Resources

A collection of information on the history of policing and abolition work in the US, as well as examples of what abolition looks like and answers to some commonly asked questions around abolition.

The movement to defund the police in the United States is gaining unprecedented momentum as protests continue across the globe. This week on Intercepted: Chenjerai Kumanyika is joined by the iconic geographer and abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Gilmore is one of the world’s preeminent scholars on prisons and the machinery of carceral punishment and policing. In this discussion, she offers a sweeping and detailed analysis of the relentless expansion and funding of police and prisons, and how locking people in cages has become central to the American project. Gilmore offers a comprehensive road map for understanding how we have arrived at the present political moment of brutality and rebellion, and she lays out the need for prison abolition and defunding police forces.

Abolition has been a huge topic in the wake of the uprising sparked by the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Calls to defund or abolish the police are now experiencing a surge of interest, in the form of street art, protest signs, op eds, and more. In this episode, I’ll be exploring things to consider as you take your first steps toward joining the abolitionist movement, especially in this tumultuous moment of a pandemic and global uprising, in a conversation with Mariame Kaba.

A toolkit that provides steps to design a powerful action around demilitarizing the police and police accountability in your community.

A 2018 report that details the current state of school-policing for Black and Latino students and advocates for the removal of school police.

To crystallize the concept of defunding the police, CNN posed three scenarios to experts and activists in the movement and asked how they’d be handled in an America without police. The participants are Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter; Philip McHarris, a doctoral candidate in sociology and African American Studies at Yale University and lead research and policy associate at the Community Resource Hub for Safety and Accountability; and Alex Vitale, a professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and author of “The End of Policing”

This report illustrates specific steps the New York City Council and Mayor Bill de Blasio must make to cut at least $1 billion from NYPD’s FY21 expense budget to ensure that monies can be redirected to protect and strengthen essential services, programs and infrastructure that address key needs of Black, Latinx and other NYC communities of color for an equitable transition in the COVID-19 period.

As more and more school districts around the country are joining the movement to end the school-to-prison pipeline and remove police from inside of schools, we want to share more information about the realities of school-based policing in Chicago. This report examines the disparities in who is impacted by school-based policing, the misconduct records of the CPD officers assigned to CPS, and the ways funds currently allocated towards policing could be re-invested.

The coronavirus pandemic has transformed the US education system overnight. The antiracist rebellion in the streets has shown a light on the deep racial inequality in America. Educators and activists who have nurtured radical dreams for public schools now face an unprecedented moment of change, and the challenge of trying to teach and organize online in the midst of unfolding crises. This video is a discussion with Bettina L. Love, Dr. Gholnecsar Muhammad, Dena Simmons, and Brian Jones.