USA

Cleveland Officer Will Not Face Charges in Tamir Rice Shooting Death

  • December 29, 2015
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CLEVELAND — A grand jury declined on Monday to charge a Cleveland patrolman who fatally shot a 12-year-old boy holding a pellet gun, capping more than a year of investigation into a case that added to national outrage over white officers killing African-Americans. In announcing the decision, Timothy J. McGinty, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, said he had recommended that the grand jurors not bring charges in the killing of the boy, Tamir Rice, who was playing with the gun outside a recreation center in November 2014. Mr. McGinty said the fatal encounter had been a tragedy and a “perfect storm…

New York City Policing, by the Numbers

  • December 29, 2015
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The warnings began even before Bill de Blasio was sworn in as New York City’s mayor in January 2014. A safe New York depended on the aggressive policing tactics that began in the 1990s and flourished under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Ray Kelly. Without those tactics, the doomsayers said, the city would be swamped by a 1970s-style crime wave. After a federal judge ruled in 2013 that the Police Department’s “stop and frisk” policy was so sweeping that it violated the Constitution, Mr. Kelly was furious. “Violent crime will go up,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the…

Memorial Blockade: A Love Letter to Communities Resisting Police Violence

  • December 25, 2015
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Toting a number of large gift-wrapped packages, a group of 16 Chicagoans walked into a crosswalk in the city’s financial district on December 15. After strolling into a formation that stretched from one side of Congress Parkway to the other, at the mouth of the Eisenhower Expressway, they unwrapped the packages, revealing a set of lockboxes – blockade devices that attach protesters to one another as they attempt to hold space – and locked themselves together. The lockboxes were unusually ornate, with white lights and paper and cloth flowers woven throughout their surface area. Once a box connected each person…

Drones and Lethal Robotics: The Future of the Police War on Black Lives

  • December 25, 2015
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“We are not in a police state now, not yet. I’m talking about what may come. I realize I shouldn’t put it that way … White, middle-class, educated people like myself are not living in a police state … Black, poor people are living in a police state.” – Daniel Ellsberg speaking with Arundhati Roy Mass movement against police brutality is not a new phenomenon, but the last few years have seen a rise in calls for accountability. The idea that police officers should face at least some repercussions for their actions seems to have struck a chord within public…

The Logic of the Police State: Waking Up to the Darkness in US Policing

  • December 25, 2015
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If you’ve been listening to various police agencies and their supporters, then you know what the future holds: anarchy is coming – and it’s all the fault of activists. In May, a Wall Street Journal op-ed warned of a “new nationwide crime wave” thanks to “intense agitation against American police departments” over the previous year. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie went further. Talking recently with the host of CBS’s Face the Nation, the Republican presidential hopeful asserted that the Black Lives Matter movement wasn’t about reform but something far more sinister. “They’ve been chanting in the streets for the murder…

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