mises | Dealing with violent crime constitutes only a small minority of what police deal with on a daily basis. For example,
in 2014, out of 11,205,833 arrests made nationwide (in the US), 498,666
arrests were for violent crimes and 1,553,980 arrests were for property
crime.
That means 82 percent of arrests were made for something other than violent crime or property crime.
Moreover,
many of these non-violent offenses — such as drug use, liquor
violations, carrying an illegal knife, or other infractions that should
be regarded as small-time offenses can result in serious jail time or
prison time, as well as steep fines and lost earnings.
For instance, the highly publicized death of Eric Garner
at the hands of police officers was a conflict precipitated by the sale
of untaxed cigarettes by Garner. The police officers who killed Freddie
Gray in custody in Baltimore later claimed the arrest was necessary
because Gray possessed a knife that violated city ordinances.
And
then there are the countless cases of non-criminals who have been
stopped, searched, arrested and imprisoned for petty drug offenses such
as possession.
Indeed, police departments spend an immense amount of time and resources on these non-violent offenses. In their book, The Challenge of Crime, Henry Ruth and Kevin Reitz observe:
[W]e
do know that the effort to stem the tide of illicit drugs has been
massive — and expensive. On the local level, 93 percent of county police
agencies and 82 percent of all municipal agencies with more than one
hundred police officers contained a full-time drug enforcement unit, as
did about 60 percent of the state police agencies, and almost 70 percent
of all sheriffs' departments. New York City alone in 1997 reported over
2,500 police officers dedicated to drug units and task forcese. More
than 90 percent of all these police agencies received money and property
forfeited by drug sellers for use in law enforcement opertations. ...
State
and local police made about 1.6 million arrests for drug abuse
violations in 2000, four-fifths of them for drug possession. ... And in
1998, drug offenders were 35 percent of all felons convicted in state
courts.
In Gangs and Gang Crime, Michael
Newton Reports: "In 1987, drug offenses produced 7.4 percent of all
American arrests, nearly doubling to 13.1 percent by 2005."
As
Ruth and Reitz note, there are financial incentives to police agencies
to pursue drug offenders. The nature of drug offenses also gives the
police more reason to make arrests in general. As explained by Lawrence
Travis in Introduction to Criminal Justice:
With
increased emphasis on drug crimes, agents and agencies of the justice
system have uncovered offenses that have been present for years. Because
drug offenses have gone unreported in the past, Zeisel (1982) noted
that they present an almost limitless supply of business for the police.
changing public perceptions of the seriousness of drug offenses has
supported increased drug enforcement efforts.
[Peter] Kraska
observed that with drug offenders, police "can seek actively to detect
drug crimes, as opposed to violent and property crimes, for which they
have little choice but to react to complaints." Thus, the volume of drug
offenders entering the justice system is more a product of police
activity than is that of violent or property offenders.. Political
pressure to treat drug offenses more seriously, coupled with giving
incentives such as profit from seizing the property of drug offenders,
spurs more aggressive police action."
In other words,
rather than react to complaints about violent crime or property crime,
drug enforcement provides the police with nearly limitless opportunities
to search, question, and arrest suspects for any number of offenses
related to drugs. Moreover, if the police attempt to stop and search a
person, and the person becomes uncooperative, police may then be able to
justify an arrest for "resisting arrest" or similar offense even if no
drugs are found.
Arrests in turn then bolster a police officer's career, even though little time has been spent on investigating violent crime or recovering stolen property.
NYTimes | As
Mrs. Clinton herself said last year, “I don’t believe you change
hearts, I believe you change laws. You change allocation of resources,
you change the way systems operate.”
What,
even, would the form of this conversation be? Editorials? Panels?
Reports? “Hamilton”? Even the last, which Mrs. Clinton encouraged her
audience to listen to, won’t prevent more Alton Sterlings, or get an
ex-con back into mainstream life.
Mrs.
Clinton is trying to win an election, and it isn’t the time for novelty
or tilting at windmills. But she has said herself that we must change
both laws and attitudes. If she is serious about dedicating her first
100 days to getting work for underserved people, then policies — not
conversations — would do much more to prepare black America to take
advantage of those opportunities.
