Police Reform CantWait

The criminal justice system is broken. CantWait's goal is to improve trust and confidence in law enforcement by establishing protocols that prevent crime, strengthen community institutions, and empower people to improve their lives.

Communities that are not safe cannot prosper—and yet, state-sanctioned violence from law enforcement threatens the fabric of civil society in every community in America. Police fail to protect people from violent crimes and are themselves viewed as a threat to ordinary citizens.

Police unions have been a huge impediment to meaningful reform, and the special protections unions have spearheaded, such as qualified immunity, have led directly to the breakdown in trust that has left communities reeling.

CantWait will engage and empower marginalized communities and help them ensure that local law enforcement agencies are operating in accordance with basic principles of good governance.

CantWait is developing tools to restore accountability and transparency to law enforcement. Working at the local level, CantWait will flood target jurisdictions with resources, empowering city managers and community organizers with educational materials as well as model legislation, union contracts, memoranda of understanding, and use-of-force guidelines. Current standards for law enforcement are not aligned with the ideas of a free society or with basic principles of good governance. CantWait will raise the bar, working with law enforcement officers, labor lawyers, and civil liberties advocates to restore trust and confidence in the police departments our communities rely on to keep the peace. CantWait's Serve and Protect Index will establish baseline measurements of police performance: crime rates, cases cleared, police budgets, 911 response times, etc. Success for CantWait means the 18,733 law enforcement agencies across the United States will instate policies that incentivize effective policing and remove bad actors from the force.

For months, the CantWait team has been talking with policy experts, law enforcement officers, labor lawyers, community organizers, and local policymakers to determine the unique challenges of our initial target jurisdictions. CantWait is testing messaging, developing model police union contracts and legislation, etc. and building out the local networks we will need to activate to make change.