Resources

As a result of years of persistent multi-organizational advocacy, the public has access to data on policing in New York City public schools. First passed in 2011 and then amended in 2015, the “Student Safety Act” mandates that the New York City Police Department (NYPD) post quarterly datasets. As of August 2021, there are now five full school years of reporting on school policing. From the 2016-2017 school year to 2021-2021, there have been a total of 40,233 reports of school-based police interventions. During that time, Black girls represented 57% of all school-based police interventions targeting girls, but made up only 22% of the girls in the public school system.

In this report, OIG details ShotSpotter’s functionality and descriptive statistics regarding law enforcement activity related to CPD’s response to ShotSpotter alerts. OIG does not issue recommendations associated with this descriptive data. OIG is issuing this analysis of the outcomes of ShotSpotter alerts to provide the public and City government officials—to the extent feasible given the quality of OEMC and CPD’s data—with clear and accurate information regarding CPD’s use of ShotSpotter technology.

OIG concluded from its analysis that CPD responses to ShotSpotter alerts rarely produce documented evidence of a gun-related crime, investigatory stop, or recovery of a firearm. Additionally, OIG identified evidence that the introduction of ShotSpotter technology in Chicago has changed the way some CPD members perceive and interact with individuals present in areas where ShotSpotter alerts are frequent.

This report analyzes data from the U.S. Department of Education’s 2017-18 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), the 2019 California Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA) Stops dataset, and data from Stockton Unified School District on police in schools. The data conclusively show harmful and discriminatory policing patterns in schools. School police contribute to the criminalization of tens of thousands of California students, resulting in them being pushed out of school and into the school-to-prison pipeline. Critically, the data suggest that schools underreport the number of assigned law enforcement officers, so these problems are likely even more severe.

Los Angeles, America’s second largest city, has a horrible secret. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department – the fourth largest police department in the country – harbors dozens of criminal gangs within its ranks. These gangs have been involved in assaults, the creation of false evidence, and even murder. Now, with the help of the brave journalist Cerise Castle, the story can be told.

Traditionally, prosecutors do not use a centralized mechanism to track police misconduct. Instead, line prosecutors primarily share information with each other about problematic officers by word-of-mouth, and anecdotally, if at all. As a result, a prosecutor’s office that does not have a formal system to track police misconduct risks having prosecutors fail to comply with their legal obligations. To systematically track police misconduct, a growing number of prosecutors are creating internal police disclosure lists, or databases of police officers with a history of wrongdoing.

The Tracking Police Misconduct Action Guide explains why it is crucial to have a police disclosure list, and details the most important issues to consider when creating one. To produce this guide, the IIP interviewed high-ranking prosecutors throughout the country. Our hope is that upon reviewing this guide, prosecutors will develop or improve upon their own mechanisms for tracking police misconduct. By following these recommendations, prosecutors can fulfill their ethical duties and hold the police accountable, while also protecting the due process rights of police officers.

Today’s viral videos of police abuse have a long political lineage. But what if one of the oldest tools of copwatching is now taken away?

Ron Wilkins takes us back to 1966, in the wake of the Watts uprising, in which he joined an early cop watch program — one that would inspire the likes of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.

Then, reporter Jenny Casas introduces us to journalists and activists who have been using police scanners for decades to peek inside the infamously closed world of police departments. Many departments are now trying to end the practice. Special thanks to Andy Lanset and KQED for the archival tape.

And transformative justice organizer Ejeris Dixon, who is the Founding Director of Vision Change Win and editor of Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, joins Kai to take calls about how communities can keep themselves safe without – and from – police intervention.

Police are facing one of the greatest crises of legitimacy in a generation. In the wake of the largest uprisings in U.S. history, sparked by police violence, bloated police budgets, and the deadly impacts of a failure to invest in community health and safety laid bare by the pandemic, pro-police forces are on the defensive. So they are reaching for one of their most reliable weapons — fear.

This is nothing new — cops and policymakers have always used fearmongering to push “law and order” agendas and pour more and more money into police departments. Now, with police budgets under scrutiny by campaigns to defund the police and refund our communities all across the country, lawmakers and the media are once again recycling old talking points about increasing violence and crime, claiming that campaigns to defund police are responsible.

Read our new report to explore data, talking points, and narratives that highlight the fact that COPS DON’T STOP VIOLENCE.

Human Impact Partners joined with the Dignity Not Detention Coalition to create a resource outlining recommendations for what healthy, just, and supportive immigration policy can look like for unaccompanied youth immigrating to the US, without relying on detention or detention-like facilities.

This report profiles several jurisdictions that recently removed police from their schools and detail how communities were able to wage successful campaigns and the types of resources schools have implemented in place of law enforcement.