Philadelphia Special Weapons Attack Team Did THE Most

Police Violence Against Peaceful Protesters In 125 Cities In 40 States

focalabs.co.uk  |  Amnesty International used open-source intelligence (OSINT) research techniques to obtain and verify all of the media assets included on the incidents of police violence map.  Videos were sourced from social media platforms, including, but not limited to, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.  To document these violations, Amnesty International’s Crisis Evidence Lab, working with its Digital Verification Corps hubs at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Cambridge, gathered nearly 500 videos of incidents from social media platforms. This digital content was then verified and geolocated. The verified content was analyzed by investigators with expertise in weapons, police tactics, and international and US law governing the use of force.

Where necessary, videos were edited to protect the identity of the persons involved and a review was conducted to ensure that videos are not listed that could incriminate protesters, that could expose the identity of minors, or that could lead to possible re-traumatisation.

Note on Vicarious Trauma Protection

Monitoring human rights abuses is traumatic at the best of times. Amnesty International took steps to protect the wellbeing of the research teams throughout the project.

Following tips and guidelines from organizations such as the DART Centre, First Draft News, Amnesty International’s Citizen Evidence Lab, and the Human Rights Resilience Project, we worked to ensure that only those who needed to view the worst of the content did so, that all members of the research teams were able to receive any support they needed, and built a team atmosphere which allowed each member of the team to share their experiences.  

Any investigation looking at abuses of international human rights law or international humanitarian law should consider the potentially traumatic impact on the investigation team – regardless of whether they are in the field or researching from afar, and should take steps to ensure appropriate support structures are in place.

How You Gone Demilitarize All These Ex-Military On The Dole As Police?

counterpunch |  Calls for de-militarization of law enforcement have gained new momentum in the wake of nationwide protests against police brutality. That process won’t be easy in a nation where nearly one fifth of all cops are military veterans — including Derek Chauvin, George Floyd’s killer in Minneapolis and Robert McCabe, one of two officers charged with felony assault for knocking down a 75-year-old protester in Buffalo.

When loaded down with cast-off Pentagon gear, police officers from any background are more likely to regard peaceful protestors as enemy combatants, particularly when the Pentagon’s own top official refers to their protest scenes as “battle space.” But studies show that employing people with experience in war zones abroad has not been a boon to “community policing” either. Getting police departments to stop acting like an occupying army will require many fundamental changes, including much closer screening of job applicants who are veterans and ending their preferential hiring treatment.

Policing is currently the third most common occupation for men and women who have served in the military. It is an option widely encouraged by career counsellors and veterans’ organizations like the American Legion.  As a result, several hundred thousand veterans are now wearing a badge of some sort. Although veterans comprise just 6 percent of the US population, they represent 19 percent of all law enforcement personnel.

This disproportionate representation is due, in part, to preferential hiring requirements, mandated by state or federal law. In addition, under the Obama Administration, the Department of Justice provided local police departments with tens of millions of dollars to fund veterans-only positions.

As noted [EF1] by the Marshall Project, in its 2017 report, “When Warriors Put On the Badge,” this combination of hiring preferences and special funding has made it harder to “build police forces that resemble and understand diverse communities.” The beneficiaries have been disproportionately white, because 60 percent of all enlisted men and women are not people of color.

Police Have A Racist Far-Right Social Media Ecosystem Of Their Own

HuffPost | American police officers have already been tied to the spread of extremist content on social media. A Reveal News investigation last June found that hundreds of active-duty and retired officers, from every level of U.S. law enforcement, had quietly joined private Confederate, anti-Islam, misogynistic or anti-government militia Facebook groups full of racist memes and conspiracy theories.

The investigation was a rare glimpse at the culture behind the blue wall. As Reveal News noted, disciplinary records and investigations into police misconduct “are kept secret in a majority of states, meaning most American cops enjoy a blanket of protection that can cover up biases.”

But the recent unrest has provoked some law enforcement officials to openly broadcast their tolerance for police misconduct online, outside of these closed or little-known groups. In a Facebook post earlier this month, the Brevard County, Florida, chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police offered to rehire police officers from other areas who are charged with using excessive force against protesters.

“Lower taxes, no spineless leadership, or dumb mayors rambling on at press conferences,” promised the now-deleted Facebook post, for which Brevard County FOP President Bert Gamin has claimed responsibility. “Plus.... we got your back!”

Certainly not all police officers believe the wild stories pushed by Law Enforcement Today and circulated on pro-police social media groups. But right-wing media and many police labor leaders are heavily invested in the idea of presenting police as hard-right defenders of law and order. 

Outlets such as Fox News and OAN often provide a safe space for former officers and labor officials to defend law enforcement’s conduct without challenge. One such voice has been police union leader Ed Mullins, head of the NYPD’s Sergeants Benevolent Association, who in February announced the NYPD was “declaring war” on de Blasio and accused the mayor of fomenting anti-cop sentiment. Mullins has recently appeared on Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity’s shows, as well as far-right outlets Newsmax and OAN, where he called for military support to quell the protests.

Levin, from the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism, said police and city officials nationwide need to pay attention to what some cops are reading and writing online, and get a handle on it.

