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

  1. Pteryxx says

    A discussion about the 2014 book Mass Incarceration On Trial by Jonathan Simon. Newsweek link (originally from Reason dot com): The Unconstitutional Horrors of Prison Overcrowding

    Imagine a society where convicts were sentenced to death by untreated renal failure or denial of chemotherapy. Modern Americans would surely consider such a place barbaric and cruel.

    Yet in the 1990s and 2000s, California essentially meted out such punishments, knowingly shoveling unprecedented numbers of convicts into overcrowded, under-equipped prisons to serve long, hopeless sentences.

    In 2006, “a preventable or possibly preventable death occurred” somewhere in California’s prison system “once every five to six days,” the U.S. Supreme Court observed in the 2011 case of Brown v. Plata. It’s hard to find medical staff even for functional prisons; vacancies in the California system ranged from 20 percent for doctors to 44 percent for X-ray technicians.

    But an excess of inmates, more than a lack of doctors, caused the state’s prison health care crisis. Built to house roughly 80,000 people, California’s prisons were stuffed with twice that many residents, prompting Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to declare a state of emergency.

    With every cell full, prison officials had packed gymnasiums with double and triple bunks. In one such makeshift dormitory, a prisoner was beaten to death. No one on the prison staff noticed for several hours.

    California conceded that such conditions violated the Eighth Amendment, but the state fought long and hard with prisoners’ rights lawyers over how to remedy the violations. In Plata, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower federal court order requiring California to reduce prison overcrowding to 137.5 percent of capacity over the next two years. (In subsequent litigation, the deadline was extended to 2016.)

    […]

    Those photographs, and the underlying facts, didn’t directly implicate the prisons of any other state. Still, Simon rejects the notion that Plata was a one-off, “a remarkable but unique judicial intervention—the Bush v. Gore of prison jurisprudence.” Instead, precisely because of California’s outsize place in the annals of recent prison history, Simon reads Plata expansively, as “the legal basis for nationwide dismantling of mass incarceration.”

    Simon agrees with everyone involved in Plata that California’s prisons amounted by 2011 to a systematic Eighth Amendment violation. But he goes one step further: The California example proves, he argues, that imprisoning massive numbers of people fundamentally cannot comport with the Eighth Amendment.

  2. rq says

    From Tashiliciously Shirked‘s link, above:

    After the assembly, Rebecca and Charles’ daughter asked why cops shoot “good people”— a conversation that Charles just wasn’t ready to have. The parents are outraged that they were put into a position to speak to their child about racism and are now seeking an apology.

    So basically, because the parents had issues communicating with their child, everyone else is at fault. The poor daughter, I hope she gets some answers from someone, and grows up far less close-minded than her parents.

  5. Pteryxx says

    I guess so – I would’ve picked a better topic if I knew that post would end up at #1, oops.

    Post #500 of the previous page: (link)

    Start of the previous page 1: (link)

    and my transcript and image descriptions of Ronald Wimberley’s comic essay “Lighten Up” surfaced at #489 here: (link)

  6. rq says

    Variety of stuff.
    Category Entertainment up first, but really it’ll be a mix of all the things.

    Fact Matters: Why Does The Media Insist On Calling Suge Knight A Rapper?! Suge Knight is on trial for mowing down several people with his car, and he has gone so far as to have himself declared blind to escape consequences. Anyway, not the point:

    Media Insists On Calling Suge Knight A Rapper

    Suge Knight has never spit a single bar on any song ever. He’s not a rapper. He’s a mogul. A Businessman. And whether you think he’s a good or just businessman or a thief and murderer, the fact remains that Suge Knight is a mogul. Not a rapper.

    Yet every time he’s been mentioned since allegedly murdering someone, he’s been called a rapper. But…why?

    What compels the media to insist that Suge has spit bars to achieve his fame? Pure laziness probably plays a part. But it probably has something to do with the desire to pain rap and rappers as people who commit murders and act insane in court. There isn’t a distinction between a business person in the rap field and a rapper – probably because a person of color in the rap diaspora solely known for business practices is unheard of to them. I bet if Steve Stoute or Dame Dash got arrested for knifing someone up, they’d get called rappers too.

    For example, remember when Chris Brown was called a rapper?

    Exactly.

    It’d be great if the media stopped placing their own racist expectations on Blackness.

    Please and thank you.

    So, again: SUGE KNIGHT IS NOT A RAPPER. So stop it.

    That’s the point.

    Snoop Dogg Developing HBO Drama About 1980s Los Angeles

    He just appeared on the season final of “Empire,” so it’s only fitting that Snoop Dogg is slowly building a TV empire of his own.

    The rapper announced Friday in his keynote speech at SXSW that he will exec produce a drama about 1980s Los Angeles with director Allen Hughes (“The Book of Eli”) and writer Rodney Barnes (“The Boondocks”).

    The show will center around a family living in inner-city L.A. and will explore the effects of Reagan-era social policies on the area. Snoop Dogg grew up in Long Beach during that era.

    “HBO is the No. 1 network in the world as far as developing and having these types of shows come to life,” he said during his SXSW Q&A with longtime manager Ted Chung. “This is a dream come true to be able to tell a story that’s going to be told the right way on the right network.”

    The musician’s five-part documentary series “Snoop & Son: A Dad’s Dream” recently aired on ESPN. The show followed Snoop Dogg and his football star son, Cordell Broadus, as he prepared to start a college football career.

    I love the picture used in the article – remind me again, though, how many main actors of colour with wealth and power can be found in Game of Thrones?

    This is a touch old, a couple of days, but the bar outside of which Martese Johnson was so brutally arrested released a statement, which is here: Trinity Irish Pub Releases Statement on Wednesday’s Incident

    STATEMENT FROM MANAGEMENT OF TRINITY IRISH PUB – MARTESE JOHNSON INCIDENT

    The management of Trinity Irish Pub located at 1505 University Avenue on UVA’s Corner wish to issue this Press Release to clarify the events of the morning of March 18, 2015 with respect to the Martese Johnson incident, which resulted in his assault and arrest by three Alcohol Beverage Control special agents.

    First, Trinity is restaurant and Irish pub which has been serving the UVA community for 7 1/2 years. Trinity is a place of public accommodation. Trinity does not nor has it ever discriminated on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin which is prohibited by Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Trinity currently employs about 130 individuals of all ages, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and color. Employees and our guests are treated with the utmost respect, not because its required by law but because it’s the way to run a successful establishment.

    Because it serves alcohol to its patrons, Trinity is licensed and regulated by Virginia’s Alcohol Beverage Control Board. In a college town, ensuring that underage patrons are not served alcohol is a priority. The management of Trinity have found it best to enact a strict 21 and over policy after 10pm during busy evenings for the establishment, generally Tuesday through Saturday evenings. Trinity believes this notably limits the possibility of underage students attempting to gain access to the restaurant. A 10pm timeframe is fair because it allows underage students to still dine at our restaurant for a late dinner. At 10pm, Trinity switches over to our late night food menu. Once 10pm comes, under no circumstances do we allow anyone under the age of 21 to enter the establishment. However, there are special circumstances, such as parties renting out the restaurant, when Trinity will allow underage patrons. This rule is communicated to bouncers on a repetitive basis. At 10pm, Trinity also locks up its patio furniture to assemble a barrier to form a line to the door. This gives us the best way to control the line, keep patrons safe, and most importantly, prevent underage students from sneaking in. Once 10pm comes, Trinity makes sure that each and every single person who wishes to enter the restaurant is ID’d.

    Three bouncers are typically positioned at the door. Two bouncers constantly check ID’s while the third controls the exit and monitors the number of patrons to ensure fire code safety. If any questions arise about ID’s, the bouncers are instructed to ask one another first and if they are still unsure, a manager will assist and solve the issue. Trinity believes this structured policy enables the restaurant to create a safe environment and administer to all laws to the state of Virginia.

    Prior to Tuesday evening, the management of Trinity were told by ABC agents that their establishment would be watched over closely on St. Patrick’s Day because “they were Irish.” In order to ensure that they were in compliance with ABC regulations, Mr. Kevin Badke, Managing Owner of Trinity Irish Pub, was on the restaurant premises and at the front door for a good part of the evening. On or about 12:15am, he spoke with Fire Marshall officials as well as ABC agents who were positioned outside the restaurant and closer to the street on University Way.

    Sometime shortly thereafter, Martese Johnson, who had been in the line described, stepped up to Mr. Badke and handed him his ID. Mr. Badke did not look at the birthdate or the photo, but he did note that the ID was from Illinois. Mr. Badke is from Illinois. Mr. Badke asked Mr. Johnson to provide the zip code on the ID. According to Mr. Badke, this is a test he frequently uses to determine if a patron is using a fake ID. If the ID doesn’t belong to them, they are not familiar with some of the details on the ID. Mr. Johnson provided the wrong zip code, although it was close to the one on the license. Mr. Badke immediately responded that he could not accept it. Mr. Johnson, probably realizing the reason for the error, stated that he had moved. At this point, Mr. Badke and Mr. Johnson had a brief conversation because Mr. Badke is from the south side of Chicago, where Mr. Johnson indicated he was from. In Mr. Badke’s opinion, Mr. Johnson did not appear to be intoxicated in the least. Despite the conversation, which was cordial and respectful, Mr. Badke reiterated that he could not permit him to enter. He handed Mr. Johnson his ID back and Mr. Johnson began walking in a north westerly direction up University Avenue. A few moments later, Mr. Badke heard a commotion, turned, and saw Mr. Johnson on the ground about 30 feet further up on University Avenue with ABC agents detaining him.

    There have been reported comments that management of Trinity were belligerent towards Mr. Johnson or that Mr. Johnson was belligerent towards management. 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.

    There have been reports that Trinity engages or engaged, in this incident, in racial profiling in not permitting Mr. Johnson to enter. The rationale for allowing patrons to enter – being familiar with the zip code on their own license – is color, gender, race, and ethnicity-blind.

    Comments made by a previous employee by the name of Dante DeVito that Trinity instructs its management to scrutinize persons of color for entry, are patently false. Mr. DeVito was employed by Trinity for six months and was terminated by management for cause. His comments are those of a disgruntled former employee and are not accurate.

    Trinity has been interviewed by and is cooperating with the State Police who indicated that they are investigating the use of excessive force by the ABC officials who arrested Mr. Johnson.

    A long statement, but detailed. And presents an account of the incident pretty much the polar opposite of the police report.

    Good for her, but did she really have to?
    Mo’ne Davis Forgives Baseball Player Over Insult Asks College to Reinstate Him

    Mo’ne Davis continues to show why she’s the most mature 13-year-old alive — we’ve just learned she reached out to the president of Bloomsburg University and asked him to reinstate the baseball player who called her a bad name on Twitter.

    TMZ Sports spoke with a rep for Bloomsburg who tells us … President David L. Soltz received an email from Davis and her coach in which they ask that Joey Casselberry’s dismissal from the team be reconsidered.

    Casselberry was booted from the squad this weekend after he posted a tweet saying, “Disney is making a movie about Mo’ne Davis? WHAT A JOKE. That s*** got rocked by Nevada.”

    The team said Casselberry violated the athletic department’s social media policy — and possibly the school’s code of conduct.

    While Bloomsburg says they respect Davis’ opinion and praise her for being incredibly mature about the situation — the school will NOT reinstate the baseball player … saying, “Right now we’re standing firm.”

    For his part, Casselberry apologized for the tweet and says he’s a huge Mo’ne Davis fan.

    I hope the school does not reinstate him. Does not.
    And I’m with @JamilahLemieux re: Mo’Ne Davis. Black folk, especially black women, are always expected to forgive white male trauma.

  7. rq says

    Video: Ferguson demonstrators throw bottles at police

    WARNING: THIS VIDEO CONTAINS LANGUAGE THAT SOME VIEWERS MAY FIND OFFENSIVE

    FERGUSON, MO (KTVI) – Demonstrators met in Ferguson for a march against police brutality on Sunday. YouTube user Rose Tullis posted video of the protesters outside a fast food restaurant.

    A Ferguson police officer can be seen standing outside the eating establishment. Protesters verbally harass him and then start throwing water bottles at him. He leaves the area while a woman sings, “We ain’t scared of the po-po; they tried to kill us on the low-low.”

    The crowd disperses after the incident.

    NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio Offers Landlords $1,000 For Housing Homeless Families

    In efforts to reduce homelessness in New York City, Mayor Bill De Blasio is offering New York landlords a cash incentive to house the homeless in their properties. Those interested in doing so will be given a $1,000 signing bonus is addition to the city funds that will pay for the homeless families’ rent. Some New York City residents are not impressed.

    Here’s the Madame Noire link: NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio Offers Landlords $1,000 For Housing Homeless Families

    The program is operated through New York City’s new Living In Communities Rental Assistance Program, which is trying to get homeless families out of the shelter system, which is being stretched to its limits. For homeless families to qualify in this program, they must have full-time jobs but cannot afford the costs of moving and rent. Others in the program must also be escaping from domestic violence or have special needs that leave them at a financial disadvantage.

    The homeless families are expected to contribute 30 percent of their income to their rent in this program and the amount of assistance depends on the family size. For example, a family of two will receive $1,268 in assistance. That figure increases depending on the family size.

    Many are skeptical about this program because of the stigma that surrounds homeless people.

    The library in Ferguson offered a place for children and adults to go in the summer during the worst of the protests. Scott Bonner awarded the Lemony Snicket Prize for Noble Librarians Faced with Adversity.

    Scott Bonner, director of the Ferguson Public Library in Missouri, has been selected as the recipient of the second annual Lemony Snicket Prize for Noble Librarians Faced with Adversity. Daniel Handler, also known as Lemony Snicket, will co-present Bonner with the prize with National Book Award-winning author Jacqueline Woodson on Sunday, June 28 during the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference & Exhibition in San Francisco. Bonner will receive a cash prize and an object from Handler’s private collection.

    On August 9, 2014, the shooting of unarmed teenager Mike Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri set off a string of protests, demonstrations, riots, civil unrest, arson and violence. But in the middle of this climate of fear—where local disruptions caused businesses to board up their windows and delayed the start of the school year for the 12,000 youth in the Ferguson-Florissant School District— the Ferguson Public Library remained open and engaged, thanks to Bonner and the absolutely vital and tireless work of every member of his staff . […]

    When the governor submitted an economic injury disaster declaration in the area, Bonner brought the Small Business Administration into the library to make low-interest loans and aid available to local Ferguson businesses. And when the library began receiving too many patrons and running too many programs to house, Bonner secured space at the church next door and kept on going. While buildings were being burnt down, he was building the community of Ferguson.

    The Lemony Snicket Prize for Noble Librarians Faced with Adversity was established in 2014 by the American Library Association in partnership with Daniel Handler. The prize, which is co-administered by ALA’s Governance Office and the Office for Intellectual Freedom, annually recognizes and honors a librarian who has faced adversity with integrity and dignity intact. The prize is $10,000, a certificate and an odd, symbolic object. Bonner will be joining last year’s prize winner, Laurence Copel, who was honored for her work in the Lower Ninth Ward Street Library of New Orleans.

    Well, congratulations!!!

    Ferguson shooting suspect confessed on hidden camera, warrant reveals

    A confidential informant wearing a hidden video camera recorded accused gunman Jeffrey L. Williams admitting that he fired the shots that seriously wounded two police officers during a demonstration in Ferguson, Mo., according to search warrants obtained by Yahoo News.

    Williams was arrested March 15 and charged with two counts of first-degree assault, one count of firing a weapon from a vehicle and three counts of armed criminal action. An officer from the St. Louis County Police Department was struck in the shoulder. A member of the nearby Webster Groves Police Department was hit below his right eye. Both are now recovering at home.

    At a news conference announcing the arrest, St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch said that Williams’ confession was key to bringing the charges but declined to give details of how the admission was obtained.

    Jerryl T. Christmas, Williams’ attorney, told Yahoo News last week that his client said “he never fired a weapon” and was recanting his confession. Christmas claimed that officers pistol-whipped Williams during the arrest, allegations the St. Louis County Police called false.

    So it wasn’t an official confession?

    Battered Ferguson Taps Into Crowdfunding

    The 69-year-old Ms. Morris initially struggled to find funds to rebuild her Fashions R Boutique. But a college student from a nearby city telephoned her within days after the fire to talk about the possibility of her using social networking to raise money, a process known as crowdfunding.

    The student called twice more before Ms. Morris agreed to the plan. Then, he and two friends set up a profile page on the crowdfunding website GoFundMe, to eventually raise more than $20,000 to help reconstruct her store.

    At least 26 Ferguson area businesses claiming damage from the unrest that followed last year’s fatal police shooting here of an unarmed black teenager have raised a combined $447,198 on GoFundMe. The average amount raised on the San Diego-based service by businesses’ campaigns related to the unrest was about $17,000, according to tallies posted online.

    By comparison, according to data reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, 69 small businesses in Ferguson and other affected communities have received an average $9,525 apiece in no-interest loans or grants from the Small Business Relief Program, a public-private partnership. The fund, which raised $1 million from private-sector and government sources, has provided a total of $657,235 in aid to area businesses, many of which need working capital.

    Using GoFundMe—which takes a 5% cut of donations and charges a processing fee of about 3%—shows how cash-strapped small businesses are turning to crowdfunding in times of need. The cash raised via crowdfunding has been just a fraction of what most businesses need to rebuild, but it has helped people like Ms. Morris, who is trying to plug the inevitable gaps that remain, even with insurance.

    Another popular crowdfunding site, Kickstarter, says broadly that it is aimed at raising funds for creative projects, from “experiences” to “art” but it prohibits projects that are raising money for charity or for financial incentives, like equity, according to its website.[…]

    Business owners and entrepreneurs nationwide raised $3 million through 23,600 GoFundMe campaigns last year, more than double the number in 2013,according to the company. More broadly, “business and entrepreneurship” accounted for roughly 41% of the more than in $10 billion funds raised via crowdfunding platforms in 2014, according to estimates by Massolution, a division of Los Angeles-based research and advisory firm Crowdsourcing LLC.

    Yet a gas station in nearby Dellwood raised less than 2% of the $75,000 it sought on GoFundMe, and Cakes by Nette, a bakery, raised $805, or 8%, of the $10,000 it sought, according to the site.

    Charles Davis, owner of the Ferguson Burger Bar & More began a GoFundMe account in November to help provide Christmas baskets for needy families, including a whole turkey and the pan to cook it in. Extra money would have gone to help his business, which suffered a number of days of forced closure during protests. But the little more than $4,000 they raised was just enough to buy 150 baskets.

    “If there had been excess, we would have used it to help with our loss,” said the entrepreneur, who added that his business threw away thousands of dollars in perishable food during the upheaval. “It is what it is,” he said with disappointment.

    “It could have been, or should have been, a good resource,” James Knowles, Ferguson’s mayor, said of crowdfunding. Not everyone took full advantage of the opportunity, he said, and the businesses that benefited the most were those who found a champion, like the college students who helped Ms. Morris. Some didn’t get that boost.

    Many local business owners took out loans to start their companies, and now feel they can’t afford to take on additional debt, even in the form of no-interest loans. So, Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander started a GoFundMe campaign with the Regional Business Council and North County Inc., aimed at businesses in Ferguson and adjacent Dellwood and Jennings that were burglarized or damaged since riots began in August 2014.

    As of Sunday, $40,916 has been raised on GoFundMe, according to the campaign’s page. Mr. Kander’s spokeswoman said a total of $118,569 has been raised, including offline donations. A committee of community leaders is overseeing the distribution of funds, she said.

    “No tax dollars are going to be used in this initiative at all,” Mr. Kander said in a video posted on the page for the fund. “It’s solely money that’s going to be raised from the St. Louis community and hopefully, from around the country. That’s where you come in.”

    Good luck to them!

  8. rq says

    Upcoming Ferguson town hall with the DOJ is open to public but banning all media ;
    I’m at #BeyondFerguson panel discussion. Already filling up despite a half hour until it begins. Good lineup includes @MsPackyetti + @deray.
    “Community” graffiti next to a traffic tickets and felonies office. Yes I’m in #Ferguson


    #BlackUVADemands CALL TO ACTION

    Solidarity Week
    March 23 – March 29

    Organize your campus into action

    CLICK HERE to download full set of #NotJustUVA Social Media images

    CLICK HERE to access editable flyer for your school/organization

    In support of Martese Johnson, and people using the #NotJustUVA hashtag on twitter.

    President Obama Weighs In On Racist Fraternity Chant “On Any Given Day Somebody Is Doing Something Stupid”

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    President Obama Weighs In On Racist Fraternity Chant “On Any Given Day Somebody Is Doing Something Stupid”
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    10 hours ago – By Bossip Staff Categories: Bolitics, News, Quote of The Day

    President Obama Says We Should Measure Progress By The Public’s Reaction To Stupidity

    President Barack Obama has weighed in on the controversy over SAE’s racist rant which was caught on tape. While he deems the foul clip as an act of stupidity, he says the more important matter is how the public rallied together in outrage.

    According to AOL reports:

    ​President Barack Obama shared his reactions to the video of University of Oklahoma fraternity brothers uttering a violent and racially-charged chant in an exclusive interview with Sam Stein of the Huffington Post released on Saturday.

    “Look, at any given point on any given day, somebody is doing something stupid out there,” Obama said when asked for his reaction to the viral clip. “In the age of the Internet, it’s going to attract attention. I don’t think this is the first time that somebody at a fraternity has done something stupid, racist, sexist. It won’t be the last.”

    The discovery of the video spurred the school’s decision to kick the fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, off campus. School President David Boren ultimately decided to expel two students over the incident too, a move the president praised.

    “What was heartening was the quick response from President Boren, somebody who I know well and I know who has great integrity,” he said.

    Two weeks after he marked the 50th anniversary of the civil rights marches at Selma with a speech in which he spoke about the advances that have been made in the fight for racial equality, Obama reflected on how a moment like the SAE chant fits into our country’s evolution.

    “The way we have to measure progress here is not, is there ever going to be an incident of racism in the country. It’s how does the majority of our country respond?” he said. “And on that front, there’s no doubt that the overwhelming number of students at the University of Oklahoma, and around the country, think that kind of behavior is deplorable and don’t accept it.
    “Frankly, 30 years ago or 40 years ago, there might have been a different reaction and more tolerance for that kind of racist chant,” he added.

    Do you think he’s right to celebrate our progress or do you think more needs to be done before we can applaud ourselves for reacting “correctly” to ignorance?

    Interlude: Space. I just love that it is a black woman speaking for NASA here. Vanessa Wyche

    “Absolutely amazing” is how I would describe my career at NASA. Having the ability to have a profession in one’s area of interest is rewarding, but being able to do that and work at NASA—well, that’s pretty awesome. I began my NASA career at Johnson Space Center (JSC) as a project engineer assisting researchers from universities with developing hardware to conduct biomedical experiments on space shuttle astronauts. How cool is that! As a young girl fascinated by science and how the human body works, I never could have imagined I would have this opportunity—this is a dream come true.

    Growing up, I liked to figure out how things worked. I opened and tinkered with my toys and got pretty good at fixing things. Until one morning when I attempted, unsupervised and unauthorized, to fix my grandmother’s TV set and literally received the shock of my life—and a major scolding as well. However, instead of being deterred, my curiosity was piqued. Unfortunately, there weren’t resources in my community for youth who were interested in engineering. My elementary and middle schools did not even have science laboratories.

    My parents were both Educators who exposed their children to a variety of activities (sports, music, dance, scouting, religion). Although we did not have science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)-related camps, they supported whatever educational passions we pursued. One Christmas they gave my brother a chemistry set and we did experiments in the backyard. This was the beginning of two future engineers (my brother is a chemical engineer).

    As a child, I was not very familiar with NASA. While I was in college studying to be an engineer, I learned one of the Challenger astronauts, Dr. Ronald McNair, was from a town in South Carolina only 35 miles from my hometown. Dr. McNair’s achievements marked an awareness of the endless possibilities available to me, including working at NASA. I was inspired to pursue my dream of obtaining a Master of Science in Bioengineering. My first job was working for the Food and Drug Administration as a medical device evaluator, determining the effectiveness and safety of hardware and systems used in diagnostics, treatment and prevention of diseases. Although the work was rewarding, I was elated when I had the opportunity to transfer and work at NASA.

    My career began as a Project Engineer in the Space Life Sciences Directorate developing biomedical hardware to fly on the Space Shuttle. That progressed to Project Manager for suites of hardware systems for medical and microgravity experiments. This led to responsible positions in human spaceflight systems engineering and operations, including Flight Manager for several missions in the Space Shuttle Program, and Director of Operations and Test Integration in the Constellation Program. Previously, I served as Acting Director of JSC’s Human Exploration Development Support until my recent assignment as Assistant to the Center Director supporting tactical operations and strategic planning for JSC.

    I’ve had the thrilling opportunity to develop hardware flown on the Space Shuttle and to the Russian-Mir Space Station, supporting training and data collection on astronauts—before, during and after flight. I’ve also been responsible for the development and integration of hardware and systems, including ensuring astronauts were trained for research missions on the Space Shuttle and for missions which assembled the International Space Station.

    With the support of NASA, I conduct outreach at schools, churches, and via organizations such as Boy Scouts, Jack and Jill of America, and the Links, Incorporated to inspire interest in STEM fields. For the past two years, I’ve spearheaded a partnership between JSC’s African American Employee Resources Group and the Port City Chapter of the Links, Inc. to sponsor a science fair at a Houston elementary school. Engineers from across JSC and of various backgrounds volunteer to help children design and conduct experiments, as well as assist with hosting the fair. Perhaps some of these children will be inspired to pursue careers in STEM fields.

    The most important lesson I’ve learned in my life is “don’t let your environment define you.” Even though I did not have the facilities and an accessible role model, because of my determination to pursue my dream, I enjoy a most rewarding career.

    And there’s video at the link, too.

  9. rq says

    Protest continues in New York. I know sometimes it feels like ‘just another protest’, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that it is still going on. And it’s not just New York, I just get more posts from New York, is all. Anyway.
    #PeoplesMonday for #RekiaBoyd & all women victimized by cops has begun in #GrandCentral NYC. #VoicesOfTheUnheard ;
    Many gathered to hear reading of facts of #RekiaBoyd’s murder in #GrandCentral. #BlackLivesMatter #VoicesOfTheUnheard ;
    #PeoplesMonday has taken over the streets for #RekiaBoyd & all womem victimized by cops. #BlackLivesMatter.;
    #PeoplesMonday shutting down @UrbanOutfitters in protest of the noose t-shirt. #BlackLivesMatter #VoicesOfTheUnheard ;
    #PeoplesMonday shutting down @Starbucks to read facts about police killings. #Every28Hours #RaceTogether.;
    #PeoplesMonday shutting down Times Square for #RekiaBoyd & all women victimized by cops. #VoicesOfTheUnheard.
    I also like how the protest group in New York focusses on the deaths less well-known.

  10. rq says

    Meet the NAACP history makers, for 2015:

    During Black History Month, we asked NAACP supporters to send us the names of people they know who have recently taken their civil rights activism to the next level. Whether on the national scale, or in their own backyards, we want to recognize all of the courageous brothers and sisters taking a stand against injustice, discrimination, and inequality. Hundreds of names were submitted, and we are so proud to share them all.

    Here’s five of them, of whom you may recognize a couple:

    Rev. Traci D. Blackmon

    Rev. Blackmon is pastor of Christ the King United Church of Christ, located just outside of Ferguson, MO. Also a nurse, she took time away from her job to organize in Ferguson during some of the most violent days of protest following Michael Brown’s shooting.

    Rev. Blackmon has been an extremely vocal and influential voice in the fight against police brutality and racial profiling. She helped to plan the Mother’s March, where mothers from across the country — many of whom had lost children to gun violence — assembled to call for peace. She is credited with bringing St. Louis together at a time of great despair and unrest through her activism and organizing.

    Her unflagging commitment to giving voices to the voiceless and to empower those who may feel powerless has made her an incredible force in the fight for justice.

    Patrisse Marie Cullors

    #BlackLivesMatter became the national rallying cry of anti-police brutality and anti-racial profiling activists in 2014. Patrisse is one of the founders of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, as well as the founder and director of Dignity and Power Now, a grassroots organization in Los Angeles that fights for the dignity and power of incarcerated people and their families.

    Patrisse has spent the past year traveling state to state, organizing communities to respond to police violence, and amplifying black and black queer voices to the forefront. In the fight against the excessive criminalization, policing, and incarceration of Black communities, she has been an excellent leader. Her hard work, courage, and dedication are a true a inspiration for today’s advocates of justice and equality!

    Londrelle Hall

    Londrelle is the founder of the Run For Justice campaign, which aims to raise $1 million to provide support for the family of Michael Brown, and in the longer term, establish afterschool programs to empower and enrich black youth.

    After learning of Michael Brown’s tragic death, Londrelle and his friend Ray Mills knew they had to do something to raise awareness of the injustice black youth face in our communities, and to engage in peaceful protest. So they set out to run from Atlanta, GA to Michael Brown’s memorial in Ferguson, MO — a 20 day, 540-mile journey in the name of justice.

    Londrelle inspired so many people along the way to speak out in the name of civil rights and racial equality, and continues to inspire both budding and seasoned activists every day.

    Keith Knight

    Keith Knight tackles issues of race and inequality through humorous, but hard-hitting art in the form of cartoons. For more than two decades, Keith has explored and exposed issues of racial profiling and police brutality in America through his comic strips. His slideshow, They Shoot Black People, Don’t They: A Cartoonist’s look at Police Brutality presents a thought-provoking record of the history of police brutality over the past 20 years.

    Keith’s ability to inspire conversation and action through his comic strips is a testament to the power art can have on a movement, and a shining example for all those looking for their unique way to make change in the world.

    DeRay McKesson

    The late-2014 protests in Ferguson, MO following the shooting death of Michael Brown were not lead by a single voice or organization, but Deray McKesson has been one of the most notable activists in the growing grassroots movement.

    In the days following Michael Brown’s death, Deray traveled to Missouri for the first time to protest. He harnessed the power of social media to share information from the ground in Ferguson, and aid concerned activists in their path to action. He, along with co-creator Johnetta Elzie, maintain a newsletter, Words to Action, to connect activists with articles, actions, and resources to keep the movement going strong.

    Online and on the ground, Deray continues to be a leader in the fight for justice and equality for all.

    Martese Johnson Expected to Enter Not Guilty Pleas, I should hope so!

    The University of Virginia student arrested by Alcoholic Beverage Control agents last week plans to plead not guilty at his first court hearing.

    Twenty-year-old Martese Johnson is set for a hearing Thursday morning, March 26, on charges of public intoxication and obstruction of justice stemming from the incident on the university’s Corner.

    The law office representing Johnson says the commonwealth attorney’s office has asked to continue the case until the last week of May so that State Police can complete an investigation of the arrest.

    Investigators say they’ve fielded dozens of phone calls and emails, and collected videos and photographs relevant to the case.

    Video at the link, plus a couple of press releases from the police and Martese’s lawyer.

    This is sort of opposite to those wanting to keep all video of police from the public.Cops in Colorado Could Soon Face $15,000 Fines if they Try to Stop People from Filming

    A package of bills that are designed to increase police oversight have been introduced in the Colorado Legislature. One of the measures included in the package would impose up to $15,000 in civil penalties for cops who interfere with someone trying to film them.

    “Primarily, it came up as a result of the number of news reports we’ve been seeing about police officers telling people, ‘Give me your camera,’ or taking the data away, and that is unacceptable conduct,” said Rep. Joe Salazar, a Democrat from Thornton and co-sponsor of the bill.

    According to 7 News Denver, Salazar said House Bill 15-1290 has support from both Democrats and Republicans and is not intended to penalize police.

    “It takes a very special person to be a police officer,” Salazar said. “We want to honor them, but at the same time, we have a few bad apples who need to be aware that their conduct now has major, major consequences.” […]

    However, it is apparent that the “existing process” isn’t enough to deter police from violating the rights of individuals. We’ve seen several cases, recently, in which police in Colorado have violated the rights of people who record them.

    Last month we reported on the case of a man shopping at a Wal-Mart who saw police arresting a shoplifter. When the man filming, Chris Hoover, started recording this altercation with police, he was arrested, for filming.

    Also, in November, a man filmed Denver police as they beat a man and his pregnant wife. Officers took his tablet and deleted the video. However, they were too late as it had already uploaded to his Dropbox account.

    Here’s a few shots from the hearing for former officer Manney, shooter of Dontre Hamilton.
    Manney has been permanently terminated from MPD. #NoJusticeNoCompromise #JusticeforDontre #BlackLivesMatter
    ‘There’s no other appropriate sanction. His incompetence led to a chain of events that led to a death.’ -Chief Flynn #DoBetterMKE
    Flynn on recommending permanent discharge of Manney: ‘A man is dead. The degree of harm is about as significant as it could possibly be.

    Sounds like someone is making a good decision out there.

  11. rq says

    San Diego police body camera report: Fewer complaints, less use of force

    Complaints have fallen 40.5% and use of “personal body” force by officers has been reduced by 46.5% and use of pepper spray by 30.5%, according to the report developed by the Police Department for the City Council’s Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods Committee.
    U.S. issues recommendations for San Diego police
    U.S. issues recommendations for San Diego police

    By year’s end, the department plans to have nearly 1,000 officers equipped with the small cameras, including patrol officers, gang-unit officers and motorcycle officers. Currently, 600 officers have the cameras.

    The report to the council is based on preliminary statistics gathered for 2014 and January 2015.

    “Body-worn camera technology is a win-win for both the officer and the community,” Deputy Chief David Ramirez said in the report, set to be discussed at Wednesday’s meeting.

    The department began testing the use of body cameras in January 2014, two months before city leaders called for an audit of the department’s managerial practices by the U.S. Department of Justice. […]

    Still to be decided is the issue of what video from the cameras will be released to the public and media. The department’s restrictive policy has brought criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union and others.

    Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman, a strong supporter of body cameras, has said that she is reluctant to release the videos, in part, because citizens shown on the videos have privacy rights.

    But in the case of a controversial officer-involved incident, like the shooting in Ferguson, Mo., Zimmerman said she would be inclined to release the video as soon as possible.

    Sounds like there’s more to it: FBI bringing in ‘profilers’ on the Otis Byrd hanging case

    The FBI is enlisting the help of their fabled Behavioral Analysis Unit in the case of the hanging death of Claiborne County man Otis Byrd.

    Byrd, 54, was found hanging by a bedsheet from a tree not far from his last known residence Thursday after having been missing for two weeks. Local authorities called in the FBI upon finding his body, and the probe has been an all-encompassing one for federal, state, and local law enforcement over the last few days.

    The NAACP immediately released Byrd’s identity, and called for the Department of Justice to get involved in the case.

    According to FBI.gov, the Behavioral Analysis Unit “focuses specifically on criminal human behavior in an attempt to better understand criminals—who they are, how they think, why they do what they do—as a means to help solve crimes.” Officials said they hope the BAU will help narrow down whether Byrd’s death was a suicide or a homicide.

    FBI Special Agent in Charge Don Alway said investigators continue to do interviews through the weekend, but now they’re putting every new detail under the microscope to see if there are any new leads that develop.

    “We’re really going to ask for folks again to dig deep and think if there’s anyone who has communicated with Mr. Byrd, especially from March 2 on, no matter how small that communication could have been,” he said.

    Authorities are still waiting on autopsy results to help determine the manner of death as well.

    “We’re hoping that autopsy report will shed light into the definitive cause of death,” Alway said.

    Florida, for a moment: Investigation reveals that four Florida officers filmed KKK video, texting about ‘killing n*ggers’

    These exchanges aren’t just disturbing because they are racist, but they must have widespread implications on how these four men performed their essential duties. To believe that these men felt the way they clearly feel about African Americans, but that their attitudes had no significant impact on how they investigated cases and treated people is preposterous.

    Will they be allowed to serve as officers elsewhere? Will nothing be done to look at their prior cases? These essential questions and more must be answered.

    You can actually read their exchanges at the link, if you feel like it. I don’t feel like citing them here. :P

    Issues in Philadelphia? Noooo. Philadelphia Police Department needs reforms, Justice Department finds

    “The department has much work to do in the months and years ahead. Our assessment uncovered policy, training and operational deficiencies in addition to an undercurrent of significant strife between the com­munity and department,” the Justice Department report says.

    Philadelphia police officers do not receive “regular, consistent” training in the department’s policy on deadly force, and the department does not make it easy for officers to use stun guns, leaving them with fewer options to avoid using deadly force, the federal agency found.

    Ramsey asked for the federal review in 2013 when he noticed officer-involved shootings were increasing even though violent crime and assaults against officers in the city were on the decline.

    From 2007 through 2014, there were 394 officer-involved shootings in the city, according to the report. In recent years, the number of such shootings decreased from 58 in 2012 to 28 last year.

    The review found that deficiencies in the way the Philadelphia police handle internal probes of officer-involved shootings and alleged officer misconduct leave “segments of the community feeling disenfranchised and distrustful of the police department.”

    That distrust might be exacerbated by apparent racial disparities in officer-involved shootings. The report says 59% of the officers involved in shootings from 2007 through 2014 were white, while 81% of those struck by police gunfire were black.

    In that same eight-year span, Philadelphia police shot 59 unarmed suspects, roughly 16% of the total number of people they shot. Forty-five of those unarmed suspects were black, the report found.

    “These racial disparities have created a deep mistrust of law enforcement in communities of color,” Reggie Shuford, executive director of the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. “The police department must begin to repair this relationship by emphasizing de-escalation and mutual respect in their interactions rather than relying on force.”

    The federal review also found that officers involved in those shootings from 2007 through 2014 were relatively inaccurate. Officers hit their targets just 18% of the time, according to the report, and accuracy plummeted as the number of shots in an incident increased. Officers who fired only once during a clash with a suspect hit their intended targets about half of the time, the report says.

    And Mother Jones on the same: Philadelphia Cops Shoot and Kill People at Six Times the Rate of the NYPD

    In Philadelphia, a city with a vastly smaller population than that of New York, has seen a much higher rate of police shootings in recent years. According to a new report published on Monday by the US Department of Justice, police violence disproportionately affects Philadelphia’s black community, and officers don’t receive consistent training on the department’s deadly force policy.

    The 174-page report results from an investigation the DOJ launched in 2013 at the request of Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, during a time when officer-involved shootings, including fatal incidents, were on the rise, even as violent crimes and assaults against the police was on the decline. “Police carry baggage and lack legitimacy in some communities,” Ramsey, who has been appointed to chair the Presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing, recently told the New York Times. “And for us to change the paradigm, we have to understand why we are viewed in this way.”

    The DOJ’s Philadelphia investigation, which examined nearly 400 deadly force incidents between 2007 and 2013, provides a rare close-up of the patterns of officer-involved shootings. The report follows on the heels of another damning report the DOJ published on the city of Ferguson, where federal investigators found systematic racial discrimination among public officials and police.

    While it’s nearly impossible to know how much the findings in Philadelphia represent police practices across the country—there is no comprehensive national data on police officers’ use of force, as we reported last year—the DOJ probe does reveal an alarming rate of shootings when compared to other large departments. Philadelphia’s police force, which is one-fifth the size of the NYPD, saw dozens more officer shootings resulting in deaths and injuries than those by the NYPD over the same period.

    Key findings with graphs at the link.

    MO lawmakers introduce bill to prevent food stamp recipients from buying fish (among other things), because the gods forbid those poor people try and enjoy themselves once in a while, right???

    Missouri lawmakers are on a new quest to further demoralize and degrade citizens who rely on SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). State Representative Rick Brattin has introduced a bill that would, among other things, prevent food stamps from being used to purchase fish and steak. From House Bill 813:

    A recipient of supplemental nutrition assistance program benefits shall not use such benefits to purchase cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood, or steak.

    More from the Riverfront Times:

    “There’s a long history of trying to dictate what somebody should be buying on food stamps. The program itself has been really stigmatized,” says Washington University professor Mark Rank, who authored Living on the Edge: The Realities of Welfare in America.

    ………

    “There have been a lot of studies on fraud, when there were actually people buying, trading and selling their EBT cards, but it was a very small percentage of the overall population,” he says. “But fish is good for you — why should that be prohibited?”

    Good question. Why would healthy foods be prohibited? Perhaps because state Rep. Brattin has images of welfare queens sitting around and dining on steak and lobster? Maybe state Rep. Brattin should take the Welfare Food Challenge and find out for himself just how hard it is to prepare healthy meals on a food stamp budget.

  12. rq says

    #BeyondFerguson: 7 Quotes from Deray Mckesson

    NPR’s Michele Martin was back in Ferguson, Missouri moderating a second Beyond Ferguson forum sponsored by St. Louis Public Radio (for a recap on the first forum click here).

    While the forum included Ferguson activists like Rev. F. Willis Johnson, Deray Mckesson and Brittany Packnett, notable figureheads were missing. Mayor James Knowles, the Ferguson Police Department and Missouri Fraternal Order of Police all declined to participate in the forum.

    Mostly likely, they didn’t want a repeat of the first forum where tensions ran high as community members expressed their outrage.

    With the recent Department of Justice Ferguson report that excoriated Ferguson’s Police Department, they couldn’t afford anymore public embarrassment. Despite their absence, some of the most poignant moments of the forum came from Mckesson who offered his thoughts on a wide variety of issues pertaining to Ferguson. Below are some of his best quotes of the night.

    See link for more, and that blog seems to have several other good entries, including this one: #BlackLivesMatter: Top Stories You Should Read, which in turn has several excellent links to follow.

    this week @Rap Sessions sits down w/ activists who have inspired a generation @TefPoe @Nettaaaaaaaa @brownblaze

    Dontre Hamilton Shooting: Fired Milwaukee Cop Won’t Get His Job Back

    The firing of Milwaukee police Officer Christopher Manney last year was proper, and Manney won’t get his job back, a police review board decided Monday night in the death of Dontre Hamilton, a mentally ill black man whom Manney killed with 14 gunshots last year.

    The three-commissioner panel unanimously agreed that Police Chief Ed Flynn was right to fire Manney in October, NBC station WTMJ reported. Prosecutors declined to prosecute Manney in December, saying he’d shot Hamilton in April in self-defense — a decision that set off several days of protests in Milwaukee.

    Manney is appealing his dismissal, but the review panel declared that he violated police rules in initiating the patdown that led to the shooting of Hamilton, who had been sleeping in a park. Investigators said Hamilton had schizophrenia and had stopped taking his medication.

    The U.S. Justice Department has said it will review the shooting to determine whether it should pursue a federal civil rights prosecution.

  13. rq says

    NYC Commissioner’s Ancestors Were Slaves Of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Family.

    Cumberbatch is his father’s name and the old man’s an actor too, although Dad wasn’t brave enough to use it and instead works as Timothy Carlton. “Cumberbatch — it sounds like a fart in a bath, doesn’t it?” he laughs. “What a fluffy old name. I can never say it on a Monday morning. When I became an actor, Mum wasn’t keen on me keeping it. ‘They’ll be after you for money,’ she used to say.”

    By “they” he means the descendants of Britain’s slave trade. “There are lots of Cumberbatches in our former Caribbean colonies,” he says. “When their ancestors lost their African names, they called themselves after their masters. Reparation cases are ongoing in the American courts. I’ve got friends involved in researching this scar on human history and I’ve spoken to them about it. The issue of how far you should be willing to atone is interesting. I mean, it’s not as if I’m making a profit from the suffering — it’s not like it’s Nazi money.” But the Cumberbatches, he thinks, were “pretty dodgy”.

    Wow. There I was, ready to ask: “How’s your mum looking these days?” Here Cumberbatch is, ‘fessing up to a dark family secret. But the acting world turns strangely. Cumberbatch, in his professional life to date, has already impersonated William Pitt the Younger in the film Amazing Grace about the campaign to end the slave trade. “Maybe I was trying to right a wrong there,” he says with an edgy smile.

    That’s from an interview in 2007. Note bolded part. I would say that his family being where it is, is a result of profiting from the slave trade, so no, he can’t just absolve himself of the past like that. Good for him for not hiding his name, though.

    Here’s a call for support:
    Smh I grew up out there! RT 1x, the text attached reads as follows:

    Ok, so Saturday my son went to a party in St. Charles with two white friends. He was target because of the color of his skin. He was called N*GG*R and everything else I didn’t name him at birth. Needless to say, my baby was jumped by 8 white boys. He was kicked in the head, punched and left for dead. Had it not been for his friend Tim jumping in telling him to go they could have killed my baby. Tim sustained stitches and a concussion due to this. Anyone that knows my son knows he’s not an aggressive kid, so why him… oh yeah I forgot he was black and that’s a crime. I am pulling together supporters so that St. Charles will charge them with a hate crime which means it turns Federal and anyone under 18 would be automatically certified as an adult. Most of these boys were 18 while all alone my son just turned 15. If you are interested in being a supporter please respond to this post.

    It’s by a Qiana S. Futrell on Facebook.

  14. rq says

    Evening news.
    I feel like this belongs here, too: George Takei’s Legacy Project

    The Story of Allegiance

    Allegiance tells an epic, multi-generational tale about the Kimura family, in particular a brother and sister, Sammy (Glee’s Telly Leung) and Kei (TONY-Award winner for Miss Saigon, Lea Salonga), whose bond is tested after they choose opposing paths to save their family. Their journeys take them from the rich California heartland, to the wind swept wastelands of Wyoming, to the battlefields of war-torn Europe.
    Framed by an American war hero (played by me) recounting his family’s experience, Allegiance offers a rare and personal look into a time in our history when everyday citizens became heroes.

    George Takei in Allegiance. Photo courtesy of Henry DiRocco

    Allegiance is the reason I first took to the Internet, knowing that I’d need to build an audience for this untold story. Today, I am grateful to connect daily with millions of inspiring, funny, passionate individuals who prove what I have long known to be true – that our world is a better place when we all participate. I invite you to join me on a special endeavor to ensure that our vital work continues for generations to come. […]

    The museum, Allegiance, and I share the same mission: to tell stories that educate and ensure that we never forget, and never repeat, the tragedy of the Japanese American internment. By giving today, your dollar is helping Allegiance get to Broadway this fall and helping create a new endowment for the museum, a permanent source of unrestricted revenue for this wonderful institution.

    More at the link.

    You have to read it to believe it. Have a bingo card handy. Ferguson and Benghazi’s troubling parallels

    Ferguson has become the liberal Benghazi. It is more of a cause than a place, more of an ideological statement than an incident. Ferguson was not the racist murder it was thought to be, and Benghazi was not an incident in which the Obama administration’s incompetence or timidity allowed four Americans to die. The facts argue otherwise.

    Both events tell us something about the passions of our times. It was quickly apparent what had happened at Ferguson. Michael Brown was not on his knees, hands up, when he was shot. He was rushing at the police officer.

    Did he deserve to die? No. But did Darren Wilson shoot him for no reason? Again, no. Did the Justice Department later find that Ferguson’s police force was a cesspool of racism, incompetence and corruption? Yes. But did any of that mean that Wilson killed Brown in cold blood or that Brown was shot because he was black? No and no.

    A grand jury studied what happened and did not indict Wilson. Eric Holder’s Justice Department reached the same conclusion. Let me offer another conclusion: If Brown was not criminally shot because he was black, then possibly the cop was accused because he was white. Who was the stereotyped individual here?

    Pause: And how instrumental was the deep-seated racism within the Ferguson PD in Darren Wilson stopping Michael Brown on the street in the first place? The author treats these things like two separate events. To continue:

    We live in a time where facts that do not fit an ideology or grievance are merely disregarded — or alternative ones concocted: Do you think campus rape is a problem not taken seriously? Then pillory the accused, deprive them of basic rights, say your critics are blaming the victim — and fling the dross of questionable statistics into the air.

    Do you think black men are casually killed by the police? Then concoct a statistic, as Arlene Eisen has done, and watch with satisfaction as it goes viral. The widely used “#every28hours” hashtag turns out to be a hash of statistics and hunches, all of it infused by leftist cant about “the national security state” and the “perpetual war on black people.”

    Do you think that the African American men who are killed by the police are solely victims of racism? If so, then ignore that, in 2013, about 44 percent of the nation’s murder victims were black — and some 90 percent of those victims were killed by other black people. There is a problem here, and it does not go away by yelling “Racist, Racist” at the numbers.

    Yes, black-on-black crime is a problem. But so is the disproportionate dying of unarmed black people at the hands of white people and law enforcement officers. And not just dying. The author at the end admits that he doesn’t believe racism to be gone, but he also “also believe[s] that distorting the facts can impede progress. The dead of anywhere — Ferguson or Benghazi — do matter. And so does the truth.”

    Event tonight: Can #media & local communities work together to heal the #RacialDivide? WATCH LIVE: The Aspen Institute Community Dialogue on Healing the Racial Divide, with a livestream link.

    In the aftermath of the events in Ferguson, Staten Island and elsewhere, race relations are at the forefront of the minds of many Americans. Specifically in St. Louis, the relationship between local communities and law enforcement officers assigned to protect them is worsening, the quality of information shared is both positively and negatively affected by the new media environment, and the city remains one of the most racially segregated metropolitan areas of the United States.

    To address these increasingly significant issues, the Aspen Institute Communications & Society Program is convening the “Aspen Institute Community Dialogue on Healing the Racial Divide,” March 24, 2015, at the Renaissance St. Louis Grand Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri.

    More information on the panels, etc., at the link, but here’s a quick look at one: @timjeby #RacialDivide session #Ferguson with @SuzanneMalveaux, Don Marsh, @deray & @GilbertBailon.

    West coast. SFPD Shut Down by Protesters Chained to the Gates After Police Murder Innocent Man

    Over 200 protesters took to the streets and shut down the San Francisco Mission Police Department for four hours and fifteen minutes on Monday.

    They did so by handcuffing and shackling themselves while holding a mock trial as others chained themselves to the building’s gate and benches. The demonstration took place to mark the one year anniversary of officers fatally shooting Alex Nieto, 28. Nieto was shot 15 times after police mistook the taser from his security job for a pistol. […]

    Police claim that they “feared for their lives” after Nieto had drawn his taser from 75 feet away. However, witnesses argue that the young man never pointed it at anyone.

    The Officers’ bullets struck Alex in his forehead and at least nine other places leaving his body grossly disfigured and mortally wounded, according to Justice4AlexNieto[dot]org.

    They also report that eleven out of the fifteen shots caused downward trajectory wounds. That is, eleven shots were fired from above Alex into his face, temple, chest, shoulders, and back. Seven of those shots are in a head to toe downward trajectory indicating that Alex was in a completely defenseless position when officers fatally wounded him.

    After executing Nieto, the officers searched his vehicle without a warrant using the keys obtained from their victims body. They searched his family’s home, and immediately took to the media to begin the character assassination. His parent’s first heard of Nieto’s death from relatives in Mexico who had seen his name printed in the press. It seemed to many that the department was investigating Nieto instead of the shooting.

    For six months the department withheld his autopsy report. The family had to wait nine long months for the Department to release the names of the four shooters. They were released only after a federal judge ordered transparency in the matter.

    Protests and demonstrations have continuously taken place to demand justice for Nieto. Unfortunately, SFPD officers have continued the killing and have taken the lives of Amilcar Perez-Lopez, O’Shaine Evans, Matthew Hoffman, and Alice Brown in the last year since Nieto’s death.

    Since 2000, there have been 97 officer-involved shootings resulting in 33 deaths at the hands of San Francisco police officers.

  15. rq says

    Starbucks pulls plug on race talks; now what? Soledad O’Brien weighs in.

    This is what it’s come to. Starbucks asked its local baristas to have conversations about race. Not the federal government or Congress. Not academia or the NAACP. But a national coffee shop chain waded into an area of social conflict that is as old as the slave ships and as modern as stop-and-frisk policing.

    Then people went crazy.

    Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz was accused of ruining that magic morning moment when customers fork over $4.15 for a “grande” coffee with warm skim milk and vanilla extract. A barista writing “Race Together” on cups was called an affront to mornings and coffee — such important conversations belonged inside a hallowed institution, not a common coffee shop, where apparently people no longer chat.

    A lot of the reaction came via snipes on Twitter from people calling Schultz out on Starbucks’ diversity, the hue of his mochaccinos, or his liberal “brewing” of controversy. The nastiness drove the company’s communications chief briefly off Twitter. Then, after barely a week, Starbucks shut down the whole darned thing, pushing ahead with a hiring and media initiative instead. […]

    People do need to talk about race. Not because of a harmless coffee cup, but because we have a real race problem and we need solutions. Starfish Media Group just finished a nationwide tour of American colleges, universities and communities called “Black in America 2015.” It’s based on our CNN documentary series that takes a close look at the challenges and triumphs of being black in America: from the hopes of the Martin Luther King era to today’s unlikely brew of un-kept promises and vast opportunities.

    There were plenty of conversations about race among the thousands of black and white college students and panelists like rapper Chuck D and Cedric Alexander of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives. They lined up to talk about how their experiences mirrored those of the people in the documentaries: black families finding common roots with whites, the politics of skin color, or the black-and-blue conflict over the police engaging in racial profiling. The topics and perceptions were an unending thread. Not only did people talk when they were offered the chance; they wanted to talk.

    At Stony Brook University, one of our tour stops, a young white male student asked our panel if effecting change in racial discrimination today was even harder to achieve than it was during the Civil Rights era when racism was more overt. What a good question.

    There are no longer signs segregating our bathrooms and water fountains, but police are being caught on cell phone videos in apparent attacks on young black men — the new signposts of racial inequality. New technology has multiplied and spread symbols of racial injustice, but that has created new challenges and new reasons to talk.

    In this country we sometimes pretend we are so far past the ugly days of Jim Crow and middle-of-the-night cross burnings as to have no racial issues to discuss. We did, after all, elect a black president who, like me, has both a black and a white parent and descends from immigrants.

    But blacks and whites don’t see things the same, and that is a big problem we need to discuss. Pew Research Center asked people of both races this year how much more needs to be done to achieve racial equality. Seventy-nine percent of blacks said “a lot” more work needs to be done. Just 44% of whites thought the same. […]

    In 2014, our CNN documentary “Black in America: Black & Blue” showed police officers talking fearfully about facing off against young criminals on familiar streets and African-American men in fear that they would become the victims of police shootings. The documentary was released just as grand juries chose not to indict the police officers in the Eric Garner and Ferguson, Missouri, cases.

    To me, it reveals how damaging the rift in our perceptions can be. […]

    Black people talk about race all the time, from processing comments about our freckles to recounting how someone rolls their fingers through our child’s curly hair. We don’t get or expect an even playing field at work. We don’t ever get to cross a street in a hoodie at night without the other pedestrians making a string of assumptions. We don’t have some mutable characteristic. We wake up and go to bed black, and that makes a difference in this country.

    CEO Howard Schultz was left wondering why it was such a bad idea to encourage people to talk about race. His initial letter to his staff made it clear he believes his #racetogether coffee cup campaign can contribute to starting an important conversation. “What if our customers … had a renewed level of understanding and sensitivity about the issue, and they themselves would spread that to their own sphere of influence?”

    What a good question it was. What if?

    I submitted a request for Nixon’s text messages from early August. Apparently Nixon’s office does not have them. Documents attached.

    100 Days of Learning: Ferguson Commission Report, in pdf. What they’ve learned, and some ideas on how change needs to happen. The facts are pretty depressing.

    Possibly everyone on FB has seen the ‘Humans of New York’ initiative, which posts random strangers with short quotes or bits of information. Here’s Humans of St. Louis, same idea.

    What is it with retailers? The Strange Story Of H&M’s Fake Racist White Power Metal Bands

    In addition to its array of basics, graphic tees, and polos, H&M sells quite a few rock and metal band T-shirts.

    But did you know they also sell band tees of bands that, well, ~don’t exist~?

    In fact, this bomber jacket — sold by H&M in Sweden — is covered in imaginary band patches.

    But the bands might not be so fake after all.

    This week, a YouTube video featuring tracks of many of the bands adorned on H&M’s clothing popped up.

    A label called Strong Scene Productions claimed that they were simply releasing music from “long forgotten bands.” The bands all happened to have the same names as the fake ones on H&M’s clothing.

    “As illustrated by the bomber jacket and t-shirts worn by the models of H & M,” they wrote on their Facebook page, “the new items feature logos from long-forgotten underground goth and thrash acts such as the French LANY, Mexican MORTUS, American ‘cosmic hippie metal’-gurus MYSTIC TRIANGLE and GREY from Germany – the originator of the whole symphonic female metal-genre.”
    The bands had song titles like “Sign of the Antichrist,” “Hellish Massacre,” “Holocaust Tomb,” and, best of all, “Vaginal’s Juice Dripping Into Cadaverous.”

    And here’s the craziest part: A couple of the bands seemed to have had ties to the NSBM community (that’s National Socalist Black Metal scene, meaning they are racists and/or neo-Nazis). […]

    “None of these bands have any sort of history beyond pages created this year,” wrote Robert Pasbani on Metal Injection. “This marketing project seems to dig deep. They even created tracks by these potentially fake bands to make it seem like all of this is real.”

    Rosenberg added, “H&M are not only participating in the creation of fake metal bands in order to peddle merch for said bands, but they’re trying really, really, REALLY hard to make people think those bands are real.”
    But AS IT TURNS OUT, H&M had nothing to do with it. The fake band tapes are the work of an arts collective in Sweden.

    According to its leader, Henri Sorvali, who poses under the name Ville Huopakangas, all of the music and artwork — in fact Strong Scene Productions itself — was created recently, in response to H&M’s fake metal bands.

    H&M has not responded to a request for comment from BuzzFeed Life.
    Sorvali also happens to be the guitarist and keyboardist for the band Moonsorrow.

    Strong Scene Productions, Sorvali told BuzzFeed Life, created an elaborate hoax aimed at poking fun at H&M’s claims at music legitimacy.

    And, he stresses, they had no official ties to H&M: “[We] create[d] pieces of art inspired by their new spring collection. We are not a label, but a one-time improvised, collective art project in the vein of Spinal Tap and other parodies with no intentions on anything except for art.”

    He went on, “The whole project was to show that not all metal music is what you hear in commercial forms, and different sub-genres exist even within metal music.”
    Sorvali also told Noisey he wanted “to point out the fact that you cannot commercialize a subculture without actually knowing all the different aspects of it.”

    (Formatting weird because BuzzFeed.)
    Well, I’m confused – do they mean to show how white supremacist metal music can be? Or is this a stab at all those labels using hip-hop culture? As the article says at the very end, “Confused yet?”

  16. rq says

    TW for suicide!!! Young transgender activist Blake Brockington mourned

    Friends and community members are today mourning the passing of a local transgender youth activist, Blake Brockington, who died as the result of suicide overnight.

    Brockington, 18, was a 2014 graduate of East Mecklenburg High School where, last year, he was nominated and later crowned homecoming king as an openly transgender student after winning a fundraising competition and drawing in $2,335.55 for a charity chosen by the school. Brockington’s homecoming win is believed to be the first for an openly transgender student in Charlotte.

    Details of Brockington’s passing and any plans for memorials are not yet known. qnotes will provide updates as they become available.

    Brockington’s death was confirmed and announced publicly Tuesday morning by Time Out Youth Center, a local LGBT youth services agency where Brockington received support.

    The center is working today to ensure other youth and staff receive needed support. Executive Director Rodney Tucker says youth members and clients have been at their center since 9 a.m. this morning. A counselor will be on hand to speak with staff and is available to youth and clients throughout the day.

    Brockington’s death is the second such local incident in recent weeks.
    Young activist wanted change

    In the year since his homecoming win and graduation, Brockington became an outspoken advocate, speaking at last year’s Transgender Day of Remembrance event and organizing public rallies and other grassroots campaigns to raise awareness on police brutality and violence. In one action in December, Brockington led activists in a brief shut down of Independence Square at Trade & Tryon Sts., followed by an impromptu march through Uptown. He and other activists also planned and coordinated a similar action at SouthPark Mall during the Christmas shopping season.

    Brockington, who came out as transgender in his sophomore year of high school, was active in East Meck’s band where he served as drum major for two years. He also played on a student club rugby team.

    East Mecklenburg High School teacher Martha Deiss, whom Brockington had for a civics and economics course his sophomore year, said last year that he was one of her brightest students.

    “A great student,” Deiss said of Brockington. “Always had the highest grades.”

    His homecoming victory, he told qnotes at the time, was a way to build awareness and support for other transgender students.

    “I honestly feel like this is something I have to do,” Brockington said last year, noting few other transgender male students have had the opportunity.

    Brockington said at the time that winning will mean the most for several younger transgender students he had mentored, including a nine-year-old boy.

    “He really looks up to me. That’s my heart,” Brockington said of his mentee. “He has support now and he will be able to avoid just about everything I’m going through and I don’t want him to ever have to be scared. I feel like if I do this, that’s one red flag for everybody to say, ‘Nobody should be scared to be themselves and everybody should have an equal opportunity to have an enjoyable high school experience.’”

    But the homecoming win came with a price, Brockington told The Charlotte Observer earlier this year.

    “That was single-handedly the hardest part of my trans journey,” Brockington told the daily newspaper. “Really hateful things were said on the Internet. It was hard. I saw how narrow-minded the world really is.”

    He had a strong message for the public — “we are still human.”

    “I’m still a person,” Brockington said. “And trans people are still people. Our bodies just don’t match what’s up (in our heads). We need support, not people looking down at us or degrading us or overlooking us. We are still human.”
    Need support?

    Those youth in need of support are encouraged to contact Time Out Youth,timeoutyouth.org, 704-344-8335. Their center is located at 2320-A N. Davidson St. They are open Tuesday and have staff and counselors available.

    Those youth in need of immediate support can call the Trevor Project helpline at 1-866-488-7386 or access resources online at thetrevorproject.org.

    Because all black lives matter. Going to let that one stand alone in comment.

  17. rq says

    1 in 13 African-American Adults Prohibited From Voting in the United States

    As Americans honor those who fought for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, 50 years ago, it’s easy to forget that 5.9 million citizens — 2.2 million of them African-Americans — remain disenfranchised today. One out of every 13 African-Americans is prohibited from casting a ballot in the United States.

    These men and women lost their right to vote because of felony convictions. Depending on the laws in their states, some may regain access to the polls when they complete their prison sentences, finish parole, or complete probation, but those in Kentucky, Florida and Iowa will be disenfranchised for the rest of their lives. (Only two states — Maine and Vermont — allow those currently in prison on felony charges to vote, and eight states even ban inmates with misdemeanors.)

    Most of those affected by these voting restrictions — 75 percent — have already done their time and returned to the community. […]

    Thanks to a steady push from advocates, since 1997 at least 23 states have eased their voting restrictions. Last Monday, the Maryland Senate passed a bill that would restore voting rights immediately after release from prison. The bill’s sponsor in the House, where it heads next, is Cory McCray (D-Baltimore City), who has a personal connection to the issue: as a teen, the assemblyman was arrested and jailed multiple times for drug dealing.

    McCray told The Washington Post that Maryland’s disenfranchisement of people on parole and probation “doesn’t make sense. The debt has been paid.”

    A similar bill affecting those who have completed prison sentences passed the Minnesota Senate Judiciary Committee last month. Marc Mauer is optimistic that both the Maryland and Minnesota bills could pass in the coming months.

    Grassroots efforts to reform voting restrictions are growing in other states, including Kentucky, where both houses passed legislation year but were ultimately unable to agree on a final bill, as well as Iowa and Florida. Widely regarded as the worst state for felon voting rights, Florida has nearly three times more disenfranchised ex-felons than Texas, the second-highest state.

    US Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Rand Paul (R-KY) have also introduced federal legislation that would allow ex-felons to vote in federal elections, regardless of state laws. […]

    The consequences of all this disenfranchisement are real, not only for individual ex-felons, but for the nation as a whole. Communities with high numbers of ex-felons lose their voices at the polls, and voting restrictions can have a measurable effect even on national political elections. A study published by the American Sociological Association determined that ex-felon enfranchisement in Florida alone would “certainly” have pushed Al Gore to presidential victory in 2000.

    Our nation’s confusing patchwork of voting restrictions also means that “people with felony convictions and the electoral officials themselves are often misinformed about the policy,” says the Sentencing Project’s Mauer. “There may be substantially more people who are kept away from the ballot box than even [the current] legal prohibitions would require.”

    Ultimately, voter disenfranchisement is just one more way to dole out punishment and perpetrate cycles of poverty, incarceration and voicelessness. Formerly incarcerated people attempting to reintegrate into society already face disadvantages finding employment and housing, and former drug felons are even banned for life from receiving food stamps. (Some states opt out of this lingering federal “War on Drugs” legislation, but many don’t.)

    Another city compared to NYC, comes out for the worse. Chicago’s Stop-And-Frisk Rate Four Times New York At Its Worst, ACLU Says

    The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois released a report Monday saying it identified more than 250,000 Chicago stop-and-frisk encounters in which there were no arrests from May through August 2014. African-Americans accounted for nearly three-quarters of those stopped, even though they make up about a third of the city’s population. On a per capita basis, Chicago police stopped 93.6 people per 1,000 residents, or more than four times New York’s peak rate of 22.9 stops per 1,000 residents, which happened during the same four-month period of 2011.

    “The Chicago Police Department stops a shocking number of innocent people,” said Harvey Grossman, the ACLU’s legal director. “And just like New York, we see that African Americans are singled out for these searches.”

    People were far more likely to be stopped in predominantly black communities and blacks were more likely to be the target of stops in predominantly white neighborhoods, the study found. For example, African-Americans accounted for 15 percent of the stops in the Jefferson Park area, even though they made up just one percent of its population.

    The ACLU said it also found that police gave no “legally sufficient reason” for initiating many of the stops. It said it examined a random sampling of “contact cards,” which officers are required to fill out whenever they make such a stop. On half the cards, the officers didn’t state a reason for the stop, and in some cases, they stated that they stopped someone for a reason that wasn’t related to suspected criminal activity.

    Grossman said the information that was on the cards was woefully inadequate, and the cards didn’t indicate that a person had been frisked, which the ACLU researchers can only assume happened.

    Police officials responded Monday by saying that the department prohibits racial profiling and other “bias based policing.” They said over the last three years the department has improved training to ensure that police officers are aware of that policy and comply, including requiring more detailed documentation and adding more supervision.

    It also released figures showing that the percentage of contact-card incidents is closely aligned with the percentage of police case reports where a crime suspect was identified by race.

    Seriously, you can’t make this shit up. You can’t. George Zimmerman: Obama Turned Americans Against Me

    In an interview posted online Monday by his lawyer, Zimmerman argues Obama shouldn’t have weighed in on his case.

    “President Obama held his Rose Garden speech stating, ‘If I had a son he would look like Trayvon.’ To me that was clearly a dereliction of duty pitting Americans against each other solely based on race,” Zimmerman said.

    Zimmerman said he felt “prosecuted by the federal government” because of Obama’s remarks, and said he thinks someone like Obama should “not interject himself in a local law enforcement matter or a state matter.”

    “Instead of rushing to judgment, making racially charged comments and pitting American against American, I believe that he should of taken the higher road given his position and said — been an example, been a leader as the president should be, and say let’s not rush to judgment,” Zimmerman said. “As I’m sure he would want that same luxury afforded to him if he was accused of something, and asked for calm, ask for peace.”

    Fuck you, Zimmerman.

    Cleveland and Brandon Jones: Another black teen killed by Cleveland police as mother asks: ‘Why? What happened?’

    On Thursday last week, Jones broke into the nearby Parkway Grocery and stole cigarettes and money, according to the store’s owner. Officers responded to a call of a break-in at approximately 2.15am and struggled with Jones after he left the store carrying a bag. One officer fired, striking Jones, who died at the hospital hours later.

    “Everybody knows he shouldn’t have been there,” Brown said. “Everybody knows what he did was wrong – we’re past that. My baby should not be dead.”

    The police department has provided few details about the shooting, and they did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.

    The officers, who have not been identified, were placed on three-day administrative leave and the department’s use of deadly force team is looking into the case. Jones’s family, meanwhile, is looking for answers.

    “We’re living every day wondering. That’s how we’re living: wondering,” Brown said. “Why? Why, and what happened?”

    Cleveland is still reeling from the police killings of unarmed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was fatally shot in November, and unarmed 37-year-old Tanisha Anderson, who died earlier that month after being physically restrained during a mental health episode.

    Then, in December, the Justice Department released a damning investigation into the Cleveland police department that said that it had engaged in “excessive and unreasonable force” in hundreds of cases between 2010 and 2013.

    The report arrived amid demands for systemic change in how US police interact with minority groups, spurred by the high-profile deaths of unarmed black men Michael Brown, 18, and Eric Garner, 43.

    Numerous activist groups in Cleveland have worked to get justice for these deaths. The message has also been a constant presence in the wake of Jones’s death – plastered at the bottom of the utility pole that serves as Jones’s makeshift memorial is a sign surrounded by candles and flowers that reads: “Black Lives Matter.”

    On Sunday, Brown went to her first Justice for Tamir Rice rally, and she has also met Tamir’s family. “They are wonderful people, wonderful people who want justice just like I do,” Brown said.

    Activists are also gathering around Jones’s family and offering support by holding vigils for the teenager, helping promote the online fundraising page to cover funeral costs and supporting his family in the grieving process, as they reflect on the loss of the young man they knew as a funny, family-oriented guy.

    “Everyone knew when someone was having a bad day, Brandon would just come around and make them laugh,” Brown said. “Even when you’re not in the mood to laugh.”

    Whether it was helping his dad with construction work, or making sure the family had the means to pay the bills or put food on the table, Jones was always focused on protecting his family.

    He had seven siblings, and made sure his younger sisters were taken care of. “He was kind of tough on them about staying in school, not messing with young boys,” Brown said.

    She said the cycle of unarmed people being killed by police needed to stop, and that justice could only be achieved if police were held accountable for what they had done.

    “They’re just killing these little boys, these young men, when they don’t have to,” Brown said. “And at the end of the day, our family members are gone, and they [the police] are back at work – the same job, committing the same crime to another family, to another young man, to another young boy.”

    More at the link.
    Note: no one is saying he was right in robbing the store. They’re saying he shouldn’t have been shot dead like that.

  19. Pteryxx says

    quoting that WaPo opinionated fool from rq’s #14:

    Do you think that the African American men who are killed by the police are solely victims of racism? If so, then ignore that, in 2013, about 44 percent of the nation’s murder victims were black — and some 90 percent of those victims were killed by other black people. There is a problem here, and it does not go away by yelling “Racist, Racist” at the numbers.

    Know what might help reduce the black-on-black murder rate (not that it’s anything but a disingenuous derail)? If black victims, black witnesses, and black people who don’t feel safe in their communities were able to call on the police for help and trust them to show up and do their jobs instead of arresting and/or shooting whoever crosses their path, including the people who needed the help in the first place. These are not unrelated issues. Sheesh.

  20. rq says

    This is a general article: State bills would limit access to police body cam videos

    Police departments nationwide are already spending millions to outfit officers with cameras and archive the results. In this latest clash between the people’s right to know and government authority, the responsibility to record encounters, retain copies and decide what to make public mostly rests with the same police.

    In the absence of public records protections, these police decisions can be unilateral and final in many cases.

    “It undercuts the whole purpose of the cameras,” said Michelle Richardson, public policy director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.

    “People behave better on film, whether it’s the police or the suspect, because they realize others are going to see them. When you take away that possible consequence, you really undercut the oversight value of these,” she said.

    Supporters say the privacy rights of crime victims and witnesses need protecting, and that police need to limit the broad and costly public records requests they’re getting. Routinely releasing these videos will deter people from calling for help and cooperating with police, they say.

    “Public safety trumps transparency,” said Kansas state Sen. Greg Smith, a Republican. “It’s not trying to hide something. It’s making sure we’re not releasing information that’s going to get other people hurt.”

    The Kansas Senate voted 40-0 last month to exempt the recordings from the state’s open records act. Police would only have to release them to people who are the subject of the recordings and their representatives, and could charge them a viewing fee. Kansas police also would be able to release videos at their own discretion.

    In Minnesota, the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced a bill Friday that would deem most recordings off-limits to the general public, except when an officer uses a dangerous weapon or causes bodily harm.

    Even some supporters of privacy restrictions agree that barring extraordinary circumstances or a court order, police could exercise too much unilateral authority over what gets seen.

    “I think it’s a fair concern and a fair criticism that people might cherry pick and release only the ones that show them in a favorable light,” said former Charlotte, North Carolina, police chief Darrel Stephens, executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association. But he said departments also have to consider the “potential impact and unintended consequences” of disclosure.

    I have an article for this. Following investigation by .@KMOV, Charles Kirksey is no longer municipal court judge in Normandy & Bellerieve Acres. Judge: “no comment.” Those are municipalities near STL.

    Anthony Hill was a veteran with bipolar disorder. And got killed by police for it. Atlanta Police Shooting Victim Tried to Follow ‘Sensible’ Path

    For those closest to Mr. Hill, the pain has been amplified by the fact that he had, until that last day, largely heeded his grandfather’s counsel. He had no criminal record. He had served in the war in Afghanistan. And before his death, Mr. Hill, 26, had been trying, like many other Americans, to make sense of the complex questions of race and law enforcement that have emerged since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

    In a Twitter post on Dec. 24, Mr. Hill challenged protesters not to reflexively condemn all police officers.

    “If 99 of 100 officers” were on the streets “killing black men like its hunting season,” he wrote, “that still leaves 1 just doing his job. Stop w/ the generalizations.”

    A state investigation of the shooting is underway. But according to friends and family, doctors told Mr. Hill that he had bipolar disorder after he returned from Afghanistan. They believe that his bizarre antics before the shooting — in which he removed his clothes and clambered down from a second-floor balcony — were symptoms of his illness.

    In Moncks Corner, the grief and anger commingled with incredulity. Mr. Hill was the last man anyone would have expected to tangle with the police, they said. And he deserved better.

    “To come home from Afghanistan and be killed by someone who’s supposed to protect you — that I don’t understand,” said James A. Hill, 29, Mr. Hill’s brother.

    His father, also named Anthony, said, “Why would you go directly to deadly force for someone who clearly does not have a weapon?” […]

    Armed instead with “Be sensible” — his grandfather’s counsel nearly every time he left the house — Mr. Hill came of age in a world that revolved around school, family and the weekly rhythms set by the Moncks Corner African Methodist Episcopal Church, where he sang in the youth choir and was captivated, early on, by the power of music.

    In high school, he played the male lead, Danny Zuko, in a production of “Grease.” The summer after graduation, his mother said, he worked as an intern with a local law enforcement agency.

    He tried his hand at college, but eventually dropped out to enlist, in 2008, in the Air Force. Two years later, Mr. Hill was deployed to Afghanistan. His father said he had been responsible for loading ordnance into aircraft in Kandahar Province.

    His Atlanta roommate, Kailien Alexander, a 23-year-old college student, said that Mr. Hill had told him that he had post-traumatic stress disorder, and that he had seen children killed in Afghanistan.

    “It just didn’t sit right with him,” Mr. Alexander said.

    After doctors diagnosed the disorder, his mother said, he was “medically retired” from the Air Force. Later, Mr. Hill moved to Atlanta, in hopes of breaking into the music business. He worked as an intern at a recording studio, and took odd jobs while constructing R&B tracks at home, sometimes recording in his closet with Mr. Alexander’s help.

    He was open about his mental illness, even commenting about it on Twitter. The illness, his family members said, seemed to mostly manifest itself in bursts of hourslong phone conversations. But before March 9, no one had seen him fully lose control.

    Mr. Alexander said he and Mr. Hill were poor but happy, and eager to make friends in an apartment complex mostly filled by families. One hot afternoon, Mr. Alexander recalled, the pair spent some of their last money on ice pops for the children in the neighborhood. […]

    °DeKalb police officials said Officer Olsen had a Taser with him at the time of the shooting. They also said the officer had undergone training in dealing with the mentally ill. This week, the department announced that it would increase its training requirements for “critical incidents,” which include encounters with the mentally ill, but Capt. Steven R. Fore said the change was unrelated to the shooting.
    Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
    Continue reading the main story

    In an interview last week, Mr. Hill’s family blamed the Department of Veterans Affairs for failing to properly treat Mr. Hill, arguing that he should have had better guidance after he learned of his mental illness and retired. Officials said they could not comment on an individual case.

    Ms. Giummo said she did not think her son’s story had much to do with race. “There is a ‘black and white’ issue” in the country, she said, “but our main concern is we want to know what happened.”

    “And if he was a black officer, we’d still feel the same way,” she added.

    St. Ann reserve officer accused in crash quits, blames drinking on Ferguson, chief says

    A St. Ann reserve police officer accused of crashing a car into a house while driving drunk in north St. Louis County over the weekend quit the force Tuesday.

    St. Ann Police Chief Aaron Jimenez said the officer told him that he had a drinking problem and said it had started after working shifts in Ferguson during the height of protests there.

    The officer, Jacob Klaus, could not immediately be reached for comment. […]

    °Klaus was a reserve officer, which meant he would work part time for St. Ann and was paid for only certain tasks, such as working traffic detail or prisoner transport. He would work on patrol with no pay and had been with the department about 1½ years.

    “He put in all that free time to get hired eventually with our department,” Jimenez said.

    The chief said it appeared the officer had been drinking at Fast Eddie’s Bon Air bar in Alton before the crash Saturday. He was not on duty at the time.

    Jimenez said Klaus was apologetic and said he started drinking after spending time volunteering with the department for shifts in Ferguson.

    “He felt it was a lot of pressure on his life, a lot of negativity,” Jimenez said.

    The chief said he believed the officer’s claim that he started drinking after Ferguson.

    “That’s what he said, and we had zero problem with him before,” Jimenez said. “He was not a drinker and had no substance abuse when he took the lie detector test” before being hired.

    Jimenez said the stresses of protests in Ferguson, where officers were berated by protesters and felt under constant threat, had taken its toll.

    There’s resources for that, I’m sure. Not alcohol. And – a lie-detector test? Really? How dated is this department?

    Beyond Henke/Mudd, 3 #Ferguson cops have discreetly quit the PD. 9 more actively looking for other employment. Don’t let the door hit ya. So maybe some change at the lower level is happening, too. Just worried that these people will be rehired at different police forces.

    Missouri attorney general drops eight municipalities from Macks Creek lawsuit

    Attorney General Chris Koster announced Tuesday that eight municipalities — Bellerive Acres, Calverton Park, Hanley Hills, Kinloch, Uplands Park, Velda City, Velda Village Hills and Vinita Terrace — have been dismissed from his lawsuit alleging they were violating “Macks Creek law,” which limits profits cities can take from traffic cases and mandates detailed financial reporting. Hillsdale, Moline Acres and Normandy still are being examined.

    In a statement, Koster said he dismissed these eight because they had either submitted their financial report to the state auditor’s office or they re-filed reports with corrected revenue calculations from traffic fines and court costs.

    In December, Koster sued 13 municipalities in St. Louis County Circuit Court for violating the law. One month later, he adjusted that list, dismissing some municipalities and adding others.

    “Our goal in initiating this action was to obtain compliance with the letter of the Macks Creek law, so that the Auditor and the Department of Revenue have the information they need to fulfill their oversight roles,” Koster said in a statement. “We will continue to review compliance and to require timely and accurate revenue reports from Missouri’s municipalities.”

    So from 13 to 5. That seems like a major difference.

  21. rq says

    Ferguson to appoint interim city manager –

    Pam Hylton is expected to officially become Ferguson’s interim city manager Tuesday night.

    Hylton, who was hired in 2011, is stepping into the role previously occupied by John Shaw.

    Shaw resigned two weeks ago in the aftermath of a Department of Justice report that said the city used its municipal court to raise money of the backs of the poor.

    The city council plans to conduct a national search to find a permanent replacement for Shaw. In the meantime, Hylton will work under a temporary employment agreement, which the City Council will vote on Tuesday night.

    Shaw, who earned $120,000 annually, is receiving a year’s salary and health insurance as severance.

    Hylton currently earns $76,128.

    The city declined to provide a copy of Hylton’s new contract until the council approves it.

    Ah, so that was the Amnesty AGM this weekend! With all the tweets about racism found within Amnesty structure. Here’s their statement on the weekend: Statement from Amnesty International USA Board Chair Ann Burroughs and Executive Director Steven Hawkins following this weekend’s Annual General Meeting in Brooklyn

    “Inclusion is the promise of human rights. While Amnesty International has worked over the past 54 years to challenge discrimination and exclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, political opinion, age, sexual orientation, gender and gender identity, disability, immigration or other status, we welcome thought-provoking conversations.

    We are encouraged by the discussions held over the past weekend. We know that a culture of honest dialogue is essential to creating a welcoming, empowering and respectful environment for all people and a truly powerful, inclusive and effective movement.

    Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) believes that dismantling all forms of oppression is fundamental to eliminating human rights abuses and promoting human dignity. We are committed to being an organization whose membership is drawn from a wide diversity of communities; who addresses issues of critical concern to diverse communities, consistent with its mission and obligation to advance human rights globally; and who ensures the full participation of diverse communities in the leadership structure and decision-making processes of the organization.

    AIUSA’s leadership is committed to having an open door policy for staff, member leaders, and activists as we work together to create an environment of equity and fairness for all.”

    It has been mentioned that the statement doesn’t really address the concerns raised by people over the weekend.

    Ferguson Town Hall w DOJ happening this Thursday, 6PM @Flo Valley! Be there to discuss quality policing.

    Cops shoot woman’s autistic son in the face, get a settlement worth $3 million more than hers. That’s not a typo.

    Two Los Angeles cops have won a $4 million settlement with the city after arguing that they were discriminated against after they fatally shot an unarmed autistic man in the face.

    That’s four times what the victim’s mother got in her own 2012 settlement: $950,000.

    The shooting took place in L.A.’s Koreatown neighborhood in 2010. Long story short: the shooting was found justified by the police department, but the city’s civilian review board found that the officers violated the department’s use-of-force policy, and that the shooting was unreasonable.

    The officers returned to work, this time with desk jobs. Two years later, the officers filed a lawsuit against the city, alleging they had been discriminated and retaliated against after the shooting. They settled that case on Friday: $2 million for one officer and $1.9 million for the other.

    Confused? Here is the logic.

    The officers alleged they faced an internal backlash in the department, since they were both Latino and the slain man was black. Requests to return to the field were denied, and the duo was repeatedly passed over for promotions and transfers, they argued.

    “I do not have confidence in their ability to perform the duties of a field officer,” Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said during the trial. “I have no immediate intention of returning them to the field.”

    He added that they “made serious tactical errors” during the fatal encounter, but he adamantly argued that the shooting was justified.

    Gregory Smith, the officers’ attorney, offered this astounding reasoning as an example of how his clients were discriminated against: a white LAPD officer who shot an unarmed Latino man was able to return to work after only a six week probation period.

    Honestly, I’ll give them discrimination, since no white officer should be returned to field duty after shooting an unarmed person either, but 2 fucking million each – seriously?

    Beware the Black Twitter? No One Is Safe From Black Twitter. Not Even Black People.

    But just because Black Twitter goes after offensive slip ups made by white people, doesn’t mean black people are exempt from the same fury.

    In the spirit of true equality, no one is safe from Black Twitter — and the proof of it lies in two recent hashtags.

    In their coverage of the finding of black man Otis Byrd hanging from a tree in Mississippi last week, CNN laid emphasis on the man’s criminal record. Relevant or not, Black Twitter didn’t take nicely to said focus when so few details about the surrounding circumstances were available to contextualize his life and death. Thus, #CNNBeLike was born.

    Likewise, recent controversial remarks on racism from black celebrities such as Common, Kanye and Raven-Symone have of late stirred a relatively similar response from Black Twitter. And boy did the #BlackCelebsBeLike sarcasm sting every bit as bad as it’s precursor.

    You can hate Black Twitter all you want — or commend it for its brutal honesty — but you have to admit they don’t play favorites.

    Examples of both at the link!

  22. rq says

    Chicago, for justice for torture victims: Call Finance Committee Members on March 25

    We have a hearing on the Burge Torture Reparations Ordinance in the Finance Committee on April 14, 2015 at 10 a.m! It will be our opportunity to present the torture survivors and our evidence to members of the Finance Committee and the public and demonstrate why this entire ordinance must be passed.

    It is important for the aldermen and women who support our ordinance to attend that meeting and publicly demonstrate their support for our ordinance with their presence and their votes.

    On Wednesday, March 25, please call the finance committee members listed below, and ask them if they plan on attending the finance committee hearing on 4.14.15 at 10 a.m. Ask them to commit to doing so.

    List of alderpeople at the link.

    Grab a drink before reading the headline. More from George Zimmerman. George Zimmerman compares his ideals to Anne Frank’s, blames Obama for woes. We got the Obama woes yesterday, but the Anne Frank ideals – that’s new.

    In the video, Zimmerman compared his ideals to those of Anne Frank, saying, “I still believe that people are truly good at heart, as Anne Frank has said, and I will put myself in any position to help another human in any way I can.”

    He said he would only feel guilty for Martin’s death if he thought he could have saved both Martin’s life and his own that night.

    “Only in a true life or death scenario can you have mental clearness to know that you cannot feel guilty for surviving,” he said. “Had I had a fraction of the thought that I could have done something differently, acted differently so that both of us who survived, then I would have heavier weight on my shoulders. That sense in the back of my mind but in all fairness you cannot as a human feel guilty for living, for surviving.”

    I commend his mental fortuity in going forth so well from murdering an unarmed teenager. Truly stunning.

    This is from April 2014, on fast food workers fighting for a higher minimum wage. The Minimum Wage Worker Strikes Back.

    Patrick has spent one third of his life working in fast food restaurants, and most of that time wondering how to get out. Between 2007 and 2008 he worked at Subway, then Popeye’s Chicken, then Red Lobster. No place paid above minimum wage no matter how long he stayed or how hard he worked, so in 2008 he took a job as a waiter at Romano’s Macaroni Grill. He hoped that a more formal chain would pay more. They started him at three dollars an hour plus tips. After two years of hoping, he quit.

    His next job was at Arby’s, where the manager assured him all workers get a raise. They did not. In 2011, he took a second job at Chipotle. For months, Patrick worked from 9:00 am — 3:00 pm at Arby’s and 4:00 pm — 11:00 pm at Chipotle. Some days, he worked 13 hours. Some weeks, he had no days off. The commutes were long, expensive and necessary. Patrick lives in an economically struggling area of St. Louis’s North County with few job opportunities. Like most who live there, he is African-American.

    Patrick would take the bus to the Arby’s in Kirkwood, an affluent St. Louis suburb, then catch another bus to the Chipotle in the suburb of University City, where he served burritos to rich students from nearby Washington University. He anxiously watched the tip jar, wondering if he would get enough for bus fare home. Sometimes he did not and walked for miles. The strain caught up with him, and he left Arby’s to work at Chipotle “full time” — or the closest to full time a fast food worker is allowed.

    “I expected a great difference when I started at Chipotle, but there was none whatsoever,” he says. Chipotle advertises itself as “food with integrity”. The organic vegetables Patrick chops, the steel tables he shines — all promote a new fast food model: forward-thinking, considerate, responsible. Except to the workers.

    “Each place I worked at is unique,” he says. “But they are no different in terms of pay.”

    Patrick still works at Chipotle. After three years, he has gotten a raise of 80 cents. He now makes $8.80 per hour, the most money he has made in his life. He is allowed to work up to 35 hours per week, but is usually assigned fewer, and he is never assigned enough to live on. If a worker gets 40 hours per week, he tells me, the manager could lose his bonus. Patrick feels sorry for the managers, some of whom sympathize with his plight. They are often not paid more than the workers and load up on hours to compensate.

    “At Arby’s the manager salary was $7.35 an hour,” he recalls. $7.35 was the Missouri minimum wage, raised in late 2013 to $7.50. “My manager worked 70 hours a week like a legit slave. He worked hard.”

    Patrick is part of an industry in which working like a “legit slave” is an aspiration. A 70-hour work week means you make enough to survive. In St. Louis, fast food is a billion dollar industry, but neither workers nor managers see much of that profit.

    More at the link. Apparently little has changed in the intervening year.

    What If Sarah Palin Were a Brain Surgeon?

    For those unfamiliar with the mood of America’s far right, casually branding the president a psychopath is exactly the sort of talk that strikes a chord—and just the thing that has made Carson a sensation in the GOP. Today the former pediatric neurosurgeon—who’s never run for elected office—is suddenly besting candidates like Jeb, Marco, and Rand in some 2016 polls and preparing to announce his campaign for the White House. As for the current resident, well, Carson is sometimes encouraged to cut him just a little slack before he hands over the keys.

    “He faces the same challenges you will face,” Williams said of Obama as he spoke. “He’s gotta convince people to believe him. That’s all he’s doing: selling his narrative.”

    “But he knows he’s telling a lie!” Carson vented. “He’s trying to sell what he thinks is not true! He’s sitting there saying, ‘These Americans are so stupid I can tell them anything.’ ”

    Since his inadvertent entry into politics two years ago, Carson has defined himself chiefly as a rhetorical bomb-thrower. He’s invoked bestiality and pedophilia while arguing against gay marriage, and earlier this month, during an appearance on CNN, he argued that homosexuality is a choice, “because a lot of people who go into prison go into prison straight, and when they come out, they’re gay.” (After an uproar, Carson issued an apology and declared he would no longer talk about gay rights.) With equally provocative flair, he’s railed against the forces of government, declaring that Obamacare is “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery” and, in fact, “is slavery, in a way.” Similarly outrageous was his contention that “we live in a Gestapo age” and that America today is “very much like Nazi Germany.”

    This time next year, in the thick of the primaries, such wild statements could sink a candidate. Not so in these hurly-burly months before the race begins in earnest. Indeed, it’s in these early days of the campaign—before armies of political professionals descend and campaign contributions skyrocket—when a familiar sort of long shot can thrive. And among a certain segment of the GOP, Ben Carson is thriving. Yes, his chances for winning may be slim—only two presidents have reached the White House without electoral experience or high military rank—but activists on the right hope that, at the very least, Carson will give voice to a conservative anger and resentment that’ll influence the rest of the GOP field. “He’s like a messenger,” Williams says of Carson. “He might not be king, but he will have the ear of the king.”

    Of course, one big way Carson differs from most quixotic right-wing ideologues is his race. Conservatives, long frustrated that their disgust with Obama and his policies is regarded as racist, no doubt find it politically advantageous—and psychologically helpful—to have a black person offering those critiques. As one GOP fund-raising guru told Time, “There’s nothing they love more than a black candidate who agrees with them on conservative views.” […]

    Sparse as Carson’s foreign-policy bona fides may be, the trip was devised to bolster them. And although he wasn’t able to secure a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Carson and his entourage—consisting of his wife, Candy; Williams; and a handful of aides and their spouses-visited the Western Wall, lit a menorah with the mayor of Jerusalem, and drove to the Golan Heights for what was billed as a “geopolitical strategic briefing.” But the three members of the Israeli Defense Forces assigned to give it-a portly male lieutenant colonel in the medical corps and two twentysomething female soldiers from the public-affairs unit—didn’t seem to be at risk of revealing classified information. Adding to the low-key vibe, the briefing took place at an observation deck on Mount Bental, a popular tourist destination with a gift shop and coin-operated binoculars, where a group of high school students on a field trip were making a ruckus.

    “Perhaps we can move over here,” the lieutenant colonel suggested, steering Carson’s group to a quieter spot to discuss the nearby Syrian civil war. He claimed that most of the Islamist fighters weren’t Syrian but came from Morocco and Europe. “It’s just like the troublemakers in Ferguson,” Carson said, betraying a habit of wedging the unfamiliar into a context he understands.

    The lieutenant colonel tried to direct Carson’s attention to a Syrian city in the distance, where some of the war’s fiercest fighting has raged. But Carson seemed just as interested in his own location—and whether he was safely under the cover of Israel’s vaunted missile-defense system. “Is this area right here protected by the Iron Dome?” he wondered. […]

    But long before he was a mega-star to the Tea Party, Carson was a bona fide hero in the black community. He grew up poor in Detroit, raised by a single mother who had dropped out of school after the third grade and was married at 13. Nonetheless, she required her two sons to read two books a week and write reports (never mind that she could barely read them). Her boys quickly became star students. Not that there weren’t other challenges. Carson had a terrible temper. When he was in high school, he got into an argument with a friend over the radio station they were listening to. In a flash of anger, Carson tried to plunge a camping knife into his friend’s stomach. But the knife hit the boy’s belt buckle instead and snapped in half. As Carson tells it, the moment was a turning point. He ran home and prayed for patience. “God heard my deep cries of anguish,” Carson later wrote in his memoir Gifted Hands. “A feeling of lightness flowed over me, and I knew a change of heart had taken place. I felt different. I was different.”

    Carson eventually went to Yale and then on to med school at Michigan. In 1984, when he was just 33, he became the head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, the first African-American to run a division at the prestigious hospital. He quickly earned a reputation as a daring surgeon, and in 1987 Carson performed one of the most storied operations in medical history by separating a pair of Siamese twins joined at the head. It was the first time such a surgery had been successful, and it made international headlines. “I knew that my life was going to change after that, because the media isn’t completely stupid,” Carson says now. “They’d start looking at my background, and they’d say, ‘Whaaaaaat?’ ” He soon received the first of his sixty-two honorary degrees. Not long ago, I overheard a woman ask Carson if he still had roots in Michigan. “My roots there are there’s a high school in Detroit named after me,” Carson replied.

    For all of Carson’s medical renown, his greatest fame came in the African-American community. Even as a young resident, Carson spent many of his precious few hours outside the operating room visiting inner-city Baltimore schools. “I can’t even count how many times I saw Ben Carson when I was a kid,” the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who grew up in inner-city Baltimore in the ’80s and ’90s, told me. “Any time anyone wanted to bring out any sort of inspirational figure for young black kids, especially young black boys, in Baltimore, you turned to Ben Carson.” In those days, Carson and his family were something like a real-life version of the Cosbys: The doctor’s three sons played around town in a string quartet with Candy called the Carson Four.

    He started an educational foundation to help black students, and across the country Carson’s memoir Gifted Hands—which was later turned into a TV movie starring Cuba Gooding Jr.—became required reading for African-American kids. “My mother gave me a copy,” recalls Joshua DuBois, the Obama White House’s former director of faith-based initiatives, “and said, ‘This man is a symbol of how you need to be looking at your life.’ ” […]

    Since embarking on his political journey, Carson has received more than just applause. He’s generated plenty of cash. The Draft Carson Super PAC, which was founded in late 2013 by the conservative activist John Philip Sousa IV (yes, the composer’s great-grandson), has raised more than $13 million from over 150,000 donors who want to see Carson run for president. (By comparison, the pro-Clinton Super PAC Ready for Hillary raised $9 million last year.) Meanwhile, the American Legacy PAC enlisted Carson to fund-raise for efforts to repeal Obamacare; since the program was launched in early 2014, it’s brought in $6 million. “The fire hose got turned on, and the money came so fast,” says Mike Murray, American Legacy’s founder and a Republican direct-mail guru who’s worked with Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, and a host of other leading conservatives. “In terms of direct marketing, I’ve never seen anything like Dr. Carson.”

    Terry Giles, a trial lawyer with no political experience whom Carson will tap to run his campaign, predicts his candidate will have financial resources not typically available to far-right challengers. He expects that, between the various conservative causes Carson has lent his name to (or had his name appropriated by), the campaign will have a mailing list with upwards of 2 million potential supporters on it—all of whom have expressed their interest in Carson in the past two years. “If I can get $100 from 1.5 million people,” Giles told me, “I’ll have $150 million for the first four primaries, and we’ll be extremely competitive.”

    While it’s true that Carson possesses rare attributes his opponents can’t claim, the doctor’s résumé is glaringly thin in certain spots. But Carson believes his lack of political experience is an asset, not a failing. “We’re at a point in time where it’s been demonstrated fairly dramatically that political experience doesn’t seem to help a whole lot and perhaps may be hurtful,” he told me.

    I pressed him on this point. What if Barack Obama, I posited with a bit of hyperbole, decided to change careers and said that he now wanted to be a neurosurgeon—and, what’s more, that he wanted his first operation to be separating conjoined twins? Did Carson see any parallels between that hypothetical and his situation? “No,” he said emphatically. “Just the fact that you would ask that question tells me that you don’t understand all that’s involved in becoming a neurosurgeon. There’s so much more than becoming a political figure, it’s not even in the same ballpark.”

    There’s quite a bit more at the link. None of it particularly encouraging.

    Albert Einstein in 1946 speaking of white supremacy and racism towards black people,and I quote the very end: “Your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force; and in the white man’s quest for wealth and an easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery. The modern prejudice against Negroes is the result of the desire to maintain this unworthy condition.”

    If prisoners can work for companies while incarcerated, why not when they are out and trying to restart their life? #WSUJustice @nvlevy

    Relatedly, Protesters, former inmates want the St. Louis workhouse to close

    The U.S. Department of Justice reported in 2013 that the workhouse had one of the highest rates of sexual misconduct among jails in the country, according to a national survey. Of 220 inmates who responded from St. Louis, 6.3 percent said they were sexually victimized at least once. Only jails in Indianapolis and Baltimore had worse ratings.

    There have been escapes in recent years and more complaints about inadequate medical care. The American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri said it sued the city of St. Louis and Correctional Medical Services, or Corizon, a medical care provider at the jail, for the “deliberate indifference to a serious medical condition” for an HIV-positive inmate. The case was dismissed in 2012 as part of a settlement agreement.

    Dale Glass, the city’s corrections commissioner, says he essentially wants what the protesters want.

    “I’d like to see less people in jail,” he said. But he added that if employment, treatment, medication and other needs aren’t met, “it’s just a wish. It will never happen.”

    Under his watch since he began as commissioner in 2012, the workhouse population has dropped from an average of about 1,100 people a day to 600. The city is pursuing a MacArthur Foundation grant that would help further decrease the jail population.

    Maggie Crane, spokeswoman for Mayor Francis Slay, said the workhouse passes city standards. She said a grievance policy allows inmates to file complaints.

    She said the workhouse won’t be shut down soon.

    “I don’t think the people of St. Louis would be happy with us if we did, except for the dozen people outside today,” she said.

    Of the 616 inmates at the jail Monday, most of them were being held on state felony charges, the remainder for state misdemeanors and a few ordinance violations.

    “People are saying city, city, city,” Crane said. “This is state, state, state.”

    Still, she reiterated that the workhouse is not the “Four Seasons” yet meets necessary standards.

    “It’s not a place you should strive to be,” she said. “It is a jail.”

    That seems to excuse a lot, if you read the stories of those who came out of there at the start of the article.

  23. rq says

    Man accused of driving Maserati toward police fatally shot

    Police trying to serve a warrant fatally shot a man in a Maserati near a suburban Atlanta shopping center.

    Smyrna police officer Ed Cason tells WXIA-TV (http://on.11alive.com/1CMl95e ) that Smyrna and Cobb County police were trying to serve a man with a probation violation warrant Tuesday afternoon and the man got into the white luxury car and drove toward them. Footage from local television stations showed the white car with multiple bullet holes had come to a stop in a grassy area near a parking lot.

    The man’s identity hasn’t been released.

    The shooting northwest of Atlanta comes a day after a robbery suspect fired at a Gwinnett County police officer at a Norcross apartment complex. The suspect fled on foot and the officer wasn’t injured.

    But the stories already contradict:
    Witness: Man in Maserati was not driving at police when they shot him dead

    A woman who was inside the store where the shooting occurred tells Channel 2’s Rachel Stockman what she saw before shots were fired.

    No text at the site, just video.

  24. rq says

    Some twitter commentary:
    #NicholasThomas. 25. Killed by police in Smyrna, GA today.

    There were 4 Cobb County officers and 3 Smyrna police involved in the killing of #NicholasThomas today. 7 officers. America.
    The police were serving #NicholasThomas a warrant and then killed him — they “feared for their lives.” He wasn’t driving towards them.
    And note how every news article prominently notes that #NicholasThomas was driving a Maserati. That is intentional, it functions here.
    And there are no bullets in the windshield. But the police claim they shot him as he drove towards them. #NicholasThomas
    Freaking parking tickets. Serving warrant for parking tickets. They kill this 24 yr old for parking tickets.

  25. rq says

    RAW INTERVIEW: Mother of man shot, killed by police speaks, again – just video!

    Kendrick Lamar Played A Surprise Concert On A Reebok Flatbed Truck Last Night

    If you wanted to see Kendrick Lamar play his first live show since the release of To Pimp A Butterfly, you had to run to catch it. Literally. Last night, Kendrick tweeted a location in L.A. and said to meet him there. When people got there, they were greeted with the sight of Kendrick, with his band, on the back of a Reebok-sponsored flatbed truck. (Kendrick did a commercial for the shoe company last year.) As he performed, the truck drove slowly, and fans ran for 5K to keep up with him. Reebok’s cameras filmed the whole thing, naturally. Ab-Soul guested. Check out some video evidence below. […]

    According to Twitter reports, L.A. cops shut the show down shortly after Kendrick said, “Fuck the police.”

    Yup.

    Things intersect. Transgender homecoming king Blake Brockington dies from apparent suicide

    Brockington chose the name “Blake” because it sounded masculine and came to him in a dream. But his family didn’t take his transition well and he moved in with a foster family after he became open about his identity.

    “My family feels like this is a decision I made,” Brockington told the Charlotte Observer. “They think, ‘You’re already black, why would you want to draw more attention to yourself?’ But it’s not a decision. It is who I am. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”

    Telling his family about being transgender was the hardest part of the transition. “That was single-handedly the hardest part of my trans journey,” Brockington said. “Really hateful things were said on the Internet. It was hard. I saw how narrow-minded the world really is.”

    Police no longer believe #OtisByrd, a man found hanging in a tree in Mississippi, committed suicide. They are ‘investigating’ a lynching.

    Guess what colour she is: EXCLUSIVE: L.I. woman says psych ward doctors believed she was delusional for insisting Obama follows her on Twitter

    A Long Island woman’s insistence that President Obama follows her on Twitter made doctors at the Harlem Hospital psych ward think she was delusional and suffering from bipolar disorder — but she was actually telling the truth, a lawsuit charges.

    Kam Brock’s frightening eight-day “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” ordeal at the mental facility included forced injections of powerful sedatives and demands she down doses of lithium, medical records obtained through her suit filed in Manhattan Federal Court show.

    They also indicate that doctors didn’t believe the leader of the free world followed her on Twitter — though @BarackObama follows over 640,000 accounts, including hers. They were also skeptical she worked at a bank, records show.

    “I told (the doctor) Obama follows me on Twitter to show her the type of person I am. I’m a good person, a positive person. Obama follows positive people!” Brock, whose Twitter handle is @AkilahBrock, said.

    A “master treatment plan” from Harlem Hospital backs up the Astoria Bank worker’s story.

    “Objective: Patient will verbalize the importance of education for employment and will state that Obama is not following her on Twitter,” the document reads.

    It also notes “patient’s weaknesses: inability to test reality, unemployment.”

    Adding insult to insanity, the hospital hit Brock with a bill of $13,637.10, she charges in her suit seeking unspecified damages.

    The whole situation is terrifying.

    Ah, and Nicholas Thomas – you thought he was a good kind of guy? Think again! Man shot dead by police had history of assaulting cops. YES, the victim-blaming is strong.

    The man shot and killed by police as he drove a Maserati toward them at a shopping plaza in Vinings has a history of assaulting police officers.

    According to court records, 23-year-old Nicholas Thomas was convicted in 2014 of aggravated assault on a peace officer and attempting to elude capture. On Mar. 21, 2013, a Kennesaw State University police officer attempted to pull over Thomas for speeding; Thomas accelerated and drove at the officer.

    He was also convicted of driving with a suspended license, no proof of insurance, and using a license plate that didn’t match his car.

    The fatal shooting happened a Goodyear Service Center near the intersection of Cumberland Parkway and Paces Ferry Road at around 1:30 p.m. Tuesday.

    Thomas’s parents said they are certain that police had no justification for shooting and killing their son. Police say their initial investigation indicates officers feared for their lives as they said the car was aimed straight at them.

    More at the link. It is unclear whether Nicholas drove at the officers, or whether he was backing up towards the officers. But did the officers shoot too soon? Oh yes.

  26. says

    Well, and I’d like to see details on that 2004 conviction before I’m willing to say it’s a pattern: anyone wanna give odds on whether he actually “drove at officers” back then, given how often that is accused without grounds by police? We keep seeing them SAY it happened, when nonpolice witnesses say it didn’t.

  28. Pteryxx says

    He was wearing green and everything. *headshake*

    Linked from TMM’s #27:

    At NBC, Jason Johnson wrote an op-ed about the heartbreaking audio of Johnson screaming “I go to UVA, you fucking racists” during his arrest:

    Here’s Johnson’s piece about dogwhistling the myth of the Perfect Victim and “I go to UVA”: NBC

    “I go to UVA” is a nasty little golden ticket, born of a frothy mix of classism and institutional racism, and it’s doled out to only those certain African Americans that ventured into the hallowed white spaces deemed off limits just a generation before (UVA didn’t integrate until 1972). I used it exactly twice, once while being harassed by a shop owner at a store across the street from where Martese Johnson was beaten, and once more when I was being stared down by a cop that pulled me over.

    I was lucky it worked.

    “I go to UVA” is used sparingly, as a black person you know that at best it bestows a few minutes of privilege upon you that white kids at UVA take for granted. The image of Martese Johnson beaten and bloodied, screaming “I go to UVA” exposes the greatest, deepest fear that every single one of us had at UVA — that nothing protects us. That no matter how well-spoken you are, what clubs you’re a part of, or who you’re with, you can be infantilized, emasculated, and stripped of all your hard work, and public status in the blink of an eye.

    There are no “perfect victims” in a war driven by white supremacist (and possibly misogynist) rage and police power. Even if Martese Johnson WAS using a fake ID (he wasn’t) or was drunk (he wasn’t) that wouldn’t justify the brutality of what he experienced, or call into question the subsequent protests and investigations that have happened since.

    If the Department of Health and human services determined that Eric Garner died of a heart attack does that mean Erica Garner is avoiding the truth when she dons a “I Can’t Breathe” T-Shirt? This is the horrifying sobering reality of what happened at UVA. That no amount of “talks” or preparation can keep you safe from racial rage whether it is backed up by a gun and a badge or just a bad attitude.

    I went to UVA too.

    And I shudder thinking about how foolish I was as an undergrad, thinking that granted me any special protection, that I would be treated as an equal.

  29. Pteryxx says

    Why women of color often won’t go to the police after being sexually assaulted: Guardian

    If we report our assaults to police, we risk being retraumatized not only by the inhumane process of reliving a violent experience through sharing its gory details – but also by the violence of the criminal justice system itself, which treats rape victims like suspects. Worse yet, the police themselves commit assault with impunity; often, they target black women in particular, knowing our existence at the intersections of racism and misogyny make crimes against us far less likely to be investigated.

    To be a “good rape victim” is to immediately report your assault to the police (even knowing you will likely never see “justice”), but to be a good black person is to avoid the police entirely because your life quite literally depends on it. The tightrope walk is impossible.

    That’s why black anti-sexual assault activists, like survivor and feminist writer Wagatwe Wanjuki, have long argued that survivors should not be forced to report their assaults to police in order for their stories to be believed.

    That’s important because as cities and campuses examine their handling of sexual assaults, they often assume survivors should or must report to police.

    Plenty of links in the article. One to Jezebel in 2014: When You’re a Black Woman, You’re Never Good Enough to Be a Victim

    I’d sometimes felt ridiculous about that [personal] story until reading about the Holtzclaw case — how almost none of his alleged black victims reported him, convinced no one would believe them. Or care. (Holtzclaw’s role as a police officer obviously intensified to this fear.) In their stories, I recognized the shared sense, or more accurately, awareness, that although black women can be victimized — are more likely than their white peers to be victimized, in fact — we are rarely acknowledged as victims. Rape culture forces all women to prove they don’t provoke sexual violence; the hypersexualization of black women pretends their very nature invites it. With the awareness of this image comes the often infuriating need to, consciously and just as often unconsciously, navigate the world with it as a guide.

    […]

    Rape is vastly underreported across the board, but African-American women are significantly less likely to report than white women are. In fact, a Department of Justice study found that while one out of six white women report sexual assault, just one out of 16 black women do. For many of Holtzclaw’s alleged victims, the added complexities of class and previous arrests made the choice of of keeping quiet less threatening than being stalked and sexually battered. (Holtzclaw reportedly assaulted some of his victims multiple times.) Lots of people will dwell on this — it’s a wink-nudge way of talking around race — while ignoring the fact that there are black women in every sphere, in every class, in every town, who wrestle with the reality that our bodies and lives are simply valued less. It is an incredibly sad fact, with long historical roots. A heartbreaking truth that, sadly and surely, Daniel Holtzclaw knew all too well.

    That led me to this 2012 piece in Forbes:

    Robinson points out that in studies of Black women’s sexuality conducted by psychologist Dr. Gail Elizabeth Wyatt, half of the women who had experienced childhood sexual abuse never told anyone and less than 5 percent ever got counseling. “African-American women are raped at a higher rate than White women, and are less likely to report it. We have suffered in silence far too long,” she says.

    The movement to end sexual violence in the lives of Black women in the U.S. is inextricably connected to the Civil Rights movement. We cannot effectively discuss the issue of sexual assault in Black communities without acknowledging the direct war that was waged against Black women through rape during slavery and the Jim Crow era.

    We must also honor the legacy of anti-rape activism.

    Although Rosa Parks is remembered as the NAACP organizer who sparked the 1955 bus boycott and helped give birth to the Civil Rights Movement, she was an anti-rape activist long before the boycott. “Decades before radical feminists in the Women’s Movement urged rape survivors to ‘speak out,’ African American women’s public protests galvanized local, national and even international outrage and sparked larger campaigns for racial justice and human dignity,” says Dr. Danielle L. McGuire, author of At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance (A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power).

  30. Pteryxx says

    and Oklahoma approving a bill to execute prisoners by nitrogen gas hypoxia (!) without any debate: Guardian:

    The bill, along with a similar proposal in the Oklahoma house, would allow the state to use nitrogen gas – which when inhaled leads to hypoxia, the gradual lack of oxygen in the blood – if lethal injection is ruled unconstitutional. Lethal injection would remain the state’s primary execution method, but nitrogen gas would be the state’s first backup method ahead of the electric chair, which the state has not used since 1966, and a firing squad, which has never been used in an Oklahoma execution.

    Neither the house nor senate version of the plan has been publicly debated, and that lack of open discussion continued on Tuesday when the senate judiciary committee voted 8-0 for the house bill without debate or testimony.

    The legislation, which has already been approved in the house, now moves to the full senate. The senate version has already been passed by the senate and is pending in a house committee.

    The co-author of the legislation, representative Mike Ritze, did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment on Tuesday.

    Ryan Kiesel, executive director of Oklahoma’s American Civil Liberties Union chapter, said lawmakers are taking the wrong approach.

    “It’s a fool’s errand to even engage in this utterly bizarre process of searching out new ways to take people’s lives against their will,” Kiesel said, noting that nitrogen gas is not used by any other states in executions. “We would be experimenting on the condemned using a process that has been banned in many states for the euthanasia of animals.”

  31. rq says

    Pteryxx @30
    That’s almost as bad as reintroducing the firing squad. I think that was Utah?

    +++

    @11AliveNews And police who murdered #NicholasThomas had history of violence against people of color. What’s your point? #blacklivesmatter
    Yes, they’re going after his reputation. As many have mentioned on twitter, it’s 2015.
    In 2014, #NicholasThomas was apprehended alive.

    50 years ago today, 25,000 complete five-day march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights .

    There used to be a Confederate flag flying over the Alabama capitol. SPLC changed that: Holmes v. Hunt

    It took three lawsuits and a forgotten piece of legislation, but lawmakers and lawyers finally forced an Alabama governor to stop flying the Confederate battle flag over the capitol dome.

    Many saw it as a symbol of oppression, though for some it was a symbol of pride. The Confederate battle flag had flown over the Alabama state capitol since 1963. Raised by then-Governor George Wallace, it flew as a symbol of his defiance during the struggles of the 1960s to end segregation. Nearly thirty years later, the Center won a lawsuit to remove the flag from the capitol dome.

    The lawsuit was filed on behalf of three African-American state lawmakers who had made several attempts to get the flag removed, including two prior lawsuits. In 1992, using a forgotten statute enacted in 1891, the Center’s lawyers and the black legislators succeeded.

    The 1891 statute required that the only flags that could legally be flown over the state capitol were the state and national flags. Therefore, the Confederate flag had to be removed.

    The state court judge agreed with the Center’s interpretation of the statute and enjoined then-Governor Guy Hunt from flying the Confederate battle flag. The governor appealed but the appeal was later dropped.

    There’s a new website up, called shutdownthecourts.com. First information up: Ferguson is Just the Start —
    We Need Change in All the Municipal Courts    , worth following.

    Ferguson and Dellwood have fired Judge Brockmeyer, Dellwood is providing amnesty, and the Missouri Supreme Court has moved all Ferguson cases to circuit court. We know that Ferguson is not unique — that all the municipal courts in St. Louis are just like Ferguson, if not worse. We need to keep pushing until all municipal prosecutors, all municipal judges, all municipalities and Steve Stenger agree to real changes in the municipal courts.

    For months now, legal groups such as Arch City Defenders, SLU School of Law and Equal Justice Under Law have filed class action lawsuits against Ferguson and Jennings municipal courts. The DOJ and Ferguson Commission have both highlighted necessary reforms to the municipal courts. Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE) has engaged in months of protest around the municipal courts and recently did two #ShutDownTheCourts actions where citizens blocked the doors to the Pine Lawn courts. MORE recently released a report demanding a moratorium on bench warrants until significant reforms have been made.

    We know with a little more pushing we can get to a point where all judges, all prosecutors and all municipalities are required to make true structural change in the court system. This website is a resource for planning #ShutDownTheCourts protests and other future actions to pressure the municipal courts to stop their racist ways. It will be updated regularly.

    More information on events and actions at the link!

  32. rq says

    Canadians, here’s one for you:
    Trudeau says our racist past haunts our present. He’s right.

    “These are troubling times,” Trudeau said. “Across Canada, and especially in my home province, Canadians are being encouraged by their government to be fearful of one another.

    “For me, this is both unconscionable and a real threat to Canadian liberty. For me, it is basic truth that prime ministers of liberal democracies ought not to be in the business of telling women what they can and cannot wear on their head during public ceremonies.”

    “You can dislike the niqab,” Trudeau went on to say. “You can hold it up as a symbol of oppression. You can try to convince your fellow citizens that it is a choice they ought not to make. This is a free country. Those are your rights.

    “But those who would use the state’s power to restrict women’s religious freedom and freedom of expression indulge the very same repressive impulse that they profess to condemn. It is a cruel joke to claim you are liberating people from oppression by dictating in law what they can and cannot wear.”

    At this point, the columnists-who-know-what-is-best-for-us started to spin out because Trudeau mentioned many of our past sins with respect to minorities in this country. They told us that, somehow, we should just avoid talking about this history when we talk about treatment of minorities today. […]

    Surely we can’t simply ignore our past in dealing with issues we face today — particularly since the events Trudeau mentions didn’t happen all that long ago. Many of the serious examples of Canadian intolerance he cited happened within my (admittedly long) lifetime.

    I was not alive 100 years ago, of course, at the time of the disgraceful Komagata Maru affair, which saw 340 Sikhs, 24 Muslims and 12 Hindus — all British subjects — refused entry into Canada at Vancouver and sent back to India.

    I was very much alive in 1942 when Japanese-Canadians were expelled from the British Columbia coast and interned without charges or trials, their property seized and sold for peanuts.

    (I pause here to admit, as I did a few weeks ago, that my father “bought” a factory from the “trustee” for the Japanese at 10 cents on the dollar, and with this “loot” I was educated and raised. No doubt my conscience bothers me, but in the words of Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio, “Always let your conscience be your guide.”) […]

    When I was a boy in the 1940s, there was a popular restaurant chain in Vancouver called White Lunch. This, courtesy of Vancouver-based AHA Media:

    A number of White Lunch restaurants operated in the city (and) included 865 Granville, 737 West Pender and 714 West Pender. The White Lunch name reflected a policy of serving and hiring only white people. The civic government reinforced racism in the culinary industry by passing a 1937 ordinance that prohibited white women from working in Chinatown.

    Whites believed they had an appointed place in the Darwinist order and needed to protect white women from ‘lascivious Orientals.’ A delegation of 16 waitresses from three restaurants marched to City Hall on Sept. 24, 1937 to protest the ordinance but the mayor refused them a hearing. Restaurant proprietors had their licences revoked if they failed to observe the civic ruling.

    Incidentally, Canadians of Chinese extraction didn’t get the vote until 1947. Japanese-Canadians didn’t get the vote until 1949 and it wasn’t until 1960 that First Nations members were allowed to cast a ballot.

    Most of us can remember when some Canadians thoughtlessly overreacted because Sikhs wearing turbans were enrolled in the RCMP. Then we had the disgraceful and ridiculous spectacle in 1993 of Sikhs being denied admission to the Canadian Legion because wearing a turban was tendentiously said to be “disrespectful to the Queen.”

    It wasn’t until the 1970s that the courts began to give First Nations their rights; only very recently have these rights have actually materialized. Their struggle continues. […]

    Here’s how Trudeau referenced this event in his speech: “We should all shudder to hear the same rhetoric that led to a ‘none is too many’ immigration policy toward Jews in the ’30s and ’40s being used to raise fears against Muslims today.”

    The wording of that statement is critically important, given a great many critics — including NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair— have accused Trudeau of conflating the treatment of Muslims with the Holocaust.

    He did nothing of the sort. He didn’t mention the Holocaust, directly or by inference, and has not mentioned it since, despite the baiting efforts of the Tories and now Mulcair and the NDP.

    The policy he mentioned predated the Holocaust. The Jews in question were fleeing because of Kristallnacht — the violent anti-Jewish pogroms which took place on Nov. 9 and 10, 1938, throughout Germany.

    If anyone in May 1939 had predicted that a civilized nation would murder some six million people — including the mentally ill and disabled, Roma people and homosexuals — he would have been considered mad.

    Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney did raise the Holocaust the day after the Trudeau speech when he said that Bill C-51 seeks to criminalize pro-terrorist speech because “the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers, it began with words.”

    Defence Minister Jason Kenney, who as immigration minister introduced the niqab ban during citizenship ceremonies in 2011, joined in, tweeting this jab: “It is obscene to conflate the essentially public nature of the citizenship oath with an anti-Semitic bar on refugees fleeing the Holocaust.”

    But Trudeau did nothing of the sort. The responsibility for raising of the temperature of this debate rests entirely with the Harper government.

    After this long, 100-year odyssey from the Komagata Maru to Harper, it seemed that we’d reached the point where most Canadians truly were a gentle and tolerant people. Our maturity allowed both the free speech to criticize and the freedom to do that which does no harm. Then disaster struck in the person of Stephen Harper — and a government with a petty, mean-spirited and vindictive approach to those who don’t agree with them. […]

    During the Second World War, in Kerrisdale where I lived, people boycotted Barers Bakery because of its German name. (It was owned by a Dutch couple.) The name of the German Shepherd dog breed was changed to Alsatian. And we know what happened to Japanese-Canadians. This is the sort of thing prime ministers are supposed to recognize and take care to avoid.

    Let me put it plainly — the Harper government has, with full knowledge of the consequences, taken a public position in inflammatory language at a time when they knew, or ought to have known, this would bring out the worst in some people. Under these circumstances, how can one possibly criticize Trudeau for reminding us of where we have been in our less attractive moments and urging us to remember our history in dealing with human rights today?

    Perhaps this was a matter of political opportunism. Frankly, I don’t care — because the message was important on its own terms.

    My hope is that we all calm down now and go back to being what we were before this scary government took over the reins of power — decent, caring, tolerant people, conscious not only of our own rights, but those of others.

    Police behaving like police: Dozens protest rough arrest of man by Inkster police

    Detroit resident Floyd Dent was pulled over after officers observed him driving through an area of high drug activity, said Dent’s attorney, Greg Rohl.

    “He’s physically extracted from the vehicle, he’s thrown to the ground, and he’s pummeled by no fewer than 16 head shots, three kicks, and four Tasers, implemented by various officers,” Rohl said.

    The protest Wednesday was organized by the Michigan chapter of the National Action Network, led by the Rev. Charles Williams II.

    “We’re here for one reason: These officers need to go. They need to be fired,” Williams said. “Not suspended with pay, not allowed to sit at desks and get paid by the people.”

    After about a half hour of marching, protesters entered the police station around 11:30 a.m. and filled the small lobby.

    Chief Vicki Yost led the crowd back outside and briefly walked with the group as Williams demanded the officers be fired and members of the crowd called for a federal investigation.

    “I am encouraging people to let the investigation run its course,” Yost said, as the crowd gathered around her. “Then we will act accordingly.”

    The Michigan State Police are investigating the arrest, Lt. Michael Shaw said Tuesday.

    A racist pro-lifer compared abortion to slavery, but I’m looking for something to be offended about. Yeah, that happened on twitter. … Yeah. Black people’s oppression just gets co-opted right and left, eh? Lynching for animal rights, slavery for abortion… Fuck that shit.

    A white man getting a hairstyle associated with African hair makes him “hard” (ie aggressive). What racist bullshit. An ad for Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart’s new movie, Get Hard. Apparently a tasteless comedy about life in prison? Woo.


    Black Woman Locked In Psych Ward For 8 Days Because Cops Couldn’t Believe She’s A Businesswoman    . That’s the same story above. And yes, they charged her for the stay. Hey, luxuries like personalized psych care don’t come cheap, whether you need it or not.
    I hope she wins her suit.

  33. rq says

    Just going to put this here and then do the rest later.
    Oklahoma student who led racist chant to meet black leaders

    Stephen Jones, an attorney for the now-disbanded local fraternity, said Wednesday that an agreement has been reached with the university that calls for no members of the fraternity to be expelled. Jones declined to comment further about the details of the agreement, and OU officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the deal.

    Pittman said she has arranged for Pettit to meet with black students, elected officials, local pastors and civil rights leaders in Oklahoma.

    “I wanted him to be educated on some of the struggles they’ve endured,” Pittman said. “I think that will enlighten him and give him a new perspective on a culture that he is completely unaware of.”

    Among those scheduled to attend the private meeting is Marilyn Luper-Hildreth, the daughter of the late civil rights leader Clara Luper, an Oklahoma City schoolteacher who led sit-ins at segregated Oklahoma City drugstore counters in the late 1950s.

    After the meeting, Pittman said Pettit also will speak at an afternoon press conference at a Baptist church on the city’s predominantly black northeast side.

    The lawyer for the group also made sure to emphasize that the students who were expelled actually left the university first. I guess this is that difference between someone being fired and them writing a resignation, huh?
    Anyway, some commentary, incl. some quotes from the press conference. Take note, future politicians, this is how you become a media darling.
    Only in America does white privilege allow you to sing about hanging black folk & then go on an apology tour meeting civil rights leaders.
    I am legit stunned at the arrogance of this former SAE member to go around apologizing to famous black folk. Stunned. What a power demonstration.
    This SAE kid should be in anti-racism trainings coupled with trainings on white supremacy and dominant culture dynamics. Apology tour? Nah.
    Like, I’m literally speechless as he reads this statement about how the SAE kid is sorry at a PRESS CONFERENCE. People also noted how the black leaders are standing behind him like an obedient line of subordinates.
    “Who you saw in that video is not who I am, is not who I was raised to be.” – SAE chanter Levi at the press conference WHO WAS IT, THEN, LEVI, huh??? WHO WAS IT?
    (more next comment – this kid young man says a lot of silly stuff)

  34. rq says

    “From this point forward, I will be the leader who I should’ve been on that bus.” – SAE kid Levi
    It is unreal that this SAE chanter kid is having a press conference about how HE has been impacted. I mean, c’mon.
    This SAE kid has had some intense media coaching. America.
    “If I ever see racism in any form, I believe I now have the courage and meaning behind those words to refute that behavior.” – SAE kid
    He also said “I’m not here to talk about what happened on that bus, I’m here to apologize for what I did.” Spot the omission. :P Okay, Other updates later, but this was just outrageous enough for my morning.

    That, and this: Unarmed Floyd Dent, beaten by Michigan police. This is American policing. Graphic. Labelled Rodney King 2015 by twitter. (Article on the protests above in comment 32.)
    Here’s HuffPo on it, too: ‘I’m Lucky To Be Living’: Video Shows Cops Brutally Beating Unarmed Black Man In Michigan

    The Michigan State Police officers said they pulled over 57-year-old Floyd Dent for violating a traffic violation in January. The dashcam video, which was obtained by WDIV and released on Tuesday, shows Dent opening the door to his car only to be met by an officer who withdrew his gun and aimed it directly at him. Officers dragged Dent out of the vehicle, forced him face down to the ground and proceeded to place him in a chokehold.

    “I’m lucky to be living. I think they was trying to kill me, especially when they had choked me,” Dent told WDIV. “I mean, I was on my last breath. I kept telling the officer, ‘Please, I can’t breathe.’”

    According to police reports obtained by the TV station, the primary officer served 16 punches to Dent’s head, leaving his face bloody and body bruised. More officers arrived to the scene and attempted to place Dent in handcuffs. The video shows Dent attempting to cover his face to lessen the impact of the punches, while one officer uses a stun gun on him three times and a third tries to place him in handcuffs.

    Police said they pulled Dent over for failing to make a complete halt at a stop sign, and later followed his Cadillac down the street through one of the state’s predominantly black neighborhoods.

    Dent, who was unarmed and has no criminal record, said he was not intentionally trying to get away, and video shows him driving at the same speed while cops followed behind him. Dent said he did not immediately stop because he was unaware he did anything wrong — and he has maintained the same argument.

    “When the overhead lights came on, I looked and said, ‘Wow, are they stopping me?’” Dent said. “So I just kept going until I realized that they were really stopping me.”

    “The next thing I know, the officer runs up to me with his gun, you know, talking about blowing my head off,” Dent continued. “Then he grabbed me out of the car and started beating on me, you know. I just couldn’t believe it.”

    Dent said he had his hands out after opening his car door. Officers said they did not see both hands and claim Dent yelled, “I’ll kill you.” However, there is no recorded audio from the incident, WDIV reported.

    “You have six responding vehicles. Not one officer is equipped with a microphone to take down this alleged threat,” Dent’s attorney, Greg Rohl, told the local news station.

    The primary officer claimed he was protecting himself, according to WDIV. Officers said that Dent, who later said he feared he would die as a result of the chokehold, resisted arrest and bit the officer in the arm, which resulted in the series of significant blows to Dent’s head. However, no photographs are available of the alleged bite marks and the officer did not seek medical attention, WDIV reported.

    Can you imagine how terrified he must have been in that situation – a chokehold? And so he bit the officer – and got even worse for it. Yes, I’m glad he’s alive.

  35. says

    rq @32:

    A racist pro-lifer compared abortion to slavery, but I’m looking for something to be offended about. Yeah, that happened on twitter. … Yeah. Black people’s oppression just gets co-opted right and left, eh? Lynching for animal rights, slavery for abortion… Fuck that shit.

    Tangentially related to the above, here’s an Addicting Info article in response to an angry tirade against men who take offense by right wing loon Steven Crowder (and here’s my response).

  36. rq says

    Interlude: Sports! Black Women Sweep the NCAA D1 Swimming Championship

    History was made at the NCAA Women’s Division 1 Swimming and Diving Championship when the gold, silver and bronze medals were taken home by three black women: Simone Manuel, Lia Neal, and Natalie Hinds, respectively. At Saturday’s competition Manuel and Neal of Stanford University, and Hinds of University of Florida became the first black women to sweep the D1 swimming championship.

    Well done!

    An exoneration happens every three days in America. What this really says about our justice system – that it’s deeply flawed?

    According to the National Registry of Exonerations at the University of Michigan, 1,569 men and women in the United States, most of them African American, have been completely exonerated after being wrongfully convicted and sent to prison. The number of people exonerated for wrongful convictions actually broke a record high in 2014 with 125 exonerations, including six people who were actually on death row awaiting execution.

    Less than every three days in our country, some man or woman is released back into society after spending a tragic portion of their life behind bars for a crime they never committed. Few injustices can compare to the horror of spending one hour in prison for something you didn’t do.

    Ricky Jackson of Ohio spent 341,640 hours, or 39 years, behind bars before he was exonerated. Just a teenager when he was convicted, he was nearly a senior citizen when he was released.

    Jonathan Fleming was serving the 25th year of a 25-year sentence when he was finally exonerated after a wrongful conviction.

    Glenn Ford, on death row for 30 years in Louisiana, was 64 years old when he was released and was exonerated. Stricken with lung cancer, he was only expected to live a few more months.

    One study determined that nearly 10,000 people are likely to be wrongfully convicted for serious crimes annually. Another study estimates that as many as 340 people are likely to have been executed in the United States before they were properly exonerated.

    This is a travesty. Anyone who says otherwise is sick. […]

    Our justice system is altogether broken. This brokenness, though, must not be understood in some abstract way. It’s broken because the people leading it are often sick, disturbed racists who care very little for those on the receiving end of their sickness.

    It’s not good enough to simply give wrongfully convicted men an insufficient check and an apology. We must repair the broken system so these instances go away for good.

    A few other tidbits, esp. about the deep-seated racism of the system, at the link.

    Join me in asking @GovJayNixon to appoint an African American as the next State Auditor. Petition link: Make History by Appointing the First African-American Statewide Elected Official as Missouri Auditor!

    Governor, it’s time!… You have the opportunity to make history by appointing the first African-American Statewide Elected Official as Missouri Auditor.

    In 1920, the first African-American was elected to the MO House of Representatives. Forty years later, the first African-American was elected to the MO Senate. Thirty-five years after that, we saw the first African-American State Supreme Court Judge. Yet, nearly 100 years after racial barriers were first broken in Missouri government, still no racial diversity exists in statewide office holders. Governor, it’s time to appoint a qualified African-American as our State Auditor. Make the change Governor Nixon! Make history!

    Trouble is, I read about Ben Carson, and I think, being African-American can’t be the only criterion…

    U.S. Cops Continue to Kill the Mentally Ill in Large Numbers, Especially in NYC, While Effective Approaches Are Ignored

    Parker is hoping a bill he introduced in 2013 requiring all police officers in New York state to undergo Crisis Intervention Training, an intensive week-long course that trains officers on how to deal with mentally ill people in distress, will be signed into law by the end of this year. Currently, there is no centralized way in which the NYPD or other law enforcement agencies in the state of New York train its officers on how to deal with mentally ill people. Only threedepartments in the state (Westchester, Nassau and Monroe counties) offer CIT training to their officers.

    As it stands now, NYPD cadets receive a paltry eight hours of mental health crisis training, according to Carla Rabinowitz, a community organizer who has been advocating for the NYPD to undergo CIT training. Under the CIT model, officers would get 40 hours in one year. They would also learn techniques for how to speak with someone who is suffering mental duress: never yell, show your hands at all times, don’t threaten or surround the person, and reduce the intensity of the moment.

    The NYPD has an Emergency Support Unit (ESU) that is called on to deal with mentally ill people but it comprises just 366 of the 35,000 officers on the force. The unit also does more than just respond to calls of people who are in emotional distress, so the members aren’t specifically trained or charged with handling mental health crisis calls.

    Charles Cochran, the founder of CIT training, told AlterNet that the CIT model, which has become the national standard for training police officers to deal with the mentally ill, is more than a training program. In order for it to work, it must be implemented in conjunction with mental health providers and community advocates.

    “It’s really not a law enforcement program, that’s another mistake people make about CIT,” he said. “It’s a community program. Law enforcement is a very significant part of it but it is no more administered or owned by law enforcement than the other providers.”

    The former Memphis cop created the CIT model during the late 1980s after the mother of 27-year-old Joseph Robinson called 911 to seek help for her mentally ill son who was stabbing himself with a knife. The cops ended up shooting Robinson, an incident most people in the community believed could have been avoided had the officers been better trained to deal with people in severe psychiatric distress. After months of community conversations over how the shooting should have been better handled, Cochran began training Memphis police officers on the best ways to respond to calls where they may encounter a mentally ill person. He says the training helped but it was because everyone in the city of Memphis bought into the model.

    Eventually, other cities around the country adopted Memphis’ model and saw improvements in how officers deal with mentally ill people. Before CIT was implemented in Memphis, there were 35 injuries to mentally ill people per 100,000 calls; three years after CIT was introduced, that number dropped to 7 per 100,00 calls.

    CIT is not merely about training, Cochran added. Police officers have been in training “since the beginning of time.” Most importantly, police work with the residents of the community and mental health advocates as a unit to address the city’s issues. The police cannot act unilaterally to better serve the mentally ill. That won’t work.

    […]

    According to a USA Today series on mental health in the United States, states cut $5 billion in mental health funding from 2009-2012. During this time more than 4,500 public psychiatric hospital beds were eliminated, or 10 percent of the country’s supply. That explains why 26 percent of people living in homeless shelters have a mental illness and 46 percent live with a mental illness or substance use disorder. Often, untrained police officers are the first responders, which can lead to deadly consequences for the person in crisis.

    The Albuquerque Police Department implemented CIT in 1997, but in 2010 and 2011, nearly 75 percent of the people killed by APD suffered from a mental illness. The most egregious police-involved killing of a mentally ill person in Albuquerque was James Boyd, in March 2014. Video of the shooting clearly shows there was no need to shoot Boyd. Two officers involved in that shooting have been charged with murder.

    Asked about this, Cochran says Albuquerque had moved away from the principles of CIT, which has led to shootings such as Boyd’s. “They drifted away from the core elements of CIT and it became just a training program,” he said. “It did not stabilize as a community program.” (The New Yorker recently published an extensive feature that, in part, lines up with Cochran’s points.)

    He added that everyone shouldn’t be trained to specialized in CIT, as it is an intensely people-skilled position that may not be a good fit for every officer.

    “It takes a very disciplined, skilled mature leader to be able to duck into the middle of a crisis event and address the multiple layers of fear, including fears of the individual in crisis, fear of the people who may be present and the fear of the officers who may be present as well,” Cochran said. “That takes leadership, skills, judgement and understanding of his or her role as a CIT officer and they take that very seriously. They are committed to this role because of the passion they have as to their performance and their leadership.”

    Studies support the argument that CIT helps to reduce the number of violent encounters mentally people have with police. The American Psychiatric Association said last year that more research needs to be conducted to fully access the true impacts of CIT.

    How the whitest city in America appears through the eyes of its black residents

    In the above picture of Portland, Ore., from Dustin Cable’s breathtaking Racial Dot Map, each blue dot represents a white resident counted during the 2010 census. The city itself is about 76 percent white, making it the whitest big city in the U.S. And diversity has been dwindling in the neighborhoods close to the center of town, as minorities have increasingly moved out to the city’s edges. […]

    The below five-minute video, created by Ifanyi Bell and commissioned by the Oregon Humanities organization, offers a beautiful view on how these demographics are experienced by blacks in Portland who feel they’re losing what little place they previously possessed in this city. As Casey Parks at The Oregonian points out, the word “gentrification” is never spoken in the video. Freed from its loaded, messy meaning, the short film cuts more deeply to the heart of what it’s like to live in a changing city when that change doesn’t seem to include you.

    “Spaces have always been not only places where we gather, but places where we get sort of fulfilled, where we see each and tell our stories and where we become whole again and we become renewed,” one man, Charles McGee, tells the camera. “And when you’re in the whitest city in America, those spaces are even more critical.

    “Losing those spaces means you lose a critical element of who you are. It means that you lose your ability to not only share, but to grow.”

    Video at the link.

  37. rq says

    Current speaker defines racial healing, implicit bias, and structural racism. Ferguson Commission.
    Current speaker at the Ferguson Commission discussed racial equity.
    (See slides attached.)

    Thursday, March 26th. 6-8pm. Flo Valley. DOJ Town Hall Meeting.

    UVA Students Push To Remove Virginia ABC Agents’ Ability To Arrest People

    The UVA Student Council is scheduled to vote Wednesday night on a resolution drafted by student government Chair of the Representative Body Abraham Axler, on behalf of the school’s Black Student Alliance, calling on Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) to immediately strip ABC agents of their law enforcement authorities. ABC agents oversee state-run liquor stores and liquor licenses, and are allowed to arrest people who are found violating related laws.

    “There are times in which arrests are going to have to be made in connection with illegal use of alcohol,” Axler told The Huffington Post. “But when that does happen, it should be local law enforcement agencies making the arrest.”

    Axler said students aren’t demanding punishment for ABC employees who did not do anything wrong, but that agents should no longer be allowed to make arrests. He pointed to the arrests of Martese Johnson, a student who was arrested by ABC agents after a bloody altercation earlier this month, and Elizabeth Daly, who was arrested two years ago after ABC agents erroneously accused her of buying alcohol while underage, to illustrate why he believes McAuliffe should adopt the UVA students’ proposal.

    An online petition started by UVA law student Sam Shirazi asking the state to remove ABC agents’ power to arrest individuals has attracted more than 500 signatures.

    “At the very least, ABC officers should no longer have power to target individuals on the street and should focus on enforcement against businesses,” Shirazi wrote in the petition.

    McAuliffe’s office did not respond to requests from HuffPost to comment on the student council resolution or the petition.

    In reference to the article above on people exonerated – Man freed after 19 years for murder sues Baltimore police

    Sabein Burgess, 44, who was incarcerated for 19 years before being freed last year, said he lost untold income, but — more importantly — was forced to miss his daughter’s childhood.

    “I was locked up my daughter’s whole life,” Burgess said. “From the time she was born all the way until she was 19. No amount of money can repay that.”

    Burgess doesn’t specify how much he is seeking in the lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court. His attorney said he wants “justice” and the “ability to rebuild” his life.

    “There’s no amount of money that could compensate Mr. Burgess for the two decades where he was wrongfully convicted,” said attorney Gayle Horn of Chicago.

    A police spokeswoman said the department does not comment on pending litigation. Burgess’ lawsuit names several detectives and officers involved in the case as co-defendants. Attempts by The Baltimore Sun to reach co-defendants were unsuccessful.

    Retired homicide Detective Gerald Goldstein, who worked on the case and is named as a co-defendant in the lawsuit, told the Associated Press that “there is absolutely no doubt” about Burgess’ guilt.

    “Every single thing that he told us, we proved he was lying,” Goldstein said. “They must have really had the evidence against him for a Baltimore City jury to convict him.” […]

    Dorsey, a childhood acquaintance of Burgess who was serving 45 years for attempted murder and armed robbery, also sent letters to Burgess’ lawyer. He said he and a notorious hit man named Howard Rice fired the shots that killed Dyson during a home invasion and attempted robbery while Burgess was not home.

    Rice was dead by the time Dorsey wrote the letter.

    Detectives interviewed Dorsey but discounted the confession because it lacked details.

    The Baltimore police crime lab came under scrutiny in the 2000s for contamination problems, and scientists began to note that the chemicals from gunshot residue didn’t necessarily indicate someone had fired a gun.

    In Burgess’ appeal, attorneys argued that he got the chemicals on him from cradling Dyson.

    In April 2010, the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project obtained previously undisclosed police notes in Burgess’ case. They included statements that Dyson’s then-6-year-old son, Brian Rainey, had made a statement that cast doubt on Burgess’ involvement.

    In 2012, Rainey, who was incarcerated at the time, said he had witnessed the moments before his mother’s killing and corroborated Dorsey’s account. He and Dorsey both wrote affidavits with their accounts of the night Dyson was killed.

    The mounting evidence prompted a Baltimore judge to order a new trial in February 2014. The state’s attorney’s office dropped charges against Burgess.

    In his lawsuit, Burgess says police “withheld and fabricated evidence.” He says detectives concealed statements Rainey made as a boy, “fabricated gunshot residue” evidence, and tried to pressure Burgess into a confession by saying they would find people to say he fired the shots.

    Burgess also says police “fabricated police reports” that indicated Rainey had been asleep when the boy said he witnessed the home invasion.

    The gunshot residue found on Burgess was on his palm, he says in the lawsuit, but detectives purposefully said it was found on the “webbing” of Burgess’ hand — consistent with someone firing a gun.

    “I think they used me to close the case,” Burgess said.

  38. rq says

    Sort of tangential, but possibly related: Elite Colleges Are Now Destroying Admissions Records

    Yale and Stanford universities have both officially — and quietly — changed their approach to admissions record keeping, the schools said, preventing many students who had requested the files from accessing the information. In accordance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, students who requested the files before the change, which came about 15 days after Stanford students began publicizing the law, will be able to view them.

    Stanford and Yale admit just 5% and 6.25% of students, respectively, in what can appear to outsiders to be a particularly obtuse and subjective process. Stanford rejected 40,000 applicants last year.

    Harvard University is currently embroiled in a lawsuit over its admissions policies, with a complaint alleging it discriminates against Asian-American applicants by limiting the number of it accepts each year. Some had speculated that Harvard students’ admissions records could shed light on the merits of the case. Harvard did not respond to repeated requests for comment on whether it still retained students’ evaluative admissions records.

    Both Yale and Stanford presented the changes as a return to original policies regarding admissions records: Before the files were retained digitally, paper records were “disposed of on a regular basis, simply because there was not space to store them all,” said Karen Peart, a Yale spokeswoman.

    Lisa Lapin, a spokeswoman for Stanford, said that the flood of requests prompted Stanford to “ask ourselves, ‘Why do we need these records?’ … They have not had any use to the university, there’s no need to keep them, and we historically didn’t keep them.”

    Peart said allowing students to view their admissions records could be compromising to the admissions process at Yale, “discouraging admissions officers from making specific and frank judgments about a student’s application.”

    Class Bigotry at Washington University in St. Louis: A Resignation

    I just sent the following open letter of resignation to Mark S. Wrighton, chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis.

    Dear Chancellor Wrighton:

    I’m Chris Pepus and I work in the university’s Film & Media Archive. I am sending you this open letter to resign in protest against ongoing class bias in the university’s admissions policies.

    Washington University has consistently ranked last in social diversity among leading colleges, measured by the percentage of students eligible for Pell Grants, a need-based federal scholarship. In January, your administration promised a new commitment to social diversity, but we both know it is a sham. It is time the people did as well, since they pay for Wash. U.’s tax exemptions.

    Describing your new policy in The New York Times, David Leonhardt wrote that your administration “will commit to more than doubling the share of undergraduates with Pell grants, to at least 13 percent, by 2020.” He was wrong. Your administration committed to ensuring that 13% of students in the 2020-21 freshman class are Pell-eligible. The number of Pell recipients in preceding classes could be lower, even significantly lower, and you would still be able to say that you kept your promise.

    Leonhardt also wrote: “The leaders of Washington University in St. Louis have decided that it has a distinction they no longer want: the nation’s least economically diverse top college.” He was too optimistic on that point as well. Currently, Wash. U. is last in U.S. News & World Report’s ranking of economic diversity at its top 25 national universities, with only 6% of students receiving Pell Grants. You could meet your goal of increased Pell numbers and still be last in that ranking.

    Even modest increases in Pell enrollments by Wash. U.’s nearest competitors at the bottom of the U.S. News list (Cal Tech at 11%, Notre Dame and Princeton at 12%) will keep the university ranked 25th out of 25. If Wash. U.’s increase in Pell recipients among pre-2020 classes is low enough, those three institutions can keep their Pell enrollments where they are and Wash. U. will still remain in last place. […]

    Aided by that enormous expansion (weighted disproportionately toward middle-class students), other socially exclusive universities, such as Harvard, have seen their percentages of Pell students rise out of single digits, finally. But not this institution. In recent years, Wash. U. has actually been declining in terms of social diversity.

    The barriers to inclusion will not be removed at Wash. U., or other leading colleges, until an aggressive policy of affirmative action based on social class is added to existing affirmative-action programs. Your new “commitment” is a travesty of that essential policy.

    Your administration has described the plan to increase Pell enrollment as “ambitious” and cultivated the notion that it is difficult to enroll qualified working-class people. But the case of the University of California at Berkeley destroys such myths. According to the latest federal data, 36% of UC Berkeley’s students receive Pell Grants, compared to, again, 6% at Washington University. UCB has managed to enroll six times the percentage of Pell recipients as Wash. U., despite having (according to contemporary federal data) an endowment of $1.2 billion, as opposed to Wash. U.’s $5.3 billion.

    Nor can anyone say that UC Berkeley’s academic reputation has suffered due to its socially inclusive admissions policy. In the most recent installment of the prestigious Times Higher Education rankings, UCB is rated 8th in the world to Wash. U.’s 42nd. The University of California at Los Angeles, with an even higher ratio of Pell recipients on campus (39%), ranks 12th.

    You may well note that Wash. U. is placed ahead of UC Berkeley and UCLA in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, but that is principally because U.S. News assigns great weight to institutional wealth. The most salient category of the magazine’s rankings is the “peer assessment score” given by administrators and faculty at other colleges. In that category, Wash. U. is rated 4 out of a possible 5, versus Berkeley’s 4.7 and UCLA’s 4.2. […]

    This institution’s terribly low percentage of Pell Grant recipients is the result of systemic class bias. The university’s official pronouncements make that all too clear. Wash. U. administrators have attempted to excuse low enrollment of Pell Grant recipients by resorting to doubletalk insulting to working-class people.

    For instance, Provost Thorp consistently tries to justify Wash. U.’s record of social exclusion by pretending that the university had to choose between strengthening academic excellence and enrolling more working-class students. Last December, Student Life quoted the Provost’s remarks on why the administration had failed to address the university’s low Pell enrollment. “Wash. U. has made some smart strategic decisions that may have made it the place that it is,” he said. “It’s easy to say that this should have been done differently, but . . . to say we shouldn’t have invested in things when we did is kind of false logic [ellipses original].” Back in October, he offered the same excuse, with a more aggressive conclusion: “We’re not going to apologize for that.”

    If Provost Thorp cannot bring himself to apologize for the university’s derisively low number of working-class students, I question whether he is capable of apologizing for anything. At the least, his remarks show that he isn’t facing the problem.

    It is deceitful to claim that administrators ever had to choose between academic excellence and social inclusion. In 2012, economist Elise Gould found that low-income students who earned high scores on 8th-grade tests were less likely to attend college than rich students who scored low on the same tests. There is an enormous pool of talented students who are not being recruited by other leading institutions.

    Maybe the student who would have brought new prestige to Wash. U. through, say, a great scientific discovery wound up working at Wal-Mart because the university instead admitted a less qualified rich person now busily engaged in coasting through life. Had you been interested in enhancing academic excellence, rather than enhancing the privileges of the rich, recruiting qualified, low-income students would have been a central element of your campaign to improve the university’s reputation. […]

    I have learned a lot working at the Film & Media Archive, which houses materials from powerful documentaries on civil rights and social justice, e.g. Eyes on the Prize and The Great Depression. I got to help researchers learn more about such subjects as the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and labor activists who fought racism and economic oppression.

    The stories contained in the archive’s materials can be very inspiring. But they can also be a criticism of your life. These days, they feel like the latter to me. I am ashamed of myself for failing to send you a letter like this one before now. My working-class status and freelance writing on class issues also accuse me, despite the reasons I gave myself for staying on the job this long. (“I need the health insurance.” “The work schedule lets me write on evenings and weekends.” “I can use vacation time for writing.”)

    After my years at Wash. U., I no longer believe that elite private colleges can be reformed. I believe education must be public, and free to students. In any case, no university as wealthy as this one should be allowed to keep its tax exemptions unless it ends legacy preferences and does at least as well in admitting Pell Grant recipients as UC Berkeley. We need that tax money for the education of the people, not just the rich.

    No top American college is as far away from social diversity as Wash. U., and you are clearly happy for it to stay that way. So here is my two-weeks notice. I can no longer stand to be associated with the class bigotry that is deeply entrenched in this institution.

    Sincerely,

    Chris Pepus

    There’s a note to readers at the end:

    If you agree with this letter, please share it with your friends. Writers on higher education frequently note that there is no national movement demanding access to top colleges for working-class people. That is largely because writers on higher education refuse to address class bias directly. That omission may have something to do with the backgrounds of leading journalists, who are mostly graduates of socially exclusive, private, East Coast colleges.

    I hope that you will use the donate button at the upper right of the page to support my work. (In case you’re wondering, I don’t have another job lined up.) The media elite have systematically excluded views like the ones expressed in my letter. That monopoly will continue unless the people support alternatives to it.

    More from post-racial Americaaaa! Texas A&M Corpus Christi Student Threatened With Lynching

    She had just returned from spring break and was greeted with horrific threats and slurs.

    According to KRISTV, a black student at Texas A&M Corpus Christi found racial slurs and threats written all over her apartment, left there by individuals who apparently broke in while she was gone.

    A scrawl on one of the apartment doors showed a character like that from a hangman game, only next to it were the chilling words, “White Power. [We’re] coming for you.”

    Another scrawl read, “Die n–ger. Where is your protector? White Power.”

    “I think the community ought to be hurt by this. I think that we all ought to take it very seriously,” Corpus Christi Police Chief Floyd Simpson said at a news conference Monday.

    According to the news station, the complex in which the apartment is located is gated and seems to have a security camera, but it is still unclear how the vandals broke in.

    “Quite frankly, we think we have a bead on some people who may be involved in this. The best thing they can do is come forward and have a discussion about this, and let us bring this to a logical conclusion,” the police chief said. The individuals responsible could be charged with burglary, criminal mischief and making terroristic threats.

    As for the student, she was relocated to a nearby complex.

    Ferguson Commission Meeting. Forgot to put that in previous comment – people attend these meetings! Yay!

    First George Zimmerman says he’s like Anne Frank. Now Ted Cruz says he’s like Galileo. Next: Slobodan Milošević says he’s like Joan Baez. Can’t wait.

    Lauryn Hill’s Album ‘The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill’ Is Being Entered Into the Library of Congress

    Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Radiohead’s 1997 smash OK Computer, the Doors’ eponymous 1967 debut, Joan Baez’ Joan Baez, Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate from 1949 and more are being entered into the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry. Variety reports the National Recording Registry made the announcement this morning and the total number of inducted recordings to is up to 425,

    According to the press release:

    Under the terms of the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000, the Librarian, with advice from the Library’s National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB), is tasked with annually selecting 25 recordings that are “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and are at least 10 years old. The selections for the 2014 registry bring the total number of recordings on the registry to 425, a small part of the Library’s vast recorded-sound collection of nearly 3 million items.

    In their explanations of why each recording was selected, the Library of Congress writes of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, “Lauryn Hill’s debut solo record, following the breakup of the Fugees, is a work of honesty in which Hill explores her feelings on topics that included the deep wonder of pregnancy, the pitfalls of modern relationships and the experience of the sacred. The album effortlessly fuses soul, rhythm and blues, rap and reggae. Hill’s vocal range, smooth clear highs and vibrato are stunning. The rapping is rhythmically compelling while always retaining, and frequently exploiting, the natural cadences of conversational speech. Standout guest performances include Carlos Santana’s soulful acoustic guitar solo on ‘Zion,’ and duets with Mary J. Blige and D’Angelo on ‘I Used to Love Him’ and ‘Nothing Even Matters,’ respectively.”

  39. rq says

    Worse than Rodney King. Shocking dash cam video shows suburban Detroit police brutally beating man. Floyd Dent.

    Floyd Dent is an amazing man. He has worked his entire adult life, from age 20-57, for Ford Motor Company in suburban Detroit. Never a day in his life has he been in trouble with the law. Loved by his family and community, he’s about as upstanding of a citizen as a man could be.

    So, when the Michigan State Police in Wayne County, outside of Detroit, trailed Floyd’s car, suspecting him of purchasing drugs, what happened next may be the most preposterous case of police brutality in modern American history.

    Yanked from his car and put into a brutal, illegal choke hold, officers begin to repeatedly punch Floyd in the face, nearly knocking him unconscious. Another officer comes up and shocks Floyd three separate times with his Taser – putting him at great risk of death. In all, ten officers, all of them white, made contact with Floyd during this ordeal.

    While in the hospital, Floyd was forced to take drug tests, which all came back negative for drugs.

    They eventually charged him with not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign. Floyd even disputes this charge. One of the officers, as you will see in the video, was previously cited by the government for falsely planting evidence.

    I have tweets about that officer.
    At the root of the brutal beating of #FloydDent is one man. Perpetually violent and corrupt. William (Bill) “Robocop” Melendez. Dig deeper.
    This is William Melendez. The officer who nearly killed #FloydDent. Read this.
    More on Officer William Melendez. He has killed unarmed people before. Planted evidence. Threatened witnesses.
    Beyond being absolutely preposterous, #FloydDent passed every drug test they gave him. Worked at Ford for 37 years. Never arrested once.
    Full of sketchiness. #Robocop @ShaunKing That man has made a lot of headlines.

  40. rq says

    Nebraska senator compares police to ISIS, says he’d shoot a cop. And now I’m confused – some have compared Ferguson protestors to ISIS, now the cops… which is it???? :P

    A black Nebraska state senator compared American police to Islamic terrorists and suggested he’d shoot a cop if only he had a weapon.

    State Sen. Ernie Chambers said during a legislative hearing on gun bills Friday that you don’t have to go halfway around the world to find an ISIS mentality. It can be found in America because police terrorize blacks every day.

    He was referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which has beheaded journalists and brutally executed Westerners and others.

    “My ISIS is the police,” Chambers said, adding police can get away with shooting people if they “think” they’re going to do something — like pull a weapon.

    “The police are licensed to kill us — children, old people,” he said.

    After his comments were reported by Nebraska Watchdog and picked up by national media outlets, several Nebraska officials called on him to apologize and a senator said lawmakers are considering censuring him. […]

    “I wouldn’t go to Syria, I wouldn’t go to Iraq, I wouldn’t go to Afghanistan, I wouldn’t go to Yemen, I wouldn’t go to Tunisia, I wouldn’t go to Lebanon, I wouldn’t go to Jordan, I would do it right here,” Chambers said. “Nobody from ISIS ever terrorized us as a people as the police do daily.” […]

    “If I was going to carry a weapon, it wouldn’t be against you, it wouldn’t be against these people who come here that I might have a dispute with. Mine would be for the police,” he said. “And if I carried a gun I’d want to shoot him first and then ask questions later, like they say the cop ought to do.”

    During an interview Tuesday, Chambers, who is no stranger to fiery rhetoric and controversy, back-pedaled a bit. He said people in his community feel terrorized by police who can shoot them and are often cleared. He pointed to a recent case of an unarmed Omaha man shot twice in the back by a cop.

    “I don’t carry a weapon. I’ve never carried a weapon,” he said. “But if I were in the situation that some people are in … if you’re going to follow the rule available to cops, just shoot somebody and come up with an alibi.”

    However, he said he knows young people in his community look up to him and might take his comments literally.

    “I’m not advocating that anybody, especially anybody in my community, go out and shoot people,” Chambers said.

    Chambers said he was drawing a parallel between people being murdered by ISIS and American citizens killed by police who subsequently are cleared of criminal wrongdoing.

    “They’re encouraged and they’re given a free pass,” he said. “All you (police) have to say is you felt like you were in danger, then a citizen could say, ‘I will shoot first and ask questions later.’ ”

    He’s pushed local, state and federal officials to stop the flow of guns into his north Omaha community. If weapons were coming into “the white community,” he said, officials would jump on it.

    “As long as that happens, the violence will continue,” Chambers said of guns flooding north Omaha.

    Audio at the link, but I especially love this part of the article:

    Although Chambers regularly makes inflammatory statements, his most outrageous comments are rarely covered by Nebraska media — in part because he’s been making them for years.

    He’s seen by many as a lovable curmudgeon, iconic liberal and defender of the downtrodden. He is a 77-year-old independent who has served 40 years in the Legislature and often talks about slavery, racial tension and Christian hypocrisy.

    So… he’s been ignored by media until he says something violent against the status quo. Nice one there, media.

    Journalist penalized for participating in marches: KSDK silent on newsroom aide who helmed Ferguson marches

    A KSDK newsroom employee who helped the station cover one civil rights protest — and then organized, promoted and participated in another — may or may not keep her job.

    Station officials refused to say Wednesday whether Jana Marie Gamble still works as a part-time production assistant after questions arose about her promotion of a protest last weekend in Ferguson.

    “We do not discuss personnel matters,” said Marv Danielski, KSDK’s station manager.

    When asked if KSDK viewers had a right to know if Gamble would be involved in any of Channel 5’s future coverage of Ferguson, Danielski repeated: “My policy is that we do not talk about personnel matters.”

    Previously, Danielski said production assistants do not make editorial decisions, and only work the teleprompter and provide technical support.

    But on the KSDK website, about 45 photographs that Gamble took at rallies in early March in Selma, Ala., are posted with a Farrah Fazal story entitled “Selma: Then & Now.”

    Also from the Selma event, Gamble posted photos to her production company’s Facebook page that are tagged with hashtags referencing both the television station (#KSDK) and her own company (#It’sAGambleProduction). […]

    Photos of the Ferguson gathering posted to her Facebook page bore an “It’s a Gamble Production” logo, but did not reference KSDK. Many of the photos can still be seen on the Facebook page for the Leadership Coalition for Justice, Baruti and Shahid’s group.

    On the coalition’s Facebook page, Gamble recently wrote about the criticism she has received since “my involvement in assisting with this Cause …”

    Florissant, St. Louis County face new civil rights lawsuit. Another one!

    An African-American man from North County who authorities said died in 2013 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound was actually killed by police, a civil rights lawsuit filed Tuesday by his daughters alleges.

    The federal suit, filed in U.S District Court in St. Louis against the city of Florissant, St. Louis County and six law enforcement officials, is the latest in a string of legal complaints against North County municipalities following the events of last fall that are now collectively called Ferguson.

    The lawsuit alleges that on Oct. 20, 2013, Afolabi Abayomi was shot and killed in his driveway in the 10100 block of Winkler Drive in unincoporated St. Louis County by Florissant police officers Andrew Gerwitz and Joshua Smith, who are both white. Abayomi was 44 years old.

    Miami: LOOK: Outside the Miami Gardens City Commission Meeting: “Welcome to Suspect City: Cops show up, body counts go UP”
    1,100 names demanding the release of the video and audio involving the shooting death of Lavall Hall. Fl. St. 406.136

    Soledad O’Brien on Starbucks and race: ‘It’s okay to ask and it’s okay to answer’

    Soledad O’Brien watched the vitriol aimed at Starbucks scroll across her Twitter feed. The former CNN anchor, who now heads up her own media production company, Starfish Media Group, had a particular interest in the “Race Together” campaign, in which the coffee giant had encouraged baristas to kindle conversations on race by writing the slogan on coffee cups. O’Brien, 48, recently returned from a national tour of college campuses where she had convened a series of conversations on race. The tour was a follow-up to her company’s CNN documentary series “Black in America” about the experiences of U.S. blacks.

    O’Brien says she was chagrined by the criticism of Starbucks but not completely surprised.

    “The people on Twitter who have responded….I don’t think they even realize the luxury of their position,” says O’Brien, a married mother of four, and daughter of a black Cuban woman and a white Australian man of Irish descent. “They say ‘I don’t want to have these conversations about race when I’m getting my cappuccino.’ … Well, I don’t want to have these conversations about race either. … But I have this conversation all the time. I have it when someone says to me, ‘You’re not really black’, or ‘You speak so well for being black’ or ‘If you’re Latino, you can’t be black.’ Black and Latino people have these conversations all the time.”

    O’Brien sides with Starbucks in its effort to bring more Americans into the fray. “I think for Starbucks there was something — well, brave isn’t quite the right word — but there was something aggressively interested in challenging people to have a conversation who were not the kind of people who generally have these conversations.”

    In an interview, O’Brien talked about what she learned about Americans’ attitudes about race on her tour, what life as a person of color has taught her, and how people might best go about launching conversations about race in their daily lives. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

    Interview follows at the article.

  41. rq says

    Va. Gov. Orders Retraining for ABC Police

    Gov. Terry McAuliffe ordered state liquor agents retrained Wednesday following a high profile arrest that left a University of Virginia student bloodied and shouting allegations of racism.

    The executive order requires Virginia’s approximately 130 Alcoholic Beverage Control agents to complete additional training on the use of force, cultural diversity, community policing and interaction with youth by Sept. 1.

    It also establishes a law enforcement panel to review ABC practices and make recommendations by Nov. 1 and requires the agency’s law enforcement arm to work with police in college towns to improve operations. […]

    Watkins [lawyer for Martese Johnson] said the order illustrates “that we all share a common belief: It is important for all law enforcement agencies to act within the bounds of the law.”

    ABC spokeswoman Kathleen Shaw said the agency has already begun working to improve training and will comply with the governor’s order.

    About 500 students demanded answers about the arrest and ABC tactics from law enforcement officials during a forum at U.Va. two days after the arrest. Dissatisfied with responses that they considered too broad, representatives of a black students’ organization shouted in unison, “Answer the question we asked.” They marched out before the event was over with their fists raised, chanting “Black lives matter.”[…]

    ABC agents have begun wearing uniforms, another reform promised after the Daly incident, but has not yet made good on a pledge to require agents to wear body cameras. ABC said the governor has asked a state panel to determine how best to employ the technology for all state law enforcement agencies.

    I’m not sure what the entire conversation here was, but: @GreatDismal Apologies, you were right. I had no idea that legalized slavery was in the confederate constitution. Just putting that out there.

    Yesterday Pteryxx had an article on gas chambers, and I mentioned Utah. Here’s more on the firing squad: Utah brings back the firing squad, so how does it work?

    WHAT HAPPENS ON EXECUTION DAY?

    The prisoner is seated in a chair that is set up in front of a wood panel and in between stacked sandbags that keep the bullets from ricocheting around the room.

    A target is pinned over the inmate’s heart. Shooters aim for the chest rather than the head because it’s a bigger target and usually allows for a faster death, said Utah Rep. Paul Ray, who sponsored the proposal.

    The prisoner is offered a two-minute window to offer final words. In 1977, Gary Gilmore used that chance to say, “Let’s do this,” before he died.

    Five shooters set up about 25 feet from the chair, with their .30-caliber Winchester rifles pointing through slots in a wall. Assuming they hit their target, the heart ruptures and the prisoner dies quickly from blood loss.

    In 2010, Ronnie Lee Gardner was declared dead two minutes after he was shot. He was the last person killed by firing squad in the U.S.

    ___

    WHO ARE THE SHOOTERS?

    The gunmen are chosen from a pool of volunteer officers, with priority given to those from the area where the crime happened.

    There are always more volunteers than spots on the squad, Ray has said.

    The shooters’ identities are kept anonymous, and one of their rifles is loaded with a blank round so nobody knows which officer killed the inmate.

    ___

    HAVE FIRING SQUAD EXECUTIONS EVER GONE WRONG?

    Not in recent history, said Deborah Denno, a Fordham Law School professor who has long studied executions. Utah’s three firing squad executions in the past four decades went as planned, she said.

    But the Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment, warns that a firing squad is not a foolproof execution method because the inmate could move or the shooters could miss the heart, causing a slower, more painful death.

    One such case appears to have happened in 1879, during Utah’s territorial days, when a firing squad missed Wallace Wilkerson’s heart and it took him 27 minutes to die, according to newspaper accounts.

    Denno said errant shots to Wilkerson’s shoulder might have been intentional to make him suffer.

    ___

    CAN ORGANS BE DONATED AFTER FIRING SQUAD EXECUTIONS?

    Yes. Unlike a lethal injection that poisons the organs, the bodies of people executed by firing squad remain usable.

    Gilmore, executed by firing squad in 1977, agreed to donate his eyes, kidneys, liver and pituitary gland for medical use. His kidneys proved unusable because of bullet wounds.

    Gardner did not donate his organs.

    Okay, I find the whole discussion pretty disgusting, but scroll back to this part: “The gunmen are chosen from a pool of volunteer officers, with priority given to those from the area where the crime happened.” How is that impartial execution of justice, if they leave the execution wide open for retributive shooting? Isn’t that a conflict of interest?

    Standoff. Protest, a history. Photo of a crowd of white-clothed Klan members facing a crowd of black protestors.

    Here’s one for contrast, #CrimingWhileWhite. Christian family band who sang about End Times arrested after deadly gunfight in Arizona Walmart parking lot. Wanna guess how many of them are dead by police?

    An evangelical Christian family band that believed in a coming Jesus Apocalypse was arrested last Saturday following a deadly gunfight outside a Walmart parking lot in Cottonwood, Arizona. Nine suspects were involved in a violent brawl that left at least one person dead. Suspects arrested from the Gaver family included Peter Gaver, 55, and his sons, Jeremiah, 29, and Nathaniel, 27, all from the small-time Christian band Matthew 24 Now.

    That’s right. None.

    Black girls’ sexual burden: Why Mo’ne Davis was really called a “slut”

    Mo’ne Davis is a Black girl wunderkind. At age 13, she has pitched a shutout at the Little League World Series, becoming the first girl ever to do so, and she has been on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Disney is now planning to do a movie about her called, “Throw Like Mo.”

    I’m not ashamed to admit that I still watch the Disney Channel, and I will certainly be tuning in. But everyone isn’t as excited as I am to see a Black girl on the come up. Last week, Joey Casselberry, a sophomore baseball player from Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania, called Mo’ne a “slut” in response to the news about the movie. He was subsequently expelled from the team.

    In response, Davis has forgiven him and she and her coach have asked that he be reinstated. About Casselberry, Davis released a statement, which said:

    Everyone makes mistakes and everyone deserves a second chance. I know he didn’t mean it in that type of way, and I know a lot of people get tired of like seeing me on TV but just think about what you’re doing before you actually do it. I know right now he’s really hurt and I know how hard he worked just to get where he is right now.

    Her level of empathy is remarkable but not particularly surprising. Black girls learn almost from the womb to empathize with others, even when those others have committed deep injustices toward us. Perhaps it is the unparalleled level of our suffering that makes us always look with empathy upon others.

    But I am troubled. It is absolutely wonderful that Davis has this kind of care and concern and a heart so huge that she can forgive a nearly adult person for insulting her. It goes without saying that she’s a better person than Casselberry.

    But she should not have to be. For starters, he meant what he said. One doesn’t slip up and mistakenly call a young teen girl a slut. Second, it bothers me that she sounds almost apologetic about how much others have to see her on television. Girls in our culture are taught that they should never take up too much space, that they should be seen (and look real pretty), but not heard. And Black girls in our culture are damn near invisible, whether in regards to their triumphs or their struggles.

    Lest we think this inappropriate sexual shaming of Black girls is an isolated incident, let us not forget that in 2013, The Onion “jokingly” referred to then 9-year old actress Quvenzhané Wallis, as a “c*nt” in reference to her Oscar nomination that year for Beasts of the Southern Wild. […]

    The fact that Black girl artists and athletes are understood only in terms of a sexuality that they may not even have begun to articulate for themselves should concern us. That their sexuality is already being publicly circumscribed by white men (and the anonymous Onion tweeter) in dirty and shameful terms is appalling.

    Even more concerning is Davis’ identification of Casselberry as “really hurt,” and as a person who has “worked hard to get where he is right now.” Black girls learn early and often the script of toting around someone else’s pain. We learn to identify with those who have abused us, to see their humanity, even when they don’t see ours. […]

    Recently the African American Policy Forum released a report called “Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected.” There are a number of troubling findings in this report. One is that Black girls are six times more likely than white girls to be suspended from school. Among boys, who are suspended more often than girls no matter their race, Black boys were three times more likely to be suspended than white boys. This suggests that Black girls actually suffer a higher instance of racially disparate treatment in matters of school discipline than their Black male counterparts. It also indicates that school is not a particularly safe space for either our girls or our boys.

    The report also found that Black girls experience a high degree of sexual harassment and interpersonal violence in their schools and that this is often dismissed as “boys will be boys.” In other words, Black girls’ sexual security is a routine casualty of boys’ sexual maturation process. School officials are frequently reticent in addressing the problem, but when girls respond to harassment by defending themselves, they are often subject to zero-tolerance measures by school officials.

    Until very recently, I had forgotten my own harrowing experience of continued sexual harassment as an elementary school kid. In the 3rd grade, I took the bus home from school. For some reason, there were a number of older boys on the bus, who to my 8-year old me, seemed really big and really scary. They were probably around the age of 12 or 13. But each day a group of them, led by a ringleader named Gregory, would begin the taunts and jeers. They knew that I was a latchkey kid, that I got off the bus everyday, climbed the hill to our 2-bedroom apartment, and let myself in with a single key hanging from an ice cream cone key chain. So they began to threaten that they were going to get off the bus with me, follow me into my house, and do things to me. The level of menace on the face of the ringleader, the intentional way that he looked at me, the perverse pleasure he got from seeing me squirm in fear, made me believe him. I’m unsure how long it went on –weeks, months. Eventually I told my mother. And it was a very uncomfortable conversation to have, since I had only recently even been taught what sex was! With one phone call to the bus driver, the harassment stopped. I got on the bus, and Greg was curiously silent. I was relieved. […]

    I recognize that I’m supposed to celebrate Mo’ne Davis’ character and applaud for her being so generous. To be clear, I’m mega proud of Davis. She’s an absolute superstar in my book. I love it when Black girls win. And she is winning. But as both a scholar and a former Black girl, I know that Black women’s prodigious capacity for empathy comes with a cost. Davis’ pain matters here. Not Casselberry’s. Too often Black women and Black girls on their way to becoming Black women are taught that everyone else’s pain matters more than our own. Too often we teach Black girls that they have to lose to win. Mo’ne, a consummate athlete, knows better than that.

    That invisibility of Black girl pain costs us our self-confidence, our emotional wellness, our livelihoods and sometimes our lives. And that is not a win. Mo’ne Davis deserves our love, our support, and our advocacy. Sexist and racist behavior is for losers. And we need to call it out, denounce it, dismantle it, and make space for Black girls to win.

  42. rq says

    Your Guide to the Worst Anti-Racism Campaign Ever, via Skepchick.

    Let’s start with the serious problems this creates for the poor barista. These people are not paid nearly enough to deal with the highly touchy and nuanced subject of race, nor are they provided with any training about how to start these conversations. Also somehow they have to balance “the customer is always right” with “that was an incredibly racist thing to say, you asshole”. It’s all too easy to imagine this initiative backfiring on the baristas who have far less money and power than the folks who decided the whole thing was a good idea.

    There’s also the problem that setting up conversations about race is something that takes a lot of practice and work. Some people spend their whole lives facilitating these types of conversations, and they have to set up some serious ground rules to keep things civil and useful. Usually conversations about race require a lot of basic education about concepts like structural racism and privilege. Usually there’s also some sort of moderator to keep things from getting out of hand, cruel, or straight out offensively racist. There is literally no way for any of these helpful ground rules to be set in a two minute interaction while a line of people are growing impatient for their morning espresso. A useful conversation about race cannot be had in 20 seconds.

    It’s also worth noting the language that Starbucks used to introduce the campaign: “we at Starbucks should be willing to talk about these issues in America,” CEO Howard Schultz said. “Not to point fingers or to place blame, and not because we have answers, but because staying silent is not who we are.” They refer to a race problem. Nowhere do they mention “racism”. America’s problem is less about the ability to talk about race and more about the ability to talk about racism, but Starbucks doesn’t feel the need to bring up that little issue. They appear to be taking no stand on things like police brutality, or the killing of people of color. That’s worrisome at best.

    As the cherry on top of this “we have no idea how to actually contribute” cake, the news releases refer to Michael Brown and Eric Garner, but there is no Starbucks to be found in the entirety of Ferguson or in the neighborhood where Garner lived. [..]

    While it’s entirely possible that this was all a misguided but well-intentioned attempt at discussing race, it’s not a big surprise that it ended so prematurely. It might be time for Starbucks bigwigs to spend some time in a conversation about race with people who actually study it.

    The Interim Chief of the Ferguson PD’s first public comments are that protestors are abusing the police and that we aren’t peaceful. Sounds like a great start.

    Transparency! Accountability!! Repercussions!!! No. Arizona Legislature Passes Bill to Keep Cops’ Names Secret After They Shoot Civilians

    On Tuesday the Arizona Legislature passed a bill that would forbid any state agency from releasing the name of police officers who shoot a civilian when that shooting results in death or “serious physical injury.” The act would bar law enforcement, as well as all government entities, from releasing an officer’s name for 60 days following the incident. If the officer has a disciplinary record, or is disciplined as a result of the shooting, his name may still not be released for the full 60 days. The act now heads to Gov. Doug Ducey for a signature.

    Supporters of the bill claim it is designed to protect law enforcement from harassment following a shooting. The Arizona Police Association strongly supports the measure, in part because its members are afraid that protesters will march in front of the homes of officers who shoot unarmed civilians. Critics insist that the bill will only exacerbate public frustration with the police by decreasing transparency and accountability. They also note that Arizona law already allows police to withhold sensitive information, like home addresses, of police officers when safety may be a concern.

    The bill easily passed both houses of Arizona’s Republican-dominated legislature. The only real controversy was whether the gag order would last for 60 or 90 days, and whether law enforcement could ever release information about disciplinary proceedings against officers involved in shootings. Ducey, a Republican, has not yet declared whether he will sign the bill into law.

    Protesters want 2 Inkster police officers fired after video shows them beating motorist – that’s the least that should happen.

    Inkster Police Chief Vicki Yost met protesters Wednesday and said the incident is being investigated by Michigan State Police. She says the officers are on paid leave.

    The Rev. Charles Williams II threatened to “shut Inkster down until we get justice.” Yost says she’s not hiding anything but won’t take further action until the investigation is completed.

    Might be a repost.

    “This is what happens to black men in America” – Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard Scholar @notjustuva #NotJustUVa Story from 2009. Gates was a Harvard professor arrested at his own home because he couldn’t get the lock open.

    Feedback from last meeting about what stands in the way of racial reconciliation in #stl #STLForward . List includes: no space for healing, fragmentation and segregation, history and institutional policy, need for power within black community.

  43. rq says

    A new study suggests people have a hard time believing black and Latina women are scientists

    Forty-eight percent of black women and 47 percent of Latina women said they’d had this experience. The numbers for white and Asian women are lower but still disturbing, at 32 percent and 23 percent, respectively.

    Those are just some of the findings from new research reported by the Harvard Business Review. The takeaway of the study, by Joan C. Williams, Katherine W. Phillips, and Erika V. Hall, is that personal choices aren’t the only reason women decide to leave STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) careers. The bias they face in the workplace once they enter these jobs plays a huge role, too. And unsurprisingly that bias is especially intense and takes different forms when it comes to women of color.

    The researchers interviewed 60 female scientists and surveyed 557 more, and confirmed Williams’s previous findings that there are four major patterns of bias women face at work:

    Having to prove their competence over and over again
    Walking a tightrope between being seen as too feminine to be competent and too masculine to be likable
    Having their commitment to their work and their competence questioned after they start families
    Navigating the tense relationships between women that result from the gender bias they all face

    They also uncovered a fifth pattern that applied mostly to black and Latina women: isolation. These women said they were excluded from social events with their STEM colleagues (or excluded themselves because of negative experiences or fear of being judged), and that they fielded offensive comments and assumptions based on their identities.

    Things like being mistaken for custodial and administrative staff understandably contributed to this experience.

    This may be a repost, too, but worth a reread.

    Black America Is Just 72 Percent Equal To White America. In Some Areas, The Inequality Is Worse Than That. Almost as equal as women!

    A report released last week holds troubling findings about lasting inequality across the African-American community.

    The 2015 “State of Black America” study, conducted by the National Urban League, finds that black Americans fare worse than their white peers across a variety of indicators, including economics, social justice and overall equality. The report, issued every year since 1976, showed modest gains in some areas, but leaves plenty of concerns about the speed of progress more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

    “What do we say and how would we frame the state of black America for 2015? I must use the word crisis,” said Marc H. Morial, president and chief executive of the National Urban League, at a Thursday news conference in Washington, D.C.

