Daily Archives: June 15, 2020

By Evan Blake 15 June 2020

As a result of statewide school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, a staggering 779,000 K-12 public school educators lost their jobs throughout the US in the months of April and May. Over the same period, 239,000 public college professors and other employees and 424,000 educators at private K-12 schools and universities were laid off. The combined 1.44 million education-related job losses will in many cases be permanent and will have devastating repercussions for both educators and an entire generation of students.

These figures are based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) monthly unemployment surveys for April and May, which reported a combined loss of 1.1 million public and private K-12 and higher education jobs in April, and a further 340,000 education jobs lost in May. As dire as these figures are, there are reasons to believe that the BLS is doctoring jobless figures in the interests of the Trump administration, and that the real number of educator layoffs is even higher than reported.

In both months, the BLS acknowledged that there were errors in collecting data, which caused the agency to underestimate the true rate of unemployment by 5 percent in April and 3 percent in May. The reported decline in unemployment in May was seized upon by Trump to falsely claim that an economic recovery had begun.

The astonishing figures on education-related layoffs have largely gone unreported in the mainstream press, with only a handful of articles indicating the massive assault on both public and private education jobs over the past two months.

There is no specific breakdown of how the layoffs have affected each section of education workersincluding teachers, custodial staff, counselors, cafeteria workers, social workers, nurses, paraprofessionals and othersbut the bulk of the layoffs have likely not impacted teachers, whose contracts typically protect their jobs through the end of the school year. In all likelihood, districts significantly cut custodial and cafeteria staff, paraprofessionals and office staff when schools began closing en masse in mid-March due to the pandemic.

These sections of school workers, who are paid less than teachers and far less than administrators, typically have less savings and live from paycheck to paycheck. They are generally members of trade unions, primarily the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), while teachers are members of either the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) or the National Education Association (NEA). Not one of these organizations has lifted a finger to oppose the massive assault on jobs, continuing their decades-long complicity in the attack on public education.

Most school districts across the US have deadlines in March to give layoff notices to educators, which is an annual occurrence in many districts. For example, in March, Sacramento City Unified School District officially laid off 11 full-time teachers and 46.5 full-time equivalent classified positions, including bus drivers, clerks, campus monitors, yard duty employees and instructional aides. These cuts had been planned for some time. Since the pandemic, undoubtedly many more layoffs across the district have gone unreported, as they have across the US.

As the World Socialist Web Site has reported, numerous states across the US have announced major budget cuts planned for the end of the school year and in the coming months, indicating that even further job cuts are on the agenda. In New York City alone, $185 million in K-12 education cuts have been implemented for the current fiscal year, primarily from the central office, and an additional $642 million are being planned for the coming year.

Charity, a former substitute teacher in multiple districts in the Sacramento, California, metropolitan area, who was furloughed from her position in mid-March, told the World Socialist Web Site, Im not surprised, but I know that the students, families, furloughed and terminated workers and their communities will be negatively impacted. Many students were already lacking adequate food, housing, and mental health care.

She continued, I think educators, parents, workers coming together to combat the coming austerity is what is necessary to right this horrible wrong, and its lots of work, righteous work, but lots of work.

She added, I am a socialist. Capitalism will not address the needs of the populace because it is not structured to do so. It is meant to extract as much profit as is possible. I think of the ventilators needed to save lives recently from the current pandemic. States were bidding against one another for their residents. That is ridiculous. So too, our schools should be equipped to teach future generations to maintain and advance our society. Capitalism doesnt want to pay taxes of any kind to support precious institutionsschools, hospitals, people.

A paraprofessional in Brookline, Massachusetts, where over half the teaching staff have received pink slips and over 300 paraprofessionals are now threatened with layoffs, told the World Socialist Web Site, It is truly saddening to see and hear so many educators are being laid off around the country. In times like these we truly need more educators, not less. It is baffling as to why this is happening right now.

He said that the layoffs in Brookline are troubling to say the least. This not only affects my colleagues and myself, but the students and families in Brookline who we work with.

Commenting on the broader political situation, he noted, Capitalism has failed, plain and simple. I have yet to hear how capitalism has helped anyone but the top 1 percent and it is insane. I am on the side of humanity, and I see no way capitalism can truly benefit that.

The elimination of 779,000 K-12 public education jobs in April and May by far surpasses the estimated loss of education jobs in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, and the public school system never recovered from the previous wave of cost-cutting and job-cutting.

