Reifschneider said he tries to think about a moment when he helped someone, even if it's something mundane like pulling up behind a driver who ran out of gas. He's encouraged his fellow police officers to also reflect on a good deed.
Most for-profit companies still confine nonprofit relationships to corporate philanthropy. Donations flow through foundations, annual reports highlight community contributions, and nonprofit engagement is framed as evidence of corporate responsibility.
The labor of this kind of organizing was invisible and deeply exhausting. In a precarious workplace, where a so-called 'performance review' could amount to job loss, organizing meant building a bridge while standing on it.
Losing staff could be detrimental to the projects we worked on, and there was a growing dissatisfaction with how meetings were run. These mostly one-sided discussions left the quieter half of us feeling pushed aside, like our thoughts didn't matter much. If things stayed this way, I worried the good people on our team would start quitting one by one.
"Are you okay?" These were Alex Pretti's last words, said to a woman after ICE agents had tackled and pepper-sprayed her. Videos from bystanders show Pretti holding up a phone, attempting to document what was happening before he himself was pepper-sprayed, wrestled to the ground, and killed by those officers. He lost his life not for committing violence, but for documenting it, and stepping in to protect someone facing it.
The change in the administration's tactics in Minneapolis is not a retreat. Instead, they are regrouping and planning another mode of attack, with the hopes that their repression might be met with resistance that is easier to control and contain. People who garner their relevancy and power through the dehumanization and oppression of others will do whatever it takes to cling to their soulless sense of self.