Alex's Post

As fate would have it, I have been the first "poster" during the previous semester and am the final poster this year, so I have been lucky enough to start and end this year's blog. I hope I will do it justice.

We discussed in class several ways to minimize the a critical social justice issue from occurring: police brutality. It is unlikely that the problem will ever go away, because it is inherently tied in with someone's temper and hence can never be completely preventable, but we were able to come up with several changes that can help prevent further occurrences of brutality:
-identify under which circumstances instances of brutality most likely occur, allowing the NYPD to try different approaches to policing such as with domestic disturbances
-changing the Compstat system
-creating workshops for the police and the public to teach them how to better interact with one another
-trying to create, or reestablish the respect between police and high-crime neighborhoods
-increasing the relations between the police and high-crime neighborhoods to lessen the stress experienced by police when they go into the neighborhood, hopefully allowing things to not get out of hand due to tempers

Personally, while I understand one very important aspect to solving the problem is fully understanding it, I believe the key to decreasing police brutality is to increase how well an officer knows the neighborhood he or she is policing. If an officer grew up in the area they police, he or she will feel comfortable in the neighborhood, high-crime rate or not, or at least be more comfortable than other unfamiliar officers would be. Such a familiarity would decrease the chances brutality would occur because the officer would not be under excessive stress, the officer is more likely to know the people he or she interacts with--lessening the chances of brutality further--and the people would know the officer increasing the chances of cooperation so long as there is no personal animosity between them.

Has anyone came up with any more solutions?

Nadiya's post

Thank you everyone for the lively discussion! We discussed different ideas regarding genocide during our class, and I would like to address them in this post.

What constitutes genocide is controversial. Even though a legal definition exists, we still debate about its scope, typology, and conditions under which individuals may intervene and who may intervene. What if we include too many things in our definition? Will it dilute its meaning? Is genocide something new or something that has existed even before we gave it a name? For instance, Alex Hinton believes the former. He states that “Genocide… is a product of, not an aberration from, modern social life.”

During our class, we say many types of genocide, ranging from domestic violence to the mass killing of Native Americans. Chad made an excellent point by saying that the killing of the Native Americans is genocide. If this is true, why then do we cherish the perpetrators as our heroes? Andrew Jackson was a President of the United States. In 1812, he was the Hero of the Battle of New Orleans. Mr. Jackson promised the Native Americans to protect them. In fact, he was the one who made them marsh from Georgia to Oklahoma a few years later.

Mass killings are occurring all over the word. The UN Security Council (SC) is responsible for making the decision of intervention in the cases of genocide. But there are five permanent members of the SC (France, China, Russian Federation, the U. S., and the United Kingdom) who can veto this intervention. Why can one country exercise this power and others cannot? What gives them this privilege? Money? We mentioned that in some cases of genocide countries some countries might benefit from mass killings (e.g. France was selling weapons to the African countries when the Rwandan genocide was occurring). Again, is it all about money? If so, what is the price of people’s lives?

The next topic we discussed is how historical narratives are used in modern context, specifically in propaganda. Propaganda is used in order to manipulate collective minds. Politicians use national symbols (e.g. the U. S. flag) and events (e.g. the Ukrainian Famine) to influence the citizens. They use people for achieving their goals. They use symbols in order to cover goals that might be dangerous (e.g. a war). At the Nuremberg trials, Herman Goering, Hitler’s second in command, said

“Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."