What
if, instead of calling for a conversation, Mrs. Clinton had called for
revitalized support for vocational schooling to help get poor black
people into solid jobs that don’t require a college degree? Or an end to
the war on drugs, which furnishes a black market that tempts
underserved black men away from legal work. Or ensuring cheap, universal
access to long-acting reversible contraceptives, to help poor women
(who praise these devices) control when they start families. Or
phonics-based reading programs, which are proved to be the key to
teaching poor kids how to read. All poor black kids should have access
to them just as they get free breakfasts.
These
narrow policy proposals may not have the emotional reach of a
conversation, and in and of themselves they will not stop the next
Philando Castile either. But they would do more for black America than
any amount of formulaic dialogues, or exploring the subtle contours of
whites’ inner feelings about black people. Maybe there could be
compromise: Let’s have a national conversation, but make it about
legislation, not feelings.
stateofthenation2012 | At the end of the day racial tensions are always the result of fierce
economic competition. Race wars are actually class wars in disguise.
Race riots occur during times of great financial duress. Racial hatreds
are easily inflamed when those on the other side of the tracks appear
to be doing better. The greater the divide between the 1% and the 99%
the more anger and rage, frustration and discouragement will be vented.
The Obama Administration is already well-known for willfully
neglecting the black communities throughout the nation. Obama’s
complete lack of sound economic policy and necessary financial restraint
have pushed the nation to a monetary collapse and fiscal bankruptcy.
Truly, the political, economic and social consequences of Obama’s
systematic destruction of American enterprise is catastrophic. Obamacare alone
has served to shudder countless businesses across the country. The
poor black communities have essentially shunned that cost-prohibitive
scheme designed to enrich health insurance companies.
One need look no further than the city of Detroit (and Obama’s
hometown Chicago) to understand the degree of Obama’s willful neglect.
That city resembles nothing short of an apocalyptic wasteland. Having a
predominantly black population, Detroit has nevertheless received very
little federal assistance, financial aid or emergency relief (like when
the water is shut off). Just how long can such a dire situation
continue before a ‘racial’ conflagration occurs. Financial desperation
will always push the economically oppressed into desperate actions.
This Administration is quite aware of their gross failure in regard
to economic recovery because the Congressional Black Caucus has told
them so repeatedly. Many of the more honest minority state
representatives have admitted that Obama has proven to be an unmitigated
disaster for black America. In fact he has done very little regarding
the critical causes of community renewal, business development and
genuine black empowerment.
Because of their monumental failure, Obama and his racist cohorts
have chosen to play the race card at every opportunity as a means of
misdirection. By inciting racial tensions, race riots, and race wars
their own profound failings are covered up. By continually misdirecting
the peoples’ attention to genuine or fictitious acts of racism, the
root causes of the coming class war are never exposed so that they can
be addressed.
Always and everywhere - remember the lessons you've learned at school.
theatlantic | Last week, 25-year-old Micah Xavier Johnson murdered five police officers in Dallas. This abhorrent act of political extremism cannot be divorced from American history—recent or old. In black communities, the police departments have only enjoyed a kind of quasi-legitimacy. That is because wanton discrimination is definitional to the black experience, and very often it is law enforcement which implements that discrimination with violence. A community consistently subjected to violent discrimination under the law will lose respect for it, and act beyond it. When such actions stretch to mass murder it is horrific. But it is also predictable.
To understand the lack of police legitimacy in black communities, consider the contempt in which most white Americans hold O.J. Simpson. Consider their feelings toward the judge and jury in the case. And then consider that this is approximately how black people have felt every few months for generations. It’s not just that the belief that Officer Timothy Loehmann got away with murdering a 12-year-old Tamir Rice, it is the reality that police officers have been getting away with murdering black people since the advent of American policing. The injustice compounds, congeals until there is an almost tangible sense of dread and grievance that compels a community to understand the police as objects of fear, not respect.
What does it mean, for instance, that black children are ritually told that any stray movement in the face of the police might result in their own legal killing? When Eric Holder spoke about getting “The Talk” from his father, and then giving it to his own son, many of us nodded our heads. But many more of us were terrified. When the nation’s top cop must warn his children to be skeptical of his own troops, how legitimate can the police actually be?
In the black community, it’s the force they deploy, and not any higher American ideal, that gives police their power. This is obviously dangerous for those who are policed. Less appreciated is the danger illegitimacy ultimately poses to those who must do the policing. For if the law represents nothing but the greatest force, then it really is indistinguishable from any other street gang. And if the law is nothing but a gang, then it is certain that someone will resort to the kind of justice typically meted out to all other powers in the street.