“We can’t have that in policing today,” he said. “We’re now in an era where police are so detached from many segments of the community that they serve that we don’t have the luxury of having this kind of garbage being tolerated within departments.”

Police Reform? It's Not Possible To Reform A Fundamentally Corrupt Institution

fivethirtyeight |  On its surface, large majorities of Americans support “police reform.” But “reform” is vague and gets complicated fast. For one thing, the police aren’t a single entity. There are more than 15,000 law enforcement agencies scattered throughout the U.S., which means that any change has to be piecemeal. And it’s also hard to figure out what departments are actually doing, or how to compare them. Within a single metro area, multiple departments could be operating under different rules or different standards of rule enforcement, and even using different definitions of particular buzzword-heavy reforms like “community policing.”

That lack of uniformity makes it difficult to compare police departments that have implemented similar policies. “To understand if a police reform is actually working the way you want, you need to be able to see what officers do in the field and figure out whether the reform you’re looking at changed that,” said Emily Owens, a criminology professor at the University of California, Irvine. “We don’t really have the data or the studies right now for me to say with confidence, ‘We know that these reforms work and these don’t.’”

What’s more, the data that exists is full of holes — and bias. Even when researchers try to document whether the police are doing a good job or how departments might improve, they’re often conducting those studies using metrics that help tell only part of the story. Policing data is imperfect. Due to a lack of systematic or reliable data on police misconduct, the fact that the data we do have is mostly from police departments themselves, and an emphasis on crime and police presence, it’s liable to miss important variables such as nature of police interactions with the public, or the fact that plenty of illegal or violent behavior happens in places and populations where police aren’t looking for it.

Controlavirus Economic Reconfiguration And Genocidal Eliminationism In India

opendemocracy |  The only thing we know for sure is that both lockdown and social distancing cannot be applicable in India, if we think of the tens of millions living in the slums. Take for example Dharavi, the largest slum in Asia in the heart of Mumbai: almost one million people in two square kilometers, one toilet for several hundred people, what does quarantine or social distancing mean in such conditions? 

Instead of testing, monitoring, stopping public gatherings and shutting down, say, restaurants and malls, at a time when there were only a few hundred cases, they brought the hammer down on the whole country. They smashed an economy already in a deep crisis and that is now obviously in a massive recession. Hundreds of millions of jobs have been lost. 

The cases are rocketing up, and now number 280,000. As the graph climbs the lockdown has been lifted. Having broken everything, the government has now absolved itself of all responsibility, and is telling us that we have to learn to live with the virus. People who should have been allowed to go home two months ago, are now reaching their villages, carrying the virus with them.  

It is only Modi’s hubris, his unchallenged power and his complete lack of understanding of the country he rules that could have resulted in such a mighty disaster. He is cunning, but unintelligent. That is a dangerous combination. 

Add to all this, the Modi Government’s overt Islamophobia, amplified by a shameless, irresponsible mainstream media – that overtly blamed Muslims for being spreaders of disease. You have whole TV shows dedicated to “COVID jihad” etc... All this came off the back of the unconstitutional dismantling of Kashmir’s special status (leading to a 10 month on-and-off lockdown and internet seige of 6 million people in the Kashmir valley – a mass human rights violation by any standards), the new anti-Muslim citizenship law, and the pogrom against Muslims in North East Delhi in which the Delhi Police were seen actively participating. 

Young Muslims, students and activists are being arrested every day for being “conspirators” in the massacre. While ruling party politicians who actually came out on the streets calling for “traitors” to be shot, remain in positions of power and high visibility. 

You have been criticized for an interview that you gave to Deutsche Welle, in which you describe this rampant Islamophobia as something that could be a prelude to genocide. Can you help us to understand the escalation of this situation?

Yes. I said that the language being used by the mainstream media against Muslims was designed to dehumanise them. To paint an entire community as “corona jihadis” during this pandemic, when there is a pre-existing atmosphere of violence against Muslims is to create a genocidal climate. 

Over the last couple of years we have had so many instances of mob lynchings and George Floyd-type killings – the difference in India being that Hindu vigilante mobs do the killing and the police, the legal system and the political climate help them to get away with it.

Hidden Deaths Casued By The Controlavirus Quarantine

KHN  |  Sara Wittner had seemingly gotten her life back under control. After a December relapse in her battle with drug addiction, the 32-year-old completed a 30-day detox program and started taking a monthly injection to block her cravings for opioids. She was engaged to be married, working for a local health association and counseling others about drug addiction.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

The virus knocked down all the supports she had carefully built around her: no more in-person Narcotics Anonymous meetings, no talks over coffee with a trusted friend or her addiction recovery sponsor. As the virus stressed hospitals and clinics, her appointment to get the next monthly shot of medication was moved back from 30 days to 45 days.

As best her family could reconstruct from the messages on her phone, Wittner started using again on April 12, Easter Sunday, more than a week after her originally scheduled appointment, when she should have gotten her next injection. She couldn’t stave off the cravings any longer as she waited for her appointment that coming Friday. She used again that Tuesday and Wednesday.