In September 2019, the number of local education jobs was 60,000 less than the same figure in September 2008, but given the 1,419,000 increase in enrollment over the intervening period, there was an estimated shortage of 300,000 education jobs at the start of this school year, a figure that has more than tripled in the past two months alone.

As a result of the legacy of austerity from the Great Recession, beginning in 2018 teachers and other educators initiated a powerful wave of strikes across the US. Since the wildcat strike of West Virginia teachers in February 2018, over 700,000 educators have gone on strike in over a dozen states, contributing to the largest upsurge of the class struggle in the US since 1986.

As indicated by the recent mass, multiracial demonstrations against police violence, there is a growing radicalization taking place among workers and youth, including many educators who have taken part in demonstrations. The militancy of educators at every point comes into conflict with the right-wing trade union apparatuses that have facilitated the mass layoffs and attacks on public schools.

The WSWS Educators Newsletter calls on educators to form independent rank-and-file committees at every school to begin organizing a systematic campaign against budget cuts and layoffs. The demand must be raised for full funding for education and all the social needs of the working class, to be paid for by heavy taxation of the rich and the reallocation of the trillions being funneled to Wall Street under the cover of the coronavirus pandemic.

In this struggle, educators can place no faith in the Democratic Party, which for decades has collaborated with the Republicans to destroy public education. In the CARES Act, which passed through Congress in two days with near-unanimous support from both parties, trillions of dollars were handed over to Wall Street, while states were left to starve and K-12 public education was allocated merely $13.5 billion.

The so-called HEROES Act passed by the House of Representatives, and touted as the solution to the states budget crises, is a fraud perpetrated by the Democrats and their allies in the trade unions, and has been declared dead on arrival by Trump and Senate Republicans. The act allocates merely $60 billion for K-12 public education while states face deficits of at least $230 billion in education funding through the coming school year.

Educators are acutely aware of the assault taking place on public education, which will only intensify in the coming months. When the WSWS broke the news May 30 about devastating cuts to public schools in Randolph, Massachusetts, the article went viral and has now been read nearly 700,000 times.

The silence on mass layoffs of educators imposed by the corporate media must be broken. We appeal to all educators to send us your stories, expose layoffs that have taken place or are being planned in your district, and subscribe to our newsletter to follow developments. Ultimately, the defense of public education is predicated on the abolition of capitalism, which subordinates all social needs to private profit. We urge the most class conscious educators to make the decision to join the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) today and take up the fight for socialism.

The author also recommends:

Massachusetts teacher denounces cuts to Randolph and Brookline schools [11 June 2020]

35,000 sign petition to provide full funding to Randolph schools in Massachusetts [9 June 2020]

US colleges and universities continue jobs bloodbath as they press to open in the fall [6 June 2020]

Continue reading here:

Over 1.4 million US education jobs slashed in April and May - World Socialist Web Site

This afternoon, Unlock the Box: The National Campaign To End Solitary Confinement released a report based on research and analysis by Solitary Watch. The press release for the report follows.

Washington, D.C.The Unlock the Box Campaign announced today the release of a new Special Report entitled Solitary Confinement Is Never the Answer, documenting the impacts and risks associated with the estimated 500 percent increase in the use of solitary confinement as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Special Report notes that the number of people held in solitary confinement in the United States ballooned to an estimated 300,000 people in April, as compared to an estimated 60,000 people held in solitary confinement each day prior to the outbreak.

Unlock the Box, a national campaign to end the use of solitary confinement, is issuing this report in response to the dramatic growth in the use of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, jails, and detention centers since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on research and analysis by the national watchdog group Solitary Watch, the reports findings demonstrate the urgency for federal, state, and local officials to immediately reduce the number of people behind bars, where the coronavirus infection rate is three times higher than in the population at large, and to use safe and effective alternatives to solitary to prevent the spread of the virus among incarcerated people and correctional staff, as well as their communities.

The use of solitary confinement had been declining steadily in United States prisons and jails over the past decade following a 2011 United Nations Report naming the country a global outlier for its institutionalized use of the practice. The U.N.s Nelson Mandela Rules label prolonged solitary confinement of more than 15 days as a form of torture, and call for abolition of solitary confinement for children, pregnant women and people suffering from disabilities impacted by isolation, such as serious mental illness. Several states, including Colorado, Maine and New Jersey have enacted reforms to either ban or significantly reduce the practice over the past 10 years, and the Obama administration ushered in important new restrictions on solitary confinement for juvenile offenders in the federal prisons system in 2016.

