"In recent years, federal and state-level criminal justice reforms have softened the punitive responses to crime that defined the quarter-century from 1980–2005. The main beneficiaries of these reforms have been non-violent criminals, who are increasingly eligible for pre- and post-charge diversion, expungement, early release from custody and early discharge from community supervision. For those convicted of violent offenses, not much has changed: sentences remain long; opportunities for release remain few; and conditions of post-release supervision are tightly enforced, leading to high rates of return to prison. The justification for a harsh response to violent crime is that such crime inflicts significant harm and represents a dramatic deviation from standards of acceptable behavior. In fact, “violent” behavior—that is, behavior that is intended to cause, or does in fact cause, physical injury to another person—is hardly anomalous. Across the life-course, and particularly in youth and young adulthood, such behaviors frequently occur among a broad spectrum of the population and rarely lead to criminal conviction. This Article explores why only some behavior is labeled violent, and what implications this fact has for sentencing and correctional management of people convicted of violent crimes, and for the broader management of the criminal justice system."
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Showing posts with label Violence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Violence. Show all posts
Do Violent Criminals Believe They are Doing the Right Thing? Many Murderers are "Morally Motivated", Claims Study
"The reasons behind violence are varied, but a common belief is that criminals act from a breakdown of morals.
But
now, researchers in California claim most acts of violence come from a
very different impulse - the desire to do the right thing.
Their
study argues that many violent attacks are committed as a form of
retribution, with the aggressor feeling as though they must commit the
crime.
'When
someone does something to hurt themselves or other people, or to kill
somebody, they usually do so because they think they have to,' Professor
Alan Fiske of the University of California said.
'They think they should do it, that it's the right thing to do, that they ought to do it and that it's morally necessary.'
Co-author,
professor Tage Rai, of Northwestern University, added: 'Killings and
physical attacks are often committed in retribution for wrongs - real or perceived.
The researchers have written a book, Virtuous Violence, which outlines their controversial beliefs.
They
say they arrived at their conclusion after analysing a wide array of
previous research on violence, including thousands of interviews with
violent offenders."
Virtuous Violence is available online to the University of Toronto community
Violence Is at the Core of What All of Us Should be Fighting Against on International Women's Day
Yesterday was a bad day for pretty much anyone who cares about racial
equality, voting rights, police violence and that vague thing we call
“justice.” But leave it to the brilliant Angela Davis to turn the blow
into a rallying cry to counteract violence — both institutional and
intimate.
First, here’s what happened. After an intense lobbying campaign by the police union — officially called the Fraternal Order of Police; you’ll see why the name is important later — the senate blocked President Obama’s nomination of Debo P. Adegbile to be the chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Adegbile, who headed the NAACP’s legal defense fund for years, was tarred by the police’s union, and subsequently by Democrat and Republican senators alike, for having helped represent journalist and Black Panther member Mumia Abu-Jamal in an appeal of his death sentence for allegedly killed a Philadelphia police officer.
No matter that Adebgile and the team won the appeal. Or that Abu-Jamal’s case is riddled with inconsistencies. Or that Adebgile has been a leading champion of voting rights and civil rights for decades.
Read on...
First, here’s what happened. After an intense lobbying campaign by the police union — officially called the Fraternal Order of Police; you’ll see why the name is important later — the senate blocked President Obama’s nomination of Debo P. Adegbile to be the chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Adegbile, who headed the NAACP’s legal defense fund for years, was tarred by the police’s union, and subsequently by Democrat and Republican senators alike, for having helped represent journalist and Black Panther member Mumia Abu-Jamal in an appeal of his death sentence for allegedly killed a Philadelphia police officer.
No matter that Adebgile and the team won the appeal. Or that Abu-Jamal’s case is riddled with inconsistencies. Or that Adebgile has been a leading champion of voting rights and civil rights for decades.
Read on...
