I never thought of it that way » « So…then fecal transplants could be a kind of mind control?

Reagan’s ‘morning in America’ has acquired a different resonance

We have another of those really long-running threads, focused on the problem of race in America, and particularly the issues highlighted by events in Ferguson, Missouri. There’s no shortage of material, and it keeps going and going, hampered only by the limitation of the blog medium: in particular, that I automatically shut down all discussion threads after 3 months, to block spam. That’s not enough time!

So here’s another semi-open thread — talk about America’s race problem. Forever, or until it’s fixed.

I never thought of it that way » « So…then fecal transplants could be a kind of mind control?

Comments

  4. says

    Racism is a general problem in the US that plays a big role in incidents such as Ferguson. But I think the role of police training and their style of functioning has to be explored as well. Its bad enough that dumb racists make a significant portion of US law enforcement. But what makes it worse is there is very little restraint on them on the use of lethal force. Of course, their use of lethal force is strongly race-specific, but just the fact that its considered OK for a cop to shoot a person dead on any sign of resistance or possibility of possession of a firearm is shocking to me. Shouldn’t cop at the very least wait till they are certain that they are being shot at before using lethal force? Seems as though they are trained to care about their own lives before anyone else’s. In that case, why do we need cops, coming in with instant epithets of “XYZ city’s finest” or “brave men and women”? Where does the “brave” part come in if they act & react no better than a George Zimmerman?
    and not just lethal force, you have cases of general police brutality where a 57 YEAR OLD Indian man was left partially paralyzed after police tackled him violently. His crime? Walking & looking at yards while brown,

  5. rq says

    Forever, or whenever it’s fixed.
    Not much of a choice there, PZ.
    At any rate, thank you for opening up yet another thread. Prepare for a barrage of posts once I get home. I have been maintaining the links, even if no suitable venue has been available. :)

    Sagar Keer
    I suggest you check out the link in the OP, which also points out the racial disparity that appears in cop-shooting cases. It is sometimes difficult to make a comparison, since there seem to be less white people shot by cops, but it isn’t just a matter of training in the use of lethal methods, but also a matter of subconscious biases that can influence the cops’ supposed feelings of danger. These two things combined are very fatal, indeed.
    Because there is one case where two BB-gun-armed gunmen entered a Wal-Mart and opened fire, and were arrested alive – contrast that to the case of John Crawford III, who was shot dead just for holding a gun in a non-threatening pose. And that’s just one example.

  6. rq says

    Basically, these comments begin where the last post left off. So some links may be a couple of days, sorry about that. Here goes!
    Crew waiting for the protestors arrested today to be released. STL.

    Bobby Shmurda Speaks Out About His Gang-Related Charges: ‘That Shit Is Bullshit’

    When Bobby Shmurda, the charismatic star of the surprise 2014 hit “Hot N—a,” emerged from the back of a New York County Supreme Court room in January, the 20-year-old looked sad and serious. Shmurda sat very still at the defense table, showing none of the viral persona that was responsible for 102 million YouTube views, a $2 million record deal and the international “Shmoney Dance” craze. Today he was just another young man before the judge, one of 13 reputed members of the East Flatbush, Brooklyn, alleged gang GS9 (“God’s Sons”) to have his case called.
    “When I see the judge and the DA, I just see a bunch of people trying to take my life away for being blessed,” says Shmurda, who talked with Billboard from the Manhattan Detention Complex, where he has been held since December. “When I look at them, it looks like a bunch of haters.”
    Four months ago, Shmurda was ¬racing around a Midtown soundstage, ¬sunglasses and gold chains glinting, as he performed “Hot Boy” (the “Hot N—a” radio edit) on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. With him were lifelong GS9 friends, -beaming, and two female dancers in “Shmoney Team” crop tops. The same month, “Hot Boy” reached the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100. “Everything felt like the best moment of my life,” Shmurda says. “Everything.”
    […]

    But as Shmurda’s wildest dreams were coming true, the New York Police Department was closing in on him. At about 4 a.m. on Dec. 17, nine days after the rap artist appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to promote his Shmurda She Wrote EP, cops stormed Times Square’s Quad Studios, where Shmurda was recording (and where 2Pac was shot in 1994). Police also executed search warrants in East Flatbush. In total, they rounded up 15 GS9 members, including Shmurda’s older brother, Javase, 22. Officials claim they seized 10 weapons in the sweep, along with a small amount of crack.
    The following day, in a joint press conference, the NYPD and Special Narcotics Prosecutor’s Office delivered an indictment based on a yearlong investigation that accused GS9 members of 69 counts (later upped to 101), including conspiracy, second-degree murder (for a 2013 bodega shooting), attempted murder (for a 2014 shooting that struck an innocent bystander) and reckless endangerment (for June gunfire outside a Brooklyn barbershop). Also during the press conference, NYPD Commissioner William Bratton alleged that GS9 stood for “G-Stone Crips” adding, “This gang … gloated about murder, shooting and drug-dealing in YouTube videos and viral dance moves.”

    Further, the accusation alleged that “the driving force behind the GS9 gang and organizing figure within this particular conspiracy” was one Ackquille Pollard, aka Bobby Shmurda. (“He ‘murdered’ every track he did,” his mother says about her son’s stage name.) Prosecutors charged Shmurda with conspiracy to commit murder and assault, weapons possession, reckless endangerment and criminal use of drug paraphernalia. While the prosecution has not identified a GS9 hierarchy, it says his “status” made others defer to him. “That shit is bullshit,” insists Shmurda. Asked about the charges, he says, “Bullshit.” He offers, “I come from a bad neighborhood. They’re upset that somebody my age made it out and is making so much money.”
    […]
    “I do know that Bobby Shmurda isn’t proud of his background,” says Ebro Darden, morning show host at WQHT (Hot 97) New York. “When we broke his record, he expressed that to me. He doesn’t want to just be what his neighborhood is about — just a statistic. He was trying to have fun.”
    Early in 2014, Shmurda and his GS9 squad filmed a no-budget video for “Hot N—a” on the streets outside their apartments, mugging for the camera and intermittently pantomiming firing guns. About halfway through the clip, posted to YouTube in March, Shmurda casually flings his Knicks hat into the air, folds in his shoulders as if to indicate the unbearable weight of his own awesomeness and waves his arms while cocking his hips. Uploaded to Vine in June, this six-second routine went so epically viral that, within a matter of weeks, the “Shmoney Dance” became a worldwide meme. Soon, Beyoncé, Peyton Manning and Kevin Hart were caught on film imitating Shmurda’s silly, swaggy moves — along with grandmothers, college students, Elmo and an American soldier in Iraq.
    Amid the frenzy, Epic made him an offer. “I met with Shmurda and didn’t let him leave,” Sha Money, executive vp urban A&R, told Billboard in October. “I wanted to be in business that day.” (An Epic representative says the company stands by Shmurda and he’s still one of the label’s artists, but Epic refused multiple requests for further comment.)
    After “Hot N—a” went viral, Shmurda spent 2014 touring nonstop, leading caravans of friends and fans from Brooklyn to shows all over the country. “He was very much overwhelmed by everything happening all at once,” says his mother. DJ Mustard hit him up on Twitter, Drake brought him onstage to perform and French Montana invited him to video shoots. But throughout, friends say he remained quirky and open, a childlike guy who would jump into a pickup football game in the park, and he handled the attention with good humor: When TMZ confronted him on a sidewalk, he cheerfully taught the cameraman how to do the Shmoney Dance.
    “He’s like a puppy,” says GS9’s P-Gutta, Shmurda’s tour manager. “He wants to be lovable … He’s an innocent kind of guy.”
    Around the neighborhood, Shmurda became a hero — and his fame changed the place. Some GS9 members got “Shmoney” tattoos. His manic, goofy presence created a new vibe for a neighborhood that often had been somber. GS9 member Cash, 22, says local parties became fun in a way they hadn’t been for years: “He made the gangsters dance.”
    Shmurda found deliverance from the hood’s hopelessness, moving to a new, quiet, mostly Korean neighborhood in Brooklyn. “There was never no trouble,” he says. That feeling lasted less than six months.
    […]

    Kenneth Montgomery says that his client is no gang leader, just the most famous person in a crime-ridden area. “Mr. Pollard is not accused of shooting or assaulting anyone, nor was he found in receipt of any drugs,” he says. “It’s sad to me that this kid is facing the possibility of his career being ruined over something like this. He’s a bright and talented young kid.” (“The charge is conspiracy,” counters Special Prosecutor spokeswoman Kati Cornell. “Not just the people pulling the trigger are responsible for the shootings. Individuals play different roles.”) […]

    Shmurda’s next hearing date is March 18. For the most serious of his conspiracy charges, the viral rap star could face up to 25 years in prison. A conviction on the second-degree weapons possession charges could bring up to 15 years — for each of the six counts. But Shmurda, who says the first thing he’ll do when he gets out is “write some platinum songs,” remains optimistic: “It started off good last year and it ended up ass. So hopefully it started off bad this year and will end off outrageous.”

    (Video) Florida Drivers Challenging Police Over Legally Questionable DUI Checkpoints In my opinion, random DUI checks are a good thing… but then I’ve never had to worry abou the police turning it into a whole other thing.

    The Radical Brownies have made an appearance here before, but not in article form: Young Oakland Girls Called ‘Radical Brownies’ Learn Social Justice Instead Of Selling Cookies

    After the recent Black Lives Matter protests, there is a new brownie troop in Oakland. Instead of selling cookies, they are spreading a message.
    On a Saturday afternoon in Oakland, a handful of 8 to 10 year old girls are gathered, in brown uniforms, giggling and eating cupcakes. They look like Girl Scouts, but it’s not just fun and games.
    And it’s not just fun and games. “White policeman are killing black young folks such as women, men and children,” one of the girls said.
    Another girl said, “Mike Brown. He was shot because he didn’t do nothing. Only the police officer shot him because of his skin color.”
    These girls are called the “Radical Brownies.” And instead of learning sewing, they’re learning social justice.
    Even their uniforms have a message.
    “The beret, it’s a Black Panther/Brown Beret twist,” one of the Radical Brownies said.
    “I think it’s very appropriate. A lot of the work the Black Panthers did was community oriented,” Radical Brownies co-founder Marilyn Hollinquest told KPIX 5.
    Hollinquest and her friend Anayvette Martinez co-founded the group about a month ago, after Anayvette’s daughter Coatlupe told her she wanted to join a girl’s group.
    “How amazing would it be to have a girls’ troop that was really focused around social justice and where girls could even earn badges?” Martinez said.
    Their first badge, a fist emblazoned with the words Black Lives Matter. They earned it for marching in a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in Oakland last month.
    “The girls felt really just like passionate about the topic and they loved being there,” Martinez said.
    When asked about the big issues they are tackling, Martinez said, “They are big issues. But we also feel like these are conversations that they’re not too young to be having.”
    The Radical Brownies have triggered an avalanche of criticism online, with some accusing the group of brainwashing.
    “We did strike a nerve. We definitely did strike a nerve,” Hollinquest said.
    But Hollinquest said they are not telling the girls what to think. “Kids already understand fairness and unfairness, so we take that understanding at an age-appropriate level,” she said.
    The girls said they feel like they are a sisterhood.
    “It’s really good for me because it brings out who I am,” one of the girls said.
    Martinez said, “After this first year, we’re hoping to be able to support other chapters starting.
    In a matter of weeks, the Radical Brownies’ Facebook page received 10,000 likes. There have been requests from as far away as France and Bermuda to start chapters there. ”

    @deray Amazing timing! Last night @BLMPDX did #DateWithJustice. NW is turning up this weekend!
    Denver Community Defense Committee’s Official Statement on “March Against Police Terror”

    On Saturday February 14, over 300 people marched through the streets of Denver to show solidarity with families who have lost their loved ones or had their loved one’s lives threatened because of police violence.
    When the March arrived at the Denver Police Headquarters, a bucket of paint was thrown by unknown March participants at a memorial to police officers who have been killed while in performance of their jobs. This single action has gained the most attention in the media, and has become a rallying call for Denver police and those who defend their actions.
    We, as the members of the Denver Community Defense Committee, the organization that planned the March against Police Terror, voice our unwavering support and solidarity to all those who participated in the protests and March yesterday.
    It is telling that at this moment, local media and the Denver Police Department are more offended over red paint being splashed on a piece of stone than the very real red blood that continues to stain our streets because of unchecked police violence. Although the paint was easily washed off the memorial, the scars left by police terror can never be washed away.
    That a police department that stages raids to serve non-violent warrants on unarmed suspects during funerals, as was the case when police killed Ryan Ronquillo on July 2, 2014 outside the Romero Funeral Home during a funeral, would then complain about a small amount of paint on a piece of stone as “dis-honoring the dead” is beyond insulting.
    That a police department that would handcuff, search, and then brutalize an already dead body as they did on January 26, 2015 after they killed 17 year old Jessie Hernandez, would denounce an act of non-violent protest as “disrespectful” is beyond sickening.
    It is an act of extreme injustice that two people will face charges in court, accused of throwing paint on a piece of stone, and will face more jail time and harsher punishments than any police officer who has killed an unarmed suspect in this city. While two unarmed protesters will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for an act of civil disobedience where no one was harmed, officers like Jeffrey DiManna, who has been involved in three cases of shooting unarmed suspects in the last seven months, will continue to patrol our streets without fear of any punishment whatsoever.
    With these facts as the foundation for the situation we find ourselves facing within the city of Denver, how can anyone question why people would start to feel motivated to take bolder and more desperate actions against the institutions of police violence? The people of Denver have run out of cheeks to turn. We are being pushed into a corner by a system of police who murder with complete immunity, and the city officials and District Attorneys who do nothing to stem the flow of blood in our streets.

  7. rq says

    Jimi Hendrix. 1961. 101st Airborne.
    This i san orphan tweet from somewhere else: @MHPshow “Plaintiffs in this case are each impoverished people who were jailed by the City of Jennings because they were unable to pay debt”

    Brian Williams Used ‘Thuggish Kids’ To Dramatize Hurricane Katrina Story

    “Our hotel was overrun with gangs,” Williams told former “NBC Nightly News” managing editor Tom Brokaw in a video published by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in June 2014. “You’d hear young, kind-of-thuggish kids walking about and down the hall all night,” he told author Judith Sylvester for her 2008 book The Media and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, according to The Washington Post.
    It was revealed this week that Williams’ portrayal of the security situation at the Ritz-Carlton during Hurricane Katrina may not be accurate. As The Post points out, three individuals have said no gangs infiltrated the hotel, as Williams claims. The Post also spoke with the hotel’s manager at the time, Myra DeGersdorff, who said the closest thing to there being “gangs” in the Ritz-Carlton was one incident where “maybe one or two” looters entered the hotel but were “immediately” chased out.
    Whether or not his story is true, Williams’s choice of words is telling. Why did he seek to portray the criminals as “thuggish kids”? It seems that in grasping for a scary stereotype to add drama to his story, he settled on a word that conveyed a very specific image — that of a young black male, and one that white people might find frightening. The word “thug” is particularly useful in conjuring that stereotype because it’s a loaded term that stays (just barely) within the boundaries of what’s typically deemed “acceptable” language.
    But “thug” is a heavy word, fraught with hidden meaning. “It seems like it’s an accepted way of calling somebody the N-word now,” said professional football player Richard Sherman during a press conference in January of last year after being called a “thug” by hundreds of people on TV and the Internet, merely because he’d briefly taunted a player from another team in the presence of a video camera (after a truly exceptional play which no doubt left him feeling exhilarated).
    Sherman asked, “Can a guy on a football field just talking to people” be a thug? He questioned whether people would use the word to refer to white athletes who were acting belligerently: “There was a hockey game where they didn’t even play hockey! They just threw the puck aside and started fighting. I saw that and said, ‘Ah, man, I’m the thug?’”
    Sherman’s remarks represent only one of the latest examples in an alarming trend, where the word “thug” is used as a kind of code. Ever since 2008, the word has been a convenient dog whistle for conservatives and the right-wing to refer to President Barack Obama. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Karl Rove and Michelle Malkin have all used the word to drum up anger against the president and his policies. Limbaugh in particular seems to employ it on a fairly regular basis for this purpose. (Hat tip to the research group Media Matters for America for keeping track.)

    Ex-Chicago Officer Accused of Torturing Black Men Is Released From Prison

    Jon Burge was transferred to a Florida halfway house Thursday, the report says. Burge and the detectives he supervised terrorized the city’s mainly black South Side throughout the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, according to the report. He reportedly forced scores into making false confessions.
    But after the expiration of the statute of limitations for his alleged crimes, Burge was convicted of perjury in 2010 on a charge of lying about police torture, the report says. He was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison on the perjury conviction.
    On Thursday Anthony Holmes, one of Burge’s victims, stood at Chicago’s City Hall and recounted the pain he endured under Burge’s crew. He told reporters of being arrested in 1973 and taken to a police station where detectives hooked him up to an electrical box and put a bag over his head, the Tribune reports. Holmes said that officers shocked him repeatedly until he confessed to a murder he did not commit. The nearly 70-year-old Holmes recalled Burge calling him the n-word and warning him against biting through the bag over his head, the Tribune reports.
    “I need some help,” Holmes told a crowd of reporters, according to the Tribune. “I try to hold my emotions back because I don’t want people to see me like that. … My family has been through a lot.”

    Lawmaker Opposes Education Funding Because It Would Go To ‘Blacks’ Who Get ‘Welfare Crazy Checks’
     I’m getting the feeling that using ‘Blacks’ as opposed to ‘black people’ is quickly becoming something a little bit like ‘thug’ but more polite.

    A Mississippi state lawmaker said he opposed putting more money into elementary schools because he came from a town where “all the blacks are getting food stamps and what I call ‘welfare crazy checks.’ They don’t work.”
    In an interview with the Clarion-Ledger regarding education funding, state Rep. Gene Alday (R) stated his opposition to a push to increase funding to improve elementary school reading scores. Alday implied that increasing education funding for children in black families would be pointless.
    […]

    The Mississippi legislature recently advanced a bill that would provide exceptions to the reading policy for students with learning disabilities. The bill is opposed by Gov. Phil Bryant (R), who supports the third grade gate policy.
    “It’s disappointing that 62 members of the House of Representatives would vote to socially promote children who cannot read,” Bryant told the Clarion-Ledger. “With votes like this, it is little wonder that Mississippi’s public education system has been an abysmal failure.”
    Bryant’s critics suggest that he needs to change his approach. “If the governor is sincere about making universal literacy a gateway, rather than a gatekeeper, he would support full funding for what it will take to get the literacy job done,” said Mike Sayer, co-founder of Southern Echo, a grassroots civil rights group that works with African-American students.
    Alday staunchly opposes increasing the funding. “I don’t see any schools hurting,” he said.

    LeBron James Reveals He Won’t Let His Sons Play Outside With Toy Guns (DETAILS)

    During a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, James touched on the Ohio police shooting that left 12-year-old Tamir Rice dead last November — an event that resonates with the 30-year-old father of two. When asked if he’s had the “talk” with his sons, LeBron said:

    “I have those conversations with my boys. They have tons of play guns. None of them look real. We have Nerf guns that are lime green and purple and yellow,” he says. “But I don’t even let them take them out of the house.”

    Tamir was playing at a park with a toy gun when he was fatally shot by a rookie police officer.
    He continued, detailing what he will tell his sons — LeBron Jr., and Bryce Maximus — about how to respond during encounters with officers.

    “And the talk is, ‘You be respectful, you do what’s asked and you let them do their job, and we’ll take care of the rest after. You don’t have to boast and brag and automatically think it’s us against the police.’ I’ve had one or two encounters with the police in my life that were nothing. But sometimes you just got to shut up. It’s that simple. Just be quiet and let them do their job and go on about your life and hopefully things go well.”

    In recent months, James has been vocal about dismantling police violence nationwide. In December, James and a handful of NBA players donned “I Can’t Breathe” t-shirts, an act of solidarity to honor the life of Eric Garner, the father of six who died when an NYPD officer placed him in an illegal chokehold last summer.

    “It’s not a Cavs thing,” James told ESPN at the time. “It’s a worldly thing.”
    “It’s just for us to make a [statement] to understand what we’re going through as a society,” James said when asked about the T-shirt. “I’ve been quoted over and over about what’s going on as far as it’s more of a notion to the family, more than anything. Obviously, as a society we have to do better. We have to be better for one another. It doesn’t matter what race you are. It’s more of a shout out to the family more than anything, because they’re the ones that should be getting all the energy and effort.”

  8. rq says

    When the @SLMPD arrest a group of non-violent protesters and then release the ones who are popular on Twitter, there is a problem.
    Y’all, @MsPackyetti is leading a Racial Identity Training Session right now. And it’s incredible. Here’s the pdf on that: Racial Identity Development. From a black people’s perspective and a white people’s perspective, very interesting… thought-provoking.

    This Is How Black Girls End Up in the School-To-Prison Pipeline

    According to a report released Wednesday, incidents such as these in which black girls are subject to harsh, apparently unwarranted school discipline and end up in the juvenile justice system are much more likely than the existing research and public conversation about the school-to-prison pipeline suggest. Concern and interventions focus largely on boys of color, particularly black boys. But according to the report, titled “Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected,” black girls are also disciplined at disproportionately high rates compared to white girls and, as a result, are excluded from opportunities to learn. Black boys are suspended more than three times as often as white boys, and often that statistic is held up as sole proof of a problem. But if black girls are suspended six times more often than white girls, which data analysis in this new report finds, then why and what can be done to reduce that disparity?
    The report, authored by the African American Policy Forum in collaboration with Columbia Law School, looked at 2011–12 school year data collected by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights and found:
    —Twelve percent of all black girls in school were suspended, while two percent of white girls were subjected to that form of discipline.
    —In New York City’s public schools, black students made up 28 percent of the student body and white students were 14 percent. But black girls were 90 percent of all girls expelled, and no white girls were expelled that school year.
    —In Boston’s public schools, black students made up 35 percent of the student body and white students were 14 percent. Black girls were 63 percent of all girls expelled, and no white girls were expelled that school year.
    The report goes beyond simply reporting the problem and recommends solutions, such as training teachers how to work with students traumatized by violence and sexual assault and recognizing that girls have needs that can differ from boys’ and so demand specially tailored solutions. “This cannot be a trickle-down affair,” Kimberlé Crenshaw, a legal scholar and one of the report’s authors, said Wednesday on a call to announce its release.
    As for the problems girls face at school, some of these were explored in depth in a New York Times article late last year that examined the same Office of Civil Rights data for insight into race, gender and school discipline. According to that story, intraracial disparities exist as well. “Researchers say that within minority groups, darker-skinned girls are disciplined more harshly than light-skinned ones,” Tanzina Vega reported. Vega focused on a district in Georgia where a 12-year-old black girl was accused of criminal trespassing after writing graffiti in a school bathroom. The girl’s friend, who was also involved and is white, faced no such charges because her family was able to pay $100 in restitution.
    But the difference in how white and black girls are disciplined often isn’t just about who has the money to buy their way out of harsh punishment and who doesn’t. Making a decision about whether and how to discipline a student is subjective, so biases around race and gender creep into calls educators have to make every day. According to the African American Policy Forum report, the girls interviewed in focus groups believed their teachers and school counselors often perceived them as “loud and rowdy, ghetto,” and so relied on harsh discipline practices as a way to counteract and try to root out those behaviors.
    Last fall, I interviewed educator and scholar Monique Morris for a story I was reporting about how teachers can address behavior problems without turning to suspensions or otherwise pushing students out of the classroom. Morris, who’s working on a book on the criminalization of black girls in schools, has conducted interviews and run focus groups across the San Francisco Bay Area and in Boston, New Orleans and Chicago with students who have struggled in or been ousted from the traditional school system. She said sometimes teachers and administrators think they’re doing something innocuous by teaching girls to be ladylike or to meet some other standard of femininity—by sending a girl wearing short shorts home or requiring that she stay in the office, for example—when in reality they’re doing harm.
    “They try to police girls’ sexuality in ways that really just marginalize them from the school environment,” Morris said. “In an attempt to try to show love and maybe even engage with the young women, they end up pushing them away and criminalizing their behavior in ways that are unnecessary.” Instead, these are moments when educators should focus on boys’ inappropriate behavior rather than solely blaming that behavior on the way a girl dresses, she said.
    As for solutions, Morris said the girls she’s interviewed are longing for dependable, caring relationships with teachers who believe in their promise.“The girls who have the best relationships with teachers are the ones who do the best in school,” she said.
    The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the National Women’s Law Center have organized a congressional briefing on improving educational outcomes for black girls, including how to reform zero-tolerance discipline policies to avoid school pushout. The event is February 11 in Washington, DC, and open to the public.

    Civil Rights Icon John Lewis: Without Selma, Obama Would Not Be President

    “I don’t think as a group we had any idea that our marching feet would have such an impact 50 years later,” Lewis said in an interview on “Face The Nation.”
    “If it hadn’t been for that march across Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, there would be no Barack Obama as president of the United States of America,” he said.
    […]

    Despite the progress since Bloody Sunday, Lewis said that the country still had more work to do on race relations. He said that the country had let the tensions surrounding the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of Michael Brown — an unarmed black teen fatally shot by a police officer — “drift away.” If the country passes on confronting the complex racial issues raised by Ferguson, Lewis said, there will be similar incidents in the future.
    “We can make progress, we can deal with the issue of justice, we can deal with the issue of police and communities,” he said. “You bring communities and law enforcement and not sweep the issues under the rug.”
    Lewis added that FBI Director James Comey made a “profound statement” last Thursday when he acknowledged that law enforcement officers carried racial biases.
    Even with those challenges, Lewis said that he still thought the United States could achieve a colorblind society.
    “Sometimes I feel like crying, tears of happiness, tears of joy, to see the distance we’ve come and the progress we’ve made,” Lewis said. “When people tell me nothing has changed, I just feel like saying, ‘Come and walk in my shoes. I will show you. I will take you to those places.'”

    Police dash cam shows part of contested arrest – until St. Louis officer turns camera off
     Dash cams solve everyone’sp roblems!

    As video cameras begin to sweep post-Ferguson policing — and policymakers grapple with whether to bar the public from watching the images — one such recording sits at the heart of a new lawsuit.
    It shows St. Louis police making an arrest that would later be called abusive, and catches an apparently surprised officer yelling, in part, “Everybody hold up. We’re red right now!” before she abruptly shuts off the camera.
    Joel Schwartz and Bevis Schock, lawyers who filed suit Jan. 22 on behalf of Cortez Bufford, said “red” is cop slang for a running camera. What is seen before the video stops, they claim, supports their accusations in St. Louis Circuit Court that police lacked probable cause and applied excessive force.
    The video, which St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay’s office had asked a private lawyer to delay releasing last summer, shows city officers pull Bufford from a car, kick him repeatedly and shock him with a Taser. It played a role in the dropping of charges against Bufford.
    But a lawyer for the St. Louis Police Officers’ Association insists that the video really reflects a proper escalation of force applied against a resisting suspect who was lucky he didn’t get shot when he reached for a gun.
    Police Chief Sam Dotson declined to comment on the specifics of the case.

    More at the link.

    By performing on the ground Kanye is forcing the audience to compare his body to the dead bodies of black folk.

  9. rq says

    Here’s another on the dashcam situation: Police dash cam shows part of contested arrest – until St. Louis officer turns camera off

    And Shaun King on the same, via DailyKos: St. Louis police and mayor do not want you to see this video of police brutality

    On April 10, 2014, four months before Ferguson teenager Michael Brown was shot and killed by St. Louis area police, another 18 year old, Cortez Bufford, was pulled over by police in St. Louis for “making an illegal u-turn.” Within a few minutes, a full-fledged scandal ensued and the the mayor of St. Louis has worked for months to keep it from the public.
    The video is below, but let’s break down the key facts. Let’s start with the strange reality that all charges were dropped against Cortez Bufford. These charges were:
    1. Police alleged that Bufford was a suspect in an area shooting.
    2. Police alleged they saw marijuana in the car.
    3. Police alleged they recovered an illegally owned gun from Bufford.
    4. Police alleged that Bufford made an illegal u-turn.
    5. Police alleged that Bufford kicked officers and resisted arrest.
    Now, think for a moment, and ask yourself why in the world would all charges be dropped against a young black with all of those things stacked against him? If it doesn’t add up, the video will make sense of it for you. At around 6:00 in the video, police force Cortez Bufford out of the car and begin assaulting him, kicking him, using their taser on him multiple times and even screaming for him to remain still while they tase him.
    […]

    Officer Kelli Swinton approaches Burkemper’s patrol car. There is the sound of an opening car door, and she loudly declares: “Hold up. Hold up, y’all. Hold up. Hold up, everybody, hold up. We’re red right now, so if you guys are worried about cameras, just wait.”
    The audio cuts out, and the video ends eight seconds later.
    In response to an open records request, City Counselor Winston Calvert released the same video on Friday, plus views from other dash cams.
    One shows that after Burkemper’s camera stopped, officers continued to huddle around Bufford. That camera shuts off, too, leaving a gap of more than two minutes before Bufford is seen on it again, stumbling and falling once as he’s taken to a police vehicle. Other videos show unrelated scenes and both Bufford and his passenger sitting inside vehicles.

    […]
    For 10 months, the mayor of St. Louis and the St. Louis police have worked to conceal this video knowing full well that it creates a negative image of their department and their work to remain on the up and up with the public. Yes, dash cams and body cameras are essential, but if any video has ever proven the need for real policies on how they are managed, it’s this.

    @ShaunKing @deray Again, cameras without an accountability structure will not work. No reforms will work w/o accountability.

    Nancy Green, aka “Aunt Jemima”, was the world’s first living trademark and signed a lifetime contract in the 1890s.

    .@deray “Aunt Jemima has become known as one of the most exploited and abused women in American history,” said one of her great-grandsons.

    7 out of the 11 major U.S. currency notes and coins (1, 5, 10, 25 cent coins, 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 dollar notes) feature slave owners.

  10. rq says

    Scientists Reveal Secrets Behind Hip Hop’s Most Complicated Rhymes

    “With ‘traditional’ rhyme, the decision about whether two words rhyme or not is something we can explain pretty easily based on our conscious reflection (either they’re the same or they’re not),” Dr. Wendell Kimper, a linguistics professor at the university who supervised the research, told The Huffington Post in an email. “With half-rhyme, it becomes a lot harder to figure out where to draw the line — we know that it has something to do with how similar the sounds are to each other, but as an individual you wouldn’t be able to explain precisely why one half-rhyme works and another doesn’t. When it comes to speech sounds, there’s still a lot we don’t know about similarity and how to measure it.”
    For the research, Kimper’s student Louise Middleton, a third-year linguistics student at the university, examined the music of eight different rappers, paying close attention to their rhyming structures and patterns, vocabulary size, rhyme rate and the position of the rhyme in or across lines. The first 2,000 words from each artists’ debut album were analyzed.
    “It was a big enough sample to produce statistically significant differences between artists, and statistically significant correlations between certain types of rhyme and artists’ vocabulary size,” Kimper said in the email.
    So, what did Middleton find?
    “My research found that over 70 percent of the time artists used half-rhyme, such as ‘hop-rock,’ rather than traditional rhymes,” Middleton said in a written statement. “These imperfect rap rhymes are not something that you simply come up with on the spot but something that popular rap artists have the natural ability to create.”

    The Golden 13, the first black commissioned and warrant officers in the Navy. , wiki link: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Thirteen

    The CBC found the story: Civil rights lawyers sue Ferguson over ‘debtors’ prisons’

    Lawyers allege that the cities of Ferguson and nearby Jennings are routinely violating their citizens’ civil rights by locking people up for unpaid fines — a practice that hits the poor, and people of colour, especially hard.
    And the issue of local governments squeezing the poor for municipal revenue goes far beyond Ferguson and Jennings. It affects hundreds of communities across the United States.
    To find out more, we were joined by:
    • Michael-John Voss is the co-founder and managing attorney of ArchCity Defenders.
    • Chris Albin-Lackey is a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch in New York City. He authored the 2014 report, “Profiting from Probation: America’s ‘Offender-Funded’ Probation Industry.”

    Audio at the link.

    And the Sea Salt Company came up with a very avant garde advertisement. Remove the picture of a noose and the disgusting name “The Hanging Tree”, this is pretty offensive @seasaltcompany See pictures for puke-value.

    Yup, Voter ID Laws Have Nothing to Do With Fraud

    Put another way, the rush for voter ID has nothing to do with fraud—which is near non-existent—and everything to do with political gain. And for Republicans who want the most bang for their voter suppression buck, African Americans are an obvious target; reduce their share of black voters in the electorate, and—in states like Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina—you cripple Democratic chances in statewide elections.
    It’s not hard to see how this works. If you’re impoverished, unbanked, or otherwise outside of the mainstream economy, it’s hard to collect or purchase documents, and file for ID. Moreover, it’s simply true that, because of past discrimination and persistent racial inequality, blacks are more likely to fall into those categories. Any law that makes voting a function of resources—which is how voter identification laws work—is a law that will disproportionately harm African Americans.
    If this research says anything, it’s that partisan Republicans know this, and are acting accordingly. Does this make them “racists?” I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. What matters are outcomes, and with voter ID laws, the GOP is pursuing that one that’s unambiguously harmful to black people.

  11. rq says

    George Washington, Slave Catcher

    While Lincoln’s role in ending slavery is understood to have been more nuanced than his reputation as the great emancipator would suggest, it has taken longer for us to replace stories about cherry trees and false teeth with narratives about George Washington’s slaveholding.
    When he was 11 years old, Washington inherited 10 slaves from his father’s estate. He continued to acquire slaves — some through the death of family members and others through direct purchase. Washington’s cache of enslaved people peaked in 1759 when he married the wealthy widow Martha Dandridge Custis. His new wife brought more than 80 slaves to the estate at Mount Vernon. On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly 150 souls were counted as part of the property there.
    In 1789, Washington became the first president of the United States, a planter president who used and sanctioned black slavery. Washington needed slave labor to maintain his wealth, his lifestyle and his reputation. As he aged, Washington flirted with attempts to extricate himself from the murderous institution — “to get quit of Negroes,” as he famously wrote in 1778. But he never did.
    During the president’s two terms in office, the Washingtons relocated first to New York and then to Philadelphia. Although slavery had steadily declined in the North, the Washingtons decided that they could not live without it. Once settled in Philadelphia, Washington encountered his first roadblock to slave ownership in the region — Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act of 1780.
    The act began dismantling slavery, eventually releasing people from bondage after their 28th birthdays. Under the law, any slave who entered Pennsylvania with an owner and lived in the state for longer than six months would be set free automatically. This presented a problem for the new president.
    Washington developed a canny strategy that would protect his property and allow him to avoid public scrutiny. Every six months, the president’s slaves would travel back to Mount Vernon or would journey with Mrs. Washington outside the boundaries of the state. In essence, the Washingtons reset the clock. The president was secretive when writing to his personal secretary Tobias Lear in 1791: “I request that these Sentiments and this advise may be known to none but yourself & Mrs. Washington.”
    […]
    Washington almost made it through his two terms in office without a major incident involving his slave ownership. On a spring evening in May of 1796, though, Ona Judge, the Washingtons’ 22-year-old slave woman, slipped away from the president’s house in Philadelphia. At 15, she had joined the Washingtons on their tour of Northern living. She was among a small cohort of nine slaves who lived with the president and his family in Philadelphia. Judge was Martha Washington’s first attendant; she took care of Mrs. Washington’s personal needs.
    What prompted Judge’s decision to bolt was Martha Washington’s plan to give Judge away as a wedding gift to her granddaughter. Judge fled Philadelphia for Portsmouth, N.H., a city with 360 free black people, and virtually no slaves. Within a few months of her arrival, Judge married Jack Staines, a free black sailor, with whom she had three children. Judge and her offspring were vulnerable to slave catchers. They lived as free people, but legally belonged to Martha Washington.
    Washington and his agents pursued Judge for three years, dispatching friends, officials and relatives to find and recapture her. Twelve weeks before his death, Washington was still actively pursuing her, but with the help of close allies, Judge managed to elude his slave-catching grasp.
    George Washington died on Dec. 14, 1799. At the time of his death, 318 enslaved people lived at Mount Vernon and fewer than half of them belonged to the former president. Washington’s will called for the emancipation of his slaves following the death of his wife. He completed in death what he had been unwilling to do while living, an act made easier because he had no biological children expecting an inheritance. Martha Washington lived until 1802 and upon her death all of her human property went to her inheritors. She emancipated no one.
    When asked by a reporter if she had regrets about leaving the Washingtons, Judge responded, “No, I am free, and have, I trust, been made a child of God by the means.” Ona Judge died on Feb. 25, 1848. She has earned a salute during the month of February.

    TONIGHT @ #HSSU! Making the Connection: Meeting of the Minds between Students & Activists! 10pm until midnight.

    No free rein for misinforming and confusing jurors

    This lawsuit, Grand Juror Doe vs. Robert McCulloch in his official capacity as a Prosecuting Attorney,” deserves updates and editorial endorsements. It is a unique way to punish prosecutors for potential fraud against the court through misinformation, confusion and lack of timeliness as the grand juror points out in the complaint, which is supported and litigated by the ACLU. Specifically, Doe filed that “the presentation was made in a muddled and untimely manner.” Fraud against the court is a prosecutable offense.
    This is the charge that McCulloch and his team, including assistant prosecutor Kathy Alizadeh, could face. Alizadeh handed the grand jury a 1979 Missouri law that claimed it is legal to shoot a fleeing suspect — and did not tell them that the Supreme Court overturned the law 30 years ago, in 1985. Two weeks later, she gave the grand jury a document that reflected the current state of the law. But she told the jurors to fold in half the first document in order to remind themselves not to “necessarily rely on that because there is a portion of that that doesn’t comply with the law.” Confused, a juror asked if U.S. Supreme Court rulings overturn Missouri law. Instead of answering a simple “Yes,” another assistant district attorney spoke up and responded, “We don’t want to get into a law class.”
    Advertisement: Story Continues Below
    As a result, the grand jury operated on an unclear understanding of the relevant law for whether Darren Wilson was legally justified to shoot Michael Brown as he ran away (regardless of the confusion of whether he was surrendering or not).
    In addition, McCulloch and his team never confronted Officer Wilson sufficiently about why and how Michael Brown was shot the second time from 35 feet away. Since the officer claimed he was aware that Brown was unarmed, why didn’t the policeman shoot the final shots at the legs to disable rather than the head to kill?
    The ACLU, representing juror Doe in the case, asks that the judge lift restrictions on Doe’s First Amendment right to discuss the prosecution’s actions. The juror further argues that prosecutor McCulloch discussed the nonindictment in a way that falsely made the grand jury’s findings appear unanimous. However, only four of the 12 were sufficient to block the indictment and as many as eight, a majority, may have voted to indict.
    Prosecutors could also be held accountable in Staten Island, where the videographer who shot the footage of the illegal death-inducing choke hold and the “I can’t breathe” statements was dismissed after just 10 minutes of testimony, with no penetrating questions regarding what he saw, the angles, the time duration, the results and the like.
    There are a lot of proposals to improve future prosecutions’ objectivity, including police body cameras, training and community policing. These are all excellent and necessary, but prosecutors are the final bulwark when injustice is actually committed. The knowledge that they, too, are subject to prosecution and criminal cases will go a long way toward equalizing race and justice in America.
    The Doe case is an excellent first step, but is not as far as the jurors could and should go, not only for the right to speak but to hold the prosecution accountable. Tony Rothert, legal director of the Missouri ACLU, said his group is also supporting suits that would directly confront McCulloch and his team for fraud and removing McCulloch from office. Rothert says he “wants to get the conversation going.” These suits are also underreported in the media.

    First African=American woman licensed to practice medicine in America: Pioneer “@IsisPaperzZ: Nobody GAVE black women shit. “@ShannonLeeKiss: “”

    America’s Worst President
    , video at the link.

    Every February, a national holiday celebrates the accomplishments of the various men who have held America’s highest office. But this Presidents Day, let’s take a moment to remember the man who betrayed his running mate, Abraham Lincoln; let the South off easy after the Civil War; turned a blind eye on rampant domestic terrorism; and ensured a full century of disenfranchisement for black Americans. The video above makes the case that Andrew Johnson is inarguably America’s worst president.

    “Blacks around the table” Absent from the Academy

    If universities and higher education institutions exist as key sites for the manufacture of culture and knowledge, what impact does this lack of representation within Higher Education have on our nations and institutions? When we discuss issues such as institutional racism within the Metropolitan Police, or the excessively high rates of black underemployment, or growing ethnicity related health inequalities, is it possible to make sense of these phenomena without also looking at cultural reproduction? How are such phenomena created and shaped by experiences and discourses within the academies?
    With these questions in mind I wanted to use film to find out more about what lies behind the dearth of black professors within Higher Education. Absent From The Academy attempts to trace and uncover the impact that the lack of black professors has on the UK. I won’t go into too much detail here about my findings, as you can watch the film below. There were however a number of tangents that I was unable to include in the film, a few of which I think would be relevant for us to discuss now.
    […]

    In both the UK and the United States massive racial underrepresentation and flagrant misrepresentation also blights much of the media industry. The discourses and practices that feed into this industry, incubated in universities around the world, are marked by an implicit whiteness. I was reminded of this in the Award Season Roundtable series, featuring director Steve McQueen that took place in 2012. In the presence of some of Hollywood’s most well renowned directors, all of whom were white (and male), except McQueen – the interviewer asks McQueen specifically, why there are so few female and black directors. At this point it is only possible to imagine the conversation that would have ensued without the presence of McQueen.
    Alas, instead of answering the question posed, McQueen sidelined it in favour of another, asking instead how it is possible for directors to make films set in places such as New York and LA and not cast a single black or Latino person in any role of relevance. ‘Why is that?’ asks the interviewer, ‘I don’t know’ McQueen responds, ‘Ask them’, pointing to his fellow directors.
    The silence that follows is mesmerizing. McQueen has shone a light directly onto their previously invisible and naturalized whiteness. There is little they can say by way of response. The only option available is to question their own motives, their own positions in relation to accepted modes of Hollywood practice. They of course collectively decline to engage in such a conversation, but by that point it doesn’t really matter, the implications resonate across our screens.
    […]

    Both Rob Berkeley and Dr. Shilliam spoke off-camera with me about black academics that have specialized in topics such as German philosophy or Greek ethics, only to find gainful employment in those fields a struggle. A struggle not because they lacked the relevant knowledge to teach or to pursue further research in these areas, but because they were often overlooked for those roles, as they did not fit the image of such a scholar.
    This notion of racial specialization plays itself out everyday in HE in obvious but unchallenged ways – such as in the notions that Indians excel in computer science, blacks the arts, East Asians in mathematics. These types of stereotypes exist within universities and can impact upon the ways in which heads of departments, lecturers, teaching assistants and senior administrators interact with new academics and learners, as well as who gets funding and additional support.[…]

    Ahmed’s point is that not only can Black and brown people appear as aberrations within the spaces shaped by institutional whiteness, our bodies can also feel the weight of whiteness. We do not blend into the environment. Instead we can remain in a perpetual state of an excruciating Fanonian self-awareness ‘exposed, visible and different’, with our aspirations, capacities and habits held in check by the structures around us.
    While our experiences of university life can be personally disorientating and problematic, I don’t think we should be discouraged. There are increasing numbers of inspirational black academics and for that matter, fellow students, that are transforming the classroom, institutional cultures and knowledge itself. There is much to be gained from our presence.

  12. rq says

    The phenomenon of us being surprised (pleasantly or horribly) by facts from black history is a direct consequence of erasure’s success.

    Yay! Little League: Jackie Robinson West didn’t cheat

    The vice president of the Evergreen Park Athletic Association, which runs the Little League program for a portion of the southwest suburbs, said Tuesday he began expressing concerns about the authenticity of residences reported by Jackie Robinson West team members in late August, around the time the South Side team made its way up the ranks at the international Little League games in Pennsylvania.
    “The further Jackie Robinson progressed … the less interested people seemed to be in finding out the truth about where these guys actually live,” said Chris Janes, vice president of the Evergreen Park Athletic Association.
    But Brian McClintock, a spokesman for Little League International, which organizes the Little League World Series, said in an emailed statement Tuesday the organization investigated the residency complaints, and is “confident that the documentation provided to the organization from Jackie Robinson West Little League meets the residency regulations for the 2014 Little League Baseball tournament season” and the issue is considered “closed at this time.”
    Janes’ allegations that some members of the team didn’t live within the team’s boundaries were first reported Tuesday by DNAinfo[dot]com.
    McClintock said the organization confirmed the residency documentation of the Jackie Robinson West team at the beginning of tournament play in June, and reviewed it a second time in October after a neighboring league contacted it with questions about the players’ eligibility.
    “Following this additional review, our initial determination that the Jackie Robinson West players meet eligibility requirements still stands. Little League considers the issue closed at this time,” McClintock said in the emailed statement.
    […]
    Parents of team members reached Tuesday also said the allegations lack merit.
    “Every last kid lived in or went to school within the boundaries,” said Christopher Green, whose son, Brandon, 13, played catcher and pitcher. “They’ve (the Evergreen Park league) filed a complaint before when they lost. I just think it’s ridiculous they would bring this same allegation again.”
    “Some of these kids have been playing together from a very young age. That’s why they’re that good,” Green said.
    The Jackie Robinson West team became Chicago’s summer love story, taking the national Little League championship in August with a 7-5defeat over Las Vegas. During their rise to the top, the city hosted watch parties that drew hundreds.
    Janes said his essential concern is not about “taking something away from somebody else,” but rather ensuring teams follow the rules.
    “If leagues can manipulate these rules as easily as it appears they have, it’s going to give a whole lot of incentive to other leagues to do the same,” said Janes, who added that he is a father of three children who currently play in the Evergreen Park league. “What that’ll ultimately do is take away from Little League.”
    Carlton Hondras, father of Jackie Robinson West player Trey Hondras, said that he and other parents have nothing to hide.
    “We didn’t do anything wrong,” Hondras said. “Everything I did was in the best interest of my son and my family. I wouldn’t do anything to embarrass my family or the (Jackie Robinson) league.
    “I’m a little disgusted people would go to this measure to turn something a group of 13 kids tried to do as positive into a negative. I don’t understand that.”

    Miss. Judge Who Reportedly Hit Mentally Disabled Man and Yelled ‘Run, N–ger, Run’ Indicted After 9 Months

    Nine months ago a now-former Mississippi judge is alleged to have smacked a mentally disabled man before yelling, “Run, n–ger, run.” In response to that incident, a grand jury has “served an indictment for simple assault on a vulnerable adult,” the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reports.
    There was no word on why the process to indict former Madison County Justice Court Judge Bill Weisenberger took so long, but Weisenberger’s attorney told the newspaper in an emailed statement that the former judge has been cooperative since the alleged May 8 incident.
    According to witnesses who spoke with news station WAPT, 20-year-old Eric Rivers, an African-American man with special needs, was working as a traffic monitor and parking attendant at a Canton, Miss., flea market May 8, when Weisenberger reportedly smacked him and yelled, “Run, n–ger, run.”
    On Thursday, Weisenberger turned himself in to the Madison County sheriff and was released on $10,000 bond.
    “From the beginning of this matter, Judge Weisenberger has cooperated with each law-enforcement and investigatory agency that wanted to know what actually occurred at the Canton Flea Market last spring,” Weisenberger’s lawyer, Bill Kirksey, wrote in an emailed statement viewed by the Clarion-Ledger. “Judge Weisenberger has denied and continues to deny any wrongdoing or the commission of any crime against any person.”
    Kirksey also noted that he has no idea why this case has not been resolved faster; the Clarion-Ledger notes that some four grand juries came and went without ever having this case presented to them. He added that the attorney general’s office controls which cases the grand jury hears.
    The Clarion-Ledger reports that during the nine months that this case has been active but not resolved, Weisenberger has received his annual salary of $45,700, “though he voluntarily stepped down from the bench.”

    The article lists other misbehaviour by the same judge. Why is he a judge again?

    More than 100 workers, students, and faculty braving the cold at #umn supporting @WhoseDiv demands!

    A black Union soldier posted at a Slave Auction House, Whitehall Street, Atlanta (1864)

    Event called ‘Processing the Black Experience in St Louis’, for activists interested in healthy ways of processing trauma. RSVP- free group being offered this week! Please share the info. #stlabpsi #heal #workingthrutrauma

  13. rq says

    Target. America. Picture of a black man at the doctor’s, with a target on his back, the doctor asks: “How long have you had this?” The black man is thinking: “Too long…”

    The movement started with MB getting killed by a white cop. YES. But then ALL kinds of Black folks showed up to fight the good fight…
    …then those who are often marginalized were again marginalized within their own community while fighting for freedom.
    But those marginalized (women, the young, the LGBT) are suppose to shut up and deal while putting OUR bodies on the line? FUCK THAT.

    Black girls are suspended from school 6 times more often than white girls

    But new research by the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and Columbia Law School’s Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies suggests that race is an even more significant factor when it comes to how girls are treated in school.
    The conclusion: The toll that harsh disciplinary policies and zero tolerance environments take on black female students deserves much more attention.
    Here’s one powerful example, based on data from schools in Boston and New York City, and published in the report, “Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected”: researchers found that suspension rates for black girls when compared to white girls were even higher than those of black boys versus white boys. While black boys are suspended three times more than white boys — a pretty shocking disparity — black girls are suspended a staggering six times more than white girls.
    […]

    The researchers conclude that the way race, gender, and class issues work to push black girls out of school is tragically under-explored in conversations about racial educational disparities, which tend to focus disproportionately on the experiences of black boys.
    “The particular disparities facing Black girls are largely unrecognized in the mainstream discourse about punitive policies in public education,” the report’s authors wrote. “Consequently, efforts to confront the challenge of ensuring equitable and fair opportunities for Black girls in school remain underdeveloped.”

    What exactly is a microaggression?

    What makes microaggressions different from other rude or insensitive actions or comments?
    Microaggressions are more than just insults, insensitive comments, or generalized jerky behavior.
    They’re something very specific: the kinds of remarks, questions, or actions that are painful because they have to do with a person’s membership in a group that’s discriminated against or subject to stereotypes. And a key part of what makes them so disconcerting is that they happen casually, frequently, and often without any harm intended, in everyday life.
    They happen casually, frequently, and often without any harm intended.
    This is how psychologist Derald W. Sue, who’s written two books on microaggressions , defines the term: “The everyday slights, indignities, put downs and insults that people of color, women, LGBT populations or those who are marginalized experiences in their day-to-day interactions with people.”
    As he explained in the video below, which provides an overview of the concept, microaggressions often appear to be a compliment or a joke, but contain a hidden insult about a group of people (as in the example above, about the Asian-American student’s English, or when a lesbian is told, “You don’t look like you’re gay!” )
    […]
    Given the way social media gives a rare platform to a lot of the same groups who field these sorts of daily insults, it’s caught on and has become a popular topic of discussion on Twitter and Tumblr, especially among young people.
    Harvard University students’ “I, Too, Am Harvard” campaign — a collection of photos and testimonials about the microaggressions black students experienced — was hugely popular. There are Tumblrs dedicated to chronicling microaggressions at colleges including St. Olaf University, Swarthmore College, Oberlin College, Dartmouth College and Smith College, too.
    Here, students quote the things people have said to them (“You’re so lucky to be black — so easy to get into college,” and “You can’t be a woman if you can’t reproduce,”) and vent about their frustrations with the types of comments they have to field. (“‘What are you?’ is not an introduction.”)
    In an April 2014 interview with USA Today, Sue that he was happy to see the term go “mainstream,” and said he’d noticed that college students found microaggressions “experientially true.” In other words, people have embraced it because it described things that are really happening to them.
    […]
    Are microaggressions the same as racism, sexism, and homophobia?
    They are based on some of the same core ideas about people who are minorities or are marginalized in America (for example, that they’re not smart, that they don’t belong, or that they make good punchlines), but microaggressions are a little different from overtly racist, sexist, or homopohobic acts or comments because they typically don’t have any negative intent or hostility behind them.
    Sue explained in his video primer on the topic, “People who engage in microagressions are ordinary folks who experience themselves as good, moral, decent individuals. Microaggressions occur because they are outside the level of conscious awareness of the perpetrator.”
    “It (is not) the overt racists, the white supremacists, the Klan, the skinheads,” he told USA Today. But, he clarified, in some ways, this makes them all the more dangerous. The outright bigots, he explained, “are less likely to affect the standard of my living than individuals who are well-intentioned — educators, employers, health care providers — who are unaware of their biases.”
    In this way, microaggressions are closely tied to implicit biases, which are the attitudes, stereotypes and assumptions that we’re not even aware of, that can creep into our minds and affect our actions (also known as, “thoughts about people you didn’t know you had.”)
    A person with implicit bias against black people might have trouble connecting “black” with positive terms on the Implicit Association Test, a computerized test designed to measure how closely we associate certain topics in our minds. It’s fair to guess that that same person might be someone who gets a little nervous — and shows it — when she first sees a black man in the elevator she’s about to enter. So, more than expressions of conscious prejudice or intentional bigoted statements, you can think of microaggressions as implicit biases come to life in our everyday interactions.
    And yes, just like we all harbor various prejudices, we’ve all probably subjected someone to a microaggression at some point in life.
    […]
    What do I do if I want to avoid subjecting people to microaggressions?
    In short: make an effort.
    It’s not very hard to put some thought into the biases you might hold, become curious about the way your words and actions are perceived by others, listen when people explain why certain remarks offend them, and make it a habit stop for a beat and think before you speak, especially when you’re weighing in on someone’s identity.
    In his video on microaggressions, Sue offered five suggestions for things individuals can do to avoid them:
    1. Be constantly vigilant of your own biases and fears.
    2. Seek out interaction with people who differ from you (in terms of race, culture, ethnicity, and other qualities).
    3. Don’t be defensive.
    4. Be open to discussing your won attitudes and biases ad how they might have hurt others or in some sense revealed bias on your part.
    5. Be an ally, by standing personally against all forms of bias and discrimination.
    Bonus tip: Peruse the many examples of microaggressions that have been chronicled in articles, in academic research, and using social media. Once you hear about how they affect people, chances are, you will be more aware of what they look like, and suddenly much less likely to repeat them.

  14. rq says

    Update: this week’s #FergusonFoodShare drop-off times and locations… (changed due to the weather)
    @FergFoodShare: 1) Thursday, South City, 4219 Hartford St. 6-7:30pm #FergusonFoodShare donation drop-off
    @FergFoodShare: 2) Friday, 6-7:30pm, Reds BBQ Parking Lot. 9300 West Florissant Avenue #FergusonFoodShare donation drop-off
    @FergFoodShare: 3) Friday, South City, 4219 Hartford St. 8:00-9:30pm #FergusonFoodShare donation drop-off
    @FergFoodShare: 4) Saturday, 9-10am, Reds BBQ Parking Lot. 9300 West Florissant Avenue #FergusonFoodShare donation drop-off
    #FergusonFoodShare wk 2 items: Apples, carrots, chicken legs/wings or quarters, corn, green beans, green peppers, oatmeal (assorted flavors)

  18. says

    @rq #5

    I absolutely agree about the racial disparity. White people get away with things black people can’t even dream of doing without being hunted down by these thugs in uniform.
    When I look at the narrative in media about such incidents, hearing the police commissioners/authorities talk about them: It seems to be taken for granted that the police have the right to use extreme force at even a hint of non-cooperation or struggle (completely disregarding the needs of suicidal or impaired people, or simply someone who doesn’t understand: children, older foreign nationals). That they choose to use discretion only for certain races and not others is the core issue. But don’t you feel it would help if we take away their “ammo” (that use of force is considered OK at the smallest of suspicions)?

  19. rq says

    Sagar Keer
    I feel that is a whole different conversation. We are not on this thread to discuss policing methods as such, we are here to discuss the effects of racism in everyday life, including that of police officers and how they police, and their (un)conscious biases. Taking away police officers’ use of force privileges will not stop racism. Talking about racism and how to stop it will stop racism.

  20. Anne Fenwick says

    If this is a thread to complain about all things racist in American life, I’d like to complain about the huge number of white Americans who’ve casually, gratuitously and ‘helpfully’ warned me away from black-majority areas and events. It both reflects and perpetuates the minset which leads to higher levels of engagement between law enforcement and black people which leads to more incarcerations and shootings. Also, it’s a form of slander, and while I usually disapprove of patriotism, slandering your compatriots to foreign visitors is about as shitty as it gets. Please stop doing it or letting people do it around you.

    Not that anyone here does that, I’m sure. Do you guys have any idea how often it happens?

  21. rq says

    Anne Fenwick
    Officially or unofficially?
    By that I mean, by city policy of some kind (or company, or real estate company, or etc) or by ordinary everyday folk? Because the former floats up from time to time in articles about ‘unofficial’ city division or where people are advised to buy homes, etc. The latter is harder to track, but I’m certain it happens.

  22. rq says

    On with the links!
    First Black Student being Harassed (Colorized)

    Interlude: music! In a New Video, Joey Bada$$ Takes on Police Shootings of Unarmed Black Men

    Some might describe the Brooklyn rapper Jo-Vaughn Virginie Scott, a.k.a. Joey Bada$$, as up-and-coming, but it seems he’s already arrived. Even if his debut album, B4.DA.$$, was released just three weeks ago, the 20-year-old has already co-founded a successful hip-hop collective called Pro Era (which you may recognize from the t-shirt Malia Obama was wearing in her leaked Instagram selfie), performed for thousands on stages all over the world, and racked up millions of views on SoundCloud and YouTube.

    The new album was released to critical acclaim, garnering favorable comparisons to the iconic rapper Nas, who also gained fame and respect as a teenager. That’s partly by design: Bada$$ credits Nas as a source of inspiration, and, like Nas, he’s using his beats and metaphors to highlight social ills. “I think music is the most powerful tool when it comes to spreading messages and getting words across,” he told me over the phone. “It plays a really big part.”

    His latest single, “Like Me,” which Bada$$ premiered last month on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, gives his take on the recent string of shootings of unarmed black men by police, and on some of the baggage that comes with being born black in America. “My way of protesting is through my music,” he says. “With this newfound stature I have this voice where if I say something, a lot of people listen to it.”

    Bada$$ says the new video (premiered above) channels his state of mind: We see him caught up in a situation over a girl. He’s accosted by a man with a gun, and even though he’s unarmed, he becomes a police target. “In the video, the hot-headed guy, he gets killed by the police with a gun in his hand. And me, the cool guy, who is away from all the violence, I still end up being mixed in the loop—just being a victim because of my surroundings or where I’m from.” You’ll also catch some references to Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown.

    Yet the song and video both end with an element of hope. Bada$$ had wanted to leave people pondering. “I pray that there is hope,” he explains. “But even the fact that I have to dream like that is what’s disturbing. My message is that it can happen to any one of us.”

    Video at the link.

    Haha, Roorda! Controversial St. Louis police union leader muzzled when it comes to civilian review

    The St. Louis Police Officers Association’s business manager, Jeff Roorda, had spoken on behalf of city police officers on every topic up until Jan. 28, including the creation of a civilian board to review police shootings.

    But during a chaotic public hearing on the matter at City Hall that night, Roorda wore a bracelet with the words, “I am Darren Wilson,” shouted at an alderman about restoring order to the meeting and got into a scuffle with a protester that is still under investigation.

    Roorda’s actions dominated headlines following the meeting and led the St. Louis Police Officers Association to appoint union attorney Neil Bruntrager as the point person on the issue of civilian review, Bruntrager said.

    “It is very important that we as an organization portray ourselves in the most positive light,” Bruntrager said.

    “I also don’t believe (Roorda) did anything inappropriate … but I also think that people expect us to meet a higher standard, and our duty is to do that. Rather than be in a position where we have to explain the behavior, whether good or bad, it’s better if we only have to talk about the legal issues involved in this bill.

    “That’s what the executive board wants to do and that’s what Jeff wants to do, and as a consequence, I’m dealing with these issues. It’s about the issues and not about the people.”

    Roorda said he doesn’t regret any of his actions during the meeting and says wearing the bracelet was exercising his right to freedom of speech.

    Not entirely sure where he’s being muzzled. Perhaps someone else can point that out to me.

    Workers Awarded $15,000,000 After Bosses Called Them ‘N–gers’ and Separated Them by Race

    Seven Denver warehouse workers were awarded some $15 million after a federal judge found that bosses separated the blacks from other workers because of their race and called them n–gers and “lazy, stupid Africans.”

    The judge also found that managers at Matheson Trucking and Matheson Flight Extenders Inc. discriminated against the workers “in all phases of employment, including hiring, termination, conditions of employment, promotion, vacation pay, furlough, discipline, work shifts, benefits and wages,” the Daily Mail notes.

    According to the Denver Post, many of the plaintiffs were from the African country of Mali, one was from Brazil and another was a white whistleblower, who was dubbed “the tribe’s assistant” and ultimately lost his job after he complained about the treatment of his co-workers.

    “Basically, I did the right thing. This isn’t 1960 anymore,” Dean Patricelli, the white employee, told the Denver Post.

    The other plaintiffs in the lawsuit were Ernie Duke, Mahamet Camara, Andre De Oliveira, Bemba Diallo, Salif Diallo and Macire Diarra.

    The Denver Post reports that managers at Matheson, a Sacramento, Calif., company that moves large quantities of mail for the U.S. Postal Service and FedEx, forced blacks to work on one side of the warehouse, while whites worked on the other. The lawsuit filed by the workers also claimed that supervisors not only called the black employees racist names but allowed white employees to do the same, and that prime days on which workers could make double pay were given to white workers regardless of seniority.

    On one occasion, the Daily Mail notes, “an employee yelled that all black people should be shot.”

    According to the employees’ lawsuit, which was filed in 2010, things became unbearable in 2007 when Leslie Capra became the station manager. The lawsuit claimed that Capra was “more openly hostile toward black employees.” As such, working conditions quickly deteriorated.

    The verdict, which was handed down Wednesday, “includes $13 million in punitive damages, $318,000 in back pay for workers who were fired for being black and another $650,000 for emotional distress,” according to the Denver Post.

    Stacey Campbell, an attorney for Matheson, says the company “prides itself on hiring and employing a highly diverse workforce consisting of men and women of different races and cultures” and plans to appeal the decision, according to the Post.

    Apparently these things still happen. o.o

    Tangentially related, 16 theories for why crime plummeted in the US

    Around 24 years ago, crime rates in the US started to mysteriously decline. Since then, crime has fallen by roughly half, with violent crimes plummeting by roughly 51 percent and property crimes decreasing by about 43 percent.

    Almost as soon as the crime decline began, criminologists started trying to figure out the reasons. Different theories have come in and out of vogue over the past couple of decades. Some theories, such as mass incarceration, seemed very sound in the 1990s, but have been called into question as more data has come in. Some surprising theories, such as one related to the decreasing lead content in gasoline, have recently gained momentum.

    In a massive new report released Thursday, the Brennan Center for Justice looked at more than a dozen of these explanations and ran statistical analyses to show how much of the crime decline can be attributed to each one of them. Their conclusion is that a lot of things had some effect on crime in the 1990s — but there was no smoking gun.

    But even the Brennan report, by its own admission, only tells part of the story. It didn’t account for some additional theories touted by criminal justice experts, such as the idea that technology keeps people indoors. So we rounded up some of the Brennan Center’s ideas, plus a few they didn’t mention, to analyze 16 popular theories for the plummeting crime rate.

    Includes “More criminals in prison” with obligatory picture of black man; “More police on the streets” and “Broken-window policing”; other things like the economy, technology keeping people inside, gentrification (? really?) and the aging population. A few better-known theories (like legalized abortion, lead in the air) are also included.

    The indomitable. Ruth Bader Ginsburg on abortion, race and the broken Congress

    Ginsburg was more voluble about the lingering legacy of racial oppression in the United States. One of her most stinging dissents came in 2013 with Shelby County v. Holder, the 5-4 decision gutting the Voting Rights Act on the theory that federal protections against discriminatory state voting laws were no longer needed.

    The majority, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, effectively ended the system of preclearance, where states and localities with a history of racial discrimination in voting must clear any changes to voting laws with the federal government.

    “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,” Ginsburg famously wrote then.

    In contrast to her conservative colleagues, some of whose decisions have rested on the premise that racism is an artifact of the past, Ginsburg told msnbc, “People who think you could wave a magic wand and the legacy of the past will be over are blind.” Residential and educational segregation persist, she said, as does discrimination in lending.

    “We’ve come a long way from the days where there was state enforced segregation,” Ginsburg said. “But we still have a way to go.”

    Her thoughts on other issues can be found within.

  23. Anne Fenwick says

    @20 – rq

    I mean ordinary, everyday folks, specifically of a Democrat voting persuasion,but it’s not just my personal experience, it’s a known thing among European visitors to America and it happens a lot. Is it ok to use this thread of everyday anecdotal complaints or is it mostly for your more serious references? Which are great, by the way.

  25. rq says

    Those who do not know their history… Oklahoma Lawmakers Vote Overwhelmingly To Ban Advanced Placement U.S. History

    Oklahoma Rep. Dan Fisher (R) has introduced “emergency” legislation “prohibiting the expenditure of funds on the Advanced Placement United States History course.” Fisher is part of a group called the “Black Robe Regiment” which argues “the church and God himself has been under assault, marginalized, and diminished by the progressives and secularists.” The group attacks the “false wall of separation of church and state.” The Black Robe Regiment claims that a “growing tide of special interest groups indoctrinating our youth at the exclusion of the Christian perspective.”

    Fisher said the Advanced Placement history class fails to teach “American exceptionalism.” The bill passed the Oklahoma House Education committee on Monday on a vote of 11-4. You can read the actual course description for the course here.

    For other lawmakers, however, Fisher is thinking too small. Oklahoma Rep. Sally Kern (R) claims that all “AP courses violate the legislation approved last year that repealed Common Core.” She has asked the Oklahoma Attorney General to issue a ruling. Kern argues that “AP courses are similar to Common Core, in that they could be construed as an attempt to impose a national curriculum on American schools.”

    Advanced Placement courses are actually developed by a private group, the College Board, and are not required of any student or high school. They are the primary way that student can earn college credit in high school. Taking advanced placement course can save students money and are generally seen as a prerequisite to admission to elite colleges. A representative from the College Board called the claims by Fisher and others “mythology and not true.”

    In August last year, the Republican National Committee blasted the Advanced Placement U.S. History test, claiming it “deliberately distorts and/or edits out important historical events.” The RNC said a new framework for the exam “reflects a radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects.” The College Board countered that the framework had not been changed since 2012.

    Must maintain exceptionalism! Negative aspects. Ha.

    Mroe on those body cameras: City body camera no-bid contracts raise questions

    While camera technology has been touted as among the most promising strategies to bolster flagging trust between police and minority communities, criminal justice analysts are urging law enforcement agencies to proceed with caution in its application.

    “Where I begin to sit up and take notice is when there is a lack of deliberation,” said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who has written extensively on police operations. “You want to be sure when you use new technology that it will be a benefit.”

    Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks, who once served as the city’s police chief, said the desire to move quickly can result in “corruption” of the process.

    “Regard for city controls and safeguards are important,” Parks said.

    In Albuquerque, municipal and state authorities are reviewing a 2013 no-bid deal between the city and Taser International worth nearly $2 million.

    Peter Pacheco, the city’s inspector general, said the review is focusing on former police chief Ray Schultz’s dealings with the company prior to the deal, which involved more than 500 cameras for the police department. The agency has been plagued by a wave of fatal shootings by police, resulting in last year’s finding by the Justice Department that officers were “routinely” using lethal force against residents.

    “We want to make sure the contract was secured properly,” Pacheco said, declining further comment.

    Schultz, now working for a Texas police department, declined to comment on the inquiry.

    Taser, which rose to prominence in the law enforcement industry as the nation’s largest provider of stun guns, has been on the receiving end of several sole-source camera deals. Company spokesman Steve Tuttle said that while many agencies have sought information from Taser since its cameras debuted in 2009, “Taser does not have control over the bidding process in any individual government agency.”

    “We work closely with our customers to make sure that their…body camera program runs successfully for their agency,” Tuttle said. “We encourage clients to work closely with their local city council and community to develop a set of best practices, guidelines and policies for implementing their program.”

    In Albuquerque, Tuttle said that the company has been “open and transparent.”

    “But since it’s an ongoing investigation we are unable to provide further comment,” he said.

    Some city officials defended the so-called sole-source contracting process, arguing that the need to quickly address public safety problems and the unique capacity of Taser to assist those efforts outweighed the need to seek competitive bids.

    San Diego City Council President Pro Tem Marti Emerald said the city approved a nearly $1 million sole-source contract with Taser last year because it offered a potential “solution” to a public safety problem.

    Emerald said the purchase was designed to quickly address incidents in which some officers were “abusing members of the public.”

    “We haven’t had a big problem, but enough of one that it gave us pause and we knew we had to come up with a solution,” she said.

    Emerald said the city considered other providers, including Seattle-based Vievu. But she said Taser offered a product that “meets our need.”

    Following a field trial of the Taser cameras, the city’s purchasing officials recommended approval because of “unique” functions of the Taser device that were “deemed a necessity,” according to city documents. Among the functions referenced by city officials: a 12-hour battery that would cover 10-hour patrol shifts.

    In documents supporting a $788,000 no-bid 2014 contract with Taser, Spokane officials also cited unique product functions and a “package deal” that would save the city $488,000. A city panel reviewing the police department’s use of force had recommended a body camera program.

    “Approving the sole source and purchase of these items will ensure we can implement the recommendations of the Use of Force Commission while also recognizing a significant amount of savings,” according to a city evaluation of the deal.

    Also, Mayor pledges police body cameras by year’s end

    Last year, Young championed legislation to require all of the city’s nearly 3,000 police officers to wear body cameras as part of an effort to end police brutality. Rawlings-Blake vetoed the bill, opting for a mayoral task force to study privacy issues and cost before purchasing cameras. She has argued that many practical issues have to be resolved before cameras are used, such as when officers might be expected to turn them off and how to store the footage.

    City Councilman Warren Branch, the lead sponsor of council bill, said residents of his district repeatedly asked him to have police wear the cameras to cut down on brutality. He has cited questions surrounding the 2013 in-custody death of Tyrone West and a 2014 video showing an officer repeatedly punching a suspect, among other cases, as reasons for the proposed law.

    The mayoral task force studying the issue is to release its recommendations Wednesday evening. The mayor said she will be getting a “full briefing” on the recommendations at the same time the public does. She said members of the audience will be able to ask questions and make comments.

    Oh, and speaking of Mr Patel, so brutally assaulted by cops – and the utility of having misbehaving cops on camera. Or, rather, speaking of the cop who assaulted him. What is Wrong with People? Fundraiser Set Up For Cop Who Paralyzed Innocent Grandfather

    An online fundraiser for Madison police officer Eric Parker, who is facing charges of third-degree assault after brutally attacking 57-year-old Sureshbhai Patel, who does not speak English, has raised over $3,000 in only three days. The campaign- that has currently been shared nearly 600 times on Facebook, has a goal of $10,000 and 28 days left to reach it.

    Sureshbhai Patel is an Indian citizen who had come to the United States to help his son and his wife with their new baby as his son went back to school for his master’s degree. The innocent grandfather was taking a morning walk on February 6, when a bigoted neighbor called the police. The neighbor described the gentleman as, “a skinny black guy, he’s got a toboggan on, he’s really skinny.”

    When police arrived to unjustly harass him, he could not understand their commands or what the situation was. This resulted in the barbaric Officer Parker throwing him face first into the ground while holding his hands behind his back.

    Patel was left temporarily paralyzed and hospitalized with fused vertebrae, all because he could not understand what the officers were saying to him. The man had simply been out for a walk and had committed absolutely no crime to warrant being approached, let alone assaulted.

    The department has publicly apologized to the family and arrested the officer. He was freed the same day on a $1,000 bond. […]

    Patel is expected to incur over $250,000 in medical bills and does not have any form of health insurance. Thankfully, humanity is winning out, and a fundraiser launched for Patel has already raised over $167,000 from nearly 4,000 people in only four days. Patel’s lawyer has issued a statement to the Hindu American Foundation verifying that all proceeds from the Go Fund Me will be used solely for medical expenses and related issues and not for any legal fees.

    The fundraiser has received donations and well wishes from donors around the world, with many American’s expressing their shame and embarrassment that this could happen to a guest here.

    Link to fundraiser in the text.
    Also, they only let him out on bond? That means… he had to pay the cops for the assault???

    Man Claims St. Louis Cops Turned Off Dash Cam and Then Beat Him. Before it was all about ‘the video they didn’t want you to see!’, now the man is already ‘claiming’ these things happened. Wasn’t it all on video? But the article is basically a repost.

    News 4 Investigates: Traffic ticket quotas for officers?

    The mandate was put in writing. It requires officers to take a specific number of “self-initiated activities” each month. St. Clair gave News 4 Investigates copies of spreadsheets used by the Bellefontaine Neighbors Police Department to track those activities. It identifies seven different activities that officers are required to do. Those include writing ordinance violations, traffic arrests, uniform traffic tickets, parking violations and traffic warnings.

    St. Clair had to do 50 of them every month. The spreadsheet shows that Traffic Arrests represented up to 15 percent of the required activities for Bellfontaine Neighbors cops, an equivalent of up to 8 arrests per month, and that Uniform Traffic Tickets were up to 60 percent, or about 30 tickets per month.

    In September 2013, St. Clair was threatened with “disciplinary action” because he failed to meet the 50 minimum required. In a notification letter, he was told “you produced only 32 activities, which is less than 70 percent of your required minimum performance standard.” If he continued to fail to meet those minimum standards, he should “expect to be replaced, disciplined, or terminated.”

    Despite his concerns, after getting that letter St. Clair started writing more tickets, and from that point on, he says, he always met the minimum required standard for “self-initiated activities.”

    “I wasn’t comfortable doing it, but I had to do it. I have a wife and 2 children I had to support,” said St. Clair.

    Police Chief Robert Pruett insisted the policy “is not a quota system.” However, he admitted during an off-camera conversation that officers have been threatened with discipline and disciplined for not meeting the minimum numbers set for them. He told me that Mayor Robert Doerr had ordered him not to give us an interview.

    Even the mayor says it’s not quotas, so I guess it’s not. Right?

  27. rq says

    Anne Fenwick
    Actually, I think it’s even better to also complain about everyday experiences with racism. This thread would be all the better for it, since those personal-personal experiences aren’t usually written up in article form. I do find personal-type stories and perspectives, but it would be nice for there to be more, so you’re welcome to share!! Definitely!

    +++

    Interlude: St Louis 100 years ago. 30 Stunning Vintage Photographs of St. Louis Streets in the Early 20th Century .

    The War on the War on Poverty

    Today, that move looks downright prescient: Ranked better than average in poverty in 2005, North Carolina has since experienced the greatest increase in concentrated poverty in the country. Charlotte has the worst upward mobility of America’s 50 biggest cities. In the east, hundreds of black agricultural towns are neglected and abandoned, and in the west, the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia are suffering from a meth and prescription drug epidemic.

    The Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity was formed by Edwards—the son of a mill worker—and UNC Law School Dean Gene Nichol with a stated mission to “advocate for proposals, policies and services to mitigate poverty in North Carolina.” Edwards used the center to hone his “Two Americas” platform for 2008, and an early bipartisan event featured former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp. Then Edwards left to run for president.

    After a controversial stint as president of the College of William & Mary, Nichol took over the Poverty Center in 2008. The following year, the Great Recession forced education cuts that ended public funding for the center, which carried on with a $117,000 budget made up of private grants from the UNC Law Foundation and Z. Smith Reynolds.

    Then Republicans swept the 2010 midterm and won the governorship in 2012, giving the GOP control of Raleigh for the first time since the Reconstruction. Despite the state’s fifth-highest unemployment rate in the nation, legislators cut unemployment benefits, refused to expand Medicaid, slashed taxes on the rich and raised them on the poor. North Carolina fell to eleventh worst in poverty.

    So Nichol joined the state’s Moral Mondays civil disobedience movement and began excoriating state government in columns for the News & Observer.

    “Few would have guessed, three years ago, that a governor and General Assembly would, or could, so swiftly alter the character and meaning of a commonwealth,” he wrote in March 2014. “North Carolina must reject and inter its unforgivable war on poor people…. It is a rank violation of our history, our ethics, our scriptures and our constitutions. We’re a decent people. We aren’t bullies. And we don’t like those who are.”

    With the American labor movement in decline, the last bastion of liberalism, especially in the south, is academia. But Nichol, and the center he helped build, today are on the verge of being ousted by the very same right-wing, free-market ideologues who are partly responsible for—and see no problem with—the state’s spiraling poverty. […]

    The Pope Foundation’s chairman is Art Pope, a free-market philanthropist and friend of the Koch brothers. According to the Washington Post, the foundation steered over $55 million to conservative think-tanks and advocacy organizations including the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, the John Locke Foundation, and the Civitas Institute.

    Not only did those organizations oppose the creation of the Poverty Center; they viscously denied poverty was even a problem.

    While Edwards was running for president in 2004, George Leef, director of research at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, wrote: “Now, we can feel sorry for kids in families where there are hard times, but why is that a governmental problem, much less a presidential one?… Most unemployed workers find new employment within a month or two and in the meantime they can get by.”

    When the Poverty Center launched, Leef disparaged its desire to move “more Americans out of poverty and into the middle class,” because poverty is “something individuals need to overcome through their own efforts.”

    Another Pope staffer argued that “the only way the law can contribute on those issues is by scaling back—reducing regulation, cutting bureaucracy, returning to a more laissez-faire approach toward people’s incomes and decisions.”

    If Art Pope’s friends ever took over the university system, the Poverty Center was finished. And Pope planned exactly that: His family and organizations spent $2.2 million in 2010, winning 18 of 22 targeted races in the legislature, and the Pope-backed Americans for Prosperity chapter in North Carolina backed Pat McCrory’s winning bid for governor in 2012. McCrory named Pope his budget director. […]

    When McCrory signed a voter ID bill, Nichol wrote a column in the News & Observer describing the governor as a “21st century successor to Maddox, Wallace and Faubus.” Three days later, Civitas’s Francis De Luca, and the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy’s Jane Shaw posted an article saying, “Nichol’s nastiness and increasingly unhinged partisanship … reflects an arrogance and radicalism that have been building for years,” and revealing Nichol’s $204,400 law school salary and that of his wife, the chief of staff for the UNC Health Care System.

    Then Civitas filed a public records request for six weeks of Nichol’s emails, phone calls, and text messages from the fall of 2013, obtaining 1,180 pages of correspondence. Over a hundred professors signed an open letter to McCrory and Pope calling the request an abuse of power, and “citizens may reasonably infer that a sitting administration is using a private tax-exempt nonprofit organization funded by one of its leading officials to retaliate for criticism of its policies and intimidate future dissent.”

    As a result of the controversy, Nichol was required to give the university a “heads up” before every column, and to add the words “He doesn’t speak for UNC” at the end. The News & Observer’s Jim Jenkins prophesied, “Republicans won’t respect the university for bending to their pressure. Instead, they’ll see weakness.” He was right.

    In June of 2014, Civitas recommended cutting from centers and institutes. Two months later, McCrory signed a budget directing the Board of Governors to consider cutting $15 million. Despite private funding, the Poverty Center was targeted by a BOG Working Group on Centers and Institutes formed last September to review all 237 centers within the university system.

    The working group selected 34 centers for scrutiny in “a very subjective process,” admits Working Group Chairman Jim Holmes. “Any member for any reason, or motivation, could pick a center they wanted to hear from, and we didn’t question [the] reason.” […]

    Closing the Poverty Center wouldn’t stop Nichol from writing, but it would be a further hollowing out of a public university system that used to have high regard for the poor. Former UNC system President Bill Friday was on stage when President John F. Kennedy told UNC students this “great institution … has required great sacrifice by the people of North Carolina. I cannot believe that all of this is undertaken merely to give this school’s graduates an economic advantage in the life struggle.”

    Friday, who served on the board of the Poverty Center till the day he died in 2012, later told Nichol’s students, “A million Tar Heels living in poverty paid taxes to support your education. You’ll want to think about what you’re going to do to pay ‘em back.”

    The Pope Center for Higher Education Policy sees it differently. Last month, in a 36-page paper unironically titled “Renewal of the University,” it proposed a national effort to replace centers that espouse “philosophies of multiculturalism, postmodernism, and statism” with centers that preserve and promote a “general philosophy of liberty.”

    “At times in my life,” Nichol says, “I’ve thought that if we work hard enough, that if we make these issues visible, then the wealthy will do more to help those at the bottom. I think that less frequently now.”

    Relatedly, Killing in Washington State Offers ‘Ferguson’ Moment for Hispanics

    Then, last week, one of their own was killed by the police, his death caught in a video that has sped around the Internet. Antonio Zambrano-Montes, 35, is shown running from three Pasco officers. He turns and swings his hands upward, before he is felled by a spray of bullets, his body slamming the concrete. He had been throwing rocks at cars and police officers.

    It was the third killing by the Pasco police since July, and the video has brought international attention, with a flurry of online commenters criticizing the use of force against a man without a gun or a knife, making comparisons to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

    It has drawn condemnation from the president of Mexico and multiple investigations, including inquiries by a task force of local police agencies, by the county coroner and by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. An official from the United States attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Washington has also called community leaders, assuring them that the shooting will get a thorough review, which may include an examination of police training and whether it played a role. […]

    While many Hispanics have found work and stable, if not particularly affluent, lives here, the killing has drawn attention to their lack of clout. And, as with blacks in Ferguson, it has intensified feelings among Hispanics that they remain second-tier residents, despite their deep roots here, defined by the many Latino shops that now dominate the main thoroughfare, Lewis Street.

    “They had him like a deer, hunting him,” said Maria Paniagua, 41, a resident with six children. “What happens when one of my kids gets in a jam and runs. Will they shoot him down?”

    Though Latino workers have been here since at least the 1960s, attracted by jobs gathering fruit and asparagus in the region’s vast fields, few have moved into law enforcement or city government. Of the city’s 68 officers, 14 are Hispanic. A dozen officers speak Spanish fluently, and some residents cite language barriers that complicate interactions with the police. The City Council has one Latino member. The five-member school board, which oversees a system that is 70 percent Latino, typically has one or two Latino members, but this year has none. […]

    The shooting has caused soul-searching among some city officials, who, even as they urge the residents to wait for the results of an investigation, say the protests have uncovered anger bubbling below the surface.

    “This was about more than just Antonio,” said City Manager Dave Zabell, who took over the job last August. “It’s part of a community emerging,” he continued, “and frankly, it’s welcomed.”

    More at the link.

    High School Graduation Rates Between Black and White Males Widen. Some of the numbers are being questioned, though.

    The report, which provides a state-by-state breakdown of Black male graduation rates, should serve as a “barometer for where the country is at the moment,” said Pedro A. Noguera, an education professor and executive director of the Metropolitan Center at NYU.

    And while high school graduation rates have increased overall, disparities have intensified, said Noguera, who suggested a need to look “beyond the data” and search for other factors that might be contributing to educational disparities along lines of race and ethnicity.

    “It’s particularly important that we not simply look at the data but when we look at the data ask: Why is it that certain places like Montgomery County [in Maryland] have made so much progress and other places are lagging so far behind?” Noguera said.

    The report—formally titled “BLACK LIVES MATTER: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males”—found that, at the national level, estimates for the 2012-13 school year indicate a national graduation rate of 59 percent for Black males, 65 percent for Latino males and 80 percent for White males.

    “Since the Schott Foundation’s last report, the four-year Black male graduation rate has increased by seven percentage points, yet the graduation gap between Black and White males has widened, increasing from 19 percentage points in school year 2009-10 to 21 percentage points in 2012-13,” the report states.

    In a conference call Tuesday, some journalists took the Schott Foundation to task on its figures and claims.

    For instance, the new Schott Foundation report purports that, among large urban school districts, Philadelphia has one of the lowest Black male graduation rates in the nation at 24 percent.

    However, the Philadelphia Public School Notebook has published data that show the Black male graduation rate is more than twice as high as it is portrayed to be in the Schott report.

    “Our organization and District have been monitoring the graduation rate annually and find that the four-year cohort graduation rate for Black males in the District has been in the mid-50’s for the past three years, for the classes of 2011, 2012, and 2013,” wrote Philadelphia Public School Notebook writer Shannon Nolan in an e-mail in which she provided a link to the Notebook’s published report.

    The Schott report acknowledges that it uses “estimates” and “moving averages” to calculate what it believes graduation rates are in given locales.

    Diverse engaged Noguera in a conversation about whether school districts such as Montgomery County in Maryland, which the report says has the largest 2011-12 estimated Black male graduation rate in the country at 74 percent, actually deserve credit given the fact that the district has a high proportion of families of economic means, which is correlated with higher academic achievement.

    Conversely, Diverse asked whether school districts such as Detroit, which the report says has the lowest Black male graduation rate in the country at 20 percent, deserve blame given the fact that Detroit has higher proportions of children in poverty, which is correlated with lower academic achievement.

    Noguera acknowledged that Montgomery County has significant wealth but said it also has a disproportionate number of African-Americans and Latino families at or below poverty.

    “So I think it would be a mistake to just see Montgomery County as an affluent district,” Noguera said. “That being said I would say that it is one of the few districts in the country that’s actually been making steady progress over the last several years in reducing academic disparities,” Noguera said. “And this has been pretty well documented.”

    And
    Ferguson: Thug Illusion in a Media Revolution    ,

    The nationwide protests after the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson have brought much needed attention to issues of institutional racism, police brutality and the killing of unarmed black men across the US. The #BlackLivesMatter protests have also brought people together and created unity in black communities throughout the country.

    Mainstream media broadcast images from Ferguson of stores being looted and buildings up in flames. The images shown in MSM succeeded in creating a massive media spectacle. MSM combined with some elements in social media also managed to push false narratives into the public discourse regarding who exactly was in the Ferguson streets and what they were doing there. The narrative that “thugs” were causing destruction and mayhem in Ferguson was amplified in MSM in attempts to smear and discredit the #BlackLivesMatter protests. But who are these so-called “thugs” running amok in Missouri?

    The word “thug” is a hot button word. It has a negative connotation, bringing to mind a mental image of gang members. Detractors tweeted images of red and blue bandana-wearing black men as proof that thugs were present in Ferguson and therefore police violence used against protesters was justified.

    Indeed we saw images of Bloods and Crips participating in Ferguson protests, but we did not see them looting stores – we saw them protecting local businesses. Some of those gang members were also organizing their communities and rival gangs were (and still are) working together.

    A video was sent to the Revolution News facebook page a few months ago and it had a powerful impact on us. We have not shared it yet because we wanted to learn more about these guys first. We were impressed with what they had to say.

    The following video by Shamir Maloney is a very candid interview with Trev and Shoota, members of the Bloods, speaking about their experience protesting in Ferguson.

    They have some very reasonable opinions. They want laws to be changed. Background checks on cops coming from the military who return with PTSD, working doubles when they’re supposed to be on point. They want better laws for who is running their streets, for cops to have some sympathy and talk to them about what’s going on.

    They want kids to look back at Ferguson protests and say, “bruh they straight changed it.”
    […]

    But what happens when a gang member with a criminal record who is released on probation gets re-arrested for protesting? What happens when they commit acts of civil disobedience? If they are arrested for failure to disperse at a protest, are they penalized with harsher sentences due to their past records? Do gang members with criminal records have a first amendment right to protest peacefully?

    Shoota, who was still protesting after this video was made, is now in Milwaukee helping with protests supporting Dontre Hamilton. Below is a follow up interview with Shoota where he explains more about his experiences protesting, such as being hit with rubber bullets, tear gassed and harassed by police in Ferguson for “abiding by the law and doing what the Constitution says we can do.” He was also “roughed up and slammed on the ground” in Milwaukee.

    Shoota also reveals something important that perhaps has not been highlighted enough: people in these communities are scared. Those who have previous felonies are afraid to protest, and they have good reason to fear. The risks they take to exercise their first amendment rights are much higher than the average protester. If people like Trev and Shoota are subjected to arbitrary arrests (like we see happen all the time) they don’t get held for a few hours and released on bail. They risk going to jail for a long time.

    Regardless of the consequences, they are not only protesting, they are on the front lines. And let’s be clear, these guys are no angels. They have a past. They’ve been through the system. They are fully aware of what will happen if they have past records or pending warrants and get arrested while protesting. Everyone else speaks for them because when they speak for themselves, they go to jail.

    Crimes they committed in the past should not invalidate their voices in the present. On the contrary, we as a society need to listen to their voices above all others. They come from communities most affected by poverty, crime and police brutality. They are the statistics everyone is talking about: poor, black men with felonies. They are the most marginalized in 21st century USA. They are working from within to make positive changes and their voices are being lost in the media spectacle that has become the “Thugs of Ferguson.”

  28. rq says

    Repeat information, but might be of use to someone – Ferguson Alternate Spring Break, running from now until April (each week, a new week-long session).
    Also, Updated time for the @SVA_News @VASASVA event this Thurs. #Ferguson #Ferguson2NYC #FergusonFoodShare (5-8pm not 7-10), also accepting winter clothes, toiletries, books and non-perishables.

    Waiting for more info on this: Trayvon Scott, 30, was suspect who died in Baltimore police custody Saturday after North Baltimore foot pursuit.
    Police say Scott was wanted in a 2010 att murder. Warrant for his arrest issued on 2/11/15. Officer spotted him Saturday & chased him.

    Relevant because black president, but I can’t read full article as I do not subscribe: President BuzzFeed.

    Meanwhile, down in Philadelphia, Wolf likely facing fight on controversial State Police Commissioner

    The veteran officer, who until recently headed the Maryland State Police, is not facing scrutiny just from legislators. He’s also fielding it from within his own ranks.

    A Facebook page has been created where retired troopers and others have excoriated Brown over his decision to don the gray uniform troopers wear – even though, despite a long career in policing, he did not attend the State Police Academy. They are mobilizing supporters to contact senators who could vote on his confirmation next month.

    In their mind, Brown, 50, is an outsider, not steeped in the culture and traditions of the agency, and therefore unable to understand its needs. They also assert that controversies in Brown’s past will give legislators pause.

    Hm, that almost sounds like the kind of person who would do well as commissioner. More:

    “I expect every trooper in this organization to care about this organization,” he said. “And every single day, I’m going to care about this organization.”

    In choosing Brown, Wolf cited his lengthy resumé, which includes assignments from beat cop to top cop. Wolf also noted Brown’s commitment to diversity: as head of the state police in Maryland, he recruited in areas with high minority populations and at historically black colleges.

    The Democratic governor is hardly the first to pluck someone from outside the agency, a decision that rankles those who have gone through the academy and risen through the ranks.

    Wolf’s Republican predecessor, Gov. Tom Corbett, tapped Frank Noonan, a career investigator with the FBI and the state Attorney General’s Office, to head the state police.

    But Noonan chose not to wear a state police uniform, a gesture troopers took as a token of respect.

    “That said a lot,” Joseph Kovel, head of the troopers’ union, told The Inquirer in 2013. This time around, the Pennsylvania State Troopers Association has remained silent on Brown since releasing an initial statement welcoming him.

    Thomas Stuckey, a retired state police corporal from Harrisburg, said the union should speak up.

    As one of the administrators of the Facebook page called “He didn’t earn it, he shouldn’t wear it,” Stuckey says he has heard from dozens of people upset about Brown’s selection.

    Active troopers, he said, can’t talk: “We are a paramilitary organization. You obey orders from above, and you aren’t allowed to take a political stance.”

    But Stuckey said troopers worry that Brown doesn’t care about how passionately they feel about the traditions of their organization. “If I tell you that wearing the uniform is not honoring me, shouldn’t you take that off?” Stuckey asked.

    Brown countered that he wears the uniform as a way to respect the agency. He said the uniform is what represents the organization, and when he speaks with elected officials, or is out in the community, “it’s important that the commissioner represents the agency.”

    Okay, let’s back up there a sec – they called themselves a paramilitary organization, where you obey orders from above. Still more:

    At the time, a furor erupted over his police pension. According to news reports, Brown took advantage of a provision in the Baltimore city code that permitted an employee to receive pension benefits if he or she had served between 15 and 20 years and was “removed . . . without fault upon his part.”

    In Brown’s case, he had worked for the Baltimore police just of shy of 15 years, and had received credit for his work in San Jose. He left the Baltimore police voluntarily to join the O’Malley administration, but the city police commissioner at the time wrote Brown a letter saying he had notified the retirement board of Brown’s “layoff.”

    Despite the uproar, a Police Department lawyer later determined that Brown, a former deputy police commissioner, had qualified for the pension.

    Brown defends the pension, noting that he got paid for only 18 years of service and that similar credit had been given to other employees. “This wasn’t done for Marcus Brown,” he said.

    Well, questions need to be asked, but then, everyone who has received a shady pension should be scrutinized. Either way, he can’t be any worse than other commissioners, amirite, what with that record of diversity? (Which certainly sounds liek the right kind of thinking.)

    The Rise of Homeschooling Among Black Families

    Marvell is one of an estimated 220,000 African American children currently being homeschooled, according to the National Home Education Research Institute. Black families have become one of the fastest-growing demographics in homeschooling, with black students making up an estimated 10 percent of the homeschooling population. (For comparison’s sake, they make up 16 percent of all public-school students nationwide, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.)

    And while white homeschooling families traditionally cite religious or moral disagreements with public schools in their decision to pull them out of traditional classroom settings, studies indicate black families are more likely to cite the culture of low expectations for African American students or dissatisfaction with how their children—especially boys—are treated in schools.

    Marvell, now 7 and in the second grade, was the only black student in both his kindergarten and first-grade classes, and one of only a few black students in his San Diego elementary school, according to his mother. And Marvell’s Asperger syndrome—a high-functioning form of autism that makes social interaction difficult—only added to the curiosity and cruelty with which his fellow classmates approached him, Robinson added. She was concerned the school wasn’t doing enough about it. “I just thought maybe I could do a better job myself,” she said.

    “They said, ‘kids will be kids,’ and the only solution was for Marvell to be monitored—like he had done something wrong,” Robinson said. “In the end, I don’t think that anyone should have to monitor my kid” because of other kids’ behavior. […]

    Robinson likely joins hundreds of other African American parents who’ve decided to homeschool their children because of dissatisfaction with the traditional campuses. Indeed, Joyce Burges at National Black Home Educators has watched her membership grow “exponentially” in the 15 years since the organization was founded, a trend also reflected in Marvell’s home state of California. While Burges’s national conferences in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, used to attract only around 50 people, they now attract upwards of 400, she said—a noteworthy number for the first organization for black homeschoolers in a sea of predominantly white organizations.

    Research conducted by Marie-Josée Cérol—known professionally as Ama Mazama—also offers insight into the growing trend. A faculty member in the African American Studies department at Temple University in Philadelphia, Mazama began homeschooling her three children 12 years ago and realized quickly that there was little research on black homeschoolers.

    “Whenever there are mentions of African American homeschoolers, it’s assumed that we homeschool for the same reasons as European-American homeschoolers, but this isn’t really the case,” she said. “Because of the unique circumstances of black people in this country, there is really a new story to be told.”

    In a 2012 report published in the Journal of Black Studies, Mazama surveyed black homeschooling families from around the country and found that most chose to educate their children at home at least in part to avoid school-related racism. Mazama calls this rationale “racial protectionism” and said it is a response to the inability of schools to meet the needs of black students. “We have all heard that the American education system is not the best and is falling behind in terms of international standards,” she said. “But this is compounded for black children, who are treated as though they are not as intelligent and cannot perform as well, and therefore the standards for them should be lower.”

    Mazama said schools also rob black children of the opportunity to learn about their own culture because of a “Euro-centric” world-history curriculum. “Typically, the curriculum begins African American history with slavery and ends it with the Civil Rights Movement,” she said. “You have to listen to yourself simply being talked about as a descendent of slaves, which is not empowering. There is more to African history than that.” Mazama’s studies show that black parents who choose to homeschool often teach a comprehensive view of African history by incorporating more detailed descriptions of ancient African civilizations and accounts of successful African people throughout history. This allows children to “build their sense of racial pride and self esteem,” she said.

    Meanwhile, Cheryl Fields-Smith, an associate professor in the department of Educational Theory and Practice at the University of Georgia, has in her own studies found similar motivations among black homeschoolers. “The schools want little black boys to behave like little white girls, and that’s just never going to happen. They are different,” she said. “I think black families who are in a position to homeschool can use homeschooling to avoid the issues of their children being labeled ‘trouble makers’ and the suggestion that their children need special-education services because they learn and behave differently.” [… – I would say, though, that it’s less that black boys should behave like white girls, but that their possible normal childish behaviours are blown well out of proportion, in synch with the perceived over-maturity of African-American children – Tamir Rice, for example, was 12, but the cops first said they thought he was 20…]

    However, both Mazama and Fields-Smith say this is beginning to change; barriers that in the past might have left homeschooling out of the question for many working-class families are being lifted. Greater access to public-education resources is making homeschooling more appealing, too. Mazama pointed to the availability of subsidies ensuring homeschooled children have access to standard public-school nutritional offerings, for example, and public programs allowing homeschooled students to enroll in extracurricular activities and after-school sports as reasons why families are increasingly seeing homeschooling as a valid alternative to traditional education. In fact, Fields-Smith is in the process of writing a book on black, single homeschooling mothers because she sees “more and more families of less means” making the decision to sacrifice traditional career paths so that they can pull their children from school. […]

    The poor education, according to McKnight, left Micah significantly behind in several subjects, which means she’s now trying to pack as much into his schedule as possible to get him back on track. “He doesn’t really get a day off—not right now, because he’s just behind. I feel like he doesn’t really have time to relax,” McKnight said, explaining she wasn’t aware just how behind he was until she started to homeschool him. Most devastating, she said, was when she realized her son was reading well below his expected third-grade level: “I felt like I had totally failed him, and the school had totally failed him, and the only thing I could do was work with him one-on-one to get him caught up.”

    To get Micah up to par in his academics, McKnight has employed a customized mix of purchased homeschool lesson plans and learning materials she developed herself—all on top of what he learns at the collective. When Micah is home, McKnight said her days are “totally dedicated to him.” They work for at least an hour on each of the core subjects, studying within the grade level that best suits him in each area. On days he returns from the collective, McKnight reads with him for two or three hours with the goal of getting him to a third-grade level by the end of the year. Lessons even continue on Saturdays and Sundays. He’s at his father’s place every other weekend, where he continues his reading schedule, and on the weekends that he’s home McKnight takes him on educational field trips—Atlanta’s many museums are frequent destinations.

    It’s this ability to shape everyday activities and lessons to meet the personal needs of each child that Fields-Smith finds so promising about homeschooling—especially for black families. “There is no one way to homeschool,” she said, noting all of the families that she consulted for her study were “catering to their children and customizing their education for them” instead of using a single stock homeschooling curriculum.

    Still, Mazama and Fields-Smith acknowledge that homeschooling is controversial, particularly in the black community. “For African Americans there is a sense of betrayal when you leave public schools in particular,” Mazama said. “Because the struggle to get into those schools was so harsh and so long, there is this sense of loyalty to the public schools. People say, ‘We fought to get into these schools, and now you are just going to leave?’”

    For Paula Penn-Nabrit, an African American scholar and writer who homeschooled her children in the 1990s, this struggle hits very close to home. Her husband’s uncle, James Nabrit, argued Brown v. Board of Education in front of the Supreme Court alongside Thurgood Marshall; he later served as the president of Howard University. When Penn-Nabrit decided to pull her three sons from public school, it angered many of her black friends. “A lot of people felt that because my family was intimately involved in the effort to integrate schools, that for me to pull my children out of schools was a betrayal of all that work,” she said. “But it really wasn’t. The case had nothing to do with what I, as a parent, decide I want for my child. That decision meant the state can’t decide to give me less than, but I can decide I want more than.” […]

    Upon deciding to homeschool their sons, Penn-Nabrit and her husband, both of whom have degrees in the humanities, elected to teach them the subject areas they knew well.** For the remaining science and math courses, however, they hired black, mostly male, graduate students from the Ohio State University to take over—in large part so that the boys had exposure to successful people who looked like them.*** After all, according to the Department of Education, less than 2 percent of current classroom teachers nationwide are African American males; until their homeschooling, Penn-Nabrit’s children had never had a black man as a teacher.

    “Most black people go to school and never have a teacher that looks like them, and this is particularly true for black boys,” she said. Similar concerns, she noted, led to the creation of single-sex schools—a particularly apt comparison for Penn-Nabrit, who attended Wellesley. “If women benefit from having a period of isolation from the larger group, that could be applicable to black boys as well.”

    Mazama, meanwhile, said that rooting children in their heritage in an educational setting allows them to do better emotionally and socially. “If anything, homeschooled black children would be much stronger because they would not have been devastated at an early age by racism,” she said. She explained that the absence of these early destructive experiences, combined with a heritage-focused curriculum, ultimately allows children to recognize and deal constructively with racism—”not by denying it, but by confronting it because they are comfortable with who they are.”

    “That’s the way I teach my own children,” she continued. “I have seen this work.”

  30. rq says

    All Scientists Are White Men, So Those Black And Latina Ladies Must Be Janitors

    The full report adds to the growing data on the challenges women in STEM fields face, and finds that the situation is especially bad for women of color, who frequently reported having to prove their competence again and again to male colleagues. The study had 500 online participants, and followed up with in-depth interviews of another 60 women of color. And it’s about as depressing as you might expect. For instance, Black women reported more pressure to prove their competence (76.9%) than did Latinas (64.5%), Asian-Americans (63.6%) and white women (62.7%) — a phenomenon the study calls “prove-it-again” bias. Also, black and latina women both reported that they had to be careful to avoid being seen as “angry.” Can’t imagine what would possibly make them angry in the first place.

    Surprisingly, the study found that “The stereotype that Asians are good at science appears to help Asian-American women with students — but not colleagues.” While Asian women reported more “prove-it-again” bias from their colleagues than did white women, they also reported the least “prove-it-again” bias from students as compared to the other groups.

    And another surprise: among women scientists from outside the US, women from India actually thought that gender discrimination was worse in labs and universities in the good old USA than in India. Women from Africa and Japan thought the situation was better here than at home.

    And of course, both white and minority women in science and tech reported being relegated to what they called “office housework” — filling in grant forms, planning meetings, and so on. And when they’re successful in their careers, they’re more likely to have that success attributed to luck than to brilliance or hard work. Or maybe they just should have gone to the local science museum to learn how to make makeup.

    BLACK MEN WHO MADE THAT “CORETTA WASN’T A FEMINIST” MEME, here you go: you’re welcome.

    ThinkProgress on James Craig Anderson, with previously unknown information (to me) – like the fact that his partner was a father of a young child (I say his partner was the father, though they were both parents to the child – but the law being what it is…). TW. The Brutal, Jim Crow-Style Lynching That Recently Took A Black Man’s Life In Mississippi

    James Craig Anderson sang tenor in the choir at the First Hyde Park Missionary Baptist Church in Jackson, Mississippi. He’d worked at a car plant near Jackson for seven years, and he enjoyed gardening in his free time. Anderson’s partner of 17 years, a man named James Bradfield, was the legal guardian of a 4 year-old child, and Anderson and Bradfield were raising the child together. This child will not grow up in Anderson’s care, however, because Anderson was killed by a mob of white teenagers.

    The murder of Mr. Anderson recalls Jim Crow era lynchings. On a Sunday morning shortly before dawn, a group of teenagers were drinking in the nearby town of Puckett. According to police, one of them told his friends they should leave and “go fuck with some niggers.” Two carloads of the boys then drove to Jackson, where they found Anderson in a parking lot, beat him, and then drove their pickup truck over him. During the beating, some of the teens reportedly yelled out the words “white power.” […]

    On Tuesday, Anderson’s family found justice. But Anderson remains dead. Mr. Bradfield, a man who cannot even call himself a widower due to another form of unconstitutional injustice, said in a statement to the court that his adopted son sleeps in his bed because “he doesn’t want those people to get me.” The United States of America has a black president. That president appointed a black judge, a black attorney general, and a black prosecutor. And none of these men have the power to restore what a small band of drunk teenagers took away from Anderson and his family.

    Almost two years to the day after racism killed James Craig Anderson, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Shelby County v. Holder. “Things have changed in the South,” Chief Justice John Roberts explained in his opinion for the Court. “Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels.” On these points, the Chief Justice is correct. The South is different than it was in 1965. Racial minorities do enjoy high offices, including the office of President of the United States.

    But it only took a few boys from a tiny town in the poorest state in the nation to re-create the age of Jim Crow lynchings.

    This is what Chief Justice Roberts missed in his opinion scrapping a key provision of the Voting Rights Act on the theory that it did not reflect “current needs.” He missed the fact that racism can be an intensely individualistic crime against reason. A police force can be committed to equality, and a single cop can still fire impulsively on a black suspect. A nation can be committed to universal suffrage, and yet a single state legislature can erect obstacles to the right to vote. Lynchings are now infrequent in the South, but that does not make Anderson’s death any less tragic. And it certainly does not justify eliminating laws banning racially-motivated killings.

    We are fortunate to live in a nation where most people do not commit serious violations of the law. Most employers do not act with racist intent. Most cops do not fire their guns unnecessarily. Most teenagers do not follow up a night of drinking with violence. Judge Reeves’ “New Mississippi” is slowly but consistently displacing the old one.

    But that does not mean that we should make Roberts’ mistake of blurring the line between less racism and no racism. Anderson did not die due to a racist regime of state-sponsored apartheid, he died because of a small band of hateful Americans. And that was enough to leave his adopted son without one of his fathers.

    I have to disagree with the conclusion, though – that it was individual racism, rather than collective racism. It may not be written in the books any longer, but there sure as hell is a systemic problem with racism – it’s not just individual people deciding to act racist. Their actions are the product of the system within which they live. Sure, less racism is better than a lot of racism, but it sure as hell isn’t no racism, and even less racism can be harmful and show up unexpectedly in the most ordinary of places.

    This is an old one (from November), so no quoting, but it serves as a bit of an outro/intro: FBI notorious for assassinating blacks: US activist. Contrast that with FBI director Comey’s speech last thread, and this: Civil rights group challenges FBI chief’s claim that police racial bias is ‘unconscious’

    Comey’s comments were meant to address mounting concerns in the wake of recent incidents in which African Americans have died at the hands of police – a fate suffered by Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York last year, among others. It came as part of a rare discussion on the relationship between law enforcement and minority communities.

    His comments prompted a concerned response from ColorofChange.org, a 1 million-member civil rights group formed in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a statement, the group said that Comey’s speech “perpetuated many of the dangerous, discriminatory perspectives that uphold the crisis of violent and abusive policing.”

    The group also said: “Director Comey presented false equivalencies around the police violence facing Black and brown Americans and the growing calls for systemic policing reform. Holding police accountable for addressing the crisis of discriminatory police misconduct is not ‘unfair,’ but is rather one of the most critical challenges facing our nation.”

    ColorofChange[dot]org also disputed Comey’s “argument that Black and brown communities are to blame for the daily terror and indignity of discriminatory policing. The reality is that law enforcement and leaders such as Director Comey and Attorney General Holder have the responsibility and obligation to address the violence and discrimination endemic to law enforcement.”

    According to the NAACP, 43 percent of the people incarcerated in the US prison system are African American. Yet while blacks make up roughly 12 percent of drug users, according to the group, African Americans make up 59 percent of the nation’s prison population with regards to inmates serving time for drug offenses.

    “The problems of law enforcement are structural just as much as they are about the implicit racial bias of police,” ColorofChange[dot]org said. “These problems require a complete overhaul of the systems, policies and practices that uphold discriminatory and violent policing, such as Stop and Frisk, Broken Windows policing and so-called predictive policing. These practices incentivize police to target, harass and unjustly arrest Black and brown people for the most minor of issues.”

    Tim Devaney, a reporter for the DC-based web publication The Hill, noted that the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) — a national group that represents the interest of law enforcement officials — took aim at Director Comey’s remarks as well.

    “Police officers are constantly reminded not to generalize about ethnic groups or religious groups or groups of any kinds,” Jim Pasco, the FOP’s executive director, told The Hill. “We would just remind Director Comey there are over 750,000 police officers and it is probably not good practice to generalize about them.”

    According to a poll published last month conducted by Reuters and IPSOS, nearly one third of the US public and almost half of African Americans believe that police “routinely lie to serve their own interests.”

  31. rq says

    All Scientists Are White Men, So Those Black And Latina Ladies Must Be Janitors

    The full report adds to the growing data on the challenges women in STEM fields face, and finds that the situation is especially bad for women of color, who frequently reported having to prove their competence again and again to male colleagues. The study had 500 online participants, and followed up with in-depth interviews of another 60 women of color. And it’s about as depressing as you might expect. For instance, Black women reported more pressure to prove their competence (76.9%) than did Latinas (64.5%), Asian-Americans (63.6%) and white women (62.7%) — a phenomenon the study calls “prove-it-again” bias. Also, black and latina women both reported that they had to be careful to avoid being seen as “angry.” Can’t imagine what would possibly make them angry in the first place.

    Surprisingly, the study found that “The stereotype that Asians are good at science appears to help Asian-American women with students — but not colleagues.” While Asian women reported more “prove-it-again” bias from their colleagues than did white women, they also reported the least “prove-it-again” bias from students as compared to the other groups.

    And another surprise: among women scientists from outside the US, women from India actually thought that gender discrimination was worse in labs and universities in the good old USA than in India. Women from Africa and Japan thought the situation was better here than at home.

    And of course, both white and minority women in science and tech reported being relegated to what they called “office housework” — filling in grant forms, planning meetings, and so on. And when they’re successful in their careers, they’re more likely to have that success attributed to luck than to brilliance or hard work. Or maybe they just should have gone to the local science museum to learn how to make makeup.

    BLACK MEN WHO MADE THAT “CORETTA WASN’T A FEMINIST” MEME, here you go: you’re welcome.

    ThinkProgress on James Craig Anderson, with previously unknown information (to me) – like the fact that his partner was a father of a young child (I say his partner was the father, though they were both parents to the child – but the law being what it is…). TW. The Brutal, Jim Crow-Style Lynching That Recently Took A Black Man’s Life In Mississippi

    James Craig Anderson sang tenor in the choir at the First Hyde Park Missionary Baptist Church in Jackson, Mississippi. He’d worked at a car plant near Jackson for seven years, and he enjoyed gardening in his free time. Anderson’s partner of 17 years, a man named James Bradfield, was the legal guardian of a 4 year-old child, and Anderson and Bradfield were raising the child together. This child will not grow up in Anderson’s care, however, because Anderson was killed by a mob of white teenagers.

    The murder of Mr. Anderson recalls Jim Crow era lynchings. On a Sunday morning shortly before dawn, a group of teenagers were drinking in the nearby town of Puckett. According to police, one of them told his friends they should leave and “go fuck with some n*gg*rs.” Two carloads of the boys then drove to Jackson, where they found Anderson in a parking lot, beat him, and then drove their pickup truck over him. During the beating, some of the teens reportedly yelled out the words “white power.” […]

    On Tuesday, Anderson’s family found justice. But Anderson remains dead. Mr. Bradfield, a man who cannot even call himself a widower due to another form of unconstitutional injustice, said in a statement to the court that his adopted son sleeps in his bed because “he doesn’t want those people to get me.” The United States of America has a black president. That president appointed a black judge, a black attorney general, and a black prosecutor. And none of these men have the power to restore what a small band of drunk teenagers took away from Anderson and his family.

    Almost two years to the day after racism killed James Craig Anderson, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Shelby County v. Holder. “Things have changed in the South,” Chief Justice John Roberts explained in his opinion for the Court. “Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels.” On these points, the Chief Justice is correct. The South is different than it was in 1965. Racial minorities do enjoy high offices, including the office of President of the United States.

    But it only took a few boys from a tiny town in the poorest state in the nation to re-create the age of Jim Crow lynchings.

    This is what Chief Justice Roberts missed in his opinion scrapping a key provision of the Voting Rights Act on the theory that it did not reflect “current needs.” He missed the fact that racism can be an intensely individualistic crime against reason. A police force can be committed to equality, and a single cop can still fire impulsively on a black suspect. A nation can be committed to universal suffrage, and yet a single state legislature can erect obstacles to the right to vote. Lynchings are now infrequent in the South, but that does not make Anderson’s death any less tragic. And it certainly does not justify eliminating laws banning racially-motivated killings.

    We are fortunate to live in a nation where most people do not commit serious violations of the law. Most employers do not act with racist intent. Most cops do not fire their guns unnecessarily. Most teenagers do not follow up a night of drinking with violence. Judge Reeves’ “New Mississippi” is slowly but consistently displacing the old one.

    But that does not mean that we should make Roberts’ mistake of blurring the line between less racism and no racism. Anderson did not die due to a racist regime of state-sponsored apartheid, he died because of a small band of hateful Americans. And that was enough to leave his adopted son without one of his fathers.

    I have to disagree with the conclusion, though – that it was individual racism, rather than collective racism. It may not be written in the books any longer, but there sure as hell is a systemic problem with racism – it’s not just individual people deciding to act racist. Their actions are the product of the system within which they live. Sure, less racism is better than a lot of racism, but it sure as hell isn’t no racism, and even less racism can be harmful and show up unexpectedly in the most ordinary of places.

    This is an old one (from November), so no quoting, but it serves as a bit of an outro/intro: FBI notorious for assassinating blacks: US activist. Contrast that with FBI director Comey’s speech last thread, and this: Civil rights group challenges FBI chief’s claim that police racial bias is ‘unconscious’

    Comey’s comments were meant to address mounting concerns in the wake of recent incidents in which African Americans have died at the hands of police – a fate suffered by Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York last year, among others. It came as part of a rare discussion on the relationship between law enforcement and minority communities.

    His comments prompted a concerned response from ColorofChange.org, a 1 million-member civil rights group formed in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a statement, the group said that Comey’s speech “perpetuated many of the dangerous, discriminatory perspectives that uphold the crisis of violent and abusive policing.”

    The group also said: “Director Comey presented false equivalencies around the police violence facing Black and brown Americans and the growing calls for systemic policing reform. Holding police accountable for addressing the crisis of discriminatory police misconduct is not ‘unfair,’ but is rather one of the most critical challenges facing our nation.”

    ColorofChange[dot]org also disputed Comey’s “argument that Black and brown communities are to blame for the daily terror and indignity of discriminatory policing. The reality is that law enforcement and leaders such as Director Comey and Attorney General Holder have the responsibility and obligation to address the violence and discrimination endemic to law enforcement.”

    According to the NAACP, 43 percent of the people incarcerated in the US prison system are African American. Yet while blacks make up roughly 12 percent of drug users, according to the group, African Americans make up 59 percent of the nation’s prison population with regards to inmates serving time for drug offenses.

    “The problems of law enforcement are structural just as much as they are about the implicit racial bias of police,” ColorofChange[dot]org said. “These problems require a complete overhaul of the systems, policies and practices that uphold discriminatory and violent policing, such as Stop and Frisk, Broken Windows policing and so-called predictive policing. These practices incentivize police to target, harass and unjustly arrest Black and brown people for the most minor of issues.”

    Tim Devaney, a reporter for the DC-based web publication The Hill, noted that the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) — a national group that represents the interest of law enforcement officials — took aim at Director Comey’s remarks as well.

    “Police officers are constantly reminded not to generalize about ethnic groups or religious groups or groups of any kinds,” Jim Pasco, the FOP’s executive director, told The Hill. “We would just remind Director Comey there are over 750,000 police officers and it is probably not good practice to generalize about them.”

    According to a poll published last month conducted by Reuters and IPSOS, nearly one third of the US public and almost half of African Americans believe that police “routinely lie to serve their own interests.”

  32. says

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/06/science/a-macarthur-grant-winner-tries-to-unearth-biases-to-aid-criminal-justice.html?_r=0

    (excerpt)

    Jennifer L. Eberhardt, 49, an associate professor of psychology at Stanford University, studies the effect of unconscious ideas about race on the workings of the criminal justice system. She was one of 21 winners of 2014 MacArthur “genius” grants.

    Interest in her work has grown after the deaths of black suspects at the hands of police officers in Missouri and New York. We spoke for two hours in New York in September and again by telephone on Jan. 1. Here is an condensed and edited version of our conversations.

    WHEN YOUR MACARTHUR WAS ANNOUNCED, IT WAS SAID YOU HAD SHOWN HOW CRIMINAL SENTENCING WAS RELATED TO SKIN COLOR AND RACIAL STEREOTYPING. HOW DID YOU DO THAT?

    The particular study they were referring to was on the death penalty. We gathered photographs of people convicted of capital crimes and who were eligible for a death sentence. We then cropped them and asked Stanford students to rate how stereotypically black the faces appeared to be.

    We told our subjects to use any dimension they wanted with which to make that judgment: skin color, width of nose, thickness of lips. Interestingly, though we didn’t give them clear direction of what we meant by “stereotypically black,” there was a lot of agreement about what that was.

    Now, the students had no idea where these pictures came from or that these were convicted felons. We wondered if their ratings of blackness could predict whether the person had received a life or a death sentence.

    AND WERE THEY PREDICTIVE?

    Oh, yes. People who were judged to be most black were, in reality, most likely to have drawn a death sentence. In fact, they were over twice as likely to get a death sentence.

    YOU’VE ALSO DONE STUDIES ON HOW PEOPLE PERCEIVE RACE AND WEAPONRY. WHAT DID YOU DISCOVER?

    There’s one where we exposed people subliminally to black and white faces. We did this by sitting subjects in front of computer screens and exposing them to pictures of faces at such a rapid rate that they couldn’t consciously detect what they’ve been exposed to.

    Then we displayed a blurry object on the screen. Sometimes, the object was crime-relevant — a gun or a knife. At other times, it was crime-irrelevant — a stapler. In 41 frames, this blurry object moved into focus.

    Our participants told us that when they’d been exposed to the black faces beforehand, they were able to identify the crime-relevant objects quicker. Exposure to the white faces led them to need more frames to say, “That’s a gun.”

    WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF THIS?

    Seeing a lot of black faces created a perceptual readiness to detect crime-related objects.

    WHAT HAPPENED WHEN YOU HAD STUDENTS PLAY COMPUTER GAMES THAT CENTERED ON SHOOTING BLACK PEOPLE WHO MIGHT BE CARRYING GUNS?

    This is an experiment that another social psychologist, Josh Correll at the University of Colorado-Boulder, has done. But we’ve done it, too.

    You have a computer game simulation where a subject sees someone holding an object. If it’s a gun, they hit a button labeled “Shoot.” If it’s a harmless object, they hit another labeled “Don’t Shoot.”

    It turns out that if they are shown a black person with a gun, they’ll respond with “Shoot” faster than when flashed the image of a white person with a gun. People are more likely to mistakenly respond with “Shoot” to a black person with no gun than to a white person with no gun.

  34. opus says

    What a surprise!

    Between 2000 and 2004, Enos and a group of Harvard graduate students studied a public-housing reconstruction project in Chicago that caused the displacement of more than 25,000 African Americans, many of whom had previously lived in close proximity to white voters. After the African Americans moved out of the voting district, a startling effect became apparent: the white voters’ turnout dropped by 12 to 15 percentage points, leading Enos and his team to believe that white residents’ previously higher levels of civic engagement were in large part caused by feelings of racial threat.

    “That’s a lot of people. Political parties work really hard to try and turn out two or three percentage points of people—this is a 15 percentage point drop, so it’s a huge swing in who votes and who doesn’t,” Enos notes. “What it looks like…[is that] when [whites] were living next to these black neighbors, they were ‘racially threatened.’ The presence of these African Americans was affecting their psychology in some way and causing them to vote in a certain way.”

    After dividing voters by race, Enos and his team measured how far they lived from the demolished housing projects and then estimated voting patterns, using a method called ecological inference (the process of using aggregate data to draw conclusions about individual-level behavior) developed by Weatherhead University Professor Gary King.

    Enos found that the way people voted changed according to their proximity to housing projects: whites who lived nearby were voting for Republicans at a higher rate than whites living in other areas. “After those projects came down, they all voted Republican at the same rate,” Enos adds. “It looked like the presence of those housing projects caused them to vote Republican.”

    Paper: http://people.hmdc.harvard.edu/~renos/papers/EnosChicago/EnosChicago.pdf

    Source: http://harvardmagazine.com/2014/09/unraveling-racial-threat

  35. opie says

    Racism: photons of varying wavelength striking retinas are literally changing culture and the course of human history. A testament to the rationality of 3 lbs of cranial meat.

  36. says

    I was asked to repost this in the comments here, as it seemed topical.

    I was just reading this story on the CBC website: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/in-fairfax-va-a-different-no-less-scary-police-shooting-1.2960995
    about a police shooting and the complete lack of real legal consequences for police officers that kill people. It is one of the few articles I have seen in the mainstream press that has been critical of police officers and their expectation of complete submission to authority by people. What amazed me in this case is that four fellow officers actually contradicted the story of the shooter, breaking that wall of silence that normally goes up. But even with this being the case, nothing has happened.

    But the killing of John Geer should frighten everyone. It is the best example yet that while police often target minorities disproportionately, their basic and overriding demand is total and unquestioning submission to their authority.

  37. rq says

    This is a rather tangential article, but I’m sure the program would have an impact on poor black people and families who are temporarily or chronically homeless: Room for Improvement

    We could, as a country, look at the root causes of homelessness and try to fix them. One of the main causes is that a lot of people can’t afford a place to live. They don’t have enough money to pay rent, even for the cheapest dives available. Prices are rising, inventory is extremely tight, and the upshot is, as a new report by the Urban Institute finds, that there’s only 29 affordable units available for every 100 extremely low-income households. So we could create more jobs, redistribute the wealth, improve education, socialize health carebasically redesign our political and economic systems to make sure everybody can afford a roof over their heads.

    Instead of this, we do one of two things: We stick our heads in the sand or try to find bandages for the symptoms. This story is about how Utah has found a third way.

    To understand how the state did that it helps to know that homeless-service advocates roughly divide their clients into two groups: those who will be homeless for only a few weeks or a couple of months, and those who are “chronically homeless,” meaning they have been without a place to live for more than a year, and have other problems—mental illness or substance abuse or other debilitating damage. The vast majority, 85 percent, of the nation’s estimated 580,000 homeless are of the temporary variety, mainly men but also women and whole families who spend relatively short periods of time sleeping in shelters or cars, then get their lives together and, despite an economy increasingly stacked against them, find a place to live, somehow. However, the remaining 15 percent, the chronically homeless, fill up the shelters night after night and spend a lot of time in emergency rooms and jails. This is expensive—costing between $30,000 and $50,000 per person per year according to the Interagency Council on Homelessness. And there are a few people in every city, like Reno’s infamous “Million-Dollar Murray,” who really bust the bank. So in recent years, both local and federal efforts to solve the homelessness epidemic have concentrated on the chronic population, currently about 84,000 nationwide.

    In 2005, approximately 2,000 of these chronically homeless people lived in the state of Utah, mainly in and around Salt Lake City. Many different agencies and groups—governmental and nonprofit, charitable and religious—worked to get them back on their feet and off the streets. But the numbers and costs just kept going up.

    The model for dealing with the chronically homeless at that time, both here and in most places across the nation, was to get them “ready” for housing by guiding them through drug rehabilitation programs or mental-health counseling, or both. If and when they stopped drinking or doing drugs or acting crazy, they were given heavily subsidized housing on the condition that they stay clean and relatively sane. This model, sometimes called “linear residential treatment” or “continuum of care,” seemed to be a good idea, but it didn’t work very well because relatively few chronically homeless people ever completed the work required to become “ready,” and those who did often could not stay clean or stop having mental episodes, so they lost their apartments and became homeless again.

    In 1992, a psychologist at New York University named Sam Tsemberis decided to test a new model. His idea was to just give the chronically homeless a place to live, on a permanent basis, without making them pass any tests or attend any programs or fill out any forms.

    “Okay,” Tsemberis recalls thinking, “they’re schizophrenic, alcoholic, traumatized, brain damaged. What if we don’t make them pass any tests or fill out any forms? They aren’t any good at that stuff. Inability to pass tests and fill out forms was a large part of how they ended up homeless in the first place. Why not just give them a place to live and offer them free counseling and therapy, health care, and let them decide if they want to participate? Why not treat chronically homeless people as human beings and members of our community who have a basic right to housing and health care?”

    Tsemberis and his associates, a group called Pathways to Housing, ran a large test in which they provided apartments to 242 chronically homeless individuals, no questions asked. In their apartments they could drink, take drugs, and suffer mental breakdowns, as long as they didn’t hurt anyone or bother their neighbors. If they needed and wanted to go to rehab or detox, these services were provided. If they needed and wanted medical care, it was also provided. But it was up to the client to decide what services and care to participate in.

    The results were remarkable. After five years, 88 percent of the clients were still in their apartments, and the cost of caring for them in their own homes was a little less than what it would have cost to take care of them on the street. A subsequent study of 4,679 New York City homeless with severe mental illness found that each cost an average of $40,449 a year in emergency room, shelter, and other expenses to the system, and that getting those individuals in supportive housing saved an average of $16,282. Soon other cities such as Seattle and Portland, Maine, as well as states like Rhode Island and Illinois, ran their own tests with similar results. Denver found that emergency-service costs alone went down 73 percent for people put in Housing First, for a savings of $31,545 per person; detox visits went down 82 percent, for an additional savings of $8,732. By 2003, Housing First had been embraced by the Bush administration.

    Still, the new paradigm was slow to catch on. Old practices are sometimes hard to give up, even when they don’t work. When Housing First was initially proposed in Salt Lake City, some homeless advocates thought the new model would be a disaster. Also, it would be hard to sell the ultra-conservative Utah Legislature on giving free homes to drug addicts and alcoholics. And the Legislature would have to back the idea because even though most of the funding for new construction would come from the federal government, the state would have to pick up the balance and find ways to plan, build, and manage the new units. And where are you going to put them? Not in my backyard.

    They got the LDS involved, which got the program going, but there’s no mention on how much of their religion they also push, except this:

    If you’re a member of the church and you lose your job, your house, and all your money, you can go to your bishop and he’ll give you a place to live, some food, some money, and set you up with a job…no questions asked. All you have to do in return is some community service and try to follow the teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith. A system very much like Housing First—give them what they need, then work on their problems.

    Which refers specifically to members of the church, but I don’t know how much of that carries over into the Housing First program.

    This Supreme Court Decision Could Encourage One Of The Worst Forms Of Racism

    The country has progressed since the late ’60s, and blatant prejudice is now much less common. Yet housing discrimination persists, often due to bias built into the system. So over the years, the federal courts have expanded the Fair Housing Act to cover practices with a discriminatory outcome. Under this theory, known as “disparate impact,” a policy or practice can be illegal if it disproportionately affects minorities, regardless if that was its purpose. Disparate impact claims are crucial to fighting racial inequality today.

    But this key weapon could soon be taken away. The Supreme Court will likely rule this summer in a case, Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, that may forbid disparate impact claims under the Fair Housing Act. Such a decision would effectively defang the law. It would also shed a disturbing light on how this court believes the law should react to entrenched discrimination.

    The underlying reality of the Texas case is that certain housing policies disadvantage minorities more than whites, whether by hidden design, careless disregard or unfortunate coincidence. It’s this type of discrimination — in housing, but also employment, voting and education — that today produces some of the biggest barriers to bridging the racial divide. If the Supreme Court acknowledges this truth and believes justice is best served by fostering equality “in fact, and not simply in form” — to borrow a phrase from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — its decision should be easy. That it probably won’t be helps explain why racial inequality remains such an unrelenting problem for the nation.

    The article includes a closer look at the segregated past of housing and mortgaging etc. Here’s another factor:

    The Supreme Court is now debating whether disparate impact claims can even be raised in housing cases.

    On Jan. 21, the justices heard oral arguments in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project. The Dallas-area nonprofit, which promotes racially and economically diverse communities, filed suit after finding that for the past few decades, the Texas housing department had allocated almost all affordable-housing tax credits to developments in minority neighborhoods, while denying credits to those in white neighborhoods. This effectively kept low-income residents from moving to white communities. The nonprofit is raising a disparate impact claim under the Fair Housing Act.

    The Texas agency, unable to show there was no less-discriminatory alternative to its practice, lost the case in federal district court and in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. It petitioned the Supreme Court to rule for the first time on the overall permissibility of disparate impact claims under the Fair Housing Act. Court watchers suggest the decision may come down to Justice Antonin Scalia, who during oral arguments indicated sympathy with both sides.

    Opponents argue that disparate impact claims are unfair to policymakers, financial institutions and property owners. If housing policies and practices are instituted for legitimate reasons based on race-neutral criteria, the basic argument goes, then they should be legal despite any unintended discriminatory effects — and the people who implement those policies and practices should not be blamed.

    During oral arguments, Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller suggested another problem: that housing officials and developers wary of possible Fair Housing Act lawsuits might make race-conscious decisions in favor of minorities, creating “the functional equivalent of a quota system.” This would raise constitutional issues of its own.

    Other critics have expressed concerns that the idea of disparate impact is too fluid — that just because a practice unevenly affects a minority group doesn’t mean that it harms the group or that it doesn’t help other minority groups.

    And to finish off:

    A Supreme Court ruling against disparate impact would cap a string of controversial civil rights decisions.

    “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a 2007 decision on school desegregation in Seattle. That sounds simple enough, but such a focus on explicit racial preferences overlooks the issues of structural discrimination — the kind found in housing and other areas today.

    In 2009, the Supreme Court declared that New Haven, Connecticut, had violated the civil rights of white firefighters when it threw out a promotion exam that no black firefighter had passed. The city took the racial gap in exam results as a sign that the test itself might violate employment protections under the Civil Rights Act, but the court ruled against New Haven. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted a key section of the Voting Rights Act that determined which states had to obtain pre-approval from the federal government before making changes to their voting systems. And last year, the justices upheld a Michigan ban on affirmative action, declaring that a state’s voters can prohibit the use of race as a factor in college admissions.

    As ProPublica noted, a ruling against disparate impact claims this year would give the Roberts Court a dubious hat trick: It would have effectively undermined the three most substantial civil rights laws of the 1960s — the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

    Whatever the Supreme Court decides in the current case, some of the justices are clearly unconvinced that discrimination not driven by overt bias is a problem, or at least one that the law should take a stand against.

    Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke to this troubling pattern last year in her dissent in the Michigan affirmative action case. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination,” she said, responding to Roberts’ quote from seven years earlier.

    Sotomayor, one of only two racial minorities on the high court, chose to read aloud her dissent, something the justices do only when they feel particularly strongly.

    A ruling in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project is expected sometime in June.

    So go Texas, I suppose?

    St. Louis police turn over Kajieme Powell shooting case to prosecutor –

    Police found no criminal wrongdoing in two officers’ fatal shooting of Kajieme Powell last summer, but Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce said Tuesday that under new procedures her office will take a fresh look anyway.

    It is part of a process in which prosecutors now review officers’ use of deadly force, whether the department recommends criminal charges or not. Joyce said that in this case, it did not.

    After receiving the police reports Tuesday, Joyce issued a statement that the department findings “do not, in any way, dictate the actions to be taken by my office.”

    She wrote that experienced prosecutors will review the evidence, including a cellphone video of the shooting made by a bystander. She promised, “If necessary, we will conduct our own witness interviews to get to the truth of the circumstances of the shooting.”

    On Aug. 19, two St. Louis officers were sent to the Six Stars Market, in the 8700 block of Riverview Boulevard, on a report that a man stole energy drinks and pastries. The officers said he advanced at them with a knife. Each fired six shots, police said.

    The cellphone video shows the event at some distance, and includes the sound of Powell shouting “Shoot me! Kill me now!”

    One officer, 25, had been on the force a little more than three years; the other, 31, was on for about 2½ years. Powell lived with his grandmother in the 1500 block of Hornsby Avenue in St. Louis.

    Police Chief Sam Dotson has defended the shooting, noting that policy allows deadly force against someone threatening an officer with a knife from up to 21 feet away.

    Powell appears on the video to be much closer when he was shot, but calculations of just how close have not been released.

    The chief said Tasers were not an option against a potentially deadly weapon, and with Powell wearing a coat that might stop the probes.

    The case was reviewed separately by homicide detectives and then by the newly created Force Investigative Unit, Dotson said.

    Some aspects, including the video, were publicly released. Others, including the officers’ names, were not.

    “Once the circuit attorney’s office has reviewed the findings and a decision is rendered, all findings permissible under the Sunshine Law will be released to the public,” Dotson said in a prepared statement.

    Joyce invited anyone with relevant information to contact her office, and asked for patience from the public. She wrote, “A thorough review demands sufficient time to seek the truth.”

    The opening paragraph/sentence pretty much sums things up. ‘Anyway’ – you know, if they have time. I certainly hope they find the time and the effort.

    Here’s CNN on the officer who turned off his dashcam, St Louis officer under fire for turning off dashcam video during arrest, video at the link.
    Also from CNN: What really happened to Malcolm X?, video at the link.

    Taking a look back at Ferguson, though, Justice Department ‘seriously examining’ Ferguson race case. Well, thatš alright then, they’re taking a ‘serious’ look!

    The organization, Arch City Defenders, has been investigating for months allegations that the city of Ferguson engaged in a pattern of discrimination and encouraged its police department to target low-income residents and jail those who could not pay the fines.

    Thomas Harvey, executive director of Arch City Defenders, told POLITICO that he and his colleagues have consulted Justice Department lawyers and that he met one-on-one with Christy Lopez, the deputy chief of the department’s Civil Rights Special Litigation Section. Lopez has been tasked with leading the Justice Department’s larger investigation of the Ferguson police.

    “All discussions [with the Justice Department have focused on what we believe to be a connection between the allegations of police misconduct and the erosion of trust between members of communities of color and their government,” Harvey said.

    In public comments Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder didn’t discuss the direction of the federal probe, but emphasized that he expects the investigation to wrap up by the time he leaves office — likely within the next few weeks.

    “I’m satisfied with the progress that we have made, and also I’m comfortable saying that I’m going to be able to make those calls before I leave office,” Holder told reporters at the National Press Club on Tuesday. […]

    In the Ferguson matter, the Department of Justice reportedly is unlikely to pursue charges against Wilson. But it previously authorized a second autopsy of Michael Brown, and Attorney General Holder met personally with Brown’s family and local officials in Ferguson last year.

    The private lawsuit alleges that the city of Ferguson has violated citizens’ constitutional rights by placing them in unsanitary, overcrowded jails for outstanding debt to the city. These jails, the lawyers claimed, are often coated in mucus, dirt and feces. Jails in neighboring Jennings have reported two suicides in the past two years.

    The Ferguson Police Department, the lawsuit claims, excessively fined residents because of pressure to generate revenue for the town. Missouri law limits the amount of a city’s operating budget that can come from traffic fines to 30 percent, though The New York Times reported that many cities either ignore this law or fail to report their figures.

    Various Missouri lawmakers have proposed reducing the state’s cap on the portion of a city’s budget that can come from tickets to 10 percent.

    The Ferguson Police Department last week issued a statement disputing the lawsuit’s claims, asserting that no prisoner is held in city jails for longer than 72 hours, that the jails are sanitary and that those in custody have access to “toilet, wash-basin, and drinking water.”

    “We believe this lawsuit is disturbing because it contains allegations that are not based on objective facts,” Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III said in a statement.

    But Harvey believes that his investigation could provide key insight into the anger exhibited by protesters after Michael Brown’s shooting. “They’re just pissed off because they’re being exploited; they’re not dangerous.”

    Interlude: Idris Elba
    Pierce Brosnan backs Idris Elba to be the next James Bond – awful nice of Pierce!

    He has been backed by everyone from Kanye West to Jamie Foxx – and now Idris Elba has earned the support of a former James Bond actor to take on the role of 007.

    Pierce Brosnan has said Idris Elba could step up to the mark to play the British spy. In an interview with the RadioTimes, he said: “Yeah, he would make a good Bond”.

    Brosnan also said Colin Salmon, who the actor starred alongside in The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day as MI6 deputy chief of staff, would be a good fit for the role.

    Pierce Brosnan has also backed British actor Colin Salmon for the role “Colin Salmon also. May the best man get the job and may Daniel [Craig] bring home the bacon for as long as he wants,” he said.

    Elba has been rumoured to play the British spy for a number of years, but his name resurfaced again in 2014 when a hacked Sony email revealed the company thought the actor “should be the next Bond”.

    Rather a shame that Daniel Craig still has a couple more movies to make before he can leave the franchise.

  38. rq says

    Crap. You’re missing out on the Elba previous comment. Onwards! Directly to the annals of Stupid:
    Krispy Kreme’s “KKK Wednesdays” promotion backfires, obviously

    A United Kingdom branch of Krispy Kreme has officially apologized after advertising their short-lived “KKK [Krispy Kreme Klub] Wednesdays” promotion for their Hull location. Apparently, people outside the U.S. — including the representatives from Krispy Kreme’s British headquarters who approved the promotion — are unfamiliar with the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist organization known for grotesque violence primarily against black people.

    “Krispy Kreme apologizes unreservedly for the inappropriate name of a customer promotion at one of our stores,” said a Krispy Kreme spokesperson in a statement. “The promotion was never intended to cause offense. All material has been withdrawn and an internal investigation is currently underway.”

    According to the Hull Daily Mail, the promotion was part of a calendar of children’s activities and was advertised on the company’s national Facebook page. It wasn’t long before commenters began pointing out the regrettable oversight.

    “This was sent from the head office, so it has been advertised at all the outlets,” said the spokesperson in an interview. “But we have now taken down the sign from our point of sale. We don’t have a new name for the event yet but it is still going ahead this week.”

    The promotion has scheduled events including “Colouring Tuesday” and “Face Painting Thursday.”

    I will only make the comment that ‘Colouring Tuesday’ might also resonate poorly. No further comment from me.

    More frighteningly, ‘White Power’ Signs Held Up at Texas High School Basketball Game

    It was an interesting basketball game—one that went into three overtimes—between Flower Mound High School and Plano East High School in Texas Friday, but what got the most attention was a picture tweeted out showing attendees holding up two signs that jointly read “White Power,” WFAA-TV reports.

    The signs, held up in Flower Mound’s student section, shocked both parents and students alike.

    “We thought it was racist,” one Plano East student athlete, who asked not to be identified, told the news station. “[The sign] said ‘white power,’ and we were shocked.”

    Witnesses at the game said the sign was held up late in the game as play intensified and scoring leads switched several times.

    “Our student section started pointing at the sign,” the Plano East athlete added. “That’s when it clicked into everyone’s mind … ‘Whoa … what are these guys doing?’ And the teachers came and took the signs down.”

    According to WFAA-TV, it is believed that the “white” meant the team’s color, but the “power” in the sign did not fit in with any of the school’s cheers. Witnesses also reported that there were slurs hurled at players throughout the game.

    Eric Littleton, coach of the Flower Mound team, took to social media to decry the sign.

    “Unacceptable. As head coach at FMHS I offer our full voice apology. I will pursue this fully. No place for this,” he wrote.

    The Lewisville Intermediate School District reportedly is investigating the incident.

    Video apparently at the link; work computer is blocking it out. :P

    A worthy comparison: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Claiming Isis represents Islam is like claiming to the Ku Klux Klan represents Christianity

    Asked by host Mika Brzezinski what he thought really drove the militant group, he said: “It’s a play for money and power, and these people try to impose their will on people so people will listen to them, and they can be in charge. That’s all it’s about. They’ve taken on a fascist attitude and a fascist approach to everything. You do what we say or you die.”

    “You can make parallels to things that have happened here in America. Like the Ku Klux Klan saying they are the Christian knights,” he added. “And they do not practice Christianity.”

    Using the First Crusade of 1095 as an example, he said that religion has always been used “as an excuse” to gain status and commit harrowing acts of violence, like beheadings and execution by burning.

    “It’s not an excuse, it’s no excuse and oppressing one group means that we have to look out, all groups have to get together to fight that type of oppression, because we all should be free,” he said.

    Black Police Officers Divided Over Eric Garner’s Death

    “The most difficult part of this whole process is people failing to understand that I am an African-American man. I could be Eric Garner or I could be Daniel Pantaleo – I could be either or,” says 48-year-old NYPD Detective Yuseff Hamm.

    Hamm readily admits that he is caught in the middle of a firestorm within his own ranks. He is the president of the NYPD Guardians Association, a fraternal organization of African American police officers. There are about 2,000 members and they are sharply divided about the use of force in the death of Eric Garner. Many members want Yuseff Hamm—who’s been on the job since 2001—to condemn what some black officers believe is excessive force, but Hamm refuses. For that, he says, he’s been harshly criticized.

    “You should read some of the emails that I receive. They call me all kinds of names except the one name that I remember,” says Hamm. “The guardians position is unique. As the president of this fraternal organization, I’ve made a conscious decision to stand on the side of justice.”

    “He caused a man to lose his life and as far as I’m concerned that’s unforgivable,” says Charlie McCray, the president of the Retired NYPD Guardians.

    McCray has harsh words for NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who is seen here taking Eric Garner down. He says his 800 African-American retired NYPD members are unanimously opposed to the way officers handled Eric Garner—and the group also has strong views about Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Pat Lynch.

    “Pat Lynch is protecting his job, but he really, really overdid it,” McCray says.

    Although Hamm and McCray have different points of view, both agree that more dialogue is needed and The Guardians should be included in the ongoing dialogue at City Hall.

    Also video at the link.

    One more on Ferguson and Holder-before-he-leaves-office. Holder confirms separate Ferguson probes to be finished before he leaves office

    On Ferguson, Holder denied he had unduly influenced the Justice Department’s investigation of Ferguson police when he said less than three months after the shooting that “wholesale change” was needed in the department.

    “I don’t think that that response was inappropriate,” Holder said, adding that “the reality was I had been briefed all along on this matter.”

    Holder, who visited Ferguson 11 days after the shooting, argued that “nothing I say… would have an impact on career people” in the Justice Department doing the investigations.

    “I think everybody will see when we announce our results that the process that we have engaged in is, as I said back at the time when I went to Ferguson, independent, thorough, and based on all the facts,” Holder said. “And I am confident that people will be satisfied with the results that will be announced.”

    But Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson said he believes Holder tainted the Justice Department’s investigation.

    “The public should be skeptical of the integrity of the investigation given that the ultimate boss in that department has gone public with his conclusion prior to the investigation being completed,” he said.

    Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III agreed, saying the probe was “set up to be extremely political.” He said the city would study any recommendations the department might make.

    “We’re always looking to make positive improvements in our police department,” he said. “If there is a legitimate issue, we want to address that, but right now I don’t really have any idea what that is in eyes of the DOJ.”

    I love it when the Authoritehs scream Bias! and Politicized! when they have so much of both themselves.

  39. rq says

    Mmkay, and this is the last link that is working for me from work; I have a few more lined up ready to go but they’ll have to wait for home computer. Where there will be even more (probably tomorrow).
    Racism against black people – not just in America! Time to shut down this modern-day minstrel show

    Whenever possible — that is, when the incident in question is not blatantly screaming “racism” at the top of its lungs — one must learn to extend the benefit of the doubt to what might seem to be way beyond the reasonable. Otherwise, it’s very likely you’ll be seeing behavior that could be classified as racist at every turn. You really will. Especially in Japan.

    And, to make these modifications all the more appealing, I’ve found that this kind of thinking and behavior gets rewarded. People, particularly whites and Japanese, find you much more appealing and approachable. After all, nobody wants to be told that they’ve been unintentionally racist — or that behavior they’ve sanctioned as cultural quirks and implicit biases are likely indicative of something a lot uglier. But, if you modify that modus operandi, you get labeled an evenhanded, fair-minded guy — instead of a hothead who presumes racist intent, or un-intent, at every questionable act they come upon. These guys lose credibility quickly, like the boy who cried wolf when the canine in question was just a beagle or chihuahua.

    So when that Japanese person stands, vacates the seat beside you and sits elsewhere on the subway or bus, you must train yourself to sell yourself on the notion that the person could just as well have needed to stretch their legs, or wanted to, umm, give you some extra room. Or perhaps they had been harassed the previous week by a guy who looked just like you, or have had random foreigners just turn and embarrassingly spit English at them. Make it feasible now, cuz you’re the one who’s gotta sell it and buy it!

    And if you find yourself, as some of my fellow expats have, being stopped by cops an inordinate amount of times on your bike, or just walking down the street? Before you sprint to the default reason of supposed oversensitive Americans, take a deep breath, man up and tell yourself, sell to yourself, that it’s just as likely — hell, more likely — that the cops are being extra-vigilant because there have been a string of bike robberies by illegal aliens, and, like it or not, you kinda sorta fit that description. (Of course, you fit the description of a legal alien too, but that’s beside the point. Sell it. Buy it.)

    And when a former adviser to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe goes on record extolling the system of apartheid, whereby blacks, whites and Asians are forced to live separately, instead of calling her a racist, you can appreciate her words for their honesty and forthrightness. You can even admire her a bit for having the audacity to say what you’re pretty sure many of the people you encounter here would endorse if they had half her courage.

    And when you turn on the television one night soon and see a J-pop group called Rats & Star — who’ve clearly raided Little Richard’s (or maybe Flavor Flav’s) wardrobe — singing doo-wop songs in shoddy English with their faces painted black as tar, just do yourself a favor and stop! Don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t drop any R-bombs!

    Just consider the possibilities first: Like maybe, just maybe, these guys really, really love black people so much that they are prepared to forsake their own race in favor of blackness — at least during performances, anyway. (I’m pretty sure they don’t wanna be black full-time. Even these guys know there’s a lot more to being black in this world than doo-wopping and shoe polish.)

    Or, like my Japanese then-girlfriend back in 2009 told me after I referred to Gosperats, another homegrown blackface group, as “ignorant bastards”: I ought to stop to consider that these guys have been around, like, forever and have nothing but respect and adoration for black people and music, and that this minstrel show of theirs is their way — the Japanese way — of paying homage to black music history. (Need I explain why I dumped her?)

    “You’re way too sensitive about race,” she’d snapped over my shoulder as I blogged about these guys. “Everything is race, race, race, race, race with you. Are all black people like that?”

    And she had a good point. Perhaps it is my tender sensibilities that are at fault sometimes. But in this case, I seriously doubt it.
    […]

    I wasn’t going to write about this, you know. I tackled this years ago on my blog, Loco in Yokohama, back when this kind of stuff — this low-hanging fruit — used to get me all worked up. But some white guys figured that a black guy ought to be the guy writing about these Japanese guys, and I’m that black guy.

    I had been planning to publish a column this month about how black history can be constructive or detrimental to your health, and included in it some thoughts on how Japanese people might benefit from a bit of black history. I sh-t you not.

    All of which speaks directly to this racist bullsh-t — I mean, this cultural misunderstanding — one that could have been avoided in the 30-some-odd years this band has existed if, while they were researching the music, costumes and other aspects of black music and performance, they had simply taken a second to see if what they wanted to do with blackface had ever been done before. You know, just a little proactive research about the industry they would spend the next three f-cking decades profiting handsomely from.

    But alas, when I saw this story on the Net the other day — that they were going to be on Fuji TV alongside popular girl group Momoiro Clover Z, who would be similarly blacked up — all I could say was, “Mata ka yo?” (“Jeezus! Again?”), suck my teeth and click away. To me, it’s not shocking to see blackfaced bands here. With the attitudes and ignorance encountered here regularly, the only shocking thing is that there aren’t more of these groups. A Ku Klux Klan-themed idol group wouldn’t even surprise me here.

    I’m still, however, pleasantly surprised when non-Japanese people in Japan get worked up over something important. They’re a beautiful sight to see! Like when Julien Blanc was spreading his misogynistic garbage about Japanese women. Remember how the Japanosphere responded? They damn near shut down the Internet with their furor over his antics. Of course, everything he said could be heard in any gaijin (foreigner) bar in Tokyo or Yokohama on any given day, but it was still great to see people get activated for a good cause. Not to mention that, let’s say, inappropriate ANA advert that got a lot of people upset and resulted in Japan’s biggest airline re-editing a television commercial advertising new flights.

    And even Japanese get worked up when they want to. Like back in 2011, when the Japanese Embassy in London sent a letter to the BBC complaining about A-bomb jokes on an episode of a British TV comedy quiz, leading the BBC to apologize for offending Japanese sensibilities. And very recently, conservative Netizens in Japan campaigned to keep Angelina Jolie’s biographical movie about a former American POW from opening in theaters here because of its depictions of Imperial Japanese Army brutality. All beautiful acts of activism, right?

    Well, I say, if ANA and the BBC can be made to change their tunes, and if Blanc can be shut down, so can these guys. And if this crap does air, I say shame on you, Fuji TV, for airing a modern-day minstrel show and shining a national spotlight on this extreme ignorance. And shame on you, blackface bands, for not bothering to Google the term or for ignoring what you found when you did. And shame on anyone that suggests these performers deserve the benefit of the doubt!

    And notice, I didn’t drop an R-bomb on these guys, not even once.

    Reading the first part, I was getting ready to be all ‘never MIND the cultural differences, racism is racism!’ but I loved the turnaround.
    As for me and my locality, I can say, with conviction, that blackface is a thing here, too, and nobody sees a thing wrong with it. Last summer (I think, may have been the summer before) there was a concert show being put on for one of the many summertime festivals, and the theme was… well, I forget what the theme was, something about journeys and fairytales, though I could be wrong. Nice location – open-air stage in the Rātslaukums, which lies between the Riga City Council building and the Melngalvju nams, with the statue of Rolands looking on. Directly behind the stage, the Museum of Occupation, somewhat lost in the background even with it’s starkly cubed, black brutalism. All corners and lines, is that building. And right there, on stage, an actor MCing the show – dressed as, you will not guess it, someone from the Arabian Nights. The fantasy-like ones, that is, where the people of Arab descent (or perhaps it was a Moor in this case :P) wear shiny turbans, embroidered open vests, loose satin pants, gold-touched curled-toe shoes… and blackface. No, they couldn’t find someone of colour to MC (and there are people of colour in Latvia). No, they couldn’t do with just the costume but without the blackface.
    But then, one of the more contemporary theatre troupes put on a showing of Othello with white Othello in full-body blackface (blackbody?). Because it just wouldn’t do for Othello to be white and still of a different nationality? At least the ballet version hired a black dancer for the primary role, for the first season of shows. Nowadays they make do with a local white guy, sans black facepaint. For some people, it’s a theatrical device. What I find damning is their inability to research the gimmick, to see that it isn’t such a gimmick so much as an appropriation… but then, there aren’t so many black people in Latvia that they would care, right? :P
    [/thoughts]

  40. rq says

    Yesterday’s leftovers:
    Two letters from the Denver police to the mayor. Can’t confirm how real they are; if they are, they’re rpetty terrible!
    First one here (pdf) and the second one here. To specify, from the Fraternal Order of Police in Denver.

    Some people are racist and proud of it. Chelsea fans chant “We’re racist” while keeping black man off train

    Not to be outdone, Chelsea fans riding the Paris metro on the way to their Champions League clash against Paris Saint Germain physically prevented a black man from getting on the train while chanting “We’re racist, we’re racist, and that’s the way we like it.” So they’re going to have to come up with something other than “no one can say we’re racist” when they offer their public apologies.

    There’s video at the link. Oh, and the person they’re trying to one-up is Sacchi, a soccer trainer in Italy, who lamented the excess of black people on the Italian team, but he’s not a racist.

    Positive news? More police departments choosing restraint over quick action

    But at a time when some police departments have been criticized for using military-style methods of crowd control against protesters, Denver’s approach of restraint is being shared by agencies across the country, as experts say police interference can actually escalate violence and erode trust.

    “We have learned that providing route security at a distance and intentionally avoiding direct confrontation prevents injury to officers, limits liability, and minimizes the criminal actions of many protesters,” the chief wrote in the email to officers, adding that police should take “immediate enforcement action” only rarely. In Saturday’s case, police arrested two protesters for vandalism, but only after the demonstration.

    “There’s a lot more emphasis today on de-escalation,” said policing consultant Joe Brann, a former chief and founder of the Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing program. “It provides more confidence, with these protests, when you see signs that the police are being very reasonable and calculated when they do have to take enforcement action and they’re not jumping into the fray willy nilly.”

    Aggressive police tactics drew criticism in Ferguson, Missouri, where officers with riot gear and military-grade equipment clashed with protesters after the police shooting of Michael Brown. The response renewed questions about how best to respond to protests and caused many departments to re-evaluate their own policies.

    Denver Police Chief Robert White told officers the department’s policy of restraint had proven effective in earlier protests over killings by police, including Brown’s and the chokehold death of Eric Garner in New York City. Protests flared again when officers involved in both deaths were not indicted by local grand juries.

    “We always have to weigh, what are we getting in the middle of? If the situation deteriorates because of the police action, it’s not always the best action,” said Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank, whose officers watched as a man defaced their headquarters with a marker during a recent protest. They arrested him later. “I understand the frustration. But we’ve got to look at the bigger picture.”

    That’s a departure from a time when officers would rush in and make arrests, said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. “You’re not going to let them off the hook. It just isn’t necessary to wade into a crowd and create more conflict,” he said.

    Well, from what activists have mentioned, there are still departments who will rush into the crowd and snatch people for arrest. More:

    Police chiefs in Chicago, Boston, Nashville, Tennessee, and elsewhere have taken a largely hands-off approach to demonstrations, shutting down streets for marches and opening lines of communication with protest groups. Attorney General Eric Holder urged police restraint to “minimize needless confrontation” ahead of November’s announcement that the Ferguson officer who shot Brown would not be criminally charged.

    Dealing with protests starts before demonstrators even hit the streets, said Maj. Max Geron of the Dallas Police Department, speaking in his capacity as a security studies scholar who wrote his master’s thesis on policing and protests. He studied the responses of the Dallas; Portland, Oregon; New York City and Oakland, California, police departments to Occupy Wall Street protests and found that a hands-off approach works best whenever possible.

    Portland Police, for example, assigned specific officers to patrol Occupy encampments so protesters could become familiar with them, Geron said. In Salt Lake City, police made arrangements with Occupy protesters so they could be arrested on their own terms.

    “I’m convinced that if the police’s first response to a gathering is riot shields and helmets, then that says, throw rocks and bottles at us, we’re expecting this horrible confrontation,” Burbank said. “What you try and do is meet and say what do you need how can we facilitate your free speech?”

    More conversations would be nice – and it would also be nice for the police to actually listen to the free speech on offer, draw some conclusions, and make some changes. But then, as on another thread, being necessarily heard is not a right. :P It’s just not always the smart choice not to listen.

    There are some things white and black folk can agree on. Or, Interlude: Kardashian! Dear Tyga:
    Blacks and Whites Are Quite Clear on Friendships Between Grown Men and Little Girls

    However, it’s difficult for me to be silent when a relationship between a teenaged girl and a grown man—someone’s father, at that—is being normalized, especially when other little girls are watching this paring play out and take notes. I don’t want my little girl or anyone else’s looking at Tyga and Kylie, be they ‘just friends’ or otherwise, and thinking it’s acceptable.

    I recall hearing some months ago that Kyle Jenner kicked it for her 17th birthday with Tyga, Chris Brown and Trey Songz and thinking, “What in the hell is going on?” What parents would ever, in a million years go for this? Alas, this is the mystical land of Kardashia, where everyone is for sale, and existing through the lense of deluxe Instagram filters and paparazzi photos running on blogs the family is rumored to keep on retainer.

    As the rumors persisted, it started to look like Tyga was participating in a behavior that we can find in both hoods (such as the fast food parking lots that R. Kelly terrorized in 1990s Chicago) and elite spaces (hello Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld) across the country. Yet another gross grown man choosing to be enamored by a ‘hot’ young girl, as opposed to the many adult women who’d be more than happy to ignore his reptilian appearance because he’s got coins. How dreadful and, in the state in which they live, illegal if they are, in fact, having sex. […]

    For how dishonest his defense of his ‘innocent’ relationship with the 17-year-old sounded, equally troubling is Tyga’s assertion that there is some great difference in the capability of Blacks and Whites to have friendships:

    “In Black culture it’s different. If you hang around somebody you’re smashing them, White people, White culture, it’s different. They really friends. It’s genuine, it’s different. How we think is a little different with our mentality.”

    It’s hard to understand exactly what he’s trying to say here, because his word choices are so awkward. Does he mean that White people know how to really be friends in ways that Black people don’t? Are white folks better at being platonic friends across gender lines? Wouldn’t a 26-year-old who was falsely accused of dating a teenager state, unequivocally “I AM NOT DATING A LITTLE GIRL, THAT IS DISGUSTING, WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT?”

    YOU ARE NOT TELLING ME THAT WHITE PEOPLE THINK IT’S OKAY FOR 26-YEAR-OLD MEN AND 17-YEAR-OLD GIRLS TO BE FRIENDS, TYGA, THAT IS NOT WHAT YOU ARE TELLING ME. There are still communities in this country where you’d get strung up on a tree for such a relationship even if you were the same age, so please spare me your pathetic attempts at critical race theory.

    This isn’t a Black/White thing, this is a Hollywood/Kardashian thing that would not play out with parents who aren’t permissive to the point of neglect—this same child dropped out of home school to focus on her “career!” Perhaps Black people have been more vocal in calling this relationship out for what it is—inappropriate—but when White gossip rags routinely run pictures of people who barely know each other with the suggestion that they must be sleeping together, please don’t tell me that our paler countrymen are simply better equipped at managing friendships.

    Grand juries are ‘relic of another time’: New York’s top judge urges reform

    During his State of the Judiciary speech, Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman said he had introduced legislation that would compel courts to disclose the specific charges filed, instructions given to a grand jury panel and the testimony provided by public servants and experts in cases of great public interest. The bill would also require that a judge be physically present during hearings involving police officers charged with assault or homicide.

    “In cases of significant public interest, secrecy does not further the principles it is designed to protect but, in fact, significantly impedes fair comment and understanding of the court process,” Lippman said, according to a transcript of the remarks delivered Tuesday.

    Lippman’s bill comes less than four months after a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict a New York City police officer in the death of Eric Garner, who collapsed after he was placed in what many have described as a chokehold during an arrest in July. Chokeholds have been outlawed as a law enforcement tactic by nearly every major police department in the U.S.

    Under New York state law, only presiding district attorneys have the power to make grand jury information public.

    After the Garner decision, Richmond County Dist. Atty. Daniel Donovan asked a state court to make public only the type of evidence reviewed by the grand jury and the number of witnesses who testified.

    Transcripts of witness testimony, Garner’s autopsy report and the exact charges Donovan pursued against Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo remain secret.

    Donovan’s decision was in stark contrast to decisions made by St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch in the wake of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Mo. Brown, like Garner, was unarmed at the time of his lethal encounter with a police officer. McCulloch elected to make testimony and witness statements public just minutes after the grand jury decided not to indict Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, who shot Brown to death.

    The New York state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and Garner’s family are suing to make that information public. Calls to a spokesman for Donovan were not immediately returned.

    Lippman’s bill is the latest in a series of moves to make investigations into police killings of civilians more transparent and less ripe for skepticism. Two New York state Assembly members introduced similar legislation late last year, and state Atty. Gen. Eric Schneiderman asked Gov. Andrew Cuomo for the power to investigate police killings, which would essentially allow him to appoint special prosecutors in cases like Garner’s.

    The move is meant to alleviate concern that district attorney’s offices cannot investigate police officers without bias, as the agencies normally work together on homicide investigations and various task forces.

    I love the comment that was at the forefront when I blockquoted: “Just what we need, another judge who thinks he is omnipotent or better than our Founding Fathers and years of judicial process”. (Somewhat paraphrased. :P) Apparently the Founding Fathers were absolutely infallible and could predict the future so as to align all laws and every paragraph of the constitution with everyone’s future needs, amendments be damned!

  41. rq says

    Pussy Riot Get Buried Alive In “I Can’t Breathe,” Dedicated To Eric Garner

    “We’ve known, on our own skin, what police brutality feels like and we can’t be silent on this issue,” the band members have said in a statement. As such, they recorded “I Can’t Breathe” over the course of one long night back in December, when protests against police brutality raged across the country. Pussy Riot’s English-language debut has an industrial feel and an urgency that’s a bit of a departure from their previous work, and it was recorded with an assist from Richard Hell and Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Nick Zinner. If the mere title of the song sounds inflammatory, the video is a visual Molotov.

    The entire affair unfolds in one long, uncomfortable take that finds the two remaining band members, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, being buried alive. During a slow pan to a dirt pile, the camera passes over a pack of cigarettes that recalls the illegal-sale-item Eric Garner was reportedly killed over. Next we see the two women lying on their backs, wearing Russian army fatigues with insignia that reads ‘Homo,’ and it is not long before they are showered with dirt. To completion.

    I would just like to note that their shirts don’t say ‘HOMO’, but are the Russian spelling for ‘OMON‘. Basically, the special forces of the military. Which as a significance of its own.

    Fifty Years After Medicare Desegregated Hospitals, Blacks Still Fighting for Health Care Access

    While my research examines the interaction of racial politics with efforts to pass large-scale health reform from the New Deal to the ongoing opposition to the ACA, focusing on this year’s 50th anniversary of the passage of Medicare and Medicaid offered an opportunity to shine light on how important these programs have been in reducing the discrimination and institutional racism that were once hallmarks of American health care.

    For a good part of the 20th century American health care was segregated and national health care policy like the Hill-Burton Hospital Construction Act was structured by powerful Southern legislators who used states’ rights as the guiding principle for incrementally expanding federal involvement in health care while maintaining “separate but equal” facilities throughout the South. The deeply entrenched Jim Crow system of segregated hospitals in the South often relegated blacks to substandard care and denial of admission to white hospitals even as black patients experienced life-threatening emergencies right outside their doors. Moreover, African American health care providers were excluded from membership in professional associations such as the American Medical Association that were crucially important for credentialing purposes and hospital admission privileges.

    When Medicare went into effect in 1966, the Johnson administration used the Civil Rights Act as the basis for requiring hospitals to desegregate as a condition for receiving Medicare funds. By pulling this important policy lever, the Johnson administration ushered a relatively swift end to the Jim Crow hospital system in the South.

    Medicare was a breakthrough in the long battle to achieve universalism in federal health care policy. Universalism as a principle means that every American has access to the same benefits. It is an important safe guard against discrimination and the nuances of state politics. […]

    As originally written, the ACA’s Medicaid expansion provides uniform eligibility requirements across the states by making adults with incomes at or below 138% of the poverty line eligible for coverage. With this provision, the nation was the closest it has ever been to implementing a national, universal health care program for poor adults.

    Medicare and Medicaid have been important vehicles for ensuring access to care for seniors, the poor and other vulnerable populations. Both of these programs have been especially significant for African Americans as they not only helped to dismantle the Jim Crow health system but continue to serve as powerful public health tools for reducing racial disparities in health.

    State Medicaid expansion decisions and their impact on communities of color point to the unfinished business in the fight to ensure equitable access to health care. The ACA has the potential to bring us closer to reducing the disparities in health care access that have far too long defined black life in America. Republican legislators and governors can play a crucial part in this effort by expanding Medicaid.

    Man killed in altercation with TPD officer

    Jeremy Lett, 28, was shot by TPD officer David Stith, who was responding to reports of a burglary at the Shadow Ridge Apartments on West Tharpe Street around 8 p.m. Wednesday.

    After Stith spotted and confronted a man matching the burglary suspect’s description, the two men were involved in a physical altercation during which Stith shot Lett, according to TPD spokesman David Northway. The burglary was reported at the complex, but Northway did not know which apartment.

    Stith, who was not injured, has been placed on administrative leave with pay following the incident, which is protocol when an officer fires his weapon in the line of duty.

    Leon County court records show Lett was a resident of the single-story apartment complex. He did not have a criminal record.

    Stith joined TPD in 1999 and since then has had several disciplinary actions brought against him.

    He was suspended in February 2012 for 40 hours for violating TPD policies and again in May of that year for 10 hours without pay for his use of force while responding to a domestic battery incident, according to his personnel file.

    “Officer Stith used excessive force and failed to document use of force during his response to a possible domestic disturbance,” the summary of an internal investigation into the incident says.

    Here’s a thought, because it’s another case where a physical struggle was involved – maybe, if police officers weren’t so busy reaching for their guns, they’d have an easier time subduing their suspects? I mean, how easy can it be to fight off or hold onto someone if you’re only using one hand, right? Which means obviously you feel in danger and will shoot at first opportunity – but wouldn’t it be wiser to use both hands in the first place?

    In Chicago, an event – Civil Rights: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow February 20-21, 2015 9:00 am – 6:00 pm (come hang with Diane Nash & me).

    You need an account to listen to Ta-Nehisi Coates here, but I’m hoping a youtube link will turn up (there was one, but it doesn’t seem to be working anymore – it was here, for what it’s worth. From the tweets, it must have been an excellent presentation – Mr Coates reading from his newest book. Will keep an eye out.

  42. rq says

    Night court. No seats. 12 degrees. Some defendants left. Warrants for not entering building they were locked out of.

    Two FB events:
    Stand with MOA10 in Court

    #BlackLivesMpls organized a nonviolent, peaceful demonstration at the Mall of America (MOA) in Bloomington, one of the most visible locations in the country. On December 20, 2014, 3,000 people from all walks of life descended upon MOA to sing, chant, and to remind the world that #BlackLivesMatter. Rather than welcome the demonstrators into MOA, we were met by police in riot gear. In spite of the demonstration being peaceful, roughly two dozen people were arrested, stores were shut down by mall security and police, and exits were sealed. What started as a demonstration of Dr. King’s vision of the ‘beloved community,’ became a reminder of what Dr. King warned could destroy our nation: The triple giants of racism, militarism, and extreme materialism. All three of those giants were present that day at MOA and they set out to crush the spirits of ‘the little guy.'”

    Defendants face up to 8 misdemeanors which carry a maximum of 2 years in jail and a $7,000 fine on top of the $25,000 being sought in restitution for “lost revenue” and “police overtime”.

    “This amounts to political persecution and is a gross misuse of prosecutorial discretion and a waste of taxpayer dollars. Thankfully, these intimidation tactics will not be effective in shutting down our movement. Our voices will only grow stronger in the process.”- Nekima Levy-Pounds

    We urge each and every person who believes in the goal of creating a just and equitable society to raise their voice in support of the movement.

    Now is the time to stand with, and support, the 10 defendants charged for the Mall of America protest

    MOA is Mall of America, just in case anyone has forgotten. Link to the legal defense fund over there, don’t need to be logged in or have facebook at all to view this event.
    And the other one: PACK THE HEARING ROOM

    There is a MN State Senate hearing on body cameras & felon voter re-enfranchisement in Capitol Rm. 15.

    Currently the language surrounding Body Camera Policy is weak at best. We need to show our legislators that we want body cameras to increase public safety and police accountability in the state of Minnesota.

    Join Black Lives Matter Minneapolis and Pack The Room to show our State Senate the strong support for All People’s voting rights and Comprehensive, Community-inclusive Body camera standards.

    That one’s today, at noon CST. In Minneapolis, the miracle city.

    Which reminds me, pulling two links from that thread to put over here, thanks to kelecable.
    If Minneapolis is so great, why is it so bad for African Americans?

    As Derek Thompson writes in the March issue:

    What’s wrong with American cities? is a question that demographers and economists have debated for years. But maybe we should be looking to a luminary exception and asking the opposite question: What’s right with Minneapolis?

    Well, to start, the area is a corporate hub that employs a generous swath of educated middle-class workers. The region possesses an ample supply of housing, too, its suburbs sprawling free in every direction. The city also is isolated enough that people find it hard to leave. Where would you go? Iowa?

    On top of these advantages, Thompson credits two policies that spread out the rewards and responsibilities of growth. In 1971, municipalities in the Minneapolis-St. Paul orbit agreed to share a portion of their commercial property tax revenue. Then, in 1976, Minnesota passed a law requiring every neighborhood in the metro region — both the suburbs and the inner core — to build affordable housing.

    These initiatives helped smooth the jagged inequities that often accompany increased prosperity. But how much did they contribute to what Thompson calls the Minneapolis “miracle”? And just who benefited from these policies?

    The questions arise because Minneapolis has another quirk, one that’s a bit more difficult to talk about: It’s really white. In the 2010 Census, about 79 percent of people in the Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington area said they were non-Hispanic white. Only 8.4 percent said they were non-Hispanic black. […]

    Race is directly related to the question of whether children born to poorer parents will prosper. The authors of the Harvard-Berkeley study of intergenerational mobility devote a section to discussing the connection. “The main lesson of this analysis [in this section] is that both blacks and whites living in areas with large African American populations have lower rates of upward income mobility,” they write. They cannot pinpoint why, exactly, but their calculations say that segregation plays a role. […]

    The picture is less rosy these days. Since the 1970s, the city’s minority population has swelled, and segregation has worsened, particularly in its schools. About 62 percent of black students attend high-poverty schools, compared with 10 percent of white students. Beyond Minneapolis, the state of Minnesota has one of the largest gaps in black-white student achievement. Recently, WalletHub analyzed the black-white gap in census indicators such as household income, homeownership and educational attainment. It ranked Minnesota as the worst state for financial inequality.

    Over the past 40 years, other cities have been puzzling over how to share opportunity with people who had been systematically denied it for centuries. Minneapolis largely sat out that debate, and its lack of experience shows. Consider these maps from the Urban Institute of people living below the poverty line.

    Poverty, particularly nonwhite poverty, has been pooling in the city’s center for decades. As Thompson mentions, the city once had vigorous schemes to bust up concentrated poverty. Those efforts have fallen by the wayside, and today, low-income housing is mostly being built downtown, further clustering the poor. The MinnPost noted in 2010 that Minneapolis has race and income gaps between its urban core and wealthy suburbs and is doing worse on these measures than peer cities such as Denver, Seattle and Portland.

    This is not to dispute that the Twin Cities area has a lot of comfortable, affordable neighborhoods, which is the premise of the Atlantic’s piece: Minneapolis has good jobs, and living there is fairly cheap. But it is also developing serious problems with racial disparities and segregation, issues that its equitable-growth policies have done little to fix.

    And the other one, About that “Miracle”

    The claim that the Twin Cities are, and have been, such dynamic places to live is likely to ring hollow to at least one large category of Twin Cities residents: people of color.

    Indeed, within hours of Thompson’s post going up, critics on Twitter began to point out, rightly, that for people of color, life in the Twin Cities is, and has been, a far cry from miraculous.

    For many, the more realistic assessments came when Minnesota was recently named the second-worst state in the country for Black people to live. Or when statistical studies confirmed the lived educational experiences of people of color here: that Minnesota has the worst educational inequity for Latino students in the country; that Minnesota ranks dead last in the country in graduating Native American students.

    The list of disparities goes on and on. In Minnesota, very HIGH income Black people were 3.8 times more likely than very LOW income White people to be given subprime loans when purchasing a home. Black Minneapolis residents are over 11 times more likely than White residents to be arrested for marijuana possession. The overall arrest rate for Black Minneapolis residents is over six times higher than that for non-Black residents.

    The Twin Cities is, indeed, a place where youngish White folks can thrive. One need only take a walk through the Minneapolis skyways over the lunch hour to find them teeming with thousands of twenty- and thirty-something professionals, dressed to the nines, an overwhelming proportion of them white.

    But the history and present day story of Minnesota, like the rest of the United States, is a story of the exploitation and oppression of people of color by White people. […]

    To investigate the success of the Minneapolis project, Thompson looks to history. But it is a very specific and narrow history. He goes back to the 19th-century, but focuses his attention only on the mill owners who set up shop on the Mississippi. Sadly (and, unfortunately, typically), his brief venture to the past does not include the first governor of Minnesota declaring “the Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state.” Nor does it include Abraham Lincoln condoning the hanging of 38 Sioux after the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, nor the United States Congress, in the aftermath of that war, passing an act declaring that the Dakota had “made an unprovoked, aggressive, and most savage war upon the United States” and therefore abrogating all treaties with the Dakotas.

    This abrogation of treaties and seizure of lands represented not only individual tragedy for the people involved, but a tangible transfer of exceedingly valuable land from Native people to White people.

    Many Latino families in Minnesota can trace their ancestry back to the end of the 19th century, when huge agriculture companies, like American Crystal Sugar (then called Minnesota Sugar Company) recruited migrant workers from the U.S.-Mexico border to come work in Minnesota. The ag companies used their political influence to ensure that labor laws weren’t applied to these migrant workers (which allowed them to put children to work), and government officials would often give the companies a heads-up before coming to inspect the dilapidated housing they provided for their workers. When the Great Depression hit, Latino workers on farms and in cities were often the first to be fired. In some cities, unemployment levels passed 80%.

    This history represents not only an unfortunate reality for the migrant agriculture workers at the time, but also, in the words of Coates, a specific transfer of wealth from the workers to whom it was owed to the White owners and managers of the ag companies. […]

    It’s not just that racial restrictive covenants made desirable housing stock less accessible to people of color; it’s that, by definition, it made that stock more accessible to White people. Generations of racist housing practices have been a huge contributor to the chasm in wealth disparities in our country. The wealth that many Black families would have accumulated had they had access to the housing they wanted was instead transferred to White people.

    None of this is to say that every analysis of urban policy must include an exhaustive history of all of its peoples. But any analysis of the success of a community, particularly when that success is so clearly demarcated along racial lines, must spend as much of its energy investigating taking as it does investigating creating. And that, to me, is the great flaw in Thompson’s post. He treats the “miracle of Minneapolis” solely as something that was built and created, without bothering to examine how the current social reality is the product of both building and taking simultaneously.

    Yes, the mill owners built their mills. Yes, innovative tax policies were enacted. But the relative strength of the prospects of White Twin Cities residents is also the product of taking land and wealth from Native Americans, taking labor and wages from Latino workers, and taking housing wealth from Black residents, to name just a few.

    Here is a brutal reality with which we White folks need to grapple: you cannot disadvantage one group of people without advantaging another. You cannot look solely at what has been built, without also looking at what has been taken, from whom and by whom. And you cannot treat that taking as an exclusively historical phenomenon.

    In his article, Thompson doesn’t acknowledge the realities of racial disparities and injustice in the Twin Cities at all. But I’d argue that any serious analysis of the “miracle” of Minneapolis must go several steps past acknowledging the realities of racial inequity and grapple with this question: to what extent do White people in the Twin Cities experience disproportionate prosperity as a result of the oppression and exploitation of people of color? It’s not enough simply to note that one group is in a position of advantage relative to another; we must consider how one reality may have led to the other.

    I submit that the dual realities that the Twin Cities are home to both strong White prosperity and also some of the worst racial inequity in the country are neither coincidental nor incidental. Those two realities are profoundly intertwined.

    As White people, we have a prevailing inability to perceive the role race and power are playing in the world. Too often, we interpret this lack of perception to mean that race is playing no role. This is true in how we interpret and present our history as well.

  43. rq says

    The second paragraph in the second-last link previous comment should be blockblockquoted, I blame tpyos.

    Magic Johnson to invest $10M in Chicago youth summer job program

    Earvin “Magic” Johnson is making a big investment in Chicago’s youth. The NBA legend and Kimbra Walter are co-founders of Inner City Youth Empowerment.

    They are expected to announce a two-year, $10 million investment in the city’s summer job program for at-risk youth, One Summer Chicago Plus.

    The mayor’s office said the funding is expected to provide 5,000 jobs for children and young adults who are at risk of becoming involved in violence.

    One Summer Chicago Plus provides opportunities for young people to work 25 hours a week, to connect with mentors and build social skills.

    Yay proactive!

    Pray the Gay Away by @BlackGayPoet. This young man is power. The youtube link: Pray the gay away By Thomas “Vocab” Hill

    Me performing a piece portraying the emotions of a boy forced to “pray the gay away” from himself.

  44. rq says

    I said it when Lebron wore it & I’ll say it re: the SELMA cast, if this shirt offends you, you are probably racist.

    Racist letter sent to Bridgeport cops spurs probe

    With African-American officers calling for action, State Police have launched an investigation into a racially charged letter placed in a police officer’s workplace mailbox last week.

    On Wednesday the Bridgeport Guardians, a group representing minority police officers in the city, was joined by the National Association of Black Law Enforcement Officers, or NABLEO, and members of the Westchester/Rockland counties Guardians in calling for the firing of whoever is responsible for distributing at least three racist letters to police officers’ mailboxes.

    One of the letters in particular, which has the words “white power” at both the beginning and end, calls out and threatens one officer, Clive Higgins.

    Higgins is the only one of three police officers acquitted in what is known as the “Beardsley Stomp.” The video, posted on YouTube, shows three city police officers kicking a downed suspect.

    The short letter, which was sent anonymously and typed on Police Department letterhead, states that Higgins doesn’t belong in the department, that black officers belong in the toilet and goes so far as to say, “You better watch your back. We know where you live.”

    “Right now, there’s an active investigation at the state level, so everything is in question: its authenticity, the motive and every part of the development and distribution of it,” said city spokesman Brett Broesder. “With that said, the city has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to discrimination of any kind, especially that of a racial nature.”

    He said the department, which is recruiting new officers, is the most diverse in the state.

    “Any allegation of racial discrimination that seeks to divide our police department or our community will not be tolerated,” Broesder said. “If the investigation turns up any wrongdoing, swift, fair, just and immediate action will be taken against those guilty of wrongdoing. Racial discrimination will not be tolerated. Period.”

    Detective Harold Dimbo said the letters, sent out over several months, were not only distributed to black officers, but all spoke negatively about black officers.

    The Guardians’ attorney, Thomas Bucci, said the group wants to make clear that most of the department, regardless of race, finds the letters “intolerable.”

    Reading a letter written by national president Chuck Wilson, Hubert Smith, a Norwalk police officer and vice president of NABLEO, compared the situation to the “Domelights” scandal in Philadelphia in 2009, in which black officers sued the department for allegedly allowing its officers to post racist remarks on the website of that name.

    The organization said “there is no doubt” that the Bridgeport letters were sent by someone within the department because the letters were sent on department-issued letterhead and placed in mailboxes only accessible by police.

    “These issues severely highlight what can only be considered as a thriving, condoned hostile work environment, one which is apparently condoned both administratively and systemically,” Smith said. “The perpetrators of these assaults, for that is exactly what they are, apparently feel secure in their current anonymity, even with the recognition that they may possibly face no adverse action if their identity is known. Yet they must be stripped of their anonymity and outed in the most public fashion possible, regardless of who they are and what station they maintain. Issues such as this have no place in our profession or society, and only serve to further inflame already unsteady relationships.”

    Here’s a link between (former?) cops and torture at Guantanamo – Guantánamo torturer led brutal Chicago regime of shackling and confession

    In a dark foreshadowing of the United States’ post-9/11 descent into torture, a Guardian investigation can reveal that Richard Zuley, a detective on Chicago’s north side from 1977 to 2007, repeatedly engaged in methods of interrogation resulting in at least one wrongful conviction and subsequent cases more recently thrown into doubt following allegations of abuse.

    Zuley’s record suggests a continuum between police abuses in urban America and the wartime detention scandals that continue to do persistent damage to the reputation of the United States. Zuley’s tactics, which would be supercharged at Guantánamo when he took over the interrogation of a high-profile detainee as a US Navy reserve lieutenant, included:

    • Shackling suspects to police-precinct walls through eyebolts for hours on end.

    • Accusations of planting evidence when there was pressure for a high-profile murder conviction.

    • Threats of harm to family members of those under interrogation used as leverage.

    • Pressure on suspects to implicate themselves and others.

    • Threats of being subject to the death penalty if suspects did not confess.

    The Cook County state’s attorney office now has an examination open into a second conviction involving Zuley, filings in an Illinois court showed on Tuesday. (The Guardian is publishing the first part of its investigation on Wednesday.) While representatives of the state’s attorney’s office told the Guardian that the examination concerns only a single case, the office is seeking civilian complaint files regarding Zuley from a local independent police review authority.
    Richard Zuley While ‘assigned’ to the US military base at Guantánamo Bay, longtime Chicago detective and US Naval reservist Richard Zuley led one of the most brutal interrogations ever conducted at the prison. “I’ve never seen anyone stoop to these levels,” a former Marine Corps prosecutor said. Illustration: Nate Kitch/The Guardian

    The wrongful-conviction examination into Zuley follows an extraordinary 2013 decision by state’s attorney Anita Alvarez to free an innocent man Zuley’s faulty police work sent to prison for 23 years.

    Lathierial Boyd, convicted in 1990 of murder, accuses Zuley in a federal civil-rights lawsuit of planting evidence and withholding crucial details.

    Boyd told the Guardian that Zuley had a racial animus as well. “No n*gg*r is supposed to live like this,” he remembered Zuley telling him after the detective searched his expensive loft.

    Other Chicago cases detailed by the Guardian, centering on three people interrogated by Zuley who are still in state prison, turned up evidence in police precinct houses of severe and internationally condemned tactics in Guantánamo Bay interrogation rooms.

    Several of those techniques – prolonged shackling, threats about family, pressure to confess – used by Zuley bear similarities to those he enacted when he took over the interrogation of Mohamedou Ould Slahi at Guantánamo, described in official government reports and a best-selling memoir serialised last month by the Guardian as one of the most brutal in the history of the notorious US wartime prison.
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    After Zuley took over in July 2003, Slahi was subjected to even more extreme interrogation tactics: multiple death threats, extreme temperatures, sleep deprivation and a terrifying nighttime boat ride in which he was made to believe that worse was in store.

    Most official accounts of Slahi’s torture have concealed or glossed over Zuley’s name.

    This shit spreads easily.

    Prince C. Jones Jr. , a friend of @tanehisicoates shot dead because of police profiling. Sad story.

    This author, Naomi Murakawa, was recommended for several books into policing and race, among other things.

    Selected Publications:

    Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

    Katherine Beckett and Naomi Murakawa, “Mapping the Shadow Carceral State: Toward an Institutionally Capacious Approach to Punishment,” Theoretical Criminology 16 (2012): 221-244.

    Naomi Murakawa, “Phantom Racism and the Myth of Crime and Punishment,” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 59 (2012): 99-122.

    Naomi Murakawa, “Toothless: The Methamphetamine ‘Epidemic,’ ‘Meth Mouth,’ and the Racial Construction of Drug Scares,” Du Bois Review 8 (Spring 2011): 219-229.

    Naomi Murakawa and Katherine Beckett, “The Penology of Racial Innocence: The Erasure of Racism in the Study and Practice of Punishment,” Law & Society Review 44 (September/December 2010): 695-730.

    Naomi Murakawa, “The Origins of the Carceral Crisis: Racial Order as ‘Law and Order’ in Postwar American Politics,” in Race and American Political Development, eds. Joseph Lowndes, Julie Novkov, and Dorian Warren (New York: Routledge, 2008): 234-255.
    Rebecca Bohrman and Naomi Murakawa, “Remaking Big Government: Immigration and Crime Control in the New American State,” in Global Lockdown: Women of Color and the Global Prison Industrial Complex, eds. Julia Sudbury and Asale Angel-Ajani (New York: Routledge, 2005): 109-126.

    Mo’Nique Says Roles in Empire and The Butler ”Just Went Away”: Lee Daniels Told Me I’ve Been ”Blackballed”

    The former star of The Parkers, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as the title character’s abusive, domineering mother in Precious, writes in an essay in the Feb. 27 issue of The Hollywood Reporter that director-producer Lee Daniels clued her in just a few months ago.

    Noting that an Oscar win “normally does” lead to “more respect, choices, money” in the business, Mo’Nique writes, “But I got a phone call from Lee Daniels…And he said to me, ‘Mo’Nique, you’ve been blackballed.’ I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Because you didn’t play the game.'”

    People who would say that she’s “difficult,” “tactless” or “tacky” would “probably be right,” the actress writes. “That’s why I have my beautiful husband because he’s so full of tact. I’m just a girl from Baltimore. But being from that place, you learn not to let anybody take advantage of you.”

    Since co-starring in Precious with Gabourey Sidibe, Lenny Kravitzand an unrecognizable Mariah Carey, the 47-year-old actress only has a few credits to her name, none of them major theatrical releases.

    Mo’Nique also writes that she was offered the role of Forest Whitaker’s wife in Lee Daniels’ The Butler, a part that ultimately went to Oprah Winfrey; a role in the Daniels-produced Fox hit Empire; and the role of Richard Pryor’s grandmother [also now set to be played by Oprah] in the upcoming biopic Daniels is working on—but, she adds, “they all just went away.”

    In response to Mo’Nique, Daniels said in a statement to THR:

    “Mo’Nique is a creative force to be reckoned with. Her demands through Precious were not always in line with the campaign. This soured her relationship with the Hollywood community. I consider her a friend. I have and will always think of her for parts that we can collaborate on, however the consensus among the creative teams and powers thus far were to go another way with these roles.”

  45. rq says

    White aldermen betray black lives

    It was a dramatic scene just weeks ago when Alderwoman Sharon Tyus shut down the Board of Aldermen with her tribute to Black Lives Matter. And even more dramatic at the end when alderpersons, black and white, stood up holding Black Lives Matter signs. They each took turns speaking, stating their commitment to changing a persistent culture of institutionalized racism.

    Among those participating were Lyda Krewson, Christine Ingrassia and Shane Cohn. That was then. This is now.

    Those three turned tail. They let down those they had stood with and symbolically committed to protect. Like so many (too many) “white allies,” they stood down when it was for real – when it was time to cast a meaningful vote.

    Friday, February 13 was their opportunity to vote to move forward the bill for civilian oversight of the St. Louis police. It was a straightforward vote on a bill they had studied and whose language had remained essentially the same since they had signed on as co-sponsors. It was time to say if they stood with the folks they said they would stand with.

    All three voted no. […]

    When people are in the streets crying out for justice, does it really matter if you like the sponsor of the bill? Is your confusion over procedural tactics so self-justifying that you can’t walk across the aldermanic chamber and seek clarity? Is your fear of the threat of a police slowdown in your ward more important than the fear of our black brothers and sisters every time police look their way?

    Please spare us the complaint that you only wanted a better bill. We all want a better bill, but this one has been carefully negotiated into a delicate balance. You are the ones now carelessly threatening to derail the process – you, who are white, protected and privileged enough to find justification for standing down.

    There are ways we can “spend” our privilege, by taking on some discomfort ourselves to fight with others who have no choice but to fight. But there are ways our privilege can be sadly misspent – when we forget what really matters and hide behind whiteness as a shield. These three spent like drunken sailors on Friday.

    And here’s one for your ‘black-on-black crime’ square. For the nth Bingo in a row.
    Black lives should also matter when the killer is black: Phillip Morris

    I’m still waiting on the rallies.

    I’m still waiting on fed-up people who are down with the cause. I’m still waiting on social justice activists to lie in the streets, disrupt commerce and protest ad nauseam the killings of black men.

    I’m still waiting for a community willing to rise up and act as if it really gives a damn about six people shot – three fatally – in a barbershop massacre on the evening of Feb. 3rd.

    Where’s the rage, folks?

    I’m still waiting on people willing to demonstrate that they really believe black lives matter. When will they march through the streets of Cleveland, East Cleveland, Warrensville Heights, on those avenues and into the alleys where black men routinely shoot, stab and beat one another to death over the most trivial of slights.

    I’m waiting for the same level of angry protests, the looting, the despair, the angry gnashing of teeth that happen when a conflict involves a white cop and a black suspect, who dies. Let’s be consistent – all black lives matter.

    Or, do they?

    Do black lives matter less when the killer comes in the same skin color as the deceased? Or do they simply matter more when the killer is a white cop in a blue uniform? What is the convoluted racial arithmetic here? […]

    “But something happens to people in law enforcement. Many of us develop different flavors of cynicism that we work hard to resist because they can be lazy mental shortcuts,” Comey said.

    Translated: Many officers – white and black – must constantly fight the instinct to racially profile simply because experience leads them to be hypersensitive to the movement and the threat posed by black males.

    FBI directors don’t talk like that. But Comey took it a step further. He was curious to know the full extent of fatal outcomes between police and black Americans. When he ordered his staff to provide him with data on the number of blacks shot by police in America each year, it couldn’t. The information is not kept.

    That’s the shocking confession. That’s the candid opening that offers a useful way forward.

    “The first step to understanding what is really going on in our communities and in our country is to gather more and better data related to those we arrest, those we confront for breaking the law and jeopardizing public safety, and those who confront us,” Comey said.

    Which brings us back to the African-American community and the urgent need to see a much higher premium placed on all lives lost. It’s not just tragic incidents like this month’s barbershop massacre, or the five lives gunned down in a home invasion on the city’s East Side in November.

    It’s the local (and national) body count that goes up daily without a whimper of neighborhood concern or any sustained community outrage. That’s the confession that’s needed from the black side of this equation. Too many African-Americans act as if they don’t care or have a meaningful say in the matter.

    Yes, black lives matter. But black lives must not matter only when the hand holding the gun is white. Yes, police reforms are needed. But, ultimately, law enforcement isn’t the root of the problem.

    The complex root of the criminal problem that threatens both law enforcement and African-Americans trapped in poverty, is the greatly weakened state of the black family and continuing cycles of punishing economic futility. This leads to the dangerous and criminal mindset of far too many fatherless young black males. This reality is what breeds barbershop killers.

    Several other squares within the article, including ‘decline of the black family’, ‘fatherless boys’ and I’m sure a couple of more.

  46. rq says

    Rather tangential, but with an effect. Infoporn: College Faculties Have a Serious Diversity Problem

    To be a professor is to belong to a select few—an insider’s club of vanishing tenured faculty positions. It’s no secret that a fancy diploma can help grads vying for those coveted spots. But while working on his PhD and contemplating his career prospects, computer scientist Aaron Clauset wanted to know just how much weight a prestigious alma mater—an MIT, a Stanford, a Harvard—carried. So he decided to dive into the data himself.

    Clauset and a couple of grad school friends started gathering information about who’s hiring whom. After a break in the project, during which he graduated and landed a faculty position at the University of Colorado at Boulder (yup, he joined the club), Clauset started up again—recruiting his new students for help. They spent three years grabbing and analyzing hiring data from computer science, business, and history departments, collecting info on 19,000 faculty positions across North America.

    Their results: 71 to 86 percent of all faculty came from only a quarter of the institutions surveyed. In computer science, just 18 institutions produced half of all faculty jobs. “Essentially, faculty jobs are reserved for a small number of graduates from a small number of institutions,” Clauset says.

    But that’s not necessarily bad, right? The prestigious universities are supposedly the best, so shouldn’t their graduates be the best too? Not so, Clauset says. The imbalance is just too stark to be merit-based. Academic hiring leans heavily on name-recognition, biasing the universities’ decisions toward prestigious, branded institutions—just like hiring in a lot of other industries.[…]

    What does that mean for companies like Google and Facebook? Well, like universities, it means that they’re hiring a lot of the same kind of people, over and over again. And that means less diversity—of opinion, of technical and cultural background, of ideas, of talent.

    Those practices are also what make gender (and racial and ethnic) diversity so hard to come by. Hire based on familiarity—either a name-brand school, or maybe, your sex chromosomes—and you end up with a homogenous workforce. Google, for example, has a worldwide employee base that’s only 30 percent female. That number drops to 17 percent when considering only technical jobs. And the same problem exists in academia, Clauset says: “Only 15 percent of computer science faculty is female.”

    Not only that, but Clauset’s analysis shows that women in computer science have a harder time finding quality faculty jobs. Most graduates tend to get jobs at a lower-ranked institution than the one they attended. But in computer science (and business), women have to settle for jobs at schools ranked especially low—the drop in rankings between their alma mater and their new employer was 12 to 18 percent greater than for men. “I was surprised that the difference was large as it is,” Clauset says.

    Biases in hiring practices run deep, so if companies and universities want to change these trends, they have to tackle diversity head-on. “If we want to improve it, we’re going to have to make a concerted, conscious effort to change it,” Clauset says. He thinks extending his analysis to job placement in the tech industry could help companies figure out how to improve diversity and retention rates.

    St Louis University apparently showed some art that not everyone agreed with. Here’s their statement on that: An Important Message from the President
    Clarification of Artwork    , cited in full, emphases mine:

    Dear Faculty, Staff and Students,

    I write today to address concerns regarding the proposed artwork that was one of the 13 Clock Tower Accords.

    Let me start by saying that there has been considerable misinformation and confusion regarding this artwork, and I have heard from many of our friends of the University who have expressed their strong opinions regarding reports from various media sources and blogs.

    So, I want to clarify the record: Contrary to some reports, it was never our intention to – nor will we – commission artwork that would be anti-police or would honor the Ferguson protesters. Those reports are just wrong. [I guess honouring the protestors protesting police brutality is just wrong?]

    What we envisioned with the artwork was a way to honor our shared Jesuit values that promote inclusion rather than division. Our commitment to open dialogue and discussion of difficult issues has not wavered. As we engage in dialogue, let us focus on what unites us rather than what divides us. One common thread running through all of the communications I have received is a commitment to SLU’s mission. If we can unite around that, we will find common ground on how to recognize the dedication of a great University to diversity and inclusion.

    At Saint Louis University, we are proud to be the first historically white institution of higher education in a former slave state to formally admit African American students. [We used to be racist but now we’re not.] There have been many significant people and events that have impacted inclusion on our campus in the 71 years since Father Claude Heithaus’ courageous homily laid the groundwork for the integration of SLU.

    Some community members who have contacted me have suggested that the artwork depict a timeline of key milestones in the University’s civil rights history. I welcome your thoughts about such a timeline or other ways to commemorate SLU’s history of inclusion.

    It is important to note that we are not alone in promoting dialogue and inclusion in the St. Louis region. A myriad of companies, foundations, universities and non-profits have stepped forward to address the issues our region faces. SLU has formed many new partnerships because of the work they have begun.

    While the issue of the artwork has generated a lot of discussion, there is so much more taking place on our campus. Groups of administrators, faculty, staff and students are actively working to develop our strategic plan to guide SLU’s future. A separate committee is reviewing our operations to find ways we can be more effective and efficient. A new residence hall will soon rise out of the ground along Laclede Avenue. We have been interviewing four strong candidates to be our next provost. And last weekend, we welcomed 600 visitors from across the country – prospective students and their families – for the first of two Presidential Scholar events. There are many other major initiatives underway across the University that will move SLU forward in the months and years ahead.

    In the coming days and weeks, I hope to talk with as many of you as possible about all that is going on at SLU. I promise to listen and to share my thoughts with you.

    I thank you for your passion and your devotion to Saint Louis University.

    Sincerely,

    Fred P. Pestello, Ph.D.
    President

    Pasco shooting: police will not say how many bullets fired at unarmed man

    At a press conference on Thursday, Sgt Ken Lattin of Kennewick police, the spokesman for the special investigative unit (SIU) of neighboring forces investigating the incident, conceded for the first time that all three officers involved in the shooting had opened fire. He would not reveal how many rounds were discharged, arguing the medical examiner’s office would disclose the tally at a later date.

    Zambrano-Montes was killed in a volley of fire last week at a busy intersection in Pasco. Police say the Mexican national was throwing rocks at traffic and officers just before the shooting. Video footage depicting the incident appears to show him running away from police and then raising his arms before turning towards the three officers. He is then shot dead. Community members, police reform advocates and the Mexican foreign ministry have argued the use of force against Zambrano-Montes was grossly unjustified.

    Lattin also said the FBI were monitoring the police investigation into the incident, marking the potential for a federal intervention in the case.

    “If [the FBI] chose to come in and take over, they certainly can. But right now they’re just monitoring,” said Lattin, adding that the Washington State crime lab had begun examining forensics from the case as a “top priority”.

    Lattin informed reporters that none of the officers were wearing body cameras, and that none were certified Spanish speakers, although it remains unclear if any of the officers attempted to address Zambrano-Montes is Spanish.[…]

    The Franklin County coroner Dan Blasdel has confirmed a coroner’s inquiry into the shooting will occur after the SIU investigation, which is likely to take a number of months, has concluded.

    Blasdel told the Guardian that Zambrano-Montes has died as a result of “multiple shots to the torso” but that no further information on the number of bullets would be released until the case came before a jury.

    “I have all the confidence in the world of the SIU investigation,” Blasdel told the Guardian on Thursday. “The reason that I set up the inquest is because there’s a lot of Hispanic people that are pointing and saying this is cops investigating cops and so it’s biased. That’s not fair. So I want to make sure that’s brought out to the public, that investigation is transparent and everyone can see that it’s not bias.”

    Ferguson Police Chief responds to report that DOJ is wrapping investigation

    The Ferguson Police Chief is responding to leaks about possible action from the Justice Department. CNN reported Wednesday night that the feds would file a lawsuit if the Ferguson police department didn’t make some big changes.

    Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson says he hasn’t been told that the Justice Department investigation is wrapping up now. He said as recently as Saturday the DOJ was still requesting documents from his police department.

    CNN is reporting that the Justice Department is preparing legal action against the Ferguson Police Department if it does not make some changes on its own concerning tactics that discriminate against minorities. This comes after a federal investigation into the shooting death of Michael Brown and a broader look at the police department as a whole.

    Chief Thomas Jackson told me this afternoon that his department already is implementing some of the Justice Department recommendations. He said he is extremely disappointed with the apparent leak from the federal government.

    Chief Jackson says his city already has implemented DOJ recommendations including court reform, reduction of jail time and failure to appear warrants to help people who are struggling financially.

    The Chief also says he has no intentions of resigning. He wants to see the Ferguson police and citizen issues resolved first. THen, he says anything is on the table as far as his future.

    And because he makes a regular appearance here, a round of applause! Ta-Nehisi Coates Honored With 2014 George Polk Award

    The Atlantic national correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates is being honored with a 2014 George Polk Award for Commentary for “The Case for Reparations,” his June 2014 cover story. In this powerful essay, Coates mapped the obstacles African Americans have faced in accumulating wealth across generations, challenging the country to reckon with the moral debts it has incurred from slavery through Jim Crow to racist housing policies. Long Island University announced the recipients of the 66th annual awards last night.

    “It’s a tremendous honor to receive the Polk Award. I take it as recognition for the tremendous effort and investment The Atlantic has put into pushing new ideas into the mainstream backed by thorough research and reporting,” said Coates.

    “I’m grateful to the Polk committee for recognizing the power and importance of Ta-Nehisi’s work. Here at The Atlantic we see his essay as a landmark contribution to a tradition of promoting true equality of citizenship and opportunity that stretches back to our founding in 1857 as an abolitionist magazine,” said James Bennet, editor in chief and president of The Atlantic.

    “The Case for Reparations” focused on the North Lawndale neighborhood in Chicago’s West Side. Coates traced the dire problems of the neighborhood—skyrocketing rates of poverty, infant mortality, unemployment, and homicide—to housing discrimination officially mandated by the Federal Housing Administration after World War II. In moving interviews, Coates documented the predatory loans that were the only choice available to aspiring black homeowners in Chicago—and described a countermovement, the Contract Buyers League, that sprang up in the late 1960s seeking, in essence, reparations. The Atlantic paired the article with two original video documentaries, along with interactive maps that illustrated the enduring consequences of redlining on Chicago’s population.

    The piece received overwhelming reader response and critical praise, and has continued to drive a national conversation about addressing racism. “The Case for Reparations” brought more unique visitors in a single day to The Atlantic’s site than any previous magazine story, and the June issue sold 60 percent more copies on newsstand than its 2013 counterpart. Coates has appeared on dozens of television and radio shows and spoken in many sold-out forums across the country, including in North Lawndale.

    The George Polk Awards honor special achievement in journalism, placing a premium on investigative and enterprising reporting. They were established in 1949 by Long Island University (LIU) to commemorate George Polk, a CBS correspondent murdered in 1948 while covering the Greek civil war. Awardees will be honored at a ceremony at The Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan on Friday, April 10.

    And here’s another on the disparate numbers of people in jail. We Lock Up Tons of Innocent People—and Charge Them for the Privilege . Because the report discussed has been mentioned before, I will only turn attention towards the article’s final point:

    5. Society’s race problems are amplified by the local jail dynamic: The Vera report notes that about 38 percent of felony defendants will spend their entire pretrial periods in jail, but only one in 10 were denied bail in the first place. The rest, many of whom are African American men, simply can’t afford to post bail: “Black men appear to be caught in a cycle of disadvantage: incarcerated at higher rates and, therefore, more likely to be unemployed and/or in debt, they have more trouble posting bail.”

  47. rq says

    For general reading, The Multidimensional Model of Racial Identity (MMRI)

    The Multidimensional Model of Racial Identity (MMRI) represents a synthesis of ideas from many existing models of African American racial identity (Sellers et al., 1998). The MMRI defines racial identity as that part of the person’s self-concept that is related to her/his membership within a race. It is concerned with both the significance the individual places on race in defining him/herself and the individual’s interpretations of what it means to be Black. The MMRI proposes four dimensions of racial identity in African Americans: the salience of identity; the centrality of the identity; the ideology associated with the identity; and the regard in which the person holds African Americans. The first two dimensions address the significance of race in the individual’s self-definition; the second two dimensions address the qualitative meaning that the individual ascribes to being Black.

    Racial identity salience refers to the extent to which a person’s race is a relevant part of her/his self-concept at a particular moment in time. Salience is concerned with the specific event as the level of analysis. It is highly sensitive to both the context of a situation as well as the person’s proclivity to define her/himself in terms of race (i.e., centrality). Salience is the dynamic aspect of racial identity. Salience is the mechanism by which the other three stable dimensions (centrality, ideology, and regard) influence the way a person experiences a particular event. When racial identity is made salient, individuals’ ideology and regard influences their construal and behavioral response.

    The centrality dimension of racial identity refers to the extent to which a person normatively defines her/himself with regard to race. It is an indicator of whether race is a core part of an individual’s self-concept. Implicit in the conceptualization of centrality is a hierarchical ranking of different identities with regard to their proximity to the individual’s core definition of self.

    The third dimension of racial identity, ideology, is the individual’s beliefs, opinions, and attitudes with respect to the way s/he feels Blacks should act. This dimension represents the person’s philosophy about the ways in which African Americans should live and interact with society. Four ideologies are proposed: 1) a nationalist philosophy, characterized by a viewpoint that emphasizes the uniqueness of being of African descent; 2) an oppressed minority philosophy, characterized by a viewpoint that emphasizes the similarities between African Americans and other oppressed groups; 3) an assimilation philosophy, characterized by a viewpoint that emphasizes the similarities between African Americans and the rest of American society; and 4) a humanist philosophy, characterized by a viewpoint that emphasizes the commonalties amongst all humans. Although some individuals can be categorized as possessing one ideology predominantly, but it is likely that most people hold a variety of ideological philosophies that vary across areas of functioning.

    The fourth dimension, regard, refers to a person’s affective and evaluative judgment of his/her race. The regard dimension consists of a private and a public component. Private regard refers to the extent to which individuals feel positively or negatively towards African Americans and their membership in that group. On the other hand, public regard refers to the extent to which individuals feel that others view African Americans positively or negatively.

    The link further looks at black identity specifically, and black identity in teenagers. Related to Racial Identity Development in pdf above.

    Frontline Ferguson Protester and Palestinian­-American Bassem Masri on How the #Ferguson2Palestine Solidarity Movement Was Formed

    In one of the most amazing shows of solidarity, the people of Palestine and Ferguson are reaching out to each other because they are fighting a common system of injustice, control and racism.

    I speak about this connection from personal experience. I am a Palestinian-American who has lived in both Jerusalem and in Ferguson. I have lived under the racist regimes of both cities and know first hand the sense of occupation that both populations experience on a daily basis.

    The Ferguson protests have highlighted a racist system by kindling a worldwide conversation about police brutality, a conversation sparked by the execution of Mike Brown at the hands of an officer in the Ferguson Police Department. The police’s hard-handed reaction to protests made it inevitable that people around the globe would draw similarities between the people of Ferguson and the ongoing struggles of the people of Palestine. Both movements would have collided at some point.

    But “Palestine 2 Ferguson” manifested itself from day one.

    Linked Oppression, Linked Struggle

    In August 2014, Palestinians reached out via Twitter with advice to protesters on how to protect themselves properly from chemical agents. These Palestinians were veterans of the weekly protests in occupied towns in the West Bank like Nabi Saleh and Bil’in. They had faced the teargas, rubber coated steel bullets and even live fire that the Israeli army used to crush unarmed demonstrations. They had served as lab rats as the Israelis tested weapons and methods of repression they would later export to American police departments. While Palestinians were tweeting out that advice and support, instructing Ferguson protesters on how to wash teargas residue from their eyes and how to make a gas mask from Hawaiian punch bottles, bombs were raining down on the Gaza Strip and demonstrators were cut down with live bullets at the Qalandiya checkpoint that separated Ramallah from Jerusalem. In one picture shared widely on social media, a resident of Bil’lin, Hamde Abu Rahme, held a sign reading, “The Palestinian people know what it means to be shot while unarmed because of your ethnicity.” He concluded the sign with the hashtags #Ferguson and #Justice.

    That was a very powerful statement of solidarity, and it showed that oppressed people could make alliances across oceans and heavily fortified borders in a joint struggle to achieve justice. Before August 9, the day Brown was killed, many Palestinians didn’t know the struggles African Americans and other minorities faced in America, and many African Americans didn’t know much about Palestine. But in the assault against peaceful protesters following the murder of Mike Brown, the system made a huge mistake. It wound up uniting people from all across the world who were sick of violent police repression and the impunity that their oppressors enjoyed. More importantly, it exposed how America and Israel share values of ethnic cleansing and discrimination.

    […]

    Segregated Spaces

    I’ve experienced the Ferguson to Palestine connection in visceral ways.

    Walking down the street in Al Quds (Jerusalem), the smells of the bakeries and coffee shops fill the air. The unrelenting dry heat beats down on you and history is beneath every step. It’s breathtaking. Succumbing to that beauty makes it easy to forget you live under a brutal military occupation–at least for a little bit.

    When I’m in Jerusalem, I feel how tense it is. I remember walking down the street minding my own business, watching a teenager kick around a soccer ball, doing tricks with it. Out of no where a military jeep stopped and threw this teenager in the back of the jeep. There was no question, no muss, no fuss–this was the the Israeli military’s version of Stop and Frisk. The same sort of thing happens here in Saint Louis on a daily basis, where the police stop people for no apparent reason, hauling them off to jail, splitting families apart to instill fear into a community. Both Israel and the police do this for a very specific reason: to force people into obedience. […]

    In Ferguson, being caught in a neighborhood where you don’t “belong” raises immediate suspicion among the police. I have found myself wandering into neighborhoods I didn’t “belong” in in both Jerusalem and in St. Louis. In both cases, I was harassed by racist authorities, who ask me what I am doing there and suggest that if I don’t leave, there will be consequences.

    Invisible borders exist between separated communities. Your race determines if you are allowed to cross that border drawn along lines of fear, intimidation, and generations of violence and pain.

    Now the task is clear: we must break down these borders together.

    The Road Ahead: Black Liberation to Palestinian Liberation

    On August 9th, we in Ferguson started a conversation about human rights and police brutality. I have made it my personal mission to inform as many people as I can about how the United States enables and supports oppression both here and abroad.

    More than a conversation is taking place, though. Concrete links are being forged.

    Front line Ferguson protesters recently traveled on a delegation to Palestine. Among them were members of Hands Up United, the Dream Defenders and more — groups that were integral to the demonstrations that broke out on August 9 in reaction to Mike Brown’s shooting. They took it upon themselves to go see these atrocities in Palestine with their own eyes.

    I was excited that my friends were able to see what Palestinians have experienced for decades. They came back with an intense sense of purpose.

    “There is no grey area in right or wrong. This is one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of human rights,” Tef Poe said after returning from Palestine. Poe is an African-American hip-hop artist and co-founder of Hands Up United who has emerged as one of the most outspoken Ferguson activists. He added: “What’s happening in Palestine is bloody murder and the Israeli settlers are guilty of building an empire on the bones of the Palestinians.”

    What Poe’s statements show is that we have created a collective voice where we amplify one another, a voice most prominent on social media. We have connected using hashtags such as #Palestine2Ferguson, #BlackLivesMatter, #CommonOppressor and #BlackAndBrownAlianza. It has been a way to intersect struggles, raise awareness, and unite under the banner of humanity.

    The struggle against police brutality has extended into the year 2015. But the lesson of the hot summer of 2014 is that we can build our ranks with solidarity our natural allies — people who have experienced racism and occupation beneath the cover of a fake democracy. For, Palestinian freedom and Black Liberation have become inseparable.

    And it’s still Black History Month, so here, have some black history! 5 Black Women Historical Figures from Around the World You Should Know

    As we celebrate what’s left of Black History Month and look forward to Women’s History Month, it’s important to remember that Black women around the globe have made incredible contributions to world history. From Brazil to the United Kingdom and everywhere else, Black women have done incredible things, created incredible things, and have been incredible people. Take a passport-free journey through time and geography and get to know about 5 such women.

    On the list are Queen Nanny of the Maroons, Olive Morris, Marie-Joseph Angelique, Chica (or Xica) da Silva and Amina Sukhera. What’s even more awesome about the list is that it has only one women from ‘western’ culture – and that is Olive Morris, from the UK. The rest are from, as it were, the rest of the world.

  48. rq says

    Whoops sorry Marie-Joseph Angelique began her life in Portugal but lived and died in Canada, but the point about a non-focus on the former British Empire still stands.

  49. rq says

    LBJ’s Condolence Letter to Coretta Scott King to Be Auctioned

    In the historic letter, Johnson expresses his condolences to Coretta Scott King and adds that King’s assassin would be found.

    “We will overcome this calamity,” Johnson wrote.

    Years later, in 2003, Coretta Scott King gave the letter to singer Harry Belafonte, a staunch supporter and friend of her husband.

    Around 2008, the Post reports, Belafonte thought to auction the letter through Sotheby’s after Coretta died, but the Kings’ three surviving children were against the plan, being particularly guarded regarding their father’s legacy.

    This led to a lawsuit between Belafonte and the King estate after the estate claimed that the letter had been taken without permission, which ended any plans for a possible auction.

    Belafonte was allowed to keep ownership of the letter after the two sides reached a settlement early last year.

    Now the letter is set to go on the auction block in early March, just days after the 50th anniversary of the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., the Post notes.

    However, Belafonte isn’t the one trying to sell. The new consignors are Shirley and Stoney Cooks, Belafonte’s half sister and brother-in-law. According to the Post, Belafonte gave the letter to Shirley Cooks as a symbol of his appreciation for her support during the legal fallout.

    The minimum bid for the historic letter is $60,000, although Quinn’s Auction Galleries, where the sale is set up, thinks it could net at least $120,000.

    The price of history.

    Yesterday this tweet came up, Guiliani’s dog-whistle is beautiful b/c his audience could read whatever racist, conspiratorial, fear-monger-y thing they wanted into it. and today I found context:
    Giuliani: Obama Had a White Mother, So I’m Not a Racist

    Mr. Giuliani’s remarks — made at a New York fund-raising event for Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin on Wednesday night and first reported by Politico — set off an uproar.

    “I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Mr. Giuliani said at the event. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up, through love of this country.”

    Critics suggested that Mr. Giuliani’s description of Mr. Obama’s upbringing reflected a prejudiced view that Mr. Obama was different from other Americans.

    In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Giuliani dismissed the criticism and said he was describing the worldview that had shaped Mr. Obama’s upbringing.

    “Some people thought it was racist — I thought that was a joke, since he was brought up by a white mother, a white grandfather, went to white schools, and most of this he learned from white people,” Mr. Giuliani said in the interview. “This isn’t racism. This is socialism or possibly anti-colonialism.”

    He also challenged a reporter to find examples of Mr. Obama expressing love for his country.

    “I’m happy for him to give a speech where he talks about what’s good about America and doesn’t include all the criticism,” Mr. Giuliani said.

    Mr. Giuliani said his remarks on Wednesday night were in response to a question about what kind of president he would like to see elected in 2016. He responded, he said, by telling the audience that he wanted a leader who was Mr. Obama’s opposite.

    “I want an American president to raise our spirits again, like a Ronald Reagan,” he said.

    Mr. Giuliani said he also objected to the president’s comments about the Crusades at the National Prayer Breakfast this month, in which Mr. Obama said that during the Inquisition, people had “committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”

    “Now we know there’s something wrong with the guy,” Mr. Giuliani said of the president. “I thought that one sort of went off the cliff.’’

    He added: “What I don’t find with Obama — this will get me in more trouble again — is a really deep knowledge of history. I think it’s a dilettante’s knowledge of history.”

    The White House declined to comment.

    (I’m just flabbergasted by the suggestion that, because he moved in white circles – those most often proclaiming great patriotism and xenophobia – Obama could be considered to ‘not love America’. Wouldn’t those be exactly the circles where he would learn to love America? I’m so confused!) Meanwhile, here’s more on Giuliani and love: Rudy Giuliani and the Meaning of Love

    What does it mean if someone “doesn’t love” Rudolph Giuliani? Many New Yorkers have considered that question, or a stronger variation; there are a lot of passions in this city. The inquiry hasn’t made us doubt ourselves. It shouldn’t make President Obama feel bad, either—even though Giuliani, on Wednesday night, managed to conflate love for himself with all kinds of grander emotions. “I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the President loves America,” Giuliani said at an event for Scott Walker, in Manhattan, according to Politico’s Darren Samuelsohn. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me.”

    We know the weight of the “me” in there—with Giuliani, it is always, in the end, about Giuliani. He spent eight years as New York City’s mayor, which is no time at all compared to the number of hours he has spent bragging about it. But who is this “you” whom Obama also doesn’t love? Giuliani was speaking to, as Politico put it, “60 right-leaning business executives and conservative media types.” The President was less loving than all of them, Giuliani said, because, “He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”

    What faces did Giuliani see—or fail to see—at the event that made him so sure of that assessment? He talks as if he knows what the children of loving, patriotic parents look like. Obama was brought up by a single mother who, even when they lived abroad, played him recordings of the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., an act in which one really can see many kinds of love mixed together. He was also cared for by grandparents whose love of country Giuliani has no business impugning. These types of casual insults, so characteristic of Giuliani, remind us that he has no business pontificating about other people’s affections. (He talks freely enough about his own.) But, leaving Obama’s heritage aside, is Giuliani really saying that someone without American parents, and without specific early instruction in a particular brand of patriotism, can’t get his mind around this country’s greatness? There are a lot of immigrants who have loved this country and died for it—that is the idea of America. Or was Giuliani just suggesting to the audience that there was something different about Obama? And what might that be? […]

    Politico spoke to Giuliani after the dinner, and reported that he “elaborated” by complaining that Obama “sees our weaknesses as footnotes to the great things we’ve done,” which raises the question of where, if even footnotes are too presumptuous, the weaknesses should go in the book of America. Giuliani continued, “What country has left so many young men and women dead abroad to save other countries without taking land? This is not the colonial empire that somehow he has in his hand. I’ve never felt that from him. I felt that from [George] W. [Bush]. I felt that from [Bill] Clinton. I felt that from every American president, including ones I disagreed with, including [Jimmy] Carter. I don’t feel that from President Obama.” So this is, again, about how Giuliani has “felt” when he’s been with Obama: as if he were talking to someone else’s colonial who was out of place in a position of power. Giuliani also weighed in on the Crusades—“I’m not sure how wrong the Crusades are. The Crusades were kind of an equal battle between two groups of barbarians”—a matter whose connection to American patriotism he left unclear.

    John McCain had a fine moment in the 2008 campaign when he told a woman at a town-hall meeting who said that she was scared of Obama because he was “an Arab” that Obama wasn’t, and that she didn’t have to worry. But that was a moment of basic decency, not some grand act of bravery. Trying out rhetoric of the Giuliani kind may be a temptation for the candidates in 2016. They won’t be running against Obama, but they also won’t have to look him in the face. His Americanism will be an idea that the G.O.P. can accept as a given or use to discredit itself.

    As it happened, Obama gave a speech on Wednesday, too, at a White House summit on combating violent extremism. In it, he talked about “the ideals that have shaped us for more than two centuries” and said, “The story extremists and terrorists don’t want the world to know—Muslims succeeding and thriving in America. Because when that truth is known, it exposes their propaganda as the lie that it is. It’s also a story that every American must never forget, because it reminds us all that hatred and bigotry and prejudice have no place in our country. It’s not just counterproductive; it doesn’t just aid terrorists; it’s wrong. It’s contrary to who we are.” He also talked about a card he’d received from an eleven-year-old girl named Sabrina, who is Muslim. She wrote on it, “I enjoy being American.” It was a Valentine’s Day card, in the shape of a heart.

    Because low-income children. The famous ‘word gap’ doesn’t hurt only the young. It affects many educators, too.

    While parents play a vital role in early literacy skills, so do early childhood educators (day-care teachers and child-care providers). Millions of children today spend a great deal of time in early education (child-care) settings. Low-income children can spend more hours a week in child care than in quality time with their parents.

    It will come as a surprise to Americans to learn that as many as 1 million state-licensed and nationally credentialed early childhood educators are at-risk for functional illiteracy; their reading and writing skills are inadequate to manage daily living and employment tasks that require reading skills beyond a basic level. […]

    There are approximately 10,000 early childhood educators in Massachusetts who would benefit from base-line literacy testing; these early childhood educators have not enrolled in college programs. We have tested 120, the majority scoring at fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade equivalence in all areas. Eighty-five percent knew little about computers (all have smartphones). Most had no e-mail address, had never done an Internet search or used Microsoft Word.

    To further assess their skill levels and interest in the field, we asked the educators to complete a career survey. Even we were surprised to learn that 97 percent had little or no interest in early education and 98 percent had little knowledge or skill needed for the job. (After the completion of the coursework and re-administering the same career survey, early childhood educator interest and skills levels increased considerably.) To add to the mix, most educators had no idea how little they knew or why their low literacy test scores mattered.

    Massachusetts is not alone in the hiring and licensing functionally illiterate early childhood educators. Most states require extremely low levels of education for early childhood teacher licensing. No state in the nation measures or ensures the basic adult literacy competence of non-college early childhood educators. In 32 of 50 states, a half-million non-college early childhood educators are licensed as lead teachers and hold a high school diploma or less. To put this in perspective, a high school diploma in no way ensures adult literacy competence, even at tenth-grade competence. In 2014, 31 percent of American high school graduates met “no“ college readiness benchmarks in English, reading, writing, math and science on the ACT. […]

    Americans remain in the dark about this workforce because it is invisible. Like other low-wage workers, there’s no time or money to politicize their struggles. The irony and tragedy here is that this low-wage work is intricately tied to how well our children are being educated. The lives of these low-wage workers mirror those of disadvantaged children. Both face the ravages of poverty, lack education, suffer from greater depression and poorer health outcomes and have no power to change of any of it. Low-literacy early childhood educators struggle with their own word gaps — and for the same reasons low-income children do. They have lived with (and in spite of) academic, social and income disparities for decades.

    We cut off our noses to spite our faces by ignoring this crisis. Low-literacy early childhood educators and children in their care share misfortunes that perpetuate what I call a mirroring of disadvantage. Each reflects to the other the persistent, durable and complex adversities thrust upon them. Such adversities have consequences outside in the world and inside the classroom, the place they meet for sustenance. […]

    With 49 of 50 states implementing Quality Rating Improvement systems (QRIS) a functionally illiterate workforce will slow, if not prevent, them from meeting requisite quality standards. It’s no secret that effective professional development for early childhood educators has long been lacking. Critics point to its historically high price tag, its short-sightedness, its inconsistent nature and its inability to meet the needs of non-traditional learners (a majority of early childhood educators).

    Adult literacy testing, on the other hand, is cost-free and convenient to take (online), and test scores are immediate, easy to assess and can readily be integrated into current professional development standards. Early childhood educator literacy test scores are integral to creating effective professional development strategies for those who need support. Contextualized learning will allow a large American workforce contingency to keep their jobs while they develop their literacy proficiency. Greater literacy proficiency will better prepare low-literacy early childhood educators to teach young children and will move them closer to college entrance.

    If we’re serious about closing the word gap for low-income children, we must also be serious about closing the word gap for functionally illiterate early childhood educators. By implementing professional development strategies that use adult literacy testing to assess and then develop low-literacy early childhood educators, we will not only help to transform the “juxtaposed inequalities” of these educators and the children in their care, we also will help to close the achievement and opportunity gaps of both.

    Does it get any better than that?

    Off Target on Toy-Gun Regulation

    Though mock gunplay may be ubiquitous among young people, that hardly means all children brandishing toy weapons are looked at the same. Around dinnertime on Sept. 27, 1994, a 13-year-old named Nicholas Heyward Jr. and three friends were playing cops and robbers on the roof of the Gowanus Houses in Brooklyn. Heyward, carrying a replica rifle with a bright orange grip and tip, was walking down the stairwell to his home when he was shot and killed by a 23-year-old housing police officer named Brian George. In response to Heyward’s death, Toys “R” Us and Kay-Bee Toy Stores pulled realistic toy guns from their shelves.

    Heyward wouldn’t be the last. In December 2010, Rohayent Gomez, also 13 at the time, was playing cops and robbers with his friends in Glassell Park in Los Angeles. They were confronted by two L.A.P.D. officers, who, according to their statements to investigators, were on the lookout for graffiti and gang activity. Upon spotting an “airsoft” pistol on Gomez, one officer shot him in the chest, leaving him paralyzed.

    Last month, Tamir Rice was in a park in Cleveland holding an airsoft pistol from which the blaze orange plug had been removed. According to a 911 caller, Rice waved the pistol in the air and pointed it at others in the park. The caller told the police dispatcher he didn’t think the gun was real, but that was not relayed to responding officers. In video footage released by the Cleveland Police Department, a police cruiser pulls up alongside Rice, who is standing by a gazebo. Less than two seconds after the car stops, Rice, shot in the torso, crumples to the ground and disappears from sight.
    Continue reading the main story
    Recent Comments
    marcellis22
    23 December 2014

    One has to have a license to drive, to sell liquor, to get married, to import and export merchandise, to work as a medical professional, and…
    annberkeley2008
    22 December 2014

    In a society awash in guns, the police feel outgunned and endangered and over react when they sense someone, no matter what age, wishes them…
    Tony Mack
    21 December 2014

    It’s truly amazing how everyone wants to blame police, the NRA bogeyman, toy gun manufacturers, et al. Yet the one party responsible for all…

    See All Comments

    Cleveland authorities quickly released a photo of the airsoft. All black with a textured grip, it looks so much like the real thing that you might wonder if, in the two seconds it took the police officer to shoot Rice, a blaze orange plug would have even been noticed. Besides, the gun’s barrel was reportedly tucked into the waistband of Rice’s pants.

    In response to Rice’s shooting, Aaron Dilks, a St. Louis County police officer, wrote a post on his department’s Facebook page titled, “Kids Will Be Kids?” He warned parents of the risks airsoft and other replica weapons could pose to their children’s lives, how all realistic toy guns would be treated as real by law enforcement. “The police will respond [with] lights and sirens and come to a screeching halt in the area where your child is playing with the gun,” he wrote, before offering tips for how to ensure their safety: comply with officers’ instructions, drop the gun immediately and don’t run away.
    Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
    Continue reading the main story

    Rice didn’t seem to have time for any of that, nor did John Crawford III, a 22-year-old father of two who was shot by the police in an Ohio Wal-Mart just three months earlier. At the time he was killed, Crawford was holding an MK-177 pellet rifle. A concerned shopper called 911 and said that Crawford had been pointing it at children (but later recanted this statement). The surveillance video that has been released to the public does not show Crawford pointing the rifle at anyone, nor does it corroborate the testimony of the police, who said they shot Crawford after delivering several verbal warnings. Instead, the video shows Crawford chatting on his cellphone, the pellet rifle swinging from his hand. According to the person who was on the other end of the line, Crawford only had time to say, “It’s not real,” before the gunfire started.

    Rice and Crawford, both killed in Ohio, had less than a total of five seconds to respond before police opened fire.

    Last month, in response to the shootings, Alicia Reece, an Ohio state legislator, announced that she would be introducing legislation to expand existing laws mandating bright markings on replica guns to include BB, pellet and airsoft weapons. But Reece’s legislation, if passed, would not prevent children from painting over any brightly colored markings, and it certainly would not force the police to take more time to assess a potentially dangerous situation.

    More subtly, a focus on regulation serves to excise the deaths of Tamir Rice and John Crawford III from the larger conversation on race and policing that began anew with the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. What little information exists on police shootings of people with toy guns suggests that blacks and Latinos are overrepresented among the victims. The 26 years that have passed since Roberti’s proposition have proved too little about the efficacy of blaze orange, and too much about the inevitability of tragedy in neighborhoods where even children at play can be presumed guilty.

  50. rq says

    Apologies for not deleted the ads and comment teasers out of previous blockquote. :P

    And I hear that the riot police will be on hand for McCulloch’s upcoming appearance at SLU. St. Louis, the conspiracy continues.

    McCulloch stifles speech by keeping grand juror from talking

    A student organization at St. Louis University School of Law is hosting St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch as the opening speaker Friday at a symposium titled “The Thin Blue Line: Policing Post-Ferguson.” The symposium features several prominent, national academic scholars, and St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar.

    Many in St. Louis question the logic behind having McCulloch kick off an academic symposium on policing, as he is not an academic scholar on policing and he is not a police officer. However, others view that McCulloch will contribute to the dialogue because of his tenure prosecuting police in St. Louis County and supervision over the Darren Wilson grand jury.

    Because of McCulloch’s experience and the reference to Ferguson in the symposium’s title, it seems highly likely that he will speak on the events that led to Michael Brown’s death and the subsequent grand jury. More speech continues the conversation as St. Louis grapples with how to reform local law enforcement practices and Missouri’s criminal justice system. What St. Louis needs is more dialogue and more speech.

    However, McCulloch’s office is stifling speech. Last week his office filed a motion to dismiss a complaint brought by a juror from the Darren Wilson grand jury. The juror seeks to openly speak about her or his service on the grand jury but fears legal reprisal.

    If McCulloch speaks at a symposium on policing post-Ferguson with the hope of contributing to the dialogue that improves our justice system and community relations, then the juror must be allowed to add her or his voice to the conversation, too. Now is not the time to stifle speech in St. Louis.

    Mentioned yesterday in connection with torture, more on Zuley. Evidence from Chicago detective’s cases re-examined for multiple exonerations

    Just days after Illinois state officials indicated their own review of the long-time police officer’s civilian-complaint file, Chicago attorney Kathleen Zellner told the Guardian on Thursday she has requested that evidence in the cases of Andre Griggs, Benita Johnson and Lee Harris, who were all convicted on the strength of Zuley’s detective work, are re-examined with the potential for multiple exonerations.

    If the wrongful convictions are established, “it’ll be a very strong civil rights case … against Zuley and others,” Zellner said, to serve as a deterrent against future police abuses in a city notorious for them.

    “We believe there are probably additional cases.”

    Police did not conduct DNA testing at the time on what little physical evidence there was in the cases against Griggs, Johnson and Harris. But now, state of the art forensic and DNA testing may finally be able to determine – definitively – their innocence.

    On Tuesday, as the Guardian was preparing to publish an investigation into Zuley’s police work, filings in an Illinois court showed the Cook County state’s attorney office now has an examination open into a second conviction involving Zuley.

    While representatives of the state’s attorney’s office told the Guardian that its examination concerns only a single case, the office is seeking civilian complaint files regarding Zuley from a local independent police review authority.

    Since state’s attorney Anita Alvarez established a convictions-integrity division in 2012, the unit has voided 10 convictions, and is currently examining 170 others.

    Zellner is also representing Lathierial Boyd, whose murder conviction was voided in 2013 after 23 years in prison, in a federal civil-rights lawsuit against Zuley and other police. Having helped exonerate 16 clients already, Zellner said she intends to press forward with the Griggs, Johnson and Harris cases even if the DNA evidence is inconclusive.

    Zellner, who has won more exonerations than any other lawyer in the US, is moving forward with re-examinations of what evidence those high-profile cases – in which a white detective sent three black people to prison for killing two white women – actually have.

    If DNA tests, requested by Zellner, exonerate the three people Richard Zuley was central in convicting, Zuley’s current civil-rights legal woes are likely to compound.

    “We’re going to do a lot of new forensic testing on all these cases,” Zellner told the Guardian.

    As detailed in a Guardian series published this week, Andre Griggs, Benita Johnson and Lee Harris were convicted in Chicago murder cases investigated by Zuley. All three 1990s-era convictions depended heavily on interrogations described by the three and detailed in court records as coercive, and were slight on physical evidence connecting the suspects to the crimes.

    And remember, this is just the one guy…

    Anonymous activist faces 3 years in jail for protesting in Ferguson

    As soon as the masks became visible, the traffic stop quickly escalated to charges of trespassing. One member of that group, who was arrested a total of seven times while protesting against police brutality in Ferguson last year, now faces up to three years in jail and thousands of dollars in fines for five criminal charges incurred during one month of protests.

    At home, Alex Poucher is a 29-year-old father to a 7-year-old girl. But online and in the streets, he’s a self-described member of Anonymous who currently has five charges pending against him in Missouri courts, including two counts of interfering with an officer, impeding traffic, refusal to disperse, and unlawful assembly.

    Of his seven arrests, Poucher caught at least three on video. Now, he’s using that footage to launch a crowdfunding campaign to raise $12,000, an effort to help him fend off the charges without using a state-appointed lawyer, a system he doesn’t trust to defend him.

    With his first court date on Thursday, Feb. 19, Poucher denies ever breaking the law or disobeying any orders.

    Poucher first popped up on our radar when he sat down with a member of the KKK in an effort to talk them out of violence during the Ferguson protests. He was first arrested for interfering with an officer on Nov. 19, 2014, three days after he first arrived in Ferguson. He faces up to one year in jail or a $1,000 fine for the offense.

    The letter sent to Poucher from the St. Louis County Municipal Court to Poucher says he was arrested because he was “interlocking arms with other protesters to prevent police officers from moving protesters from the street to the sidewalk and to avoid arrest.”

    Poucher’s arrest happened to be captured on video by the Associated Press. It’s not a perfect account of what happened, but it shows that, when police reached him, Poucher wasn’t particularly near another protester—never mind linking arms in interference with them. He was turned and walking toward the sidewalk, as police had instructed. […]

    After Poucher and the rest of the group were hauled off to jail, the police searched the car. The gas masks, megaphones, first aid kits, and tool kits—Poucher says he’s a “trained street medic,” the skills of which he used when police and protesters clashed—items that police found in the back trunk were never seen again.

    “Under Missouri’s laws, an unlawful assembly is a gathering of six or more people who agree to violate any criminal laws by force or violence,” Poucher explained. “There were only five of us in the car, and none of us agreed to violate any criminal laws nor did we. And we left when asked to. We were lawfully assembled.”

    Poucher, who has only raised about $285 as of publication, has already become a target for a number of people opposed to the Ferguson protests.

    Poucher reached out to organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, but has been declined legal help so far.

    Poucher’s phone, which captured the entirety of his Dec. 11 arrest unbeknownst to police, stayed on as officers drove the evidence to a nearby precinct.

    And here’s one for the police behaving badly file. Video Captures Louisiana Cop Repeatedly Punching a Restrained Teen in the Face

    According to police, Brady Becker fessed up to drinking half of a bottle of Crown Friday night before running into police. He was with a “large group of individuals” in a parking garage when a couple of plainclothes officers first encountered him. They say Becker was yelling “Fuck the cops” even before the officers identified themselves (what an impressive display of prescience). Becker then shoved detective Nicholas Breaux, and Breaux “escorted” the kid to the ground (an interesting choice of words). Police also say Becker refused orders to stop and struck Breaux.

    Throughout the ordeal, Becker’s lawyer says Breaux didn’t identify himself as a police officer until he’d already beaten the shit out of the kid. Attorney David Belfield III says there are several witnesses to dispute the arrest report, and Becker never pushed, attacked, or struck the officer. He went on to say the undercover cops instigated the altercation.

    Becker was taken to the hospital for “unspecified injuries.” His mugshot shows two black eyes and a couple of butterfly strips over his eyebrow.

  52. rq says

    Here’s a few links, the rest will have to wait for later (prob tomorrow, sorry it’s ab usy weekend).

    Just in the interest of getting non-mainstream work out there by black people outside of America: CRUMBS, a surreal post-apocalyptic film from Ethiopia

    Check out this surprisingly twisted and odd trailer for CRUMBS, a feature length science fiction film from Ethiopia.

    Our friends at Comic Book Resources share:

    Billed as both “an Ethiopian post-apocalyptic surreal sci-fi feature-length film” and a “love story,” it’s the brainchild of Miguel Llansó, Spanish filmmaker who lives in Addis Ababa. The trailer is downright Lynchian — never mind the violent Santa, who’s the guy in the Nazi uniform? — and goes a long way to establish the film’s off-kilter tone, if not necessarily the plot, which involves alien visitors, a couple of scrap collectors and, well, not-so-jolly ol’ Saint Nick.

    Man Arrested In Explosion Near Colorado NAACP Office Was Allegedly Targeting Accountant

    According to the Associated Press, which cited court records filed on Friday, Murphy was distraught over financial problems, and built an improvised explosive device to harm an accountant he said would not return his phone calls and who had not returned his tax records.

    Murphy’s arrest came after a series of interviews with witnesses who noticed “a specific type of truck” and an individual fleeing the scene, according to a statement from the Department of Justice.

    After a monthlong investigation, authorities tracked down a person and vehicle that “closely matched” a description witnesses had given days after the incident. Authorities then obtained a search warrant for Murphy’s home, where officers found “seven firearms, and devices similar to the one used at the building,” according to the statement.

    Because Murphy has prior felony convictions, it is against the law for him to carry firearms. He told police in an earlier round of questioning that the target of his device was not the NAACP.

    If Murphy is found guilty of arson, he will be sentenced to at least five years in prison and fined up to $250,000. If he is convicted of being a felon in possession of firearms, he will face as many as 10 years in prison, and another fine of up to $250,000. […]

    The NAACP chapter’s president, Harry Allen Jr., told The Gazette he would wait for the outcome of the investigation before labeling the explosion a hate crime.

    “This won’t deter us from doing the job we want to do in the community,” he told The Gazette.

    The NAACP released a statement saying the cause of the explosion was still unknown. “The NAACP looks forward to a full and thorough investigation into this matter by federal agents and local law enforcement,” the statement said.

    As twitter said: The official story is that the guy accused of bombing the NAACP ACTUALLY wanted to frighten his accountant. So no hate crime, no terrorism. Easy peasy!

    Justice Department Looking Into Fatal Utah Police Shooting Of Black Man

    In a letter released late Friday, the Department of Justice revealed that it is conducting a “federal review” into the killing of Darrien Hunt. The FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Utah also are participating in the review.

    Last September, two white officers in Saratoga Springs, Utah, fatally shot Hunt, who is black, six times. Utah County Attorney Jeff Buhman ruled in November that the officers were justified in killing Hunt. At a news conference to announce the ruling, investigators displayed a samurai sword they said Hunt was carrying at the time of the shooting. […]

    Robert Sykes, an attorney representing Hunt’s family, told BuzzFeed News that he received the letter Friday but was not given any additional information. The letter itself also doesn’t mentioned the impetus for the review, though it invites Sykes to submit any evidence he feels is relevant to the case.

    An attorney for Saratoga Springs told the Salt Lake Tribune the city also learned of the review Friday.

    Hunt’s family has filed a civil rights lawsuit against the city and the officers involved in the shooting. In the suit, they argue Hunt was “peaceful and non-threatening” before he was shot. The suit also alleges that Hunt was “outfitted like a swordsman character in a Japanese anime series” and that his sword was “a decorative, anime-style katana sword.”

    Hereš two Malcolm X videos:
    MALCOLM X : The Police Are Working With the Criminals and MALCOLM X: THE POLICE ATTACK YOU THEN CHARGE YOU WITH ASSAULT!

    Next post going to put up some pictures from the protest at SLU Law, where McCullogh was giving his talk. Lots of action there, but only a few tweets via me.

  53. rq says

    So this is the event, I posted aout it before, and here’s activist reaction – and action:
    Traffic blocked in both directions on Tucker outside #slulaw where #bobmcculloch should be finished speaking soon ;
    #BlackLivesMatter Outside #Slulaw right now #SLU #Ferguson
    Whose Streets, our streets Outside #Slulaw right now #SLU #Ferguson
    Barricades up at #SLULAW in preparation for #McCulloch #ThinBlueLine symposium #MikeBrown #Ferguson
    Lots of security outside #SLULAW before #McCulloch speaks #ThinBlueLine #Ferguson #MikeBrown @deray.
    They had people on the inside, too, interrupting speeches and the like. Dotson and McCullogh especially.

  54. rq says

    Here’s a peek at the inside: At least two in audience interrupt McCulloch. 1 wears a judge’s robe and calls for a “trial” of McCulloch. #PLR2015

    Also action in Pasco: Still outside Pasco City Hall as the sun starts to go down. #PascoShooting
    Some more signs outside Pasco City Hall. #PascoShooting

    Random: First Lady Michelle Obama hosts a WH event celebrating women of the Civil Rights Movement. #BlackHistoryMonth
    Art: Harp by Augusta Savage.

    And Malcolm X – Malcolm X Remembered 50 Years After 1965 Assassination

    This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, one of the most influential political figures of the 20th century. He was shot dead as he spoke before a packed audience at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City on February 21, 1965. Malcolm X had just taken the stage when shots rang out riddling his body with bullets. He was 39 years old. Details of his assassination remain disputed to this day. We air highlights from his speeches, “By Any Means Necessary” and “The Ballot or the Bullet.” We also speak with journalist Herb Boyd, who along with Malcolm X’s daughter, Ilyasah Shabazz, co-edited “The Diary of Malcolm X: El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, 1964.”

    Video at the link, with transcript in the article.

  55. rq says

    Here’s more on Malcolm X, in photos – TW for death: Malcolm X: Powerful Images From the EBONY Archives

    “N*gger” Spray Painted on Lincoln University Sign

    Someone spray-painted the “n”-word on a sign at the entrance of Lincoln University overnight, according to a message sent to the university community Thursday morning. Public safety officers at the university in Chester County discovered the graffiti on its northwest corner entrance sign at 1:50 a.m., and the word was gone later Thursday morning, officials said.

    Lincoln University, founded in 1854, was the nation’s first historically Black college or university.

    Black history of the architectural vein:
    In Jim Crow South, Iconic Duke Basketball Arena Was Designed by Black Architect Julian Abele

    Little-known Black history fact: Duke’s venerable and historic Cameron Indoor Stadium, which opened 75 years ago Tuesday, was designed by Julian Abele, a Black man whose architectural gifts were mostly concealed because of his race.

    Abele was the first Black person to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania’s architecture department and, at the turn of the century, joined the firm of Horace Trumbaur. His talent was undeniable, even during those times, and he eventually rose to chief designer.

    Trumbaur’s firm designed many of the edifices on Duke’s campus. Abele was unable to sign his name to his creations, however. It was not until Trumbaur died, just before the designing of Cameron Indoor Stadium, that Abele begin signing his name to his work.

    “Therefore, our drawing of Cameron Indoor Stadium is one of the very first that we have that we can directly ascribe to Julian Abele,” Duke archivist Valerie Gillispie said to http://www.unc.org. “He was really in the background.

    “So he was actually designing buildings that were being used on a segregated Southern campus. So it’s very unusual.”

    Abele created what was considered at the time the most state-of-the-art basketball facility south of Philadelphia. It had amenities no other arena had.

    “The ability to heat it, the ability to light it brightly—those were really all brand new and made the stadium one of the most desirable places for people to play,” Gillispie said.

    Abele’s building has long been one of the iconic college basketball facilities in the country, a place enthusiasts put on their bucket list to visit.

    Ironically, it was not until 25 years after the building opened that a Black player first played in the building designed by a Black man. That was 1965. Two years later, C.B. Claiborne became the first Black basketball player at Duke.

    Abele also designed the Widener Memorial Library at Harvard and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

    In education, Fox Host: ‘There Really Shouldn’t Be Public Schools’ Anymore

    Fox host Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery suggested getting rid of the nation’s public schools during a discussion on Thursday’s “Outnumbered.”

    Kennedy’s comments came during a segment about an Oklahoma bill, approved by a House committee, that seeks to eliminate AP US History. The bill asserts that the current iteration of the course doesn’t show “American exceptionalism,” instead highlighting “what is bad about America.”

    “There really shouldn’t be public schools, should there?” Kennedy said. “I mean we should really go to a system where parents of every stripe have a choice, have a say in the kind of education their kids get because, when we have centralized, bureaucratic education doctrines and dogmas like this, that’s exactly what happens.”

    Alex Ferrer, the show’s “OneLuckyGuy,” laughed off Kennedy’s comments before stressing the importance of accepting the good and the bad of American history.

    Co-host Andrea Tantaros chimed in, saying the nation should “abolish the Department of Education” before Kennedy continued.

    “You’re already paying for it with your taxes,” she said. “What if you got that money back, whichever, you know, county or city, however much they allocate to your child’s education? What if you got that back and you got to decide? And you had a say in your teachers and where your kids went to school.”

    It seemed tangentially related, for right-wing stupidity and for privilege.

    And two from Black History of Technology: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges

    If you’ve got fond memories of blowing into video game cartridges, you’ve got Gerald “Jerry” Lawson to thank. As the head of engineering and marketing for Fairchild Semiconductor’s gaming outfit in the mid-’70s, Lawson developed the first home gaming console that utilized interchangeable cartridges, the Fairchild Channel F. That system never saw the heights of popularity of consoles from Atari, Nintendo and Sega, but it was a significant step forward for the entire gaming industry. Prior to the Channel F, games like Pong were built directly into their hardware — there was no swapping them out to play something else — and few believed that you could even give a console a microprocessor of its own. Lawson, who passed away at 70 from diabetes complications in 2011, was the first major African-American figure in the game industry. And, just like the tech world today, it still isn’t as diverse as it should be.

    Only 2 percent of game developers in 2005 were African-American, according to a study by the International Game Developer Association (who also honored Lawson as a game pioneer a month before his death). But things were even worse during Lawson’s time: For his first five years at Fairchild, the company and its executives actually thought he was Indian. He was also one of two black members of the Homebrew Computing Club, a group that famously included Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and other Silicon Valley pioneers. […]

    It’s hard to fathom today, but trying to make removable game cartridges was an incredibly new concept in the ’70s. Lawson and his team at Fairchild had no clue how the cartridges would fare after being plugged in and out multiple times — remember, nobody had ever done it before. The company also caught the attention of the FCC, as it was aiming to deliver the first consumer device with its own microprocessor. Lawson’s description of meeting the agency’s grueling requirements reads like engineering comedy: Fairchild had to encase the console’s motherboard in aluminum; it put a metal chute over the cartridge adapter to keep in radiation; and every cartridge it produced had to be approved by the FCC. He was also justifiably apoplectic when, years later, Texas Instruments successfully lobbied to change the laws that determined the FCC’s harsh requirements.

    As for how race affected his job prospects during the ’60s and ’70s, Lawson told Vintage Computing it “could be both a plus and a minus.” If he did well, it seemed as if he did twice as well, since any accomplishment received instant notoriety. But the idea of a 6-foot-6-inch black man working as an engineer was still surprising to many people. Lawson noted that some people reacted with “total shock” when they saw him for the first time.

    Lawson also had plenty of insightful advice for young black men and women who were interested in science and engineering careers:

    First of all, get them to consider it [technical careers] in the first place. That’s key. Even considering the thing. They need to understand that they’re in a land by themselves. Don’t look for your buddies to be helpful, because they won’t be. You’ve gotta step away from the crowd and go do your own thing. You find a ground; cover it; it’s brand-new; you’re on your own — you’re an explorer. That’s about what it’s going to be like. Explore new vistas, new avenues, new ways — not relying on everyone else’s way to tell you which way to go, and how to go, and what you should be doing.

    “The whole reason I did games was because people said, ‘You can’t do it,'” Lawson told the San Jose Mercury News in an interview. “I’m one of the guys, if you tell me I can’t do something, I’ll turn around and do it.”

    Whoa. And the second: Mark Dean designed the first IBM PC while breaking racial barriers

    Dr. Mark Dean, an African-American computer scientist and engineer, spent over 30 years at IBM pursuing the Next Big Thing. He was chief engineer of the 12-person team that designed the original IBM PC in the early ’80s, earning him three of the nine original patents for that device. Dean was also instrumental in designing the Industry Standard Architecture bus (which made it easy to plug external devices into IBM’s PCs), laid the groundwork for color PC monitors and led the team that created the first gigahertz microprocessor. And despite his many accomplishments shaping our modern computing landscape, Dean isn’t afraid to admit that the PC may now be going the way of the dodo.

    IBM’s 5150 PC with a color monitor

    It’s impressive enough that he was instrumental to so many significant projects, but it’s even more remarkable in an industry where African-American representation is still an issue today. When younger tech companies like Google are reporting that only 2 percent of its workforce is black and only 3 percent is Hispanic in 2014, it’s tough to imagine what the landscape was like for minorities decades ago. (IBM, for its part, claims a long history of diversity initiatives.) When we asked if he noticed much of a change in the tech industry’s diversity over the years, Dean said in an email:

    I personally believe most of the industry [doesn’t] understand the benefits of a diverse workforce (awareness of societal norms and biases, cross-sectional innovation, diversity of leadership styles, out-of-the-box thinking, brand strength across all parts of society, better understanding of emerging markets — domestic and international). Most industry leaders, including corporate boards, aren’t willing to do what it takes to make a difference and create a diverse workforce.

    Throughout all of his work, he focused on predicting where computing was headed. Dean was right on target in the late ’90s, when he was dreaming up a magazine-sized tablet that could accept voice commands, play media and replace your PC. He predicted that we’d see that within 10 years, which was pretty much in line with the iPad’s debut in 2010. You might recall Dean’s surprising comments on the IBM PC’s 30th birthday, where he said the PC was “going the way of the typewriter” and revealed that his main computer was a tablet. He called IBM a “vanguard of the post-PC era” for selling its PC division to Lenovo in 2005 — perhaps a wise move given the slowdown of the PC market over the past few years. And he argued the push away from commodity markets like PCs, printers and disk drives (RIP, Deskstar) allowed IBM to focus on next-level projects like the Watson supercomputer.

    “I ignored the people attempting to block my progress and had no limits to who I talked to and in sharing my opinion,” Dean said when we asked how he dealt with issues around racism (which includes both the subtle, systemic type of racism, and the more obvious form). “I also was able to demonstrate my ideas to a point where it was hard to argue their viability. It took a lot of work and sacrifice. But I was confident and believed I had some good ideas. Fortunately, there were a few in the right leadership positions that agreed with my ideas.” […]

    Dean’s ultimate advice to young people confronting racism at work: “Don’t give up.”

    “If someone is blocking your ideas and advancement, find a different way to expose your proposals, innovations and request,” he said. “There is often someone at the next level or an associate manager that is willing to listen. To break through, you often have to be better than the rest. This takes a lot of work, but it is achievable. I would also suggest young people consider emerging areas of opportunity: bio-engineering, civil engineering, nano-technology, analytics, security, sensor technology, material science.”

    So yes, I learned several new things today.

  56. rq says

    Okay that’s one in moderation but keep an eye out, has lots of interesting new stuff in it – not necessarily pertaining to any actual case, but out of history.

    Here’s part of the letter the Justice Dept. sent to the lawyer for #DarrienHunt’s mother. @fox13now #Utah

    Black Arts Boomerang

    In the current movement against white supremacy and the police we can see the beginnings of a new Black Arts Movement

    Tell me something
    what you think would happen if
    everytime they kill a black boy
    then we kill a cop
    everytime they kill a black man
    then we kill a cop
    you think the accident rate would lower subsequently?

    In 1978, June Jordan presaged the fire our time with her “Poem about Police Violence,” written after the NYPD choked Arthur Miller to death in Crown Heights (a lynching method that would later kill Anthony Baez in 1994 and Eric Garner in 2014). Her poem highlighted how the “diction of the powerful” can re-construe police brutality as “justifiable accidents”, while community defense efforts are distortedly framed as resisting arrest and incitement to riot. Jordan’s question—how to settle scores, how to push the limits of freedom as an act of re-humanization—flows out of the long lineage of the Black Arts Movement, in which poetry and performance offer insurgent experimental space to test ideas that can be enacted, while social conflicts are absorbed into and shared across spoken words. Jordan and other radical artists called for retribution against police violence, revealed the dignity in rioting (reparations), and illuminated new directions for Black lives not just to matter, but to articulate the furthest horizons of liberation.

    Chickens have once again come home to roost in New York City. Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, killed on December 20, then Andrew Dossi and Aliro Pellerano shot on January 5, are likely the first of more police officers who will be targeted for street retribution, and the NYPD’s longstanding policies of racial violence are squarely to blame. The NYPD’s “work” slowdown backfired amidst major fissures between Mayor de Blasio, Commissioner Bratton, City Councilmembers, and police officers, opening up a remarkable opportunity for community control, transformative justice, and other alternatives to policing to be undertaken. Meanwhile, recognition of queer Black women’s creation of the #BlackLivesMatter meme, defenses of rioting, and critical histories of policing circulate, as Black movement-centering films like Concerning Violence, Dear White People, Fruitvale Station, Selma, and The Throwaways begin to proliferate.

    What can we learn from the Black Arts Movement, at its height during the last long period of urban rebellions in the 1960s and 70s? We can begin by assessing the direct link between poetics and street tactics manifested by Jordan and other writers like Amiri Baraka, who demanded in the 1966 poem “Black Art,” “we want ‘poems that kill.’ / Assassin poems, Poems that shoot / guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys / and take their weapons leaving them dead.” In the 1967 poem “Black People!,” he urged readers to reclaim countless goods that an economic system had stolen from them across centuries: “All the stores will open if you will say the magic words… Up against the wall mother fucker this is a stick up!” At his packed community readings, people would shout these familiar lines with explosive delight. With the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem and Spirit House Players in Newark, Baraka wrote and performed one-act plays like Arm Yourself or Harm Yourself infused with debates about how poor Black communities could confront police brutality.

    Diane DiPrima, an Italian-American sister of the Black Arts Movement, dispatched “Revolutionary Letters” that enjoined uprising communities to store dry foods, water in bathtubs, salt and matches in case city officials shut off utilities. She launched these poems as direct action trainings for readers to anticipate and avoid tear gas, kettling, unfamiliar protest sites: “Everytime you pick the spot for a be-in / a demonstration, a march, a rally, you are choosing the ground / for a potential battle. / You are still calling the shots. / Pick your terrain with that in mind.” David Henderson’s 1970 poem “Keep on Pushing,” also analyzed the geographies of urban warfare in the Summer of 1964’s Harlem Riots. Henderson warned of the crude mathematics of wide avenues that can swallow protest pickets, easily dismantle popular barricades, and muster five hundred cops in fifteen minutes, but he also suggests how, “For Harlem/ reinforcements come from the Bronx / just over the three-borough Bridge. / a shot a cry a rumor / can muster five hundred Negroes / from idle and strategic street corners / bars stoops hallways windows.”

    As today, so Black women half a century ago were among the most lucid movement leaders and artists, possessing a unique insight to speak and listen across multiple valences of oppression and resistance. In 1959, Black lesbian playwright Lorraine Hansberry measured how “the most oppressed group of any oppressed group will be its women, obviously”—therefore, those who are twice oppressed can become twice militant (or in the case of Hansberry, thrice militant). By 1970, Black novelist and filmmaker Toni Cade Bambara documented:

    Black women have been forming work-study groups, discussion clubs, cooperative nurseries, cooperative businesses, consumer education groups, women’s workshops on the campuses, women’s caucuses within existing organizations, Afro-American women’s magazines… they have begun correspondence with sisters in Vietnam, Guatemala, Algeria, Ghana on the Liberation Struggle and the Woman, formed alliances on a Third World Women plank.

    As these political formations widely flourished, Black Arts poetics also identified women of color’s holistic rebirths and reclaimed lineages, as Sonia Sanchez revealed in 1974, “come ride my birth, earth mother / tell me how i have become, became / this woman with razor blades between / her teeth. / sing me my history O earth mother / about tongues multiplying memories / about breaths contained in straw.” […]

    Meanwhile, our streets have swelled with direct action poetics, polyphonic melodies, counter-power maps, images of alchemical resistance. Black Arts cultural critic Larry Neal’s words in 1970—”A realistic movement among the black arts community should be about the extension of the remembered and a resurrection of the unremembered“—resound today. During the recent Millions March NYC, Eric Garner’s stare was held aloft by a surging body of thousands, as Mike Brown’s walk down the middle of the street was reenacted by entire families. “Hands up, don’t shoot” became “Fists up, fight back.” Marches stretched up to Harlem proclaiming “No struggle, no progress” and “By any means necessary” on Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X Boulevards. Final words were transformed into incantations of endurance: I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.

    B4xJpyyCYAArhg2.jpg_large

    Lyrical eulogies fashioned on the spot carried the names of the dead: “Turn up, don’t turn down: we do this for Mike Brown. Push back, now push harder: we do this for Eric Garner. Hands up to the sky: we do this for Akai. This is why we’re here: justice for Tamir.” Remixes, layered one after another, wove improvisations and pop references: “No cop zone, No cop zone! They know better, they know better!” (after Rae Sremmurd’s “No Flex Zone”)… “Turn down for what?” (DJ Snake and Lil Jon)… “All I wanna say is they don’t really care about us!” (Michael Jackson). Humor ridiculed over-inflated police: “Why you dressed in riot gear? I don’t see no riot here.” Double dutch-swarms cleverly shut down intersections: “They think it’s a game. They think it’s a joke.” New strategies were tested on the tongues of those who will enact them: “Community control, it’s our demand. Can we do it? Yes we can!”

    Interventionist theater played out on bridges, highways, squares, parks, stations, commerce events, as helicopters crisscrossed the sky and cop cars trailed behind crowds like sideways christmas lights. Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, Triborough, Verrazano, FDR, West Side Highway, Foley Square, Times Square, Union Square, Washington Square, Bryant Park, Columbus Circle, Grand Central Station, Macy’s Parade, Rockefeller Tree Lighting, Saks Fifth Avenue—these major city arteries clogged with the thick boil of intergenerational blood. Most recently, #BlackBrunch’s 4.5 minute Sunday interruptions in posh restaurants lay realities of bullet-riddled Black lives on the tables of white supremacist insularity, whose furious backlash offers the most damning evidence of the action’s relevance. These wildcat tactics inherited from anticolonial liberation movements practice the “war of the flea”—urban guerrilla methods of swarm-strike-fade-repeat to disrupt/transform multiple places at once, while avoiding “hard lock” occupations that can result in mass arrests that would slow down mobilizations of such confident character.

    These Black Arts legacies from half a century ago can also help us articulate today how freedoms of artistic expression are neither synonymous nor compatible with maintaining systems of oppression, but can rather work to overturn caricatures and the ideologies that shape them. For instance, Black Panther artist Emory Douglas’s work was suffused with satire, violence, and critiques of religion, but his creative compass was antithetical to the likes of Charlie Hebdo cartoons. Although the 12 French artists should not have been murdered, their pens flowed from the ideological wells of European and United States neocolonial that are inflicted upon the rest of the world. For the Western world to consider the recent attacks a complete shock recalls a dangerous naivete that Jean-Paul Sartre warned about in 1961: It is the moment of the boomerang; it is the third phase of violence; it comes back on us, it strikes us, and we do not realize any more than we did the other times that it’s we that have launched it. It’s indeed telling of the dominant moral calculus how little mainstream U.S. media covered the January 3 Boko Haram massacre of up to 2,000 Nigerians and the January 6 Colorado Springs NAACP office bombing, in contrast to the Paris shootings.

    […]
    To wrench justice from the mouth of the impossible, to prepare for the 22nd century tomorrow (in the words of Black Arts high priestess Nina Simone), we will need all of our creative tools and political experiences across generations and ethnic backgrounds. We need those who march for miles, those who stay home to care for infants and elderly, and those who are differently able to struggle. We need prisoner solidarity lessons from abolitionist movements and families whose members are encaged. We need to nurture strong communities not only to make the police obsolete, but to unlearn how we police each other in relationships, workplaces, classrooms, neighborhoods, and movements. We need to wield arts as purposefully as Copwatch cameras, resist arrests as deftly as we embrace friends and lovers, and continue to sing the names of our dead as vibrant political discourse. We need to see each bit of respiration as an act of warfare against a system that would rather see us extinguished. The fire of these last tumultuous months—of our long incendiary past—is not out, but its blaze has momentarily dimmed. Together, let’s keep breathing on the flame. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe…

    Why Malcolm X Is Getting Written Out of History

    He is an icon. He is a face on a T-shirt. But although he was certainly not silent in life, his daughter Ilyasah Shabazz fears he is not well understood. “It was when I was watching the second Obama inauguration that I started to really worry that my father was being written out of history,” she says, explaining her determination to correct what, she believes, is the misrepresentation of her father’s legacy with a series of projects that include turning the memorial centre for both of her parents at the Audubon Ballroom into a more active institution, commemorating the afternoon of Malcolm X’s murder with a moment of silence, and supporting a campaign for his birthday to become a national holiday in the US, as is Martin Luther King’s.

    On a quiet winter’s morning at the Audubon Ballroom, with its small exhibit and sole staff member on the premises, some of these plans seem far from fruition – but Malcolm X continues to be a powerful figure in the political consciousness and a widely accepted part of the American story. In 1972, Malcolm’s widow, Betty Shabazz, dined with Richard Nixon, and in 1999 the US Postal Service issued a Malcolm X stamp in his honour – something the man himself might have found unbelievable.

    Even so, it may be more difficult for President Obama – who has rejected the false claim that he is a Muslim – to recognise Malcolm X, than Clinton or Nixon. Although Obama has talked about The Autobiography of Malcolm X inspiring him as a young man, it was a bust of Martin Luther King that he installed in the Oval Office.

    If it is easier for the political establishment to embrace Martin Luther King’s doctrine than to look into the mirror of the consequences of racial oppression and justice held up to the world by Malcolm X, the political reality annoys Ilyasah: “Why can’t these people just have a backbone and invite Malcolm? I mean, what is the big deal? Put a bust up of Malcolm X. Let’s tell the truth about Malcolm X,” she says. […]

    At the time of his death he was no longer Malcolm X, preaching to black urban ghettos, but Malcolm the global revolutionary, who had brought together an alliance of African and Middle Eastern leaders in support of his new Organization of Afro-American Unity, and who was intent on pressing his human rights claims against the US government at the United Nations.

    It was an evolution lost on most of mainstream America, however, who remembered the man who once said, “The common enemy is the white man,” reminded black Americans that it was within their legal rights to buy a shotgun, and said president Kennedy’s assassination was a case of “chickens coming home to roost”. After his murder, The New York Times called him an “extraordinary and twisted man” who had turned his gifts to “evil purpose”, while TIME denounced him a demagogue whose “creed was violence”. […]

    Last summer’s protests over the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and then over the death of Eric Garner in New York, made Ilyasah want to reach out again to young Americans and explain her father’s legacy.

    “Now you have people of all different ethnic backgrounds saying, yes, black lives matter. Then you start to think about Malcolm X and say, well, wait a minute, what did he really say that was wrong? And because you silenced people like Malcolm X we find that the same problem persists 50 years later.”

    While she supports the protests, Ilyasah questions what follow-through there will be: “What is the end result?”

    The end result for the memory of Malcolm X may not yet be a national holiday. Howard Dodson, who oversaw the Malcolm X papers at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, recounts that only intense lobbying by his family, and well-known figures, achieved that objective for Martin Luther King in the face of much opposition. Such opposition would be only more intense over Malcolm X.

    More recently, Ilyasah and her family have disputed a series of lurid personal claims in a 2011 biography of Malcolm X written by Manning Marable. “It was a great book but they inserted three things that were just absolutely ridiculous, and we felt that it was sensationalised,” she says. In addition to alleging that Malcolm X was a cross-dresser, “they said that my father liked putting powder on old white men’s butts”, and alluded to a relationship Betty Shabazz may have had with another man while married to Malcolm. These things are “just not true”, Ilyasah says, adding that her mother was a widow for many years and never remarried. If anything of these allegations had been true, she points out, the FBI would have had a field day revealing them in the 1960s.

    Ilyasah Shabazz believes the father she was denied the opportunity to know in life should go down in history as “a courageous man. A compassionate man. He was such a loving person, but he sacrificed his personal self for the benefit of humanity.” Like many of the protesters Ilyasah saw on the streets this summer, she says: “He was a young man seeking justice.”

    Lots of background on Malcolm X at the link.

    The above articles are too smart, so let’s take it back a notch. Ferguson police chief: No racial problem in police department, with video (autoplay).

    Ferguson, Missouri Police Chief Tom Jackson says his department is misunderstood.

    mo-ferguson-reynolds-jackson-intv-hrem63-sub-01-copy-01frame5500.jpg
    Ferguson, Missouri Police Chief Tom Jackson
    CBS News
    “There is not a racial problem in the police department,” said Jackson in an interview with CBS News correspondent Dean Reynolds.

    Jackon’s department has been the subject of intense scrutiny ever since Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed unarmed teenager Michael Brown last year. The shooting and the subsequent decision by a grand jury to not charge Wilson led to nationwide protests.

    Watch the video above to see Jackson’s full interview.

    And I’ll have to finish later. :)
    … And that whole comment was written about an hour ago, but it will still be a short while until I finish up.

  57. rq says

    Colorado man says he wanted to bomb accountant, not NAACP headquarters

    During interviews with federal investigators, Murphy admitted to the attack, but claimed he was trying to threaten an accountant who was withholding years of tax records, according to a criminal complaint filed Friday. Murphy did not appear to make any mention of animosity toward the NAACP in the interviews, though the complaint does not contain a complete transcript of his conversation with investigators.

    On the morning of Jan. 5, Murphy is believed to have placed a pipe bomb near a container of gasoline before igniting the items outside a building that houses the NAACP’s Colorado Springs chapter and a barbershop.

    The contents of the container did not ignite properly, the FBI has previously said. No one was injured and the building did not sustain significant damage.

    Murphy is expected to appear in federal court at 2 p.m. Friday.

    According to the complaint, Murphy told investigators that he built the pipe bomb using a shotgun shell, fireworks and other home materials that he used as a carpenter. He then placed the pipe bomb, a two-gallon can of gasoline and a road flare beside the building on South El Paso Street where he believed the tax offices were located. He told police that the “rationale for the pipe bomb was rage.”

    Murphy, who spent three years in a Colorado state prison for a 2007 theft conviction, told investigators he was having financial troubles and believed the accountant he was targeting had purposely destroyed his tax records.

    However, Henry Allen, the president of the NAACP’s Colorado Springs chapter, seemed highly skeptical of Murphy’s motives during an interview with the Los Angeles Times on Friday.

    Allen said there hasn’t been a tax office connected to the building on South El Paso Street in nearly 20 years.

    And there you have it folks, not a hate crime. Just like Chapel Hill was about parking.

    Now this sounds like a good step: Baltimore police want to pair officers with mental health professionals

    Batts wants to form 18 teams made up of one police officer and one mental health professional who would respond to emergency calls where mental illness is suspected. He said such teams could make a big difference in dealing with people who are homeless, suicidal or have mental health problems.

    The teams would be split among the city’s nine police districts, with half working day shifts and the others on night shifts, Batts said.

    The commissioner told the delegation that a similar program has been place for 12 to 15 years in Long Beach, Calif., where he used to work.

    State Sen. Shirley Nathan-Pulliam, a Democrat whose district straddles the city-county line, has introduced a bill that would require that city and Baltimore County police establish such programs by June 1, 2016, though it does not include funding.

    Police train all new officers on how to deal with calls involving people suspected of being mentally ill and review shootings to aid in training.

    But the Baltimore Police Department has faced criticism amid allegations of excessive use of force and other misconduct. A Baltimore Sun investigation found that the city has paid nearly $6 million in court judgments and settlements in more than 100 lawsuits filed since 2011. The U.S. Justice Department is reviewing department policies and practices at Batts’ request.

    Cops behaving badly: “Officer of the Year” Admits to Raping 20 Male Immigrants, Not Charged as Sex Offender. *sigh*

    About the eminent domain case in St Louis, St. Clair County plans to offer land near Scott AFB at no cost for National Geospatial-Intelligence relocation

    “My recommendation would be that it is no cost to the federal government,” said Mark Kern, the chairman of the St. Clair County Board.

    The agency is looking to move from its current facility near the Anheuser-Busch brewery. It has named four potential locations in the St. Louis region, including one in north St. Louis. City officials are fighting hard to keep the agency within its borders.

    The agency, which provides mapping support for the U.S. military, employs 3,000 people. Its workforce brings in an estimated $2.4 million in annual earnings tax to city coffers and has an average salary of $75,000.

    But St. Clair County’s offer is one that could prove enticing to federal officials.

    The land offered to the government, near MidAmerica Airport and adjacent to Scott Air Force Base, is owned by St. Clair County and is infrastructure-ready and equipped with fiber optics.

    Kern said the county could simply transfer the land to the federal government and federal officials could make it part of the air base.

    Cost is one of the factors the federal government is considering. The Army Corp of Engineers, the agency that will build the facility, currently is analyzing each site. Its staff is judging them based on the following priorities: location (zoning, neighborhood quality, commuting impact), infrastructure (power, traffic and transportation, availability of utilities), development suitability (cost impacts, design restrictions, expansion capability, environmental impacts) and quality of site (configuration, size, topography).

    Agency officials appear to like the idea of being near other military installations. The geospatial agency relocated its eastern headquarters in the Washington area last decade. It moved from Bethesda, Md., to the Fort Belvoir army base in Virginia.

    The relocation would be a coup for St. Clair County officials, who have long worked to secure the fate of Scott, the Metro East’s largest employer.

    Meanwhile, the north St. Louis land would come at a significant cost.

    St. Louis city, which approved a bill to use eminent domain to clear 100 acres of land near the demolished Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, would pay $8 million to $10 million for residential properties and an additional $10 million to $15 million for businesses. That means the federal government would have to pay upward of $20 million for land in St. Louis.

    Local governments typically buy or secure the land involved in such a proposal and then sell it to the federal government for fair market value.

    The city still needs to do significant infrastructure improvements around the site. The Board of Aldermen has so far failed to put a $200 million bond issue on the ballot that would enable them to do so.

    Still, officials in St. Louis argue that an executive order encouraging federal investment in urban areas will help their case. Last year, the government pulled 800 Veterans Affairs jobs out of downtown St. Louis and moved them to St. Louis County.

    The geospatial plan has raised concerns in the neighborhood, however, especially from those who would be forced to lose their homes to make way for the project.

    Kids pose as inspiring trailblazers for Black History Month

    Nonprofit organization Because of Them, We Can has launched a new campaign for Black History Month. However, founder and photographer Eunique Jones Gibson hopes to inspire young people beyond just February.

    The organization’s latest campaign features kids dressed as inspiring black leaders and trailblazers such as Desmond Tutu, Ella Fitzgerald and Chuck Stone. The organization has also partnered with Nickelodeon to air national PSA’s inspired by figures like Maya Angelou (shown in the video above) and Muhammad Ali.

    In addition, the organization will be releasing a new photo every day during the month of February on their Facebook page. In addition to Black History Month, the organization has also broadened their campaign with billboards and bus shelters with campaign images, beginning in Newark, New Jersey and Brooklyn, New York.

    Pictures and video at the link.

