Resources

This report comes through collaboration between Mijente, Perry Undem, the Community Resource Hub, and the Center for Advancing Innovative Policy. This report is the first national comprehensive study on Latinx attitudes about policing and public safety in the United States and Puerto Rico. We believe in our gente and our communities, that together we can envision and build futures beyond the constraints of punitive measures. That’s why we commissioned a national study and focus groups, to better understand Latinx experiences and develop strategic organizing interventions and resources. The results tell a story that mirrors the Latinx diaspora as a whole: our gente’s political perspectives vary drastically depending on any number of factors. Still, in analyzing thousands of responses across 11 different focus groups, it is clear that our gente believe that making communities safer is about resources, jobs, and education, not more police.

The expanding surveillance and criminalization of mutual aid, self-managed care, and bodily autonomy, and the growing attempts to criminalize pregnant people, parents, and health care providers have far-reaching ramifications beyond abortion criminalization that require us to join together to collectively resist!

Hundreds of restrictive bills have been proposed, many passed, including the Texas law (SB8) that not only bans abortion after six weeks, but deputizes civilians to police each other’s reproductive decisions. Such laws are just the latest examples in a long history of criminalizing bodily autonomy, especially for Black, Indigenous, migrant, disabled, queer, and trans people, and people with low incomes who will experience the harshest impacts of anti-abortion legislation.

This brief offers an analysis of how our movements are connected, and how to push back against a widening web of criminalization.

Survivors want safety and support. Defunding police is a survivor-led anti-violence strategy that stops police from looting resources survivors need to prevent, avoid, escape and heal from violence – and puts more money into violence prevention and interruption, and meeting survivors’ needs.

In the 16 months since police officers murdered George Perry Floyd Jr. in Minneapolis, grassroots activists and community members have spurred an ongoing global conversation about racialized police violence. Recent surveys by the American Public Media Research Lab and our research team indicate that Black residents (and other residents of color) in Minnesota hold higher levels of distrust towards police, experience higher levels of police discrimination, and believe police are more likely to target racial and ethnic minorities than white residents. In response, grassroots organizers and local leaders have proposed a range of recommendations to address police violence, from defunding—or altogether abolishing—the Minneapolis Police Department, to more modest reforms such as banning chokeholds and misconduct training.

Amid all of the issues that exist in coverage and legal accountability when it comes to cases of police violence against Black people, separate hurdles remain when it comes to acknowledging the stories of Black women and queer people killed by the police. State violence against Black women, femmes, and queer folk is rarely at the center of mass mobilization and media attention. That’s despite the fact that Black women are overrepresented among the people shot and killed by the police. And also, the reality that transgender people are more than thee times as likely to experience police violence as cisgender people.

The Takeaway speaks with Andrea Ritchie, a co-founder of Interrupting Criminalization, an initiative that aims to end the criminalization of women and LGBTQ people of color. She’s also the author of “Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color.”

As a result of years of persistent multi-organizational advocacy, the public has access to data on policing in New York City public schools. First passed in 2011 and then amended in 2015, the “Student Safety Act” mandates that the New York City Police Department (NYPD) post quarterly datasets. As of August 2021, there are now five full school years of reporting on school policing. From the 2016-2017 school year to 2021-2021, there have been a total of 40,233 reports of school-based police interventions. During that time, Black girls represented 57% of all school-based police interventions targeting girls, but made up only 22% of the girls in the public school system.

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.

Amidst a growing national conversation about sexual violence sparked by #MeToo and the ‘me, too.’ movement originated by Tarana Burke, and an ongoing national reckoning around the violence of policing, one form of sexual and police violence remains shrouded in silence: police sexual violence.

This is a curriculum for sexual assault service providers intended to accompany Interrupting Criminalization’s report Shrouded in Silence: Police Sexual Violence – What We Know and What We Can Do About It. Facilitators and participants are strongly encouraged to review the report before using any of the exercises in this curriculum.

In the midst of a national reckoning around the violence of policing, and a national conversation about sexual assault prompted by #MeToo and the ‘me, too.’ movement launched by Tarana Burke, sexual violence by law enforcement officers – including local and state police, ICE agents and Border Patrol, school “resource” officers, federal law enforcement agents, probation and parole officers – remains shrouded in silence. Survivors of police sexual violence are rarely heard from or discussed in either conversation, and their experiences generally do not drive organizing and advocacy in either context.

This report, in conjunction with an accompanying curriculum for sexual assault service providers, is intended to contribute to breaking this silence, to summarize what we know about sexual violence by law enforcement officers, and to offer concrete steps toward prevention of police sexual violence and increased safety, support, and opportunities for healing for survivors. For more information and a more detailed analysis of police sexual violence, see Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color (excerpts available at invisiblenomorebook.com).