Body-worn cameras are tools organized, controlled and deployed by police. How should they be used? When should they be used? Where should they be used? These are all questions answered exclusively by police. Any police reform demand that includes a call for all police to wear body cameras is a call to invest total oversight authority of police with police.
Some of this country’s most coercive institutions – including the Metropolitan Police and Security Service (MI5) – can be traced to the imperial needs of 19th and early 20th century imperial Britain.
From the Philippines to the War on Terror, the U.S. state has utilised its vast imperial domains as grounds for experimentation for coercive social control.
Robots have been hailed as the "unsung heroes" of the Covid-19 pandemic, allowing potentially risky work to be carried out remotely. But the reality of robotics is more complicated than its boosters make out; it has allowed work to be offshored, often at vastly reduced pay and poor conditions. Here, Phil Jones looks at the new world of remote working.
The first article in a five-part series examining the ‘imperial boomerang effect’ and its operation in a range of contexts.
At least since the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Los Angeles and New York police departments used and justified chokehold techniques, while at the same time banning and sanctioning some versions of the technique. In a five-year period in the 1980s, LAPD officers killed sixteen people with a chokehold, and fourteen of these deaths were of Black people.
Kate Derickson reports from the Minneapolis Uprising: "During those long nights, new subjectivities were formed, and the grammar of the social order was suspended, allowing arrangements to be newly sensed, new forms of solidarities to be detected. These tentative arrangements repositioned the police as not on 'our' side."
While delegates made their way to Chicago for the 1968 Democratic National Convention, tens of thousands of protesters were set to converge in the city for a week of civil disobedience. Protesters, passersby, and even residents out on their porches were beaten. The chasing, swinging, and clubbing was indiscriminate. Journalists, denied any special treatment, were battered and taunted, at times even targeted.
More than 2,000 police helicopters prowl the skies over US cities. If we consider the tactical helicopters operated by US police departments as a unit, it is larger than every military on earth except for the fleets maintained by the United States, China and Russia.
The elite fear the destruction of their property, yes, but even more they fear the destruction of the social relations that make private property possible. And so they fear a world without police.
"What separates a martyr from an ally lies in who calls the shots, who does the grunt work, who gets the glory and who decides, in the aftermath, how the story of the uprising is told." Audrea Lim reports on this week's protests against racist police violence in New York City.
An account of the Black Panthers’ United Front against Fascism (UFAF) conference in August 1969 that appeared in the Old Mole, a paper of the Students for a Democratic Society.