Resources

Created by the Interrupting Criminalization Initiative (a member of the Movement for Black Lives), this is a toolkit designed to advance a long term vision of abolition of police through divestment from policing as a practice, dismantling policing institutions, and building community-based responses to harm, need, and conflict that do not rely on surveillance, policing and punishment.

Calls for reform suggesting the deployment of social workers instead of police in our communities overlook the past and present damage done by the child welfare system as co-conspiring with police. The primary goal of this brief is to discuss the ways the Department of Children and Family Services is interconnected with police through data sharing, predictive analytics, and direct partnership. We see this brief as just the beginning of a larger endeavor in understanding the harm of the child welfare system on children and families.

A resource detailing a few key facts about police response to domestic violence and highlighting defunding police as a survivor led anti-violence strategy that stops police from looting resources survivors need to prevent, avoid, escape and heal from violence – and puts more money into violence prevention and interruption, and meeting survivors’ needs.

Situated at the present historical moment of resurgent white nationalism and xenophobia, Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism undertakes comparative inquiry of imaginations and practices of sanctuary and refuge. Seeking to accompany movements that challenge detention and deportation, Sanctuary Spaces supports scholarship, art, and pedagogy that enact different humanisms and other worlds of political being. Organized around three themes, Abolition on Stolen Land, The End of Humanitarianism, and Freedom and Fugitivity, the year-long endeavor convenes public programs, virtual residencies, and conceptual conversations to generate frames and actions that unravel the logics of liberalism and its entanglements with imperialism.

This kit is designed to consolidate the information regarding Invest Divest strategy and resources for Louisville, Kentucky. This kit is intended to be used for the following: refer to this document for campaigning at the social media level, share this document with your base, and hold teach-ins and trainings on the uses of narrative and social media for this campaign, post directly from your own personal channels, and share to and from the partner organizations listed here.

In response to the expanding criminalization of reproductive autonomy through increasing restrictions on abortion and reproductive care, and the growing criminalization of pregnant people and parents, a group of reproductive justice and anti-criminalization organizers and advocates came together in May 2019 to develop a shared analysis and resistance strategies. This preliminary list of policies which can contribute to increased surveillance, policing, criminalization, and punishment of pregnant people, parents, and providers emerged from these conversations. This document is intended to inform policymakers and advocates concerned about reproductive justice, intimate partner and domestic violence, public health, and criminalization about the potential consequences of the policy approaches outlined below, and to offer alternative strategies that carry less risk of contributing to the criminalization of reproductive autonomy.

The ongoing scourge of police terrorism has reinvigorated an important national conversation about policing and incarceration — their history, purpose, and practice. While some have called for reforms, like stricter use-of-force policies and enhanced body cam protocols for officers, others have demanded more sweeping change. “Abolition for the People,” a project produced by Kaepernick Publishing in partnership with LEVEL, seeks to end that debate once and for all. Over the next four weeks, the project will publish 30 stories from organizers, political prisoners, scholars, and advocates — all of which point to the crucial conclusion that policing and prisons do not serve as catch-all solutions for the issues and people the state deems social problems.

This is a video collaboration with Project Nia & Blue Seat Studios. This four-minute animated video is made with young people in mind but can be a useful introduction to basic #DefundPolice concepts for all ages. People have a lot of ideas about policing. And our ideas about policing are shaped by our race, our genders, our class, and our parents. Dominant culture, especially mass media sells us the image of “Officer Friendly.” But whose experience is that actually based on?

When Sacramento police officers shot Stephon Clark to death in his grandmother’s backyard in 2018, they were responding to a vandalism complaint. And in Fort Worth, Texas, last year, an officer shot Atatiana Jefferson through her bedroom window while responding to a call about an open door. To help readers think through whether or not to call the police, HuffPost examined 16 scenarios that commonly involve dialing 911, everything from witnessing acts of vandalism to having your identity stolen to mental health concerns.