real utopias

Image: Three girls at a juvenile facility in Racine, Wisconsin. Richard Ross How did we end up with millions behind bars and police armed like soldiers? How did we get here? The numbers are chillin...

Chief Superintendent Steve Hui Chun-tak, speaking at the police’s daily press conference, says protesters who dress up are "concealing their own identities as if they were going to a carnival".

When police in Ferguson, Missouri, released a video showing Michael Brown allegedly robbing a store and shoving around a clerk just hours before the unarmed teen was shot dead in a seemingly unrelated confrontation with an officer, many accused the department of engaging in deliberate character assassination — a tactic that some rights advocates say is commonly used against African-American victims of excessive force in an attempt to shift blame from perpetrators to victims.

By now, it’s well known that the National Security Agency is collecting troves of data about law-abiding Americans. But the NSA is not alone: A series of new reports show that state and local police have been busy collecting data on our daily activities as well — under questionable or nonexistent legal pretenses. These revelations about the extent of police snooping in the U.S. — and the lack of oversight over it — paint a disturbing picture for anyone who cares about civil liberties and privacy protection.