By Seema Sadanandan, Organizer, ACLU of the Nation's Capital at 1:43pm
When Officer David Bailey grabbed a 10-year-old student by the back of his head and slammed it into the school cafeteria table, it is safe to say that student was not free to leave. On that afternoon, Bailey decided that his routine beat on the streets of Southeast D.C. extended into the hallways of Moten Elementary School.
Although Bailey was not a trained school resource officer contracted from the Metropolitan Police Department nor one of the three contract officers assigned to Moten at the time, his presence raised no red flags. Regular visits from the police in D.C. Public Schools had become ubiquitous.
The editorial page of the New York Times recently weighed in on an important but underappreciated aspect of the financial crisis: The systematic targeting of communities of color for risky and unfair loans. As the Timesput it:
Pricing discrimination — illegally charging minority customers more for loans and other services than similarly qualified whites are charged — is a longstanding problem. It grew to outrageous proportions during the bubble years. Studies by consumer advocates found that large numbers of minority borrowers who were eligible for affordable, traditional loans were routinely steered toward ruinously priced subprime loans that they would never be able to repay.
Rampant lending discrimination during the housing bubble exposed black and Latino communities to the harshest consequences of the economic crisis. The link between race, subprime lending, and devastating rates of foreclosure has been crystal clear for some time. Researches at Princeton have found, for example, that "the greater the degree of Hispanic and especially black segregation a metropolitan area exhibits, the higher the number and rate of foreclosures it experiences." That same study found that these disparities are due in large part to the disproportionate chance that minority borrowers will receive subprime loans.
By Will Matthews, ACLU of Northern California at 2:59pm
A malicious and factually inaccurate e-mail accusing the ACLU of not standing solidly on the side of religious liberty – an e-mail that was first circulated six years ago – has once again reared its ugly head and popped up in the e-mail inboxes of people across the country. In an effort to set the record straight, below are two myths the e-mail passes off as truth, followed by the facts which effectively debunk the e-mail’s claims.
By Dena Sher, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:50pm
Despite evidence to the contrary, the government continues to embrace a theory that adopting radical ideas is a first step toward terrorist violence. Based on this discredited model, "preventive" policies are being pursued, resulting in discrimination, suspicionless surveillance of entire communities, and selective law enforcement against belief communities and political activists. The following is the second installment in the ACLU blog series "Radically Wrong," which highlights counterterrorism policies that are not only ineffective, but also undermine our constitutional rights.
The ACLU today submitted comments to the FAA on the agency’s incorporation of privacy into its drone “test zones” program. (You can read our comments here.) Through the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, Congress has required the FAA to develop a plan for incorporating drones into the national airspace, including the establishment of six test sites where such integration can be tested. The FAA has faced delays on the establishment of the test sites, which the FAA has attributed to privacy issues that have, until now, gone unaddressed. So on February 14, 2013, the FAA published proposed privacy requirements for test site operators. The ACLU’s comments on those proposed requirements commend the FAA’s effort to focus on privacy impacts, while also advocating for more meaningful protections.
By Allie Bohm, Advocacy & Policy Strategist, ACLU at 2:08pm
As a visiting student at Barnard College years ago, I attended the transfer students’ orientation where each student was asked to explain why she had chosen Barnard. I’ll never forget one woman’s response: Well, I went to an all-girls elementary school and an all-girls middle school and an all-girls high school, and when I got to my co-ed college, I didn’t know how to function around the boys, so I decided to transfer to Barnard. Well, that’s one solution. I think I laughed at the time.
By Noa Yachot, Communication Strategist, ACLU at 2:31pm
A detailed and harrowing first-person narrative of a prisoner's experiences in Guantánamo is available to the public for the first time: Slate today published a three-part series of excerpts from The Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi. The excerpts were culled from a manuscript hundreds of pages in length, which Slahi provided his attorneys, a pro bono team of ACLU and other lawyers. After being classified for years, Slahi's memoirs – of arrest, rendition, torture, and imprisonment without charge or trial – are finally seeing the light of day, albeit with some redactions.
By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 11:56am
Recent days have seen significant concern about an unassuming bill with an unassuming name: the "Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011." The bill, H.R. 347, has been variously described as making the First Amendment illegal or criminalizing the Occupy protests.
The truth is more mundane, but the issues raised are still of major significance for the First Amendment.
