Resources

In response to community demands for public accountability and for a responsible process of abolition that provides restitution to people harmed by the database, the Policing in Chicago Research Group at the University of Illinois at Chicago carried out an evaluation of the Regional Gang Intelligence Database (RGID). This report outlines what is known about RGID and the questions that remain.

California’s passage into law of Senate Bill 1421 allows for the public disclosure of investigations into police officers for misconduct (e.g., use of force, lying, sexual assault, etc.). Additionally, Assembly Bill 748 contains new disclosure provisions, broadly allowing audio and video recordings of “critical incidents” to be released to the public. This paper is intended to inform readers about the new laws, what they cover, how to respond to California Public Records Act requests for disclosable records, and how to deal with competing viewpoints regarding interpretation of the statutes.

Repeated instances of police violence against unarmed civilians have drawn worldwide attention to the contemporary crisis of police legitimacy. Community-oriented policing (COP), which encourages positive, nonenforcement contact between police officers and the public, has been widely promoted as a policy intervention for building public trust and enhancing police legitimacy. To date, however, there is little evidence that COP actually leads to changes in attitudes toward the police. Researchers conducted a randomized trial with a large urban police department and found that positive contact with police—delivered via brief door-to-door nonenforcement community policing visits—substantially improved residents’ attitudes toward police, including legitimacy and willingness to cooperate. These effects remained large in a 21-day follow-up and were largest among nonwhite respondents.

An encounter with the police can make us freeze up or “leave” our bodies in the moment. Repeated over time, experiences of aggression or harm at the hands of police can seem to pile up and keep us from feeling and acting like ourselves. This guide exists to help you stay connected to yourself, your streets and your support system so you can communicate what you need in these situations.

Born of the passion of neighborhood mothers outraged at the NYPD’s treatment of their sons, this report spent two years documenting experiences of policing in a 40-block community near Yankee stadium. The collaborative research team of neighborhood residents in the South Bronx and members of the Public Science Project, the CUNY Graduate Center, John Jay College, and Pace University Law Center conducted focus groups of local residents, creating and analyzing a comprehensive survey that was distributed throughout the neighborhood. 1,030 residents took the survey, sharing their attitudes and experiences with police. These are the results.

This video short shows the process of “critical mapping” used to represent the cumulative and uneven impact of hot spot policing across New York City – every NYPD police stop, every hour, for the entire year of 2011. The process is called “critical mapping” because researchers use maps to interrogate and speak back to the “official” maps that label neighborhoods a “hot spot” of crime.

Researchers for Fair Policing is an intergenerational team of researchers from Make the Road New York & the Public Science Project. These videos are a collection of stories of young people’s experiences with the police and school safety officers. There have been over 1 million young people stopped over the past few years, each of these experiences is unique. As you listen to the stories, consider how the NYPD’s long history of aggressive, zero-tolerance policing policies are impacting young people and what should be done about it.

This report covers FBI surveillance of political activity over roughly the past decade. It find that the FBI has repeatedly monitored civil society groups, including racial justice movements, Occupy Wall Street, environmentalists, Palestinian solidarity activists, Abolish ICE protesters, and Cuba and Iran normalization proponents. Additionally, FBI agents conducted interviews that critics have argued were designed to chill protests at the Republican National Convention or intimidate Muslim-American voters.

If we want a just and humane world, we must create one in which apparatuses of oppression are no longer considered reasonable. This week on For The Wild, we are joined by Mariame Kaba for an expansive conversation on Transformative Justice, community accountability, criminalization of survivors, and freedom on the horizon. Mariame addresses punishment as an issue of directionality while reminding us why it is vital to have the prison abolition movement in conversation with the movement for climate and environmental justice. When we engage with these issues and shape our actions out of a commitment to removing violence at its core, we are working to transform our world beyond recognition into something teeming with possibility, beauty, and life.