If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
Truth be told, slurs are common around the water cooler, reflecting a dehumanizing view of criminal defendants that comes from years of locking them up, one person of color at a time.
If you or I get a subpoena for documents, we are supposed to do our best to find them and produce them. A subpoena, after all is a court order. But the Chicago police see it differently.
Farmers impart stories of having to sell their land and find other work because they can't compete in an unfair marketplace. Former neighborhood market owners explain how they've been pushed out of business by large national chains.
Inside the USAID-headquarters-turned-courthouse in Port-au-Prince, the case against former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier was being heard, in a trial unlikely to bring justice to the hundreds of thousands killed and tortured by him and his father François.
Wearing a badge and carrying a gun grants you awesome power in this, or any society. And with great power comes great responsibility. When that covenant is breached there is a terrible price to be paid.
You don't see throngs of people with white ribbons on CNN -- not because they are gone, but because they are not deemed newsworthy. But these people and their struggle are very much real.
How convenient! Anyone the president has executed is considered guilty unless proven innocent after they are dead. There is no messy due process, no court, only secret evidence; the president personally judges the merits and orders the executions.
In 127 years, they had never done this before. The Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission reversed a decision and fired a police officer. The reversal followed a week of protests by community groups and leaders.
Some will argue that compassion for others means risk for officers. That empathy for criminals, or even suspects, means an insensitivity to victims. That force makes us safe, so any question of force makes us vulnerable.
You'd be hard-pressed to find a city whose police culture has a stronger devotion to the blue code of silence than Chicago. There were a couple more e...
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently ran an editorial praising a new program by University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist David Klinger that will...
The video below is from a video deposition with Collinsville, Illinois, police officer Michael Reichert. Reichert is the office who pulled over film...
Had a video not revealed the truth, Mr. Halevy could very easily be languishing in prison for crimes he never committed.
This evening is the final destination for an incredibly difficult, tragic journey that began here with the end of Federico Aldrovandi's life. It began when he was murdered by four police officers without any explanation.
The legal use of Tasers for pain compliance -- hurting people so badly that they are rendered submissive -- is common. This is legal torture. It doesn't stop being torture, and it doesn't stop being wrong, when inflicted to make someone obey police orders.
We need to answer the broader questions about increasing equality and opportunity for all to ensure NYC's successful future as a city worthy of being upheld as a model metropolis. We must demand police reform now to create a better present.
