Mutual Aid and Police Accountability with Tha Hood Squad

From a chicken coop providing omelet breakfasts to underserved communities, to a network of farms stretching from Oakland to East Palo Alto, to a night watch program aimed at keeping the police accountable and protecting marginalized communities from police violence, to providing grassroots disaster relief during the most recent storms in the Bay Area — The Hood Squad seems to do it all.

In this episode, we've brought on JT, Savage, and Nay from The Hood Squad, a mutual aid and police accountability organization based out of the Bay Area. Through their six principles of peace, love, harmony, balance, unity, and justice, the Hood Squad aims to shift the systematic oppression which has targeted the disenfranchised communities of the world.

We discuss their origins as a grassroots art and media collective, their expansion into a very broad array of mutual aid work including police patrols or "night shifts" and disaster relief work, and how the Hood Squad reinvests into their community with farming and training for self-sufficiency, self-awareness, and communal responsibility.

Follow Tha Hood Squad on Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube. And support their work at thahoodsquad.com

Episode credits:

• Host, producer, and editor: Robert Raymond
• Presenter and exectuvie producer: Tom Llewellyn
• Theme Music: "Meet you on the other side" by Cultivate Beats

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The Response is a podcast series from Shareable.net exploring how communities are building collective resilience in the wake of disasters