Hi everyone! A few words of introduction: I’m a researcher at The Sentencing Project — we’re a non-profit organization that’s been engaged in research and advocacy for 30 years to make the criminal justice system more fair and effective.
I’ll be moderating our discussion on this topic with Sakira Cook from The Leadership…
This is just a tiny fragment of a hugely complex discussion, so apologies if it seems narrow:
There is endless development of powerful weapons that can destroy the world many times over….if some tiny fraction of that budget were put into the development of more effective non-lethal arms for police, and advanced training…
Thank you. Can you tell us about past or ongoing efforts by the Ella Baker Center, or other organizations, to incorporate race and reinvestment into broader reform debates and efforts?
Another major obstacle in remedying police misconduct and abuses has been the blanket indemnification that police officers receive when they are sued. Joanna has done an amazing job of researching and writing a piece on this issue.
Officers are rarely ever subject to punitive damages and when they are the agency or…
And thank you Jermey Haile and our other panelist for their work. I believe this bill is likely to pass as it has significant bi-partisan support, yet we must look to the states to also evolve and reform, as the majority of offenders are housed in state prisons. In the most recent Bureau of Justice stats, there were a total of 1,561,500 offenders…
So there’s not much accountability on any front: it’s extremely rare for an officer to actually get convicted and incarcerated (handy graphic from FiveThirtyEight below), pretty hard for a police officer to get fired, and they’re protected from facing the financial pain, too.
This is April Joyner, a freelance business/tech writer. Does this necessarily have to be the case: that reliance on statistics leads to abuse? Any instances where data science has helped improve police-community relations or cut back on abuse?
