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This Article sets out to pinpoint the locus of control over the police. Running the police force is one of the most important tasks assigned to local governments in America. Yet heretofore policing has not been analyzed through the lens of local government law. Through a review of state statutes, this Article reveals that the reigning notion that the police are local oversimplifies a complex legal reality. Local governments are mostly empowered to choose to establish (or not establish) a police force and to define the force's size and role. However, they are mostly not afforded concomitant full powers over the police workforce. Issues pertaining to officers' employment status--hiring, service terms, and, most significantly, removal--are heavily regulated through state mandates. Because these mandates are almost always geared toward aggressively protecting officers' rights, local governments are left largely bereft of means to discipline officers who misbehave. This division of powers--whereby the local government mostly controls the objectives and functions of a public service but does not enjoy similar levels of control over the workforce providing the service--is unique to policing. Powers over other important local functions do not follow this pattern. Moreover, local government law theories cannot justify this division of powers that withholds from the local government most powers over officers' employment patterns. A principled analysis indicates that local control of the police workforce would in many instances contribute to economic efficiency and to democratic participation, the two values normally associated with local governance. The Article thus concludes by suggesting multiple doctrinal reforms that could begin to realign powers over the police force. Such reforms are of particular importance today as our system continues to grapple with the challenge of widespread police violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the unanticipated convergence of human experiences among Black and Brown citizens of France and the United States, despite their historical and legislative differences. Investigating racial inequity and police brutality through a comparative lens, this paper highlights global connections forged by racial and ethnic minorities in their shared anti-racist struggles. Emphasizing the transformative potential of acknowledging and sharing these narratives, this paper navigates linguistic, social, and legislative dimensions, providing insights into legal standings and communal ideologies. Addressing the lasting consequences of racial bias, this paper urges a reevaluation of societal structures and legal frameworks to foster global racial and social equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qualified immunity is a judge-made doctrine that offers immunity to state actors sued for violations of constitutional rights. In recent years, the doctrine has received increased scrutiny for its application to cases claiming police use of excessive force, but the doctrine's application is broader: qualified immunity can defeat a broad array of constitutional claims. This Article proposes a new ground to question qualified immunity, arguing that the narrative and epistemic effects of qualified immunity provide strong reasons for reconsideration of current doctrine. Using narrative and epistemic lenses, the Article reveals that qualified immunity doctrine systematically disadvantages civil rights plaintiffs and ultimately undermines civil rights law and the commitment to rights enforcement. Current qualified immunity doctrine excludes plaintiffs' stories and denies their knowledge, diminishing their stature in the law. Further, qualified immunity doctrine deprives courts of the very narratives that develop the law, deepening injustice by rendering a range of civil rights-related experiences essentially unknowable in the law. Qualified immunity thus dangerously slows the growth of the law and widens the distance between people's lived experience and the law. The Article argues that any effort to recalibrate qualified immunity must consider the narrative and epistemic values at risk, complementing other doctrinal arguments for reexamining qualified immunity and adding to the debate on the doctrine's future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the legal issues about qualified immunity for law enforcement officers in Louisiana, particularly as a factor contributing to police brutality cases, as well as the recommended reforms to address the issues.

Police violence is a widespread problem in the United States that disproportionately affects Black communities. Social justice movements and the media pressure prosecutors to pursue criminal charges against offending officers. However, convictions are rare, partly because officers can assert a legal defense for using deadly force in effecting arrests. Based on common law or state justification statutes, this available defense permits officers to use deadly force in "reasonable" circumstances, pursuant to the Fourth Amendment. What constitutes "reasonable," however, is a fact-specific, discretionary, and murky question for courts. Pennsylvania's justification statute, 18 PA. CONS. STAT. § 508(a), was at issue in Commonwealth v. Pownall, in which the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office ("DAO") charged Officer Ryan Pownall with third-degree murder for allegedly killing David Jones, a Black man, during a traffic stop. The DAO anticipated that Pownall would rely on section 508(a) at trial and, in a motion in limine, preemptively asked the court not to use the standard suggested jury instructions that summarize the statute. The DAO argued that the statute is unconstitutional because it permits the use of deadly force in categorically unreasonable situations. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed the lower courts' dismissal of the motion under procedural rules without reaching the issue of section 508(a)'s constitutionality. But, the court strongly suggested that section 508(a) is constitutional and, importantly, reasoned that rewriting the statute is a job reserved solely for the legislature. Pownall highlights the difficulty and necessity of challenging and changing use of force policies and defenses and the way they are explained to juries. Today, the jury instructions are vague and do not reflect the nuances of deadly force, including the systemic biases favoring police. Because jury instructions are critical to reaching accurate verdicts, stakeholders should rewrite the instructions to ensure a fair administration of justice and hold officers accountable, thereby reducing future violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the online news framing of police and protesters in Europe by looking at three late 2020/early 2021 protests: the vigil for Sarah Everard, killed by a police officer, the 47th Athens Polytechnic uprising anniversary rally and the protests against the imprisonment of Catalan rapper Pablo Hasél. A qualitative content analysis was conducted to analyse a sample of 114 articles, gathered from six ideologically opposed news outlets in the three countries. The results indicate that police actions are predominantly located within either the 'police brutality' or the 'order-maintenance' frame depending on the political orientation of the outlet while the framing of the protesters appears to be more fragmented. Results also suggest that it would be inaccurate to claim that only the right-wing press insulates the police. Overall, this study found media framing to be dependent on the perceived level of deviance of the protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black Americans' witnessing of online anti-Black police brutality is related to negative psychological outcomes, including stress and depressive symptoms. This study examined the degree to which grief disenfranchisement, social support, and coping style predicted stress, depressive symptoms, and prolonged grief among 189 Black undergraduate students grieving police murders of Black Americans. The students experienced moderate stress, elevated depressive symptoms, and low levels of prolonged grief, and coping style emerged as the most robust predictor of mental health outcomes. Specifically, planning, behavioral disengagement, and ritual-centered coping predicted variance in perceived stress. Additionally, behavioral disengagement explained variance in depressive symptoms; and disenfranchised grief, changes in goals, and collective-centered coping accounted for variance in prolonged grief. These findings may contribute to the development of interventions to support Black undergraduate students as they grieve police murders of Black Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extending the new field of mimetic studies to the racist somatechnics of police violence against minorities in the United States, this article focuses on the specific case of the police murder of Rayshard Brooks in 2020 (Atlanta, Georgia) to account for the complex interplay of somatic, technical, and mimetic factors that triggered his murder. I argue that this exemplary case calls for a diagnostic of the patho(-)logical vortex of contagious violence that entangles racist triggers, unconscious bodily actions and reactions, as well as the agentic power of guns qua technical 'actants.' While this hypermimetic spiral of violence escapes conscious control, it generates unconscious pathologies internal to racist violence in general and to the somatechnics of police violence in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BackgroundA disproportionate number of people who are killed by police each year are Black. While much attention rightly remains on victims of police brutality, there is a sparse literature on police brutality and perinatal health outcomes. We aimed to explore how Black pregnant women perceive police brutality affects them during pregnancy and might affect their children.MethodsThis qualitative study involved semi-structured interviews among 24 Black pregnant women in New Haven, Connecticut (January 2017 to August 2018). Interview questions explored neighborhood factors, safety, stressors during pregnancy, and anticipated stressors while parenting. Grounded theory informed the analysis.ResultsParticipants, regardless of socioeconomic status, shared experiences with police and beliefs about anticipated police brutality, as summarized in the following themes: (1) experiences that lead to police distrust - "If this is the way that mommy's treated [by police]"; (2) anticipating police brutality - "I'm always expecting that phone call"; (3) stress and fear during pregnancy - "It's a boy, [I feel] absolutely petrified"; and (4) 'the talk' about avoiding police brutality - "How do you get prepared?" Even participants who reported positive experiences with police anticipated brutality towards their children.ConclusionsInteractions between Black people and police on a personal, familial, community, and societal level influenced how Black pregnant women understand the potential for police brutality towards their children. Anticipated police brutality is a source of stress during pregnancy, which may adversely influence maternal and infant health outcomes. Police brutality must be addressed in all communities to prevent harming the health of birthing people and their children.

The article "Violence against childhood and adolescence. Ignored and invisible victims" addresses the need to document and make visible the different forms of violence and violation of rights suffered by children and young people in Venezuela. The text shows an increase and severity of these manifestations of violence, which are not reflected in public statistics and are often unknown to authorities. Delinquent and police violence has promoted the adoption of norms and beliefs characteristic of a culture of violence. The restitution of violated rights and priority attention to this population is demanded, as well as the implementation of public policies and comprehensive protection programs. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines how individual police officers in China interpret and justify the use of excessive force on social media through their WeChat Subscription Accounts (WSAs). Existing research examines how the police department uses social media to justify deadly force, but overlooks individual officers' online justifications. Adopting a critical discourse analysis approach, this study analyses 211 articles commenting on a prominent case of police violence in China. The findings shed light on the online voice of Chinese frontline officers, revealing an ideology that defends the use of excessive force. The articles published in WSAs displayed strong empathy towards the involved officer; contested the characterization of the incident as police brutality by police officials, the public, and the media; and employed various strategies to justify the officer's actions. The discussion section expands on these findings by drawing comparisons to justifications in the United States, emphasizing the distinctive dynamic between individual officers' online expression and official police discourse in China, and offering insights for scholars examining online expression and digital nationalism in the Chinese context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I analyse how different policing actors project their power and sovereignty in two informal settlements in Kenya: Mathare and Kaptembwo. Using the idea of permissive space, I unpack how power, relationships, and sovereignty issues are negotiated through everyday policing practices and repetitive public performances. I interrogate how the police, community policing bodies, boda boda (motorcycle taxi) riders, men and women, and young people interacted in different spaces of impunity as they exercised sovereignty. I show how they draw on historical claims to power negotiated over time that entitled them with authority over particular issues, such as carrying out street violence on suspected criminals. As a result, I establish how legitimacy and sovereignty are negotiated, contested, constructed, and reconstructed. We can only understand these dynamics if one looks at how actors negotiate their relationships with the state and each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from the protest paradigm and the mediation opportunity structure, this study textually analyzes mainstream and alternative media coverage of the 2019 inequality protests in Chile and the 2020 racial justice protests in the United States. In both cases, violence and forceful policing were linked to the protests, allowing this study to explore mediated violence and compare the discursive construction of the demonstrations, protesters, and police as articulated through 1) violence/damage, 2) repression, 3) oppression, and 4) blame. Findings revealed Chilean and U.S. mainstream media emphasized protester violence in juxtaposition with police trying to maintain order, peacefulness was portrayed as a novelty, and violence was disengaged from historical context. In contrast, alternative media treated protester violence as a response to structural violence, and police repression of protesters was criticized. This study shows the continued pervasiveness of the protest paradigm in mainstream news, and the way alternative media can offer discursive opportunities to counterframe police and protester violence and challenge mainstream media's hostile portrayals of protesters' use of the logic of damage. Ultimately, we suggest media and discursive opportunity structures are key to understanding mainstream and alternative media portrayals of protests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing attention to police shootings of unarmed citizens has provoked important discussions surrounding use of police force. While an emerging literature explores perceptions of those victimized by police, less is known about White Americans' opinions towards the institution of policing. Drawing from stereotyping and dehumanization literatures, do Whites' attitudes towards police vary based on the identity of a victim? And does the news of any police shooting influence Whites' attitudes about police? Across two survey experiments, participants read a news story describing police killing an innocent victim and report subsequent attitudes towards police. We find that Whites' views of police remain relatively neutral, on average, in response to news of a fatal police shooting. Our findings suggest that protest mobilization adjacent to police brutality may mask an underlying neutrality in opinions about policing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the lineages of police violence, family trauma, and police reform through a case study of the Rochester police killing of Denise Hawkins in 1975. Michael Leach, a 22-year-old, white police officer, responded to a "family trouble" call involving a domestic dispute between Hawkins and her husband. When the 18-year-old, 100-pound Black woman emerged from