    Here’s a breakdown of some of the study’s key findings.
    [chart]
    Equality in social justice, health and economics showed small increases from 2014, when those numbers stood at 56.9 percent, 78.2 percent and 55.4 percent, respectively. The National Urban League explains that the nearly 4 percentage-point increase in the social justice index is a result of “fewer Blacks being victims of violent crimes and fewer Black high school students carrying weapons, while at the same time, the rate for white high school students increased.”

    The smaller increase in health equality was attributed in part to increased coverage under the Affordable Care Act, while the minor bump in economic equality was the “result of improvements in the income, poverty and home loan denial camps.” The report also points out that unemployment and homeownership gaps widened over the same period.

    The “State of Black America” report also showed disturbing inequality across a set of key education indicators.
    [chart]
    In addition to data on fourth- and eighth-grade proficiency levels, the report also analyzed equality in high school graduation rates and found that black students in some states are graduating at rates up to 35 percent lower than their white counterparts. In Nebraska, the state with the lowest equality index, the high school graduation rate for black students was 65 percent the rate of white students.

    The map below plots some key black-white income disparities in metropolitan areas across the nation.
    [map]
    Income inequality between black and white residents was most rampant in the San Francisco metro area, where the median income for white households was $95,285 and only $39,902 for black households. The report also analyzed employment equality in metropolitan areas across the country, finding that Jackson, Mississippi, rated the worst, with 14 percent unemployment among black residents and 3.9 percent unemployment among whites.

    Link to the full report: here.

    NYPD Commissioner To Privacy Advocates: ‘Get A Life’. Stay classy, Bratton.

    Bratton and Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the launch of ShotSpotter last week. The $1.5 million program, which has been implemented in other cities, consists of a series of publicly mounted microphones intended to capture the sounds of gunfire and send data to police in real time about where the shooting is happening.

    At a press conference announcing the launch, de Blasio said that the technology “increases the chances of catching the shooter. It increases the chances of recovering the weapon. It increases the chances of stopping further crime.”

    But it can also, on occasion, increase the chances of authorities listening in on people’s conversations. Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter have been used to convict people in murder trials in Oakland, California, and New Bedford, Connecticut, raising concerns among civil liberties advocates.

    Pressed about those concerns earlier this week by Rita Cosby on her Sunday WABC show, Bratton said “the advocates have to get a life.”

    “We’re not out there eavesdropping,” he said. “That’s not what the system does. That’s not what it’s designed to do. That’s not what it’s capable of. So get a life. Move on to some other issue. We’re not out there eavesdropping on public conversations. I got enough to do without doing that.”

    Still, privacy advocates could be forgiven for being wary of the NYPD.

    In recent years, the department has spied on Muslim communities and protesters, stopped and frisked hundreds of thousands of people illegally and maintained a camera surveillance program called the Domain Awareness System, which watches over much of Manhattan.

    The New York Civil Liberties Union has not made any public comment about ShotSpotter. A spokesperson told The Huffington Post Wednesday that the organization is still studying the technology.

    Racial bias, cronyism tearing apart N.J. National Guard, senior officers allege

    The New Jersey National Guard prides itself on rigor and readiness, and, from its sprawling base southeast of Trenton, its members became a beacon of help after Tropical Storm Irene and Hurricane Sandy ravaged portions of the state.

    But internal records obtained by NJ Advance Media show the Guard now faces a storm of its own, with at least four senior officers, including two top minorities, alleging a “toxic command climate,” fueled by racial discrimination and retaliatory actions.

    The officers accuse the adjutant general, Brig. Gen. Michael Cunniff, and the director of the joint staff, Brig. Gen. James Grant, of stunting the careers of critics and rewarding loyalists and friends with educational opportunities and promotions.

    Among allegations in the documents, one of the most senior officers, who is Hispanic, claimed he was cut out from command decisions, passed over for promotion, undermined by Cunniff and Grant, and eventually forced to go on leave.

    Another senior officer claimed he was targeted for not backing the former adjutant general in a 2011 sex scandal that led to the general’s removal.

    A third claimed he fell out of favor when he questioned the dismissal of a large number of African Americans from a technician force.

    And in September, the state inspector general found for a fourth senior officer who claimed Cunniff unfairly targeted him for removal despite his good performance. His removal from a coveted job later was reversed.

    Taken together, the records reveal serious discord at the top of the 8,600-member force as the Guard’s commander-in-chief, Gov. Chris Christie, eyes a 2016 run for president.

    “The organization is less effective, more disruptive and compromised at all levels due to (Cunniff’s) lack of leadership,” according to a letter sent to the U.S. Department of the Army inspector general by four senior officers, who asked federal authorities to investigate Grant’s “tyrannical behavior.”

    Chief Warrant Officer Patrick Daugherty, a spokesman for the Guard and the state Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, said all complaints are taken seriously and given fair consideration, but there “is not any turmoil in the organization.”

    “There may be turmoil amongst those who aren’t happy with command decisions, but the organization is quite healthy and continues to provide top-notch support to our state and nation,” Daugherty said. “We’re not a department in crisis right now.”

    Crisis, no crisis – who the hell knows, right? More:

    In related allegations, filed Dec. 8 with the Guard’s Equal Employment Opportunity officer, Col. John Langston accused Cunniff and Grant of racial discrimination for not considering him for Alvarado’s job as chief of staff.

    Langston, a full-time active guard member who is black, claimed he was qualified for the position and had excellent evaluations, including one from August in which Grant himself stated he was “one of the top three colonels,” was “earmarked…for a brigade-level command” and should be groomed “for promotion to brigadier general.”

    After being made chief-of-staff, the complaint said, Perron reassigned Langston from director of operations and training at the Joint Training and Training Development Center to commanding officer, a move he called a “demotion.” Perron declined comment for this story.

    “I am being professionally neutered,” wrote Langston, 51, of Newark.

    He said the move was retaliation for questioning Perron’s staff about the recent departure of six black members from a technician force. He said in the complaint Perron came to his office “incensed” and wanted to know why the inquiry was made, and then became agitated and demanded his source for the information.

    “I believe (Perron’s) past relationship with BG Grant has earned him preferential treatment,” Langston wrote. “I further believe BG Grant and Col. Perron conspired to deny me education, and removed me from my position solely because I am black.”

    Langston also alleged he was denied continuing education opportunities afforded to other colonels, saying in the complaint, “the only exception is I am black.”

    Alvarado and Langston are not the first to accuse Grant of discrimination.

    In 2001, while Grant worked for State Police, an administrative law judge ruled in favor of a female sergeant who accused him of gender discrimination, stripping her of duties, subjecting her to an internal investigation and blocking future promotion.

    The judge noted “the flagrant hostility of Grant” and ruled his testimony, including his denials in the matter, were “not credible,” according to the decision.

    Daugherty, a spokesman for the Guard, declined comment on the State Police case.

    And even more at the link.

  44. rq says

    Here’s some stuff I picked up from Tony:
    Two pdfs – Seeing Black: Race, Crime, and Visual Processing, which is a rather frightening study about law enforcement officers and perceptions of race in determining is someone is a suspect or not:

    Using police officers and undergraduates as participants, the authors investigated the influence of stereotypic associations on visual processing in 5 studies. Study 1 demonstrates that Black faces influence participants’ ability to spontaneously detect degraded images of crime-relevant objects. Conversely, Studies 2–4 demonstrate that activating abstract concepts (i.e., crime and basketball) induces attentional biases toward Black male faces. Moreover, these processing biases may be related to the degree to which
    a social group member is physically representative of the social group (Studies 4–5). These studies, taken together, suggest that some associations between social groups and concepts are bidirectional and operate as visual tuning devices—producing shifts in perception and attention of a sort likely to influence decision making and behavior.

    … And RACE AND PUNISHMENT:
    RACIAL PERCEPTIONS OF CRIME AND SUPPORT FOR PUNITIVE POLICIES    , from the Sentencing Project.

    How News Outlets Help Convince You That Most Criminals Are Black. Read this.

    Compared to the percentage of crimes they actually commit, African Americans are grossly overrepresented on local news broadcasts about criminal activity, according to a new report from Media Matters for America. In New York City alone, black people make up 75 percent of criminals discussed on local channels, whereas they only make up 51 percent of the actual arrest rate.

    Between August and December last year, WABC, WNBC, and WCBS overrepresented black people in theft, assault, and murder coverage. On WABC, WNBC, and WCBS, respectively, 82 percent, 73 percent, and 70 percent of all wrongdoers were black. However, data from 2010-2013, shows that black people only account for 55 percent of murders, 49 percent of assaults, and 55 percent of thefts in the city. Out of all murders covered on WABC, which Media Matters assigned an “F” grade, 78 percent were committed by a black person. Similarly, 82 percent and 85 percent of assaults and thefts, respectively, involved black perpetrators. On average, WNYW/FOX5, which received a “B” rating, reported far fewer criminal incidents than other mainstream outlets, but 100 percent of reported thefts were committed by black perpetrators. […]

    Unfortunately, media bias parallels extensive research that shows how African Americans are far more criminalized than their white counterparts, nationwide. One study about “who looks criminal” determined that police officers frequently associate black faces with criminal behavior. According to a 2010 survey, white people overestimated African Americans’ participation in burglaries, illegal drug sales and juvenile crime by 20-30 percent. Additionally, white people support stricter criminal justice policies if they think that more black people are arrested as a result.

    Despite widespread racial bias, though, social media has begun to take traditional media to task on its misrepresentation of black criminals — and victims. In the wake of Michael Brown’s death, national news outlets shared a photo of the deceased in a jersey, jeans, and making a hand gesture that could be perceived as a gang sign. Shortly thereafter, the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown became a trending topic on Twitter, as people shared side-by-side photos of traditionally acceptable and stereotypically unacceptable poses. News stations were also called out for their silence surrounding the NAACP bombing in Colorado.

    And this: Editor For Top Industry Publication Says There Is Too Much Diversity On TV. I didn’t know too much diversity was a hting.

    How does one respond to the story, written by Deadline TV editor Nellie Andreeva and posted Tuesday evening, with the headline, “Pilots 2015: The Year Of Ethnic Castings – About Time Or Too Much Of Good Thing?”

    Maybe the story won’t be so bad, a person could generously think upon reading that headline. Don’t judge the entire piece on the headline.

    But then the article reads: “Instead of opening the field for actors of any race to compete for any role in a color-blind manner, there has been a significant number of parts designated as ethnic this year, making them off-limits for Caucasian actors, some agents signal.” She goes on to cite an unnamed talent representative who claimed “50 percent of the roles in a pilot have to be ethnic.”

    This kind of crying “reverse racism” reads less like a story that could actually get published in a major publication and more like something we’d see in an email that leaked after the Sony hack.

    Andreeva is looking at what has been a widely celebrated season of freshman shows that feature casts who (finally!) look like America: Empire, Jane the Virgin, How to Get Away with Murder, Black-ish, Fresh off the Boat. But instead of seeing what just about everyone else can see — gangbusters ratings, fantastic performances, sharp writing — Andreeva sees a dangerous precedent being set, wherein parts that “should” go to white actors are snatched away by actors of color. (Or, to use Andreeva’s ill-chosen terminology, “ethnic actors.” Andreeva’s piece employs the word “ethnic” 21 times, headline included.)
    […]

    The word “peak” jumps off the page. It calls to mind Two and a Half Men creator Lee Aronsohn’s complaint in 2012 that “we’re approaching peak vagina on television, the point of labia saturation.” A handful of new female-centric shows — at the time, we’re talking about Girls, 2 Broke Girls, and Whitney — and Aronsohn, a man responsible for a show that systematically treated women like disposable objects, felt like maybe Hollywood was overdoing it with the lady stuff. A few new shows. For 51 percent of the population.

    Andreeva is perpetuating this notion that the addition of shows that explore the lives of people of color is somehow a threatening thing. But, threatening to whom? TV writers’ rooms are still dominated by white men. Latino men have practically from TV and film as leading actors; on TV and in film, Latinos are portrayed primarily as criminals, law enforcement, maids and cheap labor. FOTB is the first Asian-American sitcom to air in the U.S. in 20 years.

    The other huge blind spot in Andreeva’s piece is this: she seems to be suggesting that the only viewers who benefit from programs featuring people of color are people of color. But everyone benefits from outstanding television. To state something so obvious it is difficult to believe it must be stated: you don’t have to be black to like Empire, you don’t have to be Latino to like Jane the Virgin, you don’t have to be Asian to like FOTB. Good shows are good shows are good shows. And for the love of a country that grows more diverse by the day, “ethnic casting” is not a “trend.”

    More on Ferguson courts, Fleece Force: How Police And Courts Around Ferguson Bully Residents And Collect Millions, from Ryan J Reilly.

    Parking had never been an issue in her quiet, suburban community. Pasadena Hills is small, with a population of less than 1,000. But the municipality had recently passed an ordinance requiring those parking overnight to display a $10 residential parking sticker on their vehicles. The notice ordered Scott to come to City Hall to obtain the sticker.

    The city office has extemely limited business hours, however. The seven-hour drive from Huntsville, Alabama, back to Pasadena Hills also made it difficult for Scott to appear in person. Soon, the city began mailing her threatening letters.

    “They sent me a letter and said there would be a warrant out for my arrest if I didn’t come back for this,” Scott told The Huffington Post of her court appearance. “For $10. For parking in front of my house.”

    Such experiences are not uncommon in St. Louis County. According to a scathing report from the U.S. Department of Justice released this month, authorities in nearby Ferguson routinely abused the rights of residents, who were viewed “less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.” Attorney General Eric Holder said the Ferguson Police Department had essentially served as a “collection agency,” with officers competing to see who could issue the largest number of citations.

    A number of Ferguson officials have resigned in the wake of the DOJ report, including the police chief, Thomas Jackson, and the municipal court judge, Ronald Brockmeyer. Yet the problems with municipal courts in St. Louis County extend far beyond Ferguson.

    In dozens of interviews with The Huffington Post over the past several months, residents have called the system “out of control,” “inhumane,” “crazy,” “racist,” “unprofessional” and “sickening.” Some have told stories of being slapped with large fines for minor violations and threatened with jail if they couldn’t pay.

    “Everyone’s got a horror story about the police,” former St. Louis County Police Chief Tim Fitch told HuffPost in a recent interview. “And most of that horror story relates back to being ticketed for some minor violation.”[…]

    In December, St. Louis Metropolitan Police Chief Sam Dotson said he believed some municipalities “victimize those whom they are designed to protect.” In February, St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar called some of the current practices “immoral.”

    “If you think that taxation of our citizens through traffic enforcement in St. Louis County is bad, you have no idea how bad it is,” Belmar said.

    There are 90 separate municipalities in all, home to 11 percent of Missouri’s total population. The largest is Florissant, an area of 12 square miles with over 52,000 residents. The smallest, the village of Champ, has just six houses. Population: 13.

    Police are an overwhelming presence in St. Louis County. Nationally, the United States has roughly 2.4 police officers for every 1,000 residents, according to FBI statistics. In many parts of St. Louis County, the ratio is much higher. Beverly Hills, Missouri, with fewer than 600 people covering just 13 blocks, has 14 officers on its police force.

    As in Ferguson, many of these police departments and local courts generate massive amounts of revenue for city coffers. Municipalities in St. Louis County took in $45 million in fines and fees in 2013 — 34 percent of the amount collected statewide — according to Better Together St. Louis, a nonprofit working to improve municipal government in the St. Louis region.

    The municipal courts lie at the heart of this system. There are 81 in all. Some are housed in government buildings that were built for public use. Others, like the ones in Pasadena Hills or nearby Country Club Hills, have been set up in buildings designed as residential homes. Kinloch holds court in the cafeteria of an abandoned elementary school. In Beverly Hills, the police department and court share a building with a pharmacy. There’s an ATM in the lobby, and a payday loan outlet is conveniently located next door.

    The reach of these courts extends beyond traffic and parking violations. Some municipalities require occupancy permits for those who live in their jurisdictions, which in practice means people can be fined for sleeping over at their boyfriend or girlfriend’s house. In some municipalities, overgrown grass or failing to subscribe to a designated trash collection service are offenses that can ultimately lead to an arrest record.

    Even clothing choices can be a target. Pine Lawn has a municipal code that bans saggy pants. One man received a $50 fine in 2012 for wearing pants that were too big for his waist, according to court documents. After he missed two court dates associated with his fashion crime, he was slapped with two additional $125 fines, and for a time, there was a warrant out for his arrest. [… – FOR WEARING BAGGY PANTS – IS PINE LAWN THE FASHION POLICE NOW, TOO? Sorry-not-sorry for yelling.]

    First, court officials called for those who could afford to pay more than $75 toward their outstanding fines to step forward. Next, they called for those who could pay more than $50. Then $40. Then $30. Then $25.

    If you owe the city money and can afford to pay $100 or more per month, you can skip this whole process and mail in your payment or pay in person any other time during the month. But the poor must sit through this ordeal for hours, the doors opened occasionally only so that smokers can take a cigarette break. Those who can afford the least are forced to stay the longest.

    “The time that you’re in court is directly related to the amount of money you can pay. So if you can pay more money, you get out faster,” said Thomas Harvey of ArchCity Defenders, a pro bono legal group that has crusaded against the practices of St. Louis County’s network of municipal courts, where they represent poor clients. “You’re effectively being punished for being poor.”

    Yvonne Fulsom was one of those who had to wait until the bitter end. She had come to the court to make a $25 payment on a $1,000 debt to the city because she let her pitbull urinate in her own yard without a leash. At that rate, she would have to appear in court on the designated night every month for more than three years to pay off the full amount. Miss a night, and she could face arrest.

    The threat of incarceration is a brutally effective tool for ensuring that municipal court payments are prioritized in a poor person’s monthly budget. Ferguson was using arrest warrants “almost exclusively for the purpose of compelling payment through the threat of incarceration,” according to the Justice Department report. The practice is common across St. Louis County. […]

    A University of Missouri–St. Louis student accompanying her boyfriend to court told The Huffington Post that they were “lost and scared” trying to find their way around the nearly abandoned town on a recent court night. Luckily they stumbled upon the right location. Her boyfriend was accused of rolling through a stop sign. An officer banned her and a reporter from the courtroom, in violation of the Missouri constitution. “If your name is not on the docket, you are not allowed in the courtroom,” the officer said.

    Over in St. Ann, one of the most notorious speed traps in St. Louis County, defendants in municipal court appear before Sean O’Hagan, a prosecutor in the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office who serves as a part-time municipal judge. On one night in November, defendant after defendant went before O’Hagan, agreeing to make partial payments or explaining why they couldn’t afford to make good on their outstanding debt.

    O’Hagan ordered one defendant with a skullcap on his head to take his “rag” off. He told a woman holding her infant child to find a babysitter for her next court date, despite a warning from a St. Louis County circuit judge last year pointing out that banning children from municipal courts is also a violation of the state constitution.

    After one defendant said he didn’t have money to make a payment, O’Hagan told him to “get a job” and noted that retail stores would be hiring seasonal workers “like crazy” for the holidays. He refused a lawyer’s request to allow his client to pay off a fine over two years, saying 18 months was the best he could do. “If it’s not paid, it’s going to be revoked,” he said of the defendant’s drivers license. […]

    After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the use of racially restrictive covenants in property deeds in 1948, white leaders turned to ostensibly race-neutral means to maintain housing segregation. They passed zoning laws that allowed for only single-family residences and prohibited public housing and apartment complexes. As real-estate developers pushed into new areas, they often formally designated new municipalities.

    “We have extremely easy laws of incorporation. We can practically have a couple city blocks and if you have the right paperwork, you can incorporate as a city,” said Robert A. Cohn, the author of The History and Growth of St. Louis County, Missouri.

    “If you had six houses and some stationery, you could call yourself a town,” said Colin Gordon, a historian at the University of Iowa who has written about the development of St. Louis area.

    Some municipalities pool together to offer certain government services. The Normandy School District, for example, serves students living in 24 different municipalities. But elected leaders in many of the small cities have resisted merging with their neighbors.

    The hodgepodge of small municipalities with their very own governments has long caused problems. In 1966, a law professor called Missouri’s municipal courts the “misshapen stepchildren of our judicial system” and accused them of overusing arrest warrants.

    But the current situation began to take shape after 1980, when an amendment to the state constitution made it more difficult to raise taxes. As property values declined and businesses went under, many of the small cities started looking for other ways to keep themselves afloat. […]

    The bills in the Missouri legislature build on a number of other efforts currently underway to improve the St. Louis County municipal court system. The Ferguson Commission, appointed by Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D), has directed a municipal court task force to propose reforms. The Missouri Attorney General’s Office and the State Auditor’s Office are looking into violations, and lawsuits filed by private litigants against a handful of municipalities are ongoing. The St. Louis County Municipal Court Improvement Committee, lead by longtime municipal court judge Frank Vatterott, is encouraging the courts to voluntarily implement changes, such as letting defendants choose community service instead of fines and offering legal advisers to help people navigate the system.

    Critics say that mere reforms are not enough, however, and that the entire municipal court system needs to be replaced with full-time, professionally operated courts that cannot be so easily pressured by law enforcement and city officials.

    Brendan Roediger, a Saint Louis University School of Law professor heavily involved in efforts to reform the courts, worries that minor changes will leave local authorities with far too much power to continue abusive practices.

    “There really is local control, at least when it comes to oppressing folks,” he said.

    Alec Karakatsanis, a lawyer with Equal Justice Under Law, one of the organizations suing Ferguson and Jennings for essentially running debtors prisons, agreed.

    “We don’t just need a few small tinkering reforms to St. Louis municipal courts,” he said. […]

    Still, the fallout from the DOJ report has been swift, and reformers believe it’s only a matter of time before more changes are made, however piecemeal they may be. The Missouri Supreme Court transferred an appellate judge to take over hearings on municipal violations in Ferguson for the foreseeable future. Municipalities engaged in the same types of practices may be driven to re-examine their operations before state officials, civil rights attorneys or the federal government steps in.

    And the voices of those who have suffered under the current structure, marginalized for so long, are now front and center.

    Lots of stuff in the skipped parts.

    Freshman at Roosevelt sues city schools for directive to take online classes

    A freshman at Roosevelt High School is suing St. Louis Public Schools after the district suspended him from the school’s Virtual Learning Center in October and directed him to take online courses from home.

    The lawsuit filed last week in St. Louis Circuit Court says the student is not getting meaningful education instruction because he cannot access those online courses. He does not have a computer and cannot afford one, the suit says. And the library nearest his home does not allow minors to use its computers during school hours.

    The virtual program at Roosevelt is one of four at city district high schools where students get direction from a teacher and do most of their work online from computers at the school. The student was placed in the program in September after he was involved in a fight.

    In October, the student was suspended from the building indefinitely after allegedly taking bus tickets from a teacher’s cabinet. Since that time, the student “has earned no high school credits thus far this school year and is not making any meaningful progress towards earning any course credits,” the lawsuit says. “He has no meaningful interaction with his fellow students or the virtual program instructor.”

    The district cannot comment on pending litigation, said Jeffrey Ohmer, the district’s attorney. “However, the District is confident that our student discipline practices comply with the requirements set forth in the Revised Statutes of Missouri.”

    Amanda Schneider, a lawyer with Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, which represents the student, said it was the district’s constitutional responsibility to educate all children.

    “This continuing emphasis on suspensions and expulsions, including ‘de facto’ expulsions, fuels the school-to-prison pipeline that plagues our society and the St. Louis region in particular,” she said.

    The freshman is asking to be placed back in Roosevelt’s Virtual Schools Program so he can have access to a computer and instructor, and eventually return to a traditional classroom.

  45. says

    Remember John Crawford, III? The African-American man who was gunned down in Walmart by trigger happy racially biased cops? His father and the family lawyer viewed the surveillance footage from Walmart. Guess what? It doesn’t line up with the police report:

    John was doing nothing wrong in Walmart, nothing more, nothing less than shopping,” Wright said. He explained that the video showed Crawford facing away from officers, talking on the phone, and leaning on the toy gun like a cane. He was allegedly “shot on sight” in a “militaristic” police response.

    “The BB gun was in a down position,” Wright said. “He was kinda using the BB gun as what it looked like was a crutch. He was just leaning on it. And at some point, he raised it up and he was shot and killed. At no point in time was he facing the officers. At no point in time was there any type of suggestive movements or anything like that.”

    However, DeWine is not willing to release the video to the public. I thought the family had the right to view it,” DeWine said. “The mom did not want to view it; I understand it. The dad did view it, (but) to put the video out on TV is not the right thing to do.”

    DeWine claims that releasing the video would taint the jury pool.

    Wright said the family objects to the selective release of evidence. So far, dispatch audio and video on the day of the shooting that has been released, according to the attorney, is biased toward police. “Everything released is one-sided,” Wright said. “There is nothing favorable to John Crawford. You can’t show different pieces, show it all, don’t trickle pieces to gain favor of the public.”

    Two Officers involved in the shooting, Sgt. David Darkow and Sean Williams, were placed on paid vacation initially. Darkow has already been permitted to resume his duties. The other officer remains on administrative leave.

    A special Grand Jury will meet on September 3 to determine if the officers will be charged.

  46. says

    Man arrested and jailed for swearing during a 911 call. He was mad that police wouldn’t perform a courtesy check on his mother, who was ill. She was later found dead.

    On June 20, 2013, a City of Dalton police officer arrested Green for driving under the influence. Green told the arresting officer that his mother was ill and alone. He implored the officer to have someone check on her. No one checked on Ada Green.
    Once incarcerated, Green again notified officials about his mother’s condition. He asked jail staff to send someone to ensure that she was safe. No one checked on Ada Green despite Green’s pleas. Green was still in custody, five days later, when Ada Green was found in her home by a friend, deceased. Devastated, Green was subsequently released from jail and placed on probation for the DUI conviction.

    Nearly a year later, on June 2, 2014, Green dialed 911 and was connected to a 911 dispatcher. Green told the 911 dispatcher that he wanted to see the Dalton police officer who arrested him for DUI in 2013. The 911 operator asked Green ‘What’s the problem?’ Green responded: ‘The problem is he let my momma lay up here and die. That’s the problem.

    During the 82-second 911 phone call, Green did not raise his voice, threaten the 911 dispatcher, or insult her in any way. He used expletives two times, in passing. First, he said, ‘[t]he sorry damn asshole knows me,’ referring to the Dalton police officer who had arrested him in 2013. Later in the conversation he used the words ‘damn bullshit.’”

    After what this man had already been through, due to the incompetence of the police, he was then treated as a common criminal for using words that certainly fall under “protected speech.”

    Additionally, the 9-1-1 operator never even felt “intimidated or harassed,” as required under the law, making the arrest that much more egregious.

    According to Green’s complaint, in a conversation with a sheriff’s deputy after the call, the 9-1-1 operator said that Green “didn’t use a whole lot” of profanity and that “he did say a couple of cuss words, but it wasn’t like complete cusswords.”

    Green was never alleged to have engaged in “fighting words” or “threats of true violence” which both are unprotected forms of speech, rather he simply used swear words to describe a situation.

  47. says

    Ernie Chambers, the longest running Senator in Nebraska compared USAmerican police forces to ISIS:

    “I wouldn’t go to Syria, I wouldn’t go to Iraq, I wouldn’t go to Afghanistan, I wouldn’t go to Yemen, I wouldn’t go to Tunisia, I wouldn’t go to Lebanon, I wouldn’t go to Jordan, I would do it right here,” Chambers said. “Nobody from ISIS ever terrorized us as a people as the police do daily.”

    The beloved senator was pointing out that you don’t have to go halfway around the world to find terrorism. He states that it can be found right here in America where the police have killed 268 Americans, that we know of, in the 84 days since January 1, 2015.

    That is over three people per day, or another life taken every 8 hours.

    When looking at terrorism, the U.S. Department of State reports that only 16 non-military U.S. citizens were killed worldwide as a result of terrorism in 2013, the most recent year that there was available data. This means that as a United States citizen you are 58 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist.

  48. says

    Police chief in Louisiana proposes ordinance to ban saggy pants :

    Tuesday night Chief of Police Donald Thompson will bring an ordinance before the council to ban saggy pants, on both men and women in the city.

    Penalties include up to $200 in fines, and 30 days in jail.

    Thompson says residents he’s spoken with are at their wits end when it comes to seeing a rear end.

    “It’s fair to say at least 70% of the residents of Opelousas will support me on this law,” says Opelousas Chief of Police Donald Thompson.

    But that estimation might be a little low. Everyone I spoke to in Opelousas Monday was in support of banning saggy pants.

    “I don’t have a bias against the people that sag their pants. But I have a bias against sagging itself, because of what it’s doing to our community,” says ordinance supporter Bryant Williams.

    No word yet on how saggy pants has an effect on a community.

  49. says

    This story is amusing to a degree, but it’s emblematic of a deeper problem among police officers.
    http://thefreethoughtproject.com/watch-rights-flexing-woman-successfully-stops-cop-arresting-dog-seriously/

    If a video of this incident didn’t exist, it would be nearly impossible to believe. However, Franklin is not only a rights flexing hero, but she also knows the importance of filming police encounters.

    Last weekend, Franklin went to the grocery store with her pit bull in tow like she always does. She left her beloved pet in her own vehicle with the windows cracked while she went into the store. It was not a hot day, and the dog was perfectly safe.

    However, when someone walked near the car, her protective pup barked and growled at this passerby. The passerby, apparently being the good police state participant that they were, then called the police to handle this non-situation.

    When the officer arrived, he was waiting to pounce.

    When Franklin got back to her vehicle, she immediately rolled up the windows and apologized to all those involved. She explained that her dog was normally sweet but very protective of her and her family’s vehicle.

    For most people, this apology for a non-incident would have sufficed. But this cop wanted more. He wanted to take Franklin’s dog.

    “Officer Whipple proceeds to demand my driver’s license. I, of course, refuse, as I have done nothing wrong and then ask him if I am under arrest?” questioned Franklin.

    “Am I under arrest?” Franklin asks.

    “No, but your dog is,” says the cop.

    Franklin then explains to this cop that the dog had not harmed anyone, not gotten loose, and done absolutely nothing wrong. The officer then ran off with his proverbial tail between his legs.

    Because of Franklin’s refusal to be bullied into an unlawful situation, her and her pit bull remain together as best friends.

  50. says

    Geez, the Freethought Project has a *lot* of interesting stories to post. Here’s another one. It’s about good cops.
    http://thefreethoughtproject.com/police-officers-head-d-c-lobby-systemic-policing-reform/

    The National Coalition of Law Enforcement Officers for Justice, Reform and Accountability (NCLEO) is a contingent of current and retired law enforcement officers and whistleblowers. NCLEO will be meeting with a congressional delegation that includes civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday to discuss policing reform.

    These former officers seek to assist in helping to reform a system that is severely broken and many times entirely devoid of justice. Problems that range from racial profiling and police brutality to the lack transparency in relation to allegations and complaints of misconduct by officers will be addressed.

    “Modern policing is in a crisis that could lead to a revolution. We need a paradigm shift to get rid of antiquated policing. The insular culture of law enforcement and mental health issues in cops need to be addressed, as well as ingrained racism,” said NCLEO member Alex Salazar, a former LAPD cop turned whistleblower, in an interview with The Free Thought Project.

  51. says

    Trans activist CeCe McDonald- “There is no such thing as prison reform”:

    California prison abolition group Critical Resistance brought CeCe to the Bay Area earlier this fall. I interviewed her on prison abolition strategies, the importance of creative community on the inside, and how to fight back against systemic oppression.

    AK: What kinds of things do you want to see come out of the prison abolition movement?

    CM: In order for us to talk about the abolition of prisons we have to talk about how to prevent people from getting in prisons. How do we change things around current policies and people being in prison? It’s not so much to think about the crimes and how to prevent them–the reality is that not all crimes are preventable.

    We are going to have people who are ignorant. We are going to have people who still are filled with hate. With that we know that cases of hate crimes and violence against women and trans women, violence against the LGBTQIA community, and crimes against people of color are going to still exist.

    Crime is still going to exist, so how do we talk about abolition and not talk about the reality that hate exists? We have to acknowledge that, and figure out how to navigate that there are some people that aren’t easy to convince that: I’m a good person as a black person or I’m a good person as a trans person. We have to understand that. Then maybe we can talk about the realities of what justice could look like.

    AK: Can you talk more about the prison abolition movement compared to prison reform work?

    CM: I feel like true reform would be the actual ending of prison: dismantling the prison system. There is no such thing as saying we can fix it and end it. We can only have it one or the other way.

    A true abolitionist, while thinking of reform, would think of ways to: first, free prisoners, second, dismantle the prison industrial complex and third, find alternative solutions and other ways to deal with crime and punishment and justice, knowing that we all won’t have the same idea of what that is.

    The word ‘reform’ needs to reshape itself. We don’t want to make prison different, we want to make it end. In my opinion there is no such thing as reform.

    AK: I would like to hear some of your thoughts on community accountability processes or transformative justice as an alternative to the prison industrial complex.

    CM: Transformative justice is a very complex and touchy subject, as we all know. Some people’s idea of transformative justice is true and fair but we know that the system is not set up to be true and fair, and that it is made to break down marginalized groups, to ‘divide and conquer’.

    So, for me, transformative justice is non-essential, something that is created to give people hope that there is a fairness or could be fairness in the justice system. It’s not possible. Transformative justice is to contradict prison abolition in a sense.

    AK: You talked about people being passive players in this framework of (resisting) capitalism, racism, and all the terrible things. What are your suggestions on how people can not play that game?

    CM: I feel like a lot of times people don’t speak up. To not be so passive about things is to speak out and educate yourself on these things and know what the reality is, what the truth is, assimilate that with your privilege and make shit happen!

    For me, I feel like it’s really important because a lot of times people claim to be an ally or an activist but you can’t be passive and be both. You can’t be an activist and sit back on the sidelines and be like: “Oh, I made some cookies to raise money for a cause.” The reality is baking cookies isn’t going to help the cause and act of having a voice, standing up for people. I can’t be in a space with a bunch of people who think having a potluck is real activist work. We need to have a movement and be real about it.

    People who have privilege can make some really big changes, you know what I’m saying? I want to see how many rich white people can call out their other rich white friends when they say something wrong. And that’s being a true ally. That’s being a true activist. It don’t have to just be you with a picket sign marching down the street. That’s cool too but what about the domestic shit? What about the shit that’s right next to me? That’s what counts more than being passive and saying that you’re an activist.

    AK: What is your relationship to creative work? What possibilities for creativity are there inside prison?

    CM: I’ve seen such talent within the prison that I was at, and also watching shows about different people in prison across the country I know that a lot wrote poetry, drew pictures, very detailed, wonderful pictures, sung songs, made-up raps, and stuff like that, about the PIC or being locked up, or being caught up in the system. It was natural to who they were as individuals, because of the diversity that’s in the PIC.

    People come from so many different backgrounds and we use that as a tool in our arts: the way that we write our poetry, the way that we write our music, the way that we draw our pictures. A lot of the stuff that I wrote on the blog when I was locked-up came from and was inspired by the way I grew up, my intellect and my background, being in school, loving education. It came out in a way that was really self-expressive, showing people who I was as an individual.

    It made me feel like people were understanding who I was, not just one other person in the system, but that I was one other person with dreams and aspirations. I had this on my mind.

    I went to write and it came out on paper, and the way people connected to me was through my blog, seeing my perspective as an individual in prison.

    AK: You talked about having a positive relationship with your Parole Officer. How does that relationship work compared to interactions with Corrections staff?

    CM: We have to understand people have predispositions. Occupations attract people who have internalized issues. So a person who is racist or sexist or classist or ageist or any of these things…they’re going to work in places that you go to on a day-to-day basis whether it be the post office, McDonalds, or the prisons.

    The things that come along with being a prison guard: it’s people who feel like it’s their duty to put people of color in check and in line, you know what I’m saying? It’s icky that they work for the prison industrial complex, yes, you know what I’m saying? That exists. Those people exist and have jobs and those jobs are the places that we go to on a day-to-day basis.

    But not all of them are bad. But we also got to expect that some are going to have a predisposition about you, whether it’s because you’re a woman, whether they don’t like you because you’re black or a person of color, when they they’re not going to like you because you’re queer or you’re trans or gender non-conforming.

    AK: Is there anything else you would like to say?

    CM: I just want people to start realizing the world that we live in. I want people to open their minds and their hearts to the things that are going on across the world. With the advances of social media we see it every day: police brutality, racism, war crimes, hunger, poverty. So much that we sit back and say, “Oh well, that’s bad,” and then go about our daily lives, to the nearest Starbucks and forget all about that.

    I’m still going through issues with my incident, learning to trust people. I know there are people out there who are good, that want change, that expect love and empathy and sympathy. We need more people like that. We need to stop raising our younger generation to this idea of what hate is and it’s really hard. I know that it’s possible.

    I’m really looking forward to being more diligent and steadfast in my advocacy work and bringing together different groups of people from different backgrounds. We need to open our minds and hearts to these changes to see what justice is, fear, and equality. We have to be the people who want change and move upon that, to end the ‘-isms’.

    It hinders us as human beings. It prevents us from progressing. That’s what the system wants. They don’t want us to progress, to realize our true potential as human beings who can come together aside from all those -isms, and just be human beings.

  52. rq says

    Here’s what got left behind yesterday before I went to work:
    World’s Greatest Leaders, by Fortune magazine.

    After the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Mo., Mckesson left his school administrator job in Minneapolis to protest in St. Louis. He met Elzie at a medic training on how to respond to tear gas, and together they began to chronicle events in the shooting’s wake as they unfolded with breakneck speed. Their award-winning online newsletter, This Is the Movement, now has some 15,000 subscribers—and the two reach another 100,000 followers via Twitter. “My role here is just to amplify the message,” Mckesson tells Fortune. “We are two of many people.”

    Which is the thing about media: they have picked their ‘leaders’, ignoring all the others working hard behind the scenes. Also, I hope everyone who’s “looking for leadership in ferguson” knows that there THOUSANDS of leaders right in STL.
    Also, Comey of the FBI has made the list. Which is not as white and male as it could be.

    Cops at work: Suit: Detroit sergeant seen on video planting evidence.

    Outside groups making big push in Ferguson election

    The Service Employees International Union tells USA TODAY it will join the progressive group Working Families Party and activists from Organization for Black Struggle and Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment to help get out the vote for two candidates running for city council that they say can best help Ferguson move forward.

    The April 7 election comes just weeks after the Justice Department issued its report outlining endemic problems of racial bias in how the Ferguson’s police department and municipal court went about its business.

    Ferguson has been under the microscope since the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by a white police officer last August ignited months of demonstrations and uncovered long simmering racial tensions in the St. Louis suburb.

    “Our purpose is to back candidates that are aware of the issues that were brought up [in the Department of Justice report] and are willing to take them on,” said Jake Olson, executive director of SEIU’s Missouri/Kansas state council. “It’s not only important for Ferguson, but it could be a beginning for grassroots folks in this region that are trying to take on these issues.”

    The coalition plans to knock on the doors of 5,000 Ferguson residents living in two of the city’s wards on behalf of candidates Lee Smith, a retiree and longtime Ferguson resident, and Bob Hudgins, who has been active in the protest movement since shortly after Brown’s killing.

    The coalition, which was spearheaded by the Working Families Party (WFP), also plans on running phone banks to try to reach out to voters and tout the candidates. WFP is perhaps best known for helping lift New York’s de Blasio’s insurgent campaign in 2013.

    “This is about restoring justice and police accountability in Ferguson, but it’s also about asserting that black lives do matter in our political system and in America,” said Delvone Michael, a senior organizer for WFP who be helping organize the effort in Ferguson.

    The amount of attention being poured into the council races in this town of about 21,000 is unusual, and the coalition’s effort could be meaningful in contests that are typically decided by several hundred voters.

    *sigh* Study: Women with Natural Hair Have Low Self-Esteem. Can we not chalk it up to the hair as such, necessarily?

    The most common natural hairstyle is an afro, which many black women consider an undesirable look. The hair is many times matted and coarse, and is not considered appropriate for a business environment. Many employers consider the look untidy, and ban individuals from wearing this style.

    According to the study by Bountiful Hair, natural hair being viewed as a messy look is causing many women, who wear their hair in that manner, to feel inadequate and less desirable as their counterparts. Those feelings of inadequacy causes women with natural hair to lash out at women with treated or straightened hair, and in turn lowers their self-esteem.

    Of the 3,000 women who participated in the study, 2,500 said they did not feel as pretty as women with straightened hair. Pilar Ciara Jones, who says she participated in the study, stated, “some days I just don’t know what to do with these naps — and on those days I just avoid the mirror altogether.”

    “I try to tell myself that wearing my hair natural is all about empowerment and expressing natural beauty, but there were times when I just did not feel pretty,” Jones continued. “When you continuously break combs because your hair is so nappy, and you use everything in your refrigerator to try to tame that mane, and you still have hair so rough you could polish rocks, you begin to reevaluate your choices.”

    “At one point I was using a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs on my hair every day to try to soften it. That’s when I knew it was time to make a change. I got a relaxer and a Brazilian weave down to my butt, and I have never felt prettier,” Jones stated.

    Here’s the order of dismissal in the case concerning teargassing of that restaurant in Ferguson: Templeton et al. vs. Sam Dotson, Chief of Police, et al. Does this mean there’s a settlement?

  53. rq says

    Grand jury: Terrebonne Parish deputy will not stand trial in teen’s fatal shooting

    Deputy Preston Norman shot and killed Cameron Tillman on Sept. 23 after finding Tillman and a group of boys in an abandoned home.

    The sheriff’s office said Norman fired in self-defense after Tillman opened the door holding what appeared to be a .45-caliber pistol.

    Relatives of other teenagers in the abandoned house said their children say the boy was not holding a weapon and that he opened the door because he was expecting a friend.

    Norman was placed on administrative leave after the incident.

    District Attorney Joe Waltz said his office presented 30 witnesses to the grand jury, which returned no true bill, meaning that Norman will not stand trial.

    The FBI has requested a complete file of the findings for its own investigation on potential civil rights violations.

    Reflections on Ferguson: Boots on the Ground by Talal Ahmad. It’s from last November, before the Grand Jury decision, but worth a re-read.

    Closure Of Private Prison Forces Texas County To Plug Financial Gap

    One morning late last month, the prisoners rioted. They set fires and tore the place up. Guards put down the uprising in about five hours. But the destruction was so severe that the sprawling detention compound has been shut down. All 2,800 inmates were transferred.

    Willacy County is now facing the question — what does it do now that its biggest moneymaker is out of business?

    “Worst scenario, we’ll lose about $2.3 million annually, which is about 23 percent of our income,” says Beto Guerra, Willacy County commissioner.

    This agricultural county in the Rio Grande Valley is one of the poorest in the nation. The main street of Raymondville, the county seat, is lined with Tex-Mex cafes, payday loan offices and Joe Alexandre’s jewelry store.

    “Around the state we have seen several communities that have had their private prisons fail and they’re left holding the bag when it comes to the debt that they floated.”

    – Bob Libal

    “We never expected something like this, to this catastrophe, to happen all at one time,” he says.

    Alexandre was mayor of Raymondville twice before, and he’s running again. He says the prison’s water and sewer bill amounted to $50,000 a month — a big boost to the city. Once insurance pays for extensive repairs to the prison, the county needs to fill those beds again.

    “It’s a business,” he says. “And we’re gonna take all the advantage we can to bring in more business if possible.”

    That means more inmates.

    “What else can we do?” Alexandre says. “At the moment, we have been depending on inmates.”

    There’s something really, really, really wrong with that picture.

    Former Cardinals player punched at St. Louis County gas station after racial slur

    Former Cardinals outfielder Curt Ford said Thursday he may move away from the St. Louis area in disgust after being punched in an allegedly unprovoked, race-related attack at a gas station.

    “I’m going to let the authorities handle this situation, but I’ve had enough of St. Louis,” Ford said in a phone interview Thursday. “You hear about this kind of stuff happening, and I always knew it existed because of my previous experience working here in St. Louis, but you try to keep away from it, and there is just no way you can do that unless you stay inside like a hermit.

    “I just want justice. It’s all I want.”

    Ford, 54, said the experience has made him consider moving, even though, “I care a lot about St. Louis and I love the people here.” He added, “The people I have been involved with are all very positive and all they want to do is work and pay bills. There are very nice people here.”

    St. Louis County police from the Fenton precinct arrested James Street, 37, of the 400 block of Saline Road, a white man who allegedly slugged the black former Cardinals player Wednesday after shouting racial slurs at him and telling him to “go back to Ferguson,” the Post-Dispatch has learned.

    “I was sucker-punched, blindsided,” Ford said. “I was walking into the store and hit from my blind side.”

    No attorney was listed for Street.

    A man who witnessed the aftermath of the attack said Thursday that Street was “huge.” The man, who did not want to be identified, said he snapped pictures of Street’s car and heard him yelling at a woman who was with him for driving out the front entrance to the station, instead of the back.

    The witness noted that the people who helped Ford by giving him ice, calling 911 and writing down Street’s license plate were white.

    Boxergate: It’s time to play the blame game

    It’s finger pointing time at LAPDHQs and everyone is invited.

    The shit is hitting the fan literally over at 100 West 1st Street as it relates to what I have dubbed as Boxergate—and the show is far from over.

    Just a quick recap for those not up on game. Someone (and we’ll get into that later) thought it would be a great idea for the Los Angeles Police Department to utilize police resources to essentially host the January membership meeting of the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) while simultaneously providing an opportunity for ex-Mexican Mafia convicted hitman turned informant Rene “Boxer” Enriquez to talk about his life and sign copies of a book written about him.

    The event took place back on Jan. 28 at a place called The Reserve in downtown Los Angeles near 6th and Spring streets. And while the LAPD tried to spin it in the media as a meeting to educate local authorities and private sector tycoons about the workings of a “transnational criminal enterprise,” we have since learned (in my best impression of Maury Povich), that was a lie—or as the department likes to say, false and misleading information.

    The summary I got from those in attendance was that it was basically a YPO membership meeting with a special guest star, Boxer, courtesy of the LAPD. […]

    Thanks to our friends in the news media, currently there’s a fascinating version of the blame game going on in the upper echelons of the LAPD. So fascinating that I brought a bag of popcorn (forgot the Red Vines) to Tuesday’s Police Commission meeting to further enjoy the fallout up close and personal—I was not disappointed.

    At issue is who to blame for the okaying of this event and who knew what when.

    From the jump Deputy Chief Downing vigorously defended the event as being some of sort of training for local authorities and an elite group of top business executives about the workings of a “transnational criminal enterprise.”

    First and foremost, what kind of sense does it make for wealthy business executives to learn about the workings of a “transnational criminal enterprise” courtesy of the Los Angeles Police Department? None. Another common sense question to have asked would have been why would the LAPD be training members of the YPO?

    Second, let’s say that it was a training for local law enforcement authorities, it wasn’t, but let’s say it was. Since when does the LAPD hold trainings with alcohol being served? And why would you be training people who arguably are on their last leg any damn way with one foot out of door headed for retirement? But the kicker is, why would over 100 YPO members get the invitation first before law enforcement officials—I mean if it was really about a training for local authorizes. Exactly.

    The reality is that out of 150 guests, less than 10 percent were official law enforcement officers and the rest were members of YPO and their wives. […]

    As already proven and explained, this was not a training by any stretch of the imagination—not unless that training was an exercise on how to misuse taxpayer money and misappropriate police resources to show off to “friends” of the command staff. If that was the training then they nailed it.

    From what I’m told, Lt. Lopez has quite the history with Boxer having been a partial handler of his during his previous speaking engagements while she was supervisor of the LAPD/FBI gang task force. Apparently she works for Deputy Chief Downing at Major Crimes. Many folks in the department believe that she is directly responsible for making the connection to Boxer for Downing. […]

    I think Boxergate is far from over and it will be interesting to see what happens next or who blames who next between Beck, Moore and Downing.

    Between the false and misleading information provided by Chief Beck and Deputy Chief Downing and the lack of a valid court order to move Boxer into LAPD custody— I do believe that a grand jury needs to be convened ASAP because it’s clear that laws were broken.

    I mean the fact alone that Chief Beck said “The Inspector General isn’t privy to all the information that I am regarding this particular writ, but we’ll look into all that,” should make people sit up and take note. Could it be that I’m getting more information about Boxergate than Bustamante?

    The Inspector General is supposed to be the watchdog for us civilians when it comes to the LAPD. If they aren’t privy to all of the information on Boxergate, can we assume it’s the same when it comes to officer-involved-shootings and other LAPD shenanigans?

    Well until the next chapter in this saga is ready to be told, many thanks to the men and women of the Los Angeles Police Department who serve the City of Los Angeles with the decency and integrity that sadly many of your bosses don’t seem to possess. I hope that you’re enjoying all of this as much as I am.

    Skipped a lot at the link, it’s fascinating reading. And by ‘fascinating’ I also mean ‘gross and disgusting’.

    Her’es an idea: Tell Missouri @GovJayNixon to investigate the role of race in St Louis death penalty cases.

  54. rq says

    I haven’t posted people posting art for a while. Here’s some! by @cbabibayoc, seen at Sweet Art STL.
    why we fight by @cbabibayoc, seen at Sweet Art STL.
    my dad. (at @SweetArtSTL)

    Had hope that focus on St Louis would lead to pragmatic change, especially for most vulnerable. Instead, back-slapping and blame-dodging.

    Too often black leaders are selected by white leaders. The black community should select its own leaders. But participation is critical.

    Prosecutor: Brooklyn, Ill., police mishandled evidence and towed cars for profit. This is like everywhere – look in your own backyards. :(

  55. rq says

    S.F. jail inmates forced to fight, public defender says

    San Francisco sheriff’s deputies arranged and gambled on battles between County Jail inmates, forcing one to train for the fights and telling them to lie if they needed medical attention, the city’s public defender said Thursday.

    Since the beginning of March, at least four deputies at County Jail No. 4 at 850 Bryant St. threatened inmates with violence or withheld food if they did not fight each other, gladiator-style, for the entertainment of the deputies, Public Defender Jeff Adachi said.

    Adachi said the ringleader in these fights was Deputy Scott Neu, who was accused in 2006 of forcing inmates to perform sexual acts on him. That case was settled out of court.

    “I don’t know why he does it, but I just feel like he gets a kick out of it because I just see the look on his face,” said Ricardo Palikiko Garcia, one of the inmates who said he was forced to fight. “It looks like it brings him joy by doing this, while we’re suffering by what he’s doing.”

    An attorney for the San Francisco Deputy Sheriff’s Association, the union representing the deputies, called the allegations “exaggerated,” and said the fighting was “little more than horseplay.”

    But in a recorded conversation with Adachi, Garcia described a predatory atmosphere of fear and retribution in which deputies would knock over his tray and force him to gamble for his food.

    This Friday at @HowardU Founders Library Browsing Room, 1-3 p.m. : August Wilson and “The Ground on Which I Stand.”

    Cops shown violently beating black man during traffic stop

    Accounts of the incident from Dent and from Inkster police — all of whom in the video appear to be white — are wildly different:

    Police said Dent attempted to flee the police car, but the video appears to show Dent maintaining a consistent speed and then pulling over safely across the street from a police station.
    Police say Dent threatened to kill the officers. Dent says he didn’t — and none of the six officers’ microphones were turned on at the beginning of the incident to substantiate their claim.
    One officer said Dent bit him on the arm. Dent said he didn’t, and the officer didn’t seek medical attention or photograph his injury to support the allegation.
    Police said they found a bag of crack cocaine under the passenger seat of Dent’s car. Dent, who has worked for Ford Motor Co. for 37 years and has no criminal record, said officers planted the cocaine. A post-arrest blood test showed no drugs in his system.

    A judge dismissed all charges involved in the physical confrontation with police after watching the video obtained by WDIV. Dent’s lawyer said he was offered a plea deal resulting only in probation on the cocaine possession charge, but Dent turned it down, telling the station he wouldn’t plead guilty to a crime he didn’t commit.

    Revolting.

    John Legend On Common’s Racism Comments: ‘It’s Not Enough To Extend The Hand’

    The Chicago-bred rapper appeared on “The Daily Show” last week to give his take on how we can move past that whole racism “thing,” suggesting that black people forget about the past and extend a hand in love.

    Common stated: “If we’ve been bullied, we’ve been beat down and we don’t want it anymore. We are not extending a fist and we are not saying, ‘You did us wrong.’ It’s more like, ‘Hey, I’m extending my hand in love.’ Let’s forget about the past as much as we can and let’s move from where we are now. How can we help each other? Can you try to help us, because we are going to try to help ourselves, too.”

    Cue the controversy.

    Fans and critics alike were fuming over Common’s so-called solution to decades of discrimination and inequality. It was only a matter of time before reporters went after his fellow “Glory” artist to ask his thoughts on the matter.

    When asked about Common’s remarks, Legend told The Associated Press:

    “Oh yeah, I heard a little bit about it and I understand what he’s saying because I do believe that part of us ending racism is us seeing each other’s humanity and learning to love each other, even if we look different or worship differently or live differently. But I think it’s not enough for us to extend the hand of love. I think it’s important that that goes both ways. It’s important also that we look at policies we need to change as well.

    It’s important for us also to fight for certain changes that need to happen. And one of those issues that I really care about is education. But also another one is incarceration, which is what I talked about at the Oscars. And mass incarceration is a policy that’s kind of built up over the last four decades and it’s destroyed families and communities, and something we need to change. And it’s fallen disproportionally on black and brown communities, especially black communities, and it’s kind of a manifestation of structural racism. So when you think about that kind of thing, it’s not enough to say we need to love each other, you have to go behind that and say we need to change these policies, we need to fight, we need to protest, we need to agitate for change.”

    Common’s remarks were indeed a misstep for the rapper who’s made a career of being categorized as “conscious” and for the people. It’ll be interesting to see if he cleans up his comments or sticks with his thinking that it’s a one-sided issue.

    Atlanta’s Jay Williams (34 children with 17 women) gets own OWN reality show.

    On the heels of the highly-rated and controversial “Iyanla: Fix My Life” multi-part “mega fix” featuring Atlanta resident Jay Williams who says he fathered 34 children with 17 different women, OWN follows Jay as he works to put his life and relationships in order. With spiritual life coach Iyanla Vanzant holding him accountable every step of the way, OWN’s cameras follow Jay as he works to heal and establish new connections with his family, his children and the mothers of his children. He says that he wants to change and to be the best father he can be, but his extreme situation will challenge his best intentions and whether or not he can live up to all the responsibility. The series is co-produced by OWN and Evolution Media.

    Just… wow.

  56. rq says

    Ferguson activists face harassment:
    IMPORTANT: Threats & extortion for being for being an activist, related to information I released today. http://tapeacall.com/aam8uxk9n9

    I was rattled & didn’t get the recording started quickly enough, first part of call way worse. Kept them talking for evidence.
    Caller identified as retired LEO. I released information this morning, because I have been in fear for my safety. I am going dark.

    Here’s her twitter timeline, which I encourage you to read, as she appears to be targeted for raising questions like: So, why is the registered mailing address for Jay Nixon’s former assistant, Nixon’s fundraiser & the Darren Wilson Trust all the same?
    There’s more on that at her timeline.

  57. rq says

    Last night was a DOJ town hall meeting.
    Ferguson City Council Candidate and Protestor @Bob_Hudgins is here at the DOJ meeting. And so are @Patricialicious and @search4swag.
    The DOJ lead here said that if the City of Ferguson chooses not to work cooperatively, then the DOJ will have to take them to court.
    And no, I don’t see any officials from the City of Ferguson here at the DOJ meeting.
    There are 7 DOJ staffers here in suits on the stage. They’re going to answer questions. I’m confused about tonight’s goal.
    Question: Will the DOJ focus on other municipalities? DOJ reply: We believe that if Ferguson changes, other municipalities will change.
    Q: Why was the report issued so quickly? DOJ: We worked really hard to complete this report. We know it’s hard for communities to wait.

    mtc

  58. rq says

    A protestor highlights the diversity of the DOJ panel: 2 black men, 1 Latina, 1 Indian man, 1 Asian man, 1 white woman, 1 white man.
    And here is the DOJ Panel. (The rule is no streaming, not no pictures, FYI.)
    “This was not a few bad apples. This was a systemic and pervasive problem across the police department.” – DOJ lead
    Q: Is the DOJ report reflective of the entire dept or a few officers? DOJ: If it was a few officers it wouldn’t be a pattern & practice.
    The I Love Ferguson crowd wants all non-residents removed from the DOJ meeting.
    Then they worked in groups and I don’t know how it ended.

  59. rq says

    Faces from Ferguson: Johnetta Elzie. Also an old read, but worth re-reading.
    This from her: “This conference is for, about and by women and queer & trans folks of color” #COV4
    Wow, @incitenews did training with the staff on transphobia before the #COV4 conference.
    Good work going on.

    Black unemployment in Missouri, Illinois, among highest

    Black unemployment averaged 11.4 percent nationally last year, but was 14.7 percent in Illinois and 14.4 percent in Missouri, according to the EPI, a liberal nonprofit think tank that researches economic trends and policies and their impact on labor.

    Wilson concluded that black unemployment levels are still higher than before the Great Recession began in 2007 in 28 states, and that unemployment rates among blacks nationally is still 2.4 percentage points above the pre-Great Recession levels. Unemployment rates among whites, Hispanics, and Asians nationally are all less than 1 percentage point above the pre-recession levels, according to the EPI analysis.

    “The unemployment rate for black communities is at a crisis level, even as the economy gets closer and closer to a full recovery,” Wilson said.

    Wilson’s analysis said that Wisconsin (19.9 percent), Nevada, (16.1), Michigan (15.8), the District of Columbia (15.7), and Iowa (15.6) last year had higher black unemployment rates than Illinois and Missouri.

    Only Wisconsin, with a rise of 4.8 percentage points, had a higher rise in black unemployment than Missouri’s 3.2 last year, according to the EPI report.

    However, EPI’s analysis projects that black unemployment in Missouri will fall to 12 percent over the last three months of the year, and that Illinois’ will drop to 11.4 percent by the last three months of 2015. Both will still be higher than the projected national black unemployment rate of 10.4 percent in the final quarter of 2015, and roughly three times higher than projected white unemployment in the two states.

    White unemployment in Illinois and Missouri last year was slightly higher than the national average of 4.9 percent among whites in 2014 — 5 percent in Missouri and 5.4 percent in Illinois. Both states’ averages were down from 2013 — Missouri by just under 1 percentage point (.9), Illinois by 1.9, according to the EPI analysis.

    White unemployment in the fourth quarter of 2015 is projected by EPI to be 4 percent in Illinois and 3.9 percent in Missouri.

    Black Woman Faces Lynching Charges Following Police Altercation. Say that again?

    Twenty-year-old Maile Hampton currently faces the unusual charge of lynching in connection with a police altercation during a protest rally. Hampton is accused of interfering with the arrest of a fellow protester during a January rally against police brutality. Since Hampton’s arrest there have been multiple calls to change the name of the offense as to not associate it with lynching in the traditional sense. In a statement to the Guardian, Hampton’s lawyer Linda Parisi stated “It’s an irony that a woman of color who was at a public rally to shine a light on police brutality is arrested for lynching.” Video of the incident shows Hampton among a throng of protesters and officers and the ensuing altercation in which Hampton pulls a fellow protester out of the grasp of an officer.

    Hampton was arrested and charged with lynching and released on $100,000 bail. In California, this form of lynching is considered a felony that carries a maximum four-year jail sentence. In comparison, a more typical charge of resisting arrest would be a misdemeanor. Sacremento Mayor Kevin Johnson is working with legislators to amend the criminal code. “I was shocked to learn that in California, removing someone from police custody is defined as ‘lynching’. This word has a long and painful history in our nation and it needed to be immediately removed from California law,” he said in a statement to the Sacramento Bee.

    Building Movements Without Shedding Differences: Alicia Garza of #BlackLivesMatter

    The hashtag that’s become a movement began as a call to action for Black people after the killing of Trayvon Martin. It exploded on social media after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

    Now, Garza’s watching people adapt the #BlackLivesMatter slogan into some version of “AllLivesMatter” or even “AnimalLivesMatter.”
    “We were able to build connections online so that people can take action together offline.”

    Explaining why that’s a problem, she says, is just one of the challenges the #BlackLivesMatter movement faces at this point.

    Women are at the heart of the movement, specifically young Black women, many of them calling themselves queer. Garza talks here about what that word means to her.

    It’s about “creating a movement that feel like home … creating community,” says Garza.

    And, heads-up to all who want to shrink the movement’s goals: #BlackLivesMatter is seeking a whole lot more than a few police prosecutions.

    Video interview at the link, incl. a transcript!

    I think what’s important to know about #BlackLivesMatter and how it really took off is that when Mike Brown was killed in August of 2014, Patrice and Darnell Moore, who is a scholar, activist here in New York, called for a #BlackLivesMatter freedom ride. That drew more than 500 Black people from across the country who in 10 days raised the money, got on buses, vans, planes, however folks could get there, to really support the work that was happening in Ferguson, and also to bear witness to the incredible Jim Crow situation that still exists today.

    From that ride, people got excited about and really felt passionately about bringing what they had seen and what they had learned back to their communities. What we saw were people who were inspired by the actions that people were taking on the front lines in Ferguson. The non-compromising way that folks said, “We will not compromise for our freedom. We are going to be free no matter what.” The ways in which folks there were really challenging respectability politics. Also, the ways that people were building relationships together, knowing that maybe folks hadn’t been connected before, but certainly that they knew that they were going to be connected forever because of what had happened.

    One of the ways that we’ve seen it grow is that it’s moved, not just nationally, but internationally. We saw Afro-Colombian domestic workers sending pictures and photos saying #BlackLivesMatter. We saw folks from South Africa, folks from Ireland, folks from all over the world sending messages, not just of solidarity, but lifting up the conditions that Black people are facing in their countries. The growth of the project has really been a message of self-determination, of liberation and a call to re-humanize us around the world, which has been incredibly inspiring. I don’t even know what to say about that. […]

    First, I’ll say that changing Black Lives Matter to All Lives Matter is not an act of solidarity. What it is is a demonstration of how we don’t actually understand structural racism in this country. When we say All Lives Matter, that’s a given. Of course, we’re all human beings – we all bleed red – but the fact of the matter is some human lives are valued more than others, and that’s a problem. The other thing that we’ve seen is replacing Black with other things. I saw Animal Lives Matter one time and I just threw up a little bit in my mouth, actually. In this country, we commodify things, and we commodify movements. We see people like Ford doing commercials that say the American Revolution, right?

    What I think is important here is that we’ve been pushing people to really talk about what does structural racism look like in this country. It’s not about people being mean to each other.

    That’s just the smallest bit. It’s about interpersonal dynamics that are backed by systemic power. When we look at that, we see that Black people are on the losing end of every disparity that you can possibly think of. Not only is it not appropriate to not be paying attention to Black lives in this country, but it’s certainly not appropriate to just erase Black from the conversation. […]

    I’m with you right there. Women at the center. Young, African-American, many of them queer women, are at the center of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, not that you would know that from the media coverage. Why? Why is it so hard for journalists to tell a story with leaders like yourself getting the recognition they deserve? Maybe I shouldn’t ask you that question, but ask someone else.

    Some of it is habit and practice. Some of it’s intentional, at times. I do think that part of it is that the way that we understand how movements happen in this country is behind one charismatic leader.

    It’s really hard for people to wrap their heads around a movement that is full of leaders. That’s how our homes work; that’s how our communities work; that’s how our workplaces work, whether or not we want to talk about it. We’re just trying to reflect our own realities. We’re trying to create more pathways for more people to participate and engage. If we want a full democracy in this country, we can’t just have people following one person. Everyone has to feel like they have a stake in shaping the kind of world that we live in. Otherwise, we get into a situation like the one that we’re living in now, where nobody’s happy with the leadership that we’re getting. Honestly, people don’t know what are the pathways to participate, besides casting your vote, which in and of itself is a very flawed system, as we know.

    A lot more at the link. (Bolding is the interviewer.)

  60. rq says

    St. Louis Police, Ferguson Protesters Agree To Tear Gas Ban – that’s the settlement I alluded to above.

    Law enforcement officials for the Missouri area that includes Ferguson and attorneys for anti-police-brutality protesters have reached an agreement that would prevent the use of tear gas or other chemical agents to disperse peaceful protests.

    Calling it a “monumental, unprecedented victory,” attorneys for the protesters said the judge’s order will prohibit police from “frightening” or “punishing” protesters with tear gas and other chemical agents.

    The agreement means local law enforcement agencies — including the city police department, the county police department, and the Missouri State Highway Patrol — can no longer use tear gas, smoke, pepper spray, or other chemical agents against peaceful protesters, or without issuing clear warnings and allowing demonstrators to exit the area.

    “This sets forth some pretty common sense standards here, ” Denise Lieberman, a senior attorney with The Advancement Project, told BuzzFeed News. “We haven’t seen this kind of heavy-handed response to protests in a long time.”[…]

    “The agreement approved by the Court today documents a commonsense agreement that will allow the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department to continue to protect protesters’ constitutional rights, keep people safe, and protect people’s homes and businesses,” St. Louis City Counselor Winston Calvert said in a written statement to BuzzFeed News.

    The lawsuit asked Judge Carol E. Jackson of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri to issue a temporary restraining order to stay within the legal guidelines for determining illegal assembly and to restrict the use of chemical agents.

    The police response “appeared designed to chill people’s speech and make people scared to participate,” said Kira Banks, a psychology professor at St. Louis University who was also one of the plaintiffs. “Gratuitously tear-gassing everyone felt like an intimidation tactic; the message being sent was: ‘We are punishing you for being part of this movement.’”

    Witnesses for the law enforcement agencies countered that tear gas prevented property damage in earlier protests and that chemical agents were used in response to businesses being looted and shots being fired from crowds.

    But Jackson rejected those arguments, even denying a request that tear gas be used only as a “last resort,” saying there was no way to gauge that circumstance. In late December, Jackson issued a temporary order prohibiting police from using chemical agents without giving a clear warning or a clear means of exit.

    It was at least the second time a federal judge has had to weigh in on police action during protests in the St. Louis area following the shooting of Brown. In October, U.S. District Court Judge Catherine Perry issued an injunction barring police from enforcing what became known as “the five-second rule,” in which protesters in Ferguson could only stay still for that brief amount of time. Perry ruled that the statute was unconstitutional because it violated protesters’ freedom of speech rights, as well as due process.

    But while police and protesters’ attorneys tried to negotiate a settlement in January, another group of protesters stormed the St. Louis Metro Police Department, demanding the release of their colleagues and meetings with department officials including Chief Sam Dotson and Mayor Francis Slay. Officers arrested five demonstrators and used pepper spray on others.

    That protest complicated negotiations, which dragged on until this week. A new motion was filed with the court Wednesday, and Jackson issued the order today.

    This. Is. Hip. Hop. Rakim, @M1deadprez, Anika Tillery, Stic.man on panel panel moderated by @afroblew. #CalU #Rakim

    Angela. Ella. Odette. Zora. Rad American Women A-Z by Miriam Klein Stahl.

    Corvallis home built by freed slaves added to historic registry

    The house, which has been added to the National Register of Historic Places, is one of only a handful of pioneer-era houses remaining in Corvallis.

    Mother and daughter Hannah and Eliza Gorman, both slaves, immigrated from Missouri to Oregon over the Oregon Trail in 1844.

    Once freed from bondage, the Gormans, both unmarried, purchased the property and built their house during a period in which Oregon’s exclusion laws prohibited African Americans from owning property.

    Built in two phases, the simple house served as their home and place of business, where they became well-respected citizens in the community, working as a laundress and seamstress.

    Eliza Gorman died in 1869. After her death Hannah moved to Portland and in 1875 she sold the house and property in Corvallis.

    The Hannah and Eliza Gorman House is one of a very small percentage of settlement-era dwellings remaining in the Willamette Valley, and one of even fewer buildings remaining in Oregon that are associated with African American pioneers.

    They should fix it up and make it a museum or something. That’s the kind of history that needs to get out more.

    “Dressing down” is only a status symbol for the elite

    Why is the “CEO Casual” look sported by Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and certain other business leaders interpreted as a sign of status, while other professionals in casual dress would be laughed out of a job interview? Our research explores the conditions under which nonconforming behaviors, such as wearing red sneakers in a professional setting or entering a luxury boutique wearing gym clothes, lead to attributions of enhanced status and competence rather than social disapproval. […]

    At times, individuals who are aware of social norms and expectations may nonetheless decide to risk deviating from standards of appropriate dress, speech, and behavior. High-status individuals like Zuckerberg typically have wider latitude for deviation and are relatively freer from social constraints.

    To better understand nonconformity, our research examines how third-party observers interpret violations of convention and make inferences about the status and competence of non-conformers. Our studies explore various social environments and populations, including shop assistants at high-end boutiques in Milan, Italy, business leaders in an executive education course, and country club members at a black-tie party. In one of our experiments, Dr. Gino taught an executive education class at Harvard Business School wearing red sneakers, which are quite atypical for this environment. We refer to the red sneakers effect to signify the potential benefits of nonconformity. Individuals show that they do not need these benefits because they already possess high status.

    We find that, in certain cases, nonconforming behaviors can lead to inferences of enhanced status and competence in the eyes of others, and that this is because of—not in spite of—these behaviors’ deviance from the norm. Engaging in behaviors that present the risk of losing status gives off the impression that someone has plenty of status to spare. The dynamics of status signaling through nonconformity are similar to—though possibly more subtle and sophisticated than—the dynamics of signaling through expensive consumer goods.

    Wealthy individuals signal their position by giving up financial resources to purchase expensive luxury items. Similarly, by giving up the social benefits conferred by conformity, individuals show that they do not need these benefits because they already possess high status. […]

    We find that the observers’ familiarity with the environment, their perception of the behavior as intentional, and their own history of nonconformity all increase their willingness to assign positive attributes to an individual deviating from established norms.

    First, the observer must be somewhat familiar with the environment. Only observers who are acquainted with the consumption context and have experience observing and interpreting behavior in this specific context will derive positive inferences from signals of nonconformity rather than conformity. For example, in one of our studies, shop assistants at luxury boutiques in Milan, Italy considered a shopper more likely to make a purchase or be a celebrity when she was wearing gym clothes or a Swatch watch than when she was wearing an elegant dress or a Rolex. The environment must be one with clearly established norms that the individual intentionally defies.

    In contrast, pedestrians recruited at Milan’s central train station—of a similar demographic and socioeconomic background but less familiar with the luxury boutique environment—tended to perceive the elegantly outfitted shopper as possessing status greater than or equal to the poorly dressed shopper. Since they are more familiar with the context, the shop assistants are capable of finer, more articulated discrimination in that specific environment and rely less on prototypical product symbols to discern status.

    Second, the environment must be one with clearly established norms that the individual intentionally defies. For example, wearing gym clothes is a noticeable aberration in a luxury boutique with an expectation of nice attire, but not in a discount store where casual dress is the norm.

    Observers must believe the nonconforming individual is both aware of the norm and able to conform to it, but deliberately decides not to. A nonconforming behavior that seems unintentional or dictated by lack of a better alternative—such as ragged clothes on a homeless person—will not lead to a positive impression. […]

    Should we all pack up our elegant shoes and start wearing bright red sneakers to work? Increasing our status in the eyes of others is clearly an important goal, as it can grant us power and influence within our social groups and organizations. Weighing the benefits of adherence to social norms against the potential, more risky upsides of nonconforming practices is a difficult judgment call.

    Readers should consider whom they are aiming to impress and whether they are confident enough to withstand some occasional odd looks (which, we can assure, you will get!). Adherence to social norms—in other words, leaving the red sneakers at home—might be a wiser strategy for some people, but if you can forgo the benefits of conformity and tolerate the potential costs of nonconformity if things go sour, marching to the beat of a different drummer can have some surprising upsides.

    I also wonder how saggy pants fit into that scenario, and our perceived notions of respect, authority and intelligence related to those saggy pants.

    Neat: Rep. John Lewis will deliver the commencement address at Hampton University.

  61. rq says

    olice settle lawsuit over tear gas use during Ferguson protests

    U.S. District Judge Carol Jackson, who issued a temporary restraining order on police after a hearing here Dec. 11, was expected to dismiss the lawsuit Thursday while keeping supervision of compliance through Jan. 1, 2018. The restraining order had told police to provide “reasonable” warning before using gas on a crowd.

    Lawyers for St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson, St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar and Missouri Highway Patrol Capt. Ronald S. Johnson signed off on settlement terms.

    Police agreed not to use gas to frighten or punish people lawfully exercising their constitutional rights.

    Also, each police agency agreed to pay $2,500 in legal costs. In exchange, plaintiffs Alexis Templeton, Maureen Costello, Brittany Ferrell, Steve Hoffman, Nile McClain and Kira Hudson agreed to dismiss their claim.

    They were represented by Thomas Harvey of ArchCity Defenders and Denise Lieberman of the Advancement Project.

    “This victory rests on the shoulders of the courageous protesters who are tirelessly demonstrating in the streets of Ferguson, and it’s a testament to the powerful movement they have fostered,” Harvey said in a prepared statement.

    Lieberman noted in the joint statement, “We had not seen this kind of excessive police force used against protesters since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.” She added, “The use of tear gas in Ferguson has been a tactic to chill this movement, and today’s consent decree will finally put a stop to those efforts.”

    Templeton, a demonstrator; Banks, a St. Louis University professor; and Hoffman, a “legal observer” for the National Lawyers Guild, testified at the December hearing to being gassed and treated improperly by officers.

    Prosecutors Proceed With Case Against Student Beaten by Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Cops as Agency Comes Under Heavy Scrutiny –

    After video of Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control agents brutally beating college student Martese Johnson went viral last week, the agency has come under heavy scrutiny.

    Initial reports from arresting agent J. Miller claim Johnson, 20, was excessively intoxicated and acting belligerently. The University of Virginia honors student was charged with resisting arrest, obstructing justice without threats of force and profane swearing or intoxication in public.

    However, since the story of the arrest has received national attention, Trinity Irish Pub, the bar where Johnson was denied entrance, released a statement refuting the claims made by the arresting officer.

    According to the statement, Managing Owner Kevin Badke denied Johnson entrance after he was unable to identify crucial information attached to his identification. The two then had a cordial conversation about their connection to the Chicago area, where they are both from. […]

    Despite the mounting evidence that Johnson is not guilty, prosecutors still refuse to dismiss the case against Johnson, who ended up hospitalized that night, his face requiring ten stitches.

    In fact, earlier today, when Johnson appeared in court to enter a not guilty plea, prosecutors asked for a continuance, telling the judge they need more time to build up their case against the student.

    WHAT??? They’re going to bring a case against him??? HOLY SHIT.
    There’s more on Virginia ABC misconduct at the link. This is just par for the course in their books, I suppose, but… wow. The arrogance and spite.

  63. rq says

    Sorry about the hole in commenting, folks. I went to see a ballet at the opera last night and got sideswiped and run off the road by a surprise migraine. The lesson here: don’t go to the ballet.
    Here’s a finish to yesterday’s leftovers and then some more, eventually.

    Michigan Cops Had Perfectly Good Reason For Beating Up Unarmed Black Guy, Probably

    We’ll also have to take the cops’ word that Dent bit the arm of William Melendez, the officer who was choking Dent and punched him in the head 16 times. Melendez subsequently sought no medical treatment for being bitten, and didn’t photograph the supposed bite marks, which you’d suppose would be evidence you’d want to document if a suspect assaulted you so violently.

    Also, a baggie of crack cocaine was found in the car’s passenger seat. Dent insists it was planted, and his attorney, Greg Rohl, says there is unreleased video showing officers planting the drugs. Officer Melendez just happens to have been charged in federal court with planting evidence and falsifying police reports in 2003. But Melendez was acquitted, so there’s no reason whatsoever to think he might have done something untoward in January.

    Floyd Dent is 57, has no criminal record, and is a retired auto worker who worked at Ford for 37 years. He also was tested for drugs at a hospital after his arrest; the tests were negative. On the other hand, he is black, has a shaved head, and was driving a Cadillac at night, so he had to be guilty of something that called for a beatdown:

    Police said they first saw Dent’s car through binoculars while watching an area known to have drug activity. They followed Dent’s car and said he didn’t make a complete stop at a stop sign. Police said that when they turned on their flashing lights, Dent didn’t immediately pull over.

    “When the overhead lights came on, I looked and said, ‘Wow, are they stopping me?’” Dent said. “So I just kept going until I realized that they were really stopping me.”

    Dent said he didn’t try to flee police, and the video shows his Cadillac driving at a consistent speed until he pulled over.

    After viewing the dashcam video, a judge dismissed the charges of fleeing, assault, and resisting arrest; the only remaining charge against Dent is for possession of cocaine. Dent was offered a plea deal that would result in no jail time, only probation, and eventual expunging of the charges, but he refused it, saying he wouldn’t plead guilty to something he didn’t do.

    According to the Digitas Daily video, Officer Melendez is currently assigned to desk duty, and Inkster police have requested that the Michigan State Police investigate the incident — so there’s that, at least.

    Get ready for the usual rightwing response, as every detail of Floyd Dent’s past and his behavior during the arrest is dissected to prove that he absolutely had every one of those 16 punches to the head coming to him.

    This one is interesting. Confessions of a #FormerBlackFriend

    I have allowed “ghettos” and “hoods” and “homies” and “niggas” to fall out of white lips. I have allowed “you’re not like the rest of them” to sit in the air uncontested. I have been inspected from hair to home life upon entering white homes and I have shown white smile to many white face. I have been suburban dinner table controversy and housewife personal cause. I have been Black friend to many a white consumer. A marker of one’s ability to be down. I have been marketed and mass produced.

    My earliest interaction with predominantly white spaces began with my private primary school education. My mother, completing her two Masters as a single mother, did all that she could to get me into the best schools. These sacrifices meant driving an extra half hour out of her way every morning to get to and fro between classes. That meant moving into Los Angeles from our middle class suburb to just outside of downtown. That meant gifted and talented lotteries granting access to better schools within schools districts closer to the beach. That meant my days in West LA were capped with nights in South Central. That meant having to call home at check points not in fear of neighborhood but the watch. That meant trusting me across the country in Connecticut small town. But I was in the best schools.

    My classmates of color were often positioned there in the same exceptionalism reinforcing lottery. Rarely did we all complete our time. The white kids more often than not simply knew no different. The schools where in their backyards, we were the ones who migrated from undisclosed other places. In middle school, the ominous MAGNET school was where kids from all over the district were bussed in. All students with the “highest potential”. In high school, this was an boarding-school based program for “students of color” in an (unofficial) New York City suburb just 50 minutes from Grand Central.

    A running joke between my high school friends was that I was their imaginary friend. The possibility of my Blackness and Queerness existing in the same body was so outlandish, I was positioned as mythical. It wasn’t until college that I learned the term magical negro, thank you Sociology degree.

    […]
    College is dangerously presented and engaged with as some level playing field for all students “allowed” to enter. Higher education in this country is stratified and violent. Education remains a marker of success. I entered college feeling like a success. If all the violence I survived was preparing me for college I was ready. While issues of class, bodies, safety and race were constant, my “Black friend” status translated into “Radical/Political/Activist Friend”. It became a coded way to mark the distance in my interpersonal relationships. My blackness wasn’t inherently an issue but the caveat that came with it stood in its place.

    I allowed these violences in an effort to “humanize” or “defend” Blackness. I taught myself to talk myself out of rages. To swallow the weight of my own being. All for white benefit. I foolishly attempted to play professor/master/teacher for Blackness while appealing to white attention.

    As a #FormerBlackFriend, I implore you to unlearn your wealth in position to white validation. Reimagine your possibility and being for you. Your successes should fall into your liberation. You are worth more than a token. Your Blackness is multitudes whether among family or if you are the only nigga in the room.

    In reference to the Germanwings plane crash: What does it take for a white person to be called a “murderer” or a “terrorist” by the media? So far, it seems Holocaust is the only thing.
    While the media demonizes black murder victims to justify their deaths, it canonizes, humanizes and, makes excuses for white killers.

  64. rq says

    More commentary:
    It is truly fascinating to watch this radical humanization of Lubitz occur at the expense of the white lives he took. That is incredible.
    To be a white criminal is to be always eligible for redemption, is to be a candidate for an ever-present grace.
    A function of white supremacy is not only the centering of whiteness but a swift re-framing of white criminals as victims vs perpetrators.
    To be black and criminal is to experience a radical dehumanization — the crime is a result of an innate flaw, a defect in one’s personhood.
    To be white and criminal is to still receive the benefit of a radical humanization — the crime is a result of an illness, a disorder.

  65. rq says

    Irrelevant to anything: The Obamas Are Seriously Considering Moving To New York City. I don’t know why but I find it funny. Not in a ‘why would they kind of way’ but that it’s actually an article in the ‘news’.

    The headline sounds a bit worse than it actually is: Arizona Legislature Passes Bill to Keep Cops’ Names Secret After They Shoot Civilians – but not a lot:

    On Tuesday the Arizona Legislature passed a bill that would forbid any state agency from releasing the name of police officers who shoot a civilian when that shooting results in death or “serious physical injury.” The act would bar law enforcement, as well as all government entities, from releasing an officer’s name for 60 days following the incident. If the officer has a disciplinary record, or is disciplined as a result of the shooting, his name may still not be released for the full 60 days. The act now heads to Gov. Doug Ducey for a signature.

    Supporters of the bill claim it is designed to protect law enforcement from harassment following a shooting. The Arizona Police Association strongly supports the measure, in part because its members are afraid that protesters will march in front of the homes of officers who shoot unarmed civilians. Critics insist that the bill will only exacerbate public frustration with the police by decreasing transparency and accountability. They also note that Arizona law already allows police to withhold sensitive information, like home addresses, of police officers when safety may be a concern.

    The bill easily passed both houses of Arizona’s Republican-dominated legislature. The only real controversy was whether the gag order would last for 60 or 90 days, and whether law enforcement could ever release information about disciplinary proceedings against officers involved in shootings. Ducey, a Republican, has not yet declared whether he will sign the bill into law.

    8 Black Panther Party Programs That Were More Empowering Than Federal Government Programs

    The Breakfast Program

    The free breakfast for schoolchildren program was set up in Berkeley, California, in 1968 by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton. It was the first significant community program organized by the Panthers, and perhaps the most well known. By the end of 1969, free breakfast was served in 19 cities, under the sponsorship of the national headquarters and 23 local affiliates. More than 20,000 children received full free breakfast (bread, bacon, eggs, grits) before going to their elementary or junior high school.

    Health Clinics

    The clinics were called People’s Free Medical Centers (PFMC) and eventually were established in 13 cities across the country, from Cleveland to New Haven, Connecticut; Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to Los Angeles. Women, according to sociologist Alondra Nelson, were the backbone of the effort —not surprising, considering that approximately 60 percent of Black Panther Party members were female. Some of the clinics were in storefronts, others in trailers or hastily built structures, and most did not last long. But they offered services such as testing for high blood pressure, lead poisoning, tuberculosis and diabetes; cancer detection screenings; physical exams; treatments for colds and flu; and immunization against polio, measles, rubella, and diphtheria. Nelson reports that many of the women and men involved in the PFMCs went on to become credentialed health care professionals.

    Youth Institute

    The Intercommunal Youth Institute was established in January 1971 by the Black Panther Party. In 1974, the name was changed to Oakland Community School. The Black Panther Party goal was to get children to learn to their highest potential and to strengthen their minds so that one day they would be successful. The school graduated its first class in June 1974. In September 1977, California Gov. Edmund “Jerry” Brown Jr. and the California Legislature gave Oakland Community School a special award for “having set the standard for the highest level of elementary education in the state.”

    8 Black Panther Party Programs That Were More Empowering Than Federal Government Programs
    March 26, 2015 | Posted by Nick Chiles
    Tagged With: black panther free ambulance service, black panther free health clinic, black panther newspaper, black panther party programs, black panther youth institute, free breakfast program
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    BP school

    Youth Institute

    The Intercommunal Youth Institute was established in January 1971 by the Black Panther Party. In 1974, the name was changed to Oakland Community School. The Black Panther Party goal was to get children to learn to their highest potential and to strengthen their minds so that one day they would be successful. The school graduated its first class in June 1974. In September 1977, California Gov. Edmund “Jerry” Brown Jr. and the California Legislature gave Oakland Community School a special award for “having set the standard for the highest level of elementary education in the state.”

    Black Panther Party – 1960s

    Seniors Against a Fearful Environment (SAFE)

    SAFE, a nonprofit corporation, was started by the Black Panther Party at the request of a group of senior citizens for the purpose of preventing muggings and attacks upon the elderly, particularly when they go out to cash their Social Security or pension checks. Prior to approaching the Black Panther Party, the seniors had gone to the Oakland Police Department to request protection. There the seniors were told that they “should walk close to the curb” in the future, according to a Panther report by David Hilliard, who served as the Party’s chief of staff. The program offered free transportation and escort services to the residents of the Satellite Senior Homes, a residential complex for the elderly in Oakland, California.

    Two more pages and four more programs at the link! But stuff to think about.

  66. rq says

    Mike Brown question sparks MetroLink beating caught on video – not the way to get a point across.

    The victim took the train to to Central West End and waited for police to arrive. He told investigators that he was seated on the train when he was approached from behind. The man in the red hat and shirt asked for his cell phone. The victim refused.

    The suspect in the red hat then asked the seated man what he thought of the Mike Brown situation. The victim tells police that he hadn’t put much thought into it. That is when the man in the red hat started beating him.

    Yeah. :/

    Elvira & Refugio Nieto attend the People’s Trial of the killers of their son. #StopPoliceImpunity #Justice4AlexNieto
    #stoppoliceimpunity #justice4alexnieto shut tin’ down mission police station, gettin’ loud against killer cops

    The City of Ferguson is beginning to court proceedings for arrested protestors. “Resisting arrest” has become a sticking point.

    Taraji P. Henson Will Host SNL in April

    Taraji P. Henson has been tapped to host the April 11 episode of Saturday Night Live; SNL made the announcement on Twitter. Henson will be joined by musical guests Mumford & Sons.

    This will be Henson’s first time hosting the show, and she expressed her excitement on Instagram:

    “DREAMS DO COME TRUE!!!!!!!! #Believe #Faith #HardWorkPaysOff,” Henson posted.

    Last month SNL parodied Empire, so it’ll be interesting to see if Henson’s character Cookie gets the SNL treatment again.

    I know we’ve seen articles on this already, but here’s more: Black Girls Matter:
    Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected

    According to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Education cited in the report, nationally black girls were suspended six times more than white girls, while black boys were suspended three times as often as white boys.

    Data specific to New York and Boston demonstrates that the relative risk for disciplinary action is higher for Black girls when compared to white girls than it is for Black boys when compared to white boys.

    ● In New York, the number of disciplinary cases involving black girls was more than 10 times more than those involving their white counterparts and the number of cases involving black boys was six times the number of those involving white boys, despite there being only twice as many black students as white students.

    ● In Boston, the number of disciplinary cases involving black girls was more than 11 times more than those involving their white counterparts while the number of cases involving black boys was approximately eight times those involving white boys, despite there being less than three times as many black students as white students.

    ● Rates of expulsion were even more strikingly disproportionate between black and white students, especially among girls.

    The report recommends policies and interventions to address challenges facing girls of color, including revising policies that funnel girls into juvenile supervision facilities; developing programs that identify signs of sexual victimization and assist girls in addressing traumatic experiences; advancing programs that support girls who are pregnant, parenting, or otherwise assuming significant familial responsibilities; and improving data collection to better track discipline and achievement by race/ethnicity and gender for all groups.

    Click on the images below to access to the report, the executive summary, and a Black Girls Matter: Social Media Guide, which provides images, tweets, and key messages for you to use in promoting the basic point that Black Girls Matter.

    The link includes a video.

  67. rq says

    Repost: but sort of relevant, with Indiana’s new RELIJUSS FRIDUM and calls to boycott the state – How boycotts hurt the cities they are supposed to help
    . I think this can apply on a state-wide level, too, though how one boycotts a state in any meaningful way, I don’t know?

    Ferguson Mayor Thinks DOJ Report Put Too Much Focus On Race. Yeah, Mayor Knowles really strikes me as the most knowledgeable type on the topic.

    Knowles told The Huffington Post that he found many aspects of the report, which focused on Ferguson’s police department and municipal court system, to be “shocking.” He specifically cited the racist emails sent by two former senior police department officials and the city’s former municipal court clerk, who Knowles said he has known for years. Knowles added that he was troubled by many of the stories describing how officers used force.

    But, Knowles said he thinks the report put too much emphasis on race.

    “Regardless of the merits of a lot of the things that happened in the report, I think it’s unfortunate that the Department of Justice always tried to narrow it down to race,” Knowles said. “I think there are things in the report that were a miscarriage of justice, but every instance in the report they tried to make it about race. I don’t think that’s fair.” […]

    “When I asked the Department of Justice this, they told me, ‘African-Americans can be racist against African-Americans as well.’ I told them that was new to me,” Knowles said. “There are issues that need to be addressed and we need to address those issues, but I don’t think that in our case you can bring this down to the issue is about race.”

    Knowles has previously said that Ferguson doesn’t have an issue with a racial divide. But the report found that city engaged in unconstitutional practices that disproportionally affected its black residents. […]

    “I think it’s important that the city of Ferguson, it’s residents and it’s leadership, take ownership of the kind of policing agency that the citizens of Ferguson want. We could go to St. Louis County, but at that point we are at the mercy of what St. Louis County police want to do in our community,” Knowles said.

    “The residents of this community are going to have to make the decision of what they want the police to look like in this community, the kind of oversight it may have, and that’s what we’re focusing on at this time,” he added.

    Many of problems raised in the report about Ferguson’s municipal court are common in other St. Louis County municipalities, but Knowles declined to “make assumptions” about any other city’s practices.

    Knowles has previously pointed out that surrounding municipalities received a much higher portion of their revenue from municipal courts than Ferguson did. “I just hope that they would look at themselves and see if there is anything that they can improve upon based on what the DOJ report said or their own analysis,” Knowles said. […]

    “I don’t supervise anybody or anyone in the city, period, on the daily basis. It’s not my role as mayor, and it’s not the city council’s role,” Knowles said. “The city of Ferguson, myself and the council’s job is to make policies and hire professional staff to implement those policies. I hope that people will recognize that our focus right now is how we can look at those issues that have been brought up and how we can bring this community together and move forward and see what policies and procedures and staff that we can put into place. That’s where we as a council and mayor have to be focused.”

    I think the mayor should learn a thing or two about accountability, too. But he’s seriously ignorant about racism, how it manifests, and how it works. Just wow.

    Civil rights charges filed against Ole Miss student accused of putting noose on James Meredith statue

    The Justice Department said Friday that it had charged a student at the University of Mississippi with federal civil rights crimes for placing a noose on a statue of James Meredith, the school’s first black student, in what federal authorities said was a “flagrant” attempt to threaten black students at the school.

    These charges come a little more than a year after the noose was found on the neck of the Meredith statue, which has stood at the center of the Ole Miss campus in Oxford for nearly a decade. In February 2014, the noose was found along with an older Georgia state flag (before that state adopted a new flag without the Confederate symbol), prompting an investigation by the FBI and local police.

    Graeme Phillip Harris, the student who was charged, and others hung the rope and the flag “with the intent to threaten and intimidate African American students and employees at the university,” the Justice Department said.

    Only Harris was identified by federal officials, who said he has been indicted by a federal grand jury on one count of conspiring to violate civil rights and another count of using a threat of force to intimidate African American students due to their race.

    “This shameful and ignorant act is an insult to all Americans and a violation of our most strongly-held values,” Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. said in a statement Friday. “No one should ever be made to feel threatened or intimidated because of what they look like or who they are. By taking appropriate action to hold wrongdoers accountable, the Department of Justice is sending a clear message that flagrant infringements of our historic civil rights will not go unnoticed or unpunished.” […]

    The school’s Sigma Phi Epsilon chapter and the national organization said that the three were members of that fraternity, which expelled the three men and suspended the chapter. The national fraternity later closed the Ole Miss chapter after learning that in addition to what happened at the Meredith statue, members had committed “serious acts of hazing,” Phillip A. Cox, grand president of Sig Ep, wrote in an e-mail to members.

    Lookit that frat culture, fine examples of manhood, all of them! Such gentlemen, such diversity and intelligence! Holy fuck, they make me sick.

    Gonna be several articles laying this out, but here’s the first from Buzzfeed: University Of Oklahoma Probe Finds SAE Members Learned Racist Chant At National Event 4 Years Ago

    The racist chant sung by members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at the University of Oklahoma originated at a national leadership cruise four years ago, university president, David Boren announced in a press conference.

    Boren said the chant was brought back to the University of Oklahoma chapter and taught to members and pledges.

    “It is clear that in the four years since the chant was brought to campus, it’s existence has become a part of the institutionalized culture of the chapter,” Boren said.

    Boren also said that high school students who were potential recruits for the fraternity, were present when the chat was sung on March 7, 2015.

    The University of Oklahoma chapter of SAE has already been shut down and two students who lead the chant, which was caught on film, were expelled.

    Boren announced that 25 other members of the fraternity will undergo disciplinary action including mandatory community service and sensitivity training. Officers of the fraternity also met with leaders of African American communities to apologize in person.

    So… not so much a local issue, I guess?

    Floyd Dent, the man who was beaten by Detroit police this past week. There was talk of one of the officers involved: William Melendez, aka Robocop. And his previous troubles and misconduct in the force. Here’s more on him. Consider: this article is from 12 years ago. Ask: why is he still an officer? Why is he still an officer? In Detroit, Oversight of Police Is Welcomed

    A week after Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick agreed to improve everything from the way the department investigates officer-involved shootings to the food it serves detainees — typically bologna on two slices of white bread, every eight hours — U.S. Atty. Jeffrey Collins on June 19 indicted 17 officers for allegedly waging a private war on residents whom they deemed undesirable.

    The group, allegedly headed by William “Robocop” Melendez, is accused of stealing guns, money and drugs from suspects, planting weapons and breaking into homes without search warrants, among other crimes. All 17 have pleaded not guilty.

    More indictments, local and federal authorities say, are on the way. […]

    Investigators found a number of officers who have remained on the force and continued to be promoted despite their involvement in controversial shootings, drunken brawls or allegedly illegal detentions of suspects, federal documents show. They also discovered an internal department investigative and discipline system so erratic that officers accused of wrongdoing have worked as long as two years before being summoned before a hearings board. […]

    Weighing especially heavily on the minds of Detroit officers are the 17 indictments.

    Some of those officers allegedly stopped groups of people on the street and searched them for drugs. If they found drugs or guns, the officers would pick and choose who to arrest, falsifying reports to explain their actions, or pocket the contraband and money and allow the suspects to walk away. If they found no contraband, they sometimes planted it, the indictment alleges.

    That’s what happened, Darrell Chancellor says, when Melendez and another officer stopped him and a friend late on the night of April 22, 2002. The officers planted guns and arrested the pair, Chancellor contends in a lawsuit.

    Chancellor spent 213 days in jail on weapons charges. When federal prosecutors looked at the case, they swiftly dismissed the charges. Chancellor, 21, had a criminal record for receiving stolen property and a drug arrest, and he was well-known to Melendez, according to his attorney, Ronnie Cromer.

    “The feds would never dismiss a case with these details — except they didn’t believe the officers,” Cromer said. “Some of these officers have had complaints against them for years, dozens and dozens of complaints, and the department has done nothing.”

    Melendez and the other officers, three of whom have also earned precinct Officer of the Year awards, have been released on bond.

    As with most of the other indicted officers, Melendez’s primary accuser is a man with a felony record; said Melendez’s attorney, David Lee, “You have to consider the source.”

    But you also have to consider the officer, see, and I bet his misconduct record is much longer than the source’s felony record. You know. Think about that, too.

  68. rq says

    Media comparison:
    People are DEMANDING nuance from the media re: Lubitz. The same people didn’t demand nuance re: Mike Brown.
    Y’all, the media isn’t even referring to him as a mass murderer at this point. The main story is still his depression. That’s incredible.

    Y’all, Black Girl Magic open mic is going to be live! Come through. We’re at 2600 N. 14th Street in Old North St. Louis #ThatsAWord
    The turnout for the first Black Girl Magic open mic is amazing. We are magical. #ThatsAWord #blackgirlmagic :)

    At Duke, a black student says a white student taunted her with SAE’s racist chant – but it was just a song mistakenly sung during a drunken moment, right, no far-reaching consequences?

    At Duke, the incident was reported on a part of campus where freshmen live. University officials began investigating immediately, activated their “Bias Action Team” and are searching for witnesses, said spokesman Michael Schoenfeld. He said the “behavior that was reported is intolerable, and we deplore in the strongest way actions and statements that demean and threaten members of our community.”

    The identity of the young man who allegedly sang the chant is not known.

    The local SAE chapter issued this statement:

    “Our chapter was shocked and appalled when the news broke about the racist chant at Oklahoma University by students we were supposed to call brothers. We applauded our national organization and the OU community for refusing to tolerate the bigoted behavior of these individuals. No one deserves to be exposed to such a display of hate and we are disgusted that attitudes like these are still poisoning our society.

    “Earlier this week, our chapter felt the same stomach-turning emotions when we heard that the hateful words from the OU video were repeated on our own campus. Our hearts go out to the students targeted by this act and the pain they are coping with after facing such injustice….. It is our profound hope that the administration finds justice for the victims and gives the perpetrators the punishment they deserve.

    “As one of the most diverse and multicultural Duke IFC fraternities, we believe in fostering an open, safe, and inclusive environment in which our members can learn and grow together as brothers. We believe in eliminating stereotypes and dissolving prejudices, and we want our community to know that we stand with you in outrage at these recent acts of discrimination.”

    An anonymous group calling itself the People of Color Caucus posted a statement on Tumblr, widely shared on Facebook, that charged,”On Sunday, March 22, 2015, around 2:30 AM, a group of white male students targeted and taunted a young black female student with the racist Sigma Alpha Epsilon chant” and said the incident was not isolated but a symbol of ongoing racism and oppression on campus.

    Looks like another conversation on race and race relations has been opened.

    Body- and dashcams are all well and good. But yes, there’s accountability and the follow-up that is necessary, too. LAPD not sufficiently checking patrol car videos for officer misconduct, audit finds.

    Inspector General Alex Bustamante said police officials generally review recordings only when investigating “critical incidents” such as shootings and pursuits, or when a complaint is made against an officer.

    Although the department checks to see whether the cameras were activated, Bustamante said, supervisors generally don’t look at what is captured on the videos or review them to assess officer conduct, tactics or decision-making. Doing so would be “too time-consuming and labor intensive,” according to the report.

    Moving forward, Bustamante wrote, his office will conduct “regular and substantive reviews” of the recordings to help LAPD officials more routinely evaluate the use of the technology and officers’ actions.

    LAPD Cmdr. Andrew Smith said the department was reviewing the inspector general’s findings, but declined to comment until the report was publicly presented to the Police Commission on Tuesday.

    Bustamante described the technology as a valuable tool and said it worked well in providing information about many LAPD stops. But he also outlined concerns, finding that officers didn’t always turn on the cameras at the start of pedestrian stops and sometimes engaged subjects in areas that were out of sight.

    As a result, the report said, the inspector general and LAPD officials identified measures “that will enable the department to obtain more complete video of each stop.” Those steps included drafting a new directive that “explicitly requires” officers to activate the cameras at all stop initiations.

  69. rq says

    Flyers of racist Yik Yak posts appear on campus

    A series of racist comments targeting African-Americans and other minority groups surfaced on Yik Yak, an anonymous social media app, following the final performance of “Black Anthology Presents: The Six” on Saturday night. Comments made on the app included references to Ebola, gun violence, affirmative action and other racially charged topics.

    “Shout out to affirmative action!” one of the less violent comments read. “Without it, BA would be non-existent!”

    This year’s production of Black Anthology, which focused on race relations on college campuses, was praised by students and faculty alike. Some viewers, however, were offended by the portrayal of white people in the production and used “Wash U Confessions” and Yik Yak to criticize the show anonymously and in some cases make racist remarks.

    On Monday morning, a series of flyers featuring screenshots of Yik Yak posts were found in several locations on the Danforth campus, including the Danforth University Center, Brookings Quadrangle and Etta’s Cafe. The flyers also featured phrases such as “‘Our’ WashU?” and “#ClaimYourBigotry.”

    Senior Diane-Jo Bart-Plange tweeted a photo of a flyer after seeing it in a bathroom stall in the DUC. The flyer featured a screenshot of a Yik Yak comment that said black students should be used as target practice for cops. The words “‘Our’ WashU?” were printed over the screenshot. Bart-Plange called the flyer “shocking” and said that the entire campaign was “poorly executed.”

    “I know [the campaign] was for a reason, but I don’t want to be subjected to it,” Bart-Plange said. “I don’t think they were really thinking about how it would affect the people of color that go here and would have to see that on the bathroom stall. You have to think about the community you are trying to protect. This could have been done a different way.” […]

    “We acknowledge that the Yaks we spread around campus were triggering,” #ClaimYourBigotry members wrote. “Although we do not wish anxiety on anyone, we do believe this way of thinking needed to be exposed. These are our peers. These are the people that sit next to us in class. These are the people we could be working with in the future. If these are their honest feelings, they need to be addressed.”

    The campaign leaders also said in their statement that screenshots on the flyers were created from racially offensive and threatening Yik Yaks from the past six months, not just from Saturday night. […]

    LaTanya Buck, director of the Diversity and Inclusion Center, said that no disciplinary action has been taken toward the students responsible for the flyer campaign. A single Bias Report and Support System report was filed regarding the discriminatory nature of the original Yik Yak posts.

    The Association of Black Students issued a statement to its general body on Monday night in an effort to console students affected by the Yik Yak comments and flyer campaign. The chief organizers of Black Anthology could not be reached for comment.

    That there’s a message to allies: your good intentions might still cause harm. Perhaps, in future, a little more thought or warning might be nice? At the very least?

    And what’s the latest update re: the man arrested for the #NAACPBombing. We haven’t forgotten. Oh, right, that happened. :P

    There’s Just One Problem With Photos on Food Stamp Cards – trying to prevent even more foodstamp fraud?

    Putting photos on the cards people use to redeem food stamps seems like a simple anti-fraud idea. But in Massachusetts, which started putting photos on Electronic Benefit Transfer cards in 2013, it hasn’t worked out for reasons that should have been obvious from the outset, according to a report from the Urban Institute, a left-of-center think tank.

    The main reason is that, under federal law, you sometimes have a right to use a food stamp card that was issued to someone else.

    Food stamps aren’t awarded to an individual; they go to a household, and anyone in the household is entitled by federal law to use the E.B.T. card the food stamps come on. So, Alyssa Renta, a 12-year-old resident of Boston, sometimes shops for groceries using a card that has her father’s photo on it — and retailers accept it, as they are supposed to under the law. If you don’t have to be the person in the photo to use the card, how is the photo supposed to stop misuse?

    Additionally, federal law prohibits retailers from subjecting food stamp shoppers to special scrutiny. So, if a retailer doesn’t ordinarily ask for a photo I.D. to verify credit card transactions, it’s not supposed to scrutinize the photos on E.B.T. cards either. This gives stores an additional reason to ignore the photos — and in supermarkets where the shopper swipes the card through a reader directly, the clerk may never even come in possession of the card to examine it in the first place. […]

    Because more than one person is allowed to use an E.B.T. card, the Urban Institute suggests other non-photo strategies for combating fraud, such as better electronic monitoring of suspicious transaction patterns (like sales in round dollar amounts) and higher penalties for retailers and beneficiaries who divert benefits fraudulently.

    @TefPoe @Nettaaaaaaaa @jasiri_x doing a panel at Harvard right now. So packed. Skype feed necessary. Glad to be here. #BlackLivesMatter
    “We’re actively living in a war zone.” – @TefPoe @jasiri_x @Nettaaaaaaaa @jelani9

  70. rq says

    Airport Pat-Downs Of Black Women’s Hairstyles Deemed Discriminatory. Wait, what? They did that?

    Malaika Singleton, a neuroscientist based in Sacramento, said she was on her way to London last year for an academic conference on dementia when a TSA agent at Los Angeles International Airport began pulling and squeezing her hair.

    “I was going through the screening procedures like we all do, and after I stepped out of the full body scanner, the agent said, ‘OK, now I’m going to check your hair,'” Singleton said on Thursday.

    The same thing happened when she passed through the Minneapolis airport on her way back home, Singleton said.

    She contacted the American Civil Liberties Union, and it turned out that one of the lawyers there, a black woman who also wears the tiny, stylized form of dreadlocks known as sisterlocks had the same experience – twice.

    Novella Coleman, the ACLU attorney, had already filed a complaint about the practice in 2012, to no avail, Coleman said on Thursday. She filed another complaint based on Singleton’s experience, and on Thursday the two women said that the agency had agreed to conduct anti-discrimination training sessions with its officers to avoid what they called racial profiling of hair.

    “The first time I was on a trip with colleagues, some other attorneys who were white and Latina,” said Novella Coleman, the ACLU lawyer who filed the complaint.

    “The woman said, ‘I need to search your hair now,’ and she just started grabbing my hair and squeezing it from top to bottom,” Coleman said. Her white and Latina colleagues underwent no such searches, she said.

    Asked the reason for the search, Coleman said she was given a variety of explanations. One officer said all passengers with hair extensions were searched, but Coleman wasn’t wearing extensions. Another said people are searched if they have “abnormalities” in their hair, she said.

    Abnormalities. No comment from the TSA, or any word on sensitivity training for their officers.

    UVA Names Newest Dormitory After Former Slave Couple

    The Gibbons House is dedicated to William and Isabella Gibbons, a former slave couple who were owned by professors at UVA for more than a decade.

    “One of the recommendations of the President’s Commission on Slavery and the University was to name one or more UVA buildings after enslaved persons who were connected to the life of the university,” UVA President Teresa A. Sullivan said. “This is part of a broad, ongoing effort to recognize the role of slavery in the university’s history and to educate the members of our community about the role of enslaved persons at UVA as we approach our bicentennial.”

    After emancipation, Isabella became one of the first black teachers at the Freedman’s School, now known as the Jefferson School. William became a minister at Charlottesville’s First Baptist Church on West Main Street.

    “Not only were they slaves at the university, but they went on to really interesting lives in freedom after the Civil War. So they help us to link the past to the present,” said Kirt von Daacke, associate professor of history.

    “There were people who come out of slavery, who become successful and are meaningful in the development of a community, and I think that’s part of the story that is also sometimes gets left out,” Jefferson School Foundation Executive Director Andrea Douglas said.

    UVA historians say the school is only the second university they found that has named a campus building after a slave or slaves. In 2007, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill named a dorm after slave and poet George Moses Horton.

    More!

    Ferguson grand jury wanted to make public statement, documents reveal. Where’s the FREEZE PEACH crowd on this one?

    A week before the Ferguson grand jury chose not to charge police Officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown, it was denied a request to make a public statement about the controversial case, court documents filed Friday reveal.

    It’s unknown what the 12 jurors wanted to say or what prompted them to seek an opportunity to be heard after the case was decided. The refusal came from St. Louis County Circuit Court Judge Carolyn Whittington.

    The surprising request surfaced in an ongoing federal lawsuit of a grand juror against St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch. The juror, identified in court papers as Grand Juror Doe, seeks the court’s permission to speak publicly about his experience and wants immunity from prosecution.

    On Friday, McCulloch filed arguments and exhibits to bolster his motion for U.S. District Judge Rodney Sippel to dismiss the case. [..]

    By law, grand juries are sworn to secrecy. In Missouri, it’s a misdemeanor for them discuss evidence, witnesses or their votes. Their identities are seldom known.

    “I would imagine that it’s very unusual,” St. Louis law professor Susan McGraugh said of the panel’s wishes to go public after it ruled. “But as today proves, we don’t really get access to any requests like that that would be made.”

    McCulloch’s lawyers maintain Doe should have taken his case up with Whittington, who swore in the grand jury and denied its effort to make a public statement.

    “Indeed, on November 17, 2014, Judge Whittington rejected a request by the grand jury to issue a statement when it completed its work,” lawyers write in Friday’s filing. “…this Court should not permit [Doe] to sidestep the court to whom [Doe] swore his oath and by which he was twice charged to obey the law.” […]

    With international attention and controversy surrounding the case, McCulloch made the unique move to himself discuss in detail why the officer was cleared. He also made public most evidence presented to the grand jury — though some of it was heavily redacted.

    In January, Grand Juror Doe filed suit, alleging McCulloch wrongly implied that all 12 jurors believed that there was no evidence to support charging Wilson.

    “[McCulloch] does not know [Doe’s] identity or how he voted, and [McCulloch] has never purported to speak for any grand juror individually,” the prosecutor’s lawyers wrote in Friday’s filing. “Although [Doe] may now regret having sworn his oath and accept his charge, [Doe] has no right to publicly report his impressions, and it has long been established that a prosecutor, unlike a grand juror, is competent to discuss the evidence presented to a grand jury.”

    Taraji P. Henson Apologizes To Police After Video Counters Claim That Her Son Was Racially Profiled

    Just a week after citing repeated racial profiling as the reasoning she refused to send her son to USC, Glendale Police have released dashcam video of the “race based” traffic stop that sparked her uneasiness about sending her son to college in Southern California. Instead of a blatantly-racial stop-and-search, it appears to show a valid traffic stop that resulted in a search of the young man due to his own admission of having potentially illegal substances in his possession. Via LA Times:

    The footage obtained by the Los Angeles Times from Oct. 18 shows the officer driving in traffic about 10:10 p.m. in Glendale when the actress’ son, who is in a Honda Civic ahead of him, drives through a lighted crosswalk as a person walks across. His race was not apparent in the video as he was driving.

    the officer approaches Henson’s son’s Honda and tells him he was stopped for driving through a lighted crosswalk while someone was walking in it. The youth tells the officer he was headed to a friend’s home in Calabasas.

    Then the officer asked whether he had anything illegal in his car, and the young man responded that he had marijuana in his backpack, according to the video. He told the officer he has a state-issued medical marijuana license but couldn’t find it.

    During the lengthy traffic stop shown on the video, Johnson was searched and then told the officer he had Ritalin, a prescription pill used to treat hyperactivity, in his car. He admitted he didn’t have a prescription and got the pill from a friend.

    Johnson then consented and allowed the officer to search his car. At that point, the officer was joined by two other officers and a police cadet.

    Hours after the video hit the internet, Taraji apologized for accusing the Police department of racism:

    And it’s a very nice apology, too, straightforward. I feel she was justified in overreacting, but also very decent and kind of her to apologize.

  71. rq says

    There was a shooting in Boston. Officer shot was honored for role in bombing aftermath – the officer was wounded, the suspect was killed.

    Friday’s incident began at 6:40 p.m. when gang unit officers investigating a report of shots fired stopped a vehicle on Humboldt Avenue near Crawford Street to interview its three male occupants, authorities said Friday night.

    The suspect stepped out and began to flee while firing his gun, said David Procopio, a spokesman for the State Police, which works alongside Boston police to address gang violence.

    The suspect wounded Moynihan under the right eye, Evans said.

    A law enforcement official also said the suspect, who was not identified, had several previous gun-related charges.

    Evans said that the stop was initially routine and that the suspect had fired at police “before they had time to react,” but the officers quickly returned fire, killing the suspect.

    Gunfire also struck “a middle-aged woman” who suffered a flesh wound, possibly in her right arm, Evans said.

    “I think she got caught up in the crossfire,” he said.

    Then most of the article is how darned heroic this one officer is (and yes, he’s done fantastic and helpful things!) and how the suspect killed had a (gun-related!) record, so obviously it’s okay to shoot him and indeed a heroic deed. The community was not so thrilled, however, so here’s some twitter commentary on the aftermath:
    #RoxburyShooting video of police clashing with protesters, the youtube link: Roxbury shooting police conflict .
    Body blockade of cops at #RoxburyShooting while body removed. Shooting at 6:40, removed at 11:20 – depends on processing of the scene, though that seems like a lot.
    Tonight I watched BPD cops laugh at a grieving family trying to find out if their loved one was under the tarp. Devastating #RoxburyShooting

  72. rq says

    Tomorrow 11:30am-3pm Greater St. Mark Church 9950 Glen Owen Dr. *Dellwood, #MO #STL #Ferguson #BlackLivesMatter – an event on voter mobilization, expungement of criminal record, gun safety and awareness.

    How Ferguson-area courts bully residents to balance local budgets, in one video

    When the US Department of Justice released its searing report on the systemic racial bias of the Ferguson Police Department and court system, it noted that the St. Louis suburb likely wasn’t the only one in the county that bullied residents, particularly minorities, to raise revenue to balance its local budget.

    A new story, accompanied by the video above, by the Huffington Post’s Ryan Reilly and Mariah Stewart shows the extent that St. Louis County takes advantage of local residents for financial gain. Among the 90 municipalities in St. Louis County, some of which have just a few hundred residents, court fines and fees are often the top or second leading source of revenue, and the money very often comes out of the pockets of black and poor residents.

    A 2014 report from Better Together, a St. Louis–based nonprofit, found that municipalities in St. Louis County raised $45 million in fines and fees in 2013. Local governments in the county accounted for 34 percent of all municipal fines and fees statewide, although they made up 11 percent of Missouri’s population.

    The Huffington Post’s video focused on the egregious case of Country Club Hills. There, a 2014 report from ArchCity Defenders, a nonprofit that provides legal representation to the poor and homeless in the St. Louis area, found 33,000 outstanding warrants, even though the city had a population of less than 1,300. So for every resident in the municipality, there were nearly 26 outstanding warrants. […]

    The video shows that although investigations into St. Louis County’s justice system are getting more attention from national media after the August 9 police shooting of Michael Brown, the feelings of distrust among residents have been around for far longer. “I can’t tell you what’s going on in the mind of a police officer, but in the mind of my clients, they’re being pulled over because they’re black,” Thomas Harvey, executive director and cofounder of ArchCity Defenders, told Vox’s Sarah Kliff in August. “They’re being pulled over so the city can generate revenue.”

    Study: how being discriminated against and devalued affects our behavior. Now there’s a scientific study, so I guess these effects can now be considered to be real.

    Researchers gave online surveys to 1,280 Americans to look for connections between feelings of disrespect and a person’s propensity to engage in delinquent behaviors. Here are some of the findings:

    – Black participants who were asked to imagine a scenario in which their boss belittled African Americans said they’d be more willing to waste their employer’s time (by putting in less effort at work) or make negative comments about the company to others.
    – Female participants were asked to imagine being denied a promotion either because their boss didn’t think women should be in leadership positions or because their personality wasn’t right for the job. The women who contemplated being passed over because of their gender were more likely to say they’d begin doing incorrect work on purpose, starting rumors, or refusing to help coworkers.
    – White participants who felt they were devalued because of their race, gender, or religious affiliation were more likely to lash out by cheating than white participants who simply didn’t get what they wanted.

    Just the latest way discrimination affects people

    Previous studies have shown that discrimination based on social identity can harm victims’ performance, cognitive abilities, and willpower. The Stanford study’s findings about antisocial behavior as a consequence of disrespect are new — but it makes perfect sense that being undervalued because of identity would affect every part of a person’s life.

    As Peter Belmi, one of the coauthors of the study, told the Stanford News, “When people feel that they are being viewed negatively by others simply because they belong to a particular gender, race or other group membership, they come away with the impression that others do not treat them respectfully, which in turn makes them more likely to engage in social deviance.”

    SAE Fraternity Members Learned Racist Song At National Leadership Event, University Finds

    In a document obtained by The Huffington Post, the university concluded that the students learned the song on a cruise organized by the national SAE office four years ago. Fraternity members brought the racist song back to the OU chapter, the university’s investigation found, and over time, it was “taught to pledges as part of the formal and informal pledge process.” The document said that the song was widely known and became part of the “institutionalized culture of the chapter.”

    SAE’s national headquarters shut down the University of Oklahoma chapter on March 8, hours after video surfaced showing fraternity members on a bus singing “There will never be a n***r in SAE” to the tune of “If You’re Happy And You Know It.” The university ordered the students to vacate the fraternity house, which is owned by OU, within two days, and later moved to expel two students identified as having a “leadership role” in the song’s usage.[…]

    The university’s findings said that the racist song belted out by SAE members on March 7 was confined to one charter bus, not the entire chapter. However, the university did find there were roughly a dozen high school students on the bus who were exposed to the racist lyrics, which joked about lynching black men.

    SAE’s national headquarters did not immediately return a request for comment. It announced last week that it would conduct a national review of any racial intolerance among its chapters.

    Students from other SAE chapters, including Texas Tech University, Louisiana Tech University and the University of Texas at Austin, have come forward in recent weeks to say they, too, learned the racist song from their fraternity brothers.

    Boren said Friday that the remaining SAE members at the university who are not expelled will undergo diversity training.

    UPDATE, 6 p.m. — SAE’s national office confirmed Friday afternoon that the Oklahoma members “likely learned a racist chant while attending a national Leadership School about four years ago.” The office said it has “no current evidence” that the song is widespread across the fraternity’s 237 chapters and colonies.

    “We intend to conduct a thorough and complete investigation, and this will take time,” SAE Executive Director Blaine Ayers said in a statement. “However, we will share the results of our investigation when it is complete. Our current findings at the University of Oklahoma are similar to those announced on Friday by University of Oklahoma President David Boren. But our investigation to date shows no evidence the song was widely shared across the broader organization.”

    Learned the racist chant at a LEADERSHIP SCHOOL. Fine example you’re setting up there, SAE. Totally local problem. Wow.

    Okay, here’s a good news. 29-Year-Old Jamaican Raises $6.9 Million to Launch Skincare Products For African-Americans.

    Jamaican born entrepreneur Tristan Walker (pictured), a graduate of Stanford University, is aiming to help African-American men who have problems with their facial hair by designing a new shaving system to combat problems they face with hard stubble and facial rashes.

    The 29-year-old who grew up in Jamaica and Queens, New York, said that he noticed there is hardly anything on the market for people of color and what is available is not suitable for their type of skin.

    With backing from organizations such as Andreessen Horowitz, Upfront Ventures, Collaborative Fund and Ron Johnson (former senior vice-president of retail operations for Apple), the young entrepreneur has raised $6.9 million to set up his new company Walker & Co.

    The company aims to be the Procter & Gamble for people of color and he intends to set up an online magazine to advertise other products that the company will develop, said Walker. He adds that the company’s first venture is the “Bevel,” which is a revolutionary shaving system aimed at the African-American market.

    According to Walker, “My experience of going into a Walgreens or CVS and going to the ethnic aisle, which is really a shelf, and having to reach down to get a package that is dirty, probably expired, with a photo of a 70-year-old bald, black guy in a towel on it, that entire awful second-class citizen experience has to go.” He continued, “Many African American men have never shaved with a razor because of problems stemming from coarse or curly hair.”

    The Bevel retails for $60 for a six-piece kit that includes shaving creams and salves to help prevent rash while shaving and customers can also choose to pay an extra $30 a month to keep up with their requirements for the added extras.

    The aim of the company, according to their official website, is to develop and test various products that are designed specifically for the African-American market. It adds that this vision, combined with their promise of delivering the best customer service, will establish them as the world’s most consumer-centric health & beauty product’s company on the market.

    Marlon Nichols, a venture capital investor at intel-capital and one of the users of Bevel, said that he believes the Bevel is the best product for men of color ever invented. He adds that it is the only system he trusts to shave his head and neck without irritation.

    #EricGarner supporters at his memorial, gathered around his youngest daughter, Legacy, on her first birthday.

  73. rq says

    Judge Calls Out Portland Police For Bogus ‘Contempt Of Cop’ Arrest/Beating

    It doesn’t happen often, but a judge has called out police officers for using a non-existent offense — “contempt of cop” — to justify the use of force against a detained person. Multnomah County (OR) Judge Diana Stewart cleared 16-year-old Portland resident Thai Gurule of several charges brought against him after he was pummeled and tased by police officers for… well, basically for responding angrily to a somewhat derogatory gesture.

    Police that night had been looking for a group of seven to nine African American men, including one shirtless one, who had been walking the streets, reportedly damaging property and yelling profanities. Within minutes of receiving the group’s last known location, police several blocks away focused their attention on a group of three young men: Gurule, his 20-year-old brother and their friend.

    That was the narrative up to the point where Thai Gurule found himself on the receiving end of fists and Tasers. Ignoring the fact that this group had little in common with the suspects other than race, we come to what turned this incident into a confrontation and, finally, a one-side melee.

    The following comes from the judge’s statement on the dismissal of charges:

    As the youth walked past, Officer Hughes said, “Hey” to the youth and when the youth continued, he again said, “Hey” and clapped his hands.

    Thai Gurule turned to face Officer Hughes and in an angry or aggressive voice said “Don’t fucking clap your hands at me”. Officer Hughes stepped forward while the youth stepped back.

    Cue escalation. The officers decided to cuff Gurule (for “resisting arrest,” apparently). As a crowd began to gather, the officers decided to move Gurule into a prone position for cuffing, supposedly for officer safety. But rather than let Gurule move to a prone position, one of the officers decided to speed up the process by sweeping Gurule’s feet out from underneath him. From that point, it became an uncontrolled beating. One officer held Gurule by the hair while the other two wrestled him to the ground and hit him multiple times with their fists and knees. Finding the one-sided “struggle” to be ineffective, Sgt. Lile deployed his Taser.

    After they were done throwing blows, the officers threw the book at Thai Gurule, listing all of the following charges on the police report:

    Aggravated assault
    Simple assault
    Criminal threats
    Disorderly conduct
    Interference with public safety
    Resisting arrest

    The accompanying reports filed by the officers maintained that Gurule repeatedly swung his fists at officers and tried to choke one of them. Unfortunately for these officers, multiple recordings of the incident that contradicted their narrative were made available to the judge.

    Judge Stewart was obviously irate at the thick stack of lies delivered to her in the form of police reports and sworn testimony. She also was none too happy with the officers’ justification for initiating the arrest of a person who had done nothing more than fail to treat Officer Hughes with as much deference as he felt he deserved. Not only did she dismiss the charges, but she read the entire damning dismissal order out loud.

    In discussing the “resisting arrest” charge, Judge Stewart also addressed the pure BS motivating the officers’ arrest of Gurule. She points out there’s an exceedingly low bar that needs to be met to satisfy the requirements for bringing this charge, but the officers couldn’t even meet that.

    Actual restraint was placed upon the youth at the moment that Officers Hughes and Hornstein placed control or escort holds on the youth. At that moment, even given the broad authority described above, there is insufficient evidence before the court that the Officers were operating under their community caretaking function, or therefore under color.

    At that time, there is no evidence of concerns about a crowd forming. That concern arose as much as a minute later when the officers decided to take the youth to the ground.

    Establishing this, she gets to the heart of the matter.

    The only facts before the court are that the youth failed the attitude test when he turned and aggressively complained about Officer Hughes clapping him hands. Officer Hughes stepped forward and the youth stepped back and Officer Hughes, immediately followed by Officer Hornstein placed the holds restraining the youth.

    And there it is: the bogus arrest was prompted by a little disrespect Officer Hughes just couldn’t handle. It is surprising enough that a judge would call out an officer for this sort of behavior. It’s even more surprising that she would move on to allowing an arrested suspect’s self-defense claims stand. In most cases, the judicial branch shows deference to police officers who use excessive force in their self-defense (“feared for their safety”). In this instance, the deference went the other way.

    [W]hile a person may not use physical force to resist what is actually or perceived by the defendant to be an unlawful arrest, a person may use physical force in defending oneself from excessive use of force by an arresting officer. Any injury caused to an officer in the course of engaging in a justifiable use of force to defend oneself may under such circumstances be justified and not criminal.

    […]

    In this case, the youth’s age is a relevant factor which the court considers even without the testimony of youth. Therefore, the question before the court is whether this youth and a reasonable 16 year old youth in his position would have believed that the use or imminent use of force against him exceeded the force reasonably necessary and whether he was entitled to defend himself with a degree of force which a reasonable 16 year old would reasonably believe to be necessary for the purpose.

    […]

    The take down, although intended to be gentle and with adequate warning was nothing like that plan. Officer Hornstein swept the youth’s feet out from under him causing him the sensation of falling forward without the use of his hands to break his fall. The next 35 to 45 seconds was a melee of fists and punches and bodies falling upon him. Prior to reaching the wall, the youth was attempting to regain his footing and get back on his feet and remove himself from what a reasonable person would have felt was a senseless and aggressive use of excessive physical force.

    Once at the wall, the independent evidence of the video clips is less clear but continues to show the youth trying to struggle away from the officers rather than engage in a physical altercation…

    […]

    [G]iven that confusion, rapidity of events, the tangle of officers and the youth and the confusion caused by the crowd, I find that as to all charges herein, the state has not established beyond a reasonable doubt that the youth was not reasonably justified in the use of self-defense as to all of the charges herein.

    And with that, Thai Gurule is no longer facing criminal charges. As of yet, there’s no word of what consequences, if any, are awaiting the officers involved. The city’s police department is only a couple of years removed from a DOJ investigation, but incidents like these show there’s still work to be done.

    And, of course, the local police union has greeted this decision with assertions that the officers involved did nothing wrong and that Judge Stewart is nothing more than an armchair quarterback, but you’ll have to click over to Popehat to read Ken White’s entertaining/infuriating take on the union head’s counterclaims.

    Yeah, that’s the entire article because it’s worth reading the judge’s takedown. All of it. Also, that link at the end to Popehat, that’s not bad, either!!!

    Finding Hope In #MarteseJohnson And Racist SAE Videos

    I love my alma mater. I really do.

    But it was a tiny, pretty much all-white school in the south. And there were plenty of times in my four years there when I had to call on Jesus or Jameson or a nap to stop me from lashing out at some idiot racist.

    At college, I’d been accosted with “Yo homie yo” by drunk frat guys. I had cops called on my Black friends who were scaring White people at a party by simply being there. I heard White people say the N-word more times than I’d like to count. Overall, though, I loved my school. For the most part, I got along with my White schoolmates and professors. Still, it doesn’t take a lot of racism to leave an indelible, painful mark.

    But for so many of us, these moments of racism are topics shared in Black Student Unions and The Black Lunch Table. Generally, we just have to live with these feelings for our four years in college and move on. We’ll have rallies, meetings and ways to present to our White peers that some of the ways they talk to us are unacceptable and come from a place of racism. Sadly, though, there was always a plausible deniability; A “well they’re not talking about me. I’m enlightened.” So no matter how much we’d try to explain our place as minorities residing in these White institutions, we would hear how “sensitive” we are or how we’re “living in the past” or “looking for racism.”

    How many times have you come across a student who you just knew said the N-word amongst his or her friends but had no way to prove they are racist? Or how often did you just know that campus security guard hated your Black Excellence on his campus but didn’t feel like you had enough people to hear you out? I bet there were students at Oklahoma who felt that innate, denied racism when they debated SAE members in Sociology class. I bet there are students at UVA who felt that the ABC officers were following them around for no reason. And the only people they could talk to were fellow Black students.

    That’s why there’s hope in the SAE video and Martese Johnson’s videos. Now the cloud of deniability that was used to make us feel like we were just making sh*t up is gone. Now we have videos and an infrastructure of protest that makes these videos go “viral.” SAE racism (and Kappa Alpha racism and on and on) has been around for decades, but now the subjugated have support and voices to take our issues national. It’s great that there is a community to fight for Martese. There’s a nation of supporters ready to demand that SAE be removed. The same goes for racist baseball players who think insulting a high school girl is okay. For too long, our movements and protests were locally contained, making us feel alone and overwhelmed against institutions that have been around since we were only considered 3/5th of a person. Racism doesn’t have that luxury anymore. All of our movements are united and, most importantly, loud. Racist chants will go viral. Violence against our Black kids will turn into national protests. And schools will be held accountable in ways they didn’t have to address before. It’s beautiful.

    I’ve always contested that college (and the few years afterwards when you’re constantly denied jobs given to White counterparts of equal or lesser qualification) is probably the most racist four years of our lives because we’re surrounded by people who are free to be as racist as they want with little to no consequence. Well, I can only hope that this won’t be the case much longer as we keep holding these students and institutions accountable for the racism that has permeated their campuses for centuries. And for that, Martese’s scars wouldn’t have been created in vain.

    Survivors of the #Ayotzinapa massacre lay flowers on the ground where Mike Brown’s body was left for 4.5 hours.

    Ex-University of Mississippi Student Indicted for Noose on James Meredith Statue. See also article in comments above.

    University of Mississippi Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Brandi Hephner LaBanc said the situation is regrettable for all involved, including the former student who was charged.

    “I can’t help but feel the pain of the student and the parents who will now feel the full weight of our justice system, but also feel the pain of our campus community and the entire Ole Miss family, which suffered greatly from the terrible act committed a year ago,” she said. “We’re hopeful that this indictment will begin to bring closure and the next step in healing for our university.”

    The DeRay McKesson Episode from Fan Bros (audio at the link)

    On this week’s FanBrosShow we welcome DeRay McKesson, the activist most of you know as DeRay on Twitter. DeRay joins us to discuss going from 800 followers to 73,000 plus and what it’s like to be considered one of the young leaders of the protest movement. We speak on the events in Ferguson including some very chilling discussions on how it feels to be on the front lines of the movement. One of our most important episodes ever as the FanBrosShow explores issues that affect everyone not just the geeks and the blerds of the world.

  74. rq says

    Here’s some humour: Six Snazzy New Ways To Be Totally Racist, Without That Horrid Racist Smell

    Hey you. Racists. No, not you with the Confederate flag sending out “Obama is a monkey” emails. You, over there: closet racist. It’s time for a talk.

    The racism that you’ve been quietly sliding across the table at us for years has become pretty darn obvious lately. You may not think much of our deductive skills, but when we see the same condescension and coded language time and time again — well, we start to pick up on it. As Jay Smooth said, if your defense was a Robin Thicke song, you’d be sued for plagiarism. If you aren’t careful, people are going to stop believing that you are really “just asking a question” “playing devil’s advocate.” Heck — we may even start to suspect that you do see color and that it is about race.

    We all know that as important as that white supremacy is to you, it’s even more important that it look like it isn’t important to you. One must have standards. But don’t worry my dear “not racist” friends — I’m here to help! I’ve come up with some fresh new coded language so you can oppress all those brown folks, but with class.

    Problem words to be replaced are: ethnic, thug, reverse-racist, single mothers, developing nation and black-on-black crime. Each concept has been given a new, inoffensive, replacement, such as ‘friends of Jamaal’ for ‘ethnic’ and ‘ruffian’ for ‘thug’ – just to keep people from realizing one is racist.

    Actress Taraji Henson apologizes to Glendale police for racial profile claims Here’s her actual apology:

    “I would like to publicly apologize to the officer and the Glendale Police Department,” she said in an Instagram message with the hashtag #TurningANegativeIntoAPositive #LoveTarajiPHenson. “A mother’s job is not easy and neither is a police officer’s. Sometimes as humans we overreact without gathering all the facts. As a mother in this case, I overreacted and for that I apologize. Thank you to that officer for being kind to my son.”

    And here’s a recap of the cop’s actions, the kind that it would be nice to see mroe of:

    After checking his car, the officer decided not to cite him for the original infraction because it would have a lasting effect on his driving record. Instead, he cited the young man for possessing marijuana.

    “I am not going to give you a citation for running that yellow because that would actually put a moving violation on your driving license, and you are going to have to go to traffic school and all that stuff, so I am helping you by not giving you a violation on it. All I am going to do is take the weed from you,” he said.

    The officer told Johnson he could go to court, show proof he has a prescription and probably just pay a fine.

    “It felt like this was a little better than the other one,” he said. “I am giving this to you too because you smoked weed about two hours ago … and a warning if you have Ritalin on you and you’re not supposed to, don’t do it. That’s a big violation and I wouldn’t want to do that to you.” […]

    John Thomas, chief of the USC Department of Public Safety, said he “was deeply disturbed to read news reports about a prospective student who felt profiled on or near campus because of his race.”

    In a statement, Thomas said he wanted to talk with Henson and her son.

    “As someone who personally experienced racial profiling as a teenager, I have a stake in learning more about this incident and doing all I can to reach a just resolution,” he said.

    So a mostly good encounter. Heck, didn’t even seem to be that hard on the officer!

    Oklahoma Inquiry Traces Racist Song to National Gathering of Fraternity.

    The university’s investigation, including interviews with 160 people, showed that the song was well-known among leaders of the fraternity from multiple chapters, and shared on the cruise, David L. Boren, the University of Oklahoma president, said Friday at a news conference. In a letter to the national organization, Mr. Boren wrote that while the university has taken action, “the matter cannot be closed in our view, however, until the culture at the national level has also been addressed.” […]

    Speaking to about 200 people on Friday, he said that in all, about 25 fraternity members, including the two who were expelled, had been disciplined, and that all had accepted the discipline. He dismissed the concerns of free speech experts who have said they doubt the university has the legal right to penalize people for expressing even offensive views. “If speech is used to create a threatening and hostile environment,” Mr. Boren said, “then you have a right to act.”

    Mr. Boren said he held a meeting before the news conference between leaders of black student groups and the former fraternity chapter, “baring their souls to each other” for 90 minutes.

    “To say it was a very emotional moment for me is an understatement,” he said, his voice breaking slightly, “because I observed our students rendering apologies, apologies being accepted, uniting, treating each other with care and concern and love and dedicating themselves to rebuilding our university community.”

    One black student in that meeting, Christopher Flix, said the apologies were appreciated, but when asked if the white students were truly remorseful, said, “You know, you can never tell.”

    “I do feel like that meeting was very emotional and from that, it will be tough to think that wouldn’t be genuine,” said Mr. Flix, a senior who is president of the university’s National Pan-Hellenic Council, the umbrella group for the nine historically African-American fraternities and sororities on campus. But, he added, “the true test of character is the actions that follow the words.”

    Former leaders of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter did not respond to requests for comment.

    There’s no word on what that discipline meted out to frat members actually consisted of… I find that interesting, but I suppose that’s up to the frat to reveal. But I have a hard time believing it was adequate.

  75. rq says

    Snagged from Tony:
    When ‘Religious Liberty’ Was Used To Justify Racism Instead Of Homophobia

    Yet, while LGBT Americans are the current target of this effort to repackage prejudice as “religious liberty,” they are hardly the first. To the contrary, as Wake Forest law Professor Michael Kent Curtis explained in a 2012 law review article, many segregationists justified racial bigotry on the very same grounds that religious conservatives now hope to justify anti-gay animus. In the words of one professor at a prominent Mississippi Baptist institution, “our Southern segregation way is the Christian way . . . . [God] was the original segregationist.”
    God Of The Segregationists

    Theodore Bilbo was one of Mississippi’s great demagogues. After two non-consecutive terms as governor, Bilbo won a U.S. Senate seat campaigning against “farmer murderers, corrupters of Southern womanhood, [skunks] who steal Gideon Bibles from hotel rooms” and a host of other, equally colorful foes. In a year where just 47 Mississippi voters cast a ballot for a communist candidate, Bilbo railed against a looming communist takeover of the state — and offered himself up as the solution to this red onslaught.

    Bilbo was also a virulent racist. “I call on every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the n[*]ggers away from the polls,” Bilbo proclaimed during his successful reelection campaign in 1946. He was a proud member of the Ku Klux Klan, telling Meet the Press that same year that “[n]o man can leave the Klan. He takes an oath not to do that. Once a Ku Klux, always a Ku Klux.” During a filibuster of an anti-lynching bill, Bilbo claimed that the bill

    will open the floodgates of hell in the South. Raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousandfold; and upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for the passage of the measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon White Southern men will not tolerate.

    For Senator Bilbo, however, racism was more that just an ideology, it was a sincerely held religious belief. In a book entitled Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization, Bilbo wrote that “[p]urity of race is a gift of God . . . . And God, in his infinite wisdom, has so ordained it that when man destroys his racial purity, it can never be redeemed.” Allowing “the blood of the races [to] mix,” according to Bilbo, was a direct attack on the “Divine plan of God.” There “is every reason to believe that miscengenation and amalgamation are sins of man in direct defiance to the will of God.”

    Bilbo was one of the South’s most colorful racists, but he was hardly alone in his beliefs. As early as 1867, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld segregated railway cars on the grounds that “[t]he natural law which forbids [racial intermarriage] and that social amalgamation which leads to a corruption of races, is as clearly divine as that which imparted to [the races] different natures.” This same rationale was later adopted by state supreme courts in Alabama, Indiana and Virginia to justify bans on interracial marriage, and by justices in Kentucky to support residential segregation and segregated colleges. […]

    Bob Jones University excluded African Americans completely until the early 1970s, when it began permitting black students to attend so long as they were married. In 1975, it amended this policy to permit unmarried African American students, but it continued to prohibit interracial dating, interracial marriage, or even being “affiliated with any group or organization which holds as one of its goals or advocates interracial marriage.” As a result, the Internal Revenue Service revoked Bob Jones’ tax-exempt status.

    This decision, that the IRS would no longer give tax subsidies to racist schools even if they claimed that their racism was rooted in religious beliefs, quickly became a rallying point for the Christian Right. Indeed, according to Paul Weyrich, the seminal conservative activist who coined the term “moral majority,” the IRS’ move against schools like Bob Jones was the single most important issue driving the birth of modern day religious conservatism. According to Weyrich, “[i]t was not the school-prayer issue, and it was not the abortion issue,” that caused this “movement to surface.” Rather it was what Weyrich labeled the “federal government’s move against the Christian schools.”

    When Bob Jones’ case reached the Supreme Court, the school argued that IRS’ regulations denying tax exemptions to racist institutions “cannot constitutionally be applied to schools that engage in racial discrimination on the basis of sincerely held religious beliefs.” But the justices did not bite. In an 8-1 decision by conservative Chief Justice Warren Burger, the Court explained that “[o]n occasion this Court has found certain governmental interests so compelling as to allow even regulations prohibiting religiously based conduct.” Prohibiting race discrimination is one of these interests. […]

    One year before Bob Jones, the Court decided a case called United States v. Lee, which involved an Amish employer’s objection to paying Social Security taxes on religious grounds. As the Court explained in Lee, allowing people with religious objections to opt out of Social Security could undermine the viability of the entire program. “The design of the system requires support by mandatory contributions from covered employers and employees,” Burger wrote for the Court. “This mandatory participation is indispensable to the fiscal vitality of the social security system. . . . Moreover, a comprehensive national social security system providing for voluntary participation would be almost a contradiction in terms and difficult, if not impossible, to administer.”

    Just as importantly, allowing religious employers to exempt themselves from the law would be fundamentally unfair to the employees who are supposed to benefit from those laws. “When followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity. Granting an exemption from social security taxes to an employer operates to impose the employer’s religious faith on the employees.”

    Lee, in other words, stands for the proposition that people of faith do not exist in a vacuum. Their businesses compete with other companies who are entitled to engage in this competition upon a level playing field. Their personnel decisions impact their employees, and their decision to refuse to do business with someone — especially for reasons such as race or sexual orientation — can fundamentally demean that individual and deny them their own right to participate equally in society.

    This is why people like Theodore Bilbo should not be allowed to refuse to do business with African Americans, and it is why anti-gay business owners should not be given a special right to discriminate against LGBT consumers. And this is also something that the United States has understood for a very long time. Bob Jones and Lee are not new cases. A whole generation of Americans spent their entire professional careers enjoying the protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Religious liberty is an important value and it rightfully belongs in our Constitution, but it we do not allow it to be used to destroy the rights of others.

    The argument Gov. Brewer resolved Wednesday night with her veto stamp is no different than the argument Lyndon Johnson resolved when he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Invidious discrimination is wrong. And it doesn’t matter why someone wants to discriminate.

    Petition: File Charges against Officers Timothy Loehmann and Officer Frank Gramback

    We, the undersigned, demand that charges be filed against the Cleveland Police Officers responsible for the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was innocently minding his own business in a public picnic shelter at Cudell Recreation Center on November 22, 2014, when a police squad car driven by officer Frank Gramback suddenly descended upon Tamir and Officer Timothy Loehmann fired two shots in 0.792 seconds hitting Tamir Rice in the stomach. Unless police are held accountable for such unwarranted use of deadly force, there is no question but that tragedies like this will continue to happen

    Still needs about 3000 to make it to 25 000.


    If You Think We’re Living In A Post-Racial Society, You Need To See This Chart (IMAGE)

    Despite the fact that the U.S. economy experienced a full year of job growth and the national unemployment rate has dropped, black Americans haven’t benefitted much from this improvement. If we’re going to call ourselves a post-racial society, one big step in the right direction would be to focus on black unemployment rates.

    Currently, 20% of African Americans are unemployed in Wisconsin – the state with the highest black unemployment rate. After Wisconsin, Nevada (16.1%) and Michigan (15.8%) took the lead, as reported by the Economic Policy Institute on Thursday. This sobering data, collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, serves as proof that African Americans are still facing disproportionately high unemployment rates.

    At the end of 2014, it was reported that across the United States, 11% of African Americans did not have a job. When you consider that in 2009, national unemployment rates had reached a high of 9.9% due to the recession, the current numbers of black unemployment are far too high. Last year, the annual unemployment rate for white people was only 4.9%.

    The chart below, courtesy of Huffington Post, compares black employment rates to white unemployment rates in every state – and the evidence is impossible to ignore. Across the board, every state had a higher black unemployment rate than the national unemployment rate, which is 5.5% as of February. […]

    One of the challenges that black workers are facing is racial discrimination in the workforce. In a study, it was found that a black job applicant with no criminal record would do just as well as a white job applicant that just got out of prison. It was also discovered that black applicants were half as likely to get a job offer or callback even if they were just as qualified as a white applicant. In another experiment, data showed that employers didn’t hire as many black workers for service jobs because they thought their customers wouldn’t want to be served by them. These are old attitudes and prejudices that are still affecting us as a society today.

    Black unemployment – as well as black incarceration rates – are both areas that affect African Americans disproportionately, and areas we desperately need to work on before we think of ourselves as a nation that provides equal opportunities to all Americans.

    Also, for fun: Happy 60th birthday to Ruby Bridges! via A Mighty Girl! on Facebook.

    As a six-year-old, Ruby Bridges famously became the first African American child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in the South. When the 1st grader walked to William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans on November 14, 1960 surrounded by a team of U.S. Marshals, she was met by a vicious mob shouting and throwing objects at her.

    One of the federal marshals, Charles Burks, who served on her escort team, recalls Bridges’ courage in the face of such hatred: “For a little girl six years old going into a strange school with four strange deputy marshals, a place she had never been before, she showed a lot of courage. She never cried. She didn’t whimper. She just marched along like a little soldier. We were all very proud of her.”

    Once Ruby entered the school, she discovered that it was devoid of children because they had all been removed by their parents due to her presence. The only teacher willing to have Ruby as a student was Barbara Henry, who had recently moved from Boston. Ruby was taught by herself for her first year at the school due to the white parents’ refusal to have their children share a classroom with a black child.

    Despite daily harassment, which required the federal marshals to continue escorting her to school for months; threats towards her family; and her father’s job loss due to his family’s role in school integration, Ruby persisted in attending school. The following year, when she returned for second grade, the mobs were gone and more African American students joined her at the school. The pioneering school integration effort was a success due to Ruby Bridges’ inspiring courage, perseverance, and resilience.

    Links to books, films, documentaries and just plain more information at the link.

  76. rq says

    A bit of history in tweets:
    The Tulsa “Race Riot” of 1921.
    The Brady Mansion, where the mob of white citizens met to plan the attack on Black Wall Street.
    Tate Brady, the founder of Tulsa, was a member of the KKK. He was a leader in the destruction of Black Wall Street.
    @deray Kristallnacht is taught in every history textbook. The attack of Black Wall Street in Tulsa is relegated to a footnote. Terrible
    @darkRussianchik @deray It’s worse than just whitewashing history. Anti-black violence is being deleted from the historical record.
    @darkRussianchik @deray I didn’t learn about the riots in Tulsa that attacked Black Wall Street until African American studies in college.
    This last I find to be a terrible omission in education. More to come.

  77. rq says

    There wasn’t a race riot in Tulsa in 1921. White people destroyed a black community. It was an act of white domestic terrorism.
    There was a black-owned airport in Tulsa when Black Wall Street was in existence.
    During the destruction of Black Wall Street the local law enforcement dropped bombs on the area to aid in the destruction of the strip.
    The white community would not sell bricks to the residents who attempted to rebuild Black Wall Street. They made their own bricks.
    Black Wall Street Destruction Damage Claims. Tulsa. To the tune of 2.7 million – at that time.
    The destruction of #blackwallstreet in Tulsa left 3,000 black people dead and 600 businesses destroyed.

  78. rq says

    An article on St Louis from a couple of years ago: The view from flyover country

    St Louis is one of those cities that does not make it into the international news unless something awful happens, like it did last week in Cleveland, another American heartland city with a bad reputation and too many black people to meet the media comfort zone. The city is treated like a joke, and the people who live there and rescue women and make concise indictments of American race relations are turned into memes.

    St Louis is one of those cities where, if you are not from there, people ask why you live there. You tell them how it is a secret wonderland for children, how the zoo is free and the parks are beautiful, how people are more kind and generous than you would imagine, how it is not as dangerous as everyone says. They look at you skeptically and you know that they are thinking you cannot afford to move. They are right, but that is only part of it.

    St Louis is one of those cities that is always ahead of its time. In 1875, it was calledthe “Future Great City of the World”. In the 19th century, it lured in traders and explorers and companies that funded the city’s public works and continue to do so today. In the 20th century, St Louis showed the world ice cream and hamburgers and ragtime and blues and racism and sprawl and riots and poverty and sudden, devastating decay. In the 21st century, St Louis is starting to look more like other American cities, because in the 21st century, America started looking more like St Louis.

    St Louis is one of those cities where, if you are not from there, people ask why you live there.

    St Louis is a city where people are doing so much with so little that you start to wonder what they could do if they had more. […]

    In St Louis, possibilities are supposed to be in the past. It is the closest thing America has to a fallen imperial capital. This is where dystopian Hollywood fantasies are set and filmed. It is the gateway and the memorial of the American Dream.

    But when the American Dream is dying for everyone, St Louis might be the one to rise up. In St Louis, people know what happens when social mobility stalls, when lines harden around race and class. They know that if you have a job and work hard, you should be able to do more than survive. They know that every person, every profession, is worthy of dignity and respect.

    St Louis is no longer a city where you come to be somebody. But you might leave it a better person.

    It’s that little bit about doing a lot with little that, I think, is most applicable to today’s activists in the city, and elsewhere.

    The policing of black bodies: Racial profiling for profit and the killing of Ferguson’s Mike Brown

    More than six months after Michael Brown was killed by Officer Darren Wilson, the youth-led protests in Ferguson continue to fuel a national movement against police brutality.

    “Part of the struggle for us in Ferguson is to break a four-hundred-year belief that black people are not human,” says St. Louis native and activist Rev. Osagyefo Sekou.

    After the Department of Justice released a blistering report finding systematic racism and prejudice against blacks in the Ferguson Police Department, protests continued, the police chief and several Ferguson officials resigned, and two police officers were injured in a shooting.

    This problem, however, is not unique to Ferguson. St. Louis County is made of around 90 municipalities, each with their own police departments and courts. Residents report similar discriminatory treatment at the hands of law enforcement. And with so many different jurisdictions, a small infraction like an expired license plate can turn into dozens of fines and eventually warrants. Those in St. Louis who live below the poverty line are faced with the reality of buying food or paying fines.

    In the Fusion documentary Ferguson: A Report from Occupied Territory, we turn to the residents of St. Louis County to tell us what it’s like to be racially profiled and under siege.

    The video is at the link, worth a watch.

    General police misbehaviour: Fire Marshall Brilliantly Shuts Down Cop Who Attempts To Violate His Rights.

    The 30 Year-Old Nigerian Mobile Phone Entrepreneur Who Is Challenging Apple In Africa

    Michael Akindele, a 30 year-old Nigerian, is a director and a co-founder of SOLO Phone, an experience-driven digital content and smartphone company focused on delivering the best content and services on the mobile platform to African consumers.

    SOLO Phone, which was established in Nigeria in 2012, is an experience-driven mobile device manufacturer which aims to provide the best content and services to the African consumer at an affordable price. The company manufactures smartphones priced at $150, bundled with free music of up to 20 million songs licensed from Sony, Universal and Warner. SOLO also recently launched a Video-On-Demand App available to all Android devices in Nigeria which offers the latest Nollywood and Hollywood movies from global movie studios.

    I recently had a chat with Akindele where he recounted his entrepreneurial journey and explained why he feels SOLO phones will give other smartphones a run for their money. […]

    Walk me through your entrepreneurial journey so far. I know you worked as a Core Analyst at Accenture in the U.S, and then you returned to Nigeria to help produce the African edition of The Apprentice reality TV show. You were also involved in an animation studio before SOLO. Tell me about it.

    While developing The Apprentice Africa, I gained hands on experience on producing TV content for the African market. I recognized the gaps and immediately started developing original content inspired by African culture, music and folklore. I recognized the media market was populated by an influx of content from Western markets with little commercial opportunities left for local content producers. We successfully produced a pilot for an original 3-D animated series titled The O Twins. However,we quickly learned the market for content distribution was very shallow. Outside of the cable TV market there is little to no room left for original content production. The cable TV market is limited to affluent consumers who can afford televisions at home. However, the majority of African consumers are unable to afford this luxury. This presented a challenge I was willing to take on. I knew if someone was able to successfully solve that problem it would create tremendous opportunities not only for the distributors but also for creative professionals across the continent. Today Sub-Saharan Africa is among the world’s fastest growing mobile market in the world, and is the biggest after Asia. The introduction of affordable smartphones, specifically designed for the African market, has improved the market scenario. Mobile broadband connections are now anticipated to quadruple from its 2012 figure to reach 160 million in 2016. This uptrend reflects the gradual change in consumer habits, as they gain their first Internet experience through a mobile device. This is the future of content distribution and value added services. […]

    There are so many Smartphones in the market already. What is Solo doing differently from the others?

    Companies simply compete today in the Smartphone market on hardware specifications. Prior to 2005, no one saw Apple coming. Today Apple consumes over 90% of the profit in the Smartphone market. However, to the average emerging market and African consumer an Apple device is out of reach due to its high cost. The emergence of an open OS driven by Google had brought commoditization to the mobile hardware market. SOLO is an emerging markets play. SOLO is an experience driven device manufacturer with a vision to provide the best content and services to the African and emerging markets consumer at an affordable price that not only delivers tremendous value for money but also enriches their lives. The foundation of SOLO is built on delivering key value added services in critical enterprise verticals such as education, healthcare and commerce, to mention a few. Today, SOLO offers affordable smartphones bundled with free music up to 20 million songs licensed from Sony, Universal and Warner. This innovation was possible because of partners that believe in the SOLO vision. We also recently launched a Video-On-Demand App available to all Android devices in Nigeria offering the latest Nollywood and Hollywood movies from global movie studios such as Disney, Universal Studios and Sony Pictures. Our go to market strategy was to offer download powered by SOLO HotSpots. This innovation offers consumers to download movies in 3 – 5 minutes. This by far is the best offering in today’s market populated by streaming services where data costs are still extremely high. SOLO innovates by putting the consumer first and that is the premise SOLO was founded on. […]

    Are your phones manufactured here in Africa or is manufacturing outsourced to China?

    The economics for manufacturing our devices today in Africa isn’t possible yet. Today we produce our devices in Asia. In the mid-to-long term we will explore the possibilities of manufacturing our devices locally in Africa.

    I read somewhere that SOLO phones offer owners free access to millions of songs from international, African and Nigerian songs. What are the details of your licensing agreements with the record labels and musicians?

    Our commercial engagement with the music labels is confidential. However, we structured our agreement with the music labels to benefit local artists and content producers. Today SOLO Music compensates local music artists and their management companies with an opportunity to generate additional income based on music consumption through SOLO Music thus providing artists an opportunity to promote their music through SOLO Music to increase their earnings potential.

    This and that more at the link.

    Exclusive: TSA’s Secret Behavior Checklist to Spot Terrorists – going to put it here as tangentially related. Here’s more on the list:

    The document listing the criteria, known as the “Spot Referral Report,” is not classified, but it has been closely held by TSA and has not been previously released. A copy was provided to The Intercept by a source concerned about the quality of the program.

    The checklist ranges from the mind-numbingly obvious, like “appears to be in disguise,” which is worth three points, to the downright dubious, like a bobbing Adam’s apple. Many indicators, like “trembling” and “arriving late for flight,” appear to confirm allegations that the program picks out signs and emotions that are common to many people who fly. […]

    Since its introduction in 2007, the SPOT program has attracted controversy for the lack of science supporting it. In 2013, the Government Accountability Office found that there was no evidence to back up the idea that “behavioral indicators … can be used to identify persons who may pose a risk to aviation security.” After analyzing hundreds of scientific studies, the GAO concluded that “the human ability to accurately identify deceptive behavior based on behavioral indicators is the same as or slightly better than chance.”

    The inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security found in 2013 that TSA had failed to evaluate SPOT, and “cannot ensure that passengers at United States airports are screened objectively, show that the program is cost-effective, or reasonably justify the program’s expansion.”

    Despite those concerns, TSA has trained and deployed thousands of Behavior Detection Officers, and the program has cost more than $900 million since it began in 2007, according to the GAO.

    The 92-point checklist listed in the “Spot Referral Report” is divided into various categories with a point score for each. Those categories include a preliminary “observation and behavior analysis,” and then those passengers pulled over for additional inspection are scored based on two more categories: whether they have “unusual items,” like almanacs and “numerous prepaid calling cards or cell phones,” and a final category for “signs of deception,” which include “covers mouth with hand when speaking” and “fast eye blink rate.

    Points can also be deducted from someone’s score based on observations about the traveler that make him or her less likely, in TSA’s eyes, to be a terrorist. For example, “apparent” married couples, if both people are over 55, have two points deducted off their score. Women over the age of 55 have one pointed deducted; for men, the point deduction doesn’t come until they reach 65.

    Last week, the ACLU sued TSA to obtain records related to its behavior detection programs, alleging that they lead to racial profiling. The lawsuit is based on a Freedom of Information Act request the ACLU filed last November asking for numerous documents related to the program, including the scientific justification for the program, changes to the list of behavior indicators, materials used to train officers and screen passengers, and what happens to the information collected on travelers.

    So what I get from the list is, basically, that everyone can be a terrorist.

  79. Pteryxx says

    Al Jazeera last July: Survivors of infamous 1921 Tulsa race riots still hope for justice

    According to a 1921 New York Times article, Judge Loyal J. Martin, a former mayor of Tulsa who chaired the first race riot committee — the Tulsa City Commission — just days after the attack, said in a mass meeting that the city could redeem itself and move forward only “by complete restitution and rehabilitation of the destroyed black belt.”

    “The rest of the United States must know that the real citizenship of Tulsa weeps at this unspeakable crime and will make good the damage, so far as it can be done, to the last penny,” he said.

    But that never happened. Insurance companies denied claims from African-Americans, leaving them with nothing but the clothes on their backs, forced to start over or leave. Blacks tried to sue the city and state for damages but had their claims blocked or denied, according to the official report.

    On June 14, just two weeks after the riot, Mayor T.D. Evans addressed the commission, telling it that the incident was “inevitable” and that the victims “should receive such help as we can give them.”

    But then he said something else: “Let us immediately get to the outside fact that everything is quiet in our city, that this menace has been fully conquered, and that we are going on in a normal condition.”

    In other words: The city should move on. And for 90 years, that’s what happened.

    After an initial flurry of reports, with articles appearing as far away as the London Times, news of the “troubles” in Tulsa vanished.

    […]

    From the time of the riot, whole generations of Tulsans have grown up never hearing a word about the darkest moment in the city’s history.

    Damario Solomon-Simmons, an African-American attorney in Tulsa, is one of them.

    A native of North Tulsa, Solomon-Simmons attended Carver Middle School — on Greenwood Avenue — and still didn’t learn about Greenwood and the riots until he took an African-American studies course at the University of Oklahoma.

    All of it — the business district and the homes, the sudden destruction — left him flabbergasted. He argued with his professor, telling him, “You’re wrong! I’m from Tulsa, I’m from North Tulsa, I’ve never seen or heard of anything like that.’’

    Marc Carlson, a historian and archivist at the University of Tulsa who oversees the school’s race riot collection, said many of his students don’t know either, not even the ones from Tulsa.

    “I don’t know why that is,” he said, adding that the state Legislature requires schools to include the riot in their curriculum.

    Oddly, there is more awareness of the event in other countries than in the U.S.

    Michelle Place, executive director of the Tulsa Historical Society, said requests for information about the riot are the society’s No. 1 inquiry.

    “About a month ago I talked to someone in New Zealand. I’ve talked to Tokyo, I’ve talked to London,” said Place.

    She can understand why city leaders might be reluctant to put it in school textbooks. But why, she wondered, didn’t the tale survive orally?

    “The fact that it’s not just one of those things that we all knew took place,” she said and paused, “… takes my breath away, brings me up short.”

    […]

    After they lost their appeals, not much has happened in the way of paying the few remaining survivors. Old age and time has claimed the lives of many of them, and more die every year without any restitution.

    There are some efforts in Congress to try and help. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., introduces a bill every year on the floor of the House to remove the statute of limitations in the Greenwood case to allow the survivors’ lawsuit to go forward. But that bill — along with the one Conyers presents each year to study reparations for slavery — is not likely to ever get further than that introduction, especially in today’s divided Congress.

    “We thought we might live long enough to see something happen, but even though I’ve lived 99 years, nothing of that sort has actually happened,” Hooker said. “You keep hoping, you keep hope alive, so to speak.”

    After all, it did take 80 years before the survivors of the riot even got an official apology from the city of Tulsa. Mayor Kathy Taylor held a “celebration of conscience” and honored with a medal each of the survivors the city could contact.

    But Hooker,who was the first African American woman to serve in the Coast Guard and went on to earn a doctorate’s in psychology, remains optimistic.

    “We’ll just keep right on trying, never giving up. Never, never giving up.”

    Solomon-Simmons, on the other hand, isn’t nearly as hopeful.

    The collective failure to act, to pay the victims, to set up a scholarship fund or make a real attempt at restitution is a “stain on our nation,” he said.

    “And it’s sad to know that they’re probably all going to die without receiving anything,” he added. “Unfortunately, black life in America is still not worth that much.”

    The 2000 report on the Tulsa race riot, 188 pages, is available here from okhistory.org: PDF

  80. rq says

    Pteryxx
    Awesome, innit, how they’re considering reparations when many of the actual survivors are dead or dying of old age. How considerate.

    +++

    “@BlackFabulosity: Pen art is downright amazinggggggg. Portraits by Ghanaian artist @enBoski #africanart ” @deray #ART

    Racist Or Nah?? Rapper M.I.A. Says Oprah Accused Her Of Being A ‘Terrorist’

    M.I.A recently sat down with Rolling Stone to discuss the 10 year anniversary of her debut album. The controversial rapper shared an experience where she claims Oprah Winfrey called her a terrorist…

    Via The Grio reports:

    M.I.A. has never been one to bite her tongue and now she’s revealed in a new Rolling Stone interview that she had a rather icy encounter with Oprah Winfrey – which included being called a “terrorist.”

    The rapper recall meeting Oprah at Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World Gala in 2009, during which she tried to engage the media mogul in a discussion about the civil war in her native Sri Lanka.

    “‘Hey, people are gonna f—ing die in my country. Like, please pay attention,’” she recalled telling the talk show host. “And she was like, ‘You’re s–t because you were rude to Lady Gaga and I’m not talking to you. And I’m gonna interview Tom Cruise jumping on my sofa, so f–k off.’”

    She continues:

    She shut me down. She took that photo of me, but she was just like, ‘I can’t talk to you because you’re crazy and you’re a terrorist. And I’m like, ‘I’m not. I’m a Tamil and there are people dying in my country and you have to like look at it because you’re f—ing Oprah and every American told me you’re going to save the world.’

    M.I.A.’s interview is meant to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of her debut album “Arular.”

    Do you think Oprah really called M.I.A. a terrorist at the gala?? Read the entire interview HERE.

    Well, as they say, if you have to ask that question…

    ALEC is essentially the policy arm of white supremacy. Y’all, it’s scary how intentional white supremacy is. – what’s ALEC? This: How ALEC helps conservatives and businesses turn state election wins into new laws

    Republicans have long been viewed as more effective than Democrats in pushing their policy priorities in state legislatures. One reason why? A group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, that has helped push state-level conservative proposals. ALEC has helped develop and popularize a host of ideas designed to benefit businesses, as well as the Stand Your Ground bills that became so controversial after Trayvon Martin’s death — and it frequently manages to get its proposals enacted into law.

    This year, Republicans control 30 state legislatures, and control one chamber in 8 more. So it’s more important than ever to understand what ALEC actually is — and what it does.

    Essentially, ALEC is a group that helps craft and standardize various conservative and pro-business policies so they can be pushed in state legislatures across the country. It has facilitated collaboration among state legislators, businesses, and conservative think tanks and advocacy groups to craft many “model bills” — bills those legislators can then introduce in their home states, and perhaps get passed into law. In recent years, about 1,000 of ALEC’s model bills have been introduced to state legislatures across the country, and around 200 usually become law, the group has estimated. […]

    In recent years, about one quarter of US state legislators have been members of ALEC. But though the group advertises itself as a nonpartisan organization, all of its current officers and board members, and the vast majority of its dues-paying rank-and-file members, are Republican state legislators. While ALEC has been chaired by Democrats in the past, one of those former chairs, former Iowa representative Dolores Mertz, has since publicly blasted the group as overly partisan.

    The upshot of this is that the group is most influential and successful in states with Republican-controlled legislatures and governor’s mansions. ALEC doesn’t elect Republicans to legislatures, but it gives the party, businesses, and conservatives a menu of potential bills to choose from once the GOP does gain power. […]

    ALEC’s main focus is promoting pro-business and conservative economic policies. It’s organized into 9 main task forces run by state legislators that corporations or nonprofits can contribute to and participate in. Here are each of them, and examples of positions they back:

    Civil Justice (Tort reform)
    Commerce, Insurance, and Economic Development (Opposition to minimum wage increases, right to work, regulatory flexibility)
    Communications and Technology (Opposition to net neutrality, various other policies favored by large telecom companies)
    Education (School choice and education reform)
    Energy, Environment and Agriculture (Opposing EPA carbon regulations, opposing state renewable energy mandates)
    Health and Human Services (Repealing Obamacare, block granting Medicaid)
    International Relations (Promoting free trade, supporting the Keystone XL pipeline)
    Tax and Fiscal Policy (tax cuts, overhauls to public employee pensions)
    Justice Performance Project (various changes to state bail programs, decriminalization)

    But ALEC has frequently been criticized for blurring the lines between bills intended to benefit business generally, and bills designed to help its particular corporate members. […]

    ALEC’s close ties to corporations and the economic policies it’s pushed have been the source of some controversy. But the group was co-founded by social conservative activist Paul Weyrich, and it has also promoted model bills on gun rights, voter ID, and immigration that have been at the center of some of the biggest state controversies of the past few years. For instance:

    Months before Arizona’s legislature passed a tough anti-illegal immigration law in 2010, its lead sponsor introduced the bill at an ALEC meeting, and the group’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force adopted it. The meeting included officials from the Corrections Corporation of America, which expected to benefit financially from increased detention of immigrants, according to NPR’s Laura Sullivan.
    ALEC has drafted and pushed voter ID laws, which critics say make voting more burdensome for minorities, the poor, and the elderly.
    After Florida legislators passed the nation’s first “Stand Your Ground” law in 2005, ALEC collaborated with the NRA to promote the law nationwide. Since 2005, more than 30 states have enacted some version of Stand Your Ground, according to the Washington Post.

    In 2012, the killing of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin brought nationwide attention to Stand Your Ground laws — and ALEC’s role in promoting them came under scrutiny. Liberal groups like Color of Change campaigned to get corporations to pull their funding from ALEC — focusing on both Stand Your Ground and voter ID — and leaks of documents from the group that had begun the previous year, to progressive organizations like the Center for Media and Democracy, continued.

    The ensuing controversy severely hurt ALEC. Its various corporate funders, and its few conservative Democrat members, had joined the group for economic and business issues, not to get tarred with hot-button national controversies. According to internal documents obtained by the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington and Suzanne Goldenberg, ALEC lost nearly 400 state legislators and 64 corporate members between 2011 and 2013. The Center for Media and Democracy lists many companies that have reportedly cut ties to the group — including Amazon, General Electric, Pepsi, McDonald’s, Merck, General Motors, Microsoft, and Walgreens.

    In an apparent attempt to stop the bleeding, ALEC shut down its “Public Safety and Elections Task Force” — responsible for the guns, voter ID, and immigration model bills — and announced that it would refocus on economic issues.

    The bulk of ALEC’s funding (around $8 million a year) comes from corporations, trade associations, or conservative foundations. Hundreds of corporations and trade groups have had varying levels of involvement with ALEC over the years. The group’s Private Enterprise Advisory Council currently includes representatives from ExxonMobil, PhRMA, AT&T, UPS, State Farm Insurance, Altria (formerly Philip Morris), and the American Bail Coalition.

    Koch Industries has also been a key funder. When ALEC faced funding troubles and nearly went defunct in the mid-1990s, the Kochs gave the group a $430,000 loan, according to Lisa Graves of the Center for Media and Democracy. Then, from 1999 through 2002, a Koch Industries official chaired ALEC’s private enterprise board, and he remains on that board today. Koch foundations have given ALEC hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years.

    In 2005, the Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN) was founded to provide a counterpart to ALEC. It was later renamed the Progressive States Network (PSN). But as of the latest fundraising figures, from 2012, it was nowhere in the same league as its conservative counterpart — ALEC raised 24 times as much money as PSN.

    In 2012, another group called the American Legislative and Issue Campaign Exchange (ALICE) was founded for the same purpose. In July 2014, PSN and ALICE announced they would merge and be led by former White House aide Nick Rathod.

    But after the Democrats’ resounding defeats in the 2014 midterms, it was apparently time for a rebranding. Politico’s Ken Vogel reported on November 9 that Rathod will found a new group called the State Innovation Exchange (SiX) to push progressive priorities in the states.

    SiX seems to have even broader ambitions than ALEC — Vogel writes that the group will also use “bare-knuckle tactics like opposition research and video tracking to derail Republicans and their initiatives.” Vogel also reported that Gara LaMarche (an operative who runs the Democracy Alliance that coordinates donations from wealthy liberals) emphasized in a recent email that it’s not DC, but “the rest of the country — the states where progressive power must be built and restored — that will be our primary and urgent focus.”

    For now, though, any liberal ALEC will face one key problem — after the 2014 elections, Democrats will only control the legislatures in 11 states. A think tank to write bills might be nice, but if Democrats want those bills to actually become law, they’ll have to figure out how to win some more state elections first.

    I skipped some section titles, but basically, ALEC is the religious fundamentalist, racist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, etc., force that moves Republicans. Or that’s what it sounds like to me. :/

    I fixed it @DailyMailCeleb – Headline #1: Idris Elba can’t be Bond because he isn’t English-English'(isn’t Bond Scottish?); Headline #2: Idris Elba can’t be Bond because he is Black. The second would be closer to what the article is actually trying to say, I bet.

  81. rq says

    Police representative says DOJ’s ‘band of marauders’ concealed truth about Ferguson shooting. Warning for Roorda ahead. (Can someone please take away his platform and give him a smaller one in a less populated space?)

    Jeff Roorda, the business manager for the St. Louis Police Officers Association, has stirred the pot before and didn’t hold back at the rally outside St. Louis Police headquarters.

    In a 10-minute speech, Roorda said the Department of Justice report that found systemic racism within Ferguson’s police and court operations was intended to distract from another report by the agency that found Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson was justified in using deadly force against Michael Brown.

    “(U.S. Attorney General) Eric Holder, who wanted with every fiber of his being to find some wrongdoing on the part of Darren Wilson, sics his justice department on St. Louis,” Roorda said. “They raid St. Louis like a band of marauders…

    “What do they find? They find that this hands up don’t shoot myth was just that — a fiction that was perpetrated upon the people of Ferguson, the people of Missouri and the people of the world,” he said.

    But instead of setting the record straight, Roorda said, Holder and his civil rights team “leak out the most damaging nuggets from this other report about this horrible practice of writing tickets.

    “Police departments writing tickets. Can you imagine?!?” Roorda asked mockingly, as a crowd of about 75 police supporters hooted in the background.

    “It’s a big lie and it was used to bury the truth about Darren Wilson and what happened that day on Aug. 9 in Ferguson and that was … a young black man made a terrible mistake,” he said. […]

    “We now pretend, ‘Oh, it was never about the shooting, it was about the mistreatment of people by the Ferguson police department,” Roorda said. “Give me a break. People weren’t marching in the streets saying ‘hands up, don’t write me a ticket and don’t arrest me when I don’t show up to court.’ They were saying, ‘hands up don’t shoot.'”

    In February, a melee broke out at a public meeting discussing civilian review of St. Louis police after Roorda wore an “I am Darren Wilson” bracelet. As a result, he was sidelined as spokesman for the union on that issue.

    Republican Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder, also at the rally, called on citizens to unite in support of police, who black and white have been shot in the line of duty.

    His comments were tempered from those he made earlier this month on the conservative news outlet Newsmax TV. In that interview, Kinder said President Barack Obama and Holder had joined in “incitement of the mob” and “encouraging disorder in Ferguson.” He later told the Associated Press that the justice department was “staffed with Marxists and black radicals” and responsible for “fanning the flames of racial division” in the wake of the Ferguson shooting.

    Roorda makes me physically ill.

    Charles Barkley Wants NCAA To Pull Final Four From Indiana Over Anti-Gay Bill. And yet he doesn’t believe racism is still a thing.

    Former NBA star Charles Barkley on Friday called for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to yank its March Madness Final Four tournament out of Indiana over a new law that protects business owners from being required to serve same-sex couples because of religious objections.

    “Discrimination in any form is unacceptable to me,” Barkley said in a statement released through his agent, as quoted by USA Today. “As long as anti-gay legislation exists in any state, I strongly believe big events such as the Final Four and Super Bowl should not be held in those states’ cities.”

    Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) signed the “religious freedom” bill into law Thursday.

    The NCAA has said that it will go forward with plans to hold the Final Four in Indianapolis, although it is “especially concerned” about the possible effects of the law on its student-athletes and employees.

    Here’s another rather belated acknowledgement of a terrible history: Confronting Past, Mississippi Town Erects Emmett Till Museum 60 Years After His Killing

    Six decades after the brutal slaying of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy, the small Mississippi Delta town where two white men were acquitted of his murder is dedicating a museum to the event credited with helping spark the U.S. civil rights movement.

    The opening in Sumner on Saturday of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center is timed to coincide with the reopening across the town square of the refurbished Tallahatchie County Courthouse, where an all-white jury set Roy Bryant and J.W. Milan free after deliberating for one hour.

    The museum’s exhibits detail the 1955 murder and key moments in the trial, which attracted wide attention at the time. […]

    Work on both projects in the struggling town of a few hundred people began after the Tallahatchie Board of Supervisors issued a formal apology over the Till affair in 2006. It also established the Emmett Till Memorial Commission to bring attention to a racially charged incident that had for decades gone mostly undiscussed locally, said commission co-chairman John Wilchie.

    “For a long time, the people in Tallahatchie County were afraid to even talk about it,” he said.

    A public ceremony to celebrate the twin projects was set to take place on the square, which looks much as it did when journalists from around the world descended on it 60 years ago, and will feature speeches from Mississippi political leaders along with musical performances.

    Museum director Patrick Weems said his facility, which features the only publicly available library in town, together with the restoration of the courthouse, has helped foster a long overdue sense of racial reconciliation in the area.

    Coinciding with the renovation of several buildings on the square, along with the opening of an art gallery and a restaurant, the projects have also helped rejuvenate Sumner, he said.

    THEY ONLY APOLOGIZED IN 2006!!!

    Religious freedom? Remember, these folk were just “practicing their religious freedom” to intimidate, maim, and murder black folk. Religious freedom.

    Harrassment in social media. #TwitterFail: Twitter’s Refusal to Handle Online Stalkers, Abusers, and Haters

    I’ve done all the things you’re supposed to do when dealing with assholes on the Internet—all the victim-blaming advice that Twitter has to offer.

    I didn’t respond to Assholster. I’ve blocked at least a thousand of his accounts over the past two years. I’ve reported him using Twitter’s “Report Abuse” form. I briefly considered calling the police, but, really, what would be the point? I’ve seen how police treat stalking victims and victims of online harassment far more severe than mine. What did I expect them to do? “That anonymous Internet troll is saying shitty things about me on the Internet. Seize him!”

    Nothing worked and the harassment got worse.

    His messages to me have grown increasingly personal. He uses my full name in his tweets—creepy. He mocks my medical condition, claiming that I have a fake brain tumor—idiotic. He says that I’m pretending to be Black—what does that even mean?

    And when he’s not playing the victim, ironically complaining that I am the one harassing him, or that I am bigoted against him, or that I’m to blame for getting his multiple hate-speech accounts suspended, he is ranting and raving about k*kes and n*gg*rs.

    I’ve endured this for two years, and so have countless others. He creates hundreds of accounts to tweet his inane ramblings to my friends, online acquaintances, and even my work. He latches on to any tweet of mine and harasses anyone that I interact with.

    It got to the point where I began to feel responsible for subjecting my friends to his invective.

    But why should I feel responsible? It’s not my responsibility; it’s Twitter’s.

    Twitter, Can You Hear Me?

    After two years of blocking and reporting Assholster, I decided on a more direct approach. I began taking screenshots of the harassment and tweeting them to both Dick Costolo, the CEO of Twitter, and to Twitter Support. I also started hash-tagging my tweets “#Assholster.”

    I knew that by doing this, the harassment would likely escalate—and it did—but I thought if I could make Mr. Costolo or anyone who works at Twitter Support or Safety hear me—if I could make them see exactly what it is that I endure on a daily basis—then maybe Twitter would do something.

    So, every time Assholster tweeted me, I would tweet some variation of the following.

    “Assholster Account Number 1 for the day”
    “Assholster Account Number 2 for the day”
    “Assholster Account Number 3 for the day”
    “Assholster Account Number 4 for the day”
    “Assholster Account Number 5 for the day”

    And I would include a screenshot.

    After several days of this, Costolo finally responded: “we are on this in a couple different ways. I’d prefer to leave it at that here. Thanks very much.”

    Well that’s nice, Mr. Costolo, but I’d prefer to not have this asshole calling me “n*gg*r” day in and day out. And I’d also prefer a little transparency when it comes to whatever it is you folks at Twitter are doing about serial harassers. […]

    Yes, it’s as pointless as it sounds because as anyone who has bothered to report an abusive tweet knows, the “Report Abusive User” form is about as effective as your average YouTube commenter at a spelling bee.

    First, Twitter often takes days, weeks, or even months to respond to a report of abuse. Second, reporting an individual user for harassment is useless in cases where the abusive user’s account has already been suspended—and a new account created—by the time you complete the reporting process. In such cases, Twitter just shrugs its shoulders: Sorry. That account has been suspended. Nothing we can do.

    And even though Twitter expressly prohibits “Serial Accounts,” i.e., creating “multiple accounts for disruptive or abusive purposes,” Twitter has no way of preventing the Assholsters of the world from doing so.

