policing 
-
SOURCE: Religion & Politics
5/17/2022
Why American Christians "Back the Blue" so Fervently
by Aaron Griffith
Evangelicals within police forces and in the public at large have been encouraged to understand a scriptural mandate for police authority that often short-circuits consideration of other Christian obligations for justice, argues a historian of evangelical attitudes to law and order.
-
SOURCE: Washington Post
3/25/2022
Ted Cruz is an Unwitting Publicist for Left-Leaning Books
If you have written a book about racism, policing, or other controversial issues, your best promotional strategy is to have Senator Cruz wave your book around in a televised Senate hearing.
-
SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
3/16/2022
Don't Use Anti-Asian Violence to Throw More Money at Police
by Crystal Jing Luo
Business interests in Oakland have hijacked the safety concerns of Asian Americans to support arming police in service of real estate development that threatens low-income housing.
-
SOURCE: MSNBC
3/7/2022
The Most Revealing Moment in Former Louisville Police Officer's Trial
by Matthew Guariglia
Former officer Brett Hankison didn't hesitate to defend his actions (shooting 10 bullets through a glass door during an unannounced raid) as legitimate. Policing has shaped the law in such a way that his confidence is justified.
-
SOURCE: Protean
2/25/2022
Broken Homes of the Drug War
by David Helps
Rather than a mistake or an isolated instance of excess, a notoriously brutal and destructive LAPD raid on an apartment complex in 1988 should be seen as part of a political attack on the city's Black poor, enabled by cultural stereotypes of families of color.
-
SOURCE: TomDispatch
1/25/2022
The Other Pentagon (We Don't Think About)
by Andrea Mazzarino
The creation of DHS in the wake of the 9/11 attacks was a profound reorganization of the government that created a prodigiously-funded "security" apparatus that views threats to Americans through the dangerous lens of "insiders" vs. "outsiders".
-
SOURCE: The Metropole
12/14/2021
Introducing “Disciplining The Nation”
by Matt Guariglia and Charlotte Rosen
"Rooted in racial slavery, settler colonialism, and U.S. empire, policing and incarceration in the United States were slowly and meticulously built over time for the purpose of subordinating, punishing, and exploiting populations –and historians have the documents to prove it."
-
9/26/2021
The Rogues Gallery: The Messy Growth of Modern Policing in Gilded Age New York City
by John Oller
John Oller's new book on the rise of the NYPD combines a history of the social dynamics of the booming city, with its extremes of wealth and poverty, and a gallery of colorful rogues – in and out of uniform – whose battles shaped American law enforcement for good and ill.
-
SOURCE: Public Books
8/18/2021
Prison Tech Comes Home: Tenants and Residents in the Surveillance State
by Erin McElroy, Meredith Whittaker and Nicole E. Weber
Landlords have combined technologies developed for screening tenants in the 1970s with more recent digital surveillance and facial recognition systems developed in prisons to dramatically increase control over their tenants during an affordable housing crisis.
-
SOURCE: The New Yorker
8/6/2021
Did Last Summer's BLM Protests Change Anything?
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
A commission convened by the Mayor of Philadelphia exemplifies the American preference for symbolism over substance in recently proclaimed "racial reckonings."
-
SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
8/9/2021
Can School Discipline Be Fixed?
by Campbell F. Scribner
"One might reasonably ask, 'By what right do schools punish students in the first place?' Unfortunately, Americans have never really been able to answer that question."
-
SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
7/29/2021
Addressing Gun Violence Means Looking Beyond Policing
by Menika Dirkson
Between 1969 and 1976, Philadelphia saw success with a program to connect youth to social services, education and work opportunity, but turned toward militarized policing in the 1970s. This history should guide urban leaders away from the "tough on crime" approach.
-
SOURCE: Electronic Frontier Foundation
7/29/2021
It’s Time for Police to Stop Using ShotSpotter
by Matthew Guariglia
Surveillance systems intended to detect the auditory signature of a gunshot are inaccurate, meaning "police officers routinely are deployed to neighborhoods expecting to encounter an armed shooter, and instead encounter innocent pedestrians and neighborhood residents."
-
SOURCE: Phenomenal World
7/12/2021
Long Crises: Kim Phillips-Fein Interviews Benjamin Holtzman
While New York's mayoral campaign has invoked the "bad old days" of the 1970s, the city today is still experiencing the political-economic crisis that erupted 50 years ago.
-
SOURCE: New York Times
6/14/2021
Supreme Court Rejects Sentence Reductions for Minor Crack Offenses
Justices disagreed about what lessons to draw from the history of the 1986 Crime Bill that created the sentencing disparity for crack cocaine offenses. Does the fact that some Black organizations at the time supported the law excuse its racist impact?
-
SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
6/8/2021
The U.S. War On Drugs Helped Unleash The Violence In Colombia Today
by Kyle Longley
Counternarcotics operations have been a pretext for funding a buildup of the Colombian security forces, allowing a US-friendly rightist government to avoid dealing with the economic and social causes of unrest.
-
SOURCE: In These Times
5/27/2021
The Deep Downward Spiral of Police Violence and Rebellion, Explained
by Hamilton Nolan
A conversation with Elizabeth Hinton, author of “America On Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s.”
-
SOURCE: CNN
5/25/2021
More than 50 Years Before George Floyd, the Kerner Commission Predicted Deepening Divisions
Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris, the last surviving member of the Kerner Commission, discusses the commission's findings and how they were ignored. Historians including Jelani Cobb, Julian Zelizer and Steven Gillon also comment.
-
SOURCE: New York Times
4/25/2021
Split-Second Decisions: How a Supreme Court Case Shaped Modern Policing
The SCOTUS decision in Graham v. Connor granted broad deference to police officers' judgment about the necessity of use of force; activists now recognize the decision as an impediment to prosecuting officers for abusive actions.
-
SOURCE: Boston Review
4/26/2021
Police Reform Doesn’t Work
by Michael Brenes
Liberal calls for police reform operate within an ideological context where preserving order and enforcing private responsibility for social problems suppresses considering inequality. Minneapolis, the site of Derek Chauvin's trial and the killing of Daunte Wright, is an illustrative example.
News
- The Complicated History of Abortion and Abortion Law in the United States
- Discovery of Earliest Known Record of Mayan Calendar
- Buffalo Shooting Centuries in Making, Say Historians of Slavery and Reconstruction
- Isaac Chotiner Interviews Kathleen Belew on White Power and the Buffalo Mass Shooting
- What if Mental Illness Isn't All In Your Head?