  58. rq says

    The End of Black Respectability Politics

    “Black respectability politics” describes African-Americans’ self-policing morality and propriety in order to better reflect themselves to the white mainstream. I would be lying if I said I didn’t benefit from the cultural gymnastics of learning and adapting to mainstream etiquette, values, dress codes, hairstyles and preferred media. This is how most people, regardless of race and class, try to live. There is nothing wrong with self-improvement, dressing well and speaking proper English.

    But black respectability politics is more than self-help and discipline. It’s like living your life as a job interview. Forever. It is a state of always striving to impress and never arriving at the promised land of equality. It’s a mindfuck, because in order to be “equal” to whiteness, I have to take it upon myself to do more, to counteract the feeling that I am less.

    When some of us fail at this task, we chastise our own as “bringing down the race.” NBA analyst and Hall of Fame Basketball player Charles Barkley said as much in October amid protests against police murders: “It’s a dirty dark secret in the black community, one of the reasons we’re never going to be successful as a whole is because of other black people.”

    These statements have been a long-held Black Respectability Political party line among African-American community leaders, politicians and media barons. But hip hop, the black community’s widening generational gap, and now Cosby’s very public demise may have killed BRP for good. […]

    As we moved into the 1990s, I began to doubt that being “respectable” was enough to lift my community into Cosby heaven. It seemed like many of these goals and requirements came out of a sense of not feeling worthy. We internalized the racism we feared and then used it to castigate the people in the community who had less. There was a growing tension between the expanding black middle class and lower-class blacks who were living in areas ravaged by crime and crack-cocaine. The first major blow to 1980s BRP happened toward the end of the decade with the explosion of gangsta rap music.

    Rap music was the unruly child that would not cooperate with BRP parenting. For an older generation of African-American leaders, it was blaxploitation on steroids. These weren’t just Hollywood actors running around playing pimps and drug dealers. These were, in many cases, the real pushers and street hustlers. This time, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton couldn’t just call up Sony Music and threaten boycotts. The music was reaching its target market.

    Even as it became co-opted, commodified and watered down, hip hop crippled BRP forever. The cultural change didn’t come from Harvard MBAs and Georgetown political science majors; it came from the streets, from hustlers who were operating on the simple economics of supply and demand.

    Black television has struck a blow to BRP, too. In the 1990s, white showrunners earned millions for The Wire and The Sopranos, and African-American artists had to make an uncomfortable choice: try to compete with prestige pieces in an increasingly shrinking market, or jump into the cultural stew. They chose option B. Movies like Menace II Society and Boyz N The Hood helped to lay the groundwork for tales like Hustle & Flow, which in turn paved the way for Power and Empire. These shows are run by black storytellers retaking the African-American narrative. Like hip hop artists, they’ve sacrificed some cultural respectability in exchange for commercial success and professional viability.

    In 2014, BRP just may have died of its wounds. From the diminishment of its main spokesman Bill Cosby, to the wholesale discrediting of police murders where BRP buzzwords like “thug” were lobbed at black victims, to even President Obama’s gradual abandonment of lecture-y speeches directed at the black community, “respectabilility” reads as hollow and manipulative to a new generation.

    President Obama has come a long way from the days of scolding black families for feeding their kids a cold Popeye’s dinner. Six years ago, he was the Platonic ideal of a BRP candidate. He was clean, articulate and uncorrupted. He even weathered attempts to associate him with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the radical, evil, crazy Negro. For a second there, it seemed like respectability politics could work if all blacks just kept a pristine record, graduated from Harvard, lead a quiet life, came from a biracial background, had beautiful kids and a dynamic wife, said all the right things, made all the right moves. Perhaps Obama would singlehandedly be able to overcome 400 years of America’s intractable execration of the black body and mind by just being…perfect.

    We all know how this hypothesis has played out. Despite the brilliant speeches, the painstaking compromises, foreign policy successes, legislative achievements and, to some, being one of the most objectively successful presidents in America’s history, he is still unpopular with vast sections of white America. If a black man like Obama is still hated by almost half the population, then what hope is there for the average middle class family, a single mother, the teenage kid with a hoodie, the creative artist who likes to provoke, or the philosopher who proposes change? What hope is there for me?

    In this game of respect, maybe I’ve been playing it all wrong. Maybe we all have.

    Celebrating The Forgotten Heroines Of Black History

    Black History Month aims to celebrate the achievements of African American icons who have changed the course of history, but not all are afforded the same recognition.

    Few know about the contributions of Claudette Colvin, who was just 15 years old when she refused to give her seat on the bus to a white passenger, months before Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955.

    Treva Lindsey, a professor at Ohio State University, joined HuffPost Live on Monday to discuss Colvin’s “tremendous story.” Colvin was also one of four female plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, which overturned Montgomery’s bus segregation laws. Still, Colvin is not among the well-known civil rights leaders pegged to Black History Month, and Lindsey said there are numerous reasons for that.

    “We can talk about class, we can talk about color, we can talk about all kinds of politics that intersect with why she is not supported,” she told host Marc Lamont Hill.

    Lindsey explained that Colvin represents “tensions” in the black community that inform “how we remember, who we remember and who we celebrate” in history. Colvin, who became pregnant after her arrest, didn’t fit the profile that the NAACP wanted to lead the fight against segregation.

    “If we were to remember her as a symbolic mother [of the civil rights movement] … what does that mean about what we think a historical actor can be? What would it mean to think about a possibly unwed teenage mother being … central to even a contemporary movement?” she asked. “We have so much pejorative language around certain kinds of black pathology, and I think Claudette Colvin is an excellent example of what that does in terms of how we remember and who we engage in terms of radical racial politics.”

    Marsha P. Johnson is yet another activist whose achievements seem to have been lost in the shuffle of history.

    Johnson was an integral part of New York City’s LGBT community in the 1960s. She was photographed as part of Andy Warhol’s series on drag queens and resisted police during the 1969 raid of the West Village’s Stonewall Inn. The case of Johnson’s mysterious death, which was deemed a suicide in 1992, has since been reopened, with some suspecting foul play.

    Lindsey emphasized the importance of Johnson’s story and rewriting the narrative of black history from an “inclusive space.”

    “We start from trans inclusivity, we start from gender inclusivity, we start from the margins of the margins to really get at what that story looks like. That’s how we get through the silence. Thats how we break through the fissures,” she said.

    By focusing on a different set of actors, Lindsey suggested we may see a new and more complete version of black history.

    “I think that Marsha [Johnson], if we were to center her … in that conversation and start from someone like her to map back this long history of activism and struggle of justice, of triumph, of creation and invention, we end up somewhere different,” she said.

    Black History Month, Indian-Style: Natives and Black Folks in This Together Since 1492

    I literally didn’t realize I was a quarter black (actually a bit less than a quarter, but I’ll claim a quarter for easy math) until I was almost 13. My (almost) half-black dad really didn’t look stereotypically “black.” He looked Hispanic or maybe even Middle-Eastern—handsome dude with long wavy hair, brown skin and he had the coolest mustache. Hey, it was the 80s!

    Growing up on the Blackfeet Reservation (and then later on the Nisqually and Suquamish Reservations, as well as urban areas), I was a dusty rez kid just like the other dusty rez kids. I didn’t really get treated differently or even know that I was part black—at least I never really noticed. I always identified as simply “Native” because I was raised by a full-blooded Native, single mom—but when I actually found out, I was overjoyed!! “Heck, that means I’m a little bit like Michael Jackson!!”

    It was never really an issue.

    In hindsight, I realize that I (probably fortunately) missed out on some of the complicated and ugly stuff that sometimes happens to Natives with black ancestry. Colonization is complicated, and in the same way that even black folks have been convinced that other black people are inherently dangerous—hence the disgusting amount of black-on-black crime—many Native people seemingly have bought that lie and sometimes given into ugly racist attitudes toward black folks (to wit, the Cherokee Nation with the Freedmen racism).

    We also sometimes see examples of black folks buying into the ugly racism against Native people and we realize that we all buy into the racist bullsh*t. Even black folks. Even Native folks. None of us are exempt.

    We’re all human.

    For example, a friend of mine told me about his experience learning proper protocol for ceremony. He’s a young man, fluent in his Native language and consequently was being trained in being a leader in his people’s ceremonies. He was also, like many young people, a product of the hip-hop generation and dressed accordingly. One day, one of the older ceremonial men asked him, “Why do you dress like those black rapper guys?”

    My friend responded, “Should I dress like those white cowboy guys like you?”

    And that’s precisely right. Natives oftentimes don’t question white people’s influence on Native culture—from the English language we speak to the white blood in many Natives. Most Natives don’t bat an eye when they see a Native person with light hair or light eyes or light skin—“that’s just a fair-skinned Native”; many of those Natives do, consciously or unconsciously, question the “Nativeness” a person when they have kinky hair or dark skin.
    “Natives oftentimes don’t question white people’s influence on Native culture.”

    It’s not our fault—all of us have been trained through 500 years of brainwashing, that light skin is “normal.” The dark skin is foreign to us even though, before colonization, Native people’s skin color was much closer to that dark skin than white skin. In the words of Chris Rock, “It’s alright because it’s all white.”

    Hopefully that’s changing a bit. African-Americans dominate pop culture in America; they influence everyone. While some talk about non-Natives appropriating (I call it “being influenced by”) Native culture, we must also acknowledge the Natives who appropriate (“are influenced by”) black culture, as evidenced by the many Native hip-hop artists, fashion, etc. Everyone is influenced by someone, right? Nothing wrong with that. In fact, it’s positive—with every single Native kid who loves or emulates Jay-Z or Drake, it’s actually acknowledging a link that’s been present for centuries. […]

    In 2015, we still see those narratives intersect, with increasing scrutiny for the brutal pattern of law enforcement’s treatment within both of our communities. When we look close enough we realize that black folks’ and Natives’ history, conquest and ultimately, liberation is very closely related. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shore, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society.”

    In other words, we’re stuck with each other. Black folks know it too—that’s why so many of them are always excited to tell any Native person within earshot about their Native ancestry.

    Together, we could be an incredibly powerful force if we’re just willing to look deeply enough.

  59. Saad says

    Giuliani: Obama was influenced by communism at an early age

    “Look, this man was brought up basically in a white family, so whatever he learned or didn’t learn, I attribute this more to the influence of communism and socialism” than to his being African-American, Giuliani told the New York Daily News.

    “I don’t [see] this president as being particularly a product of African-American society or something like that. He isn’t,” Giuliani said. “Logically, think about his background … The ideas that are troubling me and are leading to this come from communists with whom he associated when he was 9 years old.”

    Trying to shift from anti-black bigotry to McCarthyism…

  60. rq says

    So I’m going to be posting info on the Ferguson Foodshare program pretty much every week, just in case someone ends up having a chance to help out, and I would like to see the program succeed.
    #FergusonFoodShare wk 3: oranges, pears, broccoli, cabbage, regular or sweet potatoes, sweetened/almond milk, canned salmon, chicken thighs
    #FergusonFoodShare donation drop-off: 1) Wednesday, 6-7pm Red’s BBQ Parking Lot 9300 West Florissant
    #FergusonFoodShare donation drop-off: 2) Thursday, 6-7pm South City, 4219 Hartford St. 2nd Fl
    #FergusonFoodShare donation drop-off: 3) Friday, 6-7:30pm South City, 4219 Hartford St. 2nd Fl
    #FergusonFoodShare donation drop-off: 4) Saturday, 12-1:00pm Red’s BBQ Parking Lot 9300 West Florissant

  61. rq says

    White-on-white murder in America is out of control

    Yet the disturbing truth, according to the FBI’s most recent homicide statistics, is that the United States is in the wake of an epidemic of white-on-white crime. Back in 2011, the most recent year for which data is available, a staggering 83 percent of white murder victims were killed by fellow Caucasians.

    This is not to say that white people are inherently prone to violence. Most whites, obviously, manage to get through life without murdering anyone. And there are many countries full of white people — Norway, Iceland, France, Denmark, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom — where white people murder each other at a much lower rate than you see here in the United States. On the other hand, although people often see criminal behavior as a symptom of poverty, the quantity of murder committed by white people specifically in the United States casts some doubt on this. Per capita GDP is considerably higher here than in France — and the white population in America is considerably richer than the national average — and yet we have more white murderers.

    To understand the level of cultural pathology at work here, it’s important to understand that 36 percent of those killed by whites are women — a far higher share than you see with black murderers.

    Clearly, the social disaster of white violence has complicated roots. But the beginning of an answer is to admit that we have a problem. It’s striking that President Obama, who’s frequently found time to comment on the height of black men’s waistlines, seems oblivious to this torrent of white killing. To be fair to the White House, however, it would be uniquely difficult for Obama to address this delicate issue. The real tragedy is that none of Obama’s 43 white predecessors have addressed it either. Indeed, looking back on America’s political iconography, there are disturbing trends toward the glorification of white violence. Peer inside the US Capitol building, and you’ll find a monument to Confederate President Jefferson Davis — the leader of an insurgency that caused an unprecedented quantity of violent white deaths.

    But whatever the causes or past mistakes, the important thing is to confront this important subject in the future. As we look ahead to a 2016 matchup that should give us two Euro-American major party nominees for the first time in a decade, perhaps America can finally get the debate about white violence it deserves.

    WHERE ARE THE WHITE PEOPLE ADDRESSING THIS SCOURGE UPON CIVILIZATION???!!

    2nd-year @SLULAW student came to #plr2015 wearing #IAmDarrenWilson & #ThinBlueLine bracelets. Disgusting. #Ferguson

    Lawyer: Video of police shooting differs from official account

    BRANDON TATE-BROWN was running – not reaching into his car for a gun – when he was fatally shot by a Philadelphia police officer in December, a lawyer representing Tate-Brown’s family told the Daily News last night.

    Attorney Brian Mildenberg said he and Tanya Brown-Dickerson on Thursday viewed surveillance footage of Tate-Brown’s encounter with two patrol cops during a traffic stop on Frankford Avenue near Magee in Mayfair on Dec. 15.

    The footage, recorded by four different cameras at nearby businesses, is imperfect – grainy images that are sometimes obstructed or washed out by the police cruiser’s flashing domelights.

    But what’s clear, Mildenberg said, is that Tate-Brown’s shooting didn’t mirror police accounts of the incident.

    The Police Department has repeatedly said Tate-Brown had knocked one officer to the ground after a violent struggle, and was fatally wounded by the other officer as he reached into the front passenger side of his 2014 Dodge Charger for a stolen, loaded handgun that was near the center console.

    Mildenberg confirmed that Tate-Brown is shown fighting with the officers, a battle that stretched from one side of Frankford Avenue to another.

    But the attorney said Tate-Brown’s final movements played out differently than many think.

    “From the video, the moment he was shot, he was running away from the officer, across Frankford Avenue,” Mildenberg said.

    “He was behind his vehicle, near the trunk of the vehicle – not near any doors – when he was shot and dropped down.”

    Mildenberg said he and Brown-Dickerson want the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the case, which is still being reviewed locally by District Attorney Seth Williams.

    Mildenberg said he also wants the Police Department to release the surveillance footage to the public, along with witness statements, police radio chatter and any other records about the shooting.

    “If you’re running across Frankford Avenue, obviously that’s not complying with the police officer, and we’re not saying that’s OK,” he said.

    “But police aren’t licensed to shoot every person that runs from them.”

    Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey said last night that the “quality of the tapes are not very good” and were filmed at a distance that did not offer much clarity.

    “The investigation did not rely solely on the tape,” he said. “You have the officers’ statements, and statements from four independent eyewitnesses who actually observed the incident as it took place.”

    Ramsey said he won’t release those statements, or the videos, to the public. He has also declined to release the names of the officers, out of concern they could face retaliation of some kind.

    “Believe me, I understand the loss of life, and the tragedy that goes along with it, but we also have to be very mindful to let the investigation take place,” he said.

    “This isn’t trial by media, and it’s not trial by public opinion. This has to be based on facts.”

    Earlier this week, Ramsey apologized to Brown-Dickerson for not notifying her weeks ago when the two officers who were involved in the shooting returned to street duty, having been cleared of any departmental violations.

    He also arranged for Brown-Dickerson to view the footage at the Internal Affairs Division’s headquarters in Northeast Philadelphia, something she had called for publicly for the last two months.

    Brown-Dickerson did not feel up to commenting yesterday, her lawyer said, but earlier this week, she told the Daily News: “Show us the proof now. They said once the investigation is up, I would get proof. Then show me. Show me the footage. Until I see that, it’s not over.”

    “We did let them see the tape. That’s what was being asked, and we did see to that,” Ramsey said. “We have nothing to hide.”

    Mildenberg said Brown-Dickerson “had to leave the room” as she watched the footage.

    “It was obviously extremely difficult, as it would be for any mother, to view video of her son’s death.”

    The attorney said he is not preparing to file a wrongful-death lawsuit. He and Brown-Dickerson want to get to the bottom of several discrepancies, including why Tate-Brown was pulled over in the first place.

    Packed house at the Walker-Ford Center in Tallahassee, learning about the school to prison pipeline.
    #teachers leading #teachers in a conversation about race and equity #teacherdiversitymatters #E4EMN

    And one more for Giuliani! Fran Lebowitz: When Giuliani was mayor an unarmed black man was killed every 5 minutes

    Lebowitz said that when Giuliani ran for mayor of New York City in 1993, his ads said “vote for me and it’ll be 1952 again. He is just soaked in nostalgia. That’s what he meant when he said Obama doesn’t love the country the way we love the county.”

    “What does it mean,” Maher asked, “that Republicans want to go back to an era, the Fifties, where America was run by socialism?”

    “You mean economic policy,” Lebowitz replied. “The New Deal. That’s not the part they miss. They miss — you know, what is behind Giuliani’s comments, and we’re not allowed to say this, but it’s racism. We now live in a society where it’s worse to call someone a racist than to be one.”

    “And yet they say the most racist things,” Maher said. “Ben Stein, last year, said ‘Obama is the most racist president we’ve ever had.’ And I thought, even more than the eleven who actually owned slaves?”

    “Andrew Jackson killed Indians by hand — just because they were Indians,” he continued. “Ethnic cleansing was just the thing to do.”

    “What happened to Giuliani? He was the mayor of a liberal city. He used to be a moderate Republican.”

    “No,” Lebowitz interjected, “when Giuliani was the mayor, every five minutes an unarmed black guy was getting shot in the back. It was always a different excuse from the cops — ‘he had something in his hand, I thought it was a gun,’ and it was a candy bar. It was a key chain.”

    Maher then read Giuliani’s statement from Friday, in which he said that “what I said wasn’t racism, it couldn’t be — because Obama had a white mother, a white grandfather, he went to white schools, and most of what he learned was from whites.”

    “See,” Maher said, “this is what Republicans have against Obama — he’s too white.”

    After noting that Scott Walker — who was hosting the event at which Giuliani made these statements — failed to denounce Giuliani for them, Lebowitz said “of course they didn’t, because that’s the thing, they agree with it. It’s not that they’re holding back their criticism — it’s that they have no criticism.”

    “The problem [conservatives] have,” Bill Nye chimed in, “is their primary and the general [election].”

    “Yes,” Lebowitz replied, “because the lunatics vote in the primaries and Americans vote in the general. That’s why we don’t have a Republican president.”

    Maher then pointed out the other thing Giuliani said, that “it’s not racism, it’s socialism, or possibly anti-colonialism.”

    “Where are our colonies?” Rob Reiner asked. “We’re the colonies! We’re against ourselves!”

    “Exactly,” Maher replied. “Isn’t colonialism bad? I thought we were all kind of on that page, and now it’s bad to be anti-colonialism? I mean, what was George Washington fighting against?”

    “They’re not talking about that anti-colonialism,” Lebowitz said. “They’re talking about African and Indian anti-colonialism against the British.”

    More later, with probably at least one comment on Malcolm X articles.

  62. rq says

    History in Pictures – February

    Zinn Education Project

    #tdih Today marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X/ El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazzin 1965. As many people learn when they see the Selma Movie, Malcolm X spoke in Selma on Feb. 4, just weeks before he was murdered. He came at the invitation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to speak with young people at the Brown Chapel AME Church.

    Links for video and more material at the link, it is facebook, but no login or account required to view.

    Front page of Chicago Tribune on Malcolm X assassination. It’s the narrow highlighted column on the far right.

    Malcolm X assassination: 50 years on, mystery still clouds details of the case

    Malcolm X was a dangerous man. Not dangerous as the widely circulated image of him holding a rifle and peeking through the curtains in his home would suggest. Nor because he disagreed with the nonviolent wing of the civil rights movement and its assertion that racial integration was the primary objective of the black freedom struggle. By challenging integration as a primary goal, Malcolm X threatened to undermine the tenuous support that mainstream civil rights leaders were receiving from the government and white liberals. For many white people, Malcolm and the Nation of Islam embodied their greatest fears.

    As the public face of the National of Islam, he confronted racism well beyond the confines of southern segregation. He worked tirelessly to denounce America as a damaging imperialist and neo-colonialist system. “Just as a chicken cannot produce a duck egg”, he charged, “the system in this country cannot produce freedom for an Afro-American.” And with his characteristic wit, he added that if it did, “you would say it was certainly a revolutionary chicken.”

    By 1963, Malcolm had been suspended from the NOI for calling President Kennedy’s assassination a case of “chickens coming home to roost.” The rift deepened after Malcolm revealed that the group’s leader, Elijah Muhammad, had fathered children out-of-wedlock with NOI secretaries. This public feud combined with competing political visions to cause deep divisions within the Muslim community. Malcolm formed two independent groups in 1964: the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) and Muslim Mosque, Inc. (MMI). A year later, he prepared to release a new political program which would have likely included voter registration drives, local organizing against police brutality, and a call for the United Nations to denounce American racial practices as human rights violations. He was gunned down on the very day he was set to unveil it. […]

    In the following days, the NYPD also arrested two other members of the Nation of Islam’s Mosque 7 in Harlem: Norman 3X Butler (Muhammad Abd Al-Aziz) and Thomas 15X Johnson (Khalil Islam). Both men, as well as key witnesses who knew them, denied they were at the ballroom that day. Hayer also testified at the end of the 1966 trial that the two men had not been involved. But he refused to name any other accomplices, and all three received life sentences.

    A decade into his incarceration, Hayer came forward with new information, identifying four co-conspirators. He signed an affidavit offering the names and addresses of these men, along with a detailed timeline of their plot. With the help of the self-described “radical attorney” William Kunstler, Butler and Johnson appealed their convictions.

    Hayer named William Bradley, a NOI member called Willie X, as the man who fired the fatal shotgun blast, adding that Bradley was “known as a stick-up man.” The petition noted that Bradley was “upon information and belief presently incarcerated in the Essex County Jail, Caldwell, New Jersey.” Kunstler added that he did not know of “any comparable case in American jurisprudential history” in which an accomplice had described a crime in such detail without a thorough reinvestigation. Yet, judge Harold Rothwax rejected a motion to reopen the case. […]

    The notes appear to substantiate the accounts of Herman Ferguson and the AP of a “second man” taken into police custody. That a name should resurface 50 years later is remarkable. But more significant is that the “Ray Woods” named in the note was likely Raymond A Wood, an undercover New York City police officer with the Bureau of Special Services and Investigation (BOSSI).

    Wood began his career by infiltrating the Bronx Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) chapter under the name Ray Woodall in 1964. There, he posed as a 27 year-old graduate of Manhattan College studying law at Fordham. He was soon named CORE’s housing chairman and oversaw a voter registration project.

    Wood earned his activist bonafides by getting arrested with two others at city hall while attempting a citizen’s arrest of mayor Wagner for allowing racial discrimination on a public construction project. Feminist Susan Brownmiller, a fellow CORE activist at the time, recalled that if “CORE had placed an advertisement in the Amsterdam News describing what it was looking for, Woodall would have fit the bill.”

    By 1965, “Woodall” had been reassigned under his real name to infiltrate a group calling itself the Black Liberation Movement (BLM). He was credited with foiling a bomb plot by the BLM that allegedly targeted the Statue of Liberty and other national monuments, just a week before Malcolm X’s assassination. One of the four arrested in the plot was Walter Bowe, who also co-chaired the cultural committee in Malcolm’s OAAU. Wood’s close association with an OAAU member makes it likely that others within the organization would also have known and recognized him.

    Wood was promoted to detective second grade for making the arrests in the BLM case. And although his name and a photo of the back of his head circulated throughout the press in the week leading up to Malcolm X’s assassination, the NYPD reported that he was put back to work because his “face is still a secret.” […]

    The most obvious avenue for reopening the investigation into Malcolm X’s assassination is the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act. In 2011, the Justice Department responded to calls to reopen the case with the statement that “the matter does not implicate federal interests sufficient to necessitate the use of scarce federal investigative resources into a matter for which there can be no federal criminal prosecution.” The Till Act, however, was specifically crafted to render these objections moot. It allocates $10m annually for such investigations, and requires the Justice Department to work in concert with local law enforcement to implement state law.

    Janis McDonald, who co-directs the Cold Case Justice Initiative at Syracuse University College of Law, told me that rulings such as this ignore “the intent of Congress when the Emmett Till Act was enacted.” Its implementation, she said, “has been a failed promise to the families of those who were killed and a disregard of the congressional intent to preserve the integrity of the law for everyone. This Act has never been a priority for the Department of Justice.” It is set to expire in 2017 if not renewed by Congress.

    According to Paula Johnson, co-director of the Syracuse Cold Case Justice Initiative, the “purpose of the Emmett Till Act is to fully investigate and resolve just such killings.” The account placing Ray Wood at the scene, she said, “warrants further investigation into the knowledge or role of law enforcement in Malcolm X’s death.”

    Until Malcolm X’s assassination case is reopened and surveillance files are made fully available, the injustice to one of America’s boldest civil rights figure continues, while one or more of his killers may roam free.

    As the case turns 50 this week, the NYPD and other surveillance agencies must make their records public. It is time to for a new investigation into the assassination of this civil rights leader that will lay to rest the lingering questions about the case, and ensure that all those involved have been brought to justice.

    Malcolm X’s legacy survives 50 years after his assassination

    The uncompromising message of Malcolm X, who had virtually embodied the black power movement in its early years, carries particular resonance today, they say, a half-century after his shooting death in New York on Feb. 21, 1965.

    His ideas are at the core of a national debate over the treatment of African-Americans and other minorities by the U.S. criminal justice system that heated up after last summer’s killings of unarmed black men by white police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City.

    Those two galvanizing cases echo an incident in April 1957, when a black man named Johnson Hinton was beaten by police in New York’s Harlem neighborhood and a young Malcolm X famously came to his defense. The incident helped propel him to the national stage.

    “Some of what you see in terms of the pride of being black in America, or just being black period, come from the teachings of Malcolm X,” said Angelo Pinto, 32, an organizer for Justice League NYC, one of the groups that staged rallies across the country last fall to protest police violence against minorities.

    Malcolm X, born as Malcolm Little and also known as Malcolm Shabazz, was a powerful orator who rose to prominence as the national spokesman of the Nation of Islam, an African-American Muslim group that opposed integration with whites.

    Later, he broke with the organization and moderated some of his earlier views on the benefits of racial separation.

    He was killed at New York’s Audubon Ballroom while preparing to deliver a speech. Three members of the Nation of Islam were convicted in the shooting.

    Five decades later, the Audubon is long gone and the building now houses a bank, a restaurant and Columbia University offices. It also is home to the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center, set up by the activist’s late wife and six daughters.

    Malcolm X’s eldest daughter, Attalah Shabazz, was a schoolgirl in 1965 when she witnessed her father’s death. “I was watching it as it all happened,” she said.

    She remembers her father as “one of those persons you wait for all day to share that special something.”

    Since then, Attalah has worked to recast the image of her father, who critics have said rejected non-violence as a strategy, in contrast with the approach championed by Martin Luther King Jr., the leader to whom Malcolm X is most often compared.

    “Malcolm Shabazz is a whole man, not excerpt periods of his life,” she said. “I would never suggest that my father would want the revolutions of today to have to be violent.”

    The complexity of Malcolm’s views has become more apparent in recent years as researchers revisit his speeches, said Monica L. Miller, an associate professor of English and African Studies at Barnard College.

    “He had always in some forms linked up the struggle of African Americans to people in the world,” she said. “It became more an emphasis after he left the Nation and started traveling extensively.”

    Still, she said, “the violent nature of his death seemed to confirm what people thought about him.”

    On Saturday, the Shabazz Center will host a ceremony marking the anniversary of Malcolm X’s death. Delroy Lindo, an actor best known for his roles in films by director Spike Lee, will recite a eulogy first delivered by actor Ossie Davis at Malcolm X’s funeral.

    This is the telegram MLK sent Malcolm X’s wife after her husband’s assassination

    In it, King wrote, “While we did not always see eye to eye on methods to solve the race problem, I always had a deep affection for Malcolm and felt that he had the great ability to put his finger on the existence and root of the problem.”
    The complex relationship between two Civil Rights leaders

    That telegram was the coda to the complex relationship between two civil rights leaders who did not agree on how the fight for racial equality should be waged — King was known for his dedication to strictly non-violent resistance, while Malcolm X’s philosophy was that equal rights should be obtained by “any means necessary.”

    But that doesn’t mean Malcolm X didn’t try to work with King in his own way. In 1963, he invited King to speak at a rally in New York City, to speak to the group “before the racial powder keg explodes.” A year later, Malcolm X sent King a telegram offering what was surely a much more aggressive form of resistance to the Ku Klux Klan than King was comfortable with:

    [telegram]

    It’s common to view Malcolm X entirely in opposition to King. However, in a 1988 interview, King’s wife Coretta Scott King lent a more complete perspective to the pair and their relationship, which she implied would have flourished if they had lived longer:

    I think they respected each other. Martin had the greatest respect for Malcolm and he agreed with him in, and, in terms of the feeling of racial pride and the fact that Black people should believe in themselves and see themselves as, as lovable and beautiful. The fact that Martin had had a strong feeling of connectedness to Africa and so did Malcolm. Ah, I think if he had lived, and if the two had lived, I am sure that at some point they would have come closer together and would have been a very strong force in the total struggle for liberation and self determination of Black people in our society.

    They were both killed at age 39.

    MALCOLM TAUGHT ME:
    Reflections on X

    As people across the world commemorate the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, EBONY asked some of our favorite thought leaders to reflect on how “our Black shining prince” impacted their worldview, cultural identity and work:

    “Malcolm died advocating for teenaged, single Black mothers. He died for not remaining silent about the abuse of Black girls.” -dream hampton, writer/activist/educator

    “The words of Malcolm X, constantly remind me to pay attention to who loves me. Not superficially. Not when it’s convenient. But when it is necessary, affirming, truthful, and unconditional.” -Cheeraz Gormon, activist/poet

    “Malcolm was intentional about putting white supremacy on trial, at every juncture, and he did it so unapologetically.” -Cherrell Brown, activist

    “He taught me what it meant to publicly be a work in progress, to publicly admit when you were wrong, all in a lifelong effort to be the best person he could be for his people, his family, and himself. I take him with me everywhere I go.“-Rembert Browne, writer

    “I remember the first time I heard Brother Malcolm’s speech when he asked, “Who taught you to hate yourself?” I was 15. For me, there was a healing in his truth-telling. His words gave me permission to always call it as I see it. And without apology. “-Yaba Blay, scholar/author

    “Malcolm’s journey to Africa reminds me that we all need space for the type of black imagination that can fuel our political work.“-Darnell L. Moore, activist/writer

    “Fearless in his love of blackness, Malcolm pushed us to think deeper about the terror of The American Dream. He dared to tell our truth.” -DeRay Mckesson, activist

    “As a Black man, Malcolm X was one of my first glimpses into what it meant to be proud of your Blackness on your terms; as a storyteller, his book taught me the value in honesty and owning your truth, no matter how messy it might look in the rear view mirror.”-Michael Arceneaux, writer

    “More than anything, Malcolm X taught me that the oppression we face as Black people isn’t a matter of injustice but rather a violation of international Human Rights.”-Shantrelle P. Lewis, curator

    “I did a 10 page book report on The Autobiography of Malcolm X when I was 12 years old. That was the catalyst for the social justice work I do today.” -Tiq Milan, writer/activist

    “Change is revolutionary by nature and Malcolm’s transformation serves a lasting testament that we as people are not resigned to our character flaws or personal misfortunes. Your world is a microcosm of our world and they shift accordingly as well.” -DonWill, musician/actor

    “‘By any means necessary’–be ready to do what’s necessary for your people to have the means to live, thrive, and dream. [That] is how Malcolm X impacted my life.” – T-Dubb-Oh, activist/rapper

    “Malcolm X. helped me understand that Black Love is the greatest weapon we have in the fight against White supremacy.” -Feminista Jones, writer/activist

    “The more I learned the truth about Malcolm X, the more I began to love myself. His unwavering courage is how I attempt to show up in the world and in my work.” -Wade Davis, former NFL player/Executive Director, You Can Play Project

    “Malcolm wasn’t perfect, but he strived to be, and do, better—to be his best possible self for his people. That is the true worth of a freedom fighter.” -Jason Parham, writer/editor

    “Malcolm X’s life taught me that being angry about injustice is an opportunity to use my voice to speak out and use my gifts to spark change.”-Ebonie Johnson Cooper, philanthropist

    “Watching the Malcolm X film as a child let me see that other Black people were proud to be Black outside of my family. Malcolm made it real for me to be extremely proud of who I am and my melanin.”-Johnetta Elzie, activist

    “The moment I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I was convinced that Malcolm X was the most brilliant human being I had ever encountered. He changed my idea of Blackness, my idea of what it takes to fight for ourselves, and our loved ones. He changed me. “ -Patrise Marie Cullors, artist, organizer, freedom fighter

    “Malcolm gave me the language to recognize and process the daunting system of White supremacy. I had always been taught about racism and our struggle for freedom but Malcolm X was the first historical figure that I literally felt in my gut because he was brutally honest—about his childhood hunger, his parental loss, his illegal hustles, his time in prison, his religious development, his hatred of Whiteness and his shifting perspective. He was fearless yet utterly human. And he was just so real.” Akiba Solomon, writer/editor

    “Malcolm X taught me that my power is directly related to the knowledge I hold and the freedom of my imagination.” – Ashley Yates, activist

    “Reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as suggested to me by a White teacher at my all-White school, made me feel unapologetically Black.”-Richelle Carey, journalist/anti-domestic violence activist

    “‘By any means necessary.’ This quote from Malcolm X reminds me of the dedication to freedom demonstrated by those that came before me, what is demanded of us today, and what future generations must never forget.”- Souleo, curator/columnist

    “Malcolm X made me reconsider identity – from the names we are given to the categories society places us in. The first time I heard ‘Who Taught You to Hate Yourself?’ – it was electrifying and sparked so many questions in my mind, so many things I had never thought about seriously before. Malcolm X sparked critical thinking and self awareness in me, tools that impacted my life and my work beyond measure.” Patrice Grell Yursik, creator, Afrobella[dot]com

  63. rq says

    Malcolm X remembered on 50th anniversary of his murder

    About 300 people converged to hear remarks from one of Malcolm X’s six daughters, Ilyasah Shabazz, as well as elected officials. The ceremony was held at the Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center, formerly known as the Audubon Ballroom.

    A blue light shone onto the floor in the exact spot where he was killed. A mural with images of Malcolm X adorned a wall.
    […]

    By the time he died, the Muslim leader had moderated his militant message of black separatism and pride, but was still a passionate advocate of black unity, self-respect and self-reliance. Three members of the Nation of Islam were convicted of murder in his death. He had repudiated the Nation of Islam less than a year earlier.

    In an interview with The Associated Press on the eve of the anniversary observance, Shabazz said she was pleased that the site is now a place for people to get a sense of empowerment.

    “One of the great things about Malcolm is that he redefined the civil rights movement to include a human rights agenda,” she said.

    “So while we are focusing on integrating schools, integrating housing and all these other things, Malcolm said that we demand our human rights ‘by any means necessary.’ And that means … that we have to address these problems — that we have to identify them and absolutely discuss them.”

    Tangentially related via truthiness in entertainment, harping on Selma. Why Hollywood won’t win an Oscar for history

    The problems with Selma

    The much-admired filmSelma has won the overwhelming praise of critics for its powerful portrayal of Martin Luther King, the bruising struggle for civil rights in the U.S. and the astonishing courage of those who risked their lives to counter vicious racism.

    Its main criticism is for making Johnson appear to be an opponent rather than backer of voting rights legislation and the Selma march, which Johnson suggested to King in the hope it would boost his campaign to win support for reform.

    But Reynolds — who knows King’s wife Coretta — is also unhappy with the film’s portrayal of the lifelong activist as an accessory to her husband who is “tearful” over his suspected infidelity and living “under a fog of fear” in segregation-era Alabama. A long stretch, she says, from the real Coretta’s steel-spined determination to campaign for racial equality no matter the consequences.

    Shallow history

    It’s not only personality that is digitally altered by films, but history itself. In an era of dwindling attention spans, and where reality shows are more celebrated than real events, few people bother to delve deeper into the historical records behind the biopics they see.

    In recent years, directors have strived to produce biopics with a greater sense of reality than, say, the towering portrayals in 1963’s Cleopatra. Ancient cities are no longer mocked up on the back lots of movie studios, and ethnic roles aren’t fulfilled by painting the faces of white actors. [Actually, these days they just put white actors and actresses into roles of colour.]

    But in film, verisimilitude isn’t everything, says Guardian contributor Ronald Bergan, president of the Federation of European and Mediterranean Critics.

    “One shouldn’t go to films for absolute accuracy. If it’s a good film it need not be bogged down in the details of life. If you really want to know someone’s life, get a good biography. For a feeling for the kind of life they led, go to film. Good directors take liberties.”

    They surely do take liberties, but I really can’t remember when the historical accuracy of movies was so emphasized. It’s a movie based on real-life events, why is accuracy such an important factor? And I really have problems with Selma always being brought up as the first offender in these lists (or so it seems), with American Sniper sort of a thrown-in ‘okay, this one too’. When I would say the second deserves the greater condemnation.
    After all, Selma is a movie about civil rights told from the perspective of a black director, a rare enough view. So it paints a famous white guy in a non-positive light – so what? Was Johnson an angel? I highly doubt it. And so many other historical figures get mistreatment-by-dramatization to make a better story, I don’t see why people should take issue with it in that particular instance. (Actually, I can see why, but I really, really hate the reason.)
    Re: Coretta’s portrayal, I suppose it’s an argument for having more well-rounded women characters in movies as a whole, or perhaps she just deserves an all-female-cast movie of her own, directed and written and produced by black women. But it’s funny how in so many other movies, nobody really complains about the wife-character being moved to the background. Or at least, not so openly. Annnnyway.
    Some more on a couple of other movies in the article, though they avoid discussion of The Theory of Everything, is that one supposed to be 100% historically accurate?

    And because all black lives matter, but some fall off the radar: As Boko Haram grows stronger, Nigeria prepares for vote

    They are still missing.

    #BringBackOurGirls was pleaded from the United Nations to the red carpet, from Michelle Obama to the Pope, but the Twitter activism and all the attention it garnered didn’t help.

    If anything, Boko Haram, the group that kidnapped and enslaved 276 young women in Nigeria 10 months ago, has only gotten stronger.

    Nigeria’s elections, originally scheduled for Feb. 14, were postponed until March 28, ostensibly to give President Goodluck Jonathan’s government time to improve security.

    But the delay was met with allegations of political interference, as Jonathan is in a tight race against opposition candidate Muhammadu Buhari, who is from the northeastern region where Boko Haram is strongest.
    […]

    Boko Haram’s rise to power, from a small group of disenfranchised Muslim men from Nigeria’s north to one of the most virulent terrorist groups today, began in 2009 but has accelerated dramatically.

    Since the April kidnappings in the town of Chibok, other schools have been burned, dozens more people abducted, mosques and market places bombed, villages razed.

    In January, Boko Haram militants stormed the town of Baga, killing with impunity. Hundreds were murdered — possibly as many as 2,000. The little-noted attack took place the same week that 17 people were killed in Paris.

    If the number of Boko Haram victims is numbing, then there is this: On Jan. 10, a young girl walked into a crowded market in Maiduguri with explosives strapped to her body. She was no more than 10 years old, witnesses said.

    Unlike the fights against other terrorist groups, complicated by intractable regional conflicts, the fight against Boko Haram should be more straightforward.

    So why is it not?
    […]

    Meanwhile, Boko Haram has carved out what analysts are now calling “Africa’s Islamic State,” which is about the size of Belgium.

    “They have had the space to get funding, to kidnap, travel, to get logistical help from other groups,” says Nigerian analyst Atta Barkindo.

    “They’re able to recruit young people who may never get any help from the Nigerian government and Boko Haram is able to pay them,” says Barkindo, adding they gain more foot soldiers and finances in every town they overtake.

    Barkindo says Nigerian soldiers combating Boko Haram have complained privately about the lack of support and resources — instances where they are left without weapons, ammunition and fuel.
    [..]

    But talk is rarely about rescuing the kidnapped girls anymore. Fifty-seven have managed to escape but it is believed 219 are still being held.

    They continue to haunt Nigeria. Until the girls are rescued, Rotimi Olawale wants to keep it that way. Every day, for about two hours as the sun is setting, he demonstrates in Nigeria’s capital, as part of a diverse group, Bring Back Our Girls. “We thought it would take one or two weeks,” he said in a telephone interview from Abuja this week.

    In the beginning, thousands came to protest. Now, there are about 60, with as many as 90 on the weekends.

    “Sometimes we have parents of the girls come from Chibok, others come who have been victims of terror and they share their stories,” he said.

    Olawale is from Nigeria’s southwest and did not know the kidnapped girls, although he has come to know their families. “I am not from that region but we need to take a stand as a nation, as citizens, united.

    “We will not allow this to be swept under the carpet. We need to keep pressure on.”

    Oh, and another entertainment aside, the Toronto Star wrote about Mo’Nique, too: Mo’Nique ‘blackballed’ by Hollywood after Oscar win.

  64. rq says

    #MUBB #MarquetteDay #BlackLivesMatter #WeAreMarquette @BMOHBC @MarquetteU @VillanovaU @mutribune @journalsentinel

    Editorial: Grand juries don’t need to be so secretive

    New York’s top judge has just come out in favor of two provocative changes to the secretive grand-jury process — ideas that should get the utmost attention in Albany.

    In the aftermath of several dismaying and deadly incidents involving civilians and police, Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman is suggesting courts release transcripts and documents from the closed-door proceedings if the grand jury does not indict. A judge would have the authority if reveal documents deemed in the public interest.

    Further, he says it would make sense for a judge to be present during grand jury proceedings if the matter involves a violent incident between civilians and police.

    Lippman’s suggestions are positive because they would promote a more open, responsible government, and help bridge the alarming gap of distrust that has developed in recent years.

    In one instance, a New York City grand jury declined to indict a white police officer in the case of Eric Garner, a 43-year-old unarmed black man who died in July in a police chokehold. This came after national debate regarding a white officer in Ferguson, Mo., who wasn’t indicted in the August shooting death of black teenager.

    But the death count didn’t end there. Two New York City police officers subsequently were killed in cold blood, gunned down by a man with criminal record, a history of mental instability and an apparent deranged vengeance for what happened in Ferguson.

    New York’s leaders have been focusing on numerous improvements for the Empire State — actions that could not only better protect suspects but police officers too. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has suggested equipping police officers with body cameras, bolstering funds for bulletproof vests for officers and installing bulletproof glass in patrol cars in high-crime areas. Recruiting more minorities into law enforcement positions makes sense as well.

    So does Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s push for more authority to investigate and prosecute police officers involved in altercations with civilians. Local district attorneys have close working relationships with their local law enforcement; it’s the nature of their jobs. Appointing special prosecutors or the attorney general’s office in cases involving police officers would be a good way to ensure objectivity and avoid even the appearance of impropriety.

    The state has a lot to consider here. In the last few months, plenty of suggestions have been made to improve both the protection of police and citizens. A massive effort must be made to ratchet down emotions and restore faith in the system.

    OPINION: Black Panthers redux offers untold tales

    This most recent incarnation of the Black Panther Party emerged recently at the opening of Documentary Fortnight 2015, the Museum of Modern Arts’ annual showcase of documentaries.

    The movie, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, is the latest work of Stanley Nelson, himself something of a revolutionary. Nelson’s films — eight of which have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival — probe the soft underbelly of America’s lingering race problem. From his examination of the Jonestown massacre, the murder of Emmett Till and the 1964 Mississippi voter registration drive, Nelson’s works shine a light into the dark places that few other filmmakers venture.

    In his latest work, Nelson doesn’t rewrite history so much as he reveals a parallel story of a Black Panther Party that was more complex — and well-intended — than was portrayed during the group’s tumultuous history. In 1969, then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover branded the Black Panther Party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

    Nelson’s documentary tells the story of Hoover’s animus for the Black Panthers — and the organization’s bloody conflicts with law enforcement. Many of the clashes were precipitated by the FBI. Of the 295 actions taken by the FBI to “disrupt” black nationalist groups under COINTELPRO, 233 targeted the Black Panthers, a U.S. Senate committee reported in 1976.

    “I felt the story of the Panthers hadn’t really been told,” Nelson said shortly after the screening ended. “I think it was important in this film to find new things.”

    And he did. The documentary gives more than a fleeting glimpse of the role played by black women in the Black Panther Party. By the end of the 1960s, it reveals, a majority of the group’s members were women. Among others, it gives voice to Kathleen Cleaver, the influential wife of Eldridge Cleaver, the Panthers’ minister of information, and to Elaine Brown, who replaced him in that job.

    But it is the relevance of Nelson’s documentary to the recent spate of run-ins between blacks and cops that makes his theatrical resurrection of the Black Panther Party a compelling bit of filmmaking. In one scene, actor Marlon Brando decries the police shooting of a young member of the organization. “That could have been my son lying there,” Brando said, sounding eerily similar to what President Obama said on the heels of the killing of Trayvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman and wannabe policeman. “You know, when (Martin) was first shot I said that this could have been my son,” Obama said in July 2013.

    Nelson’s film tells us about the Black Panthers’ efforts to address some of the most daunting social problems in black communities around the country. At the height of its breakfast program, the group served 20,000 meals a week to poor children, it operated free health clinics and free food giveaway programs in inner city neighborhoods.

    Of course, Nelson’s film is not the whole truth of the Black Panther Party. But it is a large part of what has gone missing in the telling of its story. “Until the lions have their own historians,” the African proverb goes, “the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

    Bridge blocked by group protesting Pasco police shooting

    The newspaper says the demonstrators shut down traffic along the cable bridge as they slowly marched south toward Kennewick. Many motorists yelled and honked in support.

    The protesters then turned and marched back toward Pasco, blocking traffic heading north as the sun set on the Columbia River. The marchers shouted “We will not be silenced” and “We are all Antonio,” referring to Antonio Zambrano-Montes, who was killed by police. The protesters then left the bridge and rallied in Pasco.

    “This is about the right not to be shot by police because you have a rock in your hand,” said Alfredo Lamedo, 53, of Spokane, as he marched. “How many bullets were in that rock?”

    The Feb. 10 killing of Zambrano-Montes — captured on cellphone video by an onlooker — has sparked calls for a federal investigation. Police have said Zambrano-Montes did not have a gun or a knife.

    The killing was the fourth by law enforcement officers in Pasco in less than a year. It has roiled this fast-growing agricultural city of 68,000, where more than half the residents are Hispanic but few are members of the police force or the power structure.

    Business suffering for cafe at shooting scene

    Owner Vinicio Marin Gomez says business has dropped by 85 percent and he was forced to close the doors to Vinny’s Cafe & Bakery twice last week to cut costs.

    The fourth-generation baker believes people have been scared off by the shooting.

    “People used to come in before and have breakfast and eat lunch,” he said from behind the counter of his shop. “Now, zero. Zero.”

    The cafe is on Lewis Street and its front door is just feet from Zambrano-Montes was shot and killed by police. Marin Gomez opened the shop up for Zambrano-Montes’ family, hoards of media and city officials in the days following the shooting,

    However, few people actually bought Marin Gomez’s homemade pastries or hearty sandwiches, he said. He estimates he has lost thousands of dollars in the last two weeks.

    The store opened in December and business was good until the shooting, Marin Gomez said. It’s the first business the Pasco man has opened and he is hopeful the shooting will not force him to close down.

    Pasco police set up a GoFundMe account to help raise money to offset the drop in sales. By Saturday night the account had raised $365 out of the $25,000 goal. Police Chief Bob Metzger told the Herald local police donated $500 as well.

    Marin Gomez says he is hopeful people will come back despite protests and the constant flow of media outside the shop.

    Oscar’s First Black Winner Accepted Her Honor in a Segregated ‘No Blacks’ Hotel in L.A.

    On a February afternoon in 1940, Hattie McDaniel — then one of the biggest African-American movie stars in the world — marched into the Culver City offices of producer David O. Selznick and placed a stack of Gone With the Wind reviews on his desk. The Civil War epic, released two months earlier, had become an instant cultural sensation, and McDaniel’s portrayal of Mammy — the head slave at Tara, the film’s fictional Southern plantation — was being singled out by both white and African-American critics as extraordinary. The Los Angeles Times even praised her work as “worthy of Academy supporting awards.” Selznick took the hint and submitted the 44-year-old for a nomination in the best supporting actress category, along with her co-star, Olivia de Havilland, contributing to the film’s record-setting 13 noms.

    The 12th Academy Awards were held at the famed Cocoanut Grove nightclub in The Ambassador Hotel. McDaniel arrived in a rhinestone-studded turquoise gown with white gardenias in her hair. (Seventy years later in 2010, a blue-gown– and white-gardenia–clad Mo’Nique, one of 11 black actors to win Academy Awards since, was the only one to pay homage to McDaniel while accepting her best supporting actress Oscar for Lee Daniels’ Precious.) McDaniel then was escorted, not to the Gone With the Wind table — where Selznick sat with de Havilland and his two Oscar-nominated leads, Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable — but to a small table set against a far wall, where she took a seat with her escort, F.P. Yober, and her white agent, William Meiklejohn. With the hotel’s strict no-blacks policy, Selznick had to call in a special favor just to have McDaniel allowed into the building (it was officially integrated by 1959, when the Unruh Civil Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination in California).

    […]

    But Hollywood’s highest honor couldn’t stave off the indignities that greeted McDaniel at every turn. White Hollywood pigeonholed her as the sassy Mammy archetype, with 74 confirmable domestic roles out of the IMDb list of 94 (“I’d rather play a maid than be a maid,” was her go-to response). The NAACP disowned her for perpetuating negative stereotypes. Even after death, her Oscar, which she left to Howard University, was deemed valueless by appraisers and later went missing from the school — and has remained so for more than 40 years. Her final wish — to be buried in Hollywood Cemetery — was denied because of the color of her skin.

    McDaniel’s career was defined by contradictions, from performing in “whiteface” early on to accounts that her refusal to utter the N-word meant it never made it onscreen in Gone With the Wind. “We all grew up with this image of her, the Mammy character, kind of cringing,” says Jill Watts, author of Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood. “But she saw herself in the old-fashioned sense as a ‘race woman’ — someone advancing the race.” Adds Mo’Nique: “That woman had to endure questions from the white community and the black community. But she said, ‘I’m an actress — and when you say, “Cut,” I’m no longer that.’ If anybody knew who this woman really was, they would say, ‘Let me shut my mouth.'” […]

    Said McDaniel in 1944 about her disappointing prospects following her Oscar win, “It was as if I had done something wrong.” Selznick’s first move had been to dispatch her on a live, movie-palace tour as Mammy, which played to half-filled houses. But he saw less and less use for his typecast star, and Warner Bros. eventually bought out her contract.

    Even after World War II, she continued to play underwritten maid parts in such films as 1946’s Song of the South, Walt Disney’s adaptation of the Uncle Remus stories, now considered a rare racist blot on the studio’s legacy. In her final years, McDaniel found success on the radio, taking over in 1947 from Bob Corley — a white voice actor who mimicked an African-American woman — as the title character in Beulah, a hit comedy series about a live-in maid. It was the first time an African-American woman starred in a radio show, earning McDaniel $1,000 a week. She was cast in the TV version of Beulah in 1951 but shot only six episodes before falling ill. She died Oct. 26, 1952, of breast cancer. She was 57.

  65. rq says

    St. Louis County Prosecutor: ‘I’m Pretty Sure All Lives Matter’

    McCulloch, an SLU alum, was invited to be the opening speaker at a discussion at the university called “Thin Blue Line: Policing Post-Ferguson.”

    “There’s no post-Ferguson,” student Christian Gordan, 22, told HuffPost as he demonstrated outside the SLU building. “Ferguson is still a city. There’s still a problem; there’s no post-anything.”

    Days before the event, SLU president Fred Pestello released a letter in response to scrutiny over inviting McCulloch. The letter insisted McCulloch’s presence would be beneficial to the conversation students need to have, saying, “One way to fulfill our mission is to expose members of the community to our academic world and to help our students gain a richer understanding of the societal challenges outside our classrooms.”

    Only a limited amount of registered participants and media members were allowed inside the private event. McCulloch began his presentation by discussing the procedures used in the Mike Brown grand jury process. In December, McCulloch admitted to calling a troubled witness to the stand to testify in front of the grand jury.

    In his speech, McCulloch said his job was “to see justice done,” and not solely to get an indictment of Wilson.

    Just 15 minutes into his speech, protesters stood up and pleaded to put Bob McCulloch on trial and began singing the “requiem for Mike Brown” song. In response to protesters chanting, “Black lives matter,” McCulloch said, “I’m pretty certain all lives matter,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

    Protesters were eventually escorted out of the courtroom by police officers. None were arrested. Meanwhile, back inside the courtroom, McCulloch told the audience the protesters had not used freedom of speech in a respectable way. “I’m always amazed when those who profess their rights to free speech won’t let anyone else speak,” the Post-Dispatch noted McCulloch saying.

    #BlackLivesMatter Activists Shut Down Emeryville Home Depot; Demand Surveillance Tapes Of Fatal Police Shooting

    Dozens of #BlackLivesMatter protesters forced Home Depot in Emeryville to close its doors for several hours Saturday.

    The group was demanding answers about the February 3 shooting death of Yuvette Henderson, an Oakland woman shot and killed by two Emeryville officers.

    Henderson was accused of shoplifting at Home Depot and trying to carjack motorists. Police said Henderson pointed a gun at them, but protesters don’t believe that. They want the store to release security tapes of the incident.
    #BlackLivesMatter activists block the entrance to Home Depot in Emeryville in protest of the Feb. 3 police shooting of Yuvette Henderson in the store parking lot.

    One protester told KCBS, “Home Depot has tapes of what happened both outside and inside the store and they are refusing to release them. We’re demanding that police forces, both private security and police forces on our street to stop terrorizing our people and stop militarizing our communities.”

    According to the organizers, Henderson was shot with three different weapons, one of which was an AR 15 semi-automatic rifle.

    Protesting in snow: End of Brandon Tate Brown rally. But clearly not the end.
    Happening right now. We are coming. We are ready. Tear it down. #BlackOutTour

    Valerie Smith of Princeton to become Swarthmore’s first African American president

    A Princeton dean and professor of literature and African American studies will lead Swarthmore College when the new academic year begins.

    The school announced Saturday that Valerie Smith, 59, would become the 15th president of the 150-year-old institution beginning July 1. She becomes Swarthmore’s first African American president.

    “I was really struck by the passionate commitment faculty, staff, and students have toward Swarthmore,” Smith said, ” . . . the level of deep intellectual engagement.”

    Smith expressed an interest in deepening Swarthmore’s interdisciplinary work and increasing the school’s ties with its neighbors.

    “I would hope to be able to enhance opportunity for engagement with the broader Swarthmore community, with the region, and the city of Philadelphia,” she said.

    Of Swarthmore’s 1,500 students, 6 percent are African American, while whites make up 43 percent of the student body.

    Smith comes to the school after recent years in which its students became leading voices in national debates over higher education’s social conscience and responsibilities toward victims of sexual misconduct. Swarthmore students were among those who filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Education that their school mishandled reports of sexual assault – making sexual misconduct on college campuses part of a national conversation.

    Since receiving a consultant’s report, Swarthmore has brought on additional staff, provided training for employees, and adopted an interim policy on the handling of sexual assault and harassment complaints.

    Smith declined to speak in depth on the issue, only saying the school had made “tremendous progress,” but acknowledging that work on the issue remains.

    Mia Ferguson, 21, who will graduate in May, is one of the leaders at Swarthmore on the issue of sexual violence.

    “I think it’s exciting to see someone who’s so passionate about her academic background and is speaking a lot about race and class, topics that haven’t been at the focus of what the college is doing the past few years if ever, really,” Ferguson said.

    Ferguson agreed the school was doing better addressing concerns about sexual misconduct, but said Swarthmore had not taken full advantage of an internal task force assembled to review issues of discrimination at the school. She said there remained a lack of communication among different groups on campus. She was hopeful Smith would improve that.

    “Her academic work speaks pretty strongly to social inequalities,” she said.

    UN calls for police torture reparations seem to have made no difference to the city #traintakeover #rahmrepnow
    Come to UC Berkeley NOW for a tribute to Malcolm X, 50 years after his assassination. 2050 VLSB. #MX50Forever – program in the pictures at the link.

  66. rq says

    Nice crowd for the screening. #BlackHomesMatter

    Earlier we demanded passage to reparations ordinance during the #Traintakeover #RahmRepNow
    “@EthosIII: TRAIN TAKEOVER,,, Demanding reparations for victims of CPD torture #ReparationsNOW #traintakeover ”

    DEVELOPING: Officer Involved Shooting At Trayvon Martin Memorial In Baltimore -@yvonnewenger. The story in tweets, no details at all, yet.

    Oh! And speaking of the Oscars, Oscars Protest Planned Over Lack Of Diversity

    Activist and political commentator Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, civil rights group Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable said they would demonstrate on Sunday before the televised ceremony.

    “We are calling for a boycott of Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony,” National Action Network political director Najee Ali said at a news conference. “We believe the Oscars needs more diversity within its membership.”

    The location of the Los Angeles demonstration has yet to be determined with police, Ali said.

    The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hands out the Oscars, does not disclose the demographic breakdown of its roughly 6,100 members, but has long been criticized for being predominately white and male.

    A 2012 investigation by the Los Angeles Times found Academy members were 94 percent white and 77 percent male. Members, who are selected for their work and recommended by existing members, had a median age of 62, the study said.

    This year’s nominations had no ethnic minority actors among the 20 nominees in all four acting categories, which spawned the trending Twitter hashtag “#OscarsSoWhite.”

    “It is very important that the Academy Awards and its leadership have a membership and a type of voting system that represents America,” Ali said.

    Notable minority exclusions this year include British actor David Oyelowo and director Ava DuVernay of Martin Luther King Jr. biopic “Selma,” which earned a best picture nomination.

    And the reason? They’re just white men who got into the Academy on merit. See this tweet: Fuck the Academy & its members’ horrible baby opinions via @pointfivekorean, see attached picture. I can’t seem to find the article it’s from at the moment, though.

  67. rq says

    Demo for Yvette Henderson has shut down the Home Depot where police killed her | check #justiceforYuvette for updates;
    Altar in memory of #YuvetteHenderson & in remembrance of #MalcolmX, connecting those dots. #Justice4Yuvette;
    5 mins left of 5 hr shutdown of Home Depot, length of time #YuvetteHenderson lay shot in the street #Justice4Yuvette;
    Walking down to join the last group blocking the doors #Justice4Yuvette.

    We’re getting started in :30 minutes!!! #hashtaglunchbagphl #hashtaglunchbag;
    Today | #HashtagLunchBag | #HashtagLunchBagATL

  68. rq says

    Highlights from #MalcolmX50 rally in #Lowell MA @deray, see picture, a list of black lives that matter.

    Black Primary School Students In Rhode Island Are 6x More Likely To Be Suspended Than White Peers

    According to the organization, “significant and persistent racial disparities exist” in Rhode Island’s education system — and elementary school students are not exempt. Between 2004-2012, 17,000 suspensions were issued in the state’s elementary schools. Although black students only received 28 percent of those suspensions, they make up 9 percent of the kids in that age group. On the flip side, white students were suspended 0.7 times less frequently than would be expected for their population size.

    Similar trends follow students into their high school years as well. There, black students are still two times more likely to be suspended.

    These disciplinary patterns set the stage for a racially uneven justice system in the state. Black males in the state are 9.3 times more likely than their white counterparts to spend time in juvenile detention. When looking at Rhode Island’s black population, there were “331.8 black arrests per 1,000 residents compared to just 36.3 non-black arrests.” In 2010 alone, 30 percent of the state’s prison system was black, even though black people only constitute 6 percent of the general population.

    Indeed, the impacts of harsh disciplinary actions in schools are well-known. Although the ACLU’s report did not explore student interactions with police, high suspension rates are still problematic.

    They put every black person in the Oscar commercial they could think of including Jack Black. Lol. Guilt much?? Haven’t checked youtube for it yet, though it sounds intriguing!!

    Here’s where “white” Americans have the highest percentage of African ancestry

    In a study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics in December 2014, researchers used the ancestry data compiled by the commercial genetic testing company 23and Me to measure the percentage of African ancestry of people who self-identified as white. It turns out that self-identified white people who live in the South have the highest concentrations of African DNA.

    In South Carolina and Louisiana — the states shaded the darkest green on the map above — researchers found that one in 20 people who called themselves white had at least 2 percent African ancestry. And in a lot of the South, about 10 percent of people who identified as white turned out to have African DNA.

    Some maps and charts at the link.

    11 ways race isn’t real

    The discussion surrounding the actress’s identity is just the latest example of how there’s no consensus when it comes to who should be called what — black, white, Asian, or Latino — in the United States. It’s a reminder that race is a social and political construct.

    Most people have heard that concept by now. But what does it actually mean?

    It means that racial categories are not real. By “real,” I mean based on facts that people can even begin to agree on. Permanent. Scientific. Objective. Logical. Consistent. Able to stand up to scrutiny.

    This, of course, does not mean that the concept of race isn’t hugely important in our lives. Although race isn’t real, racism certainly is. The racial categories to which we’re assigned, based on how we look to others or how we identify ourselves, can determine real-life experiences, inspire hate, drive political outcomes, and make the difference between life and death. But these important consequences are a result of a relatively new idea that was based on shaky reasoning and shady motivations. This makes the borders of the various categories impossible to pin down and renders today’s debates about how particular people should identify futile.

    The 11 items follow, incl. the fact that Americans embraced race to make slavery seem okay, that definitions of race can change on a whim, that sometimes European people of certain ancestries weren’t considered ‘white’, and a whole bunch basically saying people can define race for themselves. I’m not convinced by the article, mostly because even if it is an artificial construct, race and racial identity, at the moment, are so involved in shaping the world and individuals and how they live in the world that it’s hard to just say ‘oh hey it doesn’t exist’.

  69. rq says

    We know that the incident began inside Home Depot & we are demanding they #ReleaseTheTapes #JusticeforYuvette

    #Ferguson right now.

    How blacks were portrayed in cartoons 50 years ago vs. now. Progress, I would say.

    In the UK, Ex-UKIP councillor Rozanne Duncan: ‘No regrets’ over comments

    In the fly-on-the-wall documentary, Mrs Duncan was recorded as telling UKIP press officer Liz Langton Way: “The only people I do have problems with are negroes. And I don’t know why.

    “I don’t know whether there is something in my psyche or whether it’s karma from a previous life or whether something happened to me as a very, very young person and I’ve drawn a veil over it – because that sometimes happens, doesn’t it?

    “But I really do have a problem with people with negroid features.”

    She was forced out of UKIP when the party became aware of the comments.

    Mrs Duncan claimed there was a “hidden agenda” behind her expulsion and insisted there was nothing “racist or derogatory” in what she said.

    She said: “I don’t regret saying it. I don’t regret anything, that’s the truth.

    “I still honestly believe that what I said was never at any time racist or derogatory.

    “I used the word ‘negroes’ as you would do Asians, Chinese, Muslims, Jews. It’s a description, it’s not an insult – in the same way as you would say, ‘What do you mean by Jewish? Well, they belong to a community, they have got a certain faith, they have usually got noses that have got a bit of a curve to them, married women – if they are orthodox Jews – wear wigs.’ It’s description.”

    And in Ethiopia, Space Observatory Offers Ethiopia Pathway to Stars, Development

    Space technology is new to Ethiopia, but a lot is expected from two new telescopes that are part of Ethiopia’s development program. VOA’s Marthe van der Wolf reports.

    Video at the link. Go, Ethiopian space explorers!!

    Obama to designate 3 new national monuments, including Pullman District in Chicago

    The White House said Obama will be in his hometown Thursday to announce the Pullman National Monument.

    The neighborhood on the city’s South Side was built by industrialist George Pullman in the 19th century for workers to manufacture luxurious railroad sleeping cars. The neighborhood was crucial in the African-American labor movement.

    Obama also is expected to announce designation of Honouliuli National Monument in Hawaii, the site of an internment camp where Japanese-American citizens and prisoners of war were held during World War II; as well as Browns Canyon National Monument in Colorado, a 21,000-acre site along the Arkansas River popular for whitewater rafting.

  70. rq says

    Related: As many as 2,800 inmates to be moved from Texas prison

    Ed Ross, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, said the inmates who had taken control are “now compliant” but that negotiations were ongoing Saturday in an effort for staff to “regain complete control” of Willacy County Correctional Center.

    “The situation is not resolved, though we’re moving toward a peaceful resolution,” FBI spokesman Erik Vasys said Saturday evening.

    It wasn’t immediately clear what progress had been made through the negotiations, but Sheriff Larry Spence said there were no hostages involved in the standoff and only minor injuries reported. Spence said the inmates “have pipes they can use as weapons.”

    Management & Training Corp., the private contractor that operates the center for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, said about 2,000 inmates became disruptive Friday because they’re upset with medical services and refused to perform work duties.

    MTC spokesman Issa Arnita said in a statement that prisons officials have begun moving the inmates and that the process would continue into next week.

    Arnita said prison administrators met with inmates Friday to address their concerns but that the prisoners “breached” their housing units and reached the recreation yard. The Valley Morning Star reports fires were set inside three of the prison’s 10 housing units.

    Authorities say about 800 to 900 other inmates are not participating in the disturbance. The inmates being held at the facility, which is in far South Texas more than 200 miles south of San Antonio, are described as “low-level” offenders who are primarily immigrants in the U.S. illegally.

    “Correctional officers used non-lethal force, tear gas, to attempt to control the unruly offenders,” Arnita said in the statement.

    No inmate breached two perimeter security fences, and there’s no danger to the public, he said.

    The large Kevlar tents that make up the facility were described in a 2014 report by the American Civil Liberties Union as not “only foul, cramped and depressing, but also overcrowded.”

    The report said that inmates reported that their medical concerns were often ignored by staff and that corners were often cut when it came to health care.

    When 12 major magazines first put black people on their covers

    Over the decades, magazines have been flaky when it comes to featuring black people, or any people of color, on their respective and coveted covers. Though some might denounce this as a problem from the past, a rundown of 2014 fashion magazines shows how prevalent it still is. A lengthy report from the Fashion Spot of 44 major fashion magazines worldwide showed that out of 611 covers, people of color overall only made 119 appearances. About 60% of that group was black, the report finds.

    Black-centric mags like Ebony and Essence have combatted this uneven tilt by regularly featuring black cover stars. As powerful as their impact has been, it’s a big fight in a larger war.

    Let’s put that into perspective. Magazines like Vanity Fair only had two solo black women on the cover in the past decade: Beyoncé in 2005 and Kerry Washington in 2013. Jay Z nabbed a cover soon after Washington.

    In 2002, Halle Berry became only the fifth black woman ever to cover Cosmopolitan, a magazine that’s been around since 1886. And it took all the way until 1996 for GQ to feature a black woman on the cover (supermodel on the rise, Tyra Banks).

    You don’t have to look far in the past to see the magazine industry’s spotty history with diversity. We found the first time many major magazines put black people their covers. While this list is not exhaustive, we selected some of the most iconic covers, the moments that dropped jaws, sold millions of copies and landed a spot in history.

    Ranges from Times in 1930 to Paris Vogue in 1988.

    Black Brunch actions still happening: Lost Lakes Cafe. #blackbrunchseattle
    Capitol Hill. Seattle. #blackbrunchseattl
    #BlackBrunchSeattle on the move again this morning in Cap Hill!

  71. rq says

    Update on the shooting at the Trayvon Martin memorial:

    Police are investigating an officer involved shooting at Riggs and Freemont.

    The suspect is listed as critical but stable, according to CBS Baltimore.

    The altercation occurred during a traffic stop and the suspect was tased and then shot. It’s not clear what led to the shooting.

    Same link as above.

    Brilliant, sad, spot-on. Mad Magazine, as relevant as ever. Credits: Desmond Devlin/Richard Williams/Norman Rockwell.

    Ta-Nehisi Coates vs Shelby Steele Reparations Debate This Week Abc

    on this week abc with george stephanopoulos Ta-Nehisi Coates and Shelby Steele debate Reparations abc news, ta-nehisi coates defends calls for reparations while shelby steele pretty much says let things be as they are

    And a screenshot of Coates’ reaction: I think we all had the same reaction when hearing Shelby Steele say we shouldn’t stop racial income inequality. Side-eye and a half.

    Oh, goodbye, history. Oklahoma Lawmakers Vote Overwhelmingly To Ban Advanced Placement U.S. History

    Oklahoma Rep. Dan Fisher (R) has introduced “emergency” legislation “prohibiting the expenditure of funds on the Advanced Placement United States History course.” Fisher is part of a group called the “Black Robe Regiment” which argues “the church and God himself has been under assault, marginalized, and diminished by the progressives and secularists.” The group attacks the “false wall of separation of church and state.” The Black Robe Regiment claims that a “growing tide of special interest groups indoctrinating our youth at the exclusion of the Christian perspective.”

    Fisher said the Advanced Placement history class fails to teach “American exceptionalism.” The bill passed the Oklahoma House Education committee on Monday on a vote of 11-4. You can read the actual course description for the course here.

    For other lawmakers, however, Fisher is thinking too small. Oklahoma Rep. Sally Kern (R) claims that all “AP courses violate the legislation approved last year that repealed Common Core.” She has asked the Oklahoma Attorney General to issue a ruling. Kern argues that “AP courses are similar to Common Core, in that they could be construed as an attempt to impose a national curriculum on American schools.”

    Advanced Placement courses are actually developed by a private group, the College Board, and are not required of any student or high school. They are the primary way that student can earn college credit in high school. Taking advanced placement course can save students money and are generally seen as a prerequisite to admission to elite colleges. A representative from the College Board called the claims by Fisher and others “mythology and not true.”

    In August last year, the Republican National Committee blasted the Advanced Placement U.S. History test, claiming it “deliberately distorts and/or edits out important historical events.” The RNC said a new framework for the exam “reflects a radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects.” The College Board countered that the framework had not been changed since 2012.

    What Caused the Crime Decline? , book.

    What Caused the Crime Decline? examines one of the nation’s least understood recent phenomena – the dramatic decline in crime nationwide over the past two decades – and analyzes various theories for why it occurred, by reviewing more than 40 years of data from all 50 states and the 50 largest cities. It concludes that over-harsh criminal justice policies, particularly increased incarceration, which rose even more dramatically over the same period, were not the main drivers of the crime decline. In fact, the report finds that increased incarceration has been declining in its effectiveness as a crime control tactic for more than 30 years. Its effect on crime rates since 1990 has been limited, and has been non-existent since 2000.

    More important were various social, economic, and environmental factors, such as growth in income and an aging population. The introduction of CompStat, a data-driven policing technique, also played a significant role in reducing crime in cities that introduced it.

    The report concludes that considering the immense social, fiscal, and economic costs of mass incarceration, programs that improve economic opportunities, modernize policing practices, and expand treatment and rehabilitation programs, all could be a better public safety investment.

    pdf downloadable at the link.

  72. rq says

    Thomas “Vocab” Hill, @ Busboys and Poets

    Performing an original piece titled “War” at Busboys and Poets 5th and K Washington, DC

    A woman named Nicole held Shantel Davis as the life left her body. And Shantel said, “Call the ambulance. Please don’t let me die.”
    The story: Unarmed woman, 23, shot dead by Brooklyn cop was on attempted murder rap

    Shantel Davis, 23, took a bullet in the chest during a wild struggle with police after she tried to drive away from the smashup on Church Ave. and E. 38th St. in East Flatbush on Thursday, cops said.

    No gun was found on Davis. Her rap sheet — which included robbery and drug busts — shows she was no stranger to run-ins with the law.

    Davis was due in court Friday on charges stemming from an attack on April 23, 2011 — when she and a band of brutes allegedly held a man hostage as they robbed his Clarendon Road apartment, court papers show. […]

    The two plainclothes officers — who sources identified as Detective Phillip Atkins, 44, and Police Officer Daniel Guida, 27 — began to follow Davis in their unmarked car as she sped through a series of red lights before she crashed, cops said.

    Davis was driving a 1998 Toyota Camry that she allegedly stole the week before. Armed with a pistol — and just a block away from her E. 52nd St. home — Davis approached the car’s owner, Vilma Craig, 57, and told her to hand over the keys, sources said.

    “She had the gun pointed at me,” Craig told the Daily News Friday. “She took my car, my pocketbook and everything in the car.”

    It was not clear whether the two cops knew the car was stolen when they approached Davis after she wrecked it.

    The 5-foot-6, 185-pound Davis slid into the passenger side of the car in an attempt to flee, cops said.
    After a brief struggle with Guida, Davis hopped back in the driver’s seat and tried to drive away.

    Atkins, holding his service-issued Smith & Wesson 9-mm., began to grapple with the frantic woman and tried to stop her from putting the car into gear.

    But Davis managed to put the car in reverse and hit the gas. During the struggle, Atkins fired one shot, hitting Davis in the chest and killing her.

    Atkins had never fired his weapon while on duty, cops said, but court papers show he has been the defendant in six federal lawsuits.

    But some say litigation is common for active officers like Atkins, who boasts more than 800 arrests during his 12-year career.

    “It’s unfair to measure a narcotic detective’s performance by the lawsuits that are filed against him,” said Michael Palladino, head of the Detectives’ Endowment Association. “Drug dealers are interested in one thing: making money, either by selling drugs or filing lawsuits.”

    Friends and neighbors described Davis as “a sweetie.”

    “She was sweet,” said friend Kelvia Joseph, 24. “She did her stuff on the side, but she was a good person.”

  73. rq says

    This is going to be the Oscar edition. Not exclusively, but mostly.
    Oscars protest stopped at the request of Selma director

    A scheduled protest against the Oscars was canceled at the request of Selma director Ava DuVernay, but organizers say they will continue to demand more diversity in Hollywood.

    The political director of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Action Network, Najee Ali, said in a statement that the group will “pursue instead a direct dialogue with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.” This year, all 20 of the acting nominees are white, and the show has been criticized for not recognizing DuVernay or the stars of the civil rights film Selma, the Los Angeles Times reports. “We salute all the artists being celebrated today at the Oscars while demanding an examination of the sidelining and underrepresentation of artists of color and women artists,” Ali said in the statement. “Art can change the world, and the world is more diverse than this year’s honorees.” Catherine Garcia

    Going to interlude already with Chicago elections. Re-election Bid Offers Test of Mayor’s Appeal to ‘Two Chicagos’

    Fast-forward four years and Chicago has gotten to know Mr. Emanuel. He oversaw the closing of nearly 50 public schools, and many of the schools were in minority neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. He clashed with the Chicago Teachers Union, which went on strike for the first time in a quarter-century. He presided through an increase in killings that included more than 500 homicides in one year, most of which took place on the South and West Sides.

    Seeking a second term, Mr. Emanuel is seen as the front-runner beside four lesser-financed, lesser-known candidates. Yet as he tries to win re-election next week, an essential worry for his campaign is how well he will do with black residents, who make up about a third of the city’s population of 2.7 million. To avoid a runoff in April, Mr. Emanuel must win at least one vote more than 50 percent on Tuesday — an outcome that is threatened by the possibility of a weak showing from alienated black voters.

    “It all seems to be just for the people who have money, not for the middle-income or the lower-income,” said Mary Anderson, a nursing educator from the South Side’s Chatham neighborhood. She said she supported Mr. Emanuel in 2011 but had yet to decide this time. […]

    “Nothing has happened in those communities that are desolate right now,” she said, adding of Mr. Emanuel: “He talks about a lot of plans. But who’s at the table? It’s still two Chicagos.”

    That dynamic may help explain why Mr. Emanuel was standing beside Bobby L. Rush, a black South Side congressman, the other day inside the Little Black Pearl, a youth art center. Mr. Emanuel stood close, touching Mr. Rush’s arm several times, as the congressman spoke to a crowd that included the pastor to Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor, as well as the mother of Hadiya Pendleton, the black teenager killed by gang-related crossfire not long after she performed in festivities to mark Mr. Obama’s last inauguration.

    “I offer my support to the mayor fully cognizant that a few will strongly disagree with this decision,” Mr. Rush said. “They will say, ‘Bobby, why?’ ” […]

    In an interview, Mr. Emanuel addressed the notion of two Chicagos. “ ‘The city that works’ has to work for everybody,” he said, alluding to a nickname for Chicago. “Have we made progress in areas that had developed for years? Yes. Is our work done? Absolutely not.”

    Mr. Emanuel said the decision to close so many schools had been extremely difficult. “But I did not want to be the mayor who says kids should have a better school and relegate them to underenrolled, underperforming schools because it was easier for me and harder for them the rest of their lives,” he said.

    He pointed to other choices that he said had helped the city — and its most struggling neighborhoods. “We also did full-day kindergarten, we did pre-K universal, we turned the community colleges into a career and a job builder rather than a repeat of your high school years, which is why we doubled enrollment,” he said.

    For a city accustomed for the better part of a half-century to having someone named Daley at its helm, Mr. Emanuel, 55, has made himself at home with uncanny speed and apparent ease. After winning a legal fight over whether he had lived in Chicago long enough to run for mayor, Mr. Emanuel captured more than 55 percent of the vote in 2011, sidestepping a runoff. […]

    In the end, Mr. Emanuel’s competition in Tuesday’s nonpartisan election reads like a tour of Chicago’s neighborhoods. Jesus Garcia, a Mexican-American county board member known as Chuy, was endorsed by Ms. Lewis and the teachers’ union, which is again starting negotiations over a new contract. Willie Wilson, a black businessman, boasts about his lack of experience in politics. Bob Fioretti, a white alderman with Polish and Italian roots, portrays himself as a rare voice of independence. William Walls III, once an aide to Mayor Washington, is a perennial candidate.

    Mr. Emanuel has raised about $13 million since 2012, more than his opponents combined, and his ads are filling the airwaves. A Chicago Tribune investigation concluded that more than half of his top donors received some sort of benefit from City Hall — just the sort of finding that has stuck Mr. Emanuel with a nickname alluding to wealth: “Mayor 1 Percent.”

    Still, a Chicago Tribune poll published on Tuesday showed Mr. Emanuel ahead, with 45 percent support — not enough to avoid a runoff, but 18 percent of voters in the survey said they were still undecided. And Mr. Emanuel’s approval ratings among black voters appeared greatly improved from just six months ago; this time, about a third of those polled said they disapproved of his performance.

    Mr. Emanuel has received endorsements from The Chicago Sun-Times and The Tribune, and he was backed last week by The Chicago Defender, a traditionally black newspaper.

    Darius Shannon, who lives on the South Side, said Mr. Emanuel had won his vote. His street was swiftly swept after a blizzard hit the city a few weeks back, he said, and the school closings were unavoidable. “To build a better city, some things have to be moved around,” Mr. Shannon said.

    But Tracey Lasenby of South Shore has yet to decide. “Look, I believe that the city has become a great tourist destination under Mr. Emanuel,” she said. “But what’s the sense of building a park if my child can’t play in it because they’re going to get shot? What’s the use?”

    Missouri Lawmakers Propose Banning Public From Viewing Footage From Police Body Cams

    The bill, introduced by Sen. Doug Libla (R), would make all footage recorded by police officers, including dashboard and body cameras, exempt from the state’s open records law, and would prevent the state from requiring that police departments purchase and use body cameras. As the law currently stands, the public is able to request police videos through Missouri open record, or Sunshine, law.

    Missouri’s Attorney General Chris Koster (D) also recently supported restricting public access to footage recorded on body cameras.

    Supporters of Libla’s bill, including Sheldon Lineback, the executive director for Missouri Police Chiefs Association, cited privacy concerns. “Individuals may make mistakes and those mistakes never come off the Internet,” she argued.

    Others, however, are less convinced.

    The ACLU’s Sarah Rossi called it an “end run around Missouri’s Sunshine law,” which she claimed already enables law enforcement to withhold evidence from active police investigations.

    “By not making [the videos] public record, it seems useless to have [body cameras] when the purpose is to create a system to go back and see what’s going on,” a St. Louis resident member of the Don’t Shoot Coalition told the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

    Debate about the Missouri bill underscores a national conversation about the deployment of body cameras and their potential to curb police brutality. Indeed, some research has shown that cops are often on their best behavior when they’re being watched — in Rialto, California, for example, complaints against police dropped 88 percent after officers were required to wear cameras.

    However, video footage of police misconduct doesn’t always guarantee that justice will be served. In December, a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, who was filmed using an illegal chokehold on Eric Garner. Last year, a jury acquitted two former police officers for beating a homeless schizophrenic man to death, despite harrowing video showing the man pleading for help and asking for his father. And in 2013, a Chicago police officer dodged charges for fatally shooting an unarmed man, in spite of footage that showed the officer firing 16 times while standing over the victim’s body.

    Additionally, problems can arise when cops intentionally tamper with recording equipment or use the cameras selectively. As ThinkProgress previously reported, officers in Los Angeles disabled antennas on multiple vehicles before patrolling low-income neighborhoods.

    Still, the technological deficiencies won’t be solved by walling off public access to body camera recordings, opponents of the Missouri bill contest.

    Oscars in history: Oscar’s First Black Winner Accepted Her Honor in a Segregated ‘No Blacks’ Hotel in L.A.

    The 12th Academy Awards were held at the famed Cocoanut Grove nightclub in The Ambassador Hotel. McDaniel arrived in a rhinestone-studded turquoise gown with white gardenias in her hair. (Seventy years later in 2010, a blue-gown– and white-gardenia–clad Mo’Nique, one of 11 black actors to win Academy Awards since, was the only one to pay homage to McDaniel while accepting her best supporting actress Oscar for Lee Daniels’ Precious.) McDaniel then was escorted, not to the Gone With the Wind table — where Selznick sat with de Havilland and his two Oscar-nominated leads, Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable — but to a small table set against a far wall, where she took a seat with her escort, F.P. Yober, and her white agent, William Meiklejohn. With the hotel’s strict no-blacks policy, Selznick had to call in a special favor just to have McDaniel allowed into the building (it was officially integrated by 1959, when the Unruh Civil Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination in California). […]

    “Every picture and every line, it belonged to Hattie. She knew she was supposed to be subservient, but she never delivered a subservient line,” says MaBel Collins (center), 77, partner of Edgar Goff, McDaniel’s grandnephew. McDaniel’s descendants were photographed Feb. 13 at The Culver Studios in Culver City, a few yards from Gone With the Wind producer David O. Selznick’s former offices and where most of the movie was filmed.

    A list of winners had leaked before the show, so McDaniel’s win came as no shock. Even so, when she was presented with the embossed plaque given to supporting winners at the time, the room was rife with emotion, wrote syndicated gossip columnist Louella Parsons: “You would have had the choke in your voice that all of us had.” The daughter of two former slaves gave a gracious speech about her win: “I shall always hold it as a beacon for anything I may be able to do in the future. I sincerely hope that I shall always be a credit to my race and the motion picture industry.”

    But Hollywood’s highest honor couldn’t stave off the indignities that greeted McDaniel at every turn. White Hollywood pigeonholed her as the sassy Mammy archetype, with 74 confirmable domestic roles out of the IMDb list of 94 (“I’d rather play a maid than be a maid,” was her go-to response). The NAACP disowned her for perpetuating negative stereotypes. Even after death, her Oscar, which she left to Howard University, was deemed valueless by appraisers and later went missing from the school — and has remained so for more than 40 years. Her final wish — to be buried in Hollywood Cemetery — was denied because of the color of her skin.

    McDaniel’s career was defined by contradictions, from performing in “whiteface” early on to accounts that her refusal to utter the N-word meant it never made it onscreen in Gone With the Wind. “We all grew up with this image of her, the Mammy character, kind of cringing,” says Jill Watts, author of Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood. “But she saw herself in the old-fashioned sense as a ‘race woman’ — someone advancing the race.” Adds Mo’Nique: “That woman had to endure questions from the white community and the black community. But she said, ‘I’m an actress — and when you say, “Cut,” I’m no longer that.’ If anybody knew who this woman really was, they would say, ‘Let me shut my mouth.’” […]

    Said McDaniel in 1944 about her disappointing prospects following her Oscar win, “It was as if I had done something wrong.” Selznick’s first move had been to dispatch her on a live, movie-palace tour as Mammy, which played to half-filled houses. But he saw less and less use for his typecast star, and Warner Bros. eventually bought out her contract.

    Even after World War II, she continued to play underwritten maid parts in such films as 1946’sSong of the South, Walt Disney’s adaptation of the Uncle Remus stories, now considered a rare racist blot on the studio’s legacy. In her final years, McDaniel found success on the radio, taking over in 1947 from Bob Corley — a white voice actor who mimicked an African-American woman — as the title character in Beulah, a hit comedy series about a live-in maid. It was the first time an African-American woman starred in a radio show, earning McDaniel $1,000 a week. She was cast in the TV version of Beulah in 1951 but shot only six episodes before falling ill. She died Oct. 26, 1952, of breast cancer. She was 57. […]

    In her last days, McDaniel threw a deathbed party, coincidentally attended by her grandnephew’s future life partner MaBel Collins, then 15, who recalls “people milling around, drinking, laughing. Guests would go in one or two at a time and visit with her. I had no idea who that dying movie star was until a couple years later, I saw Gone With the Wind> — and realized that was Hattie in the bed.”

    In her last will and testament, McDaniel left detailed instructions for her funeral. “I desire a white casket and a white shroud; white gardenias in my hair and in my hands, together with a white gard­enia blanket and a pillow of red roses,” she wrote. “I also wish to be buried in the Hollywood Cemetery,” today known as Hollywood Forever Cemetery. But the resting place of numerous showbiz types — including GWTW director Victor Fleming — had a whites-only policy. Hattie was buried at Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery, the first L.A. cemetery open to all races. In 1999, Edgar successfully lobbied to get a marble memorial to McDaniel placed at Hollywood Forever.

    McDaniel also specified what was to become of her Oscar, which an appraiser dismissed as having “no value” in an accounting of her estate. Despite working steadily until her death, McDaniel left the world in debt: Her belongings were valued at $10,336.47 (about $95,000 today), $1,000 less than what she was deemed to owe the IRS. The Oscar, she wrote, was to be left to Howard University, but the award went missing from the Washington, D.C., school during the early 1970s.

    In 2011, inspired in part by Mo’Nique’s Oscar-night tribute, W. Burlette Carter, a professor at George Washington Law School, undertook a yearlong investigation of the missing Oscar. Though the school was eventually cooperative, it never gave her permission to search its stacks. Carter, who says the Oscar would today be worth half a million dollars, dismisses one theory that it was tossed into the Potomac River by “angry protesting students” after Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination. She discovered that the Oscar never came to the school from McDaniel’s estate, but was gifted in the early 1960s by actor Leigh Whipper, a friend of Hattie’s from when she ran the Hollywood Victory Committee division that entertained black troops during World War II. The last time anyone remembers seeing the Oscar was 1972, when it was removed from a glass case in the school’s drama department, which has since been gutted. (Howard declined comment.) “It’s a sad story,” says Carter, “but this Oscar represents a triumph for blacks — because we can look back and see that things really are so much better now than they were at that time.”

    More of the actress’ history at the link, truly an astounding, astounding woman!

    ‘Selma’s Missing Epilogue: The Recent Dissolution Of The Voting Rights Act

    The final scenes of the 2014 film Selma, which depicts Martin Luther King Jr.’s struggle for federal voting rights legislation to protect African Americans in the South, leave viewers applauding, content with our nation’s civil rights progress after witnessing a concrete example of how a protest effected meaningful national change. But what the movie doesn’t provide is an update — a scene that flashes forward almost 50 years to show how the exact rights granted to blacks who marched across Alabama in demonstration have recently been eroded by our highest court and then by states across the country.

    The Golden Globe-nominated film stars the powerful David Oyelowo as King and depicts the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches which eventually led President Lyndon Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. While the film has been scrutinized for its depiction of Johnson as an obstructionist who had to be repeatedly persuaded by King to pass the landmark legislation, the overall takeaway from the film is the historic voting rights success caused by the activism of African Americans and other civil rights champions in Alabama.

    Though the entire film portrays just a few months of the mid 1960s, it’s a strong representation of how far the country has come from when Jim Crow laws including poll taxes and literacy tests prevented voting to the passage of the legislation which regulates elections and prohibits racial discrimination in voting. The radical Jim Crow laws are depicted early in the movie when Oprah Winfrey’s character is forbidden from registering to vote because she cannot name all of the regional judges in Alabama.

    The release of African American director Ava DuVernay’s film at the end of a year filled with racial tensions — from the shooting and subsequent protests in Ferguson to Eric Garner’s death in New York — makes the film especially poignant. But even more striking is how the very rights championed by King have been eroded since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 2013 which effectively struck down the heart of Johnson’s Voting Rights Act.

    The high court’s ruling in Shelby County v. Holder opened the doors for nine Southern states to change their election laws without federal approval. In the year and a half since the decision, courts have heard a number of cases about the constitutionality of newly passed voter ID legislation and other methods of voter suppression, while voters across the country have faced increased barriers to casting their ballots. […]

    In addition to voter ID laws, states have found other ways to restrict voting following the dismemberment of the VRA. In 2013, Florida officials attempted to purge thousands of people from the rolls — disproportionately Latinos — because of suspicions that they were not citizens. The state ultimately suspended the effort, but a similar initiative in Virginia was more successful.

    A number of states have also made efforts to shorten early voting periods and to eliminate same day registration — both actions that would have been illegal if the entire VRA was still in effect. Laws that disenfranchise felons also play a large roll in suppressing voters who are disproportionately African American.

    Even without restrictive legislation blocking them from the polls, African Americans in the South still turnout to vote in lower numbers than their white counterparts. The New York Times reported this week that based on voter registration data, the legacy of Jim Crow endures for older voters in the South who grew up under segregation. “The direct effects of Jim Crow may endure as long as the generation that grew up under its influence remains,” the Times said.

    In one impactful scene in Selma, a court ruling allows protesters to move forward with their third march after the first two had been blocked by state troopers instructed to act by Governor George Wallace. While the decision is given little screen time, its clear during the film that the court literally and figuratively cleared the road for the final successful march to take place.

    But with a current government where the highest court can invalidate the VRA, it’s hard to imagine a modern court that would take the same kind of action as the federal circuit did in 1965. As Brody said in the New Yorker, “Were such a case to arise in a Southern circuit of the federal court today, I wonder whether there’s a judge who’d see to the rights of mainly black protesters rather than to those of the authorities.”

    And quick preview from the Oscars: John Legend: “There are more black men under correctional control today than were under slavery in 1850.” Best Oscar speech ever! Patricia Arquette went with the ‘more equality for women’ line, but more on that later.

  74. rq says

    A closer look at the pay gap, in charts. It really is mostly charts. Also, it mostly looks at male-female comparisons, but also splits by race, so it’s interesting to see how that works out.

    FACT: @Oprah is the first black woman to be nominated as a producer. #Oscars2015

    #OscarsSoWhite a Mexican filmmaker wins for Best Picture and Sean Penn make a racist joke about it. Ridiculous.
    Yes, Sean Penn made a greencard joke on the grand stage. Uh-huh.

    Chris Pine Cries Through ‘Glory’ on Behalf of Us All. They show David Oyelowo (yes? they didn’t caption the picture, but it looks like him!) too. Here’s the performance itself: Watch John Legend and Common’s heartbreaking Oscar performance of Selma’s “Glory” – going to watch it later, but at least that link doesn’t show the tears of Chris Pine (incidentally and off-topic, MRA tears probably look something like that, too).

    It wasn’t easy to stand out on Oscar night — a night that featured technicolor cowboys, storm troopers, and Neil Patrick Harris singing and dancing. But Common and John Legend’s soaring and ultimately heartbreaking performance of “Glory” from the movie Selma did it.

    The song itself is a soaring marvel, flying on the wings of John Legends’s vocals. But there’s also a brutal, brilliant strength to it with Common’s rapping.

    There’s an added level of emotion to this performance. Selma, the movie in which “Glory” appears, was left out of the Best Director and Best Actor categories — a reminder that the Oscars still perpetually struggle with diversity.

    “Glory” ended up winning the Oscar for best original song on Sunday night.

    Okay, this is a long scroll-through, but here’s more on the song: The Oscar for best original song goes to “Glory” from “Selma,” as performed by John Legend and Common.

    John Legend and Common reduced the audience to complete silence (and some tears) as they delivered a joint acceptance speech for “Glory,” which won best original song.

    “ ‘Selma’ is now because the struggle for justice is now,” Legend said. “We know that the voting rights that they fought for 50 years ago is being compromised in this country today.”

    He went on to say the U.S. is the most incarcerated country in the world, as “there are more black men under correctional control today than were under slavery in 1850.”

    “People are marching with our song — we see you, we love you,” he said. “March on.”

    Backstage Common said: “I feel like to whom much is given much is required. The fact we have an opportunity to get to a stage like the Oscars. How could you not say anything. Beyond what we have done on this song, John has always made music about love, he’s been doing things about education for a long time. I feel it’s our duty to do it.”

    John Legend discussed process: “Common called me. He describe what they were looking for and gave me ideas for the title of the song. ‘Glory.’ That word really inspired me. My thoughts were that the song should sound triumphant but realize there is more work to do.”

    —

    John Legend and Common’s performance of “Glory” from “Selma” earned a rousing standing ovation of the crowd, while stars Carmen Ejogo and David Oyelowo cried in the audience. (A few camera pans to other sections of the crowd showed it was difficult to find a dry eye in the house, as Chris Pine was seen with a tear rolling down.)

    If you feel like you’ve seen them sing “Glory” pretty recently…well, you probably saw the Grammys a couple weeks ago. (Of course, then they had an intro by Beyoncé.) Regardless of what happens tonight, the song is already a winner this award season, as it picked up the best original song trophy at the Golden Globes.
    So that mentions Legend and the acceptance speech, more on that in a moment.

  75. rq says

    I borked something there, but the necessary link works, so no reposts.

    Oh, that last link also had this:

    “Birdman” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel” tied for most wins, with four Academy Awards apiece during the Oscars ceremony Sunday night. “Birdman” took home awards for best picture, director, for Alejandro González Iñárritu, cinematography and original screenplay. “Budapest” won Oscars for production design, costume design, original score and hair and makeup. That left “Boyhood,” a potential front runner, with just one award, for best supporting actress for Patricia Arquette. She gave an impassioned speech advocating for gender equality, which got plenty of applause, including some whooping from Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lopez.

    But she also had some backstage comments that wren’t as groundbreaking or positive.
    Patricia Arquette *invited* POC & LGBTQ folks into feminism as if we haven’t already been doing the work. Chile.
    Oh! And I found them, same Washington Post link:

    “To every woman who gave birth, to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights,” she announced. “It is our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America!” […]

    She continued the conversation backstage, reports The Post’s Geoff Edgers:

    “It is time for us … We don’t have equal rights for Americans. The truth is even though we sort of feel like there is, there are huge issues that are at play and really do affect women.

    It’s time for all the women in America, and the men who love women and all the gay people and people of color we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.”

    So, I have two questions: 1) do women who haven’t given birth, or who can’t give birth, do they still count? and 2) so should people of colour and gay people (who are obviously none of them women too) just drop all their other issues and help push white, straight women up? Because that’s kind of what it sounds like…

    Moving on to someone who said things right.
    John Legend is right: more black men are in correctional control now than enslaved in 1850

    It’s become a widely cited statistic, after the publication of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow in 2011 — which helped made mass incarceration a hot topic of discussion. But is it true? Yes, the basic numbers check out — although the stat is a little misleading.

    The key to this is the term “correctional control” — which doesn’t just refer to prisons, but to jails (for people who haven’t been convicted yet, or are serving short local sentences); parole (for people who’ve been released from prison but are still being supervised); and probation (supervision as an alternative to a prison sentence). In all, as of a 2009 report from the Pew Public Safety Performance Project, one in every 31 Americans is under one of these four types of “control.”

    So while there are fewer black men physically in prison today than there were in slavery in 1850, the addition of probation and parole brings it over the top.

    Here are the numbers:

    In 1850, there were 872,924 black men (16 or older) who were enslaved in the US, according to the Census.
    As of December 31, 2013, there were about 526,000 black men in state and federal prisons in the US.
    In 2013, there were about 877,000 black men on probation, and 280,000 black men on parole (according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics source cited by Politifact).
    The Bureau of Justice Statistics doesn’t break down jail populations by both race and gender, but 86 percent of all 730,000 jail residents in 2013 were male, and 36 percent were black. So it seems plausible that at least a couple hundred thousand black men are in jail.

    The totals: 1.68 million black men are under correctional control in the US, not counting jails. That’s over three times as many black men as were enslaved in 1850.

    Here’s why this is a bit misleading: there are more black men (and more people, generally) in the US now than there were a century and a half ago. In 1850, there were 3.6 million African Americans in the US (men and women), according to the Census; in 2010, there were 42 million. So a much larger share of the black male population was enslaved in 1850 than is under correctional control today.

    That doesn’t keep the statistic Legend offered from being true, or alarming. What’s even more alarming is the number of other statistics he could have offered to show the impact that mass incarceration has had on black men over the past few decades.

    And this, John Legend’s Oscar Speech About Rates of Black Correctional Control is Factually Correct

    There were a lot of topical acceptance speeches tonight. Best Supporting Actress Patricia Arquette spoke for wage equality for women, and Best Adapted Screenplay winner Graham Moore talked about when he attempted suicide at 16, and asked for anyone who’s ever thought about suicide and gone on living, to talk to a younger person in need. But it was Common’s plea for acceptance, and unity in fight’s for change, and Legend’s comparison of voting rights being taken away from people of color again—via incarceration—that will hopefully make it the speech that everyone remembers and marinates on tomorrow. […]

    Getting back to Legend’s statement—making sure access to the right to vote is kept—which is what the Selma march was for: 7% of the entire African American community is disenfranchised due to felon voting laws. In comparison, only 1.8% of all other races combined are disenfranchised in America due to felon voting laws.

    That extra 5.2% discrepancy is what makes it harder to breathe. And why Legend and Common’s performance and speech were the most important use of airtime in the Oscar telecast.

    Oh, someone looked at Patricia Arquette’s speech betttern I did. Oscars: Patricia Arquette follows call for wage equality with tone-deaf comment on race

    So far, so good. And in fact, Arquette does have a point about wage equality — according to the Institute for Women, the current wage gap won’t close until 2058.

    But about right here is where we have to stop cheerleading for Arquette — because, she appears to have veered into an unfortunate bit of feminist whitesplaining backstage in the press room. As PopSugar reported it, here’s what she said:

    It’s time for all the women in America, and all the men that love women and all the gay people and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.”

    Oy. The problem is that for “gay people” and “people of color” that whites have “fought for” to in turn fight for wage equality, they cannnot treat all women as a monolithic block. Wage equality still affects women of color disproportionately.
    […]

    The exact numbers may vary by analysis, but here’s some data from the 2012 census that backs up the gap. According to the American Association of University Women, in 2012, white, non-Hispanic women made just 78 cents on a white man’s dollar. For other groups, though, the picture was more grim: black women earned just 64 cents on a white man’s dollar, and Latinas clocked in the lowest, making 53 cents on the dollar.

    So yes, Arquette is right in that it’s time to talk about women earning less, and, as a corollary, winding up in careers that pay less. But to ask people of color to fight for white women — when they disproportionately shoulder even more of a wage gap — shows an unfortunate type of feminist myopia at best.

  76. rq says

    9 groundbreaking black poets who revolutionized the written word

    Numerous black poets have made waves in the literary world, from Gwendolyn Brooks, who in 1950 became the first black writer to win a Pulitzer Prize, to Maya Angelou, one of the foremost poets of the 20th century. Writers like Gil Scott-Heron and Amiri Baraka electrified the written word with their sociopolitical statements, while Audre Lorde and Nikki Giovanni wrote radical lines that addressed sexism and racism.

    These are just a few of the pioneering black poets who forged ahead, paving the way for writers that came after them. While this isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, these are nine poets you shouldn’t go any longer without reading.

    This Black History Month, take time to appreciate their work with these selections from classic poems.

    The list: Gil Scott-Heron, Audre Lorde, Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Rita Dove and Langston Hughes. With short excerpts in the photos at the link.

    Here’s some privilege. With humour. Natural Hair For White Girls

    While being white does have certain advantages in our society, it also has a lot of downfalls. Chief among them being the fact that the natural hair movement callously excludes us. We can’t simply refuse to shampoo and condition and get that look in the way that women of color can. This is the face and scalp of black privilege, and if we want a more cohesive society, we need to peel that black scalp back and take a look at the systems that oppress us. We need to acknowledge the fact that natural hair is a slap in the face to white women.

    The two black women I know – Acura and Delicious, coworkers of mine – come into the teachers’ lounge every day with a sense of confidence that I could only hope to one day fake. Where does that proud sista-girl disposition come from? It comes from their exotic manes. It comes from their springy locks of coiled defiance, shooting up towards the sky like the fists of black panthers. Their rejection of the patriarchy is perfectly expressed through those gravity defying strands of identity and culture – almost punctuating their visage like a million little exclamation points. Their style asserts their presence, and it’s brilliantly radiant, like a black moon eclipsing the sun, or a cartoon that smoked an exploding cigar. I always want to reach out and touch their hair, and I often do, feigning disgust and contempt as I hide my jealousy and admiration.

    But, how can I have it? How can I get that ethnic flavor? How can we, as white women, cast off the shackles of the patriarchy and achieve true beauty and agency through the power of natural hair? How can we join in and have a part of that look – the part that is naturally owed to us as women?

    Recipe follows, with directions, and the article ends with this paragraph:

    Take that black ladies, now it’s our turn to be Nubian queens! You’ll need to apply the home-made hair dye every week or so, and make sure you maintain a diet high in heavy metals to help offset the amount of ionizing radiation your hair is giving off. But rest assured, you’re now as liberated as women of color. You’ll never have to spend another dollar on cosmetics, and now you can join your sisters of color, hand in hand, lock in lock, in the never ending quest to smash the patriarchy. You go girl.

    Information website on Sharod Kindell with pictures, links, funding links, etc. That’s the man still not receiving adequate health care after being shot by cops and put in jail.

  77. rq says

    Edmund Winston Pettus—Confederate General, Ku Klux Klan leader, U.S. Senator, proud American.

    Revealed: Chelsea ‘racist chant suspect’ named as former Northern Ireland police officer who is now a director of HUMAN RIGHTS charity

    A former police officer and human rights activist has been named as one of the men involved in an allegedly racist incident on the Paris Metro last week involving Chelsea supporters.

    Richard Barklie, 50, from Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland was identified after the Metropolitan Police released stills of men they want to speak to in connection with the incident.

    Mr Barklie now works with human rights charity in Northern Ireland which helps people affected by the troubles. […]

    Tonight, Mr Barklie issued a statement through his lawyer in which he admitted involvement in an ‘incident’ that resulted in Souleymane Sylla being ‘unable to enter part of the train’.

    He said he had an account he wanted to provide to police that would explain the ‘context and circumstances’.

    Mr Barklie denied singing any racist songs; said he travelled to the game alone; insisted he did not know any of the other individuals captured on video footage of the incident; and said he has never been part of any ‘group or faction’ of Chelsea fans.

    The statement was issued by Belfast solicitor Kevin Winters.

    ‘We act on behalf of Mr Barklie identified as one of the people sought by authorities investigating an incident on the Paris Metro on 16/2/15 ,’ it said.

    ‘We contacted London Metropolitan Police today to advise that our client is happy to assist with inquiries.

    ‘Pending formal engagement with police, our client is anxious to put on record his total abhorrence for racism and any activity associated with it.

    ‘As someone who has spent years working with disadvantaged communities in Africa and India he can point to a cv in human rights work which undermines any suggestion he is racist.

    ‘Today a senior official in the World Human Rights Forum confirmed their support for him.

    ‘Mr Barklie is a Chelsea season ticket holder and has travelled to matches for over 20 years now without incident.

    ‘He travelled alone to the Paris St Germain match and has no knowledge whatsoever of the identities of the other people depicted in recent YouTube video releases. He wants to stress that he was not and never has been part of any group or faction of Chelsea supporters.
    As someone who has spent years working with disadvantaged communities in Africa and India he can point to a cv in human rights work which undermines any suggestion he is racist
    Solicitor Kevin Winters

    ‘He did not participate in racist chanting and singing and condemns any behaviour supporting that.

    ‘He accepts he was involved in an incident when a person now known to him as Souleymane S was unable to enter a part of the train.

    ‘He has an account to give to police which will explain the context and circumstances as they prevailed at that particular time.

    ‘In the meantime pending that, he wants to put on record his sincerest apologies for the trauma and stress suffered by Mr Souleymane.

    ‘He readily acknowledges that any judgement on the integrity of his apology will be kept in abeyance pending the outworkings of the investigation.

    ‘Given the extremely sensitive nature of the issues engaged we urge upon all media outlets to exercise as much restraint as possible when commenting on the case.

    ‘We accept on behalf of our client that public interest demands nothing but total indignation and condemnation from all media reporting but such reporting ought not to persist at the expense of undermining Mr Barklie’s right to a fair trial

    ‘Tonight London Met confirmed with us that arrangements were in hand to take the investigation to the next stage.’ […]

    Five people have so far been suspended from Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge ground following investigations into the incident.

    The club has reiterated its promise to ban for life anyone proved to have been involved in the altercation and is helping police in the UK and Paris.

    Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho said the club are ‘appalled’ by the racial abuse, adding that owner Roman Abramovich is also ‘disgusted’.

    Meanwhile, police are seeking a gang of men, believed to be Chelsea fans, who were heard shouting racist chants at London St Pancras station on Wednesday evening.

    A member of the public reported the men, who had travelled by train from Paris Gare du Nord, British Transport Police (BTP) said.

    It is believed they were returning home after attending Chelsea’s match with PSG.

    Well, if he says he isn’t racist, then he isn’t racist. Isn’t that how it works for white men? Also, he apologized, so everything is A-OK now!!!

    Teaching Ferguson: How colleges are incorporating race cases in the classroom

    As the play opened, a young black man lay motionless beneath a tarp. He symbolized unarmed black men who’ve died because someone — a twitchy neighbor, an inexperienced police officer — perceived him as a threat. Specifically, Vaughn Midder was portraying Trayvon Martin, shot to death by a neighborhood watch captain in 2012, when Midder was a college sophomore. As they rehearsed at the University of Maryland, the cast members waited to hear whether the Ferguson, Mo., police officer who shot Michael Brown would be indicted.

    Midder noticed students taking selfies next to the tarp. It upset him and he demanded that the photos be deleted. To them, it was just a play; to Midder — who has been pulled over by police — what happened to Martin could have happened to him.

    “I’m already aware of the fact that by being a young black man, I could be harassed by police,” he said. “I don’t want that feeling intensified, knowing that people have pictures of me pretending to be dead.”

    Martin, Ferguson and their galvanizing ripple effects have inspired universities across the country to incorporate racially charged tragedies into their curricula, sometimes in novel ways.

    An assistant professor of English and film studies at Hampton University in Virginia has told her students to produce documentaries exploring their points of view about Brown, Martin and other young black men, connecting their deaths to the civil rights movement. […]

    A postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis is teaching a new class called “The Politics of Black Criminality and Popular Protest,” in which he discusses the transition from slavery to the formal and informal systems of criminal justice that have affected blacks throughout history. (The university’s library is partnering with other St. Louis-area universities and organizations to archive the outpouring of community- and media-generated content after Ferguson.)

    “There is a long history of segregation and control and policies that are meant to maintain racial and class boundaries,” said Douglas Flowe, the postdoc.

    Flowe, the son of a New York police officer, has heard the stories of the threats his father faced. But he said he also has been wrongly accused of transporting drugs when he was a college student.

    “I don’t want to talk about Ferguson as some isolated event, but that it is part of a continuum,” he said. “If you’re under the impression that the forces that created issues of criminality aren’t as deep as they really are, it’s easy to have the perception that having a black president, and the advances of the civil rights movement, would simply be enough to right all the wrongs.” […]

    Some law professors are struggling with how to talk to their students about Ferguson and Staten Island, said Georgetown Law professor Paul Butler. Butler, a former prosecutor, said he and many of his peers became attorneys because they were inspired by Thurgood Marshall and others who fought the battle for civil rights in the courts. Now, he said, many professors are less optimistic about the legal system’s potential to eliminate racial injustice.

    Last month, at a workshop of the Society of American Law Teachers, Butler started thinking about how law professors in 1965 might have taught the march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. “Would a law professor say, ‘On one hand, demonstrators are being beat up by police; on the other hand, they really should’ve gotten a permit’? To me, that even-handedness would miss the point,” he said. “In Selma, the teachable moment wasn’t about a permit; the moment was the courage of the marchers and how they changed the law. I don’t want this to be a Selma that I look back on and regret that I didn’t step up.” […]

    At Baltimore’s Morgan State University, another historically black college, journalism professor Karen Houppert knew she couldn’t send her students to Missouri to cover the protests over Brown’s death, so she had them investigate Baltimore’s new curfew law, which went into effect the day before Brown was killed , aimed at making at-risk kids safer. Children younger than 14 are required to be indoors after 9 p.m., ages 14 to 16 by 10 or 11.

    “What I hoped they’d take away from this is that Ferguson is not so far away from Baltimore and we have many of the same issues going on in our city,” said Houppert, who has written pieces for The Washington Post. “They can feel empowered to investigate and dig into and share with the public.”

    Houppert’s students examined the controversial law from the perspective of kids, their parents, city council members, police and employees of the curfew centers where violators are taken. The students created a Web site that includes videos, photos and infographics, and their stories and video were picked up by Baltimore City Paper. Among the students’ findings: The curfew centers seemed to function largely as a babysitting service, and more black youths than whites were detained.

    Houppert, who is the only white faculty member in her department, said the racial disparity startled her. Also startling, she said, was that the student journalists were afraid of being stopped for curfew violations, though they all were older than 17.

    The students said that while the law’s intent to keep kids safe seemed genuine, “intention probably doesn’t matter that much because lawmakers aren’t in charge of enforcing it,” said Asha Glover, who analyzed the detention data. “Blacks were still getting the effects. It may not be racially motivated, but I’m not sure that always comes through.” […]

    Maria Varela, who worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Selma in 1963 and 1964 and lectures at colleges, said students’ role in the civil rights movement is de-emphasized in textbooks. She tells undergrads that Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson weren’t the only ones who changed history. Young people did, too. Confronting inequality should be about more than marching, wearing T-shirts and creating hashtags, she said: It’s about knocking on doors, finding out people’s concerns and discovering potential leaders in the community who can address those concerns.

    “There was anger and disappointment in Ferguson way before Michael Brown was shot,” Varela said. “People have been misled into believing that social change happens with big events and ‘great man’ leaders. It’s only a movement if people start going door-to-door and finding out what people in Staten Island and Ferguson and all communities need to deal with the oppression in their life.”

    The U-Md. play, “Collidescope: Adventures in Pre- and Post-Racial America,” ran in November. In addition to Trayvon Martin, Vaughn Midder played several roles in the gender- and race-bending play. He was a slave, a Southern belle who owned slaves, a 7-year-old in a low-income family and Paul Robeson. The last scene, which included the entire multiracial cast, was of a memorial for Brown. Actors carried candles, flowers, stuffed animals and signs saying “RIP.” One actress, a black woman, was so overwhelmed she began sobbing after she left the stage.

    Midder told the cast that if anyone wanted to discuss the issues raised in the play, he’d be glad to get together. Last month, a white student texted him. She said she’d been thinking about the show and the media coverage of the police shootings. She said she wanted to talk about the Brown case and how people feel when they’re perceived by others through the lens of ethnicity. He said he’d be happy to meet.

    Note the Intent is not magic effect of the Baltimore curfew.

    Two parter via the Grauniad, an examination of Selma vs two other big movies in the Best Picture category, Boyhood and American Sniper, and their depictions of black vs. white childhood and masculinity. Both parts are excellent reading, though a bit long, so here they are:
    Boyhood, Selma and American Sniper: race meets masculinity on film – part one

    As film-makers walk down the red carpet this awards season, I keep wondering: what makes a man, or a boy, in the American imagination? How is he constructed, in relation to patriarchy and race? Consider the portrayal of manhood and masculinity in three male-centered American biopics, each up for awards this season: Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, Ava DuVernay’s Selma, and Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper.

    There are overarching themes and, to be sure, significant differences. Ellar Coltrane’s portrayal of Mason, constructed over 12 years, is ostensibly about a fictional character, while David Oyelowo’s MLK and Bradley Cooper’s Kyle are fictional representations of actual Americans (both legends, although for extraordinarily different reasons). Boyhood and American Sniper were directed by white men (Linklater was nominated for a directing Oscar; Eastwood was not), while Selma was directed by a black woman (also snubbed by the academy).

    Mason and MLK’s stories meditate on the intimate ways violence shapes the life of the American man, while Kyle’s mortal infliction of violence as the sniper with the most confirmed kills in US history is mostly praised without critique. Mason’s and MLK’s stories both took years to be told, before receiving critical praise and modest commercial success, while American Sniper was on screens just two years after the book it was based on was published, before becoming the highest grossing war movie ever released in American theaters.

    But considering them together – and, even more so, considering America’s very different popular and critical receptions to the filmed portrayals of these three males – can give us some insight into how the United States thinks about boyhood and manhood (and also into patriotism, violence, patriarchy and race) in 2015.[…]

    I happened to be in Europe the first time I watched it, and was amazed at how a three-hour parade of specifically American banality held almost everyone in the audience with rapt attention. Abroad, I felt as though Boyhood was transmitting some universally digestible message, but it was also saying something profound about what it has meant to be an American male post-9/11. Mason’s boyhood incubates at the same time as Kyle’s manhood does in American Sniper. Both elevate, almost obsessively, a 21st century American propensity for looking inwardly towards the family, and how it takes care of developing men. Sniper’s focus is on a war zone, and Boyhood’s in suburban Texas, but both of their worlds – like much of post-9/11 America – are really only concerned with developing the egos and wellbeing of white males, turning blinders on to just about everything and everyone around them. Boyhood is at least incredibly sensitive and touching in considering all the violent forces – particularly those which come at the hands of abusive men – which make a man out of a boy.

    And yet, it annoyed the hell out of me on two fronts: its racism of omission, and the precious way it placed white American boyhood on a pedestal to be worshipped, both of which bolster the idea that all lives do not matter equally.

    It felt absurd to watch a movie filmed in Texas, over the past dozen years, almost exclusively about white people. Texas is, after all, about 40% Hispanic, but you’d never know it from Mason’s friends or family. Particularly when viewing Boyhood overseas, making sense of Linklater’s choice to set his magnum opus in an all-white Lone Star State (on the Mexican border) was hard to understand. It felt all the more ridiculous when Mason’s dad (Ethan Hawke) campaigns for Barack Obama, a scene in which the topic of prejudice is briefly broached but without any actual people of color. […]

    It is in this world that Mason becomes a man: a world where people of color largely do not exist, and when they most significantly (if briefly) do, they appear mostly just as foils for a white savior. This brings me to my second problem with Boyhood, which took me some time to clarify in my mind: how precious it treated Mason’s journey, and how late into life white males are allowed to hold on to their innocent boyhood compared to men of color.

    Mason makes a lot of mistakes. Some he pays for, but most he does not. And yet, we see him as an angel in ways we are unlikely to ever see a black or Hispanic boy.

    When he is unfairly persecuted by the violence of his stepfathers, your heart as a viewer is rooting for him. Being a queer person myself, when Mason wears nail polish to openly challenge the concepts of masculinity around him, I was totally cheering for him. But I was annoyed, in retrospect, to find myself so emotionally invested in the success of an average white boy as he headed off towards his manhood by the end of the film. […]

    When Mason and his friend aren’t punished for drinking and driving – indeed, when we are left longing so clearly for Mason’s success despite his being a rather mediocre shit – it reinforces a supremacist mindset about the value of darling white boyhood, while black and Hispanic boyhood, not to mention girlhood of any race, is not considered even worthy of mention. Linklater’s film is somewhat awkwardly titled, when you consider he cast his own daughter Lorelei as one of the leads, then directed her for 12 years only to title the film Boyhood. A film called Girlhood, about young women of color, wouldn’t come from the United States at all, but from France.

    There is a killjoy quality, admittedly, in reading a movie one really likes in such a way and not just accepting it as mere entertainment. As I’ve written before, I wish this weren’t so; but, I’d wish even more strongly to not live in a world where patriarchy and white supremacy weren’t so rampant that their subtle reinforcement in films wasn’t so insidious.

    Shortly after I first saw Boyhood, I flew to Missouri and spent time where Michael Brown had been killed. It is inconceivable, based on my years of reporting, that a white boy acting similarly would have been mowed down in his boyhood by Darren Wilson as brown Brown was in his. I also talked to five brothers (ages three to 16) about their fears of the police, and I couldn’t help question why their brown boyhood is considered expendable while a character like Mason’s is so beloved. As artist Oasa DuVerney said of Renisha McBride (a young black woman who was shot dead after crashing her car and knocking on a house for help), “Our kids are not allowed to make mistakes. We can’t do it, because they will show us no mercy.”

    Indeed. Should we consider, then, the repeatedly constructed innocence we cheer for of the semi-fictional Mason’s boyhood in comparison to the presumed guilt (with mortal consequences) of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, or Trayvon Martin’s boyhood? Or Renisha McBride’s girlhood? Or young John Crawford’s manhood? Can one accept Boyhood’s message unquestioningly and still believe black lives matter? To quote hooks again: “I don’t think we will get much further in terms of decolonizing our minds” unless people like me who liked Boyhood can also critically examine that accepting Mason’s white privilege is indissoluble from his transition from boyhood to manhood.

    That’s part one, here’s part two: Selma and American Sniper: men depicted in black and white – part two

    When it came to people of color making better lives for themselves, Ava Duvernay, the director of Selma, was not “interested in making a white-savior movie”. [note this quote, and let it sink in next time someone wants to argue Johnson got an unfair portrayal]

    DuVernay did start her film, which centers on Martin Luther King’s role in the historic 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, by focusing on girlhood, opening with the death of four black girls who were blown up at 16th Street Baptist Church. The scene is a lyrically haunting nightmare of the disregard for the worth of black lives. Yet while it sets in motion the urgency that Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John Lewis and others feel as they fight for black lives over the next two hours, it is never a revenge film. (American Sniper is similarly set in motion by acts of terrorism, but quickly devolves into a orgiastically pornographic revenge fantasy, waged against the wrong enemy to boot.)

    Disappointingly, given it is one of the few feature films to be directed by a woman in any given year, Selma moves away from those girls and on to the men for the bulk of the film. Manhood – as it also is in American Sniper – is constructed in Selma largely in the absence of women, save for the frozen-out wife. Except for a supporting role from Carmen Ejogo as Coretta Scott King, and an even smaller role for Oprah Winfrey as Annie Lee Cooper, Selma takes us to the civil rights domain of straight men. Coretta doesn’t get the credit she deserves, and Bayard Rustin – the openly gay co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, played by Ruben Santiago-Hudson – is kept well on the sidelines, as he often was in real life.

    With these caveats, DuVernay’s portrayal of black manhood – usually given short shrift by Hollywood – is still rich and deep. David Oyelowo’s Martin Luther King is not an American man or even an African American man, but a black man. Much of Selma’s criticism, I’m convinced, flows from the film’s unabashed blackness: we in America are used to seeing the sanitized King, the neutered King, the palatable King marketed to white consumers who can be trotted out once a year without defending or even recognizing blackness.

    Even conservatives embrace the “color-blind” King in 2015, who is allegedly proof that racial oppression is over. A powerful, challenging King is at odds with a Hollywood tradition of rewarding black actors to play “subservient” roles, as Oyelowo (who was snubbed for an Oscar nomination) recently pointed out, noting how long it has taken for MLK to be filmed as “the center of his own narrative”.

    The King who has familiarly resided in the American imagination has done so in a way which renders him so powerless, he is mostly a boy. [….]

    Selma presents such an assertive black manhood, which is the very opposite, in many ways, of Linklater’s white boyhood and Eastwood’s obsessively defensive innocent white manhood. Counter to common black tropes typically recycled in Hollywood (as identified in Donald Bogle’s excellent book Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks), Oyelowo’s King is a black man in full. He is sexual and not a neutered saint, his marital affairs acknowledged with a refreshing frankness. Personally, he has many doubts (including of white politicians). Professionally, he is assertive and pragmatic, utilizing radical non-violent resistance as an offensive strategy and not, as oft portrayed a half century later, out of passivity and defensiveness. He butts heads figuratively and literally with white men.

    Selma’s MLK is black as hell, viewed in a segregated black world through a black lens. Bradford Young, Selma’s black cinematographer who also shot 2011’s Pariah, was educated at Howard University. There, like director (and one time Spike Lee cinematographer) Ernest Dickerson, his “training was geared toward exposing my community”. This training comes through in Selma’s rich hues and deep browns – so much so that the film could almost be watched with the sound off. […]

    Selma’s international cast and crew placed MLK’s manhood within this type of world blackness and not in relation to American whiteness. This, I am convinced, is largely behind the brouhaha over Selma’s “historical inaccuracies”, which is so hysterically out of proportion, rightwing websites are actually defending the honor of President Lyndon Johnson. As a historian myself, I hardly dismiss LBJ’s role in civil rights history out of hand. I have been oddly fascinated by LBJ since I was a teenager, and I’ve read more books on him than on any other president. (Indeed, this is a stack of Johnson biographies next to my bed, topped by a vase of LBJ’s face.) I’m well aware of discrepancies between certain historical accounts of LBJ and the Selma script, and may have some made different choices myself than DuVerney and British screenwriter Paul Webb.

    But as a trained film-maker, I know Hollywood is not the go to place for factual history. Films are fantasies which must be read. Even still, for all of Maureen Dowd’s angst, DuVernay gets the spirit of LBJ as a simultaneous force for and against civil rights progress pretty much spot on.

    In Selma, both MLK and LBJ must be read as characters who elucidate certain truths about their eras and audiences in 1965 and 2015. As a character in Selma, LBJ performs the role of obdurate-cum-helpful ally, a function most white ally politicians in the 1960s (including LBJ himself much of the time) performed. There is nothing false in Selma about the essence of that. True, LBJ strong-armed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 through Congress. He was also deeply invested in maintaining his own power, and would refer to civil rights legislation as “the n*gg*r bill”, and said, before sending Thurgood Marshall to the US supreme court: “When I appoint a n*gg*r to the court, I want everyone to know he’s a n*gg*r.”

    DuVernay felt no need to portray LBJ as the American negro’s savior; instead, she made a film about a black man’s battle against white supremacy. LBJ’s defense merely meant that Selma was being held to a higher standard for “historical accuracy” than, say, the film Exodus was, with its all-white cast set in ancient Egypt. Since the poll tax, black American citizens have become somewhat used to being held to different and more rigorous standard, even when they are presenting something essentially honest. Fantasies which reinforce white supremacy – ie that all important people in history must have been white, whether they obtained the vote in the American south or ruled over ancient Egypt or are worthy of a three-hour film about their childhood – rarely face any such scrutiny. […]

    Morbidly, it says a great deal about the US that American Sniper opened its assault on moviegoers on Martin Luther King weekend – who was himself murdered by a sniper – by shattering records with the highest grossing opening weekend ever in the month of January (and the highest opening weekend of octogenarian Eastwood’s entire career).

    In American Sniper, Kyle completes four tours of duty in Iraq to allegedly become the most “successful” sniper in American history. Cooper’s eyes are pretty to look at, and if you don’t mind children being hunted in a rifle’s sights, it’s a rather entertaining movie. I did not hate it as much as liberal friends of mine who haven’t seen it (and who assumed I would detest it), nor did I find it to be “almost too dumb to criticize” or even entirely simplistic. It is not a stupid movie as much as it is a manipulative movie which needs to be read very carefully in order to subvert its slick and well constructed messages.

    Of course the historical accuracy of Eastwood’s Kyle hasn’t been challenged as vociferously as DuVernay’s LBJ’s was. Kyle’s estate may have had to settle for character defamation, but his story is so familiar in the American canon that it needn’t be questioned: he is the prototypical protective white man who saves American innocents from savagery. Kyle – who called any Iraqi in his path overseas a “savage” much more often in real life than in Cooper’s rendition – portrays a type of American manhood that is instantly recognizable in the United States. American history, fictional and imagined, is rife with such white men ostensibly protecting women and children (not to mention enlightenment and freedom) from “savages”.

    Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, John Wayne, Ronald Reagan (the actor and the president), the Lone Ranger, Pa from Little House on the Prairie, Buffalo Bill, Joe the Plumber: Americans immediately know, and rarely challenge the authority of, heroes like Kyle – our rugged white men whose manifest destiny is to stand as the last line of defense between civilization and barbarism. […]

    American Sniper does not pin the shitshow of violence upon the central lie it perpetuates, which led to the deaths of more than a hundred thousand people, only a small fraction of which were Kyle’s comrades in arms. The film is more of an opportunity for Cooper, with his seductive eyes and recently spornosexual body, to prove his manhood as Kyle shoots “savages” and protects the woman on his cellphone some 7,000 miles away. Mind you, these Iraqi “savages” are at home in a country Kyle’s government invaded under false pretenses. Kyle and his buddies break into home after home in ways Floridians (or citizens of the 20-odd American states with stand-your-ground laws) would never tolerate from a domestic intruder, let alone a foreign invader.

    But Iraq is a colony ripe for perfectly innocent exploitation in American Sniper. Kyle, inexplicably, is supposed to remain an innocent in this equation, reifying a phenomena Fred Moten and Stefano Harney describe in their book The Undercommons which is meant to elicit our ire at the natives and sympathy for the invaders:

    In Michael Parenti’s classic anti-imperial analysis of Hollywood movies, he points to the “upside-down” way that the “make-believe media” portrays colonial settlement. In films like Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) or Shaka Zulu (1987), the settler is portrayed as surrounded by “natives”, inverting, in Parenti’s view, the role of aggressor so that colonialism is made to look like self-defense. Indeed, aggression and self-defense are reversed in these movies.

    What Eastwood is doing here; quite simply, is remaking the American western in Iraq; it’s an inverted, but familiar, world where white men aggressively steal from brown folk, then rush to “defend” their own women and children. American Sniper flirts with examining violence and how it transforms Kyle the boy into a man who earns his living by blowing off strangers’ heads in a strange land. Eastwood initially connects the violence of hunting and bullying as formative to a sniper’s development. He even dangles the possibility of book ending his film this way, showing a shell-shocked Kyle teaching his son to hunt in the movie’s final moments. But then Eastwood chickens out and doesn’t dramatize the most interesting irony of Kyle’s life: that he was shot dead in a shooting range by another Iraq war vet. Unable to bear showing our hero killed (at the hands of another vet who also never had any business going to Iraq), after we’ve watched him kill for two hours, Eastwood reduces Kyle’s death to a title card, ending the movie with video footage of jingoistic crowds praising Kyle’s corpse.

    The only philosophical questions and moral dilemmas American Sniper ultimately seems interested in concern how the innocence of white manhood can be protected, and how it can be harmed by violence done to (but not by) it. Kyle does reflect upon the morality of what he’s doing, but it’s a worry couched in how his sense of his own honor and innocence may be impacted; it is not invested in the cost to those he is killing. For Iraqis I imagine watching American Sniper would be like black Americans watching a film about Darren Wilson which focused on his anguish and showed nothing more of Michael Brown than a Hollywood rendition of cops indiscriminately killing anonymous black youth. […]

    Considering these films together, and how they’ve been received by the American people, can give us a sense about why American manhood is constructed so often while denying the influences of feminism and queerness (or even acknowledging the presence of women at all). We can also glean clues as to why America continues to be a nation where black and brown boys and men are so feared that we are disproportionately killed, arrested, convicted and unemployed.

    Does American Sniper explain why Craig Stephen Hicks killed three Muslim students in North Carolina? No. But does the nation’s reaction to American Sniper help understand why news outlets downplay the triple murders of Deah Barakat, Yuso Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha as “just” over a parking dispute, and not as a mass murder? Or to explain why Hicks’ mortal violence will never cast suspicion of terrorism upon white men, while media tycoons and legislators expect all Muslims to accept blame for foreign terrorists? You betcha.

    For even in their precious boyhood, white American males have access to the innocence of habeas corpus that their young black and brown brothers simply do not. So it’s really no surprise that American Sniper, a tale of a white American man celebrated for using his gun to kill scores of people of color, was a commercial American hit while Selma was a relative dud. Nothing can temper Americans’ appetite for armed white men: not threats on the life of Anita Sarkeesian, not pleas for peace by MLK after four girls were blown up, not 168 people exploding in Oklahoma.

    Much more so than Selma’s dream of pacifist, transnational blackness, American Sniper is a perfect fantasy for our current conception of manhood in the United States, a nation where violence against women is too often dismissed; where violence by individuals in ethnic groups swiftly casts aspersions on all its members; and yet, where no number of mass shootings by white men – waged in movie theaters, elementary schools, neighborhood congressional meet-ups, or sovereign countries – will ever allow white manhood to be seen as anything but as innocent and pure as young Mason heading off to college at the end of Boyhood.

    Yah, that’s a lot of text, but it was a good analysis.

    There was morning action in STL, protestors went to say ‘good morning’ to Stenger, with this list of demands (see attached photo): Steve Stenger, Good Mourning. STL. Protest. Basically, 1) justice; 2) a moratorium on bench warrants; 3) diversity and 4) resignations of those who are not letting the city of Ferguson move forward.

  78. says

    Should point out, Chelsea have a long history of racist incidents from fans and players. They, along with West Ham supporters, have regularly made gas noises at the supporters of Tottenham, a club particularly associated with Jewish fans, for instance; more Chelsea supporters than any other top English team have been banned for racist chants and songs (http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/more-chelsea-fans-arrested-for-racist-chants-than-any-other-premier-league-club-home-office-stats-reveal-10056572.html), and their main “firm” of football hooligans is a hotbed of white supremacists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Headhunters). (Note: I support Tottenham, so I can’t be said to be neutral in this, but I stand by my words).

    So they’ve got long form for this most recent racist act. That the man mentioned did development work in Africa hardly insulates from the possibility of his being racist, either (not that you’d think it would, rq). White British men have been going to Africa for centuries, hasn’t stopped most of them from being hideously racist.

  79. rq says

    CaitieCat
    I would even think that it makes them even more racist, since they can revel in their first-world saviour complex and look down on those less fortunate. Again, perhaps not consciously, but… reinforcing white privilege probably has its effects.
    And thanks for the background on Chelsea. How horrid!!!

  80. rq says

    And this morning @Kristi_Capel of Fox 8 in Ohio referred to the “Jigaboo music” re: the Oscars. She did not know it was a racist slur (I did not even know it was a word). She has apologized on twitter, saying if I offended you.

    White women earn 82¢ for every $ a white man earns. We know that. Black men earn 75¢ for every $ a white man earns. You never hear about it. More such tidbits in the twitter stream there.

    MSNBC shake-up: Al Sharpton to lose nightly show

    The recent suspension of Brian Williams and spotlight on news personalities has caused a shake-up at MSNBC. The Daily Beast is reporting that the Rev. Al Sharpton may lose his nightly time slot. His show, “Politics Nation with Al Sharpton,” has been on the air since 2011 and has had a successful run. At issue is a steady slide in viewership that will cause news correspondent Chris Hayes to be replaced by the “Rachel Maddow Show.” Maddow’s show will move from its current 9 p.m. slot to 8 p.m., while a search is underway for a new host for the 9 p.m. time slot left by Maddow.

    It is rumored that Sharpton’s show will move from its nightly 6 p.m. time slot to a weekend only show. Sharpton attracts a solid 35 percent Black audience and is considered a lightning rod of controversy because of his activism on behalf of the oppressed. The source at MSNBC stated it was also part of a change in the political mindset of the programming stating, “Going left was a brilliant strategy while it lasted, and made hundreds of millions of dollars for Comcast, but now it doesn’t work anymore…The goal is to move away from left-wing TV.”

    There has been no word from the Sharpton camp on the rumored changes at MSNBC.

    Ah, rumoured. Well, I’ll wait for some confirmation – while Sharpton takes issue with many of the younger activists and protestors out there, I still think it would be a shame for him to lose the platform he has.

    In New York, Indictment of an Officer Divides Chinese-Americans

    For Chinese immigrants in New York City and elsewhere, recent events have provided an opportunity for a rare public reckoning with one of their adopted country’s most volatile fault lines. Though Officer Liang and one of the two New York officers killed in an anti-police ambush in December shared a Chinese heritage, Chinese-Americans have so far figured little in the debates over police misconduct and racial injustice that have roiled the country.

    Now Chinese-Americans, too, find themselves divided.

    Some have hesitated, reluctant to find politics or racial discrimination in the indictment of Officer Liang. Others have hailed the charges against him as a means of improving relations between the police and all minorities. But for some, the indictment is nothing less than the scapegoating of a young officer whose parents may have to live without their only son — and a call to arms for a minority group that has never been as politically active as blacks or Hispanics.

    “We don’t want to be pushed around anymore, or picked on anymore,” Mr. Gim said. “We’re going to fight back.” [..]

    “Peter Liang being Asian only means that all cops need to be held accountable, regardless of skin color,” said Cathy Dang, the executive director of CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, an advocacy group in New York that works with Asian immigrants from several countries. “We should use this indictment as fuel for us to organize even harder to hold the white officers who’ve killed accountable.”

    Councilwoman Margaret Chin, a Democrat who represents the Chinatown neighborhood, also called for Officer Liang to be indicted, saying the filing of charges would be a step toward reforming a police force that she said has unfairly targeted Asians as well as blacks and Latinos.

    Officers have not had nearly as many fatal encounters with Chinese, she and other Chinatown leaders acknowledged. The last one to attract attention in New York was the fatal shooting in 1995 of a 16-year-old boy, Yong Xin Huang, who was playing with a pellet gun in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Two decades before that, Chinatown residents marched on City Hall to protest the alleged police beating of Peter Yew, an engineer who had been a bystander at the scene of a traffic dispute.

    “Let the judicial system take its course,” Ms. Chin said in an interview. “We can reform the whole system so everyone can get equal treatment.”

    In some ways, Officer Liang’s case seems all too easy to slice along racial lines. Like Mr. Gurley, the shooting victim, the Brooklyn district attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson, is black; the judge who oversaw the officer’s arraignment, Justice Danny K. Chun of State Supreme Court, is Korean-American. After Justice Chun granted the prosecutors’ request to release the officer on his own recognizance, Mr. Gurley’s aunt spat out: “Asian judge!”

    Even so, Ms. Dang said she hoped to encourage Asian-Americans to find common cause with blacks. Her group had previously called for the indictments of the officers involved in the deaths of Mr. Garner and other unarmed black men.

    “When the Peter Liang case happened, it did make it a little more complicated to navigate between our different communities,” she said, adding, “I actually think there’s a growing investment in the organizing, especially by young Asian-Americans.”

    The community leaders rallying around Officer Liang say they sympathize with Mr. Gurley’s family. But Officer Liang’s parents — who work in a restaurant and a garment factory and speak almost no English — are vulnerable as well, they said.

    To them, second-degree manslaughter is too harsh a charge for what they say was a mistake. They accuse Mr. Thompson, a Democrat who has criticized law enforcement practices that affect minorities disproportionately, of bowing to political pressure after the officer linked to Mr. Garner’s death was not indicted.[…]

    Bona Sun, one of those who is backing Officer Liang, said the news of his indictment had almost immediately prompted “heated debates” in her social circle about whether Chinese parents should continue to support their children in becoming officers. Of the more than 2,100 Asian-Americans within the department’s uniformed ranks — about 6 percent of the total — roughly half are Chinese-American, police statistics show.

    That figure has grown tenfold in the last 25 years. That it is not bigger, she said, is both a cause and a symptom of how little mainstream political power her community can claim.

    “We are very vulnerable,” she said. “We don’t speak up.”

  82. rq says

    Here’s another on the Chelsea fan’s apology: Richard Barklie, Chelsea fan involved in Paris train incident, apologizes through lawyer

    Barklie, a season ticket holder at Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge, does not know any of them other people shown in the Paris video, solicitor Kevin Winters said.

    “He did not participate in racist chanting and singing and condemns any behaviour supporting that,” Winters said. “He accepts he was involved in an incident when a person now known to him as Souleymane S was unable to enter a part of the train.

    “He has an account to give to police which will explain the context and circumstances as they prevailed at that particular time. In the meantime pending that, he wants to put on record his sincerest apologies for the trauma and stress suffered by Mr. Souleymane.”

    Barklie is a director with the World Human Rights Forum, a global organization with offices in Northern Ireland.

    “Pending formal engagement with police, our client is anxious to put on record his total abhorrence for racism and any activity associated with it,” Winters said. “As someone who has spent years working with disadvantaged communities in Africa and India he can point to a CV in human rights work which undermines any suggestion he is racist.”

    Yes, of course, of course. That’s what he says. But the beginning of the article says this:

    Richard Barklie — a former Northern Ireland police officer — denied taking part in any racist chanting but admitted to being involved in the incident where a black man was pushed off a Paris metro train. The incident was captured on video before Chelsea’s Champions League match at Paris Saint-Germain on Tuesday.

    What was that about actions, and louder than words?

    Oscars 2015: Thousands boycott Academy Awards over lack of diversity

    Of everything published in the run up to this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, diversity — or rather, a lack thereof among nominees — undeniably dominated the conversation, both online and off.

    One need look no further than the opening line of tonight’s show for proof of just how much friction 2015’s crop of 100 per cent white acting nominees has caused.

    “Tonight we honour Hollywood’s best and whitest — I mean brightest,” joked first-time Oscar host Neil Patrick Harris in reference to the controversy, which he had also addressed with a tongue-in-cheek tweet earlier this month.

    While many on Twitter have been praising Harris for addressing the diversity issue head-on during his opening monologue, the feeds of those who have been loudest in criticizing the Academy for failing to recognize artists of colour haven’t mentioned it at all.

    That’s because they’re not watching the 2015 Oscars.

    As D.C.-based lawyer and creator of the viral #OscarsSoWhite hashtag April Reign writes, “I’m not going to complain about not seeing faces like mine in movies, then turn around & give the #Oscars 3 hours of ratings.”
    […]

    On Friday, Reuters reported that several activism groups, including Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, were planning to protest this year’s televised Oscars ceremony while stars arrived on the red carpet.

    “The goal of the protest is to send a message to the Academy, send a message to Hollywood, send a message to the film industry,” said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, head of the L.A. Urban Policy Roundtable group to AFP last week. “And the message is very simple: you don’t reflect America; your industry doesn’t reflect America. Women, Hispanics, African-Americans, people of colour (are) invisible in Hollywood.”

    The protest was called off, however, just hours before it was set to take place.

    “Upon the request of SELMA director Ava DuVernay, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Action Network has agreed to forgo our planned protests of the Oscars today and pursue instead a direct dialogue with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences via Cheryl Boone Isaacs and Dawn Hudson,” wrote Najee Ali, political director of the National Action Network’s Los Angeles chapter in a statement.

    “We continue to be fervent in our mission for expansion and inclusion within the Academy and the motion picture industry as a whole,” Ali’s statement continued. “We salute all the artists being celebrated today at the Oscars while demanding an examination of the sidelining and underrepresentation of artists of color and women artists. Art can change the world and the world is more diverse than this year’s honorees.”

    Oh, and a note on Sean Penn’s green card joke: it was a joke. Sean Penn’s green card comment offends many but not Inarritu

    “I found it hilarious,” Inarritu said after the ceremony. “Sean and I have that kind of brutal (relationship) where only true friendship can survive.”

    Inarritu directed Penn in his 2003 film “21 Grams,” and the pair remain friends. Penn posed for pictures with Inarritu after the ceremony.

    The director, who won three Oscars on Sunday night, said he has told many similarly brutal jokes at Penn’s expense. “I make on him a lot of very tough jokes that I will not tell you,” Inarritu said.

    Joke or not, the remark struck many online as problematic for an awards ceremony that had been criticized for not having more nominees of colour.

    So does Inarritu make fun of Sean Penn for being a wifebeater?
    And jokes between friends should stay exactly that: jokes between friends. Bringing them to the public stage puts them in a whole new context. And I still think it was an awfully insensitive ‘joke’ from Penn. Ha. Ha. Bloody ha.

    I seem to have lost another link re: the Oscars, but then again, there’s probably enough about the Oscars already.

  83. says

    Some right-wingers from southern states have decided to say and do more stupid stuff, and that includes celebrating the anniversary of the assassination of Lincoln:

    […] The League of the South recently announced it will be celebrating the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assasination this coming April, in case there were any lingering doubts about where their sentiments lie.

    […] Institute on the Constitution, proudly hosted a speaker who argued that “President Obama is not eligible to be president of the United States because he is not a ‘natural born citizen’ as defined by Article II of the Constitution, which was based on Deuteronomy 17,” […]

    In 2004, the far-right Constitution Party tried to recruit Moore [Judge Roy Moore of “no gay marriage” infamy] to run for president on its ticket. […]

    Salon link.
    Religion Dispatches link.

    Cross posted from the Lounge.

  84. Saad says

    Zimmerman won’t face civil rights violation charges for killing Trayvon Martin>

    The U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday it will not file civil rights charges against George Zimmerman, a Florida neighborhood watch volunteer who fatally shot unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012.

    The department said it had not found sufficient evidence that Zimmerman intentionally violated the civil rights of Martin, 17.

    The announcement comes as the Justice Department also investigates Darren Wilson, a police officer who shot and killed unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August.

    Both incidents sparked nationwide outcry from civil rights advocates who have pressured the Obama administration to press charges against the two men for acting on racial bias.

    Thursday will be the third anniversary of Martin’s shooting.

  85. rq says

    And Saad posts it before I can, if I find any more on that I will post it up, but yes, there you have it, no civil rights violations in Zimmerman’s murder of Martin. Nice, that.
    Anyway, bunch of mish-mash to get through.

    Feb 23 2015
    Crowd-funding Campaign Wants to Pay Back Amen Break Creator

    It’s the best-known sample of all time. It might be the most-heard six seconds of sound in modern recording.

    But before it became the “Amen break,” the signature riff was part of The Winstons’ song “Amen, Brother.”

    And so, how much did the artists who actually produced the original sound earn from their “success”? Well, that’ll be … nothing, apart from the original revenues from the 1969 release. Nothing in royalties from its use … well, seemingly everywhere. (N.W.A.? Oasis? Futurama? Check.)

    Zip. Zero. The drummer, Gregory Coleman, died homeless in 2006. Richard L. Spencer, the vocalist and sax player you hear on the classic cut, owned the copyright but never got a cent from its reuse. Forget Searching for Sugarman. BBC tracking down Richard L. Spencer (picture, top) may be the even bigger story of a lost and unsung musical hero, all but disappearing after 1971.

    So now, one crowd funding project wants to right the wrong, doing through donations what the international intellectual property system couldn’t do for an independent musician.

    The project is the brainchild of Martyn Webster, a 42-year old DJ from the UK. Webster fits the MO of the whole Amen break-sampling scene, making electro, hiphop, and rap in the 80s and 90s. So, he’s just a DJ who loved this musical gesture and wanted to give back. The plan: raise money, then give it to Richard L. Spencer to make up for years and years of success given to other artists.

    Mr. Webster writes, simply:

    If you have ever written or sold any music with the amen break, or even just enjoyed one of the countless hundreds and hundreds of tunes that contain it over various genres and styles of music, please donate towards the good cause of the worldwide music community giving something back to the man behind the legendary breakbeat.

    That message seems to have resonated. In just five days, the project has blasted past its original £1,000 target to net a whopping £10,529 in funds – not bad for what amounts to little more than “passing the hat.” It’s a perfect case in which small funds add up: 940 people contributed to that big number. And it’s getting attention; I saw it via Facebook on a German blog, but the mighty Rolling Stone has also taken notice. […]

    Postlog: As several people have pointed out to me, there is a fairly essential flaw in the goals of this project which none of the coverage so far seems to have addressed. The essence of the “Amen break” isn’t the song – it’s the drum solo. You can’t hear Richard L. Spencer (sax and vocals) in the actual sample. Yes, technically speaking, Richard L. Spencer owns the copyright – but copyright law here has utterly failed to be meaningful in the usage of the sample, let alone enforceable. I wonder why, for instance, the crowd-funding project doesn’t at least split the money between Mr. Spencer and Gregory Coleman’s heirs. Under copyright law, the publishing rights to a sample would absolutely belong to Mr. Spencer; Mr. Coleman’s role as a drummer was work-for-hire and he would never get royalties unless he had a writing credit. But we’re not talking about copyright laws or royalties; this is just a donation project. I’ve asked the project for their take on this, even though I think that it’s still admirable to give money to the surviving member of The Winstons.

    Answer: for now, it all goes to Richard. One issue is, he’s the one they can find. Martyn explains:

    As above, all money raised will go to Richard.
    Some people have said some should go to the daughter and step-daughter of Gregory Coleman (the drummer).
    If we are able to get in contact with them then it is definitely something that could also happen.

    That conversation for now remains between Martyn and Richard.

    This is already gone and done, but still: Here at the US Commission on Civil Rights discussion at UMSL. Livestream should be available.

    Sheriff that Laughed about Flash Banging a Toddler, Was Just Shot By Murderous Rogue Cop. If I believed in karma…

    Terrell has been the subject of a number of reports at The Free Thought Project, because he is the law enforcement official who authorized the “no knock raid” that maimed and nearly killed a young toddler. Terrell then later broke a promise to pay the family’s medical bills when he left them to take care of it on their own.

    On Sunday, Sheriff Terrell and Deputy William Zigan were dispatched to a domestic disturbance that involved former Gainesville city police officer Anthony Giaquinta. Giaquinta was recently fired from his job at the Gainesville Police Department, but as of now the reason for his termination is unknown.

    When police arrived on the scene, they found Giaquinta’s ex-wife dead in the garage of the home.

    The suspect then shot both Terrell and Zigan, then fled the scene and began a search that ended just before midnight, when police found the bodies of two men, including Anthony Giaquinta.

    Missouri elementary schools have largest disparity btwn black and white suspension rates, says a report from the Civil Rights Project.

    After Ferguson, Missouri Legislator Wants To Keep Police Videos Private

    State Sen. Doug Libla (R) introduced a bill that would exempt any videos taken by police, including everything from body cameras to dashboard cameras, from public release.

    Currently, any member of the public can request such material through the state’s open records law, with a few narrow exemptions including cases involving juveniles or open investigations. If it becomes law, Libla’s bill would ban the public from viewing any videos.

    “Any recording captured by a camera” used by or attached to a police officer “shall not be a public record for purposes of the state’s open records law… and shall not be disclosed by a law enforcement agency except upon order of a court in the course of a criminal investigation or prosecution or civil litigation,” the bill reads. The text also adds that “no law enforcement agency shall be required by the state to provide cameras… to officers employed by the agency, not shall the state require any peace officer to wear such cameras.”

    The Missouri Press Association and American Civil Liberties Union have both testified against the bill, citing a need for transparency.

    “We should not be in a state where secret police records are the norm,” said Sheldon Lineback, the executive director of the Missouri Press Association. “Refusing to release records can only lead to mistrust.”

    Others, including Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster (D), have expressed concerns about providing more access to police videos.

    “Currently, Missouri’s Sunshine Law provides news media and entertainment producers nearly unfettered access to videos from body-worn cameras. Adoption of body-worn cameras must not lead to a new era of voyeurism and entertainment television at the expense of Missourians’ privacy,” Koster recently wrote. “Therefore, I urge [state lawmakers] to consider amendments…to protect such video footage from those who would monetize it or use it to exploit the people it depicts.”

    #Ferguson becomes election issue. @MayorSlay-backed candidate attacks @MeganEllyia for supporting #BlackLivesMatter. See the pictures, but in short, he accuses the competition of welcoming outside agitators to Ferguson and blasts her for participation in protests.

  86. rq says

    We Are Our Heroes: On Activism In The Age Of Celebrity Worship

    Ever since Mike Brown was murdered, I’ve seen people ask for the Kanyes and the LeBrons to speak out. And while their voices are welcome, the movement doesn’t live and die by their involvement. That’s why they’re called “movements.” They’re moving. And not moving only means you get left behind. For every Kanye West or Jay Z we’re begging to speak up in some profound way, there’s a Killer Mike or Jesse Williams whose comments are as impassioned, necessary and important as anyone else’s. I’d much rather embrace Killer Mike or Tef Poe’s messages than a celebrity who may only be speaking because he or she feels obligated by the fans to do so.

    While we clamored for LeBron to say something or wanted NBA players to stand up for Garner over All-Star weekend in New York, we didn’t praise the St. Louis Rams nearly enough for coming out of their tunnels with #HandsUpDontShoot gestures. None of those Rams players were stars, but their actions revealed a deeply racist community of businesses in St. Louis appalled by their cries for equality. The move was powerful, important and didn’t need an all-star to pull off.

    Activism is as mainstream as its ever been in my lifetime and we as an audience have the ability to build up our activists instead of waiting for a Beyonce “For Mike Brown” single to go live on iTunes. Case in point: J. Cole. Cole released an album with little notice and received praise leading up to its release solely on the strength of how much his fans respect him. And a large part of that respect comes from his willingness to go to Ferguson without any press. Or to march for Eric Garner. Or to perform a song about police brutality on Letterman even though it wasn’t a song from his album that he was supposed to be promoting. These moves have earned him a fan base that supports him enough to get him 350,000 albums sold in his first week. By contrast, an artist like Nicki Minaj did a fraction of those numbers despite her massive PR push and being everywhere for a solid three months.

    Hopefully the J. Cole example is a sign that we’re ready to have celebrities who are famous for being beloved instead of being beloved because they are famous. This is an integral distinction to have because I truly believe that it’s impossible to have an effective movement in an era of celebrity worship. […]

    The struggle for understanding in America is centuries old and proving the worth of a Black life takes all the help it can get. So for that, any celebrity who wants to lend any assistance is welcome. If Beyonce and Pharrell want to take a few beats to put their hands up at the Grammys, good for them. If Jay Z wants to funnel money to the movement in secret, it’s definitely welcome. And if Charles Barkley wants to deride the people trying to affect change, then that’s his prerogative. But we are long past the time when we need any celebrity for a movement’s survival. In fact, it’s probably the celebrity who needs the movement. Because it’s a lonely, sad place to be when everyone has moved and you’re left standing still.

    Maya Angelou Honored with Forever Stamp

    Though Angelou died last year at the age of 86, she remains an icon and inspiration because of her life of advocacy and her countless contributions to society. Her memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is one of her most acclaimed works. It tells the story of her life in the Jim Crow South.

    The Postal Service plans to preview the stamp and provide details on the date and location of the first day of issue ceremony at a later time. Postmaster General Megan J. Brennan stated, “Maya Angelou inspired our nation through a life of advocacy and through her many contributions to the written and spoken word. Her wide-ranging achievements as a playwright, poet, memoirist, educator, and advocate for justice and equality enhanced our culture.”

    Yay Maya! A lovely lasting tribute, as long as the postal service doesn’t go out of service. The link also has a link to 10 of her best works. I recommend!!!

    Interlude: Music! Listen to Big Sean’s “Me, Myself, and I”

    With Dark Sky Paradise out tomorrow, Big Sean drops a new song titled “Me, Myself, and I,” which samples Beyoncé’s 2003 song of the same name, and a track that Sean says is one of his favorites. Sean continues his recent lyrical assault on this release, as he vibes in and out of rhyme schemes while claiming his stake in hip-hop as one of the best artists out right now. This obviously won’t be on the album, but as Sean wrote on Twitter, it’s more of a thank you to the fans for the continued support.

    Sean’s bars are at a high level throughout this freestyle, but one particular sequence at the 1:48 mark has people speculating that Sean may have taken a shot at Kendrick Lamar. During the line in question, Sean raps, “Can he really spit, or do he just hide behind his skits like half of these rappers do, and then y’all go and praise him in this bitch like they’re the savior of this shit.” Whether or not Sean was taking shots at Kendrick will remain to be seen, but it is clear that he was sending shade in someone’s direction.

    Interlude: Sports (Boxing)
    Trailer: Doc on 17-Year-Old Gold Medalist Claressa ‘T-Rex’ Shields, Youngest Woman to Box in Olympics

    The 2012 Summer Olympics years behind us (the next installment is in 2016), a documentary feature film about 19 year-old Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, the youngest woman – and one of the first – to ever box in the Olympics, will be making its world premiere at the upcoming SXSW Film Festival in Austin. TX.

    The tri-continental effort (North America, Europe and Asia) comes from directors Drea Cooper & Zackary Canepari, who begun work on the film in 2012 (when Shields was 17 years old), en route to a successful $64,000 crowdfunding campaign – funds that were used to complete the film.

    Here’s a long description of the project: “T-Rex isn’t her real name. Her real name is Claressa. Friends and family just call her Ressa. She’s from Flint, Michigan. She’s in high school. Next year she’ll be a senior. The first day we met, it was her 17th birthday. She had a water balloon fight and a big, yellow cake. She carries her money around in a plastic bottle. She wears her hair in braids (sometimes). She takes the bus to school. She likes twitter. She likes boys. She writes in her journal. Pretty everyday for a teenager. But this is hardly an everyday story. Six years ago her dad took her to a local boxing gym. She said she wanted to box. He said, “Hell no. Boxing is a man’s sport.” She ignored him. She dreams of being the first woman in history to win the gold medal in Olympic boxing. But in order for her to succeed, she’ll need to stand her ground both inside and outside the ring.”

    At the 2012 summer Olympics in London, women’s boxing was a first-time-ever sport, with Claressa being the youngest of all the competitors. She would eventually claim her sport in history as the youngest, and the first woman boxer to win a Gold Medal in her weight class.

    She returned home, to Flint after the Olympics, as a new chapter in her life began…

    Her current record stands at Wins 43, 18 of them by knockout, and just 1 loss! Her last big win was last year, when she took home the Gold at the 2014 AIBA Women’s World Boxing Championships.

    The documentary that tells her story, titled “T-Rex,” will make its world premiere at SXSW next month.

    Trailer at the link.

    Here’s some Patricia Arquette – The Road to Structural Erasure Is Paved With Well-Intentioned White Ladies

    With those words—whether intentional or not (and personally, I believe it was unintentional)—Patricia Arquette gave voice to a system of structural erasure that has been the gold standard in the feminist movement since well before Sojourner Truth stood up and declared “Ain’t I A Woman?”

    That erasure assumes that all men are white men and all people of color are men. And that erasure leaves women of color wondering where they fit into all of this. […]

    Andrea concludes her piece by saying, “Let’s not go all ‘Je Suis Patricia Arquette’ on this shit.”

    Unfortunately, that’s been happening. White women, by and large, have loudly applauded Arquette’s words—lumping together her acceptance speech and her backstage interview, quoted above—leaving primarily women of color and LGBTQ women of color scratching their heads wondering whether to divest themselves of their gender, their race, their sexual orientation, or their gender identity in order to be included in the “us” Arquette implored everyone to start fighting for.

    And, frankly, that’s what concerns me a whole hell of a lot more than Arquette’s comments: The reaction from the left—liberals, progressives, whatever we’re calling ourselves these days—has been, by and large, an abomination.

    Sadly, however, such disgraceful reactions to the structural erasure and silencing of women of color are typical.

    On the one hand, Patricia Arquette is “just an actress” and we should be happy that she spoke out about pay equity, even if the way in which she spoke out about it left something to be desired.

    On the other hand, Patricia Arquette is an ally and by criticizing her we are eating our own and letting the misogynists win.

    On the other-other hand, Patricia Arquette isn’t the enemy and by talking about her problematic framing of the people she thinks should be fighting for wage equality for “us” (along with her framing of who “us” is), we are shifting our focus from the real enemy—the GOP and those who would deny us pay equity.

    And on the fourth hand, Patricia Arquette meant well. So really, guys, stop vilifying her.

    All of these reactions are as tired as they are facile.

    First of all, Patricia Arquette is not “just an actress.” She’s a talented, well-spoken award-winning actress who has done a good deal of charity work throughout her career. She clearly cares about social issues—see her work with Give Love and The Creative Coalition—and actually seems to give a damn when she could easily be rolling around in her piles of money like Scrooge McDuck.

    Any claim that she’s “just an actress” is actually rather anti-feminist. It implies that she is incapable of critical thought and incapable of growth in her feminist praxis.[…]

    Second, I’m not here for kumbaya feminism. Kumbaya feminism demands that Black women take a backseat to whatever interest of the day white women deem most important. Kumbaya feminism castigates as “divisive” any Black woman who dares speak out against the White Feminist Industrial Complex. Kumbaya feminism is little more than trickle-down feminism. It posits that rising tides lift all boats and ignores the fact that the boats of most Black women (and, indeed, other women of color) are rigged with anchors. Besides, if my speaking out against centuries-old erasure of Black women in the struggle for women’s equality constitutes “eating our own,” then pass me a knife and fork and some hot sauce because I’m hungry.

    Third, the notion that we cannot criticize public figures with large platforms because doing so distracts from the real enemy—those in power who would deny us equal pay—is a silencing technique. I am quite capable of criticizing Arquette’s comments while also pointing out that the GOP comprises a bunch of do-nothing anti-women ass clowns. In fact, I would argue that criticizing Arquette is of more value than railing on Twitter about Republicans or writing another blog post titled “Republicans Are The Worst!” At least Arquette seems to be capable of growth and critical thought.

    And fourth, the notion that Arquette “meant well” is entirely besides the point. Sure, her intentions may have been noble. Maybe she misspoke. I believe her words came from a good place. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And when someone who has a platform as large as Arquette engages in the same kind of erasure that has plagued the feminist movement since Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton first became homies, then you’re goddamn right that I’m going to criticize it.

    And finally, there are white folks who have never even thought about the intersection of gender and race (or sexual orientation or gender identity) in their approach to feminism. And you know what? That’s fine. It was only a few years ago, thanks to extensive reading and researching, that I was able to put the term “intersectionality” to my life experience. Not knowing all the feminist terminology is nothing to be embarrassed about. But that lack of knowledge certainly does present an opportunity. And if when presented with that opportunity, White Feminists™ choose to ignore it, then that says something about how invested they are in equality for “all women” as opposed to equality for white women.

    Furthermore, I need to disabuse everyone of the notion that white women have spent centuries fighting for the rights of everyone. That’s simply not the case. The truth is far more complicated than that. Yes, there are white women who were staunch abolitionists. And then those same white women turned and found common cause with white supremacists in order to advance their own interests. […]

    The point is simply this: When Black women and non-Black women of color raise concerns about problems within White Feminism™, if you are inclined to argue with them, maybe take a step back and just listen instead of rushing to shut them up, or demanding that they be grateful for whatever crumbs slide off the White Feminist™ dining room table. Because we’re not shutting up anytime soon, and we are not going to be relegated to the back of the feminist bus.

    “@NASA_Marshall: Leland reads 2 @HSVk12 Morris El 2nd graders about #BlackHistory & #STEM ”those kids were amazing Thx

  87. rq says

    We Are Our Heroes: On Activism In The Age Of Celebrity Worship

    Ever since Mike Brown was murdered, I’ve seen people ask for the Kanyes and the LeBrons to speak out. And while their voices are welcome, the movement doesn’t live and die by their involvement. That’s why they’re called “movements.” They’re moving. And not moving only means you get left behind. For every Kanye West or Jay Z we’re begging to speak up in some profound way, there’s a Killer Mike or Jesse Williams whose comments are as impassioned, necessary and important as anyone else’s. I’d much rather embrace Killer Mike or Tef Poe’s messages than a celebrity who may only be speaking because he or she feels obligated by the fans to do so.

    While we clamored for LeBron to say something or wanted NBA players to stand up for Garner over All-Star weekend in New York, we didn’t praise the St. Louis Rams nearly enough for coming out of their tunnels with #HandsUpDontShoot gestures. None of those Rams players were stars, but their actions revealed a deeply racist community of businesses in St. Louis appalled by their cries for equality. The move was powerful, important and didn’t need an all-star to pull off.

    Activism is as mainstream as its ever been in my lifetime and we as an audience have the ability to build up our activists instead of waiting for a Beyonce “For Mike Brown” single to go live on iTunes. Case in point: J. Cole. Cole released an album with little notice and received praise leading up to its release solely on the strength of how much his fans respect him. And a large part of that respect comes from his willingness to go to Ferguson without any press. Or to march for Eric Garner. Or to perform a song about police brutality on Letterman even though it wasn’t a song from his album that he was supposed to be promoting. These moves have earned him a fan base that supports him enough to get him 350,000 albums sold in his first week. By contrast, an artist like Nicki Minaj did a fraction of those numbers despite her massive PR push and being everywhere for a solid three months.

    Hopefully the J. Cole example is a sign that we’re ready to have celebrities who are famous for being beloved instead of being beloved because they are famous. This is an integral distinction to have because I truly believe that it’s impossible to have an effective movement in an era of celebrity worship. […]

    The struggle for understanding in America is centuries old and proving the worth of a Black life takes all the help it can get. So for that, any celebrity who wants to lend any assistance is welcome. If Beyonce and Pharrell want to take a few beats to put their hands up at the Grammys, good for them. If Jay Z wants to funnel money to the movement in secret, it’s definitely welcome. And if Charles Barkley wants to deride the people trying to affect change, then that’s his prerogative. But we are long past the time when we need any celebrity for a movement’s survival. In fact, it’s probably the celebrity who needs the movement. Because it’s a lonely, sad place to be when everyone has moved and you’re left standing still.

    Maya Angelou Honored with Forever Stamp

    Though Angelou died last year at the age of 86, she remains an icon and inspiration because of her life of advocacy and her countless contributions to society. Her memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is one of her most acclaimed works. It tells the story of her life in the Jim Crow South.

    The Postal Service plans to preview the stamp and provide details on the date and location of the first day of issue ceremony at a later time. Postmaster General Megan J. Brennan stated, “Maya Angelou inspired our nation through a life of advocacy and through her many contributions to the written and spoken word. Her wide-ranging achievements as a playwright, poet, memoirist, educator, and advocate for justice and equality enhanced our culture.”

    Yay Maya! A lovely lasting tribute, as long as the postal service doesn’t go out of service. The link also has a link to 10 of her best works. I recommend!!!

    Interlude: Music! Listen to Big Sean’s “Me, Myself, and I”

    With Dark Sky Paradise out tomorrow, Big Sean drops a new song titled “Me, Myself, and I,” which samples Beyoncé’s 2003 song of the same name, and a track that Sean says is one of his favorites. Sean continues his recent lyrical assault on this release, as he vibes in and out of rhyme schemes while claiming his stake in hip-hop as one of the best artists out right now. This obviously won’t be on the album, but as Sean wrote on Twitter, it’s more of a thank you to the fans for the continued support.

    Sean’s bars are at a high level throughout this freestyle, but one particular sequence at the 1:48 mark has people speculating that Sean may have taken a shot at Kendrick Lamar. During the line in question, Sean raps, “Can he really spit, or do he just hide behind his skits like half of these rappers do, and then y’all go and praise him in this b*tch like they’re the savior of this shit.” Whether or not Sean was taking shots at Kendrick will remain to be seen, but it is clear that he was sending shade in someone’s direction.

    Interlude: Sports (Boxing)
    Trailer: Doc on 17-Year-Old Gold Medalist Claressa ‘T-Rex’ Shields, Youngest Woman to Box in Olympics

    The 2012 Summer Olympics years behind us (the next installment is in 2016), a documentary feature film about 19 year-old Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, the youngest woman – and one of the first – to ever box in the Olympics, will be making its world premiere at the upcoming SXSW Film Festival in Austin. TX.

    The tri-continental effort (North America, Europe and Asia) comes from directors Drea Cooper & Zackary Canepari, who begun work on the film in 2012 (when Shields was 17 years old), en route to a successful $64,000 crowdfunding campaign – funds that were used to complete the film.

    Here’s a long description of the project: “T-Rex isn’t her real name. Her real name is Claressa. Friends and family just call her Ressa. She’s from Flint, Michigan. She’s in high school. Next year she’ll be a senior. The first day we met, it was her 17th birthday. She had a water balloon fight and a big, yellow cake. She carries her money around in a plastic bottle. She wears her hair in braids (sometimes). She takes the bus to school. She likes twitter. She likes boys. She writes in her journal. Pretty everyday for a teenager. But this is hardly an everyday story. Six years ago her dad took her to a local boxing gym. She said she wanted to box. He said, “Hell no. Boxing is a man’s sport.” She ignored him. She dreams of being the first woman in history to win the gold medal in Olympic boxing. But in order for her to succeed, she’ll need to stand her ground both inside and outside the ring.”

    At the 2012 summer Olympics in London, women’s boxing was a first-time-ever sport, with Claressa being the youngest of all the competitors. She would eventually claim her sport in history as the youngest, and the first woman boxer to win a Gold Medal in her weight class.

    She returned home, to Flint after the Olympics, as a new chapter in her life began…

    Her current record stands at Wins 43, 18 of them by knockout, and just 1 loss! Her last big win was last year, when she took home the Gold at the 2014 AIBA Women’s World Boxing Championships.

    The documentary that tells her story, titled “T-Rex,” will make its world premiere at SXSW next month.

    Trailer at the link.

    Here’s some Patricia Arquette – The Road to Structural Erasure Is Paved With Well-Intentioned White Ladies

    With those words—whether intentional or not (and personally, I believe it was unintentional)—Patricia Arquette gave voice to a system of structural erasure that has been the gold standard in the feminist movement since well before Sojourner Truth stood up and declared “Ain’t I A Woman?”

    That erasure assumes that all men are white men and all people of color are men. And that erasure leaves women of color wondering where they fit into all of this. […]

    Andrea concludes her piece by saying, “Let’s not go all ‘Je Suis Patricia Arquette’ on this shit.”

    Unfortunately, that’s been happening. White women, by and large, have loudly applauded Arquette’s words—lumping together her acceptance speech and her backstage interview, quoted above—leaving primarily women of color and LGBTQ women of color scratching their heads wondering whether to divest themselves of their gender, their race, their sexual orientation, or their gender identity in order to be included in the “us” Arquette implored everyone to start fighting for.

    And, frankly, that’s what concerns me a whole hell of a lot more than Arquette’s comments: The reaction from the left—liberals, progressives, whatever we’re calling ourselves these days—has been, by and large, an abomination.

    Sadly, however, such disgraceful reactions to the structural erasure and silencing of women of color are typical.

    On the one hand, Patricia Arquette is “just an actress” and we should be happy that she spoke out about pay equity, even if the way in which she spoke out about it left something to be desired.

    On the other hand, Patricia Arquette is an ally and by criticizing her we are eating our own and letting the misogynists win.

    On the other-other hand, Patricia Arquette isn’t the enemy and by talking about her problematic framing of the people she thinks should be fighting for wage equality for “us” (along with her framing of who “us” is), we are shifting our focus from the real enemy—the GOP and those who would deny us pay equity.

    And on the fourth hand, Patricia Arquette meant well. So really, guys, stop vilifying her.

    All of these reactions are as tired as they are facile.

    First of all, Patricia Arquette is not “just an actress.” She’s a talented, well-spoken award-winning actress who has done a good deal of charity work throughout her career. She clearly cares about social issues—see her work with Give Love and The Creative Coalition—and actually seems to give a damn when she could easily be rolling around in her piles of money like Scrooge McDuck.

    Any claim that she’s “just an actress” is actually rather anti-feminist. It implies that she is incapable of critical thought and incapable of growth in her feminist praxis.[…]

    Second, I’m not here for kumbaya feminism. Kumbaya feminism demands that Black women take a backseat to whatever interest of the day white women deem most important. Kumbaya feminism castigates as “divisive” any Black woman who dares speak out against the White Feminist Industrial Complex. Kumbaya feminism is little more than trickle-down feminism. It posits that rising tides lift all boats and ignores the fact that the boats of most Black women (and, indeed, other women of color) are rigged with anchors. Besides, if my speaking out against centuries-old erasure of Black women in the struggle for women’s equality constitutes “eating our own,” then pass me a knife and fork and some hot sauce because I’m hungry.

    Third, the notion that we cannot criticize public figures with large platforms because doing so distracts from the real enemy—those in power who would deny us equal pay—is a silencing technique. I am quite capable of criticizing Arquette’s comments while also pointing out that the GOP comprises a bunch of do-nothing anti-women ass clowns. In fact, I would argue that criticizing Arquette is of more value than railing on Twitter about Republicans or writing another blog post titled “Republicans Are The Worst!” At least Arquette seems to be capable of growth and critical thought.

    And fourth, the notion that Arquette “meant well” is entirely besides the point. Sure, her intentions may have been noble. Maybe she misspoke. I believe her words came from a good place. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And when someone who has a platform as large as Arquette engages in the same kind of erasure that has plagued the feminist movement since Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton first became homies, then you’re goddamn right that I’m going to criticize it.

    And finally, there are white folks who have never even thought about the intersection of gender and race (or sexual orientation or gender identity) in their approach to feminism. And you know what? That’s fine. It was only a few years ago, thanks to extensive reading and researching, that I was able to put the term “intersectionality” to my life experience. Not knowing all the feminist terminology is nothing to be embarrassed about. But that lack of knowledge certainly does present an opportunity. And if when presented with that opportunity, White Feminists™ choose to ignore it, then that says something about how invested they are in equality for “all women” as opposed to equality for white women.

    Furthermore, I need to disabuse everyone of the notion that white women have spent centuries fighting for the rights of everyone. That’s simply not the case. The truth is far more complicated than that. Yes, there are white women who were staunch abolitionists. And then those same white women turned and found common cause with white supremacists in order to advance their own interests. […]

    The point is simply this: When Black women and non-Black women of color raise concerns about problems within White Feminism™, if you are inclined to argue with them, maybe take a step back and just listen instead of rushing to shut them up, or demanding that they be grateful for whatever crumbs slide off the White Feminist™ dining room table. Because we’re not shutting up anytime soon, and we are not going to be relegated to the back of the feminist bus.

    “@NASA_Marshall: Leland reads 2 @HSVk12 Morris El 2nd graders about #BlackHistory & #STEM ”those kids were amazing Thx

  88. rq says

    Street Image Helps a Young Rapper, Until It Doesn’t. That whole bit about using black culture but not standing up for black people…

    But Mr. Pollard says that he hasn’t heard what he wants from his label, Epic Records — namely a firm reassurance of its backing and help making his $2 million bail: “When I got locked up, I thought they were going to come for me,” he said in an interview from the Manhattan Detention Complex, “but they never came.”

    Barely six months ago, Epic, a subsidiary of Sony, wooed Mr. Pollard, 20, with a seven-figure, multi-album deal, largely on the strength of one viral hit, known in its censored version as “Hot Boy.” With the label’s support, that song went on to reach No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100.

    But now, after Mr. Pollard’s electric performance on “The Tonight Show” and almost 1 million downloads sold — more than 800,000 for “Hot Boy” alone, according to Nielsen Music — Epic has distanced itself, declining, despite pleas from music industry figures like 50 Cent, to help the rapper get out. […]

    Older hip-hop stars remember when labels were full service: 50 Cent recalled getting rappers on his Interscope imprint, G Unit, out of jail in a matter of hours; Suge Knight of Death Row Records infamously paid Tupac Shakur’s bail in exchange for a recording contract.

    But as rap has become more corporate, that kind of aid is unusual. Matthew Middleton, Mr. Pollard’s entertainment lawyer, said that while Epic is not obligated to cover bail or legal fees for Mr. Pollard, the artist expected more support, financial and emotional, especially after the label’s spirited pursuit of the rapper made them business partners.

    “These companies for years have capitalized and made millions and millions of dollars from kids in the inner city portraying their plight to the rest of the world,” Mr. Middleton said. “To take advantage of that and exploit it from a business standpoint and then turn your back is disingenuous, to say the least.”

    Epic declined requests to comment on Mr. Pollard’s status. But industry sources say they understand the company’s reluctance to get involved, given the seriousness of the charges.

    Here’s the ever-recurring hot topic, grand juries!! Should Judges Oversee Grand Juries?

    Many state officials are calling for an overhaul of the criminal justice system. Now, New York’s top judge wants to put judges in grand jury rooms in cases of police-related killings of civilians. Jonathan Lippman, chief judge of the State of New York, explains his proposal for a more hands-on role for judges.

    Audio at the link.

    MSNBC shake-up: Al Sharpton to lose nightly show. I think this is a re-post.

    Anyone in Houston? It may not be too late! Soledad O’Brien’s ‘Black in America’ Tour Comes to UH on Feb. 24

    The University of Houston (UH) will host broadcast journalist, executive producer and philanthropist Soledad O’Brien’s “Black in America 2015” tour at 7 p.m., Feb. 24 in Cullen Performance Hall.Black in America

    “’Black in America” is about Americans talking about the uncomfortable issue of race, about opening the floor to new perspectives, problems and the powerful experiences of regular people,” said O’Brien. “This is a forum for the conversation America is ready to have.”

    O’Brien will moderate the panel discussion at UH with economist, author and political commentator Julianne Malveaux; Antonio French, 21st Ward alderman in St. Louis, Mo.; a surprise guest via Skype; and Leonard M. Baynes, dean of the UH Law Center who has a national reputation as a communications law scholar with specializations in business, media and diversity issues.

    Sponsored by UH’s Center for Diversity and Inclusion, the event is free and open to the public as seating permits, but tickets are required. Tickets are available for pickup (while supplies last) through Feb. 20 in the Center for Diversity and Inclusion, located in the Student Center South, Room B12.

    The Center for Diversity and Inclusion selected O’ Brien as a part of its inaugural Spring Speaker Series because she covers topics that are timely and that educate others on important social justice issues, said Niya Blair, director of the center.

    “We want to be a part of the national conversation that is occurring. Soledad and her tour align with the Center for Diversity and Inclusion’s mission,” Blair said.

    The award-winning journalist presents a detailed examination of the facts behind community policing, racial profiling, controversial crime reduction tactics and arrest quotas. Audiences – from Miami to Houston to Massachusetts – will see videos that show how a war between civil rights and crime reduction is unfurling on America’s streets.

    Baynes said he is honored to participate in the discussion. “Ms. O’Brien is a treasure in helping to raise the many social and economic issues still facing the African American community in America,” he said. “I am very grateful and honored to be part of the program.”

    Links to trailers and more info at the link.

    Stay Of Execution Issued For Texas Man Claiming New Evidence Of Innocence

    Reed’s lawyers at the Innocence Project, which is affiliated with Cardozo School of Law, expressed relief that the court put the execution, which was scheduled for March 5, on hold.

    “We’re extremely relieved that the court has stayed Mr. Reed’s execution so there will be proper consideration of the powerful new evidence of his innocence,” Bryce Benjet, a staff attorney with the Innocence Project, said in a statement. In Reed’s petition to the court, his lawyers argued that new forensic evidence, with corroborating new witness accounts, justified the court granting Reed’s petition.

    Benjet added, “We are also optimistic that this will give us the opportunity to finally conduct DNA testing that could prove who actually committed the crime.”

    Reed was convicted of murder in 1998 for the 1996 killing of 19-year-old Stacey Stites. Reed’s lawyers, however, argue that he did not kill Stites. Noting that the court previously stated that there was a “healthy suspicion” that Reed had not killed Stites, the lawyers now are arguing that “the additional evidence presented in this application tips the scales and demonstrates Mr. Reed’s innocence by clear and convincing evidence.”

    I think back in autumn I had a lengthy article on this case, but I’ll have to look it up to be sure.

    The geography of inequality in #STL: If you live in some parts, you can expect to live 18 years less. – @jqjp1

  89. rq says

    Lawyer: Video of police shooting differs from official account

    The footage, recorded by four different cameras at nearby businesses, is imperfect – grainy images that are sometimes obstructed or washed out by the police cruiser’s flashing domelights.

    But what’s clear, Mildenberg said, is that Tate-Brown’s shooting didn’t mirror police accounts of the incident.

    The Police Department has repeatedly said Tate-Brown had knocked one officer to the ground after a violent struggle, and was fatally wounded by the other officer as he reached into the front passenger side of his 2014 Dodge Charger for a stolen, loaded handgun that was near the center console.

    Mildenberg confirmed that Tate-Brown is shown fighting with the officers, a battle that stretched from one side of Frankford Avenue to another.

    But the attorney said Tate-Brown’s final movements played out differently than many think.

    “From the video, the moment he was shot, he was running away from the officer, across Frankford Avenue,” Mildenberg said.

    “He was behind his vehicle, near the trunk of the vehicle – not near any doors – when he was shot and dropped down.”

    Mildenberg said he and Brown-Dickerson want the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the case, which is still being reviewed locally by District Attorney Seth Williams.

    Mildenberg said he also wants the Police Department to release the surveillance footage to the public, along with witness statements, police radio chatter and any other records about the shooting.

    Woman shot, killed by CMPD officer during altercation

    “She was just a little thing,” said a woman who did not want to be identified outside her apartment just a few doors from where an officer shot and killed Janisha Fonville, 20. “He could have tased her or something.. pepper sprayed her.”

    Police say they received a call about domestic violence involving two women at an apartment.

    “When officers got there they saw one of the complainants outside in front of the house,” said Chief Rodney Monroe, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. “She told officers that they (the two women having a fight) were inside.”

    Officers entered the apartment to find Fonville and her girlfriend. Monroe said Fonville allegedly lunged at both officers with a kitchen knife after refusing to drop the weapon. “She got into a crouching position,” Monroe said.

    She was shot by officer Anthony Holzhauer, police said. Fonville was later pronounced dead at Carolinas Medical Center.

    Per CMPD protocol, Holzhauer has been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of the shooting investigation.

    Holzhauer has been on the police force for five years. This is the third incident Holzhauer used his weapon while on duty, CMPD said.

    It’s the second time Holzhauer used deadly force while on duty.

    The positive numbers about young black men

    Earlier this month, an attention-grabbing 30-second video, released by the Mystic Valley Area Branch of the NAACP and featuring Medford High School students, debunked many stereotypes and myths about young black men. But why stop there? Some other numbers to consider:

    ■ 9 out of 10 black people 12 or older currently don’t use illicit drugs.

    ■ 93% don’t suffer from substance abuse issues.

    ■ 7 out of 10 black fathers ages 15 to 44 who live with their children bathe, dress, diaper, or help their child use the toilet daily — the highest ratio by race.

    All kinds of positive numbers at the link, but I especially loved this bit:

    Fathers who live with their children and took them to and from activities every day [Hispanic/Latino – 22.8; white – 19.5; black/African-American – 27.1]

    So maybe white people should look at that whole father issue affecting the white crime rate, esp. white-on-white crime.
    Here’s a link to the video mentioned at the beginning, Statistics open eyes to the debate on race

    Even the Medford High School teenagers had never heard the statistics they would be reciting in the public service announcement about young black men just like them.

    One out of three goes to college. Three out of four are drug free. Five out of nine have jobs. Seven out of eight are not teenage fathers. Eleven out of 12 finish high school.

    “It was a bit of an eye-opener,” said 17-year-old Martin Seck, who everyone, including his mother, calls Slim.

    “It really brought light to what really goes on in the African community,” interrupted his friend Abdi Jama, also 17.

    “The African-American community,” corrected Seck.

    The poignant 30-second video, released last week by the Mystic Valley Area Branch of the NAACP, opens with three young black men sitting on a stoop as one says, “I am a statistic.” The group grows with each statistic given until it concludes with each of them saying, “I have a purpose, and that’s a fact I’m proud of.”

    More at the link.

    Zendaya responds to media commenting that her locs smell of patchouli and weed. Apologies no time to transcribe, but it is wonderful.

    Apparently, “activist” on HRC panel blames #Ferguson protests 4 allegedly “emboldening” black ppl 2 confront police.

  90. rq says

    Cops getting off for bad behaviour: No charges filed in LAPD killing of driver in chase

    The decision came after LAPD Chief Charlie Beck’s finding last year that the officers violated department policy for using deadly force when they shot Brian Beaird, a 51-year-old National Guard veteran, on the night of Dec. 13, 2013.

    Before the department’s investigation was complete, the city agreed to pay Beaird’s family $5 million to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit — the largest payout Los Angeles has made in a fatal police shooting case in at least a decade.

    But in a Jan. 29 letter outlining the decision not to file charges, prosecutors cited a “tense and chaotic” situation in which officers thought Beaird was reaching for a weapon.

    Prosecutors ultimately determined that there was “insufficient evidence to provide beyond a reasonable doubt” that the three officers “did not act in self-defense and in defense of others.”

    “Officers had reason to believe Beaird might be a danger,” prosecutors wrote.

    The letter noted Beck’s opinion that the shooting was out of policy, but cited the lower burden of proof used in LAPD administrative proceedings versus criminal prosecutions. Beck had rejected claims by the officers that they fired because they feared their lives were in danger.

    Dale Galipo, an attorney representing Beaird’s family, said his clients were “disappointed, but not surprised.”

    “I think one of the reasons we have so many police shootings is that no one ever prosecutes the officer,” Galipo said. “One wonders whether or not without criminal prosecution, these shootings will actually be deterred.”

    An attorney representing the three officers — identified by the LAPD as Armando Corral, Leonardo Ortiz and Michael Ayala — could not be reached for comment Monday evening. An LAPD spokesman said the officers had been relieved of duty, without pay, pending disciplinary action.

    The newest conservative hero is a black middle schooler from Georgia

    His name is C.J. Pearson. He is 12. And he is very certain that Obama doesn’t love America. Here’s his video saying just that; it has been viewed almost 450,000 times on You Tube since it was posted Saturday.

    “President Obama, you don’t love America. If you really did love America, you would call ISIS what it really it is, an assault on Christianity, an assault on America and a downright hate for the American values our country holds,” he says. “… And when it takes a mayor, the former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, to call you out on your downright hatred for America, then so be it. I applaud him for his comments and I definitely do hope that one day other people will get enough guts to speak out against your downright hatred for this nation.”

    (Probably won’t happen, kid, not from anyone who wants to maintain their credibility anyway. Even Giuliani has softened his tone).

    Pearson is the executive director of Young Georgians in Government and is passionate about getting young people involved in politics. We predict that he has a future in this business — on cable news or talk radio or on the Internet. Pearson clearly agrees. He announced his candidacy for state Superintendent of Education last week. (And, Pearson is fighting to lower the minimum age requirements in Georgia election law because of course he is.)

    …

    There’s a 50th anniversary march in honour of the Selma march this weekend, I believe. Sign up for updates: 50th Anniversary Selma, March ’15

    Not just police officers, but correctional officers, too. 3 correctional officers placed on leave after inmate found inside cell full of steam

    Louis Leysath, 35, who was serving a 30-year sentence for murdering his girlfriend in 2008, was found unresponsive Friday inside his cell, which was full of steam. Leysath was housed alone, officials said, and that there was no fire in the cell.

    A spokesman for the state’s Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services did not say why or how the cell became full of steam, citing an ongoing investigation.

    The medical examiner has not yet completed its autopsy report, corrections officials said, but say foul play is not suspected, and it us unclear whether his death was accidental or a suicide.

    They said officers attempted CPR but Leysath was pronounced dead a short time later.

    In addition to a death investigation, corrections officials said an administrative review of the incident is being conducted.

    “This Department is committed to thorough investigations, and openness in sharing information once we are able to,” Secretary of Public Safety & Correctional Services Stephen Moyer said in a statement late Monday. “At this time, many questions remain unanswered, and until they are answered, we simply cannot jeopardize the investigation by discussing it.”

    Lawyer: Video shows Tate-Brown driving with lights on before cops killed him

    “You see clearly that he pulls up in his white car with the headlights on. He gets out, walks into the 7-Eleven, walks around, and then drives off with his lights on the entire time,” Mildenberg said.

    The Police Department has said that officers pulled over Tate-Brown’s 2014 Dodge Charger on Frankford Avenue near Magee because its lights were off. A violent struggle ensued, and Tate-Brown was fatally shot.

    The department said that Tate-Brown was shot as he reached into the passenger side of his car to retrieve a stolen, loaded handgun from near the center console.

    But Mildenberg told the Daily News last week that surveillance footage he and Brown-Dickerson viewed at the Internal Affairs Division’s headquarters showed that Tate-Brown was shot as he ran behind the trunk of the car, nowhere near the passenger-side door or the weapon. The car’s lights appeared to be on in that footage as well, he said.

    “We know from the video that his headlights were on, and we know that he wasn’t reaching for a gun when they shot him,” Mildenberg said. “Whether Brandon started the struggle or whether he had a gun is not clear, but we do know [that the Police Department]lied about two items.”

    Interesting 2 juxtapose these headlines & compare @KMOV’s & @stltodays coverage of the same event. #STL #Ferguson , one talks about the civil rights commission talking to cops about use of force, the other says the return of warm weather could bring more violence to the streets. Both articles purportedly are reporting on the same event.

  91. rq says

    African-Americans Disproportionately Affected by Hunger Despite Economic Upturn

    African-Americans continue to suffer disproportionately high rates of hunger and poverty despite the growing economy, according to a new analysis released today by Bread for the World. The shortage of good, stable jobs and the impact of mass incarceration on the community continues to worsen the situation.

    “As African-Americans, we still suffer from some of the highest rates of hunger and poverty in the country despite the growth of our country’s economy since 2008,” said Eric Mitchell, director of government relations at Bread for the World. “The lack of jobs that pay fair wages is preventing people of color from moving out of poverty and the recession.”

    The median income for African-Americans in 2013 (latest available data) was $24,864, significantly lower than the median for all Americans. Poverty affected nearly three out of ten African-Americans or nearly twice the average rate for the general population. The same rates hold in terms of their ability to feed their families.

    The problem is worsened by the effects of mass incarceration; currently the United States holds the highest number of people in prison in the world. “Incarceration for non-violent criminal offenses aggravates the situation for black people in America since these laws, time and again, put people of color behind bars at a higher rate than white people for the same offense,” said Mitchell.

    African-Americans constitute nearly half of the total 2.3 million prison population in the country. Once a person has a criminal record, the act of providing for one’s self and family becomes exponentially harder. Many states deny returning citizens access to such programs as SNAP, even while they look for work. For those who are lucky to land a job, their yearly earnings are reduced by as much as 40 percent. “The best way to combat hunger and poverty in the African-American community is through jobs that pay fair wages, strong safety-net programs, and by ensuring laws are in place to protect people and not further marginalize them from society,” Mitchell added.

    And because the prison population is disproportionately black: States Predict Inmates’ Future Crimes With Secretive Surveys

    Thomas has been in and out of Arkansas prisons since 2008 for nonviolent crimes, including check fraud. After he got out in November 2013, the state predicted he was a low risk to commit another crime, Thomas said, and assigned him the least amount of supervision.

    His low-risk prediction would have been calculated based on answers to a lengthy questionnaire, the latest tool among the nation’s court systems to try to predict the likelihood that an offender will commit a crime again.

    Across the country, states have turned to a data-driven movement to drive down prison populations, reduce recidivism and save billions of dollars. One emerging practice is the use of risk-and-needs assessment tools, which are questionnaires that explore issues beyond criminal history. They are based on surveys of offenders making their way through the justice system.

    In a country with the highest incarceration numbers in the world, these questionnaires are a pillar of a new effort to get people out of prison. Repeat offenders are a major driver of bloated prison populations. But an Associated Press examination found significant problems with the surveys, which are used inconsistently across the United States, sometimes within the same jurisdiction.

    Supporters cite some research, such as a 1987 Rand Corp. study that said the surveys can be up to 70 percent accurate in predicting the likelihood of repeat offenses, if they are used correctly. Even the Rand study, one of the seminal pieces of research on the subject, was skeptical of the surveys’ effectiveness.

    It’s nearly impossible to measure the surveys’ impact on recidivism because they are only part of broader efforts.

    These assessment surveys, used for crimes ranging from petty thievery to serial murders, come with their own set of risks.

    Many rely on criminals to tell the truth, though jurisdictions do not always check to make sure the answers are accurate.

    The surveys are clouded in secrecy. Some states never release the evaluations, shielding government officials from being held accountable for decisions that affect public safety.

    Some have the potential to punish people for being poor or uneducated by attaching a lower risk to those with steady work and high levels of education.

    The surveys can include more than 100 questions and explore a defendant’s education, family, income, job status, history of moving, parents’ arrest history, or whether he or she has a phone. A score is affixed to each answer and the result helps shape how the defendant will be supervised in the system.

    “How easy would you say it is to acquire drugs in your neighborhood?” a convicted thief could be asked.

    “How many prior sex offense arrests (with force) as an adult?” a sex offender could be asked. A bubbled answer sheet lists options ranging from zero to more than three.

    The idea is to use data about past offenders to predict what current defendants with similar backgrounds might do when released from prison. A major push is to free up parole and probation officers to focus on those more likely to reoffend, instead of lower risk inmates.

    “It is a vast improvement over the decision-making process of 20, 30 years ago when parole boards and the courts didn’t have any statistical information to base their decisions on,” said Adam Gelb, director of the Public Safety Performance Project at the Pew Charitable Trusts, which is working with the U.S. Justice Department on changes to the prison systems nationally.

    Of course, they use a failure of the survey to make a point.

    Pennsylvania Supreme Court Candidate Withdraws Nomination After Racist Email Surfaces

    County Judge Thomas Kistler (R) said Monday that he was taking himself out of the running because “several circumstances have developed here, at home, in Centre County, which have dramatically altered the legal system, and require my full attention.”

    “The current vacancy in the Court Administration position, in addition to several other urgent matters in our court, make this an inopportune time for me to reduce my commitment to the citizens of Centre County,” he added. “My primary concern has to remain the full and proper functioning of the Centre County court.”

    Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) nominated Kistler to fill a vacancy in the state Supreme Court two weeks ago. “Today, Judge Thomas Kistler voluntarily withdrew his nomination to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania and I accepted,” Wolf said in a statement.

    Last week, the Centre Daily Times reported that on Dec. 16, 2013, an email from the account of Centre County President Judge Thomas King Kistler went out to 22 people with the subject line, “Touching and heart-warming. Merry Christmas to ALL!” and was signed “JK.”

    It was a holiday card with an image of a black woman visiting a black man in jail, with the caption, “Merry Christmas from the Johnsons.” Raging Chicken Press posted the image, which has been circulating online since at least 2011:

    Kistler did not reference the email at all in his letter withdrawing himself from consideration.

    Last week, he confirmed to the Centre Daily Times that he had forwarded the image in the email, but insisted he was not being racist.

    “There was absolutely no ill intent,” he said. “It was a comment about how lightly people take being incarcerated.”

    “I am proud of the reputation that this whole court has for complete fairness to everyone who comes to this building,” he added. “There is not one person in this building who has a racial tone to them. The last thing I would do would be to express some racial bias and send it to 20 friends.”

    SEE? HE SAYS HE IS NOT RACIST! IT WAS JUST A JOKE, YOUSE GUYSE!!!!!

    Not just Giuliani and that 12-year-old. Bobby Jindal appears outside White House to proclaim Obama ‘unfit to be commander in chief’

    Gov. Bobby Jindal continued his attacks on President Barack Obama, proclaiming just outside the White House Monday (Februrary 23) that Obama is “unfit to be commander in chief” based on his refusal to commit resources needed to defeat and kill radical Islamic terrorists.

    “I take no joy in saying that,” Jindal said after he and other governors met with the president for nearly 90 minutes. “I don’t say so for partisan or ideological reasons.”

    But he said a president who cannot call the enemy “radical Islamic terrorists,” or is willing to rule out ground troops, except for very limited missions, isn’t leading the United States to victory over a brutal enemy that he says only can be stopped by killing them.

    Jindal,who is expected to seek the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, had expressed the same sentiments in a column that appeared Monday on http://www.foxnews.com

    Wrote Jindal: “Let’s review some of what these radical Islamic terrorists have done recently in broad daylight: beheaded American captives and filmed it; beheaded 21 Christians in Libya and filmed it; burned a Jordanian pilot alive in a cage and filmed it; and attacked a school in Pakistan, killing over a hundred children and teachers.”

    Obama shouldn’t rule out ground troops, not limit the operation against ISIL to three years, as Jindal says is done in the authorization for force the president submitted to Congress.

    The attack on the president was reminiscent of last year’s governors’ meeting with the president, when Jindal again appeared before the microphones to criticize the president. His attacks that year, accusing the president of not doing nearly enough to grow the economy with his focus on raising the minimum wage, drew an angry rebuke from Connecticut Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy who said the meeting was all about cooperation between governors and the White House and accused Jindal of trying to turn it into a partisan event.

    There was no such conflict this time, though some of the governors didn’t seem all that pleased to hear Jindal call the president unfit to be commander in chief.

    The news conference was well underway, when a reporter asked Jindal to comment again about former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s controversial statements last week that President Obama doesn’t really love America.

    Jindal responded that he’s “sure the president does love America.”

    But he said that his refusal to blame Islamic terrorists for the brutal killings in Iraq, Syria and Pakistan on Islamic terrorists reflects poorly on the president.

    Followed by islamophobia. Who knew?

    From history, What a Black Man’s Cool, Detached Gaze Says About Race in the Early Days of Italy

    Painted in a vivid but carefully controlled range of colors, the image of an anonymous black man took form in the studio of Wilhelm Trübner, a young itinerant artist exploring the wider world beyond his native Germany. At this time, only in his early 20s, Trübner had set out to travel and study independently after his tutelage with the influential painter Wilhelm Leibl. In 1872 he arrived in Rome, immersing himself in the works of the Italian Renaissance masters. His sojourn coincided with the nationalist movement known as the Risorgimento, which championed the recovery of a historically fragmented, cultural and political identity for the long-fractured Italian peninsula. Both the artist and his black subject lived within the quickened tempo of life in the recently established national capital.

    During his brief stay in Rome, Trübner seems to have engaged the services of casually encountered models. Among the most significant products of his brief stay is this remarkable painting and two others of the same subject and pictorial format. In one, the black man is posed in right profile. His form appears darkened against an expansive, cloudy landscape towering over a distant city, presumably Rome. In the immediate foreground appears a bouquet of flowers, dominated by the brilliant red of peony blossoms.

    The third work presents the subject in a more specific, interior environment, engaged in the focused activity of reading a newspaper. Set within a bourgeois milieu, the man sits on a comfortable sofa, his top hat, cane and gloves placed beside him. The masthead of the paper reads La Libertà, or “Liberty,” perhaps reflecting Trübner’s own progressive political views, here transferred by proxy to his sitter.

    These three quite varied responses to the same subject were made ostensibly as studies of form and color. Trübner depicts the black man from the three principal viewpoints of the portrait format: full-face, profile and three-quarter. The studies are dated 1872 and 1873, so his experience with the model must have lasted for as long as several months.

    As far as is known, the artist never again devoted such energy to the depiction of a black subject during his long career of over 40 years. In this case, however, Trübner may have been motivated in his choice of subject by the opportunity to study the effects of light and color on a dark-skinned person. Yet his engagement with his model already manifested a nascent attention to character typical of the realist tradition of German painting. A simple study is transformed into an insightful investigation of the sitter’s personality, along with a hint of narrative created by the inclusion of the cigar and purse.

    The memorable record of an anonymous black man at the dawn of modern Italy also raises the question of the reception of people of color in the peninsula during the modern period. Emerging evidence reveals the development of unique attitudes to race during dramatic episodes of social upheaval and the struggle for national identity. While Trübner worked in Rome, vast numbers of native-born Italians had begun to depart to seek better opportunities in the United States and elsewhere.

    The calm demeanor of the man with the cigar belongs to the brief period between the end of slavery in Italy and the beginning of the government’s imperialist ventures in Africa. At its southernmost extent only about 90 miles from the North African coast, Italy would soon embark on the same agenda of colonial expansion as other European nations. Many Italians left to settle in new zones of occupation in East Africa.

    Conversely, like Trübner’s model, black people found their way to Italy by various means. During previous several centuries, black people had worked throughout the peninsula as servants and even slaves. For young men, a common means of entry was through bustling seaports such as Civitavecchia, Rome’s major opening on the Mediterranean. This may have been the case with the man seen here, though he could also have been one of a significant number of long-time residents engaged in any number of occupations.

    And from FtB’s very own, Respect my authoritah!

    Such altercations are common. We had the ghastly story of an elderly Indian man who was visiting his son in Alabama who is now partially paralyzed because someone in the neighborhood reported a strange man of color was wandering around in their suburban street. Police arrived but when the man did not respond to their questions (he did not speak English) they threw him face down to the ground causing spinal injuries. The video is appalling.

    Then there is a Texas woman who had three ribs broken by the police because they say she showed disrespect to them and used profanities. Then we had another case of a woman being arrested for yelling expletives at a police officer while riding past on her bike. She won $100,000 in damages. And the man who was Tasered by the police when he asked them for identification.

    The problem is that there is no check on what goes into the police reports that have to be filed by officers after every incident. This article describes a website where police officers exchange tips and information. You find them saying how to write false reports and plant evidence such as cocaine and heroin residue on unsuspecting victims who refuse to ‘cooperate’ (i.e., grovel) before them, and how their superior officers support these practices. Hence they feel that they can get away with anything.

    As cartoonist Tom Tomorrow says, just because they have guns and Tasers and the presumption that they are acting lawfully, police seem to think that no one has the right to question them. They now also want to classify attacks on police as hate crimes. If that happens, citizens voicing contempt or anger at the police could have the charges against them enhanced.

    People should have the perfect right to voice their feelings to police officers without fear of physical retaliation. What I would like to see as part of police training is for them to be subjected to long periods of contempt, anger, and verbal abuse to see if they can remain calm and objective in the face of it. Those who cannot do not have the temperament to be trusted with the use of force. Another way to stop the abuse is if more and more lawsuits go against the police, requiring them to pay large damages to their victims, because money carries the most authority.

    Lots of links in the post.

  92. rq says

    Crap, there was a link in an article previous comment, a short stay in moderation required.

    Text Messages Show Officers Who Shot 137 Rounds Into Car Knew Suspects Were Unarmed

    Officer Michael Brelo is preparing to stand trial for a November 29, 2012 shooting in which him and 12 other officers fired 137 shots at multiple unarmed victims.

    Brelo stands accused of firing 46 shots, some while on the hood of the victims’ car. The shooting resulted in the deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, two unarmed victims who fled a traffic stop.

    Brelo claims that he is innocent, but prosecutors are accusing him, his attorney and the police union of a massive coverup.

    Brelo and one of the other officers involved in the murder that night, James Hummel, exchanged text messages just after leaving the scene of the crime. The officers openly discussed being aware that the victims were unarmed.

    According to Cleveland.com:

    In the hours following the shooting, Patrolman James Hummel sent texts in which he said “they all knew” neither of the victims had a gun – that the officers had mistaken a silver can of soda pop for a weapon, prosecutors said.

    The texts said that what some of the officers had suspected were gunshots were actually backfires from the fleeing car, that Brelo “was going to be in trouble,” and that “everyone knew Brelo did something wrong,” prosecutors said.

    Throughout the course of the investigation, the police union reportedly told the officers involved to deny any wrongdoing in the case and to remain silent in front of prosecutors.

    “Hummel asked they not be present, didn’t feel comfortable talking in front of them,” Assistant County Prosecutor Sherri Royster said in court.

    This week, the prosecution requested that defense attorney Pat D’Angelo be removed from the case because he was involved in the cover-up, and that would represent a conflict of interest.

    Brelo’s trial is scheduled to start in April, where he will face charges of voluntary manslaughter. If convicted, he could be sentenced to a maximum of 22 years in prison.

    The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden ‘black site’

    The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.

    Alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include:

    Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.
    Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.
    Shackling for prolonged periods.
    Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
    Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.

    At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.

    Brian Jacob Church, a protester known as one of the “Nato Three”, was held and questioned at Homan Square in 2012 following a police raid. Officers restrained Church for the better part of a day, denying him access to an attorney, before sending him to a nearby police station to be booked and charged.

    “Homan Square is definitely an unusual place,” Church told the Guardian on Friday. “It brings to mind the interrogation facilities they use in the Middle East. The CIA calls them black sites. It’s a domestic black site. When you go in, no one knows what’s happened to you.”

    The secretive warehouse is the latest example of Chicago police practices that echo the much-criticized detention abuses of the US war on terrorism. While those abuses impacted people overseas, Homan Square – said to house military-style vehicles, interrogation cells and even a cage – trains its focus on Americans, most often poor, black and brown.

    Unlike a precinct, no one taken to Homan Square is said to be booked. Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside.

    “It’s sort of an open secret among attorneys that regularly make police station visits, this place – if you can’t find a client in the system, odds are they’re there,” said Chicago lawyer Julia Bartmes.

    Chicago civil-rights attorney Flint Taylor said Homan Square represented a routinization of a notorious practice in local police work that violates the fifth and sixth amendments of the constitution.

    “This Homan Square revelation seems to me to be an institutionalization of the practice that dates back more than 40 years,” Taylor said, “of violating a suspect or witness’ rights to a lawyer and not to be physically or otherwise coerced into giving a statement.” […]

    But in detailing episodes involving their clients over the past several years, lawyers described mad scrambles that led to the closed doors of Homan Square, a place most had never heard of previously. The facility was even unknown to Rob Warden, the founder of Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, until the Guardian informed him of the allegations of clients who vanish into inherently coercive police custody.

    “They just disappear,” said Anthony Hill, a criminal defense attorney, “until they show up at a district for charging or are just released back out on the street.”

    ABC news on the latest re: Trayvon and George. Trayvon Martin: DOJ Set to Announce No Charges Against George Zimmerman. I’m shocked at how young he (Trayvon) looks in the photo.

    ABC News has learned Martin’s family will soon be notified that the Justice Department will not be filing charges against George Zimmerman, who shot the 17-year-old after a confrontation in 2012. Thursday marks three years to the day since Martin was killed.

    Federal prosecutors concluded there is not sufficient evidence to prove Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman in Sanford, Fla., intentionally violated Martin’s civil rights, sources told ABC News.

    The case sparked intense discussions over race in America because Martin was walking to his home with only Skittles and an iced tea in his hands.

    Florida prosecutors tried to convict Zimmerman of state-level murder and manslaughter charges, but in July 2013 a jury acquitted him, saying prosecutors didn’t have enough evidence to prove their case.

    One juror -– the only minority on the all-female jury –- later told ABC News that “as the law was read to me, if you have no proof that he killed him intentionally, you can’t say he’s guilty.”

    “You can’t put the man in jail even though in our hearts we felt he was guilty,” she said. “But we had to grab our hearts and put it aside and look at the evidence.”

    In Sanford, race-related tensions had been simmering for nearly a century, but Martin’s death “was the proverbial ‘straw that broke the camel’s back,’” bringing “those issues to the surface,” the new Sanford police chief, Cecil Smith, recently told federal officials.

    After Martin was killed, Holder sat down his own teenage son to explain that -– as unfair as it may be -– young black men must often interact with police in a different way than others, he told an NAACP convention in July 2013. It was “a conversation I hoped I’d never have to have,” Holder added.

    As media attention mounted over Martin’s death, protests grew across the country calling for justice. The city of Sanford now says a police department had not been scrutinized like that by the press, religious organizations, social activists and the broader public since Los Angeles police beat Rodney King in 1991.

    Zimmerman was not a police officer and the neighborhood watch program he was a part of was independent from local police.

    Many accused Zimmerman of discriminating against Martin –- essentially taking action against the teenager and ultimately killing him because Martin was black. Zimmerman is Hispanic.

    The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and FBI opened an investigation into the case, noting “experienced federal prosecutors” would determine “whether the evidence reveals a prosecutable violation” of federal law. In a statement, the department noted there are “limited federal criminal civil rights statutes within our jurisdiction.”

    Privately and publicly, Justice Department officials have been telegraphing all along that they were unlikely to file charges against Zimmerman. And in November 2013, Holder said the case against Zimmerman “in substantial part was resolved” with his acquittal months earlier.

    Nevertheless, federal officials have insisted their civil-rights probe would be thorough and complete. Several months ago –- nearly two years into the Justice Department’s investigation –- Holder said federal investigators were still seeking to interview certain witnesses “as a result of some recent developments.”

    More recently, Holder has said he hoped to announce the findings of the Zimmerman and Ferguson-related probes before he leaves office, which could happen in a matter of weeks, depending on when the U.S. Senate confirms his successor.

    Holder has said then when a decision is announced in the Zimmerman case, it will be accompanied by “as much information” as possible detailing the Justice Department’s findings.

    In the Ferguson case, the department is currently conducting two probes into the matter.

    So don’t hold your breath for justice in Michael Brown’s case.
    If the federal gov’t and the Florida gov’t say that #GeorgeZimmerman broke no law when he killed #TrayvonMartin then we need a new law.

    And tonight this is the last link – Interlude: Literature. Ordinary Light by Tracy K. Smith, an excerpt:

    She left us at night. it had felt like night for a long time, the days at once short and ceaselessly long. November-dark. She’d been lifting her hand to signal for relief, a code we’d concocted once it became too much effort for her to speak and too difficult for us to understand her when she did. When it became clear that it was taking everything out of her just to lift the arm, we told her to blink, a movement that, when you’re watching for it, becomes impossibly hard to discern. “Was that a blink?” we’d ask when her eyelids just seemed to ripple or twitch. “Are you blinking, Mom? Was that a blink?” until finally, she’d heave the lids up and let them thud back down to say, Yes, the pain weighs that much, and I am lying here, pinned beneath it. Do something.
    Did we recognize the day when it arrived? A day with so much pain, a day when her patience had dissolved and she wanted noth-ing but to be outside of it. Pain. The word itself doesn’t hurt enough, doesn’t know how to tell us what it stands for. We gave her morphine. Each time she asked for it, we asked her if she was sure, and she found a way to tell us that she was, and so we were sure—weren’t we?—that this was the end, this was when and how she would go.
    I was grateful for my brother Conrad and his wife, both doc-tors. None of the rest of us would have known how to administer the drug in such a way as to say what we needed it to say— Take this dose, measured out, controlled, a proven means of temporary relief — rather than what we knew it actually meant. Grateful, and hopeful that the training might stand guard against the fact that the patient was our mother.
    The nurse who came by each day was a cheerful person who knew not to be cheery. Calm, available, knowing, pleasant. But she stopped short of chipper. She must have been instructed not to bring that kind of feeling into a home that was preparing for death. Not to bring hope. Instead, she brought mild comfort, a commendable gentleness that helped to rebuild something inside us. The nurse cared for our mother the way we sought to care for our mother: with no signs of struggle, no stifled rage at God and the unfair world, no tears. In changing our mother’s bandages and handling her flesh with such competence and ease, the nurse cared for us, too. Once a day for only an hour at a time, she came and eased our load just enough to get us to the next day when we knew she’d come again.
    I had sat and read the hospice literature one morning at the dining room table. A binder with information about how to care for the dying at home. It said that as death approaches, the body becomes cool to the touch. The limbs lose their warmth as the body concentrates its energy on the essential functions. Some-times when I was alone with my mother, I’d touch her feet and legs, checking to see how cool she had become. I was both fright-ened and reassured that the literature was correct, as if her body was saying goodbye to the world, preparing itself for a journey— though that’s not it, exactly, for the body goes nowhere, merely shuts down in preparation for being left. I could sense my mother leaving, getting ready for some elsewhere I couldn’t visit, and like the cool hands and feet I’d check for every day, it both crushed and heartened me. Every day, she spoke less, ate less, surrendered a little more of her presence in this world. Every day, she seemed to be more firmly aligned with a place or a state I believed in but couldn’t decipher.
    When the dark outside was real—not just the dark of approach-ing winter, and not just the dark of rain, which we’d had for days, too—her dying came on. We recognized it. We circled her bed, though we stopped short of holding hands, perhaps because that gesture would have meant we were holding on, and we were finally ready to let her go. Each of us took a turn saying “I love you” and “Goodbye.” We made our promises. Then we heard a sound that seemed to carve a tunnel between our world and some other. It was an otherworldly breath, a vivid presence that blew past us without stopping, leaving us, the living, clamped in place by the silence that followed. I would come back to the sound and the presence of that breath again and again, thinking how miracu-lous it was that she had ridden off on that last exhalation, her life instantly whisked away, carried over into a place none of us will ever understand until perhaps we are there ourselves.
    It’s the kind of miracle we never let ourselves consider, the miracle of death. She followed that last breath wherever it led and left her body behind in the old four-poster Queen Anne bed, where for the first time in all of our lives it was a body and nothing more.

  93. says

    How Crack vs Coke sentencing unfairly targets poor people

    Crack and cocaine may be nearly identical on a molecular level, but people who are charged with possession of just 1 gram of crack are given the same sentence as those found in possession of 18 grams of cocaine.

    This 18:1 sentencing disparity is actually an improvement from the previous sentencing gulf of 100:1, thanks to the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, but as new research shows, any disparity unfairly targets crack users, who are more likely to be black, low-income and less educated.

    The nation’s coke problem is much larger than its crack problem, with 12 percent of U.S. adults reporting coke use and 4 percent reporting crack use. Yet crack users are still at higher risk for an arrest, or multiple arrests, in their lifetime.

    “We wrote this paper to inform the public and Congress about the disparities in the sentencing laws between crack and powder cocaine, which continue to have profound legal and social consequences for users,” said study author Dr. Joseph J. Palamar, an assistant professor of population health at NYU’s Langone Medical Center. “The sentencing laws appear to unfairly target the poor, with blacks ultimately experiencing high incarceration rates as a result.”

    ****

    The bad cop database

    At a time when police departments around the country are being criticized for a lack of a transparency, the arrival of Legal Aid’s database represents a bold attempt to systematically track officers with a history of civil rights violations and other kinds of misbehavior, and thereby force judges, prosecutors, and juries to take the officers’ past actions into consideration when adjudicating cases. If a defense attorney can successfully call into question the credibility of an arresting officer, she might be able to convince a judge to let a defendant out of jail without bail, or maybe even to dismiss the case entirely. Information about an officer’s past misconduct can also serve as a bargaining chip during plea negotiations with prosecutors.

    Take someone like Detective Sekou Bourne, for instance, who is currently being prosecuted in the NYPD’s administrative court for allegedly frisking a woman improperly in East New York and unlawfully entering her home in April 2013 after concluding, mistakenly, that she had crack cocaine in her hand. According to Justine Luongo, the attorney-in-charge of the Legal Aid Society’s criminal practice, a search for Bourne’s name in the Legal Aid database brings up reports on this incident, along with records of seven civil rights lawsuits that have been filed against him. The fact that all of those cases ended in settlements, Luongo said, could be useful information for defense attorneys next time prosecutors try to build a case against someone based on Bourne’s testimony. (A call to Bourne’s attorney was not returned.)

    Cynthia Conti-Cook, a former civil rights lawyer, joined the Legal Aid Society last spring with the idea for the database, officially known as the Cop Accountability Program, already in mind. The reason she wanted to build it, she said, is that typically, when a criminal case begins, there’s a “big red arrow that says ‘criminal’ pointing to the defendant” and not much a defense lawyer can say other than “my client denies the charges.” With the database, a lawyer can quickly discover records of past misconduct by the accusing officer—if they exist—and with that information in hand, can “start shifting that red arrow toward the police officer, by showing that they’ve also been engaged in activity that deteriorates their credibility.”

    “It takes the judge’s attention away from what your client did wrong to get here, and puts more of a burden on the police officer to prove that your client actually did something,” Conti-Cook said. That matters, she added, because “more and more, in this broken-windows climate, the main and sometimes only witness in a case will be a police officer.”

    According to Luongo, lawyers at Legal Aid are encouraged to be comprehensive in uploading information to the system, which means including complaints that ended up being dismissed or that could not be substantiated, and making note of those outcomes. It’s up to the lawyers who use the database to determine whether and how to present the information they find in the database in court.

    The contents of the Legal Aid database have been harvested from a variety of sources, including documents known as Brady letters that are submitted by prosecutors before trial as part of their obligation to disclose exculpatory material to the defense. Prosecutors usually submit Brady letters at the “eleventh hour,” said Conti-Cook, meaning right before trial is set to start, and often defense attorneys put them in their file, maybe use them once during the proceedings, and then never think about them again. The database, Conti-Cook said, is about “taking that institutional knowledge and figuring out a systematic way of sharing it with everyone.”

    Other sources of information include civil lawsuits filed against the city, criminal trials in which a police witness was deemed not credible by a judge, and news reports about police wrongdoing. Information also comes from grievances that New Yorkers have filed against individual officers with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, a city agency that investigates and prosecutes police misconduct. Once a week, interns from the Legal Aid Society are dispatched to take notes on public hearings at the CCRB, then incorporate any valuable tidbits they hear into the database.

  94. says

    Texas state legislator Garnet Coleman proposes bill to place strong limits on ‘Stand Your Ground’ law

    Yesterday I filled House Bill 1627, a bill that would repeal the Texas “Stand Your Ground” law. In 2007, I was one of only 13 legislators to vote against the bill’s passage because I understood the danger it presents to everyday Texans.

    Today, if a person uses deadly force against someone they have reason to believe presents a threat to them, that deadly force is presumed to be reasonable. It’s presumed to be reasonable even if it later turns out they actually presented no threat at all.

    There’s nothing reasonable about this. In fact, it’s dangerous. We have codified “shooting first, and asking questions later”. It allows people to target others based on assumptions, normalizing otherwise criminal behavior. Trayvon Martin was just walking down the street; Jordan Davis was just listening to music in a car with his friends.

    When I hear stories like those, it makes me particularly concerned for young men of color. We already deal with the day-to-day, default criminalization that makes being black a dangerous prospect. The “Stand Your Ground” law compounds the problem by giving permission to those who would kill us on the basis of prejudice alone.

    As I told KVUE yesterday, “I’m more afraid now, personally, than I ever have been since the 70s that somehow somebody’s going to make a mistake and believe that I’m dangerous”.

    Before this law passed in 2007, if you had an opportunity to safely avoid or escape a dangerous situation, that was the right thing to do. Today, the law encourages armed individuals to seek out danger and use deadly force when they find it. In a 2012 Texas A&M University study on the effects of “Stand Your Ground” laws passed nationwide, researchers noted an 7-9% increase in homicides in states with the law. This uptick in violence is hard to ignore. That’s 600 additional homicides a year.

    We cannot allow people to use violence recklessly just because they are afraid. Who or what people find dangerous is in the “eye of the beholder”. That’s why this week’s song comes from Metallica. House Bill 1627 will return the use of deadly force to a common sense standard. It is our responsibility to return Texas law to a balance that values human life, avoids violence when possible and preserves the right to self-defense in clear situations of immediate life-threatening danger.

    You can read more about why passing House Bill 1627 is so important to me in the op-ed I wrote for today’s edition of the Houston Chronicle.

  97. rq says

    Baltimore Police Launch Investigation Into New Brutality Claim, autoplay video at the link.

    Police say so far, no one from the community has filed a formal complaint with internal affairs but the department says it is committed to transparency. Derek Valcourt reports.

    Can’t catch a break, huh, Baltimore?

    The Howard Zinn Freedom to Write Award

    The prize is awarded in memory of Howard Zinn, renowned historian, writer-activist, and champion of free speech, writers and independent publishers. Zinn was posthumously awarded the 2010 Freedom to Write “Thomas Paine Award” which was then renamed to memorialize his lifelong work and dedication. The “People Speak” award recognizes American writers.
    The 2015 Zinn Award

    Ferguson activists and bloggers Johnetta Elzie and DeRay McKesson will share the 2015 Howard Zinn Freedom to Write Award for their work as activists, organizers, and citizen journalists in the Ferguson protest movement. Their reporting and This Is the Movement newsletter engaged and unified disparate voices in the wake of the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Their activism focused an enraged community, and has been instrumental in transforming a cycle of tragedies into a movement, assuring that the world would not forget the names of Eric Garner, John Crawford III, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and too many others.

    Elzie and McKesson’s reporting demonstrate the dedication to justice and equality that Zinn made his life’s mission, and that he referred to specifically in this passage from A Power Governments Cannot Suppress:

    “A poem can inspire a movement. A pamphlet can spark a revolution. Civil disobedience can arouse people and provoke us to think, when we organize with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress.”

    In awarding Johnetta Elzie and DeRay McKesson the 2015 Zinn Award, we are recognizing their work in speaking truth to power and providing a necessary counterpoint to the mainstream narrative.

    Congratulations!

    ‘Little Ballers’ Documentary Teaches Us That Black Boys Aren’t Monolithic

    “Little Ballers,” a 2013 documentary that premieres Wednesday on Nickelodeon, focuses on the New York-based AAU basketball team New Heights as they fight their way to the national championship. Four boys in particular, Judah, Tyriek, Cole and Kevin, pepper in their opinions on basketball and life in general, noting their personal goals of making it to the NBA.

    At 11 years old, these boys evoke the raw emotion of childhood innocence, which is counterbalanced by the adults of the movie — including their Coach Billy, current and former NBA players like Carmelo Anthony and Walt Frazier, and cultural pundits such as Travis King and Roland Martin — who stress the idea that dreams also have a layer of reality to them.

    In addition to its all-star cast, “Little Ballers” is directed by author Crystal McCrary, who happens to be one of the team moms, and executive produced by recording artist Lupe Fiasco and NBA player Amar’e Stoudemire. […]

    Throughout filming, McCrary encountered a slew of emotions, including on-court tantrums, locker room tears and, of course, the unabashed boys who tell it like it is. “Since the boys hadn’t had any real disappointments in their 11-year-old lives, they believed they could scale Mount Everest, they believed that they are going to make it to the NBA, despite the fact that the odds are overwhelmingly against them,” she said. “And that’s inspirational.”

    However, there are underlying themes within “Little Ballers” that bring up society’s ongoing interaction with black boys and men. The film illuminates the issue of street and gang violence, and how the AAU helps kids avoid dangerous situations, allowing them to make safer decisions. […]

    Further, McCrary touches on another overarching tone: the stereotypical notion that black people, especially men and boys, are monolithic characters in America — especially in the social and political climate following the killings of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and several others.

    New Heights wasn’t just a “black team,” as its members had different backgrounds, but the film mostly focuses on black players and coaches, which has more meaning than just race. “It’s about these four boys that come from diverse family and economic situations,” McCrary said. […]

    More importantly, McCrary felt like the boys’ different upbringings prove that in the face of diversity, there can be common ground. “So, we as people of color in this country come from all different backgrounds and all different family situations, so we’re not monolithic,” McCray said, but the team’s commitment to each other combats stereotype.

    “I also found inspiration in the bond that they developed as brothers,” she noted. “For these young men, race, class and culture really meant nothing, but what did mean something was the brotherhood they developed playing together as teammates and getting to know each other off the court.”

    Editorial: Closing police video records is wrong step for Missouri

    For all the division among black and white and Republican and Democrat in responding to the killings of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner, there is wide agreement that body cameras and dash cams serve both the public interest and that of police. Whether you tend to identify more with police or with protesters, you can find a reason to support body cameras. Transparency cuts both ways; it can increase trust between police and the communities they serve, and it can protect officers from unfair accusations of brutality.

    A December Washington Post-ABC News poll, for instance, found that 86 percent of Americans believe police should wear cameras while on duty. And while there was some split depending on political affiliation — 94 percent of liberal Democrats support the idea of body cameras compared to 79 percent of conservative Republicans — the overwhelming consensus is clear.

    But when it comes to developing state policies that govern the use of body cameras, the devil is in the details, and in Missouri, the current proposal under debate in the Legislature would actually be a giant step backward on the issue of transparency and government accountability.

    Senate Bill 331, sponsored by Sen. Doug Libla, R-Poplar Bluff, seeks to change the state’s Sunshine Law so that neither dash cam video nor body camera video would be open records. Such a change to state law would reverse the status quo that, for instance, allowed the public access to the St. Louis Police Department dash cam video of the April 10 arrest of Cortez Bufford.

    In that video, police are shown surrounding Mr. Bufford — who was found to have a Kel-Tec 9mm semi-automatic pistol — kicking him and eventually jolting him twice with a Taser. Police Chief Sam Dotson says the video shows a proper escalation of various police techniques to get a resisting suspect to submit to arrest. But it also captured Officer Kelli Swinton telling her fellow officers to wait until she could turn off the dash cam: “Hold up, everybody, hold up. We’re red right now, so if you guys are worried about cameras, just wait,” she said.

    Officer Swinton has been suspended for five days. She is challenging the suspension.

    Were Senate Bill 331 to become law, it would take a court order for the video to be released to the public.

    Transparency and trust, and potentially the ability of a police officer to defend his or her actions, would vanish. That’s the wrong response to a policy that is being implemented across the country with the stated purpose of increasing trust between police and the communities they serve.

    Instead, Missouri lawmakers should pay close attention to the guidelines produced in a Justice Department report in conjunction with the Police Executive Research Forum, the same group currently studying best police practices in the St. Louis region. The report recognizes the difficulty of balancing public transparency with privacy concerns, but, it says, for body cameras to make a difference, there has to be some level of public accountability.

    “Once an agency travels down the road of deploying body-worn cameras, it will be difficult to reverse course because the public will come to expect the availability of video records,” the report cautions. Policies should balance “accountability, transparency and privacy rights.” […]

    Missouri Republicans, who control the Legislature with veto-proof majorities, are famous for their distrust of the federal government, proposing a variety of bills over the past few years that would seek to nullify federal laws and, in some cases, criminalize federal law enforcement activity.

    The bills, misguided as they have been, are based on the philosophy that state lawmakers don’t trust the government, particularly at the federal level. In their parlance, for the sake of individual liberty, they seek protection from government tyranny.

    At its core, that is what the push for body cameras is about, giving the public the tools to limit the power of government.

    On Monday, at a public meeting of the Missouri Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, St. Louis police Capt. Mary Edwards-Fears got to the heart of the issue surrounding the need for community trust in police.

    “People will not tolerate being kept out of the information loop, especially when it comes to policing and public safety,” Capt. Edwards-Fears said. “When it comes to critical incidents, we must explain ourselves fully and quickly.”

    Adding body cameras to police operations in Missouri but making the videos secret defeats their purpose. Lawmakers need to find a better balance that starts with this presumption: Police videos are public records.

    More at the link.

    James Baldwin Denounced Richard Wright’s ‘Native Son’ As a ‘Protest Novel.’ Was He Right?

    James Baldwin excoriated the protest novel as a pamphlet in literary disguise, tenanted by caricatures in service to a social or political agenda. Its failure, he wrote, lay in “its insistence that it is . . . categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.” Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” cannot transcend blackness, and his blackness, in Wright’s hands, is as ugly and debased a thing as ever was. Whether the book is a protest novel, or even whether it fails as a work of literature, are questions unworthy of a groundbreaking work that continues to inspire debate 75 years after its publication. More relevant is the matter of its resonance in our time, so distant from Wright’s own.

    “Native Son” sold an astonishing 215,000 copies within three weeks of publication. Thus, a great many people received a swift and unsparing education in the conditions in which blacks lived in ghettos all over America. Of course, black people already knew about all of that, so it is safe to conclude that Wright’s intended audience was white. And, in any case, I don’t imagine many black people would have embraced such a grotesque portrait of themselves. Bigger Thomas is a rapist and a murderer motivated only by fear, hate and a slew of animal impulses. He is the black ape gone berserk that reigned supreme in the white racial imagination. Other black characters in the novel don’t fare much better — they are petty criminals or mammies or have been so ground under the heel of oppression as to be without agency or even intelligence. Wright’s is a bleak and ungenerous depiction of black life.

    Wright knew this, of course — his characters were purposely exaggerated, in part to elicit a white audience’s sympathy and to shock it into racial awareness and political action. But where does that leave his black subjects? Let us consider some other works published in roughly the same era: Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Jean Toomer’s “Cane,” Ann Petry’s “The Street.” Like Bigger Thomas, the protagonists in these books are black, suffering under segregation and, for the most part, poor. Unlike Bigger Thomas, they are robust and nuanced characters — not caricatures endlessly acting out the pathologies of race. Much of the black literature of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, explicitly or implicitly, was concerned with race in America. How could it have been otherwise? For better or worse, many of the characters in the literature of that period were representational to some extent — black people in the real world were the correlative to black characters on the page. And this is significant, because when black writers affirmed their black subjects’ full humanity, the scope of their novels included the expectation that the real world would change radically so that it too could affirm and acknowledge that humanity. I am led to wonder, then, about a character like Bigger Thomas. What future, what vision is reflected in such a miserable and incompletely realized creature?
    Continue reading the main story

    It would be absurd to deny the accomplishments of “Native Son” or to protest its distinguished place in the literary canon. With Bigger Thomas, Wright courageously defied those who would have preferred a milder character, a less provocative commentary on the “problem of the color line” (as Du Bois called it), one that would reassure white readers rather than terrify them. And certainly, when Baldwin attacked “Native Son” he was, as he wrote in his essay “Alas, Poor Richard,” at a “carnivorous age,” sharpening his sword to kill his literary father so that he could take his place. Nonetheless, with regard to resonance, “Native Son” is limited by a circumscribed vision that fails to extend much beyond the novel’s moment in 1940. Certainly the racism that made Bigger Thomas still exists, but, thank God, Bigger Thomas himself does not — he never did.

    @deray From Canfield Drive to Bay Street in Staten Island, the movement connects us. #HandsUpDontShoot #ICantBreathe
    For the record, it’s been just over 200 days of protesting and activism. 200.

  98. rq says

    Here’s three on that secret torture house in Chicago. Sorry, the ‘interrogation compound’. With enhanced interrogation techniques? Maybe, maybe not – but it is alleged that people are brought there with none of the paperwork.
    Chicago Police deny report of secret interrogation compound at Homan Square site

    The Guardian newspaper published a story Tuesday saying the Chicago Police Department operates an “off-the-books interrogation compound” that some local defense lawyers called the domestic version of a secret CIA “black site,” but police officials responded that the facility isn’t used to violate suspects’ rights — and isn’t even secret.

    The massive Homan Square facility is a former Sears, Roebuck & Co. warehouse on the West Side. The building now houses the police department’s Organized Crime Bureau, the Evidence and Recovered Property Section, its ballistics lab and the SWAT unit.

    “The secretive warehouse is the latest example of Chicago Police practices that echo the much-criticized detention abuses of the U.S. war on terrorism,” the Guardian reported.

    But the existence of the building isn’t being kept under wraps by the police: The public is able to recover inventoried property from the evidence unit and news conferences are regularly held at Homan Square when the department shows off seized drugs.

    And unlike other Chicago Police facilities over the years, no allegations of torture have been reported in the media in connection with Homan Square.

    Marty Maloney, a spokesman for the police department, said interviews are handled no differently at Homan Square than at other police facilities, such as the department’s 22 districts or its three detective headquarters.

    “If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them,” Maloney said. “There are always records of anyone who is arrested by CPD, and this is not any different at Homan Square.”

    Arrest reports are completed at Homan Square, and suspects are taken to other facilities for booking, Maloney said.

    The Guardian quoted Brian Jacob Church, a protester known as one of the “NATO 3,” saying he was handcuffed for about 17 hours and was denied access to an attorney while police interrogated him. Church said he was later taken to the nearby Harrison police district, where he was booked.

    “It brings to mind the interrogation facilities they use in the Middle East,” Church was quoted as saying.

    The Guardian story didn’t allege that Church suffered from physical abuse at Homan Square other than his complaint that his left wrist was handcuffed to a bar behind a bench and his ankles were cuffed together. [… – so, the first report doesn’t mention torture as such, just general mistreatment (probably similar to what happens anyway) but the PD jumps to torture right away…]

    The Guardian spoke to several Chicago defense attorneys who said they’d never heard of Homan Square before their clients were taken there. Attorneys have attempted to gain access to the facility, but were “most often turned away even as their clients remain in custody inside,” the newspaper reported.

    The Guardian also ominously noted that John Hubbard, 44, was found unresponsive in an interview room at Homan Square and pronounced dead on Feb. 2, 2013. The Guardian said the Cook County medical examiner’s office couldn’t locate a record indicating his cause of death.

    But on Tuesday, the office told the Sun-Times that Hubbard died of an accidental heroin overdose. He was taken into custody after he allegedly bought drugs from an undercover officer, arrest records show.

    So he overdosed while in police custody? That also doesn’t sound quite right…

    Story two, Chicago police deny British paper’s claims about beatings, illegal detentions

    “CPD abides by all laws, rules and guidelines pertaining to any interviews of suspects or witnesses, at Homan Square or any other CPD facility,” department spokesman Martin Maloney said in a statement. “If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them. It also houses CPD’s Evidence Recovered Property Section, where the public is able to claim inventoried property.”

    The British newspaper’s story, which describes the Homan Square facility as being akin to a CIA black site, quoted a few attorneys and Brian Church, who was part of the so-called NATO 3. That three men were convicted last year on explosives charges, not more serious state terrorism charges, on allegations that they made crude Molotov cocktails in the lead-up to the 2012 NATO summit in Chicago.

    Church is quoted as saying he was handcuffed for 17 hours and interrogated by police at the Homan Square facility while being denied access to an attorney. Church and two others received sentences ranging from five to eight years.

    The story characterizes the facility as being “off the books,” but in his statement, Maloney said, “There are always records of anyone who is arrested by CPD, and this is not any different at Homan Square.”

    “The allegation that physical violence is a part of interviews with suspects is unequivocally false,” Maloney said. “It is offensive, and it is not supported by any facts whatsoever.”

    And three, Chicago police are running a horrifying CIA-style black site out of a warehouse – from the headline, this one ran prior to the Chicago PD disclaimer.

    Unlike the CIA’s black sites, The Guardian reports that the Chicago facility targets people who aren’t suspected of terror-related activities; the site is reportedly shared by anti-gang and anti-drug police units.

    In one instance, The Guardian reports, 12 people who were protesting a Nato summit in 2012 were taken to the warehouse. One man, Jacob Church, says he was cuffed to a bench for around 17 hours and interrogated without receiving Miranda rights. “Essentially, I wasn’t allowed to make contact with anybody,” Church told The Guardian. “I had essentially figured, ‘all right, well, they disappeared us and so we’re probably never going to see the light of day again.'” An attorney who eventually gained access to the facility reportedly had to talk to Church through a “floor-to-ceiling chain-link metal cage.” But most attorneys, The Guardian notes, have been completely turned away from the site.

    One detainee, John Hubbard, died in the facility, The Guardian reports. At the time, The Chicago Tribune unceremoniously reported the event under the headline “man in custody found unresponsive, dies.”

    “”That scares the hell out of me.””

    […]

    As The Guardian’s report demonstrates, it’s not just weapons from the war on terror that are flowing to police departments across the country: it’s tactics and attitudes, too. “I’ve never known of any kind of organized, secret place where they go and just hold somebody before booking for hours and hours and hours,” retired DC homicide detective James Trainum told The Guardian. “That scares the hell out of me that that even exists or might exist.”

    Baltimore again. Should city school police be armed inside school walls? Board hears from both sides

    A bill, introduced in the General Assembly by Del. Curt Anderson and Sen. Joan Carter Conway, would allow members of the 141-member city school police force — the only sworn force in the state designated specifically for a school district — to carry service weapons in school buildings while classes are in session.

    The measure would allow a change advocated by the city school board, and officers say the matter is one of life and death.

    “I want to be on the right side of history,” Sgt. Clyde Boatwright, president of the city school police union, told board members.

    “We’re one heartbeat away from our town becoming the next Newtown,” he said, referring to the 2012 incident in which a gunman entered a Connecticut elementary school and fatally shot 20 children and 6 adults.

    Current law allows the city school officers, who are assigned primarily to middle and high schools, to be armed only while patrolling the exterior of school buildings and before and after school hours. They cannot be armed while stationed inside schools during the day.

    Despite the restrictions, city school police officials acknowledge that officers often carry weapons in school buildings anyway — essentially breaking the law — because they are constantly moving on and off school grounds.

    However, the measure is vehemently opposed by some parents, students and youth advocates who say the presence of weapons makes students feel like criminals and heightens fear of violence inside school walls.

    “Our kids face violence every day living in Baltimore City. … There has to be a place where they can go and not have to be exposed to firearms and deadly weapons,” said Aimee Harmon-Darrow, the parent of a first-grader at Creative City Public Charter School. She said she has already had to explain to her son how a schoolmate’s father was killed in gun violence.

    “I want this bill shot down,” said Darius Craig, a senior at Digital Harbor High School. “They need to be focused on other things, like the professionalism of the police force. I think that will make us feel safer.”

    Proponents include hundreds of educators throughout the city and students like Debra Hammond, a junior at Merganthaler Vocational-Technical Senior High School, who said they feel safer knowing school police are in their buildings. [wanna bet she’s white? …]

    “Where is the research, the data that suggests that this particular change is needed in order to keep our children safer?” said Del. Mary Washington, a Baltimore Democrat. Washington said she generally opposes guns in schools, and believes the district needs to better justify the change.

    “This is a real opportunity, when we’re looking at the role of law enforcement, to step back and assess the climate in our schools,” said Washington, calling the current proposal “a piecemeal approach.”

    Darrow and other parents said they have many unanswered questions about the legislation — in part because the district failed to inform residents that it was in the works. Darrow started an online petition, which had more than 300 signatures as of Tuesday, calling for officials to withdraw the bill, provide more information about why it’s needed and allow more parent input.

    School board officials acknowledge that when they voted in December on legislative initiatives, and later published goals for the assembly session, they did not mention the issue of allowing school officers to carry guns. Stone apologized for that Tuesday.

    State lawmakers required the school district to hold Tuesday’s hearing. Washington and other lawmakers joined residents in criticizing what she described as a lack of transparency on the issue. […]

    But Rais Akbar, juvenile justice policy director for Advocates for Children and Youth, said there is overwhelming research that guns haven’t prevented tragedies.

    And further research shows that over-policing in schools has a negative impact on students, including a rise in juvenile arrests, Akbar said, with barely any research showing guns improve school safety.

    “Given that imbalance, it suggests we should have less policing,” Akbar said. “There are a lot of nightmare scenarios that can happen, but they don’t, which means that argument amounts to nothing more than fear-mongering.”

    Three high school principals testified at the hearing Tuesday in favor of the legislation.

    “What message are we sending our kids when we say we don’t trust our police to be in your school with their weapon?” said Chris Battaglia, principal of Benjamin Franklin High School at Masonville Cove.

    City lawmakers are split on whether increasing violence in schools calls for increased access to weapons by officers.

    “If we have an incident like what’s been happening around the country, where people are going into the schools, killing teachers and killing everybody else, I think our school police should be able to carry guns,” said City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young. “We’ve got to be real about this.”

    But City Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke said more guns in schools — even those carried by police — could result in more children being shot.

    “I think it’s a very bad idea,” she said.

    “Do you really stop an attack because you have somebody with a gun? Or is that gun really adding to shots fired? When you take guns inside the school, you charge the atmosphere,” she said.

    I’m just flabbergasted that there’s a whole police force for policing just the school district. o.o
    From the meeting: Parent: Allowing school police to carry guns in school will ensure that there is a gun in every school. And we all know what a great idea that is! :P

    Posted before, but reposted because they keep updating – Black History Month: Faces From The New Civil Rights Movement. Protestors as people.

  99. rq says

    NYPD Commissioner Calls Out Police for ‘Many of the Worst Parts of Black History’

    Bratton made his remarks while addressing the crowd at a Black History Month event at the Greater Allen AME Cathedral of New York in the Jamaica section of the city’s borough of Queens.

    “Slavery, our country’s original sin, sat on a foundation codified by laws and enforced by police, by slave catchers,” Bratton reportedly said, pointing out that “many of the worst parts of black history would have been impossible without police.”

    The commissioner used New York’s own history as an example, pointing to Dutch settler Peter Stuyvesant’s arrival in then-New Amsterdam. Stuyvesant’s first action, Bratton noted, was to build a police force before using enslaved people to build the colony, according to the news site.

    “Since then, the stories of police and black citizens have intertwined again and again,” Bratton added. “The unequal nature of that relationship cannot and must not be denied.”

    Waiting for the outcry.
    Bill Bratton’s Rhetorical Reparations

    Recognition of our forebears does matter, and it’s welcome when they are not used as a commercial for American racial progress. But Black History Month has become a platitudinous moment, representative of so much said and much less done.

    I was reminded of that today, when New York Police Department Commissioner William Bratton addressed an African Methodist Episcopal church in Jamaica, Queens. Bratton, whose already beleaguered reputation in communities of color took a major blow when one of his officers choked Eric Garner to death last July, made remarks that would be startling coming from any police commissioner. Business Insider reported that after Black History Month boilerplate name-drops of King and Parks, the commissioner uttered these words to the predominantly black audience:

    “The best parts of American history would have been impossible without the police. Many of the worst parts of black history would have been impossible without police, too.”

    Bratton followed that up with a history lesson about Peter Stuyvesant, one of New York’s earliest settlers and the founder of the city’s police force, who used slaves. He noted “deepening racial divide in this country—a divide we thought we had healed,” and that “the NYPD needs to face the hard truth: that in our most vulnerable neighborhoods, we have an issue with police satisfaction.”

    It isn’t the first time Bratton, in the midst of the city’s heated racial climate, has addressed these concerns; the day after the funeral of murdered officer Rafael Ramos, he told Meet the Press host Chuck Todd that he recognized the “reality” of African American concerns and fears about police. A recent New York Times report indicated that Mayor Bill de Blasio and a police union head are getting along again—some might argue too well—after a winter that saw citywide protests against cops and demonstrations by police at the funerals of two slain officers. Given that, it seems only decent and politically smart for the city’s top cop to offer an olive branch to a constituency that has been brutalized physically and emotionally by a number of the officers he leads.

    Still, Bratton was addressing the wrong audience. The commissioner’s remarks are not unlike those given nearly two weeks ago by FBI director James Comey to a collegiate crowd at Georgetown University in Washington. Both men spoke to people who may have been personally assuaged by the words, but who are virtually powerless to help those words become the action or reform that law enforcement agencies need. Both speeches amounted to little more than rhetorical reparations, mere recognition that wrong has been done in the absence of a plan to prevent future Eric Garners and Akai Gurleys. Both should have addressed the people who can actually change the culture of policing: the officers and agents under their command.

    It is also a fairly easy placation, particularly during the time of year our country sets aside for such confession, to state the obvious: Law enforcement has authored some of the most brutal and murderous chapters of African American history. That speech is more difficult to swallow when considering the 4,500 words Bratton spat forth in December fervently defending the ineffective “broken windows” tactic he champions, even as New York’s communities of color are disproportionately targeted. Even Bratton can contain multitudes, but which words are meant to signify his true intentions? Inherently, it seems impossible that he can denounce past police evils and while he praises a policy that increases the likelihood of future discrimination by police. For real progress, some of the NYPD’s (and FBI’s, for that matter) actual enforcement practices will have to be reformed and, in the case of “broken windows,” scrapped.

    Bratton may have intended no malice on Tuesday, but he only fed us a line—just in time for the end of Black History Month. Yes, at least it’s more than what we’re hearing out of Chicago, some may say, where The Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman today reported that police have secret rendition sites, the kind of thing we hear about our government doing in overseas war zones. It’s certainly more than what we’ve heard out of my native Cleveland, where a police union head told columnist Connie Schultz that 12-year-old Tamir Rice, with only a pellet gun in his waistband, was “in the wrong” and “menacing” for those two or so seconds before he was gunned down by a rookie cop. But if Bratton’s words are exceptional only amid modern-day police horrors and other officials’ silence, I’m unsure how many black-allyship cookies Bratton really deserves.

    “We celebrate how far we’ve come, and we recognize how far we have to go,” Bratton said. That’s true. But black New Yorkers already get that. Do his officers? I don’t need Bratton’s repeated assurance that he understands the past trauma of black interactions with police. I’ll be more encouraged by practical, transparent steps taken to ensure his officers don’t interrupt black futures in this city.

    When Whites Get a Free Pass

    As they describe in two working papers, Redzo Mujcic and Paul Frijters, economists at the University of Queensland, trained and assigned 29 young adult testers (from both genders and different ethnic groups) to board public buses in Brisbane and insert an empty fare card into the bus scanner. After the scanner made a loud sound informing the driver that the card did not have enough value, the testers said, “I do not have any money, but I need to get to” a station about 1.2 miles away. (The station varied according to where the testers boarded.)

    With more than 1,500 observations, the study uncovered substantial, statistically significant race discrimination. Bus drivers were twice as willing to let white testers ride free as black testers (72 percent versus 36 percent of the time). Bus drivers showed some relative favoritism toward testers who shared their own race, but even black drivers still favored white testers over black testers (allowing free rides 83 percent versus 68 percent of the time).

    The study also found that racial disparities persisted when the testers wore business attire or dressed in army uniforms. For example, testers wearing army uniforms were allowed to ride free 97 percent of the time if they were white, but only 77 percent of the time if they were black.

    This elegant experiment follows in a tradition of audit testing, in which social scientists have sent testers of different races to, for example, bargain over the price of new cars or old baseball cards. But the Australian study is the first, to my knowledge, to focus on discretionary accommodations. It’s less likely these days to find people in positions of authority, even at lower levels of decision making, consciously denying minorities rights. But it is easier to imagine decision makers, like the bus drivers, granting extra privileges and accommodations to nonminorities. Discriminatory gifts are more likely than discriminatory denials. […]

    A police officer is an out-and-out bigot if she targets innocent blacks for speeding tickets. But an officer who is more likely to give a pass to white motorists who exceed the speed limit than to black ones is also discriminating, even if with little or no conscious awareness. This is one reason the Twitter hashtag #crimingwhilewhite is so powerful: It draws attention to the racially biased exercise of discretion by police officers, prosecutors and judges, which results in whites getting a pass for the kinds of offenses for which minorities are punished.

    Racial discrimination is more likely in settings in which both decision makers and bystanders cannot easily observe how comparable nonminorities are treated. A restaurant is unlikely to charge Hispanics higher prices for a hamburger, because the victim could compare her bill to the price listed on the menu. But one-off accommodations where the decision maker retains substantial discretion don’t offer any easy point of comparison. My kids, who are white, have never been turned down when I asked if they could use a bathroom designated for “employees only.” After reading the Australian bus study, I wonder whether the same is true for minority families.

    The bus study underscores this point. Drivers were more likely to let testers ride free when there were fewer people on the bus to observe the transaction. And the drivers themselves were probably not aware that they were treating minorities differently. When drivers, in a questionnaire conducted after the field test, were shown photographs of the testers and asked how they would respond, hypothetically, to a free-ride request, they indicated no statistically significant bias against minorities in the photos (86 percent said they would let the black individual ride free).

    Of course, unconscious bias might play out differently in the United States than in Australia. But research in America, too, suggests that decision makers use discretion to bestow benefits in a discriminatory fashion. For example, a recent study of 22 law firms by Arin N. Reeves, a lawyer and sociologist, found that partners were less critical of a junior lawyer’s draft memo if they were told the lawyer was white than if they were told the lawyer was black.

    What does white privilege mean today? In part, it means to live in the world while being given the benefit of the doubt. Have you ever been able to return a sweater without a receipt? Has an employee ever let you into a store after closing time? Did a car dealership take a little extra off the sticker price when you asked? When’s the last time you received service with a smile?

    White privilege doesn’t (usually) operate as brazenly and audaciously as in the Eddie Murphy joke, but it continues in the form of discretionary benefits, many of them unconscious ones. These privileges are hard to eradicate, but essential to understand.

  100. rq says

    It’s Not Zendaya’s Fault That Giuliana Doesn’t Know She Is a Goddess

    Zendaya inevitably looks bananas flawless at all times, as we generally note on this here website whenever she makes an appearance in public. But despite having a nigh-perfect red carpet look, Giuliana Rancic and Kelly Osborne took the Academy Awards as an opportunity to make some straight-up racist-ass comments about her hair, which is currently in locs and utterly gorgeous. Zendaya, being the excellent, intelligent young woman she is, fired back with some smart tweets and in doing so, dropped the mic.

    It all started on Fashion Police when Giuliana said that Zendaya’s hair looked like it “smells like patchouli oil.” Osbourne chimed in, “Or weed.” [Update: Osbourne has clarified that she did not make the weed comment.]

    Zendaya’s response still uncitable due to format. Will try and transcribe later, as it really is great.

    Not jsut in the States. SIU withholding identity of man shot by police, worrying transparency advocates – so there’s even less transparency? Wow.

    Due to a fairly recent policy change at the Special Investigations Unit, the public may never know the man’s identity — a troubling thought, say observers, who point out that the name is crucial to scrutinizing a shooting by police and ensuring transparency.

    The SIU, which investigates all police-related deaths, decided in 2012 to release names of people killed by officers only with the consent of the family.

    The new policy stands in contrast to police force practice, which is to routinely release the names of homicide victims regardless of the family’s wishes.

    In the case of last Wednesday’s police shooting near Dupont St. and Spadina Rd., “investigators are continuing to work diligently to locate next of kin,” SIU spokeswoman Jasbir Dhillon said. In other words, the man’s name is being kept secret while the SIU searches for his family. And if his family is located but doesn’t consent to releasing the name, it is likely to remain secret forever.

    “I would say there’s a greater need for society to understand every possible fact we can about a death when the person is shot by police, even more so than when we’re talking about a homicide not involving a police officer,” said Ryerson University journalism professor and former lawyer Lisa Taylor.

    “What other fact is more salient than the identity of the victim? The more we know, the more we can understand.”

    Taylor said it would be “reasonable” to expect families of those killed by police could experience some pressure in having to decide whether to release their relative’s name, a decision no other families of homicide victims must contemplate.

    “It may put pressure on them, but we don’t know what kind. Do they feel compelled to be quiet? Or compelled to speak up?” she said. “And what distinguishes these people who were killed from any others? No (other family) gets to make that choice.”

    Few details have been made public about last Wednesday night’s shooting. Police were called to the scene around 9:15 p.m., after getting reports of a man with a knife near 140 Spadina Rd., according to the SIU. An interaction between a police officer and the man followed, and he was shot. He was later pronounced dead in hospital. A man in his 60s was found at the scene with serious stab wounds to his neck and was also taken to hospital.

    Some other provinces name the victim of a police killing regardless of the family’s wishes. In British Columbia, the coroners’ service releases names on behalf of the police oversight body, the Independent Investigations Office, usually within 48 to 72 hours.

    Spokeswoman Barbara McLintock told the Star last year that families are notified and informed of what information will be disseminated. The coroners’ office explains the reasoning behind making names public: identities will come out in an automatically triggered coroner’s report or inquest and, often, they’re already circulating on social media anyway.

    Toronto lawyer Julian Falconer, who has represented families of those killed by police, said he is sympathetic to their situation, but supports naming the victim and the officer who used lethal force, once every effort has been made by the SIU to notify the family.

    George Zimmerman will not face federal charges in Trayvon Martin death. It made Canadian news.

    The decision resolves a case that focused public attention on self-defence gun laws and became a flashpoint in the national conversation about race two years before the Ferguson, Mo., police shooting of a black man.

    Zimmerman has maintained that he acted in self-defence when he shot the 17-year-old Martin during a confrontation inside a gated community in Sanford, Fla., just outside Orlando. Martin, who was black, was unarmed when he was killed. Zimmerman identifies himself as Hispanic.

    Once Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder by a state jury in July 2013, Martin’s family turned to the federal investigation in final hopes that he would be held accountable for the shooting.

    That probe focused on whether the killing could be charged as a federal hate crime and on whether Zimmerman wilfully deprived Martin of his civil rights, a difficult legal standard to meet. But Justice Department officials said they ultimately determined there was insufficient evidence to prove Zimmerman killed the teenager on account of his race.

    “Our decision not to pursue federal charges does not condone the shooting that resulted in the death of Trayvon Martin and is based solely on the high legal standard applicable to these cases,” Vanita Gupta, the Justice Department’s top civil rights official, said in a statement announcing the decision.

    Zimmerman’s attorney, Don West, was on a flight and couldn’t immediately comment on the decision. A call to Zimmerman’s cellphone went directly to voicemail.

    Martin’s parents were too distraught after their meeting in Miami with Justice Department officials to speak with reporters, said their attorney Ben Crump, who called the decision a “bitter pill to swallow” even though it was expected.

    “What they told his family and I was that because Trayvon wasn’t able to tell us his version of events, there was a lack of evidence to bring the charges. That’s the tragedy,” Crump said.

    They said it outright: Because Trayvon couldn’t testify, there is a lack of evidence. Like HOLY SHIT. Also, Toronto Star, seriously, this ‘resolves the case’? Like hell it does. Like hell.

  101. rq says

    Vice President Biden’s Black History Month celebration honoring those that gave their lives so we can live free. 150 years since the Emancipation Proclamation and 50 years since Selma. Those that walked in Selma, AL thank you for your courage and sacrifice to make a better place for our children to dream learn, and explore! #STEAM

    Baltimore officials kept in dark about detective’s brutality case

    While seeking approval this week for a $150,000 settlement in a lawsuit alleging brutality by a Baltimore detective, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s administration did not tell the city spending board that taxpayers had already paid $100,000 to settle another lawsuit against the officer.

    City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young, concerned about the omission, called Tuesday for greater disclosure about police misconduct.

    “Going forward, that will become standard in this process,” Lester Davis, Young’s spokesman, said about information detailing previous payouts. Young “has made it clear to the Law Department that he would like to know about prior allegations. Everyone benefits in this process.”
    Behind the Baltimore Sun’s investigation into police lawsuit settlements
    Baltimore Sun reporter Mark Puente discusses The Baltimore Sun investigation into lawsuits paid by Baltimore police for police misconduct. (Baltimore Sun video)

    Comptroller Joan M. Pratt, who sits with Young on the five-member spending board, also said she wanted to know about “prior legal matters” when a proposed settlement involving a police officer comes before the board. “However, each settlement that comes to the board should stand on its facts,” she said in a statement.

    The administration vowed to provide more details about settlements after a Baltimore Sun investigation found that taxpayers had paid nearly $6 million since 2011 in lawsuits alleging misconduct by officers — including some who had been sued multiple times. The investigation also showed that city officials lacked a comprehensive system to track such misconduct.

    The new settlement — one of two police-related proposals scheduled for a Board of Estimates vote Wednesday — would provide $150,000 to Marque Marshall. The Baltimore man had to have two fingers reattached after Detective Calvin Moss shot him in the Belair-Edison neighborhood in 2013.

    In such settlements, the officer and city do not acknowledge any wrongdoing.

    Documents sent to Board of Estimates members didn’t mention that Moss has faced other lawsuits alleging misconduct. In 2012, for example, the city paid a $100,000 settlement to a cafeteria worker who alleged that Moss wrongfully arrested her while she was delivering church raffle tickets.

    Juries ruled in favor of Moss in two other lawsuits.

    City lawyers didn’t disclose the $100,000 settlement on Monday when they briefed Young and Pratt. The officials didn’t learn about the earlier payout until The Sun asked the administration about the omission.

    Amid the community anger sparked by The Sun investigation, administration officials said in October that the Law Department’s settlement committee of eight senior lawyers would get information on prior lawsuits and determine whether an officer would make a good witness in court. Officials also vowed to provide more detailed records to the Board of Estimates.

    Mayoral spokesman Kevin Harris said city lawyers do not want to prejudice board members, so they only provide information on a lawsuit under consideration. Older allegations or earlier payouts will be provided if board members request records, he added, noting that neither Young nor Pratt had asked for that.

    “If the council president and comptroller want that information, all they have to do is ask,” Harris said.

    Harris said the administration is not hiding information from the public. “There’s nothing to suggest that we’re not being transparent.”

    City Councilman Warren Branch, head of the public safety committee, said the administration should disclose information about earlier payouts to the Board of Estimates. “We should be transparent in everything since it’s the people’s money.”

    Last fall, some ministers and activists were skeptical of Rawlings-Blake’s transparency pledge. That’s still true.

    “That conduct does not surprise me,” said attorney A. Dwight Pettit, who frequently represents plaintiffs in lawsuits against police officers. “I don’t have much confidence in their disclosure system.”

    Here’s something new out of the fog of history, Black Statue of Liberty – Summary Report

    In early 1998, the Statue of Liberty National Monument staff began receiving inquiries about rumors that the Statue of Liberty was originally meant to be a monument to the end of slavery in America at the end of the Civil War. In response, the Monument’s Superintendent launched an intensive, two-year investigation of the rumors and the truth about the statue’s early history. The research reported here is based on investigations conducted on the internet, through personal interviews and in public and private library and archival collections in the U.S. and France.

    The rumors have been circulating on the Internet, through e-mail networks and in telephone calls. In their totality, the rumors constitute a counter-narrative about the origin and development of the statue that preserves and transmits valuable information about its early history (discussed in Part I of the report). Parts II and III of the report examine four specific claims that are made in the multiple and often overlapping versions of the rumors. Part III also includes a discussion of the roles of African Americans in the statue’s early history (1876-1886) and race relations as an enduring theme associated with the monument. A Chronology of American Race Relations for the Statue of Liberty is presented here. Following the Conclusions and Recommendations for Further Research, appendices present additional information about research methods, specific research findings concerning the rumors’ Proof of Documents, a chronology of internet and media dissemination of the rumors, and a list of further readings about the meanings and interpretations of the statue.

    The Rumors

    Claim 1. The Statue of Liberty was conceived at a dinner party in 1865 at the home of Edouard de Laboulaye, a prominent French abolitionist, following the death of President Lincoln.

    Finding: This story is a legend. All available evidence points to its conception in 1870 or 1871. The dinner party legend is traceable to a single source — an 1885 fund-raising pamphlet written by the statue’s sculptor, Auguste Bartholdi, after the death of Laboulaye.

    Claim 2. Edouard de Laboulaye and Auguste Bartholdi were well-known French abolitionists who proposed the monument to recognize the critical roles played by black soldiers in the Civil War.

    Finding: No evidence was found to support the claim that the Statue of Liberty was intended to memorialize black combatants in the Civil War. Edouard de Laboulaye was a prolific French abolitionist who believed that the end of slavery marked the realization of the American democratic ideal embodied in the Declaration of Independence. His use of references to the French role in the American Revolution to generate support for his efforts on behalf of American slaves and freedmen are critical to understanding his conception of the Statue of Liberty. Auguste Bartholdi was largely apolitical and adapted his self-presentation to advance his career as an artist. His frequent references to race-related subjects during his 1871 visit to the United States reflect the influences of his French patrons and American contacts.

    Claim 3: The original model for the Statue of Liberty was a black woman, but the design was changed to appease white Americans who would not accept an African-American Liberty.

    Finding: The statue’s design almost certainly evolved from an earlier concept Bartholdi proposed for a colossal monument in Egypt, for which the artist used his drawings of Egyptian women as models. Bartholdi’s preliminary design for the Statue of Liberty is consistent with contemporary depictions of Liberty, but differs markedly from sculptures representing freed American slaves and Civil War soldiers. Bartholdi changed a broken shackle and chain in the statue’s left hand to tablets inscribed “July IV, MDCCLXXVI” (July 4, 1776) at Laboulaye’s request, to emphasize a broader vision of liberty for all mankind. There is no evidence that Bartholdi’s “original” design was perceived by white American supporters or the United States government as representing a black woman, or was changed on those grounds.

    Claim4: By the time of its dedication in 1886, European immigration to the United States had increased so substantially that earlier meanings associated with the statue were eclipsed, and this association has continued to be the predominant understanding of the statue’s meaning from then until now.

    Finding: The conventional interpretation of the statue as a monument to American immigrants is a twentieth-century phenomenon. In its early years (1871-1886), that view was only rarely and vaguely expressed, while references to the Civil War and abolition of slavery occur repeatedly from its first introduction to the United States in 1871 up to and including the dedication celebrations in 1886. Immigrants did not actually see the Statue of Liberty in large numbers until after its unveiling. In the early twentieth century, the statue became a popular symbol for nativists and white supremacists. Official use of the statue’s image to appeal to immigrants only began in earnest with public efforts to Americanize immigrant children and the government’s advertising campaign for World War I bonds. The “immigrant” interpretation gained momentum in the 1930s as Americans prepared for war with Hitler and by the 1950s, it had become the predominant understanding of the statue’s original purpose and meaning.

    The article addresses a few of the issues in greater detail, but very interesting, I thought.

    You’d think they’d realize it makes them part of the problem. NYPD cops call Eric Garner training ‘boring’ and ‘waste of time’

    The New York Police Department has reviewed half of the surveys filled out by the 4,000 police officers that have taken the three-day training program, according to the New York Post’s “high-ranking source,” and cops are reportedly calling the course a “waste of time.”

    The training includes two days of mostly lectures on policing tactics and one day of training officers how to use a “high-low takedown” to subdue suspects rather than a chokehold, the source said. The NYPD began offering the training last year following the incident in which Eric Garner, an unarmed black man accused of illegally selling cigarettes, died after being placed in a chokehold by Officer Daniel Pantaleo.

    Many officers have fallen asleep during the sessions, the Post added, as 16,000 others wait for their turn at the training.

    Though maneuvers like the one used last July by Pantaleo on Garner are illegal for local police to use, a recent review found that officers were quick to employ the tactic and were rarely punished to a considerable extent for doing so.

    “Officers thought they were going to get some real hands-on, quality training on how to deal with a hostile prisoner or arrestee,” the Post source said. “They didn’t get that.”

    Eight-hour lectures at the NYPD’s $750 million academy in Queens – equipped with a mock bank, bodega, and police cars – have put some participants to sleep, he said.

    “It’s three days, it’s boring and there’s no real tactics,” the source stated. “They’re not putting them in scenarios. Cops felt they would get more tactical training in light of the Eric Garner case.”

    The first day of the training focuses on a workshop called ‘Blue Courage,’ which focuses on, according to the organization’s website, “self-improvement, increased engagement, stress-management, developing resilience, igniting culture change, combatting cynicism, while improving overall health and well-being.”

    “It’s more of a self-reflection kind of course,” the source said. “Reflecting on how they can improve as police officers.”

    It sounds like the right kind of training with the wrong kind of attitude. Seriously, more tactics? Hands-on? You’d think the case had shown they need less of the hands-on…

    Byron Allen Files $20 Billion Discrimination Lawsuit Against Comcast and Al Sharpton

    Bryon Allen’s company, National Association of African-American Owned Media, filed a $20 billion discrimination lawsuit against Comcast, Al Sharpton, Time Warner and various African-American advocacy groups. Allen states in the lawsuit that his company has been denied opportunities to secure distribution on cable systems owned by Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

    “100% African American–owned media has been shut out by Comcast,” the lawsuit alleges. “Of the approximately $11 billion in channel carriage fees that Comcast pays to license television channels each year, less than $3 million is paid to 100% African American–owned media.”

    Allen’s production and distribution company consists of digital channels as Justice Central, Cars.TV and Comedy.TV.

    According to The Hollywood Reporter, the lawsuit states that Comcast paid Sharpton and his National Action Network more than $3.8 million “in donations and as salary for the on-screen television hosting position on MSNBC.” Sharpton is paid $750,000 a year by NBCUniversal, the lawsuit said.

    Sharpton was named as a defendant in his lawsuit as well as the NAACP and the Urban League, because they’ve all received contributions from Comcast.

    The lawsuit goes on to say that the black channels on Comcast are “fronts” and “white-owned businesses” that are actually ran by friends or family members of Comcast executives.

    In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, Comcast basically scoffed at the lawsuit.

    “We do not generally comment on pending litigation, but this complaint represents nothing more than a string of inflammatory, inaccurate, and unsupported allegations,” Comcast stated.

    Sharpton’s National Action Network told The Hollywood Reporter that the lawsuit is frivolous. “If in fact we were to be served, we would gladly defend our relationship with any company as well as to state on the record why we found these discriminatory accusations made by said party to be less than credible and beneath the standards that we engage in.”

    NAN also stated that, “As for Rev. Sharpton’s TV show ratings the numbers are clear. Rev. Sharpton’s show has the highest ratings of any 6 p.m. show in the history of the network.”

    The school to prison pipeline, explained

    Juvenile crime rates are plummeting, and the number of Americans in juvenile detention has dropped. One report shows the juvenile incarceration rate dropped 41 percent between 1995 and 2010.

    But school discipline policies are moving in the opposite direction: out-of-school suspensions have increased about 10 percent since 2000. They have more than doubled since the 1970s. Black students are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students, according to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, and research in Texas found students who have been suspended are more likely to be held back a grade and drop out of school entirely. Those facts have led to concern among some people, including the Obama administration, that schools are suspending students too much and need to find other ways to discipline them.

    The reason the difference between juvenile detention and school discipline is so surprising — and the reason school discipline is seen as a growing concern — is that the two are connected, leading civil-rights advocates to talk about a “school-to-prison pipeline.” Especially for older students, trouble at school can lead to their first contact with the criminal justice system. And in many cases, schools themselves are the ones pushing students into the juvenile justice system — often by having students arrested at school.

    Here’s how the current state of school discipline developed and why some districts and federal officials are working to change the status quo.

    Items include zero tolerance policies, discipline outsourced to juvenile courts and officers in schools, racial disparity in discipline, and more.

    Brace yourselves for this one, especially where Tamir Rice is discussed. A City of Two Tales

    Cleveland is becoming a city defined by its collective impatience. Nearly three months have passed since a white Cleveland police officer shot and killed Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy wielding an air gun in a city park.

    We’re still waiting to see if the rookie officer who shot him, Timothy Loehmann, will be indicted.

    Less than two weeks after Tamir died, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder flew to Cleveland to publicly deliver the Department of Justice’s findings after a two-year investigation into police practices.

    The devastating 58-page report, written by U.S. attorney Steven Dettelbach and DOJ staff, chronicled a pattern of unreasonable and excessive force so extreme and systemic—and unconstitutional—that federal and city officials are now negotiating a consent decree, enforced by court supervision, to ensure reform.

    We’re waiting for that, too.

    I asked Dettelbach earlier this month when, if he were solely in charge, would he announce the consent decree. His response: “Yesterday.”

    He quickly added that, of course, it was appropriate to wait for community input, but there’s no denying his restlessness. “My constant push is, ‘Why isn’t it done yet?’”

    Police Chief Calvin Williams’ response to Dettelbach’s question is to raise his eyebrows and frown. “Easy for him to say,” he said in an interview last week. “They had two years to work on this report. We’ve only had a few weeks to digest it and respond.”

    Mayor Frank Jackson echoed the chief. “We asked for them to do it. We cooperated with them. Now, I am trying to bring calm and stability to the process to get this right.”

    Jackson made early headlines and drew considerable criticism by insisting problems outlined in the DOJ report were not systemic, despite its extraordinarily blunt conclusion that “the trust between the Cleveland Division of Police and many of the communities it serves is broken.” The report called for “a cultural shift at all levels to change an ‘us-against-them’ mentality we too often observed.” In an interview last week, Jackson said his critics were missing the point.

    “My biggest complaint [with the DOJ report] is that it didn’t go far enough,” he said. “Investigate the criminal justice system and the disparity in how police are held accountable. Investigate who gets arrested and who does not; who gets indicted and who does not. … If you aren’t addressing that, then the consent decree is an illusion, and a facade.” […]

    Neither race nor Tamir Rice were mentioned in the DOJ report, but his death and the police killings of unarmed black men in Ferguson and New York have added a sense of urgency to the call for action in Cleveland.

    In the absence of visible and immediate progress, generalizations about what’s at stake in Cleveland continue to dominate discourse here and across the nation—in media coverage, on talk shows and on social media. The mix of opinions, in no particular order:

    Residents fear and hate the police, or they respect the police and want more of them in their neighborhoods.

    The mayor has been weakened by recent events, or he is emboldened by not-so-distant successes in downtown development and school reform.

    Consent decree negotiations between the DOJ and city officials are stalled or progressing, productive or hostile, concluding soon or God only knows when.

    Every accusation meets its counterpunch; every proposed solution seems daunting in its execution. One of the most enduring allegations, in the wake of recent police killings of a number of unarmed black residents, is that too many Cleveland cops are racist and unnecessarily aggressive.

    Too often in that regard, the rank and file who insist otherwise have not been served well by their spokesmen. […]

    For a few years, Loomis lost his union leadership to Jeff Follmer, who was even more intemperate. Last fall, Follmer insisted in an interview with MSNBC that Tamir Rice’s death was “justifiable.” For those Americans concerned about excessive use of force, he had a suggestion.

    “How about this: Listen to police officers’ commands. Listen to what we tell you, and just stop. I think that eliminates a lot of problems.”

    As of last month, Loomis is back at the union’s helm. He seems determined to help frame the ongoing conversation of what comes next. Three weeks ago, he showed up at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church for a packed rally convened by the Greater Cleveland Congregations.

    The GCC is a nonpartisan coalition of faith groups from the city and surrounding Cuyahoga County. It is arguably one of the most influential of the 13 groups to make consent decree recommendations in recent weeks to Jackson, Williams and Dettelbach.

    At the GCC event on Feb. 3, dozens of people, representing more than 1,100 in attendance, walked up to the microphone and announced their organizations and how many members they’d brought with them. Soon after, one of the speakers on stage introduced Steve Loomis, who was sitting in the audience at the front of the church. The same white guy who four years earlier had described Cleveland residents as the “dregs of society” stood and smiled.

    The crowd, two-thirds black and sitting in a church in one of Cleveland’s poorest neighborhoods, erupted into prolonged applause.

    “I was surprised,” Loomis told me in an interview two days later. “I was surprised at that amount of support for the police. It was a stark contrast to some of the other public meetings I’ve attended where I’ve been called a neo-Nazi and leader of the Klan.”

    Chief Williams smiled when I told him about the applause for Loomis. But unlike Loomis, he acknowledged that mistakes occur.

    “I’ve been saying that all along. There are a lot of things happening that don’t reflect well on us, but the majority support us. They understand we make mistakes. … I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to a community meeting or run into someone and they say, ‘We support you.’”

    Mayor Jackson, who was also in attendance, said he also wasn’t surprised by the warm response to Loomis, and used it to illustrate what he thinks the DOJ got wrong. “I’ve said continually that we don’t have in Cleveland the kind of anti-police mentality they have in other places. As a general rule, they do well.”

    The Rev. Jawanza Colvin, who is head pastor at the storied and influential Olivet Church and co-chairs GCC with Rabbi Joshua Caruso and the Rev. Tracey Lind, says it’s important to understand the mood of the people.

    “It was not Loomis being applauded, it was the officers he represents,” he said in an interview. “Most don’t know Steve Loomis or what he’s said. Many of us have law enforcement in our families and in our congregations, not just in Cleveland, but also in the suburbs. We didn’t want to disparage the majority of police. There were about 20 officers present that night.”

    Colvin’s message: Do not mistake applause for complacency. […]

    Nothing gets Steve Loomis churning faster than questions about what happened on the day that Tamir Rice was shot.

    His constant refrain: The police are heroes misunderstood by a public being fed a steady, media-generated, activist-fueled diet of false information about how they do their jobs.

