Resources

Around a decade ago, Stop LAPD Spying developed a copwatch practice that we call Watch the Watchers. Copwatch refers to the practice of community members teaming up to observe and document police abuses, especially arrests and other violence. Watch the Watchers built on this practice with a focus on surveillance technologies and patterns. You can watch videos explaining our Watch the Watchers work at May Day actions in MacArthur park in 2015, where we exposed LAPD undercover surveillance, and in 2017, where LAPD officers tried to lie about spy technologies deployed to monitor the crowd.

This website is intended as a tool to empower community members engaged in copwatch and other countersurveillance practices. You can use it to identify officers who are causing harm in your community. The website’s ease of use also makes it a political statement, flipping the direction of surveillance against the state’s agents. Police have vast information about all of us at their fingertips, yet they move in secrecy.

Every year in the United States, police dogs injure thousands of people, biting and maiming bystanders, officers and people suspected of petty crimes. Dogs have served as instruments of violence in incidents dating back to the days of slavery, and as recently as the Black Lives Matter protests. At the same time, police departments love to show off their dogs—at parades or on Twitter, visiting classrooms or posing with a Girl Scout troop. Some K-9s even have their own adorable Instagram accounts.

In our year-long investigation with The Marshall Project, AL.com and the IndyStar, we identified and tracked individual cases, pulling data across the country to compile more than 150 severe incidents. We found that most bite victims were suspected of low-level, non-violent crimes. Almost none of them were armed. The Marshall Project’s nationwide tracker allows readers to sort incidents by state, read descriptions of the attacks and view videos of some of them.

As access to data about policing has become the subject of increased advocacy and police data has become increasingly available, a growing cottage industry has arisen around collecting, analyzing, and publicizing information about policing. Unfortunately, these efforts are often disconnected from organizing aimed at effecting change by reducing and eliminating police profiling, violence and criminalization.

A convening was held with the overall objective to discuss the potential benefits and harms of police data collection and dissemination, and to surface and develop best practices in an accountable and reciprocal relationship with individuals and communities directly targeted by policing and the people and organizations representing and working directly with them. This report draws on the rich discussion of these questions to make a series of recommendations for participants, for the field, and for philanthropic partners.

An investigation by The Marshall Project and The Institute for Public Service Reporting at the University of Memphis found incidents of aggressive policing throughout the 1,900-member force. A review of more than 200 arrest reports from spring of last year shows that rank-and-file officers, as well as Scorpion members, used overzealous methods in their encounters. Among them: stopping a vehicle because part of its temporary tag was “flapping in the wind,” chasing a man for “appearing to back away” as they approached, and detaining someone after he warned people in his neighborhood that plainclothes police were conducting an investigation. The department’s own data indicates broad use of aggressive tactics.

The NYPD Misconduct Complaint Database, which the NYCLU obtained through Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests, is a repository of complaints made by the public on record at the CCRB. These complaints span two distinct periods: the time since the CCRB started operating as an independent city agency outside the NYPD in 1994 and the prior period when the CCRB operated within the NYPD. The database includes 279,644 unique complaint records involving 102,121 incidents and 48,757 active or former NYPD officers.

The Muslim Abolitionist Futures National Network is releasing this public statement in solidarity with #StopCopCity protestors and joins organizational demands to drop domestic terrorism charges against the Defend the Atlanta Forest Protestors. Since December, 42 protestors have been charged with domestic terrorism, a felony that carries up to 35 years in prison. These terrorism enhancements are meant to punish #StopCopCity forest defenders and repress resistance movements.

This webpage is a centralized hub for resources related to Gender-Based Violence (GBV) from organizations across British Columbia, as well as key national and international research. Use the dropdown menu to search for specific criminalization and GBV resources.

This report from the frontlines chronicles ongoing victories in efforts to reduce police budgets, increase investment in meeting community needs and building community-based institutions, and grow movements to divest from the violence of policing. Summarizing lessons learned over the past two years, it calls on movements and philanthropic organizations to make deep and long-term investments in organizing toward the world our communities deserve.

Over the past few years, there has been growing attention to the violence of policing and obstacles to police accountability and community safety that does not rely on police. With this heightened attention, the role and influence of police unions/fraternal organizations/associations has entered the spotlight, sparking discussions and debate over how to challenge obstacles posed by police union power.1 As calls grow to address police union power, so too does apprehension around targeting what many assume functions as a typical labor union. Some caution that critiques of police unions is a slippery slope that can only lead to negative consequences for all public sector unions, not just those for police unions.