(Credit: AP)During the just-concluded trial on the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program, the city argued that officers’ disproportionate targeting of black and Latino New Yorkers was not due to racial profiling but because each stopped individual was doing something suspicious at the time. The data, however, tells a different story: weapons and drugs were more often found on white New Yorkers during stops than on minorities, according to the Public Advocate’s analysis of the NYPD’s 2012 statistics. White New Yorkers make up a small minority of stop-and-frisks, which were 84 percent black and Latino residents. Despite this much higher number of minorities deemed suspicious by police, the likelihood that stopping an African American would find a weapon … [Read more...]

Last August, a woman in Josephine County called 911 and pleaded with dispatchers to send police — “my ex-boyfriend is trying to break into my house. I’m not letting him in but he’s like, tried to break down the door and he’s tried to break into one of the windows.” The woman had good reason to be afraid of this man, as she told the dispatcher on the other side of the phone, this same abusive ex had put her in the hospital just a few weeks before. But the dispatcher has no one to send. Because the local sheriff’s department recently lost millions in federal funds, it laid off 23 of its 29 deputies and limited their availability to eight hours on Mondays through Fridays. The woman’s call to 911 took place on a Saturday. With no deputies available, the 911 … [Read more...]

The idea that some racial groups are, on average, smarter than others is without a doubt among the most discussed (and debunked) “taboos” in American intellectual history. It is an argument that has been advanced since the days of slavery, one that helped push through the draconian Immigration Act of 1924, and one that set off a scientific firestorm in the late 60s that’s hardly flagged since. Yet every time the race and IQ hypothesis reclaims the public spotlight, we are caught slackjaw, always returning to the same basic debates on the same basic concepts. The recent fracas sparked by Dr. Jason Richwine’s doctoral dissertation is a case in point. The paper is a dry thing, written for an academic audience, yet its core claim, that Latino immigrants to the United States are and … [Read more...]

Under both the influence of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, and corporate spending in state courts around the country, procedural wins have imposed new onerous hurdles on individuals aiming to hold businesses accountable for their wrongdoing. Two new analyses out this week point to the real costs of these losses for individuals. In one study, researchers found that dismissals of housing and employment discrimination claims spiked from 62 percent before two major Supreme Court cases made it harder to state a claim, to 71 percent afterwards. Even more noteworthy, that spike in dismissals fell largely on Republican-appointed judges, whose dismissal rate spiked from 61 percent to 74 percent in cases where defendants disputed the legitimacy of the plaintiffs’ initial … [Read more...]

Summer has not even begun and children across America have barely gotten bored with last year’s Christmas presents. Yet Texas is already gearing up for the season when conservatives accuse liberals like the two people pictured above of waging a War on Christmas. A measure labeled the “Merry Christmas bill,” which is currently awaiting Gov. Rick Perry’s (R-TX) signature, provides that public school staff may “offer traditional greetings” including “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Hanukkah” to their students, and it permits school districts to “display on school property scenes or symbols associated with traditional winter celebrations, including a menorah or a Christmas image such as a nativity scene or Christmas tree” so … [Read more...]