NATION article about police pushback post-Ferguson.

What those who declare a “Ferguson effect” want us to believe is that police need a “free hand” to control crime. Any attempts to end abusive, racist, or illegal police activity is problematic because it interferes with unfettered police power. This is a misunderstanding of the nature of effective policing. Decades of research shows that policing works best when communities support the police, feel respected by them, and accept their actions as legitimate. Second, it throws the Constitution under the bus. Practices like shooting fleeing suspects and stopping and frisking people without reasonable suspicion have been found unconstitutional. To defend these practices as not only necessary but appropriate flies in the face of our legal system and should call into question the loyalties of those who mimic them. Finally, the social costs of racist overpolicing are too high, regardless of effectiveness or legality. No society should be asked to accept the levels of arrest and incarceration being meted out against young people of color in the United States. It tears at the basic social fabric, and is one of the main drivers of increasing social and economic inequality.

The above passage is from the article "No, Protests Against Police Brutality Are Not Increasing Crime" in THE NATION:
http://www.thenation.com/article/there-is-absolutely-no-such-thing-as-the-ferguson-effect/

It's worth reading in the wake of media coverage of the tragic killings of police in Houston and Chicago intended to "balance" the coverage of police killing suspects in Ferguson, Baltimore, NYC, etc.

New poem: ALBUQUERQUE

the whole world watches

the beatings and shootings

the protests on Central Avenue

and as a result

the police get body cameras
which are turned off
when a young officer high-on-rage
decides to pummel someone
who hasn't defied him
and the officer, with every punch,
silently curses every suspect
nonviolent or otherwise
and the people in government
who don't Understand
and make him wear a body camera
and trust him to not do the same old things
in the same old ways
>
if I lived in Albuquerque,
I'd pray that,
from the ordinary-people Valley
to the moneyed Heights,
enough fellow citizens would say "enough"
and demand the APD wear body cameras
that officers could never ever turn off
in the course of what should be
workdays free of unnecessary force