Executive Summary The notion of “environmental justice” reflects the disproportionately high burden of environmental hazards—such as pollution—borne by low-income communities, communities of color, and indigenous communities, as well as the disproportionately low access of these communities to environmental benefits—such as clean water. This already unequal distribution of environmental costs and benefits has been gradually exacerbated […]
Executive Summary Over the past several months, protests against police violence and the criminalization of communities of color have increased focus and attention on calls to defund the police and limit their political influence. This development has forced elected prosecutors to reckon with their role in a system that has long failed in its mission […]
Executive Summary To reduce police violence and abuses of power, officers’ contacts with the public can be limited by transferring some policing functions to non-police agencies that can better promote individual and societal well-being. One proposal to significantly decrease police encounters without compromising public safety is to remove civil traffic law enforcement from the duties […]
Executive Summary Same-day voter registration—where a voter can both register and vote on Election Day—improves democracy in the United States by making it easier for people to vote. Same-day voter registration promotes greater participation: states with this policy tend to have higher turnout than states with onerous registration deadlines. This reform has a notable, positive […]
Executive Summary In a national poll, we asked voters whether they support comprehensive marijuana reform that would legalize marijuana and begin to address the historic, intergenerational harms wrought by decades of racially disparate enforcement. We specifically asked about the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment & Expungement (MORE) Act, legislation that would decriminalize marijuana at the federal level […]
Executive Summary In October of 2018, an arbitrator ordered Florida’s Opa-locka Police Department to rehire Sergeant German Bosque. This was the sixth time that the city had attempted to fire Sergeant Bosque, and the sixth time an arbitrator ordered the city to rehire Bosque on appeal. There were good reasons to fire Bosque. Over the […]
Executive Summary During a pandemic, any greater consolidation of corporations is a risk to health, jobs, and small businesses. Instead of charging forward with more mergers during the coronavirus-created economic crisis, we should impose a moratorium until the Federal Trade Commission can determine that small businesses, workers, and consumers are no longer under the financial […]
Executive Summary In the days and weeks following the murder of George Floyd, people throughout the United States organized and protested against racist systems of policing, criminalization, and incarceration. Some called for defunding and abolishing entire police departments, while others demanded more incremental policing reforms. But across the board, a common theme emerged: the police, […]
Executive Summary At the end of July, the expanded unemployment insurance (UI) benefit — passed as part of the “Coronavirus Aid and Relief Act” (CARES) — expired. In the month of July, expanded UI provided approximately 30 million unemployed Americans an extra $600 per week. The goal of this policy was to ensure that workers […]
Executive Summary The student loan debt crisis is leading to tremendous dispossession of wealth and income from borrowers—and disproportionately from Black and Latinx borrowers, as well as women borrowers of all races, with Black and Latinx women faring the worst. Aggressive student loan collection practices, which may even involve arrest or threat of arrest, are […]
Executive Summary The questions of whether, when, and how to safely open America’s schools have become the center of political fights over the coronavirus. President Trump has taken a hard line on opening schools — his administration is insisting that schools must fully re-open for in-person learning, and is threatening to cut federal funding for districts that […]
Executive Summary Police use of facial recognition technology has become routine in the United States, posing grave risks to privacy and civil liberties, especially for people of color. Despite its ubiquity, there is no comprehensive regulation of the technology and its use by law enforcement. Thus far, some cities and states have reined in law […]
Executive Summary Police communications are not reserved for communicating to the public about ongoing emergencies. Instead, the police have their own publicly-funded public relation teams, often used to control public narratives about crime and public safety in ways that promote police power, stoke fear about crime, and conceal police abuse and other misconduct. While these […]
Executive Summary Congress has the ability to provide comprehensive aid to households in the next stimulus package. At its core, the new legislation must provide recurring, inclusive, and long-term relief for individuals and families. This relief must not end at an arbitrary date by which Congress wishes the coronavirus will magically disappear. It must give […]
Executive Summary COVID-19 has caused intertwined health and economic crises: the virus threatens the health of millions of Americans, and the resulting economic harm is devastating, especially for working people and families. The burden of these crises has not fallen equally. Communities of color, especially Black and Latinx people, have borne the brunt of the […]
Executive Summary The coronavirus pandemic has dramatically and ominously shifted the scale of the eviction crisis in the United States. Short of extensive, multipronged legislative action, estimates suggest that anywhere from 19 to 23 million renters (or 11 million renter households) are at risk of eviction between summer and fall 2020. Congress must take immediate […]
Executive Summary Since Facebook announced Libra, its proposed “global crypto-currency,” a bit over a year ago, central banks and monetary authorities worldwide have accelerated their efforts to develop central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Sweden and China, for example, were nearly ready to test their own proto-CBDCs even before last summer. Thanks to CBDCs’ promise to […]
Executive Summary In Portland, Oregon, federal agents in unmarked cars chased protestors and snatched them off the streets without explanation. One video shows federal agents in camouflage fatigues and generic “police” badges grabbing a protester, binding his hands, and placing him into the back of an unmarked minivan. In Washington, D.C., during protests in front of the […]
Executive Summary The challenges around eviction and housing affordability predate the pandemic, which means the response must also extend well beyond it to protect renters now and from ongoing housing instability going forward. While COVID-19 is pushing tens of millions of people over the eviction cliff, the staggering lack of affordable housing, particularly for the […]
Executive Summary Amidst the larger debate about funding for law enforcement, Data for Progress and The Justice Collaborative conducted a national survey to examine attitudes toward police presence in schools. Programs that keep “school resource officers” in schools are prohibitively expensive, running into the millions of dollars, and have not prevented a single school shooting. […]
