Crime & Policing

Angela Davis on Abolition, Calls to Defund Police, Toppled Racist Statues & Voting in 2020 Election - Democracy Now
Amid a worldwide uprising against police brutality and racism, we discuss the historic moment with legendary scholar and activist Angela Davis. She also responds to the destruction and removal of racist monuments in cities across the United States; President Trump’s upcoming rally on Juneteenth in Tulsa, the site of a white mob’s massacre of Black people; and the 2020 election, in which two parties “connected to corporate capitalism” will compete for the presidency and people will have to be persuaded to vote “so the current occupant of the White House is forever ousted.”

Campaign Zero
Over 1,000 people are killed by police every year in America. We are calling on local, state, and federal lawmakers to take immediate action to adopt data-driven policy solutions to end this violence and hold police accountable.Nearly sixty percent of victims did not have a gun or were involved in activities that should not require police intervention such as harmless "quality of life" behaviors or mental health crises.We can live in an America where the police do not kill people. By implementing the right policy changes, we can end police killings and other forms of police violence in the United States.

Bad Chicago Cops Spread Their Misconduct Like a Disease - The Intercept.
Recently released data from the Chicago police department shows that misconduct spreads from officer to officer like an infectious disease. And the same behavior that leads cops to violate the rules often predicts whether they will participate in a shooting.

The Biggest Lie in the White Supremacist Propaganda Playbook: Unraveling the Truth About ‘Black-on-White Crime’ - Southern Poverty Law Center.
The idea that black people are wantonly attacking white people in some sort of quiet race war is an untruthful and damaging narrative with a very long history in America. White Americans’ unsubstantiated views about the potential of violence from black people was the number one excuse they used to justify slavery, lynching, Jim Crow and various forms of mass incarceration.

Blue Lives Matter Backers Reveal Their True Intent - NJ.com
Remember when “Blue Lives Matter” signs and banners first appeared on lawns, in business windows and as bumper stickers, as pushback against “Black Lives Matter” protests of police brutality? It was supposed to be a sign of support for officers. Well, now it seems to have been just what I thought it was: a way to silence those who protest against excessive force, while appearing not to be to racist.

Broken Windows Policing Doesn’t Work: It also may have killed Eric Garner - Slate
Why was Garner approached at all? Because of the emphasis on “broken windows policing” under NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton. As Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s police commissioner in the 1990s, Bratton presided over a surge in petty-crime law enforcement, on the theory that vigorously enforcing the small laws in some way dissuades or prevents people from breaking the big ones. There’s little evidence that theory is correct.

The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America - Khalil Gibran Muhammad
The idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans’ own ideas about race and crime. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, Khalil Gibran Muhammad reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.

The Criminogenic and Psychological Effects of Police Stops on Adolescent Black and Latino Boys - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Four waves of longitudinal survey data demonstrate that contact with law enforcement predicts increases in black and Latino adolescents’ self-reported criminal behaviors 6, 12, and 18 months later.

The Disproportionate Risks of Driving While Black - New York Times
More than a year of turmoil over the deaths of unarmed blacks after encounters with the police in Ferguson, Mo., in Baltimore and elsewhere has sparked a national debate over how much racial bias skews law enforcement behavior, even subconsciously.

The Enduring Myth of Black Criminality - Ta-Nahisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates explores how mass incarceration has affected African American families. "There's a long history in this country of dealing with problems in the African American community through the criminal justice system," he says in this animated interview. "The enduring view of African Americans in this country is as a race of people who are prone to criminality."

Examining the Role of Use of Force Policies in Ending Police Violence - Samuel Sinyangwe
We consulted legal experts, academics, and activists to identify a range of policies designed to impose common sense restrictions on how and when police use force against civilians. Then we reviewed the use of force guidelines of the nation’s largest police departments to determine where these policies were currently in place and whether they were associated with fewer police involved killings.