the apartment, she held a kitchen knife. Within five seconds, Leach had shot and killed her, later claiming she endangered his life. Though Hawkins' name is included in lists of Black women killed by police, little is known about her life and legacy. Using newspapers, police records, and oral history, we examine activists' attempts to scale the call for justice for Denise Hawkins to the national level, the police department's defense of Leach as the true victim in the incident, and the city leaders' compromised efforts to establish a civilian oversight of police. Within the context of Rochester's robust history of resistance to police violence, we argue that the reform efforts of the late 1970s ultimately failed to redress the police use of deadly force. Furthermore, when Michael Leach killed again in 2012—this time shooting his own son, whom he mistook for an intruder—his defense attorney successfully depicted Leach as the sympathetic figure. In shifting the focus to Denise Hawkins, this work contributes to the Black feminist call to memorialize Black women killed by police and suggests that the policies that protect the officers who use deadly force cause widespread, intergenerational harm to officers and their victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on how the Boston Police Department's gang database relies on arbitrary factors, potentially leading to the criminalization of innocent conduct. It discusses the point system used to verify individuals as gang members, critiques the lack of transparency and potential biases in the database, and analyzes cases highlighting how innocent interactions could result in inclusion in the database, violating individual privacy rights.

The article highlights police brutality in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder, focusing on Smith v. City of Philadelphia. It also discuss into the excessive use of force during protests, particularly in West Philadelphia, and discusses the pursuit of abolitionist remedies through litigation, navigating tensions between immediate harm reduction and transformative change.

Implicit racial bias has gained attention as a central contributor to enduring racial disparities in various systems in the United States, such as in criminal justice, particularly regarding police violence—and in education as related to school discipline. Scholars in education have suggested multiple strategies and products (e.g., professional development modules) to raise awareness among practitioners about their implicit biases. Similar to other individualistic approaches, such as the concept of grit, the implicit-bias approach has gained popularity in academia and practice as a remedy for racial disparities. This paper criticizes these product-oriented, individualistic solutions, targeting changes in an individual's psychological traits. Building upon a collective, participatory form of knowledge production activity led by a rural high school serving American Indian youth, we call for redirection to systemic transformation in the dysfunctional discipline system to address racial injustice in discipline with—not for—educators, students, families, and community members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The absence of police accountability has never been more visible. Highprofile police brutality has resulted in high -profile disappointment, 14'here culpable officers walk away undisciplined, unprosecuted, and undeterred from committing the same atrocity again. Such impunity has exposed longstanding dejiciencies within the United States' two-tiered and multipolar system of civil rights enforcement. Chief among these failures is 18 U,S,C. § 242, an oftoverlooked statute that imposes criminal liability upon 01.ficers who "willfully" deprive others of any federal constitutional right. The statute's threshold requirement ofwillful intent has confused courts and discouraged enforcement, resulting in the heavy underdeterrence of civil rights violations. Federal legislative efforts to reform Section 242 have been unsuccessful, and the Supreme Court seems unwilling to revisit its authoritative-but perhaps unworkable-interpretation of the statute in Screws v. United States. State equivalents fare no better, as they utilize comparable standards that present judges, juries, and prosecutors with similar roadblocks to accountability. To remedy the impotence of Section 242 and its sub-federal 01Bhoots, this Comment argues that state legislatures should impose criminal liability upon law enforcement agents who "recklessly" deprive others of their state constitutional rights. By lowering the mens rea required for liability and incorporating the expansive protections of state constitutional jurisprudence, this proposal criminalizes a much wider range of police misconduct than is currently prohibited. However, this change would still protect officers who reasonably adhere to the law, allowing those individuals to do their jobs without the#ar of unwarranted reprisal. A recklessness standard would also allow local .judges to escape the Supreme Court's amorphous definition ofwillfulness in Screws. which was frequently invoked by state courts seeking to interpret Section 242's state-level analogues. Although the expansion of criminal liability comes with many downsides, it is much needed in the realm of police misconduct, where violations routinely occur without any measure of accountability at all. For these reasons, this Comment asserts that states need a broader, more predictable, and more civilian-friendly criminal deprivation of rights statute to deter unconstitutional police behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Chang-rae Lee's novel "Native Speaker," focusing on the themes of language and identity. The protagonist, Henry Park, is a complex character with multiple identities, including being the son of a Korean immigrant and an American citizen. The novel explores issues of race, ethnicity, and assimilation in the context of 1990s America. Language and speech are central to the novel, serving as a metaphor for national belonging and the process of assimilation. The article also touches on other themes in the novel, such as family and cosmopolitanism. The text explores the role of language and speech in shaping identity and cultural belonging. It highlights the differences between Korean and English, and how language can reveal cultural values and priorities. English is portrayed as a means of asserting Americanness and survival, while other languages are associated with foreignness. The text also examines the power dynamics and inequalities embedded in language, particularly in relation to race and whiteness. Silence is explored as a form of communication and identity, both chosen and imposed. Overall, the text offers a nuanced perspective on the complexities of language and its impact on individual and cultural identities. [Extracted from the article]

Police kill around 1,000 persons annually in the United States. This is a significant issue for social work because of the effects these killings have on individuals and communities. Recent research has shown a positive relationship between violent political rhetoric (VPR) and mass shootings. This study aimed to investigate if a relationship exists between VPR and police violence that results in the death of civilians. This was a secondary analysis of publicly available data on police killings of civilians. The dependent variable was a measure of the number of police violence killings of civilians. Three control variables were included in analyses: monthly gun ownership, monthly average temperature in the U.S., and the annual murder rate in the U.S. An auto-regressive distributed lag error correction time series analysis was used in data analyses, and as a sensitivity check a Poisson time series regression with robust standard errors was also employed. The results showed a positive relationship between VPR and police violence killings of civilians. The principal implication of these findings for social work is that social workers collaborate with professionals in other disciplines to find ways to reduce the use of VPR by politicians and others in the media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual assault is among the most challenging offenses to investigate and prosecute, a reality that is exacerbated when the perpetrator is a police officer. In this article, we analyze the attrition of 689 reports of police-involved sexual assault made to the Ontario Special Investigations Unit, between 2005 and 2020. The findings reveal that the vast majority of sexual assault reports do not result in criminal charges, with only 1.59% of complaints resulting in a conviction and sentence. We situate these findings within the wider context of criminal justice responses to sexual violence and police oversight and make suggestions for reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, guest editor Patrick Lyons discusses the concept of racial capitalism with Françoise Vergès. The interview begins with a question concerning Vergès's relationship to Robinson's Black Marxism , and after a detour through her political biography, addresses subjects including the status of racial capitalism in contemporary French politics, the global concept of the "Racial Capitalocene," the politics of race, gender, and waste in Vergès' current work, and racialized police violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Spring 2020, the revival of the debate over race in France, triggered by the killing of George Floyd and the foregrounding of France's own victims of racialized police violence, coincided with a greater recognition of Asians' exposure to racism. As this last decade witnessed an emergence of French Asian reappropriations of the question of race, this article focuses on Grace Ly's debut novel Jeune fille modèle (2018). I draw attention to the ways narratives such as Ly's, through their focus on the French Asian descendant, their preoccupations over identification and sense of national belonging, struggle to account for the inscription of Asian presence in the longue durée history of racial/capitalist exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing number of unarmed Blacks killed by the police has increased research on racial inequities in exposure to police violence and support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. In this study, we use data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) to examine the specific experiences of Black immigrants in the USA. We show that Black immigrants, like Black natives, have higher risks of being treated unfairly or with excessive force by the police compared to White natives and other immigrants. These inequities are generally explained by factors such as skin color differences and experiences of racial discrimination. We also find stronger support for the BLM movement among Black immigrants than among White natives that is not explained by the former's comparatively more adverse experiences with the police. Our results show important nuances in the experiences of Black immigrant groups. For example, African immigrants were less likely to have adverse encounters with the police compared to White natives, but consistently expressed more support the BLM movement compared to the latter. While these findings are important, they are limited to the