By Dan Falk/Undark

The events of the past few weeks have put issues of racial justice, and the use of force by police officers against Black Americans, in the spotlight. But sociologists and criminologists have been studying these disparities for years, and by now there is a vast literature documenting the unequal treatment of minorities by police forces across the country.
Brianna Remster, who holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Penn State, is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Villanova. In her research, she makes use of quantitative studies examining inequalities in criminal justice experiences, including issues surrounding police violence, incarceration, and mental health in vulnerable populations.
While most Undark interviews are conducted by phone or Skype, in this case the interview was conducted by e-mail earlier this month. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Undark: In 2017, you wrote that you were “surprised to discover that there have been few systematic analyses of disparities in police use of force.” Is that still the case in 2020? Is your work hampered by a lack of data?

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Posted on June 24, 2020

By Andre Perry/The Hechinger Report

In recent years, an outburst of national studies and exposés has shown that black teachers produce better academic and behavioral outcomes for black students compared to their white counterparts. This has led to numerous articles calling for the recruitment of more black teachers and/or asking where all the black teachers have gone. But the flipside to those studies isn’t making as many headlines. What’s wrong with white teachers? How do we close the black-white teaching performance gap?
Extolling the need for more black teachers is not the same as demanding white teachers be less racist. Naming what’s wrong with white people’s teaching skills must begin with calling out racism. We certainly need more black teachers, but recruitment isn’t a solution for the racism students and teachers of color face everyday.
The research is overwhelming.

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Posted on June 20, 2020

By Jason Kelley and Matthew Guariglia/The Electronic Frontier Foundation

Across the United States, people are taking to the street to protest racist police violence, including the tragic police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. This is a historic moment of reckoning for law enforcement. Technology companies, too, must rethink how the tools they design and sell to police departments minimize accountability and exacerbate injustice. Even worse, some companies profit directly from exploiting irrational fears of crime that all too often feed the flames of police brutality.
So we’re calling on Amazon Ring, one of the worst offenders, to immediately end the partnerships it holds with over 1,300 law enforcement agencies.

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Posted on June 17, 2020

By The Kaiser Family Foundation

A new KFF analysis finds nearly one in four workers (24%) are considered at high risk of serious illness if they get infected by the novel coronavirus, highlighting the challenges that businesses, public offices and other employers face as they move toward reopening.
The analysis estimates 37.7 million workers (based on their work status in 2018) are at high risk of serious illness from COVID-19. This includes 10 million who are at least 65-years-old and an additional 27.7 million who have pre-existing medical conditions that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says put people at higher risk for severe illness from COVID-19. Many of these people may be out of work right now or working remotely, but would be at greater risk if they had to return to in-person work.

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Posted on June 15, 2020

By Michael Grabell, Claire Perlman and Bernice Yeung/ProPublica

For weeks, Rachel Willard, the county health director in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, had watched with alarm as COVID-19 cases rolled in from the Tyson Foods chicken plant in the center of town. Then Tyson hired a private company to take over testing, and the information suddenly slowed to a trickle.
Blinded to the burgeoning health crisis, Willard and her small staff grew increasingly agitated. The outbreak had already spread across 100 miles of the North Carolina Piedmont, and two workers had died. But nearly a week after Tyson’s testing ended in May, the county health agency had received less than 20% of the results. The little information it did receive was missing phone numbers and other data, hindering critical efforts to follow up with infected workers, to tell them to isolate and to trace their contacts.
“Our fear and alarm is the fact that close contacts and positive cases are walking around, potentially shedding the virus and infecting others,” Willard, who was coordinating the response while on maternity leave, wrote to state officials on May 14.
Only after the state public health director warned Tyson that failure to turn over information could result in “injunctive relief or prosecution” did the testing company release the information. As of Wednesday, 599 workers had tested positive, more than a fifth of the plant’s workforce.
The dangerous delay by the nation’s largest food company is one of a series of breakdowns revealed in tens of thousands of pages of e-mails, text messages, meeting notes and reports that ProPublica obtained from dozens of public health agencies across the country.

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Posted on June 12, 2020

By The Office of Inspector General

The Public Safety section of the City of Chicago Office of Inspector General (OIG) completed a review of the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD) processes for managing and producing its records for criminal prosecution and civil litigation arising out of law enforcement activities.
OIG’s review found that the Department’s records management practices are inadequate to ensure that it can identify and produce all requested, relevant, and/or responsive records in its possession, and, therefore, to ensure that CPD meets is constitutional and other legal obligations for disclosure.
CPD’s inability to ensure that it meets these obligations poses fundamental risks to due process and the fairness of criminal and civil litigation.
Specifically, OIG found the following:

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Posted on June 11, 2020

By Andre Perry/The Hechinger Report

Every black parent, at some point, has to have “the talk,” the proverbial sit-down where we engage our children in a serious discussion about how black people are treated by police. We explain how to converse with police, how to make eye contact, how or when to show respect, how, when necessary, they must sometimes genuflect to unjust authority in order to protect themselves.
Inevitably, it’s not just one talk. Circumstances force us to have a series of conversations throughout our children’s young lives, because racism is a constant presence.
If you are just having “the talk” with your child for the first time this week to explain the protests they’re seeing on television or outside their windows over the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, you have a problem. It probably means you’re not regularly talking with them about current events and they’re not getting a good education about American history in school. It also means you have willfully buried your head in the sand to the stark injustices that disrespect the very notion of our American democracy and to the role you may be playing in those injustices by your silence.
In the face of almost daily occurrences of racial violence against black people, there shouldn’t be one talk about police when you’re a parent – of any race. We teach our children every day to help them navigate the communities they live in. We should be talking to kids about racism in this country all the time.

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Posted on June 10, 2020

By David Rutter

If modern medical science prevails and I do my part by looking both ways before crossing the street, there is some chance I will get to be 75.
The age. Not the speed.
In fact, the science of predictable death forecasting assesses that I have a 62 percent chance at this moment of reaching 80, and a worth-the-bet chance of making it to 90.
If you statistically excluded childhood deaths and those who step in front of a truck, I can hit 100 without a sweat.
Because I have never had a 62 percent chance of anything good happening to me, I consider these odds are, to turn a phrase, literally a mortal lock.
But reaching for some statistical finish line is not the point.
What do you want out of life when you are 75?
I want to be “ANTIFA provocateur” Martin Gugino, the witness-for-justice Buffalo peace activist, who somehow tricked riot police into pushing him down, bashing his head on the pavement and letting his brain fluids gush out.

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Posted on June 9, 2020

By Sophia Cope and Adam Schwartz/The Electronic Frontier Foundation

Like the rest of the world, we are horrified by the videos of George Floyd’s murder. Once again, police brutality was documented by brave bystanders exercising their First Amendment rights. Their videos forcefully tell a painful truth that has further fueled a movement to demand an end to racism and abuse of power by police officers.
Recordings of police officers, whether by witnesses to an incident with officers, individuals who are themselves interacting with officers, or by members of the press, are an invaluable tool in the fight for police accountability. Often, it’s the video alone that leads to disciplinary action, firing, or prosecution of an officer.
This post provides some practical tips to record the police legally and safely, and explains some of the legal nuances of recording the police.

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Posted on June 9, 2020

By David Rutter

As an angry, old, white man, I will give this country one more chance with the clear understanding that I might just walk out the door and never return.
America is pissing me off. Seriously.

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Posted on June 4, 2020