Fluent Essays

Blackboard Informal Writing Assignment: By 10pm on Thursday, March 11, please submit a 1-2 page (typed, double-spaced) response with your initial thoughts, feelings, questions, and responses to the articles “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police” and “How Armed Police Officers on Campus Have Become a Ubiquitous Part of American College Life.” You should submit this via Blackboard, using the link under Course Content.https://nyti.ms/2YBa4UG Because reform won’t happen. By Mariame Kaba Ms. Kaba is an organizer against criminalization. June 12, 2020 Congressional Democrats want to make it easier to identify and prosecute police misconduct; Joe Biden wants to give police departments $300 million. But efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms like these have failed for nearly a century. Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police. There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo. So when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man’s neck until he dies, that’s the logical result of policing in America. When a police officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as his job. Now two weeks of nationwide protests have led some to call for defunding the police, while others argue that doing so would make us less safe. The first thing to point out is that police officers don’t do what you think they do. They spend most of their time responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other noncriminal issues. We’ve been taught to think they “catch the bad guys; they chase the bank robbers; they find the serial killers,” said Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, in an interview with Jacobin. But this is “a big myth,” he said. “The vast majority of police officers make one felony arrest a year. If they make two, they’re cop of the month.” We can’t simply change their job descriptions to focus on the worst of the worst criminals. That’s not what they are set up to do. Second, a “safe” world is not one in which the police keep black and other marginalized people in check through threats of arrest, incarceration, violence and death. I’ve been advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of your view on police power — whether you want to get rid of the police or simply to make them less violent — here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people. The idea is gaining traction in Minneapolis, Dallas, Los Angeles and other cities. History is instructive, not because it offers us a blueprint for how to act in the present but because it can help us ask better questions for the future. The Lexow Committee undertook the first major investigation into police misconduct in New York City in! # $ OPINION How armed police officers on campus have become a ubiquitous part of American college life Angela Wright: Over 100 American universities have contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense. This has allowed universities to procure grenade launchers, armoured vehicles and military assault riBes like the M-16. By Angela Wright June 25, 2020 Police arrest an African-American protester, whose face is bloodied following a confrontation with police, during an anti-Vietnam War protest near 14th street in Manhattan, New York City, New York following the Kent State shooting, May 7, 1970. (Stuart Lutz/Gado/Getty) Angela Wright is a writer and political analyst based in Toronto. It was just after midnight. I was finishing up what had become a nightly routine: a late-night study session with friends at the library. It was a cool fall night, and my friend offered to drive us to our on-campus apartments. Just as we pulled into the parking lot of my friend’s apartment complex on campus, bright headlights flooded the windshield.  20 Ingenious Inventions 2020 Theyre selling like crazy.Everybody wants them Techgadgetstrends.com How armed police officers on campus have become a ubiquitou... https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/how-armed-police-officers-on... 1 of 4 9/9/20, 9:23 PM A police officer appro dropping us off, my o reminded that I wasn’t in Canada anymore. In the United States, campus police carry guns. I sat in the back seat in sheer silence, staring at my friend’s campus parking pass hanging from the rearview mirror. With the world’s eyes fixated on the violence of municipal police forces, the central role of armed police forces on American university campuses have flown under the radar. And the history that brought so many armed police officers to campuses across the U.S. is marred with controversy as well as death. MORE: Hal Johnson: ‘Yes, there is systemic racism in Canada’ The first college police force was formed in 1894 at Yale University, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that armed police officers on campus became a ubiquitous part of American college life. Unlike municipal police forces, who are funded with municipal budgets and paid with local taxes, university police departments are employed directly by universities. As Baby Boomers entered university, the 1960s anti-segregation protests gave way to a growing anti-war protest against the U.S. military’s increasing involvement in Vietnam. But in 1965, the military made changes to draft eligibility: previously, young men enrolled as undergraduate and graduate students in universities were exempt from the draft. Now, desperate for more soldiers, only the highest-achieving students would be exempt. Using various testing methods, universities ranked their students, and only those whose scores tested above a certain cut off would be exempt from the draft.  University students staged anti-war teach-ins across campuses and protested their universities’ co