crime 
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SOURCE: The American Prospect
4/18/2022
The Police Have No Legal "Duty to Protect" Anyone. Should they Get More Money?
The Supreme Court has ruled that police officers have no definitive legal duty to take protective action on behalf of anyone. Would this fact influence debates about funding them if it were more widely known?
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SOURCE: KOIN 6
4/16/2022
Elliott Young: Know the History Behind Today's Crime Panic
The historian gave a minute-long background briefing on what's really driving fears of crime and what should be done.
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SOURCE: The Guardian
4/19/2022
"More Cops" is Not the Answer for NYC
by Simon Balto
The entire, terrifying episode that unfolded across 29 hours in New York was a testament to the futility of spending more money on police, and to the lie that police “keep us safe”.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
4/14/2022
Rational or Not, Crime Fears Threaten the Subway with a Death Spiral
Can studying past crime panics help cities convince riders to use mass transit systems when fear of crime is on the rise?
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4/10/2022
After 50 Years, "The Godfather" Still Has Fresh Lessons For Us
by Sam Ben-Meir
Francis Ford Coppola couldn't have anticipated the Trump presidency and its aftermath, but his 1972 masterpiece nevertheless helps uns to understand it.
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SOURCE: Mother Jones
3/28/2022
Hawley's Attacks on KBJ Part of Long History of Politicizing Child Abuse Panics
Historian Paul Renfro explains the rising fears of child abduction in the 1980s and the way those fears have been used politically.
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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.
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SOURCE: New York Times
12/15/2021
He Was Convicted of Raping Alice Sebold. Then the Case Unraveled.
The recent exoneration of Anthony Broadwater calls for revisiting the context of writer Alice Sebold's sexual assault, including the state of urban America, the climate of racism and the politics of crime in the early 1980s.
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SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
11/5/2021
Where Did the Public Toilets Go?
Peter Baldwin offers context for how American cities haltingly adopted and quickly abandoned public toilets, a story that encompasses the racial, gender and class politics of how people interact in urban space.
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SOURCE: Crosscut
10/15/2021
Beware "Rising Crime" Rhetoric in Seattle Politics
by Dan Berger
Progressive prosecutor candidates like Nicole Thomas-Kennedy in Seattle reflect a growing social movement to reverse decades of failed "tough on crime" policies that have accomplished little but swell the ranks fo the incarcerated, says a historian of crime and punishment.
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SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
10/4/2021
Are Millennial Workers and Boomer Managers Destroying the Mafia, Too?
Federal prosecutions in the 1980s and 1990s decimated experienced middle-management ranks in New York's organized crime families. Are they struggling today because their remaining workforce consists of boomers who can't quit and millennials who are on their phones too much?
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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.
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8/8/2021
Drug Prohibition and the Political Roots of Cartel Violence in Mexico
by Benjamin T. Smith
Violence is not so much in the DNA of the drug trade as the DNA of drug prohibition. And until both American and Mexican police forces stop treating it like a war, the violence won’t stop.
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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."
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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?
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SOURCE: The Metropole
6/14/2021
Hyper-Segregation, Inequality, And Murder Rates — A Review Of “The Ecology Of Homicide”
by Menika Dirkson
The late historian Eric Schneider uses criminal court records to argue that Philadelphia's violent crime rate is an ecological phenomenon, in which public policy decisions and private actions created conditions for spikes in violence.
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SOURCE: HuffPost
6/11/2021
White House Pushes To Jump-Start Civil Rights-Era Cold Cases Board
The White House has named nominees for the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board, which will reexamine unsolved murder cases of the civil rights era.
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SOURCE: New York Review of Books
4/29/2020
‘I’ve Lost Everything to the Beast’: Reviewing 4 Books on MS-13
by Rachel Nolan
While the specter of the MS-13 gang has been central to political panics about immigration, the group's origins are American. A Latin American historian reviews four new books.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
3/24/2021
Why America’s Great Crime Decline Is Over
Sociologist Patrick Sharkey examines the trajectory of crime in modern America and rejects single-cause explanations.
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SOURCE: Ars Technica
3/23/2021
Stabbing, Crucifixion, Eaten by Eels: Learn all about Murder the Roman Way
Historian Emma Souther's new book is a mix of the true crime genre and a history of crime and punishment in ancient Rome.
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