Resources

This guide from the office of Philadelphia Councilmember Helen Gym contains opportunities to volunteer your labor, donate to a good cause, and get connected with support during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Durham Beyond Policing Coalition developed this proposal because the draft budget for the City of Durham for 2019-20 contained a request from the DPD for 72 additional full time (FTE) officers over three years, with the first year’s cost given as $1,729,573 for an initial 25 new officers. After considerable study, we have found the rationale for DPD’s budget request is incomplete and outdated, and we object to the premise that more officers will make the people of Durham safer. This proposal offers what we feel is a more holistic approach to some of the same issues and opportunities.

An article by Stop LAPD Spying and Coalition and Free Radicals on the dangers of PredPol, a predictive policing technology, and its context in the COVID-19 pandemic.

This policy paper outlines general principles that should guide the consideration of any proposal for technology-assisted contact-tracing, or TACT. This document does not address fine-grained details, either technical or legal, but sets out principles to help evaluate any TACT proposal. Given the trans-jurisdictional nature of many of these schemes, specific legal protections may take different forms in different contexts. But architectural and design principles will have an impact anywhere such a system is deployed.

In the fight against COVID-19, one of our most powerful weapons is manual contact-tracing, the time-consuming process of interviewing patients to find who they might have exposed to the virus. Alarmingly, new technological alternatives to manual contact tracing threaten to distract from these public health efforts, creating products that likely won’t improve public health, but which will pose an existential threat to the public’s privacy. If Apple and Google’s Bluetooth method goes forward, it’s also clear that existing legal protections are insufficient. Under existing laws, the use of Bluetooth proximity detection will just become another deeply invasive tool in federal, state, and local governments’ arsenal of surveillance technology.

A radical practice is suddenly getting mainstream attention. Will it change how we help one another? This article gives examples of mutual aid practices happening during the COVID-19 crisis, the history of mutual aid, and the potential future of the practice as we move forward.

This resource is a living document as part of an ongoing series in response to COVID-19. This crisis is not an isolated moment in time. Policing, capitalism, and public health in the US have always been a crisis, and everything we’re fighting for right now is what we’ve long demanded.

This report examines in detail the experience of working-class immigrant, Black and Brown New Yorkers during this crisis. Based on a survey of 244 primarily Latinx immigrants across New York City, Long Island, and Westchester, one third of whom are undocumented, it provides striking findings related to the pandemic’s toll on community members’ health, income and work, housing insecurity, and education.

A toolkit on the “Addressing Law Enforcement Violence as a Public Health Issue” policy statement made in 2018 by the American Public Health Association (APHA) that shares ideas about the action steps, organizing talking points, and a worksheet for implementing the APHA statement where you are.