In some policy areas, including health care, military affairs and the economy, the most consequential political decisions are made in the nation’s capital. But in the criminal justice system, states, cities and counties are the central players. For every federal law enforcement agent, about a half-dozen state highway patrol officers, county sheriffs and city police patrol the streets. Similarly, less than one-seventh of the country’s prison inmates are in federal facilities.
Because the federal prison system is so small, even dramatic congressional reforms in federal criminal penalties would have only a modest impact on the level of incarceration in the United States. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was thus making an empty promise when he pledged to reduce the number of prisoners in the United States below that of China: Not even granting presidential pardons to every single federal prisoner would achieve this goal.
bloomberg | A new study shows that blacks and Hispanics in the U.S. are more than twice as likely as whites to "experience some form of force in interactions withpolice," but no more likely to experience the most "extreme use of force -- officer-involved shootings." That finding can be important tode-escalating the kind of violence that culminated with the tragedy in Dallas last week.
Roland G. Fryer, a Harvard economist,sayshis anger about the killings of blacks by police drove him to look into the data. The resultingpaper, unsurprisingly, showed that blacks and Hispanics have more violent interactions with police -- being grabbed, pushed into a wall or onto the ground, having a gun pointed at them. The study looked at more than 1,000 shootings in 10 major police departments, and found that even after correcting for various circumstances of the encounters -- such as the crime rate in the areas where they occurred -- the race effect remains. And non-whites are likely to be subjected to force even when they are compliant with police requests.
Fryer, however, wassurprised to discoverthat lethal force is more infrequently applied to blacks and Hispanics than to whites. Using a dataset from Houston, Texas, he calculated that blacks were 23.8 percent less likely to be fired upon by police than whites. "Partitioning the data in myriad ways, we find no evidence of racial discrimination in officer-involved shootings," he wrote.
HuffPo |How are your local courts and jails funded? If your community is like most of America, chances are the criminal justice system itself has become a revenue collection service - with problematic results.
Every stateexcept Alaska, North Dakota, and DC has increased civil and criminal fees since 2010. Many charge for services that are constitutionally required and were once free. As states and local governments have felt the pinch from the 2008 economic crash, they have turned to fines and fees to fill in budget gaps.
The most famous example is inFerguson, Missouri. The U.S. Justice Department’s investigation of the Ferguson Police Department exposed how the department collects fines and fees not for the sake of public safety, butto raise moneyfor city government. The FPD revenue targets in 2015 accounted for 20% of the city’s operating budget.
Or listen toJared Thornburg, in Westminister, Colorado. He was ticketed for making an illegal left turn. But because he had lost his job after a serious workplace injury, he couldn’t pay the ticket. He found a new job - but the day before he started, he was arrested for not paying the fines, which had escalated from $165 to $306. He was sentenced to 10 days in jail, which cost that city $70 per night. As Jared points out, “It cost the taxpayers more than what my fine was for and it just wasted 10 days of my life.”
It adds up to what Bill Mauer, from the Institute of Justice, calls “taxation by citation.” This reliance on fines and fees to cover fiscal gaps brings along with it four main problems.
DOTE | First, and just to get this point out of the
way, Johnson's "killing spree" was totally meaningless unless one deems
it meaningful that humans have big brains which can go haywire and often
do. If you follow that uncomfortable truth to the end of the line, you
risk becoming a social pariah. Few take that path!
Secondly, what we see above is that the shooting or abuse of unarmed
black men by white police officers, which is routine in the United
States, has been conflated with the actions of a single black man whose
big brain had gone haywire. These incidents are taken to be separate but
somehow equal. What's wrong with this picture?
I'll tell you what's wrong with it — in the former case, we're
talking about a real and alarming trend reflecting implicit racial bias,
whereas in the latter ("killing spree") case, we're talking about a
one-off. Big brains go haywire all the time, but let's be specific:
How many times have black men armed with assault rifles carried out sniper-style attacks on white police officers?
Never! — until last week (as far as I know, and read here). Certainly there's no trend.
Police have shot and killed a young black man (ages 18 to 29) — such
as Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. —175 times since January 2015; 24 of
them were unarmed. Over that same period, police have shot and killed
172 young white men, 18 of whom were unarmed. Once again, while in raw
number there were similar totals of white and black victims, blacks were
killed at rates disproportionate to their percentage of the U.S.
population.
