Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • Europe's New Trick Against Wildfires: Let It Burn

    Led by Portugal and Spain, European nations have shifted their responses to wildfires from a heavy emphasis on suppression to a more prevention-based approach. Climate change has increased fire risk greatly. By letting smaller fires burn, to reduce the fuel available to future megafires, and with other forest-management methods, Mediterranean countries have had no large blazes so far in 2020. Portugal, three years after a massive fire killed at least 120, registered its lowest number of fires in a decade. In Spain, prevention includes Fire Flocks, herds of sheep and goats whose grazing cleans up forests.

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  • Low-key cops and a white shaggy dog: How Marathon County transformed its response to residents in crisis

    In Wisconsin, plain-clothes law enforcement officers are teaming up with mental health experts to handle calls related to crisis intervention. The goal of the Marathon County Crisis Assessment Response Team is to reduce unnecessary detentions of people experiencing mental health crises, while also increasing trust with the community. In the two years since the program launched, the "rate of hospitalizing or jailing people in crisis" has dropped in both consecutive years, which has consequently saved the county a great deal of expenses.

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  • Why Detroit Might Be the True Test of Whether More Cameras Make Cities Safer

    In Detroit, Project Greenlight uses video surveillance technology to try to solve and deter street crime. Instead of the police requesting private security video after a crime occurs, businesses pay to install the Greenlight system, which then streams video live to police analysts. The police claim it has lowered crime, but researches have found no evidence that it affects violent crime rates. Critics see the system as a pay-to-play system in which businesses buy better police protection. And they say that the cameras, and the use of facial recognition software, bias enforcement against people of color.

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  • How South Korea Successfully Managed Coronavirus

    Despite never mandating a lockdown, South Korea has been able to better control the spread of COVID-19 as compared to other countries of similar economic and development status. Focusing on information management and testing, as well as the use of technology to aid both of these tactics, the country has kept the case count to fewer than 80 cases per day. According to the chairman of the World Health Organization’s global outbreak alert and response network, “No country has adapted to living with, and containing, the virus like South Korea."

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  • Do We Need Police To Curb L.A.'s Traffic Violence? Some Cities Are Saving Lives Without Them

    Five years after Los Angeles launched its Vision Zero program to reduce traffic fatalities, the numbers of pedestrians and cyclists killed on city streets have soared. By relying too heavily on the racially fraught and often ineffective practice of police stops of vehicles, and by not spending enough on street redesigns and automated enforcement technologies, L.A. has failed to make the kind of progress that cities like New York and Seattle have made with engineering innovations, stricter speed limits, and camera enforcement.

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  • The Rise of Dual Credit

    Dual credit classes were a response to the increasing costs of attending college and university and to make postsecondary education more accessible to low-income students. Although low-income and minority students are still having trouble accessing dual credit courses, research shows they have some level of success. “Research shows that students who take dual credit courses are more likely to enroll in and complete college than students who don’t—and to finish faster, too.”

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  • Police have shot people experiencing a mental health crisis. Who should you call instead?

    Daniel Prude's death in police custody illustrates a common flaw in how police respond to mental health crises, but reform advocates disagree on whether to improve police training or bypass police almost entirely. Mental health crises make up a large share of police calls, jailings, and fatal police shootings. Most police training on mental health responses is limited to 4-12 hours. Some departments put at least some officers through crisis intervention training. But critics of police-focused responses prefer non-police response teams, in use in a few cities.

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  • Mental Health And Police Violence: How Crisis Intervention Teams Are Failing

    More than 2,700 police departments in the U.S. have crisis intervention teams aimed at responding to mental health crises with fewer arrests and less violence, but the death of Daniel Prude in Rochester police custody offers clear lessons in the shortcomings and misuse of the CIT model. A lack of adequate mental health services across the country, coupled with superficial training of the police, too often means a police response to a crisis will not de-escalate the situation or lead to meaningful help for the person in crisis. A recent study found CITs have not shown they will lower violence.

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  • Public Health Workers Stand Behind Contact Tracing

    The Carolina Community Tracing Collaborative (CCTC) is the first statewide coordinated care network that contact traces new COVID-19 cases and electronically connects people to community resources. Investigators interview newly diagnosed patients, provide information about appropriately isolating, and identify people who were potentially exposed, all of whom are also contacted and connected to resources. Information is entered into a secure online system at each stage and individuals are followed up with. It is not clear that CCTC has successfully tracked the origins of many widespread COVID-19 infections.

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  • No WiFi at home? One Virginia school district has a creative solution for students

    A school district in Virginia has implemented a two-prong solution to provide internet access to rural students during the pandemic. The indoor solution allows students to make appointments to be inside the school to access the internet. The outside solution, equipping three schools in the district with equipment to boost their Wi-Fi signals, allowing students who can’t make indoor appointments a way to access the Wi-Fi. “We just took advantage of something that was already happening in the district."

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