What does it mean to read LA in the frame of the “Americas”, and to understand its police violence in the context of a hemispheric imperialist project of domination? Inversely, how can we understand abolitionism as a political project that is continental, local and circulating? We talk about this in this special episode from Traffic in the Americas about police violence and abolitionist resistance in Los Angeles (California) with Hamid Khan from the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and Ananya Roy from the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. It was made in collaboration with the Laboratorio de Narrativas Urbanas (LABNA) and Sergio Montero. Hosted by Isabel Peñaranda Currie.
This episode also features an original composition and performance by FreeSoul Smith for Sur-Urbano, and which was produced by Upeksha - Voices of Resilience. Smith is part of the Esquina Redonda, an amazing group that brings together people displaced by the Bronx police operation in Bogotá, and which also participated in the Traffic in the Americas conference.

Hamid explains the history and work of @stoplapdspying and their recent report, “Automating Banishment”, which studies the relationship of “data-driven policing” to real estate development and settler colonialism. It "belongs to the community, produced through collective study and grassroots self-defense". You can read the full report here.
Ananya spoke about her work on  “Racial banishment’, which  “emphasizes state-instituted violence against racialised bodies and communities”, shifting  attention from displacement to the dispossession of personhood underpinning racial capitalism. She writes that “The antonym of racial banishment is, as the black radical tradition insists, freedom. These “freedom dreams” ([…] animate urban struggles around the world.” We end by talking about how abolitionist ideas participate in kinds of traffic in the Americas. You can find one of her articles on Racial Banishment here.

This conversation arose within the framework of "Traffic in the Americas," a transnational initiative that sought to promote collaborations between academics and activists to theorize how different types of traffic (of people, objects, ideas) shape the cities of the Americas. It was organized by: Kevin O'Neill of the University of Toronto, Austin Zeiderman of LSE , Ananya Roy of UCLA and Sergio Montero of the Los Andes University thanks to funding from The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 

Hamid Khan is an organizer with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. He was the founder and former Executive Director of South Asian Network (1990-2010), and serves on the board of Political Research Associates, an organization that seeks to advance progressive thinking and action by providing research-based information, analysis, and referrals.
The mission of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition is to build community-based power to dismantle police surveillance, spying, and infiltration programs. The coalition utilizes multiple campaigns to advance an innovative organizing model that is Los Angeles-based but has implications regionally, nationally, and internationally
Founding Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography and The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy.