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After the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020, some Americans argued the country would be better off without police. A police-free zone was established in Seattle. The zone was shut down several months later after four shootings, two deaths, and several sexual assaults.

Violent crime is an undeniable problem in the United States: homicides rose 25 percent from 2019 to 2020 and still continue to rise in some cities. In New York City, voters responded to the recent crime surge by nominating former NYPD Captain Eric Adams for mayor. Even in progressive cities, it seems, people still believe policing is the best solution to violent crime. A Pew Research Center poll shows that few Americans support abolishing or defunding the police.

So how can we fix our current policing problems? What would a more humane version of policing look like and what is stopping us from getting it?

Here are three police reform ideas from scholars who have studied American policing:

In an Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) video on community policing, economists Jayme Lemke and Liya Palagashvili trace the history of today's citywide police forces back to Prohibition. Politicians believed consolidating small neighborhood police departments into citywide forces with unified standards would make cities better equipped to enforce federal prohibition laws.

But consolidation came with a price, Lemke and Palagashvili say. Previously, under smaller neighborhood departments, police officers were seen as long-term partners with the community with the mutual goal of making the neighborhood safer. This is known as community policing, and it incentivizes officers to act in the best interest of the people in their community, which does not always mean arresting offenders.

"You have a kid out after curfew," Lemke, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, says. "Does he get hauled home to mom, or does he get hauled to jail?"

But consolidated forces have a one-size-fits-all approach to neighborhood safety: enforce laws through citations and arrests. Police success quickly became measured by numbers: the number of people stopped and arrested. "The culture is, you're not working unless you are writing summonses or arresting people," NYPD Officer Adyl Polanco told NPR.

In the 1970s, Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom pushed back on the consolidation of police forces and other public departments. Her theory of polycentric governance suggested that communities would be better off with multiple decision-making bodies interacting rather than decision-making power being centralized in larger consolidated bodies. She studied police departments even riding in the back of police cars and found that communities with smaller neighborhood police departments had a better relationship with police because that is when coproduction a shared responsibility for achieving safety takes place.

"Many of the officers in very big departments do not see themselves as responsible to citizens," Ostrom said. "They are on duty for specific hours and with an entirely different mentality." Ostrom argued that community police forces are more likely to employ officers who are willing to try outside-the-box solutions to solve a neighborhood's unique problems problems that are rarely fixed through tickets and arrests.

Jake Monaghan, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of New Orleans, spoke about bad policing incentives at a recent IHS symposium, "Unnecessary Evils: Laws, Judging, and Policing in an Overcriminalized World." He is currently working on a book about what good policing looks like.

"I argue first that one important way to overcome failures in the criminal justice system is to engage in discretionary non-enforcement of certain laws," Monaghan writes in his book abstract.

Recognizing that discretion is an inevitable element of policing means abandoning any misconception that police should behave like the military. "Soldiers are typically allowed very little discretion in the course of their work," Monaghan writes. "Policing, especially in the patrol division, is characterized by significant amounts of discretion." We should view police officers not as soldiers but "as genuine professionals who should be exercising discretion by drawing on a body of specialized knowledge."

We can encourage the exercise of legitimate, well-reasoned discretion by specializing the patrol division, Monaghan argues, so that officers responding to calls have the necessary training to decide when not enforcing a law is in the best interest of the community.

Civil asset forfeiture currently allows police departments in most jurisdictions to seize assets from criminal suspects before they are convicted or even arrested. If police claim an asset was involved in a crime, they can confiscate it then use it to help fund police activities.

"Police departments and municipal governments around the country rely on seized assets, whether cash directly or property that can be sold for cash, to help pay for operations and programs that they otherwise could not afford," Chris Surprenant, professor of ethics at University of New Orleans, and Jason Brennan, professor of ethics at Georgetown University, write in their book Injustice For All: How Financial Incentives Corrupted and Can Fix the Criminal Justice System.