    In fact, many serial harassers use scripts to create multiple new accounts automatically, which is why most of Assholster’s Twitter handles are simply a string of letters: @gndmxkll or @gnndcdm.

    Twitter doesn’t even bother to make sure that its users are following its own rules. […]

    While Twitter with its thousands of engineers has been unable or unwilling to develop solutions to the rampant racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-semitic, and transphobic harassment that its users suffer on a daily basis—solutions like those suggested by iOS developer Danilo Campos in a recent blog post entitled “The Least Twitter Could Do”—Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, a senior staff technologist at Electronic Frontier Foundation, recently stepped up.

    Last Monday, Hoffman-Andrews unveiled Block Together, a new app “intended to help cope with harassers and abusers on Twitter.” To say that the app has changed my Twitter life is to understate its significance to me.

    I am now able to control my Twitter experience in ways that before I could not. Block Together permits me to share my list of blocked users (over 5,000 users) with other Twitter users (and vice versa) so that I can avoid those users that people whom I trust have already deemed unworthy of my time.

    More importantly, however, the app permits me to automatically block accounts less than seven days old that tweet at me.

    I signed up for the app immediately, and for the past six days, I have had a reprieve from the constant barrage of racist and misogynist insults and slurs that had become a part of my daily Twitter experience.

    Block Together is currently the only app that permits users to control their own content. But another app is in the works: San Francisco-based developer Cori Johnson is working on Flaminga, an app that promises even more robust solutions to Twitter abuse than those currently offered by Block Together.

    So there you have it: Two developers are attacking Twitter’s abuse problem while Twitter twiddles its thumbs.

    Still, why is Twitter ignoring its users cries for help? Why has Twitter left the problem to its users to solve? […]

    To put it bluntly, Twitter is run primarily by white guys who are presumably straight. And because, for the most part, straight white guys don’t endure the same level of online harassment that women do, they simply cannot understand what it’s like to be on the receiving end of relentless abuse. After all, to paraphrase Louis C.K., you can’t even hurt a white man’s feelings.

    For women, the harassment on Twitter is often unbearable, and the facile response of those who are not subjected to regular harassment—and, indeed, the response of Twitter itself—is infuriating: “Don’t feed the trolls.” “Just block them.”

    But “just block them” is not a solution for those of us who are relentlessly assailed by Twitter users who have nothing better to do than to slap us in the face with their hate-filled filth, and who, upon account suspension, create new accounts in order to continue their campaign of harassment.

    Often, the best solution is to reduce Twitter activity or to quit the platform entirely. I know many women who have already done that. But that solution benefits neither the victims of harassment nor Twitter. If, as Twitter claims, its goal is to reach every person on the planet, then Twitter higher-ups are going to need to acknowledge that most of the people on the planet aren’t straight white dudes, and they’re going to need to come up with a way curb the abuse.

    Until that time, developers of apps like Block Together are stepping up to fill the void—a void that, thus far, Twitter refuses to fill itself.

    Relevant to Social Justice Warriors everywhere.

  82. rq says

    How slavery and coerced labor shaped global migration in 1858

    Where were people moving to 150 years ago? And what countries were they leaving? This French map (via Reddit user @midafternoonmap) displays the flow of hundreds of thousands of people who migrated in 1858 (hover over the map to zoom): […]

    The term “migrants,” here, is a little misleading. Africans brought to the Caribbean (and in even greater numbers to Madagascar and Mauritius) were trafficked slaves made to work on sugar plantations. (Importing slaves to the US had been illegal for 50 years.) Indian and Chinese migrants in the Caribbean were technically “indentured servants” — an alternative source of labor, especially in places where the slave trade was banned. But the working conditions of indentured servants and slaves were similar. And both were essentially coerced into migration.

    Forced migration mostly happened to nonwhites in 1858 — but not always. Remember that big band of British migrants to Australia? Some of them (the map doesn’t show how many) were prisoners being deported to the colony.

    People tend to think of immigration as a voluntary thing. But this map is a reminder of just how many people around the world are from a particular region because their ancestors were shipped there without having much say in the matter.

    How different would that map be without slavery and forced labour? And funnily enough, that pink line heading down from northern Europe to South America? Some of that was Latvians, too – as forced labour for the current German overlord of the era (1700s or so).

    Black Brunch today in two cities so far:
    Atlanta: Just to be clear…all those folks who left their tables and didn’t pay for their meal…that’s illegal….soo #BlackBrunchATL
    “You think people don’t hate you now?”- brunch attendee.You don’t begin to hate someone for interrupting your brunch. #BlackBrunchATL
    #BlackBrunchATL is a non-violent method of disrupting white spaces. Watch how people with privilege flee the weight of their apathy. Watch.
    “You’re making our guests uncomfortable”-waitress. Your silence is making our lives uncomfortable. Which side are you on? #BlackBrunchATL
    Tacoma: #blackbrunchtacoma

  83. rq says

    Here’s a re-read: [FERGUSON FORWARD]
    ‘When I close my eyes at night, I see people running from tear gas’    .

    Relatedly, here’s a storify of the tweets from back in August. Why these threads even got started. August 9th – August 11th #Ferguson Coverage on Twitter.

    And this is… an interesting read. A black man goes off on a white woman who says she’s “frustrated” . Here’s the woman’s view:

    I’m sorry but I would like to challenge some of your Black male readers. I am a White female who is engaged to a Black male-good-looking, educated and loving. I just don’t understand a lot of Black female’s attitudes about our relationship. My man decided he wanted me because the pickings amongst Black women were slim to none. As he said they were either too fat, too loud, too mean, too argumentative, too needy, too materialistic or carrying too much excess baggage. Before I became engaged, whenever I went out I was constantly approached by Black men, willing to wine and dine me and give me the world. If Black women are so up in arms about us being with their men, why don’t they look at themselves and make some changes. I am tired of the dirty looks I get and snide remarks when we’re out in public. I would like to hear from some Black men about why we are so appealing and coveted by them. Bryant Gumbel just left his wife of 26 years for one of us Charles Barkley, Scottie Pippen, the model Tyson Beckford, Montell Williams, Quincy Jones, James Earl Jones, Harry Belafonte, Sydney Poitier, Kofi Anan, Cuba Gooding Jr., Don Cornelius, Berry Gordy, Billy Blanks, Larry Fishburne, Wesley Snipes… I could go on and on. But, right now, I’m a little angry and that is why I wrote this so hurriedly. Don’t be mad with us White women because so many of your men want us. Get your acts together and learn from us and we may lead you to treat your men better. If I’m wrong, Black men, let me know.

    A black man proceeded to tell her that she was wrong:

    I would like to respond to the letter written by A Disgusted White Girl. Let me start by saying that I am a 28-year old black man. I graduated from one of the most prestigious universities in Atlanta, Georgia with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Business Management. I have a good job at a major corporation and have recently purchased a house. So, I consider myself to be among the ranks of successful black men. I will not use my precious time to slander white people. I just want to set the record straight of why black men date white women. Back in the day, one of the biggest reasons why black men dated white women was because they were considered easy. The black girls in my neighborhood were raised in the church. They were very strict about when they lost their virginity and who they lost it to. Because of our impatience to wait, brothers would look for someone who would give it up easy without too much hassle. So, they turned to the white girls. Nowadays, in my opinion, a lot of brothers date white women because they are docile and easy to control. A lot of black men, because of insecurities, fears, and overall weaknesses, have become intimidated by the strength of our black women. We are afraid that our woman will be more successful than us, make more money than us, drive nicer cars and own bigger houses.

    Because of this fear, many black men look for a more docile woman. Someone we can control. I have talked to numerous black men and they continuously comment on how easy it is to control and walk over their white women. I just want to set the record straight. I want A Disgusted White Girl to know that not all successful black men date white women. Brothers like Ahmad Rashad, Denzel Washington, Michael Jordan, Morris Chestnut, Will Smith, Blair Underwood, Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, Samuel L. Jackson, and Chris Rock all married strong black women And, to flip the script, there are numerous white men, in and out of the spot light, who openly or secretly desire black women over white women. Ted Danson, Robert DeNiro, and David Bowie to name a few. I just don’t want a disgusted white girl to be misinformed Stop thinking that because you are white that you are some type of goddess. Remember, when black Egyptian Queens like Hatsepshut and Nitorcris were ruling Dynasties and armies of men in Egypt, you were over in the caves of Europe eating raw meat and beating each other over the head with clubs.

    Read your history! It was the black woman that taught you how to cook and season your food. It was the black woman that taught you how to raise your children. It was black women who were breast feeding and raising your babies during slavery. It is the black woman that had to endure watching their fathers, husbands, and children beaten, killed, and thrown in jail. Black women were born with two strikes against them: being black and being a woman. And, through all this, Still They Rise! It is because of the black women’s strength, elegance, power, love and beauty that I could> never> date anyone except my black Queen. It is not just the outer beauty that captivates and draws me to them. It is not the fact that they come in all shapes, sizes, colors and shades that I love them. Their inner beauty is what I find most appealing about black women. Their strong spirit, loving and nurturing souls, their integrity, their ability to overcome great obstacles, their willingness to stand for what they believe in, and their determination to succeed and reach their highest potential while enduring great pain and suffering is why I have fallen in love with black women. I honestly believe that your anger is geared more toward jealousy and envy more so than snotty looks. If this were not so, then why do you continuously go to tanning salons to darken your skin? If you are so proud to be white, then why don’t you just be happy with your pale skin? Why do you continue to inject your lips, hips, and breasts with unnatural and dangerous substances so you can look fuller and more voluptuous? I think that your anger is really a result of you wanting to have what the black woman has.

    Not saying everything said is 100% true, because obviously black women are also not monolith, but – seriously? This is the kind of strongly positive, fierce and respectful defense black women rarely receive, and it deserves to be repeated.

    Checked out #BlackBrunchATL. Interesting how whites who have “Christian” in their bios condemn a movement speaking out against oppression.

    @Deray’s “Black Wallstreet” and @IWashington’s “Blackness” Tweets Spark Massive, Midnight Debate. This was an interesting exchange, on blackness and identifying as black, in relation to white supremacy:

    [tweet] @deray I think that if we stop calling ourselves “black”, then other’s will be forced to relinquish their “white”, “red”, “brown” & “yellow”[/tweet]

    Unfortunately, Isaiah Washington’s response to Deray was isolated, retweeted out of context and, on the back of Raven-Symone’s gaffe’s and Common’s #NewBlack commentary, he was lumped in with them because he’s a Black celebrity. Unfair but this is what Twitter has become… *sigh*… Thankfully, Isaiah didn’t back down and things got better.

    [tweet]@deray I believe that we have the power to weaken white supremacy by refusing to utter the word “blackness” or “black” for the next 50 yrs[/tweet]

    […]

    [tweet] @deray A lot of our scholars (& Malcolm X), etc. insisted that we move from “black” to “African” because Black has no land, no language, etc [/tweet]

    […]

    [tweet] @IWashington @drgoddess @keenblackgirl @deray white supremacy is not about a ‘word’. It’s about people + power + systems & institutions [/tweet]

    […]

    [tweet] @IWashington @drgoddess @Tuniekc @keenblackgirl @deray @SoulRevision identifying as African instead of Black will not save us from WS. [/tweet]

    […]

    [tweet] @drgoddess my point to @IWashington is that it doesn’t matter how you self identify, white supremacy sees a Black man/woman. Always [/tweet]

    […]

    [tweet] @SoulRevision @drgoddess Operative word being “weakened” my young sister. Can we reject being “black” and hold on to our “blackness”?? [/tweet]

    […]

    [tweet] @drgoddess if anyone else is labeled by their country-why shouldn’t we? We are American.They want us to denote a different kind of American [/tweet]

    […]

    [tweet] Divesting myself from being called “Black” is NOT divesting myself from poor people of color or indigenous Africans. #ItsPanAfricanism y’all [/tweet]

    There’s more at the link, an interesting discussion that’s worth reading. It also probably makes more sense at the link, I tried to pull some of the points trying to be made.

    The Black Lives Matter reading list: Books to change the world – possibly a repost, but if so, then the reading list has no doubt been updated and expanded. :)

  84. rq says

    Please follow/share @RecallKnowles15 for information regarding the recall of mayor James Knowles in #ferguson #fegusonrecall @SouthardsArt
    They’re looking for signatures to recall the mayor. [/obvious] We need 2500 signatures to account for margin of error. #Ferguson #FergusonRecall

    Afeni Shakur Black Activist. Imprisoned while pregnant. Acted as her own defense attorney and was acquitted. With photos. Question – is Shakur a common last name? Been seeing it pop up a lot (relatively): Assata, Tupac, now Afeni…? [/interesting]

    And this makes me smile: Box Office: ‘Home’ Trumps Expectations With $54 Million Debut

    Jeffrey Katzenberg must be breathing a huge sigh of relief after the embattled DreamWorks Animation chief scored a much needed box office win with the release of “Home.”

    The family film was the weekend’s top ticket seller, pulling in a sterling $54 million, easily eclipsing projections that had it bowing to between $30 million and $35 million. It’s one of the studio’s best-ever openings for an original movie and the biggest debut it has had since “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted” kicked off to $60.3 million in 2012.

    The studio has suffered through a string of film flops such as “Turbo” and “Mr. Peabody and Sherman,” as well as failed sales to Hasbro and SoftBank. “Home” is the only film it is releasing this year, so expectations for the movie about an alien invasion were high and scrutiny was intense. “Home” cost $130 million to produce and launched in 3,708 locations. Fox distributed the picture.

    “You’ve got to give credit to the movie itself,” said Chris Aronson, Fox’s domestic distribution chief. “It’s an original story with heart and action and humor, all the elements that people want to be entertained.”

    The film’s success could be reflected in DreamWorks Animation’s stock price. Shares of the company closed Friday up 3% at $22.68 and continued to climb in after-hours trading on the strong box office results.

    Not so thrilled about the second-place movie, Get Hard (the prison one with Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart… I have doubts), but Home? What with having a little black girl as lead? Yes. :)

  85. rq says

    53 yrs ago today I was released from Parchman Penitentiary after being arrested in Jackson for using “white” restroom. That’s from John Lewis, yesterday.

    REPORT: New York City Television Stations Continue Disproportionate Coverage Of Black Crime – ah, so it was pointed out to them, and they still do it? Yup.

    Coverage Of Crimes Involving Black Suspects Was Substantially Higher Than Historical Arrest Rates From NYPD Statistics. In stories where race could be identified, the percentage of African-American suspects in murders, thefts, and assaults covered by WCBS, WNBC, WABC, and WNYW (Fox) was well above the percentage of African-American suspects who have been arrested for those crimes in New York City. According to averages of arrest statistics from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) for the past four years, African-American suspects were arrested in 54 percent of murders, 55 percent of thefts, and 49 percent of assaults. However, between August 18 and December 31, 2014, the suspects in the four stations’ coverage of murders were 74 percent African-American, the suspects in coverage of thefts were 84 percent African-American, and suspects in assaults were 73 percent African-American […]

    Portrayals Of African-Americans As Criminals Heighten White People’s Animosity Toward African-Americans. In the 2000 book The Black Image in the White Mind, professors Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki analyze various forms of television programming to determine how the perception of African-Americans is affected by their portrayals on television. Chapter 5 of their book discusses how “local television news portrays Blacks in urban communities with a limited palate that paints a world apparently out of control and replete with danger.” They also write that the “accumulated impression from these images is that race alone suffices for comprehensive identification of criminals — that being African American is almost tantamount to guilt.” The authors later note (emphasis added):

    The racial stereotyping of Blacks encouraged by the images and implicit comparisons to Whites on local news reduces the latter’s empathy and heightens animosity, as demonstrated empirically by several experimental studies. To the extent local television news thereby undermines the fragile foundations of racial comity, it could reduce apparent and real responsiveness of White-dominated society to the needs of poor minorities, especially Blacks. The result, in turn, is continued employment discrimination and government unresponsiveness to the urban job loss and economic dislocation that has so traumatized the inner city — and consequent breeding of crime. [The Black Image in the White Mind, University of Chicago Press, 2000]

    And a note on the study:

    It should also be noted that during this period, there was continuing coverage of a white police officer who was involved in the death of Eric Garner, an African-American man. The data from that story was not included because Garner was not considered a suspect in any of the categories of crimes included in the report and because it was unclear from reporting whether the police officer was considered a suspect in a crime, according to NYPD classifications of suspects. Subsequently, during the period of this report, it was announced that the police officer would not be charged with a crime. In addition, an Asian police officer was involved in the death of Akai Gurley, an African-American man. Data from that story was also not included as it was unclear from reporting if the police officer was considered a suspect in a crime, according to NYPD classifications of suspects.

    Lots of graphs and studies at the link, it’s pretty incredible.

    And they’ve now made a “target practice” game where me, @stackizshort, and @bassem_masri are the targets. Yes! You can now play Ferguson Police Target Practice, featuring prominent Ferguson protestors. !!! This sounds familiar.

    A party at Phi Delt last week at UGA. Theme was dress like you don’t have a degree. #NotJustSAE #NotJustUVA . Guess what they’re wearing.

    A touch on Black Brunch in Atlanta: Flash mob protesters barge into Vinings restaurants, want diners to feel “uncomfortable”

    Members of #BlackBrunchATL descended on two restaurants in Vinings Jubilee, going after Paces & Vine, and Another Broken Egg Café, before moving to their next target.

    Each time, they shouted slogans at startled customers for several minutes, and always made an exit with enough time to outrun police when the restaurant managers called 911.

    Our cameras tried to catch up with the protesters, but they were too quick, eluding us at the sites of their first two demonstrations. However, the CBS46 crew searched the area and found them before they left Canoe, an elegant setting with low lights on the Chattahoochee River.

    “The idea for this is to go into places where people feel most comfortable and make them uncomfortable,” said protest organizer, Zakkiyya Anderson.

    One woman, who didn’t wish to be identified, said she was confused. She originally thought it was a restaurant-authorized announcement, like the fanfare that sometimes accompanies birthday cake deliveries. But when she saw the facial expressions on the wait staff, it dawned on her that this was not a planned event.

    Dave May described the commotion he saw from his table.

    “Well, it was quite unexpected, and it was loud,” said May.

    Richard Bryson said it happened so quickly, he didn’t understand what was going on.

    “I wasn’t really sure what the message was they were trying to convey,” said Bryson.

    The group is speaking against the shooting death of Nick Thomas in Smyrna on Monday. Police are calling it self-defense, claiming Thomas was getting ready to run them over with his car.

    Restaurant guest, David Cooper said, “I guess it’s cool to rally the troops for your cause, but if you’re going to come in, be nice enough to order something.”

    When we asked Anderson why she is demonstrating at restaurants and addressing patrons who don’t have anything to do with the shooting, she said, “They actually do, because if you’re not involving yourself in this movement or showing solidarity, you actually are part of the problem.”

    And here’s an opinion: So we trash @Starbucks for creating a neutral place for racial dialogue, but praise #BlackBrunchATL for soliciting/disrupting. Makes senses… Honestly? I wouldn’t say Starbucks as such is a neutral space for racial dialogue, not by a long shot.

  86. rq says

    Idaho Man Charged With Felony for Posting Non-Threatening Rant Against Cop on Facebook (Updated). He is white, so I don’t know if it will amount to much, but still… seriously?

    On February 2, Matthew Townsend was standing on the sidewalk near a Liberty Tax Service office in Meridian, Idaho dressed as the Grim Reaper, holding a sign that said “Taxes ≠ liberty, Taxes fund terrorism.”

    For this simple display of activism, which was a play off the usual characters dressed in Statue of Liberty costumers, Townsend would find himself arrested and jailed, charged with resisting and obstruction by a Meridian cop named Richard Brockbank.

    Seven weeks later, a day after attending a hearing for that arrest, Townsend was arrested a second time after police banged on his door at 10 p.m., rousing him from his sleep, charging him with witness intimidation over a Facebook post he had made two nights earlier that police described as a “terrorist threat.” [… you can read the facebook post at the link …]

    Meridian police and Ada County prosecutors had to find a second judge to sign the arrest warrant after a previous judge had refused to sign it for lack of probable cause.

    The identity of the judge who signed the warrant remains a mystery because the warrant was immediately sealed.

    Now Townsend is facing five years in prison for the witness intimidation charge in addition to the one year in jail for the obstructing charge. […]

    For threatening to use advertisements and a media campaign to shed light on his unlawful arrest, the Meridian PD and prosecutor’s office not only found a judge to issue an arrest warrant against Townsend for felony witness intimidation, they had the judge issue a no-contact order that forbids Townsend from coming within 100 feet of Officer Brockbank.

    I find it ironic that I was arrested in an effort to stop me from going to the public about Officer Brockbank and other officers at the Meridian Police Department concerning arresting me illegally… and I’m the one being charged with intimidation. It’s even more ironic that the second arrest helped bring this story to the attention of far more people than I could have done on my own.

    In order to persuade the second judge to sign the warrant, the Ada County District Attorney’s Office drafted a warrant that omitted the phrase “non violent and legal shaming” that Townsend had included in his Facebook post, but adding the word “rage” in quotations, even though he had not used that word once in the entire thread.

    Turns out he did have the word ‘rage’ but edited it out himself (because you can do that on FB now) and they used the unedited version for the warrant. They really tried hard for this one, didn’t they? If only they put so much effort into other things.

    The Racial Wealth Gap: Why A Typical White Household Has 16 Times The Wealth Of A Black One

    The typical black household now has just 6% of the wealth of the typical white household; the typical Latino household has just 8%, according to a recent study called The Racial Wealth Gap: Why Policy Matters, by Demos, a public policy organization promoting democracy and equality, and the Institute on Assets and Social Policy.

    In absolute terms, the median white household had $111,146 in wealth holdings in 2011, compared to $7,113 for the median black household and $8,348 for the median Latino household. (All figures come from the U.S. Census Bureau Survey of Income and Program Participation.)

    This is what is called the racial wealth gap.

    “Huge subsets of the population are excluded from accessing the avenues toward wealth,” says Catherine Ruetschlin, senior policy analyst for Demos and a co-author of the report, “and that is a problem for political stability. But it’s also a problem for economic stability. As we’ve seen in reports from big international finance organizations like the [International Monetary Fund] or World Economic Forum, increasing inequality is a source of increasing volatility, and wealth inequality means, when the economy hits a volatile patch, people don’t have the resources to withstand those shocks.” That, in turn, makes the economy more volatile, says Ruetschlin.

    While not every family can be expected to become wealthy in the jet-setting, Wolf-of-Wall-Street manner, every family needs some amount of wealth for economic security. The racial wealth gap means families of color may not be able to give young members of their households gifts to invest in their future, similar to what their white friends are likely to receive.

    (The study did not include households of other races or ethnic groups, such as Asian, Native American, Caribbean, Mexican, African, Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, because the populations are too small to produce statistically significant results.)

    Federal policies also reinforce the wealth gap, as many of them largely result in increasing the wealth of those who already have it.

    The three main factors driving this disparity? Homeownership. Education. Labour markets.

    Oooh, is this progress I see? Ferguson Chief Takes Steps Urged in Report

    Addressing one of the Justice Department’s primary recommendations for the Police Department here, the new acting police chief said on Thursday that he was working to better integrate his officers with the community by putting them on more bike patrols and encouraging them to walk the beat and speak with residents. The efforts pushed by Chief Alan Eickhoff, who took his post a week ago, come even as he conceded that many of his officers were still worried about their safety as anger continues after a white Ferguson police officer fatally shot an unarmed black teenager last August.

    Safety concerns were stoked further after demonstrators recently set upon a black Ferguson officer who was responding to a disturbance at a local McDonald’s, yelling profane slurs at him and throwing plastic water bottles.

    “You can’t let a few people destroy what we’re trying to do,” Chief Eickhoff said. “I worry every night when I go home at night, am I going to get a phone call, two o’clock in the morning, one of my officers have been hurt, shot, killed?”

    Chief Eickhoff, 58, joined the department as the assistant chief only about five days before Michael Brown was killed by Officer Darren Wilson. He said he would apply for the permanent position as chief only if the City Council was pleased with his work and he was asked to apply. […]

    Chief Eickhoff said he was looking to expand the department from its 50 members to the 55-officer limit that the city allows. Four of the current officers are black, two are Hispanic, one is Asian and there are two women.

    Recruitment is difficult when there are episodes like what happened to the black officer at the McDonald’s, Chief Eickhoff said.

    “Here’s my African-American officer, who, like I always tell, could be my poster child,” he said. “Educated man, loves this department, loves this community, and he’s set upon and abused and assaulted by water bottles. Now I’m supposed to go out the next day and recruit African-American officers? And they’re like: ‘Wow, we’re being singled out. Why would I want to come here?’ ”

    Apparently there is more progress to come.

    Here’s a piece on religious freedom and discrimination – not directly relevant, but worth a read. Tim Cook: Pro-discrimination ‘religious freedom’ laws are dangerous

    America’s business community recognized a long time ago that discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business. At Apple, we are in business to empower and enrich our customers’ lives. We strive to do business in a way that is just and fair. That’s why, on behalf of Apple, I’m standing up to oppose this new wave of legislation — wherever it emerges. I’m writing in the hopes that many more will join this movement. From North Carolina to Nevada, these bills under consideration truly will hurt jobs, growth and the economic vibrancy of parts of the country where a 21st-century economy was once welcomed with open arms. […]

    Men and women have fought and died fighting to protect our country’s founding principles of freedom and equality. We owe it to them, to each other and to our future to continue to fight with our words and our actions to make sure we protect those ideals. The days of segregation and discrimination marked by “Whites Only” signs on shop doors, water fountains and restrooms must remain deep in our past. We must never return to any semblance of that time. America must be a land of opportunity for everyone.

    (How diverse is Apple, by the way?)

    He said he would immediately start to address some of the concerns and recommendations in the Justice Department report, which recommended diversifying the department, changing ticketing practices and training officers on how to use force more appropriately.

  87. rq says

    Fascinating that 2nd biggest police brutality settlement in Denver history awards Alex Landau $800K, but @DenverPolice sees no wrongdoing.

    Amadou Diallo’s murder led to songs like “Devils in a Blue Dress” and “41 Shots.” What music’s coming out of today’s movements? @deray

    Here’s some from the musical front: New Tupac Music and More From the Vaults to be Released Soon

    According to Billboard, the partnership marks the beginning of a “total reset of the Shakur estate,” says president of JAM Inc. Jeff Jampol. The company was brought in by Shakur’s mother, Afeni, back in 2013 and has given them access to all of her collection. The company has also worked on posthumous releases by the Doors, Otis Redding and more and has consulted with the Michael Jackson estate.

    The 20th anniversary of ‘Pac’s September 1996 death is this year, and Jampol says there are various things in the works, including new apparel, collections for museum display, and a biography done by a critically acclaimed writer.

    “Almost an embarrassment of riches,” Jampol says of the amount of his creative work left. “Unreleased music, released music, remixes, original demos, writings, scripts, plans, video treatments, [and] poems.” Despite the amount of Tupac albums that have dropped after his death, there is even more unreleased material in the vaults to put more out.

    “Some of [the material] is in bits and pieces, some of it is complete; some of it is good, some of it needs work,” says Tom Whalley, who signed ‘Pac to Internscope in 1991 and is working with Jampol on the project. “But I think the work that is left can be completed, and is worth his fans hearing.”

    And, Jay Z launches Tidal with support from stars

    Man, it’s a revolution! Take a look at the Twitter profiles of Kanye West, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna and Coldplay and you’ll see that they’ve all turned their profile and header photos to the same shade of turquoise. What could this online movement be? Is this an LGBT rights protest? Is this a feminist campaign? Or maybe it’s something to do with police brutality?

    Then you realise – this group Twitter crusade is actually just a declaration of support for Jay Z’s new lossless streaming service Tidal, that prices subscriptions at $19.95 per month and launches in ten hours. Kanye West called for Twitter users to turn their profile blue to help support Jay Z, rapper and multi-millionaire. Some have already taken West’s advice and switched up their profile pics echoing an event called Air Max Day that took place last Thursday, when thousands of people across the world advertised for billion dollar corporation Nike, for free.

    Tidal is a service designed to rival Spotify. It promises high quality audio and video, with no ad-supported, free service. Madonna implored her fans to turn their profile blue with a reminder that “music makes the people come together”. Come on guys, “do it for the music”.

    Regarding Floyd Dent, in Detroit. And Detroit PD’s ability to keep a problematic employee employed. Why is Bill ‘Robocop’ Melendez still a police officer?

    On this past January 28, Floyd Dent, a grandfather and 37-year veteran employee of Ford Motor Company had absolutely no idea that he was about to encounter one of the most vicious, violent, and corrupt police officers in modern American history. In a matter of five minutes, Floyd Dent’s entire life would be turned upside down. Nearly choked to death, brutally punched full force in the head 16 times, and tasered over and over again, Floyd, a bloody mess, would soon be framed with the possession of crack cocaine—a drug he said he’s never touched and that tests in the hospital soon proved he hadn’t used. On top of that, he was charged with threatening and assaulting an officer and resisting arrest. The thing is, Floyd, now in the twilight of his life, was the wrong man to pull this on. He had never been in trouble a day in his life and what could easily stick to the stereotype of a younger man, just didn’t add up with Floyd.

    Once the world learned the identity of the officer who nearly killed Floyd, framed him for cocaine possession, and told lie after lie on the police report, it all made perfect sense. Bill Melendez is notorious in Detroit. In 2003, after a year-long joint investigation between the FBI and Detroit Police Department, Bill Melendez was indicted for corruption, falsifying police reports, and planting drugs/guns on suspects who had been illegally arrested. In the indictment, Melendez, nicknamed “Robocop” for his bodybuilding and excessive use of force, wasn’t listed as a bit player, but as the ringleader and driving force behind the corruption. Putting their own lives at risk, scores of witnesses, including several African-American police officers testified against Melendez, but the case crumbled with jury nullification.

    Twelve years ago, long before he nearly killed Floyd Dent, Officer Melendez had already cost the city millions of dollars in settlements and wracked up more brutality complaints than any other officer in all of Detroit. In 1996, Melendez shot and killed Lou Adkins, an unarmed man, who witnesses said was on the ground and posed no harm when Melendez shot him, execution style, 11 times. The city of Detroit paid $1 million to Adkins’s family in a wrongful-death suit, but Melendez kept his job. Complaint after complaint on Bill Melendez has been filed for illegally planting evidence.

    With all of these cases and complaints against Melendez, it’s the false report he filed and the dash cam that captured his brutality against Floyd Dent that will be his undoing. […]

    A judge has now dismissed the charges against Floyd Dent for threatening or assaulting an officer, because the evidence clearly doesn’t show that these things happened. If those charges have been dismissed, though, how can the brutality of Officer Melendez be justified?

    The jig is up, Robocop. The world knows that you are a domestic terrorist to people of color throughout Detroit. This will be your last case of brutality against an innocent man.

    In spite of being offered a bogus plea deal on the drug charge against him, Floyd Dent has bravely plead not guilty at great risk to his own future. We must support him in this endeavor and stand with him as he fights against a corrupt system and a corrupt officer who has harmed communities for far too long.

  88. Pteryxx says

    re John Lewis’s tweet: “53 yrs ago today I was released from Parchman Penitentiary after being arrested in Jackson for using “white” restroom.”

    That was actually on July 7, 2014, when these Morning in America threads weren’t yet running (because Mike Brown was still alive). Still, Rep. Lewis’s tweet went viral then and may as well go a second round. Here’s news coverage from the time:

    USA Today: Congressman’s civil rights-era mugshot goes viral on Twitter

    The Georgia Democrat tweeted his mugshot from the summer of 1961 when he was arrested as a Freedom Rider in Jackson, Miss., for using a whites-only restroom. Monday marks the 53rd anniversary of Lewis’ release after 37 days of imprisonment from what he called the Parchman Penitentiary. Mississippi’s state pentitentiary, known also as Parchman Farm, was notorious in the 1960s for trying to break the spirit of the Freedom Riders — the activists who rode buses throughout the South to challenge segregation.

    More than 21,000 people retweeted Lewis’ post and 13,000 labeled it a “favorite.”

    The congressman, who received a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his civil rights work, was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington. Lewis will forever be known for the violent beating he took leading marchers in 1965 from Selma to Montgomery on the day known as Bloody Sunday.

    Lewis told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he sent the tweet with his mugshot photo to “educate and inform people who were not even born 53 years ago.”

    From that Atlanta Journal-Constitution article:

    Lewis’ arrest came through his efforts as a Freedom Rider. Having already participated in several Nashville sit-ins as a Fisk University student, Lewis volunteered in 1961 to go on the Freedom Rides, a potentially dangerous mission to challenge segregation at interstate bus terminals across the South.

    On several occasions, the riders, including Lewis were harassed and beaten by angry mobs of whites. When he was arrested in May 24, 1961, he was sent to the notorious Parchman Penitentiary.

    “Parchman was one of the worst prisons in America,” Lewis said, adding that he somehow avoided being beaten and forced to do hard labor while in prison, although he was only permitted to shower once a week.

    Two years after his release, he was the youngest speaker at the March on Washington.

    and Vox linked to an 1973 interview that John Lewis gave for UNC’s Southern Oral History Program, which includes more about the Freedom Rides, his arrest and Parchman prison: (Vox link), full 1973 transcript (at UNC)

    Excerpt quoted by Vox:

    The moment we all started stepping off the van truck, walking to the gate through the gate that leads to maximum security, that’s where we were being placed. We had to walk right in and you had to take off all of your clothes. So all of us-seventy-five guys, black and white, because during that period you had students, professors, ministers coming in from all parts of the country to continue the Freedom Ride. And we stood there for at least two hours without and clothes and I just felt that it was an attempt to belittle and dehumanize you.

    Then they would take us in twos, two blacks and two whites—the segregation started all over again after we got inside the jail—to take a shower. While we were taking a shower, there was a guard standing there with a gun pointed on you while you showered. If you had a beard or a mustache, any hair, you had to shave your beard off, you had to shave your mustache off. After taking the showers in twos, you were placed in a cell and given a Mississippi undershirt and a pair of shorts.

    During our stay in Mississippi Penitentiary we didn’t have any visitors. We were able to write one person a letter. The second day Governor [unknown] came by with some state officials. We all got out within a forty-day period in order to appeal the charges.

    INTERVIEWERS:
    You were there for how long?

    JOHN LEWIS:
    I was there for thirty-seven days.

    and some more about the Freedom Ride activity that Lewis was arrested for, excerpted by me from the 1973 interview: (page numbers removed, ellipses in brackets are mine)

    When I left the seminary in ’61, I went on the Freedom Rides and this was my first time going into the state of Mississippi, late May, June of ’61. It was a terrible experience to come through Birmingham and Montgomery. I’ll never forget, a group of us seven blacks and three whites from the [unclear] university, colleges and universities in Nashville. After the CORE sponsored Freedom Rides, a group of us left on May 17, 1961, and took a Greyhound bus, a regular bus, to Birmingham. Before we arrived in the city of Birmingham, the bus was stopped outside the city and a member of the Birmingham Police Department [unclear] got on the bus and said, “Where are the Freedom Riders?” No one said anything. This member of the Police Department literally took over the bus by asking for the tickets and he looked at the tickets and saw that we all had tickets from Nashville, making a stop in Birmingham, Montgomery, Jackson, then on to New Orleans. He just literally identified us as being the Freedom Riders and he was really correct.

    When we arrived at the Birmingham bus station they took us off, placed us in protective custody and [unclear] and other members of the Birmingham Police Department and took us to the Birmingham City Jail. It was on a Wednesday. We stayed there Wednesday. We went on a hunger strike. We refused to eat anything, [unclear] Thursday and Friday morning about three o’clock in the morning Bull Connor and other members of the Birmingham Police Department and a reporter from the Birmingham News came up to the cell and said, “We are taking you back to the college campuses in Nashville.” But they took us to the Alabama-Tennessee state line, a little town called [unclear], Alabama or Tennessee, and left us there.

    […]

    We went back to Birmingham and stayed at the bus station from Friday night, [unclear] all night, and tried to get a bus to go from Birmingham to Montgomery. In the meantime, Attorney General Kennedy was negotiating with the Greyhound authorities, trying to get the bus moving. All of the drivers from the Greyhound Bus Company were refusing to drive the bus. We went out several times Friday night, at 8:30, 12:00, and 8:30 Saturday morning. We finally got a bus through from Birmingham and to Montgomery. And over the bus there was a small plane and every fifteen miles we would see state troopers from the state of Alabama.

    It was only about a hundred miles between Birmingham to Montgomery. And when we arrived about five or ten miles out, all signs of protection, plane, the state troopers. I have gone this way many, many times before riding the bus between Troy to Montgomery, Montgomery to Birmingham, Birmingham to Nashville to school for four years. When you got near the station you had this eerie feeling. It must have been about ten or ten-thirty on a Saturday and you didn’t see anything and all at once, when the bus pulled up and we started out of the bus, an angry mob of about a thousand people came toward the bus. And they first started reporters and then they started attacking us. Several of us were beaten and just left lying in the street. And there was one guy, that must have been the chief officer for the Alabama state troopers. This guy, I can’t think of his name but Newsweek or Time did a big story on him, and he literally saved the day. He kept people from literally being killed. He fired a gun to disperse the mob. We went from there to different homes in the city of Montgomery.

    Dr. King and Rev. Abernathy happened to be out of the city, they were speaking some place, and they heard about what had happened and they came back to Montgomery and planned for a big mass meeting in Montgomery on that Sunday.

  89. Pteryxx says

    further excerpt from John Lewis’s 1973 interview, just after he’s recounted being attacked on the bridge at Selma:

    INTERVIEWERS:
    Was that the most frightening moment you have ever had?

    JOHN LEWIS:
    Yes, without question. I think we were literally lucky, all of us, for no one to be seriously hurt or killed. You know, Sheriff Clark had a posse that he had organized. He had people with bullwhips, with ropes, running through the marchers on horses beating people. But people got together and I think that helped to electrify the black community in Selma and the whole area of Alabama. It had a tremendous impact on the country. People couldn’t believe that that could happen. And the response of people, particularly people who had supported SNCC and SCLC all across the country . . . a series of demonstrations took place, I think, by that Tuesday by friends of SNCC in different cities. There were about eighty sympathy marches. Protests had been organized; some people slipped into the Justice Department in Washington. The year that President Johnson served, his daughter couldn’t sleep because people had been singing, “We shall overcome,” all around the White House.

    INTERVIEWERS:
    That was eight years ago. Does it seem that long ago?

    JOHN LEWIS:
    No it doesn’t. On one hand it doesn’t; on the other, it seems like it has been a long, long time.

    INTERVIEWERS:
    Can you imagine anything like that occurring now?

    JOHN LEWIS:
    Today? No. It’s out of the question. I think it’s out of the question. I think it would be hard for anything like that to occur in the South. People don’t want to go back to that period.

    INTERVIEWERS:
    Both black and whites?

    JOHN LEWIS:
    Both blacks and whites.

  90. rq says

    One more: Murder has become the primary tactic of the police to deescalate black folk. To call the police may be to invite death.
    See this story: Knife-Wielding Woman Fatally Shot By Officers In Oxnard

    A preliminary investigation revealed a man called 911 to request the assistance of officers in a dispute between himself and his live-in girlfriend.

    When officers arrived to the scene, they heard screaming coming from inside the apartment.

    The man who reported the incident met the officer near the front door of the home.

    Seconds later, the woman approached both men with a knife and an officer-involved shooting occurred.

    Paramedics pronounced the woman dead at the scene. She was later identified as Meagan Hockaday, of Oxnard.

    And here: Woman Killed Officer-Involved Shooting In Oxnard Identified

    The incident happened at 1 a.m. Saturday on the 500 block of West Vineyard Avenue.

    Police Chief Jeri Williams said a man called 911 requesting police officers to respond to a domestic dispute he was having with Hockaday.

    “Domestic violence is one of the most challenging calls we go on. Quite frankly, in the city of Oxnard, we average 2,500 domestic violence calls a year,” Williams said.

    The first officer on scene heard screams coming from the apartment.

    Williams said the officer made contact with the man near the front door and within seconds Hockaday came at them with a knife.

    “The shooting took place in less 20 seconds from the time of the initial incident when the first officer initially made contact,” Williams said.

    Less than 20 seconds. Which isn’t a small amount of time, relaly, but it’s enough to have alternatives.
    One would think.

    Let’s see how liberal Daily Show fans really are when a Black host shows up – because: Trevor Noah will take over for Jon Stewart as ‘Daily Show’ host

    Just five months after joining Comedy Central’s Daily Show as a new cast member, 31-year-old Trevor Noah has been named the new host of the popular weeknight “news” show. The news comes just weeks after long-time host Jon Stewart announced he was stepping down from the show after 16 years. Comedy Central said Noah will take over the show “later this year.”

    I was rather hoping for Jessica Williams, but oh well.
    Via the NY Times: Trevor Noah to Succeed Jon Stewart on ‘The Daily Show’

    “I never thought I’d be more afraid of police in America than in South Africa,” he said with a smile. “It kind of makes me a little nostalgic for the old days, back home.”

    Now, after only three appearances on that Comedy Central show, Mr. Noah has gotten a huge and unexpected promotion. On Monday, Comedy Central will announce that Mr. Noah has been chosen as the new host of “The Daily Show,” succeeding Mr. Stewart after he steps down later this year.

    The network’s selection of Mr. Noah comes less than two months after Mr. Stewart, 52, revealed on Feb. 10 that he was leaving “The Daily Show” after a highly successful 16-year run that transformed the show into authoritative, satirical comedy on current events. (An exact timetable for Mr. Stewart’s departure has not been decided, Comedy Central said.)

    Mr. Noah, who spoke by phone from Dubai, where he is on a leg of a comedy tour, said he had been given a great opportunity, as well as a significant challenge.

    “You don’t believe it for the first few hours,” Mr. Noah said of learning about his new job. “You need a stiff drink, and then unfortunately you’re in a place where you can’t really get alcohol.”

    The appointment of Mr. Noah, a newcomer to American television, promises to add youthful vitality and international perspective to “The Daily Show.” It puts a nonwhite performer at the head of this flagship Comedy Central franchise, and one who comes with Mr. Stewart’s endorsement.

  92. rq says

    Via Mano Singham’s blog, here’s a good read: Sometimes, this is who we are:

    Tim Dowling captures something that had been vaguely bugging me for some time but that I could not quite put my finger on, and that is the way that some people in the US, when someone in their organization is exposed as doing something outrageous or criminal, are quick to say “This is not who we are”.

    This has become quite common as a way to avoid taking collective responsibility for a systemic problem. It is usually followed by the other cliché, that the wrong acts were the work of a ‘few bad apples’. The question that they should be asking themselves is what is wrong about our orchard that so many apples go bad?

    (Link to Dowling’s article here.)
    Applies to anytime anyone from an organization whose representative has made a mess of things says ‘This is not who we are’ – most directly applicable to the SAE fraternity, but also to other things, like police departments that insist there is no racism to be found within their ranks.

    Oh, and here’s a Toronto Star article about that movie I’m hesitant about: Will Ferrell fearlessly goes for the hard laughs

    But we’ve got to cut some slack for Ferrell, 47, because he’s been a very busy man of late. He hosted Celebrity Jeopardy! on last month’s Saturday Night Live 40th anniversary special, a show highlight, and recently did a charity gig — tweeted as #FerrellTakesTheField — in which he spring-trained as a rookie for 10 major-league baseball teams, raising nearly $1 million (U.S.) for cancer research.

    Now he’s pushing Get Hard, a film that seeks to tickle funny bones by making light of racism, prison rape and a straight male’s “gay panic.”

    Ferrell plays prison-bound California financier James King, sentenced to 10 years in San Quentin, who hires Kevin Hart’s Darnell Lewis to be his jail-life coach. King just assumes that family man Lewis is a convicted thug because Lewis is black, the same way King assumes his Latino groundskeepers don’t mind watching his nude morning exercises.

    The movie risks offence by boldly lampooning many hot-button social issues — reviews out of SXSW were decidedly mixed — but Ferrell insists comedy has to be fearless. [bolding mine]

    Take note: Ferrell is a Busy (White) Man and does Good Things. Does that mean I necessarily trust him with handling these difficult topics well? Not really. Is this a well-founded opinion? Perhaps not, but it’s mine.

  94. rq says

    The Beating of Floyd Dent

    Dent was describing what he experienced in a horrifically violent dashboard camera video that shows Inkster, Mich., police officers pulling him over, dragging him from his car, punching him 16 times in the head and tasing him three times, while he lay bloody and struggling on the ground, before arresting him.

    According to the website for a local NBC News affiliate: “Police said they first saw Dent’s car through binoculars while watching an area known to have drug activity. They followed Dent’s car and said he didn’t make a complete stop at a stop sign. Police said that when they turned on their flashing lights, Dent didn’t immediately pull over.”

    Furthermore: “Police said they ordered Dent to put his hands up, but they could only see one. Police said Dent yelled ‘I’ll kill you’ at the officers. Dent’s attorney, Greg Rohl, said there’s no audio of the alleged threat.”
    Photo

    Finally: “Police said Dent refused to put his hands behind his back. Dent said he thought he was being choked to death and tried to pull the officers’ arms away from his throat. One of the officers said Dent bit him on the arm, and that’s why he started punching Dent. Police said the force was needed to restrain Dent. The officer who said he was bit did not seek medical attention or photograph the bite marks.”

    According to The Free Press, “Police initially charged him with assault, resisting arrest and possession of cocaine, insisting they found cocaine beneath the passenger seat of his Cadillac. Dent says police planted the drugs at the time of his arrest. An Inkster district court judge, after reviewing the tape, tossed the assault and resisting charges, but Dent faces an April 1 hearing on the drug charge.” […]

    It should also be noted that, according to The Free Press, Melendez, who federal investigators in 2003 said “was known on the street as ‘Robocop,’ ” “has been involved in 12 lawsuits related to his conduct as an officer over the years, including similar allegations in a civil rights suit now pending in federal court.”

    Those lawsuits allege, “among other things, that he planted evidence, assaulted people in their homes, fabricated police reports and wrongly arrested people.”
    Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
    Continue reading the main story

    Videos like the Dent footage further the perception, especially among African-Americans, that the police are more likely to use force — specifically deadly force — against blacks than whites.
    Continue reading the main story
    Recent Comments
    ken w
    9 hours ago

    Police brutality and their trampling on the Constitution happen everywhere both for blacks and whites. I have seen it. I think black America…
    Jack
    9 hours ago

    It has indeed been documented, as Blow notes, that police are more likely to use force against blacks than whites. The suggestion that this…
    NI
    9 hours ago

    12 lawsuits against Officer Melendez alleging he planted evidence, assaulting people in their homes, fabricated police reports and wrongful…

    See All Comments

    A December CBS News poll found that 84 percent of blacks and 33 percent of whites believe that the police in most communities are more likely to use deadly force against blacks. Just 2 percent of whites, and 0 percent of blacks, believe the police are more likely to use such force against whites.

    (Fifty-seven percent of whites and 10 percent of blacks said they thought race did not affect the use of deadly force.)

    And it is important to register where the most recent cases are centered.

    As Isabel Wilkerson, author of the monumental book “The Warmth of Other Suns,” put it in a January New York Times essay titled “When Will the North Face Its Racism?”: “High-profile cases of police brutality have recently come to be associated with the North rather than the South. And it is in the South that two recent cases of police shootings of unarmed black people resulted in more vigorous prosecution.”

    She concluded: “If the events of the last year have taught us anything, it is that, as much progress has been made over the generations, the challenges of color and tribe were not locked away in another century or confined to a single region but persist as a national problem and require the commitment of the entire nation to resolve.”

    23-Year-Old Homeless Man Stops Rape Attempt in DC , very short story.

    @deray Proud of my @USStudents family and my sisters on the frontline fighting to end school to prison pipeline #BLM

    A poem: Hurricane Katrina
    Hit New Orleans
    So black people had to leave
    They say we all Americans
    So why did the media call them
    Refugees

    Something to listen to: Sarah Kendzior: “This is an ordinary place with a series of ordinary problems, that unfortunately, are fairly severe… I think to have severe problems has now become an ordinary part of American life.”

    Writer Sarah Kendzior profiles the economic struggles ahead for the activists behind Ferguson’s protest movement, and explains how conflicting narratives about the story mirror persistent racial and class divisions.

    Sarah profiles the lives and work of activists in her article Fergson, Inc. for Politico.

    Audio at the link.

    Event: Join @sybrinafulton @nettaaaaaaaa @jelani9 & me at the University of Miami Wednesday 7pm for a convo on Race, Policing, & Social Justice.

  95. rq says

    Gosh sorry about that first blockquote previous comment. I swear I checked but I guess I forgot to remove the accidental highlighted sidebar bits that got stuck in there. :(

    Dear Racists: We Don’t Owe You Our Forgiveness

    Last week Levi Pettit, one of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon balladeers who was busted singing a rousing number about anti-black terrorism, held a press conference during which he made a public relations statement disguised as an apology.

    The sheer ridiculousness of the optics quickly made the spectacle go viral.

    Oklahoma state Sen. Anastasia Pittman, chair of the Oklahoma Black Caucus, smiled and, at times, held Pettit’s arm, while Oklahoma City clergy and civic leaders stood protectively behind him as alert as the Fruit of Islam. You would have thought Pettit had sent up a black bat signal: the silhouettes of the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson illuminating the night sky.
    […]

    Political analyst and cultural critic Earl Hutchinson took “myopic” black “detractors” to task for “lambasting” Pettit. Instead, Hutchinson feels that we should be applauding the lad.

    Pettit though doesn’t deserve condemnation, he deserves praise. He and his fraternity were booted from the university. His name and that of his family has been drug deep through the mud. He’ll remain for some time the poster boy for offensive and disgusting frat racial antics whenever some wayward fraternity inevitably engages in them. He could have stood on the prior statement of apology and regret that he issued after the tape went viral and set off a national howl. He could have easily melted into the student woodwork somewhere, completed his studies, and gone on about his business. But he didn’t. Instead, he went very public with his apology and pledge to action.

    Despite the lambaste of him and the racial put downs and myopia of the detractors, this is an important step forward.

    Pettit did the right thing when he spoke out and so did the black leaders who stood behind him, encouraged and ultimately embraced him. For that, I applaud and will continue to applaud Pettit.

    Well, Hutchinson can applaud to his heart’s content. But this is exactly the same turn-the-other-cheek philosophy that has gotten us to 2015 with the rate of police killings of black Americans nearly the same as the rate of lynchings in the early decades of the 20th century.

    Jonathan Capehart also went on record as demanding that people accept Pettit’s apology with “open minds and open hearts,” a little over a week after his flimsy attempt to debunk the #BlackLivesMatter movement’s call to arms, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” Unfortunately, if he’s willing to cherry-pick a Department of Justice report to delegitimize a revolution sparked in response to the state-sanctioned killing of unarmed black people, then opening his heart to a bigot with a bare-bones apology is probably par for the course. […]

    Why on earth should we applaud clergy who stand behind a white man who sings about hanging “n–gers” from trees? What part of black liberation theology is that? When forgiveness is drenched in our blood, how do we win? How do our children win?

    We do not get gold stars or extra credit for forgiving those who hate us. Somebody lied. Our worth and our humanity shouldn’t be inexplicably tied to our capacity to forgive. And our response to prejudice and bigotry should not be a carefully modulated tone. There has to be room for black rage, black frustration and black discontent if we are ever going to move forward as a country. If white tears were going to work, this racism thing would have been fixed a long time ago.

    There is no need to play save-a-white-boy, not when our babies are being gunned down in the streets. We don’t have to join the chorus telling him, “You is kind, you is smart, you is important.” Pettit is going to be just fine.

    Black America’s emotional energy is better served making sure that we are, too.

    Chilling: Police killed more than twice as many people as reported by US government

    The first-ever attempt by US record-keepers to estimate the number of uncounted “law enforcement homicides” exposed previous official tallies as capturing less than half of the real picture. The new estimate – an average of 928 people killed by police annually over eight recent years, compared to 383 in published FBI data – amounted to a more glaring admission than ever before of the government’s failure to track how many people police kill.

    The revelation called into particular question the FBI practice of publishing annual totals of “justifiable homicides by law enforcement” – tallies that are widely cited in the media and elsewhere as the most accurate official count of police homicides.

    The new estimates added crucial framing to a criminal justice crisis in the US that was coming into sharp focus this week. A Justice Department report expected to be published on Wednesday exposed serial civil rights abuses by police in Ferguson, Missouri. On Monday, the president’s taskforce on policing issued recommendations for better data collection as part of a call for top-to-bottom criminal justice reform.

    “There was a great emphasis on the need to collect more data,” Barack Obama said after a meeting with the taskforce. “Right now, we do not have a good sense, and local communities do not have a good sense, of how frequently there may be interactions with police and community members that result in a death, result in a shooting.” […]

    The data underlying the FBI tally “is estimated to cover 46% of officer-involved homicides at best” for the years 2003-2009 and 2011, the BJS report concluded. But the published FBI tallies cover even fewer of the total deaths, closer to 41%, in part because the FBI publishes no data from Florida. A separate tally of “arrest-related deaths”, conducted by BJS itself, was slightly more accurate for the years in question, capturing 49% of law enforcement homicides, at best, the report found.

    The report estimated “an average of 928 law enforcement homicides per year” for the years in question, suggesting that the FBI’s published count of 414 such deaths in 2009, for example, might be 124% off, while its count of 347 such deaths in 2005 might be 167% off.

    “The point of this was to try to quantify the coverage error,” said Michael Planty, an author of the report.

    The years under study saw several high-profile homicides by law enforcement of unarmed civilians, such as the 2009 shooting of Oscar Grant in a train station in Oakland, California – an episode that would become the subject of the award-winning film Fruitvale Station – and the 2006 killing of Sean Bell, who died in a hail of 50 bullets outside a nightclub in Queens, New York.

    But the majority of victims in law enforcement homicides for those years not only went unnamed – they went uncounted in any one tally. Even the two counting systems combined, as overseen by the FBI and BJS, missed an average of 263 homicides by law enforcement each year, BJS found. […]

    The deaths referred to as “law enforcement homicides” in the BJS report and what the FBI calls “justifiable homicides by law enforcement” are roughly equivalent, Planty and a second senior BJS official told the Guardian, in part because nearly all homicides by police, if adjudicated at all, are deemed “justifiable”, meaning not criminal.

    “The homicides that were not justifiable, where a law enforcement officer is found guilty of homicide, there’s no way to identify that,” said Planty. “But from what we know, that number is relatively low.”

    The scathing take on the FBI numbers came about as a result of an attempt by statisticians within BJS to evaluate what was worth salvaging in the bureau’s arrest-related deaths program.

    The program was mothballed in March of last year, based on BJS’s own judgment of its shortcomings, but it may be resurrected with the renewal by Congress last December of the Deaths in Custody Reporting Act of 2000, designed primarily to count deaths in prisons and jails. [..]

    While the FBI and other government tallies have long been criticized for underreporting, an admission of the problem at the top levels of US government is swiftly emerging. Joining Comey and Obama this year has been the outgoing attorney general, Eric Holder, who in January called the government’s accounting for use of force “unacceptable”.

    In a highly anticipated investigation of its own, Holder’s Justice Department was expected to report on Wednesday that African Americans were subject to a full 88% of use-of-force cases actually documented by the police in Ferguson, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the department’s findings. In a separate report also expected as soon as Wednesday, the Justice Department was expected to clear the officer, Darren Wilson, who shot and killed an unarmed teenager there seven months ago.

    Quick comment on the new music streaming platform mentioned yesterday: The police are out here killing us like it’s real-life Nintendo Duck Hunt and they want us to come together around a more expensive spotify?
    But I wish you the best Jay w/ #TidalForAll. I’ll remain a fan, not a subscriber. And thanks for helping w/ those I Can’t Breathe shirts.

    These aren’t isolated incidents – they’re not even unique incidents to the cops who commit them. They all seem to have a history of being inappropriate police officers: Cop Who Put Eric Garner in Choke Hold Is Being Sued for Allegedly Causing a Car Accident

    In his suit, Aguire claims that Pantaleo caused a car accident last June in Staten Island that left Aguirre with severe injuries. Aguirre said that Pantaleo was trailing behind him very closely and was speeding, which caused both of their cars to get into an accident. According to Aguirre’s suit, the accident left Aguirre with “severe and permanent” injuries on his neck, back, shoulder and knees. […]

    According to the Daily News, a police source gave a description of the car accident that differed from Aguire’s account. The source said that Pantaleo was driving a marked patrol car while responding to an emergency call, and it was Pantaleo’s car that was struck by another vehicle.

    Pantaleo is no stranger to lawsuits. According to the Daily News, at least four other New Yorkers have filed a lawsuit against the officer in previous years. Two New Yorkers won a $30,000 settlement after claiming that Pantaleo strip-searched them and slapped their testicles during a public stop.

    These cops sound expensive for the department to maintain. Wouldn’t it be more efficient…?

    Putting a name to the trigger finger: Smyrna Police say Sgt. Kenneth Owens is the officer who fatally shot Nick Thomas last week during arrest. #fox5atl

  96. rq says

    In Canada, spec. Toronto area: Family and Friends Worry About Missing York Student

    As she left her home on Friday, March 20, Amina Lawal told her mother she was headed for a meeting at York University, where she is a student at the Schulich School of Business. That was the last time Funmiloya Odusola saw or heard from her daughter. It was Lawal’s nineteenth birthday.

    Now Toronto police are appealing to the public for information on her whereabouts, and fear she may be in danger. […]

    Lawal lives with Odusola near Kingston Road and Beechgrove Drive in Scarborough. Police do not appear to have any leads as to where Lawal may have gone after leaving her home. Toronto police spokesperson Victor Kwong said that police are “totally dependent” on public and media assistance when someone goes missing.

    The press release of Lawal’s disappearance has been shared thousands of times over social media since its release yesterday. Dejoure Boland, who hung out with Lawal and played on the same sports teams throughout high school, is currently studying in Fort McMurray, Alberta, but learned of Lawal’s disappearance yesterday through Instagram. “I was completely shocked,” Boland said. “Her friends are calling her repeatedly, and the fact that she’s not answering is scaring us.” […]

    Anyone with information on the whereabouts of Amina Lawal is urged to contact Toronto police by phone at (416) 808-4300, anonymously through Crime Stoppers at 416-222-TIPS (8477), or online at http://www.222tips.com. Police are also accepting information via text message (text TOR and your message to CRIMES [274-637]), and through Facebook.

    Any folks out there, please keep an eye out.

    A few recent gems from my hate mailbox… The n-word seems to dominate.

    18 yr old #ShenequeProctor found dead in cell morning after her arrest & plea for medical attention #HerDreamDeferred, will have to find more info on that.

    Civil Rights Action Filed On Behalf Of Journalists Arrested During Ferguson Protests

    Brought by German journalists Ansgar Graw, Frank Hermann and Lukas Hermsmeier, as well as The Intercept’s Ryan Devereaux, the suit accuses Ferguson police of battery, false arrest and unreasonable search and seizure.

    “This unlawful conduct was undertaken with the intention of obstructing, chilling, deterring, and retaliating against Plaintiffs for engaging in constitutionally-protected speech, newsgathering, and recording of police activities,” the complaint reads.

    The complaint details how Devereaux and Hermsmeier were shot at with rubber bullets by police officers after raising their hands in the air and clearly identifying themselves as members of the press. According to the document, Devereaux and Hermsmeier were then arrested, left hand-cuffed in plastic ties for several hours and charged with refusal to disperse.

    Graw and Herrmann were also charged with refusal to disperse and arrested while presenting their press badges. The suit claims that the officers purposefully tightened the journalists’ plastic ties in order to “inflict pain” on them. When Graw asked for an officer’s name, the man responded, “Donald Duck.”

    “This was a very new experience,” Graw said at the time. “I’ve been in several conflict zones: I was in the civil war regions in Georgia, the Gaza strip, illegally visited the Kaliningrad region when travel to the Soviet Union was still strictly prohibited for westerners, I’ve been in Iraq, Vietnam and in China, I’ve met Cuba dissidents. But to be arrested and yelled at and be rudely treated by police? For that I had to travel to Ferguson and St. Louis in the United States of America.”

    The suit asks for unspecified punitive damages.

    Back in Ferguson. Just some photos.

  97. rq says

    Interlude: TV Entertainment! “The Wiz” Will Be NBC’s Next Live Televised Musical

    “We love this yearly tradition and we’re more excited than ever to not only bring another Broadway musical to America’s living rooms, but also see it land on Broadway as well,” NBC Chairman Robert Greenblatt said in a statement. “It’s a natural next step for our live musical events … Cirque’s incredible imagination will help bring the fantasy world of Oz vividly to life and give this great show a modern spin on the age-old story we all love.”

    The Wiz, which originated as a Tony-award winning play in 1975 and was then adapted into a film in 1978, is about a girl living in Harlem named Dorothy. In the original movie version, she was played by Diana Ross, the Scarecrow was played by Michael Jackson, the Tin Man was played by Nipsey Russell, the Cowardly Lion was played by Ted Ross, and Glinda the Good Witch was played by Lena Horne.

    No cast members for NBC’s The Wiz Live! have been announced.

    That sounds pretty fun, though!

    .@deray Did you see this? Al Sharpton has issues w/ y’all but not an outright bigot like Ben Carson. h/t @ZaidJilani Very interesting, that.

    Ope, here he is again! Eric Garner chokehold cop is being sued AGAIN for causing ‘severe’ injuries to a motorist in Staten Island car crash. Includes a quick recap of other suits brought against Pantaleo.

    And there was the prison guard who had the inmates fight, gladiator style. Except there’s more to that, too. Deputy in inmate fights faced 2006 complaints

    Bullying behavior, offers of cheeseburgers for silence, threats of violence, rumors of other deputies knowing but doing nothing — the accusations in the 2006 sexual assault civil cases against San Francisco sheriff’s Deputy Scott Neu echo the allegations made Thursday by County Jail inmates who said the deputy forced them to fight each other for his entertainment.

    After three inmates in 2006 accused Neu of forcing them to perform sexual acts on him, the case was handled internally by other deputies, and apparently no criminal charges were presented to the district attorney’s office.

    Since those accusations, Neu has had four more lawsuits filed against him: one for a false arrest and three for excessive force. One excessive force lawsuit is still ongoing, according to the city attorney’s office.

    Despite all these reports of misconduct — and in the sexual assault case, criminal misconduct — Neu has kept his job with the Sheriff’s Department, in a position that allowed him to be in contact with inmates. […]

    In the sexual assault filings, three inmates — a woman and two transsexual men transitioning to women — said that in 2005 and 2006, Neu created a similar atmosphere through sexual harassment at the South of Market jail. He groped them and made lewd comments, forcing them to kiss him, show him their genitals and orally copulate him, they said in court documents. He kept them silent by threatening to beat them or send them to a jail with harsher conditions.

    One of the inmates, Sabrina Wigfall, said she told two other deputies on two separate occasions that Neu was sexually abusing her, but the deputies did nothing. The abuse continued until she told a third deputy, who alerted his supervisors.

    Another inmate, who identified then as DavidSpears, said after Neu’s harassment was reported to a deputy by another inmate, Neu confronted him in the law library.

    The other deputy had talked to Spears about the harassment, but when Neu asked him about it, Spears said he was scared and lied about what he told the other deputy. Neu brought Spears a cheeseburger and fries a few days later to ensure he stayed quiet.

    They go on to mention the second person – and suddenly I’m confused, because the article identifies and pronouns both as men, yet clearly states they were… transwomen? (Though I guess the phrase ‘transsexual men transitioning into women’ isn’t exactly clear or correct either?) Or am I missing something here? :( Way to report accurately. I mean, sexual abuse is sexual abuse, but it would be nice of them to get victim-related information right.

    Let’s blame some victims. America’s cops aren’t solving as many murders — here are some theories about why:

    NPR identified some potential causes for the depressing decline:

    – Standards for charging a suspect are higher now, maybe even too high, Vernon Gerberth, a retired “murder cop” for the NYPD told NPR.
    – People distrust the police and are less willing to help with cases, he said. Since the 1980s, police have complained about a growing “no-snitch” culture, especially in minority communities. [Lookit what happens when they call the police for help.]
    – Many unsolved cases also happen in these communities, making the people who live there more distrustful of police and less willing to cooperate. [No mention of why these communities might distrust the police, hmm? Also, is this a stab at black-on-black crime?]
    – The high crime rates in the ’80s shifted the focus to preventing, instead of solving, crimes.
    – Homicide investigations are expensive. Poor, minority communities, like Detroit, which has one of the highest murder rates in the country, usually can’t afford to lower investigators’ case loads.

    Profile of a wealthy black woman (positive reading): Why Sheryl Sandberg, Bill Bradley, and Oprah Love Mellody Hobson

    Hobson is the president of a well-respected Chicago money-management firm called Ariel Investments. She’s a board member at Estée Lauder, Starbucks (where she chairs the audit-and-compliance committee), and DreamWorks Animation (where she chairs the entire board). For many years she was a contributor to ABC’s Good Morning America; she now works for CBS News and is on the boards of too many philanthropic organizations to list. And while she’s not a household name—at least not yet—she is at the hub of an eclectic group of people who are.

    In June 2013, Hobson, who is 45, married George Lucas, the 70-year-old filmmaker who sold his company, Lucasfilm, to Walt Disney in 2012 for more than $4 billion. In August, the couple welcomed a daughter, Everest Hobson Lucas, who was born via gestational surrogate, to the world. (Lucas had adopted three children previously: Amanda, Kate, and Jett, all now young adults.) Last June, Lucas announced that the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which will showcase “moving images—from illustration to cinema to the digital media of the future,” would be built in Chicago. Although the project has faced controversy, with the Chicago Tribune comparing aspects of the design to Jabba the Hutt and Lucas now saying he may be forced to take it elsewhere, the potential change to the lakefront is a monument to Hobson’s influence—and that she can exert that kind of influence is no surprise to those who know her, including another longtime friend and fan, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. “On one level, it is shocking, it does surprise you, but then you know Mellody, and it’s not surprising at all,” he says.

    Because here’s the thing about Hobson’s remarkable life and all of this extravagant praise: it is earned. [As opposed to her being in that position without earning it – okay, so the article isn’t without its problematic issues!]
    […]

    Hobson’s commitment to work is one of her signature traits. “The one thing I knew I could do is outwork everyone,” she likes to say. A college roommate at Princeton, Ann Davis Vaughan, who is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and now runs her own research firm, says that she and her husband visited Hobson at her Chicago apartment on the day of her and Lucas’s wedding party. Hobson chatted with them for 45 minutes or so—and then excused herself to go to the office because she hadn’t yet finished Ariel’s quarterly letter to investors. “She literally went to the office on the afternoon of her own wedding party!” says Vaughan. […]

    If Hobson’s life seems ridiculously charmed, she wasn’t born in a place that made that inevitable, or even likely. She is the youngest child of a single mother, Dorothy Ashley, who had Mellody more than two decades after the birth of her first child. Hobson’s father was not present in her life. “Dorth,” as Hobson sometimes called her mother, was a hardworking entrepreneur who fixed up and rented out, and later sold, condominiums. (She passed away last year.) But she didn’t have a hard enough heart to be a good businesswoman. She couldn’t evict people who couldn’t pay their rent, recalls Hobson’s sister Pat Hamel. And when she began selling condos, she was often penalized by redlining. That, plus her own extravagance—both sisters recall their mother buying Easter dresses instead of paying the phone bill—resulted in frequent evictions and moves between Chicago’s relatively wealthier North Side and the grittier South Side, where they’d sometimes heat water for baths on hot plates. “Even though I will never be evicted again, I am haunted by those times and still work relentlessly,” Hobson wrote in her chapter in Sandberg’s Lean In for Graduates. “When I think of my career and why I leaned in, it comes down to basic survival.”

    Dorothy Ashley was a strange mixture of “brutal pragmatism and optimism,” says Hobson, who remembers returning at the age of seven from a birthday party where she was the only black child. “How did they treat you?” her mother asked. “Because they won’t always treat you well.” But her mother also instilled in her daughter both confidence and independence. “My mom would say, ‘You have a birthday party to go to? Well, you can’t go unless you’ve planned how to get there and how to get a present.’ She wouldn’t do that for me. I found my own orthodontist, my own high school. I set up interviews and did college trips. Despite her incredible concern and caring, my mom didn’t have the capacity for that. It was outside her experience, and she knew I was on top of it,” says Hobson.

    “Mellody made the decisions for her whole life,” says Hamel, who also remembers that her sister never got a spanking and that her family always believed she would be successful. “She knew what she wanted to do and how she wanted to do it.” Hamel also says that Hobson was “very, very thoughtful about her future and about the kind of people she allowed in her life.”

    In high school, at Chicago’s Saint Ignatius, Hobson recalls, she was a “joiner.” “I wasn’t with the cool kids, but I could be,” she says. “I was accepted.” Her friend Peter Thompson, a self-described jock whose grandfather is Richard J. Daley, the former longtime mayor of Chicago, says that, while Hobson was more of a nerd in school, he got to know her on a retreat. “What’s notable about Mellody is that she’s always one of the more earnest people in the room,” he says.

    Hobson does not try to hide the fact that she tries. Her fifth-grade teacher, Miss Falbo, would record weekly spelling tests by having students score their neighbor’s exam and read the grade aloud. “If everyone got 100 percent, then each person in the entire class would get two Girl Scout cookies,” Hobson remembers. “But if one person missed, there would be no cookies for anyone.” And the words were like “concatenation.” She pauses in her story to define the word for me: the linking of events in a chain. Then she recalls the moment Miss Falbo said, “ ‘Hobson, 90 percent.’ I missed a word. I’m mortified. I’m praying, I need someone else to miss or I’m toast at recess. They get to the last person [alphabetically], Adam Yaseen, and no one else has missed. Miss Falbo looks at me. ‘Hobson, I’m not going to punish the whole class because of your incompetence,’ she says. ‘You can step into the hallway while we enjoy our Girl Scout cookies.’ The door was 500 feet away, and I’m thinking to myself, Don’t cry, don’t cry. I’m looking into the room through the glass door at everyone eating their Girl Scout cookies, and I say to myself, ‘Never again. I will never, ever fail at something related to school ever again.’ It unleashed my obsession.”

    And you can read the rest at the link.

  98. rq says

    Had to visit Tamir today. RIP little dude.

    !!! Overwhelming response from Ferguson City Council Candidates to not disband the Ferguson Police Department #ulstl !!! In one sense I’m not surprised, but waiting for an article to appear to see their reasoning.

    Mumia has been in prison my entire life for a crime evidence suggests he did not commit, while Eric Garner’s killer is at home masturbating. I had to look it up: Mumia Abu-Jamal

    Mumia Abu-Jamal is:

    an internationally celebrated black writer and radio journalist

    author of six books and hundreds of columns and articles

    organizer and inspiration for the prison lawyers movement

    former member of the Black Panther Party and supporter of Philadelphia’s radical MOVE organization

    who has spent the last 30 years in prison, almost all of it in solitary confinement on Pennsylvania’s Death Row. […]

    Mumia Abu-Jamal was tried, convicted and sentenced to death in 1982 for the murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, an incident which took place on December 9,1981.

    Since the trial

    For the next 30 years, Mumia was held in isolation on Death Row.

    He was kept there for over ten years even though a federal judge ordered his death sentence overturned in 2001.

    However, after losing numerous appeals of that order, the Philadelphia District Attorney on December 7, 2011 announced he was giving up his attempts to restore Mumia’s death sentence.

    Mumia remains in prison under a sentence of life without parole.

    Much more at the link, much, much more. (He is currently in hospital.)

    Gun culture is death culture. America’s Top Killing Machine (no, not the police or the justice system).

    Car crashes killed 33,561 people in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Firearms killed 32,251 people in the United States in 2011, the most recent year for which the Centers for Disease Control has data.

    But this year gun deaths are expected to surpass car deaths. That’s according to a Center for American Progress report, which cites CDC data that shows guns will kill more Americans under 25 than cars in 2015. Already more than a quarter of the teenagers—15 years old and up—who die of injuries in the United States are killed in gun-related incidents, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. […]

    The number of fatalities on the roads in the United States has been going down for years as fewer young people drive, car safety technology improves, and even as gas prices climb. (Lower gas prices are correlated with more deaths. A $2 drop in gasoline is linked to some 9,000 additional road fatalities per year in the United States, NPR recently reported.) Though even as fatal transportation incidents dropped in 2013, they accounted for two in five fatalities in the workplace in the United States that year, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

    CDC data on firearms offers a more complicated picture, in part because of how the agency categorizes causes of death. Gun deaths can include suicides, homicides, accidental firearms discharges, and even legal killings—but the overall data picture is incomplete. Since 2008, some county-level deaths have been left out to avoid inadvertent privacy breaches. And the number of police shootings—including arrest-related deaths, which are recorded but not made public, according to The Washington Post—are notoriously evasive.

    The record of firearm deaths in the United States is murkier still because of how much is at stake politically. Firearm safety remains one of the most divisive issues in the country, with advocates on both sides cherry-picking data to support arguments about the extent to which gun regulation is necessary. It’s not even clear how many guns are out there in the first place, as the Pew Research Center pointed out in a 2013 study: “Respondent error or misstatement in surveys about gun ownership is a widely acknowledged concern of researchers. People may be reluctant to disclose ownership, especially if they are concerned that there may be future restrictions on gun possession or if they acquired their firearms illegally.”

    We do know American gun ownership far outstrips gun ownership in other countries. “With less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States is home to 35-50 percent of the world’s civilian-owned guns,” according to the Small Arms Survey.

    And while the number of firearm homicides dropped dramatically over a 20-year period ending in 2011, the percentage of violent crimes involving firearms has stayed fairly constant, according to the 2013 survey. In other words, even when fewer people die from gun violence, violent crimes involving guns are still happening at the same rate. It’s also true that as the gun homicide rate has declined in the United States, suicides now account for the majority of gun deaths, according to Pew.

  99. rq says

    StL Argus August 28, 1925: “Tulsa Warmly Welcomes Negro Business League” Host most successful convention ever @deray. Headline declares no race friction in the city.

    I’ll admit, the first time I read this headline, I read ‘Australian dads’, but that’s my problem, not the headline’s. Also, the sample photo is beyond just white – for Australians, they’re not even tan. Why are Australian ads so white?

    When US writer and academic Roxane Gay visited our fair shores recently, she noticed a glaring difference between Australia and her own country- how much whiter our media is.

    “Commercials are not very diverse here. It makes US commercials look like the promised land,” she tweeted.

    Gay later expanded on ABC radio:

    “It seems as though people of colour are completely erased from commercials as if they’re not part of the consumer public,” she said. “And that’s troubling.”

    Given the US is still far from coming to terms with its own shocking racial history, and that much of the population remains indifferent to the way this history lives on in structural inequality, Gay’s assessment is pretty damning indeed. […]

    It’s tempting to dismiss the importance of racial diversity in advertising, not least because I am, like many others, generally suspicious of consumer capitalism. Like it or not, however, commercials do matter. As Gay implies, the exclusion of people of colour renders them so insignificant that advertisers need not bother acknowledging their existence at all.

    Given my scepticism towards the advertising industry and its motives, I’m weary of heaping too much praise when they do something nominally inclusive or progressive. But, having spent the last two years living between the US and Australia, there is no doubt Gay is right.

    Unlike in Australia, where, with a few exceptions, being white is equated with being True Blue, advertisements in the US, driven by big-name brands such Coca-Cola, Chevrolet and Banana Republic, are finally reflecting the country’s racial make-up. […]

    Indeed, despite its own deeply embedded racism, the US has something Australia sorely lacks, that is a level of acknowledgment of its own shortcomings and, in some quarters at least, a willingness to address them.

    The roundly ridiculed Starbucks “Race Together” campaign, for instance, which encouraged customers to discuss race with their barista has been fairly criticised as naïve, unfair on the baristas and hypocritical (there are very few non-white executives at Starbucks). Nonetheless, it is at the very least, a blatant admission that there is a problem.

    Of course, and here’s my scepticism again, sometimes it’s hard to discern whether this racial sensitivity on the part of America’s corporate advertisers stems from a genuine desire for inclusivity or for the purposes of generating controversy.

    Nonetheless, while certainly worthy of examination and criticism, at least these advertisements and initiatives exist. By contrast, the whiteness of Australian commercials is so thoroughly normalised that, as Celeste Liddle noted during that same radio interview with Gay, it often takes foreign observers to point it out.

    We need to step away from this tacit acceptance of the way things are. Normalisation is not synonymous with acceptability. The lack of racial diversity in our commercials only further entrenches the implicit assumption that whiteness is the central human condition. White people are the stand-ins that everyone else is expected to identify with, while every other race can only ever represent themselves.

    There are those who think simply talking about race is in itself racist, an attitude that is also pervasive in America. I can only marvel at such a comfortably cocooned perspective. How easy it is to dismiss the importance of race when you are accustomed to seeing your likeness reflected everywhere. These people are so conditioned to see whiteness as an absence of race, they cannot perceive of even mere requests for racial diversity as anything other than “playing the race card.”

    TW for suicide. If you remember, several months ago, a rather prominent figure in St Louis politics committed suicide – Tom Schweich, it was (don’t worry, I couldn’t remember at first, either!). Anyway, an odd coincidence: Tom Schweich spokesperson Spence Jackson found dead

    Multiple media outlets, including our partners at the St. Louis Post- Dispatch, are reporting that Spence Jackson, media director for former Missouri Auditor Tom Schweich, has been found dead in his Jefferson City apartment. Sources say his death is being investigated as a suicide. Jackson’s death comes about one month after Schweich’s suicide. He was 44.

    Jefferson City police say they won`t release any details until later Monday morning. An official with the Cole County Sheriff`s Department says they have no comment at this point. Jackson had been Schweich`s media director since May of 2011. He also held other key republican jobs in state government.

    Jackson was critical of Schweich`s political adversaries and even called for the resignation of Missouri`s Republican Party Chairman John Hancock. That came after allegations that Hancock was behind an anti-Semitic ‘whisper campaign’ that may have led to Schweich committing suicide. Hancock has strongly denied that accusation.

    Schweich shot and killed himself at his Clayton home back on February 26th.

    Sources tell the post that Jackson took a sick day last Friday and authorities are awaiting the identification of the body found in Jackson`s apartment.

    Some of Jackson`s other jobs included being the communications director for Matt Blunt when he was secretary of state.

    Another on the same: Missouri State Auditor’s Aide Dead In Apparent Suicide

    Robert “Spence” Jackson, 45, was found dead Sunday evening in the bedroom of his apartment in Jefferson City, apparently having killed himself with a gun, Jefferson City police said in a statement.

    Jackson was a veteran of Republican state politics and at the time of his death was embroiled in in-party fighting, having called for the resignation of the party’s state chairman.

    His apparent suicide comes less than a month after his boss,

    Missouri State Auditor Tom Schweich, also shot himself to death at his home in suburban St. Louis.

    Schweich, 54, had been re-elected in November after serving for four years and announced in January that he would seek his party’s nomination for governor.

    His death on Feb. 26 came after he had complained about the tactics of rival Republicans in the primary campaign. Jackson had been quoted in Missouri press reports specifically calling for Missouri Republican Party Chairman John Hancock to step down.

    February 26 -> March 30 = more than a month but okay.

    This is an interesting point. Both #AnthonyHill & #MeaganHockaday were killed by officers who specialized in crisis intervention/mental health.

    And have a song by Beyonce: Beyoncé – Killing My (New Song 2015) .

  100. rq says

    #NotJustUVA Connecticut College cancels classes due to racist graffiti

    Classes are canceled for today at Connecticut College after racist graffiti was discovered in the bathroom of the student center.

    News 8 received Report It photos on Sunday of the racial slurs that were written on the walls of the men’s bathroom, that include the “n-word.”

    The president of the college sent a letter to students to inform them that classes were canceled on Monday because of the hateful words.

    There is also a meeting scheduled on campus Monday night to discuss the incident.

    And to know #MeaganHockaday was killed on Friday and most of us found out through Twitter by just a few articles is terrible.

    Ah, and here’s why Mumia is under discussion again – I mentioned he’s hospitalized? Apparently he’s not being allowed to see his family. Demand @MumiaAbuJamal’s family have visitation rights. Another set of numbers to call. (via @PrisonRadio) Contact info within.

    TSA Will Finally Stop Searching Black Women’s Hair for No Reason

    For years, black women have complained of being targeted by the Transportation Security Administration for unnecessary screenings because of their natural hair. After pressure from the ACLU, the TSA has finally agreed to retrain security officers. Per the agreement, the agency will provide trainings across the country with an emphasis on hair pat-downs of black female travelers. TSA has also agreed to specifically track hair pat-down complaints filed by black women at all airports they oversee to determine whether discriminatory practices are still occurring.

    In 2011, Timery Shante Nance was one of many black women pulled aside after being cleared by a full-body scan. She described watching white women with curly hair and bushy ponytails waltz through security as a TSA screener insisted on “patting” her hair, which was worn in a style she described as a “normal looking puff.” Other travelers stared at her and the experience was deeply embarrassing; a complaint she lodged to the TSA garnered no response. After repeatedly being singled out, Novella Coleman, who happens to be a staff lawyer with the ACLU of Southern California, filed an official complaint in 2012. TSA did not make any policy changes.

    A year later, Solange took to Twitter after Florida TSA agents searched her Afro. “My hair is not a storage drawer,” she tweeted. MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry has also been vocal about the “full on fingers through the braids, scalp tickling treatment” she’s received at the hands of the TSA. In an open letter to John Pistole, who was then head of the TSA, she wrote, “if your $170,000 machine can see under my clothes, but can’t figure out I’m not hiding a bomb in my braids, maybe it’s time to recalibrate the machine.”

    The TSA’s changes come after a second complaint filed by the ACLU in 2013. Malaika Singleton, a Sacramento-based neuroscientist traveling to London for an academic conference on dementia, was pulled aside by TSA officers as she exited and reentered the country. “The first time I was shocked,” she told BuzzFeed. “I just did not expect that. I felt violated.”

    It’s not yet clear what exactly the trainings will offer, but Coleman, who still works at the ACLU, will attend and observe. She remains optimistic that retraining will help stop the discriminatory practice. “I think right now we’re in a hopeful place,” she told BuzzFeed.

  101. rq says

    So! For further reading, You should check out the new site http://sevenscribes.com which features black voices. I love their initial pieces. Here’s the site: Seven Scribes, with currently only a few articles up, but definitely worth a bookmark.

    WE ARE PLEASED to announce the launch of SEVEN SCRIBES, a brand new online publication. We are committed to creating a space where young Black writers and artists can offer commentary and analysis on politics, pop culture, literature, and art. This is a space where writers and artists can experiment with content and be intentional about consumption.

    WHO WE ARE: The scribes, JOSIE HELEN, fivefifths, FRANK JACKSON, EVE L. EWING, TREY SMITH, and ERIKA STALLINGS are all independent creatives working to use our voices to create new online spaces. We are writers with other day jobs. Each of us has extensive experience in the world of online content creation and each brings a fresh and different perspective to writing and art. Trey is even a proven bread expert.

    WHAT WE OFFER that differentiates us from what’s already out there is a structure built on seven principles, principles that we believe represent a vision of the future of online content creation. In short, the values of INNOVATION, QUALITY, FREEDOM, BRAVERY and COLLABORATION guide what we do and produce.

    Our aim is to think differently about the internet. Or at least to suck a little less.

    Our aim is to create a more engaging and reflective environment than the clickbait, sensationalism, and slideshow-centered web infrastructure that dominate commentary geared towards us. Part of this aim is rooted in our structure: we are concerned with depth, engagement, and thoughtful consideration. Our goal is to add dimension to conversation; to think critically about issues. Our goal is not to beat the clock. We want to find ways to measure actual engagement with our material and its impact on real debates. Clicks and page views are played. Like…for real?

    Topics so far include: music, double mastectomy and breast cancer, natural disasters and black history, and post-modernism. Categories for (future) reading include Culture, Science & Tech, Art & Media, Politices & Business, Literature, Entertainment.

    A 26-year-old MIT graduate is turning heads over his theory that income inequality is actually about housing (in 1 graph) – not going to cite anything from this, but it’s worth a thought. Even if that thought is, I doubt Housing is the only answer.

    For 5 decades, STL has had a policy of “benign neglect” in north STL. That’s what created the crisis we have now. Tragic and predictable.
    What Antonio French wrote several years ago: QUIET CONSPIRACY: THE TEAM FOUR PLAN AND THE PLOT TO KILL NORTH ST. LOUIS

    The idea that a city government would actually encourage the deterioration of entire communities within its own boundaries is an incredibly disturbing thought. But, listening to Missouri State Representative Charles Quincy Troupe, New Yorkers aren’t the only ones to have fallen victim to their own city’s fathers.

    Rep. Troupe is sort of a relic nowadays. The “Dean of the House,” as the sign reads on his office door in the State Capitol, Troupe is a historian, a keeper of Black St. Louis’ past 50 years. And he believes in conspiracies. Because in the Northside State House district that he has represented since 1978, he has seen conspiracies unfold before his eyes.

    “When they looked at the housing stock in North St. Louis, they found surprisingly that 70-80% of the housing stock at that time were brick structures,” he says. “Back in 1980, they started shipping bricks out of North St. Louis to California, building half-million dollar homes in California and across the country. Demolition and [salvage] of wood, stained-glass windows, [and] bricks… is a $100 million dollar industry, conservatively, in the City of St. Louis per year.” […]

    Known as part of the “Young Turk” faction of the Board of Aldermen, in the fall of 1973, Aldermen John G. Roach and Richard Gephardt (now U.S. Congressman) introduced Board Bills 19 and 20. While they never actually became law, the bills were early versions of what would become known as the Team Four Plan.

    A November 8, 1973 article in the St. Louis Argus quotes the bills’ controversial language calling predominately black North St. Louis “an insignificant residential area not worthy of special maintenance effort.”

    The bills called for the preservation of 74,000 buildings in South St. Louis–and prescribed the demolition of 70,100 buildings on the Northside. The Argus pointed out that a study by the City Planning Commission published in April 1971 pointed up the fact that 70,100 houses in the section of the City north of Franklin Avenue (Dr. Martin Luther King Drive) were recommended for demolition because “rehabilitation would be uneconomical”. Conversely, 74,000 buildings in South St. Louis met “or exceed the standards of local codes and need only to be maintained.”

    According to press reports at the time, the report, which seemed to be the foundation for Roach and Gephardt’s bills, noted that 50,100 of the 70,100 buildings targeted for demolition were presently homes occupied by families.

    The bills quickly became a lightening rod for St. Louis’ black political machine of 1973. Board Bills 19 and 20 never became law but, not more than two years later, Northside residents found themselves under attack again.

    Team Four

    Team Four, Inc. was hired by the City’s Planning Commission in 1973 to prepare a city-wide comprehensive planning study, an update to the City’s 1947 Comprehensive Plan.

    Team Four prepared several technical memorandums for the City for that purpose. It is Technical Memorandum 6B, officially known as Citywide Implementation Strategies: The Draft Comprehensive Plan, historically known simply as the “Team Four Plan,” that many believe became the blueprint for North St. Louis’ present state.

    The Team Four Plan proposed public policy guidelines and strategies for saving the City from the circumstances clearly identified in the Rand Report.

    As if on a sinking ship, Team Four called upon the City to buck up and make some tough decisions if it hoped to survive. “Major shifts in public attitudes” were called upon to make the kinds of changes Team Four saw as necessary.

    Team Four recommended that the St. Louis make a “realistic appraisal of the short- and long-range potential of all areas in the City” and take determined and “clear-cut stances on the strategy for different areas of the City.”

    The Plan recommended that each area of the City be grouped into one of three groups: Conservation, Redevelopment, and Depletion, these distinctions being based on factors including age, physical qualities, loan policies, public service level and population stability. Race is not mentioned specifically. […]

    So-called Depletion Areas – areas identified as those which receive “spotty City services” and are the victims of “red lining”, where “large numbers of unemployed, the elderly, and the recipients of welfare are left to wait for assistance which does not seem to be forthcoming” – should not benefit, the Plan suggests, from the economic stimulation that would come from hosting a stopping point for the rapid transit described above (what we now call Metrolink).

    Depletion Areas present the City’s planners with an interesting riddle. On the one hand, this question: What should the City do for the residents and businesses of these Northside areas in the way of city services while their neighborhoods are being abandoned?

    And on the other hand: What should the City do to encourage investment in these areas to stabilize them?

    The Team Four Plan: “To answer one question with a public policy decision immediately causes a conflict with the other. For example, proceeding with building demolition and assembly of vacant parcels for redevelopment results in a neighborhood dotted with rubble-filled lots and boarded up buildings” the 1975 document states. “Such neighborhoods do not induce new investment.”

    “On the other hand,” it continues, “to expend public funds on new streets, libraries, schools or code enforcement in an area designated for total renewal doesn’t make sense either.”

    Team Four goes on to concede that it would be less than humane to enact a total denial of services to Northside residents. “The City cannot abandon those trapped in Depletion Areas,” it says, “nor can it ignore the eventual need to redevelop these areas.”

    Team Four warns of fence-straddling when it comes to making these tough decisions, “Allowing or encouraging scattered, uncoordinated investments within Depletion Areas will only sap the City’s too limited fiscal resources.”

    “Efforts must be made to adjust services and public investments so as to provide for those who are remaining in these areas. Yet these efforts should be pursued without encouraging new investment until the City determined that Redevelopment can and should begin.”

    “Without encouraging new investment”? In an area that is so obviously in need of reinvestment, people so in need of help and support, what could possibly be the motivation for such passive aggressiveness?

    Money, Racism, Class Discrimination, take your pick.

    And the situation now: Paul McKee’s “Northside” project is the culmination of The Team Four Plan. Reduced services, lowered property values, relocation of people.

  102. rq says

    Make sure to check back for a new comment 101, I landed in moderation but it has some good stuff in it.

    +++

    In Baltimore: Officials to outline major changes for school police force

    The plan, which will be outlined in staff meetings on Tuesday, is a relaunching of the police force in the wake of a decision by the city delegation to the General Assembly to table a bill that would have allowed officers to be armed while patrolling schools during the school day.

    The plan will include new deployment strategies for the department that will still allow officers to patrol and respond to schools, sources say.

    Baltimore city school officials did not respond to a request for information or comment.

    The role of city school police has been debated in recent weeks following the failed legislative measure to arm them at all times which divided parents, political leaders and educators. City school police are not allowed under the law to be armed inside schools, unlike local police who patrol schools in other jurisdictions across the state.

    The failed bill also left in limbo how officers would be able to continue to staff schools without breaking the law. Officers can be armed on patrol outside schools and often took their weapons inside schools even though that’s not allowed under the law. The bill was aimed at giving them legal clarity.

    Earlier this month, city schools CEO Gregory Thornton said he was auditing the department’s roles and responsibilities for efficiencies and compliance. He also said he would use the debate in Annapolis to make the department “better.”

    He said the district would announce “a new direction for the police force soon.”

    @RapSessions “Race, Policing & Social Justice” 4/1 Univ of Miami w/ @SybrinaFulton @Nettaaaaaaaa @jasiri_x @jelani9

    For fun: Barack Obama Talks ‘The Wire’ With David Simon

    President Barack Obama, it turns out, is a superfan of HBO’s classic drug-game drama The Wire. So much so, that you can literally see the most powerful man in the free world leaning on the edge of his seat to hear what series creator and head writer David Simon has to say about it.

    The president sat down with Simon for a conversation (released by the White House) and used the show as a jumping off point for discussing the real-life problems with street-level enforcement of drug prohibition, America’s mass incarceration of non-violent offenders and the long, unwinnable “war on drugs.”

    Oh, and Omar is totally his favorite character. Same, Mr. President, same.

    I repeat. This is why representation matters so much for these young black and brown girls. It may end up being a crappy movie, but Home, right now, has a much bigger effect.

    They’ve already beat their goal, but here’s De La Soul crowdfunding their new album. Also for fun.

    As introduced on Twitter, white privilege means paying $150 to be tear-gassed as part of an obstacle course (paraphrase). Tough Mudder to Use ‘Tear Gas’ in Newly Designed Obstacle Courses

    Tough Mudder is adding “tear gas” to its list of torture devices in its tough-as-nails obstacle course, which includes electric shocks, a plunge into freezing water and falling through a ring of fire.

    The Downtown Brooklyn company, which designs physically and mentally challenging obstacle courses worldwide, is set to unveil other new elements in their 2015 obstacle courses — and the addition of tear gas might be the most grueling yet. […]

    Murphy described crawling through a part of the course called “Cry Baby,” a tent filled with tear gas, as “shocking.” But he noted that “while it certainly stings, the active ingredient in this concoction is more benign than the one in real tear gas.”

    A representative for Tough Mudder did not respond to a request for the ingredients used in their tear gas. It was also not clear if any problems had been encountered.

    “Cry Baby” joins the course’s other tried obstacles like scaling “Everest,” a quarter pipe 15-feet high, running through 10,000 volt electric wires and diving into a tank filled with 34-degree water — making this year’s Tough Mudder course one of the most harrowing since the race was founded in 2010.

    The name “Cry Baby” was used during the testing phase and may change, according to Tough Mudder officials.

    I find the name offensive. Not so fun.

  103. rq says

    A distinct lack of accountability. Glenn Ford, Wrongfully Convicted And Dying Of Cancer, Denied Restitution For 30 Years On Death Row

    Caddo Parish District Judge Katherine Dorroh on Friday denied Ford compensation, saying that while Ford did not commit the murder that led to his wrongful imprisonment, he was “proven to be guilty of lesser crimes and was not an innocent man.” The judge said Ford knew about plans for the robbery that led to the killing and didn’t stop it. Further, he attempted to destroy evidence by pawning items taken in the robbery and tried to find buyers for the murder weapon used by men Ford implicated in the murder.

    “While Mr. Ford does not have the blood of Isadore Rozeman on his hands, he did not have clean hands,” Dorroh wrote in her nine-page order.

    Ford’s attorney, Gary Clements, said the court’s conclusion is akin to denying compensation for “jaywalking in front of the house where a crime happened.”

    “Truth is, if you pawned jewelry, you would never spend 30 years on death row,” Clements told The Huffington Post Monday.

    Ford’s lawyers with the Innocence Project-New Orleans (unaffiliated with the national Innocence Project) are appealing the ruling. The lawyers said in a statement Friday:

    We are disappointed with the court’s decision today denying Glenn Ford compensation for the 30 years he spent on death row for a crime the State of Louisiana agrees he did not commit. In its denial, the court adopted the State’s argument opposing compensation. The ruling inflated the fact that Mr. Ford knew the people who committed the crime and insinuated that Mr. Ford was more involved in the crime than the facts in the record indicate. This is the latest in a series of great injustices that Mr. Ford has suffered over the last 30 years.

    Ford was convicted in 1984 of murdering Rozeman, a 56-year-old Shreveport jeweler and watchmaker. After “credible evidence” surfaced corroborating Ford’s story that he was not part of Rozeman’s murder, Caddo County prosecutors asked that Ford’s conviction be vacated and he walked free in March 2014.

    Now, Ford is terminally ill with stage 4 lung cancer — which Ford argues in a separate complaint could have been mitigated at Angola Penitentiary had medical staff taken his ailments seriously. He may die in less than a year, according to Kristin Winstrom, who is handling Ford’s compensation request through the Innocence Project-New Orleans.

    “He literally has nothing,” Winstrom told The Huffington Post Monday, noting that supporters are trying to raise funds for his medical costs. “Money right now is going to hospice care.”

    Under Louisiana law, a person is eligible for up to $25,000 a year for each year he was wrongfully incarcerated, with a lifetime cap of $250,000, Winstrom explained. In Ford’s case, he would only receive restitution for a third of the time he spent on death row if his appeal succeeds.

    Well, fuck.

    White People’s Tears. Michelle Obama Sends Message To White Girls That They Don’t Matter

    The double standard runs deep in the White House and proof of that was with one particular event Saturday night, guest starring America’s First Lady. Michelle Obama not only supported the purpose of the evening, but she rallied behind it and pushed the racial bias way too far.

    From the outset, the awards ceremony seemed to have a positive vibe, encouraging higher education for girls and empowering them to achieve their highest dreams. If it wasn’t for the ceremony’s title, “Black Girls Rock!” displayed across the stage and shouted ad nauseam throughout the night, this event would be commendable in honoring girls who have accomplished great things — but only as long as you’re black.

    This isn’t the first time this annual event has hit the stage and perpetuated racial divide. It’s the fifth year, and nobody seems to believe there is an issue with it, despite the fact it seems you have to be black to attend. A “White Girls Rock!” event wouldn’t even last five minutes without rioters outside the venue, shutting it down.

    When Michelle took center stage, her message to the eager ears in the crowd full of black girls was that they must ignore the voices that suggest that they were “not good enough.” By her biased support, the First Lady, who attended Princeton and Harvard and attributes her success to being empowered as a young black girl, is essentially telling white girls they aren’t “good enough” since she doesn’t address them with the same overwhelming support she does her own race.

    What if Laura Bush hit the stage in a star-studded event for white girls only, announcing females of her race rock? It would never happen because nobody would allow it, yet this same scenario for black Americans is apparently perfectly acceptable and supported by our presidency. The issue isn’t with holding this event and encouraging education in youth, even if just for black girls, it’s that only certain races can get away with such segregated ceremonies, while whites could never do so.

    A distinct lack of self-examination and the reasons behind black girls and women needing to be told they rock, more than white girls.

    Most Americans Want Their State To Make Voter Registration Easier

    “I challenge every other state in this nation to examine their policies and find ways to ensure that there are as few barriers as possible in the way of a citizen’s right to vote,” Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D) said at the bill’s signing ceremony.

    Most Americans are in favor of enacting a similar proposal in their own state, a new survey finds. A 54 percent majority of Americans say they’d favor an automatic registration law in their state, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds, while 55 percent favor allowing eligible citizens to register on the day of an election.

    But there’s stringent opposition to making voting compulsory, an idea that President Barack Obama briefly floated this month as a potentially “transformative” policy to counteract the effects of big money on politics. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest quickly walked back the idea.

    Many agree that mandatory voting could change things: 45 percent say that election outcomes would be very different if voting were required. But they also fiercely dislike the idea. Two-thirds say they oppose mandatory voting, with nearly half strongly against it. […]

    Michael McDonald, an associate professor of political science at the University of Florida, says similar “motor voter” laws, which allow drivers to register to vote at the DMV, have done little to change turnout. But he added that since all voting in Oregon is conducted by mail, receiving a ballot could remind more people to vote in off-year elections.

    “Most people are aware of presidential elections, but they are less aware of state and local elections,” he said in an email. “More people receiving a reminder to vote in state and local elections, in the form of a mail ballot, has the most potential to increase voter participation.”

    A study published earlier this month found that after registration deadlines passed in 2012, millions of Americans searched the Web for information on registering, suggesting that some would have voted had they been able.

    The results of the HuffPost/YouGov poll also suggest that people who aren’t registered to vote are still interested in measures that could make it easier for them to sign up. While most non-registered voters, unsurprisingly, don’t consider low turnout a big problem, four in 10 support automatic registration, and most say they’d favor being able to register to vote on the day of an election. […]

    Despite the widespread public support for such reforms, however, just about one-third of Americans consider it a big problem that many eligible voters don’t cast ballots. That lack of concern is especially evident among the youngest generation, who are far less likely than their elders to think that everyone should vote. Half of Americans under 30 say they aren’t even moderately concerned with low turnout.

    There’s also little enthusiasm for government activism to increase turnout. Just 22 percent of Americans agree that the government should work to get more people to vote in elections, with 71 percent saying it’s an individual’s own responsibility to decide whether to vote.

    Take a look at this. Arrested for same crime, in newspaper white suspects get yearbook photos, black suspects get mugshots

    Rafi of the blog So Let’s Talk About It recently made a startling discovery about subtle racial biases. Earlier this month the Iowa newspaper The Gazette posted two stories about local burglaries written by the same author and published within one day of each other. One story used yearbook photos of the suspects while the other used mugshots. The only other difference between the two stories? Those who got the yearbook photos were white and those who got the mugshots were black.

    As Rafi points out, regardless of what photos were available of the black suspects, the white suspects definitely had mugshots taken. In trying to justify the discrepancy, The Gazette explained they must make a formal request in order to get mugshots, yet they were clearly willing to take that extra step when it came to the black suspects.

    This is just another reminder that the media has a lot of power to subtly shape the perception of crimes. It’s the same issue that inspired the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown hashtag on Twitter, which sought to draw attention to the way black victims of police brutality are so often portrayed as menacing or dangerous. Similarly, The Huffington Post explored how the media will often portray white suspects with more empathy and respect than black victims.

    More at the link.

    I didn’t go out on August 9th w/my best friend because I was “nice” … I went because I have a deep rooted love for black people.
    Because when I saw photos of Mike laying in that hot sun, I saw my friend Stephon. Stephon was killed by the police just last year.

  104. rq says

    LBJ, civil rights hero? Maybe not so much. Oh No, President Johnson Did Not Mastermind Selma Marches, Says Civil Rights Leader

    One of the Civil Rights Movement‘s most notable figures has come forward blasting recent claims that then-President Lyndon B. Johnson spearheaded the idea behind the marches in Selma. In fact, SNCC co-founder Diane Nash suggests that LBJ’s signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was nothing more than a delayed reaction to the deaths of activists and the happenings of the “Bloody Sunday” confrontation on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. that same year.

    “The impression too often perpetuated in history books and in popular culture is that that you have to be a president, someone special or White to have an important idea or to achieve major accomplishments. This is an idea that disempowers citizens and should not be propagated further,” Nash said in a column for the National Newspaper Publishers Association. […]

    In the film President Johnson, played by Tom Wilkinson, is portrayed as being at odds with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (played by David Oyelowo) over the nonviolent Selma demonstrations – which was a deliberate choice by the director who said she did not want to create a “White-savior movie.” Her decision to portray President Johnson as an ally with Dr. King’s chief detractor, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, prompted Joseph A. Califano, a former top domestic affairs assistant to President Johnson, to say the following in a Washington Post op-ed column:

    In fact, Selma was LBJ’s idea, he considered the Voting Rights Act his greatest legislative achievement, he viewed King as an essential partner in getting it enacted — and he didn’t use the FBI to disparage him.

    Not exactly, says Nash, who helped co-found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was a central participant on the ground during the Selma to Montgomery marches. In her NNPA column Nash takes Califano’s stance to task and says that the movement in Selma occurred far ahead of Johnson’s presidency. […]

    In Nash’s estimation, President Johnson allowed the environment that led to the deaths of Jackson, and activists James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo to continue despite his power to stop the carnage. Nash states that President Johnson’s inaction prior to the events of March 7, 1965, AKA Bloody Sunday, pushed the SCLC, SNCC and other groups to push forward for voting rights and sparked the violent standoff with Alabama police.

    Although it can’t be verified, insiders say that DuVernay’s portrayal of President Johnson as a difficult and somewhat closeted bigot may have harmed her chances at the Academy Awards. DuVernay’s film is up for Best Picture and Best Original Song. Some feel that the director was snubbed for the Best Director category, which would have been a historic first for a Black woman.

    Stop taking credit for everything, white people, in other words.

    Getting page not found on this, but it was an article on Ben Crump being assigned to a shooting case. ANnnyway.

    Powerful Short Film Challenges Beauty Ideals That Govern Skin Color

    In discussions of mainstream beauty ideals, it’s not uncommon to hear media outlets discuss the prominence of certain body types, addressing disorders like anorexia and bulimia in the process. However, for many women, particularly women of color, these are far from the only harmful ways myths and norms shape perceptions of beauty, and shape perceptions of ourselves.

    In her powerful short film “Yellow Fever,” Kenyan artist and filmmaker Ng’endo Mukii explores the relationship between a woman and her skin color, and the hierarchy of globalized beauty imposed on impressionable minds and bodies. “While growing up, I would come across women who practiced skin bleaching (‘lightening’, ‘brightening’), and often had a condescending internal reaction to them,” Mukii explained in an email to The Huffington Post.

    “Now, I realize they are only products of our society, as are we all. Since our media perpetuates Western ideals to our girls and women, and we consume this information continuously from a young age, how can we fault anyone who is susceptible to these ideals (men included), without challenging the people that are creating them?”

    Mukii explores these concepts and beyond in her enrapturing seven-minute short, which combines layered ethnographic visuals with emotive dance sequences and textural animated interviews with family members including her mother and young niece. “If I were American, I would be white, white, white, white and I’d love being white,” Mukii’s five-year-old niece says, sitting before a white pop star on the television screen. As she innocently proclaims that magic could potentially turn her skin another color, the scene becomes both jarring and heartbreaking. […]

    “Why is there no acknowledgement of the pressure that exists to push Kenyan (and other) women to willingly poison their skin and bodies with various chemicals (mercury included) in an attempt to have a paler complexion? Why is this not some form of body dysmorphia related to the skin? Why should any normal girl feel that she will be more beautiful and lead a happier life if she loses weight? Why should any normal Kenyan girl feel the same, but in relation to being paler? Why do we live in societies that agree to either of these ideas?”
    To begin to grapple with these questions and more, watch “Yellow Fever” below. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

    Bond reduction denied for man accused of shooting officers

    The man accused of shooting two police officers in March during protests in Ferguson appeared in court Tuesday.

    Jeffrey Williams was attempting to have his $300,000 bond reduced, but the judge denied it. Williams’ lawyer argued a bond that high is normally, in his experience, reserved for murder cases.

    Attorney Jerryl Christmas said the 20-year-old is not a flight risk, has no violent crime convictions, and has a girlfriend who is eight months pregnant. The lawyer asked for a $100,000, 10 percent down. […]

    “My client was beaten when he was arrested and so I don’t believe any statements that he made, he gave voluntarily,” said Christmas. “I think when they arrested him, they beat him. He was scared. He’s just a young kid, 20 years old, and he said whatever needed to be said so that he could get out of that room.”

    Once again, the judge denied the request for a reduced bond. It remains at $300,000 and Williams is back in jail.

    A grand jury is expected to hear his case, but in the meantime, Williams is back on the docket for May 5.

    Arizona Governor Vetoes Bill That Would Keep Police Names Secret After Shootings – sounds like the governor has some sense, at least.

    State senators passed the bill last week, saying it would protect officers from threats and harassment. Ducey — a Republican whose father was a 12-year veteran of the Toledo, Ohio, Police Department — wrote in a veto letter that he had strong sympathy for that position, lamenting that “in an era of social media and 24-hour news commentary, these officers and their families have been subjected to public scorn, harassment and vicious attacks.”

    But Ducey said the “unintended consequences” of shielding officers in such sensitive cases outweighed the benefits.

    “The wrong officer’s name could circulate. Speculation replaces fact. It’s very easy to see news outlets running with information that is unconfirmed or erroneous, and under this proposed law, police chiefs’ hands would be tied and they would have no way to respond or set the record straight,” he wrote. “The result could be the exact opposite of what this bill aims to do, escalating — rather than de-escalating — the situation and potentially putting completely innocent officers’ reputations and safety on the line.”

  105. rq says

    ‘Lone Ranger’ protester takes to the streets for the first time after St. Louis shooting. Not just police shootings are being protested.

    Stenger splits from Better Together board

    Better Together struck Stenger’s name from its website early Tuesday after the county executive threatened legal action to dissolve a board position he said he didn’t know existed until Monday evening.

    “What kind of group makes you a member, let alone a director, without bothering to tell you?” Stenger asked of a post he unknowingly inherited when he succeeded former County Executive Charlie Dooley in January.

    Better Together Executive Director Nancy Rice said the organization did reach out to Stenger.

    “The beginning of a new administration can be chaotic and we understand how our outreach to the county executive’s office may have not reached him,” Rice said in a statement. “A packet including a ‘Welcome Letter,’ board meeting dates and other information related to the board was sent to Mr. Stenger in January, and then his representatives did attend two (of three) board meetings this year.”

    Stenger acknowledged that representatives of his office did attend Better Together board sessions, but strictly as observers.

    Formed in late 2013, Better Together selected Dooley and St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay as ex-officio members of a board that includes a number of civic, business and community leaders.

    Slay and Dooley played prominent roles at the function where Better Together launch announced it was embarking on a year-long analysis, driven by data and community input, of factors connected a possible consolidation of the city and county.

    Critics immediately assailed the group for promoting a pro-merger agenda, an assertion dismissed by Better Together officials.

    The Ferguson disruptions nonetheless persuaded Better Together to switch its focus to regional police tactics from public health, duplication of services and other issues that might affect a merger.

    Stenger adopted a wait-and-see attitude on consolidation during the Democratic primary campaign that unseated Dooley and the subsequent general election victory over former Republican state Rep. Rick Stream.

    He announced shortly before his inauguration in January that Ferguson had changed the conversation and, as a result, flatly declared consolidation was no longer on the table.

    Stenger made clear Tuesday that he will limit his association with the organization to asking representatives to observe board proceedings.

    #FergusonAlternativeSpringBreak #FergusonASB work @fergusonlibrary starting now…
    #FergusonAlternativeSpringBreak #FergusonASB x #Ferguson Volunteer Flower Department
    #Ferguson Alternative Spring break students working in harmony w/Ferguson residents at local library @akacharleswade

    Some black men at @SLU_Official prepping for their upcoming panel “Can I live” Featuring @DrShaunHarper @HipHopPrez

  106. rq says

    Obama Commutes 22 Drug Sentences, Instantly Doubling The Number Of Commutations He’s Issued

    The men and women granted the reprieves had been imprisoned under an “outdated sentencing regime,” the administration concluded. Eight of the 22 inmates had been sentenced to life imprisonment and would have died behind bars.

    Leading up to Tuesday’s announcement, the president has tried to revamp his administration’s approach to clemency, telling The Huffington Post in a recent interview that he felt recipients should more broadly reflect the entire applicant pool and not lean toward well-connected white-collar criminals. Those granted clemency on Tuesday were all sentenced to jail for intent to distribute an illegal drug, with 14 of those cases involving possession or distribution of cocaine.

    “Had they been sentenced under current laws and policies, many of these individuals would have already served their time and paid their debt to society,” White House counsel Neil Eggleston said in a statement shared in advance with The Huffington Post. “Because many were convicted under an outdated sentencing regime, they served years — in some cases more than a decade — longer than individuals convicted today of the same crime.”

    The president sent a letter to each of the commutation recipients encouraging them to take advantage of their post-prison opportunity. An administration official said that this was the first time Obama has sent such letters during his presidency.

    “I am granting your application because you have demonstrated the potential to turn your life around. Now it is up to you to make the most of this opportunity. It will not be easy, and you will confront many who doubt people with criminal records can change. Perhaps even you are unsure of how you will adjust to your new circumstances,” the letter reads. “But remember that you have the capacity to make good choices. By doing so, you will affect not only your own life, but those close to you. You will also influence, through your example, the possibility that others in your circumstances get their own second chance in the future.”

    Tuesday’s announcement marks the beginning of a more aggressive approach on clemency from the White House, which has faced persistent criticism for being slow to grant pardons and commutations. Until Tuesday, Obama had only commuted the sentences of 21 people and pardoned 64, out of thousands of applications received.

    The Justice Department expanded its criteria for clemency applicants last year, prioritizing defendants who would have likely been given a shorter prison term had they been sentenced today and who have served at least 10 years behind bars, have had good conduct in prison, have no significant ties to criminal enterprises and have no history of violence or significant criminal history.

    Advocates for greater clemency have argued that Obama should follow through on the underlying principles of the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act that he himself signed, which reduced the disparity in federal treatment of crimes involving crack cocaine and cocaine powder. Tuesday’s commutations suggest those advocates are being heard.

    Jon Stewart’s successor, Trevor Noah, is already experiencing backlash and controversy. First, here’s an about: Here’s What You Need To Know About New “Daily Show” Host Trevor Noah – born a crime in South Africa when relationships between white and black people were illegal, speaks six languages, etc.
    Is he perfect? No. People Are Mad About Trevor Noah’s Old Tweets About Women And Jews

    But after some digging, Twitter users grew more acquainted with Noah…and found some of his old tweets about Israel and Jews. […]

    On Tuesday afternoon, Comedy Central released the following statement to BuzzFeed News: “Like many comedians, Trevor Noah pushes boundaries; he is provocative and spares no one, himself included. To judge him or his comedy based on a handful of jokes is unfair. Trevor is a talented comedian with a bright future at Comedy Central.”

    Well, controversial is one thing. Also, the tweets are supposedly from five years ago. Is it possible he has learned in the meantime? Entirely. Does that make his previous tweets okay? Not at all. Does that invalidate him as the host of a late-night show? No.
    Some say the backlash is because he’s black: #TrevorNoah backlash was so swift is because he’s a Black body critical of white supremacy.
    Some choose not to carE: Listen up White Twitter – As soon as Woody Allen stops being given TV deals- I’ll have a listen at your objections to #TrevorNoah #ThatIsAll

  107. rq says

    This one here for the casual dismissal of other possible candidates to replace Jon Stewart, most notably Jessica Williams (who was mentioned as a possibility way back when Stewart said he would be leaving) – Essay: You Can’t Put Trevor Noah in a Box

    While you can’t put Trevor Noah in a box, what you can clearly do is see what Comedy Central was aiming for in making this 31-year-old biracial South African at the masthead of their flagship show. The easy answer might be that Steven Colbert, and John Oliver were gone, and previous contributors that may have been a good fit like Wyatt Cenac or Rob Corddry have moved on to other things. But in reality it likely has to do with ratings and the realization of just how important “The Daily Show,” to a global audience. “The Daily Show” is one of the most watched American programs around the world, and millennials and Generation Xers in Europe, Africa and Asia both learn English and American politics from the show’s nightly sketches.

    More on the twitter response: Mr. Noah and the Flood

    As Salon predicted, the backlash was immediate and intense. But it did not come in the form of “right-wing rage.” It came from Salon, among other progressive outlets, which were offended — they are always offended about something — by Noah’s Twitter history and the lame jokes found there, a predictable assortment of “drunk guys will hit on fat girls” shtick with a very large dose of ugly derision aimed at Jews, e.g., a bit about running over a Jewish child in a German car.

    Salon deputy entertainment editor Anna Silman led the charge.

    Why didn’t Comedy Central (or Noah himself) go back and give his Twitter account a deeper read before making him the public face of their biggest show? And do these tweets express genuinely racist and sexist sensibilities that we should be concerned about, or are they just bad jokes? . . . Is this PC culture going into overdrive, or is the deep-rooted ignorance and puerility expressed in some of these tweets a red flag for an (aspiring) political satirist?

    Why didn’t Comedy Central apply strict scrutiny here? There are a few answers to that question that are obvious — but not if you are inside the progressive cultural bubble. Those being:
    1. So-called liberals habitually tolerate black anti-Semitism. Jesse “Hymietown” Jackson remains a revered figure in the Democratic party; Al “Bloodsuckers” Sharpton was inflicted upon the general viewing public, or at least a couple of hundred members of it, by MSNBC; progressives are happy to stand with vile anti-Semites such as Louis Farrakhan, and Democratic organizations are happy to host them. So-called liberals tolerate black anti-Semitism because they believe in their hearts that blacks are their wards and that they cannot be expected to know any better. If unfunny anti-Semitism of the Nation of Islam variety is to be indulged, what’s an unkind joke or three?

    2. Comedy Central knows that Jon Stewart’s viewers are cheap dates. They are not very bright, and they are not very interested in the world around them. The function of The Daily Show is to flatter the prejudices of a certain segment of largely white and middle-aged metropolitan liberals. Daily Show viewers are not interested in original insight — indeed, the utterance of an original thought or the indulgence of an unpredictable angle of analysis would undermine the entire structure of the program. Daily Show viewers tune in so that they can be made to feel clever for continuing to believe the things they already believe. There is no reason to believe that Noah is going to fail to deliver those exceedingly modest goods.

    3. Comedy Central was probably counting on the usual double standard, which is, generally, a safe bet. When a couple of nobody RNC staffers ran up a $2,000 bill at a lesbian-bondage-themed strip club — it is a big tent, after all! — that was a national story, with Jon Stewart providing a Muppet reenactment. (Really.) Bill Clinton parties with Jeff Epstein on Pedophile Island? A strange quiet falls upon the land. If Rush Limbaugh had joked about running over Jewish children with his German car, there would be a presidential speech on the matter in the works.

    4. As for the fat-girl jokes and the other offenses against feminist sensibilities, Comedy Central et al. were no doubt counting on what we may as well call, since his name came up, the “Clinton Rule,” which is, roughly: Men with sufficient liberal credentials are allowed to mistreat women, and women without sufficiently liberal credentials are subject to any sort of abuse that can be meted out. Bill Maher can call Sarah Palin a . . . very unkind term for a woman, and the world is hunky-dory. When Sarah Palin is greeted by crowds of well-scrubbed liberals wearing “Sarah Palin Is a . . . ,” T-shirts, the progressive world yawns. If Sarah Palin’s organization uses crosshairs as a graphic element in a campaign ad, then we are having a national emergency about civility in public discourse. So of course a certified liberal can make fat-girl jokes.

    None of this should come as a surprise to anybody — at least, to anybody who doesn’t get his news from Comedy Central.

    Hmm.

    And one more from Vulture, before moving on: The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah Is Already in Trouble on Twitter [Updated]. So… I guess we’ll just have to see? Though I have to say, my first excitement has been… somewhat tempered.

  108. rq says

    Charged with same crime, Iowa paper shows black suspects’ mug shots but whites get yearbook pics, same as above, different source.

    On March 23, the Gazette‘s Lee Hermiston reported that three University of Iowa wrestlers were arrested after being caught in possession of several items that had been stolen from local homes in Marion, Iowa. The three suspects — Ross Lembeck, Seth Gross and Logan Ryan, all 19 and all white — were shown in the Gazette‘s pages in the their freshman yearbook pictures, wearing matching coats and ties.

    According to the Gazette, “The three wrestlers were charged with possessing alcohol under the legal age. Lembeck was charged with drunken driving. Gross was charged with interference with official acts because he fought with officers, police said. Ryan was cited and released.”

    They are accused of at least seven burglaries in the area.

    On the same day, Hermiston reported on four African-American suspects charged with a burglary in Coralville, Iowa, but this group of suspects — Kwain E. Crawford, 36; Milton Whitehead, 50; Quentin D.W. Eatman, 24; and Curtis J. Johnson, 29 — were all pictured in their police mug shots.

    The four men were charged with breaking into a residence on March 20 around 4:00 a.m. and assaulting the occupants. They were reportedly looking for a gun, but left instead with a TV, around $240 in cash and a cell phone.

    Currently, the Gazette‘s website shows mug shots of the wrestlers, but D’Angelo obtained screen shots of the original article.

    Someone on the Gazette‘s original Facebook thread about the article pointed out the disparity, only to have another commenter say, “Good point other than it’s safe to say those blacks didn’t have school pics…”

    Another commenter said, “Why are they referred to as ‘wrestlers?’ Are they wrestling in the story? I though they were burglars.”

    Do better, media.

    Whistleblower cop: Oxnard, Calif., police get gun and skull tattoos every time they shoot someone – trophy tattoos for shooting people? …

    The shooting death of Hockaday must, though, be viewed in context with the sordid history of the Oxnard, California, police department. Less than a year ago, the city of Oxnard was forced to pay a record $6.7 million to the family of Alfonso Limon, an innocent man who was shot 16 to 21 times by Oxnard police as he was walking home from a high school gym. They claimed to mistakenly believe him to be a suspect in another crime. He wasn’t. He was completely unarmed and just a few dozen feet away from his front door.

    As far back as 2001, the Los Angeles Times detailed how police in Oxnard, a city with just 170,000 people, had killed more people that year than cities 22 times its size. During that year, a concerned mother called 911 because she was afraid her depressed son, Robert Jones, would harm himself. Jones was cowering in a closet when police shot and killed him, and the city later paid the family $1.5 million for the “mistake.”

    Now, a former Oxnard police officer is blowing the whistle on a sick practice of officers in the department proudly “earning” tattoos every time they shoot and kill people while on duty:

    The former Oxnard police officer who recently left the department said he saw the tattoos on the officers. He made a drawing of what the “shooting” tattoo looks like. He said the tattoos were probably purchased from a tattoo shop in Port Hueneme because that is where Oxnard officers go to get tattooed.

    The former Oxnard police officer also provided the names of seven Oxnard officers and two retired officers who allegedly had the tattoos. The nine names also included two officers who are currently commanders at the Oxnard Police Department. One is a watch commander.

    The former Oxnard officer told American Justice that if smoke is added to the tattoo, coming out of the barrel, then the shooting was fatal. He said the tattoos are “earned” by officers involved in shootings.

    This behavior is deeply disturbing and is evidence of the reality that police see shooting and killing people as a source of pride instead of shame. Are they going to get tattoos for shooting and killing Hockaday? Did the officers who unjustly shot and killed Alfonso Limon get tattoos for that as well? This is sick.

    Sounds like gang signs, if you ask me.

    Update on Mumia: Famed political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal in critical condition

    According to emails from his contingent of supporters, Abu-Jamal was taken to the hospital facility on Monday “Shackled to the bed, alone, and prevented from knowing that his family is close by he remains in intensive care. Prison officials and hospital officials when not spreading misinformation are denying Mumia’s family access to visits, while also denying the family and his lawyers any information or records about his condition.”

    His brother, Keith Cook stated “The rules that the prisons have are very arcane. They don’t give out any information about prisoners to their families or anyone else. It’s like you have your hands tied because you don’t know how the prisoner is and you have no way of talking to him. I remember a month ago— Phil Africa exercising in the prison, next thing they know they moved him to a hospital and didn’t tell his family where he was, and three days later he was dead.”

    As of Tuesday morning, the family has been given access to see Abu-Jamal who has been incarcerated since 1982 for the murder of Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Long the subject of countless rallies and demonstrations with protesters, like him, proclaiming his innocence, he spent years on death row before being removed three years ago and now serving a life sentence.

    Veteran activist and a close associate of Abu-Jamal, Pam Africa was outraged by the treatment and conditions he was enduring. “Prison officials are lying,” she said. “Mumia is going through torture at the hands of the Department of Corrections through medical neglect. It is clear to people that they want to kill Mumia. They gave him the wrong medication which made his condition worse.

    “Inmates on the inside who questioned what was happening have been subjected to direct retaliation by the superintendent,” Africa continued. “They have been moving concerned inmates out of Mumia’s unit in an effort to both bury and keep this critical information from the public.”

    Ms. Africa was unable to talk extensively when called since she was at the hospital and at a press conference with an aim toward dealing with prison officials.

    So his family is being allowed to see him. I guess that’s nice of the authorities?

    85 years after infamous lynching, another noose stirs tension in Indiana town

    When his boss tossed the noose into his hands, Mikel Neal, a black firefighter in Marion, Ind., had two thoughts.

    First, was this a threat? And, second, how would Neal tell his wife about this bizarre act, with its eerie echoes of Marion’s dark past?

    “I’m still in shock,” Neal said in an interview late Monday. “I can’t fathom why would someone do what he did.”

    Assistant fire chief Rick Backs has since been suspended by the Marion Fire Department; he released a statement apologizing for forming a noose during a knot-tying exercise at the station house Feb. 13.

    But with a disciplinary hearing set for next week in the case, Neal and other black residents are worried that Backs may suffer no lasting consequences for an act they view as troubling and divisive. In an interview with The Washington Post, Neal, who also plans a news conference for Wednesday, said that Backs specifically targeted him that day, one of nine racial minorities on the 63-person force.

    “I heard him call ‘Mickey’ – that’s my nickname – and he tosses something to me,” Neal said, adding that Backs then turned and walked out of the room. “I catch it with my right hand. I’m looking at it in shock and awe. I was very upset.” […]

    Eighty-five years after the residents of Marion lynched her third cousin, Fears-Neal learned that the town’s assistant fire chief had tossed a noose to her husband. “I was definitely in disbelief. I just listened to the story in its entirety, trying to understand what was going on and why,” she said. “My heart was aching extremely.”

    Neal himself found it hard to make sense of the incident. He said fellow firefighters present that day immediately reacted with outrage on his behalf. Others insisted it must have been a joke. The fire chief and other city officials took it very seriously.

    “I want to apologize, on behalf of myself, to the community for this type of incident even happening,” Marion Fire Chief Paul David told a local TV station.

    The chief proposed to demote Backs, but Backs insisted that the town’s Board of Public Works and Safety should decide his fate. Neal and other firefighters plan to testify at the hearing Monday.

    “Quite frankly, this is the assistant fire chief. If he doesn’t have the brain matter to understand that throwing a black man a noose, in this town, is unacceptable …then the city policy provides for his removal,” said Walter Madison, an Ohio-based civil rights attorney who is working with Neal.

    Neal “would have been willing to lay his life down to save Backs if they were in a building that was burning,” Madison said. “How do you handle that person threatening you like this?”

    Backs has apologized, of course. Very, very, very sincerely. It was a bad joke, mmkay?

    Inside St Louis’s lurid crime tabloid: ‘There’s a callousness about the value of life here’

    For those 77 years, the Evening Whirl has covered the underworld of St Louis in lurid language, cataloging crimes under headlines like “Loon Chucks Shiv at 5-0” and “Bungling Bandit Bagged and Booked”. Regular features include a column called Where Not To Be, which provides a helpful map of where readers are most likely to be murdered, and Behind the Bars, an advice column from a prisoner named Jus Bleezy, who in the latest issue calls upon readers not to flush their lives “down the drain for a chain and some street fame”.

    Many articles start with a question: “WHY did a stone-cold gunslinger end a South Side squabble with slugs?” asks one query. “WHO is the con man from the womb who can steal the tighty off your whities that is being sought by North Patrol?” asks another. There are no bylines, giving it the feel of omniscient narration from an alternatively bemused and outraged voice. […]

    “People read the Whirl because we tell it like it is,” says Anthony Sanders, the paper’s 55-year-old editor-in-chief. “If you’re a criminal and we feel that you’re a scumbag, then that’s what we call you.”

    Sanders took over the Whirl in 1995 following the long tenure of Ben Thomas, an entrepreneur who founded the paper in 1938 to document St Louis’s black nightlife. Thomas soon realized he had an audience hungry for crime, and for seven decades the Whirl documented St Louis’s spiral into poverty and depravity, at times attracting national media attention.

    When Thomas appeared on the Arsenio Hall Show in 1989, Hall called the Whirl “the wildest newspaper in the country”, and its rhyming catalog of criminality has been cited as an inspiration for gangsta rap. After a dip in circulation at the turn of the century, the Whirl’s readership is back up to about 100,000 people.

    “There is a callousness about the value of life here, period,” says Sanders. “We are among the most savage and brutal people on the face of the earth. We are killing people indiscriminately. It doesn’t always have to be gang or drug related. There are people just going off and killing people. That happens all over the country.”

    By “we”, Sanders means humanity in general – and he sees part of the Whirl’s mission as exposing its darkest side. At the top of the paper is a slogan: “There Is Power in Naming and Power in Shaming!” Above that, a call to action: “Snitching & $$ Do Catch Crooks!” The Whirl’s mantras fly in the face of the Ferguson protest movement, which is premised on the idea that law enforcement is corrupt and in need of a massive overhaul.

    As such, Sanders’s black-owned, generally pro-police newspaper occupies an uneasy place in a St Louis struggling with the question of who to trust. […]

    St Louis has long struggled with a reputation for danger, with Ferguson only the latest national symbol of a region gone to rot. Civic organizations have released videos with mostly white narrators vouching for the region’s safety, including one where three white elite university students rapped defensively about crime statistics they believe are misleading. There is some truth to their claim: crime in St Louis tends to be highly localized in the region’s most impoverished areas.

    But the truism that St Louis is not dangerous hides a darker truth: those for whom it is dangerous have very little visibility.

    “You better check the Whirl if you ain’t heard of us / I’m from the part of St Louis where they murder us.” This is the refrain of Check Da Evening Whirl, a 2009 song by the St Louis rap group Street Gang. The video showcases members of the group reading copies of the Whirl in the roughest parts of St Louis while they rap about its lowlights – cold-blooded killers, ambulances that do not arrive, abandonment of the black community. The end of the video informs you that two of the people in it are dead. This is a side of St Louis that get little coverage – a side that the Whirl, in all its sensationalist glory, forces readers to see. […]

    Since the Ferguson protest movement began, detractors have responded with the catch-all question: “What about black-on-black crime?” It’s a question that stems from the baseless assumption that black communities do not really care about violence, or grieve their own losses. The Whirl, for all its breathless tabloid hectoring, is a rebuttal to that derailment. Its purple prose rides the line between condemnation and celebration, but its stock in trade is morality tales.

  109. rq says

    This article put up yesterday includes a reference to the last lynching in Indiana:

    In 1930, two young black men were lynched on suspicion of murdering a white man. Their hanging was captured in a gruesome image by a local photographer, a photo that became an iconic depiction of American lynching – and served as inspiration for the song “Strange Fruit.” It was the last recorded lynching in a northern state.

    A third teen, James Cameron, was spared, served time in prison and later wrote a book about the experience. He opened a museum dedicated to the thousands of black Americans killed by white lynch mobs, and eventually was pardoned by then Indiana Gov. Evan Bayh (D).

    Here’s two articles on Cameron and the apology he received: Senate apologizes for lynchings, and To Cameron, apology over lynchings is personal. Oh, and just for the record? The apology came in 2005.

    Jahi Chikwendiu, Jerry Wolford Win NPPA’s Photojournalists Of The Year – why relevant? Check out his portfolio, starting at photo 28, though to be honest, there’s lots more in there worth seeing, including a heartbreaking story about an immigrant (expat?) family broken up over a stupid law.

    The Handmaid’s Tale by @MargaretAtwood [Amazon link] First ever winner of the Clarke Award in 1987, here because check out the cover, which I happen to like a lot.

  110. rq says

    Hour after we publish, local paper alerts that fire chief who made noose accepts demotion (that is, once again, referencing the story above about the noose and lynchings.

    Here at #MOLeg, Sen. banned filming at committee hearing today. At #MUMcCulloch, officials ban press entirely. First Amendment is important.

    Protestors arriving in front of of Hulston Hall now for Pros. Bob McCulloch’s event at Law School. #abc17 Yep, McCullogh is still being invited to speak.

    Election Day chart for Ferguson and Jennings via @Crewof42. Election Day is just 7 days away.

    The library is recruiting StoryCorps volunteers. Most work in May, June & July. Contact arandazzo[at]fergusonlibrary[dot]net That’s the Ferguson library, in case anyone’s interested!

    Poor @TrevorNoah. If only he had been a Muslim-hating cartoonist, You’d all be tripping over each other to defend his right to offend. Which statement is not so much a defense of Noah as it is an indictment of the double-standard in who gets to offend whom.

  111. rq says

    Vineland Man Dies After Being Taken Into Police Custody Police brutality? Oh yes.

    The man, identified as Phillip White, was arrested at a home on the 100 block of Grape Street in Vineland, New Jersey around 11 a.m. Tuesday. He died shortly after while in custody.

    Witnesses told NBC10 officers were extremely physical with White after he was already restrained and unconscious on the street.

    “They punched him, stomped him, kicked him and then they let the dog out of the car,” said Ricardo Garcia. “The dog bit him on his face and around his body. There’s no call for that. Once a man is handcuffed and unconscious, you should have stuck him in the patrol car and take him to the police station. Instead they decided to beat him right here.”

    A dog is heard barking on a police dispatch recording of the incident.

    “118 West Grape,” the dispatcher says in the recording. “Subject…hyperventilating. Officers out.”

    An officer is also heard on the recording.

    “Slow all units down,” the officer says. “Subject under…tried disarming me.”

    The Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office is currently investigating the incident. A spokesperson for the office told NBC10 White was being arrested but they haven’t revealed why.

    Here’s a photo-essay via Faces of the Movement, about Latosha and her soon-to-be opened business in Ferguson. Beautiful photography, and a very moving story. Lots of good thoughts and best wishes for the success of her store!!!

    Columbia and Mizzou Organizations Come Together to Protest McCulloch Event at Mizzou Law School

    Mizzou Students and Columbia residents came together on Tuesday, March 31, 2015 to protest an event hosted by a recently formed MU chapter of the Missouri Association of Prosecuting Attorneys. Robert McCulloch was invited by this chapter and by the university to speak to law school students. Members of MU socialist club, members of MU for Mike Brown, the Mid-Missouri Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and Occupy CoMO came together to show their discontent for how the event was setup as well as the format. Payton Huse, a member of MU Socialist Club, decided to voice her opinion and protest the forum.

    “I’m protesting not only him (Robert McCulloch) being here, but the university’s lack of transparency and the lack of accessibility for the majority of students to actually participate in his forum,” Huse said.

    The joint group is protesting not only the fact that McCulloch is speaking, but also how the forum was closed to the general public, was invite only and was only open to MU law school students. According to a pamphlet handed out by FOR, the media were not informed until Friday, March 27 while MU students were still on spring break. The group believes this was done on purpose to limit potential dissent. Huse did have a message for students of MU.

    “This is your university, you’re paying a lot to be here, the university is supposed to be representing you and your interests and you should really be questioning people like this coming to speak and the university being a platform for their ideas,” Huse said.

    De La Soul’s Kickstarter for New Album Surpasses Goal. Just another small blip on the positie news spectrum.

    Job notice for new Ferguson Judge emphasizes focus on “quality of life” offenses (those not covered by legislative restrictions). Am I justified in thinking that that sounds a little fishy?

    Also just in general: Have you checked out Athens 7 “The Black Issue” yet? #LinkInTheirBio #athensnewren #ferrarisheppard #blacklivesmatter #stopbeingfamous
    #vtrails #supportisaluxury
    #blackexcellence #melanin

  112. rq says

    @BLMLA and #Pasadena chapters issue statement on arrest of activist charged w/making terrorist threats and more – the link: Joint Statement from Black Lives Matter Los Angeles and Pasadena Chapters on the Arrest of Organizer Jasmine Richards

    Richards, 28, was arrested on Mon., Mar. 30 just hours before she was slated to attend a Pasadena City Council meeting and share new information from the Office of Independent Review’s Gennaco report on the 2012 police killing of Kendrec McDade.

    Initially citing a failure to appear charge, police later amended the charges to reflect terrorist threats, trespassing, petty theft, assault and evading the police.

    Black Lives Matter organizers believe these charges to be in direct response to Richards’ participation in a peaceful demonstration held in Pasadena just six days prior to her arrest. The demonstration, held on Mar. 24 in collaboration with Kendrec McDade’s mother Anya Slaughter, commemorated the third anniversary of McDade’s death and was part of a heightened demand for answers regarding his killing and the public release of the Gennaco report in its entirety.

    Jasmine Richards is a young woman who has overcome the harsh realities of Pasadena and emerged as a leader in the local movement against police violence. She is exactly who we hope our young people will become: strong, caring, compassionate and dedicated to fighting for justice for Black people everywhere.

    Jasmine became a member-organizer with Black Lives Matter after her participation in the Black Lives Matter Freedom Ride to Ferguson in August 2014. Since her return to Pasadena from Ferguson, she has been pivotal in making sure that Kendrec McDade’s mother Anya Slaughter and other family members of those who have been murdered or brutalized by the Pasadena police are connected to and centered in the Black Lives Matter movement.

    Richards recently became engaged to her partner of three years April, who is both devastated and infuriated by the persistent targeting of her fiancée by Pasadena police.

    As an active member of Black Lives Matter Pasadena, Jasmine Richards’ activism against police brutality has made her a highly visible target for police harassment. These current charges are an attempt by law enforcement officials to mis-characterize her and undermine her work as a galvanizing force in the Black community of Pasadena.

    This isn’t the first time Black Lives Matter activists have been surveilled and discriminated against by police.

    Raising money for her bail here: Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles Legal Defense.

    Demand #Justice for #FloydDent Friday in #Inkster. #BLMDetroit #BlackLivesMatter Event link: via Facebook. Friday April 3, 10AM.

    We’ve waited for over 8 months for the internal investigation of Officer Pantaleo who killed Eric Garner to be completed. Enough already.

  113. rq says

    Vigil now gathered at #Smyrna City Hall. #NicholasThomas #JusticeForNick
    Hundreds have now gathered in #Smyrna for #JusticeForNick #NicholasThomas
    “It’s not a matter of if you’re going to encounter law enforcement, but when.” #JusticeForNick #NicholasThomas

    “State of District Address Ending at Lincoln Theatre” Can U tell? #ThinkMoor #BlackLivesMatter #BlackHomesMatter

    As March concludes #PhillipWhite is 290th person to be killed by cop in America in 1st 90 days of 2015. #Every8Hours That’s the man who died in Vineland police custody.
    Not to be confused with this Phillip White: Philip White, Cop Who Threatened Protesters With ‘Duty To Kill’ Tweet, Placed On Administrative Leave. That’s in Oakland.

  114. rq says

    Officer Bill ‘Robocop’ Melendez named in 12 brutality and corruption lawsuits, count ’em – 12!!

    Before Bill “Robocop” Melendez brutally assaulted 57-year-old Ford Motor employee Floyd Dent this past January, he was named in 12 separate lawsuits for brutally assaulting people, planting evidence, and making illegal arrests. One case, though, sounds shockingly familiar to what Melendez did to Floyd Dent—who was choked unconscious before Melendez punched him 16 times in the face and head breaking his orbital bone, causing severe bleeding, and a brain injury.

    A federal judge recently dismissed Melendez’s petition for “qualified immunity” in an extreme case of brutality and wrongful arrest that took place on July 26, 2011. After reviewing the evidence, District Court Judge Gershwin Drain determined that Melendez and several of the officers under his command used illegal force against Deshawn Acklin and that they would not be protected under the qualified immunity clause.

    On July 26, 2011, Bill “Robocop” Melendez brutally beat and choked Deshawn Acklin until he was completely unconscious and defecated on himself. Melendez did not stop the beating until he was pulled off of Deshawn Acklin by fellow officers. Later, fellow officers sprayed Acklin with mace when he was handcuffed in the back seat of the police car. They never even charged him with a crime, but let him go out of the back door of the local jail after they took him to the hospital for his injuries.

    In addition to the extreme brutality, it appears that Melendez, as he is currently trying to do with Floyd Dent, concocted a story about what Acklin did that day to deserve such a beating.

    1. On pages 5-6 of the court filing below, Melendez claims that he looked through a window with four fellow officers and saw Deshawn and another man in the house with guns. Every other officer interviewed has no recollection of such an occurrence. Deshawn himself has stated explicitly from the beginning that he never even touched a gun inside of the house.

    2. Melendez testified that he “heard voices in the kitchen area” from outside of the house. In their testimony, no other officers heard those voices. Deshawn states in his testimony that nobody was even in the kitchen, but that he and friends were hanging out in the living room.

    3. This is key: On page 7 of the court filing, Melendez states that he sees Deshawn pull a handgun out of his waistband. None of the four additional officers testified to seeing such a thing.

    4. On page 7, Melendez testified that Deshawn, in the presence of five heavily armed officers, closed his fist and took a swing at the face of Melendez. No other officer witnessed such a thing and, of course, Deshawn stated from the beginning that this was preposterous.

    Four more major discrepancies at the link. But this officer is revolting and should never, ever wear a uniform again, if law enforcement wants to recoup its image.

    Things don’t get better: Witness: Jersey police punched, kicked, and dog bit Phillip White’s face before he died in custody, that’s the newest one.

    Late Tuesday morning, police in Vineland, New Jersey, a suburb of Philadelphia, killed 32 year old Phillip White. Ricardo Garcia witnessed the entire incident,

    “They punched him, stomped him, kicked him and then they let the dog out of the car,” said Ricardo Garcia. “The dog bit him on his face and around his body. There’s no call for that. Once a man is handcuffed and unconscious, you should have stuck him in the patrol car and take him to the police station. Instead they decided to beat him right here.”

    Another eyewitness recalled what he saw,

    Agustin Ayala of Ayala Towing said he was driving down Grape Street in his tow truck when he saw two police cars on the street and two officers trying to handcuff a man…

    The two officers, including a K9 officer, handcuffed the suspect and brought him to the ground, he said. Ayala said he asked the officers to stop because he was concerned for the man’s welfare.

    Police have provided no real explanation for how something so awful happened to an unarmed man in their custody. The police chief, Timothy Codispoti, released a statement calling it a “tragedy.” He went on to say, “I ask that everyone allow time for our justice system to now investigate this matter to its truthful conclusion.”

    There’s video at the link.

    Jay Z’s Streaming Music Service Makes No Economic Sense

    Monday’s announcement did not specify exactly how the streaming service would work, but it did provide a basic overview. Tidal has two subscription levels: $9.99 per month for standard music quality, one at $19.99 per month for higher quality. Unlike other music streaming services like Spotify, Rdio, and Google Play, Tidal will not offer an ad-supported free subscription. Artists on Tidal will offer “windows” of limited exclusivity to their new music, an incentive for fans to purchase subscriptions and hear their favorite artist’s music before it’s available elswhere. The 16 artists who have inked exclusive deals—most of whom were on hand for the announcement—have each been given 3 percent equity in the company, according to Billboard.

    There are a number of problems with this approach. First, Tidal must convince consumers to purchase the subscriptions. As of Monday, Tidal had 540,000 subscribers, compared to Spotify’s 60 million active users and 15 million paid subscribers. It will be a major battle to convince consumers using a free streaming service to fork over $10 a month to Tidal. Additionally, it’s hard to imagine there’s much of a market for Tidal’s $20, high quality subscription. That may attract certain music lovers but the rest of us are satisfied with the standard quality. For consumers who want to use their device on mobile, high quality music—and especially HD music videos—will burn through data very quickly.1

    The second problem is that artists often don’t have control over their music. The record label does. This is the big caveat about thinking of Tidal as a worker co-op. If the artist wants to provide an exclusive “window” to Tidal, the label must sign off on that plan. There’s no reason to think that most labels will do that. Jay Z, with his record label Roc Nation, has an advantage here. He can give artists permission in advance to launch their new music exclusively on Tidal, which is why it’s no surprise that some of the artists—Calvin Harris and Rihanna—who have initially signed on are Roc Nation clients. But as Tidal tries to expand and must attract artists from other record labels, Jay Z will face a big question: Will those labels agree to launch music exclusively on Tidal? I’m skeptical, especially when other streaming services have more than 100 times as many active users. In the end, the record labels remain in control.

    Finally, it’s not clear how far this worker-ownership will extend. If the original 16 artists each received a 3 percent stake in Tidal, that’s nearly half the company already disbursed. Presumably, Jay Z intends to keep a large chunk as well. If Jay Z intends to allow all artists an ownership stake in Tidal, how much will less famous artists receive? I don’t expect those details to become public, at least not anytime soon. But it’s an important consideration. If Tidal ends up mostly owned by global music icons and leaves behind thousands of other artists, then it will not ensure artists are fairly compensated for their work. It’ll just be a way for the richest artists to get even richer.

    Meh.

    Another Ferguson suit! Intercept Reporter Files Suit Against Ferguson Police

    The Intercept’s Ryan Devereaux is joined in the civil rights suit, filed today in federal court in the Eastern District of Missouri, by three German journalists who were also arrested. They allege that the police department, St. Louis County, and 20 unidentified officers violated their First Amendment rights of freedom of press and freedom of speech, used excessive force against them, and arrested them without probable cause. (The complaint is embedded below.)

    On the night of August 18, Ferguson police shot Devereaux and Lukas Hermsmeier, a freelance journalist for several German newspapers, apparently with rubber bullets, handcuffed them with plastic ties for hours, and held them overnight in jail. Devereaux and Hermsmeier say they clearly identified themselves as press when they encountered the police.

    “It may sound naive but I never assumed the possibility of police officers shooting at journalists in a manageable situation like this,” Hermsmeier told The Intercept in an emailed statement.

    The other two plaintiffs, reporters Frank Herrmann and Ansgar Graw, were arrested the same day while trying to interview and photograph police and protesters. All four journalists were arrested on the charge of “failure to disperse.”

    Devereaux wrote about the arrest, and the men he met in the jail, as part of his Ferguson coverage for The Intercept last summer.

    “I was exposed to so many stories of everyday people locked in a predatory system of excessive fines and dubious warrants,” Devereaux said. “It’s clear that a lot needs to be done to address the policing crisis in Ferguson and much of St. Louis County.”

    “What happened to us last summer was just one example of the kind of overly aggressive and reckless behavior that police in St. Louis County have developed a reputation for,” said Devereaux.

    Bucknell University Expels 3 for Racist Radio Broadcast. It’s the same old shitty news over and over again, isn’t it.

    Bucknell University says it has expelled three students over a school radio broadcast in which they made racist comments and used a slur.

    University president John Bravman met with about 1,000 students and staff Tuesday, a day after sending an email to the university community informing them of the expulsions.

    He says the March 20 broadcast violated the private university’s standards.

    Bravman didn’t identify the students but shared their comments in “the interest of transparency.” He says one used the N-word, a second said “Black people should be dead” and the third said “lynch ‘em.”

    The school says an inmate at a nearby prison told a prisoner advocacy group about the comments. The group then contacted a faculty member.

    Bucknell is a liberal arts school in Lewisburg, about 50 miles north of Harrisburg.

    Have a good news: This is Justin Lynch. 17yr old who broke Michael Phelps 100m butterfly record. #ChangeTheStory

  115. rq says

    ‘HOME’ was predicted to bomb at gross $88M at the Box Office overall…It grossed $106M in its opening weekend. Why the low prediction, because it’s starring a black girl? Take that, assholes who believe diversity in media doesn’t matter.

    Oh, before I forget, a word on Phillip White. If you listen to the video, or read the articles, one of the officers actually says that he (White) was trying to disarm him (the officer). Yet according to witnesses the guy was already cuffed at this point. The good ol’ “he reached for my gun” argument. As if that means anything after someone is already handcuffed… #PhilipWhite Honestly, these people need to come up with something new, or just stop altogether. I vote the latter.

    Investigation underway after noose found on Duke campus. Of course there’s alternate explanations, but with the background racism and current upswing (in reporting? in actual events?) of racist things happening on campuseses (campi?)…

    Officials at Duke University said Wednesday that an investigation is underway after a noose was found hanging on a tree at the Bryan Center plaza.

    Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta said in an email to students Wednesday that the noose was removed early Wednesday. The Duke Chronicle reported that the noose, which was made with yellow rope, was removed at about 2:45 a.m.

    “To whomever committed this hateful and stupid act, I just want to say that if your intent was to create fear, it will have the opposite effect,” Moneta wrote.

    Authorities are working to identify who was responsible, Moneta said.

    Anyone with information about the incident should call Duke University police at 919-684-2444.

    Dave Chappelle gets hit with banana peel during show; man arrested

    Comedian Dave Chappelle knows what’s funny, and it’s definitely not getting hit by a banana peel while on stage.

    That is exactly what happened to the “Chappelle’s Show” star Monday night while he was doing stand-up at the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Santa Fe, N.M.

    Audience member Christian Englander, who “appeared to be highly intoxicated,” threw the peel at 41-year-old Chappelle, hitting the “Half Baked” creator on his leg during his set, according to a statement by the Santa Fe Police Department.

    Englander, who police say admitted to throwing the banana peel, was arrested on suspicion of battery and disorderly conduct.

    Englander, 30, had eaten the banana while waiting in line for the show and held on to the peel, according to the police report.

    Englander’s friend was sketching pictures during the show, and when Chappelle asked him his name after complimenting the work, the man responded, “Johnny Appleseed.” It said Englander told police Chappelle made racist jokes about the name, which Englander didn’t appreciate, so he stood up and threw the peel, according to the report.

    During the arrest, Englander allegedly made racist comments to police about Chappelle, according to the report. Chappelle told police Englander did not seem apologetic for what he did and his actions seemed racist, according to the report.

    In an expletive-laden audio recording that appears to be in the incident’s immediate aftermath, it is clear Chappelle is not happy, but he seems to play it cool and makes jokes about the situation.

    Chappelle’s agent declined to comment on the situation.

    Sounds like attempted reverse racism to me.

    So, this is a new British Company, Noose & Monkey (@NooseAndMonkey_): http://www.nooseandmonkeystore.com/ Pic. via @Queen_BeeKyte: Oh, the UK is also post-racial, just so you know. Cultural differences. Whatever. Just look at the picture, it is a HORRIBLE BRAND IMAGE.

  116. rq says

    Uh… the brand ‘Noose &Monkey’? If you go to their homepage? Uses a black man as a model. Their About page: Noose & Monkey is a story of mistaken identity and disguise. During the Napoleonic wars, the crew of a French naval vessel dressed their pet monkey in an officers uniform. After being shipwrecked off Hartlepool, the monkey was discovered on the beach. The locals, assuming he was a Frenchman and therefore the enemy, hung him in the town square.

    This brand looks at the the truth and the lie, the innocent and guilty, the Noose and the Monkey. Our concept is to focus on the two sides of every story and every man, and to play with twisting those sides.
    Okay, which still means someone didn’t think this through – and it also sounds like a veiled ‘both sides of equal validity to every story!’. And that whole part of the story where the locals assume the monkey is the Frenchman? … Anyway.

    When you are a romance writer and every single white couple gets an HEA but your POC don’t…? Yeah, that’s telling. And worth calling out. *ahem* HEA = Happily Ever After, I had to look it up. *shame*

    #NotJustUVa” Noose found on Duke’s campus. Vice President of Student Affairs has sent an email to students: “ At least the email promises action and sounds horrified and shocked.

  117. rq says

    Here’s a podcast from my former university, students speaking out about diversity (or, as it were, lack thereof) on campus: Boundless Whiteness Bounded Blackness – Yusra Khogali And Sandra Hudson. A lot of student perspectives and things that I never really noticed – most students from humanities (English, History, Caribbean Studies, etc.), not many speak about being in the sciences – which probably isn’t enough to draw any conclusions, but it kind of makes a conclusion all its own.

    Joye Forrest crowned first black Miss Teen Missouri U.S.A.

    Joye Forrest, a 19 year old freshman at California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia, CA was recently crowned Miss Teen Missouri U.S.A. 2015 in Kansas City during the annual beauty Pageant. With her crown she becomes the first African American teen to hold the title in Missouri pageant history.

    Forrest will represent Missouri in the national pageant in the Miss Teen U.S.A. 2015 pageant in Washington, D. C. during first week of July, 2015.

    Forrest addressed the issue of abstinence before and until marriage during the Question and Answer session faced by all of the finalists.

    “I want to encourage others to be courageous, stand up for what they believe and not to succumb to peer pressure for all the wrong reasons,” Forrest said.

    She entered the Miss Teen U.S.A. Missouri competition as Miss Spanish Lake Teen. Forrest has an extensive background in the performing arts as a singer, pianist, and dancer.

  118. rq says

    Maria Chappelle-Nadal & @AntonioFrench speaking on #Ferguson in #Chicago, April 4th, 9am, BJsMarket, 87th S Stony, $7 breakfast

    That extended hand ain’t work eh? RT @theGrio Common no longer speaking at college graduation after police outcry over ‘A Song for Assata’ Yup, that was Common who said to extend a hand in love towards those being racist: Common no longer speaking at college graduation after police outcry over ‘A Song for Assata’

    The change comes after the outcry from law enforcement, who take issue with a 2000 song by the Glory composer called A Song for Assata. The song which is a tribute to Assata Shakur — also known as Joanne Chesimard — who was convicted in the 1973 death of Trooper Werner Foerster, has law enforcement officials upset. One union representative said that Common’s appearance at the graduation would be like a “slap in the face” to law enforcement.

    Police say the 15-year-old song paints Shakur in a sympathetic light. The song’s lyrics include reference to Shakur’s “power and pride” as “beautiful” as well as the line “May God bless your soul.”
    Listen to ‘A Song For Assata’

    Police say the song is offensive because it paints a “cop killer” in a sympathetic light.

    Although Assata Shakur has been living in Cuba for decades as a fugitive, she has been recently in the news because of the talks between the United States and Cuba leading toward thawing relations between the two countries. Several lawmakers as well as police officials have called for the president to make Cuba turn Shakur over to the United States as a condition of the agreement, but Cuba said in early March that it had no plans to do so.

    Shakur has a strong base of supporters within the African-American community who believe that the former Black Panther member was framed. Many support Cuba’s decision to deny her extradition back to the U.S.

    A 15 year old song. Yup. Love.

    [UPDATE] Cop Who Unleashed Xenophobic Tirade On Uber Driver Is A Joint Terrorism Task Force Detective – so there you have the general attitude of these guys.

    The NYPD officer caught on camera unleashing an irate rant against an Uber driver is a detective with the department’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Police sources have identified the angry cop in question as one Detective Patrick Cherry. The NYPD says the Internal Affairs Bureau is investigating the incident, during which Cherry pops off at the driver: “I don’t know where you’re coming from, where you think you’re appropriate in doing that; that’s not the way it works. How long have you been in this country? Do you understand me? I don’t know what fucking planet think you’re on right now.”

    They’ve taken his badge and gun. For now.

    Leave it to UVA to make racist jokes via the Cavalier Daily after everything that’s happened this year and with its history generally. More on that in a minute.

  119. rq says

    The UVA Cavalier mocks #MarteseJohnson two weeks to the day of his arrest. America. April Fool’s, eh.
    The Cavalier issued an apology: An apology to our readers

    The managing board of The Cavalier Daily would like to issue a sincere apology for the publication of two pieces — “ABC officers tackle Native American student outside Bodo’s Bagels” and “Zeta Psi hosts ‘Rosa Parks’ party” — in our April Fools edition which was released this morning.

    Both articles have been removed from our website, and this apology will run in our next print edition. We are currently in the process of personally reaching out to affected communities to issue apologies.

    The April Fools edition is meant to start a conversation and provide satirical commentary on important issues. The April Fools edition is not meant to come at the expense of our peers. We neglected to foresee that these pieces would come across as the latter, and for that, we regret their publication.

    We understand that the arrest of our classmate Martese Johnson by Alcoholic Beverage Control officers was a highly traumatic incident both for the community and for Martese himself. In the days that followed, as we at the paper sought to comprehend what happened and provide the community with constructive reporting, we have felt upset, angry and confused alongside the student body. We are embarrassed that our empathy for these immensely serious issues was undermined by this piece. We had no intentions of victimizing another underrepresented community in the process.

    We also apologize for the article satirizing themed fraternity parties. Our intention was not to perpetuate stereotypes, but to highlight the offensive nature of these themed parties in the past. Again, our readers were hurt by this piece, and that makes its publication inexcusable.

    The stated mission of The Cavalier Daily is to provide the University community with new, relevant and insightful information that inspires critical conversation and even action on Grounds. Today’s April Fools edition was meant to further this mission in a humorous and satirical manner. Unfortunately, we fell short of this goal today.

    We have been and remain dedicated to providing unbiased coverage of racial issues on Grounds. We hope to regain our readers’ trust through that continued coverage. We will, as always, work tirelessly to provide you with all student perspectives — especially those who feel underrepresented.

    We deeply apologize to anyone who felt hurt, marginalized or that their experiences were trivialized by these pieces.

    “We apologize to anyone who felt hurt…” not “We apologize for being kinda stupid assholes”.

    .@GovernorVA has entered closed community mtg on #MarteseJohnson at Cville’s Mt. Zion First Baptist African Church.
    After an hour-long meeting with @GovernorVA on #MarteseJohnson, listen to what community leaders had to say @ 12.

    ‘Poor N–ger Party’ Printed on Wedding Photo-Booth Pictures: Report

    An African-American couple hired a photo booth and attendant for their 2012 Houston wedding in hopes that guests would take fun photos that would commemorate their special day. The photo captions were supposed to consist of the couple’s first names and the date. Instead, they say, some guests’ photo captions read, “Poor N–ger Party.”

    “Anybody would find this caption offensive,” the couple’s attorney, Cathy Hale, told ABC 13. “I’m offended by it.”

    According to the news station, the couple, who were not identified in the report by name, are now suing Premier Photography and the owner James Evans, charging negligence, mental anguish and breach of contract, claiming that Evans failed to deliver all the photos he promised.

    Evans and his attorney refused to speak with ABC 13 and referred the news station to their response filed with the civil court.

    In filings viewed by the news station, Evans claims there is no evidence linking his company to the captions and therefore no evidence of mental anguish, ABC 13 reports.

    The news station notes that “mediation is scheduled for Thursday morning. If no agreement is reached, the case is set for trial in July.”

    “They trusted this company to provide them with a service on their most important day, and what they got was the complete opposite; they got a slap in the face,” said Hale. “Every time they think about their anniversary, they think about this. It’s never going to go away.”

    And one for the WTF: Police officer forced into counseling for taking photo with Snoop Dogg

    While most people who took their photos with Snoop Dogg at this year’s SXSW suffered little more than embarrassment, a Texas Department of Public Safety officer now has to undergo counseling. Trooper Billy Spears was called in to work security at the annual festival, when he was stopped by Mr. Dogg—who served as this year’s keynote speaker—and asked to take a photo. Mr. Dogg then posted that photo on his Instagram with the caption, “Me n my deputy dogg [gun emoji] [twinkly star emoji] [more twinkly stars emoji].” Like most people, Spears’ commanding officers were not amused.

    According to the Dallas Morning News’ Christy Hoppe, Spears was reprimanded for “posing with a known criminal”—in this case Snoop Dogg, who has been charged several times with doing exactly what he constantly sings and talks about. There was also that case of murder he was given—and although he was acquitted, the question lingered of whether he would be the G that he was. In a way, the answer was yes, at least in the sense of authorities regarding 2015-era Snoop Dogg as a “known criminal.” The man tried to launch his own line of snack foods.

    But according to Spears’ attorney, Ty Clevenger, who’s currently fighting the citation, the real reason for why his client is being punished hints at the byzantine, Machiavellian internal politics that is synonymous with the Texas police force. He believes the whole thing is just retaliation for the time Spears “reported a Alcoholic Beverage Commission officer last year for unprofessional conduct,” after said officer detained him while off duty, all because he “thought Billy disrespected him in public.” Spears was suspended but had it reversed on appeal; Clevenger believes Spears’ commanders are now “papering Billy’s file with counseling incidents” in order to punish him, which should definitely help with his learning to respect them.

    In his blog post about the incident, Clevenger also says he believes the DPS found the Instagram photo by using facial recognition software to monitor its officers, insists Spears had no way of knowing about Snoop Dogg’s criminal history. (“Believe it or not, some folks don’t watch TMZ or read People Magazine”), and points to the rapper’s history of charity work, working with his youth football league, and other examples of Snoop’s overall softening. He also brings up the salient point that Spears’ superiors likely wouldn’t “get so bent out of shape about a picture with Willie Nelson,” another “known criminal” by DPS standards.

    Being indirectly responsible for a police officer’s disciplinary counseling is believed to be the most gangsta thing Snoop Dogg has done since 1993.

  120. rq says

    In case you were wondering, Georgia Police Have $70M Worth Of Military Surplus.

    There’s a federal program that distributes surplus military equipment to local law enforcement agencies. Georgia is fifth overall, for the amount its police have received – more than $70 million worth of free gear. That’s according to a national comparison by the Pew Charitable Trusts. […]

    In Georgia alone, police have a dozen mine-resistant vehicles and nearly 4,000 rifles, including M16 assault rifles and 12-gauge shotguns. The Pew Trust research said they’re all examples of the increased militarization of American police. But, Rotondo said to remember that some of that $70 million worth of gear is boots and flashlights.

    “Of course it’s not just boots,” said Maria Haberfeld, chair of law and police science at John Jay College.

    Haberfeld said anyone who’s concerned about the 1033 program shouldn’t just focus on the kinds of equipment, but on how it’s used and against whom.

    Back around when the 1033 program began in 1991, she visited a police chief in South Carolina and noticed something in the back yard.

    “So I asked him, you know, ‘What are you going to do with this tank? Why does a civilian police department need a tank?’ He said ‘you never know.’” said Haberfeld.

    She asked if he or anyone in his police department know how to operate that tank. The answer was no.

    For amusement. And a feeling of security. I mean, how hard can it be to learn to drive a tank, right?

    Now this one’s interesting. Coroner reclassifies Henry Glover’s death as homicide in post-Hurricane Katrina police shooting case

    Nearly a decade after New Orleans police fatally shot Henry Glover and incinerated his corpse, Glover’s death has been classified as a homicide, Orleans Parish Coroner Dr. Jeffrey Rouse announced Wednesday.

    Rouse’s predecessor, longtime Coroner Frank Minyard, had declined to reclassify Glover’s cause of death, leaving it “undetermined” even after a former New Orleans police officer, David Warren, acknowledged at two federal trials that he shot Glover, 31, with a high-powered rifle from the second-floor breezeway of an Algiers strip mall on Sept. 2, 2005.

    A second former officer, Gregory McRae, admitted igniting Glover’s body in a car behind the Algiers levee, but he maintained that act was not part of a cover-up but rather a reaction to post-traumatic stress disorder that he and other first responders experienced after Hurricane Katrina.

    McRae was convicted and sentenced to 17 years in federal prison. He is the only one of the five NOPD officers accused in the Glover case ultimately to be held accountable for what federal prosecutors portrayed in a 2010 trial as a conspiracy to cover up an unjustifiable police shooting, in part by burning the key piece of evidence: Glover’s body.

    The classification of homicide “simply requires the action of one person causing the death of another,” Rouse said in a news release. “This action today reflects my medical opinion, based upon the totality of the evidence, that the death of Henry Glover was due to the actions of another person.” […]

    After the shooting, Calloway traveled with the shot and bloodied Glover and Edward King, Glover’s brother, in passerby William Tanner’s white Chevy Malibu to seek medical help at an outpost authorities had set up at nearby Habans Elementary School.

    Calloway, 44, claims that when the group got there, police beat him while his friend died unattended in the backseat of the Malibu. He has filed a federal lawsuit, which remains on hold and may be delayed further by Rouse’s decision. Calloway, who said he still suffers from PTSD and has recurring nightmares of being shot, said that if the new ruling slows his case further, that’s OK by him.

    “I’m stupid happy. I’m not happy for me. I’m happy for Henry’s children, for his kids, man. Happy for his mother,” he said.

    Calloway, who testified at both trials, said he’s ready to do so again should Cannizzaro choose to prosecute Warren, or anyone else, in state court, as Glover’s family hopes.

    “The truth is the truth. I’m gonna get up and say the same thing I’ve been saying for 10 years,” he said. […]

    In an interview, Rouse said he reviewed all the available evidence in the case, including federal court transcripts, because he felt it was his duty “to be a good nerd about it and read every last word.” Warren stipulated in his second trial that he fatally shot Glover.

    Most critical to his inquiry, however, was information he received “on loan from the FBI with the explicit instruction that I was not allowed to share it with anyone,” Rouse said.

    “I haven’t spoken to my wife about it, my chief investigator about it, my lawyer about it, and unfortunately I can’t share it with you,” Rouse said. “I will say that it was thorough and more than sufficient for me to reach a medical determination that the appropriate classification of death in Mr. Glover’s case would be homicide.”

    Asked what became of Glover’s skull, which disappeared sometime after his remains were recovered, Rouse said, “You’d have to ask the FBI for that information.”

    Minyard, by contrast, said he had seen “no new scientific evidence (on which) to base a reclassification” when he chose to leave the cause of death undetermined before leaving office, months after Glover supporters stormed his office following Warren’s acquittal. Rouse said Minyard also had reached out to federal authorities about Glover’s death but “for whatever reason, they didn’t give him any information.” […]

    Warren, a rookie officer at the time of the shooting, was convicted in 2010 for his role in Glover’s death and sentenced to 25 years in prison. But the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated his conviction in 2012, finding that Warren’s case had been unduly prejudiced when he was made to stand trial alongside fellow officers accused in a cover-up, one prosecutors couldn’t show Warren knew anything about.

    A jury found Warren not guilty of civil rights charges when he was retried alone in December 2013.

    The appeals court also dismissed one count against McRae, who admitted burning Glover’s body, and ordered a new sentencing.

    By then, U.S. District Judge Lance Africk already had tossed out the conviction of the third convicted officer, Lt. Travis McCabe, after a draft police report turned up in Warren’s case that contradicted allegations McCabe had doctored a police report on the shooting. Months after Warren’s acquittal, in December 2013, federal prosecutors declined to retry McCabe, who has since returned to the police force.

    Africk last year left no doubt, as he resentenced McRae to an identical 17 years, that he thought Warren’s account of shooting Glover out of fear was bogus, and that McRae’s claim of burning Glover’s body in a fit of post-Katrina stress also failed the sniff test.

    “You did not merely burn a corpse. You, a law enforcement officer, burned a corpse to obstruct justice,” Africk said. “The court remains convinced that Glover posed no immediate threat to Warren or any other individual and that he was merely an unarmed, non-dangerous man, whom Warren shot dead.” […]

    Warren testified he feared for his life and pulled the trigger only after he saw two men storm the rear gate of the mall at Gen. De Gaulle and Texas drives in Algiers — a claim the second federal jury apparently believed.

    Glover and Calloway had rolled up behind the shopping center in a stolen truck to fetch suitcases packed with looted items left behind by two female friends who lived nearby. Their plan, Calloway testified, was to grab the suitcases and clear out of town.

    “No warning. It was: Pow. Gunfire. ‘Leave now,’ ” Calloway said Wednesday, recalling the shooting.

    On Wednesday, Calloway teared up as he recalled Glover, saying his friend and brother-in-law was an avid reader and family man.

    “He would go every morning like clockwork to get a cup of coffee and a newspaper. Every day. He was a guy always tried to do better. I knew him since he was a child, being a positive person. He was the disciplinarian for the kids,” Calloway said.

    “The last time I saw him, I didn’t know if he was dead already. He was dying. He was laying in the back of Tanner’s car. They drove off with him. I never seen him no more.”

    He fucking feared for his life from a rooftop, with the men down on the road? Well fuck.

    And President Obama just signed the Slain Officer Family Support Act of 2015 into law. America.

    Common Pulled From Kean University Commencement Speech After Police Complaints. Blah, blah, we don’t like his song, etc. blah blah blah.

    Teen Heart Transplant Recipient Dies in Fatal Police Car Chase

    A Georgia teen who received a heart transplant less than two years ago has died in a car accident while fleeing police, according to officials.

    Anthony Stokes, 17, was driving a car that matched the description of a car used to flee a home burglary, in which a masked person allegedly shot a gun at an 81-year-old woman who was home watching television, Roswell Police spokeswoman Officer Lisa Holland told ABC News.

    When officers tried to pull the vehicle over, the driver allegedly refused to stop, and they chased him, she said.

    “The car lost control at an intersection, ran over a curb, hit a pedestrian and ran into big, metal pole,” Holland said.

    Stokes died Tuesday night from injuries sustained in the crash.

    17.

    American police killed more people in March (111) than the entire UK police have killed since 1900

    Yeah. Those numbers are real.

    A total of 111 people were killed by police in the United States in March of 2015. Since 1900, in the entire United Kingdom, 52 people have been killed by police.

    Don’t bother adjusting for population differences, or poverty, or mental illness, or anything else. The sheer fact that American police kill TWICE as many people per month as police have killed in the modern history of the United Kingdom is sick, preposterous, and alarming.

    In March:

    Police beat Phillip White to death in New Jersey. He was unarmed.

    Police shot and killed Meagan Hockaday, a 26-year-old mother of three.

    Police shot and killed Nicholas Thomas, an unarmed man on his job at Goodyear in metro Atlanta.

    Police shot and killed Anthony Hill, an unarmed war veteran fighting through mental illness, in metro Atlanta.

    I could tell 107 more of those stories.

    This has to end.

    March. There’s still April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, and December of this year left. And then all other years still to come.

  121. says

    3 Florida prison guards exposed as members of KKK, plotted to kill black inmate

    The three men — Thomas Jordan Driver, 25, David Elliot Morgan, 47, and 42-year-old Charles Thomas Newcomb — each were arrested Thursday on one state count of conspiracy to commit murder, according to a statement from Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi’s office.
    Driver and Morgan are current employees of the Department of Corrections, and Newcomb is a former corrections employee. The state’s statement says Driver had the fight with the inmate.
    Bondi’s office said the three were members of the Traditional American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
    The case will be prosecuted in Columbia County in north Florida. The State Attorney’s office there did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
    The wide-ranging investigation included the FBI, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, and various state and local agencies. The FBI’s office in Jacksonville said it would not comment on an open investigation.
    The charges for the three men mark the latest black eye for the Florida Corrections Department.

  122. rq says

    Hundreds gather for a rally outside of #Duke Chapel as the university President makes remarks about the noose found.

    County Prosecutor: #PhillipWhite handcuffed when he went into “respiratory distress”, & there may be video | @deray There’s a press release attached to that tweet.

    2 Fatally Shot, 12-Year-Old Boy Wounded In Hawthorne Officer-Involved Shooting

    According to a preliminary investigation, a Hawthorne police officer was on patrol when a woman driving a car pulled up and said she was being followed. The officer told the driver to pull up in front of him and he would investigate, sheriff’s officials said.

    Investigators say a white Cadillac then pulled up next to the officer and the woman.

    “The right front passenger of the suspect vehicle got out and began firing at the driver and passenger in front of the police officer. The police officer immediately got out. And an officer-involved shooting occurred,” Los Angeles County sheriff’s Lt. Dave Coleman said.

    A passenger in the front seat of the shooter’s car was killed, and the male driver and a man in the rear seat were arrested.

    A 12-year-old boy was in the victim’s car.

    “The child ran to a different location, and being treated now at a local hospital for gun shot wounds,” Coleman said.

    Both the shooter and the female victim were declared dead at the scene.

    Just a random case of incompetence, if the victim asking for help was one of those actually fatally shot… by the officer supposedly helping her.

    Atlanta Educators Convicted in School Cheating Scandal

    On their eighth day of deliberations, the jurors convicted 11 of the 12 defendants of racketeering, a felony that carries up to 20 years in prison. Many of the defendants — a mixture of Atlanta public school teachers, testing coordinators and administrators — were also convicted of other charges, such as making false statements, that could add years to their sentences.

    Judge Jerry W. Baxter of Fulton County Superior Court ordered most of the educators jailed immediately, and they were led from the courtroom in handcuffs. Judge Baxter, who presided over a trial that began with opening statements more than six months ago, will begin sentencing hearings next week.

    “Our entire effort in this case was simply to get our community to stop and take a look at our educational system,” District Attorney Paul L. Howard Jr. said, adding, “I think because of the decision of this jury today that people will stop. I think people will stop, and they will make an assessment of our educational system.” […]

    The inquiry, which was completed in 2011, led to findings that were startling and unsparing: Investigators concluded that cheating had occurred in at least 44 schools and that the district had been troubled by “organized and systemic misconduct.” Nearly 180 employees, including 38 principals, were accused of wrongdoing as part of an effort to inflate test scores and misrepresent the achievement of Atlanta’s students and schools.

    The investigators wrote that cheating was particularly ingrained in individual schools — at one, for instance, a principal wore gloves while she altered answer sheets — but they also said that the district’s top officials, including Superintendent Beverly L. Hall, bore some responsibility. […]

    Defense lawyers, some of whom were clearly angered by Judge Baxter’s decision to jail the educators on Wednesday, immediately began planning appeals and said they were stunned by the verdicts.

    20 years in prison, for cheating on school tests. Can you imagine?

    Suspended for supporting the Second Amendment: SCLC suspends Georgia Chapter President for call to bear arms

    The Southern Christian Leadership Conference Wednesday suspended the president of its Georgia chapter, the day after he urged blacks to exercise their Second Amendment right to bear arms in response to recent police shootings of unarmed blacks.

    SCLC National President and CEO Dr. Charles Steele made the announcement at a news conference.

    The action comes after Georgia SCLC President Sam Mosteller Tuesday called on all African-Americans to exercise their Second Amendment right to bear arms.

    In a statement, Dr. Steele said, “We have found that his (Reverend Mosteller’s) comments do not represent, not reflect the principles and position of this organization.”

    As a result, the national organization announced the indefinite suspension of Rev. Mosteller, ordered an internal investigation, and ordered him to undergo an internal training program.

    Tuesday, Rev. Mosteller told reporters he is tired of talking and marching and of inaction at the local and federal level.

    He said police and the justice system have failed blacks in cities nationwide.

    Reverend Mosteller stated, “We going to have to do something in our community to let the rest of America know that we are not going to be victimized by just anybody whether it be police or folks that decide that black people are thugs and we need to control that black community. We [are] not going to allow that anymore.”

    But when asked if he was suggesting blacks pack weapons the reverend insisted he was being misquoted saying, “Listen, listen I didn’t say that. I said the Second Amendment right? I didn’t say pack weapons, I said Second Amendment. Please don’t put words in my mouth, please don’t do that… Do you have to carry a weapon to avail yourself of the Second Amendment the answer is no, you don’t have to okay?”

    In his statement, Dr. Steele said the SCLC was founded and maintains its position against violence of “ANY type.”

    Reform! Municipal court reforms include no new charges for missing court date, Missouri speaker says – so maybe less accumulative fees?

    People charged with speeding and other minor traffic offenses in municipal courts would no longer face additional charges simply for missing court dates under sweeping changes pushed by House Speaker John Diehl.

    A failure to appear charge has “the effect of doubling or quadrupling the amount of fines that are assessed” against traffic offenders and “puts them in a hole they can never get out of,” Diehl, R-Town and Country, said Wednesday. […]

    St. Louis University law professor Brendan Roediger said that by eliminating the failure to appear charge, the House plan was “the closest to real reform that we’ve gotten so far. I’m elated that we’re talking about real change.”

    But Roediger, who is part of a legal team alleging constitutional violations in municipal courts, said he was disappointed that the new proposal would allow a person to be jailed for up to 48 hours if arrested on a warrant for a minor traffic violation — and for up to 72 hours for other violations.

    “Three days is a very long time for a poor person to be locked up on a speeding ticket,” Roediger said. […]

    Under the House plan, failure to appear charges would no longer be filed in connection with municipal traffic offenses that carry up to four points on drivers licenses.

    Diehl said a warrant could still be issued for the underlying traffic charge if the person didn’t show up in court, “but we’re not going to allow municipalities to pile on that additional charge.”

    Sens. Jamilah Nasheed, D-St. Louis, and Maria Chappelle-Nadal, D-University City, attended Diehl’s news conference outlining the bill. They applauded his efforts.

    “We have to change the climate,” said Chappelle-Nadal, whose district includes Ferguson. “I know that my constituents want to seek a balance between safety and also being overburdened,” she said.

    The House proposal is “a solid step in the right direction,” according to a statement released by the Rev. Starsky Wilson and Rich McClure, co-chairmen of the governor-appointed Ferguson Commission.

  123. rq says

    University removes Common as graduation speaker amid police outcry

    “The students expressed interest in Common because he composed the Oscar-winning song Glory with our prior commencement speaker John Legend,” Kayne said. “While we respect his talent, Kean is pursuing other speaker options.”

    New Jersey state police were troubled by the choice because of lyrics in Common’s 2000 recording A Song for Assata. The song is about Joanne Chesimard, who goes by the name Assata Shakur, and was convicted in 1977 of killing trooper Werner Foerster in 1973. She escaped from prison and has been living in Cuba as a fugitive.

    The song describes the shootout and the treatment meted out to Shakur in prison: “A call, one cot, no window, facing hell/Put in the basement of a prison with all males” and concludes “Assata had been convicted of a murder she couldn’t have done/Medical evidence shown she couldn’t have shot the gun.”

    Chris Burgos, president of the State Troopers Fraternal Association of New Jersey, called the choice of Common a “slap in the face”.

    “What is troubling here is that a state university that is subsidized with state taxpayer funds, is once again being questioned on their decision-making at the highest levels,” Burgos said in an emailed statement.