There is a human tragedy unfolding all around us in our nations jails and prisons, and that is the callous use of torture as a first, second and final response to COVID-19, said Jessica Sandoval, Campaign Strategist for the Unlock the Box Campaign. As this Special Report demonstrates, solitary confinement creates an atmosphere of fear and mistrust that prevents sick people from reporting their symptoms, and puts incarcerated people, correctional officers and local communities at greater risk from COVID-19. Rather than developing a comprehensive plan that would take at-risk people out of correctional facilities, officials at the federal, state and local level are reversing years of hard fought human rights gains by dramatically increasing this uniquely American form of cruel and unusual punishment.

The Special Report, which draws on the expert analysis of leading medical, public health, and correctional health care professionals and criminal justice reform advocates working across the United States, paints a stark picture of the myriad ways in which under-prepared state and federal corrections officials have failed to develop comprehensive plans for containing the spread of COVID-19 inside their facilities, and have instead chosen to systematically respond with torture.

From information on the public record, we know that there has been a huge surge in the use of solitary confinement in prisons across the country, said Jean Casella, Co-Director of Solitary Watch. And from accounts by incarcerated people, family members, and prison health care staff, we know that this is causing widespread harm, while failing to contain the spread of the virus.

The reports key findings are as follows:

COVID-19 has led to an explosion in the use of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, jails, and detention centers.

While COVID-19 presents a grave and growing threat to incarcerated people and correctional staff, the use of solitary confinement will increase, rather than curb, the spread of the virus.

Significantly reducing prison and jail populations remains the best way to protect the health and safety of incarcerated people, correctional staff, and communities from COVID-19.

For people left within prisons, COVID-19 can be contained without the dangerous use of solitary confinement through universal testing, the safe separation of positive and non-positive residents and staff, and high-quality personal protective equipment (PPE) for all people living and working in these facilities.

Quarantine and medical isolation in prisons must not resemble punitive solitary confinement, which is an internationally recognized form of torture.

The public health impacts of elevated solitary confinement during the COVID-19 crisis are enormous. Instead of being tested and provided with adequate medical attention, many incarcerated people demonstrating symptoms are swiftly transferred to solitary confinement where they are deprived of all social contact, receive no information or attention from medical staff, and are subject to unsanitary conditions.

To avoid such conditions, people held in prisons and jails are known to underreport symptoms of the virus which only further escalates its spread. Even if they do not demonstrate symptoms of COVID-19, incarcerated people report that they have been threatened with solitary or placed in solitary for refusing to follow rules that put them at risk, protesting unsafe conditions, or speaking out to the public or the press.

Using solitary confinement as the primary means to contain the virus only puts these populations and the individuals who monitor them at greater risk of contracting it. Failure to take bold action to stem the spread of the virus in correctional institutions could result in an additional 100,000 deaths, according to one recent report, and it is projected that more than two-thirds of those additional casualties would not be incarcerated individuals or staff, but rather people in their communities.

Drawing on the work of public health experts at Amend at UCSF, the Special Report shares best practices for saving the lives of incarcerated people and correctional staff for the current COVID crisis and beyond, including decarceration, using small group settings, and medical isolation as a means to properly treat infected individuals or those at high risk of infection. Finally, the Special Report explains why any positive changes should extend beyond the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure the long term health and safety of our communities.

STATEMENTS FROM UNLOCK THE BOX COALITION MEMBERS

Solitary confinement is not a public health strategy its torture, said Amy Fettig, Director, ACLU Stop Solitary Campaign. In order to stop the COVID-19 pandemic and protect people who live and work in prisons and jails we need science not punishment and prejudice to lead the way.

This report reveals a harrowing truth: that punishment, in the form of solitary confinement, is being used as a default policy when it should be a measure of last resort, said Johnny Perez, Director of the National Religious Campaign Against Tortures U.S. Prisons Program.The systemic use of punishment in the form of solitary confinement in response to the global public health crisis of the pandemic has allowed corrections systems to further harm the very people they are responsible for protecting. Facilities built for punitive isolation are being used to confine those who have tested positive for the coronavirus. Imagine having headache or fever and then being placed in a closet for reporting your symptoms. That is the reality our incarcerated neighbors are facing, and even more so at a time when the nation has come to its knees in recognition of state sponsored violence against black and brown people of color. People need care and not punishment, compassion not retribution, and second chances not death sentences.

Separating people who become infected with COVID-19 is a necessary public health measure to prevent the spread of COVId-19, particularly in prisons and jails, said Dr. Brie Williams, Founder and Director of Amend at UCSF. But turning to the punitive practice of solitary confinement in response to the pandemic will only make things worse.

