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#policing — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #policing, aggregated by home.social.

  1. The group that I've been organizing with on police body cameras in Somerville just put out an update on where things sit, including the call-to-action with regard to Tuesday's hearing.
    docs.google.com/document/d/e/2

    #SomervilleMA #surveillance #policing #BodyCameras #MAPol

  2. The #UK government is funding a new National Roads #Policing Coordination Centre (NRPCC) to lead a nationwide crackdown on illegal number plates across #England. Police forces will share intelligence, data and technology to identify offenders and disrupt organised crime groups using the road network.

    The NRPCC will trial #technology including specialised goggles designed to detect plates altered to evade cameras. Illegal plates, including cloned, ‘ghost’ and missing plates, can be used to avoid speeding, parking and clean air zone penalties, as well as conceal vehicles involved in serious crime.

    Drivers using incorrectly displayed number plates can be fined up to £1,000. The initiative forms part of the government’s new Road Safety Strategy, which aims to improve enforcement and save thousands of lives. The DVSA and DVLA are also working with police to tackle businesses supplying illegal plates and support roadside enforcement.
    gov.uk/government/news/crackdo

  3. Public Health Experts Sound Alarm as Feds Keep Deploying Tear Gas Near Kids

    “We don’t know the long-term effects. We don’t understand their effects on children,” said a pediatrician.

    murica.website/2026/02/public-

  4. The War on #Masks Has Taken on a New Meaning

    This time, the masks have nothing to do with #COVID19.

    By Henry Grabar
    Feb 05, 20254:57 PM

    "Last month, state legislators in New York introduced a bill that would create a new crime: 'masked harassment.'

    "That, the law explains, is when you wear a mask 'for the primary purpose of menacing or threatening violence against another person' or 'placing another person or group of persons in reasonable fear for their physical safety.'

    "If that seems like a bit of a niche offense—threatening violence is already a crime, after all—it’s because the language has been watered down to attract political support. It’s a sign of New York Democrats’ cautious new approach over masks in public life, and a retreat from last spring, when anti-Israel protests, on top of a widespread urban crime panic, pushed leaders from New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass to consider mask bans.

    "In its original form, the New York bill would have banned masks at public assemblies entirely. But the outcry from #DisabilityRights advocates, #CriminalJustice reformers, #HealthCareWorkers, and #CivilLiberties groups was swift, and so New York wound up with this bill on 'masked harassment' instead.

    "Elsewhere, the pandemic-era leniency on masking in public is over. #NorthCarolina Republicans overrode a gubernatorial veto last summer to once again #BanPublicFaceCoverings, except to stop the spread of contagious diseases. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost dusted off an old law to threaten #StudentProtesters with #felonies. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has asked the state’s Senate to consider a bill to #unmask #protesters this year.

    "For Republicans, it’s a chance to kill two birds with one stone. They can strike back against the perceived overreach of pandemic-era #HealthDirectives and make it easier to arrest #demonstrators at the same time.

    "In #Ohio and North Carolina, the original statutes were written in the 1950s to stop demonstrations by the #KuKluxKlan, but had been ignored or suspended during the #pandemic and the #GeorgeFloydProtests. Many lawmakers have cited the recent demonstrations in defense of #Gaza as a reason to crack down again. Defending the proposed mask ban in New York, Anti-Defamation League [#ADL] president Jonathan Greenblatt said the demonstrators were using '#KKK tactics' to intimidate Jewish New Yorkers.

    "That instinct was bolstered by the sense among many city residents and elected leaders that widespread masking was a factor behind the pandemic-era crime spike. That led to #Philadelphia banning #SkiMasks in parks, on trains, and in public buildings. A more recent, high-profile example came in December with the Midtown Manhattan killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO #BrianThompson by a #MaskedAssassin, which prompted New York Mayor Eric Adams to call for cab drivers and business owners to ask customers to remove their masks. The new New York bill has won over the liberal Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who endorsed the 'tailored' approach. As the police say: #NoFaceNoCase.

