Islamic State: Giant library of group’s online propaganda discovered

2020/09/05 Leave a comment

Highlights the degree of sophistication and resources:
One of the largest collections of online material belonging to the group calling itself Islamic State has been discovered by researchers at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD).
The digital library contains more than 90,000 items and has an estimated 10,000 unique visitors a month.
Experts say it provides a way to continually replenish extremist content on the net.
But taking it down is difficult because the data is not stored in one place.
And despite counter-terrorism authorities in Britain and the US having been alerted to this growing repository, it continues to grow.

‘Better terrorist’

The discovery came after the death of the prominent IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in October 2019.
At the time, many social media posts supporting the organisation contained a short link.
It led researchers to documents and videos in nine different languages.
They included details of attacks, including those on Manchester Arena on 22 May 2017, in London on 7 July 2005 and in the US on 11 September 2001.
“[There’s] everything you need to know to plan and carry out an attack,” said ISD deputy director Moustafa Ayad, who discovered the archive.
“Things that teach you how to be a better terrorist essentially.”
The ISD named the library the Caliphate Cache.
For months the institute’s researchers have studied how it evolves, how it is being administered and who is visiting it.
The data is spread across a decentralised system, rather than a single computer server.
Anyone can share the content across the web, via servers based at multiple locations.
And this hampers any effort to take it offline.
But as long as the Caliphate Cache remains live, it aids IS by providing a means to continuously seed out content.

Pop singer

The material is added to social-media comments pages and spread via bot accounts.
Another technique has been to target Twitter accounts linked to celebrities and athletes.
For example, IS hijacked an account belonging to a fan of the pop singer Justin Bieber and used it to promote material from the cache.
In another case, the group managed to fool the English rugby team’s account into following one of its own by masquerading as a supporter.
“They understand how not just to game platforms, they understand the power of the content that is contained within the Caliphate Cache,” Mr Ayad said.

Runaway brides

Not all the cache’s content is violent.
Visitors also encounter philosophies of IS, religious texts and propagandised versions of what an IS lifestyle looks like.
The researchers say this includes material runaway brides such as Shamima Begum would have seen.
Most of those drawn to the Caliphate Cache are 18- to 24-year-old males in the Arab world, with 40% of the traffic coming from social media, largely via YouTube.

Extremist groups

The ISD has also discovered the Caliphate Cache is not unique.
There are smaller repositories belonging to other extremist groups, many of which are also using decentralised platforms.
“The attraction for jihadists of these platforms is that the developers of these decentralised platforms have no way of acting against content that is stored on user-operated servers or content that’s shared across a dispersed network of users, ” BBC Monitoring senior jihadi specialist Mina Al-Lami said.
“It’s really all about privacy, freedom and encryption.
“That’s what attracts jihadists.”
The researchers have alerted the US Attorney’s Office for Eastern District of New York, which prosecutes counter-terrorism cases, as well as the Met Police.
The authorities in New York have not commented.
But the Met acknowledged receiving the referral and said it was being assessed by specialist officers.

Source: Islamic State: Giant library of group’s online propaganda discovered

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with , ,

Racial authoritarianism in US democracy

2020/09/05 2 Comments

Bit of a dense read but nevertheless a reminder of the lingering influence of the past on the present:

Recently, casual and savage violence of police against peaceful protesters and images of police in military gear sweeping up residents into unmarked vans has led journalists to question whether U.S. democracy is in peril. Many observers described these recent actions as authoritarian. But racial authoritarianism has been central to citizenship and governance of race-class subjugated communities throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries. It describes state oppression such that groups of residents live under extremely divergent experiences of government and laws. Yet when police engage in excessive surveillance, incursions on civil liberties, and arbitrary force as a matter of routine patrol, many scholars of American politics are reluctant to consider it a violation of democracy and instead deem them aberrations in an otherwise functioning democracy. This mischaracterization is not limited only to intellectual discourse but also affects the public sphere. By obscuring evidence of racial authoritarianism, reforms will not land where needed. Procedural reform is useful when we are simply improving policing, not ridding democracy of authoritarian practices.

Racial authoritarian governance has deeply shaped our institutions, political arrangements, and state development, and virtually every racial justice movement over the past 100 years has tried to expose its operation, challenge it, and seek freedom from it (1). Coterminous with democracy in the United States, racially authoritarian patterns are reproduced and innovated after periods of democratic expansion in the United States. Since the 1960s, policing has been the primary administrative tool of racial authoritarianism: One segment of the population effectively lives under a different set of rules and, as a result, experiences differential power and citizenship.

Although many Black intellectuals and citizens have understood how authoritarian power operates on citizens within a democracy, scholars of U.S. politics largely overlook state power to coerce, surveil, and enact violence often by police authorities and treat it as unimportant to theorizing our democracy. Starting from the assumption of a liberal tradition and examining deviations from a mostly pluralistic polity, they document evidence of democratic retreat only when political competition is curtailed and trust in governing institutions erodes, despite overwhelming evidence of racial authoritarianism. This view, stretching from the field’s defining scholars to the present day, is housed within a polity that was increasingly turning to, and expanding, its coercive instruments of surveillance, predation, violent intimidation, and confinement, concentrated on race-class subjugated residents.

The result is a substantive and substantial narrowing: By failing to consider the possibility of widespread, coherent, and racially targeted authoritarian practices, the focus in academic debates becomes improving aspects of democratic quality and the distribution and delivery of democratic goods—more representation, more votes, more responsive policy—while rendering invisible the lack of autonomy and freedom, and the vulnerability to state violence and illegal takings, that characterizes the experience of U.S. democracy for those experiencing its more authoritarian aspects. We should augment our understanding, theories, and measurement to encompass or reconcile the presence of such authoritarian practices within U.S. democracy. In addition to measuring democratic performance through national indicators such as free and fair elections, we should also include local coercive practices concentrated on subgroups of the population.

A Trenchant Rebuttal

Once we look beyond democracy’s formal structures, institutions, and rules to the lived experiences of political authority, we see that they pose a sharp contrast, and a trenchant rebuttal, to the conventional understandings of liberal democracy. For example, drawing on the largest database of narrative accounts of policing in U.S. cities after the Baltimore uprising of 2015, we see that U.S. residents have a sophisticated understanding of the actual operation of democracy and are witnesses to its relationship to authoritarian practices (2). Stopped by police, subject to violation of privacy and displays of force, routine seizure of resources, and unable to freely assemble because of police occupation of their neighborhoods, they described being effectively outside the provisions of the main text of U.S. democracy—the Constitution:

“But every black and every Hispanic that gets stopped, especially here in LA, they asked to get out their car…okay. And it’s a difference. When you’re telling me, you’re going to go and say, ‘Oh you’re just nitpicking, you’re crying, you’re complaining.’ But we live this. You see? We live it” [(2), p. 1162].

“They’re paid to protect and serve but they’re not protecting us, they’re not serving us, they’re killing us and eliminating us” [(2), p. 1160].

Police have long proscribed the movement of Black communities and engaged in racial and social control. When historians interviewed several thousand Black Americans who had lived under Jim Crow (state and local laws that enforced racial segregation and disenfranchisement in the U.S. South) in the 1930s and 1940s, police were understood to be guardians of white democracy (3). They described orientations similar to conversations about life decades later. For example, how police goaded Black people into displays of force: “They would come and mess with you in order for you to say something … This gave them an excuse to hit you, you know” (3). State violence through police was witnessed, as well as the absence of accountability when police executed Black people.

When we look to narrative accounts and the undemocratic practices they reveal, we may be better equipped to anticipate critical ruptures in political life. State practices of policing, surveillance, and impunity that are quotidian for racially subjugated people, when popularized, become worrying signs of an authoritarian turn.

