Category Archives: Topic Series

Special Interview with Alondra Nelson on Criminalization and Public Health

This past week, I interviewed Alondra Nelson, PhD (Professor of Sociology and Director, Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University), about her research on the Black Panther Party, which culminated in her most recent book Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination. In this interview, I ask Professor Nelson about her experience entering spaces more commonly trodden by activists, what role she thinks stigma has in criminalization and public health, and the problems she sees with medicalizing behavior.

Can you share a bit about how your research speaks to issues of criminalization and public health?

I guess I set out to study public health, in a sense, but certainly not criminalization. In the process of writing my last book “Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination,” I discovered while doing that research that members of the Black Panther Party were involved in a legal campaign, an activist campaign, to block funding to a proposed research center at UCLA in the early 1970s, 1972 specifically. This center was to be called The Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence, and it was being proposed at a time where there was a lot of public anxiety and public discourse around violence in American society. It was a time during which the covers of Time magazine and Life magazine were posing the question “What are we going to do about this scourge of violence in our society?” One of the answers that arises, or response to this moral panic, is this proposal for this center at UCLA.

The center is interesting for a couple of reasons. One, that I don’t delve in too much into in the book but is worth noting in our conversation, is that the Center is being proposed underneath the umbrella of Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA, which still exists, and it’s at a moment where psychologists and psychiatrists are in effect working to make their disciplines more scientific. Now, it’s common place for a colleague in psychology departments to do research using MRI, and these sorts things it was uncommon. It was a moment in the evolution of psychology and psychiatry that it was becoming more scientific. Part of how it was becoming more scientific at this UCLA project is that they were looking almost solely to biological and physiological causes for violent behavior. They were looking at endocrine levels. They were looking at genes. They were doing a proposed study that was going to look into violence in the XYY chromosome. There’s a study that was proposed to look at, the hypothesis was “are women more or less violent at different moments in their menstrual cycle.” There were a couple of proposals that began from the assumption that Black and Latino boys and men were biologically prone to be violent. It was criminalizing in two ways. One the one hand, it assumed that there were two kind of pools (there are lots of different research project that would have been housed in this violence center, but one of the projects was planning to look at populations to test prisoners, primarily Black and Brown prisoners, to see if there was something effectively wrong with their brains; if there was brain pathology that was why they were violent. These were people who were already incarcerated and institutionalized, so the assumption there was that there was a link between biology, brain pathology, and violence.

On the other hand, there was another study that proposed to look at Black and Brown boys in the Los Angeles public school district with the implication being that these boys were on their way to being criminals. So, can we intervene? Let’s look at their brains before things go bad, or maybe they’re just natural born criminals and things will already go bad. The interesting thing is that at least some of these research projects are obviously about ideas about who are criminals, who are natural born criminals, in a way that goes back to Lambroso in the 19th century, this idea that some people are inherently bad seeds. On the other hand, and this goes to the public health piece, it was articulated in the proposal in a train around health care and health issues, wanting a healthier society and that the justification for doing it was more social health and social well-being.

How has criminalization and mass incarceration affected the lives of people in your research?

My research has been among, this for this book in particular, both health activists who are professionals and health activists who are lay experts or lay people. It’s less the health piece, but it’s more that they’re activists that have led to criminalization and mass incarceration being significant parts of their lives.

I write about the Black Panther Party. As we know from the historical record, as we know from the media and the like, that the federal government, the US Government, made it it’s mission to really decimate the Black Panther Party’s ranks. The counter-intelligence program, COINTELPRO, went about the work of decimating the ranks of the Black Panther Party and really just diminishing their spirit through many means. They planted news stories and they shaped public perception about the party. One of the things that people often ask me is “Why haven’t we heard any of this stuff about the Black Panther Party’s self-activism?” One of the answers I suggest is that the COINTELPRO was successful in shaping media frame around the Panthers even for those who might have been sympathetic. The federal government’s work of framing the party also did the work of shaping our national memory of them.

There’s that piece. Part of it was also that, under the banner of then-governor Reagan being a law-and-order governor and a backlash to the activism of the 60’s, there was a, effectively, war on activists although it was never named. We had the war on cancer and we had the war on poverty, but there was certainly also a war on activists.

This meant that many of the people who were involved in the Black Panther Party and other activist organizations from the time went to jail on trumped up charges or went to jail perhaps on legitimate charges, but served or continued to serve disproportionate sentences. People have been in jail or in solitary confinement for crimes that they were convicted of in a legal process that somewhat questionable for 30, 40 years. One of the legacies of the Black Panther Party and the way that they responded happens in this cauldron of expansion of mass incarceration and the criminalization of activism as an excuse for doing that.

Just to give you an example of how things have changed in the last 4 decades or so, the activists that I write about would basically set up a storefront health clinics, for example, or they would set up the headquarters of Black Panther offices at storefronts. These sorts of things. People ask me now, “Could they do this now?” The only legacy of this work that was able to continue on in the same way, although there’s lots of legacies of the Black Panthers self-activism, is the Common Ground Health Clinic that springs up after Hurricane Katrina. I argue that the only reason that it was even able to happen is because the entire health care and criminal justice infrastructure of the city had completely collapsed.

The Common Ground Health Clinic was started by a former Black Panther, and a nurse, and another activist. Three days after Hurricane Katrina comes through, but within 6 months, the Common Ground Health Clinic had become an NGO. There was a lot of pressure from both state and federal agencies for them to get licensing and these sorts of things. So, for the most part, the Black Panther activism that I write about, worked against the grain of being public health authorities. They actually resisted and rejected any effort for them, for the most part, to get licensing and accreditation from local or state agencies. There was certainly the place in Chicago where there was a series of lawsuits that was trying to get the Black Panthers to go to be under the auspices of the public health authority in that city.

But what happens now? The Hurricane Katrina Common Ground Collective Clinic is, I think, anomalous because Hurricane Katrina, a natural and unnatural disaster, was a bit anomalous. You couldn’t pull this work off today because if you open a storefront clinic, it would be shut down by police authorities in a day or two. I don’t think could make a go of it. I think one of the enduring legacies of this criminalization of activism is (just to look at activism at a place in New York City today); I participated, for example, last March and our colleague Jessie Daniels was there as well. I was there with her in the silent March against stop and frisk practices in New York City. That was up and down along parts of Fifth Avenue.

In order to pull off that March, the activists had to go to City Hall. They had to file a permit. They had to get permission from the state. They had to tell the mayor’s office or the police department between which blocks they would walk on Fifth Avenue. They had to tell the mayor’s office and the police department at which times the protest would take place. That creates a different kind of activism. Could you imagine if during the civil rights movement, you had to go to Bull Connor, a notorious racist police officer, and tell him that you’re going to do a sit-in between these days or you’re going to hold a March at this time between these days. It would have been impossible. But because one of the responses to the population of activists that I studied in the 60’s and 70’s has been the criminalization of activism, we no longer can even imagine organic activism excepting the Occupy movement in recent years.

I’m going to throw 3 questions at you. What are your thoughts on policy approaches that draw from public health rather than criminal justice? Are there any examples of policy approaches that draw from public health rather than criminal justice? If so, do you think these are better or just reproduce the same systems of inequality?

Those are tough questions I think because it depends on the population. In Sociology, Peter Conrad, among others, have developed and elaborated this idea of medicalization. In a classic book Peter Conrad and his coauthor write about the process of medicalization moving a behavior or a condition from the category of sin or stigma to illness. That illness allows people to take what a person would call a social role. It allows people to sometimes get sympathy and get resources. There’s a whole suite of social actions that come into play when someone is identified as having an illness and being a patient and being more sympathetic.

I think that to put something in a public health frame rather than a criminal frame ideally allows this to happen for people. If someone is a drug addict and struggling with drug addiction, ideally for us to say as a society and as physicians and activists, this type of person is suffering with a disease and we shouldn’t stigmatize the behavior. We need to use the whole apparatus of public health resources to help this person.

The classic medicalization story is alcoholism. Alcoholism going from being a crime or a sin to being a condition where people can say “I’m an alcoholic” and they’re in that healing process and these sorts of things. However, and I argue this a little bit in the Panther book when talking about health issues, I think if a population is already so deeply stigmatized like particularly poor African-Americans and poor African-American males so that they’re almost like a caste in thinking about the lack of social mobility in India. The shift from criminalization to medicalization doesn’t offer that transition that I’m talking about necessarily.

For some poor, marginalized population, they’re so over-determined by criminal stigma and racism, effectively, that that window, that threshold to medicalization that might offer public support, resources, sympathy, a new social role is not available to them. I think that, and this is going to end our conversation on a down note, but the down note is to just accept that that’s true and not look to the public health arena as the panacea for social progress. I just think there are, fundamentally, groups for whom medicalization doesn’t work in the same way.

We need to work on the bigger issue of stigma. If you have a group of people who are like a caste; who are considered subhuman, a-human, always criminal, beyond help, undeserving; the move to a public health frame alone is not going to work. I think that that can be part of the piece, the move from criminalization to public health, but the larger work needs to be around a human rights struggle that awakens the awareness and the humanity of all of us.

A major focus of JustPublics@365 is bringing together academics, activists and journalists in ways that promote social justice, civic engagement and greater democracy. What sort of ‘lessons learned’ do you have from your experience entering a terrain more frequently trod by activists and journalists?

I think one answer comes out of my research and one that comes out of my experience working with JustPublics@365. As a researcher I learned that the way that we as a society treat activists, and treated this activist population that I worked with in particular, has consequences for what we can know about the world. It took me a very long time to have access to some of the people that I have interviews with in my book, in part because they have been so mistreated by other researchers; they had been so mistreated by other forms of authority: police authority, physicians. As a researcher, I couldn’t just go in and say, “I’m a young professor at Yale. Let me interview you.”

Most other places in the world, if you say “I’m professor XY from XY of the institution, that opens doors for you.”. But in activist circles, that often closes doors. What that meant is that I had to build long-term, sustained, still-existing-today relationships with the people I wanted to speak with for my book. These had to become more than just me parachuting down, extracting information and resources, and parachuting out.

