WASHINGTON — Attorney General William P. Barr warned that communities and critics of policing must display more deference or risk losing protection, a stark admonition that underscored the Trump administration’s support for law enforcement amid an ongoing national conversation about police brutality against minorities. “They have to start showing, more than they do, the respect […]
Read More
I left a recent matinee of “Queen & Slim,” the mesmerizing new outlaw romance directed by Melina Matsoukas, astonished on two levels. The film itself kept me rapt; I cried through the end and left the theater with the dazed, disoriented feeling you get when a movie makes you momentarily forget everything else in your […]
Read More
This essay includes spoilers for the sixth episode of HBO’s “Watchmen.” You can think of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s “Watchmen” graphic novel series as an extended answer to a set of questions about the superhero as an idea and an ideal. What kind of society produces masked, costumed vigilantes? What kind of person puts […]
Read More
HONG KONG — The people of Hong Kong don’t get to choose their government. But that hasn’t stopped them from finding ways to express what they think about it. After months of voicing their concerns on the streets, on Sunday they took those to the polling booths. Well beyond any actual protesters who voted in […]
Read More
HONG KONG — Hong Kong’s district council election saw the pro-establishment camp have one of its biggest defeats since the territory returned to Chinese control 22 years ago, as dozens of seasoned politicians were replaced with a crop of newcomers, many of whom were inspired to run by the antigovernment protests. The district councils are […]
Read More
ST. LOUIS — Milton Green was in the driveway of his home on St. Louis’s North Side one night when he suddenly found the barrel of a gun pointed in his direction. Right away, his police training kicked in: He pulled a badge from beneath his T-shirt and grabbed ahold of his service weapon, a […]
Read More
We are being told of the evils of “cancel culture,” a new scourge that enforces purity, banishes dissent and squelches sober and reasoned debate. But cancel culture is not new. A brief accounting of the illustrious and venerable ranks of blocked and dragged Americans encompasses Sarah Good, Elijah Lovejoy, Ida B. Wells, Dalton Trumbo, Paul […]
Read More
An Alabama jury found a white police officer guilty of manslaughter on Friday in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man in Montgomery in 2016, the latest case in which an officer has been held to account for using lethal force. The officer, Aaron Cody Smith, 26, faced a murder charge, but the 12-person […]
Read More
I remember the first time I encountered God. It was 2002 and my mother, with three small children in tow, had just arrived at the doors of the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit in Atlanta, Ga. She was not seeking salvation from sin, but homelessness. For months we had been living in a domestic violence […]
Read More
The person I love and I were among the first members of the public to see the new film “Queen & Slim.” Early in September, we watched it alone on an upper floor of a nondescript office building in downtown San Francisco. It was a phenomenally isolating experience. We sat in a screening room accompanied […]
Read More
SANTIAGO, Chile — Brandon González, 19, marched with a group of protesters down the main artery of this Andean capital on Oct. 28 when riot police barricading the way to the presidential palace opened fire with tear gas and hardened rubber bullets. Mr. González, who had come from his hospital job equipped with bandages and […]
Read More
BEIJING — A former employee of Britain’s consulate in Hong Kong said on Wednesday that the Chinese police tortured and beat him, deprived him of sleep and hung him in a spread-eagled pose for hours as they sought information about what they alleged was foreign interference in the protests that have convulsed the city. In […]
Read More
Sofia B. Newman, an actress with about 2,500 Twitter followers, was returning home from work this month when she saw a woman who was selling churros at the Broadway Junction subway station in Brooklyn having a heated discussion with four police officers. Ms. Newman said she started recording the interaction with her phone so she […]
Read More
A shirtless 15-year-old boy with no arms and no legs was held facedown on the kitchen floor of his Arizona group home by a deputy more than twice his size, an eight-minute video released last week shows. The teenager was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct last week, which prompted him to release the video […]
Read More
ImageProtesters clashed with riot police at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in Sha Tin on Tuesday.Credit…Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times HONG KONG — It both comforts and depresses me, as a lawyer who has practiced for four decades, that every day over the past few months I have been besieged on […]
Read More
The City Commission in Grand Rapids, Mich., has agreed to pay a former Marine $190,000 after he was wrongfully detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for three days last year. The former Marine, Jilmar Ramos-Gomez, 28, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan filed complaints in April over the Grand Rapids Police Department’s involvement […]
Read More
Few things are more harrowing than watching a video of a police officer confront a person in emotional crisis armed with a knife or other similar object. The officer almost always points a gun at that person and yells, “Drop it!” If staring down the barrel of a gun isn’t enough to give a person […]
Read More
HONG KONG — Students on Hong Kong’s university campuses erected roadblocks and gathered bricks in preparation for battle with the police on Wednesday, as residents navigated severe transit disruptions and office workers brawled with officers in the heart of the financial district. This week’s disruptions are notable because they have strained the city’s infrastructure during […]
Read More
HONG KONG — What started in June with peaceful rallies in opposition to contentious legislation has devolved into a steady stream of mayhem, with some protesters embracing violent behaviors in response to brutal police tactics. The protesters and the Hong Kong government, backed by Beijing, appear to have intractable differences, and there have been few […]
Read More
BUSTED IN NEW YORKAnd Other EssaysBy Darryl Pinckney According to a rumor in New Orleans, an old family restaurant used to give a free ham to any police officer who killed a black person in the line of duty. The restaurant stopped doing this only in the 1980s, the story goes, when a black police […]
Read More
HONG KONG — On a Hong Kong street corner, a young protester found himself staring at the end of an angry police officer’s handgun. He was shot. Across town on an overpass, a middle-aged man argued with rowdy protesters, accusing them of lacking patriotism for the Chinese motherland. He was set on fire. By nightfall, […]
Read More
He lost his daughter to a fatal police shooting almost a month ago. Now, he’s gone, too. The father of Atatiana Jefferson, the black 28-year-old woman who was shot and killed by a white Fort Worth police officer responding to an open door call, died on Saturday, a family spokesman said. Ms. Jefferson’s father, Marquis […]
Read More
HONG KONG — Pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong have called for a general strike on Monday, seeking to disrupt the Asian financial center in the aftermath of the death of a student following a clash with the police and the arrest of six pro-democracy lawmakers. The organizers plan to start disrupting traffic at 7 a.m., […]
Read More