    Here’s another on the NYPD officer being xenophobic: Cop caught berating Uber driver in xenophobic rant is NYPD detective, police sources say (WARNING: GRAPHIC LANGUAGE IN VIDEO)

    The NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau is investigating the video, which shows Det. Patrick Cherry lambasting the Uber driver during a traffic stop and mocking his broken English.

    “I don’t know where you’re coming from, where you think you’re appropriate in doing that; that’s not the way it works. How long have you been in this country?” Cherry, who is white, barked at the driver after pulling him over in an unmarked car with flashing lights, according to video of the encounter.

    The roadside rage erupted after the detective tried to park the unmarked car without using his blinker, and the Uber driver went around him and gestured to him to use his signal, according to Sanjay Seth, a passenger in the Uber car who posted the video clip.

    The car Cherry drives in the video does not belong to the NYPD, according to a police source.
    The angry cop pictured here, yelling at an Uber driver and mocking him, is NYPD Detective Patrick Cherry, police sources said. Sanjay Seth/via YouTube
    The angry cop pictured here, yelling at an Uber driver and mocking him, is NYPD Detective Patrick Cherry, police sources said.

    Moments before slamming the car door and storming away, the hot-headed Cherry, who is based out of Federal Plaza in Manhattan, shouted at the driver: “I don’t know what f—ing planet you’re on right now!”

    The detective repeatedly mocked the mild-mannered driver’s accent and pronunciation of English words, cursing at him. The driver responded calmly, saying “okay” during one point in Cherry’s tirade, the video shows. The driver’s ethnicity was not immediately clear.

    The driver filed a complaint with police, which prompted the NYPD to assign the case to the Internal Affairs Bureau.

    #duke students lead silent march after noose found hanging from a tree on campus #DukeNoose

    This Cop Is On Trial For Firing 49 Shots At Two Unarmed Suspects. There’s a cop on trial! A recap:

    The events of Nov. 29, 2012, began when Officer John Jordan stopped Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams for a signal violation. Jordan also suspected Russell and Williams of drug activity, originally spotting them outside the Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry men’s homeless shelter, a spot known for drug dealing and often referred to as “the wall.”

    Jordan told investigators that as he approached Russell’s Chevy Malibu, Williams, in the passenger seat, became irate and started flailing and screaming. Russell put the car back in gear and took off. Jordan ran back to his car and gave chase, but he was too slow and Russell lost him.

    The episode might have been over if Russell’s Malibu, with a history of engine woes, didn’t let out a booming backfire right front of Nan — which he mistook for a gunshot.

    For the next 22 minutes, Timothy Russell led police on a chase reaching speeds of 100 mph.

    As Russell ran red lights and blew through busy intersections, 62 police vehicles and more than 100 officers joined the pursuit, according to a state investigation. A federal investigation would later determine that 37% of the Cleveland Police Department was involved.

    Russell eventually reached a dead end in the staff parking lot of Heritage Middle School. As he circled the lot looking for a way out, Officer Wilfredo Diaz took the first shots at the Malibu.

    “Shots fired, shots fired!” rang out over the police radio as Diaz pulled the trigger and fired four shots. None of the officers on the scene knew for sure, but all would later tell investigators they assumed that it was the suspects firing, not the police.

    “They’re ramming us!” an officer broadcasted as Russell’s Malibu collided with a police car blocking the only exit.

    “Watch for crossfire! Crossfire!” someone yelled as the officers unleashed a barrage of bullets.

    When it was all over, 13 officers fired 137 shots. Russell and Williams were hit more than 20 times each and died inside the Malibu. No guns were found inside the car. Every shot fired came from a Cleveland cop’s gun. Investigators later determined that during the shoot-out there were two waves of gunfire — one lasting 17 seconds and another lasting about five seconds.

    To get an idea, count off 17 seconds and imagine a constant barrage of gunfire during that time. That is an extraordinarily long amount of time for something like that. To continue:

    In all, 63 officers were suspended, one supervisor was fired, and two more supervisors were demoted. Days of protests and rallies in Cleveland followed. The public outcry and horrific detail surrounding Williams and Russell’s killings by police became the catalyst for a Department of Justice investigation of the department’s use of force policies — the second federal probe of Cleveland Police in less than 10 years. The families of Williams and Russell each reached $1.5 million settlements with the city.

    That might have been the end of the of the legal efforts to right the wrongs of Nov. 29, if it weren’t for Officer Michael Brelo’s role.

    During the second wave of gunfire, the five-year veteran of the department jumped on the hood of the Malibu, trained his Glock on the suspects, and sent a hail of bullets into the windshield.

    Of the 137 bullets fired by cops in the parking lot that night, 49 of them came from Brelo’s gun. That second, five-second wave that investigators wrote about came solely from his Glock 17.

    On April 6, Brelo will go on trial for two counts of voluntary manslaughter. If convicted, he could face up to 10 years in prison. Of the 13 officers who fired shots that day, Brelo was the only one indicted by a Cuyahoga County grand jury. (Five other supervisors face misdemeanor charges for dereliction of duty.) […]

    “I want to make sure my brother’s life wasn’t in vain. If somebody was responsible, I want it uncovered,” Michelle said. “I really believe that they’re using this guy Brelo as a scapegoat to take the fall.

    “I believe that Brelo getting up on that car and shooting into deceased bodies was just unnecessary, but there were other officers there that shot a lot. And I don’t think it’s fair that he’s the only one who should be brought to trial.”

    One question she may never know the answer to is why her brother didn’t stop that night when he was pulled over.

    “I know he had a reason. I don’t believe he was high and out of his mind.” […]

    Court documents show that during the grand jury proceedings that followed the state’s investigation, all officers who shot their weapons on Nov. 29 invoked their Fifth Amendment rights and declined to testify for fear of self-incrimination.

    Then Sabolik and Farley were granted immunity and testified.

    Sabolik and Farley’s grand jury testimonies remain sealed. However, during his interview with investigators, Sabolik’s recollection of how he learned the identity of the shooter on top of the hood contradicts Brelo’s explanation that he lost time between when he took cover and holstered his gun.

    “You said later on you found out what was up on the hood of the car?” investigators asked Sabolik. “How did you find out?”

    “Because he was talking about it,” the rookie replied.

    “He was talking about?” investigators probed. “Who was that?”

    “Mike Brelo,” Sabolik said.

    VOLUNTARY MANSLAUGHTER FOR FIRING INTO A CAR AT PEOPLE, because shooting at people never ever kills them ever. Right? Who’da known??

    Police misbehaviour:Baltimore police slow to release internal reports

    They created a Force Investigation Team to look into all incidents in which officers used deadly force or when an interaction with police resulted in serious injuries. They pledged to publicly release reports of the internal investigations on their website.

    Nine months later, seven reports have been released out of 40 incidents logged in 2014 and 2015. The last report the agency released is for an incident that took place in July.

    Asked this week why more reports haven’t been released, the Police Department did not provide a response.

    In early February, Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts cited the FIT database as part of the agency’s effort to become more transparent. Asked then why police had posted so few reports, he called the process an “evolution” and said the website should be viewed as a step forward.

    “We’re heading in the right direction, we’re doing the right things,” he said. “As we evolve and continue to evolve, we will get better at the things that we do, but we’re going in the right direction so you should give us some credit.”

    Excessive-force complaints have dropped by nearly half since 2012, he said.

    Batts said police shooting and use-of-force cases take time to investigate and determining whether officers followed both the law and police protocol can be complicated.

    Back then, Deputy Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said FIT reports are “completed in various stages” but that doesn’t mean they can be released. The posting of reports on the website is the last step after the reports are reviewed by a Force Review Board, prosecutors and the commissioner.

    “The publication of that [report] is the absolute last step, so they’re moving along,” Rodriguez said. “We want them to be expeditious as possible, but we want to also make sure that they’re accurate.”

    For fun: The Full Transcript Of Jay Z’s Tidal Q&A At The Clive Davis Institute Of Recorded Music.

  124. rq says

    ICYMI: #TerrellBeasley was 4th man N #STL area found shot-&-burned-in-car since Sept. Turned out he was shot by SLMPD

    Mexicans of African Descent Established Los Angeles on This Day in 1781 – not actually this day, but a day in September.

    Governor of Las Californias, a Spanish-owned region, Felipe de Neve called on 11 families to help build the new city in the region by recruiting them from Sonora and Sinaloa, Mexico. According to a census record taken at the time, there were two persons of African ancestry, eight Spanish and Black persons, and nine American Indians. There was also one Spanish and Indian person, with the rest being Spaniards.

    According to the efforts of historian William M. Mason, the actual racial makeup of the pobladores was perhaps more racially balanced than not. Mason wrote that of the 44, only two were White, while 26 had some manner of African ancestry and that 16 of the group were “mestizos” or mixed Spanish and Indian people.

    Black Mexicans Luis Quintero and Antonio Mesa, the only two named on the 1781 census, married mixed women and bore several children between them.

    The pobladores founded the city “El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora La Reina de los Ángeles sobre el Río Porciúncula” (Spanish for The Town of Our Lady Queen of the Angels on the Porciuncula River) that day, after some priests found the area 10 years prior. Another historian, Dr. Antonio Rios-Bustamante, states that Los Angeles’ original settlers were even more mixed than the census stated, but was that African, Indian and European ancestry was a hallmark.

    Learn something new everyday.

    Cop Filmed Berating an Uber Driver Will Be Transferred Out of Elite Unit. I certainly hope so – an elite unit is not where you want those most prone to frustration and short tempers.

    Boycott @Cosmopolitan this is downright disgusting. Article on this later, but – basically – four comparison photos, with photo on left of a black woman or other woman of colour saying “R.I.P.” (to her particular make-up style), and the photo on the right of a white woman demonstrating the new make-up style. It’s a lot more terrible than it may seem right now.

    Supreme Court Tired Of White Kids Whining About Their Precious American Flag Short version – white kids and parents in a school upset over Mexican students celebrating Cinco de Mayo. And being obnoxious about it.

  125. rq says

    From FtB’s very own Dana Hunter, Even Our Police Dogs are Racist – When Their Human Handlers Are. It’s about as bad a read as it sounds.

    People treat dogs like they don’t share our prejudices, but forget they’re handled by humans, and eager to please those humans. They don’t have an abstract philosophy of life. They don’t have an independent morality that tells them always being sicced on people of color is wrong. They’re pretty good reflections of what people teach them and allow them to do.

    We need to remember that when people are saying, “The dog alerted to X.” It’s not as objective as we like to think. The dogs are clever, and trying to please, and pick up on prejudices both conscious and unconscious. The article shows they’ll alert when there’s nothing there, just because their handler is putting off signals saying something should be there, and they expect the dog to find it. And handlers don’t always listen to their dogs, so the dogs learn not to mention it when something is there. […]

    I used to have faith in law enforcement. I used to trust the K-9s and their handlers. That trust is very severely eroded by now. And while I think we can improve, fix some of the problems, and reduce the various isms that are staining the profession, I believe now we need to always retain a healthy skepticism. Lots of someones need to watch the watchmen. And their little dogs, too.

    A look back into history. 17 Times “The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air” Got Way, Way Too Real. Worth a read for a few laughs that are more than jokes.

    Civil rights commission reports on STL hearing

    On Monday, February 23, Rosenfeld was among more than 20 people who presented to the Missouri Advisory Committee, which advises the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The 12-member committee’s goal was to hear testimony on civil rights concerns related to community and police interactions in Missouri.

    On Wednesday, April 1, the committee held a conference call to discuss preliminary findings from the all-day meeting, held at UMSL. From what he heard from panelists, committee member David Rose, an UMSL professor, said it seems hotspot policing is not an effective strategy.

    “We are getting too far away from community-based policing, and now we are suffering the effects of that,” Rose said.

    The committee voted Wednesday to send an advisory memo to the U.S. commission, recommending that they look into eight areas of concern raised by the panelists. Those include insufficient data on police shootings, municipalities’ reliance on court fees to fund governments, and hotspot policing becoming a priority over community-based policing. All the recommendations aligned closely to what they heard from local community and academic leaders earlier this year. […]

    Several community leaders spoke about police interactions in the community – including Pastor Traci Blackmon of Christ the King Church, James Clark of Better Family Life and Charli Cooksey of the Young Citizen’s Council of St. Louis.

    Pamela Meanes, president of the National Bar Association, said her organization goes into the community to educate residents on their basic rights, including the right to remain silent and to not be detained unnecessarily. However, she said she must also speak to them about the reality for African-American residents – that they may do everything correctly and “still end up dead.”

    “As an African-American lawyer, I should not have to go into a community of African-American children and educate them on their rights,” Meanes said, “but tell them in the same breath that they are not allowed to exercise those rights because there may be a fear or possibility that if they do that, they may not come home to their parents.”

    She said the National Bar Association believes that legislation, training on de-escalating use of force and serious conversations about race are necessary steps to addressing the nation’s current crisis. […]

    During Rosenfeld’s presentation, he spoke about Dotson’s claim recently that the Ferguson protests have caused crime to increase in the city. However, Rosenfeld said in his research, the number of homicides increased “well before” Brown’s death.

    Capt. Mary Edwards-Fears, of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police, spoke about the need for more transparency.

    She said if there is one thing that the Ferguson unrest has taught them, it’s that, “people will not tolerate being kept out of the information loop,” especially regarding use of force.

    Residents also had an opportunity to speak, and that allowed committee members to get a “full picture” of the civil rights violations across the state regarding use of force, said committee chairman S. David Mitchell.

    “The real goal, to be honest, is not to be ‘let’s blame the police,’” he said, “but to come up with something so that we can address what seems to be a deep-seated problem.”

    Cops. Misbehaviour. Missouri police officer accused of throwing boy, 4, against wall. Yes.

    Happy Birthday to #scifi legend Samuel Delany. (Master writer & Octavia Butler’s 1st Clarion teacher.) #Afrofuturism (Yesterday, I think.)

    Okay… and… this. The meaning of this t-shirt? Our ancestors spent 98% of the last 10 million years in Africa. It’s a tweet by Dawkins. A new shirt at his internet store. “We are all Africans”, with a big red atheist A on Africans. Like what.

    McCullogh is all about transparency. Public, Media Locked out of Bob McCulloch Speech at MU Law School

    St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCulloch spoke Tuesday at the University of Missouri School of Law about the grand jury process and his experience handling the investigation into now-former Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson’s responsibility in the shooting death of Michael Brown last year.

    The MU student chapter of the Missouri Association of Prosecuting Attorneys organized the event, which restricted to law school students and faculty who had to register prior. Media and the public were not allowed to attend the talk.

    Motivated by the closed nature of the event, students and community organizers from organizations such as Occupy COMO and the Mid-Missouri Fellowship of Reconciliation gathered to protest by chanting and holding signs with messages about Ferguson.

    MU graduate student Reuben Faloughi said he was concerned with the locked doors and lack of publicity for the event. “The format that this talk was held—it’s unfair,” Faloughi said. “Nobody else gets to have a conversation with McCulloch.”

    Coordinator of the Mid-Missouri Fellowship of Reconciliation Jeff Stack said he understands the need for security, but also that he wishes the event was more balanced and inclusive.

    “Democracy is a little messy sometimes and unfortunately Mr. McCulloch is kind of used to kind of being an orchestrator and having control for how the courtroom operates and grand jury is a system of heightened control,” Stack said. “Maybe he’s uncomfortable with settings like that (an open forum), but that’s kind of what we really need to have a vibrant democracy.”

    MU Law School Dean Gary Myers said the event was planned with the law school audience in mind.

    “It was designed really to be a law school event so people can have that discussion and dialogue, and I can share with you that the discussion was vigorous and thorough,” Myers said. […]

    Samantha Green, a second year MU law student, said she thought the event was overall a good experience. However, she added that McCulloch dodged many of the questions, but that “wasn’t something that I was necessarily surprised by.”

    “I thought that there was an attempt at honest dialogue, but it just really didn’t quite get there for me,” Green said.

    Kayla Jackson-Williams, an MU law student and president of the school’s Black Law Students Association, said her question for McCulloch on how he plans to fix the disconnect between him and the black community went unanswered.

    “He said what he wanted people to hear and he didn’t fully answer questions to the degree at which he could because he wanted it to go in a certain direction,” Jackson-Williams said.

    Both law students proposed that any similar event in the future, while giving initial preference to law students and faculty, should be open to the public.

    As for the closed nature of the event, Green said she thought the intentions of limiting attendance to members of the legal community were good, but that she wished the public had an opportunity to listen in.

  126. rq says

    Ugh, The Real 125 is in moderation.

    Karin Jones’ ROM exhibition “undresses” racial identity

    The silhouette is iconic: a stiffly corseted waist, a high collar, a generous bustle at the rear. From Jane Austen characters to Cinderella to modern-day brides, the Victorian-style dress has symbolized wealth and beauty for over a century. In a new exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum, however, VCC alumna and Jewellery Art & Design instructor Karin Jones is putting this classic figure in a whole new light.

    Jones’ contemporary art installation, Worn: Shaping Black Feminine Identity, is the first work in Of Africa, a three-year multiplatform project meant to pay homage to African themes and artists in Canada. The piece is a black, Victorian-era mourning dress, a symbol of both high culture and sadness in late 19th century Europe. Instead of cloth, however, Jones has woven the dress entirely from the synthetic braids used in popular African hairstyles. Scattered beneath the dress are bolls from a cotton plant, as well as a few that were crafted from the artist’s own hair.

    For Jones, this piece expresses her own complex identity as an African-Canadian. In her artist statement, she writes:

    “The work underlines African hairstyles as a craft as refined as any decorative art produced in Europe; it alludes to the invisible labour of the thousands of Africans who contributed to the wealth of the British Empire… [It’s] a mythic figure born of the cross-cultural forces of colonialism, commerce, and slavery. I wear my African-Canadian identity much as a Victorian woman would have worn this type of dress: proudly, but also uncomfortably, shaped but also constrained by it.”

    […]

    At first, it may seem like quite the leap to go from crafting intricate jewellery to weaving synthetic apparel, but for Jones, the progression was actually quite organic.

    As a jewellery designer, Jones already had an interest the social customs of beauty. As an African-Canadian, she also held a longstanding unease about the trend to suppress natural black hairstyles. Motivated to raise awareness about this through art, Jones was first attracted to traditional Victorian hair jewellery—another popular trend of the era.

    From there, she went on to learn weaving and lace-making techniques with the goal of recreating traditional European symbols of power, but from African-style braids. Eventually, in response to the ROM’s public call for its Of Africa series, Jones produced Worn, which has been extremely well-received.

    Worn: Shaping Black Feminine Identity will be shown until November 1, 2015 at the ROM’s Sigmund Samuel Gallery of Canada.

    I wish I could go.

    DeRay McKesson ’07, Among Fortune’s ‘Greatest Leaders,’ To Speak on Campus April 2 – that’s at Bowdoin.

    DeRay Mckesson ’07 has been at the epicenter of the firestorm emanating from Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by police there. With This Is The Moment, the award-winning online newsletter he co-founded, and his social media omnipresence, Mckesson earned a spot, along with the newsletter’s cofounder Johnetta Elzie, on Fortune‘s list of “The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders.”

    Mckesson delivers the talk “Ferguson, Social Media and the Common Good” at 7 p.m. April 2, 2015, in Kresge Auditorium, Visual Arts Center.

    Family of Aiyana Stanley-Jones sues Detroit cop

    The family of Aiyana Stanley-Jones has filed a wrongful death lawsuit in federal court against the Detroit police officer involved in a May 2010 raid that led to her shooting death.

    Named in the lawsuit filed by attorney Geoffrey Fieger are Officer Joseph Weekley, Robert Rowe, the Detroit Police Department, members of the department’s Special Response Team and the city of Detroit.

    The lawsuit alleges that Weekley and Rowe used excessive force, violated Aiyana’s civil rights and attempted to cover up circumstances surrounding the shooting. The family has requested a jury trial and is seeking damages of at least $75,000 in the filing in U.S. District Court in Detroit.

    “Defendants Joseph Weekly and Robert Rowe unlawfully seized Aiyana Stanley-Jones, used excessive force against her and unlawfully used deadly force thereby inflicting horrendous personal injuries and ultimately death from which certain damages naturally followed to the members of Aiyana Stanley-Jones family and/or estate,” the lawsuit said.

    Weekley’s attorney Steve Fishman could not be reached for comment.

    The lawsuit comes after the last charge against Weekley, a misdemeanor count of careless discharge causing injury or death, was dismissed in late January. His first trial for involuntary manslaughter and the misdemeanor count ended in a hung jury. His second trial on the misdemeanor count ended in a mistrial.

    When the misdemeanor count was dismissed in January, Fieger said he would proceed with a civil lawsuit case.

    I hope they win.

    Same story Tony had above, from DailyKos: 3 members of Florida Department of Corrections found to be in KKK; arrested for murder plot

    No need to pinch yourself, it really is 2015. According to the Orlando Sentinel:

    Two current and one former prison employee who all belonged to the KKK planned to kill a black inmate as he was released in retaliation for a fight, officials said Thursday.

    The three men — Thomas Jordan Driver, 25, David Elliot Morgan, 47, and 42-year-old Charles Thomas Newcomb — each were arrested Thursday on one state count of conspiracy to commit murder, according to a statement from Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi’s office.

    In light of this, you must remember that a record 346 inmates died in Florida prisons last year—including men and women who were gassed to death, burned to death, and beaten to death, all by staff. It can be hard to really believe that we are in 2015, but this is absolutely our new normal.

    That last paragraph really puts this kind of plot into perspective – as in, it’s not an isolated case. Most likely.

    Justice for Luis Rodriguez, Killed by Police Employees in Moore, Oklahoma

    On February 15th, 2014 Luis F. Rodriguez was killed in the parking lot of the Warren Theater in Moore, Oklahoma.

    Will the men responsible – Ryan Minard, Joseph Bradley, and Brian Clarkston, employed at the Moore police outfit, and Tyler Howser and Chad Strang, employed at the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation outfit, be held accountable?

    These unnecessary situations will continue to destroy lives, and negatively impact families and communities, until we each recognize that fact, and choose to withdraw our support and consent of them, and operate according to the fact that badges don’t grant extra rights.

  127. rq says

    Cosmo Used White Models For “Gorgeous” Trends And Black Models For Trends That Needed To “Die”

    Cosmopolitan has been heavily criticised over its choice of models in an online article about beauty trends in 2015.

    The online version of the magazine compared “gorgeous” fashion and beauty trends with those that needed to “die”.
    For the 21 trends that were “gorgeous”, every single photo used was of a white woman, apart from Nicole Richie who is bi-racial.

    For the trends that needed to “die”, almost a fifth were illustrated with a woman of colour. […]

    A 2014 report on diversity in fashion magazines found that white models were featured on covers five times more often than people of colour.

    “If these results prove anything, it’s that fashion continues to have a global diversity problem,” writer Jihan Forbes said in the report. “Fashion should represent beauty in all forms and it’s about time our magazines reflect that.”
    It’s not just the fashion industry that has been criticised for failing to be inclusive of people of colour and their beauty.

    Brands such as Dove have been called out for using questionable language on their products.

    In a statement about the label suggesting white skin was “normal”, a Dove spokersperson said: “In this case, there was an oversight from our team… as soon as our teams in Europe discovered this error, they began the process of relabeling the bottles.”

    BuzzFeed News has contacted the online version of Cosmopolitan and the writer of the piece for a comment.

    Over 100 People Were Killed by Police in March. Have Police Gotten the Post-Ferguson Memo Yet?

    Here’s a statistic for you: It’s been 31 days since the release of the White House Task Force on 21st Century Policing report, but the number of fatal police encounters is already over 100 and counting. That’s an average of more than three people killed each day in March by police in America.

    Too many of this month’s victims fit a profile we know all too well – unarmed men of color, some of whom have psychiatric disabilities. Victims like Charly Keunang in Los Angeles, California; Tony Robinson in Madison, Wisconsin; Anthony Hill in DeKalb County, Georgia; and Brandon Jones in Cleveland, Ohio; confirm that the problems with policing are national in scope.

    This isn’t a problem concentrated in a few rogue police departments. Even those police departments with the best of intentions need reform. Take, for example, last week’s Department of Justice report that Philadelphia police shot 400 people – over 80 percent African-American – in seven years. This is in a city where the police commissioner is an author of the very same White House task force report calling for police reform.

    So clearly we must do more than read – or even write – these reports. Report recommendations, several of which are adopted from ACLU recommendations, must be implemented. The task force report makes 63 recommendations, but let’s focus on just two. Neither one is novel, but both are critical to real police reform. […]

    As the ACLU explained to the task force, data collection and reporting is the easiest single thing any police department can do starting today. And it will offer the best depiction of what policing in the 21st century looks like.

    Both the ACLU and the task force recommend data collection on a range of police and citizen encounters – from stops and arrests to nonfatal and fatal police shootings. “Policies on use of force,” the task force writes, “should also require agencies to collect, maintain, and report data to the Federal Government on all officer-involved shootings, whether fatal or nonfatal, as well as any in-custody death.” And data must be inclusive not just of race and gender but disability as well.

    In order for local law enforcement to get serious about data collection, it may take the dangling of federal dollars. The recently enacted Death in Custody Act, which requires data collection on what the title suggests, is taking that approach by penalizing noncompliant agencies through Department of Justice funds. Earlier mandates around data collection – ones that allow law enforcement to voluntarily report data without penalty —aren’t working.

    The task force report – like so many others before it – has spelled out what’s needed for police reform. How many more reports or police shootings do we need before we get to work?

    Yesterday and day before I mentioned Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose family was not permitted to see him while in hospital. An Update on Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Condition

    Mumia’s wife and brother were allowed to see him separately for 30 minutes each late this morning. The mobilization worked. But our job is not yet done. On the morning of March 30, 2015 Mumia fainted in the prison and was taken to the ICU of a nearby clinic. His blood sugar count was dangerously high at 779. He was in a diabetic shock. For perspective: diabetic coma is 800. He is recovering slowly and still in ICU. His blood sugar is currently at 333.

    That Mumia had diabetes was a complete shock to all of us. For the last 3 months, he has been under medical care in the prison and diagnosed with eczema. And since he had three “comprehensive” blood tests since February, diabetes should have been diagnosed and treated accordingly. But it never was. Instead he has been subjected to hell by the prison medical system. In January Mumia was shaken out of a deep sleep by guards during count. For the infraction of not being awake during count he was punished for 2 weeks, without calls or yard. Deep trance-like sleep and lethargy were the first signs of the problem. In addition to the physical depletion produced by untreated diabetes, he was/is also dealing with a severe outbreak of eczema. He likened his skin to that of an elephant’s. It was raw, blistered and bloody all over. He was so sick that he was not taking visitors. The “meds” he was given for his skin produced an extreme adverse reaction. His skin swelled and ruptured and he was put in the prison infirmary for 2 weeks. There’s more, but the above point to negligence of the worse kind if not an outright attempt on Mumia’s life.

    We are demanding review of his case by outside doctors and…since the world is watching, we are calling for Mumia’s immediate release. It’s time to bring our brother home.

    These two very very brief visits by his immediate family were important. But the OUTRAGEOUS actions by the PA DOC continue. They are controlling the hospitals actions and LIMITING all information about his condition. Preventing the Mumia Abu-Jamal and his family from getting access to the critical information they need for his care. His family and lawyers still have very very little information about his treatment and his conditions. They are trying to limit additional visits. It was inhumane that his family continues to be limited in accessing and monitoring his condition and his health. Literally for 20 hours his family was in the Intensive Care ICU and were told nothing. Now that they have had a visit. They are attempting to speak with the doctors and get medical records.

    Gunmen kill more than 70 at university in Kenya. Let’s not keep this massacre out of public sight.

    In the attack, which turned into a hostage siege that continued into the evening at Garissa University College, masked militants separated Christian students from Muslims, and then gunned them down without mercy, survivors said. Others ran for their lives with bullets whistling through the air, and hundreds of students remained unaccounted for more than 11 hours after the bloodshed began.

    At least 79 people were wounded at the school 145 kilometers (90 miles) from the Somali border by the al-Qaida linked group, said Interior Minister Joseph Nkaissery, who gave the death toll of more than 70. A dusk-to-dawn curfew was ordered in Garissa and three nearby counties.

    Kenyan security forces cornered the gunmen in a dormitory, and President Uhuru Kenyatta said in a speech to the nation that the attackers were holding hostages.

    Ali Mohamud Rage, a spokesman for al-Shabab, said fighters from the Somalia-based extremist group were responsible. The al-Qaida-linked group has been blamed for a series of attacks, including the siege at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi in 2013 that killed 67 people, as well as other violence in northern Kenya.

    Police identified a possible mastermind of the attack as Mohammed Mohamud, who is alleged to lead al-Shabab’s cross-border raids into Kenya, and they posted a $220,000 bounty for him. Also known by the names Dulyadin and Gamadhere, he was a teacher at an Islamic religious school, or madrassa, and claimed responsibility for a bus attack in Makka, Kenya, in November that killed 28 people.

    One of the survivors of Thursday’s attack, Collins Wetangula, told The Associated Press he was preparing to take a shower when he heard gunshots coming from Tana dorm, which hosts both men and women, 150 meters (yards) away. The campus has six dorms and at least 887 students, he said.

    When he heard the gunshots, he locked himself and three roommates in their room, said Wetangula, who is vice chairman of the university’s student union.

    “All I could hear were footsteps and gunshots. Nobody was screaming because they thought this would lead the gunmen to know where they are,” he said.

    He added: “The gunmen were saying, ‘Sisi ni al-Shabab,'” — Swahili for “We are al-Shabab.”

    He heard the attackers arrive at his dormitory, open the doors and ask if the people who had hidden inside were Muslims or Christians.

    “If you were a Christian, you were shot on the spot,” he said. “With each blast of the gun, I thought I was going to die.”

    The gunmen then started shooting rapidly, as if exchanging fire, Wetangula said.

    “The next thing, we saw people in military uniform through the window of the back of our rooms who identified themselves as the Kenyan military,” he said. The soldiers took him and around 20 others to safety.

    More at the link.
    And just…

    New York Times on the same, higher death toll. Shabab Attack on a Kenya University Kills 147, Officials Say.

    The @LAPDHQ shot/killed Steven Washington. That’s his mother. Was fully autistic. Completely unarmed. Face blown off .

  128. rq says

    Just FYI, that last little bit about Steven Washington is from 2010, with the idea that this is not a new issue, not a new problem… and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better.
    I guess I don’t have to explain that to anyone here, at any rate.

    Another old one. More of this please. Pittsburgh police chief Cameron McLay, holding sign saying “I resolve to challenge racism at work #End White Silence”.

    The Petty Etiquette of Discrimination

    “In its everyday operation,” sociologist James Loewen wrote, “segregation consists of a pervasive system of etiquette.”

    That’s a counter-intuitive definition. Discrimination, especially the pervasive discrimination of the Jim Crow era, tends to be remembered as a matter of violence, not as a matter of manners. Jim Crow involved lynchings, beatings, and the KKK—politeness and etiquette seems like secondary matters at best. And yet politeness and violence are in fact intertwined and inseparable. Segregation was accomplished through an elaborate system of norms about when black and white people could meet, and how they could interact.

    “Biracial segregation forms a complete set of definitions, expressing and codifying the relationship of dominance and subservience,” Loewen argues. This is ultimately enforced by laws and violence, when necessary—but often it’s more subtle, involving disapprobation, disapproving looks, cutting remarks, and (as Mark Twain described in Huck Finn) internalized shame. Institutionalized hatred is not just formal large-scale violence or legal rules. It is also the small-scale sneers and corrections and social coercion which normalize and justify that violence. Discrimination is, in brief, petty stuff. It’s etiquette.

    Trevor Noah is currently mired in a welter of petty stuff. Noah, a black South African comedian, was picked to succeed Jon Stewart at the helm of The Daily Show. Shortly thereafter, the internet unearthed a number of tweets in which Noah made anti-Semitic and misogynist jokes.

    I should probably put that word “jokes” in quotes; the tweets are little more than tedious ritualized restating of stereotypes: Jewish people are rich, “fat chicks” are unattractive. Still, no matter how unfunny they are, a couple of bad social media jokes are only a couple of bad social media jokes. Compared to actual apartheid (which was abolished during Noah’s lifetime) they seem relatively minor. Elahe Izadi at The Washington Post points out that “the handful of tweets that have Trevor Noah in the hot seat represent less than one percent of Noah’s entire Twitter output.” Comedians sometimes make bad jokes. If Noah stumbled into stereotypes on a few occasions—well, people make mistakes. Do we really need to make a big deal about it?

    I certainly don’t think Noah should be fired. But I think it’s appropriate to criticize him for his public statements. Yes, it’s petty to call him out over a handful of tweets—but society, as a web of interpersonal relationships, norms, and small daily interactions, is, again, built around petty stuff. Women have their physical appearance policed, not through violence, but through offhand comments and shaming. When Noah writes, “’Oh yeah the weekend. People are gonna get drunk & think that I’m sexy!’ – fat chicks everywhere”—that’s not just a joke. It’s part of a system of norms that says that guys have a right to comment on women’s bodies and to sneer at them for being insufficiently sexual, or too sexual, or unattractive, or too attractive, or for expressing sexual desire, or for not expressing sexual desire.

    The joke, in other words, is part of an etiquette, or ties into an etiquette, whereby women in public are supposed to feel ashamed for being women. Discrimination, stigma, and sexism—like segregation—function through small-bore norms, which determine what you can wear, or think, or feel, without being jostled, censured, or shamed. […]

    Again, the issue here is not necessarily a legal one, since the legal issues are murky. It’s symbolic. But symbols matter—or, to put it another way, social signaling matters. Prejudice and discrimination are validated and enforced in no small part through interpersonal, intercommunal understandings of what behavior is acceptable and what behavior isn’t. Ending prejudice and discrimination means changing those understandings. At one point, Jews and gay people were seen as unpleasant and ridiculous. Associating with them was shameful. Now, to some degree and at some times, at least, discrimination against those groups is itself deemed unpleasant, ridiculous, and shameful. Changing the world sometimes involves repealing unjust laws. Just as often, though, it happens by changing the small, petty interactions that make up our daily lives.

    I thought it might compare Noah with white comedians who have said terrible shit in terms of treatment, but that’s probably for another time. Annnnyway, all kinds of people are assholes. And being knowledgeable about one kind of discrimination doesn’t make one good at all of them.

    Equal Justice Initiative Wins Release of Anthony Ray Hinton – that’s a good news!

    Anthony Ray Hinton, one of the longest serving death row prisoners in Alabama history and among the longest serving condemned prisoners to be freed after presenting evidence of innocence, will be released tomorrow after Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Laura Petro granted the State’s motion to dismiss the charges against him.

    Mr. Hinton spent 30 years on death row for a crime he did not commit.

    Thirty years ago, Mr. Hinton was arrested and charged with two capital murders based solely on the assertion that a revolver taken from his mother’s home was the gun used in both murders and in a third uncharged crime. EJI attorneys engaged three of the nation’s top firearms examiners who testified in 2002 that the revolver could not be matched to crime evidence. State prosecutors never questioned the new findings but nontheless refused to re-examine the case or concede error. After another 12 years of litigation, the United States Supreme Court reversed lower court rulings in 2014, and Judge Petro granted him a new trial. She entered an Order of Nolle Prosequi today after the State informed the court that forensic scientists with the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences have tested the evidence and confirmed the prior testing which revealed the crime bullets cannot be matched to the Hinton weapon.

    After 30 years in custody for crimes he did not commit, Mr. Hinton’s release is bittersweet. “We are thrilled that Mr. Hinton will finally be released because he has unnecessarily spent years on Alabama’s death row when evidence of his innocence was clearly presented,” said his lead attorney, Bryan Stevenson. “The refusal of state prosecutors to re-examine this case despite persuasive and reliable evidence of innocence is disappointing and troubling.” […]

    “Race, poverty, inadequate legal assistance, and prosecutorial indifference to innocence conspired to create a textbook example of injustice,” Mr. Stevenson said. “I can’t think of a case that more urgently dramatizes the need for reform than what has happened to Anthony Ray Hinton.”

    More details on that lawsuit brought by Aiyana’s family: Lawsuit Alleges Police Cover-Up In Fatal Shooting Of Sleeping 7-Year-Old Aiyana Stanley-Jones

    The lawsuit disputes Weekley’s version of events, alleging that the grenade went through the window and struck Aiyana. Then, the suit says, police “blindly fired random shots” from outside the home, with one of the bullets fatally striking Aiyana in the neck.

    Officials have said Weekley was first through the door. According to the complaint, he “rushed into the house and made physical contact [with Mertilla Jones] in an intentional cover-up conspiracy to hide what happened.”

    The suit accuses Weekley and Rowe of excessive force and/or unlawful use of deadly force. It further accuses the city, police department and the unnamed supervisors of the Special Response Team with violating Aiyana’s civil rights through policies and training; all defendants are accused of conspiracy:

    Upon Defendants realizing that they had critically injured the seven-year-old girl, they intentionally conspired to cover-up their unlawful acts by providing false and fictitious information to the authorities and to the media regarding the shooting of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, including falsely claiming that the bullet that killed her was fired from inside the lower unit of the duplex rather than from the outside, and that the discharge of the firearm was the result of a physical struggle between Mertilla Jones, Aiyana’s grandmother and the Defendant members of the Detroit Police Special Response Team. Defendant acted in concert to cover-up the facts and circumstances of the fatal shooting of Aiyana Stanley-Jones. As soon as Defendants realize that they had entered the wrong unit of the duplex and had burned, shot and mortally wounded the innocent seven year old Aiyana StanleyJones, they mutually, either tacitly or overtly, agreed to commence a conspiracy to coverup the facts of what they had done.

    A police spokeswoman declined to comment on the litigation as a matter of policy, and the city did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    The lawsuit lists Aiyana’s mother, Dominika Jones, and Erica Moore, representative of Aiyana’s estate, as plaintiffs. The family requested a jury trial and is seeking $7.5 million in damages, according to the court filing.

    The botched raid drew additional scrutiny to the Detroit Police Department, because it was filmed for a reality television show. A crew for the A&E show “The First 48,” which follows murder investigations, caught the beginning of the raid on tape. Critics have questioned whether the filming affected how police executed the search warrant, suggesting it influenced the decision to go at night and use a flash-bang grenade.

    Of course, it looks better on camera.

  129. rq says

    I would justl ike to bring to your attention a case in Canada, where certain groups of people (in this case, Native Americans) have trouble getting the justice that they deserve. Cindy Gladue case sends a devastating message to Aboriginal women

    Thirty-six year-old Cindy Gladue, died in an Edmonton hotel room in June, 2011. She bled to death, her body was found in the bathtub. Charged in the case was a truck driver, from Ontario — Bradley Barton. Earlier this month Mr. Barton was found not guilty of first-degree murder, as well as of manslaughter. It’s a decision that has given way to outrage among women’s rights activists.

    Critics say the trial itself would have gone much differently if the victim hadn’t been an aboriginal woman, and a sex worker, and if the jury hearing the case hadn’t been entirely non-native. Also something unprecedented happened in the course of the trial.

    That something unprecedented: they used a preserved part of Cindy Gladue’s own body as a piece of evidence. Not photos, not reports, the actual piece of her body. … And that bit about the entire jury being non-native, that… would have been the least they could have done.

    US to UN Human Rights Committee: Move Along, Nothing to See Here

    Yesterday the United States gave the U.N. Human Rights Committee its one year follow-up report on progress made to implement four priority recommendations made by the committee a year ago. The independent human rights experts had reviewed the United States’ compliance with a major human rights treaty, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). They found the U.S. coming up short in many areas, including accountability for torture, privacy and surveillance, Guantánamo, and gun violence.

    Yesterday’s disappointing 15-page submission does provide some information on Justice Department investigations regarding police misconduct, including the recent Ferguson report. But, there was nothing on accountability measures taken in the aftermath of the release of the Senate report on the CIA torture program. The need for Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor remains as glaring as ever.

    The submission notes that the Senate report’s 500-page executive summary was “declassified with minimal redactions to protect national security,” but it failed to commit to release the entire report (which the ACLU is currently fighting for in a FOIA lawsuit). And while the submission states that the U.S. “supports transparency and has taken steps to ensure that it never resorts to the use of those [harsh interrogation] techniques again,” there is no mention of any concrete actions taken to criminally investigate CIA torture, especially in light of the new information made public in the report about the brutality of the CIA’s methods, and its lies to Congress, the media, and the public about its torture program.

    Under the ICCPR and the Convention Against Torture, the U.S. has an obligation to effectively, independently, and impartially investigate all cases of unlawful killing or torture, as well as arbitrary detention or enforced disappearance. The U.S. also has an international legal obligation to appropriately prosecute perpetrators – including high-level policymakers. […]

    The ACLU and other human rights groups have until May 1st to submit “shadow reports” to the Human Rights Committee, which will subsequently assess and grade U.S. implementation of the key priority recommendations. The Obama administration can still avoid a low grade by responding to domestic and international calls to appoint a special prosecutor to conduct a comprehensive criminal investigation of the tactics described in the Senate torture report, including all acts authorizing or ordering acts of torture and other abuses and provide redress to victims of torture.

    Well I don’t feel that the USAmerica is going to get particularly high marks this year.

    Okay because we all need some laughs, here’s an example of community policing done right: Isles of Scilly Police Facebook page (accessible without logging in).
    And alright, I don’t actually know if they do community policing right, but there facebook page certainly sounds like they do. And yeah, I know they’re a small force in a small community. Still.

  130. rq says

    Okay kinda rushing through these as I’m racing a train but I want to clear out the tabs before I head out – update attempts will be made, but I don’t know how reliable the new country internet is, or how many hours I will have to spend, but they will. So. I’m glad there aren’t TOO many links.

    #FloydDent protest in #Inkster @takeonhate #NAN #BLMDetroit #BlackLivesMatter
    The #BLMDetroit marshal team demonstrates how to #ServeAndProtect the people. #FloydDent march #Inkster

    Welcome To Normandy, One Of The Many Fergusons You’ve Never Heard Of

    Normandy isn’t Ferguson. But Ferguson’s neighboring municipalities in St. Louis County share many of the same issues. While Ferguson’s April 7 municipal election to replace half of the city council has received national attention and intense interest from outside organizations, hardly anyone is paying attention to elections the same day in Normandy and other St. Louis County towns.

    The 100 or so people — every one of them black — who had to report to Normandy municipal court on Wednesday evening probably wish there was more interest. Even in St. Louis County — where Ferguson and many of the other small cities use their police departments and municipal courts to raise revenue — Normandy sticks out. The city brings in a shocking 40 percent of its general revenue from fines and fees — one of the highest percentages in St. Louis County.

    Normandy Mayor Patrick Green recently claimed the municipal court system actually loses money — if you include expenses for the entire police department. Green said he considers an effort by the Missouri state legislature to limit traffic ticket revenue an attack on Normandy and its officers.

    “It’s an insult to this community and its police force,” Green said. “Our police aren’t out there ‘producing revenue.’ They are out there fighting crime.”

    Monique Abby, a black lawyer who lives in Ferguson, was filling in as acting municipal judge in Normandy this week. That’s because the former judge, Charles Kirksey, stepped down last month after a local news station revealed that he owed more than $100,000 in back taxes and had admitted to a “pattern of misconduct” in his private practice.

    Inside the quiet courtroom, there appeared to be no prosecutor. People gasped and shook their heads as they heard how much money some of the defendants owed.

    In Ferguson, one of the first changes the city made to its municipal court system after protests following the police killing of Michael Brown in August was to eliminate the fine for “failure to appear,” which could quickly mount for defendants who missed court dates for minor tickets. But in Normandy, so-called FTAs — failure to appears — remain a nice way to pad the city coffers: $100 each, plus $26.50 in court costs for each charge.

    That meant penalties for some defendants could have topped the $1,000 maximum that municipal courts are allowed to impose. The judge dropped some charges for defendants who owed the most money, but some still had to pay as much as $800. While the U.S. Justice Department’s report on Ferguson’s municipal court recommended the city accept partial payments, Normandy refuses to accept payments of less than $100 per month.

    Harry Turner, 35, of St. Louis, said he’s been to Normandy court more than twice, each time in connection with traffic violations. Turner was pulled over in a nearby municipality because he allegedly had a license plate bulb out. The officer arrested him because he owed Normandy money, and the city issued a warrant for his arrest after he missed court. He had to post a $500 bond to get out of jail.

    “Court costs are too high — especially, for those of us who are trying to make our payments,” Turner said. “I feel like a lot of municipalities are here for revenue. I don’t think they’re here to clean the streets up.” […]

    Normandy defending a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster, who contends the town is violating a state law that limits revenue that municipalities can derive from traffic fines and court costs to 30 percent of the budget.

    Despite Normandy’s problems, there seems little interest in Tuesday’s election. Most of the candidates didn’t even bother to respond to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for its voters’ guide.

    Half of the city council’s eight seats are up for election, and all but one of the incumbents who are running face an opponent. Some of the council members said in interviews that their city is much different from Ferguson and they weren’t inclined to make changes.

    Bob Reid, a white member of the city council who isn’t up for re-election until next year, said he hadn’t read the Justice Department’s Ferguson report in its entirety. But he praised Normandy’s community policing. “I think that’s a little different from Ferguson,” Reid said.

    Terry Gannon, a white woman who represents Normandy’s Ward 3, is unopposed in the election. She said Normandy was “very different” from Ferguson.

    “We have a certified police department. We have community policing. We have a balanced budget and an auditor,” Gannon said in an interview. “We have a city council meeting with our auditor every quarter and go over finances in detail. We’re nothing like Ferguson.”

    Albany man dies after police use Taser gun in struggle. Yesterday.

    City police are investigating the circumstances that led to the death of a mentally ill man who was shocked with a Taser following a confrontation with three officers after they stopped him early Thursday as he walked on an Arbor Hill street.

    The family of Donald “Dontay” Ivy, 39, described him as a paranoid schizophrenic they said suffered from heart problems. His relatives waited for answers later in the day about the death of a man they said was quiet and introverted as they gathered outside their Second Street residence, several blocks from where the incident unfolded.

    Police said Ivy fought with the officers, Michael Mahany, Joshua Sears and Charles Skinkle, at Lark and Second streets and led them on a brief foot chase. The officers started performing CPR on Ivy 11 minutes after the confrontation began at 12:36 a.m., according to a police spokesman.

    Police leaders have not said why the officers confronted Ivy or how many times he was struck with a Taser. Ivy was pronounced dead at Albany Medical Center Hospital after he arrived in an ambulance at 1:10 a.m., a spokesman said.

    Acting Police Chief Brendan Cox, who took over the department last Friday following the retirement of Chief Steven Krokoff, said an autopsy was conducted but he declined to discuss the findings, saying the medical examiner still has work to do. The results of a toxicology test that may show whether there were any drugs or alcohol in Ivy’s system could takes weeks to process.

    No weapons were found on Ivy, Cox said, and the department is examining what led up to the officers approaching Ivy. The three officers were placed on administrative leave while the internal review unfolds.

    Three officers, one mentally ill man and a Taser. Instant death.

    Phoenix Cop Who Killed Unarmed Black Man Won’t Face Charges

    No criminal charges will be filed against a white Phoenix police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black man in December during what authorities described as a struggle, county prosecutors said on Wednesday.

    Prosecutors found that Officer Mark Rine was justified in using deadly force against Rumain Brisbon, said Jerry Cobb, a Maricopa County attorney spokesman.

    The shooting aroused community outrage and brought protests seen nationwide to the streets of Phoenix.

    Cobb said the shooting was within Arizona law governing such conduct, but was unaware of the specific findings of the incident review.

    Police have said that Brisbon, 34, was shot and killed on Dec. 2 as he struggled with Rine, who suspected he was selling drugs and mistakenly believed that he felt the handle of a gun in the man’s pocket.

    It was later learned that Brisbon was actually carrying a pill bottle in the struggle outside an apartment complex in Phoenix.

    Marci Kratter, the attorney for Brisbon’s family, said she was not surprised that Rine will not be held accountable.

    “There was no investigation,” Kratter said. “They were certainly not interested in finding out what the truth was.”

    Kratter said the family plans to pursue further legal action.

    County Attorney Bill Montgomery told a local newspaper that the seven-year veteran officer had a “reasonable fear for his life” after Brisbon failed to obey police directives and acted like he possessed a weapon.

    Fear! For his life! Because! Fear! Instant death!

    Florida Jailhouse Guards Arrested in KKK Murder Plot

    Thursday’s arrest came after an investigation that appears, judging from redacted affidavits signed by FBI agents involved in the case, to have been built on testimony from a mole inside the Florida KKK. The FBI’s informant is never named.

    A statement from the Florida Attorney General’s office lists multiple law enforcement agencies involved in the investigation, including the Florida Highway Patrol and Florida Fish and Wildlife. A spokeswoman for the FBI’s Jacksonville Division confirmed that her office initiated and spearheaded the investigation but added, “there were a lot of agencies that participated.”

    The murder plot came to the attention of law enforcement started at a Klan meeting in late 2014. That’s where Moran and Newcomb introduced Driver to an FBI confidential informant posing as a KKK member, according to court documents. The purpose of that meeting, judging by the conversation that follows in the affidavit, was to arrange a killing.

    “The defendants plotted the murder as retaliation for a fight between the inmate, who is African American, and Driver,” according to a press release from the state’s Attorney General’s office. Conversations between the men involved and the FBI informant shed more light on the motivations involved. Driver appeared to be carrying a vendetta since getting into a fight with the inmate, who he said bit him during the altercation with the intent of giving him a fatal disease.

    According to the FBI’s account of that initial meeting, Driver and Moran both “told the [informant] that they wanted [redacted] to end up “six feet under.” Another man present at that initial meeting was TAKKKK Grand Dragon Jamie Vincent Ward. After hearing the plans Ward tells the informant, “they would have a sit down to discuss the [redacted] situation.” No charges have been filed against Ward.

    The plot progresses in subsequent conversations recorded by the FBI to discussions of what kind of weapon to use, and where and when to do the killing. Driver vents more about his anger over the initial fight and the need to get revenge as he and his partners lace their plans with Klan salutations and racial epithets.

    No killing ever takes place, but the FBI stages a murder scene after informing the target of the conspiracy against him. “Immediately upon notification,” the affidavit notes, the intended victim “spontaneously stated that it must have been ‘those police’ and that they must not be satisfied yet.” With his cooperation the FBI staged a photo and manipulated it to make it look as if he’d been shot to death. That photo was then taken around by the informant on a burner phone and shown to the guards and ex-guard moonlighting as Klansmen, who gave their approval for a job well done. Then they all got arrested.

  131. rq says

    Feel safe yet?
    New Kansas Law Allows Residents to Carry a Concealed Gun Without Permit or Training – honestly, how do laws like that help law enforcement officers feel safer? OKay, the random carrier might feel themselves to be safer (never mind everyone around them), but now cops honestly can’t know if people are carrying guns. At all. How does that interact with their already heightened feelings of fear for black people? Do they feel more justified in that fear, with the passing of these kinds of laws? How does that work?

    Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback signed a bill into law on Thursday that will allow Kansas residents to carry a concealed weapon without a permit or training. Both chambers of the state legislature supported the measure, which will go into effect in July. Kansas will be the sixth state to enact such a law—coined “constitutional carry”—joining Alaska, Arizona, Vermont, Arkansas, and Wyoming, according to Reuters. Nine other states are considering similar laws.

    “Asked why he did not think training should be required if it is valuable, Brownback said carrying a gun is a constitutional right,” the Kansas City Star reports. “We’re saying that if you want to do that in this state, then you don’t have to get the permission slip from the government,” Brownback said. According to the state attorney general’s office, some 87,000 Kansans have concealed-carry permits.

    Oh, and yeah, carry a gun with no training. Smart move, that one. REAL SMART.

    Albuquerque Cop Charged With Two Felonies After Attacking Man, Then Deleting Video Evidence – misbehaving officer.

    Death of man in police custody probed

    The Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office and New Jersey State Police are investigating the “in-custody, non-shooting” death of an 32-year-old city man late Tuesday morning after his arrest by city police on the 100 block of Grape Street.

    May they do a thorough job. But if you read the final paragraph of the article, don’t hold out much hope.

    Rules for the Black Birdwatcher – saw this before, now video format available! Something lighthearted… yet not.

    Bomb charges added against two men who allegedly wanted to blow up the Gateway Arch.

    The Post-Dispatch reported in November that sources said the men, who were charged then with making false statements to obtain guns, also had plans to bomb the Arch and kill St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch and then-Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson.

    The new indictment against Olajuwon Ali Davis and Brandon Orlando Baldwin, both 22, was not that specific. It says only that they tried to “damage and destroy, by means of explosives, a building, vehicle and other property.”

    Baldwin also said he wanted to use the bombs against people, according to court documents.

    “The arrests last November of these two defendants, who are members of the St. Louis Chapter of the New Black Panther Party, prevented their alleged plot to carry out violent acts during the protests in Ferguson,” William Woods, head of the St. Louis office of the FBI, said in a statement Thursday.

    The men watched a recording showing a bomb detonation on Nov. 12 and Baldwin said, “we need ’em, we need ’em,” court documents say.

    Davis paid a deposit on Nov. 18 and agreed to buy what he believed were three bombs, according to the documents. Days later, Davis and Baldwin picked up the devices and were arrested, authorities said.

    No other details were given in court documents about the arrest.

    Reading through official report on police response to Boston Marathon bombing. Key takeway: self-deploying police officers made things worse.
    Yeah those last two are kind of tangential, but still. There.

  132. rq says

    Chicagoans Are Stopped and Frisked by Police Even More Than New Yorkers

    New York may be the city that put the controversial police practice known as “stop and frisk” on the nation’s radar — but Chicago officers are initiating these encounters four times more frequently than New York did at the height of its practice in that city in 2011, according to a report released yesterday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

    The Illinois branch of the group, which issued the report, also found that black residents accounted for nearly three quarters of police stop and searches in Chicago — a disproportionate figure given only just over a third of the city’s population is African American.

    The study found that in 2014, an average of 93.6 out of every 1,000 Chicago residents were stopped and frisked. In comparison, only 1.6 New York residents were stopped in that same year, while that number reached 22.9 at the peak of the practice in New York in 2011, before widespread criticism led to a review by a federal judge who ruled it unconstitutional. In the summer of 2014 alone, Chicago police stopped more than 250,000 people without arresting them, the report found.

    “While most of the media coverage has suggested that that stop and frisk was a New York phenomena — it’s misuse is not limited to New York,” Harvey Grossman, legal director for the ACLU of Illinois, said in a statement accompanying the report. “Chicago has been systematically abusing this practice, for reasons that are not justified by our Constitution.”

    “Just like New York, we see that African Americans are singled out for these searches,” he added.

    The disproportionate police targeting of African Americans is highlighted by such figures in the report, which revealed that in neighborhoods like Chicago’s Jefferson Park, black residents make up only 1 percent of the population, but account for 14 percent of all stops, the ACLU said.

    The report also highlighted problems in the reporting process: in every police report card on stops in Chicago that researchers examined, officers failed to provide sufficient reasons to legally justify the stop — often offering explanations “unrelated to a suspicion of a crime” instead.

    The police department failed to address this issue, and has not provided adequate training to its officers, the report charged.

    More at the link.

    If you’re going to read one thing from here, read this. These are the racist e-mails that got 3 Ferguson police and court officials fired

    The e-mails, released to The Washington Post in response to a public-records request, were sent and received by Mary Ann Twitty, who was Ferguson’s court clerk, as well as former Ferguson police captain Rick Henke and former police sergeant William Mudd. All three were removed from their jobs after the Department of Justice discovered the e-mails, which prompted an internal investigation by city officials. The unredacted versions show for the first time which employee sent which e-mails.

    None of the three has spoken publicly since losing their jobs, and neither Twitty nor Henke could be reached for comment on Thursday. Mudd declined to comment through a family member.

    These e-mails were among the evidence presented by the Justice Department in a report released this year that concluded that racism pervaded the Ferguson Police Department. The report cited an analysis of those ticketed and arrested as well as anecdotal evidence about when and why Ferguson police officers use force on residents.

    The e-mails — all sent between 2008 and 2011 — are primarily e-mail forwards containing insensitive and offensive jokes. One of the e-mails, sent by Twitty to both men as well as a third recipient with the subject line “Insensitive One Liners,” included the lines: “There’s a new Muslim clothing shop that opened in our shopping center, but they threw me out after I asked if I could look at some of the bomber jackets.” […]

    Federal, state and local officials immediately condemned the e-mails, the contents of some of which had been included in part or referenced in the DOJ report.

    “The evidence of racial bias comes not only from statistics, but also from remarks made by police, city and court officials,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder said in March upon the report’s release. “A thorough examination of the records – including a large volume of work e-mails – shows a number of public servants expressing racist comments or gender discrimination; demonstrating grotesque views and images of African Americans in which they were seen as the ‘other,’ called ‘transient’ by public officials, and characterized as lacking personal responsibility.”

    On the day that the DOJ released their report, Ferguson Mayor James Knowles (R) condemned the e-mails and insisted that they were not reflective of the culture within the Ferguson Police Department.

    “Let me be clear, this type of behavior will not be tolerated in the Ferguson Police Department or in any department in the city of Ferguson,” Knowles said. “These actions taken by these individuals are in no way representative of the employees of the city of Ferguson.”

    Neither Knowles nor officials with the Justice Department could be reached immediately for comment on the full content of the e-mails.

    St. Louis Alderman Antonio French said the full content of the e-mails further prove that change is needed in Ferguson.

    “What it shows is that a culture existed and was allowed to fester in Ferguson municipal government and Ferguson Police Department. What we have seen so far is a few voluntary resignations but not a full acceptance of responsibility for that culture that has been allowed to exist in that municipal government,” French told The Post on Thursday. “Even after the DOJ report . . . there is still a lot of work to be done and it still remains to be seen whether the people who remain in power will be the ones to make the change.”

    Read the rest, but be warned. It’s NASTY stuff. And there are people who find it funny.

    Cosmo Used Black Models for Trends That Should “Die” — And Revealed a Huge Problem. Yeah, they also tried to apologize.

    Media outlets also called out the bias, with assertive headlines like the Root’s “Cosmopolitan Kills Black Styles To Let White Girls Live” and Bustle’s “The Cosmo Article ’21 Trends That Need To Die in 2015′ Should Have Never Been Published.”

    Cosmo attempted to quell dissent by swapping out some of the images and adding an editor’s note, writing, “This article focuses on beauty trends with images that represent those trends. Some images have been taken out of context, and we apologize for any offense. Celebrating all women is our mission, and we will continue to work hard to do that.”

    But such an explanation places the blame on the reader, by asserting that they took images “out of context.” This was hardly an effective apology (but then, blaming others for one’s own oversight rarely is).

    Cosmo’s oversight — but fashion’s problem: At a time when identity politics dominate discourse, Cosmo should have considered how its portrayal of en vogue and outdated trends would read to an increasingly diverse audience. The magazine’s oversight is symptomatic of a broader problem in fashion: the underrepresentation of women of color. “A 2014 report on diversity in fashion found that white models appeared on the cover of magazines five times as often as” women of color, the Sydney Morning Herald points out.

    Event in Denver: The Real Gangmembers Wear Badges: Take the streets against killer cops!

    April 2nd will mark 9 months since members of the Denver Police Department’s Gang Unit killed Ryan Ronquillo, a 20 year old Chicano man, as he sat alone in his car outside a friend’s funeral in Northwest Denver.

    Nine months later, and there has been no justice.

    In what has proven to not be a coincidence, members of the Gang Unit have shot and wounded two more unarmed occupants of motor vehicles since they killed Ryan. The Denver Gang Unit has been responsible for thee of the four high profile shootings of unarmed occupants of motor vehicles that have rocked Denver in the last 9 months. (Jessie Hernandez, who was shot and killed in January, was shot by members of District 2).

    In November members of the Gang Unit were involved in repeatedly shooting the unarmed Jurado brothers, and again in January, the same unit was responsible for shooting unarmed Sharod Kindell, even as he raised his hands to surrender.

    At the center of these shootings, a more specific tie binds these three cases. Officer Jeffrey DiManna, an officer with DPD’s gang unit, was involved in all three of these shootings of unarmed occupants of motor vehicles. He was one of four officers who killed Ryan, one of two officers who shot Sharod, and was present when the Jurados were shot, though DPD refuses to confirm whether he fired any shots.

    Join us as we take the streets to demand justice. The Gang Unit is the the biggest gang of all. it’s no coincidence that this same unit is tasked with crowd control and brutally attacking demonstrations and protests.

    It’s far past time to recognize the destructive effect the DPD Gang Unit has on our communities, how they aid in the criminalization of Black and Brown youth, and how they purposefully destabilize the communities and neighborhoods of Denver. Our streets are not safer because of the Gang Unit. Our streets are ravaged by gang violence in part because of the policies of this same unit. Let’s take back our streets!

    Justice for Ryan! Justice for Sharod! Justice for the Jurado brothers! Justice for them all!

    More info at the link.
    Okay, that’s it from me for now.

  134. rq says

    Going to get some posting in, yay! Though not-so-yay, not all of it is pretty. As per the usual.
    bluentx – thanks for that link, wow.

    +++

    US Cops Killed More People In March Than UK Cops Have Killed Since 1900. Same info, different source, still scary.

    New York: “Carry one another’s burdens but each must carry their own” #solidarity #ReclaimHolyWeek #ThisIsWhatTheologyLooksLike
    March heads down Broadway for #ReclaimHolyWeek in #NY carrying crosses. #BlackLivesMatter
    Speaker: do y’all want 1,000 new police? Crowd: we want 1,000 new teachers! #ReclaimHolyWeek
    “When black lives matter, all lives will matter!” W.8th & B’way #reclaimholyweek #blacklivesmatter
    They locked the doors of the justice building to keep us out. How symbolic. #LaPietaMarch #ReclaimHolyWeek
    Reclaiming religious imagery. Or something.

  135. rq says

    A Yogi in the South Side: Reaching Black Youth in Chicago With Yoga – this from the new Seven Scribes website, looks they’ll be turning out good material, too.

    I Grow Chicago is based in the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago’s south side, and it employs the arts, yoga and meditation, sustainable farming and nutrition education to, “foster creativity, wellness and empowerment for individuals in the community as a whole.” A part of the youth summer program that I was working with included a daily morning yoga practice prior to our work in the lot.

    Most of the kids weren’t having it.

    Most of the kids also didn’t realize that while I hold secondary degrees and used my mean code switch daily, I am still from Decatur, Georgia and none of their posturing phased me in the least. So while not yet teaching, I enforced yoga. You will take your shoes off. You will attempt downward facing dog. You will close your eyes during meditation.

    After a couple of weeks, I no longer had to be such an overt enforcer. And it wasn’t because the kids had begun fearing me as though I was the Trunchbull from “Matilda.” It was, I think, because they had begun to feel the effects of the yoga. For instance, there was one girl who had self-diagnosed as bipolar, due to her penchant for losing control of her emotions and lashing out at people. But when she began to use the breathing techniques she’d learned to reassess and respond differently to stressors she encountered in her daily life, she realized that she simply hadn’t developed the necessary coping methods to successfully navigate her world. […]

    As I became more familiar with the group, listening to their stories and attempting to relate to their south side Chicago narratives from my Atlanta-informed perspective, I started to see just how scary these kids weren’t – and given my own upbringing and experiences, I was ashamed of myself for having in any way subscribed to the largely media-driven notion of what kind of person resided in these areas.

    They were just kids. They weren’t consumed with gang culture, though it was still a part of many of their lives. And they weren’t brimming with anger at all times, ready to commit violence with the smallest provocation. And when they were angry, one could hardly blame them when taking into account the larger exterior forces and stressors present in many of their lives. But mostly, their worlds – much like mine as a young teen – revolved instead around the latest music and clothing releases, proving to one another how cool they were, and of course, trying their best to attract women (I spent a significant amount of time trying to educate them as to why cat calling at women who passed by was not only wrong, but wouldn’t produce the results they desired – getting the digits).

    In short, they weren’t the monsters depicted on CNN and in drill music. They were just teens trying to figure out their world and how to best survive in it. And survival often meant putting up a wall and assuming the mantle of a “savage.”

    The barriers between us came down further as they learned who I was beyond the Northwestern education that had been the only data point provided about me. They began to see that it is possible for someone of modest means like me (although I will not pretend to come from quite as dire of a situation as some of the kids with whom I worked) to make it out. They began to see that being educated doesn’t equate to being whitewashed. They saw my blackness, and began to see that black can mean more than what Englewood (like ghettos nationwide) had taught them. As I saw myself in them, they also began to see themselves in me.

    That establishment of a comfort level allowed us to do more in-depth transformative work and mentoring. There was one kid, (referred to as Winston here to protect his identity) who was 19, could barely read, but had was willing to try to overcome his past lifestyle. He had a genuine and consistent desire to better himself. I gave Winston the Autobiography of Malcolm X to read, knowing that the story – as it had done for many before him – would change his life. I knew, though, that it was unlikely he was at the reading level where he would be able to easily navigate the book.

    I was right, as days later he returned the book stating that he was unable to understand many of the words. I responded by saying that was half the point; for every word he came across that he was unfamiliar with, he should look it up and learn its meaning and pronunciation. I also told him that Malcolm himself had done something similar while in prison, reading the dictionary by moonlight, eventually degrading his vision, resulting in his wearing of the now iconic frames that make him immediately identifiable.

    I handed the book back, telling him that it would be slow going, but by the end of the story he would be transformed in more ways than he would realize. I told him to keep the book, to care for it as I cared about him. I still can’t describe the look in his eyes at hearing that he was cared about. From that day on he reported to me which words he’d learned, and the steps he was taking to avoid backsliding into his former lifestyle, though he admitted it was hard. But because we were available and supportive of him and his efforts, he said he was able to maintain his course. […]

    In time, folks around the hood began to warm to the organization’s presence, forming an almost symbiotic relationship evinced by situations in which there was reciprocal protection. When police would swarm groups of young men at the end of the 6400 block of Honore St. where we had begun work on the I Grow Peace House, assuming that only illegal activity could be taking place, I Grow members would defend against police, assuring them that those young men were not engaged in any illicit activities. And as work began on the house, renovating and landscaping the premises that would eventually feature classrooms, an outdoor farm, and space to practice yoga both in and outside, those with clout in the neighborhood made it plain to others that there was to be no vandalism of the property – it was to be protected, because it was for them.

    So I jumped at the chance to become a certified kundalini yoga instructor. Not only did it speak to my bent toward eastern spirituality (they were right to use that approach first), but it afforded me my first tangible opportunity to affect real change in the lives of the types of kids I’ve always wanted to help. I had already seen the positives, and if there was any way that my being black could foster a deeper connection to the practice and bring about more positive results, I was totally down.

    That is a feel-good story.

    DeRay Mckesson ’07: Ferguson Social Media and the Common Good

    Activist and blogger DeRay Mckesson ’07 returned to Bowdoin to talk about his role in Ferguson and activism in the black community.

    Mckesson has been at the epicenter of the firestorm emanating from Ferguson, Missouri. With This Is The Movement, the award-winning online newsletter he co-founded, and his social media omnipresence, Mckesson has earned a spot, along with the newsletter’s cofounder Johnetta Elzie, on Fortune‘s list of “The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders.”

    Stop. Making. Us. Learn. New. Names. via @deray

    Atlanta Dream forward Angel McCoughtry comes out on Instagram. Super-short, but also a happy read.

    Shout-out to the Grauniad: @deray I love the way the @guardian delved into torture by Chicago cops like #JonBurge & #RichardZuley, unlike the American media.

    Duke Student Admits to Hanging Noose; School Won’t Release Name

    Officials at Duke University have announced that an undergraduate at the school has come forward and admitted to hanging a noose from a tree on campus. Officials are, however, refusing to release the student’s name.

    According to the Associated Press, the unnamed student has left the campus but is still enrolled at the school. Duke is considering what disciplinary actions to take, school spokesman Michael Schoenfeld said at a news conference. AP notes that the student’s school status could change, depending on the results of an investigation by law-enforcement officials and a student-conduct review.

    School officials cited federal education law in explaining why they wouldn’t release the student’s “gender, race or whether the student had been in trouble in the past,” according to AP.

    The noose was found hanging from a tree 2 a.m. Wednesday in a plaza that is at the heart of campus, AP notes. People began posting photos of the noose to Twitter, which sparked concern among black students and staff on campus.

    Henry Washington, vice president of the Black Student Alliance, told AP that he learned of the noose from Twitter and “that he and about 14 other students saw the noose hanging overnight.”

    “I appreciate that immediate action was taken both by the student community to identify a person and by the faculty to ensure that disciplinary action is taken,” Washington told AP Thursday.

    Not italicized part – italics mine. Media.

  136. rq says

    Idaho police shoot pregnant woman, in 15 seconds, with an AR-15 rifle – video

    Dashboard and body camera footage obtained by the Guardian show police officers shoot Jeanetta Riley, a 35-year-old woman with a history of mental health problems who was wielding a knife outside a hospital in Sandpoint, Idaho. Riley died from the gunshot wounds. All officers on the scene have since been cleared of any wrongdoing, and the family has received no apology over the incident

    And yes, #JeanettaRiley was murdered by police last year. The video footage was just released.
    @deray they’ll have a day long standoff with a killer with multiple guns, but shoot a pregnant woman over a knife in seconds????

    Welcome to the revolutionary household of @bdoulaoblongata & I. Photo of a doormat that says ‘Come back with a warrant’. :D

    Mother of #AkaiGurley speaks in front of cross for #EricGarner in City Hall Park, NYC. #BlackLivesMatter #NoNewNYPD

    Father Criticizes Detroit Police For Alleged ‘Negligence’ In Son’s Traffic Stop Death

    An asthmatic man died during a traffic stop in Detroit Monday, and his father says police were negligent in handling both the incident and its aftermath.

    Anthony Clark Reed was stopped while driving around 9 p.m. in southwest Detroit, according to the Detroit Police Department. He fell unconscious while detained and was taken to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead. His father Kevin Clark, a pastor, first learned of his death about two hours later.

    Clark told The Huffington Post his first thought was that Clark Reed, who had previously been hospitalized for his asthma, suffered an asthma attack and that police were indirectly involved in his death. At the hospital, a staffer told Clark his 24-year-old son had suffered a heart attack. […]

    Then a DPD officer called Clark the next day, nearly 12 hours after Clark Reed’s death. Clark told The Huffington Post that the officer said the police report stated the Dodge Charger Clark Reed was driving had tinted windows, which is restricted by the state, and that Clark Reed appeared to be reaching under his seat — movements that made it look as if he might be hiding something.

    According to Clark, the officer said that Clark Reed told the cops who pulled him over that he couldn’t breathe. The officer reportedly told Clark that Clark Reed was handcuffed after being stopped; the police department would not comment on the details of the traffic stop.

    DPD spokeswoman Nicole Kirkwood told HuffPost that officers responded by giving Clark Reed his inhaler, performing CPR when he passed out and calling medics to the scene.

    Clark, who said his son juggled a full-time job while studying to become a nurse, had an alternate explanation for the movements that officers found suspicious.

    “He was gasping for air, looking for his inhaler [as he was driving],” Clark suggested instead. “When Detroit police pulled him out of the car he was already in panic mode … and they handcuffed him, and he’s trying to tell them he can’t breathe. I believe it caused his death … He dropped dead right there, in the hands of Detroit police officers who were negligent.”

    According to MLive, the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office has not yet determined the cause of death.

    Clark was just as concerned with how police had handled the incident after Clark Reed’s death. He questioned why no one from the police department was able to give them information at the hospital or when he called, twice.

    “Why wasn’t there an officer there to talk to me and tell me why we had lost our only son?” Clark asked. “Why was there complete silence about his death until 8:30 the next morning? … Something happened that they did not want the public to know about, least of all me.”

  137. rq says

    Duke: Student has admitted to hanging noose in tree

    An undergraduate student at Duke University admitted to hanging a noose in a tree and has left campus while disciplinary actions are considered, university officials said Thursday.

    School spokesman Michael Schoenfeld said at a news conference that the school would not release the name of the student who admitted to hanging the noose, found early Wednesday in a plaza at the heart of the campus. The person is still enrolled at Duke, but faces student conduct and law enforcement investigations.

    The student was identified with information provided by other students and will be subject to Duke’s student conduct process, Schoenfeld said. An investigation is continuing to find out if others were involved.

    School officials believe federal education laws protecting information about students and their grades prevent the school from describing the culprit’s gender, race or whether the student had been in trouble in the past, Schoenfeld said.

    He said state and federal law enforcement officials are also considering whether the student should face criminal charges.

    Feds Say Georgia’s Treatment of Transgender Prisoners Is Unconstitutional

    For three years, the Georgia Department of Corrections allegedly has denied transgender inmate Ashley Diamond medical treatment for gender dysphoria, causing her such distress that she has attempted on multiple occasions to castrate herself, cut off her penis, and kill herself. In February, Diamond filed a lawsuit against GDC officials, and on Friday the Department of Justice dealt the GDC a major blow, claiming that the state’s failure to adequately treat inmates with gender dysphoria “constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.”

    The DOJ weighed in on Diamond’s case via a statement of interest, which offers recommendations for how the district court in Georgia should rule in the case. It focused on Georgia’s so-called freeze-frame policy, which prevents inmates from receiving hormone therapy for gender dysphoria if they were not identified as transgender and referred for treatment immediately during the prison intake process. “Freeze-frame policies and other policies that apply blanket prohibitions to such treatment are facially unconstitutional because they fail to provide individualized assessment and treatment of a serious medical need,” DOJ officials wrote, adding that similar policies have been previously struck down in Wisconsin and New York.

    Chinyere Ezie, Diamond’s lead attorney, says the defense has until next Friday to submit briefs in response to the complaint, which may include a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The first hearing for the case is scheduled for April 13. You can read the DOJ’s entire statement below, and check out our earlier coverage of Diamond’s case.

    All black lives matter. And guess what? They got the pronouns right in the article.

    Cops being ugly: CPD investigating officer accused of breaking basketball hoop

    A Chicago police officer is accused of trying to break a basketball hoop in the Little Village neighborhood.

    A resident recorded the incident using a cellphone. It’s getting a lot of attention on social media and YouTube.

    Noe Silva owns the hoop, and while the alderman says there have been complaints in the past, Silva says people in the neighborhood have been playing like this for years.

    “Plenty of cops pass by, plenty of them and they see us playing and wave ‘Hi, hi how you doing’, they keep goin’. Sometimes say put it away, we put it away,” Silva said.

    Sivla says the officer in this case just grabbed the hoop without saying anything. The police department said the incident is under investigation.

    Here’s a Full Video of The Rock Lip Syncing “Shake It Off.” God Bless America. I know that’s kind of random, but hey. Random.

    Albany now: shutting down Pearl St NO JUSTICE NO PEACE DISARM THE POLICE #JusticeForDontay #BlackLivesMatter

    Kendrick Lamar to Throw Out Los Angeles Dodgers’ First Pitch. Woo!

  138. rq says

    4 officers without jobs after review of NSU student’s arrest

    Four officers are no longer employed by the Norfolk Police Department (NPD) after an internal review of a Norfolk State University student’s January arrest.

    Police Chief Michael Goldsmith released a statement Friday evening after finishing his review of London Colvin’s arrest, during which she was attacked by a police K-9. The K-9 officer is one of the four who are now unemployed. A fifth officer has been suspended for several days.

    “Their actions do not represent the values of my department,” Goldsmith said in the release. “We have a great police department filled with men and women who work hard in this community everyday. We must hold ourselves to high standards and embrace opportunities to strengthen our relationship with the people we serve.”

    Note use of ‘this is not who we are’ defense.

    This should show the headline from April 5 1968 on the assassination of MLK.
    King was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Today marks the 47th anniversary of his death.
    “@deray: Martin did not “just die.” He was as assassinated. He was a revolutionary.”

    A Writer From The Onion Totally Destroys Patton Oswalt in This Epic Twitter Rant

    So “Daily Show” host-in-waiting Trevor Noah tweeted some stuff, and then people found that stuff and criticized it, and then there was much hand-wringing over the criticism and whether it was needed or whether it was just the “Internet outrage machine” claiming its latest victim. And then Patton Oswalt threw down a barrage of 53 tweets in an “epic Twitter rant” that totally “DESTROYED” Noah’s critics. And there was darkness on the face of the deep.

    But then Joe Garden, a veteran comedy writer and the former editor of The Onion, weighed in with his own Twitter essay, which because he’s not famous and his thoughts don’t satisfy the white-hot need to yell SHUT UP EVERYBODY won’t get an iota of the traction Oswalt’s did. I’ll mostly let Garden’s essay speak for itself, except to point out that while Oswalt’s is predicated on the idea that empathy is someone else’s problem, Garden sees it as a tool for improving himself — and, by extension, being a better, funnier comedy writer. He’s able to accept moments of criticism as course-corrections on the path towards enlightenment rather than taking them as invitations to just curl up and die already.

    Whoa wait what? Nashville Prosecutor Fired Over Female Sterilization in Plea Deals

    A prosecutor in Nashville, Tenn., was fired after reports emerged that he had demanded that women involved in some plea negotiations undergo sterilization, the Associated Press reports.

    Brian Holmgren, a former Davidson County assistant district attorney, told the AP on Wednesday that he had been fired. He declined to say why he was dismissed, and officials would not discuss what prompted his dismissal.

    But the move comes after an investigation by the AP revealed that sterilization surgery was used as part of plea bargains at least four times in the past five years in child abuse and neglect cases.

    The most recent case, first reported by the Tennessean, involved Jasmine Randers, 36, who had a 20-year history of mental illness. She had been charged with neglect after her 5-day-old baby mysteriously died, the report says. And her defense attorney says the prosecutor assigned to the case refused to move forward with a plea deal to keep the woman out of prison unless she had the surgery.

    Davidson County District Attorney Glenn Funk, a former defense attorney who took over the office in September, recently barred lawyers in the office from demanding sterilization as part of plea bargains, the AP notes.

    “The bottom line is the government can’t be ordering a forced sterilization,” Funk told the AP.

    While shocking, coerced sterilization by the U.S. legal system is not new.

    The practice “evokes a dark time in America, when minorities, the poor and those deemed mentally unfit or ‘deficient’ were forced to undergo medical procedures that prevented them from having children,” the AP writes.

  139. rq says

    Not just USAmerica. Brazil Clashes After Boy Shot Dead By Police

    Clashes have taken place in Brazil after a 10-year-old boy was allegedly shot dead by police during an operation against drug gangs.

    Eduardo de Jesus Ferreira was killed at the Complexo Alemao shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, sparking protests in the area.

    His mother Terezinha Maria de Jesus told G1 news portal her son was at the door of their house when she saw a police officer shoot him.

    Authorities said the officers involved in the anti-gang operation have been suspended while an investigation is carried out.

    10 years old.

    Saw this yesterday, but here’s the BBC with video. Alabama death row inmate freed after 30 years.

    Black lives everywhere: Survivor Found 2 Days After Kenya University Attack Leaves 148 Dead

    A survivor of the killings at Garissa University College was found on Saturday, two days after the attack by Islamic extremists killed 148 people.

    Cynthia Cheroitich, 19, told The Associated Press from her hospital gurney that she hid in a large cupboard and covered herself with clothes, refusing to emerge even when some of her classmates came out of hiding at the demands of the gunmen from the al-Shabab group.

    She was rescued shortly before 10 a.m., according to Kenyan officials.

    Cheroitich said she didn’t believe that rescuers urging her to come out of her hiding place were there to help, suspecting at first that they were militants.

    “How do I know that you are the Kenyan police?” she said she asked them.

    Only when Kenyan security forces had one of her teachers appeal to her did she come out, she said. […]

    Al-Shabab on Saturday warned of more attacks in Kenya like the assault on Garissa University College, according to the SITE intelligence monitoring group,

    The Islamic militant group issued a statement which said the attack on Garissa college was in retaliation for killings carried out by Kenyan troops fighting the rebels in Somalia.

    The attack on the college in northeastern Kenya on Thursday killed 148 people.

    “No amount of precaution of safety measures will be able to guarantee your safety, thwart another attack or prevent another bloodbath,” said the statement.

    “Kenyan cities will run red with blood … This will be a long, gruesome war of which you, the Kenyan public, are its first casualties,” said the statement, issued on Shabab affiliated webites and Twitter accounts.

    Don’t turn away, world.

    Diddy is producing a series described as ‘South Park set in inner-city Detroit’

    Though Archer has been a massive success for FX, the network’s other animated shows (2014’s Chozen, 2012’s Unsupervised) never made it past even one season. Maybe Diddy can help.

    Sean Combs, who in previous incarnations has been called P. Diddy, Puff Daddy, and the “Best Reason to Buy the Godzilla soundtrack,” is set to produce a new animated comedy called Brightmoor for FX, according to Deadline.

    Brightmoor focuses on African-American students at Brightmoor Elementary. Deadline says it’s being described as “South Park set in inner-city Detroit.” Chip Hall, whose past work includes King of the Hill and Blue Mountain State, and Detroit standup Comedian CP created and will write Brightmoor.

    No other details are available; here’s hoping Diddy gets to be an elementary school music teacher — or maybe even Dr. Jinx.

    Privilege comes in many forms. Deion Sanders called out his son on Twitter for pretending to have street cred

    When your own dad calls you out on Twitter, it’s time to pack it up and go home.

    Deion Sanders Jr. got owned by his dad on Thursday after tweeting about the need to get “hood doughnuts” in the mornings.

    The elder Sanders, a former football and baseball player who is an analyst for CBS Sports and the NFL Network, told his son to “stop the hood stuff” and called him a Huxtable with a trust fund.

    On Friday, he brought up his son’s “hood” comment again. Clearly, he’s not over it.

  141. rq says

    Also that article posted by bluentx above? Is great. It also speaks about the racism of the North – back in the ’60s. So no, the North isn’t less racist than the South, it has just managed not to tarnish its own image as much, somehow.

    As a result of the events of April 17, and of the police performance that day, and because Harlem is policed like occupied territory, six young Negro men, the oldest of whom is 20, are now in prison, facing life sentences for murder. Their names are Wallace Baker, Daniel Hamm, Walter Thomas, Willie Craig, Ronald Felder and Robert Rice. Perhaps their names don’t matter. They might be my brothers, they might also be yours. My report is based, in part, on Truman Nelson’s The Torture of Mothers (The Garrison Press, 15 Olive Street, Newburyport, Mass., with an introduction by Maxwell Gelsmar). The Torture of Mothers is a detailed account of the case which is now known as the case of The Harlem Six. Mr. Nelson is not, as I have earlier misled certain people into believing, a white Southern novelist, but a white Northern one. It is a rather melancholy comment, I think, on the Northern intellectual community, and it reveals, rather to my despair, how little I have come to expect of it that I should have been led so irresistibly into this error. In a way, though, I certainly have no wish to blame Mr. Nelson for my errors, he is, nevertheless, somewhat himself to blame. His tone makes it clear that he means what he says and he knows what he means. The tone is rare. I have come to expect it only of Southerners—or mainly from Southerners—since Southerners must pay so high a price for their private and their public liberation. But Mr. Nelson actually comes from New England, and is what another age would have called an abolitionist. No Northern liberal would have been capable of it because the Northern liberal considers himself as already saved, whereas the white Southerner has to pay the price for his soul’s salvation out of his own anguish and in his own flesh and in the only time he has. Mr. Nelson wrote the book in an attempt to create publicity and public indignation; whatever money the book makes goes into the effort to free The Harlem Six. I think the book is an extraordinary moral achievement, in the great American tradition of Tom Paine and Frederick Douglass, but I will not be so dishonest as to pretend that I am writing a book review. No, I am writing a report, which is also a plea for the recognition of our common humanity. Without this recognition, our common humanity will be proved in unutterable ways. My report is also based on what I myself know, for I was born in Harlem and raised there. Neither I, nor my family, can be said ever really to have left; we are—perhaps—no longer as totally at the mercy of the cops and the landlords as once we were. In any case, our roots, our friends, our deepest associations are there, and “there” is only about fifteen blocks away.

  142. Rob Grigjanis says

    rq @139: Death squads have been killing kids in Brazil for decades;

    A familiar sight in Brazil’s cities for decades, the meninos de rua (street kids) used to be considered no more than pests. But because they are increasingly blamed for the rising crime rate in Brazil’s cities, they have now become prey: an average of four a day are killed. The most shocking attack came around midnight two weeks ago in Rio. Five men opened fire on a group of 50 sleeping children, killing three, ages 11, 14 and 17, on the spot. Two more died in the hospital from gunshot wounds to the head. Two other boys were dragged into a car and shot, their bodies dumped a mile away. An eighty boy died five days later, never waking from a coma.

    Three military policemen were arrested for the shootings as Brazilians sought to address, once again, the escalating cycle of vigilantism. President Itamar Franco said he felt the murders “like a punch in the face,” and protesters marched through Rio carrying banners that read STREET KIDS ARE OUR KIDS.

    Yet many Brazilians had no sympathy for the victims. “Everyone is making them out to be heroes,” says taxi driver Joao Mendes, “but they were not sweet flowers.” Citizens calling in to local talk shows applauded the massacre. Says Alexandre Coelho Reis, 23, who worked in Rio: “Many of these 13-year-old kids have killed. They deserve to die.”

  144. rq says

    7 San Francisco officers suspended over racist texts. Can’t seem to cite, but worth a read.

    Thank you, Robert Townsend…. For your integrity. #blackoutneverends – there’s a text-photo. Excerpt:

    As a kid, I thought it was silly & goofy to see my Dad in a cape. He left his mark on Hollywood and could’ve made millions more if he was willing to play a runaway slave, pretend to be the less intelligent token black friend, a thief, a thug, or even wear a dress and padding to become an old stereotypical black woman. However, he taught me images are powerful. What we put on tv..what we read…all of the images we show to the youth…are powerful beyond measure. He feels accomplished because he played a brown super hero and made little brown kids feel like someone finally represented them. Settling may make you more money but never settling means so much more.

    Double Dutch’s Forgotten Hip-Hop Origins

    In November of 1982, the New York City Rap Tour came to Paris, bringing with it a culture that had never been seen in Europe— hip-hop. The group of young and black New Yorkers wore a variety of leathers, sneakers, jumpsuits, puffer coats, caps, and hoodies. And, according to a write-up by David Hershkovits for Sunday News Magazine, they “blindsided the Europeans [in the audience] with their burst of personality and freedom of creation.”

    Afrika Bambaataa DJed. The Infinity Rappers rhymed next to him. Futura 2000 and Fab 5 Freddy sprayed canvases and walls surrounding the performance space. And in the middle of the dance floor, right before the Rock Steady Crew came out to breakdance, the Fantastic Four jumped rope, or more specifically double dutched.

    The names of those DJs, rappers, and graffiti writers who performed that fateful day have become fixtures in hip-hop lore. The Fantastic Four are less well known, but at the time, the double dutch girls defined the earliest incarnation of hip-hop.

    “In France they were like, ‘The American’s are coming to town!’ At this point, rap was coming into its own. We had Afrika Bambataa, the Rock Steady Crew, and us,” says Delores Finlayson of the Fantastic Four. “We were a part of that trend.”

    “The tour in France was New York City rap, and [double dutch] was part of the street culture,” Fab 5 Freddy says. Freddy was the original hip-hop impresario who organized that very first rap tour not long before he solidified the concept of hip-hop with his 1983 movie Wild Style. “[Double dutch] fit perfectly with the tour and it was a great element. That was the big bright moment regarding putting it all under the umbrella of hip-hop.”

    But today double dutch has disappeared from hip-hop consciousness. It pops up sporadically in creepy Angel Haze videos, during a Pharrell–Missy Elliott performances at the BET awards, or as a minor motif in movies dedicated to New York City like Top Five. But beyond those increasingly negligible roles, double dutch is no longer considered part of hip-hop. The oft-quoted four elements—MCing, DJing, graffiti, and breakdancing—that make hip-hop what it is, leave it out.

    So what happened to double dutch?

    More at the link. Did not know. Double-dutch – a sport?? Wow.

    2nd Cell Video of Police Interaction Ahead of NJ Man’s Death

    More cell phone video showing police interacting with a Vineland, New Jersey man ahead of his death surfaced Friday. The latest footage provides a clearer view of the final moments of Phillip White’s life — which involved officer behavior that one expert found questionable and led the man’s family to launch an independent investigation.

    Thirty-two-year-old White died Tuesday while in police custody. Vineland Police Officers had retrained him on the 100 block of Grape Street in Vineland a short time earlier in response to reports of a disorderly person.

    The expert — a top ranking law enforcement official and former use of force instructor — spoke anonymously about what transpired on the tape.

    The official, who is not connected to the investigation, said officers should have called off the dog immediately after bringing White under control. He also said the officer who demanded the person recording the video turn over his cell phone had no right to do so.

    White’s family retained attorney, Conrad Benedetto, to conduct an independent investigation into the 32-year-old man’s death, according to a news release.

    “There are great concerns about the circumstances that surround this death,” Benedetto said. “Mr. White’s demise is the second police-involved force incident in Cumberland County within 91 days. The public and Mr. White’s family deserve answers as to how Phillip was killed and why there is a lack of oversight of local police.”

    Inadvertently. Deputy ‘inadvertently’ shoots suspect with gun, believing he was using Taser

    A Tulsa County reserve deputy is on administrative leave after “inadvertently” shooting a suspect with his gun.

    Police say Robert (Bob) Bates, 73, thought he pulled out his Taser during an arrest, but instead shot the suspect, who later died at a local hospital.

    The shooting happened after an apparent drug and gun selling operation by the Tulsa Violent Crimes task force Thursday. Bates, a member of the task force, was part of a group of deputies trying to arrest Eric Courtney Harris, 44, in the parking lot of a Dollar General store.

    Police say Harris, a convicted felon, sold undercover officers a pistol. When confronted by an arrest team, he fled the scene on foot and police say they “observed him reaching for his waistband area …causing concern for the deputies safety.”

    After a brief pursuit, police say Harris was forced to the ground, where he continued to resist arrest and “refused to pull his left arm from underneath his body where his hand was near his waistband.”

    It was during this portion of the arrest that police say “the reserve deputy was attempting to use less lethal force, believing he was utilizing a Taser, when he inadvertently discharged his service weapon, firing one round which struck Harris.”

    Harris died at a local hospital and his cause of death is under investigation. Police say Harris admitted to medics at the scene that he may have been under the influence of Phencyclidine, a street drug commonly known as PCP.

    When asked if another gun was found on Harris, Shannon Clark of the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office says “The suspect was placed in the ambulance and transported so quickly. I have not been told there was a second weapon found on him yet.”

    Wait… there are 73-year-old police officers on active duty?
    Also, inadvertently.
    Those are two separate issues.

    Not just the police. Firefighters in St. Louis County do not look like those they are trained to protect

    In Hazelwood, none of the city’s 36 firefighters is black although nearly a third of its residents are African-American.

    In neighboring Ferguson, more than 67 percent of residents are black, compared with 7 percent of firefighters.

    And in the Florissant Valley Fire Protection District, two of the 60 firefighters are black, representing 3.3 percent of the department. By comparison, more than a quarter of the residents who live in that part of the region are African-American.

    The situation is the same throughout the parts of St. Louis County with large African-American populations. With the Justice Department fresh off an investigation here after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, more cities are being scrutinized for their hiring practices amid criticism that minorities are systemically underrepresented in public employment.

    Fire chiefs say that there are not enough qualified black applicants and that blacks hired are hard to retain, often recruited by other departments that offer better pay and benefits in communities with fewer emergency calls.

    “Even when we are fortunate to hire a minority, we don’t get to hold onto them for very long,” Hazelwood Fire Chief Dave Radel said. He said part of the reason for a lack of blacks on his department came from having two fire protection districts that also serve parts of his city. It doesn’t take long for firefighters on mutual aid calls to begin talking and find where the better salaries are, he said.

    But one of those districts — Florissant Valley — is not faring much better.

    The department recently received 70 qualified applicants to test for a hiring list that is likely to go into effect in May. Fire Chief Scott Seppelt recalled one or two African-Americans among them. After a series of tests, 10 applicants made the cut. All are white.

    Seppelt said his department continued to look at ways to improve diversity. Like some other departments, Florissant Valley provides training for fire and EMT programs at North Technical High School, part of the Special School District. Successful students graduate from high school with community college credits.

    “We really do want to see that applicant pool change. We are open to any way we can assist in doing that,” Seppelt said.

    Perhaps it’s worth examining the internal culture. More at the link.

    Faces Not Forgotten at the #morningmarch #ReclaimHolyWeek

  145. rq says

    Today, we remember Maya Angelou on her birthday. Her legacy, works and mission live on in the hearts of millions.

    Cosmo accused of racial bias in trends that ‘need to die’ list . And what a wonderful apology it was.

    Yes. “@MillennialAU: To the #BlackChurch, we need YOU. #ReclaimHolyWeek ” Sorry I’m too tired to transcribe, there’s text attached to that tweet, Reclaiming religion, as it were.

    Roorda: “Senator are you calling me a racist?” Chappelle-Nadal: “Yes, absolutely!” I wish that lady was my senator. #SheGivesNoFucks From March 13.

    Teen Dies After Falling Off Roof While Fleeing Cops In The Bronx

    The 17-year-old boy who fell off a roof Thursday night while being chased by cops who were in the process of making a marijuana bust in The Bronx has died, according to the NYPD.

    Police have confirmed that Hakeem Kuta, 17, died this morning. Kuta and a fellow teenage boy climbed onto the roof of 2685 Valentine Avenue in Kingsbridge around 7:35 p.m. on Thursday after officers attempted to arrest them for allegedly smoking marijuana inside the building.

    According to cops, Kuta fell over a ledge and plummeted six stories into an alleyway below. Officers say they attempted to give him aid, performing chest compressions and “cradl[ing]” his head. Kuta was transported by EMS to St. Barnabas Hospital in critical condition, but succumbed to his injuries at 10:48 a.m. today.

    Cradling his head, y’all.

    University of South Carolina suspends student for racist pic. Universities, cradle of progressive thinking. Home of racist imagery and texts.

    A South Carolina college student who said “n—–s” were to blame for the campus’ poor Internet connection has been suspended, school officials said.

    The University of South Carolina student is seen writing out a list of “reasons why USC WiFi blows” on a study room whiteboard in a shocking Snapchat photo that has gone viral.

    The racial slur tops the unidentified white woman’s list, which also includes “incompetent” professors, “ratchets,” an overpopulated campus and parking.

    “Racist and uncivil rhetoric have no place at the University of South Carolina,” the school’s president Harris Pastides said in a statement Friday.

    “The unfortunate and disappointing act of a student in a study room has challenged the Carolina community to reflect on our values and tell the world what we believe.”

    The student in the photo, who is not being named by the university, also faces USC code of conduct investigations. It’s unclear if she will be expelled.

    This is the third such racially charged incident to occur on a college campus in the past week. Three Bucknell University students in Pennsylvaniawere booted for making racist comments during a March 20 campus radio broadcast.

    A Duke University student who admitted to placing a noose on a tree is no longer on campus, although disciplinary actions are pending and criminal charges are under consideration.

  146. rq says

    Three generations of Martin Luther Kings.

    The Photograph That Captured the Horror of MLK’s Assassination

    Had Joseph Louw decided to finish his dinner on April 4, 1968, the photographs that captured the horror of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination may never have come to be. Louw, a young South African photographer and filmmaker at work on a documentary about King, had been eating dinner in a Memphis restaurant during the hour before tragedy struck. A sudden urge to watch the NBC nightly news brought him back to the Lorraine Motel, where he soon heard a single shot fired.

    Louw, who was staying three doors down from King, immediately rushed onto the balcony, where he saw King collapse to the ground. After realizing there was nothing he could do to help, he ran inside to get his camera. “At first,” he told LIFE the following week, “it was just a matter of realizing the horror of the thing. Then I knew I must record it for the world to see.”

    Louw captured the chaos and emotion that hovered over that April evening. He shot four rolls of film, but one image in particular remains emblazoned on the memories of those alive to see it at the time. In the moments following the shot, as King lay unconscious on the balcony, his comrades turned their attention to a sight in the distance: the assassin, getting away. They pointed their fingers in concert in the direction of his flight.

    Louw rushed to the studio of fellow photographer Ernest C. Withers to develop the film. As he did, his hands shook. “I remember the last stage of developing,” he said. “It was the longest 10 minutes of my life. The first picture I looked at was Dr. King laying behind the railing. I never did photograph him full in the face. I felt I had to keep my distance and respect.”

    Go see the pictures.

    Chicago.

    Supposed to be a Beyonce video. YES ANOTHER ONE.

    Anthony Ray Hinton Is Free After 30 Years Wrongfully on Death Row – read about it again. Wonder how many more are out there.

    Anthony Ray Hinton walked out of the Jefferson County Jail at 9:30 a.m. today a free man for the first time in 30 years. “The sun does shine,” he said as he was embraced by family and friends.

    One of the longest serving death row prisoners in Alabama history and among the longest serving condemned prisoners to be freed after presenting evidence of innocence, Mr. Hinton is the 152nd person exonerated from death row since 1983.

    Thirty years ago, he was arrested and charged with two capital murders based solely on the assertion that a revolver taken from his mother’s home was the gun used in both murders and in a third uncharged crime. EJI attorneys engaged three of the nation’s top firearms examiners who found in 1999 and testified in 2002 that the revolver could not be matched to crime evidence.

    For more than fifteen years, EJI attorneys repeatedly have asked state officials to re-examine the evidence in this case, but former Jefferson County District Attorney David Barber, and Attorneys General from Troy King to Luther Strange, all failed to do so.

    After the United States Supreme Court reversed lower court rulings in 2014, Judge Petro granted Mr. Hinton a new trial last September. District Attorney Brandon Falls’s office took months before finally conducting the testing that EJI has requested for fifteen years. That testing confirmed that the crime bullets cannot be matched to the Hinton weapon or to a single gun, and the State moved to dismiss the charges against Mr. Hinton.

    Judge Petro entered an Order of Nolle Prosequi yesterday and ordered Mr. Hinton’s release.

    Bryan Stevenson, Mr. Hinton’s attorney and EJI director, said that his wrongful conviction, and the length of time it took to free him, is due to prosecutorial misconduct and the indifference of judges. “We gave the prosecutors every opportunity to do the right thing. They just would not do it.”

    Mr. Hinton was convicted because he didn’t have the money to prove his innocence at trial, Mr. Stevenson said.

    “He was convicted because he’s poor. We have a system that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent, and his case proves it. We have a system that is compromised by racial bias, and his case proves it.”

    “We’ve gotten into a culture,” he said, “where the pressure to convict and to achieve these outcomes is so great that owning up to mistakes is less frequent than you’d like to imagine.”
    Outside the jail this morning, Mr. Hinton said he will continue to pray for the families of the murder victims, who together with him have suffered a miscarriage of justice. “I shouldn’t have (sat) on death row for 30 years,” Mr. Hinton told reporters.

    “All they had to do was to test the gun.” He expressed the wish that prosecutors and judges who were indifferent to his innocence be held accountable.

    “The State of Alabama let me down tremendously,” Mr. Hinton said in his first interview after his release. “I have no respect for the prosecutors, the judges. And I say that not with malice in my heart. I say it because they took 30 years from me.”

    Driving around St Louis today, saw a lot of #BlackLivesMatter signs on people’s lawns. Are you seeing this in your city too?

  147. rq says

    Freed after 30 years on death row – MSNBC video.

    For the second time this week, a man has been cleared of charges that left him on death row for decades – Anthony Ray Hinton walked out of a Birmingham jail a free man on Friday. Rev. Sharpton talks with Hinton’s attorney about what’s next for the newly free man. Duration: 11:50

    Remember Tony Robinson? Got shot in his own home and dragged out like a dog, with blood smearing all over the front stoop. Pretty gruesome, lots of clean-up. Well. Guess who’s getting the bill, instead of the cops? Landlord Sends Man $1,200 Bill To Cleanup His Roommate’s Blood, Who Was Shot Dead By Police

    Last month, a Madison, WI, police officer shot and killed Tony Terrell Robinson Jr., an unarmed 19-year-old. The city’s chief of police has compared the case to death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO.

    On Wednesday, the Wisconsin-based Devil’s Advocates Radio Network reported that Robinson’s surviving roommate, Anthony M. Limon, had received an eviction notice, giving him five days to vacate their Madison apartment or pay their three-days-late rent and $1,192.15 for “bio-hazard cleanup” for removal of Robinson’s blood from the apartment. The notice was addressed to Limon and his mother, whose name also appears on the lease.

    The notice was sent by landlord Ray A. Peterson. Peterson told Devil’s Advocates co-host Mike Crute that he believed it appropriate to bill Limon for the bio-hazard removal because Robinson’s name did not appear on the lease.

    In an interview with ThinkProgress, Peterson confirmed the report and argued that he was obligated to treat all tenants equally to avoid potentially violating non-discrimination laws. “If we gave them special privileges, it could be a real discrimination problem,” he explained. “In order to stay in business we have to treat the laws equally and all lessees equally.” He noted that an attorney for the tenants had indicated they intend to vacate without waiting to be evicted, which he termed a “delightful message.” Regarding the tragic death of Robinson, Peterson added, “We certainly feel bad about it.”

    Brenda K. Konkel, the executive director of the Madison-based Tenant Resource Center told ThinkProgress that Peterson was under no legal obligation to evict Limon or charge him for the blood removal. “There is no law like that,” she explained, and while “he has to treat everyone the same in similar circumstances,” there would only be a legal issue if someone of a different protected class were also to be killed in one of his apartments by the police and he treated the cases differently.

    In 1999, Peterson was convicted of violating a city ordinance after disconnecting the electricity and heat for an occupied dwelling.

    He sounds like an all-round asshole, but the insensitivity of sending the bill to Robinson’s roommate…

    The Martin Luther King Conspiracy
    Exposed in Memphis

    According to a Memphis jury’s verdict on December 8, 1999, in the wrongful death lawsuit of the King family versus Loyd Jowers “and other unknown co-conspirators,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government. Almost 32 years after King’s murder at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, a court extended the circle of responsibility for the assassination beyond the late scapegoat James Earl Ray to the United States government.

    I can hardly believe the fact that, apart from the courtroom participants, only Memphis TV reporter Wendell Stacy and I attended from beginning to end this historic three-and-one-half week trial. Because of journalistic neglect scarcely anyone else in this land of ours even knows what went on in it. After critical testimony was given in the trial’s second week before an almost empty gallery, Barbara Reis, U.S. correspondent for the Lisbon daily Publico who was there several days, turned to me and said, “Everything in the U.S. is the trial of the century. O.J. Simpson’s trial was the trial of the century. Clinton’s trial was the trial of the century. But this is the trial of the century, and who’s here?”

    What I experienced in that courtroom ranged from inspiration at the courage of the Kings, their lawyer-investigator William F. Pepper, and the witnesses, to amazement at the government’s carefully interwoven plot to kill Dr. King. The seriousness with which U.S. intelligence agencies planned the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. speaks eloquently of the threat Kingian nonviolence represented to the powers that be in the spring of 1968.

    In the complaint filed by the King family, “King versus Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators,” the only named defendant, Loyd Jowers, was never their primary concern. As soon became evident in court, the real defendants were the anonymous co-conspirators who stood in the shadows behind Jowers, the former owner of a Memphis bar and grill. The Kings and Pepper were in effect charging U.S. intelligence agencies – particularly the FBI and Army intelligence – with organizing, subcontracting, and covering up the assassination. Such a charge guarantees almost insuperable obstacles to its being argued in a court within the United States. Judicially it is an unwelcome beast.

    Long, long read with detailed information of the events surrounding the assassination of MLK Jr. Also interesting, and frightening, but long.

    TSA Says It Will Stop Touching So Many Black Women’s Hair. Making the rounds at different sources.

    At her husband’s funeral, Coretta Scott King requested that his last sermon be played aloud. Wow: Youtube link: Dr. King’s Funeral Service .

  148. rq says

    Millennial Activists United and LaTosha Baker presents #BlackChurch

    Over time the battle for Black Liberation has evolved greatly, and so too has it’s voice. However, Black Churches across America, as a whole, have been largely silent in supporting the ongoing struggles against racism & systematic oppression. The time to use your collective voices in service for those without a voice is at hand.

    For our people who embrace Protestant & Catholic beliefs it is important to know that the very savior you revere was the revolutionary of his era. He spent his time not preaching to those who were already holy, but in servitude to the marginalized, the shunned, & the oppressed. And since we were cast in the shape of our creator it is our duty to advocate for those who look like you. For us. For each other.

    It shall take a combination of both prayer & practice in order to cease the senseless cycles of violence plaguing the Black Community & win us our true God given freedom. We cannot sit idly by in the comfort of our homes & church pews when the real battle must be fought in the streets, the same as Jesus himself did.

    FIRST OBJECTIVE

    To confront the Black Church goers with the truths that they often do not acknowledge.
    To spur our people into taking direct action in the communities they pray for.
    To make the connection between Jesus and the people.

    We have decided to bring our burdens to your front door.

    #BlackChurch, we need you.

    Some from LA:
    RIGHT NOW: Die in outside LA City Hall and the LA PA #rudeawakening #MLKlegacymarch #BlacknBrownLivesUnited
    #rudeawakening #sclcLA #CantKillAfrica #wesaynomore @LACANetwork @FightSoulCities @Fightfor15LA @YouthJusticeLA
    Today I’m tweeting from skid row in LA. Everyone sees LA as a city of wealth. Not here #rudeawakening #MLKlegacymarch

    Concerning March, Ides or otherwise: The March 2015 Police Violence Report. America. In one convenient infographic.

    Today in NC: we #ReclaimMLK by canvassing community members to stand with underpaid workers on 4/15! #Fightfor15

  149. rq says

    Rev. Jesse Jackson leads a March to the polls for @garcia4chicago

    #Australia: Fascists of #ReclaimAustralia demo met by huge counter demo happening now in #Melbourne. #NoRoomForRacism

    Mother claims police tased, beat her daughter, left her in need of surgeries

    A mother said police brutally tased and beat her daughter, leaving her in need of multiple surgeries.

    “She’s got some teeth missing out of her mouth, her face is swollen up,” said Valerie Williams, the girl’s mother.

    Police told News 4 the situation started when an officer saw 19-year-old Kenisha Gray holding up traffic as she held a conversation in the middle of an intersection. Gray allegedly ran when approached by officers.

    After catching and handcuffing Gray, police said she escaped while still cuffed, so officers tased her, causing her to fall face-first onto the pavement.

    “That’s a lie,” Williams said. “I don’t see how she could hit face first, and she got all of this messed up on her face. I don’t understand, if she hit face first, she wouldn’t have had all this on her face. I can’t believe this.”

    No one from police was available to be interviewed on the incident.

    Gray is at home recovering from broken bones and missing teeth.

    This is what happens when you march peacefully with church folk on the anniversary of MLK being assassinated
    In other news, white kids are setting fires and rioting because their school’s basketball team lost. Yah, that happened.
    #CallItARiot @baltimoresun Distinct lack of word “riot” in your coverage of #OhioState, despite *89* fires. #Ferguson

  150. rq says

    So there was that teenager (see link 5, comment 145) who fell off a roof in New York while being chased by cops. Here’s something ugly: the cops make fun of him, with phrases like ‘turkeys can’t fly’, ‘oh well, less paperwork’ and ‘bon voyage, birdman’.
    Also, I have to learn how to do those donotlink links or whatever it is that one does to reduce traffic.

    Hundreds of Kentucky fans lighting couch on fire. In ferguson, it’s rioting thugs. In Kentucky, it’s “immature fans”.

    Misty Copeland. Look at something beautiful.

    Baltimore: This City Could Become The Next Detroit

    Starting this week, 25,000 households in Baltimore will suddenly lose their access to water for owing bills of $250 or more, with very little notice given and no public hearings.

    Rita, a renter in Southeast Baltimore who asked to remain anonymous for this story in order to protect her two children from being taken away, told ThinkProgress she was served with a shutoff notice last week. Maryland law states that a child that is “neglected” may be taken out of his or her home and put into foster care. One characteristic of “neglect” as defined by the Maryland Department of Human Resources is a child with “consistently poor hygiene” that is “un-bathed, [having] unwashed or matted hair, noticeable body odor.”

    “I love my kids, and I’d do anything for them,” Rita told ThinkProgress. “But if I turn on the shower or the sink and there’s no water, how can I give them a bath?”

    Food and Water Watch researcher Mary Grant explained that making water unavailable to residents is a major health risk, and that if Baltimore were to deprive 25,000 households of water, diseases would have a high chance of propagating throughout densely-populated neighborhoods.

    “There is direct risk associated with lack of access to water,” Grant told ThinkProgress. “When you lose your water service, you lose water to wash your hands to flush the toilet, there is risk of disease spreading.”

    City officials like Department of Public Works director Rudy Chow claim that residents using water without paying are to blame for the $40 million in overdue water bills. In fact, the Baltimore Sun found more than a third of the unpaid bills stem from just 369 businesses, who owe $15 million in revenue, while government offices and nonprofits have outstanding water bills to the tune of $10 million. One of those businesses, RG Steel (now bankrupt) owes $7 million in delinquent water bills all by itself.

    “It’s interesting that the city isn’t targeting those businesses first,” Grant said.

    Very interesting. More at the link.

  151. rq says

    The Passion of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

    We celebrate MLK in Selma and at the March on Washington but stay largely silent about his anti-war and anti-poverty activism, which revealed the ambitions and limits of his dream of a beloved community.

    Those limits came into sharpest focus in the aftermath of one of King’s greatest political triumphs. Political turmoil in Selma, Alabama in 1965 riveted the nation, turning into one of the most indelible chapters in America’s racial history and leading to the passage of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965. President Lyndon Johnson signed the voting bill and gave a beaming King a commemorative pen.

    Five days later the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles exploded in what would be a week-long riot that represented the largest domestic civil unrest in the nation’s history. Watts transformed King, who was heckled by local residents for preaching nonviolence. He would spend the next three years connecting issues of racial equality to a movement for economic justice and ending the Vietnam War.

    The Black Power Movement, popularized by the young activist Stokely Carmichael, forced King to confront the limits of the political reforms advocated by the civil rights movement. Voting rights and unfettered access to public accommodations did little to tackle the stubbornness of income inequality and the yawning wealth gap between the races. Public school integration remained halting and unsteady. Against this sobering backdrop some African-Americans grew more radicalized even as many whites became disaffected with what seemed like a seemingly endless list of racial grievances that now spilled over into a wave of domestic racial uprisings.

    King faced the onslaught of white backlash and Black Power by linking domestic struggles for racial justice with an international vision for human rights that challenged America to direct resources being spent in Vietnam to the domestic war on poverty. For King, Lyndon Johnson’s dreams of a Great Society would not be achieved through guns and butter.

    On April 4, 1967, one year before his death, King publicly denounced the Vietnam War during a speech at New York’s Riverside Church. Declaring that the “time for silence” had passed, King thrust himself into the forefront of the nation’s burgeoning anti-war movement, an act that effectively ended his political alliance with Johnson.

    King’s last year on Earth featured daring political alliances. Eleven days after his Riverside address King and Carmichael shared a stage at a huge anti-war demonstration that ran from Central Park to the United Nations. Carmichael and King, despite political disagreements on the question of self-defense and nonviolence, found common ground in opposing the war in Vietnam. […]

    King’s final speech, on April 3, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee, is most often remembered (like his March on Washington address) for its poetic conclusion, when he preached about traversing the “mountaintop” and witnessing the “promised land” of racial and economic justice that awaited African-Americans. “We’ve got some difficult days ahead of us,” he reminded them, but he remained boldly optimistic that justice would come. Perhaps the most important part of that speech is a moment that is largely forgotten. “The greatness of America,” said King, “lies in the right to protest for right.”

    King’s political courage at the end of his life found him on the wrong side of sitting American presidents, mainstream liberal thought leaders and the national racial status quo. Remarkably, King tapped into what he characterized as “those great wells of democracy” to reveal the depth and breadth of racial and economic injustice despite America’s insistence that civil rights laws had ushered in a new age of citizenship and justice.

    But, like contemporary #BlackLivesMatter demonstrators, King insisted that the diminishment of racial and economic oppression did not equal full and robust citizenship. King believed that black lives mattered—not only at the voting booths and in restaurants and public accommodations, but for those who collected garbage, lived off of food stamps and could barely afford to keep a roof over their heads.

    This kind of moral and political conviction transcended the soaring rhetoric for which the early King is most remembered. Having shared his vision of a beloved community with the world during most of his career, King spent the rest of his life (and all of his political capital) on matching eloquent words with heroic deeds in the face of daunting odds. Forty-seven years after his death, it is worth remembering the radical Martin Luther King Jr. who demanded a “revolution of values” long after the national applause had stopped.

    Cops arrest 31 as ‘hostile’ Kentucky fans set fires after NCAA Tournament loss to Wisconsin – note headline, language in article, and also, who made the cover photo.

    .@deray Soldiers guard maj.-white Congress during the DC Riots, which spurred the ’68 CRA, after MLK’s assassination.

    This day in history: a Baltimore police officer at Gay/Orleans streets in 1968 after post- #MLK assassination riots.

    Human screen time of Disney PoC characters in 3 of the last 6 PoC-lead Disney films. Yup, they spend most of their time as animals.

    March Against Police Terror denver,co April 4, 2015. Youtube video at the link.

  152. rq says

    Easter protests. #BlackChurch
    @AmandaMichelle @akacharleswade @deray Some churches used last words of police brutality victims as texts for Good Friday.
    “You don’t have to choose between faith & activism.” You really don’t. #BlackChurch action is powerful. @MillennialAU
    And here are the clergy and church member who came to remove protestors at Faith Miracle. #BlackChurch
    And a man just walked by, bowed his hands in prayer, and said, “Righteous. Righteous. Righteous.” The movement lives. #BlackChurch
    A church member has come to speak with @keenblackgirl. She’s a supporter. #BlackChurch
    The Pastor of New Cote Brilliante came to greet protestors. #BlackChurch

    None of that is in particularly chronological order.

  153. rq says

    Many more staff from Friendly Temple have come to manage the protestors. This is fascinating. #BlackChurch

    #GarissaAttack Sadness & rage at Chiromo mortuary @BBCAfrica #Kenya #Nairobi
    Kenyans using social media to share names of #GarissaAttack victims and their dreams, their stories. #147notjustanumber
    #147notjustanumber. We will name them one by one.

    Here’s one: Mary Muchiri Shee, Miss Garissa University #147notjustanumber We will name them one by one. I’ll post more, hopefully I’ll get all 147.

    These are the two biggest mass-murderers in Europe. Who can blame you for getting nervous around young white men?

  154. rq says

    Man Pulled Over for Window Tint Dies After Police Refuse Him Access to His Inhaler

    The father of Reed, Pastor Kevin Clark, is speaking out and saying that his son’s death was caused by negligence on the part of the Detroit police. The pastor also says that the negligence continued after his death, when they failed to contact the family for over two hours.

    During the stop over the windows on his new Dodge Charger, Reed, who has previously been hospitalized for asthma, told the officer he was having trouble breathing. Reed reportedly went to reach under his seat during the stop, which his father believes was to look for his inhaler, and for unknown reasons ended up handcuffed and thus denied access to his medication.

    The lack of oxygen caused him to fall unconscious while in the officer’s custody. At this point the police reportedly gave the dying young man his inhaler, but it was too late, and CPR as well as other efforts to revive him proved fruitless. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.

    RIP Elizabeth Nyangarora. Graduated in 2012 from St Andrews Kanga Girls High. #147notjustanumber #TheyHaveNames
    R.I.P Ruth Esiromo she was killed by the terrorists according to her boyfriend. Indeed #147notjustanumber

  155. rq says

    This is Tobias, he died in #GarissaAttack; to us he’s not a number, he’s a son, bro, friend. #147notJustANumber

    Jeff Macharia #147notjustanumber #TheyHaveNames

    Doreen ‘Specialrose’ Gakii #147notjustanumber #TheyHaveNames

    7) @Maskani254: Dadly Mose #147notjustanumber #TheyHaveNames ”

    9) @Maskani254: Faith Kendi #147notjustanumber #TheyHaveNames

    Book: White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (Brown Studies in Religion)

    Christology is especially problematic for feminists. Because Jesus was undeniably male and because the Christian church claims him as the unique God-bearer, feminist christology confronts the dual tasks of explaining the significance of a male God-bearer for women and creating a christological model adequate to feminist experience. Jacquelyn Grant rehearses the development and challenges of feminist christology and argues that, because it has reflected the experience of White women predominantly, it fails to speak to the concerns of non-white and non-western women. In response to this failure, Grant proposes a womanist theology and christology that emerge from and are adequate to the reality of contemporary Black women.

  156. rq says

    Here Are Some Of The Victims Of The Kenya University Massacre. Names and pictures.
    Still going to post individual ones if I come across them.

    Teachers facing possible decades in prison for cheating

    The cheating scandal in Atlanta raises questions of whether this is about failing schools and teachers or a failing system. Melissa Harris-Perry talks with two attorneys whose clients are among those educators awaiting sentencing.

    MSNBC video.

    If The Criminal Justice System Treated Other Music The Way It Treats Rap

    In courtrooms, jurors are told by prosecutors, who sometimes misinterpret or manipulate rap lyrics, to view an artist’s words as literal autobiography, rather than metaphorical or exaggerated storytelling. This works with disturbing effectiveness, critics say, because rap songs often contain lyrics that reinforce racial stereotypes about black males and hyper-sexuality or violence — helpful when the prosecutor is trying to make the defendant out to be an actual criminal.

    But when did we decide that the content of a song is a direct reflection of the songwriter’s character — and that it’s evidence of real-life actions undertaken by that person? When did we decide there’s no clear distinction between the world an artist creates and the world he or she actually lives in?

    Would we ever have suspected Johnny Cash of actually being a cold-blooded killer? […]

    If the criminal justice system treated other kinds of music the way it treats rap, all of the artists below would be seen as suspects. Their lyrics could be considered confessions, and might be cited as evidence of the artists’ criminal psyches or proof of their personal connection to actual crimes.

    That would be completely ridiculous, of course. So why should rap music be any different?

    Third Eye Blind, “Slow Motion”

    Miss Jones taught me English
    But I think I just shot her son
    ‘Cause he owed me money
    With a bullet in the chest you cannot run
    Now he’s bleeding in a vacant lot
    The one in the summer where we used to smoke pot
    I guess I didn’t mean it
    But man, you shoulda seen it
    His flesh explode

    Guns N’ Roses, “Used to Love Her”

    I used to love her, but I had to kill her
    I knew I’d miss her, so I had to keep her
    She’s buried right in my backyard

    Neil Young, “Down by the River”

    Down by the river I shot my baby
    Down by the river, dead, dead
    Shot her dead, shot her dead

    Bob Marley, “I Shot the Sheriff”

    I shot the sheriff
    But I say, but I didn’t shoot no deputy
    I didn’t shoot no deputy

    Dixie Chicks, “Goodbye Earl”

    Earl had to die, goodbye Earl
    We need a break, let’s go out to the lake, Earl
    We’ll pack a lunch, and stuff you in the trunk, Earl
    Is that alright? Good! Let’s go for a ride, Earl

    Maroon 5, “Wake Up Call”

    Caught you in the morning with another one in my bed
    Don’t you care about me anymore?
    Don’t you care about me? I don’t think so
    Six foot tall
    Came without a warning so I had to shoot him dead
    He won’t come around here anymore
    No, he won’t come around here, I don’t feel so bad

    Rihanna, “Man Down”

    Oh, mama, mama, mama
    I just shot a man down
    In central station
    In front of a big ol’ crowd

    Tom Jones, “Delilah”

    She stood there laughing
    I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more
    My, my, my, Delilah
    Why, why, why, Delilah
    So before they come to break down the door
    Forgive me Delilah I just couldn’t take any more

    #ReachHigher! #BlackGirlsRock, instagram photo:

    Like the First Lady and many of you, success wasn’t handed to me. I worked hard in high school, went to a public college, joined @TeachForAmerica, and accepted an unpaid internship at the @WhiteHouse that ultimately landed me a job. Now I work for the First Lady, and it’s an incredible honor to work for someone who continues to inspire me each and every day. It’s amazing what you can do when you are determined to #ReachHigher! #BlackGirlsRock -Kristin

    Meet 50 year old Ibrahim Ali who helped Garissa students escape. With video only, no text.

    #STL Cty & Deacons discuss how to handle #BlackChurch at Faith Miracle Temple #ReclaimHolyWeek #Ferguson #HappyEaster

  157. rq says

    They need more photos of her: Misty Copeland to Dance Swan Lake at DC’s Kennedy Center

    History will be made at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater on the evening of Thursday, April 9, when Misty Copeland, a soloist with the American Ballet Theatre, joins Brooklyn Mack of the Washington Ballet in a performance of Swan Lake. Copeland and Mack, both African American, will go where no dancers of color have gone before. They will become the first African Americans to dance the leading roles of Odette/Odile and Prince Siegfried respectively in what remains our whitest performing art: classical ballet.

    There should be little doubt that Copeland—a rising star at the American Ballet Theater who gained notoriety after appearing in a widely noticed Under Armour advertising campaign—and Mack—trained at Washington’s Kirov Academy of Ballet and Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet—have demonstrated ample talent on ballet stages around the world. Their appearance as leads in Swan Lake would be seen merely as appropriate next steps in their expanding careers if they were white.

    Their success should remind all Washingtonians of the pioneering role that D.C. has played in promoting African-American dance. As dance historian Tamara Brown has noted, the juxtaposition of academic training at Howard University and the numerous popular theaters along U Street nurtured a creative center for African-American dance during much of the 20th century. Howard University’s Maryrose Reeves Allen stood at the heart of this energetic scene.
    […]

    Maryrose Reeves Allen remained active in the Howard University and dance communities after her retirement in 1967. In 1991, one year before Allen’s death, Howard became the first historically black university to offer a degree in dance through its Department of Theatre Arts. Her spirit will be very much present at the Kennedy Center as Copeland and Mack step center stage.

    Oklahoma police do not plan to review death said to be stun gun mistake . Not even a review.

    Police in Oklahoma said they do not intend to further investigate an incident in which a volunteer, undercover 73-year-old “reserve deputy” mistook his gun for a Taser and shot and killed a suspect who was wrestling on the ground with a sheriff’s deputy, according to a police account.

    The reserve deputy, Bob Bates, an insurance executive, told police he thought he was firing his Taser at the suspect, Eric Courtney Harris, 44.

    “It was me,” Bates said in an interview on Friday with the Tulsa World. “My attorney has advised me not to comment. As much as I would like to, I can’t.”

    Bates did not reply to an emailed request for comment on Sunday, and calls to his workplace were not returned. A call to the supervisor of the Tulsa County reserve deputy program, Tulsa County sergeant Paula Hite, was not returned.

    The Tulsa paper quoted homicide sergeant Dave Walker as saying on Friday that police “would not investigate the death unless the sheriff’s office asked them to”.

    “And they have not asked us to,” Walker told the World.

    Oooooh maaaaaannn… not even a review.

    Memory problems? Maybe he shouldn’t be a cop. Cop ‘can’t remember’ climbing on car hood and firing last 15 shots of 137-bullet barrage that killed unarmed couple (even though his footprints were found and his colleague says they talked about it)

    An Ohio police officer who jumped on the hood of a car and fired the final 15 rounds of a 137-shot barrage that killed a pair of unarmed suspects is claiming that he doesn’t remember doing it.

    Michael Brelo goes on trial on Monday charged with two counts of voluntary manslaughter for the deaths of Timothy Russell, 43, and Malissa Williams, 30.

    He is the lone officer among the 13 who fired their weapons that night who is charged criminally because prosecutors say he stood on the hood and opened fire four seconds after the other officers had stopped shooting.

    A rookie cop told the same investigators Michael Brelo spoke with that the 31-year-old Cleveland officer talked about it in the days after the November 2012 shooting.

    Brelo’s footprints were also found on the hood of the beat-up Chevy Malibu where Russell, 43, and Williams, 30, died.

    Usual recap of information and misremembering at the link.

    Jackie Robinson on what happens when a black person stands up to protest or speak bold truth. (via @barnabaspiper)

    Virtually every time the black stands up like a [hu]man to make a protest or tell a truth as [s]he sees it, white folks and some white-minded black folks try to hush or shame [them] by singing out that “You’ve come a long way” routine. They fail to say that we’ve still got a long way to go because of the unjust headstart the founding fathers of this country had on us and the handicaps they bestowed on the red [people] they robbed and the blacks they abducted and enslaved. Whites are expert game-players in their contests to maintain absolute power. One of their time-honored gimmicks is to point to individual blacks who have achieved recognition: ‘But look at Ralph Bunche. Think about Lena Horne or Marian Anderson. Look at Jackie Robinson. They made it.

  158. rq says

    Kenya Attack: #147NotJustaNumber Remembers the Victims of Garissa Assault. Just a bit more about those who started the hashtag.

    RIP Angela ‘Ka/Jojo’ Kimata. We will name them one by one. #147notjustanumber #TheyHaveNames via @GhekoLishous

    The painful text JANET AKINYI wrote to her boyfriend before her death at #GarissaAttack university #TheyHaveNames

    Isaac Kosgey aka. Pop Lord Bushen #147notjustanumber #TheyHaveNames

    9) @Maskani254: Faith Kendi #147notjustanumber #TheyHaveNames

    “@TRENDINGKENYA: Lydia Melody Obondi #147notjustanumber #TheyHaveNames ~@Maskani254 ”

  159. rq says

    Tonie Wangu #147notjustanumber #TheyHaveNames

    Man shot and killed by police on southwest side of Indianapolis.

    A man was shot by police just before 12:30 a.m. in the 5700 block of Ashby Drive on Indianapolis’ southwest side near Decatur Central High School.

    IMPD says that officers responded to a call of a suicidal person.

    When they arrived, officers found a 23-year-old man armed with a rifle standing on the front porch of a house. He was also armed with two hand guns.

    The officers attempted to get the man to put down the rifle. The suspect fired one round at officers. Officers then returned fire, killing the man.

    The home belonged to the the man’s mother. The man allowed his mother to escape the house during the incident. She was not injured.

    IMPD told us they were unsure why the man fired at officers, but did say that they had been aware of the man having mental issues in the past.

    “We talk about mental health in our community,” said IMPD Chief Rick Hite. “And this is one of the examples of why we need to have services available to people and families on demand and officers had to protect the community, the family and themselves and unfortunately they had to take a life.”
    Police have not released the man’s name.

    No word on race, but apparently mental illness was an issue the police were unable to deal with appropriately.

    Guatemalans deliberately infected with STDs sue Johns Hopkins University for $1bn. Because this shit isn’t out of a dystopian novel, it really happened.

    Nearly 800 plaintiffs have launched a billion-dollar lawsuit against Johns Hopkins University over its alleged role in the deliberate infection of hundreds of vulnerable Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases, including syphilis and gonorrhoea, during a medical experiment programme in the 1940s and 1950s.

    The lawsuit, which also names the philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation, alleges that both institutions helped “design, support, encourage and finance” the experiments by employing scientists and physicians involved in the tests, which were designed to ascertain if penicillin could prevent the diseases.

    Researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine held “substantial influence” over the commissioning of the research programme by dominating panels that approved federal funding for the research, the suit claims.

    The lawsuit asserts that a researcher paid by the Rockefeller Foundation was assigned to the experiments, which he travelled to inspect on at least six occasions.

    The suit also claims that predecessor companies of the pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb supplied penicillin for use in the experiments, which they knew to be both secretive and non-consensual.

    The experiments, which occurred between 1945 and 1956, were kept secret until they were discovered in 2010 by a college professor, Susan Reverby. The programme published no findings and did not inform Guatemalans who were infected of the consequences of their participation, nor did it provide them with follow up medical care or inform them of ways to prevent the infections spreading, the lawsuit states.
    Advertisement

    Orphans, prisoners and mental health patients were deliberately infected in the experiments.

    The plaintiffs’ case quotes the correspondence from one of the programme’s lead researchers who tells another doctor that if it were discovered by “some goody organisation” that the programme was testing people who were mentally ill it would “raise a lot of smoke”. The manager continues: “I see no reason to say where the work was done and the type of volunteer.”

    Baltimore-based attorney for the plaintiffs Paul Bekman told the Guardian that of the 774 claimants, about 60 were direct survivors of the programme. Many have died as a result of deliberate infection and others had passed on disease to family members and partners. […]

    A spokeswoman for Johns Hopkins School of Medicine said the institute expressed “profound sympathy” for the victims of the experiments and their families, but added: “Johns Hopkins did not initiate, pay for, direct of conduct the study in Guatemala. No nonprofit university or hospital has ever been held liable for a study conducted by the US government.”

    The university stated it would “vigorously defend” the lawsuit.

    The Rockefeller Foundation issued a detailed response to the claim online, which it described as seeking to “improperly to assign ‘guilt by association’ in the absence of compensation from the United States federal government”.

    The statement continued: “In the absence of a connection to the Rockefeller Foundation, the lawsuit attempts to connect the Foundation to the experiments through misleading characterizations of relationships between the Foundation and individuals who were in some way associated with the experiments.”

    A spokeswoman for Bristol-Myers Squibb declined to comment.

    Avoidance of responsibility, or are they really targetting the wrong people? Who knows. But if you read the article, be warned, it’s pretty horrific.

    Friendly Temple: Deacons battled us to occupy the sidewalk. They eventually understood us tho. #BlackChurch #Ferguson

    When Protest Comes to Your Door

    Protest. What comes to mind when you think about a protest? What’s the vibe? Would the silent protests common among monks come to mind? What about the hunger strikes in prison? Probably not, because the media doesn’t like to hype and loop that kind of protest.

    The portrayal of Ferguson protests has been narrow. And in many ways, the protest actions have not utilized the multitude of forms protest can take.

    Millennial Activists United has worked to change the narrow portrayal of protest in St. Louis. From their die-in in Lambert airport to their creative dramatic vignettes at #BlackBrunch, MAU is making sure we “stay woke” and continue to acknowledge that deleterious effects of police violence on Black lives.

    Let’s revisit the definition of protest: an expression of bearing witness on behalf of an express cause by words or actions with regard to particular events, policies, or situations. Protests can take many forms, from individual statements to mass demonstrations

    When you get bad service at that restaurant and commit to never return, you are protesting. When you sign that online petition, you are protesting. We do it all the time. However, protesting in St. Louis post-Ferguson has often meant confrontation and tear gas. So I get why some people don’t understand the concept of protesting outside of this frame.

    MAU has known that clever, thoughtful, and strategic actions are needed for #BlackLivesMatter to continue to grow as a movement. On Easter Sunday, they brought the protest to the #BlackChurch. It was a SILENT action where protesters hummed “Wade in the Water” when approached or engaged. Signs and banners read, “Jesus questioned the status quo,” “Let justice run down like water and righteousness as a mighty stream,” and “Jesus was revolutionary.” The most “agitating” posters read, “Mike Brown was the least of these,” “You don’t have to choose between faith and activism” and “crucifixion = lynching.”

    They have outlined their reasoning, but I would like to add a few thoughts.

    The protest was aimed at the Black church as an institution. And what better time to bring a plea for community and connection to the Black church than Easter (i.e. record attendance)? As a whole, the Black church could do better at connecting the work of #BlackLivesMatter to the radical-servant-to-the-least-of-these named Jesus. There are a number of clergy doing amazing work, but we must not conflate the individual with the institution. Challenging an institution does not mean that all individuals within said institution are in lock step. So MAU protesting the church does not mean all pastors and parishioners are “bad.” It is simply a call to reflect on if we are truly using all in our sphere of influence to publically support or effect change in the status quo regarding law enforcements’ treatment of Black lives. Rather than be offended that a particular church was targeted, it might be best to consider it an opportunity. One church, New Cote Brilliante, was welcoming and the pastor came out to express his support. Another called the police—even after one deacon explicitly agreed with each sign as he walked down the line of protestors. Another used their group of approximately 15 male deacons to attempt to intimidate and physically block protesters. Mind you this was in response to silence and the intermittent humming of a Negro spiritual. […]

    How would you feel if a protest came to your front door? Would you be able to hear the message and potentially stand in solidarity, or would you be so lost in your defensiveness and indignation that you would meet their message with anger?

    MAU continues to push us outside of our comfort zone, and truthfully, that is only place real change happens.

    Skipped a bit, worth a read, at the link.

  160. rq says

    EXCLUSIVE: As Chicago Police Kill Youth, Vast Misconduct Allegations Purged

    On July 4, 2014, as the final explosions of Chicago’s lakefront fireworks extravaganza trailed into the water and began fading in the night sky, 14-year-old Pedro Rios Jr. crossed Cicero Avenue in front of an approaching police car, on the northwest side of town.

    A brown-skinned boy just over 110 pounds, sporting a low fade haircut and the faint beginnings of a mustache, Rios walked in blue-and-white sneakers, shorts and a blue T-shirt – which soon bore the marks of two gunshots, fired into his back by a police officer.

    The young Chicagoan technically saw the end of his eighth grade year; school had ended for the summer two and a half weeks prior. But given a spell of missed days and poor grades, Rios did not graduate from the neighborhood elementary school he attended with two younger brothers.

    Pronounced dead on the scene of his encounter with police, he never will.

    That authorities in the squad car pursued the 14-year-old – and that an officer discharged a firearm, killing Rios – is not in dispute. Yet an official copy of the boy’s death record, certified by the Cook County medical examiner, states “suicide” under “manner of death.” Performed by the same medical examiner’s office, Rios’ autopsy findings state “homicide.”

    Meanwhile, the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) – a City of Chicago agency tasked with investigating police misconduct complaints and weapon discharge notifications – categorized the fatal shooting of Rios as “non fatal” in its statistical report to the public.

    Such misclassifications are not the only aberrations Truthout discovered in government reporting related to the death of the 14-year-old. Nor is Rios’ shooting the only instance in which a fatal encounter with Chicago police officers disappeared from statistics.

    According to IPRA spokesperson Larry Merritt, in separate conversations with both Truthout and the Chicago Justice Project, the oversight agency’s numbers are sourced directly from the Chicago Police Department, via the Citizen and Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting (CLEAR) database. Translated from jargon: Chicago’s municipal government provides accuracy in reporting police violence only to the extent accuracy exists in police data. Even setting the matter of IPRA’s purported independence from the department aside – the revelation is a bombshell.
    As deaths disappear into database digits, Laura and Pedro Rios Sr. live the reality that their four children are now three.

    After months of trumpeting free-falling crime rates, as evidence of successful policing, Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy faces ongoing scrutiny over the department’s statistics. Covered in detail by journalists at Chicago magazine, McCarthy-era crime reporting has seen a small number of murders go uncounted as such, marked in a mysterious non-criminal “death investigation” column instead. For a department intent on measuring success by year-to-date statistics, creatively categorizing crime provides a surefire route for driving down the crime rate, as officers themselves and experts who’ve long studied the numbers, related in Chicago magazine’s report.

    Analyzing three years of deadly shootings by police under McCarthy’s leadership, Truthout found at least four fatal shootings, in addition to the fatality of Pedro Rios Jr., missing from reports to the public.

    That’s just the beginning of the article. Classifying a police shooting as ‘suicide’? Sounds like it’s nothing extraordinary for someone in cuffs to shoot themselves after being searched and found weaponless (as in other cases we’ve seen)…

    Here’s another on the same: Death of 14-Year-Old Latino Killed by Chicago Police Kill Labeled ‘Suicide’

    On the Fourth of July 2014, Chicago police shot and killed a 14-year-old child, Pedro Rios Jr. Although the Cook County medical examiner’s autopsy revealed that Rios’s death was caused by homicide, his official death record, certified by the same agency, reads “suicide” as the manner of death.

    That—and many more disturbing details of Chicago police and the Independent Police Review Authority’s (IPRA) practices around officer-involved killings—is what Sarah Macaraeg found in part one of her four-part investigation for Truthout.

    According to its website, Chicago’s IPRA was created in 2007 over criticism over the police department’s misconduct. IPRA is lead “by a civilian Chief Administrator and staffed entirely with civilian investigators, IPRA is an independent agency of the City of Chicago, separate from the Chicago Police Department. IPRA replaced the former Office of Professional Standards.” But, Macaraeg’s reporting indicates IPRA is failing at holding police accountable: the agency failed to even count at least six officer-involved killings in three years alone—including Rios’s death, which is ironically listed as “non-fatal.”

    Part one of Truthout’s investigation yields damning conclusions about the Chicago PD as well as the very costly civilian-led IPRA, including institutionalized bias.

    Rip Angela #147NotJustANumber @C_NyaKundiH @kenyanpundit #GarissaAttack we will name them by names

    NY Student Accepted at All 8 Ivy League Schools

    At a time when tens of thousands of American students are getting turned away from their first-, second- and even third-choice college picks, Harold Ekeh, of Long Island, N.Y., has an enviable quandary: deciding which of the eight Ivy League colleges he will attend next year, according to CBS New York.

    For all his hard work and accomplishments, the Elmont High School salutatorian was no less surprised when the acceptance letters arrived. “Absolutely shocked,” Harold told the television news station about the acceptances. “It was as though I was hit repeatedly. I was stunned.”

    Harols, whose family immigrated to the city eight years ago from Nigeria, told the station that he credits his academic success with his family’s humble beginnings, thirst for education and a strong desire to make a meaningful mark on society.

    “I am just thanking God for what he is doing for my family in the life of my son,” Harold’s mother, Roseline, told CBS News. She works for a human resources agency in Queens, N.Y., while his father, Paul, works in the traffic division of the New York City Police Department.

    “I am overwhelmed,” his dad told the news outlet. “To say that I am proud is not enough; it is awesome.”

    Although Harold spent most of his high school years focused on complicated biochemistry experiments, he volunteered on social-justice campaigns, served as a mentor and participated in sports. He was also elected to Elmont’s homecoming court and honor society.

    “Kids would say, ‘I want to be a firefighter or a police officer or a superhero.’ I would say I want to explore the human body, what makes us who we are,” he said. “I would like to be a neurosurgeon when I grow up.”

    As for which school he’ll pick, he’s leaning toward Yale but plans to visit the other schools in upcoming weeks.

    “I am very humbled by this,” he said. “I see this as not an accomplishment for me but as an accomplishment for my school, my community. Because I really see this as my mission to inspire the next generation.”

    I hope all his dreams come true. And may the racism be far away.

    New Jersey man says he was robbed by rapper DMX and his entourage at Newark gas station: police. Eh?

    #CrimingWhileWhite Baby-Faced Teen Arrested for Impersonating a Cop at Ice Cream Stand. Check the language all the way through. 19, and a teen? Tamir (12) was a ‘young man’.

    Reminder: 2 days till #Ferguson elections and 2 wks till the special session to pass the Civilian Oversight Board!!!

  161. rq says

    Damn you, moderation. There will be a new #160 soon!

    RT @FrankGibberish: When your barber could have been a surgeon but…institutional racism.

    #BlackChurch folk calling the police on non-violent black protesters. In/near St. Louis. Wake me when this nightmare ends. #ReclaimHolyWeek

    Opportunity for up to 30 workers: starting today at 3pm, paying $10 an hour to canvas in wards 2 & 3. Also, looking for canvassers tomorrow!
    If interested, please attend training at the Quality Inn in Hazelwood (55 Dunn Rd) from 2-3pm. Email OpHelpOrHush[at]gmail[dot]com.

    Ferguson Is Having an Election, but Will Ferguson Vote?

    “When people on the left get mad, they march. When people on the right get mad, they vote. From the standpoint of influencing government, voting beats marching,” said former Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank during a TV interview March 28.

    In that interview, Frank was talking about the Occupy movement, but the sentiment could easily apply to what goes on in Ferguson, Mo., Tuesday, when the city holds its municipal elections.

    In a city where the last election only brought out 6 percent of eligible African Americans, turnout is the difference between change and more of the same.

    “I attach tremendous significance to this election. This is the first election post-Mike Brown, and my opponent does not court African Americans at all, and that’s two-thirds of the people in this ward,” Ferguson mayoral candidate Bob Hudgins told The Root Thursday.

    Asked if he thought there would be an uptick in turnout Tuesday, Hudgins said, “There has to be. A year ago it was 12 percent in this ward. If it’s 12 percent on Tuesday, I will lose.”

    There was a lot of talk about registering voters after several weeks of protests last year following the police shooting death of Michael Brown, but results have been tepid. According to one report, only 128 new voters were registered by October 2014, after almost three months of demonstrations. Many young protesters are pushing for change through other means.

    The Department of Justice’s report on racial discrimination in Ferguson has already resulted in the resignations of Ferguson’s police chief, city manager and a municipal judge.

    Historically, Ferguson has had very low voter turnout, leading to a majority-white city government where the mayor, City Council and police chief are white, as well as 94 percent of the police force. The weak turnout has been blamed on everything from how municipal elections are held on odd years instead of the even years of congressional and presidential elections to the transient nature of the city’s black population. […]

    Only three [!!!]African Americans have run for the Ferguson City Council in the past 120 years, despite the fact that the city has grown more and more African American. Ferguson is currently 67 percent black. Looking to change this, on Tuesday, four African Americans are running for the council in Ferguson’s three wards. […]

    “It’s not just about black candidates. Everybody who’s black is not going to necessarily advocate for equality and focus on your issues. All skinfolk ain’t kinfolk. Just because someone doesn’t look like you doesn’t mean they can’t be an advocate for you,” Bynes told The Root.

    “If people want to fight and stand up for what’s right regardless of the color of their skin, the community will be behind that,” she added.

    For months, Bynes has been engaged in the not-so-glamorous work of on-the-ground grassroots politics. She said, “There is going to be an increase in voter turnout. Both Bob [Hudgins] and Lee [Smith] have been told, ‘You’re the first person who’s ever knocked on my door and asked for my vote.’ That’s the kind of stuff that makes a tremendous difference.”

    There will be other campaign activity in Ferguson this Easter weekend.

    The day before Easter, Reps. Lacy Clay and Emanuel Cleaver (both D-Mo.) and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) were in Ferguson and the neighboring towns of Jennings and Dellwood, knocking on doors and talking with voters. They attended a campaign workshop on civic engagement organized by the Congressional Black Caucus Political Education & Leadership Institute at Wellspring Church in Ferguson. The workshop focused on community canvassing, campaign management and get-out-the-vote strategies.

    “By raising the awareness that there’s an election of April 7, we will be hopefully able to generate the turnout we need to make a difference,” Clay told The Root during an interview on Capitol Hill.

  162. rq says

    Seen before, different source: Transgender Woman Cites Attacks and Abuse in Men’s Prison

    Before she fell on hard times and got into trouble with the law, Ashley Diamond had a wardrobe of wigs named after her favorite divas. “Darling, hand me Aretha” or Mariah or Madonna, she would say to her younger sister when they glammed up to go out on the town.

    Ms. Diamond, 36, had lived openly and outspokenly as a transgender woman since adolescence, much of that time defying the norms in this conservative Southern city.

    But on the day she arrived at a Georgia prison intake center in 2012, the deliberate defeminizing of Ms. Diamond began. Ordered to strip alongside male inmates, she froze but ultimately removed her long hair and the Hannah Montana pajamas in which she had been taken into custody, she said. She hugged her rounded breasts protectively.

    Looking back, she said, it seemed an apt rite of initiation into what became three years of degrading and abusive treatment, starting with the state’s denial of the hormones she says she had taken for 17 years. But on Friday, Ms. Diamond and, through her, all transgender inmates won the unexpected support of the Justice Department, which intervened on her behalf in the federal lawsuit she filed against Georgia corrections officials in February.

    “During intake, I kept saying: ‘Hello? I’m trans? I’m a woman?’ ” Ms. Diamond recounted in a phone conversation from prison a few weeks ago. “But to them I was gay. I was what they called a ‘sissy.’ So finally I was like: ‘O.K., I’m a sissy. Do you have a place where sissies can go and be O.K.?’ ”

    They did not provide one, she said. A first-time inmate at 33 whose major offense was burglary, Ms. Diamond was sent to a series of high-security lockups for violent male prisoners. She has been raped at least seven times by inmates, her lawsuit asserts, with a detailed accounting of each. She has been mocked by prison officials as a “he-she thing” and thrown into solitary confinement for “pretending to be a woman.” She has undergone drastic physical changes without hormones. And, in desperation, she has tried to castrate and to kill herself several times.

    “My biggest concern is that she survives to get out of prison, which I worry about every day,” said Stephen Sloan, a counselor who treated her at Baldwin State Prison and whose pleas that Ms. Diamond be restarted on hormones were ignored.

    In her lawsuit, Ms. Diamond asks the court to direct prison officials to provide her hormone therapy, to allow her to express her female identity through “grooming, pronoun use and dress,” and to provide her safer housing.

    She also seeks broader changes in policy and practice. And the Justice Department, in its support, declared hormone therapy to be necessary medical care, saying Georgia, and other states, must treat “gender dysphoria” like any other health condition and provide “individual assessment and care.”

    Georgia’s Department of Corrections has declined to comment about the case. As a matter of policy, it also denied The New York Times’s request to interview Ms. Diamond in person at Georgia State Prison, where she was moved a few weeks ago in apparent retaliation for her lawsuit, she claims. Georgia State had more sexual assaults between 2009 and 2014 than all but one other state prison.

    Since her arrival there, Ms. Diamond has survived an attempted rape in a stairwell, dealt with inmates exposing themselves and masturbating in front of her, and faced relentless sexual coercion, she said last week in an emergency motion seeking an immediate transfer to a safer institution.

    Though Ms. Diamond believes she is championing a cause larger than herself, she has expressed increasing despair. She sobbed continually during a recent visit from her lawyer, and in the phone interview, she said: “Every day I struggle with trying to stay alive and not wanting to die. Sometimes I think being a martyr would be better than having to live with all this.”

    Last year, Ms. Diamond smuggled video snippets out of prison, and a friend posted them on YouTube. In them, her head wrapped in a white turban, she struck a lighter and more defiant tone, hoping that recent television portrayals of transgender characters might generate concern for her plight.

    “While it seems like the whole world is obsessed with ‘Orange Is the New Black,’ I’m living it,” she said.

    But unlike the transgender woman inmate played by Laverne Cox on “Orange,” the Netflix series, Ms. Diamond is locked up with men, for what could be eight and a half more years, and her reality is grimmer than television fiction.

    Her lawyer, Chinyere Ezie of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Ms. Diamond’s case dramatized the “discrimination to incarceration pipeline” that disproportionately lands transgender people, and especially those who are black like Ms. Diamond, behind bars.

    Many face rejection by their families, harassment at school and discrimination in the workplace. Black transgender people have inordinately high rates of extreme poverty, homelessness, suicide attempts and imprisonment; nearly half those surveyed for the National Transgender Discrimination Survey had been imprisoned, compared with 16 percent of the study’s 6,450 participants.

    And transgender women in male prisons are 13 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than is the general population, with 59 percent reporting sexual assaults, according to a frequently cited California study. […]

    Shortly after Ms. Diamond entered the Georgia prison system in 2012, new federal standards under the Prison Rape Elimination Act established special protections for transgender inmates, recognizing them as an especially vulnerable group whose prison placement should be carefully considered and continually reviewed.

    Georgia itself committed to evaluate each inmate individually during intake to identify “risk factors associated with sexual assault,” and has declared zero tolerance for sexual assault and misconduct. In Ms. Diamond’s perception, however, “that is just words on paper.”

    Though she said she loudly declared herself a transgender woman during intake, she was assigned to a high-security prison for men, where within a month she was brutally attacked — punched, stomped, raped and knocked unconscious — by six gang members, the lawsuit says.

    She was then transferred to another high-security prison, Baldwin State, where Dr. Sloan works. In his notes on her case, he describes the atmosphere there as “one of marked homophobia with little support for inmates who are members of sexual minorities.”

    By the time Dr. Sloan met her, Ms. Diamond had already gone through an abrupt withdrawal from the hormones she says she had been taking: estrogen, progestin creams, testosterone blockers and anti-androgen medications. As her body transformed, and without access to feminine dress and grooming, her appearance and her gender identity were suddenly and painfully unaligned, she said.

    Georgia’s policy, which the Justice Department says is unconstitutional, is to “freeze” treatment at current levels at entry into the system and deny “new” hormone therapy. It is unclear why, then, Ms. Diamond was denied treatment.

    “Ashley is actually the first transgendered individual I’ve worked with who really has been outspoken and demanding her rights,” Dr. Sloan said. “What I’ve always done is just document my observations of how the system is hurting her.”

    Over the next couple of years, Ms. Diamond repeatedly suffered sexual assaults and harassment, which she says some prison officials told her she had brought on herself while others cautioned her to “guard your booty.” She also attempted suicide several times, and tried to sever her penis with a razor, ending up hospitalized.

    For a period, Ms. Diamond was housed with nonviolent offenders and “ceased being a victim of sexual coercion or assault,” her lawsuit says. But when she renewed her push for hormone therapy, she says, she was told to develop better coping skills, placed in solitary confinement, and transferred back to a high-security prison.

    In apparent response to her lawsuit, Ms. Diamond was recently given a hormone patch, though the dosage is too low, her lawyer said.

    A couple of weeks ago, on her mother’s cottage porch, the phone rang. Her younger sister answered and shrieked: “Ashley! I love you!”

    Ms. Diamond had found a few minutes to call before a head count was taken, she said over the speakerphone.

    “I’m in a little hell right now,” she said, her voice trembling. The state attorney general had called the prison after her lawyers reported the attempted rape in the stairwell, she said. “The warden came up to me and said: ‘Do I need to lock you down? I’m not going to have this!’ ”

    Her sisters wailed, and her mother raised her arms to the skies.

    “Don’t cry, everybody,” Ms. Diamond said. “Please, don’t cry.”

    I skipped her biography because space, but please, read it. Brave woman. And fuck the system. Just fuck it. I can’t even realiably say ‘I hope she comes out of prison as okay as possible’ because it is clear that nothing happening to her is okay in any sense of the word. Moral support, as much as that can do. :/

    Whether required or not, demand for vote on new stadium is growing louder. Just a silly piece on silly people who want to spend money in silly ways when there are bigger issues than football to deal with.

    #Ferguson City Council candidates to support/vote for on Tuesday:
    W1: Ella Jones
    W2: @Bob_Hudgins
    W3: Lee Smith
    #FergusonElex #JPCTumblr

    From Twitter to Instagram, a different #Ferguson conversation

    In a new analysis of the #Ferguson hashtag on Twitter and Instagram, Pew Research Center has found some striking differences between the two social media platforms in how people use the hashtag and direct the conversation.

    On Twitter, which quickly became a source of information about the Michael Brown shooting last August, usage of the hashtag #Ferguson has primarily focused on the discussion about Brown, the ensuing protests and the authorities’ response.

    But on Instagram – a growing photo-sharing site with roughly the same number of users as Twitter – the usage is much broader. There, the hashtag has been employed less as a reference to the events in Missouri, and more often as a way for people to discuss or reference issues such as race, police brutality and politics. In other words, the content and context a user gets from tracking the #Ferguson hashtag on Instagram is quite different from on Twitter.

    For example, 86% of the Twitter conversation with that hashtag was directly related to the news in Ferguson, such as the community protests, the U.S. Department of Justice report or the city’s police department.

    And unlike on Twitter, a majority (62%) of the Instagram posts studied were not directly about the events of Ferguson and their aftermath, but instead used the hashtag to make a connection between the subject of the post and the Ferguson saga. By contrast, 38% were posts where Ferguson was the subject.

    To analyze #Ferguson on Twitter and Instagram, we utilized two different methods. For Twitter, researchers used the social media analytics tool from Crimson Hexagon to conduct computer coding of all public tweets starting on March 3, 2015, when new developments brought Ferguson back into the headlines, and ending on March 25. Instagram is a less mature and less studied platform than Twitter, and there are fewer tools for analyzing its content. To study Instagram, researchers pulled publicly available posts directly from the site’s API (application program interface) and performed human coding of a random sample of posts appearing during the same period.

    Details at the link, an interesting analysis of social media and how it is used. And how specific events or things become emblematic, symbols of something wider and more pervasive than just the original.

    Phi Kappa Psi fraternity says its plans to pursue “all available legal action” against Rolling Stone over “reckless reporting” of UVA story. Not sure whether that is to do with sexual assault things or racist things (probably the former), but seriously, frat? Seriously?

    How jailed APS teachers were cheated first by President Bush and No Child Left Behind

    Eleven teachers from the Atlanta Public Schools system were convicted and jailed for being involved in a cheating scandal that shocked the nation. The cheating scandal came to light after an investigation concluded that teachers at 44 schools changed test answers in an effort to raise scores on standardized tests.

    But while the teachers were initially convicted for cheating the students, each educator was first cheated by President George Bush and the shortsighted No Child Left Behind Act. Three days after taking office in 2001, Bush signed the act which required states to implement more accountability on standardized tests.

    Underperforming schools would be punished and potentially lose funding, while schools that met or exceeded standards would receive bonuses and awards.

    From the outset, No Child Left Behind was created on a flawed premise. Although testing became a priority, there was never additional federal funding provided for after-school programs or weekend prep courses. Creativity was stifled as teachers were focused on teaching the test instead of an all-around curriculum. Students nationwide were held to the same standards, but each state measured proficiency differently.

    Many of the teachers caught in Atlanta’s scandal were teaching in low-income communities. The students who attend school on Atlanta’s west and south sides are more likely to to deal with different life circumstances than children who reside on the north side of Atlanta. Socioeconomics can play a major role in education when it comes to access to resources. No Child Left Behind assumes that every child in the state will learn at the same pace.

    Overall, No Child Left Behind created a culture of competition and survival versus improving education. The teachers involved in Atlanta’s scandal were more worried about numbers than actual education. Test scores were the bottom line and the students weren’t given the resources to adapt.

    The case soon became a national news story and Fulton County D.A. Paul Howard decided to make an example out of the teachers by charging them under the RICO Act. The act, which can lead to 20 years in prison, focuses on racketeering and is usually applied to drug organizations or the mafia. It’s excessive to charge a group of educators with the RICO Act when considering that there wasn’t an initial attempt to commit an organized crime.

    Unfortunately, the teachers reacted in an extreme manner to an education act that was fundamentally extreme.

    The teachers who cheated should be held accountable for their actions, but their crime was set forth years before by President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act.

  163. rq says

    Autopsy confirms Zion teen shot twice in back by police. Well, fuck.

    A Lake County teen killed Saturday by a Zion police officer was shot in the back — twice — according to autopsy results released Monday.

    Lake County Coroner Thomas Rudd said Justus Howell suffered two wounds to his torso. One was what he called a “devastating” injury to his spleen, liver and heart; the other shot struck the back of his right shoulder, Rudd said.

    Standard toxicology results are pending, he said.

    Sam Cunningham, vice president of the Lake County NAACP chapter and a Waukegan alderman, said the chapter has been helping Justus’ family to make sure they understand their rights.

    Alice Howell, Justus Howell’s grandmother, is the secretary of the chapter, Cunningham said.

    While the chapter also plans help with faith-based needs, the most important and immediate need they plan to assist with is getting the family legal help.

    “They need an attorney to speak to investigators for them,” Cunningham said. “And they need legal advice to guide them through this process.”

    Finally, Cunningham said that if financial assistance is needed by the family for final arrangements, the chapter plans to set up a place for donations to be given within the next 24 hours.

    While he knows that many people in the community are angry about the fact that a young man was killed by a police officer, he is asking for calm and patience until the investigation is complete.

    “Right now, people who are upset, you have a right to be upset and history is on our side,” Cunningham said. “But now we have to focus on the investigation. Emotion should be channeled into making sure that justice prevails.”

    On Sunday, dozens of family and friends of Justus had gathered at the scene of Saturday’s shooting.

    Some said he was an aspiring rapper, while his mother, LaToya Howell, said Justus also wanted to go to medical school to be a surgeon.

    “Justus was a young man murdered by Zion police,” she said. “As he was fleeing from police, they killed my son. He couldn’t have been a threat if he was running.” […]

    While most of the group was made up of family members and friends, some came just because they were angry about what happened to a member of their community.

    “You can’t keep killing our black children and not tell us why,” said Vanessa Gibbs, of Zion. “When is this going to stop? I’ve heard too many of these stories and I’m tired.”

    Young Life vs. Deadly Force: The Training and Racism of Police Shootings

    Fast-forward to 2014: A month before the killing of Michael Brown (the 18-year-old Black youth shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri), Chicago Police union spokesperson Pat Camden justified Rios’ shooting to media in the hours between his death and that of 16-year-old Warren Robinson the next day. “You put your hands in the air, I guarantee you, you will be fine,” said Camden, who was deputy director of Chicago Police News Affairs at the time of Ware’s killing.

    The police spokesman also justified the killing of 17-year-old Christian Green one year prior; the boy was shot in the back on July 4, 2013. In Camden’s account, the Black teen ran from police and then stopped to point a weapon at pursuing officers.

    According to the Independent Police Review Authority’s investigation, a video exists in which the boy is seen attempting to throw a gun away while running from police. There is no proof cited, beyond the involved officers’ statement, that the weapon was pointed at police. Robinson, meanwhile, reportedly ran from officers who claim to have begun their pursuit because the teen matched a description. While crawling out from beneath a car they had surrounded, Robinson allegedly pointed a gun, according to police – an account disputed by eyewitnesses.

    Given the prevalence of the police allegation, and the high-profile killing of two New York City police officers in late 2014, Truthout spoke with Loyola University criminologist and clinical psychologist Dr. Art Lurigio to garner insight on civilian gun threats to police.

    “It’s a rare event,” the criminologist explained. “It’s not a trivial amount, but the impression in the general public is that incidents of police being shot at are much more common than they are. If you see something often in news and movies, you will overestimate the frequency in which it occurs.”

    “Most of the people of a community are not shooters and are not gang members. Even most gang members are not shooters,” Lurigio said. “It is a very small percentage of people who might engage in violence.”

    According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, 41 officers were killed by gunfire across the United States in 2014: Not an insignificant number, as Lurigio pointed out. But among the vast population with whom police interact, the number paints a picture of relative safety.

    Commenting at a 2012 Use of Force policy symposium, Louis Dekmar, chief of police in LaGrange, Georgia, said, “Recent police deaths are tragic but the most violent year for police occurred in 1971. We need to take … data and examine it historically rather than take it raw and think we are under siege. Without proper analysis there is fear that is unwarranted.”

    In Truthout’s analysis, for every 6 million civilians policed in 2014, one officer fatality from civilian gunfire occurred. (1)

    Asked about the likely factors leading to the rare instance in which a civilian does pull a gun on a police officer, Lurigio explained, “It’s an extreme act, in the sense that the person doing so is putting their life in obvious peril, in that it’s the ultimate threat to the ultimate authority on the street…. A person pulling a weapon on police would have been involved in many high-risk situations, in which the situation unfolding is just another. They’re not thinking beyond the moment.”

    Usually, Lurigio noted, the person pulling the gun is a young man. Yet the portrait does not otherwise align easily with shooting victims such as Rios, Green and Robinson, who reportedly fled perceived peril, while officers pursued it, later citing fear for their lives.

    Killed by gunshots to the back and/or while laying face down, the teens’ deaths are not aberrations. Among the 10 fatal shooting cases most recently closed by the Independent Police Review Authority, three occurred under similar dynamics – and were deemed “justified.”

    Most of the article is about Rios, the 14-year-old about whom I posted above, shot in the back. And after, about Green. Note bits about police officers being shot by civilians. On the training itself:

    Perhaps controversial to some, Callahan’s comment alludes to the simple fact that any given officer’s perception of the severity of a threat and the means necessary to neutralize it is subjective.

    Conceal and carry gun laws codify the fact that possession of a firearm alone cannot be grounds for shooting. Meanwhile, Chicago neighborhoods where many police shootings take place are those that have been systematically abandoned by city planners – with the absence of jobs, closing of schools and historic disinvestment leaving little left but an informal economy of which guns are a part.

    Regarding the use of deadly force against civilians, police officers are afforded broad latitude – assumed a necessity given the split-second decision-making required in all situations of grave danger – paving the way for the exoneration of shooting officers in even the most questionable of killings.

    Yet clearly, such circumstances are the exception and not the rule. Meanwhile, the Secret Service and four of the 10 most competitive economies in the world – Finland, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom – demonstrate success with minimal to nonexistent use of deadly force.

    In addition to these international models, Dr. Richard David, an intensive care pediatrician and public health researcher, points to a key historical precedent. “For as long as there’s been human society, we’ve always given the young people special care and a little slack,” he said. “All that is based on enormous tradition.”

    “An Automatic Reaction Without Thought”

    But with officers logging hundreds of hours in physical and video simulations, in which they face mortal danger at the hands of civilians and must quickly kill or be killed, US law enforcement training on the use of deadly force makes no allowances for youth, or anyone else perceived as a threat.

    “The threshold that’s crossed is taking the weapon out,” said criminologist Art Lurigio. “Practice targets do not include arms and legs. It’s the torso and the head with the bull’s-eye in the middle. Those are deadly shots and that’s what police practice a thousand times.”

    “It becomes an automatic reaction without thought,” analogous to basketball players’ free throws, he explained. “If officers think, if they hesitate, they are not going to precisely execute a practiced behavior.”

    Chicago Police spokespeople did not respond to Truthout’s request for comment on the department’s training practices. However, recent reports of mainstream journalists, observing and participating in deadly force trainings – to the point of firing on simulated civilians in virtual and role-play scenarios – offer a glimpse inside the thinking cultivated in officers.

    “Recruits are trained to recognize and react to a movement that looks like a gun being drawn,” described a San Diego journalist, who was told by a training officer, “They’re taught from Day One the hands are what’s going to kill you.”
    “I got grandkids I’ll have to sit down and tell what happened, when they’re old enough. I got a son that I’ll never see again.”

    Halfway across the United States, in the state capital of Springfield, Illinois, an evening news reporter characterized authorizations to use force as determined “not by what’s right, but what’s reasonable,” after a simulated encounter with a suicidal woman. “I think you have to give her the opportunity to put the gun down,” the journalist said, when asked by the instructor to guess the appropriate amount of time to wait before shooting the woman. “It doesn’t take very long for that gun to go from here to here,” the instructor said, pointing to his head and then the young journalist. “It’s a natural inclination … to try to talk her out of that, so under our policy you would have been authorized to actually use deadly force.”

    Back in Chicago, officers undergo 900 to 1,000 hours of deadly force role-play training before placement on the streets, according to a 2011 news segment featuring a correspondent who “fired” on two civilians reaching for cell phones, in the course of participating in the simulation.

    “It helps them and inoculates them to stress,” a Chicago Police instructor told the reporter.

    But in its publication, “Principles of Good Policing,” the Department of Justice quotes a report of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, “Balance of Forces,” offering a warning on the approach as of 1982.

    “In-service crisis intervention training as opposed to pre-service training was associated with a low justifiable homicide rate by police,” the report notes. “Agencies with simulator, stress, and physical exertion firearms training experience a higher justifiable homicide rate by police than agencies without such training.”

    That last paragraph is very interesting. Does it really inoculate officers against stress, as their superiors seem to imply? Or does it condition them to see more threat in less threatening situations, because that is the ‘better safe than sorry’ way to protect one’s life? Article wraps up with a look at police force and racism.

    “We know if we empower Black Women, the whole COUNTRY lifts up.” #BlackGirlsRock

    Shows like ‘Black-ish’ perpetuate racist stereotypes – do they? I’ve never seen Black-ish.

    “Black-ish,” the hit freshman ABC comedy series that features appealing characters in dumb situations, most of them African-Americans, I believe promotes ugly racial bigotry.

    But don’t ask me. Ask Donald Trump.

    “How is ABC Television allowed to have a show entitled ‘Black-ish’? ” the real-estate developer and reality-TV babe, a white guy, tweeted in October. “Can you imagine the furor of a show, ‘White-ish’! Racism at highest level?’’ […]

    Or, ask my kid.

    When she attended a private school in Brooklyn, my daughter’s best friend was a black girl. I don’t think that my child, who is white, even noticed the superficial racial differences between her and her pal. That is, until the day that her fourth-grade teacher, a white man, lectured the inseparable girls, in earshot of their parents, telling them that they must never forget that their skins are of different hues.

    I think that he meant well. But as I watched, an expression of utter bewilderment overtook my daughter’s face as her innocence was stripped away.

    Or, ask a barista.

    Many Starbucks drink-slingers last month annoyed the coffee-selling chain’s customers nationwide by writing the words “Race Together’’ on cups, using a condescending, corporate-generated slogan in an effort to spark unnecessary and unhelpful conversations about race relations.

    “Black-ish’’ brings about the same kind of racial lunacy, making people of all skin colors appear biased, clueless and, most of all, racist. The show presents tortured portrayals of African-Americans with money, pushing the false notion that affluent blacks become middle-class members of the bourgeoisie — folks derided as “bougie’’ (pronounced bhoo-shee) in the show’s parlance.

    In the world of “Black-ish,” well-to-do black people are not black at all. They’re “black-ish.’’ All this is played for yuks.

    I believe that the majority of Americans have moved beyond being punch lines in sick ethnic jokes. But I don’t make TV shows. […]

    In the first episode, Dre’s 12-year-old son, Andre Jr. (Marcus Scribner), asks his father for a bar mitzvah on his 13th birthday, like those of his rich-kid friends, although he isn’t Jewish. He also wants to be called the less-black-sounding “Andy’’ and, rather than play basketball, he wants to go out for field hockey, which his dad savages as a sport for white girls. In another episode, Dre’s 15-year-old daughter, Zoey (Yara Shahidi), gets dumped by her white, French boyfriend, coincidentally named Andre. But she’s delighted to learn that Andre dumped her not because of racial differences, but because he found her “shallow.’’

    Hilarity ensues as Dre, reluctantly, accepts his kids’ choices.

    This season, Fox debuted the hit TV drama series “Empire’’ about a clan of African-Americans whose members got rich from the family’s music company. Patriarch Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard) is a former drug dealer who worries that his three sons are spoiled rotten. But he’s not plagued by the kind of existential turmoil that grips Dre.

    ABC brass have yet to announce if “Black-ish’’ will see a second season. But a TV insider assured me that the show will be back. (“Empire’’ has already been renewed.)

    We’re almost certain to see more racist drivel masquerading as social commentary.

    How to unpack all of that? I certainly can’t, not in great detail, but once I realized the author was seriously telling us to listen to Mr Trump, I had a lot of trouble taking any of her issues seriously. Is the show awesome? I still don’t know, still haven’t seen it, though it does seem to have the usual sexism within. Is it inaccurate or somehow racist? Maybe, though the things the author points out seem to be quite accurately taken from black people’s lives – at least, my twitter feed has seen examples of it all (I know, anecdata, hey?). Anyway, I think the most clueless person here is the author, but of course, that’s just my uneducated opinion.

    white washing in magazines should be as big of a topic as them using photoshop to make people look skinnier – and this really might be, generally speaking, rather trivial, but holy shit? I knew magazines lightened skin tones and chalked it up to glam lighting, but the contrasts are nearly unbelievable.

  164. rq says

    Does the Black Church Need to Lead the Ferguson Movement?

    Aeneas Williams began his Easter sermon wearing a “DUKE” baseball cap. Lest we congregants think he was an overzealous fan giving into the sin of pride, the pastor of the Spirit Church had a purpose related to NCAA basketball fervor and was wearing the cap to underscore a simple point to his flock in Ferguson, Missouri: Stop the madness.

    Williams reminded the congregation seated in the McCluer South-Berkeley High School auditorium of the oft-ridiculous way in which we accept lies about race, noting that we’re not that far away from the United States being, as he termed it, “majority-minority.”

    “Most of us are mixed,” he said. “All this old, crazy stuff. You’re mixed with something! ‘I’m all black’; ‘I’m all white’—the devil is a liar. You got something in you!” The crowd laughed with recognition as the pastor went on to counter some particularly egregious racial stereotypes. “Stop this foolishness and this madness, OK. We’re all crazy, all right? We all have some stuff we’re working on, we’re all under construction. Stop this madness, OK? Stop this madness. Stop this madness. Stop this madness. This stuff is hurting people.” […]

    Should these churches be leading and guiding these protests, whether they manifest as a march, as a demonstration—or as a vote? On Tuesday Ferguson will hold its first civic elections since Brown’s death, giving residents a chance to remake their influential City Council, a decision all the more crucial in light of last month’s damning Department of Justice report about the local police and courts. This Easter weekend, the question came to the fore of how involved black churches must be, going forward, when it comes to stirring up the pot of protest in Ferguson, and elsewhere. […]

    One of the more flippant criticisms of the burgeoning civil rights movement that has risen out of Ferguson has been that the anger did the talking, and that there hasn’t been a tangible political advocacy plan to pair with the consistent protest actions. Whether or not the criticism was unfair seemed irrelevant on Saturday; given the importance of this election in Ferguson, the CBC invested $15,000 and brought along some headliners. Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota gave me the brother-nod as he and I made eye contact at the decimated bagel and coffee table. Lacy Clay, the United States representative for the congressional district that includes Ferguson, was there, as was Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, the former mayor of Kansas City, and chair of the CBC since 2010.

    “I think Ferguson is the city that the civil rights movement bypassed,” Cleaver told Williams and I as we sat with him in the office of Pastor F. Willis Johnson. He was lamenting the lack of local transition from church-based civil rights activism to political power that many others, including himself, had experienced. (One could argue that City Council candidates like Bob Hudgins and Lee Smith, whose candidacies rose out of protest and political organization in the wake of Brown’s death, are an example of Ferguson’s belated political maturity.)

    Cleaver marveled at how a town that is almost 70 percent black has presently one City Council member of color, and only two total in the city’s 120 years, noting that Ferguson’s corrupt government practices were “taxation by citation” and “strobe-light municipal financing” that disproportionately arrests and bankrupts black people. “You beat on these people and they start becoming more and more submissive,” he said, worrying that if they stayed home Tuesday and didn’t vote (or vote without knowing their candidates), the national sympathy for what their city government has put them through would fade. […]

    “We pastors have a two-fold role: priestly and prophetic,” Rev. Raphael Warnock told NPR’s Michel Martin in December about the role of the church in the wake of highly publicized police killings of black men last year. “On the priestly side, our job is comfort the afflicted. On the prophetic side, our job is to afflict the comfortable. And the question becomes how can one remain true to both in this moment.”

    On Easter Sunday, a group of activists situated themselves in front of several St. Louis area churches to confront that dilemma directly. The group Millennial Activists United (MAU) led demonstrations during Easter services to urge congregations and clergy to action.

    “Black Churches across America, as a whole, have been largely silent in supporting the ongoing struggles against racism & systematic oppression,” read the MAU’s pre-released statement. “The time to use your collective voices in service of those without a voice is at hand.”

    The statement evoked Jesus’s activist legacy of taking the fight to the streets. “It shall take a combination of both prayer and practice in order to cease the senseless cycles of violence plaguing the Black community & win us our true God given freedom,” it read.

    The reception wasn’t always, as you might say, Christian. At the Friendly Temple, a piece of pristine construction that appears like an oasis on a decrepit stretch of St. Louis’s Dr. Martin Luther King Drive, protestor DeRay Mckesson documented on Twitter and Vine the volume of staffers sent out by the church to block the demonstration—as well as the arrival of the police. […]

    To paraphrase Warnock, the black church is an entity of inherent contradiction, stemming from a religious tradition force-fed to our enslaved ancestors that eventually helped pave a path for black emancipation in generation after generation. Will it do so here, now, in Ferguson? Templeton told me that the protests will morph into canvassing for the City Council elections, and Pastor Williams, through the Adopt-a-Block ministry, continues to canvas as well. He’s reminding people of both the Word and the election.

    It will take prayer, protest, and politics to unite at the ballot box Tuesday for Ferguson to see the powerful change it needs.

    PZ’s This is what happens when you call the cops.

    @Justice4Tony march to DA’s office steps off #Justice4Tony #MadisonShootin

    Protesters arrested in Valdosta simply for requesting honorary diploma for Kendrick Johnson #MARCH4KJ

    In Wyoming and Texas, school truancy is prosecuted as a crime in adult courts. Kids and their parents get cuffed and hit with big fines.
    The DOJ is investigating whether truancy courts in Dallas County, TX deny due process by preventing access to lawyers & imposing large fines.

  165. rq says

    #NicholasThomas case sent to GBI on Thurs, but we’re not discussing the 10-days of absolute radio silence from #Cobb authorities prior (1/3)

    #KendrickJohnson marchers met by law enforcement at Lowndes High a school. @WCTV

    #GarissaAttack: Lives snuffed out too soon #147notjustanumber

    Binyavanga Wainaina: “Kenya is not a nation if we can’t properly memorialize each and every citizen we lose”

    I want to go to a place. A piece of ground, also a place online, where we can find the names of all those who have died for Kenya since 1963. I want to know their names. I want to walk and walk listen and witness know the lives of those no longer visible to me, but whose blood mattered. I want the children I may once have to go there and visit and walk through our stories. I want all schools to go there.

    We are not a nation if we can’t properly and fully memorialize each and every citizen we lose. I want to see the names ages and photographs of those who died in Mpeketoni. Those killed during PEV. Stories. Forgetting is not good. It is in these acts, our public commons reawaken. The politics of saying we are not ready to face ourselves, the fullness of our pain, is the same politics that allows us to ignore it when a Kenyan strips the institution they are given to run, strips it dry, dry, and returns like a zombie, a plastic rubber-band zombie in some new form, to govern somewhere else again.

    I want a public again. I want some random church choir knocking on my door at easter to sing at my door. I want to see three million Nairobians flood the streets to cry, and sing, and hug because our children have been killed. I want to stop feeling that we live inside mostly the private. I want never to hear the word self-empowerment again.

    I am the product of a nation that empowered me. I am a child of Municipal Council schools, I am a child of Kenya National Library Services, of Provincial General hospital, Nakuru. I want thousands of names inscribed permanently in Uhuru Park. I want each name to have a story. I want to see the names. I want to see the names. Stories. I want to see the names. Photographs. It is not enough to send MPESA to Red Cross. I want to be a citizen of a nation that is not just Electoristan.

    My heart is dull with pain, and I feel the pull to cover it all with that hard, now familiar Kenyan cynicism and move on, which really means suck the very remaining soul of it dry.

    Peter Masinde, the first officer shot on #Garissa campus. He was 32. His wife is pregnant #147notjustanumber “

    Storifying the names: #147NotJustANumber

    The victims of last week’s attack at a University in Garissa are being remembered and honored on social media. Family, friends and others are posting the name and picture of each of the victims. These are some of them. #TheyHaveNames

    I hope they add to it.

  166. rq says

    Veronica Syokau from Kitui. 2nd year. Loved swimming. Her mom still in shock. #147notjustanumber

    Joy Chepkorir, a daughter,niece, sister and friend to many…
    #147notjustanumber

    No, Andrew Harrison didn’t use a ‘racial slur.’ Stop insisting the ‘N-word’ is always racist.

    The “racial slur” accusations and “double standard” charges hurled by the media and from angry corners of Twitter after Andrew Harrison’s hot-mic moment this weekend are evidence of just how perverted our nation’s race conversation has become. The University of Kentucky sophomore, on the heels of his basketball team’s first and only loss of the season, was caught muttering “F— that nigga” under his breath when a teammate was asked about opponent Frank Kaminsky during a post-game news conference.

    Harrison blundered when he dropped the f-word in a formal setting and on an open microphone. It was a 20-year-old’s stupid mistake, and his apology should have been the end of it. But it wasn’t. Headlines indicted Harrison (a black guy) for using “a racial slur” against Kaminsky (a white guy). Then came whining from across the Internet that Harrison was the beneficiary of a double standard, because his use of the word didn’t result in his expulsion or his being branded a racist. The same day, these critics noted, news broke that a University of South Carolina student was suspended after a photo of her writing the plural of the n-word on a white board went viral.