Video Game Allows Players To Reenact Newtown Massacre
In an online video game, players follow shooter Adam Lanza’s footsteps
the day of the Sandy Hook Elementary school mass shooting. Called “The
Slaying of Sandy Hook Elementary School,” the widely condemned simulation takes players through the shootings of 26 children and adults before it shows their “score”:
Game creator Ryan Jake Lambourn claims it has a “gun safety” message, but activists against gun violence are baffled and disgusted by the game. The family of Victoria Soto, a murdered Newtown teacher, took their outrage to Twitter, telling Lambourn, “Please tell us how playing a game that recreates how Vicki died would be beneficial?” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told the Hartford Courant he hopes the “very disturbed person who could think of something like this sees the cruelty of what he’s done and stops it.”
Read on....
Game creator Ryan Jake Lambourn claims it has a “gun safety” message, but activists against gun violence are baffled and disgusted by the game. The family of Victoria Soto, a murdered Newtown teacher, took their outrage to Twitter, telling Lambourn, “Please tell us how playing a game that recreates how Vicki died would be beneficial?” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told the Hartford Courant he hopes the “very disturbed person who could think of something like this sees the cruelty of what he’s done and stops it.”
Read on....
Chronicle of a Death Retold
It will be an anniversary draped in black crêpe and ribboned with old
newsreels, a day of somber re-appraisals by the usual bores and lurid
speculations by the usual loons. But beneath the cacophony, not all of
it generated by Chris Matthews’s yap, will rest the severed feeling of
irretrievable, inexplicable loss. Fifty years ago, on November 22, 1963,
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated riding in a motorcade
cruising through Dallas’s Dealey Plaza, the top of his head torn off by a
rifle shot fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book
Depository, his brain matter spilling into the lap of First Lady
Jacqueline Kennedy, whose pink suit and pillbox hat colorize our
memories of a noir nightmare unfolding under a noonday sun. Like the
bombing of Pearl Harbor, in 1941, and the destruction of the Twin
Towers, in 2001, J.F.K.’s assassination was one of those unifying,
defining moments when everyone alive remembers where they were when the
news struck, shattering the glass wall separating before and after. I
was in the sixth grade, a member of the safety patrol, with a white sash
and official-looking badge: I remember the light at the end of the
school hallway reflecting off the floor as word went round and the
weight in the air the days after. For kids my age, it was like losing a
father, a father who had all of our motley fates in his hands. (During
the Cuban missile crisis, of 1962, a lot of us grade-schoolers thought
we might be goners, our Twilight Zone atomic nightmares about to come true.)
In those big-three-network days (ABC, CBS, NBC), television was broadcast mostly in black and white, and the images of the coverage that followed—the riderless horse, John-John’s salute as his father’s casket went by, Jacqueline Kennedy’s mourning veil (which Andy Warhol would multiply into a silkscreen montage, deifying her as a widow Madonna)—bled into our consciousness like irremovable ink. A deluge of memoirs, biographies, photo albums, magazine special editions, political reconsiderations, pulpy reconstructions (Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Kennedy), tales of Camelot romance, and pantie-sniffing scandal trawls have followed ever since, a perpetual cottage industry of Kennedyiana, building to November’s golden-anniversary publishing crescendo.
Read on...
In those big-three-network days (ABC, CBS, NBC), television was broadcast mostly in black and white, and the images of the coverage that followed—the riderless horse, John-John’s salute as his father’s casket went by, Jacqueline Kennedy’s mourning veil (which Andy Warhol would multiply into a silkscreen montage, deifying her as a widow Madonna)—bled into our consciousness like irremovable ink. A deluge of memoirs, biographies, photo albums, magazine special editions, political reconsiderations, pulpy reconstructions (Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Kennedy), tales of Camelot romance, and pantie-sniffing scandal trawls have followed ever since, a perpetual cottage industry of Kennedyiana, building to November’s golden-anniversary publishing crescendo.
Read on...
Weather and Violence
AS temperatures rise, tempers flare. Anyone who has experienced the
hostility of a swelteringly hot summer day in the city can attest to
that.
