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From Vox
Are we headed toward a “polycrisis”? The buzzword of the moment, explained. -
A group of activists protest the World Economic Forum (WEF) at its closing in Davos, Switzerland, on January 20, 2023. | Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
The concept of “polycrisis” was everywhere in Davos. But is it saying anything meaningful?
There is nothing that Davos loves more than a good buzzword, and in 2023 that buzzword was “polycrisis.”
The folks at this year’s World Economic Forum adopted the term after historian Adam Tooze popularized it in his inaugural Financial Times column last year. At its annual meeting last week, the WEF released its “Global Risks Report 2023,” warning that “eroding geopolitical cooperation will have ripple effects across the global risks landscape over the medium term, including contributing to a potential polycrisis of interrelated environmental, geopolitical and socioeconomic risks relating to the supply of and demand for natural resources.”
This warning generated a lot of hand-wringing on the narrow streets of Davos. Little wonder — a “polycrisis” sounds pretty bad! But it also sounds to some like a confusing and redundant neologism. In the opening Davos panel, historian Niall Ferguson rejected the term, explaining it as “just history happening.” In a bit of hot FT-on-FT action, columnist Gideon Rachman characterized polycrisis as one of his least favorite terms, asking, “Does it actually mean anything?”
As someone who has written a book about zombie apocalypses and taught a course about the end of the world, I have a smidgen more sympathy for the polycrisis concept. I think its proponents are trying to get at something more than just history happening. They are putting a name to the belief that a more interconnected, complex world is vulnerable to an interconnected, complex global catastrophe.
That is a legitimate concern. Just because the concept of a polycrisis is real, however, does not mean that the logic behind a polycrisis is ironclad. Some of it echoes 1970s concerns about resource depletion combined with an increasing population — in other words, neo-Malthusianism gussied up to sound fancy. A lot more of it can be reduced to concerns about climate change, which are real but not poly-anything. Those warnings about a polycrisis might be well-intentioned, but they also assume the existence of powerful negative feedback effects that may not actually exist.
The future will not be crisis-free by any stretch of the imagination — but the notion of a polycrisis might do more harm than good in attempting to get a grip on the systemic risks that threaten humanity.
The history of the idea of the polycrisis
As with many buzzwords foretelling despair, the origins of polycrisis can be blamed on the French.
In their 1999 book Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millennium, French complexity theorist Edgar Morin and his co-author Anne Brigitte Kern warned of the “complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrollable processes, and the general crisis of the planet.” Other academics began using the term in a similar way. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker adopted the term to characterize the cluster of negative shocks triggered by the 2008 financial crisis.
So far, so redundant — none of these initial references really seem to mean much beyond “A Big, Bad Catastrophe.” Tooze’s initial column and Substack post, however, referenced the work of political scientists Michael Lawrence, Scott Janzwood, and Thomas Homer-Dixon. They work at the Cascade Institute, a Canadian research center focusing on emergent and systemic risks. In a 2022 working paper, they provide the fullest etymology of “polycrisis” and what they mean by it.
So what the hell is a polycrisis? The quick-and-dirty answer is that it’s the concatenation of shocks that generate crises that trigger crises in other systems that, in turn, worsen the initial crises, making the combined effect far, far worse than the sum of its parts.
The longer answer requires some familiarity with how complex systems work. Complex systems can range from a nuclear power plant to Earth’s ecosystem. In tightly wound and complex systems, not even experts can be entirely sure how the inner workings of the system will respond to stresses and shocks. Those who study systemic and catastrophic risks have long been aware that crises in these systems are often endogenous — i.e., they often bubble up from within the system’s inscrutable internal workings.
For example, when Lehman Brothers declared Chapter 11 in September 2008, few observers understood that Lehman’s bankruptcy would cause panic in money market funds. That was a relatively risk-free asset class seemingly far removed from the subprime mortgage debt that felled Lehman.
Except the Reserve Primary Fund, the oldest money market fund in the country, had invested some of its assets at Lehman, which had enabled it to offer a slightly higher rate of return. With those investments frozen by Lehman’s bankruptcy, the Reserve Primary Fund had to “break the buck” and price its fund below a dollar — hitherto unthinkable for a fund that was seen as pretty secure. That caused credit markets everywhere to seize up, and the Great Recession unfolded. The crisis cascaded so quickly that it was impossible for regulators and central banks to get out in front of the disaster wave.
