MetroBridge GRS Course Aims to Help Reshape Community Policing in Lynn
Lynn, Mass., made headlines in summer 2020 when Thomas McGee, then the city’s mayor, allocated $25,000 to the community organization Lynn Racial Justice Coalition (LRJC) to study creating an alternative to policing. The study, commissioned following nationwide protests in response to police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, was to explore the logistics of establishing an unarmed crisis response team to address emergency situations—such as individuals experiencing mental health crises—that police officers aren’t trained to address.
Sociologist Jessica Simes’ New Book Explores the Toll of Mass Incarceration and Its Racial Disparities
Her discovery launched Simes, now a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of sociology, on an eight-year investigation into the shifting geography of mass incarceration—specifically in Massachusetts, but with the pattern being repeated across the country—and the consequences for neighborhoods and communities. Her findings—a data-driven story of American punishment and place mostly untold by scholars and researchers—are presented in her recent book, Punishing Places: The Geography of Mass Imprisonment (University of California Press, October 2021).
POV: Militarization of Policing Risks Turning US Cities into Battlespaces
During President Trump’s now-infamous walk to St. John’s Church for a photo op earlier this month, he was escorted by the Secretary of Defense and a four-star general in battle fatigues. National Guard troops and unmarked federal agents used tear gas, flash grenades, and rubber bullets to clear the president’s path of otherwise peaceful protestors. Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s recent calls for government actors to “dominate the battlespace” played out right in Lafayette Square, a grassy plaza adjacent to the White House in front of an Episcopal church. The message seemed clear: the full force of the US military stood in support of President Trump’s authoritarian pageantry.