But researchers are now quantifying the causal relationship between
extreme climate and human conflict. Whether their focus is on
small-scale interpersonal aggression or large-scale political
instability, low-income or high-income societies, the year 10,000 B.C.
or the present day, the overall conclusion is the same: episodes of
extreme climate make people more violent toward one another.
In a paper published this month in the journal Science, we assembled 60
of the best studies on this topic from fields as diverse as archaeology,
criminology, economics, geography, history, political science and
psychology. Typically, these were studies that compared, in a given
population, levels of violence during periods of normal climate with
levels of violence during periods of extreme climate. We then combined
the results from those studies that concerned modern data in a
“meta-analysis,” a powerful statistical procedure that allowed us to
compare and aggregate findings across the individual studies.
Why is violent crime so rare in Iceland?
Even though I grew up in New England, there was something novel about
seeing an Icelandic blizzard. It was paralysing, with epic wind gusts
that made snowflakes feel like razors.
As I dragged my bags along Reykjavik's snowy pavement, an older man in a Jeep pulled alongside me.
"You want to get in?" he asked.
It sounded crazy. Why would I ever get in a stranger's car?
Despite everything I was taught about riding in cars with strangers, I climbed in the backseat. And I knew nothing bad was going to happen to me.
Read on...
As I dragged my bags along Reykjavik's snowy pavement, an older man in a Jeep pulled alongside me.
"You want to get in?" he asked.
It sounded crazy. Why would I ever get in a stranger's car?
Despite everything I was taught about riding in cars with strangers, I climbed in the backseat. And I knew nothing bad was going to happen to me.
Read on...
We Can't Let Hatred and Gun Paranoia Silence Our Great Democracy
We were struck this week by one response to our broadcast last week on
gun violence and the Newtown school killings. A visitor to the website
wrote, “It is interesting to me that Bill Moyers, who every week
describes the massive levels of corruption in our government… [and] the
advocates for gun control don’t understand that we who own guns in part
own them to be sure that when our government becomes so corrupt we have
guns to do something about it.”
About the same time that man’s post showed up on the web, we saw the startling survey from Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind polling organization, the one finding that nearly three in ten registered voters agree with the statement: “In the next few years, an armed revolution might be necessary in order to protect our liberties.” Three out of ten! That includes 44 percent of Republicans, 27 percent of independents and 18 percent of Democrats.
That poll also noted that a quarter of Americans think that facts about the Newtown shootings “are being hidden,” and an additional 11 percent “are unsure.” As Sahil Kapur wrote at Talking Points Memo:
Read on...
About the same time that man’s post showed up on the web, we saw the startling survey from Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind polling organization, the one finding that nearly three in ten registered voters agree with the statement: “In the next few years, an armed revolution might be necessary in order to protect our liberties.” Three out of ten! That includes 44 percent of Republicans, 27 percent of independents and 18 percent of Democrats.
That poll also noted that a quarter of Americans think that facts about the Newtown shootings “are being hidden,” and an additional 11 percent “are unsure.” As Sahil Kapur wrote at Talking Points Memo:
Read on...
Cleveland Horror Caps Week of Violence Against Women
These tales of misogyny should jolt us to connect the dots and to shine a
stronger light on the violence against women that’s always there
beneath the surface.
In just the last few days, we’ve seen a
series of news stories involving violence against women. The violence
comes in different forms -- physical, psychological, financial -- and
from different quarters: a former school-bus driver in Cleveland, the
NRA convention in Houston, the military, congress. And so it’s not
surprising that the media, as usual, is delivering these stories as
unrelated incidents. But arriving almost simultaneously, these tales of
misogyny should jolt us all to connect the dots and to shine a stronger
light on the violence against women that’s always there, just below the
surface.
