(task) The NYPD Slowdown’s Dirty Little Secret - The Daily Beast

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> COP TALK01.10.15
> The NYPD Slowdown’s Dirty Little Secret
> Cutting off low level arrests was supposed to be a bargaining tactic for police officers in New York, but not all of them want the slowdown to end.
> The police slowdown in New York, where cops have virtually stopped making certain types of low-level arrests, might be coming to an end soon. For a lot of police officers, it’ll be an unhappy moment, because they never liked making the penny ante collars in the first place.
>
> “We’re coming out of what was a pretty widespread stoppage of certain types of activity, the discretionary type of activity by and large,” police commissioner Bill Bratton told NPR’s Robert Siegel <http://www.wnyc.org/story/bratton-confirms-nypd-work-slowdown/> in an interview Friday.
>
> In the rank and file of the police department, there are mixed feelings about the slowdown and a possible return to the status quo.
>
> “I’d break it down like this,” an officer in East Harlem told The Daily Beast. “20 percent of the department is very active, they’d arrest their mothers if they could, and they want to get back to work. Another 20 percent doesn’t want any activity period; they’d be happy to hide and nap all day.”
>
> The officer added, “And then there’s the great middle that thinks things are fine now as far as their concerned and all they want is good arrests.”
>
> The not good arrests, by implication, were all the low level infractions policed as part of the so-called “Broken Windows” approach to law enforcement, defended by both Bratton and Mayor de Blasio. It holds that one of the ways to bust high-level crooks is to crack down on seemingly minor crimes.
>
> Between December 29 2014—January 4 2015, arrests across New York city dropped by 56 percent and summonses were down 92 percent <http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2015/01/8559634/police-activity-dropped-major-slowdown> compared to the same time last year.
>
> It’s not novel to point out that the police slowdown, which pitted the police and their unions against city hall, granted one of the central demands of the #blacklivesmatter protestors—an end to Broken Windows policing.
>
> Less noted though, is how many police officers are themselves ambivalent about actively enforcing low level offenses, and how that bodes for the post-slowdown future of policing in New York.
>
> Retired NYPD lieutenant Steve Osborne made the point in an op-ed for the New York Times <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/opinion/the-nypd-protests-an-officers-view.html?_r=0> that was sharply critical of both de Blasio and the protestors.
>
> “I have to suspend my disbelief,” the officer in East Harlem said, “to see how sentencing a guy with an open container is going to really bring crime down.”
> “More police productivity has meant far less crime, but at a certain point New York began to feel like, yes, a police state, and the police don’t like it any more than you,” Osborne wrote.
>
> “The time has probably come for the Police Department to ease up on the low-level ‘broken-windows’ stuff while re-evaluating the impact it may or may not have on real, serious crime,” he added. “No one will welcome this more than the average cop on the beat, who has been pressed to find crime where so much less of it exists.”
>
> Day to day, no one has been telling police officers in New York how not to do their jobs.
>
> “It sounds very unusual,” the officer in East Harlem said, “but I haven’t seen any coordinated activity besides the union putting the message out and then saying jump.”
>
> It hasn’t taken much effort to coordinate the slowdown because, as Osborne notes, average beat cops were never that excited in the first place with going after public urination and loitering arrests. To them, it was a distraction from stopping more serious crimes.
>
> Broken Windows advocates argue that some cops always resisted more active policing. When Broken Windows was first introduced, they say, police officers had to be pushed, by Bratton among other, to adopt the active policing approach that brought crime down to its current historic lows in new York.
>
> But as New York got safer, the methods rather than the results became the measures of success. More arrests meant better policing as the tail started to wag the dog.
>
> Bratton himself has said nearly as much in criticizing his predecessor Ray Kelly’s overuse of the controversial stop and frisk tactic that overwhelmingly targeted minorities.
>
> “The commissioner and the former mayor did a great job in the sense of keeping the community safe, keeping crime down, but one of the tools used to do that, I believe, was used too extensively,” Bratton said in March 2014.
>
> Stop and Frisks have fallen considerably since their high in 2011 when 685,724 New Yorkers were stopped by police, but some numbers driven approaches remain embedded in the department.
>
> As a detective in the Bronx tells The Daily Beast, “there technically are no quotas” in the police department “but you can call them what you want, “productivity goals,” they are back door quotas.”
>
> And those back door quotas can put pressure on officers.
