Twenty-Five Years after Sa-I-Gu: Multiracial Politics in Times of Crisis

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Chang ◽  
Daniel Martinez HoSang ◽  
Soya Jung ◽  
Chandan Reddy ◽  
Alex Tom
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Critical Consciousness ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The State ◽  
Racial Capitalism

We chose to frame this conversation in terms of crisis: not only the state of permanent crisis created by racial capitalism and settler colonialism but also specific flashpoints like Sa-I-Gu [the Korean term for the April 1992 uprising in Los Angeles after the acquittal of the police officers involved in the Rodney King beating]. We want to look at the conditions surrounding these flashpoints and the responses to them that then shaped race consciousness and politics subsequently. Today we have no shortage of crisis, no shortage of flashpoints. And yet there is hope. Perhaps more than at any other time in my lifetime, there are opportunities to shift mass culture, at the very least to popularize and normalize a slightly more critical consciousness. So now I want to turn to my friends here to talk about crisis and multiracial politics. We’ll start with Sa-I-Gu and work forward to this moment and also to future possibilities.

Lifting the Veil

2014 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 43-55
Author(s):  
Scott Pittman
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
State Government ◽  
The State ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
National Archives ◽  
The Veil ◽  
Hiring And Firing ◽  
And Control ◽  
California Schools

The story of anti-communism in California schools is a tale well and often told. But few scholars have appreciated the important role played by private surveillance networks. This article examines how privately funded and run investigations shaped the state government’s pursuit of leftist educators. The previously-secret papers of Major General Ralph H. Van Deman, which were opened to researchers at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., only a few years ago, show that the general operated a private spy network out of San Diego and fed information to military, federal, and state government agencies. Moreover, he taught the state government’s chief anti-communist bureaucrat, Richard E. Combs, how to recruit informants and monitor and control subversives. The case of the suspicious death of one University of California, Los Angeles student – a student that the anti-communists claimed had been “scared to death” by the Reds – shows the extent of the collaboration between Combs and Van Deman. It further illustrates how they conspired to promote fear of communism, influence hiring and firing of University of California faculty, and punish those educators who did not support their project. Although it was rarely successful, Combs’ and Van Deman’s coordinated campaign reveals a story of public-private anticommunist collaboration in California that has been largely forgotten. Because Van Deman’s files are now finally open to researchers, Californians can gain a much more complete understanding of their state bureaucracy’s role in the Red Scare purges of California educators.

Unification and Its Discontents

2016 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-16
Author(s):  
Brian Kovalesky
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School District ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
The State ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
City Schools

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the height of protests and actions by civil rights activists around de facto school segregation in the Los Angeles area, the residents of a group of small cities just southeast of the City of Los Angeles fought to break away from the Los Angeles City Schools and create a new, independent school district—one that would help preserve racially segregated schools in the area. The “Four Cities” coalition was comprised of residents of the majority white, working-class cities of Vernon, Maywood, Huntington Park, and Bell—all of which had joined the Los Angeles City Schools in the 1920s and 1930s rather than continue to operate local districts. The coalition later expanded to include residents of the cities of South Gate, Cudahy, and some unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, although Vernon was eventually excluded. The Four Cities coalition petitioned for the new district in response to a planned merger of the Los Angeles City Schools—until this time comprised of separate elementary and high school districts—into the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The coalition's strategy was to utilize a provision of the district unification process that allowed citizens to petition for reconfiguration or redrawing of boundaries. Unification was encouraged by the California State Board of Education and legislature in order to combine the administrative functions of separate primary and secondary school districts—the dominant model up to this time—to better serve the state's rapidly growing population of children and their educational needs, and was being deliberated in communities across the state and throughout Los Angeles County. The debates at the time over school district unification in the Greater Los Angeles area, like the one over the Four Cities proposal, were inextricably tied to larger issues, such as taxation, control of community institutions, the size and role of state and county government, and racial segregation. At the same time that civil rights activists in the area and the state government alike were articulating a vision of public schools that was more inclusive and demanded larger-scale, consolidated administration, the unification process reveals an often-overlooked grassroots activism among residents of the majority white, working-class cities surrounding Los Angeles that put forward a vision of exclusionary, smaller-scale school districts based on notions of local control and what they termed “community identity.”