Of all of the unarmed men shot and killed by police in 2015, 40 percent of them were black, even though black men make up just 6 percent of the nation’s population.
And, when considering shootings confined within a single race, a
black person shot and killed by police is more likely to have been
unarmed than a white person. About 13 percent of all black people who
have been fatally shot by police since January 2015 were unarmed,
compared with 7 percent of all white people.
Perhaps these raw statistics don't seem quite as damning as Black
Lives Matter people would like to argue, but we are talking about only
the most extreme cases here — black people were shot and killed. What about "less extreme" cases like this? (Vox,
July 7, 2016). This incident is described by a former St. Louis police
officer who is black. Reading this account requires a strong stomach.
As a new officer with the St. Louis in the mid-1990s, I responded to a
call for an "officer in need of aid." I was partnered that day with a
white female officer. When we got to the scene, it turned out that the
officer was fine, and the aid call was canceled. He'd been in a foot
pursuit chasing a suspect in an armed robbery and lost him.
The officer I was with asked him if he'd seen where the suspect went.
The officer picked a house on the block we were on, and we went to it
and knocked on the door. A young man about 18 years old answered the
door, partially opening it and peering out at my partner and me. He was
standing on crutches. My partner accused him of harboring a suspect. He
denied it. He said that this was his family's home and he was home
alone.
My partner then forced the door the rest of the way open, grabbed him
by his throat, and snatched him out of the house onto the front porch.
She took him to the ledge of the porch and, still holding him by the
throat, punched him hard in the face and then in the groin. My partner
that day snatched an 18-year-old kid off crutches and assaulted him,
simply for stating the fact that he was home alone.
I got the officer off of him. But because an aid call had gone out,
several other officers had arrived on the scene. One of those officers,
who was black, ascended the stairs and asked what was going on. My
partner pointed to the young man, still lying on the porch, and said,
"That son of a bitch just assaulted me." The black officer then went up
to the young man and told him to "get the fuck up, I'm taking you in for
assaulting an officer." The young man looked up at the officer and
said, "Man ... you see I can't go." His crutches lay not far from him.
The officer picked him up, cuffed him, and slammed him into the
house, where he was able to prop himself up by leaning against it. The
officer then told him again to get moving to the police car on the
street because he was under arrest. The young man told him one last
time, in a pleading tone that was somehow angry at the same time, "You
see I can't go!" The officer reached down and grabbed both the young
man's ankles and yanked up. This caused the young man to strike his head
on the porch. The officer then dragged him to the police car. We then
searched the house. No one was in it.
And the point is...
These kinds of scenes play themselves out everyday all over our country in black and brown communities.
Beyond the many unarmed blacks killed by police, including recently Freddie Gray
in Baltimore, other police abuses that don't result in death foment
resentment, distrust, and malice toward police in black and brown
communities all over the country. Long before Darren Wilson shot and
killed unarmed Michael Brown last August, there was a poisonous
relationship between the Ferguson, Missouri, department and the
community it claimed to serve. For example, in 2009 Henry Davis was stopped unlawfully
in Ferguson, taken to the police station, and brutally beaten while in
handcuffs. He was then charged for bleeding on the officers' uniforms
after they beat him.
So every time somebody treats that Dallas killing spree — blue lives
matter — as akin to police brutality against black people in the United
States — black lives matter — you can say "bullshit!" because that's
what it is.
RT | Black Lives Matter has come under fire from over 100,000 people
who have signed on to have the anti-police brutality group classified as
a terrorist organization in a White House petition. However, the
signatories may learn that petitions don’t matter.
A petition seeking
to classify the civil rights organization Black Lives Matter as a
terrorist outfit has exceeded 100,000 signatures on the White House’s
petition center, We the People. Any initiative that receives at least
100,000 signatures is placed on a list of pending petitions to which the
administration must respond within 60 days.
The author of the
petition, known only as Y.S., created the petition a day after Alton
Sterling was killed by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the same
day that Philando Castile was shot during a traffic stop in a St. Paul,
Minnesota suburb.
"Does the US Department of Defense see protest movements and social
activism in different parts of the world as a threat to US national
security? If so, why? Does the US Department of Defense consider
political movements aiming for large scale political and economic change
as a national security matter? If so, why? Activism,
protest, 'political movements' and of course NGOs are a vital element
of a healthy civil society and democracy - why is it that the DoD is
funding research to investigate such issues?"