    "For what it’s worth, there are too many confounding variables and too little data to be sure if mask-wearing is associated with crime, said Ernesto Lopez at the Council for Criminal Justice, which collects crime reporting statistics from various cities. 'From a theoretical statement it makes sense that could occur, but it has not been demonstrated that’s the case,' he told me.

    "But if all that weighed in favor of more mask bans, there was also widespread resistance. Disability advocates mobilized to defend the right to mask; North Carolina had to write a medical exemption into their bill at the insistence of a GOP House member. #PoliceReformers observed that #MaskBans have often been used for pretextual #policing and racial profiling against #BlackAmericans. (#AtlantaGeorgia tabled a mask ban for that reason.)

    "What looms largest, as the second Trump administration begins, is the role of protest. As Semafor’s Dave Weigel has noted, masks have become a badge of left-wing protest culture. That’s in part an extension of politicized COVID-era concerns about health and civility, but at this point it is mostly a tactic to preserve anonymity in an era of #FacialRecognition, streaming video, and #doxing. Last year, the anonymous #ProIsrael website the #CanaryMission posted photographs of hundreds of students and faculty at campus protests and posted their names and photos online, labeling some as supporters of terrorism.

    "'The concern takes on new urgency as Donald Trump pledges to revoke the visas of pro-Palestine protesters, and the Trump-Musk GOP embraces the naming and shaming of otherwise private citizens. A conservative group called the American Accountability Foundation has begun circulating lists of federal workers, many of them Black, who should be
    'targets' for their alleged involvement in #DEI initiatives at work.

    "Clearly, the masked protest does not always sit well with an older generation, many of whom cut their teeth in the protests of the pre-internet age. As Georgetown professor Michael Kazin told the New York Times last year: 'I do think if you are going to demonstrate, and it’s something you feel deeply about, you should be willing to stand up and be counted.'"

    Source:
    slate.com/business/2025/02/mas
    #Fascism #AuthoritarianRule #BigBrother #BigBrotherIsWatchingYou #SurveillanceState #SilencingDissent

  5. And how much economic damage is from climate change and pollution from #FossilFuels? #BigOil is the real criminal here!

    #ClimateProtesters are taking action against Big Oil. UK courts are handing them prison terms akin to rapists and thieves

    By Kara Fox, CNN
    September 14, 2024

    London CNN — "As #RightWing rioters attacked communities with #racist violence across parts of the UK last month, 22-year-old #ClimateActivist #CressieGethin sat in a prison cell.

    "Her crime? Organizing a disruptive protest against new government-granted licenses to drill for oil — a planet-heating #FossilFuel — in the #NorthSea.

    "In late July, a London court found #Gethin and four other members of the #JustStopOil activist group guilty of 'conspiring intentionally to cause a #PublicNuisance,' after recruiting protesters to climb structures along the M25 — a major ring road around London — bringing traffic to a standstill in parts over four days in November 2022.

    "Prosecutors alleged that the protests, organized over a #ZoomCall, disrupted more than 700,000 drivers, caused economic damage of over £760,000 ($980,000) and racked up £1 million ($1.3m) in policing costs.

    "Now Gethin and three others — Louise Lancaster, #DanielShaw and #LuciaWhittakerDeAbreu, who planned the disruption on the call — are serving four-year jail terms, while Just Stop Oil co-founder #RogerHallam was given five years. All are appealing.

    "The sentences are believed to be the longest in the UK’s history for #nonviolent protest and were delivered under two new controversial laws that supercharged #policing powers to crack down on disruptive protests, even when they are peaceful.

    "They place the act of planning a 'public nuisance' event, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, on a similar footing as #ViolentCrimes like robbery, for which punishments range from community service to 12 years’ jail, or rape, which is four to 19 years.

    "The judge — who in court referred to the activists as '#extremists' — justified the long jail terms because all five activists had previously been convicted of one or more offenses in relation to direct action protest. Each were on bail for another set of proceedings when the Zoom call took place. He also noted people missed important doctor’s visits and funerals because of the protest.

    "But activists like Gethin say their demonstrations are proportionate to the problem at hand — a rapidly warming world that threatens to transform life as we know it, through deadly #ExtremeWeather events and by pushing #ecosystems to their brinks. They are now battling the bolstered powers of the #police and courts to get their point across.

