Bangladesh’s prime minister just fled the country in a helicopter. Why?

“Hasina’s exit on an India-bound military helicopter came after crowds broke a curfew and stormed the prime minister’s residence in the capital Dhaka, following weeks of bloody protest.
The movement that ultimately toppled her started with students frustrated at their lack of job prospects and snowballed to include ordinary Bangladeshis facing increasingly tough economic conditions. But the jubilant scenes in the capital Dhaka come at great cost; around 300 people have been killed since the protests started in June, and the country’s future remains uncertain as a military-backed caretaker government steps in.

After a decade and a half in power, Hasina’s legacy is complicated. On the one hand, her government built modern infrastructure and improved development opportunities, especially for the poor. But she also increasingly cracked down on the press, as well as the opposition, and as time went on, many forms of dissent.

Army General Waker-uz-Zaman announced Monday that the military had taken control of the government; parliament is being dissolved, and the government is formulating a plan for fresh elections.

“The country is going through a revolutionary period,” Zaman said in a national television address. “We request you to have faith in the army of the country. Please don’t go back to the path of violence and please return to nonviolent and peaceful ways.”

Though a people-power movement has won a victory in driving Hasina out, the young democracy is entering a period of major uncertainty; indeed, what happens next for Bangladesh is anyone’s guess.”

https://www.vox.com/world-politics/365259/bangladesh-sheikh-hasina-awami-protests-bnp

Study: George Floyd Protests Did Not Cause Mass Exodus of Police Officers

“Did the social justice protests of 2020 cause a wave of police officers to leave the force? A recent study suggests the truth may not be so simple.
In May 2020, a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd by pinning him to the ground with his knee. When video of the encounter circulated online, the image of a white police officer nonchalantly kneeling atop a black man until he asphyxiated ignited a powder keg: Americans, stir-crazy from sheltering in place for the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic, took to the streets to protest police brutality, in some cases violently.

The conventional wisdom says that amid a nationwide spike in crime and mounting protests in which demonstrators proclaimed that “all cops are bastards,” many officers simply gave in.”

“A June 2021 survey from the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) found a 45 percent increase in retirements in 2020–2021 when compared to the previous year, as well as an 18 percent rise in resignations.

But a new study from Duke University law professor Ben Grunwald challenges this narrative. To assess the validity of the claim that officers resigned en masse after the 2020 protests, Grunwald collected data “on every job held by every officer in all 6,800 local law enforcement agencies across fifteen states that, together, cover half the U.S. population.” That database came to encompass over 972,000 officers between the mid-1990s and 2022, though for the study, he focused only on 2011–2021.

Grunwald found that “the increase in separations” among those agencies “after the summer of 2020 was smaller, later, less sudden, and possibly less pervasive than the retention-crisis narrative suggests.”

“Separations were nearly stable in 2020 compared to the year before,” he writes, while “in 2021, separations increased by historically large numbers but substantially less than the most widely reported figures for that period.” Specifically, separations in 2020 increased “by less than 1% compared to 2019” while they “rose far more in 2021, by 18% relative to 2019.” Grunwald notes that while this increase “was historically unusual, larger than any two-year period in the previous decade,” it is also much smaller than the 2021 PERF study suggested, and about one-third of it “can be explained by pre-existing trends that long predate the events of 2020.”

“All told, the cumulative effect on aggregate employment by the end of 2021 was just 1%,” Grunwald concludes. “This was not because of increased lateral mobility [officers transferring to another department or another role within law enforcement], as some have wondered. Rather, [the database] shows that the vast majority of excess separations in 2021 were by officers leaving the field, at least for a while.” He does acknowledge, though, that “a substantial minority of large departments [those with 500 or more officers] were meaningfully hit, losing over 5% of staff by the end of 2021.””

https://reason.com/2024/07/08/study-george-floyd-protests-did-not-cause-mass-exodus-of-police-officers/

What Kenya’s deadly protests are really about

“parliament passed a bill increasing taxes — including on a bevy of everyday essentials like cooking oil, diapers, and bread — on a population already suffering from inflation and high rates of unemployment.
As protests increased in size and intensity, even breaching parliament’s chambers, they were met with violent repression. Nearly two dozen people were killed Tuesday.

After initial recalcitrance, President William Ruto said Wednesday he would not sign the controversial bill. His decision was a victory for the protesters, but the saga leaves the country’s future more uncertain than ever, both economically and politically.”

“Kenya’s troubles are a distillation of the problems facing several dozen developing nations, crushed under debt”

“Complicating matters are Kenya’s other economic problems. Corruption, cronyism, financial mismanagement, and the vestiges of colonialism have hobbled Kenya’s once-impressive economic development and exacerbated class and ethnic inequalities.”

https://www.vox.com/world-politics/357857/kenya-protest-tax-ruto-loans-china-imf

Daniel Perry’s Pardon Makes a Mockery of Self-Defense

“It is absolutely true that the right to self-defense is vital. And to argue that Perry—who, prior to killing Foster at a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest, wrote that he wanted to “shoot the [protesters] in the front and push the pedal to the metal”—acted in self-defense is to make a total mockery of that right and those who’ve had to exercise it.”

“In July 2020, Perry ran a red light and drove into a crowd of protesters. That in and of itself, of course, is not enough to deduce that he was looking for a fight. His own statements prior to doing so, however, add a great deal of helpful context and show his frame of mind at the time. “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex,” he wrote on social media on May 31, 2020. Also in May, he threatened to a friend that he “might go to Dallas to shoot looters.” And then in mid-June, he sent that message about going to a protest, “shoot[ing] the ones in the front,” and then careening his car through the hubbub.
This was part of a pattern. Austin police detective William Bursley testified, for instance, that Perry searched on Safari for “protesters in Seattle gets shot,” “riot shootouts,” and “protests in Dallas live.” It is not hard to connect the dots between his searches and messages.

So what about that stand-your-ground defense Abbott alleges the jury nullified? Core to Perry’s case and trial was whether he reasonably feared for his life that July evening. Foster indeed had a rifle on him—because open carry is legal in Texas. The Second Amendment does not solely exist for people with conservative views. The big question then: Was Foster pointing the gun at Perry when he approached his vehicle? For the answer, we can go to Perry himself, who told law enforcement that he was not. “I believe he was going to aim at me,” he said. “I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.” But that is not a self-defense justification, as Perry cannot claim clairvoyance.

That the jury reached the conclusion they did is not a mystery, nor is it an outrage. What is outrageous, however, is that a governor who claims to care about law and order has made clear that his support for crime victims is at least in part conditional on having the “right” politics.”

https://reason.com/2024/05/17/daniel-perrys-pardon-makes-a-mockery-of-self-defense/

For Peaceful Campus Protests, Colleges Need Free Speech Principles

“One challenge of free speech advocacy is holding the line even when the speech in question is vile. Then you must make distinctions between acceptable forms of expression and those that violate the rights of others. That’s why it’s important to have clear, firm principles applied equally to all points of view. In the absence of clarity, you find yourself making things up as you go along—like too many institutions of higher learning at a moment of campus unrest.”

https://reason.com/2024/05/01/for-peaceful-campus-protests-colleges-need-free-speech-principles/

Economist Joseph Stiglitz on Pro-Palestine campus protests, Trump and rethinking freedom

Economist Joseph Stiglitz on Pro-Palestine campus protests, Trump and rethinking freedom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie5GX8e3FbA

What the backlash to student protests over Gaza is really about

What the backlash to student protests over Gaza is really about

https://www.vox.com/2024/4/24/24138333/columbia-student-protests-gaza-nyu-divest-faculty