Hiding in Plain View

Despite racial authoritarianism’s glaring presence in experiential accounts of U.S. democracy, it has been hiding in plain view in the field of political science. In a field responsible for constructing metrics on democratic stability and political behavior, our failure to theorize racial authoritarianism has had consequences for how U.S. democracy is conceived by the public and policy-makers.

There are several reasons why racial authoritarianism in the United States has, for so long, gone unnamed by our field. One reason is because scholars tend to discount knowledge derived from a bottom-up approach (actual citizen experience), which may obscure our understanding of how government authority is actually experienced. Empirical research on democracy leans heavily on quantifiable indices (such as the Polity Index) and nationally representative survey samples. These measures are useful tools for comparative analysis and standardized snapshots for change over time, but they do not leave room for citizens to define democratic deficits on their own terms or through their own experiential accounts. When we use narrative accounts as the lens through which we view U.S. democracy, racial authoritarianism comes clearly into focus.

Relatedly, scholars tend to fixate on nationally representative institutions and political activities such as voting and operate from an overly narrow definition of authoritarian practices (executive power grabs, direct police collusion, and limited political competition). But the focus on executive overreach can be misleading in a political system as decentralized as the United States, where local governments have high levels of autonomy over police authority in particular. Without a focus on the local or subnational level, it is easy to overlook the ways in which U.S. federalism facilitates racial authoritarianism.

Third, for scholars who have written about modern policing practices, there is no shortage of analysis of their racially disparate outcomes (1). But students of political science have tended to examine the coercion, occupation, subjectivity, and extraction that constitute what we call racial authoritarianism in isolation from democracy. We tend to analyze racialized policing within a separate literature on incarceration and criminal justice; but why should we not also analyze it in the literature on democratic transitions, subnational or group-based authoritarianism, and political violence?

If the field of political science sequestered police repression from questions of democracy, historical Black thinkers did not. An understanding of racial authoritarianism—although completely absent in mainstream scholarship—animated historical Black theorizations that contested U.S. democracy’s hard line boundary from authoritarian modes of governance. They saw police violence and power as a central instrument upholding the differentiated citizenship key to the operation of democracy in the United States. For example, in 1966 James Baldwin wrote, “I have witnessed and endured the brutality of the police many more times than once—but, of course, I cannot prove it. I cannot prove it because the Police Department investigates itself, quite as though it were answerable only to itself. But it cannot be allowed to be answerable only to itself. It must be made to answer to the community which pays it, and which it is legally sworn to protect, and if American Negroes are not a part of the American community, then all of the American professions are a fraud” (4).

This brings us to the final reason, which is that we have been working from foundations of a discipline that has segregated and isolated Black knowledge. For example, our field’s most vaunted scholar of American democracy, Robert Dahl, theorized civic life through a case study in New Haven during a period of mass racial upheaval across northern U.S. cities (5). Yet, Dahl’s account portrayed a democracy that subjugated Black citizens did not live and had never taken part in. Political science scholars have typically examined democratic deficits as a question of who is represented and how; they tend to focus on exclusion from political participation or social citizenship, or hindrances on the ability of citizens to have equal influence (6).

Scholarly treatises flowed from Dahl’s conceptions but stood uneasily alongside a chorus of Black intellectuals, folk leaders, and activists that contested the clean distinction between democracy and authoritarian rule. Instead of describing pluralism, polyarchy, and liberalism, they called attention to undemocratic legacies, visible and unapologetically practiced on their streets.

That mainstream approaches have hardened into deep scholarly grooves has had consequences. Today, students learn about authoritarianism abroad. We are taught American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States is singular for its old constitution, institutional arrangements such as federalism, lack of feudalism, and weaker welfare state, not because we have a racial authoritarianism distinct from any other nation in the western world. When we do recognize authoritarian governance in the United States, it is a past relic, confined to the post-emancipation U.S. South where Black disenfranchisement, one-party rule, and explicit political violence reigned but was eventually overcome. And when scholars present evidence of democratic backsliding in contemporary U.S. politics, they ignore the expansion of racial repression, focusing instead on polarization, distrust in institutions, and extreme income inequality—all of which themselves derive from or are linked to racial authoritarianism.

Promising Frameworks

How can scholars study authoritarian modes of governance within democratic states? What can attending to racial authoritarianism teach us about the nature and evolution of U.S. democracy? Fortunately, there are promising theories on which we can build. A few scholars have pointed to the possibility that authoritarian practices co-exist within formally democratic states and institutions. King and Smith have argued that U.S. democracy was formed through the contestation of liberal egalitarian ideologies and illiberal, ascriptive hierarchy (7). Miller describes “racialized state failure” in which U.S. federalism and racism interact to create conditions comparable with those of failed states (such as extreme levels of homicide, state violence, and imprisonment) (8). Hanchard reminds us that the most celebrated democracies, back to ancient Athens, had the longest histories of racial slavery, subjugation, imperialism, police terror, and highly unequal labor regimes (9). He argues against typical stances in our field that tend to ignore the coexistence of democracy and ethnoracial hierarchy and that the former’s institutional development was shaped by the latter: “The seemingly straightforward genealogy that reduces democracy to its formal and performative elements ignores how coercion, empire, and forced labor have been deeply intertwined in democratic experiments in the Greek city-states and in contemporary societies” [(10), p. 68].

The literature on the relatively recent democratization of the United States also offers an opening. Scholars of U.S. and comparative political development have long understood one-party rule in the South before the Second Reconstruction (1945–1968) as authoritarian. Mickey has analyzed these “authoritarian enclaves,” that “created and regulated racially separate—and significantly unfree—civic spheres” [(10), p. 5]. Gibson has described subnational authoritarianism in the United States as compatible with, and enabled by, federal democratic institutions before the Second Reconstruction (11). However, scholars stop shy of theorizing the persistence or reemergence of authoritarian practices after the fall of territorial subnational authoritarianism in the 1960s.

Last, we can learn from scholars working outside the United States who have analyzed and provided theories to explain conditions that aid the endurance of coercive institutions in democracies, including the police, who further “stratify citizenship” along the dimensions of race, class, and geography by failing to protect citizens, serving instead the interests of the state and engaging in extralegal force (12). In countries with histories of military rule, norms of police violence endure in the transition to democracy. During dictatorships, even the middle classes are subject to state and police repression, but this falls away under democratic reforms; ironically, the rise of democracy helps concentrate police violence on poor and raced groups. Citizens being “outlaws” in Bolivia—unprotected by police and law but also subject to its capricious regulation—draws parallel to Black communities in the United States experiencing “legal estrangement” (13, 14). How might scholars better connect racial authoritarianism across democracies?

Unlike Latin American cases, where authoritarian practices predated and then survived democratic openings, in the United States, authoritarian policing tended to develop after democratic expansions. State power to surveil and confine citizens increased in response to a wave of democratization in both the First (1863–1877) and Second Reconstruction . On the heels of the abolition of slavery, new forms of repression evolved, including the leasing of Black convict labor; after the voting, civil rights, and fair housing acts of the 1960s, racially targeted policing practices grew on nearly every indicator (1). Scholars should account for whether and why police power and Black mass imprisonment have tended to grow in relation to periods of formal democratization.

Anemic, Distorted, Dire

The United States is now and has historically been characterized by high levels of state control of and violence toward racially subjugated groups alongside formal political freedom. Just as racial slavery defined U.S. democracy historically, racial authoritarianism continues to define the practices of our democracy. In the current political moment, recognition of the fraying of democratic institutions has collided with a movement for Black liberation from police atrocities. Scholars often do the work of making such a connection legible more broadly. But if scholars continue to keep the former separate from the latter by ignoring racial authoritarianism, we will continue to have an anemic and distorted conception of U.S. democracy, with potentially dire consequences for policy. It is perhaps unsurprising that the media has followed suit, presenting racialized policing as distinct from democratic backsliding, linked only by the executive’s rhetoric and actions.

