I had the great opportunity to partner with Dr. Nick Crofts of the Centre for Law Enforcement and Public Health (Australia) to serve as the Guest Editor for a special issue of the Journal of Community Safety and Well-Being. The special issue, Envisaging Healthy and Safe Communities, shares lessons from a project we led that sought to document and highlight initiatives across the globe that are taking alternative approaches to promote health and safety.
Policing Reform Continues Even as the Senate Fails
While partisanship doomed congressional action, state-level legislation and White House leadership can still promote accountability and transparency.
“Looting as Pathology of Order.” The ways in which looting is invoked to recreate oppressive and racialized forms of social control & order.
In 2011 my graduate thesis was approved & published. It focused on an analysis of looting as an analytical lens to understand how social order is constructed & enforced through anti-Black racial ideologies and discourses, private property norms, and use of exceptional force by the state.
#JusticeforRamarley demonstrations in NYC [Photos]
Ramarley Graham was shot & killed on February 2, 2012 in the Bronx by NYPD officer Richard Haste. Ramarely was unarmed & was not committing a crime at the time of his death. He was shot and killed in front of his grandmother in the bathroom of his home after Officer Haste chased him into …
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Ferguson, Missouri: Not Just an American Tragedy
The shooting death of Mike Brown by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer and the subsequent stand-offs between protestors and heavily armed law enforcement units might seem like a quintessentially all-American tragedy. But it’s not. Consider the violent rioting that erupted across England in 2011, after police in London shot dead Mark Duggan, a black British …
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Equality Betrayed: Speaking Out Against Ethnic Profiling by French Police
Adji Ahoudian is a French citizen, and an elected member in the office of the mayor of the 19th arrondissement in Paris. He proudly remembers the day he received his new official I.D., with the Republican motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. But then, after attending a council meeting one day, he was stopped by the police …
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Police Profiling: A Global Problem
The Open Society Foundations support efforts to document and remedy profiling by law enforcement in the United States and Europe. Strategic litigation is a key tool, and a new wave of cases is challenging profiling in New York, the UK, Australia, and France. Here, Marc Krupanski of the Open Society Justice Initiative and Terrance Pitts …
Immigration Crackdown in Stockholm Provokes Pushback
The messages keep coming in to the Facebook and Twitter accounts of a social network called REVA Spotter: 10.37am: uniformed police at Fridhemsplan station, on their way to the platform. 11.04am: uniformed cops at Central station, Sergels Square exit. Seem to be checking ID. 11.30am: police checks at Maltesholmsvägen and Hasselby Square. The updates provide …
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Still Waiting for an End to Police Discrimination in Spain
Rosalind Williams has a special place in the struggle against discrimination by European police forces against people of color and ethnic minorities. Twenty years ago, she was stopped and asked for her identity papers by Spanish police in a railway station. An African-American who had acquired Spanish citizenship by marriage, she was travelling with her …
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Policing the Police: Civilian Video Monitoring of Police Activity
Police misconduct and violence continues throughout the world, often without any oversight, accountability or justice for the victims. Recent deaths of civilians by police officers in New York, violent repression of “Occupy” protestors, and rampant police violence in response to the “Arab Spring” have brought renewed attention to the persistent issue of police violence. A …
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