Crime

Akai Gurley was unarmed when he was shot dead by a NYPD officer

A grand jury will decide whether to indict the New York City police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black man in the stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project last month, the local prosecutor said Friday.

The news, reported by the Wall Street Journal, follows on the heels of protests over grand jury decisions not to indict police officers in the deaths of unarmed black men in New York City and Ferguson, Mo.

Akai Gurley, 28, was shot dead on Nov. 20 by rookie officer Peter Liang, who officials say discharged his weapon accidentally. Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson’s decision comes after conducting an investigation with the New York Police Department. The New York Daily News, citing unnamed sources, reports that Liang texted his union representative rather than calling for help as Gurley lay dying.

“I’m going to do it because it’s important to get to the bottom of what happened to Mr. Gurley, who was an innocent unarmed man who lost his life,” Thompson told the Journal of his decision to convene a grand jury. “So on behalf of the people of Brooklyn, we need to figure out and determine what exactly happened in that stairwell.”

[WSJ]

U.S. Navy officials are investigating the incident

U.S. Navy officials are investigating who secretly filmed female officers showering and changing clothes while aboard a submarine, according to a CNN report.

“Incidents that violate the trust of our sailors go against every core value we hold sacred in our naval service,” Navy Vice Admiral M.J. Connor wrote in a letter, according to CNN.

At least three female officers were videotaped over the course of a year aboard the USS Wyoming, and the recordings were sent to members of the crew, according to an incident report cited by CNN.

Read the full story from CNN.

'We have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced,' the magazine's managing editor says

The magazine that published a detailed account of a gang rape at the University of Virginia said Friday that it no longer considers the woman behind the story to be a reliable source.

Rolling Stone‘s vivid depiction of a gang rape suffered by a woman it called “Jackie” at a fraternity house drew national headlines and renewed conversations about sexual assault on college campuses. The magazine apologized to readers about the story Friday.

“In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced,” managing editor Will Dana wrote in a note to readers.

MORE: No police investigation yet in UVA rape case

The story has come under growing scrutiny after its author acknowledged not contacting the men accused of wrongdoing.

“We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account,” Dana wrote. “We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story.

MORE: The sexual assault crisis on American campuses

The story prompted UVA’s president to temporarily suspend fraternity activity and to promise an investigation, along with wider calls to reform the way sexual assault allegations are handled on campuses.

The fraternity in question, Phi Kappa Psi, released a statement Friday detailing what it said were a number of factual inaccuracies in the Rolling Stone account. And in a series of Twitter messages later Friday, Dana said the story was Rolling Stone‘s responsibility, not Jackie’s.

And in a statement, UVA President Teresa A. Sullivan said administrators were aware of the new reports. “The University remains first and foremost concerned with the care and support of our students and, especially, any survivor of sexual assault,” she said. “Our students, their safety, and their wellbeing, remain our top priority. Over the past two weeks, our community has been more focused than ever on one of the most difficult and critical issues facing higher education today: sexual violence on college campuses. Today’s news must not alter this focus.”

Read next: Questioning an Accuser’s Story: A Rape Victim Group Weighs In

The 43-year-old former rapper says he is not the person he once was

Thousands took the streets and chanted Garner's last words: "I can't breathe"

This article originally appeared on Patheos.

10.2 million people sit in prison cells today around the world– and almost half of them are right here, in the United States. While in the US we like to boast about being “#1″ we forget that we’re actually #1 at a lot of things that we probably shouldn’t be proud of – and having the highest incarceration rate in the world is one of them.

And, it’s not just our incarceration numbers that should be a shock to our system, but the recidivism rate that we should find most concerning. In a study from 2005-2010, researchers found that 3 out of 4 former prisoners are re-arrested within 5 years after being released from prison.

Simply put, the way we approach crime and punishment doesn’t work.

I remember back to my days listening to talk radio and the initial chatter of prison overcrowding once we started to realize that our prisons were beginning to bulge at the seams. I distinctly remember the solution one commentator had: build more prisons.

Unfortunately, the approach of building more prisons and punishing more harshly (aka, mandatory sentencing, three strikes laws, the war on drugs) hasn’t worked and has only led to more of the same. In fact, some of our harsh approach to crime and punishment has actually led to more crime as nonviolent offenders (such as folks going to jail for marijuana offenses), come out on the other side of prison more “hardened” than they were to begin with. Throw into the mix the huge vocational barriers someone with a criminal record faces, and our situation is ripe for failure– one that actively produces more crime and brokenness, not less.

Actually, it’s beyond ripe for failure – it has failed. Past tense.