    “Tamir Rice is an absolute example of that,” Loomis said. “There’s this perception that police just slid up in the car and shot him. That’s not reality from the officers’ perception. They acted based on what they knew at the time.”[…]

    Loomis objects to much of the above depiction of events, shifting between past and present tense as he explains why.

    “Tamir Rice is in the wrong,” he said. “He’s menacing. He’s 5-feet-7, 191 pounds. He wasn’t that little kid you’re seeing in pictures. He’s a 12-year-old in an adult body. Tamir looks to his left and sees a police car. He puts his gun in his waistband. Those people—99 percent of the time those people run away from us. We don’t want him running into the rec center. That could be a whole other set of really bad events. They’re trying to flush him into the field. Frank [the driver] is expecting the kid to run. The circumstances are so fluid and unique. …

    “The guy with the gun is not running. He’s walking toward us. He’s squaring off with Cleveland police and he has a gun. Loehmann is thinking, ‘Oh my God, he’s pulling it out of his waistband.’”

    As for Loehmann, whose lawyer did not return a call for this story, Loomis is livid about media coverage of the young officer’s personnel file from his time in 2012 with the police force in Independence, Ohio. The file, which Cleveland police admit they never saw before hiring Loehmann in March 2014, outlines numerous concerns about his emotional maturity that led to his forced resignation. Much of the coverage focused on a description in the file of Loehmann breaking down in tears at a firing range.

    All rubbish, Loomis said.

    “This Timothy Loehmann thing, this is a sideshow,” he said. “Nothing in Timothy Loehmann’s history would have made him ineligible to be hired. The Select Committee recommended him unanimously. He was emotional at the firing range because his girlfriend of three years broke up with him in a text message.

    “And there’s something you need to understand about suburban police forces like Independence. It’s even more competitive. For some reason, Timothy had juice with the mayor, who told the chief, ‘Hire Tim.’ He had a political target on his back from Day One. For some reason, the sergeant didn’t like him … he didn’t fit the mold.”

    Independence Police Chief Michael Kilbane scoffed at Loomis’ version of Loehmann’s short tenure on the force there.

    “Absolutely, unqualifiedly, not true,” he said. “I wasn’t chief then, but I’ve had to familiarize myself with every aspect of this case.” No one, he said, makes the chief hire officers, and Loehmann was still on probation when they let him go.

    “He didn’t have time not to fit in here. He was here a matter of two to three days after he finished academy. There are no secrets here. His personnel file speaks for itself.” […]

    As chief, Williams is reserved and shows no discomfort with pregnant pauses. Union president Loomis, on the other hand, loves to talk. He’s capable of long stretches of thoughtful conversation but seems unable to resist the temptation to be bombastic, fueling depictions that cast him as a caricature, rather than an advocate.

    He opposes body cameras, which the chief insists all officers will soon wear. He complains that the union was never asked to weigh in on the consent decree, “but the NAACP did have a seat at the table,” a charge the chief denies. And he rejects the chief’s claim that every officer can be trained to do the kind of community policing that builds relationships with residents.

    “Look,” Loomis said, “I remember the days of community policing, before the cuts in 2004, when a helicopter landed in the backyard of a school and kids could walk up and touch it, talk to the pilot. We’d bring our motorcycles and horses—positive, positive, positive. But some are born to be community policemen, and others are not.”[so maybe sort them out before letting them on the force? or, you know, training…?]

    In fairness to Loomis, he believes in the value of community policy and credits one such officer for his career. […]

    Loomis and Williams find common ground when they insist the DOJ is wrong to describe the police relationship with the community as broken. Both men reject any suggestion of racism on the force, even after I told them about off-the-record conversations with officers of color who insist otherwise.

    “A lot of officers have my cell,” Williams said. “They know how to reach me. They don’t tell me someone’s racist.”

    Loomis scoffed. “Racial tensions?” he said. “No. I don’t see it at all.”

    Two Saturdays ago, Loomis inadvertently illustrated a version of the problem he denied existed.

    Before 9 that morning, Loomis sent to my cellphone a police officer’s photograph of an elementary-age student’s drawing hanging on a school wall. In it, a white police officer is arresting a black man wearing a suit and fedora and sitting at a counter. Large dark letters on the bottom read, “Civil Disobedience.”

    “Connie, this is what we are up against,” Loomis wrote in a text. “While the skill of the grammar school artist is apparent the content is troubling. If our schools and teachers are accepting and in fact celebrating this message (by hanging it on the wall) how is anything going to change. Someone is teaching this kid to that feeling and acting like that is acceptable when it is not. The kids should be taught to respect elders and authority not defy it.”

    I pointed out that February is Black History Month and suggested the drawing might depict the lunch counter sit-ins in the South in the 1960s.

    He did not acknowledge that. “It’s amazing to watch 5 or 6 year old kids interact with each other in playgrounds and school settings,” he responded. “They have NO care about race, economic status (the brand name of their sneakers) or religion. They are ALL innocent and pure…It is not until us grown ups, media, apparently our teachers, and special interest groups poison the hearts and minds of these innocent angelic kids. The teachers and principal should be ashamed.”

    A few days later I tracked down the elementary school and spoke to the principal, Alisha Evans. I hadn’t even finished describing the picture before she knew which one it was.

    “Oh, my gosh,” she said. “It says ‘civil disobedience’ on it? Yes, that’s ours.”

    She sighed. “The man in the suit? In that picture? That’s Martin Luther King Jr.”

    There seems to be this huge disconnect between all kinds of different groups of people in the city. Good luck sorting that out.

  102. rq says

    There will be a new comment 101 soon.

    Should city school police be armed inside school walls? Board hears from both sides – yes, I just posted it above, but the link is here for convenience, as I wanted to highlight the following two paragraphs:

    Boatwright said school police undergo the same training and meet the same standards and expectations as Baltimore police and other law enforcement agencies — and in fact have citywide jurisdiction. In addition to protecting Baltimore’s 85,000 students, the school police officers are regularly called upon to supplement city police by providing extra patrols and manning at large events.

    Boatwright said school officers should be afforded the same protections and purview as city police, and others who would be responsible for responding to a violent incidents such as school shootings. He said in the past three years, school police have responded to 78 school lockdowns, meaning there was a threat of an armed person or another serious incident.

    Doesn’t the phrase ‘same protections and purview as city police’ imply an equivalency between schoolchildren and the random mix of mostly adults one polices on the city street? Sure, they’ve had 78 lockdowns and threats of an armed person – they don’t mention how many of those were actually necessary or how many were false alarms. What worries me is the fact that children in school are more and more being viewed as adults, and adults in need of armed protection. Sounds a lot like prison, to me – and a lot of high-level background stress.
    Anyway.
    Not everyone agrees with me.
    City Schools FOP in his own words. In short, disarming school police officers will leave blood on the hands of those passing such legislation, as in his many years of experience of policing schools, he has taken firearms from many students and adults. 105 school shootings since Sandy Hook (THAT MANY????), so if officers can’t carry guns in schools, children will die. Is there some missing logic?

    Trayvon’s family on the DOJ investigation concluding in no action – again, in short, they are disappointed with the findings, but are committed to the eradication of senseless violence in communities; they will never forget.

    Still waiting for the original video to make an appearance. Erica Garner’s response in a press release to the video suggesting that she is critical of the Rev. Al Sharpton, NAN. Once more, in short – she is not severing ties with Sharpton; she never said Sharpton tried to profit from her father’s death; never said NAN was trying to control her actions; she did say Sharpton was About the Money, in that he helps families take murder charges to civil court to get at least some semblance of justice. Also, she made some comments during an emotional moment, and it has been a learning experience. Basically, it’s a media hit job to cause rifts between her and Sharpton.

    Thursday, we shut it down. Start an action in your community on the anniversary of Trayvon’s death. #hoodiesup

  103. rq says

    Giuliana Rancic Makes Somber On-Air Apology to Zendaya Coleman For Dreadlocks Comment (Video)

    Fashion Police host Giuliana Rancic dedicated time during Tuesday’s E! News to offer a public apology to Zendaya Coleman for a comment she made about the Disney star’s dreadlocked hair at the Oscars.

    The apology follows a comment Rancic made on Monday night’s Fashion Police about Zendaya’s hair: “I feel like she smells like patchouli oil and weed.”

    Zendaya took to Instagram to defend her hair choice, which drew support from fellow women in Hollywood, including Kelly Osbourne, Ava DuVernay, Kerry Washington, Niecey Nash, Khloe Kardashian and Chloe Grace Moretz.

    Rancic made the below statement at the wrap of Tuesday’s show.

    I’d really like to address something that is weighing very heavy on my heart. I want to apologize for a comment that I made on last night’s Fashion Police about Zendaya’s hair. Now, as you know, Fashion Police is a show that pokes fun at celebrities in good spirit, but I do understand that something I said last night did cross the line. I just want everyone to know, I didn’t intend to hurt anybody, but I’ve learned it is not my intent that matters — it’s the result, and the result is that people are offended, including Zendaya, and that is not OK. Therefore, I want to say to Zendaya, and anyone else out there that I have hurt, that I am so, so sincerely sorry. This really has been a learning experience for me — I’ve learned a lot today — and this incident has taught me to be a lot more aware of cliches and stereotypes, how much damage they can do. And that I am responsible, as we all are, to not perpetuate them further. Thank you for listening.

    Well. I’m rather happy and surprised, since she seems to have done it right.

  105. rq says

    Tony
    Yah, she looks like somebody really, really, really gave her mind a jolt. I hope she takes the advice to heart, and moves ahead a better, smarter, more aware person.

  106. says

    64,000 women in America all have one important thing in common:

    On Dec. 18, 2011, she drove her 1998 Chevy Blazer out of her family driveway in St. Louis County, Mo., at 3 p.m. Three hours later, the vehicle was found at an intersection 25 minutes away in East St. Louis. The driver’s door was open, the car was empty and the engine was still running.

    Phoenix was 23 years old. She hasn’t been seen or heard from since.

    The Coldons commemorated their daughter’s 26th birthday on May 23, a bittersweet moment considering the circumstances. But her disappearance represents a much larger problem: As of today, more than 64,000 black women remain missing across the United States.

    Background: The Daily Mail explored this phenomenon in early 2012, and recently reposted their story to draw new attention to the issue. The statistics, in addition to others published by the FBI and the nonprofit Black and Missing Foundation, paint a grim picture of race and disappearance in America.

    The Coldons commemorated their daughter’s 26th birthday on May 23, a bittersweet moment considering the circumstances. But her disappearance represents a much larger problem: As of today, more than 64,000 black women remain missing across the United States.

    Background: The Daily Mail explored this phenomenon in early 2012, and recently reposted their story to draw new attention to the issue. The statistics, in addition to others published by the FBI and the nonprofit Black and Missing Foundation, paint a grim picture of race and disappearance in America.

    It gets worse: The reasons for these disappearances vary, and cannot all be attributed to foul play. But a telling pattern emerges in how they’re documented by the media, with critics citing a stark racial divide in news coverage of such incidents.

    Essence points to a 2010 report titled “Missing Children in National News Coverage,” which found that while black children accounted for 33.2% of missing children that year, the media exposure rate was an unimpressive 19.5%. While black men go missing at statistically higher rates, coverage of black female disappearances is particularly telling in light of the attention similar stories get when white women are involved.

    “If you Google ‘Natalee Holloway,’ how many impressions would you get?” Black and Missing cofounder Natalie Wilson told ABC News last year. “If you Google ‘Unique Harris,’ who’s missing from D.C., the story is not the same.”

  107. rq says

    This is a repost, but because the anniversary is coming up, here’s Letter from Selma.

    The tour continues, now in Florida: Soledad O’Brien todiscuss race, policing

    The award-winning journalist is bringing her Black in America tour to Florida International University and said she’s excited to hear from students and the community on changing the conversation about race and policing.

    A former CNN anchor who founded Starfish Media Group, which distributes content across such networks as CNN, Al Jazeera America and HBO, O’Brien said one of her goals is expanding the dialogue. Discussions of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York and police brutality must go beyond sound bites and debates between commentators, she said.

    “The biggest issue in the conversation that’s been happening so far is really that nobody’s listening,” she said.

    In the latest entry of the Black in America documentary series, Black and Blue, O’Brien looks at the numbers behind such police practices as stop and frisk. She looks for stories from people impacted by the policies and the officers and officials executing them.

    The FIU discussion will feature St. Louis alderman Antonio French, who was on the ground during the protests in Ferguson, and economist Julianne Malveaux as panelists.

    O’Brien said the panels have been rewarding because students are given a chance to address subjects like race and politics and discuss how those topics impact their daily lives.

    “People just want to be heard, and it’s a very emotional conversation,” O’Brien said.

    Miami will be the last stop in the tour. O’Brien has already started thinking of new topics. As the 2016 presidential election approaches, she hopes to lead discussions on voting rights for black and Hispanic voters. She hopes her next lecture and tour series can include historically black colleges and universities.

    “It’s up to students to run with the ball and hear the things that are being said and spun to them,” O’Brien said. “You have to have these conversations on multiple fronts.”

    Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/celebrities/article11093912.html#storylink=cpy

    Trayvon Martin’s Mother Says Killer Got Away With Murder

    Speaking with The Associated Press on Wednesday before the third anniversary of her 17-year-old son’s death, Sybrina Fulton says she still believes George Zimmerman got away with murder.

    “He took a life, carelessly and recklessly, and he shouldn’t deserve to have his entire life walking around on the street free. I just believe that he should be held accountable for what he’s done,” Fulton said.
    […]

    The U.S. Justice Department announced Tuesday that it found insufficient evidence to establish that Zimmerman willfully deprived Martin of his civil rights or killed him because of his race.

    “The Justice Department is the top of the line here,” Fulton said. “But what they found just wasn’t enough.”

    Zimmerman, for his part, is relieved the case is closed, according to his attorney, Don West.

    “This cloud he was under has been lifted,” West told the AP, adding that he finds it misleading to suggest that charges weren’t filed only because the legal standard for federal hate crime is so tough to meet.

    “There simply was never any compelling evidence that this was a federal hate crime. Race played no role in it whatsoever,” West said.

    See? He says he’s not racist. QED!
    I am, strangely enough, more inclined to side with Trayvon’s mother, however. He got away with cold-blooded murder.

    .@SenatorNasheed confirms Mo Dir of Public Safety Dan Isom resigning. More in next @kmoxnews., there’s an audio link but I don’t know if it’s working – as in, I don’t know if it directs to current radio or the bit mentioned.

    Report: Chicago Police shoot teen 16 times

    While national attention was focused on the Michael Brown police-involved shooting case in Ferguson, Mo., and the Eric Garner police chokehold death in New York, few people seemed to care about what happened to McDonald.

    McDonald allegedly had a knife and was slashing car tires when police encountered him on the night of Oct. 20, 2014.

    Pat Camden, a spokesman for the Fraternal Order of Police, who routinely turns up at the scene to speak to reporters after police shootings, described McDonald as “having a strange gaze about him.” He told reporters police officers used a squad car to try to box McDonald in against a fence near 41st and Pulaski

    “An officer shot him in the chest when he refused to comply with orders to drop the knife and continued to approach the officers,” Camden told a Chicago Sun-Times reporter.

    But the autopsy report, which the “Invisible Institute” obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, appears to suggest McDonald wasn’t just shot in the chest. His body was riddled with bullets.

    According to the autopsy, McDonald had gunshot wounds to the left scalp, neck, left chest, right chest, left elbow, right upper arm, left forearm, right upper leg, left upper back, left elbow, posterior right upper arm, right arm, right forearm, right hand, right lower back, right upper leg.

    “How could an incident that began with the responding officers assessing the situation and deciding they needed a Taser end a few minutes later with 16 bullets ripping through Laquan McDonald’s body from different directions?” asked Kalven in a lengthy article posted on Slate.com.

    “Did more than one officer fire? Or did a single officer empty a full magazine?” he asked.

    As with all police-involved shootings, this incident is being reviewed by the Independent Police Review Authority.

    Some of the panels from our apartheid wall contributed by various campus organizations and artists. #FreePalestine Here because some reference Ferguson.

  108. rq says

    University walkouts still occurring: #UWWalkout happening NOW! #BlackLivesMatter #UW
    UW Tacoma Vice Chancellor comes up to speak about what he’ll do about our demands #UWwalkout #uwtwalkout
    This isn’t even half though #uwbwalkout #UWwalkout

    Poll: 54% of Republicans say that, “deep down,” Obama is a Muslim

    The idea that Obama is Muslim, a thread of the “birther” conspiracy theory that Obama is not actually American, goes back to the 2008 presidential campaign, when some Obama critics presented him as “other,” if not explicitly foreign.

    Still, this poll shows unusually high levels of belief in the idea that Obama is affiliated with Islam. Theodoridis links, for example, to an August 2010 Pew poll showing 31 percent of Republicans identifying Obama as Muslim. A June 2012 Gallup poll reported 18 percent.

    Theodoridis suggests that the way his question was phrased likely explains the disparity — and may in fact better portray Americans’ views:

    Previous survey questions about Obama’s religion tend to sound like a pop quiz – such as “do you happen to know the religious faith of Barack Obama?” But by asking “what Obama believes deep down?” I was intentionally granting respondents license to stray from the president’s self-reported Christian faith. This reveals a prevalent willingness to distrust this president or categorize him as “the other” in terms of religion.

    The uptick in American, and particularly Republican, views of Obama as Muslim may also in part be explained by the rise of ISIS, which political opponents have seized on to argue that Obama is soft on Islamist terror. While these opponents do not say that Obama is soft on Islamist terror because he is Muslim, they could easily feed into preexisting suspicion of Obama based on his race and background.

    In more recent months, Obama has also attempted to defray the tide of American Islamophobia that has coincided with ISIS’s rise, in part by correctly defending Islam and Muslims against bigotry. Increased belief that Obama “deep down” believes in Islam may be an unfortunate cost of this effort.

    Al-Jazeera is on it: Chicago police slammed for ‘hiding’ suspects at Homan Square
    The Guardian newspaper reported on allegations of abuses at Homan Square, including beatings and holding people without access to counsel for more than 12 hours, in an investigation published on Tuesday.

    The CPD denied the allegations raised by the Guardian story. “If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them,” the CPD said in a statement. “There are always records of anyone who is arrested by CPD, and this is not any different at Homan Square.”

    Legal advocates contacted by Al Jazeera contradict that, saying that people taken to Homan Square do not go through a formal booking process, so there is no record of an arrest. That makes it difficult for lawyers to locate their clients, Siska said.

    It has become “policy” to check Homan Square when a client can’t be found at any of Chicago’s police districts, according to Eliza Solowiej, the executive director of Chicago’s First Defense Legal Aid. Chicago is divided into 22 police precincts, known as districts.

    “People taken there are disappeared from the system,” Solowiej told Al Jazeera. “Homan Square is where lawyers look when we can’t find someone taken into custody and when the Chicago Police Department says they have no record of the arrest. Our policy is to drive over to Homan Square and knock on the door.”

    Suspects are typically held incommunicado at the facility anywhere between 5 to 20 hours, according to Siska.

    CPD did not respond by time of publication to a request for comment about how long people are held at Homan Square.

    Cutting a suspect off from the outside world serves as an interrogation tool, according to Chicago-based attorney Sarah Gelsomino, who represented activist Brian Jacob Church after he was taken to the facility in 2012. The Guardian reported extensively on Church’s experience at Homan Square.

    “Our client felt like no one was going to find him,” said Gelsomino. “It’s a defeating way to feel, and that can really assist in breaking the suspect down.”

    2 men formally charged with defacing Denver Police Department’s Fallen Officer Memorial

    The two men accused of defacing the Denver Police Department’s Fallen Officer Memorial have been formally charged.

    Robert Guerrero, 25, and Matthew Goldberg, 23, are each charged with criminal mischief, defacing public property, desecration of a venerated object and resisting arrest, according to the Denver District Attorney’s office.

    Criminal mischief is a felony charge, the others are misdemeanors.

    A group of protesters said they marched Feb. 14 from the State Capitol to Denver Police headquarters in response to recent shootings involving Denver Police.

    Police said at some point, during the protest, red paint was put on the memorial, along with protest stickers.

    Guerrero and Goldberg were both arrested, then released on $5,000 bond. They are expected back in court on March 2 to be advised of the charges.

    Video at the link.

  109. rq says

    *sigh*

    Zendaya Accepts Giuliana Rancic’s Apology – the good, second one, that is.

    Zendaya had posted another statement on Instagram following Giuliana Rancic’s public apology regarding remarks about Zendaya’s hair.

    Zendaya wrote, in part, “It is our job to spot these issues within others and ourselves and destroy them before they become hurtful. I have so many people looking up to me, that I couldn’t be scared, wait it out, nor could I just stand up for me; I had to do it for WE.”

    “Giuliana, I appreciate your apology and am glad it was a learning experience for you and for the network,” she continued. “I hope that others negatively affected by her words can find it in their hearts to accept her apology as well.”

    Full text at the link, and it is one amazing response.

    Former St. Louis police chief resigns as Nixon’s public safety chief after six months

    Dan Isom, who formerly was St. Louis police chief, said in a statement issued by Nixon’s office that he was eager to return to the University of Missouri-St. Louis teaching spot from which the governor recruited him six months before.

    State Sen. Jamilah Nasheed, D-St. Louis, who was Senate sponsor of Isom’s nomination, said Wednesday that she believed there had been friction between Nixon’s office and Isom over how unrest in Ferguson was handled.

    “They should have known he wasn’t going to be a poster child,” Nasheed said. She said that Isom “wanted to see some reform and it just fell on deaf ears.”

    Isom declined to comment Wednesday night.

    He becomes the third high-ranking public safety official to leave Nixon’s administration in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by then-Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9.

    Col. Ron Replogle, superintendent of the Missouri Highway Patrol, announced this month that he will retire May 1. Jerry Lee, Isom’s predecessor at the public safety department, left his post in late August.

    Isom is African-American, and his selection helped Nixon deflect criticism that the governor faced for having no blacks in his Cabinet. Since then, Nixon has added another: Nia Ray is director of the Department of Revenue.

    In a statement issued by Nixon’s office, Isom said he had discovered that teaching was his “true passion.”

    “It has been a great honor to serve as the Director of Public Safety during this important time, but after a long career in law enforcement I have found that my true passion is teaching and I’m eager to return to my students,” it says.

    The news release says Isom’s resignation is effective Monday and states that Nixon will name his deputy chief of staff, Peter Lyskowski, as acting director of the department until a permanent director is appointed. It also says that former Dunklin County Prosecuting Attorney Stephen Sokoloff, of Kennett, will join the department as a deputy director.

    “Over the last six months, Dan Isom has been a strong leader for the department and an invaluable member of my Cabinet,” Nixon said in the statement. “I am deeply grateful for his wise counsel and leadership, and wish him all the best as he resumes his work at UMSL.”

    Nixon’s staff, now with one less black person. I think he was the only one.
    Here’s a bit more: Public safety director chosen amid Ferguson unrest resigns

    On Wednesday, just six months into his job, Isom announced that he’s stepping down, effective on March 2. And the search begins for his successor.

    Isom confirmed in a statement issued by Nixon’s office that he plans to return to the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he previously taught in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice.

    “It has been a great honor to serve as the director of public safety during this important time,” Isom said. “But after a long career in law enforcement I have found that my true passion is teaching, and I’m eager to return to my students at UMSL.”

    Isom was appointed in August after Darren Wilson, a white police officer in Ferguson, shot and killed Brown, an unarmed, black 18-year-old. The appointment came as Nixon, a Democrat, was facing criticism both for a lack of black leaders in his Cabinet and for the state’s response to protesters and looters after the Aug. 9 shooting.

    At the time, Nixon did not say whether the leadership change was related to the events in Ferguson. On Wednesday, Nixon called Isom “a strong leader for the department.”

    Isom started serving in the top public safety role on Sept. 1 but faced hurdles last month during his confirmation with the Senate. The primary concern was his role in a racial discrimination lawsuit during his time as police chief.

    Lawmakers eventually voted overwhelmingly in favor of him.

    A federal jury in 2013 awarded a white police sergeant $420,000 in punitive damages over his claim that he was unfairly denied a promotion because his superiors wanted a black female to help lead the city police academy. The jury levied $20,000 in damages against Isom for his responsibility as police chief over the actions of other department leaders.

    Isom and other defendants have appealed.

    Democratic Sen. Jamilah Nasheed of St. Louis, who issued a statement earlier Wednesday about Isom’s resignation, backed him throughout the confirmation process, which she said “took a lot of heavy lifting to get him there, to say the least.”

    While praising Isom, she criticized Nixon.

    “I sponsored Dr. Isom’s nomination because I believe that he has the ability and experience to reform the justice system in the state of Missouri,” Nasheed said in her written statement. “The governor needs to start taking responsibility for these needed reforms. This state needs leadership, and the governor is not showing that right now.”

    Check out that discrimination suit. Just… check it out. Wow. I hope they win their appeal.

    Study: Killers are less likely to be executed if their victims are black. So it goes all ways.

    Black people are much more frequently executed for killing white people than white people are for killing black people, and capital punishment is rarely used at all victims when are black — especially when they’re male.

    That’s according to a paper that’s set to be published in the journal Politics, Groups, and Identities.

    The researchers — Frank Baumgartner, Amanda Grigg, and Alisa Mastro —compared homicide victim data with data on the victims of every inmate executed in the US from 1976 through 2013 (that’s 1,369 executions).

    Here’s some of what they say the data revealed:

    While 47 percent of all homicide victims were black, blacks made up 17 percent of the victims of inmates who were executed. […]

    The researchers found that it was exceptionally hard to find examples of killers of black male victims who were executed. “Black men, especially among the relatively young, have a statistical risk of homicide victimization many times higher than any other racial or gender group, ” they wrote, “but their killers rarely face the death penalty.”

    They titled the paper #BlackLivesDontMatter, altering the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag that’s been used in protests against police-involved deaths of African-American men, to reflect the sobering findings.

    6 facts about black Americans for Black History Month

    1 High school dropout rates have declined faster among blacks ages 18 to 24 than the national average. Among blacks, the rate dropped from 24% in 1976 to 8% in 2013, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data. Among all Americans, the rate also decreased, from 16% to 7% over this time period. At the same time, the share of blacks who have graduated from college has increased faster than the national average. For blacks, the share 25 and older who have at least a bachelor’s degree has increased from 7% in 1976 to 22% in 2013. Among all Americans, the share has increased from 15% to 32% over the same time period.

    2 In the last presidential election, the black voter turnout rate exceeded that of whites in a presidential election for the first time, by 66.6% to 64.1%. It’s worth noting that in 2004, the last presidential election without Barack Obama on the ballot, the white voter turnout rate exceeded that of blacks by a substantial margin (67.2% of eligible white voters to 60.3% blacks). The gap in turnout rates between whites and blacks has been closing over time. In recent decades, the white-black gap in turnout rates was widest in 1992, when Bill Clinton was elected (70.2% to 59.2%).

    3 From 1910 to 1970, about 6 million blacks left the South to move to other parts of the country in what is called the Great Migration. Since then, this trend has reversed, in part because of the decline of industrial jobs in Northern cities that pushed blacks south starting in the 1970s, according to the Brookings Institution. From 1970 to 2010, the black population increased by about 10 million in the South and just 6 million in the rest of the country. Today most of the country’s black population (57%) lives in the South, up from 52% to 1970. Blacks are the largest nonwhite racial or ethnic group in 13 of 16 Southern states and in the District of Columbia. In these states, the black population is at least twice that of Hispanics.

    4 The poverty rate among blacks is the highest of any racial or ethnic group, but has declined slightly over time, from 31.3% in 1976 to 27.2% in 2014, according to census data. By comparison, the overall U.S. poverty rate has increased from 12.3% in 1976 to 14.9% in 2014. Blacks also fare worse than other groups in terms of wealth. In 2013, the median wealth of white households ($141,900) was 13 times the median wealth of black households ($11,000), the widest gap since 1989, according to a Pew Research analysis of Federal Reserve survey data.

    5 Barack Obama overshadows others as the nation’s most important black leader. A two-thirds majority of blacks in 2011 said Obama was the most important black leader in the U.S., according to a Washington Post poll. Some 7% named Martin Luther King Jr., and 16% offered no opinion. Various surveys show Jesse Jackson had been the top choice in previous decades. In 2006, 15% of blacks named Jackson the nation’s most important black leader (11% said Condoleezza Rice and 8% said Colin Powell). In 1994, 34% of blacks said Jackson, down from 51% in 1983.

    6 Looking to the future, blacks are more likely than whites to say a lot needs to be done to achieve racial equality in the U.S. In a 2013 Pew Research survey, 79% of blacks said so, compared with just 44% of whites. Only 8% of blacks said a little or nothing needed to be done, while 17% of whites said so.

  110. rq says

    The high costs of being poor in America: Stress, pain, and worry

    My father, a pediatrician at Johns Hopkins, published an article in 1974 entitled “The High Cost of Being Poor,” showing that poor urban Peruvians paid more for water and electricity than the rich. The poor paid roughly 15 times more per unit cost, even though the services were of much lower quality. Unlike the affluent, who had water and electricity piped into their homes, they had to buy their water from trucks, and often had to substitute candles and kerosene for electricity. Small wonder the lower-income children had worse health and poorer nutrition.

    Today, those same urban slums where he (and later I) conducted research have water, electricity, paved streets, and a growing middle class population; infant malnutrition is virtually non-existent (if anything, obesity incidence is becoming a concern). But here in the United States, poverty is exacting a high cost—not in terms of water and power, but in terms of stress, unhappiness, and pain.
    The Cost of American Poverty

    Reported stress levels are higher on average in the U.S. than in Latin America. Importantly, the gap between the levels of the rich and poor is also much greater, with the U.S. poor reporting the highest levels of stress of all cohorts. Of course ‘stress’ is a complex phenomenon, however: “Good” stress is associated with the pursuit of goals, while “bad” stress is associated with struggling to cope. Bad stress, which is associated with an inability to plan ahead, lower life satisfaction levels, and worse health outcomes, is more common at the bottom of the distribution.

    Pain, worry, sadness, and anger (reported as experienced the day before or not) are also all significantly higher among low income cohorts than among wealthy ones, while reported satisfaction with life as a whole is significantly lower, according to our analysis of Gallup data […]

    Chronic Poverty, Chronic Pain

    There are also big differences in reports of chronic suffering across income groups, according to a recent study by Ronald Anderson. Those with incomes below the poverty line were twice as likely to report chronic pain and mental distress as those earning $75,000 or more, and three to five times more likely to have extreme pain or extreme distress.

    Experiencing discrimination is also associated with stress. Among other things, discrimination raises the transaction costs of simple things such as getting a loan or buying a home. Maternal stress related to discrimination is associated with lower birth weights—which are linked to worse outcomes on a number of progress indicators—thus passing disadvantage on to the next generation, according to a new study by Zaneta Thayer at the University of Colorado.
    The cost and pain of poverty in the U.S. less about basic goods like water and electricity than nonmaterial factors: insecurity, stress, lack of opportunity and discrimination. Many of our policies, such as decent quality education, health insurance or savings incentives can help individuals to move out of poverty; they can also help to reduce the costs of being poor.

    Cops behaving badly”Video Shows Florida Cop Dragging Shackled Woman Through Courthouse by Her Feet

    “I am concerned by the way the deputy handled this situation, because there were other courses of action he could have taken,” Israel said in a statement.

    Johnson, a 27-year veteran of the department, has been ordered to stay away from inmates until further notice.

    Rios had reportedly just left a mental competency hearing on misdemeanor trespassing and criminal mischief charges in which Broward Judge Kal Le Var Evans declared her mentally incompetent.

    Witnesses said Rios began arguing with a female deputy after the hearing and was escorted out of the courtroom by Johnson into the hallway, where she sat on a bench and began to cry.

    Johnson reportedly told Rios to “get up,” before physically grabbing the woman by her leg restraints and hauling her across the floor.

    Concerned. Watch the video. ‘Concerned’ should be an understatement and a half.

    Teach for America is looking to extend opportunities to black men in the classroom. I know we’ve discussed the program before, but I’m putting it here with the idea that, hopefully, they’re actually trying to improve themselves and the educational system.

    Tangentially related, on differing experiences growing up in a minority vs majority culture. It’s Time To Talk About Why Our Young People Turn Against Their Country.

    This via Tony, cross-posted from the Lounge: Straight Talk for White Men

    White men sometimes feel besieged and baffled by these suggestions of systematic advantage. When I wrote a series last year, “When Whites Just Don’t Get It,” the reaction from white men was often indignant: It’s an equal playing field now! Get off our case!

    Yet the evidence is overwhelming that unconscious bias remains widespread in ways that systematically benefit both whites and men. So white men get a double dividend, a payoff from both racial and gender biases. […]

    It’s not that we white men are intentionally doing anything wrong, but we do have a penchant for obliviousness about the way we are beneficiaries of systematic unfairness. Maybe that’s because in a race, it’s easy not to notice a tailwind, and white men often go through life with a tailwind, while women and people of color must push against a headwind.

    While we don’t notice systematic unfairness, we do observe specific efforts to redress it — such as affirmative action, which often strikes white men as profoundly unjust. Thus a majority of white Americans surveyed in a 2011 study said that there is now more racism against whites than against blacks.

    None of these examples mean exactly that society is full of hard-core racists and misogynists. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a Duke University sociologist, aptly calls the present situation “racism without racists”; it could equally be called “misogyny without misogynists.” Of course, there are die-hard racists and misogynists out there, but the bigger problem seems to be well-meaning people who believe in equal rights yet make decisions that inadvertently transmit both racism and sexism.

    So, come on, white men! Let’s just acknowledge that we’re all flawed, biased and sometimes irrational, and that we can do more to resist unconscious bias. That means trying not to hire people just because they look like us, avoiding telling a young girl she’s “beautiful” while her brother is “smart.” It means acknowledging systematic bias as a step toward correcting it.

    Over time, white wealth increases while black wealth does not

  111. rq says

    Pasco shooting: Officers fired 17 shots at Mexican immigrant, police say

    The three officers involved in the death of an unarmed Mexican man in Washington state fired 17 shots, including several that struck the former orchard worker but none that hit him in the back, a task force spokesman said Wednesday.

    The regional law enforcement task force is investigating the Feb. 10 killing of Antonio Zambrano-Montes, which has led to weeks of protests and calls for a federal probe.

    Kennewick police Sgt. Ken Lattin, a spokesman for the task force, said at a news conference that five or six bullets struck Zambrano-Montes. However, he said autopsy results were pending, and he couldn’t be more specific about where the 35-year-old was shot.

    “There were no shots in the back,” Lattin said.

    Well, with the autopsy pending, I don’t think he can be 100% on that statement, either.

    With the legendary Dr. Jim Gates standing in front of an image of the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma. Dr. Gates interviewed to be an astronaut in the 80’s after going to school at MIT with Astronaut Dr. Ron McNair. Very proud of this brother’s work in supersymmetry, supergravity and superspace. He is the first African American to hold an endowed chair at a major US research university. Proud of you my friend.

    Lawsuit aims to reveal disciplinary history of NYPD cop who used chokehold on Eric Garner

    The Legal Aid Society has filed suit to force the CCRB to turn over information it might have about Daniel Pantaleo, the officer whose takedown of Garner led to his death on Staten Island last year.

    “Our city needs to know if the systems of police oversight failed to prevent Garner’s death by failing to deter an officer with a history of excessive force,” the Manhattan Supeme Court suit says.

    The CCRB has denied the Legal Aid Society’s requests for the info, saying it’s prevented from doing so for legal and privacy reasons.

    “It’s very clear the law does not allow us to reveal any personnel information going into an officer’s file. It’s not even a close question,” CCRB chairman Richard Emery told the Daily News.

    Legal Aid lawyer Cynthia Conti-Cook said that law needs to be reformed — and she’s hoping the suit will help in “expanding the conversation.”

    “The existence of prior civilian complaints and prosecutions is a matter of public concern,” the suit says. “This court should not interpret civil right laws so broad as to prohibit the CCRB from essentially answering whether Mr. Pantaleo was previously the subject of civilian complaints or a prosecution.”

    The suit notes that Garner’s arrest history was made public soon after his death.

    Trayvon’s mother again – Trayvon Martin’s mother disappointed Zimmerman won’t be charged with hate crime

    Fulton now channels her grief into work with the Trayvon Martin Foundation, which reaches out to other families who have lost children to violence, awards scholarships and collects school supplies for poor students.

    She is also watching to see how the Justice Department handles other high-profile killings of unarmed black men. Decisions are pending on whether to charge police in New York and Ferguson, Missouri with depriving the victims of their civil rights by using excessive force in the course of duty.

    “What we want is accountability, we want somebody to be arrested, we want somebody to go to jail, of course,” Fulton said. “But … we have grand juries and special grand juries; they’re making a decision to not even arrest a person.”

    Seth Williams calls mother of Brandon Tate-Brown

    Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams on Tuesday called the mother of a 25-year-old Frankford motorist killed by police after a traffic stop last year to explain his office’s investigative process in the case.

    A spokesman for Williams said the district attorney also offered his condolences to Brandon Tate-Brown’s family. At the same time, however, Williams declined to release video showing the shooting because it is still considered evidence in an ongoing investigation.

    Tate-Brown’s mother, Tanya Dickerson-Brown, and her attorney, Brian Mildenberg, have called for authorities to release more evidence in the case, which has sparked protests.

    “The only way for us to understand the entire encounter is for the police to release the rest of the evidence and the police officers’ statements from that night,” Mildenberg said Monday night. […]

    Mildenberg said he has obtained video from a 7-Eleven store 11/2 miles from the site of the shooting that shows Tate-Brown was driving with his headlights on that night.

    The department Tuesday night challenged that assertion.

    “The department has thoroughly investigated this incident, therefore, this video isn’t some breaking development, nor is it the video of the particular incident,” police spokesman Lt. John Stanford said in an e-mail.

    “Perhaps if those so quick to point out irrelevant video would just allow the investigation and review to take its course, they could make an educated determination based on all evidence and not just what they want to see. We have been committed to the integrity of this investigation from the very beginning and that fact isn’t going to change.”

    This month, the department determined that the two officers involved in the shooting had not violated any departmental policy. Both were allowed to return to street duty.

    And just like that they’re back on duty.

    A City’s Tragedy

    Two Milwaukee police officers who were on foot talked to Dontre for about five minutes and told the Starbucks’ employees he wasn’t doing anything wrong. When Dontre didn’t leave, the barista called the non-emergency line a second time. The same officers returned and, after talking to Dontre again, told the Starbucks employees he wasn’t doing anything illegal by being in the park and they couldn’t make him leave.

    At 3:30 p.m., a third officer arrived, unaware that two officers had already spoken to Hamilton. Christopher Manney, a 13-year veteran of the police force, asked Hamilton to stand and began questioning him. Dontre stood and turned his back to Manney, who began a pat-down frisk, searching for a weapon.

    Hamilton didn’t have a weapon. And when he resisted, the search escalated into an altercation. Although eyewitness reports differ about how the exchange began and who struck the first blow, Manney later told the state Division of Criminal Investigation he used his wooden baton in self-defense to strike Hamilton, once in the rib area. Hamilton was able to trap the baton between his arms and his torso, and he spun away from Manney, who lost control of the baton.

    According to Manney, Hamilton advanced toward him and hit him on the side of his neck with the baton. Manney pushed away with his left arm, unholstered his Smith & Wesson .40-caliber semi-automatic pistol with his right hand, aimed and fired, striking Hamilton in the chest. Hamilton moved toward him, and Manney kept firing, until Dontre fell to the ground with gunshot wounds to the right side of his neck, the right side of his chest, his abdomen, and right and left forearms.

    Hamilton suffered a total of 21 gunshot wounds in his body within three to four seconds – 15 entry wounds and six exit wounds – including the partial amputation of his left thumb. […]

    The timing of Dontre Hamilton’s death coincided with the highly publicized killings months later of other black men at the hands of white police officers. The shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and the chokehold death of Eric Garner in New York City unleashed nationwide protests and sparked impassioned debate on policing methods and race.

    Unlike the Brown and Garner cases, however, Hamilton’s story was less about race than it was about mental illness. At least, at the outset. As the completion of a state investigation of the Hamilton shooting wore on, and a decision of whether Manney would face criminal charges languished for weeks and then months, frustration took hold of those who questioned the police officer’s actions, and race was pushed to the forefront.

    But, also unlike the Brown and Garner cases, and others similar, the public protests over Hamilton’s shooting have been absent of violence.

    Still, the case has had vast repercussions: on the people directly involved – Hamilton’s family, Manney, Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn and his department – and on the community at large, which looks for answers to a tragedy that has played out more and more frequently here and around the country. […]

    The desire to be rich prompted Dontre to start working at a gas station at age 13. He volunteered to work double shifts and played the lottery every day. When he wasn’t working, he spent his time listening to music and watching movies. Donnie Brasco and The Godfather trilogy were his favorites. He could recite the words to the scripts.

    When Dontre was in his late 20s, he told Nate that he was hearing voices. The older brother didn’t want to believe it. So Dontre confided in a family friend, who called Nate and told him about some of the strange things Dontre had been saying. Nate finally began to believe there might be something wrong with Dontre.

    In February 2013, Dontre stabbed himself, thinking someone was trying to kill his family. He was admitted to the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

    He was connected with services through Milwaukee County, which helped him find transitional housing and a peer support specialist. County staff also helped him apply for Medicaid so he could receive his medication.

    But because of mixups with his insurance coverage, Dontre wasn’t always able to receive the monthly injection needed to keep his mental health issues at bay. The last time he had his medication was Dec. 2, 2013. His next shot was scheduled for May 7, eight days after he was killed.

    “He was generally doing well, but still suffering from occasional episodes with some paranoia,” Nate says. “He had not been able to get his medications for a while, which is why we were working with Dontre, the Mental Health Complex and the county outreach program to try to get his medications restored.” […]

    “The purpose is not to demonize the victim but rather identify him and, through his death, draw attention to the extraordinary social health problem being played out on the streets of America today, including Milwaukee,” he said, standing in a conference room at police headquarters. “In the course of our investigation into his background, we have learned this is not his first experience with the Milwaukee Police Department. As recently as last year, police were summoned to a scene where he attempted to kill himself by stabbing both sides of his neck saying, ‘Voices told me to kill myself and you people, too.’”

    Flynn went on to say Dontre was homeless, had previously been arrested for armed robbery and disorderly conduct – things his family and attorney dispute. (There are records from the police department that show Hamilton was charged with disorderly conduct in 2011 after a disturbance at his mother’s house where he was breaking things and refused to leave. The case was later dismissed, according to court records.) The family, though, was convinced the altercation with Manney was directly related to his mental health issues, not because he was a violent criminal.

    It was that press conference that prompted the Hamilton family to contact the media and begin participating in demonstrations. They wanted to clear Dontre’s name.

    “There is so much put in the media that is a lie, that is misleading, that hurts us on a whole separate level,” Nate says. “We’re fighting for justice. No other family should have to go through that.”

    The Hamiltons hired Jonathan Safran, a high-profile civil rights attorney, to represent the family. The 57-year-old Safran is accustomed to TV cameras. He had gained attention in 2004, when he represented Frank Jude Jr. in the largest case against the Milwaukee Police Department in history. Jude was severely beaten by off-duty Milwaukee police officers at a house party in Bay View after being accused of stealing a police badge. Three officers were convicted in federal court for the beating and received 15-year prison terms.

    Safran also represented the family of Derek Williams, who died in police custody in the back of an MPD squad in 2011. The death was determined by the medical examiner to be a homicide; however, the three police officers involved were not charged. He also has represented plaintiffs in the strip-search case against Milwaukee Police. [..]

    Mental health calls to the Milwaukee Police Department have climbed steadily since 2004. In 2013, there were 8,127 calls for mental health service, up about 3.5 percent from 2012. That same year, 5,500 people were taken to emergency detention.

    These numbers should be the focus of the Hamilton case, says Flynn, but Ferguson has changed the narrative to an issue of racial injustice.

    Flynn rejects the notion that race was a factor in Hamilton’s shooting. “A number of people have wrapped themselves around this family with varying agendas,” he says. “Their influence is pernicious. No objective person could see this as a racial issue.”

    But race was top of mind last September outside a small boardroom on the third floor of City Hall, where Flynn addressed the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission.
    No justice. No compromise.

    The chants were low at first, but built to a booming rumble outside the closed doors of the boardroom where the Coalition for Justice, formed in the wake of Hamilton’s shooting, had come to present the commission with a list of six demands.

    High on the list: the immediate suspension without pay of any police officer involved in any criminal investigation.

    The rally was one of many, as “No justice. No compromise” became the mantra for dozens of faithful supporters over the next year.

    The delay in the release of the state investigation, as well as delays in Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm’s decision on whether to bring charges against Manney, had frustrated members of the coalition. The protests got larger, and more disruptive, culminating with the arrest of 74 people on Dec. 19, 2014, during rush-hour demonstrations that blocked traffic on Interstate 43.

    “We are going to continue this campaign until we get answers, and we should not have to compromise,” said the founder of the Coalition for Justice, Curtis Sails, after one Downtown demonstration.

    But compared to disturbances in Ferguson and in New York, the protests in Milwaukee had been relatively peaceful. The Hamilton family repeatedly pleaded with protesters to remain nonviolent.
    Flynn – who more than once has called Dontre’s killing a “major tragic situation” – believes the city has remained calm because his officers have facilitated the protesters’ First Amendment rights in a way that respects them and recognizes their frustrations.

    But even more so, Flynn says what is shown on television – large groups of people storming Downtown in outrage over this case – is not reality. The actual protests most often include about 50-60 people, half of whom are white. Since coming to Milwaukee seven years ago, Flynn has focused his efforts on community-based policing and developing neighborhood-based leaders.

    He says it’s working, and the city’s reaction to this shooting, as opposed to the reaction in Ferguson and elsewhere, is based on the thousands of interactions with his department. He believes his department is one of the few governmental organizations helping the city’s impoverished neighborhoods.

    “There is a strong interest in national television journalism to keep this going,” says Flynn, who is serving the last year in his second term as chief of police. “They are trying to say that the disaster in Cleveland, the tragedy in Milwaukee, the problems in Ferguson and the issues in Los Angeles are all part of a unitary pattern… Every one of these cases has unique facts. But when you link them together, it only empowers fraudulent pseudo activists… Do they honestly think they are going to help Milwaukee get the assistance from state and federal authorities that it needs to truly help these disadvantaged neighborhoods by acting this way?” […]

    Barbara Beckert is the Milwaukee director of Disability Rights Wisconsin and the coordinator of the Milwaukee Mental Health Task Force. She believes if Manney had been trained properly, he would not have patted down Hamilton, which could have spared his life. One of the two officers who first approached Hamilton was certified in crisis intervention. Manney was not.

    The task force was formed in 2004 after a Hmong man with paranoid schizophrenia was shot and killed by Milwaukee police. Since then, at least seven others with documented, severe mental illness, including Hamilton, have reportedly died after confrontations with Milwaukee police.

    The Milwaukee Mental Health Task Force is asking that more police officers and Milwaukee County Sheriff’s deputies complete a 40-hour training program so they receive Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) certification. Currently, about one in five MPD officers have completed the training.

    “We are determined that Dontre’s death be seen as a critical turning point,” Beckert says, “as the moment in which our community awakened to the still-urgent need to change the way vulnerable people are treated in our streets and in our parks.”

    In December, Flynn and Mayor Tom Barrett announced that all Milwaukee police officers would begin CIT training in 2015.

    Days later, on Dec. 22, nearly nine months after Dontre’s death, Chisholm announced he would not criminally charge Christopher Manney, calling the officer’s shooting justifiable self-defense. “I can be deeply aware of the very real historical reasons for concern,” Chisholm said at the time, “but I cannot be swayed by passion or prejudgment when making these decisions, regardless of how popular or how unpopular that decision is.”

    The day the Hamilton family finally learned of the DA’s decision, the city braced for riots. A staging area was quickly assembled under a freeway overpass west of the Downtown train station, with unmarked police cars, vans, buses, squads, mobile jails, rapid response vehicles and horse trailers at the ready. Downtown businesses told employees to move their cars off the street. And area hospitals went on high alert for patients in need of treatment for tear gas exposure.

    All of the preparations were for naught. The family held a news conference on the federal courthouse stairs. Nate Hamilton, who has emerged as the family spokesman, asked for calm and called on the people in power to create change. Dameion and Maria stood quietly, tears rolling down their faces as Nate spoke. In the end, the family peacefully walked the streets of the city with their devoted followers for nearly six hours.

    It was a cold and rainy evening, and at 5:45 p.m., the family sent out thank-yous via social media, saying they would reconvene the next morning. […]

    Attorney Jonathan Safran continues to work the Hamilton case. He has met with members of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and FBI agents, who are investigating possible civil rights violations by Manney. Once the criminal investigations are complete, the family will likely file a civil suit against the city. Meanwhile, the Fire and Police Commission has not yet ruled on Manney’s appeal to find out if he will get his job back with the Milwaukee Police Department.

    Since his brother’s death, Nate Hamilton continues to serve as the family spokesman, pushing people to create positive change. “They just need to be turned on, and injustice should turn on the switch,” Nate says. “Racial profiling, segregation, police brutality; this should all activate the intentions of people wanting a better society.”

    Maria Hamilton has founded Mothers for Justice United, which describes itself as a group for mothers whose unarmed children have been killed by police officers and white vigilantes. Maria hopes to eventually create a foundation in Dontre’s name as a way to give back to the people who have helped her heal.

    With the rest of his family, Dameion Perkins continues to grieve. “Every day is a challenge to not be angry,” he says. “If you’ve ever been hit unexpectedly and lost your breath, that is how this situation is. Every day, you have to continue with the loss of your brother.”

    Dontre Hamilton would have turned 32 on Jan. 20. He is buried in the far northwest corner of Graceland Cemetery on North 43rd Street in Milwaukee. A broken Christmas ornament and a tiny frozen Christmas tree lie on the ground near a raised pile of dirt that marks his grave. So far, there is no headstone.

    Much more at the link itself.

  112. rq says

    One State Is About to Turn Police Body Cameras Into Nothing More Than Empty Gestures

    Other states: Missouri isn’t the only place where privacy concerns are hampering the rollout of the cameras. In Minnesota, a bill sponsored by three former police officers turned state legislators would prevent videos from being seen by anyone but those recorded and require all footage not being used in an investigation to be destroyed.

    In Los Angeles, where the police department will soon roll out 7,000 body cams for monitoring everyday police activity, police Chief Charlie Beck raised similar concerns. The Los Angeles Times reported that Beck told a community meeting there should be a “moral prohibition” on sharing body camera footage, elaborating that “victims call us when they’ve had horrific things done to them by evil people. And to make those things public revictimizes them, doesn’t serve justice. And I don’t think it’s the right thing to do.”

    How effective are body cameras? The cameras are intended to ensure police officers are held accountable for their actions and members of the public have records to back them up when things go wrong. In a much-vaunted trial in Rialto, California, use of force and complaints against officers plummeted in February 2012 when 70 of its police officers were ordered to begin using the cameras. In 2014, video footage led to the exposure of police brutality incidents in Baltimore and Columbia, South Carolina. […]

    “The ACLU has been working with legislators to try and craft body cam legislation that would allow for the use of cameras while also addressing privacy and confidentiality concerns. Investigations could greatly benefit from footage obtained by body cameras. There are policies that can coincide with use of cameras that limit the burden on law enforcement and records offices while also respecting the public’s right to know.”

    Charts and graphs at the link, too.

    Asking America’s Police Officers to Explain Abusive Cops. The article examines several cases of on-going police brutality and excessive force, and the lack of acknowledgement to these cases.

    What do police officers make of this story? How do they explain the fact that such abusive behavior continued for so long? What do they regard as an appropriate punishment? What would they suggest to guard against similar abuses elsewhere? What would they do if they encountered fellow officers treating a man this way? I don’t mean to suggest that police are of one mind about this or any other controversy, or that Miami Gardens reflects how police behave everywhere. But when the public reads or listens to stories that document egregious police abuses, it is rare to encounter any members of the police community who express alarm, or champion reforms, or denounce the bad apples, or articulate why they have a different view than the conventional wisdom.

    If you’re a police officer, maybe no one asked for your opinion on a case like this before. I invite any of your thoughts. Those willing to share should email conor[at]theatlantic[dot]com—I’ll publish responses without names unless otherwise requested.

    Illinois Cops Received Media Training on How Not to ‘Be the Next Ferguson’

    Local law enforcement union officials in suburban Illinois are conducting training sessions to teach officers how to avoid having their departments become the “next Ferguson” — the Missouri town that descended into chaos and became a flashpoint for international protests after a local police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teen in August.

    But the focus is not on curbing police brutality or improving community relations, but rather, how to handle bad press. The Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) recently launched an event titled “Media Relations Training: Don’t Be the Next Ferguson, Missouri!” the Chicago Tribune reported.

    Around 70 suburban officers and officials showed up to the half-day event.

    The instruction was carried out in Orland Park, Illinois, less than 300 miles away from the neighborhood where Ferguson officer Darren Wilson fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown on August 9. The session was a “what not to do” — in terms of public relations — if a similar event occurred in Illinois.

    Intense media scrutiny following Brown’s death has struck a chord with law enforcement officials eager to avoid a public relations meltdown like the one at Ferguson’s police department as protesters gathered across the St. Louis suburb, and later cities across the country, to call for an end to police brutality. News of the shooting and protests later spread across the world as hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter and #JusticeForMikeBrown rapidly spread across the internet.

    “I think people saw Ferguson as an ‘Oh, my gosh’ and said, ‘I don’t want an “Oh, my gosh” in Orland Park,'” Rick Rosenthal, president of RAR Communications, who ran the training session, told the Tribune. “I think they see that if an officer has to use deadly force, that’s a matter for investigation, but in public relations, they can do a better job than Ferguson did.”

    Rosenthal said that the Ferguson police department’s lack of communication after Brown’s death and resulting “information vacuum” was filled by “speculation, rumor, and outright falsehoods” in the “Twitterverse.”

    Twitter was a major platform for anti-police brutality campaigners in the wake of Brown’s killing and other police shootings of unarmed black men in the US, including Eric Garner in New York and Tamir Rice in Cleveland. Social media was one of the topics addressed in the training seminar, which included recommendations for police to release information within the first two hours of an incident.

    Other subjects included “Feeding the Animals,” a lesson in giving the media something to work with instead of shutting them out. This phrase was criticized as having racial overtones when it was posted on a flyer for the course in St. Louis, but Rosenthal said there was no intentional reference to race or Ferguson.

    “I wouldn’t call it earth-shattering, but we’re making an effort to equip chiefs with tools they need to do a great job in the post-Ferguson era, and media relations is one of them,” IACP Executive Director Ed Wojcicki said.

    Isn’t that… the media-training program… that was going around end-of-summer 2014, in St Louis? Esp. the ‘feeding the animals’ bit? They’re actually using it? Wow.

    Racism affects black girls as much as boys. So why are girls being ignored?

    According to their research, black girls are suspended six times more than their white peers (while black boys are only suspended three times more than white males), and disproportionately suffer under excessive disciplinary measures in schools.

    One story detailed a teacher striking a diabetic and asthmatic student when she nodded off in class, and in Alabama, an 8-year-old girl was arrested for acting out in class. Another girl described school police officers writing tickets for tardiness that led to bench warrants for her arrest.

    And while black girls around the country are struggling in these kinds of conditions, they continue to be ignored or neglected at every level. President Obama himself made waves when he issued support for a nationwide initiative that targets black boys only, leaving their female peers by the wayside. […]

    The illogics of racism turned even excellence into a symptom of bad behavior. She made me show her the book to prove it was my writing. And, even then, she never apologized — just half-heartedly scratched out the D+ and replaced it with a higher grade. My shining moment, gone with the ease and indifference of her bigotry.

    But the horror of that moment stays with me, the realization that being smart and working hard might never be enough. I wasn’t sure how I could survive a world that would constantly question my abilities, give me more obstacles than my peers, and then downplay my achievements when I somehow managed to deliver.

    I was overwhelmed by the thought of having to be a black girl for the rest of my life.

    I was demoted in scholastic level across the board after that horrendous eighth-grade year. I was kept out of Advanced Placement classes in English and History throughout high school. And once I graduated high school, I never took another English class again.

    It had been my favorite subject. […]

    Racism is a national disaster in this country. It robs us of brilliance, ingenuity and progress. And in a country where policymakers at the highest levels neglect black girls in favor of offering support to their male peers, we continue to undermine the progress of the entire community.

    Mentoring black boys doesn’t help black girls raise children alone or try to attend school while pregnant. Focusing only on black boys doesn’t keep black women from being the group with the fastest-growing rates of imprisonment or highest HIV infections. It doesn’t stop the gender bias that disproportionately burdens girls with family and childcare responsibilities at home. “Trickle-down” community building that delivers support to only men and boys doesn’t help black women and girls any better than trickle-down economics helps the poor. And prioritizing black men and boys over black women and girls is simply about putting men first and women last.

    As always.

    As schools continue to deteriorate, at increasingly rapid rates in the cities in which brown and black children disproportionately reside, I am concerned about the fate of black and brown girls. Our stories are rarely told, and so people have learned to think they’re insignificant. Our experiences are minimized, and so, too, are our contributions.

    I hope this report is a wake-up call to us all. We black women and girls must continue to speak truth to power, even when that power looks like us. There is a crisis happening. And it needs to be dealt with now.

    #CrimingWhileWhite – 2 CT teens arrested for crawling through Walmart with toy guns, yelling ‘headshot’ – the second such case.

    Officers were called to the Walmart, which is located at 120 Commercial Pkwy., just after 7 p.m. after customers were reportedly screaming “headshot” while pointing toy guns at children.

    The two teens thought it was a joke but nobody was laughing, especially not police.

    “Demonstrating a lot of disturbing behaviors, they were military crawling behind people, would smack on the floor and when the person would turn around, they would point up and say bang, bang,” said Branford Police Captain Geoffrey Morgan.

    Upon arrival, police noticed 19-year-old Joseph O’Buck and a 17-year-old male “involved in numerous disturbing, threatening acts against customers.” Their behavior included the following:

    Military type crawling throughout the store
    Sneaking up behind customers
    Tapping on the floor
    Yelling “bang” when the customer looked
    Climbing on store racks
    Pretending to “pick people off”Yelling, “headshot”

    “At one point they were crawling all over the racks yelling headshot, headshot. They were sneaking up behind small kids, alarmed a number of small children,” Morgan said.

    Shoppers said the behavior was just uncalled for.

    “Old enough, definitely old enough to know better,” said Karen Messina of Branford. “Its a little scary and you know who wants that when they’re putting their bags or groceries in their car.”

    Police said the teens recorded what they were doing on a cell phone.

    “There were over 31 videos of their behavior in there so that stuff will be turned over to the prosecutors,” Morgan said.

    GUESS WHAT? They’re still alive! And arrested! NOT DEAD!!!

  113. rq says

    And two more via Tony, from the Entertainment District:
    Racists Freak Out At The Trailer For Will Smith’s Latest Film, The Reason Is Truly Pathetic (VIDEO)     – beacuse of interracial couple. The article is mostly racial comments, so I won’t quote, but if you feel like reading some racist garbage, well.. go for it.

    Racist FBers: ‘Black Privilege’ Is The Real Problem, Just Look At Oprah’s House! (IMAGES) – because every black person is Oprah, and that’s why they’re being oppressed, they’re too rich!

    Don’t you mean “worked her way out of a Chicago ghetto and earned a talk show that eventually got so huge her sponsors offered to give her fans free stuff?”

    To further prove “black privilege,” these imbeciles have also posted pictures of other successful black peoples’ homes, completely forgetting that most of them came from extreme poverty. How dare people poke a stick at privileged white people? Have you seen the mansions that Chris Rock, Jamie Foxx, or Eddie Murphy own?

    While making fun of them for bashing Oprah Winfrey’s success is a hoot, most of what they post is so disgusting it deserves some good old-fashioned shaming. […]

    A day will come when people understand that minorities create venues and platforms that appeal to their social groups because they don’t have the “privilege” of everything else being centered around them.

    Oh, and FYI, you ignorant racist boobs, BET has some of the best content on television.

  115. rq says

    Chicago’s “Black Site” Detainees Speak Out

    On Tuesday, The Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman reported on the “equivalent of a CIA black site” operated by police in Chicago. When computer program analyst Kory Wright opened the story, he told me, “I immediately recognized the building” — because, the Chicago resident says, he was zip-tied to a bench there for hours in an intentionally overheated room without access to water or a bathroom, eventually giving false statements to try and end his ordeal.

    A friend of Wright’s swept up in the same police raid described his own brutal treatment at the facility, known as Homan Square, including attacks to his face and genitals. The experiences of the two men line up with the way defense attorneys described the “black site” warehouse to Ackerman: as a place where detainees were held off the books, without access to lawyers, while being beaten or shackled for long periods of time.

    Wright claims that nine years ago, he spent “at least six [brutal] hours” at the Homan facility on his 21st birthday. He says that he was never read his Miranda rights, and that his arrest was not put into the police system until after his ordeal was over. Wright was reminded of the facility again this week when he noticed a tweet from a writer he admires, The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, linking to Ackerman’s story. Ackerman compared Homan Square to the network of shadowy torture centers built by the CIA across the Middle East — but focused “on Americans, most often poor, black and brown,” rather than on purported overseas terrorists. […]

    “When we first got to that place, we went in a garage and they walked us up the stairs,” he says. Phone calls to counsel and family were denied, Wright and Hutcherson say, while no fingerprints were taken, and no paperwork was filled out — which means there was no evidence they were ever there. “I tried to tell them it was my birthday,” he says, “and I think I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He [a Chicago police officer] got the nerve to go get his friend, and they, like, sung happy birthday.” Wright believes the virulent police officers were taunting him. “I see it [Homan] everyday. I shudder,” says Wright, whose neighborhood was just south of the facility.

    The four men were split up and placed in small, separate rooms that were the size of office cubicles. It was a steamy summer day, and Wright was sweating profusely at Homan; he believes the police either turned the heat on, or turned the air conditioning off, to sweat him out. “When we first got in there it was room-temperature, and before he [a Chicago police officer] left, he was like, ‘It’s gon’ get a little hot in here,’” says Hutcherson, now 29.

    For six hours, a sweaty Wright sat zip-tied to a bench with no access to a restroom, a telephone or water. “They strapped me — like across, kind of — to a bench, and my hands were strapped on both sides of me,” he says. “I can’t even scratch my face.” When Wright first arrived at Homan, he was left alone for a while in the hot room. Wright asked the police if he could call his mother, but instead, various police officers came “in and out. They were badgering me with questions. ‘Tell me about this murder!’” one officer shouted. Wright provided his interrogator with false information and names, with the hope of making it stop. He told me he was “trying to get out of the situation and give them something they wanted.”

    Meanwhile, Hutcherson — also shackled to a bench — was being interrogated in another room. “He [a Chicago police officer] gets up, walking toward me,” Hutcherson alleges. “I already know what’s finna happen. I brace myself, and he hit me a little bit and then take his foot and stepped on my groin.” According to Hutcherson, the officer struck him two or three times in the face before kicking his penis.

    “You must think I’m a fucking idiot,” Hutcherson says his attacker told him. Within an hour, Hutcherson, who was in town for his mother’s funeral, faked an asthma attack that unnerved the police. He says they then released him from detention and sent him on his way. […]

    More broadly, Wright’s tale is typical of low-income, minoritized people victimized by America’s criminal justice system. Eventually, he was taken to Cook County jail, where he was processed and charged with distribution of heroin and cocaine. Given his low-income status, Wright’s only option for counsel was a public defender.

    Wright’s lawyer, he says, was pregnant and overworked, while Wright suffered through multiple continuances. When his public defender gave birth, Wright was assigned a new attorney, who also, naturally, had a taxing caseload. In the end, the drug charges against Wright were thrown out, though not before he’d spent six months under house arrest because his mother lacked the money to fund a bond for release.

    Kory Wright was attending Wilbur Wright Community College, and taking criminal justice courses, when he was detained at Homan. He says he had hopes of becoming a police officer in the city of Chicago before that June day. Wright told me a story about how police — when he was 16 years old — had roughed up him up, along with some friends of his. Afterwards, Wright decided he wanted to be a counterweight to that sort of police-initiated harassment, which regularly afflicts communities such as North Lawndale. But his experience at Homan, and his subsequent arrest, caused him to miss a semester of school.

    Fortunately, Wright recovered, and today, at age 29, he is working on his master’s degree in network engineering at DePaul University. He lives in Bronzeville, a neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, and is the father of a new baby girl. But the touchless torture he says he suffered at Homan continues to haunt him. “The whole thing caused a rift between me and my mom. I didn’t like being black at all after that, and when I got to DePaul, I started trying to be as white as possible,” a doleful Wright told me. “Being black is a curse.”

    Just read that last paragraph. Heart breaking.
    Also, I wonder how many of these young men, having bad experiences with police, have turned away from possible jobs in law enforcement? How many have had that dream of making things better crushed due to mistreatment by cops? And people wonder why the system is what it is.

    Here’s a petition: Defund Bratton’s Army!

    Defund Bratton’s new Department of Homeland Security-funded NYPD units.
    Why is this important?

    Whether it’s a counterterrorism-unit build up or mobile units for neighborhood “safety” and disorder control, New Yorkers say NO to Department of Homeland Security-funded NYPD militarization!

    The War Resisters League’s campaign, “Demilitarize Health and Security,” condemns the unveiling of a DHS-funded 900-officer counterterrorism and special operations overhaul by New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton. According to Bratton, in amendments to his original statements on January 29th, both the 350-member counterterrorist auxiliary unit – equipped with “long rifles and machine guns” designed for “disorder control and counterterrorism protection capabilities” – and the 500-officer special-operations unit Strategic Response Group (SRG) mandated to monitor protests and “sudden rises in crime” will be rolled out in the Summer of 2015. Bratton’s conflation of “terrorism issues, crime issues and demonstrations issues” will only further criminalize our communities, violate our right to protest, and curtail our ability to survive and thrive.

    We demand an end to the build up of Bratton’s army because militarization is a threat to our safety! We urge Mayor de Blasio to stand with New Yorkers and call for the defunding of Bratton’s two newly proposed units. Together, we can create real solutions for community safety and wellness without tanks and assault rifles!

    L.A. Police Chief Does Not Want to Be Oppressed

    With the straightest face I can muster up while typing this, it seems that Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck does not wish to be oppressed—or harassed or annoyed or have his time wasted for that matter. This according to an ex parte application filed Tuesday in federal court on behalf of the City of Los Angeles, Chief Beck, and the LAPD officers involved in that heinous October 16 South LA beat down of 22-year-old Clinton Alford.

    You remember Mr. Alford. He was guy who was minding his own beeswax riding his bike home on October 16 near 55th Street and Avalon Boulevard in South Los Angeles when out of nowhere he was subjected to unwarranted harassment and annoyance by five police officers. Being a Black man in South Los Angeles, according to the police he was suspected of drug possession. However that case didn’t quite pan out and those charges were a big waste of time and eventually dropped. But not before they proceeded to oppress Mr. Alford by beating and kicking him until he lost consciousness after he got scared and ran away from the plainclothes officers. Which I will add sounds similar to that recent LAPD officer-involved shooting in South L.A. on 43rd Street and Figueroa Street.

    But I digressed.

    A nearby business had a camera that captured the whole Alford incident and that video has since been confiscated and now is under lock and key (if not destroyed). As far as I know, Chief Beck is not releasing it—and with good reason. From what I’m told it’s the kind of stuff that uprisings more commonly referred to in the media as riots are made of.

    Chief Beck said he was “extremely concerned about this particular use of force.”

    Clinton Alford told the media that he was “just praying that they wouldn’t kill me. I just closed my eyes and tried to hold on.”

    The application filed goes on cite F.R.C.P. 26 (C) (1) (A) (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) and argues that because Chief Beck was neither personally involved with, nor does he have any personal knowledge of the use of force against Mr. Alford that his deposition must not be allowed. The City Attorney’s office argues that Beck’s position as Chief of Police of the Los Angeles Police Department does not automatically make him subject to deposition nor do his limited statements made to the media and that the only objective in having him deposed on this issue is to harass and annoy him and to waste his time. It goes on to say that the courts must issue a protective order barring the deposition of Chief Beck in this matter. […]

    According to the City, the beating of Clinton Alford is not a case with extraordinary or exceptional circumstances that would warrant the taking of Chief Beck’s deposition. The City believes that there is no basis for deposing Chief Beck–other than to annoy and harass him.

    And I quote directly from the application:

    “As the Police Chief of the second largest city in the United States, Chief Beck clearly qualifies as a high-ranking government official. Further, he is extremely busy and has several important duties, including the responsibility of overseeing nearly 10,000 police officers, and dealing with public security issues in a post 9-11 world, not to mention addressing the current financial problems facing the City, and various other time constraints, all which make Chief Beck very different from other witnesses.”

    In the words of rapper Big Sean, Beck’s “got a million trillion things he’d rather fuckin’ do” than to be fuckin’ with some deposition.

    He’s so oppressed by information. And having to reveal it. Poor guy.

    Activists Groups Unite Against Secret Police Facility, Call for Boots on the Ground #Gitmo2Chicago

    It was also recently reported that large numbers of military police officers, who were formerly stationed at the infamous torture prisons, are now getting jobs as local cops, and could be coming to a town near you. The Worcester Police department in Massachusetts is testing a pilot program, in which former Guantanamo prison guards will be given jobs as police.

    It was also revealed that former Guantánamo Bay interrogator Richard Zuley was already torturing people as a Chicago detective before he was ever stationed at the military prison. In fact, it was reported that he was one of the most brutal officers in the city during his 25 years with the police department.

    As American’s largely sat back and turned a blind eye to the abuses occurring at our torturous military prisons, perhaps they failed to realize that the militarization and torture tactics would be coming home to their front doors. This is what a police state looks like.

    Now, a wide range of activists, organizations, and independent media, including PANDAA, Cop Block, The Anti Media, Police the Police, Anonymous, and The Free Thought Project are calling for action to raise awareness of the massive right’s violations occurring on our own soil, and demand the torture center be shut down for good.

    A Twitter Storm has been called for Friday at 7 pm CST using the hashtag #Gitmo2Chicago. Anonymous has declared #OpHomanSquare Engaged, and a boots on the ground protest has been called for Saturday at 3 pm CST, at 3379 Fillmore St, Chicago.

    Here are some sample tweets and instructions on how to participate in the Twitter Storm.

    ********* DO NOT BEGIN TWEETING UNTIL 8 PM EST / 5 PM PST ******

    That’s 3AM my time, so I don’t know how involved with tweeting I’ll be able to get right off the bat, but hey, all you other twitter folk! More instructions follow, together with sample tweets, so really, the hard work’s been done!

  116. says

    This link isn’t directly related to issues of race in USAmerica, but it does relate to movements seeking progressive social changes.

    Edward Snowden: gay marriage movement shows why governments shouldn’t have perfect surveillance

    .
    He said in a Reddit Q&A session: “We should remember that governments don’t often reform themselves.
    “One of the arguments in a book I read recently… is that perfect enforcement of the law sounds like a good thing, but that may not always be the case. The end of crime sounds pretty compelling, right, so how can that be?
    “When we look back on history, the progress of Western civilization and human rights is actually founded on the violation of law.
    “America was of course born out of a violent revolution that was an outrageous treason against the crown and established order of the day.
    “History shows that the righting of historical wrongs is often born from acts of unrepentant criminality. Slavery. The protection of persecuted Jews.
    “But even on less extremist topics, we can find similar examples. How about the prohibition of alcohol? Gay marriage? Marijuana?
    “Where would we be today if the government, enjoying powers of perfect surveillance and enforcement, had – entirely within the law – rounded up, imprisoned, and shamed all of these lawbreakers?
    “Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognise that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren’t just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determing thour [sic] futures.”

  117. rq says

    Massachusetts State Police want $800 for Eric Garner protest docs, and we need you help to get them

    After the #EnoughIsEnough: Justice for Eric Garner protest in Boston, user Joshua Eaton filed for all documents (emails, reports, photo/video) related to this protest, and the associated group “We Are the Ones Boston,” from both Boston and Massachusetts State Police departments.

    We haven’t heard anything from the BPD after they acknowledged the request, but the MSP responded that they while they weren’t able to search for “We Are The Ones” in their indices, they did have material regarding the protest – specifically, $822 worth.

    We need your help to free these docs – these reports and emails could provide valuable insight into how the state police approach protests and protestors, particularly in regards to the use of social media monitoring. We’ll negotiate with the MSP based on how much we raise, so more money means more docs, and every bit really does help.

    Please pass the message on, and donate on the request page via the button below. As always, we couldn’t do this without you, so very sincerely, thanks.

    Donate button at the link.

    Here’s some sad news, Schweich faced nasty campaign. Requested media at his home before killing self. Preempting oppo research release? Coincidences? Sad & awful.
    In the news, Tom Schweich, Missouri auditor and candidate for governor, dies in apparent suicide

    The sudden death of the second-term auditor shocked and saddened the state’s political establishment and roiled the race for governor barely a month after it began.

    “What we know at this point suggests an apparent suicide,” Clayton Police Chief Kevin Murphy told reporters in a news conference Thursday afternoon. He said there was “nothing to support anything other than that at this point,” and said Schweich died from a single gunshot wound.

    Murphy said he didn’t know whether Schweich left a note. The chief said an autopsy and investigation are pending.

    Earlier in the day, a police source told the Post-Dispatch that Schweich’s wife was in another room of their house when she heard her husband making phone calls, followed by a gunshot. Schweich had been shot in the head, the source said.

    More on Schweich in the article, and here: Schweich Launches Audits Of Municipal Courts In Ferguson And Six Other Area Cities

    The Republican official included Ferguson’s court in the tally; it has come under scrutiny since the shooting death of Michael Brown.

    Besides Ferguson, Schweich will audit St. Louis County-based municipal courts in Bella Villa, Pine Lawn and St. Ann. He’ll also audit Foristell in St. Charles County and Foley and Winfield in Lincoln County.

    Speaking to reporters in St. Louis, Schweich said he’d be examining whether these municipal courts are violating the “Mack’s Creek” law restricting how much revenue a city can collect from traffic violations and related fees from local courts. The latest revision limits revenue to 30 percent of a city’s budget. Any excess is to be turned over to the state for education.

    According to a press release, the audits will examine “statistics on warrants (including data on race and gender), embezzlement, special treatment or corruption, and proper accounting practices.”

    Since Brown’s death, municipal courts have come under fire for trapping poor people, especially African Americans, in a cycle of increasingly onerous fines for minor infractions. Some fear that municipalities are aggressively ticketing to pad their budgets, especially in cities where commercial development is lagging.

    “More and more officials have become concerned about the abuse of the traffic court system for revenue generation purposes rather than for safety, justice and efficiency purposes,” Schweich said. […]

    Schweich’s audit has bipartisan support, ranging from Republicans like St. Charles County Executive Steve Ehlmann and Democrats such as state Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal, D-University City, and state Rep. Sharon Pace, D-St. Louis County.

    “There are real concerns in regards to the tickets that (people are) receiving,” said Pace, who represents part of Ferguson. “It should not be a revenue-generating source. And that’s what it’s being used for in certain municipalities.”

    Ehlmann said he’s often been alarmed by how many police departments are stopping people when he drives to downtown St. Louis on Interstate 70. And he learned from talking with the Rev. B.T. Rice that the fines are causing church members to donate less money to their congregations.

    Church members “would say ‘well, I’ve got a $200 fine in some municipality and I need to pay that or I’ll go to jail,’” Ehlmann said.

    Schweich said that if his audits – to be conducted during 2015 – find that cities are violating the Mack’s Creek law, the attorney general’s office could sue to get the additional money for the state. He also said the municipal court in question could be stripped of its jurisdiction.

    “What they should do is at the end of each fiscal year, they should calculate whether they’ve exceeded that percentage and then send in a check; it’s real simple,” Schweich said. “It’s only if they don’t do that that the problem arises.” […]

    Still, Ehlmann would like state lawmakers to enact even more curbs on municipal courts. That includes forcing them to sentence people to community service – as opposed to issuing steep fines.

    “I’d like to see more use of public works programs when you don’t have the money. Fine,” he said. “Show up at City Hall on Sunday morning and let’s go pick up trash. The punishments don’t need to be monetary. Nobody’s suggesting that you should get a free pass or speed or break the law.

    “I used to be a judge,” he added. “In some cases, it’s ridiculous to keep piling on the fines because you know these people can’t pay anyway. So give them an alternative.”

    Audio at the link. Sounds like it’s all an unfortunate coincidence of events. Condolences to the family.

    Senate Committee backs Loretta Lynch for attorney general

    The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 12 to eight Thursday to confirm Loretta Lynch as the next attorney general, sending her nomination before the full Senate for debate and a vote that is expected in the coming weeks.

    President Obama nominated Lynch, a U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, to succeed Eric Holder as the head of the Justice Department (DOJ) after Holder announced his resignation in September.

    Though Lynch’s opponents didn’t raise questions about her background, several Republicans on the committee objected to her support for Mr. Obama’s recent move to defer deportation for up to five million illegal immigrants. The issue came up several times during her confirmation hearings in January, which also served as a forum for Republicans to air their grievances with Holder.

    Ultimately, Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, and Jeff Flake, R-Arizona, joined the nine Democrats on the Judiciary Committee in supporting Lynch’s nomination. Six Republicans had announced their opposition before the vote, with many citing immigration as a primary concern.

    “At the outset of this nomination process, I said that no Senator should vote to confirm anyone for this position–the top law enforcement job in America–who supported the president’s unlawful actions. Congress must defend its constitutional role, which is clearly threatened,” Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama, said in a statement immediately after Lynch’s hearing.

    In addition to Sessions, the senators voting no include Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz of Texas, Mike Lee of Utah, David Vitter of Louisiana, David Perdue of Georgia and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

    Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, is expected to schedule a debate and vote on Lynch’s nomination before the full Senate in the coming weeks.

    Sounds like you have a new attorney general, US of A!

    Held for hours at secret Chicago ‘black site’: ‘You’re a hostage. It’s kidnapping’

    Vic Suter, a protester arrested before the 2012 Nato summit in Chicago, has told the Guardian about her experience of being detained inside Homan Square, a warehouse where multiple detainees allege they have been unable to contact legal counsel. Suter described a situation in which she was neither booked nor permitted a phone call – in defiance both of Chicago police procedures and a statement by police on Tuesday attempting to deny the Guardian’s reporting.

    Suter’s account echoes that of Brian Jacob Church, whose story of extended detention without public notification and delayed legal access was featured in a Guardian’s exposé on Tuesday.

    At the nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side, lawyers and arrestees say police detain suspects and witnesses for hours without booking or otherwise posting public notifications of their whereabouts, preventing their relatives and attorneys from knowing where they are.

    Suter, whose recollection was backed up by her former lawyer Lillian McCartin, said she was shackled by her right wrist to a bar behind a bench in Homan Square for approximately 18 hours before she was permitted access to her attorney.

    “The stark difference between Homan and a county jail or a precinct that has holding cells or any other concept of a common jail that most Americans have is that you have no rights at Homan,” Suter said.

    “You are just kind of held hostage. The inability to see a lawyer is a drastic departure from what we consider our constitutional rights. Not being able to have that phone call, the lack of booking, makes it so that when you’re there, you understand that no one knows where you are.”

    Arrested alongside Church on 16 May, 2012, Suter found herself taken to the same warehouse, only kept by herself in a different cell.

    “You’re going to get a tour of hell in Homan,” she said the police officer who drove her to the warehouse told her. […]

    But it would be another two to three hours, Suter and McCartin estimated, before she was driven by police to an actual precinct, booked and permitted to call her mother. After a night in a holding cell, Suter was told she was free to go.

    “Not being able to communicate outwardly by making a phone call or talking to a lawyer, and not being booked in so that someone can find you, you’re a hostage. It’s kidnapping.” […]

    “Homan Square is definitely an unusual place,” Church told the Guardian in an interview on Friday. “It brings to mind the interrogation facilities they use in the Middle East. The CIA calls them black sites. It’s a domestic black site. When you go in, no one knows what’s happened to you.”

    While multiple Chicago attorneys described their clients being beaten and “disappeared” inside Homan Square without a record, Church was the only person who had been detained at the facility who agreed to talk with the media until Wednesday.

    Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside Homan Square do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside.

    After the Guardian published its investigation on Tuesday, the Chicago police emailed a statement – the department’s only comment to the Guardian since it began publishing investigations into Chicago police abuse last week. The statement, without getting into details, cited the presence of undercover units as necessitating secrecy around Homan Square.

  118. rq says

    Here’s a llama joke: “know your llama suspect” – black llama: thug; brown llama: terrorist; white llama: troubled youth.

    ‘Gestapo’ tactics at US police ‘black site’ ring alarm from Chicago to Washington

    Politicians and civil-rights groups across the US expressed shock upon hearing descriptions of off-the-books interrogation at Homan Square, the Chicago warehouse that multiple lawyers and one shackled-up protester likened to a US counter-terrorist black site in a Guardian investigation published this week.

    As three more people came forward detailing their stories of being “held hostage” and “strapped” inside Homan Square without access to an attorney or an official public record of their detention by Chicago police, officials and activists said the allegations merited further inquiry and risked aggravating wounds over community policing and race that have reached as high as the White House.

    Caught in the swirl of questions around the complex – still active on Wednesday – was Emanuel, the former chief of staff to Barack Obama who is suddenly facing a mayoral runoff election after failing to win a majority in a contest that has seen debate over police tactics take a central role.

    Emanuel’s office refused multiple requests for comment from the Guardian on Wednesday, referring a reporter to an unspecific denial from the Chicago police.

    But Luis Gutiérrez, the influential Illinois congressman whose shifting support for Emanuel was expected to secure Tuesday’s election, joined a chorus of colleagues in asking for more information about Homan Square.

    “I had not heard about the story until I read about it in the Guardian,” Gutiérrez said late Wednesday. “I want to get more information, but if the allegations are true, it sounds outrageous.”

    Congressman Danny Davis, a Democrat who represents the Chicago west-side neighbourhood where Homan Square is located, said he was “terribly saddened” to hear of the allegations. Davis said he “would certainly strongly support an investigation” by the US Department of Justice, as two former senior justice department civil-rights officials urged the department on Wednesday to launch.

    Earlier in the day, as a county commissioner urged the top law-enforcement investigators in the country to do the same, another reporter and photographer waited to accompany him on a visit outside the premises of Homan Square.

    A man, in a jumpsuit and a ski mask, pulled out of the Homan Square parking lot in an SUV and made multiple circles before coming to a stop.

    “You can take a picture,” said the man, who then offered what he considered a joke: “We are all CIA, right?” […]

    “I hadn’t heard of the sort of CIA or Gestapo tactics that were mentioned in the Guardian article until it was brought to my attention,” Boykin said in an interview outside Homan Square. “And we are calling for the Department of Justice to open an investigation into these allegations.”

    The Guardian reported on Tuesday that police in Chicago detain suspects at Homan Square without booking them, thereby preventing their relatives and lawyers from knowing their whereabouts, reminiscent in the eyes of some lawyers and civil-rights activists of a CIA black site.

    While people are held at Homan Square, which lawyers described as a process that often lasted between 12 and 24 hours, several attorneys said they had been refused access to the facility, and described entrance to it as a rare occurrence. One man interviewed by the Guardian said that ahead of a Nato protest in 2012, he was handcuffed to a bar behind bench for 17 hours inside Homan Square and refused a phone call before police finally permitted him to see his attorney.

    In an interview Wednesday, another Nato protester, Vic Suter, offered a similar account of close shackling and an estimated 18 hours without access to an attorney.

    “You are just kind of held hostage,” Suter told the Guardian. “The inability to see a lawyer is a drastic departure from what we consider our constitutional rights. Not being able to have that phone call, the lack of booking, makes it so that when you’re there, you understand that no one knows where you are.”

    A third person, Kory Wright, came forward to the Intercept in a story published Thursday. He described spending six hours at Homan Square without being booked or having access to a lawyer, as well as being zip-tied to a bench “like a cross”.

    Wright’s friend, Deandre Hutcherson, told the Intercept that he, too, was held at the facility, without either of the men being read their Miranda rights.

    Boykin, the county commissioner, looked up at the warehouse and said that a potential US justice department investigation would be “an extension of reform – making sure people’s basic rights are not violated but that they have opportunity to counsel”.

    “It’s one thing to quell demonstration and protests,” Boykin said, “but it’s another thing to use antiquated Gestapo tactics that are more commonly found in parts of the underdeveloped world or in places like China or Russia.”

    “Not in America.”

    Obama’s task force on improving police relations in the wake of the shooting of the unarmed teenager Michael Brown six months ago in Ferguson, Missouri, was expected to release its first set of recommendations on community policing as soon as Monday. The third anniversary of the killing of unarmed teenager teenager Trayvon Martin is Thursday, two days after a Department of Justice civil-rights investigation brought no charges against George Zimmerman, the neighbourhood watchman who shot him dead. […]

    Amnesty International USA has called for the mayor to open his own “independent and impartial investigation” into the Homan Square facility, with the human-rights group requesting “unrestricted access” to the site.

    In a letter to Emanuel, Amnesty USA’s executive director Steven Hawkins wrote: “As the mayor of Chicago, you have a responsibility under US and international law to ensure that human rights violations are not committed within the city.”

    The group lobbied Emanuel during the mayoral campaign to commit to a program of reparations for victims of abuse between 1972 and 1991 at the hands Jon Burge, the notorious former Chicago police commander who was released from home custody this month.

    Emanuel has not made a financial commitment to reparations but has promised a route to “closure” for the surviving victims.

    “It is his responsibility as the mayor of Chicago, as a public figure to make sure that his city is complying with international law,” Amnesty USA’s senior campaigner, Jasmine Heiss, told the Guardian. “Because without a clear commitment to addressing things like police torture, it gives torturers the go ahead to continue to undermine the rule of law and ignore international guidelines.”

    A representative for the Chicago branch of the American Civil Liberties Union said the group was gathering facts about Homan Square as well. […]

    Karl Brinson, president of the Chicago Westside Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said the NAACP was attempting “to find out what’s going on” at Homan Square.

    “We knew the facility was there, but we didn’t know what all it encompassed exactly and what was taking place there,” he told the Guardian. “You’re never going to build trust with anybody or get any kind of community relationships going on while doing this.”

    The justice department declined to comment to the Guardian on Wednesday.

    Better late than never, at least it’s getting media attention now. More articles on this later.

    First, a little from Black History: 10 Black History Landmarks Google Maps Leaves At Your Fingertips

    Google Maps can do so much more than just getting you to the nearest gas station.

    For lovers of Black History Month, the innovative platform can allow you to experience black history like no other by taking virtual trips to some of the most iconic Black heritage sites and landmarks like the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York, Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas and 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

    To further enrich your knowledge of black history, we encourage you to take a trip to these signficant venues. However, while travel may be difficult, Google maps can offer you the next best thing: a 360 degree street view of any and all the historic locations you wish to view.

    Do yourself a favor and experience the Black History Month experience you deserve.

    Here are ten must-see African American heritage sites, tell us your most beloved black history landmarks in the comments below!

    List includes: MLK memorial, Little Rock Central High School, Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong’s house, the Apollo Theatre, the birthplace of rap, and more.

    Chicago police misconduct payouts topped $50 million in 2014

    The City of Chicago paid $54.2 million in settlements and verdicts for police misconduct cases last year, including more than $9.5 million in attorneys’ fees, according to an analysis of city law department data by The Chicago Reporter.

    That’s more than the budget for the offices of the mayor, the city treasurer, the city council, the council committees and the department of human resources – combined.

    Police misconduct complaints include those alleging excessive force, extended detention, false arrest, failure to provide medical care, illegal search or seizure, malicious prosecution and wrongful conviction.

    The vast majority of payments came from settlements, which usually do not require the city or police officers to admit wrongdoing. Only 9 of the 161 police misconduct cases in 2014 were the result of jury verdicts.

    Many of those who received payments last year filed suits against the city years earlier, with one lawsuit going back as far as 2004.

    The only year since 2008 when the city has paid more for police misconduct than last year was 2013, when verdicts for five of the torture victims of disgraced Commander Jon Burge were paid out, totaling $34.3 million. The total amount of police misconduct payouts that year was $81.3 million.

    Police misconduct complaints accounted for just 15 percent of all cases brought against the city that were settled last year, but more than half of all payouts. In total, the city paid more than $95 million to settle cases against police, fire, transportation, water management and other departments. Many of the cases were for car accidents involving city vehicles.

    Police misconduct cases cost the city more than three and a half times that of other city cases, on average, or about $335,000 per case. However, that figure was skewed because of a small number of payouts that were $1 million or more. The median settlement amount, where exactly half of the cases are more and half are less, is $35,550.

    The $54.2 million in payments to victims and attorneys in 2014 doesn’t include the amount the city paid its own lawyers to defend against the cases, which often name both the city and specific police officers as defendants. An analysis by the People’s Law Office showed that Chicago paid nearly $63 million to 11 outside law firms to defend the city and its police officers against allegations of misconduct from 2003 to 2012, or an average of $7.1-million per year. The 57 lawyers in the city’s civil rights litigation division, which defend the city and police officers is misconduct cases, have a budget of $4.6 million this year.

    Kanye West Issues A Public Apology To Beck And Bruno Mars

    Taking to Twitter Thursday evening (Feb. 26), Yeezy expressed his apology in 140 characters, but also added Bruno Mars to his list of penitence.

    “I also want to publicly apologize to Bruno Mars, I used to hate on him but I really respect what he does as an artist,” Ye said. The “All Day” rapper also mentioned that he would love for the “Uptown Funk” artist to sing a hook on a new song he co-produced with Diddy titled “88 Keys,” reigning in Tyler, the Creator to direct the future visual.

    This news comes hours after Kanye spoke with BBC Radio One’s Zane Lowe, where he addressed his reasoning behind aiming his frustration with the Recording Academy toward Beck.

    “Everyone has the right to be wrong… ironically, when I was having dinner with Taylor Swift, the Beck album starts playing and I was like. ‘Wow, this is really good, maybe I might have been wrong.’ And the Grammys are like an ex girlfriend,” he said. “Soon as you get in the car with them, you want to go right back home.”

    So, for those not in favour, there is time to prepare to leave the state and/or country. Here’s when you can expect racial minorities to be the majority in each state

    States of Change: The Demographic Evolution of the American Electorate, 1974-2060, a new report by the Center for American Progress, the American Enterprise Institute, and demographer William H. Frey of the Brookings Institution, makes predictions for when the 22 states that are expected to be majority-minority by 2060 will each hit their tipping points, if they haven’t already.

    The authors based their calculations on the current Population Survey, the American Community Survey, the Census’ 2014 National Population Projections and their own projections, to predict the year racial and ethnic minorities will become the majority in each state:

    States of Change: The Demographic Evolution of the American Electorate, 1974-2060, by the Center for American Progress, the American Enterprise Institute, and demographer William H. Frey of the Brookings Institution, researchers predict that two more states (Maryland and Nevada) will have majority-minority status within 5 years

    States of Change: The Demographic Evolution of the American Electorate, 1974-2060, by the Center for American Progress, the American Enterprise Institute, and William H. Frey of the Brookings Institution.

    According to the report, four states — Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and New Jersey — are set to tip in the 2020s. In the 2030s, Alaska, Louisiana, and New York will follow. Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Virginia will obtain race-ethnic majority-minority status in 2040s. And Colorado, North Carolina, and Washington are on track to make it in the 2050s. (Hawaii is absent from the list because, under the criteria the researchers used, white people have always been the minority there, so it never needed a “tipping year” to achieve majority-minority status.)

    When and if the remaining states hit their racial tipping points, it will be after 2060. But the report’s authors also provide a list of 10 states that will be near (at least 40 percent) majority-minority by then: Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Utah. That group is especially interesting because it includes a couple of states that aren’t known for their racial diversity at all right now.

    The report projects that the country as a whole will be majority-minority by 2044.

    You can really get a sense of how things are going to change, just by comparing the amount of darker blue shading on the 2060 map to the amount in the 2014 map.

    States of Change: The Demographic Evolution of the American Electorate, 1974-2060, by the Center for American Progress, the American Enterprise Institute, and William H. Frey of the Brookings Institution.

    States of Change: The Demographic Evolution of the American Electorate, 1974-2060, by the Center for American Progress, the American Enterprise Institute, and William H. Frey of the Brookings Institution.

    Majority-minority voting: When it will happen and what it means

    The authors of the report also make predictions about when racial and ethnic minorities will make up not just the majority of the population, but a majority of eligible voters in each state. Here’s what that shift will look like:

    According to the report, four states — Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and New Jersey — are set to tip in the 2020s. In the 2030s, Alaska, Louisiana, and New York will follow. Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Virginia will obtain race-ethnic majority-minority status in 2040s. And Colorado, North Carolina, and Washington are on track to make it in the 2050s. (Hawaii is absent from the list because, under the criteria the researchers used, white people have always been the minority there, so it never needed a “tipping year” to achieve majority-minority status.)

    When and if the remaining states hit their racial tipping points, it will be after 2060. But the report’s authors also provide a list of 10 states that will be near (at least 40 percent) majority-minority by then: Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Utah. That group is especially interesting because it includes a couple of states that aren’t known for their racial diversity at all right now.

    The report projects that the country as a whole will be majority-minority by 2044.

    You can really get a sense of how things are going to change, just by comparing the amount of darker blue shading on the 2060 map to the amount in the 2014 map. […]

    Released hand-in-hand with the report is an interactive tool that lets users graph the data and projected data on race/ethnicity, age, generation, education, and marital status, both for individual states and the entire country (and if you’re interested in politics, you can also look at this data just for people of voting age, eligible voters, or registered voters).

    Given the data on how many states are expected to move to majority-minority populations in the coming decades, it’s no surprise that selecting race for the whole country shows the percentage of the white population — the red line, on the graph below — declining steadily through 2060, while the black population stays the same, and the numbers of Hispanic, Asian, and “other” Americans steadily increase.

    Charts and graphs at the link.

    News Anchor Receives 3-Day Suspension for Jigaboo Comments

    According to Raw Story, Cleveland Fox 8 issued a statement Wednesday regarding Capel’s suspension. “Kristi Capel will not be anchoring Fox 8 News in the Morning for the remainder of the week,” the station said. The station also went on to defend Capel’s reputation.

    “This incident has prompted thousands of social media comments and emails from across the viewing area and the nation. Unlike many who have commented, co-anchor Wayne Dawson and many of us at Fox 8 have the advantage of knowing Kristi Capel personally and her work in our community,” the station stated. “It is for that reason that we join with the pastors she met with on Tuesday to begin the process of forgiveness and healing.”

    Capel is quite fortunate to have only received a suspension, especially since there’s a petition circulating that calls for her termination.

    Pastors, though? Really? Did they lay hands on her and rebuke her racist tongue? This is just too much.

  119. rq says

    Interlude: random racist celebrity. Actually, I probably shouldn’t say ‘racist’. We’ll go with ‘rightwing’. Random rightwing celebrity. “I like skinny white chicks”: Kid Rock explains why he doesn’t like Beyonce in utterly demented Rolling Stone interview .

    Messenger: From voicemail to voicemail: The short political life and times of Tom Schweich. As it isn’t directly relevant, I’m only citing the last little bit:

    I liked him because he was different. Misguided, at times, but the man cared about what he was doing. He thought he was making a difference. As auditor, he did.

    In the end, he called me, perhaps because he didn’t have anybody else. Nobody in his party wanted him to hold a news conference suggesting that there were anti-Semites in the Republican Party. “I won’t back down,” he told me. I believed him.

    Because anti-Semites in the Republican party would be a bit surprise? Really? Maybe, in a way.
    Here’s another on Schweich: Ferguson Q&A: State Auditor Tom Schweich

    THE MISSOURI TIMES: As a citizen of St. Louis County who has an interesting background in law enforcement and investigations, how do you view the early response from local law enforcement to the Ferguson community’s reaction to the death of Michael Brown?

    AUDITOR TOM SCHWEICH: With respect to law enforcement’s response, my first experience in law enforcement was working on the Waco investigation, where there were also allegations that the government had used excessive force on citizens. My first reaction is that St. Louis County police should have had their authority removed earlier by the Governor. It is impossible to investigate yourself and be objective or be perceived to be objective. Ferguson is still part of St. Louis County, so simply removing St. Louis County was probably not the best idea. Bringing in the Highway Patrol – real outsiders – having true independence was the right move that occurred too late, but it was the right move.

    TMT: What do you agree and disagree with the most regarding how the Ferguson situation has been handled by local law enforcement?

    TS: This applies to both local law enforcement and the community: the only way to get to the bottom of a highly controversial situation, when people have died, is through a completely independent investigation. It really attributes to the consternation that goes on to the violence and to the negative reaction that some people have. What has to happen is a complete and total independent investigation by people who have no interest in the outcome – someone that everyone can trust, someone that will answer the key questions – and then we’ll know who’s at fault, who’s responsible, who was right, who was wrong. That’s what we did in the Waco investigation. There had been lots of local investigations; nobody trusted them. They brought in a complete outside to do a very thorough independent investigation with competent people, independent people, hardworking people who were really committed to getting the right answer. When that report came out, the situation was pretty much resolved because of the independence of the investigation.

    What has to happen here is that this investigation be allowed to proceed. I understand the FBI is involved, of course now we have the Highway Patrol involved in maintaining order. That’s the kind of independence that is needed to yield a result that people are satisfied with. Justice needs to be served. If someone needs to be indicted, they’ll be indicted. If someone needs to go to jail, they’ll go to jail. But, you don’t really know any of that until you have a complete and thorough investigation.

    TMT: What is something that St. Louis County could have done better in regards to distinguishing the treatment of those peacefully assembling from looters and rioters?

    TS: This is always an issue for law enforcement: how aggressive do you treat people? When I was doing work in Afghanistan, helping to train the police there, we were very concerned about the militarization of the police. It was very important that we had the trust of the people and that is true whether you are in Afghanistan or Washington, D.C, or Chicago or St. Louis or Ferguson. You’ve got to have a community policing operation that people trust. When you bring in tanks and indiscriminately fire at people, you undermine that confidence. That’s an issue worldwide, not just here. How far do you arm the police so they look like a military than a police force – and it does look like they might have gone too far. But, again, I’m just saying based on what I’m seeing on TV without seeing any results of an independent investigation.

    TMT: TIME Magazine equated Ferguson to looking like Iraq in an article days ago, due to the extensive use of Pentagon equipment. Based on your experience with Afghanistan, did TIME get it right?

    TS: No. Look, there is a very unfortunate situation involving [the Pentagon equipment], and there were a couple nights that it did look like they were using tanks and heavy equipment against protesters – many of whom were peacefully protesting. But, to try to compare that – the chaos, the mayhem that is going on in Afghanistan on a daily basis – is not an appropriate comparison. I spend a lot of time in Ferguson; it is not too far from where I live. My insurance agent is located there and my wife and I enjoy shopping at some of the antique stores there. To try to suggest somehow that it pertains to Afghanistan is a media hyperbole and it is not helping the situation at all.

    TMT: Why do you think that the regional conflict responded so well to Governor Nixon’s actions? What did he do right?

    TS: Bringing in the Highway Patrol – again, independence is the key in a situation like this. You take the actors who are involved out of the equation. He did that, he just did it way, way too late.

    TMT: How do you see the community changing after such an emotional moment in their history? What can the county, Missouri, and local government’s learn from it?

    TS: One thing we need to do is restore; people like me that have always gone to Ferguson to keep going there. We have to show people that this is not Afghanistan or Iraq and ignore the silly media analogies showing that there is violence and mayhem everywhere and remind people that by and large, it is a peaceful community. It is a thriving community. It is a community that people feel comfortable going to. Obviously now, the people of the city have some tending to do and there was obviously some tension in the city that needed to be resolved, but one way that we can synchronize is by continuing to visit the businesses in Ferguson, by continuing to look upon Ferguson as an important part of St. Louis County – as many of us always have.

    Talked to so many in St. Louis who have said since #Ferguson they’ve been diagnosed with PTSD or more. We in STL need to support each other.
    @sarahkendzior There help for adults 20+ affected by Ferguson. Contact Janet Frain at jfrain[at]providentstl[dot]org or call 314.802.2629.

  120. rq says

    CPD Whistleblower exposes Chicago Police

    This was our Video Pitch for a crowd-sourcing campaign, disregard the links to the crowd-source page. We have hours upon hours of audio interviews. We tried to get them to Rahm Emanuel and other politicians, like Luis Gutierrez, they all denied our requests or told us to get a lawyer, nobody wants to touch it. Now that the Blacksite has been exposed by the guardian we would again like to ask the politicians if they care to speak to whistle blower. Please help us get this into their hands. We are limited by liability on what we can air publicly, this is just a taste. Our staff positions are open to anyone who wants to help expose this, we also need lawyers to help us figure out what we can publicly use.

    I understand the footage is about a year old. A YEAR. A year ago, the ‘black site’ could have been revealed. Wow.

    For Trayvon, who died yesterday, three years ago. Marching to the police headquarters for #TrayvonMartin’s 3 year Anniversary shooting death chanting #TheHoodieMarch
    We marched to Police HQ, left Skittles/Arizona Ice Tea in memory of 3-yrs since #TrayvonMartin’s murder. #HoodiesUp

    Amnesty International USA Calls on Mayor Rahm Emanuel to Investigate Chicago “Black Site”

    Amnesty International USA called on Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to investigate allegations published in The Guardian newspaper of a Chicago Police Department facility in Homan Square, including beatings and disappearances of people detained there.

    “As the Mayor of Chicago, you have a responsibility under US and international law to ensure that human rights violations are not committed within the city,” wrote Amnesty International USA executive director Steven W. Hawkins.

    Amnesty International USA urged Mayor Emanuel to:

    – Open an independent and impartial investigation into the allegations made about human rights violations at the Homan Square facility and make the results public.
    – Allow Amnesty International and other independent human and civil rights organizations and monitors full, unrestricted access to the Homan Square facility.
    – Meet with Amnesty International to discuss additional steps the City of Chicago should take to prevent and end human rights violations, ensure accountability and bring Chicago Police practices into full conformity with international standards.

    “As we’ve seen the world over, from Guantanamo to the Philippines, when detainees are being held in secret, human rights violations inevitably occur. Mayor Emanuel must use all of the tools at his disposal to investigate these claims and ensure the protection of those in detention,” Hawkins said.

    The report on the Homan Square facility comes as the City of Chicago continues to fall far short in meeting its obligations under international human rights law to ensure accountability and remedy for torture and ill-treatment by Chicago Police operating under the direction of former Commander Jon Burge from 1972-1991.

    Amnesty International USA also reiterated its call on Mayor Emanuel to support the Chicago City Council Ordinance providing Reparations for the Chicago Police Torture Survivors, including full rehabilitation, restitution, compensation and apology.

    Cops behaving badly: San Francisco Police Officer Hits, Kicks Homeless Man Who Slept On Bus (VIDEO)

    Video recorded on a city bus shows a San Francisco police officer kicking and hitting a homeless man after the officer apparently struggled to wake the man up.

    Officer Raymond Chu also allegedly pepper sprayed 36-year-old Bernard Warren, according to the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, as their scuffle moved from inside the empty bus at the last stop in the Richmond district to the street outside.

    Warren was hospitalized and jailed for two weeks until a judge saw the footage, which was recorded on Feb. 11. He has been charged with threatening an officer, punishable by a year behind bars.

    “This sort of force was totally unnecessary. It was completely over the top,” said San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi, whose office is representing Warren. “If you find anyone sleeping on a bus, it’s reasonable to wake them up and ask [them] to leave. Sure, but is that reason to beat [someone] down? […]

    “Fundamentally we have a situation where a man was sleeping, which is not a crime,” said Coalition on the Homelessness Executive Director Jennifer Friedenbach. “It started off as completely innocent. This should not be a police situation. By aggressively charging [Warren], this sends a message to the officer that his behavior was acceptable, that it’s okay to escalate non-criminal situations.”

  121. rq says

    Advocates, police square off over brutality legislation

    “Enough is enough,” said Marion Gray-Hopkins, whose 19-year-old son, Gary, was shot to death by a Prince George’s County police officer 15 years ago.

    She joined rights advocates and others at a news conference before a Senate hearing on several bills. One would spell out when police wearing body cameras must turn them on. Another would make it easier to file excessive force complaints against officers and speed up internal investigations of such incidents.

    “We’re not here to pick on cops, only bad cops,” said Ryan Dennis, a spokesman for the Maryland Coalition for Justice and Equality.

    But law enforcement officials turned out in force to oppose the bills, arguing that they go too far and would be counterproductive.

    A police union official warned that changing the rules for internal investigations could worsen police-community relations rather than improve them. And a spokesman for the state’s police chiefs said that the body camera standards under consideration are so complicated they would discourage police departments from fitting their officers with them.

    While the deaths of unarmed black men during confrontations with police in Missouri and New York have sparked national debate, advocates say incidents in Maryland have fueled similar mistrust of law enforcement in minority communities.

    A six-month Baltimore Sun investigation, for instance, found that Baltimore taxpayers had paid nearly $6 million since 2011 to settle 102 lawsuits alleging police brutality and other misconduct. Officers had battered dozens of residents during questionable arrests, the investigation revealed, resulting in broken bones, head trauma, organ failure and even death.

    Responding to community anger over those revelations, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts have asked the U.S. Department of Justice to make a comprehensive review of the Police Department.

    The mayor and police commissioner also have said they support body cameras as a way to rebuild public trust, and other police departments are moving to adopt them as well.

    Sen. Victor R. Ramirez, a Prince George’s County Democrat, said he believes there needs to be a statewide “framework” for how the cameras are used. His bill would not require police departments to use cameras. But in those that do, he said, officers need to know when they should be filming, and when they should not.

    “Ultimately, what we’re trying to do is bridge law enforcement and our citizens, build that relationship,” he said. […]

    John Fitzgerald, speaking for the Maryland association of police chiefs, suggested the prohibition on filming protests was counterproductive. If violence flares, Fitzgerald, chief of the Chevy Chase municipal force, said he wants cameras running so he could be sure his officers act appropriately.

    Another point of contention is a provision requiring officers to get civilians’ consent to film when they’re not in a public setting or dealing with emergency or criminal activity. Maryland law generally requires the consent of anyone being recorded, and Ramirez said that complicates how body cameras are used.

    But opponents said the legislation is too rigid. With officers facing a wide variety of situations in the field, they argue that the standards could inappropriately restrict them in deciding when to film and when not to.

    This and that else at the link.

    Ah, the Detroit Water Crisis, not heard from in a while: Detroit Water Shutoff Crisis: Public Water Brigade Grows

    As of March 2014, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) was missing about $175 million in water payments, almost $100,000 of that from residential customers who had lost their jobs or couldn’t afford the hefty water bill last summer. Residents were already paying an average of $64 per month water access. With an 8.7 percent increase in June, many unemployed residents and individuals on Social Security Income checks couldn’t afford water for cooking, washing and basic needs.

    With the city’s bankruptcy the year before, much of DWSD’s extensive coverage area was now being consolidated into a new company, the Great Lakes Water Authority, which would assume water services for the city’s suburbs. That left the city of Detroit’s old water system to manage its bills with a smaller customer count, much of which was represented by low-income neighborhoods hit hard by layoffs and other financial problems from the recent recession.

    DWSD’s trip to bankruptcy court on Sept. 29 made worldwide news after U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes refused a request for a temporary moratorium on the water shut-offs that the department had initiated in June.

    “There is no such right or law,” said Rhodes, disagreeing with a United Nations declaration that “water is a fundamental right.”

    By November, DWSD had disconnected more than 30,000 accounts, with the highest monthly number (7,200) occurring in June, when the hot weather was ramping up, in a city that has an average of 50 heat-related deaths per year.

    The crisis has prompted outrage across the country, protests on city streets and water shipments from concerned Canadians on the other side of the border. It also inspired an ingenious, if not simplistic, response: Let Detroiters help other Detroiters get water.

    Detroit Water Brigade, which began in June 2014 at the start of the shutoffs, is designed to do just that. According to the organization’s website, it was kicked into motion when one of its co-founders, Danny McGlashing, founder of Occupy Sandy, wrote a proposal for a temporary citizen-led initiative to provide “[interim] water relief for residents in single family homes and apartment/condo units who’re experiencing water shutoffs.” Along with other activists and artists that include Justin Wedes (who founded the Paul Robeson Freedom School) and Boston Radio personality Rodney Deas (Radio Rahim), McGlashing instigated a movement to provide water to those who couldn’t afford to pay their looming water bills and had been shut off.

    The project could have easily remained small, limited to a few dozen neighborhood blocks, but it didn’t. It mushroomed, propelled by the burgeoning number of households that were now without water. According to Wedes, the Brigade quickly realized that handing out containers of tap water on a daily or weekly basis wasn’t the answer. People needed ways to survive and to increase their independence.

    In addition creating a means to stockpile drinking water for hot weather and general population needs, the brigade came up with collection systems by which people could collect rainwater and purify it for drinking purposes, as well as an emergency fund to help people reinstate their access to water.

    “The DWB continues to provide emergency water deliveries to families across Detroit,” said Wedes in a recent interview. “We’ve also implemented a financial assistance program, called the Water Affordability Fund, for families to get help paying their water bills to restore access.

    Before winter set in, the Brigade had also started a collection of cold weather gear to ensure that those left without hot water or power would have one more layer to protect them from Detroit’s icy winters. And they started the groundwork toward creating an “sustainable eco-village,” called Avalon Village, that would include its own rainwater collection system.

    “The eco-village will model alternative water collection, retention and sewerage systems that we hope will inspire changes in the way municipalities deal with water,” he said.

    Wedes, who is best known for his work with the Occupy Wall Street movement, admits that there are still significant hurdles to overcome.

    “The winter has brought its own new challenges: Families that can’t afford gas have their heat cut, and the water shutoffs continue. Also fires are more prevalent in the winter, as people who are heating their home with ad hoc methods inadvertently start fires.”

    But the groundwork seems to be paying off. There are now more than 20 different water collection hubs in Detroit, backed by a network of hundreds of volunteers and organizations of all backgrounds.

    “We have partnered with many organizations, including Auntie Na’s Community Center, the House of Help Community Center, several churches [and] synagogues, Wayne State student groups, and the Universities of Michigan, Bowling Green State, Central Michigan and Eastern Michigan,” Wedes said.

    And the initiative has continued to gain international support. In November, Detroit Water Brigade activists flew to Dublin, Ireland, another city hit by water accessibility issues, to take part in water protests.

    Icy weather has slowed down some of the shutoffs, but the group expects the process to continue on, adding even more need to a finely-tuned network of volunteers who can help get water and supplies to those in need. Wedes says they’re now up to 500 volunteers who expect to be out in force as the weather continues to warm.

    Which it is expected to do. The Detroit Climate Action Collaborative says Detroit temps are on the way up, and have been increasing since at least 1959. It looks like the Detroit Water Brigade may very well be needed next summer if the city isn’t able to solve its economic and humanitarian challenges.

    Article quoted in full.

    Another officer with past misconduct, also involved in a fatal shooting. Woman claims cop in fatal Bridgeton shooting sexually extorted her, lawsuit says

    Shakera Brown, 22, of Bridgeton, claims throughout last year, Bridgeton Patrolman Braheme Days – who, along with Patrolman Roger Worley, shot and killed Jerame C. Reid following a traffic stop on Dec. 30 – “usurped his police authority … by engaging in acts of sexual extortion, false imprisonment and intimidation,” the lawsuit says.

    The prosecutor’s office is investigating the use of deadly force in the fatal shooting of Reid, which was captured on a police dashboard camera. Both officers have been placed on paid administrative leave.

    According to court documents filed in U.S. Federal Court for the District of New Jersey on Thursday, Brown is suing Days, the Bridgeton Police Department and City of Bridgeton in excess of $25 million in damages.

    “We encourage the Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office look at this and investigate it further because we think there might be other victims other than (my client),” said Raheem Watson, a Philadelphia-based attorney representing Brown. “We suspect that this is not an isolated incident, that there may be other victims who are similarly situated … but we cannot confirm that at this time.”

    Days did not immediately return a request for comment.

    Love the vocabulary. ‘Sexual extortion’. Isn’t that, as a minimum, sexual assault? Rape? Disgusting behaviour.

    3 yrs. ago today I was teaching Emmett Till in Sanford. My students crying said “Prof. they’re still killing us.” #TrayvonMartin #HoodiesUp

  122. rq says

    Calgary students disciplined after wearing apparent KKK robes – that’s in tolerant, not-racist Canada, by the way.

    Two Calgary high school students who showed up at a party wearing what appeared to be Ku Klux Klan robes sparked outrage on social media and were disciplined by school administrators after the negative reaction spilled into school halls.

    The theme of the weekend party was to dress in white so their clothes would glow under black lights. Two St. Francis High School students wore white robes and hoods in the same style as the white supremacist group KKK.

    Photos of the costume spread quickly on Twitter, among other social media platforms, with suggestions the outfit was racist.

    “I was so shocked,” said Sarah Ghebrezghi, a recent St. Francis graduate who knew people at the party and saw the photos online. “It was hard to believe for sure.”

    Police said the uproar over the costumes was based on a misunderstanding, and that the two students had no intention to appear racist.

    “There’s no reference to the KKK or any extremist view; it was just, cover ourselves head to toe in white garments as the theme of the party was dictating,” Sgt. Duane Lepchuk told Global News. […]

    The Calgary Catholic School District said the students responsible for the “questionable behaviour” at the party were disciplined, but it would not disclose exactly what actions were taken.

    The students were off school property when they wore the offending clothing, but “there were some heated sentiments about it at the school the following week,” said Tania Younker, spokeswoman for the school district.

    “We don’t tolerate any inappropriate behaviour or anything that would negatively alter the tone of the school,” Younker said.

    Mark Berger, the principal of St. Francis, wrote in an email to parents Thursday that aside from taking disciplinary action, school staff would address concerns with the rest of the student population.

    “The safety of our students is paramount to all members of our community and we will continue to work with them to ensure they feel safe and secure at school,” Berger wrote.

    Corneluis said the two students have since apologized to her, saying they didn’t mean to come off as racist. But she’s now worried the students are being threatened over the incident. One of them told her he’s afraid.

    Life in Prison for Selling $20 in Weed

    On September 5, 2008, Fate Vincent Winslow watched a plainclothes stranger approach him. Homeless and hungry, on a dark street rife with crime, the 41-year-old African American was anxious to make contact, motivated by one singular need: food.

    Another man, this one white, stood next to Winslow. He is referred to in court documents exclusively as “Perdue.”

    It was nearly 9:20 p.m., hours after the sun had dipped below the abandoned buildings surrounding them. The lights of downtown Shreveport, Louisiana, flickered in the distance as the plain-clothes man—unbeknownst to them, an undercover cop—arrived. […]

    The details of what happened next remain murky. Winslow returned to the scene, allegedly with marijuana. Money and drugs were exchanged between hands in the dark. When Scroggins and the other officers rushed to the scene after Officer Alkire confirmed the pot, they found $5 on Winslow and $20 on Perdue. Both bills had been marked, but no one could explain how, exactly, they got there.

    Police arrested Winslow, drove him to prison, and locked him up. Six months later, a jury found him guilty of distribution of a schedule I substance (marijuana). Three months after that, a judge sentenced him to life imprisonment with hard labor, without the benefit of parole.

    Perdue was never arrested.

    The felony for selling marijuana on September 5 was, in Winslow’s case, the straw that broke the camel’s back. Using his existing criminal record, the prosecution sought the maximum punishment. His prior convictions, all non-violent felonies, made him a candidate for the notorious mandatory minimum sentencing laws.

    In 1985, at the age of 17, Winslow was convicted of simple burglary and sentenced to three years. In 1994, at 26, he was charged with the same, this time given 8½ years. In 2004, he was arrested for possession of cocaine, landing him 18 more months in prison. Multiple felonies left Winslow moneyless, jobless, and ineligible for food stamps (those with drug felonies are permanently banned from applying). [emphasis mine …]

    On four 8½ x 11 inch pages lined with questions, Winslow scribbled down his story. “Why did you get involved in this crime?” one survey question reads. “To get $5 dollars to get something to eat,” he writes. Amid an appeal for money to find a new lawyer, mentions of suicidal thoughts, and confessions of alcohol addiction, Winslow flips the script. In bold black letters, written at the law library of the notoriously horrific Angola prison, he poses a question of his own:

    “[They] let [Perdue] go and I got life: Please explain.”

    Winslow’s case may be one of the most egregious for marijuana violations, but it’s far from an anomaly. Jennifer Turner, the investigator behind the ACLU report, says the severity of his punishment is all too familiar. “[Fate’s] case is tragically typical,” she says. “A typical example of the draconian punishments meted out under three-strikes laws.”

    It’s a phenomenon she captured in her resulting report, a 240-page document titled A Living Death: Life Without Parole for NonViolent Offenders. Published in November 2013, the analysis exposes a justice system teeming with stories like Winslow’s—people serving life sentences for crimes many would consider minor.

    Currently, there are 3,278 prisoners sentenced to die in prison for nonviolent offenses. Some of these offenses involve property crimes, ranging from stealing tools from a tool shed to shoplifting a $159 jacket. The vast majority, however, stem from drugs. Seventy-nine percent of these inmates are serving life for drug offenses. Sixty-five percent of them are black.

    Nowhere is the inequity of this system more apparent than Louisana. With 429 inmates serving life sentences for crimes like Winslow’s, the state holds the record for the most nonviolent offenders locked up for life. A staggering ninety-one percent of these inmates are black. Louisiana State Penitentiary, where Winslow is housed, has the largest population of black men serving life sentences for nonviolent crimes in the world. It’s a problem so rampant, even the warden of the prison itself is speaking out.

    “There’s an answer to this without being so extreme. But we’re still-living-20-years-ago extreme. Throw the human away. He’s worthless. Boom: up the river,” says Angola Prison Warden Burl Cain. “And yet, he didn’t even kill anybody. He didn’t do anything, he just had an addiction he couldn’t control and he was trying to support it robbing. That’s terrible to rob people—I’ve been robbed, I hate it. I want something done to him. But not all his life. That’s extreme. That’s cruel and unusual punishment to me.” […]

    The prosecution called one other witness, an expert in forensic chemistry narcotics from Northwestern. The defense called none. In Louisiana, the testimony of a single undercover police officer is enough to convict someone of distribution of a Schedule One substance. Before sending the jury into deliberations, the judge urged them to focus on the arguments they heard in court. “Your determination of the facts must be based on evidence presented in court,” he said. For Winslow, who had not a single person come to his defense, this was bad news.

    Unable to afford an attorney, he had been placed with Rubenstein by the state. Winslow says he had promised to subpoena two witnesses and the audio from the patrol car. Neither materialized in court. Aware that his life was on the line, Winslow fought for additional help. “I stood up and informed the judge that my lawyer Alex Rubenstein was inaffective (sic) as my council and he was doing nothing to help me,” he says. The motion for a new attorney was dismissed.

    With multiple incriminating testimonies against Winslow, and zero to the contrary, the jury went into deliberations. Exactly 52 minutes later, just in time for lunch, they reached a verdict. Ten jurors, all white, voted guilty. The other two, both black, voted innocent. In Louisiana, where unanimous juries are not mandatory, 10 votes were enough. Guilty as charged.

    Of the eight women and four men in the jury, just one responded to a request for comment—a woman whose job necessitates she remain anonymous. “The jury wasn’t told,” she says, referring to the life sentence that Winslow is now serving as a result of the verdict. This case, she says, was presented merely as a simple drug offense, not as the deciding factor in someone’s future. “I was instructed whether or not to convict on this interaction. [Pause]. It was, what it was. It was very clear, there was no doubt.”

    In the years since the trial, her memory of it is limited. She can hardly envision Winslow’s face, or anything about his appearance, just that he looked “disheveled” and never took the stand. But there is one thing, as we keep talking, that creeps back into her mind. “I do remember it was a very small amount of marijuana. It was ridiculously small.”

    “Whoever his lawyer was didn’t make any case for him,” she continues. “In my mind I thought…why are we doing this for such a small amount?” While she’s one of the 10 who found Winslow guilty of the charge, she’s audibly surprised to hear his fate. “I think it’s really an imbalance of the punishment fitting the crime,” she says. “I don’t think it’s fair when we’re looking back and states are legalizing this drug. Now it’s petty to me. I don’t know if it’s a petty crime, but its seems pretty petty.” […]

    Davis takes issue with Brown’s strategy of enhancing the sentences of defendants who he believes may have committed other crimes. “A person isn’t convicted of a crime unless the prosecutor has the evidence to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt in court,” she says. “That’s the foundation of our criminal justice system.”

    The Winslow case, she says, is a “prime example” of the abuse of power that’s endemic in our legal system. “The charging decisions are made behind closed doors in the prosecutor’s office; they don’t have to explain to a judge—or to anyone—why they chose to prosecute one person under a mandatory sentencing law and not another,” she says. “There’s no transparency…which results in a prosecutor with this tremendous power and almost no accountability.”

    “[Brown’s] attitude, I imagine, is not unique,” says Davis of this particular prosecutor. “You have all this power and you’re never held accountable. There’s no punishment, there’s no deterrent effect, so you start behaving that way—a lot of prosecutors behave that way.”

    With recent racially charged stories in the legal realm, such as the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, she’s seen an increase in people paying attention to this problem. It’s something she hopes will continue. “The Supreme Court has specifically said that the role of prosecutors is not to get convictions,” she says. “The role is to seek justice.”

    For Brown, it seems, convictions are the point. In his mind, using the mandatory minimum sentencing laws to lock up people like Winslow for life isn’t just legal, it’s simply the right thing to do. “We’re doing what is within the law,” he says. “It is kind of what you want prosecutors to do. You don’t want us to act arbitrarily and treat everyone the same, because they’re not.”

    Winslow’s defense attorney, Alex Rubenstein, has researched the case before we finally speak on the phone. This case is one he seems to have strong feelings about—few of them in favor of Winslow. While he admits that Prosecutor Brown is “notorious” for using the law to enhance sentences on cases like this one, he doesn’t necessarily think it was the wrong call this time. “He was distributing marijuana,” says Rubenstein of Winslow. “I can’t really be sympathetic.” When I ask if he thinks this was an appropriate sentence, keeping in mind that people can serve as little as nine years for murder, he responds: “I do.”

    Rubenstein says he doesn’t remember Winslow standing up to tell the judge that he was being ineffective, but doesn’t necessarily rule it out. He stands by not bringing any witnesses to the stand in Winslow’s defense. He says there was no one to bring. It’s something that he sees a lot as a public defender, representing a majority black, underprivileged population from high-crime areas. “You have to be realistic about it, we don’t have the best clientele in the world,” he says. “I’m not saying they’re all losers—we win some cases, we try our best—but sometimes there just isn’t anything there.” […]

    In August 2013, then-Attorney General Eric Holder replied to these concerns in a memo addressed to U.S. prosecutors and assistant attorney generals. “We must ensure that our most severe mandatory minimum penalties are reserved for serious, high-level, or violent drug offenders,” wrote Holder. “Long sentences for low-level, non-violent drug offenses do not promote public safety, deterrence, and rehabilitation.”

    But perhaps the most troubling issue is where it all begins: the arrest. If it’s mandatory minimum laws landing young black men in prison for life, it’s unfair arrests that are getting them there. Despite data that they use drugs at the same rate as whites, African Americans are 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana related crimes.

    Once arrested, blacks are sentenced to prison for nonviolent crimes such as drug possession at 20 times the rate of whites. Individual state’s racial disparities are even worse. Blacks are 23 times more likely to be sentenced to life for a nonviolent crime in Louisiana, 18 times more likely than whites in Oklahoma, and an incredible 33 more in Illinois. Louisiana isn’t the only state to have a majority of black inmates make up their life sentence for nonviolent crimes. Mississippi’s population of prisoners serving life sentences for nonviolent crimes is 78.5 percent black; in Illinois it’s 70; South Carolina and Florida, above 60.

    In her book The New Jim Crow, author Michelle Alexander explains the fatal flaw of mandatory minimums:

    “People choose to commit crimes, and that’s why they are locked up or locked out, we are told—but herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives,” she writes. “In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.”

    At the end of Winslow’s ACLU questionnaire, he echoes the absurdity Alexander seeks to highlight. “Life sentence for two 5 (sic) dollar bags of weed. People kill people and get five,” he writes.

    The final question they ask is simple, the answer is chilling. “What’s life been like in prison?” they write. “There is no life in prison…just waiting to die.”

    The attitudes of the two attorneys in the case (the ones in court) are absolutely indicative of the entire legal system. They see nothing wrong with being so lackadaisical about the case, about not even trying – they can’t even consider the fact that a sentence that harsh might be wrong. Just wow.

    Why Is It So Hard to Prove a Civil Rights Crime?

    The non-prosecution of Zimmerman should give you some pause. For one, data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics reveals that, in 2012, only one person out of 17 initially investigated under the 2009 law was ultimately convicted. That covers the entire country. Granted, a lot of things can happen from the moment DOJ opens an investigation—plea bargaining, special deals, dropped charges, no charges. But contrast that with the total number of racially motivated incidents reported by state law enforcement agencies to the FBI: 3,297 in 2012. Of those incidents, 66 percent were reported to be motivated by anti-black bias. Though states are free to prosecute those cases under their own laws, there seems to be a disconnect between what’s happening at the state level and what DOJ can do in the most extreme cases.

    Then there’s the issue of how difficult it is to prove a federal civil-rights crime. After a thorough review of the evidence, federal investigators concluded they couldn’t prove Zimmerman violated either of the two federal laws they examined. More importantly, they couldn’t prove their case “beyond a reasonable doubt.” In most criminal cases, only a jury decides whether evidence meets that really high standard. But here DOJ took on that role because of the high-profile nature of the case—the department wanted to make sure it had a winning case. And the reasons were more pragmatic than anything else: the potential for a second acquittal in federal court, another media circus, and more suffering for the Martin family were too high a price to pay. Not to mention Holder would’ve opened himself up to criticism with a baseless prosecution.

    That explains why DOJ, in its announcement about Zimmerman, went to great lengths to note investigators reviewed every single piece of evidence the Florida case produced—the trial record, forensic evidence, ballistics reports, you name it—and conducted 75 independent interviews plus additional evidence-gathering. Most of that evidence didn’t go to proving Zimmerman’s physical act of injuring or killing Martin—that wasn’t in dispute. The biggest hurdle for federal prosecutors was getting inside Zimmerman’s mind, to prove that he “willfully” engaged Martin and took his life because he was black.

    Willfulness, in civil rights cases or otherwise, is by far the most difficult thing to prove in criminal law. And absent a damning confession from Zimmerman or a mountain of circumstantial evidence showing that he harbors resentment toward black teenagers, making that showing is hard—so hard, DOJ determined, it couldn’t risk pressing charges and losing later.

    If there’s one takeaway from this outcome, which reportedly has the Martin family “heartbroken,” is that at least there’s now an indication of how DOJ will respond in another closely watched case: the civil rights probe of Ferguson officer Darren Wilson. He’s being investigated under a totally different statute, but the legal bar is the same: Will DOJ have enough evidence that Wilson willfully shot and killed Michael Brown because he was black? Don’t hold your breath.

    In what could be more hopeful news, BREAKING: Attorney General Eric Holder will spend his last days in office pushing for a lower standard of proof for civil rights offenses.

    Pittsburgh man writes police chief after witnessing police brutality; sees immediate coverup

    Earlier this week Samm Hodges bore witness not only to an extreme case of police brutality, but the quick coverup and lies that police often spin to cover their tracks. So disturbed by what he saw, he wrote this letter to the Pittsburgh Chief of Police, Cameron McLay – who became a viral hit himself after holding up a sign stating that white silence to racism needs to end.

    My name is Samm Hodges. Me and my family have been living here in Pittsburgh for 8 years. Our house is on Federal St, and we really really love this city.

    Today, I saw something which horrified me. I work downtown at First and Market. I was leaving with a friend of mine to get coffee when we saw and heard sirens. Suddenly, a young black man who I now know as Devon Davis ran within yards of us, being chased by police officers with guns drawn. He was almost immediately tackled by between 6 and 12 officers. A whole swarm, I didn’t count.

    But then, as he lay pinned to the ground, the officers began beating him viciously with batons while yelling to ‘stop resisting.’ He wasn’t resisting, and he kept saying ‘I’m not doing anything.’ They beat him for a long time and when they were done, he was laying in a pool of his own blood with what news reports say is a broken leg. I was only 30 yards away. The had to carry him to the police van.

    The official statement from the office of Public Safety is quoted in the Post Gazette and Trib Live says that ‘they found him severely injured in a pool of blood’

    That’s completely not true. He was tackled and then beaten severely while pinned to the ground by a whole swarm of officers. I saw him running very quickly, his leg was not broken prior to being tackled. Then he was tackled and beaten viciously in the legs. Then he had to be carried away. There was no blood on the ground where he had been running before. He had no limp before.

    I know that you won’t stand for this kind of dishonesty and brutality. I’m very shaken up by what i saw, and I lost a lot of respect for the men and women I trust to keep me and my family safe. Please make this right. I am willing to testify or do whatever it takes to see justice is served.

    Thank you in advance for handling this situation with justice and thoughtfulness.

    Samm Hodges

    More video and photos forthcoming.

  123. rq says

    The Evangelist

    Today, Maranda works at a Kroger grocery store in Big Lake, Minnesota — a town of 10,000 about 40 miles northwest of Minneapolis. She doesn’t have use of her right hand and walks with a limp, but she lives in her own apartment and is able to take care of herself. Now 33, Maranda is a triumph of both the human spirit and science.

    A few weeks ago, her brother called to give her an update on Carson, whom Maranda hasn’t seen or spoken to in nearly 30 years.

    “He was like, ‘I gotta tell you something. Your doctor is going to run for president,’” Maranda told BuzzFeed News. “I think that’s awesome. I think he’d do really good. All the things I have in life, I wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for Ben Carson.”

    This is the unblemished view of Carson, a “folk hero” — a title he earned in a lengthy feature in the New York Times in 1993 — turned White House contender.

    Carson hasn’t changed much, though the people evangelizing his story have. For the past 20 years, teachers and parents pressed his inspirational autobiography, Gifted Hands, into the hands of black children; today, conservatives far away from D.C., people who are not campaign operatives, see Carson as their champion — an intellectual social conservative.

    The source of this allure is the same: Carson is a great American success story, a rags-to-riches hero who embodied achievement against long odds. His achievement turned him into an icon of black triumph, a Horatio Alger figure in hospital scrubs.

    He didn’t do this through sports, music, or any of the other typical avenues to celebrity. He did it in a profession where the barrier for entry is extremely high, even among our best and brightest minds. It isn’t brain surgery? Well, for Carson, it actually was.

    But he’s now risking this previously unassailable legacy in national politics, where reputations are broken as often as made. He’s making a series of sharp-edged statements that undermine his previously universal appeal, particularly in communities he once sought to set an example for. He has traded one kind of national stature for another one, hotter but also faster burning.

    “If you’re white and you oppose a progressive black person, you’re a racist,” Carson told the audience gathered for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday. “If you’re black and you oppose the progressive agenda, you’re crazy.” […]

    When Carson arrived at Johns Hopkins Hospital — ranked the top hospital in the country for two decades — as a neurosurgery resident in 1977, he said that he was sometimes mistaken for an orderly.

    “It wasn’t deliberately racist,” he told the New York Times in 1993. “It’s just that orderlies were the only black hospital employees these people had ever seen before.”

    Carson soon began collecting an impressive set of credentials: assistant professor of neurosurgery, assistant professor of oncology, and, at age 33, director of the Division of Pediatric Neurosurgery. He was then the nation’s youngest chief of pediatric neurosurgery, and one of only three black doctors in that position in the United States.

    “He could walk into the patient’s room the evening before surgery, meet the parents for the first time, speak to them for a few minutes, and it was as if God had entered the room,” the late Dr. John Freeman, an internationally renowned Johns Hopkins pediatric neurologist, wrote in his self-published memoir Looking Back: A Career in Child Neurology.

    “Many of the patients came to Hopkins because of Ben’s reputation, which was very well deserved. He is one of the very few individuals that I can honestly say ‘walks on water.’”

    Because of this esteem, Carson often performed more than 400 operations a year — at the very high end of the caseload of a typical neurosurgeon. And his practice was particularly challenging: He dealt mostly with the most feeble patients (newborns and children) and the most severe conditions (tumors, traumatic brain injuries, congenital dwarfism, etc.).

    Despite those difficulties, Carson appears to have maintained a very clean docket for a surgeon working in a specialty that ranks No. 1 for lawsuits, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2011. Records show only one malpractice suit and one other suit naming him and Johns Hopkins as defendants, both dismissed — though an appeal is pending in the former suit. The NEJM study shows that a neurosurgeon faces a 19.1% chance of facing a claim annually; or they should expect to be sued roughly every five years.

    His gift with a forceps enabled thousands of suffering children to lead normal — or at least more normal — lives. It also launched him to public prominence. Carson had a story to tell — and eventually, sell.

    Carson signed with a Christian publishing company and wrote Gifted Hands, the inspirational and influential autobiography that was published in 1990. Clocking in at little more than 200 pages, it was Carson’s wide-eyed prescriptive for underachievers who needed only better role models — Michael Jordan and Dr. Dre need not apply — and regular trips to the library.

    He talked about overcoming his anger, which once resulted in stabbing a playmate when he was 9, by praying away his temper. He spent a chapter recounting how joining ROTC altered the course of his high school career, even helping him to understand that obsessing over fashion — “the peer thing,” he calls it — was immature. He recalled using a series of connections to land summer jobs while in college, discovering “influence could get me inside the door, but my productivity and the quality of my work were the real tests.” […]

    Carson’s message was virtually indistinguishable from the sermons many in the audience might’ve heard from the pulpit of a black church. Carson could talk about personal responsibility and self-reliance and turning tragedy into triumph because of his familiar biography, echoing homilies delivered by men ranging from Malcolm X to T.D. Jakes.

    Carson quickly set about pitching a prescription for struggling kids everywhere, railing against the exalted status of athletes, celebrities, and the most superficial aspects of popular culture. That peer thing, again. […]

    A devout Seventh-Day Adventist, Carson took up this cause with the fervor of a barnstorming preacher. (In Carson’s home in Maryland, there is a portrait of him sitting alongside a beaming, brown-haired Jesus hanging over the stairwell. Jesus extends his left hand, as if beckoning to someone. They look like old friends.)

    “He would talk about Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson, how those guys when they talked and went into a place, people got excited,” said Dr. Ron Anderson, an ophthalmologist at the Washington Hospital Center.

    “It didn’t take long. Especially after his book came out and people knew who he was. He reached Jackson and Jordan in terms of walking into a school or an auditorium.”

    He released more books, including two — Think Big (1996) and The Big Picture (2000) — that rehashed his philosophies for success. “And who could better advise than a man who has transformed himself from a ghetto kid into the most celebrated pediatric neurosurgeon in the world?” reads a description of Think Big on Amazon. Staying on message, and mostly avoiding contentious political talk, Carson touted the merits of hard work and faith in God. Some of the chapters in those books included titles like “Books Are For Reading,” “Seeing Hardship as Advantage,” and “Moving Beyond a Victim Mentality.”

    In those final chapters of The Big Picture, there are also glimpses of the side of Carson the world would see years later when he delivered the keynote at a South Carolina tea party convention, an old-fashioned conservatism on race and other social questions. Carson wrote that he opposed affirmative action and criticized the use of racial and ethnic labels such as Irish-Americans, African-Americans, or “some other brand-Americans,” warning “if we are not careful we may fragment and hyphenate ourselves into oblivion.” He called political correctness “a serious threat” and said “it discourages honesty. It places a higher value on making everyone feel good than on stating what we really believe.” Carson also wrote “homosexual behavior is wrong” but that he had gay co-workers and “as long as they do their jobs well, their sexual orientation is not an issue I concern myself with.” […]

    In 1997, Carson loudly denounced a decision by the Maryland chapter of the NAACP to protest any and all public appearances by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. “It’s pretty disgusting,” he told The Star-Ledger. “I think it’s time to move beyond that point. Slavery’s been over for a long time now.”

    It wouldn’t really be until the National Prayer Breakfast in 2013 that Carson would catapult himself into public consciousness as a conservative leader. The 27-minute speech denounced Obamacare and progressive taxation as the president sat just 10 feet away. Months later at the Values Voters Summit, Carson would call Obamacare “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”

    But even then, the Carson of old wasn’t so different. In 1997, at the very same event, he argued against affirmative action and the welfare state — standing in front of President Bill Clinton.

    Brem, the Hopkins doctor, could hardly believe Carson, a man whom he described as “soft-spoken, mild-mannered, and incredibly polite,” was the same person who was challenging President Clinton in front of roughly 3,000 attendees.

    “I almost fell out of my chair,” Brem said, recalling watching Carson open a chasm between himself and the president of the United States. “It was so shocking.” […]

    That time might yet come for Carson. But the work he is truly known for, a series of operations that are complicated, risky, and often lifesaving — is the kind of thing that most humans never do, let alone presidential candidates. (On Hopkins’ website, Carson has an 84-page resume that includes nearly 20 pages of honors and 68 honorary degrees from schools as diverse as Morgan State University in Baltimore and Medical University of Southern Africa.)

    Carson’s more extreme comments in recent years — particularly those about gays and lesbians — have unsettled some former colleagues.

    “The thing that’s crazy is that he’s trained more gay neurosurgeons than anybody in the country,” Brem said. “He works beautifully with people.”

    Carson’s longtime friends and colleagues are concerned about how his turn to politics is affecting his legacy. In an email thread among Hopkins employees accidentally shared with BuzzFeed News, one former colleague recommend “speaking to [BuzzFeed News] without getting drawn into political discussion.”

    That was rather long.

    Holder: Standard in federal civil rights cases is ‘too high’

    Attorney General Eric Holder, during his final weeks in office, plans to ask Congress to lower the standard of proof in federal civil rights cases, a change that would make the federal government “a better backstop” against discrimination in cases like the deaths of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, according to NBC News and POLITICO.

    “We do need to change the law. I do think the standard is too high,” Holder told NBC News Thursday. “There needs to be a change with regard to the standard of proof.”

    Holder said that between now and his departure, likely in early March when the Senate is expected to confirm Loretta Lynch as his successor, he will call for a lower standard of proof for civil rights crimes, he told POLITICO. Such a change would make it easier for the federal government to bring civil rights charges in the future, the news organization reports. […]

    Holder said Tuesday that the evidence in the Zimmerman case did not meet the “high standard for a federal hate crime prosecution,” but the decision should not end efforts to explore racial tensions in the justice system.

    “I think that if we adjust those standards, we can make the federal government a better backstop — make us more a part of the process in an appropriate way to reassure the American people that decisions are made by people who are really disinterested,” Holder told POLITICO. “I think that if we make those adjustments, we will have that capacity.”

    No Shootings This Year in NYPD Precinct Where Police Officers Were Murdered

    The commanding officer of the 79th Precinct said it was the only one in Brooklyn North to avoid shooting incidents in the first nine weeks of the year. The 84th Precinct in Downtown Brooklyn also shared in the streak up to Feb. 15, according to NYPD data.

    “We haven’t had one shooting in 2015,” Deputy Inspector John Chell told residents at the 79th Precinct’s first community council meeting of the year Wednesday.

    “I’ll never be happy unless there’s no crime — that’s not going to happen, but I’m sure going to try with the help of my officers.”

    Chell attributed the lull to “simple policing” and an “omnipresence” of officers in the precinct.

    “It’s been a cumulative effort of crime prevention over the past years and we’re just moving it forward,” the commanding officer said. “And it’s really also thanks to the volunteer partnership with the community.”

    Anti-Defamation League Sounds Warning About White Supremacists in Mo. Prisons

    The Anti-Defamation League says it’s a growing problem – white supremacist gangs in Missouri prisons.

    Regional director Karen Aroesty is tracking several white supremacist groups representing dozens of inmates.

    She says the five main groups are: Sacred Separatist Group (SSG), Joplin Honkies, Peckerwood Midwest, Family Values and Aryan Circle.

    “I don’t want to alarm people at how many folks are engaged in this, and trying to count individuals sometimes is difficult,” Aroesty says. “The reality is, they can do enormous damage as a single individual, and that’s what is worth paying attention to.”

    The concern is that white gang members in Missouri prisons are getting radicalized, she says, and could carry out hate crimes when they’re released.

    Aroesty says in late January, a Springfield police officer suffered career-ending injuries after being shot by a member of the Southwest Honkies.

    Earlier this month, two members of the Joplin Honkies were charged with a hate crime for allegedly threatening to kill a black woman and her children while breaking into their home.

    This is old news, but I don’tk now if this article specifically was mentioned. Commissioner Bratton Unveils Plans For New High-Tech Anti-Terror Police Unit

    The unit of 350 cops will be specially trained in high-tech weaponry to deal with protests, “lone wolf” attacks and evolving threats posed by terrorists, CBS2’s Marcia Kramer reported.

    The Strategic Response Group, Bratton said, will be dedicated to “disorder control and counterterrorism protection capabilities.”

    “It is designed for dealing with events like our recent protests, or incidents like Mumbai or what just happened in Paris,” the commissioner said.

    Funding for the new squad is expected to come from both the city and federal Homeland Security grants.

    “They’ll be equipped and trained in ways that our normal patrol officers are not,” Bratton said. “They’ll be equipped with all the extra heavy protective gear, with the long rifles and machine guns — unfortunately sometimes necessary in these instances.” […]

    The new unit will also move away from depleting neighborhoods of their cops, 1010 WINS’ Juliet Papa reported.

    “We’re able to leave them back in the precincts so they get an enhanced presence,” Bratton said.

    Roy Richter, president of the Captains Endowment Association, said he supports the move.

    “That’s a great idea,” he told Kramer. “To the extent that you relieve the drain on resources in the neighborhoods by assigning an officer to an anti-terror function … I think that’s a very positive thing.

    “There’s been a dialogue that’s been happening, which is positive. Any time you have a dialogue and develop a relationship and can see the people you’re speaking to, so this further assists that,” Richter added.

    Bratton is also calling on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to outfit all new subway cars with cameras that would be monitored on the train by an officer in the conductor’s booth, as well as at an off-site location.

    The commissioner said he will also ask Mayor Bill de Blasio for more funding to buy more Tasers as an alternative to the use of force. Bratton reportedly wants at least 450 cops — five or six at each of the city’s 77 precincts — to carry Tasers on them, not leave them in their cars, Kramer reported.

    Bratton admitted he had more work to do to bring up the morale of the department. A poll done by the NYPD found that a majority of cops fear getting sued or being disciplined by the department.

    The commissioner also hinted he would be asking the mayor to hire more cops.

    Anyway, upthread there’s a petition to stop this over-militarization.

    America’s Unfair Rules of the Road

    Race and transportation have long been intertwined, whether it be federally funded highways that plowed through, or isolated, minority neighborhoods; Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott; or segregated streetcars and trolleys. And there has been tremendous progress within the past century, particularly when Brown v. Board of Education struck down “separate but equal,” leading to the eventual desegregation of public transportation. In the 1990s, two pieces of legislation, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act and the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, increased community involvement and awareness of civil rights issues in transportation planning. But discrimination, while certainly less overt, remains today. […]

    Sometimes, as in Buffalo’s case, communities feel cut out of the decision-making process. Those in power make decisions about transportation planning, resulting in ill-planned bus routes, transportation more likely to benefit those with cars than those without, and bleak environmental costs. In some cities, roads continue to pull apart neighborhoods, prioritizing commuters over communities. Nationally, the United States remains a country where many forms of transportation are effectively still segregated—whites and minorities ride different kinds of transportation, resulting in an unequal ability to reach jobs, education, and a better life. “Discrimination in transportation, quite often it’s more subtle today,” says Robert Bullard, dean of Texas Southern University’s school of public affairs, and a co-editor of Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism and New Routes to Equity. “We don’t have laws about posting signs for whites and coloreds. We don’t have laws segregating people on buses and trains … [but] if you look at quality of service, efficiency of service, look at amenities attached to suburban rail versus inner-city bus lines, it’s like night and day.”

    In Buffalo, the advocacy group Clean Air Coalition of Western New York filed a Title VI complaint against expansion of the Peace Bridge in response to what the organization’s members call an exclusionary process. This type of administrative complaint uses the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as grounds for identifying and fighting discrimination. The landmark law forbids the recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, color, or national origin. Although occasionally used in lawsuits, which generally require proving discriminatory intent, Title VI complaints require demonstrating only that a federally funded transportation project has a discriminatory (or, in technical terms, “disparate”) impact. If a transportation project can be proven to have a disparate impact, agencies can cut a project’s federal funding. In 2010, of the $40.2 billion in public funds allotted for transit, $10.4 billion were federal funds.

    Based on recent complaints provided by the Federal Highway Administration and Federal Transit Authority through Freedom of Information Act requests, as well as older complaints and several lawsuits, I closely examined about 40 cases of racial discrimination in transportation planning, many from the past 15 years. I interviewed people and lawyers involved, and looked at the relationship between transportation funding and race around the country. (These cases included Juneau, Memphis, Boston, Houston, Johnson County, Kansas, and the Gila River Indian Community, a reservation in Arizona.) While the presence of a Title VI complaint or lawsuit isn’t sufficient on its own to prove discrimination—and conversely, the lack of a complaint cannot be assumed to indicate a fair and equitable transportation system—these complaints underscore that transit is often not available to those who need it most, and that new public transportation projects often serve those who own cars, at the expense of those who don’t. […]

    Cities may be designed for people without automobiles, but the suburbs have increasingly become the home of those without cars. The number of suburban poor increased by more than 60 percent between 2000 and 2012 according to the Brookings Institution, and public transportation systems have yet to catch up. For those without cars—according to 2013 U.S. Census data, 15.9 percent of blacks and 9.1 percent of Hispanics live in households without cars, compared to just 5 percent of whites—public transportation is not a convenience, but a necessity. “One of the stories we tell ourselves in the narrative of the United States is about social and physical mobility,” says Marc Brenman, co-author of the book The Right to Transportation: Moving to Equity. “You can’t have either of those kinds of mobility without an equitable transportation system.” […]

    The new bus service in Beavercreek, although limited, was the result of a Title VI complaint, filed by Moreland’s church group. For more than a decade, the citizens of Beavercreek had fought the buses, claiming that they’d bring crime into their community. In an attempt to squash the public transportation effort, the city council requested restrictive bus-stop regulations, including requiring substantial shelters, lights, police call boxes, and surveillance cameras. In June 2013, about a year after a federal investigator came to Dayton, the Federal Highway Administration released the results of its investigation: Beavercreek’s rejection of bus stops was, in fact, discriminatory. “African Americans have faced discriminatory impact as a result of the City’s decision to deny the [Regional Transit Authority’s] application to install bus stops,” the federal report read.

    Beavercreek isn’t unique. “The fact that there wasn’t service [in Beavercreek], and was resistance to service there demonstrates a trend we’ve seen in other parts of the country, of seeing transit as delivering undesirables to the area,” says Jason Reece, director of research at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. “It’s not uncommon to get pushback to bus stops, and even bike paths and trails.” […]

    In August 2013, people on both sides of the issue attended a city council meeting at Beavercreek’s city hall, a nondescript building in an industrial park, to debate whether they should reject the new bus stops, and therefore lose the federal funding that came with them. At the end of the meeting agenda, attendees each had three minutes to address the room.

    Among those who opposed the new bus routes, upset citizens bemoaned the criminals or unruly teenagers the buses would bring to the mall. They felt Beavercreek had been the subject of a smear campaign, and they were fed up with being called racist: by the blogosphere, the local paper, and, in some cases, their friends and neighbors.

    For some in the crowded room, it was an issue of individual responsibility; they had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps—without a public bus, mind you—and said that others should as well. A woman named Cathy Bryan said she had paid her way through college by waiting tables and tending bar. “I figured it out, and if you care, you’ll figure it out, too,” she said. […]

    On the other side of the issue, person after person got up and told the city council why they needed a bus, their words spilling out until they were cut off at the three-minute mark. A white woman from Beavercreek said her church, which was located near the mall, had trouble hiring child care workers because the applicants were dependent on public transportation. “I cannot stand here and say there is no racial element,” she said. “I’m confident that there is, knowing that the racial issues are much more under the surface than they used to be.” A black woman, Deborah Wagner, said a bus would help her family get to doctor’s appointments, so that Wagner herself wouldn’t have to miss work to drive. She took issue with the emphasis on teenagers and parenting. “That’s an insult to a black mother,” she said.
    A young Dayton activist rallies for better bus service, June 2013. A young Dayton, Ohio activist rallies for better bus service in June 2013.

    Photo courtesy Cory Ramey

    At the end, the mayor, looking exhausted and exasperated, closed the meeting and made a beeline for the door. But in an interview a few weeks later at a Panera in another mall in town, Beavercreek’s mayor at the time, Vicki Giambrone, argued that the federal decision, which found that banning the buses resulted in discrimination, was motivated by economics, not race. “This was about three bus stops on one stretch of road, and not about race or certain kinds of people or public transit in general,” said Giambrone. “The Federal Highway report says we ran a racially neutral process, and that often gets left out of any stories.” (That is true, says Ellis Jacobs, an attorney with Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, which worked with the church group. The decision doesn’t accuse the Beavercreek council of having discriminatory intent, but does make clear the process had a discriminatory impact.)

    Since January 2014, buses have been running to the mall, although on a limited basis; on a weekday, buses come every hour or so. In May, the Dayton Daily News’ analysis of crime statistics from the first two months of bus service found that crime hadn’t increased.
    ***

    Citizen groups first began to use Title VI to fight racial disparities in major transportation systems in the mid-1990s. One of the earliest was Los Angeles’ Bus Riders Union. At the time, L.A.’s fleet of buses was old, overcrowded, and prone to breaking down. Rather than refurbishing or replacing its bus fleet, the city planned to decrease bus service and get rid of monthly bus passes, while building a billion-dollar rail line. (As in many cities, bus ridership was largely lower-income minorities, and rail ridership tended toward wealthier whites.) In 1996, the Bus Riders Union lawsuit was settled, resulting in a 10-year consent decree, which placed stringent rules on transit funding. The decree forced the transit authority to retain the monthly bus pass at a lower cost, purchase more than 100 new buses, and create new routes specifically to help people of color. “[The finding] caused a lot of people in the transportation world to sit up and say, ‘What’s going on?’ ” says Joe Grengs, an urban planning professor at the University of Michigan.
    riding the bus home from The Gathering Place in Denver, CO. Gabriela Gomez, 31, comforts her son Edwin, 20 months, while riding the bus in Denver.

    Photo by Craig F. Walker/The Denver Post

    “That case really crystalized the link between civil rights and transportation more than any other case in recent history,” says Guillermo Mayer, president and chief executive of Public Advocates, who has worked on more recent Title VI lawsuits and administrative complaints, including with the Bus Riders Union.

    Then, in 2001, the Supreme Court dramatically changed the way advocates could use Title VI. In the case Alexander v. Sandoval, the court altered the standard, concluding that an individual had to prove that the policy was intended to cause discrimination, a much higher bar to prove. Advocacy groups, like the Bus Riders Union, who fight for greater funding being allocated to transportation systems for minority communities, could no longer realistically take their claims to the courts. “Without that right of private action, you have to go to the agencies themselves,” says Bob Allen, director of policy and advocacy campaigns at Urban Habitat, a Bay Area advocacy group that has been involved with filing Title VI complaints. Filing administrative complaints are entirely dependent on the enforcement of individual people at individual government agencies, says Allen.

    The Federal Highway Administration receives 40 to 60 complaints each year and investigates about seven, says spokesman Doug Hecox. The FTA received seven Title VI complaints in fiscal year 2014, according to a spokeswoman.

    Janet Rogers, co-founder of the advocacy group Transit Action Network, which filed a Title VI complaint in Kansas in 2012, remembers calling her contact at the FTA. “He said there were so many Title VI complaints from this region that he wanted to know if there was something in the water,” she said. Complaints tend to fall into general categories: funding transit used by wealthier whites, like light rails and trolleys, over buses, whose ridership tends to consist of people with lower incomes and minorities; funding roads without devoting money to types of transit used by those without cars; and transit that helps wealthier populations while having negative health or environmental effects on poor communities.

    Some of these Title VI complaints get resolved after federal investigators visit, but others languish in bureaucratic limbo for years, especially those filed without legal representation. “When you have lawyers behind you they treat you differently,” says JoNina Ervin, who was involved in filing Title VI complaints in Memphis and Nashville, both without legal help. “With just citizens, they are dismissive.”

    But after the Supreme Court’s ruling, citizen groups lost their best weapon for fighting back. Even the Federal Highway Administration, in a civil rights self-assessment it conducted in 2009, concluded that it lacks the funding, organization, and expertise to level the playing field. “Alexander v. Sandoval had quite sweeping ramifications,” says Grengs, the urban planning professor. “It really threw a wet blanket on the potential for pushing government agencies on civil rights issues … and it really elevated the bar that you had to clear for proving intentional discrimination.” […]

    There are other possibilities that would at least mitigate the fumes and pollution. Today, there are no trees or other environmental barriers between the bridge ramp and duty-free plaza and the neighborhood. The Clean Air Coalition has proposed planting bamboo, which grows quickly and absorbs more carbon dioxide than trees or installing truck stop electrification stations, which would curb emissions from idling trucks. Neighborhood residents have suggested fixes like speed bumps or signs prohibiting trucks from neighborhood streets, where they currently park when drivers want to sleep or wait out heavy traffic.

    Residents say they have won some small battles—the Bridge Authority hired a firm to create buffers—but, on a larger scale, residents still feel powerless, as the construction moves forward and the Bridge Authority plans to demolish another major property in the neighborhood, the former Episcopal Church Home, for unknown purposes. “They did have meetings for us, to get accountability of people who came to the meeting,” says Carrión, the activist. “I wish I would have known what I know now, because I wouldn’t have signed their sheet.”

    Carrión had gone to the sessions, believing that they were an honest effort to solicit opinions from the neighborhood. “We went to all these meetings, and we were still thinking we were still in that process,” she says, adding that she, like several of her relatives, has asthma. “We thought they were going to change their mind. And give us the benefit of the doubt, or compromise. But they had their mind made up.”

    Every time she passes a sign near the highway, it’s a reminder of what’s to come. “Right there, it says, the Peace Bridge plaza is coming,’ ” says Carrión. “All this fighting that we did, all that picketing that we do—these people didn’t hear us.”

    Much more discussion of individual cities and specific cases at the link. Four pages of information.

  124. rq says

    Building the First Slavery Museum in America,/a>. It only opened last year.

    On Dec. 7, the Whitney Plantation, in the town of Wallace, 35 miles west of New Orleans, celebrated its opening, and it was clear, based on the crowd entering the freshly painted gates, that the plantation intended to provide a different experience from those of its neighbors. Roughly half of the visitors were black, for starters, an anomaly on plantation tours in the Deep South. And while there were plenty of genteel New Orleanians eager for a peek at the antiques inside the property’s Creole mansion, they were outnumbered by professors, historians, preservationists, artists, graduate students, gospel singers and men and women from Senegal dressed in traditional West African garb: flowing boubous of intricate embroidery and bright, saturated colors. If opinions on the restoration varied, visitors were in agreement that they had never seen anything quite like it. Built largely in secret and under decidedly unorthodox circumstances, the Whitney had been turned into a museum dedicated to telling the story of slavery — the first of its kind in the United States.

    Located on land where slaves worked for more than a century, in a state where the sight of the Confederate flag is not uncommon, the results are both educational and visceral. An exhibit on the North American slave trade inside the visitors’ center, for instance, is lent particular resonance by its proximity, just a few steps away outside its door, to seven cabins that once housed slaves. From their weathered cypress frames, a dusty path, lined with hulking iron kettles that were used by slaves to boil sugar cane, leads to a grassy clearing dominated by a slave jail — an approach designed so that a visitor’s most memorable glimpse of the white shutters and stately columns of the property’s 220-year-old “Big House” will come through the rusted bars of the squat, rectangular cell. A number of memorials also dot the grounds, including a series of angled granite walls engraved with the names of the 107,000 slaves who spent their lives in Louisiana before 1820. Inspired by Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the memorial lists the names nonalphabetically to mirror the confusion and chaos that defined a slave’s life.
    Continue reading the main story

    Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, was among those to address the crowd on opening day. He first visited the Whitney as the state’s lieutenant governor in 2008, when the project was in its infancy, and at the time he compared its significance to that of Auschwitz. Now he was speaking four days after a grand jury in New York City declined to indict a police officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner, a black man who was stopped for selling untaxed cigarettes; 13 days after another grand jury in Missouri cleared an officer in the shooting death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager; and two weeks after Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy playing with a toy gun in a Cleveland park, was killed by a police officer. Evoking the riots and protests then gripping the nation, Landrieu said, “It is fortuitous that we come here today to stand on the very soil that gives lie to the protestations that we have made, and forces us as Americans to check where we’ve been and where we are going.” […]

    “Like everyone else,” John Cummings said a few days earlier, “you’re probably wondering what the rich white boy has been up to out here.”

    He was driving around the Whitney in his Ford S.U.V., making sure the museum would be ready for the public. Born and raised in New Orleans, Cummings is as rife with contrasts as the land that surrounds his plantation. He is 77 but projects the unrelenting angst of a teenager. His disposition is exceedingly proper — the portly carriage, the trimmed white beard, the florid drawl — but he dresses in a rumpled manner that suggests a morning habit of mistaking the laundry hamper for the dresser. As someone who had to hitchhike to high school and remains bitter about not being able to afford his class ring, he embodies the scrappiness of the Irish Catholics who flooded New Orleans in the 19th century. But as a trial lawyer who has helped win more than $5 billion in class-action settlements and a real estate magnate whose holdings have multiplied his wealth many times over, Cummings personifies the affluence and power held by an elite and mostly white sliver of a city with a majority black population.

    “I suppose it is a suspicious thing, what I’ve gone and done with the joint,” he continued, acknowledging that his decision to “spend millions I have no interest in getting back” on the museum has long been a source of local confusion. More than a few of the 670 residents of Wallace — 90 percent of whom are black, many the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers who worked the region’s land — have voiced their bewilderment over the years. So, too, have the owners of other tourist-oriented plantations, all of whom are white. Members of Cummings’s close-knit family (he has eight children by two wives) also struggle to clarify their patriarch’s motivations, resorting to the shoulder-shrugging logic of “John being John,” as if explaining a stubborn refusal to throw away old newspapers rather than a consuming, heterodox and very expensive attempt to confront the darkest period of American history. “Challenge me, fight me on it,” he said. “I’ve been asked all the questions. About white guilt this and that. About the honky trying to profit off of slavery. But here’s the thing: Don’t you think the story of slavery is important?” With that, Cummings went silent, something he does with unsettling frequency in conversation.
    Continue reading the main story

    “Well, I checked into it, and I heard you weren’t telling it,” he finally resumed, “so I figured I might as well get started.” […]

    It takes just a few minutes of conversation with Cummings, however, to understand that he would never have been keen on restoring the Whitney in the mold of neighboring plantations, which rely on weddings and sorority reunions to supplement the income brought in by picnicking tourists. Pet projects he has taken up in recent years include outlining for the Vatican a list of wrongs the Catholic Church should formally apologize for and — to the chagrin of, in his words, “my friends who have all had political sex changes in the past 15 years” — exploring ways to curb the influence of conservative “super PACs.” Decades ago, his interest in abuses of power led to his involvement in the civil rights movement; in 1968, he worked alongside African-American activists to get the Audubon Park swimming pool in New Orleans opened to blacks. “If someone is going to deny someone rights simply because they have the power to do it — well, I’m interested,” he explained. “I’m coming, and I’m going to bring the cannons.”

    Still, his plans for the Whitney might have gone in an entirely different direction, if not for the existence of an unlikely document. The property’s previous owner was Formosa, a plastics and petrochemical giant, which in 1991 planned to build a $700 million plant for manufacturing rayon on its nearly 2,000 acres. Preservationists and environmentalists balked. Looking for avenues of appeasement, Formosa commissioned an exhaustive survey of the grounds, with the idea that the most historic sections would be turned into a token museum of Creole culture while a majority of the rest would be razed to make way for the factory. In the end, it was wasted money and effort: The opposition remained vigilant, rayon was going out of fashion, the Whitney went back on the market and Cummings inherited the eight-volume study with the purchase. “Thanks to Formosa, I knew more about my plantation than anyone else around here — maybe more than any plantation in America outside of Monticello,” said Cummings, a litigator accustomed to teasing secrets from dense paperwork. “A lot of what was in there was about the architecture and artifacts, but you started to see the story of slavery. You saw it in terms of who built what.”

    After digesting the study, Cummings began reading “any book I could find” about slavery. Particularly influential was “Africans in Colonial Louisiana,” by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, a professor at Rutgers. Certain details startled Cummings, like the fact that 38 percent of slaves shipped from Africa ended up in Brazil. No wonder, he thought, that the women he watched on television celebrating Carnival in Rio de Janeiro so closely resembled those he saw dancing in the Mardi Gras parades that surrounded him as a youth. “I started to see slavery and the hangover from slavery everywhere I looked,” he said. As a descendant of Irish laborers, he has no direct ties to slaveholders; still, in a departure from the views held by many Southern whites, Cummings considered the issue a personal one. “If ‘guilt’ is the best word to use, then yes, I feel guilt,” he said. “I mean, you start understanding that the wealth of this part of the world — wealth that has benefited me — was created by some half a million black people who just passed us by. How is it that we don’t acknowledge this?”[…]

    Before leaving the grounds, Cummings stopped at the edge of the property’s small lagoon. It was here that the Whitney’s most provocative memorial would soon be completed, one dedicated to the victims of the German Coast Uprising, an event rarely mentioned in American history books. In January 1811, at least 125 slaves walked off their plantations and, dressed in makeshift military garb, began marching in revolt along River Road toward New Orleans. (The area was then called the German Coast for the high number of German immigrants, like the Haydels.) The slaves were suppressed by militias after two days, with about 95 killed, some during fighting and some after the show trials that followed. As a warning to other slaves, dozens were decapitated, their heads placed on spikes along River Road and in what is now Jackson Square in the French Quarter.
    Continue reading the main story

    “It’ll be optional, O.K.? Not for the kids,” said Cummings, who commissioned Woodrow Nash, an African-­American sculptor he met at Jazz Fest, to make 60 heads out of ceramic, which will be set atop stainless-steel rods on the lagoon’s small island. “But just in case you’re worried about people getting distracted by the pretty house over there, the last thing you’ll see before leaving here will be 60 beheaded slaves.”

    The memorial had lately become a source of controversy among locals, who were concerned that it would be too disturbing.

    “It is disturbing,” Cummings said as he pulled out past Whitney’s gate. “But you know what else? It happened. It happened right here on this road.” […]

    Slavery is by no means unmemorialized in American museums, though the subject tends to be lumped in more broadly with African-American history. In 2004, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center opened in Cincinnati with the mission of showcasing “freedom’s heroes.” Since 2007, the Old Slave Mart in Charleston, S.C., has operated as a small museum focusing on the early slave trade, on a site where slaves were sold at public auctions until 1863. The National Civil Rights Museum, which opened in Memphis in 1991 and was built around the Lorraine Motel, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, offers a brief section devoted to slavery. Next year, the National Museum of African American History and Culture is scheduled to be dedicated in Washington as part of the Smithsonian Institution, a project supported by $250 million in federal funding; exhibits on slavery will stand alongside those containing a trumpet played by Louis Armstrong and boxing gloves worn by Muhammad Ali. “It has to be said that the end note in most of these museums is that civil rights triumphs and America is wonderful,” says Paul Finkelman, a historian who focuses on slavery and the law. “We are a nation that has always readily embraced the good of the past and discarded the bad. This does not always lead to the most productive of dialogues on matters that deserve and require them.”
    Continue reading the main story

    What makes slavery so difficult to think about, from the vantage point of history, is that it was both at odds with America’s founding values — freedom, liberty, democracy — and critical to how they flourished. The Declaration of Independence proclaiming that “all men are created equal” was drafted by men who were afforded the time to debate its language because the land that enriched many of them was tended to by slaves. The White House and the Capitol were built, in part, by slaves. The economy of early America, responsible for the nation’s swift rise and sustained power, would not have been possible without slavery. But the country’s longstanding culture of racism and racial tensions — from the lynchings of the Jim Crow-era South to the discriminatory housing policies of the North to the treatment of blacks by the police today — is deeply rooted in slavery as well. “Slavery gets understood as a kind of prehistory to freedom rather than what it really is: the foundation for a country where white supremacy was predicated upon African-American exploitation,” says Walter Johnson, a Harvard professor. “This is still, in many respects, the America of 2015.” […]

    Jonathan Holloway, a dean at Yale College and a professor of African-American studies, arrived for a tour in late January. He was in the area to give a talk at Louisiana State University about the ways the horrors of slavery are confronted and avoided in heritage tourism, and he found the Whitney to be a “genius step” in a long-overdue direction. “People have tried to do a museum like this for years, and I’m still stunned that this guy made it happen,” he said afterward. “There I was, coming down to talk about how in trying to tell the story, it’s often one step forward and two steps back, and boom, here’s the Whitney.” Holloway was particularly taken by the museum’s subversive approach. “Having been on a number of tours where the entire focus is on the Big House, the way they’ve turned the script inside out is a brilliant slipping of the skirt,” he said. “The mad genius of the whole thing is really resonant. Is it an art gallery? A plantation tour? A museum? It’s almost this astonishing piece of performance art, and as great art does, it makes you stop and wonder.”

    Cummings, for his part, has been on the grounds every day since the Whitney opened, where he is in the habit of approaching visitors as they enter and telling them how they should feel afterward: “You’re not going to be the same person when you leave here” — a line that some found more grating than endearing. Inwardly, though, he was constantly making notes on what could be done to improve the experience.

    “Look, we’re not perfect, and we’ve made a lot of mistakes, and we’ll make more,” he said one afternoon as the sun set across the sugar-cane fields that surround the plantation in much the form they did when slaves worked them 200 years ago. “We need all the help we can get — not financial, but we need brains.” With this in mind, he recently started reaching out to prominent African-American academics, hoping to create a board of directors — typically the first step for a museum, not one taken six weeks after opening day. “I’m firing before I’m aiming, O.K.?” he said. “I’m smart enough to know I don’t have the answers, but so far it looks like it’s the right thing.”

    Sorry, another long article. But another one worth reading. Someone spending money (more) wisely.

    Family wants video released in police-involved shooting

    Authorities say Villalpando, a Mexican national and father of four, led a Grapevine police officer on a chase Friday to Euless. But, it’s what happened when he pulled over that’s at the center of the growing controversy.

    “We want just the truth,” Romero said. “We want the video to be released.”

    Romero said he saw the dashcam video that showed his brother-in-law with his hands up as the officer hurled profanities at him. Police confirmed Villalpando was unarmed, but said he didn’t follow commands. The officer eventually shot him dead. But, Euless police, who are in charge of the criminal investigation because it happened in their town, have no intention of releasing the video right now for fear witnesses may see it before they’re interviewed.

    “Releasing the video may skew their memory, causing us to be a source of witness contamination which is the last thing that we want,” Starnes said.

    Both the family and police say Villalpando spoke English during the confrontation. Euless police say they’re waiting on toxicology reports from the medical examiner’s office.

    Officials with the Mexican Consulate are also involved and say they’re incensed their office wasn’t notified of the death for days. An official came to Euless police Thursday for some answers.

    “We are optimistic with the initial reaction with the police department,” said Mexican Consulate Dr. Jose Octavio Trip Villanueva. “They are open and receptive and listen to our interest and our concerns.”

    “If they made a mistake, be honest and say I’m sorry,” Romero said of the incident.

  125. rq says

    COMIC LOVERS heads up! #BlackComicsMonth – Day 27 – Mikki Kendall Interview

    MizCaramelVixen: I won’t lie, I had no idea who you were until Gail (Simone) hit me up via DM and said “you might wanna talk to Karnythia, she’s amazing.” of course I do whatever Gail says, who wouldn’t. After following you on twitter, I realized you were enjoyable. I stalked your website, shed some thug tears and knew she was right.

    Can you tell me a little…or a lot about yourself?

    Mikki Kendall: Gail has been my comics godmother. I’m from Chicago, a geeky girl in every sense of the word. Literally my nickname as a kid was Books because I was always reading. I didn’t have the best childhood and reading was always an escape for me. So I am heavily informed by a broad cross section of genres from psych case studies, mysteries, romance to sci-fi. And I have always loved comics.

    This is like a lightning strike though, because I never thought I’d be writing comics.

    MCV: I was also one whose childhood was crappy and found my escape through reading comics and Stephen King. What kind of comics did you read?

    MK: Heavy on the Wonder Woman, X-Men, lots of random What If books (no idea why but I had a thing for them). Some Superman and Batman, but usually the books with Catwoman, Poison Ivy or Harley Quinn, along with indies and Image Comics.

    I liked Wild Cats and I know that makes me one of like 45 people.

    MCV: Girl Power! Definitely 45, can’t give you the 46, sorry.

    MK: Yep, Storm is still one of my faves. No, I accept that I am an outlier. I also prefer graphic novels to monthly books. I’m so weird.

    MCV: How did you get involved with writing comics?

    MK: So this is one of those “I was discovered in a comic store” stories.

    I met Gail (Simone) while she was in Chicago doing a signing and we’d talked online previously, so I made her gluten free triple chocolate cupcakes and brought them to her. She asked if I wrote too and I said something about writing weird sci-fi and Gail asked to see it. I thought she was just being nice, but she asked again and I sent her links to a couple of things.

    She liked it, asked if I had any interest in writing comics. I said yes (totally expected that to go nowhere) and then when this [Swords of Sorrow] came up, she asked if I’d be interested. I honestly thought Dynamite would say no. I’m best known for non fiction, kind of known for fiction, but not really and yet….they were willing to give me a shot.

    MCV: FLOORED!!! Literally my mouth has hit the floor!!!!

    MK: I absolutely love Gail. Admittedly I am published already, with an MA in writing and I have my own audience.

    MCV: Gail Simone handpicked YOU, Mikki Kendall, to be involved with Swords of Sorrow! You just won the Super Bowl, you know that right?

    MK: Oh absolutely.

    MCV: Tell us, what have you written?

    MK: I wrote this story, If God is Watching. I’ve also written a lesbian steampunk anthology titled, “Copper for Trickster”. I have a ton of fan fiction and flash fiction scattered around. I’ve also written for Ebony, Essence, Xo Jane, NPR, The Guardian and Salon. My non fiction list is really long.

    There is more at the link, lots mroe great stuff, in addition to the other 26 days in February where I missed this!!!

    Mmkay, so that Chicago black site? Has got everyone riled up. Including the rightwing. That website is an eyesore.

    More people coming forward about being held at the site. ‘I sat in that place for three days, man’: Chicagoans detail abusive confinement inside police ‘black site’

    Four black Chicagoans have now come forward to the Guardian detailing off-the-books ordeals at the facility, including another who describes being detained in “a big cage” with his wrists cuffed to a bench so he couldn’t move.

    The Guardian has now interviewed six people about their detention at the Homan Square police warehouse. With striking consistency, all have described extensive detentions without benefit of legal counsel or public notice of where they were.

    The first-hand accounts of two white protesters who “disappeared” at the police warehouse in 2012 set off political and civil-rights outrage this week, and multiple protests have now been scheduled by organizers including the Black Lives Matter movement. […]

    The Chicago police did not respond to questions for this story. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, currently facing a heated runoff for re-election, said on Thursday night it was “not true” that the police maintain a facility lawyers have compared to a CIA “black site”.

    Activists are planning a “Shut Down Homan Square” protest on Saturday and a demonstration for reparations for longstanding victims of Chicago police torture on Monday. Representatives from Black Lives Matter Chicago said they were helping to organize and promote the Monday action. Several Chicago local and national politicians are calling for investigations, including from the US justice department, into allegations of police misconduct at the warehouse.

    While Terry said that he did not see anyone else while confined at Homan in 2011, he said he heard people yelling “no, no, no” and “stop”. He remembered seeing chain-link “cages”, of the sort previously described to the Guardian by attorneys and former police superintendent Richard Brzeczek. They reminded him of dog kennels, he said.

    “They got kennels – like, for people,” Terry told the Guardian. “I didn’t really want to believe that, but it is the truth.”

    He continued: “I never saw anyone, but I know something else is going on. You don’t want to be in that kind of situation, so you gotta be quiet about it, so you don’t go down that route.”

    While shackled and interrogated over the next three days, police fed Terry only twice, he said, with baloney sandwiches and juice. He got to use the bathroom “hardly ever, but I did use it.”

    “Every day they came to ask some questions. Am I in a gang? Who am I with? Who run this? Who run that? Give them a gun and they’ll let me go,” Terry said. “That was pretty much the main thing: give them a gun and they’ll let me go. But I didn’t produce a gun.”

    Had Terry found them a gun, he said, his ordeal with police might never end: “The thing about it is, when they say give them a gun, they let you go, but it’s like long invisible string tied to your ass. They definitely gonna come back to interrogate you to get another gun, or ask you about this crime, give them some information about this crime.” […]

    More recently, around February 2014, Nellis said he got a tip that his client – 19 years old, black and from the west side of Chicago – had been taken to Homan Square in connection with a drug investigation. When he got to the warehouse on Homan and Fillmore, he asked a woman “wearing a police uniform” what the unfamiliar building was.

    “What I recall her saying is, ‘Oh, I don’t know what this is,” and walked off,” Nellis said. Another attempt at flagging down officers in the Homan Square docking bay, during which he identified himself as a lawyer seeking to see his client, resulted in them telling Nellis: “This isn’t a police station, we don’t hold people here.”

    Nellis dialed a contact he declined to identify and complained, saying he knew his client was inside Homan Square. About ten minutes later, an officer emerged to let him in. Nellis’ client – whom he declined to name, citing ongoing legal issues – was in handcuffs and had been interrogated. Nellis believes the youth had been in custody for a “few hours”.

    “I know many other attorneys through First Defense Legal Aid who have tried to get in there and been denied numerous times,” Nellis said.

    In a statement issued to the Guardian and other news outlets on Tuesday, Chicago police denied the Guardian’s reporting, without giving specifics, and insisted that Homan Square is no different than any other police facility, albeit somewhat more sensitive given the presence of undercover units. The department, which has not denied interrogating suspects at Homan Square, did not respond to questions from the Guardian sent on Thursday about Terry, Wright and Hutcherson. […]

    The justice department has declined comment on Homan Square. Emanuel’s office has refused multiple requests for comment from the Guardian this week, referring a reporter to the police department statement.

    When police finally released Hutcherson in 2006 – after about three or four hours, he said, that saw him punched in the face, stomped in the groin and kept in a baking room – he said he sprinted out of the warehouse in fear.

    “I take off running, you know, because I want to get out of the situation. I’m 19, I never been arrested, no record, nothing,” he said.

    “I’ll never forget: the officer that let me out, he’s like, ‘Stop running, asshole, before you pass out.’ And I just paid him no mind, just kept running straight down Homan.”

    Atlanta and Kevin Davis: Atlanta Woman Says Police Shot And Killed Her Boyfriend Without Warning

    The Georgia Bureau of Investigations has opened an investigation into the shooting. After the G.B.I. wraps it investigation — hopefully in the next two weeks, Davis’s lawyer told BuzzFeed News — the agency will present its report to the district attorney, who will make a determination whether to move forward with charges against the officers involved in the incident.

    Edwards met with the G.B.I. on Friday and told investigators her version of the story.

    She believes that if Pitts or the other officers responding had called out to the couple when they arrived at her apartment, things would have played out differently.

    “We never heard the police announce themselves. Had we heard them announce themselves Kevin would have never retrieved his gun,” Edwards said.

    “@NBCNews: Kim Kardashian has ushered in the golden age of big butts, and it’s big business You need to see the picture of major side-eye. The article itself: Butt Augmentation, Labiaplasty on the Rise, Plastic Surgeons Say. Another situation of appropriation and wrongful attribution.

  126. rq says

    “@1000Ferguson: Don’t forget about our Hiring Event this Saturday #Ferguson #STL #STLJobs ”

    KKK Was Terrorizing America Decades Before Islamic State Appeared

    For David Pilgrim, the founder and director of the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University, the actions of ISIS and other extremist groups are familiar — no better, no worse than the historic stateside violence against African-Americans.

    “There’s nothing you’re going to see today that’s not going to have already occurred in the U.S.,” he said. “If you think of these groups that behead now — first of all, beheading is barbaric but it’s no more or less barbaric than some of the lynchings that occurred in the U.S.”

    The Ku Klux Klan was a domestic terror organization from its beginning, said Pilgrim, who finds it offensive when, after 9/11, some Americans would bemoan that terrorism had finally breached U.S. borders.

    “That is ignoring and trivializing — if not just summarily dismissing — all the people, especially the peoples of color in this country, who were lynched in this country; who had their homes bombed in this country; who were victims of race riots,” he said.

    Victims of lynching were often burned, castrated, shot, stabbed and, in some cases, beheaded. Bodies were then hung or dragged through towns for display.

    Most of these atrocities occurred during the eras of slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow — but not all.

    It was 116 years after slavery and 40 years after Jim Crow when 19-year-old Michael Donald’s body was found swinging gently from a Mobile, Alabama, camphor tree in 1981. A perfect hangman’s knot containing 13 loops held the noose wrapped around his neck, and a squad of Klansmen stood on a porch across the street, looking on as the police gathered evidence.

    Lynchings like Donald’s exemplify the terrorist methods that have always been the “stock and trade” of the KKK, according to Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

    “Michael Donald was sort of a classic case,” he said. “It was real terrorism in the sense that Michael Donald was a completely random victim. He was completely unknown to his Klan murderers. He was simply abducted off the street and murdered in order to frighten black people.”

    Donald’s lynching is often referred to as “America’s last.” His death falls outside the terror lynchings that ran rampant during the Jim Crow era, according to a report released by Alabama’s Equal Justice Initiative earlier this month.

    The study found almost 3,960 African-Americans were lynched from 1877 to 1950 — a number that supersedes previous estimates by at least 700. It looked at lynchings in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. […]

    Third-era Klan groups arose in response to the Brown v. Board of Education verdict, with membership peaking at about 40,000 around 1965. These individual Klans were more autonomous and often used the same terrorist methods as the first incarnation in an attempt to impede the civil rights movement.

    Henry Hays and James Knowles, Donald’s murderers, belonged to the United Klans of America, a third-era KKK organization based in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that, at its height, was considered the strongest and most violent in the nation.

    “The United Klans of America absolutely gloried in violence. That was their main, and perhaps their only, political tool,” Potok said. “Violence and terrorism was a way of life for the United Klans of America. The group thought that these tactics would make it possible to reinstitute white supremacy.”

    Not only was the UKA linked to Donald’s killing, members were also held responsible for the Mother’s Day attack on Freedom Riders and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing — an attack resulting in the deaths of four young black girls. Both attacks occurred around Birmingham, Alabama, in 1961 and 1963, respectively.

    “It’s like they were born to have a genocide or something — a black genocide,” Fields said of the Klan. “They hated blacks. They was gonna get ’em anyway. You couldn’t walk the street. If they could get you, they would hurt you.”

    However, Donald’s lynching wasn’t part of a widespread attempt to make a statement against a large civil rights movement — it was revenge for a particular incident. He was, as Potok said, a random sacrifice — the KKK’s retribution for the death of a local white police officer whose alleged killer, an African-American, had walked free.

    It was thought that the African-Americans who sat on the jury in the cop-killing case had altered the verdict, and at a post-trial meeting, Bennie Hays, the “Titan” of the UKA, reportedly said, “If a black man can get away with killing a white man, we ought to be able to get away with killing a black man.”

    Considering the situation today, this statement is almost laughable. If it weren’t so deadly and terrifying.

    A lynching, per Pilgrim, involves an extrajudicial killing where the death is used to make a statement against a certain group or individual. Essentially, the killing has a purpose that transcends the actual death of the victim regardless of whether it was executed publicly — a common misconception as to what defines a lynching.

    Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center said such crimes are often used as a warning.

    “It’s not just that you’re killing this person, for one reason or another. It’s that you’re warning all the rest,” Potok said. “It was message crime. It was supposed to send a message to black people in Alabama, and elsewhere, that if you do things like set black cop killers free, we will kill you.”

    While current terror organizations abroad are fighting to upset the existing conditions of their societies, the Klan aimed to maintain the status quo being threatened by a rapidly growing social movement.

    The goal of first- and third-era Klan groups was to return to a time when “men were men, women were women, and black people knew their place,” according to Potok.

    “The radical right, in general in the United States, was — until the end of the civil rights movement — essentially restorationist,” he said. “The Klan, and most other groups of those years … wanted to turn back the clock.”

    Knowles testified in 1984 during a civil rights lawsuit filed against the Klan by Beulah Mae Donald, Michael Donald’s mother, that one of the purposes of the killing was to “show Klan strength in Alabama.”

    Mobile’s black community got the message loud and clear.

    “They come out and let us know they in full bloom … How do you think that made us feel? It was like they can do anything they wanna do,” she said. “They sent a message to us saying, ‘Y’all think that it’s gone away. [That] we’ve left — we still here.’ Cause we didn’t think they’d do something like that.”

    Sometimes I really hate the things I’ve been learning on this thread.

  128. rq says

    Sorry for missing a couple of days, it’ll be a lot to catch up on, but not all at once, so take heart!

    Ferguson’s sole black City Council member breaks his silence

    Dwayne James is Ferguson’s only black City Council member. He’s notoriously media-shy. But six months after Brown’s death and only weeks before local elections — which could triple the number of black council members — he agreed to a rare interview with Al Jazeera America. We met him in the basement of Ferguson’s City Hall, where he runs the Ferguson Youth Initiative. It’s a program that aims to reach out to Ferguson teens and steer them on a path toward college. It was there that James spoke for the first time to national media about Brown’s shooting death and how it deeply affected him.

    Dwayne James: The first reaction is, you — you’re sad because someone died. That’s first. And then it’s the reflection. It’s “What could I have done? What could we have done? What should we have done? And how are we going to make sure that we learn from this and move forward?” So that first period was “This is happening in my backyard. This was under our watch, my watch. I should have, could have, would have [done] a lot of different things.” And you reflect on that. And then you turn into “All right, how am I going to learn? How are we going to learn? How are we going to act a little bit better and work a little bit harder to make sure that it doesn’t happen again?”

    Duarte Geraldino: Did it strike you any deeper, as a black man who also happens to be in a position of authority?

    It struck me as a black man. Because growing up, you always have those thoughts of the black murder rate for males is a little bit higher than other categories. So you’re worried about that. And then, in authority, it’s basically “This is my community. What could I have done? What should I have done?” So that hit. And that continues to hit. It continues to say, “All right, I’m not just — I’m not the only voice.” But I just need to continue to showcase my voice, just like the entire community needs to showcase their voice.

    What have you learned after the Michael Brown incident? What are the lessons that you will take with you and that you hope to pass on to other people?

    That no matter how much you do, there’s always more to be done.

    Explain that.

    For four years, we’ve been working with the Ferguson youth initiative, trying to better engage and better enrich the lives of young people. And we were doing great. You know, we had our successes. We were bringing in youth for different programs. We had our youth advisory board that was bringing back suggestions for the city. But there was more to be done. There was another sector of youth that we weren’t engaging. There was more programs that could have — that should have been done or could have been done to help enrich their lives a little bit more. So no matter how much we were doing and how great we thought we were, this was like, “All right, now it’s time to get to work.”

    There’s more at the link, but I’m going to stop citing there, and note the blaming: they weren’t engaging youth enough, therefore Michael Brown got shot. Nothing about community relations with police, or with profiling, but obviously it is the non-engaged youth that is somehow at fault for this… Anyway, a bit more at the link, but it’s all awfully wishy-washy.

    Scalise says he’ll go to Selma ‘next year’

    Leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) had urged the Louisiana Republican to participate in the events commemorating the watershed 1965 march as a way to mend fences following news that he’d given a speech before a white supremacist group as a state lawmaker in 2002.

    But Scalise said Thursday that, while he’s made “no final decisions,” he likely won’t be making the trip.

    “We’ve talked to them about going,” he told The Hill. “We’re definitely going next year.”

    The news has frustrated CBC leaders, who saw Scalise’s participation this year as a public gesture of atonement and camaraderie with the black community in the wake of past missteps.

    Scalise churned headlines in December after a Louisiana-based blogger reported that, as a state lawmaker 12 years earlier, the No. 3 House Republican had addressed the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, a racist group founded by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

    Subsequent reports uncovered earlier votes he’d made against resolutions apologizing for slavery and creating the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

    Scalise issued a statement saying the speech was a “mistake I regret,” but he’s been largely silent on the topic since then.

    Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) said he was “disappointed” that Scalise won’t attend the event, which marks the 50th anniversary of the famous march, in which Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) took part.

    “I think it would have been good for him to come to demonstrate, for optics more than anything else, his commitment to equality and that he has no racial hostilities,” Cleaver, who formerly headed the CBC, said Thursday.

    Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) echoed that message, arguing that Scalise “needs to do a lot of things” to repair his image in the eyes of minorities. A visit to Selma, Thompson said, would be a good start.

    “He has significant relationship-building [to do], especially with the black community,” Thompson said. “Anything that he can show that will paint him in a different light can only be positive for him.”

    Whelp, he’ll go next year. For the 51st anniversary. That’s a nice, round, well-known number. :P

    Denver policeman accused repeatedly of excessive force taken off streets.

    According to internal affairs files released this week, 40 complaints have been lodged against Miller during his nine years on the force, nearly half from citizens who accused him of excessive force, using profane language and threatening to arrest people for no reason.

    The details emerge at a testing time for the Denver Police Department, which has been embroiled in controversy since the fatal shooting of a 17-year-old girl by two officers last month that led to protests.

    Murray said complaints against officers always triggered automatic performance reviews, but the process has been modified to require supervisors to provide a written plan of how to address the individual’s behavior, whether or not any formal disciplinary action is taken.

    “That’s where we dropped the ball before,” Murray said.

    Two excessive force cases involving Miller resulted in large payouts to settle federal lawsuits filed against him and the city.

    In one instance, the city paid $225,000 to a man who was struck by Miller and suffered a broken leg following a verbal altercation.

    Most recently, it agreed to pay $860,000 to James Moore, a disabled veteran who said he was beaten by Miller and another officer without provocation after they responded to his home on a noise complaint. [ID:nL1N0VE1YV]

    The pair “beat Mr. Moore with such brutality while he was helpless on the ground that he lost consciousness, his heart stopped beating and paramedics or law enforcement officers had to administer CPR to save his life,” the lawsuit read.

    The lawyer for both victims, David Lane, called Miller “one of the most violent officers on the force who should not only be fired but prosecuted.”

    The internal affairs records show Miller was disciplined just once for a citizen complaint, a two-day suspension without pay for manhandling an innocent woman in 2010.

    Murray said excessive force cases can be hard to prove without corroboration and because victims often refuse to work with investigators.

    Yeah, I WONDER WHY.

    Protests Erupt Over UNC Board’s Decision To Shutter Poverty Center

    Approximately two-dozen protesters disrupted the meeting to voice their disapproval of the board’s decision to close the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Some were escorted out by campus police at UNC Charlotte, according to the Associated Press.

    The proposal to close the poverty center incited controversy after a working group charged with reviewing the system’s research centers advanced it last week. Closure supporters on the board argued that the center did advocacy and therefore was inappropriately associated with an academic institution and that it “did not provide a wide range of alternatives for addressing poverty.”

    Since the center is privately funded, critics of the board’s decision say that the process was politically motivated. The center’s head, law professor Gene Nichol, wrote it was a “dark day” for the university in a statement following the vote. Nichol called the decision a reprisal act, given his criticisms of the state legislature for cutting unemployment benefits, rejecting Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and passing voting rights restrictions.

    “None should be confused about what happened today in Charlotte,” Nichol wrote. “The university’s governing board moved to abolish an academic center in order to punish its director for publishing articles that displease the board and its political benefactors. The governors said to a member of the faculty: We cannot allow your writings to go without rebuke. We may not be able to fire you, but we will do all we can to suppress your efforts. Criticisms of this governor and of this General Assembly, at this public university, are not to be tolerated. Were I to have praised the legislature’s war on poor people rather than decry it, the board would have placed laurels on my head instead of boots on my neck.”

    55 years ago today, I was arrested for the first time for protesting segregated lunch counters in downtown Nashville.

    And this is just stupidly heartbreaking. City of Cleveland responds to Tamir Rice lawsuit by saying boy’s death was caused because of his own actions

    The city, in its response, wrote that Tamir’s death on Nov. 22 and all of the injuries his family claims in the suit “were directly and proximately caused by their own acts, not this Defendant.” It also says that the 12-year-old’s shooting death was caused “by the failure … to exercise due care to avoid injury.”

    The response does not explain these defenses in more detail, though 20 defenses are listed in all, including another one that says Tamir died because of “the conduct of individuals or entities other than Defendant.”

    The city also wrote that it does not have enough information to respond in full because the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Office’s investigation into Rice’s death by police officer Timothy Loehmann is not finished.

    The Sheriff’s Office has not given a timeline on completing its investigation into Tamir’s death and turning the case over to Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty’s Office. A spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office did not return messages left Friday. […]

    In its filing, the city, as it has done before, denied having knowledge of problems in Loehmann’s past police employment history.

    Finally, in response to an accusation contained in the suit that the city was using the sheriff’s office’s investigation as an excuse to withhold information, the city says it is not doing this and is cooperating in the investigation.

    Walter Madison, an Akron attorney representing the Rice family, said Friday that he believes “that there’s merit in our complaint.”

    “I do believe that a 12-year-old child died unnecessarily at the hands of Cleveland police officers and I do believe that certain officers shouldn’t have been entitled to wear the uniform,” he said.

    Or heartbreakingly stupid. Yup, Tamir got himself killed. *spits*

  129. rq says

    This is from Friday evening/night.
    The faces of many lost black lives shut down Penn Station with us tonight. #ShutItDown For #BlackLivesMatter;
    Shut Down Penn Station has taken the streets headed to Penn. #ShutItDown for #BlackLivesMatter;
    Beautiful: Shut Down Penn Station has shut down all of 6th Ave. #ShutItDown For #BlackLivesMatter.;
    The exit from the Lincoln Tunnel is shut down. #ShutItDown for #BlackLivesMatter.;
    That is a fucking shot gun drawn and cocked on a peaceful protest. #ShutItDown For #BlackLivesMatter;
    Chants of #ICantBreathe in the street as we shut down 42nd. #ShutItDown For #BlackLivesMatter.

  130. rq says

    Yah, the whole catch-up will continue tomorrow, there’s a whole stack on Chicago (of course) and the weekend in general. Stay tuned!

  131. rq says

    (Again these first few will be from Friday evening/night, and Saturday – if I manage to get things more or less in chronological order.)
    ‘Black Lives Matter’ UW walkout draws hundreds

    Hundreds of students, faculty, administration and community members walked out of their classrooms, from libraries and from residence halls to meet at in front of Mary Gates Hall on the University of Washington’s Seattle campus.

    The walkout was in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, and to address diversity issues on the University of Washington campuses and within the greater community.

    “It’s not the mayor of Seattle’s responsibility to take care of black people, it’s black people’s responsibility to take care of each other…and to work with people from all communities. We need to be there for each other,” said Jaebadiah Gardner, a UW alum who runs a real estate company in Seattle.

    The walkout was organized by Outside Agitators 206 and a variety of campus organizations at all three University of Washington campuses in Seattle, Bothell and Tacoma.

    Walkout organizer Nikkita Oliver emphasized the significance of doing a walkout on this scale at a university.

    “What better place to call to attention these issues, where we can have these types of dialogues on our classrooms?” she asked, as supporters cheered.

    The group marched from Mary Gates Hall to the Husky Union Building to deliver a set of demands from the ASUW Joint Commissions Committee.

    “We, through our own work and personal views, are seeking to combat anti-blackness in our communities and the school-to-prison pipeline. We encourage UW and the greater Seattle community to join us in this effort,” their statement read, in part. […]

    According to data released in January by the Office of Minority Affairs and Diversity, out of the 29,458 undergraduates enrolled at the university, 11,947 are students of color — and 1,026 are black. That’s 3 percent. Of the 4,115 faculty across all three campuses, 70 are black— 1.7 percent. Additionally, out of the 2,006 professional students, 42 are black — 2 percent. […]

    Their top demand was the have equitable access to higher education, not just equal opportunity access to education. The group called for the repeal of Initiative 200, which prohibited the University of Washington and other government entities to use preferential treatment according to race for school admissions or hiring.

    “I-200 repealed Affirmative Action and was meant to provide equal opportunity access for potential students, but this negatively affected the acceptance of students of color into the University of Washington,” the undergraduate demands read.

    They also called for the presidents of the university and ASUW to write public statements in favor of repealing I-200.

    “Whether you are a racial minority, LGBTQ, abled or disabled, trans, gay, cis – whatever you are, we are here to support you,” Palca Shibale, the secretary of the African Student Association, said at the rally. ** […]

    Ralina Joseph, an associate professor in the Communication, American Ethnic Studies and Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies departments, took students from her Black Cultural Studies class to the walkout in support.

    “Students, particularly minoritized students, need to be supported in their efforts to have voice and resist oppressive structures. Being a part of the walkout was one of the all ways I could support their efforts,” Joseph said in a text message. “Plus it’s my struggle too!”

    Vice President and Vice Provost of Minority Affairs & Diversity Sheila Edwards Lange also reached out to her staff, expressing her support for other administrators and OMDA staff to walkout as well. Edwards Lange was present throughout the day at the march.

    “I think it’s great that students are turning to action after the protest and thinking about what kinds of things they can do to affect change,” she said. “If we can’t have open and free dialogue [about these issues] at a university, then where else can we have it? This is the place where we should have the free exchange of ideas and have students have a voice.”

    Edwards Lange said university officials would not release a statement on the walkout.

    Interim UW president Ana Mari Cauce said that she is prepared to work with students on the given demands.

    “Overall I have been so impressed by the students that have been involved in the movement and I think that they’re making points that this is a good time to make,” Cauce told The Seattle Globalist.

    Recent events “make it very clear that things are not okay, and we have a long way to go. Education and access to higher education is part of where we need to go and [bring] the kind of visibility… to the kinds of issues that are still out there, so I am very supportive.”

    The **: Note here the inclusivity – not ‘hey all you other [previously] oppressed folk, come over here and help us’ but ‘here we are, we’re in this together, let’s do something about it’.

    Like I said, there will be a lot on Chicago. Here’s a small collection to follow.
    War Declared Against Chicago PD Over Secret Jail

    While most of the United States is busy trying to grasp the fact that the United States has a secret jail where American citizens are beat and denied access to fundamental rights, groups across the country are coordinating a way to strike back against the rogue police department.

    An Anonymous-affiliated activist said:

    “This is the moment when Americans have to decide whether they want to live in a police state or if they are willing to fight back against oppression.”

    The battle started when The Guardian disclosed its investigation into the Chicago Police Department’s secret facility that is located inside a warehouse on Chicago’s west side. […]

    The Fifth Column has an editorial policy against advocating violence of any kind, but the building itself should certainly be destroyed by civil authorities after every officer that ever brought someone to the facility is incarcerated.

    This is not a case where the American people can turn a blind eye. One man, John Hubbard, was taken to the facility for some unknown reason. He never breathed free air again. There is no known reason for him to ever have been in police custody. The Cook County medical examiner has no record stating a cause of death. The 44-year-old simply disappeared from his family and friends and turned up dead at the hands of police.

    Chicago PD’s Black Site is not concerned with terrorism. It’s used to intimidate protesters, suspects of every kind, and uncooperative witnesses. The anti-gang and anti-drug task forces use the building. It could be your 15-year-old that is taken to a facility like this in your community and beaten into confessing over a dime bag of pot.

    If this facility is allowed to remain or the police officers that used it are not sent to prison, facilities like this will spring up all over the country. This is the precipice of the police state. This is what you have been warned about. This is something so atrocious that Americans cannot simply stick their heads in the sand. This is the moment to proclaim in one voice that this will not be tolerated.

    The nation’s police rape, murder, torture, and violate the inalienable rights of the people at will without penalty. How can we say we live in anything other than a police state?

    Secret Police Facility “Black Site” Discovered Inside America, Detaining & Torturing Americans – not cited because there isn’t any new information, basically a rehash – with commentary – of the Guardian article. Here for archival purposes.

    The connection between Guantanamo and Chicago has certainly been made, in several ways. Activists Groups Unite Against Secret Police Facility, Call for Boots on the Ground #Gitmo2Chicago

    It was also recently reported that large numbers of military police officers, who were formerly stationed at the infamous torture prisons, are now getting jobs as local cops, and could be coming to a town near you. The Worcester Police department in Massachusetts is testing a pilot program, in which former Guantanamo prison guards will be given jobs as police.

    It was also revealed that former Guantánamo Bay interrogator Richard Zuley was already torturing people as a Chicago detective before he was ever stationed at the military prison. In fact, it was reported that he was one of the most brutal officers in the city during his 25 years with the police department.

    As American’s largely sat back and turned a blind eye to the abuses occurring at our torturous military prisons, perhaps they failed to realize that the militarization and torture tactics would be coming home to their front doors. This is what a police state looks like.

    Now, a wide range of activists, organizations, and independent media, including PANDAA, Cop Block, The Anti Media, Police the Police, Anonymous, and The Free Thought Project are calling for action to raise awareness of the massive right’s violations occurring on our own soil, and demand the torture center be shut down for good.

    Was Zuley mentioned before? I think this is a repost, too, in prep for this weekend. Sorry.

    This Won’t End Well: Military Police From the Torturous Gitmo Prison, Being Recruited as Cops

    It was recently reported that large numbers of military police officers who were formerly stationed at the infamous torture prisons, are now getting jobs as local cops, and could be coming to a town near you. The Worcester Police department in Massachusetts is testing a pilot program, in which former Guantanamo prison guards will be given jobs as police.

    Although it is common practice for police departments to hire from the military, Worcester police sergeant Richard Cipro said that this is the first program in the country to specifically recruits from military prisons. He called the effort a “life-changing opportunity” when speaking to new recruits during a recent training class.

    New recruits from Guantanamo Bay receive a full-time, paid 35 week training course which is apparently designed to help them make the transition from military police to neighborhood cop. Each class is filled with dozens of potential recruits, many of whom have worked in Guantanamo Bay. There are many hundreds and even thousands more who worked at lesser known military prison camps that are run in very much the same way, being accepted to police departments nationwide.

    Cipro has said that people transitioning from the military require less physical training, which saves the department money in the long-run. However, many have pointed out that this is another example of the blurring lines between the military and the police in America.

    Critics of former military personnel working in law enforcement, have argued that departments are contributing to the war-time mentality among police by hiring soldiers that are accustomed to operating in combat conditions. Hiring guards from Guantanamo Bay would be taking this a step further, as the prison has become notorious for widespread torture and abuse. [..]

    Sadly, when it comes time to pick new recruits to transition from the military to a police department, the type of people who get the jobs are not the type of people who refuse orders.

    A decade ago, Democracy Now spoke with a former army sergeant, Erik Saar who served as an Arabic translator at Guantanamo Bay for six months. Among the abuses he says he witnessed was sexual abuse, mock interrogations, the use of dogs and a female interrogator smearing what looked like menstrual blood on a Muslim prisoner. He also says children were imprisoned at Guantanamo and that the military ordered them not to speak to the Red Cross.

    Essentially, it may not be just Zuley. He’s just most notorious right now. :/ Spooky.

    From history, America’s Forgotten Mass Lynching: When 237 People Were Murdered In Arkansas

    The visits began in the fall of 1918, just as World War I ended. At his office in Little Rock, Arkansas, attorney Ulysses S. Bratton listened as African American sharecroppers from the Delta told stories of theft, exploitation, and endless debt. A man named Carter had tended 90 acres of cotton, only to have his landlord seize the entire crop and his possessions. From the town of Ratio, in Phillips County, Arkansas, a black farmer reported that a plantation manager refused to give sharecroppers an itemized account for their crop. Another sharecropper told of a landlord trying “to starve the people into selling the cotton at his own price. They ain’t allowing us down there room to move our feet except to go to the field.”

    No one could know it at the time, but within a year these inauspicious meetings would lead to one of the worst episodes of racial violence in U.S. history. Initiated by whites, the violence—by any measure, a massacre—claimed the lives of 237 African Americans, according to a just released report from the Equal Justice Initiative. The death toll was unusually high, but the use of racial violence to subjugate blacks during this time was not uncommon. As the Equal Justice Initiative observes, “Racial terror lynching was a tool used to enforce Jim Crow laws and racial segregation—a tactic for maintaining racial control by victimizing the entire African American community, not merely punishment of an alleged perpetrator for a crime.” This was certainly true of the massacre in Phillips County, Arkansas. […]

    There was nothing “peaceable” about the methods used to demolish the sharecroppers’ union. Late on the night of September 30, 1919, the planters dispatched three men to break up a union meeting in a rough hewn black church at Hoop Spur, a crossroads three miles north of Elaine. Prepared for trouble, the sharecroppers had assigned six men to patrol outside the church. A verbal confrontation led to gunfire that fatally wounded one of the attackers. The union men dispersed, but not for long. Bracing for reprisals from their landlords, they rousted fellow sharecroppers from bed and formed self-defense forces.

    The planters also mobilized. Sheriff Frank Kitchens deputized a massive white posse, even setting up a headquarters at the courthouse in the county seat of Helena to organize his recruits. Hundreds of white veterans, recently returned from military service in France, flocked to the courthouse. Dividing into small groups, the armed white men set out into the countryside to search for the sharecroppers. The posse believed that a black conspiracy to murder white planters had just been begun and that they must do whatever it took to put down the alleged uprising. The result was the killing of 237 African Americans.

    None of the perpetrators—participants in mass murder—answered for their crimes. No one was charged, no trials were held, at least not of those who had killed blacks. In the early 20th century, state-sanctioned collective violence targeting African Americans was a common occurrence in the United States. 1919 was an especially bloody year. By September, the nation had already experienced seven major outbreaks of anti-black violence (commonly called “race riots”). Riots had flared in cities as different as Knoxville, Omaha, and Washington, D.C. In Chicago, a lakefront altercation between whites and blacks escalated into a week-long riot that took the lives of 38 men (23 black, 15 white). To restore order, Illinois Gov. Frank Lowden called in thousands of state militia.

    The root cause of 1919’s violence was the reassertion of white supremacy after World War I. Disfranchisement, Jim Crow laws, and biased police forces and courts had stripped African Americans of many of their constitutional rights and created deepset economic, social, and political inequities. Blacks who defied the rules and traditions of white supremacy risked personal ruin (being banished from their hometowns was one punishment), bodily harm (beatings and whippings), and death. In just five months in 1919, from January to May, more than 20 lynch mobs murdered two dozen African Americans. One of these victims was a black veteran killed for refusing to stop wearing his Army uniform. Lynchers took pride in their actions, often posing for photographs at the scenes of their crimes; few were ever charged, let alone convicted. Mob violence helped protect the racial status quo.

    What made 1919 unique was the armed resistance that black Americans mounted against white mobs trying to keep them “in their place.” During the United States’ brief but transformative involvement in World War I, almost 370,000 black men served in the military, most of them in the Army. On the homefront, African American men and women bought war bonds, volunteered for the Red Cross, and worked in defense factories. They were fighting to make the world safe for democracy, as President Woodrow Wilson defined the war’s purpose, yet they didn’t have equal rights and opportunities at home. When the war ended, African Americans resolved to make America safe for democracy. In May 1919, civil rights activist and prolific writer W.E.B. Du Bois declared, “We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.” […]

    The sharecroppers did the best they could to defend themselves and their families and neighbors. A group of sharecroppers and a black veteran in uniform shot back when part of the posse opened fire. Hearing the shots, union member Frank Moore rallied the men with him. “Let’s go help them people out,” he shouted. But the sharecroppers were outgunned and outmanned. By October 3, most had been captured and jailed. Sheriff’s deputies and special agents for the Missouri Pacific Railroad tortured them to extract false confessions to a conspiracy to murder whites. Rigged trials brought swift convictions and death sentences for 12 men whose only crime was their attempt to obtain fair earnings for their labor. Protracted appeals, supported by the NAACP, resulted in a Supreme Court decision (Moore v. Dempsey, 1923) that helped free the men. The ruling also established the federal government’s obligation to ensure that state trial proceedings preserve the Constitution’s guarantee of due process and equal protection of the laws, a standard the Arkansas trials certainly had not met.

    This legal victory couldn’t give back the lives of the black residents killed by the posse, vigilantes, and troops in Phillips County. The death toll of 237 reported by the Equal Justice Initiative is a new figure, based on extensive research. In 1919, sources as varied as the NAACP and the Bureau of Investigation (forerunner of the FBI) estimated the number of killed African Americans at 25 to 80. Writer Robert Whitaker, who has identified 22 separate killing sites of African Americans during the massacre, put the death toll at more than 100. NAACP official Walter White, who risked his life in October 1919 to investigate the killings, stated that the “number of Negroes killed during the riot is unknown and probably never will be known.” In contrast, just four whites died, all of them posse members; one or two may have died as a result of friendly fire.

    Say the number of African Americans killed in Phillips County in 1919 was 25. Or 80. Or 237. The very fact that, almost one hundred years after the massacre, we are still trying to pinpoint the death toll should lead us to a larger reckoning: coming to terms with one of the most violent years in the nation’s history, bloodshed that resulted from efforts to make America safe for democracy.

  132. rq says

    Specifically Zuley: Infamous GITMO “Interrogator” Also Tortured Americans And Forced Confessions As A Chicago Cop

    Now, a new investigation by the Guardian has revealed that Former Guantánamo Bay interrogator Richard Zuley was already torturing people as a Chicago detective before he was ever stationed at the military prison.

    In fact, it was reported that he was one of the most brutal officers in the city during his 25 years with the police department.

    During his time on the police force, between 1977 and 2007, Zuley behaved as if he was in a military prison in a war zone. Zuley often used torture to force confessions out of suspects. He has also been accused of shackling inmates to the walls during interrogations and leaving them for hours on end with no food or water. He’s been accused of threatening to hurt family members of suspects if they did not confess, threatening suspects with the death penalty, and in some cases he was even caught planting evidence.

    He then left and became an interrogator in the military prisons at Guantánamo Bay, where he reportedly carried out “one of the most shocking acts of torture ever conducted.” […]

    Zuley fit in great at Guantánamo Bay, and quickly rose through the ranks to become one of the lead interrogators at the prison.

    “From what I was told, General Miller thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Miller was amazed at the information he was getting. So apparently Zuley ratcheted up these techniques, with the backing of Miller, to go up the chain of command for approval,” Couch said.

    Richard Zuley is currently free, but is now under investigation after some of the innocent people who he put behind bars are now clearing their names and filing complaints against the former officer.

    It is a sad state of affairs when those who claim to protect freedom behave in a manner indicative of the historically villainous states of the past.

    Facebook event for next weekend, #Protest the current use of secret prisons in Chicago, IL.

    According to The Guardian, the Chicago police department has been up to no good. With the recent reports that activists are being held in a secret prison in Chicago, Illinois, without the slightlest possibility of contact with the outside world; Some fear this may be a ripple effect caused by the National Defense Authorization Act, which allows local police departments as well as the US military to detain Americans indefinititely should the state label you a “homegrown terrorist.”

    Stories Continue To Emerge From Chicago Police Department ‘Black Site’

    Though some local politicians say this might be the first time they’ve heard of such tactics being used at the facility, it’s hardly surprising these things are taking place. Jerry Boyle, a lawyer and member of the Chicago chapter of the National Lawyer’s Guild, said that the site, and practice of disappearing arrestees, is an all too common practice. “Lawyers have known for awhile that Homan is a black hole,” said Boyle. “When you can’t find your client and all else fails, you try that. If you get lucky, they might acknowledge they have your client.”

    Boyle said roughly ten years ago, a family member of a client called him to report an arrest. “I tried the usual things, asked where he was arrested, where the alleged offense occurred. They didn’t know. I called central booking – they’re usually the last to know – so I started calling over to Homan.” Boyle said that after several rounds of calls to inside sources he learned his client was at the warehouse, but when he went to it, he was denied entry or access to his client.

    The problem with the Homan site, as well as many other instances of police abuse, is that there’s little or no accountability when nothing goes to court. Whether or not the rights of an arrestee were violated plays out in the legal system, and if nothing goes to court or gets reported, little happens. “There is no punishment available for a violation of an arrestee’s constitutional rights unless they (the police) fess up to the fact,” said Boyle. “Homan square is the blackest of the black holes.”

    While the majority of local media have been busy either reprinting non-answers from police officials or shamefully belittling and even outright mocking the victims who’ve come forward, we shouldn’t forget or shrug our shoulders at these stories. The fact that they’re “nothing new,” should be the kind of thing media and politicians feel both shock and outrage about, rather than shaking our heads and doing nothing. According to the Chicago Reporter, the City paid out $54.2 million last year alone in settlements stemming from police misconduct, which doesn’t even include fees paid to its own lawyers. If anything, that alone shows this is the sort of thing that’s far from isolated and far from over.

    Slight shift in focus, autopsy news on two recent shootings. Second Autopsy Reveals Pasco Police Shot Antonio Zambrano-Montes In The Back

    Just a day after it was revealed police in Washington state shot at a Mexican migrant 17 times, hitting him as many as six times, a second autopsy shows that police shot Antonio Zambrano-Montes from behind.

    A lawyer for Zambrano-Montes’ family says the second medical examination contradicts investigators’ initial report that the 35-year-old was not hit in the back. In fact, Zambrano-Montes was shot twice in the back during the Feb. 10 standoff with Pasco police, according to attorney Charles Herrmann.

    The autopsy also revealed that Zambrano-Montes was shot seven times, not six, as Sgt. Ken Lattin of the Tri-Cities Special Investigation Unit claimed Wednesday. […]

    Lattin has declined to speak with Huffington Post about the new autopsy, but coroner Dan Blasdel suggested that the pathologist who performed the second autopsy may have been biased.

    And the second, Attorney: Autopsy Of Latina Teen Killed By Denver Cops Contradicts Police Account

    The coroner ruled Jessica “Jessie” Hernandez’s death a homicide and said two bullets were recovered, adding that the wounds to her right thigh and pelvis were likely from a single bullet. None of the shots were fired at close range.

    Jessica was killed on Jan. 26 in a confrontation with police who were responding to a report of a suspicious vehicle. Two officers approached the car on foot after they determined it was reported stolen, the Denver Police Department said in a statement.

    Authorities said Hernandez drove the car, which had four other teens inside it, into one of the officers and struck him on the leg. Both officers then fired and shot Hernandez multiple times, she was taken to a local hospital where she was pronounced dead.

    Attorneys for the family of Jessica Hernandez said the report shows she was shot from the driver’s side, and contradicts police statements that she was driving at officers when they fired.

    “The report shows that Jessie was shot from the driver’s side of the car and not from close range,” attorney Qusair Mohamedbhai said in a statement. “These facts undermine the Denver Police Department’s claim that Jessie was driving at the officers as they shot her.”

    A friend of Jessica’s who was in the passenger seat during the incident had previously told BuzzFeed News that officers were standing next to the car, not in front of it, when they shot. Trina Diaz, 16, also said the officer was hit only after Jessica was struck.

    The Denver Police Department declined to comment on the autopsy’s findings and Mohamedbhai’s statements.

    From Friday night: 7th Avenue shut down leaving Times Square. #ShutItDown For #BlackLivesMatter

  133. rq says

    Let the onslaught begin.
    So, this is tangentially related, mostly due to the discrepancies in reproductive justice along racial lines. New Law Book Could Change the Face of Reproductive Rights

    The book begins with a definition of reproductive justice informed by advocates and activists. It also lays out the concept of intersectionality—how sociopolitical factors shape people’s lives in overlapping ways.

    Issues of race, class and gender are not relegated to specific chapters; they inform the entire book. For example, in addressing Griswold vs. Connecticut, the case that opened the door for legalizing contraception for married couples, Murray writes about how the pill was tested on women in Puerto Rico in ways that may have been exploitative.

    “The interest in controlling reproduction has been racialized almost from the start,” says Murray. “The earliest efforts to medicalize obstetrics and gynecology came from doctors who were experimenting on enslaved women. The criminalization of pregnancy has been laid out on the bodies of black women. There is a really racialized discourse in the effort to control reproduction and sexuality.”

    Adams says the framework and resources in “Cases on Reproductive Rights and Justice” will influence how lawyers and policymakers do their jobs. Many law school graduates will become judicial clerks, legislative aids and public defenders or prosecutors,” says Adams. “They will infuse their memos, meetings and briefs—and enlighten their high-powered bosses—with the knowledge and framing they learned from [the casebook].”

    Here’s hoping it affects thinking in racial issues in reproductive justive, too.

    Glittery Blackface Models Spark Backlash at Milan Fashion Week.

    “I’m all for unique and interesting styles that command attention, but come on — you can hardly see the models’ faces,” a writer for Bustle wrote, according to E News. “Not to mention that this is literally blackface, which is, you know, racist,”

    Cutugno, who says the collection was inspired by artist Emilio Isgrò, apologized, saying he was unaware blackface was offensive.

    “I am extremely respectful of the afroamerican culture and extremely sorry for each type episode of racism,” he tells E News. “Furthermore my inspiration was coming from a completely different idea which has nothing to do with the theme of afroamerican culture. I would have never tought (sic) someone could have find the make up offensive, otherwhise (sic) I would have never used it.”

    Of course, there’s some saying it’s about ethics in fashion modelling, not racism, so…

    You thought it was bad? Our election system’s anti-minority bias is even worse than you think

    Much of the extant literature has mainly been focused on voter ID laws; but Vandewalker and Bentele find that the strategy is actually more expansive than that. They have created an extensive metric that includes nine different measures of accessibility, including voter ID, absentee voting and same-day registration. They find that the accessibility of voting systems is negatively correlated with the share of the state’s population that is black (see chart). As the black population increases, voting systems become more inaccessible. The chart below includes all changes that were passed in the legislature; as of writing some of the changes were stalled in court.

    The study finds that between 2006 and 2012, the most influential factor in determining whether a law would be passed was Republican control of government. It also finds that the level of anti-black stereotyping in a state (a measure based on survey respondents’ beliefs about work ethic and intelligence) strongly correlates with the proposal (though not the passage) of voting restrictions. Vandewalker and Bentele find that states with a recent increase in Democratic turnout were more likely to pass a restriction indicating “the passage of voter restrictions as a partisan response by Republicans to recent Democratic electoral gains.” States with large black populations were significantly more likely to pass restrictive laws. Finally, they note that what little voter fraud exists does not correlate at all with voter restrictions.

    The GOP has dramatically expanded its control of state legislatures in recent years. Before the 2014 election, Republicans controlled 59 of the 98 state legislative chambers; they now control 67. MSNBC recently reported that Republicans are already working to pass voter ID laws in five major states. Bentele and Vandewalker’s analysis indicates that “restrictive voting laws are often discriminatory responses to minority voting strength.” They find that the correlation between anti-black attitudes in the state and a restrictive voting system increased between 2010 and 2013. Conservatives have moved beyond just pushing for voter ID and have also worked to curb early voting and other important methods to increase access.

    To see the combined effect of all these different measures, I obtained the data that Vandewalker and Bentele compiled. I find that there is a strong raw correlation between their ease of electoral access index and voter turnout (see below). Using a variation of their analysis, I also find that electoral systems are significantly more open in states with a higher white population. The ease of accessibility index was also strongly correlated with voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election. Combined with the large academic literature showing that voting restrictions reduce turnout and that turnout affects the outcomes of elections, there is a strong case that the current push to reduce voting rights is rooted in partisan ambitions. […]

    There is some hope: The Brennan Center for Justice recently found that “190 bills to expand voting access have been introduced in 31 states, compared to 49 restrictive measures in 19 states, the new analysis found.” This is a welcome development, however, my analysis of the Bentele dataset indicates that the overall change is positive, but modest. The chart below shows how voting access has changed between 2010 and 2014. States on the line remain the same, states below have seen voting rights contract, and states above the line have seen voting access increase. In total, 16 states increased accessibility while 14 states decreased accessibility. The mean score on the accessibility index shifted from 6.27 to 6.38 (assuming that all the passed laws go into effect).

    Some charts and graphs at the link.

    Here’s a criming-while-white story. And notice the reporting: no pictures, no tarring of characters, nothing. Treetops Resort: Fraternity damage could top $400,000

    “If you just look at our out-of-pocket expenses, things we’ve paid to contractors, third parties, it’s around $230,000. It doesn’t take into consideration management time or damage to the resort’s reputation. Our accountants and attorneys are saying that this could be up to an additional $200,000,” Barry Owens, Treetops general manager, said in an e-mail statement Saturday.

    “We’re now talking a total of $430,000,” he said.

    Added to that, Owens said he had reason to believe the fraternity might not pay the resort for the destruction.

    “It also has become evident that the fraternity representatives have suggested that they are unwilling to pay for the damage that they caused the resort,” Owens said in the statement. He could not be reached for further explanation.

    Treetops spokeswoman Susan Wilcox Olson said Saturday that Sigma Alpha Mu has paid $25,000 toward restitution but also said a representative has told Treetops that the fraternity is “unwilling to accept liability and pay restitution.”

    Assholes.

    Out of Trouble, but Criminal Records Keep Men Out of Work

    The share of American men with criminal records — particularly black men — grew rapidly in recent decades as the government pursued aggressive law enforcement strategies, especially against drug crimes. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, those men are having particular trouble finding work. Men with criminal records account for about 34 percent of all nonworking men ages 25 to 54, according to a recent New York Times/CBS News/Kaiser Family Foundation poll.

    The reluctance of employers to hire people with criminal records, combined with laws that place broad categories of jobs off-limits, is not just a frustration for men like Mr. Mirsky; it is also taking a toll on the broader economy. It is preventing millions of American men from becoming, in that old phrase, productive members of society.

    “Prior to the prison boom, when convictions were restricted to a smaller fraction of the population, it wasn’t great for their rehab potential but it wasn’t having a huge impact,” said Devah Pager, a Harvard professor of sociology. “Now such a large fraction of the population is affected that it has really significant implications, not just for those people, but for the labor market as a whole.”

    Employers, of course, have always taken an interest in the histories of prospective employees. Banks do not want to hire embezzlers; trucking companies do not want drunken drivers. Schools and security companies don’t want to hire criminals of any kind. But the easy availability of online databases lets employers investigate everyone — indeed, it makes hard to justify not looking. Surveys show roughly nine in 10 United States employers check databases of criminal records when hiring for at least some positions. Some focus solely on felony convictions; others also consider misdemeanors or arrests.

    Rising concern that background checks are being used to systematically exclude applicants with criminal records is fueling a national “ban the box” movement to improve their chances. The name refers to the box that job applicants are sometimes required to check if they have been convicted of a felony or a misdemeanor. Fourteen states and several dozen cities have passed laws, mostly in recent years, that generally require employers to postpone background checks until the later stages of the hiring process. […]

    The ready availability of criminal records databases has fueled the perception that it is irresponsible for employers to ignore available information. Local governments increasingly put criminal records online, and private companies like HireRight, Sterling BackCheck and LexisNexis Risk Solutions aggregate those records, offering almost instant results. In the early 1990s, less than half of companies routinely checked criminal histories. Now relatively few refrain.

    “Criminal background screening is an important tool — nearly the only tool — that employers have to protect their customers, their employees and themselves from criminal behavior,” Todd McCracken, president of the National Small Business Association, testified before a congressional committee last year. Local, state and federal governments have embraced the same logic, writing background checks into professional licensing requirements and post-9/11 security regulations.

    These policies affect a growing number of people. About 10 percent of nonincarcerated men had felony records in 2010, up from 4 percent in 1980, according to research led by the sociologists Sarah Shannon of the University of Georgia and Christopher Uggen of the University of Minnesota. The numbers are much higher among African-American men: About 25 percent of nonincarcerated black men had been convicted of a felony, up from 9 percent in 1980.

    The problem with criminal background checks, in Mr. Uggen’s view, is a lack of deliberation about what employers should be looking for. Some employers ask about convictions for felonies; some ask only about narrow categories of felony like violent crimes or sex crimes. Others ask about any arrest whatsoever. “We haven’t really figured out what a disqualifying offense should be for particular activities,” he said. […]

    In 2008, for example, the government began to check the backgrounds of 1.2 million workers at the nation’s ports. A law passed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks mandated the exclusion of anyone with a conviction in the last seven years, and 59,000 workers were excluded as a result. But 30,000 of those workers filed appeals arguing their records were inaccurate, and in 25,000 of those cases, a more careful examination found no evidence of a conviction, according to a subsequent review by the Government Accountability Office. That’s worth repeating: When the background check system identified a felon, it was wrong at least 42 percent of the time.

    And the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission warned in 2012 that the systematic exclusion of people with criminal records was effectively a form of discrimination against black men, who were disproportionately affected. It has filed lawsuits charging such discrimination by companies including BMW, Dollar General and Pepsi.

    Jeffrey Menteer, who is 26 and lives in northwestern Pennsylvania, has applied for 15 jobs since June, when he completed a six-month prison term for a gun possession charge. A company that makes screen doors told him it might hire him after he gets off parole in October. Other than that he has found nothing. He said his criminal record was making it hard to find work.

    “Between that and my race, black living in a white town, it’s tough,” he said.

    He worked steadily as a logger for about five years before he was arrested. He made about $800 a week except in the spring, the off-season for the tree-cutting business. Now he lives with his parents, and the only money he makes is from occasional work shoveling snow.

    “I don’t really blame them, but I wish they’d be a little more open-minded,” he said of local employers. “People do change.”

    These concerns, and a wave of stories like Mr. Menteer’s, have catalyzed efforts to legislate protections.

    The first “fair chance” law was passed by Hawaii in 1998. The law prohibits most private employers from inquiring about criminal history until after making a conditional job offer. Then the offer can be revoked only if the offense is relevant.

    In just the last few years, the list of jurisdictions with similar laws has expanded rapidly, although the details vary: Some apply only to public sector jobs, others allow background checks at earlier stages in the hiring process, and they all include long lists of exemptions.

    Still, the trend is clear enough that several of the nation’s largest employers, including Walmart, Home Depot and Target, have also stopped asking about criminal records at the beginning of the job application process.

  134. rq says

    #FergusonFoodShare
    #FergusonFoodShare donation drop-off: 1) Thursday, 6-7:30pm South City, 4219 Hartford St. 2nd Fl
    #FergusonFoodShare donation drop-off: 2) Friday, 6:00-7:30pm 9200 West Florissant (old Ponderosa parking lot)
    #FergusonFoodShare donation drop-off: 3) Saturday, 9:00-10:30am 9200 West Florissant (old Ponderosa parking lot)
    #FergusonFoodShare wk 4 items: apples, bananas (choose less ripe, firm bananas that can sit 3-4 days), corn, onions, spinach, ground turkey

  135. rq says

    Oh, it’s those blacks doing it to themselves. Lee Daniels Says Mo’Nique Got Herself Blackballed With ‘Reverse Racism’

    Lee Daniels sat down with everyone’s favorite CNN anchor, Don Lemon, on Thursday and discussed recent claims by actress Mo’Nique that she’s been blackballed in Hollywood. In an essay for the Hollywood Reporter, Mo’Nique had said that Daniels was the one to deliver the news to her, telling her that she didn’t “play the game.”

    “I thought, once you won the award, that’s the top prize—and so you’re supposed to be treated as if you got the top prize,” Mo’Nique wrote.

    Mo’Nique also went on to say that Daniels even removed her from his projects. “I was offered the role in The Butler that Oprah Winfrey played,” she said. “I was also approached by Empire to be on Empire. And I was offered the role as Richard Pryor’s grandmother in [Daniels’ upcoming Pryor biopic]. Each of those things that he offered me was taken off the table.”

    In his interview with Lemon, Daniels claimed that Mo’Nique was blackballed because of reverse racism. “She was making unreasonable demands, and she wasn’t thinking—this was when reverse racism was happening, I think,” Daniels stated. “I told her, ‘You have to thank the producers of the film, you have to thank the studios.’ And I think she didn’t understand that, and I said, ‘People aren’t going to respond well if you don’t.’

    “This is not just ‘show.’ It’s ‘show business,’” he told Lemon. “And you’ve gotta play ball, and you can’t scream—I don’t like calling the race card. I don’t believe in it. If I buy into it, it becomes real. If I knew what I knew when I was 21, I wouldn’t be where I’m at right now.”

    “Some people call that ‘selling out,’” Lemon noted.

    “Well, I guess I’m a sellout,” Daniels responded. “But I’m not going to not work, and I’m not going to not tell my truth. And I’m not going to call people out on their bull. So whatever that means, sell out. I’ll see you in the theaters.”

    Reverse racism, though? Yes, you “play the game” in Hollywood, but what does reverse racism have to do with this?

    Something tells me Daniels doesn’t know his words or terms. First, there’s no such thing as reverse racism. And those who use the term are typically white people. Second, I doubt that a white person who didn’t “play the game” would be blackballed.

    If Mo’nique’s attitude was to blame for her being blackballed, then that’s one thing. Perhaps Mo’Nique is the one person in Hollywood who isn’t willing to do the dance. Apparently, though, Daniels has on his tap shoes and is ready and willing.

    Whatever gets you to where you want to be, I guess.

    The Broward County Police Department is trying to currently sweep the #CalvonReid shooting death under the rug. Read the story. Hmm, a name for to the google of.

    The Limits of Talking About Privilege to Teenagers

    In Manhattan, educators at several private schools have decided that one of the best ways to teach white kids about race is to have them discuss it with other white people. “At a few schools,” the New York Times reports, “students and faculty members are starting white affinity groups, where they tackle issues of white privilege, often in all-white settings. The groups have sprung from an idea that whites should not rely on their black, Asian or Latino peers to educate them about racism and white dominance.” Once again, elite subculture imitates a Portlandia sketch. [… <- that is also my reaction. …]

    The trend consists of schools “asking white students and faculty members to examine their own race and to dig deeply into how their presence affects life for everyone in their school communities, with a special emphasis on the meaning and repercussions of what has come to be called white privilege.” At Friend’s Seminary, for example, a “Day of Concern” entailed gathering students into small discussion groups where “the overarching theme of the day was identity, privilege and power.” The ideas being taught have trickled down from the selective colleges many private schoolers aspire to attend. It’s as if they’re taking AP Identity Studies. Acknowledging their privilege seems to be what’s required to pass.[ …]

    Private school kids in New York City ought to be taught how lucky they are. And they ought to be taught how racial bias continues to shape life in the United States. In their borough, Manhattan, a young white man can walk down the street unmolested by police in any neighborhood. If a young Hispanic or black man frequents certain streets in casual dress, he is likely to be shoved against a wall by an NYPD officer, and few will care if his Fourth Amendment rights were wantonly violated. Hard truths like that are best set forth by educators, not ignored or denied. But the description of how these kids are being taught leaves me conflicted.

    The New York Times headlined its article, “At New York Private Schools, Challenging White Privilege From the Inside.” But the story doesn’t describe people “challenging” unearned advantage so much as learning to discuss it, often with academic jargon that smuggles in a lot of contested claims via inadequately defined terms. When elite schools launch a campaign to end legacy preferences in college admissions, I’ll believe that they’re “challenge white privilege from the inside.”

    As it stands, the schools seem to have recognized that being conversant in “white privilege theory” will give their students tools they need to excel in some subcultures populated by graduates of elite colleges. As the article puts it, “educators charged with preparing students for life inside these schools, in college, and beyond maintain that anti-racist thinking is a 21st-century skill and that social competency requires a sophisticated understanding of how race works in America.”

    That passage is bursting with questionable assumptions.

    For example, I am skeptical that something as impossibly complicated as “how race works in America” is accessible to Manhattan private school teachers, whatever “diversity consultant” lectures in their stead, or anyone, really. How do administrators measure the “sophistication” of men like Derrick Gay, the 39-year-old diversity consultant named in the article? Perhaps he happens to have an exquisitely sophisticated understanding of “how race works” in his time. But even if that is so, one wonders if youngsters more than two decades his junior face the same racial landscape. When I talk with people a quarter-century older than me about race, I often notice a gap in perceptions, experiences and assumptions.

    These programs also seem to have a narrow notion of what constitutes “anti-racist thinking,” a phrase that should encompass views from Ward Connerly on left. In any era, many competing ideological frameworks qualify as “anti-racist thinking.” And substantial cooperation is possible among subscribers to most of them.

    Finally, when it comes to building “social competency,” one wonders, among whom?

    These educationally privileged students will become exquisitely adept at invoking privilege to signal moral sophistication and guard their status among similarly acculturated peers. But I fear that they’ll emerge from their formal schooling less able to coherently discuss race or privilege with anyone outside of their educational cohort, having been taught to deploy inaccessible buzzwords and abstract theory rather than plain language, discrete examples, and a focus on solutions. […]

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    The Limits of Talking About Privilege to Teenagers
    Conor Friedersdorf Feb 27 2015, 7:18 AM ET

    Keith Bedford/Reuters

    In Manhattan, educators at several private schools have decided that one of the best ways to teach white kids about race is to have them discuss it with other white people. “At a few schools,” the New York Times reports, “students and faculty members are starting white affinity groups, where they tackle issues of white privilege, often in all-white settings. The groups have sprung from an idea that whites should not rely on their black, Asian or Latino peers to educate them about racism and white dominance.” Once again, elite subculture imitates a Portlandia sketch.

    These sessions are part of a trend.
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    At the kinds of schools that labor mightily to secure unearned advantages for their students in the college admissions process, “faculty members and students are grappling with race and class in ways that may seem surprising to outsiders and deeply unsettling to some longtime insiders,” Kyle Spencer reports beneath the headline, “At New York Private Schools, Challenging White Privilege From the Inside.”

    The trend consists of schools “asking white students and faculty members to examine their own race and to dig deeply into how their presence affects life for everyone in their school communities, with a special emphasis on the meaning and repercussions of what has come to be called white privilege.” At Friend’s Seminary, for example, a “Day of Concern” entailed gathering students into small discussion groups where “the overarching theme of the day was identity, privilege and power.” The ideas being taught have trickled down from the selective colleges many private schoolers aspire to attend. It’s as if they’re taking AP Identity Studies. Acknowledging their privilege seems to be what’s required to pass.

    * * *

    The word “privilege” never crossed the lips of any teacher of mine.

    But as early as kindergarten or first grade, I began to understand that I was a very lucky kid. First, I realized that not everyone had both parents and all their grandparents still alive. Then I learned about divorce and felt blessed that my family was all together. I grew up in Costa Mesa, California, where my parents and their neighbors seemed to live like the people on Family Ties, and went to a Catholic school in nearby Newport Beach, where many seemed to live like the people on The O.C.

    I still remember when I first glimpsed beyond that bubble.

    One autumn, when I was six or seven, my teacher announced that our class would help provide presents that Christmas for a family that couldn’t afford them. We were told the names and ages of a single mother and her five or six children. It wasn’t the first time that I’d been exposed to the concept of poverty, but knowing names of kids my age who wouldn’t get Christmas presents made it real.

    A year or two later, I went to Mexico for the first time. I’ll never forget driving across the border into Tijuana (which was safe enough for anyone to do in those days), seeing the shanty towns clinging perilously to dirt hills visible from the highway, and realizing what my parents had meant when they said it was a poor country.

    Between family vacations and trips that the Catholic Church sponsored to build houses for poor Mexican families, I knew a lot of kids growing up who most fully grasped their own privilege for the first time in the hours after they crossed our Southern border. And I knew a lot of kids who managed similar insights within Orange County. My Catholic high school required a substantial number of volunteer hours to graduate. Some people served the homeless at soup kitchens. Others worked at hospitals. Still others volunteered to help rich people at fancy dinners nominally held for charity. I fulfilled my requirement as a volunteer at a camp run by the Wheelchair Tennis Association and a counselor at Special Camp for Special Kids. That’s when I realized what a privilege it is to be born with a healthy body.
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    Later still, while attending college in Claremont, California, I began thinking about race and policing as never before when I read the following about a nearby police killing:

    Irvin Landrum Jr., 18, died Jan. 17, six days after he was shot three times in the neck, chest and ankle on a sidewalk in the quiet eastern Los Angeles County suburb. One of the officers involved told investigators the shooting was in self defense after Landrum pulled a .45-caliber pistol from his waistband and fired first.

    But a subsequent investigation by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department showed that the gun Landrum allegedly used was never fired and bore no fingerprints.

    Some of my peers organized protests. I wondered, “Would he be alive if he were white?” My effort to report out what really happened as a very green campus journalist failed, but I remember slowly realizing how much more pressure there would’ve been to find the truth had the dead youth been a student at one of the Claremont Colleges, or had his parents had been wealthy or politically connected in town. That insight ultimately influenced stories I’ve tried to highlight as a journalist.

    Looking back at my education, there are all sorts of things I wished I would’ve understood earlier and myriad ways that my educators could’ve done a better job. I could’ve been a better student too: more curious, more attuned to how much I didn’t understand. But I know that I learned best via experiences and concrete examples, even though I could always parrot back abstract theory on anything.

    * * *

    Private school kids in New York City ought to be taught how lucky they are. And they ought to be taught how racial bias continues to shape life in the United States. In their borough, Manhattan, a young white man can walk down the street unmolested by police in any neighborhood. If a young Hispanic or black man frequents certain streets in casual dress, he is likely to be shoved against a wall by an NYPD officer, and few will care if his Fourth Amendment rights were wantonly violated. Hard truths like that are best set forth by educators, not ignored or denied. But the description of how these kids are being taught leaves me conflicted.

    The New York Times headlined its article, “At New York Private Schools, Challenging White Privilege From the Inside.” But the story doesn’t describe people “challenging” unearned advantage so much as learning to discuss it, often with academic jargon that smuggles in a lot of contested claims via inadequately defined terms. When elite schools launch a campaign to end legacy preferences in college admissions, I’ll believe that they’re “challenge white privilege from the inside.”

    As it stands, the schools seem to have recognized that being conversant in “white privilege theory” will give their students tools they need to excel in some subcultures populated by graduates of elite colleges. As the article puts it, “educators charged with preparing students for life inside these schools, in college, and beyond maintain that anti-racist thinking is a 21st-century skill and that social competency requires a sophisticated understanding of how race works in America.”

    That passage is bursting with questionable assumptions.

    For example, I am skeptical that something as impossibly complicated as “how race works in America” is accessible to Manhattan private school teachers, whatever “diversity consultant” lectures in their stead, or anyone, really. How do administrators measure the “sophistication” of men like Derrick Gay, the 39-year-old diversity consultant named in the article? Perhaps he happens to have an exquisitely sophisticated understanding of “how race works” in his time. But even if that is so, one wonders if youngsters more than two decades his junior face the same racial landscape. When I talk with people a quarter-century older than me about race, I often notice a gap in perceptions, experiences and assumptions.

    These programs also seem to have a narrow notion of what constitutes “anti-racist thinking,” a phrase that should encompass views from Ward Connerly on left. In any era, many competing ideological frameworks qualify as “anti-racist thinking.” And substantial cooperation is possible among subscribers to most of them.

    Finally, when it comes to building “social competency,” one wonders, among whom?

    These educationally privileged students will become exquisitely adept at invoking privilege to signal moral sophistication and guard their status among similarly acculturated peers. But I fear that they’ll emerge from their formal schooling less able to coherently discuss race or privilege with anyone outside of their educational cohort, having been taught to deploy inaccessible buzzwords and abstract theory rather than plain language, discrete examples, and a focus on solutions.

    Even if elite private schools could accurately identify the most qualified experts in racial sophistication—and even if those experts had a theory of race in America that accurately captured the realities of people decades their junior—I’d still be unconvinced that these kids are best served by insular, intellectual discussions. In their classrooms, everyone is privileged enough to attend the sort of elite school where privilege is taught to privileged children of the mostly privileged. The wisdom and insights that these kids can summon in group conversation is limited.

    Meanwhile, New York City is right outside the classroom door.

    If these teenagers are as smart as I imagine, they’d surely learn a lot more if they skipped lectures imperiously framed around trendy theories and spent the day playing dominoes with the old-timers on West 151st Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, or seeking out this young man to share his experience of Stop and Frisk. Absent heavy-handed models of race in America, perhaps they’d reflect more on injustices they perceived rather than fitting them into molds made by their elders.

    And if their subculture didn’t put such a premium on verbally acknowledging privilege, as if doing so is a demonstration of virtue and the beginning of a more enlightened society, maybe they’d feel more pressure to actually help people who need it, or to identify specific injustices and at least attempt concrete steps to fix them. I pass homeless people almost every day. Sometimes I try to offer a little help. Far more often, I don’t. But I’ve never had the feeling that they’d appreciate it if I said, “Hey man, just so you know, I know how much more privileged I am than you.”

    All sorts of Americans who haven’t any inkling of privilege theory manage to do vital work fighting racism, racial bias, and prejudicial discrimination. Many of those people are driven by the ethos that the ultimate end goal is a colorblind society, where everyone is judged by the content of their character, and whether one’s ancestry is African American or European American or Asian American makes no more difference than if one is of English, Dutch, or Italian ancestry today. The elites who reject color-blindness as an ideal have had the correct insight that its most simplistic iteration denies the valence race undeniably has in the real world. They’re correct that it’s naive to act as if we’re close to achieving it.

    But whereas people striving to eventually get to colorblindness believe that it’s progress when whites don’t internally feel or externally adopt whiteness as a primary tribal identity, the trend in parts of America’s elite educational subculture is to embrace what might be called Anti-Racist White Tribalism, wherein whites start conceiving of their whiteness as their most important attribute.

    “At the Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, two white seniors started the Exploring Whiteness club in the fall, which now regularly attracts 15 students,” the Times reports. “They were inspired by reading ‘Waking Up White,’ a memoir by Debby Irving, a self-proclaimed WASP from New England who discovered in her late 40s that many of the benefits her father had received in housing and education from the G.I. Bill had been denied to millions of African-American veterans.”

    If I could imagine a healthy America where elites encouraged whites to self-identify based on their racial identity, I wouldn’t be bothered by these well-meaning kids and their reaction to what sounds like a wonderful book. The racism of the G.I. Bill and its echoes across generations is certainly something everyone should know.

    But nothing in U.S. history leads me to believe that encouraging people to regard whiteness as the core of their identity will end well. Throughout our history, once-marginalized groups, among them Irish, Italians, Germans, Cajuns, Poles, Catholics, and Jews, have to varying degrees gained the privilege of deracination and its analogs. An Italian American living in Los Angeles today can emphasize her ancestry, ignore it, or any gradation, and her choice is validated.

    That same privilege has been unjustly denied to other groups, especially blacks.

    Tremendous inequities have resulted. Simplistic colorblindness is unequipped to grasp their legacy. But is the best way forward hyper-emphasis on everyone’s racial or ethnic background, including artificially constructed majoritarian whiteness, on the bet that every identity group will cease succumbing to tribalism? Or should we strive for a future where all individuals can embrace or ignore their racial identity per their preference? Perhaps neither approach can ever fully succeed. But I’d argue that the former approach poses a much greater risk of balkanization, and is doomed insofar as “separate-but-equal” never actually works.

    The latter approach—call it aspirational colorblindness—strikes me as a plausibly better alternative. I acknowledge both its pitfalls and the long odds against total success. But given the degree to which it is ignored within elite academic culture, you’d think it had been as rigorously discredited as geocentrism.

    In the course of their educations, students in grade school, high school and beyond ought to be presented with unvarnished facts about life in the United States, including racism, sexism, and other bigotries that shape life here. They ought to be exposed to the concept of implicit bias; the harms done by stereotypes, generalizations, and prejudgment; thought-provoking works like Peggy McIntosh’s influential essay on privilege; and also essays from the rich history of diverse thinkers who approach anti-racism from an individualist’s perspective.

    The object ought to be showing young people the world as fully, clearly and completely as possible, and familiarizing them with lots of competing frameworks for understanding it, so that they can grapple toward their own conclusions. They’re all but guaranteed to disagree deeply among themselves, so they should be reminded that people of goodwill can share the goal of reducing racial bias, or any other unfairness that can be remedied, even when they’re operating under different ur-theories of identity in America and how best to fight injustice.

    Instead, I fear that students are being indoctrinated into one highly contested framework, and that those who reject it will erroneously conclude, “anti-racism isn’t for me.”

    New Museum Depicts ‘The Life Of A Slave From Cradle To The Tomb’. There’s a lot on the museum and the founder upthread, but this article has some visitor reactions.

    The newest attraction aims to give visitors a realistic look at life in the pre-Civil War South. Don’t expect hoop skirts and mint juleps, but stark relics that tell the story of a dark period in American history, through the eyes of the enslaved.

    From the entrance, Whitney Plantation in Wallace, La., resembles the other plantations, with majestic oaks framing the front walk to the French-Creole style “big house.”

    But before you can see the late-18th century home, furnished with period finery, a tour guide introduces you to the slaves who built it, and everything else, on this former sugar cane plantation. […]

    “It’s overwhelming to see such names,” says Avis Alexander Jessie of nearby Vacherie, La. She wonders if a name etched here — Alexandre, born 1851 — could be a relation. “Our ancestor’s name could be on this.”

    She says the museum makes her think in a more personal way about the human toll of slavery. “The father was left behind. The kids were gone. These people raped these women,” Jessie says. “It’s just hard to think that your great-great-great grandfather or grandmother was into all of this.”

    In recent years, some of the popular antebellum plantations here have started to incorporate displays about slavery. But the Whitney is the first to design the visitor’s entire experience around that history.

    “What was the life of a slave from cradle to the tomb? You come here, you will learn about it,” says Ibrahima Seck, academic director at Whitney Plantation. […]

    Cummings says he was inspired to turn the Whitney into a slavery museum after reading the slave narratives collected by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration. He says Americans have a hard time talking honestly about the legacy of slavery.

    “If we can demonstrate that there is a hangover from slavery, they will then understand exactly what happened, and what obligation we [have] as a nation,” he says. “Maybe not as individuals — we didn’t own slaves. But as a nation, what is it that we can do to right some of the wrongs?”

    Felton Hurst and his family, from New Orleans, were among the first visitors to the new museum.

    “Really, it’s amazing,” Hurst says. “I love it.” His wife, Marilyn, is from Wallace and grew up hearing stories about the plantation.

    “A lot of people who were sharecroppers here in my family … worked the plantation,” she says. “So I’m kind of glad to be here. It’s very neat.”

    Their daughter Alea Hurst, 28, says “it sort of feels to me a gift and a curse.” She’s struck by the small size of the slave quarters — two-room wooden shacks that would house two families, eating, sleeping and living all in the same tight space.

    “It’s a gift because I’m here to experience what happened then,” says Alea Hurst. “But the curse is what happened in the past.”

    A Brutal Beating Wakes Attica’s Ghosts

    Mr. Williams had been transferred to Attica that January following an altercation with other inmates at a different facility. He had just four months to serve before he was to be released. He was doing his best to stay out of trouble. His plan was to go home to New Brunswick and try to find work as a barber. That evening, Mr. Williams remembers, he had been in his cell watching the rap stars Lil Wayne and Young Jeezy on television, and missed the shouting on the cellblock. The guards ordered him to strip for a search and then marched him down the hall to a darkened dayroom used for meetings and classes for what they told him would be a urine test.

    Mr. Williams is 5-foot-8, and a solid 170 pounds. But corrections officers tend toward linebacker size, and the three officers towered over him. The smallest was Sgt. Sean Warner, 37, at 5-foot-11, 240 pounds. Beside him was Officer Keith Swack, 37, a burly 6-foot-3 and some 300 pounds. A third officer was standing behind the cell door. Mr. Williams thought it was Officer Matthew Rademacher, 29, who had followed his father into the job six years earlier. Officer Rademacher was six feet tall and weighed 260 pounds. All three men are white and had goatees at the time.

    Mr. Williams was wondering why a sergeant would be doing the grunt work of conducting an impromptu drug test when, he said, a fist hammered him hard on the right side of his rib cage. He doubled up, collapsing to the floor. More blows rained down. Mr. Williams tried to curl up to protect himself from the pummeling of batons, fists and kicks. Someone jumped on his ankle. He screamed in pain. He opened his eyes to see a guard aiming a kick at his head, as though punting a football. I’m going to die here, he thought.

    Inmates in cells across from the dayroom watched the attack, among them a convict named Charles Bisesi, 67, who saw Mr. Williams pitched face-first onto the floor. He saw guards kick Mr. Williams in the head and face, and strike him with their heavy wooden batons. Mr. Bisesi estimated that Mr. Williams had been kicked up to 50 times, and struck with a dozen more blows from nightsticks, thwacks delivered with such force that Mr. Bisesi could hear the thud as wood hit flesh. He also heard Mr. Williams begging for his life, cries loud enough that prisoners two floors below heard them as well.
    Continue reading the main story

    A couple of minutes after the beating began, one of the guards loudly rapped his baton on the floor. At the signal, more guards rushed upstairs and into the dayroom. Witnesses differed on the number. Some said that as many as 12 officers had plunged into the scrum. Others recalled seeing two or three. All agreed that when they were finished, Mr. Williams could not walk.

    His ordeal is the subject of an unprecedented trial scheduled to open on Monday in western New York. Three guards — Sergeant Warner and Officers Rademacher and Swack — face charges stemming from the beating that night. All three have pleaded not guilty. An examination of this case and dozens of others offers a vivid lesson in the intractable culture of prison brutality, especially given the notoriety of Attica, which entered the cultural lexicon as a synonym for prison havoc after 43 men died there in 1971 as the state suppressed an uprising by inmates. This account is based on investigative reports and court filings, as well as interviews with people on both sides of the bars at Attica, state officials and prison reform advocates. […]

    Looming over everything at Attica is the riot. The state commission that investigated the September 1971 uprising memorably described it as the bloodiest single encounter, Indian massacres aside, between Americans since the Civil War. Forty-three men died there, 89 more were wounded. Eleven of those killed were state workers, eight guards and three civilians. All but one had been held as hostages and died in a deadly hail of friendly fire after Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller ordered the authorities to retake the prison after a four-day standoff with mutinous inmates. One guard died two days earlier as a result of a beating inflicted by prisoners the day the riot erupted.

    The rest of the victims were inmates. Twenty-nine were killed by police bullets fired in the Sept. 13 retaking of the prison. Three more were executed by other inmates during the takeover for actions deemed counter to the rebellion.

    To those who work at the prison, the history of the riot is an everyday reminder of the danger that inmates, who greatly outnumber guards, could take over at any time. Mark Cunningham, an Attica sergeant whose father was killed in the retaking, tells all new recruits about the events of 1971. “I make sure it gets talked about,” Sergeant Cunningham said. “You do certain things a certain way because it wasn’t done one time and the inmates took control.”

    Attica’s special tensions were long evident to Brian Fischer, who spent 35 years working in the state prison system, the last six as corrections commissioner, before he retired in 2013. “Attica has a unique personality, in part because of the riot,” Mr. Fischer said in an interview. “There’s an historical negativity if you will,” he added. “That doesn’t go away.” […]

    Closings of any kind have been vigorously resisted by the New York State Correction Officers Police Benevolent Association, which represents the state’s 20,000 corrections officers. Partly, it is simple bread-and-butter unionism: Shutdowns mean lost jobs. Former Gov. Eliot Spitzer said he had encountered stiff union resistance when he tried to trim the state’s vast prison facilities. “Their political heft in districts where prisons were significant employers drove the opposition,” he said.

    But recent closings, the union says, have led to inmate overcrowding and understaffing of guards, making their jobs far more dangerous. As proof, the union points to the recent rise in inmate assaults on staff, which reached 747 last year. In October, union leaders rallied outside Attica, where 85 cells meant to hold a single inmate are double-bunked. “Our officers have been stabbed and suffered compound fractures by inmates,” said Michael Powers, the current union president. “The state can’t continue to downplay the situation.”

    State officials say what they call the “uptick” in inmate attacks is not linked to the closings, but have agreed to review staffing changes with the union.

    The other uptick in prison violence is in the use of force by officers. While officials are supposed to track every time a body hold, baton strike, closed fist or chemical spray is employed by guards, inmates argue that does not always happen. Still, the number of recorded incidents rose by 25 percent between 2009 and 2013, with most of them taking place in the maximum security facilities.

    Unlike Rikers Island, the huge New York City jail complex that has been roiled by revelations about the mistreatment of inmates in the past year, what occurs in the toughest state prisons has garnered little public notice. At Attica, most violent encounters between inmates and guards are handled internally. Charges are filed against the offender, a hearing is held and then a sentence is imposed, usually a hefty term in the Box. Inmates are invariably convicted. Of the 228 cases at Attica in which inmates were accused of assaulting corrections employees between 2010 and 2013, only one prisoner was found not guilty of all charges. Everyone else was sent to the Box for periods ranging from two to 16 months, records show. […]

    Had the nurse on duty the night George Williams was beaten played down his injuries, he believes the episode would have been logged as one more inmate assault on staff members. “She was a blessing,” he said. “If she hadn’t of said I needed a surgeon, I would have been dead.”

    Instead, Mr. Williams’s case took a very different route. The corrections department’s inspector general began an inquiry, and the State Police were soon called in as well. Over the following weeks, investigators asked guards, inmates and medical personnel what they had seen.
    Continue reading the main story

    Many did not want to talk about it. Under their union contract, corrections officers are obligated to answer questions only from their employers and have the right to refuse to talk to outside police agencies. State Police investigators attempted to interview 15 guards; 11 declined to cooperate.

    Inmates on C Block were reluctant to talk for their own reasons. More than two dozen said they had seen Mr. Williams marched past them and had later heard his screams. But those with the clearest view of what happened inside the dayroom balked at telling what they saw, saying they feared retaliation.

    To get their stories, the State Police had the corrections department relocate five inmates to other prisons. Only after he was moved 100 miles east to Auburn Correctional Facility did Chris Tessitore recount how he had heard officers voicing anger at the curses screamed out that night. Mr. Tessitore said he had seen a guard aiming kicks at Mr. Williams on the floor but had averted his gaze when an officer looked in his direction. The screaming, he said, “went on for three to five minutes.”

    An inmate named Alex Harris, who was relocated to Downstate Correctional Facility in Dutchess County, said that as he watched the beating, a guard had yelled to “get off the gates” — a command issued when officers do not want an audience. He said he had turned away to watch TV, but he still heard Mr. Williams pleading for his life.

    A month after the beating, just as corrections officers and residents of the village of Attica were marking the anniversary of the 1971 riot, the corrections department issued formal “Notices of Discipline” to five officers. The notices sought their dismissal for using excessive force on Mr. Williams, submitting false documentation and lying to the inspector general. […]

    Union leaders denounced the charges. “They did not go after this guy,” the union’s western regional representative, Al Mothershed, told a Rochester television station. “They did not beat him up intentionally. They used the amount of force that was necessary to gain control of this inmate and keep him from attaining a weapon.”

    State corrections officials acknowledged in a statement that the department had referred the case to prosecutors, but stopped short of condemning the attack. The indictments, it said, were “troubling.”

    The choice to refer the case to law enforcement was made by Mr. Fischer, the corrections commissioner at the time. “This was something too obvious to ignore,” he said. The “beat-down,” he added, was the worst such incident on his watch. “It was clear to me that a number of officers had acted together. It wasn’t something that spontaneously occurred, like in the middle of the hall.”

    Mr. Williams was sitting in another prison dayroom when news of the arrests came on television. “I almost passed out,” he recalled. […]

    The surest way to catch officers using excessive force is on camera, but at Attica, there are few. Unlike most state maximum security facilities, the cameras are confined to the mess halls, the Box and — in a bid to catch drug smuggling — the visiting room.

    Inmates have long sought cameras in the corridors, said James Conway, a former Attica superintendent whose father and uncle worked as guards at the prison. “They suspect there is physical abuse and the cameras will protect them,” said Mr. Conway, adding that he never had the money to install them. Pressed about Attica’s dearth of cameras, Mr. Annucci, the acting commissioner, said some 500 would be installed there this year. […]

    George Williams knew about Attica’s history but had not concerned himself with it. “I wasn’t there for that,” he said during an interview in November in a New Brunswick restaurant. Now 32, he is a good-looking man, with a broad face, wavy, close-cropped hair and a bright smile. As he talked, he dabbed steadily at his nose, a residual effect of the sinus damage from the beating three years ago. Other mementos included a left eye more sunken than the right, and a leg that, he said, “is always bothering me.” Less visible are the headaches and nightmares. “I still can’t sleep,” he said.

    After he was released from the hospital, Mr. Williams was sent to a different maximum security prison, near Buffalo. He finished his sentence in January 2012 but was soon behind bars again, in New Jersey, for a probation violation. Doctors there said he had post-traumatic stress disorder after he described flashbacks and waking from nightmares in a sweat.

    He still does not know why he was singled out at Attica. “I was doing my time,” he said. “I was ready to go.” He was released from jail in New Jersey just before Thanksgiving. His crimes, he said, were a product of being “young and dumb.” In the hospital, he worried that if he died, his family would assume it was “because of something I did.”

    Mr. Williams is now trying to raise money for barbering school tuition. Of the criminal case against the Attica guards, he expressed wonder that it was still active. “I don’t want it to be a cliché, but I just hope that justice is served,” he said. “That’s it.”

    The trial is scheduled to begin on Monday. The defendants — Sergeant Warner and Officers Rademacher and Swack — have retained some of western New York’s top criminal defense lawyers, thanks in part to help from fellow officers. The fourth guard, Officer Hibsch, was given immunity to testify, but lawyers for the defendants have indicated that they are not concerned with his testimony. “There were all kinds of plea offers,” Norman Effman, who represents Officer Rademacher, said. “Our clients could walk away if they were willing to resign their jobs. They maintain their innocence; they did nothing wrong.”

    Officer Hibsch returned to work at Attica after an arbitrator ruled in May that his use of force in the dayroom on the day that Mr. Williams was beaten was “not unjustified.” After hearing from 39 witnesses, including Mr. Williams and several other C Block inmates, the arbitrator ordered Mr. Hibsch reinstated with back pay. Corrections officials said that, as a personnel matter, they could not discuss the decision.

    Inmates still incarcerated at Attica said there were high hopes that the case would spur changes in how the prison was policed. Those hopes have since ebbed. The only way to get attention, they said, is something dramatic. “We feel Albany doesn’t give a damn,” one inmate said, voicing despair rather than menace. “No one on the outside is going to change anything. Guys say: ‘We need a riot. It’s the only way to stop it.’ ”

    And for the kids, First-graders are changing the complexion of St. Louis area schools

    In many ways, the group isn’t much different from first-graders 23 years ago when Thompson started teaching at Wyland Elementary School, a brown brick building surrounded by middle-class bungalows and ranch-style homes in the Ritenour School District in north St. Louis County.

    But they represent an extraordinary shift taking place in public schools throughout much of St. Louis County. In the next decade, they and their peers will transform the complexion of many of the region’s schools from predominantly white classrooms to a mosaic of races, cultures and backgrounds.

    Inside Thompson’s room, the morning announcements had just wrapped up. The children had finished saying the Pledge of Allegiance.

    It was Edwin’s turn to read from his journal. The boy with short-cropped dark hair struggled with several words as he looked at the lines he’d written describing his school and his teacher.

    “He speaks Spanish,” said Kyng Jackson in a loud whisper, across the table.

    “I speak even more Spanish,” said Jorge Bejarano, who speaks Spanish at home. “And more English.”

    When Thompson began teaching at Wyland, her students were predominantly white and middle class. Some of them were second- or third-generation Wyland students, like Damian Salmieri, a boy with light brown hair whose mother attended elementary school here.

    But the rapid suburbanization of black, Hispanic and Asian families, coupled with a decline in the white population, is diversifying this school and others. In St. Louis County as a whole, minority groups are gaining in numbers as the white population drops.

    The transformation is manifest first in the earliest grades. Immigration and higher birth rates among some minority groups means that young children are more diverse than the general population. As those children age, the racial makeup of all schools — and ultimately the population as a whole — changes.

    It’s a phenomenon happening across much of the St. Louis area, in districts stretching from Collinsville to St. Charles, where most first grades are among the most diverse groups of children the region has ever seen.

    The increasing diversity is embraced by many educators who say putting children of different races, cultures and backgrounds into the same classroom ultimately reduces prejudice and leads to richer learning. […]

    New diversity also bringing challenges — ones that could make it more difficult for the region’s schools to ensure that all children succeed.

    In Missouri, black and Hispanic children continue to lag behind white children in academic achievement. They’re more likely to end up in remedial courses in college.

    Graduation rates for black and Hispanic students lag behind white students by 10 and 15 percentage points, respectively. Less than two of every three students who speak English as a second language make it to graduation. This is partly because children of new immigrants often quit school to get a job and help support their families.

    Even as the racial population shift is diversifying many of the region’s white classrooms, those changes are largely bypassing and further segregating most African-American students.

    More than half of black first-graders in St. Louis County and more than two-thirds of those in the city of St. Louis attend schools where 90 percent of their peers are also black, according to a Post-Dispatch analysis of state education data.

    Schools with large concentrations of black children also have the highest concentrations of poverty in the region.

    “It’s that combination where you’re seeing effects that are not positive,” said William Tate, vice provost for Graduate Education at Washington University. “What you have to worry about is, are these kids surrounded by the broader opportunity to develop as young people who can be productive?”

    At a two-day seminar last month at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, educators from several area school districts attempted to tackle the challenge of serving the rising numbers of disadvantaged students.

    “It’s a wake-up call,” said Anjale Welton, an assistant professor of education policy at the University of Illinois. “You’re going to have to engage in training on how to shift classroom practices, how you teach, how you connect and relate to parents.”

    Some more at the link.

  136. rq says

    Interlude: Ornithology 9 Rules for the Black Birdwatcher

    1. Be prepared to be confused with the other black birder. Yes, there are only two of you at the bird festival. Yes, you’re wearing a name tag and are six inches taller than he is. Yes, you will be called by his name at least half a dozen times by supposedly observant people who can distinguish gull molts in a blizzard.

    2. Carry your binoculars — and three forms of identification — at all times. You’ll need the binoculars to pick that tufted duck out of the flock of scaup and ring-necks. You’ll need the photo ID to convince the cops, FBI, Homeland Security, and the flashlight-toting security guard that you’re not a terrorist or escaped convict.

    3. Don’t bird in a hoodie. Ever.

    4. Nocturnal birding is a no-no. Yeah, so you’re chasing that once-in-a-lifetime rare owl from Outer Mongolia that’s blowing up your twitter alert. You’re a black man sneaking around in the nether regions of a suburban park — at dusk, with a spotting scope. Guess what? You’re going to have some prolonged conversations with the authorities. Even if you look like Forest Whitaker — especially if you look like Forest Whitaker.

    5. Black birds — any black birds — are your birds. The often-overlooked blackbirds, family Icteridae, are declining across the board. Then there are the other birds that just happen to be black — crows and their kin are among the smartest things with feathers and wings. They’re largely ignored because of their ubiquity and often persecuted because of stereotype and misunderstanding. Sounds like profiling to me.

    6. The official word for an African American in cryptic clothing — camo or otherwise — is incognegro. You are a rare bird, easy to see but invisible just the same. Until you snap off the identification of some confusing fall warbler by chip note as it flies overhead at midnight, or a juvie molting shorebird in heavy fog, you will just be a token.

    7. Want to see the jaws of blue-blooded birders drop faster than a northern gannet into a shoal of shad? Tell them John James Audubon, the patron saint of American ornithology, had some black blood coursing through his veins. Old JJ’s mom was likely part Haitian. Hey, if we can claim Tiger Woods . . .

    8. Use what’s left of your black-president momentum on the largely liberal birder crowd to step to the front of the spotting-scope line to view that wayward smew that wandered into U.S. waters from Eurasia. Tell them you’re down with Barack, and they’ll move even more to the left to let you look at the doomed duck. After all, you stand about as much of a chance of seeing a smew again as you do of seeing another black president.

    9. You’re an endangered species — extinction looms. You know all the black birders like siblings and can count them on two hands. You’re afraid to have lunch with them all because a single catastrophe could wipe the species from the face of the earth. There’s talk and posturing about diversifying the hobby, but the money is not where the mouths are. People buy binoculars that would fund the economy of a small Caribbean island — where, coincidentally, lots of neotropical migratory birds winter, and where local people of color might contribute to their conservation if more birders cared about more than counting birds.

    NYPD Bruised, audio at the link.

    Following the death of Eric Garner on Staten Island during an arrest for selling loose cigarettes, WNYC began looking into the NYPD’s use of force and record of disciplining problem cops. The reporting found low-level arrests can often spiral dangerously out of control — a major concern for a department that has prioritized the aggressive policing of low-level offenses. And when individual officers do show a propensity for violence, the department has often failed to act.

    In Maryland, a first: Md. National Guard leadership takes historic turn

    Maj. Gen. Linda L. Singh took command of the Maryland National Guard on Saturday, the first woman and the first African-American to hold the position, saying, “This is absolutely the best job I could hope for in the military and the best state in which to do it.”

    With some 250 uniformed troops in formation before her and hundreds of guests seated on both sides of the podium at the Fifth Regiment Armory in Baltimore, Singh, a 50-year-old combat veteran of Kosovo and Afghanistan, said, “When I think of the journey we have ahead, it’s going to be tough, it’s going to be challenging.” […]

    The significance of an African-American woman taking command of the guard was not lost on retired Lt. Gen. James F. Fretterd, who served as adjutant general from 1987 to 2003, and presided over a push to bring more diversity to the officer corps. He recalled a meeting with officers that took place at the Fifth Regiment Armory soon after he took command.

    “I looked around the room — there was no woman above the rank of captain,” said Fretterd, 84, who lives in Denton. “I said we’ve got to change this with minorities and women. … I had four women who became general officers under my watch.”

    There’s more to do, he said. “If it wasn’t for the women and minorities, we wouldn’t have an Army, we wouldn’t have an Air Force.”

    Asked to describe the meaning of the day, he called it a “dream come true.”

    Former Maryland Del. Clarence “Tiger” Davis of East Baltimore said he worked with Fretterd during his time in the legislature on getting more women and minorities into the Maryland National Guard.

    “What you’re seeing is the culmination” of those efforts, said Davis, 72. “It started back in the mid ’80s and here we are. … Who could have imagined where we’d be today?”

    Congratulations to Singh, and wow, awesome attitude – and action – from Fretterd.

    There was another shooting in St Louis yesterday, I will have more on it later – for now, here’s this. Suspect in Wellston police shooting dies of wounds

    According to the news release from St. Louis County Police, the shooting occurred just after the officer pulled over a vehicle at Morton and Page avenues for a traffic violation at 10:15 a.m.

    As the officer was questioning the driver, a passenger climbed into the driver’s seat and attempted to drive away, according to the release.

    The officer got into the vehicle on the passenger side, and struggled with the suspect. The vehicle was traveling fast and the officer — “in fear for his life” — shot at the suspect three times, the release said.

    The suspect lost control of the vehicle two blocks north of the initial stop at Morton and Chatham avenues.

    Umm, again, I take issue with an officer’s intelligence when the officer deems it a smart move to fire at the driver of a speeding car. In fear for his life – for fucks’ sakes. Seriously.
    And here is the official statement on the killing of Thomas Allen by STL PD yesterday. Read this. B asically what it says in the article, but in more police-official sounding language.

    Map: 16 states have more people in prisons and jails than college housing. This keeps cropping up as true and then untrue…

    One possible takeaway is that states keeping more inmates in prisons and jails than people in college housing arguably have poor priorities. College is still a great investment, with multiple studies showing higher education significantly increases people’s wages and economic output. Mass incarceration in the US long ago hit diminishing returns that make it an ineffective crime-fighting tool; an analysis by the Pew Public Safety Performance Project found that the 10 states that shrunk incarceration rates the most over the past five years saw bigger drops in crime than the 10 states where incarceration rates most grew.

    But the map doesn’t show that there are fewer people in college than jail and prison. The entire US corrections population, which includes people in jail, prison, parole, and probation, totaled 6.9 million in 2013. In comparison, about 19.5 million people were enrolled for college that same year — but most students live off-campus.

    So while criminal justice experts generally agree it’s long past time to reduce the number of Americans in jails and prisons, the map isn’t a perfect comparison. But it at least shows the US has a lot of jail and prison inmates.

  137. rq says

    Shoveling a Path Out of Prison

    Boston Mayor Marty Walsh has actually praised the use of current inmates as “an important component to successful re-entry.” There’s no question that it’s a cheap solution. After all, the median wage in state prisons is 20 cents per hour. Those who have already paid their time, by contrast, would need to be paid the prevailing wage. And the union workers performing the same tasks are paid $30 an hour.
    […]

    Fortunately, there is a better way to make work programs like emergency snow-shoveling beneficial for all.

    How can states do this?

    A regular government jobs program for formerly-incarcerated people could play a valuable role in maintaining public areas and infrastructure while assisting the transition from the prison to the community. Such a program would also provide a readily available workforce that could respond in moments of catastrophe.

    Better yet, extending the program to provide real jobs to those who are about to be released would help them build a nest-egg to transition back into society. Pay all these workers the prevailing wage, and they will be able to afford rent and other necessities for successful reentry. And set up a payment plan so that former prisoners can pay back their debts, such as fines owed to the courts, once they are back up on their feet.

    Such a payment plan for fees and fines would represent a big upgrade over the usual work-release programs. Financial obligations are usually deducted from the paycheck up front, and debt can follow formerly incarcerated people around for years. This erodes their incentive to work, makes crime more tempting, and absorbs money that might otherwise procure stable housing and other basic necessities.

    People who have been incarcerated—mostly minority men with low-incomes and little schooling —continue to pay a price long after they have left prison. They often enter prison with close to nothing and return to society with little money to get established after incarceration.

    Compounding the problem, they also face significant barriers to finding employment upon release.
    […]

    Many former prisoners can’t support families or afford housing, and can’t shell out enough money to pay the criminal justice system’s numerous fees and fines. In a vicious cycle, some of these men and women are sent back to jail when they fail to pay. Given all of this, it’s not surprising that almost 70% of those released will get re-arrested.

    Worse yet, the consequences of incarceration extend far beyond the person imprisoned. The families and the children of those who go to prison also suffer from the negative financial effects of incarceration. This often leads to eviction of families from their homes. Matt Desmond of Harvard University calls these the “twin destructive forces” of incarceration and eviction. In fact, according research done by Christopher Wildeman of Cornell University and Sara Wakefield of Rutgers University, paternal incarceration more than doubles the risk of homelessness for African-American children and increases the chances that these kids will be poor and commit crimes themselves.

    This cycle ensnares taxpayers, who end up footing larger bills for social programs and pay for the exorbitant cost of incarceration.

    For those reasons, offering much-needed public maintenance jobs to recently released prisoners and those about to be released is a wise investment. States would gain a steady workforce to maintain and upgrade infrastructure, and the flexibility to deploy it in response to catastrophic events like blizzards. These funds should be put into a new “reentry account” to help them pay for rent and basic necessities upon release, and, once they are stable, their debts to the government and others.

