Police Perceptions of Irrational Unstable Behaviours and Use of Force

Police identification of people experiencing mental illness is usually based on either the person having an official contact history with police or through observing behavioural indicators commonly associated with mental illness during an encounter. Police have voiced concerns with their ability to identify and respond to people experiencing mental illness in a timely way and report that they commonly resort to more coercive tactical options to resolve encounters. The present study employed a mixed method design to examine 286 police use of force incidents to investigate the association between force used on and by offenders displaying irrational-unstable behavioural characteristics. The irrational-unstable offenders were two times more likely to be perceived by police to have an apparent mental disorder and almost four times more likely to have a known mental health history; one in six had an official record of contact with mental health services. There were few differences in police and offender use of force, considering force as both a categorical and a continuous variable, while incident-level comparisons suggested that police force was generally proportional to offender resistance. Implications are discussed in terms of the need to redress limitations with the traditional police approach style.     

On Jordan Peterson,Postmodernism, and PoMo-Bashing

Jordan Peterson says that postmodernists say no interpretation is better than another. I would no sooner identify Peterson’s adversaries as those who have been misled by “postmodernism” than I would identify them as misled by “sustainability,” “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” or “intersectionality.” Such fare is mainly symptomatic. “Postmodern” invocations are often like “sustainability” invocations: inessential. This piece is not a defense of postmodernism. It is a critique of PoMo-bashing.     

The Interactions and Experiences of Armenians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey from the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 to the Present

This article will examine the interactions of Armenians and Jews as well as shared and dissimilar experiences in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey from the early 20th century to the present to compare how affinities and differences in political outlook have affected their relationship. It has been stated at times in academia, by politicians, and members of the press that the Armenian and Jewish Diasporas have had similar historical experiences mostly through hardships. Despite that being the case, this article will show that throughout their experiences as non-Muslim minorities in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey Armenians and Jews have never developed any coordinated collaboration; instead, they have pursued perceived respective ethnic interests, largely influenced by historical memory and geopolitics. At the same time, the Young Turks and later the Turkish state engaged in policies, especially toward non-Muslim minorities, that have been described as contradictory, ambivalent, or both in nature, influenced by changing perceptions of citizenship and identity as well as geopolitics.