Follow Us
Enough already with tasers for San Francisco police!
April 13, 2013
San Franciscans working from 2004 to 2013 to keep tasers out of SFPD officers’ hands as they “talk down” people in public crisis are today celebrating SFPD Chief Greg Suhr’s Wednesday, April 10, decision to drop his “less lethal” taser proposal for San Francisco cops. Idriss Stelley Foundation Program Director Jeremy Miller affirmed: “The Police Commission should be commended for engaging this issue seriously in a manner that befits their political responsibility. Tasers torture and kill. They are unaccountable weapons for unaccountable officers. But it was the people of San Francisco who forced Suhr’s hand.”
Taser community forums raise unanswered questions
March 30, 2013
Police Chief Greg Suhr and the SF Police Commission finally scheduled and held the required community forums, where Suhr and Comdrs. Richard Corriea and Mikail Ali described the Electronic Control Weapon (ECW) proposal and invited community input. This updated story includes a report on the Tenderloin community forum, organized by residents. All testimony was anti-taser.
ACLU opposes SFPD taser deployment
January 5, 2013
A Dec. 4, 2012, ACLU letter to SF Mayor Ed Lee urged rejecting any SFPD proposal “to deploy tasers or other conductive energy devices”. The letter emphasizes that costly tasers would generate heavy legal fees from officer overuse and abuse, posing serious injury and death risks, especially to SFPD’s targeted populations: people in public mental health crisis and people of color.
‘Communities rising’ across California to end mass incarceration and the 40-year war on drugs
June 18, 2011
CURB is sending a strong message from different parts of the state to Gov. Brown and the state legislature, calling for the state to take active steps to end its participation in the 40-year-old “war on drugs” and to prioritize vital social services over prison spending.
Supreme Court upholds ruling to reduce California prison population
May 23, 2011
This morning the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed a previous court order requiring the state of California to reduce dramatically the number of people in its horribly overcrowded state prison system. California will have two years to reduce overcrowding by 46,000. “Public safety is a direct outcome of public education, affordable housing and living-wage jobs. These are goals we can achieve now if we take this opportunity to shrink prisons and jails,” declared Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of “Golden Gulag.”
Groups demand realignment of priorities in county jails
May 4, 2011
The Budget for Humanity, recently released by Californians United for a Responsible Budget’s (CURB) calls for drastic reductions to the prison population and an end to prison construction and to cuts in education, health and housing through more aggressive taxation of corporations and the wealthy.