Resources

As we approach the twentieth anniversary of the War on Terror, we are calling for abolishing the War on Terror and reinvesting resources into structures of community care to protect the future of our people. It is our hope that this agenda is used as a tool to further engage our communities, grassroots organizations, movement groups, and policymakers in order to build power, heal, and enact change.

The goal of this tool is to support organizations, collectives, groups, and community members committed to moving with abolitionist values in their policy advocacy efforts. Our intention is to support groups and community members discern the type of policies that expand and further entrench the Global War on Terror, and the type of policies that can move us toward its abolition. Our hope is to share a framework for policy objectives and oversight demands that move us toward our collaborative vision of abolition to the “Global War on Terror.”

The child welfare system is not a helping system. The system subjugates, surveils, regulates, and punishes families – families who are disproportionately Black and Indigenous. It acts as a family policing system. The system and its supporters portray family policing as a legitimate, supportive helping system – one that protects the safety and well-being of children through necessary state-sanctioned interventions. But the outcomes for children and families are abysmal. Children have significantly worse outcomes as a result of system involvement. Families do not experience healing and children are not safer. Ultimately, the impact of the system on children, families, and communities underscores the ways in which the system functions to maintain anti-Blackness, White supremacy, racial capitalism, and colonialism. We can collectively do better.

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.

The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) conducted survey research among high school students and middle and high school parents and teachers to better understand the promise of technologies aimed at keeping students safe and the risks that they pose, as reported by those most directly interacting with such tools. In particular, the research focused on student activity monitoring, the nearly ubiquitous practice of schools using technology to monitor students’ activities online, especially on devices provided by the school. CDT built on its previous research, which showed that this monitoring is conducted primarily to comply with perceived legal requirements and to keep students safe. While stakeholders are optimistic that student activity monitoring will keep students safe, in practice it creates significant efficacy and equity gaps.

Nearly 40% of the 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the U.S. failed to report crime data to the FBI’s national database in 2021 after the transition to a new collection system. The transition creates huge gaps in national crime stats sure to be exploited by politicians in this election year. Use these tables to check on your state and local agencies.

The Advancement Project will be promoting a 3-part animated video series called How Cops Get Off, which breaks down the systems in place that are actively working against us to keep cops in power and unaccountable to those they swear to serve and protect.

Narrated by AP’s board member, Jesse Williams, each four-minute video in the series breaks down a major structure in our culture and laws that keep cops in power and unaccountable: the dominant narrative in tv shows, movies, and news, the protectors within our criminal legal system like prosecutors and police associations, and the laws that shields cops from accountability like qualified immunity. The series is centered around a 6 week-long culture change campaign that will not only drive people to watch and share the videos but also engage in conversations about our current system and drive action to local grassroots partners who are pushing for new models of safety.

This report breaks down all the recommendations we support, the ones we don’t, and why. We also look at potential revenue streams to pay for these shifts in practice and new community safety programs, analyze OPD calls for service data in a brand new APTP report, and highlight work already happening at the grassroots level that needs more investment. Such community programs are already keeping us safe — which is no surprise because #WeKeepUsSafe and #WeTakeCareOfUs.

The Anti Police-Terror Project commissioned a study by AH Datalytics to analyze how the Oakland Police Department spends its time. This assessment is not a staffing study and does not purport to evaluate law enforcement staffing needs for specific tasks. Rather this analysis is designed to help identify event types that entities other than law enforcement may be best suited to handle for most events.