Political scientists prepare and educate the next generation of civic leaders, teachers, policy-makers, pollsters, and change agents; by representing to them democracy in this way, we give them a half-truth, a flawed understanding of U.S. democracy, which may shrink policy agendas and political discourse more broadly. The analysis and description of democratic frameworks—and, for example, backsliding—influences the media and carries weight in policy circles (15). Thus, it is essential that political scientists continue to offer theories for understanding democracy with attention to its actual practice in heavily policed communities, so as not to squander an opportunity to improve it.

Source: Racial authoritarianism in US democracy

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Why the Coronavirus More Often Strikes Children of Color

2020/09/05 Leave a comment

Mainly linked to lower socio-economic status:

One of the notable features of the new coronavirus, evident early in the pandemic, was that it largely spared children. Some become severely ill, but deaths have been few, compared to adults.

But people of color have been disproportionately affected by Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, and recent studies have renewed concern about the susceptibility of children in these communities.

They are infected at higher rates than white children, and hospitalized at rates five to eight times that of white children. Children of color make up the overwhelming majority of those who develop a life-threatening complication called multisystem inflammatory syndrome, or MIS-C.

Of more than 180,000 Americans who have died of Covid-19, fewer than 100 are children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But children of color comprise the majority of those who have died of Covid-19.

The deaths include 41 Hispanic children, 24 Black children, 19 white children, three Asian-American children, three American Indian/Alaska Native children, and two multiracial children.

The unique vulnerabilities of these youngsters are coming to light even as the number of infections in children is rising and schools and parents around the country are grappling with nettlesome decisions about reopening safely.

The susceptibility of minority children to the disease is not unique to the United States. Black children hospitalized in the United Kingdom were more likely than whites to be transferred to critical care and to develop MIS-C, according to a study published last week in the journal BMJ.

“Children don’t exist in a vacuum,” said Dr. Monika K. Goyal, a pediatric emergency medicine specialist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington.

Among 1,000 children tested for Covid-19 at a site in Washington in March and April, nearly half of the Hispanic children and nearly one-third of the Black children were positive for the coronavirus, Dr. Goyal found in a recent study.

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In China’s Xinjiang, Forced Medication Accompanies Coronavirus Lockdown

2020/09/03 Leave a comment

News from China and the Uighurs gets worse and worse:

When police arrested the middle-aged Uighur woman at the height of China’s coronavirus outbreak, she was crammed into a cell with dozens of other women in a detention center.

There, she said, she was forced to drink a medicine that made her feel weak and nauseous, guards watching as she gulped. She and the others also had to strip naked once a week and cover their faces as guards hosed them and their cells down with disinfectant “like firemen,” she said.

“It was scalding,” recounted the woman by phone from Xinjiang, declining to be named out of fear of retribution. “My hands were ruined, my skin was peeling.”

The government in China’s far northwest Xinjiang region is resorting to draconian measures to combat the coronavirus, including physically locking residents in homes, imposing quarantines of more than 40 days and arresting those who do not comply. Furthermore, in what experts call a breach of medical ethics, some residents are being coerced into swallowing traditional Chinese medicine, according to government notices, social media posts and interviews with three people in quarantine in Xinjiang.

There is a lack of rigorous clinical data showing traditional Chinese medicine works against the virus, and one of the herbal remedies used in Xinjiang, Qingfei Paidu, includes ingredients banned in Germany, Switzerland, the U.S. and other countries for high levels of toxins and carcinogens.

The latest grueling lockdown, now in its 45th day, comes in response to 826 cases reported in Xinjiang since mid-July, China’s largest caseload since the initial outbreak. But the Xinjiang lockdown is especially striking because of its severity, and because there hasn’t been a single new case of local transmission in over a week.

Harsh lockdowns have been imposed elsewhere in China, most notably in Wuhan in Hubei province, where the virus was first detected. But though Wuhan grappled with over 50,000 cases and Hubei with 68,000 in all, many more than in Xinjiang, residents there weren’t forced to take traditional medicine and were generally allowed outdoors within their compounds for exercise or grocery deliveries.

The response to an outbreak of more than 300 cases in Beijing in early June was milder still, with a few select neighborhoods locked down for a few weeks. In contrast, more than half of Xinjiang’s 25 million people are under a lockdown that extends hundreds of miles from the center of the outbreak in the capital, Urumqi, according to an AP review of government notices and state media reports.

Even as Wuhan and the rest of China has mostly returned to ordinary life, Xinjiang’s lockdown is backed by a vast surveillance apparatus that has turned the region into a digital police state. Over the past three years, Xinjiang authorities have swept a million or more Uighurs, Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities into various forms of detention, including extrajudicial internment camps, under a widespread security crackdown.

After being detained for over a month, the Uighur woman was released and locked into her home. Conditions are now better, she told the AP, but she is still under lockdown, despite regular tests showing she is free of the virus.

Once a day, she says, community workers force traditional medicine in white unmarked bottles on her, saying she’ll be detained if she doesn’t drink them. The AP saw photos of the bottles, which match those in images from another Xinjiang resident and others circulating on Chinese social media.

Authorities say the measures taken are for the well-being of all residents, though they haven’t commented on why they are harsher than those taken elsewhere. The Chinese government has struggled for decades to control Xinjiang, at times clashing violently with many of the region’s native Uighurs, who resent Beijing’s heavy-handed rule.

“The Xinjiang Autonomous Region upheld the principle of people and life first….and guaranteed the safety and health of local people of all ethnic groups,” Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a press briefing Friday.

Xinjiang authorities can carry out the harsh measures, experts say, because of its lavishly funded security apparatus, which by some estimates deploys the most police per capita of anywhere on the planet.

“Xinjiang is a police state, so it’s basically martial law,” says Darren Byler, a researcher on the Uighurs at the University of Colorado. “They think Uighurs can’t really police themselves, they have to be forced to comply in order for a quarantine to be effective.”

Not all the recent outbreak measures in Xinjiang are targeted at the Uighurs and other largely Muslim minorities. Some are being enforced on China’s majority Han residents in Xinjiang as well, though they are generally spared the extrajudicial detention used against minorities. This month, thousands of Xinjiang residents took to social media to complain about what they called excessive measures against the virus in posts that are often censored, some with images of residents handcuffed to railings and front doors sealed with metal bars.

One Han Chinese woman with the last name of Wang posted photos of herself drinking traditional Chinese medicine in front of a medical worker in full protective gear.

“Why are you forcing us to drink medicine when we’re not sick!” she asked in a Aug. 18 post that was swiftly deleted. “Who will take responsibility if there’s problems after drinking so much medicine? Why don’t we even have the right to protect our own health?”

A few days later she simply wrote: “I’ve lost all hope. I cry when I think about it.”

After the heavy criticism, the authorities eased some restrictions last week, now allowing some residents to walk in their compounds, and a limited few to leave the region after a bureaucratic approval process.

Wang did not respond to a request for interviews. But her account is in line with many others posted on social media, as well as those interviewed by the AP.

One Han businessman working between Urumqi and Beijing told the AP he was put in quarantine in mid-July. Despite having taken coronavirus tests five times and testing negative each time, he said, the authorities still haven’t let him out – not for so much as a walk. When he’s complained about his condition online, he said, he’s had his posts deleted and been told to stay silent.

“The most terrible thing is silence,” he wrote on Chinese social media site Weibo in mid-August. “After a long silence, you will fall into the abyss of hopelessness.”

“I’ve been in this room for so long, I don’t remember how long. I just want to forget,” he wrote again, days later. “I’m writing out my feelings to reassure myself I still exist. I fear I’ll be forgotten by the world.”

“I’m falling apart,” he told the AP more recently, declining to be named out of fear of retribution.

He, too, is being forced to take Chinese traditional medicine, he said, including liquid from the same unmarked white bottles as the Uighur woman. He is also forced to take Lianhua Qingwen, a herbal remedy seized regularly by U.S. Customs and Border patrol for violating FDA laws by falsely claiming to be effective against COVID-19.

