Police

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• SOURCE: The New Republic
  6/1/2022
  

  Why the Police Have No Duty to Protect You

  A series of Supreme Court decisions in recent decades have reinforced police officers' discretion about how and if to act, and made in nearly impossible for the public to hold the police accountable for those choices, even when lives are lost. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  5/31/2022
  

  Los Angeles's Response to 1992 Riots Remains Model of How Not to Do It

  by V.N. Trinh

  The strategy of encouraging private business development, without seriously reforming police, fixing public schools, or addressing poverty, proved unequal to the task of promoting justice in LA. 

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  4/29/2022
  

  Racist Jokes Were the Glue of the LAPD Culture that Led to 1992 Riots

  by Raúl Pérez

  The LAPD was never forced to confront the documented ways that a culture of racial stereotyping and bigoted jokes cemented the systemic abuse of communities of color in the city. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  4/22/2022
  

  Racist Policing Has Roots in Controlling Sex Work

  by Sarah A. Seo

  Anne Gray Fischer's book shows that police policy toward sexuality in public space changed in ways that made Black women's public lives subject to increased control and that entrenched the discretion of police to stop people for suspected minor offenses that is associated with "broken windows" policing today. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Republic
  4/21/2022
  

  How the Public Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Wiretapping

  by Andrew Lanham

  Brian Hochman shows that the white backlash to civil rights and racial justice protests helped to undermine longstanding civil libertarian opposition to electronic surveillance and normalize the idea of the government spying on Americans. 

• 
• 4/24/2022
  

  Footage in NYC's Archives Sheds Important Light on the Northern Civil Rights Movement and Police Efforts to Undermine It

  by L.E.J. Rachell

  Surveillance footage in the New York City Archives helps to highlight the importance of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to the northern civil rights movement – and the techniques the NYPD used to disrupt it. 

• 
• SOURCE: Boston Review
  4/19/2022
  

  T. Thomas Fortune: The Forgotten Founder of Abolition Democracy

  by Robin D.G. Kelley

  T. Thomas Fortune's critique of Reconstruction is a radical intellectual document that has valuable lessons for the activists and scholars associated with the prison abolition movement. 

• 
• SOURCE: The American Prospect
  4/18/2022
  

  The Police Have No Legal "Duty to Protect" Anyone. Should they Get More Money?

  The Supreme Court has ruled that police officers have no definitive legal duty to take protective action on behalf of anyone. Would this fact influence debates about funding them if it were more widely known? 

• 
• SOURCE: The Guardian
  4/19/2022
  

  "More Cops" is Not the Answer for NYC

  by Simon Balto

  The entire, terrifying episode that unfolded across 29 hours in New York was a testament to the futility of spending more money on police, and to the lie that police “keep us safe”. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Nation
  3/9/2022
  

  Review: The Pragmatism of Police Abolition

  Activist and police abolitionist Derecka Purnell's book draws on personal and academic history to push readers to question what they think an ideal society looks like, and whether police forces are an instrument for achieving it. 

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  11/17/2021
  

  Law Enforcement Has Long Practiced Double Standards for Activists

  by Denise Lynn

  Nobody should be shocked that the FBI has aggressively surveilled Black Lives Matter organizers while deciding that the online organizing of the January 6 attack on the Capitol was protected speech; this double standard has characterized law enforcement's approach to racial justice protest. 

• 
• SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer
  12/15/2021
  

  Philadelphia DA: Prosecutors Hid Evidence for Years in a 2003 Murder Case

  Prosecutors in Philadelphia are accused of withholding evidence that undermined the credibility of key witnesses in the case, a pattern that critics argue has been widespread.

• 
• 11/7/2021
  

  Historically, Black Distrust of Police is About More than Acts of Violence

  by Christopher Hayes

  The Harlem rebellion against the NYPD in July 1964 was sparked by a police killing of a teenager (and a grand jury's refusal to indict him), but reflected the role of the police in maintaining a profoundly unequal social order that affected everyday life in Black neighborhoods, a situation that has changed little. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Magazine
  10/4/2021
  

  The Forgotten, but Consequential, New York City Police Riot of 1992

  Encouraged by Rudy Giuliani, thousands of New York City Police officers, some drunk, staged a riot at City Hall and on the Brooklyn Bridge to protest Mayor David Dinkins's 1992 proposal of an all-civilian, independent police complaint review board. Why has this pivotal event been scrubbed from many New Yorkers' memories? 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/22/2021
  

  George Holliday Dies at 61, Taped LAPD Beating of Rodney King

  George Holliday's fortuitous purchase of a camcorder inaugurated the era of civilian video evidence of police abuse, though accountability has followed only rarely. 

• 
• SOURCE: Bookforum
  9/12/2021
  

  Vice, Vice, Baby: Anna Lvovsky's History of Policing Sex

  The “shifting public understandings of homosexuality in the twentieth century,” the legal historian Anna Lvovsky argues, “cannot be fully understood without a history of policing.”

• 
• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  7/12/2021
  

  Black Power and Anti-Carceral State Infrastructure

  by Joshua L. Crutchfield

  Mutual aid groups that formed in response to the COVID pandemic echo the ways that participants in the Black Freedom movement sought to create alternative instititutions for the benefit of communities and individuals that did not reinforce the power of the police. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  6/29/2021
  

  Liquor Laws Once Targeted Gay Bars. Now, One State Is Apologizing.

  New Jersey's liquor commission has released documents that show how it applied liquor laws to close gay bars, showing how marginalized groups can be singled out through bureaucratic means. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Guardian
  6/28/2021
  

  Revealed: Neo-Confederate Group Includes Military Officers and Politicians

  Despite its denial of links to far-right groups, the Sons of Confederate Veterans has considerable overlap with them, and was a key player in the fight over statues that led to the notorious "Unite the Right" assembly in Charlottesville in 2017. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  6/24/2021
  

  The Unknown History of Black Uprisings

  by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

  Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor reviews Elizabeth Hinton's new "America on Fire" and explains how it shakes up established accounts of a "good" and "nonviolent" civil rights movement giving way to protest and violence.