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Amazons cover-your-ass gesture, while certainly laudable, has had very little impact thus far on the bigger picture. Along with the smaller companies like Rank One, Cognitec, and NEC, which continue to sell facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies, other strains of similar technology are further expanding the surveillance state and perpetuating a culture of fear and racism in America. A year after the George Floyd protests, we remain at an inflection point for law enforcement, but instead of pausing more potentially dangerous surveillance systems until the government sorts out regulation, the vast majority of tech companies and lawmakers have chosen instead to continue full speed ahead. Together, theyre applying a move-fast-and-break-things mentality to things that, if broken, cannot be fixednamely privacy, freedom, and human lives.

If demand is running high for security solutions recently, its because violent crime has risen as well. Just last week, between July 17 and July 23, at least 430 people were killed in 915 shootings across the country, according to Gun Violence Archives collaboration with ABCs This Week. Only halfway through the year, 2021 is already on pace to top 2020 in gun-related deathswhile 2020 was already the deadliest year for shootings in two decades.

Prominent Republicans and the National Fraternal Order of Police have tied the crime-spike to the Defund the Police rallying cry that emerged from last years protests, despite the fact that little defunding has actually taken place yet, and the fact that violent crime is also up in cities that maintained or increased funding for police. The panic around the surge also seems to somehow disregard the anomaly factor of a once-in-a-century pandemic, prior to which violent crime had plunged precipitously since the early 1990s. But panic has never historically been confused with rational, analytical thinking; so instead of looking into Americas surplus of guns and lack of a social safety net, the powers that be are instead beefing up surveillance systems.

A lot of people have an innate fear of being monitored and tracked. They put pieces of tape over their laptop camera lens, like a Band-Aid that might heal any vulnerability to being seen involuntarily. They avoid smart home gadgets, such as Amazon Echo, for fear that everything they say will be recorded and archived. However, eventually, everyone must go outside and enter the public sphere, at which point they find themselves in constant risk of being surveilled in one way or another.

Smileyoure on candid panopticon.

What lawmakers and law enforcers both seem to want, in theory, is the digital equivalent of magic: the omniscient ability to catch criminals in the act, find them anywhere they may attempt to flee, and even predict their crimes before they happen. In practice, however, the equipment that tech companies have produced to meet these ends ranges from spotty to catastrophic.

Lets take a look at some of whats taking a look at us.

ShotSpotter is, for lack of a better way to put it, Shazam for crime noise. Its a tool that uses hidden microphone sensors to detect the sound and location of gunshots, and then puts out an alert for participating police officers. Currently in use in more than 100 cities, the technology generates, in Chicago alone, an average of 21,000 alerts each year. The company claims it is 97% accurate.

Not only does the device inform officers about potential active crime scenes, its website also promises to help build courtroom-ready cases. Unfortunately, as Motherboard reported earlier this week, those cases are often built with altered evidence.

According to the report, ShotSpotters analysts have the ability to manually override its algorithms and reclassify a sound as a gunshot, or change other factors like the location of the sound, or the time it took place, according to the needs of the case. These analysts have frequently modified alerts at the request of police departments.

The danger doesnt end there, either. The law enforcement tendency to use ShotSpotter exclusively in predominantly Black and Latino communities is poised to further the already disproportionate rate of police brutality in those communities. It was a ShotSpotter alert this past March, for instance, that sent police to a street in Chicago where they ended up shooting and killing 13-year-old Adam Toledo.

Atlanta-based Flock Safety made headlines recently for its $150 million Series D round of funding, and pledge to reduce crime by 25% in the next three years. Operating on motion sensors, the device pairs solar-powered license-plate readers with cloud-based software. Police have used license-plate readers for at least a decade, but the ones made by Flock Safety are said to be more powerful than their predecessors. They automatically take down the make, model, color, and distinguishing marks of any vehicle that passes by, and record the date and time as well. Flock Safety also issues an alert whenever it spots a known stolen vehicle, or one thats fled a crime scene. The product is already set up in 1,200 communities in 40 states, and used by over 700 law enforcement agencies.