Since the start of the outbreak, the Chinese government has pushed traditional medicine on its population. The remedies are touted by President Xi Jinping, China’s nationalist, authoritarian leader, who has advocated a revival of traditional Chinese culture. Although some state-backed doctors say they have conducted trials showing the medicine works against the virus, no rigorous clinical data supporting that claim has been published in international scientific journals.

“None of these medicines have been scientifically proven to be effective and safe,” said Fang Shimin, a former biochemist and writer known for his investigations of scientific fraud in China who now lives in the United States. “It’s unethical to force people, sick or healthy, to take unproven medicines.”

When the virus first started spreading, thousands flooded pharmacies in Hubei province searching for traditional remedies after state media promoted their effectiveness against the virus. Packs of pills were tucked into care packages sent to Chinese workers and students overseas, some emblazoned with the Chinese flag, others reading: “The motherland will forever firmly back you up”.

But the new measures in Xinjiang forcing some residents to take the medicine is unprecedented, experts say. The government says that the participation rate in traditional Chinese medicine treatment in the region has “reached 100%”, according to a state media report. When asked about resident complaints that they were being forced to take Chinese medicine, one local official said it was being done “according to expert opinion.”

“We’re helping resolve the problems of ordinary people,” said Liu Haijiang, the head of Dabancheng district in Urumqi, “like getting their children to school, delivering them medicine or getting them a doctor.”

With Xi’s ascent, critics of Chinese traditional medicine have fallen silent. In April, an influential Hubei doctor, Yu Xiangdong, was removed from a hospital management position for questioning the efficacy of the remedies, an acquittance confirmed. A government notice online said Yu “openly published inappropriate remarks slandering the nation’s epidemic prevention policy and traditional Chinese medicine.”

In March, the World Health Organization removed guidance on its site saying that herbal remedies were not effective against the virus and could be harmful, saying it was “too broad”. And in May, the Beijing city government announced a draft law that would criminalize speech “defaming or slandering” traditional Chinese medicine. Now, the government is pushing traditional Chinese remedies as a treatment for COVID-19 overseas, sending pills and specialists to countries such as Iran, Italy, and the Philippines.

Other leaders have also spearheaded unproven and potentially risky remedies – notably U.S. President Donald Trump, who stumped for the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which can cause heart rhythm problems, despite no evidence that it’s effective against COVID-19. But China appears to be the first to force citizens – at least in Xinjiang – to take them.

The Chinese government’s push for traditional medicine is bolstering the fortunes of billionaires and padding state coffers. The family of Wu Yiling, the founder of the company that makes Lianhua Qingwen, has seen the value of their stake more than double in the past six months, netting them over a billion dollars. Also profiting: the Guangdong government, which owns a stake in Wu’s company.

“It’s a huge waste of money, these companies are making millions,” said a public health expert who works closely with the Chinese government, declining to be identified out of fear of retribution. “But then again – why not take it? There’s a placebo effect, it’s not that harmful. Why bother? There’s no point in fighting on this.”

Measures vary widely by city and neighborhood, and not all residents are taking the medication. The Uighur woman says that despite the threats against her, she’s flushing the liquid and pills down the toilet. A Han man whose parents are in Xinjiang told the AP that for them, the remedies are voluntary.

Though the measures are “extreme,” he says, they’re understandable.

“There’s no other way if the government wants to control this epidemic,” he said, declining to be named to avoid retribution. “We don’t want our outbreak to become like Europe or America.”

Source: In China’s Xinjiang, Forced Medication Accompanies Coronavirus Lockdown

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New policing technology may worsen inequality

2020/09/02 Leave a comment

Good discussion of the risks involved, although not convinced that a judicial enquiry is the best way to address the many policy issues involved:

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the right to equal protection under the law. It is a beautiful thing and a hallmark of a free democracy. Unfortunately, the freedom to live without discrimination remains an unrealized dream for many in Canada. Worsening this problem, the growing use of algorithmic policing technology in Canada poses a fast-approaching threat to equality rights that our justice system is ill-equipped to confront.

Systemic bias in Canada’s criminal justice system is so notorious that Canadian courts no longer require proof of its existence. Indigenous and Black communities are among the worst affected. The critical question is: what can be done? The right to equality under section 15 of Canada’s Charter, a largely forgotten right in the justice system, should serve to remind governments and law enforcement services that bold change is not merely an option. It is a constitutional imperative.

Most often, courts respond to discrimination in the justice system by granting remedies such as compensation, or exclusion of evidence from court proceedings. But these case-specific remedies seem to operate as pyrrhic victories, while systemic change remains elusive. A case-by-case approach to remedying rights violations is also costly for the public and burdensome to the very individuals wronged.

Making matters worse, Canadian police services are beginning to explore the use of algorithmic technologies that may exacerbate systemic discrimination.

As described in a recent report jointly published by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and International Human Rights Program (co-authored by myself), the widespread use of algorithmic policing technology would be deeply problematic. Predictive policing technology is used to attempt to forecast individuals or locations that are most likely to be involved in crimes that have not yet occurred (and may well never occur). Data sets (including data sets created by police) are fed into algorithms that are then supposed to produce “predictions” through machine-learning methods.

Given the continuing over-representation of Black and Indigenous individuals in policing data caused by over-policing and discrimination in the justice system, using such data to forecast potential crime risks perpetuating or amplifying existing inequality. As scholar Virginia Eubanks describes, policing algorithms can operate as “feedback loops of injustice.”

In the report, we call for moratoriums on these controversial technologies, and urge Ottawa to convene a judicial inquiry on the legality of repurposing police data for use in algorithms. Section 15 may well prohibit police decision-making that is guided by algorithmic predictions that are rooted in biased data.

A judicial inquiry is important because section 15 is under-utilized and rarely applied in Canadian courts. Its scope is not well understood. There are substantial costs and legal hurdles that must be overcome to bring a discrimination claim in court. Despite some recent signs of hope, in-court litigation is slow and has not ended the cyclical harm experienced by vulnerable groups.

In theory, the public does not need to wait for courts to painstakingly deliberate these problems over decades. Section 15 prohibits all government action taken in the criminal law enforcement system that has the adverse effect of disproportionately disadvantaging racialized and Indigenous communities (or other groups protected by section 15). The constitutional prohibition operates automatically and is in effect right now.

Section 15 also requires governments and police services to move beyond circular debates as to whether the justice system’s damage is caused by overt racism, historic racism, institutional bias, poverty, or depleted mental health-care systems. It is all of the above. But section 15 prohibits much more than overt racism. It prohibits all government activity that has the purpose or effect of disproportionately disadvantaging protected groups.

When the Charter was enacted in 1982, governments were given a three-year grace period to comply with section 15 in particular — a concession granted in recognition of the hard work and substantial legal reform that would be required by governments to fulfil their new obligations. Nearly 40 years later, it is time for the burden of that hard work to be taken up and completed.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2020/09/01/new-policing-technology-may-worsen-inequality.html

 

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Germany: Coronavirus protests increasing anti-Semitism

2020/09/02 Leave a comment

Of note:

The Central Council of Jews in Germany has warned of increased anti-Semitism due to the protests against coronavirus measures.

“For months, conspiracy theories with anti-Semitic tendencies have been deliberately stirred up in the coronavirus debate,” Council President Josef Schuster told German daily newspaper Bild.

“If, for example, the Rothschilds are blamed for the pandemic, then this is a synonym for Jews,” said Shuster.

He added that not everyone who protested in Berlin in August was anti-Semitic or racist, “but they walked among them.”

Two recent protests have drawn tens of thousands from across the country to Berlin. The demonstrations were mainly peaceful, but at one point, hundreds of demonstrators broke through a blockade in an attempt to storm the Reichstag building.

Police also see uptick

The police trade union, the GdP, said it has also seen a rise in radicalization of protesters against coronavirus protective measures.

