Parents at Rise have long documented how the family policing system affects Black and brown people living in low-income areas of NYC. In July, a team of researchers from Duke University and Rutgers University published the study, “Contact with Child Protective Services is pervasive but unequally distributed by race and ethnicity in large US counties.” As its title suggests, the paper finds that the system impacts the lives of far too many Black and brown families.
Dr. Frank Edwards, an assistant professor at Rutgers University’s School of Criminal Justice who studies race and state violence, policing and family separation, was part of the team that worked on this study. Here, he discusses their findings in NYC and nationally, mandated reporting, investigations and why he is an abolitionist.
