Resources

For decades, efforts by police to seize illicit drugs have been a cornerstone strategy for disrupting drug markets and removing drugs from communities. But there’s an unintended outcome when opioids are seized, a new study finds — increases in overdoses, including those that are fatal.

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.

Police violence is a public health issue in need of public health solutions. Reducing police contact through public health–informed alternative response programs separate from law enforcement agencies is one strategy to reduce police perpetration of physical, emotional, and sexual violence. Such programs may improve health outcomes, especially for communities that are disproportionately harmed by the police, such as Black, Latino/a, Native American, and transgender communities; nonbinary residents; people who are drug users, sex workers, or houseless; and people who experience mental health challenges.

The use of alternative response teams is increasing across the United States. This article provides a public health rationale and framework for developing and implementing alternative response programs informed by public health principles of care, equity, and prevention.

In this report, Communities United, Movimiento Poder, Reimagine Richmond, and the Social Movement Support Lab examine the 2022 budgets of the 20 largest US cities and their respective counties to determine whether their investments prioritize the Mass Criminalization System or Systems of Community Care. We analyze the size of these public investments, the ratio between them, the cost to local residents, how that translates into the city personnel that residents encounter on a daily basis, and how these dynamics have shifted over time.

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.

As acknowledged by the City of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, racism is a public health crisis in this region. Yet, rather than addressing the needs of the most oppressed citizens, the city and county continue to pour excessive funds into the police, who have played a central role in creating a fundamentally unsafe and unhealthy space for Black residents. We must decenter the police from the lives of Black people. Through steep cuts to police personnel and funding, the city and county can instead use those funds to meaningfully support the health and safety of communities.

Police officers often serve as first responders to mental health and substance abuse crises. Concerns over the unintended consequences and high costs associated with this approach have motivated emergency response models that augment or completely remove police involvement. However, there is little causal evidence evaluating these programs. This study presents evidence on the impact of an innovative “community response” pilot in Denver that directed targeted emergency calls to health care responders instead of the police. Evidence shows that the program reduced reports of targeted, less serious crimes (e.g., trespassing, public disorder, and resisting arrest) by 34% and had no detectable effect on more serious crimes. The sharp reduction in targeted crimes reflects the fact that health-focused first responders are less likely to report individuals they serve as criminal offenders and the spillover benefits of the program (e.g., reducing crime during hours when the program was not in operation).

This episode examines how news and pop cultural media deputize and urge listeners, readers, and viewers to act as neighborhood vigilantes. We study how this instills a climate of constant, unnecessary fear; presents the current US and criminal legal system as the only option to reduce crime; excludes crimes against the poor and working class like wage theft, food and housing insecurity, and lack of healthcare; and how these systemics can inflict unjust harm upon the subjects of these anonymous tips.

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.