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The Business of Death: Dealing with Loss and Grief

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your  background. I build companies that tackle taboo topics. The org has been running (on its own) for nearly half my life. I founded my first social venture at age 15 focused on dating abuse and domestic violence education in schools. After graduating with a BBA from Parsons the New School for Design, I ran Special Projects for , one of the largest global orgs for teens and social change. Then, I joined the founding team of Crisis Text Line as the Director of Communications. I oversaw brand, PR, marketing, strategic partnerships and business development--- growing the org to 12,000 volunteers, 76 million messages, in 3 countries. DoSomething.org I left Crisis Text Line in 2018 to launch Lantern, a venture backed Public Benefit Corporation on a mission to change the way we talk about and manage end of life and death. I earned a Masters of Science in Strategic Communications from Columbia University in 2019. I’m an active volunteer and Board member for Experience Camps, a one-week free summer camp for children who've lost a loved one. I’m also a World Economic Forum Global Shaper, and committee member for the Dying Well Initiative of the Global Wellness Institute. In my free time, I’m on a global search for the spiciest food. What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do? is your step-by-step guide to navigating life before and after a death. Lantern We provide people and companies with all the tools and resources you need for end-of-life planning, death and grief. What is the origin story? Lantern began in the fall of 2018 with one sentence: “I think we need to do something about death.” Some background: having lost my dad as a young kid, when my grandmother (my dad’s mom) died in the winter of 2018, I was tasked with all of the planning that ensued. I walked into the nursing home where my grandmother lived and was confronted with two police officers, a nurse, my grandmother’s body, and a question of “what do you want to do next?” Needless to say, the experience was overwhelming, complicated, and pretty much entirely unguided. I started asking questions about why a better option didn’t exist and turned to Alyssa, my go-to person for cracking a difficult challenge. Together we started answering that question with “it should and we should build it.” What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem? . We even have a matching tattoo to prove it. We’ve worked together on and off since 2012 and found a true entrepreneurial soulmate in each other. I tend to look at things from 10,000 feet up, big picture dreaming (the kite!). I get insanely excited about new ideas. I can be extremely creative and also, extremely scattered. Alyssa is the person that brings those ideas to life. She has an innate ability to keep me firmly grounded (the string!) by focusing our energy, figuring out what works and what doesn’t, then laying the groundwork that makes it happen. My co-founder, Alyssa, and I call each other the kite and string Our teammates (Shae, Wendy, Shivani, Linde, Ndie, and Adeyemi) are why Lantern exists today. Shae built the foundation of Lantern from scratch. The team has taken a lofty vision and made it better than we could’ve ever dreamed. As a team, we’ve created a culture of care and support. Everyone is generous with information, willing to teach and learn, and celebrate one another. Doing this together is what makes the experience so meaningful and rewarding. If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing? It’s hard to envision a life without Lantern! My background is in non-profits so I think I would’ve stayed in that realm. Or, possibly doing CSR for a company that has CSR built into the foundation of the business (no marketing campaigns!). At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics? Linde, our Product Manager, introduced OKRs to our team, and we are loving it! Other than revenue/partnership development, our primary focus is on engagement. . We’d rather one person find deep meaning and connection to our service than 100 that visit once. We steer clear of vanity metrics What’s most exciting about your traction to date? Helping real people every single day. One story that forever comes to mind: Three days after Lantern went live, a friend's father died suddenly. Typically, in these circumstances, the community around the family frantically searches for things to do or say. Perhaps they send flowers or a text saying “let me know if there’s anything I can do”. We were able to offer her Lantern, a tool that not only reduces the burden of logistics on the grieving family but allows them to delegate and take people up on their offer to help. She later texted us this: "Know that the Lantern checklist is bringing my mom so much comfort. She feels so validated checking things off." Messages like this are a regular occurrence at Lantern and it’s what gets our team out of bed each morning. What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why? Most excited: Stem cell research. I took a stem cell research class in college and have followed developments ever since. Most worried about: Deep fake technology and the ramifications of false information on the internet. What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform? Our technical lead, Shae, is a HackerNoon reader! When we found out we were being considered for StartUp of the Year the team was thrilled. What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself? You have to get comfortable with not knowing how to do things. Believing you can and should know how to do everything is largely ego-based when you’re older. When you’re young, it’s mostly because you think everyone else knows what they’re doing. News flash: they don’t. And, essentially everything is new when starting a business. You may possess certain skill sets but they’re being applied to something that hasn’t existed before. I’ve learned that the best thing I could do for myself, my team and our company is tell people “I don’t know how to x” and seek out the best possible person to help me learn. What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing? Young people aren’t as afraid to end-of-life plan as previous generations. COVID-19 really highlighted this shift in our culture. Discussing death is seen as a taboo in the US when, in reality, it’s a fact of life. In choosing whether to discuss mortality, the real choice we are making is whether to ensure our loved ones are taken care of after we are gone… or not. Even if you don’t have a dollar to your name, an end-of-life plan is still necessary. It’s the greatest gift you can give those you love. Lantern was nominated as in Startups of the Year hosted by HackerNoon one of the best startups in Brooklyn, New York

