Resources

For decades, efforts by police to seize illicit drugs have been a cornerstone strategy for disrupting drug markets and removing drugs from communities. But there’s an unintended outcome when opioids are seized, a new study finds — increases in overdoses, including those that are fatal.

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.

In this report, we find that the militarized portion of this budget is by far its largest single component. And yet the same legislators demanding billions in discretionary savings have vowed to exempt that militarized spending from any cuts. Instead, they’ve targeted the much smaller portion that funds human and community needs for even deeper cuts.

This report shows just how over-militarized our federal discretionary spending already is. We argue that this militarized spending has done far more harm than good, while our consistent under-investment in human needs has made us much less safe. Finally, we make recommendations for getting our national priorities right in the future.

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.

Never heard of police foundations? That’s the point. Behind closed doors, police foundations and their corporate sponsors privately fund the ongoing militarization and expansion of policing – targeting Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. Color Of Change and LittleSis have compiled the most extensive report to date of the links between police foundations and corporations, identifying over 1,200 corporate donations or executives serving as board members at 23 of the largest police foundations in the country.

Youth arrests and incarceration increased in the closing decades of the 20th century but have fallen sharply since that time. Public opinion often lags behind these realities, wrongly assuming both that crime is perpetually increasing and that youth offending is routinely violent. In fact, youth offending is predominantly low-level, and the 21st century has seen significant declines in youth arrests and incarceration. Between 2000 and 2020, the number of youth held in juvenile justice facilities fell from 109,000 to 25,000—a 77% decline.

As The Sentencing Project marks 50 years since the era of mass incarceration began, states working to end this overly punitive era can learn important lessons from both the rise and then the sustained fall in youth arrests and placements.

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.

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.