The traditional American approach to crime and punishment doesn’t work.

This past week I’ve been reading a great new book by Derek Flood called Disarming Scripture: Cherry-Picking Liberals, Violence-Loving Conservatives, and really connected with his thoughts in a section called A Practical Guide To Enemy-Love. In regards to our failed approach to crime and punishment he writes:

We commonly think of justice in terms of retribution. When we speak of a person “getting justice ” we mean getting punishment. Love of enemies challenges this understanding of justice and asks: what if justice was not about punishing and hurting, but about mending and making things right again? What if justice was not about deterring through negative consequences, but about doing something good in order to reverse those hurtful dynamics? What if real justice was about repairing broken lives?”

I’ve certainly spoken of this difference between restorative justice and punitive justice both here on the blog and in my book, Undiluted, but Flood brings up some really good additional thoughts on the matter. He goes on to say:

“The sad fact is that our current prison system has become a factory for hardening criminals rather than healing them. Instead of learning empathy and how to manage their impulses and emotions, the brutal culture of prison life teaches inmates that one must be brutally violent in order to survive. Because of these patterns learned in prison, the alarming repeat offense rate is sadly not all that surprising. Locking someone up in the hell of prison life naturally breeds violence, not reform repentance. People do not learn empathy by being shamed and dehumanized. Retribution gains popular support by appealing to our most primitive impulses, but in the end results in a broken system that perpetuates hurt instead and cycles of violence.”

In the book, Flood cites a successful program that clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of a restorative justice approach over a punitive approach: the RSVP program run by the San Francisco’s Sheriff’s Department. In this alternative program, they took some of their most violent offenders and tried a restorative approach instead of just locking them up and throwing away the key. This program that taught them communal living, personal dignity, development of empathy for others, and how to manage their own emotions, had some results many might find surprising: an 80% reduction in violent recidivism, and the total elimination of assault on prison officials (pg. 185).

The effectiveness of restorative justice compared to punitive justice is simply amazing. But, that really shouldn’t be a shock to us. Why wouldn’t restoring a life work better than simply subjecting it to punishment?

The American approach to crime and punishment needs some re-framing because the old way simply doesn’t work. A punitive focused approach results in over populated prisons filled to the brim– both with some folks who justly should be there, and some who probably should not. All however, are forced to acclimate to a violent prison life that simply turns them into “hardened criminals” even if they didn’t arrive as one. When they are released, they face so many barriers to reintegration into society that the violent survival mechanisms the prison system taught them quickly become one of their only tools to move forward in life.

We cannot continue a system with this philosophical approach and think that we’re actually doing justice– we’re not. Justice, as I write in Undiluted, is about “making the world a little less broken and a little more right,” and as Flood points out in Disarming Scripture, our current system does anything but that.

The solution?

We must become people who long to see a life restored instead of a life destroyed, and we must become willing to do whatever it takes to make the former happen, while resisting the easier path of doing the latter. Together, we can begin to influence culture in such a way that we reform our penal system to become something that sees justice as a life restored instead of punishment given.

Benjamin L. Corey, is an Anabaptist author, speaker, and blogger. His first book, Undiluted: Rediscovering the Radical Message of Jesus, is available now at your local bookstore.

Read more from Patheos:

• New Disturbing Document Reveals How Saudi Blogger Raif Badawi Was Punished for Questioning Islam and Saudi Government
• A Fundamental Belief of Capitalism Is that Nature Is for the Rich
• Why Church? Why Not Just Go to the Mountains to Experience God?

Some 22,000 officers will complete a three-day training course on tactics like deescalation

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio called for the retraining of the city’s police force on Thursday, one day after the announcement that a grand jury declined to indict a white officer in the death of an unarmed black man.

“The relationship between police and community has to change. The way we go about policing has to change,” de Blasio said in an afternoon news conference, standing next to Police Commissioner William Bratton and other city leaders as he called for reforms. “People need to know that black lives and brown lives matter as much as white lives.”

MORE: See Protestors Take to the Streets After the Eric Garner Grand Jury Decision

Some 22,000 officers will complete a three-day training course that will aim to brush them up on tactics like deescalating situations and interacting with people who are mentally ill, Bratton said. De Blasio noted that $35 million will go into the training to allow for overtime pay.

The mayor’s announcement followed a night of largely peaceful demonstrations around the city and preempted a rally planned Thursday evening at Lower Manhattan’s Foley Square. A series of police-involved deaths this year has put politicians under scrutiny over a lack of trust between police departments and the local communities they serve.

Read next: Why a Medical Examiner Called Eric Garner’s Death a ‘Homicide’