    A note on Cleveland and Tamir Rice, Tamir Rice ‘directly and proximately’ responsible for own police shooting death, says city

    The city of Cleveland’s defense, filed with the US district court on Friday, argues that both Rice and members of his family are to blame for any damages, injuries and losses arising from the incident. The argument lists 20 lines of defence, including that Rice did not “exercise due care to avoid injury” and that members of his family, including his mother and teenage sister, who have lodged the claim, sustained damages “caused by their own acts”.

    Due care from a 12-year-old playing with a toy gun in an open-carry state. Fuck you, Cleveland.

    Ahh, a pay audit! Baltimore Police fight release of secret pay audit

    But in new court papers filed in McWhite’s case, officials acknowledge the audit and say it “identifies named BPD employees that have had their educational pay benefits discontinued for not having the required credentials to receive said pay benefits, and who have now been referred to” internal affairs.

    The acknowledgement comes from an attorney for the Police Department who wants the audit kept confidential. Its existence apparently was initially confirmed by a special prosecutor who was brought in to handle McWhite’s case, due to personal ties between State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby and McWhite. A spokeswoman for the office said in January that Mosby and McWhite are friends.

    City Councilman Brandon Scott, vice chair of the public safety committee, said the agency should “absolutely” release the audit.

    “If there’s been an audit done on the use of city taxpayer funds to see how people are earning city taxpayer dollars, people should have the right to see it,” he said.

    The Police Department did not respond to a call and an email seeking comment.

    McWhite’s attorney, Ivan Bates, wants the audit because he is arguing that McWhite is being selectively prosecuted because he is black. No other officers have been criminally charged as a result of the review.

    “It is the defendant’s understanding that other similarly situated white officers who have been accused of receiving a fraudulent educational incentive by the internal affairs division have, in fact, not been charged with theft as Lieutenant Colonel McWhite, a black male, has been in the instant matter,” Bates wrote in a motion seeking the audit.

    Wait wait wait, police department racially discriminating against their own? Noooooooo.

    Private police carry guns and make arrests, and their ranks are swelling. Private police? Like those people who showed up in Ferguson in November?

    The stop was routine police work, except for one fact: Youlen is not a Manassas officer. The citation came courtesy of the private force he created that, until recently, he called the “Manassas Junction Police Department.”

    He is its chief and sole officer.

    He is a force of one.

    And he is not alone. Like more and more Virginians, Youlen gained his police powers using a little-known provision of state law that allows private citizens to petition the courts for the authority to carry a gun, display a badge and make arrests. The number of “special conservators of the peace” — or SCOPs, as they are known — has doubled in Virginia over the past decade to roughly 750, according to state records.

    The growth is mirrored nationally in the ranks of private police, who increasingly patrol corporate campuses, neighborhoods and museums as the demand for private security has increased and police services have been cut in some places.

    The trend has raised concerns in Virginia and elsewhere, because these armed officers often receive a small fraction of the training and oversight of their municipal counterparts. Arrests of private police officers and incidents involving SCOPs overstepping their authority have also raised concerns.

    The Virginia legislature approved a bill Friday increasing the training and regulation of SCOPs. The private officers would now be required to train for 130 hours, up from 40 hours — less than the state requires for nail technicians, auctioneers and security guards.

    In neighboring D.C., a similar designation called “special police” requires 40 hours of training. Maryland officials leave instruction to the discretion of employers but have no requirements. Other states have similar systems. […]

    SCOPs are free to call themselves “police” in Virginia, ­although the new bill would ­require court approval. Youlen recently dropped “police department” from the name of his operation, anticipating that lawmakers would restrict use of the term. It is now called Manassas Junction LLC.

    Youlen, who is a former police officer, said he sees his work as a complement to the Manassas force, not a replacement for it. He said he provides the type of intensive policing, hands-on engagement with the community and attention to small problems that the city simply doesn’t have the resources or manpower to provide.

    “I’m a part-time police officer and a part-time advocate,” Youlen said of his work. “And I would hope a part-time role model and steady security presence for these communities.” […]

    In another incident in 2012, a SCOP on a motorcycle with flashing lights and various law enforcement-style stickers pulled over a Virginia State Police special agent driving on I-64 near the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, according to court records.

    The SCOP asked the officer why he was going so fast. The officer replied, “Who are you?” and flashed his badge, according to court records. The SCOP then rode off.

    The officer said the man on the motorcycle was likely a SCOP named Michael Tynan, who runs a security officer training academy in Virginia Beach.

    Portsmouth police questioned Tynan after he was seen conducting another traffic stop in 2013, according to the court documents. He told officers his SCOP status allowed him to perform traffic stops. He also said he was a retired state trooper but later admitted he failed out of the academy.

    The Virginia Attorney General’s Office moved to strip Tynan of his SCOP commission in Portsmouth in 2013, and Tynan agreed to surrender it.

    In an interview, Tynan said he was unaware of the allegations and would have challenged them if he had known about them. “I categorically deny these things,” Tynan said.

    The government’s motion to vacate Tynan’s SCOP commission in Portsmouth said he was “unfit for an appointment,” but state records show Tynan is still registered as a SCOP in Virginia Beach. […]

    To become a SCOP in Virginia, an individual must register with the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services. That requires the applicant to pass a criminal background check and an alcohol and drug test. The new bill ups the training requirement to 130 hours for armed SCOPs — still far less than the 580 to 1,200 hours required of municipal police officers in the state.

    The individual then petitions a circuit court to be commissioned with the sponsorship of an employer.

    Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe is expected to sign the bill increasing training and regulation for SCOPs. Sen. Thomas K. Norment Jr., who sponsored it, said he would like to eventually bar SCOPs from calling themselves police and using flashing lights. The current bill allows them to do both, with the permission of the courts.

    “I’m pleased with the progress, but there is still some work to do,” Norment said.

    Poorly trained, armed vigilantes out on the streets? Sounds good to me.

    Man, 107, slain in police shootout in Arkansas months after telling cops he’d rather die than go back to son-in-law’s house: report. I’m just going to leave that headline there like that.

    And here’s a new site up that might get interesting – it lets you play with data! Or at least compare data. Mapping Police Violence, it is called, and that is what it does!

    On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown Jr. was murdered by Officer Darren Wilson, sparking nationwide protests against police killings of black people. This map, a project of WeTheProtesters[dot]org, bears witness to the black men and women who have been killed at the hands of law enforcement in 2014. And while a focus on police killings cannot capture the full scale of the violence our communities face at the hands of police, we hope this data helps communities better understand the problem and begin to make progress towards addressing it. […]

    o At least 1175 people were killed by police in 2014. 302 (26%) were black.

    o Black people were killed by police at 2x the rate of their representation in the general population.

    o At least 56 unarmed black people were killed by police, more than all other races combined.

    o Police killed at least 14 more black people in 2014 than in 2012, an increase of 5%. Police killings increased despite a drop in crime.

    o Where you live matters. A black person in St. Louis is 4x more likely to be killed by police than a black person in New York City. A black person in Florida is more than 2.5x more likely to be killed by police than a black person in Georgia.

    o It doesn’t have to be this way. One black person was killed nationwide in Canada in 2014. There are more black people in Canada than Missouri.

    *ahem* I’d just like to note that, in Canada, those black people are spread over a much larger area. But I suppose the point still (sort of) stands.
    Anyway, there’s a video and charts at the link and from what I’ve seen on twitter, there’s a lot of interesting comparisons to make – Florida is the most dangerous state for black people, and more shooting happen in St Louis than New York (for example). Go, explore!

  138. rq says

    Chilling Video Shows Cop Shooting And Killing Homeless Man In West Monroe, Louisiana

    Officials have released the chilling video footage of a tragic incident dating back to December 4, 2014. The shocking video shows a West Monroe, Louisiana, police officer shooting a homeless man dead outside a convenience store. According to KNOE News, the police officer who was behind the incident has been identified as Officer Jody LeDoux. The officer is currently standing trial at a Louisiana court and has been charged with one count of negligent homicide. The homeless man killed by LeDoux was later identified as Raymond Keith Martinez. The incident happened in early December on the store located on 7th Street in West Monroe.

    LeDoux has pleaded not guilty to the charges, although looking at the footage, it is difficult to defend his actions.While all the facts of the case are not known, LeDoux has found support from several of his colleagues from the West Monroe Police Department. LeDoux is next scheduled to appear in court on May 19, 2015.

    The video footage shows officer LeDoux arriving at the parking lot of the convenience store, where there are several other people standing. Later, the video cuts to the part where LeDoux is clearly seen using his gun on Raymond. While the footage seems blurry, in the video, Jody is seen shooting Raymond at least four times, after which the man falls to the ground. It is unclear as to what Raymond was doing at the time of the shooting. From the video, it didn’t seem he was acting overtly aggressive. Lots of facts pertaining to the circumstances in which the homeless man was shot dead, however, remain a mystery.

    Compare that to this: VIDEO: LAPD shot & killed a homeless man held down by two other cops, just hours ago: There’s a link to a Facebook video there, but it will also appear in an LA Times articles I’ll have up later.

    Racism: not just against blacks. Texas lawmaker suggests Asians adopt easier names

    Brown suggested that Asian-Americans should find a way to make their names more accessible.

    “Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” Brown said.

    Brown later told Ko: “Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”

    Democratic Chairman Boyd Richie said Republicans are trying to suppress votes with a partisan identification bill and said Brown “is adding insult to injury with her disrespectful comments.”

    Brown spokesman Jordan Berry said Brown was not making a racially motivated comment but was trying to resolve an identification problem.

    SHE SAYS SHE’S NOT RACIST, GODDAMMIT!! :P

    Map: European colonialism conquered every country in the world but these five

    As you can see, just about every corner of the globe was colonized outright or was dominated under various designations like “protectorate” or “mandate,” all of which are indicated in green. This includes the entirety of the Americas (French Guiana is incorrectly labeled as part of Europe due a technical issue, but make no mistake, it was colonized) and all of Africa save for little Liberia. More on Liberia later. The Middle East and Asia were divided up as well.

    Some countries instead fell under “spheres of influence,” marked in yellow, in which a European power would declare that country or some part of it subject to their influence, which was a step removed from but in practice not all that distinct from conquering it outright. Iran, for example, was divided between British and Russian sphere of influence, which meant that the European powers owned exclusive rights to Iranian oil and gas in their areas, among other things. […]

    There are only four countries that escaped European colonialism completely. Japan and Korea successfully staved off European domination, in part due to their strength and diplomacy, their isolationist policies, and perhaps their distance. Thailand was spared when the British and French Empires decided to let it remained independent as a buffer between British-controlled Burma and French Indochina. Japan, however, colonized both Korea and Thailand itself during its early-20th-century imperial period.

    Then there is Liberia, which European powers spared because the United States backed the Liberian state, which was established in the early 1800s by freed American slaves who had decided to move to Africa. The Liberian project was fraught — the Americans who moved there ruled as a privileged minority, and the US and European powers shipped former slaves there rather than actually account for their enslavement — but it escaped European domination.

    There is also debate as to whether Ethiopia could be considered the sixth country never subjugated by European colonialism. Italy colonized neighboring countries, and Ethiopia ceded several territories to Italian colonization as part of an 1889 treaty. The treaty was also intended to force Ethiopia to cede its foreign affairs to Italy — a hallmark of colonial subjugation — but the Amharic version of the treaty excluded this fact due to a mistranslation, leading to a war that Italy lost. Later, Italy conquered Ethiopia in 1935 and annexed it the next year, but this lasted only until 1941. While some consider this period of Italian rule to be a function of colonialism, others argue that it’s better understood as part of World War Two and thus no more Italian colonization than the Nazi conquest of Poland was German colonization — although it could be certainly be argued that these fascist expansions were in fact a form of colonialism, as many eastern Europeans might.

    German colonialization used to be a thing (13th century and after), but it kind of stayed in Europe for the most part.

    It starts early. LeBron James Wants College Coaches To Stop Recruiting His 10-Year-Old Son

    LeBron James said Tuesday that his 10-year-old son, LeBron James Jr., has already received a number of offers to play college basketball, and he’s not pleased about it.

    “Yeah, he’s already got some offers from colleges,” James said, according to Fox Sport Ohio. “It’s pretty crazy. It should be a violation. You shouldn’t be recruiting 10-year-old kids.”

    James didn’t name any schools specifically when he said his son had received some offers, but a number of college coaches are already, uh, putting out feelers and making connections with his son, who also goes by Bronny.

    Thad Matta, the heach coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes basketball team, for one, said in October — when Bronny was still only 9 years old — that he “will be” on the coach’s radar in the future. (James has a well-established link with the university.) […]

    But it’s likely that Bronny has yet to qualify as a “prospective student-athlete,” a technical NCAA term mostly applied to high school-level athletes that institutes stricter recruiting rules. That’s because Bronny hasn’t even reached middle school yet.

    Of course, that hasn’t stopped the rankers from ranking him among the best players of his age group, at least according to WKYC, an NBC affiliate in the Cleveland area. […]

    Regardless, it’s highly likely that James mentioning any “offers” his son has received made the schools offering those offers incredibly, incredibly nervous.

    ‘Shut Down Homan Square’: Anonymous, Black Lives Matter swarm Chicago police ‘black site’

    Organizer Travis McDermott said Saturday’s “Shut Down Homan Square” protest was one of several being planned as far away as Los Angeles.

    “Hopefully with the presence we expect to have, that will put a little bit of pressure to say, ‘Hey, look – this isn’t going to go away,” he said.

    On Friday night, campaigners associated with the Occupy and Anonymous collectives took to Twitter , Instagram and other social-media platforms with the hashtag #Gitmo2Chicago to decry allegations of what users alternatively labeled as a “secret prison” and “torture soon coming to a city near you” .

    Six people and multiple Chicago attorneys came forward to the Guardian this week with detailed accounts of police holding suspects and witnesses for sustained periods of detention inside Homan Square, without public records, access to attorneys or being read their most basic rights – involving what they said included shackling, physical abuse and being “disappeared” from legal counsel and family. The Guardian’s recent investigation into Chicago police brutality began the week before, with a two-part account of the tactics of Detective Richard Zuley, who went from Chicago homicide investigator to Guantánamo Bay torturer .

    The Chicago police department, in its only official statement on the swirling allegations , denied the Guardian’s reporting on Tuesday, without giving specifics. In a report on the Guardian’s reporting published on Friday night, the Chicago Tribune characterized local attorneys’ perception of the statement as “laughable”.

    Local and national organizers, meanwhile, have zeroed in on Emanuel, who on Thursday night – two days after being forced into an extended campaign in which policing has been a major issue – made his first statements about the Homan Square row.

    “That’s not true,” Emanuel said of the Guardian’s reporting, on the local public television program Chicago Tonight. “We follow the rules.”

    Emanuel has not responded to detailed questions from the Guardian, sent on Wednesday. Another set of questions sent on Friday, requesting comment on human-rights group requests for access to the site and an elaboration of Emanuel’s comments on Homan Square, did not receive a response despite repeated requests. […]

    Representatives from the Chicago branch of Black Lives Matter, the movement closely associated with the killings of Trayvon Martin in Florida and Michael Brown in Missouri , said they were backing the Homan Square demonstrations as part of a pattern of long-time Chicago police violence.

    “In order to uproot the systemic embedded abuse that has allowed for the creation of such ‘black sites’ like that of Homan Square as well as police torturers like that of Jon Burge, transparent and persistent investigation is the first step of many,” a statement attributed to the group read.

    Local civil-rights groups have long sought reparations relating to the notorious practices of Burge, the former Chicago police commander who was released from home custody this month and is estimated to have cost the city upwards of $100m stemming from settlements and judgments in civil-rights cases.

    A second demonstration – promoted on Facebook with the title “Reparations Not Black Sites” – was set for Monday evening near Emanuel’s office and endorsed by Black Lives Matter Chicago, which was seeking “unrestricted access” to Homan Square.

    Another event, in Los Angeles on Sunday, cited the Guardian’s reporting as a spark for further action.

    “Some fear this may be a ripple effect,” the event’s Facebook page read, “caused by the National Defense Authorization Act, which allows local police departments as well as the US military to detain Americans indefinitely should the state label you a ‘homegrown terrorist’.”

    Politicians from Washington to Chicago called for inquiries by the US justice department and Emanuel’s office into the allegations at Homan Square after the Guardian’s investigation surfaced earlier this week.

    The local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) told the Guardian on Friday that it was still “vetting” allegations as more people came forward to both the Guardian and the Intercept late this week.

    “Right now what we are looking to do is establish credibility by getting others who have been affected, and the protest will allow for others to come forward,” said Chicago attorney Billy Mills, who said he found the Chicago police statement on Homan Square to be “vague” and “missing specific details”.

  139. rq says

    Here it is: LAPD fatal shooting of man caught on tape

    Smith said the officers approached the man and made contact with him, at which point he “began fighting and physically resisting the officers.” The officers attempted to take him into custody and at one point, attempted to use a Taser that Smith said was “ineffective.”

    The man continued to resist police, Smith said, and the man and some of the officers fell to the ground.

    “At some point in there, a struggle over one of the officer’s weapons occurred,” Smith said. “At that point an officer-involved shooting happened.”

    Two officers and a sergeant fired at the man, who was pronounced dead at the scene, Smith said. It was unclear how many times the officers fired, although at least five shots can be heard on the video recording that captured the shooting.

    No other gun was recovered at the scene, Smith said. It was unclear if the man had any other weapons among his possessions — investigators were still combing the scene late Sunday night.

    The man has been tentatively identified, but Smith said it was unclear if he was homeless.

    Two officers were treated and released for injuries sustained in the struggle, Smith said. The extent of those injuries was unclear.

    The woman seen in the video recording picking up an officer’s baton was detained and is expected to be arrested, Smith said. She had not been booked as of 9 p.m. Sunday, and it was unclear what charges she would face, but Smith said the arrest would stem from her picking up the baton.

    Smith said that, based on the video recording, it was unclear what the officers told the man before they fired. He said investigators would use audio enhancement software to determine what exactly was said and when.

    Protests over LAPD fatally shooting mentally ill homeless man

    Video footage of Los Angeles police officers shooting dead a homeless black man, aka Africa, has triggered an avalanche of protest on social media. The man had allegedly been just recently released after spending 10 years in a psychiatric facility.

    Footage of the incident, published on Facebook by one of the witnesses, shows a group of LAPD officers scuffling with two people. After two officers dragged one person away, others wrestled the second person to the ground. One of the officers is heard saying “Drop the gun!” About five shots can then be heard. […]

    The sound of a Taser could also be heard in the video.

    The shooting occurred in downtown Los Angeles’ Skid Row, near the Union Rescue Mission which provides a number of services to homeless people,BuzzFeedreports.

    Small #LAPD protest of today’s officer involved shooting happening at Pershing Park right now. #SkidRow

    Childhood poverty in New Orleans back at pre-Katrina levels

    The report notes that 82 percent of families with children in New Orleans have at least one working parent. But 12 percent of full-time workers earn less than $17,500 a year, compared with only 8 percent nationally. And women in the city — 48 percent of New Orleans children live in single-parent homes where there is no husband — are more likely to be in low-wage jobs. About 64,000 working women in the city earned less than $17,500 in the past year.

    The report argues that low wages, rather than family structure, are at the root of the problem, despite pointing to a strong correlation between single-parent families and poverty. It cites other research showing that decent-paying jobs are often a prerequisite for stable marriages, meaning that single-parent homes and childhood poverty both tend to spring from the same underlying cause: poor wages.

    “Indeed, as the real earnings of many Americans have declined over the past 50 years, men who have borne the brunt of these changes have been decreasingly likely to marry,” the report says.

    The Data Center also points to research showing that poverty has damaging — and lasting — effects on young brains.

    “Children in poverty are much more likely to experience exposure to violence, chronic neglect and the accumulated burdens of economic hardship,” the report says, and that can lead to “lifelong difficulties in learning, memory and self-regulation.”

    Justice Department to Fault Ferguson Police, Seeing Racial Bias in Traffic Stops

    According to several officials who have been briefed on the report’s conclusions, the report criticizes the city for disproportionately ticketing and arresting African-Americans and relying on the fines to balance the city’s budget. The report, which is expected to be released as early as this week, will force Ferguson officials to either negotiate a settlement with the Justice Department or face being sued by it on civil rights charges. Either way, the result is likely to be significant changes inside the Ferguson Police Department, which is at the center of a national debate over race and policing. [..]

    Blacks accounted for 86 percent of traffic stops in 2013 but make up 63 percent of the population, according to the most recent data published by the Missouri attorney general. And once they were stopped, black drivers were twice as likely to be searched, even though searches of white drivers were more likely to turn up contraband.

    For people in Ferguson who cannot afford to pay their tickets, routine traffic stops can become yearslong ordeals, with repeated imprisonments because of mounting fines. Such fines are the city’s second-largest source of revenue after sales tax. Federal investigators say that has provided a financial incentive to continue law enforcement policies that unfairly target African-Americans.

    In an unrelated but similar case, the Justice Department recently filed court documents in a lawsuit over whether the city of Clanton, Ala., is running a debtors’ prison. The lawsuit says city officials there keep poor people in jail simply because of their inability to pay fines.

    “Because such systems do not account for individual circumstances of the accused, they essentially mandate pretrial detention for anyone who is too poor to pay the predetermined fee,” wrote Vanita Gupta, the top civil rights prosecutor at the Justice Department, who is also supervising the Ferguson inquiry.

    Investigators do not need to prove that Ferguson’s policies are racially motivated or that the police intentionally singled out minorities. They need to show only that police tactics had a “disparate impact” on African-Americans and that this was avoidable. Nevertheless, the Justice Department’s report is expected to include a reference to a racist joke that was circulated by email among city officials, according to several law enforcement officials. [..]

    The Ferguson case will be the last in a long string of civil rights investigations into police departments that Mr. Holder has directed during his tenure. Since he became attorney general in 2009, the Justice Department has opened more than 20 such investigations and issued strong rebukes of departments in Cleveland and Albuquerque, accusing them of excessive force and unwarranted shootings.

    The Ferguson report, however, is expected to more closely resemble last summer’s report into police activities in Newark. There, as in Ferguson, the police stopped black people at a significantly higher rate than whites. “This disparity is stark and unremitting,” the Justice Department wrote in that report, which concluded that African-Americans “bear the brunt” of the city’s unconstitutional police practices.

    In some cities investigated by the Justice Department, such as Albuquerque and Portland, Ore., city officials have said they are open to making changes and quickly reaching an agreement with the department to fix problems. Others have taken a more confrontational approach, did not settle and faced a federal civil rights lawsuit. The Justice Department has four such lawsuits open, including one against Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., and another against Sheriff Terry S. Johnson of Alamance County, N.C.

    Mr. Knowles said he would not speculate on how Ferguson would respond to the report. “The City of Ferguson is going to make its decisions based on what its residents and the people in this region feel is necessary to move us forward,” he said. […]

    “I wanted the people of Ferguson to know that I personally understood that mistrust,” Mr. Holder said last summer after returning from Missouri. “I wanted them to know that while so much else may be uncertain, this attorney general and this Department of Justice stands with the people of Ferguson.”

    Comments like these attracted criticism from some police groups who said Mr. Holder was taking sides and casting aspersions on police officers. Mr. Holder has pledged that the Ferguson investigation — by far the most closely watched during his tenure — would be fair and independent. “I’m confident people will be satisfied with the results,” he said.

    Here’s a site for tracking public records requests. MuckRock brings public records requests into the 21st Century.

    MuckRock helps anyone file, track and share public records requests, using a mix of software and hands-on help to make the process as easy and transparent as possible. Originally made possible by a grant from the Sunlight Foundation, the service is now funded primarily by its users, including journalists, researchers, activists, and people who just want to better understand what their government is up to. Using MuckRock is easy, and it’s free to try it out and see if it’s a good fit for you.

    Turn your idea into a request
    The easiest way to get started is to simply file a request: Click “Create a FOIA Request” at the top right on any page, and a short form will help walk you through the required steps. MuckRock has a database of tens of thousands of government agencies and almost every single city, town and county, so when asked where you’d like to submit your request, you can generally just type the first few letters and we’ll show a list of places we have.

    It seemed relevant.

  140. rq says

    Unfortunately the rest will have to wait until after work, as work does not allow Twitter. And a good thing, too (for work productivity levels). The onslaught is onpause.

  143. rq says

    This is still ‘dated’ stuff, mostly from March 1 or thereabouts now.
    First, an event: LA. Protest. Tuesday, March 3rd.

    Ferguson is recovering. Boys and Girls Club to open in Ferguson

    Flint Fowler, the organization’s president, said the club will be housed in Ferguson Middle School, part of the Ferguson-Florissant School District. Fowler said the school provided ample space and serves students from several elementary schools, which will make the club accessible to many in the area.

    “Ferguson had been on our radar as a location where we wanted to have a presence” for years, Fowler said. After the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by then-Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, and the social unrest and protests that followed, the nonprofit Ferguson Youth Initiative approached the Boys & Girls Club about opening a location in the area.

    That was key for Fowler, who said it was important that the club be invited into the area by community members after the events following Brown’s death instead of initiating the formation process, as the club typically does. “Here we were encouraged to take a look and to be a part of the strategy to address the needs of young people,” Fowler said.

    The organization has raised enough money to operate the new location for three years — at about $500,000 a year — plus additional startup costs of about $180,000. In all, the Boys & Girls Club raised about $1.5 million to open the Ferguson club, Fowler said.

    Initially, it will have about 15 people on staff and additional volunteers, anywhere from 20 to 100, Fowler said. He expects at the outset to serve about 400 youths in the Ferguson area, aged six to 18.

    The connection between police and schools, once more: Police Chief Says Over-Policing Contributes To High Dropout Rate

    Until fall 2013, school police officers in Texas could charge students with Class C misdemeanors and issue citations, or student tickets, for behavior like chewing gum in class, the Texas Tribune reported. Now these officers are not allowed to issue tickets for noncriminal activities.

    “We shouldn’t be taking adolescent behavior and criminalizing it,” Acevedo told The Huffington Post Tuesday. Over the years, Acevedo said, police officers have “taken the place of what’s traditionally been administrators’ duties.”

    In the 2013-14 school year — the first year that police could not issue student tickets — disciplinary write-ups for skipping class were down by nearly a quarter as compared the year before, the Houston Chronicle reported. Austin had a “banner year in terms of the graduation” last year, Acevedo told HuffPost.

    “I’m convinced if we as a society followed that mindset and returned to the day that police officers are only there for safety … we’re gonna have a positive impact,” he said.

    “It’s not just good enough for Austin to do this,” Acevedo added, noting that all school districts should have a conversation about reforming their discipline policies. He said that there is a high dropout rate among students of color, and “part of that is the fact that we’re treating adolescent behavior in too many inner-city schools as criminal behavior.”

    In Texas, truancy is a criminal offense. The combination of that and the proliferation of school ticketing “did drive a large number of students into the court system,” Matt Simpson, senior policy strategist at the ACLU of Texas, told HuffPost. Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Nathan Hecht asked for an examination of the state’s criminal truancy laws last week.

    “Students that have any contact with the court system very often return to the court system,” Simpson said. The ACLU lists “policing school hallways” as a step in the school-to-prison pipeline.

    School police officers should not be discipling students, said Kevin Quinn, president of the Arizona School Resource Officers Association and former president of the National Association of School Resource Officers, a nonprofit organization that trains and provides resources for administrators and law enforcement officials on campuses.

    “There’s a definite difference between what [a school resource officer] should be doing on campus and what’s left to an administrator,” Quinn told HuffPost. “We tell [school resource officers] that from the beginning: ‘You’re not a disciplinarian and you’re not there to enforce school policy.'”

    Instead, school police officers across the country should have three duties, Quinn said. The first is to serve in case of violence or actual criminal activity on campus. The second is to go to classrooms to teach and answer questions about the law. The third is to regularly interact with students as positive mentors and trustworthy figures.

    Here’s a serving of white privilege: This Lawmaker Wants a Civil Rights Organization for White People

    A member of the Tennessee House of Representatives says she was “misunderstood” when she called for a new civil rights organization that supports white people. Rep. Sheila Butt posted a Facebook comment suggesting that “…It is time for a Council on Christian Relations and an NAAWP in this country.”

    Shelia ButtShe later said she made up the controversial acronym and explained that she was not referring to the National Association for the Advancement of White People, the group once led by white supremacist and former KKK leader David Duke.

    Butt was responding to “an open letter to Republican leaders” that urged Republican presidential candidates to “engage Muslim voters, reject Islamophobia.” Butt, who has since apologized, said her remarks were intended to mean “Western people” or “Western culture.”

    “I strongly believe that this nation is better off when we all adhere to our Christian values and beliefs,” she told her colleagues on the House floor. “…And this being divisive, and this trying to make something intentionally that was inclusive to be divisive, is something that should not happen in this body, and I am disappointed if it was misunderstood by many of you or some of you.”

    So saying ‘Western’ makes the acronym… less racist? Seriously? Because when it comes to white vs. western, it’s pretty much the same thing…

    I’m not entirely sure how to classify this one: Madonna Compares Ageism Against Her to Racism and Homophobia. As Twitter said, ‘She would.’

    The veteran pop singer likened age-discrimination to racist and homophobic comments, saying, “It’s still the one area where you can totally discriminate against somebody and talk shit. Because of their age. Only females, though. Not males. So in that respect, we still live in a very sexist society.”

    She continued: “No one would dare to say a degrading remark about being black or dare to say a degrading remark on Instagram about someone being gay. But my age — anybody and everybody would say something degrading to me. And I always think to myself, why is that accepted? What’s the difference between that and racism, or any discrimination? They’re judging me by my age. I don’t understand. I’m trying to get my head around it.”

    There’s certainly some truth to that. And a big part of this sort of ageism is sexism. But like racism and homophobia? (I don’t have the years to judge, as I don’t see it.)

    Another black actress says winning an Oscar didn’t help: Halle Berry Says Her Oscar Win Didn’t Help Her Get Better Roles.

    Berry, who can currently be seen in Frankie and Alice (a film that, despite being made in 2009, is just now being released to DVD), spoke with The Guardian about her frustration finding worthwhile roles following her Best Actress Oscar win for Monster’s Ball in 2002.

    “If anybody tells you [that] after winning an Oscar, they can pick out things that will be hits, they’re lying!” the actress says. (Something tells us she might be referring to this.)

    She also touched on the difficulty she’s endured in the biz as a woman of color—noting that, frustratingly, her skin often causes more of an issue than her age.

    “I’ve always had a hard time getting roles, being of color, so I’ve got as many available to me as I’ve always had—there’s no difference for me,” she explains. “When I was 21, it was as hard as it is now when I’m 48. For me, it’s the same [laughs grimly].”

    And as far as her still being the only black woman to ever win the Oscar for Best Actress [Ed note: How is that even possible??? UGH], Berry says the film industry has still got a ways to go in terms of accepting diversity:

    “The quality and value of our work isn’t determined by an award. I would like to see more [actors of color] recognized, absolutely, but we all need to find the win in the work, and doing our craft. The real win is when we’re not just selling stories of color, that people of color can be in everyday stories. Where we’re not saying: “These are the movies for black people.”

    Amen, Halle Berry. Seriously.

  144. rq says

    #JeremyLett is now the 5th suspect to have been shot and killed by the Tallahassee Police Department within the last year.

    Here’s another prison story. I say ‘another’ like it’s nothing, but it’s pretty… wow. Terrible. The Horrifying Truth of Life in Solitary Confinement, From People Who Lived It

    The ACLUTx collected tales of Texas inmates screaming, self-mutilating and hallucinating while in solitary confinement for its 2015 report, which asserts that such isolation not only compromises inmates’ mental health but also leads to increased crime and violence within prisons.

    Such assertions are all the more distressing in light of the fact that, as the New York Times has noted, prisoners sent to solitary confinement are often there for breaking a rule, and not for violent behavior. What’s more, these horrific stories of seclusion, desolation and abuse aren’t exclusive to Texas: Tens of thousands of people across the country are isolated in similar cells, with human contact limited to the hands of correctional officers sliding meals through door slots or, sometimes, physically harming detainees. African-Americans and Latinos are sent to solitary confinement in particularly large numbers, and these racialized groups are also subject to the harshest and most dehumanizing conditions. […]

    Mic spoke with nine people who were once held in solitary confinement, either alone or crammed with another inmate (“bunkie”) who was sent to “the hole.” While their stories and time in isolation vary, they each offer a vital glimpse into the inhumanity faced by those currently languishing in confinement cells across the U.S.

    Note: Some of these personal anecdotes contain ableist language, and some suicidal themes may be triggering. These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.

    That note is in the article, so let it be a trigger warning for what follows.
    Time in solitary ranging from 30 to 730 (!!!) days.

    After being the first African-American to be admitted to @JohnsHopkins , he taught at DCPS. #BlackHistoryMonth. That would be Kelly Miller.

    #BrandonTateBrown mom speaking in #bridgeton. Killed by @PhillyPolice #blacklivesmatter #JerameReid ;
    These cops are rolling eyes about Days raping a woman. #blacklivesmatter #justiceforjerame #JerameReid

    University of Chicago offers $1 million for best idea to stem youth violence

    More than suicide or heart disease, HIV or unintentional injuries, homicide has claimed the lives of more young African-American males than anything else.

    In an effort to change that narrative, the University of Chicago Crime Lab has teamed up with the MacArthur Foundation and Get In Chicago to offer up to $1 million for the best idea or ideas to combat youth violence.

    “This is not an intractable problem, but we have not made enough progress,” said Roseanna Ander, executive director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab and Urban Education Lab.

    Organizers of the design competition said they are looking for imaginative solutions to the complex issue. The goal is to improve life outcomes of the young people who walk the city’s streets, attend its schools and play in its parks.

    The deadline to submit plans is fast approaching. All letters of interest have to be in by Monday, after which a limited number of applicants will be asked to file full proposals. The awards will be announced in late May.

    Plans should focus on Chicago youths ages 13 to 18. The hope, Ander said, is that researchers can use the data collected in tandem with other studies to tease out the common elements of effective programs, whether they be increasing school engagement or understanding the role of a positive adult in a young person’s life.

    “We really need to have a variety of approaches that meet different sets of needs,” Ander said. “No one of them is going to be the slam-dunk, but hopefully, collectively, there will be a portfolio of strategies that can help make the quantum leap we need to make, not just in Chicago but in lots of other cities that are struggling mightily with this problem.”

    I have mixed feelings. Obviously it’s a good thing to try to solve.
    But I’m a bit bothered about the ‘black-on-black crime’ aspect of the initiative, esp. as it focuses only on (straight?) black men… and how it seems like they’re ignoring a whole body of research already conducted, showing how things like reducing poverty, stable housing and access to decent education can reduce violence among youth.
    Maybe it’s just me.

  145. rq says

    Black people are lazy moochers, living on those food stamps? Not really: Who Gets Food Stamps? White People, Mostly

    Gene Alday, a Republican member of the Mississippi state legislature, apologized last week for telling a reporter that all the African-Americans in his hometown of Walls, Mississippi, are unemployed and on food stamps.

    “I come from a town where all the blacks are getting food stamps and what I call ‘welfare crazy checks,'” Alday said to a reporter for The Clarion-Ledger, a Mississippi newspaper, earlier this month. “They don’t work.”

    Nationally, most of the people who receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are white. According to 2013 data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program, 40.2 percent of SNAP recipients are white, 25.7 percent are black, 10.3 percent are Hispanic, 2.1 percent are Asian and 1.2 percent are Native American.

    A few charts and more information and details at the link.

    Study: lighter-skinned black and Hispanic people look smarter to white people

    There’s a broad assumption that this phenomenon — a preference for light skin over dark and accompanying discrimination — is contained within the black community and other communities of color. But now, research suggests that some white people buy into colorism, too.

    In a new study published in the journal Social Currents, Villanova University’s Lance Hannon found that, all things being equal, white interviewers deemed lighter-skinned blacks and Hispanics more intelligent than darker-skinned people who had identical educational achievement, vocabularies, scores on a political test, and a variety of other factors.

    The results provide good reason to believe that what Hannon calls “white colorism” exists. And they raise concerns about what unfair, complexion-based beliefs about who’s smart and who’s not can have in every area of American life. […]

    And in fact, colorism in various areas of American life has been studied before. In his write up of the new research, Pacific Standard’s Tom Jacobs summed up the findings of previous studies on the topic, with conclusions including:

    – lighter-skinned black men with bachelor’s degrees have a distinct advantage in job application processes over black men who have MBAs;
    – lighter skinned black women in North Carolina received lighter prison sentences than their darker peers;
    – African-Americans with more education are remembered as being lighter than they actually are.

    But Hannon’s new research is the first to focus on how colorism determines white people’s perceptions of the intelligence of people of color.

    He analyzed data from the 2012 American National Election Study, which is a face-to-face survey on social and political values and opinion. Interviewers are required to describe each subject’s skin tone on a 10-point scale, and also rate intelligence on a five-point scale from “very low” to “very high.”

    Looking at the results for 223 African-American and Hispanic subjects who were interviewed by white interviewers, he found that African Americans and Latinos who were deemed to have lighter skin tones were also significantly more likely to be seen as intelligent.

    If you’re wondering whether it could be that the lighter-skinned subjects really were more intelligent (perhaps because of the way colorism in the larger society affected their educational opportunities) you’re wrong — Hannon controlled for all of that. “Importantly, the effects of skin tone on intelligence assessment were independent of respondent education level, vocabulary test score, political knowledge assessment, and other demographic factors,” he wrote. […]

    A belief among some white people that darker-skinned black and Hispanic people aren’t smart could have (and is likely already having) society-wide impacts that perpetuate inequality. “If white adults have a tendency to equate lighter skin with intelligence,” Hannon concluded, “this may impact the quality and level of expectations white teachers and other school authorities have for certain students.”

    It’s reasonable to conclude that this type of thinking — whether it’s conscious or the result of implicit bias — could taint decisions about everything from hiring and promotions, awards and internships, to mentorship and all of the other judgments that determine the trajectory of a person’s life.

    The paper calls for future sociological research to stop treating colorism as something that only happens within racial groups, and insists that if American racism is to be fully addressed, white colorism will have to be a part of the conversation.

    I’m a bit confused, because I would have thought that colorism – from anyone – would be a part of racism. Sort of stemming from racism, as it were.
    Also, the article mentions two documentaries – Dark Girls and Light Girls about which I have heard good things, but have not been able to watch yet.

    Another from Chicago. Recording in police shooting suddenly found, prompting cries of foul

    In sworn depositions and again on a federal witness stand earlier this week, Mosqueda repeatedly said he pulled over Darius Pinex’s Oldsmobile Aurora in January 2011 because it matched the description he’d heard over his police radio of a car involved in a shooting and pursuit that had occupants who might be armed.

    But no recording of the dispatch was ever produced. As the wrongful death lawsuit filed by Pinex’s family went to trial this week, attorneys for the city insisted it didn’t exist. Even as Mosqueda repeated his claims about the dispatch call to a jury Wednesday, the recording was still missing.

    Then suddenly, it wasn’t.

    The day after Mosqueda’s testimony, it was revealed the emergency broadcast had been found after all, and that city attorneys had waited two days before notifying the other side. Mosqueda had claimed the radio dispatch described the car as dark green with rimmed wheels similar to Pinex’s vehicle, but the 20-second recording had no such detail. Both cars had a temporary license plate, but the plate on Pinex’s Oldsmobile didn’t match the number read over the radio.

    And the dispatcher made no mention of the car being involved in a shooting or that the occupants could be armed and dangerous, all cited by Mosqueda as reasons he and his partner, Officer Gildardo Sierra, decided to stop Pinex’s vehicle. The call relayed only that officers in the South Chicago District had chased an Oldsmobile with temporary plates — 3 1/2 hours before Pinex’s shooting and more than 6 miles away — and that a sergeant had called off the pursuit.

    On Friday, after jurors heard the recording, Mosqueda was forced to retake the stand and try to explain the discrepancy.

    Saying he had testified “to the best of my ability of what I remembered,” Mosqueda contended he was justified in his belief that the car was the same one that had been pursued by police earlier that night.

    “A vehicle pursuit can be for a shooting and also a high-risk traffic pursuit,” Mosqueda testified. “So what I believed was the vehicle was involved in something of that nature.”

    In a testy exchange, Robert Johnson, an attorney for a passenger who was also shot in the incident, all but accused Mosqueda of lying under oath.

    “You needed that car to be involved in a shooting to justify shooting it full of holes, didn’t you?” Johnson asked at one point as Mosqueda’s attorney shouted an objection.

    The sudden appearance of the evidence in the midst of a trial prompted the plaintiff lawyers to ask U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang to issue a rare directed finding in their favor. Chang stopped short of taking that step, but the judge ripped city attorneys, saying there was no explanation for why the recording was not produced earlier.

    Oh, black brunch was a thing on Sunday again, they’re also organizing in Minnesota (that’s what MN means, right?), too. #BlackBrunchMN bout to roll out
    We made a bunch of notecards with info to hand out at #BlackBrunchMN #BlackLivesMatter. Lots of white outrage and discomfort followed.

    Interlude: hip-hop, white rappers, and gay rights. The Heist: Macklemore’s Hold on Homosexuality in Hip-Hop

    Herein lays the issue of representation. Macklemore’s status as a white, mainstream pop star bars him from being the voice of rap, while his existence as a heterosexual male bars him from representing another community besides the hip-hop community that he supports; the LGBTQ community. His song “Same Love”—which has become nothing short of a national anthem for same sex marriage—further propelled his career while thrusting him into the age-old discussion of white privilege.

    Now, creating a space where men can talk about sexism, where whites can talk about racism and where straight people can talk about homophobia is important. However allowing said groups to speak on behalf of other groups is dangerous, in that it perpetuates neglect; neglect of an already existing voice. In “Same Love”, Macklemore raps, “When everyone else is more comfortable remaining voiceless/ Rather than fighting for humans that have had their rights stolen/ I might not be the same, but that’s not important.” That’s actually extremely important, Macklemore. To reduce the countless failed struggles for civil rights to the conclusion that oppressed groups are “comfortable remaining voiceless” is a slap in the face to an entire movement with members who have been silenced against their will, not by choice.

    macklemore grammy

    Black and openly gay rapper Le1f tweeted, “it saddens me out that a straight man is the voice pop music has chosen for gay rights.” The New York-based artist criticized Macklemore for profiting off the creation of a gay rights anthem without thoroughly addressing the heteronormative constrains of the music industry that have allowed for his song and not a gay rapper’s song to be accepted. Le1f ranted on Twitter alluding to his song “Wut” when he tweeted, “that time that straight white dude ripped off my song then made a video about gay interracial love and made a million dollars”, and “news just in: gay people don’t care about your video about gay people.”

    The lack of queer representation in Hip Hop and the selective public acceptance should not overshadow the fact that there have been rappers before Macklemore who don’t have a Billboard topping gay rights anthem that teeny boppers in Middle America can sing along to in the car with their parents, but who still openly support gay marriage. Granted, the hip-hop community does not have the greatest reputation when it comes to homophobia. However, rebuking the entire community to that of a virulently homophobic group is reductive. Prominent rappers such as Kanye West, 50 Cent, A$AP Rocky, Queen Latifah, and Lil B who all support same sex marriage.

    In “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics” author Cathy J. Cohen delves into the flawed homogenized study of which queer representation has fallen under. She writes, “Disappointingly, left largely unexplored has been the role of race and one’s relationship to dominant power in constructing the range of public and private possibilities for such fundamental concepts…So while we can talk of the heterosexual and the queer, these labels/categories tell us very little about the differences in the relative power of, for example, middle-class White gay men and poor heterosexual Black women and men” (29). Here, addressing race is critical in assessing issues regarding sexual orientation. Despite the fact that there are openly queer and transgender rappers in the industry such as Le1f, Nicki Minaj, Azealia Banks, Mykki Blanco, Cakes Da Killa, and Zebra Katz, it took a white, heterosexual male for mainstream society to recognize gay acceptance in hip-hop.

    Funny how that works. :P

  146. rq says

    About 100 people gathering outside Homan Square police facility; about 20 CPD officers here.
    People gathering for protest outside CPD police facility The Guardian dubbed a “black site.”
    From Saturday, I believe.

    Obama plans to take Malia, Sasha to Selma – I’m constantly confused about the date of this event.

    President and Mrs. Obama plan to take their teenage daughters Malia and Sasha with them next week to Selma, Alabama, “to remind them of their own obligations” to fight for justice, Mr. Obama announced Thursday.

    The president will be there to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the historic civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery.

    “Next week, Michelle and I and the girls will be traveling to Selma to pay tribute, not just as a president or a first lady or as African-Americans, but as Americans for those who changed the course of history at the Independence Bridge,” Mr. Obama said at the African-American History Month Reception at the White House.

    “I know that when I take Malia and Sasha down with Michelle next week down to Selma, part of what I’m hoping to do is to remind them of their own obligations,” he said. “Because there are going to be marches for them to march and struggles for them to fight, and if we’ve done our job then that next generation is going to be picking up the torch as well.”

    At Thursday’s event, Mr. Obama also noted the presence of the parents of Trayvon Martin, the teenager whose death became a racial flashpoint in 2012.

    “Today on the third anniversary of Trayvon Martin’s death, showing all of our kids, all of them, every single day that, their lives matter, that’s part of our task,” he said. “I want to thank Trayvon’s parents for being here on what’s a very difficult day for them.”

    Mr. Obama also spotlighted Mattie Atkins, telling the story of her march around the Marion courthouse for their right to vote:

    “Early in 1965, Mattie who was just 27 years old, a mother of five, joined with others in her community to march around the Marion courthouse for their right to vote,” he said. “Intentions ran high, the threat of violence mounted, but at night the protestors would gather in the church and resolve to come back the next day… Next week, the world will turn its eyes to Selma again, and when it does I want everyone to remember that it was because of people like Ms. Atkins and all the others who are here today that we, that we celebrate.”

    Also on Thursday, the Senate voted to award the Congressional Gold Medal to honor those who participated in the Selma marches.

    ‘I sat in that place for three days, man’: Chicagoans detail abusive confinement inside police ‘black site’

    Activists are planning a “Shut Down Homan Square” protest on Saturday and a demonstration for reparations for longstanding victims of Chicago police torture on Monday. Representatives from Black Lives Matter Chicago said they were helping to organize and promote the Monday action. Several Chicago local and national politicians are calling for investigations, including from the US justice department, into allegations of police misconduct at the warehouse.

    The rest is the same horrible stuff as always.

    Meanwhile in Tampa… Check out that tank.

    More and more people filing into the Capitol as protesters chant “shut it down!”. #wiunion #wrongforwi

  147. rq says

    Ah, another frmo the black brunch: Peace sign and fist bump from the same restaurant manager who wanted us to stop. #blackbrunchmn

    We Ain’t Gonna Stop, Till Our People Are Free!!! , by Dru Hill.

    State, city program gives security guards police powers

    The two men wore body armor with “POLICE” written across the chest and spilled out of their unmarked car, weapons drawn, ordering Christopher Dukes and his passenger out of their vehicle at a South Baltimore gas station parking lot. When Dukes pulled off, they embarked on a high-speed chase down Interstate 295 until catching up and placing the pair under arrest, charging documents show.

    Then it was time for the real police to take over.

    The men in the body armor were not Baltimore police officers or federal agents, but instead a little-known classification of security guards known as “special police,” who are commissioned by the city or state to arrest and detain citizens — but only on specific properties.

    For decades, they have added an extra layer of eyes and ears on the streets, supplementing the sworn police force at no cost to taxpayers and protecting some of Baltimore’s most venerable institutions. But some of the officers have also faced lawsuits and resident complaints, leading city police to re-evaluate whether to continue the program.

    City and state police do not provide or require training to the special officers, do not monitor their actions and do not generally investigate complaints against them. Employers are responsible for oversight.

    In a wide-ranging lawsuit filed this summer by residents of Cherry Hill — including Dukes, who was convicted of assault in the case — as well as an earlier suit filed in Northeast Baltimore, residents say special police officers overstepped their bounds and violated the residents’ civil rights.

    Critics say the program is ripe for abuse on the streets, with residents of tough neighborhoods complaining that they can’t tell the difference between the special police and city cops. And many with law enforcement backgrounds who now work in the security industry say they worry about police powers being given to people without proper training and supervision.

    “Nobody is overseeing them,” said Larry S. Davidson Sr., a retired Baltimore officer who runs a security company that doesn’t use special police. “The next thing you know, they’re going into apartment complexes and jacking people up and violating people’s rights because they haven’t got the proper training to know the difference.”

    The Baltimore Police Department has become so concerned about the program — including attempts by some to impersonate special police officers with counterfeit badges or confusing uniforms and vehicles — that officials are reconsidering the policy of granting special police licenses. The state issues licenses in the city as well and has no such plans.

    “The program’s going to be re-evaluated and presented to the next commissioner on whether this is a function that will continue,” said Anthony Guglielmi, the department’s chief spokesman.

    Special police officers work for a wide variety of organizations, including the Johns Hopkins University and the District Court of Maryland. They stand watch over shopping centers and apartment complexes, rarely getting into anything controversial. The sprawling Greater Grace Church, located in a former strip mall in Northeast Baltimore, has 10 commissioned special police officers. […]

    “You have security guards, the folks you see walking the malls or standing posts, working entry to certain buildings. And then there’s special police,” said John Simpson, a retired Maryland State Police commander who for years oversaw special police licensing. “Security is observe and report. Special police can engage.”

    The special police and security guards working in the city help cover areas where city police cannot be, and their observations can provide useful intelligence. In addition to arrest powers, special police officers can have people committed to mental institutions and take other actions reserved for police, including searching people. They can carry guns, but only if they have the same permits required for other residents.

    Art: This is my Lisa Bonet Cubism piece, I hope you guys like it. Share it, Maybe she will see it, thanks

    Americans are making a big mistake about health care – vaguely ties in with themes of government and welfare state and racism.

    Almost everyone who has health insurance in the United States gets help from the government to afford it. For the elderly, that’s Medicare. For the disabled and the poor, that’s Medicaid. For full-time workers it’s the tax subsidy for employer-provided health insurance.

    Some of what you see in this poll is a simple misunderstanding — older Americans either don’t know what Medicare is or mistakenly believe they have “paid for” their benefits with earlier taxes.

    But Americans who get insurance from their jobs are also benefitting from a massive government program. A program whose existence is hidden from sight but is nonetheless quite real and substantial.

    … And people don’t know about it.

    Oh, and this one’s good. Note above in the article abotu Obama and Selma, the very last bit, where they honoured those who marched? Ha. Conservatives who refuse to restore the Voting Rights Act, vote to honor those who fought for it

    I wish I was surprised.

    It took the Senate Banking Committee about two minutes on Tuesday to unanimously pass a bill honoring those who walked in the historic 1965 civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama.

    “I am pleased to serve as an original co-sponsor of this bill,” said Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the chairman, moments before it passed.

    But while the bill has a noble aim — to award the Congressional Gold Medal to thousands of people who marched on Bloody Sunday, Turnaround Tuesday and the final stretch of the 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery — most of its supporters are doing nothing to restore the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 law that came in response to those marches.

    This is the America we live in in 2015.

    The same conservative members of Congress, understanding the gravity of the moment, speedily voted to honor the brave men and women who fought and bled, just 50 years ago, for the right to vote in the United States, have all but refused, over the course of the past 18 months, to do anything at all to restore the strength of the Voting Rights Act.

    Not only that, but states all across the country are using voter suppression, particularly of African Americans, as an election strategy. Al Jazeera sadly details how state after state, all with conservative political leaders, are enacting new laws to eat away at the Voting Rights Act. Furthermore, a new study determined the places least likely to discriminate against Latino voters were those previously protected by the Voting Rights Act.

    In the phenomenal piece, Jim Crow Returns, Al Jazeera goes into great detail on how millions and millions of voters are being suppressed across the country by conservative leaders. This is why it smacks of complete fakery when lawmakers so quickly vote to honor the living legends who fought for the right to vote while simultaneously tearing apart what they fought for every chance they get.

  148. rq says

    So recently there have been articles on how research shows white privilege is real, and like this one – Why racism is not backed by science . And I wonder who the target audience is.

    As someone who writes about evolution and genetics – both of which involve the study of inheritance, and both of which rely on making quantitative comparisons between living things – I often receive letters from people associating Darwin with racism, usually citing the use of the words “favoured races” in the lengthy subtitle to his masterpiece, On the Origin of Species. Of course, Darwin doesn’t discuss humans in that great book, and “races” was used to describe groups within non-human species. Contemporary use of language must be taken into account. [… – abolitionist or no, I remember reading bits of Darwin that were decidedly racist]

    Here follows a short and condensed history of racism’s connection to genetics and eugenics. And then we move on.

    We now know that the way we talk about race has no scientific validity. There is no genetic basis that corresponds with any particular group of people, no essentialist DNA for black people or white people or anyone. This is not a hippy ideal, it’s a fact. There are genetic characteristics that associate with certain populations, but none of these is exclusive, nor correspond uniquely with any one group that might fit a racial epithet. Regional adaptations are real, but these tend to express difference within so-called races, not between them. Sickle-cell anaemia affects people of all skin colours because it has evolved where malaria is common. Tibetans are genetically adapted to high altitude, rendering Chinese residents of Beijing more similar to Europeans than their superficially similar neighbours. Tay-Sachs disease, once thought to be a “Jewish disease”, is as common in French Canadians and Cajuns. And so it goes on.

    We harvest thousands of human genomes every week. Last month, the UK launched the 100,000 Genomes project to identify genetic bases for many diseases, but within that booty we will also find more of the secret history of our species, our DNA mixed and remixed through endless sex and continuous migration. We are too horny and mobile to have stuck to our own kind for very long.

    Race doesn’t exist, racism does. But we can now confine it to opinions and not pretend that there might be any scientific validity in bigotry.

    I don’t like that argument – is race really purely a biological construct, that it can be dismissed so easily? Considering that most racist don’t know shit about biology and genetics, I doubt it. As long as racism exists, race as such will be an issue, whether the line is drawn in biology or in culture. And I think it’s a bad idea to deny that.

    Interlude: TV Entertainment! The Top 15 Black TV Shows of All-Time

    The rise and fall of Black TV shows have been a tumultuous one. Beginning in the 1950s with situational comedy Amos ‘n’ Andy, black sitcoms have gotten both their fair share of praises and criticisms.

    The height of black television was arguably the 90s. Many stations featured shows with all African American casts and many also achieved the highest ratings on their respective networks.

    The decline of black television have left a yearning for more quality programming for black audiences and made the following black tv shows that much more special to us.

    Yes, the Cosby Show is on the list (everyone’s favourite family!), but so is the Jeffersons, the Flip Wilson Show, Soul Train, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Boondocks, and others. Most of whom I’ve never heard (but then, me and TV…).

    But for the video…

    The latest example of cellphone video vindicating someone from false charges is a doozy. It comes from Washington Parish, La., and WWL TV.

    One of the worst days of Douglas Dendinger’s life began with him handing an envelope to a police officer.

    In order to help out his family and earn a quick $50, Dendinger agreed to act as a process server, giving a brutality lawsuit filed by his nephew to Chad Cassard as the former Bogalusa police officer exited the Washington Parish Courthouse.

    The handoff went smoothly, but Dendinger said the reaction from Cassard, and a group of officers and attorneys clustered around him, turned his life upside down.

    “It was like sticking a stick in a bee’s nest.” Dendinger, 47, recalled. “They started cursing me. They threw the summons at me. Right at my face, but it fell short. Vulgarities. I just didn’t know what to think. I was a little shocked.”

    Not knowing what to make of the blow-up, a puzzled Dendinger drove home. That’s where things went from bad to worse.

    “Within about 20 minutes, there were these bright lights shining through my windows. It was like, ‘Oh my God.’ I mean I knew immediately, a police car.”

    “And that’s when the nightmare started,” he said. “I was arrested.”

    He was not only arrested, he was also charged with two felonies and a misdemeanor. A prior drug charge on his record meant he was potentially looking at decades in prison. Seven witnesses backed up the police account that Dendinger had assaulted Cassard.

    But Dendinger had asked his wife and nephew to record him serving the papers. It was a last minute decision, but one that may have saved him his freedom.

    From what can be seen on the clips, Dendinger never touches Cassard, who calmly takes the envelope and walks back into the courthouse, handing [prosecutor Leigh Anne] Wall the envelope.

    “He’d still be in a world of trouble if he didn’t have that film,” said David Cressy, a friend of Dendinger who once served as a prosecutor under [former St. Tammany District Attorney Walter] Reed. “It was him against all of them. They took advantage of that and said all sorts of fictitious things happened. And it didn’t happen. It would still be going like that had they not had the film.”

    Dendinger spent nearly a year waiting for trial, racking up attorney’s fees. As a disabled Army veteran on a fixed income, Dendinger said the case stretched him financially, but in his eyes, he was fighting for his life.

    After nearly a year passed, his attorneys forced Reed to recuse his office. The case was referred to the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office, which promptly dropped the charges.

    Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission and himself a former prosecutor, studied the videos. He did not hesitate in his assessment.

    “I didn’t see a battery, certainly a battery committed that would warrant criminal charges,” Goyeneche said. “And more importantly, the attorney general’s office didn’t see a battery.”

    That’s all well and good. And Dendinger has since filed a federal civil rights lawsuit. I hope he collects.

    But here’s my question: Why aren’t the seven witnesses to Dendinger’s nonexistent assault on Cassard already facing felony charges? Why are all but one of the cops who filed false reports still wearing badges and collecting paychecks? Why aren’t the attorneys who filed false reports facing disbarment? Dendinger’s prosecutors both filed false reports, then prosecuted Dendinger based on the reports they knew were false. They should be looking for new careers — after they get out of jail.

    If a group of regular citizens had pulled this on someone, they’d all likely be facing criminal conspiracy charges on top of the perjury and other charges. So why aren’t these cops and prosecutors?

    Very, very good questions, those last ones. Very.

    The Music of Malcolm X

    The civil-rights leader had a curious relationship to France; he was drawn to its culture, but disgusted by its colonial practices. His Grenadian-born mother was proficient in French and taught her children the language. More than one French scholar has suggested that Malcolm X’s political motto, “By any means necessary,” was borrowed from Sartre’s play “Dirty Hands.” And, to the distress of American intelligence agencies, the French were captivated by Malcolm X as well. At one point, J. Edgar Hoover even contacted French authorities to warn them that the film director Pierre Dominique Gaisseau had recently been in touch with Malcolm, the leader of a “fanatical” and “anti-white organization.” When Malcolm was barred from entering Paris, on February 9, 1965, and French border officials mentioned that the American embassy was behind the decision, he taunted them, “I didn’t know that France was a satellite of the United States.”

    Malcolm X’s expulsion from France was unusual; France had long prided itself on providing refuge to African-American artists and radicals, if only to show that the republic was colorblind and immune to America’s racial ills. In 1978, when the French government refused to extradite four Black Panthers wanted in the U.S. for a hijacking, the militants became a cause célèbre among French intellectuals. And, of course, France has had a century-old love affair with African-American culture. French fans revelled in jazz in the 1920s, when it was still shunned in the States, and hip-hop found a welcoming home in France some sixty years later.

    But France’s relationship to African-American culture has recently turned awkward, as hip-hop and the rhetoric of Black Power and Malcolm X are deployed by minority youth in the country’s banlieues to mock the ideas of colorblindness and secularism (laïcité). After 9/11, some American commentators claimed that “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” was a radicalizing text that taught “victimization,” and drove young Americans such as John Walker Lindh to participate in jihad. Similarly, the authorities in France are now wondering if it was a dangerous mix of Islam and black militancy—personified by Malcolm and brewed in France’s prisons—that drove the Charlie Hebdo killer Chérif Kouachi to violence. Fifty years after his death, Malcolm X is again troubling trans-Atlantic waters.

    Zeal for Malcolm X is a geo-political bellwether of sorts. Interest in Malcolm X tends to appear at the margins of societies, in urban areas where state institutions and services don’t fully reach, peopled by darker-hued minorities who are developing a racial consciousness. In the mid-nineteen-sixties, a Black Power movement emerged in England, inspired by Malcolm X’s visit in 1965. Soon, other Black Power movements were born: the Black Panther party of Israel, launched by North African Jews in 1971; the Polynesian Panther Party, in New Zealand; and the Dalit Panther Party, founded in 1972 to empower India’s “untouchables.”

    Today, interest in Malcolm X is most intense among blacks and Muslims in Western Europe. The last decade has seen the rise of a host of European-based groups that lionize Malcolm and draw on the Black Power movement: the Arab European League of Belgium, the Natives of the Republic in France, the Pantrarna of Sweden, and the Black Panthers of Greece.

    For young European Muslims, caught between surveillance states and far-right movements, Malcolm X is attractive simply for how he dealt with state oppression and organized hostility—through transcendence. If America didn’t want him, he wasn’t to be bound by its borders. Malcolm’s awesome trajectory from street hustler to the global arena—rising above any and all states, freed from the shackles of patriotism and national allegiance, fearing only Allah—is riveting to young people living in ghettos. And for young Muslims trying to make sense of global Muslim besiegement, Malcolm’s linking of the local with the international, the struggle against racism with the fight against imperialism, is especially appealing. […]

    In recent years, counter-terrorism experts have argued that music is a particularly good way to distinguish a moderate Muslim from an extremist. French officials are thus on the lookout for jihadi rhymes, but they also don’t want youth turning away from music altogether. A poster released by the French Ministry of Interior last month, listing indicators that a friend or family member is becoming an extremist, claims that one telltale sign of radicalization is if a person has stopped listening to music. Experts are now arguing that moderate hip-hop and a moderate understanding of Malcolm X would help reach at-risk Muslim youth, especially as former militants come forward claiming they were set on the path to extremism by gangsta rap and Malcolm X.

    The idea that antipathy toward music, admiration for Malcolm X, and attraction to militancy go together is, of course, terribly reductive. As a young man, Malcolm was famously passionate about music. In his autobiography, he boasts of how, as a shoeshine boy in Boston’s Roseland State Ballroom, he shined the shoes of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, and other greats. During his Detroit Red phase, Malcolm danced and played drums at jazz bars, under the stage name Jack Carlton. But when he joined the Nation of Islam, his views began to change. In 1950, while in prison, Malcolm penned a letter to a fellow Muslim, describing his love of jazz and its “comforting effects.” “My ace girl was Dina Washington,” he wrote (meaning the singer Dinah Washington). “She’s still the greatest.” But the music also reminds him of his “sinful past” and he vows to indulge only in jazz performed by Muslim artists.

    For the rest of his life, Malcolm X would try to balance his love of music with his political and religious commitments. In a speech in 1964, he underscored the importance of music to black liberation, stating that music was “the only area on the American scene where the black man has been free to create. And he has mastered it.” Malcolm’s personal papers are a delight to read in part because they are sprinkled with references to music and literature—they contain mentions of Thelonious Monk and his “Muslim Band,” the vocalist Dakota Staton, and a newspaper clipping of Duke Ellington’s State Department tour in Syria and Iran. While traveling in Africa, Malcolm immersed himself in the musical life of the newly independent states, visiting social clubs and dance centers, heartened by how they were trying to revive indigenous musical forms as part of their decolonization. At the Ghana Press Club, he takes in a heady performance of highlife music, and—in Maya Angelou’s telling—taps his fingers on his lap but refuses to dance. In Cairo, he hangs out with African-American jazz aficionados who are trying to create a “progressive” Afro-Asian genre to counter what’s being broadcast by the State Department. Music for emancipation is permissible.

    As nervous European officials contemplate how to de-radicalize Malcolm, and American embassies go all out this month to commemorate the “moderate” Malcolm, it’s worth recalling the man’s complexities and just how much he hated propaganda. I’m not a racist, he once told his diary: I am an extremist. I am, he wrote, “extremely against wrong.”

    The leading ladies of network TV’s three highest rated dramas

    Billionaire Sells Artworks to Help Fund Harlem School

    How do you smartly leave an art collection to a charitable cause? That’s the issue that William Louis-Dreyfus has been grappling with these past several years, after spending half a century amassing a collection of 3,500 artworks. The former chairman of Louis Dreyfus Holding B.V., one of the largest family businesses, is in the process of selling off his massive collection so he can donate the proceeds to the Harlem Children’s Zone.

    The Paris-born Louis-Dreyfus, 82, says his bequest ranks as his first major act of philanthropy. The collection comprises some 170 artists, including Alberto Giacometti, Wassily Kandinsky, and Jean Dubuffet, and is worth anywhere from $10 million to $50 million, he estimates. […]

    The impetus for Louis-Dreyfus’ decision came four years ago, when he watched a 60 Minutes profile on the Harlem charity. It explained the organization’s innovative “cradle to college” approach to breaking the cycle of generational poverty through an interconnected set of community and parenting workshops, as well as preschools, charter schools, and colleges. It all struck a chord with Louis-Dreyfus. “I just knew that whatever I was going to do with my art would involve black Americans or people in schools,” he says. “It was not going to the Met or MoMA.”

    So, in March 2011, Louis-Dreyfus brought his proposal to the Harlem Children Zone’s founder and then-CEO Geoffrey Canada, and to Chief Operating Officer Anne Williams-Isom, who is now running the organization. Louis-Dreyfus showed up without an entourage. “He was very unassuming, so on the ball, so well educated, and superconnected to otherness and to black people in this country,” recalls Williams-Isom. “Here was this 80-something white man coming into our office and talking about racism. Geoffrey and I both had our jaws on the floor.”

    As it turns out, the Harlem Children’s Zone was already well known among Wall Street philanthropists, but it had reached an inflection point after 20 years in operation. It had plans to increase its endowment from $300 million to over $400 million to support $30 million in annual operating expenses, but it also wanted a durable financial strategy that could transcend its executives’ personalities and support its students (currently numbering 12,300) through college. Louis-Dreyfus’ gift would go a long way toward aiding the organization’s goal of establishing its long-term financial stability.

    I wouldn’t mind picking up a Kandinsky or two for a good cause.

    Louis-Dreyfus says that the pieces will be sold off individually or in groups over the coming years, based on the market. The proceeds will be set up in such a way that the Harlem organization has a pool of capital to draw from over time. But there are some serious hurdles to be overcome, including the fact that many of the artists Louis-Dreyfus collected are obscure and do not currently command top dollar (see box, below). Meanwhile, during the start-up phase, Louis-Dreyfus will cover the foundation’s operating costs; eventually, a portion of the artworks’ sales will pick up this expense. Louis-Dreyfus insists the Harlem charity will not have a say in the timing of the sales. His board will be the sole arbiter, in consultation with himself, and will base decisions on the foundation’s cash needs, market conditions, and other circumstances.

    Motivated to do something similar with your own art collection? Ramsay Slugg, a U.S. Trust Bank of America wealth strategist who specializes in art, recommends becoming aware of the related-use rule. “If you are going to give to a charity, make sure that the charity will use the artwork as part of its mission,” he says, “and if it does not, that means the donor will be limited to a cost-basis deduction.”

    In other words, let’s say an artwork in Louis-Dreyfus’ collection was purchased for $1,000 two decades earlier and is now worth $100,000. If the art is sold and the proceeds given directly to the nonprofit, the donor can deduct the full $100,000. But if the donor instead gives the artwork to the charity, only the $1,000 cost of the work is deductible (with both scenarios subject to general charitable deduction rules), because the art itself is not part of the organization’s core mission. Such deductions add up if you have a major collection purchased over 50 years. […]

    A great deal of the collection is “outsider art,” or works created by untrained artists who often live on the margins of society, and not infrequently in mental institutions or prisons. Among them: Bill Traylor, a man born into slavery in Alabama who began to draw when he was 85. Another corner of the museum is devoted to James Castle, an artist whom Louis-Dreyfus calls the “soul of the collection.” Born deaf, Castle’s drawings are made almost entirely from found materials. “I saw his paintings and said they looked like Seurat. His drawings have an unbelievable quality.”

    But that’s a problem of sorts for the Harlem Children’s Zone, which is hoping for a huge windfall. The collection is based on Louis-Dreyfus’ personal if idiosyncratic tastes, as well as his rejection of popular, market-driven art. He doesn’t own a Jeff Koons or an Andy Warhol, and he shuns the art-fair circuit, calling the works shown there overpriced. And while he does own a few marquee names, he says, “I bought what I liked….This was not meant to be a financial asset.”

    That’s why the collection’s disposal is still being determined, and how that’s done will be key to the project’s success. In order to get the maximum benefit for the Harlem organization, Louis-Dreyfus is waiting to sell the works when, he hopes, the prices for his collection have moved north. “This is a long-term affair,” he says. “It is a question of judgment. We have to reach a decision based on the art’s value and how it will be sold at its most advantageous.”

    That means, in the short term, he’s in the business of market-making — raising the profile of works in his collection so that their prices catch up to his lofty opinion. To that end, he continues loaning works to galleries and museums and talking to the press. A documentary made about his collection, called Generosity of Eye and narrated by his daughter, the acclaimed actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus, was released online last summer. We’re hoping that as many Harlem Children’s Zone students as possible get a superlative education out of Louis-Dreyfus’ market-making success.

  149. rq says

    More confusion only leads to one solution: More transparency

    After months of silence and refusal to present any details about the incident beyond the preliminary police report, Commissioner Charles Ramsey and Philadelphia Police Internal Affairs Bureau decided to allow a select few to privately review evidence in a case that has otherwise been under tight lockdown.

    And since then, it’s been a rodeo show.

    The first to be able to observe some evidence was mother of Brandon Tate-Brown, Tanya Brown, and her lawyer, Brian Mildenberg, Esq., followed by several members of the Police Advisory Commission. Since then, in respective statements, there have been conflicting tones between the two parties as to what happened on the video and in the evidence.

    The first time around, Ms. Brown and her attorney were invited to see the surveillance footage on February 19, they came back with an account that contradicted the PPD’s official account. They told the Philadelphia Daily News that the account didn’t mirror the police’s official version. “From the video, the moment he was shot, he was running away from the officer, across Frankford Avenue,” Mildenberg told DN. “He was behind his vehicle, near the trunk of the vehicle – not near any doors – when he was shot and dropped down.”

    In the same article, Ramsey told the newspaper, “The investigation did not rely solely on the tape. You have the officers’ statements, and statements from four independent eyewitnesses who actually observed the incident as it took place.”

    Following that, Ramsey invited the Police Advisory Commission to view the footage along with the eyewitness statements that accompanied them. PAC returned with a statement that seemed less suggestive than Brown’s family attorney.

    “I’ve spent two hours this morning reviewing the video and redacted witness statements.” Executive Director of PAC, Kelvyn Anderson said in a two page statement. “I reviewed four witness statements, plus one from an emergency responder and one of the officers who stopped the vehicle. Two of the witness views are from nearby residents looking outside onto the scene, another is from a man who rode up to the scene on a bicycle and stood watching only a few feet away on the passenger side.”

    Anderson goes on to speak about an eyewitness who was on the driver’s side describing part of the verbal exchange between Tate-Brown and the officer. “A witness who was on the driver’s side was within earshot and describes part of the verbal exchange. The officers repeatedly ask where’s the gun, and at one point, Brown says it’s in the vehicle.”

    That bit of detail has certainly left me in some confusion, and after the opportunity to revisit Internal Affairs to view the same materials PAC had, Mildenberg Law Firm says this detail is partly inaccurate.

    “Witnesses did not see Brandon carrying a gun or hear Brandon admit to having a gun, contrary to reports of others who have seen the statements.” Mildenberg says in response to PAC’s statement. “The closest a witness came to providing information supporting an inference that Brandon admitted to a gun was that one witness stated he overheard police, after Brandon complied and exited the vehicle, and during a time where a police officer had his gun drawn and was pointing it at Brandon’s back, asking Brandon to tell them whether he had a gun and where it was. This witness overheard Brandon deny that he had the gun on him. This has been misinterpreted and reported as Brandon admitted to having a gun, but just not on him. This is not what the witness reported.” […]

    One of the four eyewitnesses describe the verbal exchange. Mr. Anderson says this witness was “within earshot” on the driver’s side. But that doesn’t seem to add up with the account I heard from my December 20 conversation with Angelica Santiago about her December 17 conversation with what’s apparently the “where’s the gun” eyewitness police used in their investigation. Anderson, in his statement, says there were four eyewitnesses. Two he says viewed from inside looking outside, and a bicyclist on the passenger side. Being that there are no residences directly across the street “within earshot” of the incident, who is this person on the driver’s side who heard Tate-Brown’s conversation with the officer? The off-duty cop who allegedly tried to help? Or was it the gentleman who told his story to Santiago two days after the shooting?

    Mildenberg said of the off-duty cop who tried to help the police, “During the time where there was a struggle between Brandon and the police officers, a ‘good Samaritan,’ who appears to be an off duty law enforcement or security officer (we don’t know for sure because the Police Department redacted the part of the statement where the witness identifies his profession), was driving by the scene on Frankford Avenue with a female friend in his vehicle. Upon arriving at the scene, he noticed the struggle, and decided, against his female friend’s urging not to leave the car, to exit the vehicle to provide assistance to the officers.” […]

    Allowing others to see the evidence in this case is a great step towards transparency, but not allowing the viewers to take proper notation, has lead to some confusion on facts when conveying them to the public, who are invested in their streets’ safety, as well.

    The two parties — PAC and Mildenberg Law — continue to press for even more Philadelphia Police Department transparency, which means a release of the evidence that allowed anonymous officers in question back onto Philadelphia streets. “Family renews claim for police to release all videos and statements to the public.” Mildenberg Law says in a March 1st email.

    Interim report on the police task force, which isn’t opening for me, so I can’t get the actual title. Maybe it iwll work for someone.
    Ah, no it opened, but there’s no good title and blockquoting is weird. I’ll try again later, maybe.

    Please join BLM, @BAJItweet, @MillionHoodies & others for Safety Beyond Policing Townhall TODAY 1-2pm EST #NoNewNYPD Umm, that was yesterday, so I guess that ship has sailed. Sorry.
    And that’s all the catch-up, now I just have to deal with yesterday’s stuff.

  150. rq says

    Audio only here, sorry, from the BBC World Service Radio: New Black Leaders,

    Brittany Ferrell and Alexis Thompson, co-founders of Millennial Activists United

    Meet Claudette Colvin, the 15 y/o who refused to give up her bus seat to a white woman 9 months before Rosa Parks.

    Remember that man shot in STL yesterday? It looks like there may have been a 5-year-old girl in the back of the car… Wellston police fatal shooting of fleeing driver with 5yo girl in backseat being investigated by STL County PD Crimes Against Persons Unit.
    Ask Chief Walker if a 5yr old was in the car during the shooting? Chief’s information at the tweet, and here’s hoping there’s more information on that coming out.

    Guuesssss whaaat? The newsletter is back! thisisthemovement, installment #78: Intro –

    Hey Y’all,

    A lot has happened in 2015, and the newsletter was on hiatus for February 2015. But as of today, we’re back. Here are some key updates:

    Today we launched mappingpoliceviolence[dot]org, a set of comprehensive maps of the 302 black people killed by police in 2014. Check it out.

    And we are humbled and honored to receive the 2015 Howard Zinn Freedom to Write Award from PEN New England. We are but two of many people who told and continue to tell the story of police brutality and violence in America.

    There’s a lot of news — both to catch up on and that’s new. Read, share, stay connected.

    // Netta and DeRay

    Material within:

    Ferguson/STL
    Thomas Allen, The Latest Victim of Police Violence in STL Thomas Allen Jr., 34, was shot by Wellston police on 2/28 and died on 3/1. STL County PD is currently investigating. You must read the official police account of the killing for yourself, as it leaves many unanswered questions. And this is the 7th killing by police in STL, combining those by Metro and County PD, since August. Must read.

    Justice Department To Fault Ferguson PD According to reports, the US DOJ is going to cite deficiencies and areas for growth within the Ferguson Police Department related to discriminatory ticketing, arrests, and issuing fines. And the report may “…force Ferguson officials either [to] negotiate a settlement with the Justice Department or face being sued by it on civil rights charges.” Absolute must read.

    Ledarius Williams Shot and Killed By St. Louis Police On February 3rd, around 3:35pm, two police officers saw Williams walking down the street and pursued him. The two white officers claim Williams had a gun, witnesses say they did not see a gun. Police say they struggled with Williams to get the gun away from him. Four shots were fired, police did not say how many hit Ledarius. Ledarius Williams, 23 year old black man, died.

    Missouri Elementary Schools Have Highest Rate of Suspending Black Children “Elementary schools in Missouri suspended 14.3 percent of black students at least once in the 2011-12 school year, compared with 1.8 percent of white students.” Interesting read.

    Tamir Rice/Cleveland
    City of Cleveland Responds to Tamir Rice Lawsuit The City of Cleveland responded to a lawsuit by the family of Tamir by saying that 12 year old Tamir died and his family suffered because of his own actions. The response says that the 12 year old’s shooting death was caused “…by the failure … to exercise due care to avoid injury,” placing the blame on the victim and not the police officer who killed him. Absolute must read.

    Baltimore
    Baltimore PD Fights Release of Audit Finding Officers Lacked Educational Credits But Received Bonuses There exists a now-secret audit of educational credits attained by members of the Baltimore Police Department that the department is refusing to release to the public. In 2014, it was found “…that a high-ranking commander had used a bogus degree from a diploma mill to earn a pay bonus” and the audit may show that this has happened frequently. Important read.

    Jessica Hernandez/Denver
    Autopsy of Jessica Hernandez Appears to Contradict Official Police Account “The report shows that Jessie was shot from the driver’s side of the car and not from close range. These facts undermine the Denver Police Department’s claim that Jessie was driving at the officers as they shot her.” Must Read.

    Brandon Tate-Brown/Philly
    Details of Brandon Tate-Brown’s Death Are Getting More Contradictory Recent reports suggest that what the police have told the Medical Examiner’s Office is drastically different than what police officials have released to the public. Necessary and important must read.

    LA
    LAPD Shoots and Kills Homeless Man, Caught on Video Yesterday, officers surrounded and killed a homeless man, nicknamed “Africa” in a situation that highlights police abuse of power/force. Watch the video, then read the article. In reading, pay close attention to how the event is described by police and the newspaper report. Absolute must read.

    Chicago
    Chicago Police Detain Americans at Abuse-laden ‘Black Site’ The Chicago police department is using a warehouse facility, known as Homan Square, as a domestic black site. It is at this facility, people are denied their basic constitutional rights. After investigation the abuse includes: keeping arrestees out of official booking databases, shackling for prolonged periods, denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility and holding people without legal counsel for between 12-24 hours.

    Commentary/Miscellaneous
    Video of December Killing of Homeless Man in Louisiana Just Released On December 4, 2014, Raymond Keith Martinez, a homeless man, was killed by a West Monroe, LA police officer — and it’s caught on tape. You must watch this. Now.

    FBI Monitored and Critiqued Black Writers for Decades “Newly declassified documents from the FBI reveal how the [FBI] under J Edgar Hoover monitored the activities of dozens of prominent African American writers for decades, devoting thousands of pages to detailing their activities and critiquing their work.” Fascinating and troubling read.

    High School Students Taunt Black Basketball Players During Game, Face No Consequences “Students at a Catholic high school at the New Jersey shore have been warned but not punished after two of them dressed as a monkey and a banana during a game against a mostly black basketball team.” Y’all, read this.

    Again, it’s a mix of things we have on this thread and other, unseen, stuff, so yay, more reading!

  151. rq says

    Hotter Than Lava, on flash-bang grenades. Which suddenly soudns like way too cartoonish a name.

    Jason Ward and his high-school sweetheart Treneshia Dukes were asleep, naked, in the apartment when an explosion went off and their bedroom window shattered. Ward leapt up toward the broken glass. Dukes started running. In the dark, she crashed into a closet door before stumbling into the bathroom and balling up in the tub. “I just started crying and I’m praying like, ‘I’m not going to die like this, this is not how I want to die,’” she later testified. Seconds later, a man wearing a mask stormed the bathroom and held a gun to her face, instructing her to lie on the floor. “If you move I’m going to blow your fucking brains out,’” Dukes recalled him saying. It was then she noticed skin hanging off her arm and blistering patches of pink flesh on her brown legs.

    The masked man noticed her skin, too. He told Dukes to sit up and signaled to a man in plainclothes to inspect her. “The guy came in there,” recalled Dukes, just starting to realize she was dealing with the police, not armed assailants, “and he looked at me and he looked back at the other guy and was like, ‘Y’all done fucked up.’”

    Dukes had been hit by a flashbang, a $50 device used by the police to disorient suspects, often during drug raids. First designed nearly 40 years ago to help military special forces rescue hostages, flashbangs create a stunningly bright burst of light and an ear-splitting boom that temporarily blind and deafen anyone standing within a few feet of them. Last week, French special forces used flashbangs as part of a dramatic operation to free hostages held at a kosher supermarket in Paris. But when these modified hand grenades explode on the human body, they can cause severe injury or death. The flash powder burns hotter than lava. Dukes suffered second-degree burns across her body. When later asked to describe the pain she felt that morning on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the absolute greatest, Dukes said 100. […]

    The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit wrote in 2000 that “police cannot automatically throw bombs into drug dealers’ houses, even if the bomb goes by the euphemism ‘flash-bang device.’” In practice, however, there are few checks on officers who want to use them. Once a police department registers its inventory with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, it is accountable only to itself for how it uses the stockpile. ProPublica’s review of flashbang injuries found no criminal convictions against police officers who injured citizens with the devices.

    After Dukes filed a formal complaint, a Clayton County Police Department internal investigators wrote in their report that officers had done “nothing wrong” the morning of her injury. In fact, the team commander was promoted. Outraged by the inaction, Dukes filed a civil lawsuit against the police in July 2012, alleging excessive use of force. “No one has ever apologized,” Dukes said in an interview. “It’s not right to feel like you can just hurt someone, and it’s OK.” […]

    Sensing a need, Nixon decided to try his hand at building a flashbang. By 1990, he had patented a device that he called the Omni Blast. He marketed his device as having less smoke than its competitors and a more spherical explosion. Pretty soon, he had customers all across the nation.

    But, as flashbangs became ubiquitous, Nixon worried that departments weren’t training officers to use them properly. Reports of accidents started to trickle in. A prison guard in Nevada lost her hand when a flashbang exploded during a training exercise. And then, in 2002, an officer closer to Nixon’s home in Arkansas was injured. An Omni Blast exploded in the hand of Brandt Carmical, a North Little Rock police officer, as he conducted a flashbang demonstration for a local Boy Scout troop. It pulverized his right hand, blew out his right eardrum and perforated his left eardrum. “I saw all this flesh,” Carmical recalled. “I couldn’t hear anything.” At the hospital, Carmical’s hand was amputated at the wrist. Later, he had to go back for further surgery because black powder from the flashbang was causing his skin to rot. […]

    Nixon said he stopped selling flashbangs two years after Carmical’s accident, concerned that police officers are not sufficiently trained to use them. “I realized that, let’s say this is the perfect device,” Nixon said, “it’s still going to hurt people.” In Nixon’s opinion, the police are wrong to treat flashbangs like less destructive weapons such as tear gas and sound cannons. “It boggles my mind,” he said.

    Carmical, a former Marine, returned to work wearing a prosthetic with a U.S. Marine Corps logo and rejoined the SWAT team. He said the North Little Rock police have become “more selective” about flashbang deployment since his injury. Often, he said, they will set off a flashbang outside a home as a distraction, allowing officers to enter from another side of the house. When flashbangs are needed, Carmical prefers to let his teammates throw them. Being near an exploding flashbang can cause Carmical to freeze up. “It’s almost like unplugging myself for just a second,” he recalled, grateful that his fellow officers “kind of pat me on the shoulder and plug me back in.”

    Across the river, in Little Rock, Ark., the police department is still using flashbangs on nearly every raid, according to ProPublica’s analysis. Police department records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, as part of its nationwide survey of police militarization, showed that between 2011 and 2013, Little Rock police tossed flashbangs into homes on 112 occasions, or 84 percent of raids — nearly all of them in predominantly black neighborhoods.

    Then there’s the case of the lady selling food and alchohol (on Sundays!) – FOOD AND ALCOHOL – and they flashbanged her house, and they fucking said this:

    Little Rock Police Department spokesman Allen said he does not consider the force used on Harris’ home to be excessive. “If she hadn’t been selling illegal items out of the home, no warrant would have been served,” he said. “What you call extreme, we call safe.”

    Because “warrant” = “flashbang”. Holy shit, victim-blaming! And no restraint or accountability. Onwards with the article, which explains again the case of Bou Bou Phonesavanh, the baby we’ve read about before, who had to have his face reconstructed after police attacked his house:

    In October, a Habersham County grand jury declined to indict the officers involved. “Some of what contributed to this tragedy can be attributed to well-intentioned people getting in too big a hurry,” the grand jury wrote in its findings. The grand jury instead recommended that officers receive better training and that policy makers consider restricting the use of “no-knock” warrants, which allow police to burst into homes unannounced, often using battering rams and flashbangs. The Phonesavanhs plan to file a civil lawsuit to recover their medical expenses, which the county has refused to pay, and are hoping federal prosecutors will bring charges against the officers involved. “For us, justice won’t mean money,” Alecia Phonesavanh said. “Justice means actual consequences for the officers who caused this nightmare for my family.”

    Georgia State Sen. Vincent Fort hopes the case will renew momentum for a bill he’s been pushing since 2008 that would require a higher legal standard to issue no-knock search warrants. “The likelihood of something passing has increased,” he said, acknowledging that strengthening no-knock requirements would not necessarily prevent police from throwing flashbangs after a brief knock on the door. Fort said he is also considering adding requirements for flashbang training and restricting their use to daytime hours.

    Currently, there are no binding national requirements for police to be trained in the use of flashbangs. The National Tactical Officers Association, the trade group for SWAT teams, strongly advises that untrained officers not be allowed to use flashbangs. The trade group conducts its own training sessions that officers can attend (if their department can afford to send them). Most flashbang manufacturers also offer instruction for a fee. David Pearson, who runs flashbang training sessions for the trade group, said in an interview that he urges caution. “Flashbangs do have their place,” he said, “but I don’t think it’s on every mission or in every room.” […]

    Aim is very important in flashbang legal cases. This standard was established in 1987 when the California Supreme Court ruled that throwing a flashbang could be considered a reasonable use of force when officers “have seen fully into a targeted room.” This legal precedent means that Dukes’ case will likely turn on a narrow thread of argument. Did the police wildly throw a flashbang into her bedroom without looking, or did Dukes unwittingly run into the path of a flashbang that they had carefully aimed?

    Dukes testified she was lying in bed when a circular object flew in through the window, landed on her thigh and exploded. Her account is supported by her boyfriend’s brother, who visited shortly after the raid, and the maintenance man for the apartment complex. Both testified that they saw black flashbang residue on the wall above the bed. Also on her side is a powerful piece of physical evidence: a burned red-and-black comforter under which Dukes slept at the moment of the raid.

    Flashbangs do have their place, but I don’t think it’s on every mission or in every room.

    Clayton County officials admit that at least three flashbangs were deployed during the raid that injured Dukes. SWAT commander Stephen Branham, who is a defendant in the case, testified that he was standing within view of Dukes’ bedroom window and that his team indeed broke it in an operation known as a “break and rake.” Branham said that on a previous raid his team had thrown a flashbang through a window it had broken. But during the Laurel Park raid, he testified, “I was standing there the whole time. Nobody threw a bang through that window.” According to Branham, his team deployed two flashbangs outside the apartment, and Sergeant Malette threw a third one into the front hallway after the front door had been breached. Malette testified that Dukes must have run into his flashbang. “From where she ended up and where the flashbang was and the marks and stuff on the door, with the evidence, I surmised that it was — it was actually the bang that I deployed that would be responsible for burning her in that area,” Malette said. […]

    The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia will soon decide whether to allow Dukes’ case to proceed. Dukes, now 26, has had two children with Ward and works as a package handler at a warehouse. At the time she was burned, Dukes was pregnant but didn’t know it. When she found out, she immediately stopped taking the powerful painkillers she had been prescribed in the hospital. But sometimes she worries that her son, who turns 4 in March, could have been affected by the medicine she took. Today, it bothers her that her skin is darker in the patches where she was burned. “My skin is ugly, and I feel like I’m ugly,” she said in an interview. “When I talk about it, I just get angry.”

    Sometimes loud noises trigger memories of the event. One summer night after the accident, Dukes woke up in a panic. A storm was raging outside and, in her sleepy state, she confused the thunder and lightning for flashbang explosions. She ran into the bathroom once again and curled up on the floor, rocking and saying, “They’re coming, they’re coming.” Her mother found her and asked who was coming. “I said, ‘Them. Please don’t burn me again.’”

    City Of Cleveland Apologizes For Blaming Tamir Rice For His Own Fatal Shooting

    An ongoing federal lawsuit filed by the family of Tamir Rice prompted a response from the city of Cleveland last week arguing that the 12-year-old was responsible for his own death.

    The city’s claims caused outrage from family and community members — and perhaps led to a public apology from Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson who shared the city’s regrets for the language they used.

    “This is not the character or personality of the city of Cleveland to be that insensitive to the family or even the victim,” Jackson said at a news conference on Monday, according to local news station Fox 8.

    Uh, that’s an apology? Here’s another on that: Cleveland blames Tamir Rice, 12, for his own death, then apologizes

    In papers filed in federal court Friday, the city said Tamir was responsible for his own death and said the injuries, losses and damages were “directly and proximately caused by the failure of [Tamir] to exercise due care to avoid injury.”

    On Monday, a Rice family attorney reacted angrily.

    “That has to be the most incredulous comment I have ever heard,” Walter Madison said. “The family is just completely infuriated. They are still picking up the pieces of their lives and they have been obliterated by such an insult.”

    Madison said 12-year-olds could not exercise adult judgment, and Cleveland appeared to be saying that they should.

    “There are many things we don’t allow 12-year-olds to do,” he said. “We don’t allow them to vote, we don’t allow them to drink, because they don’t have the capacity to understand the consequences of their actions.”

    Cleveland also argued that the city did not have enough information to respond in full to the Rice family allegations because the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Office is still investigating Tamir’s death.

    Cleveland Mayor Frank G. Jackson disavowed the legal filings Monday, calling them “insensitive.”

    “In an attempt to protect all of our defenses we used words and we phrased things in such a way that was very insensitive,” Jackson said. “Very insensitive to the tragedy in general, the family and the victim in particular.”

    The city will file amended documents “that will deal with the insensitivity of the language and the characterization we use but also at the same time preserve the defense,” Jackson said.

    Uh, so yeah, if that’s the apology, then… that’s a pretty crappy kind of apology.
    Basically what Cleveland told the world is that it’s cool to kill a Black kid b/c he was being a kid. #TamirRice

    Felony theft charge filed against St. Louis County police lieutenant

    In a prepared statement, department officials said Campbell worked security for the Dirt Cheap Co. from Jan. 10, 2014, to Feb. 5. Police said Campbell worked for Dirt Cheap while also performing police duties on 47 separate occasions.

    Police put the value of the theft at $5,899.78. Campbell has been suspended from the department without pay.

    Authorities said they discovered the alleged theft while conducting a separate internal investigation of Campbell but provided no details.

    “While this is certainly troubling, it is our responsibility to ensure we maintain the integrity of the St. Louis County Police Department,” Police Chief Jon Belmar said in a prepared statement.

    Campbell’s attorney, Neil Bruntrager, characterized the investigation as a “misunderstanding.”

    Bruntrager said that command rank officers don’t work a strict 40-hour week, and instead of overtime pay receive “flex time” to use as they see fit. So, he said, such an officer might work 12 hours one day and four the next.

    “We think they are incorrect about this and had he been given the opportunity to explain, that we think this could have been resolved, but they leapt to conclusions that are not supported by the evidence,” Bruntrager said.

  152. rq says

    LAPD Caught On Video Shooting Homeless Man To Death

    Los Angeles police fatally shot a homeless man on Sunday in a disturbing encounter that was caught on video.

    According to the Los Angeles Times, the man, whom witnesses called “Africa,” was pronounced dead at the hospital.

    The incident, which occurred around noon in the city’s Skid Row area, was captured on video and briefly uploaded to Facebook. WARNING: content is disturbing. […]

    One witness, Yolanda Young, told CBS2 that the altercation occurred over an argument in a tent.

    “Next thing I know, dude swung on a cop and the cop swung back. And they were hitting on him and then two other cop cars pulled up and they got out of the car and ran over there, and they had three Tasers out,” Young said.

    Africa had spent 10 years at a mental facility before settling into Skid Row four or five months ago, neighbor Ina Murphy told the LA Times. Another resident also said that police had asked Africa multiple times to dismantle his tent, in accordance with a court ruling that allows folks to sleep on Skid Row at night as long as they take down their tents during the day. […]

    There will be an investigation to determine if the use of force was properly deployed. Investigators are looking for additional video that captured the incident, including footage from the body cameras some of the officers may have been wearing. At least one officer was wearing a body camera, Smith told the newspaper.

    More on Tamir: It’s Tamir Rice’s fault

    As if the November 2014 Cleveland police shooting of Tamir Rice wasn’t bad enough. The Post’s Wesley Lowery reports that the city of Cleveland is blaming the 12-year-old who was playing with a toy gun in a park near his home for his own death. In response to the federal lawsuit filed by Tamir’s family, city officials accuse Tamir of “failure…to exercise due care to avoid injury.”

    Right. It’s Tamir’s fault that the 911 caller’s admonition that the gun he was playing with was “probably fake” never made it to the officers.

    It’s Tamir’s fault that he was shot and killed by police officer Timothy Loehmann just “1½ to 2 seconds” after his car arrived on the scene.

    It’s Tamir’s fault that Loehmann quit his previous police job before he was dismissed for “deficiencies” only to be hired by a police department now under federal investigation for “allegations that CPD officers use excessive force, including unreasonable deadly force.”

    It’s Tamir’s fault that first aid was administered, not by Loehmann or his partner, but by an FBI agent who happened to be in the area — four minutes after Tamir was shot.

    And it’s Tamir’s fault that he was not seen as a child. “Shots fired, male down, um, black male, maybe 20,” one of the officers said when calling in the shooting. Or as Cleveland Police Patrolman’s Association president Steve Loomis told Politico magazine, “He’s menacing. He’s 5-feet-7, 191 pounds. He wasn’t that little kid you’re seeing in pictures. He’s a 12-year-old in an adult body.” Given everything we know now about his case, the rest of Loomis’s quote is literally and figuratively unbelievable.

    Also from Washington Post, Tamir Rice family attorney says ‘unbelievable’ that city of Cleveland court filing blames Tamir for his own death

    “What they said is incredulous at best. It’s unbelievable,” said Walter Madison, one of the Rice family’s attorneys, during an interview with The Washington Post on Monday in which he said the city’s response was further evidence of police arrogance. “There are a number of things that we in society don’t allow 12-year-olds to do. We don’t allow them to vote, we don’t allow them to drink. In court we don’t try them as adults. They don’t have the capacity to understand the consequences of their actions.”

    On Monday afternoon, Cleveland Mayor Frank G. Jackson apologized to the Rice family and Cleveland residents “for our poor use of words and our insensitivity” in the filing.

    “In an attempt to protect all of our defenses, we used words and we phrased things in such a way that was very insensitive,” he said at a news conference. “Very insensitive to tragedy in general, the family and the victim in particular.”

    He said the city would be filing an amended court document using more sensitive language.

    Yeah, I’m still not seeing the apologetic part of that apology.

    Cleveland Leaders Apologize Over Blaming Boy for Own Death, with autoplay video.

    The court documents filed late last week by the city said Tamir’s injuries and the subsequent complaints for damages stemmed from his actions and failure “to exercise due care to avoid injury.” It similarly said the “injuries, losses and damages” cited for his relatives in the complaint “were directly and proximately caused by their own acts,” not by the city.

    Jackson said that he’s talked with representatives of Tamir’s family, and that the city plans to alter the wording in the documents within the next three weeks.

    “We are sincerely apologetic for our misuse and mischaracterization of our answer to that complaint,” he said.

    The city said in response to the federal lawsuit that it didn’t violate Tamir’s federal rights and that it is entitled to certain legal immunities. […]

    The federal lawsuit alleges excessive force, negligence, infliction of emotional distress on his sister and mother, violation of due process for the parents, and failure by the responding officers to immediately provide first aid to the boy, who died the next day. It also claims false imprisonment of Tamir’s 14-year-old sister, who ran toward the scene after the shooting, struggled with police and was handcuffed and put into a cruiser parked near her wounded brother.

    Why we all bear responsibility for the torture of black, brown and poor people — at home and abroad

    The abuse of detainees is no less horrible if carried out in an isolated prison north of Kabul or an abandoned warehouse in Chicago. There is, however, something especially disconcerting to know that this kind of activity has been hidden in plain site in a major US city. Among many Americans there’s an unavoidable, if somewhat problematic, NIMBY (not in my backyard) sentiment: US soil is no place for extraordinary renditions.

    But they do happen, and there are similarities between what takes place at home and abroad. Whether near or far, black, brown and poor people can be disappeared and mistreated — essentially dehumanized — for years without public attention.

    Of course, the existence of brutal interrogations in secret prisons, wherever they occur, cannot be blamed on the public turning a blind eye. This is a story about abuse and the violation of human rights. But we must reflect on the fact that such abuses have consistently been meted out to individuals considered dispensable or contemptible. In light of the revelation that for many years certain arrestees in Chicago were denied access to lawyers, the question of who gets to be disappeared is all-important.

    “Homan Square – said to house military-style vehicles, interrogation cells and even a cage – trains its focus on Americans, most often poor, black and brown,” wrote Ackerman. This domestic black site, then, is yet another example of how justice can be denied to poor, non-white communities. And it shows that this can continue without note for so long precisely because the voices of these communities so rarely occupy the center of mainstream media consciousness.

    The Chicago police department is to blame for concealing the unconstitutional practices behind Homan Square’s walls. As with CIA black sites, these are secrets violently defended by the institutions that keep them. Yet the conditions that allow this sort of abuse to continue without great public note are undeniably tied to the socio-economic and political standing of the victims. After 9/11, a sea of blind eyes turned away from the way in which alleged terror suspects were tortured and disappeared by the CIA, as well as governments worldwide that allowed black sites to covertly operate.

    Chicago policing has a storied history of abusing black men. Former Chicago police commander, John Burge, appointed in 1972, oversaw the torture of over 100 black men over the course of a decade to extract confessions. He served four and a half years in prison, but has been allowed to collect a pension from the city. Richard Zuley, a former Chicago detective who later went to work as an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay, was notorious for abusing, threatening and torturing non-white suspects during his CPD tenure from 1977 to 2001.

    As long ago as 1959, the ACLU of Illinois published a study entitled “Secret Detention by the Chicago Police.” The document exposed practices including removing arrest suspects from the reach of attorneys for many hours, and beating arrestees to elicit confessions. When decades pass and the same abuses continue, there’s no room to blame bad apple police. This is a systematic issue, woven tightly into the fabric of Chicago policing, which has gone unaddressed all too long. […]

    The story of a Chicago black site is not only a lesson in the dangers of the creeping militarization of domestic policing. If the ability to disappear suspects is emblematic of War on Terror tactics, then Homan Square is not an example of how the boundless war crept onto US soil. Rather, it illustrates how this sort of war was being waged in America long before 9/11 by the police and against poor people of color. It should not have taken so long for society’s privileged to recognize that a war is going on in our midst. But to call it a war between the police and America’s poor and black suggests two sides in conflict with equal footing. It is more appropriate to call it a decades long assault.

    And to end this comment on a lighter note, 22 Contemporary Authors You Absolutely Should Be Reading. Someone called the list racist, but I think that was sarcasm of the reverse racism kind. Anyway, this is a list I can get behind.

  153. rq says

    ‘Reparations, Not Black Sites’: Rally Held for Chicago Police Torture Survivors, a storify.

    Organizers from a vibrant grassroots group called We Charge Genocide organized a rally in response to allegations that the Chicago Police Department operates a “black site” at Homan Square on the west side of Chicago.
    The organizers sought to connect outrage at the news about Homan Square to a decades long struggle against torture and abuse by Chicago police.

    Pictures at the link.
    “Transformation now. Reparations now.” Banners at #RahmRepNow rally in Chicago
    Seems like more media here than there were for #Gitmo2Chicago rally on Sat. #RahmRepNow
    “The things happening in #HomanSquare are also happening in back alleys in Bronzeville” #RahmRepNow #Gitmo2Chicago

    For people who like examining documents, Requesting materials/documents related to public protests that took place approximately between Nov 25, 2014 and Dec 31, 2014.

    NYPD Deputy Commissioner: Crazies Off Their Meds Practically Asking To Get Shot

    The ignorant tweet further stigmatizes the mentally ill and assumes that everyone exhibiting signs of psychosis is unmedicated and wants to be shot. It’s true that suicide-by-cop is a known phenomenon, but according to the San Francisco Chronicle, the stats on it are murky:

    A 1998 FBI study looking at 240 cases over a 15-year period found that 16 percent of people shot by police had possible suicidal motivations.

    A study published in the Journal of Forensic Studies in 2009, which looked at more than 700 shootings throughout North America, determined that 36 percent of them were suicides, while an additional 5 percent featured subjects who were suicidal during the encounter.

    Vivian Lord, a UNC professor and author of Suicide by Cop: Victims on Both Sides of the Badge, and Rebecca Stincelli, a former crisis interventionist for the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department and author of a separate book on the same phenomenon, both estimate that “12 to 15 percent of all police killings nationwide are provoked for the sake of suicide.”

    So it’s a small percentage of mentally ill people who are “w[a]lking into police bullets.” According to a report by the Treatment Advocacy Center and the National Sheriff’s Association, there are “suggestions” that “many” of those shot by police in a justifiable homicide “were not taking their medications.” Suggestions are not hard data.

    What’s worse about Tumin’s comment is that he wasn’t even referring to an obvious suicide-by-cop situation. He was referring to this article about police who are called in to help mentally ill people, asked to de-escalate the situation, and resort to extreme force anyway. For example, Miami Gardens woman Catherine Daniels called police in for reinforcement while her son suffered a psychotic episode. They fatally shot her son:

    Daniels locked herself inside the house and called the police to help get him back to the hospital, just as she did the previous week. She says that she told police about her son’s mental illnesses, and that he took medication.

    When police arrived at the scene, a scuffle broke out. A few moments later, Hall was shot twice in the middle of his own street—once in the arm and a fatal shot to the chest. As he lay struggling on the concrete, police handcuffed him. He was pronounced dead shortly after.

    “Why did they take my child’s life when I called for help?” Daniels asked local government officials at a Miami Gardens City Commission meeting on Wednesday, fighting through tears. “I just want answers,” she said.

    Ironically, the tweet comes just when the NYPD is being trained on how to better serve the community and learn how to negotiate in volatile situations. And this is one of the guys charged with improving the NYPD’s communication strategy…eek.

    Thus speaks a person who is ostensibly a leader for police. Says a lot.

  154. rq says

    Video: Cop Cocks Shotgun & Asks Protesters, “Are You Scared?”

    The NYPD recently decided against policing protests with machine guns, but it looks like the Port Authority police aren’t ready to put down their shotguns.

    Friday night, more than 30 Black Lives Matter protesters converged on Penn Station, carrying pictures and chanting the names of people who have died at the hands of the NYPD.

    After leaving Penn Station, the group drifted over to the Lincoln Tunnel entrance, and resolved to block Manhattan-bound traffic for 11 minutes—one minute for each time Garner told police “I can’t breathe.”

    No sooner had the group spread itself across the two lanes of incoming traffic than a group of Port Authority police approached, says Patrick Waldo, who was among the protesters. One of the officers was carrying a shotgun.

    “The officer with the gun was one of the first that I noticed,” Waldo said. “He actually had hand-on-the trigger, shotgun up in the air. We were all like, whoa whoa whoa, take it easy!”

    “We mic-check that we’re gonna be there for 11 minutes,” says Kim Ortiz, one of the organizers of the protest. “And then we hear the officer rack the gun. We were like, ‘We’re armed with a banner and cardboard signs!’ He was like, ‘Are you scared, are you scared?’ And we were like ‘No, we’re not scared.’”

    There’s video of the incident. Around minute 3:20, you can see the officer with the shotgun approach.

    On the video, the officer can be seen telling the assembled group of peaceful protesters that “this isn’t about protest, I’m worried about terrorism.”

    “He saw the signs and the banners,” says Keegan Stephen, another protester who witnessed the exchange. “It made it clear that his motivation was to intimidate a peaceful protest. It blurs those lines around the difference between peaceful protest and terrorism.”

    About eight minutes into the 11-minute protest, another Port Authority officer showed up toting a shotgun. Another video clearly shows him, at the 3:20 mark, loading and then racking his gun in front of the protesters. The officer’s badge identifies him as M. Fusco.

    The Port Authority’s press office did not immediately respond to our request for comment. We’ll update if they get back to us.

    For the protesters, the officers’ display of weapons was a clear example of precisely the issues that had moved them into the streets in the first place. “We were out there to address the militarization of the police, over-policing, police brutality, and the disconnect between police and the communities that they are hired to serve and protect,” Waldo said. “And here was that disconnect on full display. It was this guy who walked up to us with his gun drawn and no words. No language, no words, just a gun. And that’s exactly why we’re out there every night that we are: to say that there should be communication, there should be language.”

    Ortiz says the cops’ behavior won’t dissuade her from protesting. “It makes me more inclined to be out there,” she says. “It’s a testament to exactly what we’re going out to protest for. As long as there are police that do that, there will be marchers.”

    Criming while white – still alive! St. Charles woman who tried to disarm officer gets 7-year sentence.

    At least 1175 people were killed by police in 2014. 302 (26%) were black., via the mappingthepolice website. When it comes to unarmed people killed, the number is at 56 for black people – more than all other races combined.

    Here Are 3 New “Use-Of-Force” Techniques NYPD Officers Are Being Taught To Avoid Chokeholds

    “The training that’s going to happen here in this building will change the future of this city,” Mayor Bill De Blasio said at the program’s launch. “It will have not just an impact on thousands of people, it will have an impact on millions of people, because every interaction that every officer has with their fellow New Yorkers after they are trained again will be different.”
    The first two days cover how to talk people down instead of taking them down, and how to deflect negative comments.

    Day Three covers defensive strategies and “use-of-force” moves so that officers don’t use chokeholds. The NYPD has banned the use of chokeholds since the mid-1990s.

    If a suspect is resisting arrest, officers should, if possible, wait to assemble a three-person team before attempting to use force, according to the traning

    Here are three “use of force” methods being taught, according to DNA Info:
    1. The rear tackle

    In this first method, two officers grab an arm of the person and seize control at the elbow. The third officer “sweeps” a leg, forcing the person into kneeling position where they can be handcuffed.

    2. The “armbar”

    A martial arts maneuver that hyperextends the arm over an officers arm, causing an “elbow joint lock.” This allows the officer to control the person by leveraging the person’s arm over his own.

    3. The “hammerlock”

    In this move, the person’s arm is bent toward their back with upward pressure toward the shoulder joint. It makes handcuffing the person more manageable.

    “We never taught officers how to avoid having contact with the neck and to work as a team in taking a resisting suspect into custody,” said Michael Julian, a former Chief of Personnel who has returned to his post to aid in the retraining initiative.
    “What we’re teaching them is how to control that anger and how to channel that anger so that they don’t act out,” Julian said during a press conference at City Hall.

    “We think we can control that emotion. And we think you’ll see behavioral changes very soon.”

    Mad. Co. Grand Jury chooses not to indict officer who reportedly shot and killed Cinque D’Jahspora back in Nov.

    WH Task Force: All police shootings should be independently reviewed

    A White House Task Force charged with probing the deteriorated relationship between police and the communities they protect issued a report to President Obama on Monday that calls for independent investigations into all police shootings and to abolish all policing practices that rely on racial profiling.

    “The moment is now for us to make these changes,” Obama said during a meeting with task force members at the White House on Monday, according to the Associated Press.

    “We have a great opportunity coming out of some great conflict and tragedy to really transform how we think about community law enforcement relations so that everybody feels safer and our law enforcement officers feel — rather than being embattled — feel fully supported. We need to seize that opportunity.”

    The report, delivered just 90 days after President Obama commissioned the panel, also called for more body cameras on police officers — but stopped short of suggesting the technology could be a silver bullet solution. It also suggest re-training for most officers and said that police departments must be more transparent. […]

    Included in the report were calls for a renewed focus on and funding for community policing programs, and for residency requirements that would ensure more officers live in the cities that they patrol.

    The task force also called for better record keeping about police use of force incidents. Currently there are no reliable statistics about how often police use their weapons and what the circumstances of those cases are.

    “There’s no reason for us not to have this data available,” said Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, who was co-chair of the task force, during a phone call with reporters on Monday. “Now that we know that this does not exist, it is our responsibility to do everything we can to develop that information.” […]

    The task force’s work was closely watched, with many wondering aloud if policing groups would be willing participants and if the task force would focus on one or two sweeping suggestions. Instead, the task force report contains a litany of recommendations that cover many elements of policing and community relationships — many of which national civil rights groups have pushed for for years.

    “The majority of the recommendations in the report are ones that the ACLU has pushed for and stood behind for quite some time,” said Kanya A. Bennett, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, in a statement. “Most of the recommendations are essential and should be non-negotiable. For us to see meaningful change, local authorities must first implement data collection systems to improve transparency, use of force policies that emphasize de-escalation, eradicate all forms of biased policing, and improve community engagement and oversight to provide accountability.”

  155. rq says

    Police Accountability Tool

    This tool is designed to help you hold police departments accountable for police violence. You can use the tool to compare police departments across the country to identify which police departments are most likely to threaten black life. You can also compare police departments operating in similar sized jurisdictions and jurisdictions with similar amounts of crime to show that, even under similar circumstances, some police departments are more likely to take black life than others. […]

    The police departments included in this tool where chosen because they represent jurisdictions with large populations in general and/or large black populations (Over 50,000). In some cases, police departments were added with jurisdiction over counties, states or small towns because they were responsible for killing two or more black people in 2014. More police departments will be added over time. Please contact sam[at]thisisthemovement[dot]org if you would like to add a police department to the chart.

    Fun with data.

    A new campaign is trying to put one of these 15 women on the $20 bill

    A new campaign wants to put a woman on the $20 bill, and now they have a list of possible candidates vetted by historians.

    The list from nonprofit Women on $20s includes early women’s rights activists, such as Susan B. Anthony (who was briefly on a dollar coin), Alice Paul, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; civil rights icon Rosa Parks; anti-slavery activists Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman; three members of Congress, Patsy Mink, Shirley Chisholm, and Barbara Jordan; Frances Perkins, the first woman in the US Cabinet; Red Cross founder Clara Barton; former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt; birth control activist Margaret Sanger, environmentalist Rachel Carson, and feminist Betty Friedan.

    Anyone can vote (if you’re willing to give the group your email address), and the group of 15 will be narrowed down to three, with a second round of voting later on. The group hopes to get 100,000 signatures to petition the White House to consider its eventual choice.

    President Obama has already said putting a woman on US currency is “a pretty good idea.” Vox’s executive editor Matt Yglesias has explained why replacing Andrew Jackson on the $20 is the best way to do it.

    Ripe for Pharyngulation!!!

    Great distillation of the conservative paradox re: racism and beyond. Either history matters or it doesn’t.

    Panorama: die-in in #GrandCentral for #AiyanaJones and all women & girls victimized by cops. #VoicesOfTheUnheard
    5 facts about #AiyanaJones, 7-year-old shot & killed in her bed by a cop who walks free. #VoicesOfTheUnheard

    “Policy Reform” slide that Dr. Isom is explaining & questioned by @StlChange commissioners. #FergusonCommission

  156. rq says

    Tamir Rice’s mom: ‘They never even gave him a chance’, autplay video frmo CNN.

    After Cleveland’s mayor apology for the city’s “insensitivity”, Erin Burnett speaks with Samaria Rice, mother of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was shot and killed by Cleveland police in 2014.

    The Cleveland mayor didn’t apologize. He said “we could have slapped the 12-year-old in the face different.” Basically, that.

    City Of Cleveland Apologizes For Blaming Tamir Rice For His Own Fatal Shooting – same stuff, different title.
    And encore une fois, Cleveland leaders apologize over blaming boy for own death.

    Imagine if we mapped police violence worldwide. It would show 1 police killing in England. 14 in Canada. 1175 in USA. Police state.

    ‘Officer Awareness’ Memo: Police Accountability Recording App Could Lead To Dangerous ‘Flash Mobs’

    New Jersey’s ACLU branch put together “Police Tape” back in 2012, an app which allowed anyone to record cops with a press of a button. The app then hid itself while the recording continued. If the recording was interrupted, the app would automatically send the recording to the ACLU. The app also advised those confronted by cops of their rights in various situations.

    The app is apparently no longer available, but ACLU-NJ reported 30,000 downloads within the first few months of its availability. Widespread coverage of this police accountability app led to a somewhat overwrought response from (of all places) the Burbank, California Police Department.

    “OFFICER AWARENESS,” the bulletin yells, before heading into a brief summation of the app’s capabilities. It takes a turn for the truly absurd when Lt. Eric Deroian attempts to portray the app as potentially dangerous to officers.

    Both apps [including the “stop and frisk” app developed by ACLU-NY] will notify other app users within a defined area if someone has activated their app, with the exact location of the police action. This may result in officer safety issues if community groups are able to pinpoint various police actions, and respond to the location in the form of a flash mob.

    First off, let’s deal with the why of this app’s existence. It is only because officers have routinely (and illegally) confiscated, shut down or deleted recordings from civilians’ cell phones that an automatic archival process is needed. Despite being told repeatedly by judges, the DOJ and their own internal policies that citizens have the right to record police officers in public areas, many cops still seem to believe this isn’t actually a right but a privilege completely subject to any recorded officer’s willingness to oblige.

    Because cops doing bad things hate to be held accountable for their actions, they often turn on those recording their actions. And because officers have power, weapons and the benefit of a doubt eternally on their side, it’s usually pretty easy to shut down recordings. The tide is slowly turning, but civilians are still severely limited in their options when confronted by a cop who doesn’t want to be recorded.

    That’s why apps like these even exist, and cops have only themselves to blame for this situation.

    Now, let’s address the inadvertent hilarity of the “flash mob” claim. Even if there were enough people with the app installed in the area, it’s highly unlikely a coordinated (and apparently threatening) response would be mounted. The thing about successful flash mobs is that they’re usually coordinated ahead of time. The best ones are, anyway. There are some that gel unexpectedly, but flash mobs usually require participants to be at least a little prepared.

    Being suddenly alerted about some unexpected police bullshittery isn’t generally going to provoke anything more than additional cameras and angry voices. I’ve seen tons of police video captured by citizens and I have yet to see crowds physically attack officers no matter how much of a beatdown they’re putting on some unlucky individual. A lot of yelling and swearing? Yeah. But nothing more “threatening” than that. Even when a cop is choking the life out of someone, everyone stands a few feet away and hurls nothing more dangerous than epithets and criticism.

    Here’s the other thing: You know who else can “notify [others] in their area” and “pinpoint various police actions?” Cops. And their “flash mobs” usually arrive at high speed with sirens blaring, and armed to the teeth with a variety of lethal (and slightly less-lethal, depending on application) weapons. This “mob” has the force of law behind it, as well as a large number of options citizens don’t have — like departments and unions willing to justify nearly any amount of misconduct, as well as various levels of legal immunity should the “police action” result in a civil lawsuit. They’ll also be acting out of “fear for their safety,” so the occasional kidney punch/emptied gun magazine will be almost instantly forgiven. All the unfriendly citizen flash mob has is… well, their voices and their cameras. Nothing like bringing a Galaxy 4 to a gun/Taser fight.

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  158. Pteryxx says

    Breaking news – the Justice Department’s review of the Ferguson police department finds racial bias and constitutional rights violations. Full report to come as early as tomorrow.

    WaPo: Justice Dept. review finds pattern of racial bias among Ferguson police

    The Justice Department will issue findings this week that accuse the Ferguson, Mo. police department of racial bias and routinely violating the constitutional rights of citizens, including by stopping drivers without reasonable suspicion, making arrests without probable cause and using excessive force, officials said.

    In hundreds of interviews and in a sweeping review of more than 35,000 pages of Ferguson police records and other documents, Justice officials found that while African Americans make up 67 percent of the population in Ferguson, they accounted for 93 percent of all arrests between 2012 and 2014.

    The findings come as Justice Department officials attempt to negotiate a settlement with the Ferguson Police Department to change its practices. If they are unable to reach agreement, the department could bring a lawsuit, as it has done against law enforcement agencies in other jurisdictions in recent years. A U.S. official said that Ferguson officials have been cooperating so far.

    […]

    The review concludes that racial bias and a focus on generating revenue over public safety has a profound effect on Ferguson police and court practices and routinely violates the Constitution and federal law.

    The Justice review also found a pattern or practice of Ferguson police using unreasonable force against citizens. In 88 percent of the cases in which the department used force, it was used against African Americans. In all of the 14 canine bite incidents for which racial information was available, the person bitten was African American.

    In Ferguson court cases, African Americans are 68 percent less likely than others to have their cases dismissed by the municipal judge, according to the Justice review. In 2013, African Americans accounted for 92 percent of cases in which an arrest warrant was issued.

    From October 2012 to October 2014, 96 percent of people arrested during traffic stops solely because of an outstanding warrant were African American, the review found.

    Justice investigators also reviewed types of arrests and the treatment of detainees inside Ferguson’s city jail by Ferguson police officers.They found that from April to September 2014, 95 percent of people held in the Ferguson jail longer than two days were African American. The Ferguson police department also “overwhelmingly” charges African Americans with certain “petty offenses,” the investigation concluded.

    For example, from 2011 to 2013, African Americans accounted for 95 percent of all “Manner of Walking in Roadway” charges, 94 percent of all “Failure to Comply” charges, and 92 percent of all “Peace Disturbance charges,” the review found.

    NY Times: Justice Department to Fault Ferguson Police, Seeing Racial Bias in Traffic Stops

    Investigators do not need to prove that Ferguson’s policies are racially motivated or that the police intentionally singled out minorities. They need to show only that police tactics had a “disparate impact” on African-Americans and that this was avoidable. Nevertheless, the Justice Department’s report is expected to include a reference to a racist joke that was circulated by email among city officials, according to several law enforcement officials.

    James Knowles III, the mayor of Ferguson, said last week that he did not know what the Justice Department had found or would conclude. But he criticized Mr. Holder for saying recently that wholesale change was needed in Ferguson’s police department.

    “How come they haven’t told us there is something that needs to be changed as they found it?” Mr. Knowles asked. “Why have they allowed whatever they think is happening to continue to happen for six months if that’s the case?”

    *rolleyes*

    In some cities investigated by the Justice Department, such as Albuquerque and Portland, Ore., city officials have said they are open to making changes and quickly reaching an agreement with the department to fix problems. Others have taken a more confrontational approach, did not settle and faced a federal civil rights lawsuit. The Justice Department has four such lawsuits open, including one against Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., and another against Sheriff Terry S. Johnson of Alamance County, N.C.

    Mr. Knowles said he would not speculate on how Ferguson would respond to the report. “The City of Ferguson is going to make its decisions based on what its residents and the people in this region feel is necessary to move us forward,” he said.

    So there’s the difference between the extremely high standard of intentional racial bias, or intent to deprive a person of their civil rights, which the Justice Dept. could not reach in either Wilson’s or Zimmerman’s cases, versus the ‘disparate impact’ standard. By disparate impact, widespread and blatant civil rights violations are plain as day.

    New Republic, last week: Why Is It So Hard to Prove a Civil Rights Crime?

    That explains why DOJ, in its announcement about Zimmerman, went to great lengths to note investigators reviewed every single piece of evidence the Florida case produced—the trial record, forensic evidence, ballistics reports, you name it—and conducted 75 independent interviews plus additional evidence-gathering. Most of that evidence didn’t go to proving Zimmerman’s physical act of injuring or killing Martin—that wasn’t in dispute. The biggest hurdle for federal prosecutors was getting inside Zimmerman’s mind, to prove that he “willfully” engaged Martin and took his life because he was black.

    Willfulness, in civil rights cases or otherwise, is by far the most difficult thing to prove in criminal law. And absent a damning confession from Zimmerman or a mountain of circumstantial evidence showing that he harbors resentment toward black teenagers, making that showing is hard—so hard, DOJ determined, it couldn’t risk pressing charges and losing later.

    If there’s one takeaway from this outcome, which reportedly has the Martin family “heartbroken,” is that at least there’s now an indication of how DOJ will respond in another closely watched case: the civil rights probe of Ferguson officer Darren Wilson. He’s being investigated under a totally different statute, but the legal bar is the same: Will DOJ have enough evidence that Wilson willfully shot and killed Michael Brown because he was black? Don’t hold your breath.

  159. Pteryxx says

    Shaun King on the DOJ report, at Daily Kos: How the DOJ strategy of holding systems accountable never quite holds individual cops accountable

    Overall, this is good news for those who’ve been fighting for justice on the ground in Ferguson and will hopefully provide a sincere sense of being seen heard for so many people in Missouri who’ve been abused by police to fund cash-strapped local governments. If, as a result of this upcoming DOJ report, African Americans in Ferguson and around St. Louis are treated more fairly by law enforcement, progress will be made.

    Now, all of that stands on its own. It’s good. What I’m about to say is not meant to negate the good news of progress, but to lament one essential shortcoming.

    These systems, in cities like Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Seattle, Cleveland, and Ferguson, which are cited by the DOJ in exhaustive reports detailing racism, unthinkable brutality, and even unjust murders at the hands of police, are made up of people. People run these systems, manage them, oversee them, guide them, but when the DOJ cites patterns and practices of abuse, the people who committed the actions that created the patterns aren’t held responsible in any meaningful way.

    They aren’t terminated and prohibited from ever serving in law enforcement again.

    In spite of clear evidence of constitutional violations, they aren’t tried in federal court for any wrongdoing.

    Instead, they are asked, sternly, to change. This isn’t enough.

    Police, in great part, abuse people and abuse the system because they can. They are fully and completely aware that prosecutors will take it easy on them, that their fellow officers will protect them, and that even the federal government, while it may cite them in a report, won’t go so far as to have them serve time in prison for their offenses. Even Tim Loehmann, the officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Cleveland resident Tamir Rice—after being told by his first police force that his service was no longer needed due to insubordination, lying, failed gun training, and more—was given the wonderful chance to resign. (This in spite of his superior stating on his record that Loehmann would likely never grow into a decent officer.) As we now know, Loehmann’s resignation gave him a chance to start over somewhere else—where he soon killed a child.

    Here’s the thing: Police should be held to an even higher standard of justice than everyday people. Sworn to uphold the law, police should then be properly punished when they violate it.

  161. watry says

    Thanks for the authors list in #152, rq. I’m a bookish person, and the bookish circles I hang out in online are really pushing awareness of racial bias in publishing, including pushing people to actively seek out authors of color and other minority populations.

    Some of them I’m already reading (I didn’t know Colson Whitehead was black!) , some of them I’ve never heard of. To the library! And when I get paid, the bookstore!

  162. rq says

    So people have been calling for boycotts of cities where police shootings have taken place. Firstly, I’m rather confused as to how that works, exactly, but there’s also this: How boycotts hurt the cities they are supposed to help.

    Boycotts have a storied tradition in Civil Rights history, with the Montgomery bus boycott frequently cited as evidence for their utility. But the vulnerable rust belt cities of 2015 are a far cry from Alabama of 1955. The Montgomery boycott was designed as a strike against segregation, but the stark division of a Montgomery bus—whites in the front, blacks in the back—was, paradoxically, easier to protest. Black and white was as clearly delineated as right and wrong. In contrast, to boycott an entire city—particularly a rust belt city like St. Louis or Cleveland with a majority black population—is to strike against an uncertain target. How do you punish those responsible for abuse without making their victims collateral damage?

    Cities like Cleveland and St. Louis are often objects of national derision. This is “flyover country,” “the Mistake on the Lake”—places elites would never consider boycotting because they would never considering visiting in the first place. It is easy to call for a boycott of rust belt cities when you do not see their shuttered stores and abandoned malls and long-forgotten factories. It is easy to assume that boycotts carry weight, when the reality is that life here is tenuous, opportunities fleeting and stability low. A boycott means lost wages on your service job, the fastest growing sector in regions still hard-hit by the recession. A boycott means losing the tourism dollars from the few not driven away by your terrible reputation. A boycott means business will go on for local white elites as usual, because racial and class segregation is so deep that residents essentially function in two separate economies—a state of affairs quite different from that of the Montgomery bus system.

    Some have suggested that a targeted boycott aimed at a powerful city industry—sports, for example—could sway the powers that be. But this assumes a scale of solidarity that does not exist. If it did, there would be no need for a boycott. The day white St. Louis decides to forgo the Cardinals to show their commitment to black rights is a day black rights have already been won.

    Boycotts can still be an effective means of political protest, but they need to reflect the demography, economy, and culture of the regions they target. To boycott a city is not the same as boycotting a product or corporation, where the entity being boycotted has the power to make a change. A city is a far more amorphous entity. Boycotts should be led from within, not imported from outside—and they should reflect the present economic reality. No group has suffered more in the recession “recovery” than black Americans, who have lost jobs, homes, and wealth at a disproportionate rate. Boycotting a majority black city wholesale means eliminating more resources from people who have spent the past seven years losing them. It often means boycotting the powerless and leaving them even more so, even if that is not the intent. When Arizona became the object of a boycott following the passage of its immigration laws, it was Hispanic laborers who often paid the consequences in lost work.

    “Boycott Cleveland” smacks of the same desultory logic as: “Let the south secede.” This phrase is uttered by northern liberals as a condemnation of southern racism, but its implementation would do nothing but solidify it. “Let the south secede” implies two things: that the most important people in the south are white, with the black population but an afterthought; and that the suffering of black people is best handled by looking away. “Let the south secede” is not an argument about the south, but about the centrality of the northern critic, who wants to live in an America free of discrimination while doing nothing to combat it. “Boycott Cleveland” carries a similar tenor: “This is not a place for enlightened people like me,” it says, while ignoring that people—real people—are working there for change.

    Ferguson, state officials to be briefed on DOJ investigation today – this was prior to releasing the information itself.

    The investigation is largely expected to result in a settlement, known as a federal consent decree.

    It’s been looming over the police department in the months following the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown on Aug. 9.

    But what does federal intervention mean for a police department, and how has it played out in departments elsewhere across the country?

    Some believe a consent decree will double as a death certificate for a department the size of Ferguson’s, burying it under years of reforms and monitoring the city cannot afford.

    Others who have undergone the process have said that for as expensive and time-consuming as the federal investigations may have been, their departments are better off because of it.

    Former St. Louis County Police Chief Tim Fitch has conducted evaluations for a national accreditation organization at two police departments that have undergone consent decrees.

    “In my experience, they have been viewed as a handcuff on cops when it comes to doing proactive policing, and activists have thought they are very beneficial to the community,” Fitch said.

    Only about 25 police departments have undergone the process, which typically lasts for about five years and costs millions.

    Should a police department disagree with the findings, there is little recourse. Departments, such as Maricopa County, Ariz., have tried, unsuccessfully, to sue the federal government.

    Most departments, such as New Orleans, Seattle, Los Angeles, Detroit and Cincinnati, have been able to sustain the costs because of their size. With a force of about 53 officers, Ferguson could become one of the smallest to face a consent decree. East Haven, Conn., is nearly identical in size to Ferguson’s force, and it is projecting a cost of about $3 million, according to the New Haven Register.

    No matter the size of the department, consent decrees have themes in common. Use of force, citizen complaints, traffic stop data and early warning systems for problematic police behavior are among them, said Sam Walker, a police accountability expert of the University of Nebraska.

    Walker agrees the process is pricey.

    “They are paying for things they didn’t do in the past, paying for their sins,” Walker said.

    This week, the New York Times quoted unidentified sources saying federal officials found a pattern of discrimination within the Ferguson Police Department’s racial profiling statistics.

    Out of history, Jose Campos Torres, killed by Houston officers in 1977. This is not justice. The officers were punished with: guilty of negligent homicide, one year of probation a $1 fine. Only later were civil rights violations looked at.

    Remember Sharod Kindell, the man who was shot and then kept in custody with inadequate health care? Apparently they let him out… then rearrested him. #DENVER #EMERGENCY ACTION NOW. GET TO DENVER POLICE HQ AT 13th & BANNOCK. #SharodKindell WAS RE ARRESTED.
    #SharodKindell recently released on bail, now DPD has arrested him on trumped up charges, follow @SMoKeeGyrl & @WaywardStreamer 4 updates.
    I’ll have an eye out for more this morning.

  163. rq says

    So onto Ferguson! Same information from several sources to follow.
    CNN popped up first. Justice report finds systematic discrimination against African Americans in Ferguson

    Among the findings, reviewed by CNN: from 2012 to 2014, 85% of people subject to vehicle stops by Ferguson police were African American; 90% of those who received citations were black; and 93% of people arrested were black. This while 67% of the Ferguson population is black.

    In 88% of the cases in which police the Ferguson police reported using force, it was against African Americans. During the period 2012-2014 black drivers were twice as likely as white drivers to be searched during traffic stops, but 26% less likely to be found in possession of contraband.

    Blacks were disproportionately more likely to be cited for minor infractions: 95% of tickets for “manner of walking in roadway,” essentially jaywalking, were against African Americans. Also, 94% of all “failure to comply” charges were filed against black people.

    The findings in the investigation are expected to be made public as soon as Wednesday, and the Justice Department is expected to pursue a court-supervised consent decree that requires the city of Ferguson to make changes to its police and courts.

    According to the findings, reviewed by CNN, African Americans were 68% less likely to have their cases dismissed by a Ferguson municipal judge, and were overwhelmingly more likely to be arrested during traffic stops solely for an outstanding warrant by the Ferguson courts.

    The investigators found evidence of racist jokes being sent around by Ferguson police and court officials. One November 2008 email read in part that President Barack Obama wouldn’t likely be President for long because “what black man holds a steady job for four years.”

    Another jokes that made the rounds on Ferguson government email in May 2011 said: “An African American woman in New Orleans was admitted into the hospital for a pregnancy termination. Two weeks later she received a check for $3000. She phoned the hospital to ask who it was from. The hospital said: ‘Crimestoppers.'”

    Read those last two paragraphs, and tell me that the Ferguson PD is not racist. Fuck. Me. Community policing.

    Here’s the St Louis Post-Dispatch, Ferguson Police acted in patterns of racial bias, Department of Justice to report

    Law enforcement officials familiar with the DOJ’s findings said Tuesday the report will show that Ferguson Police disproportionately stopped African-Americans for no reasonable suspicion, made arrests with no probable cause and used force disproportionately against blacks. It also found cases of racial bias in police practices and in emails by Ferguson Police. And it says that the combination of racial bias and a dependency upon fines for revenue has led to wide gulf of distrust between police and black citizens.

    Attorney General Eric Holder is expected to announce findings on the pattern and practices investigation as early as Wednesday. It is separate from an investigation over whether the civil rights of Brown, 18, were violated, when he was shot and killed by Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9. The Department of Justice would not comment on when the civil rights investigation findings will be announced.

    The report will say that between 2012 and 2014, while African-Americans made up 67 percent of the population in Ferguson, 85 percent of those subject to a vehicle stop were African-American, 90 percent who received citations were black and 93 percent of those arrested were black.

    It also will say that African-American drivers were twice as likely as white drivers to be searched during vehicle stops but were 26 percent less likely to be in possession of illegal material.

    In documented cases of use of force by Ferguson Police, the report will say, 88 percent were against African-Americans. […]

    The investigation also found that from April to September last year, 95 percent of people held at the Ferguson jail longer than two days were African-American.

    Blacks in Ferguson are also more likely than others to be charged with offenses like “manner of walking in roadway” or “failure to comply,” according to the report.

    The report will also say that Ferguson has a pattern of putting revenue over public safety, in violation of the 14th Amendment’s due process and equal process protections, by collecting thousands of dollars in fines on those living below or near poverty. The report says that since 2010, Ferguson courts have collected more than $442,000 for failure to appear fines.

    It will note that the failure to appear charge was discontinued last year.

    In general, the DOJ report will say there is a wide gulf of mistrust between the Ferguson Police Department and major portions of the population, particularly black citizens.

    Consequently, law enforcement is often seen as illegitimate or even absent, the department’s report will say.

    I love the future tense here. It’sl ike they know everything, but they can’t report on ti because it hasn’t been officially released.

    Justice Dept. review finds pattern of racial bias among Ferguson police, that’s the Washington Post:

    In hundreds of interviews and in a broad review of more than 35,000 pages of Ferguson police records and other documents, Justice officials found that although African Americans make up 67 percent of the population in Ferguson, they accounted for 93 percent of all arrests between 2012 and 2014.

    The findings come as Justice Department officials attempt to negotiate a settlement with the police department to change its practices. If they are unable to reach an agreement, the department could bring a lawsuit, as it has done against law enforcement agencies in other jurisdictions in recent years. A U.S. official said that Ferguson officials have been cooperating.

    As part of its findings, the Justice Department concluded that African Americans accounted for 85 percent of all people stopped by Ferguson police officers and 90 percent of all citations issued.

    The Justice Department plans to release evidence this week of racial bias found in e-mails written by Ferguson police and municipal court officials. A November 2008 e-mail, for instance, stated that President Obama could not be president for very long because “what black man holds a steady job for four years.”

    The Justice Department did not identify who wrote this and other racist e-mails and whom they were sent to. Officials at the department spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the review and its findings before a planned release this week.

    The review concludes that racial bias and a focus on generating revenue over public safety have a profound effect on Ferguson police and court practices and routinely violate the Constitution and federal law. […]

    Justice investigators spent about 100 days in Ferguson, observing police and court practices, including four sessions of the Ferguson Municipal Court. They conducted an analysis of police data on stops, searches and arrests, as well as data collected by the court, and met with neighborhood associations and advocacy groups. The investigators also interviewed city, police and court officials, including the Ferguson police chief and his command staff.

    In the past five years, the Justice Department’s civil rights division has opened more than 20 investigations of police departments, more than twice as many as were opened in the previous five.

    The department has entered into 15 agreements with law enforcement agencies, including consent decrees with nine of them, including the New Orleans and Albuquerque police departments.

    Justice officials have seven open investigations, including a civil rights inquiry into the Cleveland Police Department. In December, the department issued a report accusing the Cleveland police of engaging in a “pattern or practice” of unnecessary force — including shooting residents, striking them in the head and spraying them with chemicals.

    The department and Cleveland agreed to establish an independent monitor to oversee changes, including better training and supervision of officers.

    So Cleveland’s up next.

    NBC, too – Justice Department releases scathing Ferguson report

    The DOJ findings include the following: (1) a pattern and practice of disproportionate stops and arrests of blacks without probable cause, (2) unreasonable force, (3) racially biased handling of warrants by municipal courts, and (4) a pattern of focusing on revenue over public safety that violated the rights of poor, black residents.

    As part of the investigation, federal investigators also uncovered email evidence of further racial bias and stereotyping by both members of the Ferguson police department and municipal court officials. The email evidence includes racist jokes, one that referenced President Barack Obama and another that referred to a refund a black woman received for an abortion as a credit from “Crimestoppers.”
    [caption]“And while blacks were more than twice as likely as whites to be stopped while driving, they were 26% less likely to be found with illegal contraband.”[/caption]

    The report comes six months after a white Ferguson police officer shot and killed unarmed black teenager Michael Brown Jr., an incident that drew widespread scrutiny and brought national attention to the long history of abuses allegedly committed by the city’s overwhelmingly white police force against its majority black population. […]

    But even more than the treatment they received once stopped, the Justice Department’s report found that blacks were used in the criminal justice system to buoy the city’s economy and balance its budget. The practices uncovered by federal investigators have violated residents’ constitutional rights to due process and equal protection under the law. [..].

    The enormity of the net cast by law enforcement and court officials upon the city’s black community is staggering. As of late 2014, more than 16,000 Ferguson residents – out of a population of 21,000 – had outstanding warrants issued by the city’s municipal courts. The vast majority of those warrants stem from cases involving minor violations such as parking infractions, traffic tickets, and housing code violations, according to the report.

    These findings, long known by local activists, lawyers and many black residents, underscore the tainted relationship between blacks and police. Many have pointed to the fact that initial reports claimed Officer Wilson stopped Brown and a friend for little more than walking down the center of the street.

    16 000 out of 21 000.

    Source: Probe Of Ferguson Police Uncovers Racist Comment About Obama, from NPR news. Same information as elsewhere.

    And last one, Ferguson Shooting: Federal Investigation Expected to Show Pattern of Discrimination at Police Department – still in the future-like tense.

    In essence they accuse the Ferguson police department of a pattern and practice of discrimination.

    The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division found multiple examples of police and municipal court officials exhibiting racial bias in emails sent on official Ferguson accounts.

    Examples include a November 2008 email which stated that President Barack Obama would not be president for very long because “what black man holds a steady job for four years.” Another racist email from May 2011 stated: “An African-American woman in New Orleans was admitted into the hospital for a pregnancy termination. Two weeks later she received check for $5,000. She phoned the hospital to ask who it was from. The hospital said, ‘Crimestoppers.’”

    From April to September 2014, 95 percent of people held at the Ferguson jail longer than two days were African American.

    African Americans accounted for 95 percent of all “Manner of Walking in Roadway” — essentially jaywalking — charges, 94 percent of “failure to comply” charges and 92 percent of all “peace disturbance” charges.

  164. rq says

    Ferguson Police Routinely Violate Rights of Blacks, Justice Dept. Finds

    The racial disparity in those statistics was so stark that the Justice Department has concluded in a report scheduled for release on Wednesday that there was only one explanation: The Ferguson Police Department was routinely violating the constitutional rights of its black residents.

    The report, based on a six-month investigation, provides a glimpse into the roots of the racial tensions that boiled over in Ferguson last summer after a black teenager, Michael Brown, was fatally shot by a white police officer, making it a worldwide flash point in the debate over race and policing in America. It describes a city where the police used force almost exclusively on blacks and regularly stopped people without probable cause. Racial bias is so ingrained, the report said, that Ferguson officials circulated racist jokes on their government email accounts. […]

    “There are serious problems here that cannot be explained away,” said a law enforcement official who has seen the report and spoke on the condition of anonymity because it had not been released yet.

    Those findings reinforce what the city’s black residents have been saying publicly since the shooting in August, that the criminal justice system in Ferguson works differently for blacks and whites. A black motorist who is pulled over is twice as likely to be searched as a white motorist, even though searches of white drivers are more likely to turn up drugs or other contraband, the report found.

    Minor, largely discretionary offenses such as disturbing the peace and jaywalking were brought almost exclusively against blacks. When whites were charged with these crimes, they were 68 percent more likely to have their cases dismissed, the Justice Department found.

    “I’ve known it all my life about living out here,” Angel Goree, 39, who lives in the apartment complex where Mr. Brown was killed, said Tuesday by phone.

    Many such statistics surfaced in the aftermath of Mr. Brown’s shooting, but the Justice Department report offers a more complete look at the data than ever before. Federal investigators conducted hundreds of interviews, reviewed 35,000 pages of police records and analyzed race data compiled for every police stop. […]

    For Mr. Holder, the case has been deeply personal. He spoke about conversations he had as a boy with his father about what to do when stopped by the police. And he described his own experience as the victim of racial profiling. Such comments drew the ire of police groups who said Mr. Holder, the nation’s first black attorney general, was fueling anti-police sentiment in minority neighborhoods. Mr. Holder has stood by his remarks, which have since been echoed by James Comey, the F.B.I. director.

    The report is due to be released in Mr. Holder’s final days in office. He announced his retirement last year and plans to leave as soon as the nominee to succeed him, Loretta E. Lynch, is confirmed in the Senate.

    In pushing for police reforms, the Justice Department typically does not call for personnel changes, such as the firing of a police chief. Instead, it typically seek institutional changes, such as mandated training, efforts to diversify the police force and more outside oversight. In many cities, the two sides agree on a federal monitor to ensure the police department is complying.

    Ms. Goree said she was skeptical that changes would be made without the city’s being sued.

    “If the Justice Department doesn’t take it to the full extent of the law,” she said, “it’s not going to be one iota of a change.”

    Contrast those racial disparities with what Mayor Knowles said half-a-year ago: Is Race An Issue In Ferguson? Depends On Whom You Ask

    “I grew up here, and it’s always been a very diverse community,” said James Knowles, mayor of Ferguson since 2011, who is white. “So for people to come out and say that there’s some long-standing anger or there’s a history of racial tension is absolutely ridiculous,” he said. “There’s not a black-white divide in Ferguson.”

    That whole article is worth a re-read, a nice portrait of Ferguson, with history.

    Messages spray painted in snow outside Cleveland City Hall, link via the tweet.

    So who’s the #Ferguson PD protester that made @googlemaps ?, google maps link here. :D

    “Justice for Africa” Protest Against Killer Cops – Photos and Video from LAPD HQ

    Currently, Jason Nellis, who blogs at “The World as seen by Jazoof” and has also been involved with Nevada Cop Block and other Las Vegas area groups, is in Los Angeles, where protests over the shooting of an unarmed homeless man by the Los Angeles Police are taking place at the LAPD headquarters. These are photos and videos he has taken there. We should have an update with commentary and more details at some point later.

  165. rq says

    Autopsy Reveals Denver Police Shot Jessica Hernandez 4 Times, Death Ruled A Homicide

    Hernandez’s Jan. 26 death, which is under investigation by the Denver District Attorney’s Office, sparked weeks of protest. Police say Officers Gabriel Jordan and Daniel Greene opened fire when Hernandez drove a stolen car towards one of them. But the family’s lawyer, Qusair Mohamedbhai, said the autopsy disputes officers’ claims, NBC reports.

    Mohamedbhai said in a statement that the autopsy doesn’t indicate that Hernandez was driving toward the officers who shot her since since the bullet wounds entered her body from the driver’s side of the car and were not fired at close range. He told NBC News on Saturday that the left-to-right wound path and trajectory of the bullets that struck Hernandez “undermine the version of the events put forth by the Denver Police Department.”

    Denver police spokeswoman Raquel Lopez said it would be “inappropriate” for the department to respond to comments from the Hernandez family lawyers until the district attorney’s investigation is complete.

    The Hernandez family has said they have “no confidence” that the district attorney will conduct a fair investigation. Through Mohamedbhai, they are calling for an independent federal investigation into the teen’s death.

    Tamir Rice Shooting: Attorney for Cop in Killing Blasts Mayor’s Apology – so now it’s turning into a back-and-forth over who gets to be least sensitive? Or something?

    A lawyer representing a Cleveland police officer who fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice in November criticized the city’s mayor Tuesday for apologizing for the language used in a legal response to a lawsuit filed by the boy’s family.

    “In reviewing the events of November 22, 2014, the mayor and others were not present. Life looks different through a rear view mirror,” said Henry Hilow, Officer Tim Loehmann’s attorney. […]

    “In an attempt to protect all of our defenses we used words and we phrased things in such a way that was very insensitive, very insensitive to the tragedy in general, the family and the victim in particular,” Jackson said Monday. “So we are apologizing today as the City of Cleveland to the family of Tamir Rice and to the citizens of the City of Cleveland for our poor use of words and our insensitivity in the use of those words.”

    Hilow said the city’s attorneys were only defending Cleveland in the lawsuit. “It was irresponsible for Mayor Jackson to comment on a pending lawsuit. Mayor Jackson, who is an attorney, knows the importance of representing a client and acting responsibly,” Hilow said. “His conduct has done a disservice to the City of Cleveland and the attorneys for the city.”

    And I don’t even know what to say about this upcoming cover of @EducationNext. Hint: It uses the idea of absent black fathers to try and make a point about the modern American family.

    thisisthemovement, installment #79:

    Ferguson/STL
    DOJ Finds Pattern of Racial Bias Among Ferguson Police The DOJ report re: the Ferguson Police Department has been leaked and highlights a pattern of systemic and structural racism within the Ferguson Police Department — this article has highlights. Absolute must read.

    Missouri Director of Public Safety, Dan Isom, Resigns Appointed in the wake of Ferguson, Isom served as the state Director of Public Safety, a key law enforcement role and he has recently announced that he is resigning and is returning to work at UMSL. Interesting timing and read.

    Lawsuit Prevents Kansas City Students From Being Disciplined for Protest Students in Kansas City Public Schools held a silent protest re: Ferguson during a speech by Gov. Nixon months ago and the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the district to ensure that the students were not disciplined. The lawsuit was settled and the students will not be disciplined. Important read.

    NYC/Eric Garner
    Disciplinary History of NYPD Cop Who Killed Garner The Legal Aid Society has filed a lawsuit to get the Civilian Complaint Review Board “…to turn over information it might have about Daniel Pantaleo.” Important, interesting read.

    Tamir Rice/Cleveland
    Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson Apologizes to the Family of Tamir Rice Mayor Frank Jackson issued a public apology on Monday for the insensitive language used in answering the lawsuit filed after a Cleveland police officer killed 12 year old Tamir last November. The city’s response says that Tamir’s death was caused by “failure … to exercise due care to avoid injury.”

    Los Angeles
    Los Angeles Police Criticized for Use of Force Sunday afternoon a Los Angeles police officer killed a homeless, unarmed black man known as “Africa”. Witnesses say the police were actively trying to take down the tents of homeless folks on Skid Row. “They didn’t have to kill the man…Police are harassing people every day.”

    Antonio Zambrano-Mones/Pasco, Washington
    3 Officers Fired 17 Shots at Antonio Zambrano-Montes Antonio Zambrano-Montes was shot on February 10th by 3 officers who fired a total of 17 bullets and Zambrano-Montes was apparently throwing rocks.

    Commentary/Miscellaneous
    Mexico Calls on United States to Monitor Fatal Police Shootings of Mexican Nationals Mexico calls on the U.S. Department of Justice to monitor the shootings of three Mexican nationals in the United States within the last month. “Mexico joins several civil society organizations in their urgent call to move forward the review of use of force policies and practices.”

    Testimony for 21st Century Policing The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing has just released its Interim Report. You should definitely read, or skim at least.

    Fairfax County To Create 25-member Police Commission After Unarmed John Geer Was Killed Unarmed John Geer was killed in 2013 by police in the doorway of his home, people are denied their basic constitutional rights. And now, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors is creating a Police Commission to address issues moving forward. Also, the Board of Supervisors may discipline the County Attorney his past actions.

    Claudette Colvin On March 2, 1955 Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat to a young white girl on the bus. “History had me glued to the seat,” said Colvin. Claudette did this courageous act 9 months before Rosa Parks, a 42 year old professional and officer in the NAACP, did the same thing. Claudette Colvin is one of the many unnamed individuals who made the Civil Rights Movement move.

    Officers React to Miami Gardens Incident This article captures responses from police officers from across the country reacting to the recent news of Miami Gardens police abusing their authority by repeatedly arresting a man for trespassing for being at his own home. Interesting read.

    Study: Killers Are Less Likely To Be Executed If Their Victims Are Black This article unpacks a study that is soon-to-be-published that concludes “Black people are much more frequently executed for killing white people are for killing black people, and capital punishment is rarely used at all victims when are black — especially when they’re male.”

    School to Prison Pipeline Defined This article provides a deeper look into the nuances of the “school-to-prison” pipeline. Powerful read.

    What’s Next
    Thursday, March. 5th — Monday, March 9th
    Selma 50th Anniversary Bridge Crossing Jubilee
    For the full Jubilee schedule, click here.

    In 2014, police in the small town Hope Mills, NC, killed more black ppl than police in Seattle, SF, Newark+Oakland. Modern day lynchings. This guy has been playing with the statistics on Mapping Police Violence, his whole timeline is worth checking out.

    #Ferguson will respond to DOJ’s report after it is released to the public tomorrow at presser at TBA time/location , see press release attached, which basically says Ferguson will respond after the official DOJ announcement.

  166. rq says

    Justice is not an abstract concept. Justice is a living Mike Brown. Justice is a smiling Tamir. Justice is no more death.

    DOJ Finds Ferguson Police Routinely Discriminate, via Huffington Post. Same old, for the moment.

    @sarahkendzior I kinda hate the idea that we need an investigation and a racist joke to legitimize what regular folks have been saying.

    And Mashable, Federal probe of Ferguson police reveals pattern of racial bias

    Among the findings of the report was a racially tinged 2008 message in a municipal email account stating that President Barack Obama would not be president for very long because “what black man holds a steady job for four years.”

    Can we talk about the phrase ‘racially tinged’, okay? And:

    However, four officers in the U.S. have not had the same fortune. One police officer in a small Colorado town is facing murder charges after he followed a man into his home in October and shot him in the back. A different NYPD officer is facing charges after he recently shot a man in a Brooklyn housing complex, and two officers in Albuquerque, New Mexico, face murder charges after killing a homeless man in the hills above the city last year.

    So four out of… how many are facing charges? This is good news? More like the rare exceptions.

    Few Say Police Forces Nationally Do Well in Treating Races Equally – this from August, but it just supports what the DOJ found. So yes, this is data that has been known for ages, yet it takes a DOJ report to somehow make it real. And I bet there will be excuses galore.

    Interesting, The month after Mike Brown was killed, the # of black ppl killed by police dropped 56% nationwide. Protests matter. There’s a link to the data, too.

  167. rq says

    #BlackBrunchMN White uncomfortability was at it’s peak today. @blklibmn, from Saturday. Just a photo.

    Not gonna lie, I didn’t think there’d be a concert in Selma. And definitely not one featuring Lady Gaga and R. Kelly. Y’all.
    More on that: Lady Gaga, R. Kelly to perform in Selma

    Lady Gaga and R. Kelly will perform in Selma Saturday night following President Barack Obama’s speech at the Selma 50 event, according to WSFA 12 News. The event recognizes the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the Selma-to-Montgomery March, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, according to its website.

    T.I., Young Breezy, We Are Toonz, Bigg Robb, The Impressions, and The Voice’s Toia Jones will also take the stage. George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, along with a number of U.S. senators and representatives, will also be in attendance.

    The commemoration will continue on Sunday, with the annual crossing over Edmund Pettus Bridge, and another concert. Rick Ross, Aloe Blacc, Doug E. Fresh, Estelle, Flavor Flav, India.Aire, Kelly Price, MC Lyte, Vanilla Ice, and others are set to perform. Harry Belafonte, Peter Yarrow, Bill Bellamy, Bill Withers, Cicely Tyson, Gary Owen, John Salley, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Tom Joyner, and others, are set to appear.

    Sunday’s concert will stream live on BET[dot]com and CentricTV[dot]com, and will later air on March 15 with historical footage, interviews, and photographs.

    Umm, so I know there’s a march happening, separate from this… But I’m still not sure a concert of this kind is appropriate. Eh.

    Minneapolis school officials respond to controversy over slavery game

    Earlier this month, days ago, Rafranz Davis, an educator in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area who blogs about educational technology, opened her e-mail to find a rave review of “Mission US: Flight to Freedom,” a computer game that teachers could use to celebrate Black History Month.

    In the game, players assume the role of Lucy King, a 14-year-old who in 1848 attempts to run away from the Kentucky plantation where she is enslaved and make her way north. Throughout the game, Lucy is confronted by choices, many of a “Do what I say or I’ll whip you” sort.

    Some choices earn badges. Some are met with violence, humiliation and cruelty. When Lucy stays silent in the face of accusatory questions from Mr. Otis, the overseer, he tells her he likes “quiet negroes.” Later Lucy, described as a “Nigress,” is auctioned off for $800.

    The game is designed to give middle school students a sense what the experience of slavery was like. The School Library Journal described it as “fun” and the review site Jay is Games called it “a must-play.”

    Here and elsewhere, lots of parents seem to disagree. It’s bad enough that schools tend to mark Black History Month with discussions of African American achievements from the distant past. Why celebrate slavery? And why subject children, and in particular black children, to an “effective simulation” of the most painful chapter of their history?

    […]

    New York PBS affiliate WNET, the game’s creator, responded last week with a statement listing the credentials of the scholars and associations that contributed to the project. “Flight to Freedom is part of a growing body of ‘serious games’ that immerses users in historical and contemporary problems in ways that encourage perspective-taking, discussion, and weighing of multiple kinds of evidence,” the station asserted.

    “Educators have found that games can be an effective way to teach about sensitive topics such as human rights, the war on terror, immigration, and environmental crises. The Mission US approach has been shown to be especially effective for reaching struggling learners who have difficulty learning from a textbook.”

    “Flight to Freedom” is one of four computer games created by using $3.3 million from the aforementioned organizations. The other games are about the American Revolution; the Cheyenne experience during westward expansion; and life as a Russian immigrant in New York.

    The list of scholars, among them African Americans and American Indians, who contributed to the games’ development is long indeed. More than 1 million people have registered to play the games, which can be streamed for free.

    […]

    A little additional context: Minnesota teachers often express doubts about teaching the historical experiences of people of color. Because the teacher corps is 96 percent white, it’s not uncommon for a teacher to know less than a student has learned at home. There is a huge fear of getting it wrong.

    As a result, teachers often look for curriculum produced by a trusted source. Here the gold standard is the Minnesota Historical Society, which has a wealth of classroom resources. In the case of “Flight to Freedom,” the source is also the creator of Sesame Street.

    […]

    Of course re-enacting a day as a pioneer or a miner does not generally involve rape, mutilation, murder or bondage. Nor does a day spent churning butter at a frontier farm involve the risk of a child thinking they had a beating coming because the made a choice that was wrong — or not right enough.

    […]
    Indeed, the Anti-Defamation League has come out against re-enactments, noting that a Holocaust simulation in a Florida middle school traumatized students. Simulations, the group noted, “trivialize the experience of victims and can leave students with the impression at the conclusion of the activity that they actually know what it was like during the Holocaust.”

    Further, “They stereotype group behavior and distort historical reality by reducing groups of people and their experiences and actions to one-dimensional representations.”

    As the controversy has raged around the country, some scholars have suggested that a larger issue is the cultural competence of the classroom where students are being taught about slavery via any media.

    “There are young black children all over the country having alienating experiences in the classroom when reading Huck Finn and Harriet Tubman,” one urban education professor told Education Week.

    And more frmo schools, Missouri elementary schools have highest rate of suspending black children

    The study by the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA uses district level out-of-school suspension rates to compare disparities in every state. About 3.5 million children lost almost 18 million days of instruction in the 2011-12 school year to suspensions, the study says. Keeping students out of school reduces their chances of graduation and success, a phenomenon commonly called the school-to-prison pipeline.

    “We know that effective schools do not suspend high numbers of kids,” said Daniel Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies. “Effective schools keep kids in school and have a high amount of instruction time.”

    According to the findings, elementary schools in Missouri suspended 14.3 percent of black students at least once in the 2011-12 school year, compared with 1.8 percent of white students. The 12.5-point difference is two times higher than the national disparity.

    Pushing Missouri’s overall rate upward was St. Louis Public Schools, which suspended 29.1 percent of its elementary school enrollment that year. Normandy and Riverview Gardens each suspended around 21 percent of their elementary students. Kansas City had similar numbers.

    The four districts enroll about one-third of the state’s black children. Since 2012, the St. Louis-area districts have taken steps to use in-school suspension as an alternative to sending students home.

    The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education issued a statement asking districts to be mindful of the disparity.

    “In light of this data showing the disparity in suspension rates for black and white students, the Department urges districts to take a close look at discipline policies and determine how schools can keep students engaged and learning in school,” it states.

    Losen said disadvantaged schools may not have the support staff needed to effectively handle classroom management problems, which is why some turn to suspensions to deal with discipline. In many other situations, bias plays a role. As a general rule, Losen said, black boys receive harsher penalties for offenses that don’t always lead to suspension for children of other races.

    “What we’re coming to understand as a culture, there’s a tendency to perceive a situation involving black males as being more dangerous than it actually is,” he said. “It shows up when you look at large numbers over the course of time. It may not show up in every incident.”

    As children get to middle and high school, discipline rates tend to rise.

    In Missouri, secondary schools suspended 27 percent of black students and 7 percent of white students at least once in 2011-12, the study says. The 20-point disparity is the fourth widest in the country.

    I never thought the Policing Task Force would recommend special prosecutors and external investigators. That’s bold. And I’m all for it.
    I have to find more on the Policing Task Force.

  168. rq says

    The motherfucking FEDERAL GOVERNMENT has called the police racist & watch White Amerikkka justify it.

    Police depts in Albuquerque, Kansas City, Atlantic City, Ardmore, Hope Mills, Rowan County kill black ppl at higher rates than Ferguson PD. I believe Albuquerque is being investigated?

    @WyzeChef Du Bois foretold of these scenarios in his opus Black Reconstruction in 1935. Black bodies made to be everything but citizens.

    Amnesty International USA Responds to Reports of Department of Justice Findings in Ferguson Police Department Investigation

    In response to reports that the Department of Justice will release its findings from a civil rights investigation of the Ferguson, Missouri Police Department, Amnesty International USA executive director Steven W. Hawkins issued the following statement:

    “The Justice Department should be commended for using the tools at its disposal to investigate the Ferguson Police Department. Michael Brown’s death touched off a long-overdue and much-needed conversation about race and policing that must continue. The U.S. still has a long way to go before it has truly accountable policing. This country’s long history of racial profiling and other police abuses is only matched by its equally long history of inadequate accountability for those responsible. President Obama should support the creation of a National Crime and Justice Task Force to review and evaluate all components of the criminal justice system and make recommendations on comprehensive criminal justice reform.

    “Ferguson is one of thousands of cities in this country with entrenched tension between law enforcement and the communities it is tasked to protect. The Justice Department can and should move forward with a national review of police tactics and practices, especially those concerning deadly force. Not only that, it must begin to require all police agencies to collect and publish the statistics on deaths by law enforcement. We still don’t know exactly how many people are killed by police officers every year.“

    To read On the Streets of America: Human Rights Abuses in Ferguson, go to: http://amnestyusa.org/OnTheStreetsOfAmerica

    Good news? Ferguson Police Department May Fold Due To DOJ Probe

    Once Ferguson tallies the costs of either fighting the DOJ allegations or adopting reforms the department will require, it may decide the best choice would be to get rid of the police department and hire another agency to police the town.

    “My guess is it’s going to be so expensive to the city of Ferguson, they’re going to have to make a survival decision,” Tim Fitch, the former head of the St. Louis County Police Department, said in a recent interview with The Huffington Post. “Financially, I don’t believe they’re going to be able to do one of two things: Either they’re going to fight it, and not be able to afford that, or to implement all of the changes that DOJ is going to require is going to be so expensive, they’re not going to be able to do it.”

    Fitch and some other county law enforcement officials have criticized some small police departments in the county for aggressive ticket-writing and law enforcement. Jon Belmar, the current St. Louis County police chief, called the ticketing practices of some departments “immoral.” St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch has said there are police departments in the area that shouldn’t exist. St. Louis County may stand to benefit by taking over Ferguson policing if such a decision is reached.

    Ferguson officials have given no indication they are considering handing the town’s law enforcement to another agency. They said they won’t comment on the DOJ investigation until it is formally released.

    “I can tell you that the citizens I hear from by and large –- and this is even from citizens who’ve been involved in protests -– want nothing to do with St. Louis County Police,” Mayor James Knowles III recently told St. Louis Public Radio. “Many people, for whatever they feel is wrong with a local municipal police department, feel that they have the most influence over a local municipal police department.”

    But the costs of reform, including paying for a court-ordered monitor, along with a likely decrease in revenue generated by Ferguson’s municipal court, may force consideration. Only a few cities as small as Ferguson have worked with the DOJ on police reforms. The process may cost millions over several years. […]

    “I happen to believe that a consent decree and a monitor are going to be required in the Ferguson situation, and I find it hard to believe that if the department just folded up and flew away, that would end the problem,” Bobb said in a recent interview.

    As news of the DOJ investigation leaked out Tuesday, some Ferguson-area activists and politicians renewed their calls for the city police department to be shut down.

    Tony Rice, a protest organizer and Ferguson resident, said he hopes the Ferguson department dissolves, but he is unsure about the idea of St. Louis County Police Department taking over.

    “At this point, yes they should fold,” Rice said in an interview, adding that he thinks Ferguson Chief Jackson could be part of the solution.

    “St. Louis County approved of the militarization of the officers,” Rice said. “I am not fond of them.”

    As mentioned on Twitter, Ferguson is surrounded by many small PDs, all of which engage in the same or similar patterns of behaviour as Ferguson, so just disbanding the one wouldn’t do much, in terms of creating a safer, better environment or better police-community relations.

  169. rq says

    Chart of the Week: The black-white gap in incarceration rates

    Fifty years after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law, there still remains gaps between blacks and whites on many social and economic measures. Our Chart of the Week looks at one of them: the higher incarceration rates of black men compared with those of white men.

    The above graphic from the Washington Post’s Wonkblog shows that black men in their prime working years, especially those without a high school diploma, are much more likely to be in jail than white men are.

    While institutionalization rates rose for both blacks and whites from 1980 to 2000, it was especially sharp among the less educated black men – rising from 10% in 1980 for those ages 20 to 24 to 30% in 2000. In 2010, the institutionalization rate for this group dropped to 26%, but, as was the case in 2000, they were more likely to be institutionalized than they were to be employed (19% employment rate in 2010). Institutionalization and employment trends were similar, if not more dramatic, for black men with no high school diploma ages 25 to 29.

    The chart is based on a study by University of Chicago economists Derek Neal and Armin Rick, who tabulated Census Long Form data from 1960 to 2000, and American Community Survey data from 2010. Neal and Rick’s study was in part a follow-up to a 1989 paper by James Smith of the RAND Corporation and Finis Welch of UCLA, which found substantial progress in closing the black-white gap in education, employment and earnings from 1940 to 1980.

    But in the U. Chicago study, Neal and Rick concluded that progress on similar measures have sputtered since 1980, in part because of the disproportionately high incarceration rates. They noted, for example, that while employment rates for all men had declined since 1980, “these declines in employment and increases in incarceration have been much more dramatic among black men than white men.” The authors attributed part of this trend to the change in prison policies in the 1970s and 80s.

    In 2010, all black men were six times as likely as all white men to be incarcerated in federal, state and local jails, according to a 2013 Pew Research Center study. We also found that black-white gaps in median household income and wealth had widened in recent decades, while gaps in high school completion and life expectancy had narrowed. In last year’s survey, fewer than half of all Americans (45%) said the country has made substantial progress toward racial equality, and 49% said “a lot more” remains to be done.

    Ferguson police racially biased says US Justice Department – seeing it in headlines like that always makes me think everyone is surprised. When they shouldn’t be.

    Attempts to seek comment from the police department and city government were not successful.

    A spokesman for the Missouri governor said: “We haven’t seen the report to be able to comment on it.”

    It is believed the report will accuse the police of using excessive force against blacks and present evidence that black motorists are stopped and searched without reason.

    Now that’s interesting, ‘we haven’t seen the report’, since from what I understand they have seen it – it just hasn’t been publicly released yet (later today).

    And here is the summary of the DOJ report re: the Ferguson PD, leaked yesterday. In Twitter document photos, and a big red ‘Not For Publication’ at the top.

    Former head of organization for black St. Louis officers group put on unpaid leave

    The police department said Tuesday that Sgt. Darren Wilson was suspended Monday without pay, amid ongoing internal and criminal investigations into “financial irregularities” discovered by the Ethical Society of Police in December. City police did not say why Wilson was suspended and declined to comment further.

    Wilson has been a city police officer since March 1997. The city sergeant is not related to the former Ferguson police officer of the same name, whose shooting of Michael Brown in August sparked nationwide attention.

    Wilson has not been arrested or charged with a crime. He could not be reached for comment.

    The Ethical Society of Police discovered irregularities in December. Police Chief Sam Dotson said in January that no public money was missing and that all of it came from dues of members of the Ethical Society.

    Here, have some humour: Black people in Ferguson “accounted for 85 percent of traffic stops, 90 percent of tickets and 93 percent of arrests.”
    I, for one, will stand up and courageously and correctly condemn the culture of failure in the black community which promotes Jay-Walking.

  170. rq says

    And another for fun: Daniel Craig to be first white Shaft, from the Daily Mash. Of course, there are the naysayers:

    “Craig was great in the James Bond films, which are justifiably seen as classics of whitesploitation cinema, but that character races around shooting guns and shagging loads of women which is totally different to Shaft.”

    If only. :D

  171. The Mellow Monkey says

    Trigger Warning.

    There is FSOG inspired Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson erotica for sale.

    Sally Hemings. A real person who was enslaved. A real person who was raped by one of our founding fathers starting when she was around fourteen years old. Jenny Trout’s commentary really encapsulates the horror of the whole “Freedom of Speech” issue on this one:

    Look, I know that censorship is bad. I know this, because there’s a whole amendment about freedom of expression in the Constitution. It was written by James Madison, who based it off a bill that Thomas Jefferson introduced in the Virginia legislature in 1779. So, the existence of this “erotic” short story fetishizing slavery and rape, about a real slave owner and the real woman he raped from the time she was a little girl is protected by a law that was originally the work of that slave owner who raped that little girl. Not only does this book exploit the rape and enslavement of Sally Hemings, it uses the historical political power of her rapist against her over a century later. Even in death, she’s being violated, but our laws say that we can’t violate the author’s rights to write and publish this shit.

    There’s apparently another book in the works, by an actual established romance author. I haven’t seen them outed yet on Twitter, though.

  173. rq says

    The Mellow Monkey
    I had huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge hopes it was just an internet rumour, after seeing Jenny Trout’s original RT.
    I have no words.
    None.

  175. rq says

    The Mellow Monkey
    I know of a great new museum where those authors should be sent for a visit. See posts on the Whitney Plantation, above @124, for a nice long intro and background. And the man putting the slavery museum together is doing his damnedest to make it as harsh as possible (which I applaud). Seriously, someone buy them tickets.

  176. Pteryxx says

    Lots and lots of articles getting into the 104-page DOJ report. First, some source links:

    Scribd link

    via Mother Jones, PDF link and textfile link

    St Louis Today has the report via an embedded PDF viewer: link

    The MoJo link also has PDF and txt versions of the DOJ report on the shooting of Michael Brown, resulting in its decision not to charge Wilson.

  177. Pteryxx says

    Newsweek’s selection of the worst police misconduct in the DOJ report, with extensive quotes: Newsweek

    A woman’s parking ticket, which began as a $151 fine (plus fees), ballooned to more than $1,000 after she failed to appear in court several times:

    Eric Holder also mentioned this example in his press conference this afternoon. From the DOJ report:

    From 2007 to 2014, the woman was arrested twice, spent six days in jail, and paid $550 to the court for the events stemming from this single instance of illegal parking. Court records show that she twice attempted to make partial payments of $25 and $50, but the court returned those payments, refusing to accept anything less than payment in full. One of those payments was later accepted, but only after the court’s letter rejecting payment by money order was returned as undeliverable. This woman is now making regular payments on the fine. As of December 2014, over seven years later, despite initially owing a $151 fine and having already paid $550, she still owed $541.

    Newsweek:

    The DoJ alleges Ferguson police frequently dispensed with justice, instead policing with the goal of generating profit for the municipality through fines and fees. For example, they enacted a “traffic enforcement initiative” with the sole stated goal of generating revenue:

    DOJ:

    In an April 2014 communication from the Finance Director to Chief Jackson and the City Manager, the Finance Director recommended immediate implementation of an “I-270 traffic enforcement initiative” in order to “begin to fill the revenue pipeline.” The Finance Director’s email attached a computation of the net revenues that would be generated by the initiative, which required paying five officers overtime for highway traffic enforcement for a four-hour shift. The Finance Director stated that “there is nothing to keep us from running this initiative 1,2,3,4,5,6, or even 7 days a week. Admittedly at 7 days per week[] we would see diminishing returns.” Indeed, in a separate email to FPD supervisors, the Patrol Captain explained that “[t]he plan behind this [initiative] is to PRODUCE traffic tickets, not provide easy OT.” There is no indication that anyone considered whether community policing and public safety would be better served by devoting five overtime officers to neighborhood policing instead of a “revenue pipeline” of highway traffic enforcement. Rather, the only downsides to the program that City officials appear to have considered are that “this initiative requires 60 to 90 [days] of lead time to turn citations into cash,” and that Missouri law caps the proportion of revenue that can come from municipal fines at 30%, which limits the extent to which the program can be used.

    Officers failing to document arrests:

    In Ferguson, officers will sometimes make an arrest without writing a report or even obtaining an incident number, and hundreds of reports can pile up for months without supervisors reviewing them. Officers’ uses of force frequently go unreported, and are reviewed only laxly when reviewed at all. As a result of these deficient practices, stops, arrests, and uses of force that violate the law or FPD policy are rarely detected We identified several elements to this pattern of misconduct.

    Several examples of particularly egregious detentions and arrests without cause:

    As with its pattern of unconstitutional stops, FPD routinely makes arrests without probable cause. Frequently, officers arrest people for conduct that plainly does not meet the elements of the cited offense. For example, in November 2013, an officer approached five African-American young people listening to music in a car. Claiming to have smelled marijuana, the officer placed them under arrest for disorderly conduct based on their “gathering in a group for the purposes of committing illegal activity.” The young people were detained and charged—some taken to jail, others delivered to their parents—despite the officer finding no marijuana, even after conducting an inventory search of the car. Similarly, in February 2012, an officer wrote an arrest notification ticket for Peace Disturbance for “loud music” coming from a car. The arrest ticket appears unlawful as the officer did not assert, and there is no other indication, that a third party was disturbed by the music—an element of the offense. See Ferguson Mun. Code § 29-82 (prohibiting certain conduct that “unreasonably and knowingly disturbs or alarms another person or persons”). Nonetheless, a supervisor approved it. These warrantless arrests violated the Fourth Amendment because they were not based on probable cause. See Virginia v. Moore, 553 U.S. 164, 173 (2008).

    Including stopping people from giving care to loved ones:

    We also reviewed many instances in which FPD officers arrested individuals who sought to care for loved ones who had been hurt. In one instance from May 2014, for example, a man rushed to the scene of a car accident involving his girlfriend, who was badly injured and bleeding profusely when he arrived. He approached and tried to calm her. When officers arrived they treated him rudely, according to the man, telling him to move away from his girlfriend, which he did not want to do. They then immediately proceeded to handcuff and arrest him, which, officers assert, he resisted. EMS and other officers were not on the scene during this arrest, so the accident victim remained unattended, bleeding from her injuries, while officers were arresting the boyfriend. Officers charged the man with five municipal code violations (Resisting Arrest, Disorderly Conduct, Assault on an Officer, Obstructing Government Operations, and Failure to Comply) and had his vehicle towed and impounded.

    Ignoring misconduct allegations and not even keeping records of incidents:

    FPD appears to intentionally not treat allegations of misconduct as complaints even where it believes that the officer in fact committed the misconduct. In one incident, for example, a supervisor wrote an email directly to an officer about a complaint the Police Chief had received about an officer speeding through the park in a neighboring town. The supervisor informed the officer that the Chief tracked the car number given by the complainant back to the officer, but assured the officer that the supervisor’s email was “[j]ust for your information. No need to reply and there is no record of this other than this email.”

    And allowing Ferguson officers to lie to internal investigators without reprimand:

    Our investigation raised concerns in particular about how FPD responds to untruthfulness by officers. In many departments, a finding of untruthfulness pursuant to internal investigation results in an officer’s termination because the officer’s credibility on police reports and in providing testimony is subsequently subject to challenge. In FPD, untruthfulness appears not even to always result in a formal investigation, and even where sustained, has little effect. In one case we reviewed, FPD sustained a charge of untruthfulness against an officer after he was found to have lied to the investigator about whether he had engaged in an argument with a civilian over the loudspeaker of his police vehicle. FPD imposed only a 12-hour suspension on the officer. In addition, FPD appears not to have taken the officer’s untruthfulness into sufficient account inseveral subsequent complaints, including in at least one case in which the complainant alleged conduct very similar to that alleged in the case in which FPD found the officer untruthful. Nor, as discussed above, has FPD or the City disclosed this information to defendants challenging charges brought by the officer.

  178. Pteryxx says

    Crooks and Liars: DOJ Ferguson Report: Personal Responsibility Only Applies To Black People (Updated)

    This report shows Ferguson PD (and thousands of cities just like Ferguson) to be a mass of racism and corruption, focused on extorting residents rather than keeping the community safe. Indeed, Ferguson police functioned as collection agents for the city, who used fines to beef up revenue shortfalls, while making it nearly impossible for anyone who was fined to actually pay the fine and get out from under the ongoing penalty of an outstanding violation.

    From the DOJ report (bolds from C&L):

    City, police, and court officials for years have worked in concert to maximize revenue at every stage of the enforcement process, beginning with how fines and fine enforcement processes are established. In a February 2011 report requested by the City Council at a Financial Planning Session and drafted by Ferguson’s Finance Director with contributions from Chief Jackson, the Finance Director reported on “efforts to increase efficiencies and maximize collection” by the municipal court. The report included an extensive comparison of Ferguson’s fines to those of surrounding municipalities and noted with approval that Ferguson’s fines are “at or near the top of the list.” The chart noted, for example, that while other municipalities’ parking fines generally range from $5 to $100, Ferguson’s is $102. The chart noted also that the charge for “Weeds/Tall Grass” was as little as $5 in one city but, in Ferguson, it ranged from $77 to $102. The report stated that the acting prosecutor had reviewed the City’s “high volume offenses” and “started recommending higher fines on these cases, and recommending probation only infrequently.” While the report stated that this recommendation was because of a “large volume of non-compliance,” the recommendation was in fact emphasized as one of several ways that the code enforcement system had been honed to produce more revenue.

    C&L:

    However, the notion of “personal responsibility” is one that is selectively applied in Ferguson.

    On page 77 of the report, they note that most officials and lawmakers in Ferguson consider the problem to be a lack of personal responsibility on the part of African-Americans, even though the facts do not bear that conclusion out.

    Worse, there’s a huge double standard about how standards of personal responsibility are applied.

    quoting the report (bolds from C&L):

    The common practice among Ferguson officials of writing off tickets further evidences a double standard grounded in racial stereotyping. Even as Ferguson City officials maintain the harmful stereotype that black individuals lack personal responsibility—and continue to cite this lack of personal responsibility as the cause of the disparate impact of Ferguson’s practices—white City officials condone a striking lack of personal responsibility among themselves and their friends. Court records and emails show City officials, including the Municipal Judge, the Court Clerk, and FPD supervisors assisting friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and themselves in eliminating citations, fines, and fees.

    One example:

    In October 2013, Judge Brockmeyer sent Ferguson’s Prosecuting Attorney an email with the subject line “City of Hazelwood vs. Ronald Brockmeyer.” The Judge wrote: “Pursuant to our conversation, attached please find the red light camera ticket received by the undersigned. I would appreciate it if you would please see to it that this ticket is dismissed.” The Prosecuting Attorney, who also serves as prosecuting attorney in Hazelwood, responded: “I worked on red light matters today and dismissed the ticket that you sent over. Since I entered that into the system today, you may or may not get a second notice – you can just ignore that.”

    C&L:

    The entire report is just scathing. While the conclusion expresses optimism that the Ferguson PD and Municipal Court can be cleaned up and changed, I’m not nearly as optimistic. I believe that culture is so baked into the Ferguson PD from top to bottom that the only way to change it would be to purge most of their police officers and most certainly their police chief and judge who oversees the fine collection process. That judge, by the way, is Judge Ronald Brockmeyer, mentioned in the example of double standards above.

  179. Pteryxx says

    from Wesley Lowery at WaPo, reactions in Ferguson. DOJ report renews outrage in Ferguson

    Above all, they said, the report serves as vindication. Their protest chants following the police killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown declared that Ferguson police were racially discriminatory. Now, they noted, DOJ has said they were right.

    “I live in Ferguson so I knew this. We always knew what was going on,” said Tony Rice, one of the young leaders who became a key coordinator for the protests outside the Ferguson police department. “The way the police treat us, that’s nothing new to us.”

    […]

    “I would speculate that the same pattern and practices of Ferguson exist in every other department in St. Louis County,” said Adolphus Pruitt, the president of the St. Louis NAACP, which has filed racial discrimination complaints against county police to the DOJ in the past and still awaits a response.

    Now, Pruitt and others said, Jackson must go and the department should be disbanded.

    “It’s time for the Ferguson police department to disappear,” he said.

    […]

    “Ray Charles could see the institutional racism that’s going on here in Ferguson,” said state Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal. Chappelle-Nadal said she is eager to read the full report, and is outraged by details reported by the Washington Post and other media outlets. Specifically, she is incensed by statistics showing black people being bitten by police dogs while in custody.

    “I’m disturbed by what I’m reading,” she said. “We’re allowing police dogs to bite people? What is this, 1955?”

    An outspoken critic of Ferguson’s police chief and major, she said both should resign.

    “They need to get rid of the police chief, that’s the first thing they should do,” Chappelle-Nadal said. “They should have disbanded this police department in August.”

  180. Pteryxx says

    and Newsweek also points out: that the DOJ report backs up ArchCity Defenders: link

    The DOJ’s findings coincide with independent investigations of Ferguson’s criminal justice system. ArchCity Defenders, a legal aid practice representing poor defendants, released a paper August 14 that found similar disparities between Ferguson’s treatment of whites and minorities. The paper said that much of the racial tension in Ferguson stemmed from traffic-ticketing practices.

    African-Americans weren’t just taking to the streets because they’d experienced the “driving while black” phenomenon. Clients of ArchCity complained that traffic prosecution propelled them into poverty—because they couldn’t pay tickets, they wound up in jail, prompting job and housing losses. In February, ArchCity and Equal Justice Under Law filed two federal class-action lawsuits against Ferguson and nearby Jennings, claiming these practices constituted illegal, modern-day debtors’ prisons.

    “What we’re seeing here is small towns using their police and courts to generate revenue through fines and fees,”ArchCity’s executive director, Thomas B. Harvey, said in a statement.

    Chris Hayes on MSNBC tonight said that while it was hard for a white person like him to believe what he was seeing in Ferguson, it really was that bad; the DOJ report proves once and for all that the Ferguson police are ruining the lives of the people they’re supposed to be protecting, and the black citizens of Ferguson have been telling the truth all along.

  181. Pteryxx says

    Other portions of the DOJ report highlighted by WaPo, while quoting Scribd embeds. I’ve copied the relevant sections from the textfile linked by Mother Jones above. Bolds follow WaPo’s highlighting. WaPo article

    Harsh and unfair payment practices, including issuing arrest warrants for a single missed or even partial payment:

    In lieu of proportioning a fine to a particular individual’s ability to pay or allowing a
    process by which a person could petition the court for a reduction, the court offers payment plans to those who cannot afford to immediately pay in full. But such payment plans do not serve as a substitute for an ability-to-pay determination, which, properly employed, can enable a person in some cases to pay in full and resolve the case. Moreover, the court’s rules regarding payment plans are themselves severe. Unlike some other municipalities that require a $50 monthly payment, Ferguson’s standard payment plan requires payments of $100 per month, which remains a difficult amount for many to pay, especially those who are also making payments to other municipalities. Further, the court treats a single missed, partial, or untimely payment as a missed appearance. In such a case, the court immediately issues an arrest warrant without any notice or opportunity to explain why a payment was missed—for example, because the person was sick, or the court closed its doors early that day. The court reportedly has softened this rule during the course of our investigation by allowing a person who has missed a payment to go to court to seek leave for not paying the full amount owed. However, even this softened rule provides minimal relief, as making this request requires a person to appear in court the first Wednesday of the month at 11:00 a.m. If a person misses that session, the court immediately issues an arrest warrant. Before the court provided this Wednesday morning court session for those on payment plans, court staff frequently rejected requests from payment plan participants to reduce or continue monthly payments—leaving individuals unable to make the required payment with no recourse besides incurring a Failure to Appear charge, receiving additional fines, and having an arrest warrant issued. In July 2014, an assistant court clerk wrote in an email that she rejected a defendant’s request for a reduced monthly payment on account of inability to pay and told the defendant, “everyone says [they] can’t pay.”

    Arrest warrants used to compel payment:

    Although Ferguson’s court—unlike many other municipal courts in the region—has ceased imposing the Failure to Appear charge, the court continues to routinely issue arrest warrants for missed appearances and missed payments. The evidence we have found shows that these arrest warrants are used almost exclusively for the purpose of compelling payment through the threat of incarceration. The evidence also shows that the harms of the court’s warrant practices are exacerbated by the court’s bond procedures, which impose unnecessary obstacles to clearing a warrant or securing release after being arrested on a warrant and often function to further prolong a case and a person’s involvement in the municipal justice system. These practices—together with the consequences to individuals and communities that result—raise significant due process and equal protection concerns.

    And when people are arrested and held, they get no credit for time served – the FPD often doesn’t even bother keeping records:

    It is not uncommon for an individual charged with only a minor violation to be arrested
    on a warrant, be unable to afford bond, and have no recourse but to await release. Longstanding court rules provide for a person arrested pursuant to an arrest warrant to be held up to 72 hours before being released without bond, and the court’s recent orders do not appear to change this. Records show that individuals are routinely held for 72 hours. FPD’s records management system only began capturing meaningful jail data in April 2014; but from April to September 2014 alone, 77 people were detained in the jail for longer than two days, and many of those detentions neared, reached, or exceeded the 72-hour mark. Of those 77 people, 73, or 95%, were black. Many people, including the woman described earlier who was charged with two parking code violations, have reported being held up until the 72-hour limit—despite having no ability to pay. Indeed, many others report being held for far longer, and documentary evidence is consistent with these reports. In April 2010, for example, the Chief of Police wrote an email to the Captain of the Patrol Division stating that the “intent is that when the watch commander / street supervisor gets the census from the jail he asks who will come up on 72 hrs.,” and, if there is any such person, “he can have them given the next available court date and released, or authorize they remain in jail, since he will be the designate.” The email continues: “If someone has already been there more than 72 hours, it may be assumed their continued hold was previously authorized.” Further, as noted above, while comprehensive jail records do not exist for detentions prior to April 2014, records do show several recent instances in which FPD detained a person for longer than the purported 72-hour limit.
    Despite the fact that those arrested by FPD for outstanding municipal warrants can be held for several days if unable to post bond, the Ferguson municipal court does not give credit for time served. As a result, there have been many cases in which a person has been arrested on a warrant, detained for 72 hours or more, and released owing the same amount as before the arrest was made. Court records do not even track the total amount of time a person has spent in jail as part of a case. When asked why this is not tracked, a member of court staff told us: “It’s only three days anyway.” These prolonged detentions for those who cannot afford bond are alarming, and raise considerable due process and equal protection concerns. The prolonged detentions are especially concerning given that there is no public safety need for those who receive municipal warrants to be jailed at all.

    And this is so normalized to the FPD that their people can say ‘what’s the big deal? It’s only three days’ to a DOJ investigator’s face, while they’re under investigation for civil rights violations. What sort of retraining could address that level of not giving a single fuck?

  182. Pteryxx says

    From St Louis Today, more on why Judge Brockmeyer isn’t just tiny little Ferguson’s problem: Ferguson officials erased tickets for friends and family, DOJ discovers

    The civil rights investigation in Ferguson has uncovered favors being called in by some of the city and court’s top officials — from the judge to the mayor, to the court clerk and several patrol supervisors.

    And while the report released Wednesday focuses on ticket fixing in just Ferguson, it makes clear that the abuses stretch further.

    “It’s clear that writing off tickets between the Ferguson court staff and the clerks of other municipal courts in the region is routine,” the report notes.

    According to the Department of Justice report, a search of emails revealed at least 12 tickets that were “fixed” based on exchanges between Ferguson’s court clerk and a Hazelwood clerk. Ferguson’s clerk also sought help with a ticket from a clerk in St. Ann.

    In addition to making his own ticket disappear, Brockmeyer also in August 2014 took care of a failure to appear notice and speeding ticket issued to a patrol officer in Breckenridge Hills. Brockmeyer also serves as part-time judge there, as well as prosecutor in Dellwood and Florissant.

    Karr and Brockmeyer could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

    The DOJ just released 100 pages on how corrupt Ferguson is… but drive or walk a few miles in any direction and there’ll be another little town with its own police force and court system and the same limited means of squeezing revenue out of its citizens.

  183. rq says

    Whew, it’s so nice to have someone else on here for a change! :D
    I’m going to try to not double-up on any of your posts, Pteryxx, I’ve just gone through your comments here and I’m not even sure I want to get into anything else. :/ Here goes.
    Actual postings in a bit, both articles and people’s reactions and the press conference in Ferguson.

  184. rq says

    Okay! This will be somewhat random order, and where there are document photos, I’ll try to summarize as best as I can.

    According to the Department of Justice, Ferguson police only ever use dogs on black suspects. Makes you think, that one.

    Cuba stands their ground, won’t return Assata Shakur , Assata being a huge influence to today’s protestors and activists.

    While a member of the Black Liberation Army, Shakur, then Joanne Chesimard, was involved in an incident in which New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster was shot during a traffic stop. She was convicted in 1977 but managed to escape prison. Shakur has since fled to Cuba, where she has remained in sanctuary even as she retained her spot on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

    In December, when President Obama announced a new era of thawed relations with Cuba, after fifty years of isolation, Shakur’s case regained the national spotlight, with several top conservatives, including New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez calling for Cuba to hand her over. They and other officials have asked for Shakur’s return to be a requirement of renewed diplomatic ties between the two countries.

    In a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, Menendez said that Cuba’s refusal to return the now 67-year-old Shakur “is an intolerable insult to all those who long to see justice served.”

    I’m just going to leave that there, in contrast to the DOJ report and the reactions to come – esp. keeping in mind that a trooper was shot but not killed. So let’s go look at more intolerable insults to those who long to see justice served.

    Via @RobertDEdwards, some #Ferguson officers competed to see who could issue the most citations during a single stop. Twitter document photo basically says the same thing.

    We are subhuman to the #Ferguson PD, twitter document photo of an incident where a man was stopped by police, called racist slurs, and had his face slammed into the wall for standing up for himself (non-violently – basically, he just said he did nothing wrong, and the officer replied that he can always find something to charge him with).

    Al-Jazeera on the report: DOJ report on Ferguson: City’s mostly white police target black residents, has a short (2 minute) video summarizing most of the findings.

    To reflect again what Pteryxx wrote above about the whole area being full of corrupt court systems – Don’t let anybody tell you this is just Ferguson there are 90 more municipalities is St. Louis county all with the same mentality…

  185. rq says

    So there were racist emails (more on that later). So you might ask, how did people in the Ferguson police react to these racist emails? They forwarded them. The twitter document photo goes on to state that nobody was ever disciplined for these emails.

    What tangible effect will the DOJ report on the #Ferguson PD have for black St. Louisans if all the other muni PDs stay the same? Good question.

    The DOJ document via NY Times, the one specifically on the shooting of Michael Brown – this is not the general Ferguson civil rights document, but the Darren Wilson one. You can guess what the conclusion there is, too.

    Consider this when consuming news: #DOJ looked at 9 people who gave media interviews about Michael Brown’s death. Only 1 was credible.

    So in media articles, Darren Wilson Is Cleared of Rights Violations in Ferguson Shooting. Not surprising, as Zimmerman was also cleared recently, and it is known that the bar for these investigations is inordinately high.

    In an 86-page report released Wednesday that detailed and evaluated the testimony of more than 40 witnesses, the Justice Department largely corroborated or found little credible evidence to contradict the account of the officer, Darren Wilson, who is white.

    Versions of events that sharply conflicted with Mr. Wilson’s were largely inconsistent with forensic evidence or with the witnesses’ previous statements, the report said. And in some cases, witnesses whose accounts supported Mr. Wilson said they had been afraid to come forth or tell the truth because they feared reprisals from the enraged community.

    The decision ended a lengthy investigation into the shooting in August, in which Mr. Wilson killed Mr. Brown in the street as he tried to stop the teenager for a possible theft of some cigarillos from a convenience store. Several witnesses said Mr. Brown, 18, had his hands up in surrender when he died, leading to violent clashes in Ferguson and nationwide protest featuring chants of “Hands up, don’t shoot.”

    But federal agents and civil rights prosecutors rejected that story, just as a state grand jury did in November when it decided not to indict Mr. Wilson. The former officer, who left the Ferguson Police Department late last year, said that Mr. Brown had leaned into his patrol car, punched him, reached for his gun, and then after running away, turned and charged at him, making Mr. Wilson fear for his life.

    “There is no evidence upon which prosecutors can rely to disprove Wilson’s stated subjective belief that he feared for his safety,” the report said. At the same time, it concluded that the witnesses who said that Mr. Brown was surrendering were not credible.

    “Those witness accounts stating that Brown never moved back toward Wilson could not be relied upon in a prosecution because their accounts cannot be reconciled with the DNA bloodstain evidence and other credible witness accounts.”

    Civil rights charges represented a difficult hurdle for prosecutors to clear. The law requires prosecutors to prove that Mr. Wilson willfully violated Mr. Brown’s civil rights when he shot him. Courts have given officers wide latitude when deciding when to use deadly force if they think their lives are in danger.

    In a news conference Wednesday afternoon, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. called the report “fair and rigorous from the start,” saying it had been conducted independently from the investigation by the local police and had included the canvassing of more than 300 residences to locate additional witnesses. “The facts do not support the filing of criminal charges against Officer Darren Wilson in this case,” Mr. Holder said. For those who feel otherwise, he said, “I urge you to read this report in full.”

    Um… okay. I’ll have to read the report, but I’m still not convinced. Haha, call me a hyperskeptic, but considering Darren Wilson’s employment milieu, I’m utterly unconvinced that there wasn’t a racial slant to him stopping Michael Brown on the street in the first place.
    (Also, the DNA bloodstain evidence? Seriously? Either they’re missing a conjunction or they’ve come up with a totally new forensic analysis. :P)

    Darren Wilson ‘Relieved’ at No Charges From Feds. I just bet he is.

    “I think that this is going to be a real roadblock for different civil suits that are brought,” Bruntrager says. “Going forward, there could be a civil case, but it’s going to be a very difficult case to prosecute from the plaintiff’s point of view.”

    In the months following the shooting, protesters thronged the streets chanting “hands up, don’t shoot.”

    Bruntrager says the absence of any federal civil rights charges against Wilson questions the legitimacy of that viewpoint.

    “It also really does say that the narrative that came out from people like Dorian Johnson and the ‘hands up, don’t shoot,’ that that narrative was simply false,” Bruntrager says.

    Bruntrager declines to say more about where Wilson is living or what the future holds for his client.

    “We still have issues obviously in terms of security,” Bruntrager says. “We’re still concerned about this. And the fact that this is over and closed doesn’t necessarily meann that people are going to forget.”

    I don’t want to quote any direct lines from Wilson, so this – the potential consequences of this report – will have to do. And honestly, I have no problem with Darren Wilson living in fear for the rest of his life. I don’t want him to come to harm, and I don’t want him to cause harm, but if he lives with a discomfort and a nagging feeling of mild paranoia, that’s okay with me.

  186. rq says

    “@RobertDEdwards: Holder cited this story as one example of biased policing in #Ferguson ” – arrested for sitting in his parked car on a hot day to cool off. Got charged with not having a license. Lost his job with the federal government due to these charges.

    Holder Blasts ‘Toxic Environment’ Created By Ferguson Police

    Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday said that while the Justice Department cleared Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson of any civil rights violations in the shooting death of unarmed teen Michael Brown, Holder understands why the city of Ferguson reacted to the death with widespread protests.

    “It is not difficult to imagine how a single tragic incident set off the city of Ferguson like a powder keg,” Holder said at a news conference detailing the Justice Department’s investigations into Brown’s death and the Ferguson Police Department’s conduct.

    The Justice Department found a “widespread pattern or practice” of Constitutional violations and racial bias in the Ferguson Police Department.

    Holder described a “highly toxic environment” where “people feel under assault.”

    He urged those who question the Justice Department’s findings from the investigation into Brown’s death to read what he described as the “searing” report on the Ferguson Police Department’s practices.

    “Although some community perceptions of Michael Brown’s tragic death may not have been accurate, the widespread conditions that these perceptions were based upon, and the climate that gave rise to them, were all too real,” Holder said.

    The attorney general called upon Ferguson leaders to address the concerns raised in the Justice Department’s report.

    “It is time for Ferguson’s leaders to take immediate, wholesale and structural corrective action,” Holder said.

    The same via Washington Post, Holder: Report shows why Michael Brown’s death set off Ferguson like ‘a powder keg’

    The report highlighted repeated examples of bias in law enforcement and described a system that seemed to be built upon using arrest warrants to force money out of black residents. In addition, the Justice Department also pointed to several racist e-mails written by police and municipal court supervisors and highlighted numerous allegations of physical and bigoted activity on the part of officers.

    “Seen in this context, amid a highly toxic environment, defined by mistrust and resentment, stoked by years of bad feelings and spurred by illegal and misguided practices, it is not difficult to imagine how a single tragic incident set off the city of Ferguson like a powder keg,” Holder said during a news conference Wednesday afternoon in Washington, D.C.

    In Ferguson, it has become “routine” for officers to violate the constitutional rights of residents, he said. This behavior deepens the distrust that residents say has long existed, as encounters between police and residents “frequently and rapidly escalate and end up blatantly and unnecessarily crossing the line,” he said.

    He described the investigation as fair, thorough and rigorous, and vowed to continue working with people in Ferguson and surrounding municipalities, calling the report “only the beginning” of a necessary process. After the Justice Department issued similarly harsh reports on the police departments of Cleveland and Albuquerque last year, city officials in both places reached settlements with the department and promised that reforms would follow.

    Holder said that the Justice Department “reserves all of its rights and abilities” to force changes in Ferguson, a reminder that if city officials and federal officials are not able to negotiate a settlement, a federal lawsuit could follow.

    Here’s Holder himself in twenty-four minutes: Watch Attorney General Eric Holder discuss DOJ Ferguson investigation findings

    Attorney General Eric Holder, at a news conference on Wednesday, discussed the findings from the Department of Justice’s investigation into the city of Ferguson, Missouri and the shooting death of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson.

    Youtube video.

    11 alarming findings in the report on Ferguson police

    1. Issuing citations was a competition for some officers

    “Issuing three or four charges in one stop is not uncommon in Ferguson. Officers sometimes write six, eight, or, in at least one instance, fourteen citations for a single encounter. Indeed, officers told us that some compete to see who can issue the largest number of citations during a single stop.”

    2. City officials solicit more police citations to boost revenue

    In March 2010, the City Finance Director wrote to Chief Jackson: “unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year … Given that we are looking at a substantial sales tax shortfall, it’s not an insignificant issue.” In March 2013, the Finance Director wrote to the City Manager: “Court fees are anticipated to rise about 7.5%. I did ask the Chief if he thought the PD could deliver 10% increase. He indicated they could try.”

    3. Officers would occasionally arrest and/or stop African-Americans with no reason

    “From a July 2013 incident in which a police officer came across an African-American man on the way to arrest someone else in an apartment building and ended up cuffing the first man “without reasonable suspicion”: “Ignoring the central fact that they had handcuffed a man and put him in a police car despite having no reason to believe he had done anything wrong, a sergeant vigorously defended FPD’s actions, characterizing the detention as “minimal” and pointing out that the car was air conditioned.” […]

    4. Ferguson officers aren’t writing up their reports, and no one is checking

    “FPD supervisors are more concerned with the number of citations and arrests officers produce than whether those citations and arrests are lawful or promote public safety. Internal communications among command staff reveal that FPD for years has failed to ensure even that officers write their reports and first-line supervisors approve them … In 2014, the official had the same complaint, remarking on 600 reports that had not been approved over a six-month period. Another supervisor remarked that coding errors in the new records management system is set up “to hide, do away with, or just forget reports.”

    5. Literally everyone is “WANTED”

    “FPD and other law enforcement agencies in St. Louis County use a system of “wanteds” or “stop orders” as a substitute for seeking judicial approval for an arrest warrant. When officers believe a person has committed a crime but are not able to immediately locate that person, they can enter a “wanted” into the statewide law enforcement database, indicating to all other law enforcement agencies that the person should be arrested if located.” […]

    6. Ferguson officers are confused about the First Amendment

    “FPD arrests people for a variety of protected conduct: people are punished for talking back to officers, recording public police activities, and lawfully protesting perceived injustices.”

    7. Ferguson officers are using unnecessary force against the mentally ill

    “FPD records suggest a tendency to use unnecessary force against vulnerable groups such as people with mental health conditions or cognitive disabilities, and juvenile students … Ferguson is currently in litigation against the estate of a man with mental illness who died in September 2011 after he had an ECW deployed against him three times for allegedly running toward an officer while swinging his fist.”

    8. Uncovered emails written by Ferguson officials about President Barack Obama, Michelle Obama are racist

    “A November 2008 email stated that President Barack Obama would not be President for very long because “what black man holds a steady job for four years.”

    “An April 2011 email depicted President Barack Obama as a chimpanzee.”

    “An October 2011 email included a photo of a bare-chested group of dancing women, apparently in Africa, with the caption, “Michelle Obama’s High School Reunion.”

    9. If you’re a mayor or employee of the court, no tickets for you!

    “Court records and emails show City officials, including the Municipal Judge, the Court Clerk, and FPD supervisors assisting friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and themselves in eliminating citations, fines, and fees.” […]

    10. Police shoved a 15-year-old African-American girl into a locker

    “In November 2013, a [School Resource Officer] charged a ninth grade girl with several violations after she refused to follow his orders to walk to the principal’s office. The student and a classmate, both 15-year-old African-American girls, had gotten into a fight during class. When the officer responded, school staff had the two girls separated in a hallway. One refused the officer’s order to walk to the principal’s office, instead trying to push past staff toward the other girl. The officer pushed her backward toward a row of lockers and then announced that she was under arrest for Failure to Comply.”

    11. SEND IN THE DOGS!

    “They also release canines on unarmed subjects unreasonably and before attempting to use force less likely to cause injury.”

    “In December 2011, officers deployed a canine to bite an unarmed 14-year-old African-American boy who was waiting in an abandoned house for his friends … … The officer peeked into the space and saw the boy, who was 5’5” and 140 pounds, curled up in a ball, hiding. According to the officer, the boy would not show his hands despite being warned that the officer would use the dog. The officer then deployed the dog, which bit the boy’s arm, causing puncture wounds.”

    “By the canine officer’s own account, he saw the boy in the closet and thus had the opportunity to assess the threat posed by this 5’5” 14 year old. Moreover, there were no exigent circumstances requiring apprehension by dog bite. Four officers were present and had control of the scene.”

    “According to the boy, with whom we spoke, he never hid in a storage space and he never heard any police warnings. He told us that he was waiting for his friends in the basement of the house, a vacant building where they would go when they skipped school. The boy approached the stairs when he heard footsteps on the upper level, thinking his friends had arrived. When he saw the dog at the top of the steps, he turned to run, but the dog quickly bit him on the ankle and then the thigh, causing him to fall to the floor. The dog was about to bite his face or neck but instead got his left arm, which the boy had raised to protect himself. FPD officers struck him while he was on the ground, one of them putting a boot on the side of his head. He recalled the officers laughing about the incident afterward.”

    That’s a nice summary of things. More details at the link in a few situations.

    St. Louis Alderman Antonio French Sounds Off On DOJ Report: Ferguson Police Chief ‘Needs To Go’ – mildly put, I think.

    “My recommendation is that immediately there needs to be some level of accountability,” he said. “For the last seven months I’ve been calling for the resignation of the Chief of the Ferguson Police department and I think some of the specific details outlined in this Department of Justice report really make it impossible for him to stay there. When you have the culture that exists with these racist emails… the stats alone suggest he needs to go.”

    French thinks Ferguson may opt to dissolve their police department and hand over the reigns to St. Louis County’s police force, “a larger, more professional department that we can hold to a higher standard.”

    But ultimately the choices come down to the “Ferguson City Council and Manager,” according to the Alderman, who represents the 21st Ward.

    “[They need] to take immediate action and response to this report and then, in the months to come, I think the people of Ferguson are really going to have to say what kind of community they want to have and what kind of policing they want to have.”

  187. rq says

    Amnesty International USA Responds to Reports of Department of Justice Findings in Ferguson Police Department Investigation

    In response to reports that the Department of Justice will release its findings from a civil rights investigation of the Ferguson, Missouri Police Department, Amnesty International USA executive director Steven W. Hawkins issued the following statement:

    “The Justice Department should be commended for using the tools at its disposal to investigate the Ferguson Police Department. Michael Brown’s death touched off a long-overdue and much-needed conversation about race and policing that must continue. The U.S. still has a long way to go before it has truly accountable policing. This country’s long history of racial profiling and other police abuses is only matched by its equally long history of inadequate accountability for those responsible. President Obama should support the creation of a National Crime and Justice Task Force to review and evaluate all components of the criminal justice system and make recommendations on comprehensive criminal justice reform.

    “Ferguson is one of thousands of cities in this country with entrenched tension between law enforcement and the communities it is tasked to protect. The Justice Department can and should move forward with a national review of police tactics and practices, especially those concerning deadly force. Not only that, it must begin to require all police agencies to collect and publish the statistics on deaths by law enforcement. We still don’t know exactly how many people are killed by police officers every year.“

    The leaked DOJ report states that 95 percent of jaywalking arrests were African Americans. This is why Darren Wilson stopped Mike Brown. Well, it’s no longer the leaked report.

    How can the same agency that produced this report say that Wilson was innocent? So innocent that it doesn’t even warrant a trial?

    Ferguson officials have announced that their press conference in response to the DOJ report will be at 5:30 today. #FergusonReport

    McCulloch: people who come thru the court system need to know they’re treated fairly and I think they get that when try come thru here. CAN WE LAUGH NOW??

    St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCulloch has little to say about DOJ Ferguson PD report, but says not surprised that DOJ cleared Wilson. I don’t think anyone’s surprised.

  188. rq says

    Wow, Stenger’s response is especially weak. “Truly hope,” huh? You do have some power, dude. DO something. Attached is his response – not sure if it’s the whole thing or not. Basically, thanks, DOJ, we’ll talk about this later.

    Quick aside, Yale Clears Police Officer Who Detained Student

    A Yale University report has cleared the officer who briefly detained a black student at gunpoint, renewing a debate over racial profiling on campuses. The student who was detained was not the actual suspect, but the student’s father was a New York Times columnist who publicized the case. The Yale report found no violations of procedures. “Among its findings, the investigation concluded that the officer drew his firearm in the ‘low ready’ position, with his finger off the trigger at all times, and put his weapon back in its holster in a matter of seconds. The officer did not violate any Yale Police regulations regarding patrol procedures or the use of force, the report stated,” said a summary by Yale of the report.

    Charles M. Blow, the father of the student, said on Twitter: “So, according to Yale, this was ‘in compliance with department policy’? No apology?” He followed that with “#sigh.”

    No racism here.

    In Wake Of Crisis, Ferguson PD Could Face Extinction

    The kind of reforms most typical in cases, such as the one Ferguson now faces, often requires new technology, revised training protocols, hiring key personnel and other investments. That is money Ferguson does not have.

    Ferguson police departmentAnd, frankly, without black people lining the courtroom to pay fines and fees, there is nowhere to get it. Thus, it stands to reason that one day soon there may not be a Ferguson Police Department to write about. Rather than incur the massive expense, city leaders may find it more cost effective to simply close the doors.

    ViolenceFergusonWhile this investigation was limited to Ferguson, anyone familiar with the area can recount similar experiences from around Greater St. Louis. There is another “Ferguson” right next door and two doors down from that. Former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson once worked in neighboring Jennings. Though no federal civil rights investigation was involved, that small department was shuttered under similar accusations.

    It is safe to say that Wilson will never face a jury of his peers or be forced to testify under oath in a criminal trial about what happened the day he killed an unarmed 18-year-old. Instead, the young man he shot, Michael Brown, was placed on public trial.

    The final irony may be that in shooting Brown, Wilson may have sent his own department to its grave.

    Ah, but remember, Darren Wilson came from a disbanded police force, so the chance that all these guys will go on and continue policing terribly somewhere else? Very high.

    Cops Attack Unity Rally — Against Police Brutality

    A peaceful protest against police brutality outside the Cumberland County courthouse here on Feb. 28 was disrupted by an orchestrated police provocation that resulted in two people being arrested. The rally was cut short after police converged on the gathering, confronting demonstrators and pushing them out of the street, even though organizers had a permit. Demonstrators reported seeing police armed with M16s.

    The demonstration, initiated by the Salem County-based civil rights group National Awareness Alliance, was held to unite families from New Jersey and Philadelphia who have been demanding justice for loved ones killed or injured by police. Starting at the intersection where police killed Jerame Reid, 36, of Bridgeton on Dec. 30, 2014, it was the fifth event demanding justice for Reid since his death.

    Reid’s mother, Shelia Reid, led a half-mile march of nearly 200 protesters to the rally site. On one side of her walked Tanya Brown Dickerson, whose son Brandon Tate-Brown, 26, was killed by Philadelphia police on Dec. 15. On Reid’s other side was Regina Ashford, whose son Kashad Ashford, 23, was killed by Rutherford, N.J., police on Sept. 16. They were joined by Ikea Coney and her 17-year-old son Darrin Manning, who survived a brutal attack by a Philadelphia police officer in January 2014.

    The demonstration was supported by the Newark, N.J.-based People’s Organization for Progress and the Philadelphia Coalition for Racial, Economic and Legal Justice.

    Just minutes before the police attack, a jeep driven by a New Jersey state police officer, blaring out commands that the road be cleared, barreled toward protesters. When demonstrators refused to disperse, an SUV coming close behind the police car rammed into the crowd and hit a man, who responded by kicking the tire of the car. Within seconds, dozens of police vehicles descended on the demonstration and cops arrested the man who was hit, while letting the SUV speed away.

    The police attack occurred within minutes after Bridgeton Mayor Albert B. Kelly had addressed the rally, and just before Shelia Reid was about to speak. Rally organizers loudly denounced the provocation designed to silence Reid and promised to continue their fight. They noted that police who were photographing the entire rally and confrontation from the roof of a nearby restaurant reportedly carried military-style weapons.

    The police only pulled back after speakers called on demonstrators to record the confrontation on their cellphone video cams.

    I took this pic back in August. Look closely. At the paper in the man’s hand. At how long it is. At how fucking long it is.

    Ferguson officials erased tickets for friends and family, DOJ discovers

    The civil rights investigation in Ferguson has uncovered favors being called in by some of the city and court’s top officials — from the judge to the mayor, to the court clerk and several patrol supervisors.

    And while the report released Wednesday focuses on ticket fixing in just Ferguson, it makes clear that the abuses stretch further.

    “It’s clear that writing off tickets between the Ferguson court staff and the clerks of other municipal courts in the region is routine,” the report notes.

    According to the Department of Justice report, a search of emails revealed at least 12 tickets that were “fixed” based on exchanges between Ferguson’s court clerk and a Hazelwood clerk. Ferguson’s clerk also sought help with a ticket from a clerk in St. Ann.

    In addition to making his own ticket disappear, Brockmeyer also in August 2014 took care of a failure to appear notice and speeding ticket issued to a patrol officer in Breckenridge Hills. Brockmeyer also serves as part-time judge there, as well as prosecutor in Dellwood and Florissant.

    Karr and Brockmeyer could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

    In August 2013, according to the report, Mayor James Knowles III asked Karr for a parking ticket to be dismissed for someone he knew through volunteer work.

    Knowles acknowledged that the person “shouldn’t have left his car unattended there, but it was an honest mistake” and “I would hate for him to have to pay for this,” according to the report.

    Knowles called the Post-Dispatch on Wednesday and said that although he knew the driver, he didn’t fix the ticket because of that — rather that the driver worked for a local nonprofit summer day camp that partners with the city, and was on official business, picking up area children from the city pool.

    In March 2014, according to the report, the court clerk received a request for help from a relative. The clerk responded: “Your ticket of $200 has magically disappeared!” Three months later, the relative emailed her again: “Can you work your magic again?” She did, on at least one ticket, according to the report.

    What makes the favor trading worse, according to the DOJ investigators, is that it comes while many in Ferguson government blame “a lack of personal responsibility” as the reason why blacks experience more obstacles with Ferguson’s police and court systems than whites.

  189. rq says

    @StLouCo Prosecutor Bob McCulloch says DOJ had access to same evidence presented to grand jury that exonerated Darren Wilson. .#Ferguson
    “It’s not a professional way to conduct an investigation” @StLouCo Prostr Bob McCulloch on DOJ leaks prior to release of .#Ferguson report
    “It’s not anything anyone likes to see” @SaintLouCo Prosecutor Bob McCulloch on DOJ charges of racial discrimination in .#Ferguson
    “I never felt incriminated so there is no reason to feel vindicated.” StLCo Prsctr Bob McCulloch on DOJ clearing Darren Wilson .#Ferguson
    Oh, and speaking of witnesses, does the DOJ mention McCullogh’s star witness, the one who was most likely making things up? If we’re going to talk about credible witnesses, that is.

    The Feds vs. Ferguson

    As the Justice Department report pointed out:

    “Court practices exacerbate the harm of Ferguson’s unconstitutional police practices. They impose a particular hardship upon Ferguson’s most vulnerable residents, especially upon those living in or near poverty. Minor offenses can generate crippling debts, result in jail time because of an inability to pay, and result in the loss of a driver’s license, employment, or housing.”

    According to an August Brookings report:

    “Between 2000 and 2010-2012, Ferguson’s poor population doubled. By the end of that period, roughly one in four residents lived below the federal poverty line ($23,492 for a family of four in 2012), and 44 percent fell below twice that level.”

    The view that emerges from the Justice Department report is that citizens were not only paying a poverty tax, but a pigment tax as the local authorities sought to balance their budgets and pad their coffers on the backs of poor black people.

    Perhaps most disturbing — and damning — is actual correspondence in the report where the authorities don’t even attempt to disguise their intent.

    Take this passage from the report:

    “In March 2010, for instance, the City Finance Director wrote to Chief [Thomas] Jackson that ‘unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year. . . . Given that we are looking at a substantial sales tax shortfall, it’s not an insignificant issue.’ Similarly, in March 2013, the Finance Director wrote to the City Manager: ‘Court fees are anticipated to rise about 7.5%. I did ask the Chief if he thought the PD could deliver 10% increase. He indicated they could try.’”

    Furthermore, the report made clear that “officer evaluations and promotions depend to an inordinate degree on ‘productivity,’ meaning the number of citations issued.”

    The report read like one about a shakedown gang rather than about city officials. […]

    Some officers balked at this obscenity, particularly as it related to “imposing mounting penalties on people who will never be able to afford them” — one member repeating the adage “How can you get blood from a turnip?” But “enough officers — at all ranks — have internalized this message that a culture of reflexive enforcement action, unconcerned with whether the police action actually promotes public safety, and unconcerned with the impact the decision has on individual lives or community trust has taken hold within FPD.”

    And the racial disparities as charged by the Justice Department are unconscionable.

    According to the report, “Ferguson’s approach to law enforcement both reflects and reinforces racial bias” and “there is evidence that this is due in part to intentional discrimination on the basis of race.”

    For instance:

    “African Americans are more than twice as likely as white drivers to be searched during vehicle stops even after controlling for non-race based variables such as the reason the vehicle stop was initiated, but are found in possession of contraband 26% less often than white drivers, suggesting officers are impermissibly considering race as a factor when determining whether to search.”

    Also:

    “FPD appears to bring certain offenses almost exclusively against African Americans. For example, from 2011 to 2013, African Americans accounted for 95% of Manner of Walking in Roadway charges, and 94% of all Failure to Comply charges.”

    Furthermore:

    “Even where FPD officers have legal grounds to stop or arrest, however, they frequently take actions that ratchet up tensions and needlessly escalate the situation to the point that they feel force is necessary.” […]

    Whatever one thinks about the case of the killing and how it was handled in the courts, it is clear that Brown’s death will not be in vain. It is clear that the frustration that poured out onto the streets of Ferguson was not without merit.

    Once again, the oppression people feel as part of their lived experiences, and can share only by way of anecdote, is bolstered by data.

    When people say “Black Lives Matter,” they’re not referring only to the lives lost, but also to those stunted and controlled by a system of power that sees them as pawns.

    Indeed.

    17 disturbing statistics from the federal report on Ferguson police

    African Americans experience disparate impact in nearly every aspect of Ferguson’s law enforcement system. Despite making up 67 percent of the population, African Americans accounted for 85 percent of FPD’s traffic stops, 90 percent of FPD’s citations, and 93 percent of FPD’s arrests from 2012 to 2014.
    African Americans are 2.07 times more likely to be searched during a vehicular stop but are 26 percent less likely to have contraband found on them during a search. They are 2.00 times more likely to receive a citation and 2.37 times more likely to be arrested following a vehicular stop.
    African Americans have force used against them at disproportionately high rates, accounting for 88% of all cases from 2010 to August 2014 in which an FPD officer reported using force. In all 14 uses of force involving a canine bite for which we have information about the race of the person bitten, the person was African American.
    African Americans are more likely to receive multiple citations during a single incident, receiving four or more citations on 73 occasions between October 2012 and July 2014, whereas non-African Americans received four or more citations only twice during that period.
    African Americans account for 95 percent of Manner of Walking charges; 94 percent of all Fail to Comply charges; 92 percent of all Resisting Arrest charges; 92 percent of all Peace Disturbance charges; and 89 percent of all Failure to Obey charges.
    African Americans are 68 percent less likely than others to have their cases dismissed by the Municipal Judge, and in 2013 African Americans accounted for 92 percent of cases in which an arrest warrant was issued.
    African Americans account for 96 percent of known arrests made exclusively because of an outstanding municipal warrant.
    As noted previously on Wonkblog, statistics can mislead, especially when it comes to police. In this case, though, the federal investigation produced overwhelming evidence that these disparities are due to bias in the criminal justice system, not to other factors.

  190. rq says

    Elsewhere, for a moment – Family seeks answers in Baltimore Co. police shooting

    Poline’s family members say they want more explanation. They say Poline knew police were looking for him in connection with the stabbing, and he had told relatives he planned to turn himself in — but first, they say, he wanted to see his sister and her baby.

    They say Poline took an unregulated cab, or a “hack,” to the apartment but was shot inside the cab before the visit.

    #Gitmo2Chicago: Thousands Rise Up Against Chicago Police ‘Black Sites’

    The Chicago police department reportedly operates a secret interrogation compound, similar to the CIA’s black sites, at the Homan Square warehouse. Practices at the site allegedly include beatings, prolonged shackling and denying detainees legal counsel.

    “I have spoken with several people who have been detained and several attorneys who have represented the detained, so people are coming forward, but the more people who do, the harder it will be for CPD to claim this isn’t happening at Homan Square,” one of the organizers, Billy Joe Mills, wrote on the protest’s Facebook event page.

    The goals of the demonstration are a public inspection of the alleged interrogation site, a roundtable discussion on the matter, making information available to the public, and for all Chicago detainees to be given access to their attorneys, according to the Facebook page.

    Organizers, which include Chicago Anonymous, urge anyone who has been detained at the Homan Square to come forward, as well as police officers who have knowledge of the situation.

    Last week, Anthony Hill, an attorney specializing in criminal defense matters, told Sputnik that detainees at Homan Square are held incommunicado and forced to give false confessions.

    The Chicago police rejected the claims stating that they abide by all laws.

    Also rally will take place Wednesday in Asheville, North Carolina.

    “A rally will be held in Asheville to raise awareness concerning the disclosure of Homan Square, a secret interrogation facility ran by the Chicago Police Department,” a Facebook event page for the rally reads.

    The purpose of the rally is to “shed light on these revelations so that these practices may come to an end,” according to the organizers.

    More on the same: #Gitmo2Chicago: Thousands expected to attend Chicago protest against Homan Square torture site.

    Ah, the protests! Protesters blocking traffic outside #Ferguson Police Department. Some cats turning around. More on that later.

    Ferguson Inc.

    It is their daily lives that were coldly recounted in a Justice Department report, six months in the making, that studied 35,000 pages of police records and racial data to uncover what they already knew: Justice in Ferguson is served unevenly and it is anything but color blind. As just one example, culled from damning statistic layered upon damning statistic, in a town that is one-third white, 93 percent of arrests were of black citizens.

    The Justice Department’s simple conclusion—that racial bias and racial discrimination is endemic inside the Ferguson police—is exactly what protestors here have been saying since August 9th, when Darren Wilson shot and killed teenager Michael Brown and then left his body on the street for four and a half hours.

    Until this week’s news brought Ferguson back to national attention, the city and the protests had slipped from national headlines. The cable channel satellite trucks that were once fixtures of Ferguson parking lots have long been gone.

    But in St. Louis, the protests have continued: A regular occurrence in a city that wants to keep a focus on reform. […]

    Since August, millions of dollars have been raised or donated to further the Ferguson cause. Older and historically underfunded St. Louis groups like the Organization for Black Struggle (OBS) and Missourians for Organizational Reform and Empowerment (MORE) received multimillion dollar grants from George Soros’s foundations. Meanwhile, new organizations like Heal STL—founded by St. Louis alderman Antonio French, himself a prominent protester—raised tens of thousands in August before going down in flames, literally, in November, after which an additional $30,000 was raised to rebuild office space.

    The Ferguson Commission, a group selected by Missouri Governor Jay Nixon to examine the conflict’s causes, pays some of its members over $100,000 per year. The creation of the commission, along with the newly created Office of Community Engagement where employees also boast six-figure salaries, are estimated to cost taxpayers over $2 million. Every week at Ferguson Commission meetings, aggrieved locals speak of the urgency of problems like poverty, which the commission duly documents. But while perhaps fruitful in the long run, documentation does little to comfort the many St. Louis citizens scrambling to get by.

    “Ferguson” has become a buzzword, shorthand for engaged activism or lucrative chaos, depending which way you lean. Twitter splashes #Ferguson across their office walls, Ferguson T-shirts are sold at rallies across the country, and in November, media pumped Ferguson for ratings like they were staging a hunger games. Documentaries of protesters abound, with the documented now complaining that outsiders are profiting off their exploitation. Dozens of online fundraisers drop the Ferguson name to push for everything from community service initiatives to independent journalism to restoring burned-down businesses to riot tourism. National black leaders like Al Sharpton have embraced Ferguson as a cause celebre, much to the dismay of some St. Louis activists, who fear a local movement instigated by youth is being hijacked by an older generation for profit.

    St. Louis activists often refer to their “protester family.” And it is like a family, in that families fight about money. As protesters debate the direction of the movement—local or national, civil disobedience or targeted violence, reform or revolution—they also battle, however reluctantly, for position and prominence. […]

    Live-streaming brought the world to Ferguson, but it turned Masri’s world upside-down. The online video streams proved crucial to spreading word of the Ferguson unrest and providing an on-the-street alternative to the police perspectives and official press conferences, all while giving global viewers a glimpse of life on the streets of St. Louis. Over the past six months, Masri has adjusted to his newfound fame and its discontents—he’s recognized on the street by fans and regarded with disdain by law enforcement. He shrugs off arrests and threats from detractors as part of his new life.

    What he cannot understand, however, are attacks from within the movement itself.

    “Please do not send money to Bassem,” the messages from Maibes say. “He has some very real problems and people won’t shut his BS down. We have to distance ourselves.”

    As a result of the direct messages being leaked to the public, Masri was forced to confess to over 21,000 Twitter followers that he is a recovering heroin addict and methadone patient. Clean for seventeen months, he is a vocal critic of the criminalization of addiction and the prison industrial complex. But Masri never wanted to go public with his own struggle. He was a casualty of the Ferguson money race, where the personal is political and the political is manipulated for profit.

    “I never knew there was competition,” Masri sighs. “I thought we were in it together.”

    Masri says the dispute with the other streamer was an aberration and he wishes people would stay focused on what he calls St. Louis’s real problems: police brutality, systemic racism, and rampant inequality. But it is hard to stay focused when you are struggling to survive. Masri is one of dozens of demonstrators to solicit donations since protests broke out in August. The activists raising money share many goals: combatting corruption and police brutality, empowering the black community and educating the public on racism.

    What they do not share are equal resources to do so. […]

    “I didn’t ask for none of this,” Masri says. “It came to me. I felt it was my duty as a recovering addict who has seen everything in this city, the good the bad and the ugly, to come out and call people on their shit. If there’s something that needs to be said, and nobody is willing to say it, I’ll say it. It’s not about leadership. It’s about respect. I respect people, so people respect me back.”

    Masri is seen as a success story, but an examination of his finances speaks to the obstacles Ferguson activists face. His biggest donations have been to get him out of jail. In November, the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee launched a gofundme to pay a $15,000 cash only bond, incurred after his arrest while filming a protest. The group raised the money within 48 hours.

    People looking for victories within the Ferguson movement often point to fundraisers like Masri’s, which raised a large sum of money quickly, or court cases like the ACLU’s win against the “five second rule,” which had required protesters to keep moving or face arrest. But Ferguson’s “victories” tend to be over problems that arose from the protests—victories for the act of protesting, not victories for the movement’s greater goals. Deeper problems like poverty persist, and Masri says you can look no further than his own video for evidence.

    “Watch the livestream and you’ll see protesters asking for food and gas and everything else,” Masri says. “People are scrambling. All this money going around but it’s not going to people on the ground. I have no idea where it is going. No idea.”

    Like other protesters, Masri has struggled with the ethics of raising funds to support his role in a movement of the impoverished.

    “My dad taught me as a child never to depend on no one,” Masri recalls. “He came here from Jerusalem with nothing. So the first time I put up a fundraiser I was hesitant. I did it because my equipment got stolen and I needed to replace it. But when I got the money, I didn’t use it for that. I ended up spreading it around the protesters. I bought one woman an iPhone because she needed it. I bought people food, I paid phone bills. I gave it away so that people could get by.”[…]

    For Ferguson activist Charles Wade, combatting protester poverty is essential to keeping the movement alive.

    “I’m all for protesting,” Wade says, “but it’s a state of emergency for the people we’re not discussing. And the people who no one is discussing are those experiencing not paycheck to paycheck poverty, but no paycheck poverty. The media looks to Twitter, but this is a story about people who aren’t even on Twitter. This is a movement of everyday people who understand that injustice should not be tolerated, that oppression affects so many. That is the face of the movement—not Twitter.”

    As he talks, Wade, a former celebrity stylist, is mopping the floor of a sparsely furnished apartment on St. Louis’s south side. This is one of the nine apartments rented by Operation Help or Hush, a non-profit Wade co-founded with St. Louis native Tasha Burton to cover protesters’ daily needs. Wade is preparing the apartment for its new arrivals: Ferguson protesters displaced from their homes or unable to afford shelter.

    “Everything a normal person needs, we get it,” he says. “And I say ‘normal’ intentionally, because a lot of people don’t see poor people as normal. If people need apartments, get them apartments. If people need milk, get them milk. If they need tampons, get them tampons. But you have to see these people as deserving. And when I say deserving, I mean that every human is deserving of basic care. If you don’t see these as lives that matter, if you don’t see these people as valuable, as people who have great things to give our community and our country, it is easy to neglect them.”

    Operation Help or Hush (OHoH) is one of dozens of grassroots organizations created in the August aftermath. Some, like a small group called The Freedom Fighters, are made up of disenfranchised black youth who lack basic resources. OHoH’s transitional housing program was created to help activists take to the streets without having to live on them. The organization has since raised over $50,000 and opened a number of subsidiary enterprises—Ferguson for Hire, Ferguson Foodshare—aimed at making daily life better and surmounting a major social barrier: pride.

    “Sustainability is a conversation about what people need,” explains Kayla Reed, a protester who was house-sitting for OHoH when I arrived. Newly employed at OBS, Reed says the Ferguson movement displaced many young people whose family members shunned them for their activism, worried it would lead to trouble with the law.

    Forced with the choice between stability and standing up for what they believe in, young protesters chose the latter—and paid a price they could not afford. Some were evicted from their homes. Others lost wages on hourly service industry jobs that barely covered their rent in the first place. Several activists described to me pressure, especially in the months before the grand jury decision, to be constantly present at protests—and to have that presence documented on Twitter or else it wouldn’t “count.” The desperation and determination of those early months left many disillusioned and destitute later on. […]

    Hailing from Austin, Wade is the rare non-St. Louisan prominent in the movement, and he is still adjusting to St. Louis ways. A 2010 documentary, City of Haterz, proposed that St. Louis suffers from a “slave mentality” due to a constant struggle for resources, in which one person’s gain is assumed to be another’s loss. Peruse the Ferguson hashtag, and it is hard to miss that feuding in action.

    “I try to push the idea of community,” Wade says, “but it’s hard for people who have always had to fight to stop fighting. We should be fighting together, not one another. It’s difficult because it’s so competitive.”

    Those on the losing end know it all too well. […]

    Until Ferguson erupted, Payne led a middle-class life. On her own since age 19, she was working an office job in Ferguson when Brown was killed. The minute she clocked out, Payne hit the streets, attending demonstrations and meetings. She was a constant presence on the ground, though rarely interviewed by the media. As the protests wore on, her position at her company was eliminated. Payne was left with nothing.

    “I think it’s wrong that there are so many people in my situation. I can’t imagine knowing, ‘I have this available’ and not give it. There is so much that could be done, but it’s not a priority,” she says. “People don’t see that others have different needs because their own needs are being met.”

    For some, protest is a form of recreation. “Ferguson October,” a weekend event held one month before the grand jury verdict, attracted busloads of out-of-towners eager to get their selfie in front of the burned down QuikTrip. Others flew in and out of St. Louis regularly as the media fervor grew. But for Payne, who lives near Ferguson in St. Louis’s North County, it was a struggle just to get around town.

    “I’m over the south side thing,” she says, referring to the recurring protests in St. Louis’s Shaw neighborhood, where 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers was killed in October. “I don’t have the gas to get back and forth to there. These days I eat one meal a day, or I try to eat for free. I’ve lost everything but my car. I’m out of my comfort zone—I was used to being independent. But it’s real out here.”

    Payne is one of many protesters to have experienced downward mobility as a result of Ferguson. She says she does not blame the movement for her decisions. But the Ferguson resource scramble teaches an unnerving lesson: sacrifice for your community, and become the sacrifice yourself.

    “When I had money, I gave it away,” she recalls. “And then I was like, ‘Oh. I have no money left.’ It was not a great financial decision, but in the heat of the moment, you draw bonds with people. Someone had a cell phone bill, I would pay it, because it was important we stay in touch and not get separated on the streets.”

    Now Payne is looking for a job. She would love one related to activism—she voluntarily attends about 20 hours of policy meetings each week and leads training workshops on anti-racism—but finds them few and far between. She has found purpose in her life, but no way to financially sustain it.

    Ferguson’s protests can seem like an exclusive club. Other than Operation Help or Hush, she sees no one addressing, or even acknowledging, basic protester needs.

    “There is a divide between people whose needs are being met, or at least it seems like their needs are being met, and those who aren’t,” she says. “It causes problems. We’re all doing the work, but you only get paid if it’s with an organization or if you’re one of like seven people getting a lot of donations.”

    Regardless of her financial status, Payne plans to continue her activism. An avid student of history, she sees Ferguson as part of a centuries-long struggle, one that rarely rewards the efforts of black women. She wants things to change, but is not optimistic.

    “It’s empowering to protest but it’s also like goddamn, I’m reading about 1830s slave rebellions and then looking at St. Louis in 2015 and I’m like are you kidding me?” she says. “Everything we’re going through has already been done. It’s the same shit for two hundred years.” […]

    As the protest movement goes national, Ferguson has been reduced to “where it began.” But the economic hardship that both predated and predicated the protests has only been exacerbated. Most activists who entered the movement in poverty remain in poverty. Some who entered with means have lost them, while a tiny fraction has found money and opportunity. For St. Louis’s impoverished youth, it is the same old story, with an audience that diminishes each day.

    As media attention moves away from St. Louis, protesters like Wade and Masri worry about sustainability. Masri says his livestream is funded and that he was financially unaffected by the spat with the fellow streamer. He is more concerned about the fate of the community. When I ask what will happen to the movement if people cannot afford to participate, his face falls.

    “The movement…” he trails off. “I don’t know. I really don’t know. All I know is we need to give people the opportunity to live not just a life but a respectable life. This has always been an issue. The last thing Martin Luther King was doing was a poor people march where they were going to occupy DC and challenge US capitalism.

    “Of course,” he concludes. “They killed him for that.”

    And not just racism. Funny how people who discriminate do so on several axes at once, usually. Not always. But often. Sexual harassment tolerated within Ferguson police department, federal report alleges

    Amid the 102-page federal report on the police department’s racial profiling practices are allegations of sexual harassment and lack of gender diversity.

    The Department of Justice investigation that accused the department of racially-biased policing contained the allegations of sexual harassment within a footnote.

    The report found that the department also has “strikingly disparate gender diversity.” The report notes that 55 percent of Ferguson residents are female, but that only four of 53 officers employed by the department are female.

    “Ferguson’s efforts to retain qualified female and black officers may be compromised by the same biases we saw more broadly in the department,” according to the report. “In particular, while the focus of our investigation did not permit us to reach a conclusive finding, we found evidence that the Ferguson Police Department tolerates sexual harassment by male officers, and has responded poorly to allegations of sexual harassment that have been made by female officers.”

    Ferguson city leaders hosted a press conference late Wednesday responding to the report, but did not address the sexual harassment allegations or take questions from reporters.

    Mayor James Knowles III did note the city has hired a black female corrections officer and two black female assistant court clerks since the Michael Brown shooting on Aug. 9.

    Knowles noted that women only account for 13 percent of all law enforcement.

  191. rq says

    A Letter From Black America

    Last July 4, my family and I went to Long Island to celebrate the holiday with a friend and her family. After eating some barbecue, a group of us decided to take a walk along the ocean. The mood on the beach that day was festive. Music from a nearby party pulsed through the haze of sizzling meat. Lovers strolled hand in hand. Giggling children chased each other along the boardwalk.

    Most of the foot traffic was heading in one direction, but then two teenage girls came toward us, moving stiffly against the flow, both of them looking nervously to their right. “He’s got a gun,” one of them said in a low voice.

    I turned my gaze to follow theirs, and was clasping my 4-year-old daughter’s hand when a young man extended his arm and fired off multiple shots along the busy street running parallel to the boardwalk. Snatching my daughter up into my arms, I joined the throng of screaming revelers running away from the gunfire and toward the water.

    The shots stopped as quickly as they had started. The man disappeared between some buildings. Chest heaving, hands shaking, I tried to calm my crying daughter, while my husband, friends and I all looked at one another in breathless disbelief. I turned to check on Hunter, a high school intern from Oregon who was staying with my family for a few weeks, but she was on the phone.

    “Someone was just shooting on the beach,” she said, between gulps of air, to the person on the line.

    Unable to imagine whom she would be calling at that moment, I asked her, somewhat indignantly, if she couldn’t have waited until we got to safety before calling her mom.

    “No,” she said. “I am talking to the police.”

    My friends and I locked eyes in stunned silence. Between the four adults, we hold six degrees. Three of us are journalists. And not one of us had thought to call the police. We had not even considered it.

    We also are all black. And without realizing it, in that moment, each of us had made a set of calculations, an instantaneous weighing of the pros and cons.

    As far as we could tell, no one had been hurt. The shooter was long gone, and we had seen the back of him for only a second or two. On the other hand, calling the police posed considerable risks. It carried the very real possibility of inviting disrespect, even physical harm. We had seen witnesses treated like suspects, and knew how quickly black people calling the police for help could wind up cuffed in the back of a squad car. Some of us knew of black professionals who’d had guns drawn on them for no reason.

    This was before Michael Brown. Before police killed John Crawford III for carrying a BB gun in a Wal-Mart or shot down 12-year-old Tamir Rice in a Cleveland park. Before Akai Gurley was killed by an officer while walking in a dark staircase and before Eric Garner was choked to death upon suspicion of selling “loosies.” Without yet knowing those names, we all could go down a list of unarmed black people killed by law enforcement.

    We feared what could happen if police came rushing into a group of people who, by virtue of our skin color, might be mistaken for suspects.

    For those of you reading this who may not be black, or perhaps Latino, this is my chance to tell you that a substantial portion of your fellow citizens in the United States of America have little expectation of being treated fairly by the law or receiving justice. It’s possible this will come as a surprise to you. But to a very real extent, you have grown up in a different country than I have.

    More at the link. Nothing particularly new, but a first-person account of being black in America. Very engaging read, though, as always, depressing.

    Remember: you have the privilege of reading what Mike proved with his LIFE. While you turn the page, every one of his dreams is gone.
    DOJ: We think…
    Me: Yeah?
    DOJ: That maybe…
    Me: YEAH!?
    DOJ: Cops might be racist.
    Me: ….
    DOJ: … Did you read our report?

    Three St. Louis police officers removed from duty amid allegations of criminal conduct

    In the statement, Chief Sam Dotson said, “The department will continue to be vigorous in efforts to root out officers whose actions compromise the integrity of the organization. We hold our officers to a high standard and expect them to abide by the very same laws they are sworn to uphold.”

    McGhee was critically injured Dec. 19 after he pulled up to the curb in the 3800 block of North 25th Street and began to get out of a truck. A car drove alongside him and someone opened fire.

    McGhee returned fire, killing Terrell Beasley, 28, of the 4000 block of Cleveland Avenue, officials said. Beasley’s body was found a few hours later in a burning vehicle along the 700 block of Thrush Avenune in the Baden neighborhood.

    Dominic Lamont Irons, 29, of the 2800 block of Delmar Boulevard has been charged as the alleged driver of the suspect vehicle.

    No motive for the attack was made public, but the sources said they believed McGhee was targeted.

    McGhee joined the department in May 2011 and resigned Feb. 27, shortly after being suspended.

    McGhee’s attorney, John Bouhasin, confirmed that his client resigned under charges but said medical and personal reasons had driven the decision. He describe McGhee as a model officer who had been a boxer for the Guns ’N Hoses fundraiser for Backstoppers and had won an Officer of the Month award with very few complaints and good arrest totals.

    “I really can’t comment because it’s being investigated and I haven’t been presented with a full set of facts to make a determination,” he said. “Due to serious physical injuries that he’s still suffering from, he doesn’t believe he will be able to perform the duties as a police officer. With that, along with family reasons, he decided it’s time to resign and pursue another career path.”

    Major joined the department in May 2011 and was suspended without pay Feb. 24. His attorney, Joe Hogan, declined comment.

    Brassfield joined in February 1996 and was suspended Feb. 26. His attorney could not be reached for comment.

    Roorda weighs in at the end there, though without his usual ‘police are awesome’ stuff. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that at least two out of the three officers are black? (There is no photo of the third.)

    Federal jury sides with police officers in fatal shooting, awards no damages

    The eight-member panel, which deliberated about seven hours over two days, also declined to award any damages to a passenger in the car, Matthew Colyer, who was wounded in the shooting.

    While the jury’s verdict was a clear vindication for the officers, the case may be far from over. U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang, who has ripped city attorneys for not producing the dispatch recording before the trial, has given the go-ahead for a full investigation into how the rules breach occurred and whether any sanctions should be imposed.

    Attorneys for both plaintiffs have also said in court they plan to ask for a retrial because of the error.

    In the courthouse lobby, Pinex’s mother, Gloria, decried the jury’s decision, shouting through tears that the evidence in the trial had shown the officers to be liars.

    “How can you side with somebody who just lied in your face?” she said. “They’ve been lying to me for four whole years, knowing that tape existed and they never gave it to me. But they let them walk, and my son’s gone for nothing? How dare they?” […]

    “They killed Darius Pinex for no reason,” his estate’s lawyer, Steven Fine, said in closing arguments. “They lied about the dispatch.”

    But the city’s attorney implored jurors to put themselves in the officers’ shoes, calling them “people, not robocops.”

    Jordan Marsh, an assistant corporation counsel, said the officers truly thought at the time that Pinex’s car was wanted because of the earlier emergency dispatch. He also pointed to testimony by Sierra that he stopped the police SUV in front of Pinex’s car — instead of behind as he normally would — because he saw the Oldsmobile make a jerking motion as it slowed, leading him to think the driver might try to speed off.

    Marsh also criticized Colyer, saying he has given conflicting accounts of what happened.

    The Tribune first disclosed in 2011 that within six months of Pinex’s death, Sierra was involved in two other shootings. In one of those incidents, a squad car dashboard camera showed Sierra fire three shots into Flint Farmer’s back as he was on the ground. Sierra claimed to have mistaken a cellphone held by Farmer for a gun.

    Ferguson mayor responds to DOJ report on racial bias, takes no questions:

    Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III on Wednesday evening spent less than 10 minutes responding to the 100-page report documenting numerous instances of racial bias at the Ferguson Police Department and municipal court. He took no questions from the press before leaving the room at the city’s community center.

    The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division made 13 recommendations for the police department and 13 recommendations for municipal courts – including shifting the city’s “policing to raise revenue” model and adding more training for police officers in de-escalation and avoiding use of force.

    Knowles mostly spoke about what the city has already started doing since Aug. 9, when former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown Jr. He said employees have been through diversity training, and the city is the first in the region to establish a civilian oversight board that reviews into the policies and procedures of the police department. The board meets weekly.

    The DOJ discovered that several racist emails circulated by police supervisors and court staff, including one email that joked about an abortion by a black woman being a means of crime control. All of the email senders are current employees and almost all of the emails were sent through their official city email accounts and during work hours. None of the employees were disciplined, according to DOJ investigators.

    Knowles said that one person was fired shortly after the city’s meeting with the DOJ this afternoon, and two other employees are under investigation.

    The report documented several cases where residents have spent hundreds of dollars and days in jail for things as small as trash violations. Knowles said that the municipal court judge has a new docket for “those having trouble with fines.” These residents have an option for different payment plans and alternative sentencing, he said. The city has also capped the amount of revenue that the city can bring in from court fines and fees to 15 percent of city’s budget, which is half of the current legal limit, he said. Any excess will be appropriated for community projects, he said.

    “We must do better not only as a city, but also as a state and country,” Knowles said.

    Oh wow, hey look, they fired one person for the racist emails. And… they’ve had diversity training! Yah! Right.

  192. rq says

    Here is another Ferguson issue: Dem prosecutor. Dem governor. How can Missouri Dems ask Blacks to vote for them after DOJ report? Then again, how can they possibly vote Republican, too?

    Mo. lawmakers call for disbanding of Ferguson Police Department after DOJ ruling

    State Senators Jamilah Nasheed and Maria Chappelle-Nadal are both calling for the Ferguson Police Department to be disbanded.

    “It really shines a light on a serious problem, and that’s racism,” Nasheed said of the department.

    Nasheed believes another department needs to take over policing in the North County community.

    “If we’re going to restore true, [we] have to start with municipal courts,” said Nasheed.

    Chappelle-Nadal also called for the Ferguson Police Department to be dismantled, saying that every day individuals are targeted and harassed.

    When asked how she can use her position as a state senator to correct problems, Chappelle-Nadal said she has a bill that would restrict the use of deadly force unless there is an imminent threat to the officer or those nearby.

    Don’t they already function (thep olice, that is) under something resembling imminent threat?

    Gov. Nixon issues statement regarding today’s announcement by Department of Justice

    Jefferson City, MO

    Gov. Jay Nixon released the following statement regarding today’s announcement by the U.S. Department of Justice:

    “On Aug. 11, I asked the Department of Justice to conduct an independent investigation following the shooting of Michael Brown. I appreciate their diligent efforts as well as their specific recommendations for how to restore confidence, build trust, and promote greater fairness in the City of Ferguson’s courts and police department.

    “Facts exposed in the Department of Justice’s report on the Ferguson Police Department are deeply disturbing, and demonstrate the urgent need for the reforms I have called for, some of which the General Assembly is now considering, including reforms to municipal courts.

    “Discrimination has no place in our justice system and no place in a democratic society. All Missourians deserve to be treated with fairness, dignity and respect. That is why I will continue to work to enact policies and legislation that promote greater fairness, equality and inclusion in all our communities.”

    Yes, a paragon of anti-racism, is Nixon.

    Mayor Knowles basically said they are doing nothing new to address the DOJ report, and now leaves the room not answering Qs #Ferguson

    One person fired. ONE. Over a racist email. Wilson got to resign and he murdered someone.

  193. rq says

    Ferguson police chief Jackson didn’t even show up. What a sham.

    Ferguson Police Tolerate Sexual Harassment of Female Officers: Justice Department

    Buried in footnote No. 61 of the Department of Justice’s damning report on the Ferguson Police Department’s widespread problems with racial bias, investigators say they also found evidence that the department tolerates sexual harassment of female officers by male officers.

    The footnote follows a section about the lack of diversity on Ferguson’s police force. Only 4 of Ferguson’s 54 sworn officers are African American, despite the city’s two-thirds black population. Adding more black officers, coupled with other widespread reforms of the police department, “has the potential to increase community confidence in the police department,” according to the justice department’s 102-page report.

    The report goes into detail about the factors that could prevent black candidates from seeking jobs with the Ferguson police, including racial stereotypes held by police and court officials illustrated through racially insensitive emails.

    (For example, an October 2011 email sent by an unidentified current Ferguson official includes a photo of “a bare-chested group of dancing women, apparently in Africa, with the caption, ‘Michelle Obama’s High School Reunion,'” according to the report.)

    While the justice department’s report focuses on racial bias and diversity in Ferguson, footnote No. 61 explains that it also found troubling patterns of gender bias at the police department. From the report:

    While not the focus of our investigation, the information we reviewed indicated that Ferguson’s efforts to retain qualified female and black officers may be compromised by the same biases we saw more broadly in the department. In particular, while the focus of our investigation did not permit us to reach a conclusive finding, we found evidence that (Ferguson Police Department) tolerates sexual harassment by male officers, and has responded poorly to allegations of sexual harassment that have been made by female officers.

    The report makes no effort to describe allegations of sexual harassment, but investigators say increasing gender diversity on the force could be “critical” to improving the department overall.

    “Diversity of all types — including race, ethnicity, sex, national origin, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity — can be beneficial both to police community relationships and the culture of the law enforcement agency,” according to the report. “Increasing gender and sexual orientation diversity in policing in particular may be critical in re-making internal police culture and creating new assumptions about what makes policing effective.”

    Federal investigators launched the probe into Ferguson police tactics soon after the August 9 shooting of Michael Brown, reviewing hundreds of interviews and 35,000 pages of police records.

    A couple of more interesting (and horrible) links within this article.

    Officer Darren Wilson cleared by Justice Department, autoplay video.

    Rev. Sharpton talks to the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart about the latest developments in the Department of Justice’s investigation into the Ferguson police department. What does it mean now that Officer Darren Wilson is cleared?

    Incredulous, the Mayor of Ferguson blames all of the violations of the constitutional rights of black people in Ferguson on 3 people.

    Justice Dept. echoes Ferguson residents’ complaints about police

    St. Louis Alderman Antonio French said the police department’s behavior amounted to “taxation by citation.” He told CNN the arrests affected not just Ferguson residents but also residents of nearby communities who pass through Ferguson en route to other locales in the area.

    The statistics sound damning, but former Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard Parks, who dealt with the Justice Department during his five-year tenure as chief, said, “The numbers can be deceiving because the population is overwhelmingly black.”

    The numbers alone don’t paint the full picture, he said, explaining that he’d need more than mere statistics about each stop to draw solid conclusions. […]

    Politics may even be at play, Los Angeles-based community activist Joe Hicks suggested. Attorney General Eric Holder wanted to bring civil rights cases against Ferguson Officer Darren Wilson, who killed Michael Brown in August, and Florida neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon Martin in 2012 — but neither case panned out. The report may be Holder’s way to “extract a pound of flesh, if you will, from the Ferguson Police Department.”

    (Also Wednesday, the Justice Department closed its investigation into Wilson, declining to bring criminal charges against him.)

    Still, the report likely didn’t surprise some residents who spoke to CNN in August, during the height of the protests. […]

    Even white residents have complained of run-ins with police. Tom Steigerwald, 31, who has lived in Ferguson since 1994, said Ferguson has always been a diverse town, and race isn’t much of a factor among residents.

    “It’s always diverse, but they always got along,” he said.

    But the police?

    “They all got a power trip problem, a lot of them,” he said.

    Following Wednesday’s announcement, Michael Brown’s parents, Lesley McSpadden and Michael Brown Sr., released a statement saying they were disappointed that Wilson would not face federal charges in their son’s death. But the report on the police department could provide a silver lining.

    “We are encouraged that the DOJ will hold the Ferguson Police Department accountable for the pattern of racial bias and profiling they found in their handling of interactions with people of color,” the statement said. “It is our hope that through this action, true change will come not only in Ferguson, but around the country. If that change happens, our son’s death will not have been in vain.”

    Next comment dealing with protest last night. Not pretty.

  195. rq says

    The Justice Department also says Ferguson police tolerated sexual harassment of female officers

    However, tucked away in a footnote toward the end of the report, investigators also described another troubling trend: Evidence suggested that the department, which included very few female police officers, “tolerates sexual harassment by male officers.”

    While this fact is not given the same attention as the other issues uncovered by investigators, it is offered less as an aside and more as evidence of larger problems that pervaded the department.

    “While not the focus of our investigation, the information we reviewed indicated that Ferguson’s efforts to retain qualified female and black officers may be compromised by the same biases we saw more broadly in the department,” the footnote states. “In particular, while the focus of our investigation did not permit us to reach a conclusive finding, we found evidence that [the department] tolerates sexual harassment by male officers, and has responded poorly to allegations of sexual harassment that have been made by female officers.”

    This statement comes at the bottom of the section on how Ferguson’s police force sorely lacks diversity, a point that has been made repeatedly due to the fact that while two-thirds of Ferguson residents are black, its police officers are almost exclusively white. Out of the 54 commissioned officers on the force, just four are black.

    There is a problem of gender imbalance as well: Ferguson police officers are also almost exclusively male, with just four female officers, the report states. This problem is not unique to Ferguson, as the overwhelming majority of local police officers are men, according to federal statistics. (At least one female officer was identified last year as Barbara Spradling, who married Darren Wilson, the former Ferguson officer who shot and killed Michael Brown; it is unknown if she still works for the Ferguson police, and an attorney for Wilson did not return a message seeking comment on Wednesday.)

    “During our investigation we received many complaints about [the department’s] lack of gender diversity as well,” the report states.

    Many say police practices in Ferguson extend to other municipalities

    Many say the practices of the Ferguson Police Department cited in a report by the Department of Justice are used by other local police departments.

    The report found a pattern of racial bias by officers, and an effort to write lots of tickets to provide a revenue stream for the city.

    “If I had my way, the Justice Department would leave Ferguson and start going to Bellefontaine Neighbors, Hazelwood, St. Ann, and start doing the same sort of review with all of them,” said Adolphus Pruitt with NAACP of St. Louis.

    St. Louis Alderman Antonio French, who has participated in protests since Michael Brown’s death, said other local law enforcement agencies may engage in behavior worse than Ferguson’s.

    “By no means should the Department of Justice feel like their work is done just because of the report on Ferguson. Ferguson is just one of the many cities that engage in the same if not worse behavior,” French said.

    Both Pruitt and French said too many small municipalities fund city coffers by targeting African Americans and piling on fines. Pruitt believes the DOJ’s scathing report should signal the end for the Ferguson police and other local police departments.

    “I have no reason to believe that in order for effective policing here in St. Louis County you either have 23 or 42 police departments,” Pruitt said. “Bottom line, it’s time for a more unified police department for all of St. Louis County.”

    DOJ Report Vindicates Ferguson Protesters As Police Department Faces Uncertain Future

    The long-anticipated report detailed systemic issues with the Ferguson Police Department and its municipal court, and provided accounts of individual incidents, many based on police reports authored by Ferguson officers. The report lends force to the complaints of protesters and some Ferguson residents, who have long said the city treated them as sources of revenue rather than citizens to be protected.

    In a briefing with reporters on Wednesday, a Justice Department official expressed confidence that Ferguson could implement a lengthy list of necessary reforms. The official said the city cooperated with the DOJ investigation, and a meeting with Ferguson officials on Tuesday was not adversarial.

    But the public reaction of Ferguson officials to the damning report left unclear what will happen next. Mayor James Knowles III made a brief statement before cameras on Wednesday night, announcing that one Ferguson employee who sent racist emails mentioned in the report had been fired, and two other employees who sent racist emails were on leave.

    Yet Knowles, who appeared without police Chief Tom Jackson or other city officials, gave no indication that his government would continue to cooperate with federal civil rights officials. And the racist emails, though disturbing, were only a minor component of the lengthy federal report, which called into question the city’s entire approach to policing and the enforcement of its municipal code.

    The report raises the question of whether the Ferguson will continue to operate its own police department or instead contract with another law enforcement agency. Ferguson is one of the smallest cities subjected to such a Justice Department probe, and the high cost of implementing reforms, along with an anticipated decrease in municipal court revenue from fines and fees, may force the city to consider disbanding its police force of just over 50 officers.

    Attorney General Eric Holder said at Justice Department headquarters in Washington that it was “time for Ferguson’s leaders to take immediate, wholesale and structural corrective action” to address problems detailed in the report.

    Holder said police policies caused “severely damaged relationships between law enforcement and members of the community” and “made professional policing vastly more difficult -– and unnecessarily placed officers at increased risk.” He said the Justice Department would reserve the right to force the city to comply.

    “Nothing is off the table,” Holder said, adding that federal officials would also work with surrounding municipalities that are likely engaged in the same types of unconstitutional practices found in Ferguson.

    Ferguson Mayor Knowles: ‘We must do better;’ Critics want more specifics

    Ferguson Mayor James Knowles provided little indication how his city would respond to a scathing Department of Justice report documenting pervasive racial bias in the city’s police department and municipal court system. But he listed several steps the city was already taking to deal with allegations of bias.

    “Today’s report allows the city of Ferguson to identify problems not only in our police department, but in the entire St. Louis region,” Knowles said. “We must do better not only as a city, but as a state, and as a country. We must all work to address issues of racial disparity in all aspects of society.”

    That report concluded that “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the city’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs,” and the city’s practices soured relations with black residents in and around the city.

    While Knowles told a standing-room-only group of reporters that city officials discussed the report with federal officials, he did not say whether Ferguson would enter into a consent decree with the department.

    He also didn’t say whether Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson, who wasn’t present at the press conference, would keep his job or whether Ferguson city manager John Shaw – who oversees the day-to-day operations of the police department – would be ousted.

    The mayor read from a prepared text and took no questions from reporters. […]

    Ferguson Township Democratic Committeewoman Patricia Bynes wanted to know specifically whether the city would enter into a consent decree with the Department of Justice – not just a recitation of changes the city’s made before the report came out.

    She also wanted city officials held accountable, including Shaw.

    “The only person on the hook should not be Chief Jackson – there’s a lot going on in this city,” Bynes said. “And the person who’s absolutely in charge is the city manager. I was absolutely hoping to hear from the city manager, in addition to the mayor.”

    Former Ferguson Mayor Brian Fletcher –a candidate for city council – also wanted to hear more specifics about what the report means for Ferguson. But he took a different view of the situation than Robinson or Bynes.

    He said he was surprised that Ferguson was the target of the Department of Justice’s ire – and not other municipalities in St. Louis County.

    “One of the things the mayor did say is [the city’s] implemented a lot of programs that were the first in the region,” Fletcher said. “So hopefully, I think some good will come out of this and maybe other departments will implement some of these changes – a citizen’s review board for example.” […]

    “Discrimination has no place in our justice system and no place in a democratic society,” Nixon said. “All Missourians deserve to be treated with fairness, dignity and respect. That is why I will continue to work to enact policies and legislation that promote greater fairness, equality and inclusion in all our communities.”

    State Sens. Maria Chappelle-Nadal, D-University City, and Jamilah Nasheed, D-St. Louis, said they were “appalled” with the news of the racist emails and other practices from the Ferguson Police Department. The two held a news conference in Jefferson City on Wednesday to announce their support for disbanding the police department and the resignation of Tom Jackson.

    “These are people who are accountable for the safety of our communities and they’re making jokes about African-Americans,” Chappelle-Nadal said. “This is not Jim Crow, this is institutional racism.”

    The senators suggested that another police department should police Ferguson, but it needs to be a department without a history of racial profiling. [<- good luck with that …]

    In a statement, St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger “thanked the Department of Justice for their work on a comprehensive and informative report.”

    “I truly hope the Ferguson Police Department will address the numerous concerns identified by federal officials during their investigation,” Stenger said.

    Stenger spokesman Cordell Whitlock said that Stenger wasn’t going to speculate whether the report would force Ferguson to dissolve its police department and contract with the St. Louis County Police Department. That process may be difficult, especially if it requires an affirmative vote from the city council and the passage of a citywide referendum.

    “If Ferguson approaches St. Louis County for assistance with policing, the appropriate discussions would take place,” Whitlock said. […]

    In December, Koster expressed concerns that “the level of balkanization, in my personal opinion, is hurting the future prospects of growth in the St. Louis County region and the St. Louis municipal region as a whole.” That was a referencing to how St. Louis County has 90 municipalities, many of which have their own police departments.

    He added that “when you have [dozens of] police departments – many of them being so small — it is very hard, as we have seen, to keep quality at a level that we expect of our police departments.”

    Oh, and a reminder, the citizen’s review board, that barely got accepted a short while ago, lacks subpoena power. It shall be seen how useful it will be in the long run.

    Remember while reading #FergusonReport that #HomanSquare exists. Abuse by law enforcement is rampant in the US.

    And a reminder from the Grauniad, Ferguson reform to courts system could leave residents paying more

    A new rule, introduced by the city council at a bad-tempered meeting with residents on Tuesday evening, states that no more than 15% of Ferguson’s revenue may come from court fines. Residents have blamed the fines for raising tensions with Ferguson authorities, which were amplified by the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in August.

    A statement released by Devin James, a public relations executive recruited to help improve Ferguson’s image, said when the measure was announced that it “sends a clear message that the fines imposed as punishment in the municipal court are not to be viewed as a source of revenue for the city”.

    Ferguson expected to collect about $2m in court fines in the 2014 fiscal year, according to its latest budget documents. This represents about 11.2% of the city’s $18.6m total annual revenues.

    But under the new rule, Ferguson could collect 15% of the $20.2m total revenue that the city is expecting for 2015. This is more than $3m, an increase of $943,800 on the total taken in 2014 under the existing system that has caused such anger among residents of Ferguson. Court takings have risen by 44% since 2010 under a newly aggressive system of traffic policing, according to the city.

  196. rq says

    More officers and helicopters #Ferguson

    Here are 7 racist jokes Ferguson police and court officials made over email

    Here are the seven emails the Justice Department uncovered, all of which come from current employees and were apparently sent during work hours:

    A November 2008 email said President Barack Obama won’t be president for long because “what black man holds a steady job for four years.”
    A March 2010 email mocked African Americans with horrible stereotypes about their families and how they speak. One line of the email read, “I be so glad that dis be my last child support payment! Month after month, year after year, all dose payments!”
    An April 2011 email depicted President Obama as a chimpanzee.
    A May 2011 email said, “An African-American woman in New Orleans was admitted into the hospital for a pregnancy termination. Two weeks later she received a check for $5,000. She phoned the hospital to ask who it was from. The hospital said, ‘Crimestoppers.'”
    A June 2011 email said a man wanted to obtain “welfare” for his dogs because they are “mixed in color, unemployed, lazy, can’t speak English and have no frigging clue who their Daddies are.”
    An October 2011 email had a photo of a bare-chested group of dancing women, apparently in Africa, with the caption, “Michelle Obama’s High School Reunion.”
    A December 2011 email made jokes based off offensive stereotypes about Muslims.

    The Justice Department found no evidence that any of the police and court officials who engaged in these emails were ever disciplined. The investigation also found no indication that any official asked the sender to stop sending such emails, or any proof that the emails were reported. “Instead, the emails were usually forwarded along to others,” the report stated.

    The emails back an important point made by the Justice Department: the report argued the disparities in law enforcement can only be explained, at least in part, by unlawful bias and stereotypes against African-Americans. The exchanges show that outright racism very clearly.

    I’m going to try to not repeat or quote those jokes from here on in, if that’s okay by everyone.

    Ferguson right now.
    Circle 4 1/2 mins of silence
    23 degrees and protesters gathering at Ferguson PD hours after DOJ reports.

    Protesters chant outside Ferguson police department, four arrested

    Wednesday night, a group of about 50 protesters gathered in front of the Ferguson police department.

    Some had come from a press conference where Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III spoke about the Department of Justice report released earlier in the day.

    Protesters started out by chanting on the sidewalk, but soon moved into the street. About five Ferguson police officers responded and one asked the group twice over a loudspeaker to move, but the group refused. Protesters blocked traffic, occasionally allowing vehicles to drive through, and eventually Ferguson police vehicles parked at both ends nearby to block traffic.

    Several more police officers arrived, and some walked into the street and told protesters to move. At least two protesters who sat in the street were arrested. Two legal observers were arrested, Democratic committeewoman Patricia Bynes said. All four arrested were women, she said.

    The scene had quieted significantly by about 10:45 p.m., when most police officers left.

  197. rq says

    Feds: Ferguson Preys Viciously on Black Residents

    Police in Ferguson, Missouri have presided over a predatory system of entrenched racism, economic exploitation and constitutional rights violations stretching back several years, according to a long-awaited Department of Justice investigation released Wednesday. The scathing 102-page report paints a portrait of a vicious environment in which Ferguson’s black residents are disproportionately mired in municipal court fines — frequently resulting from dubious traffic stops — in order to generate revenue for the St. Louis suburb and routinely subjected to excessive use of force.

    The report, six months in the making, confirms many of the complaints black residents raised in the wake the fatal August shooting of Michael Brown — an unarmed African American teen — by Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson police officer. Brown’s killing sparked months of protest, highlighting longstanding discriminatory practices carried out by Ferguson’s majority white police force against Ferguson’s majority black population.

    What follows is more of the same information.

    [OFFICIAL] Ferguson police officer fired over emails, 2 others suspended – mayor

    Two Ferguson, Missouri, police officers were placed on administrative leave Tuesday after city officials were informed of the results of a damning Justice Department report, and a third officer has since been terminated, Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III said at a press conference.

    The actions were taken after a review of city emails discovered “explicit racial bias” by the three police officers.

    “Let me be clear. This type of behavior will not be tolerated and the Ferguson Police Department or in any department in the city of Ferguson,” Knowles said, adding that the officers were immediately placed on administrative leave after city officials were informed on Tuesday. One was later fired.

    “These actions taken by these individuals are in no way representative of the employees of the city of Ferguson,” the mayor said. “Today’s report allows the city of Ferguson to identify the problems, not only in our police department, but in the entire St. Louis region.”

    Knowles added: “The department is in the process of hiring three new officers. We hope to have an update on these positions and the racial makeup of these new hires sometime in the next week.”

    The mayor added that Ferguson, as well as the state and country as a whole, must work to address issues of racial disparity in all aspects of society. “All Ferguson police officers have completed mandatory diversity training as of December 31, 2014,” he said.

    The Ferguson Police Department has also launched an explorer program to both engage youth in the law enforcement profession and to potentially recruit them for police officer positions in the future.

    The mayor also announced a weekly task force made up of residents, businesses, and law enforcement officers who will form a civilian oversight board to review complaints and to provide citizen input into the policies and procedures of the city’s police department.

    “This ground-breaking initiative will be the first of this kind in this region,” he added.

    The City of Ferguson has also retained the services of an independent consultant, as recommended by the Department of Justice, to conduct a patrol staffing and employment study.

    Ferguson police arrested protesters after release of Justice Department report

    On Wednesday afternoon, the US Department of Justice released a searing report criticizing the Ferguson Police Department for disproportionately harassing, stopping, and arresting black residents in a pattern of racial bias, largely to raise revenue from fines and court fees. And, in a move that’s sure to raise eyebrows among local law enforcement’s critics, when a small number of protesters went to the police station Wednesday evening to demonstrate against the systemic racial disparities uncovered by the report, police began making arrests.

    It’s unclear how many protesters were on the scene, how many were detained, and what led to the arrests, but there are no reports so far of any violence on the part of the demonstrators.

    Tweets and photos in the article.

    I was told that each of the 4 women arrested at #Ferguson PD tonight are being held on $300 bond. Please help: link to bail fund within.
    You see what has been going on all over with Ferguson, the Trayvon Martin case, Tamir Rice, but you want to act like I’m making it up;
    We shall see if peaceful protest are sustainable or simply a mockery of what playing by the oppressors rules looks like.

  198. rq says

    Bullhorn is loud tonight #Ferguson

    Editorial: The hammer of Justice falls on Ferguson

    On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice said witness testimony and forensic evidence do not refute Mr. Wilson’s assertion that he feared for his life when he shot Mr. Brown, even though the 18-year-old was unarmed. The same conclusion was reached in November by a St. Louis County grand jury.

    But later Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder addressed the findings of his department’s investigation into the circumstances underlying the community outrage over Mr. Brown’s death. “Some of those protesters were right,” Mr. Holder said, adding that the findings of the six-month investigation of the Ferguson Police Department are “searing.”

    The Ferguson report came two days after the release of interim recommendations from President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. What happened in Ferguson leading up to Aug. 9 underscored the importance of the task force recommendations: Police practices in large parts of America must change.

    That’s already happening in some of the nation’s more forward-thinking police departments, as well as in the two dozen departments operating with Justice Department supervision under court-approved consent decrees.

    Ferguson will have to reach its own agreement with the Justice Department or face the possibility of a civil rights lawsuit. Either way would be expensive, raising the possibility that the city could choose to disband its 52-officer police force. The neighboring city of Jennings did that in 2011, choosing to contract for services from the St. Louis County Police Department. Ironically, one of the newly unemployed Jennings officers, Darren Wilson, was hired on in Ferguson.

    The public interest, in terms of both finances and public safety, suggests that dumping its police department would be the wisest course for Ferguson — and indeed, for most of the nearly five dozen other police departments in St. Louis County. As the president’s task force noted Monday, “small forces often lack the resources for training and equipment accessible to larger departments.”

    Too many of them in St. Louis County do what the Justice Department found Ferguson to be doing: writing traffic tickets, 90 percent of them to black motorists, to raise revenue for the city.

    Federal investigators found a paper trail laying out in stark detail the blatant, relentless pressure that city officials put on police and municipal court personnel to generate income. […]

    Let the firings begin. And let them begin at the top.

    “Good supervision would correct improper arrests by an officer before they became routine,” the DOJ report said. “But in Ferguson, the same dynamics that lead officers to make unlawful stops and arrests cause supervisors to conduct only perfunctory reviews of officers’ actions — when they conduct any review at all. FPD supervisors are more concerned with the number of citations and arrests officers produce than whether those citations and arrests are lawful or promote public safety.”

    The 21,000 residents of Ferguson, the third of them who are white and the two-thirds who are black, deserve better. Dump this police force ASAP.

    In their hearts, most of the other police chiefs in St. Louis County know that what happened in Ferguson was an accident of geography. The incident at Canfield Drive and Copper Creek Court could have happened in most of the other 89 county municipalities.

    Since 2000, data compiled by the Missouri attorney general’s office have shown that in most county municipalities, blacks are far more likely than whites to be stopped for traffic offenses.

    Data compiled by the legal activist group Arch City Defenders and the St. Louis University Law School have amply demonstrated how the county’s 81 municipal courts, in league with the traffic law industry, shake down the poor. The practice is particularly prevalent in heavily black north St. Louis County, including in cities run by elected black politicians.

    Police and court abuses are not unique to Ferguson, something of which Mr. Holder suggested the Justice Department is fully aware. Going forward, he said, DOJ investigators will continue to monitor practices in Ferguson and “surrounding municipalities.” For emphasis, he repeated “and surrounding municipalities.”

    Twenty-first century policing must turn away from a “confrontation” model to a “guardian” model, the president’s task force said. The focus should be on building trust, not piling up statistics.

    On progressive police forces, swaggering macho cops are being transformed — sometimes reluctantly, often enthusiastically — into better educated, better trained, more community-oriented, more diverse and more effective police forces. They’re trained to recognize their own biases. They’re using sophisticated data models to identify individual criminals instead of patrolling entire communities like occupying forces.

    Everyone, including the cops, is safer. If this could be the eventual legacy of the Ferguson tragedy, what a gift it would be.

    Ferguson police report: Most shocking parts I’ll let y’all go through that by yourselves, don’t miss the top 10 worst examples.

    Ferguson Police Tainted by Bias, Justice Department Says

    It is rare for the Justice Department to bring the weight of the federal government down on a small city. Normally, it targets large police forces. But Mr. Brown’s shooting prompted a broader investigation, and Mr. Holder said what investigators uncovered raised questions about what went on in police departments around the country.

    Their report described a city where police officers did not know the law or did not bother to follow it. Internal documents showed Ferguson police officers conducting “pedestrian checks,” in which they stopped people walking down the street and demanded to see their identification without any probable cause. One officer cited in the report told investigators he considered people who refused to show identification to be suspicious or aggressive, and typically arrested them. […]

    Oversight in the department is so lax and record-keeping is so inconsistent that illegal stops and arrests go unnoticed or unquestioned. “Supervisors are more concerned with the number of citations and arrests officers produce than whether those citations and arrests are lawful or promote public safety,” the Justice Department concluded.

    But federal authorities reserved some of their harshest criticism for the local court system, which does not function as an independent branch of government. Court employees answer to the police chief. The prosecutor is also the city’s lawyer. Judges are installed by the City Council and must be reappointed every two years.

    The Justice Department report describes the courts as a bureaucratic morass in which people often receive the wrong court dates, court procedures are made up on the fly, and it can be unclear how much people owe or when they owe it. The punishment for missing a payment or an appearance, even for routine traffic violations, is often jail.

    Court fines are a major source of revenue, and internal emails show city officials pushing for more tickets and fines, then congratulating one another when revenue exceeded expectations. Police supervisors insisted that officers hit ticket quotas and reorganized the shift schedules to help hit them.

    “Everything’s about the courts,” one Ferguson officer told federal investigators. “The court’s enforcement priorities are money.”

    Poor, mostly African-American residents have described being trapped in the court system for years as they are repeatedly jailed, even when trying to make payments. Meanwhile, the Justice Department found, police officers and city officials regularly fix tickets for each other and their friends. […]

    For Mr. Holder, who declared last year that he stood with the people of Ferguson, the report culminates a tenure that has made civil rights investigations a priority. He is leaving office as soon as his successor is confirmed, probably within the coming weeks. His department has opened more than 20 investigations into police departments. But none has received the attention of Ferguson.

    “With the conclusion of our investigations into these matters,” Mr. Holder said, “I again commit to the people of Ferguson that we will continue to stand with you and to work with you to ensure that the necessary reforms are implemented.”

    On Wednesday night, there were two dozen protesters outside the police department, and officers made a handful of arrests of those standing in the streets.

    Okay, that’s it for now. I’m taking a break.

  199. rq says

    Officer ambushed and shot in Atlanta. Waiting for connection to anti-police-brutality riots.

    “All Ferguson PD Officers have completed mandatory Diversity Training since Dec. 31, 2014.” – Mayor Knowles re: DOJ report

    @deray 1) nobody needed the DOJ report to sue these towns; 2) we’re in 14 lawsuits so far. Protests, policy, litigation…we need it all.

