Happy to share a recent publication I wrote with colleagues for the Journal of Community Safety and Well-Being, a Canadian-based international journal founded on the principles of multi-sector collaboration. The piece details our current project to document practical examples from jurisdictions across the world of alternative approaches to solving entrenched social challenges and problems without relying upon a punitive and enforcement-led policing model
America’s recovery from COVID must include jails & prisons
s America struggles to claw its way out of the prolonged pandemic and looks to the incoming Biden Administration for a light in the tunnel, this light must shine on the crisis raging across American prisons, jails, and detention centers.
“What does the construction of a toilet in a favela teach us about the failure of the war on drugs?”
(Coverage of our article on harm reduction & right to the city in VICE) Excited to see lengthy coverage in VICE of my recent journal article, A Right to the City? Harm Reduction as Urban Community Development and Social Inclusion, in MIT's Projections. You can find the article (in Spanish) here. It was published on …
Police and Harm Reduction
Sharing the 2018 guidance document I wrote for law enforcement personnel around the world on practical steps they can take to advance public safety, public health, and public confidence, particularly in relation to drug enforcement. As overdose deaths, police violence, and public protests all continue to soar, this guidance has become even more important. There are other options to keep communities healthy and safe.
A Right to the City? Harm Reduction as Urban Community Development and Social Inclusion
In cities across Latin America, community-based harm reduction and drug policy activists are ushering in a new, broader understanding of harm reduction for drug use, which they place within a banner of a “right to the city.”
On Kyle Rittenhouse’s attempted surrender, the police’s disregard, & what this reveals about anti-Black racism, policing, and public safety.
Some thoughts after after watching the videos of Kyle Rittenhouse try to turn himself in to police & the police drive right by him. And what this reveals about the other side of anti-Black racism in policing and how this further undermines our safety. In the video, Kyle walks toward multiple vehicles and they zoom …
“Looting as Pathology of Order.” The ways in which looting is invoked to recreate oppressive and racialized forms of social control & order.
In 2011 my graduate thesis was approved & published. It focused on an analysis of looting as an analytical lens to understand how social order is constructed & enforced through anti-Black racial ideologies and discourses, private property norms, and use of exceptional force by the state.
Police face backlash over virus rules. Enter ‘violence interrupters’.
Alternatives to police responses to community needs & conflicts are needed now more than ever.
But let us not stop with Covid. These & other approaches need to be invested in and prioritized now and in the future.
“Mexico Is Setting a Global Example on HIV Treatment” — But the president’s recent funding cuts to civil society organizations threaten to imperil their progress.
**Featured interview in this article by Anne Deslandes, published by Foreign Policy on November 13, 2019. Available here.** HIV in Mexico is once again a time bomb that will explode.” That’s how Aram Barra described the current trajectory of the immunodeficiency virus in the country at the International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Science in Mexico City …
Book Launch—City of Omens: A Search for the Missing Women of the Borderlands – July 11 NYC
I am very happy to host this book launch and moderate the subsequent discussion with Dan Werb, Maia Szalavitz, and Dr. Patty Gonzalez-Zuñiga, and featuring Dan's new book City of Omens: A Search for the Missing Women of the Borderlands. Having visited and supported harm reduction and community safety work in Tijuana for the past several …