Our Pledge of Support
The Postvention Alliance supports Grand Valley BIPOC youth advocates in their demands for local change. We stand with our local youth advocates and we support their community solutions. Please see their full comments to the Grand Junction City Council on June 3, 2020.
Their testimonies of ongoing racially and minority motivated hatred - much of it experienced in our local schools, from Kindergarten through University - can not be ignored. Experiences such as these cause suicide attempts and suicide deaths in our community and communities across the country.
Our school district has sent a letter of support, our city council has committed to creating a racial justice conversation, and here is our local police chief’s letter of support as well. We appreciate the fact that such a high number of his crew are CIT trained.
We value first-person lived-experience as the expert voice to lead change, which is why we follow Kelechi Ubozoh and Keris Myrick for direction in supporting black suicide survivor experiences. We are 100% survivor informed, survivor driven, and survivor led in our public actions. We want to see an immediate end to armed transport for all suicide crisis and mental health purposes.
During this time of racial healing and reconciliation, we must keep in mind that people in a mental health crisis are 16x more likely to be killed by police than the general population. Being black increases the risk exponentially.
Most people are unaware that a police vehicle is the usual mode of crisis transportation during suicide and mental health crises. Most are also unaware that people who are suffering suicidality are very rarely a danger to others. The completely false notion that people with mental illness are dangerous is a result of historic bigotry and scapegoating by the media. If you’re interested in community led scholarship on the topic, The Crisis of Black Youth Suicide in America is the place to begin.
So, please join us in demanding an immediate end to armed transport for citizens experiencing psychiatric emeregencies. The barbaric practice is traumatizing and life threatening in the immediate, and may well be why suicide risk is elevated after a hospital stay.
To be clear, it is inappropriate to be angry at the police for the practice because we, as a society, invented the practice of policing people with suicidality, and have allowed it to continue. Our whole society is at fault for this specific systemic abuse of suffering people and we are all responsible for making it stop.
Our alliance is actively anti-racist, anti-profiling, and anti-surveillance in suicide postvention and suicide prevention research, funding, and care practices. In addition to supporting our local youth movement, please join us and Western Colorado Alliance in supporting Colorado SB20-217 to Enhance Law Enforcement Integrity.
Though we are roughly reflective of our Western Colorado demographics, we are still lacking in some areas. We desire more youth, disenfranchised, and underserved voices to guide our work. We desire more collaborations such as those we already enjoy with the Positive Women’s Network and the Western Colorado Writer’s Forum.
If you are reading this and you don’t know how to respond to the crisis, here is a link to anti-racism resources.
During this time and in times to come, we wish you peace.