The story of the three Cleveland women who were found alive after being held captive (and, by all accounts, raped, beaten and bound) in a neighbor’s house for 10 years is the most shocking. The suspect, Ariel Castro, 52, reportedly let them outside only twice in all that time. Michelle Knight was 20 when she disappeared in 2002, Amanda Berry had been reported missing in 2003 when she was 16, and Gina DeJesus vanished at age 14 in 2004 on her way home from school. Berry’s mother died in 2006 of what friends say was “a broken heart” less than two years after a psychic on "The Montel Williams Show" told her Amanda was dead. DeJesus’ mother believed her daughter had been sold into the sex trade. On Monday, Berry and her 6-year-old daughter (possibly fathered by Castro) escaped with the help of neighbors Charles Ramsey and Angel Cordero. The other women came out shortly after. Berry and DeJesus are now home, while Knight remains in the hospital.
Read on...
The story of the three Cleveland women who were found alive after being held captive (and, by all accounts, raped, beaten and bound) in a neighbor’s house for 10 years is the most shocking. The suspect, Ariel Castro, 52, reportedly let them outside only twice in all that time. Michelle Knight was 20 when she disappeared in 2002, Amanda Berry had been reported missing in 2003 when she was 16, and Gina DeJesus vanished at age 14 in 2004 on her way home from school. Berry’s mother died in 2006 of what friends say was “a broken heart” less than two years after a psychic on "The Montel Williams Show" told her Amanda was dead. DeJesus’ mother believed her daughter had been sold into the sex trade. On Monday, Berry and her 6-year-old daughter (possibly fathered by Castro) escaped with the help of neighbors Charles Ramsey and Angel Cordero. The other women came out shortly after. Berry and DeJesus are now home, while Knight remains in the hospital.
Read on...
NYPD Policy Will Deter Reports from Domestic Violence Victims
As if being beaten within an inch of their lives wasn't enough, now
domestic violence victims can be jailed if they have an open warrant and
report their beating to the police.
The New York Post reports that NYPD cops are required to run criminal background checks on victims of domestic violence.
Women who report domestic violence are exposing themselves to arrest under a new NYPD directive that orders cops to run criminal checks on the accused and the accuser, The Post has learned.
The memo by Chief of Detectives Phil Pulaski requires detectives to look at open warrants, complaint histories and even the driving records of both parties.
“You have no choice but to lock them up” if the victims turn out to have warrants, including for minor offenses like unpaid tickets, a police source said.
Read on....
The New York Post reports that NYPD cops are required to run criminal background checks on victims of domestic violence.
Women who report domestic violence are exposing themselves to arrest under a new NYPD directive that orders cops to run criminal checks on the accused and the accuser, The Post has learned.
The memo by Chief of Detectives Phil Pulaski requires detectives to look at open warrants, complaint histories and even the driving records of both parties.
“You have no choice but to lock them up” if the victims turn out to have warrants, including for minor offenses like unpaid tickets, a police source said.
Read on....
GOP Caves, Stops Blocking Violence Against Women Act
On Thursday, following a heated debate on the House floor,
lawmakers passed the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.
Republicans had held up the law for more than a year over provisions
designed to protect undocumented immigrants, Native Americans, and members of the LGBT community. In a separate, earlier vote, the House rejected an alternative, stripped-down VAWA pushed by House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor, instead embracing the bipartisan version of the bill the Senate passed last week.
The Senate version of the bill, however, was itself a modified version of Democrats' original bill, passed after Democrats acquiesced to Republican objections and removed a section that would have made more visas available to undocumented victims of domestic violence who help law enforcement prosecute their abusers. But the Senate's compromise bill wasn't good enough for the House Republican leadership, who introduced an alternate version that removed protections for members of the LGBT community and made it harder for tribal courts to prosecute non-Indian abusers.
Read on...
The Senate version of the bill, however, was itself a modified version of Democrats' original bill, passed after Democrats acquiesced to Republican objections and removed a section that would have made more visas available to undocumented victims of domestic violence who help law enforcement prosecute their abusers. But the Senate's compromise bill wasn't good enough for the House Republican leadership, who introduced an alternate version that removed protections for members of the LGBT community and made it harder for tribal courts to prosecute non-Indian abusers.
Read on...
