What Is The Root Cause of “Police Brutality”?

The culminating activity after our exploration of “police brutality” will be to write an editorial that expresses your opinion about an instance or issue that has given rise to the phenomenon.

Your editorial will need to be 2-3 pages long, and double spaced. A bibliography is required for this assignment, and you will need at least 5-6 resources to be considered for a passing grade. Topics are due Wednesday, April 14th, sources and preliminary outline are due Thursday, April 15th, and rough drafts will be due on Monday, April 19th. Final drafts are due Wednesday, April 21st.

Class Resources :

Girl Shot With Beanbag Gets Probation For Hitting Portland Police Officer (Oregonian)

SWAT Overkill (Popular Mechanics)

When Cops Become Combat Troops (Salon)

The Life and Death of Jack Dale Collins (Portland Mercury)

At Last – Council Approves Better Cop Oversight (Portland Mercury)

The Diallo Verdict – The Overview (New York Times)

Who Will Rebuild Haiti?

(Assignment #1) During our first week, you should have read the articles in this packet, and begun to make a short timeline of Haitian events, and a list of key players in Haiti’s recent history. Once you have completed that task, you should augment your timeline and lists with the the information found in this article, “Mixed U.S. Signals Tilt Haiti Towards Chaos” from the New York Times.

(Assignment #2) Once you’ve completed your timeline, you should prepare for our “tribunal” regarding Haiti by selecting a character, and researching their past. After you have selected a character, and thoroughly developed them as a entity, you should submit a brief character analysis that includes your character’s name, occupation, history in Haiti, and particular feeling about who’s the most responsible for the current tragedy befalling the Carribbean nation.

(Assignment #3) Assuming you participated in the “tribunal” please post answers to the following questions as comments to this post.

1. Was your character easy or difficult to obtain information on? And, why do you think that is?
2. Did you identify or side with your character, or did your character act in a manner that was outside your comfort zone? Explain.
3. What did you learn about your character through this process?
4. What did you learn about the other characters through this process?
5. In our deliberation, who had the most to say, and who was left out of the process? Do you think that our classroom dynamic represented the real world, in terms of who had the most voice?
6. Did you agree with the final verdict reached by the jury? Why / why not?
7. What do you see as the point of this activity?
8. What could’ve made the activity better or worse?

Write Around Iraq

Now that we have spent some time analyzing other people’s articles, we will attempt to synthesize our own article about a current event in Iraq using pieces of other articles. After doing some preliminary research about current events in Iraq, you will select one instance to write about authoritatively.

To do this, you will need to find at least 2 articles from national sources and at least two from international sources that have different perspectives on the event. Once you have selected the articles, and analyzed them for their particular bias, you will write your own article about the event that includes information from all four of the articles.

Your piece will need to have a headline, a byline, and at least two quotes about the event which should come from your four articles. These pieces will be shared in class on Monday, November 2nd, and will need to be submitted in their final form by Wednesday, November 4th.

ROUGH DRAFTS : November 2nd

FINAL DRAFTS  :  November 4th