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Baltimore's Violence Interrupters Confront Shootings, the Coronavirus, and Corrupt Cops

Brandon Soderberg Baynard Woods

July 26, 2020 |

The Intercept |

Text |

Over 3000 Words

Response Location: United States, Baltimore, Maryland

Baltimore’s Safe Streets program, which uses a public-health approach to stopping the spread of community gun violence, mediated more than 1,800 conflicts in 2019 and is credited with preventing homicides altogether in one neighborhood, despite the city’s overall violent year. Since the program’s launch in 2007, studies have shown it to be effective in its use of “credible messengers” whose street savvy can be deployed to “interrupt” retaliatory violence. But the Baltimore program also illustrates tensions between such community-based programs and the police, especially when the police are corrupt.

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Giving Police Departments Money to Buy Body Cameras Will Never End Brutality

Tyler Hicks

July 26, 2020 |

Truthout |

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1500-3000 Words

Response Location: United States, Milford, Delaware

Body-worn cameras gained popularity as a potential check on police brutality, but for them to fulfill that purpose, numerous changes in typical public policies are needed, starting with public access to videos and independent oversight of camera policies. Research is inconclusive about whether cameras have changed police conduct, but they have discouraged citizen complaints about police. Other changes that could improve the use of cameras as a police-reform tool include constraining officers' discretion to record and better automated review of reams of stored data.

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How Your Local Election Clerk Is Fighting Global Disinformation

Matt Vasilogambros

July 20, 2020 |

Stateline |

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1500-3000 Words

Response Location: United States

Many entities are working with social media companies to flag election-related disinformation. The California Secretary of State emails voters about how to report false information so the state can flag it and the Arizona Secretary of State verifies official accounts with social media companies. In the private sector, the startup VineSite uses artificial intelligence to identify and flag false information and the nonprofit Mitre has an app used by 160 election officials to report social media disinformation. Officials have a good relationship with social media companies, but there is room for improvement.

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How a Coalition of New York Activists Revealed Police-Department Secrets

Tom Robbins

July 17, 2020 |

The New Yorker |

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Over 3000 Words

Response Location: United States, New York

When New York legislators abolished a state law that had long shielded police officers’ disciplinary records from public scrutiny, they were not just responding to recent protests but also to activism over many years by reform advocates and families of victims of police violence. Long-running legal challenges had failed to pry the records loose. But activists – opposed by police unions and their allies – had used public testimony, publicity, and their families’ stories to lay the groundwork for changes that then came quickly after George Floyd’s death sparked nationwide protests of police brutality.

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The long quest to stop a ‘Sugar Daddy' judge

John Shiffman Michael Berens

July 14, 2020 |

Reuters |

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Over 3000 Words

Response Location: United States, Arkansas

Arkansas’ judicial oversight agency has the staffing and persistence to hold bad judges accountable in ways that counter a nationwide pattern of weak enforcement and judicial impunity. The Arkansas Judicial Discipline & Disability Commission has a staff that’s almost three times as large as the national per-judge average and it publicly disciplines judges more than twice the national rate. It is one of the few such agencies that will investigate anonymous complaints, frequently a barrier to starting judicial misconduct probes.

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Democracy Reform: Voters Not Politicians

Richard Davies Jim Meigs

July 10, 2020 |

How Do We Fix It? |

Podcast |

Over 15 Minutes

Response Location: United States, Michigan

Voters Not Politicians is a grassroots initiative that, with the help of hundreds of volunteers, ran a successful campaign to defeat gerrymandering in Michigan. The state has a citizen-led ballot initiative option, so the group held townhall meetings and gathered over 410,000 voter signatures to get the initiative on the statewide ballot. The measure was challenged in courts, but the group raised funds for legal help and the initiative passed by a margin of 61-39 percent. The new law requires that an independent group of average citizens will decide district boundaries with full transparency.

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Their Unlikely Alliance Began at Whataburger. Can They Reform a Texas Jail?

Maurice Chammah

July 01, 2020 |

The Marshall Project |

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1500-3000 Words

Response Location: United States, Tyler, Texas

Dalila Reynoso's local activism blossomed into a full-blown watchdog role when COVID-19 began to spread through the Smith County, Texas, jail. The marriage of criminal justice reform and pandemic safety, vested in one woman, mirrors much larger court watch and jail watch projects in larger cities. For her part, Reynoso became a conduit for complaints about jail conditions. Thanks to her diplomatic skills, and a receptive sheriff's openness to criticism and change, the pair's efforts lowered virus cases from 52 to three within three weeks and lowered the jail population by more than 150 people.

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When it comes to police oversight, many watchdogs lack teeth

Rob Kuznia Casey Tolan

June 25, 2020 |

CNN |

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1500-3000 Words

Response Location: United States

The most effective civilian oversight agencies that act as watchdogs over police discipline are empowered to conduct independent investigations, impose discipline on individual officers, and influence disciplinary policy. One of the strongest, in Oakland, forced the police chief out of office over police shootings and diversity on the police force. But the lessons to be learned in this field come more often from the many examples of structural flaws that render civilian oversight powerless to counter the wishes of the police, or even to be listened to.

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9 Departments and Multiple Infractions for One New Jersey Police Officer

Rukmini Callimachi

June 24, 2020 |

The New York Times |

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1500-3000 Words

Response Location: United States, Woodlynne, New Jersey

New Jersey’s responses to police misconduct offer stark lessons in how certain failures can allow troubled officers to hop from job to job undetected. The state lacks a central database of police misconduct and remains one of only five states that cannot revoke an officer’s credentials because of performance. In one case, an officer with serial failures at nine departments, involving 16 incidents in which people he arrested got injured, the red flags that should have been raised never were, allowing him to mistreat residents of majority-Black neighborhoods despite a record indicating racism and brutality.

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What's Happened To Hawaii's Police Shootings Review Board?

Blaze Lovell

June 17, 2020 |

Honolulu Civil Beat |

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800-1500 Words

Response Location: United States, Hawaii

The groundswell for greater accountability in police shootings has barely caused a ripple in Hawaii, where the state’s Law Enforcement Officer Independent Review board has finished only one case in its first three years of existence and has suspended meetings during the pandemic. With one of its two citizen member slots vacant on an otherwise law-enforcement-heavy board, the panel fails a basic tenet of accountability by severely limiting public access to the cases it’s considering and its deliberations, says one critic.

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