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Community Control

Cops Incorporate Private Cameras Into Their Surveillance Networks

May 16, 2023 Beryl Lipton, Electronic Frontier Foundation. , , , ,
Police have their sights set on every surveillance camera in every business, on every porch, in all the cities and counties of the country. Grocery store trips, walks down the street, and otherwise minding your own business when outside your home could soon come under the ever-present eye of the government. In a quiet but rapid expansion of law enforcement surveillance, U.S. cities are buying and promoting products from Georgia-based company Fusus in order to access on-demand, live video from public and private camera networks. The company sells police a cloud-based platform for creating real-time crime centers and a streamlined way for officers to interface with their various surveillance streams, including predictive policing, gunshot detection, license plate readers, and drones.

Activists Occupy Minneapolis’ Roof Depot Site To Stay Demolition

February 22, 2023 Susan Du, Star Tribune. , , ,
Minneapolis - East Phillips neighborhood activists, including residents of the Little Earth of United Tribes housing complex for Native Americans, snipped the fence barring public access to a city-owned vacant building Tuesday morning and set up more than a dozen tents. But by late evening, police had swarmed the site, clearing the camp, fortifying the fence and arresting at least two of the activists. The activists were protesting plans to raze the former Roof Depot warehouse and build a new Public Works facility for water maintenance staff, their equipment and vehicles that include a new diesel fuel station and roughly 800 parking spaces.

How To Build A Better Bike-Share Program

February 20, 2023 Gabriela Aoun Angueira, Next City. , , , ,
New Orleans, Louisiana - Geoff Coats still remembers how he felt when, in May 2020, all 1,350 bicycles in New Orleans’s popular bike-share program vanished. “It was horrible,” says Coats, who managed the service, called Blue Bikes, for its owner, Uber. “For a lot of people, it was a little bit of PTSD from Hurricane Katrina, when the national chains could have reopened weeks after the storm but stayed away. It felt like, once again, when we’re down, we get kicked.” Blue Bikes, which New Orleans launched in 2017 to reduce emissions and offer reliable transportation to low-income residents, was flourishing before COVID shut down the city.

Chicago: Community Commission Stops Implementation Of Gang Database

January 30, 2023 Kobi Guillory, Fight Back News. , , ,
Chicago, Illinois - 60 people observed the latest meeting of the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability (CCPSA), January 26 at Olive Harvey College. The agenda included a proposed policy stopping the Chicago Police Department from creating a new gang database; selecting members for the Non-citizens Advisory Council established by the Empowering Communities for Public Safety ordinance; and setting goals for the Chicago PD, the Police Board, and the Civilian Office of Police Accountability. A dozen Police District Council candidates were in attendance. Two, Cherli Montgomery from the 7th District and Eric Russell from the 6th, spoke in the public comments section of the meeting. "This day is historic because someone voted early for District Councils today," Russell exclaimed.

Packed House For First Community Commission For Public Safety And Accountability Meeting

October 7, 2022 Kobi Guillory, Fightback News. , , ,
Chicago, IL - The first meeting of the Interim Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability (CCPSA) took place on the evening of Thursday September 29 at Malcolm X College. The meeting was attended by almost 200 people, most of who were members or supporters of the Empowering Communities for Public Safety (ECPS) coalition. The CCPSA introduced itself to the community, set up committees to do its work, and elected Anthony Driver and Oswaldo Gomez as its president and vice president. The public comments were filled with support for the CCPSA and demands that the mayor and city council give the Interim Commission the staff and budget necessary to transform the city’s public safety system.

Mapping The Police: Citizen Control Of The Security Forces In Buenos Aires

August 2, 2022 Arg Medios, People's Dispatch. , , ,
Last week, Ofelia Fernández, a member of the Buenos Aires legislature, announced on her social media the launch of a Map of the City’s Police, a collaborative webpage whose objective is to highlight, identify, and denounce situations of police violence within the territory of Buenos Aires; consequently allowing citizens to hold local security forces to account. This tool of citizen participation was designed in conjunction with a network of individuals and organizations. Those behind the initiative include Fernández, the representative from Frente Patria Grande alliance of the ruling Frente de Todos coalition, the Center for Legal and Social Studies, the Association Against Institutional Violence, The Shout from the South, and the magazine Crisis, who are all looking to construct novel strategies in the fight for human rights.

‘We Are Resilient People Who Fight For Each Other’

July 10, 2022 Eli Day and  Elnora Gavin, Convergence. , , ,
Elnora Gavin is a lifelong Benton Harbor resident and currently works as the West Michigan organizer with We the People Michigan. In this interview, she talks about her love for Benton Harbor, the challenges facing ordinary people there, and how they’re fighting to address everything from school closures to a disastrous human-made water crisis, and ultimately create a Benton Harbor where everyone flourishes. Eli Day, a Detroit-based writer and We the People Michigan communications director, interviewed Gavin for Convergence.

National Community Solar Programs Tracker

June 19, 2022 Maria McCoy and John Farrell , Institute For Local Self-Reliance. , ,
For decades, rooftop solar has allowed homeowners to generate their own renewable electricity — reducing their dependence on monopoly utilities and lowering their energy bills. However, solar rooftops are not a viable option for many people. What about those who can’t afford one? What about renters? Plus, only a portion of buildings have roofs that are large enough, facing the right direction, and sunny enough for solar. Community solar picks up where traditional rooftop solar fails. Through community solar, individuals subscribe to a portion of a nearby solar garden and get credits on their energy bill for the electricity it produces. This way, people without the financial means for solar on their rooftops and people who don’t own suitable rooftops can still reap the benefits of renewable energy.