    Ferguson Police “Believe” Four People Arrested In Protests, Refuse To Release Charges

    The Justice Department on Wednesday released the results of two civil rights investigations, one into the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and one into the Ferguson police department.
    Investigators concluded there was not enough evidence to charge Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Brown, a black teenager who was unarmed.
    Justice Department officials did find a widespread pattern of unconstitutional abuse committed by the Ferguson police department, including the use of unreasonable stops and force on minority members of the community.
    Michael Brown’s parents said Wednesday they were “saddened” and “disappointed” by the decision.
    Attorney General Eric Holder said about not charging officer Darren Wilson, “I…know these findings may not be consistent with some people’s expectations.”
    Three city employees have been placed on administrative leave, including one who was fired, after the DOJ found racist emails.

    A group of protesters gathered outside the Ferguson police department on Wednesday night. A dispatcher told BuzzFeed News she “believed” four were arrested, and wouldn’t give out charges because that information was “private.”

    More at the link.
    And I get that the DOJ report is damning and horrifying and all kinds of bad things, but to anyone who has been paying attention to the black folk on the ground, it certainly shouldn’t be ‘shocking’, unless you’re shocked at how terrible it is – which also, if you’ve been following along, shouldn’t be that shocking. But the point. I hate all the websites (and for now it’s BuzzFeed) trying to clickbait capitalize, with link titles like ‘See the most shocking sections here’ (I paraphrase, but there’s a very similar one right there in that link above).
    Seriously, people, it should not be shocking, because it’s things that have been said over and over and over. Perhaps the depth and ubiquity of the racist behaviour is more than expected, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say shocking.

    Then again, I have previously self-confessed to being shocked by behaviour that is honestly part of the pattern, but which seems especially incomprehensible.
    Still seems like a cheap headline for a media source.

    Here’s How Ferguson Police Use Dogs On Town Residents

    The Department of Justice’s investigation into the Ferguson Police Department found that its use of dogs is “part of its pattern of excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment.”
    The investigation also found that Ferguson police use “dog bites only against African-American subjects is evidence of discriminatory policing in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and other federal laws.”

    The boy told the investigators “he never hid in a storage space and he never
    heard any police warnings.”

    The Department of Justice concluded “this force appears objectively unreasonable.”

    The report states that, based on “available records,” Ferguson police “have exclusively set their dogs against black individuals, often in cases where doing so was not justified by the danger presented.”
    The report recommends more strict rules on the use of canines by Ferguson police.

    The Department of Justice said that “recommendations and other measures” will be “be part of a court-enforceable remedial process that includes involvement from community stakeholders as well as independent oversight.”

    Sorry that’s a weird citing, but the article is written like that with several DOJ text inserts that didn’t copy-paste (but which say what the sentence-like captions say).

  200. rq says

    Lynna’s comment from PZ’s post on the report:

    Chris Hayes reported on the “direct evidence of racial bias.”
    http://www.msnbc.com/all

    Rachel Maddow’s coverage:
    http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/searing-doj-report-condemns-ferguson-police-408504387574

    Rev. Sharpton talks to the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart about the latest developments in the Department of Justice’s investigation into the Ferguson police department:
    http://www.msnbc.com/politicsnation (select video from playlist)

  201. rq says

    DOJ: Ferguson PD routinely violated constitutional rights of African Americans

    The Department of Justice found that Ferguson officers routinely engaged in stunning patterns of racial bias, including unreasonable excessive force. MSNBC’s Trymaine Lee reports and Alderman Antonio French weighs in.

    Police, Protesters Square Off in Ferguson, Missouri

    Crowd gathered outside Ferguson Police Department after publication of DoJ report that said there was evidence of racial bias within the force.
    Both are MSNBC videos.

    Racial Bias In Ferguson, And Beyond

    If you wondered last summer why Ferguson, Missouri blew up so fast and hard after the killing of Michael Brown, yesterday the Department of Justice had one answer for you. This, said Attorney General Eric Holder and a big DOJ report, was a town under a racist police force. Emailing starkly racist jokes – the President as a chimpanzee. Stopping and arresting African-American citizens at a far higher rate than whites. Using force and dogs and poverty in a way that trapped people – jailed people – to fill city coffers. This hour On Point: the Ferguson report, and what comes now.

    There’s a reading list at the bottom of that article.

    Seattle’s smart take on how to help the poor: subsidize their transit

    The project — from the same city that last year brought us a $15 minimum wage, and a higher property tax to fund preschool for the poor — was designed to blunt rising inequality in the region, and it could aid as many as 100,000 low-income people there. Riders who qualify get a special “ORCA Lift” card for use on all of the region’s transit systems that will automatically deduct $1.50 fares, as low as half of the standard rate on some services. A couple of other U.S. cities, including San Francisco, have tried something similar, but none has aspired to reach as many riders as Seattle hopes to. From the New York Times:

    The distinctions start with scale and ambition: King County has about two and a half times San Francisco’s population, and in aiming for enrollment numbers San Franciscans could only dream of, it is relying on what transit experts say is the most innovative idea of all: tools honed by the Affordable Care Act. A countywide system of more than 40 health clinics, food banks, community colleges and other sites run by nonprofit groups was put together to enroll residents in health insurance, and those partners were re-enlisted in the last few weeks to start registering people for ORCA Lift.

    To make matters even simpler, riders can verify their eligibility by showing that they’ve already qualified for other benefits like Medicaid, food stamps, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

    This kind of transit discount is one of the smartest subsidies any city can offer to the poor for a host of reasons. It’s much cheaper — and politically more feasible — to enable the poor to commute to cheaper housing than to try to build that affordable housing in the expensive neighborhoods where many of them work. Transit is already heavily subsidized by public money, and this system directs that subsidy to the people who need it most. Improving public transit is also a tangible way to tackle unemployment among would-be workers who have a hard time keeping a job because they have a hard time getting to it.

    A discount transit program is also, quite simply, a way to boost the incomes of the poor by returning more money to their pockets. If you spend as much on coffee as you do commuting every day, the difference doesn’t sound like much. But it’s the equivalent of a modest raise for people making minimum wage, even in Seattle.

  202. rq says

    Blockquoting faaaaaaiillll.

    This is why so many women, blk women specifically, loath to call the police. #FergusonReport In short, she got charged because her boyfriend lived in her house some of the time and only she and her brother were officially registered. This, when she called the police for a domestic disturbance.

    A storify: Was Barbie Spradling at Ferguson PD When Darren Wilson Arrived on 8/9/14?

    Darren Wilson arrived at Ferguson PD at 12:15 pm after his commanding officer, a Ferguson sergeant who took Darren Wilson’s statement at the crime scene, sent him there alone in the sergeant’s patrol car.
    The St. Louis County PD detective would not arrive at Ferguson PD until 2:01 pm. I decided to try to reconstruct, based on the various accounts, what happened in that hour and forty-five-minute gap in time. I stumbled upon something very interesting and possibly very damaging.
    In reviewing Darren Wilson’s Grand Jury testimony from September 16th, I noticed an oddity that I hadn’t seen before in reading the massive reams of Grand Jury testimony. There was a section where McCulloch’s office not only redacted the name, but they redacted the gender of the person with whom Darren Wilson first interacted when he arrived at Ferguson PD.
    At this point in August, Barbie Spradling was rumored to be 3-4 months pregnant with Darren Wilson’s child. In my experience, pregnant police officers are put on desk duty and/or light patrol duty after they tell their commanding officers about a pregnancy. From line 17 on, the sergeant on scene says he sent Darren Wilson back to the station alone because there was an officer on light duty there to sit with him. Notice the “who,” on line 21. Perhaps, “who, because she’s pregnant….” Notice the lack of (nonredacted) gendered pronouns to address this officer.

    Since there are only five female police officers with Ferguson PD, according to a Ferguson PD spokeswoman in August, it would make sense that McCulloch’s office would redact the gender if they wanted to protect this section from an easy process of elimination by the media.

    More at the link, which seems important given that Barbara is Darren Wilson’s now-wife, and was also a witness at his grand jury (while they were still engaged). Also, that storify points out the gender disparity in the Ferguson PD.

    Interlude: Entertainment for Selma March! Why BET picked Vanilla Ice to perform at Selma concert

    Perhaps the most highly anticipated event will be BET’s three-hour concert.

    Artists like Bill Withers, Cicely Tyson and Harry Belafonte are set to appear along with Flava Flav, Rick Ross and Doug E. Fresh. One name on the lineup that’s raising a few eyebrows is Vanilla Ice.

    Paxton Baker, general manager and executive vice president of Centric TV and president of BET Event Productions, said that he and Belafonte had been chosen as co-artistic directors but that they were given less than three weeks to put together the three-hour production.

    The short time frame proved to be a natural fit for Vanilla Ice, according to Al.com.

    “Vanilla Ice was in the Soul Train Awards two years ago and he’s a really cool person. When we call him for things he likes working with us and we like working with him,” Baker said. “He’s one of the people we call to participate in things with us, and if he can do it he absolutely will. I sent him a text and within two minutes his response was two words: ‘I’m in,’” Baker said.

    The rapper is set to perform one of his own songs at the concert, but the most anticipated moment will be the ensemble piece “Self Destruction,” which will be sung by Rick Ross, Bell Biv DeVoe, Flava Flav, Doug E. Fresh, MC Lyte, D-Nice and others.

    Vanilla Ice will also participate in the “Self Destruction” performance.

    More Racist Things Ferguson Officials Did, from MotherJones. Basically just more horrible examples.

  203. rq says

    Brown’s family to speak at 10 a.m., that’s a livestream link going right now. Or jsut ended, I’m not sure, I caught the tail-end.

    The family of Michael Brown is expected to hold a news conference Thursday morning in response to the Department of Justice’s inquiry into the Ferguson Police Department and their decision not to file federal charges against former officer Darren Wilson.

    Brown’s parents, Lesley McSpadden and Michael Brown Sr., will join attorneys Benjamin Crump Anthony Gray, and Daryl Parks at 10 a.m. at greater St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church.

    Mike Brown’s family will file a civil suit. And I’m all about it. I’ll come to the house-warming when they own the current PD building.


    ‘It was an afro comb not a gun’ says girl, 15, arrested by armed police in Croydon

    A 15-YEAR-OLD girl arrested by armed police because they thought she had a gun says the “firearm” was actually an afro comb.

    Rochae Davis spent nine hours in police custody last Friday after being arrested in Croydon on suspicion of possessing a firearm.

    Officers told her she had been spotted on CCTV earlier that afternoon walking through the town centre with a gun.

    After she was bailed, Rochae told the Advertiser the object in the recording was a black afro comb which she had tucked into her waistband.

    Simone Davis, her mum, agreed she could speak publicly about the incident in the hope of clearing her name.

    “There’s been a terrible mistake,” she said.

    “There is no way my daughter would have a gun – she isn’t that type of girl.”

    Rochae took the bus into Croydon last Friday to meet friends at McDonald’s in North End.

    When she arrived, she was confronted by a girl from another school who wanted to have a fight with her.

    Miss Davis, 33, who lives in Croydon, said: “This girl had been bothering Rochae for months, wanting a fight with her over something really stupid.

    “My daughter didn’t want to back down, so she agreed in order to save face.”

    The two girls and their friends left McDonald’s to find somewhere to have the fight without being caught on CCTV.

    Miss Wilson said: “Rochae had heard the girl had a knife so she took her friend’s comb – because it’s got silver spikes – as protection and put it into her waistband. That’s what has been seen on camera.”

    Rochae said the fight lasted two minutes and neither she nor the other girl had used their weapons.

    “I went back to McDonald’s for a while and then left to go home,” she said.

    “As I was walking back with a friend, six police officers appeared. They were from Trident [the Met’s gun crime unit] and had guns. They pushed us against a wall and searched us.

    “It was only after they had finished that they said they had seen me on CCTV with a firearm.

    “I was so confused. I said I didn’t have a gun, but they wouldn’t listen.”

    Rochae was arrested in Poplar Walk at around 5.15pm and was taken to Windmill Road custody centre, where she was searched again and interviewed by the police.

    “I tried to tell them what happened, but they kept saying they saw me on CCTV,” said Rochae.

    “I was really scared. I didn’t know what was happening. They took my clothes and my stuff – it was really uncomfortable.”

    The schoolgirl was detained for nine hours before being bailed until April.

    Miss Davis added: “I’m very angry. Rochae is just a child – she’s traumatised. I’m not saying she is an angel, but she has never been in trouble with the police.

    “My sister was in the interview with her and she was able to see the CCTV footage and you can see it’s an afro comb.

    “I haven’t slept. I’m so worried for her. I know it wasn’t a gun.”

    Police said they were called to reports of a “disturbance” in Centrale shopping centre at 4.30pm.

    A Met Police spokesman added: “As officers were responding, police were contacted by the local authority CCTV control room, which was also monitoring the incident, with information that a female had been seen with what was believed to be a firearm in the area.

    “Police arrived and a number of people were dispersed. A short while later, officers stopped a 15-year-old girl in Poplar Walk and she was subsequently arrested on suspicion of possession of a firearm.

    “She has since been bailed to return to a south London police station in mid-April pending further inquiries.

    “No firearm has been recovered at this stage.”

  204. rq says

    #TheTrashies: Challenging the media’s misinformed consensus, a general word on media, etc.

    Last week I had one of those moments of self-doubt, the kind I imagine crash over writers who don’t fit into the media mould (read: white, middle or upper class, and usually male) all too often. One of my friends helped to nudge me onto firmer ground by sending me a famous James Baldwin quote as words of encouragement:

    “The bottom line is: you write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world.”

    Baldwin (and my very wise friend who sent me Baldwin’s sage advice) was right; even when there’s a seeming consensus of opinion that’s tells you you’re wrong, you shouldn’t let yourself be silenced. Or, as Audre Lorde eloquently put it, “your silence will not protect you.”

    It’s this message that Media Diversified are sending with a set awards they’ve launched in the past week, which they’ve called #TheTrashies our equivalent of Hollywood’s Razzies (in a happy coincidence, as part of #TheTrashies they tweeted this same Baldwin quote yesterday). Under this hashtag, people from across the world can nominate articles from the mainstream media that rely on and perpetuate racism and islamophobia, however subtle this may be. It’s an entirely democratic process; nominations close this Saturday (7th March) and a poll (which will be a list of the top entries) will be open next week.

    I could contribute, but the choice is way too huge.

    @deray Know you are busy but HB101, bill to arm school police in Baltimore being voted on tmrw at 9AM before city delegation. See a couple of articles above on this.

    Study: More than half of people killed by police aren’t counted by the FBI

    Different federal tallies under-counted the number of people killed by police by more than half from 2003 to 2009 and 2011, according to a new analysis released on March 3 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS).

    Federal agencies track nationwide police-caused deaths through BJS’s Arrest-Related Deaths (ARD) and the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also tracks law enforcement homicides through the National Vital Statistics Report, but this tally wasn’t included in the new analysis.

    ARD captured approximately 49 percent of people killed by police, while SHR captured 46 percent, according to the analysis. Neither system picked up about 28 percent of law enforcement homicides in the US, the analysis concluded, meaning more than one quarter of police-caused deaths aren’t tracked at all under ARD or SHR.

    Criminal justice experts have long known that these measures are flawed. ARD collects police-caused homicides data through state reporting coordinators, but the methods of collecting data can greatly vary from state to state, often depend on differing access to technology, and sometimes don’t directly involve police departments or coroner’s offices. SHR relies on reports submitted by police agencies, but these reports are voluntary — and some states, like Florida, don’t participate.

    Researchers at RTI International, which conducted the analysis for BJS, put together a Venn diagram to show which deaths are picked up by ARD, SHR, both, and neither. The researchers estimated more than 7,400 people were killed by police between 2003 to 2009 and 2011, or more than 900 deaths to law enforcement on average each year. […]

    “The available data (FBI, Vital Stats, BJS) are worse than miserable,” David Klinger, a criminologist at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, wrote in an email to me last month. “They suck and no one should do any sort of analysis with them beyond using them to say that we have some floor [regarding] shootings and perhaps note that there are all sorts of circumstances involved when shootings occur.”

    The Obama administration criticized the flawed statistics in recent months. In January, outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, who heads the Department of Justice, called for better data collection of police killings.

    “The troubling reality is that we lack the ability right now to comprehensively track the number of incidents of either uses of force directed at police officers or uses of force by police,” Holder said, according to The Hill. “This strikes many — including me — as unacceptable.”

    12 pastors total have lived in the house that King lived in while he was Montgomery — last pastor living here in 1992.
    This is the spot where the bomb hit Dr. King’s house in Montgomery.
    The First White House of the Confederac

  205. rq says

    A general word on gaming and learning about one’s own racism: Hopi-less: How Kachina Became Donut County

    Kachina, as presented at GDC 13, was a beautiful and completely novel puzzle game, in which you played a hole in the ground. By sliding the hole around the ground, you could place it under objects smaller than its circumference, and they would fall in. As the hole consumed, it grew in size, letting you gobble up larger and larger objects, from trees to buildings to mountains. Esposito then demonstrated other mechanics that allowed wonderful interactions, spitting objects back out of the hole to solve puzzles, manipulate environments, and generally look incredibly lovely and cheerful. It also had a vaguely Native American vibe to it: totem poles, carved figurines, that sort of thing. The reasons didn’t come up.

    It turns out the reasons were inspired by Esposito’s having taken a fondness to doll-sculptures he’d seen created by the Hopi. Intrigued by their design, and a desire to incorporate this style into the game, he wrote on his game’s website that the project was, “Drawing from Hopi folklore.” A sentence that would come to embarrass him, after an awkward journey.

    “There’s no such thing as Hopi folklore,” he told a packed crowd at this week’s session. “It’s a religion. It’s not cool to be ‘drawing’ from that.” He further explained that the depth of his research into the topic had been, well, liking the look of those dolls. But at that point, it was the design of his game, it looked good, and he was happy. And then he got sent a link to a blog post.

    A teacher, writing for an educational website, American Indians In Children’s Literature, had written a short post explaining why she was disappointed by what she’d seen of Kachina, and that it was being funded by The Indie Fund. A calm, pleasantly worded article, not calling for bans, but rather expressing a disappointment that it was, in her opinion, having a negative impact on the efforts to educate people about native US cultures. She observed that teepees and totem poles had nothing to do with the Hopi, and explained to Esposito that she was disappointed that his game might be unhelpful.

    Esposito explained that he had the worst possible reaction. “I decided to prove her wrong. I would make the most authentic game. It would be heroic… I am quite embarrassed about this.”

    To do this, Esposito began research. He bought books. He read about the Hopi, their stories and legends, and began working on making them be part of his game. His player character, a young girl of Hopi descent, would be exploring her own heritage, learning about it as the player did too, taught by Esposito through his game. Hopi dolls would guide her on her journey, and the story of the erasure of the Hopi people would be told, authentically, educationally…

    To illustrate how far off his original plan the game had become, Esposito showed a series of screenshots showing some frankly awful ideas. A sequence in which your hole would be responsible for burning down reservations, and then to build houses all over the site. Teeth-clawing. And somehow there was also to be a smelling mechanic – your hole could detect smells, then seek their source, and, er, yeah.

    “I was so far out in the weeds,” said the developer. “I didn’t know enough about what I was talking about. I started asking people for help.” People like professors of indigenous cultures, people who could help him to fill in the gaps his research could not. And it was when speaking to one such professor that the elusive obvious was put to him. “Why don’t you actually talk to the Hopi tribe about this game?”

    It was finally doing this that led Ben to realising how far off track he’d gone. After talking to people of the tribe for a while, listening to them about their art and their stories, he had his apocalyptic moment.

    “They’re people.”

    What had been a project, part faithful desire to tell unknown tales, part desire to prove someone wrong, he realised, was actually the real-life stories of real-life people. “And I was not treating them way,” he admitted with humility. “A lot of what I was doing was hurting them. I couldn’t do it justice, because they didn’t want me to do it justice.”

    It’s a beautiful story.

    Ala. Electrical Engineer Sues Police After Being Tased at His Own Home

    When the law-enforcement officials refused to say why they had come to his new home, Dominique Kenebrew denied them entry. It was then, he claimed, that the deputies tried to enter the home, tasing him in the back.

    The electrical engineer filed a federal lawsuit against Madison County, Ala., deputies and Sheriff Blake Dorning on Monday for illegal search, illegal seizure and excessive force, AL.com reports.

    The official complaint claims that Deputy Daniel Dejong “shot Kenebrew in the back with his taser, delivering a five-second electrical shock … pulled the taser trigger two more times, delivering two more five-second electrical shocks,” during the May 2013 incident.

    Kenebrew was arrested after the altercation on charges of obstructing government operations, but he was acquitted.

    More than two dozen guests were in attendance at the party when its host was apprehended. Kenebrew and his guests are black, but the 28-year-old is reluctant to say that race was a factor.

    “I really don’t want to go that route,” he told AL.com. Still, he says of the officers, “I don’t think they expected me to be the owner of the house.”

    Police reports and the lawsuit, while agreeing on the basic facts of the incident, vary in the specific details.

    Having data and documentation is good, but fast forward me to the part where Americans believe policing is racist and do something about it.

    Breaking: Brown Family Will File Civil Lawsuit, Ferguson Police Official Fired –

    The family of Michael Brown has announced that they will file a civil lawsuit against the city of Ferguson following the Department of Justice’s announcement that they will not seek federal charges against Darren Wilson. In the aftermath of the DOJ’s scathing report on the racial biases within the city of Ferguson, one Ferguson police official has been fired and two suspended over racist emails released yesterday in the DOJ’s report.

    From News One:

    During a Thursday press conference, Michael Brown’s family attorneys announced that they will file a civil lawsuit against the city of Ferguson following the Justice Department’s decision not to press charges against Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who shot and killed their unarmed son.

    The Brown family is “officially in the process” of building their case. This is the first time the family has released a statement since the scathing Justice Department report that exonerated Wilson and found racially biased policing practices within the department.

    Read more at News One

    Goodnightly – Department of Justice’s Ferguson Report

    . Can’t watch it, but it might be good.

    This one’s good: [Video] Watch UC Berkeley Students School Their Professor About Institutional Racism

    When students at UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare grew tired of a professor’s racially charged remarks, they took a somewhat unconventional approach: a teach-in — for their teacher.

    The action happened on February 24 and was aimed at Steven Segal, a tenured professor of social welfare and mental health who’s been with the university for more than 40 years. According to a report in The Bold Italic, Segal, who is white, recited a rap he’d written about “black-on-black crime” at a Black Lives Matter event on campus. Later, in class, he continued rapping, this time about scapegoating police. Here’s more from The Bold Italic:

    “We all experienced the emotional impact of your actions. We would not be here today if this did not really immensely impact pain on all of us,” Erika O’Bannon, a student and protest organizer, said to Segal in a YouTube video of the action. “We cannot stand by this institution that supports your beliefs and the beliefs that you’re teaching to this class. We refuse to let this class continue as usual.”

    Video at the link.

  206. rq says

    Stupid html.

    Report: What Is Wrong With the Ferguson Police Department?

    In a scathing report released Wednesday, the Justice Department concluded that the Ferguson Police Department had been routinely violating the constitutional rights of its black residents.

    Some graphs and examples at the link.

    Ferguson’s True Criminals

    As it stands, we have good evidence that Brown committed criminal acts, as well as a firm conclusion from the Justice Department that there aren’t sufficient facts to support a criminal indictment against Wilson and that the officer is neither guilty of a civil rights violation nor culpable under federal law. As far as the state goes, the evidence shows that he did what he had to do.

    But this conclusion shouldn’t lead anyone to dismiss the discord in Ferguson, which was fueled by stronger forces than Brown’s death. The reason it happened as it did—the reason the anger spilled into protests and rioting—is because of a long history of police mistreatment and unfairness. Journalists covered much of this in the weeks and months after the August protests. But a new review from the Justice Department goes beyond what we know to expand on the Ferguson police practices. The department didn’t just discriminate against black Americans; it targeted them for fines and fees and knowingly violated their constitutional rights.
    […]

    It’s possible that these are legitimate stops, tickets, and arrests and that the black people of Ferguson are unusually criminal and hostile to the law. But the full scope of the Justice Department’s investigation belies this reading of the data. From beginning to end, the report—a six-month project of interviews, analysis, and research—details a steady stream of outrageous police conduct. “Our investigation has revealed that these disparities occur, at least in part, because of unlawful bias against and stereotypes about African Americans,” concludes the report. Indeed, there were times when it reads like a dispatch from another, more authoritarian era of American history, where police detained and punished black citizens for the slightest “offenses,” from challenging a police stop to simply asking a question. […]]

    Officers weren’t protecting citizens as much as they were corralling potential offenders and sources of revenue, with a huge assist from the city municipal court. “City and police leadership pressure officers to write citations, independent of any public safety need, and rely on citation productivity to fund the City budget. … Court staff are keenly aware that the City considers revenue generation to be the municipal court’s primary purpose,” the Justice Department writes. Officials imposed huge fines for minor violations, including a total of $1,000 for one 67-year-old woman who failed to pay a trash-removal citation, leading to a warrant and a cascade of new fees.

    Once fined, residents have to pay in full—court clerks refuse to take partial payments. At the same time, failure to pay in time brings warrants and additional fines, creating a cycle of escalating tickets and fees. One woman, after failing to pay parking tickets following financial difficulties, including homelessness, was issued seven “failure to appear” offenses after missing court dates between 2007 and 2010. After each offense, she was loaded with more fees and additional arrest warrants: “As of December 2014, over seven years later, despite initially owing a $151 fine and having already paid $550, she still owed $541.”

    With that said, even if you pay your fines on time, it is difficult to resolve your case. “The rules and procedures of the court are difficult for the public to discern,” writes the Justice Department. “It is often difficult for an individual who receives a municipal citation or summons in Ferguson to know how much is owed, where and how to pay the ticket, what the options for payment are, what rights the individual has, and what the consequences are for various actions or oversights.”

    When I was in Ferguson, I talked to white residents who were baffled by the anger of their black neighbors. What was so bad about the city? they asked. Why are you so upset?

    It’s not hard to grok. In Ferguson, if you are black, you live in the shadow of lawlessness and plunder, directed by city officials and enforced by the police. You work, and you pay taxes, and those taxes go to fund a system that stops you, arrests you, and steals from you.

    Which is all to say that we shouldn’t ask why Ferguson rioted. We should ask why it didn’t happen sooner.

    The Cop Who Choked Eric Garner to Death Won’t Have to Pay a Dime in Damages

    New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer is currently reviewing civil claims brought by the family of Eric Garner, the 43-year old Staten Island man who died in July 2014 after NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo put him in a chokehold. The $75 million worth of claims include wrongful death, assault, pain and suffering, and negligent hiring and training by the NYPD. But if the city decides to settle the case with the Garner family, a spokesperson for the comptroller told Mother Jones, Pantaleo will pay nothing.
    Officer Pantaleo remains protected from financial liability despite that he was the subject of at least three civil rights lawsuits before the death of Eric Garner.

    Instead, taxpayers will shoulder the cost. Between 2006 and 2011, New York City paid out $348 million in settlements or judgments in cases pertaining to civil rights violations by police, according to a UCLA study published in June 2014. Those nearly 7,000 misconduct cases included allegations of excessive use of force, sexual assault, unreasonable searches, and false arrests. More than 99 percent of the payouts came from the city’s municipal budget, which has a line item dedicated to settlements and judgments each year. (The city did require police to pay a tiny fraction of the total damages, with officers personally contributing in less than 1 percent of the cases for a total of $114,000.)

    This scenario is typical of police departments across the country, says the study’s author Joanna Schwartz, who analyzed records from 81 law enforcement agencies employing 20 percent of the nation’s approximately 765,000 police officers. (The NYPD, which is responsible for three-quarters of the cases in the study, employs just over 36,000 officers.) Out of the more than $735 million paid out by cities and counties for police misconduct between 2006 and 2011, government budgets paid more than 99 percent. Local laws indemnifying officers from responsibility for such damages vary, but “there is little variation in the outcome,” Schwartz wrote. “Officers almost never pay.”

    Even if the Garner family were to take its case to court and prevail, the chances of Pantaleo paying are extremely remote. The 34 cases in the study where New York City officers paid some amount were all resolved with settlements, Schwartz notes, not with judgments in court, which few such cases ever reach.

    Moreover, Pantaleo remains protected from financial liability despite that he was the subject of at least three civil rights lawsuits before the death of Garner. One case, in 2013, involved two men from Staten Island who alleged that Pantaleo and three other officers unlawfully stopped and ordered them from their vehicle, then pulled down their pants and “touched and searched their genital areas, or stood by while this was done in their presence.” The city paid a $30,000 settlement to the plaintiffs, while the officers paid nothing. Two other lawsuits stemming from a 2012 incident alleged that Pantaleo and other NYPD officers falsely arrested and imprisoned two men, according to federal court records. (Both of those cases are pending.)

    The rest of the article points to other police shootings, where families are suing – and I’m not sure if they’re trying to dissuade them or what, but it almost sounds like it. Could be just me and the hour, though.

    And I heard that Obama is now marching to Birmingham and will not be coming to Montgomery at all. Interesting. #Selma50

    Just witnessed #OperationStreamline in person. They tell undocumented to plead guilty & sentence them like a conveyor belt. #AZdispatch

    We will not be distracted. We want justice for #LavallHall. @MiamiGardensFL

  207. rq says

    Leahy Calls On Senate To Confirm Historic Nominee For Attorney General

    This week marks the 50th anniversary of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, an historic moment in the civil rights movement that prompted bipartisan action in Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act. In a floor statement Monday, Ranking Member Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) urged Senators to come together in that same spirit and confirm Loretta Lynch to be the next attorney general of the United States.

    Once confirmed, Lynch will be the first African American woman to serve as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. Her nomination has broad support from civil rights groups, law enforcement, fellow prosecutors, and legal practitioners. The Judiciary Committee reported her nomination on a bipartisan vote last week, and she has been pending longer than any other nominee to be attorney general in recent history.

    In a floor statement, Leahy said it is time for the Senate to come together and confirm this historic nominee.

    “When Ms. Lynch is told that she must continue to wait for her confirmation vote, I am reminded that those dedicated to the fight for civil rights have long heard their detractors tell them to just be patient. To just wait their turn,” Leahy said, adding that “It should not be too much to ask how much longer Loretta Lynch will be made to wait before she can become the next United States Attorney General.”

    “Our Nation deserves to have its chief law enforcement officer considered without further delay,” he said. “I call on the Majority Leader to simply set a date for her confirmation. Do not leave the American people wondering if this extremely qualified woman will get a timely vote. Treat her like every previous Attorney General nominee. Our Nation faces too many challenges to play politics with this important nomination.”

    Alabama’s Life to Death Override. Look it up yall. Out of control.

    Some art: black innocence. (IG: nelsonmakamo), Children. (IG: nelsonmakamo).

    The Gangsters of Ferguson

    Yesterday the Justice Department released the results of a long and thorough investigation into the killing of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson. The investigation concluded that there was not enough evidence to prove a violation of federal law by Officer Wilson. The investigation concluded much more. The investigation concluded that physical evidence and witness statements corroborated Wilson’s claim that Michael Brown reached into the car and struck the officer. It concluded that claims that Wilson reached out and grabbed Brown first “were inconsistent with physical and forensic evidence.”

    The investigation concluded that there was no evidence to contradict Wilson’s claim that Brown reached for his gun. The investigation concluded that Wilson did not shoot Brown in the back. That he did not shoot Brown as he was running away. That Brown did stop and turn toward Wilson. That in those next moments “several witnesses stated that Brown appeared to pose a physical threat to Wilson.” That claims that Brown had his hands up “in an unambiguous sign of surrender” are not supported by the “physical and forensic evidence,” and are sometimes, “materially inconsistent with that witness’s own prior statements with no explanation, credible for otherwise, as to why those accounts changed over time.”

    Unlike the local investigators, the Justice Department did not merely toss all evidence before a grand jury and say, “you figure it out.” The federal investigators did the work themselves and came to the conclusion that Officer Wilson had not committed “prosecutable violations under the applicable federal criminal civil rights statute, 18 U.S.C. § 242.”

    Our system, ideally, neither catches every single offender, nor lightly imposes the prosecution, jailing, and fining of its citizens. A high burden of proof should attend any attempt to strip away one’s liberties. The Justice Department investigation reflects a department attempting to live up to those ideals and giving Officer Wilson the due process that he, and anyone else falling under our legal system, deserves.

    One cannot say the same for Officer Wilson’s employers.[…]

    One should understand that the Justice Department did not simply find indirect evidence of unintentionally racist practices which harm black people, but “discriminatory intent”—that is to say willful racism aimed to generate cash. Justice in Ferguson is not a matter of “racism without racists,” but racism with racists so secure, so proud, so brazen that they used their government emails to flaunt it.

    The emails including “jokes” depicting President Obama as a chimp, mocking how black people talk (“I be so glad that dis be my last child support payment!”), depicting blacks as criminals, welfare recipients, unemployed, lazy, and having “no frigging clue who their Daddies are.” This humor—given the imprimatur of government email—resulted in neither reprimand, nor protest, nor even a polite request to refrain from reoffending. “Instead,” according to the report, “the emails were usually forwarded along to others.”

    One should resist the urge to clutch pearls and carp about the “mean people” of Ferguson. Bigoted jokes are never really jokes at all, so much as a tool by which one sanctifies plunder. If black people in Ferguson are the 47 percent—a class of takers, of immoral reprobates, driving up crime while driving down quality of life—then why should they not be “the sources of revenue?” In this way a racist “joke” transfigures raw pillage into legal taxation. The “joke” is in fact an entire worldview that reveals that the agents of plunder, the police, are in fact not plundering anyone at all. They are just making sure the reprobates pay their fair share. […]

    What are the tools in Ferguson to address the robber that so regularly breaks into my house? One necessary tool is suspicion and skepticism—the denial of the sort of the credit one generally grants officers of the state. When Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown there was little reason to credit his account, and several reason to disbelieve it. The reason is not related to whether Michael Brown was “an angel” or not. The reasons are contained in a report rendered by the highest offices of the American government. Crediting the accounts of Ferguson’s officers is a good way to enroll yourself in your own plunder and destruction.

    Government, if its name means anything, must rise above those suspicions and that skepticism and seek out justice. And if it seeks to improve its name it must do much more—it must seek out the roots of the skepticism. The lack of faith among black people in Ferguson’s governance, or in America’s governance, is not something that should be bragged about. One cannot feel good about living under gangsters, and that is the reality of Ferguson right now.

    The innocence of Darren Wilson does not change this fundamental fact. Indeed the focus on the deeds of alleged individual perpetrators, on perceived bad actors, obscures the broad systemic corruption which is really at the root. Darren Wilson is not the first gang member to be publicly accused of a crime he did not commit. But Darren Wilson was given the kind of due process that those of us who are often presumed to be gang members rarely enjoy. I do not favor lowering the standard of justice offered Officer Wilson. I favor raising the standard of justice offered to the rest of us.

    For you romance lovers, #BlackWomenInRomance: 10 Romance Authors I Can’t Wait To Read More Of In 2015

    My To-Read list is now almost as long as the digits in Pi, and I’m sure a lot of you could say the same (So many dang good books out there. Geez!), but here are ten authors whose work I’ve been able to sample and want to read more of in the months and years ahead.

    Alyssa Cole (Historical/Fantasy) – Alyssa hooked me with her short story, Be Not Afraid in the collection For Love & Liberty: Untold Loves Stories of the American Revolution. Her fantasy romance Agnes Moor’s Wild Knight is just begging for a read.

    Victoria A. Smith (New Adult) – Victoria has been a leading voice in the New Adult genre. Check out her debut romance The Space Between.

    Editor’s Note: The Space Between book is free right now! Amazon, B&N, Kobo, iBooks

    Yvette Hines (Contemporary/Paranormal) – Some books find you at just the right moment. I inhaled Yvette’s Den County Werebear Series in a matter of days, books that mix classic fairy tales with naughty humor. The series starts with Bear’s Gold.

    Fiona Zedde (LGBT Paranormal/Contemporary) – Fiona has crafted a catalog of passionate lesbian romances featuring young black women. Start with Bliss. You won’t be disappointed.

    Lena Matthews (Contemporary) – Lena writes such damn good interracial romance. I really enjoyed Happily Even After. He’s So Shy is next on my list.

    Shelly Ellis (Contemporary) – Just read the blurb for Can’t Stand The Heat (book 1 in her Gibbons Gold Diggers series). Just give the blurb a read and I’m sure you’ll be drooling just like me. Oh and did I mention that Shelly was nominated for an NAACP Image award this year? Yeah.

    Piper Huguley (Historical) – Oh man, you better watch out for Piper. The Lawyer’s Luck hit the streets with a bang and I have a feeling she is going to be the one to watch in Historical Romance, joining the ranks with greats like Beverly Jenkins. I can’t wait to read more of Piper’s work.

    Yolanda Wallace (LGBT Contemporary) – Yolanda adds something I love to the romance genre, versatility. Each and every one of Yolanda’s stories brings something new and different to the table. Check out her debut novel Rum Spring, or her most recent title, The War Within.

    Ambrielle Kirk (Contemporary/Paranormal) – Every time I turn around Ambrielle is out with something new. I’m trying to keep up. First up, Driven By Desire (book 1 in her Rugged Riders series).

    Direction towards even more at the link.

  208. rq says

    The Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery is free all-day this upcoming Saturday for #Selma50. FYI.

    Thank you, Crommunist, for this one. People have been wondering about where the libertarians are. Heh. U.S. DoJ Won’t Charge Darren Wilson, Excoriates Ferguson In Report, from the Cato Institute.

    Confirming expectations, the U.S. Department of Justice has announced that it will not file federal civil rights charges against the police officer who shot Michael Brown following a confrontation on the streets of Ferguson, Mo. Contrary to a visual theme repeated before countless news cameras through weeks of protests, “no, Michael Brown’s hands probably were not up” at the time of the shooting. In the end, “Hands Up — Don’t Shoot” 2014’s iconic protest gesture, was founded in the self-serving, oft-repeated eyewitness account of Brown chum/soon-established-robbery-accomplice Dorrian Johnson. And he was credible why?

    At the same time, the report released yesterday by the U.S. Department of Justice makes clear that the Ferguson, Mo. police department was up to its hip in bad practices, ranging from the rights-violative (knowingly baseless arrests and stops, arresting persons for recording police actions) to the cynical (“revenue policing” aimed at squeezing money out of the populace over subjective/petty offenses that include “manner of walking.”)

    Whether these bad local police practices are a suitable subject for federal oversight, and where the actually existing U.S. Department of Justice gets off complaining about high-handed and revenue-driven law enforcement given its own sorry track record, are other questions. But any view of Ferguson’s troubles in the back-view mirror should now acknowledge two things: 1) many people rushed to assume Officer Darren Wilson’s guilt who should have known better; 2) even so, there was much to protest in Ferguson law enforcement.

    In recent months, libertarians who took an interest in the Ferguson events and sympathetically noted the grievances of local residents have been sniped at from a few quarters as insufficiently supportive of the legitimate role of the police. While I can’t speak for all libertarians, I’d say that at groups like Cato, most of us were careful not to prejudge the specifics of the Wilson/Brown encounter before the facts were in, but were not afraid to be critical of the underlying patterns that soon became clear in on-the-scene reporting from Ferguson (escalatory tactics, revenue-driven policing and municipal court practices, pervasive disrespect for citizens’ rights in street encounters, and so forth). After yesterday’s release of the DoJ report, I continue to believe that ours has been the right approach.

  210. rq says

    Tony
    Not in one link like that, no.
    And I’m surprised it’s only 21 being investigated. :P

  211. rq says

    Justice Department Calls On Ferguson To Align Level Of Institutional Racism With Rest Of Country

    Describing its policing practices as totally out of step with the nation as a whole, the U.S. Department of Justice called on Ferguson, MO to take immediate action to align its level of institutional racism with the rest of the country, sources said Thursday. “Our findings suggest that Ferguson requires profound changes to its criminal justice system to bring its routine violations of African-American civil rights in line with acceptable amounts present in police precincts across America,” said Attorney General Eric Holder, adding that a top-to-bottom overhaul could be required to square the Ferguson Police Department’s use of illegal searches and unlawful arrests with the remainder of the U.S. “Ferguson simply cannot continue living in a past in which its reliance on intimidation and excessive force flies in the face of reasonable levels of brutality elsewhere in the country.” Holder went on to say that without reform, residents of Ferguson could never hope to treat their police with the same level of mistrust as everyone else.

    That’s the Onion.

    Ferguson shows how a police force can turn into a plundering ‘collection agency’

    “The new Department of Justice report depicts a system in Ferguson that is much closer to a racket aimed at squeezing revenue out of its population than a properly working democracy,” wrote George Washington University political scientist Henry Farrell in the Monkey Cage blog, which runs in The Washington Post. Ferguson city employees, from the police chief to the finance director, collaborated to generate revenue through tickets and fees, according to the Justice Department. As described in the report, Farrell and others pointed out, Ferguson is reminiscent of medieval Europe, when gangster governments collected “tribute” and bamboozled the subject population at every turn.

    Here’s Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson writing to the city manager: “Municipal Court gross revenue for calendar year 2012 passed the $2,000,000 mark for the first time in history, reaching $2,066,050 (not including red light photo enforcement.)” The city manager was thrilled. “Awesome!” he wrote. “Thanks!”

    And here’s a police captain, in March 2012, writing to the Ferguson city manager to boast of record collections to the tune of $235,000. “The [court clerk] girls have been swamped all day with a line of people paying off fines today,” he wrote the city official. “Since 9:30 this morning there hasn’t been less than 5 people waiting in line and for the last three hours 10 to 15 people at all times.” The city manager was, again, overjoyed at the revenues bolstering city coffers, lauding the police and court staff for their “great work.” [note casual sexism, too] […]

    The tacit agreement between a police force and citizenry is that fines and taxes, while onerous, pay for necessary protection. It’s a process that often works well. But if it’s abused, it can “qualify as our largest examples of organized crime,” wrote Columbia University’s famed social scientist Charles Tilly, cited by Farrell. They take money and offer protection in an agreement that can work quite nicely, but frequently doesn’t.

    “The word ‘protection’ sounds two contrasting tones,” Tilly wrote. “One is comforting, the other ominous. With one tone, ‘protection’ calls up images of the shelter against danger provided by a powerful friend … With the other, it evokes the racket in which a local strong man forces merchants to pay tribute in order to avoid damage — damage the strong man himself threatens to deliver.” […]

    “Consider the definition of a racketeer as someone who creates a threat and then charges for its reduction,” Tilly wrote, citing how European states first formed during the early 1600s. Venice, for example, was inhabited by both merchants working the ports and a government with questionable motives. “Governments’ provision of protection, by this standard, often qualifies as racketeering,” he wrote.

    The city of Ferguson works in a similar way. It strives to extract an ever-increasing amount of revenue from people who can’t afford to give another dime. “City, police, and court officials for years have worked in concert to maximize revenue at every stage of the enforcement process, beginning with how fines and fine enforcement processes are established,” the Justice Department report said.

    The amount of revenue siphoned through citations rose 56 percent between 2011 and 2014 — from $1.4 million to $2.3 million — which netted the city a tidy tribute. So when the chief of police reported that his team had “beat our next biggest month in the last four years” in revenue collection, the city manager had one reaction.

    “Wonderful!” he said.

    Mike Brown’s family announces lawsuit against Darren Wilson and the city of Ferguson

    The fight for justice for Mike Brown is far from over.

    Just this morning, at a news conference at Greater St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church in St. Louis County, family attorney Darryl Parks, alongside Mike Brown’s parents, announced that a civil lawsuit would soon be filed.

    The family always intended on filing this suit, but chose to wait until after the grand jury and DOJ proceedings were complete—with the hope that Darren Wilson would be found guilty in at least one of the investigations. When he wasn’t, they released the following statement:

    We are profoundly disappointed that the killer of our child will not face the consequence of his actions.

    While we understand that many others share our pain, we ask that you channel your frustration in ways that will make a positive change. We need to work together to fix the system that allowed this to happen.

    Join with us in our campaign to ensure that every police officer working the streets in this country wears a body camera.

    We respectfully ask that you please keep your protests peaceful. Answering violence with violence is not the appropriate reaction.

    Let’s not just make noise, let’s make a difference.

    Details are forthcoming on the lawsuit.

    DOJ releases report, city promises change. But will it happen? To the extent that it needs to? Some would say no. Some in Ferguson Who Are Part of Problem Are Asked to Help Solve It

    When Mayor James Knowles III announced Wednesday that one official had been fired and two others were under investigation in connection with racist emails, he said that the behavior was “in no way representative” of the city or its employees.

    On Thursday, however, a city spokesman revealed that the fired official was not a low-level officer but the city’s top court clerk, Mary Ann Twitty. In a court system that the Justice Department found was rife with constitutional violations, Ms. Twitty wielded power nearly on par with a judge. The emails uncovered by the Justice Department included a cartoon portraying President Obama as a chimpanzee and a joke about giving a black woman a crime-prevention award for having an abortion.

    They were circulated widely, Justice Department officials said, and no discipline has been announced for those who received the emails and said nothing.

    While Ms. Twitty was terminated, her involvement in the emails and their wide distribution illustrate how difficult fixing the Ferguson Police Department and municipal court will be when many city officials led, participated in or tolerated the most controversial practices uncovered by the Justice Department. Those city employees include the police chief who authorized arrests without probable cause; the municipal judge who adds new charges when people contest their citations, yet quietly got his own traffic ticket wiped away; and the city manager who was the force behind the financially driven policies that led to widespread discrimination.

    Many of those same officials will now be the ones attempting to carry out the reforms demanded by the Justice Department.

    “We cannot just leave this region to its own devices to take care of this problem itself,” said Patricia Bynes, a Democratic committeewoman in Ferguson and the surrounding area who has become a national critic of the Police Department since Officer Darren Wilson, who is white, shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, in August. “I know that people in power do not have the courage, the boldness or the persistence to actually do the right thing.”

    In particular, the responsibility for making changes will fall to John Shaw, the 39-year-old city manager. He is the city’s chief executive, responsible for supervising the police department, nominating the municipal judge and running the city. And he is cited repeatedly in the Justice Department’s scathing report. […]

    Federal investigators were especially upset by city officials who said they were unaware of the problems that the Justice Department had uncovered. The report showed that the police stopped and searched black motorists far more often than whites and made warrantless, suspicionless stops of black pedestrians. Those figures came from the city’s own files. “Either you’re not engaged or you’re being willfully blind,” one federal investigator said.

    Jeff Rainford, the former chief of staff for the St. Louis mayor, said he worked closely with Mr. Shaw after the shooting. “My recollection of John Shaw is that he understood the depth of the problem and understood that they were incapable of handling it on their own,” he said.

    Mr. Shaw told people he supported changes, including forcing the police chief, Thomas Jackson, to resign, Mr. Rainford said. But while congressional officials and police officials from surrounding departments urged Mr. Shaw to remove Chief Jackson, it never happened; some said the city manager was uncertain whether he could legally do so. Mr. Shaw hired Chief Jackson, and officials say the two are close.

    Mr. Shaw “always seemed to always be concerned that he wasn’t doing enough to please the City Council,” said Brian P. Fletcher, the former mayor of Ferguson who hired him. Mr. Shaw was tough and demanding of city officials but left it to them to handle problems. “Maybe he left too much to the department heads instead of getting more involved himself,” Mr. Fletcher said. […]

    The Justice Department has called for an overhaul of Ferguson’s criminal justice system. Meeting federal demands would require abandoning the city’s police philosophy, which focuses on generating revenue; retraining the entire department; and building a community-oriented force. An outside monitor would be installed, and a federal judge would be empowered to enforce the settlement. A settlement would not resolve a lawsuit from Mr. Brown’s family, which lawyers said Thursday was coming.

    A federal settlement would also probably force significant change of the city’s court system, which does not function as an independent branch of government. The Justice Department’s report outlines how the municipal judge, Ronald J. Brockmeyer, a lawyer from neighboring St. Charles County, created fees as a way to boost revenue. Many of them are “widely considered abusive and may be unlawful,” the Justice Department’s analysis said. The report suggested that Mr. Brockmeyer worked with the city prosecutor and the police department to maximize fines and fees.

    “Suggest you come to court someday and see for yourself that the allegations are unfounded,” Mr. Brockmeyer wrote in an email response to questions from The New York Times.

    Re: Ms Twitty, and her high status, that sort of explains why there were no repercussions for the email(s). If the people at the top are doing it without facing consequences, leading by example as it were, I doubt those lower down were particularly worried.

    Oh boy. This Drunk White Guy In A Pickup Explains All You Need To Know About Race And Policing

    My daughter deserved a treat. After all, she had just sat through hours of adult conversation as the only 6-year-old in the room. Over the past few months, as I’ve reported on the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson, I’ve covered countless protests and community meetings. When I attended the latest gathering of the Ferguson Commission on Monday, which focused on race relations in St. Louis, I dragged my kindergartener along.

    Because she was on her best behavior — and since I felt responsible for her uneventful evening — I decided to treat her to one of her favorite guilty pleasures, White Castle. After I placed my order at the drive-through and waited in line for the pickup window, I heard some commotion behind me. Two cars back, a white man in a pickup truck had his head out the window, yelling at the black woman in the vehicle behind me as she prepared to place her order. He apparently believed the woman had cut him off.

    “Why don’t you watch where the fuck you’re going next time?” the man yelled. As the woman and her daughter placed their orders, the man drove out of line and pulled up beside them to yell some more. It was clear to me he was intoxicated.

    He continued to scream at the woman and her daughter. He used the N-word. “That’s all you people fucking know how to do is yell and fight,” he bellowed. “You want some of this?”

    The woman remained calm, but the man wouldn’t quit. My own daughter was afraid to look back at what was happening behind us. She started crying and put her hands over her ears.

    I heard the woman tell the man she was going to call the police.

    “I’m white, call them twice bitch,” the man screamed. Then he circled the woman’s car with his pickup and drove across the street, watching, as the woman picked up her order and parked. I never saw her call the cops.

    I was shocked. I’d never seen anyone act that nasty in my life. Given the key role that Twitter has played in coverage of Ferguson, I tweeted about the White Castle confrontation. Those tweets got the attention of the alt-weekly in St. Louis as well as an executive of White Castle, who called me to apologize and promise an investigation.

    As extreme as it was, the drive-through confrontation shouldn’t have been entirely surprising. That a drunken white man would believe the police would take his side rather than that of a black woman and her daughter speaks to the massive divide in perception of law enforcement I’ve seen up close as I’ve covered the St. Louis region over the past several months. […]

    My own family and friends had long warned me to be careful driving through St. Louis County. Even driving with a broken headlight could land me a night in jail, they said. My parents both originally lived in the city, but moved to St. Charles County before I was born to give my sister and I the opportunity to attend better schools. We were some of the only black students in our classes.

    In St. Charles County, there weren’t endless tales of aggressive ticketing or police misconduct or municipalities nickel-and-diming citizens to generate revenue. The biggest complaints probably came from my white male classmates who received speeding tickets for driving too fast. But there was never really a possibility that they would go to jail because they couldn’t pay a ticket. The police, generally, were not an entity to be feared. […]

    Of course, the deep mistrust between black residents and law enforcement has developed over decades, and the entrenched problems aren’t going to be fixed overnight. But a wide range of organizations and individuals have brought awareness of racial bias and the need for police and municipal court reform, and there’s potential for some change in the near future. The very meeting my daughter and I attended addressed the same issue we would encounter later that night.

    I’m still glad to be a St. Louis County resident. My daughter gets to attend school alongside classmates of diverse backgrounds. The drunken man in the pickup certainly scared her, but she’s still young. She doesn’t understand that the incident had anything to do with race. And if I explain it to her when she’s older, I hope enough will have changed that she’ll never understand how it could have happened in the first place.

    So the big Selma event(s) are this weekend, and some have issue with the celebrity-studded concert. Not just because of the concert as such, either: Two men who violate women’s autonomy/bodies performing at Selma. How is that liberating & celebratory of Bloody Sunday? Spit in my face.

  212. rq says

    Justice Department Calls On Ferguson To Align Level Of Institutional Racism With Rest Of Country

    Describing its policing practices as totally out of step with the nation as a whole, the U.S. Department of Justice called on Ferguson, MO to take immediate action to align its level of institutional racism with the rest of the country, sources said Thursday. “Our findings suggest that Ferguson requires profound changes to its criminal justice system to bring its routine violations of African-American civil rights in line with acceptable amounts present in police precincts across America,” said Attorney General Eric Holder, adding that a top-to-bottom overhaul could be required to square the Ferguson Police Department’s use of illegal searches and unlawful arrests with the remainder of the U.S. “Ferguson simply cannot continue living in a past in which its reliance on intimidation and excessive force flies in the face of reasonable levels of brutality elsewhere in the country.” Holder went on to say that without reform, residents of Ferguson could never hope to treat their police with the same level of mistrust as everyone else.

    That’s the Onion.

    Ferguson shows how a police force can turn into a plundering ‘collection agency’

    “The new Department of Justice report depicts a system in Ferguson that is much closer to a racket aimed at squeezing revenue out of its population than a properly working democracy,” wrote George Washington University political scientist Henry Farrell in the Monkey Cage blog, which runs in The Washington Post. Ferguson city employees, from the police chief to the finance director, collaborated to generate revenue through tickets and fees, according to the Justice Department. As described in the report, Farrell and others pointed out, Ferguson is reminiscent of medieval Europe, when gangster governments collected “tribute” and bamboozled the subject population at every turn.

    Here’s Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson writing to the city manager: “Municipal Court gross revenue for calendar year 2012 passed the $2,000,000 mark for the first time in history, reaching $2,066,050 (not including red light photo enforcement.)” The city manager was thrilled. “Awesome!” he wrote. “Thanks!”

    And here’s a police captain, in March 2012, writing to the Ferguson city manager to boast of record collections to the tune of $235,000. “The [court clerk] girls have been swamped all day with a line of people paying off fines today,” he wrote the city official. “Since 9:30 this morning there hasn’t been less than 5 people waiting in line and for the last three hours 10 to 15 people at all times.” The city manager was, again, overjoyed at the revenues bolstering city coffers, lauding the police and court staff for their “great work.” [note casual sexism, too] […]

    The tacit agreement between a police force and citizenry is that fines and taxes, while onerous, pay for necessary protection. It’s a process that often works well. But if it’s abused, it can “qualify as our largest examples of organized crime,” wrote Columbia University’s famed social scientist Charles Tilly, cited by Farrell. They take money and offer protection in an agreement that can work quite nicely, but frequently doesn’t.

    “The word ‘protection’ sounds two contrasting tones,” Tilly wrote. “One is comforting, the other ominous. With one tone, ‘protection’ calls up images of the shelter against danger provided by a powerful friend … With the other, it evokes the racket in which a local strong man forces merchants to pay tribute in order to avoid damage — damage the strong man himself threatens to deliver.” […]

    “Consider the definition of a racketeer as someone who creates a threat and then charges for its reduction,” Tilly wrote, citing how European states first formed during the early 1600s. Venice, for example, was inhabited by both merchants working the ports and a government with questionable motives. “Governments’ provision of protection, by this standard, often qualifies as racketeering,” he wrote.

    The city of Ferguson works in a similar way. It strives to extract an ever-increasing amount of revenue from people who can’t afford to give another dime. “City, police, and court officials for years have worked in concert to maximize revenue at every stage of the enforcement process, beginning with how fines and fine enforcement processes are established,” the Justice Department report said.

    The amount of revenue siphoned through citations rose 56 percent between 2011 and 2014 — from $1.4 million to $2.3 million — which netted the city a tidy tribute. So when the chief of police reported that his team had “beat our next biggest month in the last four years” in revenue collection, the city manager had one reaction.

    “Wonderful!” he said.

    Mike Brown’s family announces lawsuit against Darren Wilson and the city of Ferguson

    The fight for justice for Mike Brown is far from over.

    Just this morning, at a news conference at Greater St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church in St. Louis County, family attorney Darryl Parks, alongside Mike Brown’s parents, announced that a civil lawsuit would soon be filed.

    The family always intended on filing this suit, but chose to wait until after the grand jury and DOJ proceedings were complete—with the hope that Darren Wilson would be found guilty in at least one of the investigations. When he wasn’t, they released the following statement:

    We are profoundly disappointed that the killer of our child will not face the consequence of his actions.

    While we understand that many others share our pain, we ask that you channel your frustration in ways that will make a positive change. We need to work together to fix the system that allowed this to happen.

    Join with us in our campaign to ensure that every police officer working the streets in this country wears a body camera.

    We respectfully ask that you please keep your protests peaceful. Answering violence with violence is not the appropriate reaction.

    Let’s not just make noise, let’s make a difference.

    Details are forthcoming on the lawsuit.

    DOJ releases report, city promises change. But will it happen? To the extent that it needs to? Some would say no. Some in Ferguson Who Are Part of Problem Are Asked to Help Solve It

    When Mayor James Knowles III announced Wednesday that one official had been fired and two others were under investigation in connection with racist emails, he said that the behavior was “in no way representative” of the city or its employees.

    On Thursday, however, a city spokesman revealed that the fired official was not a low-level officer but the city’s top court clerk, Mary Ann Twitty. In a court system that the Justice Department found was rife with constitutional violations, Ms. Twitty wielded power nearly on par with a judge. The emails uncovered by the Justice Department included a cartoon portraying President Obama as a chimpanzee and a joke about giving a black woman a crime-prevention award for having an abortion.

    They were circulated widely, Justice Department officials said, and no discipline has been announced for those who received the emails and said nothing.

    While Ms. Twitty was terminated, her involvement in the emails and their wide distribution illustrate how difficult fixing the Ferguson Police Department and municipal court will be when many city officials led, participated in or tolerated the most controversial practices uncovered by the Justice Department. Those city employees include the police chief who authorized arrests without probable cause; the municipal judge who adds new charges when people contest their citations, yet quietly got his own traffic ticket wiped away; and the city manager who was the force behind the financially driven policies that led to widespread discrimination.

    Many of those same officials will now be the ones attempting to carry out the reforms demanded by the Justice Department.

    “We cannot just leave this region to its own devices to take care of this problem itself,” said Patricia Bynes, a Democratic committeewoman in Ferguson and the surrounding area who has become a national critic of the Police Department since Officer Darren Wilson, who is white, shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, in August. “I know that people in power do not have the courage, the boldness or the persistence to actually do the right thing.”

    In particular, the responsibility for making changes will fall to John Shaw, the 39-year-old city manager. He is the city’s chief executive, responsible for supervising the police department, nominating the municipal judge and running the city. And he is cited repeatedly in the Justice Department’s scathing report. […]

    Federal investigators were especially upset by city officials who said they were unaware of the problems that the Justice Department had uncovered. The report showed that the police stopped and searched black motorists far more often than whites and made warrantless, suspicionless stops of black pedestrians. Those figures came from the city’s own files. “Either you’re not engaged or you’re being willfully blind,” one federal investigator said.

    Jeff Rainford, the former chief of staff for the St. Louis mayor, said he worked closely with Mr. Shaw after the shooting. “My recollection of John Shaw is that he understood the depth of the problem and understood that they were incapable of handling it on their own,” he said.

    Mr. Shaw told people he supported changes, including forcing the police chief, Thomas Jackson, to resign, Mr. Rainford said. But while congressional officials and police officials from surrounding departments urged Mr. Shaw to remove Chief Jackson, it never happened; some said the city manager was uncertain whether he could legally do so. Mr. Shaw hired Chief Jackson, and officials say the two are close.

    Mr. Shaw “always seemed to always be concerned that he wasn’t doing enough to please the City Council,” said Brian P. Fletcher, the former mayor of Ferguson who hired him. Mr. Shaw was tough and demanding of city officials but left it to them to handle problems. “Maybe he left too much to the department heads instead of getting more involved himself,” Mr. Fletcher said. […]

    The Justice Department has called for an overhaul of Ferguson’s criminal justice system. Meeting federal demands would require abandoning the city’s police philosophy, which focuses on generating revenue; retraining the entire department; and building a community-oriented force. An outside monitor would be installed, and a federal judge would be empowered to enforce the settlement. A settlement would not resolve a lawsuit from Mr. Brown’s family, which lawyers said Thursday was coming.

    A federal settlement would also probably force significant change of the city’s court system, which does not function as an independent branch of government. The Justice Department’s report outlines how the municipal judge, Ronald J. Brockmeyer, a lawyer from neighboring St. Charles County, created fees as a way to boost revenue. Many of them are “widely considered abusive and may be unlawful,” the Justice Department’s analysis said. The report suggested that Mr. Brockmeyer worked with the city prosecutor and the police department to maximize fines and fees.

    “Suggest you come to court someday and see for yourself that the allegations are unfounded,” Mr. Brockmeyer wrote in an email response to questions from The New York Times.

    Re: Ms Twitty, and her high status, that sort of explains why there were no repercussions for the email(s). If the people at the top are doing it without facing consequences, leading by example as it were, I doubt those lower down were particularly worried.

    Oh boy. This Drunk White Guy In A Pickup Explains All You Need To Know About Race And Policing

    My daughter deserved a treat. After all, she had just sat through hours of adult conversation as the only 6-year-old in the room. Over the past few months, as I’ve reported on the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson, I’ve covered countless protests and community meetings. When I attended the latest gathering of the Ferguson Commission on Monday, which focused on race relations in St. Louis, I dragged my kindergartener along.

    Because she was on her best behavior — and since I felt responsible for her uneventful evening — I decided to treat her to one of her favorite guilty pleasures, White Castle. After I placed my order at the drive-through and waited in line for the pickup window, I heard some commotion behind me. Two cars back, a white man in a pickup truck had his head out the window, yelling at the black woman in the vehicle behind me as she prepared to place her order. He apparently believed the woman had cut him off.

    “Why don’t you watch where the fuck you’re going next time?” the man yelled. As the woman and her daughter placed their orders, the man drove out of line and pulled up beside them to yell some more. It was clear to me he was intoxicated.

    He continued to scream at the woman and her daughter. He used the N-word. “That’s all you people fucking know how to do is yell and fight,” he bellowed. “You want some of this?”

    The woman remained calm, but the man wouldn’t quit. My own daughter was afraid to look back at what was happening behind us. She started crying and put her hands over her ears.

    I heard the woman tell the man she was going to call the police.

    “I’m white, call them twice b*tch,” the man screamed. Then he circled the woman’s car with his pickup and drove across the street, watching, as the woman picked up her order and parked. I never saw her call the cops.

    I was shocked. I’d never seen anyone act that nasty in my life. Given the key role that Twitter has played in coverage of Ferguson, I tweeted about the White Castle confrontation. Those tweets got the attention of the alt-weekly in St. Louis as well as an executive of White Castle, who called me to apologize and promise an investigation.

    As extreme as it was, the drive-through confrontation shouldn’t have been entirely surprising. That a drunken white man would believe the police would take his side rather than that of a black woman and her daughter speaks to the massive divide in perception of law enforcement I’ve seen up close as I’ve covered the St. Louis region over the past several months. […]

    My own family and friends had long warned me to be careful driving through St. Louis County. Even driving with a broken headlight could land me a night in jail, they said. My parents both originally lived in the city, but moved to St. Charles County before I was born to give my sister and I the opportunity to attend better schools. We were some of the only black students in our classes.

    In St. Charles County, there weren’t endless tales of aggressive ticketing or police misconduct or municipalities nickel-and-diming citizens to generate revenue. The biggest complaints probably came from my white male classmates who received speeding tickets for driving too fast. But there was never really a possibility that they would go to jail because they couldn’t pay a ticket. The police, generally, were not an entity to be feared. […]

    Of course, the deep mistrust between black residents and law enforcement has developed over decades, and the entrenched problems aren’t going to be fixed overnight. But a wide range of organizations and individuals have brought awareness of racial bias and the need for police and municipal court reform, and there’s potential for some change in the near future. The very meeting my daughter and I attended addressed the same issue we would encounter later that night.

    I’m still glad to be a St. Louis County resident. My daughter gets to attend school alongside classmates of diverse backgrounds. The drunken man in the pickup certainly scared her, but she’s still young. She doesn’t understand that the incident had anything to do with race. And if I explain it to her when she’s older, I hope enough will have changed that she’ll never understand how it could have happened in the first place.

    So the big Selma event(s) are this weekend, and some have issue with the celebrity-studded concert. Not just because of the concert as such, either: Two men who violate women’s autonomy/bodies performing at Selma. How is that liberating & celebratory of Bloody Sunday? Spit in my face.

  213. rq says

    Completely Real Coalition Of African-American Pastors To Give ‘MLK Award’ To Alabama’s Roy Moore

    A group that calls itself the Coalition of African-American Pastors has finally found a freedom fighter worthy of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy, and it is the holistically bigoted Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, he who has been heroically standing in the gay courthouse door, for freedom, pretty much this entire year, and whose court buddies on Tuesday decided to set up camp in their own courthouse doors to protect Alabama from gay marriage, at least until SCOTUS crams it down all their throats for good in June.

    The CAAP announced in a press release that Big White Roy will be getting their FIRST EVER Dr. King Freedom award, because obviously he is doing more to advance the cause of civil rights of Americans than anyone, due to he hates gays THE MOST:

    Hero Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore Will Block Gay Courthouse Door, For Freedom

    Today, the Coalition of African American Pastors (CAAP) announced that Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore would receive their first ever “Letter from Birmingham Jail Courage Award” in recognition of Justice Moore’s principled stand in defense of traditional marriage.

    The group was moved to honor Chief Justice Moore following his defense of Alabama’s statutory and constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. Moore’s actions were based on the fact that the federal court does not have the power to redefine marriage in direct opposition to legal tradition and the clearly expressed will of the people. His courage and conviction persuaded CAAP that Chief Moore was the ideal honoree for the inaugural presentation of an award inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous letter.

    Federal courts are not aware of all legal traditions! Also, they have NEVER thwarted the clearly expressed will of the people, certainly not the times, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled that black pastors were entitled to full equality under the Civil Rights Act or allowed to own property or to marry whatever woman they love. These newfangled activist federal courts are out of control, what with the way they prevent the majority from unduly discriminating against minorities.
    […]

    So, if you are out there thinking, HUNH, I wonder if this Coalition of African-American pastors is even a real thing or if it’s a front group designed to make it look like equality for LGBT people is somehow in direct opposition to the black community, you would be wondering right, because you are S-M-R-T!

    In point of fact, CAAP is a direct affiliate of the nastily dishonest National Organization for Marriage! You are shocked, pick yourself up off the floor right now, we are not done. So what is the deal with this group that NOM has put on the front lines? Let Jeremy Hooper tell you a lil’ bit about their leader, William Owens:

    William Owens is the National Organization For Marriage’s religious liaison. He’s also a proudly anti-LGBT man (but I repeat myself?).

    In recent years, Mr. Owens has proudly claimed that homosexuality is not natural. He also once insisted that President Obama is a Judas for supporting marriage equality and claimed that those who follow him “lose all of their allegiance to God and country.” He praised Russia’s anti-gay laws. Oh, and Mr. Owens also has a truly unfortunate penchant for linking homosexuality to pedophilia. To name just a few of Owens’ recent slights.

    Owens’ last cause, working in tandem with NOM, is his call to impeach U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder for the apparent high crime and/or misdemeanor of being too pro-equality. Owens is now beating this drum all around town with a fresh batch of anti-gay rhetoric to couple with his call.

    USA Today also reports that CAAP has borrowed money from the Family Research Council and the American Family Association, two of the most passionate groups working for the full enfranchisement of black folks in America today most biggest, most bigoted, and WHITEST groups on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Map.

    So, it’s almost like they’re just a front group or something, huh!

    Bit more at the link.

    Protesters target Pine Lawn municipal court

    A group of protesters gathered outside the Pine Lawn police station and courthouse Thursday evening in an attempt to shut down the city court.

    The group, with a organization called Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, said that Pine Lawn, which has a population of approximately 3,400 residents, had over 20,000 outstanding arrest warrants last year.

    The group of about 20 people demanded that Pine Lawn eliminate outstanding fines and cancel warrants and place a moratorium on bench warrants until significant changes are made to the system.
    […]
    City spokesman Lou Thimes Jr. said the city did participate in several amnesty programs and was looking into the possibility of creating a community service program, but wanted to explore the legal aspects of that first. He said the city was not going to eliminate outstanding fines or place a moratorium on bench warrants.

    “The best way you can rectify that is how you alter your existing rules of engagement,” he said.

    He said the city is looking at the Department of Justice recommendations for nearby Ferguson, which a day earlier was the focus of a scathing report on its municipal courts.

    Thimes said the Pine Lawn wants to be more people-oriented, to not cite a person for multiple offenses like a broken tail light or cracked windshield after an initial stop for speeding. “We want to have higher levels of discretion and be more people-minded,” he said.

    To try shut the court down, the protesters gave people at the courthouse fliers that appeared to be court continuance documents. But most people went inside anyway.

    Patricia Gillespie, 61, came to fight a $350 ticket she got for obstructing traffic. She left when protesters told her the court was closed.

    The city has been embroiled in controversy in recent months. Its mayor, Sylvester Caldwell, faces extortion charges that say he took money from the owner of a towing firm in exchange for steering police business there and for extorting money from a convenience store.

    I don’t know if deliberately misleading people about whether the court is closed or not (esp. if they’re trying to pay fines, and considering the potential penalties for not showing up…) is a good strategy. Either way. Pine Lawn is near Ferguson (adjacent?) and some say it is even worse. So there’s that.

    Same from HuffPo: Protesters Target Municipal Court In St. Louis Suburb That Survives On Traffic Tickets

    The city of Pine Lawn, which sits on just over half a square mile of land about 10 minutes from Ferguson, has around 3,000 mostly black residents, nearly a third of whom live below the poverty line. Pine Lawn does not have enough of a tax base to survive without extracting hundreds of thousands of dollars per year from residents and drivers passing through the city. The number of warrants generated in 2013 alone surpasses the entire population of the city, and police that year issued seven tickets for every resident, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

    Pine Lawn, which one resident described a “poster child of dysfunction” in St. Louis County, is in the middle of a number of scandals. The mayor, Sylvester Caldwell, was arrested by FBI agents in September and is currently facing federal bribery charges. Until recently, the city employed a police commander who had faced multiple allegations that he raped and drugged women, and whose behavior was labeled “sociopathic” by his police academy instructor.

    The protest outside of Pine Lawn’s municipal court on Thursday was coordinated by the activist group Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, which has been calling for changes to municipal courts in St. Louis County. St. Louis County’s municipal courts have been scrutinized in recent months because many small municipalities use tickets and court fees as a way to keep their cities financially afloat, which opponents say disproportionately targets poor residents.

    Legislation has been proposed to further limit the percentage of a municipal budget that can come from traffic fees, while the state attorney general is suing several municipalities that do not comply with a law that currently places a 30 percent cap. The chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court has said changes may be needed in the municipal court system, and a panel made up of municipal court judges are considering some modest changes to the process. Several outside organizations are pushing for broader changes and pursuing litigation against several municipalities on their own, but political leaders in many of the small municipalities have already signaled their opposition.

    Many believe that aggressive ticketing by small municipalities played a significant role in the anger aimed at police officers in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson in August. But Anthony Gray, the attorney for Brown’s family, serves as the part-time prosecutor in Pine Lawn and stuck up for its system of court fines. He has served as the tiny city’s equivalent of a police chief since 2014, and defended Pine Lawn’s approach in an interview with a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter on Thursday night. “It’s not like we’re pulling over people who were not violating the law,” he told the outlet.

    So allegedly The Brown Family Attorney, Anthony Gray is now representing the city of Pine-lawn (a force worse than #Ferguson) wow Umm, what?

    Pine Lawn: ‘Poster child of dysfunction?’

    “Pine Lawn is the poster child of dysfunction in North County,” said city resident Elwyn Walls, 59, a vocal critic of Caldwell and a self-proclaimed government watchdog.

    Without many other sources of income, the city relied on its police and court to raise about two-thirds of the city’s general revenue last year alone. A state law says cities can’t get more than 30 percent of general revenue from traffic fines. Last year, Pine Lawn issued about seven summonses for traffic violations and other infractions for every city resident.

    City Administrator Brian Krueger said complaints about city government, and unfair police and housing code practices come from a vocal few. He said good things happen here: The city in 2012 saw the construction of about 40 homes using state tax credits for low-income housing, and in 2011 saw the dedication of the Barack Obama Elementary School in the Normandy School District.

    And there’s a groundbreaking this month for a $10 million senior housing project on Vetter Place.

    He acknowledged the city is tough on people claiming residency in Pine Lawn just to take advantage of school district transfer rules allowing students free tuition to attend schools outside the Normandy district.

    “We’re not perfect,” Krueger said. But he said most city residents appreciate Pine Lawn’s zero-tolerance approach to crime and property decay.

    Pine Lawn’s website puts the city’s population at 4,204; the most recent census estimate is 3,261. The site portrays Caldwell sitting behind his desk in what appears to be the Oval Office of Gerald Ford. He is wearing a charcoal suit and crisp blue tie, clutching a pen as if poised to sign important legislation.

    And there is more subterfuge: A photograph that is represented to be people receiving donations at the Caldwell Community Help Center is actually a Post-Dispatch photo taken in 2011 of people shopping at the MERS/Goodwill Outlet in St. Louis.

    The city’s crown jewel, Pelton Jackson Municipal Park, which features a playground, basketball court, baseball field, running track and exercise equipment, was gated and locked on Friday with “no trespassing” warnings displayed. Krueger explained the park is open only on weekends in the fall because there has been vandalism. The city can’t afford a full-time park ranger.

    Adrian Wright, who served as mayor for 12 years before losing to Caldwell in 2005, said he thinks Pine Lawn should stop trying to be a city.

    He pointed to Caldwell’s $60,000 salary and perks such as unlimited use of a Dodge Charger and free gasoline — in a city whose farthest reaches are a 15-minute walk. How can a city of 3,200 afford that, he asked?

    Before the City Council enacted an ordinance in 2012 to make the mayor position a full-time job, it paid $700 a month, or $8,400 a year.

    Plenty more at the link.

    Pine Lawn, MO generates 48% of its revenue from tickets and fines. Despite having only 3,000 people, its police dept wrote 21,000 tickets. Assuming everyone has a ticket, that’s 7 tickets per person. And then remember that not everyone has a ticket. Which means some people have 0 tickets, and some have……..

  215. rq says

    #Ferguson Witness: Prosecutor put words in my mouth | November 25, 2014., here’s the youtube video at the link.

    The new civil rights leaders: Emerging voices in the 21st century, a good read.

    Some of the concerns are old — voting rights, police misconduct, racial profiling. Others — such as trans rights and access to technology — are more recent. Much in the spirit of activists who pushed for civil rights a half century ago, a new generation is fighting battles old and new. A sampling of these emerging leaders across the country:

    Includes names both familiar and unfamiliar, but nicely diverse.

    Full Coverage
    50 years after the march on Selma

    On March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers blocked civil rights demonstrators who had just crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. The troopers attacked the marchers in events that became known as “Bloody Sunday.”

    Basically, a list of articles at the link on Selma, then and now, analyses, etc. Lots of reading.

    “@PerceivedThreat: @AntonioFrench we’ve got a shirt waiting on you. Please support the #perceivedthreat campaign. ”

    Attorney for Michael Brown’s family was also head of troubled police department

    Anthony Gray seemed to be everywhere. As an attorney for Mike Brown’s family, Gray received international attention, blasting the city of Ferguson and insisting Officer Darren Wilson should be arrested for killing Brown.

    However, at the same time Gray was turning up the heat on Ferguson, he was also the Director of Public Safety, and commonly referred to as the police chief, of nearby Pine Lawn. Pine Lawn is a small, impoverished, nearly all black community with a police department widely considered to be one of the worst in the St. Louis region.

    Gray was in charge of the Pine Lawn Police Department for most of 2014. His top commander was Steve Blakeney, a cop who has been accused of raping one woman, punching another, and was accused of harassing residents who repeatedly filed complaints against him. Blakeney has denied all the allegations made against him.

    Gray did not provide a comment to News 4 on the accusations about Blakeney is facing.

    Thursday, Blakeney sent News 4 a copy of a lawsuit naming Pine Lawn and former City Manager Brian Krueger as defendants. In it, he argues that he was fired because he was a whistleblower that helped build the criminal case that prompted indictments against current Pine Lawn Mayor Sylvester Caldwell. The suit also focuses on the role of Anthony Gray.

    The suit says Pine Lawn provided up to 10 police officers for “riot control” in Ferguson. However, in November, when the decision of the grand jury in the Michael Brown case was announced, Gray allegedly told Blakeney that “he wanted no Pine Lawn officers in Ferguson.”

    Blakeney claims Pine Lawn officers received supplies and months of training to assist Ferguson police, but Gray didn’t want them there after the grand jury decision was announced. Blakeney says he told Gray he had a conflict of interest, but Gray said there was no conflict.

    Before becoming Pine Lawn’s equivalent of a police chief, Gray was the city prosecutor, a critical role in the town’s approach to collecting massive amounts of money through its municipal court. He has now resumed his role as the town’s prosecutor. In 2013 and 2014, Pine Lawn collected $3.5 million in court fines and fees, which accounted for almost half the city’s general revenue.

    When asked by News 4 if he thought Pine Lawn was collecting too much money in fines, Gray responded with “no comment.”

  216. rq says

    Ms. Diane Nash speaks about how the white state troopers acted with hatred and brutality while black folks behaved w/dignity in Selma.
    Currently listening to elders speak about women in the movement. Amazing. #Selma50
    And @Nettaaaaaaaa is currently speaking at the event about being a woman in the movement. #Selma50

    Activist Plans to Bring Guns on St. Louis MetroLink As Test of Missouri Law. They’re probably white. The true test will be when black people can do so with no serious repercussions.

    Obama: Type Of Racial Discrimination In Ferguson Police Department Not Isolated – thank you, Obama, for recognizing that.

    Obama said improving civil rights and civil liberties with police is one of the areas that “requires collective action and mobilization” 50 years after pivotal civil rights marches brought change to the country. The president made his first remarks about this week’s Justice Department report of racial bias in Ferguson, which found officers routinely discriminating against blacks by using excessive force.

    “I don’t think that is typical of what happens across the country, but it’s not an isolated incident,” Obama told The Joe Madison Radio Show on Sirius XM radio’s Urban View channel. “I think that there are circumstances in which trust between communities and law enforcement have broken down, and individuals or entire departments may not have the training or the accountability to make sure that they’re protecting and serving all people and not just some.”

    Obama’s interview was to preview his trip Saturday to Selma, Alabama, where he plans to speak from the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where white police officers beat civil rights protesters on March 7, 1965. Obama last visited Selma in 2007, when he was running for the Democratic presidential nomination and spoke about the responsibility of those who came after the civil rights generation of the ’60s to carry on the struggle.

    It was a theme he reiterated ahead of his return visit.

    In another interview with radio host Tom Joyner, Obama said that despite the progress in race relations over the past 50 years, the Justice Department findings about Ferguson show that civil rights “is an unfinished project.”

    “There is work to be done right now,” he said.

    Lots more at the link, but mostly recaps of the two DOJ reports and people’s opinions on them.

    As we look beyond Ferguson, many of the towns with the worst records of preying on the poor actually have black govts. They too must change.
    I stand with the oppressed, no matter the race of the oppressor. Sadly, there were Africans who sold other Africans into slavery. #PineLawn

  217. rq says

    So, for anyone still following along here, PZ has two threads open discussing the DOJ report, here (the white man one) and here (Ta-Nehisi Coates’ analysis) – this second one, I think roundabouts comment 24, has a great link to a DailyKos article from Lynna. And by ‘great’ I mean utterly depressing.
    So I’ll have this and that on the DOJ reports interspersed, but more tweets on (a) Selma this weekend and (b) another shooting, this time in Madison, WI. Plus the usual random assortment of opinions and articles.

    This Police Brutality Map Shows ‘Ferguson Is Everywhere’

    This week the U.S. Department of Justice released a blistering report following an investigation of the Ferguson Police Department. The report included a long and (to some) shocking list of discriminatory police practices. But discrimination and police violence aren’t limited to one police department, and a team of social justice activists has created an interactive map to demonstrate how pervasive such practices are across the United States.

    The map shows that police violence disproportionately targets black men on a national scale. Or, in the words of data analyst Samuel Sinyangwe, one of the map’s creators, it shows “that Ferguson is everywhere.”

    Sinyangwe and his fellow activists have been compiling information and resources to help support the #blacklivesmatter movement on the ground. In the process, they realized that a comprehensive national snapshot of police violence was missing—guided in part by articles from Reuben Fischer-Baum of FiveThirtyEight, who has argued that official figures on police killings aren’t reliable.

    Using non-governmental databases highlighted by Fischer-Baum, including Fatal Encounters and Killed By Police, Sinyangwe and his collaborators estimated that there were 1,175 total police killings in 2014. They then sorted the records by race and found that 302 of the deceased were black—or 26 percent of the total. That’s an overrepresentation of African Americans, who make up 13 percent of the general population.

    “In terms of comprehensiveness, our estimate is that [the data] is capturing at least 90 percent of all folks who are killed by police in 2014,” Sinyangwe tells CityLab.

    Black people—particularly young, black men—were more likely to be killed by police in certain parts of the country than in others. To Sinyangwe, such data dismantles the argument that police violence is simply a response to black-on-black crime, because levels of police violence vary between regions with similar crime rates and shares of black population, he says. […]

    Sinyangwe hopes the project will help convince doubtful parties that there’s a problem with police brutality in the United States compared with other developed countries—one that disproportionately affects black people. The animated map fills in police violence by geography over the course of 2014. “Being able to see that unfold over the year communicates the level of urgency in a way that statistics don’t,” he says.

    The east coast seems especially bad.

    Missouri Senators Call for Dissolving the Entire Ferguson Police Department

    This week, it was reported that two senators in Missouri have called for the Ferguson Police Department to be dissolved. This call for action comes on the heels of a federal report that uncovered systematic racial bias within the ranks of the department.

    Democratic Sens. Jamilah Nasheed and Maria Chappelle-Nadal suggested on Wednesday that the corruption that exists within the Ferguson Police Department is so deep that other lawmakers should consider disbanding the police department entirely and start from scratch.

    According to a report conducted by The U.S. Justice Department, police in Ferguson disproportionately targeted minorities and were more concerned with generating revenue than protecting people and property. Although, it is likely that this much can be said for just about any police department in the country.

    Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III responded by saying that the police department may have had a few bad apples, but they have made a number of changes since Brown’s death.

    The Mayor also dismissed the suggestion of disbanding the entire police force. However, this idea is not very far fetched considering the many difficulties that the community has had with the police in Ferguson.

    Other cities throughout the country with far fewer problems than Ferguson have been disbanding their police forces and opting for private security instead.

    As we reported last week, the community of Sharpstown, Texas fired its police force and hired S.E.A.L. Security Solutions, a private firm, to patrol their streets. The town then noticed a 61% reduction in crime in just 20 months.

    The question is, is a private firm really the answer?

    Fifty Years After Bloody Sunday in Selma, Everything and Nothing Has Changed

    Congress can’t agree on much these days, but on February 11, the House unanimously passed a resolution awarding the Congressional Gold Medal—the body’s highest honor—to the foot soldiers of the 1965 voting-rights movement in Selma, Alabama.

    The resolution was sponsored by Representative Terri Sewell, Alabama’s first black Congresswoman, who grew up in Selma. Sewell was born on January 1, 1965, a day before Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Selma to kick off the demonstrations that would result in passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) eight months later. On February 15, 2015, Sewell returned to Selma, which she now represents, to honor the “unsung heroes” of the voting-rights movement at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, the red brick headquarters for Selma’s civil-rights activists in 1965, taking the pulpit where King once preached.

    The film Selma has brought renewed attention to the dramatic protests of 1965. Tens of thousands of people, including President Obama, will converge on the city on March 7, the fiftieth anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” when 600 marchers, including John Lewis, now a Congressman, were brutally beaten by Alabama state troopers.

    At Brown Chapel, Sewell stressed the disturbing parallels between the fight for voting rights then and now. She cited the Supreme Court’s gutting of the VRA in 2013 and the spread of voter-ID laws that disproportionately burden minority voters. “The assaults of the past are here again,” she said. “Old battles have become new again.” Sewell’s mother, Nancy, Selma’s first black city councilwoman, read the names of the two dozen foot soldiers as Sewell presented each of them with a gold certificate. The loudest applause greeted 85-year-old Frederick Douglas Reese, who strode down the aisle in a sharp pinstripe suit. “My principal!” Sewell called him. […]

    The statistics are staggering—Dallas County was the poorest in Alabama last year, with unemployment double the state and national average. More than 40 percent of families live below the poverty line. The violent crime rate is five times the state average. The Alabama Policy Institute named Selma the “least Business-Friendly City” in the state. Selma describes itself as the “Queen City of the Black Belt,” but The Birmingham News more aptly labeled the region, named the Black Belt because of its rich soil, as “Alabama’s Third World.” Ten thousand white residents have left Selma in the past three decades, leaving it 80 percent African-American. There are nearly as many vacant buildings as occupied ones in the once picturesque downtown, and side streets are desolate.

    Blacks now control Selma politically, but long-standing racial disparities persist. The west side, where most whites live, has tall pines, manicured lawns and the city’s only country club, which remains all-white. Despite Selma’s stark poverty, girls were playing tennis and the parking lot was filled with Escalades on a recent Saturday afternoon.

    Old wounds have not healed in Selma, which was founded as a major slave-trading center. There are still rotting slave quarters in back alleys, and massive foundries that produced weapons for the Confederate Army still line the banks of the Alabama River. Every April, a month after the Bloody Sunday commemoration, hundreds come to town to re-enact the Battle of Selma, when Union troops burned the city to the ground. Some also pay respects to Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first grand wizard of the KKK, whose memorial in the city’s moss-draped Confederate cemetery describes him as “one of the South’s finest heroes.”

    Selma remains defined by its past, whether it be 1865 or 1965. Too many people visit the Edmund Pettus Bridge (named after a Confederate general who led the Alabama Klan) and the voting-rights museum across the street but never dig any deeper. “We have to move beyond the bridge,” Sewell said at Brown Chapel. “It’s not just about one commemoration on one day. We have to live Selma.” The historical focus on Bloody Sunday—as important as it is—has too often obscured the many problems facing the city today. “Selma has done a lot more for the rest of the world than it has done for itself,” the city’s first black mayor, James Perkins, often says.

    In Selma, it feels like everything and nothing has changed. […]

    Selma is not Ferguson; black political power is a fact of life here. Economic power is another story. “The biggest obstacle has been that even when there is black electoral power, the economic power is nearly all white,” Sanders says. For example, in 2009, blacks made up 27 percent of Alabama’s population, but owned only 3 percent of the state’s agriculture and 2 percent of its timberland—the largest industries in the Black Belt. Amendments to the Alabama Constitution, pushed through by Gov. George Wallace in the 1970s following integration of the state’s schools, taxed agriculture and timberland at only 10 percent of market value, depriving areas like Selma of millions of dollars in revenue. As a result, “the children of the rural poor, whether black or white, are left to struggle as best as they can in underfunded, dilapidated schools,” District Court Judge Lynwood Smith wrote in 2011.

    Selma, says Sewell, is “emblematic of rural communities across this nation that have been left behind.” […]

    Legislation to strengthen the VRA in the wake of the Court’s decision has gone nowhere in Congress. The House unanimously approved Sewell’s bill honoring the foot soldiers of Selma, but only eleven Republicans have sponsored the Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2014 in the House, and none in the Senate.

    It remains to be seen whether Congress can move from symbolism to substance on civil rights. Sewell and Lewis recently screened Selma at the Capitol with Republican lawmakers and plan to welcome a large bipartisan delegation to Alabama for the anniversary of Bloody Sunday.

    “My hope is that the bipartisan efforts we’ve made will move people to recommit themselves to restore the teeth back into the Voting Rights Act,” Sewell says. “Gold medals are great—I think it’s long overdue and much deserved that the foot soldiers are going to finally get their place in history, but the biggest tribute that we can give to those foot soldiers is fully restoring the Voting Rights Act.”

    Selma transformed America. It’s time for America to repay that debt.

    More on Selma, its history, and the Voting Rights Act at the link. Fascinating stuff.

    ACLU suit rE: reporters in Ferguson, and cops creating an intimidating atmosphere. It’s the actual paperwork, so it’s legalese, just a warning.

  218. rq says

    Two of my favourite activists are in Selma and about, and they went to the Jefferson Davis museum (well, it’s the 1st whitehouse of the Confederacy, but it’s also Jefferson Davis’ house). Some interesting tour-guiding, as follows in tweets. Yall. The tour guide is legit trying to convince me Jefferson Davis, his family and associates had nothing to do with slavery. No slaves.
    The tour guide said that Davis was merely a politician who was interested in the economy of slavery but not owning black people as slaves.
    Me: Wikipedia is saying Davis had a lot of slaves Tour Guide: Noooooo 1st WH of the Confederacy
    @deray Frederick B. Schell sketch depicts Davis’s slaves arriving at Chickasaw Bayou, original at NY Historical Soc.
    Lord have mercy the tour guide is telling @2LiveUnchained that she should take the gift of cotton even tho her ancestors had to pick it.
    “Let go and let God” says the tour guide to @2LiveUnchained about declining to take the cotton .

  219. rq says

    Our tour guide picked this cotton herself. And she noted “white people picked cotton too.” 1st WH of the Confederacy.
    The tour guide also notes that a large group of free black men from Massachusetts came down to fight for the confederacy.
    This woman is painting the most beautiful picture of slavery, while trying not to mention slaves were people held as property. Im blown away
    @deray Wikipedia: “By early 1836, Davis had purchased 16 slaves; he held 40 slaves by 1840, and 74 by 1845. In 1860, he owned 113 slaves.”
    @deray The cotton gin, which removes the seeds, was patented by Eli Whitney but actually invented by ‘Sam,’ an enslaved African. #history
    And the tour guide refers to “The War Between The States” & that the Southern states “made more money for this country” than the North.
    (a bit more)

  220. rq says

    Here’s a final comment from the museum: “A lot of the slaves were let free and then they weren’t taken care of.” – Tour Guide at the 1st WH of the Confederacy re: post-civil war. This is a tour guide. In Alabama. That’s their perception of history and slavery. It’s rather … wow.

    White people really hate being excluded. It’s a damn hashtag, chill. Imagine being excluded from constitutional rights #BlackOutDay – yesterday was BlackOutDay. In that spirit, Happy #BlackOutDay to the young ones who can’t be here with us today. We honor your lives each & every day.

    I’m told 1 of the 2 Ferguson cops who resigned over racist emails today was supervisor on scene Aug 9 who Wilson spoke to & was GJ witness. More on this later.

    Silence in Ferguson, and defiance elsewhere, in wake of DOJ report

    A day after the Department of Justice slammed Ferguson’s police and court systems for discriminatory practices that prey on the city’s black population, there was silence from the city and officials in nearby courts were either defiant or said they hadn’t read the report.

    Ferguson Judge Ronald Brockmeyer, who was criticized in the scathing report, said he welcomed a reporter to visit his court in person to “report the actual facts as to how the court operates.” But he didn’t show up to court Thursday night in Dellwood, where he is prosecutor, and otherwise declined to comment through a series of emails.

    There was also no comment from Ferguson Prosecuting Attorney Stephanie Karr, who works by day for a private law firm — Curtis, Heinz, Garrett & O’Keefe — whose partners are involved in just about all aspects of the region’s municipal court operations.

    Karr was cited in the report for dismissing Brockmeyer’s red light camera ticket in Hazelwood, where she also serves as prosecuting attorney.

    Matt Zimmerman, Hazelwood’s city manager, said he learned of allegations about Karr fixing Brockmeyer’s ticket through the newspaper. Zimmerman said the city is investigating that and the Justice Department’s report that a court clerk there and in Ferguson worked together to fix about a dozen tickets for others. He said it is too soon to say what the outcome of that investigation might be.

    The Justice Department’s 102-page report criticized Ferguson’s police and court systems for operating “not with the primary goal of administering justice or protecting the rights of the accused, but of maximizing revenue.” […]

    Several prosecutors, city attorneys and judges contacted Thursday said they couldn’t comment on the report’s findings because they hadn’t read it.

    Among them was Frank Vatterott, the judge in Overland who is leading a voluntary municipal judges’ committee investigating reforms.

    But on favors, he noted, “unfortunately ticket-fixing goes on in every city, every state. It just does. I don’t know that St. Louis is any different.”

    He said ethical issues are a matter for the two commissions that review judges’ and lawyers’ conduct.

    His committee, he said, “is working on programs to be uniformly fair, offer more alternatives to fines and jail, and help to defendants, such as public defenders and legal advisers, and to give better notice to defendants to understand their alternatives.”

    Paul Fox, court administrator for the St. Louis Circuit Courts, said Presiding Judge Maura McShane was too busy to speak with a reporter Thursday or Friday, and could be limited in what she could say ethically while municipal courts are the subject of lawsuits.

    The municipal courts are technically supervised by the circuit court, but McShane has argued that court rules limit her ability to make changes. She did in July ask the municipal courts to consider a voluntary order about public access. Several courts weren’t allowing children inside, leaving defendants with no choice but to be saddled with additional charges for missing their court dates or leaving their children unattended.

    Some court and city officials outside of Ferguson took a defiant tone Thursday.

    Brian Gremaud, an alderman in Vinita Park, one of the cities where Brockmeyer works as prosecuting attorney, said the Department of Justice report “all seems a little overblown.”

    “We are taking too much power away from the police and courts if we criticize what they are doing to keep us safe,” he said. “They are just doing their jobs. I don’t think our courts are strong enough.”

    In Breckenridge Hills, where Brockmeyer serves as judge, councilwoman Tamara Johnson said she didn’t think her city had problems.

    “I’ve never heard a bad report against our judge. We don’t have elevated court fees. We try to keep everything fair … so we don’t have our names smeared all over the place as being a bad city,” she said.

    Breckenridge Hills Mayor Jack Shrewsbury said the board actually had a closed door meeting recently to discuss firing Brockmeyer for being too lenient on court fines and jail time for offenders.

    Shrewsbury said he was not surprised by the Justice Department’s report. “Do I think he did anything wrong?” Shrewsbury said. “No more wrong than any other attorney out there. You can go to any judge, any prosecuting attorney. That stuff happens everywhere.”

    Tim Engelmeyer, who is prosecutor in three municipalities and judge in two others, said it is unfair to lump all the courts together “with a small number of poorly run courts.”

    He said in an emailed response that the “vast majority” of cities in St. Louis County do not rely on their courts to survive. That said, he added, “Whether it is in municipal court, associate circuit court, circuit court or federal court, our system largely relies on monetary fines and incarceration as permissible ways to punish someone who has committed an offense.”

    That’s a lot of citing, but the article continues in that vein. See above, where officials state they haven’t read the report – I’m like, WTF? Wouldn’t it be the first thing they read? Apparently not. Oh, and the unfairness of lumping all the courts together. Yes, the unfairness, considering the same people worked across several courts in varying capacities. How unfair. *spits*

  221. rq says

    These were given out in #Selma… Smh. “The Revolution: Bought to You by Walmart”. #Ferguson2Selma – included is a calendar with pictures from protest.

    Honor the past. Build the future. Downtown Selma.

    Two police officers, court clerk out at Ferguson over racist emails

    Two veteran police commanders have resigned and a city court clerk has been fired over racist emails cited this week in a Justice Department report critical of the city of Ferguson’s law enforcement.

    Capt. Rick Henke and Sgt. William Mudd resigned Thursday, sources confirmed Friday. Also Friday, city spokesman Jeff Small said Court Clerk Mary Ann Twitty was fired Wednesday.

    Emails were included in a voluminous report that accused Ferguson of using its police and municipal court as a revenue engine, unfairly tapping the pocketbooks of the poor and blacks.

    It was not clear whether the three were alleged to be senders or recipients of offensive emails. They could not be reached for comment.

    The sources said Henke was associated with an email from 2008 suggesting that President Barack Obama would not be president for very long because a black man can’t hold a job. They said Mudd was associated with an email from 2011 suggesting that CrimeStoppers paid a black woman who terminated a pregnancy.

    The Justice Department report also detailed other emails as well, including one that depicted Obama as a chimpanzee.

    Small would not comment on any of the former employees, citing their leaving as a personnel issue.

    In 1992, Mudd was among three officers who fired 10 shots at Kenneth Baumruk in the St. Louis County Courthouse after the man fatally shot his estranged wife and injured four others at a divorce hearing. At the time, Mudd was credited with keeping Baumruk from shooting another police officer.

    He and the others earned a Medal of Valor for their actions. Baumruk has since died in prison.

    So they got caught and then got fired – but not before, oh no!

    You can’t divorce Ferguson from broader problems of St. Louis county, nor St. Louis from broader U.S. It’s not just one place. Keep digging.

    Ferguson judge behind aggressive fines policy owes $170,000 in unpaid taxes – yah, I know PZ has a thread on this, I also have a couple of articles. :)

    Ronald J Brockmeyer, whose court allegedly jailed impoverished defendants unable to pay fines of a few hundred dollars, has a string of outstanding debts to the US government dating back to 2007, according to tax filings obtained by the Guardian from authorities in Missouri.

    Brockmeyer, 70, was this week singled out by Department of Justice investigators as being a driving force behind Ferguson’s strategy of using its municipal court to aggressively generate revenues. The policy has been blamed for a breakdown in relations between the city’s overwhelmingly white authorities and residents, two-thirds of whom are African American.

    Investigators found Brockmeyer had boasted of creating a range of new court fees, “many of which are widely considered abusive and may be unlawful”. A city councilman opposing the judge’s reappointment was warned “switching judges would/could lead to loss of revenue”.

    Brockmeyer, who has been Ferguson’s municipal court judge for 12 years, serves simultaneously as a prosecutor in two nearby cities and as a private attorney. Legal experts said his potentially conflicting interests illustrate a serious problem in the region’s judicial system. Brockmeyer, who reportedly earns $600 per shift as a prosecutor, said last year his dual role benefited defendants. “I see both sides of it,” he said. “I think it’s even better.”
    judge ronald brockmeyer ferguson As well as being a judge in Ferguson’s municipal court, Ronald Brockmeyer is also a prosecutor in two nearby cities and a private attorney. Photograph: brockmeyerlaw.com

    While Brockmeyer owes the US government $172,646 in taxes, his court in Ferguson is at the centre of a class-action federal lawsuit that alleges Ferguson repeatedly “imprisoned a human being solely because the person could not afford to make a monetary payment”.

    “Judge Brockmeyer not being incarcerated is a perfect illustration of how we should go about collecting debt from people who owe it,” said Thomas Harvey, the director of Arch City Defenders, one of the legal non-profits representing plaintiffs who were jailed in Ferguson.

    Justice Department: The Problem Is Way Bigger Than Ferguson

    It was billed as an investigation of the Ferguson Police Department. But a hard-hitting report released Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Justice also reads as an indictment of cities and towns across the St. Louis region.

    The report implicates at least four other municipalities in alleged misconduct or questionable behavior. And as the Justice Department itself acknowledged, many of the conditions described in the report could have been written about any number of the 90 municipalities in St. Louis County.

    “What’s listed in the report about Ferguson is a widespread practice,” said Thomas Harvey, executive director for the Arch City Defenders, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization that has brought attention to the municipal courts in St. Louis County over the past several months. “I don’t think anyone who takes these issues seriously … can limit their work to Ferguson.”

    The municipal court structure of St. Louis County provides many lawyers in the area with well-paid part-time jobs as prosecutors and municipal court judges that require them to work just a few hours a month. Those courts in turn serve as little more than municipal cash cows, activists have long alleged. […]

    One great irony of all this behavior, the Justice Department noted, was that Ferguson officials long said African-American residents faced disproportionate fines and other legal action because of their supposed lack of “personal responsibility” — and at the same time, those officials were cutting favors for friends.

    Some of the allegations listed in the Justice Department report seem damning, but officials in nearby towns have only begun to take stock of them. Breckenridge Hills city clerk Sheree Leamon told HuffPost, “We were not aware of anything, and we don’t have any comment on it.” Breckenridge Hills Mayor Jack Shrewsbury did not immediately return a request for comment.

    Mayors Reggie Jones of Dellwood, Thomas Schneider of Florissant and James McGee of Vinita Park – three places where Brockmeyer also serves as prosecutor — did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

    Brockmeyer did not respond to a request for comment via his law firm, which specializes in divorce and criminal defense. But there may have been warning signs about the judge. In 2011 Patch reported that Brockmeyer recalled several warrants for a Bel-Ridge trustee after she nominated him to serve as judge there.

    “I don’t think that’s a conflict at all,” Brockmeyer said in November 2014 of the many hats he wears. “Not at all.”

    The Justice Department report found that other municipalities in the area “have engaged in a number of practices that have the effect of discouraging people from attending court sessions.” One of the judges in a neighboring municipality told investigators it was “entirely the municipal courts’ fault” that people believe they will be arrested for appearing in court if they are unable to pay fines.

    “There are many other municipalities in the state of Missouri, and in fact in the country at large, that are engaged in the same kind of practices,” one DOJ official said Wednesday at a briefing with reporters on the Ferguson report. “Our investigation focused on Ferguson, but we believe and hope that there will be collaboration between Ferguson Police Department and other municipalities in the state of Missouri to engage in the same kinds of reforms, since they are now on notice about the problems with the way that it is operating in Ferguson.” […]

    A group of local judges and prosecutors called the Municipal Court Improvement Committee has similarly resisted calls to kill off the municipal courts, instead calling for more modest reforms.

    But Harvey argued that the Ferguson report proved that now is not the time for thinking small. He wants many of the courts closed.

    “I like the reforms that DOJ proposed for Ferguson,” he said. “The problem is if they adopted every single one of those reforms, it wouldn’t change things for people who have to drive through the other 90 towns.”

  222. rq says

    A quick synopsis of the #FergusonReport

    From Selma, “this water drown my family, this water mixed my blood This water tells my story, this water knows it all”

    Albuquerque Police Dept. ‘Complies’ With Records Request By Releasing Password-Protected Videos… But Not The Password

    The APD released a number of records, including footage captured before and after the shooting, but nothing containing the shooting itself. Local law firm Kennedy Kennedy & Ives, representing Gail Martin for a possible civil rights lawsuit, requested a copy of police recordings containing the actual shooting under New Mexico’s Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA).

    Over a month later, the APD responded. Sort of.

    The Kennedy Kennedy & Ives Law Practice in the lawsuit said the department in mid-August released six CDs containing records on the May 3 shooting death of Armand Martin, a 50-year-old Air Force veteran, in response to the firm’s records request. But three of the CDs were password protected.

    Now, this could have been a simple oversight, but if so, the problem would be solved already. Instead, it looks as though the APD is looking to keep the law firm from viewing the videos it requested.

    The firm has tried to get the password from APD records, evidence and violent crimes personnel to no avail, according to the complaint…

    Now the APD’s being sued. The firm is seeking not only access to the password-protected videos, but also damages and legal fees. According to the firm, access to these videos is crucial to determining whether or not Gail Martin has a legitimate civil rights case. Without them, the firm is no better positioned to make this call than the general public, which has only seen the lead-in and aftermath of the shooting.

    This isn’t the APD’s only legal battle related to its IPRA non-compliance. Late last year, KRQE of Albuquerque sued it for “serial violations” of the law. That’s in addition to the one it filed over a 2012 incident, in which the PD stalled on its response to a journalist’s public records request before releasing the requested footage at a press conference, basically stripping the reporter of her potential “scoop.”

    Life cover in 1965. #Selma50 ” @deray @Nettaaaaaaaa – it says ‘Civil rights face-off at Selma, Let the Savage Season begin’.

    The Alabama Dept. Of Homeland Security’s Mobile Command Center is set up in downtown Selma.

    The t-shirt stands are beginning to set-up in downtown Selma.

  223. rq says

    Ferguson and its money-hungry police problem

    The Justice Department’s conclusion on the matter is right at the top of the second page of the report: “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs.” This emphasis, in turn, has contributed to the city’s “pattern of unconstitutional policing.”

    In 2010, the city’s finance director wrote to the chief of police to warn of a shortfall “unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year.” Three years later, the finance director asked the chief to try to increase revenue to cover rising court fees.

    Evidently, these pressures had the desired results: “Ferguson police officers from all ranks told us that revenue generation is stressed heavily within the police department, and that the message comes from City leadership.”

    And then there is this: “Patrol assignments and schedules are geared toward aggressive enforcement of Ferguson’s municipal code, with insufficient thought given to whether enforcement strategies promote public safety or unnecessarily undermine community trust and cooperation. Officer evaluations and promotions depend to an inordinate degree on ‘productivity,’ meaning the number of citations issued.”

    As the Justice Department report goes on to detail, the burden of this form of policing has fallen most heavily on Ferguson’s black community. But even were the costs more fairly distributed, the central problem would remain: The city is using its police force not as a tool to enforce the law but as a tool to raise revenue. Once that decision is made, corruption and overreach are inevitable.

    In this, Ferguson is hardly alone. It’s awfully late in the day to pretend that many police departments don’t see themselves as in the business of raising revenue — not when professional publications feature advice on how to go about it. A 2009 article in Car and Driver quoted the head of the Police Officers Association of Michigan: “When elected officials say, ‘We need more money,’ they can’t look to the department of public works to raise revenues, so where do they find it? Police departments.” […]

    But the potential for corruption should have been evident from the start. Government is never shy about stretching its powers as far as they’ll go. That’s why limits are so important. Raising revenue is not a proper function of law enforcement, and politicians shouldn’t be pressing cops to fill municipal coffers.

    Maybe you’re unpersuaded. Maybe you think it’s just fine for the police to be in the business of helping cities meet their budgetary targets. If so, I’d ask you to take the time to read the Justice Department report on what’s been happening in Ferguson these past few years. You might just change your mind.

    The article also takes a quick look at the evil that is asset forfeiture.

    Jim Limber Davis, we’ll live tweet this tonight. Sorry, that belonged with the other museum tweets.

    John Lewis honoring four little girls who were killed in bombing at 16th street baptist church in Birmingham in 1963

    With autoplay video, Breaking down police statistics in the Ferguson report

    The conversation gets heated when Anderson questions the St. Louis Police Officers Association’s Jeff Roorda about the Ferguson report.

    If you can stand to watch Roorda speak, you have been warned. I still have a hard time stomaching that guy. At least he was on the defensive this time.

    Editorial: Missouri Supreme Court must end the Ferguson shake-down

    Even before the Missouri Supreme Court changed a rule to require municipal courts to pay more attention to a defendant’s ability to pay, he issued his own order with at least a few similar guidelines. It was a small step toward turning his court away from the “debtors’ prison” model so many municipal courts in north St. Louis County follow.

    In the cities where he was a judge or prosecutor, Mr. Brockmeyer refused to charge defendants a $100 down payment for getting old “failure-to-appear” warrants wiped out, a phony reform that some neighboring communities had adopted. And when the Supreme Court issued its new guidelines, Mr. Brockmeyer urged his fellow judges to adopt them immediately, instead of waiting for the rules to be finalized this summer.

    But all along, Judge Brockmeyer was hiding a secret. Two secrets, in fact.

    While he was busy sentencing poor, black defendants to fines they would never be able to afford, he had conspired with a racist court clerk and prosecutors in other cities to fix traffic tickets for friends, family and himself. And as The Guardian reported Friday, Mr. Brockmeyer — even as he was cracking down on people who could not pay fines — owes the U.S. government some $172,000 in taxes and fines.

    Those unfortunate facts are among the many outlined by a Department of Justice report on years of civil rights violations of its citizens by the city of Ferguson. The report blasted the pernicious and hideous practice of using the Ferguson police force and municipal court as fund-raising tools instead of instruments of justice.

    “Ferguson has allowed its focus on revenue generation to fundamentally compromise the role of Ferguson’s municipal court,” the DOJ report reads. “The municipal court does not act as a neutral arbiter of the law or a check on unlawful police conduct. Instead, the court primarily uses its judicial authority as the means to compel the payment of fines and fees that advance the City’s financial interests. This has led to court practices that violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process and equal protection requirements. The court’s practices also impose unnecessary harm, overwhelmingly on African-American individuals, and run counter to public safety.” […]

    Change, real change, must occur on multiple fronts, and it is not going to come from the municipal officials who are currently in charge. One Vinita Park alderman told Post-Dispatch reporters Jeremy Kohler and Jennifer Mann that the DOJ report was “overblown.” And Frank Vatterott, the Overland judge who is supposed to be leading a fox-guarding-the-henhouse effort to reform the courts, says of ticket-fixing: “it goes on in every city, every state. It just does.”

    That may be true. But it’s irrelevant.

    The unconstitutional oppression documented in the DOJ report’s 102 pages should disgust citizens with a conscience. It should disgust members of the legal profession, all of whom take an oath to practice law “with consideration for the defenseless and oppressed” when they are sworn in to the Bar. It should disgust police officers being told to meet ticket quotas. It should disgust the Missouri Supreme Court. It should disgust us all. […]

    The Missouri Supreme Court doesn’t have to wait for the DOJ to issue more reports. It doesn’t have to wait for the Missouri Legislature to start the dominoes of reform falling. It has the constitutional power and the moral duty to end the oppression of the municipal court system right now.

    In January, Chief Justice Mary Russell, told Missouri lawmakers this:

    “From a local municipal division to the state Supreme Court, Missouri’s courts should be open and accessible to all. Courts should primarily exist to help people resolve their legal disputes. If they serve, instead, as revenue generators for the municipality that selects and pays the court staff and judges — this creates at least a perception, if not a reality, of diminished judicial impartiality.”

    It’s time to give meaning to those words. It’s time for the Supreme Court to stand up for the people of Missouri.

    Holder says shutting down of Ferguson police possible if reforms aren’t done

    Saying he was “shocked” by what his investigators found out about Ferguson police and courts, Attorney General Eric Holder said Friday the Justice Department would be prepared to dismantle that city’s police department “if that’s what’s necessary.”

    “We are prepared to use all the powers that we have… to ensure that the situation changes there,” Holder told reporters after returning Friday from a trip to South Carolina with President Obama. “That means everything from working with them to coming up with an entirely new structure.”

    Holder commented two days after his Department of Justice issued a report he said exposed “implicit” and “explicit” racial bias among Ferguson police that created a “deeply polarized” community” and an “intensely charged atmosphere where people feel under assault, under siege,” by police.

    But senior officials at the Justice Department also said they were encouraged by Ferguson officials’ initial reaction to their report, and pointed out that several of the 26 reform measures DOJ is now trying to get Ferguson to agree to have already begun.

    Holder had said on Wednesday that he would not rule out anything in DOJ’s actions toward Ferguson, should an amicable reform agreement not come about between the city and his department. But Friday’s mention explicitly included the federal government moving to shut down the Ferguson Police Department if it felt the city was not cooperating on reforms.

    However, Holder is a lame duck at the DOJ, and it is unclear whether his possible successor believes a shutdown should be on the table this early in the negotiations with Ferguson officials.

    The nomination of Loretta Lynch to replace Holder could come to a Senate vote soon, and her supporters appear to have the votes necessary to approve her. Many Republicans, including Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., plan to vote against her, in part to protest what they say has been Holder’s bad record as attorney general.

    Others Lynch critics have said they worry she will not be independent enough from Obama or will change some of Holder’s policies they have long not liked.

    Among other things, Republicans have accused Holder of not adequately pursuing allegations of corruption in the IRS’s oversight of conservative groups, and his role in a controversial “Fast and Furious” program that critics say allowed guns to get in the hands of Mexican criminals and may have been used in the death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

    Holder, however, is using his final days to hone in on race and policing. His rhetoric Friday was not only a warning to Ferguson, it was meant for departments far beyond the St. Louis suburbs.

  224. rq says

    Some good-ish news from Baltimore, City delegation rejects guns in schools for police

    The city’s delegation in Annapolis effectively killed legislation Friday that would have lifted the prohibition, putting an end to a contentious debate that divided the community.

    So for the time being, Baltimore’s school police will remain the only police officers in the state forbidden to have firearms within public schools while classes are in session.

    “We couldn’t come up with a consensus,” said Del. Curt Anderson, chairman of the city’s House delegation, explaining the decision. Anderson, a Democrat, had sponsored the bill at the city school board’s request.

    The delegation unanimously decided to table discussion on the legislation in the House of Delegates. Anderson said he will ask the House Judiciary Committee to cancel next week’s public hearing on the matter.

    Friday’s move by the House members effectively quashes any chance a bill will pass in the General Assembly this year, lawmakers said. Sen. Joan Carter Conway, who sponsored the bill in the Senate, said she considers the bill dead.

    Sgt. Clyde Boatwright, president of the school police union, said the delegation “did not get this one right.”

    “In a city with as much crime and violence, I’m deeply saddened to know that Baltimore City students won’t have the same protections that every other K-12 student in the state of Maryland has,” Boatwright said.

    The 141-member school police force is the only one in Maryland dedicated exclusively to protecting a school district. The officers have jurisdiction throughout the city and can carry firearms while patrolling outside school grounds or when detailed to help the Baltimore Police Department with major events.

    In other districts, members of the traditional police force provide security at schools and don’t have special rules about carrying firearms inside buildings.

    They’re school police. I’d expect them to have different rules and different methods of policing from regular forces. Because children and learning environment and creating a sense of safe community, not as many guns as possible. :P

    Washington Post with Holder’s determination to dismantle Ferguson, if necessary: Holder says he’s ‘prepared’ to dismantle Ferguson police department if necessary

    Holder said he was “shocked” — surprised was “not a strong enough word,” he said — by the number of people who were mistreated by the department, and the breadth of the abuses.

    “The notion that you would use a law enforcement agency or law enforcement generally to generate revenue, and then the callous way in which that was done and the impact that it had on the lives of the ordinary citizens of that municipality, was just appalling. Appalling. And that is not something that we’re going to tolerate,” he said.

    Holder said he believes what happened in Ferguson is an “anomaly,” but he hopes that law enforcement agencies around the country are paying attention to his comment and the report — that they “understand the intensity with which the feelings are felt at the federal government level to ensure that we use all the tools that we can to make sure that what happened in Ferguson is uncovered and simply does not happen in any other part of the country.”

    Ferguson officials will likely have to enter into an agreement or negotiate a settlement with the Department of Justice to change their police and governmental practices. If they do not, the government can bring a civil rights lawsuit against the city on behalf of its citizens.

    President Obama said Friday that Ferguson is “clearly a broken and racially biased system” and brought about an “oppressive and abusive situation.”

    John Lewis & members of Congress on steps of 16th street baptist church in Birmingham #FPI15

    BoingBoing on Brockmeyer’s debt – Judge who invented Ferguson’s debtor’s prisons owes $170K in tax

    Next bits from on-the-groudn tweets re: the shooting of 19yo unarmed Tony Robinson in Madison, WI.
    #WillyStreet #news3
    Crowd chants “Black lives matter!” on Willy St @BadgerHerald
    more next comment

  225. rq says

    Unarmed #AnthonyRobinson (aged 19), known by friends as Tony, was killed by Madison, Wisconsin tonight.

    Crowd estimate on Willy St is more than 100. @BadgerHerald #WillyStreet
    More than 20 officers at corner of Willy St and Few St. @BadgerHerald #WillyStreet
    “Ferguson and Madison,” crowd chants at #younggiftedblack protest @BadgerHerald
    Mother was not allowed to see son at hospital, protesters say. @BadgerHerald

    Obama’s Police Reforms Ignore the Most Important Cause of Police Misconduct

    Rather than directly addressing the functional role of the police, and the ways in which the laws they were tasked to enforce were based on a history of racial inequality, liberal reforms worked to strengthen that legal system by increasing resources for its enforcement and imbuing it with a mission of race-blind equality of application. This was based on the fallacy that the law always protects everyone equally. But, in fact, the law was neither intended to nor in practice functions in that way. The poor in particular are at a disadvantage, in that the laws more harshly target the transgressions that they are more likely to commit. As Anatole French pointed out in 1894, “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.”

    Today’s Task Force falls into this same trap. One of the central tenets of the Task Force’s report is reliance on procedural reforms. Procedural justice deals with the ways in which the law is enforced, rather than substantive justness, which involves the actual outcomes of the functioning of the system. Such procedural reforms focus on training officers to be more judicious and race-neutral in their use of force and how they interact with the public. The report encourages officers to work harder to explain to people why they are being stopped, questioned or arrested. Departments are advised to create consistent use of force policies and mechanisms for civilian oversight and transparency. The report implies that more training, diversity and communication will lead to enhanced police community relations, more effective crime control and greater police legitimacy.

    Similar goals were set in the late 1960s. The Katzenbach report of 1967 argued that the roots of crime lay in poverty and racial exclusion, but also that a central part of the solution was the development of a more robust and procedurally fair criminal justice system that would uphold the rights of all people to be free of crime. In keeping with this, it called for a major expansion of federal spending on criminal justice. Just as local housing and social services programs needed federal support, so too did prisons, courts and police: “Every part of the system is undernourished. There is too little manpower and what there is is not well enough trained or well enough paid.” The Commission called for improved training, racial diversity in hiring, programmatic innovations, and research. The Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders reached a similar conclusion, calling for “advance [sic] training, planning, adequate intelligence systems, and knowledge of the ghetto community.”

    Similarly, Johnson’s initial draft of the 1968 Safe Streets bill called for resources to be devoted to recruitment and training of police, modernization of equipment, better coordination between criminal-justice agencies, and innovative prevention and rehabilitation efforts, and had the support of the ACLU and other liberal reform groups. After Congress finished with it, the bill primarily granted funds in large blocks to states to use as they saw fit. Johnson signed the bill anyway, claiming that the core goals of professionalizing the police would be achieved. Over the next decade, the result was a massive expansion in police hardware, SWAT teams and drug enforcement units, and almost no money towards prevention and rehabilitation.

    The one change many point to as a positive development from this era of reform was the emergence of community policing initiatives. Even this reform, however, was deeply problematic. Part of the problem lies in the nature of community. Steve Herbert, in his book, Citizens, Cops, and Power: Recognizing the Limits of Community, shows that those who are active in community affairs are not usually representative of the full diversity of views and experiences in urban neighborhoods. Community meetings tend to be populated by longtime residents; those who own, rather than rent, their homes; business owners; and landlords. The views of renters, youth, homeless people, immigrants and the most socially marginalized are rarely represented in these bodies. As a result, the problems identified by such a process tend to focus on “quality of life” concerns involving low-level disorderly behavior rather than serious crime.

    Community policing also tends to turn all neighborhood problems into police problems. Across the country, community police programs have been based on the idea that the “community” should bring its myriad of concerns about neighborhood conditions to the police, who will work with them on developing solutions. The tools that police have for solving these problems, however, are generally limited to punitive enforcement actions such as arrests and ticketing. Why should the police necessarily be the sole or even lead agency in developing strategies to address community concerns about disorder and public safety?

    By conceptualizing the problem of policing as one of inadequate training and professionalization, reformers fail to directly address the ways in which the very nature of policing and the legal system served to maintain and exacerbate racial inequality. By calling for color-blind “law and order,” they in essence strengthen a system that puts people of color at a structural disadvantage. At root, they fail to appreciate that the basic nature of the police, since its earliest origins, is to be a tool for managing inequality and maintaining the status quo. Police reforms that fail to directly address this reality are doomed to reproduce it.

    Some more at the link.

  226. rq says

    More form Madison, UPDATE: Victim identified in officer-involved shooting

    The 19-year-old who was killed during an officer-involved shooting has been identified as Anthony Robinson.

    Michael Johnson, CEO of the Boys and Girls Club of Dane County, confirmed the teenager’s identity.

    Johnson says he met with the victim’s family and Madison Police Chief Mike Koval earlier this morning. Koval reportedly apologized to the family for their loss and listened to their concerns.

    Robinson’s family went to the protesting site last night outside the City-County building, asking organizers for a peaceful protest.

    The State Department of Justice’s Division of Criminal Investigation is taking over the investigation.

    that last little bit there is apparently legislation in Wisconsin, that a third party must investigate officer involved shootings. Personally, I think that’s a good move.

    RAW: Madison Police Chief Mike Koval addresses officer-involved shooting. That’st he police chief in video.
    Police: Officer shot, killed teen after assault

    Madison Police Chief Michael Koval said officers responded to a disturbance where it was reported that a person was jumping in and out of traffic, and possibly responsible for a battery.

    At a Friday night news conference, Koval did not identify the person killed. However, Michael Johnson, CEO of the Boys & Girls Club of Dane County, identified him as 19-year-old Tony Robinson.

    Koval said the officer heard something in the person’s home and went in. He said the person assaulted the officer, and the officer shot him. Koval said the officer rendered aid, and the man was transferred to the hospital where he died.

    Police said the scene on Williamson Street is volatile and upsetting.

    Koval said the Department of Justice will conduct an investigation, and MPD will only “supplement their needs.”

    Holder ‘prepared’ to dismantle Ferguson police department. Same information, different source.

    City of St. Louis hosting ‘Compliance Week’ for anyone with minor offenses – sounds good, that. Ha.

    St. Louis City officials say they will be hosting “Compliance Week” for anyone in the area with minor offenses.

    Anyone with a minor offense will go before a judge for free and work out a plan to take care of their issues.

    “We’re talking about city municipality ordinances in non-violent truancy, nuisance violations, and moving and non-moving violations can be some examples of that,” said St. Louis City Communications Director Maggie Crane.

    The “Compliance Week” will be held at municipal court on Market Street from 8:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. starting on Monday, March 9 through Friday, March 13.

    Denial is strong with these ones. Ferguson mayor says scathing DOJ report ‘not proof’ of widespread abuses

    “There are stories that have been told in that report … that are very concerning, and those things have to be addressed,” Knowles said. “What they’ve shown is that it has happened. Now, how often has that happened? I don’t know. Their assertion is it happens regularly. Based on what? I’m not sure yet.

    “Do they have a statistic that tells me that they’ve examined every arrest that we’ve made for the past four years and that half, or all, or 10 percent, or 5 percent are unconstitutional or without cause? They do not have that. They have not examined at that level that I know of at this point.”

    Knowles said he and other city officials would be “going through and examining those issues to make sure that there are not conclusions being based on anecdotal evidence.” He emphasized, though, that any civil rights violations were “unacceptable, and you need to write that down.”

    The report stated there was probable cause to believe the police and court routinely violate people’s civil rights. But, Knowles said, “that’s not proof.” He added that “there is probably another side to all of these stories.”

    The report criticized Ferguson’s police and court systems for operating “not with the primary goal of administering justice or protecting the rights of the accused, but of maximizing revenue.” It said Judge Ronald J. Brockmeyer helped set escalating fines and used harsh tactics to secure collections while fixing tickets for friends and family in Ferguson and elsewhere.

    Asked Friday whether Brockmeyer should remain as judge, Knowles said that was “something we have to look at,” although he said he didn’t think Brockmeyer could be removed in the middle of an appointed term without filing a complaint with the Commission on Retirement, Removal and Discipline.

    City Manager John Shaw was another figure criticized in the report for pushing police again and again to increase the money they were raising for the city through traffic enforcement. Asked whether his job was on the line, Knowles said he wasn’t going to talk about potential staffing changes.

    “There is a tremendous amount of things he’s been able to do for this community,” Knowles said.

    As for Ferguson police Chief Tom Jackson, Knowles said he wasn’t making a quick decision. “He still has a tremendous number of people in this community who support him.”

    Knowles took issue with Department of Justice findings that police disproportionately stop black drivers. He said he believes Ferguson’s businesses are daytime destinations for African-Americans, unfairly skewing the chances that a driver being pulled over will be black.

    Knowles said he hoped the city could come to an agreement with the Justice Department as to “what is an effective public policy solution.”

    Yup, that’s some top-calibre denial right there. Of course there’s a lot of support in town – from the white folk living off the painfully-given pennies of black folk. Disgusting.

  227. rq says

    And some more on Madison, #BlackLivesMatter Crowds gather at Few & Williamson St. vigil in aftermath of police killing of Tony Robinson.
    Report that two demonstrators are being held without charge at the county jail. We are going now to demand their release #AnthonyRobinson Rumour has it that they’re also witnesses to the shooting.
    Grandmother of #AnthonyRobinson speaks. “I don’t want violence out here. But there must be consequences.”
    Grandmother of #AnthonyRobinson: “Don’t let Tony’s death mean nothing, don’t let him just be another dead black kid.”
    FYI, this is still from last night. I have yet to catch up completely. Working on it.

    19-year-old dead after being shot by Madison police officer, chief says

    A 19-year-old man died after he was shot Friday by a Madison police officer following an altercation on Williamson Street, Chief Mike Koval said.

    Madison police declined to identify the man, but family and friends identified him as Tony Robinson, a 2014 graduate of Sun Prairie High School.

    After the shooting, a crowd of demonstrators and organizers from the Young, Gifted and Black Coalition gathered at the scene and formed a line across Few Street, where police had blocked off the area around the scene of the shooting.

    Dozens of people drummed, prayed and chanted “Black lives matter.”

    Robinson was black.

    Koval said he did not know if the man had a weapon at the time of the shooting.

    Robinson’s grandmother, Sharon Irwin, said Robinson was unarmed and posed the question to police: “What happened to your Taser?”

    It was unclear how Irwin knew whether Robinson had a weapon.

    Koval said police were called because a man, who was responsible for a recent battery, was jumping in and out of traffic and creating a safety hazard.

    An officer went to an apartment that the man had gone into, heard a disturbance and forced entry, and was assaulted by the man, Koval said.

    “The officer did draw his revolver and subsequently shot the subject,” he said.

    Koval said more than one shot was fired. He said the officer immediately began to administer first aid, as did other officers who arrived at the scene.

    The man died at a local hospital, Koval said.

    The state Department of Justice’s Division of Criminal Investigation is investigating the shooting.

    An interesting situation that seems rather all over the place.

    50 Years Past Selma, Historic Town Makes Slow March Toward Change

    “The people who received less benefit from the movement are the ones who did the most,” said Andrew Young, a lieutenant of Martin Luther King Jr.’s who was among those marching on March 4, 1965. “That’s always bothered me.”

    “The farmers who let us stay in their homes, who bonded us out of jail, are old guys now. They still own land but they can’t make a living on the land.”

    But others who live and work in Selma say the city is making progress — though it is held to a higher standard because of its transformative history.

    “This community’s not doomed,” said Selma-Dallas County Economic Development Authority Executive Director Wayne Vardaman, a lifelong resident of the county. “Through [the bridge re-enactment] that’s the perception. People say, ‘We’ve gotta save Selma! It’s falling off a cliff!’ Do we need some help? Sure. But it’s not dying. It’s changed.”

    Selma was the site of one of America’s greatest horrors and greatest triumphs. Five decades ago, the plight of thousands of disenfranchised blacks drew the Rev. Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to this town to wage the last great battle of the Civil Rights Movement.

    King’s choice to use Selma to spotlight the issue of voter disenfranchisement was strategic: Though blacks represented more than half of Selma’s population, only one percent of them were registered to vote. Not only did the city exemplify the worst of Jim Crow, its sheriff, Jim Clark, was an ideal adversary in the mold of Birmingham’s Bull Connor. A showdown between the two guaranteed national media attention.

    “That was the point, to try to expose the worst of the situation,” said Rutgers University historian Steven Lawson, who has authored several books on civil and voting rights.

    Preventing blacks from voting was a pillar of segregation that was viciously preserved by the state’s white power structure. Without Selma, it may never have been toppled. […]

    Indeed, while some point to today as a moment when local and federal governments are shortening early voting and requiring voters to show identification at the polls — actions some say are dismantling the gains of those who marched from Selma to Montgomery — the political landscape in Selma is vastly different than that of a half century ago. The voting population in 1960 in Dallas County was 64 percent white; today it is 69 percent black.

    Selma elected its first black mayor, James Perkins, in 2000. After two terms, he was succeeded by the city’s first black council president, George Evans. Democratic Congresswoman Terri Sewell, who represents Selma, is the first black woman ever to serve in the Alabama congressional delegation.

    The events of Selma fast-tracked access to the franchise for Southern blacks who had been viciously denied the right to vote since the turn of the 20th century. Such swift action on a seemingly impossible problem was seen as extraordinary — and so, too, is the city most associated with this momentous change.

    But now as then, Selma should be looked at as an example, not an exception, said Nisa Miranda, director of The University of Alabama Center for Economic Development. Miranda said that in the 15 years she has worked with Selma, she has seen change — but incremental, not monumental.

    “Selma is seen as special and unique, as having charted some kind of a path,” said Miranda, whose work focuses on sustainable economic growth in rural communities like Selma. “It’s an expectation that [Selma] should push itself to do so much more because of its renown.” […]

    Aside from the annual re-enactment of Selma, tourism plays a huge role in the county’s economy. Ashley Mason of the Selma-Dallas County Tourism Department said the estimated economic impact of tourism on the area in 2013 was $67 million.

    Though figures for last year are not yet available, 2014 was also active. The filming of “Selma” drew a lot of attention and dollars to the city. And in addition to this year’s milestone anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” Selma is also preparing next month to mark another watershed moment: the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Selma, one of the last stands of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

    On Monday, the cameras will again depart — capping the annual weekend ritual known as the Bridge Crossing Jubilee — and Selma will return to being just another small town in rural America, trying to attract residents, jobs and revenue.

    “If you take out what happened here… it probably would not be as newsworthy,” Verdaman said. “We are under a magnifying glass every year. That’s tough. It certainly doesn’t make my job any easier. I’m trying to sell the community.”

  228. rq says

    Black Teen Tony Robinson Shot Dead by Cop in Madison, Wisconsin

    Koval said the officer followed the man to the residence where the battery took place, and said the man attacked the officer there. During the confrontation, the officer drew his weapon and shot the suspect.

    “The initial finds at the scene did not reflect a gun or anything of that nature” on the suspect, Koval said.

    The officer performed CPR on the suspect, who was taken to a hospital but later died. Koval said the state Department of Justice’s Division of Criminal Investigation will lead a probe into the shooting.

    More than 100 protesters gathered at the scene of the shooting, according to witnesses and reports, with video showing the crowd chanting: “Who can you trust? Not the police.”

    Robinson’s family said police have not allowed them to see his body.

    “They won’t let us come near him,” Sharon Irwin, Robinson’s grandmother, told the crowd that had gathered Friday night after the altercation. “I just want to hold him and tell him it’s OK. Go home to God. They told me he was evidence.”

    Family spokesman Michael Johnson said on Facebook that Robinson was a “loving and caring young man” who was about to attend Milwaukee Area Technical College to pursue a business degree. The family met with the mayor and police chief last night, Johnson told NBC News.

    “It’s a challenging time for this family right now. To lose a son, especially the way they lost a son,” he said.

    Koval appealed to the public to stay calm while the investigation got underway.

    2 witnesses to murder of #AnthonyRobinson were quickly incarcerated without a lawyer & questioned (double speak for treated like criminals) (that’s the rumour).

    The state of Wisconsin is 88% White and 6.5% Black. However, Wisconsin leads the nation in Black male incarcerations. #AnthonyRobinson

    Voting rights! 50 Years After Bloody Sunday, Voting Rights Are Under Attack

    Tens of thousands of people—including President Obama—will travel to Selma this weekend to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” the infamous march that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

    The progress since then has been remarkable. Because of the VRA, the number of black, Hispanic and Asian officeholders has skyrocketed from under 1,000 in 1965 to over 17,000 today. “African-Americans went from holding fewer than 1,000 elected offices nationwide to over 10,000,” according to a new report from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, “Latinos from a small number of offices to over 6,000, and Asian Americans from under a hundred documented cases to almost 1,000.” In Alabama, the birthplace of the VRA, the number of black elected officials has increased from eighty-six in 1970 to 757 today.

    Despite these dramatic improvements, the right to vote is currently under the most sustained attack since the passage of the VRA.

    In 2011 and 2012, 180 new voting restrictions were introduced in forty-one states, with new laws adopted in nineteen states that made it harder to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Many of these laws were blocked in court in 2012, but a year later the Supreme Court gutted the VRA, dealing a devastating blow to voting rights. As a result, twenty-one states had new restrictions in place in 2014.

    The attack on voting rights has spread to virtually every state in the country. From 2011 to 2015, 395 new voting restrictions have been introduced in forty-nine states (Idaho is the lone exception). Half the states in the country have adopted measures making it harder to vote. (Scroll to the bottom for a list of the states.)

    Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision, states with the worst histories of voting discrimination, like Alabama, no longer have to approve their voting changes with the federal government. The Southern states that were previously subject to “precelarence” have been particularly aggressive in curbing voting rights. […]

    This trend is getting worse in 2015. In the first few weeks of this year, forty new voting restrictions were introduced in seventeen states. That number will grow as state legislatures consider proposed legislation. Nevada, New Mexico and Missouri are among the states moving to pass voter-ID laws. “It’s surprising and remarkable that in 2015 we’re fighting over the same thing we fought over 50 years ago—the right to vote,” says Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center.

    The Stage Is Set! A look at the Edmund Pettus Bridge this morning ahead of President Obama’s speech today! #Selma50

    Oh, and that Edmund Pettus Bridge. Inside the fight to strip a KKK leader’s name from Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge

    This weekend, as President Obama and members of Congress travel to Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, a new generation of activists is working to strip the name of Edmund Pettus — a former state legislator who doubled as a top KKK official — from the city’s most famous civil rights landmark.

    Students Unite, an organization made mostly of college and graduate students focused on social justice issues in Selma, has collected more than 158,000 signatures on a Change.org petition calling on Alabama leaders to rename the bridge, where police viciously beat demonstrators marching for voting rights on March 7, 1965.

    But because the bridge is both part of a federal highway and a National Historic landmark —not to mention a source of sentimentality for some in Alabama — erasing the avowed racist’s name from it won’t be as simple as some think.
    Pettus’ racism was no secret

    “Everyone knows the bridge is famous for the march and Bloody Sunday, so the idea that the name of the place where all of this happened represents something so contrary to all of that really bothers us,” said Students Unite’s executive director, 25-year-old John Gainey.

    The discrepancy is striking, but the life of the bridge’s namesake has never been a secret. The Washington Post reported that when the bridge was constructed 75 years ago, Pettus’ legacy was well known, and the span of the highway was named “for a man revered locally as a tenacious Southern leader.”

    It’s also right there on the Federal Highway Administration’s website in its description of the structure, which was built in 1940 and carries traffic across the Alabama River: “It had been named after a Civil War General and Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan who served in the United States Senate from 1897 until his death in 1907. He was the last Confederate General to serve in the Senate.” […]

    According to the Federal Highway Administration, states retain power over naming and renaming any highways under their jurisdiction, either through the introduction of legislation or an action by the State department of transportation. (In February 2008, a state resolution renamed a portion of Alabama 62 the “Curly Putnam Jr. Highway,” in honor of a songwriter.)

    Tony W. Harris, the Alabama Department of Transportation’s media and community relations bureau chief said that when the state legislature passes a resolution regarding an honorary naming of a road or bridge, that resolution must be ratified by the transportation director in order to be made official. He suggested the Department of Interior or National Park Service would possibly have to be involved in changing the name of the bridge’s National Historic Landmark designation.

    The Change[dot]org petition calls on “Alabama, the city of Selma, and the National Park Service to” to remove Pettus’ name from the bridge. Gainey said the specific process for renaming, was “somewhat murky” to organizers, but they planned to approach Alabama governor Robert J. Bentley with the results of the petition.[…]

    There’s unlikely to be agreement about this, even among Alabama’s leadership. Politico reported that, on a national level, no members of the House Republican leadership plan to attend this weekend’s commemorative events, a fact that highlights how partisan issues related to the commemoration of civil rights history are.

    Harris (of the Alabama DOT) suggested that he personally might not support an effort to replace Pettus’ name. “The bridge’s name is linked to history because of what happened at the bridge in 1965, and the monumental change that followed,” he said in an email to Vox. “And it’s the name ‘Edmund Pettus Bridge’ that has been recorded as a National Historic Landmark.”

    I see no issue with renaming the bridge and annotating the history books with ‘formerly known as the edmund Pettus Bridge’. But that’s just me.

  229. rq says

    Photographer Helped Expose Brutality Of Selma’s ‘Bloody Sunday’

    Spider Martin’s real introduction to the civil rights movement came on a late night at home in February 1965. He was 25, a photographer for The Birmingham News. He explains in a video from 1987 that he got the call because he was the youngest staff member and no one else wanted to go. That assignment would lead to his most famous work.

    “About midnight I get this phone call from the chief photographer and he says ‘Spider, we need to get you to go down to Marion, Ala.’ Says there’s been a church burned and there’d been a black man who was protesting killed. He was shot with a shotgun. His name was Jimmie Lee Jackson.”

    James “Spider” Martin grew up near Birmingham. Small in stature, he earned the nickname “Spider” for his quick moves on the high school football field. He said while he grew up with a few black friends, he was largely ignorant of the injustice blacks faced. That changed once he started covering the Jimmie Lee Jackson case, according to his daughter Tracy.

    “He realized that it was history and that it was important,” she says. “He got wrapped up in it.”

    Jackson’s killing helped spur the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights marches a few weeks later. Martin was in Selma for Bloody Sunday when state troopers attacked protesters. Holding a camera made him just as much a target. He recounted in an interview with Alabama Public Television, what happened when a police officer saw him.

    “He walks over to me and, blow! Hits me right here in the back of the head,” he said. “I still got a dent in my head and I still have nerve damage there. I go down on my knees and I’m like seeing stars and there’s tear gas everywhere. And then he grabs me by the shirt and he looks straight in my eyes and he just dropped me and said, ‘scuse me. Thought you was a n*gg*r.'”

    Martin kept covering the marchers until they reached Montgomery two-and-a-half weeks later.

    Martin’s collection contains thousands of photographs, clippings and other notes — much of it previously unpublished before it was purchased by the University of Texas. Even producers of the movie Selma used his pictures to recreate scenes for the film. Exhibitions of his work are going up around in Selma for the anniversary, at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, and in New York. […]

    Spruill says the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., understood the power of visuals and tipped off photojournalists. And while the optics of Bloody Sunday were credited with shocking middle America — leading to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act — back then the pictures were considered disposable. That was partly because in the mid-’60s, photojournalism was beginning to take a backseat to the flash and immediacy of television. Spruill says he found pictures newspapers didn’t run with holes punched through them.

    “It’s like finding original copies of important American history documents trashed,” he says.

    A similar thing happened to the photographers. Martin’s daughter says it was decades before he became known for his civil rights pictures. He died in 2003 and she says he’d be excited about exhibiting his work around this 50th anniversary. But in his interview it’s clear he was uncomfortable with the attention.

    “I mean it’s kind of fun sometimes being a celebrity, you might say, or a little bit famous. But then again, I’d rather not be famous,” he said.

    Still the attention he offered through his camera, helped shape American history.

    History. Repeats.

    See, protest is not the solution. Protest is the leverage to the solution(s). In protest we reimagine our power & expose the terror we face.

    Y’all, this right here — “debacle”. Oh, okay. #Selma50 Yup, an Associated Press headline called Bloody Sunday a civil rights debacle. !!!

    Fact-checks about Selma and the Voting Rights Act An example:

    Under the Voting Rights Act, several states and portions of states that had a history of discrimination, including certain counties in Florida, needed to get preclearance from the federal government before changing voting laws. But that portion of the Voting Rights Act was challenged by Shelby County, Ala., and the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the plaintiffs in 2013.

    A few days before the justices heard oral arguments in the case, U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., argued in favor of keeping the provision. Lewis, who chaired the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at the time, suffered a skull fracture in the Selma protest.

    He said the critics of the law “complain of state expense, yet their only cost is the paper, postage and manpower required to send copies of legislation to the federal government for reviews, hardly a punishment,” Lewis wrote.

    For administrative reviews on minor issues, Lewis appeared to be correct. The Justice Department provided an administrative process for pre-clearance submissions that was designed to cut litigation costs. But states could also choose to take cases through the courts, which could be expensive. We rated his claim Half True.

    During oral arguments, Chief Justice John Roberts asked, “Do you know which state has the worst ratio of white voter turnout to African-American voter turnout? Massachusetts. Do you know what has the best, where African-American turnout actually exceeds white turnout? Mississippi.”

    The survey data Roberts likely used about Massachusetts is questionable due to wide margins of error, among other problems. Also Roberts’ decision to hold up Massachusetts as an example amounts to cherry-picking, since its data diverges significantly from that of its regional neighbors.

    However, Roberts made a valid point when he noted that black voter turnout in Mississippi and other Deep South states is high, and often exceeds white turnout. We rated his claim Half True.

    In 2014, Attorney General Eric Holder warned Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott that the federal government was monitoring voter access after the state had “repeatedly added barriers to voting and restricted access to the polls.”

    But Scott’s campaign pointed the finger back at Holder:

    “In fact, Attorney General Eric Holder’s own Justice Department precleared the voting changes in the 2011 law that governed the 2012 general election in Florida,” Scott campaign manager Melissa Sellers wrote.

    The Scott response was partially accurate but left out a lot of context. In 2011, the GOP-led Legislature cut the number of days of early voting from 14 to eight, among other election changes. The law, signed by Scott, allowed supervisors to offer between 48 hours and 96 hours of early voting over eight days.

    Scott’s statement omitted that the Justice Department only signed off on the state’s plan after it committed to offering the maximum hours for early voting in those counties. We rated Scott’s claim Half True.

    More at the link.

    Comparing Selma To Ferguson: ‘Mike Brown Is Our Jimmie Lee Jackson’, with autoplay video.

    Activist Ashley Yates joined HuffPost Live on Friday to weigh in on the similarities between today’s #BlackLivesMatter movement and the civil rights struggles of the 60s.

    “We’re seeing history repeat itself,” she told host Marc Lamont Hill.

    In 2013, the movement took a hit when the Supreme Court gutted a crucial portion of the Voting Rights Act, which was hailed as one of the most important civil rights victories of its time. The 5-4 ruling removed federal oversight from the voting processes of nine mostly southern states.

    While some may consider voting discrimination a thing of the past, Yates looked to the demographics of Ferguson’s white-dominated city council representatives as an example of the rampant voter disenfranchisement faced by black Americans.

    So, how does Ferguson, a city with an African American majority, end up with a mostly white government?

    “Well, that’s because voting disenfranchisement is very, very real,” she said. “The methods don’t look the same as they did in the Jim Crow south, but they are definitely utilizing tactics to make sure that people don’t get their voices heard.”

    She also discussed the fight against police brutality, drawing comparisons between Michael Brown and the martyrs of the past.

    “Mike Brown is our Jimmie Lee Jackson. We’re still seeing this very real history living and repeating itself today. We’re seeing the tear gas…we’re seeing people oppressed for standing up for their rights,” she said.

    But the #BlackLivesMatter protesters have also learned from the “mistakes” of the civil rights movement, she added. While black demonstrators of the ’60s enshrined respectability politics to push their fight forward, activists of today are much more unapologetic:

    We’re making sure that when we speak about black liberation, we’re talking about all black people and not just a certain sub-sector of who white America sees as acceptable in society. We’re talking about everyone. We’re not asking for our existence to be validated by being good black people, we’re demanding that our existence is validated just by living because we are human beings.

  230. rq says

    Ferguson grand juror pushes back in battle to discuss Darren Wilson case

    Ferguson, Mo., police Officer Darren Wilson had reason to fear unarmed teen Michael Brown when he fatally shot him last August — it’s now the conclusion of both state and federal authorities.

    But just two days after the Justice Department released findings of its probe, a grand juror from the St. Louis County investigation continues to advance a legal battle with prosecutor Robert McCulloch, perhaps calling into question Wilson’s innocence.

    On Friday the unidentified juror filed a 21-page memorandum arguing why U.S. District Judge Rodney Sippel shouldn’t dismiss their lawsuit against McCulloch.

    The juror — one of 12 to sit on the secret panel — alleges McCulloch publicly misrepresented that “all grand jurors believed that there was no support for any charges,” according to the federal lawsuit. The juror contends McCulloch’s team gave jurors instructions in a “muddled and untimely” manner and presented the evidence in a way that insinuated that the dead teen, not the officer, was the wrongdoer.

    [Related: Holder says U.S. will dismantle Ferguson Police Department if needed]

    After hearing three months of testimony, it was announced in late November that the grand jury declined to indict Wilson in the racially charged case. The vote did not have to be unanimous. In Missouri, a consensus of nine is needed to rule.

    Grand jurors take an oath or secrecy and are ordered to keep the panel’s deliberations and votes private. Under Missouri law, it’s a misdemeanor for a grand juror to disclose evidence or information about witnesses who appear before them.

    “This case is about Doe’s First Amendment rights,” the lawyers wrote in Friday’s filing. “The claim that a citizen with information on a matter of public concern should be permitted to challenge the government’s narrative without going to jail is a cognizable First Amendment claim.”

    Good luck!

    From earlier today, people were waiting for Obama to arrive. There were several notable people present, including Esaw Garner (Eric Garner’s wife), Michael Brown’s parents, local Ferguson protestors, and more. So, next bits from Selma. I didn’t expect country music to blaring at the base of the Edmund Pettus Bridge right now. Aye. #Selma50
    There’s general confusion re: Obama’s talk and tickets. Unclear where you get tickets, where you go when you get them, etc… #Selma50
    Loud noise outside WH as First Family about to leave for Selma; lockdown. Pool report: – so I guess Obama was late?

    Interlude: hair! In Praise Of Celebrities With Natural Hair

    Extensions and weaves may be all the rage in Hollywood, but these stars are proof that natural hair is just as beautiful.

    Whether they’re sporting voluminous afros or braided updos, these women know how to rock their natural locks like total pros. Together, they’re changing the definition of “good hair.” (The very definition of good hair was the topic of Chris Rock’s documentary “Good Hair,” which you should definitely watch. But we digress…)

    Today, we’re taking a moment to praise the female celebs who let their natural hair run free.

    Erykah Badu, Willow Smith, Viola Davis, Esperanza Spalding, and more.

  234. rq says

    My Brother’s Keeper taskforce report, for the to be reading of.

    Modern civil rights movement expands on classic methods

    Today’s movement is a complex machine whose work extends far beyond the protests in Ferguson, Mo., and its methods are at once modern and classic. The movement includes longtime organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as millennials who had never protested before last fall.

    Their weapons are demonstrations and lawsuits, but spreadsheets too; their battles are fought on sidewalks, in courtrooms and over social media. While their tone is occasionally harsher than Martin Luther King Jr.’s, they also espouse nonviolence.

    Most of all, they share a common goal with their ancestors to improve the lives of black Americans. But the racial inequalities they face are harder to illustrate, and perhaps more complicated to fix, than ever.

    “At the heart of any revolution is a well-told story, right?” said DeRay Mckesson, 29, one of the most prominent protesters to emerge from the unrest after a white Ferguson police officer fatally shot black 18-year-old Michael Brown in August. “We are trying to tell the story of what is happening to black people in America…. We believe the truth is so damning that we just need to tell it and find different ways to tell it.”

    This weekend, the president and others will mark the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Ala., where police tear-gassed and assaulted black men and women who were marching for the right to vote.

    Much of the power of the event came from brutal imagery of white supremacy in the South. Photos of white policemen beating peaceful demonstrators with nightsticks did not need much explanation. The Voting Rights Act was enacted not long after.

    But one struggle against racial inequality has been replaced by another, with problems harder to photograph than white mobs waving the Confederate flag.

    A hundred and fifty years after the end of slavery, black families remain on average 13 times poorer than their white counterparts. School segregation and housing discrimination have been illegal for decades, yet many black Americans live in poorer school districts and neighborhoods that remain informally segregated.

    The police killings that prompted recent protests recall racial unrest in northern cities and in Watts in the 1960s, when entrenched segregation and poverty were also pervasive, said Patricia Sullivan, professor of history at University of South Carolina.

    The Civil Rights Act addressed voting rights, and the Supreme Court’s earlier Brown vs. Board of Education decision did away with “separate but equal.” But a law, Sullivan said, “can’t just change” problems such as poverty.

    These days some activists and advocates have turned social media, scholarship and data analysis into powerful tools for highlighting the problems faced by modern black Americans.

    “Protest is always confrontation; protest isn’t always physical,” said Mckesson, who has more than 67,000 Twitter followers. With activist Johnetta Elzie, he helps run a newsletter that reaches thousands of readers. “How do we create infrastructure that supports the movement?” he asked. “Part of that infrastructure is making sure that people have the knowledge and information to act.” […]

    Similarly armed with statistics and scholarship, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a 16,000-word cover story for the Atlantic that traced the roots of current black poverty backward in time through housing discrimination, Jim Crow segregation and slavery.

    His piece, “The Case for Reparations,” which took two years to report, broke the single-day traffic records for the Atlantic’s website, sent the magazine’s newsstand sales soaring, and went on to win the 2014 George Polk Award for commentary in February.

    The civil rights movement of the past also had intellectual leaders, of course, and historians add that some of its early grass-roots protests were similar to seemingly spontaneous demonstrations that emerged in Ferguson and across the country last fall.

    “No one had to tell people in Montgomery that they had a problem with their buses – they knew that – and that’s a striking parallel between the two,” said Dennis C. Dickerson, the James M. Lawson Jr. professor of history at Vanderbilt University.

    The “die-ins” that spread across the country last fall – with activists lying down and playing dead in public and private places – put police shootings on a national map, added Sullivan. “It reminded me of the sit-ins, the freedom rides – but then what? That part’s important. But we’re in the moment now, so it’s hard to see.”

    Jeffrey Turner, 19, of Corvallis, Ore., is one of the movement’s new converts. He says he was glued to Twitter as demonstrations unfolded in Ferguson, and for the first time in his life decided to join protests. One came in December at the Oregon state Capitol, where demonstrators staged a die-in.

    Turner recalled thinking, “Man, I have to do this; I obviously care about this.” And when the time came, he played dead along with everyone else, to send a message.

    #Selma50 is a huge slap in the face. I couldn’t be there is weekend, but I hope they shut the fuckery parts of the celebration down.

    Just gets better n better, no? Federal Probe into SLMPD – Are St. Louis Officers Working for Drug Dealers?

    Several St. Louis police officers are under investigation for allegedly working on the side for drug dealers.

    KMOX News has learned that at least four – and as many as 25 – city police officers are under investigation.

    Sources tell us the the probe is centered on whether officers were hired to provide protection for drug dealers.

    The Drug Enforcement Agency, FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Circuit Attorney are all involved in the case.

    The investigation began in December when an off-duty officer was critically shot in north St. Louis.

    The officer returned fire, and the man he shot later turned up dead in a burning car.

    St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson says the involved officers are no longer on active duty as the investigation continues.

    “The Department will continue to be vigorous in efforts to root out officers whose actions compromise the integrity of the organization,” the chief said in a news release. “We hold our officers to a high standard and expect them to abide by the very same laws they are sworn to uphold.”

    Madison for a moment: Tony Robinson: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

    1. Police Were Responding to a Disturbance[…]
    2.Robinson Was a Recent High School Graduate About to Attend College […]
    3. Protesters Have Gathered in Madison […]
    4. The Officer’s Name Hasn’t Been Released Yet […]
    5. There Were 2 Fatal Police Shootings in Madison Last Year

    Pictures, tweets, more at the link.

    And one more moment: Wisconsin Police Fatally Shoot Black Teen, Prompting Protest.

  235. rq says

    Lots of tweets from Selma, interspersed some frmo Madison, and Chicago, and a couple other locations.
    A black US President will today walk across a bridge named for a Confederate Gen’l/KKK grand dragon. We’ll gladly take the taunting penalty.
    The sea of people facing Edmund Pettus Bridge to see Obama #Selma50

    Large crowd gathered at Madison police department #JusticeForTonyRobinson #BlackLivesMatter

    Bush showed up in Selma. @Nettaaaaaaaa Bush has not earned the right to be there. Tried to cripple the Civil Rights Div. of the DOJ. Ignored Katrina, etc, etc.
    Arrival of @RepJohnLewis. #Selma

    North of Selma, black leaders ‘fighting the same battle’

    Political leaders, including President Obama, and foot soldiers of the movement are in Selma to observe the 50th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” march that helped to propel the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

    But this is Shelby County, a rural cluster of small towns, modest homes and farmland. It was here in 2013 that local officials won a major victory when the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the federal law that resulted from those historic marches in Selma, especially the first, on March 7, 1965, when peaceful protesters at the Edmund Pettus Bridge were beaten and tear-gassed.

    “Shelby County has become the new Selma,” said the Rev. Kenneth Dukes, who has spent all 47 of his years in the county, leads the local NAACP branch and on weekdays drives a school bus for the Montevallo school district. “Not because of the brutality; we aren’t being beaten. But because we’re still here fighting for the same things, fighting the same battle.”

    The Shelby County v. Holder decision struck down a part of the Voting Rights Act that determined which states and local governments needed federal approval before changing voting procedures. Efforts by some in Congress to restore the requirement, meant as a safeguard against government practices that would disenfranchise minority voters, have seemingly stalled.

    Even as Obama prepares Saturday to lead the faithful across the bridge, a fading gray structure that straddles the muddy waters of the Alabama River, there is little hope that the law’s preclearance provision will be restored anytime soon.

    The Voting Rights Act required that nine states, including Alabama, be subject to additional scrutiny based on the fact that in November 1964 they had voting prerequisites, such as voter-registration tests, and less than 50 percent voter turnout or registration that year.

    That meant that big changes — like redistricting — as well as small changes — like moving a polling location across the street — required federal approval that could sometimes take months to obtain.

    Butch Ellis, the county attorney, declared to the Birmingham News in June 2013 that the ruling marked “a great day for Shelby County.”

    But civil rights leaders locally and nationally were incensed. One of the movement’s biggest victories — won in no small part due to the blood shed and lives lost during the Selma marches — had been invalidated.

    “We lost the bridge fight. We won it for 48 years, but now,” said the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, who has been convening meetings of pastors and national civil rights leaders in recent months aimed at refocusing efforts on restoring the preclearance provision.

    Jackson hopes that a new round of protests and marches can pressure Congress into acting. “I’m concerned that that is not the emphasis. There are all of these great preparations for a raucous celebration this weekend, rather than a solemn protest,” he said. […]

    In June 2013, the nation’s highest court declared, in a 5-to-4 decision, that the formula used to choose which states required preclearance was out of date and, therefore, unfair as it was written.

    The Voting Rights Act remained intact, but Section 4b, the formula that determined which states, counties and cities must get preclearance, had been tossed. In order for preclearance to again apply anywhere, a bitterly divided Congress would have to agree on a new formula.

    “It’s sort of sad really. When that decision came down . . . I wanted to cry,” Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who as a 25-year-old civil rights activist was severely beaten on Bloody Sunday, said at an event in Washington last week. “Some of us almost lost our lives on that bridge. During that whole process, some people were murdered. . . . People gave their very lives, and for the Supreme Court to issue that type of decision, it is very sad and we’ve got to fix it.”

    The impact of the decision was near-immediate as Southern states, now freed of their federal chaperone, began rapidly upending their voting policies — passing new voter identification laws, and curbing early voting and same-day registration.

    “It’s an undeniably sad irony that 50 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act we confront newfound efforts to make it harder to vote,” Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, a former civil rights attorney and outspoken opponent of voter ID laws, said as he sat in his D.C. office last week. A photo of Lewis, whom he calls one of his personal heroes, rests on an end table a few feet away. “We’re having a pitched debate about the future of our nation right now. At the end of the day, we should do our level best to make it easier for eligible people to vote.”

    More at the link.

  236. rq says

    Here’s a twitter narration from John Lewis. 50 yrs ago today, we set out to march from Selma to Montgomery to dramatize to the nation that people of color were denied the right to vote;
    When we got to the apex of the bridge, down below we saw a sea of blue… #Selma50
    … Alabama State Troopers #Selma50
    When we came within hearing distance, a trooper identified himself and said, “I’m Major John Cloud of the Alabama State Troopers” #Selma50
    He said, “This is an unlawful march. It will not be allowed to continue.” #Selma50
    “I’ll give you three minutes to disperse and return to your homes or to your church.” #Selma50
    more…

  237. rq says

    The man walking beside me – co-leader of the march Hosea Williams – said “Major, give us a moment to kneel and pray.”
    The Major paused for a minute and then he said, “Troopers advance!” And you saw these men putting on their gas masks.
    They came toward us beating us with nightsticks, bullwhips, trampling us with horses, releasing the teargas. #Selma50
    I was hit in the head by a state trooper with a nightstick. My legs went out from under me. #Selma50
    I thought I saw death. I thought I was going to die. #Selma50

    So that’s Selma 50 years ago, in short.

  238. rq says

    Barricades & police wagons surrounding #HomanSquare for small crowd as 3rd #Gitmo2Chicago gets underway.

    Obama gives homage to the foot soldiers of Selma. And to the importance of the Voting Rights Act. #Selma50
    “We’re the slaves who built the White House and the economy of the south” – POTUS #Selma50
    “We are the Tuskegee airmen” – POTUS #Selma50
    “We are the people Langston Hughes wrote of” – POTUS #Selma50

    Obama: “What happened in Ferguson may not be unique but it’s no longer endemic, no longer sanctioned by law.” #Selma50

  239. rq says

    Oh, that was Obama. Had a few more John Lewis quotes from his actual speech I wanted to put up before that. Eh.
    Right now: #Gitmo2Chicago march vs #HomanSquare black site takes over #Chicago street

    “17 of us were hospitalized that day but we never became bitter or hostile” – @repjohnlewis
    And essentially Mr. Lewis just hit us with a nice remix of “all lives matter”
    “If someone told me 50 years ago I’d be back on this bridge introducing a black POTUS, I’d have said you’re crazy” – Rep. John Lewis

    The most obvious link between Bloody Sunday and today is the very similar brutality peaceful protestors saw in 1965 and in 2015.

    The GOP’s Conspicuous Absence from Selma

    And the Republican party’s current leadership will be nowhere to be seen. By declining to join, Ohio representative Marsha Fudge told Politico, the GOP has “lost an opportunity to show the American people that they care.” Fudge is, of course, entirely correct. But the absence is far, far worse than that. By electing to skip the proceedings — and to send a former president and a handful of congressional representatives in lieu — the Republican leadership suggests that it does not recognize what Selma represents within America’s long history of public dissent. The United States regards itself as a nation of revolutionaries and of rebels — of those radicals, renegades, and rabble-rousers who stood tall in the face of tyranny and shouted for all the world to hear that they would not go gentle into that good night. On the right, American disobedience is typically represented by a few, ancient images. It is Washington crossing the Delaware; Patrick Henry proclaiming that he would regard as acceptable options only liberty and death; and Thomas Jefferson and his band of seditionists pledging each other “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” It is the brutal winter in Valley Forge, and the inspiration of Philadelphia. It is Trumbull’s imaginative painting, and the reluctant voices that cried out from within the early colonial factions and conceded that there was no choice for Americans but to join or to die. When it comes time each year to remember these moments, Republicans rally as one. On July Fourth, we read the Declaration of Independence, and in doing so we reaffirm that all men are created equal and that we will permit no “long train of abuses and usurpations” to reduce us “under absolute Despotism.” In our political disputes we thrill to the promises of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Often, our answer to what ails America is “James Madison.” Naturally, this is all well and good — deeply moving, even. And yet if we simultaneously forget for whom the country’s foundational “promissory note” has burned the brightest — and for whom it remained for so long an elusive source of “great deliverance” — our celebrations will run the risk of being distressingly incomplete, perhaps even hollow.

    Interlude: Wikipedia Meet the Editors Fighting Racism and Sexism on Wikipedia. Just as a short break.

  240. rq says

    So, more from Obama’s speech, for those who haven’t been able to follow along (though you can catch it at the shazzarazza link above, they have it youtubed).
    President Obama says actions of Ferguson PD “evoked the kind of abuse and disregard for citizens that spawned the Civil Rights Movement”;
    “Fifty years from Bloody Sunday, our march is not yet finished. But we’re getting closer.” —President Obama #Selma50 #MarchOn;
    “The single most powerful world in our country is ‘we’ — we the people, we shall overcome, yes we can.” – Obama #Selma50;
    What Obama’s #selma50 speech proved: His oratorical highs are as high (or higher) than any other president we’ve had.

    Hundreds of demonstrators gather on steps of the Indiana Statehouse to commentate the 50th anniversary of Selma march.

  241. rq says

    And some random impressions.
    There’s a truck full of police. That’s new. #Selma50
    To all the #Ferguson Revolutionaries who went to #Selma. Please don’t come back as Civil Rights activist. As if you graduated

    White people selling “commemorative” shit to Black folks standing in line to see PBO feels supremely exploitative somehow. #Selma #Selma50
    There’s one exit. We’re leaving. #Selma50. Honestly, that just doesn’t seem… safe.

    Unrelated to Selma, Let me ensure I get this: An event talking about white privilege is “oppressive”, “a stunt”, and “not worthy of Christian #MBIprivilege

    And finally: And I will never accept “it’s just 140 characters” as an excuse for lazy/sloppy critiques. Learn to use the platform or leave it. Dawkins isn’t the only one. :P

  242. rq says

    .@MsPackyetti asked a white man selling $10 Selma buttons where is the money going? His answer? “My gas tank” #Selma50

    Antonio French says Justice Department report reveals system of “Taxation by citation” in Ferguson, radio interview with audio.

    Seven months after Darren Wilson, a white police officer, shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year old, the Justice department released two reports this week. The first found there is not enough evidence to press federal civil rights charges against Officer Wilson. And the second detailed a frankly shocking pattern of unconstitutional and discriminatory behavior on the part of local police and courts.

    Dasha Lisitsina talked to Antonio French, Alderman of St Louis’ 21st Ward and an active participant in the protest that rocked Ferguson in the tumultuous weeks after Michael Brown’s death.

    Update: Two Ferguson police officers resigned on Friday after the report’s release. The city’s top court clerk was fired earlier in the week.

    And the Milwaukee protestors drove 1.5 hours to stand with the Madison protestors. Y’all, the movement lives. #TonyRobinson

    Fifty Years Ago, a March From Selma Into History, which links to Reliving Selma’s Civil-Rights Struggle, with a few photos of that day.

    Fifty years ago, on March 7, 1965, some 600 demonstrators set out to march 50 miles from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., to support the voting rights of African-Americans. The group didn’t get far before being attacked by state and local troopers. That day, which came to be known as “Bloody Sunday,” was followed by two more marches and, a few months later, passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In his book “Marching to the Freedom Dream” (Trolley Books, $80), photographer Dan Budnik gathers stirring color images of Selma and other events that he documented at the time. He is still in touch with some of the subjects of his photos. “It was,” he says, “one of the seminal moments in my life.”

  244. rq says

    Official count from the city of Selma is that 40,000 people attended the 50th commemoration of “Bloody Sunday”. #Selma50

    Capturing the Selma-to-Montgomery March, in photos.

    In a powerful photo, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is seen speaking in front of 25,000 civil rights marchers at the conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery march in front of the Alabama state capital building on March 25, 1965.

    The photograph was taken by Stephen Somerstein, a young college student at the time who felt compelled to document the historic march.

    Somerstein’s photos from that day are now on display at the New York Historical Society.

    His work will also be featured on a story for the “CBS Evening News” tonight.

    Meanwhile in Madison, A number of community leaders with churches & civil rights groups have gathered to discuss the shooting of Tony Robinson. #TonyRobinson
    Mayor Paul Soglin speaks to family members of Tony Robinson at the community meeting in Madison. #TonyRobinson
    The mother of Dontre Hamilton, who was shot by police in Milwaukee, is here today #Justice4Tony

  245. rq says

    Just talked to MLK lieutenant Diane Nash. She refused to walk with Pres. Obama & others across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. #Selma50
    Nash said she refused to walk across the Pettus Bridge because of the presence of Pres George W. Bush. #Selma50
    Nash said the Movement was about peace and non-violence and Bush is a man of war. I have video. Will post soon. #Selma50 #NewsOneNow

    Parents’ Incarceration Takes Toll on Children, Studies Say

    Studies show parental incarceration can be more traumatic to students than even a parent’s death or divorce, and the damage it can cause to students’ education, health, and social relationships puts them at higher risk of one day going to prison themselves. Yet in many schools, that circumstance is a hidden problem, hard for teachers to track and difficult for students and caregivers to discuss.

    “Most kids feel it has to be kept a secret,” Amy Friedman, a founder and the executive director of Pain of the Prison System, or POPS, a support club at Venice High School in Los Angeles. “If you have to keep a secret all the time, it makes everything else in school a lot harder.”

    At the 2,300-student Venice High, one cramped classroom fills with as many as 60 students on the first Wednesday of each month. The new ones may say nothing, or claim they’re just there for the lunch. The real reason comes out after a few meetings, says Ms. Friedman: All of these students, like Ms. Friedman herself, have fathers, mothers, brothers, or cousins in and out of prison.

    More than 2.7 million American children and youths have at least one parent in federal or state prison (with more having parents and other family members in local jails), and one-third of them will reach age 18 while a parent is behind bars, according to the National Resource Center on Children and Families of the Incarcerated, at Rutgers University in Camden, N.J.

    There are strong racial disparities: Forty-five percent of children of incarcerated parents are black, compared with 28 percent who are white and 21 percent who are Hispanic. […]

    “Mass incarceration is so unequally distributed across the population, that if incarceration does have an effect on kids’ educational outcomes, it has a disproportionate effect on poor and minority kids, who are already at a disadvantage,” said Kristin Turney, an assistant sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine.

    Parental incarceration can be safer for a child, particularly when the parent was imprisoned for domestic violence or child abuse. But regardless of why a parent is behind bars, emerging research suggests it puts children at high and often invisible risk, as well as aggravating existing racial and poverty gaps.

    Children of incarcerated parents have higher rates of attention deficits than those with parents missing because of death or divorce, and higher rates of behavioral problems, speech and language delays, and other developmental delays, according to a study published last summer in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior that analyzed data from a national survey of children’s health. In separate but related studies, Ms. Turney also found higher rates of asthma, obesity, depression, and anxiety.

    For education, the statistics are equally dramatic: Only 1 percent to 2 percent of students with incarcerated mothers and 13 percent to 25 percent of students with imprisoned fathers graduate from college, according to a 2013 report from the American Bar Association and the White House. […]

    “What is it about incarceration that really matters, that is so damaging to kids? We don’t know,” said Ms. Turney, a 2014 scholar for the Foundation for Child Development, for which she is studying the long-term effects of having a father in prison.

    “Is it the economic hit that these families take?—with divorce, the father can at least still contribute economically—or is it the stigma and shame for kids?” she said.

    In a study published in October in the journal Sociology of Education, Ms. Turney found the elementary-grade children of incarcerated parents were at higher risk of being held back at the end of the year—but not because of significantly lower test scores or more behavior problems than classmates.

    Rather, “it was their teachers’ perceptions of the students’ academic proficiency and how well the kid was doing,” Ms. Turney said. “It does suggest that teachers are really important here, and they really play an important role in students’ lives.”

    Ms. Friedman, of the POPS club at Venice High, raised her ex-husband’s two daughters while he was in prison. She agreed that stress and shame can make the loss of a parent to incarceration more traumatic.

    “The things that come up the most with a parent inside is this feeling that you are going to be just like them,” Ms. Friedman said, “and there’s this fear and loss and disappointment that translates to depression in a lot of kids.” […]

    Under the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act, or ASFA, a child-welfare agency will seek to end parental rights if a child has been in foster care for 15 of the past 22 months—including when the parent is behind bars. However, 32 states allow exceptions if there is a “compelling reason to believe that terminating the parent’s rights is not in the best interests of the child”—including if a parent has made meaningful attempts to stay connected to the child.

    That’s not an easy task for a parent in prison. More than 40 percent of those in federal prison are kept at least 500 miles from home, and 61 percent of those in state prison are incarcerated 100 or more miles away, according to a presentation by Philip M. Genty, a clinical professor of professional responsibility at Columbia Law School, which he gave as part of a 2013 White House symposium on children of incarcerated parents.

    “They can’t go to parent-teacher nights; they can’t be there to help with homework; they have very little access to the children.” Ms. Friedman said.

    Among the limited programs intended to keep incarcerated parents connected to their children, those focused on schooling are rarest. In the early 2000s, Florida offered some mothers in prison opportunities to read to their children regularly through videoconferences, but the program did not continue.

    “There are a lot of programs for the incarcerated, but not so many for the collateral damage out here,” Ms. Friedman said.

  246. rq says

    Watch President Obama’s historic speech in Selma for ‘Bloody Sunday’ anniversary, audio and transcript:

    It is a rare honor in this life to follow one of your heroes. And John Lewis is one of my heroes.

    Now, I have to imagine that when a younger John Lewis woke up that morning 50 years ago and made his way to Brown Chapel, heroics were not on his mind. A day like this was not on his mind. Young folks with bedrolls and backpacks were milling about. Veterans of the movement trained newcomers in the tactics of non-violence; the right way to protect yourself when attacked. A doctor described what tear gas does to the body, while marchers scribbled down instructions for contacting their loved ones. The air was thick with doubt, anticipation and fear. And they comforted themselves with the final verse of the final hymn they sung:

    “No matter what may be the test, God will take care of you;
    Lean, weary one, upon His breast, God will take care of you.”

    And then, his knapsack stocked with an apple, a toothbrush, and a book on government — all you need for a night behind bars — John Lewis led them out of the church on a mission to change America.

    President and Mrs. Bush, Governor Bentley, Mayor Evans, Sewell, Reverend Strong, members of Congress, elected officials, foot soldiers, friends, fellow Americans:

    As John noted, there are places and moments in America where this nation’s destiny has been decided. Many are sites of war — Concord and Lexington, Appomattox, Gettysburg. Others are sites that symbolize the daring of America’s character — Independence Hall and Seneca Falls, Kitty Hawk and Cape Canaveral.

    Selma is such a place. In one afternoon 50 years ago, so much of our turbulent history — the stain of slavery and anguish of civil war; the yoke of segregation and tyranny of Jim Crow; the death of four little girls in Birmingham; and the dream of a Baptist preacher — all that history met on this bridge.

    It was not a clash of armies, but a clash of wills; a contest to determine the true meaning of America. And because of men and women like John Lewis, Joseph Lowery, Hosea Williams, Amelia Boynton, Diane Nash, Ralph Abernathy, C.T. Vivian, Andrew Young, Fred Shuttlesworth, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and so many others, the idea of a just America and a fair America, an inclusive America, and a generous America — that idea ultimately triumphed.

    As is true across the landscape of American history, we cannot examine this moment in isolation. The march on Selma was part of a broader campaign that spanned generations; the leaders that day part of a long line of heroes.

    We gather here to celebrate them. We gather here to honor the courage of ordinary Americans willing to endure billy clubs and the chastening rod; tear gas and the trampling hoof; men and women who despite the gush of blood and splintered bone would stay true to their North Star and keep marching towards justice.

    They did as Scripture instructed: “Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.” And in the days to come, they went back again and again. When the trumpet call sounded for more to join, the people came –- black and white, young and old, Christian and Jew, waving the American flag and singing the same anthems full of faith and hope. A white newsman, Bill Plante, who covered the marches then and who is with us here today, quipped that the growing number of white people lowered the quality of the singing. (Laughter.) To those who marched, though, those old gospel songs must have never sounded so sweet.

    In time, their chorus would well up and reach President Johnson. And he would send them protection, and speak to the nation, echoing their call for America and the world to hear: “We shall overcome.” (Applause.) What enormous faith these men and women had. Faith in God, but also faith in America.

    The Americans who crossed this bridge, they were not physically imposing. But they gave courage to millions. They held no elected office. But they led a nation. They marched as Americans who had endured hundreds of years of brutal violence, countless daily indignities –- but they didn’t seek special treatment, just the equal treatment promised to them almost a century before. (Applause.)

    What they did here will reverberate through the ages. Not because the change they won was preordained; not because their victory was complete; but because they proved that nonviolent change is possible, that love and hope can conquer hate.

    As we commemorate their achievement, we are well-served to remember that at the time of the marches, many in power condemned rather than praised them. Back then, they were called Communists, or half-breeds, or outside agitators, sexual and moral degenerates, and worse –- they were called everything but the name their parents gave them. Their faith was questioned. Their lives were threatened. Their patriotism challenged.

    And yet, what could be more American than what happened in this place? (Applause.) What could more profoundly vindicate the idea of America than plain and humble people –- unsung, the downtrodden, the dreamers not of high station, not born to wealth or privilege, not of one religious tradition but many, coming together to shape their country’s course?

    What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this, what greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals? (Applause.)

    That’s why Selma is not some outlier in the American experience. That’s why it’s not a museum or a static monument to behold from a distance. It is instead the manifestation of a creed written into our founding documents: “We the People…in order to form a more perfect union.” “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” (Applause.)

    These are not just words. They’re a living thing, a call to action, a roadmap for citizenship and an insistence in the capacity of free men and women to shape our own destiny. For founders like Franklin and Jefferson, for leaders like Lincoln and FDR, the success of our experiment in self-government rested on engaging all of our citizens in this work. And that’s what we celebrate here in Selma. That’s what this movement was all about, one leg in our long journey toward freedom. (Applause.)

    The American instinct that led these young men and women to pick up the torch and cross this bridge, that’s the same instinct that moved patriots to choose revolution over tyranny. It’s the same instinct that drew immigrants from across oceans and the Rio Grande; the same instinct that led women to reach for the ballot, workers to organize against an unjust status quo; the same instinct that led us to plant a flag at Iwo Jima and on the surface of the Moon. (Applause.)

    It’s the idea held by generations of citizens who believed that America is a constant work in progress; who believed that loving this country requires more than singing its praises or avoiding uncomfortable truths. It requires the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak out for what is right, to shake up the status quo. That’s America. (Applause.)

    That’s what makes us unique. That’s what cements our reputation as a beacon of opportunity. Young people behind the Iron Curtain would see Selma and eventually tear down that wall. Young people in Soweto would hear Bobby Kennedy talk about ripples of hope and eventually banish the scourge of apartheid. Young people in Burma went to prison rather than submit to military rule. They saw what John Lewis had done. From the streets of Tunis to the Maidan in Ukraine, this generation of young people can draw strength from this place, where the powerless could change the world’s greatest power and push their leaders to expand the boundaries of freedom.

    They saw that idea made real right here in Selma, Alabama. They saw that idea manifest itself here in America.

    Because of campaigns like this, a Voting Rights Act was passed. Political and economic and social barriers came down. And the change these men and women wrought is visible here today in the presence of African Americans who run boardrooms, who sit on the bench, who serve in elected office from small towns to big cities; from the Congressional Black Caucus all the way to the Oval Office. (Applause.)

    Because of what they did, the doors of opportunity swung open not just for black folks, but for every American. Women marched through those doors. Latinos marched through those doors. Asian Americans, gay Americans, Americans with disabilities — they all came through those doors. (Applause.) Their endeavors gave the entire South the chance to rise again, not by reasserting the past, but by transcending the past.

    What a glorious thing, Dr. King might say. And what a solemn debt we owe. Which leads us to ask, just how might we repay that debt?

    First and foremost, we have to recognize that one day’s commemoration, no matter how special, is not enough. If Selma taught us anything, it’s that our work is never done. (Applause.) The American experiment in self-government gives work and purpose to each generation.

    Selma teaches us, as well, that action requires that we shed our cynicism. For when it comes to the pursuit of justice, we can afford neither complacency nor despair.

    Just this week, I was asked whether I thought the Department of Justice’s Ferguson report shows that, with respect to race, little has changed in this country. And I understood the question; the report’s narrative was sadly familiar. It evoked the kind of abuse and disregard for citizens that spawned the Civil Rights Movement. But I rejected the notion that nothing’s changed. What happened in Ferguson may not be unique, but it’s no longer endemic. It’s no longer sanctioned by law or by custom. And before the Civil Rights Movement, it most surely was. (Applause.)

    We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, that racial division is inherent to America. If you think nothing’s changed in the past 50 years, ask somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago or Los Angeles of the 1950s. Ask the female CEO who once might have been assigned to the secretarial pool if nothing’s changed. Ask your gay friend if it’s easier to be out and proud in America now than it was thirty years ago. To deny this progress, this hard-won progress -– our progress –- would be to rob us of our own agency, our own capacity, our responsibility to do what we can to make America better.

    Of course, a more common mistake is to suggest that Ferguson is an isolated incident; that racism is banished; that the work that drew men and women to Selma is now complete, and that whatever racial tensions remain are a consequence of those seeking to play the “race card” for their own purposes. We don’t need the Ferguson report to know that’s not true. We just need to open our eyes, and our ears, and our hearts to know that this nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us.

    We know the march is not yet over. We know the race is not yet won. We know that reaching that blessed destination where we are judged, all of us, by the content of our character requires admitting as much, facing up to the truth. “We are capable of bearing a great burden,” James Baldwin once wrote, “once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.”

    There’s nothing America can’t handle if we actually look squarely at the problem. And this is work for all Americans, not just some. Not just whites. Not just blacks. If we want to honor the courage of those who marched that day, then all of us are called to possess their moral imagination. All of us will need to feel as they did the fierce urgency of now. All of us need to recognize as they did that change depends on our actions, on our attitudes, the things we teach our children. And if we make such an effort, no matter how hard it may sometimes seem, laws can be passed, and consciences can be stirred, and consensus can be built. (Applause.)

    With such an effort, we can make sure our criminal justice system serves all and not just some. Together, we can raise the level of mutual trust that policing is built on –- the idea that police officers are members of the community they risk their lives to protect, and citizens in Ferguson and New York and Cleveland, they just want the same thing young people here marched for 50 years ago -– the protection of the law. (Applause.) Together, we can address unfair sentencing and overcrowded prisons, and the stunted circumstances that rob too many boys of the chance to become men, and rob the nation of too many men who could be good dads, and good workers, and good neighbors. (Applause.)

    With effort, we can roll back poverty and the roadblocks to opportunity. Americans don’t accept a free ride for anybody, nor do we believe in equality of outcomes. But we do expect equal opportunity. And if we really mean it, if we’re not just giving lip service to it, but if we really mean it and are willing to sacrifice for it, then, yes, we can make sure every child gets an education suitable to this new century, one that expands imaginations and lifts sights and gives those children the skills they need. We can make sure every person willing to work has the dignity of a job, and a fair wage, and a real voice, and sturdier rungs on that ladder into the middle class.

    And with effort, we can protect the foundation stone of our democracy for which so many marched across this bridge –- and that is the right to vote. (Applause.) Right now, in 2015, 50 years after Selma, there are laws across this country designed to make it harder for people to vote. As we speak, more of such laws are being proposed. Meanwhile, the Voting Rights Act, the culmination of so much blood, so much sweat and tears, the product of so much sacrifice in the face of wanton violence, the Voting Rights Act stands weakened, its future subject to political rancor.

    How can that be? The Voting Rights Act was one of the crowning achievements of our democracy, the result of Republican and Democratic efforts. (Applause.) President Reagan signed its renewal when he was in office. President George W. Bush signed its renewal when he was in office. (Applause.) One hundred members of Congress have come here today to honor people who were willing to die for the right to protect it. If we want to honor this day, let that hundred go back to Washington and gather four hundred more, and together, pledge to make it their mission to restore that law this year. That’s how we honor those on this bridge. (Applause.)

    Of course, our democracy is not the task of Congress alone, or the courts alone, or even the President alone. If every new voter-suppression law was struck down today, we would still have, here in America, one of the lowest voting rates among free peoples. Fifty years ago, registering to vote here in Selma and much of the South meant guessing the number of jellybeans in a jar, the number of bubbles on a bar of soap. It meant risking your dignity, and sometimes, your life.

    What’s our excuse today for not voting? How do we so casually discard the right for which so many fought? (Applause.) How do we so fully give away our power, our voice, in shaping America’s future? Why are we pointing to somebody else when we could take the time just to go to the polling places? (Applause.) We give away our power.

    Fellow marchers, so much has changed in 50 years. We have endured war and we’ve fashioned peace. We’ve seen technological wonders that touch every aspect of our lives. We take for granted conveniences that our parents could have scarcely imagined. But what has not changed is the imperative of citizenship; that willingness of a 26-year-old deacon, or a Unitarian minister, or a young mother of five to decide they loved this country so much that they’d risk everything to realize its promise.

    That’s what it means to love America. That’s what it means to believe in America. That’s what it means when we say America is exceptional.

    For we were born of change. We broke the old aristocracies, declaring ourselves entitled not by bloodline, but endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. We secure our rights and responsibilities through a system of self-government, of and by and for the people. That’s why we argue and fight with so much passion and conviction — because we know our efforts matter. We know America is what we make of it.

    Look at our history. We are Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea, pioneers who braved the unfamiliar, followed by a stampede of farmers and miners, and entrepreneurs and hucksters. That’s our spirit. That’s who we are.

    We are Sojourner Truth and Fannie Lou Hamer, women who could do as much as any man and then some. And we’re Susan B. Anthony, who shook the system until the law reflected that truth. That is our character.

    We’re the immigrants who stowed away on ships to reach these shores, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free –- Holocaust survivors, Soviet defectors, the Lost Boys of Sudan. We’re the hopeful strivers who cross the Rio Grande because we want our kids to know a better life. That’s how we came to be. (Applause.)

    We’re the slaves who built the White House and the economy of the South. (Applause.) We’re the ranch hands and cowboys who opened up the West, and countless laborers who laid rail, and raised skyscrapers, and organized for workers’ rights.

    We’re the fresh-faced GIs who fought to liberate a continent. And we’re the Tuskeegee Airmen, and the Navajo code-talkers, and the Japanese Americans who fought for this country even as their own liberty had been denied.

    We’re the firefighters who rushed into those buildings on 9/11, the volunteers who signed up to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. We’re the gay Americans whose blood ran in the streets of San Francisco and New York, just as blood ran down this bridge. (Applause.)

    We are storytellers, writers, poets, artists who abhor unfairness, and despise hypocrisy, and give voice to the voiceless, and tell truths that need to be told.

    We’re the inventors of gospel and jazz and blues, bluegrass and country, and hip-hop and rock and roll, and our very own sound with all the sweet sorrow and reckless joy of freedom.

    We are Jackie Robinson, enduring scorn and spiked cleats and pitches coming straight to his head, and stealing home in the World Series anyway. (Applause.)

    We are the people Langston Hughes wrote of who “build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how.” We are the people Emerson wrote of, “who for truth and honor’s sake stand fast and suffer long;” who are “never tired, so long as we can see far enough.”

    That’s what America is. Not stock photos or airbrushed history, or feeble attempts to define some of us as more American than others. (Applause.) We respect the past, but we don’t pine for the past. We don’t fear the future; we grab for it. America is not some fragile thing. We are large, in the words of Whitman, containing multitudes. We are boisterous and diverse and full of energy, perpetually young in spirit. That’s why someone like John Lewis at the ripe old age of 25 could lead a mighty march.

    And that’s what the young people here today and listening all across the country must take away from this day. You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, because you’re ready to seize what ought to be.

    For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken, there’s new ground to cover, there are more bridges to be crossed. And it is you, the young and fearless at heart, the most diverse and educated generation in our history, who the nation is waiting to follow.

    Because Selma shows us that America is not the project of any one person. Because the single-most powerful word in our democracy is the word “We.” “We The People.” “We Shall Overcome.” “Yes We Can.” (Applause.) That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh, what a glorious task we are given, to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.

    Fifty years from Bloody Sunday, our march is not yet finished, but we’re getting closer. Two hundred and thirty-nine years after this nation’s founding our union is not yet perfect, but we are getting closer. Our job’s easier because somebody already got us through that first mile. Somebody already got us over that bridge. When it feels the road is too hard, when the torch we’ve been passed feels too heavy, we will remember these early travelers, and draw strength from their example, and hold firmly the words of the prophet Isaiah: “Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on [the] wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not be faint.” (Applause.)

    We honor those who walked so we could run. We must run so our children soar. And we will not grow weary. For we believe in the power of an awesome God, and we believe in this country’s sacred promise.

    May He bless those warriors of justice no longer with us, and bless the United States of America. Thank you, everybody. (Applause.)

    Let that stand as the lone link in this comment.

  247. rq says

    #Selma50 Die-In by #Ferguson Frontline 1-by-1 each person dropped to ground while naming Police Murder Victim

    WOW. Fucking perfect, bougie black America. “@jaketapper: Former President/First Lady Bush at #Selma50 today ” Kinda odd, seeing Bush sort of pushing out to the front to lead like that…

    Black kids in the US have twice as many untreated cavities as white ones

    About 10 percent of white children had untreated cavities between 2011 and 2012, compared with 21 percent of black children, 19 percent of Hispanic children, and 16 percent of non-Hispanic Asians. And those differences persist as children grow older, according to the CDC’s report. During the same time period, 21 percent of black teens and 18 percent of Hispanic teens had untreated dental cavities. Yet only 13 percent of white teens had untreated cavities — despite the fact that Hispanic, white, black, and Asian adolescents were just as likely to have developed a cavity in their teens. Moreover, white children were about 30 percent more likely to have been treated with dental sealant — a plastic coating that prevents tooth decay — than black and Asian children.

    Dental coverage may explain some of the differences. For low-income families, dental insurance can be hard to come by, and it often takes a backseat to health care coverage. And families that qualify for Medicaid don’t always get to benefit from the dental insurance it provides, because few dentists take it. This represents a huge barrier to care, says Stefanie Russell, an epidemiologist who works on oral health at New York University. “Children often see physicians, but they don’t get to see the dentist.”

    And even if a child has dental insurance, the child’s parents might not be able to take them to see a dentist. Taking time off may be difficult for parents who have more than one job — or for parents whose jobs aren’t flexible. Cultural differences may also play a role in some cases, Russell says. For example, in some cultures or communities, there’s a sense that “dental problems are inevitable,” so “there’s no point in trying to prevent them,” she says. And because a child’s oral health is closely related to that of their parents, the issue becomes cyclical.

    Police: Veteran Officer Shot Unarmed Black Teen

    A 19-year-old black man who died after being shot by a white police officer in Madison, Wisconsin was unarmed, the city’s police chief said Saturday, assuring protesters that his officers would defend their rights to demonstrate. (March 7)

    More on this veteran officer in a bit, apparentyly he’s a veteran at shooting unarmed people, too.

    Tonight’s Southern White Savior Historical reading by @MsPackyetti – that’s the book in the Jefferson Davis house, about the orphan Davis so kindly adopted and saved, Jim Limber Davis.

  248. rq says

    Wisconsin police confirm black teen shot by cop was unarmed. Biiiig surprise.

    “He was unarmed. That’s going to make this all the more complicated for the investigators, for the public to accept,” Koval said.

    Kenny has more than 12 years of experience and was involved in a 2007 shooting but was cleared of any wrongdoing because it was a “suicide by cop-type” situation.

    Several dozen protesters gathered outside the Dane County Public Safety Building on Saturday before starting to walk toward the scene of the shooting, holding signs that read, “Black Lives Matter” — a slogan adopted by activists and protesters around the nation after recent officer-involved deaths of unarmed black men. Protesters also shouted the slogan Friday night after the shooting.

    CNN reporter grills Ferguson police chief

    Police Chief Thomas Jackson refuses to comment on the Justice Department’s scathing report detailing a range of abuses against African Americans by the city’s police force.

    Video at the link, and no, he doesn’t have any good answers.

    In Miami: “They’re Going To Kill Me,” Man Yelled Before Dying In Police Custody, not shot, though. Tased.

    Eshleman looked out her kitchen window and saw as many as five Coconut Creek police officers standing around a man on the ground. The firecracker sound she heard was the shot discharged from the Tasers fired by two of the officers into the man, who appeared to be writhing in pain.

    “He was yelling, `Baby, baby, baby. They’re going to kill me,” she recalled to CBS4’s Jim DeFede.

    From another window in their condo, Arendale watched the officers, as well. He said as they attempted to handcuff the man, one of the officers yelled at him, “Don’t move or I’ll break your [expletive] arm.”

    Arendale said as they lifted the man up, he tried to run, but only got a few steps before he was hit with two more rounds from the Tasers. The man collapsed. Arendale said the man complained, “I can’t breathe.”

    A few minutes later the man appeared dead.

    “When he stopped moving that’s when they realized he wasn’t breathing,” Arendale said.

    Eshleman and Arendale were witnessing were the final moments of 39-year-old Calvon Reid’s life. Reid’s death following an encounter with the Coconut Creek police sparked controversy this week when police were accused of trying to cover up what happened by claiming all details surrounding the incident were “confidential” and the public did not have the right to even the most basic information. At one point the department refused to acknowledge the death by citing federal privacy statutes on healthcare records. [….]

    Eshleman said as they watched the affair play out, one of the officers tried to speak to Reid in a calm voice, asking him for his name and identification. He also wanted to know how he had gotten into the complex and if he was visiting anyone there.

    It appeared Reid, however, just wanted to be left alone. A check of criminal records reveals that Reid has a lengthy criminal record for drug possession.

    The encounter escalated and Reid was Tasered by at least three of the officers, the couple said.

    Eshleman also said she recalled that while Reid was on the ground, one of the officers struck him in the head with what appeared to be a metal baton.

    After being Tasered and struck, Reid eventually did collapse. He was handcuffed and shackled but then complained he couldn’t breathe. When the officers finally rolled him over onto his back it appeared he was dead.

    Paramedics, who were already on the scene, worked on Reid and took him away in an ambulance. But the couple said it appeared to them Reid was already dead.

    Here’s on that officer in Madison. MPD officer who shot Robinson part of officer-involved shooting in 2007

    Koval said Kenny had responded to a 2007 disturbance on Camden Road that he called a “suicide by cop.” Kenny received a commendation for his response to that incident, Koval said.

    Koval asked the “community to wait patiently” as the state’s Department of Justice continues its investigation into Friday’s shooting, noting that MPD will stay out of the DOJ investigation to keep “their findings of fact untainted or untouched by” MPD.

    But Koval said MPD will now more than ever continue engaging with the community and listening to their concerns.

    “I made a trek out to the family,” Koval said. “I thought their needs should come first. … We definitely don’t want to be M.I.A., we don’t want to be missing in action now [at] the most critical time when the police has to stand up and take those questions and take that concern to heart.”

    In Selma, GOP Lawmakers Explain Why They Don’t Support John Lewis’ Bill To Restore Voting Rights Act

    Dozens of members of Congress, and many more Republicans than ever before, came to Selma this week to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the infamous attack on voting rights protesters known as Bloody Sunday.

    Some lawmakers told ThinkProgress the event highlighted the urgency of passing a currently languishing bill that would restore the full powers of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Others showed little interest in doing so.

    On his way to the commemoration ceremony, Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) said it’s been “powerful” to hear stories from Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), who helped lead the Selma march 50 years ago and was severely beaten by police. But when ThinkProgress asked if he supports Lewis’ voting rights bill, he replied, “I haven’t looked at it. Is there a Senate version?”

    A Senate version was introduced several weeks ago, and currently has zero Republican sponsors.

    Portman, who has advocated for cuts to Ohio’s early voting period and voted against the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, added before walking away: “This day is about more than just tweaks to the Voting Rights Act. This is about ensuring equal justice and learning from the lessons of the past.” [oh wow, more than just ‘tweaks’ to the VRA!!! WOW. …]

    “We are witnessing a renewed assault on voting rights and civil rights, and we in Congress have work to do,” Rep. Terri Sewell (D-AL) told ThinkProgress. “I’m not going to force my own views on my colleagues or question their motives, but I hope people come away with a renewed sense of their responsibility as lawmakers to further those ideals.”

    Other Democrats on the delegation were much more pointed.

    “It is a sin that we have not in the U.S. Congress re-invigorated the Voting Rights Act and gotten it back to the President for a signature. That’s what we ought to be talking about in Selma today,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).

    Vermont Senator and rumored presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I) added, “What happened on that bridge that day was a huge step forward for democracy in America. But what is happening right now – not just in the South but all over this country – are efforts by Republican governors and Republican legislatures to make it harder for African-Americans, for low-income people and for senior citizens to vote.”

    Some civil rights leaders, including Wade Henderson with the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, accused some of the visiting lawmakers from both parties of hypocrisy.

    “Commemoration requires legislation. Selma isn’t just a photo op, it’s a solemn remembrance of the blood, sweat, tears, and lives that went into securing voting rights for racial minorities in this country,” he said. “The Bloody Sunday march is not a parade, and it is hypocritical for members to attend the event and then do nothing to advance a VRA restoration.” […]

    But other lawmakers on the delegation said the most effective pressure won’t come from inside Congress, but from the grassroots. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) told ThinkProgress that just like 50 years ago, “It’s the young people and the peaceful protests that are going to force Congress to do the right thing.”

    Family Rep. Speaks After Unarmed Wis. Teen Shot by Cop

    The 19-year-old black man who was shot and killed by an officer on Friday was unarmed, the police chief of Madison, Wisconsin, said on Saturday. The teen was identified as Tony Terrell Robinson Jr., a graduate of Sun Prairie High School, a family spokesman and authorities said. “It’s a challenging time for this family right now. To lose a son, especially the way they lost a son,” said the family spokesman, Michael Johnson. Chief Mike Koval said during a press conference the officer who shot Tony Terrell Robinson, Jr. identified the officer who shot Tony Terrell Robinson, Jr. as Matt Kenny, 45, and said he has more than 12 years of experience. Kenny was involved in a shooting in 2007 but was cleared of any wrongdoing because it was a “suicide by cop-type” case, Koval said. Police said Kenny shot Robinson on Friday night after Robinson assaulted the officer. Kenny is on administrative leave pending the results of the investigation. Some 100 protesters took to the streets of Madison after the shooting, according to witnesses and reports, with video showing the crowd chanting: “Who can you trust? Not the police.”

  249. rq says

    President Obama’s Speech in Selma, same as before, text only.

    Ferguson Became Symbol, but Bias Knows No Border

    If the shooting of Michael Brown had taken place about 500 yards to the southeast, he would have died not in Ferguson, Mo., but in the neighboring city of Jennings. The court system there, which is overseen by a white judge but has almost exclusively black defendants, routinely sends people to jail for failure to pay minor traffic fines, a new lawsuit alleges.

    Had the shooting occurred three and a half miles to the north, the world’s attention might have turned to the city of Florissant, where in 2013, the police stopped black motorists at a rate nearly three times their share of the population. Less than four miles to the northwest, in Calverton Park, court fines and fees accounted for over 40 percent of the city’s general operating revenue last year.

    But it was Ferguson and its government that came under federal scrutiny almost unprecedented for a city of its size, culminating in a Justice Department report last week that described explicit racism among city officials, abusive policing and a system that seemed to view people “less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.” And it is Ferguson that will almost certainly be forced to make wholesale changes. […]

    Across the country, a mounting number of investigations and lawsuits have focused attention on the justice system’s heavy burdens on the poor. In Alabama, which has tried to make up for deep cuts to court funding by imposing fees like $35 for posting bail, half a dozen lawsuits contend that local courts perpetuate a cycle of steep fines for minor offenses and jail for those who cannot pay. And as early as 2009, Florida became a model for aggressive collection of court fees and fines.
    Continue reading the main story

    “There’s clear case law that police can’t illegally search you for no reason, but it happens 10,000 times a day,” said Alec Karakatsanis, a co-founder of Equal Justice Under Law and the lead lawyer in suits against Ferguson and Jennings. “The Constitution is not self-executing.”

    While statistics alone are not clear-cut proof of discrimination, there are cities around St. Louis with far greater racial disparities in traffic stops than Ferguson, and cities with court systems that appear even more predatory than the Justice Department says Ferguson’s is. According to a report from Better Together, a nonprofit group, Ferguson does not even rank among the top 20 municipalities in St. Louis County in the percentage of its budget drawn from court fines and fees. The small city of Edmundson, five miles away, brings in nearly $600 a year in court fines for every resident, more than six times the amount in Ferguson.

    Antonio Morgan, the owner of a car repair business, has spent months in various St. Louis County jails, paid thousands of dollars and been shocked by a Taser, mostly because of traffic violations. “People are actually getting mad that everybody thinks it’s Ferguson, Ferguson, Ferguson,” Mr. Morgan, 29, said. “They pull over a lot of black people, yeah, but they’re not the worst, I’ll tell you that. It’s worse ones than that.” […]

    Brendan Roediger, a professor at Saint Louis University School of Law, said the only solution was to discard the county’s municipal court system and replace it with something else.

    “I don’t think that it could possibly be fixed,” said Mr. Roediger, who, along with Arch City Defenders, a nonprofit legal group, is suing several municipalities over their court practices. “The system is absolutely rotten from the core.”

    He pointed to the routine ticket-fixing by officials across city lines described in the Justice Department report. This collusion, along with the everyday transfers of people from city jail to city jail, shows just how much the municipal governments are tied together, he said.

    Qiana Williams, 36 and the mother of a 9-year-old girl, said she had been jailed multiple times for traffic violations. She was once arrested when she called the police for help after a former boyfriend hurt her. None of this took place in Ferguson, she said: Some of her worst experiences were in another county altogether.

    “They’re all suffering from the same problems,” said Ms. Williams, who is black, adding that she had already been working with a group of activists to plan a protest against the municipal court in Pine Lawn when the shooting of Mr. Brown in August drew the protests northwest to Ferguson.

    “St. Louis knows that it’s not just a Ferguson problem,” she said. “I don’t know if the country knows.”

    Lots more good stuff in the skipped bits.

    A mostly white voter wave is reshaping politics in D.C.

    A surge of young, mainly white voters living in newly affluent neighborhoods emerged as a powerful force in last November’s elections in the District, a seismic shift that mirrors the evolution of the city’s population and could reshape its politics in years to come.

    For the first time in 40 years, voters between the ages of 25 and 34 outnumbered senior citizens, an analysis of election data shows. Also for the first time, African Americans, who historically have exerted the greatest influence over District politics, lost their majority among voters.

    The young voters cast ballots in gentrifying neighborhoods such as NoMa (short for North of Massachusetts Avenue), the H Street corridor and Shaw, while turnout declined in working- and middle-class African American precincts east of the Anacostia River. The shift appears to have been a key to the overwhelming passage of a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana that took effect last month.

    For decades, African Americans defined the nation’s capital, their majority population infusing the city’s neighborhoods, culture and politics. In local elections, black voters powered the victories of mayors such as Marion Barry and Vincent C. Gray.

    But in recent years, the city’s population exploded — and blacks lost their majority status. Younger, more affluent residents moved into neighborhoods at the city’s core and became involved in politics and local issues. […]

    The sharpest declines in voter turnout occurred in African American neighborhoods in Ward 7, east of the Anacostia River, which formed a crucial bedrock of support for Barry and Gray. While young voters migrate to neighborhoods defined by new restaurants and other amenities, black residents in long-established areas complain that the development boom has not reached them.

    “People are losing faith in the leadership,” said Gary Butler, a Ward 7 community leader explaining the drop-off in voting. “There’s no one making them want to go to the polls. They’re thinking it’s business as usual.

    “We’re getting the same people doing the same things all the time,” he said. “People are burnt out and frustrated.” [..]

    The turnout statistics from last November, if sustained, suggest that the formula for political success in the city could change. Chuck Thies, who managed Gray’s unsuccessful 2014 reelection bid, said younger voters represent “an enormous opportunity” for candidates to “tap into a new part of the electorate.”

    “The emergence of a new, potentially powerful voting bloc challenges the dominance of the African American voting bloc,” Thies said. “Not that you can ignore the African American base. But a candidate can surely cobble together a coalition that doesn’t depend on the traditional stronghold of older African Americans.”

    Among older African Americans, the District’s transformation has enhanced the sense that their importance has been diminished, particularly within the city’s power structure. A majority of the D.C. Council is now white. The recent death of Barry, once a symbol of black prominence in Washington, was another sign of a changed city.

    Yet, whether the electoral shifts are fleeting or indicate deeper change is a puzzle that will be answered only in future election cycles.

    12:30pm. Brown Chapel AME Church. Selma. Today. Pre-bridge crossing rally. See you there. #Selma50

    YALL-the craziest revisionist history I’ve ever read in my life, dangerously packaged in a propagandist kids book:

    Cop who killed unarmed 19-year-old #TonyRobinson was cleared in 2007 shooting death…

  250. Pteryxx says

    Adding to the stack above – video of the entire Selma event at DailyKos,

    and most of all, Rep. John Lewis’s remarks to introduce Obama: (youtube link) (but the automatic captions are awful)

    Democracy Now speaking briefly to John Lewis: (link)

    and a long NPR interview from 2009: Congressman, Civil Rights Icon John Lewis

    Rep. LEWIS: When growing up, I saw segregation. I saw racial discrimination. I saw those signs that said white men, colored men. White women, colored women. White waiting. And I didn’t like it. I would ask my mother and ask my parents over and over again, why? They said, that’s the way it is. Don’t get in the way, don’t get in trouble. I was so inspired by Rosa Parks in 1955. I was 15 years old. I was inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr. I heard his words on all radio. It seemed like he was saying to me, John Lewis, you too can make a contribution.

    GROSS: What was he saying on the radio?

    Rep. LEWIS: He was saying…

    GROSS: Was this a sermon or something or a speech?

    Rep. LEWIS: It was a speech but also a sermon. He was speaking at a church in Montgomery. And he was saying, in effect, that we must not just be concerned about the Pearly Gates and the streets with milk and honey. We have to be concerned about the streets of Montgomery and the doors of Woolworth. That we have to be concerned about jobs, about blacks working as cashiers, of people being able to try on clothing and bring down those signs. And I said to myself, if I ever got a chance to strike a blow against segregation and racial discrimination, I’m going to play my part or do my part.

    I was so inspired by Dr. King that in 1956, with some of my brothers and sisters and first cousins – I was only 16 years old – we went down to the public library trying to check out some books, and we were told by the librarian that the library was for whites only and not for colors. It was a public library. I never went back to that public library until July 5th, 1998 – by this time I’m in the Congress – for a book signing of my book, “Walking with the Wind.”

    GROSS: Your memoir.

    Rep. LEWIS: And they gave me a library card after the program was over. And I was inspired. I studied the philosophy and the discipline of non-violence in Nashville as a student, and I staged a sitting-in in the fall of 1959 and got arrested the first time in February 1960.

    GROSS: Now, you describe the difficulty your parents had accepting the risks that you were taking as a civil rights activist. As an activist, did you find it was difficult to convince the older generation to join up with the movement? Was it easier to convince younger people than older people?

    Rep. LEWIS: It was much easier to convince younger people, to convince students, whether they were high school or college students. In the South during that period, there was so much fear. There were people that were afraid to be a friend(ph). But there were others who said, we’ll hold the mass meetings, the rallies, the voter registration workshop in a church. It was this feeling, well, it’s taking place in a church. It must be OK. It must be all right.

    There was ministers, religious leaders that was afraid to say anything from their pulpits because they thought, for good reason, the church could be burned down, could be bombed. So we had to do a lot of convincing. And we would go into the fields where people were working in the fields and try to convince some of the field workers. We would go into beauty shops, the barber shops, knock on the doors of people’s homes trying to get them to become participant, to get involved, to come to a rally, come to a mass meeting.

    GROSS: Give me a sense of what you’d say.

    Rep. LEWIS: We would said to people, you know, you’ve been living here for 40 years, for 50 years. Your street is not paved. You have a dirt road. You don’t have clean water. If you want to change that, you must register and you must vote. You can get someone else elected. Come to a mass meeting, come next Monday. The neighbors are coming. Your uncle is coming. Your children are coming. You should be there. I tell people, we’re going to have a march for the right to vote. Don’t be afraid. You may get arrested, but a lot of other people will be getting arrested with you. And some people would be convinced, and some would not.

  251. rq says

    Key grand jury witness resigns over black abortion joke: Darren Wilson’s supervisor exposed in DOJ report. There should no longer be any doubt about the system and its interconnectedness.

    One of the two veteran Ferguson police commanders who resigned on Thursday, March 5, Sgt. William Mudd, was the first police supervisor on the scene at Canfield Drive following the fatal shooting on August 9 and the first person to speak to Wilson about the event.

    Mudd testified to the grand jury on September 16. The witness’ name is redacted in the transcripts provided to the public by St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert P. McCulloch. However, the Ferguson police sergeant who testified to interviewing Wilson soon after the shooting also testified about his own role shooting and killing a threat at St. Louis County Courthouse in 1992, for which Mudd was awarded a Medal of Valor. Mudd also belatedly filled out an incident report about Wilson’s fatal shooting of Brown, which confirms this witness is Mudd.

    Sgt. Mudd resigned on Thursday, according to the Post-Dispatch, following his identification as the police commander responsible for emailing one of the jokes about black people circulated within the Ferguson Police Department. Mudd reportedly was responsible for emailing (in May 2011) a joke about CrimeStoppers paying a black woman to have an abortion. The DoJ noted that no one at the time was censured for circulating the racial jokes, which in fact tended to be forwarded to others approvingly.

    Mudd’s finding humor in this joke about a black woman’s abortion stopping crime puts into perspective his testimony before the grand jury on September 16. It also shows something about the mindset of the first police supervisor to arrive on the scene of an officer-involved shooting where the deceased was left lying on the pavement for four and a half hours while canines were deployed for crowd control.

    What Sgt. Mudd expected from Canfield Green residents when he arrived at the scene on August 9 comes up in his grand jury testimony. It is the first thing assistant prosecutor Sheila Whirley (who is black) wanted to talk about after taking over questioning from assistant prosecutor Kathi Alizadeh (who is white). It’s a puzzling exchange where – as often happened in these proceedings – the prosecutor presumes to speak for the police officer she is supposed to be questioning. […]

    Mudd has described a modern culture of disrespect for police where “most of the time it is under their breath or just barely within earshot,” but police are always being disrespected in vulgar terms. Given the DOJ’s finding that Ferguson Police devote nearly their entire time to ticketing and arresting black people, it must be black people disrespecting police “under their breath.” Finally, the grand jury is beginning to hear something about the “business relationships” that Mudd and Wilson have in the black community and how the sergeant feels about those relationships.

    But Whirley did not probe. She moved onto logistics of the incident.

    Eventually, she came back to something Mudd had said earlier under questioning by Alizadeh. He had testified that, according to Wilson, Brown taunted Wilson that the cop was “too much of a pussy” to shoot him.

    “This is the first time we heard about ‘too much of a pussy to shoot me’,” Whirley said. In his previous recorded statement to the FBI, Mudd did not include that detail.

    “I recalled that since my recorded statement,” Mudd said, explaining that he recorded his statement to the FBI in the heat of August protests when he “was working 12-plus hours a day.”

    Mudd’s assumptions and expectations about the black community, and how they might lead him to email a joke about abortion stopping crime in the black community, remain veiled in his grand jury testimony. But his assumptions and expectations about use of lethal force as a police supervisor come through loud and clear.

    Whirley recalled something Mudd said in his recorded statement to the FBI about being required, as Wilson’s supervisor, to ask him “stupid questions” about how the officer might have prevented killing the teenager.

    “This question is not meant as any disrespect,” Whirley said, “but your recorded statement you said that, um, you have to ask stupid questions like how this could be prevented?”

    “I’m sorry?” Mudd responded, either confused or needing a moment to frame an answer.

    “In your recorded statement,” Whirley repeated, “you said that you are required to ask officers stupid questions like how could this incident prevented?”

    “That’s on the injury report,” Mudd responded – going no further than identifying where he is asked the question, without explaining why he thinks the question is “stupid.”

    For once, the prosecutor kept going.

    “You feel that’s a stupid question,” Whirley asked, “because you feel your officers don’t have any other choice?”

    “Correct,” Mudd answered.

    “When you are in that kind of situation?” the prosecutor added.

    Then Mudd laid bare his professional opinion of the justified use of lethal force: “When you are physically attacked unprovoked, I believe ‘how could he prevent this?’ is a stupid question.”

    The assumption is that once an officer has been attacked without provocation – as Wilson and Mudd claim Brown attacked Wilson through the window of the police car – it’s “stupid” to ask what the cop can do to prevent killing his assailant. It was stupid, Wilson’s supervisor thought, to ask Wilson what he could have done to prevent killing Michael Brown Jr.

    Now that we know his taste in jokes about black people like Michael Brown Jr., we know one preventive measure that Mudd might suggested, under his breath or in an email to his colleagues: if the black youth had never been born into his life of crime and disrespect, Mudd’s abortion joke implies, then the police officer would not have had to kill him.

    From the photo and the intertwining relationships all these people had, I’m even starting to wonder if any (or all) of them had any connections to local KKK chapters. Wasn’t Wilson’s wife / girlfriend implicated in something like that?

    Thousands Of Miles Are No Big Deal For These Citizens Traveling To Selma This Weekend

    Asheville, North Carolina
    One North Carolina man if finally getting to make the trip he meant to do 50 years ago. Robert Zachary was only 15 years old when Dr. King led the legendary march from Selma to Montgomery, and his parents thought he was too young to go. Now, at 65, Zachary intends on finally making the journey.
    “I’m going to Selma to give honor and homage to my ancestors, and people of my family who were there and all the great civil rights leaders we don’t always hear about — so many remain nameless, but so many fought so hard to have the right to vote.”

    Casper, Wyoming
    Fifty years ago, Reverend James Reeb was murdered after traveling to Selma to take a stand for civil rights. Today, his family members are returning to that same destination to take part in remembering the cause Reverend Reeb died for.

    Reeb’s oldest son John explains why he’s headed to Alabama, “My family are all going down to do what my dad didn’t do, and that’s finish the march.”

    Chicago, Illinois
    Approximately 50 students from Valparaiso University will travel to Selma for the 50th anniversary. The pilgrimage of sorts is an effort to connect students of the Civil Rights Movement with the living memory of the history they have learned about in their classrooms.

    “We can do a lot in the classroom but you’re connected to these stories in a new way when you’re there,” says VU history professor Heath Carter.

    Columbus, Georgia
    There are more than a few Georgia residents headed to Alabama this weekend. Four buses carrying over 200 people will set off for the ‘Bridge Crossing Jubilee’ on March 8th. The trip was planned in coordination with the Muscogee County Democratic Committee, and has, not surprisingly, sold out.

    Dallas, Texas
    50 Southern Methodist University students are going to carry on the legacy of 50 Southern Methodist University students that came before them. SMU theology undergraduates were a part of the legendary march through Montgomery and their 2015 classmates will ride a bus to the historical site in their memory.

    Oakland, California
    Members of the All Of Us Or None organization will ‘Journey for Justice’ to Selma on Saturday. AOUON is a grassroots organization dedicated to ensuring the civil and human rights of incarcerated individuals and their families. The non profit is traveling in support of voting rights and in favor of an executive order to Ban The Box, which would mean the elimination of questioning about conviction history on initial job applications. The group will travel 2,400 miles by van to reach their destination.

    Tampa, Florida
    Members of the Alachua County branch NAACP will join a bus trip of Tampa residents to the anniversary celebration in Alabama. The chapter’s president, Evelyn Foxx, isn’t the only one excited to make it down — both buses booked for the journey have been sold out.

    Washington, D.C.
    Quite a few Unitarian Universalists made their way to Selma in 1965 to join Dr. King’s legendary march — now, a new generation intends to do the same. Unitarian Universalist Association Moderator Jim Key has called for a return trip on the Amtrak Crescent Train.

    Of course, the rallies and reenacted marches will also be attended by about a hundred members of Congress as well as the First Family and President Barack Obama himself, who will make remarks at the commemoration ceremony.

    Funny, they don’t mention Ferguson at all, though I know several people are present.

    “Black women are not collateral damage, we too are targets of state violence.” #BlackLivesMatter #Selma50 #MarchOn

    How Other Missouri Cities Are Like Ferguson

    A Justice Department investigation into the operations of the Ferguson Police Department found routine racial bias and a focus on generating revenue through municipal fines. But the patterns identified in the report are not limited to Ferguson; some other Missouri cities of 10,000 people or more look similar by several measures.

    That link is all about the maps, be sure to take a look. Maps and numbers.

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  254. rq says

    Jesse Jackson spoke – “Wolves in sheeps clothing must be called out” – Jesse Jackson on the Alabama Governor, Robert J. Bentley #Selma50. The governor of Alabama had some revisionist history yesterday, apparently.

    Interlude: literature. Racism in Publishing: Stephanie Dray’s 50 Shades of Jefferson/Sally Hemings

    In a post on her Facebook author account, author of historical fiction and fantasy, Stephanie Dray, claimed her “spirits are boosted by two things,” one of which was a “50 Shades of Grey/Jefferson Mashup we’ve got in mind.” The other part of that “we” is implied to be fellow author Laura Kaye, who is currently co-writing a book with Dray, about Jefferson’s daughter. Dray goes on to say “Oh, yes, we told our editor about it. Which means it’s happening, people.” This gives the distinct impression that she was serious about publishing the book. If this wasn’t bad enough, Dray went on to respond to comments on the post, exclaiming the idea of Thomas Jefferson “showing Sally Hemings some shackles” was hilarious.

    Now, for those of you who don’t know, an insidious lie has been posited in American historical culture that Jefferson and Hemings had a consensual love affair. This is not true. First, there can be no consent when someone is OWNED by another person. Second, Hemings was 14 years old—a child. Third, Jefferson did not free Hemings and the children they had, his own children, from slavery until after he died. Now explain why imagining Jefferson holding a shackle out to Sally, or whipping her as is common practice in BDSM fiction, is something people should find funny?

    Jenny Trout wrote another post, this time about Dray’s Facebook post. Then she tweeted at both Dray and Kaye. She also tweeted publisher Harper Collins demanding to know if they planned to publish the book. Harper Collins has yet to respond. Stephanie Dray and Laura Kaye have responded. Initially via Twitter with confusion and defensiveness. Kaye even tweeting that “it was a joke.” The tweet was later deleted. As more people joined the conversation, they both began to see the impact of the “joke.”

    Eventually, they each posted apologies. (Trigger Warning: For mentions of rape, that are not actually called rape, and shameless self promotion.) Dray’s can be found here. To summarize its content, she crassly opens her apology by talking about the book she co-wrote with Kaye. She goes on to describe the rape of 14 year old Sally Hemings as “Thomas Jefferson initiated sex with his slave.” Then she claims it was her ambition “to shed light on the devastation of slavery” by writing a book about the white daughter of a slave owner and rapist. She then uses the word “apparently” to cast doubt on the accusations of her racist behavior, even as she admits to it. And claims she thought the joke (which was mocking Sally Hemings’ rape and enslavement) was “mocking our culture’s casual acceptance of women’s lack of consent in sexual circumstances.” She ends the apology by focusing on how she disappointed herself by hurting others in this way. Kaye’s apology (found here) in which she adds a few short lines onto a copy of Dray’s apology, and plugs their book again, replicates the same shallow insincerity.

    It is clear from these apologies that neither author is aware of what they actually did wrong. They downplay the severity of their actions, continually valuing their intentions over the impact of their actions on black women. In fact, they make no direct mention of black women, aside from Sally Hemings, at all in either apology. While many authors, white and people of color alike, have accepted the apologies, to others it seems Dray and Kaye only care about getting back in other white women’s good graces, and selling their book.

    No surprise as Dray’s belief that writing a book about a white woman would somehow shed light on slavery only reinforces that her perspective is centered on white women. It’s no wonder she didn’t understand the impact of her joke until a white woman told her. One wonders if white women hadn’t been upset by her actions, would Dray have ever known they were wrong? […]

    Handler’s and Dray’s racist jokes, and the industry’s instinctive reaction to defend and forgive their harmful behavior, are part of the very real systemic racism faced by black women in publishing. Where someone can not only harm and humiliate black women with impunity, but those who do so have direct power and influence on the success and survival of black women in the industry.

    This is undeniable proof that black women are not safe in the publishing industry.

    They are at risk every minute of every day, whether they are best-selling, award-winning, traditionally-published authors or self publishing their first book. They will be faced with racism from industry powerhouses like Handler, or peers like Dray and Kaye. On social media, at industry parties, or on stage at national award ceremonies black women are forced to deal with racism in order to work in this industry. That is what systemic racism looks like, that’s the very real harm created by Dray’s racist joke, and those who so easily forgive and forget her mistake.

    Black women don’t get to forget. They have to go to conventions with Dray and Kaye. They will be forced to sit on panels beside them, and wonder what jokes will be made at their expense once they’re out of ear shot. Worse yet, Black women will have to smile, shake hands, and network with them. Or just as worse, they’ll be forced to deal with people who defended them.

    That’s the hazardous and harmful work environment we create for black women when we allow this kind of behavior to continue unchecked. Even as I write this post I know there are those who have already moved on. Dray and Kaye certainly have. But before you do, I want you to think about every black woman you know.

    Can you say that it is acceptable for them to have to work in these conditions? Are you willing to tell them that their humanity and dignity is the price of doing business in this industry? If not, don’t forget or forgive. Don’t move on, until we’ve made this industry a safer place for black women.

    The only positive thing to come from this event was how women united in support and the black women authors. The day after the news about Dray’s racist joke broke, the #BlackWomenAuthors tag on twitter exploded with support. Authors, bloggers, and readers alike tweeted book and author recommendations. These tweets crossed genre, as well as race and gender lines. All kinds of people tweeted and retweeted in support of black women authors. It is still going today, go check out the tag and join in the fun.

    The #BlackWomenAuthors tag is great start at changing the industry for the better. I hope we continue to celebrate black women, and prioritize their safety above all else. They deserve nothing less.

    “@deray: Y’all, this is the doorway that #TonyRobinson was killed in, taken today. Organizer just sent it to me. ” Yes, that’s his blood on the doorstep. Because they dragged him out.

    Black Lives Matter Protesters Interrupt Obama In Selma

    On Saturday, President Obama spoke at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the 50th anniversary of the attack on voting rights protesters known as Bloody Sunday.

    “Our march is not yet finished, but we are getting closer,” he said. ” If Selma taught us anything, it’s that our work is never done – the American experiment in self-government gives work and purpose to each generation.”

    As he spoke, a group of protesters wearing shirts with airbrushed portraits of those killed by police started banging on drums and chanted, “Ferguson is here. We want change!” and “This is what democracy looks like.”

    Obama did not pause his speech or acknowledge the interruption. But some older people in the crowd became angry, shouting at the young protesters: “Your vote is your voice! Get registered!”

    A few of the demonstrators were removed by state troopers, and the rest agreed to remain silent.

    @deray @YeaaahAboutThat How poetic that a bridge named after a KKK white supremacist cannot handle the weight of EVERYBODY on it.
    I’m hearing the march across the bridge is cancelled because it can’t hold that many people. May or may not be true #Selma50.

    Lesley M., Mike Brown’s mother, is here at Brown AME. #Selma50

  255. rq says

    Moderation.
    More from Selma.
    Never-ending crowd headed for the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. #Selma50
    Even the police are in awe of how many people are here. #Selma50M
    “The reason I can fight the way I fight is because they on AM, I’m on FM, we not on the same frequency” Rev Al #Selma50
    “Yall can get mad but you’re not on juries because you’re not registered to vote” Rev. Al Sharpton #Selma50
    I hope that Sharpton listens to his speech and internalizes his words. He is delivering a powerful word to his mirror. #Selma50
    Rev. Al is now making the correlation between the Klan being Christians and.. Idk. Lost. Nvm.

  256. rq says

    So yeah Sharpton didn’t necessarilyl eave the best impression.
    Sharpton is speaking. People are starting to leave the church. #Selma50
    I don’t even know what to say about this speech happening at the pulpit. Sigh. #Selma50

    Selma. Now and Then. #Selma50
    I just don’t understand how an unarmed #TonyRobinson was killed a few days ago by the police and no speaker in #Selma50 acknowledges it.

    Our election system’s anti-minority bias is even worse than you think

    In the wake of the recent gutting of the Voting Rights Act, partisans were quick to jump on the opportunity to restrict unfavorable voters. Across the country, conservatives in particular have debated fiercely whether to pursue voter suppression to remain competitive in an increasingly diverse electorate. There was, however, another way out, as I’ve argued before: Socially and economically conservative values are not unpopular, and if conservatives were to cease supporting people who made speeches at KKK rallies, they could garner enough votes to remain competitive. I worried, though, that the temptation of voter suppression would be too great. And, indeed, a new paper by Ian Vandewalker and Keith Bentele indicates that partisans have chosen the path of voter suppression to an even greater extent than previous thought.

    When the conservative Supreme Court struck down key parts of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, states flocked to impose voter ID laws. Early research by Bentele and Erin O’Brien found these laws were “highly partisan, strategic, and racialized affairs.” Another study finds that “where elections are competitive, the furtherance of restrictive voter ID laws is a means of maintaining Republican support while curtailing Democratic electoral gains.” Support for voter ID laws among the American population is strong, but also racially based: Voters are significantly more likely to support a voter ID law when they are shown pictures of black people voting than when shown white people voting. […]

    The study finds that between 2006 and 2012, the most influential factor in determining whether a law would be passed was Republican control of government. It also finds that the level of anti-black stereotyping in a state (a measure based on survey respondents’ beliefs about work ethic and intelligence) strongly correlates with the proposal (though not the passage) of voting restrictions. Vandewalker and Bentele find that states with a recent increase in Democratic turnout were more likely to pass a restriction indicating “the passage of voter restrictions as a partisan response by Republicans to recent Democratic electoral gains.” States with large black populations were significantly more likely to pass restrictive laws. Finally, they note that what little voter fraud exists does not correlate at all with voter restrictions.

    The GOP has dramatically expanded its control of state legislatures in recent years. Before the 2014 election, Republicans controlled 59 of the 98 state legislative chambers; they now control 67. MSNBC recently reported that Republicans are already working to pass voter ID laws in five major states. Bentele and Vandewalker’s analysis indicates that “restrictive voting laws are often discriminatory responses to minority voting strength.” They find that the correlation between anti-black attitudes in the state and a restrictive voting system increased between 2010 and 2013. Conservatives have moved beyond just pushing for voter ID and have also worked to curb early voting and other important methods to increase access.

    To see the combined effect of all these different measures, I obtained the data that Vandewalker and Bentele compiled. I find that there is a strong raw correlation between their ease of electoral access index and voter turnout (see below). Using a variation of their analysis, I also find that electoral systems are significantly more open in states with a higher white population. The ease of accessibility index was also strongly correlated with voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election. Combined with the large academic literature showing that voting restrictions reduce turnout and that turnout affects the outcomes of elections, there is a strong case that the current push to reduce voting rights is rooted in partisan ambitions. […]

    There is some hope: The Brennan Center for Justice recently found that “190 bills to expand voting access have been introduced in 31 states, compared to 49 restrictive measures in 19 states, the new analysis found.” This is a welcome development, however, my analysis of the Bentele dataset indicates that the overall change is positive, but modest. The chart below shows how voting access has changed between 2010 and 2014. States on the line remain the same, states above have seen voting rights contract, and states below the line have seen voting access increase. In total, 16 states increased accessibility while 14 states decreased accessibility. The mean score on the accessibility index shifted from 6.27 to 6.38 (assuming that all the passed laws go into effect).

    I think that’s a repost, but oh well.

  258. rq says

    Our feature doc on @TorontoPolice violence to play in Hollywood, Winnipeg, Chicago, Montreal, Hamilton, Durham (NC)+, screening list here: https://whatworldproductions.com/screenings/

    And no, I did not come to Selma to see a parade of celebrities. Hopefully we can get out of this space sometime soon. #Selma50
    The people inside the church have been told that they can’t leave until extra security comes. #Selma50
    The Mayor notes that he’s called in additional law enforcement support from the governor given the crowds today. #Selma50
    I guess more people showed up than expected, it is said that the Mayor estimated the number around 80 000.

  260. rq says

    There is no photo that can convey how packed the bridge is. It’s incredible. Like, wow. #Selma50
    Here’s an attempt: The. Bridge. Is. Packed. #Selma50
    The Edmund Pettus Bridge #Selma50

    Just ran into the a portion of the Ferguson crew and Mike Sr. is here. #Selma50

    Tangential yet relevant. TW for rape. Bill Cosby sexually assaulted me. I didn’t tell because I didn’t want to let black America down.

    Like many of the women who say they were assaulted by Bill Cosby, it took me two decades to gain the courage to reveal it publicly. His accusers – mostly white, so far – have faced retaliation, humiliation and skepticism by coming forward. As an African American woman, I felt the stakes for me were even higher. Historic images of black men being vilified en masse as sexually violent sent chills through my body. Telling my story wouldn’t only help bring down Cosby; I feared it would undermine the entire African American community. […]

    Historical context also has fueled much of this doubt. Last year, before I revealed my own story, I called a very dear African American friend and asked her what she thought about the women accusing Bill Cosby. “I don’t believe these white women,” she said. “They are just trying to destroy another black man.” It pained me terribly to hear her say it, but I knew her perspective wasn’t uncommon. Black people are sensitive to the fact that, for centuries, images of African American men as threats to white women have been used to justify oppressing them. […]

    Eventually, it was the vicious anger that some directed at Barbara Bowman, Victoria Valentino and the other courageous women who spoke up about their assaults by Cosby that convinced me to come forward. I saw in their eyes the same deep pain that I had been experiencing silently for years. Other women of color started speaking up to say they had been drugged and/or sexually assaulted by Cosby, too, and model Beverly Johnson eventually joined them. When I finally told my story in the New York Daily News in November, it was hard for me to look other African American people in the eye. On some level, I felt that I had betrayed black America. And some of my African American friends seemed too hurt by the damage to Cosby’s image to offer me any support. The friend who had dismissed the stories of Cosby’s white accusers, for instance, didn’t offer me any words of comfort.

    Soon after I told my story, I ran into a successful African American photographer who asked me, “Sister, is it true?” The tone of his question made it sound like our father had died. “I’m sorry, brother, but it is true. Do not let this weaken you in any way,” I told him.

    Cosby was once a source of hope for many African Americans. But fictional icons like him should not wield so much power over our collective spirit. Our nation’s greatest African American heroes have been on the front lines of Civil Rights efforts, not in our television sets. They are in the mothers and fathers who fought real-life challenges to raise us and in the teachers and professors who worked long hours to educate us. Bill Cosby did not lead the March on Washington, and “The Cosby Show” didn’t end racism. The only legacy at stake is of one entertainer, not of black manhood, as I once feared.

  262. rq says

    Atlanta students spending Spring Break in Ferguson to help register voters

    50 students from different colleges in Atlanta are spending their Spring Break in Ferguson to help register voters.

    “In Atlanta, they had people walking in lanes on freeways. Well, that’s kind of dangerous,” said Richard Rose, President of the Atlanta NAACP. “We [decided] to focus on something safe and productive. It gives them a chance to vent their emotions.”

    The NAACP is responsible for organizing students and bringing them to the St. Louis area. Many of the students, who all come from different colleges, say it’s not about a free trip. It’s about changing the community.

    “We are going door-to-door to get people registered to vote for the April 7 election,” said Christian Smith of Clark University. “[We want] to make sure they know they can change what’s going on as long as they vote.”

    Smith, along with students from Spelman College and Morehouse College, want to be active in the community. Smith says it’s easy to go protest and hold signs. “I want to actually do something,” Smith said. “And coming here is a good way to do that.”

    The students are set to arrive Wednesday and News 4 will be sure to track their progress.

    Key grand jury witness resigns over black abortion joke: Darren Wilson’s supervisor exposed in DOJ report

    One of the two veteran Ferguson police commanders who resigned on Thursday, March 5, Sgt. William Mudd, was the first police supervisor on the scene at Canfield Drive following the fatal shooting on August 9 and the first person to speak to Wilson about the event.

    Mudd testified to the grand jury on September 16. The witness’ name is redacted in the transcripts provided to the public by St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert P. McCulloch. However, the Ferguson police sergeant who testified to interviewing Wilson soon after the shooting also testified about his own role shooting and killing a threat at St. Louis County Courthouse in 1992, for which Mudd was awarded a Medal of Valor. Mudd also belatedly filled out an incident report about Wilson’s fatal shooting of Brown, which confirms this witness is Mudd.

    Sgt. Mudd resigned on Thursday, according to the Post-Dispatch, following his identification as the police commander responsible for emailing one of the jokes about black people circulated within the Ferguson Police Department. Mudd reportedly was responsible for emailing (in May 2011) a joke about CrimeStoppers paying a black woman to have an abortion. The DoJ noted that no one at the time was censured for circulating the racial jokes, which in fact tended to be forwarded to others approvingly.

    Mudd’s finding humor in this joke about a black woman’s abortion stopping crime puts into perspective his testimony before the grand jury on September 16. It also shows something about the mindset of the first police supervisor to arrive on the scene of an officer-involved shooting where the deceased was left lying on the pavement for four and a half hours while canines were deployed for crowd control.

    What Sgt. Mudd expected from Canfield Green residents when he arrived at the scene on August 9 comes up in his grand jury testimony. It is the first thing assistant prosecutor Sheila Whirley (who is black) wanted to talk about after taking over questioning from assistant prosecutor Kathi Alizadeh (who is white). It’s a puzzling exchange where – as often happened in these proceedings – the prosecutor presumes to speak for the police officer she is supposed to be questioning.

    Coalition of Black Leaders Supports DOJ Action in Ferguson

    A group of black elected officials, clergy, and the NAACP held a news conference outside the Ferguson Police Department, Sunday afternoon, to support the findings of the U.S. Department of Justice’s probe into the police department, and to demand action be taken to reform Ferguson law enforcement.

    St. Louis County Councilwoman Hazel Erby said change is not possible without holding leadership accountable in this situation, “Over the past couple of days, Mayor Knowles has admitted no wrong in this situation. He has allowed for several people named in the report to resign, but has no intention of doing any more than that.”

    St. Louis NAACP president Adolphus Pruitt is hopeful the Missouri legislature will take up the cause of people whose records were tainted by bogus traffic stop arrests made by Ferguson Police, “There’s no reason in the world for anybody to be wrongfully-arrested, incarcerated, then find out it was false.”

    State Representative Courtney Curtis of Berkeley told the gathering he plans to ask for full expungement of the charges against those pulled over without probable cause.

    Curtis also pledged to go after wrongs within municipal court systems around the state, “We will file legislation that prevents judges from being able to serve while having outstanding tax issues. It doesn’t seem right to be able to levy fines on individuals when you are not in good standing yourself.”

    Curtis was referring to reports that have surfaced about a north St. Louis County municipal judge allegedly owing $170,000 in back taxes.

    Curtis said specifically about Ferguson Police reforms, he’ll call for a community meeting, where residents can tell what they’d like to see done.

    Ferguson resident Mary Robinson has already made up her mind, “We need new leadership here in Ferguson that can inspire the hearts and minds of our diverse community, not just a chosen few.”

    A bit more from Selma, where all kinds of people showed up: Found who’s drone it is. @AJCalloway and the TV show Extra #Selma50
    “Black Lives really Matter. And if you believe that, then you know there’s work to do.” – Maxine Waters #Selma50

    Clergy at Ferguson PD calling for resignation of city officials. 60 degrees today is a beautiful day for resignation.

  263. rq says

    Ferguson protesters in Selma: The Civil Rights Movement isn’t just for history books

    More than 1,000 people outside the Brown Chapel in Selma, Alabama, were waiting for morning mass or trying to snap a photo of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson on Sunday, as the two reverends climbed out of their cars and slipped inside. But the crowd also glimpsed a small group of mostly young men and women chanting and marching in the street with their hands in the air.

    The group was from Ferguson, Missouri, the site of widespread protests against police treatment of minorities, which began in August after a white police officer there shot and killed an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown. Demonstrators from Ferguson were in town over the weekend to commemorate the 50th anniversary of a 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, known as “Bloody Sunday.” Their goal: to remind the country that the Civil Rights Movement isn’t only something you learn about in school.

    “Unfortunately, we have involuntary martyrs,” DeMarco Davidson, a 34-year-old African-American from Ferguson, told Mashable. “Jimmie Lee Jackson was an involuntary martyr. Mike Brown was an involuntary martyr.” […]

    “We came down here to pay respect to the ones before us,” Buckley told Mashable. “We didn’t come down for the media or any of that.”

    His statement may seem ironic, given that he was talking to a reporter. However, Buckley was referring specifically to the hype surrounding Bloody Sunday’s 50th anniversary, including the commemorative t-shirts, buttons and bags on sale, the VIP tickets to get into different church services, and how the cameras are so often trained on famous figures such as Sharpton.

    “A lot of people don’t know what Selma is; they don’t know the history behind it,” Loki Jackson, a 16-year-old African-American protester from Ferguson, told Mashable. “We’re coming down here to honor the people who risked their lives to cross that bridge.”

    Jackson said he wasn’t impressed by the large number of people who crowded as close as they could to Edmund Pettus Bridge on Saturday afternoon to see U.S. President Barack Obama speak. He wasn’t very impressed with Obama, either. Instead, Jackson said he wants more acknowledgement that he and other African-Americans in Ferguson and across the U.S. are facing brutalities similar to those seen in Selma 50 years ago.

    More than just words, he wants action.

    Cotton Field to the White House. #Selma50

    More American White Women Are Dying Prematurely. I linked an article on the topic in the Lounge a while ago, though this one seems to emphasize the racial aspect more, so this time it goes here. Anyway, it’s definitely a good article pointing out an issue, but something about it makes me uncomfortable. I can’t really point out what, though perhaps addressing the high rate of dying women only when it becomes a white issue has something to do with it.
    Or the fact that the death of white women is worth a lot of articles, yet the high rate of death among black women isn’t. (This is the impression I get from the article – it’s like they don’t even wonder why so many black women die, not really, but when white women start dying more, it’s like WHOA!)
    [/opinion]

    Selma and Ferguson

    This past summer, I arrived in Ferguson four days after Michael Brown’s death, in August, and began talking with people in the Canfield Drive community, where he had been shot by the police officer Darren Wilson. Conversations about Brown’s death often dovetailed with broader assessments of aggressive policing, the onerous ticketing and fines that made many people afraid to leave their communities, and the bureaucracy that enabled these problems. This is why the news that the Department of Justice found insufficient cause to file federal charges against Darren Wilson pales in light of the Ferguson report, released on the same day.

    On the afternoon that preceded the first chaotic hail of tear gas and flash grenades from Ferguson police, in response to the initial round of protests that followed Brown’s death, I talked with Etefia Umana and Malik Ahmed, two longtime activists in the greater St. Louis area, both of whom are part of a community organization called Better Family Life. Ahmed pointedly told me that Brown’s death was a product of the relentless drive to generate revenue on the backs of poor people and to use the police as the chief mechanism for achieving it. He told me about residents who had quit their jobs because minor traffic violations had grown into huge financial burdens and arrest warrants. People reasoned that driving to work made them more vulnerable to being pulled over and arrested. Better Family Life began sponsoring an annual warrant-amnesty day with the municipal court. By the organization’s estimates, as many as four thousand people would come to the local high school to have their cases adjudicated, or to negotiate for additional time to pay court fees.

    The hundred and two pages of D.O.J. findings read like a script about police corruption: a man who is sitting in his car after playing basketball in a public park is detained by an officer, accused of being a pedophile, and given eight citations. A woman who calls the police to report a domestic disturbance is arrested for a code violation. A clergyman pumping gas into a church van is handcuffed, detained, and insulted by a police officer investigating a theft at a nearby Dollar Store. From the safe remove of a television screen, the bedlam that erupted following the grand jury’s failure to indict Darren Wilson, in November, was commonly derided as an example of black lawlessness. But people who lived in Brown’s community understood that, in fact, lawlessness had been rampant long before that November night, and that it was far from a uniformly black concern.

    Race has blinded us to a good deal of what has happened on the streets of Ferguson. Subtract the reflexive recrimination and defensiveness attending Brown’s skin color, and it becomes clear that the Department of Justice report is not simply about racial profiling but also about corruption, though that word is never used in the report. The fact that the primary victims of this corruption are black, and the fact that the people who turned Ferguson’s city services into a revenue machine are white, means that it takes more time and effort to recognize what was happening in Ferguson as graft. If we have learned anything new from the D.O.J. report, it is about the ways in which racism facilitated corruption, and the way that stereotypical views of black criminality camouflaged a practice of targeting—and all but extorting revenue from—African-American residents.

    National Review led its coverage of the report with the headline “The Injustice the DOJ Uncovered in Ferguson Wasn’t Racism.” Of the report’s findings, Ian Tuttle, who wrote the accompanying article, argued,

    But what the material in the report reveals is less a culture of racial animus than one of predatory government: “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices,” states the report, “are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs.” In the interest of expanding its treasury, Ferguson has employed its police department — 58 officers, policing a town of 21,000 — as an enforcer of the myriad municipal regulations that, rigorously enforced, nickel-and-dime the citizenry to the local government’s benefit. This is the injustice on which the Justice Department has stumbled, which helps to explain the city’s racial tensions — and which merits urgent correction.

    To arrive at this point, one must conclude that multiple reports of police hurling racial epithets at black residents and a string of racially derisive jokes e-mailed between Ferguson court and police officials do not represent “a culture of racial animus.” One would have to overlook the fact that blacks in Ferguson were searched by police twice as often as whites, despite the fact that they were twenty-six per cent less likely to be carrying contraband, suggesting that race in itself constituted a basis for suspicion. That suspicion fell not only on impoverished people who happened to be African-American but also on black business owners and clergy members.

    This hesitance to reckon with the fullest implications of Ferguson was not confined to conservative critics. In his speech in Selma on Saturday, even President Obama spun the damning findings into a more optimistic narrative:

    Just this week, I was asked whether I thought the Department of Justice’s Ferguson report shows that, with respect to race, little has changed in this country. I understand the question, for the report’s narrative was woefully familiar. It evoked the kind of abuse and disregard for citizens that spawned the civil-rights movement. But I rejected the notion that nothing’s changed. What happened in Ferguson may not be unique, but it’s no longer endemic or sanctioned by law and custom, and before the civil-rights movement it most surely was.

    The President intended to make a useful clarification, yet it’s nearly impossible to overlook the fact that the battles in Selma were animated by a local police force empowered to uphold a racially toxic status quo on behalf of a white minority population. Ferguson’s is not a singular situation. It is an object lesson in the national policing practices that have created the largest incarcerated population in the Western world, as well as a veil of permanent racial suspicion—practices that many people believe will deliver safety in exchange for injustice. What happened in Selma is happening in Ferguson, and elsewhere, too. The great danger is not that we will discount the progress that has been made but that we have claimed it prematurely.​
    I wish this article had been longer. Oh, and if you want to read the National Review article, you’ll have to go through this link.

    @deray I kid you not, there is a big Confederate Flag flying here in Tampa right off I-75. Biggest slap in the face. In a location where they want to build a future Confederate Memorial Park. Whoa.

    Bridgeton City officials call on protest organizers to get permits to demonstrate

    City officials are calling on protest organizers to acquire permits before holding any future demonstrations after marchers disobeyed authorities last Saturday and blocked traffic on one of the city’s busiest streets during a rally for Jerame Reid — the man shot and killed by Bridgeton police officers on Dec. 30.

    There was no permit for the march, but city officials said they agreed to let the organizers go ahead with the rally so long as the demonstrators used the sidewalks while on East Broad and West Broad streets — located in the city’s downtown area.

    But the agreement was broken when the large group of roughly 200 protesters ignored authorities and marched into the busy intersection of South Pearl and East Broad streets, which police had not blocked off, and then up West Broad Street to the Cumberland County Courthouse, where the rally would conclude. […]

    “I support their opportunity and right for a peaceful protest,” Kelly said. “If something happened — I thanked our police department for their work they did to ensure that we had a peaceful protest.”

    Bridgeton City Councilman Mike Zapolski said he stands by the public’s right to protest “so long as it doesn’t interfere with public safety.”

    “Obviously they have a right for what they are doing,” Zapolski said. “But they still need to have consideration for other people.”

    City administrator Dale Goodreau said the city has been trying to work with the organizers of the protests. But with the tense moments at last Saturday’s rally, he too, called for permits.

    “If you’re going to have people marching up the street, they need to come in and file for a permit to close off the street,” he said.

    The march began at South Avenue and Henry Street — where Bridgeton police officers Braheme Days and Roger Worley fired the shots that killed Reid following a traffic stop. From there, demonstrators walked about a mile to the courthouse.

    The Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the use of deadly force in fatal shooting, which was captured on a police dashboard camera. Both officers have been placed on paid administrative leave.

    Walter Hudson, chairman and founder of the Penns Grove-based National Awareness Alliance and primary organizer of the protests held in the city following Reid’s death, challenged the calls for a permit.

    “They have nothing in city ordinance that pertains to us marching in the streets,” Hudson said. ” … They are making up rules as they went by, to deter us from marching.”

    However, according to Goodreau, to close a state road for an event or protest, permits must be obtained from the city, county and state.

    Hudson said he definitely plans on holding future marches in the city. However, he said it “remains to be seen” whether the demonstration will disobey officials’ orders and go the same route to the courthouse.

    Well, also, if you block off the streets, you can warn residents and visitors in advance, and then they can avoid the blighted area, and then no one will have to look at people protesting for black lives that matter, and voila, problems solved! Protestors protest, nobody is particularly (or at least, unexpectedly) disrupted, and woo! life goes on! :P

  264. rq says

    Blockquoute fail for the ‘Selma and Ferguson’ article, it should all be quoted with double-quotes down to the sentence “I wish that article was longer”, those two sentences are my only commentary.

    Calif. Bill Banning State Sale Of Confederate Flag Passes

    AB2444 by Assemblyman Isadore Hall, D-Compton, is headed to the Senate after passing on a 72-1 vote. Hall introduced the bill after his mother saw replica Confederate money being sold at the state Capitol gift shop.

    He called the image a symbol of racism meant to intimidate.

    “Its symbolism in history is directly linked to the enslavement, torture and murder of millions of Americans,” Hall said of the Confederate flag. “The state of California should not be in the business of promoting hate toward others.”

    The only lawmaker to vote against the bill was Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, the leading Republican candidate for governor.

    “We shouldn’t be here picking the kind of speech we like,” he said. “I am not standing here defending the symbol. I am standing here defending the principle that the First Amendment principles should apply in all state buildings, of all places.”

    The bill originally banned all sales of Confederate flag memorabilia on state property. In explaining that provision, Hall noted a sign sold at the state fairgrounds depicting a Confederate flag with the phrase “It’s still my American flag.”

    He amended the bill to exclude non-government employees and businesses from the ban to avoid violating constitutional free speech protections.

    Courts have upheld the rights of individuals to display the Confederate flag while also upholding the rights of government agencies to limit what they endorse.

    “We aren’t stifling free speech here,” said Assemblyman Donald Wagner, R-Irvine, calling on Republicans who oppose flag burning to understand the symbolic implications of the Confederate flag. “Here is a symbol that’s so vile, that carries such connotations, that we in the state do not want to be associated with it.”

    Well done, California.

    Knowles: Accusations of racism in leadership are ‘ridiculous’

    Ferguson Mayor James Knowles says he and city council are evaluating who may be responsible for wrongdoing, following a searing report from the Department of Justice.

    The report accuses the Ferguson Police Department and Municipal Court of making revenue the top priority, rather than public safety. It also accuses the city of operating under racially biased practices.

    Mayor Knowles calls accusations of racism in city leadership ‘ridiculous.’

    “The city of Ferguson has actually made improvements over the past decade, made tremendous strides the last decade, and again is far less than many other communities [in reference to disparity index]. So, I think that’s an unfair characterization,” said Knowles.

    The mayor says he also does not believe Ferguson police have been giving people tickets for violations they did not commit. The DOJ report says police often give out three to four tickets in a single stop.

    “Obviously we cannot have the city focus on revenue as a means of law enforcement. But I think it also needs to be fair that these officers, when they go out there, were not necessarily being untruthful in their job,” said Knowles.

    This week, the attorney general called the police department a ‘collection agency.’ The mayor says operating as a ‘collection agency’ would go against city policy. So, he and city council are evaluation who may have broken policy. He says that evaluation includes the police chief.

    “At this point, the chief continues to work here. He’s been dedicated for the last six months to make improvements to this community, make improvements to this police department to make us more effective and more oriented toward community service and more oriented toward community policing. And that’s what we’re focused on right now,” said Knowles.

    Knowles says the evaluation also includes the city manager, who’s accused in the DOJ report as praising increasing revenue from court fees. And, the evaluation includes the finance director, who the report says encouraged the police chief to increase ticketing in order to increase revenue.

    “Everything that is outlined in the report, we are going to assign where the shortfall was, where the disconnect was, wherever something may have happened wrong or could have been done better or could have been avoided. And, we’re going to make changes based on what we think is necessary to move the community forward,” said Knowles.

    Knowles also says the city plans to continue meeting with the DOJ in order to help implement changes.

    Autoplay video at the link. And honestly? Evaluating the wrongdoing? When it’s the entire fucking bunch? He’s not disinterested enough to decide who is the wrongdoer and who isn’t, especially if he’s been turning a blind eye to this behaviour for who knows how long. Perhaps even participated. Fuck him.

    KKK fliers left at Selma homes on 50th anniversary of ‘Bloody Sunday’

    Ku Klux Klan fliers were left at Selma homes on the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.”

    Robert Jones, the grand dragon of the Loyal White Knights of the KKK spoke with AL.com Sunday afternoon and said about 4,000 KKK fliers have been distributed throughout Selma and Montgomery in the last two weeks.

    “We pretty much put out fliers, some against King and some against immigration,” Jones said. “It’s time for the American people to wake up to these falsehoods that they preach about MLK.”

    Jones said bags containing a flier and a rock were thrown onto the doorsteps of people’s homes as KKK members drove by. He said the rock acted as a paperweight, and the homes that received fliers were random.

    Jones said the KKK is not upset about the gathering in Selma over the weekend, saying “Everybody has a right to gather in this country, freedom of speech.” However, he expressed frustration about the support for Martin Luther King, Jr. and said people are “supporting a man they don’t know about.”

    According to Jones, the fliers were also a way to try to attract new members and to remind the community the KKK still exists.

    “The Klan is still out there and we are watching,” Jones said.

    Okay, if anything, that is scary, and creeping. ‘We are watching’. *shudder*

    A word from Colin Powell: Colin Powell ‘shocked but not that surprised’ by Ferguson report

    “I know these things that existed in other parts of our country. This shouldn’t have been that great a surprise to any of us,” Powell said on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” “But it’s not throughout the country. What we have to do now, then, is for all of the police departments, all of the mayors and county and other officials throughout the country, take a look in the mirror. See what you’re doing.”

    The report also found the Ferguson police had a system of using law enforcement to extract money from black residents. Powell said police departments need to more closely consider their practices.

    “Are you really arresting people just so you can get the money needed to run the government? That’s not right. And are you doing it in a discriminatory manner so that African Americans, Hispanic Americans and folks in the low-income levels of the society are paying the price in order to sustain your government or the police force?” he asked. […]

    Powell also reflected on the event in Selma, Ala., on Saturday that marked the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” when civil rights protesters suffered brutal beatings.

    “The event in Selma touched me very much because, you know, 50 years ago, I was stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, and I was also going back and forth to Birmingham, Alabama, during a very, very difficult time, and what that Bloody Sunday event did for the nation was to hold up a mirror in front of all Americans and said, look, this is what’s going on in this country. This cannot continue,” he said.

    Federal judges order California to expand prison releases, to fight overcrowding, not through some magnanimous sense of justice

    The judges, for a second time, ordered that all nonviolent second-strike offenders be eligible for parole after serving half their sentence. They told corrections officials to submit new plans for that parole process by Dec. 1, and to implement them beginning January.

    “The record contains no evidence that defendants cannot implement the required parole process by that date, 11 months after they agreed to do so ‘promptly,'” the judges wrote in Friday’s order.

    But the federal judicial panel did not take action on other steps it had ordered California to take last February. Those include increasing the sentence reductions minimum-custody inmates can earn for good behavior and participation in rehabilitation and education programs.

    Touches on using prisoners as cheap labour, too.

    Local governments have a huge diversity problem

    This interactive by the NALP shows how many new minority legislators would be needed for each each state to achieve proportionate representation.

    The United States has an immigrant population of 70 million (native and foreign born consisting of mainly Asians and Latinos), which accounts for nearly 22 percent of the country’s populace and is the fastest growing among all groups. This will soon begin to dwarf other communities. The Pew Research Center estimates that by 2050, only 47 percent of the US population will be non-Hispanic white. This increasing shift in demographics has not been reflected in the election of government officials, but it could be an indicator of things to come. […]

    Although Asians and Latinos are well represented in border states like California, Arizona and New Mexico, representation is more uneven in the East, which also has a areas of concentrated foreign-born population.

    Larger minority representation doesn’t always mean that interests will be looked after. Arizona, for example has strict border enforcement laws, and its Hispanic base wasn’t able to stop the state’s 2010 bill, Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, which imposed high penalties on immigrants. Rather, they were only able to dilute some of its extreme clauses.

    The political alienation of Asians and Latino interests has kept them out of local government, but in time, growing immigrant populations could mean larger minority representation in government.

  265. rq says

    Here’s a story out of Ferguson for you, going to take about 2 and a half comments to tell:
    So let me tell ya’ll about the police situation that nearly ended badly about 15 minutes ago in Canfield.
    So after the Anti-Racism Workshop concluded the amazing, god-tier folks from NOLA wanted to pay their respects to Mike. Right?
    So we decide to take them to the memorial so their blessings could be delivered. A simple mission; pull up, pray, pull out. Right?
    Note: Every member of the People’s Institute from New Orleans is a senior citizen. One of them brought their 80 year old mother. Right?
    So as we help Grandma Richards out the car with her walker… guess who flies down Canfield Dr., nearly hitting her? Ferguson PD.
    They showed up 3 trucks deep with a captain trailing them from behind in his car.

    tbc

  266. rq says

    As we get our elderly guests out of the way the captain pulls up on us & asks “There a fight going on here?” We just… fucking look at him.
    There we were in broad daylight LITERALLY HELPING SWEET OLD LADIES CROSS THE STREET. And Ferguson cops show up in force.
    So we answered with “There wasnt the slightest sign of a problem until ya’ll showed up.” The police captain then laughed.
    Did I mention we were LITERALLY HELPING AN ELDERLY WOMAN CROSS THE FUCKING STREET!?
    The dope part was that a bunch of Canfield residents walked outside with phones & cameras. Community Love. Community Policing.
    So yeah. I ran cops from a racist police department out of a Black neighborhood today. What ya’ll doing?

    just a bit more next…

  267. rq says

    For a split second I thought they were gonna arrest Grandma Richards for jay-walking. Or shoot all of us. For jay-walking.
    Seeing a squad of racist cops in a Black neighborhood is terrifying. Running that same squad out without violence is liberating.
    And that’s the kind of shit that still happens in Ferguson.

    Music Stars Commemorate Selma Anniversary on Social Media

    President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama made a trip to Selma, Al., to speak at the 50th anniversary of the civil rights “Bloody Sunday” march on Saturday afternoon (March 7).

    “We gather here to honor the courage of ordinary Americans,” President Obama said in his speech. “What enormous faith these people had: faith in God, but also faith in America.”

    Numerous music stars — including John Legend, Janelle Monae and Ledisi — remembered the Selma anniversary on social media. Read their tributes below.

    This one gets cross-posted, too.The murder of Ahmed Al-Jumaili in Texas should be a front-page story.

    On Thursday, the last night of his life, three and a half inches of snow fell on Dallas, the most since 1942. It was almost midnight when he and his wife stood outside to take photos of this new sight, in the country that was to be his new home. As they lingered, what residents would later describe to police as two to four men, moving on foot, entered the small complex. One or more of the men raised a rifle and shot Al-Jumaili. Police would later find bullets lodged in nearby cars as well. He died a few hours later at a nearby hospital; he was 36 years old and had been in the US for three weeks.

    Another parking dispute, I suppose.

    Wisconsin chief treading carefully after fatal shooting

    While Ferguson police initially gave little information about the shooting of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old, unarmed black man, Koval rushed to the home of Robinson’s mother. She didn’t want to meet with him, he said, but he talked and prayed with Robinson’s grandmother in the driveway for 45 minutes.

    It took a week for Ferguson to release the name of the officer who shot Brown. Koval announced the name of the officer involved in Madison, Matt Kenny, the day after the shooting. He volunteered to reporters that the officer had been in a previous fatal shooting in 2007, and that he had been cleared of wrongdoing.

    On the day that Ferguson police named the officer who shot Brown, they also released video showing what they said was Brown robbing a store. When Koval was asked about Robinson’s past criminal record Saturday, he declined to comment, saying it would be inappropriate to do so a day after the man died.

    “We have a police chief who genuinely feels for a family’s loss. It should be abundantly clear to anyone following this incident that Madison, Wisconsin, is not Ferguson, Missouri,” said Jim Palmer, executive director of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, the state’s largest police union.

    But the chief’s measured approach hasn’t impressed some demonstrators. Koval angered some of them earlier this year with a blog post demanding they stop blaming police for their problems.

    “There are no apologies that can repair the loss or deal with the loss of (Robinson),” said Brandi Grayson, an organizer with Young, Gifted and Black, a Madison group that has demonstrated against what it says is mistreatment of blacks by the justice system. “This was bound to happen. There’s nothing the chief can say short of changing the system.” […]

    Two months ago, Koval wrote a blog post criticizing Young, Black and Gifted for blaming his officers for “everything from male pattern baldness to global warming.” The entry came in response to the group staging protests over officer-involved deaths during rush-hour traffic, demanding jail officials release 350 black inmates and imploring police to stay out of black neighborhoods.

    Koval tried to be diplomatic when asked about the post on Saturday, saying he and the group have agreed to disagree on policing black neighborhoods.

    Grayson said Koval has had plenty of time to prepare for a racially charged shooting after watching what unfolded in Ferguson.

    “He had a perfect response — perfect for white people,” she said.

    Shirley Chisholm broke boundaries as the first black Congresswoman and “dared to be herself.” #IfWomenRuledTheWorld

  268. rq says

    @deray have you noticed how the klan is following the movement around the country? Makes you really wonder who burned what in #Ferguson

    Diane Nash: “I Refused To March Because George Bush Marched” [VIDEO]

    In an exclusive with Roland Martin’s NewsOne Now during the fiftieth anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” MLK lieutentant Diane Nash tells why she refused to march across the bridge with former President George W. Bush —in her mind, he was a man who condoned violence.

    Nash, who was in King’s inner circle during some of his most significant campaigns, including Selma, minced no words.

    “I refused to march because George Bush marched,” Nash told NewsOne Now’s Roland Martin on Saturday. President Bush was the only other ex president in attendance who took part in the events of the weekend.

    “I think the Selma movement was about non-violence and peace and democracy,” she continued. “And George Bush stands for just the opposite. For violence and war and stolen elections.”

    After saying that the event was “not appropriate for him,” and that his administration “had people tortured.”

    “I think that George Bush’s presence is really an insult to me and people who do not believe in non-violence.”

    Nash, who clearly did not let her years temper her courage or conviction, is widely considered the architect of many of King’s campaigns, and one of the only women in his inner circle. She was portrayed by actress Tessa Thompson in the film of the same name.

    Madison police shooting offers stark reminder that city’s race issues run deep

    After Robinson’s death, protests began. Some chanted “Black lives matter”, the slogan associated with demonstrations after the deaths at the hands of police last year of two unarmed black men, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, in Ferguson, Missouri and New York City.

    A Facebook page supporting the Madison police department, meanwhile, was launched on Saturday afternoon. It quickly gained nearly 7,000 “likes”.

    On Saturday morning, the Young, Gifted and Black Coalition, which has been advocating for criminal justice reform in the city and county since 2013, called a meeting. Matthew Braunginn, a coalition member, said approximately 150 people attended and between 400 and 500 then marched to the location of Robinson’s death.

    “We’ve been warning Madison that this could happen, and we were laughed at by certain community members,” Braunginn told the Guardian in a phone interview.

    Brown said the coalition has been pressuring the city and county for changes related to criminal justice and community investment.

    “When we invest in people, we get a return back,” he said. “But when we arrest people, we don’t get a return in costs to society. It costs a lot of money, and it costs people their lives.”

    One of the group’s aims is to have Madison shift its spending away from jail renovations towards investments in services that will improve opportunities for low-income neighborhoods. Another is to reduce the number of black people incarcerated so the number is proportional to the city’s black population.

    In 2013, a report by Race to Equity, an initiative run by the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families, found that in 2011, 80% of youths in juvenile detention facilities in Dane County, where Madison is located, were African American. They represented only 9% of the county’s population. The report also noted that African American youths were arrested six times more often than their white counterparts.

    A 2007 report from a national nonprofit, the Justice Policy Institute, ranked Dane County third in the nation in racial disparities for drug-related crimes.

    Such statistics were well known to the Madisonians who on Saturday attended an afternoon gathering at the Fountain of Life Church. Carter, along with Robinson’s grandmother, Sharon Irwin, accepted hugs and condolences. The mayors of Madison and neighboring Monona participated, along with state assembly member Melissa Sargent and leaders from Madison’s faith and non-profit communities. As of that time, the family had not been granted access to Robinson’s body.

    Saying Robinson’s death made him heartsick, Reverend Alexander Gee Jr, pastor of the Fountain of Life church, recommended a soul-searching analysis.

    “What have we done to allow this to happen?” he asked. “We have the worst disparity for kids in the country, and we are just tooling right along. How are we benefiting from the status quo? Because until we answer that, we won’t really be able to make changes.”

    Gee has been campaigning against what he sees as the city’s entrenched racial disparities through the Justified Anger Coalition. He says he realised “that being from this community, professional, middle-class, graduate degree … I could still experience some of the same things that common criminals do”.

    At the gathering, Madison’s mayor, Paul Soglin, told the Guardian that since the killing was being investigated by the Wisconsin Department of Justice, he had no information on why officer Kenny had used his firearm rather than a taser when reportedly struggling with Robinson. He also acknowledged racial disparities in the city’s policing.

    “How can you talk about the land of the free when the land ain’t free? Ya know? It’s blood on the land” Dr. Bernard Lafayette #Selma50

  269. rq says

    We just met with Dr. Lafayette, chairman of SCLC & original SNCC Selma Organizer and Raymond Arsenault, writer of “Freedom Riders” #Selma50
    I didn’t know that Diane Nash was the main trainer of the Freedom Riders. And that there were 436 Freedom Riders. #Selma50
    Arsenault spoke of Diane Nash as “the secret weapon” of the Freedom Riders because of her intense discipline. #Selma50
    Arsenault also spoke about how the Freedom Riders intentionally chose non-violence over more “emotionally satisfying” alternatives. #Selma50
    “Ferguson is now a concept, a condition, a model, an example of what’s happening in other places.” – Dr. Lafayette #Selma50
    Dr. Lafayette also told us to document everything. He lamented that he didn’t journal during the CRM. #Selma50

  271. rq says

    Funeral expense fund for Anthony “Terrell” Robinson. Please give what you can. #TonyRobinson, the link: gofundme.com/tonyterrell

    Civil rights leader to Ferguson protesters: “Let the president speak’

    Civil rights leader Bernard Lafayette was listening intently to President Barack Obama’s speech in Selma on Saturday afternoon when he began to hear what sounded like a drum beat and chants of “We want change, we want change.”

    After several minutes, he rose from his chair and, accompanied by the Rev. Darryl Gray, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference friend, they made their way through a large crowd behind him to where the commotion came from.

    Lafayette said one of the young demonstrators told him they were from Ferguson, Missouri, where a police officer fatally shot a young, unarmed black man last year — an event that led to weeks of violent protests.

    “I asked them why they were making such a ruckus, and one told me they were upset that the president wasn’t addressing their concerns, but never really told me what they were,” said Lafayette. […]

    “It wasn’t spontaneous,” said Lafayette, who had been sitting next to his wife, Kate, in a special seated section. “It was well planned and when I asked who their leader was, it turned out to be an older woman.”

    He said one of the demonstrators began crying that nobody would listen to their complaints and Lafayette let him know that he had been arrested 27 times during the protests he was involved in and once was targeted for assassination in Selma.

    Lafayette, who will be 75 in July, originally was a member of the Nashville Student Movement and worked closely throughout the 1960s with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, better known as SNCC.

    Gray said Lafayette approached the noisy group in a “peaceful manner” and had no interest in causing a problem during Obama’s speech that was interrupted several times. Lafayette found a way to quiet the protesters when one of the group’s leaders told him they had “freedom of speech” and that’s when I asked why they didn’t let the president speak.

    At that point, the drum beats and shouts of “We Want Change” stopped.

    As far as Obama’s speech was concerned, Lafayette was impressed and gave the president an “8” on a scale of 1-10.

    Here’s another dedicated to post-racial America: Video Surfaces Allegedly Showing OU Fraternity Members Chanting Racial Slur

    In the brief video, you can hear and see the members loudly chanting together, “There will never be a n***** SAE.” SAE is a reference to the fraternity’s Greek letters.

    The chant repeats the first verse, then goes on to say, “You can hang them from a tree, but they’ll never sign with me.”

    The video is believed to have been shot on Saturday while the fraternity was on a chartered bus for a date night.

    University President David Boren first responded to the video on his Twitter account, saying, “If the video is indeed of OU students, this behavior will not be tolerated and is contrary to all of our values. We are investigating. –Dbo”

    Later, Boren issued another statement on this incident: “I have been informed of the video, which shows students engaging in a racist chant. We are investigating to determine if the video involved OU students. If OU students are involved, this behavior will not be tolerated and will be addressed very quickly. If the reports are true the chapter will no longer remain on campus. This behavior is reprehensible and contrary to all of our values.”

    Sigma Alpha Epsilon also issued the following statement regarding the situation via Twitter, Sigma Alpha Epsilon is aware of the video and is both shocked and appalled at what we have seen. Those types of behaviors are not consistent with our values whatsoever. We are investigating the details and will sanction those who are responsible.”

    SAE National President Brad Cohen responded on Twitter as well, “The chapter has immediately been placed on a cease & desist. No place for racism. They will be dealt with! I know I speak for all when I say I’m disgusted and shocked by the video involving our @sae1856 chapter at U of OK. They will be dealt with.”

    Leadership at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon national headquarters is also looking into this incident, but just before 10:30 p.m. issued a press release saying that they will in fact close the SAE chapter at the University of Oklahoma.

    Students from the university are, of course, planning a protest. Freeze Peach, amirite???
    Racism is still alive. @UofOklahoma Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) Fraternity Chant. This is the youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O79I9GoLe0 It was reported as being down a while ago, but it is up.
    More action and opinion on this later.

  272. rq says

    Politicians, religious leaders and citizens call for action against Ferguson

    Elected officials, religious leaders and citizens are calling on the Department of Justice to take action against the city of Ferguson. The group met outside the Ferguson Police Department Sunday afternoon.

    “We have not stopped fighting for justice,” said Rev. Darlene Smith, President of the AME Alliance.

    State Rep. Courtney Curtis, (D) Berkeley said he will introduce legislation to expunge the records of anyone pulled over with no probable cause. He also plans on introducing legislation prohibiting attorneys from serving in multiple municipal court capacities.

    “Right here in this very region we have individuals that serve as judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys. No wonder they didn’t see a problem,” said Rep. Curtis.

    The DOJ report found systemic racial discrimination by the Ferguson Police department. The report also criticized the city for using its court system as an ATM.

    St. Louis County Councilwoman Hazel Erby, (D) 1st District, wants Eric Holder and the Department of Justice to know she supports whatever changes they deem necessary.

    “Let Ferguson be the example of what’s not acceptable in America,” said Erby.

    Ferguson Mayor James Knowles has said the city is looking into the DOJ report. He said the city is in the process of determining if changes in the forms of staffing, policy or procedures are needed.

    “Hopefully at the end we’ll emerge one of the most professional police departments in the area,” said Knowles during a Friday interview with FOX 2’s Chris Hayes. “When this is all done, the city of Ferguson is the only police department in St. Louis that has had anybody look into them like this.” ​

    OU’s SAE Is Going To Wish This Very Racist Video Didn’t Get Leaked, another on SAE at Oklahoma University.

    A pathetic display of inhumanity was recorded by an occupant aboard what appears to be a chartered bus full of Sigma Alpha Epsilon members from the University of Oklahoma. In the video, an enthusiastic chant is heard that includes the phrase “There will never be a n*gger SAE!” being repeated, followed by “You can hang ‘em from a tree, but they’ll never [inaudible] with me!”[…]

    UPDATE: The SAE chapter at OU has been placed on a “cease & desist.”

    @samswey @deray is this the same Sigma Alpha Epsilon that Arizona State banned last year?
    @killerswan @deray Yes. And the same one that Stanford banned in 2012.

    Back to Selma, Standing by a Selma resident who’s saying that her friend got arrested while trying to file a report re: the KKK letter he got. #Selma50
    It seems that Obama’s visit changed so much of the schedule that cleared the schedule re: workshops. Unfortunate. #Selma50 Because he didn’t speak when originally scheduled, and then was late. Too bad.

  273. rq says

    To sort of finish up with the fraternity thing, The racist frat, SAE, at Oklahoma University has police protection tonight as they move out of their frat house. America.
    #SAE video isnt isolated incident. OklahomaCity police killed black ppl at 9th highest rate of all US police depts. Thats out of 18,000 PDs.
    In light of OU SAE controversy, photo shows visible confederate flag hanging from OSU SAE house. Story to come soon.
    On #SAE – remember these young white men are our future lawyers, politicians, business owners… And they are the sons of our current ones.

    University of Oklahoma Fraternity Closed After Video of Racist Chant

    Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s national headquarters closed its chapter at the University of Oklahoma Sunday after a video emerged purportedly showing members of the chapter singing a racist chant.

    The video quickly gained visibility online. It was obtained and posted to Twitter by Unheard, which describes itself as “an alliance of black students organized for change within campus administration and atmosphere.” The video shows young men on a bus chanting, “There will never be a n—-r at SAE.”

    The tweet, directed at OU president David Boren, said “Racism is alive at The University of Oklahoma.”

    Students at the university planned to demonstrate on the Norman, Oklahoma, campus at 7:30 a.m. local time. A prayer vigil was held Sunday night.

    The frat house was vandalized overnight, defaced with graffiti.

    Chelsea Davis, one of two co-directors of Unheard, said the video was recorded during the weekend. Unheard was started at the beginning of the semester to demand change, especially relating to diversity issues, Davis said.

    “Clearly in that video, that is nothing new. That is nothing that just sparks up overnight. That is a chant that was well-known, well-versed, and seemed to be OK with everybody that was involved,” said Davis, a junior at the university.

    Boren responded on Twitter, saying, “If the video is indeed of OU students, this behavior will not be tolerated and is contrary to all of our values.”

    Brad Cohen, the national president of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, said the chapter “has immediately been placed on a cease and desist.”

    In a statement, the national SAE organization said it closed the Oklahoma Kappa chapter at the University of Oklahoma and suspended all of the fraternity’s members — and the members involved with the incident could have their membership privileges revoked permanently.

    “We apologize for the unacceptable and racist behavior of the individuals in the video, and we are disgusted that any member would act in such a way. Furthermore, we are embarrassed by this video and offer our empathy not only to anyone outside the organization who is offended but also to our brothers who come from a wide range of backgrounds, cultures and ethnicities,” Sigma Alpha Epsilon wrote in an online statement.

    That’s a lot of apology for being embarrassed, less apology for those who are ‘offended’, or to whom this may have caused pain or distress. ‘Offense’ seems to be the only reaction mentioned.

    And just one more for now, OU Frat Sings About Hanging N*ggers From Trees (Video)

    There was also a second video and in this one you will hear another nigger chant while they are trying to get someone to stop recording.

