police

Reevaluating Racial Bias Allegations in Policing

Researchers conducted a meta-analysis of 51 studies published since 2005 from various academic databases looking at racial bias in criminal justice sentencing. They found that with the exception of a “very small” amount of racial bias for drug crimes, there was no statistically significant difference for all other crimes.  Why then, is it a common […]

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Should Police Monitor Muslim Student Groups?

Universities have been expressing concern and even outrage over Associated Press reports that the New York Police Department spent six months in 2006-2007 keeping tabs on Muslim Student Associations at 16 colleges in the northeast, including Columbia, Yale, Rutgers and NYU. Some university presidents and spokesmen complained that the NYPD’s surveillance activities, conducted without clear […]

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Pepper Spraying for Beginners

The scenes that describe certain events or incidents in the course of human events sometimes distort the actuality of those events and incidents; and, thus, leave a flawed portrait as a historical record. For example, while the public saw the “brutality” of the Los Angeles Police Department in the Rodney King incident, they did not see […]

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Condemning the NYPD over Academic Freedom?

As Mark Bauerlein observed in his seminal essay on the topic, groupthink has the effect of producing more extreme versions of the common assumption. It stands to reason, therefore, that campuses with unusually one-sided faculties will feature more frequent episodes of extremist assertions. Such certainly seems to be the case at my own institution, Brooklyn […]

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Reviewing the Turbulence at Berkeley

The review board of the UC Berkeley campus police has issued a 128-page report on the violent student protests of last November, criticizing actions by campus police and the University administration. The introduction and summary are here and the full report is here. Coverage of the report by the AP and The Daily Cal are […]

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