Annamma’s book, The Pedagogy of Pathologization (Routledge, 2018) focuses on the education trajectories of incarcerated disabled girls of color and has won the 2019 AESA Critic’s Choice Book Award & 2018 NWSA Alison Piepmeier Book Prize.

Jesse Hagopian is a high school Ethnic Studies teacher in Seattle, an editor for Rethinking Schools magazine, and a campaign director for the Zinn Education Project’s “Teach the Black Freedom Struggle.” He is the co-editor of the books, Black Lives Matter At School: An Uprising for Educational Justice, Teaching for Black Lives, Teacher Unions and Social Justice, and the editor of More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High Stakes Testing.

Yusuf Abdul-Qadir is a lead organizer with the Syracuse Police Accountability and Reform Coalition, a member of the Black Freedom Project, and the 13th Forward Campaign to end New York’s 13th amendment exemption to the abolition of slavery. He works at Facebook as a Product Policy Manager.

Prior to joining Facebook, Abdul-Qadir was the Inaugural Senior Strategist for Racial Justice at the New York Civil Liberties Union (ACLU of New York), where he worked to advance and integrate an intersectional racial justice lens across departments within the NYCLU, and managed a docket that included environmental/climate justice, indigenous rights, marijuana justice, and reparations among other racial justice issue areas, He was a co-chair of the Racial Justice Working Group, a core member of the Privacy and Technology Working Group and a member of the DEI Committee.

He previously served as the Director of the Central New York Chapter of the NYCLU from 2015 to November 2020, where he led the organization’s work in Central New York and supported the NYCLU’s advocacy and litigation to end juvenile solitary in Onondaga County’s Justice Center; build and lead a coalition that changed Syracuse’s use of force policy, helped hold officers who engaged in misconduct accountable, defended the Syracuse Citizens’ Review Board, secured privacy protections from surveillance technologies, advanced the passage of the Syracuse Right to Know Act, and other police reform areas; worked to pass and defend bail reform; and created the Syracuse I-81 project to address environmental racism, economic exclusion and segregation in Syracuse and Onondaga County, in the replacement of I-81 in Syracuse’s Southside.

Abdul-Qadir is a social commentator who has spoken on an array of racial justice issues. In 2020, he supported the advancement of a national vision in defense of defunding the police. Abdul-Qadir is also an activist scholar and Afrofuturist whose research sits at the intersection of climate/environmental justice, racial equity and emerging technology. In 2018, he was appointed as an Adjunct Faculty at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University where he teaches information policy to graduate students.

Abdul-Qadir holds a dual Executive Masters of Public Administration and Executive Masters in International Relations from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, as well as Certificates of Advanced Studies in National Security and Counterterrorism Studies, Sustainable Enterprise and is pursuing a CAS in Information Security Management.

Jimmy Oliver is the Director of Community Engagement for the Syracuse Police Department. In a civilian role, Oliver is responsible for developing, coordinating and implementing community engagement programming.

Jimmy Oliver is a Syracuse native and alumni of Henninger High School where he played baseball and football through to Cazenovia College and Lemoyne College. Jimmy worked at the Syracuse Boys & Girls Club 2002 to 2012 before moving onto senior positions at the Boys & Girls Clubs in Greater Lynchburg and Metro Richmond. He also served as senior recreation specialist for the Lynchburg Parks and Recreation Department from 2016 to 2017.

In 2018, Jimmy returned to Syracuse and was appointed Deputy Commissioner of Syracuse Parks, Recreation, and Youth Programs by Mayor Ben Walsh. There he oversaw youth and senior programming, recreation and athletics, and lead community outreach. He was named one of Central New York’s 40 under 40 in 2020 and sits on the board of directors for various charities in the region.

Larry Williams is the CEO of Syracuse Community Connections, which provides a network of human services to residents of predominately African American, low-income residents and neighborhoods in the City of Syracuse and across Onondaga county. He was born in Syracuse and has 25 years of educational leadership as a former administrator, teacher, youth development and programming and community advocacy. Williams was the Director of Community Initiatives for Syracuse Community Connections for 4 years prior to being appointed CEO.

Talina Jones is an advocate for families who have children with disabilities. She is the Chair of the NYS Early Intervention Coordinating Council, a trainer for the Early Intervention Partners Training Project and serves on the board of CNY NYCLU. Her master’s research centered on a black womanist understanding of disability and how that lens might impact the creation of future advocacy programs created for families of color.

Twiggy Billue is president of the Syracuse Chapter of the National Action Network, owner of the HOTEP Resource Center, long time Community Organizer, and advocate are for our most vulnerable—our children. Twiggy has been married for 34 years and has three children. She works at Jubilee Homes of Syracuse as the Workforce Development Coordinator and reside on Syracuse’s South Side since the early 1990s.

Billue is currently running for Commissioner of Education on the Syracuse City School Board. She strives to work toward racial equity, but she’s known for efforts to uplift children. In 2002, Billue received the Martin Luther King Jr. Unsung Hero Award from Syracuse University, given to those who “exemplify the spirit, life, and teachings of King, but who are not widely recognized for their effort.” She believes unity and diversity are one; they exist together. She constantly challenges people to “be more intentional than comfortable, to challenge ourselves to do the things no one else will” in order to achieve diversity.

Jessica Elliott is a Syracuse Native and currently serves as the Director of Programs for the Dunbar Association, Inc, which is the oldest organization in the city that focuses on providing resources to the African American community. Jessica has been an educator for over a decade, previously with the Syracuse City School District where she authored and taught a humanities-centered African American History Course for High School Students throughout the district; and currently at Syracuse University in the History Department. The Syracuse community is home to Jessica, and the space where her and her husband’s children have begun to shape their lives. The ultimate goal that she seeks to achieve is continue the work of those Black women and men who have come before her, ensuring that the young people of the COMMUNITY are both ready and able CREATE the brightest future they can imagine.

Yahkeef Davis is a data scientist, activist, and entrepreneur. He has been an organizer with BLM Syracuse for several years. During his time as an organizer with BLM Syracuse, he has seen first-hand the impact of the racism, discrimination, and police brutality that regularly occurs in Syracuse. Since last year, he and the rest of the coalition have been fighting for the Mayor’s administration to implement the People’s Agenda for Policing. One of their biggest wins was getting the common council to pass the Right to Know Act.