“Since the first demonstrations, right-wing groups have influenced the corona protest movement,” GdP vice-chairman Jörg Radek told newspapers of the Funke Media Group. “The right-wingers are there and are about to completely take over the movement.”

Some protesters have used signs and flags associated with far-right politics, from the Reichskriegsflagge (Imperial War Flag) to costumes comparing themselves to Holocaust victims.

“Nobody can say they are just a follower now. Anyone who stays with the movement must ask themselves whether they want to join forces with right-wing extremists and combine personal concerns in the coronavirus crisis with the extremists’ anti-democratic goals,” said Radek.

Source: Germany: Coronavirus protests increasing anti-Semitism

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Dermatology Has a Problem With Skin Color

2020/09/01 Leave a comment

Another example of systemic racism in medicine:

In the spring, teenagers started showing up at doctors’ offices in droves with angry red and purple blisters on their fingers and toes. The latest unexpected feature of the coronavirus infection fascinated the public, and suddenly photographs of so-called Covid toes were everywhere on social media.

But almost all of the images depicted glossy pink lesions on white skin. Though people of color have been affected disproportionately by the pandemic, pictures of Covid toes on dark skin were curiously hard to find.

The problem isn’t unique to Covid toes or to social media. Dermatology, the medical specialty devoted to treating diseases of the skin, has a problem with brown and black skin. Though progress has been made in recent years, most textbooks that serve as road maps for diagnosing skin disorders often don’t include images of skin conditions as they appear on people of color.

That’s a glaring omission that can lead to misdiagnoses and unnecessary suffering, because many key characteristics of skin disorders — like red patches and purple blotches — may appear differently on people with different complexions, experts say.

“Pattern recognition is central to dermatology, and a lot of the pattern recognition is training your eye to recognize certain colors that trigger you to think of certain diseases,” said Dr. Jenna Lester, director of the skin of color program at the University of California, San Francisco.

“But the color in question is impacted by the surrounding color,” she said. “It can look different in darker skin. If you’re only trained to look at something in one color, you won’t recognize it in another color.”

Dr. Lester recently reviewed 130 images of coronavirus skin disorders published in medical journals and found they were overwhelmingly of white people.

As the coronavirus spread, dermatologists started an international registry to catalog examples of skin manifestations of Covid-19. The registry compiled more than 700 cases, but only 34 of disorders in Hispanic patients and 13 in Black patients were submitted.

It wasn’t until July that Dr. Roxana Daneshjou and her colleagues at Stanford University published some of the first pictures of Covid toes in nonwhite patients in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.

“We know for certain that if dark skin images are not well represented, skin doctors — but also other doctors who are not skin experts — are at a disadvantage for making a proper diagnosis,” said Dr. Hao Feng, an assistant professor of dermatology at the University of Connecticut.

Dr. Feng reported recently that the omissions are still pervasive in textbooks, where only 10 percent of images illustrate dermatologic diseases in dark skin. When pictures of Black patients were available, they most often described syphilis. He found that one digital resource, VisualDx, had a more diverse display of images: 28.5 percent represented dark skin.

“If you have no experience with this in people of color, it’s like saying you don’t know how to examine the lungs or the heart,” said Dr. Art Papier, a dermatologist who co-founded VisualDX.

All doctors observe the skin for clues to disease. Changes in the skin can be the first indication of life-threatening conditions like sepsis, cellulitis or severe drug reactions to medications.

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New StatsCan data ‘indispensable’ for understanding systemic anti-Black racism, says professor

2020/09/01 Leave a comment

Some good commentary by Malinda Smith, Afua Cooper and Carl James. My one note to Afua Cooper’s comment about Canadian Blacks being a voting block is that the very diversity of the Black community, more so than other communities, combined with their relative distribution across ridings, make it less simple than that:

Data released by Statistics Canada over the past year and a half could help to dispel the myth of a single, uniform Black population in Canada, and will be “indispensable” for researchers studying systemic racism in the country, say professors from three universities across the country.

Statistics Canada has released a spate of data on the Black population in Canada in stages since February, 2019, to honour the International Decade of Peoples of African Descent, which runs from 2015 to 2024. The studies span a 15-year period beginning in 2001 and use data from the census, the general social survey, academic studies, and more.

The data shows the diversity of the Black population is often “obscured” by anti-Black racism and stereotypes that lead to a view of a “single” Black community in Canada. That belief exacerbates the effects of systemic racism, and leads to policies and practices that fail to account for the unequal effect of certain policies or practices, say Canadian researchers.

“This data…is really important for us to see the implications of racism and stereotypes on the life chances and outcomes for the Black Canadian population. Regardless of background, educational achievement, who they are, the stereotype prevails,” said Malinda Smith, professor of political science at the University of Calgary and the vice-provost of equity, diversity, and inclusion at the school.

Prof. Smith served on an advisory council created by Statistics Canada to help interpret the data. The data, Prof. Smith continued, “is indispensable for understanding systemic racism. What it helps you to see is the disproportionate impact of a certain practice on specific groups.”

Both the “breadth” and “depth” of the Statistics Canada studies make them particularly valuable, said Afua Cooper, an historian, sociology professor at Dalhousie University, and the coauthor of the university’s report on Lord Dalhousie’s history on slavery and race. Prof. Cooper also served on the Statistics Canada advisory panel.

“I’m going ‘wow’ all the time,” Prof. Cooper said, adding that the studies have been incorporated into her teachings

The breadth of the new data allows for change, or lack of change, to be accurately observed over a longer period of time, said Carl James, professor of education and senior advisor on equity and representation at York University.

“It would be good to look at this again five years from now, so we can see if there have been changes. What accounts for those changes if there are changes? How can we know the extent to which issues we identify now have been addressed? We can only know that if the data exists,” said Prof. James, who was also a member of the panel.

Statistics Canada began releasing the first set of data during Black History Month in February 2019. Titled “Diversity of the Black population in Canada: An overview,” the  study focused primarily on demographic characteristics and sought to “highlight the diversity of the Black population in terms of their ethnic and cultural origins, places of birth and languages,” the document reads.

The studies collected data from people who self-identified as Black on Statistics Canada surveys.

The first study shows that the Black population in Canada doubled in size between 1996 and 2016, to 1.2-million people—roughly 3.5 per cent of the population. The Black population is about a decade younger, on average, than the population as a whole, with a median age of 30.  It also showed that just more than half of Black adults in Canada were born in another country—170 different countries in total.

The second release came a year later, also during Black History Month, on Feb. 25, 2020, a few weeks before COVID-19 lockdowns were imposed. It included two studies, both focused more on socioeconomic factors such as education, employment, and income.

The first study, titled “Canada’s Black population: Education, labour and resilience” said that “compared to the rest of the population, employment rates remain low and the prevalence of low-income is more common among the Black population.

“Despite these challenges, Black individuals have high rates of job satisfaction and high rates of resilience,” the study reads.

The study showed that from 2001 to 2016, the Black population had unemployment rates about four percentage points higher than the rest of the population. The finding was consistent for both men and women. Even when an individual had  postsecondary education, in 2016 the rate for the Black population was 9.2 per cent compared to 5.3 per cent in the rest of the population.

Prof. Smith wrote on Twitter that the resilience finding “does not surprise me. It might surprise those inclined toward deficit stereotypes. There’s a fierce optimism among the Black community in Canada.”

“There’s a lot of negative stereotypes of Black people as angry or violent. The findings of the resilience study was that Black people were more likely to be optimistic about the future. They thought about the potential for change,” Prof. Smith told The Hill Times.

“Black youth have desires to get into university, however they didn’t think it was going to happen because of discrimination and bias. But they have the highest aspirations. I don’t think many Canadians think of Black youth as having high aspirations for education,” she continued.

The study also said that “challenges facing the Black population may present themselves differently within specific groups” such as differences between immigrants and non-immigrants in terms of postsecondary education. Black women born in Canada were more likely than women in the rest of the population to get at least a bachelor’s degree, but Black immigrant women were significantly less likely than women in the rest of the population to get a postsecondary degree.

