Police State

Logan Glitterbomb
Center for a Stateless Society
October 16, 2016

The Baffler

Not long after Micah Johnson mortally gunned down five Dallas-area police officers and wounded nine others in July, the social media mavens at the Dallas Police Department tweeted out a picture of a man they identified as a suspect in the shooting rampage. They also asked their social media following—at nearly two hundred thousand, one of the largest on Twitter for police departments—to assist in tracking the suspect down.

by b. traven
August 30th, 2016
Crimethinc

by By Maya Dukmasova
Chicago Reader

Until that moment on Fox News, Jessica Disu hadn't considered herself a police abolitionist. But on July 11, she was on national television, surrounded by 29 other people convened by Megyn Kelly to discuss the recent killings of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and several Dallas police officers.

"I was under the impression that it would be a robust and productive conversation, even though it was Fox News," says 27-year-old Disu, who identifies herself as a "humanitarian rap artist and peace activist" and is involved with various organizations serving youth on the south side. She prepared her message before going on the show: "It should be against the law for an officer to shoot a civilian," she says. "That was what my message was supposed to be."

by Alice Speri, Sam Biddle
The Intercept
Aug. 8 2016

As more details emerge about last week’s killing by Baltimore County police of 23-year-old Korryn Gaines, activists have directed growing anger not only at local law enforcement but also at Facebook, the social media platform where Gaines posted parts of her five-hour standoff with police.

At the request of law enforcement, Facebook deleted Gaines’ account, as well her account on Instagram, which it also owns, during her confrontation with authorities. While many of her videos remain inaccessible, in one, which was re-uploaded to YouTube, an officer can be seen pointing a gun as he peers into a living room from behind a door, while a child’s voice is heard in the background. In another video, which remains on Instagram, Gaines can be heard speaking to her five-year-old son, who’s sitting on the floor wearing red pajamas.

by Matthew Irwin
August 12, 2016

From subMedia

subMedia: Hey Tom, how the fuck are you?

by Scott Jay
Libcom.org
July 31, 2016

Trigger warning for mention of sexual violence.

The city of Oakland is mired in its worst police scandal in decades which, considering the depravity of its officers, is saying something. The problem is not just the police killing and beating young Black and Latino men. No, that is not a crisis, that is the status quo. We now have a completely different problem involving dozens of cops paying a teenager for sex who was under age for some of these interactions. To be clear, this is not simply a sex scandal but a rape scandal, as the young woman involved was a minor during some of these interactions and could hardly be assumed to provide consent when the armed men having sex with her could easily send her to jail.

Deutsche Welle

US police killed or injured 55,400 people during "legal" stops, searches and arrests in 2012, according to a study in Injury Prevention, one of Britain's peer-reviewed BMJ medical journals. Researchers also found that police disproportionately targeted black people, Native Americans and Latinos for stops and arrests and, though the use of deadly or debilitating force did not vary by ethnicity, the increased contact with police created risks for members of those minorities.

"This is nowhere near a new problem or a new public health problem," said Ted Miller, a scientist at Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation in Maryland who conceived "Perils of Police Action: A Cautionary Tale From US Data Sets." "Police use of excessive force without due process of law has been with us forever as a problem, and since the Civil War it's been viewed particularly as a problem for the black community."

by Kia Makarechi
Vanity Fair
July 14, 2016

As the nation reels from a series of high-profile fatal shootings of black men by police officers, many have decried the lack of readily available data on how racial bias factors into American policing. But while it’s true that there is no adequate federal database of fatal police shootings (F.B.I. director James Comey has described the lack of data as “embarrassing and ridiculous”), there exists a wealth of academic research, official and media investigations, and court rulings on the topic of race and law enforcement.