LaNaisha Edwards was 15 when she started going to funerals in the mid-1990s. By her senior year, getting dressed for another memorial service “became the normal thing to do — sadly” in Los Angeles, she said. 

By September 2010, the plague of gun violence that destroyed other families hit too close to home. Her 24-year-old brother was fatally shot in his car while on his way home from football practice. “Vinnie,” as Edwards affectionately called him, was reforming his life and enrolled in college before his death. But that didn’t seem to matter to investigators. Edwards remembered fuming about the detectives’ accusatory tone when interviewing her devastated mother hours after the shooting. Each question had been asked as if her little brother was the main suspect in his own murder. 

For months, her mind was numb. The following year, Edwards attended an event led by community members that provided resources and a safe space for crime victims and survivors. It was unsettling for her to hear similar accounts of being disrespected by the police and denied financial support from victim services, mostly, because the lead detective said so. 

At some point, Edwards took a look around the room and absorbed its energy. Seeing everyone hugging one another and crying was a breakthrough for her. It was the first time in nearly 15 years she gave herself permission to cry. 

“I was exhausted in that moment,” Edwards recalled. “We don’t have to grow up just to die here. There’s so much more in this world for us to see.”

Since that event in 2011, she has been using her voice as an advocate with the Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice. It’s a flagship project of the nonprofit Alliance for Safety and Justice. Edwards, along with Tinisch Hollins, who joined the same organization’s San Francisco arm after her brother was shot and killed in 2013, campaigned in 2014 for the passage of Proposition 47. Hollins is now executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice.

Edwards, 41, and Hollins, 45, both lost more than one brother to gun violence. Ten years later, they’re fighting attempts to roll back criminal justice reform in California. The Golden State is among several states and Washington, D.C., considering new laws that repeal or amend existing policies that were created to reverse tough-on-crime legislation that ultimately and disproportionately did more harm than good to Black communities.

Excessive prison sentences tore families apart and criminalized those with substance use issues instead of providing resources for treatment. That’s not what over 60% of survivors of crime or families of crime victims say they want, according to a 2016 study by the Alliance for Safety and Justice.

“What keeps the community, families safe are those investments into more violence intervention programs, investing more in things like mental health services instead of investing more in police or being tough-on-crime and more incarceration that have failed communities for the past 30 years,” said Aswad Thomas, national director of Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice. 

“We cannot go back to that thinking as a way to help stop cycles of violence,” Thomas, a gun violence survivor, said.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers in California have blamed Proposition 47 for an uptick in retail crime, drug use, and unhoused individuals, crime victim advocates like Edwards and Hollins told Capital B. 

Despite some lawmakers’ rhetoric and headlines about the rise in crime, recent data reveals a not so clear-cut reality. When it comes to violent crime rates, excluding property crime, the U.S. has historic lows as of last year, according to the Prison Policy Initiative’s annual report, which dissected where and why people are incarcerated as well as dispelled myths about mass incarceration that have been erroneously peddled as political talking points.

Before Prop 47 was passed in 2014, Edwards said her community wasn’t openly discussing therapy, attending healing circles, going on meditation walks through the park or had access to a trauma recovery center in their area. Now, Prop 47 is under threat of repeal if Californians vote in favor of the Homelessness, Drug Addiction and Theft Reduction Act ballot measure in November. 

“Every time they need to change the law, it should not be at the detriment of survivors — we have suffered enough,” Edwards said. “We definitely want people to be held accountable for their actions. At the same time … we can’t keep focusing everything on just law enforcement.”

A possible return of mass incarceration rates 

When Washington, D.C., lawmakers passed the Secure D.C. Omnibus Amendment Act of 2024 in February, Taylar Nuevelle, the founder of Who Speaks for Me?, told Capital B that arrest numbers for people of color, especially Black youth, are guaranteed to increase. 

Who Speaks for Me? is a trauma-informed advocacy organization that provides long-term direct services for the rising prison population of Black women and LGBTQ community who are returning to their neighborhoods after incarceration. 

This public safety package has several provisions that aim to combat carjackings and retail thefts that prosecutors have identified teenagers and young adults as alleged suspects for those crimes.  The package outlawed wearing balaclava ski masks — a fashion trend mostly worn by teenagers in every season. It also allows law enforcement to collect DNA from an individual accused of a crime and reversed a policy that doesn’t allow police officers to review body-worn camera footage before writing reports.

Those policies — signed into law in March — immediately reminded Washington residents of the federal government’s tough-on-crime laws from the 1990s. 

“This is just another way to funnel us, Black and brown bodies, into a system that does not help but completely degrade, dehumanize and render us ineffective at living a full life,” Nuevelle said.

A major concern of the package is the implementation of “drug-free” zones. Those are the same policies that were repealed by the D.C. Council 10 years ago when the current mayor, Muriel Bowser was a member. Those zones, advocates fear, will open the door for law enforcement to stop, question, frisk, and arrest anyone for loitering without probable cause — a policy that New York City police officers used unconstitutionally, a judge ruled in 2013.

Bowser and other lawmakers behind the current bill are confident that these “legally sound” policies will combat a trend of “open-air drug dealing” in certain parts of the city, The Washington Post reported in November.

Instead of passing laws that may contribute to mass incarceration rates, advocates across the country have consistently called on lawmakers to support solutions that tackle the root causes of crime through holistic healing, mental health support, job training, and other resources that uplift the community and support justice-impacted individuals.  

