The Paterson police department is the deadliest police department in the state and on the high end of the national spectrum of police violence in the country. Those facing poverty are often subjected to the harshest forms of police violence, and more often than not, the most likely to be killed. Policing protect capital, as they uphold laws that criminalizes the poor rather than help. In this map you can see the concentration of police killing in the most impoverished parts of the city.
The Paterson Mapping Project’s mission is to develop accessible tools and resources to support and accompany grassroot movements for transformative justice in the city of Paterson.
Paterson has long been a site of struggle. From Indigenous dispossession, to worker strikes and urban movements against police violence, the poor and working class of Paterson continue to struggle for a Right to the City.
Economic, political, and social exploitation in Paterson is structural. It benefits from a lack of transparency and a dominant narrative that blames the poor and the most vulnerable for their exploitation. The production of our own research helps us to tell our own story, whereby people are empowered by resources and research that validates their experiences to counter the false narratives spread by city officials who try to convince people that displacement, an expansion of the policing and surveillance and carceral state at the expense of social resources is good for them.
We seek to support the experiences of the people of Paterson by highlighting their own experiences and using data and digital tools to build local power in the city.