CRIMINAL LEGAL SYSTEM
Between Law and Justice: A Congressman’s Perspective on Reforming the Criminal Legal System Congressman Hank Johnson When asked by the CBCF’s Center for Policy Analysis and Research to share my perspective on America’s criminal legal system, I was honored to oblige. Most call it the criminal justice system, but I immediately recognized and appreciated the distinction. Words matter! In the 27 years prior to my election to Congress, I was honored to serve as a criminal defense lawyer. For 12 of those years, I concurrently served as a county Magistrate Court judge. Among my duties as a judge were deciding on police officers’ applications for arrest and search warrants and presiding over probable cause and bond hearings. My judicial position afforded me an appreciation of law enforcement (police) and prosecutorial perspectives, which I found to be helpful as I went about my day job, which was defending people accused of violating the criminal laws. My dream was to become a lawyer, “hang a shingle,” and practice criminal defense law just like my cousin, which is exactly what I did upon law school graduation. I started out taking court-appointed work but soon developed a thriving law practice. My clients were people who worked and lived in my community, and communities that looked like mine. I found the majority of my clients and their families to be honorable people. Some of my clients were innocent, while others deserved a second, or even a third chance. In my work as a judge, I found most police officers and prosecutors to be honorable people. However, I will never forget presiding over a Saturday night Magistrate Court first appearance/bond hearing calendar, where two similar cases were brought before me. The first
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was a young Black male charged with armed robbery, accused of taking a pair of sneakers from someone at gunpoint. The other case involved a young White male accused of taking money from his mother at knifepoint. He faced the charge of robbery. The appropriate charge was armed robbery in both cases. I was able to set bond for the White defendant because he was charged only with robbery, but Georgia law compelled me to deny bond for the Black defendant because he was charged with armed robbery. The difference in how these two individuals were charged, I’m sure, had a downstream impact on prosecution and disposition decisions, including sentencing. One of my clients, Howard Jones, was convicted of armed robbery and murder and was sentenced to die in the electric chair. His case was reversed due to ineffective assistance of counsel and prosecutorial misconduct in the knowing use of perjured testimony. Unfortunately, I found both prosecutorial misconduct and ineffective counsel to be common within the criminal legal system. These are just two examples of many systemic inequities that result in a criminal legal system that falls short of what should be a system of criminal justice. Another is the Epstein file saga, which offers a vivid example of how the wealthy and well-connected are often shielded from the long arm of the criminal legal system. That is a perversion of justice. My experience in the criminal legal system has informed my work as a congressman. Because I am passionate about the rights of the accused, I introduced bills to protect defendants in our lower courts, including the Restoring Artistic Protection Act which limits how people’s creative expression can be used against them in trial, and the Effective Death Penalty Appeals Act, which ensures that wrongly convicted people on death row can present newly discovered evidence that they are innocent. I also introduced bills to hold law
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enforcement accountable, including the Police Accountability Act, which would make it a federal crime for police officers to commit murder and manslaughter; the Grand Jury Reform Act, which would require appointment of a special prosecutor when law enforcement officers are suspected to have wrongfully killed a civilian in the line of duty; and the Cooling Off Period Elimination Act, which would eliminate “cooling-off periods” for police, to help us get to the truth after a charge of police misconduct. Finally, I have introduced bills to restore faith in our court system overall, including the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act, which would mandate a binding and enforceable code of ethics for justices of the Supreme Court; the Supreme Court Tenure Establishment and Retirement Modernization Act, which would establish term limits for Supreme Court justices; and the Open Courts Act, which would make court records publicly assessable for free. Our criminal legal system has a long way to go before we can call it a criminal justice system. There is no justice unless the system is fair to all. But through legislation and honest and competent lawyers on the ground, I believe that we can get there. I promise you that I will be doing my part here in DC. Congressman Henry C. “Hank” Johnson, Jr. has served Georgia’s Fourth Congressional District since 2007, currently representing parts of DeKalb and Gwinnett counties. Elected to his 10th term in 2024, he has earned recognition as one of Congress’s most effective Democrats, championing legislation that strengthens civil rights, consumer protections, judicial transparency and accountability, and community safety. Since 2007, Congressman Johnson has helped bring more than $5 billion in federal investments back to Georgia, including more than $1 billion specifically for his district – funding that was part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act under President Barack Obama and the American Rescue Plan under President Joe Biden.
My clients were people who worked and lived in my community, and communities that looked like mine.
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Same Struggle, New Terrain: Fighting for a Fair Justice System in the Age of AI Damon T. Hewitt For generations, parents of Black children have had “the talk” with their kids—not about the birds and the bees, but about what to do if confronted by the police. It’s a sometimes uncomfortable but very serious and necessary conversation. As long as there have been police in this country, there have been horrific patterns of discrimination and brutality against Black people. Challenging these systemic injustices and ensuring that fundamental fairness is not rationed by race or zip code is what drew me to the modern-day civil rights movement. Protecting our people from violence, whether by white supremacist vigilantes or by police under color of law, has always been the work of our movement. Civil rights defenders have long addressed police abuse. We have forced many changes, but not enough as evidenced by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Tyre Nichols, Atatiana Jefferson, and many others. New tragedies follow spurts of reform. Nonetheless, we persist. Even as we continue these fights, the mechanisms of injustice continue to evolve. Today, in addition to longstanding forms of discrimination, we also face data systems, predictive tools, facial recognition, and surveillance operations powered by artificial intelligence (AI). These tools, disproportionately deployed by police in Black communities, claim neutrality while quietly replicating bias. Consider one recent case. On an October evening in Baltimore, a Black teenager named Taki finished football practice and stood outside his high school with friends awaiting a ride home. It should have been an unremarkable moment. Instead, it became a moment marked by a terror he will never forget. As Taki finished eating a bag of chips, he crumpled the bag and slipped it into his pocket. Minutes later, police flooded the campus. Officers
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approached Taki with their weapons drawn. He was ordered to his knees, handcuffed, and searched. His friends were stopped, too. Why? It turns out the school had recently installed an AI-powered surveillance system that mistook a bag of Doritos for a firearm. Taki did everything he could to remain safe. He followed commands because he understood how a young Black man must navigate to survive encounters with police—likely based upon having had “the talk” or sharing experiences with friends. Still, one thought consumed him: Am I going to die? All of this happened because a machine saw Taki as a threat, not for his humanity, his innocence, or his promise. Taki’s experience is a warning: when powerful tools are deployed without guardrails, injustice does not disappear; it multiplies. The longstanding inequities of the criminal justice system are indisputable. Black communities are surveilled more heavily. Black defendants face harsher charging decisions and fewer off-ramps from prosecution. For decades, policing strategies have treated Black neighborhoods as zones of suspicion and surveillance rather than communities worthy of nurturing and investment. We’ve challenged these practices in the courtrooms, legislatures, and streets for decades. We have long advocated for comprehensive police reform, including the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. And we have fought systems that exclude the voices of those most affected. But AI makes this work even harder because it amplifies the worst parts of the criminal justice system by automating bias and racial discrimination while offering a patina of objectivity. AI also complicates the clarity we try to give our children through “the talk.” What should I say to my own children when I know the wary eye watching and judging them may be electronic instead of human? This is why civil rights leadership is indispensable. We bring
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AI may hold the promise to transform the world around us. But the promise to transform us into what? institutional memory to debates that too often treat technology as inevitable and apolitical. We remember earlier fights over wiretapping, DNA databases, and mass surveillance. We know the fight for an equal justice system has never been fully won. And in the age of AI, it is even more fragile because innovation can come at the expense of our communities.
