police shooting
What justice for Laquan McDonald could look like
It took public pressure to convict Jason Van Dyke. It will take more pressure to reform the police.
Colonial Americans suffered under a two-tiered justice system. Later they created one.
Since before the revolution, punishment has depended on who’s being punished.
A police officer’s view from street level
“At any given moment, I may need to be a psychologist, centurion, street lawyer, or soothsayer.”
David Heim interviews Adam Plantinga
The price of brutality
No charges were filed against the police officer who killed Tamir Rice. But others are being held responsible: taxpayers.
Policing and race
Scandal and New Girl are not ordinarily “about” race. But as national conversations on police violence intensify, they’ve stepped into the discussion.
Police encounters
We are confronting a reality that for some of us was just an abstraction: black and white communities perceive the police differently and are treated differently by them.
Even a necessary evil is evil
Some people see violence as an absolute wrong. Others see it as a sometimes necessary evil, with considerable variation as to just how often these times come up. I’m at the dovish end of the latter group: I believe that there are times—not many, not remotely as many as American foreign policy consensus or law enforcement norms would have it, but some times—when a violent action might be the least-bad available option.
But a necessary evil isn’t a virtue; “least bad” doesn’t mean “good.”