Resources

On November 20th, Triad Abolition Project, Hate Out Of Winston, and Drum Majors Alliance co-signed a letter to city council, which did not receive a response from any Council member nor the city’s Mayor. On November 29th, the Winston-Salem Journal published “Police-spending critics call on city to discuss their concerns.” The People’s Report is a community dialogue in response to the Journal’s story, and continued conversation on the topic of divesting from WSPD as our city approaches the FY2021-2022 budget cycle.

Home is where you should feel the safest. For many Chicago families, it’s being invaded by the people worn to serve and protect them. When a confidential informant gives officers information, such as tips on crimes, police are required to verify it’s correct before acting. In the case of a search warrant, it must be signed by a police supervisor, an assistant state’s attorney and a judge. But Chicago Police officers often fail to verify the address before executing search warrants, leading to the wrong homes – and innocent families – being the targets.

This page was originally published on Oct. 6, 2019. On May 18, 2020, an epilogue was added. On July 29, 2020, the epilogue was updated with new data provided by police.

Situated at the present historical moment of resurgent white nationalism and xenophobia, Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism undertakes comparative inquiry of imaginations and practices of sanctuary and refuge. Seeking to accompany movements that challenge detention and deportation, Sanctuary Spaces supports scholarship, art, and pedagogy that enact different humanisms and other worlds of political being. Organized around three themes, Abolition on Stolen Land, The End of Humanitarianism, and Freedom and Fugitivity, the year-long endeavor convenes public programs, virtual residencies, and conceptual conversations to generate frames and actions that unravel the logics of liberalism and its entanglements with imperialism.

This is a video collaboration with Project Nia & Blue Seat Studios. This four-minute animated video is made with young people in mind but can be a useful introduction to basic #DefundPolice concepts for all ages. People have a lot of ideas about policing. And our ideas about policing are shaped by our race, our genders, our class, and our parents. Dominant culture, especially mass media sells us the image of “Officer Friendly.” But whose experience is that actually based on?

Breonna Taylor is the only Black woman killed by police whose case is familiar to most Americans. And a Newsy analysis shows even the highest-profile women’s cases receive only a small fraction of the coverage generated by police killings of men. The #SayHerName campaign aims to raise awareness of the connection between race and police violence and make sure the stories of Black women are being told.

Just Practice Collaborative created this Mixtape as an offering in response to the overwhelming number of requests we are getting for training, workshops and support. We want to nourish and care for our abolitionist community with as many resources as we can provide right now. This collection of 9 recorded video workshops or webinars are each between 45-90 minutes long and contain valuable frameworks, real life examples and tools you can use to help strengthen your personal practice and political commitment to this moment.

Police contracts can create barriers to just and safe policing or provide guidance and structures that hold law enforcement accountable to communities. The contract negotiations process itself can provide a rare opening for community demands to be heard. Join PolicyLink and experts from around the country to learn about how campaigns in San Francisco, Chicago, and Austin, TX, leveraged police contract negotiations into calls for more accountability, made secretive contract negotiations more transparent, and worked to address the excessive power of police unions.

A webinar partnership between Reclaim the Block and Black Visions to discuss what it means to defund police, examples from around the country of existing alternatives, and how communities can demand that the City Council fund effective public safety programs.

People around the U.S. are demanding that cities defund their local police departments. This webinar encourages us to take that demand one step further, and highlights the relationships between corporations and policing. We know that cutting the police budget is a first step towards the world we want to see but in order to fully fund our communities and invest in the things we need we must also redirect funding from the institutions that support policing.