>
> “I have to suspend my disbelief,” the officer in East Harlem said, “to see how sentencing a guy with an open container is going to really bring crime down.”
>
> “Violent crimes haven’t gotten worse in my little slice of heaven despite the slowdown on summonses and misdemeanors,” the officer added. “We’re still responding to robbery patterns. We haven’t gone down in presence for the more serious offenses.”
>
> He acknowledged that it was too soon to say how such a policing strategy would play out over an extended period. “Whether it works will reveal itself over time. That remains to be seen.”
>
> Once New York is out of the slowdown, it’s not clear what kind of policing the city will see on the other side. Will Bratton push the police to bring arrests back up to levels before they dropped off or will the department test its ability to back off?
>
> Maybe there will be some new middle ground possible despite the bluster and rhetoric. According to The Daily News, the combative president of the police union is pushing for just a slowdown that’s a little bit faster. As one police source told the paper <http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/bill-clinton-staying-nypd-de-blasio-feud-article-1.2070327>, “He said they should go back to at least 50% of what they used to do.”
>
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> MISGUIDED01.12.15
> ISIS & al Qaeda Killers Unite in Paris—and Beyond
> Western intelligence officials are obsessed with tracking rival groups like ISIS and al Qaeda. They need to concentrate on tracking down the individual terrorists instead.
> PARIS — The slaughter of journalists, the murders of cops, and the savage executions of Jewish shoppers in Paris last week are forcing the security and intelligence services in Europe and the United States to reexamine their assumptions about the threat of jihadi violence. In crisis meetings in Paris and London today, leaders are trying to get a handle on what French Prime Minister Manuel Valls admitted were “clear failings” by the police and intelligence apparatus.
>
> What went wrong? How could the authorities have failed to identify and watch very, very closely these men—Amedy Coulibaly and Chérif and Saïd Kouachi—who had records of involvement with violent jihad organizations dating back more than a decade <http://www.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2015/01/10/paris-jihadis-were-all-molotov-cocktails.html>; who established links to terrorist organizations in both North Africa and the Middle East; and who were in close contact with a convicted terrorist who once masterminded a plot to blow up the United States embassy in Paris?
>
> Those are the sorts of dots that are supposed to be connected instantly by security services, and that are supposed to raise huge red flags. And yet, they did not.
>
> Veteran intelligence and counterterror analysts in both the United States and France say they believe that part of the problem is the desire of Western governments, and especially Western politicians, to categorize terrorists in terms of their supposed organizations, and then to draw erroneous or irrelevant conclusions based on those categories.
>
> “At the end of the day, who of us gives a shit who they are killing for?”
> As a result, officials were puzzled, if not stunned, when Chérif Kouachi told the French BFMTV network over the phone on Friday that his operation against the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine was backed by al Qaeda in Yemen, while his evident accomplice, Amedy Coulibaly, in a call to the same network and in a video released yesterday, claimed his allegiance was to the so-called Islamic State and its self-proclaimed caliph.
>
> Aren’t those organizations, al Qaeda and ISIS, literally at war with each other on the Syrian battlefield? Aren’t their leaders, Ayman Zawahiri and Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, bitterly competing for international recognition as the leaders of global jihad? The answer to both questions is yes. But, here’s the problem: Knowing that does not make anyone in the West any safer, because for the likes of the Kouachis and Coulibaly, those issues are secondary if not, indeed, entirely irrelevant.
>
> “One says one thing, another says another,” a senior veteran of the CIA’s decades-long fight against jihadis told The Daily Beast, “but in the minds of these people—these three [in France] and thousands more—this is a distinction without a difference. The super-bosses may be wrapped up in these ideological fights, but the followers really are not.” And that is especially true for those who are intent on carrying out attacks in the West, far from the competition for geographical territory in Syria and the isolated ideological pontification of al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan.
>
> “The footsoldiers don’t give a shit,” as this veteran analyst and operative put it. “And at the end of the day, who of us gives a shit who they are killing for?” The challenge is to stop the people on the ground in Europe or the United States or Canada or Australia or wherever they may be from murdering innocent people, and that requires precisely the kind of close surveillance that was not conducted on these guys.
>
> To focus on organizations and imagine that the hit-men who claim allegiance to those organizations are following some rigid set of rules merely “distracts attention from the threat,” said the CIA veteran, who asked not to be named publicly criticizing his colleagues. “One of the problems with U.S. policy is that they are trying to stovepipe these groups when the problem is a global ideology.”