Minerva's programme director Dr Erin Fitzgerald said "I appreciate
your concerns and am glad that you reached out to give us the
opportunity to clarify" before promising a more detailed response.
Instead, I received the following bland statement from the DoD's press
office:
"The Department of Defense takes seriously its role in the security
of the United States, its citizens, and US allies and partners. While
every security challenge does not cause conflict, and every conflict
does not involve the US military,
Minerva helps fund basic social science research that helps increase
the Department of Defense's understanding of what causes instability and
insecurity around the world. By better understanding these conflicts
and their causes beforehand, the Department of Defense can better
prepare for the dynamic future security environment."
In 2013, Minerva funded a University of Maryland project in
collaboration with the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory to gauge the risk of civil unrest due to climate
change. The three-year $1.9 million project is developing models to anticipate what could happen to societies under a range of potential climate change scenarios.
From the outset, the Minerva programme was slated to provide over $75
million over five years for social and behavioural science research.
This year alone it has been allocated a total budget of $17.8 million by
US Congress.
The internal email from Prof Steve Corman, a principal investigator
for the project, describes a meeting hosted by the DoD's Human Social
Cultural and Behavioural Modeling (HSCB) programme in which senior
Pentagon officials said their priority was "to develop capabilities that
are deliverable quickly" in the form of "models and tools that can be
integrated with operations."
washingtonsblog | While many Americans understand why the NSA is conducting mass
surveillance of U.S. citizens, some are still confused about what’s
really going on.
In his new book, No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald writes:
The
perception that invasive surveillance is confined only to a
marginalised and deserving group of those “doing wrong” – the bad people
– ensures that the majority acquiesces to the abuse of power or even
cheers it on. But that view radically misunderstands what goals drive
all institutions of authority. “Doing something wrong” in the eyes of
such institutions encompasses far more than illegal acts, violent
behaviour and terrorist plots. It typically extends to meaningful dissent and any genuine challenge. It is the nature of authority to equate dissent with wrongdoing, or at least with a threat.
The
record is suffused with examples of groups and individuals being placed
under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views and
activism – Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, anti-war activists, environmentalists. In the eyes of the government and J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, they were all “doing something wrong”: political activity that threatened the prevailing order.
The
FBI’s domestic counterintelligence programme, Cointelpro, was first
exposed by a group of anti-war activists who had become convinced that
the anti-war movement had been infiltrated, placed under surveillance
and targeted with all sorts of dirty tricks. Lacking documentary
evidence to prove it and unsuccessful in convincing journalists to write
about their suspicions, they broke into an FBI branch office in
Pennsylvania in 1971 and carted off thousands of documents.
Files
related to Cointelpro showed how the FBI had targeted political groups
and individuals it deemed subversive and dangerous, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, black nationalist movements, socialist and communist organizations, anti-war protesters and various rightwing groups.
The bureau had infiltrated them with agents who, among other things,
attempted to manipulate members into agreeing to commit criminal acts so
that the FBI could arrest and prosecute them.
Those revelations
led to the creation of the Senate Church Committee, which concluded:
“[Over the course of 15 years] the bureau conducted a sophisticated
vigilate operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of first
amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that
preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of
dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.”
These
incidents were not aberrations of the era. During the Bush years, for
example, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
revealed, as the group put it in 2006, “new details of Pentagon
surveillance of Americans opposed to the Iraq war, including Quakers and student groups“.
The Pentagon was “keeping tabs on non-violent protesters by collecting
information and storing it in a military anti-terrorism database”. The
evidence shows that assurances that surveillance is only targeted at
those who “have done something wrong” should provide little comfort,
since a state will reflexively view any challenge to its power as
wrongdoing.
The opportunity those in power have to characterise political opponents
as “national security threats” or even “terrorists” has repeatedly
proven irresistible. In the past decade, the government, in an echo of
Hoover’s FBI, has formally so designated environmental
activists, broad swaths of anti-government rightwing groups, anti-war
activists, and associations organised around Palestinian rights. Some individuals within those broad categories may deserve the designation, but undoubtedly most do not, guilty only of holding opposing political views. Yet such groups are routinely targeted for surveillance by the NSA and its partners.
