Resources

The movement to redirect police funding towards social services and community care has ignited calls to re-examine police presence in schools. In the last month alone, several school districts have decided to disband school-based officers while urging their communities to shift funding towards other necessary services. Instead of relying on police to fulfill core educational functions, now is the time for schools to fund mental health professionals, academic support, and other evidence-based programs. Particularly in light of the twin pandemics of coronavirus and engrained structural racism, the scarce funding available should focus on what works best for students.

A webinar partnership between Reclaim the Block and Black Visions to discuss what it means to defund police, examples from around the country of existing alternatives, and how communities can demand that the City Council fund effective public safety programs.

This page is a hub for this year’s session materials, as well as additional resources related to the topic of PIC abolition, organizing, and healing justice. Click through for more information on the event.

People around the U.S. are demanding that cities defund their local police departments. This webinar encourages us to take that demand one step further, and highlights the relationships between corporations and policing. We know that cutting the police budget is a first step towards the world we want to see but in order to fully fund our communities and invest in the things we need we must also redirect funding from the institutions that support policing.

This webinar explores ACRE’s groundbreaking research on cities’ use of Police Brutality Bonds, the bonds issued to pay for police brutality settlements. Police brutality bonds generate fees for Wall Street firms like Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, and interest payments for investors, allowing them to literally profit from police violence. Borrowing can also drastically increase the costs of police violence, but these costs are not reflected in the official police budget. The webinar covers how ACRE did the research for the report, how bonds work, some of ACRE’s data sources and what other policing costs might be hiding in city budgets.

The Memorial Day death of George Floyd at the hands of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has set off protest around the globe. This four-part community conversation video series attempts to answer the question: Can you reduce funding for police, and limit their role in communities, while ensuring public safety for all communities?

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.

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