Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • How Open Source Experts Identified the US Capitol Rioters

    Digital sleuths preserved a trove of evidence from the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by acting quickly to "scrape" and archive videos, images, and other data from social media. Investigative journalists from Bellingcat, the Toronto-based Citizen Lab, and Czech data archive Intelligence X were among those who responded before rioters, worried about criminal charges, began deleting posts. Crowdsourcing calls for assistance also produced a robust response from people anxious to aid law enforcement or debunk post-riot disinformation.

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  • ‘An Epiphany Moment' for Corporate Political Donors May Have Arrived

    IBM is one of only a handful of companies that doesn’t give money to political candidates. IBM does spend millions on lobbying and runs an in-house government relations team, but the company doesn't have a political action committee and restricts money from going to political candidates when it does donate to trade groups. IBM’s founder set the policy to avoid operating as a political organization and to disinvest from a corrupt system where money buys favorable legislation. IBM’s policies could serve as a model as companies pause their political donations due to acts of violence at the Capitol.

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  • Newark cops, with reform, didn't fire a single shot in 2020

    In 2020, six years after the Justice Department imposed a series of reforms on the Newark Police Department, Newark police officers have reduced their use of force so much that they didn't fire their guns at all in 2020, nor did the city pay any brutality-lawsuit settlements. Reforms in training, including de-escalation tactics, all backed by supportive leadership and extensive community outreach, turned a "rogue department" of brutality and racism into a more trusted, effective force.

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  • The scramble to archive Capitol insurrection footage before it disappears

    Several groups are preserving digital content related to the capital insurrection to ensure it is archived in case it gets deleted. A subreddit thread collected thousands of Tweets, Snapchats, and other videos to upload to the cloud, while the Woke Collective ensured the survival of livestreams by publishing them on its own YouTube and Twitch accounts. Efforts to crowdsource the identification of members of the mob include the Instagram account, @homegrownterrorists, and the journalism site, Bellingcat, which invited contributions to a publicly editable Google spreadsheet of links.

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  • Outside/In: Everybody Knows Somebody

    The story of the passage of the Violence Against Women Act starts with a young legal aide to Sen. Joe Biden who did not identify as a feminist and knew little about the issues, but whose methodical building of a coalition and a set of arguments led to the historic passage of the law in 1994. VAWA was the first U.S. federal law to address comprehensively the ancient problem of gender-based violence. A key provision, authorizing federal civil lawsuits by victims, helped many women for six years until the Supreme Court struck it down. The law's other effects, still ongoing, include funding victim-aid groups.

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  • ‘Slow Streets' Disrupted City Planning. What Comes Next?

    When city planners rushed early in the pandemic to close streets to automobile traffic in order to give residents a safe space to roam outdoors, they ended up learning lessons entirely apart from their original goals rooted in public health and traffic safety. In Durham, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Oakland, community groups pushed back at the cities' initial failures to consider the opinions of communities of color whose neighborhoods were affected by the changes. The pushback led to collaborations and modified plans that redefined the problems at issue and the ways to address them.

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  • How activists successfully shut down key pipeline projects in New York

    Landowners, residents, community leaders, and activist groups across New York state came together to halt several pipeline projects. By conducting research, holding public events, and building a multiracial coalition of people who would be the most impacted by a pipeline, they were able to pressure state officials to deny a water-quality permit for the Constitution pipeline that would carry fracked gas throughout the northeastern United States and Canada. While some pipeline projects are continuing in the Empire State, their successful model could be used in other states.

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  • What did and did not change in Tampa Bay after the 2020 protests

    In the Tampa Bay area, the 2020 protests for racial justice and against police brutality did not result in reduced funding for area police agencies. But the protests did help prompt numerous other policing reforms in multiple agencies. Four Pinellas County agencies adopted body cameras. Some departments, including the St. Petersburg police, introduced alternatives to police to respond to mental health crises. One agency will train its officers in active bystandership, to make the duty to intervene in police misconduct more of a reality. Tampa restricted its use of no-knock warrants.

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  • Five Days Without Cops: Could Brooklyn Policing Experiment be a ‘Model for the Future'?

    For 50 hours over five days, police and community members collaborated on the Brownsville Safety Alliance pilot project, which kept police officers away from a longtime crime hotspot so that community members could provide for police-free public safety. During the experiment, no one in the neighborhood called 911 to report a serious crime. Criminologists caution that the test does not prove that police can step away permanently. But residents say that after longstanding friction over policing, they and the police struck a new tone of cooperation in community-led crime prevention that they hope can continue.

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  • A Year of Intersex Victories

    To promote the need to end intersex surgery, an organization launched a multi-pronged campaign that raised awareness about the potentially damaging impacts of the practice. The group used social media, created a petition, and held protests outside of a local hospital – all of which resulted in the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago issuing an apology and declaring that "they will no longer be performing intersex surgeries unless absolutely medically necessary moving forward." Throughout the world, similar awareness efforts have also garnered positive outcomes.

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