>
> Bruce Hoffman, the director of Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies, and author of several books on terrorism, notes that the rivalry between Zawahiri and his former disciple the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghadi is at least as much a matter of personalities and egos as it is of ideologies, which are essentially the same when it comes to inspiring terrorism. "Hotheads like these two brothers and their friend are less concerned about the ideological niceties and more like throwbacks to what Frantz Fanon [the famous theoretician of revolution and guerrilla warfare] called the catharsis of violence," said Hoffman.
>
> Clint Watts at the Foreign Policy Research Institute writes <http://warontherocks.com/2015/01/inspired-networked-directed-the-muddled-jihad-of-isis-al-qaeda-post-hebdo/> that jihadi terrorism is on its way to becoming a social movement, based on three forces: "the growing development and global proliferation of social media, an unending call for jihad due to the intractable Syrian civil war, and the West’s failure to adapt to the wicked problem of non-state threats in a networked world."
>
> The ideas behind it are simple and the understanding of them by killers like Coulibaly and the Kouachis is, at best, rudimentary. In the video in which he pledges allegiance to ISIS, Coulibaly has to read a phonetic version of the pledge in Arabic, and can barely pronounce each word. The actions of these men are based on simple equations: Cartoonists insult the Prophet, therefore cartoonists must be killed; Jews occupy Muslim Palestine, therefore Jews must be killed.
>
> Within that shallow pond of absolute hatred all sorts of evil organisms can develop and thrive, quite independently of organizational direction. And when law enforcement and intelligence services focus too much on one hierarchy or another, they completely miss the nature of these groups, says Alain Bauer, a prominent French criminologist and terrorism analyst. “They don’t understand how these things evolve, that this is a live thing, it is like a disease,” he told The Daily Beast. The virus constantly morphs and adapts, and much more quickly than the law-enforcement agencies trying to stop it.
>
> The lone wolves or, better said, the stray dogs of radical jihad can dream up any justification they want for killing people, and have. That’s long been understood in counterterror circles. But the Charlie Hebdo and kosher grocery attacks that killed 17 innocents were obviously well planned, unquestionably well armed, and apparently had adequate funds to achieve their objectives. They were not the work of loners. But, professions of allegiance notwithstanding, they may not have been directed by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula or the putative Islamic State either.
>
> Anthropologist Scott Atran, who frequently advises U.S. security officials, notes that except for the commando-style arms training the Kouachis apparently received in Yemen four years ago, this is “still most likely a homegrown cluster of self-seekers who reached out to the two big jihadi supermarket chains of ideas”—al Qaeda and ISIS—“picked what they wanted from each, and concocted their scheme. That scheme was also not so carefully planned as people may think, with much less follow-through on what to do after the initial attack.” In that respect, it is reminiscent of the Madrid bombings of 2004, carried out by low-life thugs with North African connections, which killed 191 people and injured 1,800.
>
> French investigators are now focusing increased (and very belated) attention on Djamel Beghal, who plotted to blow up the U.S. embassy in Paris in 2001, and showed himself at the time to be a skilled recruiter and organizer. He brought both Chérif Kouachi and Coulibaly into a plot to spring another infamous North African terrorist, Smaïn Aït Ali Belkacem, for which Coulibaly was jailed. It appears that even if the Kouachis trained for some time with al Qaeda forces in Yemen early in this decade, they waited for Coulibaly to get out of prison and arrange their financing and armament before carrying out their plot to slaughter journalists.
>
>
> The French authorities have been so focused on the recent threat of people returning from Syria, says Hoffman, that they may have lost sight of those dangerous figures loose in French society who had never actually gone to the recently declared Islamic State.
>
> So, was the mastermind of the Charlie Hebdo and the kosher grocery massacres in the Hadramhaut region of Yemen? Or the ISIS capital, Raqqa, in Syria? Or was the mastermind in the rural region of Cantal in southern France, where Beghal now lives under what is supposed to be close police surveillance? The accumulating evidence points to that conclusion. While focusing on the threat from abroad, the French missed the danger taking shape, literally, in their own back yard.
>
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> Pepsico
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> GAME CHANGERS <http://www.thedailybeast.com/sponsored/pepsico-game-changers.html>12.19.14
> The Science of Ingredient Innovation
> Industry leader rooted in smart new innovations.
>
> How far would you be willing to go to remain a leader in your field?
>
> For PepsiCo, anticipating and staying ahead of changing consumer demands for healthier and great tasting products is an unwavering commitment.
>
> Remaining a food and beverage powerhouse takes investments to expand research, engineering, science capabilities, and new technologies to understand consumer preferences and develop high-quality, great-tasting products that consumers trust.
>
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> Sometimes it takes going to the “ends of the Earth.”
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> Traveling to highly bio-diverse areas like the forests and jungles of Brazil, Peru, Malaysia, China, and Taiwan, PepsiCo is discovering indigenous ingredients, thousand-year-old recipes, and their possible applications in new and existing products.
>
> For example, visits to local markets in these regions have allowed PepsiCo to find ingredients like exotic antioxidant grape-like fruits, ruby-red yumberries and ginseng, betel nuts, seaweed, and sweet tropical longans, and allowed the company to observe how they are being incorporated into regional cooking. These insights and discoveries help PepsiCo anticipate, rather than react to, an ever-changing consumer landscape. It’s all part of a longer-term PepsiCo plan to broaden its portfolio through science-based research and development.
>
> During the last three years, PepsiCo’s investments in R&D increased by an impressive 25%. And research and development facilities in the United States, United Kingdom, Shanghai, Germany and Mexico — to name a few — are engines of innovation, driving topline growth. The new Shanghai location, the largest outside of North America, serves as a hub for new food and beverage products, flavors, packaging, and equipment throughout Asia.
>
> PepsiCo eliminated approximately 402,000 metric tons of added sugar from its beverage portfolio in North America in 2013 as compared to 2006, and has introduced low- and zero-calorie beverages to that end.
> The investments in science-based R&D are paying dividends. In the United States, PepsiCo has debuted nine of the top 50 new food and beverage products across all measured U.S. retail channels in 2013. They are Mountain Dew Kickstart, made with 5% real fruit juice; Starbucks ready-to-drink Iced Coffee; Tropicana Farmstand beverage that’s 100% juice, which includes one serving of fruit plus one serving of vegetable per 8 oz. serving; the fresh-brewed Lipton Pure Leaf Tea; Muller Quaker Greek-style yogurt; Tostitos Cantina Tortilla Chips, Doritos Locos Taco Chips, Ruffles MAX, and Cheetos Mix-Ups.
>
> Work on science-based strategies includes a focus on enhanced consumer experiences and preference drivers such as taste, texture, aroma, and convenience.
>
> “There are a lot of clues that nature gives you,” says Dr. Mehmood Khan, executive vice president of PepsiCo and chief scientific officer, who oversees the food and beverage company’s global R&D organization. “What’s interesting to me in the past couple of years is the merging of biology and chemistry and analytical technology that has opened up more applications with the potential to create more new products in our innovation pipeline. It’s exciting.” He likens the rapid-fire changes underway to the difference between black and white or color TV and high-definition technology: “We can see things now we didn’t see a year ago because the technology wasn’t available.”
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> Less Is More
>
> For decades, consumers generally only cared about taste and price. Now better informed, they want to know about the sustainability of a product and its packaging; where and how an ingredient is sourced; exactly what is in a product, and how it fits their specific functional needs. Not only do they want more information from manufacturers producing their foods and beverages, but consumers are also more inclined than ever before to share information and recommendations with each other. And they also expect those products to remain affordable and taste great.
>
> PepsiCo’s science-based R&D capabilities are helping the company anticipate and meet the consumer needs on a global scale. For example, PepsiCo eliminated approximately 402,000 metric tons of added sugar from its beverage portfolio in North America in 2013 as compared to 2006, and has introduced low- and zero-calorie beverages to that end.
>
> Within the same timeframe, nearly 3,900 metric tons of sodium was removed from PepsiCo’s food portfolio, and the company continues to invest in new technologies and recipes that even further reduce salt levels.
>
> Working with scientific and technology partners to create, what R&D calls a more efficient salt, PepsiCo R&D scientists recently discovered how the size and shape of salt actually affects taste perception. A couple of years ago at a forum, says Dr. Khan, “we taught medium-to-small companies some of this technology so they could utilize it in their products. We believe it was good for the industry to adopt some of this as well.” Of course, it was also good for the consumer.
