Resources

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.