Resources

Today, Catalyst California’s (formerly Advancement Project California) new Reimagine Justice & Safety program released Reimagining Community Safety in California: From Deadly and Expensive Sheriffs to Equity and Care-Centered Wellbeing. This new report, produced in partnership with ACLU SoCal, reveals how sheriff’s departments across the state engage in patrol activities that undermine community safety, waste tremendous public dollars, and inflict devastating harms on communities of color. Highlighted counties include Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento, and Riverside.

Over the past decade, large urban counties have implemented ShotSpotter, a gun fire detection technology, across the USA. It uses acoustic listening devices to identify discharged firearms’ locations. This research report found that ShotSpotter did not display protective effects for all outcomes. Results suggest that implementing ShotSpotter technology has no significant impact on firearm-related homicides or arrest outcomes. Policy solutions may represent a more cost-effective measure to reduce urban firearm violence.

Two years ago in the summer of 2020, the largest racial justice demonstrations in history swept across the globe after Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, murdered George Floyd. In the aftermath, it seemed that Americans were reckoning with whether or not the police are a necessary entity in maintaining public safety, but the issue of police abolition remains contentious for many.

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.”

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.

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.

The Advancement Project will be promoting a 3-part animated video series called How Cops Get Off, which breaks down the systems in place that are actively working against us to keep cops in power and unaccountable to those they swear to serve and protect.

Narrated by AP’s board member, Jesse Williams, each four-minute video in the series breaks down a major structure in our culture and laws that keep cops in power and unaccountable: the dominant narrative in tv shows, movies, and news, the protectors within our criminal legal system like prosecutors and police associations, and the laws that shields cops from accountability like qualified immunity. The series is centered around a 6 week-long culture change campaign that will not only drive people to watch and share the videos but also engage in conversations about our current system and drive action to local grassroots partners who are pushing for new models of safety.

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.