The Intercept: Open Data Projects Are Fueling the Fight Against Police Misconduct

Seda, a Legal Aid attorney representing adolescents charged as adults in Queens, thought the allegations against her client were dubious and was looking for a way to get him out on bail. That’s when she decided to look into the officers named in the complaint against him. What she discovered stunned her.

The arresting officer, she learned, had been sued several times, and in the 1990s, he had been part of a group of officers working a narcotics operation that was accused of planting drugs on people and stealing drugs from suspects. Some of the officers went to trial and were convicted on felony charges, but most settled, costing the city some $1.2 million in damages to their victims. The officer she was researching was acquitted in court, but he had been named in connection with at least nine separate misconduct cases and had settled at least two, she told The Intercept. [...]

Most police misconduct goes unreported, particularly in less extreme cases and in more disenfranchised communities, but complaints filed with police departments and civilian review boards, as well as lawsuits, can point to significant histories of abuse tied to specific officers and precincts. In most cases, however, a citizen who becomes the victim of police abuse has next to no way of knowing if that officer is a repeat offender or has a history of targeting certain people, say, or sexual harassment. [...]

Eventually, it emerged that Van Dyke had been accused of misconduct at least 17 times before he killed McDonald, including several allegations of brutality. Yet none of those complaints — one of which cost the city a $500,000 civil settlement — had resulted in any disciplinary action. Between 2012 and 2015, the city of Chicago paid $210 million in police misconduct settlements — with just 124 of the city’s roughly 12,000 police officers accounting for $34 million in payouts. The Chicago Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.

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The Intercept: Syria's 'Voice Of Conscience' Has A Message For The West

YASSIN AL-HAJ SALEH has lived a life of struggle for his country. Under the Syrian regime of Hafez al-Assad, he was a student activist organizing against the government. In 1980, Saleh and hundreds of others were arrested and accused of membership in a left-wing political group. He was just 19 years old when a closed court found him guilty of crimes against the state. Saleh spent the next 16 years of his life behind bars.

“I have a degree in medicine, but I am a graduate of prison, and I am indebted to this experience,” Saleh said, sitting with us in a restaurant near Istanbul’s Taksim Square. Now in his 50s, with white hair and a dignified, somewhat world-weary demeanor, Saleh, called Syria’s “voice of conscience” by many, has the appearance and bearing of a university professor. But he speaks with passionate indignation about what he calls the Assad dynasty’s “enslavement” of the Syrian people. [...]

The experience of prison transformed me and my ideas about the world. In many ways, it was an emancipatory experience. I developed the belief that to protect our fundamental values of justice, freedom, human dignity, and equality, we had to change our concepts and theories. The Soviet Union had fallen and many changes were occurring in the world. My comrades who refused to change, those who adhered to their old methods and tools, found themselves in a position of leaving their values behind. This is one reason why many leftists today are against the Syrian revolution — because they adhere to the dead letter of their beliefs, rather than the living struggle of the people for justice. [...]

Recently, an event in Rome that displayed images of those tortured and killed by Assad was attacked by fascists. Just days before, it had also been attacked in a local communist newspaper for promoting “imperialism.” There is a growing convergence between the views of fascists and the far-left about Syria and other issues. The reason for this is that perspectives on the left are outdated. They are interested in high-politics, not grassroots struggles. They are dealing with grand ideologies and historical narratives, but they don’t see people — the Syrian people aren’t represented. They are holding on to depopulated discourses that don’t represent human struggle, life, and death. [...]

I don’t think that there is anything democratic or progressive about this narrative, or about the practices and institutions related to this war on terror framing. The reason the world is now in a crisis is that the major global narrative now is not democracy, justice, socialism, or even liberalism — it is all about security and immigration. This means that Trump is better than Clinton, Marine Le Pen is better than Hollande. It means that a fascist is always better than a democrat, which means that Bashar Assad is better than the opposition.