“We kind of know her thought process was that ‘I can make it. I’ll go get my shot tomorrow,’” said her father, Leon Wittner. “‘I’ve just got to get through this one more day and then I’ll be OK.’”

But on Thursday morning, the day before her appointment, her sister Grace Sekera found her curled up in bed at her parents’ home in this Denver suburb, blood pooling on the right side of her body, foam on her lips, still clutching a syringe. Her father suspects she died of a fentanyl overdose.

However, he said, what really killed her was the coronavirus.

“Anybody that is struggling with a substance abuse disorder, anybody that has an alcohol issue and anybody with mental health issues, all of a sudden, whatever safety nets they had for the most part are gone,” he said. “And those are people that are living right on the edge of that razor.”

Sara Wittner’s death is just one example of how complicated it is to track the full impact of the coronavirus pandemic — and even what should be counted. Some people who get COVID-19 die of COVID-19. Some people who have COVID die of something else. And then there are people who die because of disruptions created by the pandemic.

America's Biggest Coronavirus Clusters

statista |  Out of America's eight biggest coronavirus outreaks, seven are in jails or correctional facilities. That's according to a list from the New York Times which shows that the biggest national cluster is in the Marion Correctional Institution in Ohio which has 2,439 cases as of June 16, 2020. Another facility in Ohio, the Pickaway Correctional Institution, has 1,791. The third largest cluster was identified in the Trousdale Turner Correctional Center in Hartsville, Tennessee.

Even though prisons account for the largest outbreaks in the U.S. with deaths within their walls increasing 73 percent in the past month alone, the vast majority of outbreaks have occurred in U.S. nursing homes and long-term care facilities. The toll on inmates has still been heavy, however, with 600 estimated to have died during the pandemic so far.

Police Unions Cause An Overwhelming Majority Of Trouble

plsonline |  By the mid-1960s police officers had responded with an aggressive and widespread police unionization campaign. Aided by court rulings more favorable to the organizing of public employees; fueled by resentment of the authoritarian organization of departments; and united in a common resistance to increasing charges of police brutality, corruption and other forms of misconduct, nearly every large-city police department had been unionized by the early 1970s. Police officers struck in New York City in 1971; in Baltimore in 1974 and in San Francisco in 1975. "Job actions" such as "blue flue" and work slowdowns (i.e. not writing tickets, making few arrests) were common in other cities.

Initially, the response to this union activity was to reduce centralization in the police bureaucracy and to include officers in discussions of rules, procedures and departmental practices. What had been the exclusive fiefdom of the police executive was now subject to negotiation with a union. But reduced municipal tax bases, caused primarily by the exodus of white, affluent executives and professionals to the suburbs in the 1970s; a prolonged economic recession in the 1970s and early 1980s; and fiscal mismanagement in many cities, led to layoffs of police and other municipal workers, and rollbacks in benefits. In fact, unions became an attractive scapegoat for municipal problems. Politicians, administrators and the media all blamed demands by public workers for the financial straits in which the cities had been floundering. Despite the fact that the fiscal crisis had been caused by much larger social and economic trends, blaming police and other workers allowed police administrators and politicians to once again reorganize the police. This reorganization has been dubbed the "Taylorization of the police" by historian Sydney Harring (1981).

Under the "Taylorization" reforms, police departments reduced the size of their forces; went from two-person to one-person patrol cars; and increased the division of labor within police departments. Police work was broken down into ever more specific, highly specialized tasks; patrol became more reactive; technology was used to restore the control of police administrators (i.e., 911 emergency lines; computerization); and some traditional police tasks were turned over to civilian employees. All of this served to further isolate the police from the citizenry; to further reduce the effectiveness of police practices; and to continually justify ever more "Taylorization" as a response to increasing inefficiency.

Concurrent with reform efforts aimed at professionalization, was an increased reliance on technology and scientific aspects of police investigation. The idea of police as scientific crime fighters had originated with August Vollmer as early as 1916, with the introduction of the crime laboratory. By 1921 Vollmer was advocating the widespread use of lie detectors and the establishment of a database for collecting national crime data (Crank and Langworthy 1992). Over the years science became synonymous with professionalism for many police executives. The use of fingerprints, serology, toxicology chemistry and scientific means for collecting evidence were emphasized as part of a professional police force. In terms of technological advancements, new ways of maintaining police record systems and enhancing police communications, such as the police radio, became priorities.

The emphasis was on efficiency and crime-fighting, with the social work aspects of policing deemphasized and discouraged. The hope was also that the professional, scientific crime-fighters would be less susceptible to corruption. It is therefore a further irony of policing that in Philadelphia new communications technologies were put to use in establishing what is arguably the first "call girl" system in the United States, calling out for prostitutes using police communications systems.