"We need to do something about death", said Liz Eddy, Lantern's Co-Founder and CEO

Suicide is extremely difficult to predict, especially in depressed individuals. But AI- algorithms could soon help doctors differentiate between patients who are depressed and those who are suicidal. , PhD from Harvard University and author of a suicide research published by the American Psychological Association said, Joseph Franklin a suicide expert who conducted an in-depth assessment of risk factors would predict a patient’s future suicidal thoughts and behaviors with the same degree of accuracy as someone with no knowledge of the patient who predicted based on a coin flip. According to the (WHO), as many as 800,000 people die due to suicide every year, with 60 percent facing major . Even though depression places a patient at a higher risk of engaging in suicidal behavior, the difference between suicidal depressed and just depressed individual is not easy to detect. World Health Organization depression So far, standardized clinical trials predicting the factors leading to suicide have proved to be cumbersome and may not always translate into routine interactions between clinicians, caregivers and educators. But a recent may have found an answer. research study Authored in collaboration with scientists at USC, Carnegie Mellon University, and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, the report investigates non-verbal facial behavior to detect suicidal risks and claims to have found a pattern that differentiates depressed and suicidal patients. The dataset used in the research comprised of interviews with subjects from the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, the University of Cincinnati Medical Center and the Princeton Community Hospital. The subjects were broadly assigned to one of the three groups — the medical control group, those suffered from depression and suicidal ideation. They were asked five open ended questions from interviewers — “Do you have hope?”, “Do you have fear?” “Do you have any secrets?”, “Are you angry?” and “Does it hurt emotionally?” The questions were designed to generate further conversation related to the patients’ conditions and past experiences. Based on past literature, the research looked into reactions based on four critical facial behaviors — smiling, frowning, head movement and eyebrow raising. The received responses were recorded on video and audio and then fed into a machine-learning algorithm, a supervised learning model known as support vector machine or SVM. The model tried to find correlations between patient groups and their facial behaviors. Through the SVM prediction models, the research study revealed that smile descriptors were the most vital features for predicting suicidal cases when compared to frowning, eyebrow raising and head velocity. The study noticed that smiling dynamic indicator, Duchenne smile, in particular, can be a strong behavioral indicator of depression and suicidality. In the past, literature has shown that reduced presence of Duchenne smile could indicate depression and psychosis and have been useful in differentiating genuine and posed smiles. Named after a French physician with a fondness for electrodes, a involves crinkling of eyes, while the absence of such smile does not involve contraction of muscles surrounding the eyes. Duchenne smile The research paper showed that people displaying non-Duchenne smiles usually masked their negative emotions, having more suicidal ideation than those with Duchenne smile. In other words, the subjects in mental health and suicidal groups smiled with less intensity and had low percentage of Duchenne smile than those in the control group. But for such AI tools to accurately predict suicidal behavior, due diligence need to be provided. has noted that if such tools fall in the hands of insurance companies, “the results could be distinctly unsavory”. Extreme Tech A crucial point deducted in a 2012 study at Northeastern University stated that it is possible to fake a “genuine” Duchenne smile, a conclusion that could negate that Duchenne smile stands as a strong suicidal indicator. research Whether AI will successfully bring down the suicidal rates through machine learning algorithms remains to be seen, but recognizing patterns of suicidal behavior itself means a step towards saving lives. If you’re facing distress or suicidal crisis in the U.S., you can immediately talk with someone at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (800–273–8255, suicidepreventionlifeline.org ) or the Crisis Text Line (text HOME to 741–741).