question is whether we are all prepared to meet the challenge in this new battleground in the fight for civil rights and racial justice. Our people are counting on us to be ready. Damon T. Hewitt is the President and Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. One of the nation’s foremost experts in civil rights litigation and policy, Hewitt has more than 20 years of experience, including prior leadership roles in the nonprofit, philanthropic, and public sectors. Hewitt previously worked for more than a decade as an attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Hewitt’s work has been in a number of news outlets, including the New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, among others. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from Louisiana State University and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
At the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, we have answered the call by pioneering a paradigm for AI accountability, including litigation challenging algorithmic bias and by helping to design policy solutions like the AI Civil Rights Act, which would impose nondiscrimination, transparency, and auditing requirements on companies that create and sell AI tools to law enforcement. We work to center AI’s impact on real people, including shedding light on Taki’s story and his fight for justice, transparency, and accountability. AI may hold the promise to transform the world around us. But the promise to transform us into what? Without civil rights leadership, AI will not fix the criminal justice system. It will further entrench racial disparities and undermine the promise of an America where Black people and all people can be treated fairly when it matters most. There is no question about whether AI will be used in the criminal justice system. It is already being deployed, to troubling effect. The
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What Shrinking the System Could Never Deliver Portia Allen-Kyle A little over 10 years ago, a push for bold, transformational change appeared to be gaining momentum, as philanthropy invested significant resources in criminal justice reform. Several people and organizations were willing to make large bets on shrinking the system by fifty percent. Some now say those efforts failed, and if one is only looking at incarceration numbers, that conclusion is understandable. But the lessons of that period are more complicated than a single metric can capture. One of the clearest lessons is that the goal itself matters. Shrinking a system assumes that the system is necessary for society to function. That concession did more than narrow policy options. It quietly shaped our imagination of what safety could be. It guided focus toward fairness through reducing disparities, mitigating harm, and implementing procedural safeguards. And to be clear, all of these things matter. But when we equate the fight for them, and even the achievement of them, with bold systemic change, we undermine our ability to win the kind of transformation our communities need over the long term. And we must hold the very real tension that while the approach to incremental reforms has failed to deliver transformational change, even those minor changes have had a real impact on the lives of people ensnared in a brutal system that is always on the prowl for more lives. Both of these things are true at the same time, and refusing to sit with that tension has limited our ability to tell the truth about where we are and how we got here.
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This framing did not emerge in a vacuum. It was reinforced by political institutions and philanthropic actors that were more comfortable measuring progress than confronting power. Reform was tolerated precisely because it preserved the legitimacy of the system itself. Transformation, by contrast, required rejecting the premise that policing and punishment were inevitable features of public safety. That rejection has never been theoretical. It has been rooted in lived experience. Former Congresswoman Cori Bush of Missouri entered public life not as a policy abstraction, but as someone who survived homelessness and police violence, carrying the memory of what the system does when it claims to protect. When she ran for Congress and won, she continued to insist that any solution premised on increasing funding for law enforcement was not a solution at all. It was a decision to preserve harm. The response to that clarity was instructive. Her position was dismissed as irresponsible, emotional, and insufficiently supported by data. That reaction revealed something deeper about how this country treats Black harm. Only with Black people do we require endless study, exhaustive proof, and the elimination of every alternative before action is allowed. Only Black suffering must be repeatedly validated before it is deemed worthy of a response. Lived experience is treated as anecdote rather than evidence, while harm continues uninterrupted. Research should inform action, not delay it. Too often, data has become a refuge for inaction, a way to postpone decisions that feel politically risky. That posture is not neutral. It is a choice. And it is a choice that disproportionately burdens Black communities with the cost of waiting. Many of the demands we are making now on policing, on ICE enforcement, on jails and detention facilities are the same demands
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that have been made for more than half a century. It reflects a refusal by those in power to listen. We cannot be more attached to specific demands than we are to a vision of equity and justice. Justice is not a checklist of incremental achievements. It is not satisfied by marginal improvements to systems that continue to rely on racialized control and dehumanization. As a society, we cannot expect to put our brutal racist origin story behind us while continuing to embrace and sustain systems that depend on profit-driven, dehumanizing methods of racialized social control. We cannot claim progress while expanding budgets for institutions that have consistently produced harm and calling that investment safety. The challenge ahead is not primarily one of policy design. It is one of courage and political will. Courage to reject the assumption that more funding for law enforcement equals safety. Courage to act on what lived experience has already made clear. Courage to imagine and build systems that produce safety rather than manage harm. Until we confront that challenge honestly, incremental reform will continue to substitute movement for progress, and our communities will continue to pay the price. Portia Allen-Kyle is the Founder of FuturaBold LLC and Why.Race.Still.Matters. A Roosevelt Fellow for Tax Policy, Portia previously served as a BidenHarris Administration appointee as Senior Advisor for Equity, Policy, and Stakeholder Engagement in the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Transportation under Secretary Pete Buttigieg and as the Interim Executive Director of Color Of Change, a digital-first organization powered by millions of members nationwide leveraging campaigns, organizing, and narrative pressure against government and corporations to act on real solutions for racial justice she led the organization’s strategic advocacy and day-to-day operations.
