One effect of the widespread protests against murders of black Americans by police has been much wider discussion of how policing systems actually work, and how they might be reformed, dismantled, or remade in the future. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

...watch a video on the history of police reform.

One effect of the widespread protests against murders of black Americans by police has been much wider discussion of how policing systems actually work, and how they might be reformed, dismantled, or remade in the future. There’s a common misperception [[link removed]] that the idea of radical policing reform is new, and that concepts like police abolition have no history or theoretical underpinning. In fact, there is a long history of people thinking about ways to promote public safety outside the methods currently in vogue. Stanford political scientist Hakeem Jefferson put together a video discussion [[link removed]] among a range of scholars on race, policing and criminal justice that offers a short introduction to both that history and cutting edge research on policing and criminal justice reform.

A family separation lie

In her defense of the Trump administration’s family separation program, then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristjen Nielsen told reporters in 2018 that immigrant families who arrived in the US through ports of entry — official border crossings — would not be separated unless the parents had committed a crime, children were determined to be at risk, or the government wasn’t sure the family was really a family. That was a lie, a newly released inspector general’s report [[link removed]] determines.

In 2018, Nielsen’s department separated dozens of families who entered the US through ports of entry and did not meet Nielsen’s conditions, keeping 40 children away from their parents for over a month, and one for over a year. Most of those children were under 14 years old.

In addition to Nielsen’s statement, a Customs and Border Patrol official told reporters in the midst of the separations that there had been only seven separations at ports of entry, which was also a lie.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Gun users as gun runners

A new report [[link removed]] from the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism investigates how the small arms trade helps finance non-state armed groups in the Middle East and North Africa. With outside weapons flooding conflict zones in both regions, there is both ample supply and ever-shifting demand in the market for small arms, which creates opportunities for groups to use the gun trade as a fundraising source.

In the Middle East, the report notes, guns are their own kind of currency between armed groups. They are an important resource, and can be bartered or even used as collateral to secure cash loans between armed groups.

In North Africa, non-state armed groups often have close relationships to smuggling networks, either as protectors of shipments or as smugglers themselves. For example, the leader of al-Mourabitoun, a subset of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, smuggled guns and cigarettes before expanding into insurgency.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE PROTEST POWER: PART II

Last week, we looked at some of the electoral effects of mass protest, but this week we’ll dig into research on one of the apparent mysteries of the past couple weeks: Do American police forces respond to protests against police killings by increasing their violence against civilians, or does it just seem that way because of the unending stream of videos [[link removed]] and reports [[link removed]] of police violence against protesters?

A paper [[link removed]] from last year by economists Jamein Cunningham and Rob Gillezeau in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology offers a jarring answer to that question. Cunningham and Gillezeau looked back at earlier waves of protest against police violence in the 1960s and 1970s, testing the effects of those actions on police killings in the years that followed.

They started by collecting a dataset of all the protests and riots (what Cunningham and Gillezeau call “racial uprisings”) by black Americans that took place in the US between 1964 and 1971, mapped down to the county level. Their data includes over 700 uprisings in that seven year period, which gives a sense of the level of upheaval in the US during that time. With the list of counties that experienced uprisings, and the year the first uprising in each county took place, in hand, Cunningham and Gillezeau could begin researching how those uprisings, often a direct result of police violence against civilians, affected subsequent police killings.

The effect, it turns out, was to increase those killings. In the first three years after a county experiences a racial uprising, police killings of both white and non-white civilians jump, and by similar amounts. The average county that had an uprising saw police kill between 2.2 and 2.4 more white people in the three years following the first uprising than in the average county that had no uprising, and the increase in killings of non-white people was between 1.4 and 3.1 in the same time frame.

That might be surprising, given that the uprisings themselves were largely the result not of generalized police violence, but of specifically anti-black police violence. If police are not just violent but racist in their violence, why would killings of white people spike alongside killings of non-white people? Well, the data doesn’t stop three years from the first uprising. When Cunningham and Gillezeau looked at a wider timescale — the 15 years from the first uprising in a county — they found that the effect of killings of white people subsided over time. In 15 years, an uprising predicted that police would kill an additional 3.8 to 6.6 white people beyond what would happen in an average county with no uprising, and the biggest effect was in the first three years. For non-white people, though, the effect of the uprising never really went away. In the 15 years following the first uprising, police in a post-uprising county killed an average of between 9 and 15.1 more non-white people than their brothers in blue from non-uprising counties.

Cunningham and Gillezeau make no claims about the mechanism that causes police killings to rise after uprisings, but it is clear from their data that expressing displeasure with police violence without limiting police ability to mete out further violence is likely to lead to more civilian death. As today’s protesters lay out their demands for public safety systems that severely curb police capabilities for violence, Cunningham and Gillezeau offer insight into the stakes of their struggle.

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Halima Gikandi examined [[link removed]] how protests against police violence in the United States are resonating in Kenya. Kenyan police killed over 100 people last year, and the government admits that police have killed at least 15 while enforcing the country’s COVID-19 curfew, although community groups allege the number is far higher. The government announced last week that six officers will be arrested for some of those killings, including the shooting of 13-year old Yasin Hussein Moyo. Despite the curfew, Kenyan’s protested outside the US Embassy in Nairobi, prompting the US ambassador to release a video calling the killing of George Floyd “abhorrent.”

Emma Claire Foley called [[link removed]] out people insinuating that violence associated with protests against killings by American police is the result of Russian interference. In addition to being baseless, it’s a charge that, Foley argued, obscures things that must be confronted. Police violence is a problem of America’s own making, and anger about it needs no foreign encouragement to boil over. To claim that domestic crises are the result of Cold War machinations three decades after the close of the Cold War constitutes willful ignorance of those crises.

Stephen Snyder spoke [[link removed]] to public health experts about the COVID-19 crisis in Yemen. A donor call co-organized by the UN and (ironically) Saudi Arabia raised just $1.35 billion in humanitarian aid to Yemen, half of what was pledged last year. That funding failure comes as COVID-19 is sweeping the country, overwhelming a public health infrastructure already severely weakened by years of war. Combatants in the Yemeni civil war, including Saudi Arabia, target health facilities, leaving civilians with nowhere to go to seek treatment for COVID-19 and other diseases. Officially, there are 482 COVID-19 cases in Yemen and 111 people have died from the virus, but observers believe the true numbers are far higher.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL PLAYED

Protesters last week came to some realizations about themselves [[link removed]], and about their relationship to technology [[link removed]] in a time of crisis.

You know a previously obscure constitutional amendment [[link removed]] is having a renaissance when it gets its own meme [[link removed]] account [[link removed]].

American security services spent the last week taking such legitimacy as they had with the various constituencies they purport to serve and lighting it on fire. Often, their methods of doing so were horrific, but sometimes it just becomes difficult to take police and soldiers seriously because they act like clowns (and not even one of the better-known clowns [[link removed]]). We dedicate the remainder of “Well played” this week to people endowed with the power to kill on the state’s behalf who make their jobs seem as ridiculous as they are terrifying:

The people who are obsessed [[link removed]] with maintaining their secret identities.

The people who are obsessed with maintaining their secret identities, and yet are also terrible [[link removed]] at it.

The people who know, amid protests against police treating black lives as expendable, what really [[link removed]] needs protecting.

The people who know that folks just trying to get home are the most dangerous [[link removed]] protesters of all.

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Critical State is written by Sam Ratner and is a collaboration between The World and Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX, BBC, and WGBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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