Resources

These documents provide information using a public health lens for families, organizers, and advocates who are demanding a response to this pandemic that upholds human dignity and prioritizes healing, not policing and incarceration.

DC has another unique opportunity to be leaders in the effort to protect residents during COVID-19. The District can change lives and utilize federal funds to keep DC functional as we recover from the pandemic. The CARES ACT gives our city leadership wide latitude in how those federal funds can be used.

The question we should be asking is this: will DC prioritize taking progressive measures to advance public health and safety in our communities by investing in housing, health care, and income for all? Or will we allow police departments throughout the District to waste vital resources on trying to police our way out of a pandemic, harming and disappearing drug users, Sex Workers, LGBTQ folks, and Black and Brown community members in the process?

A letter on the criminalization of COVID-19 response and recommendations for Congress to address the issue.

A new toolkit from Community Justice Exchange and Defender Impact Initiative for folks working to end mass criminalization and incarceration, who have taken to social media to share the injustices they witness or experience in courtrooms, whether as public defenders, court watching groups, or individual advocates.

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) is a recent movement to bring recognition to the disappearance and murders of Native women and girls; many in the movement also include two spirit and trans persons under the term. While the movement is new, the issue of MMIW is not. This compilation of resources can be a starting point to understand the crisis of MMIW fully, provide families healing, and help others implement justice and take action so that there will be no more stolen sisters.

Every city and every organizing campaign are different. Some organizing efforts have chosen to call for outright bans,
others believe that pursuing policy goals to regulate the industry is a tacit acceptance of these technologies, while others have chosen to try regulatory policies as a way to mitigate the harms. Every organized community will have to consider the political conditions and the capacity they have to win their demands. The purpose of this toolkit is to describe the menu of options and pose questions that we can ask ourselves as we approach our cities to ensure that our efforts are helping abolish surveillance and not reinforce it.

Every day, new policies stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic are making it far easier for government and private companies to collect and share vast amounts of personal and private health information. While this data is critically important from a public health standpoint, there are many unknowns around its future use. We must be aware and informed to ensure that public health emergencies are not misused to increase deportation, criminalization, and further harm to the health of immigrant, Black, and Brown communities.

In response to concerns over the potential privacy implications of its gunshot detection technology, ShotSpotter Technologies, Inc. (SST) approached the Policing Project to conduct a thorough personal privacy assessment of its product, ShotSpotter. The primary privacy concern identified was the possibility that the technology might capture voices of individuals near its sensors, and could conceivably be used for targeted voice surveillance. Although ultimately concluding that the risk of voice surveillance was extremely low in practice, Policing Project offered SST a variety of recommendations on how to make ShotSpotter even more privacy protective.

This is a recording of a conversation with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Elliott Fukui on the intersections of disability justice and transformative justice. Participants talked about non-punitive responses to harm, restorative justice and ways to engage the public, and building accountable communities.