A 5-year-old steals and eats a grape at the grocery store. A teenager “rolls” past a stop sign without really stopping. An adult decides not to report cash earned from a gig on a tax return.
Policymakers
Twenty years ago, the country saw images of police officers heroically running into buildings that would soon come crashing down.
But over the past few years, people have seen uglier images of police officers abusing their power.
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 changed policing in America, according to William Terrill, professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University.
And now, he said, policing seems to be pivoting again.
A partnership between Arizona State University and the Tempe Police Department has yielded a curriculum designed to help officers keep contacts with the public peaceful and productive — and a Team Award from the department acknowledging the important collaboration.
The website shows rows of faces, many smiling, of Native American women and girls in Arizona who are gone — missing or murdered. No one has seen Jamie for over a year. Priscilla was kidnapped from her home and murdered in 1984. Mary worked at the Bright Angel Lodge at the Grand Canyon when she went missing in 1957.
The ongoing protests over racism in the United States have fueled conversations about the role of policing, including demands for officers to focus on “de-escalating” situations before they become violent.
William Terrill, a professor of criminology at Arizona State University, has studied police behavior and culture for more than 20 years, starting in the 1990s.
An Arizona State University associate professor of criminology and criminal justice will use a $200,000 National Science Foundation grant to assess risks of COVID-19 infection among incarcerated persons and those who work in correctional institutions.
“Defund the police” has been a popular rallying cry at recent protests across the nation.
Originated by the Black Lives Matter movement and police reform activists, the slogan was introduced to the public last week and is quickly picking up steam with politicians, city councils and mayors throughout the country.
The premature death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer caught on video May 25 raises questions as to how a call to investigate a person suspected of forgery can end up in tragedy.
In the graphic footage recorded by a bystander, a handcuffed Floyd is on the ground, face-down, and struggles to breathe as one of three officers holding him down forces his knee on Floyd’s neck for several minutes while ignoring pleas from the 46-year-old man and onlookers to stop.
In the United States, managing the tensions between the privileged, politically dominant classes of society and its politically, socially and economically disadvantaged classes, to which communities of color have disproportionately belonged, has always been a central concern of police and the criminal justice system. Some U.S. police agencies were explicitly established in the Civil War era to help preserve slavery and white supremacy.
America’s criminal justice system was already in the process of reforming, but the COVID-19 pandemic could make further progress uncertain, especially if crime jumps when the shutdown ends, according to a panel of prosecutors who spoke at an Arizona State University event on May 6.