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The Conversation: Robert Manne: How we came to be so cruel to asylum seekers

If you had been told 30 years ago that Australia would create the least asylum seeker friendly institutional arrangements in the world, you would not have been believed.

In 1992 we introduced a system of indefinite mandatory detention for asylum seekers who arrive by boat. Since that time, we have accepted the idea that certain categories of refugees and asylum seekers can be imprisoned indefinitely; that those who are intercepted by our navy should be forcibly returned to the point of departure; that those who haven’t been able to be forcibly returned should be imprisoned indefinitely on remote Pacific Islands; and that those marooned on these island camps should never be allowed to settle in Australia even after several years.

How then has this come to pass? There are two main ways of explaining this.

The first is what can be called analytical narrative: the creation of an historical account that shows the circumstances in which the decisions were made and how one thing led to another. I have tried my hand at several of these.

The second way is to look at more general lines of explanation. I want to suggest five possibilities. These general lines of explanation are not alternatives to each other but complementary. Nor do they constitute an alternative to explanation by way of analytical narrative. Rather, they attempt to illuminate some of the general reasons the story took the shape it did.

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The Atlantic: Living in an Extreme Meritocracy Is Exhausting

In her illuminating new book, Weapons of Math Destruction, the data scientist Cathy O’Neil describes how companies, schools, and governments evaluate consumers, workers, and students based on ever more abundant data about their lives. She makes a convincing case that this reliance on algorithms has gone too far: Algorithms often fail to capture unquantifiable concepts such as workers’ motivation and care, and discriminate against the poor and others who can’t so easily game the metrics.

Basing decisions on impartial algorithms rather than subjective human appraisals would appear to prevent the incursion of favoritism, nepotism, and other biases. But as O’Neil thoughtfully observes, statistical models that measure performance have biases that arise from those of their creators. As a result, algorithms are often unfair and sometimes harmful. “Models are opinions embedded in mathematics,” she writes. [...]

Indeed, the desire for an efficiency achieved through a never-ending gauntlet of appraisals is unhealthy. It exhausts workers with the need to perform well at all times. It pushes them into a constant competition with each other, vying for the highest rankings that, by definition, only a few can get. It convinces people—workers, managers, students—that individual metrics are what really matter, and that any failure to dole out pay raises, grades, and other rewards based on them is unfair. And it leads the better-off to judge those below them, honing in on all the evidence that tells them how much more they deserve than others do. In this way, “objective” models provide socially-acceptable excuses to blame certain people—most often, the poor and people of color—for a past that, once digitally noted, is never really forgotten or forgiven.

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The Guardian: Xenophobic, authoritarian – and generous on welfare: how Poland’s right rules

Yet, despite the barrage of critical opinions from the western world, which Poles have historically aspired to, PiS remains the most popular party in Poland, currently polling at 38%, which is higher than the combined support of all other parliamentary parties put together. There are several reasons for this, revealing dynamics observable not only in the wider eastern European region, but further west as well.

While PiS is strongly rightwing on social issues, its economic approach can be described as leftist. It emphasises the need to tackle inequality and propagates strong welfare policies. It introduced unconditional monthly cash payments equivalent to £100 for all parents who have more than one child towards the upkeep of each subsequent child until he or she is 18. So if you have three children, you get £200 per month and so forth. For parents with one child, the payment is conditional on low income.

No previous government ever embarked on such a generous social programme. PiS’s approach puts many Polish leftists in a bind. On the one hand, they deplore the party’s unashamedly xenophobic rhetoric; on the other, they like its economic views, especially in comparison to the main opposition parties, Civic Platform and Nowoczesna, both dominated by folk still enamoured with Hayek. In effect, some on Poland’s left are not as mobilised against PiS as they could be.

While the west may have considered post-communist Poland a model of free-market success, many Poles felt marginalised in a society where successive governments espoused a “sink or swim” attitude towards citizens, irrespective of whether it was the left or the right in power. Individual success was emphasised above all. PiS’s more communitarian approach is appealing to many Poles who feel they now have a government interested in more than just macro-economic indicators.