The folks who warn about a polycrisis argue that it is not just components within a single system that are tightly interconnected. It is the systems themselves — health, geopolitics, the environment — that are increasingly interacting and tightly coupled. Therefore, if one system malfunctions, the crisis might trigger other systems to fail, leading to catastrophic negative feedback effects across multiple systems and affecting the entire world. Or, as Lawrence, Janzwood, and Homer-Dixon put it in their paper:
The core concern of the concept is that a crisis in one global system has knock-on effects that cascade (or spill over) into other global systems, creating or worsening crises there. Global crises happen less and less in isolation; they interact with one another so that one crisis makes a second more likely and deepens their overall harms. The polycrisis concept thus highlights the causal interaction of crises across global systems.
Think of rising commodity prices triggering the Arab Spring in 2010. Or think of the vicissitudes of the Covid-19 pandemic helping to trigger both the stresses in global supply chains and social dysfunction. These are examples of one systemic crisis generating another systemic crisis. Imagine all the myriad crises that climate change can trigger — from food scarcity to new pandemics to a surge in migration. The Cascade Institute paper defines a polycrisis as when three or more systems wind up being in crisis at the same time.
Given all the interconnections in the current moment, a polycrisis is not hard to conceive. To contemplate it is to be overwhelmed by catastrophic possibilities. Here, look at Tooze’s chart:
Or, if you prefer sci-fi narratives as a means to better comprehension, watch this clip from Amazon Prime’s The Peripheral, which talks about a cluster of events called “The Jackpot” in a way that sounds awfully similar to a polycrisis.
How real is the polycrisis?
Take a second now and consider all the shocks that have buffeted you, dear reader, in the past few years alone.
There is the largest land war in Europe in recent memory, a devastating pandemic, the surge in refugee flows, high inflation, fragile global governance, and the leading democracies turning inward as they face populist challenges at home. It seems easy — and enervating — to believe that the polycrisis is upon us.
The thing about the previous paragraph is that it does not just describe the current moment; it also captures the global situation almost exactly a century ago. The First World War devastated Europe. The war also helped to facilitate the spread of the influenza pandemic through troop movements and information censorship. The costs of both the war and the pandemic badly weakened the postwar order, leading to spikes in hyperinflation, illiberal ideologies, and democracies that turned inward. All of that transpired during the start of the Roaring ’20s; the world turned much darker a decade later.
So maybe Niall Ferguson has a point; what some are calling a polycrisis could just be history rhyming with itself.
Those warning about a polycrisis vigorously dispute this. They argue that the growing synchronization and interconnectivity of systemic risks increases the chance of a polycrisis. As one recent New York Times op-ed co-authored by Homer-Dixon explained, “complex and largely unrecognized causal links among the world’s economic, social and ecological systems may be causing many risks to go critical at nearly the same time.”
These concerns are borderline Malthusian. Thomas Malthus famously warned that the human population would exponentially outstrip mankind’s capacity to grow food. This proved to be spectacularly wrong, but the power of Malthusian logic remains. Neo-Malthusians are less concerned about food specifically and more about human civilization outstripping other necessary resources.
In the same op-ed, Homer-Dixon and co-author Johan Rockström worry that “the magnitude of humanity’s resource consumption and pollution output is weakening the resilience of natural systems.” The WEF report ranked a “cost-of-living crisis” as the most severe global risk over the next two years.
Concerns about climate change should not be minimized. At the same time, there are ways in which the notion of a polycrisis obfuscates more than it reveals.
Looking at the charts above makes it seem as though little can be done to prevent a polycrisis. Indeed, the Cascade Institute paper is written as though the polycrisis has already happened.
This sort of framing is bound to generate a sense of helplessness in the face of overwhelming complexity and crisis. In The Rhetoric of Reaction, Albert Hirschman warned about the “futility thesis” — the rejection of preventive action due to a fatalistic belief that it is simply too late.
It is far from obvious that there will be a polycrisis (let alone that we’re already in one). As the economist Noah Smith pointed out in his rejoinder to Tooze, its proponents underestimate how much “the global economy and political system are full of mechanisms that push back against shocks.” Indeed, for all the concerns that have been voiced over the past two years about global supply chain stresses and rampant inflation, both of those trends appear to have reversedthemselves quite nicely. Complaints about scarce container ships and computer chips that dominated 2021 have turned into stories about gluts in both markets.
CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images
Cargo ships are loaded with containers as they prepare to dock at the container terminal in Lianyungang, East China’s Jiangsu province, on January 25, 2023.
On the sociopolitical side of the ledger, it is noteworthy that as societies emerge from the pandemic, indicators of social dysfunction might start to subside. Political populism has actually been trending downward for the past year or so. Even skeptics of democracy have noticed that autocracies have been facing greater challenges as of late than democracies.
Malthusian arguments rest on producers being unable to keep pace with growing demand, and modern history suggests that the Malthusian logic has been proven wrong time and again. Homer-Dixon in particular has been a strong proponent of neo-Malthusian arguments, positing for decades that resource scarcity would lead to greater international violence. So far, the scholarly research testing his claim has found littleempiricalsupport for the hypothesis.
Predicting the unpredictable
The deeper flaw in the polycrisis logic is the presumption that one systemic crisis will inexorably lead to negative feedback effects that cause other systems to tip into crisis.
If this assumption does not hold, then the whole logic of a single polycrisis falls apart. To their credit, the Cascade Institute authors acknowledge that this might not happen, but they posit: “it seems more likely that causal interactions between systemic crises will worsen, rather than diminish, the overall emergent impacts.”
At first glance, this seems like a plausible assumption to make. Remember, however, that the proponents of a polycrisis also assert that the systems under stress are highly complex, leading to unpredictable cause-and-effect relationships. If that is true, then presuming that one systemic crisis would automatically exacerbate stresses in other systems seems premature at best and skewed at worst.
Indeed, over the last year there have been at least two examples of one systemic crisis actually lessening stress on another system.
China’s increasingly centralized autocracy generated a socioeconomic disaster in the form of “zero Covid” lockdowns. Xi Jinping kept that policy in place long after it made any sense, accidentally throttling China’s economy. The timing of China’s lockdown was fortuitous, however, as stagnant Chinese demand helped prevent an inflationary spiral from getting any worse. China’s exit from zero-Covid will likely also be countercyclical, jump-starting economic growth at a time when other regions tip into recession.
Another weird, fortuitous interaction has been the one between climate change and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As Europe aided Ukraine and resisted Russia’s blatant, illegal actions, Russia retaliated by cutting off energy exports. Many were concerned that Russia’s counter-sanctions would make this winter extremely hard and expensive for Europe.
Climate change may have provided a weird geopolitical assist to Europe, however. The warming climate is likely connected to Europe’s extremely temperate fall and winter. That, in turn, has required less electricity for heating, leaving the continent with plenty of energy reserves to last the winter. Russia’s ability to wreak havoc on the European economy has been circumscribed.
None of this is to say that systemic crises cannot exacerbate each other. Just because a polycrisis has not happened yet does not mean one is not on the horizon. Just as one buys insurance to guard against low-probability, high-impact outcomes, policymakers and elements of civil society need to guard against worst-case scenarios.
As a term of art, however, “polycrisis” distracts more than it adds. It mostly seems like a device to make people care about the Really Bad Things that climate change can do, without turning people off by warning them yet again about the hazards of climate change.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School and is the author of Drezner’s World.
Did George Santos lie about everything? -
New York Representative-elect George Santos speaks during the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Leadership Meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada, on November 19. | David Becker/Washington Post via Getty Images
The Republican representative who allegedly made up his life story, explained.
The biography of newly elected Congress member George Santos seemed quite impressive. The 34-year-old son of immigrants had graduated from Baruch College, a public college in New York, before going on to work at firms like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Santos eventually became a successful financier who started an animal rescue charity. The problem is that biography was apparently a lie, and now he might be facing not only political consequences but legal consequences for his wholesale inventions.
As revealed in the New York Times on December 19, it wasn’t just that Santos exaggerated his résumé — he had allegedly invented it out of whole cloth.
The Times found that he apparently did not graduate from Baruch College, he did not work for Goldman Sachs or Citigroup, there were no records of him being a successful financier, nor were there of him registering his animal rescue charity. The Times also found that he had been charged with check fraud in Brazil.
Further, a number of outlets have found no evidence of Santos’s repeated claims to be Jewish, to have Jewish heritage, or to be descended from refugees fleeing the Holocaust. Santos even described himself at one point as a “proud American Jew” in a campaign position paper.
