Resources

This webpage is a centralized hub for resources related to Gender-Based Violence (GBV) from organizations across British Columbia, as well as key national and international research. Use the dropdown menu to search for specific criminalization and GBV resources.

The questions in this document provide a guide to analyze whether proposed reforms to family policing further entrench the family policing system or move us closer to abolition of family policing. The questions we ask are a reflection of the world we want to build—one without family policing and one where children are safer.

Informants are the foot soldiers in the government’s war on drugs. By some estimates, up to 80% of all drug cases in America involve them, often in active roles. For police departments facing budget woes, untrained informants provide an inexpensive way to outsource the work of undercover officers. “The system makes it cheap and easy to use informants, as opposed to other, less risky but more cumbersome approaches,” says Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a leading expert on informants. “There are fewer procedures in place and fewer institutional checks on their use.” Often, deploying informants involves no paperwork and no institutional oversight, let alone lawyers, judges, or public scrutiny; their use is necessarily shrouded in secrecy.

Every day, offenders are sent out to perform high-risk police operations with few legal protections. Some are juveniles, occasionally as young as 14 or 15. Some operate through the haze of addiction; others are enrolled in state-mandated treatment programs that prohibit their association with illegal drugs of any kind. Many have been given false assurances by the police, used without regard for their safety, and treated as disposable pawns of the criminal-justice system.

In collaboration with Rutgers Graduate School of Education and the Samuel Dewitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity & Justice, this report highlights the disproportionate arrests of Black and Latinx youth by the Pomona Police Department (PPD). Our goal is to center the malpractices of a police department that does not receive the same attention as a large metropolitan police department yet suffers from similar systemic issues of racial injustice and police brutality. In response to the question “Where is justice needed most?” justice is needed most for Black and Latinx youth in Pomona, California. We honor the work of youth, parents, and community activists, as well as a social action nonprofit organization, Gente Organizada, who together have demanded accountability from its city leaders and PPD for the mistreatment of youth.

In 2021, Gente Organizada released a first-of-its-kind report on racial profiling practices in local law enforcement in the City of Pomona. Pomona Police Department’s Crusade Against Black and Latinx Youth presents clear evidence of the Pomona Police Department (PPD)’s longstanding history of discrimination and harassment focused on BIPOC youth.

The report also includes a list of demands featured in the report, including the establishment of an independent civilian body with oversight over PPD; the creation of a new city fund dedicated to investing in Black Lives and Black Futures; and a commitment from the City to shift funding from PPD and reinvest in true evidence-based community safety.

Over the past four years, the data collected under the Racial and Identity Profiling Act (“RIPA”) has provided empirical evidence showing disparities in policing throughout California. This year’s data demonstrates the same trends in disparities for all aspects of law enforcement stops, from the reason for stop to actions taken during stop to results of stop. Specifically, the 2023 Report analyzes the RIPA stop data from January 1, 2021 to December 31, 2021, collected and reported by 58 law enforcement agencies, including the 23 largest law enforcement agencies in California. The Report also explores the negative mental health impacts of adverse law enforcement interactions on individuals and communities and contains a new focus on youth interactions with law enforcement both inside and outside of school. Additionally, the report continues to examine the data and research on pretextual stops and consent searches. In this Executive Summary, the Board highlights specific findings, analyses, and research discussed in more detail in the body of the Report.

In this report, we present the findings of a combined quantitative/qualitative data analysis of over 200 incidents of police assaults between 2011 and 2021. This analysis dramatically illustrates how school policing places students, especially Black students, at a significant risk of criminalization and assault, as evidenced by the heartbreaking, far–too–frequent videos of school police officers using physical force on children. Our analysis of these #AssaultAt incidents helps us better understand the extent to which school policing jeopardizes the physical safety and health of Black and Latine students, girls and young women, students with disabilities, and students attending predominately low-income schools.

Sexual violence is an everyday practice of policing. Even in New Orleans, where in 2014 the federal government placed the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) under a
consent decree, police sexual violence persists. Despite federal and local oversight, publicly available data and public records data reveal:

• At least 236 complaints of sexual and/or intimate violence
• By 189 NOPD officers between 2014-2020

These records confirm what many quietly know: police routinely perpetrate a spectrum of sexual harm in our communities. By centering survivors – particularly Black girls, women, and queer people in the South – we can better understand the scope of the everyday violence of policing. This factsheet highlights the urgent need for divesting resources away from policing and investing in social programs that meet survivors’ needs, affirm bodily autonomy, and actually keep us safe.

School resource officers (SROs) continue to be one of the most common approaches that schools use to promote safety. SROs are meant to prevent crime in schools, but also to build relationships with students and school personnel and act as a resource for conveying law-related information. Critics of SROs suggest that they perpetuate the school-to-prison pipeline and have particularly negative consequences for students of color. In spite of these potential advantages and disadvantages of using SROs in schools, research on the effects of SROs has generally lagged behind, particularly in regard to outcomes beyond those related to crime and punishment. The purpose of this study is to examine the impacts of implementing SROs on outcomes related to school climate and suspension rates, with particular attention to racial differences in these effects and the role of school context. This study also examines how SROs perceive their roles and responsibilities and how these may be shaped by school contexts.