When we talk about non-state armed groups, we tend to talk about the headline-grabbers: major international organizations like al-Qaeda or robust recent national insurgencies like the FARC. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

…read about women and local violence.

When we talk about non-state armed groups, we tend to talk about the headline-grabbers: major international organizations like al-Qaeda or robust recent national insurgencies like the FARC. Those groups, however, form only a small minority of non-state armed groups. Far outnumbering them are what researchers have termed “community-based armed groups” — vigilante organizations, militias, gangs and others that are rooted in and focused on the politics of a particular locality. Community-based groups don’t perpetrate the most spectacular attacks, but it is the threat of their violence that most people navigate on a day-to-day basis. A new report [[link removed]] from Hilary Matfess delves into the roles that women play in these groups. She finds that women are influential in many community-based armed groups, but that their methods for exerting influence can vary widely between formal mechanisms like formal leadership within the groups and informal mechanisms, like shaping narratives by creating art about the groups.

Cow and Bull Protection

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) maintains a fleet of 10 MQ-9 Reaper drones that it flies around the US — another little piece of the Global War on Terror come home to roost. The agency claims that it is allowed to fly its drones within 100 miles of any port of entry into the US, including the border and international airports, but it generally doesn’t like to say where the drones actually do fly. A Gizmodo investigation sorted it out though, mapping [[link removed]] flight routes for seven of the CBP Reapers since last June.

The seven Reapers mapped have flown over 150 times in the last year, and they performed warrantless surveillance for a range of law enforcement agencies besides CBP. The first US citizen to be arrested with the help of drone footage was accused of cattle rustling.

Drone flights aren’t cheap. A Homeland Security inspector general report put the operating cost of CBP drones at a cool $12,555 of public funds per hour.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] When it’s a crime to question Michael Kors

The mix of jails, consumer capitalism and a pandemic create situations that are both nightmarish and fundamentally unsustainable. When Soy Sros, who works in a Cambodian factory making bags for Michael Kors and other brands, aired her concerns on Facebook that her company would lay people off as a result of COVID-19, her bosses called [[link removed]] the police. She was arrested, thrown in jail for two months and charged with crimes that could lead to a three-year prison sentence.

Cambodian jails and prisons are notoriously overcrowded, and experts have called them a “ticking time bomb” for the fast spread of COVID-19. Soy was forced to live in a cell with other people during her time in jail, vastly increasing her chances of contracting the virus.

Soy has been released awaiting trial, but there is no word yet on when or if she will be allowed to return to work. Perhaps her employers are worried that she will carry the virus back with her from the jail they sent her to, infecting others at the factory and ultimately forcing layoffs.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE When reform hasn’t worked: Part I

The recent history of police reform in America is not encouraging. Some reform measures aimed at reducing police violence in vogue today are direct retreads of reforms proposed in the past that failed to forestall police killings of black Americans that continue today. For example, the New York City police department banned the use of chokeholds by police officers in 1993. Yet in 2014, New Yorker Eric Garner was killed after a police officer put him in a chokehold, cutting off his breath. Six years after that, the New York State Assembly passed the Eric Garner Anti-Chokehold Act, which… bans chokeholds by police officers. For the next two editions of Deep Dive, we’ll be looking at recent research about whether and why efforts at police reform in the US have failed in the past.

One area of policing that draws special attention from anti-violence advocates is the stationing of police in schools, especially in schools where the students are majority black. A whole range of research shows that putting students in close contact with police generates negative outcomes for students, from making it more likely that school administrators will file criminal complaints about low-level student offenses to increasing numbers of suspensions and expulsions, which deprive students of class time. Despite that research, school districts continue expanding programs that bring police to schools, which are known as School Resource Officer (SRO) programs. Education policy scholars Erica Turner and Abigail Beneke wanted to find out why. [[link removed]]

To figure it out, Turner and Beneke conducted a case study of activism and policymaking decisions around SROs in a single midwestern city between 2015 and 2018, a timeframe that captured both the emerging academic consensus about the negative effects of SROs and the rise of the Movement for Black Lives in the US. The school district had long implemented SRO programs, but after community groups began exerting pressure on the school district to end the programs, the school board appointed a committee to examine how to reform, or possibly abolish, SRO programs in local schools.

