Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • Policing the Police 2020

    Revisiting Newark police reform six years after an earlier documentary, and after federal intervention, signs of progress provide hope in a year of unrest over police misconduct nationwide. Policies and training were overhauled, civilian oversight was imposed, albeit with limitations. Public trust edged up, and the police claim an increase in use-of-force incidents is due to better compliance with reporting requirements. Violence is down, with more use of community-based prevention instead of just policing. But the root causes of racial disparities remain, unable to be solved just by improving policing.

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  • How South African activists hope to integrate cities built to divide

    The South African government has provided free apartments to millions of people since the end of apartheid, in part as a way to address structural inequalities rooted in apartheid. The program has been a lifeline for many but has also exacerbated segregation because the housing is built just outside of cities, where Black, Asian, and mixed-race South Africans were once legally required to live. This creates new structural inequalities because it makes it harder to access good jobs, which tend to be in the city center. Advocates are now petitioning the government to build housing in the city center.

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  • NYPD Study: Implicit Bias Training Changes Minds, Not Necessarily Behavior

    After all 36,000 New York Police Department officers took required training in recognizing implicit racial bias, more officers understood how racism may increase officers' aggressiveness but there was no evidence that this awareness translated into a less racially disparate outcome in the numbers of people stopped and frisked. Since the protests of police bias that started in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, most states have imposed mandatory implicit-bias training on police. NYPD's study is a rare measurement of the effects such training can have.

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  • Portland's High Stakes Experiment to Shrink the Role of Police in Fighting Gun Violence

    Two years after reorganizing a police gun-enforcement unit to focus it on an evidence-based approach to preventing retaliatory shootings, Portland city leaders abolished the unit in a round of police budget cuts and failed to reinvest that money in community-based alternatives that don't rely on the police. The result, criminologists say, is a worst-case scenario: a policing reform that creates a vacuum and could be to blame for an alarming spike in gun violence. The most effective solutions, they say, blend effective policing with proven community-based programs.

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  • In CAHOOTS in Oregon

    Oregon's CAHOOTS program has succeeded in replacing police on many mental-health crisis calls over its 30-year history because it is integrated in a larger system of services, including law enforcement. CAHOOTS' crisis workers, who cover the cities of Eugene and Springfield with three vans taking dozens of calls for help a day, come to their jobs with expertise as EMTs, nurses, or social workers. Then they spend 500 hours of training in crisis management and de-escalation, learning to offer help without forcing it, and without the threat of arrest except in the few cases when police backup is needed.

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  • An Ohio county had the second-highest infant mortality rate in the nation. Then they started listening to Black moms.

    A local collaborative in Hamilton County, Ohio has reduced infant mortality by initiating regional educational campaigns and creating “sacred spaces” where Black women meet and learn how to become empowered to "tell the government what pregnant Black women needed." The program, which focused on three pilot neighborhoods and included leaders from the largest maternity systems in the county, resulted in the county recording the "lowest levels of infant mortality ever."

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  • Harris County's bail reforms let more people out of jail before trial without raising risk of reoffending

    Releasing tens of thousands more misdemeanor defendants from jail without requiring cash bail had no measurable effect on crime rates in Texas' most populous county. To settle a lawsuit that claimed cash bail unconstitutionally discriminated against people on the basis of wealth, Harris County established a set of reforms abolishing cash bail in most misdemeanor cases. Court-appointed researchers monitoring compliance with the settlement found re-offending rates remained stable while racial disparities in who gets released improved. Not tested yet was compliance with court appointments.

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  • Interest in Community Police Watch Training Soars as Courses Go Online

    Groups in the Bay Area that have successfully sought to have police disciplined for misconduct and won new police-accountability policies have turned their form of organized monitoring into a training platform for protesters nationwide. Responding to widespread Black Lives Matter protests, groups like Berkeley Copwatch and Wecopwatch use online education to teach hundreds of activists nationwide how to use videotape archives to systematically document abuses, and how to perform the work of legal observers at protests. Those activities are meant to act as deterrents to abuse.

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  • Minnesota COVID-19 outreach focuses on vulnerable communities of color

    To extend aid to the Minnesotans most vulnerable to the coronavirus, state and local health departments, backed by $4 million in state funding and by community groups' on-the-ground help, conducted an extensive campaign of culturally appropriate outreach to offer free COVID-19 tests and healthcare advice. The efforts have included one-on-one contacts, email blasts to free-school-lunch recipients, and TV and radio ads on media targeting Black, Latinx, immigrant, and refugee populations. Immigrant communities and people of color have been disproportionately hit by the pandemic.

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  • How two local newsrooms are sewing diversity into the fabric of their organizations

    During a year of racial-justice protests nationwide, journalists whose job is to hold institutions to account for racist outcomes have turned their gazes inward, to their own newsrooms. Their efforts have won some progress in diverse staffing at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis and the Express-News in San Antonio. The burden has fallen largely to journalists of color to press for newsrooms that better reflect their communities. In Minneapolis, managers promised a trio of new hires and better training. San Antonio editors began hiring columnists of color in the majority-Latino city.

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