The NYPD is a notoriously corrupt institution, whose indiscriminate acts of violence and murder have steadily worsened for decades. A powerful police union and a cowed City Hall ensure that even the worst cops rarely have any kind of reckoning.
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After a series of legal wrangles - a New York state law, a lawsuit by the police union, and @propublica's brave decision to publish - we finally got a glimpse at the buried horrors in the NYPD disciplinary files.
We also learned about the impunity enjoyed by dirty cops, including the cops who were caught on camera breaking the law to brutalize and maim protesters in last summer's #BLM uprising.
I'm not the first person to note that our understanding of ourselves and our society is heavily influenced by technological change - think of how we analogized biological and social functions to clockwork, then steam engines, then computers.
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I used to think that this was just a way of understanding how we get stuff hilariously wrong - think of Taylor's Scientific Management, how its grounding in mechanical systems inflicted such cruelty on workers whom Taylor demanded ape those mechanisms.
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But just as interesting is how our technological metaphors illuminate our understanding of ourselves and our society: because there ARE ways in which clockwork, steam power and digital computers resemble bodies and social structures.
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