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> The Transformation Journey
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> How did this transformation happen? PepsiCo recruited scientific talent and a leadership team with backgrounds and credentials that were unusual for a traditional food and beverage company. Experts hailed from disciplines such as agronomy, exercise physiology, endocrinology, metabolomics, and rheology, among others. Dr. Khan was previously a faculty member at the Mayo Clinic serving as director of the Diabetes, Endocrine, and Nutritional Trials unit, and oversaw worldwide R&D efforts at the Takeda Pharmaceutical Company as the president of the Takeda Global Research & Development Center.
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> With the transformation, a message of commitment was sent to the industry regarding their new approach to product development, innovation, deep consumer insights, and product design.
>
> The R&D team is combing remote regions like the Amazon in South America and parts of Asia and even Iceland, both on land and in the sea. The mission? To find various indigenous plants that are inherently sweet or salty, have fatty characteristics, are naturally sourced preservatives and could be useful in many product categories. According to Dr. Khan, PepsiCo has not only taken the lead in the industry in finding ways to reduce salt and fats, introduced lower-sugar orange juice, uncovered new oat-based benefits for consumers, and delivered high-protein beverages, it was also one of the first companies to come out with high-intensity, non-nutritive natural sweeteners like Stevia in its beverages. Part of that, Dr. Khan says, was a direct result of the global trekking PepsiCo is doing. “We’re finding other ingredients similar to Stevia that we believe might unlock further great-tasting products in the future.”
>
>
> With more than 5,000 different species and plants R&D looks at on a yearly basis, PepsiCo has at its disposal digitized tasting technology, which was first used by the pharmaceutical industry for new product discovery. Says Dr. Khan, “once we discover a plant, we can ‘fractionate’ it in order to look at it a little more closely; each one of those fractions has eight to ten natural flavor ingredients. Then as we drill down, our screening technology will tell us if an ingredient is inherently sweet, salty, fatty, or could be used for another purpose such as preservatives or energy applications.” Incorporating taste biology and sensory biology, the technology is helping to decipher hundreds of thousands of molecules to go further into human tasting applications along the road to yielding a new product. The now-efficient process “once took a month by former means and now actually takes a day,” says Dr. Khan.
>
> “When we go out into the field, we have high, rapid analytical methods where we can actually see inside the plants or molecules and send that information directly to a cloud and central database in New York,” he says, referring to a technology that has only been in place for the last two years. “The final piece is our sensory science, where once we narrow it down to a few molecules that have been validated for tasting going through our protocols, we have R&D experts that can say ‘yes, this is sweet or salty or fatty and can be used in our offerings.’ That methodology,” says Dr. Khan, “is PepsiCo’s newest. Because these ingredients are so new, we need new methodologies just to evaluate them. It’s not like evaluating vanilla extract, because some of these things represent the first time humans are actually tasting these ingredients.” Or, he says, they were only used previously in ancient recipes and “it’s the first time we brought it back to the United States to be able to taste. The whole idea is, of course, to ultimately explore how we can use these ingredients in potential new products that have a tangible consumer benefit.”
>
>
>
> Another strategy has included PepsiCo’s collaboration with chefs both in the United States and globally who, for example, might prepare desserts that, while sweet, are made without sugar. “We recently held an exposition at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa, California, and as a result our internal PepsiCo chefs recreated the same dishes these chefs did in order to capture the flavor ingredients before, during, and after the cooking and plating process. The idea was to identify what they are and apply them to different snacks, beverages, and foods. “This,” says Dr. Khan, “is a way for us to explore ways to get these flavorful ingredients into products, and offer more uniqueness and realistic flavor in seasonings for a snack chip.” These insights also help PepsiCo continue to expand its nutrition business, which represented approximately 20 percent of its net revenue in 2013. It’s a portfolio of good-for-you offerings that include drinkable oats with dairy, 100 percent juice, yogurt, humus and protein shakes to name a few.
>
>
> A Global Focus
>
> As R&D helps to drive PepsiCo’s business with state-of-the-art technology, its solutions are offering more consumers enjoyable and nutritious food and beverage options, while making them available to more places across the globe. What tastes great to an American consumer may not be what folks in China or India would choose to eat or drink. To that end, PepsiCo adapts different global brands with products customized for specific markets. Two culturally relevant examples are Tropicana Frutz Sparkling Drink in the Middle East and Quaker Inner Smile in China, a dairy and oat beverage. Likewise, the company’s iconic potato chip offerings worldwide are customized to suit local palates—from Walkers Pickled Onion crisps in England and MAXX seafood-flavored chips in Thailand to shrimp-flavored chips in Egypt and salad chips in China. Without reinventing the wheel, PepsiCo is able to leverage its global scale by creating the opportunity for great ideas to be adapted from one market to another across the world; efficiencies that allow the company to further invest in innovation that ultimately benefits the consumer worldwide.