Five things ‘Defund the police’ is not - LA Times
The nationwide calls to “defund the police” in the wake of the brutal killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25 embody both the anger at continuing gratuitous police violence and a strategy for dealing with it. But do defunders want to constrain police, replace them, reimagine them or simply abolish them?

A Hidden Factor in Police Shootings of Black Americans: Decades of Housing Segregation - The Intercept
Data has shown that, across the country, Black Americans are more likely to be killed by police than whites. But the problem is worse in the most segregated states, according to a recent study showing that racial disparities in fatal police shootings are linked to histories of structural violence.

Loose Cigarettes Today, Civil Unrest Tomorrow: The racist, classist origins of broken windows policing - Slate
Though NYPD Commissioner William Bratton is a big proponent of broken windows policing, there’s no evidence that the policy is effective in reducing violent crime. At the same time, the effects of order-maintenance policing are felt disproportionately by members of minority groups.

Mapping Police Violence
There were only 27 days in 2019 where the police did not kill someone. Black people were 24% of those killed by the police, despite being only 13% of the population. Black people are three times more likely to be killed by the police than white people. Levels of violent crime in US cities do not determine rates of police violence. 99% of killings by police from 2013-2019 have not resulted in officers being charged with a crime.

No Such Thing as ‘Black-on-Black’ Crime - Philadelphia Tribune
Did you know that less than one percent of Black folks and only about 2 percent of Black men commit a violent crime in any given year? And just in case you erroneously think the violent Black criminality that does exist is genetic as a Black thing, did you know that poor urban whites have a higher rate of violence toward each other at a rate of 56.4 per 1,000 compared to poor urban Blacks at a rate of 51.3 per 1,000?

NPR's History Podcast 'Throughline' Explores Policing In America - NPR
In this country, for the years that cover the 1600s to the mid-19th century, the most dominant presence of law enforcement was what we call today slave patrols. That's what made up policing.

The Stanford Open Policing Project
On a typical day in the United States, police officers make more than 50,000 traffic stops. Our team is gathering, analyzing, and releasing records from millions of traffic stops by law enforcement agencies across the country. Our goal is to help researchers, journalists, and policymakers investigate and improve interactions between police and the public.

Report to the United Nations on Racial Disparities in the U.S. Criminal Justice System - Sentencing Project
The Sentencing Project submitted a report to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance. The United States criminal justice system is the largest in the world. At year-end 2015, over 6.7 million individuals were under some form of correctional control in the United States, including 2.2 million incarcerated in federal, state, or local prisons and jails. The U.S. is a world leader in its rate of incarceration, dwarfing the rate of nearly every other nation.

Study Finds Police Fatally Shoot Unarmed Black Men at Disproportionate Rates - Washington Post
A new academic study that builds on Washington Post research into fatal shootings by police has found that unarmed black men were shot and killed last year at disproportionately high rates and that officers involved may be biased in how they perceive threats.

To Protect and Slur: Inside Hate Groups on Facebook, Police Officers Trade Racist Memes, Conspiracy Theories and Islamophobia - Reveal News
Hundreds of active-duty and retired law enforcement officers from across the United States are members of Confederate, anti-Islam, misogynistic or antigovernment militia groups on Facebook, a Reveal investigation has found.

What 'Defund the Police' Actually Means - The Hill
Advocates for change are demanding a redefining of what policing looks like and that city budgets prioritize community initiatives for mental health, youth programs, social services and services for the homeless.

What Exactly Does It Mean to Defund the Police? The Cut
As thousands of protesters across the country have gathered to demand justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other black people killed by the police, a related rallying cry has gained momentum: defund the police. It’s an idea that’s been popular among activists and critics of the criminal-justice system for decades.

Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police - New York Times
Tracey Meares, noted in 2017, “policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed.” The philosophy undergirding these reforms is that more rules will mean less violence. But police officers break rules all the time. Look what has happened over the past few weeks — police officers slashing tires, shoving old men on camera, and arresting and injuring journalists and protesters.