Resources

This activity guide includes stories, poems, and statistics to engage young people around the history of policing in the United States and the manifestations of police violence.

This 2016 toolkit, developed by youth interns, contains activities and supplemental materials for exploring the costs of policing in Chicago and what community safety can look like beyond the police.

This document was first created in May 2020 and is an ongoing work in progress! We hope this can be a living and collaborative document. We recognize that there are many existing resources and google docs before this one on alternatives to calling the police. Our goal for this document was to compile some of these resources and place them in the context of anti-Asian racism, in Canada, during the COVID-19 pandemic—and what we hope can be a broader dialogue around interracial solidarity.

A discussion with Professor Simone Browne, an educator and author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness and We Like to Watch: Race and Sociology of Surveillance; and Pete White, Executive Director – Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN).

Two sets of guidance addressing law enforcement’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These documents follow early reports from New York and other cities that raised concerns of uneven, sometimes discriminatory enforcement, and confusion about how to reach isolated and vulnerable groups. Vetted with community organizers, academic experts, and law enforcement officials, this COVID-19 guidance compiles best practices for state, municipal, and policing leaders as they navigate this ongoing public health emergency.

A joint letter to Mayor de Blasio from more than 50 advocacy organizations urging him to impose an immediate moratorium on police enforcement of low-level and quality of life offenses; unnecessary summonses and arrests, including fare evasion arrests and drug arrests for marijuana.

This white paper notes the novel law enforcement challenges created by COVID-19 and describes the different approach police must take. Traditional law enforcement practices such as stops, searches, and arrests currently create a substantial risk of infection for police, suspects and community members alike. This paper concludes that until stay-at-home and social distancing orders have been lifted, law enforcement agencies should suspend enforcement measures requiring close proximity or physical contact between law enforcement personnel and members of the public, except in cases where the failure to stop, search, or arrest a suspect creates an imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury to police officers or others.

To better understand the disproportionate impacts of the NYPD’s COVID-19 related enforcement, the Legal Aid Society analyzed social distancing complaints made through 311 between March 28 and May 12, COVID-19 related summonses reported by the NYPD between March 16 and May 5, and internally-tracked COVID-19 related arrests that took place between March 27 and May 2.

A discussion with Professor Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed scholar of race, gender, and the law. Her work focuses on health, social justice, and bioethics as they impact the lives of women, children and the Black community; Professor Bita Amani, Ph.D., M.H.S from Charles Drew University and Co-Chair, COVID-19 Task force on Racism and Equity at UCLA; and Jamie Garcia R.N., BSN and organizer with Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. This discussion will address questions and concerns such as 1) how does race get disguised as a biological category versus a political one?, 2) how is racial science programmed to “reconfigure” race rather than abandon it. And what it means in time of Covid-19?, and 3) how do “immunity passports” figure in the current scheme of surveillance and contact tracing?