Right now, Amazon has a prominent banner on its homepage that reads: “Black lives matter: Amazon stands in solidarity with the Black community.” The company has also tweeted about its “solidarity with the Black community” in “the fight against systemic racism and injustice.”
— Amazon (@amazon) May 31, 2020
But as thousands take to the streets in a historic wave of action to defend Black lives against rampant and systemic police violence, Amazon has been using one of its charitable arms to help fund police foundations that purchase surveillance equipment and weaponry for police forces and offer networks of corporate and civic support that help prop up police power.
AmazonSmile is an Amazon website through which shoppers can purchase products, and the AmazonSmile Foundation then donates “0.5% of the purchase price of eligible products to the charitable organization” of the shopper’s choice. Through AmazonSmile, Amazon helps to fund police foundations across the U.S. — an arrangement actively promoted by these police foundations.
For example:
- The Los Angeles Police Foundation tweeted in December 2019: “Planning on shopping tomorrow for Cyber Monday? When you shop @AmazonSmile, Amazon will make a donation to Los Angeles Police Foundation,” with the hashtag #SupportLAPD
Planning on shopping tomorrow for Cyber Monday? When you shop @AmazonSmile, Amazon will make a donation to Los Angeles Police Foundation. #CyberMonday #SupportLAPD #amazonsmile https://t.co/kYvdaYiJoR
— LA Police Foundation (@LAPoliceFdtn) December 1, 2019
- The Chicago Police Foundation’s homepage currently promotes an AmazonSmile banner to accept donations. It reads: “Support Chicago Police Foundation. When you shop at amazon.smile.com, Amazon donates.”
- The Seattle Police Foundation grants funds for the Seattle Police Department in the area of “Police Service Enhancements – Cutting-edge and specialized equipment and technology.” The Seattle Police Foundation’s website also includes a link to donate through AmazonSmile.
- The San Diego Police Officers Association tweeted in July 2019: “Attention members, friends, families, and followers! Now, when you shop @amazonsmile, Amazon will make a donation to the San Diego Police Officers Association Foundation. Click the link to donate today!” The SDPOA says it “represents the more than 1,850 dedicated and professional sworn members of the #SDPD.”
- The Cleveland Police Foundation posted a call for donations through AmazonSmile on its website in November 2019.
- The National Police Foundation tweeted in November 2018: “If you are still finishing up your #BlackFriday shopping, or getting ready for #CyberMonday, you can help support the mission of the National Police Foundation to advance policing through innovation and science by shopping through #AmazonSmile.“
Amazon’s funding of police foundations comes amidst mounting calls from protesters to defund the police and spend municipal resources on community needs.
Moreover, over the last several years, Amazon has been exposed for myriad anti-worker and anti-BIPOC activities. These include firing their own workers for speaking out against hazardous working conditions in their warehouses which are disproportionately staffed by Black, Lantinx, and Asian workers, patenting invasive surveillance technologies to track their warehouse workforce’s every move, and selling white supremacist literature and propoganda, including The Turner Diaries, a foundational white supremacist text, on their popular retail website.
Amazon also has a long history of partnering with the police, including giving over 1300 departments access to data from their Ring cameras and marketing their Rekognition facial recognition software as a law enforcement surveillance tool. They also provide technical services to ICE and have been called ICE’s “invisible backbone” as the agency enforced Trump’s “no-tolerance” immigration policy.
But Amazon is doing more than just partnering with police: they are helping to fundraise for them as well.
Amazon cannot have it both ways: it cannot proclaim that Black Lives Matter while it continues to fund police foundations that purchase surveillance technology, weaponry, and other products that are used against Black lives and which help sustain police power and a lack of police accountability through civic and corporate backing. Amazon must break with police foundations and stop donating to them.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy