Black Lives Matter Tuscon
Black Lives Matter Tucson (BLM Tucson) is a Tucson-based group that promotes and is associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, which is ostensibly seeking to reform police conduct, especially as it concerns the use of force against African American suspects and civilians. The movement has been criticized for appearing to tolerate violent demonstrations carried out in its name, for stoking racial tensions, and for creating an unsafe environment for police officers. 1 2 3 4
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The organization stated on its website that the group wanted to “break free from the narrative” being spread by “Black Leaders” who “incessantly proclaimed that ‘all lives matter,’” for according to BLM Tucson the message of “all lives matter” denies the “collective lived truth” that “no lives can matter” until “Black lives matter.” Black Lives Matter Tucson’s website had a page in 2021 titled “Defund,” accessed via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which stated that the organization supported “defunding law enforcement in order to fund Black futures.” 5 6
BLM Tucson also stated on its website that the group is led by a “revolutionary belief that the future is unapologetically Black, femme facing, and queer.” 5
Background
Black Lives Matter Tucson (BLM Tucson) is a Tucson-based group that promotes and is associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, which is ostensibly seeking to reform police conduct, especially as it concerns the use of force against African-American suspects and civilians. The movement has been criticized for appearing to tolerate violent demonstrations carried out in its name, for stoking racial tensions, and for creating an unsafe environment for police. 1 2 3 4
According to the organization’s now-defunct website in 2021, found via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, BLM Tucson was founded in 2014 and began as a “group of radical Black folx” that were “inspired and empowered to demand” an end to what the organization claimed was “state sanctioned violence” against the African American community. 5
The organization stated on its website that the group wanted to “break free from the narrative” being spread by “Black Leaders” who “incessantly proclaimed that ‘all lives matter,’” for according to BLM Tucson the message of “all lives matter” denied the “collective lived truth” that “no lives can matter” until “Black lives matter.” 5
BLM Tucson also stated on its website that the group is led by a “revolutionary belief that the future is unapologetically Black, femme facing, and queer.” 5
Defund The Police
Black Lives Matter Tucson’s website had a page in 2021 titled “Defund,” accessed via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which stated that the organization believed in “defunding law enforcement in order to fund Black futures.” According to BLM Tucson, the Tucson Police Department’s aviation and canine unit budgets could have provided funding for programs that included “rent assistance, mental health therapists (independent from the police), and transportation vouchers” for African Americans. 6
BLM Tucson also demanded that the Tucson City Council show “commitment to racial equity” by investing tax dollars into the area’s “most marginalized communities” rather than the police department, which, according to BLM Tucson, “solely exists to criminalize and punish.” 6
People
Tiera Rainey is a former organizer for Black Lives Matter Tucson. 7 Rainey was a research assistant at the United States Institute of Peace, an institution formed by Congress that partners with government and civil society organizations to prevent conflict abroad, in 2013. 8 9
She was also a treatment industrial complex program coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee from May 2018 until July 2020. The American Friends Service Committee is a Quaker-related organization that supports left-of-center policies on immigration, criminal justice, energy, and economic issues. 8