Machine Learning uses facial expressions to distinguish between depression and suicidal behavior

Photo by on Oscar Keys Unsplash While a reliable method to accurately identify suicidal patients is from medical literature, researchers are continually striving for AI-solutions to predict and prevent suicidal attempts. missing Suicide is cited as the 10th leading cause of death and is one of three leading causes on the rise, according to the (CDC). Centers for Disease Control and Prevention AI tools are diligently being deployed to address the rising suicide risk. Machine Learning for Identifying Suicidal Thoughts In a recent research, researchers from applied machine learning (ML) to overcome the limitations of traditional methods that predict suicide attempts by looking into the electronic health records of adult patients. The outcomes showed that ML accurately anticipated future suicide attempts, with accuracy within one week of a suicide event. Vanderbilt University 84 to 92 percent In 2017, researchers from ’s (CMU) Marcel Just and the University of Pittsburgh’s David Brent developed a promising approach that helped identify suicidal intentions of individuals. Funded partly by the , the study analyzed the variations of how brains discriminated and reacted to death and life related-concepts like ‘death’, ‘cruelty’, ‘trouble’, ‘carefree’, ‘good’ and ‘praise’. Carnegie Mellon University National Institute of Mental Health Published in , their study relied on a machine-learning algorithm ( ). The central point of the study was to identify suicidal thoughts by looking into their thoughts on the death-related topics. Nature Human Behavior Gaussian Naive Bayes NLP to Identify Social Media Behavior Identifying language patterns on users’ social media can also lead to early intervention and stopping a suicidal attempt. After instances of people broadcasting their suicides on , Facebook started looking for signs of suicidal thoughts through posts. Using AI, scans users’ posts and looks for patterns of suicidal behavior. It then flags the posts to human moderators who then respond by sending user resources on mental health. In urgent situations, the company contacts the first-responders who can try to find the individual. Additionally, Facebook works with 80 local partners like Save.org and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline to develop policies on self-harm and suicide-related content. Facebook Live Facebook But Facebook is not alone to help people in most vulnerable situations. While searching for “ways to kill yourself” or “suicidal thoughts”, Google search immediately takes the user to a page that provides information on 24*7 suicidal prevention lifeline, along with an online chat to help overcome the suicidal feeling. For Google searches on suicidal ways or ways to harm self, the ‘autocomplete’ is disabled. Usual google searches rely on predictive analytics and autocomplete so the user can skip typing the entire sentence in search space. As per Google’s autocomplete policy guidelines, predictions on suicidal searches comes under harmful or dangerous behavior and hence does not yield desired results. Chatbots for Identifying Anxiety and Depression According to the (WHO), an estimate of 60 percent of people who commit suicide have major . Different versions of suicide-prevention AI-tools are being deployed to address symptoms like depression that could possibly lead to a suicide. World Health Organization depression , a conversational chatbot aims to identify symptoms of anxiety and depression in young teens. The chatbot with a dorky sense of humor tracks moods through graphs and displays the progress every week, using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). In other words, it creates “the experience of a therapeutic conversation for all of the people that use him.” Woebot , a free 24/7 text line provides an AI solution to detect the risk of suicide. Powered by deep neural networks and natural language processing (NLP), Crisis Text Line can service 94% of high-risk texters within 5 minutes. The essence of the model lies in its capability of predicting risk by ‘ ’, classifying thousands of high-risk words and word combinations. This combination of model predictions and a real-time feedback loop from Crisis Counselors is key to retraining the model. Crisis Text Line reading variability in sentences and understanding context Possible Roadblocks for AI A larger debate is about the compliance of AI-solutions within the realm of complex ethical and privacy landscape. Firms often find themselves struggling to find a balance between privacy concerns and suicide prevention. In such cases, engaging the users to trust the innovative applications remains critical. In 2014, UK charity suspended its suicide prevention Radar app following concerns on privacy and its potential misuse by online bullies. When and how to intervene would also require a certain degree of certainty before approaching a case. Intervention through identification of suicidal thoughts may give rise to the risk of . Samaritans false positives But given the vast scale of relentless research efforts, clinicians may soon find AI useful for identifying suicidal intentions and that would mean saving lives. If you’re facing distress or suicidal crisis in the U.S., you can immediately talk with someone at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (800–273–8255, suicidepreventionlifeline.org ) or the Crisis Text Line (text HOME to 741–741).

