This review highlights the centrality of Black-led political mobilization, formal and informal, to articulating alternate visions of safety beyond policing and building alternate structures to transform the legal system and challenge racial criminalization. Examples include community patrols, the efforts of Black police to confront violence in their own departments and stand up structures of responsiveness, and national campaigns to challenge punitive legislation and offer alternatives.

We consider two local reparations cases—the Evanston Restorative Housing Program and Chicago reparations for police torture survivors. We argue that the programs are shaped by the differing political opportunities, the local context, and the social location of their advocates given that one was constructed within government systems in Evanston and the other largely by grassroots organizers in Chicago.

This study examines the impact of residential mobility on electoral participation among the poor by matching data from Moving to Opportunity, a US-based multicity housing-mobility experiment, with nationwide individual voter data. Notably, the study finds that receiving a housing voucher to move to a low-poverty neighborhood decreased adult participants’ voter participation for nearly two decades—a negative impact equal to or outpacing that of the most effective get-out-the-vote campaigns in absolute magnitude.