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To support and help strengthen the work of advocates and organizers, the Hub is committed to providing and uplifting up-to-date research, reports, data, model policies, toolkits and other resources. We do this by searching for, categorizing, and making available existing resources from partner organizations and others working on issues related to policing. When needed, the Hub also produces its own research in collaboration with partners. This resource database is categorized, easy to search, and regularly updated by our research team.

If you would like to suggest a resource to be included in our database, please submit it here.

Resources that appear on the Community Resource Hub website are not necessarily supported or endorsed by the Hub. The resources that appear represent various different policies, toolkits, and data that have been presented to challenge issues relevant to safety, policing, and accountability.

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Showing 138 Resources Technology × Clear All

Mass Extraction: The Widespread Power of US Law Enforcement to Search Mobile Phones

Upturn – Toward Justice in Technology

Every day, law enforcement agencies across the country search thousands of cellphones, typically incident to arrest. To search phones, law enforcement agencies use mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs), a powerful technology that allows police to extract a full copy of data from a cellphone — all emails, texts, photos, location, app data, and more — which can then be programmatically searched. As one expert puts it, with the amount of sensitive information stored on smartphones today, the tools provide a “window into the soul.”

This report documents the widespread adoption of MDFTs by law enforcement in the United States. Based on 110 public records requests to state and local law enforcement agencies across the country, our research documents more than 2,000 agencies that have purchased these tools, in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. We found that state and local law enforcement agencies have performed hundreds of thousands of cellphone extractions since 2015, often without a warrant. To our knowledge, this is the first time that such records have been widely disclosed.

Every American is at risk of having their phone forensically searched by law enforcement.

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Impact of ShotSpotter Technology on Firearm Homicides and Arrests Among Large Metropolitan Counties: a Longitudinal Analysis, 1999-2016

Mitchell L. Doucette, Christa Green, Jennifer Necci Dineen, David Shapiro, & Kerri M. Raissian for Journal of Urban Health

Over the past decade, large urban counties have implemented ShotSpotter, a gun fire detection technology, across the USA. It uses acoustic listening devices to identify discharged firearms’ locations. We examined the effect of ShotSpotter within the 68 large metropolitan counties in the USA from 1999 to 2016. We identified ShotSpotter implementation years through publicly available media. ShotSpotter did not display protective effects for all outcomes. Counties in states with permit-to-purchase firearm laws saw a 15% reduction in firearm homicide incidence rates; counties in states with right-to-carry laws saw a 21% increase in firearm homicide incidence rates. Results suggest that implementing ShotSpotter technology has no significant impact on firearm-related homicides or arrest outcomes. Policy solutions may represent a more cost-effective measure to reduce urban firearm violence.

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Market Response to Racial Uprisings

Bocar A. Ba, Roman Rivera & Alexander Whitefield

Do investors anticipate that demands for racial equity will impact companies? We explore this question in the context of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement—the largest racially motivated protest movement in U.S. history—and its effect on the U.S. policing industry using a novel dataset on publicly traded firms contracting with the police. It is unclear whether the BLM uprisings were likely to increase or decrease market valuations of firms contracting heavily with police because of the increased interest in reforming the police, fears over rising crime, and pushes to “defund the police”. We find, in contrast to the predictions of economics experts we surveyed, that in the three weeks following incidents triggering BLM uprisings, policing firms experienced a stock price increase of seven percentage points relative to the stock prices of nonpolicing firms in similar industries. In particular, firms producing surveillance technology and police accountability tools experienced higher returns following BLM activism–related events. Furthermore, policing firms’ fundamentals, such as sales, improved after the murder of George Floyd, suggesting that policing firms’ future performances bore out investors’ positive expectations following incidents triggering BLM uprisings. Our research shows how—despite BLM’s calls to reduce investment in policing and explore alternative public safety approaches—the financial market has translated high-profile violence against Black civilians and calls for systemic change into shareholder gains and additional revenues for police suppliers.

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Surveillance in school: Invasive technology, junk science

Ethical Schools – Ethics in Education Network (EIEN)

Hosts speak with Albert Fox Cahn and Sarah Roth of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, or S.T.O.P., about the increasing use of surveillance technology to track students. Claiming their technology can predict who will be a threat to themselves or the school, companies market programs that report to school officials on students’ keystrokes, words, and behaviors. School officials can provide it to law enforcement or parents.

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Twenty Years Too Many: A Call to Stop the FBI’s Secret Watchlist

Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)

For now over twenty years, the FBI has detained, surveilled, harassed, and destroyed the lives of innocent Muslims. The public record amply documents how these abuses, inflicted via always-expanding FBI powers, led not to a reduction in terrorism, but painful, farcical, and often dangerous abuses of Muslims.

All of this injustice comes from a list. This list goes by various names – the terrorist watchlist, the Terrorism Screening Database, or as the FBI recently rebranded it, the Terrorism Screening Dataset.

It has long been clear to the Muslim community itself that the FBI’s list is nothing more than a list of innocent Muslims. The consequences of being on the FBI’s list are borne almost exclusively by Muslims, and even individuals who openly espouse political violence generally do not find themselves similarly targeted so long as they themselves are not Muslim.

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Watch the Watchers: A Project by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition

Stop LAPD Spying Coalition

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.

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Mapping the War on Terror Roots of Cop City in Atlanta

Muslim Abolitionist Futures (MAF)

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.

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Financialization and Welfare Surveillance: Regulating the Poor in Technological Times (Australia & Lebanon)

Shelley Bielefeld, Kathryn Henne, & Jenna Harb

In light of concerns that the technologies employed by the digital welfare state exacerbate inequality and oppression, this article considers contemporary shifts in the administration of social assistance. Specifically, it examines the surveillance of recipients of government income support focusing on marginalized peoples in two jurisdictions: social security recipients subject to the Cashless Debit Card (CDC) in Australia, many of whom are Indigenous, and persons under the purview of the Lebanon One Unified InterOrganizational System for E-Cards (LOUISE) in Lebanon, many of whom are Syrian refugees. Taken together, the cases illuminate embedded ideologies and adverse experiences associated with the financialization of social assistance and the digitization of cash. Through a dual case study approach, this analysis draws out patterns as well as contextual distinctions to illustrate how technological changes reflect financialization trends and attempt neoliberal assimilation of social welfare recipients through intensive surveillance, albeit with disparate outcomes. After considering how these dynamics play out in each case, the article concludes by reflecting on the contradictions that emerge in relation to the promises of empowerment and individual responsibility through financialized logics and technologies.

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Hundreds of Oath Keepers Have Worked for DHS, Leaked List Shows

Project on Government Oversight (POGO) & the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project

More than 300 individuals on a leaked membership list of the far-right militia group the Oath Keepers described themselves as current or former employees of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Members were employed at DHS components such as the Border Patrol, Coast Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Secret Service, according to a review by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO).

POGO’s review appears to be the first significant public examination using the leaked records to focus on employees in DHS — an agency with the mission of countering domestic violent extremism — and it comes only months after the March 2022 publication of a DHS study which found that “the Department has significant gaps that have impeded its ability to comprehensively prevent, detect, and respond to potential threats related to domestic violent extremism within DHS.”

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