Where’s the Fear?

Brad Lander: NYPD Surveillance: What We Don’t Know, And Why It Matters. Every federal agency (including the FBI and CIA) has one, as do many city agencies. In fact, the NYPD — despite its size and operations — stands alone among major American police departments for lacking any meaningful independent oversight (L.A., Chicago, and Philadelphia all have broad independent bodies with subpoena power, for example). IGs help agencies work better. When they are following the law and doing the job right, IGs help provide independent confirmation and legitimacy. When there are ways to do it better, IGs suggest them. The…

[EVENT] Muslim Americans: Faith, Freedom, and the Future. On August 2, the Abu Dhabi Gallup Center will host the launch of Muslim Americans: Faith, Freedom, and the Future. Based on three years of research and hundreds of thousands of interviews, the new study explores Muslim Americans’ political, social, and spiritual engagement a decade after 9/11, and concludes with evidence-based recommendations for government and civil society leaders. The report discusses U.S. Muslims’ views on a range of topics…

How Blue America Subsidizes Red America. A very neat Aaron Carroll chart shows that, on average, conservative states feature more "dependency" on federal programs than do liberal ones. You can slice this kind of data in a variety of ways, but you always end up with the same aggregate pattern. It happens to be the case that the richest parts of the United States (think the San Francisco Bay area or Connecticut) favor Democrats and also that conservative areas of the country are overrepresented in the Senate. Transfers, on average, flow away from high-income and underrepresented areas and toward low-income…