The In Our Names Network is a national network of organizations, campaigns and individuals working to end police violence against Black women, girls, trans and gender nonconforming people. We formed in 2016 during a Network Gathering at the Allied Media Conference. Since then we have been creating, gathering, and sharing resources and calls for action for individuals, families, and communities responding to and demanding justice in cases of police violence against Black women, girls, trans and gender nonconforming folks through our website and Facebook page.
In 2019 founding and new network members reconvened at the historic Highlander Center in Tennessee to assess our individual and collective work over the past three years, and the broader state of organizing and movements addressing police violence against Black women, girls, trans and gender nonconforming people.
As we have continued to uplift and demand justice in individual instances of police violence against Black women, girls, trans and gender nonconforming people, the need to create alternate visions and structures of safety premised on community care, mutual responsibility and accountability beyond police has become more and more apparent. We can no longer solely pursue visibility of our experiences of policing, reforms that fail to reduce the role of police in the lives of Black women, trans and GNC people, or strategies that seek justice and accountability from systems explicitly created to police, regulate, control and punish our bodies and restrict our autonomy and self-determination. At the same time, we need to continue to document the ways in which our bodies are violated by police in order to demand justice for our sisters and siblings and to make the case for removing police from our schools, institutions, and communities and building alternatives that will genuinely produce safety for all of us.
We left the Highlander Center refreshed, replenished, and recommitted to building our network, and to four main areas of work:
- documenting sexual violence by law enforcement officers stationed in and around schools through a national participatory research project
- building responses to unmet mental health needs beyond police
- developing strategies for police accountability beyond prosecution
- building safety for Black trans women and GNC people
Through these collaborative projects, In Our Names network is engaged in visionary organizing aimed at dismantling systems of policing as they operate on Black women, trans and gender nonconforming people's bodies and life chances, and build new ways of preventing, interrupting, and ending gender-based violence so that all Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people can not only survive but thrive free from all forms of violence.
The In Our Names Network continues to raise visibility and promote organizing strategies centering the lives, stories and resistance of Black women, girls, trans and gender nonconforming people targeted by the violence of policing through the Allied Media Project's Speakers' Bureau.