crime

The problem is that the protest ought not to be about kissing at all. The original protest in the state of Kerala was sparked by a string of moral policing incidents. A theater artist and her colleague were detained for traveling together at night. A couple was arrested for suspected “immoral activities” on a bench in Alappuzha, especially suspicious because the woman was not wearing anything to indicate she was married. An IT professional in Kochi was beaten up by drunk men for riding pillion on a male colleague’s motorbike. 

Transnational organized crime generates $2 trillion in revenue per year globally, roughly the size of Britain’s economy, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Wonder how much money those fake Luis Vuitton handbags and DVDs of the latest Hollywood hits bring in? At $654 billion annually, counterfeiting and intellectual property piracy tops the global list of most lucrative illicit activities. 

In 1989, Wise and four other young black and Latino teenagers were convicted of raping and beating a white investment banker in Central Park.  The media called her the Central Park Jogger and the accused the Central Park Five. No evidence linked them to the crime except for their confessions, which came after relentless hours of police interrogation. They recanted shortly afterwards, but those statements were still enough to send them all to jail. .Last year, a decade after an inmate named Matias Reyes confessed to the crime, resulting in all five of the boys’ exoneration, Wise, who went free after 13 years, is now suing the city for wrongful imprisonment.

The summer of 2012 has not been kind to U.S. law enforcement officials. As Occupy Wall Street protests subsided, the momentum shifted away from America’s financial sector and toward the long simmering issue of police-community relations. Spurred on by the Trayvon Martin shooting, many citizens around the nation redirected their protests and rallied against ‘illegal and unwarranted’ stops by the police. The Federal Court in New York City added more public pressure by granting approval of a class-action suit brought against the NYPD for “suspicionless stops and frisks.”