African Americans have long taken to the streets to protest against racial injustice. While some progress has been made, police violence remains an ever-present reality.
The policing of lockdown places the entire population at the centre of a huge public order operation. The public they once protected from threats has itself become the threat.
Current restrictions remind us of the value of access to public space and one another. Yet even before COVID-19 some people were excluded and targeted, so a return to the status quo isn’t good enough.
With officers being hit by illness, arrests have dropped during the coronavirus crisis. Meanwhile crime rates have remained static, or even fallen. Is it time to rethink policing?
Recently, police forces have come under criticism for their engagement of facial recognition technologies. But pandemic response plans may increasingly incorporate surveillance.
“Super-recognisers” who can identify a range of ethnicities could help increase fraud detection rates at passport control and decrease false conviction rates that have relied on CCTV.
Recruiting 20,000 new police officers may sound like a massive boost, but the reality is that the Conservative’s proposal will simply replace the 20,600 police officers who have already been cut.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg apologized for his city’s ‘stop-and-frisk’ police strategy. Two criminologists argue it isn’t necessarily inherently racist – though New York’s program was.
A study looked at fines in 93 California cities. Cities with more black residents and more disproportionately white police forces tended to rely the most on fines.