Executive Summary When voters are provided two options regarding cutting or maintaining current levels of defense spending and provided arguments for and against, they support a ten percent decrease by a 14 percentage point margin. If defense spending was decreased by ten percent, healthcare (40 percent) and responding to the coronavirus pandemic (37) were the […]
Police should no longer occupy all of our vital support systems in our communities. This research and analysis is part of our Discourse series. Discourse is a collaboration between The Appeal, The Justice Collaborative Institute, and Data For Progress. Its mission is to provide expert commentary and rigorous, pragmatic research especially for public officials, reporters, […]
Through this mechanism, communities can accept accountability for the racism they allow to flourish by failing to disrupt it. This research and analysis is part of our Discourse series. Discourse is a collaboration between The Appeal, The Justice Collaborative Institute, and Data For Progress. Its mission is to provide expert commentary and rigorous, pragmatic research […]
Executive Summary When a police chokehold led to Eric Garner’s death back in 2014, a bystander caught it all on video. Protests across the nation called for fundamental reforms—and for the punishment of Daniel Pantaleo, the NYPD officer who executed the chokehold. Anyone watching the video could see that something was wrong with the officer’s […]
Executive Summary Data For Progress and The Justice Collaborative Institute conducted a survey of likely voters in swing states for the November 2020 Presidential and U.S. Senate election to gauge support for the HEROES Act, which The House passed on May 15th and is currently pending before the Senate. The HEROES Act was designed to […]
Executive Summary Income inequality in the United States is worse than ever, a divide deepened by the coronavirus pandemic and the government’s inadequate response. The mainstream banking industry has reinforced economic disparities by excluding the poor from financial services that would help them escape poverty. Private banks, though heavily subsidized by the federal government, are […]
Executive Summary In 2018, more than 5,300 people in California died from a drug overdose, the most of any state in the country. There were 650 more deaths in California than in Florida, the state with the second highest number, and close to 4,500 more deaths than in West Virginia, the state with the highest […]
Executive Summary Hundreds of thousands of people across the country and around the world have taken to the streets to demand an end to police violence and racism in the criminal legal system, moved by the devastating murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery and many others, as well as a broader […]
Executive Summary The coronavirus pandemic has exposed deep structural flaws in the design and operation of the U.S. economic and political systems. At the same time, it presents a rare opportunity for innovative rethinking and remaking of both our private markets and our public institutions, so that they better serve the needs of the American […]
Executive Summary The movement to redirect police funding towards social services and community care has ignited calls to re-examine police presence in schools. In the last month alone, several school districts have decided to disband school-based officers while urging their communities to shift funding towards other necessary services. Consider Portland, Oregon. On June 4, 2020, Portland Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero announced […]
Executive Summary Sheriffs are the so-called “tip of the spear” in eviction proceedings. While they do not instigate eviction proceedings or participate in court processes, sheriffs and their deputies in most states participate in the physical eviction process, which includes serving the writ that notifies tenants of their evictions, forcibly removing tenants from the property, […]
Social Workers address crises regularly and without an armed police officer standing in front of us. Often, the presence of an armed officer escalates a crisis that could have been better handled by mental health professionals alone. This piece is a commentary, part of The Appeal’s collection of opinion and analysis. The uprisings taking place […]
Executive Summary The recent police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and other Black Americans, along with a wave of police violence against protesters across the country, have sparked renewed scrutiny of “qualified immunity,” the court-created rule that makes it nearly impossible to sue police officers for excessive force and other constitutional violations. […]
Executive Summary Though police officers are neither medical professionals nor social workers, cities and counties across the country routinely send armed law enforcement officers to respond to emergency calls for help when a person is experiencing a mental or behavioral health crisis. This makes as little sense as sending a social worker into a home […]
Executive Summary Violence interruption programs, used in cities throughout the United States, provide a proven, community-led, and cost-effective solution to reducing gun violence. Whereas police depend on force and violence to do their jobs, often making things worse, these programs use community engagement to stop lethal violence before it occurs, prevent its spread by interrupting […]
Executive Summary On March 27, we warned about the urgent need for decarceration of jails and prisons to prevent large-scale outbreaks of COVID-19 that would lead to severe illness and death, both within facilities and beyond their walls. Since then, our fears have been realized. On April 5, Michael Tyson, age 53, was the first […]
This research and analysis is part of our Discourse series. Discourse is a collaboration between The Appeal, The Justice Collaborative Institute, and Data For Progress. Its mission is to provide expert commentary and rigorous, pragmatic research especially for public officials, reporters, advocates, and scholars. The Appeal and The Justice Collaborative Institute are editorially independent projects […]
Executive Summary Police chiefs, elected leaders, and communities have known for decades that no-knock raids are unsafe and cause injury and death. There is also a growing sense that they are unnecessary and contribute to community distrust. For example, no-knock warrants are not reserved for the most egregious of crimes but instead are most commonly […]
Executive Summary Even before the pandemic, the United States was in the midst of a homelessness crisis that ensnares more than a million people every year. This year, with a coronavirus-induced economic crisis, that number will likely grow as unemployment hits record levels and people living paycheck-to-paycheck, already in a state of housing insecurity, can […]
Executive Summary New polling reveals bipartisan support for policies that will build a fairer economy for all workers and level the playing field for service workers who depend heavily on tips and the wider workforce. These results show that New Yorkers support changing the status quo and do not want the economy to simply return […]