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newsfromstolenland · 1 year

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"Manitoba First Nations leaders are calling for the resignation of Winnipeg police chief Danny Smyth.

The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs (AMC), alongside Long Plain First Nation Chief Kyra Wilson, called for Smyth to step down Thursday, due to the police service’s refusal to search the Prairie Green Landfill for remains of three victims of an alleged serial killer.

Smyth has said that the remains are likely in the landfill north of the city, but that no search is planned, due in part to the amount of time that has passed and the fact that there’s no known starting point for a search.

The manager of the site has also said a search would be difficult at the private landfill, due to the constant movement at the site, but said the company is cooperating fully with police and expressed condolences to the victims’ families.

Police said 10,000 truckloads of refuse were dumped in the area since May, when the murders of Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran, and an unidentified victim, who is being referred to as Buffalo Woman (Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe), are believed to have taken place. Trash at the landfill is also compacted with heavy mud at a depth of about 12 metres.

In an interview with 680 CJOB’s The Start on Thursday morning, prior to the call for his resignation, Smyth said the ability to search the landfill is outside of police expertise.

“The circumstances at Prairie Green are way different than Brady (Road Landfill),” the police chief said.

“Brady was within our skills. Prairie Green is not — it would be closer to a very hazardous archaeological dig, and that’s not a skill that we have.”

Jeremy Skibicki has been charged with first-degree murder in the deaths. He was previously charged with first-degree murder in the death of Rebecca Contois, whose remains were found earlier this year at the Brady Road landfill.

“Many communities, organizations, and public leaders across the nation, are asking for a thorough search to be conducted at the Prairie Green landfill,” Long Plain First Nation, the home community of both Harris and Myran, said in a statement Thursday.

“The families of the three women deserve to have closure. Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran and Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe deserve better. Leadership will continue to advocate to have them found and brought back to their home fires.”

Long Plain’s Wilson will appear with AMC Grand Chief Cathey Merrick at a news conference in Ottawa, where Indigenous leaders and families of the victims have been calling for federal assistance with the situation in recent days, on Thursday."

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To be clear, police chief Danny Smyth is refusing to search for the bodies of three Indigenous women who are victims of a (for legal reasons, alleged) serial killer, despite knowing that they are likely there. If the women in question were white, they would be searching that landfill by now. No question.

Their names are Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran, and an unidentified woman who is being referred to as Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe (meaning: buffalo woman).

We should all be outraged.

tagging: @allthecanadianpolitics

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fantasyfangirling4ever · 2 years

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https://winnipeg.ctvnews.ca/legislature-encampment-coming-down-some-members-arrested-1.6095838

#Canada #first nations #police brutality #indigenous rights #land back #manitoba #winnipeg #human rights

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virtue-boy · 4 months

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Rest in Peace Afolabi Stephen Opaso

"The parents of an international student from Nigeria say Winnipeg police failed to "protect and serve" their son who was experiencing a "mental breakdown" when officers responded to a well-being call and fatally shot the 19-year-old on New Year's Eve."

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^^ Study on police violence in Toronto

#linksave #tw police brutality #tw antiblackness #tw antiblack violence #canada news #canadian police #winnipeg #tw antiBlackness #tw antiBlack violence #antiblackness in canada

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gongled · 8 months

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I tend not to post serious shit. But here’s something horrible. Tw police brutality.

#tw police brutality #Indigenous #Canada #Manitoba #Winnipeg #Alberta #saskatoon #Tw hypothermia

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nando161mando · 8 months

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The Independent Investigation Unit of Manitoba (IIU) is probing the events surrounding a recent arrest in Winnipeg that left a woman with a serious injury.

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stars-and-soda · 10 months

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The Police hold fucking world games and this year is in Winnipeg? How much money and time and resources are spent so police can get together and play volleyball??

#acab #police #canada #manitoba #winnipeg #world police games #soda speaks

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cyarskaren52 · 1 year

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Rachael (@conversationswithjustice)

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conversationswithjustice CW: Police violence, murder, distressing content

Canada likes to play the point the finger and deflect game, but our institutions are just as sinister, racist, and violent as the United States. You CANT reform this.

Please read and share these slides put together by @readthemaple

Caption 📢➡️ @readthemaple CW: This story contains multiple descriptions of police killings.

For full context, read Chuka Ejeckam’s article at Passage, which is a media criticism piece on how Canadian news outlets regurgitated police statements and quotes while omitting the brutality commited by these same police forces.

#canada #rcmp #police #winnipeg #peel #torontopolice #toronto #the6ix #acab #ottawa #policebrutality #abolishthepolice #abolition #socialjustice #community #investincommunities #defundthepolice #indigenouslivesmatter #indigenous #equity #justice #blm #blacklivesmatter #activism #protest #policeviolence #systemicracism #policereform #politics #policethepolice

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allthecanadianpolitics · 7 months

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Family and First Nations leaders are questioning the response by Winnipeg police following the death of an Indigenous man taken into custody. Elias Whitehead, 37, died on Oct. 15 after going into medical distress. Witness video appears to show officers using force to restrain an individual who family says was Whitehead. His partner, Jody Beardy, said the video is traumatizing and that police failed him. "Where was his help? Why didn't they keep him safe? Regardless of the situation, they failed him," Beardy said at a news conference Thursday. She said Whitehead was in Winnipeg to finish a heavy machinery course last month. The video appears to show police on top of an individual and twice one officer knees the person.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

#ACAB #defund the police #first nations #Indigenous #cdnpoli #canada #canadian politics #canadian news #Winnipeg #Winnipeg Police #Manitoba

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if-you-fan-a-fire · 1 year

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“HUGE ILLICIT STILL SEIZED AT WEST ST. PAUL,” Winnipeg Tribune. December 29, 1932. Page 1. ---- TWO ARRESTED FOLLOWING RAID ON DAIRY FARM --- Plant Has Capacity of Gallons of Alcohol Daily ---- Believed To Have Been Operating For One Year --- Raid and Arrests Made by Mr. Stubbs of Federal Excise Department ---- One of the largest illicit distilling plants ever seen in Manitoba was seized by William Stubbs of the federal excise department and a squad of R. C. M. P. on Wednesday at Lot 121, W St. Paul, one mile west of McPhillips St., and 10 miles from the city limit. Charles Pichurski and his son Mike, in whose barn the plant was found, were arrested.

Both appeared in provincial police court today when Magistrate Welsford allowed them out on ball of $2,000 each.

The still has a capacity of 1,0000 gallons of mash and running at full capacity would produce gallons of alcohol each. At the time of the seizure there were found 3,000 gallons of mash in barrels and a very large quantity of alcohol. These will be destroyed.

Cleverly Concealed Officer Stubbs says that, from appearance and from information he received since the arrests, it would appear that the huge still has been in operation for upwards of one year. During that time, many thousands of gallons of Illicit liquor must have been dispensed.

The ‘private distillery’ was cleverly concealed and hundreds of persons must have walked under it without being aware of its existence. It was situated in the hay loft of a large bam in which 20 head of milk cows were stabled.

The still room was separated from the hay loft in a room spotlessly clean and papered. The pipe from the boiler fire found its outlet through the barn ventilators in the roof while the steam exhaust went through the wall to a manure pile.

Deserves Great Credit Great credit is due officials for the seizure. Although it was known very large quantities of liquor were being distributed from the part of the country for a long time no clue could be obtained regarding the point of origin.

Two days ago, however, there was a ‘leak’ and as a result suspicion was directed against Pichurski and his son. The farm premises were carefully inspected on three occasions before the still was discovered.

When the premises were raided, it is that the two arrested were preparing to go to work on the job of turning out a liquor shipment.

Besides the liquor and plant there was also seized during the raid a very large quantity of sugar and other materials for the manufacture of alcohol.

Such was the weight of the equipment and mash, that the floor of the hay loft was badly sagged.

Photo caption: MONSTER ILLICIT STILL SEIZED One of the largest illicit distilleries ever found in Manitoba was seized Wednesday by William Stubbs, of the federal excise department, and a squad of R.C.M.P. at West St. ten miles from the city. The arrests were made at the time of the seizure. The plant was found in a hay loft over a barn. It had a capacity of 1,000 gallons of mash and could produce 175 gallons of alcohol daily. Much liquor and equipment were also taken during the raid.

#winnipeg #illicit still #excise department #moonshining #moonshine #liquor control #rural crime #rural canada #farming in canada #royal canadian mounted police #police raid #great depression in canada #crime and punishment in canada #history of crime and punishment in canada

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moderately-moist · 1 year

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#winnipeg #manitoba #Canada #police brutality #fund the public

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walrusmagazine · 1 year

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Cops on Substack: How Police Are Using PR to Combat Criticism

New communication strategies by law enforcement reveal a crisis in public trust

On paper, it seems simple: the Winnipeg Police Service’s Substack is free and accessible to anyone who chooses to read it. But, in reality, Shenher thinks the newsletter is likely “preaching to the choir” and may harm the service eventually. “The last thing that we need in this conversation is another tool of the police to centre themselves—and that is exactly what they’re doing,” he says.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

Illustration by Glenn Harvey (glenn-harvey.com)

#Police #Policing #Social media #Substack #Winnipeg #Illustration #December 2022 #Julia-Simone Rutgers #Glenn Harvey

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mostlysignssomeportents · 23 days

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The specific process by which Google enshittified its search

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

All digital businesses have the technical capacity to enshittify: the ability to change the underlying functions of the business from moment to moment and user to user, allowing for the rapid transfer of value between business customers, end users and shareholders:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Which raises an important question: why do companies enshittify at a specific moment, after refraining from enshittifying before? After all, a company always has the potential to benefit by treating its business customers and end users worse, by giving them a worse deal. If you charge more for your product and pay your suppliers less, that leaves more money on the table for your investors.

Of course, it's not that simple. While cheating, price-gouging, and degrading your product can produce gains, these tactics also threaten losses. You might lose customers to a rival, or get punished by a regulator, or face mass resignations from your employees who really believe in your product.

Companies choose not to enshittify their products…until they choose to do so. One theory to explain this is that companies are engaged in a process of continuous assessment, gathering data about their competitive risks, their regulators' mettle, their employees' boldness. When these assessments indicate that the conditions are favorable to enshittification, the CEO walks over to the big "enshittification" lever on the wall and yanks it all the way to MAX.

Some companies have certainly done this – and paid the price. Think of Myspace or Yahoo: companies that made themselves worse by reducing quality and gouging on price (be it measured in dollars or attention – that is, ads) before sinking into obscure senescence. These companies made a bet that they could get richer while getting worse, and they were wrong, and they lost out.

But this model doesn't explain the Great Enshittening, in which all the tech companies are enshittifying at the same time. Maybe all these companies are subscribing to the same business newsletter (or, more likely, buying advice from the same management consultancy) (cough McKinsey cough) that is a kind of industry-wide starter pistol for enshittification.

I think it's something else. I think the main job of a CEO is to show up for work every morning and yank on the enshittification lever as hard as you can, in hopes that you can eke out some incremental gains in your company's cost-basis and/or income by shifting value away from your suppliers and customers to yourself.

We get good digital services when the enshittification lever doesn't budge – when it is constrained: by competition, by regulation, by interoperable mods and hacks that undo enshittification (like alternative clients and ad-blockers) and by workers who have bargaining power thanks to a tight labor market or a powerful union:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

When Google ordered its staff to build a secret Chinese search engine that would censor search results and rat out dissidents to the Chinese secret police, googlers revolted and refused, and the project died:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)

When Google tried to win a US government contract to build AI for drones used to target and murder civilians far from the battlefield, googlers revolted and refused, and the project died:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/technology/google-pentagon-project-maven.html

What's happened since – what's behind all the tech companies enshittifying all at once – is that tech worker power has been smashed, especially at Google, where 12,000 workers were fired just months after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years. Likewise, competition has receded from tech bosses' worries, thanks to lax antitrust enforcement that saw most credible competitors merged into behemoths, or neutralized with predatory pricing schemes. Lax enforcement of other policies – privacy, labor and consumer protection – loosened up the enshittification lever even more. And the expansion of IP rights, which criminalize most kinds of reverse engineering and aftermarket modification, means that interoperability no longer applies friction to the enshittification lever.

Now that every tech boss has an enshittification lever that moves very freely, they can show up for work, yank the enshittification lever, and it goes all the way to MAX. When googlers protested the company's complicity in the genocide in Gaza, Google didn't kill the project – it mass-fired the workers:

https://medium.com/@notechforapartheid/statement-from-google-workers-with-the-no-tech-for-apartheid-campaign-on-googles-indiscriminate-28ba4c9b7ce8

Enshittification is a macroeconomic phenomenon, determined by the regulatory environment for competition, privacy, labor, consumer protection and IP. But enshittification is also a microeconomic phenomenon, the result of innumerable boardroom and product-planning fights within companies in which would-be enshittifiers try to do things that make the company's products and services shittier wrestle with rivals who want to keep things as they are, or make them better, whether out of principle or fear of the consequences.

Those microeconomic wrestling-matches are where we find enshittification's heroes and villains – the people who fight for the user or stand up for a fair deal, versus the people who want to cheat and wreck to make things better for the company and win bonuses and promotions for themselves:

https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/

These microeconomic struggles are usually obscure, because companies are secretive institutions and our glimpses into their deliberations are normally limited to the odd leaked memo, whistleblower tell-all, or spectacular worker revolt. But when a company gets dragged into court, a new window opens into the company's internal operations. That's especially true when the plaintiff is the US government.