One
document from the Snowden files, dated 3 October 2012, chillingly
underscores the point. It revealed that the agency has been monitoring
the online activities of individuals it believes express “radical” ideas
and who have a “radicalising” influence on others.
***
The
NSA explicitly states that none of the targeted individuals is a member
of a terrorist organisation or involved in any terror plots. Instead,
their crime is the views they express, which are deemed “radical“, a term that warrants pervasive surveillance and destructive campaigns to “exploit vulnerabilities”.
Among
the information collected about the individuals, at least one of whom
is a “US person”, are details of their online sex activities and “online
promiscuity” – the porn sites they visit and surreptitious sex chats
with women who are not their wives. The agency discusses ways to exploit
this information to destroy their reputations and credibility.
theantimedia | It is extremely important to note that in all of recorded history, an
insurgency that matured through the phases and reached this stage has
never been quelled through force. Ever. It may have been delayed, but
the insurgency simply went underground until opposition forces relaxed.
In some cases it took 800 years to achieve an insurgent victory. Once an
insurgency reaches this stage, it wins. It is that simple. See: Irish Republic Army.
At this point, in a form of bizarre just deserts, the only option law
enforcement has is the same option it offered to the American people,
which prompted this cycle: comply or die.
Certain police departments may believe they are isolated from the
violence because of their geographic location. They aren’t. Because of
social media, events that historically would have only prompted violence
within the immediate vicinity can prompt violence on the other side of
the nation. We are so close to an open insurrection in this country that
it boggles the mind. If police proceed with a law enforcement
crackdown, events could spiral out of control and open insurrection
could happen tomorrow.
Some in the media are calling for the arrests
of the leaders of Black Lives Matter, Cop Block, and other
organizations. This is possibly the worst move law enforcement could
make. This gives the cause martyrs. To continue the Irish comparison,
after the Easter Rising
the British government arrested, interned, and even executed some of
the rebellion’s leaders. The names of those men are still recited in
songs today, 100 years later. It fanned the flames of rebellion and
as Éamon de Valera is said to have remarked while waiting for the
British government to decide between executing or imprisoning him,
“every one of us they shoot brings ten more to the cause.” Today, with
social media, the effects of martyr-based propaganda are even stronger.
As a more recent example, ask those associated with the Anonymous
collective how much influence people like Jeremy Hammond, Aaron Swartz,
and Dennis Collins hold. Two of them are deceased, one sits rotting in a
federal prison, and yet they are still massive recruiting tools.
Is this guy really saying to give in to violence? Yes. That is
exactly what I am saying. There was an opportunity for a negotiated
peace after Ferguson. Law enforcement chose to refuse. Law enforcement
chose to dismiss the threat. Law enforcement chose to listen to pundits
within the media that were only interested in pandering to their
viewers. Now, that time has past. My best advice: immediately
decommission the MRAPs, end no-knock raids for non-violent offenders,
make certain the suspect is home and that you have the correct house
before executing a raid, issue body cameras to all officers, end
intrusive electronic surveillance, decommission the drones, and adopt a
“do not fire until fired upon” policy. The end result of this scenario
will be law enforcement demilitarizing; the only thing left to determine
is how many cops and innocents die along the way.
Those in political office do not care about police officers’ lives.
The last time the United States came this close to an open insurrection
we had a President that understood insurgency. In fact, he understood it
so well that he is responsible for the SEAL Teams and Green Berets having the role they have today. He understood that once it reaches a certain point, violent revolution is inevitable. He said:
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”
slate | This is the central thing to understand about what happened in
Dallas: Black people who target whites are fundamentally allied with
white people who target blacks. They’re on the same team: the race war
team. It’s a lot like the global struggle over jihadism, in which
Muslims who hate Christians collaborate, in effect, with Christians who
hate Muslims. In the case of jihadism, the real struggle isn’t between
two religions. It’s between people who want religious war and people who don’t. The same is true of race: Either you’re on the race war team, or you’re against it.
WaPo | They struggle to believe that the human indignity of being seen,
apparently, as only a close-range shooting target by so many of those
entrusted to protect and serve, can produce such heinousness. They
refuse to understand what it means to be shot by police at 2.5 times the
rate of whites, as are black males, according the The Washington Post’s
database.
They don’t, or maybe can’t, comprehend what it is like
to know that you make up 24 percent of all deaths at the end of law
enforcement’s muzzle despite being just 12 percent of the population.