The second study focused on the socioeconomic outcomes for Black youth. It found that Black youth were as likely as other youth in the rest of the population to have a high school diploma, but that Black youth were less likely to have a postsecondary diplomas or degrees. It also found second- and third-generation Black youth were less likely than a first-generation Black child to have a postsecondary degree.

“The gap between postsecondary graduation rates for Black youth and other youth remained after accounting for differences in socioeconomic and family characteristics. Other factors not measured by the Census of Population could be the source of these differences,” the study reads.

“The education system was designed for particular kinds of students in particular ways. It was not designed in a way that would address, welcome, and make inclusive the experiences of Black students,” Prof. James said.

For Prof. James, the explanation lies in the fact that Black youth tend to have worse educational outcomes the longer their family has been in Canada.

“That means those who have gone through the education system and have been socialized in Canadian society do not do as well. That tells us something must be dealt if we’re going to address the issues of Black students,” he said.

The most recent Statistics Canada release came on Aug. 13, and looked at the changes in socioeconomic outcomes of the Black population by generation, immigrant status, sex, and country of origin compared to the rest of the Canadian population between 2001 and 2016. It provided many of the same findings as the previous studies but was disaggregated to include more information, such as immigrant status, on the same questions.

Taken together, Prof. Cooper said, these studies send a message to Canadian political leaders and gives them a base of evidence to work from.

“The 2016 census tells us that there’s 1.2-million Black people. That’s a voting bloc. In terms of political survival, you have to take the Black population seriously,” she said.

Despite the clear political incentive, Prof. Cooper said these data sets show that Canadian politicians and other institutions have a duty to “ensure that Black people may be brought into the Charter.”

“How are we going to make this data work and matter? It has to matter in the day-to-day material life of Black people in this country. [Statistics Canada] has built a wonderful document. What kind of commitments do the federal government or other Canadian institutions [have] to ensure that Black people may be brought into the Charter? In criminal justice, in health, in education, [which] we have not experienced,” she said.

“Is this just going to be another report that sits on the shelf? It has to matter in the lives of Black people,” said Prof. Cooper.

Source: New StatsCan data ‘indispensable’ for understanding systemic anti-Black racism, says professor

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Wells: Another farce on Bill Blair’s watch

2020/08/31 Leave a comment

Hard not to read this column by Paul Wells and not be discouraged. Why launch a process, led by a well-known expert, and then not provide the needed data and cooperate.

And even more shocking that Correctional Services Canada does not have any of the requested data on hand.

Fortunate that with immigration, IRCC has an abundance of data, and with diversity and representation, as does TBS, even if I sometimes complain and want more.

The GiC appointments index, on the other hand, bears some similarity to the issues raised in the case of Correctional Services Canada, in that there is no integrated spreadsheet of all appointments, only separate tables by organization, as I discovered when doing my baseline analysis in 2016 (Governor in Council Appointments – 2016 Baseline):

I’ve got my journalistic obsessions, Lord knows. But the notion that Bill Blair, the minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, is in way over his head was not something I brought to this game. It’s a learned response. Lately it’s kind of getting locked in.

First there was the federal government’s response to April’s mass murder in Nova Scotia, which amounted to three months of silence and stonewalling, a botched announcement of an “independent review” that would have no power in law to compel testimony, and a hasty retreat after three days because basically everyone in Nova Scotia was saying in the newspapers what hundreds of them had been trying to tell Blair in private for months.

The hallmarks of this farce were unfamiliar but, in hindsight, look characteristic.  A long period of bland assurance that all is well in hand. (“We’ll put the processes in place to make sure that those answers not only are obtained for Canadians, but done in a way which is trustworthy,” Blair told Maclean’s in June. “It’s not an easy thing to do, but that’s my job.” Nice touch, that last bit.) The belated realization that actually, freaking nothing is happening. And finally, the headline-driven climb-down, accompanied by assurances that the minister was on top of things all along.

Fast forward to the strange case of Anthony Doob, Emeritus Professor of criminology at the University of Toronto. He’s 77, he’s in the Order of Canada, he’s one of the most-cited criminologists in the field. Last summer Blair’s predecessor Ralph Goodale put Doob in charge of a distinguished panel to monitor changes to solitary confinement in Canada’s federal prisons.

The change was part of Bill C-83, and it amounted to replacing “segregation units,” where inmates could be holed up alone for up to 22 hours a day if they were deemed dangerous to other prisoners or if they were under investigation for disciplinary infraction, with “structured intervention units (SIUs),” where they could be kept for up to 20 hours a day. Under the new law, summarized with its limitations in this article, inmates would also be given regular “meaningful human contact” with a counsellor, elder or other helpful person.

It’s a very modest improvement to treatment that’s been found systematically damaging to inmates’ prospects of rehabilitation—and, in some cases, to their lives. A succession of courts have found disciplinary segregation violated inmates’ Charter rights. Finally a B.C. Supreme Court justice gave the feds a year to fix the system.

The stakes were high. Section B of the court’s decision begins with a long discussion of whether extended solitary confinement constitutes torture. The judge sounds inclined to conclude it does.

So Bill C-83 was the Trudeau government’s coerced response to a legal obligation, not a spontaneous decision for reform. But Goodale appointed Doob and seven colleagues because he wanted to make sure the reform was working. The SIU review panel “will play an essential role in ensuring that the new SIU system achieves our goal of humane and effective corrections,” Goodale said then. He told the panel to “give ongoing feedback” to Correctional Services Canada during its one-year mandate—and to “alert the Minister directly” about any “problems or concerns” with the new system.

On Tuesday of this week, Professor Doob announced the panel no longer exists and that it had achieved nothing because Correctional Services Canada gave it no usable information and Bill Blair did nothing to help when Doob tried to tell him what was happening.

Justin Ling has reported on this over at Vice, and it’s been reported elsewhere, but I want to emphasize the Kafkaesque absurdity of the situation.

Usually when this government screws up, its defenders look around for somebody they can designate an outsider, spoiler, saboteur or wrecker, somebody who doesn’t understand the Trudeau government’s beautiful mission and who seeks to discredit it. A Jody Wilson-Raybould, a Jesse Brown, a Postmedia. That’s hard in this case because every player in this drama was appointed by this government: Blair, CSC Commissioner Anne Kelly, Doob and his fellow panelists.

From Doob’s final report (“We have essentially not been able to examine any aspect of the SIUs during their first 7-8 months of operation”) and a telephone conversation I had with Doob on Friday, the short version of what happened is as follows.

In mid-November, the panel told CSC it would need a set of information on every inmate transferred to an SIU: the inmate’s case history, the reasons for transfer, the maximum number of hours in the SIU in a 24-hour period, the average number of hours of confinement per day over the length of the stay, and so on. It was a long list of indicators, but that’s why Doob sent the list to CSC before the SIUs even opened in late November, and it’s why he asked for the first batch of data to be sent in February. This would take time. Updates would follow every two months.

The information the panel requested was “all things that were administrative in nature,” Doob said. “It’s stuff that is almost certainly in their files somewhere.” If anything he asked for wasn’t available, he’d adjust. “I’ve been working with quantitative data for 50 years. This is the sort of thing that happens all the time. And you don’t worry about it.”

Correctional Services gave no hint that any of this would be a problem.

In mid-February Doob contacted the agency to begin figuring out how the data would be transmitted to the panel, how inmate confidentiality could be respected, and so on. This is three months after he told them what he wanted and five months after the responsible cabinet minister called his work “essential.” Doob’s contact at CSC said the agency hadn’t yet decided whether it would give the panel any of the information it had requested.

