I am your Witness is an effort to provide people with privilege (white males like me), an opportunity to interface and intervene with people victimized by systemic police misconduct.
Unlike the large incidences that lead to headlines and hearings, the small instances of racial profiling and harassment are difficult to resist. It’s these small moments that combine to form systemic oppression.
The card is an effort to give people like me more capacity to make ourselves available to victims by giving all of us a single point of contact to connect via phone and the web. The card serves as an introduction to this service, with brief information about the safety and the rights of both the victim and the observer.
To become truly useful and transformative, the service would need the administrative backing of a large human service or legal organization. It would also need to become common knowledge — exchanging the card itself during an incident would usually impossible.