In communities across New York City, NYPD tactics disproportionately impact young black and Latino men. Stop-and-frisk, the overuse of low-level arrests and summonses, surveillance of Muslim communities and police intervention in school discipline are discriminatory tactics that harm communities and do not work to keep New Yorkers safe.

This report, Boxed In: The True Cost of Extreme Isolation in New York’s Prisons, is the product of an intensive, year-long investigation that involved communication with more than 100 people who have spent significant amounts of time – in one case, more than 20 years – in extreme isolation. The authors interviewed prisoners’ family members and corrections staff, and analyzed thousands of pages of Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) records obtained through the state’s open records laws.

The February 1999 shooting death of Amadou Diallo by police officers in the NYPD’s Street Crimes Unit triggered a broad public controversy about racial profiling and stop-and-frisk that continues to this day. Not only did the shooting prompt widespread protests, but it led the New York State Attorney General’s Office to conduct a detailed study of NYPD stop-and-frisk activity and led the New York City Council to enact legislation requiring the Police Department to provide quarterly reports about stop-and-frisk activity.

Taking Tasers Seriously: The Need for Better Regulation of Stun Guns in New York analyzes 851 Taser incident reports from eight police departments across the state as well as 10 departments’ policies and guidelines for using the weapons, which deliver up to 50,000 volts of electricity and have caused the deaths of more than a dozen New Yorkers in recent years. The report concludes that police officers throughout New York State are consistently misusing and overusing Tasers.

We all recognize the need for effective law enforcement, but we should also understand our own rights and responsibilities — especially in our interactions with the police.

This New York Civil Liberties Union report finds stark racial disparities between the general population and the population of persons designated as Level 3 sex offenders. The report also charges that New York uses flawed procedures for assessing an offender's risk of re-offending.

Nationally, 65 percent of teens have been harassed or assaulted during the past year because of their appearance or their perceived or actual gender, sexual orientation, gender expression, race, ethnicity, disability or religion.

The NYPD arrested and jailed nearly 400,000 people for possessing small amounts of marijuana between 1997 and 2007, a tenfold increase in marijuana arrests over the previous decade and a figure marked by startling racial and gender disparities, according to a report released Tuesday at the New York Civil Liberties Union. The report, The Marijuana Arrest Crusade in New York City: Racial Bias in Police Policy 1997-2007, is the first ever in-depth study of misdemeanor marijuana arrests in New York City during the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations.

There has emerged over the last decade a broad consensus among policy experts, criminal justice scholars and lawmakers that the War on Drugs, with its singular emphasis on incarceration, has failed. In 1993, on the 20th anniversary of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, New York State Corrections Commissioner Thomas Coughlin, III, said the state was "lock[ing] up the wrong people ... for the wrong reasons."

Since the NYPD took control of school safety in 1998, the number of police personnel in schools and the extent of their activity have skyrocketed. At the start of the 2005-2006 school year, the city employed a total of 4,625 School Safety Agents (SSAs) and at least 200 armed police officers assigned exclusively to schools. This report, Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Public Schools, offers the following recommendations for reforming New York City’s school policing program – all of which can be accomplished without any sacrifice to school safety: