Joseph Rodríguez: LAPD 1994
In a year when millions of Americans poured into the streets demanding changes in police strategy, training and deployment, the Bronx Documentary Center believes a crucial part of the conversation should be Joseph Rodríguez’s photo series and just-released book,
LAPD 1994.
On February 5th, the exhibition will be available to view online at lapd1994bdc.org.
The BDC’s online exhibition with images and text from Rodríguez’s book gives us an up-close and personal look at the cops, victims, and violent perpetrators in working-class communities of Pico Union, Rampart, and South Central Los Angeles. Though the photos were taken more than 25 years ago, they serve as markers illuminating the path to our current society, one beset by debates about policing, violence and incarceration. As Rubén Martínez writes in its introduction, Rodríguez’s body of work visually encompasses, “another moment that tore open the soul of America.”
Netflix’s misguided Night Stalker series treats its cops like gods Vox.com 1/25/2021
The climactic moment of Netflix’s true crime docuseries
Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer, is probably supposed to feel cathartic. In the final minutes of the four-part series’ third installment, San Francisco detective Frank Falzon recalls how he tracked down a friend of the California serial killer whose string of attacks throughout 1984 and 1985 made him a household name among true crime followers.
Falzon describes this moment with relish almost four decades later. In his recounting, the friend who’d originally contacted police himself with a tip about the Night Stalker’s identity balked when Falzon asked him to reveal the Night Stalker’s full name. So Falzon forcibly dragged the friend-turned-informant into his police car, threatened him, and punched him in the face.
This is an interview with the astronomer Karen Meech discussing the reasons why she doesn’t think Aumuamua is of alien origin. It seems the nut of the question, besides the inexplicable acceleration, is the shape of the object. She presents an image of a light reading taken that seems to indicate a cigar shaped geometry, not a flat one. This runs counter to the above linked articles claim that it’s 91% certainly flat.
One thing that jumped out to me. She used a term, I don’t have time to pinpoint it at the moment, where she says something to the effect that the notion of it being flat is “impossible” or something. Essentially saying because such a shape would be so out of the realm of what is considered possible that it shouldn’t be considered. This strikes me as an unjustified assumption, the entire point is that the thing doesn’t look or act like any other object we have seen.
Editor’s note: In observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the Forward is resurfacing some of our recent coverage related to the Black-Jewish experience and racial justice. This article originally appeared in July, 2020.
If you want to come to grips with the way race, injustice and real estate intertwine in America today, a good place to start is on Corning Street, a few hundred feet away from the 10 Freeway on the edge of the Westside of Los Angeles.
Corning Street looks and feels like it hasn’t changed since the 1950s. Boxy apartment buildings with names like Desert Sands. Humble Spanish-style bungalows with stained-glass bay windows. An alley behind them claimed as a pedestrian thoroughfare by working moms. A tamale cart, competing fruit stands, and an omnipresent produce truck that jingles “La Cucaracha” as it rounds the corner.
Ivan Nagy was a key player in the life of Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood Madam, who was sentenced to three years for procuring prostitutes for an A-list of top Hollywood players and free-spending Arabs. Fleiss was not an innocent when she met Nagy. At 16, she was already the lover of the millionaire financial swindler Bernie Cornfield. But it was Nagy who (according to the legendary Madam Alex) sold Fleiss to Alex for $500, then used her as a mole to take over Alex s thriving call girl operation. And it was Nagy who eventually turned Fleiss over to the police again, if Madam Alex can be believed.