These were long conversations that continue on. I’ve been happy to receive feedback about my book from the people I’ve spoke with and receive feedback from them. I think that’s one lesson. One lesson is that the structural balances in society are what they are. I know enough not to say that my structural relationship with working class activists is equal. We’re not equal in that way, but to the extent that we can try to have egalitarian relationships with the people that we work with, we need to try to do that.

I think organizations like the Panther Party offered really interesting ways for thinking about that. By necessity, they had to collaborate with doctors and nurses, nursing students, medical students to do their clinics. They didn’t have enough manpower or expertise to pull off a nationwide network of health clinics by their own, but they vetted everyone who worked with them. You couldn’t just come in and say, “Oh, I’m a medical resident at Harvard. Let me come and work in your clinic.” The party wanted to know what your political aspirations were, what your theory of social justice was. They wanted to know if you had read Franz Fanon, if you had read John Hope Franklin, if you had read Malcolm X, and often demanded that you do so. I think that we need to think about these as wholesome relationships that come with responsibilities and obligations on all sides.

More recently, I had the opportunity to participate on a panel that sets public health with Lillian Guerra, whose an editor at The Nation, gabriel Sayegh from the Drug Policy Alliance, and Glenn Martin who’s from an organization for formally incarcerated folks. I wasn’t sure, sitting down with these people who do work that’s a lot more contemporary, where the Black Panther piece would fit, but the round table (you’re never sure how these things are going to turn out when people are speaking, in some ways, informally), was very enlightening.

It was really challenging me to think about what this historical story meant for now. I think as scholars, you don’t have to justify why a historical work matters. We inherently think as scholars that a type of work that tells a new story or allows us to see the world anew, has inherent value. I think sitting in a conversation with two activists and a journalist really forced me to think of the “now” of the project.

The criminalization of activism now, that we talked about previously, that would make it impossible to have an organization like the Black Panthers to do the health activist work that they were doing, to do it now. Or to think about all that has changed with regard to the full-scaling up of mass incarceration in such a way that you might not even have in-community enough people and leadership to sustain the activist communities that you did 40 years ago.

For me, as a researcher-scholar-activist, the most important takeaway from that experience was to always, not in a present tense sense, everything from the past doesn’t have some residence in the present, but to think about those places where it does and where the work can be used in the presence of making a better world today.

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This post is part of the Monthly Social Justice Topic Series on From Punishment To Public Health (P2PH). If you have any questions, research that you would like to share related to P2PH or are interested in being interviewed for the series, please contact Morgane Richardson at [email protected] with the subject line, “Stop-and-Frisk Series.”

Challenging Punishment: From Mass Incarceration to Public Health , Human Rights, and Restorative Justice

This post is written by Ernie Drucker.

In my book A Plague of Prisons , The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America (New Press, 2013) I proposed a public health model of mass incarceration, arguing that the war on drugs and its harsh sentencing policies ignited our epidemic of imprisonment. But the fact of the imprisonment of 10 million Americans in the last 40 years demands more than re-imagining the problem – it demands solutions.

The war on drugs fueled a “race to incarcerate”, deepening America’s racial and economic disparities , and drawing resources away from other vital social and health programs. The resulting criminalization and mass incarceration of three generations of young minority males has left a trail of mass trauma and imposed systematic disadvantages on this population – direct consequences of “toxic punishment” (Golash D. The Case Against Punishment: Retribution, Crime Prevention, and the Law. NYU. 2005). The vast “criminal industrial complex” that has been built upon mass punishment, is now rapidly commoditizing criminal justice through privatization , e.g. in halfway houses for re-entering prisoners and special schools for juveniles – with little accountability for outcomes or collateral consequences.

The politically powerful and highly institutionalized system of mass punishment has taken on a life of its own and will not easily give up the lifetime grip it maintains on the population of former prisoners, all the while continuing to confer severe disadvantages on successive generations in urban communities where they are concentrated – i.e. increased homicide and suicide rates , greater risks of their own children’s future imprisonment , higher infant mortality rates , and shortened life expectancies , lower rates of employment and wages , less education , more failed marriages , and lower voting participation , associated with near universal felony disenfranchisement.

With growing privatization of prisons , we can expect even less transparency and public accountability, as we extend criminalization and mass punishment to other areas of social conflict – immigration, race relations, sexuality – each of which now provides multiple opportunities for our “culture of punishment” to assert itself in new areas e.g. in 2012 over 500,000 “illegal” immigrants were held in detention centers and 400,000 deported; 500,000 sex offenders arrested , imprisoned, and placed on computerized registries .

(Image Source)

A Watershed Moment

Fortunately we are now at a turning point in this struggle – one we must take advantage of . US Atty. General Eric Holder recently said that “too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason.” This was an important first step toward a national recognition that our decades long war on drugs has been ineffective, expensive, and cruel. As bipartisan support grows in Congress for overhauling U.S. drug laws, Holder has ordered Federal prosecutors to remove any reference to quantities of illicit drugs that trigger mandatory minimums .

But it is only through re-thinking and challenging our fundamental ideas about punishment that we will find a way out of the shadow of this great crime against humanity that mass incarceration represents. The recent case of Trayvon Martin demonstrates the limitations of our criminal justice system – based as it is on narrow model of blame and punishment . But what are the alternatives to this ancient and almost universal trope that has now become the foundation of our system of justice in America? One vital step in that direction is challenging punishment itself , turning our attention to the social injustices that underlie both crime and punishment.

When viewed through a public health lens which views mass incarceration as a collective problem that require social solutions

I’m working on a new book challenging America’s “culture of punishment” within a pubic health model based on human rights and restorative justice principals and practices. Instead of relying, as it does now, despite lip service to ideas about rehabilitation based on “correctional” systems that are, in practice vast engines of cruel retribution – even torture . My new book will map the road to restorative justice through such challenges and how these new models can allow us to put an end to mass incarceration and heal the mass trauma it has left behind .

Three Key Steps to Move from Punishment to Public Health

To launch this process in America here are three steps we must take:

Recognize the Toxicity of Punishment: Punishment can be a form of state violence and mass trauma, where pain and suffering are intentionally applied to human beings in the name of justice. Research shows that “toxic punishment” is “excessive or prolonged activation of stress response systems ( and has) damaging effects on learning, behavior, and health across the lifespan” (Harvard, Center on the Developing Child). [2] Mass incarceration is mass exposure to toxic stress. The public-health model and epidemiology of punishment , as a form of violence, allows us to examine the impacts of mass punishment and its health consequences (Velasquez-Manoff, “Status and Stress,” New York Times, Jul 27, 2013).
Challenge Our Most Toxic Systems of Punishment: we need to recognize and end the most toxic forms of punishment that characterize our system of mass incarceration. This first means reducing the size of the problem, for it is the huge scale of incarceration that drives the significance of its impact on public health and casts a shadow over American life. We can do this by setting a goal of limiting the use of prisons as the default response to so many actions by so many people – with a goal of getting back to levels before the epidemic of mass incarceration began – a figure of 100/100,000 populations in line with that of other modern democracies . Challenging mass incarceration we can build on other successful campaigns against punishment in America : e.g. opposition to the death penalty and rolling back the Rockefeller drug Laws. A great place to start is with reining in the massive use of solitary confinement – the most prominent and most torturous of all methods use in modern incarceration – the US , with 5% of world population and 25% of its prisoners, America accounts for over 50% of those held in punitive isolation. We must take on and learn from these cases , examine their sustaining sources, organizations, and leadership. Publicize the ways in which we can reduce incarceration without compromising public safety and work to build public support for alternatives to punishment .
Build New Systems Based on Public Health , Human Rights , and Restorative Justice: Restorative principals and models of conflict resolution based on human rights do not impose toxic punishment – they work to break the cycle of retributive violence by challenging the use of collective punishment as tools of state power, replacing them with public health methods and outcomes, and show that these better serve legitimate public concerns about public safety.

Positive changes in drug polices are gaining new momentum in the US , with more state undertaking marijuana’s legalization. But reducing the length and frequency of drug-related incarceration going forward, however welcome, wont do anything about the large population of drug users already stuck in our prisons and the post prison correctional control over the lives of millions more. Over 300,000 drug offenders are still serving out long terms under the now discredited mandatory sentencing policies. Most of these are young minority men with children, drawn from our poorest urban communities. We must consider ways to remove most prisoners from the strangle hold of the criminal justice system – an amnesty that would allow those who can do so to re-establish a useful place in our society and in those communities most affected by mass incarceration – restoring them to full citizenship – the most essential ingredient to human rights.

~ Ernie Drucker, PhD, is a Research Associate at John Jay College-CUNY and on the faculty of the Mailman School of Public Health.

From Punishment to Public Health: Our Next Social Justice Topic Series

Today begins our new month-long social justice series called From Punishment to Public Health. In this series we will explore how public health might offer a more humane and just approach to social ills than the current approach that is based on criminalization.

Overcrowded Prison Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison, Creative Commons Attribution

Is this the best response to social ills?
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison, Creative Commons Attribution

Since at least the 1970s, the response to drug use has been one that emphasized punishment and criminalization. The punishment framework has shaped the collective response to drug use for the past thirty years, in the US and globally. Catch phrases like “lock ‘em up and throw away the key,” “three strikes and you’re out,” and “let them rot in jail,” have characterized this time period and this attitude toward drug use.

More recently, the reliance on criminalization has been giving way to an approach that is more rooted in a public health. For example, in 2013, US Attorney General proposed moving away from mandatory minimum sentences for drugs. And, as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) – colloquially known as “Obamacare” – goes into effect, an estimated 32 million Americans will have new access to drug treatment programs. Outside the US, other countries are moving to legalize drugs (such as Portugal, Uruguay) and closing prisons due to lack of inmates (such as the Netherlands).

How are these policy changes transforming the lives of everyday people? Are public health approaches to the criminalization of drugs really better or do they simply expand control over citizens? Through a variety of knowledge streams (e.g., podcasts, data visualizations, and blog posts) we will host a month-long conversation between academics, activists and journalists about the shift from punishment to public health and if that moves us closer to a more just society. As we did with the stop-and-frisk series, at the close of this series we’ll pull all these resources together in an all-in-one guide that you can download for your own use.