Going through the testimony provided to the committee, Turner and Beneke found that different people saw SROs radically differently. One view, common among the young black and Southeast Asian activists who organized against the SRO programs, saw the officers as an ever-present threat to students of color. These students and former students told the committee about frequent harassment from SROs for things like speaking their native language or dressing “suspiciously.” In their framework, which Turner and Beneke called the “race radical view,” SROs formed the frontline of a school to prison pipeline, criminalizing normal behavior by students of color in ways that make them less likely to be able to remain in school and much more likely to be incarcerated.

Yet, their concerns fell on deaf ears. Many of the non-students who spoke to the committee saw the SROs in the opposite light — as “mentors and counselors to troubled students,” Turner and Beneke wrote. In this view, the SROs played a vital role in providing services to students managing trauma, for whom the school did not have adequate resources to offer counseling and other services. Turner and Beneke called this view the “neoliberal therapeutic view” because it emphasized the efficiency of outsourcing necessary emotional labor onto police officers, many of whom are black themselves and are among the few black adults students see on a daily basis in school. The SROs, this view argued, functioned as black role models and mentors to students who the school was otherwise unprepared to provide with role models and mentors.

In the end, the committee recommended few of the changes to SRO programs demanded by activists. Officers would still be in schools, wearing uniforms and wielding guns and the power to arrest students. SROs would be somewhat more accountable to school district leaders, but not to students or the community at large. Moreover, the committee went even further in the neoliberal therapeutic direction, giving SROs an even greater role in teaching and discipline to further access their perceived utility as mentors. The power of the neoliberal therapeutic narrative was so strong that there was no real discussion of whether that mentoring role could be filled any other way. In the 2018-2019 school year, the district paid $350,000 to employ four SROs.

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

Rupa Shenoy reported [[link removed]] on the sudden resignation of Mark Saunders, Toronto’s first black police chief. Saunders offered no clear reason for quitting, but many local observers see his departure as a result of pressure from activists working to end police violence against black Torontonians. Saunders was seen as being essentially pro-establishment, and the establishment’s record is bleak — a government study found that black people, who make up just 9% of Toronto’s population, made up 70% of those killed in police shootings in the city.

Kate Kizer highlighted [[link removed]] the ways that American policy has devalued black lives abroad as well as at home. The US has often sought to police the world as it polices its own streets, by combining paternalistic rhetoric about “saving” Afghans or “securing freedom” for Iraqis with violence that disproportionately harms people of color. The result of those wars, Kizer argues, also echoes the outcomes of American domestic policing, with American arms producing a hollow version of safety that requires unending violence to enforce.

Michael Fox spoke [[link removed]] to experts who were alarmed at the Brazilian government’s decision — now reversed due to a court order — to stop reporting COVID-19 data to the public. Last week, the Brazilian health ministry began releasing only daily data on new cases and deaths nationally from the past 24 hours, suspending its earlier practice of reporting overall infection rates, state-by-state details, and other useful data. The move produced large protests in 20 Brazilian cities, with marchers accusing Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro of trying to downplay his government’s failure to manage the virus. Brazil’s Supreme Court has since ordered the ministry to resume reporting the full data, and the ministry has complied.

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

It turns out that, legally [[link removed]], Space Force the co-equal branch of the United States military is viral marketing for Space Force the Steve Carell and John Malkovich sitcom.

The FBI’s unending quest to be the clueless grandparent of federal law enforcement is something to behold [[link removed]].

On one hand, it’s a one-in-seven chance. On the other hand, you can’t prove France didn’t test [[link removed]] their M51 ballistic missile on a Friday because of a meme [[link removed]].

A vexing vexillology problem [[link removed]] (but no reason not to do it anyway).

Some days you’re the person who captures a Mi-35 helicopter and takes your pickup truck on a joyride [[link removed]] while towing it around, and some days you’re the person who runs it [[link removed]] into a highway overpass.

A wise decision [[link removed]] (accompanied by a helpful chart at the end of the thread).

“Pardon me Mr. Drone, I suppose you didn’t hear me, I said [[link removed]] how are you, huh?” — the Air Force pilot in this [[link removed]]competition.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Follow The World: DONATE TO THE WORLD [[link removed]] Follow Inkstick: DONATE TO INKSTICK [[link removed]]

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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