MEDIA CONTACT: Madeline Bronstein, mbronstein@rabengroup.com, 585-410-4843

See the article here:

New Report Finds That 500% Increase in Use of Solitary Confinement During COVID-19 Puts Hundreds of Thousands of People at Risk - Solitary Watch

The capacity of the public health service will be built up to protect against further surges of Covid-19, according to the new draft programme for government.

Extra beds will be provided, childrens services will be extended and a range of patient charges will be cut, the document promises.

An intense focus will be maintained on Covid-19 following the principles of isolate, test, trace and treat the disease, to ensure a speedy reaction should there be an increase in cases.

While promising to ensure there is capacity for future surges of Covid-19, the document says we need to learn from and build on some responses during the pandemic, particularly in electronic health and prescribing.

It promises to accelerate the implementation of Slintecare, the 10-year programmes for the future of the health services agreed on an all-party basis in 2017.

Many of the healthcare responses to Covid-19 are important elements of Slintecare, and we will identify how to keep the gains, the document states. Underpinning our approach will be the provision of more health services in the community, increases in capacity including bed, ICU and critical care capacity and the promotion of good public health policy.

Among the specific promises in the programme for government are an increase in home-care hours and the introduction of a statutory home-care scheme; the extension of free GP care to more children and to carers; and the abolition of inpatient hospital charges for children.

Free dental care for children is to be extended and prescription charges and the drug payment scheme threshold will be reduced.

Carparking charges at hospitals will be capped where possible and the income threshold for medical cards for over-70s will be increased.

Talks will also begin with pharmacists on a new contract and an extension of their role in providing services.

The document promises the new national childrens hospital will be opened and building of the new maternity hospital at St Vincents Hospital will start once governance arrangements have been concluded.

The programme for government says the way claims for medical negligence are handled will be re-assessed so the Irish regime is brought into line with other OECD countries. Mediation may become a legal first resort for disputes.

There are plans to increase excise duty on tobacco, use taxation to discourage vaping and introduce planning restrictions on outlets selling junk food and drinks adjacent to schools.

The document also promises to work to end the admission of children to adult psychiatric units through an increase in inpatient beds and new ways of assigning these beds.

Sinn Fin health spokeswoman Louise OReilly described the health proposals in the document as a rehash of old announcements and a broad brushstroke, helicopter view of the future for the sector.

She expressed alarm over the documents failure to promise an end to private care in public hospitals, and to consultant pay inequality, and said Slaintecares proposals for universal healthcare had been replaced by a promise instead of affordable healthcare.

See the original post:

Programme for government: More hospital beds and community services promised - The Irish Times

I cannot think of a more radical definition of romantic love than the one taken by Lionel Trilling in The Last Lover, his 1958 essay on Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita. Here, Trilling argues that the defining criterion of real romantic love is scandal. Most crucially, love can only exist in opposition to marriage, which is a pragmatic arrangement about property, offspring, and communal and political alliance.

For scandal, writes Trilling, was of the essence of passion-love, which not only inverted the marital relationship of men and women but subverted marriage itself.

What then, was a modern writer to do if they wanted to write about such love? Adultery, which once threatened the sanctity of marriage to the point of appropriate scandal, does poorly in modern times: the very word is archaic; we recognise the possibility of its use only in law or in the past. While the recognition of the fear of marital infidelity did it for the audience of Othello, it doesnt cut much ice with modern audiences, for whom sexual jealousy is real but a moral assertion of that jealousy no longer sustainable. The word unfaithful, writes Trilling, which once had so terrible a charge of meaning, begins to sound quaint, seeming to be inappropriate to our moral code.

This paves the path for Trillings terrifying claim: that to maintain the true condition of passion-love, the writer must only tell the story that remains as far from marriage as possible, and widely out of the way of all practical consideration. Any working condition of mutuality would ruin everything, any concern for each others well being or prestige would make it look like a marriage, and hence out of bounds of true passion-love.

So that, Trilling reaches his conclusion, a man in the grip of an obsessional lust and a girl of twelve make the ideal couple for a story about love written in our time.

This is a dangerous claim at any time which is exactly what Trilling declares his intent to be. But it is fated to come across as especially unsettling in an age where the hashtag #MeToo has deepened our awareness of patriarchal modes of sexual exploitation, and the manner in which they exclude women from the sphere of political and sexual agency.

