Journalist – Historian – Speaker
The apartheid government of South Africa had a problem (well, it had a lot of them, but bear with me). It wanted to discriminate by race, but how does one deal with mixed-race people? It came up with the infamous “pencil test,” in which a pencil is pushed through a person’s hair, and how easily …
My first piece for Al Jazeera America is a big one: The Cult of Compliance. As regular readers know, I have been talking this for a long time and thinking about police violence in various ways for even longer. I used the phrase for the first time on this post from August 17, 2013. The …
Everybody pay attention to these next two sentences, ok? If your police force is shooting too many people, TASERs are not the solution. The solution is not to shoot people except in dire circumstances. Thank you for paying attention. Last week, a major report came out in Toronto as a result of the death of …
At the end of May, a black female professor named Ersula Ore at Arizona State University was walking across the street when she was arrested for jaywalking. By report, people cross at that site regularly to avoid construction and it is reasonably suspicious that a black woman was the person singled out by police. She …
Yesterday’s piece in The Atlantic has a quite excellent comment section (in general, Atlantic readers’ comments are polite and smart, if still sometimes easily led to the hostility that happens online everywhere). Here are three followup points (I know this is long, but bear with me). 1. Why/how are these incidents happening now? 2. How …
I co-write a new piece just published by The Atlantic on police violence and disability. My co-author is Lawrence Carter-Long, communications director for the National Council on Disability. I’m really honored to have worked with him and hope that more collaborations with the NCD follow. There’s nothing surprising in this piece for readers of this …
This is my 200th post on the blog. It’s not a happy one. As long-time readers know, my work on the Ethan Saylor case led me to coin the phrase the “cult of compliance.” This phrase allows me to link diverse moments in which authority figures respond to non-compliance with egregious acts of violence and place …
For the past year, I have been writing about a persistent pattern of police violence against people with disabilities. I have been particularly focused on the Ethan Saylor case, of course. But the stories proliferate, with a new one almost every week. On Monday, I argued that you can read both the Times Square police …
A friend and historian asked me, in the wake of yesterday’s post, to think about the ways that compliance might track against overall reduction in crime in the last few decades. This is important. Ray Kelly defended stop and frisk by saying it’s lowered crime rates. TASER notes the 110,000+ lives saved thanks to their …
In a few weeks (date not yet set), I will be publishing an essay on police brutality and disability. As a result of my work on this (really upsetting) topic, I’ve been tracking the ways that police explain their actions. The use of language, even more than the specifics of any given case, shows the …