Just like gunshot detection systems, however, license plate readers can be used for unsavory ends.

Beyond merely solving crimes like stolen cars, some of Flock Safetys competitors have been adopted by ICE agents to track down undocumented immigrants. These types of devices are not immune to error either. In 2018, for instance, another license-plate reader in the Bay Area led police to pull over a vehicle and point guns at the driver and his passenger, all over a rental car incorrectly identified as stolen.

Acquired by Amazon in 2018, Ring is a doorbell-security camera hybrid that records and sends video to users phones, and to Amazons cloud, based on motion sensors. It has famously captured some funny neighborhood moments, cementing it in some peoples imaginations as a quirky facet of modern living, but it also carries much more sinister connotations. Mainly, it turns the prospect of anyone ever coming near ones door into an alarming event, providing law enforcement with a flood of false alertsand an abundance of questionable opportunities.

Rings promise to consumers is Protection at every corner, and it fulfills that promise by deputizing Ring owners in the war on crime. Citizens report suspicious people, who may only be suspicious in their own minds, and either sic the cops on themthe so-called Karen problemor possibly take matters into their own hands, like George Zimmerman. Police, meanwhile, know that many doors with a Ring on it contain footage that might help them either solve a case, or perhaps indulge a wild hunch.

Up until recently, Ring let police privately ask users to share video footage their cameras have captured. Thanks to vocal criticism from civil liberties groups and privacy advocates, though, police now have to publicly make requests through Rings Neighbors app, a sort of digital bulletin board where people can post alerts for their community. Amazon also recently set limits on what footage police can ask for, and how much of it, after the Electronic Frontier Foundation found police officers attempting to use Ring footage to spy on Black Lives Matter protesters last summer. (Exactly the kind of hypocrisy Amazon got called out for with its gesture supporting Black Lives Matter last June.)

Rings collaboration with law enforcement runs deep, with the company even drafting press statements and social media posts for police to promote its cameras with, and officers seeming to relish the technology in turn. As Gizmodo reported in 2019, police in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, apparently raffled off Rings to members of certain communities, and were specifically instructed by superiors to verify that the users knew how to receive police requests for Ring footage.

Similar to Rings Neighbors, Citizen is another highly localized crime notification app. Its original name was Vigilante when it launched in 2016, which says pretty much everything about the companys intentions, even before the part where it encouraged users to approach the crime problem as a group and see what they could do about it. (Vigilante here is not to be confused with Vigilant Solutions, a facial recognition software company employed by many police officers.) Vigilante was swiftly banned, until it rebranded as Citizen, with a reduced emphasis on personal intervention. It now has more than 7 million users across 30 cities.

Even with the new name, the app still indulges fantasies of vigilantism, and helps mold more Kyle Rittenhouseswith unreliable information, to boot. The apps alerts are based on uncorroborated 911 calls, which sometimes get details wrong. Back in May, for instance, Motherboard reported that Citizen CEO Andrew Frame put out a $30,000 bounty for info leading to the arrest of a suspected arsonist, imploring his staff to FIND THIS FUCK, only to later discover that the man whose head hed put a price on was innocent.

Even more recently, the app has gone beyond deputizing civilians in the war on crime to quietly hiring teams of amateur field reporters to scour cities like New York and Los Angeles for crime scenes to livestream. Anyone interested in making $200 for an 8-hour shift (in New York) or $250 for a 10-hour shift (in Los Angeles) can become, essentially, Jake Gyllenhaals creepy character from the film Nightcrawler. If simple phone notifications isnt enough to get people looking over both shoulders all the time, perhaps a series of snuff films will do the trick.

Finally, theres Palantir: the supposed ultimate tool for surveillance.

Named after the Seeing Stones in Lord of the Rings, Palantir is designed to take in reams of data collected by any number of organizations, everything from license plates and fingerprints to identities of confidential informants and email records, and enable users to spot hidden connections between them. It was forged with the help of Peter Thiel, and fueled by the same omniscient ambition as the Pentagons former data-mining program, Total Information Network. Although it has worked with just about every alphabet soup acronym in government, BuzzFeed News last year described it as the most secretive company in law enforcement.

