by Michael Fortino, Ph.D.
Marsy’s Law, also known as the “crime victim bill of rights” designed to protect victims from their attackers when the latter are no longer incarcerated, is used by Florida police as a shield to hide an officer’s identity from public access after a violent encounter ...
by Michael Fortino, Ph.D.
You may not remember the 1971 Stanford University Prison Experiment. Maybe you were not yet born, but the outcome of this infamous study depicted a reality where everyday people, when assigned the role of “jailer,” almost immediately morph into sadistic, power-hungry, conformists who manage to find ...
by Michael Fortino, Ph.D.
In the summer of 2020, a summer of discontent, a summer rife with pandemic lockdowns and street protests, the Georgia Legislature chose not to address the unrest and concerns of protesters but rather to double down on the side of law enforcement. They decided to give ...
by Michael Fortino, Ph.D.
Kevin Baker and Sean Washington, having served nearly 25 years on a double murder sentence and facing life in prison, never gave up hope because they each knew that eventually someone would believe that the evidence in their case was flawed — that someone was The ...
by Michael Fortino, Ph.D.
Just when we thought things could not get any worse, somehow they did. In the midst of a global pandemic, economic collapse, mass unemployment, and racial divide, we were exposed to a dark truth about police brutality—a truth we could not unsee because the weight of ...
by Michael Fortino, Ph.D.
On October 19, 1960, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested while taking part in the Atlanta Student Movement’s campaign of boycotts and sit-ins, in which he and others attempted to seek service at a whites-only dining room in the Rich’s Department Store in ...
by Michael Fortino, Ph.D.
Now that COVID-19 has brought about new public enforcement policies, a dystopian world where government agencies watch our every move may not be as far in the future as we might think. With the intent of observing crowd activities in public places (and private ones as ...
by Michael Fortino, Ph.D.
Hundreds of rogue joint state-federal task forces—accountable to no one, and acting as units of vigilante justice—continually violate the constitutional rights of individuals while hiding behind the aegis of “qualified immunity.”
The concept of the “joint task force” was first initiated by President Richard Nixon in ...
by Michael Fortino, Ph.D.
Like a scene out of Will Smith’s movie, Legend, one of the most iconic visual images during the New York City lockdown in the wake of COVID-19 is a photo of a lone policeman on horseback patrolling a deserted downtown street. Juxtaposed to that image ...
by Michael Fortino, Ph.D.
Rand Corporation, a prominent think tank known for its ability to forecast future trends, describes a post-COVID-19 era where police departments experience reduced, if not curtailed power, and are rendered nearly obsolete as a protectorate of the public from risk of a coronavirus outbreak.
Retired Police ...
