Introduction
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In June 2020, President Obama and My Brother’s Keeper Alliance (MBK Alliance) challenged mayors and city leaders to amplify their communities’ calls for policing reform and accountability. More than 300 local jurisdictions have taken the Reimagining Policing Pledge to review and reform use-of-force policies and combat systemic racism within law enforcement. This report documents the pledge’s inspiration, shares highlights of the participating cities’ progress, and offers next steps for building on the momentum of the pledge.
Anguish and Action: The Backdrop of 2020
2020 was a year that challenged and disturbed many people’s assumptions about American institutions. The COVID-19 pandemic took hold of the country in the same year that also saw law enforcement officers shoot and kill nearly 1,000 people (Opens in a new tab), a statistic that had been repeated for each of the previous four years (Opens in a new tab). The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Tyalor, Rayshard Brooks, and too many others, challenge the country in another way: they are too familiar. To add to the challenge, officials who were sworn to protect, serve, and provide safety were responsible for their deaths.
There are hundreds of thousands of police officers and law enforcement agents in the United States, spread across as many as 17,000 agencies. (Opens in a new tab) These agencies are the overburdened center of the nation’s public safety infrastructure.
Law enforcement agents are relied on to respond to emergencies, protect and defend public spaces, enforce the criminal code, address homelessness, supervise parking and transportation, serve evictions, support disaster response, provide protection, address substance use, enforce school discipline, and more.
Turning anguish into action means confronting and inspecting these hard truths. We know that too many interactions between law enforcement and the public result in harm. We also know that law enforcement has too large of a footprint in public safety and in the daily lives of Black people in otherwise underserved communities. We believe there is an opportunity for city leaders to join with community members in this moment to forever reshape how law enforcement shows up and takes action to make our communities safer.
“ It's imperative that governments at the federal, state, and local levels come up with concrete solutions for the problems we have been dealing with for far too long. Just because we’ve done it one way forever doesn’t mean we need to continue to do it a certain way in the future. And because young people changed the trajectory of the debate this summer, we're seeing meaningful change across the country around reimagining public safety. Now is the time to stay committed and vigilant in our journey toward justice.”
–Eric Holder Jr., Former Attorney General
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