Vox Sentences: "We don't second-guess police officers"

The police officers who killed Tamir Rice won't face charges; Japan and Korea reach a historic agreement on "comfort women"; and the Obama administration's rumored plan to deport thousands of Central American families.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

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• Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty announced today that no one will be charged in the 2014 killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was shot by a police officer while playing in a park with a toy gun.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• The decision not to charge was made by a grand jury. But McGinty's office recommended that the grand jury not charge anyone, and he was clear during the press conference: "We don't second guess police officers."

  [Reuters and Business Insider / Natasha Bertrand]

• McGinty claimed that the Supreme Court "prohibits" second-guessing officers. That's partly true: the current legal standards for officer killings say it's legal for police to kill someone if their feeling of being under threat was "objectively reasonable" to another officer.

  [BuzzFeed / Adam Serwer]

• But in a country where people consistently think black boys are older, bigger and more threatening than they really are, "objectively reasonable" can get pretty subjective.

  [Washington Post / Christopher Ingraham]

• There's another reason prosecutors don't want to second-guess police: they rely on police to do their jobs. That's a strong disincentive to charge them with crimes.

  [Vox / Amanda Taub]

• Nationally speaking, though, there's evidence this might be changing. In 2015, 18 officers were charged in killings; that's up from an average of 5 a year from 2005-2014.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

Reparations for the "comfort women"

Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post via Getty Images

• Japan has reached an agreement with South Korea to apologize and provide restitution for the widespread, systematic kidnapping and rape of so-called "comfort women" by the Japanese Army during World War II.

  [The Diplomat / Yuki Tatsumi]

• If you aren't familiar with the stories of the "comfort women," these testimonies from a UN report, compiled by NPR's Elise Hu, are a horrifying, but necessary, place to start.

  [NPR via Tumblr / Elise Hu]

• As Vox's Max Fisher explains, the horrific treatment of the "comfort women" was easily swept under the rug after the war: by Japan, by the Allies, and by Korea itself (women were often blamed for their own rapes).

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• It took until 1993 for Japan to issue a formal apology to South Korea — and that apology ended up prolonging the controversy, as Japanese conservatives pushed back against it and claimed that South Korean women were volunteers.

  [Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan]

• Japanese nationalism is, if anything, more prominent now than it was then. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been relatively unapologetic for Japan's behavior during the war, and has rolled back many of the isolationist policies that were designed to protect Japan from returning to the imperialism of its past.

  [Washington Post / Max Fisher]

• The new agreement goes further than the 1993 apology in providing money to the few surviving comfort women. But it also promises that the issue will now officially be laid to rest by both sides. That is not likely to happen in practice.

  [Peterson Institute for International Economics / Stephan Haggard]

A planned immigration crackdown

Omar Torres/AFP/Getty

• The Obama administration is reportedly planning to conduct widespread immigration raids in early 2016, to catch and deport Central American families who crossed the border in recent years but have been ordered to leave by a judge.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• The plan is controversial even within the Obama administration. And it's already getting a lot of pushback from the left.

  [Washington Post / Jerry Markon and David Nakamura]

• The administration's reacting to a new spike in the number of Central American children and families across the border — reviving memories of the 2014 "border crisis."

  [Los Angeles Times / Molly Hennessy-Flake]

• But, just like in 2014, the reason for the spike could be that Central American countries are getting even more dangerous, leading people to seek asylum.

  [American Immigration Council / Beth Werlin]

• The people the administration plans to deport have already lost their asylum cases. But if the countries they'd be returned to are more dangerous than the ones they'd left, that's a serious humanitarian concern — and one that could violate the US' international obligations not to send anyone back to a country where their lives are at risk.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

MISCELLANEOUS

Democratic politicians like to define everyone making less than $250,000 as "middle-class." That's ludicrous. [NYT / Bryce Covert]

• The average American only lives 18 miles away from their mother. In Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky, the average is only 6 miles.

  [NYT / Quoctrung Bui and Claire Cain Miller]

• Inside the Postal Service facility tasked with deciphering 5 million pieces of illegibly-addressed mail a day.

  [Smithsonian Magazine / Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato]

• Fearmongering about unisex bathrooms helped defeat the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. Now fearmongering about transwomen in public bathrooms is helping to defeat laws banning anti-LGBT discrimination.

  [BuzzFeed / Dominic Holden]

• An appreciation of Moral Orel, perhaps the darkest animated series ever to air on American television.

  [Vice / Brad Stabler]

VERBATIM

"Although it is not generally serious, winter vomiting disease, as the name implies, is a far from pleasant experience." [The Guardian / Laura Barton]

• "A study of Denmark by Gustaf Bruze, a researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, showed that about half of the expected financial gain of attending college derived not from better job prospects but from the chance to meet and marry a higher-earning spouse."

  [NYT / Tyler Cowen]

• "There is no public awareness campaign about the violent crime wave set off by singers, models, dancers, and actors who have killed it any number of times in the past year."

  [Medium / Margarita Noriega]

• "I'm a scumbag, but I have a big heart. I'm like fucking Florence Nightingale."

  [Juggalo Mike Busey to Vice / Mitchell Sunderland]

• "If we attack sentimentality for supplanting emotional complication with fictions of emotive simplicity —and part of this critique is grounded in a sense of the 'artificiality' or the 'shallowness' of these fictions — it seems we need to ask ourselves: Aren’t we sometimes shallow creatures? Isn’t our truth sometimes shallower than we’d like to admit?"

  [Black Warrior Review / Leslie Jamison]

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