Resources

In the 16 months since police officers murdered George Perry Floyd Jr. in Minneapolis, grassroots activists and community members have spurred an ongoing global conversation about racialized police violence. Recent surveys by the American Public Media Research Lab and our research team indicate that Black residents (and other residents of color) in Minnesota hold higher levels of distrust towards police, experience higher levels of police discrimination, and believe police are more likely to target racial and ethnic minorities than white residents. In response, grassroots organizers and local leaders have proposed a range of recommendations to address police violence, from defunding—or altogether abolishing—the Minneapolis Police Department, to more modest reforms such as banning chokeholds and misconduct training.

Police departments in some of the largest U.S. cities have been experimenting with predictive policing as a way to forecast criminal activity. Predictive policing uses computer systems to analyze large sets of data, including historical crime data, to help decide where to deploy police or to identify individuals who are purportedly more likely to commit or be a victim of a crime.

Proponents argue that predictive policing can help predict crimes more accurately and effectively than traditional police methods. However, critics have raised concerns about transparency and accountability. Additionally, while big data companies claim that their technologies can help remove bias from police decision-making, algorithms relying on historical data risk reproducing those very biases.

Predictive policing is just one of a number of ways police departments in the United States have incorporated big data methods into their work in the last two decades. Others include adopting surveillance technologies such as facial recognition and social media monitoring. These developments have not always been accompanied by adequate safeguards.

This kit is designed to help you participate in the effort to remove dangerous provisions from the Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBA) between Louisville Metro & Louisville’s Fraternal Order of Police (FOP). This document outlines key moments in the coming weeks & months and provides you with the information you need to participate in these activities. Many of the resources here are templates that you can adapt for your own purposes.

Institutional violence within community centers, healthcare organizations, and social services, in concert with the “helping” industry’s increasing collusion with and reliance on law enforcement, fuels the prison pipeline. In response to pervasive institutional violence and increasing policing, surveillance, and targeting of queer and TGNB (trans and gender non-binary) youth of color, street-based youth, and youth experiencing homelessness, Project NIA created a toolkit to share strategies of resistance to the increased securitization of non-profit spaces.

Amid all of the issues that exist in coverage and legal accountability when it comes to cases of police violence against Black people, separate hurdles remain when it comes to acknowledging the stories of Black women and queer people killed by the police. State violence against Black women, femmes, and queer folk is rarely at the center of mass mobilization and media attention. That’s despite the fact that Black women are overrepresented among the people shot and killed by the police. And also, the reality that transgender people are more than thee times as likely to experience police violence as cisgender people.

The Takeaway speaks with Andrea Ritchie, a co-founder of Interrupting Criminalization, an initiative that aims to end the criminalization of women and LGBTQ people of color. She’s also the author of “Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color.”

Evidencia la violencia is a documentation tool to collect testimonies and stories in which police or public safety agents intervene in a violent, discriminatory or excessive way with the citizens. We collect these stories and data through interviews with affected people, their families or witnesses to the interventions, as well as press releases or stories on social networks. The documentation we collect feeds our database, a tool for community participation, search for accountability and public advocacy against State violence.

This study asks whether deficiencies in transportation are associated with disproportionate policing in Chicago using the case of cycling. The author examines how the number of bicycle citations issued per street segment are influenced by the availability of bicycle facilities and street characteristics, controlling for crash incidence, police presence, and neighborhood characteristics. Infrastructure inequities compound the effects of racially-biased policing in the context of transportation safety strategies. Remedies include the removal of traffic enforcement from safe systems strategies and equitable investment in cycling.

Solutions to Violence profiles 18 groups forging new paths to safety and healing that do not rely on the police or incarceration. The report uplifts restorative justice practitioners, community advocates, and other local leaders who are doing the day-to-day work needed to build stronger and healthier communities, help people heal, and hold those who cause harm responsible for their actions.

Over the last three and a half years, the City of Detroit has greatly expanded Project Green Light, an initiative of the Detroit Police Department (DPD), along with local businesses and other organizations, to use video surveillance and digital technology to fight crime. Since the first cameras went live in eight gas stations on January 1, 2016, the system has grown as of April 2020 to nearly 700 locations across the city.

Though it is billed by proponents as a “real-time crime-fighting” solution, others, including the DSA, see it as a mass-surveillance system that disproportionately singles out communities of color. In particular, critics cite flaws in the technology behind the project that are part of what sociologist Ruha Benjamin, in her study Race After Technology, terms the “New Jim Code.”