We’ve blogged here before about the issue of racial discrimination in the stop-and-frisk policing practice in New York City. There is lots of data that shows stop-and-frisk is discriminatory, harmful to communities and is not effective at “getting guns off the streets,” as is frequently claimed by advocates of the policing strategy. And, it’s very likely unconstitutional.
Bill diBlasio, the newly elected mayor of New York City, has promised to end stop-and-frisk and that means there is a new future ahead for the city and the communities most affected by this policy.
In an effort to assess where we are with stop-and-frisk, what the data shows, and how scholars, activists and journalists have worked to change this policy, JustPublics@365, a project of the Ford Foundation based at the CUNY-Graduate Center (and that I lead), recently curated a series on this topic. And now, that series has been compiled as an all-in-one guide to stop-and-frisk (pdf)
The 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
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.
You can download the guide(pdf) and reuse it for teaching, research, activism or media.