THREAD: One enduring truth you don't hear police mention when they talk about "crime waves" is this: violence is higher in countries that are more unequal, and violence is higher in U.S. states that are more unequal. Structural inequality kills. Let's look at the data:
In groundbreaking work studying decades of data from around the world, leading researchers found a number of things that you should know about how inequality determines all of the problems that cops, prosecutors, and judges tell you we need cages for. equalitytrust.org.uk/sites/default/…
Homicide rates are higher in more unequal rich countries:
Drug use is higher in more unequal countries:
Mental illness is more prevalent in more unequal countries:
Human caging by the government is more prevalent in more unequal countries:
Human caging by the government is more prevalent in more unequal U.S. states:
People trust each other less in more unequal U.S. states.
This is profound evidence that what you've been told by powerful people who profit from human caging is wrong. If police and prosecutors made us safe, the U.S. would be the safest country in world history. No one else has spent remotely close to the trillions that we have.
You can explore more in depth how and why powerful people created the myth of linking our health and safety to police, prosecutors, and prisons here:
The events described in this article are the kinds of things people experience under fascism. The Texas Attorney General's conduct reflects a complete breakdown in democratic institutions.
The failure of the Department of Justice and the judiciary to prevent authoritarian abuse like this should be an alarming moment for the legal profession. It's the kind of thing that should be front-page news in every paper and emergency conversations in every law class.
Federal "law enforcement" officials are behaving as if this is not an urgent situation. Instead of devoting resources to investigating illegal authoritarian abuse, federal resources in the state are mostly doubling down to help Texas officials fearmonger about the border.
THREAD. The Democratic Party platform presents such a profound crisis if we have any hope of avoiding fascism.
Kamala Harris and other Democrats would essentially only need to say that they will condition aid to Israel on compliance with international law (i.e. follow existing U.S. law on weapons). The refusal to say something so simple presents a point of no return, for a few reasons.
Here is an image of everywhere bombed in Gaza, mostly with U.S. bombs. 100,000s have been killed by conservative estimates in medical journals. The entire infrastructure (schools, hospitals, water, history, etc) destroyed, and many thousands kidnapped, raped, tortured, maimed.
THREAD. A few years ago, we were worried about the hidden epidemic of prosecutor misconduct. Why do so many prosecutors break the law? Why does nothing happen to them? Why does it stay secret? So, we tried to do something. What we found was more shocking than we imagined.
We worked with a group of the country's leading law professors to file ethics complaints against prosecutors in cases where either judges or their own prosecutor offices had already found them to have broken the law. We filed FIFTY of these complaints in New York alone.
A prosecutor breaking the law in a criminal prosecution--which can result in wrongful incarceration and family separation for years--is among the most serious violation of the code of ethics to which lawyers are bound. Ethics boards can discipline them to protect people.
I’m not sure I’ve seen anything more depraved and dishonest in my tracking of the New York Times. In its article about Netanyahu’s speech, it not only fails to report that Netanyahu flagrantly lied, but it repeats the lie with no acknowledgment Israeli media has proven it false.
You can read more about some of the most astonishing lies, and the grotesque applause for them here. But how is the reaction of a *newspaper* simply repeat the lie. It's some of the most shameful complicity in genocide imaginable, and yet normal.
Instead, one of the most fascist moments in U.S. political history--adoring applause and chants for obvious, knowable lies in support of genocide--is portrayed as "forceful" without any correction of the lies. It's a breathtaking low point for @anniekarni and @SangerNYT
In a landmark federal court victory yesterday, we won our 1st Amendment lawsuit against New York judges and officials concerning secretive ethics proceedings against prosecutors. In most cases no one knows why the state does nothing when DAs break the law. Much more to come...
This work--to shed light on how officials in the punishment bureaucracy, from police to prison guards to prosecutors to probation officers to judges, evade accountability at every level--is more and more vital in times of rising authoritarianism.
The work that @CivRightsCorps and a number of amazing law professors across the U.S. are doing to enforce basic norms of accountability and transparency is more vital than ever. You can read more at accountabilityny.org
THREAD. One of the things I explore in my new study of the propaganda surrounding police body cameras in the U.S. media and by Democratic politicians are its similarities to both international development propaganda and colonial counterinsurgency strategy.
As James Ferguson has shown in one of the seminal studies of the issue, decades of discourse about “reforming” the bureaucracy of international development follows a similar pattern.
Observers acknowledge the continuous failures of international government and non-profit aid to end poverty, make the world meaningfully more equal, or prevent ecological catastrophe.