Almost 5,000 police officers in Los Angeles have access to the all-seeing eye of Palantir. They can use one of many available non-Amazon facial recognition tools to take a photo of anyone they deem suspicious, instantly uncover their identity, and then plug it into Palantir to find out untold gobs of info about them, warrant-free. Like magic. In fact, Palantir also helps with whats known as predictive policing, current technologys answer to the precogs from Minority Report. Its an idea premised on the belief that algorithmic data can determine where future crimes may take place and when.

According to research from the Brennan Center, the Los Angeles Police Department first began to explore the possibility of predictive policing back in 2008. Since then, the LAPD has implemented a variety of predictive policing programs, including LASER, which identifies areas where gun violence is thought likely to occur, and PredPol, which calculates so-called hot spots with a high likelihood of crimes. But there is a massive difference between deploying speed traps on highways where speeding has historically been prevalent, and sending police to neighborhoodsor near specific peoplebased solely on previous patterns, to stop crime before it happens. Especially when, as The Next Web points out, the data the predictive policing has collected may be based on various forms of unlawful and biased police practices.

Ultimately, any algorithm used to predict or prevent crime is only as reliable as the human operating it is fallible.

Why are todays police increasingly becoming equipped with tools one might use to track down terrorists? Especially when they cant even seem to keep body cameras working properly.

At the beginning of last summer, during the peak of the George Floyd protests, when Amazon put a pause on its facial recognition software (it has since extended the pause indefinitely), it seemed as though America might have a serious moment of introspection over which communities were bearing the brunt of over-policing and why; but that moment has evaporated. Just as the country started to collectively question the polices power in shaping narrative, the narrative of crime is rising in cities where police were defunded quickly took over. At this point, the idea of actually defunding the police and beefing up social services in any meaningful way has curdled into a cynical talking point that Democrats may use in the 2022 election.

If all this enhanced surveillance tech was already ramping up while crime was falling over the last few decades, I shudder to think of how much more of it well get as crime rises as it has recently. The more that average citizens feel panicked, the more Silicon Valley will crank out new and inevitably flaw-prone systems to exploit the situation. Police departments will continue working with those companies, which not only give them the opportunity to cut corners or act on biases in some cases, but ironically also make them look progressive and future-forward while doing it.

At a certain point, this continued dependence on expensive, unreliable equipment begins to look like a feature and not a bug. The use of machines to reduce the possibility of human error in police work as much as possible might just be a way to avoid ever truly dealing with the kinds of deeper issues about the role of police in society that reached a boiling point last summer.

Its as futile as putting a Band-Aid over a bullet woundor putting a piece of tape over your laptop camera and thinking that means no one can find out what youre up to.

[Correction: a previous version of this article incorrectly linked Flock Safety specifically to ICE.]

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Violent crime is up. Expanding the surveillance state is not the solution - Fast Company

Forty years after the U.S. documented its first cases of HIV, Christopher Garcia-Wilde says a focus on basic essentials can help vanquish the worlds most persistent pandemic.

At 25, Christopher Garcia-Wilde has never known a world without AIDS, but the University of Miami medical and public health student envisions onethrough the kind of social activism that closed the worlds first prison camp for refugees with HIV.

Garcia-Wilde was not yet born in the fall of 1991. Thats when the U.S. imprisoned Yolande Jean and more than 200 other asylum-seeking Haitians who tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS in a detention camp on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.

But the fourth-year student at the Miller School of Medicine, a seasoned activist who studies the impact of social movements on public health, sees parallels between how the world treats many people living with HIV today and how the U.S. treated Jean and other refugees who fled the wave of terror that followed the military overthrow of Haitis first democratically elected president.

Christopher Garcia-Wilde

Yolande Jean and fellow refugees at Camp Bulkeley experienced unsafe, unsanitary, and deplorable living conditions that were oppressive and diametrically opposed to their health, Garcia-Wilde wrote in a student perspectivefor the July print issue of the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH).

