Resources

Ending mass incarceration and repairing its extensive collateral consequences must begin by focusing on the front end of the system: police work. Recognizing the roughly 18,000 police agencies around the country as gatekeepers of the system, this report explores the factors driving mass enforcement, particularly of low-level offenses; what police agencies could do instead with the right community investment, national and local leadership, and officer training, incentives, and support; and policies that could shift the policing paradigm away from the reflexive use of enforcement, which unnecessarily criminalizes people and leads directly to the jailhouse door.

In order to reduce our reliance on the criminal justice system, we need to invest in building stronger communities capable of dealing with their problems in non-coercive and non-punitive ways. Across the US local and national organizations are working to divest from policing and prisons and invest in communities and individuals. This provides an example list of platforms, organizations, and other resources that aim to build stronger communities.

For all the public controversy over police unions, there is relatively little legal scholarship on them. Neither the legal nor the social science literature on policing and police reform has explored the opportunities and constraints that labor law offers in thinking about organizational change. The scholarly deficit has substantial public policy consequences, as groups ranging from Black Lives Matter to the U.S. Department of Justice are proposing legal changes that will require the cooperation of police labor organizations to implement. This Article fills that gap.

The Campaign Zero team reviewed police union contracts of 81 of America’s 100 largest cities and police bill of rights in all 15 states with such legislation to identify the ways in which these policies make it more difficult to hold police accountable. This resource includes a report and an interactive chart to learn more about contract stipulations in each state.

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.

This report makes recommendations to the Workgroup on the Prevention of Profiling by Law Enforcement (WPPLE) in four core areas of police reform: Data Collection, Analysis and Reporting; Accountability Mechanisms, Training, and Procedural Justice.

A report that details biased police practices and their effects on communities. It also provides a set of best practices implemented across the country that can be used to challenge counties and local municipalities into adopting reforms.

For each topic covered in the companion report, model policies are provided that can and should be adopted by police departments in collaboration with transgender leaders in their communities.