Resources

On International Human Rights Day, the Center for Constitutional Rights outlines necessary steps that the Biden administration and the 117th Congress must take to begin shifting power back to the people. Our 100-day demands, rooted in human rights and international law, challenge systemic discrimination and the unjust distribution of power and public resources and amplify the future visions articulated by impacted communities and movements for social justice. In defining immediately actionable, rights-based measures for the federal government, we are guided not by what is practical, but by what is necessary, just, life-giving, and liberatory.

In the wake of nationwide demonstrations for racial justice prompted by the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and countless other Black individuals, Los Angeles has become a focal point for critical discussions around police and community relations. StudyLA’s 2020 Police and Community Relations Survey focuses on the attitudes and opinions of city of Los Angeles residents toward the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) following this period of nationwide demonstrations. Residents were asked a range of questions to measure public opinion toward policing. Specifically, we gauge how residents feel that the LAPD is doing with respect to the many facets of its mission: to safeguard the lives and property of the people the LAPD serves, to reduce the incidence and fear of crime, and to enhance public safety while working with the diverse communities to improve quality of life.

This new collaborative document edited by Mariame Kaba outlines ten major steps required to successfully launch a new paradigm for real safety, and includes helpful messages and responses for those with doubts, existing institutions that help create real safety, a deeper dive on police and prison abolition, and more models to explore.

This website was inspired by decades of work by grassroots movements, journalists, civil rights attorneys, academics and policy makers that have advocated for learning from litigation data to improve policing policies, trainings, early intervention systems and accountability. The data was collected by The Legal Aid Society’s Special Litigation Unit Cop Accountability Project team, led by Cynthia Conti-Cook and Julie Ciccolini. It was first collected for Legal Aid’s Criminal Defense Practice defenders and the thousands of clients we serve every year all over the City.

This memo assesses the current landscape of work surrounding police abolition and reviews alternatives to policing in the context of police abolitionist frameworks, offering insight and sharing successful strategies for advocates in the field. This memo also offers several recommendations for advocates, activists, and organizers working on alternatives to policing as well as a list of resources. As communities develop strategies for keeping themselves safe from various threats and for managing various crises and emergencies, they also focus on harm from policing, including police violence and police harassment. Communities have approached this in several ways. Some advocates and organizations, such as Critical Resistance, argue that police and policing needs to be abolished altogether in order to recreate a model of public safety that is not centered on punishment and control. Some advocates argue for implementing a divest/invest framework that includes defunding of police and reinvestment of those funds in developing community infrastructure, such as community-based violence intervention, hospitals, jobs, mental health programs, and schools. This approach targets the underlying causes of harm and builds out alternatives to existing models of public safety.

Created by the Interrupting Criminalization Initiative (a member of the Movement for Black Lives), this is a toolkit designed to advance a long term vision of abolition of police through divestment from policing as a practice, dismantling policing institutions, and building community-based responses to harm, need, and conflict that do not rely on surveillance, policing and punishment.

Understanding violence through a public health lens addresses the crime as well as the environment in which the crime took place. This is done by taking into account the risk and protective factors that surround a person, their community and the community in which they live. Reimagining public safety means identifying community-led and/or supported solutions and strategies that stop the bleeding today and investing in the dismantlement of the systems of inequity.

Calls for reform suggesting the deployment of social workers instead of police in our communities overlook the past and present damage done by the child welfare system as co-conspiring with police. The primary goal of this brief is to discuss the ways the Department of Children and Family Services is interconnected with police through data sharing, predictive analytics, and direct partnership. We see this brief as just the beginning of a larger endeavor in understanding the harm of the child welfare system on children and families.

A resource detailing a few key facts about police response to domestic violence and highlighting defunding police as 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.