In a media tour with friendly outlets on December 26, Santos admitted to putting “a little bit of fluff” on his résumé. In other words, he conceded that he never graduated from college, never worked for Goldman Sachs or Citigroup, and wasn’t Jewish (though he claimed to be “Jew-ish”). Santos brushed off lying about basic biographical information as embellishment, and he pushed back on the Times’s reporting about his criminal charge in Brazil. “I am not a criminal,” he told the New York Post.
The story has sparked one of the more bizarre political scandals in American history. Members of Congress have committed murder in office. In fact, a member of Congress has even killed another member of Congress. Even in the present day, we’ve seen every scandal under the sun, from Anthony Weiner tweeting a lewd picture of himself, to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s infamous Facebook post about Jewish space lasers. But it’s hard to think of a precedent for a scandal like this as Santos faces calls for his resignation from fellow Republicans and investigations into potential criminal misconduct.
Who is George Santos?
There are some things we know about Santos. The openly gay son of Brazilian immigrants, he was elected in November to an open congressional seat that includes a thin slice of Queens and much of the North Shore of Long Island in Nassau County. Santos defeated Democrat Robert Zimmerman by a margin of 54 percent to 46 percent. This represented a major swing from 2020 when Biden had won the district by the same margin. That year, Santos ran against incumbent Tom Suozzi in a similar district and lost handily by a margin of 56 percent to 43.5 percent.
Santos is also an ardent Trump supporter — so much so that he was at Trump’s Ellipse rally on January 6, 2021, and has repeatedly falsely claimed that the former president won the 2020 election.
Also, for all his alleged lying about his résumé, it is clear that one company Santos worked at, Harbor City Capital, has been accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of being a Ponzi scheme. As for Santos’s other employment, he did spend a stint as a Portuguese language customer service agent for DISH Network a decade ago.
Santos has also been accused of setting up a GoFundMe that raised $3,000 to pay for lifesaving surgery for the dying service dog of a disabled homeless veteran and then pocketing the money.He responded on Twitter by claiming “the reports that I would let a dog die is shocking & insane.” Santos added, “Over the past 24hr I have received pictures of dogs I helped reduce throughout the years along with supportive messages.”
Santos has also pushed back against the claim that he dressed in drag while living in Brazil. A drag performer who goes by the name Eula Rochard told multiple outlets that Santos used to perform in drag under the name “Kitara Ravache.”
Santos mounted an aggressive denial Thursday morning on Twitter. “The most recent obsession from the media claiming that I am a drag Queen or ‘performed’ as a drag Queen is categorically false,” said the embattled New York Republican. “The media continues to make outrageous claims about my life while I am working to deliver results.”
On Saturday, he conceded to reporters at LaGuardia Airport that he did dress in drag but that he was simply having “fun at a festival.”
What don’t we know?
We don’t know a lot. This ranges from basic facts about Santos’s biography to details about his dealings with the Brazilian criminal justice system, and everything in between, including where he actually lives.
But most importantly, we don’t know where Santos’s money comes from. The representative loaned his own campaign $700,000 during the 2022 cycle and claimed an income of $750,000. He also listed millions of dollars in assets including an apartment in Rio De Janeiro worth up to $1 million and a seven-figure savings account. It’s a major shift in fortune for someone who was evicted twice, in 2015 and 2017, for failing to pay rent and had been taken to court for not paying debts. Even in 2020, he reported income in only one category — compensation in excess of $5,000 paid by one source — with no other assets.
Santos initially provided no information on his finances on his media tour, except to concede that he owned no property. He had previously claimed on Twitter to be a landlord who owned 13 properties. The representative eventually claimed in an interview with Semafor that his newfound wealth came from “capital introduction” where he helped broker deals for the wealthy. Santos used a yacht sale as an example of how he earned a living, “If you’re looking at a $20 million yacht, my referral fee there can be anywhere between $200,000 and $400,000.”
What happens now?
Santos is already being investigated by federal and local prosecutors while the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James has been “looking into some of the issues that have come out.” Further, a complaint has been filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC)by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center alleging Santos illegally hid the source of the money he loaned his campaign through a straw donor scheme and other alleged violations, including whether he used campaign funds to pay for personal expenses. The Washington Post reported Friday that the Justice Department has asked the FEC to hold off any enforcement actions so that it can pursue a criminal investigation.
Dan Goldman, a fellow representative from New York and a former prosecutor, has suggested that Santos face criminal investigation for conspiracy to defraud the United States as well as filing false statements to the FEC.