    To make such claims is to be willfully obtuse. After years of such trite debates, it should go without saying: Context matters. White people invented the word to disparage black folks. Using it to blame black people for ruining some formerly lily-white institution is an American pastime. It’s in that context that the University of South Carolina student scrawled the plural of the n-word as the first in a list of things ruining the school’s wi-fi (illogical, but I guess she’s still learning, or something). It’s in that context that students at Bucknell University were expelled for a radio broadcast that included the n-word, along with racist comments like “black people should be dead” and “lynch ‘em.” And surely, that was the context for members of University of Oklahoma’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, who were recorded singing that racist little ditty about “hanging them from a tree.” Contrary to some ridiculous claims, those SAE boys didn’t learn that context from any rapper.

    In those types of circumstances, the n-word is used to exclude, demonize and terrorize a group of people. It’s dishonest to try to lump in Andrew Harrison with that form of systemic racism. Even though this rationale upsets some, including some black people who are vehemently against the use of the word under any circumstance, it’s nonetheless true. Those critics argue against reclaiming or redefining the n-word slur, using the derivative Harrison used. But it is clear that among those who do use that derivative, particularly millennials, the connotation is not the same. In that context, it’s used not as a racial slur, but as a comparatively benign and generic reference to another individual.

    If someone finds it a burden that white people cannot use “the n-word” without inciting anger, they operate from within a bubble filled with entitlement, privilege and delusion about what real racial burdens in America look like. It’s exhausting to have to repeatedly explain something that ought to be so easy to understand. The fact that we continue to have this debate, over whether black people should be able to repurpose a slur that is not their own invention, speaks to whose interests still dominate the race narrative. More importantly, it speaks to how, when it comes to tackling race and racism, we collectively continue to focus on the superficial rather than the substantive. What should be more troubling: Andrew Harrison calling a white guy the n-word derivative after losing a basketball game, or the racist systems that lead to disproportionate poverty and criminalization of black men and women in our country? Just because Harrison’s outburst is an easier topic to dissect doesn’t make it more demanding of our focus. We are quick to jump on racist words, but remain wilfully blind to racist systems.

    Call Harrison unsportsmanlike. Say he lacks civility. Point out that he needs to learn how to be a better loser. Let’s all agree that he should learn how to think before he speaks. But to focus on whether Harrison’s words point to hypocrisy is a fool’s errand. No matter if you believe he has a right to say it, the fact remains that the n-word – in any derivation – will always have more force when it flies out of the mouth of a member of the race who invented it.

    Bravo.

    The right’s made-up God: How bigots invented a white supremacist Jesus , another intersection of racism and religion.

    Any time right-wing conservatives declare that they are trying to restore or reclaim something, we should all be very afraid. Usually, this means the country or, in this case, the state of Indiana is about to be treated to another round of backward time travel, to the supposedly idyllic environs of the 1950s, wherein women, and gays, and blacks knew their respective places and stayed in them. While the unspoken religious subtext of this law is rooted in conservative anxieties over the legalization of same-sex marriage in Indiana, Black people and women, and all the intersections thereof (for instance Black lesbians) should be very afraid of what this new law portends.

    Last year, the Supreme Court ruled in the Hobby Lobby decision that corporations could exercise religious freedom, which means that corporations can deny insurance coverage for birth control. Now this same logic is being used to curtail and abridge the right of gay people to enjoy the same freedoms and legal protections that heterosexual citizens enjoy.

    And given our current anti-Black racial climate, there is no reason to trust that these laws won’t be eventually used for acts of racially inflected religious discrimination, perhaps against Black Muslims or Muslims of Arab descent, for instance. Surely this kind of law in this political climate sanctions the exercise of Islamophobia.

    As a practicing Christian, I am deeply incensed by these calls for restoration and reclamation in the name of religious freedom. This kind of legislation is largely driven by conservative Christian men and women, who hold political views that are antagonistic to every single group of people who are not white, male, Christian, cisgender, straight and middle-class. Jesus, a brown, working-class, Jew, doesn’t even meet all the qualifications. […]

    I often ask myself whether I really do worship the same God of white religious conservatives. On this Holy Week, when I reflect on the Christian story of Christ crucified, it is a story to me of a man who came, radically served his community, challenged the unjust show of state power, embraced children, working-class men and promiscuous women and sexual minorities (eunuchs). Of the many things Jesus preached about, he never found time to even mention gay people, let alone condemn them. His message of radical inclusivity was so threatening that the state lynched him for fear that he was fomenting a cultural and political rebellion. They viewed such acts as criminal acts and they treated Jesus as a criminal. And all who followed him were marked for death.

    This is why I identify with the story of Jesus. And frankly, it is the only story there really is. This white, blond-haired, blue-eyed, gun-toting, Bible-quoting Jesus of the religious right is a god of their own making. I call this god, the god of white supremacy and patriarchy. There is nothing about their god that speaks to me as a Black woman of working-class background living in a country where police routinely murder black men and beat the hell out of black women, where the rich get richer while politicians find ever more reasons to extract from the poor, and where the lives the church imagines for women still center around marriage and motherhood, and no sex if you’re single.

    This God isn’t the God that I serve. There is nothing holy, loving, righteous, inclusive, liberatory or theologically sound about him. He might be “biblical” but he’s also an asshole. […]

    I cannot stand in a church and worship on Sunday alongside those who on the very next Monday co-sign every kind of legislation that devalues the lives of Black people, women and gay people. I am a firm believer that our theology implicates our politics. If your politics are rooted in the contemporary anti-Black, misogynist, homophobic conservatism, then we are not serving the same God. Period.

    And more of us who love Jesus, despite our ambivalence about Christianity, the Church or organized religion, need to stand up and begin to do some reclamation of our own.

    I am heartened to say that there is a generation of young people of faith rising up, spurred on by the Ferguson events of last summer. A group of young seminarians at Union Theology Seminary in New York City have been at the fore of effort to #ReclaimHolyWeek. I spoke with one of the organizers, Candace Simpson, who told me that, “#ReclaimHolyWeek is a way for us to challenge and disrupt the sanitized stories we share during Holy Week. We refuse to pretend as though the main story of Jesus’ resurrection was that he ‘died for our sins.’ We need to be better in discussing the ways Jesus represented a threat to his empire, that his teachings disrupt power structures. We pretend that we would be mourning at his tomb, but it is clear in the ways we blame victims of the system that we are not as moral as we pretend to be.” They will spend this week protesting various forms of state-sanctioned violence against Black and Brown people.

    What this vocal contingent of the religious right is seeking to restore is not religious freedom but a sense of safety in expressing and imposing dangerous, retrograde and discriminatory ideas in the name of religion. I continue to support the free and unimpeded expression of religion. And I am hopeful that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence’s call for “clarification of the law” amid a massive backlash will actually force the Legislature to explicitly ban discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation. Then perhaps the law could do what some legal scholars claim it was meant to do, namely, protect freedom of religious expression for religious minorities in the U.S.

    Alongside that, I maintain that another kind of reclamation needs to occur. We need to reclaim the narrative of Jesus’ life and death from the evangelical right. They have not been good stewards over the narrative. They have pimped Jesus’ death to support the global spread of American empire vis-à-vis war, “missions,” and “free trade,” the abuse of native peoples, the continued subjugation of Black people, and the regulation of the sexual lives of women and gay people. Let us mark this Holy Week by declaring the death to the unholy trinity of white supremacist, capitalist, heteropatriarchy. And once these systems die, may they die once and for all, never to be resurrected.

    A nice sentiment – though why not dispense with religion altogether? But yes, some people need it. Just don’t legislate it, please. Anywhere.

    Minneapolis Officer Caught on Video Threatening Teens “Simple, if you f— with me, I’m going to break your leg before you get the chance to run.” Yup, cop with a badge talks like that to youth. Woo!

  167. rq says

    For Better or Worse, #BlackTwitter Cannot Be Denied

    In recent years, African American social media users have taken advantage of platforms like Twitter and Instagram, turning them into a megaphone. While many reduce black Twitter to a haven for jokes about reality shows, it’s actually much more diverse. Everything is up for debate, including the fight for equality.

    In this digital era, African Americans are continuing this fight with the best tools at their disposal.

    Their laptops and smartphones.

    According to the Pew Research Center, non-Hispanic blacks represent more than 27 percent of Twitter users, and their influence goes beyond what’s on TV and what music we’re listening to. They get results. From pop culture to social action, black Twitter has redefined the way many of us think about social media’s power.

    Here are a few examples of that might.

    It Flushed Starbucks’ #RaceTogether Campaign

    Healthy conversations about race relations in the U.S. are not high on most people’s agendas when they are rushing to grab their morning coffee before heading to work. Clearly, the good folks at Starbucks missed that memo.

    Led by CEO Howard Schultz, the company launched the #RaceTogether initiative as a vehicle to encourage patrons to make their country a better place.

    “If a customer asks you what this is, try to engage in a discussion that we have problems in this country in regards to race,” stated Schultz. Unfortunately for him, black Twitter refused to embrace such a shallow attempt to address such deeply rooted issues.
    […]

    It Made Ferguson National News

    This topic really needs no explanation. Following the events in Ferguson, Mo., that resulted in the death of Michael Brown, black Twitter forced the mainstream media to pay attention by rallying behind the power of the hashtag.

    Emerging from that tragedy as well as the prior killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., were a series of movements that showcased just how powerful African-American voices can be when they unite for a common cause.

    The #IfTheyGunnedMeDown hashtag challenged the portrayal of black-vs.-white “criminals” in broadcast media. And #BlackOutDay gave black people the opportunity to celebrate their beauty in ways often rejected by mainstream outlets.

    #BlackLivesMatter is probably the most potent of black Twitter’s organic initiatives. The movement has blossomed from a hashtag into a real campaign for change as it calls for recognition from key players in the political environment who can make change for African Americans across the country.

    More at the link, of course.

    And here follow several on the election in Ferguson:
    Ferguson rising: A critical vote for a city at a turning point (CNN, with video).
    Ferguson voters to make history in election Tuesday (USA Today, with video).
    Discrimination Is Written Into the Fabric of Ferguson’s Government (ACLU commentary).
    Election in Scarred Ferguson Carries Hope of ‘New Tomorrow’ (NY Times, text and video).

  168. rq says

    Teen killed in police shooting in Zion shot twice in the back: coroner

    Jennifer Witherspoon, president of the Lake County NAACP branch, said the organization was asked to speak on behalf of Howell’s family.

    “We’re very sorry that a 17-year-old lost his life,” she said. “It’s just a sad thing, but we hope that this matter will be resolved fairly and swiftly and that the truth will come out.”

    Witherspoon, who is also a chief in the Lake County Sheriff’s department, said she could not give details of the teen’s life.

    It’s just a sad thing, let’s resolve this fairly and swiftly. Whoa. Just a sad thing.

    Risper Mutindi Kasyoka, 23, died in Garissa. A-student, loved gospel music, planned to start biz consulting firm

    Alice Mbete Mulu, 21, died in Garissa. She wanted to be a teacher, she was great at volleyball, liked to read the Bible and storybooks (no pic)

    Erick Gwaro Kombo, 22, missing from Garissa “He was a gentleman and a humble person” Loved football, Christian activities (no pic available)

    Obedy Okiring Okodoi, missing from Garissa. “He was joyful, focused, wanted to achieve the highest,” a teacher to be

    Leah N Wanfula, 21, missing from Garissa, 1st of 9 to go to college, popular, loved Christian activities, mathematics

    R.I.P Ivy Betty Wanjiku (Shiko) 1st yr student #GarissaAttack #147NotJustANumber cc @Maskani254

    Purposely sending this one to moderation, as I don’t want another tail-end appendix comment.
    And I’m out for the night, see you tomorrow.

  169. says

    Man shoots at police with bow and arrow.

    Bessemer police arrested a man Friday night after a nearly four-hour standoff that started when the man shot at an officer with a bow and arrow.

    Police were called to the Timberline West apartments near UAB Medical West hospital around 7:18 p.m. on a report about a domestic disturbance in progress, Deputy Police Chief Mike Roper said.

    When officers arrived, they found the man on the balcony of an apartment with a bow and arrow in his hand. The man shot an arrow at an officer, who then fired back at the man, Roper said. The suspect retreated back into the apartment.

    Police established a perimeter and evacuated nearby apartments. They tried to communicate with the suspect, but were not able to.

    The department’s special response team entered the man’s apartment around 11:10 p.m., Roper said, and took him into custody without incident.

    Nobody was hurt in the incident. There was nobody else in the apartment, Roper said.

    But, but, but…their lives were in danger!
    Why didn’t they kill him?!

  170. rq says

    Updates tomorrow. Exhausted.
    I know I won’t be on the ball, as the Ferguson election will be over and most material is about that, sorry about that. I hope y’all will survive.

  171. says

    No worries rq. I think pretty much everyone reading this thread appreciates everything you do and fully understands that you need rest. We’ll survive :)

    ****
    Here’s a reminder that many white people in USAmerica don’t understand what racism is.
    2 white professors sue Alabama State University for racism against whites

    Two white faculty members at Alabama State University have filed a lawsuit against the school in which they claim that ASU discriminates against whites in its hiring and admissions processes, USA Today reports.

    Steven B. Chesbro, reportedly the only white dean at Alabama State, and his partner, John Garland, a faculty member, also took issue with how the school allegedly implemented regulations against same-sex couples, according to USA Today.
    Chesbro and Garland claim that the school retaliated against them for speaking up about the university’s alleged use of race to decide which students are admitted to the school and which faculty members are hired.

    Wayne Sabel, an attorney who is representing Chesbro and Garland, described some of the statements that were allegedly made to his clients about which faculty members should be brought on board to teach African-American students. “You look at some of the statements they have made that are in the complaint, and they are saying things like, ‘Only black professors should teach black students,’ ” Sabel said.

    Sabel even suggested that his clients were physically threatened when they voiced their concerns about these issues. “They have told Dr. Chesbro that his hands are tied in the face of gross insubordination, and even threats of physical harm,” Sabel said.

    Sabel also claimed that Chesbro and Garland are being forced out of their positions for taking a stand against the alleged discrimination: “There is clearly a campaign not only to force Dr. Chesbro and Dr. Garland out, but to force out a number of other longtime white faculty.”

    ASU’s administration denies the allegations and says that discussions about Chesbro’s and Garland’s employment had nothing to do with race or sexual orientation. “They deny that anything related to [Chesbro’s and Garland’s] employment arose because of anything racial or anything related to their sexual orientation,” said Bobby Segall, an attorney representing ASU.

    Among Chesbro’s and Garland’s claims are that there are at least six Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charges pending against the university; preference was given to black female professors during a hunt for a new faculty member; preference was given to African-American doctoral candidates in the school’s physical therapy program; and black students were admitted to the physical therapy program at a higher rate than white students, even though there were more white students who satisfied the GPA requirements for admission. They also claim that rules preventing couples from working together in the same department applied only to same-sex couples.

  172. says

    This southern white honkey nails racism and white supremacy (video):

    If you haven’t seen the videos by W. Honkey on racism yet, you need to. If you have, watch them again.

    “W. Honkey” is a heavyset man with a deep Southern accent. The camera angle is amateurish and, as with his other videos, he’s inside his Ford F-150. At first glance, it’s easy to have unflattering expectations. He’s a self-described “redneck.”

    W. begins by talking about the fear, pride, greed, and narcissism of white people. He admits to being a former racist.

    In this video, he talks about white culture and that while not all white people are racist, white culture is…that “we live in a white supremacist culture.”

    He calls white people “lazy” people who refuse to take responsibility for the culture we have created. He says that “inaction” is destroying us and that if we are white and we see racism, we need to stand up and say something.

    He also completely destroys the argument of people that claim they “don’t see color.” “Our system sees color,” he says. “Our culture sees color.”

    Link to his YouTube page. He has several videos that tackle racism.

  173. rq says

    Most have probably already seen this: South Carolina Officer Is Charged With Murder in Black Man’s Death

    A white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., was charged with murder on Tuesday after a video surfaced showing him shooting in the back and killing an apparently unarmed black man while the man ran away.

    The officer, Michael T. Slager, 33, said he had feared for his life because the man had taken his stun gun in a scuffle after a traffic stop on Saturday. A video, however, shows the officer firing eight times as the man, Walter L. Scott, 50, fled. The North Charleston mayor announced the state charges at a news conference Tuesday evening.

    The shooting came on the heels of high-profile instances of police officers’ using lethal force in New York, Cleveland, Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere. The deaths have set off a national debate over whether the police are too quick to use force, particularly in cases involving black men.

    A White House task force has recommended a host of changes to the nation’s police policies, and President Obama sent Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to cities around the country to try to improve police relations with minority neighborhoods. […]

    Moments after the struggle, Officer Slager reported on his radio: “Shots fired and the subject is down. He took my Taser,” according to police reports.

    But the video, which was taken by a bystander and provided to The New York Times by the Scott family’s lawyer, presents a different account. The video begins in the vacant lot, apparently moments after Officer Slager fired his Taser. Wires, which carry the electrical current from the stun gun, appear to be extending from Mr. Scott’s body as the two men tussle and Mr. Scott turns to run.

    Something — it is not clear whether it is the stun gun — is either tossed or knocked to the ground behind the two men, and Officer Slager draws his gun, the video shows. When the officer fires, Mr. Scott appears to be 15 to 20 feet away and fleeing. He falls after the last of eight shots.

    The officer then runs back toward where the initial scuffle occurred and picks something up off the ground. Moments later, he drops an object near Mr. Scott’s body, the video shows.
    Continue reading the main story

    The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, the state’s criminal investigative body, has begun an inquiry into the shooting. The F.B.I. and the Justice Department, which has opened a string of civil rights investigations into police departments under Mr. Holder, is also investigating.[…]

    Police reports say that officers performed CPR and delivered first aid to Mr. Scott. The video shows that for several minutes after the shooting, Mr. Scott remained face down with his hands cuffed behind his back. A second officer arrives, puts on blue medical gloves and attends to Mr. Scott, but is not shown performing CPR. As sirens wail in the background, a third officer later arrives, apparently with a medical kit, but is also not seen performing CPR.

    He feared for his life.
    And what liars, the police.

    Knocked doors in #Ferguson to vote tomorrow and stopped by the Mike Brown memorial to reminded myself why I fight.

    Exclusive: Dave Chappelle Releasing Comedy Special On HBO

    Dave Chappelle looks to be making 2015 his year to officially come back. Since his departure from The Chappelle Show on Comedy Central, he has returned into comedy with a series of stand-up dates. Despite being on the road over the past few years, Chappelle has not released a solo special since 2005 (For What It’s Worth). Over the weekend we discovered that during his recent shows at Austin’s ACL Live in Texas, Chappelle taped his newest set of material for fans. Sources have revealed that the ‘untitled’ special will be premiering on HBO. A date when it will air has not yet been confirmed but judging from a few reactions of those who attended the taping, Chappelle didn’t disappoint.

    Kendrick Johnson Protest Leads To Arrests At Lowndes County Schools. Recap:

    From Friday to Monday, Malika Mahogany and around a dozen members of ‘The CommUNITY’ walked 17 miles-a-day from Atlanta to Valdosta, to symbolize the 17 years of Kendrick Johnson’s life.

    When the protesters got to Lowndes County High School, their final destination, the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Department, including the Sheriff, were already there.

    “I actually wanted to come here and present them with demands. They wont’ allow us to”, says Mahogany.

    As they approached Lowndes High, Sheriff Chris Prine and his deputies stopped the protesters before they could get on Lowndes High School property.

    “The school has made the decision not to accept any letters from protesters”, says Sheriff Prine.

    According to the Sheriff, the Superintendent asked that the protesters be kept off school property.

    “If they want to address anything having to do with Kendrick Johnson, and this case, they can do so by U.S. Mail,” adds Sheriff Prine.

    Protesters with ‘The CommUNITY’ say they were delivering that letter to Superintendent, Wes Taylor, at the Lowndes County School Board Building, when four members of their organization were arrested for trespassing.

    The protesters say they were on public property and believe the school board headquarters is open to everyone.

    “It’s public property, but it’s not free access. It’s a limited access. And the school does have a right to restrict access to people on their campus”, explains Lt. Stryde Jones, with the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office.

    Mahogany says, despite the arrests, her group will continue to protest.

    “How would you feel if your son went to school and never came home, never returned home, and the next day you found out he was rolled up in a gym mat in a gymnasium,” Mahogany adds.

    Those three protesters remain in the Lowndes County Jail and are facing Trespassing charges. The reporter from Atlanta is also still in jail and is currently not up for bond.

    The reporter happens to be a black woman. Coincidence?

    Minneapolis Cop To Black Teen: ‘F**k With Me, I’ll Break Your Leg’ (VIDEO). Video contains foul language – from the cop.

    Hamza Jeylani, 17, said he and his three friends had just finished playing basketball at the YMCA on March 18 when they were pulled over by police. Jeylani told MPR News the four made a U-turn when they saw police because they were hoping to avoid confrontation. The attempt failed.

    “Plain and simple, if you fuck with me, I’m going to break your leg before you get the chance to run,” officer Rod Webber can be heard saying in the video. “I’m being honest, I don’t screw around.”

    “I never said I was going to run,” Jeylani says in response.

    “I’m just giving you a heads up. Just trying to be officer friendly right now,” Webber replies.

    A passenger in the car, 17-year-old Faysal Mohamed, said officers pulled them out of the car because they had suspected it was stolen. The minors were put in handcuffs and waited close to an hour as police searched the car and did background checks on the boys, Mohamed told My Fox Twin Cities.

    “Can you tell me why I’m being arrested?” Jeylani asks.

    “Because I feel like arresting you,” Webber responds.

    The teens were eventually let go.

    The four boys are of Somali descent, and said they believe they were racially profiled by officer Webber.

    “They had their guns drawn,” Liban Yusuf, 18, told My Fox. “I don’t know why they were so aggressive.”

    The Minneapolis Police Department was not immediately available for comment, but told My Fox that they were investigating the incident. The teens said they plan to file a formal complaint on Monday.

    Norristown Area High School students stage walkout in protest of alleged racist post by school employee. Note use of ‘alleged’.

    More than 100 Norristown Area High School students staged a walkout Tuesday morning in protest of what they said were racist comments posted to the Internet by a school employee.

    The peaceful protest was organized via Twitter following the employee’s two-day suspension, which the students and some parents said was too light a punishment.

    “Basically, we’re protesting, standing up for what we believe,” said student protestor Imani Meade.

    An employee “posted a racist statement that went viral for Norristown High School,” Meade said.
    Advertisement

    The protest drew students of all colors and races out of class to support the message.

    “She said we look shady with our hoods up and that all black people breed criminals,” said Marvin Green, a student involved in the protest.

    The protest was organized on social media with more and more students retweeting the plans, Green said.

    At 8 a.m., the students stayed true to their tweets and exited the school for 20 minutes. As they staged in the parking lot, more students joined when beckoned to come outside.

    Norristown Area School District Superintendent Janet Samuels said the administration held a question-and-answer session with the students early in the morning to help answer any questions they had about the process involved in disciplinary matters involving personnel.

    “We certainly respect the voices of our students and staff members. We understood there were some students that had some questions,” Samuels said. “Today we provided an opportunity to answer their questions … and not violate anyone and remain cognizant of the employee’s due process rights.

    “The students were attempting to share and show that in spite of what has been documented that they are a united group and to do the right things always and not be belabored by stereotypes.”

    ‘Look shady with hoods up’ and ‘breed like criminals’. Ayuh. Note use of ‘alleged’.

  174. rq says

    #PeoplesMonday in #GrandCentral has begun, reading facts of victims of police violence, every Mon. #BlackLivesMatter
    Tonight’s #PeoplesMonday dedicated to #GilbertDrogheo, unarmed man shot & killed by ex-cop in NYC subway 1 month ago
    5 facts abt #GilbertDrogheo, unarmed, shot & killed in NYC subway 1 month ago by ex-cop who still hasn’t been charged.
    They do this every fucking Monday. !!!

    Pressure is mounting on the PUBLIC release of the video from the night of the shooting of #lavallhall. We will keep you posted w/ details.

    Ray Rice says video of him beating Janay Palmer doesn’t truly represent who he is, longs for return to NFL

    In his latest desperate attempt to revive his image, Ray Rice insisted that the “gruesome” beating he once delivered to his now-wife has given the world the wrong impression. The former NFL running back insisted that his critics “just don’t know who I am.”

    In what appeared to be a carefully scripted interview with New York magazine arranged by his crisis manager, Rice opened up about his life since what he calls his “mistake” — Valentine’s Day 2014, when he knocked then-fiancée Janay Palmer unconscious on an elevator in Atlantic City. The video of the attack and the aftermath — when he dragged Palmer out of the elevator and plopped her face-down on the floor — made him the poster child for both domestic violence and the NFL’s growing criminal problem.

    It also got Rice suspended briefly by the NFL and cut by the Ravens, leaving him unemployed and seemingly without any options to return to the league.

    But in the interview, Rice said he’s “not ready to call it quits” and he remains hopeful that some NFL team will give him a chance. That’s clearly part of why he opened up to the magazine about the many hardships, both in his childhood and in his relationship with his wife, that led up to what he admitted was a “horrible” moment in his life.

    Now, after a year of therapy and healing with his wife and family, he wants everyone to believe that “mistake” wasn’t symbolic of who he really is.

    “The hardest part for me was people who don’t know me at all were writing about me or talking about me,” Rice said. “I understand the seriousness of what I did. But I’m like, ‘Man, they just don’t know who I am.’”

    But you know what? I still don’t hear any real remorse or apology or anything other than ‘Me Me Me Me!!’ Seriously. Note use of ‘this is not who we are’ argument. Can be used individually, too, it turns out.

    Oscar Winner John Legend to Produce Romance Film Awwww…

    A musical romance drama is coming down the pipeline for Grammy-winning singers John Legend and Miguel.

    Legend, who won an Oscar for the “Selma” song “Glory,” will produce the musical through a partnership between his Get Lifted Film Co. and Furst Films.

    Miguel is in talks to star in the production in the lead role. Variety reports his character would be, “a former one-hit wonder who regains his love for music when he is hired to coach an aspiring singer for her audition on a singing competition show.”

    Legend will also curate the soundtrack.

    The film will start production in September in Philadelphia.

  175. rq says

    Tangential but indicative: Felons barred from constructing Apple’s campus

    Apple is known for being secretive and picky about who works on its popular devices, but now, union officials say, that thinking also applies to the construction workers pouring the concrete for the tech giant’s new offices.

    Several construction workers who were hired to build the exterior of Apple’s new campus in Cupertino were ordered to leave the site in January due to prior felony convictions, several union officials and workers told The Chronicle. The ban is unusual for construction work, a field in which employers typically do not perform criminal background checks.

    “Apple is always nervous about preserving its proprietary information, and yet I don’t know how this would affect that concern,” said Michael Theriault, president of Iron Workers Local Union 377. “Our folks put the wire in the reinforcing bar (of the building). It makes no sense to me.”

    For work on the Apple site, anyone with a felony conviction or facing felony charges “does not meet owner standards,” according to documents from construction companies acquired by The Chronicle.

    Theriault and union business manager Dennis Meakin wrote letters to Apple CEO Tim Cook and state Attorney General Kamala Harris in January, asking for a change to that policy, but have not received a direct response.

    Both Theriault and Meakin pointed out that formerly incarcerated workers have little representation in the tech industry, and the few positions they hold “are largely through employment in services such as construction.”

    “Apple’s prohibition against employment of former felons or those with a pending felony charge does not just fail to address inequality, then, but amplifies it,” both men wrote in the letters. “It is, moreover, an evil precedent.”

    #147notjustanumber – there was a vigil yesterday. This is just one photo.

    #147notjustanumber: humanising the victims of Kenya’s Garissa attack

    Determined that the students killed in the terror attacks in Garrissa not be reduced to a number, a Kenyan social media campaign has set out to tell the story of each individual victim.

    Using the hashtag #147notjustanumber and #theyhavenames, friends and families of the victims, journalists and others on Twitter have begun to honour the lives of those who died – sharing the photographs, names, ages and character portraits as the details become available.

    Each tweet paints a powerful portrait of loss.

    They include tributes to Leah N Wanfula, who at 21 was the first of nine siblings to go to university. There’s Gideon Kirui, 22, whose entire family saved up for him to continue his education; and Selpher Wandia, 21, who was studying to become a teacher.

    They record small details that will be remembered by those closest: Beatrice Njeri Thinwa, 20, was a fan of Kenny Rogers and Mildred Yondo loved theatre, music and mangoes. […]

    In an effort to make sure each student is honoured a public google document has been created “to ensure we never forget the names of victims of internal and external acts of mass violence”. It also contains tabs for other al-Shabaab victims, including the ones on Mandera Quarry in 2014 and the Westgate shopping mall in 2013.

    Coordinated by a Kenyan blogger known as Owaahh, the document is acting as an open-source database. The public are asked to add any information they have about the Garissa students, including quotes from family members and personal Facebook pages.

    Owaahh’s team is also asking for links to source and verify the information collected. It currently lists the details of 71 victims, not all of them are verified.

    Kenyans on social media have also started to share details of a vigil “to remember and mourn the Kenyans who lost their lives”, which will be held this evening in Uhuru Park, Nairobi. People have been asked to volunteer at the event and those attending to bring hand written tributes.

    Here’s the google document. Doesn’t yet list all the names. The article includes some photos, too.

    Oh wow. Myanmar is using Ferguson to justify its latest crackdown on protesters

    There are plenty of reasons why cities and towns in America shouldn’t be using military-grade weapons or armored vehicles to scatter protests.

    But here’s one that might not have occurred to you. Over-the-top police aggression — as witnessed in Ferguson, Missouri last summer — is a gift to authoritarian nations looking to justify crackdowns of their own.

    One of them is Myanmar. The country formerly known as Burma was for decades notorious for its violent control over dissent. It has been the recipient of countless lectures from White House officials and others over the years for subjugating its citizens under military rule.

    The country is now undergoing a messy transition from despotism to a freer society. But that metamorphosis is far from complete.

    This was underscored when police assaulted unarmed student protesters — who rallied to fix a desperately broke education system — last month. The peaceful protests took place in the small town of Letpadan which, like Ferguson, has rocketed from obscurity to a household name. It all ended when rampaging cops started cracking heads and making dubious arrests. A dozen activists remain in prison almost a month later.

    The scenes made everyone who follows Myanmar nervous that the government had regressed. But there is no need to fear, according to Myanmar’s most visible official, Ye Htut, the minister of information. After all, he says, the United States sometimes uses brute force to break up protests too.

    In a statement, Ye Htut cited the crackdowns on both Occupy Wall Street and Ferguson and noted that, unlike in Myanmar, “nobody spoke of US democracy having backtracked.”

    GlobalPost caught up with Ye Htut in Yangon, Myanmar, and asked him to elaborate.

    “Even in the US,” he said, “individual police will react under pressure differently. There’s reasonable force and excessive force. That’s the problem we were facing … the actions of some individuals didn’t meet the code of conduct, our rules for handling demonstrations.”

    “Sometimes,” Ye Htut said, “there’s a very emotional response to a situation. That’s why we need more anger management.”

    For decades, the US government slammed Myanmar’s treatment of anti-government protesters, some of whom are lionized and even funded by American agencies. Last month, during a speech in Selma, Alabama, US President Barack Obama exalted the many dissidents in Myanmar who “went to prison rather than submit to military rule.”

    Officials in Myanmar, who are near giddy at the prospect of receiving American aid and investment, refrained from responding. And, anyway, they haven’t really earned the moral high ground to do so. The country remains a place where laws are weak and opposing the government is dangerous. But it’s hard not to detect the schadenfreude some officials in Myanmar felt after the Ferguson debacle.

    The Aspen Institute Community Dialogue on Healing the Racial Divide, with video.

    In the aftermath of the events in Ferguson, Staten Island and elsewhere, race relations are at the forefront of the minds of many Americans. Specifically in St. Louis, the relationship between local communities and law enforcement officers assigned to protect them is worsening, the quality of information shared is both positively and negatively affected by the new media environment, and the city remains one of the most racially segregated metropolitan areas of the United States.

    To address these increasingly significant issues, the Aspen Institute Communications & Society Program is convening the “Aspen Institute Community Dialogue on Healing the Racial Divide,” March 24, 2015, at the Renaissance St. Louis Grand Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri.

    I have a feeling this is a repost?

  176. rq says

    York student Amina Lawal, missing for weeks, found safe.

    Ferguson Faces Its Future

    Our national conversations and activist actions around race and racial injustice tend to flourish when centered around one locality. The best recent example is Ferguson, the St. Louis suburb that quite literally ignited last summer after unarmed teen Michael Brown was gunned down by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. That was followed by one of the grossest displays of militarized police violence the country has witnessed since 1965 on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

    That’s a big reason why President Obama couldn’t go to Selma last month and not say the word “Ferguson.”

    There was also the matter of inconvenient, yet symbolic timing: Days before the March 7 commemoration of the violently interrupted voting-rights march known as “Bloody Sunday,” the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) released a mortifying 102-page report about Ferguson, detailing excessive force by police officers, financial bleeding of citizens through petty arrests and ticketing, and unchecked racial bias that metastasized throughout the police and courts.

    Noting that he’d been asked in the wake of the DOJ report whether anything had changed with regards to race in this country, Obama chose to respond instead to a straw man. “I rejected the notion that nothing’s changed,” he said in his Selma speech. “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.”

    In the midst of otherwise brilliant oratory befitting the moment, this was a very strange thing to say. The ’60s were not some demarcation line for institutionalized and legalized racism, as Obama knows. And the killing of Michael Brown was indeed sanctioned by both law and custom, as the government’s report makes plain.

    Something that can demonstrably change the city, however, will take place this coming Tuesday, April 7: Ferguson will vote in its first local election since Brown was killed.

    If accountability can be measured in quiet resignations and severance packages, perhaps you could argue progress has already been made in Ferguson. The most powerful government official in town, city manager John Shaw, resigned on March 10, less than a week after the DOJ report was made public. Thomas Jackson, the beleaguered Ferguson police chief Shaw hired and managed, left his post on March 19. Both men are white. Ninety-four percent of the police force, at most recent count, is white, too. So is Mayor James Knowles III. Two-thirds of Ferguson’s 21,000 residents are black.

    This power ratio is about to change, if only slightly. Three of the six seats on the city council—the mayor occupies the seventh seat—are up for grabs. Currently, the council has one black member, Dwayne James. Among the eight candidates running on Tuesday, four are black. The open seats are dispersed among the city’s three Wards. In Ward 3, where Brown was killed, either Lee Smith or Wesley Bell will ensure that a second black Councilmember is elected. In the northernmost Ward 1, two of the four candidates are black.

    Perhaps more important than color representation will be the power these new councilmembers will have to shift how Ferguson governs itself. The City Council chooses the city manager, who in turn supervises the police department and other agencies. “This election wouldn’t have been possible without protest,” said former Ferguson resident Alexis Templeton, co-founder of Millennial Activists United. “People who have been out there and stood with us are on the ballot.” […]

    Black access to the voting franchise has been under such consistent attack in recent years that the lack of voter-ID laws affecting this election offers a sad kind of relief. But Bynes believes that a different brand of disenfranchisement may affect Ferguson’s black voters.

    “There’s nobody stopping people in Ferguson from participating in these low-level elections. The disenfranchisement comes from people feeling oppressed,” she said. “All of the systems that are in place. And when you beat people down enough, some stand up, get involved, and say, ‘Enough is enough.’ But others start giving up, and feed into the idea that ‘things are not going to change, I can’t change it, I’m not strong enough to change it’—and they give up on one of the most powerful things in this country.”

    Bynes argues that we should view voter apathy in communities like Ferguson in a different framework, and that conservative measures to limit access were, in essence, redundant when paired with bad public policy and cultural erasure. “They don’t have to play voter-ID games. There’s no poll tax anymore. They don’t even have to play games with where you put the polling place,” she told me. “After you have beaten people down enough over the years and some of them have forgotten their history, this is what happens.”

    If any community has a reason to feel beaten down, it’s black folks in Ferguson. How the brutalization of their bodies, spirits, and finances will affect their votes on Tuesday will be instructive for us all.

    More at the link.

    Billie Holliday, born on April 7, 1915. Today, her 100th birthday anniversary. Happy 100th, Billie (by now belated).

    Ferguson’s Future Hinges On A Choice Of Histories

    Ferguson’s city council candidates agreed on a lot Saturday night.

    Sitting beneath a roughhewn cross at a local church, six of the eight contenders — two candidates didn’t attend — all agreed that there should be independent investigations when police kill someone. They agreed on the value of community oriented policing, on the importance of schools, and on the problems with city management.

    There were differences, too, but more than anything else each of the candidates zeroed in on one idea: change.

    On April 7, Ferguson will vote in a municipal election for the first time since Michael Brown’s death. Three of the six sitting council members are not seeking reelection, and much has been made of the city’s looming opportunity to shake up its elected leadership.

    The race is already symbolically important; four of the candidates are black, which is significant because prior to this election the city has only ever had three black council candidates in the previous 120 years.

    The city council also writes laws. It created the civilian review board. Less than two weeks ago, it was the council that gave embattled city manager John Shaw a “mutual separation agreement.”

    In other words, the city council can play a major role in shaping Ferguson’s recovery and it’s future. But while each of the candidates have ambitious plans for the future, their histories may actually be the most important factor in this election.

    There’s more on each candidate at the link. Not useful for voting anymore, but useful in identifying who made it in. More on that later.

    Ferguson election tests mobilization efforts

    Residents in Ferguson, Mo., head to the polls Tuesday for elections that will change the city council’s racial composition and test whether months of protests over racial profiling and police brutality spur higher voter turnout.

    Since the shooting death last summer of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer, activists in the St. Louis suburb have implored people to channel concerns about discrimination into civic activism. The majority African-American town is represented by a majority white city council. A Justice Department report last month confirmed a broad pattern of biased policing that singled out African Americans for excessive arrests and harsh punishment.

    Now about 14,700 registered voters have a chance to change the face of their leadership on the council.

    Yet, if Tuesday’s election mirrors past municipal contests, turnout will be low. About 12% of eligible voters cast a ballot in last April’s mayoral election, Eric Fey, St. Louis County director of elections, said. Polls close at 7 p.m. local time. Fey expects a tally by 11 p.m.

    “The vast majority of Ferguson residents are already registered to vote,” Fey said. “It’s more of a mobilization and turnout issue.”

    Candidates are offering residents free rides to the polls and volunteers are going door to door to get out the vote.

    Regardless of the turnout, the number of African Americans on the council will at least double because Wesley Bell and Lee Smith, both black, are the only candidates for the seat in Ward 3, the neighborhood where the teenager, Michael Brown, 18, died. If a black candidate in Ward 1 wins her race, it will be the first time that African Americans control half of the six council seats in a city where two-thirds of its 21,000 residents are black.

    Bob Hudgins, a frequent protester, faces former Ferguson mayor Brian Fletcher for a seat representing Ward 2 on the council. Both men are white. One sitting council member not up for re-election is black and Mayor James Knowles, who is white, holds the seventh seat on the council. He is not up for re-election.

    Erykah Badu Releases ‘All-Star Cast Black Western’ Film on Tidal (that new platform).

    From Beyoncé to Rihanna, major artists dropped a few gems on Jay Z’s Tidal streaming service this past weekend.

    Erykah Badu debuted the short Western film, They Die By Dawn, exclusively on Tidal on Saturday, April 4.

    The 50-minute movie — directed by The Bullitts’ Jeymes Samuels — portrays real-life experiences of African-American cowboys and cowgirls. The all-star cast includes Badu, Michael K. Williams, Rosario Dawson, Jesse Williams, Isaiah Washington, Giancarlo Esposito, Nate Parker, Bokeem Woodbine and Karry Lennix.

    Ha, worth a look!

  177. rq says

    Unfreed
    The man who was accidentally released from prison 88 years early.

    H e’d spent years wondering when the other shoe would drop. The revelation had taken him by surprise — the best possible thing that could have happened under the circumstances, his lawyer said — and yet the promise of it weighed too heavily for him to completely go along with it. Part of him was sure it wasn’t true at all.
    This story was produced in partnership with Matter.

    He’d told his girlfriend, Jasmine. She didn’t seem to believe it, either. Maybe it was that even this new, shorter prison sentence still seemed too long to someone barely 20. Or maybe she didn’t like how the news seemed to change him. She bristled when he got serious and talked about marriage. Her visits slowed, then stopped. He kept her picture on the wall of his cell.

    Only after Rene Lima-Marin walked out and the gate of Colorado’s Crowley County Correctional Facility shut behind him, on April 24, 2008, did he finally decide he didn’t have to worry anymore. He was 29 years old and a free man, released after serving a decade of what had first been a sentence of 98 years.

    Jasmine came to see him right away. They stared at each other for what seemed like an hour. She said he looked weird. He was thinner, his long hair cut short. But he could not be denied now, standing there in person. He had told her he was going to change in prison, and he told her now that he’d done it.

    They moved in together. He became a father to her one-year-old son. He found a job, and then a better one, and then a union job, working construction on skyscrapers in the center of Denver. The family went to church. They took older relatives in at their new, bigger house in a nice section of Aurora. There was another child, also a boy, and a wedding timed for when he’d be done with his five years of parole. And, eventually, the demands of everyday life papered over the past. Life became about bills, chores, church, and soccer with the boys. Days and weeks passed with only the smallest reminders of the person he’d once been.

    Then on Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2014, he was getting ready for another day in the sky, installing glass windows in buildings high above the city. His cell buzzed. He didn’t recognize the number. The woman on the line said she was from the Denver public defender’s office. She didn’t understand it all herself, not yet. The prosecutor was saying that his release from prison five years and eight months earlier — a lifetime ago, a life he’d managed to mostly will out of his mind — had been a mistake. A clerical error. A judge just signed off on the order. He had to go back.

    For the longest time, he had no words. Finally, he managed a question.

    Is this even possible?

    … And just like that, they took him away again. More:

    I t was a string of robberies, but of course it wasn’t just that. In the eyes of the law, everything about the two friends’ spree was important. Every step mattered. Every movement within those stores.

    Both men received two counts of first-degree burglary and three counts of aggravated robbery, for each of the three employees they made cooperate at the two stores. That surprised Lima-Marin. “They gave me three counts because of the three people,” he says, “but I didn’t rob three people. I robbed two stores.” Then came the kidnapping charges: three counts of second-degree kidnapping, because they’d forced three employees in those two robberies to move from one part of a store to another. Lima-Marin is still outraged by this. They were never going to take anyone. “The point of the robbery was to get people to give you the money,” he says.

    Lima-Marin wasn’t just facing more charges than he expected, but the prosecutors were pursuing those charges with surprising zeal. Back in those days, Denver had been rocked by years of alarming homicide rates. Gangs had made inroads into the suburbs, including Montbello, where Lima-Marin’s family had lived in a housing project. The high-water mark for public alarm came during the “summer of violence” in 1993, when a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting killed a five-year-old boy and another killed a 10-month-old child on a visit to the Denver Zoo. No suburb of Denver may have done more to try to curb the influx of gang violence than Arapahoe County, the center of which was the town of Aurora, where Rene-Lima and Clifton lived.

    In the mid-’90s, public alarm nationally had reached a near-frenzy over so-called super-predators, juvenile offenders so impulsive that they killed or maimed without giving much thought to the consequences. Demographers and social scientists were predicting greater crime waves to come, citing data suggesting that a small percentage of young criminals were responsible for a huge swath of violent crime. The solution, many prosecutors and police thought, was to lock them away for as long as possible until their wild years were behind them. Colorado’s 18th Judicial District, in Arapahoe County, was proudly out in front of the trend. In 1987, the county had debuted a sentencing protocol called the Chronic Offender Program, or COP, to deal with young kids predisposed to committing violent crimes. The perfect target of COP was someone who seemed, on the surface, to be a lot like Lima-Marin: a violent criminal who was young, and therefore statistically more likely to commit more crimes if allowed back on the streets. […]

    On Jan. 31, 2000, a jury found both Lima-Marin and Clifton guilty on all eight counts. The sentences were to be served consecutively, for a total of 98 years. Offered the chance to say something before the judge and jury, Lima-Marin was too stunned to speak. Judge John Leopold seemed to sympathize: “I am not comfortable, frankly, with the way the case is charged,” he said as the two men stood before him. “But that is a district attorney executive-branch decision that I find I have no control over.” […]

    S o how does a sentence like this vanish? How does 98 years become 10? It didn’t make sense to Lima-Marin, and yet going against it made even less.

    He remembers first learning about the possibility of life after prison shortly after arriving at the medium-security Crowley County Correctional Facility, when he received a visit from a public defender assigned to handle his appeal. “I had no clue and no idea of how none of this worked,” Lima-Marin says. As he recalls, his lawyer surprised him by telling him that she didn’t think he ought to appeal at all. The best possible scenario had unfolded, he remembers her saying: “You no longer have 98 years. What you have is 16 years.”

    When he said he didn’t understand, the lawyer offered no explanation. He says she never even mentioned a clerical error. From what he could gather, she’d looked at his case file for the first time before meeting him, and when she read it, she saw that his release date was consistent with a 16-year sentence, as if his sentences were running concurrently. Since this matched the most favorable outcome he could expect from an appeal, he remembers her saying that it made no sense even to bother filing one. She handed him a sheet of paper, he signed it, and he never saw her again. […]

    Back in his cell, Lima-Marin wondered how this was possible. Other inmates told him that if he wanted to make sure his lawyer was right, he should ask to see what everyone called his “green sheet,” the official Department of Corrections record of his sentence and parole eligibility. The green sheet was gospel, he was told; whatever was on the green sheet, the DOC would follow. Sure enough, his green sheet confirmed what his lawyer had said: 16 years.

    Lima-Marin felt a rush of relief. “I felt like, I still have a chance here. To live life,” he says. His time felt provisional now — his early release was his to screw up. He got into a few fights early on, but they were over too quickly for anyone to notice. Then, about a year and a half into his time at Crowley, he met another inmate, a tall, imposing former gang member who had undergone a transformation. “He’d been an OG, and everyone knew him, but he was completely for God now,” Lima-Marin says. “I wanted to find out why.” Through his new friend, he joined a small prayer group and spent every available moment with them. They offered him independent reinforcement — it could be done; a person could change. He stopped going by “Michael” to underscore the transformation. He was Rene now. […]

    R ich Orman, in the Arapahoe County prosecutor’s office, received an email at 7:44 a.m. on Jan. 7, 2014, from a magistrate judge who years earlier had been the prosecutor who had secured the convictions against Lima-Marin and Clifton. The subject line was “A question out of the blue.”

    Rich,

    I was just checking the DOC inmate website, and there is a person I prosecuted under the COP program who is not there. His co-defendant, Michael Clifton, is there (with an initial parole eligibility date some 30 years away)…. I am hoping somehow I just may have missed something, but I fear that somehow he might have been mistakenly released early or something.

    Would you mind checking into the situation?

    Thanks,

    Frank Moschetti

    Orman called the DOC at once. He learned not only that Lima-Marin was free, but that he’d been out more than five years, completing his parole. He checked the state court’s computer system and noticed a strange phrase tacked on to each of Lima-Marin’s eight convictions: “No Consecutive/Concurrent Sentences.” Orman wondered if someone else might have been as confused by that phrase as he was, and decided that his sentences were concurrent.

    Orman notified the judge of the error in a memo by 12:30 p.m., and had the judge’s order in hand two hours later. Lima-Marin was arrested that night, and the hearing that sent him back to jail took place the following day. “People talk about inefficiency in government?” Orman says, smiling. “This was very quick.” [fucking makes me sick]

    One reason for the speed may have been that officials were still reeling from another case of an inmate’s accidental release. In January 2013, a 28-year-old prisoner from Colorado named Evan Ebel had been released four years early. A clerk had mistakenly written in his file that the sentence was to be served concurrently. Two months later, Ebel killed two men, including the Colorado prisons chief, Tom Clements. The case had sparked an audit of other cases; even so, Lima-Marin’s case reportedly did not come up in that audit, escaping scrutiny until Moschetti noticed it several months later. […]

    Last March, Lima-Marin’s new public defender, Marnie Adams, filed a motion with the court arguing that Lima-Marin no longer deserved or needed prison, and that to send him back amounted to cruel and unusual punishment — and that he had “a legitimate expectation of the finality” of his prison sentence when they let him out in 2008. His life outside prison proved he’d changed: “Now, Mr. Lima-Marin is a committed family man who inspires others with his love and dedication to his family.”

    In a lengthy reply on behalf of the state, Rich Orman described Lima-Marin’s five years and eight months of accidental freedom as a great stroke of luck: How many other inmates would have jumped at the chance for a half-decade furlough? The fact that Lima-Marin lived like a model citizen for five years, Orman argued, should have no bearing. “Plainly said,” Orman wrote in his reply, “the Defendant had no business getting married and starting a family.”

    On April 21, Judge William Sylvester sided with Orman, ruling against Lima-Marin’s motion to be released. The judge cited a ruling from White v. Pearlman, a 1930 case in which a clerical error released an inmate two years early, that there could be “no doubt of the power of the government to recommit a prisoner who is released or discharged by mistake.” He went a step further to say that Lima-Marin “could not have had a legitimate expectation of finality in his original sentence when he was mistakenly released early, based on a clerical error.” Lima-Marin hired an appeals lawyer, Patrick Megaro, who had represented Cornealious Anderson in Missouri. To Megaro, the main question of Lima-Marin’s case is not whether he knew about the clerical error and should have brought it to the state’s attention; it’s whether he should be punished for the state’s mistake at all. “To conclude [Lima-Marin] should have insisted that he was being wrongfully released from prison ignores reality,” Megaro argued in an August motion. “No rational individual would question the motives or correctness of his jailers and insist that they remain in prison for the rest of their life.” Megaro has asked to appear before the court to contest the matter in oral arguments. A hearing date has yet to be set. […]

    Our visit is coming to an end. After we talk, Lima-Marin will return to his cell and resume his old prison life, for how long he doesn’t know. He seems restless now, speaking more urgently, trying harder to get across what he thinks is really happening to him and what should happen. On one level, he believes he is reformed and that he’s proven he no longer poses a risk to society — that he’s a new man serving an old sentence. “What’s happened to me, it’s obvious to me, is wrong,” he says. He often says he’s being punished for the same crime twice. That’s why he thinks he’s being subjected to a second glitch.

    Lima-Marin’s life, after all, has comprised a series of reversals, each of them drastic: from a life sentence to freedom; from ex-convict to faithful father; from selfishness to religious fervor. And now, every inch of progress has been ripped away. There has to be a reason.

    He searches for it in memories: skipping church every now and then to coach soccer. Ministering with his music, but not face to face. “I’d come home and I’m tired. And then you have the bills. There’s so much going on. I’m not putting forth all of the effort that I’m supposed to be into the word, into study, into prayer. I pushed the Lord to the side, and it became about life.”

    He looks up, pausing, worried he’s said too much, struggling to find the right words. And then he does. “Jonah ran from what God wanted him to do,” he says. “So he had to be placed in a position to be able to hear from God.”

  178. rq says

    Aaargh, that was meant to be Preview! Here’s the rest of the comment:
    @Starbucks CEO just told @NPR they “*started* a national dialogue” on race. Come to #Ferguson & ask these tear gassed kids who started it.

    A chance for change as Ferguson votes for 3 City Council seats (just more on the election).

    Judge In Tiny City Facing Lawsuit Over Its ‘Illegal’ Bail System Is Running For Ferguson City Council

    Velda City, which holds court just twice a month, has a fixed cash bail system, meaning that defendants who cannot come up with any money for their bail are held for at least three days before they are released. It is the same type of system that existed in Ferguson and Jennings — two cities that are currently facing federal civil rights lawsuits for their bail systems — as well as several other municipalities in St. Louis County and other places across the country. The Justice Department recently took the position in a federal court case out of Alabama that bail or bond schemes, like those in Velda City, that mandate “payment of pre-fixed amounts for different offenses in order to gain pre-trial release, without any regard for indigence” violate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

    Had Pierce’s family members not been able to get in touch with pro bono lawyers who were already working their case, she would have been stuck in the St. Ann jail until early Sunday morning. But while she was still behind bars, attorneys quickly got to work. Less than 24 hours after her arrest, attorneys who have been challenging the practices of St. Louis County’s troubled network of municipal courts filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Velda City. The lawsuit alleges that Velda City is running an “unlawful” and “illegal” bail system that fails to consider individualized factors.

    “These fines for people who are poor really do end up destroying their lives,” said Thomas Harvey of ArchCity Defenders, a pro bono legal organization based in St. Louis that is one of two organizations behind the lawsuits against Ferguson, Jennings and now Velda City.

    Alec Karakatsanis of the group Equal Justice Under Law, the other organization involved in the lawsuits against the three cities, said Velda City’s policy of not accepting commercial bail bonds could be seen as an indication the city was more concerned about bringing in cash than simply making sure a defendant would show up in court.

    “The places that do that don’t want to give you the money back. Their whole purpose in doing that is to extort that cash and keep it,” Karakatsanis said of cities like Velda City that do not accept commercial bail bonds. “They want to make sure they get that money in hand.”

    The organizations hope to turn the lawsuits into a class action.

    Pierce was released shortly after the lawsuit against Velda City was filed. The name of the municipal court judge who had her released was Wesley Bell — a name that might sound familiar to residents of Ferguson. Bell is one of the two black candidates running for a seat on Ferguson City Council representing Ward 3. (Ward 3 contains the area in Ferguson where Michael Brown was killed in August.) Voters in Ferguson and around St. Louis County go to the polls on Tuesday.

    Bell is running against Lee Smith, a long-time Ferguson resident who has gotten the support of Patricia Bynes, a Democratic committeewoman from Ferguson who believes that Bell’s involvement in the municipal court system is a knock against him.

    In an interview on Monday, Bell said he was surprised by the lawsuit, and suggested it could have had political motivations. (The Huffington Post was not tipped off about the lawsuit against Velda City. A reporter simply stumbled upon it last week during a search of federal civil rights cases filed in the Eastern District of Missouri.)

    “I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, because there is not one time that ArchCity has come into my court and I have not helped them with whatever they were asking, because I support what they’re doing,” Bell said. “I’ve been to their fundraisers before in the past, so it disappoints me if, if — and I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt — but if they’re using this as political theater right before the election, I would say I would be disappointed. And if that’s what they’re doing, shame on them.”

    Bell said that he supported municipal court reform, and pointed to a ticket forgiveness program in Velda City that was praised by ArchCity Defenders. And in a recent visit to Velda City Municipal Court, Bell seemed willing to work with people who appeared before him. One woman appearing in court, a housekeeper from nearby Berkeley, called Bell “reasonable” and “one of the nicest judges” she’d ever seen.

    In an interview on Monday, Bell said it wasn’t his place to defend the entire municipal court system in St. Louis County, but rather to do what he could to change it.

    “I’m getting the impression that you are asking me to defend this system, the whole municipal courts situation in North County and just the state,” Bell said in the interview. “I’m not doing that. What I’m saying is that there are issues, there are courts that aren’t doing it right. There’s no question about that.”

    Bell said that he never felt pressure from Velda City Mayor Robert Hensley to increase revenue, as highlighted by the Justice Department’s report on the practices of Ferguson’s police department and municipal court.

    “The mayor, when he hired me, he made it clear, ‘Hey, I’m not going to be counting revenue, you just deal with the cases justly.’ I thought that’s the way everyone did it, for the most part, but obviously that’s not the case, and there are places where people are pressured to put on revenue,” Bell said. “I could not agree more that courts should not be revenue generators and debtors’ prisons, and I can say with certainty that I’ve never sentenced someone to jail.”

    Hmmmm.

    There were many people that led key voter registration and GOTV efforts for today’s #FergusonElections. The movement lives.

    Another test for Ferguson – more on the election. Basically a rehash of the DOJ report and why elections are important.

  179. rq says

    The Man Who Loves Ferguson (Just as It Is)

    I recently sat down with Fletcher, who served as Ferguson’s mayor between 2005 and 2011, inside the store. On a sweater day, he was wearing a short-sleeve polo shirt stretched by his midsection. At 55, he is bald with grey hair in the back, and smiles through clenched teeth. Over the course of our conversation, which has been edited for length, it became clear that Fletcher wants very badly to get back into Ferguson’s city government. […]

    JS: Can you tell me about where you were and your reaction to what happened last August?

    BF: Well, I was not in elected office at the time. I stepped down in 2011, but I remained active. As a result of what happened, I and three other people founded the I Love Ferguson Foundation. It’s a 501(c)3 not-for-profit. The purpose was to get the national media to understand we’re not such a horrible town. We’re a very good town and people here love their community. I thought, “Well, how am I going to get a lot of attention?” The idea of a yard sign came up. And you’ll still see a lot of “I Love Ferguson” yard signs around town. Now the weather has beaten them up. We’ve done 10,450 yard signs in a community of 20,000. … Our products are in all 50 states and 38 different countries. We’ve raised a quarter of a million dollars in eight months.

    JS: Where does that money go?

    BF: Well, the first $100,000—you’ll see these large checks that we have at the store—they were issued to the Reinvest North County Fund, which went directly to businesses that were either physically or economically damaged by the unrest. Now that that fund is closed, we’re contributing money. We voted this past Tuesday to give five $1,500 college scholarships to high school seniors in the Ferguson community. We authorized the purchase of 250 Lego kits for the children of the city during the Fourth of July festival. I chair that committee as well. We raise money throughout the year. We have ham and bean dinners, BBQs, cocktail parties. We cook eggs at the farmers’ market. And we pay for all the music during that day, and all the rides and games and face painting, pig races, petting zoo, all those things you would see at a festival. I chair that as well.

    The real story people don’t know is that in 2010 we had made so much progress on all issues, including race, that we were a finalist for the All-America City in the United States. And you can look that up on the Internet. One thing we lacked—we didn’t win the contest—was that we didn’t have a youth group. So we established the Ferguson Youth Initiative, a wonderful program that has over 150 to 200 teens who work on different things. They have a community service program that allows teens who get traffic violations to do community service in lieu of having to pay a fine. We’re hoping that they extend that to adults in our community who are unable to afford tickets.

    JS: That brings up the Department of Justice report which came out last month, which found the city had issued 16,000 warrants when the community’s population is 21,000. What are some of the creative solutions that you would employ if you were elected? Ferguson seems like, from my observation, a pretty nice place to live. How can it get nicer, especially for those who can’t afford these kinds of fines?

    BF: Well, let me correct the numbers. These warrants are—first of all, they’re not all Ferguson residents. Many of the tickets that are issued involve people from surrounding cities that drive through our city and they get a warrant. You get a warrant if you do not show up or contact the courts when you receive a violation. That’s what the warrants are issued for. Many of them are multiple warrants on the same individual. So the literature that’s being passed around town—saying three out of four citizens have warrants against them—is false. You can imagine that if there were three out of four people in the city with warrants, there would be chaos, there would be a revolution that would have occurred a lot more before now.

    JS: Is there anything in the DOJ report you found to be a legitimate criticism?

    BF: The emails that were racist and biased were totally inappropriate. They should have been fired, whoever did that. … So, yes, that’s a concern. It’s a concern that there were 14 incidents where dogs were used to help control or get a suspect, and they were all African Americans. That seems totally like—why? It’s not a ton over an eight-year period, but 14 times when they were all African Americans. That certainly doesn’t look right.

    JS: You had mentioned in an interview with Newsmax that political correctness had “gone astray.”

    BF: That’s what they called the name of the article. I didn’t use those exact words. (Editor’s note: Yes, he used those exact words.)

    JS: Can you elaborate a bit more on what you were trying to express?

    BF: I can. It’s hard to explain. The fact is, no resident or business has any factor of guilt in this matter. They didn’t shoot Michael Brown. The fact is, nobody knows precisely—because there have been other similar shootings since Michael Brown across the United States—why Ferguson came to this level of looting and frustration. A lot of it was because outsiders came in. We still have, right now in this election process, paid outsiders, people from as far away as New York, working on our elections. And primarily working against myself, who is deemed “the establishment”—you’ve probably seen some of those. […]

    JS: Do you understand the anger that’s swelling from a lot of folks here? Because I’ve been talking to residents who are still infuriated, and I feel like the DOJ report reignited those frustrations.

    BF: Definitely.

    JS: Can you speak to how you grasp what they are feeling?

    BF: I understand it. I grew up in poverty. I lived on food stamps, Social Security. My father died when I was a teenager. I had a mother who was not a U.S. citizen. I worked my way through college on grants and working during college. And when I was 24 years old, I was a councilman in the city of Country Club Hills. I’ve given back to public service. In 1997, I came down with heart disease and told I had five years to live and to prepare myself and my family for my imminent death. And yet I’m still alive. I’m an early retiree, but I spent twelve years as an elected vice president for the Communication Workers of America, the union that gave Ella Jones $7,000 and gave Lee Smith $5,000 and has given me nothing. So I understand discrimination. I feel like in some sense I have been discriminated against; why a union I spent twelve years of my life representing over 4,000 members has chosen not to give me any money.

    JS: Why do you think that is?

    BF: Because I am not African American. That’s the sole reason.

    That last little bit just kills me.

    More people come to canvass with @OBS_STL for today’s election. #FergusonElections

    Kenya @DailyNation tribute to the victims of al-Shabaab’s horrendous Garissa University attack. #147NotJustANumber.

    Innocent Ohio black man to get $1 million for spending 39 years in jail – can’t seem to cite, but it’s a good news story. Minus the 39 years spent in jail, of course. But the exoneration. More!

    Video: War on Africans.

    Part of the “Inside Israel’s Race Wars” presentation by David Sheen at McMaster University on March 4, 2015.
    * includes photography by ActiveStills

    Can’t vouch for all of it, haven’t had a chance to watch it all.

  180. says

    Ferguson election triples number of blacks on City Council:

    Two black candidates were among three people elected to the Ferguson City Council Tuesday, tripling African-American representation in the St. Louis suburb where poor race relations have been a focal point since the August shooting death of an 18-year-old black by a white police officer.

    The election means that half of the six-member city council in Ferguson, a town where two-thirds of the 21,000 residents are black, will now be African-American. The lone black incumbent councilman was not up for re-election. The mayor, who could break any tie votes, is white.

    Voter turnout increased substantially from the previous election following a strong get-out-the-vote effort from labor unions and other national organizations. The town that drew only 12.3 percent of registered voters last April had 29.4 percent turnout Tuesday, according to the St. Louis County Board of Elections. That was about double the overall turnout in St. Louis County, where Ferguson is located.

    Unofficial results showed that Wesley Bell defeated another black candidate to win in the 3rd Ward. Ella Jones defeated another black candidate and two white candidates in the 1st Ward. Brian Fletcher, a former mayor who is white, won a 2nd Ward race against another white candidate.

    “This community came out in record numbers to make sure our voices were heard,” said councilman-elect Bell. “When you have a community engaged, the sky is the limit.”

  181. rq says

    Onwards! Going to be a lot about Walter Scott, that man shot dead at comment 173, first link. With other stuff in between, because I don’t sort.
    Two black candidates win Ferguson council seats as turnout doubles. Generally speaking, good news. What the elected candidates will actually do and how they will work with the community and the PD and other things – remains to be seen.

    Unofficial results of Tuesday’s Ferguson City Council election, the first since Michael Brown’s fatal police shooting brought the city’s racial tensions to the national stage, have two black candidates taking seats on the nearly all-white council.

    This means the six-member body, for the first time, will likely have equal white and black representation. One black member currently sits on the dais, meanwhile, more than two-thirds of the city’s population of 22,000 people is black.

    […]
    The new council will be faced with responding to the report, which may prompt decisions about police policies, department hires—including a new chief— and discussions of how to move Ferguson forward after more than a year of uncertainty. […]

    The election had a roughly 29% voter turnout, according to multiple news reports. About 12% of voters cast ballots in the April mayoral election, Eric Fey, St. Louis County director of elections told USA Today. Many expected Brown’s death to prompt voters to head to the polls, but some feared wet weather may curb people from casting their vote.

    The election was sure to bring one more black person to the Ferguson council as both candidates in Ward 3, Bell and Lee Smith, are African-American. Ward 3 includes the street where Brown was shot. Half of the eight candidates for the three open seats are black.

    Well, not that 29% voter turnout is great, but it’s a heckuvalot better than 12!!

    Former Ferguson City Court Clerk who sent racist emails speaks out

    Twitty was fired in early March. Two police officers, Captain Rick Henke and Sgt. William Mudd, who are both police officers, resigned. All three sent racist emails. Twitty said she found the emails to be funny, but not because of their racial nature.

    “Funny as in humor wise? Yes. Not because it was racist or biased, just funny because it was just funny jokewise,” Twitty said. “I feel bad because that’s not, I don’t want people to look at me and say ‘she sent those racist jokes out because she’s racist or biased.’ I am not.”

    Twitty said she simply doing what others in Ferguson’s government were doing.

    “It took me awhile to get over the feeling of being raped and being thrown under the bus,” Twitty said. “I’m human, I meant nothing bad by it.”

    Twitty was Ferguson’s City Court Clerk for 19 years. The US Department of Justice was critical of how the court system was run, saying she boosted city revenue by setting fines. The report also alleged the city’s police department was encouraged to write lots of tickets to add to city coffers.

    “That’s not true. I set no fines, I just abided by them,” Twitty said.

    ‘This is not who I am’! ‘I was following orders’! Note bolded part. … Because being called out for spreading racist shit is just like being raped. Do better, woman. Or, you know, just fuck you and your not-even-attempted apology.

    Ferguson Elects 2 Blacks to City Council, but Rejects Activist Candidates

    In the first municipal election here since a black teenager was shot to death by a white police officer last year, voters elected two black candidates to the City Council on Tuesday, increasing the number of African-Americans on the governing body to three.

    But in a blow to the protesters who had pushed for sweeping changes to the city’s law enforcement and judicial policies after the shooting last August, voters rejected several candidates who had the direct backing of protest activists.

    The results would seem to suggest a smoother road for the current Council as it will not have to battle insurgents while it navigates a critical phase in addressing the fallout from the police killing last year and a scathing Department of Justice report last month. But they also raise questions of whether the new Council will come into conflict with the activists and demonstrators who pushed for major changes in the way the city does business.

    One of the black candidates elected on Tuesday, Ella M. Jones, a critic of the city government, will be the first black woman on the Council. The second victorious African-American candidate, Wesley Bell, had the backing of several current council members. The third winner, Brian P. Fletcher, is a former Ferguson mayor who started an “I Love Ferguson” campaign after the unrest sparked by the shooting. […]

    The next Council will have to decide critical matters of the city’s future. It would be responsible for hiring three of the most important positions in the city: a new city manager, police chief and municipal judge — three officials who resigned in the wake of the damning Justice Department report that documented widespread instances of abusive and discriminatory policing in Ferguson.

    In addition to changing law enforcement policies, the Council, in order to avoid a lawsuit against the city, will have to negotiate a settlement with the Justice Department over the abuses federal prosecutors said they found during a monthslong investigation. Many of the changes recommended by federal authorities could be very costly.

    “What is really at stake today is being able to maintain ourselves as a sovereign city,” said Lee Smith, one of the two men — both black — vying for the council seat in Ward 3, which includes the apartment complex where Mr. Brown was killed.

    Turnout for municipal elections here has historically been very poor, failing to top 12 percent in recent years. Last year, Mayor James W. Knowles III ran unopposed for re-election. Now, he is the subject of a recall effort launched by local activists.

    And may they succeed.
    More on the same: High voter turnout in Ferguson adds two black council members, for three total.
    Here’s the election results in one easy link: St. Louis County Election Results.

  182. rq says

    South Carolina police officer charged with murder after shooting man during traffic stop

    The decision to charge the officer, Michael Thomas Slager, came after graphic video footage emerged depicting Slager firing a volley of bullets into the back of Walter Scott, who was running away.

    Officers rarely face criminal charges after shooting people, a fact that has played into nationwide protests over the past year over how the police use deadly force. Yet this case took a swift, unusual turn after a video shot by a bystander provided authorities with a decisive narrative that differed from Slager’s account.

    “It wasn’t just based on the officers’ word anymore,” said Chris Stewart, an attorney for Scott’s family. “People were believing this story.”

    Authorities on Tuesday also pointed to the video as a turning point in this case and apologized to the family for the shooting. […]

    Summey and the city’s chief of police announced at a news conference that Slager, 33, would be charged and arrested. Slager, who has been fired, was arrested by the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, the agency investigating the shooting, and booked into the Charleston County jail shortly before 6 p.m. on Tuesday. He faces a possible death sentence or life in prison.

    “It’s been a tragic day for many,” Eddie Driggers, the police chief, said at the news conference. “A tragic day for many.”

    The shooting began with a routine traffic stop after 9:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. After Slager stopped a vehicle, he began chasing Walter Scott, 50, and fired his Taser, according to the incident report and city officials.

    Footage of the shooting, first obtained by the New York Times and the Post and Courier newspaper, showed Scott fleeing from Slager across a tree-lined patch of grass. Slager fires a series of shots at Scott, who appears to be unarmed, striking Scott “multiple times in the back,” according to an affidavit filed Tuesday evening.

    Slager told the dispatcher, “Shots fired and the subject is down, he took my Taser,” according to the portion of the report filled out by another officer who relayed what he heard.

    The video shows Slager picking up an item and placing it near Scott, though it is unclear if this is the Taser or something else. Police later said that Scott was hit with the Taser at least once, because part of it was still attached to him when other officers arrived on the scene. But city officials said that Scott was clearly too far away to use a Taser if he did have it. […]

    North Charleston, the third-largest city in the state, has a different demographic breakdown than the rest of South Carolina. Two-thirds of South Carolina residents are white, while North Charleston has more black residents (47 percent) than white residents (41 percent), according to the U.S. Census.

    But the city’s police force does not reflect that breakdown, as four out of five North Charleston officers last year were white, according to the Post and Courier. The city’s police department announced in February that it would obtain 115 body cameras for its officers after obtaining $275,000 in state funding.

    Authorities stressed that the episode in South Carolina was not indicative of the city’s entire police force of 342 remaining officers, instead calling this a singular “bad decision” made by one officer. […]

    Slager was initially represented by David Aylor, a local attorney, who in a statement provided to local media soon after the shooting said: “I believe once the community hears all the facts of this shooting, they’ll have a better understanding of the circumstances surrounding this investigation.”

    But on Tuesday, shortly before Slager’s arrest was announced, Aylor told The Post that he is no longer representing the officer.

    “I don’t have any involvement in that case moving forward,” he said. “No involvement.”

    This and that else at the link. But yeah. Wow. Like a poster-child case for systemic racism in the police force gone really wrong. Oh yes, and bad apples. But just a few. :P
    Note also that the article mentions he could (the officer, that is) be facing the death penalty – and he’s being charged with murder, not anything like voluntary manslaughter. I have a feeling though, that (a) these charges will be reduced by the time things go to trial (if they do) and (b) if the charges remain the same, he’ll get the lowest possible sentence. But that’s just me.

    There are good cops and we need them to step forward to lead. Here is another one. #WalterScott Too few, though. Way too few.

    The cop that killed Rekia Boyd was charged too. It’s been two years & that trial will start this month. Maybe.

    Brother #WalterScott was a veteran of the Coast Guard.

    #WalterScott

    In another case, No Civil Rights Charges in Police Shooting Death of Pace Football Player Danroy Henry

    Privacy Policy | More Newsletters
    AP/NBCNewYork
    Danroy Henry (inset left) was shot and killed by police in October of 2010.
    Updated at 10:09 PM EDT on Tuesday, Apr 7, 2015

    No federal civil rights charges will be brought in the 2010 shooting death of a college football player by a suburban New York police officer who says he shot him in his moving car when he failed to stop, a prosecutor said Tuesday.

    U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said evidence in the shooting of 20-year-old Danroy Henry Jr. in Thornwood failed to establish the “exacting standard of criminal intent” required for criminal charges.

    Prosecutors said in a release that a thorough review of evidence in the Oct. 18, 2010 shooting of the Pace University football player did not show that a law enforcement officer acted with deliberate and specific intent to break the law.

    “Neither accident, mistake, fear, negligence nor bad judgment is sufficient to establish a willful federal criminal civil rights violation,” the release said.

    More background on the case at the link.

  183. rq says

    Dash cam video to be released in Lavall Hall fatal shooting, with video.

    The attorney for the family of a mentally ill man who was shot and killed by police in Miami Gardens said the video of the shooting will soon be made public.

    US DOJ confirms investigation into fatal shooting of #WalterScott, involving FBI, DOJ Civil Rights Division, US Attorney’s Office #chsnews

    South Carolina police officer charged with murder in shooting of unarmed black man

    A South Carolina police officer was charged with murder in the shooting death of an unarmed black man after authorities obtained a video that showed him unleash a volley of gunfire while the victim ran away, officials said.

    North Charleston Police Officer Michael Thomas Slager was charged Tuesday in the death of Walter Lamer Scott, 50. The charges were filed less than an hour after the city’s mayor and police chief received a cellphone video that appears to show Scott fleeing as Slager fires at least eight shots in his direction.

    The shooting will probably be the latest turn in a national discussion on police use of force and race relations, following police killings of unarmed men last year in New York, Cleveland and Ferguson, Mo. Slager is white.

    “It’s not about race. It’s about power,” attorney L. Chris Stewart, who is representing the Scott family, said in a telephone interview with the Los Angeles Times. “That officer thought he could just shoot this man. He thought Mr. Scott was expendable.”

    If convicted, Slager could face the death penalty or life in prison.

    Scott’s family was quick to point out that without the video, Slager’s decision to open fire might have been considered justified.

    “I don’t want to see anyone shot down like my brother was shot down. I’ve seen the video. If there wasn’t a video, would we know the truth?” Anthony Scott, the victim’s brother, said during a news conference Tuesday night. “We do know the truth now.”

    One does wonder how the incident would be portrayed without the video. And it may be about power, not race, but the way the power dynamic is currently set up, it’s about race, too.
    This article is a little better, as the NY Times one does the usual whitewashing: Slager, honourable service in the Coast Guard, etc.; Scott, possessor of a record, etc. While they had both, actually, served in the Coast Guard. Funny how that gets downplayed in Scott’s instance.

    Woman Who also Filmed the Death of Eric Garner, Says NYPD Targeted and Beat Her

    Taisha Allen, who also filmed the death of Eric Garner, is speaking out and saying that her involvement with the case has put a target on her back with the NYPD. She says that officers used excessive force when arresting her two weeks ago.

    The woman gave photos of her injuries and bruises to Pix11 and the incident was also captured on video by another concerned citizen.

    “He grabs me, throws me over the gate and beats me with the baton on my back.” she told the station. “He drags me from the gate then took my arms and said stop resisting arrest.”

    The incident reportedly stems from Allen and her friend walking through a park that is not open to the public in the evening, something which she does not deny. Her friend was reportedly going to be issued a summons for the infraction, but was instead taken into custody when the officer found out there was an open warrant for his arrest.

    “The officer said, ‘you are that little girl from the Eric Garner case.’” Allen stated

    Allen attempted to intervene, which shifted the focus over to herself, and she also had a warrant. She was arrested again just days later for an alleged assault.

    The other man who filmed the death of Eric Garner, Ramsey Orta, had also made claims that he was targeted by the NYPD.

    Orta had been friends with Garner for several years, he referred to Garner as “the neighborhood dad.”

    A week after Garner’s death, Orta reported to Time that he was already receiving harassment from police for the filming of Garner’s death. He was arrested and indicted by a grand jury shortly after his arrest on charges of third-degree criminal weapon possession and criminal firearm possession. The police claim that Orta had slipped a handgun into his 17-year-old friend’s waistband near where Garner was killed.

    “I had nothing to do with this. I would be stupid to walk around with a gun after me being in the spotlight,” Rawstory reports Orta saying. “When they searched me, they didn’t find nothing on me, and the same cop that searched me, he told me clearly himself, that karma’s a b***h, what goes around comes around.”

    Are these cases coincidences, or does it seem like the NYPD wants to scare people away from filming their criminal acts?

    In other words, person who filmed the Scott shooting, be careful.

    Just talked to Officer Slager’s neighbors. They were shocked by the news. Said he was a “nice fellow” who kept to himself. #WalterScott Of course. He was a good person who would never do such a thing. :P

    #WalterScott was executed by an officer who feared for his life in North Charleston. He was shot at least 8 times in the back.

  184. rq says

    Can The Protest Movement Reform The Church?

    Yesterday, on Easter Sunday, protest leaders from Millenial Activists United held a very quiet and peaceful demonstration outside of a church in St. Louis. There was no chanting, just humming and signs being held. Signs that carried messages such as, “crucifixion = lynching” and “Mike Brown was the least of these.” Their goal was to remind Black Christians of the radical message of Christ and the implications his death and resurrection have for the today’s world. Some church members greeted the demonstrators with support and love. Others felt the demonstration was disrespectful. In the end, apparently, the church went as far as to call the police on the demonstrators. The demonstration was live tweeted using the hashtag #BlackChurch.

    This action reminded me of a piece I wrote not too long ago but never got to share. Like those demonstrators I too wonder why many congregants of Black churches have been silent on the issue of police brutality, especially considering the parrellels that can be drawn between the cross, the lynching tree, and police brutality as it exists today. It would seem that the revolutionary life that Jesus lived and the history of activism that exists within many Black church traditions would be enough to garner support across denominations. However, this has not been the case and many young people involved in the nationwide movement to change the culture of police and bring justice to the victims of state sponsored violence have felt abandoned by their local churches.

    The questions being raised and the pressure being put on the church can bring nothing but positive change. As more churches respond to the criticism from protesters the more likely it will become that the church will be an even better transformative force in society.
    […]

    The question that the Black church must answer today is, “What is its primary mission?” History tells us that the Black church has always been concerned with both saving souls and saving bodies. But when we lessen our own prophetic voices and idolize hegemonic theologies and preach/teach them as normative and universal, the church loses its identity and mission. The current social climate is ripe for the kind of prophetic and radical leadership that was integral to past social movements. Will Black Christians respond in a way, similar to their ancestors, that makes the church pertinent in the fight against state-sponsored violence toward their community? Or will they accept a version of Christianity that sustains an unjust status quo?

    I know we’re all about atheism here, but religion seems to be pretty central to a lot of protest (though not all of it), so I think it’s important also to see how people see the role of religion/church play out in their activism.

    North Charleston officer faces murder charge after video shows him shooting man in back. Nothing new to quote, just a different source.

    Dark Girls in Trauma: An Open Letter to Rashida Marie Strober

    Hi Sister,

    I pray you’re doing well in your 15 minutes of digital limelight. Like everyone, I read your Facebook post prominently featured on Bossip. I take serious issue with that barely-there “article.” With no context, nuance, or consideration, they allowed your violent language to stand alone.

    Oh Sis, don’t get me twisted or confused. I disagree with you wholeheartedly. Your language was more than offensive or hurtful … it was counterproductive, misdirected, and violent. Your words were little more than a socio-political impediment — words that not only cripple the fragile Movement for Black Liberation, but work in stark refutation to it.

    But your words come from a place of pain. I call that pain Dark Girl Trauma; the unique anguish that comes with being blessed with dark, unequivocal skin. The Trauma is a piercing result of constantly being told that our skin is ugly, unacceptable, and subordinate. From schoolyard taunts to a lack of cultural representation in media, fashion, business, and other suffocating institutions smeared in white supremacy, Dark Girl Trauma is the claustrophobic result of an omnipresent white supremacist system festering in racial and patriarchal inequity.

    I’ve suffered from it too. Being called “burnt” and “ugly” by classmates took its toll on my self esteem. In college, I thought the anti-darkgirl ignorance was behind me; as kids we say and do stupid things, but then we learn, grow, and come to accept people for who they are despite what they look like. I was proven wrong when a drunken white frat boy told me I was “beautiful, but black as hell.” My Trauma kicked in and had me cowering in anxiety while white onlookers stared in awkward disbelief. In that moment, in spite of myself, I reverted back to my childhood, when I wished for passable toffee-colored skin.

    I don’t know you, but I’m sure you’ve had experiences quite similar. And I’m sure these experiences made you the self-proclaimed “Dark Skin Activist” you claim to be.

    But Sister-to-Sister, Dark Girl-to-Dark Girl, you’re not breaking down barriers, you’re only reinforcing them. Your apparent hate for light skin Black women is a principle act in reaffirming white supremacy. Divide and conquer tactics is not uncommon nor unfamiliar; from the division of house and field slaves, white supremacy forced us to believe that the shade of our Black skin is a credible difference.

    But it isn’t — we’re all Black. And I implore you to celebrate the magical diversity of Blackness. Blackness is stronger than one shade. Blackness is a testament to our genetic strength; taking many adaptive forms, Blackness lives in multiple shades of skin as a mark of cultural survival and social endurance.

    I’m not gonna pretend that I didn’t once hold prejudice against light skin Black women at one point in time. In those moment, my Dark Girl Trauma made me weak and vulnerable to the woes of white supremacy. But when I divulged myself in racial justice work, and saw the passion of Blackness illuminating through skin both lighter and darker than mine, I compelled myself to denounce the mis-teachings of white supremacy, and unlearn its cruelty.

    I think you’d do better to do the same.

    The burden of hate is a heavy one to hold. Hate white supremacy as a network of socioeconomic institutions dead set on destroying Black communities. Hate racism and how it’s so embedded in abstract subconsciousness. Hate patriarchy and how it enables gender based violence, rape culture, and the mongrelization of Black bodies with relative ease.

    But never hate Black people.

    Your anger is misdirected. Your horizontal hostility is a time-wasting distraction. But I know where it comes from. I hear you. I see you. And I love you enough to tell you that your Dark Girl Trauma is valid, but that actions you take in an attempt to heal it, are wrong.

    In Black Love,

    Arielle

    Inspired by the story within: Eff Yo Ethnicity!!! “Dark Skinned Activist” Refuses To Support Kendrick Lamar’s Music Because His Fianceé Is Too Light???

    While we expected nothing but well-wishes and happiness over the news that Kendrick Lamar is planning to wed his high school sweetheart Whitney Alford, it seems everyone can’t be happy. And why? Because she’s just not “black enough” apparently.

    Rashida Marie Strober, a self-professed “Dark Skinned Activist” who runs the “Dark Skin Is Beautiful” Campaign posted this on her Facebook page on Friday, stirring up a gang of controversy as many people found her message to be hateful and misguided.

    See link for picture and quote.
    It’s like some people just can’t win.

    For fun: William Gottlieb’s Beautiful Vintage Photographs of Jazz Legends, from Billie Holiday to Louis Armstrong

    In the 1930s, a young reporter by the name of William Gottlieb set out to cover the boom of the jazz scene for the Washington Post, only to find the paper didn’t care to dispatch an official staff photographer. So Gottlieb, a self-taught photographer armed with his Speed Graphic and an ample supply of flashbulbs, took it upon himself to photograph the subjects of his interviews. Between 1938 and 1948, he documented the jazz scene in New York City and Washington, D.C., and created what eventually became some of history’s most iconic portraits of jazz greats. The Golden Age of Jazz gathers 219 of those, including Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan (who would have been 88 today), Billie Holiday, and Thelonious Monk, along with original text from the photographer contextualizing the images and their subjects.

    On February 16, 2010, Gottlieb’s photographs entered the public domain and are now available online, courtesy of The Library of Congress, who also have rare footage of Gottlieb speaking about his photos.

    Cue awesome photos.

    Leftover: Hearing a lot that many voters haven’t voted in a local election in yrs & are out today b/c of the past 7mos of protests #FergusonElections Fruits of labour and all that.

  185. rq says

    Black Woman Activist Faces Charges of ‘Lynching’ for Protest Activities

    Maile Hampton, the African American activist who was arrested for “lynching” after trying to pull a fellow protester away from police during a January rally against law enforcement brutality in Sacramento, has a large black butterfly tattooed across her neck.

    Below it, scrawling script reads: “Have faith in me.”

    It means: “Have faith that I am here to change the world,” said the 20-year-old with a youthful mix of passion and innocence. She got it about a year ago, around the same time she began to be politically active, she said.
    That optimism will be tested when Hampton heads into court on 9 April, facing a charge that carries the possibility of four years in prison and a lifetime of being labeled a felon.

    Video of the rally shows police tussling with a protester in the street while activists on the sidewalk yell: “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?”

    A woman who appears to be Hampton enters the street, carrying a bullhorn. She grabs the handle of a sign held by the protester being detained by police and attempts to pull it away from an officer who is also holding it. She is then pushed away by other officers.

    Hampton’s arrest – and sensational-sounding charge – made headlines. California’s lynching law was put on the books in 1933, to prevent mobs from forcibly taking people from police custody for vigilante justice.

    But the statute has long been used against protesters as well, by police if not prosecutors. In 1999, anti-fur protesters in San Francisco who blocked access to a Neiman Marcus store in Union Square were charged under the lynching law. Prosecutors declined to take the case to court. […]

    Shortly after Hampton’s arrest, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson asked state legislators to take the term out of the penal code, saying via Twitter on 25 February that the “word ‘lynching’ has a long and painful history in our nation. It’s time to remove its use in CA Law”.

    Perhaps that is why the use of the lynching law against a black woman struck many as notable. But some activists say the felony count itself is indicative of a change in attitude of police in the California state capital.

    “I have no doubt whatsoever that the Sacramento police department’s response has changed as the police brutality protests began late last year,” said Cres Vellucci of the Sacramento chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), an organization whose members attend rallies as independent observers, to monitor police response.

    “It’s very apparent, at least to NLG observers like me, that officers want the protests to stop, and if people have to be abused, or arrested or otherwise mistreated, that will happen.” […]

    Sacramento police spokesperson Traci Trapani said she “didn’t think” lynching was a common charge in a city where rallies happen on an almost weekly basis, but she was unable to provide numbers. She added that most protests were a “peaceful process” in which officers were “accommodating” of protesters.

    While video of the 18 January protest that led to Hampton’s arrest makes it clear that she did have an individual interaction with law enforcement officers, there are questions about how the resulting arrest and charges are moving through the courts.

    “Certainly there did not appear to be any conduct that rose to a felony level,” said Hampton’s pro bono lawyer, Linda Parisi, who has advised her client not to speak about the events surrounding the arrest itself. “It makes you say: ‘Really, you’ve charged this young woman with a felony charge of lynching? Is that right? Is that the message we want to send?’”
    Other arrests but different outcomes

    Parisi said two other protesters were arrested for lynching that day, with a different outcome from Hampton’s.

    Emily Cinder, a 19-year-old Caucasian woman, and her fiancé, Strong Walls, a 21-year-old mixed-race man who says he was booked into jail as Caucasian, faced the same charge.

    This Video Of Kanye West Rapping With His Mom Will Break Your Heart. Then again, it might not break your heart.

    Kanye West’s late mother, Donda, was and still is an irreplaceably important figure in his life. He named his creative agency after her, and his 2008 LP 808s and Heartbreaks, closed out with “Coldest Winter,” a sorta-cover of Tears for Fears’ “Memories Fade” in which ‘Ye heartbreakingly said a final goodbye to his mother with the words Goodbye my friend, I will never love again; his recent single “Only One” is meant to represent his mother singing through him to his daughter North. During one of the NYC stops of the Glow in the Dark tour, he blasted Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin” after performing “Hey Mama” and turned the house lights up in Madison Square Garden, sitting on the edge of the stage with his head in his hands, in total silence. It was and still is one of the most profoundly sad moments I’ve ever experienced at a concert.

    So this video of ‘Ye rapping along with his mom in a kitchen (taken from a MTV special detailing the making of Late Registration) is, for obvious reasons, similarly heartbreaking—but there’s joy to be found in it, too, to see just how much he clearly treasured his mother in his life. Watch it above; in a literal, emotional sense, it is beautiful.

    Derrick Wheat, Laurese Glover and Eugene Johnson spent ages 17-37 in prison for a crime they did not commit. Story: Three black men, convicted as teens, exonerated in Ohio after serving 20 years in prison

    In 1995, three young men, just high school students at the time—Laurese Glover, then 17, Eugene Johnson, then 18, and Derrick Wheatt, then 17—were railroaded by the Cleveland police and prosecutors office for a murder they didn’t commit. Maintaining their innocence, they served the next 20 long years in prison, but were just released after years of legal support from the Ohio Innocence Project.

    On multiple occasions both Glover and Wheatt were offered a deal to serve no jail time whatsoever if they testified against Eugene Johnson, but for 20 years they refused to do so, maintaining that all three of them were completely innocent. […]

    While it’s a beautiful that the these three brothers have been released, they’ve had 20 of their most important years on earth stolen from them. Will any police or prosecutors be held liable for this travesty? Will anything change that will prevent something like this from happening so easily again?

    Background and video of their exoneration at the link.

    S.C. police officer charged in fatal shooting. Another article.

    Michael Slager: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know, like: he shot Scott in the back three times; says he shot Scott because he felt threatened; he may have planted his taser near Scott; has been denied bond and may face death penalty; and has served on the Coast Guard, police officer for five years.

  186. rq says

    I should sleep now. #WalterScott Attached text reads:

    The thing that’s so disgusting about the murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sean Bell, etc. (a very long list) is that it’s not like we’re trying to figure out who killed them. We know perfectly well. We’re just trying to figure out if that black kid deserved to die. Their humanity is put on trial, like being a person wasn’t enough. Black people literally have to prove that we’re worthy of living.

    Perks of being white:
    NY times on the shooter vs NY times on the victim #WalterScott     See attached.

    Video shows S.C. cop fatally shooting black man in back. What’s nice here? They show Scott in his Coast Guard uniform, and then show Slager’s mugshot-type photo first, with a pic of him posing in uniform way down near the bottom (and that’s as a clikbait for another article). Kinda nice to see Scott portrayed so well (in photos).

    Just learned that Officer Michael Slager had multiple complaints of police brutality in North Charleston before he murdered #WalterScott SURPRISE! Not.

    White South Carolina policeman charged with murdering black man. Reuters is on it. They had the word ‘allegedly’ in that headline and people were (rightfully) upset over that.

  187. rq says

    Officer charged with murder after shooting man in back: What we know – what we know, what we don’t know!

    The video is so damning that authorities promptly charged a South Carolina officer with murder.

    In the footage, an African-American man, apparently unarmed, is seen running away from the officer. He gets several yards away before the officer aims his gun toward his back.

    Eight shots later, the man falls to the ground. By that point, he appears to be at least 25 feet from the officer.

    Now, the FBI is investigating why North Charleston police Officer Michael Slager shot and killed 50-year-old Walter Scott as he was running away — and whether Slager’s claim of self-defense is believable.

    If convicted of murder, the officer could face life in prison — or death.

    Here’s what we know about the case so far:

    The origin

    What we know: Slager pulled Scott over on Saturday morning for a broken tail light, authorities said.

    Somehow, that traffic stop led to both men outside, as seen on a witness’ video.

    “There are witnesses, and the officer said he did run from the vehicle initially,” Scott family attorney Chris Stewart said.

    The beginning of the video shows two men standing close to each other. Scott runs away, and Slager fires eight shots, striking him in the back.

    What we don’t know: We don’t know what words were exchanged or what type of confrontation may have occurred before Scott ran away.

    And it’s unclear why Scott ran. Regardless, the attorney said, “running from an officer doesn’t result in the death penalty.”

    The stun gun

    What we know: Slager said he used his Taser stun gun and that Scott took his Taser, according to police reports.

    “Shots fired and the subject is down,” Slager said, according to reports. “He took my Taser.”

    What we don’t know: Whether Scott actually took the officer’s stun gun, or whether it was later placed closer to Scott’s body.

    The video shows a dark object fall to the ground behind the officer when Scott starts to run away, but it’s not clear whether the object was a Taser.

    Later in the video, as the officer is standing next to Scott’s body, he picks up a dark object from the ground. But the footage does not show how the object got next to Scott’s body.

    The response

    What we know: Immediately after Scott was shot, someone yells, “Put your hands behind your back!”

    Scott, now motionless and face-down on the ground, is handcuffed.

    What we don’t know: Why, according to the footage, Slager and another officer who arrived didn’t give first aid to Scott while waiting for an ambulance to arrive.

    The reaction

    What we know: Even the mayor of North Charleston lambasted the killing.

    “I can tell you that as the result of that video and the bad decision made by our officer, he will be charged with murder,” North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey told reporters Tuesday.

    “When you’re wrong, you’re wrong. And if you make a bad decision — don’t care if you’re behind the shield or just a citizen on the street — you have to live by that decision.”

    U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina called the shooting “absolutely unnecessary and avoidable.”

    What we don’t know: How Slager plans to defend his actions. It’s also unclear who will represent him in court.

    According to CNN affiliate WCIV, Slager initially said through his attorney, David Aylor, that he followed the appropriate policies and procedures.

    But Aylor later told CNN that he no longer represents the officer. It’s not unclear whether Slager has found a new attorney.

    More at the link.

    The front page of today’s @postcourier, which has done outstanding #WalterScott coverage

    Someone also compared the number of deaths of black people at the hands of police in the last year to the number of deaths of black people in 9/11 – and while the first number is the larger, it is also an indication of how few black people were present at the WTC (in whatever capacity) on that fateful day. So.

    Ferguson voters elect two black candidates to city council – just one more on the election results!

    Everything The Police Said About Walter Scott’s Death Before A Video Showed What Really Happened. Oh yes, let’s, let’s hear the police side!

    Between the time when he shot and killed Scott early Saturday morning and when charges were filed, Slager — using the both the police department and his attorney — was able to provide his “version” of the events. He appeared well on his way to avoiding charges and pinning the blame on Scott.

    Then a video, shot by an anonymous bystander, revealed exactly what happened.

    On Saturday the police released a statement alleging that Scott had attempted to gain control of a Taser from Slager and that he was shot in a struggle over the weapon. The Post And Courier reported the initial story:

    Police in a matter of hours declared the occurrence at the corner of Remount and Craig roads a traffic stop gone wrong, alleging the dead man fought with an officer over his Taser before deadly force was employed.

    …

    A statement released by North Charleston police spokesman Spencer Pryor said a man ran on foot from the traffic stop and an officer deployed his department-issued Taser in an attempt to stop him.
    That did not work, police said, and an altercation ensued as the men struggled over the device. Police allege that during the struggle the man gained control of the Taser and attempted to use it against the officer.

    The officer then resorted to his service weapon and shot him, police alleged.

    The story clearly came from Slager but he was able to use the authoritative voice of the police department to bolster his narrative. Meanwhile, Scott could only be defended by friends who did not witness the incident. “Walter was a nice, good, honest person… He was a grown man working hard to take care of his family,” said Samuel Scott, the victim’s cousin. […]

    On Monday, Slager sought to reinforce his narrative, this time releasing a statement through his attorney. From The Post And Courier:

    Slager thinks he properly followed all procedures and policies before resorting to deadly force, lawyer David Aylor said in a statement.

    …

    “When confronted, Officer Slager reached for his Taser — as trained by the department — and then a struggle ensued,” Aylor said. “The driver tried to overpower Officer Slager in an effort to take his Taser.”

    Seconds later, the report added, he radioed that the suspect wrested control of the device. Even with the Taser’s prongs deployed, the device can still be used as a stun gun to temporarily incapacitate someone.

    Slager “felt threatened and reached for his department-issued firearm and fired his weapon,” his attorney added.

    If the video had not surfaced, that’s where the story might have ended. In nearly all cases where an officer fires a weapon, that is the end of the story. A study by The State found “[p]olice in South Carolina have fired their weapons at 209 suspects in the past five years” but none were convicted. “We ruled all the shootings were justified – and we looked at dozens and dozens of them,” one former prosecutor told The State.

    In this case, the video revealed a very different scenario. Scott, who was unarmed and fleeing, was shot in the back by Slager from a distance of at least 15 feet. After Scott was fatally shot, the video appears to capture Slager planting an object next to Scott.

  188. rq says

    Fantasy’s Othering Fetish, Part 1 – some light reading via Giliell.

    Diversity in fantasy has been thrust into the spotlight due to author George RR Martin’s popular A Song of Ice and Fire saga, which has been adapted as the mega-hit HBO Game of Thrones. Just last July on GRRM’s blog a commenter who described herself as “an african-american female” and “a devoted fan of GoT,” noted that “the lack of diversity in both the show and books” had become “troubling.” While there were a few PoC sprinkled here and there, she noticed none of them held prominent roles. “Must all black people in the series be servants, guards, or charlatans?” she asked. Before that, a commenter who self-described as an “Asian fan” wanted to know why there were no Asians in GRRM’s world. It “would be awesome,” the fan said, “to meet a character who would inspire Asians as much as Daenerys or Jon Snow.”

    Known for his interaction with his fan base, GRRM actually gave responses to both queries–though they left more frustration than resolution. In one reply he began with what appeared to be a history lesson: “Westeros around 300 AC is nowhere near as diverse as 21st century America, of course….” In another he seemed to give a geography lesson: “Well, Westeros is the fantasy analogue of the British Isles in its world, so it is a long long way from the Asia analogue. There weren’t a lot of Asians in Yorkish England either.”

    Of course I’ve been hearing these same excuses since I was a kid. There are no black people in fantasy lands of ladies, horse lords and knights–because there were no black people there. Only there are two really convenient replies. (1) Well, there were no dragons, hobbits or elves either. You made that sh*t up. That’s what fantasy is you know–sh*t we make up. So if you can toss in a talking dragon, you can toss in PoC. Easy peasy. And (2), what has become an increasingly stronger reply, “you don’t know history or geography as well as you think you do.” Turns out, none of these Euro-spaces in our reality were ever racially monolithic. The fantastic site People of Color in European Art History has been destroying this hallowed myth one painting and statue at a time. Oh, and George, that African noblewoman found in Roman-era York might just beg to differ on just who was and was not in that space.

    Still, it’s actually incorrect to say that popular literary fantasy is all lily-white. On the contrary, some of them feature a great deal of diversity. But… as the saying goes, be careful what you wish for. From black-veiled Haradrim to the Ever Victorious Seanchan to the slavers of Yunkai, the genre has had a long love affair with non-whites—cast often in the role of exotic and dangerous “others.” […]

    Some of these ideas came from travelogues and the writings of soldiers; others came directly from artists and writers who journeyed to capture their own imagery. Many of these works operated as distinct imperial propaganda, meant to display the enlightened benevolence of Western conquerors in contrast to the despotic, barbaric, lawless, decaying regimes of the lands they now colonized. Others fulfilled romantic notions of an exoticized, often sexualized, non-Western world filled with slave markets, nude harems and noble warrior savages–more indicative of a European gaze than anything approaching reality. As Said noted, Orientalism in the end was a study of the West alone (as it was a creation of the West) and tells us little of the East as it actually existed.

    Said’s thesis has been argued and counter-argued for decades, with some criticizing his views of Western explorations of the East as overly simplistic. Detractors claim that some of the research done by Westerners was well-meaning and not part of any imperial project–though how you discern that exactly (as if one negates the other) remains unexplained. At any rate, I don’t intend to get into that now. Certainly any theoretical model remains open to debate, and one as expansive as Said’s provokes diverse opinions. However, what Said introduced me to was an answer for what had so long bothered me in the fantasy genre–the act of “othering” of non-Western (more aptly put, non-white) peoples. I’d later explore this notion of the “other” and alterity through numerous other thinkers, part of postcolonial critical theory since the mid 20th century.

    When we speak of this idea of “othering,” we’re not talking about something a few bad people did. There wasn’t one nefarious guy who created it and set it into being. It existed at the very heart of Empire and the colonial project; it became the founding ethos of entire academic disciplines and social science, pervading everything from research methodologies to literature to popular art. It is institutionalized and, in some ways, inescapable. It can also be quite conflicting, where even well-meaning explorers or researchers in the West may still end up creating “othering” memes in their attempts to study non-Western people; simultaneously, those who are “studied” can themselves institutionalize some of these same “othering” notions about themselves. For instance, how does one fully evaluate Orientalist art, which at once introduces us to startling and informative picturesque settings of the non-Western world–yet is in the end a type of fabrication borne of the Western gaze? No simple answers.

    Link to an interesting blog within.

    Okorafor, Nnedi – happy birthday!

    Reflecting a racial shift, 78 counties turned majority-minority since 2000

    In the United States as a whole, the white share of the population is declining as Hispanic, Asian and black populations grow. But the shift to a more diverse nation is happening more quickly in some places than in others.

    From 2000 to 2013, 78 counties in 19 states, from California to Kansas to North Carolina, flipped from majority white to counties where no single racial or ethnic group is a majority, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data. (Our analysis includes only counties with a minimum population of 10,000 in 2013.)

    Overall, 266 of these 2,440 counties are less than half white. However, many are in urban areas that together account for about one-third (31%) of the nation’s population, despite making up just 11% of U.S. counties with a minimum population of 10,000. These counties are concentrated in California, the South and the East Coast, bypassing much of the country’s middle section.

    In 19 of the 25 biggest U.S. counties by population, whites make up less than half of the population. Of these, six that were majority white in 2000 are no longer so: San Diego, Orange, Riverside and Sacramento counties (all in California), plus Clark County, Nev., and Broward County, Fla. In addition, whites could soon become the minority in two more counties – Tarrant in Texas (Fort Worth) and Wayne in Michigan (Detroit), both of which are now 50% white.

    More at the link, including graphs.

    “@deray: I once asked an elder, “How do we keep the movement alive?” to which the elder replied, “The police will do it for you.””

    <a href="

  189. Saad says

    Slager thinks he properly followed all procedures and policies before resorting to deadly force, lawyer David Aylor said in a statement.

    “When confronted, Officer Slager reached for his Taser — as trained by the department — and then a struggle ensued,” Aylor said. “The driver tried to overpower Officer Slager in an effort to take his Taser.”

    Seconds later, the report added, he radioed that the suspect wrested control of the device. Even with the Taser’s prongs deployed, the device can still be used as a stun gun to temporarily incapacitate someone.

    Slager “felt threatened and reached for his department-issued firearm and fired his weapon,” his attorney added.

    That is unbelievable. No shame, no sense of guilt. It’s like he just went hunting or something.

  190. rq says

    Saad
    If you look at the video (the one link above shows the newspaper front page, it has a series of stills) and the cop is pulling his gun out as Scott is running away. There’s not hesitation in the movements, no pause for thought – he just goes for the gun. :/ Unclear whether the Taser was ever attempted for real. :(

  192. rq says

    PZ’s Christ, not again and The Charleston shooting: the prequel.

    Walter Scott shooting: Police officer faces murder charge in death of black man (CBC);
    White officer charged with murder in shooting death of black man (Toronto Star);
    Šokējoša slepkavība: ASV policists neapbruņota tumšādaina vīrieša mugurā raida astoņus šāvienus (local internet news). I read the comments on that last one.
    Shouldn’t’ve. The ones that aren’t openly racist are closedly so (“Now the n*gg*rs will have reason to riot! I hope that cop’s family gets protection, else they’re all going to die, it’ll be a bloodbath! Etc.”). It’s disturbing. (a) Black people haven’t shown any inclination to riot and cause bloodbaths all over the US, even though (b) I would say they have every right to be a lot more aggressive than they are.
    Fucking people are stupid.

  193. rq says

    So this is me, too: Jon Hale “I might be White and privileged but all lives matter and I can’t tolerate injustice”#WalterScott

    MN student accepted by all 8 Ivy League schools – second I’ve heard of within a couple of weeks, and it is amazing, also a person of colour – and a woman!

    Mounds Park Academy (MPA) senior Munira Khalif has a tough but awesome decision ahead, after being accepted to all eight Ivy League schools. She is also wanted by Stanford, Georgetown and the University of Minnesota (U of M).

    “I was very surprised. The best part for me was being able to call family members on the phone and to hear their excitement,” said Khalilf. “This was truly a blessing from God. To me this news is reflective of the support and encouragement of my family, my school and my community.”

    Mounds Park Academy says that in addition to a stellar academic record and a sky-high ACT score, Munira is a state speech champion and founder of MPA’s Social Consciousness Club. She is a tireless advocate to make education accessible for East African Youth, especially girls.

    “Munira has thrived in MPA’s rigorous educational environment, where we challenge students to be intellectually curious and confident communicators,” said Randy Comfort, MPA’s upper school director. “She already is making a difference in communities across the globe, and I know she is ready to embrace the challenges that arise in our constantly changing world.”

    Khalif has not yet made a final college choice, and says she will visit a few more campuses before making a final decision May 1. She plans to major in political science and continue working to make a positive impact on the world through public service.

    “I am humbled to even have the opportunity to choose amongst these schools because they are all incredible places to learn and grow,” said Khalif.

    Maybe she’ll end up at University of Minnesota. ;)

    Former Cardinal Curt Ford talks about being attacked at gas station, with video.

    Hateful and degrading, that’s how former St. Louis Cardinal Player Curt Ford describes what happened to him last month at this gas station in Fenton.

    “I get out of my car I notice he gets out looking at me screaming all this racial stuff…

    St. Louis County Police arrested 37-year-old James Street. He is charged with one count of 3rd degree assault motivated by discrimination. The incident has now been deemed a hate crime.

    “It really cuts like a knife being belittled like that.”

    Police say Ford did all he could to avoid the attack, A statement backed up by surveillance video at the Petro Mart and several witnesses.

    The Jackson, Mississippi native says St. Louis has been good to him. He made his major league debut with the Cardinals in 1985.

    The father of two and grandfather of six has even considered moving from St. Louis; however he is making the most of his time in the Gateway to the West, using his experience to help others.

    Every Black person interested in liberation work should read Negroes With Guns by Robert F. Williams.

    This is Officer Slager’s original lawyer, who quit upon seeing the video. #WalterScott The statement: Aylor No Longer Represents North Charleston Police Officer

    Attorney David Aylor Issues Statement:
    Aylor No Longer Represents North Charleston Police Officer

    Charleston, South Carolina – April 7, 2015 – Attorney David Aylor today issued the following statement regarding North Charleston Police Officer Michael Slager, the police officer involved with Saturday’s shooting.

    “Today, I withdrew my representation of Michael Slager. This is a terrible tragedy that has impacted our community.”

    Short?

    Here’s A News Report We’d Be Reading If Walter Scott’s Killing Wasn’t On Video

    A North Charleston police officer was forced to use his service weapon Saturday during a scuffle with a suspect who tried to overpower him and seize the officer’s Taser, authorities said.

    The man, who has a history of violence and a long arrest record, died on the scene as a result of the encounter, despite officers performing CPR and delivering first aid, according to police reports.

    The shooting was the 11th this year by a South Carolina police officer. The State Law Enforcement Division has begun an investigation into the incident.

    Police identified the officer involved as Patrolman 1st Class Michael Thomas Slager and the suspect as Walter Lamar Scott, 50, of Meadowlawn Drive in West Ashley. Slager, 33, served honorably in the military before joining the North Charleston Police Department more than five years ago. He has never been disciplined during his time on the force, his attorney said.

    The incident occurred behind a pawn shop on Craig Street and Remount Road. Slager initially pulled Scott over for a broken taillight. During the stop, police and witnesses say Scott fled the vehicle on foot. When Slager caught up with him a short distance from the street, Scott reportedly attempted to overpower Slager. Police say that during the struggle, the man gained control of the Taser and attempted to use it against the officer.

    It was during that scuffle that the officer fired his service weapon, fatally wounding Scott.

    “Shots fired, and the subject is down. He took my Taser,” Slager radioed immediately following the shooting.

    Slager “felt threatened and reached for his department-issued firearm and fired his weapon,” his attorney said in a statement on Sunday. “I believe once the community hears all the facts of this shooting, they’ll have a better understanding of the circumstances surrounding this investigation.”

    Slager’s attorney maintained that the officer believed he properly followed all procedures and policies before resorting to deadly force.

    “This is part of the job that no one likes and wishes would never happen,” Police Chief Eddie Driggers said, according to a release. “This type of situation is unfortunate and difficult for everyone. We are confident that SLED will conduct a complete and thorough investigation into the incident and provide their findings to all concerned.”

    A previous accusation that Slager assaulted a burglary victim was found to be without merit. In that case, it was determined that the officer had been within his rights to use force to defend himself after a man tried to overpower him.

    Scott had a lengthy rap sheet extending back to at least 1987, when he was arrested on a charge of assault and battery. In 1991, he was convicted of possession of a bludgeon. He also had a history of arrests related to contempt of court charges for failing to pay child support, and in 2008 was convicted of driving under suspension and having an open alcohol container in his car.

    Samuel Scott, a 55-year-old man who identified himself as Scott’s cousin, said he was shocked by the news.

    “He wasn’t no criminal. He wasn’t young and in the streets. He was a grown man working hard to take care of his family,” he told the Charleston Post and Courier of his cousin. “He’s not a violent guy — never seen him argue with anybody. I just can’t see it.”

    Saturday’s encounter bears similarities to the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which kicked off a national conversation about the use of force by police. Authorities there ultimately determined that Brown had attempted to overpower Officer Darren Wilson and run before turning back and charging the officer, who was forced to deploy his service weapon in the encounter.

    Slager was placed on administrative duty, pending the outcome of the state investigation.

    This article relies entirely on local news reports, which sourced their version of events to information from police, the attorney for the officer, “witnesses” and police statements. Many of those claims turned out to be lies. Slager has been charged with murder. Whenever possible, this article pulls verbatim from local news reports.

  194. Pteryxx says

    via The Vicar in the Christ, not again thread. Ramsey Orta, who filmed the police killing Eric Garner and was promptly jailed on suspicious charges (see rq’s #183 on this page) feared for his life in custody:

    Free Thought Project: Man Imprisoned After Filming Eric Garner’s Death, Refusing to Eat, Rat Poison Found in Jail Food

    While in prison, Orta has taken seemingly drastic measures to ensure that he is not killed by the gang he witnessed murder Eric Garner. Orta has been refusing to eat, as he fears that guards may poison him because he is a high-profile opponent of police brutality. Sadly, Orta’s fears were well-founded. While he has been behind bars at Rikers, dozens of other inmates have reported traces of rat poison in their food, a claim that was actually recently admitted by prison officials.

    It was reported by the New York Post last month that 19 different inmates were denied medical testing after bluish green pellets were found in their food. The prison admitted that these pellets were rat poison, but failed to give the inmates medical attention, and failed to offer any kind of explanation as to why the prison’s food was tainted with rat poison.

    Orta has been refusing to eat, so he has not ingested any of the food laced with rat poison and is not one of the 19 inmates in question. However, his health is deteriorating and he is becoming malnourished due to the lack of food.

    According to Twitter his family’s fundraiser raised enough for his bail ($16,000) as of yesterday. I haven’t found confirmation that he’s actually been released yet. Orta’s court case is set for May 28.

  195. Pteryxx says

    There’s the follow-up on Orta, published this morning: The Free Thought Project

    Ramsey’s case had sadly disappeared from the media after his initial arrest, and the grave conditions of his health and safety were entirely unknown to the public. At first, Ramsey’s bail was set at $100,000, but luckily in the past month his lawyers were able to get that number knocked down to $16,000 cash.

    When looking into Ramsey’s ordeal, I noticed that there was a fundraiser to help bail him out of jail, but the campaign had only raised $4,000 out of the needed $16,000. I knew that Ramsey had enough supporters to make this goal in no time, but, unfortunately, most of them were unaware of his dire conditions. I immediately contacted Danette Chavis, Nancy Lockhart, and Ramsey’s aunt Lisa and began putting together an article about the case.

    The next day, our article was published and our readers quickly began to share the story, and contribute to his fund if they had the means to do so. Amazingly, within just over 12 hours, supporters were able to meet his goal, which now allows his family and his lawyers to begin the process of getting him released. Ramsey’s lawyers have advised his aunt that it will now take roughly ten days to get him out of jail. A few days are required to transfer the money from the gofundme account, and the courts need to file the paperwork, which often takes longer than necessary. However, Ramsey is in better spirits now, knowing that he will be coming home soon and that he has many people on the outside who care. Now he will be able to face his charges, and the impending legal battle from the safety of his home.

  196. Saad says

    If you look at the video (the one link above shows the newspaper front page, it has a series of stills) and the cop is pulling his gun out as Scott is running away. There’s not hesitation in the movements, no pause for thought – he just goes for the gun. :/ Unclear whether the Taser was ever attempted for real. :(

    And the fact that the police immediately made up their story to release paints quite a chilling picture. I was talking about this with someone and they said, “Yeah but this time the officer’s being charged”. Well, that is SOLELY because of the indisputable video evidence, i.e. a civilian is having to do it. If that person hadn’t made this video, we know exactly what would be happening to the office right now: a paid vacation.

  197. Pteryxx says

    While remembering that Walter Scott, shot and killed by a Coast Guard veteran, was also a Coast Guard veteran himself, here’s some history on the integration of the Coast Guard. Charleston has a big Coast Guard presence and a relatively large population has served.

    Coast Guard News (2007): Looking Back: A Veteran Remembers Coast Guard Desegregation

    “I remember enlisting in 1942 in Harlem, N.Y., and after I took my oath, I was sent home,” said retired Master Chief Boatswain’s Mate Robert Hammond, 84, of Piscataway, N.J. He was one of the original African Americans stationed aboard the U.S.S. Sea Cloud, a vessel that was once used in a now little-known racial experiment.

    “This is war time, why are they sending me home?” he asked himself then. Come to find out, blacks did not report to the same boot camp whites did, so the Coast Guard had to wait until a collective number of blacks were signed in order to begin training.

    “It hit me when the bus pulled up to the training center in Manhattan Beach, N.Y., why I was sent home initially; they needed enough blacks to field a company” he said. “My bus stopped at a barracks with only black men while all the buildings next to it had white men training; I will never forget it, we were called company 24″.

    […]

    However, a young officer by the name of Carlton Skinner helped pioneer racial equality for blacks in the Coast Guard as the executive officer of the original Coast Guard Cutter Northland. He first questioned the troubled racial environment of the Coast Guard when a black crewman serving as a steward saved the ship during a patrol when an engine had died and rendered the ship useless at sea.

    While none of the white mechanics could figure out how to repair the engine, a black man who was cracking eggs and cleaning heads saved the patrol. The gentleman eventually approached Skinner asking to be advanced to machinist’s mate.

    Having considered the request and aware of the man’s reputation as a skilled and motivated mechanic, he submitted a recommendation for advancement. Skinner did not, however, anticipate the response he was to receive: the crewman was black, and blacks were only permitted to be steward’s mates.

    The motivated Skinner petitioned Coast Guard brass. He was worried for several reasons. According to historical documents located in Coast Guard archives, one was that he was fearful that the safety of the country was being compromised by having capable yet underutilized sailors stuck doing menial busy work ashore, when they were really needed underway.

    At the time, when such radical thinking was unusual, Coast Guard Commandant Russell Waesche gave Skinner the reins on a never-before tried social experiment within the U.S. sea services-Desegregation!

    In its massive arsenal of ships, the Navy owned a small little-used, German-built yacht, which had been converted into a weather patrol ship named the U.S.S. Sea Cloud in 1942. With little use for the vessel, the Navy leased the ship for one dollar to the Coast Guard. Skinner would command this ship as part of the experiment.

    The US military’s entry on the Sea Cloud is here and Skinner’s report in his own words is here:

    The proposal had to be and was based solely on military and naval effectiveness. This was because, first, that was the origin of the idea; second, because I was sure that it was the only legitimate basis for considering a plan for racial integration of the armed forces during wartime. Everyone forgets to a greater or lesser extent the progress that has been made socially in this country in the area of race relations in the years since World War II. The big civil rights programs started with President Truman. I did not consciously think of the program as a “civil rights” program. It was to me a program for increased military effectiveness. It will be remembered that President Franklin Roosevelt, basically a liberal on social issues, said during the war that Dr. New Deal has been replaced by Dr. Win The War.

    To bring about the use of Negroes in seagoing units in their best skills required a change in the rule of the Coast Guard and Navy that Negroes would not be accepted for or assigned to general ratings. It could be said that they had to be emancipated from the officer’s servant status. But, it was equally clear to me that this could not be done merely by changing the rule. The rule was encrusted with tradition. It was based on long experience that, in general, Negroes joining the Coast Guard or Navy did not have mechanical or other skills. This was probably because of: 1) the previous educational opportunities, 2) the generally rural southern society from which Negro enlistees came, and the experience of the Army with all Negro units in World War I. These all-Negro units were labor battalions, used in the most tedious and laborious work and with white officers, most of whom had and exhibited racial prejudice.

    I concluded that there had to be a demonstration that Negroes could serve in general ratings effectively. I quickly rejected the idea of an all-Negro unit. First, it was a violation of the proven method of training sailors of putting them on board ship and improving on their boot camp basic skills at sea. Sailors learn from other sailors. The Chief Boatswain’s Mate with 25 years of service, two thirds of them at sea, is the best instructor. He can be tough, but the sailor learns from this toughness how to maneuver a small boat alongside, how to paint, how to clean, how to steer, etc. For Negroes to be well qualified, they had to go to sea and go to sea with qualified enlisted men as petty officers and fellow seamen. This meant the ship had to be an integrated ship–black and white at all levels, officers, petty officers and seamen.

    While I had had no direct experience and had seen no documents, I had heard that the Navy had tried an all-Negro destroyer or destroyer escort, by a process of selecting the brightest and best qualified, and training for ratings ashore. I did not then know the name of the ship, but the “grapevine” reported that on the ship’s first trip out of New York harbor after commissioning, it had anchored next to the Ambrose Channel buoy and had wrapped its anchor chain around the buoy’s anchor chain. Whether true or not, I felt that a similar misfortune would embarrass and perhaps doom the project.

    Thus, I was convinced that the proper use of Negro skills at sea required an integrated ship. I then reflected on the degree of prejudice in the officer complement of the average ship. The few wardrooms I had served in or visited were composed of officers with very conservative political opinions. I sometimes thought I was the only officer present who voted for Roosevelt. While many officers would conscientiously carry out orders, I felt that an officer with racial prejudices, recognized or unrecognized, would not give the project a fair chance. I concluded that the Commanding Officer of the experimental ship must be sympathetic to the idea, want it to work, and be willing to give it the special care necessary to make it work.

    After his report and conclusion:

    To the best of my knowledge, the experiment was never used for publicity by the Coast Guard or the Navy. I never had a reporter or photographer come to the ship and was never asked to describe it. While in Boston once, I invited Erwin Canham, then editor of the Christian Science Monitor, whom I had known when we were fellow newspapermen in Washington, to come aboard for lunch. I described the project and showed him the ship and crew. He showed no interest of any sort in the project and never wrote about it.

    Upon reflection, I have wondered if I should not have evangelized for my theories, put on a campaign for their general adoption. I did not, first because I was too busy as commanding officer making them work, and second because of my basic belief that this kind of thing should happen naturally and should not be in the spotlight.

    So, my belief that racial integration aboard ship was sound national naval and military policy was proven, but remained unnoticed.

    From wiki:

    After the Sea Cloud, Skinner commanded a second integrated crew aboard the USS Hoaquim near the Aleutian Islands.[3] Noting the success of Skinner’s two commands, the Navy integrated the USS Mason, and dropped ship segregation completely within the next few decades.[3] Master Chief Petty Officer of the Coast Guard Vincent W. Patton III said of Skinner: “I will say without question that he was the front guard of integrating the U.S. military forces in World War II, and the man got very little credit for it”.[3]

  198. rq says

    Saad @196

    “Yeah but this time the officer’s being charged”

    Which, of course, means nothing until there’s a conviction that isn’t overturned on appeal or technicality. And the only reason the officer is being charged is because of that horrible video, as you said. I think I did put in the tweet, upthread, where someone notes that the cop in the Rekia Boyd case got charged, too – but it’s been two years and still no trial (apparently it’s pending or something). So… ‘charged’ still means not much at all. Like that makes all those other fucking times okay or something. Like one officer once being charged is like major reparations for all the other fucking abuses black people have suffered at the hands of law enforcement.
    Fuck that.

  200. Pteryxx says

    …and I didn’t realize that Dr. Olivia Hooker, the first African-American woman in the Coast Guard, is also a survivor of the 1921 Tulsa race riots and active in the call for reparations: Fordham Professor, Coast Guard Pioneer and Civil Rights Activist Dr. Olivia J. Hooker to Receive Recognition following her 100th Birthday (from March of this year)

    Nationally recognized pioneer in the rights of minority students and retired Fordham University Professor of Psychology Dr. Olivia J. Hooker is a lifelong civil rights activist and the first African American woman to enlist in the Coast Guard. To celebrate her life and 100th birthday, the Coast Guard will name a building on Staten Island in her honor on March 12th.

    “I was astonished,” Dr. Hooker told the Wall Street Journal, as she celebrated her birthday Feb. 12 with friends–along with a Coast Guard color guard and a note from President Barack Obama–at a church near her home in the Westchester County town of Greenburgh. “I never would have expected anything like that to happen.”

    […]

    Dr. Hooker vividly remembers being awakened by the thudding sounds of machine gun ammunition raining down on her family’s home. She remembers her mother carefully leading her to the window and pointing to the hill where a machine gunner was stationed and saying, “That is a machine gun on that hill, and there’s an American flag on it. That means that your country is shooting at you.”

    The Hooker family survived the massacre, and Olivia—along with her two sisters, Naomi and Irene—went on to earn Bachelor’s degrees from the Ohio State University. In 1945 and after campaigning with her sorority for integration, Dr. Hooker became the first African American woman to enlist in the Coast Guard. She earned the rank of Yeoman, Second Class.

  202. rq says

    Okay. Looks like a lot of material, mostly Walter Scott but also otehr stuff (as per the usual!) and some twitterary comments on this and that.

    Stuff starting from yesterday afternoon or so. Protesters in North Charleston, SC just just blocked the roadway in front of city hall. #WalterScott

    Oh, here’s the law that Walter Scott supposedly broke with that broken taillight: 2012 South Carolina Code of Laws
    Title 56 – Motor Vehicles
    Chapter 5 – UNIFORM ACT REGULATING TRAFFIC ON HIGHWAYS
    Section 56-5-4730 – Signal lamps and signal devices.     Not sure how it is in the States, but ’round here it’s legal (though not advisable) to drive with a broken signal light. Officially the police can’t stop you for it, but if they stop you for any other reason, they will comment on it and remind you. How does this work in the States?

    Because it came up on Twitter, here’s a few on state laws governing the filming of police:
    Illinois Passes Bill That Makes It Illegal To Record The Police (actually, it’s about private conversations, though there is the worry that this could be misapplied to police interactions where one does not explicitly ask for permission to record);
    Texas Bill Would Make Recording Police Illegal (if you’re unarmed, you can’t record within 25 feet of the officer; if armed, you can’t record within 100 feet – WTF?).

    For Mumia: #MumiaMustLive, National Day of Action For Mumia, Milwaukee
    Friday, April 10, Federal Courthouse, 517 E Wisconsin…    , a pdf with more info on Mumia and demands.

  203. rq says

    Colorado proposes bill supporting photographers who record police – that one’s a bit unusual.

    Colorado, U.S. state legislatures have introduced a new bill that, if signed into law, will prevent law enforcement officers from interfering with citizens who are photographing or recording police activity. It is House Bill 15-1290, and it comes at a time when Texas has proposed its own bill on the topic, but with a draconian slant: it penalizes citizens that film or photograph police actions within 25 feet of the incident.

    Colorado’s new bill was introduced this month, and if it goes through, it will enable citizens to partake in police oversight by way of photography and video recordings. According to the bill, a police officer cannot destroy a recording, interfere with a recording, or seize it without consent or a warrant.

    If an officer acts outside of the bounds of the law, the affected person will receive $15,000, actual damages, and will have his or her legal costs covered. The bill is said to largely be the result of increasing incidents where police officers demand cameras from people who are recording them, or who in some way destroy or delete the data. Colorado Democratic Rep. Joe Salazar, the bill’s co-sponsor, has called such actions ‘unacceptable conduct’.

    Shouldn’t need a bill. And doesn’t say much about what happens if the police start keeping tabs on you afterward. But it’s a start?

    Loretta Lynch Now Has The Votes To Be AG, But Will McConnell Allow It?

    Loretta Lynch received a boost recently when Republican Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois announced his support for her nomination as attorney general, bringing her tally to 51 supporters in the Senate.

    That’s enough for the chief federal prosecutor in Brooklyn to win confirmation.

    But the fate of the high-profile nomination rests with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who decides if and when she gets a vote and has delayed it indefinitely by entangling Lynch in an unrelated political battle over abortion.

    “I am confident from my conversation with Loretta Lynch that she will be a valuable partner in confronting the gang violence that is robbing families of their children every day in Chicago,” Kirk said after meeting with Lynch. “We need the help of the Attorney General to fight gangs of national significance through federal law enforcement agencies and prosecutors, and to address organized crime like drug and child sex trafficking.”

    The decision made Kirk the fifth Republican senator — along with every Democrat and independent — to back Lynch. The others are Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Susan Collins (R-ME).

    McConnell has made clear he won’t bring up the nomination until Democrats agree to pass a stalled bill designed to combat sex trafficking, which they have repeatedly filibustered due to a provision that limits the ability of victims to use compensation funds for an abortion. Democrats say they’ll support the bill without that provision, but Republicans insist on keeping it in the legislation.

    The battle got ugly when Democrats, after voting for the bill in committee, said they discovered the anti-abortion provision and accused the GOP of sneaking it in. Republicans fumed that the legislation had been public for weeks. Since then the two parties have been at an impasse that shows no signs of abating.

    McConnell is holding firm on his proposition.

    Asshole.

    Same shit, different source: S.C. police officer charged with murder, pretty much all video.

    A police officer in South Carolina is charged with murder after a video surfaced, authorities say, showing him shooting a man who was running away.

    We’ve learned Officer Michael Slager stopped Walter Scott for a broken taillight in North Charleston over the weekend.

    The officer is accused of firing his gun eight times after the driver broke away from him.

    Warning: Some may find the video disturbing.

    How video of the fatal South Carolina police shooting reignites the body camera debate

    The shooting has renewed outrage among civil rights groups and criminal justice activists, who have spent months calling for policing reform following the police killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and John Crawford last year.

    “It’s another indication that there is something wrong with the police culture in too many jurisdictions,” said Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League. “Another in the endless string of incidents that overwhelmingly involve African American men as victims, and overwhelmingly involve white male officers.”

    The shooting, captured by a bystander’s video, comes as national civil rights groups are convening this week in New York, in part to discuss how to best continue to propel the national push for policing and criminal justice reform.

    And, Morial and other civil rights leaders have noted, the Scott shooting shows what some consider the most damning possible evidence: a black man, without a weapon, being shot multiple times in the back as he runs away by a white officer.

    “This is yet another example, like with Eric Garner, where a picture, or a video, is worth a thousand words,” Morial said. “But for this video, this would have been another coverup, another fabrication, another lie told by a police officer when the police officer was clearly in the wrong.” […]

    Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott, both Republicans, quickly condemned the shooting, and some local elected officials said Tuesday night that Scott’s death may reinvigorate debate in the state about body cameras for police officers.

    “The horrific video that came to light yesterday is deeply troubling. It is clear the killing of Walter Scott was unnecessary and avoidable,” Tim Scott said in a statement. “The swift action taken by SLED [South Carolina Law Enforcement Division] and the relevant authorities upon receiving the video shows the severity of this terrible event.” […]

    There are currently two body camera bills being considered by state legislators, who are on recess until Tuesday. The first would commission a 60-day study of the cost and potential impact of placing body cameras on all state troopers in South Carolina. The second, more sweeping measure would require body cameras for all police officers in the state.

    “I just got off of the phone with the speaker of the house,” State Rep. Wendell Gilliard (D), the author of both pending body camera bills, said when reached late Tuesday night. “We’re going to have to pull one of those bills out of subcommittee. The speaker was very cooperative, he understood and he’s willing to work with me 100 percent like he always has.”

    The bills are both currently being considered by committee, and Gilliard said he warned some fellow lawmakers before they left for recess that they needed to act with urgency.

    “I just had a premonition that South Carolina was going to be put in a bad light, that we were just stalling on these issues as it pertains to body cameras.”

    Now, with the nation’s attention turned to North Charleston, Gilliard said he is optimistic the body camera legislation will get a full vote.

    “We need to put up or shut up in South Carolina,” Gilliard said. “We have too many people here who are talking too loud, and not enough people here who are doing the work we need done.”

    Ferguson’s government sucked, and voters just did something about it

    Even when the protests were in their early stages, many locals recognized that change started on the ballot. Groups set up voter registration tents near the pressure points of protest sites, and volunteers walked through the predominately black neighborhoods with forms in hand.
    Many Ferguson residents saw the bigger picture.

    “If we don’t vote these people out, nothing is going to change,” Lakeisha Ellis, 40, told Mashable in August. “And if we fall through the cracks, there’s nothing to catch us.”

    Though new voter registration wasn’t exceptionally high — just 562 new voters were added to the city — the message still resonated. Compared to nearly 12% in the last election, 29.4% of registered voters participated this week. And they made it to the ballot box despite raging storms that brought lightning and heavy rain to the area on Tuesday. […]

    Half of Ferguson’s six city council seats were up for grabs. Wesley Bell, a black man who had the support of the last city council, defeated another black candidate, Lee Smith, to win in the 3rd Ward. Bell is a lawyer and college professor who also serves as a municipal court judge.

    Ella Jones, a black woman and a staunch critic of the city government, defeated another black candidate and two white candidates in the 1st Ward. She will be the first black woman on the council. […]

    New voter registration wasn’t exceptionally high given the strong push that was made after the shooting, but the focus shifted to those who are already registered to vote in the weeks leading up to the election.

    Among those voters was Marty Einig, who has participated in Ferguson protests since August. She was voting in the 3rd Ward, which includes the Canfield Green apartment complex where Brown was killed.

    “I see there is raw material within this community to demonstrate hope,” Einig said.

    “I see a glass that’s half full, and I feel that the people have the will to force change.”

    But the new city council will face an uphill battle. One of its first tasks will be approving replacements for those officials who stepped down. With all eyes on Ferguson, both from within and on a national stage, the moves this city council makes will be under scrutiny.

    While many activists celebrated the election results on Tuesday, they were quick to point out that it’s just the beginning. Charles Wade of a group called Operation Help or Hush, who also organized the Alternative Spring Break group, urged residents to hold their newly elected officials accountable for the promised made on the campaign trail.

    GoFundMe rejected the campaign to support Officer Slager. #WalterScott!! Which is why it’s on IndieGoGo. And being currently reviewed (more later), but for once, good for GoFundMe. Should have done the same for the pizzeria, though.
    Eh.

  204. rq says

    And here is the official statement from US Senator Lindsey Graham re: #WalterScott. Thoughts and prayers, investigation, this is not who the police are.

    Tape-recording laws at a glance – that’s audio, does the same apply to video? Anyway, it’s a state-by-state look at the laws, with categories consent, criminal penalties, civil suits, specific hidden camera law, and penalties for disclosing and/or publishing the information.

    3 hours after #WalterScott was shot in his back in SC, an Illinois officer shot Justus Howell twice in his back. But nobody got it on camera, so everybody cares less.

    I’ve been told that dashcam footage of the police encounter with #LavallHall will be released today. Info on Lavall at the link. And yes, this footage did get released. More later.

    Lauderdale seeks independent review of police force, which actually sounds really sensible.

    Saying the city has nothing to hide, city commissioners plan to invite federal or state law enforcement officials to do their own review of the city’s police force given the recent firing of three officers over racist comments.

    Commissioner and former Police Chief Bruce Roberts said Tuesday the city needs to do more than just cooperate with any investigation that might arise — it should encourage one to clear the air.

    “There’s always going to be, in cases like this, that lack of trust that we are doing the right thing,” Roberts said. “The men and women of the department are working under a bit of a cloud.”

    Other commissioners agreed.

    “The impression that people have is that this is the tip of the iceberg,” Commissioner Dean Trantalis said. “I don’t want people to think that.”

    The commission asked Roberts and City Manager Lee Feldman to meet to develop a proposal to bring back for commission approval. The proposal could involve the U.S. Department of Justice or the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, commissioners said.

    “I think us taking the initiative to do this is the right way to go,” Commissioner Robert McKinzie said.

    The FBI’s civil rights division has already launched its own investigation into the incidents that led to the city’s announcement March 20 that three officers — Jason Holding, 31, James Wells, 30, and Christopher Sousa, 25 — were being fired regarding text messages they had sent. Officials also said a former department employee, Officer Alex Alvarez, 22, would have been fired had he not resigned in January.

    Since then, the NAACP has begun taking complaints from people about racial incidents involving city police. The group plans to forward those reports to the Justice Department.

  205. rq says

    #StuartFitzgerald faces 15 years in jail accused of assaulting Deputy who threw him onto highway. Orange Co Va @wusa9 Sounds a lot like damaging state property by bleeding on police uniforms.

    –> Odd. My dominant feeling re: the #WalterScott shooting is not “my God that policeman shot him in the back” but “at least someone filmed it”. <–

    EXCLUSIVE: Michael Slager’s Attorney Dropped Him After Video Emerged

    Charleston attorney David Aylor told The Daily Beast that he took on Slager as a client on Saturday, the day of the shooting, and removed himself as counsel on Tuesday afternoon. Aylor said he wouldn’t go into detail about his brief representation of Slager thanks to attorney-client privilege but he spoke generally about the situation. The following has been lightly edited for clarity.

    You were quoted as Officer Slager’s attorney in the aftermath of this high-profile shooting but before the video came out. Now you’re not his attorney anymore. What happened?

    I can’t specifically state what is the reason why or what isn’t the reason why I’m no longer his lawyer. All I can say is that the same day of the discovery of the video that was disclosed publicly, I withdrew as counsel immediately. Whatever factors people want to take from that and conclusions they want to make, they have the right to do that. But I can’t confirm from an attorney-client standpoint what the reason is.

    When you were representing Slager, you said, “I believe once the community hears all the facts of this shooting, they’ll have a better understanding of the circumstances surrounding this investigation.”

    That was my belief at the time, that’s why I made that statement.

    Now that the video is out, it seems the community has a much better understanding about what actually happened, and not necessarily in the officer’s favor. What’s your take on that new information?

    I think that there’s been a release of information that was not public information at the time, or not discovered at the time at least to any knowledge of mine or anyone else publicly— at least the video. I can’t comment on the specifics of what I think the video says. I’m not going to analyze the video, but again … the video came out and within the hours of the video coming out, I withdrew my representation of the client. […]

    Do you know whether Officer Slager knew someone was taping the incident?

    I can’t say what my client did and didn’t tell me, but I can tell you that I was not aware of the video, and I’m still not aware of who filmed the video, where the video came from, how the video got disclosed and who it was disclosed to first. As far as whether it was disclosed to authorities first or whether it went straight to the media, I don’t even know the answer to that question now.

    Any other thoughts on this situation as his former attorney?

    Not so much as his former attorney, just as someone in the community, I feel that it’s a tragic situation that occurred. I feel for all of those who are affected by the incident and of course the loss of life. At no point, not specific to this case, just generally speaking, is anybody above the law. And I think that’s why we have process and court systems and everybody deserves their day in court, but I won’t be participating in anything related to this case moving forward in that regard.

    Whoa. Not just any woman, either – apparently a decorated veteran. Officer Investigated After Video Shows Him Beating a 9-Month Pregnant Woman

    New details are emerging about the horrifying video we reported on Monday showing a 38-week pregnant woman being viciously assaulted by a Hunt County Sheriff deputy.

    Since the video of the March 4th incident has gone viral, the woman has been identified as Deanna Robinson, a 38-year-old decorated Air Force Veteran who once received the Airman’s Medal- the highest honor in the Air Force, after she helped drag soldiers from a burning plane in Iraq.

    On March 1, Robinson reportedly got into a shoving match with her husband as she was holding her 18-month-old son, Landry. Upset over the incident, she took her young child and went to stay at her parents house. The following day, one of her three step-children, a 9-year-old who is bound to a wheelchair due to cerebral palsy, told his teacher about the incident. The teacher proceeded to call Child Protective Services. […]

    After banging on the door to Robinson’s parent’s home, the officers stated that they were there to remove her son from her care. She informed them that nobody was taking her child without a court order or warrant. As she attempted to close the door, the officers plowed through.

    “I’m positioning myself in front of my child as the officers are screaming, ‘There’s the kid. Grab him,’” Robinson told WFAA.

    Robinson’s mother was holding Landry, as the 18-month-old witnessed his mother being hurt and abused by the officers. She was pushed up against the counter hard enough to leave serious bruising on her third trimester belly, and punched at least twice with closed fists as seen in the video that was captured by her mother’s security camera, which records roughly 30 seconds of footage at random intervals. Robinson claims that the officer continued to strike her after the camera stopped rolling, and that she was hit at least four or five times in her lower back.

    Photos and video at the link.
    And wow. I mean, I understand removing children from unsafe environments, and that sometimes this must occur quickly, but… this sounds excessive, and rather traumatic to the children? Without warning, with a lot of yelling and violence… how is that creating a safer environment for the kids? How is this helping them?

    South Carolina protesters decry police shooting

    Officer Michael Slager was charged with murder and sacked after video emerged of him shooting Walter Scott multiple times in the back following a scuffle.

    He was arrested when authorities reviewed mobile phone video of the shooting, which took place on Saturday.

    The incident has been widely condemned, and the US Department of Justice and the FBI are investigating.

    Cries of “Black lives matter!” rang out as about 50 protesters joined local politicians outside City Hall in North Charleston on Wednesday morning.

    “We cannot sit still and be quiet anymore. This is our season to speak!” said one woman who commanded the crowd’s attention.

    The protests here have been small, unlike those that followed the killing of Michael Brown, the unarmed teenager in Ferguson last year.

    But just like in Ferguson, African Americans here talk about feeling discriminated against by the police for years.

    This time there has been unusually swift action against the police officer involved, but the protesters are not convinced charges would have happened without the video evidence.

    It seems the killing of Walter Scott has once again exposed the huge issues of race and policing in this country.

    The article also includes the following list of controversial police shootings – which extends only to March 2014, and I’m certain they had to pick-and-choose to keep it short:

    US police: Controversial recent killings

    April 2015: Walter Lamer Scott, 50, is shot eight times in South Carolina as he runs away from Officer Michael Slager. Mr Scott dies at the scene. The shooting is captured on video and Mr Slager is charged with murder.

    December 2014: Jerame Reid, 36, is shot dead during a routine traffic stop in New Jersey. An officer claims Mr Reid was reaching for a gun, but video footage seems to suggest he was attempting to step out of the car, hands raised.

    November 2014: Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy, is shot dead in a playground by Cleveland police after a local resident reports he is pointing a gun at passers by. The gun turns out to be a toy. A grand jury will decide whether police will face charges.

    August 2014: Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, is shot dead by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. The shooting leads to protests, first in Ferguson and later nationwide. A grand jury decides not to charge Mr Wilson.

    July 2014: Eric Garner, an asthma sufferer, is stopped by police in New York and placed in a chokehold after refusing to be handcuffed. He dies despite repeatedly telling officers he cannot breathe. No police are charged.

    March 2014: James Boyd, an unarmed homeless man camping in Alberquerque, is shot dead by two officers. Video of the incident leads prosecutors to say the officers acted with “deliberate intention” and they are charged.

    Also love one of the links at the bottom: “Will black Americans finally get a fair deal?” Um, no.

  206. rq says

    There was a press conference yesterrday: Mayor says police chief can’t answer questions because another agency is conducting the investigation of #WalterScott’s killing.
    North Charleston Mayor said with a new grant, every city police officer will have a body camera. #WalterScott

    In lieu of flowers, the family requests that the police stop shooting unarmed black men.

    After several months of public outcry the video involving the shooting dead of Lavall Hall is being released to the public @deray @ShaunKing
    Police said to Lavall, “get on the fucking ground or you’re dead.” #AskUsAboutLavall @ShaunKing @deray @Dreamdefenders

    #LavallHall, killed while running from Miami Gardens officers, video released by family. Graphic. It is. The second half is a bit weird, as it’s form the rear-facing car camera so the action happens around the outer border, around the carseat. Action. The murder.

  207. rq says

    @deray Worried it may be only a convection on watered down charge. Ex. cop who murdered Oscar Grant on video was out in less then 2 years.

    “@2015walterscott: Walter Scott since 9:30 a.m.
    North Charleston City Hall
    #WalterScott “

    The #WalterScott memorial sits in an empty, grassy lot, two thin streets running alongside it. (With photos, this and the previous.)

    Don’t shoot – this is a repost from December, worth re-reading, as it shows some examples of police forces trying to move away from the aggressive, military-type stance. Is it working?

    The FBI counts over 400 “justifiable homicides” by American police officers every year. This number includes only those shot while committing a crime. Reporting such shootings is voluntary, so the true number is surely higher. Even undercounting, America easily outguns other rich countries: in the year to March 2013 police in England and Wales fired weapons three times and killed no one.

    Such comparisons should be read in context. America’s police operate in a country with 300m guns and a murder rate six times Germany’s. In recent years the New York Police Department (NYPD) was called to an annual average of almost 200,000 incidents involving weapons, shot 28 people and saw six of its officers shot (mostly non-fatally). Despite the headlines, it is one of America’s more restrained forces.

    The more trigger-happy police departments tend to be found in smaller cities where fewer journalists live. Peter Moskos of John Jay College has come up with a measure to identify them, which checks the number of police shootings against the number of murders in a city. The places that stand out as having a lot of police shootings relative to the number of murders are Riverside, San Diego and Sacramento in California; and Tucson and Phoenix in Arizona.

    In general, smaller police forces are less likely to have proper oversight. (This matters: half of America’s 12,500 local police forces have ten or fewer officers.) Larger jurisdictions can employ people whose job is to prosecute policemen. In Brooklyn (population 2.5m), the current district attorney made his name prosecuting an officer for sodomising a handcuffed Haitian immigrant with a broomstick in the lavatory of a police station. In a small town policemen are investigated by people they work with all the time. “The prosecutor is the guy who went to your kid’s confirmation,” says Mr Moskos. In the whole country, fewer than six officers were charged with murder or manslaughter each year, on average, between 2005 and 2011, according to Philip Stinson of Bowling Green State University.

    If the problem were just one of scale then the answer would be simple, at least in theory: merge small departments to form bigger ones. But even in some fairly large cities some officers are too eager to use force. When a police force has been the subject of frequent complaints, the Department of Justice (DoJ) is often called in to investigate and make recommendations.

    Under Barack Obama’s administration, the department currently has 27 active cases, looking at city forces such as Seattle’s or Cleveland’s and also at some individual sheriffs’ departments. Though the DoJ finds that, even in the worst departments, most shootings are justified, they also show that the shooting of unarmed people who pose no threat is disturbingly common.

    And more at the link.

    Fox’s Napolitano: Walter Scott Shooting ‘What People Said Ferguson Was’

    Video of South Carolina policeman Michael Slager shooting and killing Walter Scott, who is African American, as he ran away after a kerfuffle at a traffic stop has stoked outrage among the public and led to the officer being charged for murder.

    Coming on the heels of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the story has naturally invited comparisons. But on Fox & Friends this morning, contributor Andrew Napolitano said the two incidents should not be treated as one and the same.

    “This is what some people said Ferguson was — but it turned out it wasn’t,” Napolitano said.

    “In Ferguson, there was a bona fide fight over the officer’s gun and the officer won the fight,” Napolitano said. “This is two disparate cases here. This is a victim running away from the police, shot in the back.”

    I still don’t believe the official narrative.

    South Carolina officer radioed in Taser claim six seconds after firing final shot – six seconds to figure out a story.

    The police officer who shot Walter Scott radioed in to claim that Scott had “grabbed my Taser”, six seconds after firing his final shot, despite video suggesting the unarmed man was not in possession of the stun gun at any point, a Guardian analysis has shown.

    Syncing police scanner audio with a shocking video – the eyewitness footage out of South Carolina which led to officer Michael Slager being charged with murder – raises further questions about whether either of two officers on the video performed any CPR on Scott as was previously claimed by police.

    Analysis of the police radio shows Slager, the officer who shot at Scott eight times, making the radio call announcing the shots and alleging the Taser seizure, sounding frantic and breathless at the same time as he walks slowly towards Scott’s body.

    “Shots fired. Subject is down. He grabbed my Taser,” the scanner audio from Slager states.
    Officer Michael Slager dispatch audio from the Walter Scott shooting.

    He reaches the body, handcuffs Scott who has his head down to the floor and walks back to the area where it appears an object was dropped and picks up an item from the ground.

    At this point a second officer, now identified as Clarence Habersham, arrives on the scene and radios in. Slager then walks back towards the body and radios in stating: “I need to secure my vehicle”. At this point – over a minute after the last shot is fired – neither officer appears to have performed CPR on Scott.

    Slager then walks and drops the item, which some have speculated is a Taser, next to Scott’s body.
    Advertisement

    At this point Habersham radios in to say he has detected gunshots to Scott’s chest on the right side. He then radios to say he has detected a gunshot wound to the buttocks. He appears to be pulling Scott’s T-shirt up at this point.

    At a press conference on Wednesday North Charleston police chief Eddie Driggers said after watching the video he believed an officer had lifted Scott’s T-shirt to perform “some sort of life-saving procedure”.

    But analysis of the video and audio suggests Habersham is actually identifying the gunshot wounds rather than performing any such procedure.

    At the end of the video, over two minutes after the last shot is fired, Slager stands over Scott’s body and takes a pulse.

    I’ll give them that CPR on someone bleeding out is not the best idea (just had first aid retraining), but (a) why lie about it and say they did and (b) they didn’t even try to administer any first-aid, not even stopping bloodflow. Isn’t a medical examiner the only person who can legally declare someone dead and beyond help?
    Also, it seems entirely possible that the second officer didn’t actually see the planting of the Taser. In a way, I’d much rather believe that than that he did nothing about it… But. But.

    <a href="

  208. rq says

    Ben Carson: SC police shooting an ‘execution’

    Ben Carson, a potential Republican presidential contender, on Wednesday condemned the police shooting of an unarmed black man in North Charleston, S.C., calling it a public “execution.”

    “It’s horrible to see an execution take place in the street like that,” Carson told BuzzFeed News.

    “I think it’s so obvious that he was wrong that this provides an excellent opportunity for law enforcement personnel across the country to really come out and condemn this,” he added.

    Carson said that police officer Michael Slager, 33, resorted to lethal force too quickly during the Saturday incident, which was caught on video. Slager shot Walter Scott, 50, following a traffic stop.

    “Certainly that policeman was too quick to do it,” Carson said.

    “I don’t know if you can always generalize in a situation like that, but certainly that officer was wrong,” he added.

    Carson said he was left “aghast” by footage of Scott’s killing. […]

    The witness who recorded the video on Wednesday vowed to speak publicly “at some point” about the incident. North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey also revealed Wednesday that additional, unreleased footage of the incident recorded from Slager’s police cruiser may exist.

    That last quoted paragraph? More on that later.

    Here’s a photo of Walter Scott in his graduation gown: #WalterScott. Let’s remember him like this, or in his Coast Guard uniform.

    Protest held over South Carolina shooting

    Protests have been held in South Carolina over the shooting of an unarmed black man by a white policeman, as the mayor of the city where the incident took place announced every officer will be required to wear a body camera.

    Up to 50 people rallied at the North Charleston City Hall on Wednesday, protesting over the shooting and killing of Walter Scott after he was stopped over a traffic incident.

    The protesters claimed North Charleston police had a habit of harassing black people for small offences, such as the broken brake light that sparked the traffic stop preceding Scott’s death.

    Scott, 50, was shot by North Charleston policeman Michael Thomas Slager, who fired eight times in Saturday’s incident.

    Slager was charged with murder and has been fired by the police force.

    Officials only announced the charge on Tuesday after a graphic video of the incident was released.

    The FBI and US Justice Department have also begun a separate investigation.

    Scott’s family and their lawyer, L Chris Stewart, called for calm and peaceful protests. They said the murder charge showed that the justice system was working in this case.

    I like that qualifier, ‘the justice system was working in this case’. I get the feeling, though, that the department was kind of looking for a good reason to get rid of Slager. Not sure what gives me that impression, maybe the quick charges, but I get the feeling that if not over this (hopefully something smaller), he would have been put into the legal system from the other end somehow, eventually, anyway. Oh! This:

    Saturday’s shooting was captured on video by a bystander, who explained why he recorded the incident on Wednesday.

    Feidin Santana told NBC News that he approached the scene as he was walking to work because he noticed Slager controlling Scott on the ground. He began recording when he heard the sound of a taser, a weapon used by police to subdue potential criminals. He said: “Mr Scott was trying just to get away from the taser.”

    Worry for him is a thing.

    In North Charleston, urgent promises of change to avoid ‘another Ferguson’ – or maybe they charged him so quick because of that.

    City officials here promised to outfit the entire police department with body cameras Wednesday, seeking to defuse tension over a graphic video showing a white officer fatally shooting an unarmed black man in the back.

    Their attempts to reassure the public came as footage of the incident was replaying endlessly online and on cable news, and they showed how urgently authorities are trying to avoid frenzied protests like those seen in Ferguson, Mo., last summer.

    “The community is very angry about it, so it is important to calm the community before things get out of hand,” said James Johnson, president of the local chapter of the civil rights group National Action Network. “We don’t want another Ferguson here.”

    Since last summer, the long shadow of Ferguson has extended over city after city, as incidents in New York, Cleveland and Madison, Wis., have sparked demonstrations and outrage over how police officers use force toward black men and boys. This week, that focus turned to North Charleston, the third-largest city in South Carolina, a place with more black residents than white that is patrolled by a predominantly white police force.

    As the images of Michael Slager firing a series of shots into the back of Walter Scott spread widely, city officials moved quickly to announce that the officer has been fired and would be charged with murder. While there have been some protests since the video’s release, they have not reached the fever pitch seen elsewhere. Mayor R. Keith Summey said his city has not turned into another Ferguson “because we did what is right.”

    “We turned the investigation over to an independent agency,” Summey said at a news conference Wednesday. “We gave them everything that we have.”

    City leaders, legal observers and activists said the quick action in North Charleston spoke to a key lesson from Ferguson: Act with urgency to try to keep the peace.

    “I think we’ve all seen what happened when you seem to have clear facts and the authorities don’t move for a long time,” said David A. Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “It’s not good for anybody. That’s the lesson of places like Ferguson.”

    […] Even as North Charleston officials were publicly contrite, questions still lingered over the shooting and how authorities would have responded had this footage never been found. Slager’s initial account, which he relayed to a dispatcher, was: “Shots fired and the subject is down, he took my Taser.” A lawyer who had represented Slager had said that the officer “felt threatened” after Scott tried to overpower him; the lawyer said he no longer represents Slager, and it is unclear whether he has new legal representation. […]

    Slager was one of two South Carolina officers arrested Tuesday by the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, which is investigating the North Charleston shooting. The other man, Justin Gregory Craven, shot and killed a black man after a car chase last year, and he was charged with firing a gun into an occupied vehicle.

    The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C., reported last month that police there had shot at more than 200 people over the past five years; only a handful were charged with a crime, while none were convicted.

    Meanwhile, as Slager remains in the Charleston County jail, his wife is eight months pregnant. Summey said Wednesday that she will remain on the city’s health insurance plan until after she delivers her baby.

    “We think that’s the humane thing for us to do,” he said.

    I hate that last sentence and the context – I hate it. In essence it isn’t wrong, but ‘humane’? Really?

    On our call, the SC protestors noted how racist the local website http://charlestonthuglife[dot]net is and wanted us to show y’all. #WalterScott I’m not going to cite anything from the website mentioned, enter at your own risk. Decontamination is that way, for whenever you re-emerge.

    The Walter Scott Murder

    The horrifying video of a white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., shooting and killing an unarmed black man — while the man is running away — may still come as a shock to many Americans. But this heinous act, which the officer tried to explain away by claiming that he feared for his life, strikes a familiar chord in communities of color all across the United States.

    The case underscores two problems that have become increasingly clear since the civic discord that erupted last year after the police killed black citizens in New York, Cleveland and Ferguson, Mo. The first, most pressing problem is that poorly trained and poorly supervised officers often use deadly force unnecessarily, particularly against minority citizens. The second is that the police get away with unjustly maiming or killing people by lying about the circumstances that prompted them to use force. […]

    Mr. Slager was charged with murder on Tuesday and subsequently fired by the North Charleston Police Department. The swiftness of the charge was encouraging. The F.B.I. and the Justice Department, which has opened several civil rights investigations into police departments under Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., is also investigating. On its face, the officer’s conduct seems inconsistent with rulings by the Supreme Court, which has held that officers can use deadly force against a fleeing suspect only when there is probable cause that the suspect “poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.”

    Police departments all over the country clearly need to do a better job of training on how to de-escalate encounters with citizens and explaining when and how deadly force can be used. To get a handle on this problem, Congress must compel local police departments to report to the Justice Department all instances in which officers are fired upon or fire their own weapons at citizens. During the 1990s, Congress enacted legislation that was intended to aid the collection of data on officer-involved shootings. But many local governments do not provide the data because reporting it is optional. Mr. Holder was on the mark in January when he described this state of affairs as “unacceptable.”

    Better tracking of shooting data is, of course, important. But states and local governments need to understand that the growing outrage over wrongful death cases, like the one in North Charleston, undermines trust in law enforcement and presents a clear danger to the civic fabric. The country needs to confront this issue directly and get this problem under control.

  209. rq says

    Argh, I hope you can figure out what to do with the weird-looking link in the second-last link, the [dot] should be an actual dot, etc. Anyway. that comment is in moderation at the moment. We go forward.

    St. Louis aldermen approve clearing homes for National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

    Aldermen on Friday approved a bill that would clear about 50 homes and businesses in an effort to keep the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency within the city’s borders.

    Aldermen voted 17-11 in favor of an economic development bill for the 100-acre swath of north St. Louis being showcased to the spy agency, which is looking to move its facility currently near the Anheuser-Busch brewery. The north city site is one of four being considered by the agency.

    The bill enables the city to use eminent domain to buy up any property north of Cass Avenue in the redevelopment area to Montgomery Street. The site is bordered east and west by North Jefferson Avenue and North 22nd Street. Much of the land is vacant, but it does include houses of some longtime city residents.

    “I walk through my ward and see one house on a block,” said 5th Ward Alderman Tamika Hubbard, who sponsored the bill and represents the area around the proposed development. “The infrastructure around these homes has collapsed.”

    She said: “I see this as an opportunity,” saying that the current economic conditions around the area keep home prices low and insurance rates high.

    City leaders say the land is the only available spot in St. Louis that can house the facility. The agency, which provides mapping support for the U.S. military, employs 3,000 people, brings in an estimated $2.4 million in annual earnings tax and has an average salary of $75,000.

    Under the approved measure, the city can now use eminent domain on homeowners, forcing them to sell their property to the city at market rate. The plan is expected to cost about $8 million.

    The site is near the demolished Pruitt Igoe housing development, which was the original proposed site for the Geospatial structure. Officials said they had to expand from there because the agency required more room for its facility. The development won’t actually occur on the old Pruitt Igoe site, but just north of it.

    It remains unclear what the city plans to do with the actual site of Pruitt Igoe.

    Guess who’s going to feel the impact.
    This has been a bad deal from Day 1.

    Lawsuit seeks receiver for McKee’s NorthSide properties, the link: Lawsuit seeks receiver for McKee’s NorthSide properties.

    Here’s another for the hazmat suit: NYPD cops & ex-cops spewing racist slurs about #WalterScott & justifying murder even after vid – there’s a link following the text, but if you open the link, there’s an example of what can be found at the link. You have been warned.

    Police chief ‘sickened’ by video; Andy Savage signs on as officer’s attorney

    Angry protesters disrupted a Wednesday afternoon press conference at North Charleston City Hall after city leaders could give few new details in the investigation and aftermath of the killing of Walter Scott.

    However, officials offered three new pieces of information on the existence of another piece of video from the scene, the officer’s wife, and the city’s push to gather body cameras.

    And a short time after the press conference ended, prominent local attorney Andy Savage said he had filed a notice of appearance as former officer Michael Slager’s attorney. In a statement, Savage said it was far too early in the case to offer insights on the direction of the defense or the information that had been released.

    “As we focus in on the facts, we will probably have more to say, but it is far too early for us to be saying what we think. Slager’s previous counsel fell into that trap and we have no intention of doing our client further harm,” he said. […]

    The crowd cheered the news of body cameras being implemented, but that support of Summey and Chief Eddie Driggers was short-lived. As Driggers began to speak, a crowd of protesters that had filled the room behind a large gaggle of local and national media started chanting “No justice, no peace!”

    Driggers described his meeting with the family, saying he got to meet a group of people who loved their son and brother greatly show compassion through the mourning.

    “I have been praying for peace, peace for the family and peace for this community. I will continue to stand on that as I strive to serve and protect,” he said.

    When Driggers started taking questions from the media, the crowd of protesters became agitated at the lack of concrete answers.

    Driggers was not sure of the life-saving efforts made by Slager and the second officer to arrive, as initially reported by police and investigators.

    “I have watched the video, and I was sickened by what I saw. I have not watched it since, but in that — in the end of it, I saw a police officer removing the shirt of the individual and doing something life-saving,” he said.

    But ultimately, Driggers said he could only speak on the information he was given — and he was told that efforts were made to save Scott’s life.

    It’s unclear what efforts were made to save Scott’s life. There are several discrepancies between what was reported, what was heard on radio transmissions between Slager and dispatch officials at the time of the shooting, and what the eyewitness video shows. […]

    With so many questions about the investigation, Summey took over the press conference again, which riled up the protesters. Summey tried to explain that because of the open investigation Driggers was not allowed to comment on the evidence.

    But there may exist another video of the scene of the shooting, based on comments Summey made in the press conference. However, he said he had not seen it, but had heard about it.

    He also said not every officer in the department is CPR-certified, but stopped short of saying that may have prevented more drastic life-saving efforts after the shooting. Summey did not say if either Slager or the second officer to arrive at the scene is CPR-certified.

    When asked about hiring more black and minority officers for the police force, Summey admitted there were shortcomings in the department’s diversity that they had worked for years to change.

    A 2009 study shows that while nearly 50 percent of the city is African-American, less than a quarter of the department’s officers are black.

    Summey said the department and the mayor’s office was working to increase the percentage of minority officers on the department’s payroll, including trying to attract black officers from other nearby agencies.

    While the few details Summey and Driggers could share did little to calm the crowd of upset protesters, national leaders are commending North Charleston officials for their handling of the case.

    There’s a nice statement by Rev. Al Sharpton after this bit, if you want to read it.

  210. rq says

    Clorox fucked up on twitter. Wish we could bleach away our last tweet. Didn’t mean to offend – it was meant to be about all the[toilet][bath][wineglass] emojis that could use a clean up. I didn’t catch the original tweet, but it comes at a time when people of colour are waiting for the people-of-colour emojis to finally be available for use. And the apology sucks.

    Protesting for #WalterScott at Cleaver and Prospect. #BlackLivesMatter

    Videotaping the police? Be careful: you don’t just end up in prison. Eric Garner Videographer Goes On Prison Hunger Strike

    A crowdfunding page launched by Orta’s family has raised more than $25,000 and counting — allowing worried relatives to post the $16,250 bail to get him out. The donations will also support his legal fees.

    But posting bail means more than just freedom. It will put an end to a sort of hunger strike.

    Orta, 23, refuses to eat prison food over fears that New York Corrections Department officers will taint it with rat poison—a complaint echoed by 19 other inmates who filed a lawsuit last month claiming they were sickened by blue-green pellets found in their Rikers meatloaf.

    The amateur videographer has stated he’s being targeted by law enforcement after his July 2014 footage of a policeman putting Garner in a deadly chokehold went viral, becoming a high-profile example of controversial police tactics. The Garner death, and a subsequent grand jury decision not to indict the officer involved, became a flashpoint for New York City and set off massive protests in December of last year. Orta claims that officers have been stalking and arresting him in retaliation for the video ever since it became public.

    One of Orta’s attorneys, Will Aronin, confirmed his client is forgoing Rikers grub.

    “Ramsey is afraid because of that [inmate poison claims] and other issues,” Aronin told the Daily Beast. “We’re thrilled to circumvent this by getting him home.”

    More about videotaping at the Walter Scott scene:
    #WalterScott’s brother says Santana is a hero. There were 3 brothers, 2 years apart. Walter was the middle brother. They were very close.
    The youngest brother went to the scene of the shooting, wasn’t allowed to cross the tape. He fought & crossed the tape and broke down.
    One of the brother’s was taking pictures with his phone on the scene and police took his phone. They knew that the original story was false.

  211. rq says

    “@deray: Trained To Kill. America. #WalterScott ” Cartoon of a police instructor in sunglasses standing in front of a room of recruits. The blackboard says: “I thought he had a gun”, and the instructor is saying: “This time I want you to say it with a serious look on your face.”
    Too true.

    Walter Scott’s mother: ‘Everybody loved him’

    “We’re talking about cameras on the policemen,” Judy Scott said. “It’s a shame that you have to do that because the policemen are supposed to protect us, we’re supposed to be able to trust them.”

    Still, Scott’s mother insists that she still has faith in the justice system. And she said she still believes there are good police officers.

    “There are faithful and truthful people and God has a way to make them do the right thing,” She said.

    The slain man’s mother recalled his love for the Dallas Cowboys.

    “When I saw my son run… I just didn’t want to,” Scott said emotionally, yet keeping her composure. “I was broken, I was upset. I mean it, that really hurt.”

    Instead, she said she will remember her son in her living room, joking around with his siblings and cousins on their weekly Sunday afternoon gatherings — after church.

    Anthony Scott, the slain man’s brother, said he will always remember playing pickup football games on the gravel street that sits in front of their cream and green home.

    Scott would call his brothers as he watched the games each week, screaming into the phone about each big play.

    “Did you see that! He would be yelling it at the phone,” Anthony said of his brother. “Man, I’m really gonna miss that.”

    One of the last family gatherings Walter Scott attended was a party two weeks ago — a surprise celebration for his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. All of the siblings were in on it, a surprise that left their mother in tears.

    “We had a great celebration, an amazing celebration for family,” Anthony Scott said. “And now we’ll get together again for Walter’s home going. Not much of a celebration.”

    More at the link.

    Another cartoon: Cop in shooting pose with black man running away. The cop is saying: “He doesn’t have his hands up.” And down in the lower right corner is written ‘If you run the tape backwards, he’s charging the officer’.

    OOOooooOOOOOOoooooo, nice record! South Carolina Officers Cleared In 200 Shootings In Past 5 Years

    South Carolina Police officers have been exonerated in more than 200 shootings over the past five years.

    The details came in an investigation by The State late last month, but they take on new significance in light of the alleged murder of Walter Scott, an African American shot dead by former North Charleston police officer Michael Slager.

    From the State:

    Police in South Carolina have fired their weapons at 209 suspects in the past five years, and a handful of officers have been accused of pulling the trigger illegally – but none has being convicted, according to an analysis by The State newspaper.</blockquote.

    The analysis also found:

    At least 101 African-American suspects were shot at, of whom 34 died. At least 67 white suspects were shot at; 41 died. Five were either Latino, Asian or Native American; four of them died.

    Analysis of the statistics revealed that about 38 percent of the shootings were fatal.

    South Carolina lawyer John O’Leary, who has defended cops for 26 years, said he “cannot remember any” police in the state getting convicted.

    “Certainly, there’s been a lot of shootings,” O’Leary said.

    Someone somewhere will argue the fact that because more white people died, there’s no racism in SC police… even though more black people got shot.

    Neither the state nor the federal government has prosecuted a police officer in FL for the use of deadly force in 25 years. #lavallhall That’s in Florida. Also huge.

    Walter Scott’s Brother Recalls First Viewing of Shocking Video

    The brother of the man shot and killed by a North Charleston, S.C., police officer said the man who filmed the video of his brother’s killing did not at first release the video because the man wanted to see how investigators would handle the case.

    “He wanted to see what reports were coming from the North Charleston Police Department because of the fact that they may have told the truth,” Anthony Scott said in an phone interview from home with TIME Wednesday. “And when they continued with the lies, he said, ‘I have to come forward.’”

    On Tuesday, the officer who allegedly appears in the video, Michael Thomas Slager, was charged with murder in connection with Walter Scott’s killing. The video appears to show Walter Scott unarmed running away from the police officer before he was shot multiple times.

    The man who filmed the video opened up in an interview that aired Wednesday night. “I knew right away, I had something on my hands,” Feidin Santana told NBC Nightly News.

    “I was sickened by what I saw. And I have not watched it since,” North Charleston police chief Eddie Driggers said at a press conference Wednesday.

    Anthony Scott, whose brother was pulled over in a traffic stop Saturday morning, said he first saw the video when approached by a man at a vigil for his brother earlier this week.

    “I was angry. Shocked,” Scott said. “I said, ‘We have to have that.’ So that we could prove it was innocent.”

    “I think that if that man never showed the video we would not be at the point that we’re at right now,” Scott said. “The video tells the truth. It would not be so hard for us to prove that this man was running away when you get shot in your back. I mean how can you defend that?”

  212. rq says

    Oooh, blockquote fail. Been a while.

    Speaking of the other shooter, Man Who Filmed South Carolina Police Shooting Speaks Out

    The bystander who filmed the police shooting death of an apparently unarmed black man in South Carolina over the weekend spoke out on Wednesday.

    The video made Saturday shows North Charleston police officer Michael Slager, who is white, firing eight shots in the direction of Walter Scott, 50, as he runs away. Officials said Wednesday he was struck five times. The officer had said earlier that he shot at the man because he had taken a Taser from him during a scuffle, which began after a confrontation during a traffic stop. But the video, released Tuesday night, appears to show the officer picking up the Taser and then dropping it near the man’s body.

    Feidin Santana told NBC Nightly News in an interview that aired Wednesday night that he came across the scene when he was walking to his job.

    “I see the police officer chasing him. I was on a phone call and decided to go there and see what was going on,” he said. Asked if there was a struggle between the man and the officer, Santana said there was: “They were down on the floor before I started recording.”

    Santana had already begun filming when the man began to run from the officer. “I remember the police had control of the situation, had control of Scott,” he said. “And Scott was trying just to get away from the Taser. You could hear the sound of the Taser.”

    “I believe he just wanted to get away from the Taser,” Santana added. “But like I said, [Scott] never used the Taser.”

    The video shows the officer firing seven shots in rapid succession toward Scott, then momentarily pausing before firing an eighth. It was after the final shot that Scott fell to the ground.

    Santana kept filming. Asked about how quickly he realized what he had documented, Santana said, “I knew right away, I had something on my hands.”

    He turned the video over to the family and recalled “they were very emotional.”

    “When I turned it in,” he said, “I thought about their situation and said if I were to have a family member where that happened I would like to know the truth.”

    Walter Scott might still be alive if police had taken another black man’s claims about cop seriously (thanks, Giliell!)

    The North Charleston Police Department, which is 80 percent white in a city that is 47 percent black, has been sued in federal court 46 times since 2000.

    Mario Givens, a black North Charleston man, told the Associated Press on Wednesday that Slager had roughed him up during a 2013 investigation, when the officer came to his door and demanded to come inside without saying why he was there.

    “‘Come outside or I’ll tase you,’” Givens said the officer told him as he barged in. “I didn’t want that to happen to me, so I raised my arms over my head, and when I did, he tased me in my stomach, anyway.”

    […]

    Givens filed a formal complaint the following day, but he said police refused to take statements from neighbors who witnessed the incident.

    Slager said in his report that he feared Givens had a weapon and that he ignored several commands to come outside.

    An internal affairs investigation of Slager’s actions “exonerated” the officer.

    Brown, the ex-girlfriend, is listed as a witness in the investigative report, but she said police never contacted her about the incident.

    Givens said he was never questioned by police, either, and he learned the case was closed six weeks later after going to the police station and asking.

    “They never told me how they reached the conclusion – never,” he told the AP. “They never contacted anyone from that night, no one from the neighborhood.”

    Slager was cited in January for failing to file a report after a black woman complained that her children were being harassed.

    A police spokesman said the department planned to eventually review the excessive force case to see if Slager should have been cleared, but Givens said Scott might still be alive if his complaint had been properly handled.

    All the signs of aggression and violence in Slager were there, and visible. Someone chose to ignore that.

    Step away from Walter Scott for a moment, back to Ferguson: Ferguson Court Clerk who sent racist emails says they were funny and she feels like she’s been raped

    Yeah, this is real life.

    After sending emails out comparing President Obama to a chimp and more, Mary Ann Twitty still refuses to accept that she has a racist bone in her body. When challenged on whether or not she thought the emails were funny, here was her reply,

    … which is both at the link and in one of the comments above. The link has video of the actual interview, too.

    You know who risks their lives everyday? The people that clean the windows on them big ass buildings downtown. Perspective.

    I kid you a not, a police officer just told me privately that Officer Michael Slager would’ve likely been given an award later if not filmed. Ew.

    Outrage and apathy as another unarmed black man is gunned down by police

    How could something like this happen? After Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teen, was shot and killed by a policeman in Ferguson, Mo.; after Eric Garner, an unarmed African-American man selling loose cigarettes, was choked to death by a police officer in Staten Island; after Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old African-American boy who was playing with a pellet gun, was shot and killed by police in Cleveland? After months of protests nationwide and Justice Department investigations, how could something like this still happen?

    The sad answer to that also came on Tuesday, in Ferguson. That suburb of St. Louis had seen massive demographic change during the last few decades, with the African-American population rising from 25 percent in 1990 to 67 percent in 2010. Yet the power structure of the city of 21,000 people remained predominantly white. When Brown was shot, the mayor was white, all but one member of the city council was white, no African-Americans served on the school board, and 50 of the 53 officers in the police department (including the chief) were white. The Justice Department’s investigation of the department found a pervasive pattern of racial discrimination by local officials in which blacks were far more likely to be stopped, searched and arrested than whites, were more likely to have force used against them and received harsher sentences than whites for the same crimes.

    Tuesday was that community’s chance to set matters straight: a municipal election. Some candidates lined up to embrace the cause of the protesters who have been a constant presence in Ferguson since August, and others stood closer to the side of the existing political establishment. If ever an election has been more clearly a chance to shape a city’s future, we can’t think of it.

    Yet only 30 percent of the city’s eligible voters bothered to cast ballots. Granted, that’s a lot better than the last municipal election, when only about 12 percent turned out. The election yielded two new African-American council members, one of whom was identified with the cause of the protesters, one of whom was not. But what the people who voted chose is not so important as the fact that most Ferguson residents still chose apathy. After everything that has happened in Ferguson during the last nine months, 70 percent of people still couldn’t be bothered to make their voices heard in the most basic yet most consequential way.

    If what happened in Ferguson isn’t enough to get the people of Ferguson involved, what hope do we have that the rest of the nation could stand together and demand change? How could we ever have expected that legislators in Maryland would listen to Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s call for reforms to make it easier to hold bad cops accountable? How could we expect them to come up with standards for the use of police body cameras? And how can we expect to see an end to the tragic parade of unarmed black men killed by the police?

  213. rq says

    This simple comic strip concisely explains the complexities of white privilege. Basically a series of panels showing black people getting screwed at all points in life.

    The concept of “white privilege” (brilliantly explained in Peggy McIntosh’s essay, “Unpacking The Invisible Backpack”) can be a difficult one to grasp. After all, the entire idea of “privilege” is that it’s invisible to those who have it. Thankfully, a new comic from Barry Deutsch of Lefty Cartoons called “Bob And Race” lays out some of the many factors that contribute to white privilege. Specifically, the comic looks at privilege from a historical lens. In this case, the central figure, Bob, may not think he’s benefited from racism, but a quick trip through recent history shows the factors that gave him a step up from the day he was born.

    For instance, Bob’s grandparents were more easily able to get homes and jobs in the overtly racist past while their black peers were shut out of such advantages. Their stability directly helped Bob’s parents and Bob himself, who was also more likely to be given the “benefit of the doubt” by society when it came to behavior that black people are disproportionally arrested for (for instance, drug possession).

    The comic is a brilliant illustration of the ways in which white privilege is embedded in so many of the realities white people take for granted.

    Laughing Couples. Early 1900’s paintings of North Africans. #Africa Because I needed some paintings of laughing couples.

    Nation Hopeful There Will Be Equally Random Chance Of Justice For Future Victims Of Police Abuse. The Onion.

    Describing the murder charges brought against a white South Carolina police officer who was filmed shooting an unarmed black man as an encouraging step in the right direction, the American populace reported Wednesday they were hopeful that future victims of police abuse would have an equally random chance of receiving justice. “The number of law enforcement officers who have shot unarmed civilians and gone free over the past year has been extremely discouraging, but the fact that this policeman was arrested so swiftly shows that there can be justice for victims so long as a bystander is nearby, has a camera phone on them, captures the whole interaction, and several dozen other circumstances play out in the precise sequence,” said North Charleston, SC resident Jenine Williams, echoing the sentiments of millions of Americans who told reporters they have faith that, as long as a fair-minded eyewitness happens to be passing by at the exact right time; has the inclination to stop and film; an unobstructed view; enough battery life and memory on their phone; a steady hand; the forethought to start filming an interaction with the police before it escalates into violence; is close enough to get detailed footage, but far enough away to avoid being shot themselves or seen by the officer and potentially having their phone confiscated; and it is daytime, then justice would certainly be served. “I have a 17-year-old son who I worry about every day when he heads out into our neighborhood. But now I can take heart knowing that if, God forbid, he were ever in a situation like this, there would be a tiny fraction of a chance that every single element would fall into place and my family would receive the fair and just legal outcome we deserve.” The nation added that they were also hopeful the situation would change the behavior of police officers by making them look around to see if anyone was filming them before they moved from excessive to lethal force.

    Yuh, it’s written as a single paragraph. :/

    Frank Ocean to Release Album in July

    Frank Ocean has announced a follow-up album to his highly acclaimed 2012 release, “Channel Orange.” The new album, along with a publication, are scheduled for release in July, said his publicist, Molly Kawachi, of ID-PR.

    A photo posted on his website shows Mr. Ocean with a stack of magazines and includes the hashtags “#ISSUE1 #ALBUM3 #JULY2015 #BOYSDONTCRY.” The publication’s confirmed title is “Boys Don’t Cry.” The album is still untitled.

    Mr. Ocean released a single track, “Memrise,” last November and recently appeared on Beyoncé’s self-titled album and Jay-Z’s “Magna Carta Holy Grail.”

    “Channel Orange” won the Grammy for Best Urban Contemporary Album, and landed on the Top 10 lists of four New York Times critics in 2012.

    Off-duty #Chicago Police Det. #DanteServin is expected to stand trial tomorrow in the shooting death of #RekiaBoyd. Hoping to live Tweet.

    The similarities in these pics make me sick.They show no remorse.They don’t try 2 save them. #WalterScott #MikeBrown Visual comparison between Darren WIlson standing over Michael Brown Jr., and Slager standing over Scott.

  214. rq says

    A series of reminders.
    Remember, Darren Wilson said that Mike Brown reached for his gun and that’s why he killed him. This story reminds me of #WalterScott.
    Remember, the Miami Gardens police said #LavallHall nearly killed them but the video shows Lavall running away. Reminds me of #WalterScott.
    Remember, Zion police shot #JustusHowell twice in the back after encountering the police. Justus died. Reminds me of #WalterScott.
    Remember, the LAPD said unarmed #EzellFord reached for the gun. The autopsy showed a muzzle print in his back. Reminds me of #WalterScott.
    Remember, the STL Metro PD said #VonderritMyers reached for a gun. He was shot 6 times in the back. Reminds me of #WalterScott.
    Remember, Utah police said #DarrienHunt lunged at them with a sword. But Darrien was shot 6 times from behind. Reminds me of #WalterScott.

