Resources

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.

In September 2021, the Atlanta City Council approved a proposal to lease 381 acres of the Weelaunee Forest—stolen Muscogee land surrounded by majority-Black neighborhoods—to the Atlanta Police Foundation to build the largest militarized police training center in the US. In response, a decentralized movement has risen up to halt the destruction of the forest and the construction of what has come to be known as “Cop City.” As the Stop Cop City movement has grown, the state has employed increasingly draconian methods of repression. In January of this year, police killed Manuel “Tortuguita” Téran, a 26-year old Indigenous Venezuelan forest defender. Dozens of people have been arrested for protesting, including a legal observer with the Southern Poverty Law Center, and more than 40 have been charged with domestic terrorism. Last month, a heavily armed joint task force raided a community center and arrested three bail fund organizers living there under tenuous allegations of “money laundering” and “charity fraud.” And despite widespread opposition, the Atlanta City Council recently authorized an additional $30 million contribution to the construction of Cop City, bringing the city’s pledged total to $67 million.

​​On this week’s episode of On the Nose, culture editor Claire Schwartz is joined by three guests in Atlanta deeply engaged with Stop Cop City—Micah Herskind, a community organizer and writer; Keyanna Jones, a reverend and organizer; and Josie Duffy Rice, a writer who covers criminal justice—to discuss the movement’s roots and tactics, and what the militarization of Atlanta can teach us about the economic underpinnings of fascism.

Gun violence in Philadelphia has reached a boiling point. Politicians, police, and community members are searching for ways to curb the staggering statistics. City Council President Darrell Clarke proposed stop and frisk as a potential solution in the summer of 2022. Could beefing up this controversial police tactic help keep Philly safe?

“There’s so much deference to police around everything to do with public safety. What they say is taken as gospel without question, without requiring proof of concept, without requiring any kind of accountability for when what they’re saying actually doesn’t line up with the facts or people’s experiences,” says author and activist Andrea Ritchie. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Ritchie and host Kelly Hayes discuss Ritchie’s new book, No More Police, coauthored with Mariame Kaba, and talk about how copaganda “shapes our imagination about what policing is, what it’s doing, what it’s not doing, and the necessity of it.”

In this Pride Month episode of The Thought Project podcast, we talk to Max Osborn, a recent graduate of the Criminal Justice Ph.D. program at the CUNY Graduate Center who has carved out a niche as a queer criminologist, studying how LGBTQ individuals are affected by the criminal justice system. For his doctoral dissertation, Osborn, who is transgender and uses he and they pronouns, interviewed 42 LGBTQ individuals living in New York City to understand what their encounters with the police and with social services were like and how these interactions impacted their well-being, behavior, and sense of safety.

Two years ago in the summer of 2020, the largest racial justice demonstrations in history swept across the globe after Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, murdered George Floyd. In the aftermath, it seemed that Americans were reckoning with whether or not the police are a necessary entity in maintaining public safety, but the issue of police abolition remains contentious for many.

Are you a fan of true crime? From podcasts, books, documentaries, and Netflix series, our society is consumed with ‘juicy’ horror stories of crime. Whether it’s a story about serial killers or cold-blooded killings, people are hungry for more. In this episode of Move It Forward, we look at the genre of true crime with guest Chenjerai Kumanyika and explore its history, our fascination with it, and the realities of crime and harm on the streets.

Tune in to learn more about how institutional and systemic violence harms far more people than the sensationalized individual stories of crime and “evil” we are fed. It’s time to shift the way in which the media perpetuates fear, stereotypes, and sensationalized acts of harm and transform it as an advocacy tool to realistically address harm and violence in our communities.

What is mental health? How can we be more whole and how can we advocate for systems that help all of our community members heal? In this episode, we look at mental health with two practitioners — Iresha Picot and Jacqui Johnson. Listen to their conversation that ranges from trauma to mental health crisis response to hip-hop. Learn about the policy changes that could make city services more just and what we all need to be well.