Resources

Two 911 calls, six years apart, reveal the perils of policing and the promise of alternatives. Learn about the role the Anti Police-Terror Project plays in creating alternative responses to police in the Oakland, California area.

How are community justice organizations creatively imagining more holistic alternatives to the criminal justice systems? Join members of Reclaim Philadelphia, Youth Empowerment for Advancement Hangout (YEAH) Philly, Amistad Law Project, and Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project (YASP) to discuss this topic.

Portland Street Response (PSR) is a new first responder program for non-emergency calls involving people experiencing homelessness or mental health crisis. The program launched on February 16, 2021 in the Lents neighborhood in Portland, OR and operates Monday to Friday from 10 AM to 6 PM. The pilot is coordinated by Portland Fire & Rescue (PF&R), and the founding team consists of a firefighter paramedic, a licensed mental health crisis therapist, and two community health workers. The team is dispatched from the Bureau of Emergency Communications (BOEC) when a caller reports one or more of the following and the individual has no known access to weapons and is not displaying physically combative or threatening behavior.

The mixed-methods evaluation is comprehensive, community centered, and includes feedback from a variety of stakeholders and sources, including interviews with unhoused community members and others served by Portland Street Response. This six-month program evaluation report summarizes the findings of our evaluation thus far. However, the evaluation is ongoing and will culminate in a one-year program review at the end of the pilot period in spring 2022.

Survivors want safety and support. Defunding police is 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.

This essay is part of the ongoing “AI Lexicon” project, a call for contributions to generate alternate narratives, positionalities, and understandings to the better known and widely circulated ways of talking about artificial intelligence (AI).

Here in Boston, substantial pressure is building to #DefundPolice. Due to monumental organizing efforts by groups such as the Muslim Justice League and Families for Justice as Healing, the Boston City Council received an unprecedented amount of public feedback urging defunding for the June 4 hearing on external grants funding the Boston Police Department (BPD). Yet these external grants, totaling $2.6 million, are small potatoes compared to the full $414 million the City of Boston has proposed to fund the BPD in Fiscal Year 2020-2021 (FY21), and that the Boston City Council is slated to approve on Wednesday, June 10. Here the ACLU of Massachusetts presents a detailed analysis of how the Boston Police department uses its outsize share of taxpayer dollars.

This report delves into the rhetoric of “smart borders” to explore their ties to a broad regime of border policing and exclusion that greatly harms migrants and refugees who either seek or already make their home in the United States. Investment in an approach centered on border and immigrant policing, it argues, is incompatible with the realization of a just and humane world.

This report examines the way our criminal legal systems have driven up incarceration rates, disproportionately harmed communities of color, and failed to provide true public safety. Specifically, we analyze sentencing and incarceration policies and law enforcement practices, including those in policing and prosecution, that have created systems of control but failed to treat underlying challenges. The report then lays out a new path for public safety that looks to the comprehensive, research-based strategies in policing, prosecution, and sentencing that elected and appointed leaders are using to move away from harsh carceral practices and respond to social and economic needs. These reforms illuminate a new vision of public safety that reduces our reliance on systems of enforcement and control while relying instead on research, collaboration, and community engagement—not incarceration—to build and support communities.

Contrast the wanton police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd with police officers’ embrace of an armed 17-year-old named Kyle Rittenhouse. Or the heavily policed Black Lives Matter protests versus police selfies with the January 6 Capitol Hill mob. Or the police seizure of guns from African Americans in front of whites rallying while openly armed.

The last year is replete with striking examples of a racist double standard in policing. It is a broken record that keeps playing—seemingly louder every year—throughout American history. It tells a story that is tragically familiar: police disproportionately disrespect, harass, abuse, intimidate, brutalize, and kill people of color as compared to whites.

But to understand this longstanding thread in American society requires understanding not just the politics of race but also the politics of gender—and how, through their interlocking, Blackness is criminalized and whiteness is disproportionately treated with impunity.