Tina Frundt, founder of Courtney’s House, said the youth in Washington who are possible targets for arrest in a drug-free zone might have more serious underlying issues. 

Courtney’s House is a nonprofit organization that has helped “more than 500 victims escape from being trafficked and find a new life” since 2008, according to its website. The organization has a contract with the local child and family services agency to screen and do all the case management for youth who have been sex trafficked. 

She said those young people behind those ski masks could be survivors of being sex trafficked by a family member or have a learning disability or mental health disorder. While they won’t be prosecuted for prostitution in most states, they may still get charged with another crime, Frundt, a survivor of sex trafficking, said.

“These provisions will not make D.C. safer and will put our rights at risk,” the Washington chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement. 

A coalition of racial justice organizations and residents worked to defeat the amendment package. Back in 2021, the D.C. Council’s police reform commission released a 259-page report that provided detailed suggestions of evidence-based policies that would prioritize public safety and propose investments in existing programs that provide assistance and resources to under-resourced communities. 

“Instead of following the guidance of experts,” the coalition wrote in a January press release. “The mayor [has] chosen to inflict more harm on vulnerable D.C. communities.” 

This is “about so much more than Tyre” Nichols

Decarcerate Memphis, a coalition of community leaders, used data provided by the Memphis Police Department to release a report in February that revealed something they already knew — Black motorists in their city are targeted for pretextual traffic stops. 

The report explored those stops nine months after Tyre Nichols was beaten to death by five former Memphis police officers. It revealed, in part, that Black residents made up 91% of people accused of a crime in cases stemming from pretextual traffic stops and “Black drivers are 2.5 times as likely as white drivers to receive multiple citations on one ticket.”

Nichols was pulled over on Jan. 7, 2023. The traffic stop escalated to a physical altercation, a foot chase and several minutes of a vicious beating within yards of Nichols’ home. The 29-year-old man died at a nearby hospital three days later. The officers have been fired, criminally charged in federal and state courts, and at least one pleaded guilty.  

In response, the Memphis City Council unanimously passed six ordinances in April 2023, including one in honor of Nichols, that ended low-level traffic stops for violations such as a broken tail light that more than often ends in police violence, especially if the driver is Black.

As Nichols’ family, civil rights advocates and local lawmakers applauded those efforts, less than a year later, Tennessee state lawmakers passed a bill on March 14 that would silence all the ordinances.  

Gov. Bill Lee signed this legislation into law on March 29. It prohibits a local government — in this case, Memphis City Council — from making decisions on how a law enforcement agency conducts traffic stops — overriding local legislators’ reform efforts.
Nichols’ parents, RowVaughn and Rodney Wells, wrote in an email statement that those critical police reforms were “about so much more than Tyre.” Those ordinances provided a form of accountability with the Data Transparency Act, that requires officers to collect data from traffic stops that will be published monthly and prohibits the use of unmarked cars for traffic stops.

Public safety or fearmongering?

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, like politicians in Washington, D.C., is not only ignoring experts for guidance on cracking down on crime, he is discarding data and statistics, advocates said.

The governor has made some questionable and contradictory propositions in response to the state’s “crime wave.” Never mind that violent crime, including homicide, dropped in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. 

Landry repealed the Raise the Age bill, which prevented 17-year-olds accused of a crime to get tried as an adult and placed in an adult facility. By the end of the governor’s Legislative Special Session on crime Feb. 29, he signed 18 other bills into law, including the Constitutional Carry bill that will allow individuals age 18 and older to conceal carry a firearm without training or a permit.

These reform rollbacks across the country are going to result in wrongful convictions, Robert Jones, director of community outreach for Orleans Public Defenders, said during a virtual press briefing. The National Legal Aid and Defender Association hosted a discussion about “The State of Public Defense During a Crime-Focused Election Year” on March 14. 

Jones was released from prison in 2017 after spending more than 23 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. At 19, he was wrongly sentenced to life without parole for a 1992 crime wave in New Orleans that resulted in one death. 

“What happened in the early ’90s, is what the rollbacks are going to do now,” Jones said. “There’s fearmongering that changes regulations, rules and policies. And it scares not only the public, but it scares people in those positions to start using people as scapegoats, and the people that they’re going to use are Black and brown people.”

Orleans Parish, where New Orleans is located, had the highest exoneration rate per capita of all U.S. counties with a population of over 300,000 in the country, according to an analysis of the first 1,600 reported wrongful convictions published by the National Registry of Exonerations. Neighboring Jefferson Parish was fourth. 

Of the 86 people who have been exonerated in Louisiana, 72 are Black, the NRE’s database shows.

Landry also proposed a $7 million cut to domestic violence services and shelters in a state that ranks in the top five for highest female homicide rate, according to the Violence Policy Center. And Black women are being killed at alarming rates. 

“In states that are passing or trying to pass these tough-on-crime measures, they’re divested from victim services, especially domestic violence access services, and they’re not actually invested in helping other people and families who’ve experienced those crimes, which is a huge concern for many crime victims across the country,” Thomas said.

Investing in intervention, conflict resolution, mental health, reentry programs and connecting people to employment resources to get them back on their feet, “those are the things that help stop the cycle of violence … by preventing violence.”