While a police officer cannot lawfully take cash from a suspected drug dealer and deposit into his own bank account, he can use civil asset forfeiture to accomplish essentially the same thing: the more money a police officer seizes, the more money there will be in the police department budget to pay for raises and nicer amenities, Surprenant and Brennan explain.

Not only does this incentivize police departments to seize more assets from people, but it also incentivizes them to allow some criminal activities to take place so that they can then seize the profits.

"For example," Surprenant and Brennan explain, "when disrupting drug trade activities, any illegal drugs seized by law enforcement agents must be destroyed, but they can retain seized cash believed to be connected to drug activity and use it to fund their own operations. That cash can be kept but drugs must be destroyed has led many police departments to establish checkpoints and otherwise run operations to target individuals after sales have been made, rather than preventing those sales from being made in the first place."

States should reform asset forfeiture laws to prevent police departments from enriching themselves through policing, Surprenant and Brennan say. That will help realign police incentives with the long-term safety and well-being of the community.

As different states and municipalities experiment with police reforms like the three ideas listed above, how can we measure success? What does good policing look like?

The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf points to the "Nine Principles of Policing," drafted in 1829 by the London Metropolitan Police Department, as "the foundations of a civilized law-enforcement agency." The fourth principle is: "To recognize always that the extent to which the cooperation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives."

This, ultimately, is what we want from good policing: to secure our cooperation as much as possible through peaceful partnership. Successfully doing that means respecting the dignity and diversity of communities, treating individuals humanely, and having no overarching goal other than the peace and safety of the neighborhood.

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How the CIA used LSD to fight communism - Big Think

A Pennsylvania school board president is facing calls to resign after confiscating the microphone from a woman who was speaking out against critical race theory at a West Chester School District board meeting on July 26.

Iranian immigrant and mother of three Anita Edgarian told "Fox & Friends" that, at first, she had "no intentions to talk."

PROFESSOR TORCHES SCHOOL DISTRICT'S 'ANTI-RACIST' MATH PUSH: RACISM IS AN INDUSTRY IN AMERICA'

But, after a long, daunting meeting and many remarks giving praise to the retiring superintendent, Jim Scanlon, she got up and expressed to the school board her concerns about critical race theory. During her allotted time to speak, she told them she grew up during the Iranian Revolution and witnessed her "motherland" being "ravaged by communism."

She accused Scanlon of creating divisions and "leaving a mess." Furthermore, she described her home as "the International House of Pancakes," because her childrens friends are diverse.

When she proceeded to ask whether or not teachers were being taught critical race theory, the West Chester school board president Chris McCune said, "Anita, youre at time." She pushed back, "No, no," prompting him to angrily say, "Yes you are." McCune approached Edgarian at the podium, took the microphone, faced Anita, and told her to leave.

McCune told Edgarian, "This is shameful," as she was being removed from the building by police officers.

"Weve had a respectful meeting up until you. You bombarded up there, and now you want to monopolize the meeting. Not happening. Youre gone."

Edgarian told host Ainsley Earhardt, "By the time I asked that question, he was already coming toward me. And so that's a clarification because my parents have raised me better."

A GOP committee in West Chester is calling for McCune to resign or attend anger management counseling for his behavior.

"In a letter released Sunday, the Republican Committee of Chester County in Pennsylvania called West Chester school board president Chris McCunes conduct reprehensible, and accused him of trying to intimidate the immigrant mom. The encounter between McCune and a mom named Anita occurred at the end of last weeks two-hour board meeting, during which many parents and teachers expressed their opinions about the districts diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts,' the National Review reported.

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CRT curriculum has sparked a national conversation about the role of race and racism in school districts across the country.Often compared by critics to actual racism, CRT is a school of thought that generally focuses on how power structures and institutions impact racial minorities.

"I just don't think he likes the fact that I was saying, Why the division?"

Edgarian went on to say, "I have friends on both sides of this aisle. Friends and, you know, close friends sometimes. And you know, so I don't want my kids to grow up feeling that they cannot talk to this person or that person. And I just wanted to know and, you know, the best thing is to come out and frankly ask the question."

