At The Children’s Partnership, our goal is to ensure every child can grow up healthy and thrive, no matter their race, ethnicity, identity or background. Our work has looked at how racism impacts the health and well-being of children from historically marginalized communities. As decades of police brutality have shown, racism continues to shape the conditions of how children live, learn and play.
This is why we strongly support and respectfully request that Gov. Gavin Newsom sign AB 118 (Kamlager, CRISES Act), which would create the Community Response Initiative to Strengthen Emergency Systems (CRISES) Act pilot grant program to invest in and promote community-based responses as alternatives to police responses to local emergencies, including public health crises, mental health crises, intimate partner violence, natural disasters and community violence.
Our brief, Policing and the Harmful Impacts on Child Well-Being, identifies and addresses the ways systemic racism impacts the health and well-being of children of color within the context of policing, considers opportunities to disrupt oppressive systems, defers to community leadership and demands bold innovations that put the well-being of children first. In a webinar, we discussed the disproportionate impact of policing on Black, Latinx and Native American communities and the harmful effects on the psychological, physiological and emotional development of these communities’ children, whether they are themselves victims or are witnesses of it. Racism and oppression is traumatizing generations of children.
We must reverse centuries of disinvestment in communities of color to invest in a future where we can all be connected, represented and free.
You can take action by sending a letter to Gov. Newsom asking him to sign The CRISES Act, AB 118, NOW!