Instead,
they’ve tried to find another reason Johnson could turn into a Charles.
Maybe he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after his tour in
Afghanistan? Maybe he was otherwise mentally disturbed? Maybe he was
radicalized?
Especially for the families of the victims of
Johnson’s outburst, he understandably will be seen forever as the madman
he became. But as the best-selling white author of many sports books,
Peter Golenbock, noted on Facebook on Friday: “For years we have seen
the pictures of senseless murders of black men and children by white
policemen. Afterwards, the cops are rarely indicted and never
convicted.”
Golenbock continued, before knowing Johnson was the
sole shooter: “After all these years a group of blacks, tired of this
and obviously military trained, started shooting back in Dallas
yesterday at white cops, and now everyone is scared to death. What is
surprising is that this hasn’t occurred earlier.”
What is
fortunate for America is that most black people, like those in the
#BlackLivesMatter movement who marched that dreadful Thursday in
downtown Dallas, just seek a fairer shake.
ronpaulinstitute | This was a drone sent in to kill an American suspected of a crime.
Police
claim that continuing the negotiations was pointless and attempting to
capture him would have put officers at risk. He was supposedly shooting.
While no sane person wants police officers to be killed, risk is
something we are told they willingly accept when they sign up for police
duty. There are plenty of low-risk jobs out there.
The media
and opinion-leaders are presenting us with a false choice: if we
question the use of drones to kill Americans -- even if we suspect they
have done very bad things -- we somehow do not care about the lives of
police officers. That is not the case. It is perfectly possible to not
want police officers to be killed in the line of duty but to
wholeheartedly reject the idea of authorities using drones to remotely
kill Americans before they are found guilty.
African-American Dallas protester Mark Hughes was wrongly identified
by Dallas Police as a suspect in the shootings. Police tweeted photos
of Hughes marching with protesters openly carrying a rifle, as is
permitted in Texas. Police claimed was involved in the shooting. He was a
suspect just like Johnson was a suspect. During questioning they told Hughes that they had video of him shooting people,
which was a lie. What if police had sent in a drone to take out Mark
Hughes? What will happen in the future to a future Mark Hughes, falsely
accused by police of being involved in a shooting? Will we come to
accept murder without trial?
For
farmers, the transition from manned aircraft to drones is an easy
choice to make. Not only are they much cheaper, but they also provide
imaging tools, which can be used for detecting a variety of crop-related
issues, ranging from problems with irrigation to measuring chlorophyll
levels in plants.
So today I want to talk about the next step in
agri-tech evolution: robots. Although most modern farmers don’t have to
spend their days in the field anymore, sweating and toiling under the
sun while harvesting crops or tending to cattle, they still spend a
considerable amount of time servicing machines that harvest and spray
for them. If this part of the production were automated, farmers would
have more time (and money) to invest in expanding and perfecting their
production capacities.
They’d also boost yields in the process.
If
you think using robots in agriculture is too futuristic, think again:
They are already assisting with a growing number of back-breaking
activities in fields all over the world.
WaPo | I’m afraid that incidents such as those of the past several days will
reinforce a view that violence is not only justified but appropriate.
That such incidents will drive police and the communities they serve
further apart, dampening any interest in reconciliation.
But I’m
also optimistic. Even relationships that have been undermined by a long
history of distrust and anger can be repaired. We have seen some
remarkable progress in truly challenging situations, including police
departments in Richmond, Calif., and Camden, N.J., just to name a few.
We
can learn from those successes, and from successes outside the United
States. In Northern Ireland, for example, police and the Irish
Republican Army were in a state approaching open warfare for years
before establishing a tentative, then more lasting, relationship in the
late 1990s. More recently, U.S. military personnel put community
policing principles into practice with great effect in counterinsurgency
operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If positive relationships
can be established or repaired in those environments, surely we can do
the same in the context of domestic policing. Surely we must.
theatlantic | Commission staffers had produced a blistering and radical draft report on November 22, 1967. The 176-page report, “The America of Racism,” recounted the deep-seated racial divisions that shaped urban America, and it was damning about Johnson’s beloved Great Society programs, which the report said offered only token assistance while leaving the “white power structure” in place. What’s more, the draft treated rioting as an understandable political response to racial oppression. “A truly revolutionary spirit has begun to take hold,” they wrote, “an unwillingness to compromise or wait any longer, to risk death rather than have their people continue in a subordinate status.” Kerner then nixed the report, and his staff director fired all 120 social scientists who had worked on it.