Biographical facts may introduce disturbing tremors here: Trillings own gender, race, age, position of power and privilege those of Nabokov perhaps, and why not that of Humbert Humbert? The disrupted equation of moral codes looks different surely when one is on the wrong side of the power game? Is it a whole lot easier to take aesthetic delight in the absence of mutuality as the marker of passion-love when the apple cart of power tilts in your direction?

What about spheres of love that have traditionally existed outside the normative codes of conjugal relation? Is their existence outside the very condition of their power? Perhaps not. The inquiry into their ethical condition of existence draws us into a black hole; neither is that Trillings concern. His real concern is that of artistic representation; the novel of romance, more precisely. The moral freedom, indeed, anarchy that nourishes the soul of transgressive art is risky business in life; it can set us back by centuries of hard-earned freedom and progress.

What happens, therefore, to literature when subjects outside the pale of normative behaviour win victories to gain proximity to the centre legal, societal and otherwise? Literature itself maybe a tall order, its bundle of dark idiosyncrasies. But what about the literary sphere the space of public discussion and reception, perhaps the Habermasian one?

Members and supporters of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) community take part in Delhi's Queer Pride Parade on Sunday, November 25, 2018. (Amal KS/HT PHOTO)

Does the tenor of expectation from (erstwhile) works of transgressive romance change in an especially noticeable way when victories are won in societies that have been, for whatever reasons, slow to nurture conditions of liberation?

***

Same-sex love ceased to be a crime in the eyes of the law in India on September 6, 2018. The judges who struck down section 377 of the Indian Penal Code did so on the grounds that it criminalises consensual sexual conduct between adults of the same sex.

Eyes of law, yes. The eyes of society? Thats a longer draw and a sadder, more nettlesome discussion.

The eyes of art? They caught on quickly too! The Rainbow Literature Festival, the first-full blown festival devoted to queer and inclusive culture, was held in Delhi in December 2018. The buoyant spirit of the age guided the excited arrival of new books. Two notable memoirs published in 2019 captured the light and shadow of secrecy and normalcy Rangnekars From Straight to Normal, and Now You Know, by editor and book-blogger Vivek Tejuja. An intriguing work of collective biography followed: Gay Icons of India, edited by Hoshang Merchant and Akshaya K Rath, profiles of 22 leading English-speaking, urban, queer protagonists of different fields of art and activism.

If such books and collections were not new, the attention given to such books now began to feel different. The private literary voice often spoke in the language of Dont Let Him Know, the title of Sandip Roys moving diasporic story of closeted identity, even when communal coming together shouted Out, the title of Minal Hajratwalas 2012 collection of queer stories from India.

Read more:Review:The Scent of God by Saikat Majumdar

But in the post-2018 world, it felt like things had come a long way: from the underground cult of Riyadh Wadias Bomgay to the 2019 mainstream Bollywood movie Ek Ladki ko Dekha to Aisa Laga, a lesbian romance featuring Sonam Kapoor.

For Trilling, adultery stopped being a desirable subject for romantic literature the day it stopped shocking people. Non-heteronormative sexual identities are still a shocking matter for the majority of Indians, for whom the abolition of Section 377 remains a small technical matter that is easily ignored.

The dream remains for the day when a same-sex romance occupies the same space as heteronormative romance for the day it no longer has to be marked different. But does it stand to lose a certain kind of artistic appeal when it is indistinguishable from the normative?

Saikat Majumdars most recent book is the novel The Scent of God (2019)

See more here:

Essay: The art and law of love - Hindustan Times

On May 25, four officers of the Minneapolis, Minnesota Police Department were involved in the caught-on-video killing of 46-year-old George Floyd. Floyd, a black man, told the white officer kneeling on his neck that he couldnt breathe. Officer Derek Chauvin continued kneeling despite these pleas and despite Floyds loss of consciousness.

Floyds death captured on video and widely spread across social media set off weeks-long national and global unrest over police brutality and racism. But the protests have also escalated calls for major policing reform in the US.

While many activists have called for an entire reimagining of US law enforcement, including the defunding or even the abolition of US police agencies others who likewise decry the deaths of Black Americans in police custody have urged for more pragmatic, piecemeal reforms to the criminal justice system such as officer trainings in de-escalation and implicit bias.

For example, former Vice President and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, has even called for an increase in funding to police departments amid ongoing civil unrest. And House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn on CNNs State of the Union said, Nobody is going to defund the police. We can restructure the police forces.

The divide on police reform has marked a point of contention between Americans, who largely agree the anger behind ongoing protests against police brutality is justified, but dont support defunding police.

