NYPD attack wall street demonstration

The pictures are pretty shocking (although probably hardly surprising if you live in parts of many US cities). But on a lighter note you have to love the ultra-serious delivery and downright anger of the anchorman.

Police forces to cease recording ethnicity during stop and accounts

Really not good news.

The ethnic disproportionality in the application of police stop powers is one of the most invidious aspects of current police practice in the UK - and probably in many other countries as well. There is nothing better suited to driving a wedge between the police and the people they serve (i.e. us) than the sense that we are being unfairly stopped by officers in order that (a) we should account to them for our movements, or (b) that we should be body searched (with no reason necessary under several pieces of legislation). Disproportionality in this type of police behaviour seems to me to be the antithesis of procedural justice (and distributive justice and probably any other type of justice as well).

The argument made by Craig Mackey, who's ACPO lead on stop and search - that police have no real powers to stop and account (so presumably the change is therefore of little consequence) is I think slightly disingenuous. I wonder how many ordinary people distinguish between a stop for an account and a stop for a search, or how often a stop intended to lead to a search does not, and therefore becomes in essence a stop and account.

We should not forget that stopping people in public places merely on the suspicion that they may have committed a crime is one of the most significant powers the police have. On one hand, in the final analysis police officers should be able to approach members of the public to ask them questions and, yes, 'account' for what they are doing. Policing as it is currently construed in the UK would be impossible without this type of contact between police and citizen (for one thing policing would have to become almost entirely reactive). But on the other hand they do this not as ordinary citizens but as wielders of the power of legitimate violence. The coercion in this type of police behaviour lies not in the legal status of the act but in the power of the people doing it. Until they have proved that they can use this power fairly monitoring all stop activity is vital.

Tony Blair's magical reasoning

Tony Blair was interviewed at length on Radio 4 today (listen here - it was in the post 8am section). Among the many pearls of wisdom was his explanation as to why the motivations of Jihadists have nothing whatsoever to do with 'western' actions in the middle east and elsewhere. Rather:

"They believe in what they believe in because they believe that their religion compels then to believe in it"

That's right, they believe in something because they, y'know, believe in it.

Mind you, similar 'reasoning' is used in political discourse all the time. David Cameron recently appeared to blame the crimes committed during the August riots on 'criminality'; although to be fair, unlike Blair he went on to suggest some causes that at least nodded to a move beyond tautology (whether you agree with them or not). Lack of ability to tell right from wrong, lack of self control and so on.

Of course in both cases the magical reasoning is entirely self-serving. Blair is ideologically committed to the idea that Islamist terrorism is sui generis and definitively unrelated to actions taken by western governments; Cameron is a right wing Tory for whom the idea that crime has social as well as personal causes is extremely challenging. It's just a shame that politicians making these types of comments don't get pulled up more often by those interviewing them. If they were, we might at least start to get at their motivations for such laughable arguments.

Access to academic journals

I couldn't agree with George Monbiot more on this.

A particular concern of mine is that virtually all the research I have published has, in effect, been funded twice by the taxpayer. First in terms of paying my PhD grant and then salary while working at university; second in terms of paying for the surveys (such as the British Crime Survey) whose data I and various co-authors have used. It seems to me that in these circumstances everything should be freely available to the people - i.e. all of us - who have funded the research. And it certainly isn't at the moment, because it's sitting behind pay walls charging at least £30 a throw.

Of course there are various ways to get research out there (e.g. www.academia.edu, www.ssrn.com), but the pressure to get papers in the peer-reviewed journals that Monbiot criticises is overwhelming. It's almost the only way to build an academic career. So, obviously, you always make sure the best stuff is that which the smallest number of people can read it!

There are some ways round this problem. Working papers can be posted on the sites above, or on personal websites. Research reports can be - and are - written for the bodies who funded the surveys used. But in a classic catch-22 these will mostly be unread, indeed uncommisioned unless the author has a reputation built by publishing in peer-reviewed journals.....

And this is before we start to consider that the entire system is built on the free (to the journals) labour of academics as authors and as reviewers. I would hope that in the future we can move toward the system proposed by Monbiot. But I won't hold my breath, for reasons for inertia, if nothing else.

I also think, to be fair to the publishers, they are only really responding to a demand from within academia and from the funding bodies. The current system is almost wholly built on peer-reviewd publication, and the pressure to get published is so strong that almost everyone is working on several to many papers at any one time. These all have to go somewhere, hence the multiplication of journal titles in recent years. Which, of course, don't come for free: at the utter barest minimum, someone has to ensure that the review process functions properly and host a website.

I'm not sure the political will exists to change this situation. Indeed the current UK government presumably prefers that private companies make significant profits from the system, and would be ideologically opposed to switching to something entirely publicly funded.

Three deaths in a week following police use of 'non-leathal' weapons

This is very worrying. Of course, the use of non-lethal weapons precludes the idea that the officers involved intended the deaths. I don't think it's granting too much benefit of the doubt, even at this early stage, to assume that they believed use of the weapons was an effective way to control the situation that would not kill or seriously harm the people on the receiving end. The problem, if there is one, must therefore lie in training, the protocols involved and, possibly, the research behind the weapons themselves.

Take the pepper spray cases, for example. This report suggests pepper spray is relatively innocuous, but this, from the ACLU, paints a more complicated picture. A quick read through the ACLU report suggests what you'd probably suspect from first principles. Deaths after the use of pepper spray were concentrated among people with mental disorders, drug users, and so on - all things themselves risk factors in relation to injury during encounters with police officers (or indeed anyone else).

This suggests to me - and I'd like to see more research on this issue - that the use of non-lethal weapons may be particularly prevalent in cases where the person involved is more likely to be injured for other reasons. This obviously confounds the spray as the cause of death, but if true it would mean that deaths after the use of sprays are likely to continue even if the spray itself is not at fault.

In the current climate of increased attention - and arguably suspicion - directed at the police one wonders whether the use of any technique that is associated with deaths in custody might be curtailed or at least reconsidered. Disclaimer: the usual provisos about statistical blips apply. Three deaths don't necessarily mean anything in terms of trends or underlying factors. My point is simply that the police, particularly at this point in time, should avoid using aggressive and arguably dangerous techniques that risk undermining public trust in their ability to manage situations without rapid escalation to violence.

Now with added tweets!

Following some advice here (Paul Gilroy on the riots, worth reading) I've finally signed up to twitter. And in a rush of techno-savvy I've added a feed to the blog. I may get fed up with it - especially as you seem to get messages from people tweeting at what you're interested in, in which case some of the comments might get a bit tedious - but let's see how it goes......

A little something to cheer us up

Lot's of really bad news recently, and bad in lots of ways.

So it's good to see something that makes you smile for a second.