experiences of Black immigrants in the USA. However, our findings have important implications for policy and research on conflict theory. Moreover, they underscore the importance of Black racial solidarity on issues associated with the killing of unarmed Blacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on semi-structured interviews with security managers of the Czech football clubs, we addressed their role in countering football--related violence as part of the complex 'counter-hooligan' apparatus. We explored how their strategies responded to challenges and dilemmas resulting from the specific configuration of this apparatus, dominated by the idea of the football clubs' primary responsibility for maintaining security and public order inside stadiums. Primarily, this idea was reflected in the police withdrawal from the stadiums and disciplinary penalties imposed on clubs by the football association. However, without a corresponding shift in the public agencies' approach to controlling and punishing incidents of football-related violence, the clubs were not able to exclude the problematic minority from their stadiums. Consequently, they employed different informal and sometimes controversial practices, including the deployment of 'private' riot squads, and expressed support even for indiscriminate and unpopular measures, such as fan card schemes and biometric identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Background and setting: Domestic and family violence (DFV) is a significant societal problem that predominantly affects women and children. One behaviour that has been linked to DFV perpetration is coercive control. While various definitions have been proposed, it involves "acts of assault, threats, humiliation and intimidation or other abuse that is used to harm, punish, or frighten a victim" ranging from emotional to social and financial abuse. One potentially rich source of information on coercive control are police reports. In this paper we determine whether it is possible to automatically identify behaviours linked to coercive control from DFV police reports and present the prevalence of such behaviours by age and sex. Methods: We modified an existing rule-based text mining method to identify 48 coercive control related behaviours from 406,196 DFV reports involving a single person of interest (POI) (i.e., an individual suspected or charged with a DFV offence) against a single victim from NSW Police Force records between 2009 and 2020. Results: 223,778 (54.6%) DFV events had at least one identifiable coercive control behaviour with the most common behaviour being verbal abuse (38.9%) followed by property damage (30.0%). Financial (3.2%) and social abuse (0.4%) were the least common behaviours linked to coercive control. No major differences were found in the proportion of DFV events between male and female POIs or victims. The oldest POI group (≥ 65 years) had the largest proportion for behaviours related to verbal abuse (38.0%) while the youngest POI group reported the highest proportion of DFV involving property damage (45.5%). The youngest victim group (< 18 years old) had the highest proportion of DFV events involving verbal abuse (37.3%) while victims between 18 and 24 years old reported the most harassment through phone calls and text messages (3.1% and 2.4% respectively); double that of those in the oldest (≥ 65 years) victim group (1.4% and 0.7% respectively). Conclusions: Police data capture a wide variety of behaviours linked to coercive control, offering insights across the age spectrum and sex. Text mining can be used to retrieve such information. However, social and financial abuse were not commonly recorded emphasising the need to improve police training to encourage inquiring about such behaviours when attending DFV events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the videoclip Quilo, made by the Colombian hip-hop duo DxD and circulated online. Using bodily technologies such as hairstyles, clothing, and posing, Quilo depicts how the futurity of Black life can be shaped. Drawing from recent conceptualizations of Black life and from Latin American hip-hop studies, this article analyses Quilo by contrasting it with media coverage of police violence and the killing of Black youths in Colombia, and with the discursive construction of the multicultural mestizo nation. In this context, I interpret the treatment of temporality and space in Quilo as aesthetically evoking the non-specific time of Black grief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Summary: Police brutality is a widespread phenomenon around the world. Particularly gruesome human rights abuses in the course of policing take place in Latin America, the world's most violent region outside war zones. Democratic institutions such as competitive elections, checks and balances, and judicial independence are insufficient to prevent police from abusing their power. What factors explain that police engage in abusive behaviors, including illegal arrest, the fabrication of evidence, the use of torture to extract confessions, and the excessive use of force causing injury or death? How can societies restrain these abusive behaviors and subject police to the rule of law? Police behavior is shaped by a combination of institutional, societal, political, organizational, and individual factors. Inquisitorial criminal justice institutions, inherited from the colonial past, have persisted in Latin America until very recently. This meant that democracies in the region were born with weak due process protections that have enabled state authorities and police to abuse their coercive powers as they investigate and prosecute crimes. Police