One approach reform advocates have called for include the introduction of a national system of standards.

On June 5, Rep. Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat and leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, put forth legislation to make federal funding for local law enforcement agencies contingent upon their meeting of national standards for training on de-escalation practices, use of force, and bias. A civilian commission would be created to determine such standards, The Hill reported.

Law enforcement experts who spoke to Insider said they believed that improvements to and uniformity among the way local US police forces train their officers are not the entire solution but it could be a step in the right direction.

From Los Angeles to New York City to Minneapolis, some of the countrys largest police forces have different approaches to their training programs.

Los Angeles Police Department officers receive 960 hours of training in the academy, which includes scenario-based training, a spokesperson for the department told Insider. The LAPD academy training has included specific training on de-escalation techniques since 2017, the spokesperson said.

Officers are also given four hours of implicit bias training, though the LAPD spokesperson said: implicit bias training is also integrated into the 16 LAPD basic training modules.

Officers and Department personnel are provided in-service training and perishable skills training consistently over the course of their entire career, the spokesperson said. When large scale or sweeping policy changes are made, the entire Department will undergo training.

Training officers about their potential implicit biases is an example of such training, he said.

Officers at the New York Police Department are trained in de-escalation tactics during their scenario-based training unit, according to the departments website on officers training, which a spokesperson referred to Insider. The site does not specify the length of such training and did not mention whether officers receive any training related to implicit racial or other biases.

According to The New York Times, however, the city of New York began to provide its officers with implicit bias training in 2018 as part of a two-year $US4.5 million contract with a Florida company called Fair and Impartial Policing. Police officers in the state must undergo at least 700 hours in total of training before becoming law enforcement officers, according to the state of New York.

A website for the Minneapolis Police Academy says officers are trained in nine areas that include defensive tactics, ethics, firearms, and report writing during a 14-16 week program. The website does not mention any training in de-escalation tactics or how or if officers are trained about implicit biases.

There is almost no uniformity in police training programs, particularly when it comes to their focus on their training in implicit biases, Dr. Rashawn Ray, a fellow in governance studies at The Brookings Institution and executive director of the Lab for Applied Social Science Research (LASSR) at the University of Maryland told Insider.

What these look like on a local level are like apples to oranges, Ray said. They are so different from one another. Honestly, its not even like apples to oranges its more like fruit to vegetables. Thats just how different they are. That is something that definitely needs to change.

Ray, who offers police agencies training in implicit biases as part of his work with LASSR, said the differences in the ways officers are trained in implicit biases alone prevents large-scale changes with in the US law enforcement system.

Some agencies request a two-hour training for officers to learn about potential implicit biases, Ray told Insider. Other agencies can request days-long training that includes the use of virtual reality technology employed by the University of Maryland researchers. Theres little consistency among agencies, he said.

We dont see huge payoffs because of the huge variations across the board, Ray told Insider. Two hours of an implicit bias training is not going to change someones biases they might have, Ray said.

Chris Burbank, Vice President of Law Enforcement Strategy at the Centre for Policing Equality, told Insider he did not support the nationalization of law enforcement the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for example, wouldnt be effective in policing local communities, he said.

I believe policing is best done locally by people who are invested in the community, live in the community, participate in the community, and understand it, Burbank, who served for nine years as chief of the Salt Lake City, Utah, police department, added. But there should be national standards set.

Beyond standardising training procedures for US cops, Burbank said there should be national standards required for becoming a law enforcement officer. All potential police officers, for example, should have a four-year education prior to becoming a law enforcement officer, he said.

Ray said that national standards for police officer training could help reduce officers biases.

I think thats something that the public desires, Ray said of uniform law enforcement training practices. That is something that law enforcement does not desire.

He said police agencies would likely reject having training nationalized, partially over fears they would lose funding dedicated to training their officers. Still, Ray said that national standards could be employed while still allowing local instructors to educate new and existing officers.

LASSR even offers courses to provide training to the people who train law enforcement officers, he added as an example.

You always want the best-trained police officers, Burbank told Insider. You want them to have the most information, and you want them to have the most practical information you can always give them. However, we have viewed training especially around bias, and de-escalation, as the end-all.

He added: The idea has been if you just trained the racist cops, they wouldnt be racist anymore and you wouldnt have these problems. What we have found is that the policies, the practice, and the procedures in your police department contribute much more to the disparity or the potential outcome of bias in policing than the individual racism or bias of the officers.

As Insider previously reported, studies have suggested that implicit bias training as it currently is executed has not been effective alone in reducing the bias of police officers.

