THREAD: This is another very bad NYT article by the metro desk. Almost everything in here is worth criticizing, include the idea to write the story. But a few high-level thoughts: (1) nytimes.com/2021/01/27/nyr…
The article says there has been a "major" culture shift in Queens. Most good propaganda doesn't involve false statements--it's normative claims like this, reported as a fact, that try to set the boundaries for the reader's imagination of what's possible. (2)
The NYT makes the editorial *choice* to call her a "major" reformer, even though the paper knows that the office is still a mass incarceration machine that has barely changed at all. Very little has changed in any objective analysis of that office. (3)
This is the most subtle and dangerous kind of propaganda. It sets the table for people accepting minor tweaks to a horrific system that needs a complete transformation. (4)
I don't think most editors and reporters even understand that they are doing this. They fail to see their biases and the political choices they make in the most basic ways they frame their reporting. (5)
I wrote about the scope of the challenge ahead of us and how little these "progressive prosecutors" have done on any objective measure in much more depth here. I hope the reporter @troy_closson reads it. (6) yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-puni…
The article also repeats the metro desks baseless claim that there has been "surging violent crime" in the city (that's false). I wrote about the politics of what "violence" elite people want you to focus on and what violence they want you to ignore. (5) currentaffairs.org/2020/08/why-cr…
But even if you focus on "violent crime" as defined by elites, the NYT repeatedly misstates the evidence. (6)
And even if "violent crime" were up, using the word "surging" is a political, editorial choice. They never used that term to describe the wave of police violence that NYPD has inflicted on Black and Brown communities. (7)
We desperately need editors and reporters to be more critical about the biases and perspectives they bring to the work, because it affects what stories they tell, how they tell them, and how millions of people understand the world. (8)
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THREAD: When politicians talk "reform" of racist systems, remember the story of how New York politicians used "reform" after Kalief's death to perpetuate violence against Black children. (1) newyorker.com/magazine/2014/…
Kalief committed suicide after three years of pretrial detention at Rikers, falsely accused of stealing another child's backpack. He spent 18 months in solitary confinement. (2)
THREAD: This video is the daily churn of injustice. A Black man arrested for "drinking beer in a parking lot" is jailed because he cannot pay $5,000 cash. He begs for release, judge says: "Thank you, go with the deputy." (1)
This isn't an issue of "good cops" or "bad cops." This video right here is most of what police do. There are more arrests each year in the US for marijuana possession than all of what police call "violent crime" combined. (2)
96% of all police time is spent on what they call "non-violent" crime. (3)
THREAD: If you paid attention to what happened on January 6 in DC, pay attention to this: prosecutors in Phoenix are pursuing felony "gang" charges against peaceful BLM protestors who police attacked. theappeal.org/maricopa-count…
The felony "gang" charges, which could lead to many years in prison, "are based only on the fact that the group carried umbrellas, wore black, and used the phrase “all cops are bastards.” (2)
Police didn't attack, and Phoenix prosecutors didn't charge, large groups of armed far-right gangs who descended on the local board of elections in an attempt to "stop the steal" (3)
THREAD: In this 30-second video, a 17-year-old child with no lawyer is told that he must spend the weekend in an adult jail because he can't pay $1,000 for a misdemeanor. (1)
If you've never watched a bail hearing, this is what they look like in 3,000 courtrooms across the country. There will be 400,000 human beings jailed tonight because they can't pay enough cash. (2)
Few pieces of evidence more clearly show the cruelty and indifference of the US legal bureaucracy to Black bodies than a video where you watch a Black child thrown in a cage away from his family, with no lawyer, in a matter of seconds. (3)
THREAD: A few more shocking things about Harvard University using students to test military counterinsurgency tactics on behalf of police brutalizing young people of color in Massachusetts. (1)
Note the language in the course solicitation: prof wants to take military lessons from Iraq/Afghanistan to "clean up" Black and Brown communities. This is the language of ethnic cleansing. (2)
This Harvard solicitation comes at a time when US cages Black people at 6 times the rate of South Africa at the height of Apartheid and on behalf of one of the most notorious police depts where DOJ found massive civil rights violations perpetrated. (3) bostonglobe.com/2020/07/25/met…
THREAD: @Harvard is offering a class where elite students can learn from ex-military about using "counterinsurgency methods" from Iraq and Afghanistan to "clean up" Black and Brown communities in Massachusetts. (1)
This is part of the hidden story about the complicity of elite universities in the horrors of US policing and immigration enforcement. (2)
Fancy professors, in conjunction with big corporations, have a cottage industry to transfer military tactics/surveillance/weapons made for colonial wars to more and more sophisticated forms of domestic enclosure. stoplapdspying.org/pt42-police-st… (3)