Similarly, Garcia-Wilde continued, many people living with HIV are affected by government policies, corporate patents, health care systems, and discriminatory social conditions that are in opposition to their health. This reality holds true around the world, with millions of HIV-positive people facing daily food insecurity, poverty, language barriers, racism, sexism, homophobia, and criminalization.

The July issue, which is dedicated in part to the 40th anniversary of the first reported cases of HIV in the U.S., also includes an editorial by the Universitys graduate school dean, Guillermo Willy Prado, vice provost for faculty affairs and professor of nursing and health studies, public health sciences, and psychology, on the inequities of HIV prevention and treatment among Latinas.

Since June 1981, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention described the first U.S. cases of HIV, the virus has infected 76 million people around the world, killing nearly half of them. And despite the introduction in 2012 of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) medications that can prevent HIV transmission, the virus still infects about 1.7 million new people every year.

As such, Garcia-Wilde contends that efforts to end the worlds most persistent pandemic wont succeed if they focus on the development of vaccines, sex education, biomedical prevention, or antiretroviral medications. Instead, he argues, ending HIV/AIDS will depend on broad coalitions demanding a social transformation to provide housing, health care, healthy foods, clean water, and other basic essentials to those who live without.

We can end HIV. We will end it, insisted Garcia-Wilde, who, as an undergraduate brought free HIV testing to students at the University of Florida. But we have to change peoples social context. A lot of the things we see in our hospital and clinics come from a lack of housing, health insurance, healthy foods, and from exposures to occupational or environmental riskswhich are often created by systems, structures, and laws that require power to change. So, we have to confront the people in power who can change them. Just like the people in the first prison camp for HIV-positive refugeesand their supportersdid.

As Garcia-Wilde documented in his AJPH commentary, Jean was arrested and beaten during the September 1991 military coup that ousted President Jean Bertrand Aristide. An organizer of adult literacy programs, she was pregnant at the time, and suffered a miscarriage. In hopes of seeking asylum in the U.S., she joined thousands of Haitians who fled in rickety boats.

Intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard, she was among hundreds of refugees taken to the Guantanamo Bay camp and, after testing positive for HIV, confined in tents that offered scant protection from the elements. The detainees received even less care or comfort for their trauma. Their meager belongings were burned. The women were physically abused and forcibly injected with a long-acting contraceptive. Soldiers in riot gear regularly swept the compound.

After 15 days of a hunger strike to protest the abuse, Jean was placed in solitary confinement. But as news of the protest spread, law students at Yale University coordinated rolling hunger strikes that moved to universities across the nation. As lawyers challenged the detentions in court, a broad coalition of religious leaders, immigration groups, and HIV/AIDS activists organized demonstrations, petitions, and media blitzes. Movie stars condemned the detentions at the Academy Awards.

When a federal judge finally ordered the detainees released into the U.S. in June 1993, their lawyers credited the legal victory in part to the outside organizers and their agitation strategywhat Garcia-Wilde calls confronting power.

The son of South Florida public school teachers, Garcia-Wilde became interested in the power of social movements after the 2012 death of fellow high schooler Trayvon Martin. The 17-year-old Miami-Dade student was shot by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman while visiting his father in Central Florida. Not much came from the walk-out Garcia-Wilde helped organize at his Miramar High School to compel Zimmermans arrest, but he soon found his ideological home with the Dream Defenders.

Launched by mostly college students after Zimmermans acquittal, the civil rights organization didnt succeed in its initial goal of repealing Floridas Stand Your Ground law. But it has evolved into a broader movement focused on bringing housing, health care, jobs, and upward mobility to all.

Last year, during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Garcia-Wilde spent three days a week at St. Johns Baptist Church in Miamis Overtown neighborhood, where Dr. Armen Henderson, an assistant professor of medicine at the Miller School and fellow Dream Defenders volunteer, ensured the homeless could find free food, showers, clothes, and hygiene products as the rest of the world hunkered down.

