Resources

Chicagoans deserve real community safety—a city in which every child has a fair opportunity to grow up and achieve their full potential and every resident has the resources they need to thrive. Communities that invest in their people are safe communities. Parents in towns with well-funded public schools, public parks and libraries with a lot of youth programs, and strong public health infrastructure don’t fear for their kids’ lives every time they let them out of the house. Cities with good jobs, free public transit, and free child care give residents the opportunity to provide for their families. Real community safety comes from addressing the underlying issues that lead to crime and violence. The proposals in this report would generate $12 billion in new revenue and savings that we could invest in our people and neighborhoods.

Youth arrests and incarceration increased in the closing decades of the 20th century but have fallen sharply since that time. Public opinion often lags behind these realities, wrongly assuming both that crime is perpetually increasing and that youth offending is routinely violent. In fact, youth offending is predominantly low-level, and the 21st century has seen significant declines in youth arrests and incarceration. Between 2000 and 2020, the number of youth held in juvenile justice facilities fell from 109,000 to 25,000—a 77% decline.

As The Sentencing Project marks 50 years since the era of mass incarceration began, states working to end this overly punitive era can learn important lessons from both the rise and then the sustained fall in youth arrests and placements.

It’s been four years since a Phoenix police officer killed Jacob Harris. Records obtained by The Appeal show officials have made inconsistent or false statements about the night police killed him. As Harris’s friends grow up behind bars, his father won’t stop until he gets justice for his son.

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.

The questions in this document provide a guide to analyze whether proposed reforms to family policing further entrench the family policing system or move us closer to abolition of family policing. The questions we ask are a reflection of the world we want to build—one without family policing and one where children are safer.

Informants are the foot soldiers in the government’s war on drugs. By some estimates, up to 80% of all drug cases in America involve them, often in active roles. For police departments facing budget woes, untrained informants provide an inexpensive way to outsource the work of undercover officers. “The system makes it cheap and easy to use informants, as opposed to other, less risky but more cumbersome approaches,” says Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a leading expert on informants. “There are fewer procedures in place and fewer institutional checks on their use.” Often, deploying informants involves no paperwork and no institutional oversight, let alone lawyers, judges, or public scrutiny; their use is necessarily shrouded in secrecy.

Every day, offenders are sent out to perform high-risk police operations with few legal protections. Some are juveniles, occasionally as young as 14 or 15. Some operate through the haze of addiction; others are enrolled in state-mandated treatment programs that prohibit their association with illegal drugs of any kind. Many have been given false assurances by the police, used without regard for their safety, and treated as disposable pawns of the criminal-justice system.

In collaboration with Rutgers Graduate School of Education and the Samuel Dewitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity & Justice, this report highlights the disproportionate arrests of Black and Latinx youth by the Pomona Police Department (PPD). Our goal is to center the malpractices of a police department that does not receive the same attention as a large metropolitan police department yet suffers from similar systemic issues of racial injustice and police brutality. In response to the question “Where is justice needed most?” justice is needed most for Black and Latinx youth in Pomona, California. We honor the work of youth, parents, and community activists, as well as a social action nonprofit organization, Gente Organizada, who together have demanded accountability from its city leaders and PPD for the mistreatment of youth.

In 2021, Gente Organizada released a first-of-its-kind report on racial profiling practices in local law enforcement in the City of Pomona. Pomona Police Department’s Crusade Against Black and Latinx Youth presents clear evidence of the Pomona Police Department (PPD)’s longstanding history of discrimination and harassment focused on BIPOC youth.

The report also includes a list of demands featured in the report, including the establishment of an independent civilian body with oversight over PPD; the creation of a new city fund dedicated to investing in Black Lives and Black Futures; and a commitment from the City to shift funding from PPD and reinvest in true evidence-based community safety.

Over the past four years, the data collected under the Racial and Identity Profiling Act (“RIPA”) has provided empirical evidence showing disparities in policing throughout California. This year’s data demonstrates the same trends in disparities for all aspects of law enforcement stops, from the reason for stop to actions taken during stop to results of stop. Specifically, the 2023 Report analyzes the RIPA stop data from January 1, 2021 to December 31, 2021, collected and reported by 58 law enforcement agencies, including the 23 largest law enforcement agencies in California. The Report also explores the negative mental health impacts of adverse law enforcement interactions on individuals and communities and contains a new focus on youth interactions with law enforcement both inside and outside of school. Additionally, the report continues to examine the data and research on pretextual stops and consent searches. In this Executive Summary, the Board highlights specific findings, analyses, and research discussed in more detail in the body of the Report.