by
rjmaratea,
Feb 23, 2012, at 03:27 pm
Photo courtesy: Official Site of the City of Dayton, Ohio
Editor’s note: This post has been printed with permission of the author.
By Dr. Jamie Longazel
Last fall, the Rust Belt city of Dayton, Ohio approved the “Welcome Dayton Plan” — an attempt to foster the inclusion of immigrants and refugees in a city devastated by years of economic decline. Dayton’s plan comes at a time when two separate but not unrelated fires are blazing across the country: economic crisis and anti-immigrant sentiment.
We should certainly applaud Dayton’s willingness to embrace immigrants and refugees, especially at a time when many cities and states are passing sweeping anti-immigrant legislation. Yet for this countertrend to generate meaningful social change, it must be more than a redevelopment ploy. What we need is the formation of class-based alliances that are unwilling to submit to anti-immigrant scare tactics and eager to challenge the economic processes that have distressed these communities in the first place.
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by
rjmaratea,
Feb 3, 2012, at 04:50 pm
While leaving the gym this morning, I came across a dog that was left in a car with all of the windows sealed shut. Although it was by no means a hot morning in the southern New Mexico desert, the sun was nonetheless beating down directly on the car; by any indication, the panting dog inside was anything but comfortable. I decided to report the situation to the owner of the facility, only to be shrugged off with a flippant, “what do you want me to do about it?”
I ended up calling the police. Within minutes an officer responded to the scene and issued a citation to the couple that had left their dog in the car. Having two older sisters that are veterinarians, I realized that the animal, while not locked in the automobile for too long, may have suffered from minor heat stroke and should probably have been taken to the vet as a precautionary measure. The dog’s owners, however, merely cracked open the window and went back into the gym to resume their exercise routines.
Such treatment of pets, and animals more generally, seems far too common; and most likely, this dog’s owners probably did not think their actions equated to animal abuse any more than Archie Bunker thought that his routine slurs were racist. In many ways, this entire situation speaks to the larger question of whether animals actually have rights. Lyle Munro’s recent examination of the animal rights movement “in theory and practice” speaks to the fact that our understanding of the issue is empirically poor. In the article, he recommends a greater working partnership between research scholars and animal activists.
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by
rjmaratea,
Dec 19, 2011, at 05:58 pm
Editor’s note: This post has been reprinted with permission of the author. The original can be found on the University of Missouri-Kansas City Department of Criminal Justice and Criminolgy Blog: http://umkccjc.blogspot.com/2011/12/hate-crime-statistics-report-gender.html.
By Dr. Jessica Hodge
As someone who studies hate crimes and teaches a class about the subject, I find myself anticipating every year the release of the FBI’s
Hate Crime Statistics report.
[1] In this report, the FBI provides a variety of statistics involving the types of hate crime incidences that occurred during the previous year, and the number of hate crime offenders and victims that were involved in these offenses. The statistics included within this report are the numbers submitted to the FBI from police agencies across the country. While these numbers do provide a national picture of the number and types of hate crime offenses that took place during the previous year, the FBI’s report is far from accurate. For example, not all police agencies across the country regularly report statistics to the FBI, and even with the agencies that do report statistics to the FBI, not all of these will include their hate crime statistics. Another problem with the FBI’s numbers is that most crimes go unreported to law enforcement and thus are not included within the final total. This occurs for a variety of reasons, but in the context of hate crimes, victims are often reluctant to report incidences for fear of retaliation or further victimization by the offender(s) or by police officers. This is substantiated by the fact that advocacy groups, such as the Kansas City Anti-Violence Project,
[2] describe significantly higher numbers within their own reports since victims of hate crimes often feel more secure going to these organizations for assistance.