Garcia-Wilde, who plans to specialize in pediatrics and internal medicine so he can help "everyone from newborns to elderly folks," said his St. John's experience reinforced the beliefs he expressed on the 40th anniversary of the first HIV cases in the U.S. I met a lot of people there who were concerned about their next meal or about losing their things if they used the bathroom, he said. They werent concerned about taking their meds to prevent or treat HIV. That wasnt a priority because they were just trying to survive.

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Medical student urges social transformation to end HIV/AIDS - University of Miami

In Black Lives Matter; Marxist Hate Dressed Up as Racial Justice? by John Perazzo, published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the editor of the publication writes: Editors note: In this just-released report on Black Lives Matter, author John Perazzo exposes the BLM movement as a racist, anti-Semitic, anti-family and anti-capitalist attack on the very foundations of American democracy.

Perazzo accurately shares the origins of BLM. It came into existence because of the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman who had been charged with the murder and manslaughter of Black teen Trayvon Martin in 2012. BLM was founded to end the virulent anti-black racism that permeates American society. The movement gained steam with the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and with each Black death by cop after that.

Perazzo goes on to label the three women who founded BLM. All three were Marxists: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi. Tometi never openly stated that she was a Marxist, but she endorsed Venezuelas Nicholas Maduro and the late Hugo Chavez.

Perazzo then went on to list names of communists, socialists and dictators despised among conservative readers. The list included Fidel Castro, former Black Panther, convicted cop-killer, and longtime fugitive Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Saul Alinsky, Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. The list goes on.

This listing of names brought back memories of the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s where anybody who knew a communist or a socialist was guilty by association.

BLM is pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel (which does not make them anti-Semitic), anti-nuclear family, but pro-community, and Democratic. All these are dog whistles for evil in conservative circles.

BLM was blamed for violence and deaths in the race demonstrations that have taken place all over the country. BLM received blame for a dramatic increase in violent crime, especially in NYC: New York City was likewise turned into a cauldron of violence by BLM hatred Perazzo blamed BLM for the police pulling back from enforcing the law, fearful of becoming another Derek Chauvin, recently convicted of murdering George Floyd. Issues of the COVID pandemic were not considered in Perazzos arguments.

Perazzo concludes his pamphlet by stating, It is indeed a tragedy that a movement so evil and so ruinous has been able, with the help of a compliant mainstream news media, to dupe millions of Americans into embracing it as a crusade for racial justice. In reality, BLM is the very embodiment of Marxism, anti-semitism, and racism a trifecta of wickedness capable of destroying any society.

Lets look at some of Perazzos arguments from a more moderate perspective: First, an article in Time, written by Sanya Mansoor on Sept. 5, 2020, shared a survey by ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project) which found, The vast majority of Black Lives Matter protests more than 93% have been peaceful.

Of the 7,750 BLM demonstrations between May 26 and August 22 in 50 states and Washington, D.C., after the death of George Floyd, More than 2,400 locations reported peaceful protests while fewer than 220 reported violent demonstrations. The definition of violent protests varied according to the location from attacks on individuals and property, to fighting back against police, to toppling Confederate statues. ACLED suggests this disparity stems from political orientation and biased media framing such as disproportionate coverage of violent demonstrations.

In some cases, the violent response came from the government, in which authorities use force more often than not when they are present at protests and that disproportionately used force while intervening in demonstrations associated with the BLM movement, relative to other types of demonstrations.

These violent demonstrations occurred at a time when the Trump administration exacerbated tensions caused by racial inequality and police brutality. President Donald Trump and high-ranking members of his administration have frequently generalized protesters as violent anarchists.

Yes, BLM is left leaning and, yes, it favors the end of racial inequality. It is not against the law to be a Marxist, pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel or LGBTQ in this country. Those rights are protected by the First and 14th Amendments. There certainly has been no anti-semitism or talk of overthrowing our democracy in any of BLMs postings. It is ironic that it is those on the right who have demonized BLM have sought to minimize the Jan. 6 insurrection an attack on the very foundations of American democracy.

