Resources

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, as we long feared, we’ve been forced to navigate a new legal landscape. The terrain for people seeking abortions is changing almost daily, and abortion care is increasingly threatened for more communities. In this new era, increased attention has been paid to when the “wave” of criminalization will begin for those providing or seeking abortion care. Prosecutors have declared they won’t enforce laws and journalists have reported on possible police surveillance of period tracker apps. Yet, these responses are disconnected from what reproductive rights and justice advocates know about criminalization, and they are out of line with what has been found in research.

Newly obtained Freedom of Information records from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) provide a previously unreported window into ICE’s expansive use of LexisNexis’ Accurint data service. LexisNexis appears to be trying to keep the full extent of its dealings with ICE secret, and in its contract, prohibits government customers from naming LexisNexis or referencing use of LexisNexis in press releases. These newly released documents suggest that LexisNexis is attempting to hide its own complicity in the deportation machine.

A zine in both English and Spanish that outlines the Salt Lake City, Utah, city budget and how it is allocated to policing. It offers a list of divestment proposals and demands as well as a list of investments back into the community, such as supportive housing services, mental health resources, community spaces, and more.

The Stalker State is the information gathering, storing, and sharing environment we are all immersed in. This is an ever-changing, ever-evolving web of agencies and organizations that embody a toxic culture of data collection with the intent to police us and cause harm. It doesn’t only watch us to invade privacy, it watches to criminalize us. We invite you to explore the imagery and contemplate how all these entities connect in a way that leads to harm.

The STOP LAPD Spying Coalition has been on the forefront in the fight against data-driven policing and surveillance. Their ground-breaking work combines community research to expose surveillance and policing tech, visual and creative tools to demystify new technologies and hands-on organising. All with the explicitly abolitionist aim of building power on the ground to dismantle the carceral technologies of what they have coined the Stalker State. We invited Stop LAPD Spying Coalition members Shakeer Rahman and Hamid Khan to talk about their work and their experiences on research and mapping of surveillance technologies.

In 2020, after the largest uprising for racial justice in this nation’s history, Governor Andrew Cuomo was successfully pressured to revoke Section 50-a of the State’s Civil Rights Law. This means local governments can release the disciplinary records of police officers. All across the state cities of all sizes have released these records for the benefit of their residents. But not Troy, who has refused several formal requests to see these records.

Given how little trust now remains between the city government and the people we realize it is important that we collect and share this information on our own. It is only when we share information that we no longer feel alone and threatened. The People’s Reporting Project is an independent system to record and gather data about local law enforcement agencies and their officers. We welcome all information about your interaction with officers, past, present, and future to help us put together the necessary information that will heal our communities and root out bad actors.

Survivors want safety and support. Defunding police is a survivor-led anti-violence strategy that stops police from looting resources survivors need to prevent, avoid, escape and heal from violence – and puts more money into violence prevention and interruption, and meeting survivors’ needs.

This essay is part of the ongoing “AI Lexicon” project, a call for contributions to generate alternate narratives, positionalities, and understandings to the better known and widely circulated ways of talking about artificial intelligence (AI).

Police departments in some of the largest U.S. cities have been experimenting with predictive policing as a way to forecast criminal activity. Predictive policing uses computer systems to analyze large sets of data, including historical crime data, to help decide where to deploy police or to identify individuals who are purportedly more likely to commit or be a victim of a crime.

Proponents argue that predictive policing can help predict crimes more accurately and effectively than traditional police methods. However, critics have raised concerns about transparency and accountability. Additionally, while big data companies claim that their technologies can help remove bias from police decision-making, algorithms relying on historical data risk reproducing those very biases.

Predictive policing is just one of a number of ways police departments in the United States have incorporated big data methods into their work in the last two decades. Others include adopting surveillance technologies such as facial recognition and social media monitoring. These developments have not always been accompanied by adequate safeguards.