Simple Hard Men Ought Not Be Making Policy Or Technology Decisions...,

wired |  It's been the better part of a decade since the hacktivist group Anonymous rampaged across the internet, stealing and leaking millions of secret files from dozens of US organizations. Now, amid the global protests following the killing of George Floyd, Anonymous is back—and it's returned with a dump of hundreds of gigabytes of law enforcement files and internal communications. (Blueleaks)

On Friday of last week, the Juneteenth holiday, a leak-focused activist group known as Distributed Denial of Secrets published a 269-gigabyte collection of police data that includes emails, audio, video, and intelligence documents, with more than a million files in total. DDOSecrets founder Emma Best tells WIRED that the hacked files came from Anonymous—or at least a source self-representing as part of that group, given that under Anonymous' loose, leaderless structure anyone can declare themselves a member. Over the weekend, supporters of DDOSecrets, Anonymous, and protesters worldwide began digging through the files to pull out frank internal memos about police efforts to track the activities of protesters. The documents also reveal how law enforcement has described groups like the antifascist movement Antifa.

"It's the largest published hack of American law enforcement agencies," Emma Best, cofounder of DDOSecrets, wrote in a series of text messages. "It provides the closest inside look at the state, local, and federal agencies tasked with protecting the public, including [the] government response to COVID and the BLM protests."

The Hack

The massive internal data trove that DDOSecrets published was originally taken from a web development firm called Netsential, according to a law enforcement memo obtained by Kreb On Security. That memo, issued by the National Fusion Center Association, says that much of the data belonged to law enforcement "fusion centers" across the US that act as information-sharing hubs for federal, state, and local agencies. Netsential did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Best declined to comment on whether the information was taken from Netsential, but noted that "some Twitter users accurately pointed out that a lot of the data corresponded to Netsential systems." As for their source, Best would say only that the person self-represented as "capital A Anonymous," but added cryptically that "people may wind up seeing a familiar name down the line."

"Part of what a lot of the current protests are about is what police do and have done legally."
Emma Best, DDOSecrets

DDOSecrets has published the files in a searchable format on its website, and supporters quickly created the #blueleaks hashtag to collect their findings from the hacked files on social media. Some of the initial discoveries among the documents showed, for instance, that the FBI monitored the social accounts of protesters and sent alerts to local law enforcement about anti-police messages. Other documents detail the FBI tracking bitcoin donations to protest groups, and internal memos warning that white supremacist groups have posed as Antifa to incite violence.

Is The FDNY Tryna Get Out Ahead Of The Defunding Curve?

NYPost |  They may be New York’s Bravest, but they sure aren’t New York’s brightest.

In a Brooklyn neighborhood overrun with nightly illegal fireworks, one resident found out that some of the amateur pyrotechnic aficionados are none other than local FDNY firefighters.

The 33-year-old Crown Heights resident said he and his wife were passing by Ladder 123 on St. John’s Place near Schenectady Avenue at about 11:30 p.m. Tuesday when he saw a group of firefighters ignite what appears to be a fountain firework display.

“I thought it was young kids lighting it. And there are. But then I see the firefighters doing it — they should know better,” the man, a father of five children who asked that his name not be used, told The Post.

Video he recorded at the scene shows the firework spray sparks into the night air from a device on the street.

The man said one of the firefighters confronted him about filming the display — causing him to question whether they actually knew what they were doing was “absurd,” he said.

“As public servants, I feel like they should know better than to light fireworks at 11:30 at night. It’s completely brazen wantonness,” the man said.

“It’s like they didn’t understand why what they were doing is so absurd. It’s late at night, there are kids. You have to be responsible and set an example,” he added.

Folks Are Broke, Fireworks Are Expensive, George Floyd Rebellions Are Perfect Mimetic Cover

Slate |  Everyone in my neighborhood in Boston—not just the narcs and NIMBYs on my local NextDoor—is convinced they’re hearing way more fireworks this year. It turns out we’re not imagining it: Boston police recorded 1,445 fireworks complaints in the first week of June, compared with just 22 in the same week last year, the Boston Herald reported last week. This seems to have started when the weather began warming up—complaints in May were also up by more than 2,300 percent compared with May 2019—and it’ll only continue as we near a July 4 in which organized fireworks displays are yet another casualty of this semi-reopened pandemic summer. 

To go by the complaints cities are registering, it appears way more people are spending their free time dabbling with pyrotechnics this year. The mayor of Syracuse, New York, vowed action after a rash of 911 calls about fireworks last Tuesday night, and Syracuse police claim a 335 percent increase in fireworks complaints since the beginning of the year. Looking at New York City’s 311 data, I calculated a 920 percent year-over-year increase in fireworks complaints for the month of May. (The city made it easier to submit these complaints last June, when it began accepting reports online—but that by itself doesn’t appear to explain the May increase. The NYPD did not respond to a request for further comment.) More anecdotally, in Baltimore, “longtime residents” say individual fireworks use is noticeably more prevalent this year. In other parts of the country, Facebook and Twitter are full of complaints that it’s the worst year ever. As my colleague Ben Mathis-Lilley put it: 

We all need hobbies.

Alexander Kagan on Unsplash

Everyone in my neighborhood in Boston—not just the narcs and NIMBYs on my local NextDoor—is convinced they’re hearing way more fireworks this year. It turns out we’re not imagining it: Boston police recorded 1,445 fireworks complaints in the first week of June, compared with just 22 in the same week last year, the Boston Herald reported last week. This seems to have started when the weather began warming up—complaints in May were also up by more than 2,300 percent compared with May 2019—and it’ll only continue as we near a July 4 in which organized fireworks displays are yet another casualty of this semi-reopened pandemic summer. 

