Following successful alternative policing programs in Denver and Newark, Oakland, California is the latest city to adopt such a program with an initiative to redirect nonviolent, noncriminal calls to mobile teams of civilians.
Denver’s new Support Team Assistance Response responded to 748 incidents, with not a single one of them requiring police or leading to arrests or jail-time.
Newark police and city officials say their de-escalation training program is working, with not one officer firing his or her weapon while on duty in 2020.
Starting next year in Anchorage, Alaska, a new team of mental health first responders will replace police for emergency calls for someone with a mental health issue. The Mobile Crisis Team is funded by a new local alcohol tax and the team is trained to be dispatched to situations police do not have adequate training to address.
Thanks to a new pilot program, 911 calls in New York City that are evidently mental health-related will be taken care of by mental health and crisis workers instead of law enforcement. The move is the result of months of protests around the country over police brutality, sparked by the tragic death of George Floyd.
In order to hold police accountable when they try to hide their identities, a growing number of activists are developing facial recognition tools that identify cops, The New York Times reports — a striking inversion of the way cops tend to use facial recognition on protestors and suspects.
The law institutes a new statewide watchdog for police misconduct, bans “chokeholds” in most instances and puts limits on the ability of police departments to withhold officers’ disciplinary records. It also allows individual officers to be held financially liable in civil suits over their actions.
Colorado passed one of the most comprehensive police reform packages in the country, setting limits on police use of force and mandating data collection to make sure cops who are fired from one agency don’t get rehired by another.
The Louisville Metro Council has voted unanimously to ban no-knock warrants. The legislation was titled Breonna’s Law, in honor of Breonna Taylor whose death became one of the rallying points in protests against police violence.
Advocacy groups like the ACLU have long raised significant privacy concerns regarding facial recognition. Researchers like Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, and Deborah Raji have demonstrated that these technologies can come with built-in racial and gender biases.
