Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • Michigan group helping to keep justice on the state's environmental agenda

    The Michigan Advisory Council on Environmental Justice was created to advise Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on environmental justice issues related to pollution and energy access. In its first year, the 21-member council was influential in moratoriums on water shut-offs and provided input on the state’s latest climate plan. Some members would like the council to have “more teeth” in policy decisions, but other say they are poised to take up more issues, like injustices related to electric utilities, in their second year.

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  • More Than 1,000 Open Prostitution Cases In Brooklyn Are Going To Be Wiped From The Files

    The Brooklyn district attorney is prosecuting few prostitution cases and has dismissed 262 cases that he and sex worker advocates say are a byproduct of law enforcement unfairly targeting trans women and women of color. The DA is working toward dismissing more than 1,000 cases and declining to prosecute all new cases. While legislative action is needed to achieve full decriminalization and to void the 25,000 criminal records that date to 1975 in Brooklyn, the DA exercised his discretion based on the harm done by arresting women for sex work and on related loitering charges.

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  • Seattle Cut Its Police Budget. Now the Public Will Decide How To Spend the Money.

    Since 2017, Seattle residents have had a direct say in how some city money is spent on neighborhood projects. It's a form of "participatory budgeting" that has been spreading from Brazil through many U.S. cities. After the 2020 racial justice protests, King County Equity Now, Decriminalize Seattle, and other groups spent several months calling for a budget that takes money from policing and invests in "true public health and safety" projects. After eight weeks of hearings, the city agreed to put $30 million – $12 million cut from police – into a citizen-controlled safety budget.

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  • Worker-Owned Cooperatives are Building Their Own Investment Network

    Cooperatives are getting the funding they need through a “nationwide network of loans funds and incubators that specialize in supporting and investing in cooperative businesses.” Coops lack access to traditional funding and are typically member funded. The new source of funding has allowed historically marginalized Black and Hispanic communities the opportunity to create coops where workers share ownership equally.

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  • Cops, crisis calls and conflict over who should help

    Seattle Police Department's crisis response team answers some of the city's many 911 calls for people in distress, pairing police trained in handling such calls with mental health professionals. The aim is to counter the default policing approach to problems that usually involve mental illness or substance abuse, which is to control people. It doesn't always work, due to the complexity of the calls, the nature of policing, and the department's limited resources devoted to the program. But, when it works, it can help rather than escalate situations, and avoid the ultimate failure, the use of excessive force.

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  • An Oregon city's decades-old alternative to police

    Like many cities, Seattle is looking to Eugene, Oregon, for a model to shift resources from police to unarmed crisis responders handling 911 calls about mental health, addiction, family conflict, and other non-criminal problems. Eugene's CAHOOTS program has been doing such work for half a century, and since 1989 sending medic-and-counselor teams on calls. In 2019 it saved $8 million in police costs and $14 million for ambulances and emergency room visits. But, while taking police out of situations where they might cause more problems than they solve, it's only as good as its region's social services.

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  • "We're not just relics of the past": How #NativeTikTok is preserving Indigenous cultures and inspiring a younger generation

    Native and Indigenous individuals are using TikTok to share aspects of their traditions, challenge stereotypes, and empower young people to be proud of their culture. The videos range from instructional, teaching people indigenous languages or dance, to putting a "cultural spin" on trending content. The hashtag #NativeTikTok has over 1.3 billion views and users comment that the videos help them feel more connected to and proud of their cultures. The videos follow the tradition of preserving culture through storytelling and offer positive representations of Native and Indigenous people and their cultures.

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  • SC law enforcement agencies are supposed to report info on traffic stops, but most are not

    After the South Carolina legislature in 2005 began requiring police to enforce a seat-belt law with traffic stops, it imposed on all police departments a duty to track and report traffic-stop data on drivers' race. The law was meant as a way to prevent biased policing, through public disclosure of disparities. But only about one-third of the state's law enforcement agencies have consistently complied with the law, and some never have. Some blame ignorance of how the system should work. But another explanation is the state has done little or nothing to enforce the law.

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  • Queens Prosecutors Long Overlooked Misconduct. Can a New D.A. Do Better?

    On her first day as district attorney of Queens, Melinda Katz created a unit to review potential wrongful convictions that in its first year has exonerated four men and has 80 more cases under review. The Queens DA's office long resisted the national trend toward such "conviction integrity" units, based on its contention that all prosecutors should be open to fixing their mistakes. The office, however, showed little inclination to do so systematically. Katz put the new unit under the control of a former lawyer with the Innocence Project and showed a resolve to take claimed injustices more seriously.

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  • Is D.C. Finally on the Brink of Statehood?

    51 for 51 is an advocacy group fighting for DC statehood by educating people about DC residents’ taxation without representation and training advocates in other states, mostly young people, to lobby their senators to support a statehood bill. Organizers also bird-dogged democratic presidential candidates for a public pledge of support for statehood, which 18 did. The group has also gained new support for ending the filibuster, which is needed to pass a statehood bill in the Senate. Support for statehood is at its highest, with a bill passing the House of Representatives for the first time in June 2020.

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