To go by the complaints cities are registering, it appears way more people are spending their free time dabbling with pyrotechnics this year. The mayor of Syracuse, New York, vowed action after a rash of 911 calls about fireworks last Tuesday night, and Syracuse police claim a 335 percent increase in fireworks complaints since the beginning of the year. Looking at New York City’s 311 data, I calculated a 920 percent year-over-year increase in fireworks complaints for the month of May. (The city made it easier to submit these complaints last June, when it began accepting reports online—but that by itself doesn’t appear to explain the May increase. The NYPD did not respond to a request for further comment.) More anecdotally, in Baltimore, “longtime residents” say individual fireworks use is noticeably more prevalent this year. In other parts of the country, Facebook and Twitter are full of complaints that it’s the worst year ever. As my colleague Ben Mathis-Lilley put it:

Sudden Fireworks All the Time outbreaks seem to be happening everywhere but the media won’t talk about it. And I think that’s because everyone deep down knows the truth about who’s setting them off: The evil clowns from 2016. https://t.co/uoJzfg5pvG

— Ben Mathis-Lilley (@BenMathisLilley) June 17, 2020

It’s true that Americans always complain more about fireworks in the run-up to July 4. And a pandemic alone can’t explain why Americans are generally setting off more explosives than they used to; we can also thank a liberalization of laws in a slew of states over the past two decades. These factors make it challenging to establish just how extraordinary 2020 is in terms of DIY fireworks displays and whether the apparent boom (sorry) is a local or national phenomenon.

I Believe Mr. Flare Is Back And Hard At Work Near You Too!

BaltimoreSun | Baltimore-area residents may not always agree, but when it comes to the spate of fireworks popping off all night across town, many have suddenly found themselves on the same page.

From Poppleton and Carrollton Ridge to Patterson Park, Hampden and Locust Point, the barrage of crackles, booms and pows has united much of Baltimore around a common set of concerns, ranging from fears about accidental fires to frustrations about interrupted sleep.

“It’s mayhem. It’s a lack of understanding about what it means to live in civil society,” said Janet Miller, who lives near Hollins Market and has seen fireworks go off until the wee hours of the morning since Memorial Day weekend. “It’s hard to continue to live here and feel safe.”

While the run-up to Independence Day usually sparks some amateur fireworks displays in Baltimore, longtime city residents say this year’s showings feel different in presentation, tone and timing.

Residents all over the city — and in other major U.S. cities such as New York, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco — have taken to Facebook, Reddit and other online neighborhood bulletins to vent and share opinions, with some posts receiving more than 150 replies and dozens of likes and shares. Parents of young children, military veterans and local politicians have weighed in.

There have been more fireworks going off over the last 10 nights than I've heard in the last three July 4th holidays combined. Some special fireworks sale going on that I don't know about?

— Bill Ferguson (@SenBillFerg) June 16, 2020

Pigtown resident Cat Wall has counted 17 nights in a row of audible fireworks, starting as early as 7 p.m. and continuing as late as 4 a.m. Her dog, Halas, a 12-year-old chocolate Lab, has taken to hiding in the basement and refusing outdoor walks when it gets dark, she said.

Say It Wasn't So: 1980's Protect and Serve Arson Ring?!?!?!

NYTimes | Federal officials charged today that a group mostly made up of police officers, firefighters and private security guards set the string of fires three years ago that brought Boston the nationally reported title of ''arson capital of the world.''

The fires were set, according to United States Attorney William Weld, to scare the public into supporting more positions for the Police and Fire Departments after property tax reductions had reduced their ranks.

Federal agents arrested six people in three states this morning, and a seventh surrendered in Boston this afternoon. Two of the defendants were armed when arrested. The five arrested in the Boston area pleaded not guilty at a hearing here today. More charges and arrests were expected, Federal and state officials said.

Largest Arson Case

Mr. Weld said the 83-count Federal indictment announced today was believed to be ''the largest single arson case in history, state or Federal, in terms of the number of fires involved.''

The indictment alleges that beginning sometime after July 1981, as the effect of a statewide tax-cutting measure forced layoffs of many police officers and firefighters in Massachusetts, the members of the group set 163 fires in Boston and nine surrounding cities and towns. The outlying fires were set to divert investigators away from Boston, the indictment said.

It also said that defendants who worked for a security company burned a client's building to distract attention from themselves.

The buildings burned included houses, churches, factories, restaurants, a Marine Corps barracks and the Massachusetts Fire Academy. A total of 281 firefighters were injured in the fires.

The fires listed in the indictment grew in frequency and number over the months. They stirred deep public apprehension here, generated local and national news accounts, and two years ago resulted in the Federal investigation that produced the indictments.

