Resources

In 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) awarded a Community Policing Development (CPD) grant to the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement (NACOLE). NACOLE sought to provide comprehensive guidance on civilian oversight for oversight practitioners, law enforcement, community organizations, and local officials in order to further develop effective civilian oversight throughout the United States. With support and funding from the COPS Office, NACOLE has developed nine in-depth case studies of civilian oversight agencies throughout the United States; a searchable, online database of civilian oversight agencies and their characteristics; and a report on the state of the field and effective practices.

As the national media is shifting its attention away from demands to restructure, defund, and abolish the police, Scalawag’s Abolition Week is an appeal to keep these conversations at the forefront. This week, we’re only publishing work by or about incarcerated writers, artists, and thinkers in an effort to center their experiences and their humanity.

Whether you’ve never heard of abolition, have questions about what it means, or are already deeply committed to the work—the journey toward abolition is an ongoing process, and it’s one that we are all on together. This journey involves both changing our systems and our personal mentalities.

The Collective Freedom Project is a website and digital space made to uplift the work of advocates across the country working to dismantle narratives that criminalize our communities for cross-sector solidarity.

This article explains how the inequities embedded within the legal system serve to undermine social movements, magnify harms, and exploit the work of Black, Indigenous, and other activists of color in the process. The authors contribute to the growing collection of scholarship that questions the illusion of impartiality of our legal systems, theory, or praxis, and builds on activists’ work toward a society with equitable distribution of resources and equal access to wellness and joy.

The question of whether police belong in schools has been a long-debated topic in the United States. With the increased focus on policing generally, the debate has grown more intense. Proponents argue that police can more effectively address student-to-student conflict, such as bullying, and increase overall safety in an age of recurring school shootings. Those who oppose argue that police in schools contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline and result in disparities based on race and/or disability in discipline and arrests, as well as a climate of fear for students of color. Speakers on this program present the data, discuss the impact of police in schools and examine this issue critically to confront the question of whether police in schools result in enhanced student safety.

In May 2021, Boston’s Acting Mayor Kim Janey released her recommended City budget for the upcoming 2022 fiscal year (FY). This budget claims to double down on reducing Boston police overtime, deepening last year’s $12 million budget cut by an additional $4.9 million.

The problem? As recent ACLU analysis shows, without a simultaneous commitment to reining in the power of police unions and penalizing Boston Police Department (BPD) budgetary overages, this “cut” will simply never come to be. Taken together with the fact that Mayor Janey’s recommendation doesn’t really touch the $355 million budgeted for non-overtime policing and otherwise ignores advocates’ calls to divest from police, the FY22 BPD budget is effectively unchanged from years past.

New analysis by the ACLU of Massachusetts unpacks the Boston Police Department budget – again – making it clear that it is effectively no smaller than previous years’ budgets.

Researchers have conducted hundreds of studies looking for effective ways to prevent and reduce violence, but the knowledge base is far from complete, especially as it relates to one important question: are there ways to prevent violence without relying on the police? The obvious answer is “yes.” Policing has never been the primary explanation for obviously varying levels of community safety. Residents of wealthy areas do not experience the intense police surveillance and enforcement imposed on poor neighborhoods. Yet, rates of violence are reliably lower in wealthy communities.

Arnold Ventures asked the John Jay College Research and Evaluation Center (JohnJayREC) to review the research evidence for violence reduction strategies that do not rely on law enforcement. The scan was carried out by an expert group of researchers from the fields of public policy, criminology, law, public health, and social science. The members of the research group worked collaboratively to identify, translate, and summarize the most important and actionable studies.

The primary purpose of this guide is to serve as a pragmatic tool for individuals and communities organizing and advocating for non-police mental health crisis responses, and to offer key considerations for what can be a complex, costly, and long-term intervention strategy.

This guide highlights considerations for real, meaningful shifts away from law enforcement and towards autonomous, self-determined community-based resources and responses to unmet mental health needs. It also takes into account a range of knowledge and expertise among the intended audience: community members, advocates, organizers, activists, mental health professionals, policymakers, and other change agents working towards the selection and implementation of mental health crisis responses.

Though the campaign ended in 2019, this organizing toolkit was developed over the past year plus by #NoCopAcademy youth and adult alumni who wanted to share out how we did what we did (because people kept asking us), to document our work, and to share it with the hundreds and thousands of young people taking action today to defund policing, get cops out of our schools, and build abolitionist futures. Campaigns are an important tool for building power, and we wanted to break down all the parts that went into ours.