New Police Body Cam Data Exposes the True Scale of NYPD Violence Against Protesters

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New Police Body Cam Data Exposes the True Scale of NYPD Violence Against Protesters

BEATEN, BLINDED BY pepper spray, corralled like animals, and indiscriminately arrested for marching against police violence and racial injustice. Such was the fate hundreds of people suffered at the hands of New York Police Department (NYPD) officers in late May and early June of 2020, as thousands of people across the United States protested the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

Three years later, a class action lawsuit has resulted in the City of New York agreeing to pay $9,950 each to some 1,380 protesters as part of a settlement. Costing taxpayers more than $13 million, it’s the largest amount paid to protesters in US history, according to the legal team behind the class action suit.

Dozens of videos shared with WIRED show how the legal team built their case.

Among the videos we reviewed, an NYPD officer can be seen running down the sidewalk while pepper-spraying a person who’s standing against a building, entirely out of the officer’s way. In another video, an officer hits a protester with a car door while driving down the street. Another video shows a group of officers interlocking arms as one of them says, “Just like we fucking practiced.” The officers then charge a group of protesters before singling out a person on the sidewalk and beating them with batons. Taken together, the footage demonstrates widespread, systematic police misconduct during protests that spanned from May 28 to June 4, 2020, across multiple neighborhoods in New York City, according to the lawsuit.


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Sole emphasis on GDP growth is misguided policy

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The Tribune India

 Pritam Singh – Professor Emeritus, Oxford Brookes Business School, Oxford

The ‘Competitiveness Road Map for India@100’, recently released by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, charts out the plan for India to become an upper-middle-income country by 2047. It looks impressive at first glance. However, a closer reading of the theory underpinning this policy goal would show this to be seriously flawed.

When GDP was introduced as an economic concept, it was rightly assumed to be an annual measure of exchangeable goods and services in a country and not as a direct measure of the welfare of the people in the country. Even GDP per capita, which is a better measure than the gross GDP because it takes into account the population in the country, is a flawed measure of welfare. The major weakness of GDP per capita is that it ignores the distributional dimension of GDP

(https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/sole-emphasis-on-gdp-growth-is-misguided-policy-427619?fbclid=IwAR2iS7GQvN6C6IZ-OKgIY8i1yoV040vDv5qwd1F7W8pA9biQN_bYuSGjL0k)

Banks have given almost $7tn to fossil fuel firms since Paris deal, report reveals | Fossil fuels | The Guardian

The world’s big banks have handed nearly $7tn (£5.6tn) in funding to the fossil fuel industry since the Paris agreement to limit carbon emissions, according to research.

In 2016, after talks in Paris, 196 countries signed an agreement to limit global heating as a result of carbon emissions to at most 2C above preindustrial levels, with an ideal limit of 1.5C to prevent the worst impacts of a drastically changed climate.

Many countries have since promised to reduce carbon emissions, but the latest research shows private interests continued to funnel money to oil, gas and coal companies, which have used it to expand their operations.

(https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/13/banks-almost-7tn-fossil-fuel-firms-paris-deal-report)