The indictments and arrests were announced by an assembly of Federal and state officials that included the District Attorneys of five counties, officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Stephen E. Higgins, director of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

A "Warrior" Class Subduing Local Populations Is As American As Apple Pie

Been a minute since we had a lecture from the great Alfred McCoy. 

thediplomat |  The protests in the United States have sparked a debate about the militarization of American police forces. Much attention has been paid to the literal usage of military hardware because it is the most obvious manifestation of this phenomenon. But there is a much deeper history that goes beyond just American police choosing to take on military garb and ride Armored Personnel Carriers: American military adventures abroad have long fueled a broader militarization that shapes norms, processes, mentalities, and the relationship between the local police and the citizenry.

There was a significant amount of concern in early America and up to the late 1800s about the prospect of the U.S. military being used as a means of controlling the public. The founding fathers were suspicious of the idea of a standing army, in part, for this reason. A number of laws including the Militia Acts passed in the decades following American independence and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 tried to limit the ability of the president to use the military in domestic circumstances.

That being said, scholars have been mapping the relationship between wars and the evolution of domestic policing for some time. Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall’s work on the matter is particularly informative. They posit that a “boomerang effect” contributes to the incorporation of intrusive and aggressive means used to subdue foreign populations in domestic civilian settings. Other scholars have looked at the impact of specific conflicts or the mindsets that govern police conduct.

The Domestic Legacy of the Philippines War

Despite the formal end of the Philippine War in 1902, American colonial rule faced an aggressive insurgency seeking independence. The insurgency in the Philippines against the U.S. occupation authority provided the opportunity to experiment with new concepts involving the use of military entities to pacify a civilian population. The U.S. military formed a constabulary manned primarily by sympathetic locals that blurred the line between police and military. Rather than having two distinct forces, one protecting the country from foreign threats and the other providing security services to the populace, the Philippine Constabulary (PC) was a hybrid of both, with a comfortable revolving door between it and various other military and policing structures.

Many U.S. veterans who had been at the forefront of establishing these social control systems in the Philippines returned the United States after the war, where they sought work in local law enforcement and changed the structure of police departments, unleashing a torrent of militarization. These veterans, many of whom were involved with the PC, initially used the techniques they had mastered abroad to target out-groups like foreign workers or prostitutes. Over time, the success of these measures would open the door to a more widespread militarization of the police and a shift in organizational and cultural norms within police departments and public opinion shifted to accommodate it. As historian Alfred McCoy notes:

[T]he U.S. military, thrust into these crucibles of counterinsurgency, developed innovative methods of social control that had a decidedly negative impact on civil liberties back home. As the military plunged into a fifteen-year pacification campaign in the Philippines, its colonial security agencies fused domestic data management with foreign police techniques to forge a new weapon—a powerful intelligence apparatus that first contained and then crushed Filipino resistance. In the aftermath of this successful pacification, some of these clandestine innovations migrated homeward, silently and invisibly, to change the face of American internal security. … Empire thus proved mutually transformative in ways that have arguably damaged democracy in both the Philippines and the United States.

The notion that returning servicemen would seek employment in the civilian policing sector is not inherently harmful, but as Coyne and Hall explain, rather than these servicemen being mentored to adapt their skills for civilian service, they became agents of importation for military tactics — especially as they climbed the ranks of their respective departments:

The Resurrection Of Christ Cathedral

                       

wikipedia |  According to the official website, "the church was designed in a monumental Russian style, organically incorporating modern architectural approaches and innovations unique to the Orthodox church creation". The facades of the building are finished with metal, the arches are glazed. The walls of the church, decorated with murals, include battle scenes from military history and scripture texts. The decoration of the lower (small) church is made of ceramics and is decorated with Gzhel painting, with pieces of glass smalt used in the manufacture of mosaic panels. The central apse dedicated to the Resurrection of Christ is made in the form of a metal relief. The decoration of the church, the icon and the iconostasis (icon wall) are made of copper with enamels, as was done on the marching military icons. The image of the Saviour-Not-Made-by-Hands in the central dome of the church is the largest image of the Christ's face executed in mosaic.

Glass mosaics

Stained glass mosaics in the cathedral's vault feature various Red Army orders, accompanied by their respected ribbons that denote their class. Many of the orders display the faces of prominent military leaders from the Imperial Russian Army. The following orders are depicted in the mosaics: The Order of Alexander Nevsky (First Class), Order of Bogdan Khmelnitsky (First Class), Order of Ushakov (First Class), Order of Nakhimov (First Class), Order of Suvorov (First Class), Order of Kutuzov (First Class), Order of Victory, Order of the Red Banner, Order of the Red Star, and the Order of the Patriotic War (First Class).

Sizes

Some of the sizes are symbolic. The height of the church along with the cross is 95 meters. The diameter of the drum of the main dome is 19.45 meters, symbolizing the year when the Great Patriotic War ended – 1945. The height of the belfry is 75 meters, a reference to the 75 years that passed in 2020 since the end of World War II. The height of the small dome is 14.18 meters – 1418 days and nights hostilities lasted in Great Patriotic War. The area of the church complex is 11,000 m². The capacity of the interior of the church is up to 6,000 people.

