Welcome and Five Great Posts
I am overwhelmed by the interest in this newsletter and by the several thousand new subscribers as the future of Twitter becomes uncertain. I wanted to send a brief welcome note to all the new people. This newsletter is where I share longer form thoughts about the role of the media in distorting how we think about safety and in manipulating the kinds of investments and interventions people support to address safety.
It will always be free—and you’re always welcome to donate to our work at Civil Rights Corps if you feel inclined. I also often feature some of my paintings because my grandma likes them and she’s the only person who reads all my posts. The one above I painted as a tribute to our long-running civil rights case against Ferguson. When we sued Ferguson after Michael Brown’s killing, the city averaged 3.6 arrest warrants per household, mostly for unpaid debts. Few places capture so viscerally and in the imaginations of so many people the actual functions of the criminal punishment bureaucracy. The painting is a mosaic of wine corks that friends and family collected for me over the years, and it is my depiction of the haunting memorial of flowers and other objects that the community erected on the spot where Michael Brown was killed by Ferguson police, which the police kept destroying only for it to be built again.
To welcome the new readers, here are five of my favorite prior posts. I suggest you peruse the rest of the posts if you like these ones.
My first post ever covered some very meaningful ground to me. It explored how the media manipulates what we think by manipulating what we think is urgent:
Another favorite was a guide for organizers, journalists, and engaged residents about things they could and should be asking their police chiefs and local government officials:
Another broadly useful one is a guide for readers and reporters alike for how they can write about crime and safety better and how they can more critically read those stories:
This piece was a reaction to the shocking way in which the New York Times covered the June primary elections:
This one was more typical of my regular posts, where I dissect specific practices in specific news stories to discuss broader problems with how the media talks about these issues:
If you like these and find these useful, please pass along these posts to a friend and encourage a friend or two to subscribe. With the future of twitter uncertain, this may become a more important space for discussing these issues.