>
> For a company that began 50 years ago, PepsiCo has successfully transformed itself into a global and diversified organization, with a portfolio providing a considerable range of food and beverages around the world. As it grows and continues to innovate, PepsiCo also remains committed to offering consumers everywhere more choice and better nutrition to meet and exceed their needs while it works to minimize its environmental impact. PepsiCo’s stated mission of “performance with purpose” not only fuels its growth but allows the industry leader to stay ahead of trends as it helps to sustainably shape the world in which it operates.
>
> For more information, visit pepsico.com <http://pepsico.com/>.
>
> This content is partner content, and was not necessarily written or created by The Daily Beast editorial team.
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> Maxim Zmeyec/Reuters
> <http://www.thedailybeast.com/contributors/andrew-nagorski.html>
> Andrew Nagorski  <http://www.thedailybeast.com/contributors/andrew-nagorski.html>
> <>
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> ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP01.12.15
> Mother Russia or Battered Spouse?
> Peter Pomerantsev portrays a Russia gripped by cynicism, deception, and despair and ruled by an elite whose only concern is perpetuating its own wealth and power.
> Even before the current swoon of the ruble, the signals were all there that Vladimir Putin had embarked on a course that is increasingly isolating his country, undermining its long-term economic prospects, and shattering the illusion of ordinary citizens that they can count on rising living standards as they did for much of the previous decade. Instead, those standards now look poised for a steep decline.
>
> Still, opinion polls show that the Russian president’s use of force in neighboring Ukraine and general defiance of much of the Western world is hugely popular at home. But don’t be fooled. Putin now knows that, more than ever, he had better watch his back. His future political survival is no sure thing.
>
> How has the Kremlin leader maintained his popularity so far? Perhaps the most obvious part of the answer is his total control over television, which still is the primary and often the sole source of news for most Russians. But as Peter Pomerantsev explains in Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia <http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-True-Everything-Possible-Surreal/dp/1610394550/ref=as_at?tag=thedailybeast-autotag-20&linkCode=as2&>, what is less obvious is the formula that makes often unbelievably crude Soviet-style propaganda work. “The task is to synthesize Soviet control and Western entertainment,” he writes. In other words, Soviet-style boring is bad, Western-style glitz is good, all in the service of the big boss.
>
> That, along with the Kremlin’s frequent use of outright repression to silence dissenters, has helped contribute to an echo chamber effect. “The news is the incense by which we bless Putin’s actions, make him president,” Pomerantsev quotes Russian TV producers as saying. He knows what he’s talking about. His parents emigrated from Russia to Britain in the ’70s, and he spent nine years as a TV and film producer in their former homeland, exploring the new Russia. The result is a poignant portrait of a country where cynicism, deception, and despair are all too common, all in the service of a completely corrupted elite that is only concerned with clinging to its own wealth and power.
>
> But there’s another factor that may be just as significant as the impact of non-stop propaganda: Russians are exhibiting the classic traits of people who are trapped in abusive relationships. And many are still in denial about the nature of their relationship with their leader, even as the abuse intensifies. Harking back to the tsars and Lenin and Stalin, Pomerantsev notes: “The country seems transfixed in adoration of abusive leaders.”
>
> ‘It’s hard to get your head around the idea that they are lying quite so much and quite so brazenly.’
> This is not a new phenomenon. Marilyn Murray, an American therapist and educator who has spent more than a decade conducting classes for Russians caught in abusive family relationships, sees a direct correlation between her work and political attitudes. “We cannot help but recognize the familial resemblance between the profile of a violent family and that of the country of Russia,” she wrote in The Moscow Times in 2012. “Mother Russia is the quintessential battered wife.”
>
> Battered wives are kept largely isolated, not allowed to make decisions, and convinced that they must rely on their abusive, often alcoholic husbands for basic necessities and protection from a hostile outside world, she pointed out. While Murray limited her direct analogy to Soviet rulers, her answer to the question about why Russians “continue to marry unhealthy leaders and remain in destructive unhealthy systems” remains valid today: “Because like all battered wives, she seeks what is common and familiar to her.”