In the coming weeks, we’ll also curate a mix of academics, activists, and journalists talking about how to address this complicated social justice issue. To open this series, we will feature the following:

blog post tomorrow from Ernie Drucker, PhD (John Jay College-CUNY and Columbia-Mailman), author of A Plague of Prisons, who leads an initiative called Punishment to Public Health (P2PH) from which we take the name of this series.
a podcast interview on criminalization and public health with Alondra Nelson, PhD (Columbia University), author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and The Fight Against Medical Discrimination.
Wilneida Negron, a member of the JustPublics@365 Team, will introduce a data visualization for promoting change and we will engage leading academics on the shift from punishment to public health.
Sandeep Junnarkar (CUNY J-School), will write about his Knight Foundation-funded project Family Life Behind Bars. A hybrid of journalism, research and activism, Family Life Behind Bars, explores the impact on family relations and dynamics when one or more member of a family is incarcerated.

The aim of JustPublics@365 is to foster just the innovative work that can foster connections between academics, activists and journalists who are working to address some of the pressing social problems of our time. From where we sit in the heart of New York City, criminalization is at the top of the list of pressing social problems because of the deleterious effects it has on the democratic life of the city and the nation.

So, we offer this series on Punishment to Public Health as another case study of how we might reimagine scholarly communication for the public good.

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Click here for more information about our Monthly Social Justice Topic Series.

Stop-And-Frisk Information Guide: Bringing it All Together

Over the last month, we’ve highlighted the ways scholars, activists and journalists work to further social justice around the issue of stop-and-frisk. Today, we bring it all together.

The stop-and-frisk information guide (or Module Packet) is designed to bring together scholarship, activist strategies, and digital media tools to help you create your own stop-and-frisk social justice campaign.

Our goal with bring this all together is to create a practical, resource-rich, all-in-one introduction to start a social justice digital campaign, whether you are an activist on the ground, a journalist writing a story or an academic who may want to connect your research to social change. If you are teaching a class or training people in your organization, you can also use this Information Guide as a tool for teaching and learning about stop-and-frisk.

This Information Guide is structured around three levels of social justice outcomes:

Make Your Issues Their Interest: Raising Awareness About An Issue with an Audience
Make Your Issue Their Issue: Getting an Audience More Deeply Engaged in An Issue
Make Your Issue Their Action: Moving an Audience Towards a Specific Action

Throughout this Information Guide, we cover basic campaigning how-to’s, some of the best tools for collaboration and outreach, and provide examples from the JustPublics@365 stop-and-frisk series.

We hope that the Information Guide will help you reach you more people by integrating some of the most widely used social networks into your social justice campaign, your reporting, and your research or your classroom projects.

If you have any questions in planning your campaign, please feel free to contact us at [email protected] or send us a tweet, @JustPublics365.

Click here to download the Stop-And-Frisk Information Guide [pdf]

JustPublics@365 Stop and Frisk Series: A Temporary Conclusion

cc-licensed photo “March to End NYPD’s Stop-and-Frisk” by flickr user j-No

With this post, we are ending our month-long look at Stop-and-Frisk, the controversial set of policing practices that, as the New York Civil Liberties Union notes, has resulted in the discriminatory temporary detention of thousands of black and latino New Yorkers.

During our series, we have examined Stop-and-Frisk from a number of angles and perspectives, and through a number of different multimedia tools:

Of course, it’s that last post, which covers the election of Bill de Blasio and the recent ruling on Stop-and-Frisk legislation, that reminds us how quickly the conversation is shifting, sometimes in unexpected ways. Though our own series is over for now, we will continue to track Stop-and-Frisk on this site and will be putting together an archive of our Stop-and-Frisk posts and resources. We invite you to continue this important conversation in the comments section and through social media as we collectively chart the future of our city and work together to create a more just public.

Bill de Blasio and The Future of Stop and Frisk

On Tuesday, November 4th 2013, Bill de Blasio was elected mayor of New York City after winning 73 percent of the vote. Over the course of his campaign, de Blasio’s platform focused on stop-and-frisk, and supporting the (recently-removed) Judge Scheindlin’s ruling, which found the policing practice unconstitutional and ordered a federal monitor to oversee the NYPD. Speaking at a rally in Brooklyn to protest pending hospital closures, de Blasio said “I would not continue (the appeal). I’ve said all along we need to make significant reforms.”

So, what does it mean for stop-and-frisk policing in New York with Judge Scheindlin being challenged (and fighting back) and a mayor-elect who promises to bring change? It’s not clear yet, but activists are continuing to press the issue.

On Wednesday, activists from Color of Change joined with community leaders at City Hall to request that de Blasio follow through on his promise to reform NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy.

The question remain: will de Blasio get rid of discriminatory stop-and-frisks once he’s in office? How can activists, journalists and academics come together to ensure that changes are made to the offensive policing tactics?

One way that people who are concerned about stop-and-frisk can have their voices heard is to get involved in the innovative series of events called “Talking Transition: New York City.”

Talking Transition Tent: Nov.9-23

Talking Transition is truly new kind of effort to make the mayoral transition in New York City a truly open one. This unique approach to mayoral transition is made possible by several foundations, including our sponsor the Ford Foundation. The initiative aims to make the mayoral transition more transparent through a series of events, including The Talking Transition tent which will be open from 9AM to 9PM every day of the week from Nov.9 – Nov. 23. You can also submit your thoughts about the transition online, and there will be a series of mobile Talking Transition tents throughout the five boroughs.

Contribute to The Talking Transition and let the newly elected Mayor diBlasio know your thoughts on stop-and-frisk.

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This post is part of the Monthly Social Justice Topic Series on stop-and-frisk. If you have any questions, research that you would like to share related to Stop-and-Frisk or are interested in being interviewed for the series, please contact Morgane Richardson at [email protected] with the subject line, “Stop-and-Frisk Series.”

Interview: Brett Stoudt and Maria Torre about the Morris Justice Project

Today, our stop-and-frisk series continues with an email interview I did with two researchers involved in the Morris Justice Project (MJP), a community-based, participatory research and action project in the Bronx.

Brett Stoudt (PhD, John Jay-CUNY) is an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department with a Joint Appointment in the Gender Studies Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He has worked on numerous participatory research projects nationally and internationally. He has recently served as the Research Director for Polling for Justice: a large NYC based participatory action research project to explore, with youth and adults, the experiences of young people across criminal justice, education, and public health. His work has been published in volumes such as Class Privilege & Education Advantage and journals such as The Urban Review; Children, Youth & Environments; and Men and Masculinities.

Maria Elena Torre (PhD, Graduate Center-CUNY) is the founding Director of The Public Science Project at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. For more than 10 years she has conducted participatory action research nationally and internationally with schools, prisons, and community-based organizations. Her work has introduced the concept of ‘participatory contact zones’ to collaborative research, asking how we might build a radically inclusive ‘we’– from which to build knowledge, relationships, and policy that interrupt social injustice? She is a co-author of Echoes of Brown: Youth Documenting and Performing the Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education and Changing Minds: The Impact of College on a Maximum Security Prison.

Jessie: Can you share a little bit about the Morris Justice Project and how you came to be involved in the issue of stop-and-frisk in New York City?

Brett and Maria: The Morris Justice Project was designed to document the experiences and attitudes of residents living in a heavily policed New York City neighborhood. Since 2011, we have collaborated with residents of the Morris Avenue area of the South Bronx, a neighborhood in the 44^th police precinct that had the highest percentage of police stops leading to physical force in New York City. We joined together as a research team after each of us had grown deeply concerned about the impact of the city’s increasing use of aggressive and discriminatory policing. Mothers (who eventually became our co-researchers) had taken to filming police interactions with their sons, using their cell phones to document regular harassment in their private courtyard. We were interested in partnering with them after our own city-wide study (Polling for Justice, Stoudt, Fine & Fox, 2012) revealed disturbing interactions between youth and police. Our mutual concern led us to meet others in the neighborhood and after an open community meeting at the local Melrose library, we formed a diverse community research team of elders, mothers, fathers, youth, students, community organizers, university faculty and attorneys. Together, as co-researchers, we developed all of the research questions, methods, analyses, and products collaboratively.

Using a participatory action research (PAR) framework, we deliberately engaged the expertise in the neighborhood – the experiences and understandings of those living the consequences of years of policies like stop-and-frisk. Our team decided on a multi-method design that would be able to speak to the NYPD as well as to neighbors in the South Bronx and those who have never been stopped. Over multiple sessions and rich discussion in the library, we built our capacity as a research team through exchanging knowledge about research methods, everyday experiences of stop and frisk, and about city data on policing. We then developed a survey interview and questions with the intent of gathering a representative portrait of neighborhood experiences with and attitudes towards police, as well as close looks at those of particular populations (e.g., mothers, elders, young African American men, etc.). Armed with pens and clipboards, the research team walked the 42 blocks of our neighborhood and systematically distributed the survey in person, block by block. Surveys were also distributed with the help of local businesses, churches, the library, and social networks. Over 1,000 surveys were collected. Additionally, the research team conducted focus groups and individual interviews.

The research team analyzed the quantitative and qualitative data collaboratively using methods such as stats-in-action that allows everyone to participate in analysis at the same time. The findings were used towards a broad set of local and citywide police reform activities intended to raise awareness as well as support ongoing legal and legislative work. This included producing a report that can be easily be carried in a back-pocket, posters, buttons, and t-shirts to communicate the experiences and impact of aggressive policing; co-sponsoring events with community and legal organizations such as the Bronx Defenders and CopWatch to address neighborhood safety; and producing an active social media campaign in solidarity with court cases, legislation, and community organizing related to police reform. Throughout the research process, the lawyers on the research team provided education and legal services for individuals living in the neighborhood.

