Resources

A zine with educational materials and activities on police accountability and police abolition.

Alex Vitale offers ten ways to make communities safer for everyone. The following concrete steps present a way forward, one that would begin to reduce reliance on policing.

The movement to redirect police funding towards social services and community care has ignited calls to re-examine police presence in schools. In the last month alone, several school districts have decided to disband school-based officers while urging their communities to shift funding towards other necessary services. Instead of relying on police to fulfill core educational functions, now is the time for schools to fund mental health professionals, academic support, and other evidence-based programs. Particularly in light of the twin pandemics of coronavirus and engrained structural racism, the scarce funding available should focus on what works best for students.

Many of the worst features of mass incarceration — such as racial disparities in prisons — can be traced back to policing. Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) research on the policies that impact justice-involved and incarcerated people therefore often intersects with policing issues. Now, at a time when police practices, budgets, and roles in society are at the center of the national conversation about criminal justice, PPI has compiled key work related to policing (and discussions of other researchers’ work) in one briefing.

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.

A research report that examines 911 call data, civilian race, and officer use of force. Researchers found that white officers increase use of force as they are dispatched to more minority neighborhoods, compared to minority officers. Researchers also found that while white and Black officers use gun force at similar rates in white and racially mixed neighborhoods, white officers are five times as likely to use gun force in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Similarly, white officers increase use of any force much more than minority officers when dispatched to more minority neighborhoods.

This page is a hub for this year’s session materials, as well as additional resources related to the topic of PIC abolition, organizing, and healing justice. Click through for more information on the event.

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.

This webinar explores ACRE’s groundbreaking research on cities’ use of Police Brutality Bonds, the bonds issued to pay for police brutality settlements. Police brutality bonds generate fees for Wall Street firms like Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, and interest payments for investors, allowing them to literally profit from police violence. Borrowing can also drastically increase the costs of police violence, but these costs are not reflected in the official police budget. The webinar covers how ACRE did the research for the report, how bonds work, some of ACRE’s data sources and what other policing costs might be hiding in city budgets.