>
> Pomerantsev doesn’t invoke her theory directly, but he certainly agrees. Like a battered wife who has become adept at pretending all is well in her marriage, the Kremlin is orchestrating “one great reality show,” he writes, where the language and mechanisms of democracy are employed to mask “undemocratic intent.” He now recognizes that he was initially allowed to pursue some real stories, like the sordid truth about what he calls the “Gold Digger Academy” for young women seeking to snag wealthy mates, to help make the reality show “look and sound and feel Western.”
>
> The same was true of its political messages, with the Kremlin offering the pretense of openness, debate and democracy when everyone on the inside understands the game that is being played. At times, he confesses, even he was almost taken in, since “it’s hard to get your head around the idea that they are lying quite so much and quite so brazenly.”
>
> While genuine dissenters still exist in Russia, they are stymied at every turn. So far, Putin has been highly effective in quashing the kinds of protests that broke out after widespread charges of fraud in the 2011 parliamentary elections and his decision to return to the presidency in 2012, the post he held from 2000 to 2008. That move offered final proof, if it were needed, that his interim stint as prime minister was merely a charade to avoid overtly breaking the constitution’s term limits provision.
>
> However, the poll numbers that produce more than 80 percent approval ratings mask a widespread sense of discontent that is only likely to grow as a result of the current economic downturn. Pomerantsev focuses much of his attention on ordinary Russians who never talk of human rights or democracy, as he points out, since the Kremlin has emptied such rhetoric of its meaning. “The rage is more inchoate: hatred of cops, the army,” he writes. “Or blame it all on foreigners.”
>
> Putin has worked assiduously to keep Russians focused on such distractions, particularly “foreigners” at home (ethnic minorities) or abroad (the U.S., NATO, the E.U., Ukrainian “fascists”). As long as they ignore the real culprits, he can continue merrily on his way—even in a time of economic crisis.
>
> But what if the sycophants surrounding him, who have accumulated unparalleled wealth because of their proximity to the ultimate abuser, begin to sense that Putin has turned into a liability? Yes, he’s now their insurance policy that they can hold on to their riches. They know that if he were to leave office under any circumstances, they are likely to lose everything, as Pomerantsev points out. They understand that’s how a system based on purely arbitrary political and economic power, the system they helped construct, functions. The only rule is that there are no real rules.
>
> Nonetheless, even battered wives occasionally glimpse the truth, particularly when it is staring them in the face on a daily basis as it is now. If Putin’s inner circle senses that the Russian people may experience such an epiphany, they could become worried enough to take matters into their own hands. They could figure that that the risks of crossing Putin are greater than the risk of sticking with him.
>
> That may still seem like a long shot now, and Pomerantsev is not predicting anything of the sort. But abusers are always in full control—until they are not.
>
> Andrew Nagorski, a former Newsweek bureau chief in Berlin and Moscow, is the author of Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power <http://www.amazon.com/Hitlerland-American-Eyewitnesses-Nazi-Power/dp/143919100X/ref=as_at?tag=thedailybeast-autotag-20&linkCode=as2&>.
>
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> Photo Illustration by Emil Lendof/The Daily Beast
> <http://www.thedailybeast.com/contributors/nico-hines.html>
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> THE BAD SEED?01.07.15
> Britain May Spy on Preschoolers Searching for Potential Jihadis
> Parliament looks at measures to monitor toddlers for anti-Semitic speech. Meanwhile two kids were taken from their mother when she flew back to the UK from Turkey.
> LONDON — Western security forces have a new frontline in the battle against Islamist terrorism: the under-fives.
>
> Britain has drawn up plans to force kindergarten teachers and registered child-minders to spy on pre-school children in a bid to halt the radicalization of a new generation. Two young children were also taken into protective police custody last week when their mother, who was questioned over terror-related offenses, returned to Britain on a flight from Turkey.
>
> The apparent crackdown on pre-pubescent Muslims marks an extraordinary expansion in Britain’s already controversial counter-radicalization strategy.
>
> Alarming images of young British children pictured with weapons <http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/investigation-the-chilling-tale-of-how-a-typical-lewisham-teen-became-an-isis-bride-in-syria-9628523.html> in the so-called Islamic State prompted officials in London to say they would consider taking into care the offspring of men and women who had travelled abroad to join ISIS. Then, on New Year’s Eve, police took the two children, who landed at Luton airport with their mother, under child protection laws.