Youth, Safety, and Violence: Schools, Communities, and Mental Health
This policy brief contributes to the urgent national conversation about
violence against children, and provides three perspectives from Vera
experts on school safety, mental illness, and the delivery of mental
health services. The perspectives draw on Vera’s work with government
partners in each of these areas to develop and implement ways of
enhancing the safety, effectiveness, and fairness of systems. They offer
recommendations on placing police in schools, considering mental health
care as a public health issue, and providing mental health care service
providers with the knowledge needed to prevent violence. Vera released
the brief at a Congressional staff briefing in Washington, DC on
February 12, 2013.
Read on...
Read on...
Is It Time to Treat Violence Like a Contagious Disease?
The idea that violence is contagious doesn’t appear in the Obama
administration’s gun control plan, nor in the National Rifle
Association’s arguments. But some scientists believe that understanding
the literally infectious nature of violence is essential to preventing
it.To say violence is a sickness that threatens public health isn’t just a figure of speech, they argue. It spreads from person to person, a germ of an idea that causes changes in the brain, thriving in certain social conditions.
A century from now, people might look back on violence prevention in the early 21st century as we now regard the primitive cholera prevention efforts in the early 19th century, when the disease was considered a product of filth and immorality rather than a microbe.
“It’s extremely important to understand this differently than the way we’ve been understanding it,” said Gary Slutkin, a University of Chicago epidemiologist who founded Cure Violence, an anti-violence organization that treats violence as contagion. “We need to understand this as a biological health matter and an epidemiologic process.”
Slutkin helped organize a National Academies of Science workshop that in October published “The Contagion of Violence,” a 153-page report on the state of his field’s research.
Read on...
Hate Crimes: A Rape Every Minute, a Thousand Corpses Every Year
There' a pattern of violence against women that’s broad and deep and incessantly overlooked.
Here in the United States, where there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, and one in five women will be raped in her lifetime, the rape and gruesome murder of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi on December 16th was treated as an exceptional incident. The story of the alleged rape of an unconscious teenager by members of the Steubenville High School football team was still unfolding, and gang rapes aren’t that unusual here either. Take your pick: some of the 20 men who gang-raped an 11-year-old in Cleveland, Texas, were sentenced in November, while the instigator of the gang rape of a 16-year-old in Richmond, California, was sentenced in October, and four men who gang-raped a 15-year-old near New Orleans were sentenced in April, though the six men who gang-raped a 14-year-old in Chicago last fall are still at large. Not that I actually went out looking for incidents: they’re everywhere in the news, though no one adds them up and indicates that there might actually be a pattern
Read on....
Here in the United States, where there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, and one in five women will be raped in her lifetime, the rape and gruesome murder of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi on December 16th was treated as an exceptional incident. The story of the alleged rape of an unconscious teenager by members of the Steubenville High School football team was still unfolding, and gang rapes aren’t that unusual here either. Take your pick: some of the 20 men who gang-raped an 11-year-old in Cleveland, Texas, were sentenced in November, while the instigator of the gang rape of a 16-year-old in Richmond, California, was sentenced in October, and four men who gang-raped a 15-year-old near New Orleans were sentenced in April, though the six men who gang-raped a 14-year-old in Chicago last fall are still at large. Not that I actually went out looking for incidents: they’re everywhere in the news, though no one adds them up and indicates that there might actually be a pattern
Read on....
Today, Remember Hurt Women Near and Far
Though violence lingers, we commemorate those acting to stop it
"Why did they shoot her?" my son asked me,
aghast. I attempted to explain the attitudes of religious extremists,
their desire to maintain social, political and economic control and
power by excluding women from education, employment, and equal
participation in a community. I reminded him that many cultures
throughout time believed women to be inferior to men, just as they
believed that certain groups of people were inferior because of their
race or nationality. But to him, discrimination and violence against
women seem irrational and bizarre. In his mind, women and men -- girls
and boys -- have always been equals.
Read on...
