Resources

As we approach the twentieth anniversary of the War on Terror, we are calling for abolishing the War on Terror and reinvesting resources into structures of community care to protect the future of our people. It is our hope that this agenda is used as a tool to further engage our communities, grassroots organizations, movement groups, and policymakers in order to build power, heal, and enact change.

The goal of this tool is to support organizations, collectives, groups, and community members committed to moving with abolitionist values in their policy advocacy efforts. Our intention is to support groups and community members discern the type of policies that expand and further entrench the Global War on Terror, and the type of policies that can move us toward its abolition. Our hope is to share a framework for policy objectives and oversight demands that move us toward our collaborative vision of abolition to the “Global War on Terror.”

As acknowledged by the City of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, racism is a public health crisis in this region. Yet, rather than addressing the needs of the most oppressed citizens, the city and county continue to pour excessive funds into the police, who have played a central role in creating a fundamentally unsafe and unhealthy space for Black residents. We must decenter the police from the lives of Black people. Through steep cuts to police personnel and funding, the city and county can instead use those funds to meaningfully support the health and safety of communities.

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.

What is mental health? How can we be more whole and how can we advocate for systems that help all of our community members heal? In this episode, we look at mental health with two practitioners — Iresha Picot and Jacqui Johnson. Listen to their conversation that ranges from trauma to mental health crisis response to hip-hop. Learn about the policy changes that could make city services more just and what we all need to be well.

In this Live Interview from 1/11, we talk with Derecka Purnell, author of ‘Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom’ about her new book, her personal journey of embracing an abolitionist model and how, in the midst of a full blown reactionary moment over a rise in murders, activists can address legitimate fears of crime and provide an alternative vision to the cruel, failed “lock em up” approach.

This report was researched and written by dozens of community members collaborating through the Stop LAPD Spying Coalitionʼs Land and Policing Workgroup. Over the past decade, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition has been building community power to abolish LAPD surveillance. This report grew out of that organizing and examines the relationship of data-driven policing to real estate development, displacement, and gentrification.

While more people are beginning to understand the role of data in policing, less attention is paid to data-driven policingʼs relationship to land. This report studies that relationship with a focus on the process that has always bound policing and capitalism together: colonization. The report also examines the evolution of datadriven policing, including through LAPDʼs new Data-Informed CommunityFocused Policing, which combines data-mining and surveillance with the reformist notions of “community policing” and “police accountability.” This report is intended to frame an organizing agenda against this new program and beyond.

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.