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.

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.

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.

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.”

A chart that breaks down the difference between reformist reforms which continue or expand the reach of policing, and abolitionist steps that work to chip away and reduce its overall impact.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the George W. Bush administration launched the global “War on Terror,” capitalizing on public fears and calls for retaliation to justify military intervention and Islamophobic violence across the world. This war demonized and targeted Muslims, both abroad and in the United States. In 2002, the administration founded the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), forcibly reframing federal immigration services, emergency response, and data analysis under a mission to “secure the homeland.” This reorganization codified the false link between immigration and terrorism. Instead of making people safe, DHS and its corporate partners used “counterterrorism” to expand policing and surveillance in neighborhoods across the country, targeting immigrant and Muslim communities and intensifying the War on Terror at our doorsteps.

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. This research report found that ShotSpotter did not display protective effects for all outcomes. 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.

This research brief provides preliminary findings from a multi-year research project to understand who has been targeted by criminalization for self-managing their abortion and how these cases make their way into and through the criminal system. From 2000 to 2020, we identified 61 cases of people who were criminally investigated or arrested for allegedly ending their own pregnancy or helping someone else do so. Cases occurred across 26 states, most of which emerged in Texas, followed by Ohio, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Virginia. Understanding self-managed abortion criminalization over the last twenty years, lends insight into what the criminalization of abortion is likely to look like in a post-Roe America.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, as we long feared, we’ve been forced to navigate a new legal landscape. The terrain for people seeking abortions is changing almost daily, and abortion care is increasingly threatened for more communities. In this new era, increased attention has been paid to when the “wave” of criminalization will begin for those providing or seeking abortion care. Prosecutors have declared they won’t enforce laws and journalists have reported on possible police surveillance of period tracker apps. Yet, these responses are disconnected from what reproductive rights and justice advocates know about criminalization, and they are out of line with what has been found in research.