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.

Political scientist Hakeem Jefferson (Stanford University) facilitated a discussion about race, policing, and the state of American democracy with fellow political scientists. The conversation occurred a year after George Perry Floyd Jr., a 46-year-old Black man, was murdered by a White police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Moving beyond common notions of democracy that focus primarily on voting and electoral participation, the panelists discussed how American policing and the criminal justice system, more broadly, redefine citizenship, redistribute power, and shape marginalized people’s understanding of their place in society. Closing remarks addressed the potential for change in how criminal justice institutions treat marginalized people and how political scientists can more usefully contribute to efforts that strengthen democracy for all. This is an edited transcript of the conversation and includes a bibliography of the sources mentioned.

High rates and racial inequities in U.S. fatal police violence are an urgent area of public health concern and policy attention. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) have been described as experiencing low rates of fatal police violence, yet AAPI subgroups vary widely on nearly every demographic and economic metric. More granularly, Southeast Asian American groups displaced by US war in Southeast Asia suffered higher rates than others from the same region. Traditional racial classifications thus obscure high risks of fatal police violence for AAPI subgroups. Disaggregation is needed to improve responses to fatal police violence and its racial/ethnic inequities.

School resource officers (SROs) continue to be one of the most common approaches that schools use to promote safety. SROs are meant to prevent crime in schools, but also to build relationships with students and school personnel and act as a resource for conveying law-related information. Critics of SROs suggest that they perpetuate the school-to-prison pipeline and have particularly negative consequences for students of color. In spite of these potential advantages and disadvantages of using SROs in schools, research on the effects of SROs has generally lagged behind, particularly in regard to outcomes beyond those related to crime and punishment. The purpose of this study is to examine the impacts of implementing SROs on outcomes related to school climate and suspension rates, with particular attention to racial differences in these effects and the role of school context. This study also examines how SROs perceive their roles and responsibilities and how these may be shaped by school contexts.

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.

This research brief provides preliminary findings from a multi-year research project to understand who has been targeted by criminalization for self-managing their abortion and how these cases make their way into and through the criminal system. From 2000 to 2020, we identified 61 cases of people who were criminally investigated or arrested for allegedly ending their own pregnancy or helping someone else do so. Cases occurred across 26 states, most of which emerged in Texas, followed by Ohio, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Virginia. Understanding self-managed abortion criminalization over the last twenty years, lends insight into what the criminalization of abortion is likely to look like in a post-Roe America.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, as we long feared, we’ve been forced to navigate a new legal landscape. The terrain for people seeking abortions is changing almost daily, and abortion care is increasingly threatened for more communities. In this new era, increased attention has been paid to when the “wave” of criminalization will begin for those providing or seeking abortion care. Prosecutors have declared they won’t enforce laws and journalists have reported on possible police surveillance of period tracker apps. Yet, these responses are disconnected from what reproductive rights and justice advocates know about criminalization, and they are out of line with what has been found in research.

In this Pride Month episode of The Thought Project podcast, we talk to Max Osborn, a recent graduate of the Criminal Justice Ph.D. program at the CUNY Graduate Center who has carved out a niche as a queer criminologist, studying how LGBTQ individuals are affected by the criminal justice system. For his doctoral dissertation, Osborn, who is transgender and uses he and they pronouns, interviewed 42 LGBTQ individuals living in New York City to understand what their encounters with the police and with social services were like and how these interactions impacted their well-being, behavior, and sense of safety.

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.