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On the first day of the George Floyd trial, Eric Nelson, the attorney for Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin who kneeled on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes 46 seconds, disputed the independent…

A dream shared by many will finally come to fruition Sunday night when the April 4 anniversary of Dr. King’s murder serves as a springboard for reflection on King’s radical vision for a transformed…

Behavioral profiling, the latest trend in pre-emptive policing, has been used in America’s airport terminals since 2003 when the Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program was implemented by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) across the United States. This past May, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GOA) issued a report assessing the program’s effectiveness, how much validity was established before SPOT went nationwide, and any improvements that could be made. The results reveal serious flaws in the SPOT program’s makeup and implementation.

One of the more unexpected developments of Donald Trump’s presidency was his metamorphosis into an evangelical hero. American Christians didn’t just like his policies, they venerated him as a near…

A Texas City police officer, Cpl. Tom Robison, detained freelance photographer Lance Rosenfieldduring the first week of July 2010 for taking pictures of public signs. The law enforcement harassment of Mr. Rosenfield resembles hundreds of similar acts around the country, where taking pictures on public land in the bright of day is mistaken for “surveillance.”

We typically don’t go in for images of train wrecks or listicles at Religion Dispatches, but a recent Twitter thread by RedState publisher and notorious troll Erick Erickson prompts us to shake things…

Last week, Georgia Republicans passed a radical new law designed, as the New York Times put it, “to restrict voting access in the state.” The bill, which some have referred to as Jim Crow 2.0 for the…

On Monday this week, the New York Times announced that its investigation of NYPD “stop and frisk” practices from 2006 through 2010 found police stopped 52,000 people in a small eight-block predominantly black neighborhood called Brownsville. That’s one stop per year for every one of the neighborhood’s 14,000 residents. Police claim that almost half of those stops were prompted by “furtive action” of the resident.

In an expansion of the national Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative (SAR), law enforcement and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials recently tied both Amtrak and Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) into the initiative. Unfortunately, although SAR is meant to help intelligence analysts “connect the dots,” it has a major flaw: it encourages police to gather and share information about completely legal activities in which thousands of people engage every day.

On June 10, 2010, Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and his cosponsors Senator Thomas Carper (D-DE) and Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) introduced the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act. This bill, which would give the president power to restrict or shut down the Internet during emergencies, threatens civil liberties, including the right to free speech.