Cat Brooks Is Now a Regular Contributor for the San Francisco Chronicle

Cat Brooks published an opinion piece on June 21 in the San Francisco Chronicle mourning the loss of life of DaShawn Rhodes at Lake Merritt on Juneteenth  and making the case that more police (of which there was plenty that day) won’t keep us safe but intervention and investment will

Last week she wrote about how Oakland didn’t actually defund the police and the opportunity Oakland now has to roll up its sleeves and create a city to be proud of where there’s true public safety without an overreliance on policing.

Cat recently came to an arrangement with the Editorial team where she will be a regular contributor to the opinion pages at the Chronicle. 

Cat follows in the footsteps of Delilah Beasley, a Black woman who also settled in West Oakland, and became the first Black woman to write a regular column for a major American newspaper in 1923. Like Delilah, Cat plans to amplify Black voices and ensure Black perspectives are featured in the opinion pages of the San Francisco chronicle.

“I plan to use this platform to continue lifting up Black and other marginalized voices; shining  a light on stories that don’t always get the center stage. My job as an artivist is to harness the voices and perspectives of the streets into tangible alternatives to militarized police departments, a violent carceral state and the harmful impacts of systemic racism.” said Cat Brooks. 

Cat Brooks Bio: Cat Brooks is an award winning actress and playwright.  In her role as an artivist, she is also the KPFA co-host of UpFront and resident playwright and actress with The Lower Bottom Playaz in Oakland and 3 Girls Theater in San Francisco.  As an organizer, , she played a central role in the struggle for justice for Oscar Grant, and spent the last decade working with impacted communities and families to rapidly respond to police violence and radically transform the ways our communities are policed and incarcerated. She is the co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP) and the Executive Director of The Justice Teams Network. Cat was also the runner-up in Oakland’s 2018 mayoral election, facing incumbent Libby Schaaf.