brutality is further the product of security policies. High crime rates and the presence of highly organized criminal groups have pushed many Latin American governments to adopt militarized security interventions ‐including deploying the armed forces to control crime and militarizing police forces. Populist demands for harsh policies, moreover, generate incentives for politicians to adopt security strategies that violate human rights and which, in the long run, increase violence in society. The most affected groups are the poor, people of color, and those living in impoverished minoritized communities. Policy Implications: It is essential to strengthen due process protections and judicial oversight over police to reduce torture and other forms of police brutality. Police demilitarization and, under some conditions, community‐oriented policing approaches can sharply reduce the use of excessive force causing injury or death. Body‐worn cameras (BWC), moreover, can effectively be used to reduce police abusive behavior —and violence against police officers — even in high violence situations and where toxic police‐community relations prevail. One limitation of this technology is that it gives too much leeway to frontline officers to turn their cameras on. Poor supervision can further undermine police compliance with camera protocols. These problems can be overcome by assigning cameras to supervisors and using more advanced technologies that allow turning cameras on from the main station. Monetary incentives that reward police officers "to kill less" is another effective policy intervention to reduce police violence causing injury or death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on updating the Catholic Workers' theory of revolution, discussing Dorothy Day's radical critique of the State and its promotion of capitalism and militarism and the founding principles of the Catholic Worker movement. Topics include the historical background of Dorothy Day's activism and the movement's recent emphasis on anti-racism training and activism against police brutality targeting marginalized communities.

Scholarship that has studied the #EndSARS movement in Nigeria remains scanty. In contributing to debates surrounding the #EndSARS movement, we focus on the Niger Delta region and the effect of the movement on the people. Online interview of 20 participants across the region, reports from Amnesty International, the Human Rights Watch and Facebook posts provided data for the qualitative study. Castells' 'network society' enabled us to explain how youths formed a 'network of protesters' to resist a repressive police system. The #EndSARS protest was another opportunity for the Niger Delta youths to express their dissonance with an exclusionary political arrangement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an analysis of audiovisual evidence claims in the struggle for identifying and documenting police violence in Turkish criminal courts. Focusing on a fatal police shooting in an urban district predominantly populated by leftist groups and marginalized communities, it aims to illustrate the limits of both criminal trials and audiovisual technologies of proof. The "culture of impunity" has been the prevailing framework to describe courts' denial of the ongoing violence of law enforcement. Instead, this article pays attention to the formation of facts, regulation of sensory perceptions, and affective engagements in the courtroom. Drawing on the ethnographically grounded examination of the hearings and the case file, I argue that criminal trials establish the particular legibility of video evidence and police violence. Furthermore, the breach between the ways of seeing, hearing, and interpreting these media serves to delineate different political communities, challenging the assumed unity over which the law has authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, we have witnessed the politicizing effects of police killings in the United States. This project asks how such killings might (de)mobilize voters at the local level. We draw on multiple theoretical approaches to develop a theory of community contact with the police. We argue that when a highly visible event tied to government actions occurs—like a police killing—it can spur turnout. This is especially true where public narratives tie such events to government and structural causes. By comparing neighborhoods near a killing before and after election day, we estimate the causal effect on turnout. We find a mobilizing effect. These effects are larger when they "trend" on Google, occur in Black communities, or if the victim is Black. Proximity to a killing also increases support for abolishing the police. We conclude that police violence increases electoral participation in communities where narratives about racially unjust policing resonate most. