Resources

Most local governments spend more on policing and incarcerating local residents than on proactive investments in residents’ well-being. Access to safe and affordable housing, health care, public transportation, and other community services like libraries and parks are essential to residents’ overall quality of life. Yet many communities invest less in these vital activities than in surveilling, arresting, and jailing residents.

This dashboard examines the 2022 budgets of 20 locales across the country. In most of these places, residents pay taxes to and are governed by both a city and county government. Therefore, the dashboard analyzes both the city and county budgets to give a fuller picture of local spending on police, sheriffs, detention, housing, health, and more.

A searchable database of police, sheriffs, and other public safety agencies’ contracts.

Today, Catalyst California’s (formerly Advancement Project California) new Reimagine Justice & Safety program released Reimagining Community Safety in California: From Deadly and Expensive Sheriffs to Equity and Care-Centered Wellbeing. This new report, produced in partnership with ACLU SoCal, reveals how sheriff’s departments across the state engage in patrol activities that undermine community safety, waste tremendous public dollars, and inflict devastating harms on communities of color. Highlighted counties include Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento, and Riverside.

Do you know who is helping to put your sheriff in office? A new report shows what happens when construction, health, gun, and technology companies receive lucrative contracts from the office of the sheriff in return for campaign dollars. We scoured six years’ worth of public information & campaign finance reports. Our research found upwards of $6 million in campaign contributions that create potential conflicts of interest for the sheriffs of 11 different states.

The Collective Freedom Project is a website and digital space made to uplift the work of advocates across the country working to dismantle narratives that criminalize our communities for cross-sector solidarity.

The Police Scorecard is the first nationwide public evaluation of policing in the United States. The Scorecard calculates levels of police violence, accountability, racial bias and other policing outcomes for over 16,000 municipal and county law enforcement agencies, covering nearly 100% of the US population. The indicators included in this scorecard were selected based on a review of the research literature, input from activists and experts in the field, and a review of publicly available datasets on policing from federal, state, and local agencies. This project is designed to help communities, researchers, police leaders and policy-makers take data-informed action to reduce police use of force, increase accountability and reimagine public safety in their jurisdictions.

An extensive investigation by Cerise Castle into more than five decades of abuse, terror, and murder carried out by gangs within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

As protests to demand an end to racist policing and the carceral system catalyze a long overdue national conversation on law enforcement’s role in upholding White supremacy, this report seeks to help quantify the extent of explicit contemporary far-right and anti-immigrant influence on sheriffs departments.

Defund Sheriffs is designed to support organizers in launching their own campaigns to defund their local sheriff. The toolkit brings into focus how sheriffs fit into the broader law enforcement landscape and why defunding them is an essential step towards building more safe and just communities across the country. It also provides a step-by-step guide, applicable to any locale, on how to restructure public safety to prevent jail deaths and put a stop to the over-policing of Black and brown communities. This includes guidance for understanding budgets, identifying leverage points, and creating an alternative vision that prioritizes safety and community needs.