In a December interview with Vox, Goldman shied away from weighing in on whether Santos should be denied his seat in Congress. “I think the bigger question is not whether I think George Santos should be a member of Congress. The bigger question is whether Kevin McCarthy and the Republican leadership think that George Santos should be a member of Congress.”
A number of Santos’s fellow Republicans have called on him to resign as well. The Nassau County Republican Party, long considered the most powerful county party in New York, called on Santos to step down as have other fellow New York Republicans, including Reps. Anthony D’Esposito, Mike Lawler, Nick Langworthy, and Brandon Williams.Joe Cairo, the chair of the Nassau County GOP, told reporters, “George Santos’ campaign last year was a campaign of deceit, lies and fabrication” while demanding his resignation.
Rep. Max Miller (R-OH), one of only two Jewish Republicans in the House and a longtime Trump White House aide, called on Santos to resign in mid January, and cited the New York Republican’s lies about his family ties to the Holocaust in doing so. Republican leadership has equivocated, with Speaker Kevin McCarthyacknowledging that while Santos has “a long way to go to earn trust” and still has to face investigation by the House Ethics Committee, Santos is still “a part of the Republican conference.” But McCarthy acknowledged to reporters on Wednesday that if the Ethics Committee found that Santos broke the law, the New York Republican should be ousted from Congress.
However, as of now, McCarthy needs Santos almost as much as Santos needs McCarthy. McCarthy only became speaker by the skin of his teeth on the 15th ballot. With a narrow majority — and the likelihood of frequent member absences now that the House has gotten rid of proxy voting — McCarthy needs every vote he can get.
Further, because Santos represents one of the most Democratic seats in Congress held by a Republican, forcing him to resign under any circumstance is risky. It would be a difficult seat for a Republican to hold in a special election and a loss would further imperil an already slim GOP majority.
In the meantime, it’s a matter of waiting for the next shoe to drop. As unsustainable as the current status quo might seem, the only impetus right now for Santos to resign would be a sense of shame, and it seems unlikely that he carries that burden.
Update, January 27, 9:41 pm ET: This story was originally published on December 21 and has been updated multiple times, as more details have been reported about Santos’s background and calls for him to resign.
Why traffic stops can be so dangerous for Black Americans like Tyre Nichols -
People attend a candlelight vigil in memory of Tyre Nichols at the Tobey Skate Park on January 26, 2023, in Memphis, Tennessee. | Scott Olson/Getty Images
Nichols died from a brutal beating that followed a traffic stop.
Lawyers for the Nichols family said in a press conference Monday that Nichols had been treated like a “human piñata.” Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis said in a video statement Thursday that the attack was “heinous, reckless, and inhumane.” The Memphis Police Department and other law enforcement agencies across the country are consequently anticipating civil unrest following the release of the footage.
Five Black officers for the Memphis Police Department — Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr., and Justin Smith — were fired after an internal departmental investigation found them to be “directly responsible” for the beating. They also were found to have violated departmental policies regarding excessive force, duty to intervene, and duty to render aid.
Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy announced Thursday that each would face charges of “second-degree murder, aggravated assault, two charges of aggravated kidnapping, two charges of official misconduct and one charge of official oppression.” They could face up to 60 years in prison for the murder charges alone.
Additionally, two Memphis Fire Department workers who were involved in Nichols’s initial care have been “relieved of duty,” according to the department. It’s not clear whether they could also face charges.
Police stopped Nichols for reckless driving on January 7. Memphis’s police chief later told CNN that investigators have “been unable to substantiate” the claim that Nichols was driving recklessly, however. Nichols expressed confusion for the stop, saying in the footage that he was “just trying to go home.”
The officers who initially stopped him responded by threatening to “knock your ass the fuck out,” and to break his bones. Nichols fled from the stop; once he was caught, those threats were carried out. Officers encircled Nichols, and repeatedly punched, kicked, and hit him with a baton — sometimes while he was restrained on the ground.
He was taken to a hospital after his arrest when he complained of shortness of breath. Three days later, he died due to his injuries.
It’s not the first time that police have turned a traffic stop into a deadly altercation. Deaths like Nichols’s are all too common, especially for Black Americans, who nearly every available study shows are stopped more often than white Americans.
Why traffics stops can be dangerous for Black Americans
Black Americans are often taught — at home, through personal experience, and by the news — to see encounters with police, particularly traffic stops, as dangerous, if not potentially fatal.
