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“Protecting” the Police: The Legislative Attack on Black Lives Matter

  • August 23, 2016
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“There is a phenomenon in this country that we need to examine and it’s just not in New York,” NYPD Commissioner William Bratton told reporters in May, after addressing a national conference of police chiefs at the Times Square Marriott Marquis. “This has become very serious. I would almost describe it as an epidemic.” Bratton, who announced his retirement on August 3 — much to the delight of Black Lives Matter demonstrators who set up an encampment at City Hall calling for his resignation one day previously — was not speaking of zika or ebola. He was talking about civilians…

Chilling Tale in Duterte’s Drug War: Father and Son Killed in Police Custody

  • August 20, 2016
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MANILA — Even amid the slaughter of President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs, the killings of Renato and Jaypee Bertes stand out. The Bertes men, father and son, shared a tiny, concrete room with six other people in a metropolitan Manila slum, working odd jobs when they could find them. Both smoked shabu, a cheap form of methamphetamine that has become a scourge in the Philippines. Sometimes Jaypee Bertes sold it in small amounts, relatives said. So it was unsurprising when the police raided their room last month. They were arrested and taken to a police station where, investigators say,…

How Community Policing Can Work

  • August 12, 2016
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Los Angeles — After the recent murders of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La., and the devastating videos of the shooting deaths of black men like Alton B. Sterling and Philando Castile, the future of police-community relations in cities all over America hangs in the balance. But even as the country is still reeling from these traumas, this is no time for despair. Since the urban unrest of the 1960s, a series of post-riot audits — from the McCone, Kerner and Christopher Commissions to President Obama’s Task Force on 21st-Century Policing (on which one of us serves) —…

Another Side of Police Bias in Baltimore: How Officers Treat Women

  • August 12, 2016
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WASHINGTON — For the past two years, ever since 18-year-old Michael Brown was fatally shot by a Ferguson, Mo., police officer, America has been enmeshed in a wrenching discussion about how the police treat young black men. But this week’s blistering report from the Justice Department on police bias in Baltimore also exposed a different, though related, concern: how the police in that majority-black city treat women, especially victims of sexual assault. In six pages of the 163-page report documenting how Baltimore police officers have systematically violated the rights of African-Americans, the Justice Department also painted a picture of a…

Statement in Support of #RightToRecord

  • August 11, 2016
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In an open letter to the documentary community published today at The Talkhouse, filmmaker David Felix Sutcliffe describes a disturbing pattern of citizen journalists – those who document police killings of black and brown civilians – being targeted and arrested by law enforcement in response to their reporting. Most recently the pattern includes Diamond Reynolds who livestreamed the aftermath of Philando Castile’s shooting, Abdullah Muflahi who documented Alton Sterling’s shooting, and Chris LeDay who uploaded a video of the shooting. Other targets of arrest – and harassment – include Kevin Moore, who filmed Baltimore police dragging Freddie Gray into the…

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