“Humanize our collective experiences and bring others together who may otherwise remain at a distance.” The polarization of law enforcement and community members deepen as our nation continues to erupt into national protests. Trust has been broken and communities feel unsafe. We know the problem. The question is, “What is the solution?” COMMUNITY CONSCIOUS POLICING Join Training 4 Transformation, LLC (T4T) in Best Practices in Community Conscious Policing as we delve beneath the controversy to discover our shared humanity between law enforcement and the residents they serve. The goal and purpose of T4T is to “Humanize our collective experiences and bring others together who may otherwise remain at a distance.”
Community Conscious Policing is a public-health centered response model intended to end unnecessary and inappropriate law enforcement violence. It is designed to augment and enhance existing continuing education for law enforcement, students in social justice related fields, advocates involved in police accountability and organizations seeking to increase their outreach capacity.Our innovative training curriculum is designed with the input of sworn police trainers and thousands of diverse community participants that we brought together during very polarizing times to design a new training curriculum based on experiential learning. This model is a culturally responsive, trauma-healing approach to community and civic engagement based on the founders' conscious leadership principles. They include emotional intelligence, experiential learning, decolonizing strategies and mindfulness practices that transcend traditional barriers.T4T is a community-led organization that trains law enforcement alongside the people they serve. We center the lived experiences of Black, Indigenous and communities of color who have historically been most impacted by law enforcement and the criminal justice system. Real Life, Real Talk, Real ChangeEach testimonial is told from the perspective of the survivor. We center the lived experience of people who are most impacted by racism and law enforcement. After each reflection, we analyze it from a redress and trauma-healing perspective providing practical lessons for the reader. Community CONSCIOUS Policing was highlighted at a conference as a prime example of Police-Community Integrated Training and Education (P-CITE) by attorney Mathew Carr at Vermont Law. The purpose of this educational resource is to equip our communities with the tools, insights and resources necessary to advocate for healing justice. Readers will learn vital lessons through real-life police stop scenarios, discover alternatives on how to best navigate them and integrate practical strategies for justice and repair. Most importantly, it reveals holistic ways to heal from racial profiling and the trauma of police brutality based on indigenous wisdom.
Why is the black community treated differently from other communities by law enforcement? How are so many cops able to get away with killing unarmed black men and women? To find those answers and more, look no further than The Conscious Cop: Balancing Activism With Law & Order. Written by an active police officer, this book explores the racism that is still prevalent in today's policing. Brandon Collins touches on cases from a cop's perspective that many people are familiar with, and breaks down the rhetoric cops use to get away with killing in the line of duty. Collins also explains the need for responsible law and order in our communities. This book will lay the groundwork for law enforcement agencies to adjust their practices to ensure safe and legal policing.
Proactive policing, as a strategic approach used by police agencies to prevent crime, is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. It developed from a crisis in confidence in policing that began to emerge in the 1960s because of social unrest, rising crime rates, and growing skepticism regarding the effectiveness of standard approaches to policing. In response, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, innovative police practices and policies that took a more proactive approach began to develop. This report uses the term "proactive policing" to refer to all policing strategies that have as one of their goals the prevention or reduction of crime and disorder and that are not reactive in terms of focusing primarily on uncovering ongoing crime or on investigating or responding to crimes once they have occurred. Proactive policing is distinguished from the everyday decisions of police officers to be proactive in specific situations and instead refers to a strategic decision by police agencies to use proactive police responses in a programmatic way to reduce crime. Today, proactive policing strategies are used widely in the United States. They are not isolated programs used by a select group of agencies but rather a set of ideas that have spread across the landscape of policing. Proactive Policing reviews the evidence and discusses the data and methodological gaps on: (1) the effects of different forms of proactive policing on crime; (2) whether they are applied in a discriminatory manner; (3) whether they are being used in a legal fashion; and (4) community reaction. This report offers a comprehensive evaluation of proactive policing that includes not only its crime prevention impacts but also its broader implications for justice and U.S. communities.
Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.
Braga argues that problem-oriented policing has been evaluated as effective in controlling a wide range of crime and disorder problems, ranging from burglaries and robberies, to prostitution and various types of violence. He analyzes why problem-oriented policing interventions are effective and, thereby, intends to broaden the use of this approach in everyday policing.Problem-oriented policing directs attention and resources to the underlying problems that lurk behind many recurring crime problems. Braga summarizes the extensive worldwide research literature on three types of interventions:reducing opportunities for crime at problem-plagued places (e.g., bars, housing projects) through enforcement-oriented and/or environmental measures;targeting high-activity (repeat) offenders; andprotecting the victims of repetitive offenses. Braga concludes with ideas for correcting deficiencies in current approaches to problem-oriented policing. These suggestions address how to improve crime analysis, enhance the measurement of police performance, and secure productive police-community partnerships.
Winner of the 2017 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award, sponsored by the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Finalist for the C. Wright Mills Book Award, sponsored by the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Winner of the 2017 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award, sponsored by the American Sociological Association's Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities. Winner of the 2017 Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book, sponsored by the American Sociological Association's Sociology of Culture Section. Honorable Mention in the 2017 Book Award from the American Sociological Association's Section on Race, Class, and Gender. NAACP Image Award Nominee for an Outstanding Literary Work from a debut author. Winner of the 2017 Prose Award for Excellence in Social Sciences and the 2017 Prose Category Award for Law and Legal Studies, sponsored by the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, Association of American Publishers. Silver Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (Current Events/Social Issues category). Americans are slowly waking up to the dire effects of racial profiling, police brutality, and mass incarceration, especially in disadvantaged neighborhoods and communities of color. The criminal courts are the crucial gateway between police action on the street and the processing of primarily black and Latino defendants into jails and prisons. And yet the courts, often portrayed as sacred, impartial institutions, have remained shrouded in secrecy, with the majority of Americans kept in the dark about how they function internally. Crook County bursts open the courthouse doors and enters the hallways, courtrooms, judges' chambers, and attorneys' offices to reveal a world of punishment determined by race, not offense. Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve spent ten years working in and investigating the largest criminal courthouse in the country, Chicago–Cook County, and based on over 1,000 hours of observation, she takes readers inside our so-called halls of justice to witness the types of everyday racial abuses that fester within the courts, often in plain sight. We watch white courtroom professionals classify and deliberate on the fates of mostly black and Latino defendants while racial abuse and due process violations are encouraged and even seen as justified. Judges fall asleep on the bench. Prosecutors hang out like frat boys in the judges' chambers while the fates of defendants hang in the balance. Public defenders make choices about which defendants they will try to "save" and which they will sacrifice. Sheriff's officers cruelly mock and abuse defendants' family members. Delve deeper into Crook County with related media and instructor resources at www.sup.org/crookcountyresources. Crook County's powerful and at times devastating narratives reveal startling truths about a legal culture steeped in racial abuse. Defendants find themselves thrust into a pernicious legal world where courtroom actors live and breathe racism while simultaneously committing themselves to a colorblind ideal. Gonzalez Van Cleve urges all citizens to take a closer look at the way we do justice in America and to hold our arbiters of justice accountable to the highest standards of equality.
