News & Commentary

Breonna Taylor, Walter Wallace Jr., Daniel Prude, and Rayshard Brooks were just a few of the 1,127 people brutally killed by police in 2020. In fact, there were only 18 days last year during which a police officer in the U.S. did not kill a civilian. But in the days, weeks and months following the death of George Floyd, our nation saw a long overdue demand for systemic, transformative change in the criminal justice system. This work is far from finished as we know that Black people are still more than three times as likely to be killed during a police encounter as their white peers. O

This piece first appeared in Just Security. T

On March 13, 2020, Louisville police officers killed Breonna Taylor, a Black medical worker, during a botched no-knock raid on her apartment. Her death was one of the thousands of police killings that drove the largest protests in American history that spring and summer over policing and racism in the United States. But as demonstrators continued to march in Louisville’s streets, the local Fraternal Order of Police entered into secret negotiations with the city on their next contract, and used that opportunity to lobby for extraordinary protections for officers that would block any meaningful changes to how Louisville approaches public safety. U

In the early 1920’s, Black Americans were under the siege of direct and indirect racial violence with widespread lynchings, Jim Crow laws, and race riots across the country. And yet the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma was thriving. Its streets were lined with successful Black-owned businesses and Black professionals. The district was so successful that the area was dubbed “Black Wall Street.” B

The 2021 Democratic primary for district attorney in Philadelphia had all of the elements of a political drama: a reformer incumbent who spent his career challenging the criminal legal system versus a career prosecutor whom the current DA fired at the start of his tenure. A powerful police officers’ union trying to hold onto political power by boosting the challenger with a series of theatrical stunts. The old guard of the city’s Democratic party committee refusing to endorse the incumbent while progressive elected officials supported him. I

This piece first appeared in Just Security. O

Last week, my staff and I watched alongside the rest of the nation as the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it would consider a case challenging Mississippi’s ban on abortion starting at 15 weeks of pregnancy. This news left us feeling scared about the future of abortion access and thinking about how a bad decision could be devastating for patients like ours, for whom access to abortion is not only life-affirming, but often life-saving. U

In a year that has seen

Four and a half years ago, the use of surveillance technologies by local police and governments was growing exponentially. There were many factors behind this rapid growth, but the two most significant were (1) the ever-increasing pool of federal grant money that was being made available for surveillance tech purchases, and (2) that in almost every jurisdiction, local police were empowered to make decisions about acquiring and using surveillance technologies unilaterally and in secret. Because it is hard to oppose a specific local surveillance tech acquisition when you don’t know it’s happening, surveillance tech use by local police was turning into a runaway train. W