With the march for Alex Nieto last week and the family filing suit against the city—not to mention the ongoing coverage of Ferguson—we’ve been thinking a lot about the issue of police violence locally and around the country. Here’s some interesting recent coverage:
- San Francisco Examiner has searched through public records since 2000 and broken down some facts about officer-involved shootings. According to the Examiner, officers are more likely to shoot at a vehicle than a suspect with a gun.
- Today KQED’s Forum discusses the troubling demographic statistics of local police departments. In many Bay Area cities predominantly consisting of communities of color, many police departments are overwhelmingly white. Host Michael Krasny talks with Bay Area police chiefs, police auditors and law professors.
- In The New York Times this week, Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of UC Irvine’s Law School discusses recent Supreme Court rulings effecting how local police departments are prosecuted for officer-involved shootings. He argues that the Roberts Court has made it harder to find officers at fault.
- Also, BART police tackled and arrested the wrong unarmed, black man yesterday.
Obviously, there’s a lot more on this complex issue. Have you read anything interesting of late?
Yes, lots of interesting reading out there including this http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/08/armed-police, and this http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/08/22/first-person-salinas-couldve-been-ferguson-heres-why-it-wasnt/
More interesting is what nobody has been reading about because it hasn’t been reported. A black cop shot dead a young white male in Utah. And the media buried it.