  215. The Mellow Monkey says

    The Police Are America’s Terrorists

    Witnessing all these shootings and killings creates a constant state of terror within minorities, not altogether different from the effect larger populations feel witnessing passenger planes flying into buildings, or gunmen cutting their way through schools and shopping malls, or children blowing themselves up in cramped bazaars. The issue doesn’t involve absolute numbers; it involves the effect of knowing that at any time, your number could come up.

    The difference is that when the Boston Marathon is bombed, or people fly planes into buildings, or an aggrieved loner goes on a killing spree, we, as a society, pursue justice to the very ends of the earth, if only to sleep better at night. When killer cops rarely, if ever, even step foot in court, let alone get convicted, the absence of immediate justice or punishment leads to an unaddressed fear. It’s a fear of ubiquity; a fear that the carnage can be easily replicated, virtually anywhere, by virtually anyone; a fear that our lives don’t matter.

  216. rq says

    Hip-Hop Reacts to the Fatal Shooting of Walter Scott by Police Officer Michael Slager

    White North Charleston, S. C. police officer Michael Slager was charged with murder for fatally shooting Walter Scott, 50-year-old father of four, while he was running away from the officer in North Charleston on Saturday (April 4). The incident was captured on video by a witness. Scott’s father said on NBC News the video of the incident prevented the shooting from being “swept under the rug.” Slager was denied bail at his court hearing yesterday (April 7). The video is disgusting and very sad. Hip-hop reacted to the incident on social media. Here’s what they had to say.

    A series of tweets, videos and images.

    GoFundMe Shuts Down Campaign For Officer Charged With Murder Of Walter Scott

    A fundraising page dedicated to South Carolina police officer Michael Slager was shut down by GoFundMe on Wednesday.

    Slager was charged with the murder of 50-year-old Walter Scott after video surfaced of him shooting at the unarmed man eight times. GoFundMe’s public relations manager, Kelsea Little, told The Huffington Post that the page’s removal was “due to a violation of our terms and conditions.”

    However, Little said GoFundMe was unable to discuss the details of the campaign with anyone other than the organizer because of “privacy concerns.”

    One source of outside financial support for the Slager family will be North Charleston. In a press conference Wednesday, Mayor Keith Summey confirmed that the town would continue to pay for the medical insurance of the officer’s wife, who is eight months pregnant, until the birth of the child.

    Comparisons have been drawn between the shooting of Scott and Ferguson, Missouri, teen Michael Brown, including the online fundraising for the officer involved in the shooting in response to protests against police brutality.

    Controversy swirled around the establishment of two GoFundMe pages that raised money for Darren Wilson, the officer responsible for the fatal shooting of Brown in July. Combined, they had raised nearly half a million dollars before they disappeared from the Internet late August.

    As mentioned, they went to IndieGoGo instead.

    Similar but not the same, here’s one for the beating of Floyd Dent: MCHR Statement on Police Brutality and Misconduct

    The Michigan Coalition of Human Rights (MCHR) condemns the savage beating and arrest of Floyd Dent by Officers of the Inkster Police Department. We call for a sweeping and independent investigation of the Inkster Police Department by the Department of Justice – Civil Rights Division.
    Floyd Dent deserves restitution for his injuries – both mental and physical. Those directly involved – including the Inkster Police Department itself — must be held personally and legally accountable for their actions. However, justice in this case alone is not enough.
    We reject any depiction of this as an isolated incident or as the act of a lone “bad apple” or “rogue cop.” Sadly, it is just one example of the systemic and institutionalized police misconduct and brutality that has plagued our nation’s law enforcement agencies, including Detroit and the surrounding area, for decades. This case, along with several other recent high profile cases, have brought national attention to realities of our justice system that have long been familiar to communities throughout the country.
    The change in policing practices that is needed in Inkster, Metro Detroit and across the country requires a transformation of our law enforcement culture from one that treats us like threats to be neutralized, or as sources of revenue, to one that treats us like charges to be protected and served.
    Commitment and action at all levels of government – federal, state and local – is needed to restore faith in one of society’s most vital institutions.
    MCHR calls on leaders and the communities they serve to organize and mobilize peacefully until an enduring and permanent resolution is reached.

    It’s a weird site to read (pale blue on white), but there’s more on two of the officers involved (Randazzo and Melendez, the Robocop) and on Chief Yost, plus a list of unanswered questions and other cases of police brutality in the region.

    Noose found hanging from tree at North County school

    Authorities said police are investigating after a noose was found hanging from a tree at a school in Florissant.

    The noose was discovered in a tree behind North Tech High School Wednesday morning. After police were called, the noose was taken down.

    The school’s principal sent out a phone message to parents to inform them of what took place.

    Another noose on a school campus. What are these children learning??

    Witness who recorded shooting of Walter Scott speaks out: Cop had control before he shot, with video.

    In an exclusive interview with NBC News, the witness, Feidin Santana, said he could hear North Charleston Police Officer Michael Slager deploying his Taser on Walter Scott when he pulled out his camera phone. He said the two were on the ground before he started filming.

    “I remember the police had control of the situation,” Santana said during the interview (above). “You can hear the sound of a Taser … I believe [Scott] was just trying to get away from the Taser.”

    Slager was arrested Tuesday and charged with murder after the shooting, which occurred during a traffic stop on Saturday. Slager was charged only after the video was released, and the footage pulled the officer’s own account of the incident into question.

    Audio of Slager’s call to dispatch was released today, and there are clear discrepancies between that audio and Santana’s footage. Slager said he felt threatened because Scott allegedly reached for his Taser. Video evidence shows Slager dropping an object near Scott’s body after the shooting.

    Santana has reportedly said he waited to release the footage to see how Slager would report his actions.

    “He wanted to see what reports were coming from the North Charleston Police Department because of the fact that they may have told the truth,” Walter Scott’s brother told TIME on Wednesday. “And when they continued with the lies, he said, ‘I have to come forward.’”

    Santana also said he almost erased the footage, fearing that he’d be “in the same danger” for even possessing it. He told NBC News that he’s emotional for everyone involved.

    “It’s not something that anyone can feel good about,” he said. “[Slager] has his family … but he made a bad decision and you pay for your decisions in this life. There are other ways he could have used to get [Scott] arrested.”

    A bad decision? Seriously?

    Random happy – protestors getting engaged. OMG CONGRATS!! RT @cschredder: So this happened tonight…Congratulations to @Felonious_munk & @youthfullygrown !! Actually, just look at the happy faces and see the humanity.

  217. rq says

    Unlike Walter Scott’s Horrific Killing, Deaths By Police Are Rarely Recorded — They’re Not Even Counted by the Government. This sort of resonates with Mellow Monkey’s comment, above.

    It’s not easy to watch the video of Walter Scott running from officer Michael T. Slager, as Slager pumps not one, not two, but eight shots into his back. It’s an unspeakable horror. But the existence of that video also means that Scott may be one of the few victims of police brutality whose attacker could face justice. Slager has been fired, and charged with murder.

    But most violent encounters with police, including killings, are not recorded on video. In fact, they are not even tracked by the government. It seems incomprehensible that with all the data that is collected about Americans, there is no official count of the number of people killed by the nation’s law enforcement officers—let alone the reasons they were killed. D. Brian Burghart, the editor and publisher of the alternative weekly, Reno News & Review, is hard at work trying to rectify that. His FatalEncounters[dot]org is a project that uses crowd-sourcing and media accounts to create a national database of people who are killed through interactions with police. […]

    DH: Have you reached out to government agencies to help get data for Fatal Encounters? What was their response?

    DBB: I’ve done many public records requests at the federal level and in several states. The responses have covered the gamut, from sending the information without comment or delay, to a delayed response to the request in such a way as to make the information useless, to outright refusal to obey public records laws and challenging me to sue for the information to which every American is entitled.

    DH: Even if you could correctly identify every police homicide, how would this information help people? How would this data help us police the police?

    DBB: I believe that being able to see outcomes over time and across regions will help Americans to identify agencies and policies that get better or worse outcomes in their interactions between police and the rest of us. We’ll be able to see trends like whether people of various races are killed at a rate that’s greater or less than the population. Also, comparing this data to other giant data sources, we’ll be able to research whether veterans are killed at a high rate. We’ll be able to see the effects of poverty on policing and officer-involved homicides. We’ll be able to see which communities kill mentally ill people, and at what rates. We’ll be able to see if communities where police kill more people have more people killing police. With this information, police will be able to look at crime rates and other factors to determine the policies that work in other communities to get the best outcomes for both police and citizens.

    Most fundamentally, we’ll know the numbers of officer-involved homicides in our own communities, so we’ll know whether our own communities have particular problems, and whether we as citizens need to change things.

    DH: What, in your opinion, would make a homicide by police “justified”?

    DBB: Every human being has the right to defend themselves. I’ve looked at thousands of these things now, and most are clearly self-defense. I just don’t think there should be any officer-involved homicides that don’t get a full public scrutiny. These are public employees paid with tax dollars. This is how we are supposed to manage our government personnel in this country.

    DH: Looking at your site, it looks like homicides skyrocketed in recent years. Why is that?

    DBB: While I believe police homicides are increasing, we don’t have the data to prove that yet. Our data makes it look like they skyrocketed in recent years, but that’s just because we haven’t begun the systematic day-by-day searches beginning in 2000, yet. Part of the apparent increase is because of the growth of the Internet, which means we have access to more information each year progressing from 2000. Part of that is because in the early 2000s, digital memory was expensive, so media outlets routinely purged their archives. Also, because of the crowdsourced aspect, people tend to remember the more recent homicides, so they are more likely to report those.

    We have 12 states we believe are “complete”: Montana, South Dakota, Oregon, New York, Nevada, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and Maine. (Florida is within a week or so of completion.) I say “complete” because no matter how complete we think it is, there are homicides that are not reported either in the media or in public records requests, and they’ll crop up from time to time. For example, Las Vegas police reported a homicide to the Wall Street Journal that they did not report to me. I don’t know which it was, because the WSJ just did raw numbers, but we’ll eventually get it.

    DH: Of the data you have collected so far, are there any trends you can extrapolate from it? Is there anything that has shocked you? Is there one specific area of the country where police homicides are most prevalent?

    DBB: I always hesitate to try to extrapolate except in states for which we have “complete” data. This project, the public face of it anyway, has only been going since March. We estimate we’ve only collected 30 percent of the data. Here’s what can be said, though. People of color are killed at greater rates than they exist in the population. Mentally ill people are a high percentage, maybe 25-30 percent, of the people killed by police, particularly when you consider that drug abuse is considered a mental illness. Most people, around 96 percent, of people killed by police are men.

    It sure looks like law enforcement in the western states kill more people per capita than eastern ones, but as Florida progresses, I may have to reassess that statement.

    Some other trends that become apparent aren’t even in the data. One thing that becomes obvious is how lazy the mainstream media is. For example, the race of victims and police are often not reported by media. The media gutlessly lets police withhold names of people they’ve killed on the thinnest of rationales. Media rarely get photos of victims from families, so often the only publicly available image is a mug shot, which of course, works to support the narrative that the person killed is a career criminal.

    The official dispositions of officer-involved homicides are rarely reported. Again, it seems as though the media just assumes if an officer killed somebody, it’s justified, but that creates a de facto collusion to tell the law enforcement story, but not another side.

    More at the link.

    So @Indiegogo is replying with form letters saying they are reviewing the fundraiser for #WalterScott’s killer. Didnt take @gofundme as long.

    South Carolina case spurs new calls for tougher scrutiny when cops kill

    The swift decision of South Carolina officials to charge a police officer with the murder of an unarmed man after video evidence surfaced has not convinced Esaw Garner that such technology alone can tip the scales of justice in favor of those wrongfully killed.

    Her husband Eric Garner’s death last year in a confrontation with the NYPD was captured on a bystander’s video too, she said. But a Staten Island grand jury brought no charges against the officer who used an apparent chokehold to take down Garner during an arrest on suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes.

    “He was actually dying, OK? Screaming he could not breathe, OK? And you see it on camera — and still,” she said. “So all that video-camera nonsense? That’s exactly what is.”

    Garner was in midtown Wednesday at the Rev. Al Sharpton’s annual National Action Network convention, where activists renewed calls for changes in the wake of the South Carolina police killing of a civilian are investigated. She sat flanked by loved ones of other unarmed black men who died in encounters with the police.

    Panelists included the parents and fiancee of Sean Bell, killed in 2006 in a hail of bullets in Jamaica, Queens, and the mother of Michael Brown, whose death in Ferguson, Missouri, became a rallying cry for police accountability. […]

    Asked for comment, a Cuomo spokeswoman said: “The members of this group have endured unspeakable losses and we continue discussions with them and other community activists, criminal justice experts and law enforcement officials throughout this process.”

    Sharpton said he was prepared to go to South Carolina, where Patrolman Michael Thomas Slager had initially claimed that he shot and killed Walter Scott in self-defense when Scott tried to wrest away the officer’s Taser. The video disproved that account and showed Slager firing at the back of the fleeing Scott.

    Sharpton said he wants federal standards set for investigating allegations against police.

    How Police Training Contributes to Avoidable Deaths – from December 2014.

    Police training starts in the academy, where the concept of officer safety is so heavily emphasized that it takes on almost religious significance. Rookie officers are taught what is widely known as the “first rule of law enforcement”: An officer’s overriding goal every day is to go home at the end of their shift. But cops live in a hostile world. They learn that every encounter, every individual is a potential threat. They always have to be on their guard because, as cops often say, “complacency kills.”

    Officers aren’t just told about the risks they face. They are shown painfully vivid, heart-wrenching dash-cam footage of officers being beaten, disarmed, or gunned down after a moment of inattention or hesitation. They are told that the primary culprit isn’t the felon on the video, it is the officer’s lack of vigilance. And as they listen to the fallen officer’s last, desperate radio calls for help, every cop in the room is thinking exactly the same thing: “I won’t ever let that happen to me.” That’s the point of the training.

    More pointed lessons come in the form of hands-on exercises. One common scenario teaches officers that a suspect leaning into a car can pull out a gun and shoot at officers before they can react. Another teaches that even when an officer are pointing a gun at a suspect whose back is turned, the suspect can spin around and fire first. Yet another teaches that a knife-carrying suspect standing 20 feet away can run up to an officer and start stabbing before the officer can get their gun out of the holster. There are countless variations, but the lessons are the same: Hesitation can be fatal. So officers are trained to shoot before a threat is fully realized, to not wait until the last minute because the last minute may be too late.

    But what about the consequences of a mistake? After all, that dark object in the suspect’s hands could be a wallet, not a gun. The occasional training scenario may even make that point. But officers are taught that the risks of mistake are less—far less—than the risks of hesitation. A common phrase among cops pretty much sums it up: “Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.”

    In most police shootings, officers don’t shoot out of anger or frustration or hatred. They shoot because they are afraid. And they are afraid because they are constantly barraged with the message that that they should be afraid, that their survival depends on it. Not only do officers hear it in formal training, they also hear it informally from supervisors and older officers. They talk about it with their peers. They see it on police forums and law enforcement publications. For example, three of the four stories mentioned on the cover of this month’s Police Magazine are about dealing with threats to officer safety.

    Officers’ actions are grounded in their expectations, and they are taught to expect the worst. The officers who shot John Crawford may have honestly believed that he was raising his rifle to a shooting position even though security camera footage shows him on the phone, casually swinging the BB gun back and forth. The same may be true of the Phoenix officer who shot an unarmed man because he thought, mistakenly, that the suspect had a gun in his waistband. The officers saw what they were afraid of. They saw what they were trained to see. And they did what they had been taught to do. That’s the problem. […]

    Use-of-force training should also emphasize de-escalation and flexible tactics in a way that minimizes the need to rely on force, particularly lethal force. Police agencies that have emphasized de-escalation over assertive policing, such as Richmond, California, have seen a substantial decrease in officer uses of force, including lethal force, without seeing an increase in officer fatalities (there is no data on assaults). It is no surprise that the federal Department of Justice reviews de-escalation training (or the lack thereof) when it investigates police agencies for civil rights violations. More comprehensive tactical training would also help prevent unnecessary uses of force. Instead of rushing in to confront someone, officers need to be taught that it is often preferable to take an oblique approach that protects them as they gather information or make contact from a safe distance. Relatedly, as I’ve written elsewhere, a temporary retreat—what officers call a “tactical withdrawal”—can, in the right circumstances, maintain safety while offering alternatives to deadly force.

    Officers must also be trained to think beyond the gun-belt. The pepper spray, baton, Taser, and gun that are so easily accessible to officers are meant to be tools of last resort, to be used when non-violent tactics fail or aren’t an option. By changing officer training, agencies could start to shift the culture of policing away from the “frontal assault” mindset and toward an approach that emphasizes preserving the lives that officers are charged with protecting. Earlier this year, officers took just that approach in Kalamazoo, Michigan, relying on tactics and communication rather than weaponry to deal with a belligerent man carrying a rifle. As a result, a 40-minute standoff ended with a handshake, not an ambulance. The Seattle Police Department offered an even more dramatic example in 1997, when they eventually ended an 11-hour standoff with a mentally ill man wielding a samurai sword by making creative use of a fire-hose and a ladder. The suspect was apprehended with only minor bruises, and no officers were injured.

    Finally, police executives need to move beyond the reflexive refusal to engage in meaningful review of police uses of force. Police may act in the heat of the moment, although not nearly as often as is commonly believed, but that should not insulate their choices from review. If anything, it should lead us to review more thoroughly the factors that led to that heated moment. That review should be focused not on pointing fingers, although holding officers accountable is certainly critical, but on identifying the factors that contribute to the ultimate use of force. Walter Katz, Deputy Director of the Inspector General’s Office that oversees the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, has suggested that police shootings be reviewed by applying the Human Factors Analysis and Classification system used to investigate plane crashes. The emphasis is on identifying that factors that contributed to the error so that the error can be prevented from happening again. Officer training should be constantly revised to incorporate the lessons learned from those reviews.

    Also more at the link, all written in large paragraphs.

    Here, have a break: The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison

    The only person not bothered by the glare and the room’s awkward giddiness was Morrison herself, who sat at the head of the table, in a thin, black linen caftan, a wool beret and with a sizable diamond ring on one hand. Morrison wears her age like an Elizabethan regent or a descendant of Othello via Lorain, Ohio. Long before we met, I read that she could be impervious at times, coquettish at others. What was evident that day in Katonah was that had she so much as lifted a finger, every person in the room — the studio’s director and his engineer, her P.R. person from Knopf, her publisher and two young women from the audiobooks division of Random House — would have stopped what they were doing to ask if they could assist. Not because she required it, but because the unspoken consensus was that the person who produced the 11 novels that Morrison has written, the person those books came out of, was deserving of the fuss.

    It takes a long time to record a book. Many authors use actors. But that’s not how Morrison hears her own sentences, so she does these tedious sessions herself. That day, she would go into a narrow, low-lit booth, carrying a small pillow for her back, sit down and read from her new book for hours. We followed along in the control room, listening to her barely-a-whisper voice read from a chapter called “Sweetness”: “It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and have no idea how it happened.” […]

    During her breaks, Morrison would take her place at the table, and within minutes she was surrounded. Did she want the heater closer? Did she want tea? As a defense against our smothering neediness, she tried to preserve herself, the private person inside the author, by telling us stories. My mention of New Orleans prompted her to tell a tale that she heard from a friend that must be passed along. It goes like this: There was once a man who lived in New Orleans. A city that is like no other place in this country. Now, this man’s name was Big Lunch, and folks called him that because he was known for always coming around midday and asking for whatever food people had to spare. He put that food in his pockets, in his coat, in his pants, and when that food went bad, he didn’t mind. You could smell this man coming around even when he was blocks away because he never bathed. And of course, over time all that food and dirt began to crust and that crust caked over his skin. Somehow or other, Big Lunch got into an accident, and when they got him to the hospital, they washed him. They washed all of his dirt and crust off. All of it. But as days passed, instead of getting better, Big Lunch began to get sicker, sicker, until finally one day he took his last breath and died. “Because,” she said, looking intently at me with a smile that had nothing to do with anything funny, “those people didn’t know that all of that crust was what had been keeping him alive.”

    Morrison is a woman of guardrails and many boundaries; she keeps them up in order to do the work. The work “protects,” she told me. “It’s a serious protection: emotionally, even intellectually, from the world.” Journalists from Europe and elsewhere call these days, one after the other, and they try to be coy, but she can tell what they really want to know. “They are just calling to see when I’m going to die.” She laughed and said: “So I’ll play it up a bit and say, ‘Oh, today my arms hurt, my chest is sore.’ Because, me? I’m not going anywhere soon.”

    She wasn’t too interested in her 84th birthday, she said, until President Obama’s office called the other day to plan a lunch. When she told us this, oohs and aahs went around the room. Someone asked her where she was going to have it. “Huh,” she said, as if this were the silliest question ever posed. “At their house! At the White House!” Of course. “Well, actually, it isn’t a lunch; it is a dinner, and they said, ‘Now, Toni, this will be very informal, don’t put yourself out, you can even wear jeans if you like.’ ” She paused and shook her head slightly, saying to no one in particular: “Jeans! I’ve never worn jeans in my life, and I’m certainly not going to wear them to the White House. I mean.” Then she sighed. As if she couldn’t even explain it all to us, because we wouldn’t get it. Like we wouldn’t get how far she had come. […]

    For years, dozens upon dozens of prominent black writers — people like Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, Jayne Cortez, Nikki Giovanni and John Edgar Wideman — were in orbit with one another. Some of these black writers had no formal affiliations, but many others organized themselves under efforts like Baraka’s Black Arts Movement, where they could share the duty of not only making art but also writing themselves into the world. They were not just producing poems, plays and novels, they were also considering the obligations of their specific genre — black literature — and its defining aspects and distinct functions. We no longer connect Morrison to that earlier, loosely defined constellation of black writing, but she was there, and she was there long before she was a novelist. During the years that she worked at Random House, she published books by Muhammad Ali, Henry Dumas, Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones, whom she discovered in the 1970s. Jones’s manuscript was so impressive that when Morrison read it for the first time, uppermost in her mind, she once wrote, was “that no novel about any black woman could ever be the same after this.” It was Morrison who helped promote Ali’s book and who once hired members of the Fruit of Islam to work security for him. She also reviewed a biography of Angela Davis for The New York Times in 1972, slamming the author for being “another simpatico white girl who felt she was privy to the secret of how black revolutionaries got that way.”

    And when the poet Henry Dumas went to his death, the way so many black boys and men do, it was Morrison, who never had a chance to meet him and published his work posthumously, who sent around a book-party announcement that was part invitation, part consolation, which read: “In 1968, a young black man, Henry Dumas, went through a turnstile at a New York City subway station. A transit cop shot him in the chest and killed him. Circumstances surrounding his death remain unclear. Before that happened, however, he had written some of the most beautiful, moving and profound poetry and fiction that I have ever in my life read.” […]

    On one level, Morrison’s project is obvious: It is a history that stretches across 11 novels and just as many geographies and eras to tell a story that is hardly chronological but is thematically chained and somewhat continuous. This is the project most readily understood and accepted by even her least generous critics. But then there is the other mission, the less obvious one, the one in which Morrison often does the unthinkable as a minority, as a woman, as a former member of the working class: She democratically opens the door to all of her books only to say, “You can come in and you can sit, and you can tell me what you think, and I’m glad you are here, but you should know that this house isn’t built for you or by you.” Here, blackness isn’t a commodity; it isn’t inherently political; it is the race of a people who are varied and complicated. This is where her works become less of a history and more of a liturgy, still stretching across geographies and time, but now more pointedly, to capture and historicize: This is how we pray, this is how we escape, this is how we hurt, this is how we repent, this is how we move on. It is a project that, although ignored by many critics, evidences itself on the page. It has allowed Morrison to play with language, to take chances with how stories unravel and to consistently resist the demand to create an empirical understanding of black life in America. Instead, she makes black life — regular, quotidian black life, the kind that doesn’t sell out concert halls or sports stadiums — complex, fantastic and heroic, despite its devaluation. It is both aphorism and beyond aphorism, and a result has been pure possibility.

    Often, in black literature, it seems as though the author is performing two roles: that of the explorer and the explainer. Morrison does not do this. Morrison writes stories that are more aesthetic than overtly political, better expressed in accurate Tolstoyan detail than in generalizing sentiments blunted with anger. Most important, she is an author who writes to tease and complicate her world, not to convince others it is valid.

    “What I’m interested in is writing without the gaze, without the white gaze,” she told me. “In so many earlier books by African-American writers, particularly the men, I felt that they were not writing to me. But what interested me was the African-American experience throughout whichever time I spoke of. It was always about African-American culture and people — good, bad, indifferent, whatever — but that was, for me, the universe.”

    Lots more at the link. What a fascinating woman!

  218. rq says

    Oops, going to also quote this long bit from the Toni Morrison interview:

    Two months later, Morrison was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. A few years after that, she won the Nobel Prize. She is still, 20 years later, the only living American laureate for literature. The last time one was awarded to an American-born writer was in 1962 to John Steinbeck. And yet in their act of defiance, these 48 black letter writers had observed a truth that the fact of Morrison’s awards cannot alter: that they were working within a culture that fundamentally wasn’t interested in them and they therefore had recognized what the establishment at large had refused to; that, now and then, writers of color must struggle to merely tread water in a sea of what another Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Junot Díaz, described to me as “the unbearable whiteness” of American literature.

    This is a problem even for Morrison. She is often discussed in terms of her audience, the older black women who fan themselves with her book covers at her readings, the teenage girls who sigh on buses and trains while reading “Sula” for class, the young male rappers who have interpolated lines from “The Bluest Eye” into their songs. It is this audience that her critics dismiss derisively, suggesting that Morrison panders to them, with long, poetic sentences and stories about broken black women. It is also true that a sizable portion of her audience simply looks like her, in a world where black Americans, and people of color in general, are still perceived to be nonreaders. But of course Morrison, rather than feeling marginalized or slighted by that criticism, takes delight in it. In an interview for The Paris Review, she said: “I would like to write novels that were unmistakably mine but nevertheless fit first into African-American traditions and, second of all, this whole thing called literature.” She added: “It’s very important to me that my work be African-American. If it assimilates into a different or larger pool, so much the better. But I shouldn’t be asked to do that. Joyce is not asked to do that. Tolstoy is not. I mean, they can all be Russian, French, Irish or Catholic, they write out of where they come from, and I do too.” It is a reply that stumps her interviewer. First African-American, she asks her, as if Morrison had stuttered. Yes, Morrison replies. Rather than the whole of literature she asks. “Oh, yes,” Morrison replies.
    Continue reading the main story

    This was a radical idea. Morrison wanted to not only broaden the tastes of the industry, she also wanted to change the fate of a literary culture that had to either diversify or die. She told me that the books she edited and wrote were her contribution to the civil rights movement. By publishing black geniuses, she was also forcing the ranks of the big publishing houses and the industry to become more hospitable to her point of view, to the idea that a black writer could write for a black audience first and still write literature. She was more humanist than nationalistic, more visionary than didactic, but to some extent her editorial work was political. “We don’t need any more writers as solitary heroes,” Morrison said in her 1981 keynote address at the American Writers Congress. “We need a heroic writer’s movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious.”

    What we know now is that the inclusive, empowered revolution that Morrison raised a battle cry for has failed to come to pass. Over the last decade or so, a righteous assault on the hegemony that exists in American literature has come to the fore. Suddenly, the old guard’s oft-repeated line that people of color don’t read, that they don’t submit, that their work isn’t up to snuff was being widely and publicly debunked by workshops run by programs like Kimbilio, Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation and the Asian-American Writers’ Workshop. But what has remained more elusive is the part that Morrison figured out as an editor: What happens after the workshop and the head count? How do people change an establishment? How do people change an industry?

    Morrison serves as a totem for so much of this energy. It is not just that her writing is singular; her efforts to change the lay of the land have also been singular. Junot Díaz recalled to me that seeing Toni Morrison on the cover of Time was revelatory for him as a young writer for this exact reason. “At that moment,” he said, “you could feel the demographic shift, you could feel in the ’90s what the future was going to be and when you look at the literary world now, and it’s almost like that future was never realized. The literary world has tripled down on its whiteness.” When I asked him to explain, he said: “Well, if you think about what the colors and faces and the backgrounds of our young people are in all of our public schools, and then you look at the writers who this society valorizes, the disconnect is intergalactic. It’s almost as if they saw the future in the Time cover and said, ‘Well, we’ve got to make sure to get Franzen on the cover as a prayer against, or an attempt to exorcise, that imminent future.’ ”

    Transit coming to Ferguson – see attached document for details.

    TIME’s new cover: Black Lives Matter. Cute little intro video/gif/vine that uses footage of Scott being shot.

    Chicago Police Officer in Fatal Shooting of Rekia Boyd on Trial Thursday

    Officer Dante Servin, now 46, was off-duty when he opened fire at a group of people near Douglas Park on March 21, 2012, striking one man in his hand and 22-year-old Boyd in her head. Servin claimed a man in the group had pulled a gun, but police never recovered a weapon, and prosecutors said the man was holding a cell phone.

    Servin was indicted on charges of involuntary manslaughter, reckless discharge of a firearm and reckless conduct. He was ordered released on $75,000 bond in November 2013. Since then, he’s continued to work for the Chicago Police Department on desk duty.

    The city has already paid a $4.5 million settlement to Boyd’s estate.

    Boyd’s brother, Martinez Sutton, said his family is hopeful for a conviction, but he doesn’t like the odds.

    “If we look at the past history of all the so-called ‘bad’ police shootings,” Sutton told DNAinfo Chicago, “or all of the people who’ve been killed by police, nobody’s really been punished for it.”

    He added: “It’s always in the back of my mind that the officer [who shot my sister] may not be found guilty. The chances look slim to us that they will actually put this officer behind bars.”

    So there you go, being charged means nothing. Or nothing much.

    Missouri’s top court weighs law limiting municipal revenue from traffic fines and fees

    In a case that could have implications for efforts to reform the state’s municipal court system, the Missouri Supreme Court is weighing whether a 2013 version of the so-called “Macks Creek” law violates the state Constitution.

    The suit filed by the Missouri Municipal League does not challenge the 30 percent cap the current version of the law places on revenue generated by traffic fines and fees. Instead, the League challenged an enforcement mechanism inserted in the law in 2013 — municipal courts are blocked from hearing traffic cases if the city doesn’t comply with the law, including filing financial reports with the state auditor’s office, and sending any excess traffic fines revenue to the state.

    Attorneys for the Municipal League made four basic arguments:

    – The enforcement mechanism violates the state’s separation of powers doctrine by improperly limiting the jurisdiction of the municipal courts and the right of the Missouri Supreme Court to regulate the lower courts.
    – The mechanism violates the constitutionally protected right to an open court by preventing peoplewho have gotten a traffic ticket from having their case heard in the municipal court.

    “They’re not coming in and saying, ‘We’re not going to let these municipalities police these areas any more, or issue any more tickets,'” said Jane Dueker, an attorney for the Municipal League who was an assistant attorney general under Jay Nixon when he was attorney general. “They’re saying that once those [tickets] are issued, we’re going to stop the court from hearing them.” […]

    Advocates for municipal court reforms also filed a brief in support of the law. They argued that a close reading of Missouri laws and the Constitution shows that municipal courts can’t keep any of the money from traffic fines and fees, and therefore the entire municipal court system should be thrown out.

    “If we are going to allow 81 municipal courts to exist in St. Louis County, and if those courts are going to serve as revenue generators, then we need some limits on the system, and that limit is the Macks Creek enforcement provision,” said Marie DeFer, a student at the Saint Louis University School of Law.

    The link has more.

    “If you care anything about #WalterScott you shld do what Ferguson did… They now have [3] blk city council members”

    Via Crip Dyke, Why I Hate Being Called Articulate

    I hate to generalize, but in my experience I’ve come across far too many white people who use the word to compliment a black person for speaking “standard” English. 
During the 2008 Presidential campaign Vice President Joe Biden responded to the ascendancy of Barack Obama this way: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Soon enough, and rightly so, Biden had a lot of explaining to do. Not only had he used that red-flag word in this context, “articulate”; what the hell did he mean by expressing surprise that a black man would be “clean”?

Biden’s subsequent statements on the matter enacted the next common white tendency in such cases–instead of expressing a new understanding of why such words strike many as offensive, he and his campaign workers repeatedly argued that he hadn’t meant for them to be offensive.

    I think that while white praise of black eloquence can come across as surprise that a black person could be so well-spoken, it can also convey, sometimes, an appreciation for an extra element–sometimes style or grace, sometimes wit or rapidity of ideas–extra layers of oratory. But again, to express even that different and more nuanced form of appreciation of the way a person talks, before addressing the content of what that person says, can come across as flat out condescending.

  219. rq says

    Missouri Legislature reluctant to require police body cameras

    State Sen. Jamilah Nasheed grew emotional when she watched a video Tuesday of Walter Scott, a black man, being gunned down by a white police officer in South Carolina.

    Nasheed, D-St. Louis, watched it over and over again. And all she could think about was Michael Brown’s death eight months ago in Ferguson.

    No known video footage exists of Brown’s shooting, which left the community to sort through sometimes conflicting witness statements and police explanations. In November, a grand jury chose not to indict then-Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson in Brown’s shooting, and a federal investigation later found no civil rights violations in his death.

    Scott, 50, was shot and killed Saturday by police Officer Michael Slager in North Charleston, S.C. Slager initially said that he fired at Scott after a struggle and that he feared for his life. But a video showed Slager firing eight times at a fleeing Scott, who was unarmed. After authorities saw the video, Slager was charged with murder and fired from the department.

    To Nasheed, the incident underscores the importance of police body cameras, which bring a “certain level of accountability.” She has filed a bill in the Missouri Legislature that would require large police departments across the state to use body cameras. But few in the Legislature’s Republican majority agree with her, even after the events in South Carolina.

    Lawmakers filed at least nine body camera bills this session, but only one has made substantial progress, receiving about an hour of debate on the Senate floor last month.

    That bill, sponsored by Sen. Doug Libla, R-Poplar Bluff, would bar the state from requiring law enforcement officers to wear or attach cameras to their vehicles. He said Wednesday that the decision should be left to the city, adding that the South Carolina shooting video didn’t change his position.

    The measure also would allow agencies to keep video recordings made by cameras secret. Libla said senators were tweaking that wording before the measure was brought back up on the floor for debate. Senate Majority Leader Ron Richard, R-Joplin, says he has no intention of bringing the bill back up on the floor until issues with the state’s Sunshine Law are worked out.

    More waffling at the link.

    St. Louis police launch new unit focused on community engagement

    City officials and the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department announced Wednesday the formation of the Community Engagement and Organizational Development Division (CEOD), an office focused on strengthening relationships between the department and the citizens they serve.

    The CEOD was formed to meet the needs of policing in the 21st century and ensure equal and respectful treatment while providing the highest quality of service to citizens.

    A police lieutenant, two sergeants, and three officers comprise the unit.

    Through various community outreach programs and strategies, the CEOD’s overall mission is to build, strengthen and sustain trusting relationships and partnerships within the city’s 79 neighborhoods.

    Along with implementing community outreach programs, the CEOD will focus on organizational development and internal training. Training programs focused on ethics, de-escalation tactics, and implicit biases will provide officers with the tools necessary to better serve and communicate with citizens.

    “The public’s trust in their police department, transparency and mutual respect are all paramount to building strong community partnerships,” said St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson. “Through organizational development, the CEOD will ensure officers have the training to more effectively communicate with citizens. It’s proven: officers cannot do their job alone. By engaging citizens, we can all work together to prevent and solve crime, making our city a safe place to live, work and visit.”

    Discussion about planting evidence by self-described cops.

    There is now video backing up witnesses’ claims that Phillip White was killed by police. Police let a K-9 maul him while unconscious.
    I’m not going to share the video here. But in the video, the cop is clearly beating Phillip White while he’s limp, and sics the dog on him.

    Protestors: “If you believe all lives matter but you can’t say black lives matter, there might be a problem there.” #WalterScott

  220. rq says

    Officer who shot man had prior excessive force complaint

    The white South Carolina police officer charged with murder for shooting an unarmed black man in the back was allowed to stay on the force despite a 2013 complaint that he used excessive force against another unarmed black man.

    In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, Mario Givens recounted Wednesday how he was awakened before dawn one morning by loud banging on the front door of his family’s North Charleston home.

    On the porch was Patrolman Michael Thomas Slager, the officer now charged in the shooting death of Walter Lamer Scott, which was captured in dramatic cellphone footage by a bystander Saturday.

    Givens, who was clad only in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, cracked open his door and asked what the officer wanted.

    “He said he wanted to come in but didn’t say why,” said Givens, now 33. “He never said who he was looking for.”

    Then, without warning, Slager pushed in the door, he said.

    “Come outside or I’ll tase you,” he quoted the officer as saying, adding: “I didn’t want that to happen to me, so I raised my arms over my head, and when I did, he tased me in my stomach anyway.”

    Givens said the pain from the stun gun was so intense that he dropped to the floor and began calling for his mother, who also was in the home. At that point, he said another police officer came into the house and they dragged him outside and threw him to the ground. He was handcuffed and put in a squad car.

    Though initially accused of resisting the officers, Givens was later released without charge.

    Asked about the 2013 incident on Wednesday, North Charleston police spokesman Spencer Pryor said the department plans to review the case to see whether its decision to exonerate Slager was correct. Pryor said he had no timetable for the review.

    No timetable for the review? Well then I won’t hold my breath.

    James Baldwin writing about police brutality in 1966. Eerie. Some things never change it seems. Text attached.

    As Video Exposes Walter Scott Police Killing, Why Is the Man Who Filmed Eric Garner’s Death in Jail?

    As a South Carolina police officer faces murder charges after his fatal shooting of unarmed Walter Scott was caught on video, we look at what happened to the man who filmed Eric Garner’s fatal chokehold on Staten Island. While no police officers were indicted for Garner’s death, the man who filmed the attack, Ramsey Orta, is now locked up in jail after facing what he described as harassment by local police. Orta was first arrested on an unrelated gun charge the day after the Staten Island coroner declared Garner’s death to be a homicide. He was later arrested and jailed on a drug charge. His mother, brother and wife have all been arrested too. Supporters have accused the New York City Police Department of targeting Orta’s family for releasing the Garner video. We are joined by Ramsey Orta’s aunt, Lisa Mercado, as well as Orta family attorneys, William Aronin and Ken Perry.

    Video, with full transcript promised for later.

    Missing cams & audio-so why is #StuartFitzgerald facing prison? Unexplained use force @wusa9 That’s the guy pushed into the road by an officer of the law.

    Ferguson’s election favored experience and organization

    Experience mattered. So did name recognition.

    And now comes the difficult task of governing a city that has recently lost its city manager and police chief and must reach an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in the next few weeks.

    Tuesday’s victors were Brian Fletcher, a former mayor; Wesley Bell, a municipal court judge in Velda City; and Ella Jones, a former Mary Kay sales director who quit her job in order to run for a seat on the council.

    Fletcher, a 28-year politician and founder of the “I Love Ferguson” campaign, said it was the most difficult race he had ever run. Paid canvassers for his opponent Bob Hudgins as well as Lee Smith, a candidate in the 3rd Ward, visited neighborhoods in recent days. But those efforts had limited effects.

    Tony Rice, a local protester and activist who helped with Hudgins’ campaign, said the canvassers often didn’t know enough about the local issues to be convincing.

    “People were knocking on doors who didn’t even know who the candidates were,” Rice said. “There was nothing there to make that connection.”

    The Hudgins and Smith campaigns were both managed by Patricia Bynes, the high profile Ferguson Township Committeewoman, but apparently her organization wasn’t enough in the end.

    Bell, who had an unsuccessful bid for the St. Louis County Council last summer, drew from his experience on that campaign.

    “Obviously that was part of it,” said Dan Peterson, Bell’s campaign manager. “Most of our volunteers helped for the previous campaign.”

    And a few candidates from this election are promising to run next time there is an opportunity. So that’s nice.

  221. rq says

    The Cops Hate Being Filmed. So Why Are They OK With Body Cameras? They are?

    Cop watch is the practice of filming police interactions with individuals. Patrols usually consist of about half a dozen people with at least two layers of cameras: a front team and a back team a few feet away. If an officer tries to infringe on the rights of the front team, perhaps seizing their cameras, the second string will have it on video. Dennis Flores, founder of activist organization El Grito de Sunset Park, has been organizing against police brutality for twenty years, and learned early on that cop watching with a team is much safer than cop watching alone. In 2002, while he was trying to document a police encounter with a student, he was arrested by ten to fifteen police officers, one officer bashing him on the head with his walkie-talkie. Afterwards, Flores realized he couldn’t cop watch alone. He started training other people in his community and developed a more complex method in which cop-watch teams would go out and “build a chain of cameras, watching over each other at various distances, at various angles. So the people that are immediately up close, they might get the footage but then when the cops see cameras all around them they’ll be hesitant to try to take those cameras away or to attack people.”

    Cop-watching teams continue to grow around New York City. There are numerous cop-watch patrols in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Harlem and Queens—some are independent while others are trained by and connected to different police accountability organizations. In October 2014 the Justice Committee, CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities and Malcolm X Grassroots Movement held five cop-watch trainings, one in each of the five boroughs. They ended up training about 250 people—double the usual attendance for their trainings. The trainings in October focused on “how to observe and document police activity as an individual in your everyday life,” according to Aidge Patterson of the Justice Committee.

    Despite popular belief, the main purpose of cop watch is not to post the footage publicly, although posting can be a tactic to put certain precincts and officers under increased scrutiny. There are many different purposes of cop watching—the most immediate one: police officers may change how they’re interacting with someone when they realize a camera is watching them. Julien Terrell, on the Harlem cop-watch team and also an organizer with Brotherhood/Sister Sol, also sees cop watch as a way to “build a culture of resistance.” If someone is facing charges after a police encounter such as resisting arrest, disorderly conduct or assault on a police officer, cop-watch videos can be used to aid the defendant’s team. After filming an arrest, Flores works to get the person a lawyer and hands over the footage to be used in court.

    Cop-watch footage can have a great effect in court, where juries frequently trust police officers’ testimony. In June, a 17-year-old resident of Sunset Park was arrested while filming an officer and charged with second-degree assault on a police officer. Flores, who filmed the interaction, described it as follows:

    “This one kid who was filming [the police]. He was up close and he was by himself. There’s a woman who gets shoved onto the ground. [Then] the cops grabs the kid, steals his camera from him—I say ‘steal’ because the camera didn’t show up as evidence later on, it disappeared. But luckily we recorded it from different angles. The kid gets his head bashed in with a nightstick. The cop swings a second time and accidentally misses and cracks the head of another police officer but blames the kid. The kids gets charged with second-degree felony assault on an officer.”

    The 17-year-old defendant was facing fifteen years in prison. He and the arresting officer testified before a grand jury in August. The grand jury also watched the video that Flores had recorded of the incident and provided to the defendant’s lawyer. After seeing that evidence, the grand jury declined to indict on second-degree felony assault charges.

    This one for Marcus Ranum, who was wondering about civilian oversight of cops in the other thread. ;)
    More at the link.

    16 witnesses said #MikeBrown had his hands up when he was shot. But there was no video like in the #WalterScott case.

    Link at previous tweet: What do the newly released witness statements tell us about the Michael Brown shooting?

    In the grand jury case against Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, the prosecution revealed that physical evidence weighed in Wilson’s favor and that he had not unlawfully shot 18-year-old Michael Brown to death.

    Over the course of the investigation, federal agents interviewed dozens of witnesses—some compelled to come forward by subpoena—to piece together what happened on that August 9 afternoon. Shortly after the press conference announcing the jury’s decision, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch released the transcripts of interviews with witnesses and Wilson.

    We read and analyzed more than 500 pages of witness testimony and compared each statement to those given by Wilson. Below is a chart comparing several key details of the officer’s report to the witness statements. Was Brown facing Wilson when he was shot, or was his back turned to him? Did Brown have his hands in the air, or were they reaching toward his waist?

    But no video. No video. No video.

    Low Post-Blackness: Race and the Status of the NBA

    As Silver’s first full season as commissioner comes to an end he is undoubtedly still floating on cloud nine from the NBA’s new TV deal that will yield the league more than $2 billion annually, as well as the league’s new belief that sports gambling should be monitored and regulated which will undoubtedly yield tangible benefits for the league. Both stories ingratiated the new commissioner with progressive NBA fans.

    The commissioner is not worried about the NCAA because he has his eyes on a bigger target: the NFL. When Commissioner Silver took over the NBA, one of his explicit goals was to overtake the NFL in popularity and profitability in the US market. Specifically, Silver stated that, “I think this game should be a rival to football. In the United States, it’s the No. 1 participatory sport. We’ve all played it. I want to focus on the game. The business is going well, but this is a beautiful game.”

    With the most diverse fan base in American sports and growing global popularity, it stands to reason why the commissioner expresses such ambition. The NBA has an international draw that the NFL cannot match no matter how many horrendous regular season games the NFL hosts in London.

    Silver should be confident. The NBA has thus far had an amazing season– progressing almost entirely free of off-the-court distractions – and the league seems to acquire “face of the franchise” players almost annually. What’s to stop them?

    But there’s a fly in the ointment here. As constituted, the NBA is not and will not be remotely close to the NFL in the hearts and minds of the common American. Prejudices that have shaped the way that many Americans view minorities limit how much the average sports fan is willing to buy in to behavior that flies in the face of racial stereotypes. These beliefs help to uncover why the NFL, a league that is coming off of one of the most controversial and revealing seasons it has ever experienced, shows no signs of vulnerability in the market.

    Why? The answer is simple: the NFL resonates with the American public in a way that the NBA does not.

    This is not an indictment on the expertise of players in the NBA or on the entertainment value its fans perceive; instead it is an indictment on America and the stereotypes that impact the popularity of sports and entertainment in the US.

    Popular American forms of entertainment illustrate an almost standard formula: prominent and “intriguing” white characters as main protagonists with tangentially related minority characters as role players; pawns on the chessboard that only contribute to the main characters’ storylines.

    The utter shock of major networks following the recent success of shows like Scandal and Empire illustrates current expectations for minority-led programming. The top shows and movies from the past decade following the aforementioned formula almost exactly, award-winning shows such as Modern Family, Big Bang Theory, Mad Men, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad and 24 all echo this fact.

    If we only look at comedies, shows like Modern Family and The Big Bang Theory have exploded in popularity while using the “dash of diversity” recipe. These shows have received a small amount of negative publicity from minority groups expressing their displeasure with the characters; despite this, and to the delight of their networks and syndication partners, Modern Family has seen steady growth in viewership and awards since its beginning, while the Big Bang Theory has ballooned into the most watched show on television.

    In the NFL, the protagonists are usually the same: Quarterback. Head Coach. General Manager. Owner.

    Like any film or television show, NFL organizations have leading roles. Those leading roles are pivotal because collectively they receive most of the credit for the successes and blame for the failures of NFL teams. The NFL has done an excellent job of drawing in the casual fan’s attention and money with a recipe that includes that dash of diversity, violence, speed, regional rivalries, and cultural biases. Whether they’re quarterbacks or leading stars, head coaches or executive producers, general managers or television executives, perceptions around what effective leadership looks like appears to be the same.

    Although the total percentage of black players in the NFL and NBA are close — 76% in the NBA and 68% in the NFL — the NBA has more than twice the number of black visible leaders than the NFL. The total number of Black owners, GMs, head coaches, or starting QBs equals roughly 14% of all the available positions in those roles. While it could be argued that this number is proportionate with the percentage of Black Americans in the US, clearly other minority groups, such as Latinos, are rarely represented in the total population of visible leadership roles in NFL. This percentage is also less than half of the equivalent number for the NBA, which has twice as many blacks in the team’s best player, head coach, general manager, or owner roles (30%).

    Veeeery interesting! More at the link.

    This is okay for a cop/soldier to post on a social network ?

  224. anteprepro says

    Repost from here: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/04/08/start-acting-whiter/comment-page-1/#comment-930372

    Regarding resisting arrest:
    http://mic.com/articles/105890/one-troubling-statistic-reveals-a-major-problem-with-local-police-departments
    http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white
    http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ardus05.pdf (see table 4 in appendix. Roughly a 3:4 ratio for black deaths during arrest: white deaths during arrest. Compare to arrest rates here: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/aus9010.pdf. Confound is that the former has Hispanic group, also disproportionately killed, while the former has no Hispanic designation. But the arrest ratio, per table 1, for black to white is roughly 2:5. In main population, ratio of black to white is roughly 1:6. What does this mean? Black people are 2.4 times more likely to be arrested, and arrested black people are 1.8 times more likely to be killed during arrest. For a total rate of black people being killed by police at a rate over four times greater than white people. And that’s just a rough estimate using data that is likely an underestimate).

  226. Saad says

    Walter Scott had a passenger

    A passenger was in Walter Scott’s car when he was pulled over by a North Charleston police officer who then killed him, according to a police report CNN obtained.

    The passenger’s identity was not given in the report, but another officer responding to the incident said in the report that the passenger was detained and placed in the back seat of a police vehicle.

    Wait, what?

    Why was the passenger detained? Did he see too much?

  228. rq says

    Saad
    In comment 210, there’s mention of a younger brother at the scene (whose phone got taken away, ha) – I wonder if he was also the passenger, else how would he get there so fast?

  229. Pteryxx says

    IBI Times: Baltimore Police Used Stingray Phone Trackers Thousands Of Times Under Federal Secrecy

    The testimony of the detective revealed the widespread use of cell site simulators, known as Stingrays, which mimic the signal of cellphone towers to force phones to transmit their data to them. Police can then analyze the data to track the location of the phones.

    Detective Emmanuel Cabreja said in his testimony that the Baltimore police department had used the device, called the Hailstorm — an upgraded version of Stingrays — and other similar technology about 4,300 times since 2007, the Baltimore Sun reported. This is believed to be much higher than other known cases where similar equipment has been used by state and local police.

    The testimony marks one of the rare instances where details about the device have been divulged, as federal officials have tried to downplay its use. The government has intervened in relatively minor public records cases and criminal trials to advise local police forces to withhold details about the technology, according to documents obtained by the Associated Press (AP). The documents require the police department to obtain FBI authorization before sharing information about the Stingray technology with other law enforcement authorities.

    Cabreja said he did not comply with a subpoena to bring one of the devices to court because of a nondisclosure agreement the Baltimore police signed with the FBI. The agreement, which was presented in court on Wednesday, instructs prosecutors to drop cases if they find themselves pressed on the technology, and tells them to contact FBI agents if they are questioned by lawmakers or judges.

    “Does it instruct you to withhold evidence from the state’s attorney and the circuit court of Baltimore city, even if upon order to produce?” Defense Attorney Joshua Insley asked him during questioning. “Yes,” Cabreja replied, and added that he had spoken to the FBI last week regarding the case.

    Because of speculation in the “Why do they never try to save them” thread about how cops would disrupt bystanders’ cell phones if they could:

    In March, a federal official admitted that the Stingray could possibly be used for mass disruption of cellphone service in an area, in addition to specifically targeted phones. Authorities have insisted that officials limit the use of the device to surveil and disrupt targeted phones only.

    That article at Wired:

    Civil liberties groups have long asserted that stingrays are too invasive because they can sweep up data about every phone in their vicinity, not just targeted phones, and can interfere with their calls. Justice Department and local law enforcement agencies, however, have refused to confirm this or answer other questions about the tools.

    But in the newly uncovered document (.pdf)—a warrant application requesting approval to use a stingray—FBI Special Agent Michael A. Scimeca disclosed the disruptive capability to a judge.

    “Because of the way, the Mobile Equipment sometimes operates,” Scimeca wrote in his application, “its use has the potential to intermittently disrupt cellular service to a small fraction of Sprint’s wireless customers within its immediate vicinity. Any potential service disruption will be brief and minimized by reasonably limiting the scope and duration of the use of the Mobile Equipment.”

    The document was previously sealed and only came to light after the defense attorney for a defendant in the case filed a motion last year to dismiss evidence collected by the stingray. It’s the first time the ACLU has seen the FBI acknowledge the stingray’s disruptive capabilities and raises a number of questions about the nature of the disruption and whether the Federal Communications Commission knew about it when it certified the equipment.

    “We think the fact that stingrays block or drop calls of cell phone users in the vicinity should be of concern to cell service providers, the FCC, and ordinary people,” says Nate Wessler staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “If an emergency or important/urgent call (to a doctor, a loved one, etc.) is blocked or dropped by this technology, that’s a serious problem.”

    Stingrays are mobile surveillance systems the size of a small briefcase that impersonate a legitimate cell phone tower in order to trick mobile phones and other mobile devices in their vicinity into connecting to them and revealing their unique ID and location. Stingrays emit a signal that is stronger than the signal of other cell towers in the vicinity in order to force mobile phones and other devices to establish a connection with them and reveal their unique ID. Stingrays can then determine the direction from which the phone connected with them, data that can then be used to track the movement of the phone as it continuously connects to the fake tower.

    […]

    The Harris Corporation in Florida—the leading maker of stingrays for law enforcement in the U.S. and an aggressive proponent of secrecy around their use—has already been singled out for a questionable statement the company made to the FCC in a 2010 email. In the correspondence, a Harris representative told the FCC that the technology was used by law enforcement only “in emergency situations.” But according to records the ACLU obtained from the police department in Tallahassee, Florida, in nearly 200 cases that the equipment was used since 2007 only 29 percent of these involved an emergency. Stingrays are regularly used in day-to-day criminal investigations to track suspected drug dealers, bank robbers and others.

    […]

    Disruption can also occur from the way stingrays force-downgrade mobile devices from 3G and 4G connectivity to 2G to get them to connect and reveal their unique ID and location.

    In order for the kind of stingray used by law enforcement to work, it exploits a vulnerability in the 2G protocol. Phones using 2G don’t authenticate cell towers, which means that a rogue tower can pass itself off as a legitimate cell tower. But because 3G and 4G networks have fixed this vulnerability, the stingray will jam these networks to force nearby phones to downgrade to the vulnerable 2G network to communicate.

    “Depending on how long the jamming is taking place, there’s going to be disruption,” says Soghoian. “When your phone goes down to 2G, your data just goes to hell. So at the very least you will have disruption of internet connectivity. And if and when the phones are using the stingray as their only tower, there will likely be an inability to receive or make calls.”

  230. rq says

    Via blf, Police killing videos shock the world. So why do white Americans still trust cops?

    A stark new video of a white police officer shooting an unarmed black man in the back in South Carolina has reignited a sense of public outrage over US police killings that has been smoldering since last summer – but there is little to suggest that this latest dispatch of the YouTube era will shake confidence in police, especially among affluent white Americans.

    Ubiquitous video technology – from smartphones and dashboards to surveillance and body cameras – has produced an increasing trail of grainy footage of citizen deaths turned cultural flashpoints, from Rodney King to Oscar Grant, Eric Garner to 12-year-old Tamir Rice and many more. Yet public trust in the police has remained relatively steady – and consistently divided along racial lines. [..]

    The proliferation of video technology – with the standard inclusion of video cameras in iPhones after 2009 – expanded the number of incidents of police brutality caught on tape. Many of the most prominent examples of police killings caught on video are from recent years: Garner, Grant, John Crawford III, Rice, Antonio Zambrano-Montes.

    Video and even audio footage of police killing people may make officers uncomfortable – body-camera studies have shown a decrease in use of force, and the officer in South Carolina appears to have been making claims over his radio, not knowing he was being filmed. But such footage may not make white people trust officers any less.

    Even before the Garner killing, the gap in confidence in police expressed by white people and black people was at an all-time high of 27 points. In June 2014, 58% of white respondents said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in police, while only 31% of black respondents said so.

    Hispanic attitudes about police have closely tracked the American average, according to Gallup.

    Black respondents stood out in the Gallup data for varying attitudes about police depending on whether they lived in an urban or non-urban area. For the years 2006 to 2014, 38% of black respondents from non-urban areas expressed confidence in police, versus just 26% from urban areas. That gap of 12 points was far larger than the five-point gap for Hispanic people polled and the two-point gap for white people.

    Not enough white people killed by cops caught on video…?

    Calling for citizen review board at N. Chas City Council @ 7, #BlackLivesMatter press conference @ 5 this evening. Be there!

    This Black Trans Man Is in Prison for Killing His Rapist TW for graphic rape description

    Ky Peterson brushed off the stranger hitting on him outside a convenience store in Americus, Ga., without a second thought. It’s not like he hadn’t rebuffed a stranger’s advances before. But as he walked home past an unoccupied trailer on October 28, 2011, something hard struck the back of his head. He blacked out. When he came to, the stranger from the sidewalk was on top of him, naked and spitting homophobic slurs at the 20-year-old black trans man as he forced himself inside Peterson.

    “I freaked out,” Peterson tells The Advocate. “I screamed.” He kept screaming — in pain, in fear. Perhaps, also, in surprise: It was happening again. He was being raped on his walk home, and no one would help him. Especially not the police. Last time he was attacked in his own neighborhood, the cops could barely be bothered to file the report, and thinking they’d investigate? Maybe even arrest the guy? A fantasy.

    This was reality. This moment. Live or die. […]

    He stood up, now on one side of the trailer with his two brothers flanking him. He saw the shadowed figure of the naked stranger charging forward. He didn’t have time to think as his fingers grasped the smooth metal of the gun he’d started carrying in his backpack as a nighttime precaution ever since his first rape.

    Then Peterson made a decision he’d hoped he’d never have to. He pulled the trigger.

    The trailer filled with an impossibly loud bang. A silence descended, an eerie stillness after the hellish scraping and grunting that had filled the air moments earlier. The stranger’s body slumped over and became motionless. Three sets of wide eyes looked at each other.

    Panic set in, settling down in Peterson’s gut alongside feelings of shock and trauma. There was no way out between this rock and hard place, it seemed: His brothers both had criminal records, and whether Peterson went to the police or waited for them to discover the stranger’s body in the trailer, he knew the young black men would be painted as murderers. Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t … unless the police never found out, he considered.

    Shaking and terrified, sitting next to the dead man contemplating his fate for an hour, Peterson then made the second unthinkable move that night: He walked to his mother’s nearby trailer and retrieved her car, put the body in the trunk with his brothers’ assistance, stuffed the man’s scattered clothes into a bag he would later discard, and drove to a quiet, tree-lined street. Although Peterson had brought a shovel and planned to bury the body in the woods, the headlights of a passing car startled the 20-year-old, prompting him to leave the body on the side of a rural road with no means of identification. He hoped this nightmare would all go away. […]

    They hadn’t found the first man who raped him, no. He didn’t believe the cops would have any interest in looking for his second rapist. But Peterson knew that when three black men had killed another man, the cops were certain to show up bright and early.

    “I tried to explain my story to [the police] and they didn’t listen, and that was the main reason I attempted to cover up what had happened,” Peterson says. “It was because I knew they wouldn’t listen — that’s just the way the system is.”
    Peterson’s mind flashed back to the night before. It’d taken a few moments for the reality to sink in: The stranger was dead. One minute the man had been violently attacking Peterson, and the next he was lying lifeless with a bullet in his torso.

    There was no way Peterson, an unemployed black trans man sharing a trailer with his mother, would escape this situation unscathed — not to mention two brothers, just 14 and 16 years old at the time — once the police showed up.

    Who would the cops see when they looked at Peterson and his brothers? The victim of a rapist and potentially homicidal assailant, accompanied by two boys who had wanted only to protect their brother? Or would they see three young black men — two, actually, since they’d be bound to misgender Peterson as a woman, as most everyone besides his family did — who were likely, in their eyes, “thugs” or criminals? Could Georgia’s police even fathom a black, masculine person being a victim of sexual assault, being the target of a violent attack that was unprovoked, killing in self-defense?

    “It doesn’t surprise me to hear that in a situation in which a trans person of color is targeted, that they are not comfortable turning to the police,” says Chase Strangio, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT and HIV project. “Because the police have been a force of oppression and not assistance for communities of color generally, and particularly black trans communities.” […]

    When the cops arrived at Peterson’s family trailer that morning, Peterson was still shaken, and the trauma of being violated by a strange man — again — was beginning to sink in, making him drift into a peculiar numbness.

    In the cold light of morning, two officers were now sitting across from him with stern poker faces. Their eyes didn’t seem to take in his bruises.

    Peterson told the officers that he had been attacked and that three unknown Mexican men had pulled his attacker off him, according to investigative records obtained by The Advocate. Those same reports indicate that Peterson’s brothers told investigators that the entire incident was a scheme of Peterson’s design; that Peterson asked them to help him rob the stranger after Peterson lured him in with a promise of sex.

    Peterson continues to deny that version of the story — and wasn’t aware his brothers had turned on him in their own interviews with police until The Advocate inquired about his case.

    After a brief interview with officers inside the trailer where his mother lived, Peterson found himself standing up as he was asked to accompany the officers down to the station for questioning; his brothers were detained too. In the hours that followed, he sat in a bare, cold room across from cops each seeming to ask him the same few questions in endless permutations.

    He insisted, again and again, that he never planned to interact with the stranger, that he never left his house intending to fire his gun. He reminded them that he was, in fact, the victim of sexual assault in the first place, and that he’d discharged the weapon in fear for his life. But Peterson’s new reality began to register: The police were convinced that he and his brothers had committed armed robbery. They couldn’t be persuaded otherwise. The three would not be going home.

    But just when the interrogation seemed over for the day, the cops asked Peterson to accompany them to a waiting police vehicle. By the dark gray tint of the sky, he gauged it was the wee hours of the morning. The car stopped outside a neat little building with glowing windows and doors: a clinic.

    Peterson walked in flanked by officers. The clinic’s staff greeted the cops and then looked at Peterson with more human concern than he’d seen all day; he sat down for what turned out to be a rape kit exam.

    Peterson was poked and prodded, and answered yet another seemingly endless stream of questions. At least he was being handled gently by the clinic’s staff, a welcome change from the officers’ unrelenting gruffness. Still, one counselor’s comment cut through Peterson’s fog.

    “You don’t seem like a rape victim to me,” Peterson recalls her saying. “Something else has to be going on.”

    What else could be going on? He hadn’t mentioned he was transgender — it was something he’d kept to himself so far, thinking it might only bias the police further against him — but now he wondered if his gender nonconformity had influenced his caretakers’ perception of him. […]

    Peterson remained under arrest for possession of a firearm and shooting the attacker. And the clinic counselor’s question remained with him, haunting Peterson in the years to come. Was the whole system stacked against him?

    “What this case highlights, is from both a legal and a public perspective, how difficult it is for trans people of color to claim the status of victim,” says Strangio, the ACLU attorney. “In so many ways, our conception of victimhood has always been taken away from people of color and taken away from gender-nonconforming people and taken away from women.” […]

    Peterson spent the next 366 days in a county jail. During that year-long detention, he says he was never formally advised of the charges against him, nor was he offered meetings with the public defender who would ultimately encourage him to take a plea deal, he tells The Advocate.

    In 2003 a statute had created the Georgia Public Defenders Standards Council, establishing a statewide policy mandating that every person arrested be offered a meeting with an attorney within 72 hours of being detained.

    “Waiting a year to see a public defender is not something that the state of Georgia standards really contemplate,” Tiffany Roberts, an Atlanta-based attorney and former public defender now in private practice who specializes in criminal defense and civil rights law, tells The Advocate.

    “If you have been in jail for 72 hours and you have not seen a judicial officer, you are supposed to be released on bond, or bond is supposed to be considered,” says Roberts, who did not work on Peterson’s case. “And I’m guessing that may not have even taken place in his case.” […]

    The initial indictment — filed February 27, 2012, against Peterson and his brothers, Adam Peterson and Clarence “Deon” Coleman — charged the trio with crimes including armed robbery, aggravated assault, and malice murder. The latter-most charge can carry a lifelong prison sentence or the death penalty. The indictment handed down by a grand jury listed eight counts in all: armed robbery, aggravated assault, malice murder, two counts of felony murder, and three counts of possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony, according to court documents.

    In August 2012, Peterson signed a deal that saw him plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in jail, according to Georgia law. But Peterson was sentenced to 20 years, with 15 to serve in confinement.

    When asked about this discrepancy, Grindle was caught off-guard.

    “My memory is it was a voluntary manslaughter plea,” Grindle says. “But if what the plea agreement says is involuntary, then I effectively committed ineffective assistance of counsel. And if that’s the case, I apparently made a major mistake.”

    “I’m disappointed in myself if that’s what I let happen,” Grindle sighs. “But if that’s the case, and the maximum … is 10 years, then I screwed up. So did the [district attorney], and so did the judge.”

    The Advocate requested transcripts of Peterson’s sentencing colloquy before a judge, only to be told no such transcript existed. A separate written request to produce the transcript received no response by press time. Sentencing documents from Sumter County Superior Court and Peterson’s sentencing sheet from the Georgia Department of Corrections, both list Peterson’s crime as “involuntary manslaughter,” with a sentence of 20 years.

    Grindle’s recollection of the case led him to believe that Peterson was ineligible for an involuntary manslaughter plea, he says. Pointing to the alleged attempted robbery, the shooting, and the moved body, Grindle says “there was no way the DA would have agreed to involuntary manslaughter consciously.”

    Grindle suggests that the “involuntary” plea may have slipped in accidentally, or been the result of a clerical error made by the court recorder. “I would have jumped up and down beforehand if I had known that I had gotten it down to involuntary — that would have been a miracle in this case,” he says. “But, and even if it was an accident, and I did hear it, I sure as hell wasn’t going to correct it. Because there would have been some way that the sentence could be adjusted on appeal.” […]

    But by the time he was 20 and facing a murder charge, even Peterson’s public defender acknowledged he had “two strikes against him” before saying a word to a judge or jury.

    “Number 1, you’re African-American,” Grindle recounts saying to Peterson. “And these little old white ladies in South Georgia think that if [they] see an African-American outside their own neighborhoods, [they] need to be careful.”

    The second “strike,” Grindle says, is that Peterson looked “stereotypically gay.” “The fact you’re gay will be an issue that I have to address early on,” Grindle recalls telling Peterson. “That’s two strikes that are against us from the get-go. And that factored extensively into my and my investigator’s discussions about the case.”

    Peterson never told his public defender that he identified as trans — the first time Grindle heard Peterson’s preferred name was when The Advocate inquired about the case. “As far as I knew, [he] was a lesbian,” Grindle says. He says Peterson may have been the first transgender client he’s ever represented, though he did recount an experience with a witness in a police brutality case who was a transgender woman.

    “She was a great witness,” Grindle recalls of the woman who was ready to testify in the mid-1990s case. But “I was afraid to put her on the stand dressed as a woman — I wanted to stay as far away from that as possible.”

    “I’ve only met a few transgenders south of Atlanta in my entire life,” Grindle tells The Advocate. “But it’s a very touchy subject the further south you go, or the further you get removed … gay issues are very touchy when you get outside of any metropolitan area.”

    “This is kind of a prime example of what’s happening in public defense,” says Roberts, the Atlanta-based former public defender and current civil rights attorney. “When you have attorneys with limited resources, limited training, and clients with needs far outside of the bounds of those resources.”

    “I really don’t like how [my public defender] defended me, because I feel like he could have done more,” Peterson says. “He could have at least came more [often] and tried to talk to me. I feel like he really didn’t do a good job at representing me.”

    Peterson says he only met with Grindle twice — a charge Grindle denies.

    “I think it was more than that,” Grindle says when asked if he had just two consultations with Peterson. “But I will admit that it was not a substantial number of times.” […]

    Although Peterson’s story may sound exceptional, it’s the harsh reality for tens of thousands of transgender people currently incarcerated, most of whom are people of color.

    According to the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National LGBTQ Task Force’s 2011 survey, Injustice at Every Turn, trans and gender-nonconforming people are jailed at nearly six times the rate of their cisgender (nontrans) counterparts. While just 2.7 percent of the cisgender population had been imprisoned, 16 percent of trans respondents reported spending time in jail. The incidence of incarceration jumped to 47 percent if a respondent was black — with 41 percent reporting that they were imprisoned because of their race and gender identity alone. A 2011 report from Pennsylvania’s Gay and Lesbian Latino AIDS Education Initiative found that 80 percent of that state’s trans inmates were people of color, with 68 percent identifying as black, and many respondents listing themselves as mixed-race.

    Overall, black individuals are vastly overrepresented in American prisons — black Americans face six times the incarceration rate of their white peers. But the intersection of being a racial minority and a gender minority leaves black trans people, and especially black trans women, particularly vulnerable to criminalization. The phenomena is so common that, according to black trans sex workers’ rights advocate Monica Jones, many trans women of color use the term “walking while trans” to describe how they are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement simply for being themselves in public.

    Even when trans people of color are arrested for breaking the law, advocates are quick to point out that many infractions are so-called survival crimes: nonviolent offenses, like theft or sex work, committed by people who have few other economic options after being unable to find employment due to transphobia, sexism, racism, or — more likely — a compounded combination of such prejudices.

    As a 2015 report from the Movement Advancement Project and the Center for American Progress makes clear, rampant discrimination in employment, education, and housing results in a poverty rate for trans people four to six times the national average, often pushing trans individuals into underground economies that make them vulnerable to police encounters and incarceration.

    Peterson’s background reflects this reality. In October 2011, the then-20-year-old had not graduated high school, was unemployed, and living at home with a mother who police reports indicate was a sex worker. In fact, Peterson’s mother and friends told police that Peterson often accompanied them when meeting “johns” to provide “protection.” But everyone agreed that Peterson himself never engaged in sex work.

    Georgia has been no exception to these rules. Indeed, as Peterson tells The Advocate, his home state has become a place where men and women like him — who exist at multiple intersections of marginalization — have come to expect bias and neglect from authorities who claim to be there to “protect” citizens.

    “Any time anything ever happened and I would go to the law enforcement in my town, they never did anything about it,” Peterson says. “I was attacked by a family member a lot and they didn’t do anything, and they still done nothing. They investigated it and they say, ‘This is all we’re gonna do,’ and they just let him go free.”

    Indeed, black people — and black gay or trans people, especially — “know better than anyone that the police have historically not been there to protect you,” explains ACLU attorney Strangio. “So if something happens to you, you have good reason to doubt that the police will help. And so for so many trans people of color, and particularly black trans people, turning to the police can itself be a death sentence, as we’ve seen with so many black people in this country.” […]

    The first bright spot has been the one respectful prison official he’s encountered since entering the penal system three years ago: his mental health counselor at Pulaski. “She actually respects me as what I am. She addresses me as ‘he’ and doesn’t call me [by my birth name], so that makes me feel better,” he says.

    Recently, Peterson has been in contact with local trans advocacy group Trans(Forming), which has given him his first access to a gender therapist via video conference. Peterson anticipates receiving a formal letter diagnosing him with “gender dysphoria,” which is often the first step needed to request medically necessary hormone therapy. He is currently contemplating, in a move similar to fellow trans black Georgia inmate Ashley Diamond, pushing the state’s Department of Corrections for transition-related care.

    Day-to-day, Peterson holds on to little victories and takes life one moment at a time as he faces down the next 17 years (with 12 more to serve in prison) of his involuntary manslaughter sentence. Meanwhile, he dreams of release and a day where he can live in his authentic gender without the fears and struggles that now plague him.

    “I want to be a motivational speaker,” he says resolutely. “I want to travel around the country and educate other people about trans rights.”

    Peterson says he’s already working on his first speeches. “They’re not very good,” he concedes — but they’re a starting place.

    Those speeches, along with the letters, video calls from his partner, his GED, and the possibility of finally receiving the gender-affirming care he’s been denied, all help Peterson stay positive.

    “It gives me hope,” says Peterson. “And that’s what you’ve got to have to get by in here. That makes me stand a little taller — even if it’s just this much, it makes a difference.”

    I skipped a lot out of that link, please read it all, though it is long.

    Beyoncé, Kim, and the Politics of Celebrity Labor

    The labor of celebrity-production, then, is to make you like—or at least be compelled by—the celebrity’s presentation of self. But that’s not as easy as it might seem—you can’t just throw out a semi-fascinating self and expect fans to respond to it. Recent and historical examples suggest that the most successful celebrities fall on one of two opposing ends of the labor spectrum: they either make their labor incredibly visible, effectively inviting us to respect it and the celebrity apparatus more broadly, or else they efface it entirely, thereby contributing to the illusion of charisma as a natural, God-given trait. One extreme emphasizes the ways in which stars are “just like us” (working, tired, hustling); the other suggests they’re nothing like us at all (naturally blessed).

    That split between “relatable” celebrities and other-worldly ones is nothing new, and there will always be a mix of the two qualities in the figures we choose to venerate. Yet the rise of digital technologies—and social media in particular—has recalibrated the mix: even the most diefied of celebrities are now making their labor visible. In this way, to labor glamorously—and to be “honest” about it—has become the new signifier of authentic talent. […]

    It makes sense, then, that the visibility of celebrity labor would coincide with a period of fraught, if often sublimated, labor politics—a visibility facilitated by the spread and co-option of social media by a broad array of celebrities. Beyoncé Knowles Carter has arguably done this most visibly and effectively. Her singular name, like Madonna or Cher, is the product of her labor. Her perfectly curated Tumblr, coupled with her equally curated documentary, Beyoncé: Life is But a Dream, advance an image that is equal parts sweat, control, and endurance. This image does not take away from the mystique of Beyoncé, it adds to it: we like her more, not less, because of the supposed transparency: Girl works hard to be the Queen.

    Beyoncé is still laboring to enrich what we’re meant to understand as natural talent. Yes, she has to berate her dancers to get the show together on time; yes, she spends hours dancing and writing. But she has a voice and a body that’s naturally inclined towards refinement, and her talent is quantifiable.

    Now compare Beyoncé’s visible labor with that of Kim Kardashian, one of the hardest working celebrities in the business. Whereas Beyoncé has “real” talent, Kim’s (and that of the rest of the Kardashians) is often characterized as a simulacrum of talent: she’s famous for being famous or, to get specific, she’s famous for appearing in a sex tape with a B-list celebrity and for having a Dad who defended a former football star against a murder rap.

    Unlike the “modern” celebrity, whose reason for fame (or infamy) is clearly discernable, Kardashian is an exponent of postmodern celebrity: all surface, no substance. In many ways, she functions as the dark double to Beyoncé’s celebrity: Beyoncé sweats; Kim preens. Beyoncé orders; Kim dithers. Beyoncé breaks free from her father; Kim is subject to her mother. Put simply, Beyoncé’s labor is masculinized and legitimated, while Kardashian’s is feminized and denigrated.

    This bifurcation has to do with enduring cultural hierarchies: Beyoncé isn’t just a pop star, but a writer—one who’s appeared in films, even Oscar-winning ones, and whose documentary aired on HBO, a channel that prides itself on not being television. Kardashian isn’t just a celebrity, but a reality star—the lowest of the cultural low. Even the format of their respective media divides them: Beyoncé’s narratives of self, the labor that produces it, are mapped within the tight confines of a song, a ninety-minute film, or a collection of Instagram photos. Kardashian’s labor is diffuse, loose, and meandering. An episode of E! Entertainment Television’s Keeping Up With the Kardashians lacks the clear thesis of a Beyoncé product, especially as representations of the worth of their respective artists’ labor. No one would dare apply the term “artist” to Kardashian, despite the artistry clearly required to so carefully fashion her image. Beyoncé creates; Kardashian exists.

    I’m not suggesting that Beyoncé and Kardashian should necessarily be seen as equals—they are pursuing different paths, albeit to similar ends. Yet the way we conceive of their labor functions to further stratify the gendered division of labor, between labor that is meaningful and labor that is meaningless. Both Beyoncé and Kardashian hustle; one just effaces that mediation, that “image”-ness, more effectively than the other. More than any other figure, Kardashian reflects the realities of media production and labor. But life—or at least Beyoncé’s version of it—is but a dream, and we’ve always preferred that over reality.

    Rhodes statue removed in Cape Town as crowd celebrates

    South Africa’s University of Cape Town (UCT) has removed a statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes that had become the focus of protests.

    The monument, taken down in front of cheering protesters, will be stored for “safe keeping”, UCT’s council said.

    Students have been campaigning for the removal of the statue of the 19th Century figure, unveiled in 1934.

    Other monuments to colonial-era leaders have also been the target of protest in South Africa.

    The BBC’s Mohammed Allie told Focus On Africa radio that there was a “festive atmosphere” as students, academics, members of political parties and ordinary Cape Town residents came to witness a “historic moment for South Africa”.

    The crowd cheered as the statue was being lifted of its plinth. Once it was removed some students jumped on it and started hitting it with wooden sticks and covering the face with plastic. […]

    “We finally got the white man to sit down and listen to us,” said a student who had campaigned for it to be taken down. Some were chanting “one settler; one bullet” – a sign that anger could boil over if the lives of black people do not improve.

    Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn: Officers Are Depressed by the Current Climate

    I’ve been in policing for over 40 years. What we saw on the video of North Charleston police officer Michael Slager shooting unarmed Walter Scott eight times is the clearest example of documented wrongdoing I’ve ever seen. It’s not even a close call.
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    It’s one thing to identify with an officer needing to make split-second decisions under pressure in violent circumstances with insufficient information who reacts to a perceived or actual threat. That happens every day in America. Sometimes officers trying their best shoot and kill someone who is not the threat they perceived. It’s analogous to soldiers overseas who are clearing a village. One person fires a round, then everybody fires a round, and we have a tragic circumstance. Those troopers aren’t trying to be criminal, but nonetheless it’s tragic.
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    I have been in circumstances where officers are trying to operate with the best of intentions but still engage in questionable uses of deadly force. People want to put them in jail over an error in judgment. It’s not malice. It’s not obvious recklessness or wantonness. But what we saw on this video is not that. I don’t know a law enforcement professional who trains their officers to shoot unarmed, fleeing suspects. This is unambiguous. There’s no gray area when it comes to that. Officers know you don’t do that. […]

    Our officers are depressed by the current environment today. They’re judged by the worst example anywhere in the country. It affects their work. Officers are fearful that every action is going to be judged with the worst possible presumptions. I look at the case in South Carolina, and it’s clear that this is a wrongful use of force. Generally speaking, cops in that environment are highly sensitive now to how they will be judged when they think they’re trying to do the right thing.

    The way you prevent something like this from happening again is training and supervision. I feel right now that we’re at a critical point in terms of the public consensus about what the police are doing in the communities that need them the most. But there will be times when individuals go off the grid. There are no guarantees when it comes to human conduct. That’s what we have to understand. Bad doctors are bad doctors even though they went to good medical schools. And sometimes bad cops are bad cops even if they’ve gone through training and passed the test.

    And some more on the Ferguson election: It Will Take More Than an Election to Heal Ferguson

    With this election on Tuesday, Ferguson faced a crossroads. One month after a Department of Justice report condemned systematic abuse in the city’s police department and courts, residents had the chance, many believed, to change how their local government operated. That opportunity was created largely by the report’s fallout: John Shaw, the city manager who oversaw the government and police force, resigned, along with the Ferguson court clerk who had sent racist emails from her city address. To boot, three City Council members declined to run for re-election.

    The shakeup opened the door for candidates. There was an established local politician and an upstart young lawyer. An activist who had marched in protests ran, and long-time residents sought office for the first time, animated by Brown’s killing at the hands of former police officer Darren Wilson. For the past several days, people have reminded me that contenders for City Council typically ran unopposed. That wasn’t the case in 2015, when eight hopefuls vied for three spots—half of the council that soon will choose a new city manager. In turn, that person will choose the new police chief and court clerk. If Ferguson is to see real change in its corrupt government, it needed to begin with this ballot. It needed to start Tuesday. […]

    It remains to be seen whether activists such as Hudgins will make a lasting mark in Ferguson. But anyone who argued that Ferguson was cowed by the brutalization of its citizens or by some alleged apathy no longer has a case.

    Diversity on the Council is only one step. The larger question, particularly with Fletcher on the Council, remains just how much the city’s government, policing, and community relations will change in the months and years to come. As Brown’s death grows more distant, Ferguson still bears watching.

  231. rq says

    Protestors target sanctuaries on Easter Sunday

    The #BlackChurch action was intended to “spur our people into taking direct action in the communities they pray for,” said leaders of the Millennium Activists United (MAU), a Ferguson activist group that is led by black women in their 20s. Friendly Temple in North St. Louis was among three black churches that the group visited that day, that also included New Cote Brilliante Church of God near the Delmar Loop and Faith Miracle Temple Church in Florissant.

    “Black churches across America, as a whole, have been largely silent in supporting the ongoing struggles against racism and systematic oppression,” MAU said in a statement. “The time to use your collective voices in service for those without a voice is at hand.”

    In response, Friendly Temple staff formed a line in front of the activists, as people walked into the church. Friendly Temple Deacon James Joiner told The St. Louis American that demonstrators were blocking the entrance because the sidewalk leads to the front doors. When he tried to talk to someone in the group to understand their purpose, he said they remained silent. The demonstrators began to hum, “Wade in the Water,” and simply told him to read the signs.

    Among the signs they held were, “Jesus questioned the status quo,” “Jesus was a revolutionary,” “You don’t have to choose between faith and activism” and “crucifixion=lynching.”

    Joiner said the action surprised church leaders because no one from MAU had ever asked to meet with them. By coming out on Easter Sunday – when not only their 10,000 members attended church, but also some 2,000 guests – Joiner believed that they were trying to embarrass the church.

    “Everything they had on the signs is what we have been doing,” he said. “We just haven’t been doing it with them. They slapped us in the face and took off. That doesn’t lead to wanting to sit down and talk to someone.”

    Brittany Ferrell, a MAU leader, told The American the silent action was not meant to be adversarial but a call for help. They intentionally remained silent to avoid any conversations that could be construed as negative, she said. While many individuals within the congregations are doing amazing work to aid the Ferguson movement, she said, the institutions themselves have not stepped forward.

    “This is our cry to the black church and all its power,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “We need you.”

    Rev. Traci Blackmon, pastor at Christ the King United Church of Christ, wrote on Facebook that she interpreted the action to be less of a “stand against” and more of a “cry for.”

    “Less as a ‘crucify him’ moment and more as a ‘Hosanna’ (meaning save, or HELP us) moment, using the ONLY language and method that has been effective so far,” she wrote, stating that she was not at the action and did not know about it in advance.

    GBI Releases More Details, Identity of Man Killed in Deputy-Involved Shooting

    The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is releasing more details in a Wednesday evening deputy-involved shooting at a Valdosta motel.

    LCSO says deputies were in the process of arresting 42-year-old Dexter Pernell Bethea during a drug deal at the Econolodge on James Road in Valdosta when Bethea tried to hit the deputies with his vehicle.

    The deputies fired at and struck Bethea in an attempt to stop the vehicle from hitting them. He died at the scene.

    One deputy was struck by the vehicle and later released from South Georgia Medical Center, according to authorities.

    GBI says that Christopher Williams, 40 of Jacksonville, Connie Wood, 32, of Jacksonville Beach, Jasmine Riley, 24, of Valdosta and Michael Hendley, 39, of Valdosta were all involved in the drug transaction, arrested, and are facing charges.

    Additionally, Williams was charged with Pimping and Wood was charged with Prostitution.

    The GBI is investigating the incident and will be turned over to the district attorney up its completion.

    Valdosta is where Kendrick Johnson’s mysterious death (they found his body inside a rolled up gym mat) was ruled accidental, though there are signs pointing otherwise.

    South Carolina cop barricades himself in home, commits suicide during armed standoff

    An armed Charleston, South Carolina police officer took his own life after barricading himself in his home following a domestic dispute.

    Sergeant George Hildebidle “decided to end his life his own way,” Charleston Police Chief Gregory Mullen told reporters, but would not comment on the cause of death.

    There were two dogs in the house that made the process of confirming the officer’s death difficult, Charleston County Sheriff J. Al Cannon Jr. said.

    The Charleston County coroner arrived on the scene around 12:50 p.m. ET after law enforcement began leaving the scene in droves, WCSC reporter Hannah Moseley tweeted.

    So, while unrelated to Walter Scott, still an additional shock to the community. All of it.

  232. rq says

    S.C. Officer Justin Craven Faces Felony Charge For Fatally Shooting Unarmed Black Man In His Driveway

    Justin Gregory Craven, 25, was arrested on suspicion of discharging a firearm into an occupied vehicle, according to the state’s Law Enforcement Division. The North Augusta public safety officer is accused of shooting and killing 68-year-old Ernest Satterwhite in his driveway on Feb. 9, 2014, during a traffic stop. Craven fired repeatedly through the driver-side door of Satterwhite’s car after the victim had fully stopped in his driveway, according to the Edgefield Daily at the time.

    Craven was arrested in Edgefield County the same day Slager was charged with murder after Sunday’s shooting in North Charleston, about 150 miles away. The cases share several characteristics: They both started as a traffic stop, they were both caught on camera, and both responding officers alleged in followup reports that the victims grabbed for the officer’s weapon.

    In Satterwhite’s case, Craven said the unarmed victim “grabbed my gun” before he opened fire. A lawsuit filed by Satterwhite’s family — which recently ended in a $1 million settlement — denied that there was ever a struggle over the gun, according to The Washington Post.

    Craven admitted to firing his pistol into the car. He was initially indicted by a grand jury for a charge of “misconduct in office,” a misdemeanor, instead of a manslaughter charge sought by prosecutors. That case is reportedly still pending, and Craven hasn’t worked in law enforcement since.

    With the new charge, Craven faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $1,000. His attorney told the Post that he plans to plead not guilty.

    Satterwhite’s arrest record is mentioned, of course. Lots of traffic offenses, no known attacks on police officers, yet this time… the officer feared for his life.

  233. rq says

    Again via blf, Second officer in Walter Scott video sued over alleged attack on handcuffed man

    The second policeman in the video showing Walter Scott’s killing by officer Michael Slager is being sued by another black resident in South Carolina, who alleges police stomped on his face while he was handcuffed and lying on concrete.

    Clarence Habersham is among five North Charleston police officers named in a federal lawsuit brought by Sheldon Williams, who claims he was left with broken bones in his face after being assaulted.

    Williams, 47, alleges he suffered “severe pain for months after the attack” and that his face was left “so swollen that his left eye was barely visible”. He continues to endure “flashbacks and other post-traumatic stress symptoms”, he claims, and is seeking damages.

    “In addition, [Williams] experiences a sensation of insects crawling on the left side of his face as a result of nerve damage,” the lawsuit alleges.

    Habersham and attorneys representing the officers and police department did not respond to requests for comment. The department denied all Williams’s allegations in a past court filing and said he “told officers he had been in a fight earlier that week which left a facial abrasion”. […]

    Habersham, 37, was the first officer to arrive at the scene after his colleague Michael Slager shot Walter Scott dead as Scott, 50, ran away from a confrontation in North Charleston last Saturday morning. Slager has been charged with murder. Habersham can be seen crouched over Scott’s body in cellphone video of the incident. […]

    Doctors diagnosed Williams with three depressed fractures to bones in his face and other depressed bone fragments.

    Williams is also suing medics who gave him medical attention at the Charleston County Detention Center, claiming that they did not follow clear instructions that the prisoner must see a surgeon and have his broken bones set.

    “As a result of this delay and lack of treatment, [his] facial bones will now need to be broken and reset,” the lawsuit alleges. The medics deny any wrongdoing.

    Bell said Williams could not specify what role Habersham played in the alleged attack. “He couldn’t see, as he was being kicked,” said the attorney. However Williams was certain Habersham was among the group of officers, said Bell.

    And several from the Toronto Star, several:
    Officer charged in S.C. shooting faced 2013 complaint

    Angered by what happened, Mario Givens went downtown to police headquarters the following day and filed a formal complaint. He and his mother say several neighbours who witnessed what happened on the family’s front lawn also contacted the police, though they say officers refused to take their statements.

    The incident report from that night filed by Slager and the other officer, Maurice Huggins, provides a very different version of events. In the report, obtained by AP through a public records request, Slager wrote that he could not see one of Givens’ hands and feared he might be holding a weapon. He wrote that he observed sweat on Givens’ shirt, which he perceived as evidence he may have just run from Brown’s home, and then ordered him to exit several times.

    When Givens didn’t comply, Slager said he entered the home to prevent him from fleeing, and was then forced to use his stun gun when Givens struggled against him. According to the officers’ report, the two Givens brothers are described as looking “just alike.”

    After Mario Givens filed his complaint, the department opened an internal investigation. A brief report included in Slager’s personnel file said a senior officer was assigned to investigate. After a couple weeks, the case was closed with a notation that Slager was “exonerated.”

    Brown is listed as a witness in the investigative report, but her purported statement included none of the details she said she provided about Slager using his Taser to shock Givens while he was on the ground. She said she was never contacted as part of the police investigation and had not spoken with anyone about that night until she was contacted by an AP reporter Wednesday.

    The report also includes statements from Givens and another woman who was there that night, Yolonda Whitaker, said she saw Slager stun Givens “for no reason.” Efforts to reach Whitaker on Wednesday by phone and the addresses listed for her in the police report were unsuccessful.

    Givens said he was never contacted as part of the internal investigation into Slager and only learned the case had been closed after he went to the station about six weeks later and asked what happened.

    “They never told me how they reached the conclusion. Never. They never contacted anyone from that night. No one from the neighbourhood,” Givens said.

    Asked about the 2013 incident on Wednesday, North Charleston police spokesman Spencer Pryor said the department now plans to review the case to see if its decision to exonerate Slager was correct. He had no timetable on when that review might take place.

    Sweat is incriminating now.

    The Witness: Says he didn’t hear officer give any warning before he fired

    Not once in the moments recorded by Santana can the officer be heard yelling “stop” or telling the man to surrender. Moments after handcuffing the dying man face-down on the ground, Slager walks back to pick up what appears to be the Taser, then return and drop it at Scott’s feet as another officer arrives to check the dying man’s condition. Then he picks it up again after exchanging words with the other officer.

    The video changed everything, authorities and advocates said Wednesday.

    “What if there was no video? What if there was no witness, or ‘hero’ as I call him, to come forward?” the Scott family’s lawyer, L. Chris Stewart, told The Associated Press. “We didn’t know he existed. He came out the blue.”

    Mayor Keith Summey announced that he’s ordering 150 more body cameras so that every uniformed officer on the street will wear one, a key demand of the Black Lives Matter movement that is growing nationwide. For his part, police Chief Eddie Driggers said “I have watched the video. And I was sickened by what I saw. And I have not watched it since.”

    Their news conference was meant to quiet the uproar, but both were interrupted with shouted questions they said they could not answer, since the investigation was turned over to state law enforcement.

    North Charleston police shooting: profile of the victim

    Walter Lamar Scott, 50. Former Coast Guardsman. Father of four. A father figure to others besides, according to those who loved him.

    And now dead after four bullets to the back and one to the ear, all dealt as he tried to run away when a routine traffic stop erupted into a deadly police confrontation early Saturday.

    Local high school football star Fadol Brown, now a defensive lineman at Ole Miss, declared Scott “my step dad” on Twitter late Tuesday, as the shocking bystander’s video shed vastly different light on the weekend tragedy.

    “I loved him to death,” wrote Brown. “That cop didn’t have to shoot him down like a dog … gone miss you man.”

    Ole Miss officials later clarified the relationship between Scott and Brown, saying the Scott was in a relationship with the mother of Fadol’s longtime girlfriend.

    Scott’s own criminal history includes a string of arrests related to contempt of court charges for failing to pay child support and he was wanted on a similar Family Court warrant at the time of Saturday’s traffic stop. A lawyer representing the family suggested on Tuesday that Scott’s fear of possible jail time over child-support debts may have driven his decision to run.

    There’s more at the link. And they waited for a whole five (short) paragraphs before getting to his criminal past. Well done.

    North Charleston police shooting leads to mandatory body cameras – funny how it’s so easy to implement once there’s a good reason, yet sometimes the process gets dragged on and on and on…

    How many Americans die in police encounters? Fatal Encounters website seeks answer

    How many Americans die in fatal encounters with police officers? In the absence of political will and bureaucratic ability, Americans are rising up to count for themselves.

    The best findings so far — 3.15 citizens each day; 22 per week; 96 a month — adding up to an average of 1,150 dead Americans a year, according to data painstakingly compiled by the website fatalencounters[dot]org.

    Founder D. Brian Burghart, who launched the not-for-profit Fatal Encounters project in February 2014, stands by those findings as “better than 95 per cent accurate.”

    “What we don’t know yet are the trends going back to the year 2000, how that number has shifted over those years and what policy lessons can be drawn,” Burghart told the Star. “But thanks to a great deal of effort on the part of many people, we have complete records for 2013 and 2014. And we are confident in an average annual number of 1,150 people killed.”

    Burghart, editor and publisher of the Reno News & Review, began thinking about the project in 2013 out of frustration with the U.S. government’s inability to tabulate officer-involved deaths.

    “The fact that our government collects so much information about us — where we live, our economic status, so many unbelievable little details about our lives — but it doesn’t track its own behaviour when it kills, either justifiably or otherwise, is incomprehensible,” he said.

    “There’s a vicious cycle of reasons why we don’t get official numbers nationwide,” he said, adding the political will to solve them will eventually exist. “But in the meantime there is a huge gap that needs filling, and we’re doing our best to fill it.”

    The project works on the principle of crowdsourcing, with visitors to the site filling and submitting an online form. Burghart and his team then fact-check the submissions, matching the reported death against contemporary media reports, augmented by freedom-of-information requests to state and local law enforcement agencies.

  234. rq says

    Here’s a list, with overlap, from the CBC.
    Los Angeles Police Department taught the Canadian way when it comes to using force AN example:

    Cadets are put through a $17,000 interactive video simulator, which runs through scenarios featuring a variety of suspects and assailants. In the scenario I tried, a suspect with a shotgun refused to drop his shotgun. Even though he hadn’t pointed it at me, I shot him.

    “You fired at him,” Johnson said. “Why did you fire at him?”

    “He seemed like a threat,” I replied. “Did I fail?”

    “I’m not going to tell you what to do,” Johnson said. “My job is going to be to teach you department policy. That’s what I do with the recruits. I teach them department policy. If they understand policy, they will be the one to make that decision when and if to use deadly force.”

    It’s a lot to learn — and in not much time. Pannell and her team only have six months.

    Not nearly enough.

    Walter Scott shooting: Man who recorded video called ‘hero’ by family lawyer;
    Walter Scott shooting: 5 civil rights voices on what needs to change (a nice selection of people);
    Walter Scott shooting: South Carolina officer fired, charged with murder;
    Walter Scott shooting: Michael Slager subject of prior excessive force complaint;
    Body cameras: Can they reduce confrontations with police?

  235. says

    From Raw Story-
    Struggling with racial biases, black families are increasingly turning to homeschooling

    meschooling, common among white Americans, is showing an increase among African-Americans kids as well. African-Americans now make up about 10% of all homeschooled children in this fastest-growing form of education.

    However, the reasons for black kids to be homeschooled may not be the same as white kids. My research shows that black parents homeschool their children due to white racism.

    This may come as a surprise since, for many, we live in an age of alleged color blindness and post-racialism, characterized by the declining significance of race and racism.

    My research found strong evidence to suggest that racism is far from being a thing of the past.

    I found covert institutional racism and individual racism still persist and are largely responsible for the persistence of profound racial disparities and inequalities in many social realms. Schools, of course, are no exception, which helps one understand why racism is such a powerful drive for black homeschoolers.

    In the Spring and Fall 2010, I interviewed 74 African-American homeschooling families from around the US. While the size of my sample does not allow me to claim that it is representative of the whole African-American homeschooling population, it was nonetheless large enough to allow me to capture the main reasons why black parents tend to homeschool their children.

    Eurocentric curriculum and teachers’ attitudes

    When it comes to schools, there are at least two important areas of concern: the curriculum and teachers’ attitudes and behaviors.

    School curricula continue to promote a worldview developed by Western civilization. This wholesale Eurocentric orientation of most schools’ curricula, in a society that, ironically, is becoming increasingly brown, speaks volumes about a pervasive European ethnocentrism, that is, the notion that every one in the world thinks and does or should think and do like Europeans.

    Peggy McIntosh, an anti-racism activist, often cites a list of things she can take for granted as a white woman. Her list reflects the nature of the curriculum that students grow up being exposed to.

    As she says: “When I am told about our national heritage or about civilization, I’m shown that people of my color made it what it is;” as well as “I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that attest to the existence of their race.”

    For black people, as I found, it is a totally different experience. Indeed, while European culture and thought are implicitly presented as universal and Europe as the only place from which great ideas and discoveries originated, Africa and African-descended people find themselves quasi-excluded from the curriculum.

    As one of the fathers with whom I spoke in Atlanta succinctly articulated, “All we learn about is their stuff, and we know nothing about our stuff, our history, our culture.”

    This results in a general school-sanctioned ignorance about Africa and its descendants and in a disdain for the black experience, as I found through my interviews. Eventually, this becomes a pervasive and potent form of institutional racism.

    Racial stereotypes harm black kids

    Furthermore, the attitudes and actions of white teachers (who make up 85% of all public school teachers) were questioned by many of the African-American parents with whom I spoke. They consistently portrayed white teachers as “overly critical, unresponsive, unqualified, insensitive, offensive, mean, hypocritical, and using double standards.”

    Indeed, many white teachers seem to bring into the schools the many racist stereotypes and attitudes that have been ingrained in them, in particular the notions that blacks lack in intelligence, or are notoriously lazy and bent on criminality .

    Studies of the impact of negative white teachers’ attitudes on the school experience of black children reveal that there are two areas where teachers’ unchecked prejudices have been particularly visible and tragic: the over-referral of black students to special education programs and to the criminal system.

    Indeed, African-American students are more than twice as likely to be labeled cognitively “deficient” than white American students. Although they only make up 17% of the student population, they nonetheless represent 33% of those enrolled in programs for the mentally challenged.

    What appears to be a false and incorrect labeling, has a dire impact on the ability of black students to attend college and achieve social mobility.

    Harsh school punishments

    Likewise, black students account nationally for 34% of all suspensions. In reality, harsh school punishments have become one of the primary mechanisms through which the school-to-prison pipeline operates, pushing large numbers of black children out of school and into the “justice” system to feed the prison industrial complex that has blossomed over recent years.

    Certainly, the parents I interviewed were very much aware of and concerned about the “traps” set by many public schools for black children. One mother in New York poignantly declared, “I say America does not love my children. You know the statistics about prisons and all that. They have a plan for my children, and I am not going along with it.”

    Given this state of affairs, it is hardly surprising that a growing number of black parents, frustrated with a school system that is quick to criminalize and disenfranchise their children, turn to homeschooling as an alternative.

    Thus, for many black parents, homeschooling equates with a refusal to surrender their children to a system that they see as bent on destroying them. For them, it is an act of active and conscious resistance to racism.

    African-American homeschooling

    By taking the constant threat of harassment and discrimination out of the picture, homeschooling provides African-American parents the space and time to educate and socialize their children for optimal personal development.

    I found the home education is planned and delivered primarily by mothers, who stay at home, or work from home. This mother-led home education process is commonly observed among homeschoolers.

    In general, two strategies are commonly observed among black home educators: imparting self-knowledge and self-esteem through positive teaching about Africa and African-Americans.

    While finding ready-to-use educational materials can be challenging, most parents reported creating their own materials, by drawing from different sources, such as books, documentaries, the internet, field-trips, etc.

    Many go out of their way to provide exposure to black people who have achieved greatness in their domain, for instance, literature, science, or history, in an effort not only to educate their children about their history and culture, but also to instill racial pride and confidence in them.

    In other words, many black homeschooling parents engage in racial protectionism, so that they will have the self-confidence and knowledge necessary to face and overcome the hurdles that white racism appears to place in their path.

    Ama Mazama of Temple University is the author of the original article from The Conversation.
    She includes copious links throughout.

  236. says

    Thanks to Staten Island D.A. Dan Donovan, Ramsey Orta, the man who filmed the NYPD’s murder of Eric Garner, will remain in jail for an indeterminate period of time:

    As a high profile police accountability activist, Orta feared for his life while in police custody, and those fears were confirmed when fellow inmates at Rikers began falling ill because their food was laced with rat poison. To protect himself from similar attacks, Orta has been refusing to eat.

    However, after a push from The Free Thought Project, Ramsey Orta was given new-found hope. Orta’s story went viral and was shared tens of thousands of times on social media. The resultant virility has raised just over $40,000 as of Thursday.

    On Thursday afternoon Orta posted bond. However, smashing all of this recent hope, officials are still refusing to release him.

    According to PIX 11,

    The Staten Island district attorney, Dan Donovan, demanded a hearing to determine if the SOURCE of the bail money is permissible. That’s in spite of the fact that most of the donors, from around the country, have given their names. And District Attorney Dan Donovan happens to be running for Congress in the special election for the district made up of Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn four weeks from now.

    This, in a country where ex-police officer and eternal scumbag Darren the murderer Wilson got half a million dollars in donations.

    This, in a country where the homophobic owners of a pizzeria received nearly a million in donations.

    God fucking dammit. The priorities of so many people in this country are outta fucking whack!

  237. rq says

    Graphic New Video Backs Up Witness Accounts, Police Allow K-9 to Tear Apart Unconscious Man. It’s a graphic video, and I hope it also inspires some action on behalf of the PD against the arresting officers, because HOLY SHIT they are horrible people.

    This one’s interesting, on white people’s response – maybe they’re getting it? After Ferguson, white public officials soften their response

    The response was nothing like what happened in Ferguson, Mo.

    Days after Walter L. Scott was shot to death as he ran away from a South Carolina police officer, North Charleston’s white mayor and white police chief paid condolences to his grieving family.

    They promised a police escort for Scott’s funeral and publicly condemned the killing by Officer Michael T. Slager, who has been charged with murder.

    “This has been a horrible tragedy in our community,” North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey told reporters. “Please pray for this family.”[…]

    Nationwide, after Missouri officials’ stumbling response to the Aug. 9 Ferguson police shooting of unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown, the tone and approach of white public officials is shifting.

    “Things have changed considerably,” said John Gaskin III, a black St. Louis community activist. “Quite honestly, Ferguson was the Watergate of public relations. It was a disaster … I think a lot of people, many, learned from Ferguson.”

    Officials in Ferguson and St. Louis County were slow to release information after Brown’s shooting and responded to protests with an intimidating police presence.

    The Ferguson police chief — Thomas Jackson, who has since resigned — took almost a week to reveal the name of the officer who killed Brown, and when he did, also implicated the dead man in a strong-arm robbery. That juxtaposition angered demonstrators and fueled more unrest, which simmered for months.

    Since then, officials across the country have aggressively moved to get official information out quickly and eliminate any hint of racism.

    “Ferguson was a wakeup call, really, for police departments worldwide,” said John Guilfoil of Georgetown, Mass., who runs a public-relations company that serves about 50 police and fire departments and town governments. […]

    The swift official response in North Charleston this week has received a generally favorable reception from black activists, largely due to the murder charge against the officer.

    At a Wednesday news conference, the mayor and police chief still confronted a room of protesters chanting: “No justice, no peace! No justice, no peace! No justice, no peace!”

    Mayor Summey told the crowd: “We understand how you feel and what you’re saying.… We don’t have any issues with that.”

    The protesters challenged officials for a while, but when the news conference was over, after night fell, quiet reigned on the streets of North Charleston.

    The article also looks at a few other better responses to shootings and racist incidents. So maybe a change is in the air?

    Officer made choice, not mistake, to kill Walter Scott.

    I clicked on the video of the South Carolina police officer murdering Walter Scott by shooting the fifty year old veteran father in the back though I refuse to watch any of the ISIS beheading videos. The video of Scott’s murder was as grotesque as I imagine the ISIS videos to be, but I think the reason I watched this one was in the hope that I might somehow understand what happened. I don’t. And now I can’t not think about Walter Scott’s family having this horrific event captured on video and pasted all over the internet as just another notch in the belt of police brutalizing black lives.

    The South Carolina police chief is quoted as saying the officer who shot Walter Scott “made a mistake”. A mistake is defined as an action that is “misguided” or “wrong”, such as a misunderstanding or oversight. A mistake implies that if someone had all the correct information that they wouldn’t have made the same decision. Under the presumption that the officer who murdered Scott made a “mistake”, the only thing I can see that the officer would have done differently under the circumstances was to notice that another human being was filming his contemptible actions. “Getting caught” is the officer’s only mistake, as that action is the only “mistake” he would likely have changed if the video had never come to light.

    The white officer made a conscious choice to kill Walter Scott. That’s one key difference between regular citizens and the police – power. The one with power gets to make the choice. It’s right there in the definition. The officer knew Walter Scott was unarmed, which is why he appears to have planted a taser after relaying that as the reason he shot Scott. He didn’t make a mistake about whether Scott posed a threat to the officer. Walter Scott didn’t pose any such threat. He didn’t misunderstand that a human life was bleeding out as he cuffed the dying man’s wrists. WTF is that, anyway? I know it’s for show, but the lengths of theater some will go to in the face of actual tragedy is mind-numbing. If some officers put as much effort into protecting citizens as they did to covering their asses, we might have a fine police presence in this country. The officer found time to plant a taser nearby but couldn’t administer CPR to an obviously dying and thoroughly incapacitated man? Where does that callous disregard emanate from? Is it arrogance? Is it learned or innate? Is it hatred or simply evil?

    The author also looks at the original police (and therefore media) narrative and how the initial response has not been as good as media says it has been – namely, before video came out, media were perfectly happy to follow the official police narrative, without even questioning if there is something more to it. As always, really. The author finishes:

    I’m trying to see this turn of events as positive but I just can’t get there today. Racist court clerks being fired for doing racist things, a policeman being charged with murder after murdering a human being only because he got caught red-handed. I can’t help but remember that arrest does not a conviction make. Similarly, cynicism reigning supreme right now, I assume Mary Ann Twitty will land a job in no time or become the tearful recipient of yet another racist GoFundMe campaign.

    Northside Developer McKee leaves city property taxes unpaid – this on those properties slated to be developed, even though the developer has no money. Basically, pushing people out of there for no reason at all.

    Developer Paul McKee owns more than 1,500 acres on the north side of St. Louis, but for the last two years he has not paid property taxes on nearly any of it.

    In examining real estate property taxes, St. Louis Public Radio discovered McKee’s company, Northside Regeneration LLC, owes the city more than $750,000 in taxes for 2013 and 2014. That total includes nearly $120,000 in interest and penalties.

    The developer acknowledged the tax bill and said it would get paid.

    “We’re working with the city,” McKee said. “It’s not a cash flow problem.” He refused to say any more about the matter on the record.

    McKee has promised to revitalize a large part of the city’s north side with jobs centers, housing and other amenities. Since he began buying land in 2003, McKee has spent $40 million of his own money and received $41 million in state tax credits. The city of St. Louis also approved a $390 million Tax Increment Financing package in 2009.

    Read more about developer tax shenanigans within.

    47 years ago today, 100,000 march in funeral procession for Martin Luther King in Atlanta. Yesterday, really.

    EXCLUSIVE: Ramsey Orta, who shot Eric Garner video, not released from jail despite posting crowdfunded bail. Tony already got this one, above. Just another source. I think I’ll have another article on this, but honestly, this is the meanest and most obvious bullshit ever. They got the money, and now it’s the court not abiding by the law. Fuck them.

  238. rq says

    Rekia Boyd! Before my time, as one might say – or at least, before this thread. Trial of officer charged with her murder begins. Rekia Boyd ‘Didn’t Have a Chance,’ Prosecutor Says on Opening Day of Trial

    “She didn’t see it coming; she didn’t have a chance,” Assistant State’s Attorney Ramon Moore told a packed courtroom as opening statements in Dante Servin’s trial began.

    Servin, 46, faces charges of involuntary manslaughter, reckless discharge of a firearm and reckless conduct in the 2012 shooting that killed 22-year-old Boyd and wounded another man. The trial started Thursday afternoon.

    Servin was off-duty when he opened fire at Boyd and three others near Douglas Park about 1 a.m. on March 21, 2012. He has said he thought a man in the group pulled a gun, but police never recovered a weapon, and prosecutors said the man was holding a cell phone.

    On Thursday, Moore argued that Servin failed to live up to the “tradition of excellence” people expect from police officers. Instead, the detective fired five rounds from a 9 mm semiautomatic gun, striking Antonio Cross in his hand and Boyd in the back of her head.

    Defense attorney Jennifer Blagg countered that while the incident was a tragedy, Servin didn’t commit a crime. […]

    Before the trial started, Sutton had said his family was hopeful for a conviction, but he didn’t like the odds.

    “If we look at the past history of all the so-called ‘bad’ police shootings,” Sutton told DNAinfo Chicago, “or all of the people who’ve been killed by police, nobody’s really been punished for it.”

    He added: “It’s always in the back of my mind that the officer [who shot my sister] may not be found guilty. The chances look slim to us that they will actually put this officer behind bars.”

    Boyd’s mother, Angela Helton, told reporters after court she was frustrated by the charges brought against Servin. Even if he’s convicted, she said, he could still get “a slap on the wrist” since sentencing could amount to probation.

    “Dante Servin could not serve enough years for me,” Helton said. “He always has a smirk on his face like it’s funny. … You don’t want to know what I think of him.

    The city paid a $4.5 million settlement to Boyd’s estate in 2013.

    Servin and his attorneys didn’t wish to comment on the case Thursday. Since he was criminally indicted, Servin has continued to work for the Chicago Police Department on desk duty.

    The best of luck and I’ll try to keep my hopes up.
    More on the same: Opening statements begin in 2012 police shooting, with video.

    For the first time in a little more than 15 years a Chicago police officer is on trial for his use of deadly force.

    A judge heard opening statements today, three years after off duty Chicago detective Donte Servin opened fire on a group of people killing one and injuring another.

    The case is also being drawn into of a national debate over police brutality.

    In this case Officer Servin, who is Hispanic, was off duty at the time and is Latino.

    The victim – a 22-year old black female.

    Servin is facing involuntary manslaughter charges, making him the first Chicago police officer in more than 15 years to be charged in a fatal shooting.

    So he is Hispanic, which means he is Latino. I find that an interesting sentence.
    Ah, but also, note: no officers charged in 15 years of Chicago policing, and a Latino man shoots a young black woman, and suddenly there’s a trial (for a certain value of ‘suddenly’, of course, considering it’s been two plus years).

    Protestors want a citizens review board with subpoena powers #chsnews #WalterScott

    See, these videos re: #WalterScott show EVERYTHING the police say never happens: racial profiling, planted evidence, coverups, murder.

    Dash cam video from Michael Slager’s patrol car released

    In the video, Slager pulled over Scott and asked to see his license and registration. Scott tells the officer he is missing some paperwork, saying the car is not his but he plans to buy it and the current owner has all of the documents. Right after Scott pulls over, you can also hear Slager tell him his third brake light was out.

    Once Slager returns to his car to check Scott’s license, Scott gets out of his vehicle and Slager tells him to get back inside. Scott gets back into his car, then suddenly gets back out and takes off on foot.

    You can’t see Slager, but through his microphone you can hear him as he runs after Scott.

    Moments later, the two meet in a grassy field where Slager attempted to subdue Scott through the use of his stun gun. Video captured by a bystander that has been shown around the world and shared through social media shows Slager squeezing off eight shots to Scott as Scott attempts to run from the scene.

    Fucking… Where’s the danger, the reason to fear for one’s life? Gahds.

    @deray There are now FIVE Indiegogo campaigns raising money for Slager, one saying “Blue Lives Matter”. WTF??
    Fuck you, IndieGoGo.

  239. rq says

    Breaking: #WalterScott family attorney filing civil lawsuit against city of north charleston and officer Slager. #chsnews

    WPIX EXCLUSIVE: Ramsey Orta, who shot Eric Garner video, not released from jail despite posting crowdfunded bail

    It’s the video that came to be the rallying cry for the movement protesting the deaths of people of color in police cases – the takedown and arrest of Eric Garner, in Staten Island last summer. The man who shot that video, on his smartphone, 30-year-old Ramsey Orta, was in need of a rally of support himself.

    The day after Garner’s death was declared a homicide, Orta was arrested and jailed on an unrelated gun charge, and was later charged with a drug crime. He’s been in Rikers Island since, and has been on a hunger strike there for days now.

    So his family launched this GoFundMe site to raise the $16,000 needed for his bail bond – they’ve now raised far more, just under $40,000, and growing, from more than 1,500 people giving a few bucks each.

    But the whole effort came to a halt this afternoon, after Orta posted his bail bond. The Staten Island district attorney, Dan Donovan, demanded a hearing to determine if the SOURCE of the bail money is permissible.That’s in spite of the fact that most of the donors, from around the country, have given their names.

    And District Attorney Dan Donovan happens to be running for Congress in the special election for the district made up of Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn four weeks from now.

    Packed council meeting in North Charleston #walterscott #chsnews

    SLED on #WalterScott shooting: “There were inconsistencies including what appeared to be multiple gunshot wounds in Mr. Scott’s back.” That’s inconsistencies with the official report and the video.

    NOW: Call @dandonovan_ny’s office & demand that he cancel the bail hearing & release #RamseyOrta now: (718) 876-6300 Dunno, is anyone close enough to call?

    the right to remain silent. american policing. #WalterScott Cartoon showing a black man lying in the street, with a police officer on the right, pointing his gun and saying “You have the right to remain silent…”

  240. rq says

    File under General Police Misbehaviour: Worcester police officer arrested after allegedly assaulting inmate

    Police have arrested one of their own officers Thursday after investigating a complaint that he beat a man and made disparaging racial remarks against him while the man was waiting to be transferred from the police department to the county courthouse for arraignment.

    The incident, first reported in March, allegedly took place in December, 2014.

    While the man was handcuffed and shackled in a holding cell, the officer, Michael Motyka, allegedly entered and forced the man against a wall, punched him, threw him to the floor and kicked him.

    Also, while the man was being released from prison, Officer Motyka “made a disparaging remark with respect to the complainant’s ‘black’ skin.”

    Sgt. Kerry Hazelhurst of the Worcester Police Department said, “The officer went into the holing cell, forced the complainant against the wall and struck him, threw him down to the ground and kicked him.”
    Motyka was charged with with assault and battery, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon (shod foot) and a civil rights violation.

    Editorial: Ferguson comes to South Carolina. The case of Walter Scott

    Some 855 miles and 238 days separate the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Walter L. Scott in North Charleston, S.C. But the striking similarities of their final minutes will forever connect them.

    It’s a Saturday, and a white police officer alone in a cruiser comes upon them.

    Both cities have high African-American populations and police departments that don’t reflect the makeup of the population. Black residents in both cities have complained about being unfairly targeted because of the color of their skin.

    In Ferguson, the statistics kept as a matter of state law bear out that narrative. South Carolina doesn’t keep racial profiling statistics.

    Mr. Brown, 18, is walking down Canfield Drive. Mr. Scott, 50, is driving near the intersection of Remount and Craig roads. Both men are black. Both are unarmed.

    The officer pulls them over. There is a confrontation. The black man flees.

    He is shot and killed. He is far from the police officer when he dies.

    The white police officer — Darren Wilson in Ferguson and Michael Slager in North Charleston — says the black man grabbed for his weapon. The officer feared for his life.

    In the aftermath of the shootings, local or state police agencies block access to important information that by law should be public and would shed light on what truly happened.

    There are differences in the narratives — Mr. Brown, autopsies showed — was shot from the front. Forensic evidence backed Mr. Wilson’s account, and two separate investigations found no reliable witnesses to contradict him.

    Mr. Scott was clearly shot in the back. Haunting video shot by a bystander records Patrolman 1st Class Slager shooting Mr. Scott as he runs away. On Tuesday, after that video surfaced, Mr. Slager was charged with murder.

    Mr. Wilson, while no longer a police officer in Ferguson, is a free man.

    In South Carolina, the video left no doubt. […]

    But for most African-Americans who have been victims of Driving While Black, or Walking While Black, for those caught up in the corrupt municipal court cabal that targets them in the St. Louis region, for those in cities all across America who have protested police brutality for more than 238 days, Michael Brown is Walter Scott is Tamir Rice is Eric Garner.

    There are important differences in all of these cases, but right or wrong, for many blacks, Ferguson is North Charleston is Cleveland is New York. This is what can happen to black people in too many communities.

    This is America in 2015.

    What are we going to do about it? […]

    Perhaps the case of Walter Scott will be the rallying point that elevates this new civil rights movement and reduces the sharp division between black and white, between police and protester. There is at least anecdotal evidence coming out of San Diego’s trial use of body cameras, for instance, that both police and the communities they serve see the benefit. The cameras create a new sense of awareness that changes both police and community behavior, leaders there have said. A study of the camera use over the past year shows use-of-force incidents down 47 percent, and civilian complaints down by 41 percent.

    This is common ground that must become the new norm in American policing. Getting there — and quickly — should not be that difficult.

    The tougher challenge is for white eyes to see what black eyes see in the criminal justice system in those cases in which video isn’t available. An intense, difficult and ongoing conversation in St. Louis since Aug. 9 has opened some eyes, but it has also hardened hearts.

    During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed this issue head on. In an interview with CBS, he was asked how long the unrest that was sweeping through many cities would last. Here’s what he said:

    “I think the answer about how long it will take will depend on the federal government, on the city halls of our various cities, and on White America to a large extent,” he said. “This is where we are at this point, and I think White America will determine how long it will be and which way we go in the future.”

    This week, White America and Black America saw a white police officer shoot a fleeing black man in cold blood. But did we really see the same thing? Did we wonder about that initial point of contact? About how smoothly the police officer phonied up his story? About the lack of police video? About the culture of the department? About whether a white driver and a black one would have been pulled over for the same allegedly broken brake light?

    Chris Stewart, the attorney for Mr. Scott’s family, asked an important question at a news conference on Tuesday:

    “What if there had been no video?”

    In an age of technology, that’s a question that should haunt us no more.

    *sigh* “Disturbing” Video Shows Man Being Beaten by Cops After Stealing Horse

    San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon ordered an immediate internal investigation Thursday into an arrest by deputies after a horse pursuit caught on camera by NewsChopper4.

    Deputies appeared to use Tasers to stun a man and then beat him after the pursuit in San Bernardino County Thursday afternoon.

    Aerial footage showed the man falling off the horse, and then being stunned with a Taser by a sheriff’s deputy.

    The man appeared to fall to the ground with his arms outstretched. Two deputies immediately descended on him and began punching him in the head and kneeing him in the groin.

    The group surrounding the man grew to 11 sheriff’s deputies.

    In the two minutes after the man was stunned with a Taser, it appeared deputies kicked him 17 times, punched him 37 times and struck him with batons four times. Thirteen blows appeared to be to the head. The allegedly stolen horse stood idly nearby.

    The man did not appear to move from his position lying on the ground for more than 45 minutes. He did not appear to receive medical attention while deputies stood around him during that time.

    The man, identified as Francis Jared Pusok, 30, of Apple Valley, was hospitalized with unknown injuries, authorities said.

    More background at the link.

    There’s also Floyd Dent to think of, also caught on video: Attorney: Inkster cops lied about drugs after beat down

    A Detroit man shown on video being pummeled and bloodied by police during an Inkster traffic stop never touched the bag of cocaine he’s charged with possessing, his lawyer said Wednesday.
    Floyd Dent, 57, appeared in Wayne County Circuit Court on the felony drug charge and a not-guilty plea was entered. His lawyer, Greg Rohl, requested video, images and documents he says will prove his client is innocent and a victim of police brutality.
    Rohl told a small crowd outside the courtroom that he’s seeking Dent’s bloody mugshot, his booking video and video he said shows officers celebrating after beating Dent. The lawyer also seeks the names of nine to 11 officers on the scene.

    He said patrol car video proves Dent never had the cocaine alleged to have been in the 2011 Cadillac when he was pulled over shortly before 10 p.m. Jan. 28 near South River Park Drive and Inkster Drive.

    “There was no hit by the (police) dog; no one found anything,” Rohl said. “Then all the sudden, you see the man reach into his pocket. And then it was obstructed by an officer, and all the sudden — bingo, he’s got a bag of cocaine. It doesn’t work that way.” […]

    Rohl said Dent had some problems with unpaid tickets but looks to be cleared for a valid license next week. He said Dent, a black man, has been the victim of racial profiling, and that testimony in the most recent case supports that.

    “No doubt about it,” Rohl said.”There is a systemic issue. It’s the fact that there is racial profiling. And it’s how Mr. Dent started his journey here, by being racially profiled.”

    Professor David Harris with the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, who specializes on police behavior and law enforcement, has conducted research on racial profiling in traffic stops and written a book on it called “Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work.”

    He said it takes aggregation of police data to definitively discern racial profiling, but the nature of the multiple stops in Dent’s driving record raises questions.
    “It makes you wonder, ‘Why is this guy getting stopped for trivial (reasons) over and over again?'” Harris said, adding that these “high discretion” stops aren’t like drunken-driving or reckless driving offenses. “You’re actually deciding to pick somebody out. And the question is, ‘Why?'”
    Dent’s license was suspended during these instances, but Harris said that’s not something an officer knows until running the plate or pulling the driver over.

    Dent told the Free Press he admits making mistakes, like making an illegal U-turn in one instance. But he said he always was treated with respect. On Jan. 28 in Inkster, it was a different story.
    “I got treated like a dog,” he said.

    Dent stood mute in court Wednesday and spoke briefly outside the courtroom.

    “I feel pretty good,” he said as the crowd around him applauded. Dent said the attention has been overwhelming, and he never thought he would be in such a situation.

    IMPORTANT. On the crowdfunding: Indiegogo: Take down the Michael Slager fundraisers immediately! It’s a petition.

    The online fundraising platform Indiegogo is enabling Officer Michael Slager to profit in the aftermath of killing Walter Scott, an unarmed Black man that Slager shot eight times while he was trying to run away.

    Join our campaign demanding that Indiegogo remove ALL Michael Slager fundraising pages from their platform immediately. So far Indiegogo is refusing to do so.

    Indiegogo is defending the fundraising drive by using language that we’re all too familiar with. The company is claiming that they’re an “open” platform and they “don’t judge the content of campaigns.”

    Last year we launched a campaign targeting GoFundMe after they made a similar argument about being a “neutral technology platform.” GoFundMe failed to take down a fundraising drive in support of Darren Wilson, which raised over $430,000 and which the company profited from.

    But after 130K ColorOfChange members spoke up – and after a couple months of consistent pressure – GoFundMe donated these profits to the Ferguson-Florissant school district. Months later we know that GoFundMe remembers our campaign. When a similar Michael Slager fundraiser was started on their platform this week, GoFundMe took it down immediately. This is the power of collective action.

    Sign this petition to Indiegogo right now.

    And some more on CopWatch and other apps that can be used to film and record police easily: Justice Through a Lens

    CopWatch launched in January of 2014, as if anticipating the year that police brutality would go viral. In July, a New York cop held Eric Garner in a banned chokehold while Garner protested, “I can’t breathe.” A friend filmed Garner’s death on his cellphone from a few feet away. In August, audio of the police shooting of Ferguson teenager Michael Brown was inadvertently recorded by a neighbor, then played back on CNN; several bystanders filmed the immediate aftermath of Brown’s death. In November, a security camera directed at a Cleveland park recorded a 12-year-old boy, Tamir Rice, running around and playing with an airsoft gun. It also recorded cops driving their car onto the grass, jumping out of the police vehicle, and shooting Rice with a real weapon.

    This week, another white cop killed another unarmed black man on tape. This time, the video was longer, clearer, and closer than any we’d seen before. Chris Hayes called it “instantly iconic.” At first, South Carolina cop Michael Slager claimed that he shot and killed 50-year-old Walter Scott because he feared for his life after Scott commandeered the cop’s Taser during a routine traffic stop gone bad. But the leaked cellphone video of the incident, recorded by a 23-year-old bystander named Feiden Santana, contradicts Slager’s narrative. From his vantage point behind a chain-link fence, Santana captures Slager shooting Scott eight times in the back as Scott runs away from the officer. After Scott hits the ground and Slager cuffs his lifeless wrists behind his back, Slager can be seen running to retrieve a handheld object, then returning to drop it near Scott’s body. The video was published Tuesday night on the home page of the New York Times. Notably, given the paper’s strict profanity policy, Santana can be heard saying: “Oh, shit. Oh shit. Shit.”

    Santana talks about the act of capturing evidence as if it were a reflex. “I was just witnessing it with my eyes and letting the phone do the work,” he told MSNBC Wednesday night. His video arrives as organizations like the NEPV and the ACLU are encouraging more citizens to make more videos of more incidents, and to remind cops that they’re always being watched. Joining the CopWatch app is Mobile Justice, a free Android app developed by local ACLU chapters in Oregon, Missouri, Mississippi, and Nebraska that allows users to record videos of cops behaving badly and automatically zip them over to their local ACLU branches. And the International Evidence Locker, an app that will help bystanders record evidence of systematic abuse, encrypt it, and send it directly to a human rights organization, is currently in development by students at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and members of Amnesty International.

    The main feature shared by all of these services is the ability to quickly send video evidence straight from the witness’s private device and into the public sphere. Though Americans have a constitutional right to record video in public, the ACLU says it has monitored “a widespread, continuing pattern of law enforcement officers ordering people to stop taking photographs or video in public places, and harassing, detaining and arresting those who fail to comply.” In some cases, cops have confiscated cameras from bystanders recording arrests and then deleted the photo and video evidence they contain. These apps ensure that even a snatched phone’s video will reach the public eye. For extra protection, the ACLU app allows users the option to have their phone “automatically enter lock mode” while recording a police incident, so that prying cops can’t peer inside without a password. If a video is deleted from a phone, CopWatch encourages users to download recovery software like PhotoRec to help resuscitate lost evidence. […]

    The CopWatch and ACLU apps pair their video technology with informative guides that remind users of their rights while warning them about the potential hazards of capturing the shot. The ACLU advises amateur videographers to “announce that you are reaching for your phone” so an aggressive cop doesn’t mistake it for a weapon; if an officer “forbids or prevents you” from filming, users are urged to “not argue or resist” and to agitate for their rights later, in a court of law. CopWatch’s 35-page online guidebook advises that witnesses maintain a space of 10 feet between themselves and the incident, and tells them never to walk “within striking distance of a police officer.” Witnesses should also be careful to avoid minor, common infractions while otherwise legally filming a scene, like standing on the street instead of the sidewalk. Because a witness of police misconduct can sometimes become its target, CopWatch advises users to “have a friend present when you decide to record community-police interactions”: One person to film the cop, and another to film the person filming the cop.

    Some nice options and advice there.

  241. rq says

    5 Lies Told By The Police #WalterScott (an infographic on the Walter Scott shooting).

    Day 9: what the cicada said to the brown boy – @ClintSmithIII

    #nationalpoetrymonth – swing through her previous poetry month entries (scroll up at the link), she has some fine stuff posted up and probably will have more. This one specifically, though, goes like this:

    i’ve seen what they make of you
    how they render you a multiplicity
    of mistakes

    they have undone me as well
    pulled back my shell and feasted
    on my flesh

    claimed it was for their survival
    and they wonder why I only show my face
    every seventeen years

    but you

    you’re lucky if they let you live that long
    i could teach you some things, you know
    have been playing this game since before

    you knew what breath was
    this here is prehistoric
    why you think we fly?

    why you think we roll in packs?
    you think these swarms are for the fun of it?
    i would tell you that you don’t roll deep enough

    but every time you swarm they shoot
    get you some wings, son
    get you some wings

    — Clint Smith, Cambridge, Massachusetts

    Get you some wings.

    Here’s a series on Baltimore and surveillance, following up on Pteryxx’ 229.
    Baltimore Police used secret technology to track cellphones in thousands of cases

    The Baltimore Police Department has used an invasive and controversial cellphone tracking device thousands of times in recent years while following instructions from the FBI to withhold information about it from prosecutors and judges, a detective revealed in court testimony Wednesday.

    The testimony shows for the first time how frequently city police are using a cell site simulator, more commonly known as a “stingray,” a technology that authorities have gone to great lengths to avoid disclosing.

    The device mimics a cellphone tower to force phones within its range to connect. Police use it to track down stolen phones or find people.

    Until recently, the technology was largely unknown to the public. Privacy advocates nationwide have raised questions whether there has been proper oversight of its use.

    Baltimore has emerged in recent months as a battleground for the debate. In one case last fall, a city detective said a nondisclosure agreement with federal authorities prevented him from answering questions about the device. The judge threatened to hold him in contempt if he didn’t provide information, and prosecutors withdrew the evidence.

    The nondisclosure agreement, presented for the first time in court Wednesday, explicitly instructs prosecutors to drop cases if pressed on the technology, and tells them to contact the FBI if legislators or judges are asking questions.

    Here it is: Baltimore Police Stingray non-disclosure agreement.

    This was a link to an article about police trying to delete video evidence, but it seems to be down. Oh well.

    worry. blackness. Cartoon of an adult black man hugging a small black boy, and both of them are thinking “I worry about him so much out there”.

  242. rq says

    His name was Desmond Willis and he was shot in front of New Orleans Hamburger and Seafood company by 5 officers and his body laid there.
    #DesmondWillis

    Interlude: Music! Tyler, The Creator Has A Song Featuring Kanye West & Lil Wayne On New Album.

    Nearly an hour ago, Tyler, The Creator‘s new album Cherry Bomb appeared on iTunes. The tracklist, which includes thirteen tracks, hasn’t entirely been revealed yet, but it looks like one of the songs (Track 11) will feature both Lil Wayne and Kanye West, both of whom Tyler has stated as inspirations. Expect Cherry Bomb to be released next Monday.

    Witness Who Recorded Police Shooting Meets With Walter Scott’s Family During Emotional Reunion

    On Thursday, Santana reunited with Scott’s family members who embraced him with warm hugs. They hailed him as a hero for having the courage to record the incident and come forward with footage of the killing.

    “I don’t know how this would’ve turned out without the video, I just want to thank you,” a family member told Santana, as seen in a video released by NBC.

    Judy Scott, Walter’s mother, greeted Santana and hugged him tightly in an emotional embrace.

    “For myself as a person and for them as a family, I know if I had been in a situation and they were the ones who witnessed it, I’m sure they would look for justice also,” Santana said.

    During an emotional interview with MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Wednesday, Scott’s brothers shared memories of Walter — the “family man” as they described him — and praised Santana for his work.

    “For the gentleman behind the camera, that’s my brother,” Rodney said. “I mean he’s a definite hero, to come, stand forth and do what he did, he will never ever be forgotten.”

    Twitter: getting interns fired, one tweet at a time. “@Clorox: New emojis are alright but where’s the bleach. Picture link redacted, but that’s the original Clorox tweet. … For which they couldn’t apologize properly.

    Q&A with DeRay McKesson ’07

    On April 2, DeRay McKesson ’07 came to campus to discuss activism, his role in protests throughout the country and social media. Following his talk in Kresge, McKesson sat down for a Q&A with members of the Orient. The following has been lightly edited for clarity.

    Stuff on activism, tracking police violence, etc., etc.

  243. rq says

    Police say 25 yr old Desmond Willis lead officers on a car chase before crashing into a fence

    Media and Politics 101. (Cartoon with four panels; panel 1- “Muslim shooter = 1.3 billion Muslims held responsible”; panel 2 – “Black shooter = gang related violence”; panel 3 – “Professional shooter = National hero (or collateral damage)”; panel 4 – “White shooter = lone wolf (or parking problems or emotional issues or…)”.)

    hey, i’m just gonna tell you now there’s a good chance you might wanna skip this one – announcement for interview with Michael Slager’s mother. Wannabet, ‘he is such a nice boy and he’d never do something like that’ makes the script?

    A+ LibTrolling: Make the defeat of the Confederacy a national holiday

    The truth of the Civil War is complicated and deeply personal to many people on both sides of the Mason-Dixon. I know that it came as quite a shock to me in my early adult life to learn that the realities of 19th century America were very different from what I’d been taught in a New York public school system. Slavery was certainly a pressing issue of debate at the time, but it was hardly clear cut, since so many of the “good guys” in the North were also slave owners. The parts of the story which went almost entirely untold when I was growing up concerned the considerable economic oppression which the North had been imposing on the South by making use of their considerably advanced industrial might as compared to the more agriculturally based southern states. Access to open trade was also a big factor for some, leading to a general sense that the South was being relegated to second class citizen status.

    But a call to remove the names of Confederate leaders – or even foot soldiers – from public pillars, or ban new ones from being erected, is just being insulting for the sake of causing trouble. Those states were part of the union before the war broke out and they are states today. The blood shed by southern families was every bit as red as that leaked out by the Yankees. And there remains considerable pride among those families for the bravery, heroism and sacrifice of their ancestors no matter who won the war, as well as the subsequent ability to write the history books.

    All of this is known, but it makes for a poor liberal talking point. Therefore, it’s ignored. But when you need to troll the conservatives, I suppose you just run this up the flagpole again if you’ve run out of fresh ideas. Bonus points for the effort, though. We can all appreciate some classic trolling during a slow news period.

    Uh, okay, and all those confederate ‘heroes’ were fine upstanding citizens that were never ever white supremacists or slave-owners or…? Right?
    Keep trolling.

    It wasn’t just Walter Scott: The North Charleston Police Department has a shocking record of abuse allegations . Yeah, there was Givens, too, but as it turns out, a whole lot more…

    It’s hardly surprising that Slager remained un-prosecuted prior to the release of the video: South Carolina police have fired on 209 suspects over the past five years, but only a few have been charged and none have ever been convicted, according to The State, a South Carolina newspaper.

    The situation in North Charleston appears particularly bleak. Based on a review of public records, the North Charleston Police Department has been sued 46 times since 2000 in federal court alone. Many of the suits have been unsuccessful. Some were written by hand from jail and immediately thrown out. Others ran into trouble over evidentiary and procedural obstacles. Taken together, however, the legal documents present a stunning account of police brutality in North Charleston, where the population is 47 percent black but the police force is about 80 percent white, according to the Times.

    None of the officers accused of assaulting Williams in that motel room on Nov. 19, 2011, were fired, according to Chris Robertson, a member of Williams’ legal team: Officer J. Byrum, Officer J. Fogel, Officer Habersham, Officer K. Beckman and Sgt. Kruger were all still on the force as of about two months ago, and there’s no reason to believe that’s changed, Robertson said.

    What follows are just a handful of the accusations of police brutality made against the North Charleston Police Department over the last 15 years, according to court records reviewed by Salon. (The department directed a request for comment to City Hall. A message to the city’s Public Information Office was not immediately returned.)

    Five incidents, all of them excessively and brutally violent, without any repercussions for the officers.

    Protest is continuing outside nirth charleston city hall after city council meeting. #chs #chsnews

  244. rq says

    Interlude: Basketball. Though not much of an interlude.
    Police report says it took four officers to place Thabo Sefolosha in handcuffs. #ATLHawks
    Per NBA league source, #Hawks Thabo Sefolosha broke his right ankle during the incident in NYC. Out for season.
    Thabo Sefolosha (black man in general vicinity of New York City police officer) will miss the rest of the season. (I love the wording on this one.)
    ESPN: Don’t write Thabo “sustained injury while resisting arrest.” He denies R.A. After #WalterScott you can’t print police charges as fact.

    Here’s a couple of articles on what happened:
    Thabo Sefolosha Injury: Updates on Hawks Guard’s Leg After Arrest

    Sefolosha sustained the injury while resisting arrest outside a Manhattan night club early Wednesday morning. Sefolosha was arrested along with teammate Pero Antic for interfering with local police’s efforts to set up a crime scene following the stabbing of Indiana Pacers forward Chris Copeland. […]

    According to Marc J. Spears of Yahoo Sports, the Hawks say Sefolosha will require surgery on his leg after sustaining ligament damage in addition to his fractured tibia.

    Antic and Sefolosha each face three misdemeanor charges, per Chris Vivlamore of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, after refusing to leave the scene where Copeland was stabbed.

    Sounds like an overall eventful evening.

    Video: Cops Throw Thabo Sefolosha To The Ground And Arrest Him

    TMZ has obtained cell phone video footage of Hawks guard Thabo Sefolosha’s arrest outside of a New York night club early yesterday morning. Sefolosha and teammate Pero Antic were arrested for failing to disperse, after Pacers forward Chris Copeland was stabbed. Sefolosha reportedly fractured his tibia during the arrest, which makes some sense after seeing the video.

    The video starts as a crowd of cops scuffle with Sefolosha, and eventually take him down to the ground. Two cops walk him away in cuffs, while bystanders shout at them in French (Sefolosha is from Switzerland and speaks French). The end of the video shows cops talking to Antic while he is handcuffed sitting on the ground. According to the police report, cops told Sefolosha and Antic to leave six times before they were arrested.

  245. rq says

    From Tony, Cryptic ‘Murder’ Letter Sent To Professor Teaching ‘The Problem Of Whiteness’

    An Arizona State University professor whose class on the “problem of whiteness” sparked backlash from conservatives and a total freakout from white supremacist groups received hundreds of hate emails and letters this winter, according to a police report obtained by TPM.

    But one cryptic letter apparently stuck out to the police. It was filled with Bible verses and it described the recipient as a sinner. It contained vague references to “murder.” The letter was hand-addressed to the professor and listed nothing more than the town of Switzer, W.V. and a zip code as its return address.

    The Tempe, Ariz. Police Department began investigating harassment against ASU assistant professor Lee Bebout on Jan. 29, according to the report. Bebout reported that on that morning someone had anonymously distributed fliers in his neighborhood showing a photo of him with the label “anti-white.”

    Bebout informed police that he had also received hundreds of “angry emails and letters from people expressing their distaste for the title/content of his class,” according to the report.

    The professor told police that the hate mail started pouring in after a news story about his class, titled “Race Theory & the Problem of Whiteness,” ran on Jan. 22, according to the report. Lauren Clark, a student at ASU and correspondent for the conservative student news website Campus Reform, had appeared Jan. 23 on the Fox News show “Fox and Friends” to complain that Bebout’s class inappropriately suggested that white people were to blame for society’s ills.

    Two days later, Bebout received a mysterious letter addressed by hand to “Lee S. Bebout or current resident,” according to the police report. […]

    The case languished until police were notified on March 4 that a fingerprint had been obtained from a baggie containing the fliers collected in Bebout’s neighborhood, according to the report. After that fingerprint turned up no further leads, Bebout’s case was rendered inactive pending further new information.

    Bill Mullen, a professor of English and American Studies at Purdue University who first met Bebout when the ASU assistant professor was working on his dissertation, told TPM in a phone interview that he reached out to the professor when the “problem of whiteness” class first rose to national attention.

    “He’s under an extraordinary amount of — stress isn’t even the right word,” Mullen told TPM. “It’s not often you go to work and you have your life threatened, or you go home from work and you feel that you, your partner and your child may be in physical danger.”

    The police report stated that Bebout told police he’d received no specific threat of violence. The investigator wrote in the report that the professor told him he did not feel like he was in imminent danger and said “most people have been really supportive.”

    Mullen told TPM that he also felt ASU’s administration had left Bebout “out to dry” amid the uproar over his course.

    “I haven’t seen the administration come to his defense in the way that I would expect any university to do when an employee and his family are facing death threats,” he told TPM.

    To date, the only public statement ASU has made about the “problem of whiteness” class came in response to the Fox News segment that aired in January.

    “The class is designed to empower students to confront the difficult and often thorny issues that surround us today and reach thoughtful conclusions rather than display gut reactions,” the statement read. “A university is an academic environment where we discuss and debate a wide array of viewpoints.”

    The letter is some freaky religious drivel. All because someone wants to discuss race issues.

    Police Behaving Badly: Detroit police officers accused of robbing drug dealers

    Two former Detroit narcotics officers are accused of committing the kinds of crimes police are supposed to investigate: robbery, extortion, drug deals.

    Among the allegations — the veteran lieutenant and officer made traffic stops and fake arrests to steal drugs, money and property, according to an indictment unsealed today in U.S. District Court.

    Lt. David Hansberry and Officer Bryan Watson ­– whose nicknames are Hater and Bullet – were arraigned today on a litany of charges, including robbery conspiracy, extortion, aiding and abetting, and cocaine possession. If convicted of the most serious charge – conspiracy – the officers would each face up to 20 years in prison.

    Kevlin Omar Brown, 45 — who the indictment calls an “associate” of Hansberry — is charged with one count of interference with commerce by robbery or extortion from an incident in January 2012.

    The indictment comes after Detroit Police Chief James Craig disbanded the department’s troubled drug unit last year and officers became the target of a federal investigation.

    At a news conference, Craig said he was “troubled” by the allegations against Hansberry and Watson, who are suspended without pay. Craig said criminal allegations of this magnitude impacts the public trust.

    “The vast majority of the men and women of the Detroit Police Department are honest and hardworking, they honor the badge they wear and the oath they took to serve and protect the citizens of this city,” Craig said.

    Hansberry and Watson are accused of arranging drug transactions with civilians, including informants. But instead of completing the drug sales, the indictment says, the officers “would rob and extort participants in those transactions of controlled substances, money, and personal property.”

    Nice.

    Abolish the Police, video at the site – be warned, that site is hard on the eyes!!!

    SOURCE: Rev Al Sharpton will be speaking at Charity Baptist Church on Sunday. #WalterScott
    Ah, but – Family of Walter Scott tells Rev. Al Sharpton to keep away; police release dash-cam video from cop Michael Slager’s cruiser, note first part of the headline.

    Stay away, Rev. Al.

    That was the message from the family of South Carolina police shooting victim Walter Scott to the civil rights activist Thursday two days before the funeral for the slain father of four.

    “We don’t want another Ferguson type of circus here,” a source close to the Scott family told The Daily News.

    That was a reference to the Missouri town that was rocked by violent demonstrations last year after black teen Michael Brown was killed by a white cop.

    Sharpton gave a rousing speech at the 18-year-old’s funeral, which was attended by thousands.

    Scott family attorney Chris Stewart said they appreciate Sharpton’s support but “the funeral is only going to be close family members.”

    “The Reverend Al has called and expressed his support and condolences,” said Stewart. “The family is very appreciative.”

    Sharpton said he has been in touch with the Scott family and their lawyers but insisted “we had no plans to go down.”

    Plus more on the dashcam footage and the family meeting Feidin Santana (the guy with the video). Also, I wish they’d use Slager’s mugshot, not his Coast Guard service photo. But at least they’re using Scott’s Coast Guard service photo.

  246. rq says

    The fuck… 1st 100 days sees 319 killed by cop. 19 since #WalterScott & I see a bad trend. Cop reports no details. #Every8Hours Note: this is killed by cop, unsorted by race or whether armed/unarmed. This is a grand total. It’s the beginning of April. 319. Last year’s entire total was somewhere over 1100. Looking to surpass that this year…

    My fave photos from #SOSBLAKAUSTRALIA Rally in Melbourne.

    It’s time our country learnt to respect our first peoples – that’s from Australia (FYI), where racial issues are also rearing their head(s), what with Tony Abbott and shutting down reservations and being black and native in Australia being a ‘lifestyle choice’.

    …to this very day. Picture of a headline from the 1960s: “Seven unarmed Negroes shot in cold blood by Los Angeles police”.

    Grauniad on the dashcam, with transcript:Walter Scott shooting: police dashcam video shows him running from car

    Walter Scott’s funeral will be on Saturday, at WORD Ministries Christian Center, in Summerville S.C. Open to public, but no cameras.

  247. rq says

    San Bernardino and the wild horse chase (that ended with a man’s brutal beating by cop): Sheriff Orders Immediate Internal Investigation Into Arrest Seen on “Disturbing” Video

    San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon told NBC4 he was launching an internal investigation into the actions of the deputies.

    “I’m not sure if there was a struggle with the suspect,” McMahon said. “It appears there was in the early parts of the video. What happens afterwards, I’m not sure of, but we will investigate it thoroughly.”

    It looked pretty clear to me.

    Rare Trial Begins For Chicago Police Officer In Fatal Shooting Of Rekia Boyd. I hate how that ‘rare’ out front is so appropriate.

    Servin faces up to five years in prison if convicted. He is on desk duty pending the outcome of the trial.

    The last Chicago police officer convicted in a killing, Gregory Becker in 1997, shot a homeless man in an off-duty incident. He served nearly four years in prison.

    The trial follows a $4.5 million settlement that the city of Chicago paid to resolve a civil lawsuit filed by Boyd’s family.

    Boyd’s name has been one of many called out at protests around the country since a white police officer fatally shot an unarmed black teenager during a confrontation in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking a national debate about policing. The on-duty shooting in Ferguson was ruled justified.

    In Chicago, a city of about 2.7 million, police have killed an average of 17 people a year over the last seven years, almost every case ruled justified.

    About 80 percent of people shot by Chicago police are black. The city’s population is about 30 percent African-American, but 73 percent of suspects identified in case reports are black.

    Interlude: Golf! The man who defied death threats to play at the Masters

    The crowds gathered at the opening hole of the Masters in 1975 were used to watching a black man stride on to the first tee. But Lee Elder was not there to carry the clubs of a white competitor – he was there to play.

    It was one of the last colour barriers in US sport.

    “When I arrived at the front gate and drove down Magnolia Lane that’s when the shakes began. It was so nerve wracking. I said a prayer and asked for help to get me through the day,” says Elder.

    That short walk on to the first tee was a ground-breaking moment but all he could think about was not fumbling his first shot.

    “What if I hook a drive or slice a drive into the woods?” he thought. “I just collected my thoughts as I approached the first drive and just kind of swung the club.”

    Elder needn’t have worried – his first stroke landed in the centre of the fairway. On the first hole he made par and only dropped two shots in the first round.

    “For me, I felt it was a pretty good round,” he says.

    Before 1975, African Americans were often seen at Augusta, but only as caddies or club staff, never as players.

    The crowd too was overwhelmingly white. But Elder found that he got a rapturous reception wherever he went as he made his way around the course.

    “Every green I walked up on, the applause was just tremendous. I mean every one of them people shouted, ‘Go Lee! Good luck Lee!'”

    And it wasn’t just the spectators supporting him. After finishing his first round he found the staff lined up along the path leading to the club house, thanking him for coming and being the first black person to play there.

    Like other black golfers, Elder had experienced years of harassment while playing at tournaments in other southern states. The clubs there were bastions of conservatism and many members were determined to stop African Americans reaching the sport’s highest level.

    In the run up to the Masters he received so many intimidating letters, including death threats warning him he would never tee off, that he ended up renting two houses in Georgia. He spent the tournament living in fear, moving between the two properties so no-one would know where he was staying. […]

    Given the discrimination he had faced, he spent some time discussing the invitation with his advisers before he decided to accept.

    After the first two days of play he missed the cut and didn’t make it through to the weekend. Two years later though, it was a different story – he went back to Augusta in 1977 and finished in the top 20.

    Elder was 40 when he played at the Masters that first time. He felt that if he had played as a younger man in his 20s he might have had a chance of winning.

    “At 40 – that’s pretty late in your career but it was certainly something that I enjoyed being a part of,” he says.

    It was another two decades before an African-American player actually won the Masters – Tiger Woods in 1997. Elder was there to see it.

    Moral Monday. April 12th. Charleston. #WalterScott

    80 Municipal Courts In St. Louis County Change Fees After Criticism

    Changing a process that was blamed for fueling anger and frustration with the legal system in Ferguson, Mo., 80 municipal courts in St. Louis County have agreed to set uniform fees and fines that are meant to be more fair to people charged with offenses such as speeding.

    Critics call the move one step on what they see as a long path of reform. They note that the agreement is voluntary and lacks a formal system of tracking or enforcement.

    The changes, which replace a system of fees and fines that varied wildly between jurisdictions, are similar to ones ordered weeks ago by a judge in Ferguson. The push for reform has fed off protests and scrutiny that followed the police killing of Michael Brown last August.

    Last month, a federal inquiry faulted Ferguson for creating a system that’s “shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs.” As NPR has reported, “In 2013, the municipal court in Ferguson — a city of 21,135 people — issued 32,975 arrest warrants for nonviolent offenses, mostly driving violations.” […]

    A new report says the problems extend far beyond the St. Louis area. As Sam reported yesterday for the Two-Way, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area says that in California, spikes in fines and fees have come along with reduced access to courts, contributing to more than 4 million people facing driver’s license suspensions that “make it harder for people to get and keep jobs, harm credit ratings and raise public safety concerns.”

    The study found that California has more than $10 billion in uncollected court-ordered debt, and that the state relies on heavy fines as a revenue source.

    Protesters in South Carolina demand a review board to oversee police. Such a logical request, you’d think something like that would already be in place everywhere.

    Protesters were again at North Charleston City Hall on Thursday night, though this time they made their presence felt inside the building at a city council meeting.

    They asked for a citizen review board to monitor police activity such as shootings, and gave the city 24 hours to set up a meeting to discuss it.

    “We need to create mechanisms of trust,” Muhiydin D’Baha, who has been the most prominent spokesperson for the local Black Lives Matter chapter, said at the meeting. “We want to work together. We want to actually have a safe community.”

    Protesters in North Charleston have led a number of rallies and dialogues since a video released on Tuesday showed a white North Charleston police officer shooting and killing a black man named Walter Scott. Scott was running from the officer, whose name is Michael Slager, when Slager pulled his trigger eight times. Slager has been charged with murder and was fired from the police department.

    D’Baha wants the citizen review board to have the ability to issue subpoenas, meaning it could summon people to court.

    “We can call emergency meetings and, right now, this is an emergency,” D’Baha said.

    He wants the city council to agree to meet with him and other protesters within seven days, though it’s unclear what will happen if the council does not agree. Speaking outside city hall after the meeting, D’Baha said the group’s strategy was to negotiate first. If that failed, they would protest. And if protesting failed, they would “resist.”

    “I think [the review board] is going to play a big role,” Davon Sloss, a Black Lives Matter member, told Mashable. “It’s just a review. We’re not saying we need to bring those people down.”

    Though the reception from North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey was chilly, he did allow the protesters time at the council meeting despite not being on the schedule. D’Baha and others have said they are confident the council will meet with them, though they know that is just the first step.

    “I’m happy the mayor acknowledged what we’re asking,” Justin Lewis, another Black Lives Matter member, told Mashable. “I’m not at peace, but I’m at encouragement.”

  248. rq says

    Worse Than Ferguson: A Week In St. Louis County’s Most Egregious Night Courts

    In 2004, Sean Bailey recalls, he was driving through the streets of St. Louis County en route to a party, when he saw a familiar black-and-white car out of the corner of his eye. He reached for his phone to warn the friend he was following to slow down, but it was too late; the cop blared his siren and pulled up behind him. Bailey, who had a warrant stemming from a failure to appear in court for unpaid traffic tickets, felt a familiar pang of anxiety. He knew exactly what was going to happen next.

    “I was like, I’m going to get into this little orange jumpsuit and sit in this cold cell for a couple of days here,” the bespectacled St. Louis, Missouri native recalls, lighting a cigarette and blowing out a thin ribbon of smoke.

    The officer ran Bailey’s name and discovered he had a warrant. Bailey was arrested and sent to jail in Florissant, a municipality in northern St. Louis County bordering Ferguson. When Bailey stepped inside his cell, he was greeted with a gust of cold air. It was chilly outside — maybe 20 degrees, he speculates — “and they had the AC blasting.” The interior was grimy, and “there were a lot of guys in there, beating on the cells and calling for [help] and nobody was coming.”
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    Bailey sits comfortably on the stoop of a red-brick apartment in North St. Louis County while his daughter, who is groggy with a cold, naps inside. The 35-year-old single father is homeless, and for the moment he’s staying in a relative’s place on a noisy street dotted with crumbling corner stores. Since 1995, Bailey estimates he’s been jailed upwards of 20 times throughout St. Louis County — tallying up to more than two months behind bars — for warrants stemming from traffic violations. At least once, he was subject to what some call “riding the circuit” — shuttled to jail in a handful of municipalities back-to-back after the officer who arrested him notified police in other municipalities where he had warrants. Bailey, diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and prone to regular panic attacks, says he once faked a heart attack in his cell just to get medical care.

    “A lot of people were locked up with diabetes, high blood pressure, and they weren’t able to get their medicine. I had been locked up for days and I didn’t have my medication,” he pauses. “The paramedics got there and were like ‘he’s not having a heart attack but you might not want to keep him there anymore.’ It’s very stressful.”

    In many neighborhoods throughout St. Louis County, however, Bailey’s story is not unique.

    Missouri has the second-highest rate of traffic cases per person in the nation, and St. Louis County’s rate is twice as high as Missouri’s. According to Brendan Roediger, an assistant professor at St. Louis University School of Law, there are more than 450,000 outstanding warrants in the St. Louis County for municipal cases. In some jurisdictions, the number of warrants well exceeds the number of residents: Country Club Hills, for example, has a population of 1,381 and more than 33,102 active warrants, amounting to a ratio of nearly 24 outstanding warrants per resident. Similarly, Wellston has a population of 2,460 and more than 15,000 outstanding warrants, adding up to a ratio of more than six to one.

    The municipal court systems in which Bailey was entangled generate a huge amount of revenue by ticketing people just like him: Calverton Park, where nearly one-quarter of the population lives below the poverty line, collects 66 percent of its general revenue from court fines and fees; Vinita Terrace, where close to 20 percent of residents live under the poverty line, brings home close to 60 percent of its revenue in fines and fees; and Normandy, with 35 percent of its residents living in poverty, collects just north of 40 percent of its revenue in fines and fees. [….]

    Predatory ticketing practices in some of the county’s majority-poor, black neighborhoods range from the egregious to the Dickensian. Thomas Harvey, one of the co-founders of ArchCity Defenders, a St. Louis nonprofit law firm that represents indigent and low-income clients, described a case that has yet to be verified by court and police records, with a client who says she called police to report domestic abuse against her boyfriend and child’s father. When the police arrived at her apartment, she says they ran her license and discovered that she had warrants on unpaid traffic tickets. Instead of arresting her abuser, the woman claims the police arrested her and left her two-year-old child at home, alone, with her boyfriend.

    “So why would that woman ever call the police?” Harvey wondered. “If you can’t even call the police when you’re reporting domestic violence because of fear that you’re going to be arrested for a traffic ticket, why would you ever call?”

    And it just goes downhill from there. The problem is everywhere, not just Ferguson. NOT just Ferguson.

    . @CNN is showing Slager’s crying mother?! What about #WalterScott’s mother?! Or family?
    Slager’s mother said she hasn’t watched the video & “can’t believe her son would shoot an unarmed black man 8 times” #WalterScott
    Well, believe it. Because your son murdered #WalterScott @cnn
    That’s CNN.

    Who’s paying for Michael Slager’s heavy-hitting defense lawyer?

    On Wednesday, Andy Savage, a prominent and high-powered Charleston defense lawyer, announced he’s representing Slager, who was charged with murder after video emerged showing him shooting Walter Scott eight times as Scott fled. Slager’s previous attorney, David Aylor, quit after the video became public.

    Among Savage’s high-profile clients are an accused enemy combatant alleged to have ties to al-Qaeda, and a woman accused of letting her two children die of heat exposure after leaving them for hours in a parked car. He also has hosted an Emmy-Award-winning public affairs show on local cable TV.

    Savage didn’t return a phone call from msnbc, or respond to an email that asked who’s paying his fee.

    Paul Bergman, a professor emeritus at UCLA Law School and a co-author of The Criminal Law Handbook, said a standard fee for a top criminal defense lawyer in a murder case might involve a retainer of $10,000 to 15,000, plus hourly fees for the lawyer him or herself and a team of investigators, all of whom might cost $200-300 per hour. But he added that it’s not uncommon for lawyers to offer substantial discounts in such cases, either because of the publicity value or out of political sympathy for the accused.

    “If he’s well-known and not giving a discount, it’s hard to imagine a police officer would be able to afford this,” Bergman said.

    Of course, Slager could be getting help making the payments.

    Ryan Johnson, a spokesman for the city of North Charleston, said via email that the city is not paying for Slager’s defense. Police chief Eddie Driggers said at a press conference Wednesday that Slager had been terminated. The city has said it will continue to pay for health insurance for Slager’s pregnant wife.

    When officers are accused of crimes stemming from their law enforcement duties, police unions often provide financial and other support. An email from msnbc to a spokesman for the Southern States Police Benevolent Association (SSPBA) was forwarded to Charles Cordell, a lawyer for the group, who responded: “Neither, the Southern States PBA, nor the South Carolina PBA are involved in this case.”

    Asked to confirm that neither group was offering financial support for Slager, Cordell repeated his previous statement. Cordell did not immediately respond to a phone message seeking clarification.

    There’s no indication that Slager has family money. He served in the U.S. Coast Guard in Florida fr six years, according to his job application, and has worked as a waiter in New Jersey. He and his wife live in Hanahan, S.C., where the median household income is just over $39,000.

    A “Michael T. Slager Support Fund” page created on the online funding site IndieGoGo had raised just $749 as of Thursday afternoon. It showed a goal of $5,000. An earlier page set up on the site GoFundMe was taken down for failing to comply with the site’s terms of service.

    A message on the IndieGoGo site tells visitors: “We’re campaigning to show our Support for Officer Michael T. Slager! We believe in all of our LEOs and want to publicly support them! Although he may have made mis-steps in judgement he was protecting the community. Michael is a former Coast Guardsman with two stepchildren and a wife who is expecting a child, served for more than five years with the department without being disciplined. Please help in any way you can. He has served five years with the department without being disciplined.”

    That part at the end that they repeat? Now, I’m not sure if he was ever disciplined, but sure as hell there were complaints lodged against him. Surely that counts against a clean record, no?

    South Carolina Police Shooting Seen as Crime Strategy Gone Awry

    The aggressive tactics by North Charleston’s mostly white police force, including frequent stops of drivers and pedestrians for minor violations and an increased police presence in high-crime, mostly black areas, have led to a decrease in violent crime.

    But to many here, the strategy came at a high cost and provides a disturbing context to the police shooting here last weekend that has set off outrage throughout South Carolina and across the country. A white police officer was shown on a bystander’s video shooting and killing an unarmed black man after he fled from a traffic stop for a broken taillight on Saturday. The man, Walter L. Scott, 50, was shot in the back by the officer, Michael T. Slager, 33, who has been charged with murder and whose dismissal was announced by city officials on Wednesday.

    Aside from the furor over Mr. Scott’s death, North Charleston has been something of a window onto many of the policing issues playing out nationally.

    It saw an era of stepped-up enforcement under former Police Chief Jon R. Zumalt, and an effort to improve relations between the police and residents under the current chief, Eddie Driggers. And it has been a reminder of how much improving policing is a matter of personal decisions, rather than just policies, as the victim’s brother experienced at the crime scene Saturday in a moment of compassion from Chief Driggers.

    Black residents, merchants and former residents said police officers have been harassing and racially profiling African-Americans in North Charleston for years, though some of their reports could not be independently verified. They accused officers of assaulting them with Taser stun guns for no reason and of using aggressive tactics after stopping them or pulling them over for minor offenses. Rhonda Smith, who runs a bail bonds agency, spoke of twice writing bonds for black defendants arrested for not having horns on their bicycles.

    City officials deny allegations of widespread police misconduct and racial profiling, and they have defended their efforts to lower crime. Mr. Zumalt, who retired in 2013 after leading the police force for more than a decade, drew harsh criticism from some black residents. But in a letter to the mayor, he described his work as a success. […]

    Located just up Interstate 26 from Charleston, a haven of tourism and commerce along the South Carolina coast, North Charleston is a city of competing identities. Some neighborhoods are suburban sanctuaries filled with palmetto trees, late-model cars and spotless restaurants. Others are deeply impoverished, where blocks are dominated by pawn shops and convenience stores.

    The poverty rate here — more than 23 percent — is 5.3 percentage points higher than the rate statewide. But much of the talk here is about the crime and the policing strategies intended to combat it.

    Rashard Brown, 30, said he had been pulled over twice in less than two months, including one instance when an officer trailed him for about three miles. “If I broke down on the side of the road with a flat tire, he’d ride right past like he didn’t even see me,” he said. “But if I look like I’m riding clean and I’ve got a lot of money, next thing you know you’ve pulled me over and you stick your head in the car, smell and see what’s going on and see if you see anything.”

    Doris Brown, who lives in Charleston but owns a hair salon in North Charleston, said she, too, was pulled over for a broken taillight but believed she may have been stopped because she was a black woman driving a luxury car. “After I left, my friend went behind and there was nothing wrong with my taillight,” she said. “Everything was working with my car, so I felt as though I was being profiled.”

    A police spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. […]

    Some residents have credited Chief Driggers with helping to calm tensions, even as others angrily demanded answers from him at a news conference on Wednesday. An Episcopal deacon, Chief Driggers once served as the department’s chaplain.

    After the shooting on Saturday, Mr. Scott’s older brother, Anthony Scott, 52, went to the crime scene. He stood taking pictures of his brother’s covered body with his phone when police officers and detectives approached. Three of them surrounded him, telling him to turn over his phone, he said.

    “So, are you going to kill me, too, now?” Mr. Scott said he asked them.

    He eventually handed them his phone. Hours later, Chief Driggers arrived, returned Mr. Scott’s phone and offered his condolences.

    “The chief was very kind, very kind,” Mr. Scott said. “He was very gentlemanly, very different from the way everyone else was acting. Everyone else — it was eerie how they were acting. They were cocky.”

  249. rq says

    Walter Scott Shooting: No Warrant Over Child Support, Report Says. Well, that’s one less reason to have him killed, right?

    Walter Scott owed nearly $7,500 in back child-support payments when a South Carolina cop shot him to death — but no bench warrant had been issued for him, according to court records cited by The Associated Press.

    It is unclear whether Scott knew at the time there was no bench warrant for him, but his decision to flee during the Saturday traffic stop in North Charleston apparently led to the deadly encounter.

    Scott’s parents told TODAY on Wednesday that they believe Scott fled from Slager because he owed child support and did not want to be arrested again.

    He was first jailed for failing to pay child support in 2008 when the amount was about $6,800, the AP reported. Scott then spent a night in jail in 2011, when he was $7,500 behind in payments. He was jailed again in 2012 for missing a $6,800 payment. The AP said he last made a payment in July 2012.

    “I believe he didn’t want to go to jail again,” Walter Scott Sr. told TODAY. “He just ran away.”

    Scott’s total debt this time would have reached more than $7,800, including court fees, according to the AP.

    Honestly, I feel kinda dirty posting that information like it matters. I think I’m going to avoid such detailed articles in the future, though I’ll probably post headlines.

    And here is today’s front page of the SC @postandcourier. Friday. #WalterScott

    Elsewhere: Watch & listen. Dash cam audio goes missing as deputy throws #StuartFitzgerald onto road. Audio returns later @wusa9

    And still on a different subject: @deray @BlkBillClint Diallo’s killers got their convictions overturned too!

  250. Pteryxx says

    Rawstory: Prosecutors drop dozens of cases linked to Florida cops who fantasized about executing black suspects

    The Broward State Attorney’s Office has already dropped 12 felony cases involving charges of burglary, cocaine possession, and aggravated assault with a firearm, reported the Sun-Sentinel.

    They have also dropped 19 misdemeanor cases and one juvenile case involving at least one of the Fort Lauderdale police officers.

    About 20 more cases will be dismissed, prosecutors said.

    “All the defendants were black,” said Ron Ishoy, a spokesman for the state attorney’s office. “All the cases were dropped because at least one of the officers was the principal officer involved in the arrest.”

  251. Pteryxx says

    rq #249, that source has now been updated to show Scott *did* have a bench warrant and owed more than $7500 (though how much of that is stacking legal fees, I’d wonder, and it shouldn’t matter in the first place ffs, but for the sake of accuracy there we go.)

  253. Pteryxx says

    two from Brittney Cooper at Salon: (apologies if they’re duplicates)

    Black death has become a cultural spectacle

    One day after Slager’s arrest, Black folks are being treated to an endless replay of this murder on cable news. There is no collective sense that being inundated with video and imagery of these racialized murders of Black men by the police might traumatize and retraumatize Black people who have yet another body to add to a pile of bodies. Black death has become a cultural spectacle.

    On Sept. 11, 2001, parents called into news stations around the country to ask them to stop re-airing footage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. News stations complied. Yet Black children got up and went to school this morning, and went to bed last night with video of a white police officer callously killing a Black man running on loop. What about our children? What about their sense of safety? Let me count the ways that seeing the police murder of Black people erodes their fragile sense of security. Who should they turn to when they are in danger?

    Police officers (of all races and genders) routinely act with excessive force and callous disregard toward Black people. But Black people’s witness of racial atrocity is never believed on its own merits. Instead, white people need to be able to pull up a chair and watch the lynchings take place over and over again, to DVR them, fast forward and rewind through them, to smother Black pain and outrage and fear in an avalanche of cold, “rational” analysis. Meanwhile, minds rarely change.

    That was Wednesday and the news *still* hasn’t tired of running the shooting video over and over and over.

    On the Atlanta black teachers: America is criminalizing Black teachers: Atlanta’s cheating scandal and the racist underbelly of education reform

    Over the past generation, we have watched the GOP, helped along by an impotent Democratic Party, systematically dismantle funding for public education, underpay teachers, and allow local school systems to institute punitive disciplinary measures that have turned our schools into a prison pipeline. At exactly the same moment, these reformers and their political counterparts George W. Bush (No Child Left Behind) and Barack Obama (Race to the Top) have instituted high-stakes testing, tied to financial incentives for teachers, as the solution to the structural risks overwhelmingly facing children of color.

    Meanwhile, test-cheating scandals have proliferated in locales across the country. In other urban locales like Baltimore, Houston and Philadelphia principals and teachers were fired and/or stripped of their licenses to teach. This is a punishment that fits the crime.

    Then there’s Michelle Rhee, the famed former chancellor of D.C. Public Schools who was accused of creating the very same culture of fear about test scores that Superintendent Beverly Hall has been accused of creating in Atlanta. Hall was charged with racketeering. So why was Rhee not subject to prosecution when test-score irregularities emerged in the District? (Bruce Dixon was already asking as much two years ago over at Black Agenda Report.) Not only has Rhee not been prosecuted, but she maintains a fairly high level of bipartisan support from conservatives and political centrists for her views on education reform.

    Hall’s trial was indefinitely postponed last year due to stage IV breast cancer. She died last month at 68 years old.

    Locking up Black women under the guise of caring about Black children is an unbelievable move in an educational environment that systematically denies both care and opportunity to Black children. Locking up Black women for racketeering when the system couldn’t be bothered to lock up even one of the bankers who gave disproportionate amounts of terrible home loans to Black women leading to a national economic crash and a disproportionate amount of home foreclosures among Black women in 2008 is patently unjust.

    Given that public schools are largely funded through property taxes and that Black children are overwhelming reared by Black single mothers, the failure to vigorously prosecute the financial institutions and lenders that gutted Black neighborhoods means that the system co-signed corporate acts of institutional violence against Black mothers and children, and against neighborhood schools in Black communities.

    But now we are expected to believe that prosecuting these teachers as racketeers is an act of justice. Nothing is just about making Black women sacrificial lambs of an educational system hellbent on throwing Black children away. The images of their handcuffed Black bodies being led in shame from the courtroom gives Black parents angry about the miseducation of their children a convenient target for their angst and outrage over a failing system. Meanwhile, the real racket – privatization and defunding of public schools, diversion of taxpayer resources away from education, and increasing political clout and payouts for school reformers proselytizing the false gospel of high stakes testing – gets obscured. And white children still get educated well, either in private schools or in suburban schools funded through a solid property tax base.

  255. Saad: Openly Feminist Gamer says

    You’re too good, rq.

    Came here to post about the Francis Pusok story that you already covered in #240.

  256. Pteryxx says

    Update on Ramsey Orta: according to Rawstory he might be released today, after the hearing about whether his bail fundraiser was acceptable or not was pushed up to Friday afternoon.

    NY Daily News:

    “Upon review of materials provided by the bail bondsman…it appears it’s in compliance,” assistant district attorney Adam Silberlight said, adding that their initial resistance was based on how the online fund-raiser squared with the statute.

    A judge then signed off on the bond.

    “We’re glad the district attorney’s office realized this was the right thing to do,” said Orta’s lawyer Ken Perry, who earlier had criticized prosecutors for “playing games.”

    A law enforcement source said it took a while to review the nearly 300 pages that listed all the donors, most of whom chipped in about $10 each.

  257. rq says

    So… the NYPD Just Broke an NBA Player’s Leg

    Sefolosha’s damaged tibia comes after a season when NBA players spent last winter making statements against police violence, after the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. It also comes at a time when police brutality is under an exacting microscope following the execution of Walter Scott by Officer Michael Slager in North Charleston, South Carolina. In the blinkered reality of the sports world, the big story is that the damage to Sefolosha has happened right when the Atlanta Hawks are about to enter the playoffs with the best record in the Eastern Conference, jeopardizing what has been a dream season. Now, unless they make a deep playoff run, it will be remembered as a dream trapped between nightmares; a squad whose season began under a cloud of racist controversy, with the ugly leaked interactions between owner Bruce Levenson and general manager Danny Ferry, and now ends under a similarly colored cloud.

    How in the hell did the NYPD come to injure Thabo Sefolosha? One moment a friend of Sefolosha, fellow NBA player Chris Copeland and Copeland’s girlfriend Katrine Saltara were being stabbed at a trendy Chelsea nightclub (both are in stable condition) then Sefolosha and his Atlanta Hawk teammate Pero Antic were being arrested for obstruction . . . and then a broken leg. As for how Sefolosha’s tibia was fractured, there is the police version of what went down and then there is Thabo’s version. Stunningly, several outlets including ESPN first printed the police’s version as fact. If nothing else, the death of Walter Scott should be a lesson to all of us that there is a chasm between what the police can say happened and the reality of a situation.

    The police version, to quote ESPN’s original article was, “Sefolosha sustained the injury while resisting arrest outside a Manhattan night club early Wednesday morning. Sefolosha was arrested along with teammate Pero Antic for interfering with local police’s efforts to set up a crime scene following the stabbing of Indiana Pacers forward Chris Copeland.”

    A great deal of credit should go to the author of this piece, Kevin Arnovitz, who changed the wording in the article after a social media pushback. But the original text should be a reminder, especially this week of all weeks, that we should never take police versions as synonymous with reality. Sure enough, Sefolosha and Pero Antic deny this version of events. Their only statement has been the following:

    As members of the Atlanta Hawks, we hold ourselves to a high standard and take our roles as professionals very seriously. We will contest these charges and look forward to communicating the facts of the situation at the appropriate time. We apologize to our respective families, teammates, and the Hawks organization for any negative attention this incident has brought upon them. We are unable to provide further comment as this is an ongoing legal matter.

    We do have a videotape of what took place, but all it reveals is multiple police officers jumping the rail-thin 6’7″ 220 pound Sefolosha. Ironically, or tellingly, his fellow-arrestee, Pero Antic has an appearance we’ll describe as ornately terrifying. Tattooed, bald, seven feet tall and over 260 pounds, he is a Macedonian guy who happens to be white. Sefolosha is a Swiss guy who happens to be black. The terrifying seven-footer walked away and the guy from Switzerland was jumped. Whether or not racial bias was involved, the optics of this are very familiar to anyone who has followed the methodologies of the NYPD.

    And again: Video: NBA Player Suffers Season-Ending Injury During Altercation With NYPD Officers. No new information.

    Officer Michael Slager has been removed from general population and is now in isolation. #WalterScott No telling whether by request or due to threats.

    Howard University RT @2LiveUnchained: #BlackLoveMatters #HowardUniversity
    Howard students turn their backs to WBC #HUUnited #ThinkMoor #BlackLoveMatters #BlackOut

    #Charleston @FergusonResp ACTION TODAY FRI 4/10 CofC Cougar Mall 1PM [link] #WalterScott Demonstration #BlackLivesMatter (poster attached).

  258. rq says

    Saad
    I miss a lot of stuff. It’s up to you to figure out what that is. ;)

    +++

    The Pohjoismaat – from one of PZ’s threads on Walter Scott, reposted here because it’s really interesting to watch. Again, it’s not all in English, but the important bits are. Learn some Finnish.

  259. rq says

    Oh, and this one’s itneresting on advertising, whiteness and art. How 100 Years Of Advertisements Created The ‘White American Woman’ It’s a statement both on feminism and on whiteness, a project by a black man.

    For the past decade, conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas has been fascinated with the rhetoric of ads, how they sell not just products, but desires, stereotypes and dreams. It wasn’t long before Thomas realized that the true message of advertisements was not in the text or the logos boosting a product — so, he erased them, letting the not-so-latent subtexts come to the foreground.

    “I’ve always been interested in the power that advertising has on language,” Thomas explained to The Huffington Post. “We read them before we’re even aware that we saw them, because most of us now are immediately literate. I first was making works that looked like ads, and then started to realize maybe truth was better than fiction. So I actually use real ads as a way to talk about how advertisements shape our notions of reality, our notions of ourselves and especially our notions of others.”

    Thomas, a 39-year-old New York-based African-American artist, first delved into the archives of ads with a project entitled “Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America,” in which he examined how race can become a branding strategy. In an interview with his mother, photographer Deborah Willis, Thomas explains: “I always like to stress that the craziest thing about blackness is that black people never had much to do with actually creating it. It was actually created with commercial interest in order to turn people into property. The colonialists had to come up with a subhuman brand of person and that marketing campaign was race.”

    For the project, Thomas collected advertisements printed between 1968 and 2008 — coincidentally, Thomas noted, the years between Martin Luther King’s assassination and Barack Obama’s election. He selected one ad per year, one he felt accurately captured the atmosphere of mainstream society at the time, and then, he “unbranded” them, removing all texts and logos from the ads. “They become naked in a way,” he said. “You’re looking at what’s really being sold. The message that’s sometimes being hidden by the logo and the copy.”

    In his upcoming exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery, “Unbranded: A Century of White Women, 1915-2015,” Thomas directs his attention towards the evolution of the mythical white woman, packaged and sold by advertisements throughout the past hundred years. She’s precious, she’s innocent, she’s privileged, she’s pure — and yet she’s disenfranchised and oppressed.

    “Whiteness is something I’m fascinated with because it’s ever evolving,” Thomas explained. “One hundred years ago a lot of people we call white today would not be considered white. And also, a hundred years ago women in the U.S. didn’t have the right to vote. And, even though African American men technically did, everything was done to make sure they didn’t. I’m interested in how white women — who are often seen as the most valuable — are at the same time marginalized.”
    While Thomas’ 2008 exploration of blackness in advertising coincided with the election of President Obama, his current exhibition conveniently overlaps with the looming potential election of a female president. “In the last presidential cycle, there was this whole debate where people were going back and forth between Hillary [Clinton] and Obama, questioning are you more racist or more sexist? That’s a way of dumbing it down, obviously. But I realize that we might be on the verge of having our first female president, a white woman,” he said. “I want to look at how someone like her might have been looked at or treated or spoken to back then, and today.”

    More at the link.

    And just for unfunsies: This is what white supremacy looks like: A party at the Bundy Ranch, a funeral in North Charleston. Via Tony.

    I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I don’t like the tone of this article, but mostly because it does the negative clickbait version of ‘no one will look at this anyway so share it’ that just grates on my nerves. However. Most People Won’t Share this… because African Lives Don’t matter!

    Spare a moment for the 148 whom did not survive. The clothes of their families will be no less soaked in tears. The screams of their sorrows will echo around the streets, churches, mosques, homes and fields of a their country with no less anguish.

    Yet, the world does what to combat, acknowledge, condole or seek retribution for their murders?

    There will be no Foreign leaders photo opportunity or Je suis… hashtag. Most newspapers won’t run their tragic deaths on any front page.
    Why? A quick look at Zizek on Violence can explain our western mindset to non-western deaths and/or violence.

