Salon.com > Radicalization

When drone strikes collide with stop-and-frisk

Sat, 11 May 2013 16:00:00 +0000

When NYPD officer Kha Dang took to the stand this week in the landmark federal trial challenging stop-and-frisk practices, he couldn't have known how revealing his testimony would be. Indeed, based on his comments, it's striking that that the police department would allow Dang -- a so-called stop-and-frisk "all star" for the large numbers of stops he carried out -- on the stand at all.

As Ryan Devereaux reported for the Guardian, in the third quarter of 2009 alone "Dang made a total of six arrests out of his 127 stops. He wrote one summons. He found contraband once. He never recovered any weapons and he only stopped people of color, primarily African Americans, 115 times to be exact. He never stopped a white person." Dang's record here is stunning enough alone. More telling still is the justifications he recounted to the court for making many of his stops, referring to repeated observation of individuals' general behavioral patterns, including "furtive movements" -- a vague policing phrase regularly stretched beyond the limits of all reasonableness. "We have a general idea of their behavior," Dang testified.

Radical-right wing groups reach all time high

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 16:35:00 +0000

While the more mainstream anti-government Tea Party movement faded from view as the GOP co-opted it in the past few years, the action has moved to the fringes, where the number of radical right-wing Patriot groups reached an all time high in 2012, according to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. What's more, it's the fourth year in a row that the record has been broken.

Conspiracy-minded Patriot groups first entered the public consciousness in the 1990s with the rise of the militia movement, and then the Oklahoma City bombing. Now, the SPLC is warning government officials that they see eerie similarities between the current era and that leading up to the bombing.

“As in the period before the Oklahoma City bombing, we now are seeing ominous threats from those who believe that the government is poised to take their guns,” the group's president, Richard Cohen, wrote in a letter sent Tuesday to Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

Youth and social networks are signs of radicalism

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 16:29:00 +0000

A U.S. Army list of warning signs for radicalization, obtained by Wired, gives the impression that it would be impossible to distinguish a normal U.S. solider from a budding young terror suspect.

Wired notes some particularly vague "Risk Factors for Radicalization" among soldiers:

“Youth,” which might be a difficult thing to mitigate against, unless the military wants to take former Pentagon official Rosa Brooks’ unorthodox recruitment advice. “Social Networks” is another, and it’s probably alarmingly coterminous with Youth. Still others: “Emotional Vulnerability,” “Personal Connection to a Grievance” and “Conflict at Work or at Home.”