Resources

A report on the high rates of murder and sexual assault against Native American women across the United States, often at the hands of white and other non-Native American men outside the jurisdiction of tribal law enforcement. Many other Native American women have gone missing. This report also addresses the lack of investigations by the federal government and reasons why legal officials may not pursue investigations or specific charges.

In response to the discussion surrounding police violence against marginalized communities in the United States, Lakota People’s Law Project (LPLP) pens the Native Lives Matter report to detail the statistical frequency at which Native Americans are brutalized or killed by the police.

In recent decades, women have accounted for a growing share of America’s police officers, but this growth has been relatively slow and women remain underrepresented in the field. They also sometimes differ sharply from male officers in their views of policing and their experiences, according to a new Pew Research Center survey conducted by the National Police Research Platform.

Emerging Issues in American Policing is a quarterly digest intended for police-practitioners and community members that presents innovations in the field of policing from the leading academic journals and research publications. The April 2019 issue includes “Mental Health Calls in a Rural Police Department,” “Racial Disparities in Nashville’s Traffic Stops,” “Crisis Intervention Team Training for Youth and Officer Awareness,” and more.

For most of its history, the United States excluded people of color from its main pathways of opportunity and upward mobility, causing deep inequities across many aspects of life. But we can imagine a more equitable future in which structural racism—the policies, programs, and institutional practices that generated inequitable outcomes—and its consequences are remedied. Pages 19-24 give recommendations around policing policy to address this issue of structural racism.

Piecing together the responses to over 100 Freedom of Information Act requests and dozens of interviews, researchers found that more than half of American adults were enrolled in a face recognition network searchable by law enforcement. Across the country, state and local police departments are building their own face recognition systems, many of them more advanced than the FBI’s. We know very little about these systems. We don’t know how they impact privacy and civil liberties. We don’t know how they address accuracy problems. And we don’t know how any of these systems—local, state, or federal—affect racial and ethnic minorities.

A report that details the various ways police may use facial recognition methods to pursue suspects. There are no rules when it comes to what images police can submit to face recognition algorithms to generate investigative leads. As a consequence, agencies across the country can—and do—submit all manner of “probe photos,” photos of unknown individuals submitted for search against a police or driver license database. These images may be low-quality surveillance camera stills, social media photos with filters, and scanned photo album pictures. Records from police departments show they may also include computer-generated facial features, or composite or artist sketches.

This report details the different, and potentially dangerous, ways that facial surveillance and recognition technology are currently being used and how they could be used in the future. Thanks to face recognition technology, authorities are able to conduct biometric surveillance—pick you out from a crowd, identify you, trace your movements across a city with the network of cameras capturing your face—all completely in secret. No longer is video surveillance limited to recording what happens; it may now identify who is where, doing what, at any point in time.