Author: Adam Clare

It’s Time to Defund the Police

Militarization of police forces isn’t just an American problem, it’s a global problem, and it needs to stop. One of the many reasons police are buying tanks and high tech weaponry is because they have money to do so. In Toronto, we give the police $1 billion a year and yet something like half of all murders go unsolved and they literally stopped enforcing some laws a few years ago. In Toronto just a few days ago the police allegedly pushed a woman off of her balcony. Are the people of Toronto getting value from their police? Maybe not. Maybe we should do to the police what has been done to other public services: cut them.

Let’s replace the police with an organization that cares about the people they are supposed to protect.

Police have also become more militarized. The Federal 1033 program, the Department of Justice’s “Cops Office,” and homeland security grants have channeled billions of dollars in military hardware into American police departments to advance their “war on crime” mentality. A whole generation of police officers have been given “warrior” training that teaches them to see every encounter with the public as potentially their last, leading to a hostile attitude towards those policed and the unnecessary killing of people falsely considered a threat, such as the 12-year-old Tamir Rice, killed for holding a toy gun in an Ohio park.

The alternative is not more money for police training programs, hardware or oversight. It is to dramatically shrink their function. We must demand that local politicians develop non-police solutions to the problems poor people face. We must invest in housing, employment and healthcare in ways that directly target the problems of public safety. Instead of criminalizing homelessness, we need publicly financed supportive housing; instead of gang units, we need community-based anti-violence programs, trauma services and jobs for young people; instead of school police we need more counselors, after-school programs, and restorative justice programs.

Read more.

Protesting Works

protest

Democracy is messy and in order for it to function many voices need to be heard, when some groups can’t be heard they peacefully take to the streets. Despite a history of protesting for a good cause resulting in beneficial societal change there are people who doubt the efficacy of such movements. There is a long history of groups getting together and rallying behind a common cause which we take for granted today, like weekends and liberty. Given what is happening this week in the USA it’s high time we all show our support (in a non COVID-19 spreading way) for those fighting for human rights and eradicating racism.

In 1911, 146 workers were killed by a fire in an unsafe factory. At the time, workers often dealt with extremely hazardous working conditions. The tragedy prompted a march on New York’s Fifth Avenue of nearly 80,000 people. This march helped to pass new laws to ensure workplace safety and helped the growing union movement. This eventually led to laws that we still use today, like the minimum wage requirement and the right to collectively bargain as a union.

Read more.

Ways to Reduce Police Violence

vote sign
vote

This past week saw Americans out on the streets en masse to protest police violence, in particular race-based discrimination practiced by police throughout the nation. Non-white individuals get harassed more, suffer more violence, and are treated worse by the judicial system than white people. This has been proven time and time again, with people getting increasingly sick of it with every passing year. 2020 has seen many needless deaths due to racist and untrained officers – Americans have had enough. We can show solidarity (and many already have with rallies) while calling for systemic change in the USA and in our own countries. A few years ago Scientific American looked into ways we can change American policing.

If implicit bias workshops may not be the answer, what can police departments do?
We don’t know how to de-bias people because the culture is so saturated with those stereotypes. My general recommendation is—and I think it’s consistent with what the Center for Policing Equity is generally proposing—that departments find ways to reduce the rates at which these interactions are occurring.

Meaning what?
Police have a lot of discretion on who they can engage with and who they detain, and that can result in wild variation in discretionary stops. You can reduce the amount of contacts without compromising public safety and then the chance for biased outcomes gets reduced dramatically. We have seen that in NYC: The number of stops are way down and the racial disparities are mathematically necessarily reduced because there is less room for disparity.

Read more.

Funding Childhood Programs Improves Life and the Economy

Ensuring that kids have a chance to succeed is the best thing we can do for society. If children of all backgrounds and stations in life get the support the need from the start then all of us benefit, not just the child. We have known this for years, but it’s important to remember now as we face “uncertain times” when traditionally right-wing leaning individuals call for budget cuts and “austerity”. A recent study has proven that for every dollar spent on early childhood programs the government actually earns $7.3 back.

This paper quantifies and aggregates the multiple lifetime benefits of an influential high-quality early-childhood program with outcomes measured through midlife. Guided by economic theory, we supplement experimental data with nonexperimental data to forecast the life-cycle benefits and costs of the program. Our point estimate of the internal rate of return is 13.7%, with an associated benefit/cost ratio of 7.3. We account for model estimation and forecasting error and present estimates from extensive sensitivity analyses. This paper is a template for synthesizing experimental and nonexperimental data using economic theory to estimate the long-run life-cycle benefits of social programs.

Read more.

Visually Communicating Climate Change

Solar Panel School

Showing people the impact climate change is having on people usually results in rather depressing images. It doesn’t have to be this way, we can show people the great things people are doing to mediate and react to our changing planet. The mission of Climate Visuals is to help journalists to find and use positive imagery about climate change. Images that capture the resiliency of people and places that are withstanding the threats of environmental damage. We have the solutions to climate change, so let’s show those solutions to the world.

The first Climate Visuals report ‘Climate Visuals: Seven principles for visual climate change communication (based on international social research)’ summarises research with members of the public in three nations.

The research combined two different methods. Four structured discussion groups (with a total of 32 citizens) were held: two in London, and two in Berlin. Participants responded to dozens of climate images, engaging in detailed discussions about what they saw. Following this in-depth research, an international online survey of 3,014 people was conducted, with participants split equally between the UK, Germany and the US.

The survey allowed us to test a smaller number of images with a much larger number of people. Further details on the methodology can be found in the separate appendix document below.

Read more.