Fox News reached out to the West Chester area school district for a statement but did not hear back.

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Iranian immigrant cut off at board meeting for slamming CRT: 'My motherland was ravaged by communism' - Fox News

The intriguing article below delves into the detail of the South African Communist Party and how its ideologies have shaped the South Africa we know today. Although there are many negative connotations associated to communism, the South African Communist party has done a lot of good in its more than a hundred year history. The party cut across racial and social divide from its inception and are in many ways a political force in which the ANC can look up to and admire. Justin Rowe-Roberts

By Tom Lodge*

Until recently, just living to a 100 was an achievement worth celebrating for itself. In England new centenarians receive a special card from their queen. Perhaps the same convention is maintained in South Africa and its Communist Partys 300 000 or so members can expect a birthday message from South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on their centenary. Or maybe not.

In any case, they have more to celebrate than their partys extreme old age, though under often tough conditions survival itself is an achievement. Next to the 109-year old governing African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party is the second oldest political organisation in Africa. But, South African communists did more than outlive their rivals and opponents. They can make reasonable claims to have shaped South African history, as Ive outlined in my book, Red Road to Freedom: A History of the South African Communist Party 1921-2021.

In which ways did they do this?

And is it just history, though, that the party will be celebrating? What about today?

First, they initiated political solidarities that cut across South Africas racial and social cleavages. They began doing this from the partys formation in 1921 when it began recruiting black South Africans. Ten years later there were black people leading the party and joining it in thousands. This was in an era when most forms of social life were racially segregated, by custom if not by law. From 1948 apartheid would restrict any interracial contact still further. But, such confinements were fairly extensive well before then.

The partys commitment to cross-racial politics wavered now and then but, even so, it supplied real world evidence that black and white South Africans could share political goals and work towards them together. In the early 1930s, the first white communists were convicted and served prison sentences for sedition, that is for attempting to mobilise black followers.

Today in South Africa communists can take a considerable portion of the credit for the extent to which the countrys politics is nonracial.

Secondly, modern South Africa has one of the strongest labour movements in the developing world, a movement that still shapes government policy. Its historical gestation is a complicated story. Communists were not the only labour pioneers.

But in the 1930s and 1940s people like recently disembarked Lithuanian immigrant, Ray Alexander, assembled industrial unions that would constitute enduring foundations for what was to follow. Some of todays most powerful trade unions can trace their genealogy back to her efforts.

Communists in the 1940s such as the Port Elizabeth dry cleaning worker Raymond Mhlaba worked out a strategy of alliances beginning with community protests to support strike movements. This coalition between labour leaders and community activists would persist through the next five decades, helping to enable national liberation in 1994.

In fact, at a local level trade unionists often were community leaders in the 1940s, as well as belonging to the Communist party. In the places in which they were busiest, in New Brighton outside Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape, for example, or in the townships exclusively black residential areas dispersed along the East Rand, or in Cape Towns Langa, these leaders and their activist communist following in the 1950s after the partys prohibition continued to organise and mobilise.

It was no coincidence that the ANC had the most entrenched and systematic presence in the 1950s in the localities in which communists were best organised in the 1940s. In short, the Decade of Defiance, the ten years or so of mass action against apartheid in the 1950s, was incubated in party networks.

There are many other ways in which the party stamped its historic imprint. If the ANCs armed struggle against apartheid minority rule was decisive, and it was certainly important in inspiring other kinds of political action during the 1980s, then communists supplied most of the key members of its general staff and as well many field unit commanders.

Then from the 1920s onwards through its night-schools and other training facilities, the party educated successive echelons of South Africas political leadership. That the ANC today in its internal discourses still uses the jargon and phraseology employed by the partys commissars in the Angolan training camps 40 years ago is testimony to their enduring effectiveness as educators. Indeed, the concept of national democracy that the ANC uses to describe the kind of social order it is trying to build, itself derives from a Communist notion of a transitional stage between capitalism and socialism developed in Eastern Europe after the Second World War.