AI intervenes to bring down suicide rates

Understanding some basic neuroscience can be highly liberating as it can undo some of our apparently irreversible limitations or failings. I wrote in more detail about some topics that proved life-changing for me here: , , or . A Practical Framework to Create and Break Habits Mastering a Crucial Skill for Adaptation: Learning How to Learn Proven Strategies against Procrastination As you can imagine, much of this content is based on scientific research. Reading studies about neuroscience, procrastination, productivity, etc., is where the waters become muddier because scientific research often has an agenda that can lead to the “ ” or publication bias. This bias states that research results that don’t validate the researchers’ hypothesis tend to end up in the file drawers. In contrast, research that results in findings according to researchers’ hypothesis is more likely to be submitted to publication in scientific journals. And so, “the file drawer problem” leads to biased published data or fraudulent research with fake data to match researchers’ hypotheses. file drawer problem The website has a compelling series about research misconduct about , (changing data such as removing outliers from measurements, showing overlapping images to represent different experiments, adjusting brightness for one sample but not the other samples in a picture, etc.), and (making up data by reporting experiments that never happened or patients that never existed). Science Integrity Digest plagiarism falsification fabrication Personally, I was stupefied when I discovered that one of my favourite books, by Matthew Walker, was riddled with scientific misrepresentations. Alexey Guzey wrote which tackles the book’s inaccuracies (such as shorter sleep does not imply a shorter life span, sleep deprivation might be, in fact, beneficial as a depression therapy, sleeping less than 6 hours a night does not double the risk of cancer, the World Health Organization never declared a sleep loss epidemic, and so on). Why We Sleep an impressive article Guzey also writes about who cut a part of a research graph that contradicted Walker’s claim (“a perfect linear relationship: the less sleep that you have, higher your injury risk”), except that showed in fact, a lower likelihood of injury than the six hours of sleep column. Walker’s cherry-picking evidence the five hours of sleep column from the original research I am one of those people that took Walker’s claims at face value (“[t]wo-thirds of adults throughout all developed nations fail to obtain the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep”) and forced myself to sleep for eight hours. : As per Wikipedia Walker failed to disclose that , and that the increased risk of death associated with sleeping more than 7 hours was significantly greater than the risk of sleeping less than 7 hours as defined by a J-shaped curve. numerous meta-analyses involving over 4 million adults found the lowest mortality was associated with 7 hours of sleep Psychologist criticised Walker’s approach in his book. Stuart J. Ritchie Walker could have written a far more cautious book that limited itself to just what the data shows, but perhaps such a book wouldn’t have sold so many copies or been hailed as an intervention that ‘should change science and medicine’. Of course, sleep and sleeping well are crucial for maintaining a healthy body and mind but writing an anxiety-inducing book about sleep could do more harm than good. Walker published a response to these critics . here The [“replication crisis”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#:~:text=The%20replication%20crisis%20(also%20called,difficult%20or%20impossible%20to%20reproduce) is another problem to consider when reading scientific research, aside from faking or misleading data. This issue means that new shiny discoveries may or may not be able to be reproduced by other independent researchers, either because of the initial experiments’ design or lack of funds. It might be much easier to obtain funds for studies when a research team is the first to discover something, and it is more challenging to get a research budget to reproduce a previous finding. The Replicability-Index index website published about the replication issue regarding a chapter from another famous book, (the article concluded that the research Kahneman used in his book didn’t replicate). Kahneman accepted the conclusions of this article : an article Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow in a comment I accept the basic conclusions of this blog. …What the blog gets absolutely right is that I placed too much faith in underpowered studies. As pointed out in the blog, and earlier by Andrew Gelman, there is a special irony in my mistake