Resources

The child welfare system is not a helping system. The system subjugates, surveils, regulates, and punishes families – families who are disproportionately Black and Indigenous. It acts as a family policing system. The system and its supporters portray family policing as a legitimate, supportive helping system – one that protects the safety and well-being of children through necessary state-sanctioned interventions. But the outcomes for children and families are abysmal. Children have significantly worse outcomes as a result of system involvement. Families do not experience healing and children are not safer. Ultimately, the impact of the system on children, families, and communities underscores the ways in which the system functions to maintain anti-Blackness, White supremacy, racial capitalism, and colonialism. We can collectively do better.

The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) conducted survey research among high school students and middle and high school parents and teachers to better understand the promise of technologies aimed at keeping students safe and the risks that they pose, as reported by those most directly interacting with such tools. In particular, the research focused on student activity monitoring, the nearly ubiquitous practice of schools using technology to monitor students’ activities online, especially on devices provided by the school. CDT built on its previous research, which showed that this monitoring is conducted primarily to comply with perceived legal requirements and to keep students safe. While stakeholders are optimistic that student activity monitoring will keep students safe, in practice it creates significant efficacy and equity gaps.

This report breaks down all the recommendations we support, the ones we don’t, and why. We also look at potential revenue streams to pay for these shifts in practice and new community safety programs, analyze OPD calls for service data in a brand new APTP report, and highlight work already happening at the grassroots level that needs more investment. Such community programs are already keeping us safe — which is no surprise because #WeKeepUsSafe and #WeTakeCareOfUs.

This brief is intended to help organizers working to stop the violence of surveillance, policing and punishment and advance racial, reproductive, gender, LGBTQ, migrant, and disability justice to:

• make links between criminalization of care for trans youth across all of our struggles;
• understand how we can join the fight to challenge criminalization of trans health care;
• be of support to folks seeking and offering gender-affirming care;
• and connect the criminalization of gender-affirming health care to broader calls to defund police, decriminalize, and divest from surveillance, policing and punishment.

This report comes through collaboration between Mijente, Perry Undem, the Community Resource Hub, and the Center for Advancing Innovative Policy. This report is the first national comprehensive study on Latinx attitudes about policing and public safety in the United States and Puerto Rico. We believe in our gente and our communities, that together we can envision and build futures beyond the constraints of punitive measures. That’s why we commissioned a national study and focus groups, to better understand Latinx experiences and develop strategic organizing interventions and resources. The results tell a story that mirrors the Latinx diaspora as a whole: our gente’s political perspectives vary drastically depending on any number of factors. Still, in analyzing thousands of responses across 11 different focus groups, it is clear that our gente believe that making communities safer is about resources, jobs, and education, not more police.

How are community justice organizations creatively imagining more holistic alternatives to the criminal justice systems? Join members of Reclaim Philadelphia, Youth Empowerment for Advancement Hangout (YEAH) Philly, Amistad Law Project, and Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project (YASP) to discuss this topic.

Survivors want safety and support. Defunding police is a survivor-led anti-violence strategy that stops police from looting resources survivors need to prevent, avoid, escape and heal from violence – and puts more money into violence prevention and interruption, and meeting survivors’ needs.

Institutional violence within community centers, healthcare organizations, and social services, in concert with the “helping” industry’s increasing collusion with and reliance on law enforcement, fuels the prison pipeline. In response to pervasive institutional violence and increasing policing, surveillance, and targeting of queer and TGNB (trans and gender non-binary) youth of color, street-based youth, and youth experiencing homelessness, Project NIA created a toolkit to share strategies of resistance to the increased securitization of non-profit spaces.

As a result of years of persistent multi-organizational advocacy, the public has access to data on policing in New York City public schools. First passed in 2011 and then amended in 2015, the “Student Safety Act” mandates that the New York City Police Department (NYPD) post quarterly datasets. As of August 2021, there are now five full school years of reporting on school policing. From the 2016-2017 school year to 2021-2021, there have been a total of 40,233 reports of school-based police interventions. During that time, Black girls represented 57% of all school-based police interventions targeting girls, but made up only 22% of the girls in the public school system.