The challenge ahead is not primarily one of policy design. It is one of courage and political will.
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Amplifying Black Perspectives: Spotlight on the Criminal Legal System Which of the following best describes how Black Americans are treated across the criminal legal system today? Over 50% of respondents indicated that only some or few Black Americans receive fair treatment in the criminal legal system. Unsure
5%
Nearly Black Americans receive fair treatment in the criminal legal system
1%
Most Black Americans receive fair treatment in the criminal legal system
4%
Nearly Black Americans receive fair treatment in the criminal legal system Most Black Americans receive fair treatment in the criminal legal system Some or few Black Americans receive fair treatment in the criminal legal system Little to no Black Americans recieve fair treatment in the criminal legal system Unsure
Little to no Black Americans recieve fair treatment in the criminal legal system
36%
Some or few Black Americans receive fair treatment in the criminal legal system
54%
DATA SOURCE: THE CENTER FOR POLICY ANALYSIS AND RESEARCH AMPLIFYING BLACK PERSPECTIVES DATA PROJECT. RESULTS ARE BASED ON ANALYSIS OF AN ONLINE SURVEY OF 187 BLACK-IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUALS CONDUCTED BETWEEN JANUARY 14 – 30, 2026.
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Criminal Legal System Policy Landscape Black Americans have been greatly impacted by disparities in the criminal legal system. In the 1960s, the Republican party established itself as the party of law and order, proposing “tough on crime” legislation to respond to the purported dangers of urban areas. As crime quickly became a top concern for all Americans, the Democratic party cosigned punitive responses to crime. As crime continued to rise in the 1980s, lawmakers passed legislation to address illicit drug use. However, they codified racial disparities into drug laws by developing more severe sentencing criteria for crack cocaine, which was more prevalent in Black communities, than powder cocaine. In the 1990s, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers worked to pass a bill aimed at reducing crime rates. On September 13, 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, commonly known as the 1994 Crime Bill, into law. The legislation, the most comprehensive criminal justice bill in American history, has a complicated legacy. The 1994 Crime Bill established the three strikes provision, requiring individuals convicted of two serious violent felonies and one serious drug offense in federal court to serve a life sentence. The legislation also provided financial incentives to states that required incarcerated people to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences, well beyond typical parole eligibility requirements. These policies greatly increased incarceration rates and exacerbated racial inequities in the United States. From 2000 to 2005, the number of state and federal correctional facilities increased by 9%, while the number of incarcerated prisoners increased by 10%. The bill also funded the creation of private prisons, which contributed to the prison industrial complex, cementing the carceral system as a profit-driven enterprise. In 2021, despite a decrease in crime overall, the Black incarceration rate was six times the white incarceration rate. These harms have rippled across Black communities, leading to economic disparities and negative impacts on socioemotional wellbeing.
The 1994 Crime Bill also established the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program, which gave state attorneys general the authority to create grants to increase the police presence throughout communities. In 1998, Congress amended the bill to specify that the grants could be used in schools, paving the way for the school-toprison pipeline. The consequences of this amendment are striking. In 2023, The Sentencing Project reported that Black youth were 5.6 times as likely to be placed in juvenile facilities as their white peers. Nearly 30 states now have laws automatically charging juveniles as adults for certain crimes, bypassing the rehabilitative nature of juvenile court. The bill also created state-level sex offender registries, intended to protect the public from individuals convicted of pedophilia or sexually violent crimes. Yet researchers have not found a correlation between sex offender registration and recidivism rates. Over 30 years since the passage of the 1994 Crime Bill, the United States maintains the largest incarcerated population in the world. While crime rates are down nationally, the over-incarceration of Black Americans remains a critical issue. Policymakers must come together to resolve the inequities in the criminal legal system and create a just system for all.
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Timeline June 19, 1968 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 into law, increasing federal funding for law enforcement and funding research into criminology and crime prevention. July 1, 1973 Congress established the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
1971 President Richard Nixon declared illicit drug use “public enemy number one” and launched the “War on Drugs,” a campaign to reduce drug use by tightening laws and sentencing requirements.
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October 27, 1986 President Ronald Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 into law, establishing mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses and developing different sentencing criteria for powder cocaine and crack cocaine.
October 12, 1984 President Ronald Reagan signed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 into law, adding new criteria for pre-trial release and changing the sentencing requirements for nonviolent drug offenders.
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September 13, 1994 President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, commonly known as the 1994 Crime Bill, into law.
December 21, 2018 President Donald Trump signed the First Step Act into law, which included sentencing reform for low level drug offenders.
August 3, 2010 President Barack Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act into law, lowering the disparity in sentencing between powder cocaine and crack cocaine.
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Demanding Non-Carceral Social Interventions to Meet the Spirit of Black Lives Matter Nicole D. Porter Redefining community safety through non-carceral social interventions rather than arrests or prison admissions is the primary framework proposed by this author in Expanding Public Safety in the Era of Black Lives Matter, published in the University of Miami Law Review in 2016. The author argued that the “Black Lives Matter” narrative offered solutions for policymakers, activists, practitioners, and other stakeholders in the criminal legal system. This update revisits the non-carceral solutions proposed in 2016 and offers a perspective informed by 10 years of evidence, with attention to policy solutions adopted to challenge mass incarceration. Since the publication of the original article, the United States experienced the racial reckoning of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd during the COVID-19 pandemic. The decade from 2016 to 2026 saw the end of the nation’s first Black presidential administration, worldwide attention on the extrajudicial killings of unarmed Black men, women, and youth, and emergent solutions to develop necessary social service infrastructure as an alternative to incarceration. The decade has also been marked by uneven reform and shifting priorities that reshaped how crime, punishment, and community safety are understood in the United States. Impact of Mass Incarceration Overview Over the last 50 years, the United States has developed a uniquely punitive approach to crime that has resulted in one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. Contact with the nation’s criminal legal system exposes Black and marginalized residents to lasting harms, including the loss of liberty through incarceration, familial and community disruptions, reduced employment, housing insecurity, and heightened economic vulnerability.