The deaths of Americans like Nichols, or Daunte Wright, Sandra Bland, and Rayshard Brooks, validate that teaching. But it’s not just Black civilians who learn to fear traffic stops. As University of Arizona law professor Jordan Blair Woods wrote for the Michigan Law Review, police are taught to view stops as dangerous as well — not for those they’re stopping, but for themselves and their colleagues.
“Police academies regularly show officer trainees videos of the most extreme cases of violence against officers during routine traffic stops in order to stress that mundane police work can quickly turn into a deadly situation if they become complacent on the scene or hesitate to use force,” Woods wrote.
That training belies the fact that police officers are rarely injured in traffic stops. In Woods’s analysis of Florida traffic stop data from 2005 to 2014, the professor finds police had a 1 in 6.5 million chance of being killed during a traffic stop, and a 1 in 361,111 chance of being seriously injured. Overall, more than 98 percent of stops saw zero or minor injury to officers.
Data in other states mirrors Woods’s findings. In their book Suspect Citizens, UNC political science professor Frank Baumgartner, University of Texas government professor Derek A. Epp, and University of South Carolina political science professor Kelsey Shoub found that North Carolina “officers encountered violence about 24,000 times, or just over once per 1,000 stops.” When someone was injured at a stop, it was usually the person being stopped, the authors found.
And when wounded, like Nichols was, citizens’ chances of surviving a routine stop with police are less than stellar. A 2019 study by Shea Streeter, currently an American politics professor at the University of Michigan, found that in 2015, about 11 percent of police killings happened at traffic and pedestrian stops nationwide.
Complicating matters for Black individuals is that the data suggests they’re stopped more often than white people — in some localities, by a large margin. The Stanford Open Policing Project, a database of more than 200 million traffic stops, found that in St. Paul, Black drivers are a little over three times more likely than white drivers to be pulled over; in San Jose, California, Black drivers are six times more likely to be stopped.
Arguably, drivers of all races ought to be stopped at about the same rate — anyone of any race or gender could engage in the reckless driving Nichols was allegedly stopped for. This has led to a number of researchers trying to understand the disparity in who is stopped. In general, their results suggest that the issue has to do with officer bias, conscious or unconscious, that casts Black people as inherently more dangerous than their white counterparts.
Tied to this idea is the question of what stops are for. As a group of University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Dartmouth College researchers led by Baumgartner wrote in a 2017 paper, in many departments, traffic stops are meant to serve a dual purpose:to deter illegal behavior and as a chance for officers to investigative past or potential crimes. In many ways, this system is akin to stop-and-frisk, a practice most prominently used in New York City that was meant to uncover criminal behavior through street searches. The program was ruled unconstitutional.
As Baumgartner wrote, “officers are trained to use traffic stops as a general enforcement strategy aimed at reducing violent crime or drug trafficking. When officers are serving these broader goals, they are making an investigatory stop, and these stops have little (if anything) to do with traffic safety and everything to do with who looks suspicious.”
It’s impossible to know — at least with the information currently available — whether the officers who stopped Nichols did so because they found him suspicious. It is known, however, that they were part of Memphis’s SCORPION Unit, with the name being an acronym meaning “Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace In Our Neighborhoods.” That restoration of peace heavily involved traffic stops, according to NBC News.
If Black drivers are seen as more suspicious and police are trained to view traffic stops as dangerous in general, this creates a serious problem. When a Black driver is stopped, the interaction is more likely to begin with the officer even more on guard for trouble than they might otherwise be.
This can lead to the kind of rapid escalation seen in Nichols’s case, in which officers ended the stop through violence. Some officers favor beginning with violence, perhaps out of fear, like during the encounter that ended George Floyd’s life. Body camera footage released during Derek Chauvin’s trial, for example, shows an officer drawing his weapon shortly after approaching Floyd’s vehicle and yelling at him to “Put your fucking hands up right now.”
These tactics, as well as the fear and bias that fuel them, put Black drivers in mortal danger. Law enforcement representatives have argued the stops are necessary — “we find drugs, evidence of other crimes … it’s a very valuable tool,” Kevin Lawrence, the Texas Municipal Police Association’s executive director, told the Pew Charitable Trusts in 2020 — but those discoveries are rare. Nationally, about 4 percent of stops resulted in searches orarrests in 2015, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
This has a number of activists and elected officials questioning whether the risks traffic stops pose to drivers — particularly Black drivers — are worth such a small number of arrests.