In addition to documenting experiences and impact of aggressive policing, we developed the ‘community safety wall’ a growing mobile museum of residents’ understandings of what makes their neighborhood feel safe. These ideas will be further developed in community safety workshops this winter that will be designed to offer advocates and policymakers concrete alternatives beyond policing for creating safe communities. You can learn more about the project, the findings, and products at http://morrisjustice.org.

Jessie: What changes do you foresee with District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin’s recent ruling on this controversial policing practice?

Brett and Maria: The Floyd and Ligon class action lawsuits against the NYPD as well as the passing of the Community Safety Act (Intro 1080 and 1079) mark important strides to end discriminatory policing practices in NYC. However, the recent U.S. 2^nd Circuit Court of Appeals decision has made the future of police reform temporarily uncertain. The next mayor will play a significant role in whether future appeals are pursued and how and what changes eventually occur within the NYPD.

Jessie: Some academics might be hesitant to get involved in such a controversial political issue. What do you say to critics who might question your ‘objectivity’ as a scholar?

Brett and Maria: First, whether considered ‘controversial’ in the public or not, there is no credible academic research thus far that has been able to demonstrate a substantial relationship between the decline in crime in NYC and the increasing use of stop-and-frisk by the NYPD.

There are however, many studies, and now several lawsuits, that have demonstrated that stop- -and-frisk has too frequently been racially biased, unconstitutionally practiced, and ineffective at uncovering weapons or other crimes.

At the same time, there is increasing evidence that it deteriorates community-police relationships and has a whole set of unintended consequences, in particular for communities of color, poor communities, and among LGTBQ and gender-nonconforming people (whether stopped by police or not). For more details about the ways stop-and-frisk harms community-police relationships see http://morrisjustice.org/report and http://www.vera.org/project/stop-question-and-frisk-study). Communities like the South Bronx deserve effective policing that is fair and just.

Second, we are participatory action researchers (PAR). PAR argues that the distinction between ‘academic’ and ‘activist’ is a false dichotomy. There is a long history of scholar-activists like Kurt Lewin, W.E.B Du Bois, Ignacio Martín-Baró, Paulo Freire to name a few. Scholar-activists are committed to producing strong scholarship, grounded in carefully produced and analyzed data, that is in turn useful beyond the academy – for the general public, for activists, advocates, lawyers, and policymakers. While all of our work produces academic papers and presentations we equally value other more popular or ‘public’ ways of using our research to interrupt injustice. PAR does not subscribe to the notion that social science is ever value-free. In fact, we believe that research that strives for, or claims, objectivity, is vulnerable to reproducing values that reflect or benefit those in power or who hold privilege.

Instead, PAR asks that researchers to examine the ways knowledge is historically situated and produced, and to reflect carefully on how our lives (e.g. our experiences, values, biases, and assumptions) may determine what we ask, what we see, how we analyze, and what we say. In practice, as PAR researchers, we think and talk about our values and assumptions as part of the research process and we build diverse research teams as contact zones (almost as a validity check) with multiple standpoints, experiences, skills and expertise. We furthermore seek opportunities outside our research team to hold our instruments, data, and interpretations accountable (e.g. community-based advisory groups). And in our analyses, we intentionally seek counter-stories, outliers, and pieces of data that do not match our assumptions and overall conclusions.

Jessie: A major focus of JustPublics@365 is bringing together academics, activists and journalists in ways that promote social justice, civic engagement and greater democracy. What sort of ‘lessons learned’ do you have from your experience with the Morris Justice Project about academics entering a terrain more frequently trod by activists and journalists?

Brett and Maria: The participatory community-rooted design used by the Morris Justice Project allowed researchers (in the academy and the community) to simultaneously speak to local and citywide concerns about policing. The project was intentionally designed to deeply engage a small, highly impacted section of NYC in order that both research and action could go beyond a city sweep and remain local in its focus and attention. Our research findings and products made their way into the city-wide campaign for police-reform, and at times into the hands of lawmakers, but each instance was grounded in the community from which the data was produced.

As an example of research that braids research and action through scholarly and democratic practice, the Morris Justice Project is useful. The research team held two simultaneous commitments in solidarity with the citywide police reform movement: finding strategies to be in conversation about policing with residents in the neighborhood as well as findings strategies to amplify the experiences and concerns within this one neighborhood throughout the city. This research-action design allowed for the collection and analysis of large amounts of information (data) and then the direct delivery of that information back in a reasonably comprehensive way to those who produced it, through education, local activism, legal support, and relationship-building with local residents and community organizations. At the same time, the design allowed for the collection of information that had relevance beyond the local and the development of genuine social, professional, and political relationships that extended beyond the project. As a result, the Morris Justice Project, through its research, was able to establish strong and reciprocal connections with a host of citywide activities including grassroots activism, legislation, and lawsuits.

Visualizing The Effects of Stop and Frisk

A powerful way to understand the effects of stop-and-frisk on the people of NYC is through data visualization. Data visualization provides scholars, activists and journalists with a set of tools to display data in a way that can be more easily and clearly communicated with a broad audience. In an era in which digital media is re-shaping scholarly communication, data visualization has became an important tool in teaching, research and activism.

Many data visualizations have been created to illustrate the effects of stop-and-frisk in New York City. For example, the folks at the Center for Constitutional Rights have created a map that shows which neighborhoods have been most affected by stop-and-frisk by charting the number of stops by precinct.

The borders of the map below represent NYPD precincts throughout New York City. Image from: Stopandfrisk.org

A journalism school class at Columbia University compiled stop-and-frisk data to produce a map with stops color-coded by race. The map powerfully illustrates how stop-and-frisk policing disproportionately impacts communities of color.

Stop and frisk data broken down by race. The key to reading those dots is as follows: 1. black: blue; 2. black Hispanic: black; 3. white Hispanic: orange; 4. white: red; 5. Asian/Pacific Islander: green; 6. American Indian/Native Alaskan: yellow.

Stop and frisk data broken down by race (each dot represents a stop). The key to reading those dots is as follows: 1. black: blue; 2. black Hispanic: black; 3. white Hispanic: orange; 4. white: red; 5. Asian/Pacific Islander: green; 6. American Indian/Native Alaskan: yellow.

The online magazine BKLYNR, which features quality journalism about Brooklyn, has also used data visualization to focus attention on the issue of stop-and-frisk. In their piece, All The Stops they chart the “more than 530,000 stops that occurred in 2012, [to] reveal who is being stopped, why they’re being stopped, and what, if anything, is being found by the police as a result.” BLKYNR’s visualization of stop-and-frisk allows for a strong understanding of the volume and effects of this policing tactic and engages audiences through questions and answers such as:

Where did the stop occur?

What was the suspect’s race?

What was the reason for the stop?

Was the suspect frisked?

Was contrabound found?

Was an arrest made?

Take Action
Are you interested in making your own data visualization? There are many tools that journalists, academics, and activists can use. As a way to get started, take a look at this list of the Top 20 Data Visualization Tools.

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Special Interview with Jamilah King on Covering Stop-and-Frisk

Jamilah King is the news editor at Colorlines.com, coordinating story assignments as news breaks, as well as covering urban politics and youth culture. In this interview we talk about her involvement as one of the leading journalists working on the issues of urban politics and youth culture in New York City and what changes she foresees coming from District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin’s recent ruling on Stop-And-Frisk.

Can you share a little bit about yourself and your involvement as one of the leading journalists working on the issues of urban politics and youth culture in New York City?

I’m a senior editor at Colorlines.com. I have been with Colorlines for quite a few years. We were really moved by the issues of “Stop and Frisk” for a number of reasons but primarily as people of color who live in New York City it’s an issue that deserves attention and that’s why we try to cover it.

What is Colorlines.com?

Colorlines is a national news site where we aren’t afraid to talk about race. That could mean everything from talking about things that are kind of explicitly about race, issues like “Stop and Frisk” for sure. Pretty policy heavy and exists within this long history of police harassment of men of color specifically. It can also mean talking about music and culture and that’s sort of where I sort of step into the picture and look at issues as they relate to culture. How people move through cities or move through environments and the policies that affect that movement. For instance, today we did a story on the Swedish band Dragon, they’re getting ready to release their new album. Using a lot of South African house music on it. It’s kind of a little bit of everything. But it’s multi-centered on the idea that we’re not afraid to talk about race in an era when a lot of people are really really afraid to talk about race.

Our social justice topic series on stop-and-frisk is focused on envisioning what NYC will look like without stop-and-frisk tactics. In your experience, what changes, if any, do you foresee with District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin’s recent ruling to end this controversial policing experiment? What does this ruling mean to the young men and women of color in NYC?

I think the first thing is a lot of the folks that have been covering “Stop and Frisk.” a lot of the folks that have been advocating force and of course folks who have been directly targeted by “Stop and Frisk” practices would like to envision a New York that is actually welcoming to all of its inhabitants. You know New York has this global reputation as the city where anyone can come and make something happen. Where anyone can come and make themselves feel at home. I think that historically that has been true for certain communities. Primarily white communities or communities of privilege. But it has not historically been true for communities of color.

We did a couple of pieces specifically talking to young men of color and young people of color who were targeted by “Stop and Frisk” all the way back to 2010. We actually talked to the David Floyd who really emphasized this idea of wanting to walk down the street and not feel a sense of fear. That you are a target. In my reporting I’ve talked to a number of psychologists and policy folks who were really trying to bring home the point, the psychological, emotional and physical impact that a policy like “Stop and Frisk” has on someone.

If you are a young man of color who is walking down the street and you do get stopped and you do get cited for whatever reason, I think that it has a profound impact on not only on the way that you see police, but the way that you see yourself. I was talking to a young man who actually last summer who lived in Brownville, Brooklyn.He’s a guy who works at a community center and he had grown up in Brownsville. He really communicated to me just feeling like you’ve done something wrong. Just by being in your skin, your body. You, by walking down the street, is somehow a criminal act.

That is wrong on any number of levels. But it’s especially wrong when you think about it in this context of really policing the bodies of people of color.

