Departments

;

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: 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: 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."

  • 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: 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: 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.