Berkeley, California, for instance, approved a plan in 2021 to prohibit officers from conducting traffic stops for violations that have nothing to do with safety; Oakland has a similar policy in place. Other places, including Montgomery County, Maryland, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, have contemplated such measures as well. Washington, DC, stripped its police department of some of its authority to regulate traffic laws in 2019, empowering its transportation department to do enforcement instead. New York’s attorney general has recommended New York City make a similar change, and in 2022, New York City police announced they’d no longer use stops to randomly check for open warrants.
The long-term effectiveness of such measures remains to be seen. But they represent a small step away from the kind of policing that left Nichols, and so many before him, dead.
Update, January 27, 7:40 pm: This story has been updated to reflect the release of footage capturing Nichols’s beating and arrest.
From The Hindu: Sports
Leopard Rock obliges in the South India Sprinters Trial Stakes -
Ahead Of My Time, King’s Ransom, Supernatural and Lazarus excel -
Ravishing Form, Philosophy, Cyrenius, Silverius and Fortunatus impress -
Hockey World Cup 2023 | Belgium, Germany face-off in all European battle - Australia and Netherlands to play for bronze medal and expect to finish on a high.
I can now spend more time with my son: Sania Mirza - Sania Mirza’s father Imran remembers some of the wonderful moments in his daughter’s career
From The Hindu: National News
India holds key to world peace and prosperity: Japanese ambassador - Hiroshi Suzuki also recalled his visit to Ahmedabad in 2017 with then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
K-Smart to transform service delivery in urban local bodies -
Officer suspended for forging signatures of IAS, IPS and IFS officers - The accused forged the signatures of officers to extending licenses issued for commercial establishments at Shivajinagar bus stands and TTMCs in BTM Layout and Vijayanagar, and for other purposes
Man accused of rape convicted, sentenced to 10 years of rigorous imprisonment in Shivamogga - The 37-year-old resident of Thirthahalli taluk sexually harassed a 26-year-old lady in 2019.
Sons endorse Bhavani Revanna for Hassan seat, claim H.D. Deve Gowda and H.D. Revanna to finalise candidates for constituency - They were reacting to former Chief Minister and JD(S) leader H.D. Kumaraswamy’s statement that he would field an ordinary worker from Hassan constituency
From BBC: Europe
Ukraine war: Auschwitz anniversary marked without Russia - Moscow accuses Poland of attempting to “rewrite history” after it is not invited to the event.
How tanks from Germany, US and UK could change the Ukraine war - German Leopard 2 tanks and US M1 Abrams tanks will spearhead attacks on Russia - but is it enough?
Ukraine war: UN accuses Russia of breaking child protection rules over refugees - Moscow is accused of giving refugees Russian passports and allowing them to be adopted.
Andrew Tate: Judge explains extended detention of ‘dangerous’ influencer - The statement is the clearest indication yet of the evidence against the British-American influencer.
Czechs vote in second round of presidential election - Former PM Andrej Babis and retired Nato general Petr Pavel are vying for the ceremonial but influential post.
From Ars Technica
Annual? Bivalent? For all? Future of COVID shots murky after FDA deliberations - FDA seems sold on annual shots, but advisors call for a lot more data. - link
D&D maker retreats from attempts to update longstanding “open” license - Negative response to latest draft was “in such high volume” as to force WotC’s hand. - link
How to fix GoldenEye 007’s control issues on the Nintendo Switch [Updated] - Hard-to-find system-level customizations enable “dual stick” controls. - link
Bird study links spatial thinking with not getting eaten - Shows that birds tend to get killed at the edge of territory they know well. - link
#GermanyRIP. Kremlin-loyal hacktivists wage DDoSes to retaliate for tank aid - Killnet hacktivist group appears to have indirect ties to the Russian government. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
My nerdy friend just got a PhD on the history of palindromes. -
The Italian man says, “Last week, my wife and I had great sex. I rubbed her body all over with olive oil, we made passionate love, and she screamed for five full minutes at the end.” -
The Frenchman boasts, “Last week when my wife and I had sex, I rubbed her body all over with butter. We then made passionate love and she screamed for fifteen minutes.”
The old Jewish man says, “Well, last week my wife and I had sex too. I rubbed her body all over with schmaltz, we made love, and she screamed for over six hours.”
The Italian and Frenchman were stunned. They asked, “What could you have possibly done to make your wife scream for six hours?”
The old Jewish man replies: “I wiped my hands on the bedsheet.”
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CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images