I know that a lot of “Stop and Frisk” is very specifically about black and brown men. But it’s also an issue we have seen with queer communities of color. It’s also an issue with women of color. I think the broader issues of surveillance of communities of color is something that you see across these different sections. The AP, Associated Press, did a story, an investigation last year looking into the unwarranted surveillance of Muslim communities of New York State. And now you have all these NSA revelations we’re all seeing that we’re being targeted in some way, shape or form. Even for folks who aren’t directly impacted by a thing like “Stop and Frisk” I think they should be wary of it because it sets a precedent. It sets a precedent for the types of behaviors that law enforcement can engage in. While those behaviors may start with one particular community they often expand to a lot of other people.

A major focus of JustPublics@365 is bringing together academics, activists and journalists in ways that promote social justice, civic engagement and greater democracy. What sort of ‘lessons learned’ do you have from your experience with activists and journalists working together to shed light on Stop-and-Frisk?

I think that “Stop and Frisk” is a really is a model of a very specific policy issue that gained a lot of traction, thanks in part to those different sectors working together and each sharing their expertise. You know? You had groups in New York City who had long been working on issues of police accountability and they were sort of very involved in the organizing elements of this. You have groups like Communities Against Violence, you have also the Malcolm X Project, these groups that have long been doing this type of work. they were very much integral in pushing that policy agenda.

Then you had young people. You had young people, you had young media makers, media makers in general actually capturing what was happening. That actually gave voices and stories and faces and names to the issues that many people felt very detached from. Then of course you had the academic aspect of it which gave a lot of context, historical context that was going on. I think especially in my work as a journalist it was really important to get the perspective of academics who not only work in policy, but as I mentioned before who are psychologists and can actually talk about this as a public health issue and not just one of quote-unquote political correctness.

I think that by having a bunch of different people at the table owning their expertise, giving and allowing each other the room and the space to own that issue from their perspective. “You are great with a camera go out and make a short video,” if you are great at sort of getting into the meat of things. If you’re a great organizer and can bring a hundred or two hundred people together, then do that. I think you really, really saw a lot of that traction and positive energy around this issue.

What people and resources (both print and social media) should individuals follow to stay on top of news related to stop-and-frisk?

Colorlines.com is a good resource that I’d encourage everyone to read. Also organizations that have been working on this issue. I mentioned Malcolm X Project does a lot around policy. The Nation magazine published, about a year ago, one of the first videos that captured the interaction between a young man of color, and a police officer, who was being stopped and frisked. Those are the sort of outlets that I think that folks can go to if they want to stay plugged in. I’d also say that this is an issue that’s built around personal narrative. I think talking to people in your community about issues of police harassment or even talking to police officers themselves, ones who are safe to talk to and are willing to engage around what does safe and accountable police look like. Those are the conversations that can be had in a number of communities, not just New York.

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Where Are We Now? Stop-and-Frisk

This week, JustPublics@365 continues our month-long exploration of stop-and-frisk, the controversial set of policing practices that, as the NYCLU has noted, has resulted in the questioning of hundreds of thousands of law-abiding black and Latino New Yorkers.

In previous weeks, we have measured the effects of stop-and-frisk, interviewed leading activists working for changes in stop-and-frisk policies, and offered a comprehensive interactive timeline of important events related to stop-and-frisk.

This week, we pause to consider the state of stop-and-frisk in New York City in the shadow of an important mayoral race and recent legislation. We’ll take stock of things with the help of journalists covering the issue and politicians taking stands on it. As we do so, we’ll be sharing resources that you can explore for more information and providing visualizations of stop-and-frisk practices.

We hope you’ll join in this week as we continue to explore this important issue. Please help share this work through social media and please consider entering the conversation by leaving comments on our posts.

Get Involved
Do you have a personal story that you want to share related to stop-and frisk? JustPublics@365 is collecting digital stories related to stop-and-frisk and we would love to hear your voice. If you are interested, please contact Morgane Richardson at [email protected] with the subject line, “Stop-and-Frisk Digital Storytelling.”

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Interview: Academic-Activist Partnerships for Social Change

Stop-and-frisk as a policing strategy is driven in large measure by marijuana arrests in New York City. In New York, much of drug policy reform efforts has been around transforming policy around marijuana arrests.

At the moment, International Drug Policy Reform Conference is coming to a close in Denver, Colorado. The conference brings together academics and activists working to reform drug policy across the globe. While at the conference, I had a chance to interview two people who personify academic-activist partnerships around the connection between stop-and-frisk and marijuana arrests.

Professor Harry Levine (CUNY-Queens and the Graduate Center, Sociology) is the leading expert on the racial disparities in marijuana arrests. He holds Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and his B.A. from Brandeis University. His work has received seven distinguished scholarship awards for historical and sociological research about addiction, alcohol prohibition and regulation, international drug policy, crack cocaine, the war on drugs, and racial bias in marijuana possession arrests. In 2013 he was awarded a Senior Scholar Distinguished Achievement Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

gabriel sayegh is State Director, New York, Drug Policy Alliance, which he joined in 2003. sayegh and his team work in New York City and across the state, partnering with community organizing groups, human service agencies, and researchers to advance drug policies that are guided by science, compassion, health, racial justice and human rights. Recent successes include reform of New York’s draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws and the passage of historic legislation to prevent accidental overdose fatalities.

Jessie Daniels: Can you share a little bit about how you two came to be involved in the issue of marijuana arrests and how it is related to “stop-and-frisk” in New York City?

Harry Levine: I’ve been researching and writing about (and against) the drug war since the mid 1980s, always trying to find ways of affecting national debate and news. In 2005 I began researching the huge numbers of marijuana possession arrests and their racial bias in New York City. In 2008 the civil rights attorney Deborah Small and I released a 100 page report through the NYCLU — called “Marijuana Arrest Crusade: Racial Bias and Police Policy in New York City.” It was based on two years of partly-funded research including attending national black police conferences and obtaining marijuana arrest data from New York State and the FBI. That report made a brief splash but no follow up. A year later I received a bit more funding so I could teach part time and work on this project and began my terrific partnership with Loren Siegel, formerly director of public education for the ACLU. Gabriel came to us immediately, encouraged, seduced, and tricked us into writing an “update” about marijuana arrests. Jim Dwyer of the New York Times eventually turned a bit of it into a fabulous column headlined “Whites Smoke Pot, but Blacks Are Arrested.” And THAT made a splash. Gabriel then encouraged and seduced Loren and me again and again to dig up more data and write about it, and he created brilliant press releases, wrote articles themselves, and and Tony Newman pitched the pieces to get them in the hands of newspaper reporters, wire service reporters, the NY City Council, members of the NY State Legislature, and even the national press. I’d known Ethan Nadelmann for 20 years and Tony and Gabriel from when they were puppies, but we never worked together like this before. It was and remains a joy to do so and they’ve accomplished soooo much.

By the way, and as Gabriel is likely to say, the marijuana possession arrests in New York and nationally are a by-product or “fruit” of police stops and searches (often illegal searches). And the vast majority (77%) of those arrested for marijuana are young people in their teens and twenties. Although young whites use marijuana more than young blacks and Latinos, throughout the U.S. blacks and Latinos are arrested at many times the rates of whites because they are stopped and searched much more often than young, whites, especially the many middle-class and wealthier whites.

gabriel sayegh: The only thing I would add to in Harry’s response is that while my office wrote all our press releases they were based on Tony ’s winning formula. Tony Newman, the Director of Media at DPA, then helps to finalize the headlines and most importantly – he works his magic to pitch the stories.

In the mid 2000’s, a guy named Bruce Johnson at NDRI had published a series of academic papers about the marijuana arrests in New York City. Between that and the FBI data about the arrests in NY, we were generally aware of the problem. But it wasn’t until Harry and Deborah published their major report in 2008 that the scope of the problem became clear – it was, as Harry likes to say, a scandal. At that time, we were still working on reforming the draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws, and we started doing some field preparation for a campaign on the marijuana arrest crusade. It quickly became clear that we simply didn’t have the capacity at that moment to build and launch the type of effort we believed necessary to tackle the issue. After the Rockefeller reforms were passed in 2009, we were able to focus on building a new campaign.

Jessie Daniels: What changes do you foresee with District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin’s recent ruling on this controversial policing practice?

Harry Levine: I think one of the most important things that Judge Scheindlin has done is to provide language for explaining why the extreme racial disparities in stop and frisks (and by extension the marijuana arrests) are bad — meaning morally, ethically, legally bad, wrong, unconscionable and unconstitutional. In a piece coming out soon in The Nation magazine I say the following about the racist marijuana arrests throughout America and quote Judge Scheindlin:

Marijuana possession arrests are skewed by class, race and ethnicity because police departments systematically “go fishing” only in certain neighborhoods and methodically search only some “fish.” The result has been called “racism without racists.” No individual officers need harbor racial animosity for the criminal justice system to produce jails and courts filled with black and brown faces. However, acknowledging this absence of hostile intent does not absolve policy makers and law enforcement officials from responsibility or blame. As federal Judge Shira Scheindlin recently determined in two prominent stop-and-frisk cases, New York City’s top officials “adopted an attitude of willful blindness toward statistical evidence of racial disparities in stops and stop outcome.” Judge Scheindlin found that high-level officials “turn a blind eye” and show “willful disregard” to the discriminatory effects of their policing policies. She cited the legal doctrine of “deliberate indifference” to describe police and city officials who “willfully ignored overwhelming proof that the [stop-and-frisk] policy…is racially discriminatory and therefore violates the United States Constitution.”

gabriel sayegh: A few years ago, there was a lot of confusion in New York City – among the press, among many advocates, and in many communities — about what the law pertaining to stop and frisk practices. We asked Ira Glasser, president of the DPA board and former head of the ACLU, to give our staff a private presentation on the issue. He taught us about the detailed and incredible legal history of stop and frisk and its connection to marijuana arrests in New York City. The presentation was so instructive and illuminating that we asked him to write it up. We published his analysis and distributed it widely, and document helped us and so many others understand exactly how these issues were connected and why the police stop and frisk practices were illegal.

Judge Scheindlin’s ruling in the Floyd case is huge. If implemented, the oversight and community dialogues required under the ruling could prove transformative. We’re already seeing the number of stops in the city go down, and, along with it, the number of marijuana arrests are also going down.