Settler Colonialism and the Revolutionary War

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 7-35
Author(s):  
Andrea Lynn Smith
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
The State ◽  
The Public ◽  
150Th Anniversary ◽  
End Point ◽  
Indian Land ◽  
Indian Relations ◽  
Major General

The centerpiece of New York State’s 150th anniversary of the Sullivan Expedition of 1779 was a pageant, the “Pageant of Decision.” Major General John Sullivan’s Revolutionary War expedition was designed to eliminate the threat posed by Iroquois allied with the British. It was a genocidal operation that involved the destruction of over forty Indian villages. This article explores the motivations and tactics of state officials as they endeavored to engage the public in this past in pageant form. The pageant was widely popular, and served the state in fixing the expedition as the end point in settler-Indian relations in New York, removing from view decades of expropriations of Indian land that occurred well after Sullivan’s troops left.

The Constitutional Principle of Accountability: A Study of Contemporary South African Case Law

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chuks Okpaluba
Keyword(s):  
Judicial Review ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Public Procurement ◽  
Case Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Constitutional Principle ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Law ◽  
Constitutional Right ◽  
The Many

‘Accountability’ is one of the democratic values entrenched in the Constitution of South Africa, 1996. It is a value recognised throughout the Constitution and imposed upon the law-making organs of state, the Executive, the Judiciary and all public functionaries. This constitutional imperative is given pride of place among the other founding values: equality before the law, the rule of law and the supremacy of the Constitution. This study therefore sets out to investigate how the courts have grappled with the interpretation and application of the principle of accountability, the starting point being the relationship between accountability and judicial review. Therefore, in the exercise of its judicial review power, a court may enquire whether the failure of a public functionary to comply with a constitutional duty of accountability renders the decision made illegal, irrational or unreasonable. One of the many facets of the principle of accountability upon which this article dwells is to ascertain how the courts have deployed that expression in making the state and its agencies liable for the delictual wrongs committed against an individual in vindication of a breach of the individual’s constitutional right in the course of performing a public duty. Here, accountability and breach of public duty; the liability of the state for detaining illegal immigrants contrary to the prescripts of the law; the vicarious liability of the state for the criminal acts of the police and other law-enforcement officers (as in police rape cases and misuse of official firearms by police officers), and the liability of the state for delictual conduct in the context of public procurement are discussed. Having carefully analysed the available case law, this article concludes that no public functionary can brush aside the duty of accountability wherever it is imposed without being in breach of a vital constitutional mandate. Further, it is the constitutional duty of the courts, when called upon, to declare such act or conduct an infringement of the Constitution.

Perrinites (Cephalopoda, Ammonoidea) in the Lower Permian of California: Paleontological Notes

1986 ◽  
Vol 60 (5) ◽  
pp. 1133-1133
Author(s):  
Edward C. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
First Record ◽  
The State ◽  
Coarse Grained ◽  
Lower Permian ◽  
Invertebrate Paleontology ◽  
Important Addition ◽  
Shasta County

A specimen of the ammonoid Perrinites Böse, 1919, was collected from the McCloud Limestone east of the summit of Tombstone Mountain, Shasta County, California. This is the first record of the genus in California, an important addition to the meager Permian cephalopod fauna of the state previously reported by Miller, Furnish, and Clark (1957) and Wilson (1984). It was found 1,100 feet (335 m) above the base of the formation in a coarse-grained limestone (Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, Invertebrate Paleontology Section locality 6184) within fusulinid zone H of Skinner and Wilde (1965), considered to be late early or early middle Leonardian in age.

Policing in divided societies: Officer inclusion, citizen cooperation, and crime prevention

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (5) ◽  
pp. 580-604
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Nanes
Keyword(s):  
Panel Data ◽  
Police Officer ◽  
Crime Prevention ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Public Safety ◽  
The State ◽  
Divided Societies ◽  
Police Station ◽  
Domestic Security

How does demographic inclusion in domestic security institutions affect security provision in divided societies? Police officers rely on information from citizens to identify problems and allocate resources efficiently. Where conflict along identity lines erodes trust between citizens and the state, the police face difficulty obtaining information, hindering their ability to provide public safety. I argue that inclusiveness in the police rank-and-file addresses this problem by fostering cooperation from previously excluded segments of society. I test this argument in Israel and its conflict between the Jewish majority and non-Jewish minority. First, a survey of 804 Israeli citizens shows that non-Jews who perceive the police as more inclusive are more willing to provide the police with information. I then use original panel data on police officer demographics at every police station in Israel over a six year period to show that increases in police inclusiveness are associated with decreases in crime.

scholarly journals F v MINISTER OF SAFETY AND SECURITY: Vicarious liability and state accountability for the criminal acts of police officers

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heidi Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Police Officers ◽  
The State ◽  
Constitutional Court ◽  
Vicarious Liability ◽  
State Accountability ◽  
Normative Basis ◽  
The Law

The Constitutional Court judgement in F v Minister of Safety and Securityis a ground-breaking judgement in two important respects: firstly, it finally does away with the fiction that an employee acts within the course and scope of her employment in the so-called deviation cases in the law of vicarious liability, and secondly it clarifies the normative basis for holding the state vicariously liable for the criminal acts of police officers. In this latter respect it significantly promotes state accountability for the criminal acts of police officers.