Burbank suggested the elimination of consent searches the practice where police officers ask individuals if they can search their property without a warrant was an example of a policy change that could be implemented nationally to lead to fewer instances of implicit biases. He said these types of searches disproportionately target African Americans despite them having a low rate of success.

Burbank also pointed toward the use of a chokehold and other carotid restraints as policies police forces could eliminate nationally to reduce instances of implicit bias. Police agencies across the country, including in Minneapolis where Floyd was killed, have announced bans on chokehold and similar neck restraints.

What we want to do is start to identify the polices what are the practices, that the officers are using that are introducing bias, Burbank said.

Ray also suggested the wider deployment of new technologies may help encourage officers to act against their biases. As part of his work training officers with LASSR, Ray said hes found more success when using a virtual reality lab to place officers in hands-on situations that help trigger their potential biases.

Its not just about implicit bias everyone has implicit biases its the fact that biases are more likely to come out when people are stressed, when people are scared, and when peoples adrenalin is running. Thats an equation that happens to police officers almost every day.

Training is not just about telling law enforcement what implicit biases are, he added. Its about pointing them out and training officers about ways they can overcome them.

Its about improving police officers in situations where biases where theyre more likely to exist and then training the officers to reduce those biases. That is the most important thing about implicit bias training. Its not simply to education on the definition of it, he said.

Read more:

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There is no national standard for police trainings across the US but uniformity could help combat systemic issues, experts say - Business Insider...

The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and countless other unarmed black civilians in the US have sparked a rage that is contagious. Cities as far as London, Berlin, Melbourne, and Tokyo have seen huge demonstrations in solidarity with the growing Black Lives Matter uprising in the US. Meanwhile, in India we are still trying to work out how to respond.

One response circulating in elite circles is what journalist Rana Ayyub calls weari[ing] the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag as a fashion accessory: posting or tweeting about the movement in order to opportunistically cash in on its moral and cultural capital. Please dont do this: better responses are possible. Ask yourself these five questions to figure out if you actually support the principles of the movement and learn to put your support, if any, to work.

This shouldnt be an easy question. Personal racism does not just mean a straightforward revulsion towards black people or minorities (and yes, this includes religious and caste minorities too). It includes stereotyping, implicit bias, whitewashing, exoticising, purity politics, endogamy and much more that is deeply embedded into our socialisation.

This type of racism cant just be tackled in one individuals mind: reversing it requires anti-racist education to be institutionalised in schools and families from a young age. Black activists in the US have been doing this work with campaigns to mandate Black History Month in schools each February and to create classroom resources for teaching about difference.

But in India, parents and teachers are unlikely to teach acceptance to children when most Indian adults themselves are notoriously racist. Indian cricketers derogatorily call black colleagues kalu, Indian entertainers are fairness cream salespeople and mobs going after African residents in Delhi may well be led by Indian politicians.

Indians abroad, cushioned in caste privilege and enjoying the benefits wrought by anti-racist struggles, now increasingly side with white supremacist leaders like US President Donald Trump. Indeed, at this moment of global uprising, many see Indias most visible icon of justice Gandhi as standing on the wrong side of anti-black racism. Protestors targeting Gandhis statue right alongside the statues of slaveholders should remind us that interrogating and undoing all types of personal racism is a simple prerequisite to saying black lives matter.

The second question to ask yourself is: do I think minorities lives in my own country matter? There has rarely been a time when this question has been more urgent in India than now. From encounter killings to custodial death and torture, from drastic over-policing to arrest without trial, from everyday harassment to being disappeared, the burden of police violence in India falls squarely on minorities.

A 2019 survey showed that 50% of police personnel in India believe Muslims are more likely to commit crimes, and it shows.

Just months ago, Delhi police joined Hindutva supporters to attack the citys Muslims, following a decades-old pattern of police working as enforcers of majoritarian might rather than law. Indeed, just as George Floyd lynching became a viral video, so too did a clip of Faizan, the young Muslim man savagely beaten by the police on the roadside and made to sing the national anthem. For Faizan and the many other Muslims thus murdered, there have been no protests, no arrests, no charges, no dismissals, and no outrage.

Dalits and Adivasis similarly know the police mainly as collaborators in upper-caste violence. Rather than registering cases against caste Hindu offenders, police are more likely to themselves detain, brutalise, extort, rape, and mass murder minorities. Just Google Dalit lynched and youll see headlines no less horrific than if you Google African American lynched.

