Resources

A chart that breaks down the difference between reformist reforms which continue or expand the reach of policing, and abolitionist steps that work to chip away and reduce its overall impact.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the George W. Bush administration launched the global “War on Terror,” capitalizing on public fears and calls for retaliation to justify military intervention and Islamophobic violence across the world. This war demonized and targeted Muslims, both abroad and in the United States. In 2002, the administration founded the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), forcibly reframing federal immigration services, emergency response, and data analysis under a mission to “secure the homeland.” This reorganization codified the false link between immigration and terrorism. Instead of making people safe, DHS and its corporate partners used “counterterrorism” to expand policing and surveillance in neighborhoods across the country, targeting immigrant and Muslim communities and intensifying the War on Terror at our doorsteps.

The American criminal legal system is an important site of political socialization: scholars have shown that criminal legal contact reduces turnout and that criminalization pushes people away from public institutions more broadly. Despite this burgeoning literature, few analyses directly investigate the causal effect of lower-level police contact on voter turnout. To do so, we leverage individual-level administrative ticketing data from Hillsborough County, Florida. We show that traffic stops materially decrease participation for Black and non-Black residents alike. Although stops reduce turnout more for Black voters in the short term, they are less demobilizing over a longer time horizon. Although even low-level contacts with the police can reduce political participation across the board, our results point to a unique process of political socialization vis-à-vis the carceral state for Black Americans.

Question: Do structural interventions to abandoned houses lead to improvements in health and safety in low-income, Black neighborhoods?

Findings: In this Philadelphia citywide cluster randomized controlled trial of 63 clusters containing 258 abandoned houses and 172 participants, abandoned houses that were remediated showed substantial drops in nearby weapons violations (−8.43%), gun assaults (−13.12%), and to a lesser extent shootings (−6.96%). Substance-related outcomes were not reliably affected by the interventions, and no effect of either intervention was found for perceptions of safety or time outside for nearby residents.

Meaning: Abandoned house remediation was directly linked to reduced gun violence and may be considered in efforts to create safe and healthy communities.

Sexual violence is an everyday practice of policing. Even in New Orleans, where in 2014 the federal government placed the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) under a
consent decree, police sexual violence persists. Despite federal and local oversight, publicly available data and public records data reveal:

• At least 236 complaints of sexual and/or intimate violence
• By 189 NOPD officers between 2014-2020

These records confirm what many quietly know: police routinely perpetrate a spectrum of sexual harm in our communities. By centering survivors – particularly Black girls, women, and queer people in the South – we can better understand the scope of the everyday violence of policing. This factsheet highlights the urgent need for divesting resources away from policing and investing in social programs that meet survivors’ needs, affirm bodily autonomy, and actually keep us safe.

Nationwide, policymakers and the public are considering how best to address crime. Deeper insights on policing should guide decisions about its funding and role in the provision of public safety. Traditional cost-benefit analyses usually find policing to be “cost-effective,” meaning it creates benefits that exceed its costs. Yet a range of policing activities can result in “social costs” that are not typically considered. As a result of police activity, people can suffer physical and behavioral health problems; lose educational opportunities, jobs, and housing; and withdraw from civic engagement. An emerging body of research illuminates the extent of these social costs, which are borne primarily by Black communities and other overpoliced communities of color. Vera researchers created this report and fact sheet to fill a critical gap in understanding the holistic costs of relying on policing as a primary approach to safety.

As movements to defund and divest from policing and invest in community safety expand in the wake of the 2020 Uprisings, abolitionist organizers are increasingly grappling with questions around the role of the state in abolitionist futures, including:

• What do we imagine/advocate for instead of police and policing?
• What actions and behaviors do we think should be regulated by the state? How should they be regulated – who should be involved? What should they be empowered to do?
• How do we think resources should be distributed? By whom and how?

Our answers to these questions profoundly shape our organizing objectives and strategies, and the context in which they unfold. This Discussion Tool provides room for readers to ask and explore generative questions that open up a multitude of possibilities both drawing from and moving beyond existing analyses and frameworks.

“There’s so much deference to police around everything to do with public safety. What they say is taken as gospel without question, without requiring proof of concept, without requiring any kind of accountability for when what they’re saying actually doesn’t line up with the facts or people’s experiences,” says author and activist Andrea Ritchie. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Ritchie and host Kelly Hayes discuss Ritchie’s new book, No More Police, coauthored with Mariame Kaba, and talk about how copaganda “shapes our imagination about what policing is, what it’s doing, what it’s not doing, and the necessity of it.”

During the 1990s, in response to public dissatisfaction over what were perceived as ineffective crime reduction policies, 25 states and Congress passed three strikes laws, designed to deter criminal offenders by mandating significant sentence enhancements for those with prior convictions. Few large-scale evaluations of the impact of these laws on crime rates, however, have been conducted. This 2006 report finds that, first, that three strikes laws are positively associated with homicide rates in cities in three strikes states and, second, that cities in three strikes states witnessed no significant reduction in crime rates.