USA

There’s a lot of chatter about ‘stop and frisk.’ Here are the facts.

  • October 10, 2016
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In the last two weeks, some Americans have heard more about a controversial New York City Police Department tactic — “stop and frisk” — than possibly ever before. A whole host of conservative ideologues, elected officials and others have stepped forward to defend the Trump-Pence campaign’s claims that that tactic is an essential crime prevention tool uniquely capable of fending off anarchy and saving lives in crime-ridden communities. That’s what the Trump-Pence campaign continues to say even when confronted with the fact that a federal court ruled in 2013 that the way New York City police officers used the tactic…

Intersecting Criminalization: What Killed Ugandan Refugee Alfred Olango

  • October 8, 2016
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To flee from a war zone, only to be met with a fatal police bullet on the other side of the world: It’s an uncomfortable, truncated narrative of an abbreviated life. This was how Alfred Olango’s life concluded late last month, at the intersection of many forces of violence that converged at a San Diego suburb, in a scene that braided strands of war, policing, race and migration. A diasporic history caught up to him in the moment the police extinguished his life, but he had spent years in various states of escape. He was finally ensnared by a system…

Supreme court to address Duane Buck’s ‘racially tainted’ death sentence

  • October 5, 2016
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Duane Buck attended in 1997 the sentencing hearing in Texas that would seal his fate. The jury was being asked to decide whether to have him executed for killing his former girlfriend, Debra Gardner, and her friend Kenneth Butler. There was no disputing the conviction – Buck had carried out the brutal murders on 30 July 1995. Even so, he was still astonished by what he heard coming from the mouth of a so-called “expert” witness. Walter Quijano, a then psychologist who was frequently called to testify in Texas capital trials, was asked to give his professional opinion with regards…

Federal Charges for Chicago Officer in Shooting Caught on Video

  • September 17, 2016
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A Chicago police officer is facing federal criminal charges for shooting two black teenagers in 2013, when he fired into a stolen car that was moving away from him in an incident that was recorded on video. An indictment filed on Thursday and made public on Friday charges Officer Marco Proano with two counts of deprivation of rights under color of law, each one carrying a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. Both of the teenagers who were shot survived. Video of the encounter, captured by a dashboard camera in the officer’s squad car, became public last year as…

Charged with murder, but they didn’t kill anyone—police did

  • August 23, 2016
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A Reader investigation found ten cases since 2011 where police killed a civilian in Chicago and charged an accomplice with the murder.On July 8, 2012, as the summer sun rose over the Auburn Gresham neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, police hauled a distraught 19-year-old named Tevin Louis away from a murder scene. The victim was Louis’s best friend, Marquise Sampson. The shooter was a veteran police officer, Antonio Dicarlo. For the previous five years, Louis and Sampson had been inseparable, drawn together by rough childhoods marked by foster care and poverty. In good times, Sampson made Louis laugh….

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