>
> Plans drawn up by the Home Office would further extend the remit of child protection officials to include toddlers at risk of radicalization on home soil. A 39-page document that accompanies the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill being considered by parliament says nurseries and early childcare providers, as well as universities and prisons, have a duty “to prevent people being drawn into terrorism.”
>
> “The innocence of young people must be preserved at all costs,” said Glees. “That means that they cannot be considered targets for intelligence-led activity.”
> One of the world’s leading child psychologists dismissed the notion that it was even possible for pre-school children to be radicalized by Islamists. Professor Penelope Leach told The Daily Beast it was ludicrous to monitor young children in that way. “It sounds like a crazy idea to me,” she said. “You'd have to be an awful lot older than that. Really this is a silly story.”
>
> Under the proposals, nursery staff would be expected to report children who were making anti-Semitic remarks or said they had been taught that non-Muslims were inferior. “We would expect staff to have the training they need to identify children at risk of radicalization and know where and how to refer them for further help if necessary,” a Home Office spokesman said <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/11323558/Anti-terror-plan-to-spy-on-toddlers-is-heavy-handed.html>.
>
> The scheme has been condemned by civil liberties groups and queried by the National Association of Head Teachers. Russell Hobby, general secretary of the NAHT told The Telegraph: “It’s really important that nurseries are able to establish a strong relationship of trust with families, as they are often the first experience the families will have of the education system. Any suspicions that they are evaluating families for ideology could be quite counterproductive.”
>
> Professor Anthony Glees, the author of When Students Turn to Terror, is one of the most outspoken proponents of strengthening state intervention and monitoring inside educational institutions but he says the latest plans go too far.
>
> “Not even in Israel would primary school children be seen as deserving special attention. There are far bigger fish the government needs to fry,” he says.
>
> Glees, the director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham also said he was surprised by the New Year’s eve detention of the two children, believed to be under 10, and now held by West Midlands police.
>
> “The innocence of young people must be preserved at all costs,” said Glees. “That means that they cannot be considered targets for intelligence-led activity and should not be confused with their parents, who may well be entirely legitimate targets.”
>
> The Sunday Times reported that the children’s 25-year-old mother was arrested on suspicion of preparing for acts of terrorism <http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/article1503097.ece> when she landed at Luton on a flight from Istanbul.
>
> Haringey Council told The Daily Beast that the children had not been taken permanently into state care. Those held by police under the Children Act of 1989 would typically be placed on an “at risk” register or child protection plan which means their welfare would be monitored closely by officials.
>
> Local councils in Britain have been forced to confront policies for dealing with the children of avowed jihadis as it emerged that several are currently in Syria or Iraq in areas known under ISIS control. Siddhartha Dhar, 31, a Londoner, posed with a Kalashnikov and his newborn son in a series of posts taunting the British security forces <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2850204/Posing-Syria-newborn-son-Kalashnikov-terror-suspect-bragged-easy-evade-MI5-British-police-bail.html>.
>
> He was one of the associates of radical preacher Anjem Choudary who were rounded up and released on bail in a series of raids last September <http://www.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2014/09/25/britain-s-counter-terror-raids-the-end-of-londonistan.html>. He skipped bail and traveled to Syria with his family.
>
> Fellow British jihadi, Khadijah Dare, 22, from Lewisham in South London, who has expressed her desire to become the first female ISIS executioner, posted an online picture <http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/investigation-the-chilling-tale-of-how-a-typical-lewisham-teen-became-an-isis-bride-in-syria-9628523.html> of her four-year-old son smiling as he aimed an AK-47.
>
> A spokesman for Lewisham council said last year <http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/National/jihadists/article1492856.ece> that it would be forced to act if the family returned to Britain. “We view what she has done very seriously and if she returned to the borough we would take immediate measures to ensure the safety of her children,” he said.
>
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> READ THIS.list
> The NYPD Slowdown’s Dirty Little Secret
> by Jacob Siegel
> <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/10/the-nypd-slowdown-s-dirty-little-secret.html>ISIS & Al Qaeda Killers United In Paris
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> from Game Changers
> <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/19/the-science-of-ingredient-innovation.html>Mother Russia Or Battered Spouse?
> by Andrew Nagorski
> <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/12/mother-russia-or-battered-spouse.html>Britain’s Kindergarten Jihad
> by Nico Hines
> <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/07/britain-may-spy-on-preschoolers-searching-for-potential-jihadis.html>
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