because the first paper that Amos Tversky and I published was about the belief in the “law of small numbers,” which allows researchers to trust the results of underpowered studies with unreasonably small samples. Is it any wonder that most of us, laypeople, won’t research the science behind the articles or books we read, as it is too much to discern: how recent was that particular study (last month, five years ago)? How many citations does that article have? How was the research conducted (was it a large enough sample, did it include or exclude specific populations)? Did we find any biases, logical fallacies or other inconsistencies in the text? Did we investigate the resources listed? Did we look into conflicts of interests between author, publisher or funder? Did we search for evidence that refutes the claims we read? And so, we are at the mercy of algorithm manipulated feeds as they comply with our implicit biases, especially confirmation bias, creating and serving a self-reinforcing loop with articles, books or comments that support what we already believe. Consider the last two years, with the controversial claims about miraculous new cures against COVID-19 and the highly problematic tendencies of our society towards fragmentation and tribalism when we build a narration of “us versus them”. Or we are at the mercy of science book authors and editors and hope they got their facts straight. From : Guzey’s article about Why We Sleep … imagine that a 20-year-old who naturally needs to sleep for 7 hours a night, reads Why We Sleep, gets scared, and decides to spend the full 8 hours in bed every day. Then, assuming that they live until 75, they will waste more than 20,000 hours or more than 2 years of their life, with uncertain long-term side-effects. And some comments left to this article: Hello Alexey I wanted to drop you a line to thank you for all the time and effort involved in debunking Matthew Walker’s book. As someone who works with individuals with insomnia on a daily basis, I know from firsthand experience the harm that Walker’s book is causing. I have many stories of people who slept well on less than eight hours of sleep, read Walker’s book, tried to get more sleep and this led to more time awake, frustration, worry, sleep-related anxiety, and insomnia. Dear Alexey, Your essay on Why we sleep – I can’t thank you enough. I’m a sleep doctor in Oregon and have seen many many patients who have developed severe sleep anxiety and insomnia. Two friends in the sleep field and myself weekly have talked about people that slept well until reading this book. to the Replication Index article about Fast and Slow remarks that: The follow-up article Readers of “Thinking: Fast and Slow” should read the book as a subjective account by an eminent psychologist, rather than an objective summary of scientific evidence. Moreover, ten years have passed and if Kahneman wrote a second edition, it would be very different from the first one. Chapters 3 and 4 would probably just be scrubbed from the book. But that is science. It does make progress, even if progress is often painfully slow in the softer sciences. Falling on the other extreme, full-fledge dismissal of anything that comes from scientific research might lead to tragedy. since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy. Doubt is our product This quote comes from a tobacco industry executive in 1969 about how cigarette companies should deal with the ‘body of fact’ (the link between smoking and diseases). As the pile of evidence against tobacco grew and grew, convincing smokers that cigarettes were safe would have been a lost bet. But what if you muddle up the research that showed that smoking was dangerous, create doubt about study results, call for more research or fund your own research until smokers give up and say: “I don’t know what to believe now”? Then, you still have a viable product (tobacco) that sells. Assessing information brings us to the Goldilocks problem: neither too much astounding credulity nor too much toxic cynicism, but trying to converge to a zone where healthy scepticism and curiosity are just right because it makes us face the possibility that we might be mistaken. Doubt is a powerful weapon that can strike either way. We need to use it wisely when we come across all sorts of content. Including this article. Resources I follow to stay up to date on current development in science in general and neuroscience in particular: Barbara Oakley’s newsletter Lisa Feldman Barrett ( , ) twitter link non-twitter link Neuroskeptic ( , ) twitter link non-twitter link Stanislas Dehaene ( , ) twitter link non-twitter link Neuroscience News Scientific American Quanta Magazine Previously published at https://www.roxanamurariu.com/dilemmas-in-approaching-scientific-content/

