Black Lives Matter activists are getting serious about pushing issues of criminal justice reform and racial injustice into the public debate.
A group of activists involved in the movement on Friday launched the website Campaign Zero, which includes a comprehensive list of policy demands and a system to track the positions of candidates running for president.
The policy demands came on the heels of a recent meeting between Hillary Clinton and activists in Keene, N.H. In the Aug. 11 meeting, Clinton challenged activists linked to the Black Lives Matter movement to help her come up with a "specific vision and plan"
"That’s what I’m trying to put together in a way that I can explain it, and I can sell it — because in politics, if you can’t explain it and you can’t sell it, it stays on the shelf."
The website unveiled today seems to move closer to that goal. It lists the specific policy proposal of ending police violence in America.
While activists affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement have already been a force on the campaign trail, disrupting events by Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and Republican Jeb Bush, and releasing video from the closed-door meeting with Hillary Clinton, the Campaign Zero website adds an element of organization to the modern-day civil rights push and inserts it firmly into the bloodstream of the 2016 presidential campaign.
"The next President needs to tell the truth about police violence and urgently enact a comprehensive agenda to address it," the activists write on the website, which made its debut today.
While not officially a political platform for the Black Lives Matter movement, the activists at the heart of it -- the cofounders of We the Protesters -- are well known activists with ties to the movement.
The website includes a 'candidate tracking document,' which tallies presidential candidates positions on issues like ending pro-profit policing, limiting the use of police force and the use of body cameras.
The campaign, for example, calls for an end for for-profit policing, saying that "police should be working to keep people safe, not contributing to a system that profits from stopping, searching, ticketing, arresting and incarcerating people." It also calls for an end to undue police force, including establishing standards and reporting of police use of deadly force and strengthening local police departments’ use of force policies.
"We can live in an America where the police do not kill people," the website says. "Police in England, Germany, Australia, Japan, and even cities like Newark, NJ, and Richmond, CA, demonstrate that public safety can be ensured without killing civilians. By implementing the right policy changes, we can end police killings and other forms of police violence in the United States."
Campaign Zero was informed by the demands of protestors nationwide, research, & input from many folks. Check it out http://t.co/zswMQP8mXj— deray mckesson (@deray) August 21, 2015
Brittany Packet, one of the activists involved in Campaign Zero told The Guardian in an interview, that America was "finally waking up to this very necessary and critical conversation about race, equity and preserving the life and dignity of all citizens."