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The Intercept: Here’s why Donald Trump is deluded to expect “another Brexit”

At almost every campaign stop these days, Donald Trump urges his supporters not to lose heart just because most opinion polls show him headed for defeat. Look, he says, at what happened with Brexit — the British vote in favor of exiting the European Union in June that shocked the political and media elite of the United Kingdom.

In the past few days, Trump has predicted that America’s white working-class is poised to deliver an election-day sequel he’s called “Another Brexit,” “Beyond Brexit,” “Brexit Plus,” or “Brexit Times Five.” [...]

To start with, as Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight observed last week, it is simply not true that the polls in Britain predicted a vote against Brexit in the final weeks of that campaign. [...]

Perhaps more importantly, the idea that the American electorate is similar to the British one on the issue Trump has made the centerpiece of his campaign, immigration, is not borne out by evidence.

Having spent a good part of my childhood shuttling between the United States and the British Isles, I can attest that one of the most common errors Americans make about Britain is failing to understand just how different the two cultures are, particularly with regard to attitudes on immigration, despite sharing a (more or less) common language.

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Motherboard: Pregnant Women in Rural Pakistan Have an Unusual New Ally: Voicemail

Starting in January 2017, expectant mothers in rural Pakistan will be able to sign up for a voice message service that will give them simple healthcare tips over the course of their pregnancies, urging them to eat more iron, for example, or to get a certain vaccine.

This might sound ho-hum to people who live in the US and Canada, where many parents-to-be track every little aspect of their pregnancy through an array of gadgets and apps. But the picture is different in Pakistan, which has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world—specifically, the highest rate of first-day deaths and stillbirths, at 40.6 per 1,000 births, according to a 2014 Save The Children report. Compare this to Canada, where approximately 2.5 per 1,000 births result in same-day deaths. [...]

For example, a woman may receive a message describing body changes she can expect during the pregnancy, such as soreness in her breasts. However, the word “breasts” would be changed to “upper body” or more subtle language to suit a rural Pakistani audience.

Although many Pakistanis don’t have reliable access to healthcare, 87 percent of households do have access to a cell phone, according to one 2012 report. Since there may be only one phone for a family, and not one for every individual woman, Ammi is being marketed as a family service. “The reality is that a man will likely see the messages first and pass on the information to his wife or family member,” said Shafiq.

Illiteracy is another hurdle, especially in rural areas. The total adult literacy rate in Pakistan is 80 percent for males between the ages of 15-24 and 67 percent for females percent for females in the same age range, according to UNESCO. That’s why a voice message, as opposed to a text message, is vital to get the words across.

Although some aspects of the service may initially be free to the user, Ammi is not a charity. It is a business that hopes to generate revenue by charging users a small subscription-based fee. While the co-founders couldn’t reveal to Motherboard exactly how much it will cost users, they are aiming for it to be around 0.15 CDN cents per month, or under $1 for the nine-month duration of pregnancy.

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Politico: Lithuania’s ‘extreme tourism’ rankles the Roma

A company named Vaiduokliai, or Ghosts, just began its first tours of the Roma village of Kirtimai, advertising the trips as an “extreme challenge.”

People are being “treated like animals on a safari,” says Kvik, a Roma singer and community organizer, who fears such tours may further strengthen existing prejudices against the country’s Roma population. [...]

Lithuania has long struggled with the integration of its 2,000-some Roma population, with tens of millions of euros going toward housing and schools. But in the capital Vilnius, many residents say they don’t want Roma neighbors and so hundreds of Roma families are stuck in Kirtimai, a ramshackle village on the outskirts of town, effectively segregated from the rest of the population.

In local media, Kirtimai, the largest Roma settlement in the Baltics, is frequently described as a drug slum. A monitoring report from last year showed that news reports frequently describe Roma as lazy and criminal, often in the context of the drug trade, and one thing critics of the tour have fastened on is its emphasis on drugs and the fact that the tour guide is a former drug addict.

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