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Extreme punishments applied over the last decade were built on late nineteenth and early twentieth century law enforcement responses that addressed family violence, alcohol, and certain criminalized drug use, among other community safety priorities. The onset of mass incarceration resulted from policy choices to increase the use and severity of prison sentences. Government officials in the United States relied on policing and the criminal legal system to respond to the civil unrest of the 1960s and the following rise in crime during the late 20th century. During that period, other Western democracies experienced rises in crime, but their differing policy responses did not result in the same punitive legal system as the United States, which dramatically surged its prison populations. In the U.S., public policies enacted in the 1970s through the 1990s in response to media attention and public pressure around crime resulted in stricter federal and state sentencing laws, expanded policing, and more imprisonment. From 1972 to 2009, the incarcerated population rose by nearly 700%, even as crime rates fell sharply after peaking in 1991. Sentencing laws ranged from habitual offender statutes like California’s notorious three strikes law to federal and state mandatory time-served requirements. Mandatory minimum sentences contributed to increases in prison admissions and the end of discretionary parole through determinate sentencing, characterized by fixed terms of imprisonment that cannot be altered by a parole board or other post-conviction decisions, resulting in substantially longer sentences. Factors Contributing to the Crime Decline Crime in the United States declined substantially since reaching its peak in the early 1990s, although crime did increase during the COVID-19 pandemic. Evidence has emerged pointing to multiple
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factors contributing to the crime decline: economic conditions, incapacitation through incarceration, changes in drug markets, and community policing. An analysis by the National Academy of Sciences found that the growth in incarceration rates may have reduced crime, but the magnitude of the crime reduction remains highly uncertain, and the evidence suggests it was unlikely to have been large. Persons directly impacted by mass incarceration and their supporters raised alarms about the impacts of the nation’s high incarceration rates. Reformers supported non-punitive crime reduction policies through community-based alternatives. For example, community violence interrupter initiatives, which work with trusted leaders and mentors in neighborhoods, are associated with measurable reductions in violent crime in U.S. cities by mediating conflicts before they escalate and connecting individuals at risk of arrest to support services. Evaluations of violence interruption models such as Cure Violence have found decreases in shootings and homicides in select neighborhoods.1 Meanwhile, the widespread adoption of crime-prevention technologies—including vehicle immobilizers—contributed to dramatic declines in auto theft. Similarly, alarm systems made many property offenses harder to commit. Additional social factors contributing to declines in crime include demographic shifts, particularly an aging population and fewer people in age cohorts that dominate arrests and prison admissions, given that older adults commit crimes at much lower rates than younger adults. Trends in Criminal Legal Reform Since 2016, policy changes have been adopted at the state and local level to address the scale of incarceration and racial disparities in the criminal legal system. Between 2016 and 2025, at least 45 states, Washington D.C., and Congress advanced some type of criminal legal reform. 2 At the federal level, Congress enacted sentencing reforms through the bipartisan First Step Act in 2018 to reduce the federal prison population. The Act included several provisions, including amending 18 U.S.C. § 3624(b) so that persons in federal prison can earn up
to 54 days of good time credit for every year of their imposed sentence, rather than for every year of their sentence served. The Act also reduced mandatory minimum sentences for persons with certain drug offenses by lowering penalties for those with repeat offenses and raising the threshold for prior convictions that trigger longer sentences. This reform also made the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 retroactive, allowing individuals sentenced for crack cocaine offenses to seek reduced sentences and expanded the federal “safety valve,” by giving judges more discretion to impose sentences below mandatory minimums for persons convicted of low-level, nonviolent drug offenses. At the state level, lawmakers have adopted significant sentencing reforms over the last decade. • In 2025, Delaware, Georgia, and Maryland enacted reforms expanding sentence review and release options for incarcerated people. Delaware broadened compassionate release eligibility, Georgia created pathways for sentencing relief and resentencing for certain survivors of abuse, and Maryland established a “second look” resentencing policy for eligible young adults while expanding medical and geriatric parole. • In 2021, Mississippi lawmakers adopted Senate Bill 2795, known as the Mississippi Earned Parole Eligibility Act. The measure expanded on previous reform efforts enacted in 2008 and 2013 to reduce time served requirements before parole eligibility for nonviolent and violent offenses, respectively. • In 2020, Washington, D.C. Council members passed the Second Look Amendment Act, allowing individuals who committed an offense before age 25 and served 15 years in prison to petition for a sentence modification. • In 2018, Florida voters approved Amendment 11 with 62% support, to allow sentencing reforms to be retroactive. The amendment repealed language from the state’s ‘Saving Clause’ in the constitution that blocked the legislature from retroactively applying reductions in criminal penalties to those previously sentenced. • In 2016, Oklahoma voters authorized sentencing reform changes by passing State Question 780. The measure reclassified criminal offenses such as drug possession and low-level property offenses to misdemeanors instead of felonies. In 2019, Oklahoma lawmakers
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enacted House Bill 1269 to retroactively apply the ballot measure. Following adoption, the state’s Pardon and Parole Board established an accelerated commutation process to qualify persons under the old law for early release. Challenging Racial Disparities in the Criminal Legal System Research has documented the deep racial disparities that exist throughout the criminal legal system, from the point of arrest to after incarceration, experiences that include barriers to voting, housing, and employment. Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of white Americans. Persistent underlying causes of racial inequality in the legal system include the cumulative disadvantage for Black residents who are more likely to be arrested, convicted, and receive more punitive criminal sanctions than white residents. The complex array of factors, like defunding of social services, deindustrialization, and structural inequality, intersect with arrest and sentencing policy to exacerbate racial disparities that may result from biased discretionary decision-making. Lawmakers and advocates have worked to enact reforms to address racial disparities in the criminal legal system. Sentencing reforms adopted to address racial disparity include: • In 2025, lawmakers in Arizona and Virginia adopted changes to address the crack-powder cocaine sentencing disparity. Racial disparities in crack and powder cocaine sentencing have historically resulted in significantly harsher penalties for crack cocaine offenses—disproportionately affecting Black defendants— despite the two substances being pharmacologically similar. • Sentencing enhancement zones disproportionately increase criminal penalties for offenses committed in densely populated urban areas because of the concentration of protected areas, such as schools or churches. In 2020, the Tennessee Legislature reduced drug sentencing enhancement zone boundaries to 500 feet and limited mandatory minimum sentences to cases where a defendant’s conduct was found to endanger children. • Racial impact statements are a tool for lawmakers to evaluate potential disparities of proposed sentencing legislation before adoption and implementation. Nine states—Iowa, Colorado,
