How These Cities Are Breaking Up The Work Of Police Departments

May 26 2021

From the article: "Phillip Abita Goff, co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity, said the current opportunity to effect real change in American policing is unique. To have two major mass movements against police brutality and racism in less than a decade—the Floyd protests last year and the Black Lives Matter movement that arose in the latter years of President Barack Obama’s administration—is an aberration in American politics."

"It is rare in the country’s history that we do this work around policing more frequently than once every 30 years,” Goff said. 

“The systems that we’ve got right now in some ways are fundamentally incapable of delivering safety in the ways that we need to think about,” Goff added. “And the most important element of this is the sort of fundamental thing I think we’re not going back on is, oftentimes, what we need is not better policing but less of it.”

"Goff, who with the Center for Policing Equity worked on the traffic stop model for Berkeley, told The Appeal that his group created a report for the city in 2018 that broke down the racial disparities in police stops. Even after controlling for other factors, the group found that the disparities were high: Black motorists were 6.5 times more likely to be stopped than white motorists. The study’s results were ultimately published, over the objections of law enforcement."

“Let’s say you’re four times more likely to get force used on you by law enforcement if you’re Black than if you’re white,” said Goff. “So what portion of that 4-to-1 study is because of what police do and what portion of that is because of poverty or segregation or a lack of good mental health resources, terrible public public health?”

By Eoin Higgins

Continue reading the article on Theappeal.org.