Emgage Action, in partnership with a broad coalition of partners, is dedicated to developing and aligning a strategy to effectively impact criminal justice reform. We are committed to bringing an end to abusive police practices – which are a hyper-localized system of over 18,000 agencies organized at the city and county levels – and devastating state-sanctioned violence, both of which have exacted systemic brutality and fatality upon Black Americans since our nation’s founding.

Our Federal Work Plan focuses on:

• Educating staffers on what the federal government can do.
• Using federal grants to incentivize reverse mass incarceration. 
• Setting federal use-of-force standards, mandating use-of-force reporting by all law enforcement agencies through the Department of Justice, establishing a use-of-force database that is accessible to the public, and making federal support to law enforcement agencies conditioned on their compliance with these new standards.

Our State Work Plan focuses on:

• Monitoring state legislative sessions for key bills, that we may support or oppose, impacting Criminal Justice Reform. State laws contribute to mass incarceration and those laws must change to end it.

– Texas has pre-filed a bill, the George Floyd Act, requiring law enforcement agencies to adopt detailed policies regarding the use of peace officers, liability for peace officers, requiring law enforcement to adopt policies regarding the issuance of citations for misdemeanors, including traffic offenses that are punishable by fine only, and more. 

These reforms have been long overdue, but strategic efforts and pressure points at the right agencies can impact short-term and long-term changes.