In October 2015, President Obama publicly articulated his support for BLMs agenda by saying: I think the reason that the organizers (of BLM) used the phrase Black Lives Matter was not because they were suggesting nobody elses lives matter. Rather, what they were suggesting was there is a specific problem thats happening in the African-American community thats not happening in other communities. And that is a legitimate issue that weve got to address.

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Looking at why BLM is considered evil in conservative circles - Enumclaw Courier-Herald

In 2015, artist David Butler helped curate a group exhibition at the Elijah Pierce Gallery dubbed Forceful Perceptions, which centered itself on the violence enacted on the Black community and included Butlers painting of Trayvon Martin, who was shot and killed by George Zimmerman in 2012 at age 17.

Forceful was all about us talking about violence and the things happening to Black people, Butler said. Its number one purpose was to talk about the violence against the Black body, putting it on display, so that it was front and center.

For Whiteland, which opens at the Vanderelli Room on Friday, July 2, Butler wanted to explore similar issues of race, but without again centering Black pain, or being forced to educate a white audience on the Black experience innavigating tragedy. I didnt want someone coming in just because someone had died two months before the show, said Butler, who solicited contributions for 'Whiteland' from artists who previously displayed in Forceful Perceptions, along with a few new faces. As of press time, Butler said he expected at least eight or nine artists to show work, including Lisa McLymont, Lance Johnson and April Sunami, among others.

In conceiving the show, Butler decided he wanted toexplore the concept of whiteness, as well as how that idea plays into the larger societal contract and the continued repression of communities of color.

If we want to get into the underbelly of the real issue, its whiteness, he said. The issue is white people not wanting to come to the grips with the fact that whether youre rich or poor, well-to-do or rural Appalachian, or you just got here from Europe or Canada because of the color of your skin, youhave benefited from thesystem that has been created. And if you buy into that on any level, it becomes a problem for people who look like me.

This idea of the white populace not wanting to examine its own role in preserving systemic racism is one that is currently playing out in the conversation around critical race theory, an academic framework created four decades ago by legal scholars to explore how racism is embedded in Americas laws and institutions that has recently become the target of an intense right-wing disinformation campaign. (No, theyre not teaching critical race theory in your kids public school.)

Butlerstarted brainstorming ideas for the show by writing out a list of things that angered him, including the reality that Black people continue to be shot and killed by the police, as well asthe political personalities who are continually granted a media platform to sell white supremacist talking points to a national audience.

And I started asking, How can I talk about how all of these people still exist, and they look just like you? Butler said.

Going in, Butler said he knew he didnt want to paint portraits of individuals like Jason Meade, the sheriffs deputy who shot and killed Casey Goodson, or Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown. So instead he started to collect photos of these types, largely grouped into three categories: police officers who had killed Black citizens (Derek Chauvin, Meade, Wilson); politicians who regularlyespoused white supremacist ideologies (Donald Trump, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan); and their female equivalents in the worlds of politics and the media (Tomi Lahren, Ann Coulter, Marjorie Taylor Green).

Butler then fed these photos into Artbreeder, a website where users can create an account and upload up to eight parent photos, which are then used to producea composite child. The artist then painted a portrait of each of these unique digital spawns, none of whom exists in real life.

But it was freaky, because it felt like you knew the people. These are all people I could walk by in the Short North today, and thats creepy, Butler said of his initial reaction to seeing thecomputer-generated images. Then it becomes a metaphor for how you never know which person could do you harm. And it also brings up the idea that these children, these digital children birthed of these parents, [represent] the ways that racism reverberates through generations.

While Butler had zero interest in painting portraits of people like Meade, he said the digital amalgamations offered him a needed distance from the source material, describing the works as just data, and thats how I see them. I still havent painted a real white person in 10 years, he said, and laughed.

The trio of portraits by Butler will be flanked on the gallery walls by myriad complex pieces crafted by contemporariesincluding Lance Johnson, a graffiti artist Butler labeled an abstract gra-futurist. I was born and raised in New York City, so coming out of that bubble, it was a little disconcerting, said Johnson, who, in addition to a handful of pieces gracing the walls of the Vanderelli Room, also painted a mural on the exterior of the building. I call [the mural] We the People because America … should be a celebration of diversity. Weve come a long way, but theres a lot more to do.

