JUSTICE FOR JAYSON, JUSTICE FOR ALL BLACK AND BROWN YOUTH

CW: police brutality, gun violence, death

Jayson Negron would have turned 22 on September 16. He was 15 years old when police officer James Boulay took his life.

The Justice4Jayson collective was created through the love, labor, anger, and grief of Jayson’s community including his mother, sister, and brother. The collective continues to fight for Jayson and other brutalized Black and Brown youth, starting an “abolition fund” (see Citations) for bail support, mutual aid for families and those impacted by police violence, mutual aid for organizers, direct action work, legal defense funding for those criminalized by police, and venues for events and conferences and community spaces for abolition.

In the collective’s powerful words: “Our campaigns seek to force police out of schools, end gang policing initiatives that target and incarcerate our youth, and move funding away from policing and incarceration towards community needs, education, and health. Since being trained by Critical Resistance last year, we have been doing statewide abolitionist education to change the standard of thinking around policing and incarceration in our state and our collective ability to imagine and carry out resistance and revolution. We hope to transform who has access to this knowledge and who has the power to organize; for this upcoming year, we will be working to grow a youth-led movement to defund and dismantle policing in Bridgeport.

Within our community, because we do not rely on police and seek to build community systems of care beyond the state, we do not call police and are each other's first responders in times of need and crisis.”