Jessie Daniels: Some academics might be hesitant to get involved in such a controversial political issue. What do you say to critics who might question your ‘objectivity’ as a scholar?

Harry Levine: Most university professors and administrators understand that being objective, or factual, or accurate is not at all the same as having no point of view. And fortunately my colleagues at Queens College and City University of New York strongly support what I’ve done. And lots of academics do advocacy around criminal justice reform and the drug war — especially in law, medicine, public health, social welfare, criminology, but also sociology, anthropology, history, psychology, economics. even education. And more would like to. One obstacle is that advocacy work requires a different set of skills, knowledge and connections than conventional academic work. And almost no academics have people like Loren, Gabriel and Tony to teach them and work with them. (And perhaps most important, there is no funding to make it happen, but that’s another topic.) I think that as the movements for marijuana legalization, drug law reform, and police and criminal justice reform grow, that more academics will find ways to contribute. It is already happening in New York City and in many other places. I think of it as the huge task of building the institutions and policies for a post drug war America.

Jessie Daniels: It’s fairly unusual for people involved in policy or activism to reach out to academic researchers. Do you have any advice for people who, like you, are working on a social justice issue and want to connect with researchers and maybe don’t know how to do that?

gabriel sayegh: Back in the late 90s, I was doing a lot of activism for just and fair international trade policies, especially in those so-called free trade agreements. I learned pretty quickly that generally speaking, the public wasn’t really enthusiastic to hear about the complicated policy nuances of an international trade deal – it can be really boring stuff, inaccessible to regular folks. But those agreements often dramatically impact our economies and can undermine democracies here and abroad, so we had to find effective ways to understand and communicate about them in the public sphere. Activist researchers and academics helped us decipher some of the economic language in these deals at the time, boiling it down to a few main points. And because of their status as Ph.D.s and such, they could help legitimize our positions in the public discourse. If you’re a rag-tag activist as we were then, the press and public generally didn’t pay attention when we declared that “These kind of trade deals are unfair, unjust.” But when Dr. So and So, who is Professor at some University comes out and says, “This particular thing is unfair,” well, then, it means something different.

I was fortunate to get more serious lessons in working with academics and researchers from two people: Judy Greene and Lorenzo Jones. They showed me how a new report, issued the right way and with the right kind of media plan, can not only earn a lot of press, but also shape the narrative around the issue – sometimes dramatically. Judy is one of the foremost criminal justice researchers in the country. She started a group called Justice Strategies specifically to deploy action-oriented research – good research — in campaigns to change policy and practices in criminal justice and drug policy. Lorenzo is a longtime organizer, advocate and strategist – and a mentor to many folks in the drug policy and criminal justice fields. He’s also one of the most successful policy reformers in any field anywhere in the country – he now directs a group called A Better Way Foundation, based in Connecticut. Lorenzo and his team would take reports issued Judy or academics at one of the local universities and then build an intervention and campaign plan around that report. When I first started working with him, back in 2004, he was engaged in a major campaign to reform Connecticut’s sentencing disparities for crack and powder cocaine. They won that campaign – the first to do so anywhere in the country. They used reports and research to reinforce and strengthen their organizing work and utterly transformed the dialogue and politics around the issue. They deployed academics as experts, creating public contradictions between the experts and the idiotic nonsense of some opponents. The academics and researchers understood their positions in the university or their degrees conferred them a particular kind of social capital, and they were playing a role – as themselves, as academics, as experts operating as part of a broader campaign. Judy and Lorenzo showed me what could be done with a partnership between researchers and advocates.

I’ve learned that many academics want their research and intellectual work used beyond the academy. I don’t know if there’s a special trick for organizers to connect with these researchers, but they’re not that hard to find if you look for them. Many of these folks go to advocacy conferences or write articles for the general public. The one suggestion I offer is this: remember that little things can have a big impact. You don’t need a 100 page report to get press. You just need a few pages on a topic, cut in a new way, so reporters can write about it. Literally, a few pages authored by an academic can be called a report and you can build a whole release plan around it. Academics often fret about this, maybe because they don’t work in a world where a two or four-page document is sufficient. But if you can get them to do it, you can leverage their position as an expert to advance your cause. I admit it’s not always easy working with academics – Harry and I have gotten into our fair share of arguments – but it’s certainly worth it. We’ve done this over and over again in New York with Harry and Loren’s research. Our campaign has transformed the overall narrative about marijuana arrests in New York– those research, deployed effectively, actually shapes how people perceive and think about the issue. That’s huge.

Jessie Daniels: Another focus for us at JustPublics@365 is re-thinking how we measure ‘scholarly impact,’ and in the digital era there’s talk of ‘altmetrics’ or alternative metrics. That just means counting things like downloads instead of, or alongside of, the traditional measures of citations in peer-reviewed journals. How do you measure success when you’re working to change drug policy?

Harry Levine: When I first got involved in doing this public advocacy work I was told that the gold standard of impact was getting cited in an editorial in the New York Times. In 2008 we got cited in a Times editorial and in lots of news coverage — but we could not get even a little funding which is a much bigger problem than any problems within academia.

“Metrics” might matter if foundations were funding this kind of work. But they’re not. Academics have full time jobs, like plumbers and cardiologists. This kind of advocacy (which is not academic work) takes time away from teaching and academic projects; and it takes money to pay for research help, data analysis, and for writing, formatting and editing public reports (which are not the same at all as academic publications). Foundations like Ford are willing to fund, say, re-entry from prison programs. But almost no large foundations offer support for work like we’ve done — collecting data to expose routine police, prosecutor and court practices and then writing public reports publicizing what we’ve found. And the bit of available subsistence funding is targeted at service and community-based groups and not academics.

Until recently many liberals (including at foundations) have been allergic to research and advocacy that confronts the moral, economic and social catastrophe called “The War on Drugs.” This is, after all, a huge government program strongly supported by enormous organizations of police, prosecutors, and many elected officials. We reformers will succeed, but It will take a lot to bring the drug war down. The lack of funding for basic expenses in doing this work (research, travel, data analysis, time) is probably a bigger obstacle than anything; I think the leadership of all criminal justice and drug policy reform groups would say that.

gabriel sayegh: There’s a group out of USC – USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) — that issued a report a few years ago about metrics. They separated transactional metrics – like getting your bill passed – from transformational metrics, such as deepening the understanding of an issue among your members. We’ve gotten literally hundreds of media hits on the marijuana arrest campaign – that’s a transactional metric, we can count those media hits. But we’ve also changed the way this issue is reported on in the media – when we first started the campaign, the media, if we got any, would be dismissive: “Oh, the hippies don’t want to get arrested any more for weed.” But now, the issue is taken very seriously overall, by the NY Times, by the state legislature, by the Governor – they all acknowledge that this is a problem of racial bias, police lawlessness, fiscal waste. That’s a transformational change. The PERE report is among my favorite tools for movements to think about metrics because it’s fairly accessible and applicable to social change work. We use PERE’s metrics outline to inform our objectives and to evaluate our progress and determine success in the marijuana arrest campaign and our other campaigns. It’s a work in progress – we’re always learning how to do it better – and I’ve found it enormously valuable. I was recently talking with a foundation director who said she liked the PERE framework of transactional and transformational metrics, but many of her staff thought the transactional metric were too, I don’t remember exactly how she said it, something like wishy washy. But if we only pursued transactional metrics, we may end up just changing a policy — a transactional change – without developing an understanding of the systemic problems that often give rise to bad policies — a transformational change. I think both are essential, together.

There’s a dynamic relationship between them, and if we only pursue either transactional or transformational goals, then we’re probably not going to be all that effective overall, since the big-picture objective, at least for us, is social change.

Shaping the Narrative through Arts and Technology: Youth Activism in Stop-and-Frisk

Youth activism in stop-and-frisk is often overlooked in mass media. Much of the news regarding stop-and-frisk is centered on the class-action lawsuits filed by Communities United for Police Reform (CPR), a collective made up of several organizations, including Center for Constitutional Rights, Make the Road-NY, New York Civil Liberties Union, Picture the Homeless and Bronx Defenders.

With the focus on these high-profile efforts to end stop-and-frisk, the individual and collective efforts led by youth are often overlooked. These efforts at the local community level often include an array of micro-mobilizations such as “know-your-rights” campaigns, “cop-watch” projects, community meetings and video storytelling, as well as door-to-door advocacy, that are much less documented than the court cases which garner lots of press attention. Considered together these community-based efforts demonstrate the ability of youth to advocate for neighborhood change.

It’s been well documented that the communities most affected by the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policing strategy are also characterized by low civic engagement and pessimism regarding the likelihood of neighborhood improvement (Rengifo & Slocum, 2011 in, “Police stops and community responses in the context of the New York crime decline“). The reality of youth mobilizations counter these prevailing ideas about these communities and demonstrate that the creativity and intelligence young people bring to these issues should not be overlooked. Particularly, as academics will be getting together to discuss deeper reforms (see the new Academic Advisory Council that will help implement stop-and-frisk reforms.)

Here’s just a short list of examples of some of these youth-driven and community-based responses to stop-and-frisk:

NLG-NYC Street Law Team, is made up of a group of law students from various New York City law schools. These students meet with community groups throughout NYC and conduct free Know Your Rights: What to Do if You’re Stopped by the Police workshops.
NYC High School Youth from the Peapod Adobe Youth Voices Academy at Urban Arts produced, directed, and scored the documentary, Unreasonable Suspicion, which explores the causes and effects of stop-and-frisk.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/46900363[/vimeo]

Youth producers from the Educational Video Center investigate stop-and-frisk in NYC and interview political leaders, legal experts, and young people in neighborhoods across the city, in order to give a human face to this critical problem. Their video is called, “Life Under Suspicion: Youth Perspectives on the NYPD’s Stop and Frisk Policy.”

