Resources

In May 2021, Boston’s Acting Mayor Kim Janey released her recommended City budget for the upcoming 2022 fiscal year (FY). This budget claims to double down on reducing Boston police overtime, deepening last year’s $12 million budget cut by an additional $4.9 million.

The problem? As recent ACLU analysis shows, without a simultaneous commitment to reining in the power of police unions and penalizing Boston Police Department (BPD) budgetary overages, this “cut” will simply never come to be. Taken together with the fact that Mayor Janey’s recommendation doesn’t really touch the $355 million budgeted for non-overtime policing and otherwise ignores advocates’ calls to divest from police, the FY22 BPD budget is effectively unchanged from years past.

New analysis by the ACLU of Massachusetts unpacks the Boston Police Department budget – again – making it clear that it is effectively no smaller than previous years’ budgets.

Researchers have conducted hundreds of studies looking for effective ways to prevent and reduce violence, but the knowledge base is far from complete, especially as it relates to one important question: are there ways to prevent violence without relying on the police? The obvious answer is “yes.” Policing has never been the primary explanation for obviously varying levels of community safety. Residents of wealthy areas do not experience the intense police surveillance and enforcement imposed on poor neighborhoods. Yet, rates of violence are reliably lower in wealthy communities.

Arnold Ventures asked the John Jay College Research and Evaluation Center (JohnJayREC) to review the research evidence for violence reduction strategies that do not rely on law enforcement. The scan was carried out by an expert group of researchers from the fields of public policy, criminology, law, public health, and social science. The members of the research group worked collaboratively to identify, translate, and summarize the most important and actionable studies.

As the nation grapples with defining the proper roles and limits of police generally, and particularly in Black, Brown, and other communities that have borne disproportionate harms from police (as well as from many other institutions), we propose an approach that we believe would be both realistic and effective: adopting the goals, metrics, and lenses of public health. By replacing current performance metrics with public health metrics and flawed conceptions with ones that are based upon evidence, and by demanding agility and accountability in changing practices and policies when they are shown to cause harm, we can improve the health, safety, and well-being of communities across the United States. This article sketches out the way forward and provides some illustrative examples.

As Black Lives Matter protests swept the nation, the rubber bullets and tear gas canisters started to fly. This epidemic of “blinding by police” inspired an unlikely network of survivors.

In the wake of the recent conviction of Derek Chauvin and the police killing of Daunte Wright, a new nationwide survey by BSG sheds light on the factors that contribute to public safety and reveals an overwhelming public support to reallocate police funds for a wide range of public safety proposals. The research also illuminates American’s perceptions around police accountability and de-escalation training.

Sitting at the intersection of criminalization and capitalism, the use of emerging surveillance technology has become increasingly popular among police departments in the United States over the last few decades. While public knowledge is still catching up to the full extent of the tools that police use, we are quickly understanding more about this technology each day. Adopted for use as police “reforms,” sophisticated electronics and tech capabilities do not address the unchecked power and ballooning budgets of local police departments. Instead, they open the door for law enforcement to monitor communities while private companies profit from sales and contracts. As the movement to defund the police becomes impossible to ignore, replacing police officers with police cameras is called progress.

Living in a “surveillance state,” however, is not a foregone conclusion. Organizers across the country are pushing back against intrusive and problematic surveillance technologies by providing program models and model legislation to disrupt 21st Century Policing and ensure awareness and meaningful interventions. This report presents an overview of ongoing trends in police surveillance and the funding streams that have made and continue to make these trends possible. It also highlights ongoing advocacy efforts and provides recommendations for pushing back against the use of such technology by law enforcement.

In the midst of a national reckoning around the violence of policing, and a national conversation about sexual assault prompted by #MeToo and the ‘me, too.’ movement launched by Tarana Burke, sexual violence by law enforcement officers – including local and state police, ICE agents and Border Patrol, school “resource” officers, federal law enforcement agents, probation and parole officers – remains shrouded in silence. Survivors of police sexual violence are rarely heard from or discussed in either conversation, and their experiences generally do not drive organizing and advocacy in either context.

This report, in conjunction with an accompanying curriculum for sexual assault service providers, is intended to contribute to breaking this silence, to summarize what we know about sexual violence by law enforcement officers, and to offer concrete steps toward prevention of police sexual violence and increased safety, support, and opportunities for healing for survivors. For more information and a more detailed analysis of police sexual violence, see Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color (excerpts available at invisiblenomorebook.com).

An extensive investigation by Cerise Castle into more than five decades of abuse, terror, and murder carried out by gangs within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

A BuzzFeed News investigation has found that employees at law enforcement agencies across the US ran thousands of Clearview AI facial recognition searches — often without the knowledge of the public or even their own departments.