Resources

Do investors anticipate that demands for racial equity will impact companies? We explore this question in the context of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement—the largest racially motivated protest movement in U.S. history—and its effect on the U.S. policing industry using a novel dataset on publicly traded firms contracting with the police. It is unclear whether the BLM uprisings were likely to increase or decrease market valuations of firms contracting heavily with police because of the increased interest in reforming the police, fears over rising crime, and pushes to “defund the police”. We find, in contrast to the predictions of economics experts we surveyed, that in the three weeks following incidents triggering BLM uprisings, policing firms experienced a stock price increase of seven percentage points relative to the stock prices of nonpolicing firms in similar industries. In particular, firms producing surveillance technology and police accountability tools experienced higher returns following BLM activism–related events. Furthermore, policing firms’ fundamentals, such as sales, improved after the murder of George Floyd, suggesting that policing firms’ future performances bore out investors’ positive expectations following incidents triggering BLM uprisings. Our research shows how—despite BLM’s calls to reduce investment in policing and explore alternative public safety approaches—the financial market has translated high-profile violence against Black civilians and calls for systemic change into shareholder gains and additional revenues for police suppliers.

A Report by Maurice MP-Weeks & Brendan McQuade, this is a resource on criminalization, manufactured panic, and how the narrative of a “shoplifting surge” by corporations and the media is copaganda. This report discusses the rise of private security, the politics of crime data, the informal economy, and the need for decommodification and to end market dependence in order to build the world where we all have what we need.

Hosts speak with Albert Fox Cahn and Sarah Roth of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, or S.T.O.P., about the increasing use of surveillance technology to track students. Claiming their technology can predict who will be a threat to themselves or the school, companies market programs that report to school officials on students’ keystrokes, words, and behaviors. School officials can provide it to law enforcement or parents.

This free guide was developed by artist, organizer, and social justice educator Rania El Mugammar. This document provides tools for starting (and continuing) conversations about policing, prisons and transformative justice in the lives of children, families and the broader community. This resource includes prompts, questions, and exercises to help challenge carceral thinking, copaganda, and surveillance to develop a more robust and collective sense of justice.

In September 2021, the Atlanta City Council approved a proposal to lease 381 acres of the Weelaunee Forest—stolen Muscogee land surrounded by majority-Black neighborhoods—to the Atlanta Police Foundation to build the largest militarized police training center in the US. In response, a decentralized movement has risen up to halt the destruction of the forest and the construction of what has come to be known as “Cop City.” As the Stop Cop City movement has grown, the state has employed increasingly draconian methods of repression. In January of this year, police killed Manuel “Tortuguita” Téran, a 26-year old Indigenous Venezuelan forest defender. Dozens of people have been arrested for protesting, including a legal observer with the Southern Poverty Law Center, and more than 40 have been charged with domestic terrorism. Last month, a heavily armed joint task force raided a community center and arrested three bail fund organizers living there under tenuous allegations of “money laundering” and “charity fraud.” And despite widespread opposition, the Atlanta City Council recently authorized an additional $30 million contribution to the construction of Cop City, bringing the city’s pledged total to $67 million.

​​On this week’s episode of On the Nose, culture editor Claire Schwartz is joined by three guests in Atlanta deeply engaged with Stop Cop City—Micah Herskind, a community organizer and writer; Keyanna Jones, a reverend and organizer; and Josie Duffy Rice, a writer who covers criminal justice—to discuss the movement’s roots and tactics, and what the militarization of Atlanta can teach us about the economic underpinnings of fascism.

This toolkit was created in collaboration with MediaJustice and their ongoing work to combat disinformation as a resource for people and organizations engaging in work to dismantle, defund, and abolish systems of policing and carceral punishment, while also navigating trials of police officers who murder people in our communities.

Trials are not tools of abolition; rather, they are a (rarely) enforced consequence within the current system under the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) for people who murder while working as police officers. Police are rarely charged when they commit these murders and even less so when the victim is Black. We at MPD150 are committed to the deconstruction of the PIC in its entirety and until this is accomplished, we also honor the need for people who are employed as police officers to be held to the same laws they weaponize against our communities.

A Center for Public Integrity analysis of U.S. Department of Education data from all 50 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico found that school policing disproportionately affects students with disabilities, Black children and, in some states, Native American and Latino children. Nationwide, Black students and students with disabilities were referred to law enforcement at nearly twice their share of the overall student population.

For now over twenty years, the FBI has detained, surveilled, harassed, and destroyed the lives of innocent Muslims. The public record amply documents how these abuses, inflicted via always-expanding FBI powers, led not to a reduction in terrorism, but painful, farcical, and often dangerous abuses of Muslims.

All of this injustice comes from a list. This list goes by various names – the terrorist watchlist, the Terrorism Screening Database, or as the FBI recently rebranded it, the Terrorism Screening Dataset.

It has long been clear to the Muslim community itself that the FBI’s list is nothing more than a list of innocent Muslims. The consequences of being on the FBI’s list are borne almost exclusively by Muslims, and even individuals who openly espouse political violence generally do not find themselves similarly targeted so long as they themselves are not Muslim.

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.