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/66356465[/vimeo]

16-year-old NYC Black and Latino male, Cory Smith, created this photomontage which won first price at a Resilience Advocacy Project’s (RAP) “Youth Experiences of Stop-and-Frisk Told Through Art” contest. The photomontange features a young man at the edge of the frame: he is seated facing its bottom left corner, shoulders hunched forward, hands folded in his lap.

Photo Credit: Cory Smith

These examples highlight two powerful lessons for the Academic Advisory Council and for academics looking to further study stop-and-frisk:

(1) The arts and technology are powerful mediums for not only engaging youth, but changing narratives and helping often-marginalized voices be heard. These two combined can help overcome some of the pessimism and low civic engagement that often affect youth in low-income neighborhoods.

(2) The youth voice should be integrated into the discussion of police reforms and community healing. New research should consider innovative strategies to capture the traction of these youth-led movements and to help amplify their voice and impact.

If you are feeling inspired by these youth efforts, here are a few things you can do to participate in stop-and-frisk discussions and events:

Have a Smartphone? Encourage everyone you know to download the Stop-and-Frisk app and report any instances of stop-and-frisk that you see in the community.
Are you on Twitter? Join the conversation and learn about local advocacy efforts by following these hashtags: #stopandfrisk, #Floyd, #communitysafetyact.
Work with youth? Contact NLG-NYC Street Law Tea at [email protected] to set up a free “know your rights” workshop for your group.
Feeling social? Attend a local stop-and-frisk event and meet and collaborate with other activists. This website features upcoming events: ChangetheNYPD.

For another discussion on youth involvement in stop-and-frisk, check out Morgane Richardson’s post on Envisioning A Better Future: Youth Action Against Stop-and-Frisk. And for academics interested in getting involved in stop-and-frisk policy making, make sure to read, Julie Netherland’s post: Tips for Academics Who Want to Engage Policymakers.

Tips for Academics Who Want to Engage Policymakers

Many academics want their research to have broader impact. In fact, according to a recent study, an estimated 92% of social science scholars said they wanted to connect more with policymakers. With the ever-increasing clamor for “evidence-based policy,” policymakers – elected and appointed officials at the local, state and national level – really do want to hear from academics. Here, I offer some ways academics can get involved, tips for effectively engaging policymakers, and some frequent challenges.

As someone who was trained as an academic researcher and has worked in policy for a number of years now, I’ve come to realize that academics have an important role to play in transforming policy. Most recently, I’ve been working on the front lines of efforts to end the war on drugs and reduce mass incarceration. In my view, academics not only have important knowledge that can shape policy, their voices often have enormous weight and credibility by virtue of the training and credentials they carry.

Simply put, academics have an easier time accessing policymakers and are more likely to be taken seriously than does the average citizen without an advanced degree. There’s a privilege and a power to holding a PhD or an MD that can and should be used to promote social justice.

Despite a long tradition of notable scholar activists, many academics are either reluctant to get involved in policy advocacy or simply aren’t sure exactly how to go about it.

Here’s the good news: for most issues, you should be able to find a policy, advocacy, or grassroots community organization that is willing to work with you to be your most effective. There are lots of nuances to policy advocacy; in return for your help, most organizations will gladly walk you through those.

(New York State Capitol – Image source.
One place to find policymakers)

How Can Academics help?

Quick policy activities. These are some ways to engage for those who are just dipping a toe into the waters of policy-making or only have a few minutes, including:

Signing up for and responding to email action alerts (yes, these really can have an impact);
Writing letters and making phone calls;
Attend conferences, receptions where academics and policymakers mingle. My organization, Drug Policy Alliance, is teaming up with JustPublics@365 and the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy to host one of a reception that’ll do just that. Stop by the Sheraton Downtown Thursday night (6:15pmMT, Plaza Court 3), if you’re in Denver. We’d love to see you there!

If you have a little more time and energy, you might try engaging with media, both traditional and digital to get your research out to policy makers.

Get your work in legacy (broadcast) media outlets, such as:

Letters to the Editor (LTEs)
Op-Eds
Be a guest on a television news show

Broaden the reach of your own work by learning to use the tools of digital media, such as:

Blogging
Twitter
Storify

If you’re an academic that’s fresh out of skills in either legacy or digital media, then you might consider taking some of these Mediacamp Workshops. They’re all completely free and designed especially for academics who want to reach a broader audience with their work.

Other ways to get involved include:

Create fact sheets, policy briefs or other highly accessible materials that summarize research about the issue;
Tell a compelling story to help personalize an issue and highlight the human costs (I’m talking to you, qualitative researchers and humanities scholars);
Organize your academic colleagues – at your institution, or in your professional association – for sign-on campaigns and other forms of advocacy;
Convince your professional association to sign on to a policy proposal;
Lobby at your state capitol or city council or meet with legislators in their district offices;
Flesh out the policy implications of your research (or, the research you’ve reviewed in your area of expertise) to influence policy proposals.

To get you started, here are a few “tips of the trade” that can you help you avoid some of the most common mistakes. My work lately has been mostly at the state level working in Albany, but these guidelines are useful whether you’re trying to reach city, county, state or national lawmakers.

Tips for Being More Effective

TIP #1: Identify an organization working on the issue you care about and find the most effective one.

On any given issue, there will be a few organizations that are working on the issue. Your first step should be to familiarize yourself with the landscape of organizations and identify the one you think has been most effective.

TIP #2: Be sure to refer to your credentials when contacting policymakers – they matter.

When you reach out to elected officials, make sure that you mention your degrees and institutional affiliations. These sorts of credentials matter when you’re talking to policy makers. Without your credentials, you’re just another person with an opinion. And if you happen to be a constituent of the policymaker, be sure to mention that too.

TIP #3: Messaging really, really matters.

Most advocacy organizations have worked long and hard to develop effective messaging on their issues. It’s worth your time to speak to folks who have given this a lot of thought. Some organizations will even help you craft and/or place your op-ed or Letter to the Editor in major news outlets.

TIP #4: Work closely with an organization that understands the political scene to help craft a realistic policy proposal.

After you’ve become more deeply involved on an issue, you may have an idea for a new policy that would address a seemingly intractable problem. Crafting a policy and seeing it through the legislative process is definitely a long-term project, but it can be worth it to see lasting change. Before you spend a lot of time on your own crafting what is no doubt a brilliant new policy, it’s a good idea to work closely with an organization that has a clear understanding of the current political scene and what kinds of proposals might just make it through and which ones are dead-on-arrival.

Scholar Strategy Network (SSN) – If you want your research to influence policy, but don’t know how to make those connections, you might consider applying to become part of the Scholar Strategy Network (SSN), which brings together leading scholars to address pressing public challenges at all levels. Scholars in the network prepare short, vividly written briefs highlighting their research findings and offering policy options about a wide range of issues. SSN scholars engage in consultations with policymakers in Washington DC and state capitals, and also work closely with advocates and leaders of citizen associations.

TIP #5: Ask what research needs to be done and do it.

Typically, academic researchers have their scholarship done before they contact a policy organization, but it can also work the other way around. Sometimes, scholars will ask what kind of research needs to be done to address policy needs, and then set about to do that kind of research. CUNY Professor Harry Levine had been doing important research on marijuana arrests. He got involved with the Drug Policy Alliance and then worked with them to produce a number of highly influential reports highlighting the racial disparities and fiscal waste of marijuana arrests. Levine’s report on the fiscal waste of such arrests is here, and was picked up by Alternet; Jim Dwyer of The New York Times then featured some of Levine’s research in an Op-Ed, “Whites Smoke Pot, but Blacks are Arrested.” (There’ll be more about Harry Levine’s work in a post to follow in this series.)

The Tobin Project – If you want to do research that fills a gap in policy-making, you might contact The Tobin Project, which emphasizes “transformative research in the social sciences” and facilitates policy-scholar connections. The Tobin Project starts by identifying the gaps in research that might influence policy, and then finding scholars who want to engage policy by conducting original research that makes a contribution in this way. They recently received a MacArthur Award for Creative & Effective Organizations, so it looks like they might be on to something.

Challenges for Academics Who Want to Influence Policy

Part of the reason I encourage academics to work with experienced policy organizations is because academia isn’t generally set up to train scholars to be effective policy advocates. In fact, many features of academia actually may make pose challenges for those who want to influence policy, such as:

Different metrics of success. Even though changing a policy can impact thousands and thousands of lives, the kinds of activities above are rarely acknowledged or rewarded within academia. Books and/or peer-reviewed journal articles are likely the currency of your institution, but unfortunately, it’s the rare policymaker that looks to those sources to develop policy.
Different language. Most academics are concerned with precision and nuance, while most policymakers are looking for bullet points and sound bites.
Different forms of power and influence. Just like the politics of academic institutions, each legislative body has its own set of (usually unwritten) rules about how power really works and who is really running show. A good policy advocacy organization can help you uncover how policy is really made in your jurisdiction.
Different skills sets. Academics have lots of great skills that make them naturals at influencing policy, but some people may not know the first thing about how to conduct a lobby visit or neutralize an opponent’s argument. Again, this can be taught.

The great news is that – for the most part – these are challenges that are easily overcome. More and more, I’m hearing from academics at all stages of their career that they wish their research could have more of a real-world impact.

It can.

I’ve worked with a number of extraordinarily talented scholar-activists who have re-shaped and profoundly influenced policy and in doing so, they have positively impacted the lives of thousands of people. With a little investment of your time and talents and working with the right policy organization to gain the information and skills you need, so can you.

~ Guest blogger Julie Netherland, PhD (Sociology, CUNY, 2011), is Deputy Directory of the New York State Policy Office within the Drug Policy Alliance. She works closely with Compassionate Care New York, a group of patients, providers and organizations working together to pass a bill that would relieve the suffering of thousands of seriously ill New Yorkers by establishing a carefully regulated medical marijuana program in New York. You can follow her on Twitter @jnetherland.

“I’ve Been Stopped a Thousand Times”: Measuring Effects of Stop and Frisk

“I’ve been stopped a thousand times” – Black male survey respondent during the research conducted for Coming of Age with Stop and Frisk.

How do you measure the effects of stop-and-frisk on NYC youth, such as the survey respondent above, who report having being stopped more often than they could count or remember?

