Law Enforcement

What are the impacts of Muslim community resistance in a post-9/11 world?

The Michigan Intelligence Operations Center names the following partners -Michigan State Police (MSP) -Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) -Michigan National Guard -U.S. Department of…

The new Fusion Center in Michigan coordinated the national security intelligence efforts for law enforcement departments, threatening marginalized communities.

According to Slate, Department of Homeland Security has doled out more than $300 million since 9/11 to at least eight prestigious U.S. universities to support “centers of excellence” including the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE), and the National Center for the Study of Preparedness and Catastrophic Event Response (PACER). Since 9/11, more than 200 colleges have created homeland-security degree and certificate programs. According to Slate, another 144 have added emergency management programs “with a terrorism bent” focused on narrow topics like “the psyche of terrorists.”

What’s the scorecard on the Michigan Operational Integration Center’s ability to combine information from different sources when the threat is not terrorism but environmental disaster?

Behavioral profiling, the latest trend in pre-emptive policing, has been used in America’s airport terminals since 2003 when the Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program was implemented by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) across the United States. This past May, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GOA) issued a report assessing the program’s effectiveness, how much validity was established before SPOT went nationwide, and any improvements that could be made. The results reveal serious flaws in the SPOT program’s makeup and implementation.

A Texas City police officer, Cpl. Tom Robison, detained freelance photographer Lance Rosenfieldduring the first week of July 2010 for taking pictures of public signs. The law enforcement harassment of Mr. Rosenfield resembles hundreds of similar acts around the country, where taking pictures on public land in the bright of day is mistaken for “surveillance.”

On Monday this week, the New York Times announced that its investigation of NYPD “stop and frisk” practices from 2006 through 2010 found police stopped 52,000 people in a small eight-block predominantly black neighborhood called Brownsville. That’s one stop per year for every one of the neighborhood’s 14,000 residents. Police claim that almost half of those stops were prompted by “furtive action” of the resident.

In an expansion of the national Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative (SAR), law enforcement and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials recently tied both Amtrak and Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) into the initiative. Unfortunately, although SAR is meant to help intelligence analysts “connect the dots,” it has a major flaw: it encourages police to gather and share information about completely legal activities in which thousands of people engage every day.

When police brutally beat an African American transsexual the black media turns away; but homo- and transphobia in the media hurt the entire community.