Resources

Join us for a difficult conversation about how we sustain movements under state violence and repression.

In the United States, if undocumented immigrants are victims of crime on U.S. soil, they may qualify for a U-Visa. This is a special visa that grants undocumented victims temporary legal status, which may later open the door to applying for a green card. But despite the trauma that immigrants may have from being a victim of a crime, starting the process for applying for a U-Visa brings an additional set of challenges. Immigrant communities are often afraid to call the police, even when they’re the victim of a crime, for fear of being deported. This investigation demonstrates how law enforcement agencies are handling the U-Visa process throughout the country, using their own discretion to deny victims of crime the opportunity to apply for the visa.

This report comprehensively documents how US-Israel law enforcement trainings solidify partnerships between the U.S. and Israeli governments to exchange methods of state violence and control, including mass surveillance, racial profiling, and suppression of protest and dissent. Produced by Researching the American Israeli Alliance (RAIA) in partnership with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the report is the result of dozens of FOIAs yielding hundreds of documents, exclusive interviews with American and Israeli personnel, and exhaustive academic and media research in English, Arabic and Hebrew. Accompanying the report, RAIA released the Palestine is Here Database, a search engine mapping Israeli trainings of US law enforcement across American cities and towns.

In this episode, Maya Schenwar joins us to talk about abolition today: the abolition of incarceration. She doesn’t just spout statistics; she asks good hard questions about the system as it as: is this really what we want? Is there a better way? We cannot ask The Next Question about justice without asking the next question about CRIMINAL justice. Austin, Chi Chi, Jenny and Maya do just that on this week’s episode.

Adam polices the truth behind the overuse of SWAT Teams, illustrates how using school officers can create a pipeline for prisons, and examines the origins and intended purpose of police officers.

Community Justice Exchange partnered with Project NIA, Court Watch MA, Families for Justice as Healing, and Survived and Punished NY to produce a document that outlines abolitionist principles, as well as strategies and tactics, for organizing campaigns targeted at prosecutors. The principles came out of a prosecutor accountability convening hosted in June 2019 and they were created to provide a framework for what organizing around prosecutors might look like with an abolitionist lens. They are intended to foster alignment and inter-movement accountability for groups and individuals committed to abolition as a political vision and a practical strategy for organizing.

This report examines how racism and anti-LGBT discrimination combine to make LGBT people of color uniquely vulnerable to entering the criminal justice system and also facing unfair and abusive treatment once they are in it.

The Lucy Parsons Labs has launched OpenOversight, an interactive web tool that makes it easier for Chicago residents to file complaints against police officers. Using OpenOversight, members of the public can search for the names and badge numbers of those officers with whom they have negative interactions based on estimated age, race, and gender. Using this information, the OpenOversight web application returns a digital gallery of potential matches and, when possible, includes pictures of officers in uniform to assist in identification.

Nobody should mistake the drop in recorded stop-and-frisks as a sign that discriminatory stop-and-frisks are a thing of the past. This analysis looks at the practice of stop and frisk used by the NYPD has changed in recent years to find that while the numbers are down, the application of the tactic is still troubling.