This was a pivotal challenge faced by researchers, Jennifer Fratello (Research Director, Vera Center on Youth Justice) and Andrés Rengifo (Associate Professor, Rutgers University) for their report Coming of Age with Stop and Frisk: Experiences, Self-Perceptions, and Public Safety Implications which attempts to capture the effects of stop-and-frisk. During a recent event organized by The Center on Race, Crime and Justice at John Jay College-CUNY on October 17th, Fratello and Rengifo discussed their research.

“Meet the new Academic Advisory Council that will help implement stop-and-frisk reforms “

Now that the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practice was rejected by U.S. District Judge Scheindlin, the debate has shifted from discussions regarding its effectiveness in reducing crime to the effect it has on the lives of those stopped (in many cases more than once). As activists seek deeper reforms in policing, public scholarship is once again called upon to inform this debate.

While conducting research, Fratello and Rengifo quickly found out that in order to capture the broader effects of stop-and-frisk, they would have to learn to ask better questions and work with key government and community groups. The latter is particularly important, as they soon realized, none of the stakeholders (e.g., schools, police, public agencies, churches) were talking to each other. During the October 17th meeting, panel speaker, Dr. C. Jama Adams discussed the importance of having greater institutional channels for communication among these stakeholders. He mentioned that stop-and-frisk should be addressed holistically through a community-approach. He feels this is the only way to address the deeply-rooted culture of “fearfulness” of which he finds Black males are often the scapegoat and which he feels stifles the individual creativity and spontaneity of all community members.

Fratello and Rengifo faced challenges in capturing the instances of stop-and-frisk events in a respondents’ life. In some instances, the sheer scale of the policing practice proved to be a problem. In piloting the survey, the researchers discovered that they would have to modify their questions to account for multiple stops. For those people who were stopped more than once, they either asked them to talk about the last time they were stopped or their most memorable stop. Yet, even when conducting research in neighborhoods with high rates of stop-and-frisk occurrences, the researchers were not able to meet their data collection goals for two neighborhoods – Jackson Heights and South Bronx – even after adjusting their research questions and approach. In both of these areas they found that in general, people seemed reluctant to speak with outsiders about the police. However, in Jackson Heights they faced the additional challenge that the majority of residents (65%) are foreign-born and may have an added apprehension of talking with “outsiders” (Coming of Age with Stop and Frisk: 11).

In other words, the very nature of stop-and-frisk makes it hard to measure its effects. The reason for this is that those most victimized have a general apprehension over being approached by strangers, especially to discuss involvement with the police.

Coming of Age with Stop and Frisk: Experiences, Self-Perceptions, and Public Safety Implications at John Jay College-CUNY, October 17, 2013. (Photo Credit: WNegron)

Despite these challenges, Fratello and Rengifo were able to uncover some of the corrosive effects of stop-and-frisk policing, especially on young people. They found that among the young people most stopped (between the ages of 13 and 25), trust in law enforcement is disturbingly low.

88 percent of young people surveyed believe that residents of their neighborhood do not trust the police.
Only four in 10 respondents said they would be comfortable seeking help from police if in trouble.
Young people who have been stopped more often in the past are less willing to report crimes, even when they themselves are the victims. Each additional stop in the span of a year is associated with an eight percent drop in the person’s likelihood of reporting a violent crime he or she might experience in the future (Coming to Age with Stop and Frisk: 89).

These findings present several troubling public safety implications. For one, this population is most at risk of future victimization, therefore, its worrisome to consider they may feel like they have no where to turn if victimized. Secondly, they are also the ones for whom law enforcement needs to connect with in order to solve crimes and significantly improve safety in these neighborhoods.

Previous studies have found a similar level of distrust of law enforcement among urban youth of color. In a series of qualitative interviews with urban youth in the United States, Canada, and Australia, Ruck and colleagues document that these young people were not only concerned about abusive treatment by police but were also resigned to it because they saw it as “inevitable and unlikely to change” (Ruck et al., 2008:20, “Youth experiences of surveillance“. In M. Flynn & D.C. Brotherton). However, other studies have shown that distrust of law enforcement can be spread through social networks and does not necessarily require direct contact with the criminal justice system (Menjívar & Bejarano, 2004, “Latino immigrants’ perceptions of crime and police authorities in the United States: A case study from the Phoenix Metropolitan area“). Clearly, this highlights the need for more research to discern between other factors which could give rise to distrust of law enforcement.

(See full infographic here)

Fratello and Rengifo include a set of timely recommendations in the Vera Institute report aimed at restoring trust and improving police-community relations. Most relevant for academics is their recommendation for the NYPD to partner with researchers to better understand the costs and benefits of various proactive policing strategies meant to replace stop-and-frisk.

Although academic-police partnerships are not new and reflect a growing trend toward “evidence-based” practice, it is not a relationship which comes easily for either police or researchers. In the article, “Partnerships with University-Based Researchers,” in a 2009 edition of The Police Chief Magazine, Sanders notes that although partnerships between law enforcement leaders and academic researchers have achieved much success and demonstrate long-term benefits for both, “only a small number of law enforcement agencies have actually reaped the benefits of research partnerships” (Sanders, 2009). Other scholars describe these partnerships as filled with mutual misunderstanding that negatively impacts police-academic relationships and practices (Bradley and Nixon, 2009: “Ending the ‘dialogue of the deaf’: Evidence and policing policies“).

This research raises serious questions about the prospects for success of the proposed Academic Advisory Council, proposed by Judge Scheindlin. This council is intended to engage in a “community-based remedial process to develop sustainable reforms to the stop-and-frisk practices of the NYPD.” Scheindlin recruited Brooklyn Law School Professor I. Bennett Capers to be chair of the council, along with a dozen law professors from Columbia, Yale, Fordham, City University of New York (CUNY), Rutgers and Hofstra law schools, all of whom will serve in a pro bono capacity.

Although this Academic Advisory Council will set to play a large role in informing and shaping further police reforms, it is worth noting that other police-academic efforts at reform are underway. One important new initiative is The Center for PolicingEquity.org, which seeks to promote police transparency and accountability by facilitating innovative research collaborations between law enforcement agencies and social scientists.

The Vera Institute report, Coming of Age with Stop and Frisk, by Fratello and Rengifo is a significant contribution to understanding the effects of stop-and-frisk policing, and there is much work to be done in documenting the effects of this practice, and in charting a new way forward. The ruling by Judge Scheindlin makes it clear that the future of New York City is one without stop-and-frisk. Academic researchers who are interested in this issue have a unique opportunity to help shape this future.

Envisioning A Better Future: Youth Action Against Stop-and-Frisk

Our series on Stop-and-Frisk continues as we take a look at what it means to ‘come of age’ under stop-and-frisk. Over the next two days, we’ll focus on the impact on young people in New York City dealing with stop-and-frisk and how U.S. youth mobilize to resist criminalization.

Young adults, between the ages of 18 and 25, comprise at least half of all recorded stops in NYC. In 2012, over 286,000 young people in this age group were stopped and frisked. A study by the Vera Institute on Youth Justice recorded that young people in NYC are now less willing to report crimes, even when they are the victims. What does it mean to grow up within a system that targets, rather than protects, you? How do U.S. youth envision their futures within a system they fear?

In December 2010, the Community Justice Network For Youth (CJNY) organized a conference in D.C. to address the injustices within the U.S. juvenile justice system. They called on youth, parents and advocates to share their personal experiences and research on the justice system and create a vision of alternatives to youth incarceration. The keynote speaker, Chino Hardin (the Institute for Juvenile Justice Reform and Alternatives and Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions), addressed the audience by sharing a personal journey as a youth within the prison system. “In my youth I was arrested sixteen times and incarcerated on eight different occasions, so I know what goes on inside the walls of juvenile detention centers,” says Chino.

While Chino addressed the broken policing systems in America, Chino also instilled hope for the future, “Sometimes, you’ve gotta make the bridge by walking and sometimes that bridge is gonna be your back… [but justice will come].” Here is Chino’s keynote address (14:55):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDZU9RUMums[/youtube]

Envisioning a better future, a future beyond stop-and-frisk, means creating a future that listens to the voices of young people. In Hardin’s words, “The children are the future… we’ve gotta make sure they can hold it and they can’t hold it if their hands are cuffed behind their back.”

Be Informed. Stay Updated.
For more information on the The Vera Institute Study, take a look at Coming of Age with Stop and Frisk: Experiences, Self-Perceptions, and Public Safety Implications or contact Jennifer Fratello at [email protected]. Tomorrow, our series will offer focus on this study.

* * *

This post is part of the Monthly Social Justice Topic Series on Stop-And-Frisk. If you have any questions, research that you would like to share related to Stop-and-Frisk or are interested in being interviewed for the series, please contact Morgane Richardson at [email protected] with the subject line, “Stop-and-Frisk Series.”

JustPublics@365

reimagining scholarly communication for the public good

Category Archives: Topic Series

Special Interview with Alondra Nelson on Criminalization and Public Health

Challenging Punishment: From Mass Incarceration to Public Health , Human Rights, and Restorative Justice

From Punishment to Public Health: Our Next Social Justice Topic Series

Stop-And-Frisk Information Guide: Bringing it All Together

JustPublics@365 Stop and Frisk Series: A Temporary Conclusion

Bill de Blasio and The Future of Stop and Frisk

Interview: Brett Stoudt and Maria Torre about the Morris Justice Project

Visualizing The Effects of Stop and Frisk

Special Interview with Jamilah King on Covering Stop-and-Frisk

Where Are We Now? Stop-and-Frisk

Interview: Academic-Activist Partnerships for Social Change

Shaping the Narrative through Arts and Technology: Youth Activism in Stop-and-Frisk

Tips for Academics Who Want to Engage Policymakers

How Can Academics help?

Tips for Being More Effective

Challenges for Academics Who Want to Influence Policy

“I’ve Been Stopped a Thousand Times”: Measuring Effects of Stop and Frisk

Envisioning A Better Future: Youth Action Against Stop-and-Frisk

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