Police use of lethal violence in the United States—as powerfully documented by the Guardian and the Washington Post

“Bernard Harcourt, who wrote influential books and authored studies debunking the famous Broken Windows theory of policing (the debated idea that focusing on low-level “urban disorder” will curtail serious crime), recently pointed out (Guardian, 6/6/15) that the “crime wave” politics being carried by right-wing and corporate centrist media outlets are a classic response to a political movement that takes on racist policing in America:

The point of the “Ferguson effect,” though, is not to be accurate. It is instead to distract us from the growing evidence about the magnitude and extent of police use of lethal violence in the United States—as powerfully documented just this week by the Guardian and the Washington Post—and to besmirch the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

It’s a strategy that Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater inaugurated in his campaign in 1964, almost single-handedly turning crime into a political weapon against the civil rights movement.”

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31484-concocting-a-crime-ageddon-to-promote-police-power