Resources

From an April 2020 convening to hear from Black public health experts who have been leading research and Black organizers leading efforts to change the conditions that make Black communities vulnerable everyday and especially in the COVID-19 crisis. In an effort to learn how to better organize, mobilize and coordinate on behalf of Black communities nationwide and worldwide, this report highlights the work of D4BL Hub Leaders, partner organizations and policymakers. This report contains a review of the content of the event and an outline of D4BL demands associated with responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is a living toolkit of information on police reform, surveillance, immigration and policing, racial profiling, community oversight, and more within the Boston area. It also includes action items and ways to get involved.

In the fight against COVID-19, one of our most powerful weapons is manual contact-tracing, the time-consuming process of interviewing patients to find who they might have exposed to the virus. Alarmingly, new technological alternatives to manual contact tracing threaten to distract from these public health efforts, creating products that likely won’t improve public health, but which will pose an existential threat to the public’s privacy. If Apple and Google’s Bluetooth method goes forward, it’s also clear that existing legal protections are insufficient. Under existing laws, the use of Bluetooth proximity detection will just become another deeply invasive tool in federal, state, and local governments’ arsenal of surveillance technology.

This report examines in detail the experience of working-class immigrant, Black and Brown New Yorkers during this crisis. Based on a survey of 244 primarily Latinx immigrants across New York City, Long Island, and Westchester, one third of whom are undocumented, it provides striking findings related to the pandemic’s toll on community members’ health, income and work, housing insecurity, and education.

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) is a recent movement to bring recognition to the disappearance and murders of Native women and girls; many in the movement also include two spirit and trans persons under the term. While the movement is new, the issue of MMIW is not. This compilation of resources can be a starting point to understand the crisis of MMIW fully, provide families healing, and help others implement justice and take action so that there will be no more stolen sisters.

Every day, new policies stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic are making it far easier for government and private companies to collect and share vast amounts of personal and private health information. While this data is critically important from a public health standpoint, there are many unknowns around its future use. We must be aware and informed to ensure that public health emergencies are not misused to increase deportation, criminalization, and further harm to the health of immigrant, Black, and Brown communities.

In response to concerns over the potential privacy implications of its gunshot detection technology, ShotSpotter Technologies, Inc. (SST) approached the Policing Project to conduct a thorough personal privacy assessment of its product, ShotSpotter. The primary privacy concern identified was the possibility that the technology might capture voices of individuals near its sensors, and could conceivably be used for targeted voice surveillance. Although ultimately concluding that the risk of voice surveillance was extremely low in practice, Policing Project offered SST a variety of recommendations on how to make ShotSpotter even more privacy protective.

Every community in the US will be affected by COVID-19 – but the impacts will not be the same in each. This index identifies which communities may need the most support as coronavirus takes hold. Mapped to US census tract, county, and state levels, the CCVI helps inform COVID-19 planning and mitigation at a granular level.

This is a database of population information for US jails and prisons, as well as reported cases of COVID-19 within them. All data is gathered automatically and updated daily, or as soon as it is updated, for reports that are released with less frequency.