Resources

This report is a summary of the data collection and outreach efforts conducted on behalf of the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) to gather community and PPB insights in preparation for the creation of PPB’s strategic plan. The purpose of this outreach was to assess the Portland community’s and PPB staff’s perception of the current state of policing in Portland and help determine the priorities that these groups would like to see emphasized over the next five years.

This video short shows the process of “critical mapping” used to represent the cumulative and uneven impact of hot spot policing across New York City – every NYPD police stop, every hour, for the entire year of 2011. The process is called “critical mapping” because researchers use maps to interrogate and speak back to the “official” maps that label neighborhoods a “hot spot” of crime.

If we want a just and humane world, we must create one in which apparatuses of oppression are no longer considered reasonable. This week on For The Wild, we are joined by Mariame Kaba for an expansive conversation on Transformative Justice, community accountability, criminalization of survivors, and freedom on the horizon. Mariame addresses punishment as an issue of directionality while reminding us why it is vital to have the prison abolition movement in conversation with the movement for climate and environmental justice. When we engage with these issues and shape our actions out of a commitment to removing violence at its core, we are working to transform our world beyond recognition into something teeming with possibility, beauty, and life.

In this episode, The FRONTLINE Dispatch teams up with ProPublica to investigate a fatal police shooting in Weirton, West Virginia and the ramifications of its shocking aftermath.

This report examines false confessions, and in particular the misunderstood typology of “coerced-internalized” false confessions. These confessions are made by individuals who falsely confess, but truly believe in their guilt despite objective evidence to the contrary. The case example of Billy Wayne Cope will be discussed at length, including the reported South Carolina Court of Appeal case, the transcripts of experts and the accused from trial, as well as an discussion of the extensive television documentary highlighting the possibility that Cope was wrongfully convicted. By looking at the specific words and reasoning of Billy Wayne Cope, this paper attempts to examine the impact of one of the
most unique and misunderstood forms of false confessions, and to suggest what needs to be done differently in the future to prevent further miscarriages of justice.

Recent DNA exonerations have shed light on the problem that people sometimes confess to crimes they did not commit. Drawing on police practices, laws concerning the admissibility of confession evidence, core principles of psychology, and forensic studies involving multiple methodologies, this White Paper summarizes what is known about police-induced confessions. This review identifies factors that influence confessions as well as their effects on judges and juries. This article concludes with a strong recommendation for the mandatory electronic recording of interrogations and considers other possibilities for the reform of interrogation practices and the protection of vulnerable suspect populations.

This blueprint, developed by TJC’s attorneys and criminal justice policy experts, outlines concrete steps to address the country’s mass incarceration crisis and provides actionable solutions to creating a fairer and more equitable justice system.

This is a new initiative launched in fall 2018 through the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) Social Justice Institute by Researchers-in-Residence Andrea J. Ritchie and Mariame Kaba. The project aims to interrupt and end the the growing criminalization and incarceration of women and LGBTQ people of color for criminalized acts related to public order, poverty, child welfare, drug use, survival and self-defense, including criminalization and incarceration of survivors of violence.

Although members of law enforcement do not serve as treatment providers for any other illness, they have become “road runners,” responding to mental health emergencies and traveling long distances to shuttle people with mental illness from one facility to another. This report is the first-ever national survey of sheriffs’ offices and police departments on these issues, and it provides a unique glimpse into the burdens they must shoulder as well as the fiscal and societal implications of the current situation. The survey responses represent 355 sheriffs’ offices and police departments in the United States.