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Connecticut, Florida, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, and Virginia—and Washington D.C., have enacted racial impact statement mechanisms, requiring or authorizing analysis of proposed legislation’s potential effects on racial and ethnic disparities. New Jersey lawmakers adopted racial impact statement legislation in 2017. Black Lives Matter: Social Interventions that Support Community Safety Research and policy solutions adopted since 2016 have documented the effectiveness of non-carceral approaches to community safety, echoing the Black Lives Matter movement’s call to redefine public safety beyond policing. Rather than relying primarily on jails and prisons, policymakers should invest in robust social services that address the underlying causes of crime and reduce the likelihood of future harm. Research supports the effectiveness of noncarceral solutions such as expanding health care access, greening public spaces in disinvested communities, and providing quality education and employment opportunities, which address structural disadvantages that contribute to crime. Health Care Access and Therapeutic Intervention Expanding access to emotional and physical health has been identified as a key strategy for diverting individuals from the carceral system. In alignment with Black Lives Matter’s focus on healing and equity, healthcare access has been found to reduce arrests for low-income adults, including Black men. Similarly, therapeutic interventions like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) have proven successful for justice-involved youth by providing tools for resilience rather than punishment. Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act has been associated not only with improved health coverage but also with meaningful reductions in contact with law enforcement, suggesting important spillover effects for community safety. Studies find that states adopting Medicaid expansion experienced declines in arrests— particularly for low-level, drug-related offenses—likely reflecting improved access to mental health care, substance-use treatment, and preventive services that reduce crisis-driven encounters with
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police. Healthcare access also expands the social support for marginalized Black men who are disproportionately uninsured, overpoliced, and exposed to criminal legal system contact. Medicaid expansion appears to function as upstream crime prevention, reducing reliance on punitive enforcement while expanding noncarceral social services.4 Therapeutic interventions through cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) have been shown to reduce police contact and justice system involvement by helping young people identify healthier behaviors. CBT programs delivered in community settings help youth develop skills for emotional regulation, problem‑solving, and impulse control. These skills are associated with lower recidivism and reduced law enforcement contact.5 Greening as a Community Safety Strategy In the 1980s and 1990s, the theory of broken windows policing took hold as a means of crime control. Cities prioritized police stops and arrests for minor offenses like vagrancy and vandalism. This reliance on law enforcement for addressing public order can lead to overpolicing and disproportionately target low-income Black communities, contributing to higher rates of arrest and jail admissions. Disorder in marginalized communities can be addressed outside of law enforcement. Greening interventions, such as planting trees, restoring vacant lots, and creating community gardens, have also been shown to improve safety and well-being in disinvested neighborhoods. Research shows that greening not only enhances aesthetic appeal and environmental quality but also reduces crime by fostering community cohesion, increasing informal social surveillance, and promoting regular, positive use of public spaces. In neighborhoods where vacant lots are transformed into green spaces, studies have documented reductions in gun violence, vandalism, and other forms of violent and property crime. Greening initiatives also encourage residents to spend more time outdoors, which strengthens social ties and collective efficacy— mutual trust and the shared interest of residents in intervening for the common good—both of which are associated with lower rates of
criminal activity. By creating safer, more inviting public spaces, these interventions provide a preventive approach to community safety that complements law enforcement efforts while simultaneously improving mental health, physical activity, and neighborhood pride. 6 Community Investment and Informal Community Control Strengthening community infrastructure is central to the Black Lives Matter demand for reinvestment in Black futures. Maintaining and improving housing, public spaces, schools, and recreational facilities signals that a neighborhood is valued and cared for, fostering pride and encouraging residents to actively participate in community care. Informal community control is defined as residents’ willingness to intervene in minor disputes and support prosocial norms without relying on law enforcement. Research shows that neighborhoods with strong informal social control and visible community maintenance experience lower crime rates, as residents collectively enforce community norms as a safety strategy.7 Together, these approaches create environments where social cohesion, mutual trust, and shared responsibility reduce opportunities for criminal activity, strengthen perceptions of community safety, and support well-being. By empowering residents and strengthening local infrastructure, community investment and informal control provide preventive, sustainable strategies for reducing crime while building stronger, more resilient neighborhoods. Targeted Education and Employment Programs Over the last decade, there has been a growing awareness that targeted education and employment programs are essential to the Black Lives Matter vision that community safety can result from expanding economic opportunities, enhancing skills, and reducing the socioeconomic factors often associated with legal system contact. Workforce development and job training interventions, especially for youth and formerly incarcerated workers, have been found to reduce arrests by increasing employment prospects, providing meaningful work opportunities, and fostering stable daily routines. For example, research shows that youth employment, skills training, and job
