Vox Sentences: Obama's plan for more body cams

1. De-militarizing the police

• President Obama is asking Congress for $75 million to help police departments buy body cameras for officers.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• The goal is to pay for up to 50,000 body cameras.

• The administration will also "impose consistent standards in the types of hardware it offers [to local departments], better training in how to use it and more thorough oversight."

  [NYT / Mark Landler]

• The changes come after a White House review of federal programs that provide equipment to local police; read the report here.

  [White House]

• There's preliminary evidence that body cameras can deter police abuses, but still a lot we don't know.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Police militarization critic Radley Balko: "At first blush, quite positive."

  [Washington Post / Radley Balko]

• But the administration isn't halting military equipment distribution, as the ACLU has called for, and the report doesn't touch on how the equipment is used.

  [Washington Post / Emily Badger]

2. Deciding whether to save the planet

• UN climate negotiations are beginning in Lima, Peru.

  [BBC / Matt McGrath]

• Preventing 2º C (3.6º F) warming has been a major goal for policymakers since at least the 1990s, as many of the harshest costs of climate change get much worse at that level.

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• But those present at the negotiations are increasingly of the belief that avoiding warming of 2º C is impossible.

  [NYT / Coral Davenport]

• The inevitability of 2º C warming doesn't mean emissions cuts aren't important, though; they could be "the difference between a newly unpleasant world and an uninhabitable one."

• We're currently on pace for 3.2 to 5.4º C (5.8 to 9.7º F) warming; the World Bank has said it's unclear humans could adapt to a world with 4º C warming.

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• "4º C would likely be catastrophic rather than simply dangerous. For example, it would make life difficult, if not impossible, in much of the tropics, and would guarantee the eventual melting of the Greenland ice sheet and some of the Antarctic ice sheet."

  [Steven Sherwood to The Guardian / Damian Carrington]

3. R.A.P. jurisprudence

• The Supreme Court heard arguments in Elonis v. US, a case considering whether Anthony Elonis' Facebook posts (including rap lyrics Elonis wrote) can be prosecuted as criminal threats.

  [Slate / Dahlia Lithwick]

• The core question is whether "the speaker’s intent or the listener’s response … determine if there has been a 'true threat' of violence" in threat cases.

  [Slate / Dahlia Lithwick]

• The case attracted an amicus brief from two hip-hop scholars on how to interpret rap lyrics; it includes a great explanation of the term "thug life."

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• One of those scholars, Erik Nielsen, and Run the Jewels rapper Killer Mike note in USA Today that "no other fictional form" receives the kind of court treatment rap does.

  [USA Today / Erik Nielsen and Killer Mike]

• Case in point: a San Diego MC is being charged with attempted murder due to "his gang ties and the bump in popularity his music received due to them"; he is not implicated in the actual shooting at all.

  [Uproxx / Bansky]

• The arguments were generally a mess, with Elonis' lawyer getting "such a flurry of often-contradictory questions from the bench that he barely could make a consistent argument."

  [SCOTUSBlog / Lyle Denniston]

• You can read the full oral arguments here.

  [Supreme Court of the United States]

4. Misc.

• India's growing, but the gains are shared very, very unequally.

  [Bloomberg View /Djiraj Nayyar]

• Europe's central bank needs to start quantitative easing, like, yesterday.

  [Bloomberg View / Clive Crook]

• A restaurant in LA has a "water sommelier" and a 44-page water menu.

  [Quartz / David Yanofsky]

• Here's the Coen Brothers-like tale of a Texas accountant who dispersed millions of dollars over two years to a dozen-odd incompetent criminals to kill his wife.

  [D Magazine / Michael Mooney]

• 30 Rock has way, way more jokes per minute than most peer sitcoms.

  [The Atlantic / Talib Visram]

• Flying cars are a great illustration of William Gibson's observation that the future's already here — it's just unevenly distributed.

  [Unusual Corner / Molac]

5. Verbatim

• "Bull riding is a collaborative sport—a pairs competition in which one partner tries to kill the other, like an ice dance with an axe murderer. "

  [New Yorker / Burkhard Bilger]

• "I’ve checked into hotels under Alvy Singer."

  [Chris Rock to NY Mag / Frank Rich]

• "Before she went into politics, Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of Il Duce and the niece of Sophia Loren, had a short-lived disco career in Japan."

  [Dangerous Minds / Oliver Hall]

• "Runners were faster—by about 25 seconds in 5-kilometer races—when competing against their rivals."

  [WSJ / Ben Cohen]

• "In disasters not involving fire, panic is rarely the cause of fatalities, and even when fire is involved, such as in the 1977 Beverly Hills Supper Club fire, in Southgate, Kentucky, research has shown that people continue to help one another, even at the cost of their own lives."

  [New Yorker / John Seabrook]

• "I find it ironic that a company whose history is in student debt collection is now going to run a set of colleges that excelled at sending students into default."

  [Ben Miller to Washington Post / Danielle Douglas-Gabriel]

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