LibGuides: One Book 2020-2021: the US Carceral System & Injustice- Becoming Ms. Burton & Just Mercy: Policing

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Black Lives Matter Movement Resources
by Jody Segal Last Updated Mar 12, 2024 363 views this year

Law enforcement & incarceration

Law Enforcement & the Criminal Justice System

The police violence against Black communities that we’re witnessing in the U.S. today is not new, but the scale of demonstrations, dialogue, and introspect it has prompted is unprecedented. This moment is exposing a pattern of brutality dating back to the violent takeover of lands and lives by white European colonizers — centuries of theft and genocide of Indigenous people and enslavement of Africans. People are seeing more clearly than ever. They want to learn what it means to be an ally to anti-racist movements, and they’re looking for ways to deepen their involvement.

-From Ways to Help Fight Anti-Black Police Violence
(linked & cited in the box below)

Suggested resources

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Police Violence & Killings

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ACLU: Police Excessive Force
Part of the Criminal Justice Law Reform Project, find info on Police Excessive Force, Police Corruption, Asset Forfeiture Abuse, Police Militarization, Search and Seizure, and more
Amnesty International: Police Violence
Bureau of Justice Statistics: Use of Force
Statistics on Law Enforcement including reports, statistics, and data about Use of Force
Campaign Zero
Campaign Zero is a project of the non-profit
that...supports "the analysis of policing practices across the country, research to identify effective solutions to end police violence, technical assistance to organizers leading police accountability campaigns and the development of model legislation and advocacy to end police violence nationwide"
Center for Policing Equity
"The Center for Policing Equity is a research center founded at University of California-Los Angeles and now based at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice."
Crime and Police Conduct: Is a National Crime Wave Starting?
An update article from CQ Researcher, 2016
The Culture of Policing Is Broken: Brutality and Dehumanization Are Deeply Embedded in Many Departments.
From The Atlantic, June 2020
Department of Justice: Law Enforcement
Fatal Force: Americans Killed by Police
Washington Post data on police killings in the US: "After Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, was killed in 2014 by police in Ferguson, Mo., a Post investigation found that the FBI undercounted fatal police shootings by more than half. This is because reporting by police departments is voluntary and many departments fail to do so. In 2015, The Washington Post began to log every fatal shooting by an on-duty police officer in the United States. In that time there have been more than 5,000 such shootings recorded by The Post."
The Guardian: Police Killings - The Counted
"The Counted is a project by the Guardian – and you – working to count the number of people killed by police and other law enforcement agencies in the United States throughout 2015 and 2016, to monitor their demographics and to tell the stories of how they died. The database will combine Guardian reporting with verified crowdsourced information to build a more comprehensive record of such fatalities."
Mapping Police Violence
"This information has been meticulously sourced from the three largest, most comprehensive and impartial crowdsourced databases on police killings in the country: FatalEncounters.org, the U.S. Police Shootings Database and KilledbyPolice.net. We've also done extensive original research to further improve the quality and completeness of the data; searching social media, obituaries, criminal records databases, police reports and other sources to identify the race of 90 percent of all victims in the database."
We the Protesters
"We The Protesters" is a national organization focused on ending racism and police violence in the United States."

Source citation: Ali, Maz. "Ways to Help Fight Anti-Black Police Violence." EarthJustice, 5 June 2020, earthjustice.org/blog/2020-june/ways-to-help-fight-anti-black-police-violence. Accessed 18 Aug.2020.

Racial Profiling in Policing

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A Timeline of Events That Led to the 2020 'Fed Up'-rising
a 2020 article from "The Root" - detailed article with links to additional sources.
Racial Profiling: A Persistent Civil Rights Challenge Even in the Twenty-First Century
A 2016 article from "Case Western Reserve Law Review"
Racial Profiling and Criminal Justice
A 2011 article from "The Journal of Ethics"
Racial Profiling and Shopping while Black
A 2013 article from "Black Enterprise"
The Ridiculousness of Racial Profiling
A 2005 article from "The Arab American News":
Trayvon Martin and "The Talk" No American Child Should Have to Hear
Magazine article

Police Reform, Funding & Defunding

Use the links below to access articles and online resources on the topic.

How America's History With Race And Policing Holds Us Back From Reform
A ten minute recording from Boston Radio recorded in June 2020 with guest speaking Khalil Gibran Muhammad
What Does 'Defund the Police' Mean and Does It Have Merit?
And article from Brookings published in June 2020
America's Policing System Is Broken. It's Time to Radically Rethink Public Safety
An August 2020 article from Time
Defund the Police - from ProCon.org
A 2020 article outlining the top 3 pros/cons
Ways to Help Fight Anti-Black Police Violence
A 2020 article from EarthJustice
Police Diversity Matters
Research Study in the journal Science

Community Policing

Use the links below to access articles and online resources on the topic.

Guide to Critical Issues in Policing
A report or "Community relation services Toolkit for Policing" - Addressing 1 critical issues in policing, from Justice.gov
Community Policing Defined
A report from the U.S. Dept. of Justice on "Community Oriented Policing Services" (COPS)
Community Policing
From the National Police Foundation

Searching the library's databases

Community Policing
From the Encyclopedia of Street Crime in America, 2013
Encyclopedia of Community Policing and Problem Solving
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World Encyclopedia of Police Forces and Correctional Systems
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