Dear Pacific NorthWest friends and supporters,
As 2024 drew to a close, Critical Resistance reflected on our daunting conditions ahead and why prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition is needed to resist white supremacy and fight fascism. We know we are living through an incredibly frightening and demoralizing time. We also know this is not the time to resign ourselves to a terrifying new reality—this is the time to resist oppression and take good care of one another.
As you know, CR Portland (CRPDX) has spent the last few years since our 2020 Care Not Cops campaign victory rebuilding membership and seeding the ground for another anti-policing campaign. We are excited to invite you all to be in community with us this year as we host more political education events for PIC abolition and mobilize our communities to pressure the city to reallocate budget funds away from policing and into addressing and fulfilling people’s basic needs.
As Portland currently undergoes its newest budget cycle,
we want to share a couple things:
The city’s Proposed Budget will be released in late February.
This is a key moment for the work ahead: this proposed budget is what gets discussed, questioned, and picked apart before the city “adopts” the budget (makes it official) in late June. The mayor creates the proposed budget after putting together all the requested budgets from each bureau. Then the city council will amend, vote and approve the budget. We will need all hands on deck for this period between the “Proposed” and “Approved” budget to ensure our city resources the life-affirming infrastructure all of our communities need to thrive! This is our chance to make our voices heard and show our decision makers what we demand our city to prioritize.
We will have more updates around the budget, our new campaign development and community education opportunities for PIC abolition in the coming months.
For now, we simply ask that you take care of yourselves and each other, and please spread the word that CRPDX is slowly but steadily on the move again to resist policing. We will need to be well resourced, as individuals and as a collective, as we head into the next four years. Here are four tips to get you started:
1.) Remember that attention is currency. Consider taking a break from doomscrolling to reorient your attention to local resistance efforts when you can. We suggest this video of CR members speaking at last month’s Reclaim MLK Day March as a digital palate cleanser.
2.) Come to one of our monthly Prisoner Mail nights. Every fourth Wednesday at 6pm PT, volunteers gather virtually to correspond with hundreds of people inside prisons, jails, and detention centers while building strong political relationships with people inside. Next mail night is Wednesday, February 26. And if you have friends, family, comrades or loved ones who are locked up in jails or detention center, tell them to write to CR or call our prisoner solidarity phone line and connect them to abolitionist movement work through CR’s Prisoner Solidarity Mail Program.
3.) Help us connect with potential movement partners. We are always looking to build relationships with local organizers who share our goal of abolishing the PIC in favor of community-based, community-led solutions to safety and harm reduction. If you know a potential ally in our fight to reduce the 2025 police budget, please reach out to us at crpdx@criticalresistance.org.
4.) Donate what you can to CR. We are majority grassroots-funded and gifts from individual donors, no matter the size, keep us thriving. You can specifically become a monthly sustainer of the CRPDX chapter or give to the organization nationally.
Thank you for reading, sharing and supporting the work of Critical Resistance Portland. We hope to see you soon!
Yours in abolitionist community,
-CRPDX