Yeah, I didn’t bother to mention it because it was unrelated to the BLM stuff, but it really sucks for them. Definitely a lot going wrong at once. And it sounds like there’s a pretty deep need where they’re at too.
Just to be clear about that, it wasn’t just this organization, lots of domestic violence shelters and support orgs across the country lost federal funding recently when Congress cut the budget for the Victims of Crime Act. Like, here’s another news story from South Carolina all about that same problem playing out there,
They were getting large donations from the police department, and the police department stopped donating because of their support for BLM.
It’s actually a bit more complicated than that. From the article,
Then, Jacob Blake was shot by police seven times in Kenosha, prompting the statewide coalition of advocacy agencies Embrace is a part of to signal their support for police reform and Embrace to release an anti-racism statement.
In response, the local law enforcement groups, which had been close working partners, pulled out of collaborative groups and the Sheriff of Barron County resigned from Embrace’s Board of Directors.
Katie Bement is the Executive Director of Embrace.
“He notified us that he would no longer support the organization or advocates for our services when survivors called 911 and he contacted other departments within our service area across county lines and told them to stop working with us too. And they did,” explained Bement.
They had been receiving $25,000 annually from the Barron County Department of Health and Human Services, but that was cut after Embrace released their statement.
“There were a lot of attempts to try to figure out, kind of, how to repair those relationships and get the funding returned,” explained Bement.
“We didn’t think that we could do this work without the criminal legal system, without being aligned with the criminal legal system,” she said.
She explained that Embrace and local law enforcement agencies had spent years developing collaborative programming that Embrace didn’t want to see crumble.
Some of the 14 law enforcement agencies in the area still refer survivors to Embrace, but that’s the extent of their relationships.
I think this is a symptom of people losing their sense of cause and effect over political talking points. A shelter rightfully speaks out against power, as it should, but because of culture war nonsense they get upset and start defunding important things. Then they don’t understand why it’s struggling financially and the community is worse off.
We’re also seeing similar things with libraries, where parents want to ban books for everyone because their “objectional content” is located in the adults section and their kid might be where they shouldn’t. The libraries get defunded, close, and then the conservatives get shocked that something important to the community is closing.
I’m surprised police were giving the shelter money to begin with.
40% of police officers self-report that they have used violence against their domestic partners within the last year. In the general population, it’s estimated that domestic violence occurs in about 10% of families.
I expect it’s not the 40% who are donating. Its the officers who aren’t pieces of shit. The ones who see their colleagues abusing their partners but don’t feel like they can do anything about it because of the “thin blue line”.
Actually, it was a county health department that pulled its funding in response to the pro-BLM statement and law enforcement outcry. Police departments had been participating in “collaborative programming” with this organization (not sure if that’s just trainings or something else) and stopped doing that.
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