    The young man who is standing up on the bus really gets into it, I wonder if any of these gentlemen would be willing to sing that in front of African-American students at the University. I am not going to bemoan the fact that racism still exists in society, you already know that. But, the next you wonder why black people always feel like we are fighting an uphill battle in society just think of stories like this and 1000s others that don’t get reported. This is what we have to put up with on a daily basis.

    Think about how we can’t be sure people that are smiling in our faces aren’t secretly chanting things like this behind our backs. That is a burden we carry with us every single day of our lives.

    Yes, that’s not the only chant they know.
    See pictures of cop cars near frat members as they move out of the frat house. As twitter noted, the police can afford to protect these young white racist men but can’t afford the same respect for young black children and men, such as Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and Kajieme Powell. And Tony Robinson.

  274. rq says

    To sort of finish up with the fraternity thing, The racist frat, SAE, at Oklahoma University has police protection tonight as they move out of their frat house. America.
    #SAE video isnt isolated incident. OklahomaCity police killed black ppl at 9th highest rate of all US police depts. Thats out of 18,000 PDs.
    In light of OU SAE controversy, photo shows visible confederate flag hanging from OSU SAE house. Story to come soon.
    On #SAE – remember these young white men are our future lawyers, politicians, business owners… And they are the sons of our current ones.

    University of Oklahoma Fraternity Closed After Video of Racist Chant

    Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s national headquarters closed its chapter at the University of Oklahoma Sunday after a video emerged purportedly showing members of the chapter singing a racist chant.

    The video quickly gained visibility online. It was obtained and posted to Twitter by Unheard, which describes itself as “an alliance of black students organized for change within campus administration and atmosphere.” The video shows young men on a bus chanting, “There will never be a n—-r at SAE.”

    The tweet, directed at OU president David Boren, said “Racism is alive at The University of Oklahoma.”

    Students at the university planned to demonstrate on the Norman, Oklahoma, campus at 7:30 a.m. local time. A prayer vigil was held Sunday night.

    The frat house was vandalized overnight, defaced with graffiti.

    Chelsea Davis, one of two co-directors of Unheard, said the video was recorded during the weekend. Unheard was started at the beginning of the semester to demand change, especially relating to diversity issues, Davis said.

    “Clearly in that video, that is nothing new. That is nothing that just sparks up overnight. That is a chant that was well-known, well-versed, and seemed to be OK with everybody that was involved,” said Davis, a junior at the university.

    Boren responded on Twitter, saying, “If the video is indeed of OU students, this behavior will not be tolerated and is contrary to all of our values.”

    Brad Cohen, the national president of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, said the chapter “has immediately been placed on a cease and desist.”

    In a statement, the national SAE organization said it closed the Oklahoma Kappa chapter at the University of Oklahoma and suspended all of the fraternity’s members — and the members involved with the incident could have their membership privileges revoked permanently.

    “We apologize for the unacceptable and racist behavior of the individuals in the video, and we are disgusted that any member would act in such a way. Furthermore, we are embarrassed by this video and offer our empathy not only to anyone outside the organization who is offended but also to our brothers who come from a wide range of backgrounds, cultures and ethnicities,” Sigma Alpha Epsilon wrote in an online statement.

    That’s a lot of apology for being embarrassed, less apology for those who are ‘offended’, or to whom this may have caused pain or distress. ‘Offense’ seems to be the only reaction mentioned.

    And just one more for now, OU Frat Sings About Hanging N*ggers From Trees (Video)

    There was also a second video and in this one you will hear another n*gg*r chant while they are trying to get someone to stop recording.

    The young man who is standing up on the bus really gets into it, I wonder if any of these gentlemen would be willing to sing that in front of African-American students at the University. I am not going to bemoan the fact that racism still exists in society, you already know that. But, the next you wonder why black people always feel like we are fighting an uphill battle in society just think of stories like this and 1000s others that don’t get reported. This is what we have to put up with on a daily basis.

    Think about how we can’t be sure people that are smiling in our faces aren’t secretly chanting things like this behind our backs. That is a burden we carry with us every single day of our lives.

    Yes, that’s not the only chant they know.
    See pictures of cop cars near frat members as they move out of the frat house. As twitter noted, the police can afford to protect these young white racist men but can’t afford the same respect for young black children and men, such as Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and Kajieme Powell. And Tony Robinson.

  275. rq says

    Saw a sobbing girl tell police that #TonyRobinson was a nice guy & that they’re trying to ruin his reputation. #justice4tony

    St. Louis parochial high school adds facial recognition locks

    The system, now in its second week of use, includes cameras mounted between the double doors at the two entrances of St. Mary’s High School, 4701 South Grand Boulevard.

    Photos of students, faculty, staff, volunteers and other regulars have been uploaded, allowing doors to unlock automatically for them.

    The system also can be programmed to exclude people who don’t belong, such as sex offenders, disgruntled employees or relatives prohibited from contact with students or staff by restraining orders. For them, the doors remain locked and an email or text message is sent to key staff members.

    School President Michael England said the installation comes on the heels of a sobering seminar on school safety he attended recently. In it, he said, a speaker noted that schools do much more to prepare for fire than violence, when the latter is more likely.

    England said he knows the facial recognition system cannot stop someone from breaking through the glass doors, but he said it can help the staff better prepare for an unwanted visitor as well as know who is in the building.

    He said it also helps with his biggest marketing challenge at St. Mary’s — being located in a high-crime neighborhood.

    “I hear all the time, ‘That’s a great school, but oh, that neighborhood,’” England said. “Like all cities, there are pockets of the city that have issues, but we’re not doing it because we have any issues. We believe it’s a very positive step in the right direction.”

    “It provides an extra layer of security, and that can’t be a bad thing,” England said. “I want to tell our families we are doing the very best we can to keep everyone safe.”

    The two-camera system costs about $15,000. Right now, the school is leasing it for $500 monthly. England said he will apply for a safety grant from the Archdiocese.

    The same kinds of cameras can be found inside the St. Louis Circuit Court and several area retailers and day-care operations, said Joe Spiess, a retired St. Louis police major who is co-owner of Blue Line Security Solutions Inc. He and a group of current and retired city officers developed this technology over eight years.

    Report Reveals 10 States Have Withheld Over $50 Million in HBCU Funding – careful, this one has a autovideo in the sidebar that takes ages to find. :P

    A report released by the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities (APLU) reveals several states that are home to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) have withheld nearly $57 million in funding that was designated for the institutions.

    Between 2010 and 2012, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia, Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Florida and Delaware reportedly did not allocate proper funds to some of the minority institutions within their state. Under the Morrill Act of 1890, which established 18 black land-grant universities, the federal government committed to providing financial support to these institutions as long as the state matched that support. While the United States Department of Agriculture continues to provide federal funding to land grant institutions, APLU’s report finds disparities in states matching funds for land grant HBCUs versus predominantly white colleges and universities. When it came to HBCUs, the institutions received more than $244 million from USDA, while states matched just over $188 million. Under congressional mandate, states are not penalized if they cannot or refuse to fund the schools, leaving HBCUs with the responsibility to match the funds up to 50 percent in order to keep the federal allocation. However since 2008, more than 50 percent of HBCU Land Grant schools have applied to be waived of this requirement.

    [Related: Mobile App Entrepreneur on How to Move from Idea to Execution]

    “When the state does not match the funds, the university is on the hook to provide the money back to the USDA,” HBCU Digest reports Dr. John M. Lee Jr., Vice President for the APLU Office of Access and Success saying. “There’s no mechanism now to make states accountable if they don’t match the funds. In fact, it presents a big problem for those HBCUs that want to pursue other USDA grants. If their state legislatures aren’t matching annual funding, and a particular grant requires matching dollars from state governments, some Black colleges may be hesitant to go for that kind of grant.”

    To help solve this issue, APLU recommends state legislatures ensure that proper and fair funding is dispersed to HBCUs and predominantly white schools and that the federal government cracks down on the one-to-one matching by states.

    Death of Texas man with slit throat and missing ear ruled ‘accidental overdose’. Huh. It’s like magic.

    Alfred Wright disappeared Nov. 7 while going to visit a physical therapy client when his truck broke down.

    He called his wife to pick him up, but she called her in-laws instead because she was watching their two son.

    Lauren Wright said her husband was breathing heavily as if in distress when she called back, and his parents found his truck – but not their son – when they arrived at the Hemphill liquor store where his vehicle broke down.

    The clerk told Wright’s father she had seen him outside using his cell phone, but he had suddenly tucked the phone into his sock and took off running “as if his truck was going to blow up.”

    The 28-year-old Wright’s watch and identification were found the following day at a nearby ranch and police organized a massive manhunt, but the search was called off after three days.

    The missing man’s family hired a private investigator and organized their own search party, and Wright’s remains were discovered 18 days later just 25 yards away from where he disappeared, in an area police said they had already searched.

    The official autopsy found that Wright had died from an accidental drug overdose after toxicology tests showed cocaine and methamphetamine in his body and no evidence of severe trauma.

    But Wright’s family was baffled, because they said he never had been known to use drugs – and his partially unclothed body had a slit throat and missing an ear, tongue and two teeth.

    His body was found clothed only in boxer shorts, tennis shoes and a single sock, which had his cell phone tucked inside.

    The medical examiner attributed the injuries to animal and insect activity.

    More at the link. Maybe it was an overdose, but hell, that’s a pretty quick conclusion to draw, I think.

    University of Oklahoma fraternity suspended after racist chant. That’s just the same from Washington Post.

    The video was reportedly first posted on Sunday night by Unheard, an African American activist group at the University of Oklahoma devoted to fighting racism on campus.

    “Unheard is an alliance of Black students from the University of Oklahoma organizing for change within the campus administration and atmosphere at the university,” read a document linked to from the group’s Twitter account. “Our primary areas of focus revolve around the lack of representation and continuous support on campus. Some of the issues of which we are organizing include but are not limited to: Black faculty beyond the African­American studies department, retention rates among Black students, financial assistance/scholarships received by Black students, supportive programs for Black students, ‘The Sooner Experience’, lack of a presence within executive hierarchy, and equitable funding for Black student organizations.”

    Unheard was not immediately available for comment.

    SAE has gotten in trouble for alleged racism in the past. Some examples: In 1982, a chapter of the fraternity was suspended from the University of Cincinnati for sponsoring a mock celebration of Martin Luther King Day that was deemed racist. A similar incident caused a stir at Baylor University in Waco, Tex., in 2006. And in 2013, a chapter at Washington University in St. Louis was suspended after reportedly signing a racist song to an African American pledge.

    Founded in Alabama in 1856, SAE had a strong connection to the Confederacy.

    “Of all existing national social fraternities today, Sigma Alpha Epsilon is the only national fraternity founded in the antebellum South,” according to the fraternity’s Web site. “… The fraternity had fewer than 400 members when the Civil War began. Of those, 369 went to war for the Confederate States and seven for the Union Army.”

    This is also not the first time alleged racism at the University of Oklahoma has made the news. In 1990, student groups reached across racial lines in a yearly performance designed to bring unity to the campus.

    “This year’s act will open with scenes of racial tension and segregation that are part of the everyday life of many OU students and college students across the nation,” the Oklahoman reported at the time.

    And, in 2012, a conservative group accused the school of showing preference for some minority applicants.

    “It should not matter to a university whether an applicant has a particular skin color or what country his or her ancestors came from,” Linda Chavez, the Center for Equal Opportunity’s founder and chairman, said at the time. “In an increasingly multiracial and multiethnic society, the use of racial preferences is unacceptable.”

  276. rq says

    Sending support for @OU_Unheard today as they peacefully demonstrate against the racism at their university. 730AM. North Oval. #SAEHatesMe

    A Coincidental Cup of Kenyan Coffee:
    SNCC and Malcolm X Recast the Struggle in Nairobi     – a 31-page pdf on Malcolm X, John Lewis, and the SNCC. A bit of history for Black History Month. :P

    People On Food Stamps Make Healthier Grocery Decisions Than Most of Us. That’s for those who think their choices should be controlled.

    If you’re wondering why SNAP would subsidize junk food, you’re not alone. Recently, the program has been in the headlines mostly because of Republican efforts to slash benefits. But even among its supporters, there has been a growing movement to rethink how the benefit is targeted. In a 2012 report, a high-profile group of nutrition researchers urged the US Department of Agriculture to run pilot programs to test the effect of banning junk food from SNAP purchases (PDF). In a June 2013 letter to Congress, a group of mayors, including Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel and Newark’s Cory Booker (now the junior senator from New Jersey), echoed that call.

    The argument has undeniable appeal: Why should the already-frayed federal safety net underwrite Coca-Cola’s balance sheet? But the junk-food industry has fought hard to maintain the status quo, lobbying heavily against attempts to impose limits.

    Instinctively, I’d find myself on the side of the reformers—anything to ratchet down Americans’ consumption of empty calories. But deeper into the aisles of Dollar General, I begin to waver. Helber asks me to consider a single mother supporting two kids on a wage of about $9.50 an hour—a typical income for the people served by her food bank, even amid Austin’s ever-soaring tech economy. Helber points out some of the hard decisions the mother would have to make. At $5, a pound of hamburger would be a solid choice—but she’d still have to get buns, condiments, and sides. By contrast, individual pepperoni pizzas are just a buck each, as is a five-pack of chicken-flavored ramen noodles.

    So what about offering SNAP shoppers a carrot of incentives rather than a stick of restrictions? One USDA pilot program in Massachusetts provides a credit of 30 cents for every SNAP dollar spent on fruits and vegetables. The preliminary data shows the program resulted in a 25 percent increase in produce consumption. A similar program that doubles SNAP expenditures at farmers markets—you get $2 worth of fresh produce for every SNAP dollar you spend—has shown similar promise.

    But programs like these cost money—and the prevailing debate in Washington now is about how to cut SNAP funding, not how to improve it. Those in favor of gutting the program argue that its $80 billion annual price tag is too heft. But 65 million Americans, about 1 in 5, have incomes low enough to qualify for SNAP—that is, income at or below 1.3 times the federal poverty line. Of them, around 47 million—nearly half of them children—actually get benefits. And more than 50 percent of all benefits go to households with incomes of less than half of the poverty line (about $9,800 for a family of three in 2013).

    Then there’s the problem of access. Most incentive programs assume that you can easily get to a store that sells fresh produce—which you won’t find at most Dollar Generals. The USDA estimates that 23.5 million Americans live in food deserts, poor neighborhoods where the nearest grocery store is more than a mile away. (A mile might not sound that far, but for those without reliable transportation, it is: Imagine lugging home a week’s worth of food on foot, with kids in tow.)

    I left the Dollar General realizing that dictating what you can buy with food stamps is the kind of thing that only sounds good to people who don’t actually have to survive on a poverty income. No one denies me the occasional candy bar or Coke; why would I feel entitled to exert that kind of control over poor people? And guess what: SNAP recipients already eat more virtuously than the rest of us. A 2008 USDA report found that they are less likely than those with higher incomes to consume at least one serving of sweets or salty snacks per day. More recently, a 2015 USDA study concluded that, adjusting for demographic differences, people who take SNAP benefits don’t consume any more sugary drinks than their low-income peers who aren’t in the program.

    Given those findings, limiting SNAP families’ already-limited choices is just a gratuitous slap in the face. I say, drop the stick and subsidize carrots. There’s precious little appetite in Congress to broaden programs that give SNAP families incentives to buy vegetables; the 2014 farm bill, signed by President Obama last February, included $8.6 billion in overall funding cuts to the program over the next decade (a fraction of what SNAP’s GOP critics pined for). But the idea of subsidizing real-food purchases for SNAP households isn’t dead—the farm bill also delivered $20 million annually over the five next years to continue evaluating the already-existing pilot projects.

    Protests run into third day after police shooting in Wisconsin capital, though without any new information.

    In response to Ferguson probe, Cleaver to introduce bill to curb policing for revenue – isn’t that what Ferguson already had? Though with loopholes?

    The Fair Justice Act would make it a civil rights violation punishable by up to five years in prison for a police officer, chief or department to enforce criminal or traffic laws for the purpose of raising revenue.

    “The time has come to end the practice of using law enforcement as a cash register, a practice that has impacted too many Americans and has disproportionately affected minority and low-income communities,” Cleaver said in a statement provided to The Washington Post. “No American should have to face arbitrary police enforcement whose sole purpose is to raise revenue for a town, city, or state.”

    Much like any other legislation pitched by a Democratic lawmaker, the bill could face a perilous pathway to passage with Republicans now in control of both chambers of Congress. However, some congressional aides think there is bipartisan consensus that some action is needed in light of the national conversation around policing that was sparked by the Aug. 9 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson. […]

    “What we saw was that the Ferguson Police Department, in conjunction with the municipality, saw traffic stops, arrests, tickets as a revenue generator, as opposed to serving the community,” President Obama said in response to the report’s release. “And that it systematically was biased against African Americans.”

    A sea of legislative proposals has flooded statehouses nationwide, and late last year Congress passed the Death in Custody Act, which requires police departments to report anytime someone is killed during an arrest or detention.

    Civil rights groups say their top priority is to pass a bill to ban racial profiling by police departments – which was one recommendation to Obama by the White House Task Force on 21stCentury Policing. But such a bill has been a non-starter with many conservative lawmakers since the early 2000s.

    “Ban racial profiling”? How about some methods?

    Together, we are so loud! #Selma50 #BlackLivesMatter Aerial view of Edmund Pettus Bridge. Whoa.

  277. rq says

    March 9th, 1892
    Three Black Grocers Lynched in Memphis, Tennessee

    In March 1892, three young black men, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Steward, opened the People’s Grocery Company in Memphis, Tennessee. Located across the street from a white-owned grocery store that had been the local black community’s only option, the new business reduced the white store’s profits and threatened the racial order by forcing whites to compete economically with blacks.

    A white mob formed, intent on using force to put the black grocery out of business, and the black grocers armed themselves for defense. When the mob attacked, shots were fired and three white men were wounded. Moss, McDowell, and Steward were arrested and sensational newspaper reports published the next day fanned the flames of racial outrage. On March 9, 1892, a white mob stormed the Memphis jail, seized all three men and brutally lynched them. No one was punished for the killings.

    Ida B. Wells, a 29-year-old black schoolteacher and journalist living in Memphis, was a friend of the three murdered men and was deeply impacted by their deaths. She published an editorial urging local blacks to “save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.” More than 6000 African Americans heeded her call. Ms. Wells would devote her entire life to documenting and challenging the injustice of lynching through research, writing, speaking, and activism.

    Another little piece of history.

    Darren Wilson’s Boss Sent Racist Email

    Darren Wilson’s boss—the man who responded to the call that Michael Brown had been shot and killed and interviewed Wilson about it—has been identified as the Ferguson, Missouri, police officer who sent a racist email about paying a black woman to have an abortion to prevent crime. Sgt. William Mudd resigned last week after the Justice Department’s report outed him as the racist emailer. The St. Louis American reveals that Mudd was the anonymous cop in grand jury testimony who arrived at the scene of the shooting and then debriefed Wilson. Mudd told a prosecutor interviewing him that it’s a “stupid question” to ask how Wilson could’ve prevented himself from killing Brown. “When you are physically attacked unprovoked, I believe ‘How could he prevent this?’ is a stupid question.”

    If Ferguson becomes ‘island of justice,’ will it still be in a ‘sea of injustice’?

    Throughout the last seven months, African-American residents from all over the region have told their stories about police harassment and intimidation that has gone on for years. If the Justice Department ends up forcing only one city to changes to its police and municipal court, will the experiences of black St. Louis residents really transform that much?

    For St. Louis Alderman Antonio French, D-21st Ward, the answer is clear: “No, not at all.”

    “Ferguson is just a small piece of the puzzle,” French said. “What we saw in August and in September could have happened a mile and a half up the road in Dellwood … It just happened to happen in Ferguson. But really, we have a culture that exists in that whole area that could really set this thing off again. That frustration still exists. And so if Ferguson became an island of justice, it would still be in a sea of injustice.”

    Both before and after Brown’s death, protesters, activists and professors have sounded the alarm about law enforcement in places like Pine Lawn, Wellston, Bellefontaine Neighbors, St. Ann and Bel-Ridge. The Washington Post reported troubling incidents in Florissant and Hazelwood.

    Groups like the ArchCity Defenders emphasized that problematic policing and municipal courts weren’t happening just in north St. Louis County, but also in affluent towns like Ladue.

    While Attorney General Eric Holder said the Justice Department would work with Ferguson to change its police departments, these towns and cities are unlikely to change without pressure or leverage. That’s what worries French.

    “I think the DOJ wants this report to spark local change,” French said. “But knowing the dynamics of St. Louis County and the state legislature like we do, the DOJ is going to have to stay and extend their investigation their investigation beyond the city of Ferguson.”

    French continued, “African-Americans have been saying for a long time that their experience when traveling through these municipalities is that they feel preyed upon.

    “In fact, many of these municipalities have created a system where they only survive by enacting a system of taxation by citation that almost exclusively targets African-Americans,” French said. “And so, the state should act. St. Louis County should act. These small municipalities should act. But if they do not, then we’re really going to have to rely on the federal government to do something.”

  278. rq says

    Haha, did I say we’d seen the last on the frat? HAHA. University of Oklahoma Fraternity Closed After Racist Video Is Posted Online

    In a message on Twitter, the Oklahoma chapter of the NAACP called for “a proper investigation” into the video and said it hoped “justice is served.”

    The nine-second video was uploaded to YouTube on Sunday by a student group, the Unheard Movement, that first identified the people in it as members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, although the group did not indicate how it obtained the video or when it was filmed.

    “This video contains language that is offensive, disrespectful, and unacceptable,” the group said in a statement posted alongside the video. “Even after 50 years after the events that occurred in Selma, Alabama we still have a reason to march. We as a people have indeed come a long way, but yet still have so far to go.”

    The group said it would hold a demonstration on campus on Monday morning, and encouraged students to attend dressed in black.

    Oh, and it was just the guys? Rumour says no: I’ve also learned that some members of @OUTriDelta was on the bus at the time the video was being recorded.. #SAEHatesMe
    The racist girls @OUTriDelta were the ones clapping along side @sae1856 – now they are blocking #Trideltahatesme

    More trouble in St Louis: Police Search for Teen Who Pulled Gun on Pine Lawn Officer

    The Pine Lawn officer was working a secondary job at a skating rink, the Skate King at 2700 Kienlen Avenue, Sunday night when he heard gunshots from across the street. The officer went that direction and saw glass shot out of a passing car.

    As the officer walked up the street, he was confronted by a 17-year-old identified as Tyreece Young. Police say the teenager pointed a silver handgun at the officer who, fearing for his life, fired two shots at the suspect.

    The shots apparently missed. Young ran to a gray Ford Taurus and got in on the passenger side. The driver sped away.

    The shooting occurred just north of the intersection of Creston and Stillwell at approximately 7 p.m.

    The officer was unharmed.

    17-year-old kid, and that’s pretty much a death warrant out on his head right now. If he shot once, then he’ll probably shoot again, right? So lethal force will be entirely justified. Whatever happened, I bet that kid is scared for his life right now.

    DEA Agent: We Were Told Not to Enforce Drug Laws in Rich White Areas So not just unconscious bias, but open racism.

    The Drug Enforcement Administration (DAE), the Department of Justice agency devoted to preventing drug use and sale within the US, tells its agents not to enforce drug laws in rich white areas, according to a former employee.

    Matthew Fogg, a former US Marshal and special agent for the DAE who worked his way up the departmental chain, earning the nickname “Batman” for his enthusiastic work, told the story in an interview with Brave New Films.

    In the segment, Fogg makes explicit comparisons between the so-called “War on Drugs” and literal military wars. He also draws attention to the overt racist and classist nature of the decades-long internal “war” (emphases mine) [emphases the author’s, I may not have got them accurately here]:

    We’re talking about Gotham city. … We were jumping on guys in the middle of the night, all of that, swooping down on folks all across the country, using these sort of attack tactics that we went out on, that you would use in Vietnam, or some kind of war-torn zone. All of the stuff that we were doing, just calling it the war on drugs.

    And there wasn’t very many black guys in my position. So when I would go into the war room, where we were setting up all of our drug and gun and addiction task force determining what cities we were going to hit, I would notice that most of the time it always appeared to be urban areas.

    That’s when I asked the question, well, don’t they sell drugs out in Potomac and Springfield, and places like that? Maybe you all think they don’t, but statistics show they use more drugs out in those areas [rich and white] than anywhere.

    The special agent in charge, he says “You know, if we go out there and start messing with those folks, they know judges, they know lawyers, they know politicians. You start locking their kids up, somebody’s going to jerk our chain.” He said they’re going to call us on it, and before you know it, they’re going to shut us down, and there goes your overtime.

    What I began to see is that the drug war is totally about race. If we were locking up everybody, white and black, for doing the same drugs, they would have done the same thing they did with prohibition. They would have outlawed it. They would have said, “Let’s stop this craziness. You’re not putting my son in jail. My daughter isn’t going to jail.” If it was an equal enforcement opportunity operation, we wouldn’t be sitting here anyway.

    It’s all about fairness, man. And understanding “How would I want to be treated?” Whether I’m on the one end, or the other end. How would I be treated if everything was done equally?

    The Drug War is a racist class war.

    Anyone surprised? Except now it seems to be openly stated, not jsut an accident of badly trained lawenforcement.

  279. rq says

    OU: Members of SAE have until midnight to get off campus after racist video surfaced

    OU President David Boren released a statement Monday morning:

    To those who have misused their free speech in such a reprehensible way, I have a message for you. You are disgraceful. You have violated all that we stand for. You should not have the privilege of calling yourselves “Sooners.” Real Sooners are not racist. Real Sooners are not bigots. Real Sooners believe in equal opportunity. Real Sooners treat all people with respect. Real Sooners love each other and take care of each other like family members.

    Effective immediately, all ties and affiliations between this University and the local SAE chapter are hereby severed. I direct that the house be closed and that members will remove their personal belongings from the house by midnight tomorrow. Those needing to make special arrangements for positions shall contact the Dean of Students.

    All of us will redouble our efforts to create the strongest sense of family and community. We vow that we will be an example to the entire country of how to deal with this issue. There must be zero tolerance for racism everywhere in our nation.

    David L. Boren
    President
    University of Oklahoma

    The video was posted to YouTube on Sunday reportedly showing the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity chanting on Saturday.

    The national president of SAE, Brad Cohen, said an emergency board meeting was called Sunday night to address the issue.

    “I was not only shocked and disappointed but disgusted by the outright display of racism displayed in the video,” Cohen said. “SAE is a diverse organization, and we have zero tolerance for racism or any bad behavior. When we learned about this incident, I called an immediate board meeting, and we determined with no mental reservation whatsoever that this chapter needed to be closed immediately. I am proud of my fellow board members because we mean what we say.”

    The organization said it hopes to restart an OU chapter of SAE in the future with new members who “exemplify our beliefs and who serve as leaders on campus and in the community.”

    Their ‘zero tolerance’, though, has shown racist behaviour in other chapters, so make of that what you will.

    On campus, A leader of @OU_Unheard and @OUArtsSciences student, @Chelsea_Alyssa, addressing student athletes on north oval.
    RT @AMRice44: Just a reminder of what those college kids were singing about. #racismisNOTdead #SAE #oklahoma (TW ON THAT ATTACHED PHOTO!)
    Dr. George Henderson, Norman’s first African American homeowner in attendance at @OU_Unheard this morning.
    OU President Boren, students rally on campus in protest of racist video, article link: UPDATE: OU President Boren orders immediate closure of fraternity after racist video surfaces

    Boren is scheduled to hold a press conference at 11 a.m. at Holmberg Hall near the North Oval.

    Students also gathered on the school’s South Oval, some of them holding signs.

    Among them were about 100 athletes, including several football players. OU head football coach Bob Stoops was on the oval, along with his brother, assistant coach Mike Stoops. Men’s basketball coach Lon Kruger was also there.The athletes were not holding signs and stood in silent protest.

    Bob Stoops said he was at the protest to support his players.

    “It’s sad the ignorance that can still be there with some people. It’s just appalling,” he said. “I was here to be with my guys. We all work with beautiful young men and women of all races. It’s just, you know, very little gets me choked up. But that hurt.”

    Kruger called the video “depressing.”

    “It’s something that should concern everyone,” he said. “It’s not about athletics. It’s not about anything other than everyone being affected by this.”

    The group collectively walked down Lindsey Street and then turned north onto Jenkins Avenue. They gathered in a circle in front of the Barry Switzer at the stadium complex, and football player Ty Darlington led the group in a prayer.

    At the end, a woman in the group shouted “Boomer” and the rest of the group responded with “Sooner,” a common phrase heard during athletic events.

    Protesters also could be seen holding signs. Two seniors who attended Booker T. Washington High School in Tulsa — Adeisha Sawyer and Fareedah Shayeb — were on the South Oval.

    “I really just feel like it’s ignorance that’s being surfaced,” said Sawyer, who held a sign that depicted a black person hanging from a tree and included the lyrics of the song sung in the video. “I feel like it’s something that’s been swept under the rug for a long time. So the fact that it’s coming to light, I guess, in that sense I’m happy. But at the same time it’s still frustrating. It’s still disrespectful.”

    Shayeb called the video “astonishing.”

    “When I first saw the video, I didn’t even know what they were saying. I kept replaying it and replaying it, and I finally heard what they were saying. I must have misheard because there’s no way they’re chanting this on a bus full of people. It’s not like one person, it’s an entire bus full of people chanting this,” Shayeb said. “You’re kind of happy it surfaced because you want people to know this is happening.”

  280. rq says

    Here’s some whitewashing for ya!!! First official look at the cast and crew of highly anticipated drama Suffragette

    The film stars Carey Mulligan and Helena Bonham Carter as early footsoldiers of the feminist movement. Meryl Streep also has a small role as Emmeline Pankhurst, the celebrated political activist who helped women win the right to vote. The film has already made headlines for being the first time a commercial crew has been allowed to shoot inside the Houses of Parliament.

    To celebrate International Women’s Day on Sunday March 8, the cast and crew has assembled for a special portrait. The above picture sees actresses Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne-Marie Duff and Meryl Streep alongside the director Sarah Gavron, screenwriter Abi Morgan and producers Faye Ward and Alison Owen.

    A response: .@simondedeney makes me m/sad. Many suffragettes also fought with, for, and led by women of colour. @WritersofColour

    Interlude: Music! Watch Sam Smith, John Legend Duet on ‘Lay Me Down’ for Comic Relief. Not a huge fan of either, but it’s a nice song and a nice video.

    Here’s another on the Anderson Cooper / Jeff Roorda showdown Anderson Cooper Grills St. Louis Police Rep for Calling DOJ Report ‘Flimsy’

    Anderson Cooper tonight confronted St. Louis police spokesman Jeff Roorda after he dismissed the DOJ report on racially-motivated Ferguson policing as “flimsy.” Roorda told Cooper that “the meat of the report” (Darren Wilson not being charged) was wrapped in a “flimsy tortilla” making ridiculous allegations against the police.

    Cooper got a little frustrated as he repeatedly asked Roorda about the statistics about Ferguson police targeting black people and Roorda deflected or deferred. When Roorda told Cooper that there are black people in the nearby area that drive through Ferguson, Cooper told him that still doesn’t account for the high ticket statistics.

    Roorda pivoted to the angry Ferguson protesters to blame them for some of the outcry, but Cooper told him based on how little everyone’s heard from the Ferguson police on this, it doesn’t seem like they care. Cooper even said the Ferguson police chief is “running away like a cockroach.”

    RACISM AT COLLEGE IS AN ISOLATED INCIDENT! KKK skit shocks Wheaton College campus

    The skit, which took place Feb. 28 in a campus gym during the football team’s annual offseason team-building activity, involved groups of teammates performing skits. One group of 20 teammates, including some who are black, chose to parody several movies, including “Bad Boys II,” a 2003 Martin Lawrence and Will Smith comedy and drama that pokes fun at the KKK. During the skit at Wheaton, the group wore Klan-style white hoods and robes and carried Confederate flags.

    While those who organized the skit said it was intended to be satirical, it has outraged some on campus and provoked letters to the campus community from the evangelical Christian college’s president, Philip Ryken, organizers of the skit and two assistant football coaches who were present. The controversy comes after two other high-profile incidents at Wheaton that have drawn headlines: the arrest of a student accused of video-recording a woman showering in a college-owned apartment and a student throwing fruit at another student who questioned Ryken at a campus event about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

    “Wheaton College is far from perfect,” Ryken said in a statement to the Tribune. “I was shocked when I first heard that symbols with a history of racist violence had been used on our campus. Although I was somewhat relieved to learn — almost immediately — that the skit was intended to subvert racism, not promote it, I also knew that when students heard what had happened, it would understandably cause a lot of distress. Recent incidents have shown us how issues of prejudice and sexual misconduct damage trust and disturb the peace. Sadly, this is a campus where we have sins to confess and people to forgive every day.”

    Ryken learned of the skit several hours after it was performed, and at 1 a.m. Sunday he and other college staff members met with one of the skit’s organizers, team captain Josh Aldrin, to try to better understand what had taken place, what the group’s intent was and why the two football coaches at the event did not stop the skit. According to a statement issued late Friday by the college, Aldrin, who could not be reached for comment by the Tribune, acknowledged poor judgment and everyone in the middle-of-the-night meeting recognized that the skit was inappropriate but not motivated by racial hostility.

    In a letter emailed to the campus community Sunday, Aldrin, who is African-American, took responsibility for the parody, telling faculty and fellow students that “we made a mistake.” Aldrin, who is one of four team captains, asked for forgiveness and urged those with questions to reach out to him or teammate Wes Cannonier, who also is black.

    “As a black male, a team captain, and the leader of the group that performed the skit, I should have understood that (the) KKK and Confederate symbols are not funny in any context,” Aldrin wrote. “We hope the campus community will forgive us for our actions.”

    Because racism isn’t just against black people. Two H.S. Lacrosse Teams Cancel Games Due to Opponent’s ‘Redskins’ Mascot – good for the teams for taking a stand.

  281. Pteryxx says

    BoingBoing – Victims of police torture fight for reparations

    While it might sound like a story from Homan Square, Chicago’s police “black site” recently unearthed by The Guardian, Clement’s arrest took place over 30 years ago. On June 25, 1981, he joined the ranks of more than 100 black men and women who were tortured by police commander Jon Burge or his “midnight crew” of detectives on Chicago’s South Side from 1972-1991. Though the Homan Square reveal shocked the country, many local activists were unsurprised to hear that Chicago’s old police torture tactics had found a new home.

    Based mostly on his coerced confession, Clements became the youngest person in the history of Illinois to get a life sentence without the possibility of parole. He spent nearly three decades in prison. Only a month before his arrest, Clements had become the father to a baby girl. The next time he greeted her in public, she was 28 years old. It was the day she picked him up from prison in 2009.

    […]

    The reparations ordinance is the brainchild of Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, an organization that aims to honor and seek justice for police torture survivors. Officially released in 2013, the ordinance has languished in front of Chicago’s Finance Committee for over a year.

    While it does seek financial reparations for survivors, the ordinance’s goals are also wide-reaching and community-based. For instance, CTJM demands a psychological counseling center on the South Side; free enrollment at City Colleges for survivors and their families; and public memorials to honor survivors and their struggle. (Memorial proposals can be submitted here.) The ordinance combines activism, history, and art while making very practical demands for justice—like evidentiary hearings for all torture survivors who remain behind bars.

    Everything about the ordinance is purposeful—even its $20 million price tag reflects the more than $20 million of taxpayers’ funds the City of Chicago used to defend Burge. (By some counts, that number is closer to $100 million).

    When we arrived at City Hall, organizers hoped to deliver their 45,000 petitions directly to Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Instead a nervous looking aide greeted us. “The mayor is out to lunch,” he explained. Undeterred, CTJM continued with its programming. We heard from the mother of a torture survivor who remains in prison despite the fact that his confession was coerced. We built a memorial to the victims of police brutality. And we participated in a teach-in about the horrors of Burge’s reign. During all that time the mayor never returned from his lunch break.

  282. Pteryxx says

    Further from that BB article: one of CTJM’s requests is that Chicago police officer and torturer Jon Burge’s legacy be daylighted. (warning for torture and nightmares)

    Though Mayor Emanuel has publicly acknowledged and apologized for this “dark chapter” of Chicago history, plenty of people are still unaware of Burge’s legacy. One of CTJM’s demands is that this history be taught in all Chicago public schools.

    Jon Burge was only 22-years old when he joined the Chicago Police Department in 1970. A few years later—after being promoted to detective and assigned to Area 2 on Chicago’s South Side—he began torturing prisoners.

    Burge, and at least 26 officers that worked with him, preferred methods that left little physical evidence, particularly “black boxes” that delivered electroshocks through alligator clips attached to their victim’s face or genitals. Anthony Holmes was one of the first targets of this technique. After being brought into the interrogation room on May 30, 1973, Burge covered Holmes’ face with a clear plastic bag, attached an electrical wire to his handcuffs, and sent painful shocks coursing through his body. In a 2006 deposition, Holmes explains: “When [Burge] lifted me off the floor the last time, I said, ‘This is it.’ Whatever you want me to say or do, I did it. ‘Kill the president?” Yeah, I did that too. I didn’t care. I just wanted out of there.” Holmes would serve 30 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

    Though this torture lasted only a few hours, it’s had a lifelong psychological impact. In 2011 testimony, Holmes explains:

    I still have nightmares, not as bad as they were, but I still have them. I wake up in a cold sweat. I still fear that I am going to go back to jail for this again. I see myself falling in a deep hole and no one helping me to get out… I felt hopeless and helpless when it happened, and when I dream I feel like I am in that room again, screaming for help and no one comes to help me.

    That’s precisely why CTMP is pushing for a counseling center and other health services for survivors.

    Burge’s reign of torture couldn’t have happened without the complacent system around him. Those above him in the government and CPD likely ignored the “open secret” of what happened in Area 2, while the officers below him were probably emboldened by the idea that their torture was sanctioned by a superior officer. His techniques went unchecked for almost two decades.

    It wasn’t until 1989 that the People’s Law Office began to piece together the true extent of Area 2’s misconduct while representing torture survivor Andrew Wilson. Thanks to an anonymous tip they discovered that dozens of other black men—most of them still in prison—had similar stories of electric shocks, sexual assault, brutal beatings, and mock executions. (The Chicago Reader documented the Wilson case in fantastic detail.) Though Burge and his fellow officers were acquitted in that case, the court of public opinion pushed back.

    After an official review, Burge was fired in 1993. Evidence of his crimes continued to emerge throughout the 1990s. So many death row inmates were linked to police torture that Governor George Ryan commuted all death sentences in 2003. Both Amnesty International and the United Nations Committee Against Torture pushed the City of Chicago to bring Burge to justice.

    Finally, in late 2008 Burge was arrested, not for torture—the statute of limitations had run out on those cases—but for perjury and obstruction of justice. At his trial in 2010 he was sentenced to only four and a half years in prison. Released early to house arrest last October, Burge is now living as a free man in Florida. Since he was not convicted of a felony, he still collects a full pension from the City of Chicago. (The Mayor’s Office says it’s looking for “a legal way to pull back Burge’s pension,” which is one of CTJM’s demands.)

    …why is there a statute of limitations on fricking torture? Seriously why?

  283. Pteryxx says

    More Selma anniversary material:

    Guardian:

    On the day the marchers were beaten back, an 11-year-old boy named Marti Tolbert was standing on the roof of the tallest building in Selma, Teppers Department Store.

    “I saw smoke,” said Tolbert, now 61. “People running, hollering. Blood on people’s faces. The terror of it. The thing I really remember is that white people weren’t just using billy clubs but beating down people with table legs.”

    On Saturday, Tolbert, who still lives in Selma, watched the first black president shake hands with supporters at the foot of the same bridge, surrounded by white secret service agents.

    Tolbert was tearful, but found it hard to explain his emotions. He said there was a disconnect between the symbolism of Obama’s visit and the everyday reality of living in a still effectively racially segregated town.

    “We still got a white country club here. The only way I can go in there is if I cut the grass,” he said. “You ever go to a town, and when you arrive, you feel bad inside? There’s something still real bad about Selma today, but it is home.”

    People still live in Selma, and the KKK still puts up billboards and distributes flyers there, and now the cameras have left and the 50th anniversary crowds gone home.

    from Patheos: Moral Mondays: Selma Marches On

    We celebrate Selma most truly when we pay attention to where it is happening today. In their acceptance speech at the Oscars a few weeks ago, Common and John Legend pointed to some of the issues that weigh on us today like segregation did fifty years ago. They mentioned racial profiling and mass incarceration.

    But they, like most of us, are hardly aware of what’s happening on the ground in the black-led freedom struggle today. Jim Crow went to law school and put a suit on in the 1970s, and as James Crow, Esq. he doesn’t beat up kids at lunch counters or gas marchers anymore. He invests millions of dollars of dark money in state legislature campaigns and gerrymanders away the victories of the Voting Rights Act. And James Crow, Esq. makes sure that his misdeeds will not be televised. As such, the Movement to overcome his evil is hidden in plain sight.

    When roughly 20,000 people responded to Dr. King’s call in 1965 and marched from Selma to Montgomery, it was a national news story. When two to three times that many people showed up in the dead of winter to march on North Carolina’s state capital three weeks ago, the AP story ran on page 5 or 6 of a few major newspapers. Not a single national network sent a reporter to cover it.

    Of course, almost no one knew what was happening in Selma before Bloody Sunday. Violent resistance to black votes drew attention to the Selma struggle. In a similar way, the illegal arrests of over 1,000 citizens in North Carolina drew national attention in 2013 when week after week thousands of people gathered for “Moral Mondays.” A year and a half later, the moral movement has coordinated a sustained campaign with over two hundred actions across the state. Valentine’s Day’s Moral March was a demonstration of the breadth and commitment of the Movement. But it was largely ignored because the governing elite has become more savvy in its resistance to change. Members of this elite don’t pay hit men to take out protestors anymore. They pay ad agencies and journalists to create a narrative that makes resistance seem futile.

    The good news is that, as in Selma fifty years ago, the black-led freedom movement knows that power concedes nothing without a fight. Though the battlefield has changed, the truth has not. As Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, the chief architect of North Carolina’s Moral Movement often says, “Douglass and Tubman organized without telephones. Dr. King and Rosa Parks got folks to march without Twitter. If they brought us so far with so little, surely we can press with the resources we have.”

    The Atlantic, with video: What LBJ Really Said About Selma

    When protestors crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, they were ambushed by state troopers. Mounted police charged the protestors on horseback; troopers beat people unconscious; 17 were hospitalized. News of the “Bloody Sunday” attack immediately spread across the country.

    The next morning, as filmmaker Scott Calonico recounts in this short documentary, President Lyndon B. Johnson faced a crisis. While he publicly condemned the attack, Johnson was also calling allies and advisors, searching for a political salve to the situation. “They’re going to have another march tomorrow, and, as we see it, it’s going to go from bad to worse,” he warned.

    Calonico’s film is a fascinating peek at the politics behind a historic moment in American history. In a conversation with Bill Moyers, a White House special assistant, Johnson expresses a shocking disdain for Martin Luther King Jr.’s actions: “I really think we ought to be firm on him myself,” he says. “I just think it’s outrageous what’s on TV. I’ve been watching it here and it looks like that man is in charge of the country.”

    Also from the Guardian: Representative John Lewis ‘live’ tweets Bloody Sunday – as he saw and felt it

  286. Pteryxx says

    Maryland currently has one of the most extreme Law Enforcement Officer’s Bill of Rights (LEOBOR) in the US. Among other things it gives police officers special rights during internal investigations, precludes civilian oversight and transparency, and erects barriers to discipline. Bills before MD state legislature would enact some reforms.

    from January, Baltimore Sun:

    Currently superiors may not question their officers for 10 days following an incident. Not only are officers entitled to an attorney, union attorneys are usually available to them immediately. There is no need for an additional waiting period. Ten days simply impedes investigation and significantly delays the ability of police departments to communicate effectively with the public about what happened.

    Other timelines are too short and must be lengthened. Excessive force complaints are required to be brought within 90 days and must be notarized. That means anyone in the hospital, in jail, or unaware of his or her rights is effectively prevented from filing an excessive force complaint. And all administrative actions must be brought within one year under the current law. However, in several cases crucial information has been discovered in civil litigation after a year has passed. At that point, the agency is then barred from disciplining the offending officer.

    Under the current Maryland LEOBR, a police chief also has little to no authority to discipline an officer. Discipline may not be imposed unless recommended by a hearing board comprised of other sworn officers. So regardless of the findings of an internal investigation, a police chief cannot impose discipline unless the chief’s subordinates approve, including one of equal rank of the officer being investigated. This process is not just a barrier to discipline for misconduct. It is upside-down. Instead of an officer appealing a disciplinary decision to a hearing board, the process starts with the hearing board. This process should be brought in line with the norm for all other government employees.

    Details of the reform bills, links to text, and legislator contact information, from Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition:

    The centerpiece of coalition police reform efforts in Maryland this year is overhauling the so-called “Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights” (acronym LEOBOR or LEOBR) statute.* The main vehicle for doing so is SB566 (“Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights – Alterations”), displayed in its current form at the end of this post, and the corresponding house bill HB968.

    […]

    A look at SB0566 reveals the key passages where additions (in ALL CAPS) or deletions [bracketed out] begin to reform Maryland’s outdated LEOBR:

    p.2, lines 1-8: revisions cause internal hearings to come after discipline, not before.
    p.2, lines 27-29: the deletion of this language ends the 90 day window for complaints.
    p.3, lines 16-20: ends officer access to investigative results before he or she is questioned.
    p. 4, lines 12-15: ends the initial 10 day ‘obtaining counsel’ period’ during which the officer may not be interrogated (without, of course, denying the right to counsel when interrogated).
    p.6, lines 20-21: extends window of investigation to any time within one year of a successful civil claim by the plaintiff
    p.7, lines 17-19: adds that residents of the jurisdiction may be appointed to appeals hearing boards

    On the other hand, SB0566 does not specifically authorize strong, independent civilian review boards; in particular, it does not revise any element of Section 3 part 102, specifying that the section supersedes any other law of the State, county, or municipal corporation., and it appears to leave civilian appointments to the appeals hearing process at the discretion of the police chief.

    ACLU’s action brief

  287. rq says

    I keep thinking that, as time goes by, there will be less stuff to post – less articles, less tragedy, less opinion on twitter, more sensible people, therefore – less . I think I’ve been misleading myself: so many tabs, so much unsorted. Please forgive the jumping around the country and topics.

    Anyway. Onwards.

    MO Supreme Court just appointed Roy Richter as muni judge in #Ferguson: Is Brockmeyer out? You bet he is, but the articles are buried right now, but they will surface. For now, suspense.

    Protestors in Ferguson targeted. It’s official. Trolls won this battle. 2 tires punctured.

    Fraternity and sorority stuff. “@josh_weissman @NBCBLK focus on the chapter #SAE letters represent them but they clearly do not represent SAE” Oh. See attached pictures: 1) document showing invite to a party plus a list of items to bring in order to ‘add to the spirit of the occasion’ – includes such items as: coming in blackface, fried chicken, a KKK hood, a spade, hair in corn rows, your father (with the comment “IF you knwo who he is”), a cotton gin, food stamps, and… a lot more. It’s a FUCKING LONG list. 2) example of SAE fraternity men heckling a forum on “Images of Women in the Media”, where they were sent as punishment for disrupting a “Take Back the Night March”. 3) headline on the Washington U in St Louis SAE chapter and racist pledge activity. Yup, isolated incidents, all of them!
    Disgusted by #SAE’s racist chant? See @DNLee5’s tweets on why the bad apple approach (e.g. isolated incident, expel & move on) isn’t enough.

    @Nettaaaaaaaa I’m a @TriDelta alum, omega delta chapter 2010. Racism directly contradicts DDDs values. Yeah. But. More on this later.

    People in Madison are really, really upset over the murder of Tony Robinson. Madison, Wisconsin. They don’t seem to be shutting up, either. Good.

  288. rq says

    At the Bucks game. We turned up for Justice! @Bucks #TonyRobinson #Justice4Tony #BlackLivesMatter , see photo.

    ‘Off probation n****!’ Sorority expels ANOTHER University of Alabama member for racist Snapchat message

    A member of University of Alabama’s embattled Chi Omega sorority was expelled this week after using the same racial slur on Snapchat, which got another student in trouble last year.

    The post, a screenshot of which was obtained by University of Alabama’s student paper Crimson White, reportedly featured a photo of a PowerPoint presentation congratulating the Nu Beta chapter of Chi Omega, and was accompanied by the caption, ‘Off probation n****!’

    University spokeswoman Deborah Lane said the sorority notified both the school and the headquarters of Chi Omega about the offensive Snapchat message and quickly dismissed the student who sent it. […]

    ‘Behavior, actions and choices that disparage other students are particularly reprehensible and do not represent the values or meet the expectations of our University community.

    ‘We will continue to work diligently to ensure that UA is a welcoming and inclusive campus.’

    The embarrassing incident comes less than seven months after another Chi Omega sister was ejected from the Greek organization for using the same offensive term.

    The Greek organization made headlines last August after a Chi Omega pledge posted a photo of herself and two other girls on Snapchat with a racist message bragging that their chapter had no black women.

    ‘Chi O got no n*****!!!!!’ the caption read.

    The national Chi Omega Fraternity responded to the outrage sparked by the incident with a message on its Facebook page condemning the racist remarks.

    ‘What was expressed is absolutely reprehensible and completely inconsistent with Chi Omega’s values and policies,’ said the organization’s post. ‘Chi Omega took swift disciplinary action in accordance with the organization’s policies and procedures.’

    Funny how if their discipline is so fucking good why these things keep happening.

    Madison HS students walkout & protest @ Capitol to demand justice for #TonyRobinson #justice4tony via @itsghastlycrew

    In mourning shooting victim, friends remember a gentle man loyal to his family

    He was a caretaker for his ailing mother, and a father figure to his three younger siblings.

    He played youth football on Madison’s North Side and once dreamed of an NFL career.

    He loved skateboarding, the breakdancing movie “Kickin’ It Old Skool,” and all types of music, but mostly hip-hop.

    Friends of Tony Robinson shared those memories Saturday as they mourned the 19-year-old Madison man. Their portrait was at odds with descriptions by police of Robinson, who they said assaulted an officer during an altercation that led to the officer using deadly force.

    “He just encouraged everyone to do their best,” said 16-year-old Samantha Sorum, huddled next to friend Isabella Denson outside of the Williamson Street home where fewer than 24 hours earlier the unarmed Robinson was shot and killed by a Madison police officer.

    Through tears, his friends pointed to what appeared to be Robinson’s blood on the home’s side door stoop.

    Doris King, who lives across the street from the house, said she knew Robinson as a child and watched him grow up. Her son, Julian, was a classmate of Robinson’s at O’Keeffe Middle School in Madison. The two boys remained close into adulthood.

    “He was at my house a lot and was always so kind and sweet,” King said. “He called me ‘auntie’ and always asked if he could help me with any chores, like taking out the garbage.”

    She called him a “gentle giant,” saying he was over 6 feet tall and weighed perhaps “200 and a dime.” She said he had two younger brothers and a younger sister, and that he was a big help to his mother, Andrea Irwin, who she said has health problems.

    “He was always trying to help her with her medications,” King said. “He was the oldest in the house, and she relied on him.”

    Saturday at Irwin’s home on the city’s Southeast Side, a stream of well-wishers came and left as children played basketball in the street. A man who described himself as a family friend met a reporter on the sidewalk and said the family would not be speaking to the media Saturday due to grief and exhaustion.

    In an interview with WKOW-TV (Ch. 27) in Madison soon after the shooting, Irwin said her son was her life. “I had him when I was 17 and we grew up together,” she told the television station. “And I don’t know how to live without him.”

    She called him “our caretaker” and “a father figure” to his siblings.

    Doris King said Robinson attended East High School for a time before moving with his family to Sun Prairie. He is a 2014 Sun Prairie High School graduate.

    Friends described him as extremely popular – a “jokester.” Sorum said he was “getting his life together” and planning to study business at Madison Area Technical College. After that, he wanted to head west to Colorado, she said.

    Please read the above, the good part of his character, because as always, the mdia insists on bringing up the past – ‘trouble with the law’ and the like. Which this time goes something like this:

    Robinson was found guilty of armed robbery in December in Dane County Circuit Court, according to the state’s online court records database. The Madison police report in the case says Robinson was arrested in April along with others for an armed home invasion.

    A citizen called police after spotting several men, one of them armed with a long gun, enter an apartment building, according to the police report. Three of four suspects were captured by police after they fled the apartment building with electronics and other property, the report says.

    Doris King said she asked Robinson about his involvement because, she said, it was so out of character.

    “He felt he was under a lot of pressure from the others to do what he did,” she said. “He told me he would never do anything like that again.”

    At a meeting Saturday called by the Young, Gifted and Black Coalition, one of its leaders, M Adams, said the only relevant information is that “an unarmed black kid” was killed.

    “Too often what happens when black children are killed, they are made to seem evil or like a villain,” she said. “We have to remember this was a child.”

    That last bit, that is important.

    Flashback to Selma50, South African flags! #Selma50

    Civil Rights Leader Diane Nash Refused to March at Selma Event Because of George W. Bush

    Diane Nash, one of the main leaders and strategists during the civil rights movement, refused to march at the historic restaging of the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., this weekend because of the presence of former President George W. Bush, the Washington Post reports.

    Nash refused to join Bush and President Barack Obama, as well as members of Congress and other civil rights leaders who marched 50 years ago, in the walk across the bridge because she said it was “not appropriate.”

    “I refused to march because George Bush marched,” Nash told News One Now’s Roland Martin. “I think the Selma movement was about nonviolence and peace and democracy. And George Bush stands for just the opposite: for violence and war and stolen elections, and his administration … had people tortured.

    “This was not an appropriate event for him,” she added. “I’m also concerned that the legacy of the Selma movement, which stands for nonviolence, will be confused. And so I did not wish to be a part of something that included him.”

    Bush’s presence may have gone unnoticed because he marched across the bridge with former first lady Laura Bush toward the outer edge of the bridge. As the Post notes, many photographers were forced to crop the former president out in order to get a close shot of the Obama family, who crossed at the center.

    According to the Post, Bush’s absence in photos caused a stir among his supporters.

    I like that last bit. The one photo I saw of him, looked like he was trying to push for the front. But if he was cropped out in favour of the Obamas, well, I’m in favour of that!

  289. rq says

    If you think ‘reverse racism’ is worse than what blacks face, read the Ferguson report

    Overall, white Americans believe that discrimination against whites—i.e., “reverse racism”—is a more prevalent phenomenon than the racial discrimination African Americans face. Most of you reading this article likely find such a belief to be absurd, a myth contradicted by the facts that present themselves to us every day.

    Nevertheless, a study conducted in 2011 by scholars at Tufts and Harvard found exactly that.

    Certainly, many whites reject this myth, but enough buy into it that it has colored how different groups view the push for civil rights and equal treatment for black Americans, issues that galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement. Large segments of the white community believing that they’ve got it worse than blacks stymies the effort to galvanize support for the implementation of long-needed reforms. That’s why the Justice Department’s investigation of the police department and the municipal court system in Ferguson, Missouri, is so important. There is no way anyone—anyone with an open mind that is—could read this report and continue to deny what confronts African Americans across our country. […]

    Systematic, institutionalized racism and exploitation has been so thoroughly interwoven into every aspect of the justice and law enforcement systems in Ferguson that one Washington Post article likened it to a “collection agency,” and another described it as “racketeering.” And as bad as Ferguson is, it’s not alone. From Newark to Albuquerque to New Orleans to Cleveland to East Haven, Connecticut, to Missoula County, Montana, the Justice Department has uncovered various forms of systematic discrimination. As for the kinds of abuses perpetrated in Ferguson, there are numerous other cities that are essentially “criminalizing black people to pay the bills.”

    So what’s going to happen? What’s going to be the impact? As Shaun King put it so concisely, “Will we have justice?” The Justice Department certainly has the authority to impose change on Ferguson. As important as reforming Ferguson itself is, I’m also wondering about the degree to which this damning, detailed report will influence those across our country who believe that racial discrimination against blacks is a thing of the past. On the one hand, it’s easy to be skeptical, given the wealth of information that’s already out there.

    We have Coates’ brilliant essay that—whether or not one agrees with the idea of reparations—makes devastatingly clear the financial penalties that legally sanctioned discrimination inflicted up through the 1960s on African Americans who are still alive today, penalties that have negatively impacted the amount of wealth they have accumulated. The black-white wealth gap has remained stubbornly wide at approximately 10-to-1 over the past 30 years. And in addition to what we know about the continuing impact of past legal discrimination, we can look at, among other examples, the recent study demonstrating that the same résumé received significantly more interest from employers when it bore the name Greg or Emily than when it contained the name Jamal or Lakisha. That study was conducted not in the 1960s, but in this century.

    I have hope, however, that this report will move some people. All the people? Of course not. But some. Others will reject it, just as they reject anything that doesn’t fit into their narrow, preconceived notion of reality. Some will reject it because if Eric Holder and/or Barack Obama say that the sun is shining, well, then it must be pitch black outside. But some will be moved. How many? How far? I don’t know.

    We have made real progress in this country. Slavery was legal in 1860. Jim Crow was legal in 1960, as was housing discrimination in both the North and the South. The laws have changed, and that has improved the lives of millions. Yet our progress remains achingly incomplete, as we see in the widespread violations of laws mandating equal treatment for all. In order to get closer to a more perfect union, we need to root out clear violations of the law, and go beyond that by making the kinds of fundamental changes to our institutions that will rectify the injustices carried out in the name of white supremacy. To do so, we will need support from as many Americans as possible. Support can lead to pressure, pressure applied to officials who will need to change if they want to keep their jobs, as well as pressure applied in order to bring in new officials if current officeholders and leaders refuse to change.

    Among those who currently do not stand with us in the fight to reform our system of law enforcement and criminal justice, some are motivated by pure hate, but I believe many are influenced more by ignorance and fear. If we can reduce the level of ignorance about exactly what African Americans face, and lessen some of the misplaced fears about white disadvantage being ginned up by media figures and elected officials who—even this week—continue to bloviate about various forms of “reverse racism,” then we can strengthen our coalition and make our chances of success that much greater. As the report on Ferguson makes clear, our country can no longer continue on in the way we have in the past.

    Intro for now: I’ll be there RT @Nomoremurderz: @keenblackgirl @MillennialAU, that’s a flier for the Ferguson City Council special meeting last night, the one where they were to discuss the DOJ. It was interesting, more later.

    Barack and Me

    I’ve been chasing Barack Obama for more than a decade. I watched his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention while deep in the throes of college application essays. It was a speech that I needed to hear, a speech that felt as if it were specifically for me. Before I knew it, I was working on Capitol Hill in 2007 as a college intern for Senator Ted Kennedy, where I would occasionally catch a glimpse of the then-Senator Obama traveling on the underground monorail from the Senate to the Capitol floor. I reveled in the excitement when he announced his presidency that February. I volunteered for that campaign in 2008 in New Hampshire, taking to the streets of New England with a megaphone following his victory, and hoping to one day be a part of his actual staff. In 2011, looking for a way out of graduate school, I applied for a job as a blogger in his reelection campaign — and I almost got that job, before then not getting that job.

    My current job — the second attempt to drop out of graduate school — is a result of not getting a job with the Obama campaign. Living in New York is a result of not getting a job with the Obama administration. And my slow crawl away from politics and toward writing is a direct result of chasing — and never quite catching — the world that surrounds President Obama. The chase has felt never-ending. But in a way, I owe everything to the chase.

    The chase was on my mind as I rode in a car to Joint Base Andrews on Saturday morning. It’s what I thought about on the shuttle to Air Force One with the four other journalists, Charles Blow from the New York Times, Zerlina Maxwell from Essence, White House correspondent April Ryan from the American Urban Radio Networks, and DeWayne Wickham, a USA Today columnist and dean of Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism & Communication. And that chase is what I thought of when we arrived at Andrews and stood before Air Force One. […]

    Still tinkering more than an hour into the flight, we were alerted that we would be taken to a conference room in two minutes, and that we should get ready. The chase was back on. For a moment, I’d gotten so comfortable that I’d forgotten what the stakes were. I was just hanging out with my new friends. But just like that, we were walking through the cabin and into a conference room, and there was the president, ready to shake our hands. Once we sat down to talk, I was positioned at President Obama’s four o’clock, set to ask the third question, with Jarrett right over my shoulder. I stared at my question, wondering if I should have worn a tie, desperately trying to figure out what to do with my elbows. Leaning on the table feels sloppy, but I need to lean in to listen and the table really helps with that. But what do I do with my hands? And is my mustache curling into my mouth?

    As President Obama began his opening statement, chief official White House photographer Pete Souza roamed the room. I was listening, still thinking about my question. As the White House veteran, Ryan1 went first. I paid attention to how she asked her question, how long it took, and whether it overlapped with mine. Hers concerned the president’s place in history. Following Ryan, Maxwell asked about the Department of Justice’s Ferguson report. These were good questions, and they made sense leading up to President Obama’s speech in Selma, all of which only increased the stress I’d placed on my question. I felt proud — we were a team in this conference room, and they’d pulled their weight. As he finished answering Maxwell’s question, the president gave her a smile, rotated a bit, and looked directly at me.2

    [The Question] Mr. President, so since you were — since I was in college, which is when you were elected, I’ve watched everything you’ve had to go through — jumping through hoops, going over hurdles, everything. And there’s been a common notion amongst my peers — peers who were very interested in getting into politics, being politicians, even that — this idea of if Barack Obama can’t say or do what we think he wants to say or do as President, then could any of us ever do that if we get into politics, be it about Ferguson, about gay rights — any of these things where we feel we know what he wants to say, but he can’t really do it at that moment.

    Is that a sentiment that you are commonly aware of? And does it at all inform kind of how you want to wrap up your presidency? And I guess if you were trying to advise someone in this climate that wanted to make some change or have an immediate impact, would you advise them into getting into politics?

    [The Answer] Well, I mean, let me say a couple things about that. First of all, one of the things I’m very proud about, from the time that I ran for the U.S. Senate to me running for President to being President is I’ve said what I meant. I haven’t engaged in a lot of editing. Now, I don’t always say it the way I might say it if I’m sitting over at the dinner table with Michelle. I might not say it the way I say it if I’m on the basketball court with some of my buddies. But the trajectory of what I’ve said, what I care about around policy, I haven’t had to bite my tongue. I think that’s a mistake.

    A lot of times where this comes up in the African-American community has been the notion of, well, he hasn’t just said this is racist, or he hasn’t just called out what somebody did, or he hasn’t specifically talked about why the African American community as opposed to poor folks or middle-class folks generally need help, and hasn’t targeted enough the racial problems in this country. And I’ve answered that publicly as well, which is I am the President of all people, and if I pass legislation that is boosting their income tax credit for low-income workers, I know by definition that African Americans will be disproportionately helped by that.

    The notion that I would describe that as a bill targeting African-Americans not only does not get — help it get passed, but it also then ignores all the white folks who are also struggling, and all the Hispanic folks who are also struggling. And my job is to build coalitions of like-minded people who care about the same issues I care about.

    When it comes to issues of racial justice around — that are very specific around criminal justice, whether it’s Trayvon or Ferguson or other circumstances, I have been very forward-leaning, with the exception that I have not commented on active investigations or potential prosecutions. The reason for that is not because I’m self-editing, the reason is the formal role I have. Eric Holder is my boss — or I am Eric Holder’s boss. The prosecutors who are investigating the cases report to Eric Holder, and if it looks like I’m putting thumbs on the scale, that can have an adverse impact on the resolution of these cases.

    Now, to go to young people generally, and how they might think about public service, I don’t think that politics is the only way to serve. You can write a great book. You start a wonderful business. You start a non-profit. You’re a principal or a teacher inside a school that’s doing a great job. Those are all meaningful ways of advancing the cause.

    But we can’t ignore politics. That’s how we make determinations about our institutional arrangements in this society. That’s how resources get allocated. That’s how we decide whether a school gets money or a young person gets a student loan, or a young private gets sent to war and how he or she is treated when they come back, or whether we’re going to protect our seniors from economic insecurity when they retire. Those are all political issues, and to avoid them makes no sense.

    And the notion that there are going to be times where you have to compromise in politics suggests that you don’t have to compromise at Grantland, or you don’t have to compromise as a businessperson. That’s more a reflection of young people, thinking you can do whatever you want. The truth of the matter is, is that we live in a society where you got to work with others and not everybody is going to agree with you all the time. And the more your influence expands, the more a diverse set of people you’re going to have to deal with. That’s a skillset you’re going to need no matter what.

    This was the only moment on the morning of March 7, 2015, when I was completely at ease. The moment when the president and I were talking. As soon as it ended, I realized I’d actually asked the question and that he’d actually responded. It felt right. As the roundtable continued, we began our descent, and I kept thinking about how bizarrely normal it all felt. Being in the plane. Being in the room. Attempting to challenge the president and the president challenging me back. I’d long thought my twenties would be defined by getting sonned by the president.

    I wasn’t excited anymore. I felt oddly reserved — mostly because I felt so comfortable.

    As the plane touched down, the president was still answering the final question, from Blow. It was clear we needed to leave, but the president was not done. Everyone in the room braced the contents of the table to prevent them from sliding off during the landing, but the president kept on answering, as if nothing were out of the ordinary. His unflappability is an art. He never got defensive, even as he defended himself. He never raised his voice, and he never rushed his thoughts, occasionally pausing to make sure he was saying exactly what he intended. […]

    After we landed, we took a motorcade to the bridge. When you ride in a presidential motorcade, you realize that the Obamas have not been in traffic since January 2009. Nothing breaks the rules quite like a presidential motorcade. Everything you know about the laws of traffic do not apply. All that matters is the pavement that connects Point A to Point B. Weaving through Selma, however, my awe at the audacity of the motorcade quickly receded as I took in the scene. The people of Selma. There were people everywhere.

    Someone in the car compared the scene to Ali in Zaire. The people in the streets were running at the motorcade, waving at the 40-plus vehicles as if the Olympic torch were coming through town. At this distance from the bridge, none of these people would make it to hear Obama’s speech. So this was their moment, to see a car carrying the president of the United States as he came to town for the first time since 2007.

    The pure joy of the crowds temporarily made me forget the horror that inspired this jubilee — that people flock to Selma every year as a reminder of this country’s ugly past, as well as in remembrance of those brave men, women, and children who risked it all so this stain on American history would be seen by all, in hopes that it would never repeat itself.

    That history coursed through my mind as our car began to drive up a hill. Before I knew it, we were on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

    “Oh my Jesus,” Ryan said. And for good reason. On the other side of that bridge were the people. People as far as you could see — as far as people could be. The moment was breathtaking — for the first time all day, no one was talking. For a few seconds, all you could do was look out and think about what happened on this bridge; consider the significance of the speeches that would be taking place in front of this bridge, and who would be making those speeches; pause to think about what it means that Congressman John Lewis would again introduce Barack Obama in Selma, only instead of in a church, this time it would be just feet from where he was attacked and his skull was fractured 50 years prior.

    We drove toward the throng, then took a left off the bridge. And just like that, it was over. The events in Selma were only beginning, but once I got out of that car and entered the press area, I was no longer in any capacity with the White House. In a flash, everything went back to normal — my normal.

    Suddenly, all my problems were mundane again. I had to charge my phone through a laptop on a bush under a set of metal bleachers. I spotted quasi-celebrities and smirked. I stood, disappointed by the modest amount of emotion in the press area, as rousing speech after rousing speech was delivered. I watched Barack Obama speak from a distance. We were apart again. His speech would be met with widespread praise and some criticism. As I was watching, I vacillated between feeling inspired and frustrated, passionately applauding and then folding my arms. Once again, I was a bystander of the political machine. […]

    I’ve spent my entire life watching people who have had successful lives still get misty-eyed about blowing out that knee and never going pro; about coming up short and not qualifying for the Olympics; about not scoring high enough on that test to get into that school. People who have had more impactful lives because they came up short. People who will tell you that, ultimately, they’re happy they came up short. But people who will still openly admit it’s something they think about all the time.

    This was that. The shock of Saturday morning ran through my system for 24 hours. I expected it to finally give way to relief and to joy. But instead, this was anger.

    And I liked it, because I knew it meant I still cared. In that moment, I finally got the answer to the question I’d spent so many years wanting to ask the president. I wasn’t chasing Obama — he was a smoke screen. I was chasing political enchantment. Even if that wasn’t exactly what I’d gotten from Obama, he’d helped me get there. And as we descended into LaGuardia, that anger finally gave way to elation.

    Four-star Oklahoma recruit decommits after racist frat video surfaces, with autoplay video.

    The drama surrounding Oklahoma and the controversial fraternity video is not over yet. The video is having an effect on the school as well as those who were planning to attend.

    Four-star recruit Jean Delance had committed to the Sooners and tweeted a picture of his visit just days before the video surfaced.

    After word started to spread about the video, the offensive tackle had a change of heart.

    Although Delance has been a bit indecisive when choosing a school, he was confident about his decision to join the Sooners. Bob Pryzbylo of SoonersIllustrated[dot]com said he spoke with the recruit about the video, and he made it clear it bothered him. From that point he decided to reopen his recruitment.

    Pictures and videos with mroe at the link.

    over 48 hours later, finally cleaning up the blood. #justice4tony #tonyrobinson #blacklivesmatter #madison

  290. rq says

    Solidarity to peeps in Madison shutting it down for #TonyRobinson
    Reports: More people in Madison protesting #TonyRobinson shooting today than there were right-to-work protesters last week.

    Mall of America protesters release emails between mall official, prosecutor

    The Mall of America considered cracking down on store employees who showed solidarity with civil rights protesters at the Bloomington megamall this winter, according to emails released by the demonstration’s organizers.

    Bloomington City Attorney Sandra Johnson said the emails “appear to be valid” after they were posted on Facebook Monday by Black Lives Matter Minneapolis. The group said it obtained the emails through a public records request.

    The December emails show the city attorney and Mall of America Corporate Counsel Kathleen Allen weighing trespassing orders and civil charges to deter further unsanctioned demonstrations. In one, Allen says the mall’s owners did not want trespassing orders against Lush employees who showed support for the protest, citing “the potential for further press.”

    Johnson argued for a six-month ban from the mall for employees (with an exception allowing access to work at the store) in order to “send a good message to all persons employed at MOA. … Future demonstrations cannot be tolerated.”

    The city attorney suggested that the mall wait for the criminal cases against alleged protest leaders to play out before pursuing civil action, writing, “It’s the prosecution’s job to be the enforcer and MOA needs to continue to put on a positive, safe face.”

    Tuesday will be the first court appearances for 11 people charged with orchestrating the Dec. 20 protest, which led mall officials to close part of the mall on the last Saturday before Christmas. [..]

    Reached for comment Monday, Johnson said the emails are among more than 58,000 that are part of a public data request. She said she’s “not in cahoots” with the mall, but rather getting help to build a case and worried that the media attention could make it harder to get an unbiased jury.

    “This is tainting the jury pool … [getting] people rigidly in their positions and defensive of their positions,” she said, later continuing, “My hopes of conducting this like a normal arraignment, strictly business, are pretty much dashed.”

    In one email to the mall’s lawyer, Johnson wrote, “I do not usually posture in the media, but I want to deter future criminal activity.”

    Asked about that, the city attorney said she’s “ducked more media requests for information than I ever have in my life simply because I don’t want to sensationalize it.”

    The Mall of America declined to answer questions Monday but said in a statement that it “has cooperated with the City of Bloomington before, during and after the demonstration.”

    Brace yourselves, because in Atlanta… they shot a mentally ill, unarmed, young black man. Who was in distress and naked. And then – he lunged for the police… Naked man shot by police officer at DeKalb County apartments

    DeKalb County Police Chief Cedric Alexander said at a news briefing the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is taking over after it appeared the man, identified as Anthony Hill, 27, was unarmed.

    Officers said it started shortly after 1 p.m. when the officer responded to a suspicious person call at The Heights at Chamblee apartments at 3028 Chamblee Dunwoody Rd.

    “The caller reported a male acting deranged, knocking on doors, crawling around on the ground naked,” Alexander said.

    The caller reported the man had taken off all his clothes and was just running around throughout the entire complex,” Alexander added.

    Investigators said when the officer encountered the naked man, things turned violent.

    “When the male saw the officer he charged, running at the officer,” the police chief said. “The officer told him to stop while stepping back at which point he drew his weapon and fired two shots.”

    But other witnesses said the man as unarmed and did not charge the officer. Investigators said no weapon was found at the scene.

    “At this point this case has been turned over to the Georgia Bureau of Investigations for an independent outside investigation,” Alexander emphasized.

    The officer tried unsuccessfully to administer aid, the police chief added.

    Regardless of what that investigation uncovers, it appears police have some fence mending to do at the scene.

    “Now you are scared to call police if you see anything because you don’t know what police are going to do. They have license to kill people for no reason and that is scary,” said Henry Raco.

    Ferguson: Missouri Supreme Court just waded into #Ferguson big time: Replacing judge, giving him latitude to make changes: Roy Richter is in, effective as of March 16.

    Predictable U. of Oklahoma frat script-the students will have suspensions lifted because “college is educational and students make mistakes” THE FUCK????????

  291. rq says

    Interlude: Romance fiction! Romance Novels, Racism & Restorative Justice: Part 1

    This week, white romance author Stephanie Dray had to apologize when her racism was publicly exposed. She was joking on facebook about a BDSM romance between founding father Thomas Jefferson and the enslaved Sally Hemings. In particular, another white romance author Jenny Trout, called her out and circulated the screencap of Dray’s facebook page. The screen shot had been given to Trout by one or more women of color authors who were upset, but feared negative consequences if they were the ones to call Dray out.

    Dray used her words. She apologized on her blog and individually to everyone who tweeted her that they were upset.

    And this is where we have the same split as in my daughter’s two schools. Some are saying: “hey, she apologized. What more do you want?” Others are dissatisfied with the apology for several reasons. First, the apology itself contained additional racist language. Second, scrutiny of Dray’s work finds further instances of racism. Finally—and this is much bigger than Dray—the whole incident opens up the larger issue of racism in the romance genre and publishing in general.

    I would argue that Dray is like the kids at my daughter’s previous school. They don’t have the tools to actually repair a situation. They can only offer an apology. Dray doesn’t seem to want to be racist, but she’s so steeped in it, and so unconscious of it that her attempts at cleaning up only make it worse. What is needed here is restorative or transformative justice.

    What follows is a good analysis of her rather weak apology – and it IS part one in a series! But basically, extra awareness for me.

    President Obama and the First Family Visit Selma

    The First Family traveled to Selma, Alabama to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the marches from Selma to Montgomery, and to celebrate the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

    Video at the link.

    So… here’s a twist… Gofundme Started For Black SAE House Chef Who’s Now Unemployed, link at the link.

    In the wake of the disturbing and racist video of Oklahoma University’s SAE fraternity members being leaked, the African-American chef of the frat house, is now unemployed.

    Via The Daily Mail:

    Oklahoma University alumni are rallying around an African American chef who has been forced out of his job at the school’s disgraced fraternity after footage emerged of members performing a racist chant.

    Howard has worked at Sigma Alpha Epsilon for more than 15 years, cooking raved-about chili dogs and cheering students with his ‘infectious smile’, former members say.

    But on Monday, his role was terminated after the university closed SAE with immediate effect.

    It’s so sad that the ignorant decisions of others have affected so many people. If you would like to donate to Howard, please click on this GoFundMe link.

    Good enough for your kitchen but not good enough for your frat. Says a lot.

    Here’s the Ferguson court story: Missouri Supreme Court takes over cases in Ferguson; judge resigns

    The Missouri Supreme Court announced Monday that it will take the “extraordinary action” of reassigning all Ferguson municipal court cases to the circuit court, starting next week.

    In a news release, the court announced the move was intended “to help restore public trust and confidence in the Ferguson municipal court division.”

    Ferguson municipal Judge Ronald J. Brockmeyer resigned his position Monday afternoon. Dellwood Mayor Reggie Jones said Brockmeyer also resigned Monday as prosecutor there.
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    In a phone interview Monday night, Brockmeyer declined to say what would happen with his other municipal court positions as prosecutor in Vinita Park and Florissant, and judge in Breckenridge Hills.

    The actions Monday followed the release last week of a scathing Justice Department report on Ferguson’s police and court practices.

    “I don’t believe the report was correct,” Brockmeyer told the Post-Dispatch Monday night, “but it’s not worth fighting.” [<— SERIOUSLY???]

    A group of residents waiting outside a closed meeting of the Ferguson City Council on Monday night cheered the news.

    “That’s big,” said Melissa Sanders, 32, of Ferguson. “I’m elated — for now.”

    Sanders, of the activist group Lost Voices, said she was concerned that “they may be just pacifying us.”

    Asked after the council meeting whether City Administrator John Shaw and Police Chief Thomas Jackson might be ousted, Ferguson spokesman Jeff Small said: “Given the gravity of the (Justice Department) report, it’s safe to say everything is on the table.”

    Brockmeyer said the main reason he resigned is that he and his family had received death threats in the last several days.

    “That’s one of the most important reasons — it’s not worth jeopardizing my family,” he said.

    Among the issues mentioned in the report, Brockmeyer said, was a red-light camera ticket against him in Hazelwood that was dismissed by the Ferguson prosecutor, who also was prosecutor in Hazelwood. Brockmeyer said Monday the ticket was dismissed after he pointed out to the prosecutor that it would be difficult to show who was driving the vehicle, which was used by his law firm.

    In a news release, Bert Fulk, a law associate of Brockmeyer, said Brockmeyer “recognizes that deference to a municipal judge’s judgments and court rulings depends upon public confidence” and media reports, “regardless of their accuracy or validity have diminished the public’s confidence in the Ferguson municipal court.”

    Fulk said Brockmeyer’s resignation was intended to help restore public confidence and to “help Ferguson begin its healing process.”
    […]
    The statement from Brockmeyer’s law associate distanced the judge from police and court abuses detailed in the report. It noted that Brockmeyer’s part-time position required him to be in court only once a week, compared to the court clerk, whose role was cited in the Justice Department report as “the most significant role.”

    Judge Roy L. Richter of the Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District, will take over the Ferguson court’s caseload. The transfer of cases will continue “until further order” of the Supreme Court, according to the court’s press release.

    The order, allowed under the state constitution, authorizes Richter to implement reforms to Ferguson’s court policies and procedures.

    Chief Justice Mary R. Russell said in the release that Richter would bring “a fresh, disinterested perspective to this court’s practices, and he is able and willing to implement needed reforms.”

    Aurora police: Man killed by officer was an unarmed parole absconder

    The 37-year-old black man, identified by the coroner’s office as Naeschylus Vinzant, had removed a Department of Corrections ankle monitor on March 2, police Cmdr. Paul O’Keefe said at a news conference. The man was shot once in the chest at about 1:15 p.m. on Friday.

    The officer who fired the shot has been placed on administrative leave, O’Keefe said. The officer has retained an attorney and is in the process of being interviewed by investigators.

    The shooting happened on the 16200 block of East 12th Avenue roughly a block from Laredo Elementary School.

    Police say Vinzant was on foot and that he was shot as officers tried to arrest him. Vinzant was wanted in connection with an alleged domestic violence incident, which included kidnapping, robbery, and assault, according to investigators.

    A fugitive unit and SWAT members encountered him on Friday, O’Keefe said.

    O’Keefe declined to talk about what exactly compelled the officer to fire a shot, citing the ongoing investigation. But he said no weapon was found.

    Aurora’s new police chief, Nicholas Metz, said investigators want to be careful before releasing further details about the shooting.

    They want to be careful because police actions are so thoroughly questioned and examined, and they say it like it’s a bad thing.

    Family of Woman Killed by Officer Confronts CMPD Chief

    Less than 24 hours after an officer-involved shooting in Charlotte, CMPD officers met with the Grier Heights community for a town hall meeting about race relations and the use of deadly force. After the meeting, Chief Rodney Monroe was confronted by the family of Janisha Fonville, the 20-year-old killed last month in another officer-involved shooting.

    “We just want justice,” her uncle, Lamar Gray, said.

    Fonville was shot and killed by an officer Feb. 18. Police were responding to a domestic call and say she had a knife and lunged at them. Her family, still grieving, says the use of deadly force was not necessary.

    “He could have shot her with a BB gun and disabled her. She was 110 pounds,” Gray said.

    Many in the crowd asked officers about deadly force, something they say they fear every time they get pulled over for a traffic stop.

    “It draws the most criticism, it draws the most attention, but it’s still just a small part of what we do every day,” Monroe said.

    Monroe said holding these community meetings, where officers and residents can get to know one another, will ultimately make everyone more safe.

    “The more that we understand and know what our responsibilities are, I think we can lessen the uses of deadly force,” Monroe said.

    Fonville’s family says they won’t stop fighting for her, but talking with chief helped relieve tension.

    “He invited us to have a sit-down with him, so that’s a start,” Gray said.

    Time Warner Cable News’ special report “Through My Eyes” explores race relations in Charlotte and across the state.

  292. rq says

    “We are not going to put Tony on trial…This is about finding out exactly what happened.” — #Madison Mayor

    Ferguson judge behind aggressive fines policy resigns as city’s court system seized

    Ronald J Brockmeyer stepped down as Ferguson’s municipal court judge after Missouri’s supreme court ordered that all the court’s cases be transferred to the St Louis County circuit court, according to a source who was not authorised to speak publicly about the decision.

    Under the same ruling, Judge Roy L Richter of the Missouri court of appeals will be assigned to the county’s circuit court, where he will hear all of Ferguson’s municipal court cases “to help restore public trust and confidence” in the system.

    “Judge Richter will bring a fresh, disinterested perspective to this court’s practices and he is able and willing to implement needed reforms,” Missouri’s chief justice, Mary R Russell, said in a statement that described the move as an “extraordinary action” taken under article five of the Missouri constitution. […]

    Brockmeyer, 70, was singled out by investigators as a driving force behind Ferguson’s strategy of using its municipal court to generate revenues aggressively. Investigators found that Brockmeyer had boasted of creating a range of new court fines, “many of which are widely considered abusive and may be unlawful”. […]

    A press release accompanying Russell’s order said that all pending and future cases that were to be heard by Ferguson’s municipal court would instead be heard by Richter at the circuit court from 16 March until further notice. A court spokeswoman could not confirm how cases would proceed this week.

    The decision was welcomed cautiously by Alec Karakatsanis, the co-founder of Equal Justice Under Law, one of the legal non-profits that is suing the city. “The problems we are dealing with are endemic to our legal system and not isolated to the small municipality of Ferguson,” said Karakatsanis. “I hope this serves as a first small step toward confronting the horrors that we visit everyday on poor people of colour in the legal system and not as any kind of attempted solution.

    Russell said that staff from the state courts administrator’s office would also be assigned to “review Ferguson municipal court practices and to assist Richter in making necessary changes”.

    The state’s chief justice signalled in her statement on Monday that regional or even statewide reform may be necessary for a municipal court system that has been sharply criticised as a failed system that has lost the trust of many residents. “Although we recognise the local control our statutes give these uniquely local entities, we must not sacrifice individual rights and society’s collective commitment to justice,” said Russell.

    List of Sigma Alpha Epsilon members, via wiki.

    Report: Texas Prosecutes More Truancy Cases Than All Other States Combined

    Just one of the astounding facts revealed in “Class, Not Court: Reconsidering Texas’ Criminalization of Truancy,” is that in 2013 Texas prosecuted approximately 115,000 truancy cases–more than twice the number of all other states combined.

    These prosecutions fall heavily on minority students. In the 2013-14 school year, almost 20 percent of reported Failure to Attend School court referrals statewide involved African-American students, despite the fact that African-American students represent less than 13 percent of the student body statewide. Likewise, 64 percent of reported cases involving Hispanic students, though they represent only 52 percent of the student body.

    The report suggest that a better, more effective solution for handling truancy cases may be for schools and courts to provide prevention and intervention services for at-risk children to get them back into school.

    “We know the most effective programs to address truancy really hone in on the underlying reasons that a student is not attending school and addressing those underlying causes of chronic absenteeism,” said Deborah Fowler, the executive director of Texas Appleseed. “Those are the things that are missing in the Texas system. In Texas, we have a very court-centric approach that is very one-size-fits-all.”

    The court approach, which involves fines students can’t pay and criminal records that can follow youth into adulthood, often fails to grapple with the realities kids are facing: chronic health problems, homelessness, family violence and the need to work for survival.

    “We see when we talk to families that there are complex and varied reasons that kids miss school, and it often doesn’t really resemble what I think most people commonly think of when they think of truancy,” Fowler said.

    Students with disabilities also make up a significant percentage of students charged with truancy. While special education students represented only 9 percent of students statewide in the 2013-14 school year, they represented 13 percent of court referrals for Failure to Attend School.

    According to the report, many students with disabilities miss school to receive essential disability-related treatment from doctors and speech, occupational and physical therapists. Sometimes schools, under pressure from the state to meet attendance goals, refuse to excuse absences for therapies that parents and outside providers believe are essential, but schools do not prioritize.

    “Every time a student misses school, even for something that should be excused, you run the risk of sloppy record-keeping in the attendance office. You also run the risk of a parent or a student forgetting to turn in their excuse and a higher chance of being referred for those absences,” said Dustin Rynders, an attorney for Disability Rights Texas.

    Each truancy fine can run up to $500. Because 79 percent of those charged are economically disadvantaged, many of the tickets go unpaid. If the student’s family can’t pay the fines and court costs, that student could face arrest and incarceration when she turns 17.

    “The students who are most likely to be sent to court and fined are the students who can least afford it. We have an overrepresentation of students who are classified as economically disadvantaged going to court for truancy cases. So it’s families that are least able to pay fines that are getting saddled with these fines,” said Fowler.

    The report also describes another troubling sanction: Some judges are ordering students to “unenroll” from school and take the GED. In other words, courts in Texas are ordering children to drop out of school as a punishment for not going to school. Over a three-year period, 6,423 students who were ordered to drop out and take the GED then failed the test.

    From NatGeo, 50 Years Later, Hiking the “Bloody Sunday” Trail from Selma to Montgomery

    Fifty years ago, on March 7, 1965, 600 marchers protesting for voting equality left the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma headed for the state capitol in Montgomery. Before they had even left town, the peaceful marchers were met at the Edmund Pettus Bridge with police beatings and tear gas.

    That violence, which was televised across the nation and dubbed “Bloody Sunday,” only served to strengthen the movement’s non-violent call for civil rights, however. Two weeks later, on March 21, about 3,200 marchers led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. set out again from the chapel, across the bridge and down U.S. 80. By the time they reached the capitol, they were 25,000 strong and King gave a speech to the crowd and nation, averring: “They told us we wouldn’t get here. And there were those who said that we would get here only over their dead bodies, but all the world today knows that we are here and we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama saying, ‘We ain’t goin’ let nobody turn us around.’ ” In August, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.

    Today many of the nation’s leaders—including President Obama and his family—activists, and celebrities are in Selma attending various activities taking place in memory of the historic event.

    It might seem odd to consider a walk down a highway in Alabama among the world’s greatest hikes—but few marches have had such a profound influence on a nation and the power of the powerless to effect meaningful and lasting change in the world. That victory did not come easy.

    Hiking along a highway is not necessarily pleasant, but considering the weight of history here, it is quite powerful. And there’s more than asphalt—stop in the Southern towns of Casey and Lowndesboro for local cooking or simply enjoy the farmland that usually is a blur through the car window. Markers along the trail indicate the 1965 campsites, including the city of St. Jude historic district where musicians including Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, and Peter, Paul and Mary performed for the marchers. Another memorial honors Viola Liuzzo, a mother and voting rights advocate from Michigan, who came to Alabama to help after being horrified by the events of Bloody Sunday. Members of the Klu Klux Klan shot her while she was driving marchers back along the trail the night of March 25, 1965.

    Practical hike information at the link.

    Ward 1 Ferguson City Council candidate Doyle McClellan says DOJ report “is not a factual document” @OBS_STL @deray

  293. rq says

    #FlashbackFriday to a historic day in our Movement. The first Black Girl Scout Troop. #BlackoutDay


    Missouri Supreme Court takes over cases in Ferguson; judge resigns

    Judge Roy L. Richter of the Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District, will take over the Ferguson court’s caseload. The transfer of cases will continue “until further order” of the Supreme Court, according to the court’s press release.

    The order, allowed under the state constitution, authorizes Richter to implement reforms to Ferguson’s court policies and procedures.

    Chief Justice Mary R. Russell said in the release that Richter would bring “a fresh, disinterested perspective to this court’s practices, and he is able and willing to implement needed reforms.”

    Russell, through a spokeswoman, declined to be interviewed.

    Richter said in an email that, “Lawyers in general, and judges in particular, want the judicial system to operate fairly for all those who deal with the Courts. If that hasn’t been the case in Ferguson or anywhere else in Missouri, that needs to change — and that’s important.”

    Richter said he and the state court administrator’s office will visit Ferguson soon to assess the situation. He said he’s interested in the idea of having a wider scope of “standard” fines that would be used in Ferguson and elsewhere, and also in making the court more accessible to the public.

    “If something is a routine violation and the offender wants to pay the fine without appearing in court, that makes sense to me,” he said.

    Richter serves as chairman of the municipal judge education committee, a body of the Supreme Court that trains municipal court judges. In January, he wrote a letter to municipal court officials encouraging them to consider a range of internal reforms being proposed by the Municipal Court Improvement Committee, a voluntary group made up of judges and lawyers. It is led by Overland municipal court Judge Frank Vatterott.

    In the letter, Richter said he believed the media was misrepresenting the system and that “the vast majority of municipal courts operate the way they should” with “a few (very few) exceptions.”

    “No system is so ‘good’ that it can’t be improved, and I am a firm believer that those within the system are in a better position to propose and enact positive improvements than to have ‘improvements’ come from the outside — from folks who do not understand the practicalities (of) making new rules about matters with which they are unfamiliar,” he wrote.

    Richter, on Monday, acknowledged in an email that “one court operating improperly is one too many” but said he’s been educating municipal court judges since the early ’80s, and he does believe that most do it right.

    “Take a road trip down to Cape Girardeau — just go sit in their municipal court for a session — let me know what you think. If you don’t want to go that far, scoot down to Perryville. My point is, the entire state isn’t St. Louis County,” he said.

    Richter added he shouldn’t be viewed as an outsider coming in. “Being a judge is being a judge — you listen to both sides and do the right thing, applying the facts to the law.”

    Vatterott, who asked Richter to write the letter, said Monday that the wording was intended to ensure buy-in from the courts. He called Richter “a highly respected … straight-shooter” who “doesn’t have an agenda and calls it like he sees it.” Vatterott said that Richter would be an influential outside voice.

    Statement from the Missouri Supreme Court about their action today in #Ferguson replacing the municipal court judge: I think I ahve the statement later, but that’s just in case.

    Missouri Supreme Court assigns new judge to Ferguson Municipal court cases

    Gov. Nixon statement on action by the Missouri Supreme Court regarding the City of Ferguson’s municipal court

    JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – Gov. Jay Nixon issued the following statement on today’s action by the Missouri Supreme Court regarding the City of Ferguson’s municipal court:

    “Courts are a vital part of our democracy, and our court system is built on the trust of the citizens it serves. Today’s strong and appropriate actions by the Missouri Supreme Court are a solid step forward. I will continue to work with the Missouri Supreme Court and the legislature to ensure all municipal courts operate in the fair, transparent and accountable manner Missourians expect and deserve.”

    Blog post by a former member of the SAE. A black member. There Will Never Be Another BLACK S-A-E

    There will never be another BLACK S-A-E…. I wish there had been one less. My former fraternity broke my heart today. A video was posted allegedly showing members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity’s Oklahoma Kappa chapter chanting a disturbing song evoking images of deep hatred and cruelty that we too often choose to ignore happened in our country. To say it was racist is not enough. It hit me in the very core of my soul when I saw the video.
    I know those bus rides well. I was a member of this chapter 14 years ago. The second BLACK MAN to be initiated in those halls. We had our own songs….different songs…but songs we sang on every bus trip to every date party for four years. We didn’t know where the songs came from or who made them up or even what some of them meant, but we sang them so often we all knew them whether we wanted to or not….So now 14 years later, my “brothers” now sing this song. This is what gets their spirits united for a great night out with their friends and their dates (one of which, thank God exposed this …this). This is what binds them.
    But I remember what binded us. I remember the True Gentleman. The true gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe. Good will. Propriety. Self-Control. Honor. Virtue. Sympathy. I wanted to be an Omega. All my heroes from television were Omegas. My cousins are Kappas and Alphas. I went S-A-E.
    My mother wanted to protect her son from … everything and forbid me to pledge anything. I went through two days of rush just to see what was out there. Every house was the same, everyone looked the same, and I was very aware that no one looked like me. But a childhood friend, of mine, Ben, wanted to see the S-A-E house because his Grandfather had been an Alph and my friend hoped to honor him by extending that legacy. I walked in to what was one of the most confusing houses I’ve ever been in. I met two of the nicest, but, whitest guys of all time (still love you Geoff and Mr. Manley) who told me a lot about the house and what they wanted to provide their pledges. They told me what they expected from their pledges. They weren’t selling a hedonistic fantasy, and they weren’t trying to say what made them better than the other houses. It was refreshing…
    Then I got lost…(I said the house was confusing.) I found a room with a pool table, couches and a big screen. I had my rushee’s nametag on my chest and my National Merit/Achiever’s Scholarship, Math and Science nerd look on my face, when I met a Native American fraternity member, a Brazilian (Venezuelen. Forgive me E.P.) fraternity member, and a couple Caucasian members. They saw the look and they ripped into me and everyone else they saw, light heartedly, but they let us know they could care less if any of us there, whatever our race may be, signed with their house or not. We were in their home. Didn’t matter the color. Didn’t matter the country of origin. They were S-A-Es. Whoever you were out there is great, but once you come in here, you are one of us.
    Phi Alpha! I wanted to be an Omega. All my heroes from television are Omegas. My Cousins are Kappas and Alphas. I went S-A-E! The Pledge class had already been assembled. They had already met and gotten acquainted. They had already had official meetings as a pledge class. They were all equally pigmented. Then I showed up. The only BLACK MAN there. I’d be lying if I said race never came up there. But I wouldn’t be telling the whole story if I didn’t say that when race came up it was from a place of genuine inquiry. People wanting to understand a race they hadn’t been exposed to much.
    And in my own little self-sacrificing way, I wanted to be that for the house. I wanted to be the guy that shattered all those preconceived notions of BLACK MEN; those stereotypes of fear, that I think (it’s just my thought. It doesn’t have to be your truth) lead to our youth not always making it home from the store with their skittles. I knew when I joined that house, that I’d be looked at differently. Why would he want to be in that house? And I knew it would come from both sides.
    I remember hearing people saying things about S-A-E for having a black member. I remember being shoved into a wall at the school gym by some fellow BLACK MEN who swiped the letters on the front of my shirt and said, “Whose house is THAT, brother?!” But I held offices. I was member educator. Song chair. I led Scandals, directed U-Sing, directed Home Coming Pep Rallies (some of the Illest still!). I stood out front and said “S-A-E is different!” We can be at the Mountain Top. And we were different….
    But it’s been 14 years since I walked in, and there still hasn’t been a third BLACK MAN. I thought we were different. Maybe we weren’t. Maybe I was just being hopeful. But I believed. I believed in S-A-E. I believed in the True Gentlemen. I believed my brothers were my brothers. I believed my son should be their brother if he so chose one day. But then I saw that video. I saw that video speaking of lynching me instead of ever letting me sign. Of killing my 4 year legacy instead of ever letting him wear their letters.
    And then my son saw my face. My sweet innocent sympathetic son saw the pain and anger in my eyes and I had a decision to make: A decision White America will never understand. Do I teach my innocent 4 year old son about pure hatred today, or do I save that innocence one more day? Do I let him keep going a few more days, weeks, months before I have to start preparing him for this?
    My mother prepared me…I thought she was wrong. I thought we’d be further by now, but look at the news. Forget this one story, just look at the news. My mother prepared me. God Bless Her. And I will prepare my son, but not today. Today this BLACK MAN gave him a smile and finished eating dinner with him. This BLACK MAN gave him his bath and got him ready for bed in his perfect little world. I will not take that yet. But when I do, I will take S-A-E away as well. I had my time. I have my friends.
    But I can have no association with this organization as a BLACK MAN. I know these were “kids being kids” and maybe they aren’t the hateful ignorant lost little boys I think they are, but I will not stand behind anything that allowed this to happen. They are not just kids being kids. Those boys are sons. Sons of men who failed them, and they failed my son. You Failed ME! Member 261-057. Your boys sang in unison. They may not know where the song came from or who made it up or even what all the words really mean, but they sing it so often they know all the words whether they want to or not.
    I wanted to be an Omega. My heroes from television were all Omegas. My cousins are Kappas and Alphas….I went..S-A-E? Shame on me. But hopefully, there will never be another BLACK S-A-E. -William Bruce James, II

    That’s the entire text – he doesn’t really use paragraph breaks, so I stuck some in with apologies to the author. I’ll be honest, the very end made me tear up.

    Here he is in interview: Last black member from OU’s ‘racist’ fraternity talks about time in SAE

    William Bruce James II, who says he was the last black SAE member at OU, spoke with KFOR’s Linda Cavanaugh about his thoughts on the incident.

    James, who pledged to SAE 14 years ago, says he felt shock and disbelief after watching the video.

    The SAE alumnus says he never felt like his fraternity brothers were racist.

    “I never heard anything like that while I was there,” he said. “My brothers wouldn’t have allowed it…. That song wouldn’t have been sung.”

    James says the fact that the current members in the video knew all of the words to the mean-spirited chant shows that this wasn’t a random act.

    “This has been going on for some period of time,” he said.

    Since the video was released, James says he has seen an outpouring of support from his fraternity brothers.

    “They’re helping me be less angry about it,” he said.

    Although he has the support from his brothers, James says he still feels like he is grieving.

    “I feel like I’ve lost a family member,” James said. “That pure bond of brotherhood, I don’t know if I’ll ever get that back.”

    This is the effect of your ‘freedom of speech’ when you argue that racial slurs should be free to be used – they’re only words, right? But those words have an effect. A harmful effect. So anyone who refuses to reconsider the language that they use and hold free speech higher than empathy, I say – fuck you.

  294. rq says

    I said I had some on the Ferguson Council meeting: here’s a start, probably more later. Heh.
    City council just arrived #Ferguson
    They immediately went into a closed session #Ferguson
    When asked why they reply was “section 1-12” #Ferguson
    They went in the room and locked the door #Ferguson while we look for the “section 1-12”. We can’t find it. #Ferguson
    Section 1-12 is a “supplemental code”. Not listed. #Ferguson does what they want.
    DOJ report or no, you think change is possible with an attitude like that?

  295. rq says

    #Ferguson city council voted to hold today’s meeting in private.
    #Ferguson City Council in closed session, so this is happening: RT @MzzzMariah: Activists hold their own council mtg
    In #Ferguson City Council waiting for secret mtg to finish. Check out how white the photos on the wall are…
    And the first Ferguson City Council Meeting after the release of the DOJ reports will be held in secret. Unreal.
    Activists looking for the elusive “§ 112” private meeting rules after #Ferguson council abruptly left the room.
    “Since #Ferguson city council is ignoring the public, we’ll hold our own meeting.” A quorum has been met.

  296. rq says

    The Logic of Whiteness

    The notion of a national dialogue, or any dialogue, for that matter, presumes that talking about an injustice will somehow clear up the misunderstandings, misperceptions, assumptions, ignorance, alienation, violence, and microaggressions affiliated with racism; that such a dialogue would be a transformative moment. But the idea that within the United States we could actually have a national dialogue on racism is not only illusory. It is a misunderstanding of how whiteness as a racialised identity and its consequences — racialisation and racism — reinforces, perpetuates, and maintains white privilege and the effects of that privilege: white hegemony and white supremacy.

    The performance of whiteness, as an institutionalized structure and practice, limits the terms of social interaction and is predicated on the power to grant recognition and legitimacy. In other words, the performance of whiteness exercises the right to impose meaning, and world-view on the racialised other; and so, the performance of whiteness makes the issue of race and racism undiscussable. The very nature and logic of whiteness is antidialogical.

    In using the term antidialogical, I am referencing the meaning of that word as used by Paulo Freire, in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In Pedagogy, Freire asserts that antidialogue is a relationship between self and other, which becomes, in the sense used by Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, an “I-It” relation. That is, self sees the other as an object to be dominated, and so the relationship becomes oppressive. To be antidialogical is to exist in a vertical relationship of dominance and subordination. Antidialogical activity impedes communication and reduces the other to the status of a thing. Antidialogue is a means of dominance which dispossesses the other of their testimony and their expressiveness. It is an indispensable tool in the preservation of dominance and oppression, and consequently the preservation of whiteness.

    When you think about how the logic of whiteness is performed, that is, the reasoning upon which whiteness is predicated, what stands out is the justification on which whiteness rests: innocence. Whiteness, as a structurally infused practice expressed through racism, self-exonerates, and justifies hostility toward those categorized as inferior. As such, racism, as described by the Tunisian writer on race and colonization, Albert Memmi, is “a defense mechanism and an alibi” (160). It both protects the white perpetrator of racial aggression and hostility and rationalises the imposition of that aggression and hostility.

    Consequently, as part of the logic of whiteness, there is the tendency to blame the victims for the crimes of their white oppressors. Hence, the white view of issues and tensions associated with racism focus on African American attitudes and conduct that need to change. Accordingly, whatever difficulties African Americans face are a consequence of their own attitudes and behavior, a failure to adapt to the demands and norms of the dominant white culture.
    […]
    This type of reasoning allows many white Americans to speak and think about the “race problem” in ways that remove them from complicity in the system of racial inequality and injustice. As described by William Ryan in Blaming the Victim, whites “are, most crucially, rejecting the possibility of blaming, not the victims, but themselves. They are unconsciously passing judgments on themselves and bringing in a unanimous verdict of Not Guilty” (28). The guilt referred to here is not necessarily indicative of a sense of personal responsibility, but rather defensiveness. It is what Andrew Hacker described in Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, and Unequal as a way of denying, “to themselves that the value imputed to being white has injured people who are black” (60).

    Consequently, as explained by David T. Wellman, in Portraits of White Racism, white Americans can “be conscious of inequality and injustice without condemning themselves, to recognize a societal problem without implicating the society, and to defend their interests without referring to genes or race” (221). How is this possible? Because, asserts Wellman, “they explain it in terms of the problems of its victims; and they ‘solve’ the problem with solutions that do not affect white people; [instead] the solutions allow white people to recognize the need for change without having that change affect them in important ways [so] they get off the hook and defend their racial privilege as well” (221).

    This kind of thinking is characteristic of the inverted ethics of institutionalized whiteness, based on an assumption of rightness, and by definition ethics refers to rightness. But such an ethics of whiteness rationalizes the very opposite of right, that is, those qualities that constitute what is correct, just, proper, honorable, and lawful. This inverted sense of ethics has a long history extending back to slavery of attempting to synchronize beliefs and practices, that is, of reconciling contradictory standards of morality. To be more precise, the ethics of whiteness applies the principles of morality differently to people who are black. Therefore, the performance of whiteness acts contrary to rightness, fairness, and human dignity.

    The performance of whiteness, according to Steve Martinot in The Machinery of Whiteness, is criminal; that is, racialisation is a criminal activity which criminalizes the racialised while decriminalizing white acts of racialisation — another form of blaming the victim. In order to maintain white privilege and white hegemony the means of control are criminal in light of the constituted law, and the established legal institutions must be suspended when white privilege and white hegemony is threatened. The lawlessness of police, prosecutors, and judges and the unlawful enforcement of the law by these fiduciary agents are common perversions of American legal institutions. They are pivotal to race hierarchies, and therefore endemic to the logic of whiteness.
    […]

    White self-decriminalization therefore hampers discussion because it blames the victim and so preserves white domination, making individual acts of racism possible and permissible. White self-decriminalization as an ethical inversion hides behind the assumption of individuality, because individual acts are not systemic. Such an assumption disregards the fact that the meanings individual acts acquire are social meanings, given by others, and that the acts of those of a hegemonic group are thereby endowed with hegemonic meanings. Consequently, as a reflection of white self-decriminalization when a white person acts,the acts represent only the individual but a black person’s acts represent their community.
    […]

    What is clear is that we are not going to talk our way out of racism and police violence against people of color. Racism will never be overcome by arguments at the round table. I believe that conviction by argument and reasoning is only possible when it is backed up by overwhelming physical force — a matching of power, not intellects. Persuasion, through dialogue, is unrealistic when you are addressing white privilege and white hegemony, in order to induce whites to abandon their privileged positions.

    To expect whites to commit racial suicide is a stupendous presumption. The eradication of white privilege and white hegemony is possible only after the performance of whiteness has been relieved of its freedom to control the decisive instruments of violence. Because whiteness is a form of discourse, and antidialogism is a component of that discourse, antidialogism creates a boundary that excludes and constrains communication, – what can and cannot be said, of who can and cannot speak, who must be silent, and whose utterances are unworthy of attention.

    The very logic, and inverted ethics of whiteness, is evidence that dialogical reasoning is insufficient to compel the beneficiaries of white privilege and white hegemony to surrender their power. As British political scientist Harold F. Laski observed in Where Do We Go from Here?, “[W]henever privilege is in danger, it flies into that panic which is the mortal enemy of reason; and it is a waste of time to ask its consideration of arguments that, in another mental climate, it is capable of understanding” (Cox 168).

    The SAE frat members are getting referred to as kids and boys and all I can think about is Trayvon, Mike and Tamir…

    if you have a Taser & mace, but can’t subdue a nude unarmed 19-year-old without a deadly weapon, maybe you shouldn’t be a cop. #AnthonyHill

    OU Pres wants frat members to meet w/ African American student leaders and personally apologize to them in his office #SAE – I would say, first make sure the African American student leaders want to meet with them personally.

    “Show these kids that #BlackLivesMatter by living yours like it does.” Words to remember from #AnthonyHill #Antlanta

    Wisconsin officer who shot unarmed man was exonerated in previous fatal shooting

    On Friday, Kenny, a 12-year veteran of the Madison Police Department, was responding to reports of a man who had “battered someone” and was was jumping in and out of traffic, creating a safety hazard, Koval said.

    Kenny followed Tony Robinson, 19, into an apartment building and forced his way in because he heard a disturbance. In an ensuing scuffle, Robinson was injured by gunfire, Koval said.

    Kenny immediately began to administer first aid, as did other officers who arrived at the scene, according to the police chief. Nevertheless, Robinson, a 2014 graduate of Sun Prairie High School, died of his wounds at a local hospital.

    Based on the ongoing state-led investigation, Koval would not say how many shots were fired. Yet during a gathering in Madison to commemorate him, Robinson’s family referenced five shots.

  297. rq says

    More details on the Atlanta shooting: Naked Black Man Fatally Shot by White Police Officer in Georgia

    A naked man who was apparently unarmed was shot and killed by a police officer on Monday at an apartment complex in Chamblee, Ga., northeast of Atlanta, the authorities said.

    The man was shot by a police officer who had responded to calls about a man acting deranged, knocking on doors and running naked through the Heights at Chamblee, Cedric L. Alexander, the DeKalb County deputy chief operating officer for public safety, said in a news conference.

    The officer, who has been on the force for seven years, fired two shots at the man in a parking lot after the man charged at him and ignored his commands to stop, Mr. Alexander said. It appeared the man was unarmed, he said. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is examining the shooting.

    Both shots struck the man, and he died at the scene, Mr. Alexander said. He was identified as Anthony Hill, 27. The officer involved was placed on administrative leave pending the results of the investigation, Mr. Alexander said.

    The shooting on Monday occurred amid a national debate over race, crime and law enforcement officers’ use lethal force in encounters with civilians. Mr. Hill was black, and the officer who shot him is white, Mr. Alexander said.

    It was not clear what had led the officer to shoot Mr. Hill. Mr. Alexander said that the officer had been equipped with a Taser, but that he did not know whether the officer had used the device.

    The shooting was the third fatal police shooting since Friday of a black man who was or appeared to be unarmed. Tony Robinson, 19, was killed by a police officer in Madison, Wis., on Friday during a scuffle inside an apartment. The same day, a police officer in Aurora, Colo., shot and killed Naeschylus Vinzant, 37, a parolee who had cut off an ankle monitor. He was wanted in an “assault, robbery, kidnapping and domestic violence” incident.

    Exclusive Interview with #SharodKindell the Living victim of police violence at the hands of #Denver Police, youtube link: *DAM Exclusive* – Sharod Kindell Interview

    xclusive interview with Sharod Kindell, a father of two and partner to one. Denver police shot Sharod on January ninth while sitting in a driveway. Interview was on 3/5/15

    Dellwood to grant amnesty for traffic citations, ah, but why?

    Any arrest warrants for failing to appear in court will also be canceled, he said. He said he didn’t know the exact number, but he estimated thousands of cases would be thrown out.

    Jones said the pardons, which will take effect on March 20, were “fair and proper justice.” Traffic tickets written by the defunct Dellwood Police Department were difficult to prosecute and were making people’s lives more challenging, he said.

    He said he thought other cities’ amnesty programs, which canceled arrest warrants but still held defendants liable for the initial fine, weren’t doing enough. They “simply recycled individuals right back into the same system,” he said. “People come in and get the warrant lifted, but then they have no money to pay the fine.”

    The city’s the Board of Aldermen voted in April 2012 to dissolve the city’s embattled police department.

    The move came after an audit by county police found 121 cases from 2009 to 2011 — including burglaries, rapes and drug charges — where someone had been implicated in a crime in the city, but the casework inexplicably stopped.

    Jones said he had authority as mayor to cancel the traffic cases, but said aldermen did not object when he informed them of his plan.

    Jones said he also asked for and received the resignation of municipal prosecutor Ronald J. Brockmeyer.

    Brockmeyer was criticized in a Justice Department report last week for his role as Ferguson’s judge. The report said Brockmeyer’s court was less focused on justice than on raising money for Ferguson. [emphasis mine]

    Jones said he thought Brockmeyer had done a “decent” job as prosecutor.

    “He was very compliant,” Jones said. “He understood.”

    Are the two events unconnected? I’m not so sure.

    Can confirm that Ron Brockmeyer was asked to resign as @CityofDellwood Prosecutor yesterday and that his resignation has been received.

  298. rq says

    The media’s response of blaming black victims for their own killings—scraping up any far reach of justification they can find—is violence.
    Here’s an example: Wisconsin man killed by police faced some past troubles – he was ‘no angel’. :P Autoplay video at the link.

    An unarmed biracial man fatally shot by a white police officer tended to be an impulsive risk-taker and faced a choice between a middle-class lifestyle and the gang world, according to court documents.

    The file connected to 19-year-old Tony Robinson’s conviction last year for armed robbery shows he was diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder and anxiety and depression. The documents were contained in a report by a state Department of Corrections agent. […]

    The Associated Press had described Robinson as black based on police descriptions of him as African-American. But at a news conference Monday, family members repeatedly emphasized that he embraced a biracial identity from having a white mother and black father.

    “We don’t want to stop at ‘black lives matter’ because all lives matter,” including multiracial people like Robinson, his uncle, Turin Carter, said.

    Madison Police Chief Mike Koval has tried to strike a conciliatory tone with the city’s black community, calling Robinson’s death a tragedy and even going so far as praying with Robinson’s grandmother in her driveway hours after the shooting. On Monday, he wrote on his blog that he was sorry Robinson died and hoped his family could find forgiveness in their hearts.

    “The police are part of this community – and we share this sense of loss,” Koval wrote.

    So he’s gone from ‘black’ to ‘biracial’ and the family is emphasizing his white parentage. I find it an interesting reaction, since it’s the black part of him that people see – but will the fact that he has a white parent make anything different about his case?

    Athlete Protest

    Wide Receiver Sterling Shepard and Center Ty Darlington walk with OU’s football team walk out in all black during what was scheduled to be an open practice.

    It’s a photo of the team walking out in response to the fraternity’s despicable behaviour.

    SAE. Racism, alive. Shows a cartoon, of a young man singing “There will never be a ni-”
    white man: “Son! No! Son, you must never use the n-word.”
    young man: “Oh… because it is offensive?
    white man: “No because the blacks will use it to falsely smear you as a racist.”

    Video purports to show Oklahoma SAE house mom using “n-word”. It’s not just the frat brothers.

    A video surfaced Sunday showing members of the OU chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon chanting a racist song containing the “n-word.” Overnight, another video surfaced, this one appearing to show the SAE house mother using the same racial slur back in 2013. Jericka Duncan reports on the outrage from Norman, Oklahoma.

    Here’s the official transfer notice removing Brockmeyer and instating Richter.

  299. rq says

    ‘Scandal’ Cast Talks Ferguson Episode: ‘It Was About Lives Mattering Regardless of Who You Are’

    In last week’s urgently powerful episode of Scandal, Shonda Rhimes—the showrunner America needs, and the most progressive force in entertainment right now—boldly brought the country’s collective ongoing pain over Michael Brown, and the ever-rising count of unarmed black men killed by police, to prime time.

    “It was about lives mattering regardless of who you are,” Kerry Washington said Sunday, taking a solemn pause during a sold-out Scandal panel at PaleyFest.

    “I was very moved that Shonda had a lot of feelings about what’s been going on and that her form of protest, her form of expression, her way of contributing, is to write,” she said.

    Ripped from the headlines, “The Lawn Chair” opens with the shooting death of Brandon Parker, a 17-year-old African-American teenager, by a white officer just blocks away from the White House. The racially-charged killing threatens to ignite another Ferguson when the boy’s father Clarence (Courtney B. Vance, in an exquisite turn) arrives, shotgun in hand.

    “I like that it was a journey for Olivia herself,” said Washington. “She had to cross the picket line to validate her black card.”

    He places a lawn chair over his son’s body and demands answers as outraged locals, the media, and tense cops with their guns at the ready swarm the scene. OPA’s top dog is called in to defuse the situation and protect the city.

    And in one instant, Scandal lets Olivia Pope lead the way forward.

    After playing fixer for D.C.’s white police chief for half the episode, Olivia can no longer ignore the primacy of personal participation, or her own blackness. The post-racial boss lady of Scandal tries every trick in her arsenal, pleading with Attorney General David Rosen (Joshua Malina) to step in, to no avail.

    Faced with a righteously angry and grieving Clarence and challenged by neighborhood activist Marcus to examine the privileged white establishment she so often serves, Olivia breaks down. She crosses the picket line and joins the protest, chanting, “Stand up / Fight back / No more black men under attack!”

    “It did feel that we had come to a point where the writers were comfortable embracing this part of Olivia’s identity, and I like that it was a journey for Olivia herself,” said Washington. “She had to cross the picket line to validate her black card.”

    Both white male candidates downplay the findings of the Ferguson #DOJ report, and Magrath now bemoans the release of the racist emails. (This from a candidate in Ferguson elections.)

    “@deray: Bill O’Reilly acknowledges race. 2015. ” BILL O’REILLY SAYS RACISM IS REAL THE APOCALYPSE IS NOW

    WHERE ARE THE FATHERS?? White Men Are Overdosing on Heroin at a Record Rate

    Dr. Len Paulozzi, a medical epidemiologist who studies drug overdoses at the CDC’s Injury Center, says that both the growing availability of heroin nationwide and the shift among prescription drug users to heroin use may have contributed to the dramatic rise in deaths. “Thirty years ago, people snorting heroin never used OxyContin or Vicodin before” using heroin, says Paulozzi, who did not contribute to the CDC report. But now the drug’s abusers start with prescription drugs, he says, turning these meds into gateway drugs. A National Survey on Drug Use and Health study found that heroin abuse was 19 times higher among people who had previously abused pain relievers.

    The increase in overdoses follows a federal crackdown on prescription painkillers, beginning toward the end of the Clinton era and lasting through the Bush administration, that resulted in a rash of arrests for illegal use during the mid-2000s. While the rate of deaths involving prescription painkillers like OxyContin appears to have leveled off, heroin overdoses have risen 348 percent. Most of the deaths occurred after 2010. That year, a new tamper-resistant form of Oxy hit the market, making it less potent and harder to abuse. […]

    The rate of heroin deaths accelerated among people between the ages of 18 and 24, from 0.8 deaths per 100,000 people in 2000 to 3.9 deaths per 100,000 in 2013. For people between 25 and 44 years old, the rate jumped from 1.3 deaths per 100,000 people in 2000 to 5.4 per 100,000 in 2013. Among young and middle-aged white people, that death rate reached 7.0 per 100,000 by 2013.

    A Demonstration at the Armory Show Art Fair

    As fairgoers milled around the Armory Show, held each year on two West Side piers, shouts of “I can’t breathe” could be heard.

    Soon, about a dozen participants, all members of a group called Artists for Justice NYC, were shouting the words.

    These were some of the last words spoken by Mr. Garner, who died of compression of the neck and chest after an encounter with police officers on Staten Island seeking to arrest him for selling loose cigarettes in July.

    “I was overwhelmed with emotion and a sense of obligation to get involved and take a stand,” Shamirrah Hardin, a theater director and performer and one of the group’s founders, wrote in an email.

    The group, which includes visual artists, came together after a grand jury on Staten Island declined to return an indictment against a police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, who used a chokehold –– forbidden by police department regulations –– on Mr. Garner.

    One member, Patrick Waldo, said that participants chose the art fair for a performance with an eye toward reaching an audience that might be sympathetic but that probably was not typically involved in protests. “We’re trying to get our message out to a crowd that is historically out of touch with the struggle of black America,” he said.

    The crowd watching swelled to more than 100, and one performer, Christian Felix, began shouting other phrases attributed to Mr. Garner before his death, including “I’m minding my business” and “I didn’t do nothing.”

    As the performance continued, there were moments when the line between art and reality appeared to blur. For instance,
    an emergency medical technician holding a heavy bag elbowed his way through the crowd, apparently in response to the cries from performers saying they were unable to breathe.

    Some spectators voiced opinions about what they were witnessing.

    “I have no problem,” said Rabinder Singh, 52, an accountant from the Upper West Side. “This is performance art.”

    Within 10 minutes the unauthorized performance was over. Most protesters left singing, herded out by guards. One guard roughly grabbed and shoved a man who had sunk to the floor as part of a “die-in.”

    As the protesters left, the art fair returned to normal, with people gazing at installations. Some discussed what they had just seen, including Felipe Garcia, 24, a graduate student at the School of Visual Art, who called the performance “meaningful” and added: “I got the message.”

    “Die-in” staged Saturday at the Armory Show Art Fair in New York over Eric Garner’s death (see previous for article).

  300. rq says

    The Oklahoma Daily’s gripping headline in today’s paper: “You can hang them from a tree..” #SigmaAlphaEpsilon #sae
    The mass exodus of OU’s SAEs.

    Homeless Man Killed By LAPD In Skid Row Identified

    Witnesses identified the man by his street name, “Africa,” according to the Los Angeles Times. Witnesses said he had been living in a tent on Skid Row for several months and had spent some time in a mental health facility.

    That’s the part we knew already – but you know what’s interesting? The article never once actually mentions the man’s real, full name! He is referred to as ‘Keunang’, but now I have to go find the tweet that actually had his full name. Way to go, BuzzFeed, this time you suck.

    Lawyer: Appeal hearing for fired Milwaukee PD Off. Chris Manney, who fatally shot #DontreHamilton, set for March 19.

    Here’s an interesting one, emblematic of police culture: Three Shootings In Vallejo

    Officer Sean Kenney had shot two people in less than five months, and even though they had both died, he was still patrolling Vallejo, California, on Oct. 24, 2012, when he responded to a call about a domestic disturbance.

    The report came in after neighbors heard a commotion in Jeremiah Moore’s front yard at around 1 a.m. Marvin Clouse, who lived next door, went outside to see what was going on. Jaime Alvarado, who lived across the street, looked out his window.

    Moore, who was white, was a friendly neighbor. He was autistic, his family said. He lived with his boyfriend Jason Jessie and the two of them fixed up old cars, which sat parked on their front lawn. The garage was packed with antiques and vintage electronics that Jessie spruced up and sold on eBay. One of the items he kept in the garage, Clouse said, was a 1920s-era .22-caliber rifle.

    In recent months, neighbors had noticed that the couple had started acting strange — paranoid rants, extravagant conspiracy theories, that sort of thing. They had started taking peyote and other heavy drugs, Clouse said.

    “They were really nice guys, but they had a mental breakdown,” said Clouse.

    The police later said that Moore had pointed a rifle at the officers. In the press release version of events, Moore “appeared from the back of the interior of the house with a rifle. The man with the rifle placed the barrel of the rifle directly against an officer’s stomach. Another officer saw this and fearing for his life and the life of his fellow officer, immediately discharged his firearm.”

    In July 2014, the D.A.’s office cleared Kenney of the Moore shooting. The two-page summary regurgitated the version told in the press release, with one difference: that Moore did not press the rifle against an officer’s stomach but was pointing it at the officer from further away.

    The summary did not mention any non-police witnesses. Clouse, who said he spoke to investigators, was not cited. According to Michael Haddad, the lawyer for Moore’s family, the D.A.’s office did not contact Jaime Alvarado.

    “The D.A. is just choosing who to believe,” Haddad said. “Every cop knows if he wants to justify a shooting, just say, I feared for my life or for someone else’s life. If our D.A.s are just going to take police at their word, nobody will police the police.”

    The version Alvarado and Clouse told was much different from what the police claimed. From Alvarado’s vantage point, Moore was standing on his porch with his hands up. His arms were flailing and he had a nervous look on his face. Clouse believed that, between his autism and the drugs, Moore was in a state of panic. “He was unable to respond,” he said. […]

    Moore was the third person killed by Officer Sean Kenney in 21 weeks. Months later, rather than a reprimand, Kenney earned a promotion to detective.

    More on the city, the PD, some history, etc. at the link.

    ACLU, Disability Rights New Mexico, and the Native American Voters Alliance File Motion to Intervene in APD/DOJ Settlement Agreement

    Today, the ACLU, Disability Rights New Mexico, and the Native American Voters Alliance filed a motion to intervene in the settlement agreement between the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the City of Albuquerque. Were the court to grant this motion, these local community organizations would become parties to the agreement with the City, increasing the community’s say in how the agreement will be implemented.

    “We have always maintained that local community involvement is essential to the success of the effort to reform the Albuquerque Police Department,” said Alexandra Freedman Smith, Legal Director for the ACLU of New Mexico. “The most vulnerable populations in Albuquerque suffer the brunt of unconstitutional policing practices, and their voices must be a part of the conversation. Together, we can strengthen the efforts to build APD into the responsible, community-friendly police force our city deserves.”

    Three organizations will act as plaintiffs on behalf of the Albuquerque communities most vulnerable to police excessive use of force:

    The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New Mexico will represent Albuquerque community members who are experiencing homelessness
    Disability Rights New Mexico will represent people in Albuquerque living with mental illness
    The Native American Voters Alliance will represent the Native American community living in Albuquerque

    “Among the names of those whom APD has killed are many people who were living with mental illness,” said Nancy Koenigsberg, Executive Director of Disability Rights New Mexico. “In order to face and fix this problem, we need to change how law enforcement interacts with people in crisis. That is why it is so important that advocates for people with mental illness have a seat at the table when it comes to reforming our police department.”

    “The Native community has long felt unfairly targeted by police in Albuquerque,” said Laurie Weahkee, Executive Director of the Native American Voters Alliance. “As we move forward in the important work reforming APD, we want to be able to provide input on how our city’s police can better serve and protect Native people living in Albuquerque.”

    Albuquerque law firm Freedman, Boyd, Hollander, Goldberg, Urias, & Ward P.A., long-time civil rights attorney Phil Davis, and Nicholas Davis are partnering with attorneys from the ACLU and Disability Rights New Mexico on the motion.

  301. rq says

    #Ferguson City Council held a “special” meeting which lasted approx. 60 seconds. Then a private meeting was ordered.

    Commission that oversees Police Officer Standards & Training in MO has 2 vacant seats, every term expired, link: Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission. Perhaps a hole that should be filled ASAP?

    Madison police leaders: This won’t be Ferguson, with autoplay video.

    Reading the headlines out of Madison, Wisconsin, it’s hard not to think about Ferguson, Missouri.

    But law enforcement’s response to the shooting of 19-year-old Tony Robinson will not unfold in the same chaotic, violent and distrusting way as the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown, Madison’s top police leaders vowed.

    “I think it’s very clear that Madison, Wisconsin, is not Ferguson, Missouri,” said Jim Palmer, the executive director of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association. The head of the state’s largest law enforcement group told CNN Monday that the Madison police department, unlike the Ferguson department, has a strong relationship with the people it serves.

    Madison Police Chief Mike Koval has been out front and outspoken about Robinson’s shooting since it happened late Friday night.

    The chief said he understands people are angry and want answers.

    “We have to say we are sorry at the outset for it and then we have to show affirmative steps in moving forward to bring community back into the fold,” he said.

    Here are some ways Madison law enforcement appears to be responding differently than what was seen in Ferguson:

    I’m just going to highlight this one, see if you can pick out what is wrong with it:

    Difference in size and tone of rallies and tone

    Madison: On Friday night, dozens of demonstrators gathered in Madison. “Who do we trust?” some called out, prompting the response, “No one!”

    And in another refrain, they chanted, “Black lives matter,” a phrase that Ferguson protesters coined.

    Online the #WillyStreet hashtag, referencing to Williamson Street, where the shooting happened, trended. “Praying for Madison tonight,” wrote one activist. “Stand up, sit in, walk out – until u get answers. And until there are no more hashtag eulogies.”

    The demonstrations, which have been constant, have remained peaceful.

    Ferguson: Just hours after Brown was killed, a vigil for him turned violent as people hurled bottles at officers and kicked police cars parked on the streets.

    The often-violent demonstrations continued off and on for weeks, and protests around the country were held in solidarity. While many protesters were peaceful, in late November buildings were set on fire and destruction spread after a grand jury said it had decided not to indict Officer Wilson.

    I’ll give you a clue: the people who came to the vigil didn’t just get suddenly angry out of the blue.

    Millions of Americans Don’t Have Full Voting Rights. John Oliver Explains Just How Insane That Is.

    To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday this weekend, an event that spurred the passage of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, John Oliver took a moment out during his show last night to remind everyone that nearly 4 million people living in the United States are still denied full voting rights. Why? Because they live in territories.

    Coincidentally enough, 98 percent of these residents happen to be racial or ethnic minorities who were once categorized as government-acquired “alien races” and therefore not extended constitutional protections.

    “Alien races can’t understand Anglo-Saxon principles?” Oliver asked. “I find that condescending and I’m British. We basically invented patronizing bigotry!”

    As Oliver goes onto further explain, it gets even worse for American Samoans, who are the only people born on U.S. soil but denied citizenship. Last month, Mother Jones published a report detailing the Obama administration’s fight to continue denying citizenship to American Samoans using a century-old racist law to justify their case.

  302. rq says

    #AnthonyHill, killed by Dekalb/Atlanta police yesterday, is @AntHeezie on Twitter. Check his TL. Heartbreaking.

    SAE, White Thugs and American Traditions

    The Klansmen of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity have exposed to the world what many of us already know: Racism is part and parcel of white America’s most beloved traditions.

    By now, most people have read about SAE’s University of Oklahoma chapter and its little diddy about hanging “n–gers from trees.” There has, of course, been the required uproar, complete with OU President David Boren’s issuing a blistering statement that OU doesn’t “provide student services for bigots.”

    Oh, but they do. Along with most institutions in the United States of America, OU does indeed harbor bigots in their midst. These little grand wizards’ crime wasn’t that they sang the song; it’s that they got caught. When SAE was founded on March 9, 1856—159 years ago—in Tuscaloosa, Ala., “hanging n–gers from trees” was as commonplace as police officers shooting unarmed, black people today. As far back as 2011, SAE embraced its bad-boy reputation as the “nation’s deadliest fraternity” instead of admitting what many of its members really are: thugs.
    […]

    This is one of many reasons why so many black Americans distrust white people—particularly privileged white boys with wealth and access to power. Because they want us to believe this lie that racism can be flushed out and banned from campus. They want us to believe that making an example out of the little wanna-be massas absolves them from the responsibility of working to dismantle the white supremacy of which they so willingly partake.

    I am neither angry nor surprised by these white extremists getting caught doing what white extremists do. This is American tradition. These are the words embedded in the psyches of these white fraternity brothers before they can even speak.

    How do I know? My father was a proud member of Omega Psi Phi fraternity. By the time I was 5 or 6 years old, I was already walking around our home singing:

    “I’ve got a feeling/ I’ve got a feeling, brother/I’ve got a feeling/Somebody trying to sneak in my frat/And it ain’t gon’ be no s–t like that.”

    Those words were emblazoned on my mind like a Que brand, along with the words: “Omega man by day; Que Dog by night” and “Friendship is essential to the soul,” as well as understanding the importance of “manhood, scholarship, perseverance and uplift.”

    At the same time somewhere in America, little white boys were traipsing around Confederate-flag-adorned homes, eagerly anticipating the day that they, too, could sing about segregation and murder with their fraternity brothers just like Daddy used to do. They, too, could stand in the tradition of white supremacists so afraid of being exposed as mediocre that they lean on plantation jingles to make them feel better about themselves.

    It would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. We could shrug it off if these weren’t the boys who grow up to be the killers with badges who leave our children dead in the street, blaming them for their own deaths. We could feel sorry for the pathetic creatures they are if these weren’t the boys who grow up to be the men who execute black men when there is proof of their innocence. We could dismiss the women of Tri Delta who were captured singing along with their SAE brothers if these weren’t the girls who grow up to be the white feminists demanding that we put aside our struggles of being black in America to help them seize their equal piece of white supremacist pie.
    […]

    But, oh to be white, young and racist in America. Luckily for them, and despite all black people have endured in this country, our traditions don’t mirror the casual bloodlust of their own. If it did, I’m sure they’d be singing a much different tune.

    Miss. Sheriff Fired After Heated Xbox Rant: ‘I Get Paid to Beat Up N–gers Like You’

    A man identified only as “David” on YouTube posted a video that shows an Xbox screen and reportedly provides audio of a conversation between him and then-Sheriff’s Deputy Michael Slater. David also submitted the audio portion to the Free Thought Project, an online newsletter.

    In the audio, David and Slater exchange heated words, with David threatening and insulting the then-sheriff’s deputy, the Clarion-Ledger reports.

    According to the newspaper, at that point, Slater is reportedly heard on the video giving his address to David and saying, “You about to come to a f–king paid police officer’s house. I get paid to beat up n–gers like you.”

    Slater even provides his badge number to prove that he is a law-enforcement officer.

    According to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department, Slater was immediately terminated after the sheriff learned about the video. Sheriff’s spokeswoman Cherie Ward confirmed that it was Slater heard on the video, the Clarion-Ledger reported.

    “We don’t condone that type of behavior or language,” Ward said.

    That seems to be an appropriate response – as long as he really is terminated and won’t be hired back anywhere else in law enforcement.

    More from the family in Madison: Madison Police Shooting: Not Just About Race Because Victim Was Biracial, Family Says

    Robinson’s mother is white and his father is African American, and at a news conference this afternoon, Robinson’s uncle, Turin Carter, spoke out on behalf of the family about how this is a universal issue that should be understood by people of all races.

    “A lot of his identity was formed because of his racial ambiguity,” Carter said.

    “Tyrell felt a misfit for most of his life and that’s why we became close,” he said, while his sister — Robinson’s mother — stood behind him.

    Robinson’s death comes after a growing list of cases where unarmed teens were killed at the hands of white men, and Carter said that though the parallels to the shooting deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown are inevitable, there are significant differences because of his nephew’s mixed race.

    “I absolutely remember hashtagging Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown,” Carter said of the outpouring on social media. “It’s surreal to realize that now my nephew is now a hashtag.”

    Ah, and just in time: The 5 Worst States for Black People

    Progress, the story of black America.

    We started from the most bottom of bottoms (not having personhood) and worked our way up to the age of Obama, where we are leaps and bounds better than we were (hey, we have personhood now!) but are still struggling to make it to the middle, let alone to the top, of society’s heap. A lot of things are working against us, and a lot of it boils down to where we live.

    Let’s face it. Some places are worse to be black in than others, and I’m not just talking historically racial quagmires like Mississippi. Racism and a weakened social safety net know no region. Wisconsin, Ohio and others have their bad points, which go beyond their lack of NBA championships.

    Taking into account stats on education, health, incarceration rate, economics and general misery, these are some of the worst states for black people.

    Wisconsin

    So bad it should get ranked twice, the state of Wisconsin incarcerates black people at the highest rate in the country—13 percent. Within the state, 49 percent of black men under 30 have already been incarcerated, mostly because of its mandatory-minimum-sentencing drug laws, overall hostility toward drug users (prison is often preferred over treatment) and “driving while poor,” aka having a suspended license because of unpaid fines. Other problems with Wisconsin include its punitive voter-ID law, which disproportionately affects African Americans, and its education of black kids—boy, is it bad at education.
    […]

    Ohio

    Thank goodness they have LeBron, because Ohio is having a rough time otherwise. The Buckeye State is home to the second-highest infant mortality rate in the country. The median black household income is a horrid $26,039 (pdf), compared with $45,400 for white Ohioans. (The national median income for black households is not awesome but better than Ohio at $33,321.) Cleveland ranks in the top 10 most segregated cites. Ohio is also No. 6 on the list of worst places to raise black children. Oh, and the voter suppression: Ohio has run into myriad voting snafus affecting the black vote, going back to the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004.

    Michigan
    Michigan gets on the list for being the third-worst state in which to raise black children; the home of Detroit, America’s No. 1 most segregated city; and for having the highest black unemployment rate in the nation, which clocks in at 16.7 percent. (Michigan’s white unemployment rate is only 5.8 percent.) To go with that miserable rate, Michigan also has the lowest rate of approval (23 percent) for jobless benefits.

    Iowa

    If you’re black and into marijuana, avoid Iowa. The state arrests blacks at a rate eight times higher than whites for marijuana possession, despite the rate of drug usage between blacks and whites being about the same. For years, Iowa also held the title for locking up black people at a higher rate than any other state (it recently lost that crown to Wisconsin). While other states have large prison populations, what makes Iowa stand out is that it’s a relatively small state with a small population. In fact, its black population is only about 3 percent. Adding insult to injury, the poverty rate among African Americans in Iowa is 31 percent, compared with 11 percent for white Iowans.

    Mississippi

    As the second-worst place to raise a black child in America, Mississippi has a lot of other issues to go with that dishonor. It has the unfortunate distinction of having the highest infant mortality rate in the country—nearly 10 deaths for every 1,000 births, beating out also-high neighbors Louisiana and Alabama. But why is it so high? Probably because the numbers are heavily skewed by the black birth mortality rate, which is 13.8 per 1,000 births, with 40 percent of all infants in Mississippi being born to black women. One of the poorest states in the nation, Mississippi also has a high black unemployment rate (13.9 percent) and the worst unemployment benefits (a paltry average of $194 per week).

    SAE Fraternity Deadly Hazing of Haitian-American George Desdunes Resurfaced After Racist Chant Video Relased – and I thought it was just racist shenanigans, not a death…

    But this is not the first time this Fraternity has been in trouble or had one of their chapters close down. In 2011 a Cornell University Frat House was sued by Marie Lourdes Andre, for $25 Million over house hazing death of her 19-year-old Haitian-American sophomore son George Desdunes after members from the frat allegedly kidnapped, blindfolded, bound his hands and feet, and forced him to drink so much alcohol that he passed out and died.

    According to ABC News,

    The heartbroken mother of a Cornell University sophomore is suing a fraternity for $25 million after members allegedly kidnapped her son, blindfolded him, bound his hands and feet, and forced him to drink so much alcohol that he passed out and died.

    George Desdunes, the son of a Haitian immigrant, was pronounced dead on Feb. 25 from alcohol poisoning at Cayuga Medical Center. Desdunes’ blood alcohol level was .409 – more than five times the legal limit, according to the family’s lawsuit.

    Desdunes’ mother, Marie Lourdes Andre, is suing Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity for $25 million in the wrongful death of her only son.

    The aspiring doctor was captured by freshmen “pledges” of the fraternity who allegedly devised a horrific set of tasks and punishments for Desdunes and one other frat member.

    “I call it inmates running the institution,” said Andre’s lawyer, William Friedlander, referring to the SAE hazing. “This is a terrible tragic case. He was a really great kid.”

    Desdunes, 19, a member of the SAE fraternity, was grabbed by the freshmen pledges who tied him up with zip ties and duct tape.

    The pledges are alleged to have asked him trivia questions about the fraternity. If he answered incorrectly he reportedly had to do exercises such as sit-ups, or consume various foods and drinks including sugar, flavored syrups and vodka.

    Desdunes reportedly passed out, but instead of being brought to a hospital he was allegedly taken to the fraternity house while still bound, and left on a couch in the library.

    A housekeeper discovered Desdunes and called 911, and Desdunes was later pronounced dead at Cayuga Medical Center.

    Another SAE member, Gregory Wyler, had been kidnapped the same night, and Desdunes’ roommate had locked their bedroom door to avoid his own kidnapping.

    Andre said in her lawsuit that her son hoped to be a doctor, and was a former altar boy who played varsity soccer and the trumpet.

    She said in a statement, “With the death of my son, I find some comfort in knowing that this lawsuit may bring about changes in fraternities that will prevent other families from suffering as I have.”

    In the past year Friedlander and his co-counsel have prosecuted more than 15 hazing cases and most of them, he said, involved deaths from drinking.

    Friedlander said at least five other deaths have occurred at SAE chapters since 1997.

    SAE has more than 240 chapters and nearly 300,000 initiates.

    The fraternity released a statement in response to the lawsuit, referencing SAE’s “zero-tolerance policy” for members who don’t comply with regulations: “Members are expected to adhere to our fraternity policies and to uphold behavior consistent with our creed, ‘The True Gentleman.’”

    SAE also made note that it sponsors an anonymous hazing hotline at 1-888-NOT-HAZE FREE.

    “There’s absolutely nothing this organization endorses or publishes that would be an endorsement for hazing,” Sigma Alpha Epsilon spokesman Brandon Weghorst told ABCNews[dot]com. “Our leadership won’t hesitate to take action against individuals who do not follow our regulations or who breech our risk management.”

    In response to Desdunes’ death, Cornell withdrew recognition of SAE for the next five years which means the fraternity will not operate on Cornell’s campus during that time.

    In a statement Cornell University spokesman Tommy Bruce said the school would be following the litigation closely, and “Cornell University neither condones nor tolerates hazing or the type of activities that we understand contributed to George’s death.”

    The Cornell Fraternity pledges Max Haskin, Ben Mann, Edward Williams were later acquitted of the hazing charges in connection to death of George Desdunes,

    After a four-day bench trial, according to WJAC-TV, a judge cleared Max Haskin, Ben Mann and Edward Williams of charges accusing them of participating in the hazing ritual that allegedly led to Desdunes’ death by alcohol poisoning. The former studentswere charged with misdemeanor hazing, which could have resulted in imprisonment of up to a year.

    “They did not haze George Desdunes or cause his death,” said Raymond Schlather, the former Cornell students’ attorney, to the Ithaca Journal. “The family of George Desdunes has lost a son, and these young pledges were unnecessarily scapegoated, and their lives have been irreparably damaged.”

    You can continue reading if you want about how their lives were irreparably damaged.

  303. rq says

    A Racist Stunt Got SAE Suspended from Washington University in St. Louis, Too

    It’s not just Oklahoma.

    Two years before the University of Oklahoma shut down its Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter over a video of fraternity members singing a racist chant, Washington University did basically the same thing.

    The fraternity was suspended from Wash. U. after members participated in a pledge activity that involved photographing black students and reciting a rap with racial slurs. The chapter was reinstated after the fraternity was disciplined, leadership was removed and the chapter participated in a series of educational programming.

    And it started, as all university scandals do should, with a photo scavenger hunt.

    A group of SAE pledges, members who haven’t yet been initiated into the fraternity, entered the Bear’s Den dining hall around dinnertime in February 2013 looking for a place to take a photo of a fraternity member facing a wall in a public place, one of the scavenger hunt’s requirements. The pledge posed behind a group of black students eating dinner in the dining hall, and fraternity members took the photo without offering the students an explanation.

    From a tipster, who described the scene in an email to BroBible[dot]com:

    One of the girls sitting at the table yelled out to them, “Did you need us to pose?” All of the boys ignored her and walked away. Stunned, a few guys from the table followed them to the grill and asked if they had taken a picture of us. They claimed to be taking a picture of something behind us (which only happened to be a black worker and a large window) for a scavenger hunt.

    About half an hour later, the group of fraternity pledges returned. One pledge began reciting the lyrics to Dr. Dre’s “Bitches Ain’t Shit” (another scavenger hunt requirement) to the black students as though it were slam poetry while other fraternity members filmed on their phones and asked the students to “show some respect” for the performance.

    Snoop Dogg and Daz Dillinger repeat the N-word five times in “Bitches Ain’t Shit.” During his impromptu performance in the Washington University dining hall, the SAE pledge did, too. [..]

    The fraternity later suspended members in charge of its new-member education program and apologized for its “immature” actions.

    Wash. U. investigated the incident and required SAE to make some big changes before the chapter was reinstated.

    “Washington University’s SAE chapter is active, in good standing, and under no sanctions from the university,” says Julie Hail Flory, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Campus Communications. “Following a 2013 incident, the university halted chapter activity to allow for a thorough investigation and adjudication of the incident. Based on the outcome of the investigation, the chapter was allowed to resume operations only after the fraternity was disciplined, chapter leadership was removed and the chapter participated in a series of educational programming.”

    My oldest is biracial. My youngest is not. They’re the same color. Cops aren’t checking for a white parent @JamilahLemieux, referencing Tony Robinson’s family’s insistence that it’s not abotu race bcause he’s biracial.

    Ferguson Activists Are Struggling with Mental Trauma Long After Police Abuse During the Protests – I can only imagine.

    Johnetta Elzie rose to national prominence as a leading protester in Ferguson last summer. Her activism protesting the police shooting death of Michael Brown has been highlighted in national publications like the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, but the police aggression and the intensity of protesting nonstop took a serious toll on her mental health. During the height of the protests, she was tear-gassed at least nine times, faced off against menacing police dogs, regularly confronted by aggressive law enforcement officers, and spent many nights running away from cops. A rubber bullet struck her left collarbone during one protest.

    “It was just crazy for me to see the police responding to us like we were almost at war. Only we weren’t armed,” Elzie, a native of St. Louis, told AlterNet. “There was the constant threat of almost dying. In August, I thought I almost died at least twice when we were on the run from police.”

    She had never seen a mental health professional prior to Ferguson, but had four sessions with one during the protests. Elzie’s therapist told her she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

    “I thought only people who have experienced war could have that, but just from what I’ve experienced and what I’ve seen, she said that I definitely have it,” Elzie, 25, said.

    Mental health professionals in St. Louis County told AlterNet that the hyper-policing of local law enforcement during the protests, the tear-gassing, blasts of rubber bullets, the sight of Brown’s body lying on the street uncovered for hours, and the strain from the personal sacrifices many of the protesters made in order to be in Ferguson, could have devastating long-term effects that potentially include depression, anxiety and PTSD.

    “People are shocked when I say that we’re going to be dealing with this for at least another decade,” Marva Robinson, a clinical psychologist and president of the St. Louis Chapter of the Association of Black Psychologists, told AlterNet. “Post-traumatic stress disorder has very long-term effects, especially when people don’t seek counseling. Not only does it have a long-term effect, but it can lead into other mental illnesses such as depression, general anxiety disorder and substance abuse. So it branches off into other illnesses as a result of this one volatile event that can affect people for the next 5, 10, 15 years. Certainly affecting the way they view law enforcement officers.”

    Kira Banks, an assistant professor of psychology at St. Louis University who is researching the mental health issues of Ferguson protesters, told AlterNet that the ’round-the-clock activism many of the protesters engaged in was honorable but unhealthy, especially if they were dealing with mental health issues before the protests began.

    “It’s really hard to pull oneself out of activism because it feels so necessary for you to be present—everyday, all day, at all moments. But it’s not viable to maintain that pace,” she said. “We’ve seen people have recurrences of depressive episodes that lead to breakdowns because when you lack sleep and are pushing yourself to the limit and feel like you are literally fighting for your life or the lives of others, it’s stressful and it takes a toll on your physical health and your mental health.” […]

    Lack of Access to Mental Healthcare for African Americans

    Many African Americans find it difficult to afford therapy, which can range anywhere from $65 up to $200 and more per 50-minute session, depending on the region and whether the provider is insured or not. Another challenge for many of the Ferguson protesters whose trauma is specific to racial discrimination is that most licensed therapists aren’t black or multiculturally competent.

    African Americans are 20 percent more likely to experience psychological distress than white Americans, yet make up around 2.6 percent of mental health professionals; most black people prefer a mental health professional of the same race. The Affordable Care Act provides coverage for mental health treatment, but it still depends on the person being able to pay something. Moreover, each state implements the ACA differently, so people seeking coverage need to research the marketplace in their home state for specifics on how to get care.

    The stigma from seeking mental healthcare is also an issue. According to a 1996 study, 63 percent of African Americans view depression as a personal weakness. Attitudes about seeking help have changed in the nearly 20 years since the study was published, but Robinson says it’s still an issue for many African Americans.

    Robinson and Banks encourage residents of Ferguson and St. Louis County to take advantage of the free and low-cost mental health services in their area. Members of the Association of Black Psychologists in St. Louis offer free mental health services people can sign up for on the organization’s website. So far, the group has provided pro-bono treatment to at least 1,000 residents of St. Louis County.

    Robinson says there is no need for people who feel traumatized by the events in Ferguson to suffer through that stress alone. Help is available.

    Deadliest and Most Racist?

    Two months before the Civil War began, Noble Leslie DeVotie was boarding a steamship when he slipped, fell into the waters of Mobile Bay and drowned.

    DeVotie was one of the founders of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, the only national fraternity founded in the antebellum South. A chaplain at Alabama’s Fort Morgan at the time of his death, he became the fraternity’s — and some argue, the country’s — first Civil War casualty. Nearly 75 other SAE members would die before the war’s end, the vast majority of them fighting for the Confederate South. When the survivors returned home, many found their universities burned to the ground and the 15 chapters of the fraternity in ruins.

    SAE spent the next three decades rebuilding its ranks, eventually establishing chapters at Northern colleges. But their presence there among the well-established Northern fraternities was an uneasy one, and so two members wrote a defiant march in which, as SAE’s manual describes it, the fraternity “entered, met and held at bay its rivals in the North.” It was the first of many songs SAE would produce, earning it the nickname “the singing fraternity.”

    There’s nothing quaint about the nicknames SAE has these days — on many campuses people say the initials stand for “Sexual Assault Expected” or “Same Assholes Everywhere.” The fraternity is also known as the one in which members are most likely to die. And now it may be called the most racist. […]

    “We have to remember that the Greek letter system in the United States was founded on pretty harsh and legally supported exclusionary practices,” Matthew Hughey, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut who studies the issue, said. “There’s a normal, mundane type of racism that functions every day, but it’s harder to see. We really shouldn’t be surprised at incidents like this when they get out, as they probably happen a lot behind closed doors.”

    Despite the fact that its members agree to memorize and follow a creed known as The True Gentleman, SAE has frequently been accused of racist and discriminatory behavior over the years. Now the largest fraternity in the country, SAE seems to have played a disproportionate role in some of the most offensive incidents in recent decades — and yet remains a house in good standing at more than 200 campuses.

    In 1982, the University of Cincinnati suspended its Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter after they organized a racist party around Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. According to an article in The New York Times, flyers for the event encouraged revelers to “bring such things as a canceled welfare check, ‘your father if you know who he is’ and ‘a radio bigger than your head.'”

    In 1992, the Texas A&M University chapter hosted a “Jungle Fever” themed party which, according to an online exhibit created by the university’s Cushing Library, featured “black face, grass skirts and ‘slave hunts.'” In 2000, members of SAE at Oglethorpe University were among men from four fraternities who threw bottles at black athletes and yelled racial slurs during a cross-country meet. In 2002, a member of the Syracuse University chapter of SAE wore black face out to local bars.

    In 2006, two SAE students were suspended at the University of Memphis after harassing another member for dating a black woman and bringing her to the chapter’s house. In 2009, the Valdosta State University chapter caused outrage on campus after flying a Confederate flag on its front lawn. On Sunday, the Oklahoma State University chapter also drew ire on social media when a Confederate flag could be seen through one of its windows just hours after the controversy emerged at the University of Oklahoma.

    In 2013, the Washington University in St. Louis chapter of SAE was suspended after some of its pledges were instructed to direct racial slurs at a group of black students. Last year, 15 SAE members at the University of Arizona broke into a historically Jewish off-campus fraternity and physically assaulted its members while yelling discriminatory comments at them. In December, Clemson University’s SAE chapter was suspended after the fraternity hosted a “cripmas” party at which students dressed up as gang members.

    As for the now-infamous song, there’s evidence that the lyrics are not popular just among members of the Oklahoma chapter. One month ago, before the controversy at Oklahoma, a user on the online forum Reddit wrote that a nearly identical version was a “favorite” of SAE members at universities in Texas. On Monday, a Twitter user, whose profile has been made private, tweeted that he “was an SAE at a university in Texas from 2000-2004. The exact same chant was often used then. This is not isolated.” […]

    Unheard OU, the activist group that publicized the video, organized a large demonstration on Monday, and students took to social media to express their outrage and sadness. A football recruit who had committed to play at Oklahoma tweeted that he would no longer being doing so, and a current linebacker for Oklahoma, Eric Striker, sent a video through Snapchat furiously calling out members of SAE and other fraternities who cheer on black players when they’re on the field, only to sing racist songs behind their backs.

    “Same motherfuckers that talk about racism doesn’t exist are the same motherfuckers shaking our hands, giving us hugs, telling us how you really love us,” Striker said. “Fuck you phony-ass, fraud-ass b*tches.”

    Boren on Monday said SAE will never return to Oklahoma while he remains president, prompting some to question online whether all universities should take similar, even proactive, stances against SAE, given such a pattern of discriminatory behavior among its chapters. “Just close all SAE chapters; they’re all horrible spawning areas,” one Twitter user wrote. Said another, “SAE proudly touts association to the Confederacy on its website. Close em all down.”

    A detailed analysis of fraternity deaths by Bloomberg last year found that SAE is the country’s deadliest, and it is often accused of promoting a culture that helps lead to campus sexual assault and hazing. Andrew Lohse, a former SAE fraternity member who famously went public about his experiences at Dartmouth College, said Monday that while his chapter never sang the lyrics from the Oklahoma video, it did set lyrics about violence against women to the same tune. Even though the chapter was in New Hampshire, Lohse added, several members still referred to the Civil War as “the War of Northern Aggression.”

    Even so, Kevin Kruger, president of NASPA: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, said an outright national ban of an entire Greek organization remains unlikely. “I don’t think we’re at a place yet where SAE is branded as an organization that can’t get it right,” Kruger said. “But I think we are at a point where any organization that engages in this kind of behavior should start expecting zero tolerance.”

    I’m just wow, all the problems associated with that culture there.

    Former OU SAE fraternity house chef speaks out on racist video chant, video only, sorry. But he calls them ‘family’. :(

    Damn. RT “@bomani_jones: an old lady once, when asked how we’d know who was black, said “ask them.” she was pointing at the police.”

  304. rq says

    A Racist Stunt Got SAE Suspended from Washington University in St. Louis, Too

    It’s not just Oklahoma.

    Two years before the University of Oklahoma shut down its Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter over a video of fraternity members singing a racist chant, Washington University did basically the same thing.

    The fraternity was suspended from Wash. U. after members participated in a pledge activity that involved photographing black students and reciting a rap with racial slurs. The chapter was reinstated after the fraternity was disciplined, leadership was removed and the chapter participated in a series of educational programming.

    And it started, as all university scandals do should, with a photo scavenger hunt.

    A group of SAE pledges, members who haven’t yet been initiated into the fraternity, entered the Bear’s Den dining hall around dinnertime in February 2013 looking for a place to take a photo of a fraternity member facing a wall in a public place, one of the scavenger hunt’s requirements. The pledge posed behind a group of black students eating dinner in the dining hall, and fraternity members took the photo without offering the students an explanation.

    From a tipster, who described the scene in an email to BroBible[dot]com:

    One of the girls sitting at the table yelled out to them, “Did you need us to pose?” All of the boys ignored her and walked away. Stunned, a few guys from the table followed them to the grill and asked if they had taken a picture of us. They claimed to be taking a picture of something behind us (which only happened to be a black worker and a large window) for a scavenger hunt.

    About half an hour later, the group of fraternity pledges returned. One pledge began reciting the lyrics to Dr. Dre’s “B*tches Ain’t Shit” (another scavenger hunt requirement) to the black students as though it were slam poetry while other fraternity members filmed on their phones and asked the students to “show some respect” for the performance.

    Snoop Dogg and Daz Dillinger repeat the N-word five times in “B*tches Ain’t Shit.” During his impromptu performance in the Washington University dining hall, the SAE pledge did, too. [..]

    The fraternity later suspended members in charge of its new-member education program and apologized for its “immature” actions.

    Wash. U. investigated the incident and required SAE to make some big changes before the chapter was reinstated.

    “Washington University’s SAE chapter is active, in good standing, and under no sanctions from the university,” says Julie Hail Flory, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Campus Communications. “Following a 2013 incident, the university halted chapter activity to allow for a thorough investigation and adjudication of the incident. Based on the outcome of the investigation, the chapter was allowed to resume operations only after the fraternity was disciplined, chapter leadership was removed and the chapter participated in a series of educational programming.”

    My oldest is biracial. My youngest is not. They’re the same color. Cops aren’t checking for a white parent @JamilahLemieux, referencing Tony Robinson’s family’s insistence that it’s not abotu race bcause he’s biracial.

    Ferguson Activists Are Struggling with Mental Trauma Long After Police Abuse During the Protests – I can only imagine.

    Johnetta Elzie rose to national prominence as a leading protester in Ferguson last summer. Her activism protesting the police shooting death of Michael Brown has been highlighted in national publications like the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, but the police aggression and the intensity of protesting nonstop took a serious toll on her mental health. During the height of the protests, she was tear-gassed at least nine times, faced off against menacing police dogs, regularly confronted by aggressive law enforcement officers, and spent many nights running away from cops. A rubber bullet struck her left collarbone during one protest.

    “It was just crazy for me to see the police responding to us like we were almost at war. Only we weren’t armed,” Elzie, a native of St. Louis, told AlterNet. “There was the constant threat of almost dying. In August, I thought I almost died at least twice when we were on the run from police.”

    She had never seen a mental health professional prior to Ferguson, but had four sessions with one during the protests. Elzie’s therapist told her she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

    “I thought only people who have experienced war could have that, but just from what I’ve experienced and what I’ve seen, she said that I definitely have it,” Elzie, 25, said.

    Mental health professionals in St. Louis County told AlterNet that the hyper-policing of local law enforcement during the protests, the tear-gassing, blasts of rubber bullets, the sight of Brown’s body lying on the street uncovered for hours, and the strain from the personal sacrifices many of the protesters made in order to be in Ferguson, could have devastating long-term effects that potentially include depression, anxiety and PTSD.

    “People are shocked when I say that we’re going to be dealing with this for at least another decade,” Marva Robinson, a clinical psychologist and president of the St. Louis Chapter of the Association of Black Psychologists, told AlterNet. “Post-traumatic stress disorder has very long-term effects, especially when people don’t seek counseling. Not only does it have a long-term effect, but it can lead into other mental illnesses such as depression, general anxiety disorder and substance abuse. So it branches off into other illnesses as a result of this one volatile event that can affect people for the next 5, 10, 15 years. Certainly affecting the way they view law enforcement officers.”

    Kira Banks, an assistant professor of psychology at St. Louis University who is researching the mental health issues of Ferguson protesters, told AlterNet that the ’round-the-clock activism many of the protesters engaged in was honorable but unhealthy, especially if they were dealing with mental health issues before the protests began.

    “It’s really hard to pull oneself out of activism because it feels so necessary for you to be present—everyday, all day, at all moments. But it’s not viable to maintain that pace,” she said. “We’ve seen people have recurrences of depressive episodes that lead to breakdowns because when you lack sleep and are pushing yourself to the limit and feel like you are literally fighting for your life or the lives of others, it’s stressful and it takes a toll on your physical health and your mental health.” […]

    Lack of Access to Mental Healthcare for African Americans

    Many African Americans find it difficult to afford therapy, which can range anywhere from $65 up to $200 and more per 50-minute session, depending on the region and whether the provider is insured or not. Another challenge for many of the Ferguson protesters whose trauma is specific to racial discrimination is that most licensed therapists aren’t black or multiculturally competent.

    African Americans are 20 percent more likely to experience psychological distress than white Americans, yet make up around 2.6 percent of mental health professionals; most black people prefer a mental health professional of the same race. The Affordable Care Act provides coverage for mental health treatment, but it still depends on the person being able to pay something. Moreover, each state implements the ACA differently, so people seeking coverage need to research the marketplace in their home state for specifics on how to get care.

    The stigma from seeking mental healthcare is also an issue. According to a 1996 study, 63 percent of African Americans view depression as a personal weakness. Attitudes about seeking help have changed in the nearly 20 years since the study was published, but Robinson says it’s still an issue for many African Americans.

    Robinson and Banks encourage residents of Ferguson and St. Louis County to take advantage of the free and low-cost mental health services in their area. Members of the Association of Black Psychologists in St. Louis offer free mental health services people can sign up for on the organization’s website. So far, the group has provided pro-bono treatment to at least 1,000 residents of St. Louis County.

    Robinson says there is no need for people who feel traumatized by the events in Ferguson to suffer through that stress alone. Help is available.

    Deadliest and Most Racist?

    Two months before the Civil War began, Noble Leslie DeVotie was boarding a steamship when he slipped, fell into the waters of Mobile Bay and drowned.

    DeVotie was one of the founders of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, the only national fraternity founded in the antebellum South. A chaplain at Alabama’s Fort Morgan at the time of his death, he became the fraternity’s — and some argue, the country’s — first Civil War casualty. Nearly 75 other SAE members would die before the war’s end, the vast majority of them fighting for the Confederate South. When the survivors returned home, many found their universities burned to the ground and the 15 chapters of the fraternity in ruins.

    SAE spent the next three decades rebuilding its ranks, eventually establishing chapters at Northern colleges. But their presence there among the well-established Northern fraternities was an uneasy one, and so two members wrote a defiant march in which, as SAE’s manual describes it, the fraternity “entered, met and held at bay its rivals in the North.” It was the first of many songs SAE would produce, earning it the nickname “the singing fraternity.”

    There’s nothing quaint about the nicknames SAE has these days — on many campuses people say the initials stand for “Sexual Assault Expected” or “Same Assholes Everywhere.” The fraternity is also known as the one in which members are most likely to die. And now it may be called the most racist. […]

    “We have to remember that the Greek letter system in the United States was founded on pretty harsh and legally supported exclusionary practices,” Matthew Hughey, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut who studies the issue, said. “There’s a normal, mundane type of racism that functions every day, but it’s harder to see. We really shouldn’t be surprised at incidents like this when they get out, as they probably happen a lot behind closed doors.”

    Despite the fact that its members agree to memorize and follow a creed known as The True Gentleman, SAE has frequently been accused of racist and discriminatory behavior over the years. Now the largest fraternity in the country, SAE seems to have played a disproportionate role in some of the most offensive incidents in recent decades — and yet remains a house in good standing at more than 200 campuses.

    In 1982, the University of Cincinnati suspended its Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter after they organized a racist party around Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. According to an article in The New York Times, flyers for the event encouraged revelers to “bring such things as a canceled welfare check, ‘your father if you know who he is’ and ‘a radio bigger than your head.'”

    In 1992, the Texas A&M University chapter hosted a “Jungle Fever” themed party which, according to an online exhibit created by the university’s Cushing Library, featured “black face, grass skirts and ‘slave hunts.'” In 2000, members of SAE at Oglethorpe University were among men from four fraternities who threw bottles at black athletes and yelled racial slurs during a cross-country meet. In 2002, a member of the Syracuse University chapter of SAE wore black face out to local bars.

    In 2006, two SAE students were suspended at the University of Memphis after harassing another member for dating a black woman and bringing her to the chapter’s house. In 2009, the Valdosta State University chapter caused outrage on campus after flying a Confederate flag on its front lawn. On Sunday, the Oklahoma State University chapter also drew ire on social media when a Confederate flag could be seen through one of its windows just hours after the controversy emerged at the University of Oklahoma.

    In 2013, the Washington University in St. Louis chapter of SAE was suspended after some of its pledges were instructed to direct racial slurs at a group of black students. Last year, 15 SAE members at the University of Arizona broke into a historically Jewish off-campus fraternity and physically assaulted its members while yelling discriminatory comments at them. In December, Clemson University’s SAE chapter was suspended after the fraternity hosted a “cripmas” party at which students dressed up as gang members.

    As for the now-infamous song, there’s evidence that the lyrics are not popular just among members of the Oklahoma chapter. One month ago, before the controversy at Oklahoma, a user on the online forum Reddit wrote that a nearly identical version was a “favorite” of SAE members at universities in Texas. On Monday, a Twitter user, whose profile has been made private, tweeted that he “was an SAE at a university in Texas from 2000-2004. The exact same chant was often used then. This is not isolated.” […]

    Unheard OU, the activist group that publicized the video, organized a large demonstration on Monday, and students took to social media to express their outrage and sadness. A football recruit who had committed to play at Oklahoma tweeted that he would no longer being doing so, and a current linebacker for Oklahoma, Eric Striker, sent a video through Snapchat furiously calling out members of SAE and other fraternities who cheer on black players when they’re on the field, only to sing racist songs behind their backs.

    “Same motherfuckers that talk about racism doesn’t exist are the same motherfuckers shaking our hands, giving us hugs, telling us how you really love us,” Striker said. “Fuck you phony-ass, fraud-ass b*tches.”

    Boren on Monday said SAE will never return to Oklahoma while he remains president, prompting some to question online whether all universities should take similar, even proactive, stances against SAE, given such a pattern of discriminatory behavior among its chapters. “Just close all SAE chapters; they’re all horrible spawning areas,” one Twitter user wrote. Said another, “SAE proudly touts association to the Confederacy on its website. Close em all down.”

    A detailed analysis of fraternity deaths by Bloomberg last year found that SAE is the country’s deadliest, and it is often accused of promoting a culture that helps lead to campus sexual assault and hazing. Andrew Lohse, a former SAE fraternity member who famously went public about his experiences at Dartmouth College, said Monday that while his chapter never sang the lyrics from the Oklahoma video, it did set lyrics about violence against women to the same tune. Even though the chapter was in New Hampshire, Lohse added, several members still referred to the Civil War as “the War of Northern Aggression.”

    Even so, Kevin Kruger, president of NASPA: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, said an outright national ban of an entire Greek organization remains unlikely. “I don’t think we’re at a place yet where SAE is branded as an organization that can’t get it right,” Kruger said. “But I think we are at a point where any organization that engages in this kind of behavior should start expecting zero tolerance.”

    I’m just wow, all the problems associated with that culture there.

    Former OU SAE fraternity house chef speaks out on racist video chant, video only, sorry. But he calls them ‘family’. :(

    Damn. RT “@bomani_jones: an old lady once, when asked how we’d know who was black, said “ask them.” she was pointing at the police.”

  305. rq says

    Frat which declared they’ll never be a nigg*r in SAE recently hazed black pledgee to death, DailyKos link by Shaun King. Things we already know in one collected link.

    #AnthonyHill #VETERAN WITH MENTAL ILLNESS before he was killed by police for BEING MENTALLY ILL! .@DeptVetAffairs …

    New song dedicated to #TonyRobinson and #AnthonyHill #dropthecharges #MOA11 #BlackLivesMatter

    Racial gap in U.S. arrest rates: ‘Staggering disparity’

    When it comes to racially lopsided arrests, the most remarkable thing about Ferguson, Mo., might be just how ordinary it is.

    Police in Ferguson — which erupted into days of racially charged unrest after a white officer killed an unarmed black teen — arrest black people at a rate nearly three times higher than people of other races.

    At least 1,581 other police departments across the USA arrest black people at rates even more skewed than in Ferguson, a USA TODAY analysis of arrest records shows. That includes departments in cities as large and diverse as Chicago and San Francisco and in the suburbs that encircle St. Louis, New York and Detroit.

    Those disparities are easier to measure than they are to explain. They could be a reflection of biased policing; they could just as easily be a byproduct of the vast economic and educational gaps that persist across much of the USA — factors closely tied to crime rates. In other words, experts said, the fact that such disparities exist does little to explain their causes.

    “That does not mean police are discriminating. But it does mean it’s worth looking at. It means you might have a problem, and you need to pay attention,” said University of Pittsburgh law professor David Harris, a leading expert on racial profiling.

    Whatever the reasons, the results are the same: Blacks are far more likely to be arrested than any other racial group in the USA. In some places, dramatically so. […]

    A dozen people stood or slumped on benches before sunrise in Dearborn on a recent morning, waiting for officers to unlock the doors of the 19th District Court, where they had been summoned to answer traffic citations and petty criminal charges. Almost everyone who lives in Dearborn is white (including a large population of Arabs). Almost everyone waiting in the morning dim was black.

    “You can see who’s going in there. I guarantee they don’t live here,” Lawrence Wynn, who is black, said, looking at the line outside the courthouse door. Most days, Wynn said, he detours around Dearborn on his way home from his job at a suburban auto plant. It makes the journey half again as long, “but I’d rather do that than have to come through Dearborn at night.”

    He leaned in close. “I think they’re targeting people.”

    Dearborn police officers and officials say that’s not true. The city’s police chief, Ronald Haddad, said the arrest rates are skewed because many of the people his officers arrest don’t live in the city. They’re picked up at the shopping mall, on their way to work or simply when they’re driving through. Some are detained by private security officers before police ever arrive, meaning police would have no chance to single them out.

    Haddad said it is unfair to measure his officers’ work against the city’s demographics. “We treat everyone the same,” he said. […]

    To measure the breadth of arrest disparities, USA TODAY examined data that police departments report to the FBI each year. For each agency, USA TODAY compared the number of black people arrested during 2011 and 2012 with the number who lived in the area the department protects. (The FBI tracks arrests by race; it does not track arrests of Hispanics.)

    The review did not include thousands of smaller departments or agencies that serve areas with only a small black population. It also did not include police agencies in most parts of Alabama, Florida and Illinois because those states had not reported complete arrest data to the FBI.

    The review showed:

    • Blacks are more likely than others to be arrested in almost every city for almost every type of crime. Nationwide, black people are arrested at higher rates for crimes as serious as murder and assault, and as minor as loitering and marijuana possession.

    • Arrest rates are particularly lopsided in some pockets of the country, including St. Louis’ Missouri suburbs near Ferguson. In St. Louis County alone, more than two dozen police departments had arrest rates more lopsided than Ferguson’s. In nearby Clayton, Mo., for example, only about 8% of residents are black, compared with about 57% of people the police arrested, according to the city’s FBI reports. Clayton’s police chief, Kevin Murphy, said in a prepared statement that “Ferguson has laid bare the fact that everyone in law enforcement needs to take a hard look at how we can better serve our communities and address any disparities that have existed in our departments for too long.”

    • Deep disparities show up even in progressive university towns. USA TODAY found police in Berkeley, Calif., and Madison, Wis., arrested black people at a rate more than nine times higher than members of other racial groups. Madison Police Chief Michael Koval said most of the arrests happen in the poorest sections of the city, which are disproportionately black, and where some residents have pleaded for even more police presence. Still, he said, “I think it would be remiss to suggest the police get out of this whole thing with a free pass. We have to constantly be doing the introspective look at who we are hiring and how we are training.”

    • Arrest rates are lopsided almost everywhere. Only 173 of the 3,538 police departments USA TODAY examined arrested black people at a rate equal to or lower than other racial groups.

    Phillip Goff, president of the University of California Los Angeles’ Center for Policing Equity, said such comparisons are “seductively misleading” because they say more about how racial inequities play out than about what causes them. Those disparities are closely tied to other social and economic inequities, he said, and like most things that involve race, they defy simple explanations.

  306. rq says

    Mall of America!
    Still supporting #BlackLivesMatter and the #MOA11 outside. Singing loud.
    Outside the courtroom. Minnesota shows out. #MOA11
    Supporters of #MOA11 silenced themselves with MOA stickers outside courtroom while the 11 faced charges. @kare11
    The #MOA11 just left courtroom with a pretrial date set for May 1. Press conference to begin soon. #BlackLivesMatter
    Told y’all we would show up to support the #MOA11
    Solidarity for the #MOA11 outside of the courtroom. #BlackLivesMatter @BlackLivesMpls

  307. rq says

    .@deray spread the word, it’s officially time to #boycottMOA

    Wednesday. 3pm. Madison, Wisconsin.

    Anthony Hill: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know, incl. the main points like – he was naked, he was bipolar, he was a veteran, he was active on twitter with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, and he is the second recent shooting with that same PD.

    OU Expels Two Students Involved in Racist Frat Chant

    The Oklahoma Kappa chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon is down two members today after they were caught on video screaming racist lyrics: according to a message from the university’s president, he’s expelled two of the bros involved.

    The tweet from OU prez David Boren singles out two students in “leadership roles,” presumably the ones leading the chant of “there will never be a nigger in SAE.” I’ve contacted the university to confirm details of the expulsion, but pending that, here’s Boren’s statement:

    Basically, there is zero tolerance for this behaviour. Everyone else on the bus, though, appears to be exempt.

    Police identify naked man shot, killed by DeKalb officer

    “He was doing weird movement. He was crawling on the floor, lying down on the floor,” said one witness, who asked not to be identified

    The officer was responding to reports of an unarmed and unclothed man banging on doors and crawling on the ground.

    “He tells me, ‘I’m OK, I’m OK.’ That’s what he was saying,” the witness said.

    The witness said he told the man, identified as 27-year-old Anthony Hill, to go inside or he was going to get arrested.

    “He was acting crazy but he was calm like he didn’t know where he was. He was like kind of lost in his face,” the witness said.

    The responding officer, who is described as a seven-year veteran, confronted Hill.

    Some witnesses and the chief of police say Hill was aggressive and lunged at the officer.

    “When the male saw the officer, he charged, running at the officer. The officer called on him to step back, drew his weapon and fired two shots,” said DeKalb County Director of Public Safety Cedric Alexander.

    “The male”. Harrumph. Previous headlines also called him ‘deranged’.

  308. rq says

    .@deray spread the word, it’s officially time to #boycottMOA

    Wednesday. 3pm. Madison, Wisconsin.

    Anthony Hill: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know, incl. the main points like – he was naked, he was bipolar, he was a veteran, he was active on twitter with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, and he is the second recent shooting with that same PD.

    OU Expels Two Students Involved in Racist Frat Chant

    The Oklahoma Kappa chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon is down two members today after they were caught on video screaming racist lyrics: according to a message from the university’s president, he’s expelled two of the bros involved.

    The tweet from OU prez David Boren singles out two students in “leadership roles,” presumably the ones leading the chant of “there will never be a n”*gg*r in SAE.” I’ve contacted the university to confirm details of the expulsion, but pending that, here’s Boren’s statement:

    Basically, there is zero tolerance for this behaviour. Everyone else on the bus, though, appears to be exempt.

    Police identify naked man shot, killed by DeKalb officer

    “He was doing weird movement. He was crawling on the floor, lying down on the floor,” said one witness, who asked not to be identified

    The officer was responding to reports of an unarmed and unclothed man banging on doors and crawling on the ground.

    “He tells me, ‘I’m OK, I’m OK.’ That’s what he was saying,” the witness said.

    The witness said he told the man, identified as 27-year-old Anthony Hill, to go inside or he was going to get arrested.

    “He was acting crazy but he was calm like he didn’t know where he was. He was like kind of lost in his face,” the witness said.

    The responding officer, who is described as a seven-year veteran, confronted Hill.

    Some witnesses and the chief of police say Hill was aggressive and lunged at the officer.

    “When the male saw the officer, he charged, running at the officer. The officer called on him to step back, drew his weapon and fired two shots,” said DeKalb County Director of Public Safety Cedric Alexander.

    “The male”. Harrumph. Previous headlines also called him ‘deranged’.

  309. rq says

    White man points gun at children. Taken in alive. Mentally ill black man walks naked. Shot dead on sight.

    Another historical excursion:
    The organist at Dexter Memorial is the same organist that Dr. King invited during his time here. She’s in her 80s, Althea Thomas.
    David Oyelowo, who played Dr. King in Selma, signed the original lectern King used at Dexter Memorial after filming was completed. Aye.
    I can’t take pictures in King’s office, but the pictures in here remind you just how young he was. He was 27 when he came to Montgomery.

  310. rq says

    Attorney: Tony Robinson’s Friends Questioned For Hours After Shooting Without A Lawyer

    Anthony and Javier Limon, friends of Robinson, live at the home where Robinson was shot. Neither of the two brothers were inside the residence during the deadly shooting, witnesses told BuzzFeed News.

    After the shooting the two brothers were driven to the Central Station of the Madison Police Department in a police car and questioned for hours without an attorney, according to Craig Spaulding, who told BuzzFeed News that he is like a “surrogate dad” to the two boys.

    Spaulding added that as they were being driven away, Anthony Limon yelled to him that he wanted a lawyer brought to the station.

    “I said, ‘Don’t say a word, we’re going to get you an attorney, don’t say anything,’” Spaulding said. “Anthony said, ‘All right, all right, I’m OK. Get me an attorney.’”

    Attorney Everett Mitchell told BuzzFeed News that he received a phone call from Anthony while he was at the station, saying that he needed a lawyer. Afterward, Mitchell drove to the police station and told a Madison police officer that Anthony had called him and requested to see an attorney.

    When Mitchell arrived at the station, he said police told him that he would have to wait to speak to the boys because investigators from the Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation — the state law enforcement agency heading up this case — were on their way to meet with Anthony and Javier. Mitchell said that he waited about an hour for the DCI investigator to come speak with him.

    Mitchell told BuzzFeed News that the two boys were questioned by investigators for “at least four or five hours.”

    And then, when a lawyer arrived, they told him that the boy changed his mind about having him present during questioning. \

    Federal Marshals Chase Wrong Man Leading to Violent Traffic Accident in Oakland’s Fruitvale District

    But an updated report in the San Francisco Chronicle quotes Deputy US Marshal Joseph Palmer saying that the man who got into the car, triggering the chase, was in fact not the person the Marshals thought they were following and attempting to detain.

    The man in question, Jabari Shaw, is a well known resident of Oakland, an activist, and father. From his hospital bed in Highland Shaw is telling a different story. (See the video embedded below, posted originally to Facebook by Tur-Ha Ak.)

    According to Shaw he was leaving a friend’s house with his daughter, and a woman named Mary Valencourt who was driving, when an unmarked black car cut them off in the road. A black unmarked truck also pulled up, and several men in plain clothing jumped out running at their car. Fearing for their safety, and not seeing signs that these were federal agents, Shaw said Valencourt sped away, but several blocks later violently collided with a paratransit bus.

    Shaw said in a video posted to Facebook that he didn’t realize they were being chased by US marshals until they reached the intersection of East 19th Street and 23rd Avenue.

    “I see the light is turning red, and at this point, this is where I know it’s the police, when we get to East 19th and 23rd,” said Shaw in the video. “The first three cars that approached us were unmarked vehicles, and the police did not have on any uniforms. They blurped the light, the light only in the grill, not on top of the car, and [Mary Valencourt] starts slowing down.”

    According to Shaw, Valencourt then attempted to stop at the intersection where the light was turning red, but their vehicle was “hit from the back.”

    “I honestly believe a police car hit us and pushed us forward into the paratransit truck,” said Shaw in the video.

    Shaw said he was then pulled from the car at gunpoint, and kicked by an officer.

    Carol Fife was on the scene shortly after the crash and said several neighbors who witnessed the chase saw a vehicle push the car carrying Valencourt, Shaw and his daughter.

    O.O At least everyone is alive, that could have been terrible.

    Proclamation. Roosevelt. 1943. This gave blacks the right to fight in American armed forces, incl. Tuskegee airmen.
    The hospital on campus at Tuskegee was once the only hospital in Alabama that would treat black people who had polio.
    Also syphilis.

    More cockroaches. Ferguson mayor accused of vulgar gesture at gala: Extends middle finger while posing with young black male constituent. Nah, it’s just a frat hand sign.

    Moore said he got into the spirit of hobnobbing with the mostly white political establishment. Haney and Moore said there were at most 30 African Americans in a crowd of about 300, and most were from the older generation. Moore said he was one of only two younger black men at the gala.

    “There was one other guy, and I’d try to give him a little head nod,” Moore said. “I’m not even sure if he saw me. I was acutely aware of being a minority.”

    As a Ferguson resident, Moore said he wanted to meet Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III, one of the five white North County mayors featured at the Irish-themed program. Irish immigrants once dominated north St. Louis city and county, but their descendants have gradually left these municipalities as African Americans moved in.

    “I thought I would love to meet my mayor and shake his hand,” Moore said.

    Haney made the introduction, as president of the local Black Nurses Association chapter, because Moore was “nervous” as a first-time gala-goer. Knowles consented to posing with Moore, and Haney snapped the photograph on her phone.

    “They talked about their goatees and why men wear them,” Haney said of the Ferguson mayor and his constituent. “They didn’t spend much time together. I took their picture, there was a little small talk, then he left.” Haney sent that photo and many other pictures from the event to Moore that night.

    It was Sunday morning, after Moore had forwarded the photos to family in Florida, that a relative called him and told him to take a closer a look at one of the pictures, which turned out to be the picture of him posing with Knowles. In the picture, Knowles has the middle finger of his right hand fully extended, with the rest of his fingers withdrawn.

    “I was in shock,” Moore said. “He looked me in the eye and shook my hand and then said, ‘Fuck you.’”

    He called Haney, who showed the photograph to a political friend, who sent the photograph to The American and encouraged Haney to meet with newspaper staff.

    The American invited Haney to the paper to download the original file and enlarge it for a closer look, which confirmed that the apparently obscene gesture is unmistakably included in the original photo file.

    The American contacted Christy Lopez at the U.S. Departure of Justice, who led the Civil Rights Division’s probe into Ferguson, offering the DOJ access to the original photo file. Lopez responded and thanked the paper for reaching out, but declined to make any further analysis of the image.

    The enlarged image reveals Knowles to be holding a top hat in his right hand, which blends into Knowles’s black tuxedo pants in the lower-resolution image. When the enlarged image showing the black top hat was shared with Moore, he was even more certain the obscene gesture was deliberate.

    “I am a bald-headed man, so I wear and handle hats every day,” Moore said. “I have never held a hat like that.” He tried to hold one of his brimmed hats with his fingers in that position and found it took deliberate effort.

    “That actually took away my reasonable doubt,” Moore said. “You have to try to protrude your finger like that.”

    Texas Frat Bans Mexicans, Interracial Dating, And ‘Fagetry’ (Video)

    One user of the popular social media site Reddit posted a photo of a set of confidential rules for pledges from Phi Gamma Delta (known as Fiji) at the Univ. of Texas.

    Those rules, while they include “no drugs,” and “Respect the Ladies,” also include offensive ones like “No interracial dating,” “no Mexicans,” and – in all caps – “NO FAGETRY.”

    That last misspelled rule apparently means no gay people. […]

    UT’s Phi Gamma Delta frat, in addition to this latest unsettling display of racism and homophobia, was the scene just a month ago of a racist party, where the theme was reportedly “Border Patrol.” Students called it “Western.”

    Unlike Univ. of Oklahoma President David Boren, who immediately closed down SAE and kicked the entire frat membership out of their house, officials at UT have refused to take action for either of these issues, and even said the Border patrol party does not violate its rules.

  311. rq says

    TRIGGER WARNING HERE, for terrible racist language and violent racism, and honestly, I wish these sites would bother asterixing the n-word, because it’s just so shocking to see it out like that, unacknowledged. And if I’m bothered by it (mostly due to the always violently hateful and disgusting language surrounding the word), then I have to say that my reaction is probably nothing to that of others. So yes, TW for HORRIBLE LANGUAGE.
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    How Reddit Became a Worse Black Hole of Violent Racism than Stormfront

    One section of the Web forum is dedicated to watching black men die, while another is called “CoonTown” and features users wondering if there are any states left that are “n*gg*r free.” One conversation focuses on the state of being “Negro Free,” while another is about how best to bring attention to the assertion that black people are more prone to commit sexual assaults than whites.

    But these discussions aren’t happening on Stormfront, which since its founding in 1995 by a former Alabama Klan leader has been the largest hate forum on the Web. They’re taking place on Reddit, a huge online bulletin board. Reddit was recently spun off into its own independent entity from Advance Publications, the parent company of mass media giant Condé Nast, which also owns Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and 20 other print and online publications that reach an estimated 95 million consumers. (Advance Publications is still a majority shareholder in Reddit.) Reddit has been hailed as the last bastion of free speech on the Internet, an unregulated and vibrant community of users who post whatever they want and rely on the community around them to police their content.

    The world of online hate, long dominated by website forums like Stormfront and its smaller neo-Nazi rival Vanguard News Network (VNN), has found a new — and wildly popular — home on the Internet. Reddit boasts the 9th highest Alexa Internet traffic ranking in the United States and the 36th worldwide. Many of Reddit’s racist subreddits are among its most popular. […]

    Along with countless others with entirely different interests, Reddit increasingly is providing a home for anti-black racists — and some of the most virulent and violent propaganda around. In November 2013, a hyper-racist subreddit called “GreatApes” was formed. Users posted epithet-strewn links to “news” stories of dubious origin that riffed on long established stereotypes about the black community. GreatApes was wildly popular and grew quickly, expanding into a much larger Reddit network called “the Chimpire,” which was organized by a user known only by his or her posting name of “Jewish_NeoCon2.”

    “We feel it’s time to expand our sphere of influence and lebensraum [the Nazi term for “living space”] on reddit. Thus we have decided to create ‘the Chimpire,’ a network of n*gg*r related subreddits,” Jewish_NeoCon2 wrote at the time. “Want to read people’s experiences with n*gg*ers? There now is an affiliated subreddit for it. Want to watch chimp nature documentaries? We got it. N*gg*r hate facts? IT’S THERE. … Oh yes you bet we got videos of ghetto n*gg*rs fighting each other. N*gg*r drama on reddit? There’s a sub. Sheboons? Gibsmedat.”

    Within a year, the Chimpire network had grown to include 46 active subreddits spanning an alarming range of racist topics, including “Teenapers,” “ApeWrangling,” “Detoilet,” and “Chicongo,” along with subreddits for both “TrayvonMartin” and “ferguson,” each of them dealing with the controversial and highly publicized shooting deaths of unarmed black teenagers.

    Then, last November, Reddit’s most racist community evolved once again, adding the subreddit called CoonTown in the aftermath of a dispute between several top moderators at GreatApes. In just four days, CoonTown had reached 1,000 subscribers. And its popularity continues to grow.

    According to Reddit Metrics, as of Jan. 6, there were 552,829 subreddits. CoonTown, with its 3,287 subscribers, ranked 6,279th, placing it in the top 2% of subreddits. It is the 680th fastest-growing subreddit on the site despite — or because of — violently racist material including a large number of threads dedicated to videos of black-on-black violence. […]

    Everything up to violence , however, is very much there, including the horrific content found on other Chimpire subreddits like “WatchN*gg*rsDie” — content which is rarely, if ever, matched on forums like Stormfront and VNN, which worry about being shut down or driving off potential allies.

    That’s despite the Reddiquette section’s first rule, which implores Reddit users to “Remember the human.” “When you communicate online, all you see is a computer screen,” it says. “When talking to someone you might want to ask yourself ‘Would I say it to the person’s face?’ or ‘Would I get jumped if I said this to a buddy?'”

    If Reddit’s rules seem relaxed, that’s because they are meant to be. Still, although users are asked to “remember the human,” there is little humanity in the way the subjects of subreddits like CoonTown are treated. […]

    Racist websites and organizations do sometimes benefit from racist subreddits like the Chimpire. That’s because subreddit users often post links to other racist sites, and those links drive traffic to those other sites, which in turn typically sell merchandise in addition to pushing racist ideology and recruiting.

    It’s hard to dispute that Reddit does offer a venue for remarkably lively and unbridled conversation, and that dissident commentary that might not be tolerated elsewhere finds a welcome home there. Richard Spencer, a racist ideologue who heads the National Policy Institute, held an “AMA” (Ask Me Anything) session on Reddit last November, and although his views are widely regarded as loathsome, he was calm and understated in his discussion of far-right European politics. Unlike in WatchN*gg*rsDie, there were no links to videos of brutal killings or other visual images meant to degrade the humanity of minorities.

    Reddit is often hailed as one of the last bastions of truly free speech, and its owners’ hesitance to jeopardize that status is understandable given the loyal following it has inspired. Reddit has removed content that has been illegally appropriated from commercial interests, such as the revelations that emerged from the November hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

    The Internet is awash in racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic and other hateful content, but much of it is relatively tame. Subreddits such the Chimpire offer a window on to just how awful some of the darkest corners of the Web really are.

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    Ferguson cited for missed deadline to submit traffic-stop race data, City Council to meet

    Ferguson’s police department is among more than a dozen in Missouri that illegally missed a deadline for submitting to the state racial data relating to traffic stops, putting them at risk of losing state funding, Missouri’s top law enforcer said Tuesday.

    Attorney General Chris Koster’s callout of Ferguson and 16 other law enforcement agencies statewide came hours before the St. Louis suburb’s City Council was to hold its first public session since a U.S. Department of Justice report last week accused its police force and municipal court system of racial bias.

    Racist emails included in the DOJ report led to the firing of the city clerk and resignation of two police officers in Ferguson, which has been beset by unresent since a white police officer fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was black and unarmed, in August. And on Monday, an appellate judge was assigned to overhaul the municipal court system.

    Koster said the deadline for divulging the racial makeup of people stopped for alleged traffic offenses was March 1. The data is used to compile a yearly report about any racial disparities involving traffic stops.

    Messages seeking comment Tuesday from a Ferguson city spokesman were not immediately returned. Ferguson city leaders also remained mum about whether more personnel changes may come during Tuesday’s meeting.

  312. rq says

    Update: Naeschylus Vinzant Wasn’t Armed When Killed by Aurora Cops

    Yesterday, we told you about the many unanswered questions related to the officer-involved shooting of a man near Laredo Elementary School in Aurora on Friday, March 6.

    Some of the answers have finally started trickling in. For instance, the man has now been identified as Naeschylus Vinzant, a 37-year-old with a record of criminal offenses dating back more than twenty years.

    Yet we still don’t know why police chose to shoot Vinzant in broad daylight in such a public setting.

    Especially since he wasn’t armed at the time.

    There’s a timeline that doesn’ti ndicate why shooting him would be appropriate, and some sentences on how the PD must be treading cautiously, and then a section that begins:

    Whatever the case, Vinzant is hardly a poster child for lawful behavior.

    You can guess what follows. But seriously. MUST the media, really? Seriously?

    One for the Freeze Peach brigade: No, a public university may not expel students for racist speech [UPDATED in light of the students’ expulsion]. Reading the article, it feels manifestly wrong, but I couldn’t for the life of me argue any solid point – plus this guy is like a professor on free speech and all. I suppose my question is, is the university a government institution or not? Also, what is a fraternity – its own organization (private)? Which would clarify a lot of the constitutional bits and the university being allowed to expel students for horrible speech. But then there’s the fact that universities usually have a code of conduct of some kind (the one I went to had one!), and very likely racist speech violates that code of conduct – but anyway, here’s some excerpts:

    1. First, racist speech is constitutionally protected, just as is expression of other contemptible ideas; and universities may not discipline students based on their speech. That has been the unanimous view of courts that have considered campus speech codes and other campus speech restrictions — see here for some citations. The same, of course, is true for fraternity speech, racist or otherwise; see Iota Xi Chapter of Sigma Chi Fraternity v. George Mason University (4th Cir. 1993). (I set aside the separate question of student speech that is evaluated as part of coursework or class participation, which necessarily must be evaluated based on its content; this speech clearly doesn’t qualify.)

    UPDATE: The university president wrote that the students are being expelled for “your leadership role in leading a racist and exclusionary chant which has created a hostile educational environment for others.” But there is no First Amendment exception for racist speech, or exclusionary speech, or — as the cases I mentioned above — for speech by university students that “has created a hostile educational environment for others.”

    2. Likewise, speech doesn’t lose its constitutional protection just because it refers to violence — “You can hang him from a tree,” “the capitalists will be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes,” “by any means necessary” with pictures of guns, “apostates from Islam should be killed.” […]

    4. [UPDATE: Given the president’s letter, it’s clear that the students are being expelled solely for their speech, and not for the reason discussed in the following paragraphs.] Some people have suggested that the speech may be evidence of discriminatory decisionmaking by the fraternity in admitting members. A university may demand that groups to which it provides various benefits not discriminate in admissions. See Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2010). Indeed, nondiscrimination rules are applicable to groups generally, even apart from any benefits they get; much depends on whether the groups are seen as small and selective enough to be covered by a right to “intimate association,” and on whether apply antidiscrimination law to the groups would interfere with the groups’ expression of their ideas, and thus burden their right to “expressive associations.” See Roberts v. U.S. Jaycees (1983); Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000). The university might thus be able to discipline students who (a) are involved in a fraternity’s admissions decisions, and (b) can be shown to have denied membership to people based on race, or intentionally tried to communicate to potential members that they would deny them membership that way. I don’t think that a discussion saying that discrimination ought to take place, or even that at some unspecified time it will take place, would suffice to constitute a violation of the antidiscrimination rules, though it might be used as evidence in a future case where discrimination against a particular applicant might be alleged.

    But even if the group is found to have discriminated against black applicants, and some particular members were found to have participated in that decision, the penalty for that has to be based on the penalties that are actually meted out to people who violate this rule. If discrimination by a group generally leads to a fine against the group, or a reprimand of the participants, or even derecognition of the group, the university can’t then expel students who engage in the same action but who also engage in constitutionally protected speech — that sort of disparate treatment shows that the school is really punishing people for their speech, not for their conduct.

    This is a familiar principle from antidiscrimination law: if a black student is expelled based on conduct for which white students are generally just mildly reprimanded, the law recognizes that the expulsion was based on the student’s race, not just the student’s punishable conduct. The conduct in that situation is being used in large part as a pretext for race discrimination. Likewise, if SAE members are expelled based on conduct for which people who didn’t engage in SAE’s speech would generally just be mildly reprimanded, the expulsion would be based on the speech, not the members’ punishable conduct, which would just be pretext for punishing students for the ideas they were expressing to each other. [..]

    How long this sort of misbehavior should dog a person is an interesting ethical question, but in any event it’s pretty clear that the offending students are going to pay a substantial social and likely economic price for their actions. [GOOD.]

    Under the First Amendment, though, the government — including Oklahoma University — generally cannot add to this price, whether the offensive speech is racist, religiously bigoted, pro-revolutionary, or expressive of any other viewpoint, however repugnant it might be.

    I suppose that answers my university-government question, though from a client perspective, I’m damn glad the university is expelling these students, because they’re not creating the kind of climate in which I would like (or would like my children to) pursue an education.

  313. rq says

    Cop Who Killed Woman in Front Husband and Child While Shooting Their Dog Won’t Face Charges

    In her report, Beaver cited the fact that Hill is a police officer. Beaver says that he was in a difficult situation in which he was trying to stop a domestic dispute as well as protect himself from a dog. Being that he was a police officer, in this situation, he is entitled to special treatment, according to Beaver.

    Does Beaver’s logic make any sense at all?

    This was a clear-cut case of one person negligently taking the life of another person.

    Try to imagine a situation in which a non-police officer shoots and kills their neighbor in their front yard, either accidentally or not. Then try to imagine this non-police officer escaping any and all accountability. It would not happen.

    Police officers are supposedly highly trained professionals, prepped to make hasty decisions in volatile situations. This is a claim that we hear all the time from the police themselves as well as supporters. Being able to make this claim means that holding them less accountable than the average citizen, should never occur.

    Because of their monopoly on the use of force, cops should be held to a much higher standard of conduct than the average citizen. Unfortunately, this is almost never the case.

    The precedent set by the court’s decision, to let this officer off Scott Free, is worrisome. It has now become common practice for police officers to avoid all accountability by simply hiding behind the thin blue line.

    Facebook event: Justice for Naeschylus Vinzant! Unarmed Black man killed by Aurora Police! There’s a second one, but that one needs a login.

    Protest the killing of Naeschylus Vinzant, an unarmed Black man shot down by Aurora Police this past Friday March 6.

    Organized by Shareef Aleem, Aurora Copwatch 720-763-7558

    Bring signs, banners, anger and hope.

    Cops behaving horribly: EXCLUSIVE: Two NYPD cops admit to wrongdoing, but will keep their jobs after booze-filled night with rape victim in Seattle

    The two NYPD cops who went drinking with a 24-year-old rape victim in Seattle — before one of them tried to rip off her clothes — admitted to breaking the rules but are keeping their jobs, the Daily News has learned.

    Officer Lukasz Skorzewski, 31, and Lt. Adam Lamboy, 44, pleaded guilty to departmental charges of prohibited conduct, a police source said Monday.

    Skorzewski, who was accused of trying to tear off the New York college student’s clothes, was demoted from detective after he and Lamboy took the trip.

    The woman, shown here in silhouette, said that Skorzewski tried to have sex with her the night after they, along with another NYPD officer, went out drinking in Seattle.

    Skorzewski was docked 30 vacation days and suspended for 10 days without pay as a result of pleading guilty.

    He was transferred to the Medical Division in Queens on a year’s probation. […]

    The woman, who claimed she was previously raped in an Union Square apartment, said she went drinking with the cops after they flew out west to interview her about her allegations. […]

    Sonia Ossorio, president of the National Organization for Women’s New York City chapter, said the case is troubling.

    “The idea of a special victims detective making a pass at a rape victim when he’s charged with interviewing her about that rape shatters any notion of confidence in the NYPD’s ability to regulate itself,” she said. “It’s so far beyond the bounds of acceptability.”

    It was said that what he did was wrong, but not criminal. Because sexually assaulting a woman is not criminal? That’s without even the larger issue of special victims cops drinking with a rape victim they’re interviewing. How unprofessional, to put it mildly.

    Video: Black Lives Matter Protest Draws Crowd At The Armory Show

    Amid hoards of art buyers sipping $20 glasses of champagne, a group of Black Lives Matter protesters staged a die-in at the Armory Show yesterday afternoon.

    The demonstration was performed by a group called Artists for Justice, and involved song and spoken word. One member of the group began to draw a crowd by reenacting the last moments of Eric Garner’s life, repeating Garner’s pleas to the police to leave him alone and his final words, “I can’t breathe.”

    After the group chants “I can’t breathe!” an EMT arrives, and security guards confer as to whether the demonstration is part of a planned exhibition (we strolled through Pier 94 yesterday, and politically and socially conscious art was tough to find in the sprawling maze of droll paintings and blinking baubles).

    As security begins forcefully ejecting the protesters, one shouts, “Notice the people they grab, are black people!”

    That protester sings as she’s shoved out: “Tamir Rice was a little boy / They shot him down because he had a toy / Keep your eyes on the prize / Hold on.”

    The guard shoving her mutters, “Keep your eyes on the prize out the door.”

  314. rq says

    Ferguson pledges to work with new judge, will hire its own as well

    “The city of Ferguson court staff is looking forward to working with Judge Richter, as it begins to regain the trust of the Ferguson Community,” Mayor James Knowles said in a statement. “We understand there has been mistrust for some time, but the naming of Judge Richter will begin a new chapter for our court.”

    Ferguson is looking to start the process of hiring a new municipal judge, someone to “lead our court in a new direction, and will allow offenders to leave with a belief that they were treated fairly,” Knowles said. But a spokeswoman for the Supreme Court said Richter will act as the judge in Ferguson until further notice.

    Brockmeyer also resigned his post as the municipal prosecutor in Dellwood, at the request of Mayor Reggie Jones. But he remains the prosecutor in Florissant and Vinita Park, and the municipal judge for Breckenridge Hills.

    The mayor of Breckenridge Hills did not return a message for comment about Brockmeyer’s status. Tom Schneider, the mayor of Florissant, said he has asked Brockmeyer to take a leave of absence. Schneider, who has the final say over Brockmeyer’s fate, said he wants to consult with other officials before making a final decision.

    Vinita Park Mayor James McGee says his city will keep Brockmeyer as prosecutor. He said that Brockmeyer helped the city establish a number of high standards for the municipal court – and even talked city council members into getting rid of speed cameras.

    Also, Ferguson city manager John Shaw resigned / was let go.
    Ferguson City Manager Cited in Justice Department Report Resigns

    The city manager of Ferguson, whom a Department of Justice report blamed for overseeing the financially driven policies that led to widespread discrimination and questionable conduct by the police and the courts here, has agreed to resign. The announcement came during a City Council meeting on Tuesday, about a week after the scathing Justice Department report was released.

    The manager, John Shaw, 39, had held the post since 2007. As Ferguson’s chief executive, he was the city’s most powerful official.

    Mr. Shaw, who has not spoken publicly since the report was issued, offered a staunch defense in a page-long letter to the community that city officials distributed during the Council meeting.

    “And while I certainly respect the work that the D.O.J. recently performed in their investigation and report on the City of Ferguson, I must state clearly that my office has never instructed the Police Department to target African-Americans, nor falsify charges to administer fines, nor heap abuses on the backs of the poor,” he wrote. “Any inferences of that kind from the report are simply false.”

    The resignation was announced about 30 minutes into the Council meeting, with members voting 7 to 0 to approve a “mutual separation agreement” with Mr. Shaw.

    As people in the packed Council chamber began to understand what was happening, a buzz shot through the room as onlookers mumbled and a few let out quiet cheers.

    “We wanted to move forward as a community,” Mayor James Knowles III said during a brief news conference after the meeting.

    Until the Justice Department report was released, Mr. Shaw had remained largely in the background, while Mr. Knowles and the city’s police chief became the public faces of turmoil in Ferguson. But the report highlighted Mr. Shaw as the head of the city’s operations as it engaged in racially biased and unconstitutional policing practices.

    Mr. Shaw, whose resignation was effective at midnight Tuesday, was not at the meeting. The assistant city manager, Pam Hylton, sat in his place.

    Packed house un #Ferguson for evening city council meeting – people clapped and asked for John Knowles to resign, too. He doesn’t seem to think he should: No reaction from Knowles. He has said he will run for re-election in 2017.

    John Shaw, #Ferguson city manager, resigns. Here is his statement – it’s rather long. In essence, he has helped make Ferguson a better place to live, he has worked with the DOJ to identify and implement recommendations for change, and he denies the DOJ report.
    This doesn’t seem to square. From John Shaw’s resignation and from the DoJ’s report. A side-by-side comparison of Shaw’s statement, and the DOJ report where it says that he was complicit in the application of racial bias in the Ferguson justice system. Oh, and getting rid of people’s tickets for them.

  315. rq says

    You know, I was mistaken: when that video surfaced of the racist fraternity song, I lumped it in with other things that sort of blow over, but remain in memory as an indicator of racism. But it’s really getting a lot of attention (good) and a lot of denial (bad), and it’s really not the kind of thing that should just blow over.

    Fraternity’s house mom sings n-word

    The fallout at Sigma Alpha Epsilon continues.

    Just days after a video surfaced of frat members singing a racist song, another video is making the rounds. This one appears to show the fraternity’s house mom laughing and saying the n-word.

    The Oklahoma Daily, the university’s student newspaper, posted a Vine dating from 2013 that shows an older woman talking over a rap song, saying “ni****” seven times in quick succession.

    The woman, who is seated with an Oklahoma shirt behind her, laughs before repeating the racial epithet. The sound of “All Gold Everything” from Trinidad James — a black, Atlanta-based rapper — can be heard in the background.

    The student newspaper reports that the woman appears to be Beauton Gilbow, who was the SAE chapter’s house mom. She responded in a statement Tuesday.

    “I have been made aware that a video of me that is circulating on social media and in the news. I am heartbroken by the portrayal that I am in some way racist. I have friends of all race and do not tolerate any form of discrimination in my life.

    “I was singing along to a Trinidad song, but completely understand how the video must appear in the context of the events that occurred this week,” said Gilbow.

    Before the Vine came out but after the fraternity chapter was suspended, the woman known as “Momma B” told CNN affiliate KOCO-TV that she was blindsided by the overall controversy.

    “I feel like the rug has been pulled out from under me,” Gilbow said. “This has been my life for 15 years. And it’s tough.”

    I just bet it’s tough.

    EXCLUSIVE: Former Catholic schoolboy named as Oklahoma fraternity brother who led racist chant …as university president expels two ‘leaders’ of the song

    The conductor of a sickening racist chant by a University of Oklahoma fraternity has been identified as a graduate of an elite Catholic school in Dallas.

    Parker Rice, 19, is an OU freshman. It is believe he did not even live in the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house, which was shut down by the university on Monday.

    Rice graduated last year from the prestigious Jesuit College Preparatory School of Dallas.

    A spokesman for the school’s president, Mike Earsing, told Daily Mail Online: ‘We know for sure it is one of our students and it is Parker Rice.’

    Daily Mail Online was the first to confirm Rice’s identity.

    On Tuesday, university president David Boren said he has expelled two students who were identified as ‘leaders’ of the racist chant. A university spokesman declined to say whether Parker was one of those two students. […]

    Former classmates at the $16,000-a-year Catholic school Rice attended also confirmed to Daily Mail Online that he is the tuxedo-clad conductor seen getting out of his seat during the nine-second clip posted online on Sunday.

    Rice is featured the most prominently in the video, as he pumps his fist and encourages others aboard the chartered bus to sing along with the lyrics: ‘There will never be a n***** in SAE. You can hang him from a tree, but he’ll never sign with me. There will never be a n***** in SAE.’

    The video, taken aboard a party bus Saturday night en route from the campus in Norman to the Oklahoma City Golf & Country Club, caused immediate outrage on Sunday when it was posed on social media.

    University officials responded by banning the fraternity from campus and demanding that members move out by midnight tonight.

    On Tuesday, Jesuit College Prep confirmed that Rice was the one leading the chant. School president Earsing sent a message to students, parents and alumni saying: ‘In the recent video regarding OU and the SAE fraternity it appears that a graduate from Jesuit Dallas is leading the racist chant.’

    ‘I am appalled by the actions in the video and extremely hurt by the pain this has caused our community.’

    He also vowed to identify all of the students who sang the chant and subject them to university punishment. On Monday he said that he was considering the use of criminal prosecution against the students involved.

    Rice’s father Bob Rice is a vice president at real estate company Weeks Robinson Properties. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment by Daily Mail Online.

    More at the link, but none of it is pretty.

    Family of 2nd student seen in the SAE videos releases a statement. @kfor In short: they love their son, he made a mistake, the consequences are forever, they know he is not a racist – they are shocked, they apologize, they ask for forgiveness, and will follow their words with deeds. They ask for privacy from the media as they consider next steps.

    So a racist college student gets to be a “child” whose parents apologize for him while an unarmed black teenager shot to death is a “man”? Think about that.

    Related: he’s literally using this girl as a prop to try n deflect the anger from his frat.this is so embarrassing I might cry

    @deray This kid was a freshman. No way he was leading the chant without an upperclassman pushing him out there. Need to expel them all.

  316. rq says

    Oh, there was an article for that: (Updated) Oklahoma Student from the Racist Fraternity Video Apologizes Here’s the Levi apology:

    As parents of Levi, we love him and care for him deeply. He made a horrible mistake, and will live with the consequences forever. However, we also know the depth of our son’s character. He is a good boy, but what we saw in those videos is disgusting. While it may be difficult for those who only know Levi from the video to understand, we know his heart, and he is not a racist. We raised him to be loving and inclusive and we all remain surrounded by a diverse, close-knit group of friends.

    We were as shocked and saddened by this news as anyone. Of course, we are sad for our son — but more importantly, we apologize to the community he has hurt. We would also like to apologize to the — entire African American community, University of Oklahoma student body and administration. Our family has the responsibility to apologize, and also to seek forgiveness and reconciliation. Our words will only go so far — as a family, we commit to following our words with deeds.

    To our friends and family, thank you for your kind comments and prayers. They are very comforting in this difficult time.”

    They skip the sentence calling for privacy.
    And the Rice apology:

    “I am deeply sorry for what I did Saturday night. It was wrong and reckless. I made a horrible mistake by joining into the singing and encouraging others to do the same. On Monday, I withdrew from the university, and sadly, at this moment our family is not able to be in our home because of threatening calls as well as frightening talk on social media.

    I know everyone wants to know why or how this happened. I admit it likely was fueled by alcohol consumed at the house before the bus trip, but that’s not an excuse. Yes, the song was taught to us, but that too doesn’t work as an explanation. It’s more important to acknowledge what I did and what I didn’t do. I didn’t say no, and I clearly dismissed an important value I learned at my beloved high school, Dallas Jesuit. We were taught to be ‘Men for Others.’ I failed in that regard, and in those moments, I also completely ignored the core values and ethics I learned from my parents and others.

    At this point, all I can do is be thoughtful and prayerful about my next steps, but I am also concerned about the fraternity friends still on campus. Apparently, they are feeling unsafe and some have been harassed by others. Hopefully, the university will protect them.

    For me, this is a devastating lesson and I am seeking guidance on how I can learn from this and make sure it never happens again. My goal for the long-term is to be a man who has the heart and the courage to reject racism wherever I see or experience it in the future.”

    Feeling unsafe and harassed? My heart bleeds.

    Meanwhile, in New York: Retired correction officer fatally shoots man at Brooklyn’s Borough Hall station following scuffle on 4 train: NYPD sources

    Bloody pandemonium erupted in the Borough Hall subway station in Brooklyn Tuesday night when a retired correction officer shot and killed an apparently unarmed man who had confronted him on a No. 4 train moments earlier, police said.

    The man who was slain, Gilbert Drogheo, 32, and another man began harassing the 69-year-old retired officer as he boarded a Brooklyn-bound 4 train at the Bowling Green station in Manhattan around 6:30 p.m., according to police sources and a witness.

    “They were talking mad trash,” said the witness, 30-year-old Thomas Berry of Crown Heights, who was on his way home from work when he saw the argument. “They must have been drunk.”

    The witness said that either Drogheo or his friend told the older man: “Oh, I got you now, my n—–,” as the retired officer tried to walk between the pair to get on the train.

    All three men were black, police said, but Berry said one appeared to be Hispanic.

    “(The older man) said, ‘I’m not your n—–, I’m not your boy,’” the witness said. “He said, ‘Leave me alone, don’t talk to me.’ He was being really calm.”

    But the dispute heated up as the train left the station and traveled through the tunnel under the East River, then turned violent when one member of the duo punched the retired correction officer in the head as he tried to get off at Borough Hall, Berry and police said. […]

    The former correction officer followed the two younger men as they got off the train, first popping a clip into the gun, the witness said.

    He cornered Drogheo at the end of the platform and the two wrestled before the younger man was able to escape, Berry said.

    The witness said the gunman followed Drogheo up the stairs to the mezzanine level. It was not clear if he had his gun drawn as he went upstairs. A video obtained by Channel 2 shows the retired correction officer punching Drogheo. Then the scuffle resumed, and the retiree shot the younger man once in the torso during the struggle, according to police and MTA sources.

    So… he was being harassed, not good. But following them off the train?

    Here’s the NY Times on Anthony Hill: Naked Black Man Fatally Shot by White Police Officer in Georgia. You know, I had to go back and check the name to make sure I got the right one. :P

    The officer, who has been on the force for seven years, fired two shots at the man in a parking lot after the man charged at him and ignored his commands to stop, Mr. Alexander said. It appeared the man was unarmed, he said. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is examining the shooting.

    Both shots struck the man, and he died at the scene, Mr. Alexander said. He was identified as Anthony Hill, 27. The officer involved was placed on administrative leave pending the results of the investigation, Mr. Alexander said.

    The shooting on Monday occurred amid a national debate over race, crime and law enforcement officers’ use lethal force in encounters with civilians. Mr. Hill was black, and the officer who shot him is white, Mr. Alexander said.

    It was not clear what had led the officer to shoot Mr. Hill. Mr. Alexander said that the officer had been equipped with a Taser, but that he did not know whether the officer had used the device.

    Interlude: Music! 11 Stories Behind The Best Songs On The ‘Empire’ Soundtrack. For some light reading.

    Just nine episodes of “Empire” have aired and it’s already the biggest network drama in five years, raking in numbers that haven’t been reached since a 2009 episode of “Grey’s Anatomy.” Created by Lee Daniels and Danny Strong, “Empire” — which, for the uninitiated, is about an entertainment conglomerate on the verge of an IPO and the dramatic, maniacal family who runs it — is also positioning itself to succeed in the real-life music industry.

    Longtime producer Timbaland serves as music supervisor, and with the help of his protégé, Jim Beanz, he’s made “Empire” a hit factory. Season 1’s soundtrack drops Tuesday and features 18 original songs. The show’s Spotify account lists dozens more that didn’t make the cut. There’s even talk of taking the show on the road, a la Fox’s other music-heavy show, “Glee,” and touring with the cast’s stars.

    There’s no critical consensus as to whether the music is actually good — some tracks are corny and calculated, others are straight-up bangers — but it’s undeniable that “Empire” is sitting on pot of gold. According to Beanz, whose given name is James David Washington, Daniels or directors will give notes on what the songs should sound like, to help convey a feeling or plot point. “Music for television is absolutely different than music for radio,” Washington told The Huffington Post. “The idea for the songs can change at the drop of a dime.”

    To break down some of the tracks on the “Original Soundtrack From Season 1 of Empire,” HuffPost Entertainment spoke with Washington and Bryshere Gray, who plays the youngest Lyon, Hakeem, and also goes by his rap moniker, Yazz the Greatest. (Beware of spoilers for Episodes 1-9.)

    Claude Sitton, 89, Acclaimed Civil Rights Reporter, Dies

    When Turner Catledge, the Mississippi-born managing editor of The Times, chose Mr. Sitton to cover the South in 1958, “he was about to set in motion a level of reporting that would establish the national standard for two decades,” Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff wrote in 2006 in their Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation.” (Mr. Roberts was himself a managing editor of The Times.)

    “Nobody in the news business,” the authors continued, “would have as much impact as he would — on the reporting of the civil rights movement, on the federal government’s response, or on the movement itself. Sitton’s byline would be atop the stories that landed on the desks of three presidents.”

    One of his articles, in 1962, caught the attention of Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general at the time. It described a south Georgia sheriff and his deputies intruding on a voting rights meeting at a church in Terrell County and menacing the citizens there. One officer repeatedly struck his palm with a large flashlight as if it were a club; another ran his hand over his revolver and cartridge belt.

    Mr. Sitton began by quoting the sheriff: “We want our colored people to go on living like they have for the last hundred years.”

    Kennedy sent a Justice Department team to Terrell County to sue the sheriff two weeks later.

    “It was not that Claude was some flaming liberal or liberator,” Mr. Klibanoff told The Associated Press in an interview. “He just liked a good story and liked to have it first. And frequently he was reporting on injustice — and they knew, on the civil rights side, that if The New York Times wrote about it, it would get attention from important people.”

    Mr. Sitton covered the Little Rock school desegregation upheaval in 1958-59, after Gov. Orval E. Faubus of Arkansas ordered the city’s schools closed. He was there on June 11, 1963, when Gov. George C. Wallace fulfilled his campaign pledge to “stand in the schoolhouse door” before stepping aside when handed a presidential order to allow two black students to enroll at the University of Alabama.

    And he was on the first bus carrying Freedom Riders out of Montgomery, Ala., on May 24, 1961, as it headed toward Jackson, Miss.

    More at the link, be warned of KKK imagery and more.

    Let’s not forget how many public schools all over the country are named after Confederate “heroes” and KKK leaders. #NotJustSAE

  317. rq says

    Here’s a list of articles on John Shaw’s resignation. One of these headlines is not like the others.
    Ferguson city manager John Shaw resigns, the St Louis Post-Dispatch.
    Ferguson City Manager Cited in Justice Department Report Resigns, the New York Times (and because it jumped out at me, I highlight this paragraph: “And while I certainly respect the work that the D.O.J. recently performed in their investigation and report on the City of Ferguson, I must state clearly that my office has never instructed the Police Department to target African-Americans, nor falsify charges to administer fines, nor heap abuses on the backs of the poor,” he wrote. “Any inferences of that kind from the report are simply false.”).
    Ferguson City Manager John Shaw resigns after scathing DOJ report, MSNBC.
    Ferguson council axes city manager in wake of DOJ report, Fox News (with autoplay video).
    Ferguson city manager resigns after critical DOJ report, CNN (with autoplay video).
    So it’s four resignations and one axing – according to the council, it’s a ‘mutual separation agreement’. Isn’t that how Gwyneth Paltrow gets divorced?

  319. rq says

    Who will lead Ferguson’s day-to-day now that Shaw is out? Mayor Knowles is part-time as he repeatedly reminds us.
    I doubt Knowles will resign. He’d take the entire City of Ferguson down before he voluntarily walked away. He’ll have to be recalled.
    Knowles told reports that the city’s assistant city manager will effectively run #Ferguson as they look for a permanent city manager.
    Good that corrupt officials gone. Shouldn’t have taken DOJ to do it. Testimony of citizens who actually lived it should be enough. #Ferguson
    #Ferguson city officials aren’t providing any details of Shaw’s severance. Key question: How long will he continue to be paid? (@ $120 000 a year)
    Speaker says many people in the room owe Darren Wilson an apology. Laughter, boos follow. #Ferguson Mayor gavels for order. Yelling …

  320. rq says

    Ferguson’s city manager resigns after blistering criticism in Justice Department report, St Louis Public Radio. He just keeps on resigning all over the place.

    I’ll have to ask afterward, but this wording seems to give Knowles temporarily city manager power: Hmmmm…

    I will be waiting for the application process for the Ferguson City Manager to be announced. Can. Not. Wait.

    Aldermanic president wants review of misconduct allegations

    St. Louis Board of Aldermen President Lewis Reed is calling for hearings to look into allegations of police officer misconduct.

    The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that Reed wants to Public Safety Committee to oversee hearings after three officers were removed from duty last week as part of a criminal and internal investigation.

    Federal and local authorities are investigating allegations that the officers may be involved in criminal activity that included assisting drug dealers.

    Mary Ellen Ponder, Mayor Francis Slay’s chief of staff, Mary Ellen Ponder says the call for a hearing is a “good publicity idea” that should wait until the investigation is complete.

    Yeah, that’s in reference to this: Federal Probe into SLMPD – Are St. Louis Officers Working for Drug Dealers?

    Several St. Louis police officers are under investigation for allegedly working on the side for drug dealers.

    KMOX News has learned that at least four – and as many as 25 – city police officers are under investigation.

    Sources tell us the the probe is centered on whether officers were hired to provide protection for drug dealers.

    The Drug Enforcement Agency, FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Circuit Attorney are all involved in the case.

    The investigation began in December when an off-duty officer was critically shot in north St. Louis.

    The officer returned fire, and the man he shot later turned up dead in a burning car.

    St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson says the involved officers are no longer on active duty as the investigation continues.

    “The Department will continue to be vigorous in efforts to root out officers whose actions compromise the integrity of the organization,” the chief said in a news release. “We hold our officers to a high standard and expect them to abide by the very same laws they are sworn to uphold.”

    Do y’all remember Henry Davis, the guy who got charged with property damage for bleeding on officers’ shirts after they beat him up? Here’s a recap: Here’s One Story of Police Brutality You Won’t Read in the DOJ Ferguson Report – and yeah, that story doesn’t make it into the report, but the article at least looks into the charges and how they relate:

    Bleeding profusely after the beating, Davis was taken to Christian Hospital, where he refused treatment until someone took a picture of his injuries. No one at the hospital obliged, so Davis returned to jail, where he eventually paid $3,000 in fees and was released on lesser charges.

    Davis was originally charged with five offenses: driving while intoxicated, speeding, failure to drive in a single lane, no proof of insurance and failure to obey a police officer. The justice department’s report notes that Ferguson police tend to target blacks with multiple citations more than whites. According to the report, “between October 2012 to July 2014, 38 black individuals received four citations during a single incident, compared with only two white individuals; and while 35 black individuals received five or more citations at once, not a single white person did.”

    And one of those charges, “failure to obey,” is sketchy, the justice department said.
    “Officers rely heavily on the municipal ‘Failure to Comply’ charge” — a violation of Section 29-16, which Ferguson police also call “failure to obey” — “which appears to be facially unconstitutional in part, and is frequently abused in practice,” reads the report.
    Use of the “failure to obey” charge seems influenced by a suspect’s race. African Americans, who make up 67 percent of the population, account for 89 percent of failure to obey charges, the justice department found.

    But after officers beat Davis, they charged him with four counts of property damage. Why? Because he bled on their uniforms. […]

    But things get weird when Schottel, Davis’ lawyer, later deposed Officer John Beaird, who filed the four property damage complaints. Beaird denies ever having blood on his uniform, meaning he either lied when he filed the property-damage complaints or he lied during the deposition.

    Here’s what Beaird said, according to the Daily Beast:

    “After Mr. Davis was detained, did you have any blood on you?” asked Davis’ lawyer, James Schottel.

    “No, sir,” Beaird replied.

    Schottel showed Beaird a copy of the “property damage” complaint.

    “Is that your signature as complainant?” the lawyer asked.

    “It is, sir,” the cop said.

    “And what do you allege that Mr. Davis did unlawfully in this one?” the lawyer asked.

    “Transferred blood to my uniform while Davis was resisting,” the cop said.

    “And didn’t I ask you earlier in this deposition if Mr. Davis got blood on your uniform?”

    “You did, sir.”

    “And didn’t you respond no?”

    “Correct. I did.”

    Davis filed a civil-rights case against Ferguson, Beaird and the three other officers who participated in the beating, including current Ferguson councilwoman Kim Tihen.

    The case was thrown out last year when a judge ruled that Davis’ injuries weren’t severe enough to warrant punishing the officers, but Schottel says he hopes the justice department’s report will help his appeal, which could go on the docket as early as next month.

    “[The justice department] didn’t name him by name, but there’s lots of things they pointed out that would apply to our case,” Schottel says.

  321. rq says

    Member of UF’s softball team & some of her friends decided to go as Black members of UF’s football team #NotJustSAE O.O

    Marchers pose outside SAE building. #notonOUrcampus @kfor I’m glad to see such support out there.

    Rahm Emanuel challenger calls Homan Square police detention site ‘troubling’ . “Troubling”? Seems a bit mild, considering.

    In his first public remarks about the secretive Chicago police warehouse, exposed by the Guardian two weeks ago, the Cook County commissioner, Jesús “Chuy” García, described an ongoing effort to do what hundreds of protesters have called for: an independent investigation from city hall.

    “I did some checking through staff about the assertions made in that article,” García said in an interview with Windy City Times, the local LGBT newspaper. “We spoke with some experts in the field and we continue to investigate.”

    “They’re troubling,” García said of allegations by arrestees who detailed to the Guardian off-the-books police interrogation and abuse, “and we continue to investigate”.

    The Guardian has interviewed nine people who have told strikingly consistent stories about police holding them in Homan Square for hours without providing any way to notify their families or their lawyers as to where they are. Chicago police, in separate but unspecific statements have denied there is anything untoward about the facility.

    Chuy’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the Guardian on Tuesday, after suggesting in late February that it planned to issue a formal response. “We have not ascertained whether the assertions are true,” he told the Windy City Times in the interview.

    García’s brief remarks were the first from a Chicago mayoral candidate since Emanuel’s dismissal of the Homan Square revelation on public television in February – “That’s not true,” the mayor said – and suggested he was addressing protesters’ demands.

    Accountability, where are you?

    Apologies offered on behalf of expelled University of Oklahoma students

    The national fraternity said the chant did not reflect its 15,000 collegiate members, but also said that incidents involving other chapters and other members had come to light and would be investigated.

    “This is absolutely not who we are,” SAE said in a statement.

    “We apologize for the unacceptable and racist behavior of the individuals in the video, and we are disgusted that any member would act in such a way,” the fraternity said. […]

    The university did not identify either expelled student, but their identities came to light later Tuesday. A Catholic high school in Dallas identified one as an alumnus, Parker Rice, who is featured prominently in the video, wearing a tuxedo and smiling as he leads the chant.

    Rice, an OU freshman, issued a statement to the Dallas Morning News.

    “I am deeply sorry for what I did Saturday night,” he said. “It was wrong and reckless.”

    “I know everyone wants to know why or how this happened,” he said. Alcohol was a factor, but “that’s not an excuse.”

    His identity had been confirmed earlier by James Kramer, a spokesman for Jesuit College Preparatory School of Dallas. […]

    The other student was identified as Levi Pettit. His parents, Brody and Susan Pettit, said they were “shocked and saddened.” Their son “made a horrible mistake and will live with the consequences forever. … He is a good boy, but what we saw in those videos is disgusting.”

    The Pettits’ statement, issued on what appeared to be a family website, included apologies to “the entire African American community [and the] University of Oklahoma.”

    Also Tuesday, a black former member of SAE at the University of Oklahoma disowned the fraternity.

    “They are not my brothers,” William Bruce James II of Edmond, Okla., told CNN. “They all got to go.”

    James, a member from 2001 to 2004, said he didn’t recall hearing the racist chant, versions of which have reportedly been heard at other campuses in Texas and elsewhere.

    Fallout continued for the university, even for its beloved football team, which participated in an anti-racist demonstration Monday. On Tuesday, a top high school recruit from Texas, Jean Delance, withdrew his commitment to Oklahoma after seeing the video. […]

    Several attorneys said the expulsions were on shaky legal ground. But at least one of them said the university president did the right thing morally, if not legally.

    “The irony here is that [Boren is] arguing he’s protecting the rights of some students while infringing on the 1st Amendment rights of other students,” said Joey Senat, an associate professor who teaches media law at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. “The speech is offensive, the speech is abhorrent, but the 1st Amendment protects unpopular speech.”

    But an Oklahoma defense attorney who has litigated against the University of Oklahoma in student misconduct and due process cases said he agreed with Boren’s action.

    “I’m the person that gets these calls, and I’d tell you, I wouldn’t touch this case with a 10-foot pole,” said the attorney, who requested anonymity to discuss the issue.

    “If I was President Boren, I would have done exactly the same thing,” the attorney said. “He found what he needed to do legally and ran it through. … He knew exactly what he could do to push the envelope and pushed it — and it needed to be pushed.”

    A black chef for SAE lost his job when the frat was evicted. But by Tuesday evening, an online fundraising website had raised nearly $56,000 for Howard Dixon.

    A similar online fundraiser for the fraternity’s white house mother, Beauton Gilbow, was taken down after a short video clip emerged Monday night showing her repeatedly using the N-word while singing along with a popular rap song, “All Gold Everything,” by Trinidad James, which repeatedly uses the slur.

    Now this one’s interesting. Age Of Police Officers Who Kill People A Little-Discussed Factor

    As for the officers in those high-profile cases, most who pulled the trigger were white. Many had disciplinary records. And a number of them had another thing in common: They were under the age of 30.

    In Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson was 28 when he fatally shot Brown in August.

    A month earlier, Eric Garner was put in a fatal chokehold by NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who was 29 at the time.

    In Cleveland, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot in a playground last November after Officer Timothy Loehmann, who was then 26, mistook his pellet gun for a real weapon.

    And in Brooklyn, Officer Peter Liang, 27, who was on the job for less than 18 months, accidentally fired his gun in a public housing stairway, killing Akai Gurley.

    The age of an officer is perhaps the least-discussed factor in a fatal encounter with police, and the maturity of an officer rarely comes up in news conferences after an incident. Age wasn’t mentioned in the Justice Department’s deep, 86-page analysis of Brown’s fatal shooting released last week.

    Yet research shows that younger officers are more likely to be involved in shootings, and that the risk of shootings declines as officers age. That may be because younger officers are more likely to be working on the street than behind a desk, according to researchers, but it could also be that younger officers are predisposed to react with deadly force.

    Unions for the Ferguson Police Department, New York City Police Department, and Cleveland Police Department did not respond to requests for comment. […]

    Researchers told BuzzFeed News they are not surprised that officers who use excessive, and sometimes lethal, force are young. Studies conducted by academics and police departments alike said age is a factor — one of many, but still a factor — in an officer’s use of deadly force.

    Experts who have researched the issue said most people in their young adulthood — from ages 18 to 29 — haven’t developed full maturity of judgment to make, as the Justice Department called it in the Brown shooting analysis, “split-second judgements in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving.” (Federal investigators cleared Wilson of criminal wrongdoing this week, calling his account “credible,” but found evidence of discriminatory policing throughout the Ferguson Police Department.)

    And police orientations do little to address the emotional needs of future police officers. Across the country, police training includes little to no guidance on the psychological and emotional aspects of using force and stress management, said Maria Haberfeld, chair of the Department of Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College. […]

    Data on police-involved shootings is notoriously incomplete because the federal government relies on more than 18,000 local law enforcement agencies to report statistics for the FBI’s data, and many of them don’t. Both the United States attorney general and the director of the FBI have publicly complained about it this year.

    Still, younger officers appear to account for a disproportionate number of justifiable homicides, based on a BuzzFeed News data analysis of FBI and U.S. Census data. This finding comes with many caveats, however. For one, Census data doesn’t distinguish between officers on foot patrol and those at desk jobs. It’s possible that the higher rates are due to younger officers being assigned to more dangerous jobs, while older, more experienced officers tend to move to detective work and office jobs.

    The age issue isn’t limited to a lack of experience on the streets. Experts said the problem is deeper — it’s biological. Most people have not matured and developed their sense of judgment fully until their thirties, and police officers sometimes have to make a series of very complicated decisions in a short period of time.

    “We all recognize that people in their twenties don’t have the maturity of judgment that people in later decades do,” said Dr. Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a research professor in the department of psychology at Clark University. He added that occupations that come with heavy responsibility, such as CEOs, surgeons, and doctors are typically not held by people younger than 30 or even 40 years old.

    “With certain professions more maturity is required, and I would think police officers is one of them. You have the authority of the state behind you — the power of life and death,” he said. […]

    Nolan said if he was police chief, he would prefer to hire someone older, who had previously held another career. For Nolan, it makes more sense to hire a 32-year-old with eight years’ experience on Wall Street, for example, than a 22-year-old with a high school diploma who’s only had one job in his life.

    “We can’t keep recruiting so young; they’re not emotionally developed yet,” Haberfeld said.

    I’m a bit wary of the ‘it’s biology’ argument, because with the correct training, even that hurdle could be overcome. Still, interesting.

    Baltimore! Recently there was a vote on whether to arm school police, which ended up failing (no arms for the school police). And now: Need for city school police force questioned

    Sen. Bill Ferguson, a Baltimore Democrat, said the school system should look at whether the city Police Department could take over or share in patrolling schools, as is done in other Maryland districts at no cost to their school systems.

    According to salary records obtained by The Baltimore Sun, the city school district paid about $9 million in salaries to its 141-member police force in 2013, the most recent figures available. The department’s expenses are not detailed in the school system’s budget.

    “The conversation of whether or not the school police force should be carrying guns in schools misses the point,” said Ferguson. “It’s an important moment to ask the question: Is this the best expenditure possible for our students’ needs?” […]

    “Given that we’re the only jurisdiction that employs a school police force, we need to be looking at other models to see if it’s the right use of our school funds,” said Del. Brooke Lierman, a Baltimore Democrat.

    However, not all state lawmakers believe that using Baltimore police in city schools would be the best course.

    Del. Curt Anderson, who chairs Baltimore’s House delegation, said he doesn’t think it would be possible for the city’s police force to patrol the schools.

    “The Baltimore police force is spread extremely thin now, and to add 188 schools to their responsibility would be pushing the city’s police force beyond the limit,” Anderson said.

    Del. Jill Carter, a Baltimore Democrat, said combining the departments would be a “terrible idea.”

    “The culture of the Baltimore Police Department is not one suited to conduct business within a school,” she said.

    However, Carter is not a defender of the present system, saying that school police are to quick to arrest students for “normal teenage behavior” such as arguing or fighting. The mission of school law enforcement, she said, “should be to serve and protect the children, not criminalize the children.”

    A spokesman for the Baltimore Police Department, asked whether the agency would be able to take on the city schools, referred questions to the mayor’s office. A spokesman for the mayor said “an idea such as this would require extensive review and study.”

    Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young said having Baltimore police patrol the schools would be “the worst idea that anyone could think of.”

    Young said city police must first recover from the mistrust in the community before the officers could cultivate the sort of relationship the school police have with students and their families. He said most of the school police officers have strong ties to Baltimore and can identify with students.

  322. rq says

    In February last year we asked for the police commissioner’s emails for a period of one month and were told it would cost $7,900. Records – completely available!

    Black Harvard graduates have the same shot at a job call-back as white state college grads

    Racism is so pervasive in the US job market that even black Americans with Harvard degrees are at a disadvantage, according a new study in the journal Social Forces (highlighted in Inside Higher Ed).

    Using carefully designed test resumes submitted for job openings, the researchers found that black graduates of elite universities such as Harvard, Stanford, and Duke were as likely to get responses from employers than white graduates of much less prestigious state colleges, such as University of California, Riverside, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and University of North Carolina, Greensboro. […]

    “If we really think that education is the great equalizer, then someone who reaches the pinnacle of that system…should be rewarded pretty equally,” Gaddis says. “I would have been surprised, to be honest with you, to see no gap at all. But to see that the gap for Harvard and the other elite applicants was basically the same was very discouraging.”

    The jobs had starting salaries ranging from about $31,000 to $38,000, and the salary data also skewed lower for black candidates. They received responses from jobs with a listed salary of $3,071 less than the jobs that reached out to white applicants, according to the study.

    Gaddis discovered these inequalities by sending almost identical resumes and cover letters to 1,008 employers. The imaginary candidates either majored in business or psychology, and they had comparable grades, job experience, and campus involvement.

    The only differences were their names—meant to signal race to the employers—and the colleges they had attended. The white applicants were Caleb, Charlie, Ronny, Aubrey, Erica, and Lesly. The black applicants were Jalen, Lamar, DaQuan, Nia, Ebony, and Shanice. (The names he chose reflected statistically common names of children born to women of each race in New York, of varying levels of education.)

    There are some drawbacks to this methodology, Gaddis says. It’s unclear how many of these applicants actually would have received job offers, as it would be unethical and practically difficult to actually have the fictional candidates do interviews.

    And many Americans do not have racially identifying names. It’s unclear how these biases would play out if a black applicant named “Mark Washington” applied for a job, then went in for an in-person interview.

    The state of the labor market may also play a role in the results. Gaddis conducted this study in 2011, when the recession had a chokehold on the US economy and employers weren’t thinking as much about diversity, he says. He wants to replicate the study next year under better economic conditions, when hiring managers are able to prioritize finding candidates that are both qualified and diverse.

    The last couple of paragraphs are interesting, too.

    Proof that stand your ground applies to white men. Black women don’t have a chance.
    21-Year-Old Survives Attack By Crazed Ex, Faces Decades In Prison For Refusing To Die Quietly (IMAGE)

    Cherelle Baldwin is a 21-year-old mother from Bridgeport, Connecticut. She is facing decades in prison for the murder of her abusive former boyfriend Jeffrey Brown – because while the U.S. legal system recognizes the right of men to stand their ground, it offers no such protection to women fighting for their lives against domestic abusers.

    Brown and Baldwin were in love once. They had a baby together. But Brown became controlling, and violent. Like so many other women – Baldwin was trapped. But soon, Brown moved in with another woman – and it should have been the end of Baldwin’s suffering. Instead, he used access to his son as a way to continue the abuse. This is the recorded campaign of terror she suffered:

    He took her phone, credit cards and money.
    He stalked her constantly.
    He beat her up in her home, causing Baldwin to call the cops twice.
    In early May 2013, he was convicted for breach of the peace, a reduced charge. Baldwin wanted to help him get anger management counseling. But the most she could do was get a court order barring more threats, harassment or assaults against her while he was visiting their son.
    Just days later, Brown abruptly showed up at Baldwin’s home and took their 19-month-old from her, only returning him after she chased after Brown by driving on the wrong side of the road.

    In the final days before the fight that would end with Brown crushed between Baldwin’s Pontiac and her cinderblock garage, the terror intensified.

    On May 16, 2013 he texted her no fewer than 36 times. They were the typical pattern – first emotional apologies, then threats, then demands for money and sex. She tried to ignore it, replying only to tell him it was over and to move on.

    But he was back texting again at 7.30 am the very next day. He continued to bombard her with messages through until midnight, when he texted to say he was stalking her.[…]

    The police affidavit (which incorrectly identifies Brown as Baldwin’s boyfriend) reads:

    “She stated her boyfriend attempted to kill her.

    He climbed through her window, requested his identification, she told him where it was, he began fighting and choking her. Then he pulled a knife and choked her with his belt. Then she ran outside got in the car to attempt to flee. He managed to get in the car and proceeded to choke her again. Then she got out and fell as she did and the car ran over her leg and that he also got out to chase her[,] and the rest happen[ed] too fast and she wasn’t sure how he ended up in front of the car.”

    However, Bridgeport police disagreed with Baldwin’s version of events and pushed for criminal prosecution. They deemed that Baldwin had raced the car along the driveway and crushed Brown with intent – murder charges were filed and bail set at $1 million.

    After a six-week trial last month, a jury voted 11-1 against convicting her – the judge recorded a mistrial. On March 12, pretrial begins with a new judge, and Baldwin’s life hangs in the balance once more. The media reporting from local press has been predictably appalling – like this example below from NBC Connecticut which again misidentifies Brown as Baldwin’s boyfriend, and neglects to mention he was an abusive ex-partner.

    …

    The Side of the Oklahoma Racist Frat Story That Nobody Is Talking About

    Racists are loud and obvious. Racists can’t hide; they trip and reveal themselves. Their emails leak. Videos of them circulate. Racists lose jobs and favor, because racists have bosses, and bosses know the best way to show they’re not racist is to point at racists and say, “That’s the bad guy.”

    Racism is a different matter entirely. Racism doesn’t pop up in bold letters, or in outraged headlines on cable news. Racism doesn’t have a boss. To find it, you have to look past the racists, beyond the ranting bigots and their stomach-churning words. Racism thrives in systems and practices. Racism is hard at work in America, whether people see it clearly or not. […]

    The backlash against SAE was predictably swift: The frat’s national headquarters shut down their Oklahoma chapter, while University of Oklahoma president David Boren severed all school ties with the organization. “You are disgraceful,” he told its members in a highly publicized statement.

    What he didn’t do was talk about racism.

    Racism is bigger than a video. Racism is the legacy of being “the only national fraternity founded in the antebellum South,” with a Civil War-era membership class of 400, of whom 369 fought for the Confederacy. Racism is a school housing an organization with a documented history of racial abuse; SAE chapters in St. Louis, Memphis, Clemson, South Carolina and elsewhere have all been embroiled in racism controversies. Racism is the truth behind the frat brother’s song, that there probably never was a “nigger” at SAE, or at least none in significant numbers.

    We’ve gotten pretty good at spotting racists in America, and we’re okay at punishing them too. But the structures and systems that produce the racists still elude us. Instead, they embed themselves in our psyche and masquerade as the natural order. It’s why incidents like the SAE debacle seem to come out of nowhere and shock us out of our post-racial revery. It’s why the police in Ferguson, Missouri, can spend years brutalizing and killing black citizens, but only lose their jobs when we discover the offensive jokes they make over email.

    Americans seem largely incapable of recognizing racism in practice, de facto racism, systemic racism. We only see racism when the racists are here to scream about it. This is bad. Until we make a concerted effort to expand our understanding and vocabulary around racial inequality, the racial wages of gerrymandering, wealth preservation, mass incarceration and police violence will continue unabated. So enough patting ourselves on the back for the “progress” we’ve made — even our perceived racial progressivism is largely overstated. Today, there’s real work to be done.

    Millennials Are More Racist Than They Think – but they’re probably ironically racist, so that’s okay?

    In 2010, a Pew Research report trumpeted that “the younger generation is more racially tolerant than their elders.” In the Chicago Tribune, Ted Gregory seized on this to declare millennials “the most tolerant generation in history.” These types of arguments typically cling to the fact that young people are more likely than their elders to favor interracial marriage. But while millennials are indeed less likely than baby boomers to say that more people of different races marrying each other is a change for the worse (6 percent compared to 14 percent), their opinions on that score are basically no different than those of the generation immediately before them, the Gen Xers, who come in at 5 percent. On interracial dating, the trend is similar, with 92 percent of Gen Xers saying it’s “all right for blacks and whites to date each other,” compared to 93 percent of millennials.

    Furthermore, these questions don’t really say anything about racial justice: After all, interracial dating and marriage are unlikely to solve deep disparities in criminal justice, wealth, upward mobility, poverty and education—at least not in this century. (Black-white marriages currently make up just 2.2 percent of all marriages.) And when it comes to opinions on more structural issues, such as the role of government in solving social and economic inequality and the need for continued progress, millennials start to split along racial lines. When people are asked, for example, “How much needs to be done in order to achieve Martin Luther King’s dream of racial equality?” the gap between white millennials and millennials of color (all those who don’t identify as white) are wide. And once again, millennials are shown to be no more progressive than older generations: Among millennials, 42 percent of whites answer that “a lot” must be done to achieve racial equality, compared to 41 percent of white Gen Xers and 44 percent of white boomers.
    […]

    In a 2009 study using American National Election Studies—a survey of Americans before and after each presidential election—Vincent Hutchings finds, “younger cohorts of Whites are no more racially liberal in 2008 than they were in 1988.” My own analysis of the most recent data reveals a similar pattern: Gaps between young whites and old whites on support for programs that aim to further racial equality are very small compared to the gaps between young whites and young blacks.

    And even though the gaps within the millennial generation are wide, as with the Pew data, there is also evidence that young blacks are more racially conservative than their parents, as they are less likely to support government aid to blacks.

    Spencer Piston, professor at the Campbell Institute at Syracuse University, used ANES data and found a similar pattern on issues relating to economic inequality. He examined a tax on millionaires, affirmative action, a limit to campaign contributions and a battery of questions that measure egalitarianism. He says, “the racial divide (in particular the black/white divide) dwarfs other divides in policy opinion. Age differences in public opinion are small in comparison to racial differences.” This finding is, he adds, “consistent with a long-standing finding in political science.” Piston finds that young whites have the same level of racial stereotypes as their parents.

  323. rq says

    In February last year we asked for the police commissioner’s emails for a period of one month and were told it would cost $7,900. Records – completely available!

    Black Harvard graduates have the same shot at a job call-back as white state college grads

    Racism is so pervasive in the US job market that even black Americans with Harvard degrees are at a disadvantage, according a new study in the journal Social Forces (highlighted in Inside Higher Ed).

    Using carefully designed test resumes submitted for job openings, the researchers found that black graduates of elite universities such as Harvard, Stanford, and Duke were as likely to get responses from employers than white graduates of much less prestigious state colleges, such as University of California, Riverside, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and University of North Carolina, Greensboro. […]

    “If we really think that education is the great equalizer, then someone who reaches the pinnacle of that system…should be rewarded pretty equally,” Gaddis says. “I would have been surprised, to be honest with you, to see no gap at all. But to see that the gap for Harvard and the other elite applicants was basically the same was very discouraging.”

    The jobs had starting salaries ranging from about $31,000 to $38,000, and the salary data also skewed lower for black candidates. They received responses from jobs with a listed salary of $3,071 less than the jobs that reached out to white applicants, according to the study.

    Gaddis discovered these inequalities by sending almost identical resumes and cover letters to 1,008 employers. The imaginary candidates either majored in business or psychology, and they had comparable grades, job experience, and campus involvement.

    The only differences were their names—meant to signal race to the employers—and the colleges they had attended. The white applicants were Caleb, Charlie, Ronny, Aubrey, Erica, and Lesly. The black applicants were Jalen, Lamar, DaQuan, Nia, Ebony, and Shanice. (The names he chose reflected statistically common names of children born to women of each race in New York, of varying levels of education.)

    There are some drawbacks to this methodology, Gaddis says. It’s unclear how many of these applicants actually would have received job offers, as it would be unethical and practically difficult to actually have the fictional candidates do interviews.

    And many Americans do not have racially identifying names. It’s unclear how these biases would play out if a black applicant named “Mark Washington” applied for a job, then went in for an in-person interview.

    The state of the labor market may also play a role in the results. Gaddis conducted this study in 2011, when the recession had a chokehold on the US economy and employers weren’t thinking as much about diversity, he says. He wants to replicate the study next year under better economic conditions, when hiring managers are able to prioritize finding candidates that are both qualified and diverse.

    The last couple of paragraphs are interesting, too.

    Proof that stand your ground applies to white men. Black women don’t have a chance.
    21-Year-Old Survives Attack By Crazed Ex, Faces Decades In Prison For Refusing To Die Quietly (IMAGE)

    Cherelle Baldwin is a 21-year-old mother from Bridgeport, Connecticut. She is facing decades in prison for the murder of her abusive former boyfriend Jeffrey Brown – because while the U.S. legal system recognizes the right of men to stand their ground, it offers no such protection to women fighting for their lives against domestic abusers.

    Brown and Baldwin were in love once. They had a baby together. But Brown became controlling, and violent. Like so many other women – Baldwin was trapped. But soon, Brown moved in with another woman – and it should have been the end of Baldwin’s suffering. Instead, he used access to his son as a way to continue the abuse. This is the recorded campaign of terror she suffered:

    He took her phone, credit cards and money.
    He stalked her constantly.
    He beat her up in her home, causing Baldwin to call the cops twice.
    In early May 2013, he was convicted for breach of the peace, a reduced charge. Baldwin wanted to help him get anger management counseling. But the most she could do was get a court order barring more threats, harassment or assaults against her while he was visiting their son.
    Just days later, Brown abruptly showed up at Baldwin’s home and took their 19-month-old from her, only returning him after she chased after Brown by driving on the wrong side of the road.

    In the final days before the fight that would end with Brown crushed between Baldwin’s Pontiac and her cinderblock garage, the terror intensified.

    On May 16, 2013 he texted her no fewer than 36 times. They were the typical pattern – first emotional apologies, then threats, then demands for money and sex. She tried to ignore it, replying only to tell him it was over and to move on.

    But he was back texting again at 7.30 am the very next day. He continued to bombard her with messages through until midnight, when he texted to say he was stalking her.[…]

    The police affidavit (which incorrectly identifies Brown as Baldwin’s boyfriend) reads:

    “She stated her boyfriend attempted to kill her.

    He climbed through her window, requested his identification, she told him where it was, he began fighting and choking her. Then he pulled a knife and choked her with his belt. Then she ran outside got in the car to attempt to flee. He managed to get in the car and proceeded to choke her again. Then she got out and fell as she did and the car ran over her leg and that he also got out to chase her[,] and the rest happen[ed] too fast and she wasn’t sure how he ended up in front of the car.”

    However, Bridgeport police disagreed with Baldwin’s version of events and pushed for criminal prosecution. They deemed that Baldwin had raced the car along the driveway and crushed Brown with intent – murder charges were filed and bail set at $1 million.

    After a six-week trial last month, a jury voted 11-1 against convicting her – the judge recorded a mistrial. On March 12, pretrial begins with a new judge, and Baldwin’s life hangs in the balance once more. The media reporting from local press has been predictably appalling – like this example below from NBC Connecticut which again misidentifies Brown as Baldwin’s boyfriend, and neglects to mention he was an abusive ex-partner.

    …

    The Side of the Oklahoma Racist Frat Story That Nobody Is Talking About

    Racists are loud and obvious. Racists can’t hide; they trip and reveal themselves. Their emails leak. Videos of them circulate. Racists lose jobs and favor, because racists have bosses, and bosses know the best way to show they’re not racist is to point at racists and say, “That’s the bad guy.”

    Racism is a different matter entirely. Racism doesn’t pop up in bold letters, or in outraged headlines on cable news. Racism doesn’t have a boss. To find it, you have to look past the racists, beyond the ranting bigots and their stomach-churning words. Racism thrives in systems and practices. Racism is hard at work in America, whether people see it clearly or not. […]

    The backlash against SAE was predictably swift: The frat’s national headquarters shut down their Oklahoma chapter, while University of Oklahoma president David Boren severed all school ties with the organization. “You are disgraceful,” he told its members in a highly publicized statement.

    What he didn’t do was talk about racism.

    Racism is bigger than a video. Racism is the legacy of being “the only national fraternity founded in the antebellum South,” with a Civil War-era membership class of 400, of whom 369 fought for the Confederacy. Racism is a school housing an organization with a documented history of racial abuse; SAE chapters in St. Louis, Memphis, Clemson, South Carolina and elsewhere have all been embroiled in racism controversies. Racism is the truth behind the frat brother’s song, that there probably never was a “n*gg*r” at SAE, or at least none in significant numbers.

    We’ve gotten pretty good at spotting racists in America, and we’re okay at punishing them too. But the structures and systems that produce the racists still elude us. Instead, they embed themselves in our psyche and masquerade as the natural order. It’s why incidents like the SAE debacle seem to come out of nowhere and shock us out of our post-racial revery. It’s why the police in Ferguson, Missouri, can spend years brutalizing and killing black citizens, but only lose their jobs when we discover the offensive jokes they make over email.

    Americans seem largely incapable of recognizing racism in practice, de facto racism, systemic racism. We only see racism when the racists are here to scream about it. This is bad. Until we make a concerted effort to expand our understanding and vocabulary around racial inequality, the racial wages of gerrymandering, wealth preservation, mass incarceration and police violence will continue unabated. So enough patting ourselves on the back for the “progress” we’ve made — even our perceived racial progressivism is largely overstated. Today, there’s real work to be done.

    Millennials Are More Racist Than They Think – but they’re probably ironically racist, so that’s okay?

    In 2010, a Pew Research report trumpeted that “the younger generation is more racially tolerant than their elders.” In the Chicago Tribune, Ted Gregory seized on this to declare millennials “the most tolerant generation in history.” These types of arguments typically cling to the fact that young people are more likely than their elders to favor interracial marriage. But while millennials are indeed less likely than baby boomers to say that more people of different races marrying each other is a change for the worse (6 percent compared to 14 percent), their opinions on that score are basically no different than those of the generation immediately before them, the Gen Xers, who come in at 5 percent. On interracial dating, the trend is similar, with 92 percent of Gen Xers saying it’s “all right for blacks and whites to date each other,” compared to 93 percent of millennials.

    Furthermore, these questions don’t really say anything about racial justice: After all, interracial dating and marriage are unlikely to solve deep disparities in criminal justice, wealth, upward mobility, poverty and education—at least not in this century. (Black-white marriages currently make up just 2.2 percent of all marriages.) And when it comes to opinions on more structural issues, such as the role of government in solving social and economic inequality and the need for continued progress, millennials start to split along racial lines. When people are asked, for example, “How much needs to be done in order to achieve Martin Luther King’s dream of racial equality?” the gap between white millennials and millennials of color (all those who don’t identify as white) are wide. And once again, millennials are shown to be no more progressive than older generations: Among millennials, 42 percent of whites answer that “a lot” must be done to achieve racial equality, compared to 41 percent of white Gen Xers and 44 percent of white boomers.
    […]

    In a 2009 study using American National Election Studies—a survey of Americans before and after each presidential election—Vincent Hutchings finds, “younger cohorts of Whites are no more racially liberal in 2008 than they were in 1988.” My own analysis of the most recent data reveals a similar pattern: Gaps between young whites and old whites on support for programs that aim to further racial equality are very small compared to the gaps between young whites and young blacks.

    And even though the gaps within the millennial generation are wide, as with the Pew data, there is also evidence that young blacks are more racially conservative than their parents, as they are less likely to support government aid to blacks.

    Spencer Piston, professor at the Campbell Institute at Syracuse University, used ANES data and found a similar pattern on issues relating to economic inequality. He examined a tax on millionaires, affirmative action, a limit to campaign contributions and a battery of questions that measure egalitarianism. He says, “the racial divide (in particular the black/white divide) dwarfs other divides in policy opinion. Age differences in public opinion are small in comparison to racial differences.” This finding is, he adds, “consistent with a long-standing finding in political science.” Piston finds that young whites have the same level of racial stereotypes as their parents.

  324. rq says

    A week after the DoJ report: Ferguson still refusing to name other city officials found to have sent racist emails. We’ve asked three times.

    ‘Morning Joe’ panelists blame Oklahoma fraternity racism on black culture and rap music. Did they? Yes they did.

    Responding to a CNN interview with rapper Waka Flocka Flame — who had performed at the Oklahoma SAE chapter the previous summer — in which he said he was “disgusted” by the video in which Parker Rice led his brothers in a chant that included both racist language and a reference to lynching, Brzezinski said that some of the blame for the behavior belongs on artists like him.

    “I look at his lyrics, and you have to ask yourself why he would go on that campus. If you look at every single song [by Waka Flocka Flame], it’s a bunch of garbage,” she said. “It’s full of n-words, it’s full of f-words. It’s wrong. And he shouldn’t be disgusted with them — he should be disgusted with himself.”

    The Weekly Standard‘s Bill Kristol jumped in, opining that “popular culture becomes a cesspool, a lot corporations profit off of it, and then people are surprised that some drunk 19-year-old kids repeat what they’ve been hearing.”

    Scarborough added that “as anybody who watches Empire” — the hit Fox series about a family fighting for control of a hip hop media enterprise — “knows, 70 percent of the audience is white. The kids that are buying hip hop or gangster rap, it’s a white audience, and they hear this over and over again. So do they hear this at home? Well, chances are good, no, they heard a lot of this from guys like this who are now acting shocked.”

    Willie Geist, who Kristol christened the show’s “expert on the gangster rap,” interjected that “there is a distinction between a bunch of white kids chanting about hanging someone from a tree and using that word in a hateful way. This is a term you hear in hip hop, that African American guys, in certain contexts, call each other. There’s a distinction.”

    Umm, I’m pretty sure the rap songs don’t reference (a) the exclusivity (‘never sign with me!’) and (b) the lynching. Talk about missing the point.

  325. rq says

    Waka Flocka Flame Tells CNN He’s Disgusted After Seeing the SAE Frat Racist Chant Video

    Waka Flocka Flame appeared on CNN to discuss why he cancelled his University of Oklahoma appearance with senior political correspondent Brianna Keilar.

    Flock was scheduled to perform with SAE at the university, but cancelled his show after seeing Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s racist chant video. While speaking with Keila, Waka expressed his disappointment with the fraternity, saying he is “disgusted” by their actions. The Atlanta rapper performed at the same concert at the University of Oklahoma last year, where he bonded with the frat members and while speaking on CNN, said he felt like he was a part of their brotherhood.

    “I knew those kids,” said Flock. ”I performed for those kids. They made me feel like a brother. Just to see what a person does behind closed doors is more disgusting than [hurtful].”

    He also feels as though the students cannot be blamed, because the racist remarks were probably taught in the household. “I really can’t blame the kids. I feel like that’s passed down,” he explained. Waka was at a complete lost for words as he expressed his shock at the students’ behavior. Like many others, he feels like “everybody should be [held] accountable in that video.”

    House panel approves bill allowing armed teachers . That’s in Miami.

    The controversial bill, which won the support of the House K-12 Education Subcommittee on Wednesday, is likely to move quickly in the lower chamber.

    But it may struggle to win votes in the more moderate Senate — due largely to opposition from the teachers union and PTA.

    The proposal (HB 19) would let schools superintendents designate employees or volunteers to carry concealed weapons on school property.

    Any designated individuals would have to have served in the military or law enforcement, and undergo special training from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

    They would also need to hold concealed weapons permits.

    State Rep. Greg Steube, R-Sarasota, says the measure would keep students and teachers safe in a school shooting.

    “Most of our elementary schools do not have a school resource officer or anyone there that can respond to any type of armed threat,” Steube said. “So they are at the whim of a shooter until a law enforcement officer gets there.”

    First local sourcing on this RT @ElizabethKSDK Breaking: sources confirm #Ferguson police chief Tom Jackson plans to resign @ksdknews More on this in a moment!

    La. Transit CEO ‘Would Love’ Fewer Black Bus Drivers to Put White Passengers at Ease

    Over the last week, Baton Rouge, La.’s Capital Area Transit System CEO Bob Mirabito has been under fire for opining that white passengers don’t use the bus system because there aren’t enough white drivers.

    Needless to say, Mirabito is now making the necessary apologies in light of the fallout.

    “I apologize,” he said in a statement. “It was never my intention to offend anyone, and I am sorry that my comments on a recent podcast have distracted our community from our continued push to move our transit system forward. My comment, heard in its entirety, was not racially motivated, and I apologize that is the impression it has given people.”

    CATS board President Donna Collins-Lewis also issued an apology on behalf of the agency, saying, “The chief executive officer’s job is to continue to make improvements that have been promised to the community. The CEO reports to the board of directors, which is comprised of people from all areas of our community. The board has always, and will continue to, monitor the CEO’s performance in his position.”

    According to The Advocate, Mirabito’s comments were made during an interview last week when a podcaster asked him how he was handling the “racial divide” at CATS after becoming CEO. “CATS is actually 95 percent African American. And unfortunately our demographics don’t match Baton Rouge. I would love to have a workforce that matches the demographics of Baton Rouge because I think there are some people out there who may not ride CATS buses because they don’t like the color of an operator’s skin. … That’s a shame,” he said in the interview, according to The Advocate.

    Not racially motivated? Hm.

    Here’s the Fox link: Embattled Ferguson police chief to resign, sources say. Doesn’t ’embattled’ just make him sound like the victim? Poor guy, so embattled.

    The chief of the Ferguson, Mo., police department, which was cleared in a racially-charged shooting but accused of years of racial profiling in a subsequent Justice Department probe, will resign, law enforcement sources told Fox News.

    Chief Tom Jackson’s resignation would come one day after the Ferguson City Council unanimously approved a resolution to part ways with City Manager John Shaw following the probe that alleged racial bias at the department and courts.

    The St. Louis suburb has been beleaguered by unrest since a white police officer fatally shot an unarmed, black 18-year-old last summer.

    Michael Brown’s death prompted protests in the St. Louis area and across the nation, including after a St. Louis County grand jury declined to bring charges against former Officer Darren Wilson.

    A Washington Post editorial criticized Jackson for making a “volatile situation worse.” But Jackson repeatedly said he would not step down.

    AND CNN: Source: Ferguson police chief to resign

    Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson will resign on Wednesday, a source in the Ferguson, Missouri, City Hall told CNN.

    In the past, the police chief has said he’d considered resigning, but stayed put up to now.

    Ferguson City Manager John Shaw stepped down Tuesday, following a scathing Department of Justice report that exposed problems in the city’s policing tactics. The report mentioned both men by name.

    Jackson could not be immediately reached for comment.

    The Justice Department’s report faulted Ferguson’s officers for seeing residents as “sources of revenue,” a practice that disproportionately targeted African-Americans.

    The investigators also found evidence of racist jokes being sent around by Ferguson police and court officials.

    Two police officers resigned last week and the city’s top court clerk was fired in connection with racist emails, city spokesman Jeff Small said on Friday.

    Last week Jackson declined to comment on details in the report.

    “I need to have time to really analyze this report so I can comment on it,” Jackson told CNN Thursday.

    When asked what he planned to do about the report’s findings, the chief said he would “take action as necessary.”

    Asked whether that meant he would remain at the department, Jackson repeated himself: “I’m gonna take action where necessary.”

  326. rq says

    Hearing #Ferguson police chief is out. Now look at rest of city. And rest of Missouri. And rest of US. Examine practices, not just people.

    Mind you, the only woman named in the Ferguson Report was fired instantly. Sexism exists even in the midst of corruption. Interesting point, that.

    And Ferguson’s Chief Jackson is apparently saying that he will only resign if the PD isn’t dissolved — the arrogance of white supremacy. More on this later, I hope.

    Because black lives and black life matter: National Day of Action: OBS Joins the Fight for $15 on 4/15

    Just over two years ago, hundreds of people who work in fast food restaurants in New York City went on strike. They called for a $15/hour minimum wage and the right to form a union. Since then, the movement has spread to 160 cities and 15 countries, and continues to grow into new industries such as home health care, airports, university adjunct faculty and convenience stores. With such unprecedented growth, the Washington Post writes, “The Fight For $15 is For Everyone Now.”

    St. Louis was the third city to join the movement for $15 and a Union, and OBS has been part of that fight from the beginning. We are making moves in the midwest to bring economic justice to the forefront of our public agenda. From Ferguson to Festus, Show Me 15 is determine to make 2015 the year we win $15. […]

    Nearly four-in-ten Americans who work in jobs that pay the minimum wage are people of color. Boosting the minimum wage will help all Americans, including people of color, break down barriers to success and remove obstacles to economic stability. For us, raising the minimum wage is raising the quality of life for Black people and all people.

    NY Times on Jackson’s resignation, but I’ve reached my monthly limit for articles, so I can’t access it. :P

    Sources: Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson to resign

    Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson is expected to resign Wednesday, CBS News and News 4’s Craig Cheatham have confirmed through sources within the City of Ferguson. The move comes after pressure from the community due to a recent Justice Department report and unrest in Ferguson.

    Jackson came under fire for his handling of the investigation into the shooting death of Michael Brown and the recent DOJ report stated that Jackson forced the Ferguson Police Department to “focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs.”

    Jackson’s resignation comes a day after the resignation of Ferguson City Manager John Shaw. The Ferguson City Council voted 7-0 in favor of Shaw’s resignation, although Shaw will continue to perform duties throughout various departments throughout the city.

    Sources tell News 4 a news conference is expected to take place Wednesday afternoon, but no official announcement has been made.

    Jackson and Shaw are not the first Ferguson employees to resign amid the DOJ report. Mayor James Knowles reported last week that three employees who were involved in the racist emails detailed in the Department of Justice’s report are no longer working for Ferguson. News 4 later learned two of the employees, Captain Rick Henke and Sgt. William Mudd, who are both police officers, resigned. The third city employee, court clerk Mary Ann Twitty, was fired.

  327. rq says

    Ferguson police chief: No racial problem in police department – that’s a flashback to February 20, with autoplay video, with the chief’s assurances that there is no racial problem in the police department.

    “There is not a racial problem in the police department,” said Jackson in an interview with CBS News correspondent Dean Reynolds.

    It’s that simple, folks.

    Hearing Ferguson mayor not resigning. Guy is flown around to lecture at Harvard and do TV appearances so don’t be surprised.
    The two central industries of #Ferguson are gravy trains and bandwagons.

    Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson To Resign, Reports Say

    Jackson is the sixth and most high-profile Ferguson city employee to resign after the publication of the Justice Department report, which critically examined the practices of the police department and municipal court system. Two police officers and a court clerk stepped down because the report revealed they had sent racist emails, while the municipal judge and City Manager John Shaw resigned over their roles in implementing police practices that prioritized generating revenue over public safety concerns. […]

    In his role as police chief, Jackson supervised court employees and was involved in enacting policing tactics that DOJ found were explicitly meant to bring in money for the city. And even though federal investigators found that Jackson’s use-of-force policy was routinely ignored, he told them that he did not ever remember imposing discipline on an officer for improper use of force.

    Emails uncovered in the Justice Department report show that Jackson was praised by city officials for generating revenue through policing. In one email to Shaw, Jackson noted that Ferguson was one of only eight municipalities that collected over $1 million per year through their courts. He bragged in another email that the municipal courts’ gross revenue for the 2012 calendar year “passed the $2,000,000 mark for the first time in history, reaching $2,066,050.” Jackson also contributed to a report on “efforts to increase efficiencies and maximize collection” by the municipal courts. According to DOJ, that report “noted with approval” that Ferguson’s fines were some of the highest in the area.

    Protests in Madison still ongoing, FYI. I had a livestream but I lost it in the last browser crash. If it comes up again I will post. #BlackLivesMatter Is this Justice? #Madison #TonyRobinson

    Ferguson police chief Thomas Jackson resigns. A lot of resignation today.

  328. rq says

    Worthington Park, Madison. #justice4tony

    This is what the DoJ’s report said about Tom Jackson’s FPD supervisors, one of whom will be appointed interim chief. Basically, FPD supervisors more concerned with numbers than with lawfulness of citations etc., behind on their paperwork (approving reports, etc.), deficiencies in the system that allow reports and incidents to effectively disappear and not be reviewed.

    Making signs, practicing chants, passing out know your rights cards. #justice4tony #madison #justicefordontre
    Just got to Madison, lots kids here. It’s beautiful.. #justice4tony #BlackLivesMatter #justice4dontre
    High school students amassing to demand #justice4tony #TonyRobinson #BlackLivesMatter

  329. says

    University of Alabama students defy ‘the machine’, elect black student government president

    The student government of the University of Alabama has been dominated for a century by a white secret society called ‘the Machine.’ That changed on Tuesday when the student body elected a black president, Elliot Spillers.

    Spillers is the first non-Machine candidate to win since 1986. John Merrill, Alabama’s current Secretary of State, won that year after realizing the importance of the position. By studying the body’s past presidents, he realized they moved on to occupy positions of power within the state government.

    The Machine ran its own candidate, as usual — the current vice-president of the student body, Stephen Keller. Perhaps the most shocking part of Spillers’ victory is that he won with 57% of the vote. Plus, voter turnout was the highest in six years.

    For an outsider to realize how amazing this is, the history of the Machine has to be grasped. The Machine is notorious in its influence. The organization’s existence isn’t secret, but its operations are.

    The group is composed of at least two dozen white fraternities and sororities that pay dues to keep it running and meet in secret to set their agenda. They’ve gotten widespread, national media coverage, including stories in Esquire and the New York Times.

  330. rq says

    I’m calling it an early night.
    Also, tomorrow and the day after postings might be especially sparse and possibly non-existent due to non-computer-life stuff, but I’m sure anything I miss will float up again later. I predict a lot of resignation for tomorrow, and the (now) usual protesting. And probably some other random incidents of racism.
    Good night!

  335. says

    Ah, the irrational, racist hate of President Obama continues. In Connecticut, two dead skunks were nailed to a telephone pole with anti-Obama sign.
    One of the skunks had a string wrapped around it’s neck and the message “Obama stinks”. No implied lynching there. Nope.

    Meanwhile, some conservatives think the true problem facing the US is that the nation’s flag wasn’t waved during the anniversary of the Selma march. Great idea, that. Remind all the people commemorating the Selma march that those marching on the bridge were opposed by agents of the United States government.

    Conservatives saying stupid shit is nothing new. Happens frequently. Look upthread at the remarks made by Morning Joe co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough. Do those two ignorant fools really think hip-hop culture is responsible for the racism of those fraternity brothers? Moreover, why do we hear no cries of personal responsibility? When African-Americans screw up, they’re told they need to take more responsibility for themselves. White USAmericans aren’t held to the same standard? They get a pass? I think that’s an automatic bingo on my White Privilege card.

    Speaking of the Morning Joe co-hosts, rather than apologize for their comments, they’ve chosen to defend them.

    That defense (as well as the remarks they initially made) has been humorously mocked.

  336. says

    Beyond Black and White: How Heems’ ‘Eat, Pray, Thug’ Expands Hip Hop’s Conversation About Race:

    Queens rapper Himanshu “Heems” Suri’s just-released Eat, Pray, Thug is a grand opening and, it would seem, a grand closing. It’s the snarky rhymer’s debut solo album after a string of releases in and out of the incendiary, serially misunderstood group Das Racist, which seemed to come together on a lark and crumble just as subtly over the span of four or five years. As Das Racist’s multimedia experiment shrinks in our rearview, the motives remain unclear but the gains are valuable, particularly from the perspective of diversity. Heems picks up here where the group left off.

    Rap’s discussion of race has hinged largely on the axis of black and white America for decades, but Das Racist offered two or three more vantage points from which to discuss compound otherness in a city that prides itself on diversity. Kool A.D., an Afro-Cuban Italian Bay Area native, joined Dapwell and Heems, sons of Indian immigrants who settled in New York City’s outer boroughs, in ribbing the city’s downtown cool economy from the inside. But that’s over now, and so, Heems has hinted, is his career as a rapper.

    […]

    The album’s most gutting lyrics deal with the struggles of being Indian in a nation whose South Asian and Middle Eastern communities are casually treated as indistinct masses of post-9/11 brown danger as while Bush’s Iraq War blazes on. “They’re staring at our turbans, they’re calling them rags, they’re calling them towels,” he snarls on “Flag Shopping,” a remembrance of Hindu and Sikh families fearfully displaying their patriotism when white neighbors began to turn on Muslim communities and anyone deemed to resemble them. Closer “Patriot Act” digs deeper as Heems details the changes in language, dress and behavior many Indian Americans enacted to evade undue suspicion of terrorism. “Suicide by Cop” decries police brutality in its chorus; and “Al Q8a” is a knotty, provocative metaphor comparing his own rap prowess to weaponry in the hands of the hands of Middle Eastern dissidents.

  337. rq says

    McCullogh is just stellar. Ferguson prosecutor hasn’t read justice report.

    During the day: #Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson resigned. During the night: No riots on site. Riot police present.

    Ferguson police just arrested @The_Blant. And they also apparently arrested a 12-year-old.
    And there were several PDs present, of which these are just a selection: Florissant, St. John, hillsdale & Northwoods RT @deray: Officers from everywhere but Ferguson. Ferguson PD.
    Protesters demand more changes in Ferguson

    There was quick reaction Wednesday night from both supporters of Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson and those who wanted Jackson to resign. Today Chief Jackson resigned, following the fallout from the Department of Justice Report that stated Ferguson’s Police Department showed a pattern of discrimination, profiling and ticketing of African-Americans.

    Since the release of the DOJ Report, Ferguson’s City Manager, City Clerk, Police Chief and to two command officers from the police department have either been fired or resigned.

    Many Ferguson residents are calling for other resignations at city hall including the mayor and city council members. Three of Ferguson’s city council seats will be decided in an April 7th election.

    Currently, over 200 protesters have gathered outside the Ferguson Police Department in part to celebrate the police chiefs’ resignation and demand more changes in the City of Ferguson.

    So far, only one person has been arrested. Police in riot gear are outside the police department. Protesters have taken over south Florissant Road blocking traffic. Police have responded by shutdown Florissant Road and rerouting traffic.

    Many Ferguson residents are calling for other resignations at city hall including the mayor and city council members. Three of Ferguson’s city council seats will be decided in an April 7th election.

    Also, I don’t htink this is the kind of change protestors had in mnd: Stenger ready to step in to police Ferguson

    The St. Louis County executive says he’s spoken with Ferguson’s mayor about the possibility of St. Louis County police taking over the duties of the Ferguson Police Department.

    St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger says he’s had meetings with Ferguson Mayor James Knowles on the matter. Stenger says he’s told Knowles that county police stand ready, if called upon, to provide policing for the Ferguson community.

  338. rq says

    Justice Dept officials will travel to Ferguson in coming weeks to negotiate “court enforceable agreement” for reforms. Good luck.