    “Over the last decade, 4 million people died in the Democratic Republic of Congo – mostly political killings. Time magazine ran a cover story in 2006, titled “The Deadliest War in the World,” chronicling this state of affairs.
    But there was no uproar, no one took up on it. Comparatively,
    The death of a West Bank Palestinian child, not to mention an Israeli or an American, is mediatically worth thousands of times more than the death of a nameless Congolese…
    and yet the U.S. media reproaches the public in foreign countries for not displaying enough sympathy for the victims of the 9/11 attacks.” Zizek On Violence

    Replace 9/11 with the tragic deaths of the Charlie Hedbo staff and we are in the same situation. We ask the world to weep for our loss or a loss close to us, without showing the same sadness or respect to their losses. Or worse, the thousands of lives we have had a hand in creating; from the estimated 1.2million(at least) that have died due to the so called War on Terror.

    Antoine you’re wrong! “I do care; i wrote that status about the Charlie Hedbo Attack…”

    Well, At the same time as 12 people died in France, there were 12 other terrorist attacks around the world. The most horrific was 2000 or more that died in Nigeria at the hands of Boko Haram. Where was their Je suis hashtags, protests, headlines, posters, vigils, status or tweets.

    I say, in 2015 we need to think more as a united humanity rather than ‘them and us’.
    We need to see their deaths as our deaths.
    Their lives as our lives.
    We need to move further together instead of drifting further apart. We are socially connected but more disconnected; this banality of violence must stop. […]

    A friend asked me why this was the case and why this wasn’t major news on all media forms; to use a popular phrase why this hadn’t broke the internet?

    Well, it could be because they are Black, could be because they are far away or even simply because the media has created a narrative about Africa. That narrative is a place that is uneducated, uncivilised and a conflict zone. Not a place of development, growth, innovation and full of people with hopes, dreams and aspirations just like anywhere else. This media driven narrative means people read stories about Africa and think “that’s ok, that happens there all the time”. This gives people an excuse not to emphasise. Not to care. Not to share. Not to write that status, tweet or share that post. “Africa and violence is old news”. Do these lives not matter? Are we that busy sharing rubbish that we can’t take a moment to care for these students?
    Look around you, read the news, read your own timeline of friends and you will see we are divided and we are falling. Realistically, we can not change the foreign policy mistakes of the past. However, we can change our personal social and humanitarian thoughts and actions for the unity of today to influence the future of tomorrow.

    Only by standing together can we stop this decent into a world, whereby Extremist attacks become more frequent; in a world that becomes more marginalized and narrow minded. A world whereby, we still elect people who do not care or represent our lives. A world whereby, we allow ourselves to be distract by fake realities and celebrate infamy rather than talent. A world whereby, the gap between rich and poor grows each year. A world whereby, a “like” is valued more than real tangible protests, thought provoking, debate, discussion, actions and change!
    I don’t have the answers, but if we think together, we act together.
    WE CAN COME UP WITH A BETTER ANSWER THAN THE MINORITY THAT KEEP FAILING US AND THE WORLD!

    More in that vein – plus a bunch of scolding about how people use social media. But many good points, too.

    And for completeness, Look at this redneck (PZ’s post).

  260. Pteryxx says

    HuffPo: One-Eighth Of South Carolina Inmates Were Jailed Over Child Support Payments. Walter Scott Was One Of Them.

    Like so many other noncustodial parents in South Carolina, Scott frequently found himself in jail or under the threat of incarceration. That’s because the state metes out especially harsh punishments to those who fall behind on paying child support.

    A recent MSNBC investigation highlighted that in South Carolina, noncustodial parents can be held in contempt of civil court if their child support payments are just five days late, which means a judge can send them to jail.

    […]

    In 2009, Patterson conducted a survey of 33 county jails in South Carolina, which found that one out of every eight inmates — or 13.2 percent of the inmate population — was behind bars for contempt of civil court after falling behind on child support payments. In Charleston County, where Walter owed his back payments on child support, Patterson’s survey found that over 15 percent of inmates had been imprisoned for not paying child support. In a handful of the other counties studied, the figure was as high as 20 percent.

    […]

    In a separate study in 2010, Patterson surveyed hundreds of cases across South Carolina and found that low-income, noncustodial parents like Scott often ended up in jail without being represented by an attorney in civil court. In fact, the study showed that over 98 percent of parents being held in contempt for non-payment of child support did not have legal counsel. Ninety-five percent of the parents held in contempt ended up being sentenced to jail, with an average sentence of three months.

    Seventy-five percent of the parents Patterson examined in her 2010 paper were indigent, meaning they testified that they were presently or previously unemployed or that they were having difficulties finding work. And nearly 70 percent of the noncustodial parent-debtors were black, even though blacks made up less than 28 percent of South Carolina’s population that year.

    This system, Patterson later wrote in an amicus brief, amounts to “a modern day debtors’ prison for poor noncustodial parents who lack the ability to pay support,” and creates a “recurring cycle of incarceration that diminishes prospects for employment and deprives children of an opportunity to build a relationship” with their incarcerated parents.

    Patterson authored the brief in support of Michael Turner, a noncustodial parent in South Carolina, who in 2008 appealed a court’s decision to send him to jail for failing to pay child support. Turner claimed that his constitutional right to due process had been violated because he did not have legal counsel during the civil contempt hearing that resulted in his imprisonment.

    Turner’s case ended up in front of the Supreme Court, which ruled in a 5-4 decision in 2011 that the right to counsel only applied to criminal cases, not to people in civil or family court proceedings. However, the case did result in new federal guidelines from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Child Support Enforcement, which emphasized to state agencies that there is “no evidence that incarceration results [in] more reliable child support payments that families can count on to make ends meet.”

    […]

    There are no national statistics on the rate of incarceration for failure to pay child support. But South Carolina is one of just five states, along with Florida, Maine, Ohio and Georgia, that do not guarantee the right to an attorney during child support contempt hearings, according to a survey conducted by the National Child Support Enforcement Association. A 2009 study found that in one county jail in Georgia, nearly a third of the inmates were behind bars solely for child court contempt.

    Asked whether she had seen the video of Scott’s death, Patterson said she had, and noted that Scott’s “level of desperation” was “not uncommon among persons who in arrears in their child support.”

  261. rq says

    In about an hour or two I’m going to post up a lot of stuff. I tried reviewing what I missed while at work today, but I’m too tired to go right through to the end – I’m assuming I got most of it, anyway. It’ll all be in a sort of reverse chronological order. Whee!
    Today was Walter Scott’s funeral (some pictures from that).
    Happy Saturday, right?

  262. says

    Cross posted from the Lounge.

    Forcing African American kids into the justice system, often with trumped up charges, is a specialty of the USA. Actions for which a white child would be forgiven, or for which a white kid would be offered treatment and supervision, those actions put kids with darker skin in the school-to-prison pipeline.

    […]A police officer assigned to the school witnessed the tantrum, and filed a disorderly conduct charge against the sixth grader in juvenile court.

    Just weeks later, in November, Kayleb, who is African-American, disobeyed a new rule — this one just for him — that he wait while other kids left class. The principal sent the same school officer to get him.

    “He grabbed me and tried to take me to the office,” said Kayleb, a small, bespectacled boy who enjoys science. “I started pushing him away. He slammed me down, and then he handcuffed me.” […]

    US Department of Education data analyzed by the Center for Public Integrity show that Virginia schools in a single year referred students to law enforcement agencies at a rate nearly three times the national rate. Virginia’s referral rate: about 16 for every 1,000 students, compared to a national rate of six referrals for every 1,000 students.
    In Virginia, some of the individual schools with highest rates of referral — in one case 228 per 1,000 — were middle schools, whose students are usually from 11 to 14 years old.

    The Education Department didn’t require that schools explain why, during the 2011-12 school year, they referred students to law enforcement. And a referral did not necessarily have to end in an arrest or charges filed, at least not immediately. But by definition, it did mean that students’ behavior was reported to police or courts. […]

    http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-04-10/how-kicking-trash-can-became-criminal-6th-grader

    The authorities dealing with Kaleb, said that the need him to “man up.” They also said that “he needed to start controlling himself or that eventually they would start controlling him.”

  263. rq says

    From the funeral:
    SC Sen. Tim Scott just arrived at Walter Scott’s funeral. #WalterScott
    There are lots of folk here for the funeral. #WalterScott
    And the press are behind this caution tape at the funeral. #WalterScott
    And Congressman Sanford is here at the funeral. #WalterScott

    And on Walter Scott,here’s the police incident report: as pdf. Not Slager’s, from another officer who arrived on scene later.

    And on the day of his funeral, theyhad these headlines: Still wack. MT @deray: The @postandcourier updated the cover headline online.

    L: original. R: updated. #WalterScott The one on the left says “When you’re behind, you’re behind”; the one on the right says “Walter Scott dogged by system that ‘criminalizes’ debt”.

  264. rq says

    National Bar Association wants second officer in Walter Scott shooting video fired, arrested. That’s the one not blinking an eye at the planted evidence.

    The National Bar Association, made up of predominantly African-American attorneys and judges, is calling for the immediate arrest and indictment of North Charleston police officer Clarence Habersham, the second officer shown in the Walter Scott shooting video.

    According to a statement the organization released Friday, members are also demanding Habersham and any other North Charleston police officer who allegedly filed a false police report be terminated.

    The organization claims Habersham “deliberately left material facts out of his report” after officer Michael Slager shot and killed Scott, and made false statements about the incident. […]

    Habersham’s two-line supplement to the incident report says very little, except that he applied pressure to the gunshot wounds “and directed the best route for EMS and fire to take to get to the victim faster.” When other officers arrived, they noted in their supplemental reports, Habersham was administering first aid.

    Habersham is in his late 30s. He has been a North Charleston officer since 2007.

    The National Bar Association was founded in 1925, according to its website. It represents the interests of approximately 60,000 lawyers, judges, law professors and law students.

    Uh-oh:
    STL county pulls on the 47 bus full of black ppl and demands that they all keep their hands up while they look for a suspect…
    The officers (2) demanded for folks to shift around so that they could see, instead of walking on to the bus and actually searching.
    People on the bus kept their hands up for damn near five minutes. This is the same dept. that came to Ferguson and gassed and shot at us.
    Working on them there public relations, I see. 47 people on a bus.

    Here’s the article: Walter Scott dogged by system that “criminalizes” debt

    Some 15 years ago, long before Walter Scott’s death by a North Charleston police officer made national headlines, a family court judge threw him in jail for 15 days because he hadn’t made his child support payments.

    Scott already knew how the system worked — he owed support for two children, and then two more — but he claimed at the time that the Department of Social Services sent some of his money to the wrong mother.

    Nevertheless, he went to jail. And then he lost his $35,000-a-year job at a film company.

    Register | Manage Newsletters

    “I got mad at everybody in the whole world because I just lost the best job I ever had,” Scott told The Post and Courier in 2003. “I just stopped doing everything. I just closed myself into a little shell and started doing things I shouldn’t have been doing.”

    He drank. He found odd jobs. Still, he couldn’t make enough money to make the payments he owed.

    “I didn’t even care if I lived or died,” he said.

    Then, Scott seemed to turn a corner. He was featured in an article about a promising program called “Father to Father,” designed to help men who had fallen behind on their payments. He admitted his mistakes, then turned himself in to the state for even more missed child-support payments. He spent another five months in jail.

    “This whole time in jail, my child support is still going up,” he said. “I said, ‘Man, you got four kids depending on you, and you got people in your life that love you. You got to get it together.’ ” […]

    Richard Barr, director of community development for the S.C. Center for Fathers and Families, called South Carolina’s child support collection policy — known as “Rule 24” — among the strictest in the country. A bill five days past due hardly warrants jail time, he argued.

    “That’s tough,” Barr said. “If that happened to me every time my credit card came out, I’d be in trouble.”

    Barr, and others, say child support enforcement shouldn’t be a public safety issue anyway.

    “When you make a family issue a policing issue, what you literally do is end up treating debtors like criminals,” he said. “It’s very different to be wanted for murder and to be behind on a bill.”

    DSS, which manages 75 percent of all child support cases here, said it doesn’t know how many active warrants have been issued for men and women in South Carolina who have failed to make timely child support payments. Court clerks in Charleston and Dorchester counties would not provide their own numbers.

    Sandra Holland, support enforcement supervisor for Berkeley County Family Court, said there are currently 1,103 active bench warrants for failure to pay support in Berkeley County alone.

    “There is no question that there are lots and lots of people who are behind. The caseloads are phenomenal,” Berkowitz said. “At one point, a couple of years ago, our DSS child support attorneys had some of the highest caseloads in the country. They’re dealing with huge volume and huge numbers and they don’t always have the resources to track someone down.” [..]

    South Carolina received an $8 million federal grant to launch “Operation Work” last year — a program that helps fathers who owe child support payments find ways to support their families. Only seven other states were invited to participate.

    Operation Work is currently available in Charleston, Horry and Greenville counties. Fathers who qualify regularly meet with counselors, job coaches and program coordinators to make sure they’re meeting their families’ needs.

    Almost 100 people have enrolled so far, Barr said. “We work with men every day who have never had a resume.”

    Some of them also qualify for assistance to attend technical college or see a tutor for help with schoolwork. While they’re enrolled in the program, their child support payments are suspended.

    Unlike spending time in jail, where their debts keep adding up, Operation Work offers participants a temporary reprieve to establish work skills they need to earn money.

    The alternative is a life in the shadows, Barr said, because “as soon as you get out of jail, you’re a fugitive again.”

    This is just the type of program Berkowitz said South Carolina needs.

    “We’ve got to rethink how we help families,” she said. “Because you can’t pay child support when you’re in jail.” […]

    In 2003, child support payments were automatically drafted from Scott’s paycheck. Back then, he earned about $800 a month. It is unclear how much money he made at Brown Distribution.

    “If God ever blessed me and I came into some money, I’d help,” Scott told the newspaper 12 years ago.

    But his brother said the deck was always stacked against him.

    “I hate for anybody to get in the child support system. It can be trying. It doesn’t seem to work out for them,” Anthony Scott said. “(Walter) said that it was crazy, that he couldn’t wait to get over it. But once you’re behind, you’re behind.”

    Walter Scott Had Bench Warrant for His Arrest, Court Documents Show – so yeah, he did have one. The article goes into detail about how much, etc., but as previously mentioned, I don’t think that’s anyone’s business, so the article is here for archiving.

  265. rq says

    South Carolina investigators say they thought fatal police shooting was suspicious before video emerged. Which is why the official narrative wasn’t questioned?

    Officials of the state agency investigating the shooting say that even before the video came out, they “were concerned” about inconsistencies they quickly found.

    But this recording, which ultimately led to the officer’s arrest Tuesday as well as national outrage over what happened, only came to light because Feidin Santana happened to be there on Saturday morning while walking to his job at a barbershop.

    Santana has said he considered erasing the footage because he feared for his own safety, though he ultimately decided to give it to the family of Walter Scott, the man who was killed. After the video came out, Michael Slager, the police officer, was charged with murder and fired from the police force. North Charleston’s police chief, Eddie Driggers, said he was “sickened” by the video. The mayor, R. Keith Summey, called it “a bad decision” and emphasized that it was an isolated episode. […]

    The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division was alerted to the shooting shortly after it occurred on Saturday morning, dispatching agents and crime scene technicians to the grassy stretch where Scott was killed.

    “There were inconsistencies including what appeared to be multiple gunshot wounds in Mr. Scott’s back,” Mark Keel, chief of the agency, said in a statement. “We believed early on that there was something not right about what happened in that encounter.” […]

    These remarks were the first extended comments from the agency’s head since his agents arrested Slager and charged him with murder. They also seemed to be a response — intentionally or unintentionally — to assertions that without the video, the account offered by Slager would have gone unchallenged.

    “It would have never come to light,” Scott’s father, Walter Scott Sr., told the “Today” show. “They would have swept it under the rug, like they did with many others.”

    Police officers rarely face criminal charges after shooting people, a fact that has been cited by demonstrators protesting police actions across the country over the last year. The State, a newspaper in South Carolina, reported that officers there have shot at 209 people over the last five years; only a handful were accused of doing something illegal, and none of them were convicted. […]

    Keel said he was informed on Saturday that his agents had concerns. Santana’s video, which was given to an attorney for Scott’s family and then provided to the state agency, “confirmed our initial suspicions,” Keel said.

    State investigators have interviewed Slager and other officers on the scene, Keel said. He also suggested that the footage and interviews so far have highlighted other things of note to investigators, though he did not elaborate on what these might be.

    “While what we have seen and learned may provide some answers, it raises more questions and issues to investigate,” Keel said.

    Scarlett Wilson, the prosecutor for Charleston County, said her office was working with state agents to seek a grand jury indictment in the case.

    “My role is to hold accountable those who harm others unlawfully, regardless of profession,” she said in a statement. “This office does not dictate nor comment upon police policy, training and procedure. I am, however, deeply concerned when those who are sworn to serve and protect violate the public’s trust.”

    Different state, same racism: Report: Virginia Sends More Students to Cops Than Any Other State

    By referring an average of 15.8 out of every 1,000 students to the police, the Center for Public Integrity found, Virginia tops the nation in state rankings measuring how many students get sent to the police or courts. Among the top 15 states, nearly every state refers a disproportionately higher number of its black and Latino students and students with disabilities to cops than their peers. In Vermont, for instance, schools sends roughly 7 students to police officers for every 1,000 students, but more than three times that many black students to the juvenile justice system for every 1,000 students.

    The Center for Public Integrity shares examples of the kind of behavior for Virginia youth that’s considered criminal:

    One of McCausland’s clients is a 15-year-old charged with assault and sexual battery after she pushed a girl in the bathroom and kissed her. “Sexual abuse, that’s a pretty serious charge,” McCausland said. Another is an 11-year-old with mental-health problems who stole her teacher’s cell phone and was automatically charged with felony theft because the phone is worth at least $200.

    “She can’t do long division, but she can get felony theft,” McCausland said.

    McCausland believes the problem is compounded by police who she says “pile” charges on kids.

    A 12-year-old client went to pick up her cousin at an elementary school, saw a fight and pulled her cousin out of it, McCausland said, and when a school cop grabbed her she swore. The cop charged her with obstruction of justice for clenching her first, along with trespassing, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

    If you’re in a school-to-prison pipeline longreads kind of mood, I suggest Dana Goldstein’s Marshall Project report on West Virginia’s approach to juvenile incarceration from last October, or my 2014 Colorlines report from an Oakland charter school that’s trying to shift the tide on the criminalization of young children of color from the inside.

    Just to underline the confusion, here’s another article on the fact that there was no arrest warrant. Report: Walter Scott Owed Child Support, but There Was No Warrant Out for His Arrest. Interesting discrepancy.

    Walter Scott shooting: Family asks Al Sharpton to stay away . It’s almost word-for-word same info as I posted yesterday.

    Indiegogo removes fundraisers that supported S.C. police officer . FINALLY.

    Online crowdfunding platform Indiegogo on Friday afternoon removed all fund-raising campaigns in support of South Carolina police officer Michael Slager.

    The move came about a day after crowdfunding site GoFundMe took the same action.

    Slager, who is white, was charged Tuesday with murder after video surfaced of him fatally shooting an unarmed black man, Walter Scott, in the back during a traffic stop.

    Supporters of Slager promptly attempted fundraising campaigns for him on GoFundMe and Indiegogo. GoFundMe rejected one such campaign, telling Blue Sky on Thursday that the campaign violated its terms and conditions.

    Meanwhile, campaigns in support of Slager remained on Indiegogo through midday Friday, even as Twitter users continued to pressure the site to remove them. One campaign received about $1,500 in pledges, and six others received little to no funding.

    An Indiegogo spokesman told Blue Sky on Thursday that the site didn’t “judge the content of campaigns as long as they are in compliance with our Terms of Use.”

    But Indiegogo confirmed late Friday that it had removed all campaigns in support of Slager.

    “Our Trust & Safety team regularly conducts verifications and checks and these campaigns did not meet their standards,” an Indiegogo spokesman wrote in an email.

    St Louis: The Northside Regeneration Project may not be finished by developer Paul McKee.

    The NorthSide Regeneration project, aimed at redeveloping 1500 acres of North St. Louis, may have to be finished a developer other than its creator, Paul McKee, according to a consultant to Mayor Francis Slay, because of serious financial questions raised about McKee over the past few days.

    It was revealed this week that McKee is two years behind on city property taxes for many of the land and buildings in the footprint of the project. The total owed the city, including penalties and interest is roughly $750 million. By law, the city has to wait one more year before it can take McKee to court.

    It was also revealed this week that a Kansas finance company is suing McKee, claiming he is in default on $17.6 million in loans.

    That company, Titan Fish Two LLC, is asking the courts to put part of the NorthSide project into receivership, giving the company control over those properties.
    Could that kill the project?

    Jeff Rainford, Mayor Francis Slay`s former chief of staff, is now serving as a consultant on that project.

    Rainford says he believes the NorthSide project will happen, even if McKee loses control of some of the property to Titan Fish Two.

    ‘This particular lender came into see us and said `we understand that if there is no NorthSide Regeneration than we just paid millions of dollars for worthless ground. We want to see it happen and we are going to cooperate with you,`’ Rainford said.

    The city and state combined granted McKee more than $400 million in tax breaks to make the project happen, but because nothing has happened, Rainford says no taxpayer money has been lost.
    McKee`s lawyer issued the following statement on behalf of his client:

    Titan Fish Two, LLC recently purchased Northside Regeneration and McEagle Properties paper from another vulture fund. Titan Fish Two has filed a lawsuit seeking the appointment of a receiver over what it claims is its collateral; namely, a small fraction of the land owned and controlled by Northside Regeneration. The vast majority of the Northside Project will be unaffected by this action.

    Money down the drain, is what it is. What would that area look like, if it had already received decent investments and improvements to infrastructure?

  266. rq says

    Belated notice: The Funeral of #WalterScott will be Saturday, April 11th at 11:00. via @WCBD

    Also, there was a vigil for Walter Scott yesterday, I have some pictures, I think, but relatedly:
    A mayoral candidate engages protestors after the vigil. #WalterScott Word is he was doing some victim-blaming and proposing seminars for black men on how to interact with police.
    “I don’t know who this guy is. I’ve never seen him before. I’ll be voting for someone else.” – woman re: this mayoral candidate #WalterScott

    VIDEO: NYPD Barge into Civil Rights Activist’s Home, No Warrant, Assault Underage Daughter. Well the NYPD PR department is also working overtime, I see.

    The NYPD is at it again. This time officers were caught in a series of videos documenting them barging into a political and civil rights activist’s home without a warrant. The officers claimed that they were looking for a felon who was fleeing from them and therefore did not require a warrant to enter and search the home.

    Diane Malikah Moomin Pinkston was at home with her two daughters on Thursday afternoon around 1:30 pm, when NYPD officers began banging on her door. The woman did not trust the police, as they were not in usual uniforms and would not provide a warrant, so she called 9-1-1 and requested uniformed officers to be present. She informed the operator that the officers outside were threatening to take down her door and put her children into foster care.

    And it goes downhill from there.

    Be careful what you wish for. #reverseracism #lol #ponies Girl meets fairy, wishes she could talk to ponies. Pony whispers to her, “Reverse racism isn’t real, Debra”. Random but funny. I don’t know why.

    Consent? White America’s Silence on Police Brutality Is Consent

    If you’re white and have made it to this paragraph you might be thinking, or headed to the comments to write, “not all white people…” To be sure, there are white Americans active in efforts toward police reform. That population is, however, nowhere near the critical mass needed for change. Take for example New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. He made some unprecedented comments expressing “pain and frustration” after a grand jury failed to indict the NYPD officer who choked Eric Garner to death on film. He was quickly pressured to walk back that sentiment and, without the support he needed, did exactly that.

    The bottom line: The majority of white Americans believe the nation’s police are doing a good job despite that work often ending in the deaths of unarmed black people.

    In every major speech on race that President Obama has delivered during his presidency, he has reassured Americans of our collective will to form a more perfect union. When his 2008 campaign was in danger of being derailed by his Chicago pastor, Obama remarked on the “vast majority” of Americans who want a more equitable country. After George Zimmerman was acquitted of murder charges for killing Trayvon Martin, Obama reminded us that, “Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race.” And, when a grand jury failed to indict a white officer for choking a black Staten Island man to death, the President instructed: “…it is incumbent upon all of us, as Americans, regardless of race, region, faith, that we recognize this is an American problem.”

    Black Americans are largely on board with making police brutality an issue of urgent national interest. We’ve always been desperate for change. White Americans, not so much.

    According to Harris polls, white Americans have been slow to accept that racism plays a harmful role in policing. Between 1969 and 2014, white Americans understanding that blacks are generally discriminated against by the police has only increased from 19 percent in 1969 to a paltry 48 percent in 2014. Progress, but still short of a majority. Meanwhile, black endorsement of that statement has stayed relatively stable, increasing just 10 points from 76 percent to 86 percent during the same period.

    When we can’t complete a news cycle without learning another unarmed black person has been killed by police, one wonders: Where are the reasonable white Americans? Where’s the religious right, those patriots and lovers of life and liberty? Even more, where are those good white cops, and what do they have to say about the one who executed Scott and then had the clarity of mind to possibly plant a weapon near him and falsify a police report?

    There is a remarkable dearth of outrage from white Americans when their countrymen of color are denied the most fundamental right—life—by the police. City-level polling data from Los Angeles and New York reveals that white approval of the police is consistently high in those cities—despite the checkered history of their police departments. It drops on average somewhere around 10 points when there are high-profile cases of police brutality but, irrespective of what remedies follow, it recovers to pre-incident levels in no time.

    And make no mistake about it, police reform in this country is dependent on white Americans taking incidents of abuse seriously. White people are the nation’s largest and most empowered racial voting block, and their perception of crime, fairness, and justice is perhaps one of the most influential factors in law enforcement. Public sentiment aside, white Americans make upthe vast majority—nearly 80 percent—of this nation’s police force.

    So, what do they think? Well, it seems we have a system of policing—brutality included—that the vast majority of white Americans approve of, or, at the very least, tolerate. […]

    That brings us back to an unarmed Scott, stopped for a busted tail light in a state where you’re only required to have one, struck five times from behind as he ran away from a man who’d later appeared to plant evidence on his dead body and lie about administering CPR to him. And, of course, Scott brings us back to Miriam Carey, Aiyana Stanley Jones, Ezell Ford, John Crawford, and so many others. How many more must die, how close together, and under what circumstances before the most empowered Americans feel compelled to advance, legislate and execute police reform? Or is this the system they want?

    We must do better, white people. A lot better. Be outraged before it’s in your backyard.

  267. rq says

    Here’s more victim-smearing: Walter Scott shooting: Victim was jailed in 1987 on assault charge

    Walter Scott was jailed in 1987 on a charge of assault and battery, it has emerged.

    Charleston County Sheriff’s Department released a report on Friday that says deputies responded to a call about a fight between Scott and another man.

    When deputies told the two to break it up, the report states, Scott began shouting obscenities at the other man as well as a deputy before shoving the officer.

    Scott suffered a cut and was treated at a local hospital before being transported to the jail.

    The disposition of the case was not immediately known.

    Horrible photo they use. But fuck. 1987. Almost thirty years ago, and they have to bring it up now.

    Today with Reverend Dr. Allan Boesak #Ferguson2SouthAfrica.

    The saddest thing I’ve heard today. If South Carolina cop is convicted of murder, it may be unprecedented.

    If a white South Carolina police officer is convicted of murder for gunning down an unarmed black man as he ran away, the verdict would be unprecedented or nearly so.

    In the past 20 years, at least 22 police officers in the United States have been charged with murder for their actions in line-of-duty shootings, according to a Chronicle review of news archives.

    That includes Officer Michael Slager of North Charleston, S.C., whose video-recorded killing of Walter Scott has once again ignited a national debate on police accountability and on the handling of hundreds of fatal officer-involved police shootings that occur each year.

    None of these 22 officers, though, have been convicted of murder. Most of them, even if they were fired or sued for millions, weren’t convicted of anything, winning full acquittals or dismissals.
    The cases — summarized in the photo gallery above — involved 14 deadly incidents, some that generated national news and others that caused much less of a stir. (It’s likely some cases were missed in our search; please alert us to any other cases).

    Why don’t juries convict officers? Criminal justice experts and attorneys who have been involved in such cases point to a number of factors, including that jurors are reluctant to second-guess police officers’ decisions in what the officers described as high-pressure, high-stakes situations.But that’s not all.

    The Chronicle found that other common factors in past acquittals included the presence of prominent defense attorneys hired through police unions; intense scrutiny of the victims and their role in sparking the confrontations; and intensive media coverage and community response, even rioting, that pressured prosecutors to file charges in cases that were difficult to win.

    The low rate of both prosecutions and convictions can be viewed in two ways: Some will say it makes sense not to harshly punish people for mistakes they make while doing a dangerous and unpredictable job. Others will say that an absence of punishment is not only unjust but leaves a vacuum of accountability, making it more likely officers will use deadly force in the future.

    Note bolded paragraph.

    From the vigil: The protestors demanded an emergency city council meeting re: a citizen’s oversight board. It’s almost been 24 hours. #WalterScott
    Speakers describe the brutality of the police they endure here in South Carolina. #WalterScott
    “Raise your hand if you’ve been stopped by a North Charleston police officer.” Vigil. #WalterScott

    This from elsewhere: Disturbing dash cam shows Virginia Beach cop repeatedly Taser seated 17-year-old in car. There’s a link there, worth taking a look. Isolated incidents.

  268. rq says

    Previous in moderation, so let’s have a humour break:
    Tumblr got me bawling Two images to look at: first of a very finely done haircut of a parabolic line shaved into a man’s head, with the caption, “Barber: What you want, fam? Me: Let me get that “y = mx + b” Barber: Say no mo”; second image of tumblr responses, where the first is an extended lol; the second – “y’all uneducated ass niggas. How you gonna put a linear equation when this is clearly an exponential function???” followed by a “STAHP [crying emoticon] I love yall”, followed by “y=x^2 like a muffucka”. Math geeks rule.

    San Francisco! SF Police Department’s Disturbing Texts Leaked: ‘All N*ggers Must F*cking Hang’ (Video)

    In a disturbing revelation out of the San Francisco Police Department, text messages exchanged between officers contained offensive comments about gay men, Filipinos and Hispanics, even the term “white power” was allegedly used more than one time.

    Even more disturbing, the officers worked in neighborhoods where mostly minorities lived.

    According to the Guardian, one text reads: “All n*ggers must f*cking hang.” Another read: “Cross burning lowers blood pressure! I did the test myself!”

    Serve and protect.

    RT if You Believe in Post-Modernism: Twitter and the Alleged Death of Literature

    So recently I was in a meeting with the superintendent of a public school district. When asked what issues concern him most as he considers the educational landscape of his region, he leaned forward and furrowed his brow, clasping his hands together in the very picture of paternal concern.

    “When I see…” he began, pausing for emphasis. “When I see the way our young people communicate, it is, frankly, shocking to me. The texts. The tweets. I mean, I’ll tell you, some of them think that you, Y-O-U, is spelled ‘u.’ And Twitter. A hundred and forty characters.” Another pause. “A hundred and forty… can you imagine? I worry that one day that’s how everyone will communicate. Instead of novels, everything will be tweets.”

    I more or less managed to maintain some semblance of professional composure, even among the somber nodding heads and murmurs of assent that filled the room. Setting aside for the moment the comedy of the idea that Twitter and text communication are more grievous social ills or district concerns than racism and inequity or poverty and hunger, the idea that Twitter will be the coup de grâce that finally KOs American literature once and for all is equally alarmist and ahistorical. The idea is not novel, of course; “a hundred and forty characters” has become the facile shorthand for all kinds of millennial deficiencies—shortsightedness, impulsivity, rhetorical dullness. (“Well, that’s the kind of thing that doesn’t come through in a hundred and forty characters.”) The hashtag suffers a parallel assault, serving as a proxy for all that is seen to be useless and self-serving about Twitter.

    But what’s really so terrible about a hundred and forty characters? Where did we get the idea that to create art or convey an idea, you need to use lengthy prose or you’re doing it wrong? I’m reminded of a passage on concision from The Elements of Style:

    “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

    Strunk and White wrote The Elements of Style. I don’t have much to say about William Strunk, but E.B. White wrote Charlotte’s Web, which in case you forgot is a book about a spider that saved her friend from getting killed and eaten by writing messages like “radiant,” “humble,” and—my personal favorite—“some pig.” Talk about concise. Charlotte was a visionary in figuring out just what makes the…web work.

    Anyway, though Strunk and White have a lot to teach us about concision and parsimony, the passage quoted above is a bit too long for a tweet. Like, way too long. The tweet version (the one that ensures that every word tell) would be like this:

    [tweet] Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences. Strunk & White #dagawds tweet [/tweet]

    Or, even better, you could replace the hashtag with the glowing-hands-uplifted-in-praise emoji , which would probably be my personal choice. And unsurprisingly, Shakespeare does the whole thing one better. “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

    Fun read, actually. And educational.

    Vigil. #WalterScott

    Pleasure meeting Rev. Dr. Allan Boesak, survivor of the apartheid. He & his wife came all the way to #Ferguson to affirm our work. #Respect

    How kicking a trash can became criminal for a 6th grader

    Diagnosed as autistic, the sixth-grader was being scolded for misbehavior one day and kicked a trash can at Linkhorne Middle School in Lynchburg, Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. A police officer assigned to the school witnessed the tantrum, and filed a disorderly conduct charge against the sixth grader in juvenile court.

    Just weeks later, in November, Kayleb, who is African-American, disobeyed a new rule — this one just for him — that he wait while other kids left class. The principal sent the same school officer to get him.

    “He grabbed me and tried to take me to the office,” said Kayleb, a small, bespectacled boy who enjoys science. “I started pushing him away. He slammed me down, and then he handcuffed me.”

    In an incident report, a teacher confirmed that the officer spoke to Kayleb, then grabbed him around the chest, and that Kayleb cursed and struggled. School officials won’t comment on this case, but say that police in schools are crucial to providing a safe atmosphere and protecting against outside threats.

    Stacey Doss, Kayleb’s mother and the daughter of a police officer herself, was outraged. Educators stood by, she said, while the cop took her son in handcuffs to juvenile court. The officer filed a second misdemeanor disorderly conduct complaint. And he also submitted another charge, a very grown-up charge for a very small boy: felony assault on a police officer. That charge was filed, Doss said the officer told her, because Kayleb “fought back.”

    “I thought in my mind — Kayleb is 11,” Doss said. “He is autistic. He doesn’t fully understand how to differentiate the roles of certain people.”

    To Doss’ shock, a Lynchburg juvenile court judge found Kayleb guilty of all those charges in early April, which could prove life-altering.

    The young student’s swift trip into the criminal justice system might seem like a singular case of tough discipline. But he’s not alone.

    In fact, US Department of Education data analyzed by the Center for Public Integrity show that Virginia schools in a single year referred students to law enforcement agencies at a rate nearly three times the national rate. Virginia’s referral rate: about 16 for every 1,000 students, compared to a national rate of six referrals for every 1,000 students. In Virginia, some of the individual schools with highest rates of referral — in one case 228 per 1,000 — were middle schools, whose students are usually from 11 to 14 years old.

    The Education Department didn’t require that schools explain why, during the 2011-12 school year, they referred students to law enforcement. And a referral did not necessarily have to end in an arrest or charges filed, at least not immediately. But by definition, it did mean that students’ behavior was reported to police or courts.

    The Center’s analysis found that in Delaware, special schools for troubled kids helped drive up that small state’s rate to second after Virginia. Florida ranked third.

    The findings raise questions about what kind of incidents at school really merit police or court intervention, and provide fodder for a growing national debate over whether children, especially those in minority groups, are getting pushed into a so-called “school-to-prison pipeline” unnecessarily and unjustly. What’s happening in some schools seems almost directly at odds with guidance from the US Department of Education.

    The mind boggles. Constantly.

  269. rq says

    Share This Portrait of Walter Scott, artwork by Richard Pean.

    In far too many stories about Walter Scott—the black 50-year-old who white North Charleston, S.C., officer Michael Slager fatally shot on April 4, 2015—we can’t see his face.

    Instead we see images of Scott’s back as he flees from the scene of a traffic stop. (Scott’s family has said that he ran because he owed $18,000 in child support and there was a bench warrant out for his arrest.)

    The back of Scott on the run really doesn’t show us the father of four, the husband-to-be, the Coast Guard veteran or the forklift driver proud of the used Benz he had just bought. Walter Scott is just a suspect on the police radio: “Black male. Green shirt. Blue pants.”

    That’s why Colorlines asked artist Richard Péan to draw a portrait of this man the way his family and community might want to remember him—calm, with a smile.

    In the interest of accountability we also had Péan draw Slager. For days the 33-year-old, who had worked on the Charleston police force for five years, allowed the department to spread his lie about how Scott died with five bullets in his back. He claimed Scott grabbed his Taser and that he shot him during a scuffle.

    Only because bystander Feidin Santana, filmed and released cell-phone video of the slaying was the officer charged with first-degree murder and fired. Without that video, Slager would have been just another White Officer in Fear for His Life.

    Just as you’ve shared artist Erin Zipper’s images of other police violence victims including Amadou Diallo, Aiyanna Stanley Jones, John Crawford III, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, we want you to share Péan’s portraits of Scott and the officer who killed him.

    And then we want you to be prepared for more drawings of people of color killed by police when running away or standing still, sleeping or walking down the street, holding a toy in a store aisle or a wallet on their doorstep.

    Broken tail-light, go directly to cemetery.
    Do not pass GO.
    Do not collect $200.
    #WalterScott     – the new black monopoly (previous version had ‘Go to Jail’ on each square).

    GOAT. RT @HaerWaveMedia: Man pays for $137 traffic ticket with 137 origami pigs, delivered in doughnut boxes.

    #BlackLivesMatterCHS will hold a vigil tonight @ 6:30PM for #WalterScott. (Late information.)

    In Baltimore in 2009, I pulled over for a traffic stop. It was 6am. The officer approached my car with his gun drawn. This ain’t a game.

    A Former Black Panther-Turned-FBI Informant Brings a Camera Crew to Work, with video.

    Saeed Torres is a Harlem-born former Black Panther and self-described “revolutionary” who, while imprisoned in the early ’90s, began spying on his Muslim community for the FBI.

    As a freelancer for the FBI Torres says he’s made thousands of dollars and helped to bring in at least five convictions. In 2011, the 63-year-old let photojournalist (and one-time neighbor) Lyric R. Cabral film him on what’s supposed to be his swan song: “buddying up” to Khalifah Al-Akili, a Pittsburgh-based, white, Muslim 37-year-old husband and father who also happens to praise the Taliban on social media. The result is “(T)error,” the first documentary film to go inside an FBI counter-terrorism sting operation.

    >As if watching an FBI freelancer work isn’t already mind-blowing, things really get interesting when, unbeknownst to Torres, Cabral and co-director David Felix Sutcliffe start talking to his target, Al-Akili, too.

    (T)error” will premiere this month at the TriBeCa Film Festival, which was founded after 9/11 to revitalize Lower Manhattan. Cabral, 32, spoke with Colorlines about a film that’s about the consequences of betrayal including the one leading to Al-Akili’s questionable arrest by the FBI. Here’s an edited and condensed version of our conversation.

  270. rq says

    So offended that the white version of Blackish is called Happyish.

    This is a repost, but the project continues and so do the photographs. Portraits of protesters aim for ‘stillness’ over chaos

    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.

    Now let’s see some cops get convicted, too. Two women sentenced for hate crimes in slaying of black man

    US District Judge Henry T. Wingate went out of his way to show relatives and supporters of the two women that their presence in the truck that ran over Anderson in a Jackson parking lot was not an isolated accident but the result of a pattern of racist behavior.

    “I just wonder whether the hatred is just engrained for some particular reason,” said Wingate, who in 1984 became the first African-American federal judge in Mississippi. “Then again, that’s what race hatred is all about: whites who hate blacks and blacks who hate whites. It’s just automatic.”

    Wingate sentenced 21-year-old Shelbie Brooke Richards of Pearl to eight years in prison after her guilty plea to one count of conspiracy to commit a hate crime and one count of concealing the crime by lying to Jackson police. He sentenced 22-year-old Sarah Adelia Graves of Crystal Springs to five years in prison after her guilty plea to one count of conspiracy to commit a hate crime.

    Those were the maximum sentences available under the women’s plea agreements. But Wingate said he wished he could send the women away for longer prison terms.

    “I feel this defendant, as well as the other one, could have been charged with a much more serious count than the one that they are pleading guilty to,” Wingate said after rejecting a call from Richards’ attorney to sentence her to only the five years that Graves received. […]

    Six white men, sentenced earlier by a different judge, received prison terms ranging from four to 50 years for Anderson’s death. Two more men await sentencing by Wingate.

    Yep, we saw that case before – the judge made an epic statement there.

    Justifiable. Indictable. #WalterScott Justifiable: image of cop pointing gun; Indictable: same image of cop pointing gun overlaid by the focussing brackets of a recording camera.

    Join the movement for Justice for #LavallHall. You can view the full video / sign up at link: Justice for Lavall Hall.

  271. rq says

    So… the NYPD Just Broke an NBA Player’s Leg. Seen the story. No new information.

    NJ teacher suspended for having class write get-well cards to Mumia. Writing to political prisoners and raising socially conscious children is now a bad thing.

    A New Jersey elementary school teacher was suspended today for having her class write get-well letters to convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.

    Marylin Zuniga, a third grade teacher in Orange, tweeted Sunday that she had her students write to the deathrow inmate “to lift up his spirits as he is ill.” […]

    “The incident reported is in no way condoned nor does it reflect curriculum, program or activities approved by the district,” the statement said. “Ms. Zuniga will be immediately suspended with pay until such time the investigation is completed and based upon the results of the investigation additional action may be taken by the Board of Education.” […]

    Police union officials in Philadelphia decried Zuniga’s actions.

    “We’re disgusted by it,” said John McNesby, president of Lodge 5 of the Fraternal Order of Police. “The F.O.P., the police and the Faulkner family, we’re all disgusted. I don’t know where a teacher gets the idea to have her class send letters to a convicted felon.

    “Hopefully they’ll put a policy in place so this doesn’t happen again,” said McNesby.

    Following an outcry on social media and the right-wing blogosphere, Zuniga closed her Twitter account. She did not immediately returned calls for comment. School administrators, who are currently off for Spring Break, could also not be reached.

    Zuniga, a first-year teacher at the school, recently earned her masters in education from Columbia University.

    Another one for us white folk: White America’s racial illiteracy: Why our national conversation is poisoned from the start

    I am white. I have spent years studying what it means to be white in a society that proclaims race meaningless, yet is deeply divided by race. This is what I have learned: Any white person living in the United States will develop opinions about race simply by swimming in the water of our culture. But mainstream sources—schools, textbooks, media—don’t provide us with the multiple perspectives we need.

    Yes, we will develop strong emotionally laden opinions, but they will not be informed opinions. Our socialization renders us racially illiterate. When you add a lack of humility to that illiteracy (because we don’t know what we don’t know), you get the break-down we so often see when trying to engage white people in meaningful conversations about race.

    Mainstream dictionary definitions reduce racism to individual racial prejudice and the intentional actions that result. The people that commit these intentional acts are deemed bad, and those that don’t are good. If we are against racism and unaware of committing racist acts, we can’t be racist; racism and being a good person have become mutually exclusive. But this definition does little to explain how racial hierarchies are consistently reproduced.

    Social scientists understand racism as a multidimensional and highly adaptive system—a system that ensures an unequal distribution of resources between racial groups. Because whites built and dominate all significant institutions, (often at the expense of and on the uncompensated labor of other groups), their interests are embedded in the foundation of U.S. society.

    While individual whites may be against racism, they still benefit from the distribution of resources controlled by their group. Yes, an individual person of color can sit at the tables of power, but the overwhelming majority of decision-makers will be white. Yes, white people can have problems and face barriers, but systematic racism won’t be one of them. This distinction—between individual prejudice and a system of unequal institutionalized racial power—is fundamental. One cannot understand how racism functions in the U.S. today if one ignores group power relations. […]

    Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority and entitlement that we are either not consciously aware of or can never admit to ourselves, we become highly fragile in conversations about race. We experience a challenge to our racial worldview as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people. It also challenges our sense of rightful place in the hierarchy. Thus, we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as a very unsettling and unfair moral offense.

    The following patterns make it difficult for white people to understand racism as a system and lead to the dynamics of white fragility. While they do not apply to every white person, they are well-documented overall:

    Segregation: Most whites live, grow, play, learn, love, work and die primarily in social and geographic racial segregation. Yet, our society does not teach us to see this as a loss. Pause for a moment and consider the magnitude of this message: We lose nothing of value by having no cross-racial relationships. In fact, the whiter our schools and neighborhoods are, the more likely they are to be seen as “good.” The implicit message is that there is no inherent value in the presence or perspectives of people of Color. This is an example of the relentless messages of white superiority that circulate all around us, shaping our identities and worldviews.

    The Good/Bad Binary: The most effective adaptation of racism over time is the idea that racism is conscious bias held by mean people. If we are not aware of having negative thoughts about people of color, don’t tell racist jokes, are nice people, and even have friends of color, then we cannot be racist. Thus, a person is either racist or not racist; if a person is racist, that person is bad; if a person is not racist, that person is good. Although racism does of course occur in individual acts, these acts are part of a larger system that we all participate in. The focus on individual incidences prevents the analysis that is necessary in order to challenge this larger system. The good/bad binary is the fundamental misunderstanding driving white defensiveness about being connected to racism. We simply do not understand how socialization and implicit bias work.

    Individualism: Whites are taught to see themselves as individuals, rather than as part of a racial group. Individualism enables us to deny that racism is structured into the fabric of society. This erases our history and hides the way in which wealth has accumulated over generations and benefits us, as a group, today. It also allows us to distance ourselves from the history and actions of our group. Thus we get very irate when we are “accused” of racism, because as individuals, we are “different” from other white people and expect to be seen as such; we find intolerable any suggestion that our behavior or perspectives are typical of our group as a whole.

    Entitlement to racial comfort: In the dominant position, whites are almost always racially comfortable and thus have developed unchallenged expectations to remain so. We have not had to build tolerance for racial discomfort and thus when racial discomfort arises, whites typically respond as if something is “wrong,” and blame the person or event that triggered the discomfort (usually a person of color). This blame results in a socially-sanctioned array of responses towards the perceived source of the discomfort, including: penalization; retaliation; isolation and refusal to continue engagement. Since racism is necessarily uncomfortable in that it is oppressive, white insistence on racial comfort guarantees racism will not be faced except in the most superficial of ways.

    Racial Arrogance: Most whites have a very limited understanding of racism because we have not been trained to think in complex ways about it and because it benefits white dominance not to do so. Yet, we have no compunction about debating the knowledge of people who have thought complexly about race. Whites generally feel free to dismiss these informed perspectives rather than have the humility to acknowledge that they are unfamiliar, reflect on them further, or seek more information.

    Racial Belonging: White people enjoy a deeply internalized, largely unconscious sense of racial belonging in U.S. society. In virtually any situation or image deemed valuable in dominant society, whites belong. The interruption of racial belonging is rare and thus destabilizing and frightening to whites and usually avoided.

    Psychic freedom: Because race is constructed as residing in people of color, whites don’t bear the social burden of race. We move easily through our society without a sense of ourselves as racialized. Race is for people of color to think about—it is what happens to “them”—they can bring it up if it is an issue for them (although if they do, we can dismiss it as a personal problem, the race card, or the reason for their problems). This allows whites much more psychological energy to devote to other issues and prevents us from developing the stamina to sustain attention on an issue as charged and uncomfortable as race.

    Constant messages that we are more valuable: Living in a white dominant context, we receive constant messages that we are better and more important than people of color. For example: our centrality in history textbooks, historical representations and perspectives; our centrality in media and advertising; our teachers, role-models, heroes and heroines; everyday discourse on “good” neighborhoods and schools and who is in them; popular TV shows centered around friendship circles that are all white; religious iconography that depicts God, Adam and Eve, and other key figures as white. While one may explicitly reject the notion that one is inherently better than another, one cannot avoid internalizing the message of white superiority, as it is ubiquitous in mainstream culture.

    These privileges and the white fragility that results prevent us from listening to or comprehending the perspectives of people of color and bridging cross-racial divides. The antidote to white fragility is on-going and life-long, and includes sustained engagement, humility, and education. We can begin by:

    Being willing to tolerate the discomfort associated with an honest appraisal and discussion of our internalized superiority and racial privilege.
    Challenging our own racial reality by acknowledging ourselves as racial beings with a particular and limited perspective on race.
    Attempting to understand the racial realities of people of color through authentic interaction rather than through the media or unequal relationships.
    Taking action to address our own racism, the racism of other whites, and the racism embedded in our institutions—e.g., get educated and act.

    The antidote to white fragility is on-going and life-long, and includes sustained engagement, humility, and education.

    “Getting it” when it comes to race and racism challenges our very identities as good white people. It’s an ongoing and often painful process of seeking to uncover our socialization at its very roots. It asks us to rebuild this identity in new and often uncomfortable ways. But I can testify that it is also the most exciting, powerful, intellectually stimulating and emotionally fulfilling journey I have ever undertaken. It has impacted every aspect of my life—personal and professional.

    I overheard some reporters say that the North Charleston Police Department is no longer answering the phone. #WalterScott
    And apparently Slager’s personnel file has a note from 2010 of him being praised for his interactions with suspects. #WalterScott

    A comprehensive bill on police brutality must include a section addressing the emergency crisis on how police handle folk w/ mental illness.

  272. rq says

    Referencing the witness who filmed Walter Scott’s murder, The police can’t police themselves. And now the public is too scared to cooperate with them.

    When Feidin Santana recorded Walter Scott’s murder, his first thought was fear of reprisal from police. In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Santana said he was tempted to delete the video and move for his own safety. Though he ultimately gave the video to Scott’s family, who then turned it over to the press, he still fears reprisals. Like Scott’s family, Santana didn’t trust the police to do the right thing with the evidence, and why should he? He saw an officer, Michael Slager, shoot an unarmed man in the back, plant evidence on the body and stand calmly as fellow officers arrived at the scene and did nothing to help the dying man on the ground. Santana didn’t know who Walter Scott was, but he understood that what he had just witnessed was a crime committed by an officer of law, who would then go on to lie about what had happened in order to cover up a murder.

    The story of Walter Scott’s death sounds like fodder for a “ripped from the headlines” TV episode. This must be a fluke, a freak occurrence, the exception to the norm. In a way, it is. Certainly the majority of police officers aren’t shooting unarmed people in the back and lying about what happened. But when it comes to police officers shooting citizens, the data gets murky. The United States has no central database of police shootings, much less of police misconduct. Yet the most publicized cases highlight the reality that it is never just the actions of one officer that contribute to a climate of widespread mistrust. And citizens can hardly be expected to come forward when officers can write a report saying that CPR was performed when it wasn’t, or drop a Taser near the victim to support a false story.

    Whether the example is the Burge torture case in Chicago that spanned nine years of police brutality with 110 documented victims, the decision of Atlanta officers to posthumously frame 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston after she was killed during a botched “no knock” drug raid, or the bizarre attempt to frame Marcus Jeter for crimes he didn’t commit during a traffic stop in New Jersey, there’s no shortage of examples around the country that abuse of police power can happen anywhere. Factor in the Rampart scandal in Los Angeles, proof that officers with the New York Police Department planted drugs on suspects, recent Justice Department reports illustrating widespread problems with excessive force and biased policing in Ferguson, Mo., Cleveland and Seattle, and it becomes clear why Mr. Santana didn’t feel he could trust the police. The problem isn’t just the officers that directly commit crimes. It’s also the officers that help them get away with it and the climate that encourages successive generations of officers to prioritize themselves over the public they are sworn to protect. Look at the shooting of Akai Gurley: The officer’s first instinct in that case wasn’t to see if anyone was hurt; it was to make sure that no one got in trouble for the dead person laying in the stairwell.

    Police misconduct clearly isn’t as rare of an event as we’d all like it to be, though it does appear the majority of complaints are the result of actions by repeat offenders, the sad reality is that police officers aren’t likely to be charged for misconduct. That some officers are facing charges is the exception to the rule. For many — like Johannes Mehserle, who only served two years in jail after shooting Oscar Grant in the back — even a conviction doesn’t mean receiving more than a slap on the wrist. […]

    When the system is the problem, individuals cannot be expected to counteract the problem alone, much less accept that the only countermeasures available are in the hands of those with a stake in maintaining the status quo. If you can’t trust the police to serve and protect, how can you trust them to maintain order within their own ranks? The argument that “not all cops are bad” only works if there’s a way to be certain that bad cops are being removed from service as soon as they are discovered, and that those who report their misbehavior have an assurance of safety. Just ask Ramsey Orta what it has cost him to turn in the police.

    I skipped a lot of good stuff in the middle there.

    Prayer at the Memorial. #WalterScott

    Civil Rights Attorney Says Cops Have Been Shooting Unarmed People in the Back for Years Comforting thought.

    Investigative Journalist Stephen Janis discusses the shooting of unarmed man by a North Charleston police officer with civil rights attorney A. Dwight Pettit and its implications for police accountability in Maryland.

    Video only.

    Missing police cameras when deputy throws man on road. Yup, police recordings need to come from somewhere other than the police themselves.

    “We are not aware of any other video besides what you currently have in your possession,” said Orange County Chief Deputy Mike LaCasse.

    WUSA9’s investigation determined at least seven cameras from three different agencies should have been at the scene while Fitzgerald was in custody, including a handheld device a deputy is recorded using by the existing dash cam video.

    “This evening, I discovered that one of my patrol sergeants had taken photos of the defendant’s face and of the hood of the car,” LaCasse said responding to our finding.

    The agency won’t comment on cameras WUSA9 identified in use by the Town of Orange Police Department the night of the arrest.

    Of the seven cameras that should have been there, the one camera known to be one did not record any audio.

    According blame that on a malfunction, but the same camera begins recording continuous overmodulated audio 25 minutes after the confronation with Fitzgerald.

    “Without audio, you can’t hear me screaming out, screaming for, asking, I’m screaming oh God please help me, please help me, you know,” Fitzgerald said. “That’s when I’m on the ground I’m screaming that, when I was on the car, when they had me on the hood of the car I was screaming God please help me God, that’s what I kept saying.”

    The officer standing closest to the camera when Fitzgerald is thrown to the ground is from the Gordonsville Virginia Police department.

    She’s required by policy to wear a body camera, but that agency says she wasn’t wearing one that night because her camera was malfunctioning.

    Gordonsville has since replaced its cameras.

    Comforting, indeed.

    Interlude: Fashion! The Agony and the Ecstasy of Kanye West

    On a Sunday afternoon in early February, Kanye West was in a makeshift conference room at the downtown New York showroom of Adidas, mapping out his vision for fashion, and everything else, too. It was three days after the presentation of his first sportswear collection, Yeezy Season 1, at New York Fashion Week. Produced in collaboration with Adidas Originals, Yeezy was the culmination of more than a decade of striving, self-teaching, self-humbling and agitating for attention.

    The Yeezy presentation — where Jay Z, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Alexander Wang, West’s wife, Kim Kardashian, and their squalling daughter, North, sat in the front row alongside Anna Wintour — was not a traditional runway show. Instead, West had staged a phalanx of 50 models, many of them selected from an open call. The aesthetic of the unisex clothes borrowed from contemporary “athleisure” wear and traditional military surplus, distorting familiar silhouettes and distilling high-minded influences into street-ready looks. Not all the feedback was positive, but West seemed unfazed. “We destroyed the first village, the fashion village,” he told the group of 10 or so, graphic designers and members of his creative team obliged to attend a Sunday lunchtime meeting.

    West, who is partial to lofty rhetoric, is most at ease when sermonizing, delivering extemporaneous speeches that are part Vince Lombardi, part Tony Robbins, part Martin Luther King Jr. (“They classify my motivational speeches as rants!” he has said.) As the group listened, rapt, he segued from his plans to teach feng shui and color theory in schools, to having passed on what he says was a multimillion dollar partnership with Apple, to — in language both admiring and profane — the surpassing perfection of Kris Jenner’s progeny. And then he got to his point.

    “It’s literally like . . . I know this is really harsh, but it’s like Before Yeezy and After Yeezy,” West said. “This is the new Rome!” He was referring to his thunderous arrival in the fashion world, to his oft-mocked bid not merely to design clothes but to build, in his words, “the biggest apparel company in human history.” But he could just as easily have been talking about his own life and his recent attempts at self-transformation: his dogged efforts to remake himself, to find a comfortable balance between the self-proclaimed genius and provocateur with the hair-trigger temper he’s been, and the more moderate, approachable, self-controlled designer-of-the-people he’s trying so strenuously to become — all without losing his essential Kanye-ness.

    Lofty rhetoric, indeed!

    “Being black in America you have to work twice as hard…” A bit of Chris Rock.

  273. rq says

    The media finally chose the right pictures to use #WalterScott Yes, I like that.

    People of Color in European Art History presents 1800s week. So, for all those *ahem* scifi authors who declare there were no people of colour at such-and-such a time? Hello. They’ve got several centuries of PoC in art down the right side. Just click!

    On April 11th: President Wilson Permits Segregation Within Federal Government

    On April 11, 1913, recently inaugurated President Woodrow Wilson received Postmaster General Albert Burleson’s plan to segregate the Railway Mail Service. Burleson reported that he found it “intolerable” that white and black employees had to work together and share drinking glasses and washrooms. This sentiment was shared by others in Wilson’s administration; William McAdoo, Secretary of the Treasury, argued that segregation was necessary “to remove the causes of complaint and irritation where white women have been forced unnecessarily to sit at desks with colored men.”

    By the end of 1913, black employees in several federal departments had been relegated to separate or screened-off work areas and segregated lavatories and lunchrooms. In addition to physical separation from whites, black employees were appointed to menial positions or reassigned to divisions slated for elimination. The government also began requiring photographs on civil service applications, to better enable racial screening.

    Although implemented by his subordinates, President Wilson defended racial segregation in his administration as in the best interest of blacks. He maintained that harm was interjected into the issue only when blacks were told that segregation was humiliation. Meanwhile, segregation in federal employment was seen as the most significant blow to black rights since slavery, and seemed to signify official Presidential approval of Jim Crow policies in the South. After backlash that included organized protests by the NAACP, segregated lavatory signs were removed, but discriminatory customs persisted and there was little concrete evidence of actual policy reversal. The federal government continued to require photographs on civil service applications until 1940.

    1913.

    And: Eric Garner Bystander Ramsey Orta Released From Jail

    Ramsey Orta, the Staten Island man who filmed the arrest and death of Eric Garner, has been released from jail after his family crowd-funded his bail money. Orta was arrested in February on “drug-related charges,” but his lawyer said they were worried bail would be denied because of his involvement in the Eric Garner case.

    The Orta family’s GoFundMe campaign raised enough to post his $100,000 bail, but his lawyer Ken Perry said prosecutors wanted to hold a hearing to determine where the money was from. The hearing, which was scheduled for yesterday, has been canceled and Orta was released later on Friday. Orta’s family also said the police have been “harassing” them since Garner’s death last July.

    “We reviewed the paperwork that was submitted by the bail bondsman and we believed it met the requirements of the statute,” Assistant District Attorney Daniel Master said. “So we didn’t pursue our request to look further into the source of the funds.”

    Orta, who also has a pending gun-possession case in New York State Supreme Court and two pending misdemeanors in Pendleton Criminal Court, is accused of selling heroin, pills, crack cocaine and marijuana to an undercover officer along with his mother and his brother. His GoFundMe raised $48,000 from 1,887 donors; $16,250 was needed for bail, and the rest will be used for legal fees.

    So I don’t get it, was his bail the $100 000 or was it $16 250?

    Mental Health Summit happening now. Black Humanity we need this now. Mental health & wellness. There’s a livestream link within, but hoepfully it connects to a recording as I think it is over now. :(

  274. says

    rq

    So I don’t get it, was his bail the $100 000 or was it $16 250?

    The bail was $100,000. However, it is common practice in the States that arrestees pay 10-15% of the amount to a bond agent, who puts up the rest and will come after the arrestee personally if they fail to appear (See bounty hunter). This practice, and bounty hunting generally, is illegal pretty much everywhere else, and bail amounts are also typically much lower (or simply doesn’t exist).

  275. rq says

    Dalillama

    … People do that? Wooow.

    +++

    Here’s a story t olink to some tweets: Passengers on Metro bus asked to keep hands up during police search for suspect

    St. Louis County Police are defending their decision to ask everyone on a Metro bus to keep their hands up while officers searched for a suspect.

    “Do not move unless I tell you to move and everything is going to be ok, just fine. You understand me? No sudden movements. No nothing, ok?” an officer on the bus said. The search conducted by officers was recorded by a passenger.

    Authorities said the action stemmed from a home invasion that occurred just a few blocks away on Underhill Drive in north St. Louis County. According to police, a husband and wife at the home were held at gunpoint.

    “He was looking for money, he said ‘if you don’t give me no money I’m going to kill you, I’m going to kill you,” said victim Hazel Kuhlman.

    The suspect then fled the house and police believe he jumped onto the #47 bus. Authorities said someone on that bus matched his description, but police later determined he was not the suspect.

    The passengers are demanding answers from police as to why they were detained.

    “You guys knew specifically what you were looking for so why make all the women keep their hands up?” said passenger Laurena Williams.

    Williams’ cousin shot the video of police on the bus. She said the 12 minute long ordeal was frightening.

    “You’re on the bus and the police aren’t really telling you anything except to put your hands up and they’re detaining you on the bus, it’s an inconvenience,” Williams said.

    Police say they apologize for the hassle but said their actions were vital in a situation where an armed and dangerous man was on the loose.

    So keeping people on a bus with their hands up and still is keeping them safe. Annnyway. There’s video at the link.

    Pastors, community leaders unite in a march to stop violence in St. Louis

    Many called it a march for peace.

    “It’s a wakeup call for us to understand that it’s really real out here,” said Felicia Reece who added that her two sons were robbed last year at a gas station.

    It’s a big reason why she supports the movement to end the violence.

    “If we learn to work with one another, to help one another in the community, I think it will be a better place,” she said.

    It all comes on the heels of a violent week, during “Holy Week,” the days leading up to Easter.

    “There was a murder in St. Louis every night. From Monday to even Saturday morning,” said Rev. Spencer Booker of St. Paul Church.

    Rev. Booker along with other pastors from African Methodist Episcopal churches throughout the community all agreed that the prayer walk is their way of putting a stop to it all.

    “We’re showing we care and these are our streets and this is our neighborhoods and we plan on taking it back,” said Rev. Clinton Stancil.

    They also plan to introduce resources like utility assistance, job training and even GED programs to the community in the near future.

    “I really want peace and justice and for all of us to just work together,” Reece said.

    Tribute to Walter Scott: Walter Scott loved dancing, dominoes and the Dallas Cowboys. Just a quiet little tribute to him.

    California sheriff suspends 10 deputies following brutal beating of suspected horse thief – doesn’t say with or without pay.

    A California sheriff has suspended 10 deputies involved in a brutal beating of a suspect on Thursday that was caught on camera by a news helicopter, according to authorities.

    John McMahon, sheriff of San Bernardino County, announced his decision to place the deputies on leave at a news conference Friday. McMahon said he was “disturbed” by the video and said it “appears to be excessive.”

    “I am disturbed and troubled by what I see,” he said, referring to the footage of officers kicking and punching Francis Pusok, 30, who can be seen lying face down on the ground during the beating after he’s been shot by a Taser. “It does not appear to be in line with our policies and procedures.”

    “This is not who we are.” More:

    The FBI has launched a separate investigation into the arrest and beating to determine whether Pusok’s civil rights were violated, according to the San Bernardino Sun.

    “The results of the review will be forwarded to the United States Attorney’s Office in the Central District of California, and the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, in Washington, D.C., to determine whether further investigation and/or prosecution is warranted,” according to a statement released Friday by the federal agency, the Sun reported. […]

    McMahon said deputies involved in the three-hour pursuit were familiar with Pusok.

    During a prior domestic call, McMahon said, Pusok “made threats to kill a deputy sheriff and in fact shot a puppy in front of part of his family.”

    Pusok’s mother, Anne Clemenson, said she wanted the deputies involved in Thursday’s incident to be fired, according to the Los Angeles Times.

    “I want them done,” she said. “I’ve always thought that police are to serve and protect and what they did … it was not called for.”

    “I feel like they’re trying to paint a picture of him as a bad guy and deserving of it,” she added. “He was jumped.”

    So, not the nicest person at all, but still a human being.

    Repost? One-Eighth Of South Carolina Inmates Were Jailed Over Child Support Payments. Walter Scott Was One Of Them.

    A recent MSNBC investigation highlighted that in South Carolina, noncustodial parents can be held in contempt of civil court if their child support payments are just five days late, which means a judge can send them to jail.

    Libba Patterson, a law professor at the University of South Carolina and a former director of the South Carolina Department of Social Services, has been a vocal supporter of an ongoing effort to reform the way South Carolina punishes those who owe child support payments — an effort that has gone all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

    In 2009, Patterson conducted a survey of 33 county jails in South Carolina, which found that one out of every eight inmates — or 13.2 percent of the inmate population — was behind bars for contempt of civil court after falling behind on child support payments. In Charleston County, where Walter owed his back payments on child support, Patterson’s survey found that over 15 percent of inmates had been imprisoned for not paying child support. In a handful of the other counties studied, the figure was as high as 20 percent.

    Patterson told The Huffington Post in an interview that most states are more forgiving than South Carolina when it comes to child support payments. In general, there is no set number of days after which the debtor automatically goes to a contempt hearing.

    “There’s a more flexible process [in other states],” she said. “It’s less likely you’ll go the contempt route. You may enter a payment agreement, or may determine there’s no money. The person may pay up without going through the judicial process.”

    The professor said she has found only one other jurisdiction in the country — the 9th Judicial District of New Mexico — whose rules are as stringent as South Carolina’s.

    In a separate study in 2010, Patterson surveyed hundreds of cases across South Carolina and found that low-income, noncustodial parents like Scott often ended up in jail without being represented by an attorney in civil court. In fact, the study showed that over 98 percent of parents being held in contempt for non-payment of child support did not have legal counsel. Ninety-five percent of the parents held in contempt ended up being sentenced to jail, with an average sentence of three months.

    Seventy-five percent of the parents Patterson examined in her 2010 paper were indigent, meaning they testified that they were presently or previously unemployed or that they were having difficulties finding work. And nearly 70 percent of the noncustodial parent-debtors were black, even though blacks made up less than 28 percent of South Carolina’s population that year.

    This system, Patterson later wrote in an amicus brief, amounts to “a modern day debtors’ prison for poor noncustodial parents who lack the ability to pay support,” and creates a “recurring cycle of incarceration that diminishes prospects for employment and deprives children of an opportunity to build a relationship” with their incarcerated parents.

    Yeah, I think it’s a repost of Pteryxx’ upthread.
    But I’d like to add the comment that not paying child support is always painted in the worst of all lights – like someone was shunning their children and ignoring them, denying them care or something. But what if they’re trying but just can’t make the payments? That doesn’t make them a bad person and it really irks me that the media does this to them.

    Chicago Prepares to Pay $5,000,000 to Family of Teen Shot 16 Times by Cop

    Chicago officials are prepared to approve a $5 million settlement with the family of a 17-year-old black youth who was fatally wounded after being shot 16 times by a police officer on the Southwest Side, reports the Chicago Tribune.

    The settlement with Tina Hunter, the mother of Laquan McDonald, is scheduled to be discussed at Monday’s monthly Finance Committee meeting at City Hall, according to an agenda for the meeting posted online Friday, the Tribune writes.

    The family has not filed a lawsuit, but Hunter is the administrator of her son’s estate in Cook County probate court.

    McDonald allegedly brandished a knife when officers confronted him on Oct. 20 after responding to a call about attempted break-ins of cars, according to reports from the Chicago police and the Fraternal Order of Police, the report says. An officer shot him after he allegedly ignored commands to drop the knife, and police tried to box the teen in with two squad cars, the report says.

    A spokesman for the Cook County medical examiner’s office said the autopsy found that McDonald was shot 16 times to the chest, neck, back, arms and right leg, the report says. He was pronounced dead at Mount Sinai Hospital about an hour later.

    The officer, whose name has not been made public, has been stripped of his police powers and put on paid desk duty pending the outcome of the investigation.

  276. rq says

    Walter Scott: county sheriff punished with trash collection after dog attack on suspect – this isn’t that dog attack.

    The highest-ranking law enforcement officer in the South Carolina county where Walter Scott was shot dead was punished with trash collection duty after his team of officers dragged a man from his truck, punched him and allowed a dog to bite him as he lay on the ground.

    Al Cannon, the sheriff of Charleston County, had an assault and battery charge for hitting Timothy McManus erased from his record after completing 30 hours of litter collection and an anger management class, he said. No other officers were disciplined over the incident.

    Cannon said in an interview on Friday that the experience had given him “a greater appreciation for litter”.

    “I think it was an appropriate punishment in light of other cases and given my position,” he said.

    Soudns awfully similar to Phillip White in Vineland, except he died. More:

    The sheriff said the actions of his officers were justified because McManus ignored an order to open one of his hands to show an item he was holding. It turned out to be his cellphone. Officers also told investigators that McManus had appeared to reach for something inside his truck when first approached. “It was all looked at,” he repeated.

    Kevin Brackett, the state solicitor for York County, recommended the charge against Cannon after considering an inquiry into the arrest by the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED). Brackett wrote in a letter explaining his decision that the response of all the other officers had been “reasonable and appropriate” as they had feared for their safety.

    “I conclude that the actions of the officers were appropriate under the circumstances they faced,” Brackett wrote. “While I had the benefit of multiple viewings in slow motion, these officers did not.”

    McManus had led officers on a 25-mile car chase after allegedly almost colliding with Cannon’s police vehicle in January 2012. His driver’s licence had been suspended. The high-speed pursuit ended beside a road running through the Francis Marion national forest, after the last of 19 shots fired by three different officers blew out the truck’s tires.

    Then aged 31, McManus was sentenced to 30 months in prison in April 2013 after pleading guilty to being a “habitual traffic offender” and failing to stop for the flashing blue lights on Cannon’s police vehicle. By then he had also been arrested for falling asleep at the wheel.

    Cannon avoided full prosecution because he qualified for “pre-trial intervention”, a program designed to prevent first-time offenders being jailed for non-violent offences.

    Brackett said a charge of third-degree assault and battery was not classed as a violent offence. “There is an element of violence to it, but it is not statutorily defined as a violent crime,” Brackett said on Friday.

    An ‘element of violence’ but ‘not a violent crime’. Imagine the discussion we could have about that.

    There goes justice. Fla. Prosecutors Drop More Than 36 Cases Linked To Racist Cops

    Prosecutors in Broward County, Fla., have dropped more than three dozen criminal cases connected to four former police officers embroiled in a racism scandal, according to CBS Miami.

    The move comes after three Fort Lauderdale police officers, Jason Holding, 31, James Wells, 30, and Christopher Sousa, 25, were fired last month after a five-month investigation into a racist video and a litany of racist text messages. A fourth officer, Alex Alvarez, 22, resigned in January.

    Since then, prosecutors have been reviewing arrests made by the officers and confirmed Thursday that they “plan to drop 17 misdemeanor cases where the officers were the main officer involved in the case and they have already dropped 12 felony cases, eight misdemeanor cases and one juvenile case,” the report notes.

    CBS Miami says Broward State Attorney’s Office spokesman Ron Ishoy said that all of the defendants in the cases are black and that the felony charges include such offenses as aggravated assault with a firearm, drug possession, grand theft and unlawful possession of someone’s personal identification.

    “This is a serious matter,” Ishoy said, according to the television news outlet. “We continue to review each case in which these former policemen were the principal officers involved in the arrest. We are dropping charges against the defendants where it is appropriate.”

    Chief Assistant Public Defender Gordon Weekes said dropping the cases was merely the first step in righting wrongs committed by xenophobic officers, the report says.

    Oooooh, I totally misread the title. This is a good thing!

    Iggy Azalea and a Culture of Appropriation

    Azalea has been a regular on British commercial radio for most of 2013 with her singles, Workand Bounceboth making the Top 20 singles chart. However, there’s another strand to Azalea’s career that many will not be aware of without a Google search that goes beyond the cursory. In short, Azalea has committed to the Internet a number of transgressions that include cultural appropriation, homophobia and racism.

    The first is a series of tweets in which Azalea makes derogatory comments, stereotyping the bodies of women of colour, talking about playing football with “5 dyke b*tches”, and finally, utters a slur towards Native Americans.

    In the midst of a Twitter spat with Nicki Minaj, Azalea makes something of an apology, apparently thinking that sexism, racism and homophobia are acceptable behaviour, as long as you’re not famous. The problems continue, when on the song, D.R.U.G.S, Azalea refers to herself as a “runaway slave… master”.

    Now for this incident, she gave a more thorough apology. However, the problematic collisions with race continue in the video for her latest single, Bounce. The video is shot in India, and features Azalea dressed in the traditional dress of the country, complete with sari, and a bindi on her forehead. Azalea’s explanation for this choice is something of an indeterminate ramble, eventually trying to explain it away as “a fantasy”. […]

    Sadly, and all too predictably, Azalea’s thoughts on the issue of race in hip-hop left a lot to be desired. She seems to be completely unaware (regardless whether you think her music is any good) of how her white privilege has given her a degree of access to mainstream success, and also seems to misunderstand what segregation is.

    Now, it wouldn’t be prudent to ignore that the issue of white people in hip-hop raises numerous questions regarding appropriation, and what their place in the culture should be. Aamer Rahman recently posted his thoughts on this.

    I don’t fully agree with Rahman’s argument. I tend to be more of the opinion that crediting the origins of one’s work is the most important thing. However, I am definitely on board with how Rahman deconstructs the nature of white privilege in the context of hip-hop, especially with regards to Azalea. And while some may think I’m singling out Azalea[2], I do so because she’s become a touchstone of the problem. Each of her aforementioned displays of bigotry have often been followed with some kind of apology. But part of being contrite is to take steps to prevent repeat occurrences, which Azalea has clearly failed to do.

    Some more at the link, including a series of tweets, some with photos.

    Not going to cite from this, I think the title is enough for me. South Carolina cop charged in shooting is ‘wonderful person,’ mother says. Sympathy for the killer? Not so much. She says he looked so tired and worn… but as someone pointed out on twitter, Walter Scott looks so… dead.

    2 months after his death, we are gathering to demand justice for #AntonioZambranoMontes. #pascoshooting

    The Challenge of the Black Brunch Movement

    The #BlackBrunchSeattle and #BlackBrunchTacoma protests you may have heard about in the last few months are part of a nationwide movement that officially began a year ago in Oakland. The protests consist of a dozen or half-dozen group of young Americans interrupting brunch (which has come to more broadly symbolize affluence in America) at Seattle and Tacoma-area restaurants on Sundays to educate diners about the well-documented social injustices perpetrated systematically against black people in America. There are currently similar brunch protests happening in other large cities around the nation, including Portland, Atlanta and New York City.

    These five-minute presentations generally include a brief description of Black Brunch, an explanation of its purpose, and a reading of the names of black victims of police and vigilante violence. Sometimes the protesters chant slogans like “Black lives matter!” (a reference to a broader movement by that name, which aims to raise the visibility of racism against blacks in America).

    Individual conversations are temporarily suspended by the protesters’ speech, and the reaction by the (mostly white) diners varies. […]

    #BlackBrunchSeattle activists did not respond to our requests for a comment, but Tacoma resident Jamika Scott, 27, provided us with her perspective on the Black Brunch movement and her role in #BlackBrunchTacoma.

    “I was motivated to do it in Tacoma once I saw it happening on Twitter for a few weeks,” Scott explains. “I liked the spontaneity of the action, but that there’s a strict script and purpose. There are a lot of spaces in Tacoma where people of color don’t necessarily feel comfortable — whether that’s a cafe or restaurant — and I thought this was a creative and important way to utilize these places people of color often avoid. We’re in and out, but it’s powerful each time.”
    […]

    But many diners find the protests ineffective at best, and counter-productive at worst.

    “I get a little put off when someone’s yelling at me,” Smith says. “I get the movement and consider myself an ally, but I think this isn’t the time or the place. It dilutes the message.” After the protesters left Agrodolce, she says, everyone just seemed to go right back to what they were doing. […]

    Occasional sarcastic responses on Twitter aside, negative reactions to the protests online tend to be more vitriolic, especially when they’re anonymous — as seen in the comments on this recent Reddit thread about Black Brunch Seattle, a West Seattle Blog post about protests in Alki, and a recent piece by Kiro’s Jason Rantz — and most seem to fit in one of two equally specious straw-man arguments: “What about black-on-black crime?” and “ALL lives matter.”

    This is not too surprising, however, given how differently white and black Americans view racism, especially the fact that only 16% of white Americans believe there’s a lot of racial discrimination in America, while study after study after study — and recurring incidents like the Walter Scott murder — show otherwise.

    “Negative reactions are never wanted,” Scott says, “but they’re always informative; they help widen the lens for everyone because people start to see the unfortunate reactions others in their community have toward race.”

    There are also many diners who respond positively to the protests. “Each time there are people who thank us, ask questions, seek us out on social media to say positive things, and, on occasion, we have people who stand with us, fist in the air and everything,” Scott explains. “I’ve witnessed curiosity and gratitude grow on peoples’ faces over and over again.” […]

    If protests like these aren’t the solution, what is?

    “I don’t know,” Smith admits when I posed that question to her — and few other critics seem to have an answer, either. Until someone does, the Black Brunch activists will continue to fight to get their message across, one interrupted meal at a time.

    National Action Network Panel on Brutality Has Emotional Response to SC Shooting

    The Rev. Al Sharpton, founder and president of the civil rights organization, is hosting the four-day gathering, which got under way Wednesday. At the opening session, he laid out an agenda for civil rights activists to impact the public-policy debate as the 2016 presidential election begins to take shape.

    Sharpton wants to focus on expanding civil rights and promoting criminal-justice reform. He highlighted the spate of police killings of unarmed black men since last year’s convention. Among the needed reforms, NAN is pushing for police officers nationwide to wear body cameras.

    Every discussion on the first day seemingly referenced some aspect of the shocking video released Tuesday showing a white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., shooting and killing an unarmed black man.

    For the political panelists, it illustrated the urgency of having every police officer wear a body camera. And for the panelists on police brutality, it showed that little has changed since they lost a family member in a deadly encounter with law enforcement.

    Sharpton said that he received a phone call Saturday from the family of Walter Scott, who was gunned down in the South Carolina incident. “No one understands what the family in North Charleston is going through like these people [the panelists],” Sharpton commented.

    The panelists included the parents and fiancee of Sean Bell, the widow and mother of Eric Garner, the mothers of Michael Brown and Tamir Rice, and John Crawford III’s father. The moderator said that each panelist had lost and given so much. She asked them what the activist community could do for them.

    It was an emotional scene. Esaw Snipes, Eric Garner’s widow, broke down in tears and expressed the loneliness she feels. A consensus emerged among the families that they want the world to remember their loved ones’ names.

    “Don’t let the names die,” said John Crawford Jr., whose son John Crawford III was fatally shot by police in an Ohio Wal-Mart. “Keep active in this fight.”

    More at the link.

    Families of slain victims of police violence from Chicago are here showing solidarity with Justus Howell’s family.
    At the rally in Zion for #JustusHowell at the police station.

  277. rq says

    Oops, moderation.
    Dante Servin waives right to jury trial. Judge Dennis Porter will decide fate in bench trial #RekiaBoyd
    “Dante Servin could not serve enough years for me” – #RekiaBoyd’s mom

    Michael Slager’s New Lawyer, Andy Savage, Has Defended Killer Cops Before

    When a South Carolina policeman was acquitted of manslaughter after beating a suspect to death in 1987 in a station house, his lawyer was Andy Savage, who has built his reputation on taking cases many others would avoid at all costs.

    Savage’s latest client is another South Carolina officer, the patrolman charged with murder after being caught on a bystander’s cell phone video firing eight rounds at the back of an apparently unarmed black man, Walter Scott, in North Charleston last Saturday.

    No stranger to cameras or controversy, the 67-year-old silver-haired Savage surprised few familiar with his career when he agreed to represent officer Michael Slager in a shooting that added fuel to the national outcry over police conduct in encounters with black men.

    Known to his colleagues for appearing in court in starched shirts with colorful pocket hankerchiefs tucked in his suit jacket, Savage spent much of the last decade defending Ali al-Marri, a Qatar national accused of being an al Qaeda “sleeper” agent. The case challenged the president’s powers to indefinitely imprison people deemed security threats without charges.

    Over four decades, Savage has represented a mother charged with killing her children by leaving them in a hot car, a 17-year-old accused in a cop’s murder, and a teenager charged with stabbing another teen to death after they exchanged menacing texts.

    “Andy doesn’t shy away from a challenge,” said Miller Shealy Jr., a professor at the Charleston School of Law.

    Among his most notable cases was the defense of Roudro Gourdine, the officer charged with pummeled a suspect with more than two dozen blows to the head during an altercation at a police station in Charleston.

    A jury acquitted Gourdine, who said he could not remember the beating. Savage and the defense team produced an expert who testified that officers can lose memories or sensory perception when under extreme stress, according to media accounts.

    Richard Gershon, the Charleston law school’s former dean, called Savage a lawyer of “great integrity and courage.” He recalled Savage once telling him that people ask how he slept at night while defending people accused of egregious crimes.

    “My job is to make sure the prosecution plays by the rules,” Savage told Gershon, now dean at the University of Mississippi’s law school.

    I wonder what creative defense he will come up with for Slager.

    Officer Michael Slager’s Mother: ‘My Life Will Never Be The Same Again’ (VIDEO). Talk to your son about that, don’t complain to us.
    I hate that she claims to be grieving like the Scott family, nowhere near it.

    Man Bitten By Police Dog During Arrest Dies In NJ

    A 32-year-old man was attacked by a police dog in New Jersey last month and died shortly thereafter. Video has now surfaced showing the man being bitten by the canine while pinned to the ground by cops during an arrest.

    Cops claim that Vineland, NJ resident Phillip G. White, who died in custody on the way to a hospital on March 31st after the K-9 attack, had been acting erratically, and when officers tried to subdue him, he allegedly tried to grab one of their guns. Then, cops say they pinned him and were forced to unleash the dog on him. The attorney representing the two officers who arrested White say the victim was on drugs at the time, and claim he may have died as a result.

    “I believe the [toxicology] reports will show that he had ingested a large amount of PCP, cocaine, and another substance,” Attorney Stuart Alterman told reporters. “They [Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office] have not released the autopsy report or the preliminary toxicology.”

    I find it fishy that he knows the results before they’re in. Very fishy.

  278. rq says

    Here’s a list of black women killed for being black:
    Tanisha Anderson died November 13, 2014, age 37, at the hand of Cleveland police.
    Darnisha Harris died December 2, 2012, age 16, by police in Louisiana.
    Alesia Thomas died July 22, 2012, age 35, at a hospital after having been kicked several times by an officer in Los Angeles.
    Shantel Davis died June 14, 2012, age 23, from an “accidental” shot to the chest by a cop in New York City.
    Rekia Boyd died March 22, 2012, age 22, from a shot to the back of the head by a cop in Chicago.
    Shereese Francis died March 15, 2012, age 29, when 4 officers put their wieght on her back to handcuff her and tased her in New York City.
    Aiyana Stanley-Jones died May 16, 2010, age 7, when cops did a raid and fired his gun after a flash-bang grenande went off in a Detroit.
    Shelly Frey died December 6, 2012, age 27, at the hands of an off duty sheriff’s deputy in Houston.

  279. rq says

    Please read the new comment 278 when it comes out of moderation. It’s a short list. But altogether much too long.

    The Fight For The Soul Of The Black Lives Matter Movement

    At a march in mid-December organized by Al Sharpton’s National Action Network in Washington D.C., organizers rushed the stage and claimed that the old guard was attempting to hijack the nascent Black Lives Matter movement away from its founders.

    “This movement was started by the young people,” Johnetta Elzie, a key organizer from St. Louis, said to the raucous crowd. “There should be young people all over this stage.”

    It was one of the most visible examples of the clash between the old, signified by Sharpton, and the new, represented by grassroots groups who emerged from Ferguson and New York after the Michael Brown and Eric Garner grand jury decisions.

    Sharpton has been extremely sensitive to this criticism. “Oh, you young and hip, you’re full of fire. You’re the new face,” he sneered at a recent gathering at the headquarters of NAN in Harlem. “All that the stuff that they know will titillate your ears. That’s what a pimp says to a ho.”

    At an MLK Day march in Harlem, the division between the old and the new was quieter but no less pronounced.

    On Luxembourg Street, three cops stood behind a barricade, just a few feet away from a thousand protesters. One of the two female officers, brown skinned with accentuated eyebrows, plucked lint from the uniform of her stocky, white male colleague; they all laughed.

    Meanwhile, a dozen or so protesters began to veer from a universal chant—one about justice being lost until it is found—to a more abrasive one: “How do you spell racist? N-Y-P-D.” It’s the same kind of chant Mayor Bill de Blasio called “hateful” and an “attempt to divide this city in a time when we need to come together” a week after two detectives were fatally shot in their squad car in Brooklyn. Immediately the three officers stiffened their backs and softened their smiles.

    Minutes later, dozens of members of a group called Justice League NYC stormed past the officers on the sidewalk, led by some of its key staffers, with Councilmember Jumaane Williams at their side.

    Seeing the group of well-groomed activists and politicians stroll by, the three officers relaxed and dropped their hands from their waists. The police seemed to know that for all the demonstrators’ bluster, it was going to be an uneventful day. […]

    Like Justice for Akai Gurley, nearly a dozen grassroots groups in the Bronx are organizing against police brutality as well as interrelated social problems like gentrification, and the school-to-prison pipeline. At a protest in December, Ephraim Cruz, a former agent with the Department of Homeland Security who used to organize for the group Bronxites for NYPD Accountability, said the NYPD were committing “operational terrorism,” not only through overt violence against people of color but by enforcing a system that inflicts trauma on the poor every day.

    “We are at the very tip of the brunt of officer abuse impact,” he said. “We’re being pushed off streets because cops tell us to clear the corners, they tell us that we can’t interact in public. And we’re being pushed out by gentrification, we’re being pushed out of public schools by charter schools. We’re here to say the jig is up.”

    At a different gathering, which was formally closed to press, a member of the group Take Back the Bronx discussed their group’s efforts to establish “no cop zones,” or places where community members actively but nonviolently repel police presence block-by-block. “We explore alternatives to policing,” the representative said, adding that non-profits tied to formal funding sources attempt to “pacify us and channel the anger.”

    Regarding Justice League NYC, Black and Bello did not see the League as being as prominent as Sharpton’s NAN, but acknowledged celebrity culture and representative politics as things to be wary of.

    “Ella Baker said it best: ‘Strong people do not need strong leaders,'” Bello noted.

    With respect to Al Sharpton and NAN, Black said, “I have different views on how the movement should go. Anybody or any organization that’s embracing the National Action Network, I feel it’s important for the grassroots to stay away from that.” […]

    In The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, Naomi Murakawa argues that liberal reforms, Democratic politicians, and the NAACP are partially to blame for today’s policing practices. She argues that “liberal law and order” laid the foundation for mass incarceration in the 21st century.

    Some who are critical of the Justice League see the group as part of this pattern.

    “I see this movement being empowered off the idea of ‘better police,’ ‘better laws,'” says Timothy DuWhite, a Black Lives Matter activist. “I see the overwhelming assertion for officer indictment as a direct reflection of our society’s dependence on the prison industrial complex.”

    “The names we hear being chanted and lifted up in the streets are not black trans-women, are not cis black women, and are not queer identified men, these are just not the stories being told,” DuWhite said.

    “We must push the movement forward past the simplicity of physical harm and murder committed by the police, and begin to talk about how poverty is a form of state-sanctioned violence. How reduced access to health care is a form of state-sanctioned violence. How reduced access to proper education is a form of state-sanctioned violence.”

    After leaderless masses of protesters poured into the streets to block traffic on highways and bridges in the aftermath of the Garner and Brown grand jury decisions, the Justice League NYC began organizing actions, giving order to the spontaneity that had captured the world’s attention. The group’s first major event was a die-in and rally outside of Barclays Center during a Nets basketball game, and it continued holding similar actions in major shopping centers, as well as press conferences with councilmembers and celebrities like Nas and Russell Simmons, hours after Simmons and Jay Z met with Governor Cuomo.

    Soon Justice League moved to the front of the protest line. The mix of celebrity and media exposure compounded the number of people at their events, reinforcing their growing influence in the movement.

    After organizing a few events, the Justice League issued a set of 10 demands in early December. They ranged from calling for meetings with Mayor de Blasio and NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, to passing a law prohibiting chokeholds and a transparency-enforcing Right To Know Act.

    Mallory, the executive director at NAN for four of her 14 years there before stepping down in late 2013, describes Justice League, along with its parent non-profit, Gathering for Justice, as “exist[ing] on the same principals of National Action Network.”

    “There are many people in the Justice League who have connections to City Hall. I’m one of them,” Mallory told Gothamist. Harry Belafonte, who sits on the Justice League’s board, spoke at de Blasio’s inauguration, and the mayor selected Mallory to join his transition committee.

    “There are perhaps maybe some folks who don’t necessarily feel that that is the right strategy,” Mallory said of working with the government. “But the bottom line is that we can protest, which we do all day, but if we don’t move legislation and actual rules and regulations, then we’ve accomplished nothing.” […]

    After two NYPD Legal Affairs Bureau officers were assaulted on the Brooklyn Bridge in December after a large demonstration, Mayor de Blasio met with members of the Justice League, who, the mayor said, agreed to identify anybody who “seeks to harm the police or harm anyone and undermine their non-violent peaceful progressive movement.” The mayor seemed to be positioning the Justice League as a wedge between him and more radical elements of the movement.

    The Justice League issued a press release right after the meeting that did not address this assertion. Still, some members of the group began to vehemently deny the mayor’s claim on Twitter. Sarsour blamed the “corporate media,” not de Blasio, for trying to discredit and spread division between protesters. The next day, the group tweeted a statement saying they would not work with the NYPD to identify protesters.

    Some have questioned why the Justice League didn’t specifically denounce the mayor after he alluded to their possible work as informants.

    “If the mayor is the one that’s lying…Why don’t they call the mayor out?” said Dennis Flores, an activist with El Grito de Sunset Park. “If they don’t, it shows that they’re really trying to protect their relationship with the mayor as opposed to calling him out on lying.”

    Asked to speak to this controversy, Carmen Perez told Gothamist, “We did not, and do not, get distracted from the important work we are doing, by sensationalized media reporting.”

    Linda Sarsour added, “Just because we get a meeting with the mayor—excuse us! Excuse me that I got a meeting with the mayor. I apologize. I’ve built those connections. I didn’t wake up one morning and become some important person.” […]

    °With the streets largely empty today, and an uneasy peace between City Hall and the police—who turned their backs to the mayor and stopped enforcing petty crimes after the assassination of the two detectives—the mayor says his biggest regret through the whole affair was “not moving quickly enough to repudiate the harsh rhetoric of protesters.”

    The Justice League has continued their dialogue with high-level public officials, including a meeting with Governor Cuomo on January 20 and a closed door meeting with NYPD Police Chief James O’Neill at NAN’s headquarters on February 11.

    “We are encouraged that the Governor has publicly stated his commitment to advance criminal justice reform legislation addressing urgent concerns that have been rightfully raised by communities across the country impacted by our biased justice system,” Carmen Perez said in a statement after meeting with Cuomo.

    The governor later tabled the juvenile justice reforms he initially championed in order to pass an on-time budget.

    4715cops.jpg
    (Tod Seelie / Gothamist)

    “One conclusion I have made out of this whole thing is that the only person and group that seems to have emerged from this situation in better than they were before is William Bratton,” says Harry Levine, a sociologist at CUNY Queens who has written extensively on the NYPD’s racially-biased marijuana arrests. “He’s a smart cookie.”

    When the rift between the mayor and the police unions was deepest, de Blasio leaned heavily on Commissioner Bratton to shore up his waning support within the NYPD. And he was careful to condemn the rank-and-file for showing their backsides to the mayor without meting out any real consequences for their insolence, keeping him mostly in the favor of officers.

    Bratton has also held the tacit approval of the Justice League. Perez told the New York Review of Books that she “looked favorably upon some of Bratton’s statements about improving community relations.” And although there is no indication that Justice League has personally met with the commissioner, Chief O’Neil is the second highest ranking official within the NYPD, and has been a close ally of Bratton’s since the early 1990s.

    So intact is the commissioner’s political standing despite weeks of demonstrations, he casually announced that the NYPD had a new machine gun-toting unit to deal “with events like our recent protests” (the NYPD clarified that protests would be handled by officers without automatic weapons). More recently, Bratton visited lawmakers in Albany to request a bill that would make resisting arrest a felony, an alarming proposal, considering that 72 percent of all resisting arrest charges are brought by 15 percent of all uniformed officers. […]

    On April 13, Justice League plans to march 250 miles from New York to Washington D.C., with stops in Newark, Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore.

    Their stated goal is to urge Congress to act on legislation regarding racial profiling and police demilitarization.

    “I’m not going to show up to Washington, D.C. and mobilize thousands of people to meet us there after marching 250 miles and then just scream on the lawn and talk about our pain,” Linda Sarsour says. “We know what the problem is. We need to make sure that the people in power, who have the influence and the authority to change the things we want to be changed, they need to know what’s coming.”

    Sarsour said that for politicians, the choice is simple: “You’re either going to welcome us, and welcome our movement, or you’re going to become the opposition.”

    If the Justice League is operating by representative politics, some people haven’t asked to be represented. Zora, 23, performs anti-repression organizing with Can’t Touch This NYC. She accused the group of “shucking and jiving for these politicians.”

    None of the smaller organizations interviewed for this article have plans to participate in the march, nor does Zora.

    “They’re trying to establish themselves as leaders for a movement when the movement doesn’t need leaders.”

    Read the skipped bits at the link.Very interesting, very informative.

    So. A while ago I posted a couple of links about Eric Harris, the man ‘accidentally’ shot by a 73 year old volunteer officer who says he mistook his gun for a taser. The police released the video from that case.
    It is horrifying. The shooting itself, yes, but also the attitude of the other officers. Watch.
    BREAKING:Video shows Tulsa man’s last moments alive after accidental police shooting.

    WATCH: at the link here: Video shows Tulsa man’s last moments alive after accidental police shooting.

    An Oklahoma man’s last few moments alive after he was accidentally shot last week by a deputy who meant to stun him with a Taser is seen in disturbing video released by police Friday.

    “He shot me! He shot me, man. Oh, my god. I’m losing my breath,” Eric Harris says as he struggles on the ground with police on top of him.

    “F— your breath,” an officer can be heard saying. “Shut the f— up!”

    Reserve Deputy Robert Bates, 73, shouted “Taser! Taser!” before pulling the trigger on his gun, firing one round into Harris.

    “I shot him!” the shocked former policeman says, dropping his gun from the recoil. “I’m sorry.”

    Bates was assisting other deputies who were trying to take Harris into custody after the felon fled from police during a sting operation, the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office’s said.

    “You shouldn’t have f—–g ran!” another deputy screams, as Harris is held down by his neck and head.

    Harris, who was in his 40s, was pronounced dead April 2 about an hour after the shooting, authorities said.

    He had bolted from officers who were trying to arrest him for selling a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol and ammunition to undercover cops.

    That’s what they have at that link (plus the video), but it’s worse than that.
    I just watched the #EricHarris video and I’m speechless. I didn’t think I could still be speechless. The police are wild.
    Unarmed #EricHarris is shot, says he can’t breathe. Officer replies, “Fuck your breath.” Eric dies.

    Graphic.
    The 73yo volunteer Tulsa officer thought he reached for his taser, but actually shot #EricHarris with his gun.

  280. rq says

    Next two comments will continue with Eric Harris.
    Video of fatal shooting by reserve deputy shown at Sheriff’s Office press conference

    A reserve deputy who killed a felon as he was trying to flee a sting operation was the “victim” of a phenomenon in which he inadvertently fatally shot the suspect during a high-stress situation when he meant only to stun him, according to the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office’s investigation.

    In a news conference Friday afternoon, the Sheriff’s Office played a video of the struggle in which Reserve Deputy Robert Charles “Bob” Bates can be heard a second after firing his weapon say, “I shot him! I’m sorry.”

    Tulsa Police Sgt. Jim Clark pointed out that two seconds before the gunshot Bates, 73, yelled “Taser” twice to warn deputies to back away.

    After being shot, Eric Courtney Harris repeatedly shouted, “He shot me!” Near the footage’s end Harris says, “You shot me man. Oh, my God. My breath.” A deputy responded, “F*** your breath.”

    Clark, an expert brought in by the Sheriff’s Office, went through a slideshow presentation to explain how Bates inadvertently shot Harris, 44, instead of stunning him because of what he said is a scientifically valid phenomenon called “slips and capture.” Bates didn’t commit a crime, Clark said, and no policy violations occurred.

    Clark added that the Sheriff’s Office’s policies are in line with national standards.

    Makes me want to scream. Kill a man, suffer no consequences.
    Though there may be deeper reasons for it, in this case:
    Sheriff’s Office: Reserve deputy who fired fatal shot was among ‘lots of’ wealthy donors in reserve program. Money talks louder than anything else.

    Robert Bates, the reserve Tulsa County deputy who fatally shot a man who was in a physical altercation with another deputy last week, has donated thousands of dollars worth of items to the Sheriff’s Office since becoming a reserve deputy in 2008.

    Bates, 73, accidentally shot Eric Harris on Thursday, according to Maj. Shannon Clark, after Harris — the subject of an undercover gun and ammunition buy by the Sheriff’s Office’s Violent Crimes Task Force — fled from arrest and then fought with a deputy who tackled him. Bates, Clark said, thought he was holding a stun gun when he pulled the trigger.

    Bates is not an active member of the task force but donates his hours there as a highly regarded member of the Reserve Deputy Program, Clark said. […]

    Bates apparently is not alone as both a donor and reserve deputy. While the Sheriff’s Office has not released its full roster, Clark said other wealthy donors are among the agency’s 130 reserve deputies.

    “There are lots of wealthy people in the reserve program,” he said. “Many of them make donations of items. That’s not unusual at all.”

    Bates has donated multiple vehicles, guns and stun guns to the Sheriff’s Office since he became a reserve deputy in 2008, Clark said. The Sheriff’s Office did not have an itemized list of donations made by Bates available Monday and deferred that question to the county commissioners’ office, which tracks those items. […]

    Before Bates was a reserve deputy, he served one year — from 1964 to 1965 — as a police officer, according to Tulsa police.

    According to the Sheriff’s Office’s Reserve Deputy Program policy manual, reserves — who Clark said are not compensated financially for any hours they work — are separated into three categories: basic, intermediate and advanced.

    Bates, Clark said, is classified as an “advanced reserve,” which means he “can do anything a full-time deputy can do.” Though Bates’ assignment to the Violent Crimes Task Force was not unusual, Clark said, the insurance company executive would have been assigned to the undercover operation in a support role.

    “Although he had training and experience for the arrest team, he’s not assigned to the arrest team,” Clark said of Bates’ role on the task force. “He came to render aid during the altercation, but he’s in a support role during the operation. That means keeping notes, doing counter-surveillance, things like that.”

    According to Reserve Deputy Program policy, to be classified as “advanced,” you must have 320 hours of training with CLEET (the Council on Law Enforcement Education and Training) as well as have completed 480 hours of the TCSO Field Training Officer Program.

    At that point, the policy states, reserve deputies can “perform normal field duties by themselves and without the direct supervision of a certified deputy.”

    CLEET paralegal Catherine Streeter said Bates was actively certified with the organization, but she could not release documents stating when he received his training.

    Advanced reserve deputies “must complete 40 hours of service every six months” to maintain certification, the policy states.

    The Tulsa Police Department, by comparison, has “about 55” reserve officers, Officer Leland Ashley said. TPD reserves typically work traffic control or events such as parking lot patrols during “Safe Shopper” operations in heavy shopping seasons, he said.

    Ashley said the only time Chief Chuck Jordan remembers reserve officers being used on a task force was during last summer’s hunt for a serial rapist.

    Other than that task force, in which reserve officers sat in marked patrol cars in hopes of deterring the rapist from attacking again, Ashley said TPD reserves “aren’t utilized in task forces or undercover operations.”

    I skipped the victim-blaming criminal record shit. Playing cop. I wonder if he really was qualified to be labelled ‘advanced reserve’, or whether his goodwill towards the police played a role in his classification.

    BREAKING: Raw Video Shows Cops Shoot, Kill Subdued Man, Mock Him While He Lay Dying

    Showing law enforcements clear disconnect with reality, Tulsa Police Sgt. Jim Clark told reporters at a news conference on Friday that Harris, “absolutely was a threat when going down,” which the video clearly shows wasn’t the case.

    While this shooting may have been an accident, the standard police response of fabricating a story about the individual being shot due to posing a threat to officers is not.

    The standard way in which police do this is on clear display in the case of Walter Scott, as officers, prior to video evidence surfacing, had painted him as a threat to officer safety that needed to be shot to protect the officer’s life. Sound familiar??

    Harris was unarmed and died on April 2, about an hour after being shot.

    As if the ineptitude of the officers in the case wasn’t enough, Tulsa County Sheriff’s Capt. Billy McKelvey claimed the arresting officers were not aware Harris had been shot, despite the gunshot noise and Bates’ admission as seen on the video.
    …

    @deray Volunteer mistaking gun for taser is crazy, but the response from others in group of “America’s Finest” is mind boggling. Barbaric.
    .@Manolo730 @Ab_Weezy Here’s difference between police issued taser guns a 9mm glock. You think officer was confused?

    And look at how the media describe the #EricHarris killing. Y’all.

  281. rq says

    #EricHarris

    Deputy Accidentally Shoots Suspect With Gun Instead Of Taser, Sheriff Says.

    The trouble began with a sting operation in which authorities said Harris sold a semi-automatic pistol and several hundred rounds of ammunition to an undercover cop in a parking lot, according to KTUL.

    Officers tried arresting Harris, but he fled and reached into his waistband, according to the sheriff’s statement. Harris was knocked to the ground, but resisted and refused to remove his hand from his pants, the statement said.

    To help subdue Harris, the reserve deputy reached for his Taser, but actually grabbed his gun and fired before recognizing his fatal error, according to the sheriff’s office. Harris died later at a hospital, Fox 23 reports.

    The shooting evokes the killing of Oscar Grant in Oakland, California, early on New Year’s Day 2009. A transit officer fatally shot Grant in the back, saying he confused the gun with a Taser.

    Once again, if you want the information on Harris’ criminal past, you can go to the link itself and read the last two paragraphs. Was he a law-abiding citizen? Probably not. Did he deserve to die like this? No.

    And Raw Story on the subject: WATCH: Police release graphic video of Tulsa man as he was killed by cop who thought he pulled his Taser. No new information, just another chance to watch the video.

    “Oh, I shot him! I’m sorry.” Then they continue to cuff him, get him no help, insult him, and let him die. He wasn’t resisting. #ericharris I’m not sure what he wasn’t resisting, if he was running from the police. But not providing adequate emergency health care? That’s criminal in and of itself.
    Or, it should be.

    They told him AFTER getting shot, AFTER the volunteer piece of shit said he shot him, “fuck your breath.” But we’re supposed to trust them.

  282. rq says

    Other things.
    Unarmed Teen Shot By LAPD Cop Seeks $20,000,000 in Damages

    A lawyer for a 15-year-old youth who was shot and injured by a Los Angeles police officer this year has filed a $20 million claim against the city on behalf of his client, according to the Los Angeles Times.

    John W. Harris, the lawyer for Jamar Nicholson and another teenager, told reporters Wednesday that the teens posed no threat to themselves or others and that the officers “displayed callous disregard” for their well-being, the Times writes.

    A claim is usually the first step before a civil suit is filed. Harris said that if the city rejects the claim, he plans to file suit.

    The shooting occurred Feb. 10. Nicholson and three of his friends were standing in a South L.A. alley before school when two officers approached the group with guns drawn.

    An officer fired shots when he saw a teen holding what he believed to be a real gun but which turned out to be a toy, the report says.

    Nicholson, a high school freshman, was struck in the upper back. The officers were from the LAPD’s criminal gang-homicide unit.

    “The LAPD shot first and then asked questions later,” Harris said, the Times reports. Nicholson and his friend, 17-year-old Jason Huerta, say the shooting has caused them to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and other harm.

    “I see a cop and I get nervous,” Huerta said, according to the Times. “I’ve never really looked at police in a certain way, until that day.”

    Interlude: Music! Rapper Nelly arrested in Tennessee on drug charges. This got some responses on twitter from Ferguson protestors. Nelly was the one who asked if protestors had a plan back in August – these protestors were now wondering if this arrest is part of Nelly’s plan. Etc.

    Ope, one more Eric Harris. Family of man killed by Tulsa County deputy has questions. This is prior to release of the video.

    They said they wanted to know if Harris had a weapon and if the deputy that shot him did have his taser on him. They also said they want the Tulsa County Sheriff’s to release the video of the shooting. They also questioned if deputies were wearing Google glasses during the sting and altercation.

    FOX23 reached out to TCSO and learned they plan to invite the family to view the video if they get authorization to release the video. TCSO officials also said the tape is not being released because the DA’s office said it is potential evidence and since the investigation isn’t over it can’t be released.

    The DA’s office said in a statement to FOX23 that they have not provided any advice to TCSO in regards to this case. The DA expects to received finalized reports from TSCO Friday afternoon.

    Officials said one deputy was wearing a pair of Google Glass. They also said the sheriff’s office was not invited to the family’s news conference Thursday and that former District Attorney Tim Harris previously cautioned the office from releasing evidence in an ongoing investigation.

    Out of history: “Unless an example is made of Emmett’s lynchers, it won’t be safe for a Negro to walk the streets anywhere in America”- Mamie Till.

    How did we go from “I Can’t Breathe” to “Fuck Your Breath”? #BlackLivesMatter

  283. rq says

    Tribute video to the 147+ lovely people we lost.
    We name them one by one, we won’t forget them.
    #147NotJustANumber     Youtube video link: 147NotJustANumber

    On April 2, 2015, individuals wielding guns stormed the Garissa University College, killing 147 students. This video is a tribute to those 147, and we will never forget them.

    And today (April 7, 2015) there’s a candlelight vigil in Uhuru Park, from 5pm. Help us share their story.

    They run texts from student tweets during the song. See if you can not cry.

    You will be remembered. #147notjustanumber #GarissaAttack It’s a list of names.

    #147notjustanumber: humanising the victims of Kenya’s Garissa attack. It’s a repost, but worth looking through again, for the links seeking to collect information on those killed.

  284. rq says

    Dear American cops: when you ‘accidentally’ shoot someone, you don’t curse him, you call the ambulance #EricHarris

    #EricHarris was the 294th killed by cop April 2nd. Now cops have killed 322 in 2015 by April 11. That’s #Every8Hours

    Think Walter Scott’s death is ‘another Ferguson’? Cops don’t.

    To non-police, Scott’s death may look familiar: Not even a year after Eric Garner died during an arrest in Staten Island, N.Y., and Michael Brown died in a police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., here was another black man killed by police.

    But to law enforcement officers observing the North Charleston tragedy, the case is nothing like “another Ferguson” — and that’s where the police perspective and the civilian perspective on these events diverge.

    In Ferguson, as the Justice Department made very clear, all credible evidence supported officer Darren Wilson’s account of a justified, legal and necessary shooting. Brown robbed a store, fought for the police officer’s gun and then physically charged the cop. In North Charleston last weekend, all Scott did was drive with a broken taillight and run from the cop who pulled him over.

    Like Scott, Garner died on camera as a result of police actions — in Garner’s case, a chokehold was used during his arrest. But most police officers see very little similarity. There’s a tremendous moral and legal difference between a person dying during an altercation with police and an officer willfully using lethal force. Policing can be bad and mistaken, both tactically and morally, and still not be criminal. Garner’s and Scott’s deaths were both tragedies, but only Scott’s was a crime.

    To see a black life snuffed out by a fellow cop is especially painful to police officers who spend much of their careers trying to protect black lives. One New York City officer wrote me to say, “This cop also just shot all of law enforcement in the back.” At home and in roll calls around the nation, cops watched the video of Scott’s killing and cringed not only at his death, but also at the officer’s betrayal of the police uniform and everything it stands for.

    Police officers in general, myself included, were initially less concerned when Brown was killed. “Witnesses,” many of whom didn’t see the actual events, will inevitably lie, contradict and blame the cops. That’s to be expected, not believed. Too often, the public criticizes police for using any force at all or simply doing their job. Brown had robbed a store: Absolutely, he might fight an officer to avoid arrest. Sometimes people do fight cops, and sometimes cops need to fight for their lives. To police, Wilson’s account rang true.

    Without the North Charleston video, most cops would have similarly given Slager the benefit of the doubt. When things go wrong, they go wrong quickly. Sure, it’s easy to imagine many ways in which a situation could have been handled differently and better. That’s the luxury of hindsight. Cops need the benefit of the doubt to do their job. But it wasn’t so much that Scott was unarmed — unarmed people can kill, too — it was that Scott was running away. […]

    During his attempt to catch Scott, Slager fired his Taser. When that failed, Slager could have chased Scott or let him run away (worse things have happened). But instead, Slager drew his gun and shot. This is why cops see this case so differently: The criminal was the police officer. And Slager was arrested and charged with murder. That is the way the criminal justice system is supposed to work. (Slager was also fired immediately, which can happen only in states hostile to labor unions and civil-service protection.)

    What the deaths of Garner, Brown and Scott do have in common are individuals who didn’t want to go to jail and cops who wanted to take them there. So one logical way to reduce potentially deadly arrest situations — whether the deadly force involved is justifiable, questionable or criminal — is to stop criminalizing so many people. More productive than blaming police for enforcing existing laws would be to change and soften our laws in a way that does not jeopardize public safety.

    Many jurisdictions actively punish people, poor people in particular, with fines, tickets and court fees. And this disproportionately affects African Americans. We need to stop seeing the criminal justice system as a source of revenue. We need to actively decarcerate and end the racist war on drugs. We need to fight the poverty, violence and illegal guns that have destroyed entire cities.

    But we can start small. Every time a civil or trivial matter becomes a criminal matter, police are put in the position of becoming the bad guys. Selling “loosie” cigarettes need not be illegal. It could be legal and regulated. Minor vehicular violations like the broken taillight for which Scott was pulled over could be a matter for state inspectors rather than local police officers. Monetary fines could be indexed to reflect a person’s income or wealth. Civil fines should never escalate to incarceration. Nobody should be jailed for being poor.

    This is society’s problem. It goes beyond the police. Still, it’s hard to fathom how anybody could shoot a fleeing Walter Scott in the back.

    I like how this deflects blame from police officers high on Authoriteh to the system – which, in a way, isn’t wrong. But police officers are perfectly capable of turning a blind eye to smaller infractions, or at least – not escalating them. Broken taillight? Guy’s going out for spare parts? Give a warning and let him go. That’s it.
    So it’s not just the system, it’s all those police officers who believe in the system, esp. when it needs to be applied to black people. Changing the system would do a lot (i.e. decriminalizing some of the things mentioned and others too), but police attitude needs to be changed, too.

  285. rq says

    Maybe we need to call and demand answers from the Tulsa TSCO Reserves abt the circumstances? Force them to act. Contains a link to the website and contact info of TSCO reserves.

    David Starkey attacks ‘victim status’ of ethnic minorities and disabled, accuses Baroness Lawrence of treating black people as victims . I mean, I can’t even, but apparently other people can’t even even more.

    The outspoken historian gave a controversial interview to The Telegraph, where he suggested black people, the Muslim community and the disabled should refuse to be labelled victims.

    He claimed campaigners such as Baroness Lawrence, the mother of murdered Stephen Lawrence, are perpetuating the status of black people as victims.

    The 70-year-old suggested some black American civil rights leaders have “espoused victimhood and violence” instead of working towards equality in the peaceful direction advocated by leaders such as Martin Luther King.

    “I think to a dangerous extent that has happened in this country,” he said. “With all the praise that’s lavished on [Baroness] Doreen Lawrence, she’s constantly treating blacks as victims.”

    All forms of liberation, he added, depend upon the person refusing to be a victim. He claimed there is now “this perpetual procession of people – group after group – wanting to assume the status of victim”, describing it as “catastrophic”.

    He’s also sexist and believes in a strict gender binary. Surprised?

    This was linked to on the redneck thread by loopyj, but I’m going to put it here, too: Racism at Bass Pro Shop: A White Man’s Burden: The Story of Jorge Moran Let me highlight some of my favourite parts; note how careful he is with his language!

    Jon: You say what’s worse than the racist is white people who sit in silence and ignore, deny, and dismissing racism. Would you say the same about murder? That what’s worse than the murderer are those who do nothing if they see someone killing someone? I don’t see how people turning a blind eye to racism being perpetuated are actually worse than the actual culprits themselves.

    Jorge: Bad analogy. With murder you have accountability by the justice system. You kill someone, you get executed or go to jail often for life. You say racist things amongst your friends joking or serious; you witness racists acts or behavior; you know of racial discrimination. All these things are often ignored by white folks, it’s tolerated by us white folks. Until we develop a zero tolerance for it it will continue without accountability.

    Jon: So between the racist and those who hear it and ignore it, it is better to be the racist? The racist is the lesser of two evils?

    Jorge: Obviously they both are wrong. Just trying to make the point that until we as white folks stop being silent and complacent nothing will change.

    Uh, scratch that, wanted to excerpt more but the site seems to be weird about highlighting or else my browser is being annoying. But further in the interview, the interviewer asks him about racism he has encountered, and he deflects that well by saying that he’s white, he’s never encountered any racism, to which the interviewer then asks what is the worst racism he has ever witnessed. Also, he replies to questions about blacks being racist very well, too – questions that ask if black people can be racist.
    And the story mentioned in the title is well worth reading, too. Very much so.

    Another from the same site, so we’ll see how the citing goes. I mentioned a Clorox tweet? Here’s a piece of apologia for it: Clorox tweet racist or harmless tweet twisted to conjure angst? Regardless of intent, considering the new emojis coming out, I think people were perfectly justified in seeing a racial aspect to Clorox’ tweet. The comment at the page are few but similarly professional-victimhood tended.

    Because the emojis offered a variety of skin tones in a more diverse set of ideograms, the comment on the bleach was taken out of context. Clorox sent this tweet out along with a shape of a Clorox bottle that was made out of the new emojis. What Clorox meant by “where’s the bleach” was that it was looking for bleach to be represented as an emoji item and not to be used as an item to turn things white as was suggested on social media.

    While people were “outraged” over this “racist tweet” from Clorox, others thought it was such a far stretch and that it didn’t hold much water. It was blatantly seen as a tweet asking about product representation and not turning things white. As Refiner 29 reports, “”Police are shooting unarmed teenagers, businesses refuse to serve gays, but by all means let’s make sure we yell at Clorox over a dumb tweet,” wrote one Twitter user.

    Clorox sent out a tweet after it took down the original “where’s the bleach” tweet and said “Wish we could bleach away our last tweet. Didn’t mean to offend – it was meant to be about all the toilet, shower and red wine emoji that could use a clean up.” It is like a competition to be so politically correct that folks will actually take something as generic at this Clorox tweet and stretch it to the limit so they can be the first ones to rally a campaign.

    I sense some chlorine-tinged cluelessness in the air.

    Three from Mano Singham, on subjects already posted here:
    Meanwhile, back at the Bundy ranch … Short, and with the obvious rhetorical question at the end.
    When police act like organized crime syndicates

    This was one of the acts that prompted the US Justice Department and the state of Ohio to launch investigations into the workings of the police department and issue scathing reports about its excessive and indiscriminate use of force.

    In yesterday’s trial proceedings, one police officer refused to testify against his colleague, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights, unless he was granted immunity.

    Prosecutors got through just a couple basic questions about the identity and work history of Cleveland police officer Michael Demchak before Demchak invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination on the witness stand.

    According to a report from the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Demchak was one of 13 officers that fired their guns one night in November 2012, when two unarmed suspects were killed. Investigators concluded Demchak fired his gun four times.

    Two other police officers are expected to invoke the same defense, while two have been granted immunity. There has been some debate as to whether police officers should be able to invoke the Fifth Amendment. I think that it would be a dangerous precedent to carve out exemptions to basic constitutional rights, although the temptation to do so is great in the heated atmosphere of a high-profile case.

    I guess snitching among police officers is as looked down on as it is among gang members, how’s that for a redundant sentence? ANyway, that’s regarding the Brelo case, where two people were shot dead in a car by a barrage of 137 bullets, 49 of which came from Brelo’s gun (15 of which he shot as he stood on the hood of the car).

    An extra twist on ‘driving while black’

    Washington’s suggestion that black people driving expensive cars make for a more likely target received support from the report yesterday of a South Carolina policeman shooting eight bullets into Walter L. Scott, a 50-year Coast Guard veteran and father of four, as he ran away. Video captured by a bystander seem to show that the police officer was in no danger, made no attempt to resuscitate him, and planted a Taser near the body, all in support of the false report that the police officer filed after the death.

    What caused the police to stop Scott in the first place? The claim was that he had a broken tail light. That this is a preposterous reason is obvious because driving around the streets of America one can find cars with broken headlights and other much more serious problems.

    But the other clue that has not been widely reported is that Scott’s car was a Mercedes Benz and then the story becomes clearer. In the minds of police, this is the operative equation:

    Black driver + expensive car = criminal, likely a drug dealer.

    So while driving while black is now a cause for being stopped by police, driving an expensive car while black is even more so.

  286. rq says

    That previous was carefully counted to have sufficient links not to end up in moderation, but apparently today I suck. Eh.

  287. rq says

    More history: The Dangerous Myth of Appomattox

    ON April 9, 1865 — Palm Sunday — Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Gen. Robert E. Lee negotiated their famous “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of surrender. In the ensuing celebration, a relieved Grant told his men, “The war is over.”

    But Grant soon discovered he was wrong. Not only did fighting continue in pockets for weeks, but in other ways the United States extended the war for more than five years after Appomattox. Using its war powers to create freedom and civil rights in the South, the federal government fought against a white Southern insurgency that relied on murder and intimidation to undo the gains of the war. […]

    Appomattox, like the Civil War more broadly, retains its hold on the American imagination. More than 330,000 people visited the site in 2013. In Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” as in many other popular portrayals, the meeting between Lee and Grant suggests that, in the words of one United States general at the surrender, “We are all Americans.”

    Although those words were allegedly spoken by Ely Parker, a Tonawanda Seneca Indian, and although hundreds of thousands of African-Americans fought for the nation, the “we” in the Appomattox myth all too often is limited to white Americans. In fanciful stories of Grant’s returning a ceremonial sword to Lee, or of the United States Army’s saluting its defeated foes at the laying-down-of-arms ceremony, white Americans fashioned a story of prodigal sons returning for a happy family portrait. [..]

    And yet as late as 1869, President Grant’s attorney general argued that some rebel states remained in the “grasp of war.” When white Georgia politicians expelled every black member of the State Legislature and began a murderous campaign of intimidation, Congress and Grant extended military rule there until 1871.

    Meanwhile, Southern soldiers continued to fight as insurgents, terrorizing blacks across the region. One congressman estimated that 50,000 African-Americans were murdered by white Southerners in the first quarter-century after emancipation. “It is a fatal mistake, nay a wicked misery to talk of peace or the institutions of peace,” a federal attorney wrote almost two years after Appomattox. “We are in the very vortex of war.”
    Continue reading the main story
    Continue reading the main story
    Continue reading the main story

    Against this insurgency, even President Andrew Johnson, an opponent of Reconstruction, continued the state of war for a year after Appomattox. When Johnson tried to end the war in the summer of 1866, Congress seized control of his war powers; from 1867 to 1870, generals in the South regulated state officials and oversaw voter registration, ensuring that freedmen could claim the franchise they had lobbied for. With the guidance of military overseers, new biracial governments transformed the Constitution itself, passing the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.

    The military occupation created pockets of stability and moments of order. Excluded from politics before the war, black men won more than 1,500 offices during Reconstruction. By 1880, 20 percent of black families owned farms.

    But the occupation that helped support these gains could not be sustained. Anxious politicians reduced the Army’s size even as they assigned it more tasks. After Grant used the military to put down the Ku Klux Klan in the Carolinas in 1871, Congress and the public lost the will to pay the human and financial costs of Reconstruction.

    Once white Southern Democrats overthrew Reconstruction between the 1870s and 1890s, they utilized the Appomattox myth to erase the connection between the popular, neatly concluded Civil War and the continuing battles of Reconstruction. By the 20th century, history textbooks and popular films like “The Birth of a Nation” made the Civil War an honorable conflict among white Americans, and Reconstruction a corrupt racial tyranny of black over white (a judgment since overturned by historians like W. E. B. DuBois and Eric Foner). […]

    Years after the 1865 surrender, the novelist and veteran Albion Tourgée said that the South “surrendered at Appomattox, and the North has been surrendering ever since.” In so many wars since, the United States won the battlefield fighting but lost ground afterward.

    With the benefit of hindsight, we can learn, as Grant did, the dangers of celebrating too soon. Although a nation has a right to decide what conflicts are worth fighting, it does not have the right to forget its history, and in the process to repeat it.

    Ode to the myth of post-racial USAmerica, I suppose.

    April 14 will be national day of protest against police killings, and April 15 national day of protest against poverty wages. Quite a week.

    Never judge cause by protest participants. Many can’t leave work, travel, pay for childcare, etc. Measure protest support beyond visibility.

    And PZ on Eric Harris: Malice and incompetence?

  288. Pteryxx says

    Talking about child support, re rq in #275 above:

    But I’d like to add the comment that not paying child support is always painted in the worst of all lights – like someone was shunning their children and ignoring them, denying them care or something. But what if they’re trying but just can’t make the payments? That doesn’t make them a bad person and it really irks me that the media does this to them.

    But that selfish-deadbeat-dad narrative often doesn’t get applied to white men who are middle-class or above, who get to use the alternate narrative of crazy-b*tch-ex-out-to-get-me in the courtroom and media. Some white men who really do shun their children, strip their families bare, and run off to six-figure jobs in another state, still get away with it just by retaining a lawyer to do as little as possible, as long as it’s more than the abandoned wife can afford. Famous people also get the benefit of assumptions that any woman who divorces them must be a gold-digger. So, much like ‘welfare queen’ is a racist dogwhistle when more welfare goes to poor white people, I’d bet ‘deadbeat dad’ is used similarly, and to play into the narrative of black men as shiftless family-abandoners.

    I agree that it’s stupid and counterproductive to arrest and jail people, causing them to incur even more costs and sometimes lose their jobs, over unpaid debts or child support. However those penalties also seem to fall extra hard on those who aren’t systematically privileged. I’ve heard plenty of survivors talk about their abusers getting arrested or even jailed for a few days, but who then go right back to their well-paying jobs without missing a beat, while the survivors themselves get fired for missing work due to court hearings or hospitalizations. How much of that has to do with race, wealth, and just having the right connections and being the Right Sort? If it’s anything like the disparities in traffic stops, quite a lot.

    And as has been said repeatedly by better folks than me, a lot more black families would still have their fathers and providers if white legacy systems didn’t keep harassing, jailing, and killing them.

  289. Pteryxx says

    More on Tuesday’s upcoming day of protest against police killings: see the hashtag #ShutDownA14 (twitter link) and Stop Mass Incarceration here:

    On April 14, we will take our movement to STOP wanton police murder to a whole new level. NO SCHOOL! NO WORK! STOP BUSINESS AS USUAL!

    On this day, thousands of students must walk out of school, take over buildings and go on strike at colleges and high schools nationwide. People must gather and march in cities all across the U.S. The normal routine of this society includes wanton police murder of Black and Brown people. Everyone must disrupt that normal routine.

    Our demands are clear:
    * The murder of Black and Brown people by the police MUST STOP.
    * Justice for all the victims of brutal, murdering police.
    * Indict, convict and send killer cops to jail—the whole damn system is guilty as hell.
    * Stop the repression targeting the protests—Drop all the charges against all those arrested.

    List of cities with events, being updated here.

    From HuffPo Black Voices: Apps to help people document police abuse

    Because some police officers will order people to turn off their cameras or will attempt to confiscate or destroy phones, it bears repeating: It is, in fact, perfectly legal to film police officers in the U.S. while they are on the job, in a public place, so long as you do not physically interfere with their ability to do their jobs.

    In an effort to protect that constitutional right, developers, in recent years, have been partnering with advocacy groups like the American Civil Liberties Union to develop smartphone apps aimed at making it easier for members of the public to document allegations of police abuse — and to know their rights while doing so.

    Below are some examples of such apps, including those in development and others that are already downloadable:

    Cop Watch

    cop watch

    Created by the Network for the Elimination of Police Violence in Toronto, the free Cop Watch app — compatible with iOS platforms — has a setting that allows for video to be recorded as soon as the app is opened. The footage is then automatically uploaded to YouTube. The app also has a guide outlining the public’s rights when it comes to filming police. An Android app is “coming soon,” according to the NEPV website.

    Five-O

    fiveo

    Five-O, a free Android app created by three high school students from Decatur, Georgia, allows its users to rate and review their positive or negative interactions with police officers. Those ratings and incident comments are then aggregated and become searchable. Five-O also includes a “know your rights” section, as well as community boards that allow users to communicate and plan responses to any local trouble.

    I’m Getting Arrested

    arrested

    With just one click, the I’m Getting Arrested free Android app allows users to send a custom text message to contacts they have pre-programmed into their phones — friends, family and even legal help — in the event they are arrested. Available in 14 languages, the app was developed in 2011 and was inspired by the Occupy Wall Street protests. The Panic Button app, available on both iOS and Android platforms, could serve a similar purpose.

    More projects at the link.

  290. Pteryxx says

    At Daily Kos: How The Public Can Help Increase Good Cops In U.S. Law Enforcement Organizations by former federal agent and whistleblower Sandra Nunn:

    In the wake of many of these issues, people have often asked me what can be done to mitigate these issues and help facilitate law enforcement agencies that truly work “for the people” instead of against them. Based on years of observation and experience, I believe that the public must address this issue from several perspectives to truly be effective at facilitating positive changes.

    First, the public must recognize the power of working together in grassroots efforts in order to facilitate change. There must be greater mobilization efforts at the national level to recognize the scope of this issue throughout the country, not just in local or regional communities. And these organizations need to inspire the local communities to work together in supporting change. For this effort, a national organization with membership across the country would prove very powerful in terms of networking, organizing, and coordination of efforts. As part of this effort, I would advocate that this national organization and correspondent grassroots membership help support efforts by various organizations to enhance and increase whistleblower protections for law enforcement whistleblowers at the local, state, and federal level. Law enforcement whistleblowers risk their livelihood, careers, families, and financial stability to stand up to unethical conduct by law enforcement managers and their peers. These men and women are the insiders who see the real problems within the law enforcement agency and can pinpoint the key issues because they have witnessed it firsthand. Therefore, the public should support efforts to help protect whistleblowers against retaliation from law enforcement managers and others whose only concern is to protect themselves from public exposure instead of seeking to correct the problems revealed by whistleblower disclosures.

  291. rq says

    Category: Complicit No More from Media Diversified via Giliell. For reading, a list. A sample:

    – In “Toxic Wars” vs. Conscientious Feminism Minna Salami draws upon cross-cultural activism and dialogue to offer ‘Conscientious Feminism’ as an antidote to ‘toxic feminism’ and an ethical ‘compass that can be used to navigate the labyrinth of oppression’.
    – Touched by Patsey’s struggles in the Oscar winning film ‘12 Years a Slave’, Karen Williams’ describes how the film helped her to recognise and articulate the depths of latter day racism in her own ‘Public Life of Intimate Violence’
    – In ‘Washing Our Dirty Linen in Public’ Sukhwant Dhaliwal reflects on 25 years of Women Against Fundamentalism, a coalition of women brought together in the aftermath of the Rushdie affair. For Dhaliwal, control of women’s bodies and minds lies at the heart of all religious fundamentalism.
    – Carolyn Wysinger takes us on a journey into the corporate workplace, where as the ‘first boi in’ her inventive transgression of gender dress codes also means getting used to ‘the daily stares, the interested glances of some and the disdain of others.’
    – Stunning traditional henna designs on hands, backs and legs are the subject of artist Hina Ali’s photo essay, exploring skin as a ‘repository of honour & canvass of oppression’.

    Cuomo Cancels Meeting with Family Members of People Killed by Police

    In 2006, Sean Bell was killed by New York City police officers in hail of gunfire just hours before his wedding. The case sparked a national outcry about the excessive use of force.

    Along with the members of 17 other families, Bell’s father, William, was scheduled to meet with Governor Andrew Cuomo at 1 p.m. on Friday. But the governor canceled his appointment with the relatives of those who have died at the hands of the police. It’s the second time Cuomo has done so.

    “Well, he’s been postpoining them. For what reason, I do not know,” William Bell said.

    Cuomo is working on a package of criminal justice reforms that includes a special monitor being appointed in cases where civilians are killed by police.

    “The cops are working with the DA. The DA can’t, he ain’t going to prosecute the police officers. He gets his information from them,” William Bell said.

    But families say a special monitor is not good enough. They want an independent prosecutor automatically appointed in all cases.

    “We’re trying to ask him for an executive order for a special prosecutor for all police killings,” said Jennifer Gonzalez, who lost her son’s father, Kenny Lazo, in 2008. “Unfortunately, he keeps pushing us off. He’s met with artists, famous people regarding this matter.”

    Kind of an asshole move, if you ask me.

    Thousands dead, few prosecuted. On police-involved fatal shootings. Bleak.

    Brackney is among 54 officers charged over the past decade for fatally shooting someone while on duty, according to an analysis by The Washington Post and researchers at Bowling Green State University. This analysis, based on a wide range of public records and interviews with law enforcement, judicial and other legal experts, sought to identify for the first time every officer who faced charges­ for such shootings since 2005. These represent a small fraction of the thousands of fatal police shootings that have occurred across the country in that time.

    In an overwhelming majority of the cases where an officer was charged, the person killed was unarmed. But it usually took more than that.

    When prosecutors pressed charges, The Post analysis found, there were typically other factors that made the case exceptional, including: a victim shot in the back, a video recording of the incident, incriminating testimony from other officers or allegations of a coverup.

    Forty-three cases involved at least one of these four factors. Nineteen cases involved at least two.

    In the most recent incident, officials in North Charleston, S.C., filed a murder charge Tuesday against a white police officer, Michael T. Slager, for gunning down an apparently unarmed black man. A video recording showed Slager repeatedly shooting the man in the back as he was running away.

    “To charge an officer in a fatal shooting, it takes something so egregious, so over the top that it cannot be explained in any rational way,” said Philip M. Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green who studies arrests of police. “It also has to be a case that prosecutors are willing to hang their reputation on.”

    But even in these most extreme instances, the majority of the officers whose cases have been resolved have not been convicted, The Post analysis found. […]

    Over the past year, a series of controversial police killings of unarmed victims — including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Tamir Rice in Cleveland and Eric Garner on Staten Island — has raised questions over what it takes for officers to face criminal ­charges. Often, the public is divided over whether the police went too far. Only in rare cases­ do prosecutors and grand juries decide that the killing cannot be justified.

    Such cases include a Michigan state trooper who shot and killed an unarmed homeless man in Detroit as he was shuffling toward him, the man’s pants down past his knees. The incident was captured on video, and the officer, who said he thought the man had a gun, was charged with second-degree murder. A jury accepted the officer’s account and found him not guilty. He remains on the job.

    They also include a police officer in Darlington County, S.C., who was charged with murder after he chased an unarmed man wanted for stealing a gas grill and three U-Haul trailers into the woods, shooting him in the back four times. A jury, believing that he feared for his life, found him not guilty.

    Two Atlanta plainclothes officers opened fire and killed a 92-year-old woman during a mistaken drug raid on her home. As they pried the bars off her front door, she fired a single warning shot with an old revolver. The police responded by smashing the door down and shooting at her 39 times. One of the officers tried to disguise their error by planting bags of marijuana in her basement. The two officers pleaded guilty and received unusually stiff sentences of six and 10 years in a federal prison.

    A rap musician, Killer Mike, wrote a song to memorialize the death of this African American grandmother at the hands of white officers, comparing her killing to “the dream of King when the sniper took his life.”

    After the death of Michael Brown last summer, concerns about racism in policing have exploded in public debate, in particular whether white officers use excessive force when dealing with minorities and whether the criminal justice system protects the victims’ rights.

    Among the officers charged since 2005 for fatal shootings, more than three-quarters were white. Two-thirds of their victims were minorities, all but two of them black.

    Nearly all other cases­ involved black officers who killed black victims. In one other instance, a Latino officer fatally shot a white person and in another an Asian officer killed a black person. There were a total of 49 victims. […]

    Most of the time, prosecutors don’t press charges against police — even if there are strong suspicions that an officer has committed a crime. Prosecutors interviewed for this report say it takes compelling proof that at the time of the shooting the victim posed no threat either to the officer or to bystanders.

    Jay Hodge, a former South Carolina prosecutor, said the question boils down to this: Can the evidence disprove the officer’s story that he was defending himself or protecting the public. Hodge recounted one case he had prosecuted in which a sheriff’s deputy said he had opened fire on an unarmed suspect who grabbed for his gun. The autopsy report, Hodge said, told a different story.

    “You don’t shoot someone in the back four times and then claim self-defense,” he said. “They can’t be going for a gun if they are running away.”

    In half the criminal cases­ identified by The Post and researchers at Bowling Green, prosecutors cited forensics and autopsy reports that showed this very thing: unarmed suspects who had been shot in the back.

    Not that long ago, police had wide latitude to shoot fleeing felons. But a 1985 Supreme Court decision changed that. In Tennessee v. Garner, the justices ruled that it was not justifiable for officers to shoot simply to prevent a suspect’s escape. The suspect had to pose a significant threat of death or serious harm to either law enforcement or innocent bystanders for the shooting to be legally justified.

    In a third of the cases­ where officers faced charges, prosecutors introduced videos into evidence, saying they showed the slain suspects had posed no threat at the moment they were killed. The videos were often shot from cameras mounted on the dashboards of patrol cars, standard equipment for most police departments.

    In nearly a quarter of the cases, an officer’s colleagues turned on him, giving statements or testifying that the officer opened fire even though the suspect posed no danger at the time.

    Such testimony carries almost unequalled weight with judges and juries because police officers are considered highly credible eyewitnesses as well as experts in the proper use of force, according to prosecutors and defense attorneys. Moreover, because officers so rarely cross the “thin blue line” to testify against a colleague, their evidence can be especially powerful.

    And in 10 cases, or about a fifth of the time, prosecutors alleged that officers either planted or destroyed evidence in an attempt to exonerate themselves — a strong indication, prosecutors said, that the officers themselves recognized the shooting was unjustified. […]

    “Jurors tend to be sympathetic toward police officers,” said Randolph’s attorney, Scott King. “For every movie like ‘Training Day,’ there are 10 movies where cops are underpaid, hard-working, struggling against insurmountable odds and on the side of good.”

    The outcome of Randolph’s case is more the rule than the exception and demonstrates the daunting task facing prosecutors in those rare instances when they do charge officers in connection with fatal shootings.

    Of the 54 officers who were charged for fatally shooting someone while on duty over the past decade, 35 have had their cases resolved. Of those, a majority — 21 officers — were acquitted or saw their charges dropped.

    Jurors usually see the officer as “the good party in the fight,” said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor and expert in police use of force. “To get them to buy into a story where the officer is the bad guy goes fundamentally against everything they believe.”

    Most jurors, experts say, view officers as those who enforce laws, not break them. And unlike civilians, police officers are allowed, even expected, to use force.

    “It’s a question of whether it was too much force,” Harris said. “It’s a very flexible standard that has to be interpreted in every case. All this makes it very difficult to convict an officer.”

    Most laws that apply to on-duty shootings require jurors to essentially render a verdict on the officer’s state of mind: Was the officer truly afraid for his life or the lives of others when he fired his weapon? Would a reasonable officer have been afraid?

    More at the link.

    How St. Louis Police Robbed My Family of $1000 (and How I’m Trying To Get It Back)

    In Ferguson, at least 16,000 individuals had arrest warrants last year compared with the town’s total population of just 21,000 residents. Those warrants fed what the DOJ called a “code-enforcement system … honed to produce more revenue.” In nearby City of St. Louis, the 75,000 outstanding arrest warrants are equivalent to about one-quarter of the population, part of a county-wide problem of cash-strapped cities incentivized to “squeeze their residents with fines,” as The Washington Post put it. One city, Pine Lawn, Missouri, recently had 23,000 open arrest warrants compared with the city’s population of just 3,275 residents; court fees and traffic tickets make up nearly 30 percent of its municipal revenue. “Getting tickets — and getting them fixed — are two actions that define living in the St. Louis area,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported earlier this month.

    Statistics alone cannot convey the financial and emotional toll individuals and their families pay as a result of predatory fines and selective policing. Those costs are far reaching — as my own family discovered in the wake of my mother’s arrest. They can also be deadly, as Walter Scott’s brutal murder demonstrated.

    The woman with whom my mother was mistaken bore, in her mugshot, a striking resemblance to my mother. They were both about the same height and weight, and also shared a similar caramel complexion. “She even looked like me!” my mother said with laughter that did little to conceal her unremitting anger. But at the time my mother phoned my stepfather, neither of them knew about the blunder, so he set off for Clayton, the tony suburb where the county jail sits, with the intention of bailing his partner out. It’s somewhat remarkable that Clayton is the site of the county jail. It’s as if the powers that be want to rub the wealth of predominately white Clayton in the faces of the poor black people who are disproportionately jailed there. […]

    Although authorities eventually acknowledged the identity mix-up, my family’s money was never returned. My parents, like most in my old west St. Louis neighborhood of Wells-Goodfellow, are hard-working, tenacious people — he a construction worker who finds jobs sporadically, and she a restaurant server. “The whole thing pissed me off and scared me,” my mother told me. When asked why she didn’t file a complaint with the police, the woman I still call Mommy asked me, in an irritated tone, “What the hell is wrong with you Juan? Who was I gonna complain to?”

    As I was reporting this story, I discovered a trove of information that symbolizes how grossly incompetent our criminal justice system is when it swoops up poor people. Missouri court records show that my mother and the other woman were born in the same year. Court documents also indicate that clerks routinely misspelled the names of both women, which perhaps explains the mix-up. But judicial records fail to clarify why my mother was initially denied a phone call, or why the police chose not to process her when she arrived at the city jail. Worse, to my surprise, my mother actually pleaded guilty to the traffic charge. “I just wanted to go home,” she told me.

    My mother’s guilty plea, like a scarlet letter, remains with her. Judge Jed Rakoff, writing last year in The New York Review of Books, explained why certain people plead guilty to crimes they did not commit: “The typical person accused of a crime combines a troubled past with limited resources: he thus recognizes that, even if he is innocent, his chances of mounting an effective defense at trial may be modest at best.” In other words, a wealthier woman with resources and an attorney never would have experienced what my mother did. Even more bluntly, the child of a white woman from Clayton would not have had to go to sleep at night, and awake in the morning, wondering just where his mother was.

    When Mommy was disappeared by the police, I was away from home, but certainly no less furious. Her defeatist attitude and resignation about it all still stings eight years later. She is, by far, the strongest person I know. And yet that strength, which I grew up admiring, and which I have sought to replicate in adulthood, could not protect her when she encountered the police. Her strength was absent as she sat behind bars for two days, and it did not prevent St. Louis’s authorities from stealing her $1,000.

    My mother’s gratuitous detention scarred her, and today she no longer drives in certain surrounding areas out of fear she will be stopped once more. And when I am her passenger, the anxiousness emanating from the driver’s seat is palpable and affecting. The arrest also impacted my four little sisters who, at that time, were all under the age of 10. The youngest, my baby sister, who we call Babe, was only a few months old. My stepfather couldn’t tell them where their mother was because he did not know. “When is Mommy coming home?” one of my sisters asked my stepfather. He told me, “Man, I just broke down inside. I didn’t know what to say.”

    Recently I contacted the St. Louis Police and Circuit Attorney’s Office about the stolen money, and instead of answers, was given the inevitable runaround. They refused comment on this specific case because it goes against department policy, a spokesperson claimed. But I now have this platform — thanks in large part to my mother’s resilient parenting — and I assured the police spokesperson there would be no rest on my end until my family receives an apology and reimbursement. If I have to write about l’affaire Thompson repeatedly, and badger city officials with my voice frequently, then so be it. I’ve reached out to civil liberties lawyers about the next step. […]

    Moreover, the officials who run some of these towns and cities are not just mephitic racists exchanging lame emails about black people like the gang in Ferguson. Some St. Louis County communities — like the aforementioned Pine Lawn — are controlled by black political actors. Yet this fact does little to assuage the understandable concerns of many poor black folk that not only are civic institutions not on their side, but the same entities are actively targeting and robbing them. It should be noted that historically, the impoverished towns and cities where black people live are the direct consequences of centuries of socioeconomic abuse directed toward (and the state’s neglect of) America’s most marginalized and long-suffering demographic. “It’s a crime and a scandal,” my mother said of the whole thing.

    Against this scandalous background, one can only conclude that the regimes of the St. Louis metropolitan region, and their enforcers represented by the police, are rackets, deliberately and explicitly robbing poor black families of their limited financial resources. Libertarian and conservative activists should rally to the side of local demonstrators because the idea of armed agents of the state acting as revenue collectors ought to frighten any American — black, brown or white. Ultimately, though, I fear W.E.B. Du Bois was correct when he wrote, “A system can never fail those it was never meant to protect.”

    Lots more at the link.

    New dash cam video released of Walter Scott shooting incident, from just after the shooting.

    A new dash cam video has been released by SLED containing audio taking place moments after the shooting of Walter Scott last weekend.

    An officer can be heard telling someone on the phone that he “just shot somebody.” The officer is assumed to be Michael Slager.

    A few minutes later, another officer can be heard in response, discussing what is going to happen next.

    Neither of the officers are seen in the video, and their identities cannot be confirmed at this time.

    Here is the timeline based on the information that’s been released so far in #WalterScott’s murder. Everything seems to happen so fast.

  292. rq says

    Next up, a twitter monologue on whether video of these police shootings should be made public, a discussion that has been occurring. Questions of privacy and trauma arise.
    If a cop kills me and it is recorded, share it. Please. Perhaps I need to put this on my driver’s license, like my organ donor sticker.
    Think about all of the black people who have been killed this year and will never have a single march organized in their honor.
    If it weren’t for that #EricHarris video, would we even be talking about his death? Not a criticism, just an honest question.
    There are so many black people who are shot and killed by police that it is hard to keep up with all of the murders. Video is essential.
    If death-by-cop videos become “normal” to us, that is on *us*, not the fact that the videos are being shared.
    Cops who know they’re being recorded and kill us anyway because they *know* they can get off are the main problem, not the videos.
    Then he speaks some on trigger warnings, trauma, anxiety and therapy. And then about authority and trust.

  293. rq says

    If cops were prosecuted and convicted for killing us, fewer cops would be captured on video taking our lives. That, to me, is the issue.
    Anyone can say, “yes” or “no” about sharing these videos. What is the alternative? Not making them public at all? Trust “the authorities”?
    I’m interested in hearing how to consume these death-by-cop videos beyond “share vs don’t share.” I think both arguments lack nuance.
    Don’t get me wrong, “Trigger Warnings” help for those who need them. I’m just not sure they will always help us brace for the inevitable.
    No way we can avoid these death-by-cop videos. Black people are the hunted. The videos are an extension of that white supremacist hate.
    It’s easy to say “don’t share death-by-cop videos,” but what about the narratives pro-cop prosecutors and “authorities” can make about them?
    So yeah.

  294. rq says

    Guy is yelling, “He shot me!” Man who shoots says “I shot him!” Cops say we didn’t call the meds because we didn’t know he was shot.

    What?

    Video shows Tulsa man shot by deputy who meant to stun him. Another article on that. And yeah, they used Harris’ mugshot.

    Walter Scott’s dad: Son’s shooting would have been swept under the rug without tape. And don’t we know it.

    The parents of Walter Scott say “justice will be served” following the release of cellphone video which shows police officer Michael Slager fatally shooting their son following a traffic stop.

    “It would have never come to light. They would have swept it under the rug, like they did with many others,” Walter Scott Sr. said of the video’s release. “When I saw it, I fell to my feet and my heart was broken.”

    With video.

    Interlude: Fashion Art! Kenyan-Born Model Malaika Firth Stars In Stunning Vogue Japan Editorial Shot By Giampaolo Sgura. Stunning photos. Stunning.

    21-year-old Kenyan-born model Malaika Firth stars in an arresting new editorial for Vogue Japan. The heavily-patterned, surrealist-influenced feature, shot by Italian fashion photographer Giampaolo Sgura, will hit the stands in May. See photos from the shoot, via WE ARE SO DROEË, in the gallery above.

    A rising star in the fashion world, Firth was born in Mombasa to a half-Kenyan, half-Swiss mother, and a father of British, Seychellois and Ugandan descent, and was raised in Kenya until her family relocated to Barking, east London when she was seven. Her modeling career began in 2011, when, according to an article published yesterday in The Guardian, she saw a Channel 4 documentary (The Model Agency) about Premier Model Management. Firth felt the London-based agency was a fit, and her mother soon phoned Premier’s founder to arrange a meeting; the then 17-year-old was signed on the spot.

    In 2013 Firth became the first black model since Naomi Campbell in 1994 to star in a Prada campaign. “After that Prada campaign when I was being compared to Naomi Campbell I was so happy,” the now New York-based model said to The Guardian’s Ed Cumming. “She’s a legend. And if things aren’t changing in fashion, they need to.” “People are allowed to talk about my race,” she also told Cumming. “I like it. I guess I see myself as a kind of junior ambassador – I should pat myself on the head for that.”

    For more on Malaika Firth, read her full interview with Ed Cumming for The Guardian.

    Hard to build community when you’re still building memorials.

    Justice Department will hold community meeting on Baltimore police

    As the U.S. Department of Justice prepares to hold its first public meeting to help address brutality allegations among Baltimore police, some local residents are criticizing the months-long federal review of the Police Department.

    Tawanda Jones, whose brother died during a 2013 traffic stop in Northeast Baltimore, said she has repeatedly called the Justice Department to be interviewed, but has been rebuffed.

    “I will tell them they need to interview real families whose relatives have been killed by the police,” said Jones, the sister of Tyrone West. “The biggest thing in this whole process is the lack of transparency.”

    The community forum on Thursday evening comes months after the Justice Department agreed to help reform the nation’s eighth-largest police force. The agency started the collaborative review in January, but the 90-minute meeting at Coppin State University will be the first public gathering at which Baltimoreans can share views on their police force.

    Last fall, Police Commissioner Anthony Batts requested federal help days after a Baltimore Sun investigation revealed that residents had suffered broken bones and battered faces during arrests, and the city had paid $5.7 million since 2011 in court judgments and settlements in 102 civil suits alleging police brutality.

    The Sun also found that some city officers were involved in multiple lawsuits, and significant gaps existed in the systems used to monitor police misconduct. Almost all of the people involved in the incidents that led to the lawsuits were cleared of criminal charges.

    Some Baltimoreans called for a full-scale civil rights probe, but federal officials said that working with the Police Department was the best way to improve its interactions with the community. Batts and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake have vowed to improve the department’s relationship with residents.

    How the Walter Scott Shooting Would Have Been Reported if the Video Didn’t Exist. Video only. :/

  295. rq says

    The fuck. Def not counting right tonight, that’s another for moderation. *sigh* Onwards!

    Five Myths About Crime in Black America—and the Statistical Truths. Infographic.

    Another way to look at it: hypervisiblity masks violence’s gruesomeness: hypervisible violence becomes invisible backdrop. black death isn’t a spectacle but a setting. Setting for what? The answer looms terrible.

    The Simpsons turn black for artist’s hard-hitting response to Walter Scott police shooting

    Italian satirical artist aleXsandro Palombo has shared a series of hard-hitting artworks in response to the fatal shooting of black man Walter Scott by a white police officer in South Carolina.

    Palombo’s cartoons include a black Bart being held at gunpoint by the TV series’ police chief Clarence “Clancy” Wiggum, as a sign reading “I have a dream” is seen in the background, covered by a red “censored” stamp. This clear message suggests civil rights activist Martin Luther King’s hopes for future generations have gone unfulfilled.

    Other shocking pictures show Clancy and the Statue of Liberty wearing white Klu Klux Klan conical hats while in another, Bart lies face-down dead on the floor besides a toy gun in front of a billboard reading “Cops never sleep”, mirroring the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

    Black Springfield residents are seen holding up “I can’t breathe” signs in reference to the tragic last words of Eric Garner after he was put in a chokehold by a police officer last year, while others reflect the Black Lives Matter protests to end police brutality that erupted after teenager Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson.

    “With this art series I wanted to denounce the current social situation, the unbelievable racial facts of recent times,” Palombo told MailOnline. “The images from the suffocation of Eric Garner are horrible, uncivilized. This is a crazy and an unacceptable violence.

    “We are experiencing a dangerous social regression and if America does not react to the rampant racism it will no longer be the country of freedom and dreams, but the country of oppression and injustice.”

    Palombo posted his artworks on Facebook, with a caption reading “We are one, we are all human ‪#‎StopRacism”.

    2.7 seconds
    How 8 bullets pierced the nation
    Did it really? Did it really pierce, did it penetrate? Finally?
    Did it?

    A blink of an eye takes about four-tenths of a second. From the first shot to the last, the shooting of Walter L. Scott took 2.7 seconds. Seven blinks.

    This brief moment in time would have a cascading effect: Scott grabbed his left side and crumpled face-first onto a patch of grass; Michael T. Slager, the North Charleston police officer who shot him, lowered his pistol; Feidin Santana, on his way to work, finished capturing it all on his phone camera, video that would bring these seconds to the world.

    But that 2.7-second space in time is deceptive.

    Experts in officer-involved shootings say they usually happen after a chain of events, each link leading to another until the one where an officer decides to pull the trigger.

    And this burst of gunfire also happened against the longer chain of history, in this case, one stretching back to slavery, segregation, decades of discrimination and, more recently, officer-involved deaths in Missouri, New York, Ohio and so many other places across the country.

    As with any chain, a tragedy has links that, if broken, could have changed everything. And one such link was forged at 9:33 a.m. April 4, when Slager turned on his blue lights behind a 1990 Mercedes. […]

    While investigatory stops can be effective at identifying criminals, they also open the door to bias, the sociologists wrote. And over time, this has a corrosive effect on the entire community. “What makes inquisitive police stops so offensive to many African Americans and Latinos is not that the officers carrying them out are impolite or even frankly bigoted, but that these stops are common, repeated, routine, and even scripted.”

    In the mid-2000s, as North Charleston’s violent crime rate rose and earned the city a place on the top 10 list of dangerous cities, so did the number of tickets for seemingly minor offenses.

    Between 2006 and 2009, the height of North Charleston’s crime crackdown, officers issued more than 2,020 tickets for defective taillamps, brake lights, headlamps and mirrors, a Post and Courier analysis shows. Officers wrote more than 2,100 tickets for improperly tinted windows, 285 tickets for loud noises coming from vehicles and 175 tickets for not having a bell or light on a bike.

    Since then, North Charleston’s crime rate dropped dramatically, but tensions over these stops and tactics remained high. […]

    In the shooting’s aftermath, North Charleston Police Chief Eddie Driggers and other officers began to question Slager’s account. But they didn’t have the results of the autopsy, know where the bullets entered and exited Scott’s body; they didn’t know for sure how many rounds he had fired.

    Monday night, SLED agents played the video over and over. Word of the footage leaked to the public Tuesday morning.

    Slager was married with two stepchildren and another on the way. City officials took his family to a local hotel; they dispatched a police chaplain to be with Scott’s grieving family. Tuesday afternoon, The Post and Courier reported the existence of the video, and an hour later, city officials called a press conference.

    “When you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” Mayor Keith Summey said.

    “I have watched the video, and I was sickened by what I saw,” Chief Driggers said.

    By 5:49 p.m., Slager was in jail, charged with murder, that 2.7 seconds in time looming larger by the minute.

    Background on both Slager and Scott within.

    … Police behaving badly? Cop who ‘loves playing with dead bodies’ accused of pulling toes, ‘tickling’ feet and yanking the head of man shot dead by fellow officers as he lay in a morgue. Just going to leave that there.

    Education, pressure, and poverty. And, of course, racism. Intersect! As sentencing nears for Atlanta teachers, many condemn their conviction

    While many civic leaders, including Mayor Kasem Reed, welcomed the guilty verdicts earlier this month as the final resolution of a scandal that roiled the city for nearly six years, some are uneasy about the prospect of teachers serving up to 35 years in jail.

    Jurors in the Atlanta case — one of the largest academic misconduct trials in U.S. history — found 11 of 12 defendants guilty April 1 of violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a charge that carries a prison sentence of up to 20 years.

    Some were also found guilty of additional felonies, such as influencing a witness, theft by taking, false swearing or making a false statement or writing.

    Their supporters complain that the teachers and administrators — all African Americans who worked in low-income neighborhoods — were unfairly targeted with a racketeering statute popularly associated with mobsters and gangsters.

    “Let me just say that this town is stirred up,” said Andrew Young, the civil rights leader and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
    lRelated
    Atlanta schools cheating scandal: 11 educators convicted of racketeering

    Nation
    Atlanta schools cheating scandal: 11 educators convicted of racketeering

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    8

    It made no sense, he said, for educators to face lengthy prison sentences when so many Wall Street financiers were spared after taking part in lending abuses that devastated the U.S. economy.

    “It really made me angry to see teachers in handcuffs, because I’ve never seen a banker in handcuffs,” Young said. “To try this under a RICO statute was a sin and a shame, and the folk who did that will probably go to hell.”

    Opinion on the sentencing is sharply divided across Atlanta. About 51% of those who responded to an online poll on 11 Alive.com, the website of the local NBC affiliate, said the convicted educators should serve prison time, while 49% said they should not.

    After the verdict, former Gov. Sonny Perdue, a Republican who initiated the investigation into suspicious jumps in test scores in 2009, called the verdict “justice” for the “overwhelming number of passionate, dedicated Georgia educators.”

    Yet even some parents of children who were taught by the convicted teachers have misgivings about lengthy jail sentences.

    “Her sitting in jail is not going to help my daughter,” said Vanessa Haynes, whose 16-year-old daughter testified during the trial that her fourth-grade teacher, Angela Williamson, gave students answers to tests. Williamson faces up to 35 years in prison.

    “What are they going to do now for the children?” Haynes said. “What I want is restitution. Rather than have the lady locked up, she should tutor my daughter until she completes college.”

    The misconduct case sprang from a state investigation that implicated at least 178 teachers and administrators in “organized and systemic misconduct” in 44 Atlanta elementary and middle schools.

    By 2011, more than 80 educators had confessed to test tampering — some immediately, and others later, in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

    During the trial, prosecutors claimed that administrators set up a high-stakes testing system in which teachers received bonuses or were threatened with demotion, depending on students’ performance in standardized tests.

    The result was that thousands of low-income African American students who struggled to read and write were denied the opportunity of federal funds for remedial education.

    While cheating was undoubtedly wrong, Young said the teachers were not racketeers. “They were teachers who cracked under the heavy burdens a depressed society placed on them,” he said. “This is a time for us to judge by the spirit of the law and not the letter of the law.”

    Two protestors were targeted and arrested by NYPD last night: @TatteredRose1 and @_TAhmad. This has to end.

    Flooding streets in defiance of biz as usual more powerful than any review board, election.. #ShutDownA14 #EricHarris

  296. rq says

    That’s two in moderation for improper link counting.
    I’m going to finish up tomorrow, won’t make much of a difference.

    So many names.
    So many names.
    I can barely keep them straight anymore.

  297. rq says

    “We want justice, and we want justice now.”

    Protestors in Claiborne County called for action over the weekend in the death of Otis Byrd, the man found hanging from a tree in March.

    They said the case is taking too long.

    “We want justice, and we want justice now,” said Evan Doss, the Claibrone County NAACP President. “We’re not going to accept suicide. That’s just not there.”

    The 54-year-old victim was reported missing in early March.

    His body was discovered hanging by a bed sheet from a tree behind his home.

    FBI Agent in charge Don Always said investigators are still waiting for test results.

    “We’ll combine those results with many other facts we’ve gathered, to give the results context. These facts will give investigators the most accurate information to determine what happened,” he said via email.

    FBI To Conduct Second Test In Hanging Death Investigation

    FOX13 News has learned that the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP met Friday in Jackson with the FBI to discuss the autopsy results in the Otis Byrd case.

    The NAACP said the FBI will run another test in Mr. Byrd’s hanging death investigation.

    The final results are expected within two weeks by the last weekend of April.

    Byrd family enlists Michael Brown case medical examiner. That guy got into some trouble eventually because of his assistant. I hope things are less controversial this time around.

    The family of a man found hanging from a tree in March does not believe he committed suicide, they announced through their legal counsel Wednesday afternoon.

    Otis Byrd, 54, was found March 19 hanging by a bed sheet from a tree not far from his residence in Claiborne County after having been missing for over two weeks. Local authorities called in the FBI after finding his body.

    Authorities have said evidence doesn’t suggest foul play, but the results of an autopsy have not been made public. The FBI says it has discussed the autopsy results with the family but the family’s attorneys, Sweet and Associates, disagrees.

    “We don’t have the result of the autopsy and that’s the reason they retained counsel,” Dennis Sweet III said Wednesday.

    But authorities said they’ve briefed the family multiple times. Sheriff Marvin Lucas said the first briefing was in Claiborne County on March 21. Then they met with them again in Jackson on March 24.

    “We presented them some evidence because we’re obligated to keep them updated on how the investigation is going,” said Lucas, adding that further evidence was given to them at the second meeting. “We’re obligated to share that information with the family, but we’re not obligated to share it with anyone else.”

    Lucas asked the public not to enter into any judgment until all the facts are in.

    “Some folks want to make a race issue out of this, and they say, ‘Well, the white folks hung him,'” Lucas said. “But nothing has proven that. We need to see what the evidence says. The government has sent almost 30 agents here, and they’re the finest agents in the USA, so let’s allow them to do their job.”

    The family’s counsel has not ruled out a racial issue.

    Attorney: Family says they haven’t received enough information from police. They don’t believe #OtisByrd would commit suicide

    Otis Byrd’s family has received autopsy results in hanging death

    The FBI says it has discussed autopsy results with the family of a black man found hanging from a tree in Mississippi.

    However, investigators are not saying when they will publicly release the information or whether they consider the death of 54-year-old Otis Byrd to be homicide or suicide.

    “At each milestone in this case, the FBI’s first step is to personally brief family members,” Don Alway, special agent in charge of the FBI in Mississippi, said in a statement to The Associated Press on Wednesday.

    Agents from the FBI and the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation met March 24 with Byrd’s family to discuss the autopsy, Alway said. That was five days after Byrd was found hanging from a tree near the home he rented in Port Gibson, a small town near the Mississippi River in the southwestern part of the state.

    A call to Byrd’s sister, Florine Hodge, was not answered Wednesday, and it was not possible to leave a message seeking comment from her.

    So right now it’s all the same, no conclusive (publishable) results, everything still under investigation.

  298. rq says

    And there might be traction on the initial demand from the SC protestors. #WalterScott

    The SC protestors demanded that the North Charleston hold an emergency City Council Meeting to discuss an oversight board. #WalterScott

    And a bus of Ferguson protestors just arrived in North Charleston. #WalterScott

    Our past five #WalterScott front pages, as seen in @postandcourier newsroom in Charleston.

    The family of #RamarleyGraham has asked for a twitter storm today to mark his 22nd birthday.
    3PM, #ProsecuteNYPD.

    Sharpton: In wake of Walter Scott death, North Charleston could set ‘new tone in policing’ nationwide

    In front of a somber mayor and a sheriff who later asked for salvation, the Rev. Al Sharpton said during a Sunday morning sermon in North Charleston that the city could set a new tone for American policing.

    Sharpton, founder of the National Action Network, appeared at Charity Missionary Baptist Church during a healing service for 50-year-old Walter L. Scott, an apparently unarmed black man whose killing by a white North Charleston police officer was caught on video a little more than a week ago.

    The service portrayed how community activists, from local ones in North Charleston to Sharpton in New York City, reacted to Scott’s death and, in some cases, ultimately played a role in the arrest of the man who shot him.

    Mayor Keith Summey and Police Chief Eddie Driggers sat near the front of the sanctuary and listened to the civil rights activist rail against police misconduct in the U.S. and refer to North Charleston’s past as one pockmarked with social injustices. Two protesters stood outside the church on East Montague Avenue and carried signs about police brutality.

    Sharpton spoke passionately, though, as he praised the city leaders for promptly firing Patrolman 1st Class Michael T. Slager when the video surfaced and for announcing the officer’s arrest on a murder charge. That set North Charleston apart from places like New York City and Ferguson, Mo., where 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and Eric Garner was choked to death by police officers who were not criminally faulted, Sharpton said.

    “When he’s wrong … we protest,” he said of mayors like Summey. “When he’s right, we should have the same courage to say he’s right. […]

    Sharpton also joined about 100 residents for a vigil Sunday afternoon near Remount and Craig roads, where Scott ran from a traffic stop April 4.

    Mourners have dropped flowers and affixed signs bemoaning “police terror” to a chain-link fence not far from Scott died.

  299. rq says

    This… Walter Scott shooting: officer describes adrenaline rush in recording . Like a fucking hunt.

    The police officer who killed Walter Scott in South Carolina said afterwards that he was experiencing a rush of adrenaline, during a conversation that offers a new insight into his mindset in the minutes following the shooting.

    Patrolman Michael Slager appeared to laugh nervously in the discussion with a senior officer after fatally shooting Scott in North Charleston on 5 April. A recording of their conversation was obtained by the Guardian.

    “By the time you get home, it would probably be a good idea to kind of jot down your thoughts on what happened,” the senior officer said. “You know, once the adrenaline quits pumping.”

    “It’s pumping,” Slager said, laughing. The senior officer replied: “Oh yeah. Oh yeah.”

    Slager was charged with murder on Tuesday after authorities were given cellphone video showing the officer shot Scott eight times in the back as the 50-year-old ran away. The footage contradicted earlier claims by police that Scott had fled with Slager’s stun gun.

    Asked whether the officer making the remarks in the recording was Slager, Thom Berry, a spokesman for the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED), which is investigating the shooting, said: “It appears that way. I have not been able to independently confirm it.” […]

    In the recording from the dashcam in Slager’s radio car, the officer can be heard asking: “What happens next?” The senior officer, whose identity is not clear from the recording, told him that he would be collected by other officers and taken to police headquarters.

    “Probably once they get you there, we’ll take you home. Take your crap off, take your vest off, kind of relax for two or three.”

    “It’ll be real quick,” he said. “They’re gonna tell you you’re gonna be out for a couple of days and you’ll come back and they’ll interview you then. They’re not going to ask you any kind of questions right now. They’ll take your weapon and we’ll go from there. That’s pretty much it.”

    The senior officer again reassured Slager that he would not have to explain the shooting on the record immediately. “The last one we had, they waited a couple of days to interview officially, like, sit down and tell what happened,” he said.

    You can listen at the link.

  300. rq says

    Let me tell y’all this now. Prepare yourself for candidates to capitalize on police murders of Black people in a DISGUSTING way for 2016.

    #Ferguson2SC at #WalterScott memorial w/ locals having convo about police, while scraps of “Crime” tape blow in wind.

    And more Ferguson protestors have arrived. #WalterScott

    Demonstrators practicing locking arms, staying calm during yelling #WalterScott #chsnews

    DOJ Announces Initiative To Deploy Smartphone-Carrying Bystanders To Nation’s Streets (The Onion)

    Saying the measure was necessary to improve public safety, the Department of Justice announced Wednesday afternoon that it intends to deploy thousands of additional smartphone-carrying bystanders to the nation’s streets. “We believe increasing the presence of eyewitnesses with smartphones in our neighborhoods will go a long way toward ensuring justice is being served in our communities,” said Attorney General Eric Holder, adding that while the department intends to strategically place onlookers on street corners, in parks, and around other public spaces throughout the country, high-risk urban neighborhoods would likely receive the greatest surge in passersby ready to document any misconduct. “It has become increasingly clear that the current force of camera-wielding pedestrians is too small to properly serve our citizens, with many infractions simply going unfilmed. However, this new approach will allow citizens to go about their days, knowing that someone will always be nearby to record offenses carried out against them and eventually hold the perpetrators accountable.” Holder then reminded Americans to be thankful for the service provided by the nation’s ranks of bystanders, saying that, in much of the country, the individuals holding up digital recording devices are the only ones maintaining the line between order and chaos.

    And this local pastor is talking about his time at the March on Washington. #WalterScott

  301. rq says

    Police now say the “officer” who killed #EricHarris was a volunteer officer and not on the public payroll. They call it a “Reserve Deputy”. In other words, refusing responsibility.

    And there’s a great action planned tomorrow in STL. Mike. Kajieme. VonDerrit. Thomas. Antonio. LeDarius. Isaac.
    Protestors from the College of Charleston are organizing, too. #WalterScott

    Egregious example of gentrification: The Mary outside of a church in Bed Stuy was black for years. Now she’s been painted white. #Crazy

  304. rq says

    Man shot and killed during struggle with Indianapolis police

    Indianapolis police say a man was fatally shot during a struggle with a police officer after a foot pursuit, and two officers were injured during the incident on the city’s east side.
    lRelated
    Video released showing killing of black Oklahoma suspect

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    Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department Officer Chris Wilburn says an officer pulled over a vehicle for a routine traffic stop shortly after 3 p.m. Sunday and a man fled on foot. Wilburn says the officer caught up with the armed man after a short pursuit. WISH-TV reports the officer called for backup and a second officer arrived.

    Wilburn says the man tried to grab an officer’s gun and shots were fired.

    He says an investigation is ongoing, including into whether the suspect drew his weapon.

    The Indianapolis Star reports the officers’ injuries were not life-threatening.

    Same fucking story, new fucking date. Saaaame shit.

    NBA Looking Into NYPD Arrest Of Thabo Sefolosha

    The National Basketball Association said Saturday that it is calling for more details following the arrest earlier this week of Atlanta Hawks’ Thabo Sefolosha, which ended with the player enduring a broken ankle.

    “We are working with the Hawks organization and local law enforcement to obtain more information about the circumstances surrounding Thabo’s arrest,” NBA spokesman Mike Bass said in a statement.

    Sefolosha will be out for the remainder of the season because of the injury, the Hawks said on Thursday. It’s a blow to the team, who clinched the top of the Southeast Division last month, as NBA playoffs start next week.

    Sefolosha was arrested in the early hours of Wednesday morning while exiting a club in New York. At the same club on the same night, Indiana Pacers’ Chris Copeland was also stabbed. The Hawks were in town for a game against the Brooklyn Nets that evening. Original reports said Sefolosha, along with teammate Pero Antic, were arrested for resisting arrest and obstructing an investigation.

    The NBA’s inquiry follows the subsequent release of two videos of the arrest by TMZ Sports, which have raised questions about the altercation. TMZ Sports published the second video on Friday, which shows a different angle of the arrest, as well as an officer using his baton.

    Ezell Ford: When Bad Attorneys Happen to Good People

    I can’t stand when an attorney makes a living off of the backs and suffering of Black people all the while holding them in utter contempt and disdain.

    Up until now I have kept my mouth shut about one such attorney. I did this out of respect for the family he represented and because I didn’t see how my telling folks about his off camera behavior would help anyone’s cause–but that’s all over now.

    The death of 25-year-old Ezell Ford was a tragic event. I think we can all agree no matter what side of the fence you’re on as it relates to the fault of the officers involved in Ford’s death, that parents should never have to bury their child.

    It’s been eight months since Ford, who was described by family and friends as a mentally ill, was killed by police in South Los Angeles. According to the autopsy, Ford, who was Black, was shot three times — once in the right side, once in the right back and once in the right arm. The death was classified as a homicide by the coroner.

    The Ford family is represented by attorney Steven Lerman.

    Lerman used to be a high-profile civil rights attorney whose claim to fame was representing Rodney King–and believe me it only takes one conversation with the man or one trip to his website to know that he’s still riding high off of the King case.

    Well it seems that Lerman has earned himself a complaint to the California State Bar regarding the Ezell Ford case. […]

    A little bit of background for you–Sheppard, through his firm, has been in the business of private investigations for over 27 years in California. More recently it was Sheppard and his team that busted the reality television show “Bridezilla’s” Anita Maxwell for her role in an insurance fraud scheme where it is alleged that she collected over $40,000 in undeserved worker’s compensation benefits.

    Sheppard’s firm has a top notch reputation when it comes to being able to complete hard to do investigations and was recommended to Lerman by Roger Clark, a well known expert on police procedure and police tactics.

    Before I get into the deets surrounding Lerman’s Bar complaint, I want to say that the Lermans of the world don’t hang out in the hood chasing ambulances and listening to police scanners to know where to show up to promise us millions if we just sign on the dotted line. No, that’s what they keep a thirsty group of Uncle Toms on retainer to do for them.

    You see the Uncle Toms, much like some of these news van tracking and camera hunting so-called community activists, chase the ambulances and the police scanners. They’re Black so they blend in and they convince families in the midst of their tragedies to sign on the dotted line with the attorney paying the Uncle Tom the most money on the downlow to snag the case for them.

    And the Ezell Ford case was no different. […]

    Here’s how it works for these type of situations in the media–you start local and go national.

    The reason why the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Walter Scott became national news and lasted beyond the typical 24-hour news cycle, aside from having the video, is because nothing leads a newscast like a grieving mother. It may sound brutal and uncaring, but it’s the truth. The moment Lerman and Uncle Tom decided that the Fords shouldn’t do media, they essentially handicapped the Ford’s case. There’s only so many things that any producer, reporter or talking head can come up with to say when you don’t have the family to speak on the tragic loss of their loved one. That’s what the public wants to see and that who the public really wants to hear from. Lerman going on the news doesn’t and didn’t galvanize or move Black people to take to the streets and take action. Those that did, did it because of a personal connection with the Ford family they were able to share with others.

    If it wasn’t for those community activists that Lerman and Uncle Tom despise so much, Ezell Ford would have just been another Black man in Los Angeles dead by the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department. The media that Ezell Ford’s case did get is mainly thanks to those community activists–not Uncle Tom and not Lerman.

    And once the community activists stopped taking to the streets and protesting like with everything else Ford’s name quietly slipped out of the news.

    But back to Ken Sheppard and Progressive Investigation Associate Inc.

    Sheppard has filed a State Bar complaint against Lerman after Lerman refused to pay his bill.

    Sheppard’s firm up until now has conducted all of the interviews of the witnesses regarding the Ford death, including those witnesses who will not talk to the LAPD. […]

    And just so that we are bird-flying-into-a-glass-window clear, Lerman has a history of sordid tactics when it comes to getting clients.

    The Los Angeles Times reported back in 1991 how Lerman was accused of using unethical tactics to get hired in another high-profile case of alleged misconduct by law officers.

    In a complaint filed last week with the State Bar of California, lawyer Geraldine Green alleged that Steven Lerman used “outrageous” and “reprehensible” means to lure away a client who was expected to file a lawsuit in the death of Keith Hamilton, a mentally ill man killed Aug. 13 by sheriff’s deputies.

    The complaint, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, contends that Lerman pressured Hamilton’s mother, Clara Maxie, into retaining him. The complaint said Lerman made a “steady barrage” of phone calls to Maxie in the days after the shooting and that the calls persisted even after Maxie informed Lerman that she already had legal representation.

    Lerman also sent Maxie a large floral arrangement “to further his solicitation,” according to the complaint, and finally dispatched a limousine to bring Maxie to his office where he “wore her down” by disparaging Green’s ability to handle the case.

    From day one after Uncle Tom snagged the Ford case for Lerman it seems to have been a pain in his ass.

    I’m told by the investigators hired to work on the case that he didn’t want to drive his Mercedes-Benz over to the Ford’s because he was a afraid of how it would look. Whenever he was in South Los Angeles he was always hiding behind someone and looking like a fish out of water.

    Even though he bragged to one of the private investigators that he was one of the few white attorneys that goes to the ghetto and get his hands dirty.

    Except that he doesn’t. He let’s Uncle Tom get his hands dirty and shows to take the glory.

    Witness have told me how he complained about spending $40,000 on Ezell’s funeral.

    The day of the funeral Lerman rode to the cemetery with the private investigators and acted a straight fool in the car. […]

    We as a people have to stop allowing ourselves to be tricked into believing that because an attorney sends us flowers or a limousine to pick us up that they have our best interests at heart. Just because an attorney is white and/or Jewish doesn’t mean that attorney is the best attorney for job. And we definitely have to stop letting Uncle Tom sell us out to the highest bidder.

    Any attorney who calls himself a civil rights attorney and is proud to have the gratitude of one of the most notorious police chief’s in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department, Darryl Gates, for keeping Rodney King out media does not need to be representing Black people in any case dealing with the police. Period.

    As for Ken Sheppard and his firm, Lerman knows he owes them the money. I have all of the text messages to prove it and then some.

    Progressive Investigation Associate Inc. is a Black owned firm with an impeccable reputation for getting the job done. Lerman wouldn’t have any of the interviews of the witnesses in the Ford case if it wasn’t for the work of Sheppard and his team and he needs to compensate them for their time and work just like he’s expecting to be compensated. I’d like to see Lerman get ANYONE from 65th Street and Broadway to talk to him about what they saw that night. Exactly.

    As for the rest of us, there’s no shortage of good, honest and hardworking attorney’s out there. Do your homework. All that glistens isn’t gold and just because it’s white doesn’t mean it’s right.

    Fatal shooting by security guard proving a complicated case – in Toronto, Canada.

    The shooting that killed Ryan Hind, 39, and Donny Ouimette, 25, unfolded around 3 a.m. on Feb. 28 at a McDonald’s on Danforth Ave., east of Coxwell Ave., and was captured by security cameras.

    A GardaWorld employee, whose identity has not been made public, was in line waiting to order when a violent altercation with two men erupted.

    Moments later, shots were fired from the guard’s handgun killing Hind and Ouimette as other patrons watched in horror.

    As the lead investigator, Browne acknowledged there are complicated questions he needs to answer.

    But who pulled the trigger is not among those questions.

    “There is no issue that the security guard discharged his firearm (and) that ultimately resulted in the death of both of these men,” he said. “This, by definition, makes it a homicide.”

    Browne said he is instead focused on the circumstances of the shooting — what prompted the guard to open fire — and the law pertaining to armed security guards use of lethal force.

    “The question at this point is, is it culpable homicide or not?” he said.

  305. rq says

    “I Shot Him. I’m Sorry.”

    There’s a lot of commentary this morning about the police shooting of 44 year old Eric Harris earlier this month in Oklahoma. Here’s a good introduction to it if you haven’t heard about this incident yet. I’m only going to discuss a small part of the story and it’s hardly the most disturbing or perhaps consequential part of it. But it’s the part that stands out to me the most.

    The police version of events is that reserve deputy Robert Bates thought he was pulling out his taser when in fact he was pulling out his gun and shot Harris. The single shot proved fatal. This is called a “slips and capture” error in which in a high stress situation you think you’re doing one thing and accidentally do another. A few days later Bates told the paper he thought he was holding his taser when the gun discharged. The tape of the incident at at least some level supports this claim because it has Bates saying “I shot him!” and then “I’m sorry.”