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shortly before America's police brutality protests of 2020, a new term emerged for an old phenomenon in the criminal legal system: ghost warrants. These warrants are the result of outdated and sometimes inaccurate or incomplete information. Yet they continue to repeatedly land innocent people in jail, sometimes for months at a time. In essence, they haunt those they affect. During their detention, victims are susceptible to losing jobs, housing, and even family. Mistaken arrests disproportionately impact marginalized communities, specifically Black, Latine, poor, mentally ill, and immigrant populations. Hurdles compound when someone belongs to more than one of these communities or when they are the unfortunate victim of mistaken AI facial recognition. Currently, there are few paths to clearing up such warrants, nor is there a widespread awareness among those with the power to create such pathways. A major underpinning of the challenge both victims and criminal defense attorneys face is the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule, where police who believe they are executing a valid warrant are not punished for mistakes made in its execution. The Supreme Court of the United States has thus far failed to acknowledge the systemic negligence resulting in mistaken arrests and therefore not incentivized law enforcement agencies to keep their records reasonably clear of mistakes. In 2023, it also denied certiorari in Sosa v. Martin Cnty., Fla., where a man named David Sosa had twice been arrested and detained on an out-of-state warrant for another David Sosa, despite an amicus brief from four other David Sosas. Without legal pathways to relief, victims of mistaken arrests are left with few options. But with a concerted effort between legals scholars, who bring analysis and awareness; legislators, who have the power to create change; and the judiciary, who has the power to enforce equitable measures, mistaken arrests could be drastically reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief review article focuses on police-perpetrated racism against African American and Black (AAB) communities, typically in the form of police brutality, police violence, and aggressive policing. We assert that police-perpetrated racism constitutes a racial justice and public health problem. A growing body of literature supports this assertion, with the consequences and correlates of direct police contact, vicarious police contact, and place-based exposure to aggressive policing including mental health (e.g., anxiety symptoms, depressive symptoms, trauma) and physical health (e.g., poorer self-rated health, hypertension) sequelae. We assert that eradicating police-perpetrated racism requires acknowledgement of the historical landscape of policing as well as the ways in which police-perpetrated racism maintains racial hierarchies. We conclude by making recommendations for promoting racial equity in policing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The singular focus on procedural justice police reform is dangerous. Procedurally just law enforcement encounters provide an empirically proven subjective sense of fairness and legitimacy, while obscuring substantively unjust outcomes emanating from a fundamentally unjust system. The deceptive simplicity of procedural justice - that a polite cop is a lawful cop - promotes a false consciousness among would-be reformers that progress has been made, evokes a false sense of legitimacy divorced from objective indicia of lawfulness or morality, and claims the mantle of "reform" in the process. It is not just that procedural justice is a suboptimal type of reform; it is the type of reform that actively frustrates other reforms by dressing up policing with the perception of correctness and legitimacy. And yet, procedural justice dominates police reform policy. Virtually all current federally funded police reform proposals support procedural justice trainings to the exclusion of proposals to address police brutality, eliminate discriminatory overpolicing, demilitarize departments, and end qualified immunity. As a result, a growing procedural justice industrial complex has taken shape. This multilayered public-private partnership between government agencies, academic institutions, and for-profit training companies increasingly helps police departments "protect their brand" and "reduce liability" through procedural politeness, while requiring no changes to unlawful, unnecessary, and violent police behavior. This Article provides the first comprehensive account of this growing complex, charting its roots in community policing and evolving into a cottage industry of private, for-profit purveyors offering costly procedural justice trainings to departments flush with federal grant money. This Article also challenges the dominant scholarly narrative supporting these procedural justice policies, interrogating its role in promoting unnecessary ubiquitous police presence and justifying new racially discriminatory practices like "hot spots policing" and "precision policing." In doing so, the Article applies these process-oriented critiques to five substantive police reform proposals, exploring how this singular focus on procedural justice distinctly frustrates more necessary transformative reforms in the areas of discriminatory policing, police brutality, police accountability, legal reform, and police abolition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the deployment of digital tools in pushing citizen activism on political accountability and empowerment using the 2018 #EndSARS campaign in Nigeria as point of reference. In so doing, the article explores the utility of digital activism and analyze the successes and challenges associated with the effectiveness of its use to advance citizens' voices in transitional democracies. The study deployed Chorus Analytics to harvest and thematically analyze 13,000 tweets of Nigerians that relate to the 2018 #EndSARS campaign. The article argues that the campaign can be deemed successful given that it elicited and raised public discourse on police abuse in Nigeria. The study observes the absence of strong institutions as a challenge to digital activism in transitional democracies. The individuality of activism leaders also poses a significant danger to digital activism. The findings demonstrate the weaknesses associated with transitional democracies in the area of building strong institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]