a lot of you who think you are using gallows humor are just a part of the execution
Whiteness riots have familiar features: police partisanship, local and national media fomentation, moral panics about crime and ‘race-mixing’, followed by calls for new criminal and immigration legislation.
dehumanization through criminalization in New Zealand
During what should’ve been Roe v. Wade’s 51st birthday week, Sarah and reproductive health policy reporter Megan Burbank take a look at the movement, decades in the making, to tear down abortion rights in America, starting with the hypocrisy at its root. Is what we know as the pro-life movement a religious effort or a political movement? And how did a veneer of sincere belief conceal a toxic combination of racism and fear of paying taxes? Join us as we take out the trash — and look for the helpers who are cleaning it up.
Police are rarely forced to talk about what they actually do. This is a failure of journalism and of governance. I put together a short list of questions that any journalist or any public official could ask any police chief in any city at any time in any public oversight hearing or any media interview:
- Why do you choose not to arrest bosses for wage theft but you choose to arrest poor people for shoplifting?
- Who are the Top 10 highest paid cops in the city, including overtime? Do you think this overtime pay is a good use of taxpayer money? What internal protocols and investigations have you initiated to prevent against the epidemic of overtime and sick-leave fraud by police?
- Why do you think that about 90% of the people arrested by your department are too poor to afford an attorney? Do you think this fact says anything about the kinds of crimes that you choose to investigate and the kinds of crimes you choose to ignore?
- Why do you think, and based on what evidence, that armed police officers are the most cost-effective way to deal with vehicular traffic code enforcement? What percentage of your police budget is devoted to traffic enforcement, including overtime for writing tickets?
- Why do you think, and based on what evidence, that armed police officers are the socially optimal first responder to mental health incidents?
- Why do you choose to devote almost all of your undercover resources to drug busts and not to undercover investigations of police corruption or white-collar crime?
- Why do you choose to arrest people for drug possession as the plurality of your arrests?
- Do you have any reason to believe that, unlike the national empirical evidence, usage of illegal drugs is higher in poor neighborhoods than in wealthier neighborhoods or higher among Black people than white people in this city? If this city is not different than the data available nationally, why do you focus your narcotics operations, undercover narcotics operations, and arrests on poor people almost exclusively?
- Why do you choose not to investigate and arrest people who own polluting businesses for illegal dumping of chemicals in violation of state law? When was the last time you chose to conduct an illegal dumping undercover operation? What surveillance operations do you have devoted to monitor pollution violations? How many informants do you currently have working with officers to investigate illegal dumping of chemicals?
- Please provide a list of each officer who has been investigated for having lied, in any of the following contexts, in the past 10 years: in a police report, in an application for a warrant, on any department paperwork, in video footage, in testimony, to a prosecutor, or to a superior concerning any employment incident.
- If state law criminalizes abortion and then criminalizes contraception and then criminalizes sodomy, do you intend to have your officers cage people for any of these offenses?
- Which surveillance technology are you employing that has not been publicly disclosed to the city council? How much are you spending, and how frequently are you deploying, Stingray or similar devices to capture cellular phone information of unsuspecting residents?
- Can you provide a list of each of your predictive policing programs, as well as the procurement contracts and any private grants that pay for any program employing any form of artificial intelligence, predictive policing, or algorithmic prediction?
- How many officers are paid either full-time or part-time to do any form of public relations, including but not limited to: direct contact with reporters, social media, video production, participation in neighborhood message boards or listserves, tracking and researching public opinion, collecting information on favorable or unfavorable journalists, conducting or contracting for focus groups on police messaging, any form of lobbying, and intervention with victims families to control press access to them.
- Do you agree that you should be terminated from your job if you knowingly provided the public any false, incomplete, or misleading information to any of these questions?
City council members with oversight authority are entitled to ask these questions, and to persist until they get comprehensive, truthful answers. Major media outlets in each city are entitled to ask these questions of public officials, and to persist until they get comprehensive, truthful answers.
Building a culture and an archive of adversarial questioning of police officials on important topics should be seen as an essential component of both democratic public service and ethical media coverage. And there are many other questions to ask. Perhaps you can add your own to the list.
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The Kantō Massacre (關東大虐殺, Korean: 간토 대학살) was a mass murder in the Kantō region of Japan committed in the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake. With the explicit and implicit approval of parts of the Japanese government, the Japanese military, police, and vigilantes murdered an estimated 6,000 people: mainly ethnic Koreans, but also Chinese and Japanese people mistaken to be Korean, and Japanese communists, socialists, and anarchists.[4][5][6][7][8][9]
The massacre began on the day of the earthquake, September 1, 1923, and continued for three weeks. A significant number of incidents occurred, including the Fukuda Village Incident.[10][11]
Meanwhile, government officials met and created a plan to suppress information about and minimize the scale of the killings. Beginning on September 18, the Japanese government arrested 735 participants in the massacre, but they were reportedly given light sentences. The Japanese Governor-General of Korea paid out 200 Japanese yen in compensation to 832 families of massacre victims, although the Japanese government on the mainland only admitted to about 250 deaths.
In recent years, it has continued to be denied or minimized by both mainstream Japanese politicians and fringe Japanese right-wing groups. Since 2017, the Governor of Tokyo Yuriko Koike has consistently expressed skepticism that the massacre occurred.
The Thiaroye massacre (French: Massacre de Thiaroye; pronounced [tja.ʁwa]) was a massacre of French West African veterans of the 1940 Battle of France, by French forces on the morning of 1 December 1944. These Tirailleurs Sénégalais units had been recently liberated from prisoner camps and after being repatriated to West Africa, they mutinied against poor conditions and defaulted pay at the Thiaroye military camp, on the outskirts of Dakar, Senegal. Between 35 and over 300 people were killed.
For decades, workers who make protein for Nestle made a fair living. After a $26 billion takeover, a new owner wants to take away lunch breaks & destroy the union.
Workers won’t back down. They’ve been striking for 4 months.
{watch}
Whether it was creating super-fast thoroughbreds, or fashioning dogs small enough to fit in your sleeve, animal breeding was an obsession of the Renaissance era. And, as Mackenzie Cooley reveals, animal husbandry prompted people to think about whether humankind could also be improved by selective breeding. Speaking to Ellie Cawthorne about her Cundill Prize-shortlisted book The Perfection of Nature, she discusses how ideas about animal breeding tied into colonialism, race and eugenics.