Butler said that he hopes the work on display in Whiteland angers people, and forces them to confront a system that too many live comfortably within. And Im not saying you have to stop being white. You cant stop being white just like I cant stop being Black, he said. No, what you have to give up is the social construct that gives you power over my life. … And thats all anybody in this show is asking folks to do, is to remember that all of this (Butler gestures at the three composite portraits) creates dead Black people in the streets, the white-washing of histories and laws that are structured to preserve white supremacy.

Regardless of how this message is received, the artist said this group exhibit would likely be his last venture into this realm, serving as a bookend to a drive that started with paintings he started to create even prior to Forceful Perceptions.

This is my last hurrah with this type of [work], Butler said. After this show, Im only painting beautiful Black people and flowers. I want to be able to paint a landscape, or to do something surrealist that doesnt necessarily have race at its core, but that celebrates a more positive, joyful [aspect] of Blackness. And thats what Im going to do from here on out.

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David Butler tackles the other end of the racial spectrum in stunning Whiteland - Columbus Alive

'Boys n the Hood' - John Singleton

Often, to get the whole scope of a cultural problem, more than documentaries or news pieces, it is the work of fiction from those who live within the issue that is able to shed the most light. Initially developed as a requirement for an application to film school in 1986, John Singletons Boyz n the Hood would become a cultural phenomenon, voicing the issues of capitalism on the effect of black families living in poverty-stricken areas of Los Angeles.

Selling his work to Columbia Pictures upon Singletons graduation in 1990, his script drew inspiration from his own life as well the lives of those he grew up alongside in LA. I think I was living this film before I ever thought about making it, Singleton stated, whilst taking considerable inspiration from Rob Reiners 1986 coming-of-age film Stand by Me in crafting his own tragic tale of the adolescent transition.

Putting actors Ice Cube, Cuba Gooding Jr., Morris Chestnut, and Nia Long on the cultural map, Singletons film follows the lives of three males (Ice Cube, Gooding Jr. and Chestnut) living in the Crenshaw ghetto of Los Angeles, weighing up their future prospects as they avoid the troubles that are inflating around them. Dissecting questions of race, class and violence, it is remarkable how relevant John Singletons groundbreaking script remains, typified by one scene in which Laurence Fishburne, father of Cuba Gooding Jrs Tre Styles, lectures a group of people on the effects of gentrification in their local community.

Its called gentrification. Its what happens when the property value of a certain area is brought down, he explains. They bring the property value down. They can buy the land cheaper. Then they move the people out, raise the value and sell it at a profit. The themes and issues of Boyz n the Hood can be reduced into Fishburnes gripping two-minute speech which goes onto question the reason for drugs, guns and violence in the future, concluding his monologue by saying you have to think young brother, about your future.

Though, the characters of Singletons film, and indeed the lives of many black individuals across the USA, are caught within a systemic web of oppression and prejudice, causing violence, fear and in-fighting. Unfortunately, much of what is explored in the film remains equally pertinent in modern-day society, particularly evident following the Black Lives Matter movement that emerged in 2012 following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of African-American teen Trayvon Martin.

Speaking of the films legacy, Singleton states: Its really of its time but its also timeless because the conditions and things that people are going through still exist, the director comments, elaborating, Whether thats those in urban environments living under a police state, prevalent black-on-black crime, or the nihilistic view of the world that young people have when they dont see anything else. Continuing, the director rightfully points out that neighbourhoods have changed and evolved but many things remain the same and as long as thats the case then things wont change.

At its heart, Boyz n the Hood is a tragic fable and coming-of-age tale, situated within the context of the prominent issues that disturb the everyday lives of the black community. Nominated for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay at the 64th Academy awards, Singleton became the youngest person, and the first African-Amcieran to be nominated for Best Director, demonstrating just how far-reaching the effects of the 1991 classic stretched, transcending cultures and generations in the process.

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Revisiting John Singletons classic Boyz n the Hood 30 years later - Far Out Magazine