This turn of events “came to the panel as a complete surprise,” Doob wrote mildly in his final report. After some back-and-forth to insist on the importance of the panel’s request and gauge the agency’s willingness to block, he wrote to CSC Commissioner Anne Kelly in mid-March—and to Bill Blair at the end of March. From Kelly, he received no reply. Not until she saw her name cc’d on the complaint to Blair. That got a request from her for a meeting. But it took most of April for the meeting to happen. Finally in late May, CSC delivered data to Doob.

That data was unusable. Instead of a single spreadsheet with comparable indicators for every inmate, there were more than 900 spreadsheets. And Doob quickly discovered that depending on the criterion, the number of cases varied. Which meant that there was no way to compare among cases or between criteria. “It was a pile of crap,” he told me. Remember, this is a guy who’s spent decades in the field.

Doob’s dismayed response led to CSC, an organization with 18,000 employees, coughing up one (1) data analyst to work with him on cleaning up the data. His report is very complimentary about this data analyst, but after she’d worked for six weeks, he sent CSC a report advising the agency that he had no systematic analysis because he’d been given no useful data for most of his panel’s time on this earth.

CSC received that report on July 21. By an agreement Doob had reached with the agency when his panel was formed, it had three weeks to respond. After three weeks it hadn’t responded. After three weeks and six days, Doob received a letter from a senior deputy commissioner saying, in effect, sorry for the crummy data, we’re in the process of transferring our data collection from a platform that no longer works to one that doesn’t work yet. On the bright side, CSC promised monthly updates. On the downside, members of Doob’s panel were reaching the end of their one-year mandates, a couple at a time because they hadn’t even been appointed at the same time.

On Tuesday, Doob sent Ottawa reporters his final report with a cover-letter broadside, via the office of Kim Pate, a (Trudeau-appointed!) Ontario Senator with a long career in criminal-justice reform. “Our panel no longer exists,” he wrote. And it wasn’t just a problem that it wasn’t given the information it needed. It’s a problem because the agency that jails a huge prison population seems uninterested in how they’re doing. “CSC is telling us that it does not have systematic information on the operation of its Structured Intervention Units and apparently never made the gathering of this information a priority.”

Remember Bill Blair? Remember how he had nothing to say when Doob warned him through official channels in March? He did now, once Doob made his concerns public. “There have been news reports on the Correctional Services of Canada’s work with an Implementation Advisory Panel,” a statement from Blair’s office read.

“It is amusing to me that they don’t even acknowledge that these ‘news reports’ come from a report (from our panel) that CSC had for weeks,” Doob writes in an annotated version of Blair’s statement that Doob has been sending reporters.

The statement rehashes some of the background of the panel and adds: “We have dedicated extra resources to expedite this request.” Doob’s response: “CSC itself, for its own purposes, should want to know how the SIUs are operating. They shouldn’t have to be pushed into getting these data by an independent panel. They should want to know. Hence the implication that we are requiring them to dedicate ‘extra resources’ is, quite frankly, offensive.”

At midweek, Doob received a telephone call from Blair. “He said to me, ‘I’d like you to do this job,’” said Doob, who had written to Blair five months earlier warning that he was not being permitted to do his job.

Doob still thinks it’s worth knowing whether a court-mandated and hastily-developed reform is achieving its ends. He still thinks somebody should do the work he tried to do. Will he, now? “I told [Blair] that a necessary condition would be that I actually have the data in front of me,” he says. Promises of data later aren’t enough.

But that’s what Doob needs before he’ll even consider doing for Blair the work Goodale assigned him, the work he’s spent all of 2020 trying to do. “That’s the necessary condition. I don’t know what the sufficient conditions would be. If they even exist.”

A few concluding thoughts.

Once at a public event, I met a staffer from the Prime Minister’s Office I didn’t know yet. This person worked on files related to science and research policy, a longstanding preoccupation of mine. “When you tweet about science policy, I wind up working all weekend,” this person said. Sure, it was flattering, and I’m sure it wasn’t meant as a rigorously truthful or complete statement. But it also struck me as a little odd. I’m not smart enough to write anything on science policy that I haven’t heard from researchers. Why would my tweet be the thing that provokes overtime shifts? Why not the scientists?

I thought about this conversation when I learned that a report from a duly-constituted government-appointed panel isn’t enough to get the responsible minister involved in the file—but a headline in Vice is. Blair’s call was “a response to what’s in the media,” Doob told me, “not to what I’ve sent the government.”

This is what many people who work with this government tells me. Public servants, consultants, NGOs. Official channels are useless. Process is window dressing. This government consults but doesn’t listen, and whatever the plan is, it’s never as useful to know the plan as it is to have the personal phone numbers of a half-dozen senior staffers so you can text one of them and urge an improvised change of plans.

A couple of weeks ago Rob Silver, a supremely well-connected Liberal working for a mortgage firm, was in the news for his attempts to secure a legislative change that would benefit his company. Silver’s overtures were fruitless and I offer no opinion on their propriety, but he plainly knew what you need to do if you want to get something done in this town: Call Mike McNair, call Elder Marques, call Justin To. Write a letter to the minister? Don’t be old-fashioned.

When Anne Kelly became the Commissioner of Correctional Services Canada, Ralph Goodale wrote her a public mandate letter. “I encourage you to instil within CSC a culture of ongoing self-reflection,” he wrote, amusingly in hindsight. “This includes: regularly reviewing policies and operations to identify what works and change what does not… and welcoming constructive, good-faith critiques as indispensable drivers of progress.”

But in a government in which only a handful of staffers can actually make a decision, very few people in any department have the kind of autonomy Goodale was hoping Kelly would exercise. When the decision-making pipeline is no thicker than the PMO, and every particle of communication is the product of a chain involving dozens of staffers and bureaucrats reaching across government, nobody has the right to decide. So nobody is accountable for their decisions.

I don’t just mean that in the negative sense that nobody is sanctioned for a bad decision. I mean nobody has the authority to make a good decision. Things just happen. Or they just don’t. In a real sense, we’re not governed. We’re just given a constant runaround by people who, in many cases, would prefer not to be part of the immense machine delivering the runaround. Which is how a panel appointed to answer a basic question — has Canada stopped torturing people yet? — could work for a year and find no answers. And somehow it’s nobody’s fault. Not even Bill Blair’s, I guess.

Source: Another farce on Bill Blair’s watch

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Kay: Exploiting a Woman’s Deadly Fall to Smear Toronto’s Police

2020/08/31 Leave a comment

An interesting account of police training, the social work side of policing,  and an equally important discussion of the rush to apply a simple race lens rather than a more comprehensive look at the evidence and issues involved.

While it is necessary and legitimate to question police practices, both systemic and particular, and while any death related to policing is a human tragedy, one should neither assume that all incidents involving the police are racist or that none of them are:

A few years ago, when I did ride-alongs with Toronto-area police officers, I saw how much of their job involves dealing with mental-health and addiction issues. Most of the incidents these officers responded to were rooted in a troubled household, and the protagonists typically were well-known to the arriving officers: an autistic adult son whose outbursts overwhelmed aging parents, a wife fearful of an alcoholic husband, an agitated elderly man who’d become convinced his neighbours were spying on him through his devices. Most of these incidents required therapists as much as (or more than) police officers. But since the threat of violence hovered over all of them, at least in theory, it was the police who got the call. As I wrote at the time, the officers mostly played the role of social workers with a badge.

The stereotype of police as violent, poorly trained hotheads is sometimes borne out on YouTube, which now functions as a highlight reel for every bad apple wearing a uniform. But the reality—at least in Canada, where I live—is that new officers are typically post-secondary graduates who spend a lot of their time in training sessions. In 2016, I sat in on one such session at a police headquarters facility west of Toronto, where officers attend seminars conducted by experts from within the community, and then go through elaborate small-group role-playing scenarios led by a trained corps of actors who specialize in mimicking various crisis states. As I reported in a magazine article, the facility features a mock-up house with different rooms, so officers can perform their exercises in realistic domestic environments. When each role-playing scenario was completed, the officers were critiqued and interviewed in front of the entire group. Then the actor herself would give her impressions about how the officers’ behaviour made her feel.

