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The [Thursday] Papers"Mass surveillance society subjects us all to its gaze, but not equally so. Its power touches everyone, but its hand is heaviest in communities already disadvantaged by their poverty, race, religion, ethnicity, and immigration status. Technology and stealth allow government watchers to remain unobtrusive when they wish to be so, but their blunter tools - stop-and-frisk, suspicionless search, recruitment of snitches, compulsory questioning on intimate subjects - are conspicuous in the lives of those least empowered to object," Barton Gellman and Sam Adler-Bell write for The Century Foundation. To wit: Public and subsidized housing, no less than welfare, have historically been Fourth Amendment exclusion zones. In the early 1990s, as part of a self-described campaign against violent drug crime, police in Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and elsewhere commenced impromptu, warrantless raids of public housing complexes. Chicago's "Operation Clean Sweep" involved twelve steps, including "securing perimeter of building by placing police at all entrances and exits," "notifying the press that a sweep is under way," "inspecting each unit," and "enclosing the lobby to control access." Many Chicago housing residents had grown weary of gang violence; they welcomed the raids. Others felt their rights were under assault. In 1994, a federal court deemed "Clean Sweep" unconstitutional on Fourth Amendment grounds. Judge Wayne Anderson acknowledged in his ruling, "Many tenants within CHA housing, apparently convinced by sad experience that the larger community will not provide normal law enforcement services to them, are prepared to forgo their own constitutional rights." He was unwilling to permit the government to "suspend their neighbor's rights as well." From the Reader in 1990: "Operation Clean Sweep, the CHA's ballyhooed security program, did chase the gangbangers and drug dealers from the Prairie Courts high rise. But it also robbed innocent tenants of their freedom and dignity, and now it threatens to evict them from their homes." From the New York Times in 1989: "The crackdown, 'Operation Clean Sweep,' has won praise from Jack F. Kemp, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, who has urged housing officials in other cities to view the Chicago move as 'a model for the rest of the country.''' From the Chicago Tribune in 1988: "Street gangs and drug dealers could not stop the Chicago Housing Authority`s security crackdown. Now the American Civil Liberties Union is giving it a try. Here`s hoping the ACLU fails." See also: Clean Sweep Or Witch Hunt? * Back to the current-day Century Foundation Report: "As we have tried to demonstrate, arbitrary government intrusions in the terrains of East New York or Chicago's West Side are routinely accompanied by humiliation, physical force, the risk of a lethal encounter, or crushing financial pressure . . . "In Chicago, police have also mined Facebook and other social networks to identify individuals they judge to be at high risk of committing or becoming victims of gun violence. "Even if these correlations sometimes prove out, the concentration of law enforcement power in 'at risk' communities will reinforce the poisonous effects of historic biases. It aims to preempt bad acts by a small minority by subjecting all residents to aggressive law enforcement intrusions on the basis of their associations, demographics, and geography. "Policy makers should give careful thought to that punitive impact on the blameless majority, which is exactly akin to the central grievance of the colonists against King George. As noted above, New York's experiment with stop and frisk discovered firearms in 1.5 percent of its searches, many or most never used in a crime, at the cost of millions of searches that made up the other 98.5 percent. "There is considerable risk that machine learning techniques, when applied to a statistical record of unequal policing, will reproduce that bias in the guise of neutral science. Prejudice embedded in computer code will be an exceptionally difficult question for lay policy makers to judge." See also, from ProPublica: "Machine Bias: There's software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it's biased against blacks." - New on the Beachwood today . . . The Real Story Behind Katharine Graham And The Post * Life After Workplace Injury * Can Weed Save Football? - ChicagoGram I actually haven't posted this on the 'gram yet. But here it is anyway. - ChicagoTube The Magician and the Dragon - Epic Battle In Chicago. - BeachBook Chicago Refugee Resettlement Program Closing. * Me, a year ago: "Building a new high school in Englewood is really a way to close high schools in Englewood." * Remembering Our Exclusive Look Inside Chi-Town Rising. * What If We Talked Like TV Reporters All The Time? - TweetWood
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— Beachwood Reporter (@BeachwoodReport) December 21, 2017 *
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- The Beachwood Tip Line: Emporium. Posted on December 21, 2017 |
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