Ethical Considerations When Approaching Scientific Content

This article was originally published on by Mike Hayes for , and . ProPublica ProPublica Eric Umansky In the spring of 2019, two New York City Police Department officers entered the Bronx apartment of Kawaski Trawick. The 32-year-old personal trainer and dancer had called 911 after locking himself out. But 112 seconds after their arrival, footage showed, , despite the officer’s more-experienced partner repeatedly telling him not to use force. one of the officers shot and killed Trawick When an internal investigation later cleared the officers — saying “ ” — the for its reasoning. But records obtained by ProPublica can now reveal how the department came to that conclusion. no wrongdoing was found NYPD offered no explanation Investigators never explored key exchanges between the two officers in the run-up to the shooting. They also never followed up with the officers when their accounts contradicted the . video evidence “Any conversation between you and your partner?” the head of the investigative unit asked Officer Herbert Davis hours after the shooting. “No,” Davis answered. That wasn’t true. After arriving at Trawick’s apartment and finding him holding a stick and a bread knife, body-worn camera footage shows that Davis, who is Black, told his less-experienced white partner, Officer Brendan Thompson, not to use his Taser. “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” he said, motioning for Thompson to step back. Thompson fired his Taser anyway, causing Trawick to become enraged, and Davis then tried to stop Thompson from shooting Trawick. “No, no, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,” Davis said, before briefly pushing Thompson’s gun down. The investigators had access to all that footage. They never asked either officer about it. https://youtu.be/vA2M5aOlX_4?embedable=true Credit: Lucas Waldron and Maya Eliahou/ProPublica ProPublica obtained the , including with , via a Freedom of Information Law request. NYPD’s full internal investigation audio of interviews both officers The documents and interviews provide a rare window into how exactly a police department examines the conduct of its own officers after a shooting. The newly released information also expands the public record of the Trawick case as New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board pursues disciplinary charges against both officers for wrongfully going into Trawick’s apartment and failing to render aid after he’d been shot. Thompson faces additional charges for his use of force. The officers are contesting the charges in an ongoing administrative trial. Neither their lawyers nor their union responded to requests for comment for this story, but Thompson told police investigators that before firing on Trawick, “I feared for my safety.” The NYPD did not respond to ProPublica’s detailed questions or a request to interview Deputy Chief Kevin Maloney, the former investigative unit head who questioned both officers. He is scheduled to testify in the administrative trial on Thursday. The NYPD’s Force Investigation Division, which conducted the investigation of Trawick’s death, was created after the killing of Eric Garner and focuses on officer shootings and other uses of force. “You put some of your top investigators,” in 2015 when he started the unit. “I will get a better investigation, a speedy investigation, a more comprehensive investigation.” said then-Commissioner William Bratton The investigation of Trawick’s killing took nearly two years. The two officers, Thompson and Davis, were each interviewed once, for about 30 minutes. (Bratton, who stepped down as commissioner in 2016, did not respond to a request for comment.) In the files, investigators often refer to Trawick as “the perpetrator,” though it’s not clear that he had committed any crime — he had called 911 after he locked himself out of his apartment. They also repeatedly portray Trawick as effectively to blame for what happened. “Due to the perpetrator becoming more agitated by the officers presence, Police Officer Thompson had deployed his taser,” an investigator wrote. Trawick had struggled with his mental health and with drugs. A security guard in the building had also called 911 saying Trawick was acting erratically. But by the time the officers arrived, Trawick had already been let back into his apartment by the Fire Department. “Why are you in my home?” he repeatedly asked the officers. The interview sessions include a number of false and misleading statements by the officers. For example, Davis told investigators that Thompson fired his Taser after Trawick started to “take a step forward, like if he wanted to come at us.” But the when Thompson, holding his gun in one hand and the Taser in the other, used his Taser on Trawick without any warning. footage shows Trawick wasn’t advancing Thompson recalled that after he used the Taser, he again tried to warn Trawick. “I tell him to drop the knife you know a bunch of times.” The footage shows were issued between when Thompson used his Taser and when he shot four times, killing Trawick. no such warnings Investigators never followed up. Beyond asking the officers whether they were wearing cameras, the investigators never questioned Thompson and Davis about any of the footage. “That’s huge, they intentionally did that,” said John Baeza, a former detective who spent 16 years with the NYPD and now works as an expert witness. “That has to be intent not to question them about that.” The investigators found no wrongdoing even when they were confronted with apparent violations of protocol. Thompson, for instance, told investigators that he believed Trawick to be an “emotionally disturbed” person. The says that officers facing a potentially dangerous person in crisis should “isolate and contain” them — that text is underlined — and should “immediately request the response of a supervisor and Emergency Services Unit.” NYPD patrol guide Neither Thompson nor Davis did so. At one point, the chief investigator, Maloney, asked Davis why they didn’t call for help. “We didn’t feel we needed anybody just yet,” Davis responded. “We didn’t know how bad it was until we open the door.” Investigators did not press the issue. A former NYPD detective who helped create de-escalation training for the department previously told ProPublica that Davis and Thompson could have simply closed the door and called in the specialized unit. The timing and circumstances of the interviews were also significant. While Davis was interviewed just hours after the shooting, Thompson was interviewed roughly seven months later and, he said during the interview, he was given the body-worn camera footage to watch first. Advocates and many experts say officers to preview footage of incidents before talking to investigators in case the officers try to alter their testimony. shouldn’t be allowed Though the NYPD allowed the officer who shot Trawick to see the footage during the investigation, the department long refused to show it to the public or the Civilian Complaint Review Board. The department withheld footage for more than a year and fought against a lawsuit that had sought the full recording, arguing that releasing it would interfere with the department’s investigation. A state judge later ruled that the NYPD had illegally withheld footage and acted in “ .” bad faith When the full full footage was disclosed, it showed what happened in the minutes after the shooting. After a sergeant arrived and asked whether anyone was hurt, two officers responded in near-unison, “ ” Nobody. Just a perp. The Bronx District Attorney investigated the shooting but . declined to prosecute In the end, the NYPD investigators summarized their findings with a simple line: “No violation of department policy occurred.” Asked about the investigation, Trawick’s mother, Ellen Trawick, called it “outrageous.” The details, she said, “show the NYPD never even tried to do a real investigation.” The disciplinary trial of the two officers is scheduled to end in the next few days. But regardless of the ruling by the NYPD judge overseeing it, police Commissioner Keechant Sewell has the sole authority over what, if any, punishment to impose. Do you have information about body-worn cameras and policing that we should know about? Contact Mike Hayes by email at and on Signal or WhatsApp at 203-364-7120. Contact Eric Umansky at * *and on Signal or WhatsApp at 917-687-8406 mikeehayes@gmail.com eric.umansky@propublica.org Photo by on Jp Valery Unsplash

