More Than A Magazine, A Movement
April may be Sexual Assault Awareness Month, but every month—indeed every day—should be a time of awareness of the scourge of sexual assault and the pain inflicted on its victims.
It’s time to improve the systems already in place and to enact legislation that gives survivors the support, protection and justice they deserve.
Discussions about policing rarely center women or members of the LGBTQ community.
Monday’s “Race, Sex and Policing” panel and documentary “Women in Blue” grapple with the challenges involving women, policing and incarceration.
With the national conversation around police reform still resonating loudly around the country, documentary film “Women in Blue” shines a spotlight on the women within the Minneapolis Police Department working to reform it from the inside by fighting for gender equity.
Join Ms. for an exclusive screening of “Women in Blue” on Thursday, February 4 at 4:00 p.m PT / 7:00 p.m. ET. Then, stick around after the film for a live Q&A discussion.
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Black and brown people are too often killed with impunity by police. Now may be a tipping point and we should not squander this opportunity to make fundamental changes in policing.
The fact is that women in law enforcement respond differently. We are not talking about a few token women—but when gender parity is realized, policing fundamentally changes.
Only 12 percent of the nation’s police officers are women; that number has remained stagnant for more than 25 years. (That’s what happens when officers are recruited for physical strength, rather than critical thinking and communication skills.)
“Could George Floyd’s death have been prevented had there been women police officers on the scene? It’s likely.”
In Minneapolis, the July 2017 killing of an unarmed woman named Justine Damond resulted in Minneapolis’s first female police chief Janee Harteau being pushed out, threatening the gains women had made in the department.
Following three female police officers, “Women in Blue” charts their progress and efforts to remake the department to become more inclusive.
17-year-old Stephanie Lopez started advocating at school board meetings for school resource officers (SROs)—armed, district-funded trained police officers—to be replaced with adult hall monitors. By involving staff who would get to know the students instead of giving them citation, Lopez is looking for a more holistic approach to student management.
Domestic violence is the most common reason people in the U.S. call the police, comprising 15 to 50 percent of 911 calls—but journalist Cari Shane posits in a recent piece that “it should be more.”
The issue of police brutality and distrust is still pervasive, especially between minority groups and the police. And after taking a look into the Facebook accounts of thousands of officers, the reasons for police distrust have become even clearer.