During supper one October evening while listening to
the news on the radio, I suddenly put down my fork and gripped my
10-year-old son's arm. We listened intently to the broadcast. A Taliban
gunman had shot 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai in the head while she was sitting with her classmates on a bus in Mingora, Pakistan. The Guardian reported
that a Taliban spokesman characterized Malala's advocacy work for
girls' education as an "obscenity" that had to be stopped. Malala and
her family had been targeted because of the blog
she had written for the BBC while she was in seventh grade chronicling
the effects of Taliban repression in her region, including the burning
of girls' schools.
Read on...
Soda and Violence
Already implicated in the obesity and
diabetes epidemics, soda may be linked to violence in young people, new
research suggests. In a study of 1,878 students at Boston public high
schools, heavy soda drinkers were much more prone to violent behavior
than other teens.
That finding came about by accident. While seeking to document the incidence of violent behavior among the high-school students, professor of health policy David Hemenway, who directs the Harvard Injury Control Research Center at Harvard School of Public Health, agreed to incorporate unrelated (or so he thought) questions about nutrition at a colleague’s request.
Analyzing the survey, he found surprising correlations. Heavy consumers of nondiet soft drinks—students who had drunk five or more cans in the week preceding the survey—were more likely to have behaved violently toward peers (57 percent, versus 39 percent of respondents who drank less soda); to have behaved violently toward another child in their own families (42 percent, versus 27 percent); to have behaved violently in a dating relationship (26 percent, versus 16 percent); and to have carried a gun or a knife during the past year (40 percent, versus 27 percent). The strength of the effect was on par with the correlation (well known among researchers) between these behaviors and alcohol and tobacco use; in some cases, the correlation with soda was stronger.
Read on...
That finding came about by accident. While seeking to document the incidence of violent behavior among the high-school students, professor of health policy David Hemenway, who directs the Harvard Injury Control Research Center at Harvard School of Public Health, agreed to incorporate unrelated (or so he thought) questions about nutrition at a colleague’s request.
Analyzing the survey, he found surprising correlations. Heavy consumers of nondiet soft drinks—students who had drunk five or more cans in the week preceding the survey—were more likely to have behaved violently toward peers (57 percent, versus 39 percent of respondents who drank less soda); to have behaved violently toward another child in their own families (42 percent, versus 27 percent); to have behaved violently in a dating relationship (26 percent, versus 16 percent); and to have carried a gun or a knife during the past year (40 percent, versus 27 percent). The strength of the effect was on par with the correlation (well known among researchers) between these behaviors and alcohol and tobacco use; in some cases, the correlation with soda was stronger.
Read on...
Romney Blames Single Parents for Gun Violence
Having candidates go off the rails when asked a question is an
expected and entertaining part of any presidential debate. But still, my
heart went out to the woman who asked a simple question about
restricting access to assault rifles and got a lecture on the evils of
single parenting. The question was a simple one, directed at President
Obama:
QUESTION: President Obama, during the
Democratic National Convention in 2008, you stated you wanted to keep
AK-47s out of the hands of criminals. What has your administration done
or planned to do to limit the availability of assault weapons?
Read on...
Canada’s inexplicable anxiety over violent crime
While recent data show crime in Canada is on a downward slope, a
new public opinion poll suggests Canadians believe otherwise. According
to a Forum Poll done for the National Post,
the recent mass shootings and media coverage have the majority of
Canadians fearing “a violent crime wave.” Jake Edmiston breaks down the
results.
PERCEPTION VS. STATS
The telephone survey asked 1,639 Canadians whether they thought violent crime was increasing — 54% agreed, one-third disagreed and the remainder responded that they were unsure. Females, lower-income households and Conservatives were more likely to believe in a growing crime problem.
The majority opinion conflicts with a July 24 Statistics Canada report that showed the overall crime rate and violent crime rate are on a steady decline. The violent crime rate in Canada dropped 5% last year, though homicides and sexual assault against children saw an increase.
Read on...