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training decrease the likelihood of future arrests, in part by improving earnings and connecting workers from marginalized communities to positive peer networks. Likewise, vocational and educational programs have been linked with lower recidivism and increased post‑release employment. By strengthening social networks for marginalized residents and providing structured pathways to livingwage and stable employment, these programs support long‑term crime-reduction strategies. Conclusion: Expanding Community Safety to Affirm Black Life In 2016, the author argued that persons with convictions deserve a future in the era of Black Lives Matter politics and that the underlying structural issues that lead to crime require solutions beyond arrests and incarceration. Over the last decade, some jurisdictions have taken steps to scale back punitive sentencing policies, given evidence of their harms. The nation’s prison population peaked in 2009 and declined by 25% between 2009 and 2021. As of 2022, prison population reductions also contributed to 21 states closing or partially closing at least one correctional facility, in some cases resulting in prison repurposing, with shuttered prisons converted for community or commercial use.10 This trend should continue. Policy recommendations to support community-based infrastructure and structural reform that include: • Challenge Mass Incarceration through Sentencing Reform: To scale back the nation’s prison population, lawmakers should prioritize reforms that restore judicial discretion and acknowledge the potential for rehabilitation. Reforms include repealing mandatory minimums and adopting and implementing “Second Look” policies, which provide for retroactive judicial review of long-term sentences after a set period, such as 10 or 15 years. • Fund Social Service Infrastructure: Lawmakers should direct increased funding to social service infrastructure that promotes collective safety and well-being. Policymakers should prioritize a holistic infrastructure that integrates universal access to health and mental health care, permanent supportive housing, and robust educational supports for youth, alongside greening public spaces, to address the structural drivers of crime. • Formalize Conversion of Correctional Facilities to Community
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Assets: Lawmakers and community stakeholders should leverage existing administrative authority to facilitate the transition of closed prisons and jails into community-centered resources. The federal government’s recent disinvestment in health and other social services risks moving the country in the wrong direction by prioritizing punitive responses over community-based interventions proven to prevent crime and strengthen public safety. State and federal lawmakers must reverse this trajectory by fully supporting non-carceral solutions that address the structural conditions driving harm. Policies that expand social service infrastructure outside the criminal legal system can redirect U.S. public policy toward a more equitable future that prioritizes collective safety and well-being. Nicole D. Porter manages The Sentencing Project’s state and local advocacy efforts on sentencing reform, voting rights, and confronting racial disparities in the criminal legal system. Named a “New Civil Rights Leader” by Essence Magazine for her work to challenge mass incarceration, Porter’s advocacy and findings have supported criminal legal reforms in several states including Kentucky, Maryland Missouri, California, Texas and the District of Columbia. Porter’s areas of expertise include research and grassroots support around challenging racial disparities, felony disenfranchisement, in addition to prison closures and prison reuse. References 1. Webster, D. W., Tilchin, C. G., & Doucette, M. L. (2023). Estimating the effects of Safe Streets Baltimore on gun violence [Report]. Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. https:// publichealth.jhu.edu/sites/default/files/2023-10/estimating-theeffects-of-safe-streets-baltimore-on-gun-violence-july-2023.pdf 2. The Sentencing Project. (2016–2025). Top trends in state criminal justice reform [Annual reports series]. The Sentencing Project. 3. Morrissey, J. P., Meyer, P. S., Cuddeback, G. S., & Domino, M. E. (2016). Medicaid enrollment and mental health service use following release from jail. Psychiatric Services, 67(8), 829–835. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.201400300 and National Institute
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on Drug Abuse. (n.d.). Justice system research. National Institutes of Health. https://nida.nih.gov/research/nida-research-programsactivities/justice-system-research 4. Simes, J. T., & Jahn, J. L. (2022). The consequences of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act for police arrests. PLOS ONE, 17(1), Article e0261512. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0261512 5. Clark, P. M. (2011). Cognitive‑behavioral therapy: An evidence‑based intervention for offenders. National Institute of Justice and Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. (n.d.). Mental health: The influence of mental health on juvenile justice system involvement. U.S. Department of Justice. 6. Zhang, X. (2025). Greener the safer? Effects of urban green space on community safety and perception of safety. Journal of Criminal Justice, 97, Article 102372. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jcrimjus.2025.102372 and Sampson, R. J., Raudenbush, S. W., & Earls, F. (1997). Neighborhoods and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efficacy. Science, 277(5328), 918–924. https:// doi.org/10.1126/science.277.5328.918 7. Higgins, B. R., & Hunt, J. (2016, May 1). Collective efficacy: Taking action to improve neighborhoods. NIJ Journal. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs. https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/ articles/ 8. Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. (2025). Economic focus: Targeted workforce development and public safety. Econ Focus, (Q1–Q2). https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/ econ_focus/2025/q1-q2_feature2 9. Mueller, D., & Kluckow, R. (2023). Prisoners in 2023 – Statistical tables. Bureau of Justice Statistics. 10. Porter, N. D., & Lyons, A. (2022, August 11). Repurposing correctional facilities to strengthen communities. The Sentencing Project. https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/repurposingcorrectional-facilities-to-strengthen-communities/
Strengthening community infrastructure is central to the Black Lives Matter demand for reinvestment in Black futures.
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What Happens When You Erase a Gang Database? Dr. Sandhya Kajeepeta Many state and local law enforcement agencies maintain gang databases, digital intelligence systems that store information about people suspected to be in an organized criminal group. Proponents of gang databases argue that they are tools of precision policing crucial for crime prevention, while opponents argue that they are tools of racial profiling used to surveil, harass, and criminalize Black children and young adults. Indeed, gang databases across the country dramatically overrepresent Black boys and young men relative to their share of the population. In response to community concerns about the racialized harm of gang databases, city officials are increasingly considering eliminating their gang databases. In this article, the Thurgood Marshall Institute presents a quantitative analysis demonstrating that eliminating gang databases in Portland, Oregon, and Chicago, Illinois, was not associated with statistically significant increases in reported crime in either city and, in fact, was associated with some statistically significant declines in crime trends. These findings suggest that the elimination of gang databases in these two cities was not followed by negative public safety consequences, running counter to concerns that eliminating gang databases will result in spikes in crime. Modern technology with historical roots Although gang databases have the veneer of novel, futuristic police technology, they can be thought of as modern-day iterations of historic forms of racially discriminatory policing. Gang databases are used to profile and criminalize Black people in much the same way as policies of the past, from the post-Civil War “Black Codes” to more recent stop-and-frisk policies, now with the aid of digital technology. These policies are all linked by a shared history of racialized social control through the application of vague criteria and the labeling of Black people as deviant and dangerous.
