One San Pedro Activist’s Road To Reimagining Safety

Random Lengths News, in June, covered the film Reimagining Safety, directed by Matthew Solomon, which screened at the San Pedro International Film Festival or SPIFF in February. Put candidly, Reimagining Safety explores — and answers — with unflinching honesty what safety can look like in American society.

After the screening, the audience heard from a panel of speakers who appeared in the film. One of those is San Pedro-based, licensed clinical social worker, therapist and restorative justice practitioner Jose Gutierrez. Because he lives locally, RLN gathered his input for the story. This led to the discovery that Gutierrez, through work and activism, is doing a lot of good work. 

Gutierrez is a member of the national grassroots organization Critical Resistance or CR whose mission is to build an international movement to end the prison industrial complex. Gutierrez’s activism and work focuses on different communities including those who are incarcerated and people of color. Further, through CR, Gutierrez is joining forces with the activists to stop “Cop City” in Atlanta, Georgia. More on that later.

Gutierrez is well experienced on the subject of safety and restorative justice (which seeks to examine the impact of a crime, and determine how to repair harm to the victim, while holding the person who caused it accountable for their actions). Initially, he worked with arrested youth who entered a diversion program to expunge an arrest from their record. To do this, the youth had to attend therapy with Gutierrez. Later, he worked at LA Child Guidance Clinic, now called Wellnest. He worked with foster and homeless youth to house them, to provide support to attend college, to get a job and he provided therapy. He has worked with almost every demographic with many different diagnoses; schizophrenia, bipolar, anxiety, depression and PTSD.

Gutierrez spoke to RLN about safety, the perceptions of it that people carry and one of his main goals as a social worker — to support people of color to get their license in social work.

He recently took on a new role as clinical supervisor for a small group practice, which he said he’s more suited to, rather than the huge nonprofits where he worked for nearly a decade. Gutierrez plans to support clinicians and interns who are unlicensed to learn the profession and gain professional development to become experts in their own specialties, and then become licensed. The profession of social work opened up many doors for Gutierrez. He said people of color, especially, should challenge themselves to get a license. 

“In the profession, they say start where the client is at,” Gutierrez said. “That applies to every human being. If you help one person out, that adds up. You’re helping a community out.”       

Perceptions of Safety
Gutierrez posited, oftentimes people live in their head. His position is to not try to change someone’s mind who has an opinion about safety based on feelings and experiences. Rather, he said, if someone is thinking outside of themself, they may wonder what’s going on with this person living on the street? Or those teenagers skateboarding at the park? What’s going on with my local politicians? 

“People have had perceptions on that for years and decades,” said Gutierrez. “I think in a holistic way and to address safety in a holistic way. It’s about not making assumptions. It’s another way of looking at it. We look at safety as [more than] crime. [I start] with, do you think your community has what it needs to thrive?” 

Gutierrez explained that this is the alternative viewpoint of safety. If we assume that people believe crime has risen, Gutierrez guarantees that it’s still not as high as it was 20 years ago. But more importantly, he noted, if crime has gone up, why? Gutierrez questions why people believe crime has risen, and then, why do they think “now we have to do something reactionary, full force, get this crime out of here,” he said. 

“I [wonder], what disposes people to want to rob [the] cafe, to want to steal from their neighbors, or break into cars,” Gutierrez said. “Does the community have enough resources? I like to think of the why and what is the precursor to the crime? And now, we start to think in a holistic way.” 

Gutierrez said if we have more jobs available to people that are stealing and committing crime, we have jobs for everyone, like the teenager who likes to paint graffiti. It makes the whole community better when we address and make things better for the marginalized, for the folks that have to resort to crime. 

Questions For Communities
In his first discussion with RLN, Gutierrez put forward different questions that communities need to consider: What world do we want to live in? What does safety mean? How are we going to repair harm when it happens? When we make mistakes or we harm someone, how are we going to hold each other accountable?

Everyone is a stakeholder in this discussion. Gutierrez said we need ideas and we need people to be involved and included on how we’re going to make communities safe. One of those conversations is connected to prisons. Gutierrez, through Critical Resistance, is working on a prison closure campaign. CR, along with other activist organizations, has pushed California legislators to shut down 10 prisons by 2025. 

Gutierrez noted three California prisons that have been closed have been publicized: Deuel Vocational Institution or DVI near Tracy California which was deactivated Sept. 30, 2021; California Correctional Center or CCC in Susanville closed earlier this year (along with yards at six other prisons). And in December 2022, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation or CDCR announced the planned closure of Chuckawalla Valley State Prison by March of 2025.

“That was because of Critical Resistance and many other organizations in Southern California,” he said. “The community came out to rally at the Capitol [and] a lot of work was done.”

LA’s chapter of Critical Resistance is going full force into a part of the prison closure campaign, which it likes to address as the Norco strategy. (As of July, 2022, CRC was incarcerating people at 107.2% of its design capacity, with 2,322 occupants). The plan is to go to Norco, to the California Rehabilitation Center or CRC, in what it calls parking lot outreach days on Aug. 26. 

“We’re going to go out into the parking lot of CRC [to] speak with folks who are visiting their loved ones,” Gutierrez said. “We’re canvassing in one place and asking them questions about what type of care their loved ones are getting while they’re locked up in prison. What is lacking? What’s needed? How long their loved ones have been imprisoned. [If] they’re trying to get legal assistance to support them in their release. And most importantly, we’re going to advise them about our prison closure campaign and hopefully get them to start becoming more involved becoming volunteers.”

Stop Cop City
Stop Cop City — or Defend Atlanta Forest is a decentralized movement whose goal is to stop construction of the Atlanta Public Safety (Police) Training Center by the Atlanta Police Foundation and the City of Atlanta. The site is known for the police killing of 26-year-old protester Manuel Esteban Paez Terán or Tortuguita, Jan. 18, 2023, while his hands were raised in the air, during a raid on the occupied encampment. 

The LA chapter of CR is taking on this issue. It aims to get an initiative on the ballot in Atlanta to support the work to stop “Cop City.” To make that happen, they need 80,000 signatures from Atlanta residents. Critical Resistance has decided to support the work of Stop Cop City and is sending a delegation of people to assist them in canvassing, knocking on doors and getting signatures. Gutierrez, agreeing to help, just flew to Atlanta last week to support that work. 

“I’m excited,” Gutierrez said. “This is a powerful thing for us to align with that struggle.

Gutierrez was asked to go and canvas and return with ideas on what did and didn’t work. He’ll also gather useful information for CR’s strategy with the prison closure campaign at Norco to make it more beneficial to CR and to people who get involved with the campaign.

“I’m very thankful for the staff at Critical Resistance that has been working on this process to get people to join in a strategic and meaningful way, with purpose,” Gutierrez said. “I would encourage, if people want to start getting involved, to become volunteers and often, volunteers end up becoming members once they get to see what we’re all about.”

Go to www.criticalresistance.org and click on the LA chapter to get more information. 

Reimagining Safety’s First Online Screening, hosted by The ReMember Institute.
Time: 10 a.m., Sept. 17
Cost: Free
Details: https://tinyurl.com/remember-institute-screeening

Venue: Online

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