How Citizens’ Assemblies Are Revitalizing Democracy

June 18, 2022 Phila Back, Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
Threats to our democracy are two-fold: a growth of support for authoritarianism by some and the withdrawal from and lack of engagement in political activity by others. Both trends stem from people’s loss of trust in their government and belief that officials don’t represent and serve them. Neither escalating partisan conflict nor escapism are solutions. However one fresh tactic is increasingly being used to establish broad dialogue, actively engage citizens in policy decisions and thereby revitalize democracy. Citizens’ assemblies have a long history, from ancient Athens and Rome to Rousseau’s Geneva and Vermont’s annual town halls. Rather than bringing all residents of a particular jurisdiction together, recently leaders have turned to selecting representative demographic samples of the population using the technique of “sortition.”

Minneapolis Fights For Community-Owned Sustainable Urban Farm

June 11, 2022 Fight Back News. , , ,
Minneapolis, Minnesota - 25 community members and organizers entered Mayor Jacob Frey’s office, June 6, to demand that the city stop stifling the East Phillips neighborhood’s efforts to build a community-owned sustainable urban farm on the site of an unused Roofing Depot plant in their neighborhood. The coalition was led by the Climate Justice Committee and the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute (EPNI). The site, which has decades’ worth of toxic arsenic waste in its soil and structures, is slated to be demolished by the city to accommodate more public works facilities. This would throw all of these toxins into the air of a neighborhood that already has some of the worst air quality in Minnesota.

Los Angeles: One Step Closer To Community Control Over Sheriffs

June 2, 2022 Sol Marquez, Fight Back News. , , , ,
Los Angeles, California - In a historic move, the Civilian Oversight Commission voted in favor of a resolution to support a charter amendment giving the LA Board of Supervisors, the Civilian Oversight Commission (COC) and Office of Inspector General stronger oversight of the LA County Sheriff's Department. The vote also included the ability of the Board of Supervisors to remove a Sheriff for misconduct. Members of Centro CSO, impacted families of police killings, Black Lives Matter-LA, the ACLU, and Check the Sheriffs Coalition joined the meeting and spoke in favor of the Board of Supervisors placing a November 2022 ballot measure to win community control over the LA County Sheriff's Department and Sheriff Villanueva.

The Radical Roots Of Community Supported Agriculture

May 6, 2022 Jared Spears, Schumacher Center. , , ,
Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) is one of those rare ideas which combine transformative potential with an elegant simplicity. The CSA model of funding and sustaining locally-rooted agriculture has grown exponentially around the globe over the past four decades. Since the first formal CSA at Robyn Van En’s Indian Line Farm in South Egremont, Massachusetts in the early 1980s, CSAs have become a household fixture across the US and elsewhere; the most recent estimate by the USDA (2012) counted approximately 13,000 CSA farms in the US alone. The success of community-supported farming has coincided with rising demand for organic food since the late 1970s. But the model’s popularization has meant that, sometimes, CSAs can be misreprented as ‘just another way’ for consumers to purchase fresh, seasonal food.

This Mexican Town Kicked Out The Government Ten Years Ago

March 9, 2022 Nevermore. , , ,
After taking control of their community, the people of Cheran decided to ban political parties, abolish police, and establish a unique form of participatory democracy based on their indigenous Purepecha traditions. As anarchists, it was truly beautiful to be in a place where the people have seized control of their community from the state, and we were delighted to see that the community, by all appearances, is doing very well. Cheran has now been self-governing for over 10 years, and despite narco-violence being endemic in much of Michoacan, the autonomous town seems to be somewhat of an oasis in the midst of Mexico’s ongoing drug war. According to a 2017 article in the Los Angeles Times, there were ZERO murders or kidnappings reported in Cheran in the six years following the uprising.

Advocates Have Taken Air Pollution Monitoring Into Their Own Hands

December 17, 2021 Elena Shao, Inside Climate News. , , ,
San Francisco - Aliyah Dunn-Salahuddin still remembers riding the bus home from elementary school and smelling fresh-baked pastries and bread from the Parisian Bread Factory near Evans Street. She also remembers how quickly that scent would turn to one of sewage and smoke as the bus pulled closer to her home. Dunn-Salahuddin grew up two decades ago in Bayview-Hunters Point, a neighborhood in the southeastern corner of San Francisco, jutting into the bay. It’s under four square miles, just 8.5 percent of San Francisco’s land mass. This relatively small parcel of the city holds a disproportionate concentration of its toxic and polluting sites. For decades, state and local agencies have tried—halfheartedly, advocates say—to monitor and clean up the polluted air in Bayview.

We Need Public Control Of Our Energy Systems

September 4, 2021 Thomas M. Hanna, In These Times. , , ,
When natural disasters like Hurricane Ida occur, policymakers often wave away the damage and devastation as an unavoidable “act of god” (to use common insurance language). However, these types of response ignore deep structural deficiencies and inequities in the way critical infrastructure systems are often designed and operated in the United States. Specifically, they obscure the role of private, for-profit ownership and control of these services.
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