Long range acoustic devices (LRADs) have been previously implemented by police at protests throughout the world.
Thursday night at about 1am, at the intersection of 57 East and Madison Avenue in Manhattan—a populated area about four blocks from Columbus Circle—the NYPD used a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) to disperse about 100 protesters who were on the streets.
Continue reading Watch: NYPD uses military-grade sonic weapon on Eric Garner protesters
| By TOM HAYS & COLLEEN LONGNEW YORK (AP) — Eric Garner was overweight and in poor health. He was a nuisance to shop owners who complained about him selling untaxed cigarettes on the street. When police came to arrest him, he resisted. And if he could repeatedly say, “I can’t breathe,” it means he could breathe.
Continue reading Police: Chokehold Victim Eric Garner Complicit In Own Death
Watching Commissioner Bratton’s Face The Nation interview was a cringe-worthy experience. The commissioner rendered very opinionated answers, most of the time, very matter-of-factly and underhandedly. When you pressed your ear close to the TV speaker, you could tell that what was said so calmly wasn’t anything that should be taken as friendly to the people.
When asked how he felt when viewing the Garner choke-hold video, Bratton replied almost glibly:
“I don’t think that anybody watching that video isn’t disturbed by what they saw, that policing using involving use of force, it always looks awful. We have an expression: “lawful but awful…”
Continue reading Perspectives on the #EricGarner case: Chief Bratton, #NYPD, Protests, Police Union
Jared Bernstein
Yesterday, I published a report by myself and Ben Spielberg analyzing the Congressional Budget Office’s comprehensive data series on household income. Here we dive a bit deeper into some of the weeds, expanding on some of our findings.
One motivation for our report was to correct the record of those who claim that the trend of increasing income inequality is significantly reduced when accounting for government taxes and transfers. In fact, as we show, between 1979 and 2011, inequality measured by the Gini coefficient rose 24% based solely on market outcomes and by 22% based on CBO’s comprehensive, post-tax and transfer income data.
Continue reading Jared Bernstein: A deeper dive into the weeds of the CBO household income data
