Policing

Houston area voters re-elected Gonzalez after he supported bail reform, cleaned up the county jail, and provided aid to incarcerated people living with opioid use disorder.

Civil liberties experts say the Strategic Response Group’s recent crackdown on ICE protests is the most brutal suppression of protests in decades—and many of its officers are the subject of significant misconduct allegations, including a supervisor with 32 complaints.

Research has shown only that police can be sufficient, not that they are necessary.

Governor Newsom should sign the CRISES Act into law this week and invest in community partners who support people in crisis situations.

Lawsuits from Joliet Police Department officers are among at least 12 current federal complaints against the agency. The men say their civil rights lawsuits are part of a decades-long history of discrimination.

In February 2019, police officers in Killeen shot James Scott Reed in his home. One officer entered a guilty plea to evidence tampering, but Reed’s family is still suing the city and several officers in federal court.

Body camera video shows that Daniel Prude was complying with police when they knelt on his back and pushed his face to the ground for so long that he stopped breathing.

Administrative subpoenas—which do not require a judge’s approval—are typically used for the department’s internal investigations, but The Appeal has learned that they are being used in criminal cases.

Some say their roles are already too close to those of law enforcement and are organizing for a radical rethinking of the profession.

A state investigation found that Detroit police officers fabricated evidence that helped convict a 14-year-old boy. A judge threw out his conviction after he spent nine years in prison, but the officers are still on the job and haven’t been flagged as unreliable to testify in court.

Rates of reporting domestic violence are low in immigrant communities, where survivors of abuse often don’t want to involve the police. As an alternative, the de Blasio administration promised to fund community-based domestic violence programming—but those funds were delayed, and advocates fear programs with strong community ties may not meet the city’s requirements.

The City Council passed a budget that cut nearly $150 million from the Austin Police Department. Millions will be reinvested in services like violence prevention and supportive housing.

A lawsuit alleges Breonna Taylor died because Louisville was trying to arrest its way toward economic redevelopment. Research shows this is common.

The COVID-19 pandemic and nationwide protests over police brutality are strengthening the case against mass incarceration, advocates argue.

In a moment of crisis, the state Senate and House are slated to be in recess until January.

Law enforcement super PACs are spending big money on district attorney races and local elections from California to New York—and respected Democratic consulting firms are helping them.

Safe and healthy communities start with less police and more investment in community services that work.

Yes, we must radically transform policing in America. But we cannot stop there. We must transform the pervasive systems of economic and carceral injustice that are choking our common life.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis are both provoked by natural phenomena, the dangers they present are just as political as the crisis of police violence.

Videos contradict officers’ claims that they didn’t ‘kettle’ protesters.

The ‘drug house’ ordinances that force landlords to kick out tenants are mostly compounding the overdose crisis, critics say.

The City Council must not let Mayor Eric Garcetti’s unconscionable priorities dictate how Los Angeles responds to the COVID-19 crisis.

As COVID-19 spreads, Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio are slashing budgets, but leaving funding for police and prisons largely untouched.

Josie Duffy Rice and guest co-host Zak Cheney Rice talk with Radley Balko, opinion journalist at the Washington Post and author of The Cadaver and the Country Dentist, about faulty forensic science.

Josie Duffy Rice and guest co-host Donovan Ramsey talk with Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, about the privatization of America’s criminal legal system.

Josie Duffy Rice and guest co-host Darnell Moore talk with Sherrilyn Ifill about policing, civil rights, the criminal justice system, and more.

67% of people arrested under state laws that criminalize HIV exposure and transmission are sex workers. But new legislation meant to modernize these laws would retain harsh penalties against them.

In two articles, the Times asserts a ‘spike’ in crime since the passage of bail reform in New York, an increase that the articles themselves note they can’t prove.

With journalist Roxanna Asgarian.

A bipartisan group has recommended substantive changes to the state’s legal justice system, including cash bail reform and proposals to divert people living with mental illnesses away from incarceration.

Two recent investigations look at how, in the name of fighting crime, police departments engage in dangerous, often fatal, vehicle pursuits

Moms 4 Housing made a home for their families in a vacant house in Oakland. Yesterday, police in tanks and riot gear evicted them.

Since 2010, no Vallejo officer has been disciplined for using deadly force, despite multiple shootings of unarmed people—including a man holding a can of beer. And active police union leaders have been involved in the shooting investigations.

District Attorney Rachael Rollins ran as a reformer who would work to increase transparency, but her office and the police department have been fighting the order.

Investing billions of government dollars into programs that embed police in Black communities will not reduce police violence, nor repair years of injustice.

Advocates say the removals are more evidence of a troubling and unregulated law enforcement tool, overseen by the city’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

Some officers have recently boasted about breaking state law and collaborating with ICE, according to messages posted in the group and obtained by The Appeal.

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. New Yorkers were supposed to be finished with all of this. Done with 12 years of Michael Bloomberg, a technocratic, out-of-touch billionaire mayor who oversaw the highly […]

With Danielle Sered of Common Justice

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. Rodney Reed was scheduled to be executed tomorrow. He won’t be, at least not tomorrow. He was convicted and sentenced to die in 1998 for the rape […]