Alternatives to Policing: Violence Interrupters Show Path Forward
In the current print edition of The Indypendent we feature violence interrupters from two Brooklyn-based organizations — Elite Learners and Man Up! — who are using their street cred and deep on-the-ground knowledge to prevent violent crimes before they happen. We can’t abolish the police overnight, but projects like this offer an intriguing glimpse of a world where the role of traditional policing is greatly reduced — and with better results.
Alternatives to Policing: These Unarmed Groups Stop Crimes Before It Starts
By Lydia Wei
During her summer internship, Lydia Wei also wrote about canners, subway buskers and Cop City protesters.
“Local journalism matters, especially free local journalism,” Lydia wrote at the end of her internship. For more of her insider’s glimpse of what it’s like to work at The Indy:
I Was Out in the Streets Reporting from the Start of My Internship
By Lydia Wei
Yes, I want to support The Indypendent!
Police not only can’t prevent most crimes before they happen, they sometimes arrest the wrong person afterward. This travesty is compounded when prosecutors seek to convict the falsely accused by suppressing evidence, threatening witnesses, relying on unreliable informants, and taking advantage of the mismatch in resources between the prosecution and the defendant’s legal counsel. This happened to Carl Miller, who was convicted of an infamous crime 42 years ago and is still fighting for his exoneration, as Theodore Hamm recounts in this powerful feature story.
Waiting for Exoneration
By Theodore Hamm
MORE RECENT COVERAGE
Fired Building Cleaners Demand New Owner Restore Their Jobs and Union Benefits
By Moses Jeanfrancois
‘You Can Smell the Poop:’ East Williamsburg Submerged During Widespread City Flooding
By Elias Guerra
Straight Talk About the Pain of Poverty
By Eleanor J. Bader
INDY RADIO UPDATE
On this week’s Indypendent News Hour, we spoke with Writers Guild of America strike captain J.T. Allen about his union’s big victory following a 148-day strike against the Hollywood studio bosses, and we discussed the greater context of the ongoing autoworkers’ strike with labor historian Toni Gilpin. In the second half of the show, we looked at an MTA pilot program that is making five bus routes free to an average of 44,000 passengers per day. We heard from passengers on one of those routes — the B60, which travels from Williamsburg to Canarsie — and then spoke with Socialist Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani of Queens who championed the initiative in the state legislature and wants to expand it to more bus routes in the future.
We’ll be back on the air again on Tuesday from 5-6 p.m. on WBAI-99.5 FM and streaming on wbai.org. To see our full archive of past shows, click here.