By David J. Knight and Vesla M. Weaver
This review integrates recent scholarship outside of criminology with primary source material from a broadened source base to trace underappreciated histories of political struggle to secure safety and address harm in Black communities. Much of the existing literature in criminology and related social science fields tends to overlook bottom-up sources and the creative safety practices and sites of safety provision that exist and, in so doing, contributes to a lopsided empirical narrative of policing in the United States. This review, however, highlights the centrality of Black-led political mobilization, formal and informal, to articulating alternate visions of safety beyond policing and building alternate structures to transform the legal system and challenge racial criminalization. Examples include community patrols, the efforts of Black police to confront violence in their own departments and stand up structures of responsiveness, and national campaigns to challenge punitive legislation and offer alternatives. Unearthing these often marginalized and misrecognized histories and sources of Black-led struggle for community safety enables an analysis of not only the forms that community-led practices and interventions can take but also the ongoing state-produced conditions—referred to in this review as safety deprivation—that give rise to them. More broadly, this review uses these histories as a lens through which to consider how empirical narratives of policing and safety are transformed when community-derived, bottom-up knowledge sources are accounted for both substantively and methodologically and offers the field a guide of available databases.
Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2025. 8:25–52