Investigators Didn’t Do a Good Enough Job When Questioning Cops Who Killed Kawaski Trawick

From Likes to Depression: Meta's Role in the Youth Mental Health Crisis

Image Source: Pixabay.com The Indian dailies have been abuzz with the Narayana Murthy-Vishal Sikka saga the whole weekend. And rightfully so — the Infosys story is being keenly watched by investors, startups, and everyone else across the country… It’s creation and subsequent management has become the stuff of legends. So, when the company’s main co-founder and first non-promoter CEO have a fall out of sorts, the country wonders what went wrong. Is it a co-founder holding on too strongly to his creation? Is it a cultural mismatch…or is it simply a clash of egos? This saga reminds me of every creator’s plight… While we know that once we create something, we have to hand it over to the world, it becomes difficult for us to detach from our creations. Do we have a right to protect what we create? We most certainly do. But are we guaranteed it will be protected in the times to come…long after we are gone? I don’t know. I myself had a skirmish with a client recently who added a few lines to my work after I had written the post… I was livid when I saw the changes, purely because they weren’t my thoughts, words, or even my style. As a business person, I know what the client wants should be incorporated into the text…but as a writer, if you are trusting me to create something and expecting me to lend my name to it, it’s important that it reflects who I am and what I believe too. The fine line between what you want and what the other wants is a difficult one to tread… The balance to keep two parties happy in any situation is a tough one. What’s even tougher, is knowing that once you create something, you have no control how the world responds to it or interprets it… Each one will have their own interpretations, because each one is responding to it from their own psycho-social framework. Starting a business or creating a piece of art involves a great deal of immersion and involvement in what you are doing, but once it is created, you have to instantly detach from it. This instant detachment takes a zen-like approach that can take years to master… It takes an objectivity that few develop. So, in my view, the process from creation to detachment needs some distance in between. It needs a healthy time gap and physical space, that allows the creator to slowly disentangle from the creation. In the case of business, you could be working at it for a few years, and then gradually hand over to the next in line… In the case of writing and the creative arts, that time during post production can be used to objectively look at the strengths and flaws in your work, and gradually get ready to hand it over to your audience — to either applaud or critique. Too much attachment leads to reduced objectivity, ultimately leading to loss in some form or the other… I lost my client, and Infosys lost its CEO. I lost revenue temporarily, while the shareholders of Infosys saw huge losses due to a dip in the stock...employee morale too was affected. But if you look at the brighter side, disruption maybe a good thing, because it always leads to introspection and reassessment of values…finally leading to regeneration in some form. At what cost, though? If the cost is something you can absorb, go ahead and stand by it… If not, think again before you get too attached to what you create… My final takeaway: Get attached to anything — your philosophy of life or business or creation — only when it benefits more than just your ego, and when it serves a larger number of people or bigger cause. When the attachment serves only your ego, and not a larger good, you need to start distancing yourself from it, or else it will serve no one…not even you. PS: Thanks for taking time out to read my post. If you liked my blog, do leave a comment, applaud it, share it with your network, or follow me to receive more posts in the future.

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Since n.d.

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