A final example of the partys pioneering role in shifting political norms: earlier than any other South African political movement, the Communist Party brought women into leadership. The pioneers whom the Party should be recalling on its birthday include key women: Rebecca Bunting , Josie Mpama, Molly Wolton, Dora Tamana, Betty du Toit and Ruth First.

The Communist Party is in a tripartite governing alliance with the ANC and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the labour federation.

Communists have held important positions in ANC governments for nearly 30 years. For example, in Cyril Ramaphosas first cabinet communists were appointed to a number of ministerial portfolios, including Trade and Industry and Higher Education. Former communists have held other key positions, including the presidency itself as well as the Finance Ministry.

Party leaders can count their membership in hundreds of thousands. But are they still shaping history?

South African communists argue that their participation in government makes a real difference, reinforcing its commitment to public employment programmes, to re-industrialisation, to better foreign trade policies, and increased financial aid for students.

But they also concede that much of their effort is undone by political corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency, and that they have failed to shift the governments neo-liberal macroeconomic policies significantly. They would prefer more market regulation and more support and protection for local industry. They dislike the extent to which public services are contracted out to private firms.

They do suggest that they play a role in limiting public venality. This may be true though initially they helped to defend President Jacob Zuma against his critics as well as contributing to his victory to become ANC president at its 2007 conference, and subsequently the head of state.

With such a large signed-up following youd think Communists would constitute a powerful grouping within the ANC and in the wider political domain. But does their membership really matter?

The partys following doesnt constitute a disciplined electoral bloc, either within the ANCs own internal voting procedures nor in national or municipal polls. Nor is it a membership that draws solidarity from its participation in manufacturing in the classic Marxian sense. The largest social group from whom the party recruits is young unemployed people, a group that keeps growing.

The partys present strategic purpose is about building capacity for socialism. This includes promoting local industry and strengthening the provision of public services.

In following this course, it is fair to say that its present challenges are as formidable as anything it has confronted in the past. Global markets make it very difficult to rebuild declining industries anywhere, but particularly in a country in which workers have rights and as a consequence are comparatively well paid.

South Africas earlier industrialisation happened under a forced labour regime. Then, arguably, South Africas developmental trajectory its history was on the partys side, building an increasingly skilled industrial workforce. But industrial employment has stagnated or declined. Under such conditions constructing a unified political base is so much more difficult. Under modern conditions hopes and faith have to replace old certainties.

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SA Communist Party ideologies have shaped and are shaping the country we see today - BizNews

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In the Cold War climate of the 1950s and 1960s, the threat of communism galvanized public attention. In 1953 Martin Luther King called communismone of the most important issues of our day (Papers 6:146). As King rose to prominence he frequently had to defend himself against allegations of being a Communist, though his view thatCommunism and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible did not change (King, Strength, 93). Although sympathetic to communisms core concern with social justice, King complained that with itscold atheism wrapped in the garments of materialism, communism provides no place for God or Christ (Strength, 94).

King first studied communism on his own while a student at Crozer Theological Seminary in 1949. In his 1958 memoir, he reported that although he rejected communisms central tenets, he was sympathetic to Marxs critique of capitalism, finding thegulf between superfluous wealth and abject povertythat existed in the United States morally wrong (Stride, 94). Writing his future wife, Coretta Scott, during the first summer of their relationship, he told her that he wasmore socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. And yet I am not so opposed to capitalism that I have failed to see its relative merits(Papers 6:123; 125).

King began preaching onCommunisms Challenge to Christianityin 1952, repeating sermons on the same theme throughout his career and including one as a chapter in his 1963 volume of sermons, Strength to Love. Communisms presence demandedsober discussion,he preached, becauseCommunism is the only serious rival to Christianity(Strength, 93). King critiqued communisms ethical relativism, which allowed evil and destructive means to justify an idealistic end. Communism, wrote King,robs man of that quality which makes him man,that is, being achild of God(Strength, 95).

