Resources

This toolkit was created in collaboration with MediaJustice and their ongoing work to combat disinformation as a resource for people and organizations engaging in work to dismantle, defund, and abolish systems of policing and carceral punishment, while also navigating trials of police officers who murder people in our communities.

Trials are not tools of abolition; rather, they are a (rarely) enforced consequence within the current system under the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) for people who murder while working as police officers. Police are rarely charged when they commit these murders and even less so when the victim is Black. We at MPD150 are committed to the deconstruction of the PIC in its entirety and until this is accomplished, we also honor the need for people who are employed as police officers to be held to the same laws they weaponize against our communities.

The Atlanta community is clear – they do NOT want #CopCity. Working people in Atlanta need the same things as working peoples across the country – investment in good jobs, healthcare, education and the environment. Instead, the Atlanta Police Foundation has pushed an enormous facility equipped with shooting ranges, Blackhawk helicopters and mock urban warfare training grounds. This all indicates preparation for actions against working people, not for us. Furthermore, actions taken against the brave protestors to date have included brutal pushback, threats of RICO charges and sadly even murder. The Labor Movement is all too familiar with violent repression of just fights, and it’s important to stand fervently against it’s acceptance.

The Labor movement must take a stand for working people and communities in Atlanta that have clearly said in no uncertain terms they DO NOT WANT #CopCity to be funded or built!

Poor people in the United States are a primary target for policing, especially those forced to live on the streets. But just how many people who are unhoused are caught up in the thousands of arrests made in cities each year? How many are criminalized for behaviors that stem directly from their extreme poverty? We combed through years of data from a variety of sources to answer these questions for the city of Atlanta.

Freddie Gray, Laquan MacDonald, Kevin Matthews, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Charleena Lyles, Sandra Bland, Quintonio LeGrier, Stephon Watts, Korryn Gaines, Natasha McKenna, Eric Smith, and Daniel Prude are all Black, disabled victims of state violence. In the United States, 50 percent of people killed by law enforcement are disabled, and more than half of disabled African Americans have been arrested by the time they turn 28—double the risk in comparison to their white disabled counterparts. While these statistics provide basic insight into how law enforcement engage with parts of the disability community, much remains unknown. Specifically, the United States must improve the mechanisms used for data collection on police encounters to provide an accurate, complete picture of these long-standing dynamics and misuse of force. In the ongoing efforts and discussion surrounding police reform and the need for shifting investments into different types of interventions, policymakers need to have solid data in order to refute messaging that minimizes the magnitude of the problem.

The Abolition Working Group steering committee is pleased to share our Abolition Toolkit with you. Why make a toolkit when organizations like Critical Resistance and Interrupting Criminalization have already produced so many wonderful resources?

We wanted to lift up the abolitionist projects being done in DSA by chapters across the country and make clear the connection between abolition and socialism. We do not believe you can have one without the other.

For all of the working class to achieve collective liberation we must constrain, diminish, and abolish the carceral forces of the state — from prisons and police themselves, to their manifestations in all forms throughout society. -DSA’s Political Platform

Chicagoans deserve real community safety—a city in which every child has a fair opportunity to grow up and achieve their full potential and every resident has the resources they need to thrive. Communities that invest in their people are safe communities. Parents in towns with well-funded public schools, public parks and libraries with a lot of youth programs, and strong public health infrastructure don’t fear for their kids’ lives every time they let them out of the house. Cities with good jobs, free public transit, and free child care give residents the opportunity to provide for their families. Real community safety comes from addressing the underlying issues that lead to crime and violence. The proposals in this report would generate $12 billion in new revenue and savings that we could invest in our people and neighborhoods.

Despite being broadly banned in warfare under the terms of the 1925 Geneva Protocol, tear gas as an agent for so-called ‘riot control’ has become the preferred means for police, in the US and around the world, to clear dissenting voices from public spaces. But the toxic chemicals contained in tear gas and other widely-used chemical munitions can cause serious short- and long-term side effects, from asthma and chemical burns to lung injury and neurodegeneration.

Around a decade ago, Stop LAPD Spying developed a copwatch practice that we call Watch the Watchers. Copwatch refers to the practice of community members teaming up to observe and document police abuses, especially arrests and other violence. Watch the Watchers built on this practice with a focus on surveillance technologies and patterns. You can watch videos explaining our Watch the Watchers work at May Day actions in MacArthur park in 2015, where we exposed LAPD undercover surveillance, and in 2017, where LAPD officers tried to lie about spy technologies deployed to monitor the crowd.

This website is intended as a tool to empower community members engaged in copwatch and other countersurveillance practices. You can use it to identify officers who are causing harm in your community. The website’s ease of use also makes it a political statement, flipping the direction of surveillance against the state’s agents. Police have vast information about all of us at their fingertips, yet they move in secrecy.

Every year in the United States, police dogs injure thousands of people, biting and maiming bystanders, officers and people suspected of petty crimes. Dogs have served as instruments of violence in incidents dating back to the days of slavery, and as recently as the Black Lives Matter protests. At the same time, police departments love to show off their dogs—at parades or on Twitter, visiting classrooms or posing with a Girl Scout troop. Some K-9s even have their own adorable Instagram accounts.

In our year-long investigation with The Marshall Project, AL.com and the IndyStar, we identified and tracked individual cases, pulling data across the country to compile more than 150 severe incidents. We found that most bite victims were suspected of low-level, non-violent crimes. Almost none of them were armed. The Marshall Project’s nationwide tracker allows readers to sort incidents by state, read descriptions of the attacks and view videos of some of them.