    Protesters sitting on Florissant Rd 63136;
    Holy shit. There were just like 4 shots. It seems like an officer was shot. Shit. Officers have guns drawn. This is crazy.
    .@RE_invent_ED, Lawyer @javadesq, & I were forced to go into #Ferguson PD for our safety. Officers running around with assault rifles.
    And @RE_invent_ED who was just rushed inside the pd, said the officer was shot in the leg and is bleeding badly. #ferguson

    An article: Wounded officers released from hospital

    Two area police officers seriously wounded after they were shot while standing along S. Florissant Road directly in front of the Ferguson Police Department Thursday morning have been released from the hospital.

    The officers are from St. Louis County and Webster Groves. They were rushed to Barnes-Jewish Hospital for treatment and released before 10 a.m.
    St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar says at least three shots were fired. The Webster Groves police officer, a 32-year-old who has been on the force seven years, was shot just under his right eye, in the high-cheek area. The bullet is lodged underneath his right ear. Belmar says he will need more medical evaluations to determine the best course of treatment.

    Anyway, this isn’t going to go well forp rotestors.
    Going to go see what I can catch up on before sleep takes me.

  339. rq says

    Reports suggest sevral muzzle flashes near top Tiffin Ave hill, firing from way behind protesters @phampel @innov8ion that’s from witness accounts. Just wait until you see how Chief Belmar spins this.

    2 officers shot during Ferguson protests following police chief’s resignation

    St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said two officers were hospitalized after the shooting, which occurred shortly after midnight during demonstrations that followed the resignation of the Ferguson police chief Wednesday.

    “These police officers were standing there, and they were shot–just because they were police officers,” Belmar told reporters.

    An officer from the St. Louis County Police Department, 41 years old and a 14-year veteran, was shot in the shoulder, and an officer from the Webster Groves Police Department, 32, was shot in the face, he said.

    Both sustained serious injuries but were conscious, the chief said. […]

    During Wednesday night’s events that stretched into early Thursday, Belmar said a group of officers had been standing directly in front of the police station when shots were fired from an undetermined location to the northwest.

    “I don’t know who did the shooting, to be honest with you right now. But somehow they were embedded in that group of folks,” Belmar said.

    The fact that the shots were fired parallel to the ground and hit a group of officers standing together suggests, he said, “that there were shots that were directed directly at my police officers.”

    OMG! Shots parallel to the ground! (As opposed to… perpendicular?) Embedded with protestors – and yet, out of all the officers staring at the protestors, not one saw any kind of movement for a gun, and protestors clearly state that the shots were fired through the crowd.

    But here, look for yourselves. Video captures moment of shooting outside Ferguson, Mo., police station – Kerry Picket on YouTube, youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN-WjWLC9jk&t , though I’m getting a copyright block on ti right now.

    2 Police Officers Shot During Ferguson Protest

    In a press conference outside the hospital where the officers were being treated on Thursday morning, St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said that a 32-year-old officer from suburban Webster Groves was shot in the face and a 41-year-old officer from St. Louis County was shot in the shoulder, according to the Associated Press. Belmar said the injuries were “very serious” but that both officers were conscious, and that he assumed they were targeted because they were police officers. Police had no one in custody in connection with the shooting.

    Embattled Ferguson police chief resigns; protests resume

    Officials said that when Jackson leaves March 19, Lt. Col. Al Eickhoff will become interim chief until a national search for a replacement is finished. Eickhoff declined to comment. Jackson has been chief for five years.

    Patricia Bynes, an activist and Democratic township committeewoman, said she is pleased by Jackson’s departure but “not ready to pop the champagne yet.” She noted, “We don’t need new faces to the same culture, so I’m not ready to jump up and down yet to celebrate his resignation.”

    Jackson will receive severance pay of about $96,000, his annual salary, and health insurance for one year, Mayor James Knowles III said at a news conference. Jackson was out of town and did not attend.

    The chief is the sixth Ferguson employee to go since a scathing federal Department of Justice report last week accused the city of racist police and court practices it said were focused on generating revenue, not justice.

    Knowles said Wednesday that municipal court judge Ronald J. Brockmeyer, police Capt. Rick Henke and Sgt. William Mudd, who all resigned, and municipal court clerk Mary Ann Twitty, who was fired, did not receive severance packages. City Manager John Shaw received a year’s pay, $120,000, plus insurance.

    Sam Walker, professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and an expert on federal policing interventions, called the slew of Ferguson departures “unprecedented.”

  340. rq says

    The fact that we’re more afraid of police retaliation than random gunshots should not be taken lightly. On some psychological shit.

    Two police officers shot during protest in Ferguson

    Asked to confirm protesters’ accounts that the shots were fired from people outside the group of demonstrators, Belmar said: “I don’t know who did the shooting to be honest with you right now, but somehow they were embedded in that group of folks.”

    A few dozen demonstrators fled after the sound with some screaming, “They hit a cop,” around midnight, the photographer said.
    Advertisement

    Witness told the Los Angeles Times that they had heard around three shots fired. Video shared on social media purporting to be from the scene appeared to confirm this.

    Several dozen protesters had gathered in front of the Ferguson police department earlier on Wednesday night, just hours after the city’s police chief, Thomas Jackson, announced his resignation.

    State, county police take over Ferguson protest security after shooting – as others have said, because that worked out so well last time.

    St. Louis County Police and the Missouri State Highway Patrol will “assume command of the security detail regarding protests” at 6 p.m. (7 p.m. ET), St. Louis County Police said in a statement.

    Ferguson Police will remain responsible for “routine policing services” in the city, the statement said.

    The takeover comes less than a day after two police officers standing guard outside Ferguson police headquarters were shot in what St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar called an “ambush,” spurring a manhunt for those responsible for targeting the line of officers.

    “We could have buried two police officers,” Belmar told reporters. “… I feel very confident that whoever did this … came there for whatever nefarious reason that it was.”

    The shots rang out shortly after midnight, at the end of a protest against the Ferguson Police Department. That department has been under fire since one of its officers, Darren Wilson, shot and killed black teen Michael Brown in August, and more recently since a scathing U.S. Department of Justice report came out documenting a pattern of racial discrimination.

    While the demonstrators’ focus was Ferguson, neither of the wounded officers works in that St. Louis suburb’s police department.

    STL County Police union is calling for a mandatory sundown curfew in ferguson.

    Pres. Obama on #Ferguson shooting: “Violence against police is unacceptable. Our prayers are with the officers” – @marykbruce. Ah, here he has a swift response and statement.

    Michael Brown’s family releases statement on #ferguson police officer shootings. Basically, they don’t support any kind of violence.

  341. rq says

    Police say 3 people taken from #Ferguson home this morning have not been arrested. They may be witnesses; police not releasing more.
    Here’s the cops on the house: Police surrounded a home in #Ferguson. Officers on roof. @stlcountypd confirms part of shooting investigation.
    Police search for those who shot 2 officers in Ferguson ‘ambush’ – that’s the narrative, folks, this was an ambush!

    On Thursday morning, officers swarmed a home in Ferguson in their search for those responsible for the shooting of the two police officers.

    Tactical officers surrounded a brick bungalow on Dade Avenue near Tiffin Avenue. The home is about four blocks west of the police department. Officers went in with dogs about 9:30 a.m. A neighbor said he saw police bring two men out of the home. The woman who neighbors say rents the home was also brought out in handcuffs.

    Police said they were questioning the three but they were not under arrest. They declined to provide further details.

    Martez Little, 25, of north St. Louis County, said he was in a car Wednesday night near the Ferguson police station with the woman taken into custody Thursday. Little said they witnessed the shooting.

    “Bullets were flying past us,” Little said. “We heard them whistling by and saw two officers drop to their knees.”

    Immediately after the shooting, Little said he put his hands up and showed police his waistband to make sure they knew he was not armed.

    “The shots were coming off a hill but we didn’t see nobody shooting,” he said.

    He said he went to the protest because he still has questions about the shooting of Michael Brown, but called the shooting of the officers wrong.

    But here’s a point: My concern is there is no evidence, so far, to prove that whoever was shooting was targeting the cops and not the protesters.

    Belmar: “The responsibility of last night’s shooting lies with whoever did the shooting.” #Ferguson No comment.

  342. says

    Univision swiftly fires tv host for saying Michelle Obama looks like a Planet of the Apes cast member

    According to Univision executives, there is no space for racially inflammatory comments on their network. They proved their commitment goes beyond words when they fired host Rodner Figueroa on March 11, within hours of his making an offensive comment on that day’s edition of the Univision program El Gordo Y La Flaca.

    During a segment discussing a makeup artist who imitates celebrities, Figueroa said first lady Michelle Obama “looks like she’s part of the cast of the movie Planet of the Apes.” Co-host Raul de Molina quickly pushed back on his comments.

    Here’s what he said:

    FIGUEROA: We’re going to talk about Paolo Ballesteros, an actor and host of a Philippine talent show. He’s a beautiful makeup artist who has become a phenomenon in social media. Through makeup, he’s able to transform his face and look like the biggest celebrities of our time. I mean, I wondered how with his face he could end up looking like, I don’t know, Kim Kardashian? But through makeup, he’s able to go through this incredible transformation and look: he becomes Kim Kardashian. He’s in the smaller pictures.

    De MOLINA: We should be careful, anyone seeing him would be confused.

    FIGUEROA: I’m telling you, you see this guy sitting next to you at a bar looking like that, and you take him home.

    De MOLINA: I now know what happened.

    FIGUEROA: They say he applies makeup everywhere. Now, look at the transformation into Michelle Obama. This is truly impressive. Look at this: You know that Michelle Obama looks like she’s part of the cast of the movie Planet of the Apes. This is a difficult transformation. It’s true.

    De MOLINA: What do you think you’re saying? I think she’s a very attractive woman.

    FIGUEROA: Raul, this is not about being attractive, do you remember the movie —

    De MOLINA: — stop there now. I think she’s a very attractive woman.

  343. rq says

    Eric Holder: Ferguson police shooter a ‘damn punk’

    Attorney General Eric Holder said that whoever shot the two police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, early Thursday morning was a “damn punk.”

    Holder echoed remarks from St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar that the shooting was “an ambush,” adding once again that the department stands ready to offer its full resources to bring the perpetrators to justice.

    “This was not someone who was trying to bring healing to Ferguson,” Holder said, speaking before the announcement of a new Justice Department policing initiative. “This was a damn punk … who was trying to sow discord in an area that is trying to get its act together and trying to bring together a community that has been fractured for too long.”

    Seeing the attack “really kind of turned my stomach,” the attorney general told those gathered for the event, at the same time praising positive steps local law enforcement has taken in recent weeks to bring about change.

    Earlier in the day, Holder issued a written statement condemning the attack.

    “This heinous assault on two brave law enforcement officers was inexcusable and repugnant,” he said.

    13 hours after 2 @stlcountypd officers were shot in front of #Ferguson PD, city leaders release a statement @kmov Conducting an investigation, looking into changes to policing, etc.

    Jeff Roorda has lied about guns, he’s lied about cases & he was fired for corruption. Why do journalists use him as a credible source? Why is this relevant? Because the media is putting Roorda in front of the camera again.

    STL county and MO highway patrol will take over security of the protests. I hope that security includes protesters.
    Ferguson police are setting up cement barricades. Feels like August all over again.

    Feels like August all over again. Cop swap, rumored sundown curfew, media appetite for violence while systemic problems ignored. #Ferguson

  344. rq says

    Brockmeyer resigns as prosecuting attorney in Florissant and Vinita Park

    Brockmeyer has now resigned from four municipal court posts after a scathing Justice Department report released March 4 for acting as a revenue generator for the Ferguson court, helping to bring in millions through “creative” use of fines and fees, while dismissing tickets for himself and friends. The report also rapped him for instilling fear in traffic defendants, even jailing one for 10 days because the man refused to answer questions in court.

    Brockmeyer resigned as judge in Ferguson Municipal Court on Monday after the state Supreme Court announced it had assigned all Ferguson cases to the St. Louis County Circuit Court. He subsequently resigned from acting as Dellwood prosecutor and is on an open-ended leave of absence as Florissant prosecutor.

    City officials in Breckenridge Hills are meeting Monday to discuss his job as judge there.

    In Vinita Park, Mayor James McGee said in a news release that Brockmeyer’s service would be “dearly missed.”

    How Ferguson’s Legal System Echoes An Ugly Past

    The Justice Department’s investigation into Ferguson, Missouri, began shortly after then-Police Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in August. And now we know just how morally corrupt Ferguson’s city government actually is: For years, black residents have been forced into crushing debt or unemployment for little more than parking illegally or walking down the street. Authorities frequently compounded debts onto the original charges, issuing warrants for residents who couldn’t or didn’t pay. The St. Louis County housing authority denies public housing not just to those with felony convictions, but for “any criminal arrest, including for failing to pay fines or appear in court,” according to a report by the legal advocacy group Arch Defenders. A poor Ferguson resident could easily end up homeless, jobless, or locked up for being unable to pay a fine for “manner of walking in roadway.”

    But Ferguson’s municipal legal system, designed to use trivial violations of law to bleed its most vulnerable residents of their meager resources, is hardly unprecedented, either in the region or in American history.

    The 13th Amendment did not abolish slavery, not entirely. Instead, after Reconstruction, as the North surrendered the fight for black rights and the white men of the South violently reimposed systems of government based on white supremacy, blacks were coerced back into involuntary servitude.

    Just as in Ferguson, the primary mechanism for this new slavery, as recounted by journalist Douglas Blackmon in his groundbreaking book Slavery by Another Name, was two-bit charges designed to impose legal debts on blacks they would be required to work off. Their “crimes” ranged from “changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight cars without a ticket,” or even “adultery” or “selling cotton after sun set.” Blacks would be given no choice but to pay for their “crimes” with re-enslavement to private actors under horrifying conditions.

    “Wildly disproportionate enforcement of statutes criminalizing often trivial conduct—or completely subjective or invented—conduct so that the laws overwhelming were applied only to African-Americans,” Blackmon wrote in an email to BuzzFeed. “The motivation for doing this similar as well, though not quite so precise an echo: to generate revenue for local and state governments through the leasing of convicts out to commercial enterprises as laborers and to generate payments to specific public officials—such as sheriffs—who were compensated primarily through ‘fees’ paid by those who were arrested and revenue they received from the state to cover the cost of feeding every prisoner.”

    The subjugation of black Americans following Reconstruction to a state-backed regime of terror, forced labor, and racial apartheid is remembered in popular culture either as a necessity corrective to black lawlessness or, at best, in faded black-and-white photos of separate water fountains. But just as foundational to white supremacist rule in the South were laws that criminalized black existence not by just letter, but also by custom. White Southerners did not need to write race into their laws in order to convey the collective understanding that some laws were only meant to be enforced against blacks.

    That history is crucial to understanding Ferguson, where the Justice Department found that its overwhelmingly white police force and municipal court system were designed to treat its mostly black residents “less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.” City officials used the police force as “a collection agency for its municipal court,” urging police and court officials alike to squeeze ever more revenue from residents.

    Just as with the convict-leasing system in the South post-Reconstruction, the “crimes” with which Ferguson residents were charged were often not crimes at all, and were almost exclusively enforced against blacks. Records examined by the Department of Justice showed that blacks, despite only comprising about 67% of the population, accounted “for 95% of Manner of Walking charges; 94% of all Fail to Comply charges; 92% of all Resisting Arrest charges; 92% of all Peace Disturbance charges; and 89% of all Failure to Obey charges.” Between 2012 and 2014, blacks were accounted for for 85% of vehicle stops, 90% of citations, and 93% of arrests made by FPD officers.”

    Some have argued that Ferguson is less a product of racism than an overbearing local government. But Ferguson’s very existence is molded by a century of discriminatory zoning and housing policy. Ferguson was created; its people did not end up there as an accident of history. And as the Justice Department report shows, Ferguson officials used racial stereotypes to rationalize the bankrupting of its citizens as punishment for pseudo crimes, even as they shielded each other from the consequences of the same offenses.

    Lots more at the link.

    And here’s a nice linkdump from Dana Hunter: Responses to the DOJ’s Report on Ferguson’s Atrocious Law Enforcement. Swing through there for items I or my fellow updaters may have missed.

  345. rq says

    Gov. Nixon statement on the shooting of two police officers in Ferguson

    Jefferson City, MO

    Gov. Jay Nixon issued the following statement regarding the shooting of two police officers in Ferguson early this morning:

    “My thoughts and prayers go out to these brave officers and their families. Each day, our law enforcement officers risk their lives to protect the public and the fact that these officers appear to have been intentionally targeted is deeply troubling. The Missouri State Highway Patrol has been in contact with the St. Louis County Police Department and stands ready to assist in the investigation. It is imperative that anyone with information about the shooting immediately come forward so that those who perpetrated these senseless crimes can be apprehended and brought to justice.”

    As U.S. pushes police to diversify, FBI struggles to get minorities in the door – I wonder why, hm, white culture?

    The FBI, which is part of the Justice Department, has long struggled with recruiting special agents of color into its ranks. Of the bureau’s 13,455 agents, only 606, or 4.5 percent, are African American, according to the most recently available statistics. Only 6.8 percent are Hispanic.

    At the top levels of the FBI, only 5 percent of officials, most of whom came from the ranks of special agents, are African American. Only 2.8 percent are Hispanic.

    For law enforcement agencies, the importance of diversity goes beyond statistics to the issue of connecting with minority communities, especially at a time of tension. In its report earlier this month, the Justice Department said the Ferguson department’s lack of diversity had been a contributing factor to undermining community trust. […]

    The FBI says it is actively recruiting minority candidates from 45 professional organizations and 49 colleges and universities, including historically black schools. But some African American law enforcement officials outside the bureau say it has historically gone about recruiting minorities in the wrong way.

    “We recognize the challenges and the obstacles that law enforcement agencies face in trying to diversify,” said Malik Aziz, the national chairman of the National Black Police Association. “But the pool of qualified candidates of color is there.”

    “The FBI tends to look more at candidates who are not coming from traditional law enforcement — when we have an estimated 110,000 black police offices in the country,” Aziz said. “Instead of focusing recruitment on individuals who have completed college and are looking for specific jobs in the FBI, the FBI should look at the many police departments who have shown a great commitment to law enforcement,” he said.

    Riot officers are in the doorway. That’s new. Ferguson PD. Because protests continue.
    Protester describes raid on her home after police shooting. #AC360 is live on @CNN right now .

    The Problem Is Bigger Than Ferguson

    The situation took a tragic turn early Thursday morning when two police officers were shot and wounded during a demonstration. Police officials should not use the shootings as an excuse to clamp down on legal, peaceful demonstrations. That would only inflame tensions, making the climate worse.
    Continue reading the main story
    Related Coverage

    As part of the investigation, police SWAT units surrounded a house a few blocks from where the officers were shot.
    Manhunt Is Underway After Police Officers Are Shot in FergusonMARCH 12, 2015

    The housecleaning among the political leadership in Ferguson is a necessary step. But the illegal and discriminatory measures uncovered by the Justice Department are not limited to that troubled municipality. Indeed, the evidence strongly suggests that Ferguson is not even the worst civil rights offender in St. Louis County and that adjacent towns are also systematically targeting poor and minority citizens for street and traffic stops to rake in fines, criminalizing entire communities in the process.

    St. Louis County has some 90 municipalities, some of which get 40 percent or more of their revenue from traffic fines and fees from petty violations. Drivers can pass through several towns in just a few miles on a single road. Those detained in one town are often dragged through the courts or jails of other communities. At the moment, civil rights lawyers are suing nearly a dozen towns either for illegally jailing people who are too poor to pay fines or for assessing fines and fees that lawyers allege are illegal to begin with. […]

    Ferguson’s perverted system of justice is not unique in the county. The Justice Department’s top civil rights prosecutor, Vanita Gupta, made that point last week when she said that “Ferguson is one dot in the state, and there are many municipalities in the region engaged in the same practices a mile away.” She added that “it would be a mistake for any of those neighboring jurisdictions to fold up their hands. They should absolutely take note of this report.” The Justice Department may need to sue other towns with bad records and join some of the pending lawsuits to make this point.

    As for Ferguson, the police department has clearly broken the trust of the city it is supposed to serve. One way to solve that problem is to dissolve the department and hand the policing function over to the county itself. But cleaning up that one town won’t necessarily help its residents if they continue to be ensnared in the deplorable justice systems operating elsewhere in St. Louis County.

    Moving forward and making progress are not the same thing.

  346. rq says

    215 people in the US have now been killed by police since Jan 1. 91 in 31 days of Jan. 85 in 28 days of Feb. 39 in 12 days of March.

    Protest. Ferguson PD.
    “IT IS OUR DUTY TO FIGHT FOR OUR FREEDOM!!” #Ferguson #ABanks #AssataTaughtMe #Assata

    Hearing that protestor Dante of the Lost Voices has been arrested tonight during a traffic stop leaving tonight’s protest.

    I just got done interviewing the 3 ppl detained by police. All were released. No charges. Their house was damaged & ransacked.

    Racism is alive and well at Indiana University. #NotJustSAE Photo: white ‘protestors’ holding banner that says “Diversity = White Genocide”. Yah no.

  348. says

    Here’s another way that police brutality fucks over peoples’ lives.

    Change.org petition-I shouldn’t be fired for being attacked

    When the police started to beat me I didn’t know why. It felt like an eternity as their fists and batons hit my face and body. I remember thinking I was going to die just as my life was coming together. When they were done I had orbital skull fractures, an eye swollen shut, and a face in need of stitches and staples. The police would say I attacked them. Luckily, a video surfaced showing I was the victim and now the 2 police officers are charged with aggravated assault, criminal conspiracy, and filing false reports. That didn’t stop Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia from firing me. With the swing of a police baton, I lost my dignity and my dream job.

    I was told since I missed 3 days of work due to the attack, I would not be hired permanently at the hospital. I started this petition to ask Children’s Hospital to allow me to return to work. Nobody should lose their job because they were brutally attacked.

    After the 2 police officers beat me, all I could think about was getting to work. I had been working at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for over a month and loved it. But like most new jobs, you are on a probationary period. That’s why hours after being brutalized by the police I showed up for work. When I got hired at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia I felt I had finally made it. Not only did it pay twice as much as any job I ever had, I was finally doing a job I could take pride in. It was a job that would allow me to take care of my newborn daughter. I didn’t want anything to get in the way of this opportunity.

    When I showed up for work I was told I needed to go home. My supervisor said my appearance wasn’t appropriate for children to see and to come back in 3 days after I had time to heal. I understood, but I wanted them to know I cared enough to show up no matter what. 3 days later I returned to work and continued to work hard despite everything going on with the police. When it came to the end of my 3 months probation I was sure I’d be hired permanently. I was shocked when I was told that wouldn’t be the case. The reason given was missing the 3 days because of the attack.

    My job was what I had left of my dignity and pride. With everything going on, it was a way to show my self worth and take control of my life. It was also the best opportunity someone with a high school diploma could ask for. I could pay my bills, save money, and I was looking forward to buying a house. That all went away when Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia let me go due to no fault of my own.

    Now I am struggling to pay the bills and to care for my daughter. The plan to buy a house is no longer possible. All because I was the victim of police brutality. Please join me in asking Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to let me return to my job. Your voice will help restore my dreams. Please sign and share my petition today.

    Here’s the video of the brutal beating. It was discovered by Rivera’s girlfriend.
    http://abcnews.go.com/US/video/officers-charged-brutal-beating-caught-surveillance-video-28782411

  351. says

    I thought about that, Tony, and I’m going to guess about 1/3 Black, given the 28 hours statistic we’ve heard.

    Black people are 13% of the population, so an unbiased killing policy would mean 13% of 215= 28 should be Black; instead I estimate 70 or so, maybe a bit less using the 28 hours stat. Say 2.5 times over the tag limit, and you’re probably close to the mark. :/

  353. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    @caitiecat & others:

    It turns out that (according to some research I’ve read), that an even higher risk of being killed by cops is imposed by disability.

    Breaking that down, apparently wheelchair users are at increased risk of beating and death (possibly b/c fragile health? I really don’t know). Crutch users are at increased risk (the cops routinely justify beatings and deaths of crutch users by saying that they thought the crutch would be used as a weapon…let me rephrase, the cops justify it by saying that they were “scared” of the “weapon” the cripple had “in hand”).

    But what really kills you?
    1. Disabilities that cause uncontrollable movements of the body (yes, even small ones – a facial tic, an unpredictable and uncontrollable small movement of the face, is interpreted as a sign that the person will act unpredictably in their larger, controllable movements) and/or
    2. anything – disability or not – that causes difficulty in communication. Cops shouting at someone from behind that they are police officers and put your hands up, jerk wad! feel completely entitled to shoot a person for not complying … even when that person is deaf, or wearing headphones, or otherwise unable to communicate ***and is acting entirely normally, in an unthreatening manner, in the same way anyone does when entirely unaware that someone else is nearby***.

    yes, there’s a race effect as well, but apparently these effects were larger. So woe betide you if you are a person of color in the US who doesn’t speak English. You might hear something loud and scary behind you and duck to the side to get out of the way of whomever these dangerously loud people might be …then, while looking to see what’s going on, get shot for your evasive and furtive movements.

    Whites getting shot and killed by the cops are much more likely to have histories of nakedly advocating violence and to be clearly a violent threat to cops. The exceptions tend to be around disabilities.

    It’s fucking sick, is what it is.

  354. says

    Oh, this shit pisses me off:
    Edits to Wikipedia pages on Bell, Garner, Diallo traced to 1 Police Plaza

    Computers operating on the New York Police Department’s computer network at its 1 Police Plaza headquarters have been used to alter Wikipedia pages containing details of alleged police brutality, a review by Capital has revealed.

    “The matter is under internal review,” an NYPD spokeswoman, Det. Cheryl Crispin, wrote in an email to Capital after examples of the changes were presented to the NYPD.

    The edits and changes were linked to the NYPD through a series of Internet Protocol addresses, or IP addresses, which can be publicly tracked by various websites. (Here, for example, is one website that shows a number of IP addresses registered to the NYPD.) IP addresses can locate where a computer is when it connects to the Internet.

    Computer users identified by Capital as working on the NYPD headquarters’ network have edited and attempted to delete Wikipedia entries for several well-known victims of police altercations, including entries for Eric Garner, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo. Capital identified 85 NYPD addresses that have edited Wikipedia, although it is unclear how many users were involved, as computers on the NYPD network can operate on the department’s range of IP addresses.

    NYPD IP addresses have also been used to edit entries on stop-and-frisk, NYPD scandals, and prominent figures in the city’s political and police leadership.

    There are more than 15,000 IP addresses registered to the NYPD, which employs 50,000 people, including uniformed officers and civilians. Notable Wikipedia activity was linked to about a dozen of those NYPD IP addresses.

    On the evening of Dec. 3, hours after a Staten Island grand jury ruled not to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner, a user on the 1 Police Plaza network made multiple edits, visible here and here, to the “Death of Eric Garner” Wikipedia entry. The edits, all concerning the actions of Eric Garner and the police officers involved in the confrontation, are as follows:

    ● “Garner raised both his arms in the air” was changed to “Garner flailed his arms about as he spoke.”

    ● “[P]ush Garner’s face into the sidewalk” was changed to “push Garner’s head down into the sidewalk.”

    ● “Use of the chokehold has been prohibited” was changed to “Use of the chokehold is legal, but has been prohibited.”

    ● The sentence, “Garner, who was considerably larger than any of the officers, continued to struggle with them,” was added to the description of the incident.

    ● Instances of the word “chokehold” were replaced twice, once to “chokehold or headlock,” and once to “respiratory distress.”

  355. says

    More from the same link:

    A user on the NYPD network made a second edit to the Sean Bell entry on Dec. 23, 2009, this time changing “one Latino and two African-American men were shot a total of fifty times” to “one Latino and two African-American men were shot at a total of fifty times” (emphasis Capital’s).

    On Nov. 23, 2013, a user on the 1 Police Plaza network edited the Wikipedia entry for Amadou Diallo, an unarmed who was killed when police mistook his wallet for a gun in 1999.

    The person using this IP address made two edits to a sentence about NYPD Officer Kenneth Boss, one of the officers involved in the shooting: “Officer Kenneth Boss had been previously involved in an incident where an unarmed man was shot, but remained working as a police officer” was changed to “Officer Kenneth Boss had been previously involved in an incident where an armed man was shot.”

    “Unarmed” was changed to “armed,” and “but remained working as a police officer” was omitted entirely.

    On Oct. 15, 2013, a user at 1 Police Plaza edited the entry for the “Alexien Lien beating,” an event in which bikers and an undercover NYPD officer chased and assaulted a driver on the West Side Highway. The user deleted paragraphs of potentially anti-NYPD vandalism from the entry. Among the deleted text were claims like “After this incident police were pressuring on bikers because Alexian Lien uncle is their boss. Looks like Alexian has influential friends in the govt and got away with the incident.”

    On three separate occasions between October 2012 and March 2013, a user on the 1 Police Plaza network edited the “Stop-and-frisk” entry. The changes are as follows; bolded words indicate edits:

    “The stop-and-frisk program of New York City is a practice of the New York City Police Department to stop, question, and search people.” was changed to “The stop-and-frisk program of New York City is a practice of the New York City Police Department to stop, question and, if the circumstances of the stop warrant it, conduct a frisk of the person stopped.”

    ● “The stop-and-frisk program of New York City is a practice of the New York City Police Department to stop, question and, if the circumstances of the stop warrant it, conduct a frisk of the person stopped.” was changed to “The stop-and-frisk program of New York City is a practice of the New York City Police Department by which a police officer who reasonably suspects a person has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a felony or a Penal Law misdemeanor, stops and questions that person, and, if the circumstances of the stop warrant it, conducts a frisk of the person stopped.”

    ● “The rules for stop and frisk are found in New York State Criminal Procedure Law section 140.50, and are based on the decision of the United States Supreme Court in the case of Terry v. Ohio” was added to the entry.

    ● “if the circumstances of the stop warrant it, conducts a frisk of the person stopped” was changed to “if the officer reasonably suspects he or she is in danger of physical injury, frisks the person stopped for weapons.”

    ● An extraneous “and” was removed from a sentence.

    On two separate occasions, a user on the 1 Police Plaza network edited sections of Wikipedia’s “New York City Police Department” entry that described police misconduct. On June 30, 2006, the user deleted 1,502 characters from the “scandals and corruption” section, including a sentence that claimed “at the end of March, 2006, NYPD started to make changes to this very article in an attempt to censor scandals and corruption information.” The full deleted text can be read here.

    On June 19, 2008, a user on the 1 Police Plaza network deleted the entire “Allegations of police misconduct and the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB)” and “Other incidents” sections from the entry, for a combined total of 25,611 deleted characters. The full deleted text can be read here and here.

  356. rq says

    Tony
    You have scoooped meeE!! More links on that coming up, but gaaahds, it’s enraging.

  357. rq says

    *ahem* What’s enraging is the substance of the article, not the fact that you posted it. :P

  358. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    I interpreted you as saying the good thing, not the I-really-hate-Tony!-for-his-violent-scoop-of-me thing.

    FWIW

  359. rq says

    Crip Dyke
    It was probably more or less clear, but I just wanted to be crystal.

    +++

    Notice how the media isn’t dissecting the lives of the two #Ferguson cops who got shot? No pics of them smoking weed in high school, nothing.

    Hip-hop legend Method Man on Ferguson . There’s no quick summary, but he has an opinion. Youtube video.

    Texas Bill Would Make Recording Police Illegal – because the Texas government isn’t fond of free speech?

    Rep. Jason Villalba, R-Dallas, holds a sonogram showing his unborn son during final remarks before a provisonal vote on HB 2, an abortion bill,Tuesday, July 9, 2013, in Austin, Texas. A final, formal vote is scheduled for Wednesday. The bill, which passed, would require doctors to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, only allow abortions in surgical centers, dictate when abortion pills are taken and ban abortions after 20 weeks. (AP Photo/Eric Gay) [leaving the photo caption because it sort of illustrates the general mindset of these people]

    A bill introduced to the Texas House of Representatives would make it illegal for private citizens to record police within 25 feet.

    House Bill 2918, introduced by Texas Rep. Jason Villalba (R-Dallas) on Tuesday, would make the offense a misdemeanor. Citizens who are armed would not be permitted to record police activity within 100 feet of an officer, according to the Houston Chronicle.

    Only representatives of radio or TV organizations that hold an FCC license, newspapers and magazines would have the right to record police.

    The legislator disagreed with people on Twitter who said he’s seeking to make all filming of cops illegal.

    “My bill … just asks filmers to stand back a little so as not to interfere with law enforcement,” Villalba tweeted.

    The bill would go against precedent set in 2011 by an appeals court, which found that citizens are allowed to record police, according to the ACLU.

    When will Rudy shut up? Rudy Giuliani blames Obama for shooting of police officers in Ferguson

    Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani said on Thursday morning that Barack Obama should be more like embattled comedian Bill Cosby, and blamed the president for the shooting of two police officers in Ferguson on Wednesday.

    In a wide-ranging interview with AM970 radio’s John Gambling – which included the revelation that for a while Giuliani’s best friend was “a dog named Goalie” – the former mayor said that blame for Wednesday’s attack “starts at the top”.

    “It’s the tone that’s set by the president,” Giuliani said, adding that it was “the obligation of the president of the United States to explain to the American people –and the world – that our police are the best in the world; they are the most trained; they are the most restrained.”

    “There are very few incidents that turn out to be bad incidents,” he said, calling the shooting of the unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson by a police officer that sparked nationwide protests “a justifiable homicide”.

    Moving on to the shooting of two police officers in Brooklyn, New York, in December, Giuliani said that they, too, “were assassinated because of this atmosphere that was created”.

    Giuliani also said that Obama’s only chance to leave a legacy was if he “stood up and said – and I hate to say it because of what happened afterwards – the kinds of stuff that Bill Cosby used to say” about black-on-black violence.

    Yes, more like Bill Cosby. Sounds like a winner to me.

    Giuliani is a reminder that racism in America is a birthright of some white men and the pastime of a nation. And how.

    And if there’s anything more disgusting from Giuliani, it’s this: Rudy Giuliani: Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson Should Be ‘Commended’ For Shooting Michael Brown

    Citing a section of the Justice Department’s scathing report of racial bias within the Ferguson Police Department, Rudy Giuliani said former Officer Darren Wilson should be commended for shooting unarmed teenager Michael Brown in August.

    During an interview on Thursday, the former New York City mayor said Wilson acted dutifully and was vindicated by the report’s findings that there was not enough evidence to conclude that Brown had his hands up before he was shot.

    “What happened in Ferguson is that a man committed a robbery, attempted to assault a police officer, and the police officer — to save his life — shot him,” Giuliani told Fox News. “The police officer did his duty. The officer should be commended for what he did.”

    Far from embracing the report, Giuliani attempted to cast doubt on the more damning sections, claiming that there was little evidence to prove racism within the department.

    “It’s an allegation. There’s no proof yet,” Giuliani said.

    Fuck you, Giuliani. Fuck. You.

  360. rq says

    Kanye West Delivers Guest Lecture at Oxford University (Full Transcript)

    Kanye West has been not-so-quietly tearing it up across the pond lately. After stealing the show at the 2015 BRIT Awards, chatting with Zane Lowe and performing on The Jonathan Ross Show last week, Yeezy delivered a guest lecture at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History earlier today.

    Over the course of about 20 minutes, Ye talked to 350 students about everything from his ambitions to do fine art and getting calls from Obama (on the home phone) to Drake’s dominance and getting murdered by Nicki Minaj on his own shit. There’s a lot to sift through, but there are a couple gems buried in there, too. For one, Steve McQueen is directing the “All Day” video.

    Oxford said video of the full lecture will be made available soon. In the meantime, read a full transcript below, courtesy of The Tab.

    Read more below…

    “I’ll take one question. I wanted to vibe off an idea, and then I can riff off of that…they said I’ve got 20 minutes or so, I might go longer.

    “OK, everyone please be completely quiet, because I can literally hear a whisper, and it’ll throw off my stream of consciousness, and when I get my stream of consciousness going that’s when I give the best, illest quotes. Literally, a whisper can throw it off.

    “Today was the first time I realised, If I could have done it again I would have gone to the Art Institute over the American Academy of Art, I would have researched where I could have got the best and the strongest education.

    “And I’m sure this will end up online, so I don’t want to diss anyone at the American Academy, I’m sure it’s equal to the Art Institute of Chicago by now, but at the time I was going I would look around at the work of the class and not feel inspired by the teachers, and I kinda, the idea of being a fine artist, that’s a really difficult profession to get into, to be respected in, to make money at. Maybe the goal for some of the people was just to work at an advertising agency or at a record label.

    “My goal, if I was going to do art, fine art, would have been to become Picasso or greater.

    “That always sounds so funny to people, comparing yourself to someone in the past that has done so much, and in your life you’re not even allowed to think that you can do as much. That’s a mentality that suppresses humanity. […]

    “What I notice about creatives is that, and one of the reasons why I get into trouble, is, not only do I want to design video games, or make music, or ride bikes, I think one of the most important things to my ability to create so much in the past 30 years is my desire to play sports. I approach creativity like a sport, where if I have a drawing I react just like a jock: LOOK AT THE FUCKING DRAWING RIGHT THERE YEAH!

    “We’re all creatives here, we’re all born artists. Some people are artists of business, some people are artists of composition.

    “We were taught to hide our black fingernail polish and put our head down in the back of the class and not notice out of fear that someone might laugh at one of our ideas – that our idea could become a mockery or a failure in some way. […]

    “We’ve been sold a concept of joy through advertising, through car advertising, through fashion branding. It’s not the concept of time, time with your family, time with your friends, the little time that we do have on earth and what we do with that. It was somehow sold to us through a Gucci bag or something.

    “Time is the only luxury. It’s the only thing you can’t get back. If you lose your luggage – I’m not gonna say the obvious brand of luggage that I’d normally say because I’ve got a meeting with them soon – if you lose your expensive luggage at the airport, you can get that back. You can’t get the time back.

    “It feels like people do everything in life to get this BMW, this Benz, to get this townhome, to get 2.5 kids exactly. One of them has to be small, y’know!

    “And you’re looking for this moment where you sit in your BMW after all the work you’ve done and all the accolades you get, and you somehow think you’re gonna get that level of joy that my daughter had when she received those wolves. And when you’re sitting in traffic in your BMW, it’s something that feels empty. To everyone who reaches that point. This concept of the selfish human, this idea of separation by race, or gender, or religion, or age, or my favourite thing to hate, class.

    “People say it takes a village to raise a child. People ask me how my daughter is doing. She’s only doing good if your daughter’s doing good. We’re all one family.

    “We have the ability to approach our race like ants, or we have the ability to approach our race like crabs.

    “This is a generation that is far less racist – yes, small remnants remain of even thinking of calling something of a racial slur.

    “White people that listen to rap say ‘n*gg*r’…in the privacy of their own home.

    “That idea [racism], has passed. We’ve had The Cosby Show, Obama’s president, Beyonce’s great…that’s passed. But there’s still something you’re taught every day, especially in the UK, and that’s division by class. Our main focus, in my opinion…Imagine a world with no war, and imagine if everyone’s main focus, more so than going out to a club, their main focus was to help someone else. […]

    “People say I have a bad reputation. I think I’ve got the best reputation in the building. They want you to have a reputation of tucking your black nail polish into your pockets and sitting in the corner of the class, and not fighting for your ideas out of fear of being ridiculed.

    “That’s one of my favourite ones…to be called crazy. […]

    “People say to me ‘you’re successful, what are you crying about?’. I’m crying about the people. I’m crying about their daughters. Our daughters, as one family. What good is it. What good is anything that everyone can’t have. Every ism. They think we’re done with racism. What about elitism, what about separatism, what about classism? That’s all.”

    NYPD routinely edits & deletes @Wikipedia entries on NYPD murders, misconduct & corruption:, which tweet links to Tony’s link above on wikipedia.
    Here’s Slate on the same, Edits of Wikipedia Pages for Eric Garner, Stop-and-Frisk Were Made From NYPD Headquarters

    Wikipedia pages about Eric Garner, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo—unarmed men who were controversially killed by New York Police Department officers—have been edited in NYPD-friendly ways from the organization’s headquarters at One Police Plaza in Manhattan, Capital New York reports:

    Capital identified 85 NYPD addresses that have edited Wikipedia, although it is unclear how many users were involved, as computers on the NYPD network can operate on the department’s range of IP addresses.

    NYPD IP addresses have also been used to edit entries on stop-and-frisk, NYPD scandals, and prominent figures in the city’s political and police leadership.

    Here are some of the five changes Capital says an NYPD-affiliated IP address made to the page about Garner, who was killed in 2014 when officers detaining him on suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes put him in a chokehold (no officers were charged with crimes related to the incident):

    “Garner raised both his arms in the air” was changed to “Garner flailed his arms about as he spoke.”
    “[P]ush Garner’s face into the sidewalk” was changed to “push Garner’s head down into the sidewalk.”

    At one point a One Police Plaza user attempted to delete the entry for “Sean Bell shooting incident” altogether. The NYPD says it is investigating Capital’s findings.

    Capital also found that One Police Plaza IP addresses had edited the page about British band Chumbawumba and edited a health-related page to add a reference to “gay man on man butt sex.”

    So…. it’s not just racism.

    And from Think Progress, NYPD Caught Editing Wikipedia Entries About Police Brutality Victims

    The New York Police Department has anonymously edited and tried to delete Wikipedia pages about police brutality victims, Capital New York has discovered. Edits coming from 1 Police Plaza headquarters targeted pages for Eric Garner, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo.

    NYPD IP addresses were used to edit the Wikipedia page on the “Death of Eric Garner,” who was killed by police chokehold and inspired massive nationwide protests in the fall. Capital New York found that the department changed “Garner raised both his arms in the air” to “Garner flailed his arms about as he spoke,” and added the sentence “Garner, who was considerably larger than any of the officers, continued to struggle with them,” among other changes.

    Someone at the NYPD also tried to delete the article on Sean Bell, an unarmed man who was gunned down by officers firing 50 bullets in 2006, arguing that “no one except Al Sharpton cares anymore.” The user wrote, “The police shoot people every day, and times with a lot more than 50 bullets. This incident is more news than notable.”

    The NYPD also edited entries about the police force’s stop-and-frisk policy deemed unconstitutional in 2013, as well as a number of unrelated articles, including “Four Loko,” “Sailor Moon,” and “Croissant.”

    The edits and deletion attempts reflect the NYPD’s sometimes clumsy response to the increased scrutiny in the wake of controversies over stop-and-frisk, their treatment of Occupy Wall Street activists, and most recently, the crackdown on #BlackLivesMatter protesters.

    The NYPD has long had a testy relationship with the press, punctuated by threats and arrests of journalists who document police misconduct. Lately, the nation’s largest police force has tried to circumvent the media to control its public image — with mixed results.

    The department started writing and posting its own “good arrest” stories directly to its Facebook page last summer extolling heroic officers. In one instance highlighted by Gothamist, the NYPD reported on Facebook, “A rookie Bronx cop on a footpost this morning chased down and arrested a gun-toting 17-year-old who, moments earlier, fired four shots into another man and left him for dead on a Mount Eden street.”

    The NYPD even cracked down on an artistic mural calling the police force “murderers,” even though the property owner had approved it. When the artist declined police requests to remove the mural, NYPD officers painted over it themselves.

    Other efforts to improve the NYPD’s image online have backfired repeatedly. The ill-conceived hashtag #MyNYPD, on which Twitter users were invited to share positive interactions with police, was quickly dominated by stories of abuse and harassment. Yet the NYPD broached Twitter again after its officers ducked charges over Eric Garner’s death, using the hashtag #WeHearYou to promise to rebuild trust. That hashtag was soon swamped with criticism.

    What a PR win, NYPD. Good for you.

  362. rq says

    Obama Discusses Ferguson With Jimmy Kimmel – you know, that’s not the photo I would have picked for the headline.

    “What had been happening in Ferguson was oppressive and objectionable and was worthy of protest,” Mr. Obama said during an appearance on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” “But there was no excuse for criminal acts.”

    Mr. Obama cited the recent Justice Department report on Ferguson, which he said found a “whole structure” that indicated “both racism and just a disregard for what law enforcement is supposed to do.” But he repeated his belief that what happened in the Missouri city was “not unique, but it’s also not the norm.”

    The president’s comments about Ferguson came at a serious moment in an appearance on the late-night comedy show that also included references to Area 51, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s email address and the question of whether Mr. Obama goes in search of late-night White House sandwiches in his underwear. (“I could. I don’t,” he said.)

    More fun stuff at the link.

    Following police shootings, a night of peaceful protests in Ferguson

    Police widened the search Friday for a gunman who wounded two police officers and tipped this conflict-torn St. Louis suburb toward possible new rounds of tension and mistrust.

    Protester leaders — claiming systematic abuses and racial bias by the mostly white Ferguson Police Department — have called for calm and have denounced the shootings early Thursday.

    But they also have vowed to press ahead with rallies to demand further reforms from authorities already under pressure after a highly critical Justice Department report and the resignations of the police chief and other officials. […]

    While protests had dwindled in recent weeks, they were reignited after the Justice Department issued a scathing report about Ferguson Police Department, which prompted the resignations of the police chief, local municipal judge and town manager.

    All three men were the targets of withering criticism in a long-awaited report on the Aug. 9 shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown, an event that sparked months of sometimes violent protests in Ferguson and across the nation.

    Then, late Wednesday, with demonstrators thinning out, gunshots rang out and two officers were hit.

    For much of the day, questions hung over the protests: Would they continue to demonstrate even after the shootings of two police officers?

    But protest leaders were insistent they would not be scapegoated for the shootings, and that their demonstrations would continue.

    “The same problems and issues that existed yesterday exist today,” said DeRay McKesson, one of the most visible protest leaders. “The protests continue, the movement lives.”

    Around 8 p.m. Thursday, about a dozen members of clergy gathered several blocks away from the police department for a prayer vigil. Clutching candles, they said prayers for the officers as well as for the protesters — and for victims of police shootings.

    Manhunt for Ferguson cop shooters

    Peaceful protests in Ferguson as cops search for whoever shot two police officers early Thursday morning. msnbc’s Trymaine Lee, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, and Ferguson protester DeRay McKesson join Lawrence.

    Autoplay video.

    Ferguson Protesters to Police: Shooter Was Not One of Us

    St. Louis County’s Chief Belmar walked a fine line Thursday as he attempted to explain how protest security puts officers at risk while also supporting residents’ right to demonstrate.

    “I have said all along that we cannot sustain this without problems,” Belmar said early Thursday after the shooting. Belmar said it’s “a miracle” that gunfire hasn’t wounded officers before now. “That’s not an indictment on everybody that’s out there certainly expressing their First Amendment rights. We’ve seen in law enforcement that this is a very, very, very dangerous environment for the officers to work in, regarding the amount of gunfire that we have experienced up there.”

    Rasheen Aldridge, the youngest member of the Ferguson Commission and an organizer with Young Activists United St. Louis, says the shots that injured the two officers didn’t come from the group of protesters he stood with.

    “I know it’s a tough situation for the police,” Aldridge says. “I hope in they can find a way to keep themselves safe but to also keep the protesters safe. We’re not the ones out here with the guns.”

    The ringing of gunfire has often provided the sinister soundtrack to the Ferguson protests, especially in November during the violent, fiery protests following a grand jury’s decision not to indict former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for the fatal August 9 shooting of Michael Brown. On August 12, Mya Aaten-White was shot in the head while walking back to her car near Ferguson’s burnt-out QuikTrip after a protest.

    Police officers guarding protests are vulnerable to being ambushed, especially in a city where gun possession is rampant and antagonism against law enforcement is at a fever pitch. In August, Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson accused reporters of threatening police safety by leaving the media corral against police orders to take pictures of a car before officers could secure two guns inside.

    “These police officers were standing there and they were shot, just because they were police officers,” Belmar said.

    Belmar said the shooters were “embedded in that group” of protesters outside the Ferguson Police Department Thursday morning, and later said there is an “unfortunate association” between the gunmen and protesters.

    Tony Rice, a Ferguson activist, said there’s no connection between the gunman (or gunmen) and the protesters — other than the fact that the shooters used protesters as cover.

    “I will put my protest life on the line that when they find the shooter, he’s never even been to a protest,” Rice tells Daily RFT. Rice says after seven months of protesting in front of the police department, officers know the regulars from the instigators. “We don’t even walk that far up on Tiffin (Avenue, where the shots came from.) We don’t even walk up there, and we’ve been here seven months.”

    Oklahoma Fraternity Chapter Hires High-Profile Attorney

    The alumni of a fraternity chapter at the University of Oklahoma shut down after members were caught engaging in a racist chant have hired a high-profile Oklahoma attorney to represent them and have severed communications with its national headquarters.

    Attorney Stephen Jones, who gained national prominence as the attorney for convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, confirmed Friday that he was hired by alumni members who served on the board of the university’s local Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter.

    Jones said he does not represent two members of the fraternity who were expelled from the university after they were caught on video leading a racist chant that referenced lynching and said African-Americans would never be allowed as members.

    He said he was planning to meet with his clients Friday, and he couldn’t say whether he would represent current members of the fraternity who are being investigated by university officials for their role in the chant.

    “Obviously there are issues about First Amendment rights, due process and real estate issues, but we’re still gathering documents,” said Jones, who has also represented several Oklahoma politicians in high-profile corruption cases.

    Jones also ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for U.S. Senate in 1990 against David Boren, who is now OU’s president.

    A spokesman for the fraternity’s national headquarters said Friday that officials with the Oklahoma chapter have stopped communicating with them.

    “We have not heard from the Oklahoma chapter,” spokesman Brandon Weghorst said. “They have not engaged us since the time the chapter was closed.”

    Weghorst said the national fraternity is moving forward with plans to expel all of the suspended members of the OU chapter, a move that will permanently revoke their membership.

    Meanwhile, Weghorst said the national fraternity is continuing its investigation into SAE chapters at other universities, and planned to release an update on those investigations later Friday. He confirmed Thursday that investigations were underway into chapters at the University of Texas-Austin and Louisiana Tech University in Ruston.

    Whoa. SAE fraternity files lawsuit, denies they are racist, say they’re being ‘tarred and feathered’ Seriously???

    This isn’t a joke. The SAE fraternity, claiming they are victims, has hired high-profile attorney Stephen Jones to represent them after being ousted by the University of Oklahoma for their racism and threats of violence.

    Jones told NewsChannel 4 the group is outraged over President Boren shutting down the fraternity house and branding all SAE members as racists and bigots.

    Jones says the two students who were expelled because of the incident have apologized sincerely for their remarks, and now the incident is being exploited.

    He said they lacked judgment in a social setting, but they should not be tarred and feathered as racists.

    Lacked judgment in a social setting? What the hell does that even mean? That they are frustrated that they revealed their racism in public?

    What a hot mess. Farting at the dinner table is lacking judgment in a social setting. These men and women memorized and giddily chanted a song about hanging black men from trees.

    Between conservatives blaming hip hop for the chant and the attorney denying that his clients are even racist, it’s clear that a lot of folk are hell-bent on denying racism exists with every fiber of their being.

    Figures. The arrogance of privilege knows no bounds.

  363. rq says

    Tony
    I’m glad. :) For everything you said in your comment. :)

    +++

    A damn punk in Ferguson

    EIGHT months after the fatal shooting of a local unarmed black teenager by a white police officer, tensions still simmer in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. Last night about 150 demonstrators congregated where they always meet: in front of the police station on South Florissant Avenue. They rallied because of the resignation earlier yesterday of Thomas Jackson, the head of Ferguson police, in the wake of a scathing report by the Department of Justice (DOJ) that found that racial bias and petty harassment was rife in his force. Most of the demonstrators applauded Mr Jackson’s departure, but called for more heads to roll.

    The demonstrators were just about to pack up at around midnight when gun shots suddenly rang through the air, injuring two policemen who were part of a cordon of officers standing side-by-side to protect the police station. The two policemen were from the neighbouring St Louis county police department, as the Ferguson force had asked for back-up last night. The department was “lucky by God’s grace we didn’t lose two officers,” said Jon Belmar, head of the St Louis county police. The men were released from hospital today. Meanwhile the shooter remains at large. […]

    In most cases when a city is under federal investigation for its law-enforcement methods, the local police tries to mends its ways. Yesterday Seattle announced that it will replace four of its five top cops in an effort to meet DOJ recommendations as part of an investigation of its policing practices that started four years ago.

    Eric Holder, the attorney general, acknowledged that Ferguson has made “good faith steps” since the release of the DOJ report last week, though he says the city still has a long way to go. Yesterday’s shooting was a setback. “This was a damn punk who was trying to sow discord in an area that’s trying to get its act together and trying to bring together a community that has been fractured for too long,” said Mr Holder.

    James Knowles, the mayor of Ferguson, vowed to address each and every criticism raised in the DOJ report. He may not have much time, as he is up for re-election next month. Whoever ends up in his office will have a big job on his hands. Neutralising a powder keg is no easy task.

    McCaskill: Shooting of police shows a ‘disconnect’ between communities and police – but we don’t yet know who shot!!!

    Attorney General Eric Holder calls the gunman who shot two police officers in Ferguson, Missouri this week a “punk.” But U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill tells NBC’s “Today” show that the shooting highlights “a disconnect between some communities in this country and law enforcement.” She said, “We’ve got to go back to the drawing board.”

    Dozens of people gathered for a candlelight vigil last night, praying for peace and expressing sympathy for the officers, who’ve now been released from the hospital. A larger crowd of about 200 gathered outside the police department.

    Many called for the resignation of Ferguson’s mayor, or the disbanding of the police department. Others were there to remember 18-year-old Michael Brown, whose shooting death by a Ferguson police officer in August made the city a national focal point.

    There are still no arrests in the shootings of the two police officers. Several people were taken in for questioning, but they were later released. The two officers were released from the hospital yesterday. They were shot in front of the city’s police department, where protesters had gathered after the resignation of the city’s police chief.

    #Ferguson Roorda saying the ammo is 40 caliber. This was developed by the FBI for police officers! They need to check their ranks. I hope my Roorda link is still in my tabs, had one. I sure hope it’s text only, though. Can’t stand listening to the guy.

    Interlude: Choirs! Spelman and Bennett College Choirs Organize Joint Concert for Women’s History Month

    The only two historically black female colleges still up and running in the nation—Spelman College in Atlanta, and Bennett College in Greensboro, N.C.—are commemorating Women’s History Month by having their choirs perform together at a joint concert March 16, WFMY News 2 reports.

    The gig—a first for both schools—is aptly called a “her-storic” event and will take place at Bennett College. The choir director at Bennett spoke about how the joint concert came to be, and why it’s so special that both choir groups are coming together to pay homage to Women’s History Month.

    “The discussions between the two choirs started about five years ago,” Valerie Johnson, Bennett’s choir director, said.

    “We are the only two historically black colleges for women in the country, and that in itself is reason to celebrate. We hope this concert represents a new tradition in the lives of the two colleges.”

    Hear them sing!

    Emails show an FBI terror task force tracked a nonviolent #BlackLivesMatter protest. Link: Why Was an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force Tracking a Black Lives Matter Protest? COINTELPRO is an obsolete program… right?

    Members of an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force tracked the time and location of a Black Lives Matter protest last December at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, email obtained by The Intercept shows.

    The email from David S. Langfellow, a St. Paul police officer and member of an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, informs a fellow task force member from the Bloomington police that “CHS just confirmed the MOA protest I was taking to you about today, for the 20th of DEC @ 1400 hours.” CHS is a law enforcement acronym for “confidential human source.”

    Jeffrey VanNest, an FBI special agent and Joint Terrorism Task Force supervisor at the FBI’s Minneapolis office, was CC’d on the email. The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces are based in 104 U.S. cities and are made up of approximately 4,000 federal, state and local law enforcement officials. The FBI characterizes them as “our nation’s front line on terrorism.”

    Activists had planned the protest at the mall to call attention to police brutality against African Americans. “Our system disproportionately targets, profiles and kills black men and women, that’s what we are here talking about,” organizer Michael McDowell told a reporter at the time. “We wanted to show people who have the everyday luxury of just living their lives that they need to be aware of this, too.”

    According to an FBI spokesman, Langfellow’s Confidential Human Source was “a tipster with whom Mr. Langfellow is familiar,” who contacted him “after the tipster had discovered some information while on Facebook” that “some individuals may engage in vandalism” at the Mall of America protest. Upon receiving the email, Bloomington police officer and task-force member Benjamin Mansur forwarded it to Bloomington’s then-Deputy Police Chief Rick Hart, adding “Looks like it’s going to be the 20th…” It was then forwarded to all Bloomington police command staff. There is no mention of potential vandalism anywhere in the email chain, and no vandalism occurred at the Mall of America protest.

    The FBI spokesman emphasized that “As for any ‘FBI interest’ in the Black Lives Matter campaign, the FBI had (has) none,” and “makes certain its operational mandates do not interfere with activities protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.” The spokesman acknowledged that vandalism does not fall under the Memorandum of Understanding establishing the parameters under which local police officers are detailed to Joint Terrorism Task Forces and the task force mission of “prevention, preemption, deference and investigation of terrorist acts.” Asked why VanNest, the Joint Terrorism Task Force supervisor, was CC’d on Langfellow’s email, the spokesman responded “I don’t know” but speculated it was “as a matter of courtesy.” […]

    As reported by the Star Tribune, emails released earlier this week reveal apparent coordination between Sandra Johnson, the Bloomington city attorney, and Kathleen Allen, the Mall of America’s corporate counsel. “It’s the prosecution’s job to be the enforcer and MOA needs to continue to put on a positive, safe face,” Johnson wrote to Allen two days after the protest, encouraging the mall company to wait for a criminal charge from the city before pursuing its own lawsuit. “Agree — we would defer any civil action depending on how the criminal charges play out,” Allen wrote back.

    “That’s pretty unprecedented to use a criminal proceeding for a corporation to collect their costs, costs for policing and protest,” said Kushner. “It’s not like people stole from them or damaged belongings.”

    Nekima Levy-Pounds, a professor of law at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul and one of the Black Lives Matter defendants, said she found parallels between the conduct of law enforcement in Minnesota and the tactics used against civil rights protesters a generation ago. “I think it’s relevant,” she said, adding that in both instances, officers attempted to “curb nonviolent peaceful protests and to violate people’s rights to free speech.”

  364. rq says

    It’s Not Just Ferguson

    Holder’s conclusion, coming after an in-depth, six-month investigation in Ferguson, could have easily described many cities and local jurisdictions across the country.

    As Nusrat Choudhury said in an ACLU statement back in January, “the vicious cycle of linking racial profiling and debtors prisons,” occurs nationally and “in the process, poor people—disproportionately people of color—and their families suffer from the collateral impacts of jailing on employment, and housing.”

    In Louisiana and Washington State, for instance, those convicted of a crime are ordered to pay court and processing fees that can add up to hundreds or thousands of dollars. In Washington State, the minimum fees for a felony conviction add up to $800, and in 2004 they averaged nearly $1,400. Poor defendants often wind up indebted and put onto a payment plan where interest accrues. The inability to pay can easily land them back in prison.

    As was the case for Kevin Thompson, a black resident of Dekalb County, Georgia. He was put on probation for thirty days, during which he had to pay off more than $800 in fines related to traffic infractions. He describes his experience in an ACLU blog post announcing his involvement in a lawsuit to sue the city. When he was unable to pay in that time frame, he was sentenced to jail time for “violating probation.” The effect on Thompson lasted longer than the jail sentence: “Even after I was released, I felt scared that police might arrest me and jail me again for no good reason,” he stated. “After all, DeKalb County and [the probation company] essentially jailed me for being poor.”

    In Michigan, where residents are often jailed over unpaid traffic offenses, the ACLU profiled a mother named Kawana Young in a 2010 report on debtors’ prisons. Young received three arrest warrants for three previous traffic violations: driving without a license, playing her music too loud and having an expired tag. She was jailed five different times because she was unable to pay hundreds of dollars in fines. In Michigan—unlike in Ferguson—data is not yet available on the racial breakdown of who is hit with these fines. But racial bias in traffic stops has been shown in cities across the state. In some towns, such as Ferndale, black people made up 60 percent of traffic stops, even though they’re less than 10 percent of the town’s population.

    In Pennsylvania, parents are routinely fined for their kids’ truancy. When one child has more than three unexcused absences from school, parents must attend a truancy hearing where a judge may fine the parent $300, and also demand the parent pay court costs and fees related to the hearing. One school district racked up $500,000 in truancy fees during the 2008–09 school year—prompting the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia and the NAACP to file a lawsuit against the district. Not only can a parent be fined, failure to pay can result in jail time—and it has for hundreds of parents. Pennsylvania isn’t alone; other states, such as Texas, arrest and jail kids who have outstanding truancy fines when they turn 17.

    Some more at the link.

    Questions…, a cartoon/picture comparing the kinds of questions white women get to the kinds of questions black women get. Par exemple, “What colleges have you applied to?” versus “Will you be the first person in your family to graduate high school?” and “Do you have kids?” versus “How many kids do you have?” and “What does your husband do?” versus “Is the father still in the picture?”

    According to witnesses in the neighborhood, this is where County PD found the shell casings (104 Tiffin) ;
    County PD says shooter used a .40 c handgun, from this vantage-point at night, targeted/hit 2 officers from 3 shots.
    Protestors disputing official/public version: .@FBI @stltoday Not true. I was livestreaming in the street @ that intersection when shots whizzed right by me. Ref. to the media caption that the shot would have been a clear one down the street – while there were clearly protestors in the way. Huh.

    holy shit. – RT @audreymarielle: White people experimented on Blacks #BlackLivesMatter, this time ringworm treatment, not syphilis.

  365. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    gay man on man butt sex

    Apparently there’s some other kind of man on man butt sex out there. Apparently that would be the kind of man on man butt sex that was NOT practiced in the USA in the 1890s.

  366. rq says

    Oh, here’s Roorda. Police Union Rep Stands By Remark That Ferguson Protestors ‘Want Dead Cops’

    The spokesman for a St. Louis police union who said Thursday that the ultimate goal of the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri was “dead cops” doubled down on his comments Friday.

    Speaking on “Fox & Friends” on Thursday, Jeff Roorda of the St. Louis Police Officers Association reacted to the news that two officers had been shot and wounded in Ferguson by saying that the protesters there “want dead cops. That was their goal all along.” (Authorities said the wounded officers were expected to survive.)

    During an interview Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” co-host Mika Brzezinski offered Roorda an opportunity to soften his remarks, asking him: “Are you sure your words were exact?”

    “The shooter or shooters were peaceful protestors until they decided to pull a gun out and kill two cops,” Roorda said.

    Brzezinski said: “I just wonder then why you would put protesters in a group of one, when there are so many people that do certainly want change and have been protesting peacefully night after night after night. Are you sure that was the way to say it?”

    “It ceases to be a peaceful protest the minute somebody in the crowd engages in violence,” Roorda shot back.

    “But all those protestors did not want dead cops, sir,” Brzezinski said. “I’m trying to help you out.“

    Emphasis mine. Not interviewer trying to cover Roorda’s ass and Roorda refusing to be assisted.

    So SAE hired that lawyer (going their own way and all that), and held a press conference. Here’s a quote: #SAE Attorney cites quote: “Every 19 year old male is entitled to 5 minutes of foolishness…” Can we pick apart everything that is wrong with that statement, especially in this context? Seriously?
    Relatedly, this picture says it. A sad former SAE fratboy sitting down, while another holds up a sweater saying, “Hey, look, I found a frat that would take us!” The sweater says ‘KKK’.

    A headline so perfect it requires no article. “Oklahoma SAE Fraternity Planning to Sue Over Racism Allegations, Hires Timothy McVeigh’s Lawyer” Thank you, free speech folks (and in a way I say that ironically, but in a way, not – if that makes any sense).

    Ferguson Needs To Be Model For Systemic Change, Professor Says

    DAVID GREENE, HOST:

    Let’s continue the conversation about how a city like Ferguson and its police force can learn from what happened there. As we heard, a judge, the city manager and the police chief all stepped down this week. We asked Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, if this was a solid first step.

    KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: It’s not only a solid first step, it is a necessary first step. If I were a historian looking back on these events 50 years from now, I would tell this moment as the arc of a story of justice achieved in removing agents of oppression – not sufficient, but absolutely necessary.

    GREENE: I gather beyond, you know, changing people in these jobs, you see some more systemic problems that need to be taken care of as well.

    MUHAMMAD: That’s correct. And I think it’s not just about individuals. And I think that’s where this conversation has been for much of the last century. It’s been about cleaning house in a particular department, identifying rotten apples and saying that now that we’ve removed those individuals, everything’s going to be OK. So Ferguson should become a model department for systemic change with the kinds of value statements that the new leadership will articulate and enforce.

    GREENE: Can you just help us understand what that systemic change is that you feel has to happen in Ferguson and hasn’t happened when we’ve hit situations like this in the past?

    MUHAMMAD: Well, we might start with what does policing look like in middle-class, white, suburban communities? People are not presumptively criminal because they happen to, as one NYPD officer described, fit the description of a black male, 14 to 21, or that in most of these encounters, the context of daily abuse and microaggressions, where people are disrespected just by how they’re spoken to, has to change. So there are some basic things about decency that we should look for and expect that most white Americans take for granted in their own communities.

    GREENE: But what you’re describing sounds like racism, or as some have put it when we’ve had conversations about these incidents recently, if not racism, then it is a fear based on someone’s race. I mean, a fear among police officers of young black men. But is that we’re talking about here? I mean, just that there can’t be racism in police departments. Is that the problem?

    MUHAMMAD: Well, it is a problem. But it is too amorphous a statement to tell us what to do about it. So the reason I use the example of the kind of everyday policing that happens outside of working-class and poor black communities is just because people know what that looks like. It’s a place to start the conversation. If I just say we have to end racism and policing, it’s, like, OK, I’m not racist in the first place. And this idea of implicit bias works to some degree, but it also implicates everybody, including black people.

    I’m avoiding citing the entire interview, but the remaining little bit is worth a read. Very intelligent.

  367. rq says

    @366, comment after first blockquote says ‘Not interviewer [etc]’, should say ‘Note interviewer [etc]’. Thank you kindly, Tpyos, for this generous gift.

    Crip Dyke
    Ah, but there is non-gay man on man butt sex which is, almost by definition, gay man on man butt sex, but not. See what I mean? :P

  368. rq says

    Ferguson rebuilding: The Urban League to open a new center in Ferguson on burned QuikTrip lot

    The center will “expand the Urban League’s work to broaden access to education/job training, employment and economic self-reliance for residents of the St. Louis metro area,” the news release states.

    A source involved in the negotiations said QuikTrip will tear down the remains of the store, looted and burned on Aug. 10, the day after Michael Brown was fatally shot by a Ferguson police officer. The convenience store chain also will remove the underground gas tanks. Several donors will provide funding for the Urban League to build a “community empowerment center” on the site, which became ground zero for protests after the Brown shooting.

    QuikTrip and the Urban League have been in negotiations for several months to put a center on the site of the burned convenience store, at 9420 West Florissant Avenue, a source said.

    The new center will house the newly implemented Save Our Sons program, which landed $1.2 million in donations from St. Louis area companies in the wake of the unrest in Ferguson. The goal is to take 500 young men, jobless or underemployed, from north St. Louis County and give them a month’s training in how to land a job, keep it and get promoted. From there, the men will be matched with a job at a local company. Putting 500 men through the program is expected to take several years.

    The Urban League, which announced the program in January, came up with the idea after talking with young, unemployed men.

    Jobs have long been discussed as the solution to getting young men off the streets and out of trouble. The unemployment rate for black men in St. Louis County has run at triple the rate for whites. From 2011 to 2013, black joblessness averaged 17 percent against 5.8 percent for whites, according to the Census Bureau.

    As part of the program announcement two months ago, two St. Louis companies — who wish to remain anonymous — have promised to hire the first 40 graduates at jobs paying $10 per hour plus benefits. The Save Our Sons program, or SOS, teaches interview skills, how to impress a boss with good work, and how to network to find the next job.

  369. rq says

    After Suspension, St. Louis Cop Indicted for Delivering Shotgun to Drug Dealers

    News outlets citing anonymous police sources report that the indictment of a recently-suspended SLMPD officer is just the tip of the iceberg of a criminal investigation into a local drug ring. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that as many as twenty civilians and several officers may be involved. So far, the investigation has focused on one former SLMPD patrolman: Don McGhee.

    According to an indictment handed down Wednesday in federal court, McGhee maintained connections to individuals distributing crack and marijuana from of a house on the 3800 block of Cottage Avenue.

    On March 2, 2014, McGhee transported a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun with a pistol grip to the drug house, the indictment continues. Two days later, the shotgun, along with ammunition and several other firearms, were recovered during police raid on the property.

    McGhee now faces one felony charge for delivering the shotgun while “knowing, believing, or having reason to believe that the drug dealer would use the shotgun in relation to and in furtherance of the drug trafficking.” On Thursday, he turned himself in to authorities, pleaded not guilty and was released on $20,000 bail.

    “The actions of this individual betrayed the trust of the community and compromised the integrity of the Metropolitan Police Department,” said SLMPD Police Chief Sam Dotson in a prepared statement. “The department will continue to investigate any allegations of misconduct or unlawful behavior and will not allow the actions of this individual to tarnish the reputation of our department.”

    U.S. Attorney Richard Callahan declined to confirm if McGhee was part of a larger drug ring protection racket, but he did tell the Post-Dispatch that this is “a first step” in an investigation that “has been going on for some time.”

    What next for Black Lives Matter in Ferguson after city’s police shooting?

    But there was no need to protest any differently or give in to fear, according to demonstrator DeRay McKesson, since “the reality is we live in fear, in blackness, in America every day”.

    “I’m no more afraid than I have ever been,” McKesson said, but, as a protester, he added, “I can’t walk into spaces afraid. We plan from a place of hope, and we believe that.”

    Along with many of those gathered – some of whom have been out here repeatedly over the seven months since Michael Brown was killed – McKesson seemed optimistic about the path forward, and he categorically rejected the idea that calls for justice regarding police violence should slow down in the wake of an attack which had nothing to do with them.

    The informal branch of Black Lives Matter in Ferguson is not the origin of this movement. But the shooting of Brown certainly galvanized the national campaign, and the protesters near St Louis have been among the most high profile and consistently scrutinized since that day in August last year when Brown lost his life.

    Even Johnetta (Netta) Elzie, who was out protesting in the very first days, acknowledged: “In August, I didn’t think this was going to last past the weekend. I didn’t think this was going to be a movement. I just wanted to pay my respects to Mike Brown and just be black in America.”

    She and McKesson – who were recently awarded the Howard Zinn Freedom to Write Award for writing the This Is the Movement newsletter – and Kayla Reed of the Organization for Black Struggle are among a cohort of organizers who are not exclusively young, but are overwhelmingly so.

    Spend an evening watching them in action and it is also obvious how powerfully shaped they are, like the broader Black Lives Movement, by black women. Indeed, in disclosing her “obsession with black women in the movement” like Ella Baker, who were “background workers who should have been in the front”, Ezlie is passionate about how black women have been instrumental in American civil rights fights since before their roles were acknowledged.

    Perhaps this is key to how the movement has sustained its momentum, and why it was able to keep going just hours after it was simultaneously blamed for, and in the crossfires of, sniper shots. […]

    “Bullets don’t have names. That could have easily been one of us” shot, she said, adding that while the police had been focusing on protesters, “the real danger to everybody” was away from their group “up the hill”.

    When St Louis County erroneously said the shooter was “embedded” with the protesters, Reed noted it was a dangerous precedent to lump “everyone in the world who is not a cop into the term ‘protesters’.” Reed said she there was no question in her mind that, even after the shootings, “we needed to come back” the very next night.

    “There are some of us who make sure we come here to ensure the protests keep a certain spirit to ensure the safety of people,” Reed said. Offering “215 days of proof”, Reed said their actions “have always been nonviolent, will always be nonviolent.” She added: “We hope this event will not make the police look at us like the enemy” but instead to recognize “that their job is to protect our ability to practice our constitutional rights”.

    For Elzie, the shootings required no defense, but simply an acknowledgment of the reality that “if you were for the protests before, I’m sure your stand still stands the same. And if you were against the protests before, I’m sure your stand still stands, too.” […]

    “This movement is centered on structural and systemic reform,” which cannot be derailed by specific acts of violence against protesters or police officers, he said. Some of the players in Ferguson are starting to step off the stage, mostly without negative consequences, but the same systems in place in the summer of 2014 are still in place now. Until that changes in Ferguson (and Madison and Staten Island and elsewhere), McKesson, Reed and Elzie plan to keep at it.

    Looking forward unruffled, McKesson said: “The reality is that the movement is bigger than any one person, any one night.”

    A few words from Mr Knowles, mayor. Ferguson Mayor Knowles Slams ‘Hostile Language’ From Eric Holder

    Saying that he’s trying to save the community of Ferguson, Mo., Mayor James Knowles says that he is frustrated and concerned by the tone of Attorney General Eric Holder’s remarks about his city and its police department — both of which were harshly criticized in a recent Justice Department report.

    Knowles also says that he sees no reason to step down, as some of his critics have demanded, stating that he still has residents’ support.

    The mayor spoke about Ferguson’s response to the Justice report and the renewed calls for his resignation in an interview with All Things Considered co-host Melissa Block on Friday afternoon.

    Of the shooting of two officers outside the Ferguson Police Department earlier this week, Knowles says, “As we saw the other night, violence like that is clearly going to set back both sides of this community.”

    He adds that tensions have risen in Ferguson, where “officers are concerned for their safety; residents are concerned for their own safety right now.”

    Saying that the city of Ferguson is continuing to go over the federal report that found “a pattern of unconstitutional policing,” Knowles says the city’s officials want to work with the federal government.

    But he stops short of committing to having a federal monitor oversee what Holder called for: “immediate, wholesale and structural corrective action.”

    Knowles tells Melissa, “We also have to recognize that there are financial limitations to what the city can do — and there’s also what many residents in our community want to make sure that the city takes care of along the way.”

    Discussing the Justice Department’s findings, Holder has said the federal government would “use all the power” it has to bring change to Ferguson — including dismantling the city’s police department, if that’s necessary.

    “My understanding is that he does not have the power to dismantle the Ferguson Police Department,” Knowles says. “He has the power to sue us as a city, into bankruptcy and submission, and whatnot. But as an edict, to just say that the police department can’t operate — my understanding is that he does not have the power to do that.

    “That being said,” Knowles continues, “I have been and continue to be open to having a dialogue and work together to find an agreeable solution for all of us. Unfortunately, there continues to be hostile language coming out of the Justice Department — or rather, from Eric Holder, specifically.”

    Asked to clarify that remark, Knowles says that when he has spoken with “bureaucrats at the DOJ — and I mean bureaucrats in that they’re lifelong, career DOJ officials — there is a great sense of optimism from them, and from us, about working together. At the same time, I turn on CNN and watch Eric Holder — that’s not the same language the DOJ uses with us. So, I think that is frustrating, and concerning.”

    Chief Belmar says he’s open to the possibility that #Ferguson demonstrators – not police – were the actual targets of the gunfire.

    Belmar is indicative of unprofessional and dangerous policing: shooting happens, make inflammatory accusations, then quietly backtrack.

  370. rq says

    #Traintakeover happening now I’m the Red line .
    #traintakeover I am one of them. #blacklivesmatter

    No arrests in Ferguson police shooting; evidence under review

    There are no suspects in custody at this point. The reward for information leading to an arrest is upwards of $10,000.
    County police personnel say that there were so many rumors flying around, that Chief Belmar wanted to speak with the media to put those rumors to rest and to update the public on the investigation.

    Since the two officers were shot early Thursday morning in Ferguson, Belmar says they`ve received several dozen leads. But, not as many as they thought they would. Police are looking into all these leads, and have been poring over surveillance footage, trying to get a glimpse of the shooter.

    Thursday, several individuals were taken in for questioning, but those leads were unsuccessful.

    Belmar says an active investigation is now critical and their number one priority is to make sure things in ferguson don`t regress after this shooting. He says, we can`t afford to go back.

  371. rq says

    We are being intimated with a line … At the Center For Human & Civil Rights… #anthonyhill @Atlanta_Police
    Wall of police preventing community members from attending @noblenatl “townhall” meeting. #AnthonyHill #2015CEO

    The stubborn persistence of black-white inequality, 50 years after Selma

    Fifty years ago, Americans watched on their TV sets as state troopers and local law enforcement attacked nonviolent civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama. The event, known afterwards as “Bloody Sunday,” helped spur the passage of the Voting Rights Act. This weekend, President Obama visits Selma to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, which happened on March 7, 1965.

    Since then, the U.S. has made big strides toward equal rights, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the abolishment of Jim Crow laws, and the appointment of many more African Americans to political office. But significant gaps remain, and in some ways gaps between blacks and whites have even widened over the past few decades, as data from Pew Research Center show.

    Specifically, gaps in high school completion, life expectancy at birth and voter turnout have all narrowed, with blacks actually surpassing whites in the last category. […]

    Most disturbingly, African-Americans are actually falling farther behind in some respects. The gaps between whites and blacks have widened for three important categories: median household income, the marriage rate and median household wealth.

    50 years after the Civil Rights movement, there’s little room for complacency. Even in Selma itself, more than 40 percent of the population lives in poverty and the unemployment rate is twice the state average, and the town is still struggling to overcome its racial divisions.

    President Barack Obama on Ferguson and Race Relations , youtube video of his visit to Jimmy Kimmel.

    President Obama talks about the shooting of two police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, his speech in Selma and race relations in America.

    Tony Terrell Robinson was shot dead by Madison police. This is how it happened

    At around 6.30pm last Friday, Madison police officer Matt Kenny forced entry into the house where Robinson had been living for the past few months with two of his friends. He was responding to a series of 911 calls about a young man behaving erratically, possibly violently. Shots were fired. A few minutes later, a witness says she saw officer Kenny and another officer dragging the limp, bloody body of the biracial 19-year-old out on to the porch.

    The details of what actually happened that night are only now starting to emerge. The Guardian has spoken to witnesses who say hallucinogenic drugs played a role in Robinson’s strange behavior that night, and that at least one of the people who called 911 was a friend reaching out to police in the hope they would come to help Robinson deal with the episode.

    Police say Robinson was acting violently before the shooting, and had knocked Kenny to the ground before he was shot.

    Meanwhile, the community has erupted in protest, as young people marching under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement again question why lethal force had to be used against a young person of color who had no weapon himself. They are describing the death as murder, and calling for justice to be served. […]

    Ivy was an uncle to Robinson’s two roommates, 18-year-old Javier Limon and 19-year-old Anthony Limon. It was Javier, Ivy says, who placed a call to 911 on Friday evening alerting the police to Robinson’s erratic behavior.

    “He just wasn’t acting right, he wasn’t being himself and Javier noticed it,” Ivy said. According to his account – Ivy was out of town when the incident occurred but is in close contact with both his nephews – Javier was on his way to a local basketball game and called police to ask them to assist his friend, who he described as unarmed, not trying to hurt anybody but in need of help.

    According to Craig Spaulding, the father of another of Tony’s close friends and also in contact with the Limon brothers, Robinson had chased the car Javier was in as he headed off to the game, prompting the 911 call.

    “There was no reason for it to transpire the way it did,” Ivy said, adding that both the Limon brothers are in shock and have moved out of the city temporarily.

    Earlier in the day Robinson had been out with a small group and had eaten magic mushrooms, according to a friend who was present at the time.

    The friend, who had known Robinson for five years and whom the Guardian has chosen not to identify, said Robinson was inexperienced with hallucinogens and had consumed a large quantity. “He had no clue what he was in for. Realistically, he needed someone to sit him down and tell him that everything was OK,” the friend said.

    Robinson returned to Willy Street at around 5pm after playing on the ice at Governor’s Island.

    “He was in a place in his head that no one else in the world, in the universe could have understood but him,” said the friend, who still seemed traumatised by the events. “You have one person [Robinson] who was so fucking gone, and another man [Kenny] who was trained and capable of reason. And they killed him … He needed help and they just took him.” […]

    Three eyewitnesses present on the street either at the time of the shooting or in the immediate aftermath told the Guardian that Kenny’s patrol car did not have its rooftop siren lights on at the time of his arrival.

    What happened next remains unclear, but according to the police account the officer heard a “disturbance” inside the apartment and forced entry.

    Both Ivy and other sources with knowledge of events told the Guardian that no one else was present in the apartment at that time, raising questions about the nature of the disturbance heard before entry was forced.

    The police account states that Kenny was assaulted before he opened fire, with Madison police chief Mike Koval telling reporters that the officer was knocked to the ground after a blow to the head. The dispatch audio indicates just 18 seconds elapsed in the time between his arrival and shots being heard. [… – 18 fucking seconds.]

    The community is still reeling from Robinson’s death. Many questions remain unanswered, and protesters have vowed to continue mobilising on the issue.

    For Carter, who remained a mentor to Robinson throughout his life, the tragedy is almost too much. He weeps every night but still gets on the podiums to address the thousands of protesters who march in Robinson’s name. He told the Guardian how Robinson had nearly changed his life’s trajectory.

    “I could not imagine somebody’s death impacting my life more profoundly,” Carter said. “There is something so beautiful about a black kid, especially in America, trying to make it against all odds and fucking up so bad, but then actively trying to better his situation and become a better person. He was so close. He was so close.”

    And here’s one from the PoV of an officer: A chat with some protesters… It’s rather sentimentalish and #notallcops but it’s a perspective.

  372. rq says

    This via Ed Brayton, regarding the 50th anniversary of the Selma march. The League of the South’s Charming Selma Anniversary Message

    The openly racist, pro-slavery, neo-confederate League of the South had a charming message on the 50th anniversary of the Selma march that managed to make them look even more loathsome than they already are. Their message was pro-KKK and made the ludicrous claim that the march in Selma was a big drug-fueled sex orgy.

    The link plus excerpts at the post.

    This is sort of tangential, but it involves the system – State bar considers requiring all law students to do free legal work. I wonder if it would force attorneys to work with all kinds of clients, not just a narrow slice of them, and perhaps open their minds to greater justice and less bias in the system.

    The State Bar of California is hoping to get more help to people like Pegues by requiring that law students complete 50 hours of legal work for free or substantially reduced rates within one year of obtaining their license to practice law.

    The proposal is designed to create an army of thousands of young lawyers to assist the growing number of California residents who need legal advice but cannot afford an attorney.

    During the economic downturn that began in 2007, funding to provide legal help for the poor plummeted just as more people were falling into poverty and needed help with foreclosures, evictions and other serious problems. Legal aid organizations were more selective in how they doled out assistance. The state bar estimates that more than 1 million Californians seeking legal help are turned away each year.

    Supporters of the 50-hour requirement say they hope it will help prospective attorneys gain experience that will make them better lawyers and give them an appreciation for the importance of providing legal help to low-income residents.

    The proposal mirrors one recently adopted in New York, and advocates say its approval could lead other states to follow suit.

    There’s of course issues with funding and training, as usual. And 50 hours seems woefully little. Also, it’s more for civil cases than the criminal. I have to take issue with this statement, though: “To force law students into this type of work may turn them off it altogether, he said.” He continues that those who have an interest in this kind of work already do apply to organizations etc., but I think that misses the idea that those who wouldn’t even look at this kind of work need to see it, even for a short while, if only for educational purposes. And if that turns them off lawyering, then they shouldn’t be in the field, because helping people and justice and all that. :P

  373. rq says

    .@Prosehack65 Vid also shows ppl on Tiffen 4secs B4 shots. @FBI operating under false @stltoday rptr claim no1 in st.
    .@stlcountypd I want this ofc charged w/ property theft of & attempted destruction of evidence. #Ferguson

    Atlanta. Today. Saturday, March 14th. 4pm. Protest. #AnthonyHill

    Interlude: Diversity! Hits like ‘Empire’ signal major shift in look of network TV

    Working within a business model where as many as four out of five new series are regularly canceled, the networks are batting almost .500 in the number of rookie shows featuring characters of color that will likely be renewed.

    CW has already announced a second season for the telenovela-cum-sitcom “Jane The Virgin,” with Latina leading character Jane Villanueva (Gina Rodriguez). ABC has not made it official yet, but star Viola Davis and the producers of ABC’s “How to get Away with Murder” have let fans know that the series from creator Shonda Rhimes about a no-holds-barred law professor will be back.

    The series was the second-highest-rated new drama of the year and was the top 10 p.m. drama with viewers ages 18 to 49.

    “Thank god we’ll be back with a whole new season of insanity,” said a teaser at the end of the season finale last month.

    ABC is also certain to renew Anthony Anderson in “Black-ish,” a funny and wise exploration of African-American family life and culture. It is the highest-rated new comedy of the year.

    “Fresh Off the Boat,” a comic look at an Asian-American family living in suburban Orlando, Fla., has not enjoyed that kind of ratings success, but it is also likely to be renewed based on all the positive buzz it has generated since its arrival on ABC last month.

    But no series featuring nonwhite characters and themes about minority life has scored like Fox’s music-industry drama “Empire,” which ends its first season with a two-hour episode Wednesday night at 8. The finale will include guest appearances by Snoop Dogg, Jennifer Hudson and Patti LaBelle.

    See that? Diversity sells!!! Yay!

    City Council Races Offer Change in Ferguson After Months of Upheaval

    On April 7, Ferguson will cast its first votes for local leaders since Mr. Brown’s death in August, testing whether the anger and calls for reform rising from Ferguson’s streets will translate into higher voter turnout and a new direction at the ballot box. For years, local leaders in Ferguson ran unopposed in elections that drew 12 percent of registered voters, only single-digit percentages of black residents and almost exclusively white candidates.

    Now, eight candidates, many first-time political hopefuls, are trying to fill three of the seven Council seats; all three are being vacated by members who decided not to run again. City officials said the candidacies were unprecedented: Four African-Americans are running this year, compared with a total of three in Ferguson’s previous 120 years.

    The Council has one black member, whose term is not finished, and the city is assured of gaining a second after April 7. Mr. Smith, a retired factory worker, is running against Wesley Bell, 40, a lawyer and municipal judge, who is also black.

    Running for local government is rarely glamorous, and at this moment in Ferguson, it seems especially unappealing. The next Council members will face enormous pressure and scrutiny during their three-year terms, all for a job that pays a $250 monthly stipend.

    They will need to reach accommodation with the Justice Department, which this month called for sweeping changes in the city’s police and courts in an effort to end discriminatory law enforcement. They will need to find a new city manager and police chief, all the while under the eyes of political activists and media from around the world.

    But there will be opportunity, too: a chance to install an entirely new management team, to revamp policing practices and to take a bigger role in guiding Ferguson than councils have in the past. The candidates said they were running precisely because the stakes were so high.

    More at the link.

    It’s not just Ferguson, really, it’s not. Report confirms Mpls. arrests higher numbers of blacks

    The Minneapolis Police Department released a report this week analyzing six years of crime data based on race. Chief Janeé Harteau requested the analysis after an ACLU study found black residents were seven to 16 times more likely than whites to be arrested for low-level crimes like marijuana possession, loitering and disorderly conduct.

    In a video published online in October, Harteau called the disparities “concerning,” but said she needed more information on the subject.

    “I will ask the department’s analysis unit to examine this in areas such as victimization, location of crime and reported suspect information,” she said on the video. “These and other areas need to be examined before making an assessment on the effectiveness of improving public safety and public trust.”

    This week’s report confirmed the trends flagged by the ACLU and by a 2004 report from the Council on Crime and Justice: Black residents are arrested in much larger numbers than any other racial group.

    The Minneapolis Police Department released a statement saying the report showed that “we, as a community and as a city, need to address the issue of inequity and disparity.”

    Nekima Levy-Pounds, a law professor and adviser to the organization Black Lives Matter, said the data suggest a pattern of discriminatory policing. She is one of 11 people being prosecuted for their roles in the Black Lives Matter protest at the Mall of America last December.

    “Officers have the power to choose whether they’re going to release someone, whether they’re going to issue a citation, or whether they’re going to arrest someone,” she said. “And the fact that so many people are being arrested for such petty offenses means that there could be an abuse or misuse of discretion by officers within the city of Minneapolis.”

    But the report suggests it’s not that police are simply choosing to arrest more black people. The people who called the police also played a role.

    ACLU Executive Director Chuck Samuelson agreed that the police aren’t solely responsible for the disparities.

    “On the one hand, I think the police are doing exactly what the majority population wants them to do — the white population,” he said. “They’re behaving pretty much the way we want them to behave. They’re targeting pretty much the people we want them to target. And they’re enforcing the laws, pretty much, that we want enforced.”

    When Samuelson says the police are following the orders of the white population, it’s because that’s often who’s calling the police for these low-level crimes. […]

    African-Americans accounted for 46 percent of the city’s victims of violent crime, and for almost 80 percent of the city’s shooting victims.

    The city is trying to reduce its racial disparities in a variety of areas, including policing. The U.S. Department of Justice recently accepted its application to participate in a new program aimed at improving relations between police and the African-American community. More than 100 cities applied; Minneapolis was one of only six selected.

  375. rq says

    Moving Together to End Police Brutality, a piece from Amnesty International.

    This weekend is the International Day Against Police Brutality, which is an opportunity to celebrate the power of a grassroots movement by continuing to build one. For decades, Amnesty International USA has worked on police brutality in the United States, elevating cases and working with communities in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Prince George’s County, and more. Community groups across the country and the world have done the same, and have made tremendous progress.

    Beyond the persistent work of many groups for many years, it’s the power of young people standing up over the last several months that has moved hearts and minds, and revitalized a movement demanding human rights and accountable policing.

    It’s that movement that has made sure we know the names and stories of Mike Brown, Tanisha Anderson, Rekia Boyd, Tony Robinson, Anthony Hill and so many others. It’s a movement that has built community and pushed us toward huge reforms and policy changes. And still, there’s so much work to be done.

    Police brutality continues to be a part of the felt, lived experience of people every day, not just in the US but around the world. While people in New York City, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and Chicago feel the brutality of racial profiling, of living in fear of being stopped by police just for walking down the street with skin too brown or too black, people in Brazil have been suffering the same. Just as protesters felt the brutality of teargas in Ferguson, so have communities in in Hong Kong, in Turkey, and elsewhere. As Jorge Lazaro Nunes struggles for justice for his son, lost to the barrel of a military police officer’s gun, the people of Ayotzinapa are struggling with the brutality of mass disappearance, of losing children.

    But as those 43 young people have become the seeds of resistance in Mexico, activists around the world are countering police brutality with courage that is founded on and fueled by love. From Oakland to Ferguson to Chicago to New York, from Mexico City to the West Bank, from Chibok to Caracas and more, people are standing up to demand safety, justice, and accountability.

    It’s people who feel their human rights in their bones, who see abuse in their communities, and who refuse to stay silent that are leading the way toward change. They are fighting back with passion born of dignity, with the skill and creativity instilled through struggle, and with the strength of solidarity.

    Imprisoned police chief to collect $130,000 annual pension. Not going to cite that, just leaving that up there, because the headline alone.

    If James Knowles has no authority or accountability, then why is he speaking on the behalf of Ferguson?
    Guess which St. Louisans didn’t have the political clout to stop themselves from becoming a new source of municipal revenue. Until August.

    85 overpass. #AnthonyHill #Antlanta
    Marching along Chamblee – Tucker Rd near where #AnthonyHill shot dead by DeKalb County PD #Antlanta

  376. rq says

    How American music legends made millions off the work of a Zulu tribesman who died a pauper. The piece is actually titled “In the Jungle”, but the subtitle works better to catch the eye.

    Once upon a time, a long time ago, a small miracle took place in the brain of a man named Solomon Linda. It was 1939, and he was standing in front of a microphone in the only recording studio in black Africa when it happened. He hadn’t composed the melody or written it down or anything. He just opened his mouth and out it came, a haunting skein of fifteen notes that flowed down the wires and into a trembling stylus that cut tiny grooves into a spinning block of beeswax, which was taken to England and turned into a record that became a very big hit in that part of Africa.

    Later, the song took flight and landed in America, where it mutated into a truly immortal pop epiphany that soared to the top of the charts here and then everywhere, again and again, returning every decade or so under different names and guises. Navajo Indians sing it at powwows. Japanese teenagers know it as ライオンは寝ている. The French have a version sung in Congolese. Phish perform it live. It has been recorded by artists as diverse as R.E.M. and Glen Campbell, Brian Eno and Chet Atkins, the Nylons and Muzak schlockmeister Bert Kaempfert. The New Zealand army band turned it into a march. England’s 1986 World Cup soccer squad turned it into a joke. Hollywood put it in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. It has logged nearly three decades of continuous radio airplay in the U.S. alone. It is the most famous melody ever to emerge from Africa, a tune that has penetrated so deep into the human consciousness over so many generations that one can truly say, here is a song the whole world knows.

    Its epic transcultural saga is also, in a way, the story of popular music, which limped pale-skinned and anemic into the twentieth century but danced out the other side vastly invigorated by transfusions of ragtime and rap, jazz, blues and soul, all of whose bloodlines run back to Africa via slave ships and plantations and ghettos. It was in the nature of this transaction that black men gave more than they got and often ended up with nothing. This one’s for Solomon Linda, then, a Zulu who wrote a melody that earned untold millions for white men but died so poor that his widow couldn’t afford a stone for his grave. Let’s take it from the top, as they say in the trade. […]

    Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds cut several songs under Motsieloa’s direction, but the one we’re interested in was called “Mbube,” Zulu for “the lion,” recorded at their second session, in 1939. It was a simple three-chord ditty with lyrics something along the lines of, “Lion! Ha! You’re a lion!” inspired by an incident in the Birds’ collective Zulu boyhood when they chased lions that were stalking their father’s cattle. The first take was a dud, as was the second. Exasperated, Motsieloa looked into the corridor, dragooned a pianist, guitarist and banjo player, and tried again.

    The third take almost collapsed at the outset as the unrehearsed musicians dithered and fished for the key, but once they started cooking, the song was glory bound. “Mbube” wasn’t the most remarkable tune, but there was something terribly compelling about the underlying chant, a dense meshing of low male voices above which Solomon yodeled and howled for two exhilarating minutes, occasionally making it up as he went along. The third take was the great one, but it achieved immortality only in its dying seconds, when Solly took a deep breath, opened his mouth and improvised the melody that the world now associates with these words:

    In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight.

    Griffiths Motsieloa must have realized he’d captured something special, because that chunk of beeswax was shipped all the way to England and shipped back in the form of ten-inch 78-rpm records, which went on sale just as Hitler invaded Poland. Marketing was tricky, because there was hardly any black radio in 1939, but the song went out on “the rediffusion,” a landline that pumped music, news and “native affairs” propaganda into black neighborhoods, and people began trickling into stores to ask for it. The trickle grew into a steady stream that just rolled on for years and years, necessitating so many re-pressings that the master disintegrated. By 1948, “Mbube” had sold in the region of 100,000 copies, and Solomon Linda was the undefeated and undefeatable champion of hostel singing competitions and a superstar in the world of Zulu migrants. […]

    Came a knock on the door, and, lo, there stood his friend Alan Lomax, later to be hailed as the father of world music. Alan and his dad, John, were already famous for their song-collecting forays into the parallel universe of rural black America, where they’d discovered giants like Muddy Waters and Leadbelly. Alan was presently working for Decca, where he’d just rescued a package of 78s sent from Africa by a record company in the vain hope that someone might want to release them in America. They were about to be thrown away when Lomax intervened, thinking, “God, Pete’s the man for these.”

    And here they were: ten shellac 78s, one of which said “Mbube” on its label. Pete put it on his old Victrola and sat back. He was fascinated—there was something catchy about the underlying chant, and that wild, skirling falsetto was amazing.

    “Golly,” he said, “I can sing that.” So he got out pen and paper and started transcribing the song, but he couldn’t catch the words through all the hissing on the disk. The Zulus were chanting, “Uyimbube, uyimbube,” but it to Pete it sounded like, awimboowee or maybe awimoweh, so that’s how he wrote it down. Later he taught “Wimoweh” to the rest of his band, the Weavers, and it became, he says, “just about my favorite song to sing for the next forty years.” […]

    What might all this represent in songwriter royalties and associated revenues? I put the question to lawyers around the world, and they scratched their heads. Around 160 recordings of three versions? Thirteen movies? Half a dozen TV commercials and a hit play? Number Seven on Val Pak’s semi-authoritative ranking of the most-beloved golden oldies, and ceaseless radio airplay in every corner of the planet? It was impossible to accurately calculate, to be sure, but no one blanched at $15 million. Some said 10, some said 20, but most felt that $15 million was in the ballpark.

    Which raises an even more interesting question: What happened to all that loot? […]

    The story begins in 1939, when Solomon Linda was visited by angels in Africa’s only recording studio. At the time, Johannesburg was a hick mining town where music deals were concluded according to trading principles as old as Moses: record companies bought recordings for whatever they thought the music might be worth in the marketplace; stars generally got several guineas for a session, unknowns got almost nothing. No one got royalties, and copyright was unknown. Solomon Linda didn’t even get a contract. He walked out of that session with about ten shillings in his pocket, and the music thereafter belonged to the record company, with no further obligations to anyone. When “Mbube” became a local hit, the loot went to Eric Gallo, the playboy who owned the company. All Solomon Linda got was a menial job at the boss’s packing plant, where he worked for the rest of his days.

    When “Mbube” took flight and turned into the Weavers’ hit “Wimoweh,” Gallo could have made a fortune if he had played his cards right. Instead, he struck a handshake deal with Larry Richmond’s dad, trading “Mbube” to TRO in return for the dubious privilege of administering “Wimoweh” in such bush territories as South Africa and Rhodesia. Control of Solomon Linda’s destiny thus passed into the hands of Howie Richmond and his faithful sidekick, one Albert Brackman. […]

    As the song found its fans, money started rolling in. Every record sale triggered a mechanical royalty. Every radio play counted as a performance, which also required payment, and there was always the hope that someone might take out a “synch license” to use the tune in a movie or TV ad.

    Al, Howie and Pete Kameron divided the standard publisher’s fifty percent among themselves and distributed the other half to the writers—or in this case, adapters: Pete Seeger and the Weavers. Solomon Linda was entitled to nothing.

    This didn’t sit well with Seeger, who openly acknowledged Linda as the true author of “Wimoweh” and felt he should get the money. Indeed, he’d been hassling his publishers for months to find a way of paying the Zulu.

    “Originally they were going to send the royalties to Gallo,” Seeger recalls. “I said, ‘Don’t do that, because Linda won’t get a penny.’ “Anti-apartheid activists put Seeger in touch with a Johannesburg lawyer, who set forth into the forbidden townships to find Solomon Linda. Once contact was established, Seeger sent the Zulu a $1,000 check, and instructed his publisher to do the same with all future payments.

    He was still bragging about it 50 years later. “I never got author’s royalties on ‘Wimoweh,’” Seeger says. “Right from ’51 or ’52, I understood that the money was going to Linda. I assumed they were keeping the publisher’s fifty percent and sending the rest.” Unfortunately, Linda’s family maintains that the money only arrived years later, and even then, it was nothing like the full writer’s share Seeger was hoping to bestow.

    So much more at the link. Exploitation and appropriation at its finest. Absolute finest. It’s disgusting.

    Murder Rap: Meet The Man Facing Life In Prison For His Lyrics, yet whiteboy frat racist chants and songs are being defended as ‘free speech’ by some. Honestly? Fuck you.

    The possibility of spending the rest of his life behind bars now hangs over Duncan’s head as he and his lawyers mount their latest effort to get the case dismissed during a hearing Monday in San Diego.

    The hearing is just the latest development in Duncan’s long, Kafkaesque nightmare that grew out of an unlikely source: His self-produced rap mixtape, “No Safety,” which he released under the name Tiny Doo.

    The charges against Duncan — and 15 co-defendants — stemmed from a series of gang shootings in the San Diego area in 2012 and 2013. But Duncan’s case is unique because prosecutors don’t believe he actually pulled the trigger, planned the shootings, or even knew about them.

    Instead, prosecutors are, for the first time, using an obscure California law that makes it illegal to willfully promote or significantly benefit from gang crime. […]

    David Loy, legal director for the ACLU San Diego, told BuzzFeed News that prosecuting Duncan for his recordings is “an outrageous free speech violation,” he said. “The First Amendment draws a difference between words and deeds.”

    Loy said the courts have consistently held that artistic expression — music, film, whatever — is constitutionally protected. Consequently, even if Duncan were rapping about specific crimes, which no one is alleging, his music would be protected.

    “The government can punish crime,” Loy said. “It cannot punish speech about crime.”

    Loy said the case could have dangerous precedent-setting consequences by opening up virtually any kind of speech to criminal prosecution — a point Duncan’s lawyers have also made.

    “The problem with the DA’s theory is it would also criminalize any speech by a current or former gang about about what the gang does,” Loy said. “A biography, gang members who give interviews to the press, a gang member who made a documentary film about his experiences — under the DA’s theory, all of those current or former gang members would benefit by talking about what they say.” […]

    Nielson argued that bringing rap into the courtroom tends to happen in flimsy cases where prosecutors want to “smear the defendants character in front of a jury.”

    “Rap music often carries a lot of our cultural baggage and a lot of that baggage is racial,” Nielson said. “So when you bring that into a courtroom, you are essentially reinforcing stereotypes that jury members already have.”

    Another problem with bringing rap lyrics into a court case is that prosecutors and judges may poorly understand the artistic devices at play in rap, Kurbin said. Recent criminal cases tend to treat rap lyrics like a diary or confession, equating discussions of violence with real-world events. But rap isn’t a literal genre at all, he said.

    “We’re talking about exaggeration, we’re talking about metaphors, we’re talking about word play where meaning is inverted,” Kubrin said. “There’s a lot of metaphor in rap music that I don’t think a lot of people get.”

    For Duncan, the focus on rap lyrics represents a double standard.

    “It’s entertainment, but you want to put a stamp on my music because of who I am and where I come from,” Duncan said. “But you don’t put a stamp on The Terminator. You don’t put a stamp on Al Pacino or anything he makes on Scarface.”

    Duncan’s case fits into this larger trend, but it’s also unique because in previous instances, prosecutors were accusing the defendants of committing another crime.

    “It’s sort of a shocking extension or expansion of what I’ve seen over the last several years,” Nielson said. […]

    The time in jail took its toll on Duncan. He missed his grandfather’s death, lost his job, and his kids began struggling in school. Since his release, he’s been afraid to go out, to talk to old acquaintances, or even to wear the wrong thing — lest prosecutors interpret it as gang activity.

    And he is constantly aware that he could have a trial, and that he could lose.

    “I wake up every day feeling like this could be the last time I’m spending with my children,” Duncan said. “I could go away forever.”

    If yo uread the article, this isn’t the first case where rap lyrics are used as evidence. What the hell. Post-racial my ass.

    Audio interview with Sarah Kendzior, the wonderful author of a recent Politico article on Ferguson and money (posted either just upthread or previous thread, entitled ‘Ferguson Inc.’). Cashing In On Ferguson, audio at the link.

    Ferguson is squarely back in the media again, after two police officers were shot and a recent Department of Justice report detailed the racism and discrimination rampant among city officials. Brooke talks with journalist Sarah Kendzior about the effects of media attention on Ferguson, and what most news stories are missing about the city’s residents.

  377. says

    From HuffPo-
    The shocking finding from the DOJ Ferguson report

    The Department of Justice’s 102-page report is a rich source of damning facts about the Ferguson criminal justice system. But tucked halfway in and passed over quickly is a truly revelatory set of figures: the arrest warrant data for the Ferguson Municipal Court.

    It turns out that nearly everyone in the city is wanted for something. Even internal police department communications found the number of arrest warrants to be “staggering”. By December of 2014, “over 16,000 people had outstanding arrest warrants that had been issued by the court.” The report makes clear that this refers to individual people, rather than cases (i.e. people with many cases are not being counted multiple times). However, if we do look at the number of cases, the portrait is even starker. In 2013, 32,975 offenses had associated warrants, so that there were 1.5 offenses for every city resident.

    That means that the city of Ferguson quite literally has more crimes than people.

    To give some context as to how truly extreme this is, a comparison may be useful. In 2014, the Boston Municipal Court System, for a city of 645,000 people, issued about 2,300 criminal warrants. The Ferguson Municipal Court issued 9,000, for a population 1/30th the size of Boston’s.

    This complete penetration of policing into everyday life establishes a world of unceasing terror and violence. When everyone is a criminal by default, police are handed an extraordinary amount of discretionary power. “Discretion” may sound like an innocuous or even positive policy, but its effect is to make every single person’s freedom dependent on the mercy of individual officers. There are no more laws, there are only police. The “rule of law,” by which people are supposed to be treated equally according to a consistent set of principles, becomes the “rule of personal whim.”

    And this is precisely what occurs in Ferguson. As others have noted, the Ferguson courts appear to work as an orchestrated racket to extract money from the poor. The thousands upon thousands of warrants that are issued, according to the DOJ, are “not to protect public safety but rather to facilitate fine collection.” Residents are routinely charged with minor administrative infractions. Most of the arrest warrants stem from traffic violations, but nearly every conceivable human behavior is criminalized. An offense can be found anywhere, including citations for “Manner of Walking in Roadway,” “High Grass and Weeds,” and 14 kinds of parking violation. The dystopian absurdity reaches its apotheosis in the deliciously Orwellian transgression “failure to obey.” (Obey what? Simply to obey.) In fact, even if one does obey to the letter, solutions can be found. After Henry Davis was brutally beaten by four Ferguson officers, he found himself charged with “destruction of official property” for bleeding on their uniforms.

    None of this is even to mention the blinding levels of racism, which remain the central fact of police interactions in Ferguson and nationwide. The overwhelming force of this violent and exploitative policing system is directed at the African American population. In 2013, 92 percent of Ferguson’s arrest warrants were issued against African Americans, and black Fergusonians were 68 percent less likely than others to have their court cases dismissed. The racism is so blatant and comprehensive that the DOJ concluded that “Ferguson law enforcement practices are directly shaped and perpetuated by racial bias.” Considering the qualified and colorless language typically deployed in government documents, this is an astonishingly forceful statement.

    Ferguson’s racism has been central to the media coverage of the release of the DOJ report. But in a certain way, by focusing entirely on disparate racial impacts without examining the sheer scale of the brutal state juggernaut, one misses crucial facts. MSNBC listed as the DOJ’s number one “most shocking” finding the fact that “at least one municipal employee thought electing a black president was laughable.” But the existence of racist views in the department is not the most shocking fact, not by a country mile. Rather, endemic racism in policing comes standard. However, that racism occurs in the wider context of an ever-enlarging interlocking system of administrative bureaucracy and police violence.

    The other pitfall in analyzing the Ferguson report is to see it as being about Ferguson. There are 19,492 municipal governments in America, and the chances that Ferguson happens to be the worst are extremely slim. In fact, there is strong evidence that in the world of better funded, more militarized, more technologically advanced police departments, Ferguson is simply a high-profile case study. While the Ferguson nightmare may dwarf the problems in cities like Boston, American policing is so out-of-control that Ferguson-style practices can occur on at least some level in almost every department.

  378. chigau (違う) says

    rq #376
    I knew some of that story about The Lion Sleeps but the whole thing is staggering.

  379. rq says

    #Ferguson PD Pics Tonite. Still here.

    An @mashable photog was arrested by @SLMPD, cops say he stepped in street, one of two people arrested.
    Al-Jazeera jumped the gun: Developing Story: At least 2 people arrested in connection with police shooting in the US state of Missouri. That was false, so they retracted: So basically two people were arrested.. For something. Thanks @AJENews; @deray (see attached photos, they clarified by saying ‘unclear if two arrests in relation to protests or shooting’)

    Blocking @POPSspotSports with bicycles

    #Ferguson PD Pics Tonite. Still here.

  380. rq says

    In Atlanta: Protestor to @DeKalbCountyPD ofc: “your dept killed a man.” Cop: “I don’t care who we killed.” #AnthonyHill #Antlanta
    Reports of 6 arrests. #Antlanta rally. #AnthonyHill
    This child’s mother, a neighbor of #AnthonyHill, has been arrested for standing on the street by @DeKalbCountyPD

    Completely disgusted by the police in Dekalb. #AnthonyHill At least tehy’re not in riot gear. :P

    A white man heard screaming “get your black ass out of the street” as he tried to run a protester over. Y’all This is America. #AnthonyHill

    But protest against police brutality wasn’t the only event last night in STL: Over 100 people came out for Candlelight Vigil for Marcus Johnson, the 5 year old that was killed on Wednesday. Not a police-involved shooting, but there’s the community addressing other crime as well.

  381. rq says

    Father angry about racially insensitive homework assignment

    Jeff Royster couldn’t believe it. His eighth-grade son came home from River Trail Middle School in Johns Creek with a disturbing black history month assignment.

    “This is a bit over the top,” Royster said. “It has the guy hanging from a tree. A baby seems to be dead, a school is burning. At the very top it says, ‘This is a white man’s government.’”

    The chilling picture, published in 1859, shows a grinning Klansman shaking hands with a man wearing a sign titled ‘white league’ on his back.

    Beneath them is a skull and crossbones, and a black couple cowering for their lives.

    “It’s pretty offensive. It looks as if blacks should be afraid of being free,” Royster said.

    Royster asked the teacher for an explanation.

    “This teacher made the case that slavery should have not ended with a war, it should’ve been allowed to fade out,” Royster said.

    CBS46 asked Fulton County Schools for an answer.

    Susan Hale, a spokeswoman, said the illustration is part of a state packet from which teachers and schools can choose.

    “We regret that there was very little context to the assignment,” Hale said. “We could have put it in better context. We could have been more culturally sensitive.”

    Hale added that the district is reviewing whether the picture is appropriate for eighth graders and whether it should be used again.

    Learning about slavery and lynching? Good. The teacher’s attitude about it? Not so good. Makes me think that the kids aren’t maybe getting the right perspective on these things. :/

    UW investigates claims of racial slurs by SAE frat members – I heard that SAE conducted it’s own internal investigation and found nothing wrong. :P

    Black students at the University of Washington are alleging that members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) fraternity called African Americans “apes” and made obscene gestures and booed as marchers passed the frat’s house during a campus Black Lives Matter protest last month.

    The fraternity’s president says SAE members heard comments, too, but the fraternity has conducted its own investigation and doesn’t believe its members were involved.

    University officials said they are investigating but do not yet know what happened or who was responsible. […]

    During the Feb. 25 march, which was organized to raise awareness about racism, student Dirir Abdullahi said he heard several white men shouting racial slurs from the front yard of the SAE fraternity house while he and hundreds of others marched by.

    “There were several students who were screaming out loud, ‘You apes, why are you here on our campus,’ ” said Abdullahi, 21, a senior majoring in neurobiology.

    Several other protesters also heard the slurs, Abdullahi and others said Wednesday, but the march continued to Gerberding Hall, where protesters delivered demands to the UW president’s office.

    Zane Suarez, another student who participated in the march, said he witnessed four or five men on the second-floor balcony of the fraternity who were booing and making obscene gestures.

    But some students who participated said that while they observed some men near the fraternity acting disrespectfully toward marchers, they aren’t certain they were fraternity members.

    In a statement, Michael Hickey, president of the UW’s SAE chapter, said the offensive comments came from nonmembers who were standing on the sidewalk near the chapter house. He said he did not have any information about students yelling from the balcony.

    Hickey said the fraternity members were “concerned and shocked by these allegations, as we pride ourselves in the diversity of our chapter membership and racism is against the moral ethics of our local and national organization.”

    He said the fraternity is committed to working with others “to help hold those accountable for their offensive behavior on February 25.”

    Very committed. They’re very committed.

    The Wonkette on those NYPD cops and wikipedia, haha. New York Cops Just Tidying Up Wikipedia, Like They Did Times Square!

    But what’s so wrong with the NYPD wanting to change its own information about itself on Wikipedia? Oh nothing except for the rules about how you cannot do that on Wikipedia:

    [image of a list with things such as ‘conflict of interest’ and ‘seek review’ as conditions for editing wikipedia]

    So yeah, you cannot do that for reasons that are obvious to anyone who is not a total moron, even though total morons try to do this sort of thing all the time. They often, though not always, work on Capitol Hill.

    Anyway, we’re sure this will all get figured out, because the police department is ON IT:

    “The matter is under internal review,” an NYPD spokeswoman, Det. Cheryl Crispin, wrote in an email to Capital after examples of the changes were presented to the NYPD.

    Yeah, and we know how those internal reviews at the NYPD always work out. We’re sure whoever the culprit or culprits are, they have a real good reason.

    Breaking: Ferguson residents file to recall Mayor Knowles. Attached is a nice letter where he is respectfully asked to resign as mayor. We shall see!

  382. rq says

    The CBC on the SAE frat:
    Oklahoma fraternity to close after racist chant caught on video

    President David Boren said he was sickened and couldn’t eat or sleep after learning about the video Sunday afternoon. It shows several people on a bus participating in a chant that included a racial slur, referenced lynching and indicated black students would never be admitted to OU’s chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon.

    Boren attended a pre-dawn rally organized by students and lambasted those fraternity members as “disgraceful” and called their behaviour “reprehensible.” He said the university was looking into a range of punishment, including expulsion.

    “This is not who we are,” Boren said at a midday news conference. “I’d be glad if they left. I might even pay the bus fare for them.” […]

    “I was shocked they were just doing it openly on the bus, like they were proud of it,” said Jared Scarborough, a junior in construction science. “From the chant you could tell they had done it before. It wasn’t a first-time thing. And it was everybody. And the fist-pumping.”

    Oklahoma university expels 2 students over racist video

    OU President David Boren has severed ties with the fraternity. On Tuesday, he expelled the two students who appeared to be leading the chant and said others involved would face discipline.

    But even amid this, Fraternity, sorority membership up amid bad publicity. The entire article is pretty much ‘sure, it may be a toxic atmosphere, but people love it!’. Also, I don’t understand why they call it the ‘Greek life’. I mean, yes, the whole naming system with the letters is Greek, I get that, but… Greek life, to describe the whole culture of sororities and fraternities? (Here in Latvia, the equivalent is just called korporācija, which direct-translates to ‘corporation’ but applies to both sororities and fraternities – with similar behaviours in the fraternities, I might add, but an emphasis on etiquette and lady-like behaviour in sororities.)

  383. rq says

    Busy day, for a Sunday. Let’s get started.

    If you’re in #StL today join @MillennialAU for #BlackBrunchSTL in Forest Park at 11!(Wear all black if possible). #Solidarity I suppose the event is over, but some photos later – but protest continues!

    There’s been some issues on intersectionality popping up again.
    Without intersectionality, “black liberation” are mere words that will only uplift cis-hetero, able-bodied Black men. #NotOnMyWatch

    Pandemonium Inside NYC Council: Protesters Shout Down Bratton Over Requested NYPD Hires, with video.

    Protesters made a scene inside the City Council chamber on Thursday, voicing their displeasure with NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton’s request for money to hire more officers.

    On the very day that the Bratton finally admitted he needs more cops, a small group of dissidents hid themselves around the chamber to systematically interrupt him and shout him down, CBS2’s Marcia Kramer reported.

    It started small, with one woman screaming “It’s a lie!” in the direction of Commissioner Bratton as he started testifying about the NYPD budget.

    Then about half a dozen individual protesters stood up, one at a time, to attack the NYPD’s so-called “broken window” policy of arresting people for low-level crimes.

    The chamber’s sergeant at arms was ordered to remove an unruly individual.

    And then there was pandemonium, protesters chanting “No new cops! No new cops! No new cops!”

    Public Safety Committee Chairwoman Vanessa Gibson first ordered the protestors evicted. Then, talking over screaming dissidents, she gave up and threw everyone out.

    “All members of the public please exit this chamber,” Gibson said. “We’re going to have order in this chamber.”

    Gibson apologized to the commissioner, but he was unperturbed.

    “As Jimmy Durante used to say ‘everybody wants to get into the act.’ Okay, if I may continue,” Bratton said.

    Ironically, given what the protesters had to say, the commissioner said he had finally concluded after a year-long study that the NYPD does need more cops. At 34,000, it’s down 6,000 from his pre-911 high.

    “The Department will be seeking additional officers,” Bratton said.

    It was a 180 for Bratton, who last year said he didn’t need more manpower when the Council wanted to add 1,000 new officers, Kramer reported.

    The commissioner was non-committal about just how many he needs, but one thing he wants is 350 more officers to fight ISIS and other terror groups.

    Madison and Tony Robinson: Coroner: 19-year-old killed by officer shot in head, torso

    A 19-year-old biracial man who was unarmed when killed by a white Madison police officer was shot in his head, right arm and torso, according to preliminary autopsy reports released Friday.

    The reports from the Dane County Medical Examiner don’t say how many times Tony Robinson was shot on March 6, or whether he was shot while facing or turned away from the officer, but they determined he died from “firearm related trauma.” The medical examiner didn’t say when a final report would be released, but said the results of toxicology tests aren’t expected for several more weeks.

    Interlude: music industry! Jay Z just bought a spotify competitor. Can’t seem to cite, but there goes another black-owned business!

    Pittsburgh Rapper Jasiri X Receives Artist As Activist Fellowship Grant

    Jasiri X has made a name for himself as a politically-charged and outspoken Hip-Hop artist, working both as a community activist, as well as a recording artist. The Pittsburgh rapper won $30,000 via fellowship award based on his artistic and activist endeavors.

    Jasiri X’s track record as a rapper has garnered him praise since 2007, especially from within his hometown and similarly-styled rap circles. However, his selection as an Artist as Activist fellow with the New York City-based Robert Rauschenberg Foundation came as a bit of a surprise to him.

  384. rq says

    Sooo… cops. SFPD probes racist, homophobic texts among officers

    The texts — sent between October 2011 and June 2012 among Furminger, other officers and civilians — offer a window into the personal life of a cop who was corrupt in both conduct and character, prosecutors said.

    “Furminger actively promotes the fantasy that he is a person of character, pointing to awards that he has received as a police officer,” prosecutors wrote. “In doing so, he simply disregards the conduct for which he was convicted. … He also fails to advise the court that he is a virulent racist and homophobe.”

    On Nov. 9, 2011, a civilian texted Furminger, “Do you celebrate quanza (sic) at your school?”

    “Yeah we burn the cross on the field! Then we celebrate Whitemas,” he responded.

    On May 10, 2012, Furminger wrote to another officer, according to the documents, “I hate to tell you this but my wife friend (sic) is over with their kids and her husband is black! If (sic) is an attorney but should I be worried?”

    The officer wrote back: “Get ur pocket gun. Keep it available in case the monkey returns to his roots. Its (sic) not against the law to put an animal down.” To which Furminger responded, “Well said!” according to the filing, brought to light in a story posted by KQED News.

    The dozens of texts contain repeated uses of racial and homophobic epithets.

    In response to a text about a black officer getting a promotion, Furminger wrote, “F— n—.” He also repeatedly calls another officer a “fag,” according to the documents.

    The bigoted views expressed in the texts were disgraceful, especially in San Francisco, thought to be a bastion of progressive ideals, prosecutors said.

    “Although these sort of overtly racist views sadly still are expressed in some communities,” they wrote, “it is shocking and appalling to find a police officer in San Francisco who would give voice to them.”

    Scores Attend Funeral for Madison Teen Shot by Cop, more articles on this to come.

    Nearly 1,000 people attended the afternoon funeral in the auditorium of Madison East High School, which had additional seating in the gym, where mourners watched the ceremony on screens, according to NBC News, citing a report at the Wisconsin State Journal.

    In an emotional sendoff, friends and family alike shared stories about the teen, who was known to relatives as Terrell.

    “My nephew was not a victim, because God has called him home to take his place beside our Father on the highest of the thrones,” said his aunt, Lorien Carter, writes the television news outlet.

    The teen was shot by Madison Police Department Officer Matt Kenny on March 6 after a confrontation, police say. NBC News reports that an autopsy report released by the Dane County Medical Examiner’s Office Friday said Robinson was shot in the head, torso and upper body.

    The shooting sparked peaceful protests and occurred as the nation grapples with police violence, namely the use of excessive force, in communities of color. The family asked protesters to put away their signs during the funeral, The Associated Press says.

    Tony Robinson Shooting: 1,000 Attend Funeral for Man Killed by Police, this one with autoplay video.

    At least a thousand people gathered at a Wisconsin high school Saturday afternoon to pay respects to a 19-year-old biracial man who was fatally shot by a police officer more than a week earlier, in an incident that sparked protests.

    The auditorium at Madison East High School surpassed its 1,000 person capacity, prompting additional people attending the funeral for Tony Terrell Robinson Jr. — known to friends and family as Terrell — to filter into the gym and watch the 4 p.m. (5 p.m. ET) service on screens, according to the Wisconsin State Journal. Even more people had come earlier for the two-hour visitation, the Journal reported. […]

    Madison Police Chief Mike Koval expressed throughout the week that he understood the distrust that the shooting caused in the community and encouraged residents to protest peacefully. Robinson’s family also called for peaceful protests, but made clear that they wanted to avoid fostering an “anti-police” environment.

    Meanwhile, in LA: Man Killed in South LA Had Ties to Ezell Ford Case: Attorney

    A man who was fatally shot as he sat in a car in South Los Angeles, California, on Friday night was a possible witness in the Ezell Ford police shooting case, an attorney for the Ford family said.

    The slain man was identified by the LA County Coroner’s Office as 46-year-old Leroy Hill. He was gunned down about 11:49 p.m. near 65th Street and Broadway in what investigators said was a possible gang-related shooting.

    Hill was killed in the same neighborhood where Ford, a 25-year-old mentally ill man, was killed by LAPD officers last August.

    An attorney for the Ford family said Hill was a witness in that case, but his death was unlikely to affect any legal proceeding connected to the Ford incident.

    Municipal courts are well-oiled money machine

    Sheltered from the scrutiny of the state courts, the municipal courts are a system run by municipalities and lawyers that often serve to enrich municipalities and lawyers. Those in power hand out favors and ensure the municipalities and lawyers stay in business by using the state’s point system for drivers as leverage.

    People who can afford lawyers can get even serious cases amended to minor infractions. People who can’t afford lawyers are stuck with answering to the original charge, and sometimes end up in jail if they miss court appearances because they cannot pay.

    A blistering report released by the Department of Justice on March 4 called Ferguson’s police department a collection agency for a “constitutionally deficient” court. The report said city officials were dismissing tickets for friends and family while blaming African-Americans’ lack of “personal responsibility” for their woes in court.

    After the report, Ferguson’s city manager, police chief and municipal judge resigned; the city court clerk was fired; and the Missouri Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of assigning all pending Ferguson cases to the circuit court.

    The government report noted that Ferguson was not alone in its practices. The Justice Department said it was a case study for how other municipal police departments and courts are run.

    The municipal court system delivered more than $52 million to St. Louis County municipalities last year.

    Cheung is one of the most prominent figures in the system. He is the prosecutor in Frontenac, St. Ann and Normandy, and the judge in Ladue. He has worked as prosecutor in Ballwin, Town and Country and Hazelwood.

    Cheung and his colleagues at the Clayton law firm Curtis, Heinz, Garrett & O’Keefe are the judges, prosecutors or city attorneys in more than 20 municipalities in St. Louis County. Those positions, typically part time, paid more than $1 million combined last year.

    The Justice Department report criticized one of the firm’s lawyers, Ferguson prosecuting attorney Stephanie Karr, for fixing a ticket in Hazelwood, another city where she is the prosecuting attorney, at the request of Ferguson judge Ronald Brockmeyer.

    Some lawyers in the firm are among the major players who are involved in just about all aspects of the courts’ operations throughout the region — advising on charges, deciding charges and in some cases, working by day to defend people facing traffic charges.

    After Post-Dispatch reporters opened a wide-ranging inquiry into municipal courts late last year, records showed several lawyers communicated behind the scenes about why the records should not be released.

    More at the link, incl. what the Post-Dispatch investigation found. And it ain’t pretty, big surprise!

    Interlude: tennis! Serena Williams received standing ovation, fought tears and won while ending 14-year boycott at Indian Wells

    The world No. 1 last played the so-called fifth slam as a teenager in 2001, when she defeated Kim Clijsters in the final amidst a hostile, ugly atmosphere during which racial epithets were allegedly used toward Richard and Venus Williams. The sight of an American crowd roundly booing an American star playing an up-and-coming Belgian was one of the oddest, nastiest scenes in recent tennis memory. It all stemmed from a controversy that began two days earlier, when Venus withdrew from a semifinal against her sister minutes before they were set to take the court, renewing accusations that Richard was “fixing” the sisters’ matches. […]

    Afterward, Serena told reporters that this was one of the biggest wins of her life, an amazing statement from the second-greatest Grand Slam champion of all time after an opening-round win at a non-major. And though she was little unsure whether she’d made the correct decision, “receiving the love from the crowd here, it really meant a lot to me.” She eventually knew she was doing the right thing.

  385. rq says

    Back to that intersectionality question, it started with a radio interview. I’m also bothered that Demetrius only talked about black children and men being killed by police and not women, trans & gay folks. @hot1041

    Portraits of protesters aim for ‘stillness’ over chaos. I know I’ve said it before, but I absolutely love this project.

    Photographer Atillio D’Agnostino, artist and organizer De Andrea Nichols and activist Charles Wade are working to create an image of Ferguson protesters that contradicts the pictures of rage and violence often associated with the protests.

    Nichols says a portrait’s focus provides an alternative perspective to common media representation of protesters amid chaos. “In media you see them in the rightful rage or anger and that’s all that the rest of the world gets,” she said, “This project allows that stillness of just looking at the beauty of the people in this movement.”

    D’Agnostino, Nichols and Wade met through various protest connections. Both Wade and Nichols were integral in forming the project and soliciting participants. Nichols also documents some of the sessions and was featured as the 50th post. According to Nichols, selections from the project are being considered by Kevin Strait for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

    D’Agnostino does the primary photographic work. He says the perspectives put forth by police and government official contrast remarkably with his experiences engaging with protesters.

    “They are not interested nor capable in doing anything that would make them dangerous to our community or society yet they’re perpetually met with the reaction by our government leaders, authority, police, that insinuates in some way that they are violent or dangerous,” said the photographer.

    D’Agnostino said he felt that his images would help viewers connect with protesters on an emotional level far from the stresses of late nights, tear gas and police lines.

    “Protest is about love and duty, not destruction,” he said.

    Nichols sees the project as an act that honors connections that have developed among protesters on a personal level. Shoots range from one participant to sometimes seven or eight in a day. According to Nichols, people often trade stories about their experiences while waiting for their picture to be taken. She says the project gives a broader perspective than what can be seen by followers on twitter or watching talk shows. […]

    The project’s creators intend to continue through the anniversary of Michael Brown’s death next August.

    Maybe I should start posting more of it on here.

    Holder to stay a bit longer: McConnell: No Lynch vote unless Democrats relent on bill. So it’s not going to be so easy after all.

    Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Sunday said he plans to hold up attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch’s confirmation until the Senate passes a now-controversial human trafficking bill.

    “This will have an impact on the timing of considering a new attorney general,” McConnell told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.” “I had hoped to turn to her next week, but if we can’t finish the trafficking bill, she will be put off again.”

    Democrats are now holding up the trafficking bill, which glided through the judiciary committee, after they noticed an abortion provision embedded in the bill that would prevent victims of human trafficking from using restitution funds to pay for an abortion.

    “We have to finish the human trafficking bill,” McConnell said. “The Loretta Lynch nomination comes next.”

    A vote on Lynch’s nomination was slated to take place this coming week, more than two weeks after the Senate Judiciary Committee approved Lynch’s nomination.

    Democrats have pointed out that Lynch’s nomination has been held up in the Senate longer than any U.S. attorney general nominee in three decades.

    I’m just a bit… they want to limit access to abortion for victims of human trafficking, which most likely means rape? They really, really, really hate women.

    The tragically unnecessary police murder of Anthony Hill

    Twenty-seven-year-old Anthony Hill was an Air Force veteran in the Iraq War and an extremely talented musician. Beloved by his girlfriend, family, and friends, he was gunned down on Monday by police in Chamblee, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. Unlike so many cases where police officers claim to have seen their victim “reach for a gun,” or strangely dig into their waistband (a thing only police ever see an unarmed black man do), none of those things can be claimed in this instance.

    Anthony, who valiantly and publicly struggled with mental illness and bipolar disorder, was walking and rolling around on the ground in his apartment complex completely naked. Clearly having some type of psychotic episode, witnesses observed Anthony and called police to help him. He threatened no one.

    “He was doing weird movement. He was crawling on the floor, lying down on the floor,” said one witness, who asked not to be identified.

    “He tells me, ‘I’m OK, I’m OK.’ That’s what he was saying,” the witness said.

    The witness said he told the man, identified as 27-year-old Anthony Hill, to go inside or he was going to get arrested.

    “He was acting crazy but he was calm like he didn’t know where he was. He was like kind of lost in his face,” the witness said.

    Sadly, the police did show up. And yes, you guessed it, even in one of the blackest police forces in the country, a white officer, claiming he feared for his life, shot Anthony and killed him. […]

    What circumstance would have been more appropriate to use a Taser than this one in which you are 100 percent sure the man you are approaching is completely unarmed? [Yes, the officer had a Taser.] It must have been obvious that Anthony was struggling through a psychotic episode of some sort. If this officer was trained to deal with those struggling with mental illness, as Dekalb County claims, what in his training did he use here? It appears nothing at all.

    Sadly, we are seeing instance after instance of men and women struggling with mental illness being gunned down by police. A wounded war vet, Brian Beaird was also unarmed and nonviolent when police gunned him down on live television.

    Lavall Hall, struggling with mental illness, had only a red broomstick when police shot and killed him.

    James Boyd, a homeless man struggling with mental illness, was mercilessly gunned down by Albuquerque police.

    Matthew Ojibade’s family called the police for help because of a psychotic episode he was having and gave police his medication. He died in their custody.

    Antonio Zambrano-Montes, homeless and struggling with mental illness, was throwing rocks when police gunned him down like an animal.

    There’s also 17-year-old Kristina Coignard, who was battling through depression when police shot and killed her.

    Milton Hall was completely surrounded by police in Saginaw, Michigan. Confused and struggling with mental illness, they shot at Hall 46 times and killed him.

    This list of men and women battling through mental illness but soon killed by police sadly goes on and on. Something major has to change.

  386. rq says

    Speaking of Anthony Hill, I have never witnessed so many children in tears. #AnthonyHill #blacklivesmatter #atl
    For many of the children in the complex, #AnthonyHill was like a big brother. #blacklivesmatter #atl
    Residents of Hills apartment complex express their love for him. #AnthonyHill #blacklivesmatter #atl

    Gah, this is from that radio broadcast mentioned above. Jeff is saying that the DOJ report proves that Ferguson pd uses black ppl in the community as an ATM, not that the officers dislike blk ppl.

    Grand Juror Sues McCulloch, Says He Mischaracterized The Wilson Case . It’s an older article, but keep this in mind for later.

  387. rq says

    Municipal fines? Sure. But there’s another cost to fixing the court system. Points system was designed to get dangerous drivers off the road in Missouri

    But municipal courts in St. Louis County are undermining that system by amending virtually any traffic case when the defendant is represented by a lawyer.

    “It’s a subversion of the intent of the point system,” said Mike Right, vice president of public affairs for AAA in St. Louis, an auto club and insurance company that pushed for the point system.

    “It’s great for the drivers, who avoid having points on licenses and suffering consequences on their insurance,” he said. “But it’s not allowing the point system to do what it was supposed to do.”

    In short. I can guess who is getting the benefit of that.

    Interlude: business. Owners of Chicago’s only Black-owned B&B make it worth the trip. A short, positive read.

    #BlackBrunchPDX happening now in Portland to honor victims of police violence @deray @Awkward_Duck @Nettaaaaaaaa

    And basically tonight’s remaining news will focus on this: Arrest Made in Connection With Shooting of Two Police Officers in Ferguson

    An arrest has been made in connection with the shooting of two police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, officials said Sunday afternoon.

    Jeffrey Williams, 20, who lives just north of Ferguson, was charged with two counts of assault in the first degree and one count of firing a weapon from a vehicle, police said at a press conference Sunday afternoon. He is being held on $300,000 bond, police said.

    He could face up to life in prison, if convicted of the charges. St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch said during a news conference Sunday that Williams admitted to firing the shots that hit the two police officers, but the suspect claimed to have been in an argument with someone else, and said he wasn’t specifically targeting the officers.

    But McCulloch said investigators don’t “completely buy” Williams’ story. “We’re not 100 percent sure that there was a dispute. That’s something that’s being investigated,” McCulloch said, asking for anyone who witnessed the shooting to share information with law enforcement.

    McCulloch also urged the public to come forward to assist in the investigation into whether anyone else was involved. “It’s possible that there may have been other people with him at the time” of the shooting, McCulloch said. Witnesses, who provided information to police, aided in the arrest of Williams, who was protesting before the shooting and has protested before, McCulloch said.

    Going to be lots of twitter commentary on this.

    Prosecutor: Man held in wounding of two officers at Ferguson may have been shooting at someone else

    A man who participated in a protest outside the Ferguson police station Wednesday night returned to the area and fired shots — possibly at someone other than police — that wounded two officers, authorities said Sunday.

    Jeffrey Williams, 20, was charged with two counts of first-degree assault, one count of firing a weapon from a vehicle and three counts of armed criminal action. He was in custody, with cash-only bail set at $300,000.

    “It is possible that he was firing at someone other than the police,” St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert P. McCulloch said at a press conference Sunday. He said there had been civilians between Williams, who fired from a car, and the officers who were wounded.

    He said Williams may have acted on a dispute with people over something that had nothing to do with the demonstration, but added, “I’m not sure we’re completely buying that part of it.”

    “We’re not 100 percent sure there was a dispute,” McCulloch noted.

    He said Williams admitted firing the shots and indicated they were not at police. Some of the statements are supported by physical evidence, and some aren’t, he said.

    “I wouldn’t say he wasn’t targeting police,” McCulloch said. “I’m saying right now the evidence we have supports filing the charge that he may have been shooting at someone other than police and struck the police.”

    He said it may turn out that police were the targets, but either way essentially the same charges would apply.

  388. rq says

    First, more on the #BlackBrunch: We did #BlackBrunchSTL at South County on Telegraph Rd. and as a result the restaurant is paying for everyone’s food and they’re pissed.
    They tried role-playing protest, too: Where two white people dressed as cops were beating @MalcolmXcelsior and shot him while he was face down. #BlackBrunchSTL
    One white man yelled “hit him again!!” And another white woman walked up to one of our officers and touched her shoulder #BlackBrunchSTL
    Once she touched her shoulder she said “if they followed the law it wouldn’t happen.” #BlackBrunchSTL

    Back to the arrest in Ferguson: Police: Suspect arrested in shooting of two officers in Ferguson

    In a news conference Sunday, officials identified the man as Jeffrey Williams, 20. Officials said that Williams, who is African American, lives in the St. Louis area and that he had attended the demonstration earlier in the evening and other demonstrations in Ferguson in the past. But several prominent protest leaders said they had not seen him before.

    As the demonstration was ending, Williams allegedly fired four shots from atop a hill near the police station, striking the two officers. Robert McCulloch, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, said that Williams had admitted firing the shots but had told officers that he was aiming at someone else and struck the police by accident.

    “He may have had a dispute with some other individuals. . . . I’m not sure we completely buy that part of it,” McCulloch said. “We’re not sure there was a dispute.” McCulloch said that there were demonstrators located between the officers and the gunman at the time the shots were fired but that investigators had not located anyone who had been in a dispute with Williams earlier in the evening.

    McCulloch said that Williams fired at least some of the shots from inside a car. He said that investigators had recovered a .40-caliber handgun in Williams’s possession that matched shell casings found at the scene. McCulloch said that Williams had been charged with two counts of assault in the first degree, as well as with firing a weapon from a vehicle.

    At the time of the shooting, McCulloch said, Williams already had a warrant out for his arrest; he was on probation for receiving stolen property and had not checked in with his probation officer in seven months.

    I see Holder is out with a statement already, too.

    Ferguson suspect charged over officer shootings named as Jeffrey Williams, that’st he Grauniad link.

    A protester has admitted to shooting two police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, and is facing life in prison after being charged with assaulting them, authorities said on Sunday.

    Jeffrey Williams acknowledged “that in fact he did fire the shots that struck the two officers” outside the Ferguson police department late Wednesday night and the gun used has been seized, St Louis County prosecuting attorney Bob McCulloch said at a press conference.

    However Williams, 20, claims he was not aiming for the police officers and that the shots were part of a dispute with other civilians who were in the area, according to McCulloch. The prosecutor added: “We’re not sure we completely buy that part of it.” […]

    Demonstrators had insisted the shooter had no connection to their movement, which has protested during the seven months since officer Darren Wilson shot dead Michael Brown after an altercation that followed the unarmed black 18-year-old being stopped for jaywalking.

    However, McCulloch said Williams “is a demonstrator” and “was out there earlier in the evening as part of the demonstration” and had been at past demonstrations. The prosecutor added that Williams’s statement was he was firing at other people as part of a dispute ,“which had nothing to do with the demonstrations that were going on”.

    “It’s possible, at this point, that he was firing shots at someone other than the police but struck the police officers,” said McCulloch, who later added: “There were civilians between where the shooter was located and the officers.”

    More on that ‘protestor’ and ‘demonstrator’ label later.

  389. rq says

    Fox2Now: Suspect admits to firing shots that struck two officers in Ferguson

    At a Sunday afternoon news conference, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch said that Williams has admitted to firing the shots that struck the officers. Williams was at the protest in Ferguson Wednesday. He left, possibly after a dispute, and then later returned and fired shots from inside a vehicle, possibly at someone other than police. A handgun has been recovered and matches shell casings from the scene.

    “We’re not 100 percent sure there was a dispute,” McCulloch said at the news conference.

    Even if police were not the intended targets, Williams would face the same charges.

    I have to say, I’m a bit skeptical about him facing the same charges if the police were not the intended targets. At the very least, I’m doubtful he would have been arrested that quickly.
    Speaking of which, The investigations on the killings of VonDerrit & Kajieme have not yet concluded. Can they get this type of special treatment?

    Quick detour to NY: #AkaiGurley aunt: we need to hold all officers accountable for murders committed #JusticeforAkaiGurley #pinkhouses

    Ferguson: Group seeking mayor recall signatures

    Five residents Friday filed an affidavit saying they’ll try to force a referendum on whether to remove Mayor James Knowles — capping a tumultuous week in a community grappling not only with last year’s fatal shooting of teenager Michael Brown, but also Wednesday’s wounding of two police officers shot during a protest.

    A group supporting the filing, Organization for Black Struggle, a 35-year-old St. Louis-based activist group, said the five would try to collect enough signatures — 15% of the city’s registered voters — in the next 60 days.

    The five “initiated recall (attempt) due to Mayor Knowles’ failure to adequately rein in an out-of-control police department during the protests following Mike Brown’s death,” the activist group said.

    The city government acknowledged Saturday that it received the affidavit.

    Quite a bit more at the link, but basically, Knowles says he won’t step down.

    And no, this shooting has not shifted the momentum of the movement in any capacity. If anything, it’s reminded us to question the police.

  390. rq says

    I know the information is out there, but here’s some commentary frmo the press conference:
    Belmar and McCulloch might be the two least reliable sources of credible information in Missouri. This press conference’ll be interesting.
    Jeffrey Williams charged w two counts of assault and other charges, McCulloch just announced ;
    McCulloch: It’s possible that the suspect was firing at somebody other than police. Weapon has been recovered tied to the shell casing.
    McCulloch notes that the shooter “has acknowledged” his role in the shooting, that he did fire the shots. Ferguson Shooting.
    Notice how McCulloch framed this that the shooter is a protester targeting cops, despite the shooter claiming he wasn’t? @Nettaaaaaaaa
    McCulloch says that the suspect is a protestor and that he was at the protest earlier in the evening.
    Contradictory? Ha. Of course. Comment on that next comment.

  391. rq says

    I don’t know what happened. Who did what or why? Re: police shooting. But I do know community has 0 faith in these cops to be honest

    Just interviewed a man who visited #JeffreyWilliams today – says Williams claims he was robbed by a demonstrator who he targeting-not police;
    Correction: @deray On @CNN Bishop Derrick Robinson said he talked to Jeffrey Williams. JW told him that he was NOT a protester.
    @deray Bishop Derrick Robinson said Jeffrey Williams told him that he was targeting someone who robbed him.
    The dispute in question seems to be this one, Protesters brawl in street outside Ferguson PD,

    Two protesters got into a brawl in the street outside of the Ferguson Police Department Thursday night. The altercation took place shortly before two police officers were shot and rushed to the hospital. Witnesses say the men were voicing their frustration about the Department of Justice report regarding the Ferguson Police Department and the city’s municipal court system.

    About 60 protesters gathered near the Ferguson Police Station. They were chanting and blocking traffic on South Florissant Road for much of the night. Many were celebrating the news that Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson had resigned and calling for more changes.

    Those changes include the resignation of Mayor James Knowles.

    McCullough appears to have been trolling with that comment about Williams being a protester. “Oh, I meant back in August!”
    Yeah, because several protestors have said they don’t recognize him.

  392. rq says

    See?
    Looking at this guys photo and I’ve never seen him. In passing or a protest.
    No, I cannot recall ever seeing the suspected shooter, Jeffrey Williams, at any protests, including the night in question.
    Just for the record I barely recognize Jeffrey Williams he wasn’t a regular protester #Ferguson
    Us protesters are a FAMILY! We ALL know each other. We ALL recognize each other. This random dude doesn’t register.
    Gone to #Ferguson protests/events since August and never saw this shooter. Judging by my TL no one else has either.
    Judging from what I and other reporters remember, and some prominent activists, this guy was no mainstay, if he had ever protested at all.

  393. rq says

    Attendance at #Ferguson protests is fluid, shifting and well-documented. If shooter were a regular would be easy to find evidence.

    72 Hours Ago: Ferguson Shooter = Embedded w/ protestors. Ambushed officers. Now: Shooter in a car, 100 yards away, wasn’t shooting @ police – or, as someone else put it, They’re telling us this random 20 year old dude from North County basically had some Taken Liam Neeson type skills #Ferguson

    In St Louis an officer was shot as recently as December with little media fanfare. Current hype is effort to shape #Ferguson narrative.

  396. rq says

    Ruffina Anklesaria, an @ILoveFerguson member, says she supports Mayor Knowles & wants peace to come back to her city;
    Kenneth Wheat says he wants more African Americans to “show how they really feel,” says he supports the good police;
    Correction: small group of protesters speaking out against #Ferguson police arrived earlier. H/t @MissingUSnews.

    Police supporters retreat back into the #FergusonPD lot. Protesters follow. #Ferguson

    Prosecutor: Man held in wounding of two officers at Ferguson may have been shooting at someone else

    Danielle Dear, 27, who said she is pregnant with Williams’ child, told a reporter in a telephone interview Sunday afternoon that she spoke with Williams that morning.

    “He just told me that he was involved in a shooting with some people. He said it wasn’t police,” Dear said. “I didn’t really want to know anything else.”

    Dear, who said she is around Williams often, said she doesn’t believe that he was a regular protester in Ferguson.

    Just for that final quote from his gf. The rest is same info as everywhere else.

  397. rq says

    Random commentary from people on twitter.
    According to Robinson, Williams was beaten by police last night, and his chest and body covered in bruises that the minister says he saw;
    According to Bishop @derrb3, Williams did not have an attorney as of the presser & had not received medical attention or food today.

    “@LaurieSkrivan: Protesters and pro-#Ferguson police clash on Sunday afternoon 3-15-2015 ” A community divided.
    There was a forum today for candidates for Ferguson City Council. Not many citizens attended. video via @ShetheStreet

    #EndPoliceBrutality #BlackBrunchSTL #BlackBrunch @MillennialAU #Ferguson #ABanks #BlackLivesMatter
    Today’s #BlackBrunchSTL @MillennialAU #Ferguson #ABanks #BlackLivesMatter
    Those last two with photos.

  398. rq says

    @deray I took this pic the night of the verdict .. It’s forever my favorite . Because nice photo.

    There are 43 Ferguson related bills in the Missouri Legislature and the republican majority is stalling them. #moleg #Ferguson

    Monday Mourning. Mayor Knowles’ House. Protest. Ferguson.
    Here’s the flyer given to Mayor Knowles today. Protest. Monday Mourning.
    #Ferguson protesters get an early start – at the home of Mayor Knowles, demanding his resignation. Pic via @deray

    A person yelled at us today, “This is a restaurant.This is not a place to protest!” Was he here too? #BlackBrunchSTL

  399. rq says

    CBC on the arrest of Williams, with more voice to protestors (second half): Ferguson protests: Jeffrey Williams, 20, arrested in shooting of police officers

    Brittany Ferrell, 26, a protest leader with the group Millennial Activists United, had just left a meeting with other leaders Sunday when word of the arrest circulated. She said no one in the group knew Williams, and they checked with other frequent protesters — who also hadn’t heard of him.

    Ferrell suspected McCulloch tried to cast him as a protester to reflect negatively on the movement.

    “This is a fear tactic,” she said. “We are very tight-knit. We know each other by face if not by name, and we’ve never seen this person before.”

    John Gaskin, a St. Louis NAACP leader, said of Williams, “I don’t know him. I’ve never seen him.”

  400. rq says

    What’s the update on the guy arrested re: the #NAACPBombing?

    Many Conservatives are Blowing it on the Ferguson DOJ Report – from Red State.

    I took the time over the weekend to read the entirety of the 102-page Department of Justice report on the Ferguson PD (“FPD”). I cannot recommend highly enough that you do the same. During the course of this reading, I intentionally read it with as jaundiced of an eye towards the Department of Justice as possible. I intentionally disregarded all commentary regarding what the DOJ investigators reported that they saw, and also all of their reported interviews of the citizens of Ferguson and FPD officers. I decided to say to myself, let’s assume that everything DOJ says is a lie, and also that everyone who was willing to talk to the DOJ during the course of their investigation either lied or shaded the truth. What remained astounded me.

    Even if you read only the parts of the Ferguson DOJ report that come directly from the files of the FPD (which is to say, files that would be most favorable to the Department), the report paints an incredibly damning picture of the Ferguson Police Department. No conservative on earth should feel comfortable with the way the Ferguson PD has been operating for years, even according to their own documents.

    The reflexive defense of the FPD by conservatives tends to come from two sources: the first is the belief among many conservatives that Officer Darren Wilson was telling the truth and that the witnesses and friends of Michael Brown were lying – and thus by extension, the DOJ is perceived to be taking the “Michael Brown side” and therefore is not credible. However, this particular source of distrust makes no sense as the DOJ likewise did not charge Officer Wilson in connection with the Michael Brown shooting. Thus, insofar as the credibility of a person is judged by whether they believe the spurious “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative, the DOJ comes down on the side of conservatives.

    The second is the belief that the FPD was unfairly targeted by the DOJ as retribution for the fact that Officer Wilson was not indicted by the local authorities. Many conservatives I have spoken to are of the opinion that the FPD is no worse than any other police department and that they oppose the FPD being targeted simply because of the Michael Brown incident. I suppose this is probably true, but what I don’t understand is why that is seen as a feature, not a bug. The information I am going to describe below is appalling and breathtaking. If Ferguson is no worse than other cities, then why don’t we say that the problem is that all cities need to look very hard at fixing their municipal police departments, rather than that the Ferguson PD should be excused?

    As I was discussing some of the racial disparity statistics last night on twitter, one person contended with me that I should recognize that blacks were targeted for stops in Ferguson at a lower rate than they are nationally. If true, doesn’t that indicate that the problem is bigger, not smaller, than we suppose? Are we this committed to a news narrative that is friendly to our ideological tribe that we view it as completely excuplatory that a given police department is less racially biased than the average police force in America?

    Enough with the preamble. Let’s get in to what the Ferguson DOJ report says – again, completely ignoring all the portions generated from DOJ interviews or commentary. See if you are truly comfortable with a municipal police force operating in this manner.

    So yes, there follows a closer look at the report. What I liked about the article was that the first ad that appeared, between the first two paragraphs, was a Fiskars ad for pitchforks and shovels. It seemed appropriate, generally speaking.

    Important to read. Why I didn’t call the police when I saw two black boys with guns next door

    On the first day of winter’s thaw, I saw two teenage boys on the roof next door holding guns. I don’t know much about guns, except that they kill and that young black men holding them are likely to be killed. I called my husband, trying to keep panic out of my voice so as not alarm my own children. He looked out the window. “Jesus. Call the police”.

    After Michael Brown, John Crawford, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice – especially after Tamir – calling the police didn’t seem like the solution here.

    “Don’t you see who it is”? I told him. “Eddie and Aaron”.

    The boys’ lower-income apartments squat dwarfed by the shadow of our larger middle-income building. An invisible red line and a bright blue spiked fence separate us. Any of our fourth floor neighbors could see them as well we could. I’ve known both since they were small children, but I could see them through the eyes of a stranger, or through my husband’s first glance: two young African-American men, in hoodies, armed. […]

    But we are not in Texas and neither boy looks anything like my Caucasian husband or his ruddy, blonde cousins. Eddie is short and compact, full of muscles. Aaron is lanky, already taller than most grown men. No one is going to think they’re playing cowboys and Indians. They don’t get to be cops, only robbers. In their hands the black, snub nosed guns look real. I think of the news and of another unarmed teenager shot dead by police in Wisconsin. Tony Robinson. […]

    My husband stayed watching Eddie and Aaron. Just in case. In case what? Someone else called the police? The guns turned out to be real? Wasn’t this waiting for something to go down? How would I live with myself if I did nothing now, when action mattered? Just when I decided to go out, they disappeared down the roof hatch.

    Eddie’s mother called on Monday afternoon. I told her the boys had been on the roof playing with BB guns and before he recognized them my husband had almost called the police. I wanted them to get in trouble, but with their mothers, not the law. I also wanted them to know I was the one who told on them. And when I run into them they’re going to get in trouble with me.

    Missouri Senate committee approves $8.5M for emergencies after Ferguson exhausted funds. The National Guard ain’t cheap, I guess.

    Senate Appropriations Committee members unanimously endorsed a bill Monday that included three of Gov. Jay Nixon’s numerous requests in the supplement to the current year’s budget, meant for emergencies and unperceived expenses. Two of those would provide $8.5 million of general revenue for the state’s emergency and disaster response after those funds were depleted because of the August shooting death of Michael Brown and the protests that followed.

    About $11.5 million was spent after Nixon called in the Highway Patrol and the National Guard to assist local police officers in the response, leaving $6.7 million for emergencies in the remaining four months of the current budget year, which ends June 30. State Budget Director Linda Luebbering said that could leave the state unprepared for another emergency should it happen this year.

    Committee members initially contested that statement, but Luebbering told the Post-Dispatch that the Department of Public Safety outlined needs for the additional money, including expenses related to the Joplin tornado and other local projects for disasters such as flooding.

    Committee Chairman Kurt Schaefer, R-Columbia, said the money spent on Ferguson should be audited.

    The third request included in the measure passed Tuesday was unrelated to Ferguson but still needed for emergency response projects. The measure allows for the authority to pass $124 million — the amount requested by the Department of Public Safety — of federal money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for disaster recovery projects, such as those related to the tornado in Joplin, through the State Emergency Management Agency to reimburse building projects. The state had $80.5 million for the current year but has used nearly all of that authority. In fact, more than $25 million worth of projects now awaits reimbursement.

    11.5 million. Whew.

    Urban League to announce building a $500,000 jobs center on former Quick Trip site in Ferguson. QT donated property;
    Urban League of STL President Mike McMillan at press conference announcing plans for the QT location in #Ferguson.

  401. rq says

    The NYPD admits it edited Eric Garner and Amadou Diallo’s Wikipedia page, attempted to delete Sean Bell’s page. No action will be taken. No repercussions for fooling with the truth. Huh.
    Oh, sorry, I meant they’ll be punished in proportion to the crime. 2 NYPD Officers Who Edited Wikipedia Pages Face Slap on Wrist. Oh. Never mind, then:

    “Two officers, who have been identified, were using department equipment to access Wikipedia and make entries,” Commissioner Bill Bratton said at an unrelated press conference on Monday afternoon. “I don’t anticipate any punishment, quite frankly,” he added.

    The two officers — whose names were not released — do not work in Police Headquarters, and are assigned to two different units from one another, sources said.

    They are expected to be spoken to by Internal Affairs Bureau investigators, but barring any additional infractions, sources said they will not face any punishment for what they did to the Wikipedia pages.

    Since Wikipedia is a publicly accessed and edited web encyclopedia, it’s not inappropriate for NYPD officers or anyone else to visit pages and edit references they believe are technically inaccurate, sources said.

    “That is their First Amendment right,” a law enforcement source said.

    The NYPD doesn’t have a policy specific to accessing Wikipedia but is in the process of reviewing its social media rules to give additional guidance to its personnel, Bratton said.

    The two NYPD officers are likely to only face a minor reprimand for using department computers for personal activity, sources said.

    “We are quite clear that when you are using city computers it is supposed to be for city business. This was not authorized business,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Monday.

    9 students from HBCUs Fisk and Tennessee State have filed a federal lawsuit against the TN’s heavily contested & controversial voter-ID law. Good luck to them!!

    White people can claim slurs & rape comments as free speech. Black people get killed by police for “talking back.”

    Man trespassing in Southeast D.C. Metro tunnel shot, killed by police officer

    The Metrorail Operations Control Center reported an “unauthorized person” on the tracks Thursday night outside of the Potomac Avenue station, about two stops from the U.S. Capitol, just before 9 p.m.

    Metro officers responded. A female officer encountered the man about 400 feet from the station along the westbound tracks between Potomac Avenue and the RFK Stadium stop, Metro spokesman Dan Stessel said.

    “Shots were fired by the officer using a department-issued service weapon” and the man was pronounced dead at the scene, Stessel said. “It is not yet known how the man entered the tunnel, what he was doing there, why, etc.”

    Officials declined to say Friday whether the man was armed or how he may have threatened the police officer. Investigators identified him Friday as 35-year-old Bobby Gross.

    No officers were injured in the shooting, said Metro Transit Police spokesman Mike Tolbert. It was not clear whether the officer used any nonlethal force against the man prior to shooting. All Metro police officers carry pepper spray and an impact weapon, such as a baton or nightstick, in addition to a firearm, Stessel said.

    A D.C. police homicide unit was leading the investigation into the shooting Friday, though police released few details.

    Police and naysayers always looking for a leader to shake down. Well guess what, we are all leaders. #BlackBrunchSTL

  402. rq says

    #TraumaCenterNow: Why We Shut Down Michigan Avenue [link redacted] @cocoakinks @VeronicaBars_, link here: Trauma Center Now: Why We Shut Down Michigan Avenue

    The main reason I volunteered my body for the human chain that blocked northbound traffic on Michigan Avenue is because I am committed to pressuring the University of Chicago to reopen its level 1 trauma center at the UChicago’s medical facility. Since Fearless Leading by the Youth began the fight to restore this vital service in our community, all our efforts have been met with is traditional racist excuses. UofC spokespeople say, “the service will be a significant burden that will undercut other services already provided to the community.” For me, a black queer youth (under 25), this is unacceptable.

    Another reason I participated in blocking traffic is because disenfranchisement is real and the University of Chicago needs to be called out for it. Too often filthy rich institutions, UChicago for instance, racially alienate poor people of color by avoiding issues that overwhelmingly impact black communities. The devastating amount of black lives that are lost along the 10 mile journey from the south side to seek trauma care, and the pain black families live with, are significant burdens that undercut our right to life as black people and the quality of our black families and communities we exist in. A trauma center would be less than 1% of the 4.5 billion dollar goal for the University of Chicago Campaign: Inquiry and Impact. What I understand when they, Sharon O’Keefe specifically, hide behind the financial undertaking of a trauma center is that to Sharon O’Keefe and company black lives don’t matter.

    For me, the Trauma Center Campaign is about fighting for a fundamental way greedy white America, and all who benefit from, embody and reinvent white supremacy and structural racism, can be accountable (pay the fuck up) for the legacy of terrorism that seeks to kill black life and liberation. The University of Chicago and all of its elusive glory continues to grow and develop in my community without responding to the demands and real life needs of my community, the black community. I will not stop, nor will the Trauma Center Campaign ease up from, exposing the anti-black position Sharon O’Keefe has taken as a health provider in my community.

    More reasons and opinions at the link.

    50 Years Ago, Lyndon Johnson Delivered The Most Perfectly Radical Speech In Presidential History

    The movie Selma, which documents the Alabama state troopers’ terrorist attack on the voting rights marchers and the events that surrounded this attack, inspired a vigorous debate over whether Johnson was an eager ally of the marchers or, as the film depicts him, a much more reluctant supporter. Regardless of whether President Johnson leaped into the battle for voting rights or whether he was pushed, however, his speech firmly established him as American apartheid’s most powerful enemy. It also stands out as one of the most radical — if not the most radical — speeches ever delivered by a president.

    Johnson’s speech described the sheer creativity of Jim Crow officials seeking to keep African Americans from casting a ballot. “Every device of which human ingenuity is capable, has been used to deny this right,” Johnson explains, before laying out the impossible maze of hostile registrars, strategically closed offices and voting tests a black citizen must navigate to register to vote. “[T]he only way to pass these barriers,” Johnson explained, was “to show a white skin.”

    Yet LBJ did far more than simply lay out his case for a Voting Rights Act. He presented the cause of the men and women who were beaten at Selma as part of a moral failing that indicts America’s very soul. “[S]hould we defeat every enemy, and should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal” to the issue of equal rights for African Americans, “then we will have failed as a people and as a nation.”

    Read that last line over again, then imagine what would have happened to President Obama if he’d ever claimed that Congress must enact health reform or “we will have failed as a people and as a nation.” […]

    Johnson’s speech was, in many ways, a test of just how completely he had vanquished his opponent in the 1964 presidential elections, Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, and whether the ideology that drove Goldwater’s campaign could finally be cast aside in America’s golden age.

    Goldwater, for reasons that I explain in more detail in Injustices, was a somewhat unlikely champion for white supremacists. He’d supported weaker civil rights bills in 1957 and 1960. And he supported integrating the Arizona Air National Guard when he served as its chief of staff. Ultimately, however, the Barry Goldwater of 1964 cared more about a narrow, philosophical objection to government intervention than he did about the rights of African Americans struggling to break free from Jim Crow.

    Less than a year before Selma, LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which, among other things, banned race discrimination by employers and many businesses. Goldwater, however, denounced this law as a supposed violation of business owners’ “freedom not to associate.” He also criticized the ban on whites-only lunch counters as a threat to states rights. In a speech on the Senate floor, Goldwater announced that he could find “no constitutional basis for the exercise of Federal regulatory authority in either of these areas; and I believe the attempted usurpation of such power to be a grave threat to the very essence of our basic system of government.”

    Yet, while Goldwater feared governmental action, especially against private business, as an inherent threat to freedom, Johnson saw government as the agent of justice — and it was the mission of the United States government to achieve this justice. To LBJ, the “cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people” that reached their climax at Selma were almost like a kind of prayer, and that prayer had “summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great government.” Once summoned, its mission was “at once the oldest and the most basic of this country–to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man.”

    Five months later, Johnson would sign the Voting Rights Act into law, and America would soon see concrete proof of how effectively its national government could serve the cause of justice. Within just two years, black voter registration in the white supremacist stronghold of Mississippi increased nearly ninefold. […]

    Johnson’s radicalism, in other words, carried the day in 1965, but it is constantly under threat by another, even more radical vision of what America should be.

    Cops. LAPD Officer Arrested at US-Mexico Border for Alleged Human Smuggling.

    Protesters Say “Good Morning” To Mayor Knowles – from Monday morning. Or mourning, as they write it.

    Just after dawn, a dozen or so demonstrators showed up at the home of Ferguson mayor James Knowles. Blasting Kanye West’s “Good Morning” from a laptop, amplified with a bullhorn, the protestors stood on the sidewalk until the embattled city leader emerged from the small A-framed house. […]

    According to raw video posted from the scene, Knowles politely spoke to the protesters and handed out his business card with his cell number. A patrol car was parked at the end of the street.

    Keep it cool, Knowles. Go you.

    We are here today bc #BlackLivesMatter we e here 4 #ShareeseFrancis matters! Here 4 #UnheardVoices @NYC_ShutItDown

  403. rq says

    In Chicago, Torture survivor Anthony Holmes at Finance Comm mtg @ChicagosMayor justice delayed is justice denied #rahmrepnow
    Dozens of supporters at Finance Committee meeting to stand up 4 Reparations 4 Burge torture survivors #RahmRepNow

    Police deny claims that officers beat Ferguson shooting suspect

    Late in the day, defense attorney Jerryl Christmas suggested that police had used excessive force during the arrest. Christmas told the Associated Press that Williams had bruises on his back, shoulders and face and a knot on his head. A pastor who visited Williams in jail made similar allegations, and Williams’ mug shot appeared to show at least one red mark on his cheek.

    Authorities denied wrongdoing.

    “The St. Louis County Police Department calls these allegations completely false,” St. Louis County police spokesman Brian Schellman said in an email to the Los Angeles Times, adding that “the arrest team had an overwhelming presence and Williams did not resist whatsoever.” […]

    Robinson drew wider attention Monday after an appearance on national television in which he said Williams had been “set up” by police and that he’d been “brutally beaten” and “coerced,” according to one interview he gave on MSNBC. Robinson did not make similar remarks to The Times on Sunday. […]

    A local government employee is also in trouble for suggesting in an interview with national media that the shooting of the two police officers was “a set-up between members of the police fraternity.”

    John Muhammad, the village clerk of Uplands Park, a couple miles from Ferguson, has been suspended and will be the subject of a village board meeting over remarks he made in an interview with Fox News, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

    Muhammad said in the interview with Fox News that police “operate just like the KKK. I think they did it to make themselves a victim when honestly the victims are black people. I think it’s just a publicity stunt, no more than that,” the Post-Dispatch reported.

    Missouri LT. Governor: “More Racism In The Justice Department” Than Entire St. Louis Area. I bet he means reverse racism, yes?

    “The whole blow up of this protest movement was based on the lie that never happened of ‘hands up don’t shoot,’” Peter Kinder, the Lt. governor told NewsMaxTV’s Steve Malzberg Show Monday. “But it’s bad enough the protestors were behaving that way but we have a right to expect more from the attorney general, the head of the Justice Department of the United States, and the president of the United States. And instead what we got too often from them was incitement of the mob, and, uh, encouraging disorder in Ferguson and distributing the peaceable going-about of our lives in the greater St. Louis region.”

    Kinder added President Obama and Eric Holder “took one side” following the death of Michael Brown. Asked why, he said the Justice Department was “staffed with radical, hard-left radical, leftists lawyers.”

    He called the Justice Department under Holder, “not like any Justice Department in American history” and “Eric Holder is unlike any previous attorney general.”

    “Many of them have spent most of their careers defending Black Panthers and other violent radicals,” he added. ”

    Kinder said “where reforms are needed they’re being made,” citing resignations of police officers and the Ferguson city manger.

    Responding to a question he said, “there is more racism in the Justice Department than there is any, uh, yes, anywhere that I see in the St. Louis area.”

    “We are making progress. We’ve come an enormous way in 50 years,” he said, adding, “we still have more to do.”

    “It is the left. It is the Eric Holder and Obama-left and their minions who are obsessed with race. The rest of us are moving on beyond it,” he concluded.

    Yuh, it’s all Holder and Obama and all their minions obsessing over race, when really by now it’s the poor white man being putupon and oppressed by social justice and affirmative action policies. Gross.

    Here’s an interesting read: A Response to Fat White Activism From People of Color in the Fat Justice Movement

    While fat activism in the United States continues to be predominantly white, there is an emerging wave of fat People of Color (POC) activists moving out into all aspects of our communities. Joining with fat POC activists who have been working for years to create space for the unique challenges faced by POC within our mainstream diet culture, this has the potential to be a time of enormous shift in the perception and face of fat activism in the U.S. We are excited to be a part of this paradigm shift, and to see more of our experience reflected in the work of fat activism.

    […]

    This can be seen in the recent “Stand4Kids” campaign, most recently renamed the “I stand against weight bullying” campaign (seen here) launched by Marilyn Wann. This campaign is a great example of a provocative and direct action within the fat community, created to address fat shaming and body prejudice aimed at the children of Georgia through positive images of people of all sizes. The Georgia campaign “Strong4Life” (mentioned earlier in this letter) features a high number of children of color, and is being primarily aimed at children of color in Georgia’s poor neighborhoods. The primary organizer of “Stand4Kids/I stand against weight bullying” does not share these lived experiences, and while that truth does not mean that the organizer should not lead the project, it does raise a flag that the difference in experience between the organizer and the communities being addressed must be bridged in order to develop authentic and lasting relationships. Because the campaign launched through a crowd sourcing technique on Facebook, many of the first respondents were similarly white fat activists. As the campaign grew, it was reposted numerous times by many other white fat activists, none of whom were publicly critical of the lack of representation in the images and in the campaign’s design and implementation.

    At that time, a group of POC fat activists began to discuss their disappointment at both the campaign and lack of critical response by the larger fat community. A person of color raised questions on the “Stand4Kids” tumblr about the tools used to make the project inclusive, the intent and possible effect of the projects in communities of color, and the ways in which these images would be used to support children of color in Georgia. The response was disappointing: these discussions had not happened within this project, and the commenter was told that if they wanted to support diversity within the project, they, as a person of color, should join the project’s Facebook page and offer solutions. More recently, the organizer of the campaign did address this posted concern to acknowledge that the proper outreach had not been done, and that she would take the questions posed on board.

    As the project has grown and moved outside of its immediate sphere of contact, more and more people of color have began to participate. To date, the images on the “Stand4Kids/I stand against weight bullying” campaign site are still predominantly white individuals. Our critique of this campaign is not intended to imply that the campaign should not exist, that the organizers should not do the work, or that the images that have been created will not be effective in inspiring residents of Georgia to oppose the “Strong4Life” campaign. We offer this critique as one example of a fat activist action moving forward into a campaign without initial discussion of the inclusion of, or impact to, the communities it seeks to serve. Luckily, conversations can happen at many points during a movement; there are countless opportunities for growth, connection, and coalition. […]

    White allies of the fat justice movement:

    Flying by the seat of your pants, when it comes to addressing the real concerns and questions around diversity and inclusion of POC in fat activist spaces or campaigns, will no longer be good enough.

    POC in the fat justice movement deserve thoughtful and clear discussions around not just the intention of diversity and inclusion in the work you wish to do, but also the actual impact of the work within communities of color.
    POC in the fat justice movement demand and deserve that white fat activists build authentic collaborations with communities of color and work as allies.
    POC in the fat justice movement demand and deserve allies showing up to the table of our campaigns and work, rather than constantly being told they have made a place for us at theirs.
    POC in the fat justice movement clarify that our allies will practice doing the work of learning about the histories and impacts of colonization and oppression on POC, seek other allies to learn from and with, be open to dialogue, taking feedback, and allowing people’s firsthand experiences of racism to be the final and authoritative voice on the subject of impact to communities of color.
    POC in the fat justice movement offer that through the work of authentic inclusivity, singular vision will become shared vision. Coalition will happen. Bridges will be mended and built.

    We are looking forward to a stronger, more representational expression of fat community in which POC and poor people’s voices are heard, their experiences are respected, and their work to strengthen their individual communities is supported just as they work to support others.

    Please join us.

    Back a few months ago, a mom and her son were arrested inside McDonald’s. Falsely. Fed judge won’t dismiss false arrest claim by mom & son detained in #Ferguson McD’s amid “riot” (CC: @WesleyLowery) , see attached paperwork.

  404. rq says

    And in Ann Arbour:
    Protestors at #AnnArbor City Council Meeting. Mayor Taylor giving a not so subtle warning to us not to disrupt…
    Mayor Taylor just told protestors they will be arrested and charged with a misdemeanor if there is a disruption at tonight’s meeting.
    #AuraRosser investigation revealed one police officer used a taser.. One used a gun. But no one has ever addressed why. #BlackLivesMatter
    City council member just announced forum on community policing next month- result of previous demonstrations for #AuraRosser
    Protestors hold up signs for #AuraRosser at #AnnArbor city council meetings. #BlackLivesMatter
    City Council Members don’t know this is a silent protest. They’re waiting for us to start yelling.. Their anticipation is palpable.

  405. rq says

    Uuhhhmmmm.. So This Happened: California Car Thief Spray Paints Face Black To Throw Cops Off.

    Darren Wilson spoke on Friday night at a fundraiser held for him by a STL-area law enforcement legal support group. THEY HELD ANOTHER FUNDRAISER FOR HIM.

    NYPD Tells Cops To Stop Questioning People Just For Hanging Out In Housing Projects

    The department issued an internal memo telling all officers that they cannot stop people just for being present in a building enrolled in Operation Clean Halls. The largest NYPD union is not happy.

    Uh, that’s basically a link linking to the BuzzFeed article here.

    The memo, issued last week, is part of a settlement between the NYPD and the plaintiffs in Ligon vs. City of New York, a 2012 class-action lawsuit in which black and Latino Bronx residents alleged that cops were abusing the provisions of a decades-old policing program to harass people in their own buildings.

    “A uniformed member of the service may not approach a person merely because the person has entered or exited or is present near a building enrolled in the trespass affidavit program,” the NYPD memo states.

    The Trespass Affidavit Program — also known as “Operation Clean Halls” — began in 1991, the year when violent crime peaked in New York. The program identified buildings where criminal activity was allegedly taking place, and asked landlords to grant the NYPD permission to enter the building at any time and arrest anyone who could not prove he or she was a tenant or legitimate visitor.

    According to the Ligon complaint, NYPD officers “routinely detain residents of Clean Halls Buildings and their visitors without individualized suspicion of unlawful activity and make arrests or issue summonses without probable cause of criminal activity. For residents of Clean Halls Buildings and their visitors, merely exiting a Clean Halls Building frequently leads to being stopped, searched, and interrogated by NYPD officers on public sidewalks and in exterior courtyards.”

    Most of the buildings in the Bronx are enrolled in the program, as are some 3,900 buildings in Manhattan, the Atlantic reported.

    Backed by the NYCLU, the Bronx Defenders, and other civil rights organizations, the Ligon case was one of several class-action lawsuits brought against the NYPD under then-Commissioner Ray Kelly. The most famous of the lawsuits, Floyd v.s. City of New York, resulted in dramatic changes in the way the NYPD uses the controversial tactic of “stop and frisk.”

    The Trespass Affidavit Program allows cops to perform “vertical patrols,” in which officers climb to the top of public housing towers and then work their way down through the stairwells. It was during one of these patrols that Officer Peter Liang shot and killed Akai Gurley, an unarmed black man, as he headed to his partner’s apartment in the Pink Houses, in the East New York section of Brooklyn.

    Liang has since been indicted on criminal charges stemming from Gurley’s death.

    The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association — the largest NYPD union — issued a statement criticizing the new policy.

    “The courts have given those with criminal intent the right to loiter in places that they have no legitimate reason to be,” PBA President Pat Lynch said in a statement. “The court is protecting the rights of criminals while blatantly violating the rights of residents to have a home free of threats and criminality. The personal rights pendulum has swung way out of control.”

    Memo available at the buzzfeed link.

    Ferguson Mayor James Knowles faces recall effort, with autoplay video (though the Post-Dispatch doesn’t usually have them, which confused me at first!).

    With his chin-strap beard and glasses, Knowles has served as the public face of a city at the center of a national debate about race relations for the past seven months, ever since then-Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson shot 18-year-old Michael Brown.

    Now that five city employees have lost their jobs in the aftermath of a blistering Department of Justice report on the city’s police department and municipal court, the calls for Knowles’ head have grown increasingly loud.

    Knowles said that there had been moments when he questioned whether he should leave, but that ultimately, the city needed stability.

    “Walking away right now is just not the way I roll,” he said.

    But the mayor, 35, may not have a choice.

    Five residents notified city hall that they had formed a committee to gather signatures to force a recall election, the first step in a removal process outlined in the city’s charter. It appears the group would have 60 days to gather roughly 1,800 signatures, about 15 percent of the number of people who were eligible to vote in the last mayoral election.

    Nick Kasoff, one of the signees, said Knowles had repeatedly embarrassed the city with tone-deaf statements, including one about a week after Brown’s shooting, when Knowles told a reporter that the city did not have a racial divide.

    “It’s like he’s pulling random things out of thin air and making Ferguson look ridiculous,” Kasoff said.

    The DOJ report found that the city used its police department as a “collection agency,” to ticket residents and generate revenue through fines and court fees. It criticized Knowles for trying to have a ticket dismissed for someone he knew through volunteer work.

    “It (the police and court system) has abused people in a way that finally caught national attention because of Michael Brown,” said Kasoff, who ran against Knowles for a city council seat in 2009. “James Knowles was the one who made the policies that formed that government.”

    But Knowles, who is a weak mayor without veto power, noted that his role was mostly ceremonial and said one of the most frustrating parts of speaking for the city was that people assumed he has more power than he actually does.

    According to an email obtained by the Post-Dispatch, Knowles had advocated in October for dismissing Ron Brockmeyer, the city’s former municipal court judge.

    The email, addressed to the rest of the City Council, details how DOJ representatives and residents brought concerns about Brockmeyer that “overshadowed even concerns about the Police Department.”

    It goes on to describe Brockmeyer’s taking cellphone calls during trials and his “blatant disregard for due process.”

    “I’m tired of hearing about him,” Knowles wrote. “I didn’t want him reappointed last time anyway because of issues that I’ve heard over the years.”

    In an interview, Knowles declined to say why the council did not remove Brockmeyer before the he stepped down last week.

    In other less racist news, New York High School Will No Longer Use “Redskins” As A Mascot. Yay! Small step, good step.

    Lancaster School District created a website dedicated to the debate, offering a place for interested parties to hear arguments for both sides. On a page called “Pros and Cons Websites,” the school listed two Change.org petitions: One in support of the name with 2,802 supporters, and one opposed to the name, with 1,684 supporters. Another link on the page is RedskinsFacts.com, a PR firm–backed propaganda website that attempts to defuse criticism of the Washington football team.

    During the contentious meeting, school board member Wendy Buchert said that “although the decision is not popular, we must make an immediate decision to change the mascot” to benefit the students. Buchert argued that the debate itself had the potential to cause harm to the educational and athletic opportunities of Lancaster students.

    School board President Kenneth Graber explained that the nickname was chosen by football coaches in the 1950s and was meant to honor the bravery and courage of the Native American community.

    “That was then, this is now,” he said. “People, ethics, and standards evolve. What was acceptable 70 years ago is not acceptable now. Native Americans do not feel honored.”

    The school board showed unanimous support for changing the name. Patrick Uhteg told the crowd the school has an obligation to set a good example and protect the emotional and academic interests of the school.

  406. rq says

    First a family rep and now the (just hired) attorney for Jeffrey Williams says he was beaten during his arrest, implying coercion.

    Rookie LAPD Officer Wanted For Murder In Shooting Death. Such heroes, the boys in blue.

    Cop Says Killing Black People Is Okay Because ‘It’s Not Against The Law To Put An Animal Down’. Read that twice and double-check to make sure it’s still 2015.

    Some of the things the officers were caught saying include the following list, compiled by Alternet from a a federal document made public last Friday:

    • “We got two blacks at my boys [sic] school and they are brother and sister! There cause dad works for the school district and I am watching them like hawks.”

    • In response to a text asking “Do you celebrate quanza [sic] at your school?” Furminger wrote: “Yeah we burn the cross on the field! Then we celebrate Whitemas.”

    • “Its [sic] worth every penny to live here [Walnut Creek] away from the savages.”

    • “Those guys are pretty stupid! Ask some dumb ass questions you would expect from a black rookie! Sorry if they are your buddies!”

    • “The buffalo soldier was why the Indians Wouldnt [sic] shoot the n****rs that found for the confederate They [sic] thought they were sacred buffalo and not human.”

    • “Gunther Furminger was a famous slave auctioneer.”

    • “My wife has 2 friends over that don’t know each other the cool one says to me get me a drink n****r not knowing the other is married to one just happened right now LMFAO.”

    • “White power.”

    • In response to a text saying “n****rs should be spayed,” Furminger wrote “I saw one an hour ago with 4 kids.”

    • “I am leaving it like it is, painting KKK on the sides and calling it a day!”

    • “Cross burning lowers blood pressure! I did the test myself!”

    • In response to a text saying “All n****rs must fucking hang,” Furminger wrote “Ask my 6 year old what he thinks about Obama.”

    • In response to a text saying “Just boarded train at Mission/16th,” Furminger wrote “Ok, just watch out for BM’s” [black males].

    • “I hate to tell you this but my wife friend [sic] is over with their kids and her husband is black! If [sic] is an Attorney but should I be worried?” Furminger’s friend, an SFPD officer, responded: “Get ur pocket gun. Keep it available in case the monkey returns to his roots. Its [sic] not against the law to put an animal down.” Furminger responded, “Well said!”

    • In response to a text from another SFPD officer regarding the promotion of a black officer to sergeant, Furminger wrote: “Fuckin n****r.”

    Think Progress notes that only 6% of San Francisco’s population are African American, and yet they are seven times more likely than Caucasian residents to be arrested by the police.

    There was an article on this yesterday. Still disgusting.

    Another good-cop story. Wit the classic unhappy ending. BREAKING: Cop Actually Stopped Other Cops From Beating Guy Up! (Then Got Fired.)

    It took a couple of years, but there’s finally been a bit of justice done in Bogota, New Jersey, where a judge has ordered the police department to reinstate, with back pay, Regina Tasca, a genuinely good cop who was fired in 2012 after stopping two fellow officers, who were fellows, from beating the living crap out of a mentally ill man who only needed to be taken to a hospital. Instead of getting a commendation for excellence in serving the community, Tasca was suspended and ultimately fired for being “psychologically unfit.” […]

    As the videotape begins, you can hear Tasca requesting that the ambulance be sent with no lights, no siren — no need to upset Kyle unnecessarily. If you can stomach watching the tape, it’s pretty incredible. Kyle’s upset, refusing to go to the hospital, and Tasca is doing her job, talking to him, de-escalating the situation. And then, because obviously the little lady cop who just completed training on dealing with mentally ill citizens is not Tuff Enough, the backup officer tackles Kyle and everything goes to hell.

    And yes, it’s Tasca who got fired for breaking up the beatdown. You see, she was a troublemaker, having complained to the higher-ups about harassment on the job, so it was easier, all in all, to just get rid of her for being a pain in the ass. To move that process along, one of the other cops on the scene and Tasca’s boss lied in their reports about the incident:

    During her hearing to get her job back, the attacking officer, from neighboring Ridgefield Park Police, Sgt. Joseph Rella, admitted to covering up punching the victim. He also admitted to lying about his training in dealing with emotionally disturbed people, and violating protocol with his tackle and punch.

    Rella never faced any discipline for his brutal actions that day.

    Tasca’s boss, Captain Jim Sepp, also admitted to lying in his report to get her fired. He failed to interview witnesses, twisted quotes from Tasca and destroyed his notes used to make his report.

    Sepp never faced any discipline for lying to get a good cop fired.

    No word yet on how Eric Holder has encouraged lawlessness by not allowing cops to beat mentally ill people up, but we suppose Fox will get to that eventually.

    More crap at the link.

    And then there’s this Hang Loose t-shirt by @tavik.

    Oregon is first state to adopt automatic voter registration

    Under the legislation, every adult citizen in Oregon who has interacted with the Driver and Motor Vehicle Services Division since 2013 but hasn’t registered to vote will receive a ballot in the mail at least 20 days before the next statewide election. The measure is expected to add about 300,000 new voters to the rolls.

    “It just changes expectations for who’s responsible for making elections work,” said Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and director of the Elections Research Center. “In every other state it’s the responsibility for the voters to make sure it happens.”

    Some other states have considered such legislation but none has gone as far as Oregon.[…]

    Two years ago, when the measure was first proposed, Green said there were questions about whether the Driver and Motor Vehicle Services Division records were confidential under federal law. The legislative counsel determined the secretary of state and the division could share information as long as it was for legitimate government purposes, he said.

    People eligible to vote will get a postcard saying they’ve been registered and have three weeks to opt out. They’ll be automatically registered as unaffiliated but can select a political party from the postcard and return it to election officials through the mail.

    Automatic registration is not uncommon in other countries. A 2009 report by the Brennan Center for Justice says nations where the government takes the lead in enrolling voters have much higher registration rates. Argentina has a 100 percent registration rate, while Sweden, Australia and Canada all have registration rates over 90 percent.[…]

    “Oregon is a true leader in accessibility to voting and I challenge every other state in this nation to examine their policies and find ways to ensure there are as few barriers as possible in the way of the citizen’s right to vote,” Brown said.

    So all you need is to try and get a driver’s license.

  407. rq says

    Starbucks to encourage baristas to discuss race relations with customers. Umm, okay, are they going to have special training on that, too?

    Starbucks published a full page ad in the New York Times on Sunday — a stark, black, page with a tiny caption “Shall We Overcome?” in the middle, and the words “RaceTogether” with the company logo, on the bottom right. The ad, along with a similar one on Monday in USA Today, is part of an initiative launched this week by the coffee store chain to stimulate conversation and debate about the race in America by getting employees to engage with customers about the perennially hot button subject.

    Beginning on Monday, Starbucks baristas will have the option as they serve customers to hand cups on which they’ve handwritten the words “Race Together” and start a discussion about race. This Friday, each copy of USA Today — which has a daily print circulation of almost 2 million and is a partner of Starbucks in this initiative — will have the first of a series of insert with information about race relations, including a variety of perspectives on race. Starbucks coffee shops will also stock the insert.[…]

    The initiative follows several months of consultations with employees that started in December, in part as a result of protests that roiled several U.S. cities after grand juries declined to indict white police officers in the killings of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., near St. Louis, and 43-year-old Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y.

    Schultz has met with almost 2,000 Starbucks employees since then in cities hit most directly by racial tension and anti-police brutality protests in the last year, including Oakland, St. Louis, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Seattle, where Starbucks is based. Cognizant of what a powder keg the issue of race is, Starbucks says its baristas will be under no obligation to engage with customers on the topic. The goal is simply to foster discussion and an exchange of ideas.

    Well, there was reaction:
    “Remember that time we enslaved you guys?? That was wild right? Whew! ANYHOO, how would you like that chai?”
    “Here’s your macchiato! Let’s discuss the historic disenfranchisement of your people that has allowed me to prosper.”
    The only folks happy about Starbucks baristas discussing race with customers are the suits who run it. Feel-good liberalism at its worst.
    y’all realize there are no coloured hands in the press photos right @Starbucks #RaceTogether
    Is @Starbucks in its #RaceTogether convo gonna speak about how their logo was “borrowed” from a black Yoruba Goddess?
    Also a new hashtag, I think #NewStarbucksDrinks, like ‘Latte from a Birmingham Jail’ and ‘Malcolm Xpresso’. That may or may not be the correct hashtag.

  408. rq says

    One more on that Starbucks fantasbulous idea: Like, @Starbucks, this is your manager two weeks ago. You’re not ready for race relations lol (a manager calling police on #BlackBrunch protestors in Starbucks).

    In NYC, protest continues.
    #PeoplesMonday in #GrandCentral NYC now, demonstrating for women victimized by cops. #VoicesOfTheUnheard
    6 facts about #ShareeseFrancis, suffocated to death in her bed, wearing her nightgown, by 4 NYPD cops who walked free;
    #PeoplesMonday for #ShereeseFrancis & all women victimized by cops has taken the streets. #VoicesOfTheUnheard
    #PeoplesMonday demonstrating in Times Square for #ShereeseFrancis & all women victimized by cops. #VoicesOfTheUnheard
    Reading the facts of #ShereeseFrancis murder, suffocated to death by 4 NYPD cops in her bed, in Port Authority NYC.

  409. rq says

    Oh, BTW, these are the goodies raffled off at trivia fundraiser for Darren Wilson last Friday. A gun raffle. 12 guns as the prize. Various kinds. …

    I must see this in YouTube form RT @mattdpearce: Looks like some Roorda and @Deray action happening on CNN right now. Waiting for hte youtube.

    Another reason why science education (in this case, botany) is important. Virginia school suspends an 11-year-old for one year over a leaf that wasn’t marijuana

    Earlier this school year, a sixth-grader in the gifted-and-talented program at Bedford Middle School in Bedford, Virginia was suspended for one year after an assistant principal found something that looked like a marijuana leaf in his backpack.

    The student, the 11-year-old son of two school teachers, had to enroll in the district’s alternative education program and be homeschooled. He was evaluated by a psychiatrist for substance abuse problems, and charged with marijuana possession in juvenile court. In the months since September, he’s become withdrawn, depressed, and he suffers from panic attacks. He is worried his life is over, according to his mother, and that he will never get into college.

    The only problem? The “leaf” found in the student’s backpack wasn’t what authorities thought it was — it tested negative for marijuana three separate times.[…]

    The school’s lawyer, Jim Guynn, is quoted in the Roanoke Times article defending the policy on the basis that “it’s a pretty standard policy across the Commonwealth.” In 2011, for instance, four seventh-graders in Chesapeake, Virginia were suspended over bringing a bag of oregano to school. A quick Google search suggests similar policies are in effect in many other states as well.

    It doesn’t matter if your son or daughter brings a real pot leaf to school, or if he brings something that looks like a pot leaf — okra, tomato, maple, buckeye, etc. If your kid calls it marijuana as a joke, or if another kid thinks it might be marijuana, that’s grounds for expulsion. […]

    The Bedford case is a microcosm of drug policy — especially marijuana policy — at the national level. Most of the harm associated with marijuana use comes not from using marijuana, but from getting caught up in the strict punishments meted out by the criminal justice system for using it.

    The harm that the Bedford school district inflicted on this boy is far greater than any harm he could have incurred by eating an actual marijuana leaf, or even smoking it, or even smoking a dozen leaves.

    Fortunately, kids are resilient. With any luck the student will start to bounce back once his year of probation and mandatory pat-downs is over. But as the parent of two boys, the prospect of this sort of ordeal terrifies me.

    School official caught on camera saying: ‘I don’t like black kids’

    In the cellphone video posted on YouTube, a student asks Scandinavian Middle School Vice Principal Joseph Defillipo, “Who at this school do you not like?”

    His response was, “I just don’t like the black kids.”

    Latricia Medley has a child attending Scandinavian Middle School. She saw the online video and told Action News: “I was like shocked. Why would you want to put something like that on camera in front of a bunch of kids.”

    We asked her if she thought perhaps Defillipo was trying to make a joke.

    “That’s not a joke,” she said. “That’s not a very funny joke.”

    And nobody’s laughing. Students at the school tell Action News that they had heard all about it. Most seemed to have already downloaded it on their phones. Some were repeating the words “don’t like black kids” loudly on campus.

    The school district is taking it seriously. A written statement to Action News reads:

    “The interaction between the Scandinavian student and our employee has been brought to our attention and we are conducting an investigation. Fresno Unified takes this matter very seriously and we will take any necessary actions pending the results. During our investigation, and as a matter of practice, the employee is on paid administrative leave.”

    Medley says she has had conversations with Defillipo and never had a sense of any racism, but can’t get over what she saw and heard online.

    “I think he should be fired,” she said. “Why should we have to have our kids overseen by someone that don’t like them?”

    New NYC Program Aims to Create 5000 Women Entrepreneurs from Low Income Neighbourhoods. Can’t seem to cite, but it reads like a good program.

    Jonathan Capehart: ‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot Was Built on a Lie,’ I Was Wrong

    On Monday, Washington Post liberal columnist Jonathan Capehart joined an ever-growing chorus of pundits who are embracing the Justice Department’s most recent claims that, based on “credible” evidence, Michael Brown did not have his hands up in a mode of surrender when former Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot him.

    Earlier this month, after the DOJ cleared Wilson of civil rights violations in connection with Brown’s death, many on the right began pointing to a specific part in the DOJ report that says the claim Brown had his hands up before Wilson shot him was “inconsistent with the physical evidence” and “not credible.”

    In a Monday Post column titled, “Hands up, don’t shoot was built on a lie,” Capehart did what few commentators have done: write an entire column admitting they were wrong. […]

    Capehart went on to say that Brown is an “inappropriate symbol” for the unstable relationship between African-Americans and law enforcement, as well as for police “militarization” against protesters. The DOJ report, he wrote, “made me ill.”

    “Through exhaustive interviews with witnesses, cross-checking their statements with previous statements to authorities and the media, ballistics, DNA evidence and results from three autopsies, the Justice Department was able to present a credible and troubling picture of what happened on Canfield Drive,” Capehart wrote. “More credible than the grand jury decision to not indict Wilson. The transcript of his grand jury testimony read like so much hand-holding by the prosecution.”

    He also acknowledged another DoJ report which found that Ferguson police officers sent racist emails and disproportionately targeted African-Americans for traffic stops and other misdemeanors, and said the outcome of the Brown shooting investigation should not “diminish the importance of the real issues unearthed in Ferguson by Brown’s death,” which are being exemplified by the “Black Lives Matter” movement.

  410. rq says

    The white Confederates defending the south’s honor in Selma

    As thousands marched across Selma’s Edmund Pettus bridge this weekend, a small band of white people were less than a mile away, mourning the loss of the Confederacy and guarding a memorial to a white supremacist.

    Live Oak cemetery is a burial site for Confederate soldiers in the civil war and contains the grave of Edmund Winston Pettus, the general – and member of the Ku Klux Klan – after whom the town’s bridge was named.

    There has been a growing campaign to rename Selma’s bridge given its association with the Confederate south, and dozens of students had planned a peaceful march to the cemetery. They quickly changed plans after discovering the neo-Confederates were waiting for them.
    Obama in Selma: Ferguson report shows civil rights ‘march is not yet finished’
    Read more

    “‘March’ is a military term,” explained Todd Kiscaden, 64, who had traveled to Selma from his home in Tennessee to defend the memorial site. “In any military context, if you’re going to march on my castle, I’m going to man my barricades.” […]

    Pat Godwin, from the Selma chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy –which owns the confederate memorial site – conceded that the marchers had said they would be peaceful. “But on their website it said they were going to be protesting,” she added.

    Godwin, who lives on a ranch 15 miles out of town named Fort Dixie, showed no enthusiasm for the 50th anniversary events taking place nearby.

    She described a local black woman who organises the annual commemorative events in Selma as “a race hustler”. The civil rights footsoldiers who were attacked by Alabama state troopers on what became known as Bloody Sunday in 1965 “got the resistance they were seeking”, she said.

    Kiscaden, who owns a coal mine in Kentucky, had an equally peculiar interpretation of history. He disputed that Forrest was a a founding member of the Klan, which he said played a positive role in bringing about law and order in the south when it was first conceived in the 1860s. (He distinguished the original Klan from the hate group of the same name that, he conceded, orchestrated lynchings.)

    “The people in the south – the white people, who were being abused – organised a neighbourhood watch to try to re-establish some order,” he said of the nascent Klan. Slavery in the south was “a bad institution”, he said, but possibly “the mildest, most humane form of slavery ever practiced”.

    “If you look at the wealth created by the slaves, in food, clothing, shelter, medical care, care before you’re old enough to work, care until you died, they got 90% of the wealth that they generated,” he said. “I don’t get that. The damn government takes my money to the tune of 50%.”

    Kiscaden and Godwin insisted they were not racist. But they made plain that they hankered for a revival of some of the ideals most Americans believe were defeated in 1865.

    “The Confederate government never surrendered,” Kiscaden said. “So are we still in operation? Maybe we’ll find out. I happen to think that our history from 150 years ago is about to catch us.” […]
    A black high school teacher from Portland, Oregon, said he was especially shocked at the sight of one man guarding the perimeter of the Confederate grave site with a German Shepherd dog. Steve Fits, the owner of the dog, denied it was there to defend the cemetery. “He’s not a guard dog,” he said. “He’s my pet.”

    A short while later, Chuck Fager, 72, a junior member of Martin Luther King’s staff in the 1960s who later wrote a book about Selma, happened to wander past.

    “They’re peaceable enough to talk to, but they’re very serious about their beliefs,” he said. “Most media don’t pay attention to these folks and I think that’s a mistake. They’re a real group, they have real support, and they’re up to stuff that we don’t always see or hear about.”

    Now: Black Panther Party march around the Austin streets. #sxsw2015 gets all the attention, we’re the only reporters. See photos.

    Men Just Don’t Trust Women — And It’s A Huge Problem. Relevant paragraph:

    This is part of the reason why it took an entire high school football team full of women for some of us to finally just consider that Bill Cosby might not be Cliff Huxtable. It’s how, despite hearing complaints about it from girlfriends, homegirls, cousins, wives, and classmates, so many of us refused to believe how serious street harassment can be until we saw it with our own eyes. It’s why we needed to see actual video evidence before believing the things women had been saying for years about R. Kelly.

    There’s an obvious parallel here with the way (many) men typically regard women’s feelings and the way (many) Whites typically regard the feelings of non-Whites. It seems like every other day I’m reading about a new poll or study showing that (many) Whites don’t believe anything Black people say about anything race/racism-related until they see it with their own eyes. Personal accounts and expressions of feelings are rationalized away; only “facts” that have been carefully vetted and verified by other Whites and certain “acceptable” Blacks are to be believed.

    So how do we remedy this? And can it even be remedied? I don’t know. This distrust of women’s feelings is so ingrained, so commonplace that I’m not even sure we (men) realize it exists. I can do one thing, though. The next time my wife tells me how upset she is about something I’m not sure she should be that upset about, trust her. After five months of marriage, eight months of being engaged, and another year of whatever the hell we were doing before we got engaged, it’s the least I can do.

    The importance of trusting the voices less heard.

    Bye bye Brockmeyer. Lawyer resigns from fifth municipal post in wake of DOJ report

    Lawyer Ronald J. Brockmeyer resigned Monday from his job as prosecuting attorney in Breckenridge Hills, said Mayor Jack Shrewsbury.

    “He has resigned,” said Shrewsbury without elaboration. He said that the city received the resignation in a letter Monday.

    Brockmeyer also has resigned from posts either as municipal prosecutor or municipal judge in Ferguson, Dellwood and Vinita Park and has been placed on open-ended leave from Florissant.

    All the resignations followed a Justice Department report released March 4 that said Brockmeyer used his position as municipal judge to generate revenue for Ferguson. The state Supreme Court assigned a judge to the St. Louis County Circuit Court to handle Ferguson cases. Brockmeyer said at the time that he resigned because his family had received death threats.

    The Post-Dispatch has reported that Vinita Park Mayor James McGee said Brockmeyer “was fair and compassionate to all people” and that he would be difficult to replace.

    Florissant Mayor Thomas P. Schneider praised Brockmeyer for his service in the Vietnam War, which left him wounded.

    “It is his and my fervent hope that his recent resignations will aid in the healing process and mend the wounds we are suffering from in our region and nation,” Schneider said last week.

  411. Pteryxx says

    An Alternet interview with the professor who coined the term “white fragility”: Rawstory link

    As an anti-racist educator for more than two decades, [Robin] DiAngelo has heard versions of it recited hundreds of times by white men and women in her workshops.

    She’s heard it so many times, in fact, that she came up with a term for it: “white fragility,” which she defined in a 2011 journal article as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include outward display of emotions such as anger, fear and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence and leaving the stress-inducing situation.”

    […]

    SAB: Something that amazes me is the sophistication of some white people’s defensive maneuvers. I have a black friend who was accused of “online harassment” by a white friend after he called her out in a harsh way. What do you see going on there?

    RD: First of all, whites often confuse comfort with safety. We say we don’t feel safe, when what we mean is that we don’t feel comfortable. Secondly, no white person looks at a person of color through objective eyes. There’s been a lot of research in this area. Cross-racially, we do not see with objective eyes. Now you add that he’s a black man. It’s not a fluke that she picked the word “harassed.” In doing that, she’s reinforcing a really classic, racist paradigm: White women and black men. White women’s frailty and black men’s aggressiveness and danger.

    But even if she is feeling that, which she very well may be, we should be suspicious of our feelings in these interactions. There’s no such thing as pure feeling. You have a feeling because you’ve filtered the experience through a particular lens. The feeling is the outcome. It probably feels natural, but of course it’s shaped by what you believe.

    SAB: There’s also the issue of “tone-policing” here, right?

    RD: Yes. One of the things I try to work with white people on is letting go of our criteria about how people of color give us feedback. We have to build our stamina to just be humble and bear witness to the pain we’ve caused.

    In my workshops, one of the things I like to ask white people is, “What are the rules for how people of color should give us feedback about our racism? What are the rules, where did you get them, and whom do they serve?” Usually those questions alone make the point.

    It’s like if you’re standing on my head and I say, “Get off my head,” and you respond, “Well, you need to tell me nicely.” I’d be like, “No. Fuck you. Get off my fucking head.”

    In the course of my work, I’ve had many people of color give me feedback in ways that might be perceived as intense or emotional or angry. And on one level, it’s personal—I did do that thing that triggered the response, but at the same time it isn’t only personal. I represent a lifetime of people that have hurt them in the same way that I just did.

    And, honestly, the fact that they are willing to show me demonstrates, on some level, that they trust me.

    SAB: What do you mean?

    RD: If people of color went around showing the pain they feel in every moment that they feel it, they could be killed. It is dangerous. They cannot always share their outrage about the injustice of racism. White people can’t tolerate it. And we punish it severely—from job loss, to violence, to murder.

    For them to take that risk and show us, that is a moment of trust. I say, bring it on, thank you.

    When I’m doing a workshop, I’ll often ask the people of color in the room, somewhat facetiously, “How often have you given white people feedback about our inevitable and often unconscious racist patterns and had that go well for you?” And they laugh.

    Because it just doesn’t go well. And so one time I asked, “What would your daily life be like if you could just simply give us feedback, have us receive it graciously, reflect on it and work to change the behavior? What would your life be like?”

    And this one man of color looked at me and said, “It would be revolutionary.”

  412. Pteryxx says

    Students in Tennessee have filed a federal lawsuit against the voter-ID law that prevented them from voting in 2014. The Root: 9 HBCU Students Just Made the Voter-ID War Hot Again

    At the moment, said Doug Johnston, a Barrett Johnston lawyer on the case who has also worked aggressively against the state’s voter-ID law since its passage in 2011, the current suit doesn’t seek “to dismantle the whole voter-ID law.” However, it will seek to reverse what his clients view as violations of their constitutional rights under the 14th and 26th amendments. “The basis of this lawsuit is really very simple,” Johnston told The Root. “It’s an attempt to have students treated in the same manner as similarly situated individuals.”

    Johnston points to identification cards for state university faculty and staff, which are perfectly legal to use at the polls—and yet student IDs are not accepted: “The law’s denial of the use of student IDs when exactly the same ID is OK for others is unconstitutional.”

    In its complaint (pdf), NSOC argues that Tennessee’s strict voter-ID law, which only allows for a limited number of photo IDs, “intentionally discriminates against out-of-state college and university students, and has the purpose and effect of denying and abridging the right to vote on account of age.”

    At the heart of the case is a dispute over out-of-state student rights; the nine plaintiffs, ages 18 and 19, are originally from states such as California, Illinois, Michigan and Ohio. But they are all legal residents of Nashville, holding official state-issued student IDs. Lawyers argue that the current Tennessee voter-ID laws are too restrictive: Even though out-of-state students can apply for free identification licenses at Driver Service Centers, the process is too burdensome and effectively prevents them from voting.

    Lawyers for NSOC might be on to something. The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law highlights Tennessee as being among 15 states with the most restrictive voter-ID laws in the nation. And a recent federal Government Accountability Office report found turnout among Tennessee voters ages 18-23 had dropped by more than 4 percentage points in recent election cycles since the law was enacted.

    Tennessee House Republican Caucus press secretary Cade Cothren dismissed the notion that student voting rights have been violated and worries that “frankly, student IDs are easier to fake.” He told The Root, “If a student only has a student ID, they are eligible for a free ID from their local DMV.”

    But when asked for empirical evidence or data showing instances of actual student-ID fraud, Cothren came up short: “Beyond anecdotal evidence, there is not. These statutes were passed to prevent fraud from occurring in the first place.”

  413. Pteryxx says

    Salon on the Supreme Court housing discrimination case that will challenge the disparate impact standard: Salon

    Because America’s primary vehicle for wealth accumulation is our homes, much of the explanation of the racial wealth gap lies in unequal homeownership rates. According to the Brandeis/Demos analysis, equalizing homeownership would reduce the racial wealth gap by 31 percent for blacks and 28 percent for Latinos. This effect is muted because centuries of discrimination—including racial exclusion from neighborhoods where home values appreciate, redlining, and discriminatory lending practices—mean that people of color are segregated into relatively poor neighborhoods. Indeed, in 1969, civil rights activist John Lewis bought a three-bedroom house for $35,000 in Venetian Hills, Atlanta. He and his wife were the first black family in the middle-class neighborhood. In his book, “Walking with the Wind,” he notes that, “within two years… the white owners began moving out.” Had the value of his house simply kept up with inflation, it would be worth $222,881 today. But Zillow shows that three-bedroom houses in Venetian Hills, Atlanta, are currently selling for around $65,000 to $100,000.

    Systematic disinvestment in communities of color means that even when blacks and Latinos own their homes, they are worth far less than white homes. In addition, blacks and Latinos are targets of shady lending. They are more likely to be offered a subprime loan even if they are qualified to receive a better rate. In the wake of the financial crisis, big banks like Blackstone scooped up foreclosed homes and are now offering them to people of color to rent, further pulling wealth out of these communities to benefit rich whites.

    […]

    The Supreme Court is set to decide Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, a landmark case challenging the disparate impact test, which allows a practice to be considered discriminatory if it disproportionately and negatively impacts communities of color, even if a discriminatory intent can’t be proven.

    The case involves an excellent example of why disparate impact is so important: Nearly all of the tax credits that the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs had approved were in predominantly non-white neighborhoods. At the same time, the department disproportionately denied the claims in white neighborhoods. A federal judge decided that regardless of racial intent, the result had a “disparate impact” and increased neighborhood segregation. As Nikole Hannah-Jones has extensively documented, disparate impact has been crucial in holding banks accountable. For instance, the Justice Department used it to settle with Bank of America for $335 million after it was discovered that a mortgage company purchased by BofA had been pushing blacks and Latinos into subprime loans when a similar white borrower would have qualified for a prime loan. Because there was no official policy that required blacks and Latinos to get worse loans, the case would not have been won but for the disparate-impact statute.

    The Supreme Court has already decimated the Voting Rights Act, opening the door for onerous restrictions on voting. They upheld a law banning affirmative action at state universities and have already crushed integration efforts at K-12 schools. Worryingly, as Demos Senior Fellow Ian Haney López told ProPublica, “It is unusual for the Court to agree to hear a case when the law is clearly settled. It’s even more unusual to agree to hear the issue three years in a row.”

  414. rq says

    Pteryxx @412
    Well, I like to cover myself in bandaids just in case I happen to cut myself somewhere, you know? :P

    +++

    Car prominently displayed at Ferguson demonstrations towed

    A car which has been prominently displayed at demonstrations across the St. Louis area was towed from the owner’s apartment complex for being “unsightly.”

    The car has phrases like “no justice, no peace” and “I can’t breathe” spray-painted onto it. The phrases support Michael Brown Jr. and Eric Garner, who were both killed during encounters with police.

    The owner of the car, Lala Moore, told News 4 her vehicle was towed from her apartment complex after the complex’s manager said the car was unsightly and her lease requires Moore to keep the car in good repair.

    Moore said the decision was not justified since she believes there are other cars in worse shape that have never been towed from the complex.

    “I was furious… I was past furious,” Moore said. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

    The manager of the complex said they took action because the phrase “FTP,” which is derogatory to police, was painted on the car.

    Moore has hired a lawyer to see what kind of legal action she could pursue.

    Are There Too Many Towns in St. Louis County Propped Up By Over-Ticketing?

    Police departments in existence to write tickets that keep towns afloat – former St. Louis County Police Chief Tim Fitch says there are too many of them in the St. Louis area, and their days may be numbered.

    Fitch names Charlack, Bel-Ridge, Moline Acres, Pine Lawn – “a prime offender,” and St. Ann – where he says officers were on Interstate 70 just the other day – as departments in North County with the worst reputations for over-ticketing, along with Bella Villa in South County.

    “They are using their police officers, basically using their police powers, to generate revenue for the city,” he says.

    Fitch says the fallout from the U.S. Department of Justice intervention in Ferguson will be mounting public pressure, and maybe even a court order, for police departments region-wide to lower the amount of revenue they can generate for their cities.

    We may see the voluntary merging of some cities to reduce costs, he says, or even court-ordered reforms of how police departments work.

    Lt. Gov. Kinder Blames Feds for ‘Incitement of the Mob’ in Ferguson

    Kinder said they perpetuated the “lie” of ‘hands up don’t shoot.’

    “It’s bad enough the protesters were behaving that way, but we have a right to expect more from the attorney general, the head of the Justice Department of the United States, and the president of the United States,” Kinder said Monday on a NewsMax TV program. “And instead, what we got too often from them was incitement of the mob, and encouraging disorder in Ferguson.”

    He added that he thinks the Justice Department is staffed by “hard-left radical leftist lawyers.”

    “There is more racism in the Justice Department than there is in anywhere I see in the St. Louis area,” said Kinder, who is a Republican.

    That’s not to say he believes all is well in Ferguson.

    In the same interview, he admitted the feds’ report did uncover some legitimate issues. But he says the departures of the police chief, city manager and others are evidence that the city is trying to change.

    Dunno, he still sounds like an ignorant asshole to me.

    On the n-word: POOR GUY “@CNNTonight: “You use that word, everyone laughs. I use that word, my career is over.” @benfergusonshow ” Would love to watch that particular interview/panel, too.

    US poet defends reading of Michael Brown autopsy report as a poem

    Goldsmith, an admired writer who has published 10 books of poetry and teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania, performed “The Body of Michael Brown” at Interrupt 3, a weekend-long arts event at Brown University. Brown was the unarmed black 18-year-old fatally shot last summer in Ferguson, Missouri, by a white police officer.

    The artist Faith Holland, who attended Goldsmith’s reading, wrote on Twitter on Friday: “Just saw Kenneth Goldsmith read Michael Brown’s autopsy report for 30 minutes and no one knew wtf to do with that.”

    She told arts site Hyperallergic: “There were some brief announcements and then Goldsmith got on stage. He said [the poem]was something to do with quantified self, but otherwise there were very few introductory remarks. His reading was unemotional and relatively even and his feet moved rhythmically the entire time.”

    Goldsmith is a conceptual poet known for what he calls uncreative writing. His book Seven American Deaths and Disasters is a transcription of quotes from radio and television reports of national tragedies, including the shooting of John F Kennedy, forming a series of prose poems. “It knocks the air from your lungs,” wrote the New York Times in a review.

    According to Holland, following his reading, the small audience of around 75 people “mostly offered mild criticism but repeatedly thanked Goldsmith for ‘bringing up this discussion’”.

    Once news of Goldsmith’s reading hit the internet, however, the reaction was less muted. Author and Bad Feminist essayist Roxane Gay called it “tacky” on Twitter, highlighting “the audacity of reading an autopsy report and calling it poetry”. The writer and professor Cathy Park Hong tweeted: “Kenneth Goldsmith has reached new racist lows yet elite institutions continue to pay him guest speaker fees”.

    “For Kenneth Goldsmith to stand on stage, and not be aware that his body – his white male body, a body that is a symbol loaded with a history of oppression, of literal dominance and ownership of black bodies – is a part of the performance, then he has failed to notice something drastically important about the ‘contextualization’ of this work,” wrote PE Garcia on the online arts magazine Queen’s Mob. “If, as he says, we are to look at this as conceptual art – if we are to believe the audience is in charge of this interpretation – then Goldsmith should accept the context of his performance. He should accept the pain his audience felt. He should accept that we might look at him and only see another white man holding the corpse of a black child saying, ‘Look at what I’ve made’.”

    “To be clear, Michael Brown’s autopsy report was powerful,” tweeted Holland. “It was also obviously problematic & I’m willing to bet intentionally so – white man claiming this as ‘his new poem’ in white dominated space. But pairing graphic description of wounds with graduation photo of Michael Brown made it also an empathetic and political gesture.” She added that it was “not entirely” successful, as the “audience was happy it ‘raised issues’ but then was basically unable to discuss & event concluded early.”
    […]

    “I indeed stated at the beginning of my reading that this was a poem called The Body of Michael Brown; I never stated, ‘I am going to read the autopsy report of Michael Brown’,” he wrote. “That said, I didn’t add or alter a single word or sentiment that did not preexist in the original text, for to do so would be to go against my nearly three decades’ practice of conceptual writing, one that states that a writer need not write any new texts but rather reframe those that already exist in the world to greater effect than any subjective interpretation could lend. Perhaps people feel uncomfortable with my uncreative writing, but for me, this is the writing that is able to tell the truth in the strongest and clearest way possible.”

    He ended his explanation with the line “Ecce homo. Behold the man”, the words used by Pontius Pilate when presenting Christ to the crowds before his death, later adding a follow-up Facebook post in which he said that he had asked Brown University not to make the recording of his performance of the poem public.

    “There’s been too much pain for many people around this and I do not wish to cause any more. My speaker’s fee from the Interrupt 3 event will be donated to the family of Michael Brown,” he said.

    Not sure how I feel about this.

    Darren Wilson Gives Speech to Non-Profit for Cops “Wrongly Accused in the Line of Duty”

    A St. Louis non-profit that raises funds for police officers’ legal funds welcomed a very special guest to its annual trivia night on Saturday — former Ferguson cop Darren Wilson.

    Hunt for Justice director Christopher Hunt, who is also an officer with the St. Charles County Police Department, tells Daily RFT that Wilson made some brief remarks to open the organizations’ yearly gala. According to Hunt, there is no recording of Wilson’s remarks, but Hunt says Wilson did not mention anything about Ferguson.

    Although Hunt For Justice has contributed an undisclosed sum to Wilson’s legal defense in the past, Hunt says the funds collected Saturday will not go Wilson, and that he was not compensated in any way for speaking. Hunt declined to provide a dollar amount for how much money was raised during the trivia night. […]

    The fundraiser marks one of Wilson’s few appearances since his sit-down interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in November, which aired the day after a grand jury chose not to indict Wilson for fatally shooting unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in August. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice similarly determined that the physical evidence and witness testimony did not support criminal charges against Wilson.

    But that’s the not the end of the road for Wilson or his supporters. Brown’s family dispute’s Wilson’s explanation that he was in fear of his life when he shot the teenager, and they are suing Wilson in civil court for the wrongful death of their son.

  415. Pteryxx says

    rq @414, that reminds me: Atlantic: The story of the black band-aid

    (apologies if I got that from this thread originally)

    Since its unpretentious invention in 1920 by Johnson & Johnson in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the Band-Aid was long manufactured in a single color: a soft pink. In a 1955 TV commercial, the company showed one on the hand of a Caucasian woman: “Neat, flesh-colored, almost invisible,” a voice-over said.

    Orundu Johnson, a 66-year-old African American woman living in Harlem, remembers. “The bandages would say flesh color, and I’d explain to my kids, ‘Well, that’s not your flesh.’

    The irony of African-Americans sticking pink patches on their darker flesh did not go unnoticed by the black liberation movement either. In White Is, a militant cartoon book published in 1969 at the initiative of Harlem-based activist Preston Wilcox, a drawing depicted a young man in Black Panther garb with eyes rolled upwards, fixated at the protuberant white adhesive bandage on his forehead. The caption read: “White is a flesh colored band-aid.”

    […]

    It was 15 years ago that New York entrepreneur Michael Panayiotis created Ebon-Aid. The orange box read: “The bandage exclusively designed for people of color,” and they came in shades called black licorice, coffee brown, cinnamon, and honey beige.

    Johnson recalls the day she found Ebon-Aide in a Harlem pharmacy. She bought dozens of boxes. For her kids, but also to pack into the first-aid kits of the Harlem school where she worked as a director. “It was always a political statement for me,” she said.

    But one day, Ebon-Aides disappeared from the shelves. Johnson reached out to the manufacturer repeatedly.

    […]

    Retail giants from Wal-Mart to Rite Aid agreed to carry his product. “We found out with our market research that between the African American market and the Hispanic market we would capture about 25 percent to 28 percent of the market,” he said. “We wanted to do all the first-aid products in black.”

    But Panayiotis was frustrated by the placement of his product, which usually ended up on separate shelves dedicated to satisfying the needs of Afro-American customers. “If you don’t show it to people, how are they going to buy it?” he said.

  417. rq says

    Antonio French evaluates changes, challenges related to Ferguson

    St. Louis Alderman Antonio French was one of the most visible people in Ferguson, the city and related social media, last summer and fall after the shooting death of Michael Brown.

    Since then, French has shifted his attention back to the 21st Ward and North Campus, an education-based community program that helps parents and students. But he’s also still active in Ferguson efforts.

    “What happens down the road from me affects us all,” French told “St. Louis on the Air” host Don Marsh on Tuesday. “We are, I think, still in a crisis. It has changed and we’re in a different phase.”

    You can listen at the link, and here’s a few excerpts via tweet:
    What’s the next important step for #Ferguson? “People are still waiting for real change,” @AntonioFrench says.
    Since August, a lot of officials have been content to let this be a #Ferguson problem, @AntonioFrench says.
    “It’s not just #Ferguson, and we have to deal with it,” @AntonioFrench says.
    “We have to, at some point, acknowledge the cultural issues that we have,” @AntonioFrench says.

  418. rq says

    I missed one: “I wish we were further along,” @AntonioFrench. He says we haven’t yet done enough to address the issues that have been brought up.

    Walked in my office and there’s a group of @HowardUniv students Here! Doing Alternative spring break in Chicago! that’s one of the initiatives at work.

    Here’s the Tennessee lawsuit mentioend above, different source: 9 HBCU Students Are Coming For Tennessee’s Voter-ID-Law.

    Raven Symone defends TV host’s Michelle Obama comment: ‘Some people look like animals’

    During the conversation, Symone seemed to offer a bizarre defense of the now-fired host’s comments.

    Univision’s Rodner Figueroa was fired last week for suggesting that the first lady could have been cast in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise.

    Regular View host Rosie Perez was livid about the remark, calling it undeniably racist. Symone wasn’t convinced.

    “He did say Michelle Obama looks like a cast member of the ‘Planet of the Apes,’” Perez said emphatically.

    “But was he saying it ‘racist-like?’” Symoné interjected. “Because [Figueroa] did say he voted for [Michelle] later and I don’t think he was saying it racist.”

    “Oh please!” Perez fired back. “That’s like saying, ‘I’m not a racist, but I have black friends.”

    After comedian Michelle Collins implied Figueroa’s comments were more “stupid” than racist, Perez went right back on offense.

    “I am the Latin person here on this table,” Perez said. “And I would like to tell you that it was racist.”

    And that’s where Symoné may have dropped the mic… in a sort of terrible way.

    “Michelle don’t fire me for this,” Symoné began, sensing her remark was about to come out the wrong way. “But some people look like animals. Is that rude? I look like a bird… so can I be mad at somebody that calls me ‘Toucan Sam?’”

    For the record, we’d be mad regardless. Just mad.

    Just keep digging, just keep digging….

  419. rq says

    Darren Wilson attends trivia night, thanks crowd for support. He’s certainly getting out and around.

    Former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson attended a trivia contest Saturday in St. Charles, where his lawyer said he delivered impromptu remarks and received a standing ovation.

    But contrary to some reports, that attorney said, the event was not a fundraiser for Wilson.

    The trivia night was held at the Heart of St. Charles Banquet Center. It was sponsored by Hunt For Justice, a non-profit group formed in 2009 to support St. Charles deputy Chris Hunt, who was convicted of burglary and assault in connection with a 2009 methamphetamine bust. (Three convictions were later overturned, with one sent back for a possible new trial.) Hunt For Justice’s Facebook page has been converted into a closed group since Monday, and its website doesn’t appear to load.

    “Darren was there because a friend invited him,” said Neil Bruntrager, Wilson’s attorney. “He was just there as an attendee, a trivia player. He was a guest of a friend. Darren has never received any money from the organization.”

    On Aug. 9, Wilson shot unarmed Michael Brown, 18, in Ferguson. A federal probe and a St. Louis County grand jury have both ruled that the shooting was justified.

    One person who attended the trivia night, who did not want to be identified, said Wilson went to the front of the room between rounds and gave a short speech to the crowd of about 500 people.

    Wilson seemed uncomfortable and noted that public speaking “wasn’t really his thing,” the attendee said. Wilson thanked the people for support during the months after the shooting.

    Video Refutes Claims of Police, Shows them Execute Mentally Ill Man for Holding a Screwdriver

    A newly released body cam video shows just how ridiculous the claims were of Dallas police officers “fearing for their lives” when killing 38-year-old Jason Harrison.

    The incident happened on June 14 after police were called out to the residence by Harrison’s mother who said, “He’s just off the chain, Bipolar schizo.”

    Harrison’s mother called 9-1-1 trying to get help bringing her mentally ill son, who is bipolar and schizophrenic, to the hospital. Instead, police showed up and killed him.

    The police initially claimed that they feared for their lives and were forced to shoot Harrison after he lunged at them with a screwdriver. However, the video tells a different tale.

    In the video, Harrison’s mother is seen walking out of the house, explaining to police that her son is being irrational. She was followed by Harrison, who was holding a small screwdriver.

    As soon as Harrison walks out of the house, he is shot dead.

    As officers began screaming at the mentally ill man, it escalated. What could have been a completely peaceful surrender, turned into a violent killing.

    We can also see from the video, that these officers were equipped with less-lethal tasers, yet still reached for their pistols to fend off a man with a screwdriver.

    More information and statistics on police shootings at the link.

    Lawyer, officials at odds over whether man admitted wounding police in Ferguson

    The lawyer for Jeffrey Williams, who is accused of wounding two police officers at a protest in Ferguson last week, insisted Tuesday that his client did not shoot them — even though the prosecutor and a minister have said Williams admitted it.

    The lawyer, Jerryl Christmas, also claimed that Williams was beaten during the arrest, a claim that police deny.

    In addition, Christmas said the officers hit by gunfire were shot by accident, but would not say how he knows that if Williams was not the shooter. He said Williams did not fire a gun that night.

    Bishop Derrick Robinson, of Kingdom Destiny Fellowship, in Fairview Heights, visited Williams in jail and on Monday told MSNBC that Williams had shown a lot of remorse about the shooting and wished, “he had not done it.”

    On Tuesday, Robinson said that although he stood by his comments to the news network, he would rather not discuss it, and preferred to “allow the attorneys to further the case.”

    Christmas said he met with Williams Monday, and that, “He was remorseful about the officers being shot, he just said he couldn’t believe it and he felt bad.”

    Christmas said Williams had bruises on his back, neck and face as well as a knot on the back of his head, allegedly from the butt of an officer’s gun.

    Robinson told MSNBC that the police questioning Williams “beat him into confessing.” He added, “He was brutally beaten when he was arrested.”

    St. Louis County police called allegations of excessive force, “completely false.” A department statement said Williams was examined by a nurse at the Justice Center, who found him “fit for confinement.”

    County police Sgt. Brian Schellman said Williams’ arrest was not videotaped, but that his statement to police — admitting he fired the shots — was. Officer Shawn McGuire said he was unsure whether Williams resisted arrest.

    So much contradictory information.

    Do You Agree? Common Says Racism Can End If Blacks Extend “A Hand In Love” To Whites

    Rapper Common recently appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and opened up with his thoughts on how black people and white people can move past the things that keep racism afloat. Take a listen to his commentary below and see if you agree.

    In an nutshell, Common, along with Jon Stewart, come to the conclusion that racism can move towards ending if black people extend a hand in love to white people and white people accept that extended hand. Do you agree? Let’s discuss, Bossip fam.

    Link to the Daily Show interview within.

  420. rq says

    Missouri official accuses Justice Department of racism. We saw this article before, but how did I miss this part???

    Republican Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder on Tuesday also asserted that the department was “staffed with Marxists and black radicals” and defended statements he had made a day earlier accusing agency officials of racism.

    Justice Department spokesman Brian Fallon declined to comment about Kinder’s statements.

    That new Starbucks policy on race discussions is still echoing. “Welcome to @Starbucks. Can I help you?”
    “Help me understand why #TamirRice is dead…”
    “…extra foam?” MONDAY IS GONNA RULE.

    Starbucks SVP Deletes Twitter Account After Actual Minorities Ask Him About Race Issues

    The backlash over Starbucks’ dumb #racetogether campaign, in which employees are “encouraged” to discuss racial issues with their customers, arrived quickly. Among the numerous questions: whose dumb idea was this? Did the corporate honchos at Starbucks take into consideration whether their employees were well-equipped to have difficult conversations about race? Were they aware that they could be placing their baristas into hostile situations that they’re unprepared to diffuse? Was this the ultimate form of White Guilt? Or was the coffee company trying to capitalize off the growing news and discussion over racial issues in America?

    Naturally, people turned to Corey DuBrowa, Starbucks’ Senior Vice President of Communications, to find answers to these questions:
    [… insert screenshots of questions, blocking and a deleted account …]

    Yes: DuBrowa, a middle-aged white man, who was part of a corporate team that commanded their baristas to discuss race issues with their customers, deleted his Twitter account after people tried to discuss race issues with him.

    In a statement to PR Week, DuBrowa said that he would come back on Twitter, but only when people stopped being so gosh darn negative to him:

    DuBrowa explained that he shut down his Twitter account for a simple reason.

    “My Twitter account was targeted around midnight [on Tuesday], and the tweets represented a distraction from the respectful conversation we’re trying to have around Race Together,” he said.

    DuBrowa added that he will be back on the social network soon, and Starbucks has announcements planned for its annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday that will provide more details about and context around Race Together.

    This campaign is already 85% dead.

    “A distraction from the respectful conversation we’re trying to have”. I think I see the problem here.
    I think among the tabs is an article that says his twitter is back, we’ll see.

    Racist ‘Runnin N*gger’ Targets Sold At South Dakota Gun Show

    A South Dakota vendor was banned from Sioux Falls’ Collector’s Classic Gun Show this weekend after selling racist targets among his merchandise.

    The papers featured a caricatured profile of black man with the words “Official RUNNIN N*GG*R Target” across the top. They were being sold for ten cents each.

    Bob Campbell, the gun show’s manager, told KSFY he was “disgusted” by the flyers. He assured reporters that the racist fliers were snuck in unbeknownst to organizers who examine all merchandise before it’s set out.

    A photographer from the news station asked the vendor why he decided to use those targets. The vendor responded, “Why aren’t they there?” You know, there are some black people, and then there are some Negroes.”

    “I sold 500 of them this weekend so what difference does it make,” the vendor went on to say. He was reportedly later banned from the gun show.

    What difference does it make? FREEZE PEACH.

    Legal papers: Willie R. Dixon v. The Incorporated Village of Hempstead, et al. Amended Complaint

    Filed Amended Complaint to add more defendants’ seated on the Board of Trustees and new allegations of race discrimination and retaliation. The client is formerly an Assistant Chief before he was demoted to Police Lieutenant in retaliation for his complaints within the Hempstead Police Department.

    Sounds like another good cop got punished for standing up t the rest.

    A Starbucks exec deleted his Twitter account after backlash over the company’s ‘race together’ campaign

    Starbucks is in hot water after launching a campaign that encourages baristas to talk about race relations with customers.

    Critics have been lashing out at the company on social media, saying Starbucks is trying to capitalize on racial tension in the US.

    Following the backlash, Starbucks’ senior vice president of communications, Corey duBrowa, deleted his Twitter account, which only added to critics’ outrage.

  421. rq says

    NYC Mom Arrested After She Asked Police to Talk to Son About Stealing: Report

    According to the report, 29-year-old Tyeesha Mobley called 911 to ask the police to come talk to her son, but instead she was arrested and one of the officers told her “you black b*tches don’t know how to take care of your kids,” her lawsuit claims.

    Mobley is filing a suit against New York City, the Police Department and the Administration for Children’s Services after, she alleges, she was handcuffed and roughed up and had her two young children taken away from her for four months because of her request.

    “She was simply trying to make sure her son stayed on the right path,” Attorney Philip Sporn told DNAinfo New York. “This shouldn’t happen to anyone, let alone to a good mom with her kids.”

    It all started last April when Mobley discovered that her 9-year-old son, Tyleke, had taken $10 out of her purse. She decided to enlist some help, and a police dispatcher sent over four cops, who met with the 9-year-old and his 4-year-old brother at a gas station near their apartment.

    According to Mobley, things were going well at first. “They started asking Tyleke what did he take,” Mobley testified at an October hearing. “He told them. And about three officers was joking around with him, telling him, ‘You can’t be stealing; you’ll wind up going in the police car.’”

    However, the fourth responding officer wasn’t happy about the assignment. Mobley claims in her lawsuit that the officer said, “‘You black b*tches don’t know how to take care of your kids. … You need to call the kids’ father, not us. … We can’t raise your kids. … Why are you wasting our time? We aren’t here to raise your kid. … Why don’t you take your f–king kid and leave?’”

    When the mother attempted to leave, the officer stopped her and said she was being arrested. When she asked on what grounds, the officer allegedly responded, “‘If you’re going to say another f–king word, I’m going to knock your teeth down your throat.’”

    Mobley says she was then cuffed and thrown against a squad car and kicked in her legs.

    “All I was saying is, ‘Please stop, you’re hurting me; my kids is there,’” she said. The boys were allegedly crying and begging the officer to stop.

    According to the lawsuit, a female officer in the squad car told the officer that that was not how they were supposed to act, but the arresting officer reportedly said, “‘Black bitches like that … this is how I treat them.’”

    New York’s finest community policing. Oh yeah.

    Rahm Emanuel Fails to Show Up for Meeting with Families of Victims Killed by Chicago Police. Not going to be good for the election.

    In the shock of the presser, many of us looked at #JeffreyWilliams and said, “not a protester.” But that didn’t mean he was disowned…
    … Just that he was unfamiliar and the crime he’d supposedly admitted to want part of the protest. His life has always mattered regardless.

    Ah, a small difference in spelling, all the difference in meaning: Starbucks Wants To Talk To You About Race.
    But Does It Want to Talk To You About Racism?

    People talk about race to me but they rarely talk to me about racism. Like Starbucks, there are all kinds of euphemisms for racism: racially-tinged, racially charged, racially motivated, racially insensitive. Fortune says the “Race Together” paraphenelia will feature a variety of “perspectives” on race. There is no word on the perspectives about racism that might be featured.

    It is hard to know where to begin talking about race the way Starbucks wants to talk about race. I know theories, histories and measurements of race and racism. I do not know much about race “perspectives” that might fit on stickers that would be worth sticking somewhere. I do know that I require payment to talk about race and racism. It is a hard job. People don’t mind the race part when it is about sharing feelings and opinions. It gets a lot harder to talk about the value of wealth from slave labor in the 18th century, for instance. If you really want to bring a party to a halt, you can talk about racial differences in death penalty sentencing when the victim is black and the murderer white and vice-versa.

    It takes a lot of training and a lot of institutional support to teach people things they would rather not hear. I wonder what kind of training and support the hourly wage baristas at Starbucks will get. There is no reporting yet on whether Starbucks issued a training module on “when the customer is always right and the customer wants to be right and racist”.

    I also wonder about the value of discussing “race” as corporate social good. Granted, there isn’t much left that isn’t for sale. Starbucks is betting that we are at a point when racism not only does not have racists but race can be explained on a sticker. I disagree. But, we may be at a point when the language about race and racism has been so degraded that it can be a corporate initiative. By definition that means having little potential for risk and some amorphous attention value. If talking about race is a shortcut to the sort of medium fame that is all the rage on social media, then talking about race is meaningless. That wouldn’t matter to Starbucks but it should matter to those of us who talk seriously about race and racism.

    It is unclear who Starbucks is aiming for with this campaign. If you are a colorblind ideologue, just mentioning race is racism. If you are racist, being confronted with “perspectives” on race will piss you off. If you know the difference between race and racism, race stickers will confuse you. If you would rather talk about your feelings about that thing that was about race that one time rather than talk about racism, you’re really going to slow down the latte line.

    A Tale of Two Hoodies by Michael D’antuono. Check out the art.

  422. rq says

    NYC Mom Arrested After She Asked Police to Talk to Son About Stealing: Report

    According to the report, 29-year-old Tyeesha Mobley called 911 to ask the police to come talk to her son, but instead she was arrested and one of the officers told her “you black b*tches don’t know how to take care of your kids,” her lawsuit claims.

    Mobley is filing a suit against New York City, the Police Department and the Administration for Children’s Services after, she alleges, she was handcuffed and roughed up and had her two young children taken away from her for four months because of her request.

    “She was simply trying to make sure her son stayed on the right path,” Attorney Philip Sporn told DNAinfo New York. “This shouldn’t happen to anyone, let alone to a good mom with her kids.”

    It all started last April when Mobley discovered that her 9-year-old son, Tyleke, had taken $10 out of her purse. She decided to enlist some help, and a police dispatcher sent over four cops, who met with the 9-year-old and his 4-year-old brother at a gas station near their apartment.

    According to Mobley, things were going well at first. “They started asking Tyleke what did he take,” Mobley testified at an October hearing. “He told them. And about three officers was joking around with him, telling him, ‘You can’t be stealing; you’ll wind up going in the police car.’”

    However, the fourth responding officer wasn’t happy about the assignment. Mobley claims in her lawsuit that the officer said, “‘You black b*tches don’t know how to take care of your kids. … You need to call the kids’ father, not us. … We can’t raise your kids. … Why are you wasting our time? We aren’t here to raise your kid. … Why don’t you take your f–king kid and leave?’”

    When the mother attempted to leave, the officer stopped her and said she was being arrested. When she asked on what grounds, the officer allegedly responded, “‘If you’re going to say another f–king word, I’m going to knock your teeth down your throat.’”

    Mobley says she was then cuffed and thrown against a squad car and kicked in her legs.

    “All I was saying is, ‘Please stop, you’re hurting me; my kids is there,’” she said. The boys were allegedly crying and begging the officer to stop.

    According to the lawsuit, a female officer in the squad car told the officer that that was not how they were supposed to act, but the arresting officer reportedly said, “‘Black b*tches like that … this is how I treat them.’”

    New York’s finest community policing. Oh yeah.

    Rahm Emanuel Fails to Show Up for Meeting with Families of Victims Killed by Chicago Police. Not going to be good for the election.

    In the shock of the presser, many of us looked at #JeffreyWilliams and said, “not a protester.” But that didn’t mean he was disowned…
    … Just that he was unfamiliar and the crime he’d supposedly admitted to want part of the protest. His life has always mattered regardless.

    Ah, a small difference in spelling, all the difference in meaning: Starbucks Wants To Talk To You About Race.
    But Does It Want to Talk To You About Racism?

    People talk about race to me but they rarely talk to me about racism. Like Starbucks, there are all kinds of euphemisms for racism: racially-tinged, racially charged, racially motivated, racially insensitive. Fortune says the “Race Together” paraphenelia will feature a variety of “perspectives” on race. There is no word on the perspectives about racism that might be featured.

    It is hard to know where to begin talking about race the way Starbucks wants to talk about race. I know theories, histories and measurements of race and racism. I do not know much about race “perspectives” that might fit on stickers that would be worth sticking somewhere. I do know that I require payment to talk about race and racism. It is a hard job. People don’t mind the race part when it is about sharing feelings and opinions. It gets a lot harder to talk about the value of wealth from slave labor in the 18th century, for instance. If you really want to bring a party to a halt, you can talk about racial differences in death penalty sentencing when the victim is black and the murderer white and vice-versa.

    It takes a lot of training and a lot of institutional support to teach people things they would rather not hear. I wonder what kind of training and support the hourly wage baristas at Starbucks will get. There is no reporting yet on whether Starbucks issued a training module on “when the customer is always right and the customer wants to be right and racist”.

    I also wonder about the value of discussing “race” as corporate social good. Granted, there isn’t much left that isn’t for sale. Starbucks is betting that we are at a point when racism not only does not have racists but race can be explained on a sticker. I disagree. But, we may be at a point when the language about race and racism has been so degraded that it can be a corporate initiative. By definition that means having little potential for risk and some amorphous attention value. If talking about race is a shortcut to the sort of medium fame that is all the rage on social media, then talking about race is meaningless. That wouldn’t matter to Starbucks but it should matter to those of us who talk seriously about race and racism.

    It is unclear who Starbucks is aiming for with this campaign. If you are a colorblind ideologue, just mentioning race is racism. If you are racist, being confronted with “perspectives” on race will piss you off. If you know the difference between race and racism, race stickers will confuse you. If you would rather talk about your feelings about that thing that was about race that one time rather than talk about racism, you’re really going to slow down the latte line.

    A Tale of Two Hoodies by Michael D’antuono. Check out the art.

  423. rq says

    Darren Wilson Gives Speech to Non-Profit for Cops “Wrongly Accused in the Line of Duty”

    Hunt For Justice was founded in 2012, a year when Hunt found himself facing five years in prison on convictions for felony burglary, misdemeanor assault and property damage. The charges stemmed from a 2009 raid on a suspected meth cook’s house. Hunt was accused of illegally entering the suspect’s home and beating him. Hunt For Justice was initially founded to support Hunt in fighting the charges.

    In 2014, the Missouri Supreme Court struck down Hunt’s convictions for burglary and property damage, and sent the third conviction, for assault, back to Montgomery county for a potential new trial. Hunt remained employed with the St. Charles department throughout his appeal.

    “We provide financial and emotional assistance to police officers in times of need. [The Saturday fundraiser] was for law enforcement wrongly accused in the line of duty, and
    we don’t release the specific dollar amounts that we give to the officers,” Hunt says. “Our organization did assist Darren Wilson.”

    According the group’s website (which appears to be down since yesterday), the organization has assisted two officers who were charged along with Hunt in relation to 2009 raid, as well as a Springfield officer shot in January of this year. One page on the website included a statement of the organization’s support for Darren Wilson:

    Officer Darren Wilson was involved in an on-duty fatal shooting on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, Mo which has resulted in him being placed on administrative leave pending the results of an investigation. Hunt For Justice supports Officer Wilson and stands with the Fraternal Order of Police in doing so.

    Hunt For Justice is organizing a fundraiser for the family Officer Wilson of the Ferguson, Mo Police Department. He and his family need your help. Keep checking back here to get updates on dates and times of fundraisers for Officer Wilson.

    On Monday, a photo originally posted to the Hunt For Justice Facebook page showing Darren Wilson and Hunt began circulating on Twitter. Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery cited an attendee there who says Wilson was met with a standing ovation.

    The fundraiser marks one of Wilson’s few appearances since his sit-down interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in November, which aired the day after a grand jury chose not to indict Wilson for fatally shooting unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in August. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice similarly determined that the physical evidence and witness testimony did not support criminal charges against Wilson.

    But that’s the not the end of the road for Wilson or his supporters. Brown’s family disputes Wilson’s explanation that he was in fear of his life when he shot the teenager, and they are suing Wilson in civil court for the wrongful death of their son.

    Ferguson shooting suspect gave false confession, lawyer says

    The suspect charged with shooting two police officers during a demonstration in Ferguson, Mo., last week is now recanting a confession that he was the gunman, his lawyer told Yahoo News on Tuesday.

    “He told me that he never fired a weapon,” said Jerryl T. Christmas, attorney for Jeffrey Williams.

    Christmas said Williams, 20, was scared and in a “tremendous amount of pain,” having allegedly been pistol-whipped before being questioned by detectives.

    “I think under those circumstances he would have said anything,” Christmas said. “Anytime someone is questioned without counsel and then I see that kind of bruising, then I’m suspicious about any statements that he may have voluntarily given.”

    The lawyer said the injuries can be seen in the jail mug shot of his client.

    “He had bruising … you see the redness on the right side of his face,” Christmas said. “I don’t see how they are denying it, it’s right there on their own mug shot.”

    St. Louis County police have denied the abuse allegations for two days. On Tuesday, a department spokesman again called the accusations “completely false” without offering any potential explanation for apparent marks in Williams’ booking photograph.

    Sgt. Brian Schellman said Williams was immediately transported to police headquarters and interviewed by detectives, which was recorded on video and audio. At the jail, he said, a nurse evaluated Williams as part of the intake process.

    “The nurse released Williams as fit for confinement and he was subsequently turned over by detectives to the custody of Justice Services,” Sgt. Schellman said.

    But Christmas and a cousin of the suspect said Williams has been in the jail’s infirmary since arriving there Sunday. […]

    Complicating Williams’ retraction is that he didn’t just admit being the shooter to police. On Sunday and Monday, St. Louis pastor and Ferguson activist Derrick Robinson told reporters that Williams expressed remorse to him during a jailhouse visit.

    “He told me that he shouldn’t have done it,” Robinson told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “He was embarrassed.”

    By Tuesday, Robinson quit discussing the case and reportedly referred questions to Christmas.

    An online public database providing St. Louis County Jail information doesn’t indicate what time the mug shot was taken or when Williams was received into custody.

    So… considering the situation, I wouldn’t be surprised at anything.

    Have a few dollars to spare? Oprah to Auction Off Belongings From Chicago Condo.

    Also, is Starbucks going to address prison labor during these race discussions??? Cause that’s how their holiday coffees are packaged.

    Activist allegedly tried to bait protesters with ‘kill cops’ script

    A controversial conservative activist is being accused of trying to incite anti-police protesters by saying, “I wish I could kill some of these cops,” to provoke them into making outrageous statements.

    A former top staffer with Project Veritas, Richard Valdes, said the incident occurred in January, when an undercover operative assigned to infiltrate the protest groups was given a script that included the startling comment.

    Valdes said he was fired by the group’s founder, James O’Keefe, for not following through on the bizarre assignment.

    Valdes said Veritas assigned a Muslim undercover agent pretending to be anti-cop to attend protest meetings and utter the following statement: “Sometimes, I wish I could just kill some of these cops. Don’t you just wish we could have one of the cops right here in the middle of our group?”

    But the undercover agent refused, according to Valdes.

    “I will not say words that will jeopardize my entity, especially when they involve an illegal act of ‘murdering police,’ ” the agent wrote in a Jan. 9 e-mail to Valdes and cc’d to O’Keefe.

    Valdes claims O’Keefe, known for hidden-camera tactics against liberal groups, fired him “because he was unhappy with me for being unwilling to strong-arm the guy to do his dirty work.”

    Valdes and his lawyer, Arthur Schwartz, are threatening to sue for wrongful termination.

    “Project Veritas would never do anything that we believe would incite violence against police officers. Anyone suggesting otherwise is clearly unfamiliar with our body of work,” Veritas spokesman Dan Pollack said.

    Yesterday in history: Scientist Discovers “Drapetomania”

    In December 1849, the Louisiana State Medical Convention selected Southern physician and pro-slavery advocate Samuel Cartwright to chair a committee tasked with investigating and reporting on diseases unique to African Americans. In March 1851, at the annual meeting of the Louisiana Medical Association, Dr. Cartwright presented a report of the committee’s findings entitled, “A Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race.” In the report, Dr. Cartwright claimed blacks were very different physiologically from whites, possessing smaller brains, more sensitive skin, and overdeveloped nervous systems. These unique traits, he claimed, gave black people an especially high propensity for servitude.

    Citing “scientific” evidence and scripture, Dr. Cartwright argued that “the Negro is a slave by nature and can never be happy . . . in any other condition.” He invented the term Drapetomania, derived from the Greek words for “runaway slave” and “crazy,” to describe a curable mental disease. When infected, he claimed, enslaved black people were struck with an urge to flee bondage and seek freedom. Dr. Cartwright explained the disease as a mental affliction triggered by masters who unwisely treat their slaves as equals and prescribed severe whipping and amputation of the toes as cures. Couched in pseudo-science and presented as medical assertions, Dr. Cartwright’s report was an effort to justify and defend the institution of slavery as natural and optimal for both master and slave.

  424. rq says

    I know I mentioned this before with a stellar article from someone living in Japan. Here’s more. Japan’s blackface problem: the country’s bizarre, troubled relationship with race

    When Japanese actor Koichi Yamadera appeared on the popular variety show Monomane Battle in 2009 to perform the classic “What a Wonderful World,” it was likely meant as a tribute to the American jazz tradition that still has a small, dedicated following in Japan. Yamadera, in apparent affection for the jazz master Louis Armstrong who popularized the song, did something that would have elicited gasps in the US but raised only polite applause from his totally unfazed Japanese audience. He put on full, unironic blackface […]

    It wasn’t just him: Japanese singers imitating African-American performers have done this often. Baye McNeil, a black American writer who has lived in Japan for a decade, told me he found the blackface appalling — but didn’t think it was worth wasting too much time on in a country he loves, despite suffering from routine racism.

    “These singers were some old guys doing niche music and weren’t that terribly popular, so it wasn’t like they were in my face all the time,” McNeil told me.

    But McNeil lost his patience last month when members of a popular mainstream Japanese group posed for the promotional photo that appears at the top of this page. In it, the members of girl band Momoiro Clover Z grin in full blackface alongside old crooners Rats & Star, who have been performing in paint since the 1980s. The two bands were set to appear together on Fuji TV, a major network. […]

    But as McNeil knows all too well, this episode was only part of a much larger problem with race in Japan, a problem that cannot be quickly fixed with a petition. To Americans, and indeed most people, it’s pretty obvious that blackface is extremely racist. How could the Japanese, as well-educated as they often are, tolerate this practice? The answer goes way beyond mere ignorance of blackface’s ugly history, to a powerful national belief in Japan’s ethnic purity that leaves the country incapable of dealing with its race issues. […]

    “The blackface thing is emblematic of a larger problem of Japanese politics and civil society in which diversity is not recognized, or cultivated, or respected,” said Kyle Cleveland, associate professor of sociology at Temple University’s Tokyo campus, who lectures on race.

    This skepticism of diversity is all the more surprising given that Japan is a center of global tourism and trade, where foreigners are a common sight and foreign culture is commonly consumed. To understand why this is, you need to understand the powerful role that ethnic homogeneity — the idea of Japan as a nation of one blood — plays in its national identity. […]

    Historians have long examined how Japan’s unique history could have shaped its complicated views about foreigners. In 1639, the country’s ruling Tokugawa shogunate made the momentous decision to cut off Japan from the rest of the world; except for limited trade, it stayed that way for another two centuries. Ordinary Japanese were forbidden from traveling abroad; foreigners became a source of endless fascination.

    “There’s a whole discourse on what’s called the Galapagos effect — that Japan, having been isolated from foreign influence, developed its own kind of insular norms and values,” Cleveland said.

    Long after Japan reconnected with the rest of the world in 1853, the idea of the nation as racially distinct and homogeneous remained deeply ingrained. That manifested in its most extreme form during the country’s imperial era, when the fascist government promoted a race-based, and extremely racist, official state ideology. This ended with Imperial Japan’s defeat in World War II, but the underlying sense of Japan’s identity as rooted in racial purity has, to some degree, remained.

    In fact, Japan is home to various minorities, including Koreans, Brazilian Japanese, and a small indigenous Ainu community. But most Japanese continue to think of themselves as ethnically unified, and that’s key to understanding why racism remains pervasive in a country that otherwise seems so modern.

    Simply put, if the general consensus in Japan is that the country is largely homogeneous, it just doesn’t need to have a big conversation about race. Issues that most other societies are forced to discuss can go totally ignored in Japan. Without that national conversation, lots of well-meaning people can end up holding ideas that have been widely rejected elsewhere. […]

    The idea of “appreciative” blackface is one that has appeared again in Japan more recently. “B-stylers,” part of the small local hip-hop scene, are a niche youth subculture whose members seek to show their love of all things black — or their idea of blackness, anyway — by trying to look black, tanning themselves as dark as possible.

    Both B-stylers and the aging blackface crooners are glaring examples of cultural appropriation — also a common practice in Japan, but one in which a lot can be lost in translation. Groups like Rats & Star take what they imagine to be African-American musical tradition and pump it through a J-pop machine, and it comes out unrecognizable. They may dress in the style of a 1950s American doo-wop band, but they don’t sound anything like one.

    Cleveland thinks of Japan’s blackface singers and B-stylers in terms of “exotic othering.” While the intent may be to show enthusiasm for something thought of as cool and different, the result can end up perpetuating racist stereotypes.

    Cleveland stresses this is not in any way unique to Japan. But the key difference is that in America, for example, there are endless debates about it — there’s awareness and constant self-policing. This country, of course, has its own enormous race issues to wrestle with. But those issues get talked about. In Japan, this doesn’t happen. […]

    “I don’t think for the most part Japanese education promotes an understanding of racial diversity, racial inequality, and various aspects of racial exploitation,” he told me.

    “Japan is a globalized society,” he said, but sometimes, it’s “very tone deaf.”

    Why I deleted my Twitter account, and why I’m back. From Corey the Starbucks Social Guru himself.

    Last night, around midnight, I deleted my Twitter account. I also blocked a handful of Twitter users — given the hostile nature of what I was seeing, it felt like the right thing to do. I’ve been a dedicated — some might say obsessive — Twitter user for nearly seven years and as a professional communicator, Twitter has proven to be a valuable tool for me to interact with my professional community, with media, on behalf of Starbucks, as well as “on behalf of me.”

    But last night I felt personally attacked in a cascade of negativity. I got overwhelmed by the volume and tenor of the discussion, and I reacted. Most of all, I was concerned about becoming a distraction from the respectful conversation around Race Together that we have been trying to create. To be clear, Race Together isn’t about me, it’s about we: and having heard first-hand the number of stories our partners (at Starbucks we call our employees “partners”) shared with us in the open forums of the past few months, I have thought long and hard about the passion, concerns and painful experiences our people across the country have endured, and wanting to make sure they felt supported by their company.

    So no matter how ugly the discussion has been since I shut my account down, I’m reaffirming my belief in the power of meaningful, civil, thoughtful, respectful open conversation — on Twitter and everywhere else. I believe in it personally, and Starbucks believes in it at the core of our company’s values. It’s this belief that led us to host a series of open forums with our partners in some of the communities most affected by the recent flareups of racial tension across the country. In those meetings, we heard loud and clear that we, as a company, have an opportunity to engage on this topic, no matter how difficult. You can learn more about those meetings, and about what Starbucks is doing, here: http://news.starbucks.com/news/race-together-conversation-has-the-power-to-change-hearts-and-minds.

    I’m going to do the same. I’m only one guy, and I do actually sleep occasionally (and definitely needed to last night), but I personally will answer the challenge to participate where it’s uncomfortable, and to do so with integrity, openness, and empathy.

    Hmmm… Hmm.

    White people have this idea that “we” need to have a “conversation” about race, but they’re afraid of everything that needs to be said.

    Who wants to run Ferguson? Meet the 8 candidates for City Council

    The big question may be why. Why — after months of being in the red-hot glare of the national and international media in the aftermath of the police shooting of Michael Brown — would eight people decide to run for seats on the beleaguered Ferguson City Council, all for a part-time job that pays $250 a month?

    “I’m only optimistic about our future. I’m concerned what we’ve been through,” said Brian Fletcher, a former mayor who is running in the city’s 2nd Ward. “It’s unfortunate it happened here. But I feel that we’re strong enough to survive it.”

    In a region where contests for local offices receive little more than a fleeting mention beyond a town’s borders, the races for three open seats on the Ferguson City Council are getting unprecedented coverage.

    “Ever since I’ve been here, no one has gotten that much attention over a councilman race,” said Lee Smith, a candidate for the 3rd Ward seat.

    That’s because the April 7 election is taking place as the city stands at a crossroad.

    Ferguson’s municipal court judge, city manager and police chief resigned in the course of three days. The U.S. Department of Justice painted a damning picture of city law enforcement as racially biased and revenue-focused. And then there’s the matter of rebuilding businesses burned to the ground amid rioting and looting.

    The new council members will have to tackle those issues — and perhaps this time with a diverse City Council. […]

    Three council seats are up for election this year. All three incumbents — Ward 1 Councilwoman Kim Tihen, Ward 2 Councilman Tim Larson and Ward 3 Councilman David Conway— declined to run for another term.

    Eight candidates are running for the three spots, including four African Americans. Ferguson is roughly two-thirds black; one of the six current council members is black, which has prompted major criticism after Brown was shot and killed by then-Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.

    More on individual candidates and their thoughts on rebuilding Ferguson, the DOJ report, and other things within.

  425. rq says

    Have to post this again. Because yes. Soundbite from the discussion on the n-word on CNN, a good one.

    Dear white vegans. Stop comparing my people being enslaved, slaughtered, raped, and harassed, to farm animals. TW for the image within.

    Paperwork Filed to Remove Ferguson’s Mayor

    Mayor Knowles once considered his job to be “ceremonial,” presumably because he presides over a fairly small town of about 21,000, where the AP reports that he only makes $4,200 as its mayor. But that was before former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson killed an unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown. The killing sparked a national uprising about the excessive police force used in African-American communities.

    The AP reports that Mayor Knowles has opened up an office in City Hall to address all of the problems and issues his office has fielded since Brown’s killing, and hopes to see Ferguson through this crisis, regardless of the effort to have him removed.

    “Obviously there are people on the street calling for my resignation,” Mayor Knowles told the AP during an interview Friday, “but my voicemail, my text messages and my Facebook are full with literally hundreds of people who want me to stay.”

    “Somebody has to show leadership, and I’m focused on how we can move this community forward,” Mayor Knowles continued.

    His critics however disagree, and say that Mayor Knowles should have known and done something sooner about the racial bias that a Justice Department investigation found the city’s law enforcement agencies harbored.

    “I want the mayor out,” said Kayla Reed, 25, of the Organization for Black Struggle, a national organization advocating for the civil rights and advancement of black Americans. “True accountability means clean house, top to bottom,” Reed continued.

    So far, six city employees, including the Ferguson police chief and the city manager, have received pink slips or stepped down from their posts in recent months.

    In addition to his mayoral duties, Knowles works full-time as a general manager at a state-contracted motor vehicle license office.

    I did not know what his other job was. But I would recommend that he concentrate on it.

    Missouri man plotted to kill Obama with informant posing as white supremacist: feds. Eh?

    Cameron James Stout, 24, of Stover was arrested on Tuesday and remains in custody after an initial appearance in U.S. District Court in Jefferson City, Missouri’s capital, prosecutors said.

    An informant told a Morgan County sheriff’s deputy that Stout had asked him on Thursday for a high-powered rifle and assistance in a plan to shoot the president in the next few weeks, an affidavit attached to the criminal complaint said.

    Over the next few days, the informant, a former member of the Aryan Nation, met with Stout and agreed to put him in touch with a high-ranking member of the organization who could help him obtain a rifle and plan the attack, the affidavit said.

    Stout drew diagrams of the Washington, D.C., area and talked about possible positions from which he could fire at the White House or a church the president attends, the affidavit said.

    The Missouri man also told the informant he had loaned out a .270-caliber rifle with a scope, but had gotten it back and planned to use it in the crime, the affidavit said.

    On Tuesday, Stout told the informant and an undercover officer who was posing as an Aryan Nation superior that he planned to shoot Obama the next time the president appeared in Kansas City, the affidavit said.

    #JusticeForAnthonyHill #Antlanta #AnthonyHill

    Ex-Employee: James O’Keefe Wanted Him To Incite Violence In Ferguson

    O’Keefe, of course, denies anything like this happened. According to a statement from his spokesman to the New York Post, he claims, “Project Veritas would never do anything that we believe would incite violence against police officers. Anyone suggesting otherwise is clearly unfamiliar with our body of work.”

    Oh, it is because we are familiar with O’Keefe’s body of work that I am inclined to think it did happen just as described.

    I would not be surprised at all to see edited Ferguson video pop up one of these days. Just because this guy didn’t do the deed doesn’t mean there isn’t some unscrupulous money-grubber willing to take Koch money in exchange for principles.

    Be careful out there, protesters.

  426. rq says

    Something on the better news front: Community Bail Fund For Poor Defendants To Launch In Brooklyn

    Bail is meant to ensure people accused of crimes come back to court. But far too often, advocates say, it becomes a form of punishment in itself. Now a group of lawyers is working to start a bail fund in Brooklyn to keep people like Padilla out of Rikers — and to give them a fighting chance in court.

    Organizers said the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund will launch within days or weeks. Working as a nonprofit in conjunction with the Brooklyn Defender Services, they intend to raise $200,000 from private individuals and foundations to cover bail for low-level offenders with close community connections. When they return to court, the money will be recycled to cover other defendants’ bail.

    Bail fund co-founder Scott Hechinger, who also works as a public defender for the Brooklyn Defender Services, said the aim is to change his clients’ odds. In his day job, he said, he is presented with a daily parade of defendants being arraigned, desperate to avoid Rikers.

    “The very first time I meet my client — then within five to 10 minutes see a judge — is arguably the most important part of the case,” said Hechinger. He must quickly garner information to plead the case for release. “Bail is everything. When bail is set, I cannot do my job … all negotiating leverage goes out the window.”

    Hechinger said that when his clients are released — on their own recognizance, or with the help of a family member — the equation changes completely. Suddenly, clients can negotiate pleas or head to trial from a position of relative strength.

    The fund estimates based on 2013 data provided by Brooklyn Defender Services that defendants are nine times more likely to plead guilty to a misdemeanor if they are stuck on bail. Eighty-eight percent of those out of jail had their cases resolved without a conviction, compared to 38 percent of those in jail on bail. […]

    The bail fund is launching at a moment of ferment for criminal justice nationwide. Cities and states are increasingly reconsidering whether they need to jail people accused of minor crimes at all.

    “This is not a long-term strategy,” Hechinger said of his own project. “This is not a solution to the problem of bail. The bail fund is a short-term intervention to an urgent need.”

    Some experts on bail have questioned, however, whether focusing on short-term strategies is a good use of both money and minds when larger changes might be possible. Other states like Kentucky have significantly reduced their jail populations by making mathematical assessments of whether defendants are likely to threaten public safety before trial.

    But New York is one of very few states where judges may not legally consider defendants’ risk to community safety when setting bail. City courts frequently avoid setting bail in the first place: 72 percent of New York City defendants in felony cases were released on their own recognizance as of 2006. But when low-level offenders do receive bail, they are trapped in jail for an average of 15.7 days, according to a Human Rights Watch report that examined those with bail of $1,000 or less. In a 2013 speech, Jonathan Lippman, the state’s top judge, blasted how the system traps low-level offenders, calling for a move to risk assessment.

    Bail funds are “a bit of a stopgap measure,” said Cherise Fanno Burdeen, executive director of the Pretrial Justice Initiative. “If you have bail funds,” she worried, “does that prevent the system from actually addressing the concerns? Because they have this Band-Aid holding things together?”

    But Burdeen acknowledges that for individual clients, bail funds can be priceless.

    And this one: apparently the Race Card is wild right now. Cheney to ‘Playboy’: Obama, Holder ‘playing the race card’

    “I think they’re playing the race card,” Cheney says off the bat when asked whether race has anything to do with any of the criticism that has been aimed at President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. Instead, Cheney says all of that criticism is deserved “because of incompetence.”

    “I look at Barack Obama,” Cheney says, “and I see the worst president in my lifetime, without question … it’s a real tragedy.”

    From foreign policy to energy policy, and from America’s military to the response to the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Cheney lobbed harsh rhetorical bombs at the current administration repeatedly across nine pages of the magazine.

    “I don’t know where the president gets his guidance,” Cheney told Playboy. “I don’t know who he talks to; I don’t know who he listens to … [but] I don’t have any concept that he has a worldview that’s sort of the traditional worldview that most American presidents have adhered to for 70 years.”

    Speaking of the current proliferation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Cheney again singles out the Obama administration for blame. Without acknowledging any criticism of the flawed intelligence that got the United States into the second Iraq war, Cheney says American actions have “created a huge vacuum in that part of the world, and ISIS has moved in big-time.”

    Cheney also stated that Obama’s military strategy is having a “crippling” affect on the Pentagon’s readiness. “I am absolutely convinced there will be a future president … who will be faced with a major crisis and will not have the military capability he needs to deal with it,” Cheney says. “I can go on for hours.”

    I just bet he can. That poor interviewer (assuming someone not so ferociously inclined to the same views).

  427. rq says

    It’s insane that we have gotten to a place where good people are opting not to call 911 in real emergency situations.

    You need FB to watch this video of Roorda versus Deray; I’m still waiting on something like youtube because.

    Municipal Court judge disciplined for ‘pattern of misconduct’ as an attorney; owes taxes. No, not Brockmeyer. Another one!

    Municipal Court judge Charles Kirksey admits he did it. In an order issued a month ago by the state Supreme Court, Kirksey admits to “a pattern of misconduct” in his private law practice that includes repeatedly using the trust fund for his clients to pay his personal bills.

    In documents obtained by News 4 Investigates, Kirksey admits making 18 personal payments from the account from September 2011-May 2012. Three years ago, the trust account had an overdraft of $1,193 for a payment for personal property taxes.

    I asked Judge Kirksey if he thinks that hurts his credibility as a judge.

    “Only if you make it that kind of problem,” he told News 4. “I don’t think it is because it had nothing to do with the courts. It’s something that was particular to my practice and I straightened that out.”

    The judge added that he’s “always tried to take care of my taxes.” But unpaid taxes are an ongoing issue for Kirksey, one that has prompted the federal government to place nearly $165,000 in liens on his property during the last two decades. According to St. Louis County records, Kirksey hasn’t paid off all of the $114,000 in liens still on his property. The judge says he doesn’t know what he still owes the federal government for his unpaid taxes.

    “I let this get out of hand, but I’m working with the authorities to take care of it and that’s all I can do,” he said. As a municipal judge for more than a decade in Wellston and Normandy, Kirksey has issued thousands of warrants for the arrest of people who failed to appear in court, often for traffic violations that involved small fines.

    City officials in Normandy and Wellston said they weren’t aware of the judge’s disciplinary action for a “pattern of misconduct” as a private attorney, or his unresolved liens for unpaid federal taxes.

    Kirksey is the second municipal court judge under fire recently for unpaid taxes. Former Ferguson municipal judge Ron Brockmeyer resigned from that city and Breckenridge Hills, where he was also a judge, as well as his job as prosecutor in other north St. Louis County Municipalities, after it was revealed that he owed taxes.

    The revelation about Brockmeyer’s taxes came after he was accused by the Department of Justice of helping boost city revenue through the Ferguson municipal court.

    March 11 2015 The #Antlanta family turns out for #AnthonyHill. #blacklivesmatter

    Prestigious Art School is Giving Kanye West an Honorary Doctorate – that’s Dr Kanye West from now on!

    He once rapped about being a college dropout, but now Kanye West will receive an honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on May 11, according to the Chicago Tribune.

    Dr. Kanye West.

    He’ll be even more insufferable.

    Lisa Wainwright, the dean of faculty and vice president of academic administration at SAIC, is the person responsible for West’s receiving the honor. Wainwright said she thought he deserved the award after reading an article in which West said he wished he had attended SAIC.

    “I read it and thought, ‘Wow, this is a fantastic moment.’ Here is this major figure in the cultural landscape promoting art school, this guy from Chicago saying art school is cool. So we thought, ‘This man deserves an honorary doctorate from us!’ He should have gone here. He would have been a perfect SAIC student—he likes to shake people out of complacency.” West will join the likes of Patti Smith, Jeff Koons, and David Sedaris, who also received honorary doctorates from SAIC.

    But not everyone is happy about West’s receiving the degree, especially alums of the school. “As an alum of SAIC, I am offended that the school’s exorbitant tuition and fees will help fund this nonsense,” said Corinna Kirsch, senior editor of New York-based art magazine Art F City.

    Kirsch notes that West is receiving a degree for his music, “but the school does not have a music program, it has a fashion program and I suppose you could honor Kanye West for his contributions to fashion, but … I don’t know if that make sense. I just think this seems like a gimmick, like it is being given to the most famous person that they could get to honor.”

    She apparently has not seen any of West’s contributions to fashion.

    Everyone should now write about how much they wished they could have attended SAIC, maybe the school will hand out some more doctorates. That is how it worked for West, right?

    Actually, he may be insufferable, but if the school deems him worthy, well, why not?

    Starbucks steps into conversation about race

    The coffee chain known for its Frappuccinos says it will elaborate on the plans at its annual shareholder meeting Wednesday in Seattle. Already, workers at its U.S. stores have been told to write “Race Together” on cups and the company plans to start publishing “conversation guides” on the topic.

    The decision has sparked a backlash on social media, with people saying it’s opportunistic for a coffee chain to try and inject itself into such an important issue. But it comes as corporate executives say customers are drawn to companies that project some sort of feel-good image or embrace positions on social causes.

    At the annual meeting for Yum Brands Inc., the company that owns KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, CEO Greg Creed said in December that fast-food chains must to evolve from being perceived as “impersonal and industrial” to being able to “demonstrate that we do care.”

    Laura Ries, a branding consultant based in Atlanta, said that addressing big important, issues of the day has also become a way for companies to make themselves a part of the conversation. Otherwise, nobody is sitting around on Twitter discussing brands, she said.

    Dove soap has generated widespread praise for its campaign celebrating “Real Beauty” by featuring women who don’t look like the typical models. Always, which makes products for women, also got praise for an ad that ran during the Super Bowl seeking to empower young girls. But those were messages that had ties to the products.

    People, however, don’t associate their morning coffee with race.

    “There’s nothing wrong with talking about race relations,” Ries said. “But is it something people naturally associate with Starbucks? It’s not.”

  428. says

    http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/03/18/gifted-black-student-told-nggers-dont-belong-in-class-school-bans-her-parents-for-complaining-video/

    NyZeria, a 6th grader in Indiana received racist threats while at school. The principal dismissed her concerns. The school district only issued an alert to parents that harassment wouldn’t be tolerated. Guess what happened to the parents when they confronted school administrators with a sign reading “STOP BULLYING OUR CHILDREN”-

    Carrying a handmade poster reading “STOP BULLYING OUR CHILDREN”, the parents arrived at the school to confront administrators. Instead of addressing their concerns, school administrators called in the Elkhart County Sheriff’s Department to issue a no-trespass order against the parents.

    While racist bullies in the school have faced no consequences for their threatening behavior, the school has taken draconian actions against the concerned parents of their target.

    The Neely family have now pulled NyZeria and her three siblings from class as they have no faith their children will be safe while the school shirks its duty of care. The family are calling for a public apology from school officials and are considering filing an independent report with the sheriff’s office.

  429. says

    In searching for material for a blog post, I stumbled upon this article from Understanding Prejudice:

    When most people think of racism and other forms of bias, they picture one group having negative feelings toward another group. Although this dynamic certainly takes place, research since the 1970s has found that many group biases are more a function of favoritism toward one’s own group than negative feelings toward other groups. As Marilyn Brewer (1999, p. 438) put it in her summary of the evidence, “Ultimately, many forms of discrimination and bias may develop not because outgroups are hated, but because positive emotions such as admiration, sympathy, and trust are reserved for the ingroup.” The tendency of people to favor their own group, known as “ingroup bias,” has been found in cultures around the world (Aberson, Healy, & Romero, 2000; Brewer, 1979, 1999).

    One of the most startling aspects of ingroup bias is how easily it is triggered. This finding was documented in a series of experiments in Bristol, England, by Henri Tajfel (1970, 1981). Tajfel and his colleagues invented what is now known as the “minimal group procedure” — an experimental technique in which people who have never met before are divided into groups on the basis of minimal information (e.g., a preference for one type of painting versus another, or even just the toss of a coin). What Tajfel discovered is that groups formed on the basis of almost any distinction are prone to ingroup bias. Within minutes of being divided into groups, people tend to see their own group as superior to other groups, and they will frequently seek to maintain an advantage over other groups. One study even found that when participants were given the reward matrix in Table 2, they preferred an ingroup/outgroup award distribution of 7/1 points rather than 12/11 points, denying members of their own group 5 points (7 instead of 12) in order to maintain a high relative advantage over the outgroup (Allen & Wilder, 1975; Wilder, 1981).

    Also, wow. They have an extensive list of resource material on the psychology of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination. There’s a list of books, scholarly journals, magazines/newsletters/e-zines, and articles/essays.

  430. says

    African-American students from the University of Virginia blast animalistic arrest that left top student ‘bloodied’

    The group released a statement describing 20-year-old Martese Johnson’s treatment by officers with the state department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) as “animalistic, insensitive, and brute,” and calling on authorities to look into the incident.

    “We have seen what happens at the University when we allow problems we have long known exist to be handled quietly, so we will not be quiet,” the BSA’s statement read. “We demand noise from each other, noise from professors, noise from administrators.”

    According to the university’s student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily, Johnson was arrested after a bouncer at a local bar refused to accept his ID.

    “It happened so quickly,” a witness said. “Out of nowhere I saw the two officers wrestling Martese to the ground. I was shocked that it escalated that quickly. Eventually [Johnson was] on the ground, they’re trying to put handcuffs on him and their knees were on his back.”

    The Daily also posted video showing Johnson bleeding profusely while laying face-down on the ground as ABC agents handcuff him. One agent can be seen telling Johnson, “Stop fighting,” but Johnson is not moving.

    “I go to UVA,” Johnson says several times, before calling the agents “f*cking racists” and asking, “How does this happen?”

    The Twitter account @UVAProblems also posted a picture of Johnson at the time of the arrest, with the caption, “I stand with Martese Johnson. There is no excuse for this.”

  431. rq says

    Yeah, here’s some twitter comment on that:
    So is the media going to just ignore the fact that a young black @UVA student got beat bloody for having a fake ID?
    I just got off the phone with the President’s Office at UVA and the Communications Office and they are unaware of a situation re: Martese. But I believe several people have called them now, so they ARE aware, and a statement has been prepared, though there’s still some confusion:
    @deray Prez’ Front desk said @UVA statement coming soon. Then was transferred to Comm, who didn’t pick up. Left VM asking when.
    If you thought the BlackLivesMatter protest last semester was unnecessary because “this is UVA not Ferguson” welcome to the real world.
    Crying. With a statement from Concerned Black Students attached, detailing the incident. And he needed 10 stitches for his head? Whaaa?
    Going to be more coming up.

  432. rq says

    *sigh* Well, there’s no good way to organize everything at this point. It’ll be a bunch first on UVA and Martese Johnson and the consequences, and then some random articles. Possibly random articles will be strewn throughout, as well. I don’t know yet. I tried sorting at first and now it’s just a big mess. *sigh*

    First up, here’s the actual article from the student newspaper: University student, Honor Committee member Martese Johnson arrested

    Martese Johnson, a third-year student in the College and a member of the Honor Committee and Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, was arrested around 12:45 a.m. on Mar. 18 in front of Trinity Irish Pub on the Corner. At the request of University President Teresa Sullivan, a state investigation into the use of force in Johnson’s arrest is now underway.

    Johnson was charged with resisting arrest, obstructing justice without threats of force, and profane swearing or intoxication in public at 4:21 a.m. The arresting officer was Alcohol and Beverage Control special agent J. Miller.

    Miller noted on the arrest record that Johnson “was very agitated and belligerent but [has] no previous criminal history.”

    In the course of the arrest, Johnson sustained a head injury requiring 10 stitches.

    Johnson was held at $1,500 bail with the specification he be released on an unsecured bond when sober. He was released at 6:01 a.m. Wednesday morning.