empowered police to socially control those deemed undesirable, out of place, or dangerous, based on vague infractions such as vagrancy and loitering. These laws criminalized such actions as “wandering or strolling about in idleness” (p. 105), or, in other words, existing freely in public space.1 As their colloquial name suggests, Black Codes were disproportionately weaponized against newly freed Black people as a new means of racialized social control in the wake of abolition.1 More than one hundred years later, criminal legal policies still empower police to use their discretion to arbitrarily surveil, stop, and harass Black people. Under stop-and-frisk policies, police flood neighborhoods deemed “high crime” and stop people based on suspicion of criminal activity. Racial demographic data on police stops have demonstrated that stop-and-frisk policies result in a disproportionate rate of stops of Black people, leading some to refer to stop-and-frisk as a racial dragnet. 2 In many ways, gang databases are stop-and-frisk 2.0 – or digital racial dragnets. In fact, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) dramatically expanded its gang database directly following a 2013 court decision in which a federal judge ruled that the NYPD’s stopand-frisk practices were unconstitutional and racially discriminatory, demonstrating how gang databases have been used to replace and expand stop-and-frisk. While novel in their use of technology, gang databases are a natural outgrowth of historic forms of racialized police profiling and surveillance. Current threats posed by gang databases Gang databases vary in their specifics across the country, but several common themes among them raise important civil rights concerns. First, entry into a gang database is not based on criminal activity, but rather on vague, innocuous criteria such as the clothes a person wears, the places they live, or the places they hang out.3 This gives police substantial discretion in who they add to a gang database. Second, gang databases are typically shrouded in secrecy
After the end of slavery, criminal laws referred to as Black Codes 166
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and lack oversight, leading to frequent erroneous entries. People are often unaware that they have been added to a gang database and have little recourse to contest their inclusion. Third, gang databases are characterized by stark racial disparities due to the profiling and targeting of Black boys and young men. For example, 70% of people on the NYPD gang database are Black, 98% are male, and half are under 23 years of age.3 In Boston, Black people represent one-fourth of the city’s population, but reports suggest that two-thirds of people on the city’s gang database are Black.4 The District of Columbia’s gang database includes only one entry of a White person.5 The subjective, secretive, and racialized nature of gang databases poses serious threats to civil rights and public safety, especially for Black communities. Inclusion on a gang database can result in intensive police surveillance and harassment, as well as harsher criminal legal penalties such as elevated charges, higher bail, and more severe sentences. Additionally, federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are increasingly relying on state and local gang database entries for federal enforcement actions, such as arrests, deportations, and inclusion on the terrorist watchlist.6 People may face deportation based on entry in a local gang database, which itself could be based on nothing more than a police officer’s assertion. Given these harms and pressure from community members and advocates, city officials are increasingly considering the policy intervention of eliminating their gang databases. Because gang database proponents argue they are necessary for crime prevention
and reduction, the Thurgood Marshall Institute (TMI) analyzed crime rates in Portland and Chicago after these two cities eliminated their gang databases. Analyzing the data The Thurgood Marshall Institute employed a statistical method called interrupted time series analysis, a research design that tests for differences before and after a one-time intervention while accounting for trends prior to the intervention. In this case, the intervention was the elimination of a city’s gang database. The key assumptions of this approach are: 1) if the database had not been eliminated, trends in crime rates would have continued unchanged; and 2) there were no other interventions that occurred at the same time that would have impacted crime trends. For both cities, the Thurgood Marshall Institute analyzed trends in total crime incidents, violent crime incidents, and property crime incidents reported to police. Portland, Oregon In September 2017, the Portland Police Bureau announced it would purge and shut down its gang database and end the practice of designating people as gang members, effective October 15, 2017, after sustained concerns raised by community members. Reports suggest that 64% of people on the database were Black compared with just 7.5% of the city’s population.7 To determine whether eliminating the Portland gang database changed reported crime rates, we analyzed daily crime data from October 15, 2015 (two years prior) through October 15, 2019 (two years after). The results are presented in Table 1.
Table 1. Interrupted time series analysis results for total, violence, and property crime in Portland, Oregon (October 2015 – October 2019) Total crime
Violent crime
Property crime
Estimate
p
Estimate
p
Estimate
p
Change in intercept (immediate change)
-0.698
0.861
-0.802
0.473
0.752
0.843
Change in slope (trend change)
-0.033
<0.001
-0.001
0.584
-0.031
<0.001
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The results show that eliminating the Portland gang database was not associated with any statistically significant immediate changes (at the α=0.05 threshold for statistical significance) in the total number of crime, violent crime, or property crime incidents from October 15, 2015, through October 15, 2018. This is expected as it is unlikely that eliminating the database would have resulted in an immediate overnight change in reported crime. The results also show that eliminating the Portland gang database was not associated with a statistically significant change in the trend in violent crime incidents. The number of violent crime incidents increased over this period, but the upward trend began at least two years prior to the database’s elimination and remained consistent throughout the analytic period.
Chicago, Illinois On September 7, 2023, after years of organizing led by the Erase the Gang Database Coalition, Chicago’s Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability voted unanimously to abolish the city’s gang database and scrap the development of a new database. An estimated 75% of people on the gang database were Black compared with about 29% of the city’s population.8 To analyze whether eliminating the Chicago gang database resulted in any changes in reported crime rates, TMI analyzed daily crime data from September 7, 2021 (two years prior) through September 7, 2025 (two years after). The results indicate that eliminating the Chicago gang database was associated with a statistically significant decrease in total crime and property crime incidents (immediate and trend changes). From September 2021 to September 2023 (when the database was eliminated), reported crime in Chicago had been trending upward. After the database was eliminated, total and property crime began to trend downward. With respect to violent crime, the elimination of the Chicago gang database was associated with a smaller, but still statistically significant, decrease in the violent crime trend. Similar
The two statistically significant findings were that eliminating the Portland gang database was followed by a statistically significant downward trend in the number of total crime incidents and property crime incidents. While we cannot infer from these findings whether eliminating the gang database caused a decline in total and property crime, the findings demonstrate that the elimination of the database was followed by a decrease, not an increase, in total and property crime trends in Portland.
Table 1. Interrupted time series analysis results for total, violence, and property crime in Chicago, Illinois (September 2021 – September 2025) Total crime
Violent crime
Property crime
Estimate
p
Estimate
p
Estimate
p
Change in intercept (immediate change)
-43.005
0.006
-2.418
0.687
-39.452
<0.001
Change in slope (trend change)
-0.351
<0.001
-0.043
0.003
-0.291
<0.001
Data were obtained from the Portland Police Bureau. The analysis accounts for autocorrelation (i.e., time series datapoints tend to be correlated with one another) using an autoregressive correlation structure.
Data were obtained from the Chicago Data Portal. The analysis accounts for autocorrelation (i.e., time series datapoints tend to be correlated with one another) using an autoregressive correlation structure.
i
iii
ii
iv
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to the results from Portland, these findings do not indicate that the elimination of the gang database caused the downward trends in total, violent, and property crime. However, they provide evidence that the elimination of the database was followed by a decrease, not an increase, in total, violent, and property crime in Chicago. Figures 1 and 2 present the total, violent, and property crime time series data for Portland (Figure 1) and Chicago (Figure 2) with the model-predicted trend lines plotted over the crime data. Figure 1. Interrupted time series analysis of crime trends in Portland, Oregon, before and after the elimination of the city’s gang database (October 15, 2015 – October 15, 2019) Total crime
Violent crime
Property crime
The black lines represent daily rates of reported crime incidents, and the red lines represent the modelpredicted trend lines. Figure 2. Interrupted time series analysis of crime trends in Chicago, Illinois, before and after the elimination of the city’s gang database (September 7, 2021 – September 7, 2025) Total crime
Violent crime
Property crime
The black lines represent daily rates of reported crime incidents, and the red lines represent the modelpredicted trend lines.