    “'A very harsh sentence like this doesn’t make sense morally or legally — but it does make sense politically,' Gethin told CNN in a handwritten letter from HMP Bronzefield, a women’s prison just south of London’s Heathrow Airport.

    "The laws have drawn criticism from the UN’s special rapporteur on #EnvironmentalDefenders, #MichaelForst, who said not only do they criminalize peaceful protest, but they are being enforced in 'punitive and repressive' ways."

    Read more:
    cnn.com/2024/09/14/climate/uk-

    #BigOilAndGas #ClimateActivists #ClimateProtest #SLAPPs #CorporateColonialism #WaterDefenders
    #ClimateDefenders
    #EnvironmentalActivists
    #SilencingDissent #SLAPPs #ClimateActivists #CorporateColonialism
    #EarthDefenders #CriminalizingDissent #FreeSpeech #RightToProtest #BiodiversityNecessityDefense
    #EarthDefenders
    #SLAPPs #Fascism #CivilDisobedience
    #Activism #ClimateStrike
    #HumanRights #Article20 #2023PublicOrderAct #ClimateNecessityDefense #Corporatocracy #CorporateFascism #ClimateCrisis #ClimateCatastrophe

  6. As Rita Jabri Markwell put it:
    • trauma is a genuine wound;
    • fragility serves as an exercise of power over oppressed peoples.
    In the Zionist case, fragility depends on genuine wounds (collective Jewish historical trauma) to leverage its power and silence dissenters.

    Randa Abdel-Fattah: https://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/on-zion @supremacy

    #freeSpeech #StandWithIsrael #policing #respectability #coloniality #proZionism #JewishState #israelism #USPol #campuses #philoSemitism #silencing #JudithButler #PalestinianLivesMatter #warCrimes #genocide #diversion #smokeScreen #fragility #warOnGaza #JewishSupremacy #supremacy

  7. Nicole Narea, "a first-generation American", wrote: All three [university] presidents refused to say that students should be punished for invoking those [hateful] phrases across the board — only when it rises to the level of harassment, discrimination, or incitement to violence.

    “I have little doubt that if student activists actually were issuing unequivocal calls for the genocide of Jews on university campuses, they would be swiftly disciplined by their administrations — and rightly so,” Berkman said. “This should have been an easy question for Magill, Kornbluth, and Gay to answer, but because they felt they couldn’t contest the description of pro-Palestinian rhetoric as inherently genocidal, despite knowing that description to be untrue, they ended up looking foolish.”

    Internal discord at elite institutions and bipartisan doubt about the sanctity of higher education was the outcome that Stefanik and her Republican colleagues wanted — but not because they’re any great defenders of Jews.

    #Stefanik has echoed the antisemitic “great replacement” theory that Jews have pushed immigration and multiculturalism as a means of amassing political power over white Americans: In a 2021 campaign ad, she railed against what she characterized as Democrats’ plan to “overthrow our current electorate” by allowing undocumented immigrants to enter the country, leading to accusations of antisemitism.

    (15 Dec 2023) vox.com/politics/2023/12/15/24 @supremacy

    #freeSpeech #equation #conflation #confusion #StandWithIsrael #policing #respectability #coloniality #proZionism #JewishState #support #USPol #campuses #philoSemitism #academicFreedom #israelism #Congress #education

  8. "Those #posts going around about how we can't pop off in the us because the "cops will shoot #everyone" is such #coward shit. Nearly every #insurrectionary moment/movement towards rupture that I've experienced/witnessed has imploded from intra milieu infighting, respectability #politics, #reformism and #peace #policing, not #police #violence.

    Nobody ever said that #liberation would be easy but the #cops aren't some omnipotent and omnipresent force that can smash down every #protest/action with an iron fist.

    Lack of #respect for a #diversity of #tactics and a deeply ingrained #mythology about the "effectiveness of peaceful #protest" is FAR more paralytic to a burgeoning #insurrectionary tendency than violence can ever be."

    tumblr.com/thelearnedwobbly/71