In Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Jamal Knox and Rashee Beasley (2013), the defendants were charged with making "terroristic threats" after their rap song "F* the Police" appeared on YouTube. This unique case (similar only to U.S. v. Elonis of the same year) exposes significant issues within the law: ambiguity surrounding the law's definitions of threat and the problematic assumption at court that rap as evidence is a literal text or confessional. It also, however, reveals a certain consistency in the court's treatment of music: general dismissal. That mishandling of music, in this case, allowed for a rather drastic translation of "F* the Police" -a court-constituted violence credited to the defendants alone.
In 2016 in New Zealand, pedestrians accounted for 7.6% (n=25) of all road fatalities and 6.6% (n=257) of serious injuries (Ministry of Transport, 2017). The aim of this research was to analyse a sample of pedestrian deaths and serious injury (DSI) cases to understand the contribution of Safe System gaps in serious harm outcomes. A sample of 100 pedestrian fatality and 200 serious injury crash reports from 2013-2017 were analysed to identify the contribution of the four Safe System pillars (roads and roadsides, vehicle, speed environment, user) in each crash case. The research identified common crash scenarios and highlighted the need for improvements in speed management, safer vehicles, safety campaigns, and infrastructure design. In addition, the research identified latent high-order sociotechnical system factors that obstruct the mechanisms to effectively address these Safe System issues and which ultimately perpetuate the occurrence of pedestrian DSIs.
Crammed together in tight folds of humanity, the suburban rail passengers of Mumbai, India, experience the most densely crowded trains in the world (Basu & Hunt, 2012). Whilst the immediate physical descriptors of crowdedness in Mumbai are well understood (Hirsch, 2016), there is little knowledge of the effect this has on the multitude of passengers. This is an important omission, as the effects of crowding on passengers impact their attitudes, travel behavior, and travel decisions. This paper therefore seeks to discern the physical, emotional, and behavioural effects of rail passenger crowding in Mumbai, India. To achieve this, a qualitative methodology, including 49 face-to-face interviews and 48 hours of ethnographic and autoethnographic observations in Mumbai were conducted. Mumbai is an ideal place to study these effects as it has high-density crowding, the likes of which are not experienced elsewhere. Additionally, there is a limited understanding of the effect of crowding on passengers in non-Western societies. With increasing rail ridership worldwide, the experiences of Mumbai’s passengers within high densities may align with the future experiences of passengers in other Western and non-Western countries. For academics and service providers, understanding the specifics of the crowd, such as the density, passenger perceptions, and culture is important. With that knowledge, strategies to improve the experience of crowding would be more effective.
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