End Police Associations (EPA)
POLICE ASSOCIATIONS ARE NOT REAL UNIONS
Unions are vital. They ensure fair wages and collective bargaining for millions of people. Unions build solidarity among working class people. Unions move us forward into a future grounded in equity and justice. We are 100% for unions.
But here’s the deal: police associations provide protections to cops who perpetuate violence, racism and white supremacy. Police associations claim to protect police in support of public safety, but the statistics say the opposite. The police are one of the leading causes of death for Black people.
Rather than fight for fair wages and working conditions, police associations use collective bargaining to negotiate for the right to kill and abuse our communities with impunity.
We can’t create safe communities when police are allowed to kill and abuse their power without consequence. That starts with real labor unions removing cops from the House of Labor.
"BLM Grassroots Police Killings Dashboard" reflects 22 years of police killings in the United States.
(This dashboard is for the purpose of tracking and researching fatal police killings.This dataset does not include off-duty, in-custody, and other police-related killings.)
On average, police in the United States shoot and kill over 1000 people annually. Following the 2014 killing of Michael Brown, an investigation by the Washington Post revealed FBI data on fatal police shootings was underreported by more than 50%. In 2021, still only one-third of these incidents were included in the FBI database. Under reporting is primarily due to the lack of mandatory reporting by local police departments and discrepancies over reporting responsibilities with the updated FBI system.” – @somethingBlackmade
BLM Grassroots: "PRE/POST TITLE 42 U.S.C. 14141 (2019)"
POLICE KILLINGS HAVE BEEN UNDERREPORTED FOR DECADES LEAVING THE SCOPE OF POLICE VIOLENCE VASTLY UNDERESTIMATED
“It is well known that black citizens have been the subject of disproportionate contact with police (Tonry, 2006). This paper explores contemporary policing, police discretion, and the use of lethal force conducting a spatial and temporal analysis of census tract level data of 64 fatal encounters with the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) from 2000-2017. This study found most incidences of lethal force occurred in cumulatively disadvantaged neighborhoods and NOPD disproportionately used lethal force against black males. The goal of this project is to influence public policy surrounding police use of force incidences.” – Terry J. Wilson, II
BLM Grassroots: "Stop Cop Cities" Map