Which brings me back to Google, the poster-child for enshittification, a company that revolutionized the internet a quarter of a century ago with a search-engine that was so good that it felt like magic, which has decayed so badly and so rapidly that whole sections of the internet are disappearing from view for the 90% of users who rely on the search engine as their gateway to the internet.

Google is being sued by the DOJ's Antitrust Division, and that means we are getting a very deep look into the company, as its internal emails and memos come to light:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Google is a tech company, and tech companies have literary cultures – they run on email and other forms of written communication, even for casual speech, which is more likely to take place in a chat program than at a water-cooler. This means that tech companies have giant databases full of confessions to every crime they've ever committed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Large pieces of Google's database-of-crimes are now on display – so much, in fact, that it's hard for anyone to parse through it all and understand what it means. But some people are trying, and coming up with gold. One of those successful prospectors is Ed Zitron, who has produced a staggering account of the precise moment at which Google search tipped over into enshittification, which names the executives at the very heart of the rot:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Zitron tells the story of a boardroom struggle over search quality, in which Ben Gomes – a long-tenured googler who helped define the company during its best years – lost a fight with Prabhakar Raghavan, a computer scientist turned manager whose tactic for increasing the number of search queries (and thus the number of ads the company could show to searchers) was to decrease the quality of search. That way, searchers would have to spend more time on Google before they found what they were looking for.

Zitron contrasts the background of these two figures. Gomes, the hero, worked at Google for 19 years, solving fantastically hard technical scaling problems and eventually becoming the company's "search czar." Raghavan, the villain, "failed upwards" through his career, including a stint as Yahoo's head of search from 2005-12, a presiding over the collapse of Yahoo's search business. Under Raghavan's leadership, Yahoo's search market-share fell from 30.4% to 14%, and in the end, Yahoo jettisoned its search altogether and replaced it with Bing.

For Zitron, the memos show how Raghavan engineered the ouster of Gomes, with help from the company CEO, the ex-McKinseyite Sundar Pichai. It was a triumph for enshittification, a deliberate decision to make the product worse in order to make it more profitable, under the (correct) belief that the company's exclusivity deals to provide search everywhere from Iphones and Samsungs to Mozilla would mean that the business would face no consequences for doing so.

It a picture of a company that isn't just too big to fail – it's (as FTC Chair Lina Khan put it on The Daily Show) too big to care:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM

Zitron's done excellent sleuthing through the court exhibits here, and his writeup is incandescently brilliant. But there's one point I quibble with him on. Zitron writes that "It’s because the people running the tech industry are no longer those that built it."

I think that gets it backwards. I think that there were always enshittifiers in the C-suites of these companies. When Page and Brin brought in the war criminal Eric Schmidt to run the company, he surely started every day with a ritual, ferocious tug at that enshittification lever. The difference wasn't who was in the C-suite – the difference was how freely the lever moved.

On Saturday, I wrote:

The platforms used to treat us well and now treat us badly. That's not because they were setting a patient trap, luring us in with good treatment in the expectation of locking us in and turning on us. Tech bosses do not have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it

Someone on Hacker News called that "silly," adding that "tech bosses do in fact have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years. That's literally the business model of most startups":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40114339

That's not quite right, though. The business-model of the startup is to yank on the enshittification lever every day. Tech bosses don't lie in wait for the perfect moment to claw away all the value from their employees, users, business customers, and suppliers – they're always trying to get that value. It's only when they become too big to care that they succeed. That's the definition of being too big to care.

In antitrust circles, they sometimes say that "the process is the punishment." No matter what happens to the DOJ's case against Google, its internal workers have been made visible to the public. The secrecy surrounding the Google trial when it was underway meant that a lot of this stuff flew under the radar when it first appeared. But as Zitron's work shows, there is plenty of treasure to be found in that trove of documents that is now permanently in the public domain.

When future scholars study the enshittocene, they will look to accounts like Zitron's to mark the turning points from the old, good internet to the enshitternet. Let's hope those future scholars have a new, good internet on which to publish their findings.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

#pluralistic #ed zitron #google #microincentives #constraints #enshittification #rot economy #platform decay #search #ben gomes #code yellow #mckinsey #hacking engagement #Prabhakar Raghavan #yahoo #doj #antitrust #trustbusting

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