Month: May 2024

Distrust of police persists. This Georgia city may have a solution. – CSMonitor.com

Note: This is behind a paywall but the magazine allows 3 articles a month.

It could have all ended very badly.

After a LaGrange resident’s car was repossessed, the man’s entire family – his son, his son’s fiancée, and their baby – engaged in a high-speed chase through downtown LaGrange, with the family using another car to chase the person who repossessed their car, weaving through traffic at high speed.  

When police finally stopped the cars, emotions ran high. Their faces deep in concern, the LaGrange Police Department officers talked calmly with all involved until passions subsided.
— Read on www.csmonitor.com/USA/2024/0529/police-violence-distrust-cops-safety

Banning most low level traffic stops would deliver benefits to people, police and communities • Minnesota Reformer

Imagine a law that could make Minnesota’s roadways safer, reduce the number of dangerous interactions between the public and police, and help understaffed police departments. 

It seems too good to be true — but it’s not. 

In fact, a bill to do all of those things — by limiting when police can make traffic stops for low-level offenses — was introduced earlier this year by Rep. Cedrick Frazier, DFL-New Hope.

But the Legislature didn’t pass that bill, just like it didn’t pass similar bills in 2023, 2022 and 2021. Each delay has denied Minnesotans the benefits of safer roadways and communities.
— Read on minnesotareformer.com/2024/05/30/banning-most-low-level-traffic-stops-would-deliver-benefits-to-people-police-and-communities/

Can We Get Back to Tougher Policing

More than 40 years have passed since the publication of one of the most important public-policy essays ever written. Its title, “Broken Windows,” captured the essence of a simple but deeply insightful idea: public order matters. “[I]f a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken,” wrote the late authors, political scientist James Q. Wilson and longtime Manhattan Institute senior fellow George L. Kelling, in the March 1982 issue of The Atlantic. Visible signs of chaos were like warnings: you’re not safe here. If left unaddressed, the chaos made those areas more vulnerable to further disorder, including serious crime. “ ‘[U]ntended’ behavior,” the authors maintained, “leads to the breakdown of community controls” and causes residents to “think that crime, especially violent crime, is on the rise, and . . . modify their behavior accordingly.” The areas where disorder festers become more “vulnerable to criminal invasion” than “places where people are confident they can regulate public behavior by informal controls.”

Read more by Rafael Mangual – HERE

Building Carcerality

The U.S. carceral landscape is a loose network of sites of detention that includes jails and prisons, along with detention centers, prison camps, and juvenile detention centers. Despite the fact that these buildings each play distinct roles within legal processes, the interior spaces of carceral environments appear nearly one and the same.

In particular, the buildings share similar spatial organizations, most often a row of cell blocks organized around and oriented onto a central indoor recreation room, or a dayroom flanked by double-loaded corridors (i.e., rooms on both sides) filled with cells. Their material expression, too, is similar: the buildings are overly reliant on cold and acoustically reflective concrete masonry blocks, steel, and plastics, boasting undersaturated and austere aesthetics. Jails and prisons alike are littered with security mechanisms that syncopate passage through their hallways, in which metal doors and gates control passage from one space to the next. In these building typologies, there is a noticeable absence of natural light: the sun filters through narrow windows, and abrasive fluorescent lighting compensates for the resultant darkness.

Read more HERE

The Cost of Police Violence and Mayhem – A Report on Police Misconduct During the George Floyd Protests

Four years ago, on May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police killed George Floyd. We already had a too-long list of black men and women killed by police, and the video of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s throat for nine minutes, assisted by 3 other cops, spurred a mass protest movement into action.

The movement against the long and brutal history of police murdering Black men crystallized under the banner of Black Lives Matter (BLM) in 2013 after the acquittal of the man who killed 17-year old Trayvon Martin.1 The movement grew, forcing us to pay attention as police killed Black men and women with impunity. On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner uttered his last words, “I can’t breathe,” over and over 17 times to an NYPD cop who continued to choke him. Less than a month later, Ferguson cop Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown. And police kept killing Black people in other towns and cities all across America. We said their names and held them in our hearts: Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Alton Sterling, Breonna Taylor. And so many more, their glaring absence felt by their communities.
— Read on drive.google.com/file/d/12OOPD54mQSsCBanMomfHIN_tkumtm4IR/view