Videos

In this conversation with guest experts on issues of race, public health and Wall Street accountability, our panelists discuss the roots of systemic racism hidden in the pharmaceutical industry, the likely barriers to access to COVID-19 vaccines and medicines and the empty promises of pharmaceutical companies to mitigate the harm of their own practices, and the devastating costs to Black and Brown people. After watching the video, read ACRE's latest report - “Poi$on: How Big Pharma Price Gouging Kills Black and Brown Folks.” Racism makes simply being Black and Brown in the U.S. a pre-existing condition and price-gouging by pharmaceutical companies is one of the root causes of the health inequities our communities face.The research and analysis is a tool for advocates to hold Big Pharma accountable for the plunder of wealth and health from Black, Brown, Indigenous and other people of color, enriching wealthy white individuals and institutions. This report is dedicated to leader, mother and grandmother Gina Owens and her late daughter Tiffany Owens, who should still be here today, and who we are honored to fight alongside.

Cops and Capitalism Summer Webinar Series How to Talk About Defunding the Police Defund the Police! What was once a third rail has become a rallying cry as the grassroots movement demands that we publicly contend with the fact that police do not keep us safe. This webinar grounds participants on the history of policing, digs into the demand to defund the police and how to organize within community and advocate with leaders. Panelists also shared real-time organizing examples happening on the ground. Panelists: Tracey Corder, Deputy Campaign Director, ACRE Jasson Perez, Senior Research Analyst, ACRE Alyx Goodwin, Senior Organizer, ACRE Rick Banks, Political Director, Black Leaders Organizing Communities (BLOC)

On this webinar, we will explore how billionaires and corporations like Wells Fargo, Amazon, and Target use police foundations to fund and prop up the police. Police foundations--nonprofits that fundraise money from wealthy donors and corporations for local police departments--help maintain the racist policing status quo. We’ll discuss how directly pressuring corporations to cut ties with police foundations can strengthen fights to defund the police and invest in Black and Brown communities, as well as ensure that police departments’ public funding is not replaced by similarly enormous private funding. Participants will learn how to research which corporations support their local police foundations and hear examples of demands activists are making around corporations and police foundations in local campaigns. The Cops & Capitalism Summer Webinar Series is a collaboration between ACRE and Little Sis to provide tools to organizers and community members that will help them interrogate and expose the connections between policing, the finance industry, and corporations in their cities. Original date: 7/29/2020

An Instagram Live conversation between Maurice BP-Weeks, Co-Executive Director of ACRE and Dr. Lachelle Dawn MD. They discuss Covid, race, and Big Pharma and dive into why profit/capitalism has no place in medicine-- especially during a pandemic, and tease a new ACRE report that will be released soon. Original date: 7/22/2020

People around the U.S. are demanding that cities defund their local police departments. This webinar encourages us to take that demand one step further, and highlights the relationships between corporations and policing. We know that cutting the police budget is a first step towards the world we want to see but in order to fully fund our communities and invest in the things we need we must also redirect funding from the institutions that support policing. The 2nd webinar in the series.

Police Brutality Bonds: How Wall Street Profits From Police Misconduct. This webinar explores ACRE’s groundbreaking research on cities’ use of Police Brutality Bonds, the bonds issued to pay for police brutality settlements. Police brutality bonds generate fees for Wall Street firms like Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, and interest payments for investors, allowing them to literally profit from police violence. Borrowing can also drastically increase the costs of police violence, but these costs are not reflected in the official police budget. The webinar covers how ACRE did the research for the report, how bonds work, some of ACRE's data sources and what other policing costs might be hiding in city budgets.