I thought about all this following the real-life case of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, the 29-year-old black woman who fell to her death from a Toronto apartment balcony in May while seeking to evade police officers. During one role-playing session I observed four years ago, an actor seeking to evade officers under similar circumstances ran into a bathroom and locked the door. For five minutes, the officers awkwardly tried to coax her out, meeting with eventual success. In the analysis segment that followed, the supervising officer explained that it once was common practice for officers in such situations to simply bash open the door. But this kind of technique fell out of fashion years ago, since it led to unnecessary trauma and risk (for the officers as much as the bathroom occupant).

Some of the other acted exercises I observed included a paranoid schizophrenic crouching under a kitchen table, babbling fearfully as officers tried to soothe him, and a homeless woman who threatened to hurt herself with a knife if officers approached. While holding them at bay from her perch on a living-room sofa, the actress recited a backstory: She had nothing to live for because child services had taken away her kid, her only reason for hope. When she finally put away the knife, the officers walked forward to escort her away—at which point the supervisor ended the exercise and admonished them: “Yes, she put away that knife,” he said. “But how do you know that’s the only weapon she’s got? When you focus on the object, you forget about the person.”

There was also a memorable exercise involving a male actor who was threatening to jump from a window—which presents another grim point of analogy to the Korchinski-Paquet case. It is a mark of this man’s acting skill that, years after I watched his morbid star turn, I still remember the details of his narrative: He was a musician, suffering from depression, who was stuck pursuing a dead-end part-time position with a local orchestra.

Critically, he wasn’t the only actor who was part of this particular exercise. An older woman played the role of his mother, who was screaming non-stop as the officers arrived. Two pairs of officers did the exercise in succession, and their approaches were very different. The first pair—two men who’d recently joined the force—both approached the man and took turns imploring him to step down from the window. But they could barely make themselves heard over the screaming of the actor playing the mother role. Then came the second pair of officers, middle-aged women who’d apparently worked together on the beat. One of the women spoke to the man, while the other officer gently guided the mother off into another room. This was correct practice, the instructor said: You can’t make any progress if you’re just going to become bystanders to an ongoing drama. In many cases, you need to separate the family members before you can help them.

It’s the same principle I saw (and wrote about) when I observed two veteran officers show up at the (very real) home of a young couple who’d been fighting. The man, plainly troubled in all sorts of ways, had punched a hole in the wall, and the woman was frightened. One of the first things that happened upon our arrival was that the female officer—Constable Jaime Peach, who still serves on the Peel Police—took the man downstairs and interviewed him in the lobby. The other officer, Winston Fullinfaw (who was promoted to Staff Sergeant around the time I rode with him), interviewed the woman and learned about her complicated family situation. Had there been more adults in the household, it’s possible that more officers would have been dispatched: When it comes to complicated domestic disputes, sometimes there is no substitute for manpower. A beleaguered lone officer sometimes may become more prone to violence, since he is more likely to lose control of a situation and feel threatened.

This is something we should think about amid claims that society would be more peaceful if we simply got rid of the police, or starved it of funding. We should also think about how such police forces would respond to funding cuts. Training programs would be one of the first things to face the chopping block. Would that make anyone safer?

On May 27, the last day of Korchinski-Paquet’s life, a half-dozen Toronto Police Service officers and an EMS worker responded to a call from her family members, who’d told a 911 operator that there was a fight in their 24th-storey apartment. Because Ontario’s independent Special Investigations Unit (SIU) now has released its report on Korchinski-Paquet’s death, based on camera footage and numerous interviews, we know what happened next. As the Toronto Sun accurately reportedback in early June, Korchinski-Paquet asked to take a bathroom break before accompanying the officers downtown for mental-health treatment. She then barricaded a door, went onto her balcony, and slipped while trying to step onto another balcony, falling 24 floors to her death. Initial reports from family—which suggested that officers had murdered the woman by deliberately pushing her off the balcony—were completely false.

To state the obvious, the death of Korchinski-Paquet is a tragedy. And it would have compounded the tragedy to learn that her death was a racist act of homicide. One might therefore imagine that it would provide Torontonians with at least some meager solace to learn that their police force had acquitted itself without fault, and in a way that reflected the progressive, non-violent methods that are taught in training programs. But in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and the riots that followed, it has become a common claim among progressive media and politicians that Canada is every bit as racist as the United States. And in the absence of actual recent Canadian scenes of horror on par with the killing of Floyd, the case of Korchinski-Paquet has been cited as a substitute.

The Toronto Star, which never misses a chance to hustle racism claims to its readers, has run features with titles such as “Regis Korchinski-Paquet’s death and anti-Black violence in policing,” informing us “how systemic racism and anti-Black violence continues to play a huge role in Canada.” In a Star op-ed published in early June, opinion writer Noa Mendelsohn Aviv explicitly rejected the proposition that “in order to comment on Regis’s death, we must wait for the result of the Special Investigation Unit’s investigation because we do not yet have the facts and need to ascertain the truth.” (Even when the SIU report came out, the Star could not bear to abandon its anti-police posture, and so now is impugning the credibility of the SIU.) A Maclean’s writer described Korchinski-Paquet’s death as evidence that “Black lives” are “expendable.” The SIU investigation shows nothing of the kind, even if I doubt we will see any retractions.

Perhaps the most appalling response—because it comes from someone who purports to be seeking the job of Canadian prime minister—was from Jagmeet Singh, leader of Canada’s progressive New Democratic Party (NDP). On August 26, after the SIU released its report, Singh blithely claimed that Regis Korchinski-Paquet “died because of police intervention. She needed help and her life was taken instead. The SIU’s decision brings no justice to the family and it won’t prevent this from happening again.” Singh offered no theory as to why the SIU report was wrong, but simply delivered a flat-out blood libel against the officers who’d tried to help Korchinski-Paquet on May 27 (and who are likely traumatized by what happened, as any normal person would be). To repeat: This isn’t some college activist or aggrieved family member. It is the leader of a national Canadian political party who holds the balance of power in Canada’s minority Parliament.

Singh is in some ways a special case, because his NDP, having strayed so far from the unionized blue-collar base on which it was founded, now has been reduced to little more than a social-media outpost catering to college hashtaggers. For weeks, in 2017, he spouted conspiracist nonsense about the 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182, the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history. More recently, he casually denounced the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as a gang of bigots, and then was ejected from Parliament when he accused a fellow Parliamentarian of being racist because he didn’t go along with Singh’s slur. But though comprising an extreme example, Singh is hardly alone. Indeed, the presumption that all police are, by their nature, contaminated by racist malignancy, has become a casually recited starting point in debates about crime and policing.

In regard to the actual goal of reforming police methods—which is the thing that Singh and everyone else pretends to care about—it’s worth taking stock of the damage wrought by this irresponsible approach. About one Torontonian dies every year during encounters with police, this in a city of three-million people. That’s about one tenth the average annual tally for Minneapolis, a city that is one seventh the size of Toronto. One might think that a 70-fold difference in per-capita police-involved deaths might be seen as statistically significant, and be reasonably attributed to the massive investments in training and professionalism that I have personally witnessed in Canadian constabularies. If best practices in Toronto spread to American cities, lives truly could be saved. But instead, progressives such as Singh are far more interested in polluting Twitter with lazy lies and protest applause lines that erase any distinction between policing methods.

Information about the death of Korchinski-Paquet may be found on the web site of Ontario’s SIU. And if there are lessons to be gleaned about how to better respond to potentially violent family crises, our leaders should implement them. But so far, police critics seem far more interested in exploiting this poor woman’s death to advance their own ideological bona fides and defame innocent police officers than with preventing future tragedies.

Source: Exploiting a Woman’s Deadly Fall to Smear Toronto’s Police

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , , ,

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