PERCEPTION VS. STATS
The telephone survey asked 1,639 Canadians whether they thought violent crime was increasing — 54% agreed, one-third disagreed and the remainder responded that they were unsure. Females, lower-income households and Conservatives were more likely to believe in a growing crime problem.
The majority opinion conflicts with a July 24 Statistics Canada report that showed the overall crime rate and violent crime rate are on a steady decline. The violent crime rate in Canada dropped 5% last year, though homicides and sexual assault against children saw an increase.
Read on...
From Aurora to Anaheim, Guns Are Going Off Everywhere
Welcome to the abattoir—a nation where a man can walk into a store and
buy an assault rifle, a shotgun, a couple of Glocks; where in the
comfort of his darkened living room, windows blocked from the sunlight,
he can rig a series of bombs unperturbed and buy thousands of rounds of
ammo on the Internet; where a movie theater can turn into a killing
floor at the midnight hour.
We know about all of this. We know because the weekend of July 20 became all-Aurora-all-the-time, a round-the-clock engorgement of TV news reports, replete with massacre theme music, an endless loop of victims, their loved ones, eyewitness accounts, cellphone video, police briefings, informal memorials, and “healing,” all washed down with a presidential visit and hour upon hour of anchor and “expert” speculation. We know this because within a few days a Google search for “Aurora movie shootings” produced over 200 million hits referencing the massacre that left seventy-plus casualties, including twelve fatalities.
We know a lot less about Anaheim and the killing of Manuel Angel Diaz, shot in the back and in the head by that city’s police just a few short hours after the awful Aurora murders.
But to the people living near La Palma Avenue and North Anna Drive, the shooting of Manuel Diaz was all too familiar: it was the sixth, seventh or eighth police shooting in Anaheim, California, since the beginning of 2012. (No one seems quite sure of the exact count, though the Orange County District Attorney’s office claims six shootings, five fatalities.)
Read on...
We know about all of this. We know because the weekend of July 20 became all-Aurora-all-the-time, a round-the-clock engorgement of TV news reports, replete with massacre theme music, an endless loop of victims, their loved ones, eyewitness accounts, cellphone video, police briefings, informal memorials, and “healing,” all washed down with a presidential visit and hour upon hour of anchor and “expert” speculation. We know this because within a few days a Google search for “Aurora movie shootings” produced over 200 million hits referencing the massacre that left seventy-plus casualties, including twelve fatalities.
We know a lot less about Anaheim and the killing of Manuel Angel Diaz, shot in the back and in the head by that city’s police just a few short hours after the awful Aurora murders.
But to the people living near La Palma Avenue and North Anna Drive, the shooting of Manuel Diaz was all too familiar: it was the sixth, seventh or eighth police shooting in Anaheim, California, since the beginning of 2012. (No one seems quite sure of the exact count, though the Orange County District Attorney’s office claims six shootings, five fatalities.)
Read on...
Can Street Violence Be Fought Like a Virus?
It’s that time of year again. With summer’s arrival, people flow into the
streets of America’s poorest urban neighborhoods. Temperatures rise and
tempers get shorter. Old beefs between corner drug crews start to
simmer again as warm weather brings more addicts to the neighborhood,
sparking territorial disputes over the swelling black market. Violence
can come to the city in many ways, but it comes, like clockwork, when
the weather warms up.
In the past month alone, Philadelphia has seen an 86 percent spike in homicides, bringing the year’s tally to 173. Nearly thirty people were shot in the city over Memorial Day weekend alone. In Chicago, a rash of summer gang violence has the city in a state of emergency, as its homicide total soars 50 percent over last year’s. Some in the press have labeled it “worse than Afghanistan.”
Read on...
In the past month alone, Philadelphia has seen an 86 percent spike in homicides, bringing the year’s tally to 173. Nearly thirty people were shot in the city over Memorial Day weekend alone. In Chicago, a rash of summer gang violence has the city in a state of emergency, as its homicide total soars 50 percent over last year’s. Some in the press have labeled it “worse than Afghanistan.”
Read on...
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