Bells

The bells are made at the Voronezh Foundry. The decoration of the bells repeats ornaments decorating the cathedral. The bells reflect the theme of Victory in the Great Patriotic War, icons of patrons of the Russian Army. The main bell-evangelist was decorated with bas-reliefs depicting key events of the Great Patriotic War. Work on the manufacture of bells was carried out for six months. The ensemble weighs more than 20 tons, it includes 18 bells, the largest of which weighs 10 tons.^[7] 17 of the 18 bells are dedicated to the types and arms of the troops. On the one hand the emblem is applied to the bell, on the other, the image of the patron saint.^[7] On 23 August 2019, bells are set on the belfry of the cathedral.

Dome

On 15 November 2019, a 80-ton central dome was erected on the cathedral, the height and diameter of which are 12 meters.^[8] In total, the cathedral has six domes, four of which are identical, each of which weighs 34 tons, the central one is the largest and one is on the belfry. The design has a high alloy steel frame with a strength factor from 300 to 1500 years.

Main icon

See also: Russian icons

The central icon of the Main Church of the Russian Armed Forces is the "Holy Saviour" in the main dome. The Icon of the Savior Not Made by Hands is a canonical image of the Holy Face of Jesus Christ, miraculously imprinted on a piece of material and transmitted by the Saviour himself to King Abgar V of Osroene. The face on the icon surrounds the images of the Most Holy Mother of God of Kazan, of Vladimir, of Smolensk and of Tikhvin, placed on artistic reliefs that depict significant events in the history of the Russian state. In the ark, which invariably accompanies the icon, there are eight particles of holy patrons: the great martyr George the Victorious, St. Andrew the First-Called, St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, St. Sergius of Radonezh, the great martyr Barbara, the apostle Peter, the great martyr Panteleimon the Healer, and also Fyodor Ushakov, the righteous commander of the Black Sea Fleet and one of the most revered saints in the fleet.

The image of the Savior is placed in a bronze fold and weighs about 100 kg. The icon itself without a fold has dimensions of about 98 × 84 × 10 cm.'

The Empire Of The North

gatestoneinstitute |  Moscow sent a spectacular message last month to the world's other Arctic powers: Russia is determined to dominate the region. Russian transport aircraft, breaking the record for the highest altitude jump ever, parachuted a group of their Spetsnaz (Special Forces) over the Arctic from a height of almost 33,000 feet (Mt. Everest is 29,000 feet). Russian paratroops then executed a military exercise operation before reassembling at the Nagurskoye base, the northernmost military facility in Russia.

Any rival's attempt to catch up and surpass Moscow's head start in the Arctic is unlikely to succeed. Russia has a geopolitical advantage in that its sovereign land abuts over half of the Arctic's territorial waters. Historically, Russia's czars and commissars were frustrated in their attempts to secure warm-water ports, which would have benefited commerce and military force projection. Now, with environmental warming and subsequent accelerating ice-melt in the Arctic Ocean, Moscow appears poised to control the newest maritime corridor, "the Northeast Passage." This waterway will unite Russian Europe with Russia's Far East provinces adjacent to Pacific waters. The "Northeast Passage" could shorten the transshipment of goods from Asian countries to Europe by two weeks, rather than shipping goods through the Suez Canal route.

For centuries, ships could navigate only sections of the Arctic a few months of the year. If present climatic warming trends continue, however, and probably even if they do not, Russia seems to be expecting exclusively to exploit the region's vast energy, mineral and fishing resources, at least within the legal limits of its 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone beyond its land borders.

Russia's northwestern Arctic territory of the Kola Peninsula accounts for large portions of the country's nickel and copper output, as does Norilsk in East Siberia. The Arctic region also accounts for most of Russia's tin extraction. Russian mining centers within the Arctic Circle produce valuable minerals, such as diamonds in the Yakutia Republic in Russia's Far East, as well as palladium, platinum, selenium and cobalt. Probably the most famous minerals are the area's legendary gold deposits in the Kolyma area.

Russia's claim of exclusivity, or at least its special ties, to the Arctic are of long-standing. Moscow first claimed sovereignty over all the islands in the Arctic Sea north of its Eurasian land mass as early as 1926, and repeated this claim in 1928 and again in 1950. Russia's claim of sovereign control of these islands, along with its nearly 25,000 kilometers of Arctic coastline, is considered part of the country's historical patrimony and, therefore, its ownership supposedly non-negotiable.

5/24/14: The Spook Who Sat By The Door Is No More REDUX

WaPo |  Sam Greenlee was underappreciated, disgruntled, professionally disemboweled and perpetually agitated.

NewYorker |  Ivan Dixon’s 1973 film, “The Spook Who Sat by the Door,” which is playing at Metrograph from Friday through Sunday (it’s also on DVD and streaming), is a political fiction, based on a novel by Sam Greenlee, about the first black man in the C.I.A. After leaving the agency, the agent, Dan Freeman (Lawrence Cook) moves to Chicago, and puts his training in guerrilla warfare to use: he organizes a group of black gang members and Vietnam War veterans into a fighting force and leads a violent uprising against the police, the National Guard, and the city government. The film’s radical premise was noticed outside of Hollywood: produced independently, the film was completed and released by United Artists, but it was pulled from theatres soon after its release. Its prints were destroyed; the negative was stored under another title; and Greenlee (who died in 2014) claimed that the F.B.I. was involved in its disappearance, citing visits from agents to theatre owners who were told to pull the movie from screens. (No official documentation of these demands has emerged.)