Despite Kings consistent rejection of communism, in 1962 his associations with a few alleged Communists prompted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to launch an investigation into his alleged links with the Communist Party. In 1976 the U.S. Senate committee reviewing the FBIs investigation of King noted:We have seen no evidence establishing that either of those Advisers attempted to exploit the civil rights movement to carry out the plans of the Communist Party(Senate Select Committee, Book III, 85). From wiretaps initiated in 1963, the FBI fed controversial information to the White House and offered it tofriendlyreporters in an effort to discredit King. In 1964 King told an audience in Jackson, Mississippi, he wassick and tired of people saying this movement has been infiltrated by Communists There are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida(Herbers,Rights Workers).

In 1963 King bowed to the wishes of the Kennedy administration and fired SCLC employee Jack ODell after the FBI alleged that he was a Communist. King also agreed to cease direct communication with his friend and closest white advisor, Stanley Levison, although he eventually resumed contact with him in March 1965. FBI surveillance and bugs tracked Kings political associations and produced evidence of Kings extramarital sexual activitiesinformation that was later leaked to some reporters.

In 1965 King faced questions from journalists on Meet the Press about his association with Tennessees Highlander Folk School, which had been branded aCommunist training schoolon billboards that appeared throughout Alabama during the Selma to Montgomery March and showed King attending a Highlander workshop. King defended the school, saying that it was not Communist and noted thatgreat Americans such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Reinhold Niebuhr, Harry Golden, and many othershad supported the school (King, 28 March 1965).

Kings position on the war against Communists in northern Vietnam, like his overall position on communism, was rooted in his Christian belief in brotherhood. Indeed, in the summer of 1965 the press reported Kings off-the-cuff remarks to a Southern Christian Leadership Conference rally in Virginia:Were not going to defeat Communism with bombs and guns and gases We must work this out in the framework of our democracy(Dr. King Declares). In his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? King decried Americas morbid fear of Communism,arguing that it prevented people from embracing arevolutionary spirit and declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism, and militarism(King, Where, 190).

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Communism | The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and ...

The marriage between Socialism and Mamatha Banerjee was called by many a match made in heaven as the Tamil couple's wedding announcement went viral last week. On Sunday, the couple finally tied the knot in Tamil Nadu's Salem district, news agency ANI reported, with the wedding ceremony being attended by Socialism's siblings Communism and Leninism. Communist Party of India (CPI) president R Mutharasan was also present at the wedding event in Panaimarathupatti, added the news agency ANI. What's more, Leninism's son, named Marxism, was also in attendance at the wedding, reported ANI.

Socialism, Communism, and Leninism are all the progeny of A. Mohan, a CPI district secretary. The kids were born during the fall of the Soviet Union, but were so named by their father to signify that there is "no end to communism as long as the human race lives on." Socialism is the youngest, while Communism the eldest. Pictures of the wedding invitation, embossed with hammer-and-sickle emblems, between Socialism and a woman named Mamatha Banerjee went viral last week. The bride is named after the West Bengal chief minister, who incidentally led to the Communist Party of India (Marxist)'s downfall in the state. The match for irony couldn't have been better.

Mohan said that there was nothing unusual about his sons' names -- some of his "comrades" gave their children names such as Moscow, Russia, Vietnam and Czechoslovakia. But he admitted that his boys, especially Communism, were sometimes teased at school. One hospital refused to admit Communism when he was three years old.

The telephone numbers of the Tamil couple were printed on the wedding invite, and this prompted many netizens to shower blessings on the wedding duo, ANI reported, adding a bunch of reactions from the Twitter hivemind who revelled at this fated match. "Well... from communism to socialism, that's a welcome change lol:)," a Twitterati was quoted as saying.

(With inputs from agencies)

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Socialism and Mamatha Banerjee, Tamil couple who went viral, tie the knot in presence of Communism, Leninism - Hindustan Times