Keynote Speaker: Alex S. Vitale
The Future of Abolitionist Initiatives and the Defund Movement
Alex S. Vitale is Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He has spent the last 30 years writing about policing and consulting on community based movements, human and civil rights organizations, and governments internationally. Prof. Vitale is the author of City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics and The End of Policing. His academic writings on policing have appeared in Policing and Society, Criminology and Public Policy, Police Practice and Research, Mobilization, and Contemporary Sociology. He is also a frequent essayist whose writings have been published in The NY Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Vice News, Fortune, and USA Today. He has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, NPR, PBS, Democracy Now, and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.
Panels
Breakout Session One, 10:30 – 11:45 AM
Best Practices in Copwatching What are the most effective strategies for observing police in real time? This panel brings together experienced copwatchers to discuss best practices for observing police in a range of situations: calls for police service, officer-initiated stops, unhoused encampment sweeps, protests, etc.
Evictions, Displacement, Police Violence Since the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass Decision in the summer of 2024, places where unhoused people sleep and congregate are increasingly under attack by the state. In parallel, working class communities are displaced by gentrification. Police are at the forefront of both. This panel discussion will bring together organizers working against these forces of displacement.
Panelists: Yesica Prado (Berkeley Homeless Union), Ian Cordova Morales (Where Do We Go), Tiny (POOR Magazine)
Room: #216
Resisting Immigration Raids This know your rights workshop hosted by East Bay Sanctuary will focus on resisting immigration raids.
Room: #316
Understanding police budgets A workshop on understanding police budgets with James Burch
Room: #214
Breakout Session Two, 12:00 – 1:15
Care Not Cops The movement to build non-police crisis response sought to intervene by ensuring there were alternative options for support during a mental health crisis. This panel focuses on the promises and pitfalls of non-police responses to mental health crises.
Panelists: Andrea Prichett (Berkeley Copwatch), Marisol Cantu (Reimagine Richmond), James Burch (Black Solutions Lab), Millie Cleveland (Coalition for Police Accountability)
Room: Auditorium
Stop Cop Cities
“Cop cities” refers to the 80+ law enforcement training centers planned or in existence, across the U.S.. These massive projects are designed to optimize technology for state repression. This panel will discuss strategies to resist the expansion of cop cities.
Panelists: Imaginary Crimes Tour, John Lindsay-Poland (California Healing Justice of American Friends Service Committee), San Pablo’s Inside Agitators, Huey (Santa Cruz Copwatch)
Room: #216
Building a database This workshop with Yvonne Ng from WITNESS will focus on skills for documenting, archiving and mobilizing data from police interactions.
Room: #316
Breakout Session Three: 2:30 – 3:45
Weaponizing Data This workshop focuses on best practices in security culture, the techniques we use to build long lasting organizations in the face of state repression and non-state agitators.
Workshop led by Tarak Shah (Human Rights Data Analysis Group)
Room: #316
Facing Down Fusion Centers California’s five fusion centers, which are a few of the 80 recognized ones across the United States, operate in a quasi-official status that often makes it hard to understand what they do and how they do it. At this workshop, we will talk about how they came to be, what recent public records research tells us about what they do and what a large leak out of the Norcal fusion center called “BlueLeaks” revealed.
Workshop led by Tracy Rosenberg (Oakland Privacy)
Room: #214
Growth, Longevity and Security Grassroots organizations often spring up in direct response to police misconduct and violence. These all-volunteer efforts are incredibly difficult to maintain over time. Hear from three long time Copwatchers who have maintained their organizations for decades and managed to keep their members safe.
Panelists: Dennis Flores (El Grito NYC), Michelle Gross (Communities United Against Police Brutality)
Room: Auditorium
Pushing the Boundaries of Copwatch, A Workshop with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition’s work is fundamentally grounded in CopWatch as a method of sustained political study and disruption towards the abolition of the police state. This workshop challenges the conventional understanding of CopWatch, pushing beyond the passive documentation of harm toward a more rigorous, abolitionist, and adversarial engagement with the state itself. We will discuss how policing programs operate as counterinsurgency, how data and surveillance (analog and digital) permeate expansively, and how an “MRI” of the system—dissecting its funding, policies, and key actors—can reveal fault lines for disruption.
Room: #216
Extra: Finding Police (drone workshop) at 3:30pm!
Meet outside Berkeley City College.
Evening Program
Join us for an evening of artistic resistance from 6:30-9:30 for a night of art, music and poetry!
Live performance by PovertySkolars!
Exclusive film screening on decriminalizing sex work in New York at 7:30pm.
If you are interested in participating in a panel or workshop please reach out to us at copwatch.conference@proton.me.
Vendors
You are welcome to set up a vendor’s table at our conference at a cost of $30. We ask that you contact us beforehand at copwatch.conference@proton.me.
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