So dont chant George Floyds name if you dont care about Jitu Khatik (the 26-year-old Dalit man who died in Rajasthan police custody in February), and dont talk about black incarceration if you dont mention the dozens of Muslims being arbitrarily arrested during a pandemic.

For all those who want to say black lives matter but then continue to patriotically support the Indian police force, army, prisons and anti-terror laws, Ive got bad news. The strands of the Black Lives Matter movement that are quickly becoming dominant are not striving only for minority civil rights or against racist police, not demanding just the arrest of offending officers, and not calling at all for police retraining and legal reform: instead, they are calling for the abolition of policing and incarceration altogether.

Just as abolitionists of slavery believed that slavery could not be fixed or reformed [but] needed to be abolished, so too todays abolitionists arent trying to reform policing and prisons (themselves byproducts of slavery) but to shrink [them] into non-existence because they see that institutionalised punishment does not make us more safe. They argue that repackaging the problems of poverty, homelessness, mental illness, and addiction as crime only amounts to treating the symptom instead of the disease and that too with a treatment (caging and state violence) often worse than the disease itself.

This is why the demand coming from the streets of Minneapolis (where Floyd was murdered) and from countles s other American cities is to defund and disband the police, replacing it with community-based public safety measures.

In India, where half the public condones police violence even before a trial, abolition seems like a laughable idea. Even the other half isnt calling to shrink the scope of policing. Well-meaning NGOs put out reports insisting that strengthening the rule of law requires building Indias police capacities. Journalists bemoan how India only has 144 police personnel per 100,000 people, falling short of the United Nations recommendation of 222. Even Human Rights Watch calls for higher police budgets. The entire discussion focuses on how to increase Indias investment in policing.

But this misses the fact that policing isnt just about the police: its about the use of force to enforce an existing order. By that definition, policing in India by paramilitary, military, jailers, and sanctioned vigilante groups already enjoys better funding than education, welfare schemes, and public health do. So even though abolition is inconceivable in India at the moment, yet if you dare not conceive it, you cant lay claim to this movement.

Abolition seeks not just to end policing but to also end the unequal society that necessitates policing in the first place. This is why Americans in the streets are making what wed see in India as economic demands rather than just human rights demands, calling to defund institutions of punishment and to instead invest public money in schools, hospitals, housing, social security, and work for all, especially marginalised citizens.

Protestors point out that up to 40% of many US cities budgets go to policing, an amount larger than what is spent on violence and substance abuse prevention, mental health, affordable housing and schools put together. How much safer could communities be if this money was invested in residents rather than armed patrollers?

Meanwhile in India, Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis are the poorest of every rung of the poor: they already cant breathe in India even before the police or mobs get to them. So by all means, say that black lives matter but only if nine people owning as much wealth as half the country infuriates you, and only if India spending 9% of its budget on the military and only 3% on health is also the target of your ire. But if Indias system of hereditary poverty and disinvestment from minorities does not morally horrify you, then you arent an ally.

The current protests in the US have been compared to the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in India: both saw a largely young crowd of protestors, widespread dissent from big cities to small towns, majority groups coming out in solidarity, and a brutal reception from police and politicians. However, despite cosmetic similarities the two protests differ in essentials.

Unlike the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act whose demands were primarily defensive (remove this law and return to the existing order), Black Lives Matters demands have been offensive (change the existing order by abolishing policing). Even when some factions of the movement call for reform, others immediately propose revolutionary alternatives for direct mass accountability.

The tactics of Black Lives Matter are also revolutionary, drawing on both the civil disobedience of Martin Luther King Jr. and the militancy of the Black Panthers. This is why the most potent symbols of todays movement are all moments of collective law-breaking, whether it is the Minneapolis Police Departments 3rd Precinct on fire, slaveholder Edward Colstons statue being thrown in the harbour in England, or protestors throwing tear gas back at the US National Guard outside the White House.

These images sit in stark contrast to the movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act as symbolised by a peaceful sit-in at Shaheen Bagh, a tactic that put protestors in the defensive position while allowing the government to dominate media coverage and demobilise public support. All this points to an urgent need to rethink the watered-down version of satyagraha (as a sit in without antagonism or leverage) which now comes all too naturally to us.

However, if you prefer law and order to dissent and justice, and want the appearance of a revolutionary without taking on the labours and risks of one, dont say black lives matter.

Aparna Gopalan is PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at Harvard University. Her research and writing focuses on the reproduction of inequality and poverty in rural India.

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Five questions for Indians (who think they are) in solidarity with Black Lives Matter - Scroll.in