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Interpreting the findings Together, the findings from the interrupted time series analyses suggest that the elimination of the Portland gang database was associated with no statistically significant change in violent crime and was associated with statistically significant declines in property and total crime trends. In Chicago, the elimination of the city’s gang database was associated with statistically significant declines in total, violent, and property crime trends. There are study limitations to consider when interpreting these findings. First, this is an observational analysis; thus, as mentioned above, we cannot infer that eliminating gang databases caused crime trends to decline in these two cities. There may have been other unmeasured factors that occurred at or around the same time as the database elimination, and also impacted crime trends. Additionally, due to limited data availability, we were unable to assess the impact of eliminating the gang databases on specific crime categories, such as shootings. However, it is likely that if the elimination of the gang database had a strong effect on the number of shooting incidents, this effect would be detected in the analysis of violent crime trends. While we cannot attribute the results to the causal effect of eliminating the gang databases, it is plausible that the policy intervention of eliminating gang databases has potential crime prevention benefits. Racially discriminatory police surveillance, profiling, and harassment can have criminogenic effects, especially for children and young adults.9 When police treat Black children as criminals and dangerous from a young age, it threatens their safety as well as their social ties and sense of belonging in society. In this way, gang databases may pose a threat to public safety, and it is therefore plausible that their elimination could result in public safety benefits. This should be explored further in future research. Still, the present findings provide important policy insights. Namely, under the assumption that crime trends would have remained unchanged if the databases had not been eliminated, the findings show that eliminating gang databases in these two cities was not associated with an increase in reported crime, as might have been expected if the databases were effective crime prevention tools. These findings run counter to claims that the policy intervention of
eliminating gang databases will result in spikes in crime. Future implications Gang databases across the country are being used to surveil and criminalize Black boys and young men who are simply living their lives, based primarily on law enforcement’s use of subjective, broad, and racialized notions of what constitutes a “gang.” Portland and Chicago enacted a policy intervention to end this practice, and the findings presented here suggest that this policy intervention had no discernible negative impacts on crime and safety and may have even been associated with positive impacts on safety. Other cities that are considering the policy intervention of eliminating their own gang database due to concerns of racial discrimination and additional civil rights concerns can learn from these results. For example, the New York City Council is currently considering a bill that would eliminate the NYPD gang database and prohibit any new gang databases from taking its place. The City Council has an opportunity to follow the path charted by policymakers in Chicago and Portland. It is time for elected leaders across the country to follow the evidence, listen to community members, defend the rights of Black residents, and challenge the use of racially discriminatory gang databases. Cities should instead invest in non-discriminatory, evidence-based strategies that prevent community violence, such as place-based interventions that remediate vacant land and abandoned buildings, community-based violence interruption programs, and summer youth employment programs.10 Additionally, federal agencies’ continued reliance on local gang database entries poses a serious threat to civil rights and due process, especially given the common errors and racialized stereotypes embedded within gang databases. From 2009 to 2018, before the Chicago Police Department’s gang database was eliminated, federal immigration authorities searched the database at least 32,000 times.6 In one case, ICE used a database entry to arrest a man who Chicago officials later admitted had been mistakenly added to the city’s database. Everyone deserves to live in neighborhoods that are free from
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violence, including police violence. To achieve this goal, it is imperative that cities invest in non-discriminatory strategies that advance public safety, rather than employing discriminatory and counterproductive tactics that criminalize Black children and young adults, which can cause lifelong harm. Dr. Sandhya Kajeepeta is a Senior Researcher and Statistician at the Legal Defense Fund’s Thurgood Marshall Institute. Her research focuses on the public health consequences of structural racism, criminalization, violence, and housing insecurity. Dr. Kajeepeta holds a PhD in epidemiology from Columbia University, a MS in epidemiology from Harvard University, and a BS in mathematics from the University of Michigan. Her research and writing have been featured in the American Journal of Public Health, Lancet Public Health, the New York Times, Rolling Stone magazine, and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
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Browne-Marshall, G. J. (2013). Stop and Frisk: From SlaveCatchers to NYPD, A Legal Commentary. Gelman, A., Fagan, J., & Kiss, A. (2007). An Analysis of the New York City Police Department’s “Stop-and-Frisk” Policy in the Context of Claims of Racial Bias. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 102(479), 813–823. https://doi. org/10.1198/016214506000001040 Strauber, J., & Barrett, J. (2023). An Investigation into NYPD’s Criminal Group Database. Department of Investigation’s Office of the Inspector General for the New York City Police Department. Marcelo, P. (2019, July 30). Gang database made up mostly of young black, Latino men. AP News. https://apnews.com/ article/dd5643e358c3456dbe14c16ade03711d Washington Lawyers’ Committee. (2024). Targeted, Labeled, Criminalized: Early Findings on the District of Columbia’s Gang Database
6. Gelardi, C. (2025, July). State Cops Quietly Tag Thousands as Gang Members—And Feed Their Names to ICE. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2025/07/22/ice-gang-databasetrump-deportations/ 7. Brosseau, C. (2016, November 4). Who’s on Portland’s gang list? The Oregonian. https://www.oregonlive.com/ portland/2016/11/at_least_i_was_on_some_kind_of.html 8. Policing in Chicago Research Group at the University of Illinois at Chicago. (2017). Chicago Gang Database: Facts and Figures. Google Docs. Retrieved March 16, 2026, from https:// docs.google.com/document/d/1Ft_41wtKLU2NVKGSiN2h MHFmHaSRkIS3rNatZVvAnOk/edit?tab=t.0&usp=embed_ facebook 9. Burt, C. H., Lei, M. K., & Simons, R. L. (2017). Racial discrimination, racial socialization, and crime over time: A social schematic theory model. Criminology: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 55(4), 938–979. https://doi.org/10.1111/17459125.12164 10. Hohl, B. C., Kondo, M. C., Kajeepeta, S., MacDonald, J. M., Theall, K. P., Zimmerman, M. A., & Branas, C. C. (2019). Creating Safe And Healthy Neighborhoods With Place-Based Violence Interventions. Health Affairs (Project Hope), 38(10), 1687– 1694. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2019.00707Black Women and AI: Friend or Foe?
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