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  • Interest in Community Police Watch Training Soars as Courses Go Online

    September 02, 2020 |

    San Francisco Public Press |

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    1500-3000 Words

    Response Location: United States, San Francisco, California

    Groups in the Bay Area that have successfully sought to have police disciplined for misconduct and won new police-accountability policies have turned their form of organized monitoring into a training platform for protesters nationwide. Responding to widespread Black Lives Matter protests, groups like Berkeley Copwatch and Wecopwatch use online education to teach hundreds of activists nationwide how to use videotape archives to systematically document abuses, and how to perform the work of legal observers at protests. Those activities are meant to act as deterrents to abuse.

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  • Courts rule

    August 20, 2020 |

    Boulder Weekly |

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    1500-3000 Words

    Response Location: United States, Massachusetts

    Almost half of U.S. states guarantee citizens’ rights to petition for ballot measures, but the coronavirus made gathering signatures in person infeasible. Massachusetts courts allowed electronic signatures, but other states have not approved virtual citizen initiative campaigns. Ballot initiatives allow citizens to advance solutions and enact structural changes without relying on support from elected officials. MA groups used DocuSign to gather 30,000 signatures to get a proposal for ranked choice voting on the ballot. Not all MA groups were able to quickly or successfully pivot to the e-signature process.

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  • This AI startup is tackling the coronavirus disinformation deluge

    August 14, 2020 |

    Wired |

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    800-1500 Words

    Response Location: United Kingdom

    Logically is a fact-checking app that combines AI technology and human research to assess and label the truthfulness of news articles. The app has about 20,000 users after a soft launch in the UK, with a full launch planned for late 2020. The AI technology, a feature that makes the app unique, tries to match news claims to other sources and then human researchers take over to make a final judgment. The app has been busy fact-checking the extensive Covid-19 related misinformation. Some aspects, like technology glitches and slow fact-checking responses from researchers, still need to be worked out.

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  • Here's a look at the security precautions in Colorado's mail-in ballot system

    August 13, 2020 |

    Colorado Politics |

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    800-1500 Words

    Response Location: United States, Colorado

    Colorado has fine-tuned an effective mail-in ballot protocol for statewide elections and has one of the highest voter turnouts. Ballots are stored in tamperproof locked rooms that are continuously monitored and voters’ signatures are compared by bipartisan election judges to signatures in a state database. An audit of election results is also conducted to ensure the accuracy of the results. Officials in other states are reaching out to learn more about Colorado’s system, which is well-suited to keeping voters safe during a pandemic, but a lot goes into the system’s success and it takes time to implement.

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  • Youngstown, Ohio, Lost Its Only Paper. A 'Zombie' News Site Wants To Fill The Void

    August 10, 2020 |

    NPR |

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    1500-3000 Words

    Response Location: United States, Youngstown, Ohio

    Mahoning Matters formed as a news site with laid-off veterans of the Youngstown Vindicator, filling part of a void in local accountability journalism in what is now the largest U.S. city without a seven-day print newspaper. Its funder, The Compass Experiment, set the startup on a three-year trajectory toward self-sustainability, an experiment that has yet to play out. Meantime, Compass successfully recruited a tiny band of Vindicator alumni, whose first stories have included unmasking the public official whose sexual misconduct compromised the management of a local police department.

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  • Giving Police Departments Money to Buy Body Cameras Will Never End Brutality

    July 26, 2020 |

    Truthout |

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    1500-3000 Words

    Response Location: United States, Milford, Delaware

    Body-worn cameras gained popularity as a potential check on police brutality, but for them to fulfill that purpose, numerous changes in typical public policies are needed, starting with public access to videos and independent oversight of camera policies. Research is inconclusive about whether cameras have changed police conduct, but they have discouraged citizen complaints about police. Other changes that could improve the use of cameras as a police-reform tool include constraining officers' discretion to record and better automated review of reams of stored data.

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  • Baltimore's Violence Interrupters Confront Shootings, the Coronavirus, and Corrupt Cops

    July 26, 2020 |

    The Intercept |

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    Over 3000 Words

    Response Location: United States, Baltimore, Maryland

    Baltimore’s Safe Streets program, which uses a public-health approach to stopping the spread of community gun violence, mediated more than 1,800 conflicts in 2019 and is credited with preventing homicides altogether in one neighborhood, despite the city’s overall violent year. Since the program’s launch in 2007, studies have shown it to be effective in its use of “credible messengers” whose street savvy can be deployed to “interrupt” retaliatory violence. But the Baltimore program also illustrates tensions between such community-based programs and the police, especially when the police are corrupt.

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  • How Your Local Election Clerk Is Fighting Global Disinformation

    July 20, 2020 |

    Stateline |

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    1500-3000 Words

    Response Location: United States

    Many entities are working with social media companies to flag election-related disinformation. The California Secretary of State emails voters about how to report false information so the state can flag it and the Arizona Secretary of State verifies official accounts with social media companies. In the private sector, the startup VineSite uses artificial intelligence to identify and flag false information and the nonprofit Mitre has an app used by 160 election officials to report social media disinformation. Officials have a good relationship with social media companies, but there is room for improvement.

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  • How a Coalition of New York Activists Revealed Police-Department Secrets

    July 17, 2020 |

    The New Yorker |

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    Over 3000 Words

    Response Location: United States, New York

    When New York legislators abolished a state law that had long shielded police officers’ disciplinary records from public scrutiny, they were not just responding to recent protests but also to activism over many years by reform advocates and families of victims of police violence. Long-running legal challenges had failed to pry the records loose. But activists – opposed by police unions and their allies – had used public testimony, publicity, and their families’ stories to lay the groundwork for changes that then came quickly after George Floyd’s death sparked nationwide protests of police brutality.

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  • The long quest to stop a ‘Sugar Daddy' judge

    July 14, 2020 |

    Reuters |

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    Over 3000 Words

    Response Location: United States, Arkansas

    Arkansas’ judicial oversight agency has the staffing and persistence to hold bad judges accountable in ways that counter a nationwide pattern of weak enforcement and judicial impunity. The Arkansas Judicial Discipline & Disability Commission has a staff that’s almost three times as large as the national per-judge average and it publicly disciplines judges more than twice the national rate. It is one of the few such agencies that will investigate anonymous complaints, frequently a barrier to starting judicial misconduct probes.

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