Nevertheless, the finalKerner Reportwas still incredibly hard-hitting: “This is our basic conclusion: Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Though the commissioners had softened the language from the first draft, much of the data remained the same and the overall argument was still incredibly powerful. The report focused on institutional racism. This meant that racism was not just a product of bad individuals who believed that African Americans were inferior to white Americans, but that these racial hierarchies were literally embedded in the structure of society.
“Segregation and poverty,” the report said, “have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” The riots in Newark and Detroit, the report continued, “were not caused by, nor were they the consequences of, any organized plan or ‘conspiracy.’” The rioters were educated and had been employed in recent years; most of them were furious about facing constant discrimination when seeking new employment, trying to find a place to live, or, worst of all, interacting with hostile law-enforcement officials.
The police received the most scrutiny in the report. In a haunting section, the report explained, “Negroes firmly believe that police brutality and harassment occur repeatedly in Negro neighborhoods.” The rioting had shown that police enforcement had become a problem not a solution in race relations. More aggressive policing and militarized officers had become city officials’ de facto response to urban decay. “In several cities, the principal response has been to train and equip the police with more sophisticated weapons.” The report stressed that law-enforcement officers were not “merely a spark factor” to the riots but that they had come to symbolize “white power, white racism, and white oppression.”
But that rosy picture hides a grimmer reality. Journey to these
protected areas of northern Guatemala, and you’ll find something
resembling an ongoing ecological catastrophe. In Laguna del Tigre
National Park, nestled in the heart of the reserve, the tall acacia and
mahogany trees have been cut and burned, exiling the macaws to the tiny
fringe of forest that remains. You can see this damage on a map included
in an annual report
published by the National Council of Protected Areas (CONAP), the
Guatemalan national park service, in partnership with Western
environmental NGOs, and paid for in part by the U.S. Department of the
Interior. As the map shows, the Maya Biosphere Reserve is bisected by
what appears to be creeping fungus — illegal cattle ranches, which have
cleared about 8 percent of the reserve since 2000. These ranches stand
as a parable for the drug war. According to Guatemalan park guards, U.N.
researchers, and prosecutors alike, the unintended cause of the
deforestation is a drug war victory: a successful interdiction campaign
that redirected billions of dollars of drug cash across Guatemala,
funding a trade that threatens to destroy Central America’s greatest
forest.
According to a report
by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), until the early 2000s,
Central America was a relative sideshow in the Western Hemisphere’s
cocaine trade. The drug largely moved from Colombia across the Caribbean
into either Mexico or the southern United States. But starting around
2002, aggressive U.S. law enforcement and interdiction campaigns closed
the Caribbean route, seizing some 200 tons of cocaine. Other victories
followed in allied states. Security forces in Mexico largely shut down
direct drug flights into the country. In South America, the Colombian
government broke the power of the country’s main cartels.
But the drug trade is a river of money stretching from the Andes to
North America. Dam it in one place and — as long as there are still
users in the United States — it will find another course.
theverge | Police in Dallas used a bomb disposal robot to kill a suspect afterlast night’s deadly shootingduring a protest. In a press conference, Dallas police chief David Brown said that the robot was deployed after negotiations with the suspect failed. "We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was," said Brown. "Other options would have exposed our officers to great danger. The suspect is deceased as a result of detonating the bomb."
It’s not entirely clear what the "device" in question was, although it may have been one of the small explosives that are normally used to safely detonate larger bombs. A previous statement, from Dallas’ mayor, said only that the suspect had died after police used explosives to "blast him out."
Police have used remote-controlled bomb disposal robots for other purposes; San Jose police talked a man out of suicide last yearafter deliveringa phone and pizza to him via one. But this is the first known case where a department has described using one as a weapon, defense technology expert Peter Singer posted on Twitter, although he notes it's been used this way informally by US troops and insurgents. Unlike with the "killer robots" thathave ethicistsmost worried, any decisions in Dallas were made clearly by humans — it’s much more like an advanced tool used in an unexpected way than anything artificially intelligent or designed for murder. Still, beyond the unmanned drones used in bombing strikes, it’s one of the first known times that a robot has been intentionally used to kill a human outside the battlefield.
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
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New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...