On these grounds alone, a viewing of “The Spook Who Sat By the Door” would be a matter of urgent curiosity. But the movie is also a distinctive and accomplished work of art, no mere artifact of the times but an enduring experience. A supreme aspect of the art of movies is tone—the sensory climate of a movie, which depends on the style and mood of performance as much as the plot and the dialogue, the visual compositions as well as the locations, costumes, and décor, the editing and the music (often a sticking point), all of which are aligned with—and sharpen and focus—the ideas that the movie embodies. Dixon—who starred in one of the greatest of all independent films, Michael Roemer’s “Nothing But a Man,” from 1964 (and then spent five years on “Hogan’s Heroes”)—begins with a tone bordering on sketch-like satire that soon crystallizes into a sharp edge of restrained precision. A senator (a white man, played by Joseph Mascolo) campaigning for reëlection finds that he needs the black vote and decides to criticize the C.I.A. for having no black agents. Even in his office, the senator speaks in a pompous, stentorian voice seemingly inflated to a constant podium bluster.

8/16/13 Loss of Professional and Managerial Classes REDUX

nih | The gap between Whites and Blacks in levels of violence has animated a prolonged and controversial debate in public health and the social sciences. Our study reveals that over 60% of this gap is explained by immigration status, marriage, length of residence, verbal/reading ability, impulsivity, and neighborhood context. If we focus on odds ratios rather than raw coefficients, 70% of the gap is explained. Of all factors, neighborhood context was the most important source of the gap reduction and constitutional differences the least important.

We acknowledge the harsh and often justified criticism that tests of intelligence have endured, but we would emphasize 2 facts from our findings. First, measured verbal/reading ability, along with impulsivity/hyperactivity, predicted violence, in keeping with a long line of prior research. Second, however, neither factor accounted for much in the way of racial or ethnic disparities in violence. Whatever the ultimate validity of the constitutional difference argument, the main conclusion is that its efficacy as an explainer of race and violence is weak.

Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that Blacks are segregated by neighborhood and thus differentially exposed to key risk and protective factors, an essential ingredient to understanding the Black–White disparity in violence. The race-related neighborhood features predicting violence are percentage professional/managerial workers, moral/legal cynicism, and the concentration of immigration. We found no systematic evidence that neighborhood- or individual-level predictors of violence interacted with race/ ethnicity. The relationships we observed thus appeared to be generally robust across racial/ ethnic groups. We also found no significant racial or ethnic disparities in trajectories of change in violence.

Similar to the arguments made by William Julius Wilson in The Truly Disadvantaged,these results imply that generic interventions to improve neighborhood conditions may reduce the racial gap in violence. Policies such as housing vouchers to aid the poor in securing residence in middle-class neighborhoods may achieve the most effective results in bringing down the long-standing racial disparities in violence. Policies to increase home ownership and hence stability of residence may also reduce disparities (see model 3, Table 2 ).

Family social conditions matter as well. Our data show that parents being married, but not family configuration per se, is a salient factor predicting both the lower probability of violence and a significant reduction in the Black–White gap in violence. The tendency in past debates on Black families has been either to pathologize female-headed households as a singular risk factor or to emphasize the presence of extended kin as a protective factor. Yet neither factor predicts violence in our data. Rather, being reared in married-parent households is the distinguishing factor for children, supporting recent work on the social influence of marriage and calls for renewed attention to the labor-market contexts that support stable marriages among the poor.

Although the original gap in violence between Whites and Latinos was smaller than that between Whites and Blacks, our analysis nonetheless explained the entire gap in violence between Whites and Latino ethnic groups. The lower rate of violence among Mexican Americans compared with Whites was explained by a combination of married parents, living in a neighborhood with a high concentration of immigrants, and individual immigrant status. The contextual effect of concentrated immigration was robust, holding up even after a host of factors, including the immigrant status of the person, were taken into account.

The limitations of our study raise issues for future research. Perhaps most important is the need to replicate the results in cities other than Chicago. The mechanisms explaining the apparent benefits to those living in areas of concentrated immigration need to be further addressed, and we look to future research to examine Black–White differences in rates of violence that remain unexplained. As with any nonexperimental research, it is also possible we left out key risk factors correlated with race or ethnicity. Still, to overturn our results any such factors would have to be correlated with neighborhood characteristics and uncorrelated with the dozen-plus individual and family background measures, an unlikely scenario. Even controlling for the criminality of parents did not diminish the effects of neighborhood characteristics. Finally, it is possible that family characteristics associated with violence, such as marital status, were themselves affected by neighborhood residence. If so, our analysis would mostly likely have underestimated the association between neighborhood conditions and violence.

We conclude that the large racial/ethnic disparities in violence found in American cities are not immutable. Indeed, they are largely social in nature and therefore amenable to change.

What Blaxploitation Could Have Been....,