    Johnson has since retained Richmond attorney Daniel Watkins of the firm Williams Mullen as his lawyer.

    An email from Black Dot, signed by “Concerned Black Students,” said the arrest was unprovoked as Johnson was not resisting questioning or arrest. The email included a photo of Johnson bleeding while being held outside Trinity.

    “Outside of the doors of Trinity Irish Pub, a mass of University students bore witness to the officer’s animalistic, insensitive, and brute handling of Martese,” the email said. “He was left with his blood splattered on the pavement of University Avenue.”

    The email asks for a “swift and thorough investigation on the state, local and University levels.”

    So he was agitated and belligerent – I’m so surprised. Note, there will be word of him using a fake ID, and that being the reason the cops stopped him in the first place. But (a) none of the charges in any media story lists using a fake ID and (b) even if he was, white kids all over use fake IDs and get drunk – especially around St Paddy’s Day – and never get stopped or beat by the cops. So.
    Anyway. The article includes summaries of statements from several sources such as the arresting enforcement entity and others, some of which will be appearing in tweets as uncitable documents. The article also includes the video of the arrest. There’s a lot of blood. Be warned. Separate youtube link upcoming.
    Onwards!

    And here is the email to students from President @terrysulli re: Martese Johnson. #JusticeForMartese Summary: There was an incident, University police and Charlottesville police came, but the arresting entity is Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control, a state agency, which is why the state governor has asked for an investigation. Looking for witnesses, etc., safety paramount, etc.
    Oh, and the governor issued a statement before the president of the university.
    Martese Johnson. UVA. #JusticeForMartese In the first photo, he’s holding a sign saying ‘I am the ONLY Black student on the Honor committee’. As it happens, Vice Chair for Community Relations. :|
    Not only is Martese a black man at UVA. He is on the honor committee, a Kappa and an IMP. Arguably 1 of the most prominent figures on campus.

    Some dated tweets, when people were wondering where the president’s statement was: Here is the only official acknowledgment from UVA re: Martese Johnson thus far, from the Dean of Students. Basically, statement forthcoming.

    Gov. McAuliffe has called for an independent investigation into the details surrounding the arrest of Martese Johnson. #JusticeForMartese

  433. rq says

    Previous comment in moderation for too many links, sorry about that. Just more on the UVA etc. Continuing with that, here’s Jezebel:
    Reports: Black UVA Student Beaten by Police for Having Fake ID. There’s that fake ID – as mentioned in previous (currently moderated) comment, none of the charges are for a fake ID, all the charges seem more related to the arrest and the manner of arrest than anything else. *shrug* We’ll see?

    On Tuesday night, a third-year student at the University of Virginia named Martese Johnson was reportedly thrown to the ground by local law enforcement and bloodied in public on the main social drag of campus—all apparently because he tried to use a fake ID.

    Martese Johnson is black. All reports are alleging that he did not resist the officers’ use of force in any way, and the officers continued to brutalize him while onlookers pleaded with them to stop. A graphic photo taken at the scene is now circulating widely on the internet.

    As of now, there has been no formal response from UVA administration. [Edited to note the Cavalier Daily has since reported a fourth-year college student stating that UVA President Teresa Sullivan has “put in a request to Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe to open a state investigation.”] [Now this is interesting, because previously it was thought that the governor independently called for investigation, now it seems the president has asked him to? Hm.]

    The above picture was included in an email sent to the UVA community by a group of concerned black students, which also details the alleged incident:

    This morning Martese Johnson emerged with a head injury requiring 10 stitches.

    He was brutalized by Virginia ABC law enforcement outside of Trinity Irish Pub. His face was bloodied. His body was bruised.

    Outside of the doors of Trinity Irish Pub, a mass of University students bore witness to the officer’s animalistic, insensitive, and brute handling of Martese. He was left with his blood splattered on the pavement of University Avenue.

    Today, we are reminded of the gruesome reality that we are not immune to injustice; as University students, we are not impervious to the brutality that has reeled on news cycles around the country. We have marched and shouted that we are Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, but the proximity of this morning’s brutality to a member of our community has deepened that wound. It is no longer happening only on national television—it is a reality here and now at the University of Virginia that we must face as a collective.

    After Martese was denied entry to the bar, he found himself suddenly flung to the ground. The brutish force used resulted in his head and bodily injuries. His treatment was unprovoked as he did not resist questioning or arrest. In confusion, with blood painting his face and creating a pool on the bricks of the corner, he yelled out for mercy. Though he lay bleeding and crying out, officers continued to hold him to the pavement, pinning him down, twisting his arm, with knees to his back until he was handcuffed.

    As students pleaded with officers to lift Martese from the ground they were pushed away, and some were even handcuffed and threatened with possible arrest if they did not leave the scene.

    We demand there be a swift and thorough investigation on the state, local, and University levels. We have seen what happens at the University when we allow problems we have long known exist to be handled quietly, so we will not be quiet. We demand noise from each other, noise from professors, noise from administrators. Martese, like any other student at this university, like any other person in this country and in this world, deserves more than our uproar: he deserves follow through and intentional action.

    Look forward to a follow up email regarding further plans and actions.

    Sincerely,

    Concerned Black Students

    According to the Cavalier Daily, Johnson was “arrested on charges of resisting arrest, obstructing justice without threats of force, and profane swearing or intoxication in public” and held in jail overnight.

    Martese Johnson is a highly involved student at the University of Virginia: an Italian and Media Studies major who plans on going into business, a member of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity (a historically black frat), a leadership development chair in the Black Student Association; he was also a leader in the major student governing body (the Honor Committee). Sources tell me he was also an IMP: a member of a prestigious semi-secret society, one of three major secret societies on grounds.

    Basically the model of a model black student.
    Also, I’m glad they include the statement from concerned black students. I linked to it above in a uncitable format.

    Here’s the video of the arrest via youtube, warning for graphic!!! Arrest of Martese Johnson 3/18/15

    Viewers should be warned that this video contains disturbing images and explicit language.

    Video credit: Bryan Beaubrun

    Important piece of missing info: Martese does not own a fake ID! The ID he showed the bouncer and ABC officers was his real ID!

    The Latino Student Alliance stands with #MarteseJohnson. Here is our response to the vicious act of police brutality: appended statement of support in summary: the incident and the use of force a chilling reminder of racism, Latino Student Alliance is in solidarity with Martese and his family, invitation to action.

    ABC agents are under statewide jurisdiction, not UVA, so its correct for McAuliffe to speak first. Unclear what role Univ police had @deray

    The Virginia ABC has a history of brutality. This from 2013. Felony Arrest Of Student Who Bought Water Riles Many In Virginia

    If an encounter between several young women and Virginia’s Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control agents had gone that smoothly, the participants might be looking back on a chance encounter as merely odd, perhaps even funny. Instead, they’re coping with the aftermath of a brief flight from authorities that resulted in spending a night in jail and felony charges, now dropped, of hitting agents with a car. The state agency says it’s reviewing the case. […]

    “They were showing unidentifiable badges after they approached us, but we became frightened, as they were not in anything close to a uniform,” Daly, who was driving that night, told the Progress last week.

    “I couldn’t put my windows down unless I started my car, and when I started my car they began yelling to not move the car, not to start the car. They began trying to break the windows. My roommates and I were … terrified,” Daly stated.

    As the story has gained attention, the Virginia ABC says it is conducting a second review of the incident, after an earlier review of the agents’ actions found no problems.

    Giving its version of events in a statement released Friday, Virginia’s ABC says the first agent to approach Daly’s car was a woman who raised her badge to investigate what she suspected to be an underage purchase of beer. When the car’s occupants didn’t comply with her instructions, the agency says, other officers joined in.

    The group of agents reportedly numbered about six; the Progress reports that one of them drew their weapon and held it in a “ready” position.

    “Rather than comply with the officers’ requests, the subject drove off, striking two officers,” the ABC said Friday. “She was not arrested for possessing bottled water, but for running from police and striking two of them with a vehicle.”

    “Another [agent] jumped onto the hood of the car as Daly and her friends dialed 911 to report the incident, according to the records,” the Progress says. “The women apologized repeatedly minutes later when they stopped for a car with lights and sirens on, prosecutors said.”

    Daly admits that she and her friends panicked after being approached in the parking lot at night. Citing Daly’s lawyer, The Progress notes that earlier that night, the women had listened to survivors of sexual assaults tell their stories, as part of a Take Back the Night event.

    A passenger of the car spoke to the Progress as well, saying that the young women didn’t know who the agents were until a Charlottesville police officer came to the scene. By that time, the women had been handcuffed.

    “He helped me to the curb so that I could sit and calm down,” said the woman, who did not want her name published. “He said to us that ABC officers have all the rights of regular officers, and then finally it became clear that these were ABC officers.”

    The case has prompted outrage in Virginia, where people have contacted the governor and other state officials to complain.

    So… Yeah.

  434. rq says

    Same folk blaming Martese for being allegedly intoxicated, probably excused SAE actions for being drunk. Because Black. #JusticeForMartese

    And now, this from the VA Dept. of Alcoholic Beverage Control, whose officers arrested Martese Johnson. Public Intoxication, Obstruction of Justice, approached after not allowed inside a licensed establishment, during arrest the individual sustained injuries, an investigation will occur.

    ABC arrest of UVA student spurs McAuliffe to ask for investigation

    The governor wants an independent Virginia State Police investigation into the arrest just after St. Patrick’s day of 20-year-old student Martese Johnson. The ABC released a statement late Wednesday confirming the incident and saying the special agents involved are on administrative duties pending the investigation.

    A photo and video circulating on social media appears to show Johnson bloodied with an officer standing over him.

    “Governor McAuliffe is concerned by the reports of this incident and has asked the Secretary of Public Safety to initiate an investigation into the use of force in this matter,” reads a statement from the governor’s office. “The Governor’s office has been in contact with University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan and law enforcement and will continue to monitor the situation closely as the investigation proceeds.”

    Johnson, who is under the legal drinking age, was turned away from the Trinity Irish Pub, the Cavalier Daily reports. Around 12:45 a.m. on Wednesday morning he was arrested by Virginia ABC special agents were monitoring bars for St. Patrick’s Day and arrested Johnson on charges of obstructing justice and public intoxication according to the ABC.

    The Cavalier Daily reports Johnson was arrested by Alcohol and Beverage Control special agent J. Miller.

    “A determination was made by the agents to further detain the individual based on their observations and further questioning. In the course of an arrest being made, the arrested individual sustained injuries,” an ABC statement reads. “The individual received treatment for his injuries at a local hospital and was released.”

    “In these situations it’s critical that we get all of the facts about exactly what happened as quickly as possible,” said Attorney General Mark Herring in a statement. “I commend Governor McAuliffe for his swift decision to ask the Virginia State Police to investigate this situation.”

    ABC agents were involved in another controversial arrest of a UVA student from Henrico in a store parking lot in Charlottesville in 2013.

    In that case, 911 tapes from the night of the confrontation seem to indicate that both the students who were targeted and a witness who was watching from afar had no idea who these armed ABC agents were, as they were not in uniform. The agency promised to revise policies after the case.

    Not sure what it says about society when the first thing that came to mind when I saw #MarteseJohnson was thank god they didn’t kill him.. This. So much this.

    Attorney for UVA student Martese Johnson releases statement

    On Wednesday, Johnson’s attorney, Daniel P. Watkins, released the following statement on behalf of his client:

    “On March 18, 2015, Charlottesville Police charged 20-year old Martese Johnson with two misdemeanors: 1) obstruction of justice without force and 2) profane swearing and/or intoxication in public. The charges were filed after a Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) officer and local police confronted Mr. Johnson near “the Corner,” a popular off-campus social hub near the University of Virginia. Contrary to early police reports, Mr. Johnson has not been accused of possessing false identification.

    “Just before handcuffing him, police took Martese to the ground, striking his head on the pavement and causing him to bleed profusely from the gash on his head,” Mr. Watkins said. “This morning he received ten stitches at the University of Virginia Medical Center. Fortunately, Martese’s physical wounds are beginning to heal.”

    Mr. Johnson is a third-year student at the University of Virginia, double majoring in Italian and Media Studies. He holds numerous leadership positions on grounds, including Vice Chair for Community Relations of the Honor Committee, Vice Polemarch of the Eta Sigma Chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi, and a Chair of the Leadership Development Committee of the Black Student Alliance. He has no criminal record.

    “As evidenced by both his academic and extracurricular achievements, Martese is a smart young man with a bright future,” Mr. Watkins said. “I have spoken with him several times today, and he is absolutely devastated by yesterday’s events. Currently, we are preparing to investigate and defend this matter vigorously. Please keep Martese in your prayers during this difficult time.”

    Mr. Johnson and his family ask that the media respect his privacy at this time and direct any further questions to his attorney, Daniel Watkins, with Williams Mullen. The investigation is still in its early stages, and Mr. Watkins and Williams Mullen are limited in what information can be shared with the media.”

    Black University Of Virginia Student Reportedly Beaten By Police Over ID. I love that ‘reportedly’ bit when the photo they show is of Martese bleeding massively. And yes, there’s accidents where he could bleed like that. Still.

    University of Virginia President Theresa A. Sullivan has released a statement following the arrest of UVA honor student Martese Johnson.

    Dear Students, Faculty and Staff:

    I write to express my deep concern about an incident that occurred on The Corner early this morning and to provide information about immediate steps that I have taken in response.

    At about 12:45 a.m., one of our students was injured while Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) agents were attempting to take him into custody on the sidewalk in front of Trinity Irish Pub. University Police and Charlottesville Police arrived on the scene shortly after the incident occurred. We have not yet clarified all of the details surrounding this event, but we are seeking to do so as quickly as possible.

    This morning I met with Charlottesville Police Chief Tim Longo and University Police Chief Mike Gibson in an effort to learn more about the incident. Furthermore, because ABC is a state agency, I contacted the Governor’s office to ask for an independent investigation of the incident. In response, the Governor has asked the Secretary of Public Safety to initiate an independent Virginia State Police investigation into the use of force in this matter.

    As the investigation unfolds, eyewitnesses will play an essential role in shedding light on the details of this incident. I urge students and other members of our community who witnessed the incident or have other direct knowledge of it to come forward. Please contact the Virginia State Police at 1-800-552-0963 immediately.

    The safety and security of our students will always be my primary concern, and every member of our community should feel safe from the threat of bodily harm and other forms of violence. Today, as U.Va. students, faculty, and staff who share a set of deeply held values, we stand unified in our commitment to seeking the truth about this incident. And we stand united in our belief that equal treatment and equal justice are among our fundamental rights under the law.

    Teresa A. Sullivan
    President

    More statements at the link, but this is the one from the President I had in tweet-format above. The one that follows this one at the article is upcoming.

  435. rq says

    Some people don’t really like the president’s statement.Must be hard to express GENUINE concern for someone you’ve never met @terrysulli oh wait…#JusticeForMartese Photo of university president and Martese at some event together.

    An Important Message from Marcus L. Martin and Maurice Apprey

    Dear Students, Faculty and Staff:

    We are outraged by the brutality against a University of Virginia undergraduate student that occurred in the early hours Wednesday, March 18, 2015. This African American male student was injured on the Corner, after being stopped by Virginia Department of Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) officers. His head was slammed into the hard pavement with excessive force. The student required medical evaluation and treatment at the UVa Hospital Emergency Department. This was wrong and should not have occurred. In the many years of our medical, professional and leadership roles at the University, we view the nature of this assault as highly unusual and appalling based on the information we have received.

    This incident is now being handled at the highest level of the University and the State of Virginia. We have spoken with student leaders and are sensitive to the collective remorse and reactions of the University and community. We are asking everyone to exercise sound judgment and discretion, as we seek to protect the student’s rights and privacy. The Office for Diversity and Equity and the Office of African-American Affairs (OAAA) are available to provide support. This evening, the Office of African-American Affairs (OAAA) will be open until 8:00 pm to provide support. As we wait to learn more about what happened last night, please know you can call us to talk about this situation and your concerns.

    Violence against an individual, no matter the color of his or her skin, gender, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation, is inexcusable and appalling. If you are the victim of bias, racism, hazing, or sexual misconduct please report the incident to the Just Report It system. Our students have the right to a safe environment in which to obtain their education. We are deeply concerned about the safety of all students, faculty, staff, and community members.

    Sincerely,

    Marcus L. Martin, M.D.,
    Vice President for Diversity & Equity
    Professor of Emergency Medicine

    Maurice Apprey, Ph.D., D.M., FIPA,
    Dean, African-American Affairs
    Professor of Psychiatry

    UVA Student Assaulted by Police Over Fake ID Last Night [video], no new information.

    Protest ensued! “We won’t go!” Something of a standoff here at University Ave and Chancellor Street on UVa’s campus.
    Heading to Charlottesville PD.

  436. rq says

    The rally for Martese? JUST IN: @seancudahy reports: #MarteseJohnson event at UVa is moved to Amphitheater due to large crowds.
    And the amphitheatre: #UVA Amphitheater where Martese Johnson rally now happening

    the fact that we have to use disclaimers like “honor student, UVA, fraternity” before black man, human fucking being is the issue.

    Uproar after black UVA student injured during arrest. ‘Uproar’.

    The governor of Virginia has ordered an investigation after a black student at the University of Virginia was injured during an arrest early Wednesday.

    The university’s Black Student Alliance distributed a photograph, showing what it said was Martese Johnson, 20, during his arrest. Blood splatters his shirt and covers his face.

    Video from the incident shows Johnson pinned to the ground, screaming: “I go to UVA! … You f****** racists! What the f***? How did this happen?”

    An officer can be heard telling the student to stop fighting.

    On Wednesday night, hundreds of students rallied in support of Johnson. And Johnson himself took the microphone.

    “Regardless of your personal opinions and the way you feel about subjects … please respect everyone here,” he said. “We are one community. We deserve to respect each other, especially in times like this.”

    There follows some photos and a summary of the several statements.

    Autoplay video at this and previous link. Bloody arrest of black student leads to investigation

    Video and photos from the arrest show Johnson on the ground with his face and shirt covered in blood as agents hold him down. The incident went viral Wednesday afternoon with dozens of people writing #MarteseJohnson and #BlackLivesMatter on social media.

    Johnson can be heard on video yelling that he was a UVA student. “How did this happen you (bleeping) racists!” Johnson screams.

    On Wednesday night, a rally in support of Johnson drew hundreds of students — including Johnson.

    “We are one community,” Johnson told the crowd. “We deserve to respect each other, especially in times like this.”

    Governor Terry McAuliffe issued a statement saying his office was monitoring the case.

    “Governor McAuliffe is concerned by the reports of this incident and has asked the Secretary of Public Safety to initiate an independent Virginia State Police investigation into the use of force in this matter,” the statement said. “The governor’s office has been in contact with University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan and local law enforcement and will continue to monitor this situation closely as the investigation proceeds.”

    The special agents involved in Johnson’s arrest have been assigned to administrative duties while the investigation is underway, the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control said in a statement. […]

    The Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control said agents saw Johnson get denied entry and “a determination was made by the agents to further detain” Johnson based on “their observations and further questioning.” Johnson sustained injuries as agents arrested him and he was treated at a local hospital and released. The agency added that it would “provide whatever information or assistance is requested by Virginia State Police.”

    Fourth-year student Bryan Beaubrun, told The Cavalier Daily that he witnessed the incident and said an agent approached Johnson shortly after a bouncer at the bar asked him to step aside after refusing to accept his ID.

    “It happened so quickly,” Beaubrun told the paper. “Out of nowhere I saw the two officers wrestling Martese to the ground. I was shocked that it escalated that quickly. Eventually [he was] on the ground, they’re trying to put handcuffs on him and their knees were on his back.”

    Meanwhile, the university’s Black Student Alliance is having a meeting at 8 p.m. Tuesday to discuss the arrest as well as other students’ experiences. Johnson serves as the group’s leadership development chair.

    Oh, and regarding the statement I blockquoted in previous comme,t from Martin and Apprey? UVA’s White President Outsources Outrage Over Martese Johnson to Two Black Administrators

    The first statement, from UVA President Teresa Sullivan, expresses “deep concern about an incident that occurred.” As Sullivan puts it, “one of our students was injured while Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) agents were attempting to take him into custody.” She is, she says, asking for “an independent investigation,” though she cautions that “we have not yet clarified all of the details surrounding this event.” Neither Johnson’s race nor the possibility that he may have been a victim of police brutality are mentioned.

    The second statement is signed by two black professor-administrators at UVA — Vice President for Diversity and Equity Marcus Martin and Dean of African-American Affairs Maurice Apprey. Here’s how they begin:

    “We are outraged by the brutality against a University of Virginia undergraduate student that occurred in the early hours Wednesday, March 18, 2015. This African American male student was injured on the Corner, after being stopped by Virginia Department of Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) officers. His head was slammed into the hard pavement with excessive force… We view the nature of this assault as highly unusual and appalling based on the information we have received.”

    It goes on for another two paragraphs, but you get the gist.

    Taken independently, each of these two statements is arguably reasonable. Released in tandem, they are truly bizarre, creating a spectacle in which UVA’s white president, styling herself the voice of moderation, reason, and detachment, outsources the institution’s expression of outrage to two black administrators.

    It should not fall to UVA’s Vice President for Diversity and Equity and Dean of African-American Affairs to express anger over the police beating of a black student while their white boss preserves her “objectivity” and hedges her bets. If Sullivan, and UVA, are appalled by the violence done to Martese Johnson, let them say so. If they are not, or if they are unable to declare their views, let them say that. Because as things stand now, it looks very much like President Sullivan wants the credit for institutional bravery that Professors Martin and Apprey have provided her without the risk of attack that they are being forced to carry alone.

    It’s like racism within racism within racism, the matroshka reborn!

  437. rq says

    #JusticeForMartese – that’s the packed room indoors, which then moved to here: #UVA #BlackUVaDemands . Just awesome to see that kind of a response.

    Students marched at #VCU tonight, in solidarity with #UVA students rallying for #MarteseJohnson.

    The HuffPo on the subject. Black UVA Student Martese Johnson Bloodied During Arrest By State Liquor Agents.

    McAuliffe was “concerned by the reports of this incident” and wants an independent probe, his office said. University President Teresa Sullivan said in a statement to the campus, in Charlottesville, that she had asked the governor to investigate. Students, faculty and staff “stand unified in our commitment to seeking the truth about this incident,” Sullivan wrote. “And we stand united in our belief that equal treatment and equal justice are among our fundamental rights under the law.”

    Martese Johnson, a junior, was “flung to the ground” by Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control agents outside Trinity Irish Pub at 12:45 a.m. Wednesday, according to a statement circulated by the student group Concerned Black Students. Johnson is the leadership development chair of the UVA Black Student Alliance, which circulated the statement.

    The statement said Johnson did not resist questioning or arrest, but ABC agents pinned him to the pavement with their knees on his back. A photo the group circulated online shows Johnson lying on the sidewalk with his face bloodied as an officer appears to restrain him. […]

    Charlottesville police arrived just after 1 a.m., “responding to a disorder involving a large crowd after the incident took place,” Capt. Wendy Lewis told The Huffington Post. Lewis said the ABC agents had been conducting “some type of operation in our jurisdiction resulting in the arrest and injury” of Johnson. Police dispersed the crowd without further trouble, she added.

    Daniel P. Watkins, an attorney representing Johnson, said in a statement that “contrary to early police reports,” his client wasn’t accused of having a fake ID during the incident. He said ABC agents forced Johnson to the ground prior to handcuffing him, “striking his head on the pavement and causing him to bleed profusely from the gash on his head.”

    Johnson, a member of the school’s Honor Committee and Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, had recently posted on Facebook about the racist fraternity song in Oklahoma, writing, “This is why things like Black Greek organizations, Black mentorship programs, and Black professional networks still need to exist. If you were wondering…”

  438. rq says

    Now for some non-UVA stuff.
    This one via tony: Nevada Lawmaker Says Racism Is Over, Then Refers To Colleague As ‘Colored’

    According to the Las Vegas Review Journal, Fiore objected to witness testimony that the voter ID proposal would disproportionately disenfranchise minority voters, as similar laws have already done in other states. “We’re in 2015 and we have a black president, in case anyone didn’t notice,” she observed during a committee hearing on the bill. Fiore also asked the Nevada director of the NAACP National Voter Fund, “At what point do we stop dividing by design? And at what point do we stop using the race card?”

    Fiore also identified Assemblyman Harvey Munford (D) as the first “colored man to graduate from his high school.”

    In recent weeks, Fiore has made national headlines for her suggestions that cancer is a fungus that can simply be washed out and that “hot little girls on campus” need to carry guns to prevent rape. She was removed from her position as Republican Majority Leader in December over allegations of more than $1 million in tax liens.

    In 2012, she proposed arming school officials and college students as a way of combating school shootings.

    So, in other words, when it comes to racism, she has no clue.

    Some of the rules for the hearing tomorrow to appeal Officer Chris Manney’s firing over the murder of #DontreHamilton. No signs, no drinks, no food, no yelling, no standing room. Also, I hope Manney stays fired.

    So a neo nazi white supremacist in AZ shoots 6 ppl, kills 1 and is arrested, with a stun gun. But #AllLivesMatter ?? Yah.

    The NYPD Is Creating a Unit to Investigate Police-Involved Shootings – the same kind of unit that edits wikipedia?

    The creation of the unit in New York was precipitated by the death of Eric Garner at the hands of an officer trying to arrest him for selling loose cigarettes. Garner’s death last July motivated Bratton to send a team of officers to L.A. to see how the department there deals with use-of-force incidents.

    “They have the most contemporary policy on use-of-force training, which I seek to take advantage of,” Bratton was quoted as saying at the time. “We will develop a liaison with LAPD in anticipation of the training.”

    Citing unnamed sources, the Advance reports that the new unit is “meant to spark a culture shift within the ranks of the NYPD, since officers often don’t trust investigators from the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau.”

    Mmkay, here’s Glenn Beck at his… finest? The moment where @glennbeck on a chalkboard says @deray & I are the masterminds of a $33 million conspiracy w/ ISIS. The youtube: Glenn & I discuss who’s really pulling the strings in Ferguson 3/16/15

    Glenn Beck and John Cardillo expose the money and coordination behind the civil unrest in Ferguson, MO

    It’s about as bad as it sounds. Talk about conspiracy. Wow. Can they (Deray and Shaun King) sue for this?

  439. rq says

    Tomorrow hear from Ferguson activists @Nettaaaaaaaa & @deray right in #Cambridge!, the FB event page: A People’s History of Ferguson

    Thursday, March 19 at 6:30pm in EDT
    First Parish Cambridge Unitarian Universalist in Cambridge, Massachusetts

    Ferguson activists and 2015 Howard Zinn Honorees Johnetta Elzie and DeRay McKesson join Jabari Asim, editor-in-chief of The Crisis, in a conversation about Ferguson, activism, and citizen journalism on March 19, 6:30pm, at Cambridge Forum.

    Anyone in the area and want to go say hi on our behalf?

    And then there’s this: a statement on the movement, not a reassuring one.

    A common question people ask me is what happens next? I don’t have an answer other than to say this isn’t working… things are not better, they’re worse: riffs within the movement, wider gaps between citizens and police and way too many organizations pushing ‘more of the same’ disguised as change. The community has been reduced to an afterthought…. with zero consideration for the youth, not the youth with connects who were ‘selected’ as leaders, but the youth who rebelled on August 9 and had their movement stolen away from them.

    The new normal is a slow boil… by summer, this could be a recipe for disaster.

    So yeah, protestors aren’t necessarily a united front.

    Slavery exists even today in occupied West Papua. The Indonesian authorities treat West Papuans worse than animals .

    We don’t need to humanize #JasonHarrison, emphasizing his mental illness. He was in his home w/ a screwdriver, couldve been fixing something. Had an article yesterday, he’s the guy shot by police in front of his mother. For holding a screwdriver in his own home.

    #BlackLivesMatter Founders: Please Stop Co-opting Our Hashtag

    The founders of #BlackLivesMatter are grateful that their message has been picked up by so many people as a rallying cry, but they want other groups that use the essence of the name, such as #MuslimLivesMatter and #LatinoLivesMatter, to find their own slogans.

    At a South by Southwest panel discussion, “What #BlackLivesMatter Teaches Us About Solidarity,” Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi said they were concerned about the dilution of their message.

    “Not to say their lives don’t matter,” Tometi told the audience, “but we’ve been in a society that continues to marginalize black faces, and so we don’t want to see this kind of reappropriation and co-optation of #BlackLivesMatter as a hashtag.”

    Instead, they urged other marginalized groups to create something new and unique that #BlackLivesMatter would, in turn, support.

    Tometi, the executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, and Garza, the special-projects director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (along with Patrisse Cullors, who was not at SXSW), created the national organization #BlackLivesMatter in 2012 after the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida by George Zimmerman.

    Tometi said the hashtag became “a galvanizing way of articulating who we are and the value that we do actually have.”

    The hashtag also became an opportunity to engage others in the fight. Now the pair are using it to encourage diverse communities to come together, but Garza said it’s a complicated effort.

    “I don’t think we can have deep solidarity without addressing the question of race,” she said. “In this country, especially in the last 10 to 15 years, I think there has been a real push towards people of color coming together, and what happens is that black folks get erased from the conversation.” […]

    Meanwhile, Garza said she is looking for more “white co-conspirators” to help with unification efforts. “I think we spend a lot of time figuring out how to move white people, and just because of the social power dynamics, I don’t think that we’re best positioned to do that,” Garza said. “I think other white folks who are invested in dismantling systems of oppression are best positioned to engage with other white people.”

  440. rq says

    MO Press Association release warning that senate bill may close police video evidence, like dash footage, permanently . Basically, make it inaccessible to the public? Oh.

    Alleged Police ‘Black Site’ in Homan Square to be Topic of Meeting in D.C.

    U.S. Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.) and Cook County Commissioner Richard Boykin will meet with a special assistant to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division at 11 a.m. Wednesday in Washington, D.C.

    Homan Square is located in the state’s 7th Congressional District, which is represented by Davis. Boykin, who chairs the Cook County Board’s Committee on Human Relations, toured the Homan Square facility last week.

    After the tour, Boykin told DNAinfo Chicago that police assured him Homan Square “is not a black site” of the Chicago Police Department, a description derived from secret holding cells operated by the CIA. However, he renewed his calls for the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct an investigation into the CPD facility.

    Boykin’s tour of Homan Square came after a Guardian article published in February alleged the site is actually a secret detention facility.

    Calling the article “inaccurate” and “misleading,” Chicago Police said in a statement that Homan Square is not a secret facility, and serves as home base for officers working undercover assignments.

    Interlude: Entertainment! Afrostream: The African Netflix

    EBONY: Your drive to bring legal African-American film and TV content to Europe is refreshing and long overdue. What was your first introduction to these shows?

    Tonjé Bakang: During the summer and Christmas holidays, we would all be together as a family watching DVDs and VHSs of Def Comedy Jam and episodes of The Jamie Foxx Show, Martin, The Fresh Prince, Moesha, The Cosby Show and the Roots miniseries, all without subtitles.

    It showed me that we are connected as African-Americans and Afro-Europeans and Africans. I believe that we are bound together. I believe from the bottom of my heart that we are all bound. We have this invisible connection because we share the same cultural heritage.

    Watching those shows, I realized we have the same sense of humor. The way we interact in our families is kind of the same. It was so different from the TV shows we see in France. For us it was a relief. We did not see ourselves on television in France. Not like this. This was positive. This was empowering.

    EBONY: Your parents are in medicine—your father is a doctor and your mother a nurse. Both are very active in the community in France and Cameroon. How did they respond to your entertainment dream?

    TB: All of us, my siblings and I, are entrepreneurs. I feel that my father did not grow up to leave his country and work hard to win a scholarship and become one of the first Black doctors in France for me to grow up and do nothing. My parents developed a strong sense in us to help other people. This is not [as much] about entertainment as it is about helping everyone.
    Afrostream.TV

    Afrostream.TV

    It was time for me to do something for the Afro-Europeans, for the children of Africa. The youth on the continent are about 70 percent of the population. I wanted to do something for African-Americans. There are so many stories that people don’t know about: Africa before colonization, when there were kings and queens; the stories of Africans in Europe before colonization; the African-American inventors, not the same stories of Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. I want to make inspiring stories about ordinary people. Who will make these stories? […]

    EBONY: How did the idea for Afrostream come about?

    TB: I traveled a lot in Asia. Thailand, Malaysia. Every time I was there, I saw that in the middle of Asia, they watched their own content. They watch their own dramas, blockbusters, TV dramas, reality TV. They didn’t care about the rest of the world. They didn’t care about Hollywood. They preferred to watch people who looked like them, who had similarity in culture to them. I was so impressed. They were watching these shows, not only on TV, but on their smartphones and tablets. I wondered, “Why are we not able to do the same?” […]

    EBONY: What exactly is it that Afrostream proposes to do?

    TB: Afrostream offers exposure and access to numerous African, African-American, Afro-Caribbean movies produced around the world through legal, transactional video on demand. For now we have a pay per view platform in France, and in a few months we will launch the subscription element: Afro films, TV series, documentaries and kids shows.

    It’s not a niche market. We are not afraid that tomorrow Netflix will make a show with a Black cast. If they do, it’s a great thing for everybody. There’s a huge market. In the future, it will be easier for Black films to deal directly with us as distributors. We know the European markets.

    Many filmmakers go to festivals and they may not be picked up. We want those films. Connect with us. There is no middleman. There is so much content out there. We are open to talk to everyone. We are also interested in web series. We are talking to Black and Sexy TV and are open to more.

    EBONY: Now you have your dream team. You’ve proven demand. Afrostream is valued at over six million. What’s next?

    TB: We are partnering with MyTF1 VOD. They are the largest network in Europe based in France. We will curate the Afro content on their video on demand service. The service began about a week ago and has already surpassed expectations for Black content here in Europe. Afrostream itself has a preexisting community of around 60,000 people. These are incredible numbers for this content in Europe.

    EBONY: MyTF1 VOD is France’s most widely-distributed VOD catalogue, with multi-screen viewing and access to top American content. How did their partnership with Afrostream come about?

    TB: MyTF1 VOD approached us. We are the experts in the Black market and able to give these films the attention and direction they need to do well. It is great, because they recognize us a partner and not an employee of their much larger company. We are also very excited to work with Chris Rock and offer his film, Top Five. It would ordinarily have gone directly to video on demand in France without any major marketing push without our involvement. This is a great opportunity to show African-American filmmakers that there is a market for them here. […]

    EBONY: Can positive social change be accomplished through the use of media platforms?

    TB: When you drive this idea that “with content you can create change,” you change the way the world sees your people and the way your people see themselves. With that, you can change the world. By building a platform where a little Black girl can see a Black princess and begin to like her own hair, or when a little Black boy can see Black superheroes, it is huge. To inspire people, and not just Black people, it can inspire the world, it can change the world, because this generation will be inspired by that.

    EBONY: What’s the endgame for Afrostream?

    TB: My goal is not to become profitable too soon. My goal is to be the number one globally. We will invest a lot to have subscribers and to make content. Sixty million subscribers is our endgame.

    Our first year, in the French-speaking countries in Europe and Africa, we see 100,000 subscribers. In year two, 300,000 and much more once we launch in the US. Since we are moving to the US now, we hope to begin the service before the end of the year.

    I’m inspired by the entrepreneurship of Diddy, Jay Z, Oprah Winfrey, Tristan Walker, Charles King, Tyler Perry and his ability to build a studio. It’s important for me to thank them for inspiring me and in some way being a part of my energy.

    Racism a culturally variable thing? Perhaps. Meanwhile, This is Belgium’s Foreign Minister @dreynders – in blackface. Shocking & embarrassing. Look in the background, there’s more like that. The tweet links to this article: Bruxelles : folklore, générosité ou…colonialisme ?, unfortunately in French, but the title translates to “Brussles: folklore, generosity, or… colonialism?” Text as follows:

    C’est l’une des plus vieilles œuvres caritatives de la ville de Bruxelles. Chaque année, au moment du carnaval, cette association verse plusieurs dizaines de milliers d’euros à des crèches et à des hôpitaux qui soignent des enfants. Mais c’est aussi une tradition folklorique unique au monde : les quêteurs sont grimés en rois africains d’opérette. Les “noirauds” sont directement issus de la période du colonialisme belge, et cette année le ministre belge des affaires étrangères en personne, Didier Reynders, s’était grimé de noir. S’agit-il d’une belle tradition généreuse ou de folklore aux relents colonialistes ?

    In translation: One of the oldest charities of Brussels. Each year, during carnival, this association donates many thousands of euros to nurseries and children’s hospitals. But it is also a folk traditions unique in the world: participants are made up into operatical (tr?) African kings. The “swarthy ones” are taken directly from the era of Belgian colonialism, and this year, the Belgisn Minister of Foreign Affairs himself, Didier Reynders, painted his face in black. Is this a beautiful generous tradition or folklore with colonial overtones?
    Pardon my French, I’m out of practice, but I think I got the gist correct.

  441. rq says

    Why the N-Word Is Only Part of the SAE Problem

    But if black rage is a revolver, white supremacy is a sawed-off shotgun. Language can be violent. N*gger is a word that leaves the mouth like a buckshot, but the weapon is the real problem.

    This is the point the exhaustive commentary surrounding the now expelled and penitent University of Oklahoma Sigma Alpha Epsilon students, who sang a racist chant on video, misses.

    It hurts when white people call black people “n*gger,” but words aren’t the biggest obstacle to surmounting racism in America. That honor belongs to the fact that society continues to validate a white sense of superiority, by reinforcing the idea that whites are more intelligent, less criminal and more employable than people of color.

    Language has power, but so do the material advantages granted or denied on the basis of skin color. My classmate called me a bad word, yet society encouraged his sense of arrogance. He lives in a country where whiteness is thought to be synonymous with merit and achievement, despite the existence of structural impediments that frustrate black and brown peoples’ success. […]

    Given such a preponderance of evidence regarding racial inequality, it would be foolish to believe that black people are worse off than other racial and ethnic groups because we are lazier, more violent and less smart. Nevertheless, some people think racial inequality is a result of cultural differences and not structural conditions that privileges some and deny others, as Imani Perry, a Princeton University professor, argues in her book More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States.

    The privilege afforded to white people is a more insidious problem than the speech acts committed by the SAE frat members, my classmate or the truck driver. It verifies what any person shelling out “n*gger” actually believes about himself and the non-white other. […]

    Yet it is ironic that racist words uttered by individuals captivate our attention and distract us from the more pronounced and dehumanizing system of racial inequality that actually gives words, like n*gger, power in the first place.

    I think it’s a defense mechanism, pointing away from one’s complicity in an oppressive system: see, look, they’re being obviously racist over there, see, that’s the real problem, I’d never do that, no racism here!

    Hundreds Protest At University Of Virginia After Student’s Bloody Arrest

    It was supposed to be a gathering of University of Virginia students in one classroom Wednesday night, but a crowd of more than 300 people assembled at the campus after the arrest of Martese Johnson.

    The crowd came together a day after 20-year-old Johnson was taken into custody by agents from the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, and the governor called for an outside agency to investigate the use of force used in the arrest.

    The protest grew large enough that Charlottesville police re-routed traffic around the major streets the campus. Officers then rounded up and left the scene of the demonstration.

    “We had no idea it was going to be this size,” Charlottesville police Lt. Tom McKean told BuzzFeed News. “We’ll let them have their protest, as long as they’re peaceful.”

    But minutes later, when students and other protesters realized they were being limited to a quarter-mile stretch along University Avenue, they took their march into the city.

    The group passed mostly-empty bars and restaurants lining the streets near campus, crossed the Drewary Brown Bridge and Ridge Street (which bisects the campus and downtown), and continued through the town’s picturesque downtown mall until they arrived at the police station.

    Along the way, they recited chants that first gained popularity at protests in Ferguson, New York City, and Washington, D.C. “Hands up, don’t shoot!” “No justice, no peace/no racist police!” “Black lives matter!”

    “Ferguson isn’t an island,” said Kwame Utu, a 31-year-old Ph.D candidate in anthropology at the University of Virginia. “We’re all in for the fight of our lives.”

    Many of the students at the protest said they knew Johnson, who was repeatedly described as a popular student and member of the Honor Committee and Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity.

    Some students wondered if Johnson’s status on campus helped draw a crowd and attention to an issue that they say has gone overlooked for a number of years.

    “It’s sad but I don’t think it’d be the same crowd out here if it didn’t happen to Martese,” said Assa Diaw, a 22-year-old fourth-year student. “Even though we’ve all dealt with some degree of racism here in Charlottesville.”

    There’s a photo of Martese at the protest. And the expression on his face just kills me, esp. when compared to the other photos of him going around (pre-beating).

    Oh. CBS Commentator Assumed Jay Smooth Was Co-Opting Blackness Until He Said, ‘I’m Black’. Did not know!

    Tuesday night, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes tackled the subject of Starbucks’ #RaceTogether campaign on his show All in With Chris Hayes. The panel discussion included CBS Sunday Morning’s Nancy Giles and culture commentator and DJ Jay Smooth. Smooth is known for his talks on race and his in-depth knowledge of hip-hop and culture. […]

    During last night’s segment on Starbucks’ failed campaign, Giles started to make fun of how she assumed Smooth was co-opting blackness because of the way he talked and the music he listens to.

    “I can’t not tease Jay about the kinda like brotha way he was trying to talk, like, ‘Hey,’ with the rap music in the background, and, like, down with the people,” Giles said.

    I can’t even imagine what was going through Smooth’s head while she was talking. But he did let her know that he is definitely a rap guy.

    But Giles didn’t stop there. She just kept on inserting her foot into her mouth based on her own assumptions, and teased Smooth about trying to act black.

    “Yeah, I know, but it’s another interesting, funny thing about race. Like, there would be some people that would feel that you co-opted something like that, and other people might feel like that’s his background and that’s really cool, too,” Giles said. “These are conversations, you know, ‘Yo, like, ya know, yeah, if somebody takes my wallet,’ I mean, it’s really interesting.”

    And if there was ever a time to insert a “Well, that was awkward” gif, right now would have been that moment.

    “It’s also interesting because I’m actually black, but you assumed otherwise,” Smooth said.

    This is the exact awkwardness that many people were trying to prove when they rallied against #RaceTogether on Twitter. Imagine if Smooth was having a #RaceTogether convo with a white barista at Starbucks, and the barista has no idea he’s black and goes on a rant about “those black people.” That would definitely make for another awkward moment, when all you were trying to do was get your macchiato.

  443. rq says

    Sounds like a plan: Stephen A. Smith Wishes Every Black American Would Vote GOP for One Election

    ESPN host Stephen A. Smith thinks that if, for one election, every black American voted Republican, it would send a message to both parties that the demographic is not under any one particular party’s control.

    “What I dream is that for one election, just one, every black person in America vote Republican,” Smith said Tuesday afternoon at the Impact Symposium at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. His explanation:

    From what I’ve read, Barry Goldwater is going against Lyndon B. Johnson. He’s your Republican candidate; he is completely against the civil rights movement. Lyndon B. Johnson was in favor of it — civil rights legislation. What happens is, he wins office, Barry Goldwater loses office, but there was a Senate, a Republican Senate, that pushed the votes to the president’s desk. It was the Democrats who were against civil rights legislation — the southern Dixiecrats. So because President Lyndon B. Johnson was a Democrat, black America assumed the Democrats were for it.

    According to the clip, recorded and first published by Breitbart, Smith clarified further that black people voting for the Republican Party would be a great way to get both parties to pay attention to the racial demographic’s needs:

    Black folks in America are telling one party, “We don’t give a damn about you.” They’re telling the other party, “You’ve got our vote.” Therefore, you have labeled yourself “disenfranchised” because one party knows they’ve got you under their thumb. The other party knows they’ll never get you and nobody comes to address your interest.

    During his impassioned monologue, Smith likened blacks voting for Republicans to customers “shopping around,” essentially asking shops to “cater to them” so that they will do business.

    “We don’t do that with politics,” he lamented, “and then we blame white America for our disenfranchisement.”

    In the 2012 election, 93% of black voters supported President Barack Obama, with just 6 percent casting their ballots for the losing Republican ticket. That disparity led the Republican Party to publish an autopsy report detailing ways it can try to win over more votes from minority groups.

    In Denver: Denver auditor releases scathing report on sheriff’s department; says jail is “seriously mismanaged”

    The audit report found the city’s jail is “seriously mismanaged” and that it puts “inmates, detainees, deputies and taxpayers at significant risk.”

    Specifically, the report highlighted the department’s inability to gather internal data as one of the catalyzing factors in their failure to address problems in the jail. In particular, the report cited a vast gap in the amount of employed staff versus what is actually needed.

    “Overall, the audit found that the management of jail operations has been poor which harms the city’s reputation and leads to other problems including the waste of taxpayer resources,” the auditor’s office said in a statement.

    Gallagher said in the statement he is “deeply troubled by these findings.”

    “We have all heard the stories of abuse and other problems and are aware of the significant settlements that the city has made but to learn of the level of mismanagement that have allowed these problems to persist is what is most disturbing,” he said. […]

    In December, Gallagher fired off a letter to Mayor Michael Hancock accusing the department of trying to obstruct his staff’s work.

    He wrote, “we have encountered recalcitrance, foot-dragging and what I can only describe as obstructionist behavior.”

    Gallagher opened his investigation into the department in October.

    The long-term evaluation of the department by outside consultants is expected to be finished in May.

    All of the reviews are the result of a series of excessive force cases that have cost the city more than $10 million in legal settlements and attorneys fees.

    Audio at the link. Cashing in on Ferguson, That Letter to Iran, and Nihilism’s Allure

    This week, two police officers were shot in Ferguson, MO, bringing in yet another wave of reporters. We examine whether the constant media presence has turned the town of Ferguson into a symbol and a brand. Plus: Brooke charts the history of nihilism.

    Have I posted this already?

    Interlude: Science! Neil deGrasse Tyson’s late night TV show will premiere on 4/20

    Astrophysicist and guy I occasionally see on the subway, Neil deGrasse Tyson will premiere his new late night program StarTalk on National Geographic Channel on April 20th, according to the cable network. Variety reports that guests will include, “Former US president Jimmy Carter, biologist Richard Dawkins, retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, producer Norman Lear, film director Christopher Nolan, and Star Trek actor George Takei.”

    If you haven’t listened to the podcast that inspired the television show and shares its name, now is as fine a time as any to start. StarTalk: The Radio Show is a humorous and human take on scientific topics that can too often feel cold, distant, and incomprehensible to laypeople — like myself. The late night series will regularly feature fellow scientist and television personality Bill Nye, along with a slew of comedians, scientists, and celebrities.

    StarTalk premiers Monday, April 20th at 11PM EST. The competitive linking of Neil deGrasse Tyson memes in the comments begins now.

    Mandatory Voting? Obama Says It Would Be ‘Transformative’. Mandatory?

    Obama floated the idea of mandatory voting in the U.S. while speaking to a civic group in Cleveland on Wednesday. Asked about the corrosive influence of money in U.S. elections, Obama digressed into the related topic of voting rights and said the U.S. should be making it easier — not harder— for people to vote.

    Just ask Australia, where citizens have no choice but to vote, the president said.

    “If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country,” Obama said, calling it potentially transformative. Not only that, Obama said, but universal voting would “counteract money more than anything.”

    Disproportionately, Americans who skip the polls on Election Day are younger, lower-income and more likely to be immigrants or minorities, Obama said. “There’s a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls,” he said in a veiled reference to efforts in a number of Republican-led states to make it harder for people to vote.

    Statistically speaking, Obama is correct. Less than 37 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in the 2014 midterms, according to the United States Election Project. And a Pew Research Center study found that those avoiding the polls in 2014 tended to be younger, poorer, less educated and more racially diverse.

    At least two dozen countries have some form of compulsory voting, including Belgium, Brazil and Argentina. In many systems, absconders must provide a valid excuse or face a fine, although a few countries have laws on the books that allow for potential imprisonment.

    At issue, Obama said, is the outsize influence that those with money can have on U.S. elections, where low overall turnout often gives an advantage to the party best able to turn out its base. Obama has opposed Citizens United and other court rulings that cleared the way for super PACs and unlimited campaign spending, but embraced such groups in his 2012 re-election campaign out of fear he’d be outspent.

    Obama said he thought it would be “fun” for the U.S. to consider amending the Constitution to change the role that money plays in the electoral system. But don’t hold your breath.

    Starbucks again. Same topic. Starbucks Asks Employees to Solve Race Relations in America for No Extra Pay

    CEO Howard Schultz says the initiative comes out of his desire to show that “we at Starbucks should be willing to talk about these issues in America” after Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri. It’s admirable that an executive is taking interest in social issues, rather than only fixating on protecting his own profits. But instead of doing something about it himself, Schultz is putting the onus on his workers—and asking them to go above the normal duties of a low-wage coffee house employee for no extra pay.

    In so doing, his company joins the likes of McDonald’s and several other low-wage employers. Today’s underpaid employees are increasingly asked to do more than show up for their shifts on time, perform their duties, and do so politely. Now many employers are also asking them for something more: putting on a performance along with serving up a burger or a Frappuccino. Ahead of Valentine’s Day, McDonald’s ran a campaign where employees were asked to randomly pick customers who could “pay with lovin” instead of money if they danced, called their mom or hugged someone nearby. In reality, that required McDonald’s employees, who make just above minimum wage, to put on a show of excitement and enthusiasm on top of work that can be so rushed and intense that it leads to physical harm.

    McDonald’s wasn’t the first employer to demand this kind of work from its employees. In 2013, Pret a Manger posted expectations of its workers: they should create a “sense of fun” and not act like they were “just here for the money.” (It later removed the requirements from its website.) It didn’t clarify what else an employee shows up for if not money. But more and more employers want their workers to pretend they get something out of work other than compensation. Some sociologists estimate that half of all jobs require emotional labor today, up from just a third in 1983.

    Starbucks’s campaign is slightly different. It’s not asking employees to show delight doing about menial tasks so customers get a better experience. But it’s still an emotional performance—demanded of employees who make less than $20,000 a year on average. Schultz may genuinely want to spark meaningful conversations about race relations, but the initiative means something for the Starbucks brand, too—and the low-paid employees serve as the uncompensated brand ambassadors.

    This extra work, for no extra pay, might require even more effort and duress than urging a customer to dance, particularly for the 40 percent of the company’s workforce are people of color. As Tressie McMillan Cottom, a professor who makes money by teaching students about, in part, race and racism, notes, “I require payment to talk about race and racism. It is a hard job.” People of color are constantly being called upon to talk about race—as paragons of their backgrounds and initiators of conversations with white Americans who don’t think of themselves as having a race at all. Cottom wonders whether Starbucks employees will even be given the tools they need for these conversations: “It takes a lot of training and a lot of institutional support to teach people things they would rather not hear. I wonder what kind of training and support the hourly wage baristas at Starbucks will get.”

    Forced social justice puts extra pressure on those already stressed and pressured. Yup, sounds like a good idea.

  444. rq says

    LAPD officer involved in police shooting alleges racial discrimination

    A Los Angeles police officer testified Friday that he believes he has not been returned to field duty because he is Latino and a man he fatally shot five years ago in Koreatown was black.

    “I believe that if I was another black officer, this wouldn’t be happening to me,” Officer Allan Corrales told a Los Angeles Superior Court jury while recounting the shooting of 27-year-old Steven Eugene Washington, who turned out to be unarmed and autistic.

    Asked by Deputy City Attorney Daniel Aguilera if he would do the same thing again if faced with the same circumstances, Corrales replied, “If I believed my life was in danger again, sir, I would.”

    But Corrales added that he regrets in retrospect that Washington was killed.

    “I wish this would never have happened,” Corrales said.

    The shooting occurred about midnight on March 20, 2010, in the 800 block of South Vermont Avenue. Corrales was still in the passenger seat of a patrol car when he fired at Washington. He said the man had his hands in his waistband and then lunged toward him with one arm.

    “I believed he had a gun and that I was going to be shot in the face,” Corrales testified. […]

    Aguilera has denied any racial discrimination occurred and said both men have been treated the same as any other officer in their situation.

    Corrales said that although he makes $96,000 a year as an LAPD officer, he needs to do outside work to supplement his income so he can pay child support and other family expenses. He said he has been repeatedly told by LAPD management that he cannot work outside security jobs where he would need a gun, including a job offer from Dodger Stadium that he was forced to turn down.

    Asked by Aguilera if he was open to taking jobs where it was not necessary for him to be armed, Corrales replied, “Those jobs are harder to get, sir. I feel like I should be able to get any type of job I want.”

    Chief Charlie Beck found that the use of deadly force by Corrales was justified, but the Police Commission still concluded the officers’ actions were wrong, in particular Corrales’ use of lethal force in alleged violation of LAPD policy. Beck is scheduled to testify Monday.

    The two officers have still not been cleared to return to the field. Diego said he currently is assigned to the LAPD’s Force Investigation Division.

    plans for thursday #UVA #Charlottesville #BlackUVaDemands @teeBeeEnn @ChelseaClaytor @deja_glo @NigerianBrother – in other words, action at UVA to continue!

    A touch on voter ID. Five things we learned at the voter ID hearing

    What did we learn today? Here’s a quick list:

    • If something occurs outside your personal experience, it didn’t happen. Several of the panel’s Republican members said they simply could not believe that — in this day and age — any person in the state doesn’t already have an ID of some kind. You need them to get on an airplane, to use a credit card, to drive a car and even go to the doctor!

    Sure, some of the members of the committee tried to suggest that some people (those who don’t use airplanes, credit cards or automobiles) might not have a driver’s license or an ID card. Minorities, seniors and the homeless all might fall in to one of these categories. But that didn’t stop member after Republican member from saying they personally don’t know anybody without an ID, and couldn’t understand why the bill would be a problem.

    […]

    • The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Although some of the Democrats on the panel tried to elicit specific examples of voter fraud that could be stopped with an ID check, there was little evidence to be presented. And by little, I mean “none.”

    [examples of attempted voter fraud]

    Now, to many, this would appear to be proof that voter fraud is very difficult to pull off, and that Nevada authorities are on the job looking out for fraud. As lobbyist Kyle Davis put it, “We want the most secure electoral system in the nation. Luckily, that’s what we have.”

    But no! Not only did committee members say they’re still concerned about fraud, but so did witnesses. Former Assemblywoman Sharron Angle, who has made a cottage industry out of implying her 2010 loss to Harry Reid in the U.S. Senate race was due to fraud, testified that between 3 percent and 9 percent of votes cast nationally were fraudulent, and that Nevada’s numbers were higher!

    Evidence? Proof? Examples? Assemblyman Elliot Anderson wanted to know, risibly referring to Angle as an “expert” in the area.

    “I do not have any examples that I know of,” Angle replied.

    […]

    • Racism is over because we’ve got a black president. Assemblywoman Michele Fiore, R-Las Vegas, apparently didn’t like the fact that some committee members and witnesses claimed that minorities would be disproportionately harmed by a voter ID law. “We’re in 2015 and we have a black president, in case anyone didn’t notice,” she said. And there were apparently audible gasps in one of the hearing rooms after Fiore referred to colleague Harvey Munford, D-Las Vegas, who is black, as the first “colored man to graduate from his college.”

    Ouch, baby.

    That comment blew up on Twitter, but Fiore was undeterred. After Lonnie Feemster, the Nevada director of the NAACP National Voter Fund testified against the bill, Fiore tried to argue.

    “At what point do we stop dividing by design? And at what point do we stop using the race card?” she said.

    “We will stop when discrimination stops,” Feemster replied.

    Assemblyman Tyrone Thompson, D-North Las Vegas, stepped in to object to Fiore’s claim. “There is a disproportionate impact on communities of color,” he said. “No one is pulling a race card, it’s just facts that were stated for the record.”

    • This is starting to get creepy, and free IDs aren’t really free. Several of the members, including Fiore, pledged that they would personally pick up voters who need to get a voter ID and drive them to the DMV. (Please, please tell me none of them owns a windowless van…)

    But what about gathering the documents needed to establish identity in the first place? If you’re poor, or don’t have a computer, or a credit card, getting a birth certificate, say, from your home state isn’t easy. And those kind of barriers make it less likely that somebody who doesn’t have an ID card now would get one and, under these bills, lose the right to vote.

    • Hey, whatever happened to that one idea? If we’re to accept the premise that the state should spend money to assuage the fears of some that widespread voter fraud is taking place, there is a way to do it without harming anybody’s fundamental right to vote. Former Secretary of State Ross Miller proposed to the 2013 Legislature a plan to use DMV photos in electronic poll books, allowing election workers to compare your driver’s license or ID photo when you show up to vote.

    If you don’t have an ID, poll workers would photograph you on the spot at the polls, and place that photo in the voter file. But best of all, you could still cast a full ballot; nobody would be disenfranchised under the Miller approach. But majority Democrats rejected that idea, saying it was too costly and that there wasn’t a problem with widespread voter fraud.

    Cops making fatal mistakes. This time, a service dog is shot. San Diego Police Shoot Man’s Service Dog Dead After Responding to Wrong House

    Two officers with the San Diego Police Department were responding to a domestic disturbance call early Sunday morning when they mistakenly knocked on 24-year-old Ian Anderson’s door regarding a domestic disturbance call in the area.

    The forceful knocking woke Anderson up and excited his 6-year-old pit bull named Burberry, which started barking. When he came to the door, Anderson informed the officers that they had the wrong house. Burberry had meanwhile stopped barking and slipped out the door.

    Footage from a surveillance video that was released by Huffington Post shows one of the officers reaching his hand toward the dog after it exits the house. Burberry then runs up to the other officer, who starts backing away. Within seconds, as Burberry follows him, the officer draws his firearm and then, off-screen, shoots the dog in the head.

    “[The officer] jumped back, went this way, drew his weapon,” Anderson told NBC San Diego. “Boom. Shot right in the head and he was done. He was dead.”

    “He never hurt anyone in the world, and you shot my dog!” Anderson cries in a videotaken by Anderson’s friend right after the shooting. It shows the officer who shot Burberry identify himself as Officer Bennett and refuse to answer why he shot the dog. He tells the weeping Anderson to wait for until a supervisor arrives. […]

    Burberry helped Anderson cope with the death of his father when he was in high school, and aided his management of anxiety and depression. The registered service dog also assisted children with Down syndrome.

    Anderson told reporters that he wants to hold the officer who shot his dog accountable. While the SDPD’s investigation is underway, Anderson is asking people to sign a petition that calls for the police force to receive guidance similar to that mandated by the Colorado Dog Protection Act, which requires police in the state to undergo training to avoid the shooting of dogs.

    This tweet is a short intro to the article to follow: It’s almost as if there’s a concerted deny-racism-exists effort by hip-hop artists recently. It’s scary. It’s dangerous. And it’s odd.
    A$AP Ferg: “There’s No Racism With the Internet” – even I have to wonder, which world are they living in?

    A$AP Ferg recently sat down with NPR for an in-depth interview where he discussed a number of topics including his style, social media, and more. While Ferg spoke heavily about what he has going on musically—which includes his Ferg Forever mixtape and hitting the studio with Missy Elliott and Timbaland—his comments on racism have brought a lot of attention to the piece.

    “That’s what it is about this culture of the Internet. Is everything is merged. There’s no racism with the Internet. Racism only was — is probably like five generations ago,” he said. “Racism been over. It’s the old people that keep on holding on to it. We don’t hold on to that shit. We don’t know racism. We all like having—like my brother had white—my little brother had white girlfriends. And that’s regular.

    He says he feels that classism is the current form of oppression that separates people, which is something Kanye West has said recently, as well. “Oh, classism, meaning like—it’s just—basically it’s not about racism no more. It’s about money,” Ferg continued.

    Audio of the interview at the link.

  445. rq says

    Yes, whites and Blacks have been lynched throughout history. As recently as… this month. @NicoleZiggy_ @tavik

    An Aug. 29 photo of “hands up, don’t shoot” organized by BSA & UVA NCAAP. #MarteseJohnson in the foreground.

    Speaking of Martese, Black student’s injury during police altercation prompts university protests, from Al Jazeera.

    US college students call for #JusticeForMartese after a black student at the University of Virginia (UVA) was bloodied and injured during an altercation with police. Agents from the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) arrested Martese Johnson, 20, in front of a bar on Wednesday morning and charged him with resisting arrest, public profanity and intoxication. A video and images of the incident were circulated online, showing Johnson on the ground with his head covered in blood.

    Tweets, photos and statements at the link.

    RT @musicnews_facts: ‘The Mrs Carter Show’ is the first and only tour by a black person to gross over $200,000,000+ Yup, that’s Beyonce!!

    Ferguson and the Criminalization of American Life

    The Department of Justice’s investigation of the Ferguson Police Department has scandalized the nation, and justly so. But the department’s institutional racism, while shocking, isn’t the report’s most striking revelation.

    More damning is this: in a major American city, the criminal justice system perceives a large part of that city’s population not as citizens to be protected, but as potential targets for what can only be described as a shake-down operation designed to wring money out of the poorest and most vulnerable by any means they could, and that as a result, the overwhelming majority of Ferguson’s citizens had outstanding warrants.

    Many will try to write off this pattern of economic exploitation as some kind of strange anomaly. In fact, it’s anything but. What the racism of Ferguson’s criminal justice system produced is simply a nightmarish caricature of something that is beginning to happen on every level of American life; something which is beginning to transform our most basic sense of who we are, and how we—or most of us, anyway—relate to the central institutions of our society, in ways that are genuinely disastrous. […]

    It’s important to remember though that these were not criminal warrants. The inhabitants were not even being accused of actual crimes (that is, felonies or misdemeanors.) Parking tickets, or tickets for unmoved lawns or improperly placed trash receptacles, are not criminal matters, they are violations of administrative codes having the same legal standing as, say, a supermarket’s failure to take a loaf of bread past the due date off their shelves. They were simply being treated as if they were criminals.

    Obviously, this picture has almost nothing to do with anything we normally consider “justice.” Still, if the image of police terrorizing and manhandling citizens over parking fines seems bizarre, it’s partly because we tend to forget who and what the police actually are. The police spend very little of their time dealing with violent criminals—indeed, police sociologists report that only about 10% of the average police officer’s time is devoted to criminal matters of any kind. Most of the remaining 90% is spent dealing with infractions of various administrative codes and regulations: all those rules about how and where one can eat, drink, smoke, sell, sit, walk, and drive. If two people punch each other, or even draw a knife on each other, police are unlikely to get involved. Drive down the street in a car without license plates, on the other hand, and the authorities will show up instantly, threatening all sorts of dire consequences if you don’t do exactly what they tell you.

    The police, then, are essentially just bureaucrats with weapons. Their main role in society is to bring the threat of physical force—even, death—into situations where it would never have been otherwise invoked, such as the enforcement of civic ordinances about the sale of untaxed cigarettes. […]

    Almost every institution in America—from our corporations to our schools, hospitals, and civic authorities—now seems to operate largely as an engine for extracting revenue, by imposing ever more complex sets of rules that are designed to be broken. And these rules are almost invariably enforced on a sliding scale: ever-so-gently on the rich and powerful (think of what happens to those banks when they themselves break the law), but with absolute Draconian harshness on the poorest and most vulnerable. As a result, the wealthiest Americans gain their wealth, increasingly, not from making or selling anything, but from coming up with ever-more creative ways to make us feel like criminals.

    This is a profound transformation, and one we barely talk about. But it is rapidly altering people’s most basic conceptions of their relations with society at large.

    In a very real sense, the “middle class” is not an economic category, it’s a social one. To be middle class is to feel that the fundamental institutional structures of society are, or should be, on your side. If you see a policeman and you feel more safe, rather than less, then you can be pretty sure you’re middle class. Yet for the first time since polling began, most Americans in 2012 indicated they do not, in fact, consider themselves middle class.

    The Department of Justice report on the Ferguson Police Department should give us the means to finally begin to understand why. Most Americans no longer feel that the institutions of government are, or even could be, on their side. Because increasingly, in a very basic sense, they’re not.

    Interlude: More Science! #BLACKandSTEM 03/19/15

    There is always a long list of policy matters that effect the work of scientists, engineers and STEM educators. Here we review a few top hot items currently before the US Congress, and suggest ways for #BLACKandSTEM professions to engage the political processes. […]

    Perhaps the best way to stay informed is through professional associations, advocacy groups, think tanks and focused news outlets like The Hill, Roll Call and Politico. Bills in the US House and Senate as well as legislation in the various states can be tracked by online tools like govtrack.us.

    You should constantly engage your political leaders through calls, letters, visits and Twitter campaigns. Many professional associations have online engagement tools, and sponsor congressional visits days. The Science and Engineering Working Group has a congressional visit day event every year in March where they award to Members of Congress the George E. Brown Leadership Awards. This year the award was bestowed upon Representative Donna Edwards. Last year it was bestowed upon Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson. Both serve on the House Science Committee. Representative Johnson is the ranking member. #BLACKandSTEM individuals and organizations need get more involved in congressional visits days. Follow @STEMontheHILL and mark you calendar for next year’s event during the 2nd week of March.

    It’s rather a long list, in between that beginning at the end. Lots.

  446. rq says

    Speaking of modern-day lynching as mentioned in the first link previous comment: this is what it’sreferencing.
    NAACP: Missing African American man found hanging from tree

    Claiborne County Sheriff Marvin Lucas has confirmed a body was found on property located off of Rodney Road in Claiborne county.

    The Coroner, J.W. Mallett, confirms the body was found hanging from a tree.

    Now, the Claiborne County branch of the NAACP is indicating the man found hanging is Otis Byrd.

    54-year-old Otis James Byrd was last seen when a friend dropped him off at Vicksburg’s Riverwalk Casino ten days ago.

    They hadn’t heard from him since then.

    The NAACP has now sent an email requesting the US Department of Justice “join the current investigation of the suspicious hanging death of Mr. Otis Byrd.”

    The email goes on to say: “Mr. Otis Byrd’s body was [found] today, Thursday, March 19, 2015. After several days of missing, [he] was found hanged to death.”

    We are continuing to follow this story and will update you with new information as soon as possible.

    And here’s CNN with the same: Missing African-American man found hanging from tree in Mississippi

    The body of an African-American man, who had been missing since early this month, was found today by local police in Mississippi, according to a law enforcement official.

    Police had organized a search for the man and they found the body hanging from a tree in the woods behind the residence where he had been living.

    It is unclear if it is a suicide, or if the man was killed by someone.

    But at this point there are two parallel investigations: one by local authorities into the death and one by the FBI into whether there may be any federal civil rights violations. The FBI has a forensics team on the scene in Mississippi in part because the bureau has responsibility for federal civil rights law.

    Judge won’t release grand jury testimony in Eric Garner death

    A judge on Thursday refused to release testimony heard by a grand jury that declined to indict a police officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner, arguing there wasn’t a good enough reason to release the secret information.

    The New York Civil Liberties and others had asked the court to order Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan to release the grand jury transcript, including the testimony of the officer involved, Daniel Pantaleo, and dozens of witnesses, detailed descriptions of evidence and other documentation. A similar step was voluntarily taken by the prosecutor in Ferguson, Missouri, when a grand jury there refused to indict a white officer in the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, a black 18-year-old.

    Civil liberties lawyers had argued that the public needed to reconcile the widely watched video of the arrest with the decision not to indict the officer involved.

    Donovan argued that the disclosure would damage the credibility of prosecutors seeking to assure both grand jurors and witnesses that details of their participation would be kept from public view. Following the grand jury’s decision, Donovan asked for some information to be made public, but it didn’t include testimony or exhibits shown to jurors.

    The law required the NYCLU and the other parties who brought the lawsuit to establish a “compelling and particularized need” to release the grand jury minutes, the judge wrote.

    “What would they use the minutes for? The only answer which the court heard was the possibility of effecting legislative change,” he wrote. “That proffered need is purely speculative and does not satisfy the requirements of the law.”

  447. rq says

    Today, the officer who killed Dontre Hamilton in Milwaukee, Officer Manney, has a hearing to appeal his termination. America.
    Milwaukee officials will not allow protestors or phones into the hearing as Officer Manney, Dontre Hamilton’s killer, appeals his firing.

    On site: Police dogs are out.. Legit there’s four people outside right now.. #DoBetterMKE #JusticeforDontre
    An officer told me people attending the hearing won’t be let in till 4pm. #DoBetterMKE #JusticeforDontre
    Won’t be allowed in, but we love the message. #DoBetterMKE #JusticeforDontre (no signs allowed)
    The family of Dontre Hamilton just arrived.. #DoBetterMKE #JusticeforDontre

  448. rq says

    This would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. Joyful white guys finish ahead of struggling woman and black man in this university’s catalog

    The University of North Georgia apologized and agreed to stop distributing a course catalog that shows white men winning a race while a woman and black man lag behind.

    The illustration, used as the cover of a continuing education catalog, shows two white men wearing black suits celebrating as they cross the finish line ahead of a woman of indeterminate race and a black man, with the tagline, “Why follow when you can lead?”

    They are dressed in professional attire, although the black man is dressed more casually and the woman is wearing heels, and they appear to be struggling to keep up.

    An education reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which first reported the image, said she thought the cover was a parody when she saw it.

    The vice president of university relations agreed the image showed “poor judgment,” but said it was unintentional and “an isolated case.”

    “The image was not representative of UNG’s commitment to diversity, and this will serve as an opportunity for increased dialogue about diversity issues and we expect that to better inform our processes and publications,” said Kate Maine, the university official.

    She said the image had been removed from the department website and social media pages, and the catalog would be reprinted before it’s distributed again.

    Also, the two white guys barely look winded, like they’re out for a stroll, while both the woman and the black man are really struggling. Privilege at its finest!

    County settles suit alleging court practices targeted poor, San Francisco.

    DeKalb County agreed to policy changes meant to protect the rights of people who can’t afford fines and fees for traffic violations and other misdemeanors as part of the settlement of a federal lawsuit.

    The American Civil Liberties Union sued the county in January on behalf of a man who was jailed after he was unable to pay more than $800 in fines and fees from a traffic ticket within 30 days. Kevin Thompson’s constitutional rights to have a lawyer and a hearing to demonstrate his inability to pay were violated, the ACLU said.

    Under the settlement announced Thursday, the county has agreed to several changes, including:

    — providing a “bench card” that instructs judges on the procedure for determining ability to pay, outlines alternatives to jail and reminds judges how to protect a person’s right to an attorney in probation revocation hearing;

    — providing training and guidance to court personnel involved in misdemeanor probation;

    — revising forms to inform people charged with probation violations about their right to a lawyer and their right to request a waiver of public defender fees they can’t afford.

    The lead attorney on the case for the ACLU, Nusrat Choudhury, said she was pleased the case settled so quickly.

    “It shows an effort by the county to reform a system that has been broken for a long time,” she said.

  449. says

    Here’s a bit of good news- FL Supreme Court throws out 70 year sentence for Jacksonville 14-year-old

    The ruling ordering a new sentencing for Shimeeka Gridine, who is now 20, was part of four separate rulings that the Supreme Court issued Thursday that put new limits on how long someone can be locked up for a crime that occurred before the perpetrator was 18. The rulings are expected to have far-reaching implications on the future sentencing of juveniles who charged as adults.

    Rob Mason, the head of the Jacksonville area’s public defender’s juvenile division, said hundreds of people facing life sentences in Florida will need to be re-sentenced.

    Mason estimated that his office represents about a dozen of those people, and there are about 18 others in Clay, Duval and Nassau counties that his office can’t represent because of a conflict of interest. Those people will get private lawyers to represent them who are paid by the state.

    “We have a lot of work to do,” Mason said.

    The Supreme Court gave these defendants two years to seek a review of their sentences.

    In issuing these rulings the Florida Supreme Court appears to be coming into compliance with two U.S. Supreme Court rulings, one of which also originated in Jacksonville, that put limits on how long juveniles can be in prison.

    “It’s a great day for kids and a great day for Florida,” said Jacksonville attorney Bryan Gowdy, who got the ball rolling on this issue when he represented Terrance Jamar Graham before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010.

    Graham was sentenced to life in prison in Jacksonville for violating his armed-burglary probation by committing a home-invasion robbery when he was 17. The U.S. Supreme Court threw out that sentence and ruled it was unconstitutional to put a minor in prison for the rest of his life without the possibility of parole for offenses that did not involve a homicide.

    The Florida Supreme Court cited Graham’s case Thursday in throwing out Gridine’s sentence. Prosecutors argued that the Graham case didn’t apply because Gridine wasn’t sentenced to life, but lawyers for Gridine argued that 70 years was essentially a life sentence.

    Prosecutors also argued that Graham shouldn’t be a factor because the Supreme Court ruled in that case after Gridine was sentenced. But justices disagreed and said juveniles sentenced to life before the Graham case still need to be re-sentenced.

    Gridine will now return to Jacksonville to be re-sentenced unless the office of Attorney General Pam Bondi decides to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

    Bondi’s office could not say Thursday whether the case would be appealed.

    “If I were Bondi, I’d be reluctant to appeal this,” said University of Florida law professor John Stinneford. “I might not like the result.”

    Since the Graham case was decided, courts have moved toward the theory that children are different, Stinneford said.

    A second U.S. Supreme Court case said mandatory sentences of life without parole are unconstitutional for juvenile offenders, with Justice Anthony Kennedy citing medical research that shows a person’s brain keeps developing into their early 20s.

    Taking Gridine’s case to the U.S. Supreme Court could lead to the justices saying juveniles convicted of a crime should get out in their 20s, and Bondi doesn’t want that, Stinneford said.

    The office of State Attorney Angela Corey prosecuted Gridine at trial. Spokeswoman Jackie Barnard said the office would seek another long prison sentence for Gridine.

    “The victim in this case still bears the scars of the defendant’s decision to shoot him in the head, with a shotgun during an attempted armed robbery,” Barnard said. “We will continue to seek justice for our victim.”

    Gridine shot a 36-year-old business owner in 2009 during a gas station robbery. Without entering into an agreement with the state, Gridine pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree murder and armed robbery. Circuit Judge Adrian G. Soud sentenced him to 70 years in prison.

    The 1st District Court of Appeal in Tallahassee upheld Gridine’s sentence, disagreeing with lawyers who said the sentence was essentially the same as life. Several other appellate courts in Florida have also ruled that Graham didn’t apply unless a sentence was specifically for life.

    But the Supreme Court seemed unimpressed when the state argued that Gridine didn’t have a life sentence during oral arguments in September 2013.

    “You think for a 14-year-old a summer vacation is forever,” said Justice Barbara Pariente. “To tell a 14-year-old you’ve got a 50-year or a 70-year sentence, for them that is life.”

    In Thursday’s ruling Justice James E.C. Perry, who wrote the unanimous opinion, focused on the fact that Gridine had no chance of getting out of prison until he was in his 80s.

    “We determine that the 70-year prison sentence of this juvenile non-homicide defender does not provide a meaningful opportunity for future release,” Perry said.

    Justices also threw out the life sentences of three other Florida residents convicted of crimes before they were 18. All will be re-sentenced: Orange County’s Leighdon Henry, who was 17 when he was convicted of charges including sexual battery, kidnapping and robbery; Bay County’s Rebecca Lee Falcon, serving a life sentence for a 1997 murder when she was 15; and Brevard County’s Anthony Duwayne Horsley, convicted of first-degree murder in the 2006 shooting death of a convenience-store owner when he was 17.

    All four cases generated national attention with The New York Times and several other publications profiling Gridine.

    Thursday’s rulings make sense and corrects mistakes Florida has been making for years, said Stetson University College of Law professor Bruce Jacob.

  450. says

    Belgian Foreign Minister dons blackface for charity parade.

    Belgian Foreign Minister is at the centre of a controversy after he joined a charity parade in central Brussels wearing black paint over his face with a white ruffled collar.

    FM Didier Reynders was participating in the annual gathering of a charitable organization, known as the Noirauds (“Blacks”).

    During the annual parade, participants usually dress up in tailcoats and top hats, paint their faces black and march across the streets in Brussels’ old town.

    Following the parade, Reynders wrote a blog post hailing the “joy” of the charitable gathering and said the parade helps raise funds for disadvantaged children.

    Critics however, weren’t so amused, with Wouter Van Bellingen of the Minorities Forum saying: “This is inappropriate and shows a total lack of empathy for people of colour, especially for a Foreign Minister who is our representative abroad.”

    Human Rights Watch (HRW) European media director, Andrew Stroehlein, referred to the act as “shocking and embarrassing” and said: “Does this make his position as Foreign Minister untenable? Surely some counterparts abroad will refuse to meet with him after this, no?”

  451. rq says

    Martese Johnson speaks. Actually, his attorney does. Still.
    So his ID wasnt fake just expired? Smh “@deray: Watch Martese Johnson speak. Now. #JusticeFoMartese

    Dear Starbucks: Black People Do Not Need to Participate in #RaceTogether

    What is not explicit in the campaign for interracial dialogue is the fact that black people are the single biggest victims of racist behavior in the United States. Whether it is black people being 21 times more likely to be killed by cops than white people or consistently trailing white Americans when monthly unemployment rates are published by the Department of Labor, the real fight has less to do with dialogue and more to do with implementing systemic changes that minimize anti-blackness and dismantle white supremacy.

    Equally important, Starbucks’ phrasing, “#RaceTogether,” suggests we can heal the centuries-long wounds of racism by chatting with each other over a latte.

    Nope.

    If Starbucks really wants to have a discussion on race, it needs to be between white people only. #RaceTogether doesn’t need black people sharing their views on race. Black people are tired of educating whites about race. There are an infinite number of studies available that articulate the racism we experience, the most recent being the Ferguson report outlining how the city discriminates against its own people, using racist policing to generate revenue for its annual budget. Essentially, Ferguson officials treat black residents like field hands and jail them when they can’t pay the fees. The only conversation I’m sure Ferguson residents want to have is with a city official who will dismiss their trumped-up traffic fines and offer them financial compensation for their ill treatment. […]

    I, like many black people, don’t want to talk about how we can all live together; people; I just want to be left alone to live in my own skin and not be prosecuted for it. That won’t be solved with a dialogue on race. For black people to live without racism, we have to be respected as human beings and white people need to understand that their racism is not a problem we can fix.

    Another issue with race conversations is that it assumes that racism is a symptom of interpersonal interactions and not of white supremacy, the elephant in the room that few white people want to acknowledge. All Americans, regardless of their race, are eligible to participate in racism, whether they want to or not. As a black person in New York City, my race makes me eligible to be a victim of racial profiling by the NYPD more than 80 percent of the time. Whether I want to or not. White people, because they are white, are eligible to be perpetrators of anti-blackness in the form of stop-and-frisk, discriminatory hiring practices, hyper-expulsion of black students and other forms of anti-blackness.

    Racism has little to do with a white person wanting to be racist; it is about America’s white supremacist system that empowers white people to practice racism, be it in a police uniform, the HR office of Bank of America, or a retail store where they can racially profile shoppers. […]

    Instead of advertising their own silly corporate hashtag, it would have been better for Starbucks to advertise to seek copyright support of the three women who created the slogan and started the movement #BlackLivesMatter and print that in the New York Times. This phrase is much more time-specific, resonates with more black people, and is used by young black millennials who are marching in Ferguson and the rest of the country to fight municipal and law enforcement abuse that preys on vulnerable black communities.

    Protesters who were shot at, tear-gassed, arrested and roughed up by police are people who need to lead conversations about racism, not Starbucks baristas.

    Sponsoring the three women who are leading #BlackLivesMatter, among other social justice groups, with financial and logistical support would be far more useful than labeling cups and leading discussions on race that will do little to hold racist city governments like Ferguson and police departments like the NYPD accountable.

    Chicago’s black site. Chicago police commander resigns in wake of Homan Square revelations – as long s he doesn’t escape responsibilty.

    Nicholas Roti, the chief of the bureau of organized crime, resigned from the Chicago police department last week, Chicago police public affairs officer Mike Sullivan told the Guardian.

    The organized crime unit, according to its website, is tasked with confronting illegal narcotics, gang activity and vice in Chicago, operations that numerous people formerly held at Homan Square believe led to their incommunicado detentions there.

    Sullivan did not provide a reason for Roti’s resignation.

    Roti took charge of the organized crime division in 2010, the Chicago Sun-Times reported; and led the bureau through a command reorganization in 2011. Published reports indicate Roti is a 27-year veteran police officer.

    The Guardian exposed a series of incommunicado detention and abuse at the Chicago police facility, including people being held for extensive periods of time without public notifications to their families or access to attorneys.

    Sullivan said that Roti himself did not operate out of Homan Square, but out of police headquarters.

    Yet the organized crime bureau was cited by the Chicago police “fact sheet” released on 1 March, attempting to refute the Guardian’s reporting about a complex where 11 people thus far have told the Guardian they were effectively disappeared.

    Umm, okay. Loving U Is Complicated
    How should white listeners approach the “overwhelming blackness” of Kendrick Lamar’s brilliant new album?

    For illumination I’ve found myself holding it up less to music, at least initially, than to poetry. I’m normally sour on such moves, the give-Dylan-a-Nobel routine: Lyrics for performance and verse for the page are different species. The parallel is only elevating if you curtsey to academic authority, and songwriters need no such boost. Here, however, it may fit, given that the through line on which Lamar has strung his 16 tunes is a poem of his own.

    It unfolds fragment by fragment in between tracks, directing and animating a dialogue among the songs, their characters, their many Lamars. In the 12-minute track at the record’s end, “Mortal Man” (after he shrugs, “it ain’t really a poem”), it morphs into a “conversation” with the wraith of Tupac Shakur, using taped snippets from a rare 1994 interview. […]

    Prime among those priorities is sorting exploitation from expression under white supremacy—that is, to pimp or not to pimp the “butterfly” of one’s gifts to the outside world, whether for love or profit? In that frame, the record interrogates how to sound a singular black voice when the black-American body politic bears wounds centuries deep yet fresh as the morning news, in the skins of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and Tamir Rice, not to mention Lamar’s own fallen friends and relatives back in Compton.

    It’s a suite for many voices (mostly but far from solely Lamar’s) that dips into a much bigger pool of public and private ruckus around race. And in that it calls to mind two recent acts in American poetry, literary division.

    The first is Claudia Rankine’s National Book Award finalist Citizen: An American Lyric, which portrays “micro-aggressions” between the races, generally in the more rarefied social ranks. These stories about the enforcement of second-class citizenship are set in the second person, their (mostly) black protagonists represented as “you.” Your white neighbor calls the cops on the black friend who’s babysitting at your house. Your white boss complains about being required to hire minorities instead of the “great” candidates (so which are you?). Your new doctor screams at you to get away from her door before she realizes you have an appointment. […]

    This brings me to the other recent incident from the poetry world that seems relevant to To Pimp a Butterfly: the brouhaha right now around New York conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s choice last weekend to read Ferguson, Missouri, shooting victim Michael Brown’s autopsy report as a piece of found poetry, for a full 30 minutes at an event at Brown University. Goldsmith is white, and his critics (primarily on social media) accused him of appropriating black suffering for his own pretenses.

    Now, I can equally imagine Goldsmith meant to call out his complicity with the white institutions that deployed Brown’s autopsy, that reduced a life to organs measured and weighed. But the effect of the performance, because pain is embodied and because experience can’t be divorced from our bodies’ histories, inevitably sounds more like an additional act of exploitation.

    There’s a similar problem of standing for a white listener discussing—or indeed simply listening—to To Pimp a Butterfly. The album begins with the sound of a needle touching vinyl on the Blaxploitation-era song “Every N—er Is a Star,” and it ends with a simulation of Shakur and Lamar discussing a future in which black rioters don’t just loot stores but kill (and, they joke, eat) whites. It’s what Clover Hope described this week in Jezebel as an “overwhelming blackness,” with its reference points including Zulus, Nelson Mandela, Kunta Kinte’s amputated foot, and, as Hope writes, “Gators, cotton picking, Richard Pryor. Master, chains, jigaboos, queens, Africa, naps, and that Brazilian wavy 28-inch.”

    Musically, its main touchstones are 1960s free jazz—often called liberation music in its time—as well as 1970s funk and 1990s West Coast rap grooves and Dirty South neo-soul, all some of the blackest music in history. But it mostly doesn’t get there the easy way, by sampling. Instead, Lamar has assembled a tight posse of heavy-duty L.A.-centric jazz and funk musicians and up-and-coming producers to create most of these beats, textures, and backup vocals in the studio. […]

    On the other hand it might be that Lamar had hesitations about the complex racial imagining in that song, after he underwent his own social-media trials, over his ambivalent comments about the Ferguson protests and over the controversial climactic moment in “The Blacker the Berry” when he calls himself a hypocrite for critiquing racism when he has participated in violence against other black people back in Compton. (He refers to a murder, which I imagine is symbolic shorthand, though I can’t be sure.)

    As a result he was accused of equating structural, institutional racism (white domination) to its symptoms and consequences (“black-on-black” violence), and in that way blaming the victims. He seems to be wrestling with that debate through much of this album—are his interpretations of his own experiences deluded, the products of self-hatred? The prolix motility of the record seems partly an outcome of his artistic predilection to say both can be true, to answer polemic with paradox, to gather all possible realities into the frame. That’s an attitude often unwelcome in today’s polarized economy of outrage, and perhaps it’s part of why he makes himself such a chameleonic target, ventriloquizing such a range of alter egos, slipping (as Goldsmith seemed to try and fail to do) into other skins. That’s part of hip-hop’s essence, of course—founded on sampling, it’s also appropriation art, which is to say salvage art, which is to say survival art. […]

    Together these achievements dare us to speculate that something’s going on in black popular music that wasn’t a year or two ago, even a decade—or at least then it wasn’t so obvious. That some kind of spirit is rising, like a bright cloud of monarchs finally migrating back after an extended stay at Michoacán. As if the climate were changing, for once for the better. I don’t know, and it’s not for me to say. Let’s not take up any nets now, but lean back, listen to the susurrus, keep tuning our antennae, and watch out for the next golden wave.

  452. rq says

    Across from Harvard Yard waiting for doors to open for @deray and @Nettaaaaaaaa for @PENNewEngland talk #Ferguson
    …and folks file in for @PENNewEngland’s #PeopleSpeakFerguson (w/ honorees @deray and @Nettaaaaaaaa) in Harvard Sq.
    Great crowd at tonight’s #PeopleSpeakFerguson event! @deray @Nettaaaaaaaa @jabariasim

    In Ferguson: Judge Roy Richter addressing muni defendants in #Ferguson. He is at City Hall. We are at PD watching a stream.
    Also, starting April 1, court costs in #Ferguson will be set at $26.50. Random court fees were big criticism in @CivilRights report.

    Letterman asked Cornel West if racism has gotten better recently. America waited with baited breath hoping he’d lie & cater to its comfort.

  453. rq says

    Body Of Black Man Found Hanging From A Tree In Mississippi

    Two investigations are now examining his death — one by local authorities and another by federal authorities to determine whether there may be federal civil rights violations. The FBI, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi are all looking into the death, CNN reports.

    “Earlier in the day, the Claiborne County Sheriffs Department and the Mississippi [Department of] Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks conducted a ground search for a man who had been missing since early March,” said a statement released by the FBI. “Officers located a man hanging in the woods near Roddy Road a half mile from his last known residence.”

    Byrd’s father, Willie Shorter, told The Huffington Post that a pastor visited his home Thursday morning to deliver the news.

    “I was mad,” Shorter said, describing the emotions he felt. “How would you feel if it was your child hanging from a tree?”

    Shorter said that he declined to visit the scene and that he’s been trying to cope with the news all day. “I’m angry, but what am I supposed to do about it?” he said.

    Shorter and his wife, Janine, said they last saw Byrd on March 1. However, friends say they dropped him off at a casino in nearby Vicksburg the following day and have not seem him since. Family members filed a missing persons report on March 8.

    Black man’s body found hanging from tree in Mississippi

    The nephew said the family had been told by police that Byrd’s hands had been tied, but he had worked them free and tried to loosen the noose. But that could not be confirmed by authorities, who declined to release details.

    At this point, “we don’t know if it’s suicide or homicide,” said Jason Pack, supervisory special agent for the FBI in Mississippi.

    He said the hanging victim, who was identified by his family, had last been seen March 2, and had been sought by local authorities since the family filed a missing-person’s report on March 13.

    On Thursday, the Claiborne County Sheriff’s Department and the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks located the body in the woods near Roddy Road, about half a mile from the victim’s last known residence, Pack said. […]

    Derrick Johnson, head of the state chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, said the group wanted to be certain the death was not racially motivated.

    “We want to make sure it was not a racial hate crime,” he said. “We cannot stand by in 2015 and watch a lynching, if in fact that’s what happened.”

    The article at least includes some nice things about him – but CNN? WHAT THE FUCK “@OutFrontCNN: Black man found hanging from a tree in Mississippi: What do we know about Otis Byrd? (Basically that one time he was arrested and then paroled.) Link in tweet: autoplay video here.

  454. rq says

    Another one? Teen shot & killed by Cleveland Police on east side identified; source says he did not have a gun

    A teenager shot and killed by Cleveland Police early Thursday morning has been identified.

    Police said 18-year-old Brandon Jones was shot by officers at 2:15 a.m. on Parkwood Drive and Primrose Avenue.

    Cleveland Police said officers were checking out a break-in at a small convenience store when the shooting happened.

    When two officers arrived, police said Jones came out of the store with a bag.

    At least one officer had his gun drawn, a newsnet5.com source stated.

    The two officers approached Jones and tried to arrest the man. Police say a struggle between the three ensued.

    One officer shot the suspect at least one time.

    Jones was taken to MetroHealth Medical Center in critical condition and later died.

    According to sources, Jones did not have a weapon, but tried to grab an officer’s gun.

    No police officers were wounded in the incident.

    Sources said the police involved were two seasoned veteran officers.

    Essex Hayward, the 90-year-old owner of the shop, said it has been robbed several times and even shot before.

    He said Jones only got away with cigarettes and some money.

    Hayward’s son told newsnet5[dot]com that his dad has owned the store for more than 40 years.

    The shop was closed when the break-in happened.

    For fun: B4-XVI beforesixteen, “Highlighting an invisible conversation between hip hop and art before the 16th century.” It is excellent.

  455. rq says

    Yesterday, at UVA: “It is our duty to fight for freedom. …We have nothing to lose but our chains.” #BlackUVaDemands
    Students meeting on UVa’s campus to discuss plans to develop a list of demands via #BlackUVaDemands
    As promised, a group of about 75 students are marching through an academic building and walking in on a few classes.

    Distributing these to 1000 homes in #Ferguson today. Long long long day ahead. #FergusonAlternativeSpringBreak – Monday is a forum for city council candidates.

    UC President Janet Napolitano Apologizes For Calling Student Protests ‘Crap’

    “Yesterday after we heard from a couple of dozen speakers, things got a little active from the audience in terms of chanting and throwing stuff and whatever,” she said of Wednesday’s UC Regents meeting, according to footage shared by CBS San Francisco. “I was caught on a mic with a word that was unfortunate, so I want to just say I apologize for that. I ask for your empathy and understanding in my comments, but also to say we have public comment to listen to comments about serious things expressed seriously.”

    A few dozen students came to the meeting to protest next year’s widely contested tuition hike and to demand that a new Richmond campus proposed by UC Berkeley include an agreement that any new jobs and housing associated with the development will benefit the city’s low-income residents.

    As the students got louder, removed their clothing and began throwing fake money, a San Francisco Chronicle clip of the meeting’s live stream caught Napolitano turning to UC Regents Chairman Bruce Varner and saying, “Let’s go. We don’t have to listen to this crap.”

    Napolitano and the UC Regents have been the subject of protests since they approved a tuition hike in November that would raise tuition 5 percent per year for five years. The increase would bring next year’s in-state student base costs from $12,192 up to $12,804 and ultimately to $15,564 in 2019. Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has been a vocal opponent of the tuition hikes but said earlier this week that he believes he and Napolitano are “moving in the right direction” toward a compromise.

    O, I wonder what she would think of #BlackLivesMatter protest?

    The New York Times Terminates Contract with Razib Khan

    The New York Times has quietly cut ties with Razib Khan, one of the paper’s 20 brand-new opinion writers, following our post highlighting Khan’s association with right-wing racist publications.

    “After reviewing the full body of Razib Khan’s work, we are no longer comfortable using him as a regular, periodic contributor,” Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy wrote in an email to Gawker. “We remain open to consideration of submissions from him to our op-Ed pages, both in print and online.”

  456. rq says

    In relation to the Virginia ABC arrest, and the event from 2013 mentioned, ABC Releases Its Review of Charlottesville Incident: Two Agents Violated Agency Policy during the Operation

    “ABC deeply regrets this terribly unfortunate incident, which we know has resulted in anguish and concern not only for those immediately involved, but for the community at large,” said ABC Board Chairman J. Neal Insley. “We apologize to the young women, their families and the Charlottesville community. Although we reserved comment while the State Police conducted their independent investigation, don’t mistake our silence for a lack of concern or a lack of action.”

    ABC has taken corrective action with the agents involved, but state human resources policy prohibits the release of individual personnel information and the results of disciplinary proceedings.

    “We cannot undo the circumstances surrounding this incident,” Insley said. “We can only do our best to learn the lessons from this experience, and modify our policies, practices and training to ensure a similar incident does not occur in the future. ABC Enforcement has learned many valuable lessons from the circumstances surrounding this difficult situation and its leadership is confident that the measures put in place will prevent such situations from happening again.”

    Virginia Secretary of Public Safety Bryan Rhode commented, “My office has monitored this situation closely, and I have examined both the State Police investigation and the full ABC review. I am satisfied that ABC has thoroughly scrutinized the April 11 incident in Charlottesville, taken appropriate action in regards to violations of policy, and that the extensive training and procedural reforms should significantly help in preventing an incident like this from ever occurring again.”

    The Charlottesville Circuit Court issued an expungement order that prohibits ABC from discussing details of the event or the investigation. The expungement order requires that all police records relating to the incident be sealed. Pursuant to the Code of Virginia and regulations of the Department of Criminal Justice Services, expunged records have to be placed in a secure location in a closed, separate file, unsealed only by order of the court. By statute, it is unlawful for any person having or acquiring access to an expunged court or police record to open or review it or to disclose to another person any information from it without an order from the court that ordered the record expunged. Violation of this provision is a Class 1 misdemeanor.

    In early July, ABC announced a policy change requiring a uniformed officer be assigned to similar operations to assist in interactions with the public. In a review of the State Police investigation, ABC announced 14 additional policy or procedure changes which have been adopted, including, among others:

    Agents will attempt to contact suspected violators as close as possible to the point of purchase, make every effort to contact them in well-lit areas, and avoid making contact after an individual reaches a vehicle, if possible.
    Agents have received and will continue to receive training in how to recognize and react to situations that might require de-escalation or disengagement.
    Through training and other reinforcement, ABC will promote a reasonable, common-sense philosophy regarding the correlation between the seriousness of an offense and the agents’ response, ensuring the response is proportional to the suspected offense.
    Agents will be issued point-of-view cameras to be worn during operations.
    ABC will work with members of the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police and the Virginia Sheriff’s Association to form an advisory committee to review policies and procedures and make recommendations, including methods to strengthen relationships and coordination between ABC Enforcement and local law enforcement agencies.

    That bit there, about a common-sense philosophy regarding the correlation between the seriousness of an offense and the agents’ response… YEEEEeeeaaaaahhhh. That seems ot be working well?

    New judge takes over in Ferguson – change is in the air?

    In the first session since the Missouri Supreme Court took over Ferguson’s municipal court, Judge Roy L. Richter began on Thursday with a detailed overview of the state’s court system, and then announced he was lowering some of the fines.

    A parking ticket was now $52, instead of $102.

    Driving without insurance ticket was $177, instead of $377.

    And a ticket for an improper turn would be $97 — $5 less than before.

    But for most of the night it was tough to say whether the “extraordinary action” the Missouri Supreme Court had taken by placing Richter, of the Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District, in charge of Ferguson’s court was having the desired effect.

    It would have helped if you could have heard him. For much of the night he spoke with defendants at the bench, making it impossible for spectators to decipher what was being said.

    Michael-John Voss, of Arch City Defenders, the law firm that sparked debate about St. Louis County’s municipal court system with a white paper in August, was unimpressed.

    “It’s still a way of extracting money from poor people,” he said.

    Oh.

    Wesley Lowery is one of the journalists consistently delivering good stuff with regards to Ferguson. Now he has new responsibilities! (A bit more on this later, too.) Changes on the National staff and a move to the magazine

    Wes Lowery is pioneering a new beat focused on a national issue of critical importance: the interactions between law enforcement officials and their communities. […]

    Wes’s new beat arises from the reporting skill and digital relentlessness he displayed in covering Ferguson, where he established himself as one of the country’s most recognizable journalists covering the ensuing unrest and its causes. We’re eager to have him delve deeply into the reasons behind the tensions that exist between minority communities and police. He’ll also focus on a digital project developed in concert with Local about which we’ll have more to say later.

    Good to hear about that new focus. Yay!

    Darren Wilson Gives Speech to Non-Profit for Cops “Wrongly Accused in the Line of Duty”. Repost, I think.

    Anne Stanback: We won #MarriageEquality bc we had support of other communities. Now we must help their issues too #FF2015 #alliances #LGBTQ. Just putting that out there as a better example of trying to work together than Patricia Arquette’s ‘hey y’all over here please!’

    Never ends. Reviews still coming of St. Louis County police practices and handling of protests

    The Justice Department has handed down its evaluation of law enforcement in Ferguson. Next up: The St. Louis County police.

    But two federal reviews of the region’s second-largest police department are much different from the civil rights investigations that recently put Ferguson back into the international spotlight and sent six city officials out the door.

    These do not come with the threat of a civil rights lawsuit, something that will enforce reforms in Ferguson.

    They are conducted by the Community Oriented Policing Services arm of the Justice Department — not the Civil Rights Division, which recently delivered scathing criticism of treatment of blacks by the Ferguson police and municipal court.

    One, a process called collaborative reform, was requested by county police to assess what the department is doing well, or not.

    The other, called an after-action report, was initiated by the Justice Department to examine how police from the county, St. Louis city, Ferguson and the Missouri Highway Patrol handled the first two weeks of protests that followed the Aug. 9 shooting of an unarmed black man, Michael Brown, by a white Ferguson officer, Darren Wilson. […]

    Ronald Davis, who directs the COPs program for the Justice Department, said in November that he expected the collaborative reform process to take about two years and include an initial report and at least two “progress reports,” six months and one year after the first.

    Las Vegas was the first to undergo the process, in 2012, and its initial report contained 75 recommendations on use of force, Davis said.

    “All three are public; the community will know exactly what we think,” he said. “They will know what recommendations we provided. They will know whether or not the department actually implemented any of those recommendations.”

    Requests for information are a strain on resources and manpower, said St. Louis County Chief Jon Belmar, who asked in August for the review. But he said it was the right thing to do.

    He told the St. Louis County Police Board this month that he recently had to devote three officers to comply with inquiries after federal researchers added use-of-force policies and procedures to the list of topics under review.

    “Use of force isn’t something we felt we needed assistance with,” Belmar said. “But they said, ‘It’s something we always look at,’ so we want to give them a comprehensive representation on our use of force.”

    Mmhm. More at the link.

  457. rq says

    UVA: Waiting for a Q&A session about #MarteseJohnson’s arrest to start in Newcomb Hall on UVa’s campus.
    #BlackUVaDemands we ready .
    Hearing it went well. Another little pocket of activism raising awareness.

    15 Things That Make “White America” Uncomfortable

    1.) Members of dark ethnic groups who do not exhibit culturally accepted attitudes, vernacular, dress, and mannerisms.

    2.) Dark people walking alone at night, or during the day, depending on dress, mannerisms etc.

    3.) Accepting that whites have not played an angelic, heroic role throughout history.

    4.) The concept of white privilege.

    5.) Masculine, heterosexual black men.

    6.) Non-assimilated, intelligent women of color.

    7.) Political slogans and movements that do not explicitly include whites.

    8.) The notion that police do not serve and protect everyone.

    9.) The embracing of African hair texture and increased melanin.

    10.) Serena Williams’ body

    11.) Large groups of people of color.

    12.) Acknowledgement that the wealth of America is due to African slavery.

    13.) Accepting that occupied and invaded countries are resentful about America’s presence.

    14.) Mentions of collective retribution and matching white violence with violence.

    15.) Angry people of color. Angry whites are okay, that’s passion and patriotism.

    Mentioned, but here’s more, Eric Garner and NY and documents: A Judge Decided the Eric Garner Grand Jury Proceedings Should Stay Secret

    In a 12-page opinion, Justice Garnett denied the request to release the documents in the Garner case, effectively siding with Staten Island District Attorney Dan Donovan, whose office had argued that their release would lead to an “inevitable result of harassment or retaliation.”

    Responding to each party individually, Justice Garnett cited the lack of a “compelling or particularized need” to see the proceedings released. In this case, he deemed the motive an interest—not a need—even if the petitioners were arguing that the whole damn process was screwed.

    “What would they use the minutes for?” he wrote. “The only answer which the court heard was the possibility of effecting legislative change. That proffered need is purely speculative, and does not satisfy the requirements of the law.”

    Garnett argued that headlines do not translate into legal standing; just because the Garner case was such a big controversy does not mean the proceedings merit publication. Essentially, he’s making the case that if the documents were released, it’d be a slippery slope for the sacred institution of secret grand jury proceedings in America.

    “If every newsworthy case were deemed compelling and, thus justified disclosure, the veil of grand jury secrecy would be lifted and every citizen’s right to have fellow citizens, sitting on a grand jury, check the power of the police and the prosecutor without pressure from outside influence—real or perceived—would be imperiled,” Garnett said in the opinion.

    On Thursday, Staten Island DA Donovan’s office predictably called the decision “well-reasoned.” And you can’t blame him: The release of the grand jury proceedings might have been lethal to Donovan’s congressional campaign, even if his borough is more sympathetic to police than the rest of New York City.

    Almost immediately after Justice Garnett’s decision, the NYCLU announced the natural next step: appeal. However, New York’s grand jury secrecy laws are some of the nation’s most stringent, making this an uphill battle with no tangible endgame.

    “We are disappointed that the court has chosen to perpetuate secrecy rather than promote transparency,” NYCLU Legal Director Arthur Eisenberg said in a statement. “In doing so, the court has reinforced the distrust many New Yorkers already feel toward the performance of the criminal justice system in this case.”

    In the meantime, the Department of Justice is still conducting an investigation into whether or not Officer Pantaleo violated Eric Garner’s civil rights. In early March, a similar inquiry essentially led to the vindication of Officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown, even if a related DOJ report could end up dismantling the Ferguson Police Department. But with a federal monitor and inspector general already in place to oversee the NYPD, it’s unlikely that the investigation will result in anything nearly as impactful as the Ferguson report, let alone an indictment.

    The answer will probably be ‘no’, because she is not a Confederate hero. Black Students at Berkeley Want a Hall Renamed After Assata Shakur

    African-American students at the University of California, Berkeley, have issued a number of demands to their school’s chancellor—chief among them that a building on campus be renamed after Assata Shakur, Fox News reports.

    Shakur, born Joanne Chesimard, is an icon from the 1970s black nationalist movement who escaped from prison in 1979 after she was convicted in 1977 for killing a New Jersey state trooper. Shakur eventually fled to Cuba, where she was granted political asylum.

    The black student union at Berkeley would like Barrows Hall to be renamed “Shakur Hall.”

    “We want the renaming for someone—Assata Shakur—who we feel … represents us as black students,” Cori McGowens, spokesman for the school’s black student union, said. “We’re at a crisis on campus.” McGowens says that black students at Berkeley are isolated and marginalized.

    Other requests by the union include additional funds to create positions and the hiring of black personnel who can help them get the resources and support they need to succeed. The students would like three African-American admissions officers to be hired to oversee African-American recruitment and retention, two black psychologists who can offer guidance on how to navigate Berkeley’s “racially hostile campus,” they said, and two black advisers to look after black athletes. They would also like a program specifically created to guide black students along the path toward graduate school.

    “I came to Berkeley and I thought that it was a progressive liberal environment, but the n-word was written on the dorm wall, and my white professors were openly using the n-word,” Blake Simons, a senior at Berkeley, said. “So that’s part of my experience here … feeling marginalized.”

    The school’s chancellor, Nick Dirks, did validate some of their concerns and denounced hostile experiences that some of the school’s African-American students have been subjected to.

    “Too many [black] students have told us about being excluded from study groups, ignored during class discussions, verbally harassed at parties and social events, and feeling, in a general sense, vulnerable, isolated and invisible,” Dirks said. “This is something we deplore.”

    And Otis Byrd: My dad lives by where #OtisByrd was found in MS. A gas station there still has WHITES ONLY painted above the bathroom door #BlackLivesMatter In 2015. Think about that.

  458. rq says

    Action in Ferguson and environs:
    At PTSD training for @FergFlorSchools counselors, social workers, who say the effects of #ferguson are ongoing for some students. So glad to see mental health addressed, too, at least in some capacity!

    Meanwhile in Clayton, Another protest about #Ferguson, this time in Clayton.
    #MikeBrown Means We Got to Fight Back #Ferguson Marching begins in Clayton;
    Children lead the protest march carrying a small casket. #Clayton #Ferguson;
    Shahid calls to bring casket to front for 4.5 minutes of silence. Reference to 4.5 hours Mike Brown was in street.
    Mike Brown Sr. tells marchers thanks for coming. Says he’s bringing bikers to tomorrow’s March in #Ferguson.

  459. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    From the end of #456:

    “Use of force isn’t something we felt we needed assistance with,” Belmar said.

    Irony, thy name is Failing To Get The Fucking Point, Spectactularly. In Multiple Ways.

    …some people have a lot of middle names.

  460. rq says

    When Police Misconduct Transcends Class

    Overreaction on the part of the Virginia ABC doesn’t appear to be anything new. Almost two years ago, Elizabeth Daly, then a 20-year-old UVA student, was arrested and spent the night in jail when plainclothes ABC officers mistook her carton of bottled water for a six-pack of beer. One officer apparently drew a gun, and Daly, not knowing if the men were law enforcement or not, reportedly panicked and attempted to drive out of the parking lot. Her car “grazed” one of the officers in the process, according to reports.

    Daly, who’s white, was initially charged with two counts of assaulting a law-enforcement officer and one count of eluding police. The charges were eventually dropped, and a year after that—after Daly’s federal lawsuit—a settlement was reached. The Virginia ABC reprimanded the officers involved and made policy changes that were supposed to prevent something like this from happening again.

    While it’s unclear what will happen legally in this case—Johnson has already hired a lawyer—many critics are already framing it as yet another racially tinged confrontation between law enforcement and a young African American man. Like many of encounters between young men of color and the police, there is no explicit evidence that this situation was racially motivated. But rarely is there explicit evidence. Racism is often subconscious, only emerging when certain triggers are activated. Is that the case here? If so, what triggers might have prompted Miller to wrestle with Johnson on a sidewalk at four in the morning? […]

    Incidents like these prove that these interactions are not limited to a certain segment of the population. Johnson is said to be a high-achieving student majoring in Italian and media studies and has a leadership role at UVA’s Black Student Association. Perhaps some will point out that Johnson attempted to use of a fake ID or drank alcohol as a minor, but those are two petty infractions that are hardly uncommon among 20-year-old students, white or black, rich or poor. Nor do they warrant violence.

    If Johnson followed the news unfolding in Ferguson and New York City last year, he, like many young men of color, may have wondered if something like that could’ve happened to him. Police brutality and mistreatment often transcends class borders, and Johnson’s college credentials apparently didn’t protect him from the racial profiling he’s believed to have suffered.

    So for those arguing it’s a class thing (seen and heard), well, nuh-uh. Not so much.

    LA teacher told students Lincoln was a ‘n****r-lover’ and Michael Brown ‘got what he deserved’: lawsuit. O.

    The lawsuit, which was filed against the Los Angeles Unified School District, claims that teacher Steven Carnine made disparaging remarks to students about black and Jewish people, reported KCBS-TV.

    The suit claims that Carnine handed out a questionnaire on racial stereotypes on the day after the holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. and made offensive remarks during a discussion of the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

    “In discussing the incident, Carnine said that the guy was a thug and he got what he deserved,” the suit claims. “(The teacher also said) black people are judged for not being smart because they are not smart. A lot of them are just athletes.”

    Carnine told students that if he were walking alone at night and noticed two black men walking behind him, he would be “scared and think they are either going to steal from me or hurt me,” the suit claims.

    He also told students “we all know Jews like to hoard their money,” according to the suit.

    The lawsuit claims Carnine made these remarks while looking at the mixed-race teen and the only other black student in a class of about 30 pupils. […]

    That same day, according to the suit, Carnine told students that “people didn’t like Lincoln because he was a n****r-lover” as he smirked at the mixed-race girl.

    Her parents then met with the assistant principal, Thomas Iannucci, who the suit claims dismissed their complaints and told them there was “no need to go to the press.”

    The suit claims the teen fears for her safety and suffers from anxiety and sleep problems.

    The lawsuit accuses the school district of violating her civil rights and seeks unspecified damages, as well as a court order directing the school district to accommodate students so they will be free from discrimination.

    Washington Post appoints Wesley Lowery to new law enforcement beat

    The Washington Post announced Friday the creation of a new beat focused on “the interactions between law enforcement officials and their communities,” a topic that will be covered by national politics reporter Wesley Lowery.

    The announcement, which was made in conjunction with a series of job moves at The Post, comes months after Lowery was assigned to cover the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown. During his coverage of the story in August, Lowery was arrested along with The Huffington Post’s Ryan Reilly.

    According to the announcement, Lowery’s new assignment is a result of “the reporting skill and digital relentlessness he displayed in covering Ferguson.” He will “delve deeply into the reasons behind the tensions that exist between minority communities and police” and work on an as-yet unannounced digital project with The Post’s local desk.

    Before he came to The Post, Lowery was a general assignment reporter at The Boston Globe, where he contributed to that paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath.

    Lowery’s appointment is one of several related to the creation of a new pod at The Post called “Team America,” which will also include national investigative reporter Kimberly Kindy, social change reporter Sandhya Somashekhar and senior correspondent Kevin Sullivan. The team will be edited by Lori Montgomery and focus on producing “more aggressive news and enterprise reporting across the 50 states.”

    Will have to keep an eye out.

    Saying ‘sorry’ isn’t nearly enough, I would think. Louisiana Prosecutor Apologizes For Sending An Innocent Man To Death Row For 30 Years

    In a letter to the Shreveport Times, attorney A.M. “Marty” Stroud III took responsibility for his role in the conviction of Ford for the 1983 murder of Shreveport jeweler Isadore Rozeman, and admitted that he was more interested in winning than in justice.

    Ford, one of the country’s longest-serving death row prisoners, walked free on Tuesday after the state said he had been wrongfully charged, convicted, and imprisoned for 30 years, highlighting the frequent flaws embedded in the country’s judicial system.

    For years, Ford’s attorneys argued that he suffered from inefficient counsel during his trial and the racial bias of an all-white jury who sentenced him to death. The state’s decision to free Ford was based on new information that implicated another man who had been originally charged in the case.

    The state gave Ford a $20 debit card as he left Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison, The Atlantic reported.

    Stroud’s letter was in response to a Shreveport Times editorial that criticized the state’s decision not to compensate Ford for the time spent behind the bars because he cannot prove he is “factually innocent.”

    “Glenn Ford should be completely compensated to every extent possible because of the flaws of a system that effectively destroyed his life,” Stroud said. “The audacity of the state’s effort to deny Mr. Ford any compensation for the horrors he suffered in the name of Louisiana justice is appalling.”

    Hey, they gave him $20 on a bank card! Guys! Here’s the judge’s words:

    “In 1984, I was 33 years old. I was arrogant, judgmental, narcissistic, and very full of myself,” Stroud said. “I was not as interested in justice as I was in winning.”

    Stroud said that at the time Ford was being tried there was evidence that could have cleared him, but he admitted he was “too passive” and that his “inaction contributed to the miscarriage of justice.”

    The attorney said he dismissed rumors that other parties could have been involved in the murder. “Had I been more inquisitive, perhaps the evidence would have come to light years ago,” he said.

    “My mind-set was wrong and blinded me to my purpose of seeking justice, rather than obtaining a conviction of a person who I believed to be guilty. I did not hide evidence, I simply did not seriously consider that sufficient information may have been out there that could have led to a different conclusion. And that omission is on me.”

    Stroud berated himself for not questioning Ford’s appointed counsel, who had never tried a criminal jury case and were unprepared in trying to save their client’s life. He also pointed out that while Ford was African-American, the jury was all white.

    He admitted that the “dubious testimony” from a forensic pathologist about the shooter being left handed was “pure junk science at its evil worst.”

    From the letter:

    How totally wrong was I.

    I speak only for me and no one else.

    I apologize to Glenn Ford for all the misery I have caused him and his family.

    I apologize to the family of Mr. Rozeman for giving them the false hope of some closure.

    I apologize to the members of the jury for not having all of the story that should have been disclosed to them.

    I apologize to the court in not having been more diligent in my duty to ensure that proper disclosures of any exculpatory evidence had been provided to the defense.

    […]

    Stroud expressed regret in celebrating Ford’s death sentence.

    “After the death verdict in the Ford trial, I went out with others and celebrated with a few rounds of drinks. That’s sick. I had been entrusted with the duty to seek the death of a fellow human being, a very solemn task that certainly did not warrant any “celebration.”

    While insisting that Ford “deserves every penny owed to him” under Louisiana’s compensation statute, Stroud said that the case was “another example of the arbitrariness of the death penalty.”

    “I now realize, all too painfully, that as a young 33-year-old prosecutor, I was not capable of making a decision that could have led to the killing of another human being,” Stroud said, adding that as “fallible human beings” we are incapable of devising a system that could fairly and impartially impose the death sentence.

    “The clear reality is that the death penalty is an anathema to any society that purports to call itself civilized. It is an abomination that continues to scar the fibers of this society and it will continue to do so until this barbaric penalty is outlawed. Until then, we will live in a land that condones state assisted revenge and that is not justice in any form or fashion.”

    And you wonder how many judges are out there with that mindset right now, or who had that mindset but won’t admit to it. SCARY. So yes, the apology is laudable, but there’s a giant stack of shit that needs to be fixed if this is how things work out.

  461. rq says

    As Reform Arrives In Ferguson, Neighboring Municipal Courts Stay Out Of The Spotlight

    Media attention Thursday night was focused on the municipal court in Ferguson, where a state appeals court judge appointed by the Missouri Supreme Court effectively took over the city’s judicial system on an indefinite basis following a blistering report from the Justice Department that found the judge was in league with city officials to raise revenues. In Ferguson, newly appointed Judge Roy Richter lowered outstanding fines for defendants, as many of the city’s fines were much higher than those in other St. Louis County municipalities, and signaled he was looking to expand the city’s community service program to give defendants an alternative.

    But here in Berkeley, a city of just over 9,000 residents that directly neighbors the larger city of Ferguson, municipal court continued without the hullabaloo. The term “community service” never came up. […]

    The situation in Berkeley demonstrates just how difficult it will be to untangle the problems with municipal courts in St. Louis County, given the ingrained role that they play as revenue generators for small cities.

    While the lack of diversity within the government in majority-black Ferguson has been cited as a source of many of the city’s problems, that hasn’t been part of the problem here in nearby Berkeley. The mayor, the entire city council, the police chief, the regular municipal judge and even Thursday’s acting municipal judge are all black, in this city where African-Americans make up 81 percent of the population.

    But the city’s black representation hasn’t prevented it from using its court system as a significant revenue source. The city brought in more than $1 million through its courts in the fiscal year that ended in June 2013, and court fees make up nearly 11 percent of the city budget.

    When an armed 18-year-old was shot by a Berkeley police officer here in December, Mayor Theodore Hoskins defended his city and tried to set it apart from its infamous neighbor.

    “We are different from the city of Ferguson,” Hoskins said at the time.

    In many ways, Berkeley is different. For one, its traffic stop data shows much different patterns than its neighbor. Fewer black drivers are stopped than would be expected given their percentage of the population, and officers actually stopped twice as many white drivers than would be anticipated based on their demographics, according to data published by the Missouri attorney general’s office.

    But Berkeley still relied on ticketing to make up a significant part of its overall budget, and in 2010 even put up a speed camera along the highway, in contravention of state and county rules. The operation was eventually shut down by the highway department.

    Police behaving badly! Police Officer Charged With Holding Gun to Man’s Head

    Police and prosecutors announced Friday that a grand jury indicted Prince George’s County Officer Jenchesky Santiago on charges including first-degree assault and misconduct in office. He had been suspended with pay since police began investigating the incident last June, and now is suspended without pay.

    According to prosecutors, Santiago was on patrol in a Bowie neighborhood last May and told two men that they were parked illegally outside a home when they weren’t. The driver explained that he was dropping off his cousin, prosecutors said. Santiago ordered that man, who had been walking toward his house, to return to the car.

    When the man failed to return, Santiago blocked him from entering his home, pulled his service weapon and held it against the man’s head, prosecutors said. Santiago also pointed the gun at the man’s mouth, prosecutors said.

    He also threatened the men, saying, “We’re PGPD; we shoot people,” authorities said.

    The driver of the car used his cellphone to record video of the officer pointing the gun at his cousin, prosecutors said.

    “We do not train our officers in this manner,” Prince George’s County police chief Mark Magaw said in a statement. “These actions are not indicative of the high standards we expect of our officers.”

    Not indicative? That seems to be one of your officers, sir.

    How’s legislation coming along? Committee kills many police accountability bills

    WBAL-TV 11 News has learned that a number of police accountability bills have either been killed or are on life support. The demise of the bills come as a shock and because of the widespread community support.

    Advocates of legislation holding police more accountable for their conduct have marched, rallied, lobbied and testified.

    Law enforcement responded in large numbers, too, but in opposition and police got the ear of committee chairman Delegate Joe Vallario.

    Vallario said not all of the bills will be voted out of the committee.

    The Officer’s Bill of Rights won’t be voted on. Changes would have made misconduct cases easier to file, investigate and prosecute.

    “I don’t see any bill that’s going to change the F.O.P. Bill of rights,” Vallario said.

    An ACLU investigation uncovered 109 police-involved deaths in Maryland during the past four years.

    The study took more than a year to complete because the state has no unified system to report them. A bill to create one is not likely to survive.

    Most ACLU-backed bills have either already failed or are on life support.

    “(I’m) surprised, amazed and incredibly disappointed. I mean the Maryland Legislature has the opportunity right now. We are at an incredible moment in time where they have an opportunity to do something good,” ACLU Policy Director Sara Love said.

    A body cam bill supported by the Maryland Sheriffs’ Association is not going anywhere.

    “There’s a lot of issues with that, issues with that bill, because there are so many complicated legal problems,” Vallario said.

    Several bills allowing an independent prosecutor to handle police misconduct cases have been tabled.

    “I don’t see those moving. As a matter of fact, the state prosecutor came in and said he couldn’t handle it,” Vallario said.

    The bills were sponsored by the city delegation.

    “The atmosphere regarding police conduct is very troubling right now. I think they look to people like legislators to try and come up with a way we can reaffirm our trust in police officers, reaffirm the transparency,” said Delegate Curt Anderson, Baltimore City Delegation chairman.

    Since the committee chairman has concerns about these bills and it is so late in the session, even the bills on life support are unlikely to move.

    That’s in Maryland. Here’s hoping things look better elsewhere.

    List of demands to District Attorney Susan Hawk in regards to #JasonHarrison #OrganizedRebellion @deray @YourAnonNews. In short, calling for the termination of the officers involved, extra training for 911 dispatchers to determine if mental illness could be an issue, extra training for officers (or at least a demonstration of competence).

    #BlackUVaDemands the office of afr amer affairs is becoming home again @deray @zellieimani – more on UVA next comment.

  462. rq says

    An official from ABC has shown up and, man, he’s getting the business.
    3 times he was interrupted by students who weren’t satisfied with his answer about whether ABC agents received “adequate” training;
    Students have been insistent on getting clear answers from the panel of authorities here at UVA. #BlackUVaDemands;
    When students don’t think an answer was sufficient or clear enough, they’ve been saying – in unison – “answer the question that was asked.”
    Most of the students who were in the auditorium have left, raising their fists and chanting, “Black Lives Matter!”
    “This event was not planned with black people in mind. So we must ask: who this event was planned for?” #BlackUVaDemands

  463. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    “After the death verdict in the Ford trial, I went out with others and celebrated with a few rounds of drinks. That’s sick. I had been entrusted with the duty to seek the death of a fellow human being, a very solemn task that certainly did not warrant any “celebration.”
    While insisting that Ford “deserves every penny owed to him” under Louisiana’s compensation statute, Stroud said that the case was “another example of the arbitrariness of the death penalty.”
    “I now realize, all too painfully, that as a young 33-year-old prosecutor, I was not capable of making a decision that could have led to the killing of another human being,” Stroud said, adding th

    No, an apology 30 years later doesn’t make up for the 30 years. But I think he’s trying to set an example of the kind of self-reflection required of everyone in the institution if we want to prevent the next 30 year injustice. It’s not so much for Ford. Being humans, it probably does matter some to Ford and/or loved ones. But how much pales in comparison to the searing white light that blotted out 30 years of life.

    The important part is that publicly admitting error shows other people that you can admit error without losing others’ respect AND doing so in the way that he did, providing examples of behavior from “failing to miss the ethical mark” to “sick” (this latter from his own words) that will be used over and over in debates about the ethics of current practice and the crafting of new laws, policies, and procedures. I doubt he wrote this thinking only of how Ford and Ford’s loves would hear it. I betcha he was very consciously writing for a legal audience.

  464. says

    How parents talk to their African-American sons about the police. It’s a video, but they have a transcript as well:

    JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally tonight, a special contribution to our series Race Today, where we have been exploring how different generations see the issues making headlines.

    The conversation is a short film from the Op-Docs team at The New York Times.

    Directors Geeta Gandbhir and Blair Foster spoke to parents of African-American boys about the conversation they have with their sons on how to respond when stopped by the police.

    MAN: There’s this unspoken code of white — of racism and white supremacy that says that my life doesn’t matter.

    WOMAN: You can put your hands up and say — and cooperate and say that I’m choking and still be killed and then there’s no repercussions.

    WOMAN: It’s maddening. I get so frustrated and angry about having to prepare my kids for something that they’re not responsible for.

    WOMAN: And these are conversations that people of other races do not have to have with their children.

    MAN: The conversation with him was really just, look, you’re a beautiful young boy.

    WOMAN: Being African-American is a wonderful thing, it’s a wonderful blessing, you have come from great people, but it’s also a hard thing.

    MAN: In America, because of your skin color, as a black boy and as a black man, we are going to be dealing with a lot of danger.

    MAN: Under no circumstance are you to talk to the police if you’re arrested until I get there.

    WOMAN: Do what they say. Don’t get into any arguments.

    WOMAN: Make sure your hands are out of your pockets, so they can see.

    MAN: These are the questions you can ask. This is who to call. This is what happens if this bad thing — it’s not like, please, master, don’t whip my. No, it’s like, excuse me, sir, what’s your badge number? I’m going to film this.

    MAN: If you want police brutality to stop, if you want police to treat you like a human being, then you have to see yourself as a human being.

    WOMAN: You have every right in this world that anyone does.

    MAN: What I love about you, as my son, is, I remember when we thought about having you, and, you know, knowing that we wanted you and watching you grow.

    MAN: You are the Muhammad Ali. You are the Malcolm X. You are the Martin Luther King.

    MAN: You are an amazing young man. And the future is yours.

    MAN: And I will do my best to make sure you’re safe. That’s it. I love you.

    JUDY WOODRUFF: You can see the entire film along with additional Op-Docs videos at nytimes.com/opdocs.

    I really want to like this, but my enjoyment of the video is significantly lessened by the focus being solely on cisgender African-American men. What about African-American women? What about African-American trans women and men?

    (I left a comment there indicating my displeasure at the omissions above. Somehow I think it will be lost amid a fuckton of…questionable comments.)

  465. says

    Snoop Dogg: ‘Ronald Reagan to blame for LA gang violence’:

    On Friday that place was the Austin Convention Center, where the hip-hop legend took the stage in a navy bowtie and gray Ralph Lauren sweater vest as SXSW Music’s 2015 keynote speaker, following in the footsteps of luminaries like Lady Gaga, Bruce Springsteen, Quincy Jones, and Lou Reed. Snoop Dogg, however, was the first hip-hop artist to be honored by the nation’s preeminent music conference.

    Instead of delivering a direct address about the state of the industry, Snoop’s keynote took the form of a largely promotional conversation between the icon and his longtime manager Ted Chung. They touched briefly on Snoop’s forthcoming album Bush, for which he re-teamed with Pharrell after a hiatus (“the mothership has reconnected”), but the majority of the discussion centered on his humble beginnings, how he’s continued to evolve, and his many business endeavors and efforts to provide opportunities for the less fortunate.

    The Doggfather’s latest venture, it was announced for the first time, will be an HBO show he is developing with Menace II Society director Allen Hughes and Boondocks writer Rodney Barnes about life on the West Coast during the ‘80s, when gang violence first began to dominate the region’s inner cities, particularly in Snoop’s home of East L.A.

    “Early in the ‘70s and toward the latter part of the ‘70s everything was beautiful because we had ways to have fun and communicate, and those who were underprivileged, the low economic side of life, the government would provide for us, which helped us get by,” Snoop said. “It was a society and we all needed it and we all had it and we all helped each other. Then when Reaganomics kicked in, certain things were taken away, after-school programs and things of that nature. Guns and drugs were shipped into the neighborhood. So it was a shift of having fun and playing football to selling drugs and shooting at each other. To me it was a system that was designed, because when the Reaganomics era began, that’s when this began.”

    The article briefly mentions Trap Flix, which is described as “a website that gives a platform to urban filmmakers with limited resources”. Here’s their link: http://trapflix.com/

  466. rq says

    Today at the #wecantStopNow march, protesters made @FOX2now leave for their inability to tell unbiased stories.

    How Does a Police Department Solve Misconduct Problems? By Pressing Backspace – and not just in the NYPD.

    In the NYPD’s case, Capital New York reports that two officers were caught editing pages on the “Death of Eric Garner,” “Stop-and-Frisk,” “Sean Bell” and “Amadou Diallo” from police headquarters at 1 Police Plaza. NYPD IP addresses attempted to change the word “chokehold” to “respiratory distress” in the article concerning Eric Garner, a Staten Island man who died in July 2014 after officers wrapped their arms around his neck during an arrest. Someone at 1 Police Plaza also tried to delete the article on Sean Bell, who was shot four times in the neck and torso outside a Queens strip club by undercover officers in 2006.

    Meanwhile, U-T San Diego reported that anonymous Wikipedia users and one San Diego police dispatcher “edited or deleted” paragraphs in the “misconduct” section of the San Diego department page using IP addresses assigned by the city to the police department.

    In both cases, police officers or people who worked for the police departments deliberately excised or modified information that painted police in a bad light — something that Wikimedia Foundation senior communications manager Juliet Barbara told Mic in a statement probably would be considered “a conflict of interest by the Wikipedia community.”

    Both the NYPD and SDPD staff involved in the edits appear unlikely to face any real discipline.

    SDPD Media Relations Unit’s Lt. Scott Wahl told Mic in a statement that as the Wikipedia page is “not an SDPD or city-sponsored website, the department has no control” over changes made to it. He also said that no officers or other employees have been assigned editing the page as part of their duties, but that they will look into the incident as “appropriate.”

    An NYPD Public Information spokesman declined to comment over phone and did not return a follow-up email. However, NYPD Commissioner William Bratton recently said in a press conference that he didn’t “anticipate any punishment, being quite frank with you, other than the admonishment advising them on department policy,” although Mayor Bill de Blasio described the incidents as violations of city policies on computer use.

    Protesters spark chaotic scene at Lawncrest town meeting

    The plan for the evening was to discuss policing in the tight-knit Northeast Philly community and address the concerns of its residents, upset over its uptick in violent crime in recent years.

    Cohen had no way of knowing that hours before the meeting was set to kick off, Williams would announce that his office would not bring charges against the officers who fatally shot Brandon Tate-Brown during a car stop on Dec. 15.

    The powder keg was primed.

    So when Cohen took the microphone last night, asking the attendees to quiet down and take their seats, he wasn’t prepared for the deluge of anger.

    About 30 people standing at the rear of the rec center produced signs with Tate-Brown’s name. They booed Ramsey and Williams and chanted, “Shame!”

    Some protesters approached the table where the panelists – including Daily News Editor Michael Days – were seated. There the protesters stood, inches from Ramsey and Williams, and screamed, pointing their fingers at two of the most powerful officials in Philadelphia.

    And they made demands.

    They wanted Ramsey to release the names of the officers involved in Tate-Brown’s death, and they wanted to view the footage of the 25-year-old’s encounter with police that night at Frankford Avenue near Magee in Mayfair.

    Officers watching in the wings tried to push the group back so that the meeting they co-opted could take place.

    The powder keg exploded. […]

    The city’s top cop said the violent reaction to Williams’ announcement about the Tate-Brown case yesterday is exactly why he won’t release the name of the officers involved in the young man’s death.

    “If we had reasonable people acting in a reasonable manner, it’d be different,” he said. “But when we have people who act like this, I’m not going to put my officers and their families in harm’s way.”

    Taylor Johnson, an activist with the group Black Lives Matter, bristled at that suggestion. She said her group “would use that information to help develop a case for prosecution.”

    “Our only goal tonight was to shake people up with those questions and remind people that we still have those questions,” she said outside the rec center.

    “I find it interesting that [Ramsey] was talking about safety in response to a simple question that people need to know the answer to, that Tanya needs to know the answer to,” she said, referring to Tate-Brown’s mother, who did not attend.

    “I think a lot of people are now worried about their safety.”

    10 people arrested, in the end.

    Fun with hashtags. #CNNBeLike is a new thing, here’s three examples.
    #CNNBeLike RT @MelechT: CNN: “Looter steals rose from florist and tries to cut police officer’s fingers on thorns”
    RT @M0JOso_DOPE: #CNNbelike reports say that they wore different colors possibly gang affiliated.
    #CNNbelike “He was a towering black figure, wearing a black cloak, with his cap turned sideways like a gang member”.
    You have to look at the attached photos for the sarcasm to make sense.

  467. rq says

    4 Fort Lauderdale Police officers ousted after alleged racist messages

    Addressing reporters Friday afternoon, Fort Lauderdale Police Chief Frank Adderley said the investigation revealed 31-year-old Officer Jason Holding, 25-year-old Officer Christopher Sousa and 29-year-old Officer James Wells have been terminated. A fourth officer, 22-year-old Alex Alvarez, has tendered his resignation of his own accord.

    Adderley said the officers engaged in “sustained department misconduct and … conduct unbecoming of a police officer” which “involved racist text message exchange among themselves.”

    “I’m very disappointed, disgusted and shocked,” said Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jack Seiler. “It violates the trust we place in our law enforcement officers.”

    “The four officers’ conduct was inexcusable, and there is zero tolerance for this kind of behavior in the Fort Lauderdale Police Department,” Adderley continued.

    Adderley added Alvarez was responsible for a video that he described as “racially biased.” The clip came to light last year that became a part of an internal affairs investigation in 2014.

    When asked to elaborate about the content of the video, Adderley said, “There is someone with hood, KKK, in the video.”

    “When I observed the video, I was disgusted,” said Seiler, adding the content in the video was “extremely disrespectful.”

    Even though Alvarez resigned prior to the firing of the other three officers, Seiler said, “I can promise you, if the other one hadn’t resigned, he would have been terminated,” said Seiler.

    City Manager Lee Feldman expressed his gratitude toward the woman who came forward with the allegations. “I’d’ also like to thank the complainant for coming forward,” he said.

    Adderley said, in the wake of the investigations, the department has created a diversity class that officers will be required to attend once a year.

    Diversity class is the least they can do.

    Man who threatened to shoot Darren Wilson sentenced – Darren Wilson, meanwhile, is still free and without consequences.

    A Washington state man who posted Facebook comments threatening to shoot former Ferguson, Mo., police Officer Darren Wilson will avoid prison but has been ordered to stay off social media sites in a case that is part of a broader legal debate about when social media rants go beyond hyperbole and become a crime.

    Before U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik handed down Jaleel Abdul-Jabbaar’s sentence Thursday, he said it was one of the hardest he has had to decide. He noted that in a separate case — the recent killings of two New York police officers — the gunman posted Facebook threats before shooting the officers.

    But Lasnik accepted the defense argument that Abdul-Jabbaar’s comments were simply a strong reaction to the unfolding events in Ferguson, and he had no intention of following through on his threat to shoot Wilson.

    Abdul-Jabbaar told the judge he made a mistake, “and it won’t be repeated.”

    The judge agreed that the two months Abdul-Jabbaar already spent behind bars was enough and ordered three years of supervised release.

    In arguing for government monitoring of Abdul-Jabbaar’s computer, Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Greenberg said: “It’s OK to be frustrated, it’s OK to be angry about current events, and it’s OK to express that frustration. But our society cannot tolerate the type of violent threats the defendant made.”

    Abdul-Jabbaar pleaded guilty Feb. 2 for posting a threat against Wilson on Facebook that included a call to “give back those bullets that Police Officer Darren Wilson fired into the body of Mike Brown.”

    Activism: it’s not just for black people. LGBTQ Activists to Protest Ongoing Murders of Transgender Women. There’s a connect, though, since many if not most of the transgender women killed happen to be black.

    “Eight transgender women and gender non-conforming people have been murdered across the US this year alone. This epidemic of violence must end and we urge everyone to join us in creating a safe, just, and equitable society free from discrimination and persecution,” said Kylar Broadus, Transgender Civil Rights Project Director at the National LGBTQ Task Force.

    “We are outraged by the continued murders targeting transgender women and gender non-conforming people taking place in Southern California and throughout the nation. We must all do more to protect everyone against violence and discrimination, regardless of who they are. We call on federal and local governments, non-profit organizations, and businesses to join us in stopping these senseless murders,” said Bamby Salcedo, President of the TransLatin@ Coalition.

    Us poor white people. Such fragile egos. Why White People Freak Out When They’re Called Out About Race

    Last year, a white male Princeton undergraduate was asked by a classmate to “check his privilege.” Offended by this suggestion, he shot off a 1,300-word essay to the Tory, a right-wing campus newspaper.In it, he wrote about his grandfather who fled the Nazis to Siberia, his grandmother who survived a concentration camp in Germany, about the humble wicker basket business they started in America. He railed against his classmates for “diminishing everything [he’d] accomplished, all the hard work [he’d] done.”

    His missive was reprinted by Time. He was interviewed by the New York Times and appeared on Fox News. He became a darling of white conservatives across the country.

    What he did not do, at any point, was consider whether being white and male might have given him—if not his ancestors—some advantage in achieving incredible success in America. He did not, in other words, check his privilege. […]

    When the Black Lives Matter movement marched in the streets, holding up traffic, disrupting commerce, and refusing to allow “normal life” to resume—insofar as normalcy means a system that permits police and vigilantes to murder black men and women with impunity—white people found themselves in tense conversations online, with friends and in the media about privilege, white supremacy and racism. You could say white fragility was at an all-time high.

    I spoke with DiAngelo about how to deal with all the fragile white people, and why it’s worth doing so. […]

    SAB: What causes white fragility to set in?

    RD: For white people, their identities rest on the idea of racism as about good or bad people, about moral or immoral singular acts, and if we’re good, moral people we can’t be racist – we don’t engage in those acts. This is one of the most effective adaptations of racism over time—that we can think of racism as only something that individuals either are or are not “doing.”

    In large part, white fragility—the defensiveness, the fear of conflict—is rooted in this good/bad binary. If you call someone out, they think to themselves, “What you just said was that I am a bad person, and that is intolerable to me.” It’s a deep challenge to the core of our identity as good, moral people.

    The good/bad binary is also what leads to the very unhelpful phenomenon of un-friending on Facebook.

    SAB: Right, because the instinct is to un-friend, to dissociate from those bad white people, so that I’m not implicated in their badness.

    RD: When I’m doing a workshop with white people, I’ll often say, “If we don’t work with each other, if we give in to that pull to separate, who have we left to deal with the white person that we’ve given up on and won’t address?

    SAB: A person of color.

    RD: Exactly. And white fragility also comes from a deep sense of entitlement. Think about it like this: from the time I opened my eyes, I have been told that as a white person, I am superior to people of color. There’s never been a space in which I have not been receiving that message. From what hospital I was allowed to be born in, to how my mother was treated by the staff, to who owned the hospital, to who cleaned the rooms and took out the garbage. We are born into a racial hierarchy, and every interaction with media and culture confirms it—our sense that, at a fundamental level, we are superior.

    And, the thing is, it feels good. Even though it contradicts our most basic principles and values. So we know it, but we can never admit it. It creates this kind of dangerous internal stew that gets enacted externally in our interactions with people of color, and is crazy-making for people of color. We have set the world up to preserve that internal sense of superiority and also resist challenges to it. All while denying that anything is going on and insisting that race is meaningless to us. […]

    SAB: I notice as we’ve been talking that you almost always use the word “we” when describing white people’s tendencies. Can you tell me why you do that?

    RD: Well, for one, I’m white (and you’re white). And even as committed as I am, I’m not outside of anything that I’m talking about here. If I went around saying white people this and white people that, it would be a distancing move. I don’t want to reinforce the idea that there are some whites who are done, and others that still need work. There’s no being finished.

    Plus, in my work, I’m usually addressing white audiences, and the “we” diminishes defensiveness somewhat. It makes them more comfortable. They see that I’m not just pointing fingers outward.

    SAB: Do you ever worry about re-centering whiteness?

    RD: Well, yes. I continually struggle with that reality. By standing up there as an authority on whiteness, I’m necessarily reinforcing my authority as a white person. It goes with the territory. For example, you’re interviewing me now, on whiteness, and people of color have been saying these things for a very long time.

    On the one hand, I know that in many ways, white people can hear me in a way that they can’t hear people of color. They listen. So by god, I’m going to use my voice to challenge racism. The only alternative I can see is to not speak up and challenge racism. And that is not acceptable to me.

    It’s sort of a master’s tools dilemma.

    SAB: Yes, and racism is something that everyone thinks they’re an authority on.

    RD: That drives me crazy. I’ll run into someone I haven’t seen in 20 years in the grocery store, and they’ll say, “Hi! What’ve you been doing?”

    And I say, “I got my Ph.D.”

    And they say, “Oh wow, what in?”

    “Race relations and white racial identity.”

    And they’ll go “Oh, well you know. People just need to—”

    As if they’re going to give me the one-sentence answer to arguably the most challenging social dynamic of our time. Like, hey, why did I knock myself out for 20 years studying, researching, and challenging this within myself and others? I should have just come to you! And the answer is so simple! I’ve never heard that one before!

    Imagine if I was an astronomer. Everybody has a basic understanding of the sky, but they would not debate an astronomer on astronomy. The arrogance of white people faced with questions of race is unbelievable.

    Let’s do better, white people.

    Oh, here’s another in a similar vein, this time addressing liberals. On Madison, Tony Robinson, and White Liberal Defensiveness

    Madison is a segregated community. In the Willy Street neighborhood, where I live and where Robinson was killed, the stereotypical resident is white with a yoga mat and a co-op membership and a “Recall Scott Walker” bumper sticker. As a city we have dialogues about race and we have alarming racial disparities. In my coverage of the local music scene I’ve found deep-seated racial tensions on the subject of hip hop, which was all but banned from Madison’s top venues until very recently.

    Madison is also a very politically aware community. There are protests at the state capitol almost every week, and between the vibrant UW campus and the large number of retired activists—Madison’s beloved “old hippies”—this is a place where taking to the streets is as commonplace as a food truck in Asheville. It’s the Berkeley of the Midwest, they like to say.

    What’s become evident to me as a relative Madison newcomer is that it’s the perfect microcosm of well-meaning white liberal America. The intentions are good. The execution, however, has problems born of that very insidious white privilege: the assumption that one’s own lived experience is universal. […]

    “We Shall Overcome”

    We should be at rallies. We should show support for racial equality activism. But if there were not fundamental differences between us and Americans of color, we wouldn’t need these protests at all. And a white person holding a sign that says “We Shall Overcome” misses that point entirely. We do not need to “overcome.” We need to acknowledge that we benefit every day from a system from which others have not yet overcome. Holding up that sign doesn’t help to dismantle the system; instead, it reinforces the false notion that white people can somehow understand what it’s like to be black in America.

    This goes for white people chanting “Hands Up—Don’t Shoot” and holding signs that say “I am [Mike Brown/Eric Garner/insert name of young black victim of police violence]” too. You’re not these men. You will never know what it’s like to be pulled over and wonder if it’s because of your race. Recognize that.

    “This doesn’t happen here.”

    Madisonians have as much city pride as a Scandinavian-influenced Midwestern culture will allow. I saw many initial responses to Tony Robinson’s death along the lines of “there must be some explanation” and “Madison isn’t like Ferguson” and “Don’t condemn a whole community.”

    This is erasure.

    This did happen here. It does happen here. And Madison is so segregated and so steeped in respectability politics—Princess Ojiaku wrote that, here, she’s expected to hide her experiences with racism to ensure the comfort of others—that white people are often truly oblivious to the actual racism that goes on here every day. Loving African art and voting Democrat does not make you immune to systemic anti-Blackness, and in Madison we seem to have this idea that being liberal exonerates you in every specific instance of racism. Wisconsin’s statistics paint a far different story.

    “This happens everywhere.”

    Yes. But so does unemployment; so do pollution, crime, and other issues that communities regularly consider to be worthy of action. Something doesn’t have to be unique to our hometown for us to talk about how to address it.

    “Why aren’t we talking about [something else]?”

    At every Madison rally I’ve attended on the subject of racial inequality, a white person has grabbed the mic to demand we talk about their pet issue of choice. They think they’re helping and showing solidarity, and they will likely attempt to draw parallels with the issue at hand. But they’re literally stealing the spotlight, when white folks have a multitude of venues for the issues we care about. The importance of your issue is irrelevant. Fight for it on your own time. If you truly believe that black lives matter, believe that black voices matter, and listen.

    This and that else at the link. Let’s do better, liberals.

  468. rq says

    Tremendous Police Brutality panel led this morning by @lostvoices14 at #WhitePrivilegeConference #Ferguson, that’s from a few days ago.

    Starbucks’ ‘Race Together’ Campaign Ignores The Company’s Troubled History With Gentrification

    Mic senior editor Darnell Moore explained to HuffPost Live on Wednesday how the presence of the coffee giant specifically affects people of color.

    “The failure of Starbucks to talk about the fact that it’s proven that when they go into certain neighborhoods, particularly black neighborhoods, traditionally black neighborhoods, gentrification increases at rapid rates,” he told host Josh Zepps. “So it’s an interesting way to look at this company’s complicity in the very thing that they are attempting get people to talk about.”

    While some have questioned the “Starbucks effect,” Quartz concluded that Starbucks is in fact “driving the increase in home values” by comparing real estate values near Dunkin’ Donuts locations; homes near that coffee chain didn’t appreciate nearly as much.

    Moore added that, in many cases, Starbucks is at least “complicit” in facilitating the overall trend in gentrification. He also raised another issue with the controversial “Race Together” campaign — it’s just plain awkward.

    “Who is going to go into Starbucks and turn around to a complete stranger with a cappuccino in hand and undo all of the problems that we’re facing?” he asked.

    But there is at least one positive aspect to the coffee-induced dialogue, he conceded.

    “I mean, you can at least go home and say, ‘I had a conversation at Starbucks today with a complete stranger about racial relations,’ and feel good about yourself,” Moore said.

    What? A ‘Black Tax’ At Charlotte’s Ritz-Carlton?

    Charlotte resident Patrice Wright and her husband Tony stopped into the Ritz’s Lobby Bar as they often do on Friday nights, to unwind and recap the week over drinks before going home. When the bill came for two mixed drinks, two bourbon Manhattans, and a basket of sweet potato fries, Wright noticed an extra $10.20 fee in addition to the regular tax, something called CIAA SVC CHRG.

    Wright says she goes to social events around town several times a month, many of them in the city’s hotels, and she’d never seen an additional tariff like this. She pointed it out to Tony, but he was ready to leave and didn’t want a big scene. They paid up and walked out, but it bugged Patrice all the way home. She’d never seen anything like that during past CIAA weeks. “Do they not want us here?” she wondered.

    She posted the receipt on Facebook to see if anyone else had the same suspicions, and it quickly went viral. A Ritz representative left her number on Wright’s page and asked her to call to discuss the matter. Wright did, several times, “but I only got voicemails. She never called back.”

    A lot of ticked-off black Charlotteans think the tax was added because CIAA is largely a black event, and there is, in some quarters, a belief that black folk do not tip as well as they should. Or at all.

    Wright says she knows about the perception that blacks don’t tip, and she and her friends don’t want to be put in that bucket, so when they go out — which is often — they tip liberally.

    Now, studies like this one from Cornell University’s “hotel school” say it’s true that in general, middle-income and lower-income black folk don’t tip as much as white patrons, but it doesn’t say anything about high-income black folk. While the CIAA crowd is multi-generational — young alumni of the historically black colleges show up — the largest and most coveted segment is older alum and basketball fans who come from near and far for annual mini-reunions, prepared to spend serious money to enjoy themselves. Over the five-day event, it’s very common to spot the kinds of expensive accessories (watches, shoes, handbags) and luxe autos you’d find in glossy luxury magazines.
    Wright snapped a photo of the table tents the Ritz put out during the CIAA. i

    In other words, this is not an unsophisticated crowd, and given the negative perceptions about blacks and tipping, it’s easier to imagine them over-tipping than leaving pennies on the table.

    The Ritz also posted a notice of the minimum amount lobby-gatherers would have to spend for the privilege of hanging out there: Small table tents announced the tables were reserved for lobby patrons, and the charge would be $125 per hour per table. The charge would be waived if that amount was consumed in drinks and food. If not, expenses would accrue.

    Patrice Wright had never seen anything like this at the Charlotte Ritz before. The tents also informed potential table-renters they’d have to present their credit cards up front if they wanted to be served. “I know that happens at fast food places,” Wright says. “I mean, when you get a burger you pay for it before it’s given to you. But this was the Ritz!” And it’s kind of hard to escape the implication. “It definitely made me feel unwelcome,” she sighs.

    More at the link. including no response from the Ritz.

  469. rq says

    Well, either there’s something wrong with my twitter, or it’s been a surprisingly quiet weekend. :/ Not much to update.

  470. Pteryxx says

    I can chip in a few general articles…

    At The Nib, a cartoonist portrays in poignant artwork his experience when asked to lighten a comic book character’s skin tone: The Nib: Lighten Up

    Maybe you’re reading this and thinking, “that doesn’t seem like a big deal.” But at that moment I thought…

    “is this racist?”

    …and I know that if I’m asking that question, the answer is probably “yes”.

    From Comics Alliance:

    Not the least of these problems is the fact that there are so few characters of color in super hero comics that it doesn’t make sense to make a character less racially diverse. And when you’re also asking an artist who is a person of color to make that change, you are, purposefully or not, adding commentary about race to the editor-artist relationship.

    One of the most powerful parts of Wimberly’s piece is this statement:

    It’s not a game of pin the tail on the racist, it’s simply a matter of social literacy. In this case, being aware of how “race” as an idea is ridiculous but still informs how we behave. In art, this is very important. Art is where associations are made. Art is where we form the narratives of our identity.

    I might transcribe the essay with image descriptions if I could do it justice.

  471. Pteryxx says

    The Guardian: The counted: inside the search for the real number of police killings in the US

    In step with Obama’s call for better data in policing, and a public outcry for information about police use-of-force in general, policing leaders are increasingly admitting that carelessness, defensiveness – or, in the worst cases, indifference – does play a role in the failure of the country to track officer-related deaths.

    A justice department investigation of the FBI’s published statistics has already revealed the worst from a data standpoint: more than half the people killed by local and state law enforcement officers in the US went uncounted in the country’s most authoritative crime statistics every year, for almost a decade.

    But now, a Guardian review of how that local patchwork gets put together – including conversations with dozens of current and former police officers, policing organizations, academics and reformers – shows that non-reporting by police is only part of the problem. As many have noted before, the sheer number of local law enforcement agencies – “we’ve got 18,000”, Obama himself said at the White House earlier this month – presents a significant data standardization challenge. It is supplemented by questions at every turn over what a national database of people killed by police would look like, and how it should be built.

    In talking about the complexities of the problem, longtime observers and innovative number-crunchers share a quiet hope that a revolution in US crime statistics is closer than ever before, as anger and mistrust turn to reform and technology.

    “What we will have – hopefully in the next three years – is a robust database in the major cities of all police shootings,” David Klinger a University of Missouri criminologist, said. “Then we can say, ‘You know what, federal government, here’s what’s doable, now pass a law to fund this.’”

    Associated Press roundup: Bills that would restrict access to body camera footage

    Lawmakers in nearly a third of the states have introduced bills to restrict public access to recordings from police officer-worn body cameras. Some of the proposals:

    […]

    — Indiana: House Bill 1225 and Senate Bill 454 ask for a study on potential restrictions on the disclosure of video, the “scope and size of public records requests” that could be made for them, the persons eligible to make requests, and the purposes for which videos may be used.

    — Iowa: House File 452 says body camera recordings “shall be kept confidential.” People who are featured in them and their representatives would be able to view and copy the recordings.

    — Kansas: The Senate has approved a substitute for Senate Bill 18, which says the audio and video recordings “shall be confidential and exempt from the open records act.” Persons who are subjects of the recordings would be able to request access to them.

    — Michigan: House Bill 4234 would specify that videos taken in a “private place” would be exempt from disclosure under the state’s freedom of information act.

    — Minnesota: Senate File 498 would treat the videos as private records, available only to those who are the subjects of the recordings.

    — Missouri: House Bill 762 would specify “that a video or audio recording from a law enforcement officer’s dashboard or body camera will not be accessible to the general public.”

  472. Pteryxx says

    Buzzfeed: A Black Girl’s History With Southern Frat Racism

    I spent four years at a mostly white college in Kentucky, where daily acts of racism occurred in front of my face. So after seeing the way that some Southern white college students act in the presence of black people, it did not surprise me at all that they’d sing a fun little song about lynching niggers when they think we can’t hear them.

    […]

    You first come to Davis Hall, home of upperclassmen and fraternity members — this is the building that housed the row of Confederate flags that greeted my mother and me. After that is Clay Hall, where Transy’s freshman boys live. Davis Hall was named for Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, while Clay Hall was named after early 19th century Kentucky politician Henry Clay, who owned slaves (but magnanimously freed them after he died). Davis attended Transylvania, and Clay was once a faculty member there. Forrer Hall, the girls’ dorm, rounds the circle. (Another man with the last name of Clay — Cassius, who was an abolitionist — is also a Transylvania alum. There aren’t any buildings named after him.)

    Here’s why there was a Confederate flag in each of those windows on the second floor in Davis Hall. The school, being as small as it was, had Greek organizations, but rather than having separate Greek housing, they had Greek floors in the dorms where all members lived. The floor with the Confederate flags in the windows was inhabited by the men of Kappa Alpha Order, known as the KAs. Every black person on campus (and those who were attuned to racial insensitivity) knew to stay away from the KAs. They were the good ol’ Southern boys, and the organization itself was founded on loaded terms like “chivalry,” “modern knighthood” (gee, why does that sound familiar?), and the “ideal Christian gentleman.” They list Confederate commander Robert E. Lee as their “spiritual founder,” which still doesn’t really make much sense to me, and though it wasn’t their official emblem, they were very, very fond of the Confederate flag. Those windows and the flags in them belonged to the KAs.

    When I saw the row of flags in the building I instantly told my mother that I wanted to go back home. She told me, of course, that wasn’t an option, and so I dealt with it as best I could. I went to class, tried to be open and sociable, and vented to my handful of black friends when we were alone. But those flags never let me forget that I was not wanted at any point in history, not then and not now, not in my temporary home, the place where I slept, the place my mother was spending her hard-earned money to send me.

  473. rq says

    Thanks, Pteryxx. Turns out it’s something odd the laptop does with my twitter (back on the laptop now). So, more updates later, quite a bit more than I thought previously! :)

  474. rq says

    Ferguson’s Forgotten Murders

    Two men have been murdered here since Michael Brown’s death, but the slayings have been met with pervasive silence. The violent deaths of Robin “Jerry” Poindexter and DeAndre Joshua are unknown to many protesters and residents of Ferguson, and the victims’ families feel with good reason that police put the crimes on the back burner.

    Jerry died next to his friend Hustle, as the pair dodged bullets intended for another target in early October. DeAndre died alone in his car the night of the grand jury announcement essentially clearing Officer Darren Wilson, shot in the head before his killer tried to torch the vehicle. Both men, victims of crimes that might normally warrant more attention, have become footnotes in an international-reaching story of race and justice in America. Both men’s families now walk a lonely path in keeping Jerry and DeAndre’s memories alive, faced each day with the fact that many in Ferguson don’t want discuss anything involving Jerry and DeAndre.

    But Gerri Thompson, who watched Jerry die from her balcony in October, will talk. She wants to talk. She misses the conversations that used to flow in Ferguson.

    “Well, we had everything right here convenient for us,” Thompson said Sunday afternoon. With the mercury tipping 70 degrees, spring was making its first appearance in Ferguson, and Thompson’s balcony was open for business. “Everything was pretty much within walking distance. The people were real nice and friendly.”

    That was before, Thompson said. Before Mike Brown. Before a few buildings on West Florissant were torched in a fit of rage the night Wilson got off. Before Thompson watched from her perch as Jerry took a bullet intended for another in the heart. […]

    At a vigil for the police officers who were shot, the Rev. Tracy Blackmon called for prayers concerning a list of subjects. Prayers for police and protesters, the safety of children, and of Ferguson. Prayers for “broken people and broken systems,” prayers for justice. There was even a call to pray for Marcus Johnson, a 5-year-old killed in a St. Louis gun battle last week.

    No prayers for Jerry Poindexter. No prayers for DeAndre Joshua.

    “You’re kidding me,” said Mike Taylor, a cousin of DeAndre’s after being told the vigil held Friday night, despite its calls for remembrance, brought no mention of DeAndre. “See? They don’t care about us.”

    With the community a no-show, the families of the two men now rely solely on police for answers. DeAndre’s case is being handled by the St. Louis County Police Department and Jerry’s by Ferguson police. Chris, a heavy-set man with black-frame glasses and a voice raspy from Newport cigarettes, is concerned Ferguson’s cops can’t handle a homicide investigation with all that’s been consuming the small city — daily protests, a spate of resignations that include chief Tom Jackson, and Justice Department reports that call for wholesale change within the department, if not its complete dismantling. In the driver’s seat of his tan Chevy Suburban on Sunday, Chris laid out his frustrations.

    “I make it a point to call if not every day, every other day,” he said, gesturing with a bent phone.

    Chris hadn’t been updated on his father’s case until Tuesday, when The Daily Beast reached Det. Mark Leone of the Ferguson Police Department. Previously, Chris had been told that Det. Billy Ballard was working the case. Five months’ worth of calls to Ballard have gone unanswered, according to Chris. Leone wouldn’t discuss communications between Chris and Ballard but said he would reach out to Chris with updates about the investigation.

    “This is the first I’ve heard of him trying to reach out to us,” Leone said of Chris. […]

    Leone, the Ferguson detective, has run into the same problem. The anti-snitching culture in Ferguson is strong, maybe more powerful than the resources at the police department’s disposal. If that weren’t enough, the detective has another issue to contend with: The daily protests over Brown’s death have resulted in interviews being called off, he said, adding that the demonstrations have “certainly disrupted the investigation.”

    The unrest also provided a convenient cover for cops preoccupied by burning and looting on the night of DeAndre’s murder. Gunshots were everywhere that night. So many of them that instead of extinguishing the blazes that brought down several buildings, firefighters were held back by police. Destin wondered how it’s possible, with so many police in the area that night, that DeAndre was gunned down and not discovered till hours later.

    His memory may be off. Ferguson was in a state of anarchy following the grand jury announcement. Up and down West Florissant, angry youths roamed, burning and pillaging at will. Cops were few and far between, choosing mainly to defend their territory near police headquarters. The area where DeAndre was shot was off limits to the media, law enforcement, and protesters who considered their safety paramount. Making matters more complicated was DeAndre’s and his twin brother Dont’A’s proximity to a circle that included Brown and Dorian Johnson, the man walking with Brown the day he was killed. There’s a reason many neighbors in the area where DeAndre was murdered claim not to know his name.

    “All three of them hung out every day,” Destin said of DeAndre, Brown and Johnson.

    Dont’A and Johnson apparently still do.

    Nobody wants to come near anything involving Mike Brown, the cops and a murder investigation. That’s why doors went barely cracked and blinds were drawn on a beautiful spring day last weekend. “Snitches get stitches,” the spray paint reads on the side of a closed-down Chinese restaurant on West Florissant. The street mantra is known well enough to sew up lips in Ferguson.

    While the speculation that DeAndre’s death had something to do with Brown has been dismissed by some, it remains a rumor, and a very real hinderance to the willingness of residents to talk to police. For DeAndre’s family, the level of distrust is so pervasive, and the lack of communication so great, that they’ve taken the leap from believing that not only are police incompetent, but that they may have actually been involved in the murder. […]

    Thompson recalled the way that it used to be — that peaceful time when there was time to consider the stars above. Now, Ferguson remains broken and burned, and trapped in a silence brewed by fear.

    “I remember when I first moved over here, kids were running and playing, and you’d see the guys underneath the tree playing dominoes and stuff. Everything was just so carefree around here. Everything was so happy. The spirits was high. People would just stop and talk, even if they didn’t know you they’d stop and talk to you.

    “But now they don’t even acknowledge your presence,” Thompson said, before explaining the current state of mind in this battered American city.

    “They don’t speak to you like they used to, and people walk around with their head down now. I think people just feel… down. They’ve lost their joy. Because like now, this time of the evening you would just hear all kind of laughter, and people walking and talking, and kids running and playing and stuff. You see how quiet it is. It’s very quiet.”

    The states where poor kids are most likely to graduate from high school

    The largest black-white gaps were in the Midwest. In Minnesota, although whites graduated at below the average rate for whites nationally, blacks did so poorly that there was a difference of 27.5 percentage points in the graduation rates.

    In general, states with large gaps were those where blacks graduated at lower rates, as shown in the map below. Iowa was the exception, where blacks graduated at a rate close to the national average, but whites did exceptionally well. Iowa also boasted the highest graduation rate across all groups of any state (89.7 percent).

    The smallest difference between blacks and whites was in Hawaii, where blacks did somewhat better than their peers elsewhere and whites somewhat worse.

    In Texas, 84.1 percent of blacks graduated, the most in any state, and 85.2 percent of poor students graduated. They got their diplomas at an even higher rate in Kentucky — 85.4 percent, well above the national average for high schools in general. […]

    Another interesting set of comparisons is between the rates at which black students and economically disadvantaged students graduated. Overall, poor kids had a better chance of graduating than black kids, but in some states, economic class was more of a disadvantage than race. In Indiana, for example, poor kids of all races were nearly 9 percentage points more likely to graduate than the average black student, suggesting that black kids were doing badly for reasons besides the straightforward fact that many of them grew up in poverty.

    In North Dakota, by contrast, black kids on the whole did 8 percentage points better than the low-income group. That figure implies not only that black students are doing well, but also that many of them are comparatively well-off, since their successes did not increase the average for the economically disadvantaged.

    It’s difficult to draw any firm conclusions from these maps, since so much inside and outside the classroom affects a child’s chances of graduating from high school. A large gap between whites and blacks could reflect a public education system in which resources are directed toward schools with more white students, a discrepancy in incomes between members of each race or some combination of factors. A state with a high graduation rate for poor kids could be one where schools are especially good at overcoming the challenges of poverty, or it could be one where wealthier and poorer kids are more likely to live near each other. The concentration of poverty in urban ghettos puts poor kids in those neighborhoods at a double disadvantage.

    Maps at the link.

    “OTD, 1965, more than 3,000 civil rights demonstrators led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. began their march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.”

    Frat culture again. Fraternity Suspended Over Notebook Detailing Rape And Lynching

    On Thursday night, employees at a Raleigh’s restaurant near North Carolina State University discovered a green notebook that had been left behind by members of the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity on campus. Among the many comments scrawled in the small notebook were references to rape and lynching, recycling familiar narratives about entrenched misogyny and racism in fraternity culture.

    “That tree is so perfect for lynching,” one note read.

    “You can never trust a n***** as far as you can throw them,” scribbled another.

    Additional entries included: “It will be short and painful, just like when I rape you”; “if she’s old enough to pee, she’s old enough to me”; and “let’s go to Raleigh and yell at some n******.”

    “It was just a group of young men at state making jokes about raping people, raping children, raping dead women, making very overt racist comments,” said NCSU senior Katie Perry, who handed the notebook over to local news station WRAL after her co-workers happened upon it.

    Pi Kappa Phi’s national organization has since placed the NC State chapter on interim suspension and issued a public statement condemning the notebook’s comments. “It’s unacceptable. It’s offensive, and the things written in there are something we’re taking very, very seriously,” Pi Kappa Phi Chief Executive Mark Timmes insisted. “It’s not consistent with our values.”

    Despite repeated denunciations of bad behavior from national fraternity chapters and university leaders, however, incidents like the NCSU pledge book abound. This one is simply the latest in a series of high-profile news stories about fraternity culture’s intersection with racism and misogyny. […]

    “We are absolutely seeing a light being shined on Greek life right now, but these things are not unique to Greek life,” said Allison Tombros Korman, executive director of Culture of Respect, a preventative sexual assault group. “Sexual assault or inappropriate behavior or inappropriate chanting or comments — those aren’t just happening in Greek life.”

    Other contend that while such social issues like racism and sexism are not exclusively contained to fraternity culture, they are especially prevalent there.

    “I experienced different types of violence at fraternities,” a former student at the University of Virginia told ThinkProgress. “I got groped at parties, a guy threw me over his shoulders and dragged me up the frat stairs and I fought my way out of his arms. When I was dragged upstairs, I was shaking and said to other frat members ‘he just tried to drag me up the stairs.’ And they were like, ‘go home, you’re lying. You’re drunk, that didn’t happen. Go home. And they kicked me out the frat.”

    Funny how there’s so much going on in these frats that is inconsistent with their values. Also, the ‘it’s not just frats’ excuse. We all know it’s not just frats – but right now, we’re talking about the frats. Frats who are supposedly better because they have all these amazing gentlemanly inclusive codes of conduct and rules. I hate that excuse – not just frats. Fuck you.

    College Baseball Player Who Called Mo’ne Davis a Slut Dismissed From Team. Mo’ne is a 13-year-old girl.

    A lot of times we claim we want equality, but when someone who is different does something normal we put them on a pedestal as opposed to just treating them like we would everyone else (see Michael Sam for example). I don’t see Mo’ne Davis as anything more than an exceptional young athlete, it just happens she is a girl who dominated for a period of time a sport that is mostly played by boys. That is a good thing and she is a good role model, but doesn’t mean you have to universally agree with everything she does, but calling her a slut is WAY over the line.

    Here is the thing about Joey Casselberry, he apologized, but that only goes so far, because why would the word slut even need to be used? You take that out and his opinion is just his opinion and no one cares. You have to THINK before you TWEET, so whatever happens to him, that is his fault for not using his brain and calling a kid a slut.

    His apology tweets are weak. ‘I’m a huge fan, she’s an inspiration!’ At least the team had the sense to let him go.
    More on Mo’ne at the link, and let me say, wow!!

    Here’s one for the cockles of the heart. Retired Ark. Nurse Devotes Her Pension to Running Food Pantry

    But Charolette Tidwell has dedicated her pension funds toward running a food pantry where she feeds 7,000 people a month in her hometown of Fort Smith, Ark., NBC News reported.

    “The community that I was raised in did this,” Tidwell said. “My mom did it. The folks at the church did it. The nuns at the school that I went to elementary school did it,” Tidwell pointed out. “We were mentored into this kind of work. Service was something that I’ve always been involved in.”

    The retired nurse works, unpaid, at the food pantry six days a week. She hands out 500,000 meals a year, helping to shore up a town that has gone through layoffs and closures of factories, according to NBC.

    “I was raised in poverty, and I understand all the issues that go along with not having enough money,” she said.
    […]

    So for years Tidwell has pretty much single-handedly kept the pantry afloat, saving enough for necessities by being frugal with utility expenditures and finding the best deals on food. Now small grants are supplementing the pantry’s budget.

    “If they have a persistence or purpose to come here, I have the obligation to serve them … in a compassionate, respectful way,” Tidwell told NBC News.

  475. rq says

    Anthony Hill’s funeral:
    “@deray: Anthony Hill. Atlanta. Killed by Police. We remember you, Anthony. ” Photos by @Tif2cool
    #AnthonyHill was awarded the Air Force Achievement Medal &numerous other awards. He was a decorated officer.

    Ferguson’s Other Shooter

    Livestreaming first emerged as a protest tool during Occupy Wall Street, when new smartphones with mobile broadband allowed participants to give the world a real-time window into actions around the country. If Twitter was Occupy’s subversive newswire, livestreaming was its cable news channel. Livestreamers believe their perspective as sympathetic participant-observers can contradict distortions by the mainstream media and discourage police misconduct. This sometimes means that they’re the only ones filming when drama erupts — as was the case in Ferguson on Wednesday night, when several shots rang out, hitting two officers guarding the station.

    Protesters ducked and fled for cover. Except for Carl. “Carl’s there just grilling — it doesn’t faze him at all,” De Mian told me over the phone last Friday, laughing. I had first learned of De Mian while interviewing protesters in Ferguson in November. By then, De Mian was already well-known among Ferguson’s regular demonstrators for her unflagging documentation. She was easy to pick out of the crowd because of her wheelchair — she has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a severe connective-tissue disorder — and the monopod she uses to hoist her camera aloft while streaming.

    De Mian, who is 44 and lives 12 miles west of Ferguson in St. Charles, Mo., started filming demonstrations in 2013, when members of the community turned out to protest the killing of Trayvon Martin. When the Ferguson protests began last August, she filmed those, too. She followed livestreams when she couldn’t attend in person, and soon she began livestreaming herself. “There are a lot of people with disabilities or who have to work and want to watch the protest and keep an eye on things,” De Mian told me. She felt a sense of duty to these far-flung viewers, as well as to the protesters on the ground. So when the shots whizzed by her on Thursday, she ducked down into her chair and kept filming.

    About 35 minutes after the shooting, a police officer approached De Mian and said he needed to take her phone for evidence. On the archive of De Mian’s stream you can watch the officer grab the phone while she cries “No!” The picture freezes and a small circle begins to rotate in the center of the screen. The feed is cut.
    Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
    Continue reading the main story

    If a livestreamer doesn’t manually archive their footage, it will disappear after they stop filming. De Mian explained this to the officer. He assured her he would archive it, but it didn’t seem to be his most pressing concern. The video failed to appear on her account on Ustream, a hosting service that is popular among Ferguson’s livestreamers, and De Mian believed the video of the shooting was gone forever.

    In fact, De Mian’s livestream had been mirrored and archived by some of her viewers, and soon copies were floating around YouTube. CNN — which protesters view as hopelessly biased against them — was the first news network to broadcast the footage, within hours of the shooting. While De Mian waited outside the Police Headquarters, trying to get her phone back, she checked Twitter on a backup phone she carried. Other activists were tweeting that they had seen her footage on TV.[…]

    Eventually, Newsflare, a London-based start-up that scours the Internet for newsworthy amateur video in hopes of monetizing it for its creators in exchange for a share of the proceeds, caught wind of De Mian’s efforts, and licensed the video to The Associated Press to use for its wire service. In less than 24 hours, De Mian’s video — which she thought she had seen disappear in front of her eyes — became a content commodity, fully integrated into the mainstream media machine. She stands to make more than $1,000 for the clip and hopes landing a video with the AP might help her get an official press pass. But more important for De Mian, she finally got her phone back on Monday.

    Had that Nib cartoon/article all lined up (see Pteryxx above), it really is beautiful and educational.

    History Museum cancels Ferguson-Palestine discussion

    Sourik Beltran, an anthropology student at Washington University and president of the student group AltaVoz, proposed the event early in February. He originally called it “From Ayotzinapa to Ferguson: A Dialogue on Solidarity and Inter-Movement Collaboration.” He said the goals were to connect activists, foster collaboration among social justice groups and “draw parallels between state violence here and in Mexico.”

    A week or two later, Beltran added a third comparison. The panel would feature speakers from the Organization for Black Struggle, Latinos en Axion and, in addition, the Palestine Solidarity Committee.

    On Tuesday, two days before the panel, Beltran got a call from the History Museum.

    The museum was conflicted about “the comparison between the events in Ferguson and the actions of the Palestinians,” wrote Melanie Adams, managing director of community education and events, in a follow-up email to Beltran that day.

    “I understand that you are presenting them as movements related to issues of social justice and how diverse communities can work together to achieve social justice for all people,” she continued, according to emails provided by Beltran. “There is concern that they might not be perceived that way.”

    Beltran could either return to his original proposal, or hold the panel elsewhere, she said.

    Beltran said the late cancellation caught him by surprise. In the weeks prior he had met with multiple History Museum staffers, including Adams, and thought he had been clear about the updated agenda. […]

    On Thursday, the museum provided a variety of answers.

    In a statement on its website, it declared that “the complexities of this issue could not be adequately addressed in this format.”

    Adams told the Post-Dispatch that it wasn’t the addition of Palestine, per se, but of any third topic that “really diluted further from the original intent of program.”

    And Frances Levine, president of the museum, said she was the one who flagged this panel, when the flier showed up in her office mailbox.

    She doesn’t approve all events, she said — the museum hosts 700 a year — but she hadn’t heard about this event, and the flier didn’t contain much information. So she asked about it.

    “I found my staff had less and less knowledge of the depth of the event,” she said. “There was more correspondence with our staff about the table arrangements than the content.”

    Levine said she wanted to know about the sponsors, the speakers, the students organizing the panel and its connection to the museum’s collections and exhibits.

    But no one pressured her to pull this panel, she said. She insisted she didn’t even make the final decision. Adams did. […]

    Thursday evening, about 100 people rallied on the steps and in front of the museum, carrying signs and banners. Michael Berg, 40, of St. Louis, part of the group Jewish Voice for Peace, stood among the crowd. He wondered if the museum had been pressured to pull the Palestinian voices off the panel. “Our organizations supports equal rights and justice for all in Israel and Palestine,” he said. “And to not have Palestinian voices heard, it’s insane.”

    Juju Jacobs, an organizer with the group Organization for Black Struggle, was supposed to speak on the panel. Instead, she was one of several who spoke on a bullhorn to the crowd outside the museum. “We can make this right, right here, right now,” she said, hearing that Levine, the museum director, might be in the crowd. “We are willing to reschedule this event as it was.” The crowd chanted “Make it right! Make it right!” It appeared Levine had already left.

    Organizers handed out slips of paper to the crowd, asking them to call the museum and its administrators on Friday to reinstate the panel.

    Well, that sounds like a lost learning opportunity to me.

    If you missed it the first time… Selma Is Re-Released With 2-for-1 Ticket Offer

    Paramount Pictures is making sure everyone has a chance to experience Selma and is re-releasing the historical film with an incentive. Today Selma will play in 702 theaters in honor of the March on Washington. And as a bonus, tickets will be 2-for-1.

    Selma, which was released on Dec. 25, has grossed $51.4 million to date. Although the movie did not win best picture at the Oscars, it won an Oscar and Golden Globe for best original song for John Legend and Common’s “Glory.”

    Tickets are on sale today online and at theater box offices. For a list of participating theaters and to purchase tickets, visit SelmaMovie.com.

  476. rq says

    Marching from Forestwood park to the PD. Mike Brown St in the front – this from Saturday, I believe. More:
    #Ferguson Police Have Come Out to Push Back Crowd after #MikeBrown Sr places casket at PD door;
    Marchers arrive at Ferguson pd
    A Group Prayer for #MikeBrown at #Ferguson rally
    Can anyone help identify these colored munitions at #Ferguson protest? What does each color mean? “@search4swag: ” (yep, the cops were out!)

    In Florida: Four Fort Lauderdale cops out over racially charged behavior

    Three Fort Lauderdale, Florida, police officers were fired and one resigned over their involvement in a racially charged video and text messages, Police Chief Frank Adderley said at a press conference Friday.

    The video uses the n-word, shows images of Ku Klux Klan hoods and features a derogatory image of President Obama. It is produced to appear like a movie trailer, with flashy title screens and dramatic music.

    The officers who were fired are James Wells, Jason Holding and Christopher Sousa. The officer who resigned was Alex Alvarez, who created the racially biased video, according to Adderley. […]

    The Fort Lauderdale Police Department has instituted a mandatory, annual diversity class for cops on the force, according to NBC affiliate WTVJ.

    “This report proves that some Fort Lauderdale police officers have been routinely engaging in racially discriminatory behavior and cannot be trusted to serve and protect all citizens,” Adora Nweze, president of the Florida NAACP State Conference, said in a statement, adding, “The Florida State Conference will not delay in taking immediate, wholesale and structural corrective action to transform this police department into a fairer and more just entity. “

    “From Ferguson, Missouri to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, misconduct is running rampant in many of our nation’s police departments,” Kevin Myles, NAACP national field director for the eastern division, said in a statement, adding, “The NAACP remains committed to continuing our fight against racial profiling, police brutality and corrupt policing. The NAACP Florida State Conference and Ft. Lauderdale/Broward County Branch will work with the Fort Lauderdale Police Department to ensure that the findings from this report lead to significant change in the city’s. criminal justice system.”

  477. rq says

    Again, from last night in St Louis:
    #DelmarLoopSTL ShutItDown #BlackLivesMatter;
    STL City Police Line Up You see many with Pepper Spray in hand Delmar Loop #Ferguson ;
    St.Louis PD & U City Police got 8 teenagers in handcuffs in front of the Pageant on Delmar ;
    Police at Delmar Loop arresting “anyone under 21” walking on sidewalk. But clearly only asking Black people for ID.

    A moment onDontre Hamilton: Chris Manney was scared of #DontreHamilton but didn’t call for backup because “backup is for cowards.” #justicefordontre #DoBetterMKE
    And that’s the cop mentality. ‘Backup is for cowards’.

    These questions… RT @kateconger: omg did you guys know there is a #RaceTogether newspaper? Questions include: “I have ____ friends of a different race”, “In the past year, I have been to the home of someone of a different race ____ times”, “My children have ____ friends of a different race”, and more in a similar vein.

  478. rq says

    Not everyone is so skeptical of Starbuck’s #RaceTogether idea. @AntonioFrench @Starbucks I am a Barista at Starbucks. Had amazing conversations with people over the past three days. #RaceTogether It may have something to do with him being a white man. It may not.

    And while we’re on Starbucks, here’s Karrem Abdul-Jabbar on the subject. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Starbucks’ Flawed But Wonderful Plan To Tackle Race

    Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s bold decision to encourage his baristas to discuss race relations with willing customers has filled me with shock and awe. I’m in awe of his courageous and good-hearted attempt to do something to bring about better awareness of racism. I’m in awe that he’s willing to put morality above profits. I’m in awe that he’s willing to endure the snarky ridicule and lame coffee jokes from pundits as well as the inevitable death threats from clueless trolls. All with nothing personally or corporately to gain — and a lot to lose.

    But while in awe of his chutzpah, I’m also in shock that he thinks this will actually work. […]

    The problem with Howard Schultz’s Race Together program is that he’s picked the wrong venue with the wrong audience using the wrong spokespersons. Most of the customers at Starbucks probably don’t want to have their political awareness challenged by the person foaming their coffee. Minds are more likely to be changed by someone with some form of expertise in the subject, which baristas generally don’t have. Those who do wish to engage in a conversation about something as volatile as race are not open to change, they are either already the choir of believers in equality or are racists looking for an audience. Either way, no change will result from the exchange. In fact, I worry that such conversations could quickly escalate to violence.

    I admire Schultz’s courage and applaud his initiative in wanting to take action. It’s frustrating for all people of conscience — or just consciousness — to watch leaders in politics and the media deny the facts about racism in order to grovel for votes or ratings from the most profoundly and proudly prejudiced segment of society. For these “leaders,” money and power trumps social responsibility. They wish to flatter their way to power through the cheerleading chant of American Exceptionalism. Oklahoma, Colorado, Texas, Georgia, Nebraska, Tennessee, and several other states are removing or trying to remove advanced placement exams because they teach actual historical events and not the sanitized-for-your-protection Hallmark version they want. My pride in America isn’t based on the arrogant presumption that we’re better than everyone else, but on the fact that we have a vision of a fair and just country, and we never give up trying to make that vision a reality. We may stumble or falter or lose our way on occasion, but we always get back up and push ahead. It’s no wonder that Schultz wants to bring the conversation about race to the coffee shop when certain politicians are trying to remove it from the classroom, where it belongs.

    Schultz is right in understanding that we can’t depend on our leaders to eradicate racism. Schultz sees ending racism as a grass roots campaign that starts with the people and swells until it forces politicians to act like leaders. To achieve this, we need to educate the target audience of those who are open-minded enough to be persuaded by facts. Then we need to keep presenting those facts over and over until awareness is finally achieved. That’s when there will be progress.

    Body cameras may have provided clarity in arrest of U-Va. student, except the Virginia ABC officers weren’t wearing them, contrary to policy.

    The Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control officers who arrested Martese Johnson outside a bar early Wednesday were not outfitted with such cameras, even though ABC pledged more than a year ago to put them on every agent.

    “Agents will be issued point-of-view cameras to be worn during operations,” ABC announced in November 2013, months after another controversial arrest.

    The cameras were among 14 reforms ABC vowed to implement to quell an uproar over the arrest of 20-year-old U-Va. student Elizabeth Daly. In April 2013, ABC agents who suspected her of buying beer swarmed her car, one with a gun drawn. The liquid turned out to be sparkling water.

    Had the cameras been in place Wednesday, State Police and the public might have a clearer view of how the incident unfolded and how Johnson suffered his head injuries. Did agents throw Johnson, a 20-year-old elected representative to the school’s prestigious Honor Committee, to the concrete, as his attorney has alleged? Or did Johnson, described as “very agitated and belligerent” in ABC arrest records, resist agents? […]

    ABC spokeswoman Carol B. Mawyer said the department has not begun using the cameras because the state is grappling with how all Virginia law-enforcement agencies will purchase and use the relatively new technology. ABC has 123 sworn officers statewide.

    “It is important that a measured, reasonable approach be taken in implementing this technology rather than doing so in a piecemeal fashion across our agencies,” she said. “ABC can move forward with the use of body cameras once appropriate procedures and policies are established for state agencies.” […]

    The arrest has prompted lawmakers from both parties to call for reining in ABC’s police powers, although some also caution that it is too early to conclude that the agents did anything wrong.

    “I think the time has come to reconsider whether the ABC police should have arrest powers for ordinary citizens who aren’t in the business of distributing or selling liquor or spirits,” said Sen. A. Donald McEachin (D-Henrico.) “Given their recent behavior in the young lady’s case, I think they have forfeited their ability to arrest anybody. I’m not so sure I want them manhandling patrons like that.”

    Del. Ben L. Cline (R-Rockbridge) suggested that those powers be transferred to the State Police.

    “It would provide for a more effective law enforcement and consistent application of the laws to have fewer independent law enforcement agencies within the various branches of state government and consolidate within the State Police,” Cline said. […]

    Del. David B. Albo (R-Fairfax), who sponsored the House’s ABC reorganization bill, said he thinks agents should leave underage drinking busts to local law enforcement and focus on enforcing laws that require restaurants and bars to sell a certain amount of food in addition to alcohol. Albo said he hopes that could be accomplished with budget language next year, possibly with wording that would make funding contingent on completing a certain number of liquor-ratio audits.

    Some legislators urged caution until more is known about the case.

    “It’s awfully easy to engage in second-guessing with access to limited facts,” said Sen. Mark D. Obenshain (R-Rockingham).

    But Obenshain also called what has emerged so far “troubling” and said that ABC’s continued role in law enforcement would be a matter of debate.

    “I think it obviously is a dialogue that will continue and should continue,” he said. “There are a lot of questions that need to be asked about what the primary mission is, what their goals were, why weren’t there Charlottesville city police officers on the scene and why did they feel it necessary to make a public intoxication arrest without local law enforcement?” […]

    “I can’t tell you how many arrests I’ve had where somebody drinks courage in cup,” said Reeves, who pushed unsuccessfully this year to expand ABC’s powers to combat cigarette trafficking.

    “Now you’ve got this anti-police mentality, and people are feeling emboldened to challenge police,” he said. “Don’t rush to judgment until you find out the totality of the circumstances. Was he non­compliant? Was he drunk? What were the officers’ commands? Did the guy fight him the whole time? I can tell you, cops have bad days, and I’ve seen cops be real jerks, but most cops . . . for them to have to go hands-on, that’s not what they want to do.”

    Is that a spot of victim-blaming I hear?

    UVA Students Demand Answers About Bloody Arrest By Virginia Liquor Agents

    Representatives of a black student organization repeatedly chanted in unison, “Answer the question we asked,” after officials gave broad answers to questions about Alcoholic Beverage Control officers’ training and tactics. Dozens of black students marched out of a university auditorium in the middle of the forum with fists raised, shouting “black lives matter.” The saying has become widely known following the killings of unarmed black men by police officers in Missouri and New York.

    About 500 students and community members attended the forum, arranged by the U.Va. Student Council after 20-year-old Martese Johnson of Chicago was arrested by ABC law enforcement officers outside a Charlottesville bar early Wednesday. Johnson, who is black, needed 10 stiches close a gash on his head after Wednesday’s scuffle with officers. He attended the forum but did not speak.

    Photos and video of the arrest have circulated widely on social media, showing Johnson with his face bloody as he’s pinned to the ground by an officer. In the video, Johnson can be heard repeatedly calling the officers “(expletive) racists.” Johnson is charged with obstruction of justice without force and public intoxication or swearing; police said he became “belligerent” when officers confronted him as he tried to enter a bar.

    Officials on the panel stressed that they could not answer questions about Johnson’s arrest, citing two Virginia State Police investigations – one administrative, one criminal – ordered by Gov. Terry McAuliffe and the Charlottesville prosecutor.

    “They’re definitely being evasive,” said first-year student Taji Harris of Baltimore. “They’re using the investigation as a scapegoat to save their own colleagues, which isn’t the point now.” […]

    Ryant Washington, ABC special adviser for enforcement, provided one of the afternoon’s more direct answers when he confirmed that the three agents involved in the arrest are still being paid.

    Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy Longo, whose officers arrived at the scene of Johnson’s arrest after ABC agents already had him in custody, said officers are properly trained to de-escalate situations and do the best they can in sometimes “chaotic” situations. “Can we do better? Absolutely,” he said.

    Longo and other officials on the panel, including state Secretary of Public Safety Brian Moran, said they are taking the matter seriously and will respond appropriately to the investigations’ findings.

    Another in Cleveland. He may have been robbing a store. Still. Does that justify shooting him to death? I would say no. Fatal police shooting of black teen in Cleveland under investigation

    Eighteen-year-old Jones died on Thursday after a Cleveland Police Department officer shot him at approximately 2.15am earlier that day.

    Police were responding to reports of a break-in at Parkwood Grocery store when Jones walked out carrying a bag. Officers tried to arrest him and a struggle ensued, leading an officer to fire his gun, police said.

    Sergeant Ali Pillow, Cleveland police spokesman, said that no weapons were recovered at the scene and Cleveland city councilman Kevin Conwell said that community members believe the teenager was unarmed. […]

    Parkwood Grocery owner Essex Hayward told ABC5 that Jones took some money and cigarettes from the shop, which he said had been robbed many times before.

    Jones’s family is calling on people to join them on Saturday at 5pm where he was killed. They attended a rally on Friday organized by activist group Puncture the Silence.

    The group has been helping coordinate demonstrations in the months since a Cleveland police officer shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice after mistaking his toy gun for a real firearm.

  479. rq says

    Survey: most white Americans think people talk about race too much. Well colour me surprised.

    As national debates about race and the criminal justice system heat up following the police killings of various unarmed black men, a new survey shows that black and white Americans are deeply divided on discussions about race.

    A YouGov survey of nearly 1,000 Americans found that 57 percent of white Americans think the nation spends too much time talking about race, while 49 percent of black Americans hold the opposite view.

    The majority findings don’t necessarily reflect the opinions of all black and white Americans. YouGov found some dissent within both groups: 18 percent of white Americans said people don’t talk about race enough, while 18 percent of black Americans said people talk about race too much.

    Still, the findings continue a trend of surveys that show white people tend to see race as less of an issue than their black counterparts do. Previous decades of surveys from the Pew Research Center found that black Americans express lower confidence than their white counterparts in police’s ability to treat black and white people equally.

    As Brian Stelter, host of CNN’s Reliable Sources, previously noted, discussions about race, particularly in the aftermath of the police shooting of Michael Brown, are often characterized as national conversation — as if the entire country is having the same discussion at once. But YouGov’s findings illustrate that white and black Americans are having two distinct conversations.

    More stuff at the link.

    Snoop Dogg: Ronald Reagan to Blame For L.A. Gang Violence . Can we just blame Reagan for everything?

    Instead of delivering a direct address about the state of the industry, Snoop’s keynote took the form of a largely promotional conversation between the icon and his longtime manager Ted Chung. They touched briefly on Snoop’s forthcoming album Bush, for which he re-teamed with Pharrell after a hiatus (“the mothership has reconnected”), but the majority of the discussion centered on his humble beginnings, how he’s continued to evolve, and his many business endeavors and efforts to provide opportunities for the less fortunate.

    The Doggfather’s latest venture, it was announced for the first time, will be an HBO show he is developing with Menace II Society director Allen Hughes and Boondocks writer Rodney Barnes about life on the West Coast during the ‘80s, when gang violence first began to dominate the region’s inner cities, particularly in Snoop’s home of East L.A.

    “Early in the ‘70s and toward the latter part of the ‘70s everything was beautiful because we had ways to have fun and communicate, and those who were underprivileged, the low economic side of life, the government would provide for us, which helped us get by,” Snoop said. “It was a society and we all needed it and we all had it and we all helped each other. Then when Reaganomics kicked in, certain things were taken away, after-school programs and things of that nature. Guns and drugs were shipped into the neighborhood. So it was a shift of having fun and playing football to selling drugs and shooting at each other. To me it was a system that was designed, because when the Reaganomics era began, that’s when this began.”

    Snoop, or as he was called in the ‘80s, “Snoop Rock Ski,” was able to emerge, but countless others were not, and the show figures to explore the stories of those who weren’t so fortunate to go on to sell 30 million albums worldwide. Neither Snoop nor Chung, who will executive produce, elaborated on the project, but Deadline reports that the drama will revolve around a single family whose life was turned upside down after Reagan took office.

    The 43-year-old mogul’s effort to give a voice to the less fortunate and bring opportunity to those in the inner city doesn’t end there. An avid film buff, he created Trap Flix, a website that gives a platform to urban filmmakers with limited resources, and the Snoop Youth Football League is entering its eleventh season. In the past three years, 58 players from the league received Division I scholarships, including his own son Cordell Broadus, who in February committed to play wide receiver at UCLA. “One of the happiest day of my life was seeing my son pick a school and knowing that he’s going to college,” said Snoop. […]

    As memorable of a moment as that may have been, we have to think that learning his son was going to be the first member of his family to attend college has to have the edge in the “momentous life event” department. No offense to Willie or KFC.

    Jon Stewart. Jon Stewart calls out Fox News for a double standard in covering Ferguson and Benghazi

    In the aftermath of a Justice Department report that found officer Darren Wilson acted in self defense when he shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. — and that claims Brown raised his hands during the encounter were inaccurate — Fox News anchors have demanded an apology from those who pushed the “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative.

    “The lesson Fox News is getting at is very clear,” said Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” Thursday. “Wouldn’t it be nice if people who jumped to conclusions and peddled a false, divisive, anger-stoking narrative had to apologize for misleading America?”

    But while Fox News wants an apology over Ferguson, they ignore pushing a false narrative themselves when it came to Benghazi, Stewart said. The network paid particular attention to the Justice Department report disproving “hands up, don’t shoot,” but ignored its other report on widespread racism in police practices as well as the House Benghazi report, Stewart said. The report debunked the narrative there like there was credible intelligence about the attack before it began and that there was an order against rescuing those at the compound.

    “They demand accountability for anger and divisiveness whilst holding themselves entirely unaccountable for their anger and divisiveness,” he said. “For two years, they used Benghazi as shorthand, as a symbol for the whole concept of a corrupt, lying, tyrannical, possible murderous Obama White House, kind of like other people used ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ as a symbol for systemic racism, and there’s only really one difference between the two phenomenon: systemic racism actually exists.”

    Video at the link!

    People are worried: Has the situation in Ferguson ruined St. Louis’ image? Never mind that the rampant racism may not have been an image-maker in the first place.

    Many tourists are in St. Louis for the NCAA Wrestling Championships. They told News 4 the unrest in Ferguson did not discourage them from visiting the area.

    So, hey, I guess things are okay! (Autoplay video at the link has more.)

    Students Fight Back Against Voter ID Law That Allows Gun Licenses But Bans Student IDs.

    Under Tennessee law, a handgun carry permit can be used as ID when casting a ballot, but a student ID card cannot. The state also includes college and university faculty ID cards as acceptable forms of ID even though they are nearly identical to student IDs cards.

    Voter ID measures, which are currently enforced in 31 states across the country, have disproportionately blocked young minorities from casting ballots. Most efforts to overturn the laws have been led by civil rights and voting rights advocates, but in Tennessee, a group of students decided to take a stand this month and are leading the charge against their state’s discriminatory law.

    “If [voter ID laws] are going to exist, we want the broadest ID list possible,” Jon Sherman, a staff attorney with the Fair Elections Legal Network, told ThinkProgress. “Picking and choosing between different forms of perfectly valid and secure IDs is an effort to skew the electorate.”

    The Nashville Student Organizing Committee and a group of nine students from Fisk University and Tennessee State University, both historically black colleges, filed a lawsuit in early March against the state, alleging that excluding student IDs from the acceptable voter ID list violates the 26th Amendment, which enshrines the right to vote to qualified citizens 18 years of age and older, as well as the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. They also say the state does not allow voters to present out-of-state ID cards, which are widely held by college students living in Tennessee, therefore discriminating against out-of-state students.

    “At every step of the voter ID law’s evolution, Tennessee state legislators have purposely fenced out college and university students, especially targeting out-of-state students, rejecting multiple bills that would have added student ID cards to the voter ID list,” the complaint said.

    The suit also alleges that while the state has made it more difficult for students to vote, it has eased restrictions on older voters. Tennessee recently lowered the age for older people to vote absentee without excuse from 65 to 60 — the state only allows absentee ballots for voters who have a credible excuse — and added public sector retiree cards as acceptable ID.

    “They’ve put a thumb on the scale to make it harder for students to vote and they’ve simultaneously made it easier for older voters to cast their ballots,” said Sherman, who is representing the students in the litigation. […]

    Like their counterparts in Tennessee, a group of North Carolina students filed a suit against voter ID last year, the first legal action filed on behalf of students challenging a voter ID law. North Carolina’s voter ID law, which will go into effect in 2016 unless a court strikes it down, also prevents students from using their university IDs.

    College students and university employees also put pressure on Wisconsin to overturn its restrictive voter ID law, which was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court shortly before the 2014 election. Had the last-minute ruling not been handed down, more than 32,000 out-of-state students who attend public universities in Wisconsin would have been prevented from voting because the law would have forbidden student IDs or out-of-state ID cards.

    Texas’s voter ID law, which also excludes student IDs but allows gun licenses disenfranchised hundreds of voters during the 2014 election.

    Banning student IDs for voting is just one of several ways Republican lawmakers have tried to restrict student voting. Other popular suppression tactics include limiting same-day registration, which many students rely on, and making it harder for students to claim residency where they go to school.

    Many of the attempts are visible efforts to skew the electorate away from younger voters, who are more likely to support Democratic candidates. The New Hampshire House Speaker even admitted legislation to make it harder for students to vote in their college towns was intended to discourage “foolish” kids from voting because they tend to be more liberal.

    Regarding Saturday, Demonstrators gather for Ferguson march, rally Saturday, with autoplay video.

    The second of two Ferguson-related marches is underway. The marches are being billed as national events, organized by the National Leadership Coalition for Justice. Saturday’s march is taking place in Ferguson. Protestors will march from Forest Wood Park to the Ferguson Police Department.

    Things got off to a heated start at the first march in Clayton, MO, Friday when a few demonstrators got testy with news crew cameras and reporters, but things went smoothly for the most part. The march began at Shaw Park with participants carrying signs that read “KKK Killers” and the “New Black Panther Party” among others. The 100 plus protestors made their way through the streets of Clayton, stopping in front of the St. Louis County Justice Department.

  480. rq says

    The #Ferguson panel @RE_invent_ED @cjayconrod @MsPackyetti with @2LiveUnchained facilitating. #AmnestyM2M;
    Hearing black activists from Brazil discuss their campaigns. The message, black genocide in Brazil #AmnestyM2M;
    And @MsPackyetti asks the question of why isn’t there an African American on the board of @amnesty #AmnestyM2M;
    Catching up on the protest tonight in STL. I hear that the police are arresting protesters for simply being at the meet up spot.
    Shoutout to the Black Caucus meeting at #AmnestyM2M tonight. Felt good to around all that revolutionary black love.

  481. rq says

    St. Louis County police take recruitment on the road

    In the wake of the unrest in Ferguson, the St. Louis County police department is trying to improve diversity in its ranks. At a job fair at Hazelwood East Middle School on Saturday, men and women started with push-ups and paperwork.

    For the first time, the department went out looking for new trainees of all backgrounds, but specifically seeking minority candidates.The day featured written tests and a physical evaluations.

    There are potential recruits who see joining the force as a way to solve what has looked like a war between residents of North County and the police.

    Potential recruit Theo McFee said, “I believe I can make a difference and show people something different other than what they think or what they know or what they’ve heard, and show them law enforcement is not bad that we’re on their side, not against them.”

    Shakita Blakely added, “My husband was a little concerned, he was like, ‘with everything going on why would you want to do this?’ But I think we can make a big difference and that way we won’t always be targeted.”

    There was concern as to how many people would show up for the two-day event, but that was put to rest when about 150 people walked through the door.

    Loretta Lynch’s Long Wait – so she’s still not approved??

    The delay is peculiar chiefly because there doesn’t seem to be a clear reason for it. Republicans haven’t dug up anything scandalous from her past, no single senator is trying to block her nomination, and she likely has the votes to be confirmed, although the margin will be closer than initially expected. The strangest aspect of Lynch’s long wait is that the GOP overwhelmingly prefers her to Holder. The House has voted to hold the current attorney general in contempt, and dozens of Republicans have previously called on him to resign. Now that he actually has, they refuse to let him leave.
    See also

    The Attorney General From Brooklyn

    The GOP’s Wasted Winter

    Most of the Republican opposition to Lynch is not about her qualifications or her record as the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, but about her support for Obama’s executive actions on immigration. Which means that as usual, the opposition is all about the president. No one would expect Obama to nominate someone as attorney general who believed he was breaking the law, and while political independence is important at the Justice Department, no one would expect Lynch to announce an investigation of the White House while sitting at her confirmation hearing.

    Democrats are stepping up pressure on Republicans to confirm her, but they haven’t been blameless, either. Minority Leader Harry Reid’s strategy to use procedural maneuvers to box in Republicans on the homeland security funding fight yielded a victory in that battle, but it also kept the Republican majority from moving on other issues, like the Lynch nomination. (The Senate can do more than one thing at once, but like Reid before him, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn’t need much excuse for inaction.) Now, Democrats are holding up bipartisan anti-human-trafficking legislation over abortion language that they claim Republicans snuck into the bill. GOP lawmakers counter, with some legitimacy, that Democrats simply didn’t read the bill closely enough when it came out in January, since they raised no objections when they approved it unanimously in committee.

    What does an abortion fight have to do with Loretta Lynch? Well, McConnell had said she would finally get her confirmation vote this week, but in an effort to get Democrats to relent on the trafficking bill, he said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union that Lynch would be “put off again” unless that legislation was done. “By continuing to stall Lynch’s nomination Republicans are failing yet another basic test of their ability to govern,” Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson said in response. Lynch’s nomination can be brought to the floor at any time, he noted. “There is nothing stopping the Senate from confirming Lynch and continuing to debate the trafficking bill this week, except Senator McConnell’s unwillingness to bring her nomination up for a vote.” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, on Monday called the delay “unconscionable” and “unexplained.” […]

    Lynch’s long wait is probably costing her Republican votes she would have secured if McConnell had moved more quickly to a vote. Just four GOP senators have announced their support, enough to secure her confirmation if all 46 Democrats vote in her favor, as expected. Yet if no other Republicans vote yes, Vice President Joe Biden would have to cast the tie-breaking vote, which would be a first for a Cabinet nominee and an awkward moment that McConnell may want to avoid. (Lynch would be in far greater jeopardy had Republicans not decided to keep the contentious change to Senate filibuster rules that Democrats engineered for nominations when they had the majority in 2013.)

    Holder, meanwhile, hasn’t spent the last few months just packing his bags. He’s used the extra time in office to complete unfinished business, like closing the civil rights investigations into the shooting deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, and releasing a scathing report on racism in the Ferguson police department. He’s also sought to burnish his legacy by announcing major changes to the assets that state and local police can seize in law enforcement activities, and by heralding a drop in drug prosecutions, incarcerations, and lengthy prison sentences. Earnest said Holder will stay on the job “as long as it is necessary.” That’s probably not the message Republicans want to hear, but his retirement is in their hands: With a couple of votes in the Senate, they can get rid of Holder anytime they want.

  482. rq says

    Martese Johnson: Pub Owner Disputes Claims He Was ‘Belligerent’

    Kevin Badke, owner of Trinity Irish Pub, issued the statement through his attorney describing his encounter with Johnson early Wednesday morning, which runs counter to previous reports about Johnson’s bloody encounter with Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control officers.

    The statement says Badke was working the door when Johnson tried to enter with an Illinois ID. After Johnson gave the wrong zip code on his ID, Badke denied him entry into the bar and Johnson walked away, the report states.

    “There have been reported comments that management of Trinity were belligerent towards Mr. Johnson or that Mr. Johnson was belligerent towards management,” the statement reads, according to NBC 29. “Those allegations are patently untrue, as the brief conversation that occurred was polite and cordial. Mr. Badke’s observation was that Mr. Johnson was a disappointed patron.”

    Badke also denied allegations of racial profiling.

    “There have been reports that Trinity engages or engaged, in this incident, in racial profiling in not permitting Mr. Johnson to enter,” the statement reads. “The rationale for allowing patrons to enter—being familiar with the zip code on their own license—is color, gender, race, and ethnicity-blind.”

    The statement says it is cooperating with state police in the investigation into Johnson’s arrest, which sparked protests when video emerged of the bloody and brutal encounter.

    TW for discussion of suicide. The Night I Spoke Up About My #BlackSuicide

    I grew up on Scotten Avenue on the west side of Detroit during the 1980s, the height of the crack epidemic. Raised by my grandmother, Mama, I lived with her, my two uncles, Randy and Cricket, and my aunt, Annette, all of whom directed some form of abuse toward me. Violence was scenery. It was normal to walk home from school, only to have one of the older guys from the block suddenly run and shield my body from bullets that were being fired off just yards away. Often, I’d boil a hot dog on one burner of the stove while my uncles prepared whatever drug they were dealing on the others.

    One night during the winter of 1992, six or seven masked men dressed in SWAT team gear raided our house and held Mama, Annette, Randy, and me at gunpoint. I was 11 years old. One of the men held a gun to the back of my head while the others pistol-whipped Uncle Randy so badly that one of his eyes popped out. Blood splatter hit the walls with the strength of a high-powered water gun. Drops of blood fell from the black hole where his eye once sat and sank into our tan carpet, where they would remain for weeks. The men eventually found the drugs and money they were looking for and ran out of the front door. I don’t remember how my uncle’s drug-dealing partners learned about the break-in, but they filled our living room carrying automatic weapons soon after the masked men left. After unsuccessfully shooting at the men as they ran down the street and into the night, they rushed Randy to the hospital, where his eye was placed back into the socket.

    When I arrived at middle school the next day, most of my friends had heard about the robbery. At lunch, some of them laughed at me; my house was “weak” for getting robbed, they said. I felt ashamed and embarrassed.

    The attack also made me think differently about Uncle Randy. The most stable father figure in my life at the time, he helped me define my masculinity. This is the same man who my grandmother told me once stuck a gun down another man’s throat and asked him to repeat himself after he heard that he had called him a “bitch-ass nigga.” The man immediately apologized. But, after the robbery, Randy was “weak”and I felt like prey. I knew I could never show myself as “weak” again.

    A year later, Randy died in a fire at his apartment and Cricket had developed a bad crack habit. It was then, at age 12, that my grandmother handed me a .357 Magnum. “You’re man of the house now,” she said. Sometimes, she would give me her .22 handgun so I could fire into the bushes at night, just to get used to handling a gun in case I ever needed to shoot someone for real. […]

    About a year after Uncle Randy died, during a summer day in 1993, Mama and Uncle Cricket were in a heated argument in the living room, an event that had become routine in our house. Cricket was a nice person before he became addicted to crack but, afterward, he treated Mama and me horribly. Drunk, high, or both, he threatened us often and said the worst things imaginable to Mama. “Fuck you, bitch!” and “Suck my dick, ho!” were regular insults, but they weren’t the worst. This time, two family friends were also over and tried to calm Cricket down, but he ignored them.

    “I know what I’mma do. I’ll be right back,” he said suddenly, after he and Mama had been at each other for 15 minutes. Then, he walked down into the basement, where he lived. One of our friends, already fearful that Cricket was going for a gun, ran out the front door.

    I rushed over to where Mama was sitting and pulled the the .22 from its usual hiding spot under the edge of the cushion of her chair. “‘Rell, stop!” she yelled. She tried to snatch the gun from my hands, but she was too late. I aimed the gun at the basement door, rage flowing through my body and pooling in my pointer finger, ready to squeeze the trigger until I emptied the clip. As Cricket stepped out of the doorway, I saw a small gun in his right hand. Just as I pointed the .22 directly at him, the family friend who had stayed behind ran to me and took the gun, saving my uncle’s life and mine from what likely would have been years in prison or a juvenile institution. I was pissed. He had ruined my chance to do something I had secretly wanted to for at least a year, to finally bring my grandmother and me some peace.

    And this is where my memory goes hazy. I remember running out the door and across the street, watching Cricket at the top of the porch steps holding his gun at his temples. Mama at edge of the porch screaming for her life. A local news truck rolling up to record everything. A beat cop who knew my family arriving, trying to talk Cricket out of killing himself. […]

    One evening last summer, nearly a year after I had begun therapy, I was sitting on my bed reflecting on the previous October. I had yet to tell most people in my life that I had once been suicidal and was seeing a therapist, but I was tired of keeping it to myself. I decided I wanted a community to help support me through the process. So, on Aug. 8, I tweeted: “This is my first time openly discussing my suicide battle from nearly a year ago, but I already feel better that I’m speaking. #BlackSuicide”

    Soon, my message had been retweeted or favorited 60 times, and several of my followers responded to me directly. Some offered words of encouragement, others revealed that they were depressed and had also considered suicide. Some even told me their psychiatric diagnoses: bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and on and on. The conversation that was born of that hashtag was a revelation. I had no idea that so many black people were struggling with similar issues. A common statistic from Mental Health America is that 63% of African-Americans view depression as a weakness, nearly 10% more than the average for all races. Yet, here we were, pushing against that stigma and opening up to one another. I’ve been using #BlackSuicide ever since. The more I’ve tweeted about how the violence I experienced as a child affected my life as an adult, the more support I’ve received and have been able to give others in return.

    Growing up, I never heard anyone talk about therapy, even though black people are 20% more likely than white people to report serious psychological distress. Now, I sometimes host Twitter chats in which licensed therapists offer resources on how people can seek help. Most of the participants are black and believe they need treatment, but can’t afford it or have a hard time finding a professional who is also black and will understand their experiences. Some of the therapists who participate in my chats provide links to free or low-cost services. A few of my own followers have even shared their phone numbers in case I need someone to talk to when I’m feeling down. In addition to my own therapy, I now have an entire web of people I can lean on whenever I am struggling. […]

    I emailed my therapist that night to tell her what happened. It was the first time I had reached out to her immediately after an anxiety attack. Before, I figured I could take care of them myself. At our next session, she encouraged me to see a psychiatrist, something she had suggested back in 2013 when we first began seeing each other. At the time, I refused, fearing a diagnosis that would have taken me over the edge. Now, I have an appointment scheduled for April.

    If you or someone you know is going through a rough time, feeling depressed, or thinking about self-harm, you can call the national suicide prevention lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or visit its website. You can also head over to ReachOut.com and check out some of its resources.

    Leaving the help info at the end.

    Jesse Krimes made this using a prison bedsheet, hair gel, plastic spoons, and NYT clippings. It’s incredible.

    #TaneshaAnderson got same treatment as #MarteseJohnson. Her head was also slammed into concrete. She however died.

    Income Inequality Is Wider in Atlanta Than in San Francisco or Boston

    The gap between rich and poor has expanded in U.S. cities, and nowhere is that chasm wider than Atlanta.

    The top 5% of households earn nearly 20 times the income in the Georgia capital than the bottom 20%. That spread makes Atlanta the city with the highest degree of income inequality, ranking it ahead of San Francisco, Boston and Miami, according to a Brookings Institution study ranked released this week.

    Overall, there is wider income inequality in the nation’s 50 largest cities compared with the country as a whole. In cities, the top 5% earn 11.6 times the average household income of the bottom 20%. The gap is 9.3 times in the U.S. Both margins widened slightly in 2013 compared with 2012, according to the Brookings study.

    Income inequality did narrow in a few cities, including Nashville, Tenn., and Oklahoma City. Each of those rank among the cities with the smallest gap in earnings, but richer households still earn eight times their poorer neighbors.

    Chicago Cop Charged in Fatal Shooting of Unarmed Rekia Boyd Heads to Trial. Whoa, they charged a cop? Going to trial? For serious?

    The officer, Dante Servin, was charged with involuntary manslaughter after prosecutors say he recklessly opened fire, over his shoulder, at a group of people on March 21, 2012, fatally wounding 22-year-old Boyd. The trial is scheduled to begin April 9, after it was postponed from an October start date.

    The charges against Servin, also accused of reckless discharge of a firearm and reckless conduct, were the first time in more than 15 years that a police officer was charged in Chicago in connection with a fatal shooting, the report says. He was placed on paid desk duty and stripped of his police powers.

    The city of Chicago paid $4.5 million to settle the wrongful-death suit filed by Boyd’s family. But that has been of little solace to her family. Her brother Martinez Sutton, 32, told protesters Saturday that he’s still looking for answers in her death, the Tribune writes.

    “They say that her death was justified,” he said at the rally, the news outlet writes. “Her death was justified. Man. How? What did Rekia do? That’s what everybody asks me. And I’m still trying to find out. Because talking to everybody that was involved, I get the same answer. Nothing. So why is she dead?”

    The Tribune says Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez reportedly feels strongly that Boyd “lost her life for no reason.” But supporters of Servin say he reacted in line with his training and was protecting himself.

    Oh. Involuntary manslaughter. Because when you shoot at someone, they die by accident.

  483. rq says

    Martese Johnson: Pub Owner Disputes Claims He Was ‘Belligerent’

    Kevin Badke, owner of Trinity Irish Pub, issued the statement through his attorney describing his encounter with Johnson early Wednesday morning, which runs counter to previous reports about Johnson’s bloody encounter with Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control officers.

    The statement says Badke was working the door when Johnson tried to enter with an Illinois ID. After Johnson gave the wrong zip code on his ID, Badke denied him entry into the bar and Johnson walked away, the report states.

    “There have been reported comments that management of Trinity were belligerent towards Mr. Johnson or that Mr. Johnson was belligerent towards management,” the statement reads, according to NBC 29. “Those allegations are patently untrue, as the brief conversation that occurred was polite and cordial. Mr. Badke’s observation was that Mr. Johnson was a disappointed patron.”

    Badke also denied allegations of racial profiling.

    “There have been reports that Trinity engages or engaged, in this incident, in racial profiling in not permitting Mr. Johnson to enter,” the statement reads. “The rationale for allowing patrons to enter—being familiar with the zip code on their own license—is color, gender, race, and ethnicity-blind.”

    The statement says it is cooperating with state police in the investigation into Johnson’s arrest, which sparked protests when video emerged of the bloody and brutal encounter.

    TW for discussion of suicide. The Night I Spoke Up About My #BlackSuicide

    I grew up on Scotten Avenue on the west side of Detroit during the 1980s, the height of the crack epidemic. Raised by my grandmother, Mama, I lived with her, my two uncles, Randy and Cricket, and my aunt, Annette, all of whom directed some form of abuse toward me. Violence was scenery. It was normal to walk home from school, only to have one of the older guys from the block suddenly run and shield my body from bullets that were being fired off just yards away. Often, I’d boil a hot dog on one burner of the stove while my uncles prepared whatever drug they were dealing on the others.

    One night during the winter of 1992, six or seven masked men dressed in SWAT team gear raided our house and held Mama, Annette, Randy, and me at gunpoint. I was 11 years old. One of the men held a gun to the back of my head while the others pistol-whipped Uncle Randy so badly that one of his eyes popped out. Blood splatter hit the walls with the strength of a high-powered water gun. Drops of blood fell from the black hole where his eye once sat and sank into our tan carpet, where they would remain for weeks. The men eventually found the drugs and money they were looking for and ran out of the front door. I don’t remember how my uncle’s drug-dealing partners learned about the break-in, but they filled our living room carrying automatic weapons soon after the masked men left. After unsuccessfully shooting at the men as they ran down the street and into the night, they rushed Randy to the hospital, where his eye was placed back into the socket.

    When I arrived at middle school the next day, most of my friends had heard about the robbery. At lunch, some of them laughed at me; my house was “weak” for getting robbed, they said. I felt ashamed and embarrassed.

    The attack also made me think differently about Uncle Randy. The most stable father figure in my life at the time, he helped me define my masculinity. This is the same man who my grandmother told me once stuck a gun down another man’s throat and asked him to repeat himself after he heard that he had called him a “bitch-ass nigga.” The man immediately apologized. But, after the robbery, Randy was “weak”and I felt like prey. I knew I could never show myself as “weak” again.

    A year later, Randy died in a fire at his apartment and Cricket had developed a bad crack habit. It was then, at age 12, that my grandmother handed me a .357 Magnum. “You’re man of the house now,” she said. Sometimes, she would give me her .22 handgun so I could fire into the bushes at night, just to get used to handling a gun in case I ever needed to shoot someone for real. […]

    About a year after Uncle Randy died, during a summer day in 1993, Mama and Uncle Cricket were in a heated argument in the living room, an event that had become routine in our house. Cricket was a nice person before he became addicted to crack but, afterward, he treated Mama and me horribly. Drunk, high, or both, he threatened us often and said the worst things imaginable to Mama. “Fuck you, b*tch!” and “Suck my dick, ho!” were regular insults, but they weren’t the worst. This time, two family friends were also over and tried to calm Cricket down, but he ignored them.

    “I know what I’mma do. I’ll be right back,” he said suddenly, after he and Mama had been at each other for 15 minutes. Then, he walked down into the basement, where he lived. One of our friends, already fearful that Cricket was going for a gun, ran out the front door.

    I rushed over to where Mama was sitting and pulled the the .22 from its usual hiding spot under the edge of the cushion of her chair. “‘Rell, stop!” she yelled. She tried to snatch the gun from my hands, but she was too late. I aimed the gun at the basement door, rage flowing through my body and pooling in my pointer finger, ready to squeeze the trigger until I emptied the clip. As Cricket stepped out of the doorway, I saw a small gun in his right hand. Just as I pointed the .22 directly at him, the family friend who had stayed behind ran to me and took the gun, saving my uncle’s life and mine from what likely would have been years in prison or a juvenile institution. I was pissed. He had ruined my chance to do something I had secretly wanted to for at least a year, to finally bring my grandmother and me some peace.

    And this is where my memory goes hazy. I remember running out the door and across the street, watching Cricket at the top of the porch steps holding his gun at his temples. Mama at edge of the porch screaming for her life. A local news truck rolling up to record everything. A beat cop who knew my family arriving, trying to talk Cricket out of killing himself. […]

    One evening last summer, nearly a year after I had begun therapy, I was sitting on my bed reflecting on the previous October. I had yet to tell most people in my life that I had once been suicidal and was seeing a therapist, but I was tired of keeping it to myself. I decided I wanted a community to help support me through the process. So, on Aug. 8, I tweeted: “This is my first time openly discussing my suicide battle from nearly a year ago, but I already feel better that I’m speaking. #BlackSuicide”

    Soon, my message had been retweeted or favorited 60 times, and several of my followers responded to me directly. Some offered words of encouragement, others revealed that they were depressed and had also considered suicide. Some even told me their psychiatric diagnoses: bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and on and on. The conversation that was born of that hashtag was a revelation. I had no idea that so many black people were struggling with similar issues. A common statistic from Mental Health America is that 63% of African-Americans view depression as a weakness, nearly 10% more than the average for all races. Yet, here we were, pushing against that stigma and opening up to one another. I’ve been using #BlackSuicide ever since. The more I’ve tweeted about how the violence I experienced as a child affected my life as an adult, the more support I’ve received and have been able to give others in return.

    Growing up, I never heard anyone talk about therapy, even though black people are 20% more likely than white people to report serious psychological distress. Now, I sometimes host Twitter chats in which licensed therapists offer resources on how people can seek help. Most of the participants are black and believe they need treatment, but can’t afford it or have a hard time finding a professional who is also black and will understand their experiences. Some of the therapists who participate in my chats provide links to free or low-cost services. A few of my own followers have even shared their phone numbers in case I need someone to talk to when I’m feeling down. In addition to my own therapy, I now have an entire web of people I can lean on whenever I am struggling. […]

    I emailed my therapist that night to tell her what happened. It was the first time I had reached out to her immediately after an anxiety attack. Before, I figured I could take care of them myself. At our next session, she encouraged me to see a psychiatrist, something she had suggested back in 2013 when we first began seeing each other. At the time, I refused, fearing a diagnosis that would have taken me over the edge. Now, I have an appointment scheduled for April.

    If you or someone you know is going through a rough time, feeling depressed, or thinking about self-harm, you can call the national suicide prevention lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or visit its website. You can also head over to ReachOut.com and check out some of its resources.

    Leaving the help info at the end.

    Jesse Krimes made this using a prison bedsheet, hair gel, plastic spoons, and NYT clippings. It’s incredible.

    #TaneshaAnderson got same treatment as #MarteseJohnson. Her head was also slammed into concrete. She however died.

    Income Inequality Is Wider in Atlanta Than in San Francisco or Boston

    The gap between rich and poor has expanded in U.S. cities, and nowhere is that chasm wider than Atlanta.

    The top 5% of households earn nearly 20 times the income in the Georgia capital than the bottom 20%. That spread makes Atlanta the city with the highest degree of income inequality, ranking it ahead of San Francisco, Boston and Miami, according to a Brookings Institution study ranked released this week.

    Overall, there is wider income inequality in the nation’s 50 largest cities compared with the country as a whole. In cities, the top 5% earn 11.6 times the average household income of the bottom 20%. The gap is 9.3 times in the U.S. Both margins widened slightly in 2013 compared with 2012, according to the Brookings study.

    Income inequality did narrow in a few cities, including Nashville, Tenn., and Oklahoma City. Each of those rank among the cities with the smallest gap in earnings, but richer households still earn eight times their poorer neighbors.

    Chicago Cop Charged in Fatal Shooting of Unarmed Rekia Boyd Heads to Trial. Whoa, they charged a cop? Going to trial? For serious?

    The officer, Dante Servin, was charged with involuntary manslaughter after prosecutors say he recklessly opened fire, over his shoulder, at a group of people on March 21, 2012, fatally wounding 22-year-old Boyd. The trial is scheduled to begin April 9, after it was postponed from an October start date.

    The charges against Servin, also accused of reckless discharge of a firearm and reckless conduct, were the first time in more than 15 years that a police officer was charged in Chicago in connection with a fatal shooting, the report says. He was placed on paid desk duty and stripped of his police powers.

    The city of Chicago paid $4.5 million to settle the wrongful-death suit filed by Boyd’s family. But that has been of little solace to her family. Her brother Martinez Sutton, 32, told protesters Saturday that he’s still looking for answers in her death, the Tribune writes.

    “They say that her death was justified,” he said at the rally, the news outlet writes. “Her death was justified. Man. How? What did Rekia do? That’s what everybody asks me. And I’m still trying to find out. Because talking to everybody that was involved, I get the same answer. Nothing. So why is she dead?”

    The Tribune says Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez reportedly feels strongly that Boyd “lost her life for no reason.” But supporters of Servin say he reacted in line with his training and was protecting himself.

    Oh. Involuntary manslaughter. Because when you shoot at someone, they die by accident.

  484. rq says

    Martese Johnson: Pub Owner Disputes Claims He Was ‘Belligerent’

    Kevin Badke, owner of Trinity Irish Pub, issued the statement through his attorney describing his encounter with Johnson early Wednesday morning, which runs counter to previous reports about Johnson’s bloody encounter with Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control officers.

    The statement says Badke was working the door when Johnson tried to enter with an Illinois ID. After Johnson gave the wrong zip code on his ID, Badke denied him entry into the bar and Johnson walked away, the report states.

    “There have been reported comments that management of Trinity were belligerent towards Mr. Johnson or that Mr. Johnson was belligerent towards management,” the statement reads, according to NBC 29. “Those allegations are patently untrue, as the brief conversation that occurred was polite and cordial. Mr. Badke’s observation was that Mr. Johnson was a disappointed patron.”

    Badke also denied allegations of racial profiling.

    “There have been reports that Trinity engages or engaged, in this incident, in racial profiling in not permitting Mr. Johnson to enter,” the statement reads. “The rationale for allowing patrons to enter—being familiar with the zip code on their own license—is color, gender, race, and ethnicity-blind.”

    The statement says it is cooperating with state police in the investigation into Johnson’s arrest, which sparked protests when video emerged of the bloody and brutal encounter.

    TW for discussion of suicide. The Night I Spoke Up About My #BlackSuicide

    I grew up on Scotten Avenue on the west side of Detroit during the 1980s, the height of the crack epidemic. Raised by my grandmother, Mama, I lived with her, my two uncles, Randy and Cricket, and my aunt, Annette, all of whom directed some form of abuse toward me. Violence was scenery. It was normal to walk home from school, only to have one of the older guys from the block suddenly run and shield my body from bullets that were being fired off just yards away. Often, I’d boil a hot dog on one burner of the stove while my uncles prepared whatever drug they were dealing on the others.

    One night during the winter of 1992, six or seven masked men dressed in SWAT team gear raided our house and held Mama, Annette, Randy, and me at gunpoint. I was 11 years old. One of the men held a gun to the back of my head while the others pistol-whipped Uncle Randy so badly that one of his eyes popped out. Blood splatter hit the walls with the strength of a high-powered water gun. Drops of blood fell from the black hole where his eye once sat and sank into our tan carpet, where they would remain for weeks. The men eventually found the drugs and money they were looking for and ran out of the front door. I don’t remember how my uncle’s drug-dealing partners learned about the break-in, but they filled our living room carrying automatic weapons soon after the masked men left. After unsuccessfully shooting at the men as they ran down the street and into the night, they rushed Randy to the hospital, where his eye was placed back into the socket.

    When I arrived at middle school the next day, most of my friends had heard about the robbery. At lunch, some of them laughed at me; my house was “weak” for getting robbed, they said. I felt ashamed and embarrassed.

    The attack also made me think differently about Uncle Randy. The most stable father figure in my life at the time, he helped me define my masculinity. This is the same man who my grandmother told me once stuck a gun down another man’s throat and asked him to repeat himself after he heard that he had called him a “b*tch-ass n*gga.” The man immediately apologized. But, after the robbery, Randy was “weak”and I felt like prey. I knew I could never show myself as “weak” again.

    A year later, Randy died in a fire at his apartment and Cricket had developed a bad crack habit. It was then, at age 12, that my grandmother handed me a .357 Magnum. “You’re man of the house now,” she said. Sometimes, she would give me her .22 handgun so I could fire into the bushes at night, just to get used to handling a gun in case I ever needed to shoot someone for real. […]

    About a year after Uncle Randy died, during a summer day in 1993, Mama and Uncle Cricket were in a heated argument in the living room, an event that had become routine in our house. Cricket was a nice person before he became addicted to crack but, afterward, he treated Mama and me horribly. Drunk, high, or both, he threatened us often and said the worst things imaginable to Mama. “Fuck you, b*tch!” and “Suck my dick, ho!” were regular insults, but they weren’t the worst. This time, two family friends were also over and tried to calm Cricket down, but he ignored them.

    “I know what I’mma do. I’ll be right back,” he said suddenly, after he and Mama had been at each other for 15 minutes. Then, he walked down into the basement, where he lived. One of our friends, already fearful that Cricket was going for a gun, ran out the front door.

    I rushed over to where Mama was sitting and pulled the the .22 from its usual hiding spot under the edge of the cushion of her chair. “‘Rell, stop!” she yelled. She tried to snatch the gun from my hands, but she was too late. I aimed the gun at the basement door, rage flowing through my body and pooling in my pointer finger, ready to squeeze the trigger until I emptied the clip. As Cricket stepped out of the doorway, I saw a small gun in his right hand. Just as I pointed the .22 directly at him, the family friend who had stayed behind ran to me and took the gun, saving my uncle’s life and mine from what likely would have been years in prison or a juvenile institution. I was pissed. He had ruined my chance to do something I had secretly wanted to for at least a year, to finally bring my grandmother and me some peace.

    And this is where my memory goes hazy. I remember running out the door and across the street, watching Cricket at the top of the porch steps holding his gun at his temples. Mama at edge of the porch screaming for her life. A local news truck rolling up to record everything. A beat cop who knew my family arriving, trying to talk Cricket out of killing himself. […]

    One evening last summer, nearly a year after I had begun therapy, I was sitting on my bed reflecting on the previous October. I had yet to tell most people in my life that I had once been suicidal and was seeing a therapist, but I was tired of keeping it to myself. I decided I wanted a community to help support me through the process. So, on Aug. 8, I tweeted: “This is my first time openly discussing my suicide battle from nearly a year ago, but I already feel better that I’m speaking. #BlackSuicide”

    Soon, my message had been retweeted or favorited 60 times, and several of my followers responded to me directly. Some offered words of encouragement, others revealed that they were depressed and had also considered suicide. Some even told me their psychiatric diagnoses: bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and on and on. The conversation that was born of that hashtag was a revelation. I had no idea that so many black people were struggling with similar issues. A common statistic from Mental Health America is that 63% of African-Americans view depression as a weakness, nearly 10% more than the average for all races. Yet, here we were, pushing against that stigma and opening up to one another. I’ve been using #BlackSuicide ever since. The more I’ve tweeted about how the violence I experienced as a child affected my life as an adult, the more support I’ve received and have been able to give others in return.

    Growing up, I never heard anyone talk about therapy, even though black people are 20% more likely than white people to report serious psychological distress. Now, I sometimes host Twitter chats in which licensed therapists offer resources on how people can seek help. Most of the participants are black and believe they need treatment, but can’t afford it or have a hard time finding a professional who is also black and will understand their experiences. Some of the therapists who participate in my chats provide links to free or low-cost services. A few of my own followers have even shared their phone numbers in case I need someone to talk to when I’m feeling down. In addition to my own therapy, I now have an entire web of people I can lean on whenever I am struggling. […]

    I emailed my therapist that night to tell her what happened. It was the first time I had reached out to her immediately after an anxiety attack. Before, I figured I could take care of them myself. At our next session, she encouraged me to see a psychiatrist, something she had suggested back in 2013 when we first began seeing each other. At the time, I refused, fearing a diagnosis that would have taken me over the edge. Now, I have an appointment scheduled for April.

    If you or someone you know is going through a rough time, feeling depressed, or thinking about self-harm, you can call the national suicide prevention lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or visit its website. You can also head over to ReachOut.com and check out some of its resources.

    Leaving the help info at the end.

    Jesse Krimes made this using a prison bedsheet, hair gel, plastic spoons, and NYT clippings. It’s incredible.

    #TaneshaAnderson got same treatment as #MarteseJohnson. Her head was also slammed into concrete. She however died.

    Income Inequality Is Wider in Atlanta Than in San Francisco or Boston

    The gap between rich and poor has expanded in U.S. cities, and nowhere is that chasm wider than Atlanta.

    The top 5% of households earn nearly 20 times the income in the Georgia capital than the bottom 20%. That spread makes Atlanta the city with the highest degree of income inequality, ranking it ahead of San Francisco, Boston and Miami, according to a Brookings Institution study ranked released this week.

    Overall, there is wider income inequality in the nation’s 50 largest cities compared with the country as a whole. In cities, the top 5% earn 11.6 times the average household income of the bottom 20%. The gap is 9.3 times in the U.S. Both margins widened slightly in 2013 compared with 2012, according to the Brookings study.

    Income inequality did narrow in a few cities, including Nashville, Tenn., and Oklahoma City. Each of those rank among the cities with the smallest gap in earnings, but richer households still earn eight times their poorer neighbors.

    Chicago Cop Charged in Fatal Shooting of Unarmed Rekia Boyd Heads to Trial. Whoa, they charged a cop? Going to trial? For serious?

    The officer, Dante Servin, was charged with involuntary manslaughter after prosecutors say he recklessly opened fire, over his shoulder, at a group of people on March 21, 2012, fatally wounding 22-year-old Boyd. The trial is scheduled to begin April 9, after it was postponed from an October start date.

    The charges against Servin, also accused of reckless discharge of a firearm and reckless conduct, were the first time in more than 15 years that a police officer was charged in Chicago in connection with a fatal shooting, the report says. He was placed on paid desk duty and stripped of his police powers.

    The city of Chicago paid $4.5 million to settle the wrongful-death suit filed by Boyd’s family. But that has been of little solace to her family. Her brother Martinez Sutton, 32, told protesters Saturday that he’s still looking for answers in her death, the Tribune writes.

    “They say that her death was justified,” he said at the rally, the news outlet writes. “Her death was justified. Man. How? What did Rekia do? That’s what everybody asks me. And I’m still trying to find out. Because talking to everybody that was involved, I get the same answer. Nothing. So why is she dead?”

    The Tribune says Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez reportedly feels strongly that Boyd “lost her life for no reason.” But supporters of Servin say he reacted in line with his training and was protecting himself.

    Oh. Involuntary manslaughter. Because when you shoot at someone, they die by accident.

  485. rq says

    #BlackBrunchMN
    It is cold out here but we are remembering people. #BlackBrunchMN
    She called the police not 30 seconds after we walked in. #BlackBrunchMN
    They stared at us through the window. #BlackBrunchMN

    Really? How drug testing could actually reduce racial disparities in the workplace

    The theory is that employers assume — wrongly — that black job applicants are much more likely to use illicit drugs than white applicants, but drug testing disproves that notion by providing hard, physical evidence that black job applicants aren’t doing more drugs.

    Wozniak evaluated this theory by looking at states’ policies for drug testing. She found that states with laws that encourage the tests have 7 to 10 percent more low-skilled black men working in high-testing industries than all states with no such law, and 30 percent more low-skilled black men working in high-testing industries than states that discourage the practice. But white women appear to lose out through more drug testing, since, according to the study, employers may substitute black workers with them. Wozniak acknowledged more research is needed on the issue, but her results were promising for black workers. […]

    Drug testing a potential employee wouldn’t stop many or even most of these cases of racial prejudice, since beliefs about race can go much deeper than drug use. But the tests may have helped dispel one of the reasons employers potentially viewed a person with a stereotypical black name as less worthy of a call back.

    That doesn’t mean drug testing is necessarily a good idea for employers, since it still might mean giving up job candidates who are great despite their drug use. Last May, for example, FBI Director James Comey suggested that the agency’s policy of refusing marijuana users can block out potentially good hires. “I have to hire a great workforce to compete with those cyber criminals and some of those kids want to smoke weed on the way to the interview,” Comey said, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

    Perhaps the real lesson, then, is employers shouldn’t make such faulty assumptions about drug use that they need a scientific test to prove them wrong.

    Rash of elementary school suspensions in St. Louis area are a pipeline to problems

    Thousands of suspensions are issued to elementary school children in the St. Louis area each year for infractions ranging from throwing chairs to mouthing off.

    Among those punished are kindergartners who bite. Preschoolers with toileting mishaps during nap time. Second-graders who throw snowballs. They also include children who commit more serious offenses, such as starting fights with classmates and carrying illegal drugs in their backpacks.

    The rash of suspensions has resulted in a loss of tens of thousands of instructional hours in the St. Louis area alone, with minority children catching the brunt of them.

    And it has happened even as districts leaders with the highest suspension rates say the punishment should be used only as a last resort.

    “In the number of years I’ve been doing this, I don’t know that you could find evidence that out-of-school suspension really does anything for students,” said Scott Spurgeon, superintendent of Riverview Gardens schools, where about 4,200 elementary school suspensions were issued last year. However, “I don’t know the system is set up so we have alternate choices.”

    To be sure, the numbers illustrate some of the challenges teachers face when confronted with students whose behavior they can neither manage nor understand.

    In struggling districts, where most of the elementary suspensions are happening, some teachers have been placed in classrooms without the training to help them manage high concentrations of children who struggle both academically and socially.

    Adding to the problem is a gap between suspension rates of black and white students in Missouri public schools — the widest in the nation, according to a study the Civil Rights Project at UCLA released earlier this month, which used data from the 2011-12 school year.

    “They’re the children being overly suspended and kept out,” said Amanda Schneider, an attorney with Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, whose clients include parents of suspended children. “They’re low-income clients. They’re in poverty. They have children who need intensive services and supports.”

    Much more at the link.

  486. rq says

    And oh boy is Amnesty getting it. I had some photos and vague commentary about some panels, but the next few comments is twitter commentary on Amnesty itself and how it needs to do better.

    Let’s start with the question that started it all:
    What domestic campaigns could @amnesty work on in the US? #AmnestyM2M #HowToBringHumanRightsHome
    And with an example, here’s a petition: The US is ready for a justice system that is both equal and fair

    In the aftermath of Ferguson, President Barack Obama issued an Executive Order calling for the creation of the Task Force on 21st Century Policing to strengthen community policing and trust among law enforcement officers and the communities they serve. On March 2nd, the Task Force released its interim report and recommendations, one of which calls for the creation of a National Crime and Justice Task Force. This task force would review and evaluate all components of the criminal justice system and make recommendations on comprehensive criminal justice reform.

    Let’s end the conference the right way, two amazing women of color @rosaclemente @KingCiDot #AmnestyM2M @amnesty

    Our Demands #HowtoBringHumanRightsHome #AmnestyM2M 1) continued and additional training for board members on accountability, anti-racism and diversity; 2) black people in managerial positions where the focus is on black liberation work in the US; 3) create offices in locations where blackl iberation work is happening right now.
    Amnesty members and protestors issue demands at the Amnesty Plenary re: blackness. #AmnestyM2M
    Amnesty has a lot of work to do internally to support and recognize their commitment to undoing racism. Ferguson was just a beginning.
    When I publicly asked why @amnesty has no Black Americans on their board, it’s bc no one is above accountability. #AmnestyM2M

  487. rq says

    Crap, the intro comment to the Amnesty stuff is in moderation. Harrrrumpppphhhh.
    Oh well.

    @deray it’s fascinating seeing the surprise at Amnesty. Its history underscores long held elitism at its core. Time for change.

    There was a common suggestion, though, that several people raised: Centering black people/voices in any black liberation work. No initiatives that center whiteness in black liberation movement. #AmnestyM2M
    Relatedly, Empower domestic poc IN their communities & give them the same resources you give foreign countries. #HowToBringHumanRightsHome #AmnestyM2M
    Dont take organizers out of their home communities to work for amnesty – support them where they are #HowToBringHumanRightsHome #AmnestyM2M
    How about @amnesty 1: Hire more young Black ppl. 2: Keep them in their own communities. 3: Recognize that Black people are human #AmnestyM2M

    @deray A little shocked that Amnesty deploying a delegation to Ferguson was the first time they did it in US. They didn’t do this before?!
    I guess they didn’t realize there were still any issues in USAmerica?

  488. rq says

    Realize that domestic issues are just as much human rights issues as the issues over seas. #HowToBringHumanRightsHome #AmnestyM2M
    I agreed to be involved with this conference because I was led to believe black youth would be present. This is a white space. #AmnestyM2M
    Black folks in the org deal with racism from management on a ongoing basis and don’t feel like they have safe spaces. #AmnestyM2M
    Case in point: Just heard a manager on staff at @amnesty just said “I can’t work w/them or those demands” #AmnestyM2M
    A lot more on their timelines, @Nettaaaaaaaa and @WyzeChef, for those of you on Twitter.

    Starbucks isn’t the only company using race politics as a marketing scheme. Uhaul. Making some weird connection between slaves, the path to liberty, and moving trucks. …

  489. Pteryxx says

    I did my best to construct a transcript of Ronald Wimberly’s comic essay “Lighten Up”. All the text in brackets is my own description, hoping to preserve some of the impact and inferences of his original artwork.

    Lighten Up

    [26 square panels in sequence]

    1

    #LIGHTEN UP

    Ronald Wimberly 02/2015

    [Title panel is four horizontal bands of color – plain white at the top, then light brown, then dark brown, then black at the bottom]

    2

    [The artist’s face as a brown silhouette with the narrative text printed down it, featureless except for his glasses bisecting the text]

    I’m a cartoonist.
    Some people would say I’m black.
    But under this light I’m #5c4653

    “#5c4653” is a hexidecimal ID for a web color.
    “Black”, as I have used it, is an ID based in the concept of race.

    3

    This one time I did a couple pages in a Wolverine and the X-men jam book.
    It was a fun gig and it paid well.

    [a panel of fighting figures made from jagged swatches of red and purple colors, with the foreground character’s face area marked #f69079]

    4

    A day or so later I got back the editor’s notes, and scanning them, my eye fell on something that alarmed me.

    [closeup of the artist’s startled eyes and upper face, marked #78616a on the forehead, #625563 on the shadowed temple, and #4e444f in the hollow above his eye]

    5

    So let me preface this by saying I like this editor – and I’m not just saying that because I want to work with her again. She was great to work with. But this is an example where privilege and social literacy intersect with art.

    [Closeup of a few lines of text in the editor’s email, with the highlighted phrase: ]

    “Also, could you guys lighten Melita’s skin tone a bit?”

    [back to narrative text] Maybe you’re reading this and thinking, “that doesn’t seem like a big deal.” But at that moment I thought…

    6

    [in large dark letters on a white background, evocative of a “got milk?” ad]

    “is this racist?”

    [back to narrative font in a small black box]

    …and I know that if I’m asking that question, the answer is probably “yes.”

    7

    Melita Garner is a reporter, Wolverine’s X-girlfriend.
    (See what I did there?)
    On Comic Vine she’s described as having a Mexican father and an African-American mother.
    So I figured I’d make her some kind of brown.

    [Offset close-up of most of a woman’s face, uncompleted, with straight black hair, brown skin, and #caa468 where her eyes would be.]

    8

    Does how brown matter?

    [Closeup of an image-editing program’s Properties window, reading Document: Ethnicity, Channel: Racial Identity with a checkbox to Invert, and an Operation menu with the options New Selection, Add to Selection, Subtract from Selection, Intersect with Selection (highlighted)]

    9

    The rest of the cast, they’re blue, magenta, translucent, sharkskin…

    [Simple busts of four characters: a thin blue-haired one labeled #e8e1e7, a muscular one labeled #dec1dd, a grinning humanoid shark labeled #96b3cb, and a skeleton inside a bubble labeled #f2dede]

    10

    For reference, here is a swatch of a color I used for Melita’s skin…

    [left half of panel is a brown marked #c39e73]

    …and here is a swatch of the color I was told to match.

    [right half of panel is a gold marked #f8e0a1]

    11

    I responded to my editor with humor:

    [the author’s brown hands on a computer keyboard]

    [in white text] “I thought Melita was black and Mexican, no?”

    [in black text] “Maybe she’s in a different light? ;)”

    12

    What if I just redrew her with a cinnamon latte in her hand and a Haruki Murakami novel under her arm?

    [picture of logo’ed takeout coffee cup and a book cover of a windup bird, resting in a blank black panel]

    (I didn’t say that.)

    13

    Her response:

    [email text highlighted beneath the author’s incredulous upper face]

    “And Melita’s changed over the years…i’ve been told that she is latina and white.”

    [back to narrative text] So here’s my problem with that.

    14

    “Latina” refers to an ethnicity with a broad range of possible nationalities, appearances, and skin tones…

    [Three faces: a smiling pale and straight-haired woman marked “Arab Mexican #ebb8ac”, an olive-skinned woman holding a Brazilian flag and marked “Japanese Brazilian #d8b983”, and a dark woman with thick hair, glasses, and hot pink earrings, and marked “Dominican #503636”]

    15

    …while “white” refers to, at its most innocuous, a color…

    [top half of panel is white marked #ffffff]

    …and at its most sinister, a designation within a racial paradigm.

    [bottom half of panel is black marked #human]

    16

    I’m always sensitive about bringing up this sort of thing in work environments. The mere mention of race puts white people on edge, and that puts everybody else on edge.

    [empty dirt field with a smoking scorch mark and a danger sign with skull-and-crossbones logo and the words “Slow down – White guilt ahead!!!”]

    17

    It’s not a game of pin the tail on the racist, it’s simply a matter of social literacy. In this case, being aware of how “race” as an idea is ridiculous but still informs how we behave.

    [A cartoony brown hand holding a pin with a noose instead of a tail, above a nervous-looking, red-white-and-blue donkey logo with a star on its butt]

    18

    [blank white panel marked #ffffff]

    In art, this is very important.
    Art is where associations are made.
    Art is where we form the narratives of our identity.

    19

    [no narrative text]

    [black panel with a red-lipped grinning caricature face, marked #000000]

    20

    Why is it important to change the skin tone of this character a few degrees?

    [a classical painting of a reclining nude woman – “Olympia” by Manet – rendered in simple swatches of color, with #ffffff where her face should be]

    21

    What purpose does it serve?

    [the right half of the same painting, showing the black servant woman bringing flowers, also rendered in color swatches with #000000 over her face]

    22

    [Closeup of the reclining woman’s face and upper body, looking out at the viewer]

    I wondered if a black editor would have asked me to change her skin tone.

    23

    [Closeup of the servant’s face, looking towards her mistress]

    I’ll keep wondering.
    After 12 years working in comics, I’ve yet to have a black editor.

    24

    [Closeup of a comic-styled woman’s face]

    In the end I didn’t change the character’s skin. Nobody noticed.
    Or maybe what didn’t occur to editorial the first time around kept them from asking a second time.

    25

    I should also mention that on a previous job for Marvel, while fans noticed, editorial gave me no flack when I changed She-Hulk’s hue depending on whim and light source.

    [Three panels close on the face of She-Hulk, a green-skinned character, in different shots, marked #00a16f, #00b08d, #9db14d]

    26

    But then, corporations are less discriminating when it comes to the color green.

    [Detail of the engraving of a US dollar note, showing a President’s hair and one eye gazing out at the viewer – it’s Thomas Jefferson from the 2-dollar bill.]

  490. Pteryxx says

    Somewhere in there I posted my transcript of Ronald Wimberly’s “Lighten Up” comic essay, but it’s in moderation.

  491. rq says

    Here’s a resource discovered by Tony: Sociologists for Justice , which has several readable parts:
    1) Statement on Ferguson

    There are no short cuts to addressing systemic problems. However, as our nation again confronts the reality of race within the criminal justice system, we urge the following actions to facilitate an appropriate response to the death of Michael Brown, and to begin moving toward addressing the systemic racialized police practices that devalue and threaten black lives.

    Immediate assurance from law enforcement authorities in Missouri and the federal government that constitutional rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of the press will be protected.
    A civil rights investigation into the incidents related to the death of Michael Brown and general police practices in Ferguson.
    The establishment of an independent committee to study and analyze the failures of the policing efforts during the week following Michael Brown’s death. Ferguson residents, including leaders of grassroots organizations, should be included on the committee throughout this process. The committee must provide a clear roadmap for resetting community-police relations in a way that grants oversight power to residents.
    An independent comprehensive national study of the role of implicit bias and systemic racism in policing. Federal funding should be allocated to support police departments in implementing the recommendations from the study and ongoing monitoring and public reporting of key benchmarks (e.g., use of force, arrests by race) and improvements in police practices.
    Legislation requiring the use of dash and body-worn cameras to record all police interactions. Data from these devices should be immediately stored in tamper-proof databases, and there should be clear procedures for public access to any such recordings.
    Increased transparency of public law enforcement, including independent oversight agencies with guaranteed full access to law enforcement policies and on-the-ground operations; and more streamlined, transparent and efficient procedures for the processing of complaints and FOIA requests.
    Federal legislation, currently being developed by Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA), to halt the transfer of military equipment to local police departments, and additional legislation to curtail the use of such equipment against domestic civilian populations.
    Establishment of a ‘Ferguson Fund’ that will support long term strategies grounded in the principles of social justice, systems reform and racial equity to bring about substantial and sustained change in Ferguson and other communities facing similar challenges.

    In conclusion, we stand in solidarity with the people of Ferguson, Los Angeles, New York and throughout the country who demand justice. We encourage our colleagues and fellow citizens to support Black Lives Matter, an on-the-ground non-profit initiative committed to sustaining social action and changing the leadership in Ferguson. Additionally, we urge media to draw on a broad range of experts in their reporting of the events and call on educators to use the upcoming school year to open a space to discuss these issues.

    2) Statement on Grand Jury Decision in Shooting Death of Michael Brown

    We are deeply disappointed in the grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown. The handling of the case by St. Louis County Prosecutor Attorney Robert McCulloch and the subsequent decision by the grand jury is another example of the all-too-common elusiveness of justice for communities of color.

    Our thoughts are with Michael Brown’s family, friends, and community as they fight to be heard. We strongly support efforts to organize for systemic changes in policing across the nation. We stand in solidarity with those already engaged in efforts to ensure that Black lives matter. Further, we urge the Department of Justice to conduct a thorough investigation to determine whether federal civil rights charges should be filed against Officer Wilson and encourage the Obama administration to consider our recommendations for addressing the racialized and aggressive police practices that often lead to fatal citizen encounters.

    As we plan for how Sociologists for Justice can aid in the cause of racial justice, we urge you to join local solidarity efforts in your community and look forward to you joining us in our next steps as an organization committed to using sociology to advance justice and dignity for all.

    3) A Ferguson Syllabus

    We encourage all concerned about the injustices and inequities made evident by the recent events in Ferguson to join us as we dig deeper into understanding the multiplicity of factors that contribute to the criminalization and marginalization of black and brown communities. The following is a collection of research articles used to inform the arguments in the public statement on the events in Ferguson.

    That, followed by a list of material for the reading of, and where you can submit other studies and books.

    4) A survey

    Thank you for your interest in Sociologists for Justice. This survey is being conducted to help us plan the next phase of our work. The questionnaire contains five questions and should take less than 5 minutes to complete. Your responses will remain confidential and summarized in aggregate form. [note: if the survey is not visible in your browser below, please click here to complete the survey.]

    … And other things, including a nice right-hand sidebar with latest Ferguson news on it. So, just a heads-up on the utility of this website. :)

  492. rq says

    Starbucks quits writing ‘Race Together’ on cups

    Starbucks Corp. baristas will stop writing “Race Together” on cups, but the initiative is far from over, Chief Executive Howard Schultz wrote in an open letter to employees on Sunday.

    The writing on cups was just a “phase of the effort,” Schultz wrote.

    It’s time for Starbucks SBUX, -0.31% to “take stock,” and prepare what’s next, he wrote. The goal was to stimulate conversation and the writing on cups, which was “just the catalyst for a much broader and longer term conversation,” ends Sunday as originally planned, Schultz said.

    The campaign, launched last week, has come under criticism from the public and from Starbucks employees.

    In the letter, Schulz acknowledged that there has been criticism, but wrote that the company “didn’t expect universal praise.”

    Starbucks has several Race Together activities in the weeks and months to come, including plans to expand into urban neighborhoods, more ads about the campaign on Gannett Co. Inc’s GCI, +0.39% USA Today over the next year, and its goal to hire 10,000 unemployed youths in the next few years, he wrote.

    That was fast?

    #blackbrunch is a great entry point to action. You get to practice holding space, directly confronting power & maintaining discipline.

    Cleveland: #BrandonJones mom just showed up for #TamirRice
    #TamirRice ‘s aunt Latonya Goldsby speaks. #BrandonJones
    The people blockading traffic again. #BrandonJones

    The officer who shot Dontre Hamilton had his hearing to be reinstated today. There was a livestream, but it seems to be done now. A couple of comments:
    2 Officers had checked on Dontre twice & determined he was not doing anything wrong. Manney was the 3rd officer to engage him. #DoBetterMKE
    ‘I am not ready to return to duty, but I want to. Being a police officer is who I am.’ -Ex-Officer Manney, who murdered #DontreHamilton
    Please don’t.

  493. rq says

    TJ Maxx pulls ‘hang loose’ shirt from stores, with video.

    Frances Rivera discusses the controversial TJ Maxx t-shirt that featured a noose and the phrase

    Though why they even had the shirts…

    Austin Police tase black man as handcuffed white man runs away. It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious.

    Austin police were so preoccupied with ganging up on and tasing a black man that they allowed a white man in handcuffs to stand up and run away.

    The video, posted Thursday on Youtube, is quickly going viral and being decried as an obvious example of institutionalized racism.

    Austin police told The Grio that they eventually caught the white man.

    But that doesn’t make his escape any less impressionable because he was laying on his side with arms cuffed behind his back when he managed to stand up after a couple of failed attempts, sprinting away in front of dozens of shocked witnesses.

    The six cops surrounding the black man could only look up helplessly as he disappeared in the crowd.

  494. says

    A chance to reduce police killings of the disabled

    Twenty-five years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), people with disabilities are regularly dying at the hands of police officers across the country. In just the last few weeks, four such deaths have made national news: Kristiana Coignard in Texas, Antonio Zambrano-Montes in Washington, Lavall Hall in Florida and Charley Robinet in California. According to the American Psychological Association, some officers spend more time “responding to calls involving mental illnesses than they do investigating burglaries or felony assaults.” Too often, these encounters turn violent. Our best guess is that about 50 percent of killings by police involve psychiatric disability of some sort.

    On March 23, the Supreme Court will have a chance to address this national crisis. The case of Sheehan v. San Francisco offers the justices the chance to clarify how the ADA applies to law enforcement — an important step that could strengthen the broader movement for police reform. This case will determine to what extent police can be held accountable to the best practices of their profession.

    The case

    In August 2008, Teresa Sheehan, a resident of a group home for people with psychiatric disabilities, threatened a social worker with a kitchen knife. The social worker called the police. Two officers arrived and entered Sheehan’s room but retreated when she threatened them as well. They called for backup. Instead of waiting, they re-entered the room. Sheehan came at them with the knife, and they shot her repeatedly. Luckily, she survived. A hung jury resulted in a partial acquittal of assault charges against her.

    The lawsuit focuses on the legality of the second entry into Sheehan’s room. She sued the officers under Title II of the ADA, arguing that by not waiting for backup, the officers did not reasonably accommodate her disability. Furthermore, her attorneys argue that the violation of the ADA exempts the officers from qualified immunity, a doctrine intended to protect police from lawsuits unless it’s clearly established that the officers violated the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure. At issue is not whether the police were wrong to enter the room the second time but whether it’s allowable for Sheehan’s lawyers to argue that they were wrong before a civil jury.

    A federal judge initially dismissed Sheehan’s claim, but the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision, allowing the civil lawsuit to go forward. Now the Supreme Court will hear the case.

    The arguments

    Deputy City Attorney Christine Van Aken argues that the case is very narrow. She agrees that law enforcement must consider the ADA but that there’s a direct threat exemption that makes the officers’ second entry to the room lawful. Police had to enter because Sheehan could have had weapons or hostages or could have escaped via a window or fire escape. None of these things were true, but one legal position is that if an officer might reasonably have been concerned about these possibilities, Sheehan would have no claim.

    People like Teresa Sheehan keep being shot, and far too many are dying. We know how to reduce the rate of such killings, but we need legal reform to convince law enforcement of that on a national level.
    This chain of hypothetical possibilities, though, is not the only way of looking at this case. Here’s something we know for sure: The officers were fully aware that Sheehan had psychiatric disabilities, was in crisis and needed help. Their decision to charge back in without support made the ensuing violence inevitable.

    Furthermore, Ben Nisenbaum, an attorney for Sheehan, denies that she posed any kind of threat after the officers left the room the first time. He raises questions about the decision-making process that led the officers to re-enter the room. Why didn’t they wait for that backup? Shouldn’t the officers have tried to access some of the city’s mental health crisis resources? Shouldn’t the officers have followed the city’s policy on barricaded suspects and waited Sheehan out? These are questions Nisenbaum wants to take to a jury.

  495. rq says

    Memorial just installed for unarmed #JohnCollado at spot he was shot & killed by NYPD. Vigil starting now. 17 Post Av
    9 facts about #JohnCollado, unarmed, shot & killed by NYPD cop who didn’t identify himself as John broke up a fight.

    And then the STL County PD tweets this. “Speaking hate or racism? Please do so without our @Twitter handle. We want no part of it. #STL is better than this.”

    Yesterday, more protest in Ferguson:
    “Stand Up and Fight Back!” #Ferguson March Begins on W. Florissant
    If its Shutting Down in #Ferguson @MissJupiter1957 is streaming it
    “No Justice, No Profit!” Mobil on W. Florissant Shut Down 4 Previous Racist Behavior to Black Customers #Ferguson

  496. rq says

    One more note on Amnesty: @WyzeChef YES. You guys also wouldn’t *believe* the racism from people in the NGO’s/UNICEF programs here in Colombia+LatAmerica #AmnestyM2M

    We had to lift this from @afropunk Facebook page. It had to be done #SAEFraternity RETWEET “to be clear white boys singing abt hanging n*gg*rs got them police protection. black ppl chanting Black Lives Matter got them thrown in jail.”

    The White-Savior Industrial Complex

    Those tweets, though unpremeditated, were intentional in their irony and seriousness. I did not write them to score cheap points, much less to hurt anyone’s feelings. I believed that a certain kind of language is too infrequently seen in our public discourse. I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn’t have a point.

    But there’s a place in the political sphere for direct speech and, in the past few years in the U.S., there has been a chilling effect on a certain kind of direct speech pertaining to rights. The president is wary of being seen as the “angry black man.” People of color, women, and gays — who now have greater access to the centers of influence that ever before — are under pressure to be well-behaved when talking about their struggles. There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe words or deeds as “racially charged” even in those cases when it would be more honest to say “racist”; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse.

    It’s only in the context of this neutered language that my rather tame tweets can be seen as extreme. The interviewer on the radio show I listened to asked Kristof if he had heard of me. “Of course,” he said. She asked him what he made of my criticisms. His answer was considered and genial, but what he said worried me more than an angry outburst would have:

    There has been a real discomfort and backlash among middle-class educated Africans, Ugandans in particular in this case, but people more broadly, about having Africa as they see it defined by a warlord who does particularly brutal things, and about the perception that Americans are going to ride in on a white horse and resolve it. To me though, it seems even more uncomfortable to think that we as white Americans should not intervene in a humanitarian disaster because the victims are of a different skin color.

    Here are some of the “middle-class educated Africans” Kristof, whether he is familiar with all of them and their work or not, chose to take issue with: Ugandan journalist Rosebell Kagumire, who covered the Lord’s Resistance Army in 2005 and made an eloquent video response to Kony 2012; Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani, one of the world’s leading specialists on Uganda and the author of a thorough riposte to the political wrong-headedness of Invisible Children; and Ethiopian-American novelist Dinaw Mengestu, who sought out Joseph Kony, met his lieutenants, and recently wrote a brilliant essay about how Kony 2012 gets the issues wrong. They have a different take on what Kristof calls a “humanitarian disaster,” and this may be because they see the larger disasters behind it: militarization of poorer countries, short-sighted agricultural policies, resource extraction, the propping up of corrupt governments, and the astonishing complexity of long-running violent conflicts over a wide and varied terrain.

    I want to tread carefully here: I do not accuse Kristof of racism nor do I believe he is in any way racist. I have no doubt that he has a good heart. Listening to him on the radio, I began to think we could iron the whole thing out over a couple of beers. But that, precisely, is what worries me. That is what made me compare American sentimentality to a “wounded hippo.” His good heart does not always allow him to think constellationally. He does not connect the dots or see the patterns of power behind the isolated “disasters.” All he sees are hungry mouths, and he, in his own advocacy-by-journalism way, is putting food in those mouths as fast as he can. All he sees is need, and he sees no need to reason out the need for the need.

    But I disagree with the approach taken by Invisible Children in particular, and by the White Savior Industrial Complex in general, because there is much more to doing good work than “making a difference.” There is the principle of first do no harm. There is the idea that those who are being helped ought to be consulted over the matters that concern them. […]

    One song we hear too often is the one in which Africa serves as a backdrop for white fantasies of conquest and heroism. From the colonial project to Out of Africa to The Constant Gardener and Kony 2012, Africa has provided a space onto which white egos can conveniently be projected. It is a liberated space in which the usual rules do not apply: a nobody from America or Europe can go to Africa and become a godlike savior or, at the very least, have his or her emotional needs satisfied. Many have done it under the banner of “making a difference.” To state this obvious and well-attested truth does not make me a racist or a Mau Mau. It does give me away as an “educated middle-class African,” and I plead guilty as charged. (It is also worth noting that there are other educated middle-class Africans who see this matter differently from me. That is what people, educated and otherwise, do: they assess information and sometimes disagree with each other.)

    In any case, Kristof and I are in profound agreement about one thing: there is much happening in many parts of the African continent that is not as it ought to be. I have been fortunate in life, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t seen or experienced African poverty first-hand. I grew up in a land of military coups and economically devastating, IMF-imposed “structural adjustment” programs. The genuine hurt of Africa is no fiction.

    And we also agree on something else: that there is an internal ethical urge that demands that each of us serve justice as much as he or she can. But beyond the immediate attention that he rightly pays hungry mouths, child soldiers, or raped civilians, there are more complex and more widespread problems. There are serious problems of governance, of infrastructure, of democracy, and of law and order. These problems are neither simple in themselves nor are they reducible to slogans. Such problems are both intricate and intensely local.

    How, for example, could a well-meaning American “help” a place like Uganda today? It begins, I believe, with some humility with regards to the people in those places. It begins with some respect for the agency of the people of Uganda in their own lives. A great deal of work had been done, and continues to be done, by Ugandans to improve their own country, and ignorant comments (I’ve seen many) about how “we have to save them because they can’t save themselves” can’t change that fact. […]

    Let us begin our activism right here: with the money-driven villainy at the heart of American foreign policy. To do this would be to give up the illusion that the sentimental need to “make a difference” trumps all other considerations. What innocent heroes don’t always understand is that they play a useful role for people who have much more cynical motives. The White Savior Industrial Complex is a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system built on pillage. We can participate in the economic destruction of Haiti over long years, but when the earthquake strikes it feels good to send $10 each to the rescue fund. I have no opposition, in principle, to such donations (I frequently make them myself), but we must do such things only with awareness of what else is involved. If we are going to interfere in the lives of others, a little due diligence is a minimum requirement.

    Success for Kony 2012 would mean increased militarization of the anti-democratic Yoweri Museveni government, which has been in power in Uganda since 1986 and has played a major role in the world’s deadliest ongoing conflict, the war in the Congo. But those whom privilege allows to deny constellational thinking would enjoy ignoring this fact. There are other troubling connections, not least of them being that Museveni appears to be a U.S. proxy in its shadowy battles against militants in Sudan and, especially, in Somalia. Who sanctions these conflicts? Under whose authority and oversight are they conducted? Who is being killed and why?

    All of this takes us rather far afield from fresh-faced young Americans using the power of YouTube, Facebook, and pure enthusiasm to change the world. A singer may be innocent; never the song.

    It’s gonna be a bestseller! Justice Department’s Ferguson report to be published by New Press. Actually, I think that’s a great idea, to make it a more easily-accessible resource, esp. for academics and scholars and for ordinary people.

    New Press will publish the U.S. Department of Justice’s “Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department” and bring it to bookstores in July. The report, the result of a six-month DOJ investigation, found rampant injustice in the Missouri town where police shot and killed unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown.

    Introducing the report when it was issued online in March, U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder described Ferguson as: “A community where local authorities consistently approached law enforcement not as a means for protecting public safety, but as a way to generate revenue. A community where both policing and municipal court practices were found to disproportionately harm African American residents. A community where this harm frequently appears to stem, at least in part, from racial bias — both implicit and explicit. And a community where all of these conditions, unlawful practices and constitutional violations have not only severely undermined the public trust, eroded police legitimacy and made local residents less safe — but created an intensely charged atmosphere where people feel under assault and under siege by those charged to serve and protect them.”

    The New Press edition of the report will include a substantial introduction by Theodore M. Shaw, a former president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund who is currently a law professor and director of the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina School of Law at Chapel Hill.

    Of course, as a government document, the report is free, but there is a tradition for publishing such reports in book form. Recently, independent Melville House published “The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture” as a 576-page, $16.95 paperback and e-book. The Pentagon Papers, a report on Vietnam commissioned by then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post, were controversially published, in part, in both papers in 1971, and then appeared multiple times in paperback.

    Ellen Adler, New Press’ publisher, said in a statement that the Ferguson report “is a crucial document that deserves the widest possible readership.”

    Just please price it reasonably. :P

  497. rq says

    Starbucks Announces End Of Program Encouraging Baristas To Discuss Race

    Less than a week after announcing an initiative to deal with race relations in the United States, Schultz ended the effort to write “Race Together” on cups, which had been met with skepticism and mockery across multiple social media platforms.

    “While there has been criticism of the initiative — and I know this hasn’t been easy for any of you — let me assure you that we didn’t expect universal praise,” Schultz wrote in a statement released Sunday night.

    BuzzFeed News interviewed Schultz last week about the initiative to bring racial discussions to coffee shops as well as a new plan focused on hiring African American and Latino employees.

    Schultz wrote Sunday that having baristas write messages on customers’ cups was “always just the catalyst for a much broader and longer-term conversation” and that part “will be completed as originally planned today, March 22.”

    This end date had not been publicly mentioned before Sunday’s announcement.

    Although the program to write “Race Together” on cups will now stop, other parts of the initiative, including open forum discussions and educational sections distributed in USA Today newspapers, will continue. The plan to hire 10,000 young people will also still move forward.

    Starbucks spokeswoman Laurel Harper told the New York Times that the “Race Together” messages were not stopped because of the response: “That is not true at all.”

    Harper added, “We know that we don’t have all the solutions and the answers, but for us, doing nothing makes us part of the problem.”

    This is not Starbucks’ first attempt at tackling political and social justice issues. Schultz previously asked baristas to write “Come Together” on cups to encourage politicians to avoid a fiscal crisis. He’s also pledged to hire 10,000 veterans over a five-year plan.

    Another on the same: Starbucks ends ‘Race Together’ coffee cup campaign with push for forums and new stores.

    #RaceTogether has a website, here: Race Together. Has videos, opinions and articles, worth an explore, at least!

    Overlapping judges, prosecutors weave tangled web in St. Louis County municipal courts

    Seventy-nine municipal courts give the small towns and cities of St. Louis County significant autonomy in judging minor infractions as such speeding tickets, tall weeds or zoning violations. The judges and prosecutors work part time — in smaller jurisdictions, just two or three times a month for a few hundred dollars per each municipal court session.

    As a result, those judges and prosecutors often work for more than one town; and a prosecutor in one place may be a judge in another. The system, as a whole, starts to become a web of overlapping hires.

    In its recent report, the U.S. Department of Justice concluded that Ferguson used its municipal court abusively. It wrote the court handled cases “not with the primary goal of administering justice or protecting the rights of the accused, but of maximizing revenue. The impact that revenue concerns have on court operations undermines the court’s role as a fair and impartial judicial body.” Soon afterward, Ronald Brockmeyer resigned as the Ferguson municipal judge, and stepped down as prosecutor or judge in Breckenridge Hills, Dellwood, Florissant and Vinita Park.

    A review of municipal court data compiled by St. Louis Public Radio shows that one person holding various roles throughout St. Louis County is not unusual. While 72 attorneys hold just one position, 13 individuals have positions in three or more municipalities. Twenty hold two.

    Among them, nine attorneys work as a judge in one municipality and a prosecutor in another. […]

    Another overlap occurs among the firms where the attorneys work. Three St. Louis-area firms provide prosecutors or judges for more than a quarter of the county’s municipal courts, from Bel-Nor to Valley Park.

    One firm appears to specialize in judging: Three attorneys from Bruntrager & Billings, P.C. preside over courts in five municipalities: Des Peres, Fenton, Lakeshire, Overland and Winchester.

    The largest of the three firms, Curtis, Heinz, Garrett & O’Keefe, employs a group of lawyers who work as prosecutors in a dozen municipal courts, including Ferguson. One attorney also serves as a judge in Ladue.

    The company’s president, Carl Lumley, said the firm has specialized in municipal law for decades and also employs many city attorneys for St. Louis county municipalities. (The data compiled did not include city attorneys.)

    “There’s a team, so there’s always someone available to handle things,” Lumley said. Often, the setup allows for younger attorneys to work under the supervision of their peers.

    “As folks interview for the jobs, that experience and credibility goes a long way. I think they are careful to recuse themselves (step away from a case if there’s a perceived conflict of interest) when they should,” Lumley said.

    Combined, the courts at which Curtis, Heinz, Garrett & O’Keefe serve as prosecutors assessed $12.1 million in fines and fees from residents in 2013, according to records compiled by Better Together STL. Among those 12 courts, the percentage of the city’s general revenue coming from fines and fees varied dramatically, from 3.4 percent in tiny Lakeshire (population 1,432) to 41 percent in Normandy (population 4,987), where more than a third of the residents live in poverty. […]

    Donnell Smith, a private attorney whose firm specializes in criminal defense and civil lawsuits, serves as a judge in two municipalities and a prosecutor in two more. He rejects the idea that serving multiple roles causes a conflict of interest and says he works in the municipal court system because he enjoys interacting with residents.

    “I think it’s good that any court is being reviewed, because every system can use improvement. I just want the improvement or focus to be directed to an actual wrong or something that’s unfair that’s being done,” Smith said.

    As a judge in Dellwood, which borders Ferguson, Smith said he frequently allows defendants who cannot pay their fines to perform community service.

    “We do not lock people up because they do not have an ability to pay,” Smith said.

    A bill introduced by Missouri Rep. Courtney Curtis, D-Berkeley, would prohibit individuals from serving simultaneously as municipal prosecutor, municipal judge, prosecuting attorney, circuit attorney, city attorney or criminal defense attorney. As of March 20, the bill had not been scheduled for a hearing.

    Court connections
    Of the 81 St. Louis County municipalities we collected information from, all but 10 had at least one connection to another municipality’s court system. We defined a connection as sharing a judge or prosecutor (including situations when a prosecutor or judge in one municipality works in the other role for another municipality), or having a judge or prosecutor who works for the same law firm as a judge or prosecutor in another municipality.

    Touch the colored blocks in the grid below to see the connections. You can also change the ordering using the dropdown to more easily find a municipality.

    Yeah, all of these connections can be explained away. :P Also, the chart showing all the connections is rather nice. In a spooky, tentacled way.

    A tenured professor said to lecture hall “I hope the black students don’t decide to loot the campus center after the die-in.” #NotJustUVA

  498. Pteryxx says

    John Oliver spent his most recent show taking apart cities that fleece the poor through revolving fines: (youtube link) (Rawstory summary)

    “Let’s recap,” Oliver said. “If you get a ticket and you can’t pay it, you may get additional fines, lose your license, and eventually your job. And if you’re thinking ‘Is there any way this situation can be made worse?’ Relax, there is.”

    He then proceeded to detail how municipalities have turned their fine collections over to private probation companies who hit ticket holders with even more fees and charges, including one man who stole a $2 can of beer, who was charged $350 per month to wear a tracking device, making it even harder to pay off his fine.

    Eventually that led to the man being jailed multiple times at cost to taxpayers of over $3,500.

    “Just think about that. A $2 can of beer caused a $275 fine which the city spent over $3,000 to try and enforce,” Oliver exclaimed. “But you know what, it’s like they say, ‘You’ve got to spend money to make money to be able to afford to jail people to lose money.’ ”

  499. says

    http://thegrio.com/2015/03/21/white-parents-demand-apology-for-schools-black-history-month-event/

    whiteamericans.txt

    “Everywhere that we looked were students, high school students, wearing shirts that said ‘Black Lives Matter, I Can’t Breathe,” said Rebecca. “As I was flipping through my program, it had ‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.”

    Charles wanted to yank his daughter from the auditorium immediately, but his wife thought it best to at least let her stay long enough to sing with her school’s choir – but then things (in her mind) went from bad to even worse.

  500. Pteryxx says

    Update on the survivors of torture by John Burge and Chicago police: BoingBoing

    After languishing in City Hall for over a year, an ordinance demanding reparations for survivors is finally getting a hearing. Chicago’s Finance Committee will discuss the Torture Reparations Ordinance on April 14, 2015 at 10 a.m.

    From 1972-1991 over 100 African-American men and women were tortured into giving false confessions under the reign of police commander Jon Burge. Some spent decades in prison for crimes they didn’t commit and few have received any monetary assistance from the government. […]

    Those who want to stand in solidarity with the cause on social media should use the hashtag #RahmRepNow.

    Background in a BB article linked earlier: Victims of police torture fight for reparations

    While it might sound like a story from Homan Square, Chicago’s police “black site” recently unearthed by The Guardian, Clement’s arrest took place over 30 years ago. On June 25, 1981, he joined the ranks of more than 100 black men and women who were tortured by police commander Jon Burge or his “midnight crew” of detectives on Chicago’s South Side from 1972-1991. Though the Homan Square reveal shocked the country, many local activists were unsurprised to hear that Chicago’s old police torture tactics had found a new home.

    […]

    The reparations ordinance is the brainchild of Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, an organization that aims to honor and seek justice for police torture survivors. Officially released in 2013, the ordinance has languished in front of Chicago’s Finance Committee for over a year.

    While it does seek financial reparations for survivors, the ordinance’s goals are also wide-reaching and community-based. For instance, CTJM demands a psychological counseling center on the South Side; free enrollment at City Colleges for survivors and their families; and public memorials to honor survivors and their struggle. (Memorial proposals can be submitted here.) The ordinance combines activism, history, and art while making very practical demands for justice—like evidentiary hearings for all torture survivors who remain behind bars.

    Everything about the ordinance is purposeful—even its $20 million price tag reflects the more than $20 million of taxpayers’ funds the City of Chicago used to defend Burge. (By some counts, that number is closer to $100 million).