“Drug Raids Conducted By SWAT Teams Are Not Polite Encounters. In Countless Situations In Which Police

“Drug raids conducted by SWAT teams are not polite encounters. In countless situations in which police could easily have arrested someone or conducted a search without a military-style raid, police blast into people’s homes, typically in the middle of the night, throwing grenades, shouting, and pointing guns and rifles at anyone inside, often including young children. In recent years, dozens of people have been killed by police in the course of these raids, including elderly grandparents and those who are completely innocent of any crime. Criminologist Peter Kraska reports that between 1989 and 2001 at least 780 cases of flawed paramilitary raids reached the appellate level, a dramatic increase over the 1980s, when such cases were rare, or earlier, when they were nonexistent. Many of these cases involve people killed in botched raids. Alberta Spruill, a fifty-seven-year-old city worker from Harlem, is among the fallen. On May 16, 2003, a dozen New York City police officers stormed her apartment building on a no-knock warrant, acting on a tip from a confidential informant who told them a convicted felon was selling drugs on the sixth floor. The informant had actually been in jail at the time he said he’d bought drugs in the apartment, and the target of the raid had been arrested four days before, but the officers didn’t check and didn’t even interview the building superintendent. The only resident in the building was Alberta, described by friends as a “devout churchgoer.” Before entering, police deployed a flash-bang grenade, resulting in a blinding, deafening explosion. Alberta went into cardiac arrest and died two hours later. The death was ruled a homicide but no one was indicted. Those who survive SWAT raids are generally traumatized by the event. Not long after Spruill’s death, Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields held hearings on SWAT practices in New York City. According to the Village Voice, “Dozens of black and Latino victims—nurses, secretaries, and former officers—packed her chambers airing tales, one more horrifying than the next. Most were unable to hold back tears as they described police ransacking their homes, handcuffing children and grandparents, putting guns to their heads, and being verbally (and often physically) abusive. In many cases, victims had received no follow-up from the NYPD, even to fix busted doors or other physical damage.””

— The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

any emergency or escalation at uva today was caused by the institution and the police, not protesters.

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hatesquash

10 months ago

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hatesquash

1 year ago

The Verge

Tumblr is settling with NYC’s human rights agency over alleged porn ban bias

The ban allegedly affected LGBTQ users disproportionately.

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hatesquash

10 months ago

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hatesquash

11 months ago

for juneteenth the innocence project sent out a collection of reading material on their mailing list that i thought i should share with all of you-- a reminder of how the us prison system is a continuation of slavery, and how we all must keep fighting for justice and equality. they also are accepting donations if you have a few bucks to send their way: every dollar counts!

How the 13th Amendment Kept Slavery Alive: Perspectives From the Prison Where Slavery Never Ended

On Juneteenth, Here Are 5 Ways to Be a Better Ally

Race and Wrongful Conviction

How a Wrongly Incarcerated Person Became the ‘Most Brilliant Legal Mind’ in ‘America’s Bloodiest Prison’

A Mistaken Identification Sent Him to Prison for 38 Years, But He Never Gave Up Fighting for Freedom

‘The Dungeon Was the Last Place I Wanted to Go’: An Exoneree’s Story of Survival at Angola Prison

Book an Innocence Project Speaker This Month

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hatesquash

8 months ago

Source

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hatesquash

11 months ago

Right wing youtuber Arielle Scarcella has spent the past few weeks posting libsoftiktok style videos harassing random trans people online. She has a massive following and these videos are getting in the tens of thousands of views each, which is seriously dangerous for the people she attacks in them. Could everyone who can please help me report as many of her recent videos as possible? And please help by spreading this post

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hatesquash

1 year ago

Almost as if Forbes is just a public relations outlet and not critical in any way...

As a 19-year-old sophomore at Stanford, Elizabeth Holmes decided to transform diagnostic medicine so she dropped out of college and used her tuition money to start her own company, Theranos. Ten years later, Holmes, pictured here holding a micro-vial, is on the cutting edge of medical technology — her new blood testing method allows hundreds of tests to be run using only a few drops of blood. And, Holmes’ methods are cheaper, faster, more accurate, and less invasive than conventional methods which often require a separate vial of blood for every test. As Holmes told Wired.com earlier this year, “I started this company because I wanted to spend my life changing our health care system. When someone you love gets really sick, most of the time when you find out, it’s too late to be able to do something about it. It’s heartbreaking… We wanted to make actionable health information accessible to people everywhere at the time it matters most. That means two things: being able to detect conditions in time to do something about them and providing access to information that can empower people to improve their lives.”