Resources

A discussion with Professor Bita Amani from Charles Drew University and Co-Chair, COVID-19 Task force on Racism and Equity at UCLA; Pete White from LA CAN; and Jamie Garcia from Stop LAPD Spying Coalition to address questions and concerns such as 1) what is the disproportionate impact of COVID on Black, Brown, and poor communities?, 2) what are the various “road maps to recovery” being proposed?, and 3) what is Contact Tracing, what type of public health surveillance apparatus is being proposed, what’s our defense?

From an April 2020 convening to hear from Black public health experts who have been leading research and Black organizers leading efforts to change the conditions that make Black communities vulnerable everyday and especially in the COVID-19 crisis. In an effort to learn how to better organize, mobilize and coordinate on behalf of Black communities nationwide and worldwide, this report highlights the work of D4BL Hub Leaders, partner organizations and policymakers. This report contains a review of the content of the event and an outline of D4BL demands associated with responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.

As we work toward dismantling unjust systems, there is opportunity to highlight the intersections of our efforts and identify shared goals. This resource includes a chart of related demands across criminal and immigration issues aimed at reducing the number of people that enter, and releasing as many people as possible from jails and prisons, and detention centers. This is not a complete list, but rather a starting point for us all to consider our demands more broadly.

Noting an increase in discriminatory policing practices during COVID-19, The Leadership Conference Education Fund released principles that provide actionable recommendations for law enforcement agencies across the country to better protect the health and safety of communities and officers during the pandemic and beyond.

This guide from the office of Philadelphia Councilmember Helen Gym contains opportunities to volunteer your labor, donate to a good cause, and get connected with support during the COVID-19 pandemic.

An article by Stop LAPD Spying and Coalition and Free Radicals on the dangers of PredPol, a predictive policing technology, and its context in the COVID-19 pandemic.

This policy paper outlines general principles that should guide the consideration of any proposal for technology-assisted contact-tracing, or TACT. This document does not address fine-grained details, either technical or legal, but sets out principles to help evaluate any TACT proposal. Given the trans-jurisdictional nature of many of these schemes, specific legal protections may take different forms in different contexts. But architectural and design principles will have an impact anywhere such a system is deployed.

In the fight against COVID-19, one of our most powerful weapons is manual contact-tracing, the time-consuming process of interviewing patients to find who they might have exposed to the virus. Alarmingly, new technological alternatives to manual contact tracing threaten to distract from these public health efforts, creating products that likely won’t improve public health, but which will pose an existential threat to the public’s privacy. If Apple and Google’s Bluetooth method goes forward, it’s also clear that existing legal protections are insufficient. Under existing laws, the use of Bluetooth proximity detection will just become another deeply invasive tool in federal, state, and local governments’ arsenal of surveillance technology.

A radical practice is suddenly getting mainstream attention. Will it change how we help one another? This article gives examples of mutual aid practices happening during the COVID-19 crisis, the history of mutual aid, and the potential future of the practice as we move forward.