The evolution of policing in post-soviet Russia: Paternalism versus service in police. Officers’ understanding of their role

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 215-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Semukhina
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Early Period ◽  
The State ◽  
Retention Rates ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Institutional Identity ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
Second Period

This paper examines two interrelated issues: the role of police as an institution of Russian society and their role during the past 25 years. This research is based on a series of indepth interviews conducted by the author in 2014–2016 with former and current police officers in three Russian cities. The paper traces changes in the perceived institutional roles of the Russian police by comparing police officers’ views during three periods: early through mid-1990s, late-1990s through mid-2000s, and mid-2000s through 2010s. The study reports that, during the early period, Russian police were disfranchised from the state and this abandonment was a source of institutional identity crisis for law enforcement officers who remained on the job. This process was coupled with high levels of job dissatisfaction and the overall feeling of “abandonment” of police by the state.At the same time, it was during this post-Soviet period, when ideas of policing as a service to the society were introduced and sometimes entertained among the professional circles of police officers and other government officials. Furthermore, this period was marked by continuous, though often sporadic, institutional reforms and anti-corruption measures.In the second period, the Russian police were slowly engaging back into the state-building process, which caused increased job satisfaction and better retention rates. At the same time, the second period signified a decline of the “police as service” ideology and the comeback of paternalistic views on policing. During this time, the government’s efforts to reform police and anti-corruption measures became systemic and better organized. Also, in the second period, members of the civil society became more active in demanding public accountability and transparency from the Russian police.Finally, the modern period of police development presents a case in which the institutional identity of the Russian police has been clearly connected to the state’s capacity. This process is coupled with increased paternalistic views among police officers and a failure of “police as a service” doctrine. In such an environment, the efforts by a maturing civil society to demand public transparency and accountability of the police are often met with hostility and anger. The paper concludes that further development of the Russian police depends on the role that they will play within the modern Russian state.

“Truth Is the Keenest Weapon Ever Drawn”

2021 ◽  
Vol 98 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-73
Author(s):  
Maxwell Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Leisure Activities ◽  
City Council ◽  
Radio Station ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Methodist Church ◽  
Local Newspapers ◽  
The Many

In the 1920s and early 1930s, Robert P. Shuler, head of Trinity Methodist Church, rose to fame in Los Angeles as a tireless evangelical muckraker. Shuler, via Bob Shuler’s Magazine and his popular radio station KGEF, charged that many powerful Angelenos were involved in various vice pursuits—drinking, drug use, even prostitution—and that the city’s image as a moral, middle-class metropolis was just a facade. Using Shuler’s writings, Los Angeles City Council files, Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce minutes, and local newspapers, I argue that Shuler headed an alternative grassroots power structure in Los Angeles, founded during Prohibition. In those years, Shuler’s efforts found a receptive audience among the many midwestern migrants who had arrived in Los Angeles during previous decades. The city had once rigorously enforced alcohol restrictions, but in the 1920s, police officers and political leaders often protected illegal leisure activities. City leaders eventually retaliated against the preacher, and his power precipitously declined after the end of Prohibition, but for a time Shuler held a unique power to shape local public discourse. This essay reveals one of the battles over Los Angeles’s public image that shaped the city’s prewar rise.

Vagrant Figures

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sal Nicolazzo
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Law And Literature ◽  
Police Force ◽  
Police Legitimacy ◽  
Police Power ◽  
Racial Capitalism

This book, demonstrating the important role of eighteenth-century literary treatments of policing and vagrancy, offers a prehistory of police legitimacy in a period that predates the establishment of the modern police force. The book argues that narrative, textual, and rhetorical practices shaped not only police and legal activity of the period, but also public conceptions of police power. The author's research delves into law and literature on both sides of the Atlantic, tracking the centrality of vagrancy in establishing police power as a form of sovereignty crucial to settler colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism. The first book in several generations to address policing and vagrancy in the eighteenth-century, and the first in the field to center race and empire in its account of literary vagrancy, this work is a significant contribution to the field of eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies.

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