Month: June 2023

Covering Democracy: Protests, Police, and the Press

Here is an interesting report from a a website that I just learned about. The only issue I have with the issue of the press and riots and getting arrested is that everyone holding a smartphone thinks that they are the press and that can’t be the case. During tense and violent situations an person can’t yell “PRESS” and hold up their phone and not follow orders from the police and then wonder why they are arrested. Especially during violent and dangerous times when other persons from the real press know that safety wins out and they moved so the police can perform their job.

Otherwise checkout what the report has to say. There are 5 Chapters and all the links can be found on this webpage.

A report investigating a major threat to press freedom

In recent years, hundreds of journalists who have been covering peaceful protests, public demonstrations, and acts of civil unrest in the United States have been arrested, physically assaulted, or otherwise forcibly deterred from doing their work by law enforcement personnel. The frequency and intensity of these incidents are alarming, threatening press freedom and undermining fundamental rights at the heart of American democracy. See more HERE

Assessing the Effectiveness of Pretrial Special Conditions – Full Findings from the Pretrial Justice Collaborative

Below is an interesting report on electronic monitoring for pretrial conditions. More information is at the website and there is a link below for the report.

The analysis found that:

Being released on EM or sobriety monitoring did not significantly improve court appearance rates. The analyses found that the special conditions and non–special conditions groups had similar pretrial court appearance rates. These results were consistent across jurisdictions.

Being released on electronic monitoring did not significantly increase the percentage of people who avoided a new arrest during the pretrial period. In fact, the analysis found that the EM group had a higher pretrial rearrest rate than the non-EM group, a result that was consistent across the two jurisdictions in that analysis. While the factors causing the results are not definitively known, the difference may be a supervision effect: people may be more likely to be arrested if their actions are more closely monitored, compared with others who are less closely monitored. Alternatively, the result may reflect unmeasured differences between the EM and non-EM groups that could not be controlled for in the analysis.

Being released on sobriety monitoring did not significantly improve the percentage of people who avoided a new arrest, but there was variation in this effect among jurisdictions. In two of the four jurisdictions studied, people who were assigned to sobriety monitoring were more likely to avoid new arrests, while in the other two, the result was the opposite.

Get the report HERE

Fight subway crime by actually enforcing the law | Washington Examiner

This is an interesting find how enforcing the law, especially for minor crimes, affected overall crime. The article goes on to say broken windows policing works and the police aren’t the problem the criminals are the problem.

“This bill does not say that crime is OK,” Washington, D.C., Councilman Vincent Gray said in 2019 as he voted to decriminalize turnstile jumping in the Metro system. “This bill does not advocate lawlessness,” he insisted. “Rather, it advocates for fairness.”
— Read on www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/fight-subway-crime-by-actually-enforcing-the-law