Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • Austin wants to be a model of modern policing, but the future remains unclear

    After years of inaction on police reform measures, Austin city leaders raced to restructure and cut resources from the city's police department after the 2020 nationwide social justice protests followed close on the heels of another in a series of controversial police shootings in Austin. By freezing hiring of new officers and shifting $140 million to other agencies, the city was among the biggest cities making the earliest, boldest moves to reform policing. A year later, a severe shortage of patrol officers and rising violence has sparked a new round of debate about where the city goes from here.

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  • Atlanta Tried Housing Police in Disinvested Black Communities to Increase Trust. Is it Working?

    The Secure Neighborhoods program lets select police officers buy houses at subsidized prices if they move into a mostly Black, historically disinvested neighborhood. The aim of the program is to make police officers part of a community, build community trust, and discourage crime. While violence and auto theft in the chosen neighborhood have dropped, and some community members say the program improved relations, others complain that the gesture has been fairly superficial and just adds to gentrification pressures.

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  • Parson acknowledges new gun law needs to be revisited after police say it ties their hands

    A new Missouri law, the Second Amendment Preservation Act, restricts the ability of local law enforcement officials to collaborate with federal officials in enforcing gun laws and investigating gun crimes. The law, which legislators meant as a statement of gun-rights principles, would fine police officers who violate it. Many local law enforcement officers withdrew from federal-local gun crime task forces and have otherwise stopped working with their federal counterparts. One department stopped submitting data to the federal ballistics database. Police say the law interferes with legitimate police work.

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  • How decades of stopping forest fires made them worse

    Prescribed burning or controlled burning is an ancestral indigenous practice in which specific sections of a forest are burned. Controlled burning also happens naturally like when lightning strikes a forest. Controlled burning is good for a forest, it gets rid of dead areas, leads to healthier soil by clearing the ground, and minimizes the strength of large fires. However, due to U.S. laws that criminalized controlled burns the practice was discouraged in the U.S. Now, due to climate change and larger fires, prescribed burning is making a come back.

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  • Maybe Cops Shouldn't Handle Domestic Violence Calls

    The case of Gabby Petito illustrates how decades-old laws meant to make police take domestic violence more seriously can backfire on the people who most need protection. Mandatory-arrest laws require police responding to a domestic-violence complaint to determine who is the primary aggressor, as a prelude to an arrest. In Petito's case, as in many, Moab, Utah, police deemed her the aggressor based on a cursory investigation, and possibly based on ingrained biases against women. This does nothing to get at the root of the problem and get people the help they need.

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  • He Beat Her Repeatedly. Family Court Tried to Give Him Joint Custody of Their Children.

    Wisconsin is a leader in the movement to treat fathers as equal caregivers and to prioritize shared custody in divorces. But this fathers' rights reform, combined with outmoded ideas about women who allege domestic violence, often forces domestic violence victims to maintain frequent communication with their abusers and to turn over their children to violent former spouses for visits. Although the shared-custody law does exempt cases of serious domestic violence, advocates say the law allows large exceptions, makes proving allegations too hard, and is overseen by courts dismissive of women's allegations.

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  • ‘Every man was drinking': how much do bans on alcohol help women in India?

    The Bihar, India, state government banned drinking and selling alcohol in 2016 after women in the mostly rural state mounted protests blaming men's alcohol abuse for rampant violence against women. Hundreds of thousands of arrests, carrying severe penalties, resulted from the ban. Previous bans in Bihar and other states failed because of unpopularity and loopholes. This one has some evidence to suggest a 15% decline in drinking, but only a 4% decline in violence, while bootlegging and other crimes have increased. The prohibition protests have spread to other states.

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  • Seattle police intervening in fewer mental health calls, data show

    Washington state legislators imposed new restrictions on the use of force by police, including strict limits on physically restraining someone who is not suspected of committing a crime. At a time when non-police responders to mental health crises are not yet fully staffed, the use-of-force reforms have had the unintended consequence in Seattle of denying some people in mental health crises the emergency care they need. Police believe they are not allowed to restrain someone in order to involuntarily commit them to a mental hospital. Involuntary commitments have dropped by almost half.

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  • ‘Black Capitalism' Promised a Better City for Everyone. What Happened?

    The partnership between Black social activists and corporations in Rochester during the 1960s failed to bring about tangible progress in subsequent decades. Systemic issues of racism and poverty were unaffected by “community capitalism.”

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  • As homicides surged, Oakland's premier anti-violence program went quiet

    Oakland Ceasefire's "delicate architecture" balancing law enforcement and community-based responses to gun violence, which seemed to have helped lower the city's gun violence by half since 2012, came crashing down during the pandemic. While arrests continued, the alternative offered to people at high risk of violence – an array of services to turn their lives around – withered with a virtual ban on in-person meetings. Violence in the city surged as years of progress unraveled. The program is working to rebuild, while questioning if it should distance itself more from the police.

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