Writer, Organizer, Researcher, Network Weaver
BOOKS
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
This report, in conjunction with an accompanying curriculum for sexual assault service providers, is intended to contribute to breaking this silence, to summarize what we know about sexual violence by law enforcement officers, and to offer concrete steps toward prevention of police sexual violence and increased safety, support, and opportunities for healing for survivors. For more information and a more detailed analysis of police sexual violence, see Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color (excerpts available at invisiblenomorebook.com).
This update to our June 2020 #DefundPolice toolkit reflects victories won across the country, key strategies deployed, some lessons learned - including tricks, tensions, and roadblocks along the way - and key questions communities are contending with in campaigns to defund police as we look forward to 2021. It contains some excerpts from the original toolkit, but is not intended as a substitute. Our hope is that this report will be read in conjunction with the original #DefundPolice #FundthePeople #DefendBlack Lives toolkit, along with our What’s Next: Safer and More Just Communities Without Policing report and Domestic Violence Awareness Month & Defund fact sheet.
Police are facing one of the greatest crises of legitimacy in a generation. In the wake of the largest uprisings in U.S. history, sparked by police violence, bloated police budgets, and the deadly impacts of a failure to invest in community health and safety laid bare by the pandemic, pro-police forces are on the defensive. So they are reaching for one of their most reliable weapons — fear.
This is nothing new — cops and policymakers have always used fearmongering to push “law and order” agendas and pour more and more money into police departments. Now, with police budgets under scrutiny by campaigns to defund the police and refund our communities all across the country, lawmakers and the media are once again recycling old talking points about increasing violence and crime, claiming that campaigns to defund police are responsible.
Read our new report to explore data, talking points, and narratives that highlight the fact that COPS DON’T STOP VIOLENCE.
Andrea J. Ritchie wrote Epicenter: Chicago: Reclaiming a City from Neoliberalism in collaboration with Black Lives Matter Chicago and published by Political Research Associates in 2019. The report explores what can be learned from a city that increasingly finds itself at the epicenter of multiple discourses of violence and safety- but is also a hub of resistance- and facing a new future under a new Mayor and newly configured city council on hotly contested political terrain.
Expanding Our Frame: Deepening Our Demands for Healing and Safety for Black Survivors of Sexual Violence is a policy brief written in partnership with the National Black Women’s Justice Institute and the Ms. Foundation in 2019. The brief aims to help expand the messaging of the anti-sexual violence movement by centering Black women, girls and femmes and building new structures of partnership and accountability for healing.
Andrea published Policing Race Gender and Sex A Review of Law Enforcement Policies in 2018 which summarizes the results of her research as a 2014 Senior Soros Justice Fellow in terms of police policies governing: police profiling, police sexual violence, police interactions with LGBTQ people, police confiscation and citation of condoms as evidence of intent to engage in prostitution-related offenses, and police practices when arresting a custodial parent.
This report was produced by the National LGBT/HIV Criminal Justice Working Group, a network of over 50 organizations and individual stakeholders working to change the U.S. criminal legal system through research, education, and federal policy advocacy and published by Lambda Legal. The report offers an overview of the wide-ranging impacts of the Trump Administration’s federal criminal justice initiatives on LGBTQ people and communities, with a particular focus on impacts on LGBTQ people of color and immigrants.
Andrea and Monique W. Morris co-wrote Centering Black Women, Girls, Nonconforming People and Fem(me)s in Campaigns for Expanded Sanctuary and Freedom Cities in partnership with the National Black Women's Justice Institute and the Ms. Foundation in 2017. The policy brief outlines strategies to protect Black women, girls, gender nonconforming people and fem(me)s from over- criminalization, incarceration, and policing — experiences shared by nonimmigrant Black communities, as well as Black and other immigrant communities alike — within campaigns for expanded sanctuary and freedom cities.
The Invisible No More Study and Discussion Guide breaks down key concepts and offers reflection questions, exercises, and self-care tips designed to make the Invisible No More book more accessible to students, activists, and readers of all kinds. The Study and Discussion Guide was developed using a collaborative design process shepherded by And Also Too and an Advisory Group of leaders on the front lines for movements for justice.
Andrea is co-author of Say Her Name: Resisting Police Violence Against Black Women published in 2015 by the African American Policy Forum and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies.
Say Her Name sheds light on Black women’s experiences of police violence in an effort to support a gender-inclusive approach to racial justice that centers all Black lives equally. It is our hope that this document will serve as a tool for the resurgent racial justice movement to mobilize around the stories of Black women who have lost their lives to police violence.
Andrea was a primary author of In the Shadows of the War on Terror: Persistent Police Brutality and Abuse in the United States, a “shadow report” submitted in 2007 on behalf of over 100 national and local organizations and individuals to the United Nations Committee Against Torture, the United Nations Human Rights Committee, and the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, and has testified before all three bodies.
