Vigilantes and law enforcement groups have long worked together to create and protect the racial order in the United States.
For many marginalized communities in America, being patriotic means ignoring a history of violence and oppression that continues to this day.
Support organizations addressing community conflict, and minimizing state-sanctioned violence in the process.
Police face criticism for their use of ketamine in the arrest of individuals they mislabel as "aggressive" following the death of Elijah McClain.
Seeking convictions for violence, while understandable, legitimizes a system that disproportionately harms communities of color.
Conversations around police reforms sometimes highlight specific illegitimate acts by police officers. But law enforcement ignoring the law en masse raises deeper questions about the legitimacy of an institution with a long history of racism and brutality.
Citizen is a privately-owned “public safety” app that reports neighborhood crime to residents. It has 5 million active users, more App Store downloads than Twitter (Forbes), and is backed by venture capital firms like Sequoia Capital, which is also investing in heavyweights like Cisco, Instagram, and YouTube (Sequoia). It’s a rebrand of an app called Vigilante, which actually encouraged users to go after suspected criminals (Tech Crunch). After the Pacific Palisades fire last month, Citizen sent the full name and photo of a suspected arsonist to 860,000 users. Citizen put a $30,000 bounty on this man, who was unhoused (Oaklandside), and, as in its days as Vigilante, encouraged its users to “get out there and bring this guy to justice” (Vox). As it turns out, he was innocent.
If you’ve participated or watched protests unfold in cities across the country this past year, you may have noticed that law enforcement looked more like members of our military than neighborhood police. And that’s intentional, as, over the past decades, the U.S. has made it easier for law enforcement to access surplus military equipment for everyday use.
On August 8, the FBI raided former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on suspicion of mishandling classified documents (Politico). Conservatives...
The Cops Off Campus Coalition is a network of students, educators, and community members working to abolish policing in the education system.