    A lot of help that does Harris and his family.

    But again, I’m assuming at least for the sake of argument and I think in fact that Bates actually accidentally shot Harris – as in didn’t even realize in some sense or consciously decide to use his firearm.

    But look at the detail. Bates is a 73 year old man who is a volunteer member of the department. He’s a wealthy insurance executive who is also a major donor to the Sheriff’s Department. He did serve for one year as an actual police officer – but that was in 1964-65!

    In case you’re keeping score at home, that is fifty years ago. The series of events – old man playing policeman, thinking he’s pulling out his taser when he’s pulling out his pistol, being frank and bizarre enough to say “sorry” after shooting the guy – it would actually be funny if the results weren’t so tragic and this guy didn’t die as a result.

    Everything else that went into this tragic incident aside, and there’s a lot else, who can possibly think this is a good idea? I know many men in their 70s, some very vital, others frail. But I cannot think of any of them – certainly not when you do police work essentially as a side hobby – who should be carrying and using a firearm in what is the inherently fast moving and stressful work of suspect apprehension, under any circumstances.

    This part of the story is simply crazy.

    Activists want to meet w/Dotson. Gave him #BlackLivesMatter gift bag with coffee & coffee cup given #MondayMourning
    Instead, Officer “Jones” was sent as a spokesperson to hear requests. #MondayMourning #BlackLivesMatter #ABanks
    Todays #MondayMourning was at residence of SLMPD Police Chief Sam Dotson in #StLouisHills #BlackLivesMatter #Ferguson

    I see PZ has already addressed this article: A DAYM Shame: Woman Killed in Police Custody While She is Shackled by Her Hands And Feet #NatashaMcKenna over in It’s not crazy to distrust the police. But here’s the article:

    Visibly unstable, according to police reports, the 37-year-old woman continued to resist arrest and allegedly punched and tried to bite an officer. She was placed in a “hobble restraint device” so she could not run away again and a “spit sock” to keep her from biting anyone. She was first hospitalized but McKenna was later taken to the Fairfax County, Va. lock-up and charged with assaulting an officer.

    natashaFairfax County Police are now investigating her death.

    The news comes Sunday as Tulsa police are defending a volunteer reserve officer in the shooting death of a man in police custody. Eric Harris was pinned, face-down to the ground when Robert Bates fired his department-issued firearm. He thought it was his Taser, he explained. His supervisors wrote the incident off as a “mistake.”

    Incident reports, obtained by the Washington Post, describe the senseless death of the woman who died in police custody.

    “Six officers in full biohazard suits then placed McKenna into full restraints,” NBC Washington reported on its website. McKenna, shackled by at the hands and legs, wouldn’t “bend her knees to be placed into a chair, so an officer shocked her four times with 50,000 volts.”

    She was placed on life support and later died.

  306. rq says

    The Galveston Giant

    The war had not yet started then. Not for the United States, and not for its ally Cuba, which had still not fully emerged from its status as a Yankee protectorate after the Spanish-American war. So people back in the States waited to read news of the fight with as much anticipation as they would have for daring accounts of Roland Garros shooting down German planes with the Escadrille.1

    There was Jack Johnson. The Galveston Giant. The aging pot-bellied Negro heavyweight of all heavyweights; the man who for almost a decade had delivered Herculean body blows to the Jim Crow South as boxing’s heavyweight champion. Lumbering from the opposing corner was Jess Willard, a six foot-six cowboy from Kansas. The slow, but powerful and indefatigable “Great White Hope” with sledgehammer fists and an iron jaw. Across the country, Black Americans waited with bated breath as the man who had broken the heavyweight color line and defended challenge after challenge fought against hope while much of White America waited with glee as the latest hand-picked and groomed challenger finally stood poised to knock that man down.

    It hadn’t always been this way. Johnson had been an unknown fighter at the turn of the century, an anonymous son of a Union Negro soldier toiling in street brawls between New York and Texas. He was on the absolute periphery of the Negro prizefighting universe, and envisioning him one day crossing the color line for a title was unthinkable. But a jail stint and a run-in with aging Jewish legend Joe Choynski, a man who became his mentor and friend, helped Johnson develop a reserved and defensive style which combined with his formidable strength and stamina to create one of the first truly modern Black fighters. The three years following the 1901 jail term and his style reinvention were a whirlwind of success for Johnson, and by 1903 the “Galveston Giant” had claimed the undisputed Colored Heavyweight title. He would go on to hold that title for five straight years.

    More at the link. It makes for a nice break from all the killing.

    ‘The Wire’ Was So Real Police Made Creators Change the Plot

    HBO’s The Wire is legitimately one of the best shows ever created. There’s a reason why it’s President Obama’s favorite show. The series chronicled Baltimore’s struggle with inner city drug wars with a certain grit and authenticity that we don’t see on TV today. It was in fact so real the actual police had to say something to the show’s creators. Showrunner David Simon told The Baltimore Sun they were asked to change the plot several times by law enforcement officials so they wouldn’t “reveal certain vulnerabilities” of the police department.

    “The transition from landlines to cellular technology left police investigations vulnerable well over a decade ago,” Simon said.

    He noted that there was new technology at the time — such as Nextel phones that mimicked walkie-talkies — that “was actually impervious to any interception by law enforcement during a critical window of time.”

    “At points, we were asked by law enforcement not to reveal certain vulnerabilities in our plotlines,” Simon said. That included communications using Nextel devices.

    Simon doesn’t regret withholding from the show, “to highlight this vulnerability in our drama would have irresponsibly driven the communications of every criminal conspiracy into an impenetrable hole.”

    Back in New York: Holy Week: Black Lives Matter Protests Target NYPD Funding (PHOTOS)

    Demonstrations against the New York Police Department’s killings of Eric Garner and Akai Gurley, as well as the deaths of other black people at the hands of law enforcement agencies across the country, surged through downtown Manhattan early this month, with protesters targeting a proposal for local taxpayers to fund the hiring of 1,000 new NYPD officers.

    Public funding of police departments “is the most systemic cause” of their abuses, Candace Simpson told MintPress News.

    Simpson worked with other graduate students at Union Theological Seminary to organize a “Holy Week of Resistance,” marches that resembled traditional Good Friday and Easter Sunday processions while protesting anti-black violence by police and other state agencies.

    “We want to be proactive and get to the root of the problem,” Simpson said.

    The hiring proposal, which originated with NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton last September, has drawn opposition from protesters, but support from some elected officials, including prominent Democrats like City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito.

    “The Council believes that raising the headcount of NYPD is essential and we will be advocating it strongly this budget cycle,” Mark-Viverito said in a joint statement with the Council’s Finance Chairwoman Julissa Ferreras in February.

    In late March, the New York Post reported Bratton had stormed out of a meeting with Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris after a budget drafted by Mayor Bill de Blasio did not include the requested funding.

    Angered by Shorris’ refusal to support the plan, Bratton reportedly told his erstwhile superior, “If I don’t get them from you, I’ll go to the City Council and get them,” an account the commissioner angrily denied.

    The Post claimed multiple sources had confirmed the accuracy of its report.

    The City Council’s support for the measure angered many protesters, who said it contradicted not only the interests of Council members’ constituents, but also their own public positions. […]

    Many protesters used their signs and chants to highlight what they called better uses of the proposal’s funding, projected to top $90 million per year.

    “Most people in this city can’t afford their rent,” Maria Gutierrez of Queens told MintPress. “Schools are falling apart, and hospitals are closing. And they want to spend all of this on new cops? It’s unbelievable.”

    De Blasio’s proposal already includes $9.2 billion in 2016 allocations for the NYPD, including $8.9 billion of city funds, or 15.2 percent of local spending.

    The amount is more than the city’s combined spending on its fire, sanitation, health and mental hygiene, and homeless services departments, the 11 hospitals, five nursing homes and various community and school medical services of the Health and Hospitals Corporation, 24 campuses of the City University of New York, and the New York City Housing Authority’s 334 sprawling developments, which house over 400,000 New Yorkers.

    With the city’s population near 8.5 million, it spends over $1,000 on policing for each of its residents every year.

    Only the city’s Department of Education, which is responsible for educating 1.1 million students in over 1,800 schools, exceeds the NYPD as a local expense.

    With the city’s crime rates leading a statewide plunge of over 54 percent between 1994 and 2012 — a national trend which analysts say has little correlation to incarceration — many see little reason for police spending to rise.

    And New York City’s recent history shows few connections between crime rates and police headcounts.

    “Between 1985 and 1999, New York City increased its sworn police force by 60%,” a 2011 white paper by IBM Global Business Services found. “During this time, crime dropped by 50%. Between 1999 and 2009, New York City reduced its sworn police force by 16%. During these years, crime dropped by 37%.”

    Nationally, “no relationship was found between spending on police services and lower crime rates,” the report said.

    As the latter decline, “cities should be reaping a ‘public safety dividend,’” it continued, but have instead continued to increase their spending on policing, regardless of its benefits. “An opportunity is being perhaps missed.”

    There’s more at the link.

    If We Can’t Prevent Wrongful Convictions, Can We at Least Pay for Them?

    A few weeks ago, a former prosecutor in Caddo Parish, La., named A. M. Stroud III wrote a letter to the editor of The Shreveport Times that quickly caught fire on the Internet. Over more than 1,400 anguished words, Stroud apologized for his leading role in the 1984 trial of Glenn Ford, a Louisiana man who was convicted of murder and spent nearly 30 years on death row in Angola, the state’s maximum-security prison, until last year, when his conviction was overturned and he was released.

    “In 1984, I was 33 years old,” Stroud wrote. “I was arrogant, judgmental, narcissistic and very full of myself. I was not as interested in justice as I was in winning.” He apologized at length to Ford, then went on to declare that he now opposed the death penalty as an “abomination” that could not be justly administered. “No one should be given the ability to impose a sentence of death in any criminal proceeding,” Stroud wrote. “We are simply incapable of devising a system that can fairly and impartially impose a sentence of death because we are all fallible human beings.”

    The pathos of Stroud’s conversion and his unsparing description of the many factors that made it impossible for Ford — a black man — to receive a fair hearing in the circumstances in which he was tried were what earned the letter its large and sympathetic audience far outside of Louisiana. But in fact, Stroud had been prompted to write by a relatively narrow aspect of Ford’s case: his effort to win compensation for the years he spent in prison, which Stroud felt was entirely deserved.

    Righting all the wrongs of the criminal-justice system in Louisiana (or any state, perhaps) is a herculean undertaking, but compensating the wrongfully convicted is actually a relatively straightforward task. But Ford has yet to succeed in his bid for compensation, and the kind of law that made this possible — variations on which are on the books in many states — reveals a major failing that can and should be corrected sooner rather than later. […]

    But in the past year, the state has turned against Ford. Given only a $20 debit card when he left Angola, he went to court to ask for compensation. Louisiana allows for such awards, capping the amount exonerees can receive at $250,000, along with up to $80,000 for “loss of life opportunities,” in the form of court-approved reimbursement for medical expenses, education and job training. Now 65, Ford has late-stage lung cancer that went untreated while he was in prison. The $330,000 he is eligible for doesn’t seem like much given the 30 years he lost. Yet so far, he hasn’t received a penny of even that amount.

    Louisiana’s compensation law requires “factual innocence.” This means that the defendant didn’t commit not only the crime for which he was convicted, but also “any crime based upon the same set of facts.” The state attorney general’s office, which handles compensation cases, argued that Ford didn’t have “clean hands” — to use the legal term of art — because after Rozeman’s killing, he told the police that he knew about the plans for the robbery, pawned some of the stolen jewelry and tried to sell the gun used in the murder. Ford’s lawyer argued that he cooperated with the police by implicating the real killer. “But now they are coming up with new minor crimes he was never charged with or convicted of,” Kristin Wenstrom of Innocence Project New Orleans told me.

    Last month, Judge Katherine Clark Dorroh denied Ford compensation, saying he “was proven guilty of lesser crimes.” Ford will appeal, and he is also bringing two civil-rights suits, but his doctors think he may not live long enough to see them through.

    Ford’s plight may be particularly egregious, but the conditions that enabled it are hardly limited to Louisiana. Twenty states have no laws providing for compensation for the wrongfully convicted, according to the Innocence Project. Some of the other 30 attach strings that lead to heartless delays and denials. States may require individual exonerees to beg the legislature for a “private compensation bill.” Or they may deny awards to people who were railroaded into contributing to their own convictions by falsely confessing or pleading guilty. […]

    The hurdles to obtaining basic compensation loom especially large because of a 2011 Supreme Court ruling that has made it even more difficult to win a lawsuit claiming that prosecutorial misconduct led to the wrongful conviction. In a 5-to-4 decision, the court stripped John Thompson — another Louisiana man who spent years on death row for a murder he didn’t commit — of $14 million, awarded to him because he showed that the New Orleans district attorney’s office violated his right to see evidence before trial that suggested he was innocent. The office admitted the violation but argued that it shouldn’t be held liable because Thompson hadn’t shown a pattern of such failures. (The four dissenting justices said he had.)

    That’s the context for the denial of compensation in Ford’s case, but it doesn’t excuse that decision. The state could have let this one go, out of a sense of proportion. In other cases involving exonerees’ claims of compensation, Wenstrom pointed out in her brief for Ford, the attorney general has refrained from raising objections based on other possible past crimes.

    EJI had that horrific report on lynching. Here’s a bit of follow-up: EJI’s Report on Lynching Continues to Generate Conversation about Legacy of Racial Terror

    EJI’s report Lynching in America continues to generate conversation across the country and globally about the legacy of decades of terrorism and racial subordination most dramatically evidenced by lynching.

    EJI reported that racial terror lynching was much more prevalent than previously reported, documenting nearly 4000 lynchings of African Americans in twelve Southern states between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950.

    Many community organizations have contacted EJI to learn more about the history of lynching in their local communities. EJI’s report described the astonishing absence of any effort to acknowledge, discuss, or address lynching, and noted that most communities do not actively or visibly recognize how their race relations were shaped by terror lynching. Dozens of communities now are working to remedy that, and to begin a process of truth and reconciliation by publicly acknowledging and commemorating mass violence.

    Journalists and educators are using EJI’s report to reflect on how best to teach the legacy of racial terrorism. For example, the New York Times Learning Network blog recently juxtaposed EJI’s report with the canonical novel To Kill a Mockingbird to “situate[] the novel in its historical context and also raise[] important questions about race, justice and memory in our society today.”

    Since February a hundred editorials, news articles, op-eds, radio and television programs have used Lynching in America to inform, deepen, and expand a national and international conversation about how lynching shaped the geographic, political, social, and economic conditions of African Americans and reinforced a legacy of racial inequality that has never been adequately addressed, but is now being confronted in communities across the country.

    We congratulate #Ferguson on electing three new leaders and salute the first African American woman to serve on the council, Ella Jones.

  307. rq says

    Former UNH Student Goes It Alone In Criminal Court, Wins ‘Not Guilty’ Verdict. Well done!

    Generally speaking, this doesn’t happen. Litigants represent themselves frequently in civil court, but rarely do criminal defendants argue by themselves before a jury. Wilson had even refused stand-by council.

    Rockingham County Attorney Patricia Conway prosecuted the case. She says after 18 years as a prosecutor, “this is the second time I’ve had a jury trial with a pro se individual.”

    The first time, she won.

    Three attorneys from Conway’s office sat in the gallery as the trial began. They were there purely there out of curiosity, they said.

    The state doesn’t keep data on self-representing defendants. However, Superior Court Chief Justice Tina Nadeau says, from her experience, “they’re not likely to be successful.”

    Rob Wilson talks in paragraphs. He’s 29, grew up poor, was raised by his grandmother in Chicago, and moved to New Hampshire 11 years ago. “Black voices like mine aren’t always present,” he says.

    Three years ago, Wilson was student body president at UNH. But when I met him in December, he had just spent five months in jail, and was sleeping next to his laundry basket and trombone, in his SUV.

    Police had charged Wilson with felony-level criminal threatening after an altercation with his housemates in Portsmouth. They told police he threatened them with a knife. He said while there was an argument, he had never picked up a knife.

    Unable to post bail, Wilson spent 6 months in jail. Ultimately, a judge let him go on personal recognizance.

    When it came to getting an attorney, things did not go very well. Wilson says “there is a culture between public defenders and prosecutors, even their workload, that oftentimes robs people accused of a crime of the resources that they would need to defend themselves.” […]

    However, Keating says, generally speaking “I think New Hampshire has provided adequate resources for the public defenders to be able to do their job effectively, and I have every confidence in their abilities.”

    Wilson did not share that confidence.

    When it came time for trial, he opted to go it alone. “I represent ‘live free or die’ in this courtroom, even by my choice to defend myself,” Wilson says.

    In trial, Wilson brought up issues you don’t usually hear discussed in New Hampshire courtrooms. More than once, he asked jurors to question whether implicit or even explicit racial bias caused omissions in police report logs and warrant affidavits.

    Jonathan Rapping is a law professor whose public defender training program in Atlanta, “Gideon’s Promise,” won him a 2014 MacArthur Genius Grant. He says by focusing on Wilson’s own life experience and relevant social issues, “this young man did something that as a public defender trainer, many of us are trying to train our public defenders to do.”

    “If we are really going to help drive just outcomes,” Rapping says, then “we should be able to talk about the human condition and intangible factors that really do affect the way people think, and the assumptions they have.” Rapping says, “we’re struggling to get judges and lawyers to understand that this is relevant to justice.”

    County Prosecutor Patricia Conway says lawyers don’t usually use “social policy issues” to call police and witness credibility into question. But, she says, “in terms of arguing before a jury, they can really relate to those issues.”

    It’s hard to know what, exactly, led the jury to find Rob Wilson not guilty. What is certain is that as a defendant going it alone in a jury trial — he beat the odds.

    Very well done.

    Police Training 101. Cartoon: American Law Enforcement – panel 1: “Reasons to shoot: 1. The suspect has a gun”; panel 2: “2. The suspect has a toy gun”; panel 3: “3. The suspect has NO gun”; panel 4: “4. YOU have a gun”.

    The @ArtivistsStl, @tribex_stl and fellow activists would like to give you this @ChiefSLMPD

    This morning the protest was held at STL City police chief Sam Dotson’s home. Photos via @tribex_stl

    (White people) oppose living in 50% black neighborhood. With graph.

    Resisting #FuckYourBreath since 1492.

  308. rq says

    A look at the life of legendary piano man, Herbie Hancock. For the music-lovers among us.

    I am looking forward to reading pianist Herbie Hancock’s memoir, “Possibilities.” Hancock has always intrigued me–not just his music but his political/cultural views.

    Of course, I loved Hancock who joined saxophonist Wayne Shorter, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams to be a part of the Miles Davis band in the 1960s.

    Hancock was only 23 years of age at that time. I loved “Maiden Voyage” which he recorded with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, saxophonist George Coleman, bassist Ron Carter and his young buddy drummer Tony Williams in 1965.

    One of the first interviews I ever conducted was with Hancock in Toronto, Canada. I will admit I was intimidated by the thought of interviewing him.

    I was not intimidated by him as a man but his image as an icon in the music world called jazz. This interview had me on my toes.At that time Hancock was only playing straight ahead jazz.

    This was pre-fusion, or as some call it con-fusion. I found him, however, to be very humble, down to earth and easy to talk to. He put me at ease immediately. […]

    One of the funniest moments I remember about Hancock came while I was listening to him being interviewed by a “hip” Euro-Canadian radio personality. This hip cat asked Hancock what his next project was.

    Hancock said he was working on a soundtrack for the film “The Spook Who Set By The Door.” The hip cat shot back, “starring Vincent Price?”

    Hancock laughed and said, “No, a different kind of spook,” and left it there. “The Spook Who Set by the Door” is Sam Greenlee’s classic novel about an African who is trained to be a CIA agent, but recruits young Africans to fight their oppressors.

    It became a film directed by Ivan Dixon. The film was sabotaged by the powers-that-be in Hollywood. I encourage today’s youth to see this film, listen to Hancock’s music and read his book.

    Via imdb, here’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door:

    In order to improve his standing with Black voters, a White Senator starts a campaign for the CIA to recruit Black agents. However, all are graded on a curve and doomed to fail, save for a soft-spoken veteran named Dan Freeman. After grueling training in guerrilla warfare, clandestine operations and unarmed combat, he is assigned a meager job as the CIA’s token Black employee. After five years of racist and stereotyped treatment by his superiors, he quietly resigns to return to his native Chicago to work for a social services agency…by day. By night, he trains a street gang to be the vanguard in an upcoming race war, using all that the CIA has taught him…

    Going to have to find the book. Also, it turns out there’s a movie about the movie (fine, a documentary!), here: Infiltrating Hollywood: The Rise and Fall of the Spook Who Sat by the Door, and it’s comparatively recent (2011). Here’s the description:

    Infiltrating Hollywood: The Rise and Fall of the Spook Who Sat by the Door is an independent documentary on the controversial and FBI repressed 1973 black film The Spook Who Sat By the Door. The Spook Who Sat by The Door is widely hailed as a cult classic and one of the most important underground black productions of the era. Based on Sam Greenlee’s 1969 novel, a political satire and semi autobiography, the book imagined a world not very far from reality, in which integration would often occur due to the desire of organizations to appear politically correct, and not because of the belief in African American capability. In the narrative, political race baiting allows a black man to be begrudgingly trained as a CIA agent. This politicized but underground “Spook” would then use the white perception of black simplicity and inadequacy to turn the tables on the establishment and challenge the oppressive forces in his community. The Spook also urged African Americans to realize that the source of their repression existed both inside and outside of the black community. It encouraged blacks to shake off these mental and physical shackles and take back control of their lives. Sam Greenlee wrote a screenplay based on his novel and with actor/director Ivan Dixon sought to produce the film version of his novel. The film faced numerous obstacles including little to no budget and the denial of film permits to shoot in the city of Chicago, the primary location of the novel. On the other hand Sam, Ivan and their cast and crew also experienced the incredible support of African American Mayor Richard Hatcher and the city of Gary, Indiana who stepped in when Chicago Mayor Richard Daley rejected the production of the film within his city limits. Infiltrating Hollywood then reveals the Br’er Rabbit principle of African American existence as Greenlee and Dixon played off of the film industry’s expectations of black themed films in the 1970s by cutting their dailies to look like a Blaxploitation film to obtain finishing funds from a major distributor. United Artists took the bait and was dismayed at the final production of the film, however were bound by contract to release The Spook. The Spook used the veil of the Blaxploitation film era to create an oppositional narrative. Instead of images of pimps and prostitutes perpetuated by Hollywood during the 1970s, the film portrayed black people who were willing to fight for their beliefs, to achieve freedom from oppression. </blockquote<
    They keep remaking superhero movies. I think they should remake this one – or at least, revive the original.

    Listen to Officer Michael Slager laugh about the adrenaline rush from shooting Walter Scott. Here’s the thing, he’d be on adrenaline after shooting someone anyway – and I can’t, realistically, judge anyone on how they react while on adrenaline. Heck, I’ve been known to break down giggling in highly inappropriate yet stressful situations. But.
    Considering the crime, it’s really hard not to read a sort of enjoyment or malice in this specific reaction in this specific person.

    You know what else I can’t stand? Victim-blaming. Or victim-smearing. Slain Walter Scott struggled to be a better dad. Like that matters when someone’s shooting 8 bullets at your back.

    Scott is believed to have fled a police officer during a traffic stop in North Charleston because he was concerned he’d be arrested over his late child support payments. The unarmed black man was then fatally shot in the back by the cop.

    That’s the only bit I’m going to post from that article. For the first sentence. Despite the video evidence, Scott is only ‘believed’ to have fled a police officer. What else, do you think, is he doing in the videos?

    Unbelievable. The sheriff investigating the murder of #EricHarris said Bob Bates, the man who shot him, is a victim. Screencap of the relevant quote at the link.

  309. rq says

    My blockquote failed before the sentence “They keep remaking superhero movies”. Hope things are clear from there.

    The 73-year-old reserve cop who mistook his gun for a Taser

    Why was a 73-year-old insurance company executive playing cop?

    That’s the simple question many are asking more than a week after an undercover Tulsa police operation went wrong — and a white reserve deputy sheriff shot and killed an unarmed black man, apparently by accident. He has not been charged with a crime.

    When Robert Bates pulled his weapon and shot 44-year-old Eric Harris on April 2, he said he thought his handgun was his Taser. In a video released by police over the weekend, a gunshot fires and Bates says, “Oh, I shot him. I’m sorry.” It was one of at least two shootings this month in which a white officer shot and killed an unarmed black man — and it has created a backlash for many reasons, one being Bates is not a real police officer. He’s a reserve sheriff’s deputy. And some fear he wasn’t qualified to be one.

    The Tulsa World said Bates, who worked for a year as a police officer in 1964-65, served as chairman of the Re-elect Sheriff (Stanley) Glanz Committee in 2012 and donated $2,500 to Glanz’s campaign that year. The footage of the shooting was captured on another deputy’s body camera.

    What was a reserve cop, aging or otherwise, doing with a weapon? […]

    It’s not all that uncommon. Volunteer reserve officers have become a staple in the Tulsa sheriff’s department, which reportedly uses about 100 of them, as well as in many other cities. It’s not unusual for them to be out on assignment, Tulsa County Sheriff’s Maj. Shannon Clark told the Tulsa World. By trade, they’re bankers, doctors, lawyers, retired cops or even celebrities. They get varying degrees of training and they help the local police, not just by patrolling with them, usually at no cost, but also sometimes by bringing their own equipment, including weapons. Some departments even request donations in exchange for the positions. The Oakley, Mich., police department asks for $1,200, according to Salon.

    “These people drop four or five grand and dress up to look like police,” Donna LaMontaine, president of the Deputy Sheriffs Association of Michigan, told the magazine. “I have a problem with that.” […]

    In California, reserve training is broken up into three levels that total some 900 hours, the top tier ranking them as peace officers, according to Police magazine. In Dorchester County, S.C., it takes about 240 hours of field training to get access to a service weapon and a patrol car, according to the Summerville Journal Scene. In Tulsa, Bates had reportedly trained for hundreds of hours in homicide investigation and decontamination, police told the Tulsa World.

    “If they have that badge on, that means they are sworn in by the sheriff,” Capt. John Smith with the Dorchester County Sheriff’s Office, told the Journal Scene, “and the only difference between them and regular officers is they don’t get paid.”

    But there’s another difference: Most cops retire long before they’re 73; many retire in their 50s. Some police departments won’t hire anyone past age 40 for the physically demanding jobs. […]

    “The reserve program is great for departments to fall back on,” one PoliceOne member, Gordon Corey, said. “Even though most reserves are limited commission, if you have full-commissioned officers who are willing to still volunteer as reserves, that gives departments the opportunity to utilize these officers to fulfill call-ins and vacations from full-time officers. With this option, departments won’t have to worry they will make the wrong decision. With reserves who are just reserves and have full time jobs other than law enforcement jobs only make decisions based on what they learn in the reserve police academy which is far less than what a full time officer is taught in the police academy.” […]

    But the nature of the job — usually a volunteer position that varies greatly from department to department in the minimum training required — can pose a danger to the public as well.

    “I think reserves, being at work less, have that much more of an obligation to be up on their tactics, officer safety, the law, and policy,” Evan Wagner, a reserve deputy assigned to Los Angeles County’s Lakewood Sheriff Station, told Police magazine. “I think we’re often expected to be weaker in those areas and it makes a big impression when we’re competent. I make mistakes, but try not to twice. We may wear the same badge and uniform and face the same risks, but I don’t think that means we’re entitled to the trust of partners, whose lives will at times depend upon us. I think reserves have to earn regulars’ trust by visibly aspiring to keep themselves at their level of proficiency as much as possible.”

    So… police reserves, it’s a thing. Especially if you can pay.

    While on Bob Bates, is this about the same guy? Excessive force lawsuit that also names on Bob Bates, Deputy Sheriff.

    Plaintiff filed his civil rights complaint against defendants claiming that while incarcerated in the Tulsa City-County Jail, he was assaulted and beaten by Deputy Sheriffs Ramsey, Bates, and Bagby. In an order filed January 29, 1991, the district court dismissed several of plaintiff’s claims as barred by collateral estoppel and dismissed plaintiff’s remaining claims as failing to state a claim. On appeal, this court reversed the district court’s dismissal of plaintiff’s excessive force claim affirmed the court’s dismissal of plaintiff’s remaining federal claims, and remanded for further proceedings. See Miller v. Glanz, 948 F.2d 1562, 1572 (10th Cir. 1991).

    This court directed the district court to consider the collateral estoppel effect of plaintiff’s state criminal conviction on the second of two of plaintiff’s allegations of the use of excessive force. Id. at 1567. On remand the district court converted defendants’ motion to dismiss to a motion for summary judgment in order to consider materials outside the pleadings. In its order of May 6, 1992, the district court concluded that plaintiff’s excessive force claim was barred by collateral estoppel and granted the defendants summary judgment. Plaintiff returns to this court to appeal this decision. We affirm.

    That’s a lot of legobabble for me, but if that is the same Bates, then yeah, he, too, has a record of excessive force on the job.

    “Black people have to do better in order to be treated better” I guess “do better” means playing dead at this point. Included is a list of things black people shouldn’t do in order not to get killed. Basically, everything – with a name or sometimes more than one attached to each activity. Inlcudes things like Don’t carry a spatula (Sheretha Hall); Don’t sleep on the couch in your home (Aiyana Jones); Don’t let yourself get murdered by a cop purposely running you over (Tamon Robinson). Oh, and Don’t protest, even peacefully (everyone Black, ever).

    AP Was There: Original AP report of Lincoln’s assassination

    On the night Abraham Lincoln was shot, April 14, 1865, Associated Press correspondent Lawrence Gobright scrambled to report from the White House, the streets of the stricken capital, and even from the blood-stained box at Ford’s Theatre, where, in his memoir he reports he was handed the assassin’s gun and turned it over to authorities. Here is an edited version of his original AP dispatch:

    With graphic descriptions of the wound.

    The Truth About Black Twitter

    This was the network largely responsible for focusing the nation’s attention to the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last August. Witnesses to Brown’s killing broke the news via social media. Within moments, their accounts of what happened spread through the Twittersphere with the hashtags #Ferguson and #MikeBrown.

    And then there are the hashtag campaigns. #YouOKSis raises awareness for street harassment, #IAmJada calls for solidarity for victims of sexual assault, #BringBackOurGirls forces attention to the abduction of nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls, and #BlackLivesMatter gives voice to the ongoing movement to reform police practices. Black Twitter has also used its power to launch campaigns that criticize the incidents of racial tone deafness that are all too common across media. #EpicBraidLevels skewered Marie Claire’s bizarre praise for Kendall Jenner’s cornrows. #IfTheyGunnedMeDown illustrated the pejorative selection of images used in news stories about black victims of police shootings. Don Lemon, one of cable news’ most controversial broadcasters, has also been called out by Black Twitter for his routinely offensive #DonLemonLogic.

    Black Twitter is also the subject of academic inquiry. Researchers at the University of Southern California are currently engaged in one study to answer the question, “What is Black Twitter?” Late last year, Meredith Clark, a professor at the Mayborn School of Journalism at the University of North Texas, completed research with the goal of establishing a theoretical framework for exploring Black Twitter.

    I spoke with Clark to discuss Black Twitter, its composition, activities, and impact. A lightly edited and condensed version of our conversation follows. […]

    Ramsey: Was there something specific that inspired your research into Black Twitter?

    Clark: So, in 2010, as I was wrapping up my job at the Tallahassee Democrat, I found an article from Slate that had the headline, “How Black People Use Twitter.” And what I read in the article wasn’t at all reflective of how the black people that I knew used Twitter, what their interactions were, what they talked about, what hashtags they used, so on and so forth. And being a journalist I am particularly sensitive to media’s representation of black life, especially when there are so many black people out there that you can talk to. I kind of took it and held onto it for a couple of years. Later, I decided it was a community that I was interested in studying and it just kind of went from there.

    Ramsey: One interesting thing about your research is the way you outline the six-stage process of “being Black Twitter.” Can you break that down for me?

    Clark: What I observed in my research was this process that the communicators went to, specifically to find some sort of redress as far as the media was concerned. That process started with first identifying as a black person who is interested in the topic that is being discussed. You kind of have to have that background and a comprehension of the language that’s being used to talk about whatever the issue of the day is.

    Then there’s self-selection, which is deciding to actually participate in the conversation. And participation is marked by a certain degree of performance. That performance could be choosing to use a hashtag, choosing to use the semantic content in your tweet to make a very specific point. It could be re-tweeting or saving somebody’s tweet. These are ways of indicating to other people, both those that follow you and those who are part of this conversation, that you’re invested in this conversation.

    After that performance, there’s affirmation. You see a lot of conversation back and forth between people about things. That lets communicators know that they are not alone in this conversation, that there is someone there that’s paying attention that is willing to be engaged.

    And then re-affirmation. And that’s when you see the conversations that are had online reflected in offline spaces. So when you see them being covered by certain news media personalities; when you and your girlfriend talk about something that came up on Twitter a couple days ago; when you see panel discussions and public forums that use information that’s spread via Twitter. You specifically see this with hashtags.

    The last part of the process is what I call “vindication.” That’s looking for some kind of change in the physical world. And we’ve seen that where people lose jobs, where people make public apologies for things that they have said that have been brought to light via Twitter.

  310. rq says

    Ramsey: This discussion of hashtags brings me to some questions about the role of public-private conversation. It seems that many of the conversation had within Black Twitter are purposeful and have some public utility. What would you say is the role of the public-private conversation in the black community and on Black Twitter?

    Clark: First, and the point that a number of people miss is that, even though this conversation is being had in a public space, similar to the conversations that are had in third spaces. Just because you’re privy to it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can use it any way that you like. As journalists, you and I would take ethical issue with quoting and using someone’s name, information that we overheard by virtue of being in the same place as someone else. If you turned in a story tomorrow with a quotes from a person that you knew that you weren’t talking to, but you simply overheard their conversation at Starbucks tomorrow, your editor would look at you crazy.

    But those public-private conversations do give you an opportunity to learn from someone where you don’t necessarily have to interact with them. Where people have those conversations, their timelines are public and they are engaging in conversations so that other people are able to see it. You can take it as a learning opportunity. That’s something that a number of my participants mentioned to me, that they did not mind that people were reading their timelines, were listening to those conversations. In some cases, those conversations were indeed meant to teach people about things that they did not know about. In some cases, they are a way to avoid the awkward workplace conversations with a person who’s from a different cultural group, and still give someone some very necessary information.

    Should I stop linking to tweets?

    Ramsey: What do researchers and journalists get wrong most often when writing and thinking about Black Twitter?

    Clark: One problem that I have, and this is because I’m an ethnographer, is when writers simply copy and paste tweets from Twitter. And as a researcher, that’s problematic because these individuals haven’t consented to having their information used in that way. Even though Twitter’s terms of service say that what you put there is public, and it might be used in a certain way. We’re now starting to see blowback from individuals who never really see that coming.

    And then I just don’t see enough engagement with these individuals who are starting certain hashtags, raising particular conversations. The fact that I don’t see them directly quoted, and the fact that I don’t see them being interviewed, I don’t see widespread efforts to actually understand their views, their community, the people that they’re tweeting with and to. That’s an issue.

    … *thoughts*

    Support Feidin Santana

    The Rutherford Law Firm, LLC, undertook to represent Feidin Santana after Feidin witnessed the horrific shooting of Walter Scott on April 4, 2015.

    “As I was walking to work, I saw a scuffle ensue between two men (who have since been identified as Officer Michael Slager and Walter Scott) in a grassy, open area. After observing the two men struggle on the ground and hearing the sound of a Taser gun, I began filming the altercation with my cell phone. The video shows Officer Slager draw his gun and fire eight shots at Mr. Scott as Mr. Scott attempted to run in the opposite direction. When I later learned that Mr. Scott died from the gunshot wounds inflicted by Officer Slager, I mustered up the courage to show the recording of the incident to Mr. Scott’s family. While I initially thought about erasing the video, fearing that my life would be in danger if I came forward, I soon realized I needed to take a stand against such brutality. I realized the importance of serving as a voice for Mr. Scott and the many others who no longer have one.”

    Feidin was born and spent most of his childhood in the Dominican Republic. At the age of thirteen, he moved to the United States when his grandmother—who was a permanent resident—petitioned for her children and minor grandchildren to join her in New Jersey. His family lived in New Jersey for a year and a half before relocating to New York. After spending a year in New York, Feidin’s parents decided that Rhode Island was a better location—as residing there would allow for more comfort and better opportunity—and uprooted the family once again. When Feidin turned eighteen years old, he elected to move back to the Dominican Republic to pursue a baseball career. At the conclusion of his baseball career in 2013, Feidin returned to the United States, making his home in North Charleston, South Carolina. He currently resides there and supports his family, some of whom still live in the Dominican Republic—by working as a barber. Unfortunately, Feidin does not have a vehicle to travel to and from his place of employment. As such, any donations received would be used for the purchase of a vehicle and the continued support of his family. Thank you, in advance, for your kindness and your generosity.

    Republicans looking forward to using less racism, more sexism. For a refreshing change.

    “Hillary Clinton officially running is a breath of fresh air,” said RNC deputy vice-chair Robert Gilligan.

    “For almost eight years now we’ve had to rely on thinly veiled questions about Obama’s citizenship and him “being different” than the average American. Now we can look forward to finally switching gears with thinly veiled questions about the time of the month or her “emotional state.”

    On Twitter, many Republican voters have consistently attacked President Obama for years, making full use of America’s free speech by employing words like “monkey”, “coon” all the way to “ni**er”. With Clinton’s announcement, the base has shifted the public discourse online to include words like “Ice Queen” “Crazy Bitch” all the way to “C*nt.”

    Gilligan went on to say that there is a legitimate question of whether or not Hillary Clinton “has the stones” to be America’s Commander-in-chief.

    “Would you want Hillary Clinton answering that call at 3:00am? Will she be able to handle it or will she have a headache?”

    At press time, Republican voters who once asked Obama to release his birth certificate were busy embracing Canadian-born Ted Cruz.

    Victims of Chicago gun violence memorialized in lifelike statues. They certainly have presence.

    As Bonita Foster bounded toward the busy, sunny plaza at the corner of Huron and Rush streets, her stomach fluttered.

    “Just as I was coming around the wall, I got a butterfly,” Foster said. “… Almost like I was coming around the corner to meet Porshe. But she’s not here.”

    It has been more than two years since her 15-year-old daughter was shot and killed as she visited friends on the Southwest Side. As part of a public art exhibit highlighting gun violence, Porshe’s shape — height, weight and teenage casual stance — had been carefully studied and sculpted with plaster over wire mesh before she was dressed in her distinct style. Missing was an image of her face, done intentionally to highlight her family’s loss.

    Foster was heading into the plaza to view the lifelike statue for the first time.

    There her daughter was, in a swingy skirt, knit gray hat and scarf, fitted jacket and black leggings, one foot flipped back.

    “It’s a good look. It looks like something she would wear,” Foster said quietly as she looked at the mannequinlike sculpture.

    Porshe was one of eight victims of gun violence featured in the exhibit on display Friday at the St. James Cathedral plaza.

    The exhibit is part of “Unforgotten,” a public awareness campaign by the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence that will be traveling around the state, but Friday’s event provided the first chance for families of the eight victims to view the statues.

    Curious passers-by also wandered into the plaza, leaning in close to gaze at the vacant faces of the statues. A woman walking by couldn’t manage any words and teared up. A young child sat on a bench next to the statue of Terrell Bosley, a bass guitar case slung over his back. Bosley, who played in a church band, was fatally shot in 2006 as he helped a bandmate unload drums from a car.

    “These are all victims of gun violence in Chicago?” Lettie Tokarski asked as she wandered onto the plaza with her husband. “Heartbreaking.”

    Image of North Charleston officer Michael Slager shooting man in back w/ Taser during 2014 traffic stop. #WalterScott
    Julius Wilson, man who police say refused to get out of car and was tased by Slager, to talk. #WalterScott

    Kendrick Lamar: Shapeshifter

    Just like a writer, Kendrick is complicated and massive. On the one hand, he is an artist who is promoting self-love amongst Black people so much that media outlets, such as Slate, are debating if his Blackness is “overwhelming.” On the other hand, this emphasis on spiritual renewal and self-esteem boosting amongst Blacks tends to steer the focus on social issues away from White supremacy and toward Black attitudes. While Kendrick did express regret over Michael Brown’s death, In his biggest moment of controversy, his words gave many people the impression that he believed it was Brown’s fault more so than Darren Wilson’s. Although we should hold Kendrick accountable for whatever he says, raps and writes, we mustn’t neglect that the fact that an artist is never a fixed person either in presentation nor through a given body of work. “To Pimp A Butterfly” exemplifies this. The album sees Kendrick in the final form of his singular artistic and literary mode: as a shapeshifter mastering a multitude of voices and perspectives.

    It starts with the title. Consider Kendrick’s faith and the fact that butterflies are symbolic of Christ’s resurrection. In Greek myth, the goddess Psyche, representative of the soul, is depicted in ancient mosaics as a butterfly. On the surface level, a butterfly represents metamorphosis in a corporeal sense. With this symbolism in mind, Kendrick’s employ of perspective itself as a character can be seen in an enhanced light. His soul is changing as he oscillates between what he once was and what he is destined to be, and while the various states of mind are part of his cast along with the concrete characters, the concept of changing focus is given character as well. I think it was intentional for Kendrick to wait until “Mortal Man,”the last track of the album, to explain the title:

    The butterfly represents talent, the thoughtfulness, and the beauty within the caterpillar … the caterpillar sees the butterfly as weak and figures out a way to pimp it to his own benefits…the caterpillar goes to work on the cocoon which institutionalizes him … certain ideas start to take root … The result? Wings begin to emerge … the butterfly sheds light on situations that the caterpillar never considered, ending the internal struggle … Although the butterfly and caterpillar are completely different, they are one and the same.

    “To Pimp A Butterfly” is arguably a confession conveyed to the listener that as Kendrick’s star rises, he is traipsing along an Odyssean journey, with the Scylla and Charybdis embodying warring states of his own persona. He is the butterfly and the caterpillar in the midst of a brutal and self-debilitating evolution. He is complicated to us all because his own psyche is confusing. His story is polyphonic.

    Literary analysis follows.

  311. rq says

    Ramsey: This discussion of hashtags brings me to some questions about the role of public-private conversation. It seems that many of the conversation had within Black Twitter are purposeful and have some public utility. What would you say is the role of the public-private conversation in the black community and on Black Twitter?

    Clark: First, and the point that a number of people miss is that, even though this conversation is being had in a public space, similar to the conversations that are had in third spaces. Just because you’re privy to it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can use it any way that you like. As journalists, you and I would take ethical issue with quoting and using someone’s name, information that we overheard by virtue of being in the same place as someone else. If you turned in a story tomorrow with a quotes from a person that you knew that you weren’t talking to, but you simply overheard their conversation at Starbucks tomorrow, your editor would look at you crazy.

    But those public-private conversations do give you an opportunity to learn from someone where you don’t necessarily have to interact with them. Where people have those conversations, their timelines are public and they are engaging in conversations so that other people are able to see it. You can take it as a learning opportunity. That’s something that a number of my participants mentioned to me, that they did not mind that people were reading their timelines, were listening to those conversations. In some cases, those conversations were indeed meant to teach people about things that they did not know about. In some cases, they are a way to avoid the awkward workplace conversations with a person who’s from a different cultural group, and still give someone some very necessary information.

    Should I stop linking to tweets?

    Ramsey: What do researchers and journalists get wrong most often when writing and thinking about Black Twitter?

    Clark: One problem that I have, and this is because I’m an ethnographer, is when writers simply copy and paste tweets from Twitter. And as a researcher, that’s problematic because these individuals haven’t consented to having their information used in that way. Even though Twitter’s terms of service say that what you put there is public, and it might be used in a certain way. We’re now starting to see blowback from individuals who never really see that coming.

    And then I just don’t see enough engagement with these individuals who are starting certain hashtags, raising particular conversations. The fact that I don’t see them directly quoted, and the fact that I don’t see them being interviewed, I don’t see widespread efforts to actually understand their views, their community, the people that they’re tweeting with and to. That’s an issue.

    … *thoughts*

    Support Feidin Santana

    The Rutherford Law Firm, LLC, undertook to represent Feidin Santana after Feidin witnessed the horrific shooting of Walter Scott on April 4, 2015.

    “As I was walking to work, I saw a scuffle ensue between two men (who have since been identified as Officer Michael Slager and Walter Scott) in a grassy, open area. After observing the two men struggle on the ground and hearing the sound of a Taser gun, I began filming the altercation with my cell phone. The video shows Officer Slager draw his gun and fire eight shots at Mr. Scott as Mr. Scott attempted to run in the opposite direction. When I later learned that Mr. Scott died from the gunshot wounds inflicted by Officer Slager, I mustered up the courage to show the recording of the incident to Mr. Scott’s family. While I initially thought about erasing the video, fearing that my life would be in danger if I came forward, I soon realized I needed to take a stand against such brutality. I realized the importance of serving as a voice for Mr. Scott and the many others who no longer have one.”

    Feidin was born and spent most of his childhood in the Dominican Republic. At the age of thirteen, he moved to the United States when his grandmother—who was a permanent resident—petitioned for her children and minor grandchildren to join her in New Jersey. His family lived in New Jersey for a year and a half before relocating to New York. After spending a year in New York, Feidin’s parents decided that Rhode Island was a better location—as residing there would allow for more comfort and better opportunity—and uprooted the family once again. When Feidin turned eighteen years old, he elected to move back to the Dominican Republic to pursue a baseball career. At the conclusion of his baseball career in 2013, Feidin returned to the United States, making his home in North Charleston, South Carolina. He currently resides there and supports his family, some of whom still live in the Dominican Republic—by working as a barber. Unfortunately, Feidin does not have a vehicle to travel to and from his place of employment. As such, any donations received would be used for the purchase of a vehicle and the continued support of his family. Thank you, in advance, for your kindness and your generosity.

    Republicans looking forward to using less racism, more sexism. For a refreshing change.

    “Hillary Clinton officially running is a breath of fresh air,” said RNC deputy vice-chair Robert Gilligan.

    “For almost eight years now we’ve had to rely on thinly veiled questions about Obama’s citizenship and him “being different” than the average American. Now we can look forward to finally switching gears with thinly veiled questions about the time of the month or her “emotional state.”

    On Twitter, many Republican voters have consistently attacked President Obama for years, making full use of America’s free speech by employing words like “monkey”, “coon” all the way to “ni**er”. With Clinton’s announcement, the base has shifted the public discourse online to include words like “Ice Queen” “Crazy B*tch” all the way to “C*nt.”

    Gilligan went on to say that there is a legitimate question of whether or not Hillary Clinton “has the stones” to be America’s Commander-in-chief.

    “Would you want Hillary Clinton answering that call at 3:00am? Will she be able to handle it or will she have a headache?”

    At press time, Republican voters who once asked Obama to release his birth certificate were busy embracing Canadian-born Ted Cruz.

    Victims of Chicago gun violence memorialized in lifelike statues. They certainly have presence.

    As Bonita Foster bounded toward the busy, sunny plaza at the corner of Huron and Rush streets, her stomach fluttered.

    “Just as I was coming around the wall, I got a butterfly,” Foster said. “… Almost like I was coming around the corner to meet Porshe. But she’s not here.”

    It has been more than two years since her 15-year-old daughter was shot and killed as she visited friends on the Southwest Side. As part of a public art exhibit highlighting gun violence, Porshe’s shape — height, weight and teenage casual stance — had been carefully studied and sculpted with plaster over wire mesh before she was dressed in her distinct style. Missing was an image of her face, done intentionally to highlight her family’s loss.

    Foster was heading into the plaza to view the lifelike statue for the first time.

    There her daughter was, in a swingy skirt, knit gray hat and scarf, fitted jacket and black leggings, one foot flipped back.

    “It’s a good look. It looks like something she would wear,” Foster said quietly as she looked at the mannequinlike sculpture.

    Porshe was one of eight victims of gun violence featured in the exhibit on display Friday at the St. James Cathedral plaza.

    The exhibit is part of “Unforgotten,” a public awareness campaign by the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence that will be traveling around the state, but Friday’s event provided the first chance for families of the eight victims to view the statues.

    Curious passers-by also wandered into the plaza, leaning in close to gaze at the vacant faces of the statues. A woman walking by couldn’t manage any words and teared up. A young child sat on a bench next to the statue of Terrell Bosley, a bass guitar case slung over his back. Bosley, who played in a church band, was fatally shot in 2006 as he helped a bandmate unload drums from a car.

    “These are all victims of gun violence in Chicago?” Lettie Tokarski asked as she wandered onto the plaza with her husband. “Heartbreaking.”

    Image of North Charleston officer Michael Slager shooting man in back w/ Taser during 2014 traffic stop. #WalterScott
    Julius Wilson, man who police say refused to get out of car and was tased by Slager, to talk. #WalterScott

    Kendrick Lamar: Shapeshifter

    Just like a writer, Kendrick is complicated and massive. On the one hand, he is an artist who is promoting self-love amongst Black people so much that media outlets, such as Slate, are debating if his Blackness is “overwhelming.” On the other hand, this emphasis on spiritual renewal and self-esteem boosting amongst Blacks tends to steer the focus on social issues away from White supremacy and toward Black attitudes. While Kendrick did express regret over Michael Brown’s death, In his biggest moment of controversy, his words gave many people the impression that he believed it was Brown’s fault more so than Darren Wilson’s. Although we should hold Kendrick accountable for whatever he says, raps and writes, we mustn’t neglect that the fact that an artist is never a fixed person either in presentation nor through a given body of work. “To Pimp A Butterfly” exemplifies this. The album sees Kendrick in the final form of his singular artistic and literary mode: as a shapeshifter mastering a multitude of voices and perspectives.

    It starts with the title. Consider Kendrick’s faith and the fact that butterflies are symbolic of Christ’s resurrection. In Greek myth, the goddess Psyche, representative of the soul, is depicted in ancient mosaics as a butterfly. On the surface level, a butterfly represents metamorphosis in a corporeal sense. With this symbolism in mind, Kendrick’s employ of perspective itself as a character can be seen in an enhanced light. His soul is changing as he oscillates between what he once was and what he is destined to be, and while the various states of mind are part of his cast along with the concrete characters, the concept of changing focus is given character as well. I think it was intentional for Kendrick to wait until “Mortal Man,”the last track of the album, to explain the title:

    The butterfly represents talent, the thoughtfulness, and the beauty within the caterpillar … the caterpillar sees the butterfly as weak and figures out a way to pimp it to his own benefits…the caterpillar goes to work on the cocoon which institutionalizes him … certain ideas start to take root … The result? Wings begin to emerge … the butterfly sheds light on situations that the caterpillar never considered, ending the internal struggle … Although the butterfly and caterpillar are completely different, they are one and the same.

    “To Pimp A Butterfly” is arguably a confession conveyed to the listener that as Kendrick’s star rises, he is traipsing along an Odyssean journey, with the Scylla and Charybdis embodying warring states of his own persona. He is the butterfly and the caterpillar in the midst of a brutal and self-debilitating evolution. He is complicated to us all because his own psyche is confusing. His story is polyphonic.

    Literary analysis follows.

  312. rq says

    Black Death as Reality TV: Is Watching the Videos Too Much? Saw these videos contrasted with ISIS beheading videos, which are often deemed too inflamatory and traumatic to view.

    We learn their names. We tweet their hashtags. We watch them publicly executed in grainy surveillance or cellphone recordings. Then we wait for another judge, cop or politician to tell us that we didn’t just witness a lynching by service weapon—or, in the case of Eric Garner, banned choke hold—right before our eyes.

    This was the case with 12-year-old Tamir Rice, gunned down on the playground by Officer Timothy Loehmann, an unfit and unstable thug with a badge. It was the case with 22-year-old John Crawford III. And most recently, it was the case with 50-year-old Walter Scott, who was fleeing after a traffic stop when Police Officer Michael Slager fired eight rounds at his back. Slager lied and said he feared for his life, but bystander Feidin Santana’s video shows him fatally shooting Scott with chilling casualty.

    Kill. Rinse blood. Repeat.

    Every day in this country, African-American communities are occupied by police officers infected with racial bias so entrenched that we know the next bullet could have our son’s or daughter’s name on it simply because they exist while black.

    For that reason, many of us can’t look away when video of another extrajudicial killing is uploaded to the Internet or repeatedly shown on television for public consumption, feeling that it’s our duty to bear witness to the indignities inflicted upon black flesh.

    It is what Tanya Brown tacitly asked of us when she said of her son Brandon Tate-Brown, who was fatally shot in the head by a Philadelphia police officer last year during a traffic stop, “I told the funeral director not to put him in any makeup because I needed to see his face. I needed to see what they did to him.”

    And 60 years ago, it is what Mamie Till asked of us when she displayed her son Emmett’s disfigured body in an open casket: “I think everybody needed to know what happened to Emmett Till … I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby.”

    Some critics believe that consumption of these videos and images not only disrespects the dead but also exposes a glaring difference between how black lives are devalued in comparison with their white counterparts. This is a valid critique and one I’ve wrestled with myself as the bodies of black people continue to pile up like characters on a morbid reality-TV series. […]

    Where is the line between spreading awareness and necrophilic voyeurism, particularly when mainstream media outlets, who are often complicit in shaping narratives of black criminality, exploit black death for page views and Nielsen ratings? How do we, as black people in America, reckon with our need to visually amplify evidence of consistent and brutal injustice, while also understanding that “If it bleeds, it leads” media tactics often consist of packaging black dehumanization for white audiences who won’t give a damn past the 6 o’clock news unless it’s to say they deserved it?

    Even as we acknowledge these questions, it is difficult to turn away from the full brunt of brutality on display in those videos. It’s almost impossible not to let it seep under our skin and into our bones, to shoulder some of it and, in some ways, subconsciously attempt to build emotional armor against it in preparation for the next time that inevitably always comes.

    So, does our need to see the violence make us complicit in minimizing the sacredness of black life?
    […]

    There will never be any easy answers here because behind every hashtag memorial and media report, there lived a human being. And the desire to protect the sanctity of their bodies in death when they were denied that dignity in life is instinctive.

    Still, Scott’s last seconds are a microcosm of black America’s existence within both the historical and contemporary confines of white supremacy: murdered by racism, handcuffed in the name of justice and framed as a threat even in death.

    And the flagrant and systemic disregard for black life is something that we can never look away from—even when, especially when, it’s uncomfortable.

    Why We Should Keep Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks Off the $20 Bill – an opinion.

    After a “robust” voting process spearheaded by W20, the civil rights icons, along with former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Wilma Mankiller, the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation, were selected from a multigenerational pool of accomplished women spanning diverse industries.

    “We believe this simple, symbolic and long overdue change could be an important stepping stone for other initiatives promoting gender equality,” said W20 on its website. “Our money does say something about us, about what we value.”

    Yes, it absolutely does and that “something” is not black women. No amount of subversive symbolism changes that fact.

    This country was founded on the idea that all white men are created equal and no one else. As such, Andrew Jackson—slave owner, seventh president of the United States and current face on the $20 bill—represents exactly the values and ethics upon which this country was founded. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig: the pig in this case being a capitalist structure hell-bent on the expansion, maintenance and protection of white supremacy at any costs.

    Specifically, there is something both distasteful and ironic about putting a black woman’s face on the most frequently counterfeited and most commonly traded dollar bill in this country. Haven’t we been commodified and trafficked enough? Slapping a black female face, one of our radical icons, on a $20 bill as if it’s some attainment of the American dream would be adding insult to injury.

    When nearly half of all single African-American women have zero or negative wealth and their median wealth is $100—compared to just over $41,000 for single white American women—it is an insult. When black women are the fuel for the prison industrial complex, with incarceration rates increasing 800 percent since 1986 and black girls being the fastest-growing population of a corrupt juvenile-criminal system, it is an insult. When African-American women earn on average 64 cents (pdf) for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men, compared to the 78 cents that white women earn for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men, it is an insult.

    And frankly, putting a white woman’s face on a bill would be akin to Hillary Clinton’s being the president of the United States; a woman’s face on the same old racist, patriarchal political system that continues in both insidious and blatant ways to disenfranchise women and people of color.

    That’s not progress. It’s hush money. […]

    Though I’m sure WomenOn20s and its approximately 256,000 voters mean well, the very narrow lens through which they appear to view gender equality and sociopolitical progress leaves very little room for the lived experiences of black women throughout America’s history and into the present day; in fact, it erases them.

    And the cost of that erasure is a hell of a lot more than $20.

    Food for thought.

    Protestors from Knoxville, Tennessee have arrived in North Charleston. #WalterScott

    Abe Lincoln pops up again! Abraham Lincoln would despise you all: Race, the South and the GOP’s most delusional fantasy

    In an extraordinary amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court to oppose gay marriage, the attorney general of South Carolina recently declared that the Republican congressmen who framed the 14th Amendment intended only to prohibit discrimination against African-American men. Nothing more. Discrimination against women, people of other races and, of course, people who practice religions other than evangelical Christianity, is, according to the brief, perfectly in line with the intent of the 14th Amendment.

    If you listen carefully, you can hear Abraham Lincoln rolling in his grave.

    President Lincoln, and the Republican Party he helped found, fought a war against men who believed the law should discriminate against different classes of people.

    At stake in Lincoln’s era was not just the future of black slavery, but also the nature of America. The Declaration of Independence said that all men are created equal, but the Founding Fathers had also permitted black slavery in the new nation. Free labor and the slave system coexisted uneasily until 1848, when the country acquired the vast West from Mexico. These lands were extensive: they would later make up California, Nevada, and Utah, and parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming. Would they be settled by men who believed in human equality, or by men who practiced legal slavery?

    Complicating the question, there were already Mexicans and American Indians living in the newly acquired regions. The California gold fields were also part of the new territory, and they immediately attracted impoverished Chinese men to America. How would these non-white peoples fit into the nation? […]

    The establishment of different castes of Americans reflected a larger redefinition of American society. Southern slave owners defended inequality as the proper form of American life. In Congress, South Carolina Sen. James Henry Hammond explained that most men were drudges: stupid, unskilled workers who were strong, docile, and loyal to their betters. Members of this “mudsill” class — the derogatory name he coined for America’s slaves and wage earners — were dumb enough to be happy where they were, and would never rise. Atop this “mudsill,” according to the senator, rested higher civilization — those gentlemen who led “progress, civilization, and refinement,” — men like him, who should control society.

    Plenty of Americans were willing to buy into this version of society, so long as it meant there was someone below them. Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, one of the most prominent Democrats of his day, ridiculed the idea that all men in America should have equal rights before the law. “This government… was made by white men for the benefit of white men,” he said. Crowds of white men responded with cheers.

    But men like Abraham Lincoln opposed this new, caste vision of America. If slavery depended on skin color, he mused, then any man could be enslaved to a man with lighter skin than him. If it was based on intelligence, then any man was inferior to a man with a better intellect. Lincoln saw where this argument led. “Say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.” He spelled out what this idea of different legal castes meant for the country in an 1855 letter to his friend Joshua Speed. “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,” he wrote. “As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this,” Lincoln concluded, “I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.”

    Publicly, he stood firm on the argument he had privately made to Speed. Americans must stand equal before the law. “I should like to know,” he mused in response to Douglas’ insistence that the government should belong to white man alone, “taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, and making exceptions to it, where will it stop? If one man says it does not mean a negro, why may not another man say it does not mean another man?”

    Few native-born Americans cared about the fate of black slaves or Chinese immigrants, but many found it a matter of grave concern to hear southern planters begin to define wage earners like themselves as a permanent underclass that had no right to legal protection. Either the nation was one in which every man had an equal right to make what he could of himself, or it was one in which the government, through discriminatory laws, determined a man’s fate. In America, they insisted, every man had a right to decide his own destiny. […]

    To kill the idea of legal castes once and for all, Republicans in Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, declaring that, with the exception of certain Indians, “all persons born in the United States” were citizens entitled to “full and equal benefit of the laws,” notwithstanding any law, statute, ordinance, regulation or custom to the contrary.

    President Johnson vetoed this law, expressing his astonishment at its extraordinary declaration. Surely “the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks, people of color, negroes, mulattoes, and persons of African blood,” were not equal to white people, he wrote in his veto message. Republicans answered him definitively. They overrode his veto and put the exact same language that had appalled Johnson into the 14th Amendment.

    President Lincoln was murdered by a Southerner who insisted that America was a country for white men only. But when Lincoln breathed his last at 7:22 on the morning of April 15, 1865—150 years ago this week– he had not simply helped to end slavery. He had given his life for a nation finally dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

    @delafro_ I hate that our black women are left to be forgotten. Smh. Attached picture to an article titled “Media Blackout when police kill unarmed African American women”.

  313. rq says

    Police Reform Is Impossible in America. Is it? Is it, really? Impossible, and not just extremely difficult and slow?

    In recent weeks, the White House has reaffirmed its commitment to strengthening “community policing” around the country. The U.S. Conference of Mayors has coalesced around the same theme, releasing a report days ago with recommendations for community policing measures to be adopted nationally. The suggestions for building better “relationships” and boosting “trust” are comprehensive but, for a national crisis brought on by the killing of unarmed black people, there’s one thing conspicuously absent from the public policy solutions: the acknowledgement of racism.

    The New Testament says that faith is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Well, in the absence of data to support excessive policing and police brutality in communities of color, it appears that America has just stepped out on faith.

    Rates of violent crime are down and have been falling sharply for more than 20 years. In fact, since the early 90s, the national homicide rate has fallen by 51 percent, forcible rapes have declined by 35 percent, robberies have decreased by 56 percent and the rate of aggravated assault has been cut by 45 percent. And black Americans have contributed to the decline. For blacks, rates of robbery and serious property offenses are the lowest they’ve been in more than 40 years. Murder, rape, assault, domestic violence—all down.

    America is safer than it was 20 years ago. Really. Still, white Americans (and many black Americans, for that matter) believe there’s more violent crime than there actually is, and that blacks are largely responsible for it.

    In fact, nearly half of white Americans polled believe that violent crime has increased in the last 20 years. Another 13 percent believe that it’s stayed the same. Less than a quarter of whites realize there are less violent crimes today than there were in the 90s when the crack epidemic and gang violence were at their height. Even more, whites overestimate just how much blacks are involved in “serious street crime” and, on average, believe that black people commit a larger proportion of crime than whites do. According to a 2012 study by researchers at the University at Albany, whites significantly overestimate the share of armed robberies, break-ins and drug crimes committed by black people. […]

    In the summer of 1963, Boston public television aired “The Negro and the American Promise,” an hour-long examination of racial tension in America featuring interviews with Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin conducted by renowned psychologist Kenneth Clark. During his segment, Baldwin delivered a blistering indictment of the white American psyche that is essential to untangle the myth of black criminality and its serviceability to American identity and feelings of security.

    “What white people have to do,” Baldwin offers, “is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a N*gg*r in the first place…If I’m not a N*gg*r here and you invented him, you, the white people, invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that.”

    “N*gg*r” as used by Baldwin is, of course, more than an epithet. It is arguably the very articulation of racism in this country. Its utterance summons a phantom that is as essential to American identity as the American Dream and the Pursuit of Happiness. So, when Baldwin talks about the creation of the N*gg*r, he’s speaking to more than the word. He is assigning responsibility for a construct that has permeated every single American institution, one essential to the nation’s founding and development.

    Willie Horton, for example, was not the N*gg*r but it was conjured out of his cold stare, from OJ’s courtroom smirk and even seen by some in the form of our “contemptuous” attorney general. Darren Wilson invoked the N*gg*r quite adeptly in his testimony before a grand jury to convince them it was necessary to shoot an unarmed Michael Brown at least six times.

    “He looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked,” said Wilson about the moments before he fired the first bullet into Brown. […]

    I am not white. The N*gg*r has never been of any use to me so, unfortunately, I don’t think the question is mine to answer. I do have my theories, though. I imagine, like Coates seems to, that identifying blacks as this country’s criminals helps white Americans dismiss their own criminal activity as incidental (teenage drug use, insider trading, mass shootings, etc). But I think it also must help to organize their fear in an uncertain world. Like “Goldstein” in Orwell’s 1984, perhaps the N*gg*er gives white Americans something specific to fear so they don’t fear everything—including themselves and each other.

    Ultimately, the contrast between the reality of black crime and this nation’s perception of it reveals just how invested in the myth of the N*gg*r America actually is. And, as protesters push forward and leaders federal and local circle around “community policing” as reform, Baldwin’s question will only become more urgent. White Americans of good conscience will have to confront their boogeyman head on. Because the truth is that there can be no “community policing” in black communities without engaging the community, without engaging black people and our distortion in the American imagination.

    This: “helps white Americans dismiss their own criminal activity as incidental” recalls the ‘isolated incident’ arguments so often brought up.

    The North Charleston PD is on the lot where protestors have gathered, in marked & unmarked cars. #WalterScott

    They charged him! They charged him!!! Oklahoma Reserve Deputy, 73, Charged With Second-Degree Manslaughter in Stun-Gun Mix-Up: Tulsa DA Wish they’d stop using that smiley photo of him, though. Will this lead to justice for Eric Harris? Doubtful. Nice gesture, though, as gestures go.

    The 73-year-old volunteer reserve deputy in Oklahoma who fatally shot a suspect in an incident that the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office called “inadvertent” has now been charged with second-degree manslaughter, the Tulsa County District Attorney’s Office said today.

    Reserve deputy Robert Bates shot and killed Eric Harris April 2 after the deputy allegedly mistook his handgun for a stun-gun, officials said.

    “Mr. Bates is charged with Second-Degree Manslaughter involving culpable negligence. Oklahoma law defines culpable negligence as ‘the omission to do something which a reasonably careful person would do, or the lack of the usual ordinary care and caution in the performance of an act usually and ordinarily exercised by a person under similar circumstances and conditions,” Tulsa County District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler said in a statement today.

    “The defendant is presumed to be innocent under the law but we will be prepared to present evidence at future court hearings.”

    ABC News has been unable to reach Bates, and a message left at his daughter’s home has not been returned.

    North Charleston. Protest. Moral Monday. #WalterScott

  315. rq says

    Press conference on Eric Harris: unfortunately I don’t have time to listen, but maybe someone does.
    Oklahoma Deputy Sheriff Robert Bates Charged With Manslaughter in Suspect’s Shooting Death

    A Tulsa, Oklahoma reserve sheriff’s deputy was charged with second-degree manslaughter Monday for the shooting death of an unarmed black man, the local district attorney said.

    The charges against Robert Charles Bates came hours after the family of the dead man, Eric Courtney Harris, accused deputies of treating him inhumanely after he was shot at the conclusion of an April 2 foot chase stemming from a sting operation in which Harris had allegedly arranged to sell a gun to undercover officers from the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office Violent Crimes Task Force.

    Video footage of the incident showed Harris writhing on the ground and complaining that he was having trouble breathing. An unidentified officer can be heard responding, “F–k your breath.”

    Harris’ family release a statement Monday calling the response “appalling.” The relatives added, “No human being deserves to be treated with such contempt.”

    Bates, 73, an insurance agent who’d served as a reserve deputy since 2008, thought he was using a Taser on Harris, but shot him with a gun instead, sheriff’s officer investigators have said.

    In the video, Bates can be heard shouting”Taser! Taser!” before firing a single round from his sidearm, hitting Harris, who was pinned to the ground by officers.

    Bates quickly realized his mistake: “I shot him! I’m sorry!” he is heard saying.

    Harris was taken to the hospital, where he died about an hour later.

    The Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office defended Bates last week, saying he committed no crime, noting that officers chasing Harris had good reason to fear that he was armed. Tulsa Police Sgt. Jim Clarke, who reviewed the incident for the sheriff’s office, called the shooting an accident attributable to a faulty response to stressful situations called “slip and capture.”

    They then turned the investigation over to Tulsa County District Attorney Stephen Kunzweiler, who on Monday announced the second-degree manslaughter charges.

    Underpinning the charge is a finding of what he called in a statement “culpable negligence,” which Kunzweiler defined as “the omission to do something which a reasonably careful person would do, or the lack of the usual ordinary care and caution in the performance of an act usually and ordinarily exercised by a person under similar circumstances and conditions.”

    Harris’ family accused Clarke and the sheriff’s department of seeking to protect Bates, who, according to the Tulsa World newspaper was a chairman of Sheriff Stanley Glanz’s 2012 re-election campaign, to which he donated $2,500.

    In an interview with the paper, Glanz said he had been friends with Bates for about 50 years, and that Bates had been his insurance agent. But Glanz said he had not given Bates preferential treatment.

    There’s a video link at the link with more.
    Tulsa DA: “The significance of the Eric Harris shooting is that we lost a really good person despite what people are saying”

    @deray 2nd degree manslaughter only carries a $1000 fine in OK!!! Plus up to 4 years in jail, I hear. Sounds adequate? Hm.

    Also, people still wondering what will happen with the officer who said ‘Fuck your breath’.

  318. rq says

    More people showing up at north charleston city hall #chsnews #WalterScott

    5 protestors are entering City Hall to meet with the North Charleston Mayor. #WalterScott

    Police violence getting worse says Berkeley Copwatch founder.

    Is the violence of police, security guards, and vigilantes getting worse, or is it just that more of it is being captured by civilians with cell phone cameras? Berkeley Copwatch founder Andrea Prichett says it’s getting worse, but we may also be getting used to it

    It’s an audio clip, at the link.

    The death of Natasha McKenna in the Fairfax jail: The rest of the story

    In compiling the article for Sunday’s paper about the death of Natasha McKenna after she was Tasered four times, a number of items were omitted for various reasons related to space and deadlines. To provide additional context on this complicated case, here are some further important items to consider, beginning with this fact: The entire incident was captured on video.

    The Sheriff’s Emergency Response Team regularly records their operations, and the Fairfax County police have said there is video of the “extraction” of McKenna. This presumably would include her being hit with four Taser shocks after she was handcuffed behind her back, shackled around the legs, a hobble strap connected to both restraints, and a spit mask placed over her face. The police, who are investigating the case for any possible criminal violation, have declined to release the video while the case is still under investigation. When it does come out, it may well join the growing canon of video of fatal law enforcement actions which has shocked the country. […]

    How big, physically, was Natasha McKenna? We have reported at various times that she was 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighed 130 pounds. But in the deputies’ reports, several of those involved in trying to restrain her noted that she was so thin a standard “restraint belt” could not be used to immobilize her hands. “It was discovered that Inmate McKenna was physically too small in the torso for the belt to take effect,” one deputy wrote. “She could easily, with her hands restrained to the belt, maneuver the belt up to her chest and therefore be able to attack with her hands.”

    So the deputies had to take the belt off of her, and then cuff her behind her back. They then attached those handcuffs to one end of the ripp hobble, with the other end attached to the leg shackles. Removing the belt prolonged the process of getting McKenna controlled, and preceded the first of the four Taser jolts.

    An autopsy report should show what McKenna’s height and weight were when she died, though she spent five days on life support at Inova Fairfax Hospital after her heart stopped beating in the jail on Feb. 3. She was removed from life support and died on Feb. 8. She was 37. No cause of death has yet been released.

    Fairfax homicide detectives turned away from jail

    After McKenna was rushed to the hospital on Feb. 3, someone called the Fairfax County police. Four law enforcement officials familiar with the case said that homicide detectives then went to the jail and were refused access, because McKenna was still alive. But the reports show that two Fairfax homicide detectives and a crime scene detective then went to the Inova Fairfax Hospital and conducted interviews there.

    Sheriff Stacey Kincaid declined to discuss the specifics of McKenna’s case, but did say, “If we have a medical emergency, we call 911. If we have a person who has died, we call the police.” The sheriff’s office did call the police on Feb. 5, the officials said, when it became apparent that McKenna would not survive, and the police investigation began then. […]

    Charles Drago, the former Assistant Chief of Police in Ft. Lauderdale, provides consulting and expert witness services for both plaintiff and defense attorneys in a variety of police practices including use of force and Taser-related incidents. Drago noted that “Taser still warns police officers in their training and their warning bulletins. When you use a Taser on someone showing signs of excited delirium or or increased heart rate or increased perspiration, sometimes people end up dead.”

    Drago also noted, “If you put too many of these charges together, the folks in the medical field say when you go above three (charges), you get into a gray area about whether it causes cardiac arrest or not. It’s all part of the analysis. That’s the problem with the Taser. It doesn’t have a mind of its own. Officers have to read the warning bulletins.”

    In other words, it’s a lot worse than it seems. She was tiny. Upset and fighting, it shouldn’t take 6 guards to subdue her. Esp. with a taser. Jesus.

    This man was actually fighting the police –

    This man was actually fighting with the police officers, actually clocked one of them in the face, was CLEARLY resisting arrest.

    I don’t understand why they didn’t just shoot him in the back eight times, drop the taser next to his dead body, and then call it in as a justifiable shooting like they did with Walter Scott.

    Or shoot him as he answered his door like they did with Yvette Smith.

    Or choke him to death like they did with Eric Garner.

    Or shoot him and say, “Fuck your breath,” like they did with Eric Harris.

    Or shoot him while he’s asleep on the couch like they did with Aiyana Stanley-Jones.

    Or shoot him within seconds like they did with Tamir Rice.

    Or shoot him down in front of his kids like they did with Meagan Hockaday.

    Or shoot him because he’s naked like they did with Anthony Hill.

    This man was more of a threat to police officers than any of those people I mentioned in the above scenarios.

    Why is he still alive and the others are dead?

    Watch the video. The answer is quite clear to the eye.

    Dr. Ben Carson to Launch Presidential Campaign on May 4

    Dr. Ben Carson will launch his presidential campaign on May 4 in his hometown of Detroit, NBC News confirms.

    Carson, a former pediatric neurosurgeon who has never held elected office but has won acclaim from conservatives for his tough criticisms of the Obama administration, formed a presidential exploratory committee in early March.

    The Detroit News first reported the date of the announcement.

    A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 41 percent of GOP primary voters said they could see themselves supporting Carson, while 18 percent said they could not imagine backing his campaign.

  319. Saad: Openly Feminist Gamer says

    rq, #318

    This man was actually fighting with the police officers, actually clocked one of them in the face, was CLEARLY resisting arrest.

    I don’t understand why they didn’t just shoot him in the back eight times, drop the taser next to his dead body, and then call it in as a justifiable shooting like they did with Walter Scott.

    Or shoot him as he answered his door like they did with Yvette Smith.

    Or choke him to death like they did with Eric Garner.

    Or shoot him and say, “Fuck your breath,” like they did with Eric Harris.

    Or shoot him while he’s asleep on the couch like they did with Aiyana Stanley-Jones.

    Or shoot him within seconds like they did with Tamir Rice.

    Or shoot him down in front of his kids like they did with Meagan Hockaday.

    Or shoot him because he’s naked like they did with Anthony Hill.

    This man was more of a threat to police officers than any of those people I mentioned in the above scenarios.

    Why is he still alive and the others are dead?

    Wow.

    It’s so blatant now that seeing people still in denial makes me just sad and hopeless. What can be done when people are this blinded?

  320. rq says

    From Grand Central to Port Authority now Penn Station, shutting it down for #RamarleyGraham. #ProsecuteNYPD

    Shutting down New York City streets for #RamarleyGraham on what should be his 22nd birthday. #ProsecuteNYPD

    Tulsa Sheriff’s Office misled public after Robert Bates killed Eric Harris, victim’s family says

    Andre Harris, brother of 44-year-old Eric Harris, claimed in a Monday press conference that a deputy from the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office told him to not get a lawyer and also lied about his brother being under the influence of drugs when Robert Bates, 73, fired the fatal gunshot.

    Flanked by lawyers, Andre Harris told reporters gathered in Tulsa that a sheriff’s office representative, identified by attorney Dan Smollen as Officer Bill McKelby, admitted to him that a mistake was made.

    “We know what happened to your brother, we apologize,” Andre Harris recalled the officer saying. “You don’t have a lawyer, do you?”

    When the grief-stricken man replied no, he was advised against finding representation.

    “Doesn’t everybody get a lawyer when they’re in this situation?” Andre Harris recalled asking.

    “We want to make this right because when we make mistakes, we man up, we do the right thing,” the officer told Andre Harris. “You sit by the phone and wait for that call, we’re gonna make it right.”

    The cop further warned Andre Harris: “If you hire a lawyer, it will gum things up. It will slow things down. We want to make this right.”

    Smollen then explained that Bates, who was charged Monday with second-degree manslaughter, did not give a statement about the incident until at least four days later and while in the presence of an attorney who is also a former cop. […]

    Officers later claimed that Eric Harris was high on the drug PCP when apprehended shortly after he fled on foot during a gun-buying sting.

    Both Smollen and Andre Harris claim the assertion of drug use was a lie and that medical records will prove them right.

    Multiple phone messages left by Business Insider seeking comment from the Tulsa Sheriff’s Office have yet to be returned.

    Fox News Says ‘Minority Communities’ Need To be ‘Trained’ To be ‘More Sensitive To The Police’ – that’s Fox News.

    During an episode of Justice with Judge Jeanine on Fox News, the show’s host Jeanine Pirro asked her viewers whether the problem is with police officers or with “minorities.” In an “Instapoll” conducted by the show, she asked whether cops need to be retrained to be more sensitive to the needs of so-called “minority” communities, or whether those communities need to be “trained” to be “more sensitive” to the police.

    Can you guess the results of the “Instapoll”?

    Specifically, the poll question asked: “Do police need to be retrained on how to be sensitive to the minority community?”

    Pirro made a finger gesture in the air when saying “minority,” but it is unclear why. She was not, apparently, commenting on the fact that those groups in the United States which are often designated as “minorities” are in fact the global majority.

    Whatever her reasoning for the “air quotes,” Pirro noted that the results of the poll were “overwhelmingly in favor of law enforcement.”

    She quoted Fox viewer Jeff who answered, “Why is it always necessary to tip toe around the minority community?”

    She added another comment from a viewer named Larry, who said “No. Enough is enough. The general public needs to be more sensitive to the police and show them the respect they deserve.”

    To this comment, Pirro exclaimed: “I agree.”

    Pirro “agrees” that “the general public needs to be more sensitive to the police.”

    Feigning the illusion of the network being “fair and balanced,” Pirro quoted a dissenting opinion from a viewer named Jordan who disagreed, saying “Yes. Those cops were racially profiling.”

    But far from quoting a comprehensive and compelling argument against the Fox host’s position, the short quote from Jordan was used as a springboard for Pirro’s personal diatribe.

    “Hey Jordan, you don’t even know what racial profiling is,” she barked.

    That’s when race is used to engage law enforcement in the minority community,” Pirro added. “But offender profiling is when an offender is ID’d by a description including his race, which is the only way to investigate some of these cases.”

    Sheriff’s Deputy Who Accidentally Shot And Killed An Unarmed Man Charged With Manslaughter

    Robert Charles Bates, the 73 year-old insurance-executive-turned-volunteer-cop who was caught on video fatally shooting an unarmed black suspect was charged with second degree manslaughter on Monday. The charges allege that Bates demonstrated “culpable negligence” when he shot and killed Eric Harris while Harris was fleeing police. Under Oklahoma law, culpable negligence is defined as “the omission to do something which a reasonably careful person would do, or the lack of the usual ordinary care and caution in the performance of an act usually and ordinarily exercised by a person under similar circumstances and conditions.” […]

    Though Bates’s tragic actions may have been inadvertent, the video also shows deputies pinning Harris to the ground after he is shot (though the sheriff’s office claims that deputies called for an ambulance once they discovered Harris was wounded). One of them even seems to mock the mortally wounded man. After Harris tells the deputy “I’m losing my breath,” the officer responds, “fuck your breath.”

    Still no word on how those officers will be disciplined.

    Deputy charged in Tulsa shooting

    In a written statement, Tulsa County District Attorney Stephen A. Kunzweiler said Bates is charged with second-degree manslaughter involving culpable negligence. It’s a felony charge that could land the volunteer deputy in prison for up to four years if he’s found guilty.

    Scott Wood, an attorney who represents Bates, said the shooting was an “excusable homicide.”

    “We believe the video itself proves that it was an accident of misfortune that occurred while Deputy Bates was fulfilling his duties as a reserve deputy,” Wood said. “He is not guilty of second-degree manslaughter.”

    Investigators’ efforts to defend Bates and the other deputies involved in the arrest have sparked a mounting chorus of criticism online. Harris’ family is demanding an independent investigation of what they call unjustified brutality.

  321. rq says

    Prosecutors investigating fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald by Chicago police. Hey look, they’re using his graduation photo.

    Federal and county prosecutors confirmed Monday that they are investigating the October fatal shooting by a Chicago police officer of a teenager who authorities say was wielding a knife.

    The announcement of the investigation came the same day as the Chicago City Council’s Finance Committee agreed to pay $5 million to the family of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times. The entire council is expected to vote on the settlement Wednesday.

    Chicago Corporation Counsel Stephen Patton recommended the settlement and told reporters that dashboard camera footage of the Oct. 20 shooting prompted the city’s decision to settle with the family before a lawsuit was filed.

    “We consider his case like we consider every case based on all the evidence, all the facts, and it included the video, yes,” Patton said. “Here that was an important part of the evidence.”

    A spokesman for Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said the unidentified officer who shot McDonald has been stripped of his police powers and put on paid desk duty.

    Patton noted several officers followed McDonald for blocks and didn’t fire their weapons. He said McDonald was ordered to drop the knife, but kept walking away from police.

    The officer who shot McDonald was in a squad car that arrived later to back up the first officers to respond, Patton said. The partner of the officer who fired “also got out of the police car with guns drawn but did not shoot,” Patton said.

    HPD officer fatally shoots robbery suspect

    Investigators said as the officer approached the truck, he saw two black men fighting and one of them was wielding a hammer. The officer demanded the man drop the hammer and approached another man in the truck.

    “The officer approached the pickup truck to see what is going on,” HPD spokesman Victor Senties said. “He looks inside and sees the suspect with something in his hand which appears to be a shotgun. The suspect appears to raise what he had in his hand and points in the direction of the officer.”

    Investigators said that’s when the 12-year HPD veteran opened fire several times and riddled the truck with bullets.

    A man who was with his cousin at the gas station said they witnessed a man being robbed. The man grabbed a hammer as he and his cousin tried to help the victim.

    “I (tried) to grab the hammer from my little cousin’s hand,” he said. “Well, I did grab the hammer and (tried) to swing out. By the time I was going to come down with it, the law man was like, ‘Lay on the floor.'”

    The scene played out in front of several witnesses.

    “When the police officer pulled up, the guy got out of the truck and it looked like he dropped something,” Earl Pritchett said. “I don’t know if it was a hammer or what.”

    People who live nearby rushed to the scene after hearing the gunfire.

    “I counted at least 15 shots,” Dallas Climer said. “Then it stopped and it all started again.”

    I’m kinda confused as to who exactly got shot.

    Missouri pressured to halt execution of black man sentenced by all-white jury

    Jay Nixon, the Democratic governor of Missouri, is coming under intense pressure to stay the imminent execution of an African American man who was sentenced to death by an all-white jury in St Louis County – the jurisdiction that covers Ferguson, scene of last summer’s dramatic unrest over state-sanctioned racial discrimination.

    Barring last-minute intervention by Nixon or the US supreme court, Andre Cole, 42, will be killed by lethal injection at 6pm local time on Tuesday in a case that displays disturbing signs of racial animus. All three potential black jurors were removed from the jury pool at the demand of St Louis County prosecutors, who secured a death sentence from the resulting panel of 12 white men and women.

    Such controversial circumstances have provoked a flurry of 11th-hour protests, including appeals to Nixon that he use his governor’s prerogative to stop the execution. The complaints are all the more charged coming from the county of Ferguson which August erupted in prolonged clashes between protesters and police after the police shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown.

    “This case highlights the disparate treatment of African Americans in the criminal justice system. Ferguson exposed unequal treatment by police, and the pending execution of Andre Cole exposes the same disparity from prosecutors and the courts,” said Elston McCowan of the Missouri branch of the NAACP.

    A coalition of civil rights activists, African American organizations and religious leaders have written to Nixon demanding an official inquiry into what they claim is rampant and systemic racial bias within St Louis County that has put a vastly disproportionate number of black men on to death row. The investigation would ensure, the 60 signatories write, “that racial bias has not infected the death sentences imposed in St Louis County”. […]

    Missouri is not alone in standing accused of manipulating juries along racial lines. A similar pattern is discernible across the active death penalty states. A study by the Equal Justice Initiative found that potential black jurors have routinely been prevented from participating in capital trials, with some counties striking off up to 80% of all African American candidates.

    “We cannot continue on a path that stretches back to before the civil war of lynch mob justice in which all-white juries sentence African Americans to death. That has to stop,” said Staci Pratt of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

    Reverend Harold Ellis, pastor of Clayton Baptist Church in St Louis, said that if Cole’s execution went ahead it would aggravate the tensions that had come to the surface during the Ferguson troubles. “If Governor Nixon allows the execution to go forward he will be creating more problems, not just for Ferguson.”

    Let’s have that stay of execution, Gov. Nixon, and hear things out to the end.

    A Quick Thought About COPS , from the Daily Irritant.

    I wonder how many lives were saved by the TV show COPS?

    How many of these people would be dead today if the cops hadn’t known they were on camera?

  322. rq says

    North Charleston:
    The Mayor of North Charleston cancelled the meeting with he protestors. They weren’t notified until the meeting was to begin. #WalterScott
    The Mayor of North Charleston refused to meet with protestors as scheduled because today’s actions upset his family. #WalterScott
    And I was told the Mayor of North Charleston’s son is the chairman of the Charleston County Council. #WalterScott
    I’ve been told that the Mayor of North Charleston’s mother is particularly upset with the protests, thus his refusal to meet. #WalterScott
    You know, some folk said the Mayor of North Charleston was untrustworthy but folk wanted to give him a chance. Now they know. #WalterScott

  323. rq says

    General police misbehaviour
    Residents air concerns about Taser use during Gilmor arrests

    Residents of the West Baltimore development said city police acted aggressively when arresting people who had flocked to intervene in a struggle between a man and officers. Some said an officer used a Taser on a woman holding a young child.

    Deputy Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said he personally viewed city surveillance camera footage of the incident and disputed the witness accounts, saying the woman had handed off the child before she was struck with the Taser. Still, he said, the agency wanted to fully investigate the case and reassure residents.

    “I’ve seen a tape where another lady … took the baby before that particular encounter. We have that on tape,” Rodriguez said. “Just because the baby was not in her hands — I’m not saying that mitigates everything or that we’re not looking at it. We’re looking at it very seriously.”

    After the incident, Rodriguez said, he walked through the area with the major of the Western District and the head of internal affairs. He said police would like to see civilian footage taken from alternative angles.

    “While they were unhappy with the incident, they were very grateful and pleased that we were there and were willing to take their statements,” Rodriguez said.

    Stingray Tracking Devices: Who’s Got Them?, via ACLU. THat’s the cellphone tracking technology.

    The map below tracks what we know, based on press reports and publicly available documents, about the use of stingray tracking devices by state and local police departments. Following the map is a list of the federal law enforcement agencies known to use the technology throughout the United States. The ACLU has identified 50 agencies in 21 states and the District of Columbia that own stingrays, but because many agencies continue to shroud their purchase and use of stingrays in secrecy, this map dramatically underrepresents the actual use of stingrays by law enforcement agencies nationwide.

    Stingrays, also known as “cell site simulators” or “IMSI catchers,” are invasive cell phone surveillance devices that mimic cell phone towers and send out signals to trick cell phones in the area into transmitting their locations and identifying information. When used to track a suspect’s cell phone, they also gather information about the phones of countless bystanders who happen to be nearby. Click here for more info on stingrays.

    Map and list of agencies at the link.

    Plastic dolls spray painted black & hanging from tree in West #Baltimore has sparked concerns bc it’s near school. Unsure whether it’s art or protest or hooliganism.

    White officer won’t face death penalty in South Carolina murder: prosecutor. IS ANYONE SURPRISED? Actually, I’m glad he won’t be facing the death penalty, but I’m disappointed that he won’t be facing the maximum possible penalty for his crime. If that makes any sense.

    None of the circumstances that allow lethal punishment apply in the April 4 shooting of 50-year-old Walter Scott by North Charleston police officer Michael Slager, said Scarlett Wilson, Charleston County’s chief prosecutor.

    “Based on the facts revealed thus far, it does not appear South Carolina’s death penalty provision applies in this case because there are no statutory ‘aggravating circumstances’ present,” Wilson said in a statement.

    Such factors include murders committed during a kidnapping, robbery, drug trafficking, or with poison or physical torture.

    What about systemic racism? Isn’t that an aggravating circumstance?

    City looks to settle police wrongful death suit (Baltimore)

    The Board of Estimates is expected to approve the settlement Wednesday brought by Alice Monroe on behalf of the estate of Michael Omar Wudtee, a 38-year-old Randallstown man who died after being shot by police in 2012. Wudtee’s estate sought $10 million for his death. […]

    City lawyers encouraged officials to settle the lawsuit, citing the unpredictability of jury verdicts and conflicting accounts, including an eyewitness account that “differed in some material respects.”

    Attempts to reach Monroe and Wudtee’s family and their lawyers were unsuccessful. Neither Heffernan nor his lawyer could be reached for comment.

    In another case, the board is being asked to pay $50,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by Josephine Utley against the city. Utley was injured June 4, 2012, when a city employee, Henry Jose Prioleau, backed a trash truck into a sedan she was driving.

    Prioleau was attempting to return to a missed stop when he hit the vehicle Utley was driving, crushing its hood and breaking the windshield. She sought $170,000 in damages.

    Still no autopsy results for Trayvon Scott, man who died in Northern District custody in February, police said.

  324. rq says

    Freddy Gray, the most recent victim of @BaltimorePolice, in critical condition after 4 cops beat him while in custody.

    OH OKAY. THANKS FOR THE HEADS UP, WHITE ACADEMIA. Which links to this tweet, In which the American Journal of Sociology informs us that “none of Fanon’s books are really books.”

    Oh. Okay. Bit of highlighted text attached reads: “It should be noted from the outset that none of Fanon’s books is really a book. None was composed with care and long reflection, in successive drafts, for a clearly conceived audience.” Buh, is that how one defines ‘book’ these days? Serious? From the following ‘analysis’ of Fanon’s non-books, one might as well strike down half of white literature, too. Especially history books and science books.
    Like what the hell.

  325. rq says

    Yesterday the CBC had more on Walter Scott and Eric Harris:
    Reserve officer in Oklahoma charged with manslaughter in suspect’s shooting death;
    Walter Scott shooting: Dashcam video shows officer questioning why suspect ran;
    Walter Scott funeral: ‘I don’t think he ever met an enemy’;
    Walter Scott shooting: Gap remains between dashcam, bystander videos

    California Cops Beat Up Drunk Driver

    Police in Chico, California, brutally attacked a man they say was driving drunk, before charging him with five felony counts. Driver Sean Reardon was on probation for a previous DUI when he was pulled over for a broken tail light and old tags, and police say he was at twice the legal alcohol limit—in addition to having meth and cocaine in his blood—and refused to show his hands and fled the police. A grainy video of the Feb. 18th incident shows an officer hitting Reardon multiple times with a baton as another cop held him down to the ground. Reardon has filed a suit, which claims he suffered multiple broken bones and had to be on a ventilator.

    And San Bernardino: “I Thought I Was Being Beaten to Death”: Man Assaulted by Deputies

    A man beaten by sheriff’s deputies during an arrest after a horseback pursuit in the high desert northeast of Los Angeles said he feared for his life and struggled for air as deputies repeatedly stunned him with Tasers and delivered a barrage of kicks and punches.

    Francis Jared Pusok, 30, of Apple Valley, spoke on Monday to NBC4 about his arrest that prompted an internal investigation into San Bernardino County deputies’ actions and a federal civil rights probe. Ten deputies have been placed on paid administrative leave after the arrest, captured on camera Thursday by NewsChopper4.

    I believe that is the first time I’ve heard the real victim being allowed to express that he feared for his life. First itme.

  326. rq says

    Baltimore! Rawlings-Blake to push for bills addressing police brutality complaints

    As the Maryland General Assembly wraps up on Monday, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is scheduled to make a last-minute plea in Annapolis for bills addressing police brutality complaints, even though most of the proposals have already been killed or are stalled in committee.

    The mayor is also set to speak at noon in City Hall to discuss her “next steps” to “increase transparency and accountability” in policing, a day after she touted her plans on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to equip city police with body-worn cameras amid national outrage over the police shooting of an unarmed South Carolina man.

    “We’re going to keep going until the very end,” said the mayor’s spokesman, Kevin Harris.

    She faces a tough fight as lawmakers and Gov. Larry Hogan work to break an impasse over the budget.

    The House and Senate have reached a deal on what they want in a budget package, but the governor is not on board, and the legislature needs his consent for spending it wants restored.

    At stake for Marylanders is $68 million in education aid to 13 localities that are home to 80 percent of the state’s public school children. Democrats also want to prevent a 2 percent pay cut for state employees and restore money for health care for pregnant women, the mentally ill, the developmentally disabled and others.

    The governor, meanwhile, is holding out to deliver some of the tax relief he promised Marylanders during his successful 2014 campaign — as well as an agenda that includes greater flexibility for charter schools, a tax credit for gifts to public and private schools, and an end to the requirement that the state’s largest jurisdictions collect stormwater fees he calls “the rain tax.”

    Del. Curt Anderson, chairman of Baltimore’s House delegation, said some of the nearly two dozen bills introduced by numerous lawmakers may have had a better chance of passage if such outrage had been sparked sooner and if reform proponents had been better organized. “Stiff opposition” from police unions, he said, led to the defeat of most bills. The president of Baltimore’s police union, the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 3, could not be reached to comment.

    “Whether anything can be done in one day is probably highly unlikely,” Anderson said. “I’m sure we all could have done more in terms of providing a united front.”

    It’s been a whole year. A Year After Kidnapping, Hundreds of Schoolgirls Remain Missing

    A year after Boko Haram militants kidnapped nearly 300 schoolgirls in the town of Chibok, international efforts have done little to stop the insurgency that now controls vast swaths of northeastern Nigeria.

    Of the known 276 schoolgirls taken in April of last year, only 50 have escaped on their own, leaving 219 still missing, although unconfirmed reports have claimed 50 of the girls were seen in the Gwoza Hills three weeks ago. The failure of the Nigerian government and the international community to locate the Chibok schoolgirls reflects the many ways in which the militant group has defied a year-long campaign to defeat them.

    Volunteer for Sheriff Is Charged in Killing After Mistaking Handgun for Taser. Repost? A lot of them have the same fucking title.

    The #STL Board of Aldermen will hold a special session tomorrow to vote to establish a civilian review board. 10am in City Hall. – That’s today by now!

    In Atlanta, the educators convicted of cheating were being sentenced (probably an article later, will be checking) today. WIth sentences like this: Michael Pitts sentenced to $25K fine, 20 years to serve 7. 2K hours of community service. #APS Others got similar. More later.

    And I lost the most excellentest comment on that, about how you get punished more for advancing black youth than you do for killing them.

    Here’s a sad music break: Soul singer Percy Sledge dies aged 74

    Steve Green from talent agency Artists International Management Inc confirmed to the BBC that he died at his home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Tuesday.

    “He was one of my first acts, he was a terrific person and you don’t find that in this business very often,” said Green. “He was truly a standout.”

    Sledge had surgery for liver cancer in January 2014 but soon resumed touring. […]

    He told BBC Radio 6 Music’s Craig Charles in a 2011 interview that he came up with the melody for When A Man Loves A Woman, but signed away the rights of the song to Calvin Lewis and Andrew Wright, because “I didn’t know any better”.

    “I had the melody in my mind so I gave that song to them,” he said, adding they then created the lyrics.

    Sledge did not contest the agreement, saying: “I felt like if God fixed it in my mouth to give it to them I won’t change anything about it.

    “I’m satisfied with what I wrote but I cut my kids out of so much because I gave it to someone else – I just wasn’t thinking.”

    BBC Radio 2 DJ Tony Blackburn was among those paying tribute on Twitter, and said: “Sad to hear that Percy Sledge has died. I wonder how many times I’ve played When A Man Loves A Woman. RIP.”

  327. rq says

    This isn’t that comment, but it’s similar: Shoot unarmed man 41 times? NO JAIL TIME.

    Choke a man to death? NO JAIL TIME.

    Cheat on tests? 7 years in prison.

    Yes, We Are Different by Susanne Frenzel. (Art.)

    Some hearings for the torture victims were held in Chicago. Here’s a couple of comments from one man’s testimony: Darrell Cannon receives standing ovation as he is called to the stand. #RahmRepNow
    Officer Peter Dignant said “N*gger, listen” and showed him a bullet, turned around and made motion of putting bullet in chamber. #RahmRepNow
    The officers then broke his teeth & busted his lip,shoved the pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. They did this 3 times. #RahmRepNow Cannon called it Russian Roulette with a shotgun.

    Rep. Hank Johnson blasts Congress for its silence and inaction on police shootings

    Via the video below the fold:

    It feels like open season on black men in America and I’m outraged. In fact, all Americans are at risk when bad actors in law enforcement use their guns instead of their heads. Despite bipartisan nationwide calls for action and despite my bills to reform the broken grand jury process, hold police accountable, and end militarization—and despite my colleagues’ bills to encourage body cameras—this Congress does nothing. No hearings, no blue ribbon commissions, no nothing.

    These were the frustrated words of Rep. Hank Johnson yesterday on the floor of the House of Representatives. Johnson is right. How could it be that these constant deaths by American law enforcement grip the nation but fall on deaf ears in Congress? How could the names of our loved ones daily be the top trending topic in the world, but those who represent us act as if everything is just fine in America?

    It isn’t fine at all.

    Johnson went on, as seen in the video below the fold, to list some of the names of men and women killed by police in the past year. While it may seem unimportant to some, this acknowledgment of the names of men and women killed by police on the floor of the House dignifies the lives and memories of and loss of the men, women, boys, and girls killed by those who should protect us.

    “Mr. Speaker, here are just a few names of our colleagues and neighbors and relatives:

    “Walter Scott from [South] Carolina; Michael Brown from Missouri; Anthony Hill from Georgia; Tony Robinson from Wisconsin; Kevin Davis – Georgia; Nicholas Thomas – Georgia; Daniel Elrod – Nebraska; Antonio Zambrano-Montes – Washington; David Kassick – Pennsylvania; Jessica Hernandez – Colorado; Kevin Davis – Georgia; Dennis Grigsby – Texas; Rumain Brisbon – Phoenix; Tamir Rice – Ohio; Akai Gurley – New York; Carlos Perez – Nevada; Kajieme Powell – Missouri; Ezell Ford – California; Dillon Taylor – Utah; John Crawford III – Ohio; Naeschylus Vinzant, of Colorado; Charly Leundeu Keunang, of California; and the list goes on.”

    The video is powerful.

  328. rq says

    Emanuel Agrees To $5.5 Million Police Torture Reparations Fund – I don’t know if that is anything resembling a suitable amount in a case like this, but it is a small positive step.

    Mayor Rahm Emanuel has thrown his support behind a proposal to provide $5.5 million in reparations to dozens of victims of police torture at the hands of former police Cmdr. Jon Burge and his detectives, in an effort to provide closure on a scandal that has plagued the city for decades.

    The agreement on a reparations ordinance came as aldermen held the first public hearing on a proposed financial restitution fund for torture victims. A group of aldermen had been seeking a fund of $20 million in reparations for torture victims and their families.

    Corporation Counsel Steve Patton said the agreement worked out between the Emanuel administration and advocates for torture victims would provide $5.5 million for torture victims who cannot sue for damages, because the statute of limitations on their allegations has expired.

    The fund will provide up to $100,000 in restitution for people with credible claims of torture by Burge and his detectives. An independent arbitrator would make the final decision on all disputed claims. Only victims that have not received a previous settlement from the city will receive reparations from the fund.

    In addition to the financial reparations, the ordinance would call for the city to apologize to torture victims, and provide a number of services – including free job training and tuition at the City Colleges of Chicago for Burge victims, their immediate families, and their grandchildren. The city will also provide psychological, family, substance abuse, and other counseling for victims and their families.

    “If Burge victims, their immediate family members, or their grandchildren wish to pursue a degree from the City Colleges of Chicago, they will be able to do so for free,” Patton said.

    Volunteer for Sheriff Is Charged in Killing After Mistaking Handgun for Taser – the headline sounds familiar, but it has some odd information:

    Mr. Bates, an insurance broker, had been a reserve deputy since 2008. He is among scores of civilian police enthusiasts, including wealthy donors to law enforcement, some of whom effectively act as an armed adjunct to the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Department. [police enthusiasts?] […]

    Mr. Harris, who is black, could be heard repeatedly shouting “He shot me,” while a deputy knelt on the suspect’s head and others yelled at him to stop struggling. The video showed Mr. Bates, who is white, dropping his pistol. Officials later said he dropped it because he was unprepared for the gun’s recoil, and called it added proof that the shooting was an accident; a Taser has negligible recoil.

    Mr. Bates’s lawyer, Charles O. Brewster, said that his client would surrender to the authorities on Tuesday morning and that he intends to plead not guilty.

    “Anyone that looked at the facts here would find that there was no crime committed,” Mr. Brewster said. “It was a truly tragic incident.”

    Mr. Brewster expressed disappointment with the district attorney’s decision to charge his client.

    “I think it’s kind of a response to the national fervor and media concerning police shootings,” he said. “I think he just kind of capitulated to that. This truly is an event that was unintended and what I consider to be a justifiable homicide.”

    Or maybe all that was there all along but I didn’t see it. Too much sympathy for the shooter.

    Teen records video of classmates taunting him as ‘dirty n****r’ — and now he’s afraid to return to school

    A Michigan teen said he is afraid to return to school after he recorded two classmates repeatedly taunting him with racial slurs on a school bus.

    Phoenix Williams said the teens started telling racist jokes that they looked up in the school’s computer lab, and he said the abuse continued on the way to a field trip, reported WDIV-TV.

    The eighth-grader said he took out his cell phone March 13 and recorded the pair turned around in their seats and harassing him.

    “I’ll give you a piece of candy if you call Phoenix a dirty n****r,” one of the boys says.

    Another boy grabbed his hat and tossed it toward the back of the bus, and the teens threatened to break his phone if he told on them, Phoenix said.

    He said no other students spoke up in his defense.

    Phoenix told his mother after school about the abuse, and Shanari Williams said she called administrators and asked that the tormentors be expelled.

    However, she said school officials told her “that was not going to happen.”

    Superintendent Robert Glass described the boys’ behavior as egregious and said he took appropriate action, but he declined to specify the terms of their punishment.

    Shanari Williams said she believes one boy was suspended for two weeks and the other for two days, but both teens had returned to school by Monday.

    She doesn’t believe the school is a safe environment for her son, an honor roll student who has been completing assignments from home since the incident.

    The family of one of the teens who taunted Phoenix released a statement expressing their shame.

    “As parents we are both embarrassed and disappointed by this inexcusable behavior by our son,” the statement read. “Under no circumstances do we condone such behavior.”

    Well, your kid learned it from somewhere, and yeah, I know kids learn things from pretty much everywhere, but apparently they never got the counter-education, either.

    Another small bit of good news, regarding Floyd Dent! Officer Bill ‘Robocop’ Melendez fired for brutal roadside beating of Michigan grandfather

    After being caught on video brutally beating Floyd Dent, a grandfather and 37-year veteran of Ford Motor Company, it appears Melendez’s time in law enforcement is finally coming to an end. He has just been fired from the Inkster, Michigan, Police Department.

    “This is a big step in the right direction for the city of Inkster,” said Nicholas Bennett, one of Dent’s attorneys. “Too often do we see officers like Melendez get a free ride.”

    Melendez was placed on desk duty stemming from the January incident where Dent, 57, was pulled over, then kicked and punched more than a dozen times.

    Now multiple sources confirm to FOX 2 that Melendez has been suspended for five days, pending his termination.

    In a written statement, Inkster city councilman Michael Canty said. “His employment with the city of Inkster has been terminated.”

    It’s a shame that it has taken this long for a man so corrupt and abusive to be held accountable for his actions. Named in 12 different lawsuits for corruption and violence, Melendez was even indicted by the federal government as the corrupt ringleader inside of the Detroit Police Department in 2003.

    More, with video, at the link.

    More art: Souls of Black Folk: E Pluribus Unum I by Karole Turner Campbell.

  329. rq says

    Black Lives Matter Activists in South Carolina Demand Reform After Police Killing of Walter Scott, with video.

    Cries of “Black Lives Matter” continue to ring out across the country after new police killings of unarmed African Americans. Over the weekend in South Carolina, the funeral was held in North Charleston for Walter Scott, the black man who fled a traffic stop and was fatally shot in the back by police officer Michael Slager. Video of the incident taken by a bystander forced the police to retract its initial defense of Slager and see him charged with murder and fired from the force. This comes as Oklahoma prosecutors have charged a sheriff’s reserve deputy with second-degree manslaughter in the fatal shooting of an unarmed African-American man in Tulsa. Robert Bates — who is white — says he mistakenly used his handgun instead of his stun gun, killing the victim, Eric Harris. We are joined from South Carolina by Muhiyidin d’Baha, an organizer with Black Lives Matter Charleston.

    Transcript available at the link.

    Here’s something I learned via Deray on twitter, that South Carolina used to be rice-growing central in North America! Oh and guess what, they used slave labour. Here’s a book on the subject: Black Rice
    The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas

    Few Americans identify slavery with the cultivation of rice, yet rice was a major plantation crop during the first three centuries of settlement in the Americas. Rice accompanied African slaves across the Middle Passage throughout the New World to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the southern United States. By the middle of the eighteenth century, rice plantations in South Carolina and the black slaves who worked them had created one of the most profitable economies in the world.

    Black Rice tells the story of the true provenance of rice in the Americas. It establishes, through agricultural and historical evidence, the vital significance of rice in West African society for a millennium before Europeans arrived and the slave trade began. The standard belief that Europeans introduced rice to West Africa and then brought the knowledge of its cultivation to the Americas is a fundamental fallacy, one which succeeds in effacing the origins of the crop and the role of Africans and African-American slaves in transferring the seed, the cultivation skills, and the cultural practices necessary for establishing it in the New World.

    In this vivid interpretation of rice and slaves in the Atlantic world, Judith Carney reveals how racism has shaped our historical memory and neglected this critical African contribution to the making of the Americas.

    Relatedly, The Original Gullah Festival

    showcases the African history and heritage of South Carolina’s Low Country Gullah culture, a blend of West African, European and Native American cultures, which became a way of life for West African slaves living on the Sea Islands off the coast of the South Carolina mainland. The annul event attracts talent from the local, regional, national, and international levels and prides itself on having something to appeal to every taste, including art and history exhibits including local choirs, jazz, storytelling, symphonic music, arts and crafts, and theater.

    This year’s event runs from May 23 through May 25. For more information, please visit the festival’s official website for more information on this year’s event.

    The Gullah are African Americans who live in the Low Country region of South Carolina and Georgia, which includes both the coastal plain and the Sea Islands. Historically, the Gullah region once extended north to the Cape Fear area on the coast of North Carolina and south to the vicinity of Jacksonville on the coast of Florida; but today the Gullah area is confined to the South Carolina and Georgia Low Country. The Gullah people are also called Geechee, after the Ogeechee River near Savannah, Georgia. The term Geechee is most commonly used in Charleston, South Carolina.

    And more at that link.
    Also, due to the rice slave-industry, the South Carolina population of black people was much larger than that of white poeple: South Carolina – African-Americans – Slave Population. In 1860, almost twice that.

    Where rice wasn’t grown in South Carolina, indigo was grown. Indigo is essentially plant dye. This is why the SC flag is blue.

    Origins of Black Carolinians. Lists the ethnicities and the regions from which slaves were taken.

  330. rq says

    We’re now treating dead Nazis with more respect than we do innocent unarmed black men. #EricHarris #WalterScott As per the attached headline ref. Gunter Grass.

    Racial Gap in Men’s Sentencing

    Prison sentences of black men were nearly 20% longer than those of white men for similar crimes in recent years, an analysis by the U.S. Sentencing Commission found.

    That racial gap has widened since the Supreme Court restored judicial discretion in sentencing in 2005, according to the Sentencing Commission’s findings, which were submitted to Congress last month and released publicly this week.

    In its report, the commission recommended that federal judges give sentencing guidelines more weight, and that appeals courts more closely scrutinize sentences that fall beyond them.

    The commission, which is part of the judicial branch, was careful to avoid the implication of racism among federal judges, acknowledging that they “make sentencing decisions based on many legitimate considerations that are not or cannot be measured.”

    Still, the findings drew criticism from advocacy groups and researchers, who said the commission’s focus on the very end of the criminal-justice process ignored possible bias at earlier stages, such as when a person is arrested and charged, or enters into a plea deal with prosecutors.

    “They’ve only got data on this final slice of the process, but they are still missing crucial parts of the criminal-justice process,” said Sonja Starr, a law professor at the University of Michigan, who has analyzed sentencing and arrest data and found no marked increase in racial disparity since 2005.

    Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at the Ohio State University who studies sentencing, said, “It’s not surprising that the commission that’s in charge of both monitoring and amending the guidelines has a general affinity for the guidelines.”

    The Sentencing Commission didn’t return requests for comment.

    Is it too late? A Missouri Death Row Inmate is Waiting for the Phone Call That Decides if He Lives or Dies Tonight

    Andre Cole is currently sitting in a prison cell in Missouri, waiting for a phone call to find out if he will be executed at 6pm this evening. He may be eating his last meal when the call comes. He may even be strapped to a steel gurney in the execution chamber — the preparations for his lethal injection will continue right up until the phone rings and a judge announces whether Cole lives or dies.

    Cole’s lawyers secured an 11th-hour stay yesterday for the 52-year-old convicted of the 1998 killing of his ex-wife’s lover, but the attorney general quickly appealed the district court decision. Now they are keenly awaiting news from the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals on whether the stay will be upheld, or if the execution will proceed as planned.

    That decision could come down in the very final moments before Cole is scheduled to die, according to Staci Pratt, State Coordinator for anti-execution group Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, whose lawyers are part of the team representing Cole in his last-minute appeal.

    Pratt is among a coalition of civil rights activists, Missouri legislators, legal experts, religious organizations, and exonerated former death row inmates, who earlier this month banded together to write a letter to Missouri’s Governor Jay Nixon seeking clemency for Cole. […]
    “Regardless of one’s views about capital punishment, our justice system should not tolerate disparate or unequal treatment — particularly when a life is at stake,” the authors wrote. “We strongly urge you to exercise your authority to appoint a Board of Inquiry… to examine the exclusion of African Americans from jury service in death penalty cases.”

    Pratt said that courts in Missouri have found at least five incidents where prosecutors deliberately and unfairly struck black jurors from criminal prosecutions since Cole’s trial, three of which were death penalty cases.

    “Sadly, this is part of a pattern,” Pratt said. “Both in southern states and in Missouri, prosecutors use pretextual reasons for removing African American individuals from juries — for example, someone’s a postal worker, someone’s divorced, but they do not apply those criteria consistently to white jurors.” […]

    The latest claims of jury-rigging in Cole’s and other death row cases suggest prejudice also pervades St. Louis County’s criminal justice system. Pratt said skewed jury pools are not only a concern for individuals facing execution, but also “a problem in a more general sense.”

    “When you as an African American are denied access to a jury, that diminishes your opportunity to engage as a full citizen,” she said. “It’s stigmatizing, it’s racist, and it’s inappropriate for a system of justice that’s built on the idea that we are judged by our peers.” […]

    Last week, the Missouri Supreme Court denied a death sentence appeal, determining Cole was mentally competent enough to be executed based on court filings, but did not allow him a competency hearing that would have allowed oral arguments and testimony. His lawyers argued that it was not an appropriate way to conduct a competency hearing, and a judge for the district court agreed, writing in the stay that the decision was an “unreasonable application of the law.”

    Whether that determination will stick or be overturned is quite literally a matter of life and death that will be delivered in coming hours. Until then, Cole’s lawyers say he will sit in his cell and wait for that phone call, even if he’s not entirely able to understand the consequences conveyed by the voice on the other end of the line.

    All-white juries and the death penalty

    Prosecutors are able to get these convictions and harsh sentences because of systematic exclusion of African Americans from juries and other prosecutorial misconduct that rarely gets checked. Blacks make up about 25 per cent of the St. Louis County population, yet many black defendants face an all-white jury. The County Prosecutor’s Office includes and excludes black folks when it suits their interests. But when the accused’s life is at stake, this unjust system takes on a more serious gravity.

    Currently on Missouri’s death row are 11 men from St. Louis County; seven of them are African-American. Most victims’ families who are grieving the loss of loved ones truly want justice; they don’t want to be pawns of the prosecution. The families’ wishes seem to only count when their desire for a death sentence syncs with the state’s efforts to kill.

    Andre Cole, one of those seven men on death row, faces execution on April 14. Sixty justice-seeking leaders from the St. Louis area (including this writer) have signed onto a letter to Nixon asking for a board of inquiry that would explore the issue of race bias in jury selection. Executions would be halted until the conclusion of the inquiry.

    Last week Kimber Edwards received his execution date for May 12. You guessed it: another black man sentenced by an all-white jury in St. Louis County.

    The DOJ’s report on Ferguson showed that African American citizens do not experience equal protection under the law and due process. The racist scourge of injustice is not just relegated to Ferguson, however. It spreads across St. Louis County, the state of Missouri and the country. It must be stopped.

    It is imperative that biased juries be included as part of our judicial scrutiny. This critical piece of the criminal justice process is kindling that can ignite a Ferguson-type uprising.

    It is our duty to hold these gatekeepers accountable since they are paid with our tax dollars. Because of the spotlight put on our region due to the Ferguson uprising, we have the opportunity to address systemic failures across the board and put the “justice” in our criminal justice system for all citizens.

    And there was lots of protest yesterday – New York, Chicago, Ferguson, and more.
    Brooklyn Bridge is essentially shut down Manhattan bound
    #ShutDownA14
    More pictures as we go along.

    City Of Chicago Moves Forward With $5.5 Million Reparations Package For Jon Burge Torture Victims – just another on that.

    According to the deal, a now amended ordinance brokered by the People’s Law Office, Amnesty International, Project NIA, Chicago Torture Memorials and several other groups, some 118 victims of the former Area 2 Commander and their families will be eligible for financial compensation and other benefits. Additionally, the City will make a formal public apology and memorial to the victims.

    “It’s only now after decades of litigation, investigative journalism and organizing that the truth has come out,” said Joey Mogul, an attorney with the People’s Law Office. Mogul, several of Burge’s victims including Anthony Holmes and Darrell Cannon along with others, testified at a Finance Committee hearing today shortly after Emanuel made the announcement.

    “I cry not because I’m hurt, but because I’m mad,” said a tearful Darrell Cannon before the City Council, as he described how officers took him to a location on the outskirts of the city and forced a shotgun into his mouth, making him believe they were going to execute him. Cannon spent 24 years in prison due to the false confession he gave police after they tortured him with mock executions like the one he described along with with a cattle prod.

    Burge was never convicted of torturing suspects due to the expiration of the statute of limitations for his crimes. He, however, was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying about it and served four and a half years in prison.

  331. rq says

    Anti-police brutality protesters on New York’s Brooklyn Bridge via @VeroAlbarella #BlackLivesMatter #ShutDownA14 Impressive photos.

    Bay Area protesters denounce police killings, try to block freeways

    Scores of protesters gathered around the Bay Area on Tuesday, joining nationwide demonstrations that urged people to walk out of school and work and “stop business as usual” to signal intolerance for recent police shootings of unarmed people of color.

    As the afternoon went on, some protesters sought to block Interstate 80 in San Francisco near the Bay Bridge and Interstate 880 in downtown Oakland. Six protesters were arrested in San Francisco, officials said, and a woman was briefly detained in Oakland as police turned the crowd away on a freeway ramp.

    Ten days after the video-recorded killing of a fleeing man in South Carolina prompted murder charges against the officer, dozens came together at 24th and Mission streets in San Francisco at noon before the crowd began marching, chanting and blowing whistles. Many of those at the Mission District rally were students who had walked out of classes.

    “We’re not being heard,” said 16-year-old Julian Pikes-Prince, a sophomore at Jefferson High School. “We need to stand up and be one nation and demand justice. They’re killing kids out there, and I don’t understand why.”

    Some people waved photos of Oscar Grant, who was shot and killed by a BART police officer in 2009, as well as Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy with a replica gun shot and killed by a Cleveland officer, and Michael Brown, who was killed in Missouri during a disputed confrontation.

    Some 200 protesters have taken over #DaleyCenter since 3pm 4 #ShutdownA14 #Chicago

    Sing I can hear my brother saying I can’t breathe- we ain’t gonna stop until our pplr free #ShutDownA14 #Stockton

    All these people are being detained on Brooklyn side of Brooklyn bridge. NYPD refuses to give reason. #ShutDownA14

    DePaul is in the house, singing the I Can’t Breathe song at #ShutDownA14 Chicago!

  332. rq says

    Chants of FTP- free the people- in Ferguson as protesters block intersection. #ShutItDownA14 – There’s a streaming link at the link, but I don’t think it’s active anymore.

    Black Lives Matter protesters shut down San Francisco City Hall, Oakland freeway

    Over 200 police in riot gear are responding to San Francisco City Hall where a peaceful Black Lives Matter rally turned into a massive protest causing several nearby streets to be shut down.

    At around 2 p.m. Tuesday, several protesters stormed the city hall located at 1 Dr Carlton B Goodlett Place and blocked the entrance.

    In Oakland, between 80 to 100 protesters have taken over the northbound lanes of Interstate 880 near the Jackson Street off-ramp. California Highway Patrol are requesting mutual aid from Contra Costa and Solano county law enforcement.

    Today’s Bay Area protests — which include San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose — and are part of a nationwide rally against the recent shooting death of an unarmed black man by a white law enforcement officer in South Carolina. The officer, who shot 50-year-old Scott, Michael Slager, initially said he fired at Scott after a tussle over his department-issued Taser. However, video recorded by a witness showed the officer shooting Scott eight times as he ran away.

    #ShutDownA14

    @ Grand Army Plaza NYPD methodically netted & arrested more than I could count. Headed dif direction now #ShutDownA14

    Flatbush & Atlantic, largest intersection in Brooklyn, shut down, all directions. #ShutDownA14

    Everyone is being photographed as they are put in the van, and instructed not to give me their names. #ShutDownA14

  333. rq says

    Ferguson Commission has smallest crowd yet

    Far from the packed rooms and protests in the early days, Monday’s Ferguson Commission meeting had a lot of empty seats and one upset co-chair.

    Reverend Starsky Wilson told the crowd at Clayton High School it was the smallest since the group was formed. There were a few dozen in attendance with at least as many empty chairs as people.

    Reverend Wilson challenged those who did show up to share what they learned with those who did not.

    “I am concerned that as a region we have reach a bit of Ferguson fatigue. I am concerned that we have gotten so deep into discussions about issues and infrastructure and the capacities that we need in our respective organizations that we have forgotten that we have gotten to the this place because of police violence, brutality and the need for accountability there of,” he said.

    Monday’s meeting focused on the tools and language needed to address racial equality.

    The next meeting is tentatively scheduled for Monday, April 27th.

    Well, there was a scheduled protest, so charitably, people who would have shown up here may have been there. Still, hope the commission doesn’t lose any momentum!

    Joseph Byars is the deputy sheriff who said “fuck your breath.”

    Michael Huckeby is the deputy sheriff who kneeled on #EricHarris’ head.

    Chicago To Pay $5 Million To Family Teen Shot 16 Times By Cop While Allegedly Wielding Knife

    Federal and county prosecutors are investigating the October fatal shooting by a Chicago police officer of a teenager who authorities say was wielding a knife, and the city says it will pay his family $5 million to preclude any legal action.

    The Chicago City Council’s Finance Committee said Monday that it agreed to settle with the family of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times. Chicago Corporation Counsel Stephen Patton recommended the settlement and told reporters that dashboard camera footage of the Oct. 20 shooting prompted the city’s decision to settle with the family before a lawsuit was filed.

    The entire council is expected to vote on the settlement Wednesday.

    “We consider his case like we consider every case based on all the evidence, all the facts, and it included the video, yes,” Patton said. “Here that was an important part of the evidence.”

    Attorney Mike Robbins, who represents McDonald’s family, told WBBM-AM Chicago that a “fair and prompt resolution” was reached with the city without the necessity of litigation.

    “We think the city did the right thing here,” he said.

    A spokesman for Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said the unidentified officer who shot McDonald has been stripped of his police powers and put on paid desk duty.

    Jesse Williams Calls Out ‘Justify-Anything’ Americans Who Excuse Police Shootings

    In recent years, actor Jesse Williams has been vocal about expressing his frustration surrounding police misconduct and the “criminalization of the black body.”

    In response to the April 2 death of Eric Harris — who was fatally shot by a reserve sheriff’s deputy as he lay on the ground — the “Grey’s Anatomy” star on Monday took to his Twitter account to outline various points to Americans who constantly use excuses to justify the killing of black people. […]

    In addition to his recent string of tweets, last year Williams questioned the media’s coverage of the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Missouri, which then focused on video footage showing Brown involved in strong-arm robbery at a convenience store.

    “You’ll find that the people doing the oppressing always want to start the narrative at a convenient part, or always want to start the story in the middle,” Williams said during an August 2014 interview on CNN. “This started with a kid getting shot and killed and left in the street for four hours.”

    44% of unarmed people killed by Oklahoma police are black. 9% of Oklahoma’s population is black. (With link to spreadsheet.)
    And here are 57 people killed by police in Oklahoma since May 2013. At least 20 are black. (With link to spreadsheet.)

  334. rq says

    Yo. Young people in Charleston, SC, just shut brunch down at a restaurant called High Cotton. No business as usual today! #BlackLivesMatter

    Women killed by police in 2014.
    #questionthenarrative
    #justiceForYuvette
    #justiceForLupe

    Something not so heavy: 6 Great Black British Web Series To Look For in 2015

    A disappointing Oscar ceremony, dubbed as one of the whitest ceremony so far along with the unremarkable Grammy Awards, has set us off in a direction that, for the most part, is uncertain but will be sure to keep us hooked to our computer screens scouring for content that will add to the effervescent question: What’s going to happen next?

    Having penned a previous article on the nature of Black representation on British television at the beginning of the month, I have slowly made the transition back to the holy grail of original writing from Black creatives – the web series!

    For the courtesy of our comrades stateside, I have compiled a list of shows that are coming to our laptop screens this year! Below is a list of what we are likely to be seeing in the coming months:

    Season Four of Dear Jesus; Ackee and Saltfish (Season 1); Housemates; #SoHeSays; A Day in the Life of Daddy; and Season 2 of The Loft.

    #RahmRepNOW #ReparationsNOW Burge Reparations Ordinance, Chicago. Document photographs at the link.

    152 Innocents, Marked for Death

    Innocent people get convicted for many reasons, including bad lawyering, mistaken identifications and false confessions made under duress. But as advances in DNA analysis have accelerated the pace of exonerations, it has also become clear that prosecutorial misconduct is at the heart of an alarming number of these cases.

    In the past year alone, nine people who had been sentenced to death were released — and in all but one case, prosecutors’ wrongdoing played a key role.

    The latest was Anthony Ray Hinton, who on Apr. 3 walked out of the Alabama prison where he had spent almost 30 years, half his life, on death row. Mr. Hinton was convicted of two murders largely on faulty evidence that the bullets had come from his gun. His prosecutor at the time said he knew Mr. Hinton was guilty and “evil” just by looking at him. And later prosecutors continued to insist on his guilt even when expert testimony clearly refuted the case against him.

    Why does this keep happening? In a remarkable letter to the editor published last month in The Shreveport Times, A.M. Stroud III, a former prosecutor in Louisiana’s Caddo Parish, offered a chillingly frank answer: “Winning became everything.” […]

    The all-too-common mind-set to win at all costs has facilitated the executions of people like Cameron Todd Willingham or Carlos DeLuna, whose convictions have been convincingly debunked in recent years. And that mind-set led to the wrongful conviction of people like Mr. Hinton, Mr. Ford and Henry Lee McCollum, who was exonerated last year after spending three decades on North Carolina’s death row.

    If not for the extraordinary after-the-fact efforts of lawyers, investigators, or just plain dumb luck, these men would be dead too, and neither Mr. Cox nor anyone else would be the wiser.

  335. rq says

    Eric Harris: Sheriff’s Office confirms names of deputies in video, says they didn’t hear gunshot

    A deputy who made a callous comment to a man who had just been shot did not hear the gunshot and didn’t know the man had been wounded, sheriff’s officials told the Tulsa World.

    When asked by the World to confirm whether two names on a court witness list were those of the deputies depicted in a video of the fatal shooting, Undersheriff Tim Albin confirmed their names.

    The witness list is attached to a second-degree manslaughter charge filed Tuesday against Robert Bates, a reserve deputy who said he mistook his gun for a Taser when he shot Eric Harris, who was on the ground and unarmed.

    In the video, Harris can be heard saying, “I’m losing my breath,” to which a deputy replies, “F- — your breath.”

    The deputy who made that statement to Harris after he had been shot is Joseph Byars. Deputy Michael Huckeby is shown in the video kneeling on Harris’ head as a deputy yells at Harris, “You shouldn’t have ran,” and “Shut the f- — up.”

    Because the deputies’ faces are obscured in the video, it is difficult to tell who made those statements.

    After Harris was shot, he repeatedly told the deputies he had been shot — yelling, “He shot me!” — and blood could be seen trickling down his outstretched right arm.

    Bates can be heard on the video saying he had shot Harris, stating: “Oh, I shot him. I’m sorry.” The video shows someone, apparently Bates, bending down to pick up his revolver, which had fallen to the ground.

    Harris’ family released a statement Tuesday calling on Sheriff Stanley Glanz to address the deputies’ words and actions.

    Okay. Here’s the thing: I don’t care if he was shot or not? If you’re holding someone down on the ground and they say they can’t breathe? The fuck you tell them ‘fuck your breath’? Injured or not that is absolutely callous disregard for human life. And look, they can’t keep their stories straight:

    Albin initially said Michael Huckeby was a member of the task force, working undercover. He later said the deputy was assigned to a retail crime task force but was assisting the violent crime task force the day Harris was shot.

    The guy kneeing #EricHarris’s head is Michael Huckeby. His father, Maj. Tom Huckeby, has worked for the sheriff’s office for about 25 years.

    Commemorating CHM: White Supremacy Killed Lincoln

    When you get a moment, check out PBS’ superb film The Assassination Of Abraham Lincoln. It is, without a doubt, the saddest documentary I’ve ever watched. It’s streaming for free, so there’s no excuse not to see it.

    One thing that the piece subtly reinforces, for me, is how we disconnect the Lincoln’s murder from the Civil War. I think out of politeness, we often neglect to note the obvious–that the Confederacy’s war to preserve systemic white supremacy ended with the murder of one of the greatest presidents in this country’s history. It’s important to say this. It’s important to not simply think of what the Civil War meant for black people, and what the following years cost black people, but to think about what it cost this country.

    We talk about Booth as though he were just some crazed assassin, as opposed to talking about him as he was– a white supremacist who killed Lincoln because he believed the president was a threat to “African slavery.” We’re uncomfortable saying the obvious–that Booth was animated by beliefs that were at the core of the CSA’s very existence. This is not conjecture. These are the words of Booth himself:

    I have ever held the South were right. The very nomination of ABRAHAM LINCOLN, four years ago, spoke plainly, war — war upon Southern rights and institutions. His election proved it. “Await an overt act.” Yes, till you are bound and plundered. What folly! The South was wise. Who thinks of argument or patience when the finger of his enemy presses on the trigger? In a foreign war I, too, could say, “country, right or wrong.” But in a struggle such as ours, (where the brother tries to pierce the brother’s heart,) for God’s sake, choose the right. When a country like this spurns justice from her side she forfeits the allegiance of every honest freeman, and should leave him, untrameled by any fealty soever, to act as his conscience may approve.

    People of the North, to hate tyranny, to love liberty and justice, to strike at wrong and oppression, was the teaching of our fathers. The study of our early history will not let me forget it, and may it never.

    People of the North, to hate tyranny, to love liberty and justice, to strike at wrong and oppression, was the teaching of our fathers. The study of our early history will not let me forget it, and may it never.

    This country was formed for the white, not for the black man. And looking upon African Slavery from the same stand-point held by the noble framers of our constitution. I for one, have ever considered if one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us,) that God has ever bestowed upon a favored nation. Witness heretofore our wealth and power; witness their elevation and enlightenment above their race elsewhere. I have lived among it most of my life, and have seen less harsh treatment from master to man than I have beheld in the North from father to son. Yet, Heaven knows, no one would be willing to do more for the negro race than I, could I but see a way to still better their condition.

    But LINCOLN’s policy is only preparing the way for their total annihilation. The South are not, nor have they been fighting for the continuance of slavery. The first battle of Bull Run did away with that idea. Their causes since for war have been as noble and greater far than those that urged our fathers on Even should we allow they were wrong at the beginning of this contest, cruelty and injustice have made the wrong become the right, and they stand now (before the wonder and admiration of the world) as a noble band of patriotic heroes. Hereafter, reading of their deeds, Thermopylae will be forgotten.

    It needs to said, and it needs to be repeated–the first president to be murdered in this country’s history was murdered by a white supremacist. We have to say this. It’s not enough to think about what white racism costs black people, we have to think about what white racism costs white people. In this case, it costs them one of the wisest statesmen this country has ever produced, and led to the elevation of Andrew Johnson, a man routinely reviled as one of the worst presidents in history.

    The final irony of it all is tragic–Leaders of the self-styled Party Of Lincoln actually celebrating the battle-flag embraced by Lincoln’s murderer.

    Denver Protesters Remix Mockingjay’s “Hanging Tree” for #EricGarner: lyrics at that link, listen here: Denver Protesters Remix Mockingjay’s Hanging Tree @ Cherry Creek Mall

    The SC Supreme Court has intervened & has appointed a Circuit Court judge re: Officer Slager. #WalterScott

  336. rq says

    And here is Martin O’Malley on the protests, #WalterScott and race. Interesting. Watch the video here: O’Malley at National Action Network 4/11/15.

    View from NewsChopper4 shows police response to protest that blocked Metro train. That’s a lot of police cars.

    #ShutDownA14: Protesters against police brutality barricade Brooklyn Bridge

    Protesters gathered in New York City and around the United States to rally against police brutality and a peak in officers killing unarmed black men. Organizers spread the message on social media using the #ShutDownA14 hashtag.

    Several arrests have been made in New York after protesters shut down Brooklyn Bridge. RT’s Aleksey Yaroshevsky reports from the site.

    Protests are occurring in more than 30 cities in 18 states. Tuesday’s nationwide event was organized by the Stop Mass Incarceration Network. The group is demanding that “the murder of Black and Brown people by the police MUST STOP”; calling for “justice for all the victims of brutal, murdering police”; asking the court system to “indict, convict and send killer cops to jail” because “the whole damn system is guilty as hell”; and to “stop the repression targeting the protests” by dropping all charges against protesters.

    More at the link, with pictures and quotes from across the States.

    15 Arrests in Protest That Disrupted Metro Service Near Downtown LA

    Police arrested 15 anti-police brutality protesters who blocked Metro Blue Line service by standing and sitting on the train tracks just south of downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday.

    A few dozen demonstrators were blocking the tracks at Broadway and Washington Boulevard about 5 p.m.

    LAPD officials said protesters were given 20 minutes to disperse. Those who refused to leave were taken into custody.

    Aerial footage showed stranded Metro passengers jumping out of the train just feet away from where the demonstration took place.

    Orange Confederate monument will include 32 rebel flags. Erm ssay what?

    Despite community concerns about the city of Orange’s image, motorists entering Texas from Louisiana on Interstate 10 will be greeted by 32 waving flags representing Texas regiments of the Confederate army as soon as the flagpoles are erected.

    The Confederate monument near Martin Luther King Jr. Drive is Orange in nearing completion, despite earlier attempts to prevent construction. The free speech rights of Sons of Confederate Veterans trumps the disgust of many citizens.

    “I don’t like it. I think it’s a bad idea,” Orange City Attorney John Cash “Jack” Smith said last week. “But they own the property, and the First Amendment warrants them that right.”

    The Sons of Confederate Veterans, the group behind the $50,000-memorial, just ordered the custom-made flag poles, said Marshall Davis, Texas Division spokesman. The group has been raising money for the project for two years and construction has moved along as fund have allowed.

    The thirteen columns that represent the states that fought on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil War already stand north of the interstate off Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. The group will add eight flags as soon as the poles come in – though Davis can’t estimate when that will be – and the remaining flags will be added in increments of eight as funds allow until all 32 stand around the circular monument, Davis said.

    Each flag with have a nameplate and history of the flag.

    Locals whose ancestors fought in the Confederate Army or Navy also contributed to the memorial by purchasing bricks at $50, $300 and $500 and benches at $800, according to the group’s website.

    Residents criticized the council for allowing the project to move forward. But Smith said the city could have been sued if its officials had tried to block it.

    “Sometimes we don’t like somebody’s free speech,” Smith said. “But we can’t stop it.”

    Paul Jones, president of the Beaumont chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, questioned whether erecting a memorial that honors those who promoted and fought for the enslavement of fellow human beings is even a matter of freedom of speech and expression.

    “When you try to express your opinion to dehumanize a group of people, it’s no longer a matter of freedom of speech,” Jones said Friday.

    Just wow.

  338. says

    rq @311:

    Should I stop linking to tweets?

    I think the Tweets you post give many people the opportunity to learn from them, which is very important. As mentioned in the material you quoted at #311, this is stuff a lot of people would otherwise not be aware of. You’re helping to raise awareness of very important issues.

    Additionally, this thread and its predecessors are a great trove of information regarding the Black Lives Matter Movement as well as the corrupt USAmerican criminal justice system. *And* you’re helping spread the voices of black people to places they wouldn’t necessarily have reached otherwise. Doing so demonstrates that you value black lives (that might be a minor point, but it’s one that I find important).

    Lastly, while the Tweets are public-private conversations, you’re not a journalist writing articles about them. You’re sharing them with the people reading this thread. I think there’s a distinction to be made between civilians sharing Tweets and a journalist writing an article based on public-private conversations.

    In a nutshell, no, I don’t think you should stop sharing the Tweets.

  339. says

    Apologies if this has already been posted.
    From Daily Kos-
    When do ‘isolated incidences’ of violence become systemic violence:

    There is a pattern of responses or reactions to police killings in the media and in white society. Few are more utilized in the national lexicon than the “Isolated Instance” claim. In an effort to diffuse correlation, instances of police brutality, extrajudicial killings, and general abuses of power are presented in isolated stories in the media. Only the most visible of stories are covered, and even those deaths receive scant media coverage.

    The latest in the long, continuous string of unassociated, uncorrelated incidences is the death of 50 year old former Coast Guard serviceman Walter Scott. He was killed by former North Charleston Police Officer Michael Slager in a traffic stop for a non-functioning tail light (which, according to South Carolina ordinance codes, is not against any city or state ordinance or law as long as one tail light was fully functioning). Early stories in the media ran with the police narrative, stating that Scott struggled for the tazer with the officer, managed to wrestle it away, and that the officer “feared for his life” which caused him to draw his service weapon and fire on Scott. Video footage released after the official police timeline of events completely contradict the officer’s account and eventually led to a murder charge for the Slager.

    The dash camera shows that one lamp was working at the time of the stop. Scott was pulled over going into an Advanced Auto Parts(and was assumed to be fixing the issue), and is cooperating with the officer at the time. When Slager returns to the patrol car, he has Scott’s license and information. Scott then flees the scene, with Slager giving chase. The video captured by Feldin Santana begins with Scott and Slager standing next to one another. Scott pushes Slager’s hand away, then runs away from the officer. Slager draws his service weapon and fires 8 times at Scott from between 15 to 20 feet away. Slager then radios in “Shots fired” as he walked over to cuff the dying Scott. He walks over to the spot where he discharged his weapon, picked up an object that was knocked to the ground(allegedly his tazer), and moves it over to Scott’s body as the second officer makes it to the scene. Neither officer attempt CPR, call for EMS, or attempt first aid.

    There have been over 300 Americans killed by police in 2015. There were 115 people were killed by police last month. That is more than the entire United Kingdom police force have killed since 1900, standing at a whopping 53 deaths. In 2012, there were zero deaths in the UK due to police shootings. Service weapons were only discharged three times in that year.

    In these extrajudicial killings, the line “I feared for my life” has been a plea for law enforcement to absolve themselves of criminal action in ending another person’s life. This narrative is so common place that White Americans are convinced that police have an extremely dangerous job, when it consistently ranks outside of many top 10 lists.

    Conversely, more African Americans were killed in 2014 than in the September 11th attacks in 2001, according to the correlation of numbers from the CDC and killedbypolice.net. While it may be true that there are roughly twice as many white people than black people who were killed by police, it is also important to remember that white people outnumber black people in America by a margin of 5 to 1. Based on population data, black people are three times more likely to die in a police confrontation, and young black men are 21 times more likely to die than young white men.

    With all the correlation of statistical data, the evidence of a systemic pattern of deadly violence is fairly obvious. Unfortunately, the general population, news media, and law enforcement agencies never address brutality from a national standpoint. There are no calls to reform escalation of force, methods of non-violence deescalation being utilized, or inquiries into the alarmingly high rate of police/civilian killings.

    At first, I considered perhaps it was a lack of foresight on the part of the average white citizen. That is false considering they are at least aware that extrajudicial killings occur, but actively minimize its occurrence, severity, and overall impact. Some even celebrate the deaths of the victims, thanking officers for their service as if they were Judge Dredd in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian future. The largest problem is that many of these cases involve minor traffic infractions that result in fines or tickets, or deal with people who have mental issues. In the case of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, she didn’t even commit a crime, but was sleeping soundly before being killed by police.

    The empirical data is there, but it only serves to solidify the information already known to aware individuals:
    The institution of police have become increasingly violent. The are not holding themselves accountable for the excessive violence that they cause, and something must be done about this nationwide epidemic. There is no greater example of proof the accusation of America is now a police state than the hyper-aggressive, overly-authoritiave style of policing exhibited by law enforcement officers. Each case of a non-inditement, aquittal, or not-guilty verdict emboldens the next officer believing he or she could get away with murder. Anyone who believes in a lawful and just society must work together to tear down the blue shield that protects themselves.

  340. rq says

    Goign to drop the usual links and heads up for tomorrow, I don’t think I’ll be posting at all, back on Friday. I’ll catch up then as much as I can (ha), but – I guess take a short break?

    The man on deathrow waiting for word on the stay of execution? Sad news. Missouri Executes Mentally Ill Black Man Convicted by All-White Jury

    The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) contends that prosecutors in St. Louis County unfairly prohibit black jurors from hearing a death penalty case involving a black suspect, an allegation the state dismissed as unfounded.

    Missouri is tied with Texas for the most executions and is on track for breaking a record this year if the current trend continues.

    Not a pride-inducing record.

    The Curious Case of the Disappearing LAPD Investigations

    In the spirit of transparency and accountability, I have a suggestion for the Los Angeles Police Department, Police Commission president Steve Soboroff and the Office of the Inspector General.

    I’ve been giving some deep thought to the numerous, and I mean numerous, investigations that are oftentimes opened up on some of these more high profile scandals involving the police department.

    These are the investigations that are usually opened up miraculously after the news media reports on it and goes to the police department for some sort of comment. That comment is almost always that an investigation is being opened.

    For example, about five months ago TMZ[dot]com broke a story involving the LAPD and a song that was sung during a party hosted at the Glendale Elks Lodge by a retired officer. […]

    Well when the story broke which was around December 23, 2014, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck wasted no time in having the following tweeted out for him: “I am aware of the video released via TMZ. Like many of you, I find it offensive & absurd. It does not reflect the values of the #LAPD. I have directed our Professional Standards Bureau to look into this & determine if any active department employees were involved.”

    That was followed up with one of the department’s public information officers telling the news media that an investigation would be opened immediately.

    That was in December and according to my sources nothing was ever done by the department in terms of an investigation. Basically, the public was given lip service and as soon as the cameras and reporters moved on to the their next story it was back to business as usual. […]

    As it stands now, investigations are opened up on an evening newscast and that’s usually the last we hear of it from the department.

    Ideally, I’d like to see a section on the department’s website that provides this information as well, but we can get to that later. Getting the Police Commission on board to first at least agree to update the public regularly on these investigations would be a great start.

    Sometimes I have to push the department to bring an investigation to closure like with the now unemployed Detective Frank “Foot-in-Mouth” Lyga and the ongoing Boxergate saga–but that’s not really my job now is it?

    I think we can all agree that 2014 was a banner year for the opening of investigations after something was reported on in the news (or my blog) that the department claimed to know nothing about. I used to joke that the 10th floor of LAPDHQ’s opened up investigations every time they opened up their mouths to speak.

    It’s time for huge dose of that transparency and accountability that Chief Beck is always force feeding and hoodwinking the public with and I think the Police Commission can and should help to make that happen. Follow up and follow through is everything and would greatly help with the community relationship policing or whatever it’s being called that Los Angeles is about to embark on.

    Large crowd here at STL City Hall for the Civilian Oversight Board vote that has now been postponed.

    Parent banned from campus after threatening elementary student with knife

    Rebekah Geiger has kept her daughter, Patience, out of class at Broadview Thomson K-8 since the little girl was threatened with a knife during breakfast at school on Monday.

    “She’s 7 years old, and she’s terrified,” Geiger said.

    The person making the threat was not another student, but the mother of a classmate, who was eating with the kids.

    “She said the lady threatened to cut her tongue off,” Geiger said.

    Patience told school staffers the woman showed her a knife and threatened another student.

    Administrators tracked down the parent.

    “This parent said she did have a box cutter. It was in her coat from work, and she really was just joking, and while we understand that, we take these situations very seriously,” said Stacy Howard, spokeswoman for Seattle Public Schools.

    Howard said it appears the mother did not intend to harm the girl.

    But schools are weapons-free zones, and administrators will now ban that parent from campus for a year.

    Yes, she threatened a little black girl.

    Video: Denver police officer suspended 30 days for shoving down man standing with hands in pockets (with video)

    A Denver police officer has been suspended for 30 days without pay for shoving a LoDo bar patron backward down some stairs, according to a disciplinary order.

    Deputy Director of Safety Jess Vigil found that Officer Choice Johnson, an 11-year veteran, violated department rules by using inappropriate force.

    The report indicated that Johnson falsely portrayed the bar patron as taking a fighting stance toward the officer, when a surveillance video showed the man was standing with his hands in his pockets as the 260-pound officer violently shoved him backward down some stairs. (The video can be viewed above. The officer shoves that man at 4:23 into the video.)

    Press Conference re: Civilian Oversight Board. STL City Hall.

  341. rq says

    ArchCity Defenders saw problems with municipal courts before Ferguson turmoil

    Two years before Ferguson attracted national attention for racial tension and questionable court practices, a group of volunteer lawyers calling itself the ArchCity Defenders was already concluding that something was off about the city.

    Today the group is at the forefront of a legal movement to overhaul municipal courts regionally — one that has already secured broad political support for lowering court fines and fees.

    But back then, ArchCity Defenders was mostly an anonymous group of volunteers working exclusively with poor clients, helping them clear old arrest warrants so they could get into housing programs and find jobs.

    Thomas Harvey, a graduate of St. Louis University School of Law, was one of those volunteers. And what he was hearing brought to mind debtors prisons, which had been illegal for years.

    Again and again, Harvey and others heard harrowing stories from clients who described a system of municipal courts that preyed on the poor.

    One woman had spent more than 30 days in jail over an unpaid traffic ticket she’d gotten 15 years prior, when she was a teenager. She was assessed a fine she couldn’t pay in full. After she missed a payment, the court issued a warrant for her arrest. At a traffic stop years later, the woman was arrested and jailed.

    “They’ve made it illegal to be poor,” Harvey said.

    Harvey and his partners began working on a white paper — a 41-page policy document they hoped would explain what they say are unconstitutional municipal court practices.

    The paper, published on the ArchCity Defenders’ website in August, took off in national social justice circles just as Ferguson erupted in protest over the killing of Michael Brown by then-Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson.

    The paper essentially turned the ArchCity Defenders into the darlings of national policy experts at a time when the St. Louis area was becoming a symbol of a not-so post-racial America. In the months since, all that attention has been a mixed blessing for ArchCity Defenders.

    More at the link.

    #STL Board of Aldermen now in session to consider controversial civilian oversight board of police.

    Auction of Art Made by Japanese-Americans in Internment Camps Sparks Protest.

    Rago auction house in Lambertville, N.J., is offering photos of internees and objects that they made, including cigarette cases woven from onion sack string and wooden family nameplates that were attached to barracks. The internees gave their artworks and furniture to the historian Allen Hendershott Eaton while he was researching his 1952 book, “Beauty Behind Barbed Wire: The Arts of the Japanese in Our War Relocation Camps.”

    A petition on Change[dot]org calls the sale “a betrayal of those imprisoned people who thought their gifts would be used to educate, not be sold to the highest bidder in a national auction, pitting families against museums against private collectors.” A Facebook page for the cause has attracted almost 1,800 likes as of Monday evening. In posts, people are calling for the collection to be turned over to institutions. Internees and their descendants have also written to say that they recognize their own family members in the photos for sale.

    The poet Janice Mirikitani saw an image of her cousin Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani in a batch of 63 photos expected to bring between $800 and $1,200. “Do not commit this travesty of cheapening and ‘selling’ memories of cherished family members, and artwork which was created to survive the isolation and humiliation of the camp experience,” she wrote on the protest Facebook page.

    Toshi Abe, a board member of the Japanese American Citizens League and a spokesman for the group protesting the sale, said in an interview that postponing the auction would allow Japanese-Americans to research a better solution for the collection than dispersal on the market.

    “We want time to really sort out what to do with this artwork,” he said.

    Cruel to benefit from such cruelty.

    The Awkward Black Girl Who Is Going To Change Television

    Issa Rae stands strong, arms akimbo, on the jacket of her new memoir, “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl.”

    By most measures in entertainment, she is a wonder woman. Nearly 25 million views of her YouTube videos. New York Times best-seller status for her debut book. A greenlit pilot for HBO. She is collaborating with Shonda Rhimes and Instagram’ing with Oprah.

    Such feats are not achieved by awkwardness alone. Like the projects she produces, Issa Rae is endearing and quirky and earnestly self-aware.

    She is now focused on her most ambitious goal yet: to diversify television from the inside out. She explained her philosophy during an interview with HuffPost Live’s Marc Lamont Hill:

    Until you have people in positions of power that have varied experiences, nothing will change. Honestly, we’re not on [television executives’] radar. They don’t know. They’re not really thinking about us. If you have people in positions of power that don’t have very many black friends, that don’t really understand the black experience, they’re not thinking about it and there are not enough people concerned with it… Social media changed the game in that you’re seeing all of these tweets, you’re seeing all these trending topics from…black people who are expressing what they want to see. Now people take notice.

    Rae wants television that is authentic and culturally rich. “I think that’s entirely possible. We had an era of it for a while [including Living Single and Fresh Prince], and then we didn’t.” Moreover, she wants to redefine “what’s been painted of mainstream media’s blackness. I don’t fit within that. I’m in this awkward definition of blackness. Black is supposed to be cool, black is sassy, black is trendsetting. I just don’t feel that way. It’s almost limited in a way and I feel like black is so much more than that.”

    Interview with Issa at the link.

    The FBI Informant Who Mounted a Sting Operation Against the FBI. For some itneresting reading.

    Black measurements of ‘economic well being’ far behind whites: Congressional report. Because they needed a congressional report to know this for sure-for sure.

    While African-Americans have made significant progress since enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, there remains “startling inequities” in measurements of economic well being between blacks and whites, says a new report by Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee of Congress.

    Among the key findings from the report, released Tuesday (April 14) are:

    – At 10.1 percent, the unemployment rate for African-Americans is more than double the white jobless rate of 4.7 percent.
    – The median income of African Americans households is $34,600, nearly $24,000 less than median income of white households.
    – The median net worth of white households is 13 times the level for black households, and blacks are three times more likely to live in poverty than white Americans.

    “The cold hard facts in today’s report support the anecdotes we have heard for years and confirm that we are failing African-Americans throughout this country,” said Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-New Orleans, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, which worked on the report with staffers for the Joint Committee.

    “The growing economic disparity facing the African-American community is not merely an economic crisis but a great moral emergency,” Richmond said. “There is much work to be done on the federal, state, and local levels that will require all hands on deck including elected officials, community leaders, business leaders, and candidates for office in order to curb this epidemic.”

  342. rq says

    White parents in North Carolina are using charter schools to secede from the education system

    It’s true that the charter movement has a sunny side. KIPP schools, for instance, mostly serve low-income and minority students, putting them through extra-long school days and imposing strict rules on their behavior. Many KIPP schools have accomplished what their public school counterparts couldn’t: yanking up test scores for kids on the wrong side of the achievement gap.

    But for every successful school, there have also been failures. The research is mixed on the performance of charter schools, and it’s a mistake to believe that different is necessarily better. The question then becomes one of equity: Who gets to attend the good charter schools?

    Setting aside the drama between charters and teachers unions, or complaints that charter schools lead to the privatization of public education, there has been the persistent critique that charters increase inequality by plucking advantaged students out of traditional public schools.

    The most recent cautionary tale comes from North Carolina, where professors at Duke have traced a troubling trend of resegregation since the first charters opened in 1997. They contend that North Carolina’s charter schools have become a way for white parents to secede from the public school system, as they once did to escape racial integration orders.

    “They appear pretty clearly to be a way for white students to get out of more racially integrated schools,” said economics professor Helen Ladd, one of the authors of the draft report released Monday.

    Charter schools in North Carolina tend to be either overwhelmingly black or overwhelmingly white—in contrast to traditional public schools, which are more evenly mixed. […]

    Parental preferences are part of the problem. The charter school admissions process is itself race-blind: Schools that are too popular conduct lotteries between their applicants. But if a school isn’t white enough, white parents simply won’t apply.

    In previous research, Ladd discovered that white North Carolina parents prefer schools that are less than 20 percent black. This makes it hard to have racially balanced charter schools in a state where more than a quarter of schoolchildren are black.

    “Even though black parents might prefer racially balanced schools, the fact that white parents prefer schools with far lower proportions of black students sets up a tipping point,” the authors write. “Once a school becomes ‘too black,’ it becomes almost all black as white parents avoid it.”

    Looking at students in grades 4-8, the researchers found that the regular public school population in North Carolina has become less white over the past 15 years (from 64.1 percent white to 53 percent white), while the charter school population has grown more white (from 58.5 percent white to 62.2 percent white). […]

    One problem is that disadvantaged students have less of a chance to attend a charter school. First, they or their parents have to be plugged in enough to know which are the good charter schools and motivated enough to apply. Then, they need to have the resources to actually attend the charter, because unlike regular public schools, charter schools in North Carolina do not have to offer transportation or lunch to students. For poor students who rely on school buses and free meal programs, the costs associated with attending a charter school may discourage them from the opportunity.

    By contrast, affluent families might not think twice about driving their children to attend the high-achieving charter across town instead of a low-achieving neighborhood school. In this manner, even charter schools without explicit fees or admissions requirements may tilt toward inequality. […]

    As America’s neighborhoods become increasingly segregated, it will take conscious effort to prevent public schools from also becoming more segregated, whether by race or by class or by disability. In the South, there were once private “segregation academies” for white students to avoid integrated schools. Without planning for diversity, North Carolina’s charter schools are at risk of resurrecting that legacy.

    This is post-racial America, folks.

    The St. Louis Police Officers Union will oppose passage of Civilian Oversight Board today. Of course they will.

    Post-Dispatch photographers win National Headliners

    Post-Dispatch photographers Robert Cohen and David Carson have won National Headliner Awards for their work after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The awards are presented by the Press Club of Atlantic City.

    Cohen won first place in spot news photography for “Return Fire,” his photo of a protester throwing a tear gas canister. Carson won for photography portfolio for “#Ferguson.”

    The news staff won second place in spot news coverage for its coverage of the shooting of Michael Brown. Winning first was the Baltimore Sun for coverage of the Columbia, Md., mall shooting.

    Editorial Page Editor Tony Messenger won second place for editorial writing for a collection of editorials about Ferguson.

    J.B. Forbes won second place for photography portfolio.

    Taking third was David Carson for spot news photography for “Looting Ferguson.”

    A couple of the iconic photos at the link.

    Jaden Smith Has A New ‘Offering’ For Fans

    Jaden Smith continues the flow of new music with his latest loosie release, “Offering.” Will and Jada’s son finds his ground over a Jazzy backdrop — which he uses as a canvas as he turns questions into art.

    Look out for Jaden to drop a number of new projects this year.

    For funsies!

    Aaron Hernandez found guilty of murder by Massachusetts jury. Too bad he’s not a cop receiving the pointy end of Justice.

    Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots tight end who was charged with murder in the June 2013 shooting death of acquaintance Odin Lloyd, was found guilty of first-degree murder Wednesday by a Bristol County Superior Court jury in Massachusetts.

    And here’s BuzzFeed on the same: Aaron Hernandez Guilty Of First-Degree Murder And Sentenced To Life In Prison Without Parole.

  343. rq says

    Madison students walk out, shut down East Washington to protest Tony Robinson shooting

    About 100 protesters and students from all across Madison convened Tuesday in the middle of East Washington Avenue to protest police violence and the shooting of Tony Robinson.

    Students from Middleton and Madison West, East and LaFollette high schools met at West and East high schools around 10:30 a.m. At West, students marched through the neighborhoods chanting familiar phrases like “Who do we love? Tony Robinson. Who did they kill? Tony Robinson.”

    Within a few hours, the whole group had united outside Madison East High School, blocking traffic on East Washington Avenue throughout the afternoon. During a sit-in, they shared memories of Robinson, recited poems and sang a song. The rest of the time, they stood around in the street, some skateboarding and others dancing to music blasted from cars.

    “You guys don’t realize how much power you have,” Robinson’s grandmother Sharon Irwin said to the group of kids assembled on the street.

    “You are the future,” Irwin said. “I believe that each and every one of you can walk a different way.”

    The protests come as the city awaits a decision from Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne on whether to charge Madison Police Officer Matt Kenny in the shooting death of 19-year-old Robinson on March 6.

    I hope they do.

    Other black people doing great things: Santonio Holmes Raises Awareness of Sickle Cell Disease

    President of the III & Long Foundation, Holmes was in Washington, D.C., recently to meet with members of Congress and health care influencers, advocating for sickle cell research, awareness and treatment.

    “As a parent of someone who has been diagnosed with sickle cell, I know how financially expensive and emotionally taxing the hospital visits, bills, treatment and medication can be,” said Holmes. “My goal is to raise awareness and help families that cannot afford the proper treatments by providing grants to organizations that assist these deserving families.”

    Sickle cell disease is the most commonly inherited blood disorder in the United States, according to the National Institutes of Health. It disproportionately affects African Americans and other minorities with ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa, South and Central America, the Caribbean, India, Saudi Arabia and some Mediterranean countries.
    […]

    Compared with similar genetic disorders, sickle cell research receives a disproportionately low amount of funding. According to estimates provided by researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine comparing sickle cell disease and cystic fibrosis funding in 2010 and 2011, cystic fibrosis, which affects less than a third as many people as SCD, received between 7.6 and 11.4 times more dollars per affected person from federal and private charitable sources of support. Between 2010 and 2013, five drugs were approved for use in the treatment of cystic fibrosis, and none were approved for the treatment of SCD.

    Carlton Haywood Jr., a bioethics and hematology professor at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics who is living with SCD, says that there may be several reasons driving the low levels of awareness and research funding: Many people tend to think about SCD as a childhood disease, advocacy efforts by the sickle cell community have not been as effective as those in the hemophilia and cystic fibrosis communities, and many mistakenly believe that sickle cell is a condition that only affects one minority racial group.

    “They don’t realize that persons of any race or ethnicity are at risk for the disease, so they may not realize that everyone has a stake in improving conditions for the persons with the disease,” Haywood said.

    Driver’s License Suspensions Create Cycle of Debt. Quite impressive debt, actually.

    The last time Kenneth Seay lost his job, at an industrial bakery that offered health insurance and Christmas bonuses, it was because he had been thrown in jail for legal issues stemming from a revoked driver’s license. Same with the three jobs before that.

    In fact, Mr. Seay said, when it comes to gainful employment, it is not his criminal record that is holding him back — he did time for dealing drugs — but the $4,509.22 in fines, court costs and reinstatement fees he must pay to recover his license.

    Mr. Seay’s inability to pay those costs has trapped him in a cycle that thousands of other low-income Tennesseans are struggling to escape. Going through the legal system, even for people charged with nonviolent misdemeanors, can be expensive, with fines, public defender fees, probation fees and other costs running into hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars. Many people cannot pay.

    As a result, some states have begun suspending driver’s licenses for unsatisfied debts stemming from any criminal case, from misdemeanors like marijuana possession to felonies in which court costs can reach into the tens of thousands of dollars. In Tennessee, almost 90,000 driver’s licenses have been suspended since its law was enacted in 2011. […]

    Tennessee is not alone in the practice: Five of the 15 states with the largest prison populations have it, according to Alicia Bannon at the Brennan Center for Justice. Most states also suspend licenses for failure to pay traffic fines, another policy that critics say creates a quicksand of debt. The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators has complained that suspensions should be reserved for dangerous drivers, not indebted ones.

    But in recent years, a few states have reconsidered the policy amid concerns that it hurts low-income residents without achieving its intended goals. In 2013, Washington stopped suspending licenses for failure to pay nonmoving violations like expired registrations. Suspensions dropped by half, said Brad Benfield, a spokesman for the Washington State Department of Licensing, and each month, there have been 500 fewer arrests for driving while suspended, saving an estimated 4,500 hours of patrol officers’ time.

    And this month, a California lawmaker introduced a bill that would make it easier for people to reinstate their licenses, after a report said that four million California licenses had been suspended for failure to pay or failure to appear in court.

    “For many families, a driver’s license suspension is the beginning of a descent into abject poverty for which there is no escape,” the proposed law says. […]

    Typical court costs can vary widely. Asked for an average, a lawyer at the public defender’s office in Nashville picked up some files from her desk and read off the outstanding debts: $598, $1,100, $5,600, $14,872 and $3,800. That does not include a separate license reinstatement fee based on the number of offenses. In Mr. Seay’s case, the reinstatement fee, solely from minor traffic violations and driving-while-revoked charges, is $1,822.

    Many defendants are forced to choose between paying court debt or essentials like utility bills and child support. Mr. Seay said his tax refund this year went toward child support debt accumulated during his time in prison and periods of unemployment. For even low-level offenders, debt can make a valid license unattainable. […]

    Nashville has also set up an “indigency docket” where the court debt of poor defendants — at least, those who hear about the option — is routinely waived. But they still have to pay a license reinstatement fee to the Department of Safety based on the number and type of violations.

    Other courts do not take the time to examine defendants’ ability to pay. At a recent court session in Robertson County, north of Nashville, Erin McKissick — who said she had been placed on probation, required to pay for drug tests and threatened with losing her children after being convicted of driving while suspended and other counts — filled out an affidavit of indigency, saying she had a part-time cashier job and received $200 a month in food stamps. When Judge Joel W. Perry of General Sessions Court declined to look at it, she crumpled it into a ball.

    Reached by phone, Judge Perry said that he did not recall the details of Ms. McKissick’s case, but that if she had previously been able to pay a bail bond, he would most likely have assumed that she was not indigent.

    Even when people finally manage to get their license back, their ordeal may not be over. James Goodwin, whose blended family includes six young children, failed years ago to pay a $35 traffic fine and then was repeatedly caught driving while suspended. After thousands of dollars and seven months in jail, he said, last month he was able to show a judge his new license. The judge dismissed his latest charge of driving while suspended, but assessed him $275 in court costs.

    Mr. Goodwin was given 30 days to pay.

    Cops have killed way more Americans in America than terrorists have. Gives you pause.

    Police have killed more Americans on U.S. soil since the year 2000 than the Islamist terrorists. At Vox, Anand Katakam created an interactive map with data from Fatal Encounters, a nonprofit working to build a national database of police killings. This database, and the map Vox created, shows that US police have killed at least 5,600 people since the year 2000. That’s many more than have died in terrorist attacks on American soil.

    A huge majority of the more than 5,600 deaths on the map are from gunshots, which is hardly surprising given that guns are so deadly compared to other tools used by police. There are also a lot of noticeable fatalities from vehicle crashes, stun guns, and asphyxiations. In some cases, people died from stab wounds, medical emergencies, and what’s called “suicide by cop,” when someone commits suicide by baiting a police officer into using deadly force.

    Interactive map at the link.

    Young revolutionaries figuring out different ways to let their peers know #BlackLivesMatter.

    Today, the COB was perfected. No other amendments will be added. On the 20th the bill will be law. Yes.

  344. rq says

    Parkway North High School doesn’t want #BlackLivesMatter signs on campus b/c it’s not inclusive to all lives. Right. Way to go, educational facility.

    These Veterans Help 8,000 Chicago Students Get To School Safely Each Day

    The Safe Passage Program, founded in 2011 by nonprofit Leave No Veteran Behind (LNVB), deploys vets to monitor unsafe Chicago neighborhoods as students walk to school.

    The goal of the program is twofold: to reduce youth violence in Chicago and pay off veterans’ student loan debt. The organization covers veterans’ debt and helps them search for jobs, and in return, the veterans dedicate time and energy to looking out for students on their commute. More than 400 veterans have gone through the Safe Passage Program since it began, NationSwell reports, and LNVB services contribute to over 8,000 Chicago Public School students daily.

    Veterans can have their student loans paid off by LNVB through the Retroactive Scholarship Program, which has, to date, paid back over $150,000 in student loans. Participants of the program must complete 100-400 hours of community service, for which they are paid, and the schedule gives veterans time to look for jobs while they are working with LNVB.

    “This isn’t just volunteerism, but actual work,” Eli Williamson, co-founder of Leave No Veteran Behind, told The Huffington Post. “It provides flexibility to go and look for alternate employment.” […]

    “Our intention is to be here until the last day so kids can figure out that, ‘Hey, there’s somebody that actually cares about our safety,’ Safe Passage Program veteran Bernard Cooks told NPR. “And they can feel confident going up and down these streets.”

    Today is also seeing world-wide protest (at least, I understand it’s a world-wide event) for a higher minimum wage – in USAmerica, $15/hr.
    Our City will continue to #FightFor15 because the minimum wage must keep up with the cost of living. (New York, FYI.)

    There are about 500 people out here right now in Florida. #FightFor15

    Pittsburgh #FightFor15

    The #FightFor15 March continues in STL.

  346. says

    A primer on racism:

    It is important to recognize that racism manifests in a variety of forms and styles in today’s world. Forms of racism include the following:
    Representational: depictions of essentialized racial stereotypes are common in popular culture and media, like the tendency to cast people of color as criminals and as victims of crime, or as background characters rather than leads, in film and television; also common are racial caricatures that are racist in their representations, like “mascots” for the Cleveland Indians, Atlanta Braves, and the Washington R******* (name redacted because it is a racial slur).
    Ideological: racism is manifest in world views, beliefs and common sense ways of thinking that are premised on essentialist notions of racial categories, and the idea that white or light skinned people are superior, in a variety of ways, to dark skinned people. Historically, ideological racism supported and justified the building of European colonial empires and U.S. imperialism through unjust acquisition of land, people, and resources around the world. Today, some common ideological forms of racism include the belief that black women are sexually promiscuous, that Latina women are “fiery” or “hot tempered,” and that black men and boys are criminally oriented.
    Discursive: racism is often expressed linguistically, in the discourse we use to talk about the world and people in it, and manifests in racial slurs and hate speech, and in code words that have racialized meanings embedded in them, like “ghetto,” “thug,” or “gansta.”
    Interactional: racism takes an interactional form such as a white woman crossing a street to avoid walking past a black or Latino man, a person of color being verbally or physically assaulted because of their race, or when, someone assumes a person of color working at an establishment to be a low-level employee, though they might be a manager, executive, or owner.
    Institutional: racism can take institutional form in the way policies and laws are crafted and put into practice, such as the decades-long set of policing and legal policies known as “The War on Drugs,” which has disproportionately targeted neighborhoods and communities that are composed predominantly of people of color, New York City’s Stop-N-Frisk policy that overwhelmingly targets black and Latino males, and educational tracking policies that funnel children of color into remedial classes and trades programs.
    Structural: racism takes structural form in the ongoing, historical, and longterm reproduction of the racialized structure of our society through a combination of all of the above forms. Structural racism manifests in widespread racial segregation and stratification, recurrent displacement of people of color from neighborhoods that go through processes of gentrification, and the overwhelming burden of environmental pollution born by people of color given its proximity to their communities.
    Systemic: racism within the U.S. can be described as systemic because the country was founded on racist beliefs with racist policies and practices, and because that legacy lives today in the racism that courses throughout the entirety of our social system.
    In addition, sociologists observe a variety of styles, or types, within these different forms of racism. Some may be overtly racist, like the use of racial slurs or hate speech, or policies that intentionally discriminate against people on the basis of race. Others may be covert, kept to oneself, hidden from public view, or obscured by colorblind policies that purport to be race-neutral, when in fact they manifest in racist ways. While something may not appear obviously racist at first glance, it may in fact prove to be racist when one examines the implications of it through a sociological lens. If it relies on essentialized notions of race, and reproduces a racially structured society, then it is racist.Due to the sensitive nature of race as a topic of conversation in U.S. society, some have come to think that simply noticing race, or identifying or describing someone using race, is racist. Given the above definition, sociologists would not agree that this is the case. In fact, many sociologists, racial theorists and anti-racist activists emphasize the importance of recognizing and accounting for race and racism as necessary in the pursuit of social, economic, and political justice.

  347. rq says

    White Texas girls blame society for their racist rap about lynching black boys

    Two white girls sent letters of apology after classmates shared a racist rap song they recorded about lynching black boys who found them sexually attractive.

    The girls, whose names were not released, said they recorded the improvised rap two years ago as freshmen at Grapevine High School and did not fully understand the implications of their actions, reported Daily Kos.

    “At this time in our lives, racism was not the talk of the country nor had we ever witnessed the true power of social media, twitter was still fresh and we had never heard of anyone getting in trouble for posting anything on social media, it was the beginning of this social era,” said one of the girls in a letter written to classmates and teachers.

    School officials said they just recently became aware of the recording, which was made in June 2013 and has been circulating among students on social media.

    “N*ggas n*ggas n*ggas they always look at me, I want to kill them now, I want to hang them from a tree,” one girl raps at the start of the three-minute, 17-second recording.

    The girls repeatedly threaten to kill black boys who look at them sexually and make stereotypical references to black penis size, in addition to homophobic comments and offensive remarks about Latino and Asian-American students.

    The girls, however, insist they are not bigoted.

    “The song does not portray in any way how I actually feel about people,” one of the girls wrote. “I am a very open-minded person and I enjoy being part of a diverse family and diverse community. I am being raised to be respectful of all people, cultures and differences.”

    The other girl said they were only mirroring the society they grew up in.

    “As kids, we hear racist jokes all times of the day,” she said. “It’s what we’re around, it’s the jokes we heard.”

    But, the girl said, she learned all of those racial slurs and offensive jokes outside her parents’ home.

    “In my own home, my entire life I have never heard a foul or judgemental (sic) word for another race ever leave my parents’ mouths,” she claimed. “I myself have witnessed others spit racial slurs or comments and have been completely dumbfounded to the point of tears.”

    She cast herself of a victim of anyone who wants to see her held responsible for her own actions.

    She better grow out of that habit pretty damn quick. Even as a teenager, the whole ‘ignorance’ arugment or ‘no one was talking about it then’ is pretty weak and disrespectful and completely avoiding the responsibility.

    a representation of a Black family where the wife isn’t lighter than her husband & the little girl isn’t biracial.

    Incarceration rate for
    France 96 per 100k
    Russia 568 per 100k
    America 700 per 100k
    African-American 2285 per 100k
    AA men 4749 per 100k

    Chris Hayes on Laquan MacDonald. Police Shooting of 17 Year Old Laquan McDonald Revealed (youtube).

    Kanye West: “Every Time I Say Something That’s Extremely Truthful Out Loud, It Literally Breaks the Internet”

    Time Magazine just rolled out this year’s “100 Most Influential People” of the year list, and Kanye West has graced the cover of the piece with his profile written by Elon Musk. In the profile, Kanye talks about his legacy and how he would rather make the world better through his art, music, and fashion than worry about how he is remembered at the end. “I don’t care about having a legacy, I don’t care about being remembered,” West said.

    Kanye also talked about his competition in music, and said that he doesn’t look at it like that because he’s focusing on leaving behind something special for humanity. “Our focus needs to be less about our legacy or how we’re going to control each other, but more how can we give to each other,” said Kanye.

    Kanye’s wife, Kim Kardashian, Bradley Cooper, Tim Cook, Lorne Michaels, and many more were all also featured on this year’s list, which you can check out in full here. Both videos for the list can be found below.

    With video.

    3 supervisors refused to lie & say that Officer Bates, who killed #EricHarris, had been properly trained. The supervisors were transferred.
    More on this next comment, but that’s a pretty (mildly) reassuring thing to know.

  348. rq says

    Sources: Supervisors told to falsify reserve deputy’s training records; department announces internal review

    The Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff’s Office on Thursday questioned a training claim made by Reserve Deputy Robert Bates in the aftermath of a fatal shooting.

    In a statement that the 73-year-old reserve deputy gave the sheriff’s office following the fatal shooting of Eric Harris during an undercover operation on April 2, Bates noted he had taken “active shooter training” from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.

    Lisa Allen, chief media relations office for the sheriff’s office there, said they had no record of Bates attending their training.

    In fact, Allen said, that training is only available to members of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, meaning Bates would not have been eligible. The class, Allen said, has only been offered three times.

    “We don’t allow out-of-state people to take the class,” she said. “I’m only surmising, and I can’t confirm this because this would not have been our class, but our active shooter instructor did travel to Dallas once to teach a class.

    “Maybe he took that class and is saying he took it through us, but again, that would not have been our class, so we have no way to verify if he attended it or not.”

    In Bates’ seven-page statement to Tulsa County sheriff’s investigators, obtained by the World on Wednesday, the reserve deputy states he previously attended a five-day homicide investigation school in Dallas and received “active shooter response training” by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. […]

    Supervisors at the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office were ordered to falsify a reserve deputy’s training records, giving him credit for field training he never took and firearms certifications he should not have received, sources told the Tulsa World.

    At least three of reserve deputy Robert Bates’ supervisors were transferred after refusing to sign off on his state-required training, multiple sources speaking on condition of anonymity told the World.

    Bates, 73, is accused of second-degree manslaughter in the shooting death of Eric Harris during an undercover operation on April 2.

    The sources’ claims are corroborated by records, including a statement by Bates after the shooting, that he was certified as an advanced reserve deputy in 2007.

    An attorney for Harris’ family also raised questions about the authenticity of Bates’ training records.

    Additionally, Sheriff Stanley Glanz told a Tulsa radio station this week that Bates had been certified to use three weapons, including a revolver he fired at Harris. However, Glanz said the Sheriff’s Office has not been able to find the paperwork on those certifications.

    The sheriff’s deputy that certified Bates has moved on to work for the Secret Service, Glanz said during the radio interview.

    “We can’t find the records that she supposedly turned in,” Glanz said. “So we are going to talk to her to find out if for sure he’s been qualified with those (weapons).”

    Undersheriff Tim Albin was unavailable for comment Wednesday but in an earlier interview, Albin said he was unaware of any concerns expressed by supervisors about Bates’ training.

    The Sheriff’s Office has released a summary listing training courses Bates had been given credit for but have not released documents showing which supervisors signed off on that training.

    He rejected claims that Bates’ training records were falsified and that supervisors who refused to do so were transferred to less desirable assignments.

    “The training record speaks for itself. I have absolutely no knowledge of what you are talking about,” Albin said. “There aren’t any secrets in law enforcement. Zero. Those types of issues would have come up.”

    So all this trouble and one man’s life is worth some old white guy wanting to play with guns with the police. Fuck that shit.

    Bratton: How the NYPD lost its way. What do you mean? Their PR is amazing!

    As New York’s crime and justice conversation has been caught up in a national one, a critical, underappreciated fact is that as the city got safer over the past two decades, many fewer people were locked up here. Still, as crime kept falling, the impact of aggressive policing on the very communities that ask for protection has been magnified.

    Talking recently with the Daily News editorial board, Commissioner Bill Bratton laid out his view of where the NYPD went wrong after his first stint here in the mid-’90s, and his standard for what policing in a much safer city should look like.

    Lightly edited for clarity and flow, here’s the top cop’s view of his department’s past — specifically, how it lost focus on “the baddest of the bad guys” and began “over-policing” — and how he’s working to fix that:

    Read more at the link.

    Hunger strike launched for Loretta Lynch. I don’t have an update for this (yet).

    A civil rights group led by the Rev. Al Sharpton is launching a hunger strike to protest the delay in Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch’s confirmation.

    ADVERTISEMENT
    The National Action Network is calling the hunger strike “Confirm Loretta Lynch Fast.” A new group of women civil rights leaders and other protestors plan to fast each day that Lynch is not given a confirmation vote in an effort Sharpton said is inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Ghandi.

    “These outstanding women leaders are taking an exemplary moral stand that should shake the conscience of the nation as to how unfairly this qualified woman is being treated by Senate leadership,” Sharpton said in a statement.

    “As long as the Senate refuses to take fifteen minutes to confirm someone for Attorney General that they have already confirmed twice for U.S. Attorney, NAN and our allies will do everything in our power to draw attention to this completely unfair and unnecessary delay to vote to confirm Loretta Lynch.”

    The National Action Network will also start a letter-writing campaign and head to congressional offices to encourage support for Lynch.

    I’d like to see Sharpton himself go on hunger strike for a bit.

    Fired Inkster officer under investigation working for Highland Park PD – this regarding fired officer ‘Robocop’ Melendez, the one who had a major role in the beating of Floyd Dent.

    Officer William Melendez, clearly shown throwing most of the punches at 57-year-old Floyd Dent, was fired from Inkster police last week.

    But Melendez doesn’t have to worry about getting a new job. FOX 2 has learned he already has one with the Highland Park Police Department.

    FOX 2: “Did you know about this video when you hired him,”

    “No this video is from January, he’s been with us long time before this,” said Todd Perkins, Highland Park city attorney.

    Perkins claims the police department hired Melendez as a part-time officer more than two years before the video surfaced.

    Melendez has been on patrol and has now rotated to desk duty. Because he hasn’t done anything wrong, Perkins says Highland Park has no reason to get rid of him.

    FOX 2: “Has he had any problems on the force?”

    “Not that I recall,” Perkins said. “He has not been proven guilty of anything, I know what it looks like on video and you have have to accept that – which is objective evidence.”

    Greg Rohl, who represents Dent, is flabbergasted that another police department would ever hire the embattled officer who is still being investigated by the FBI and Michigan State Police.

    Ah, we have a skeptic! It’s not his eyes that can tell him anything about Melendez (with regard to the video), but the court of law, which is of course absolutely pristine in function and therefore is the court should ever decide that Melendez is not guilty, well, all those other people are lying. Is that how it fucking works, Mr. Perkins?

    Cop accused of brutally torturing black suspects costs Chicago $5.5 million

    Whenever Chicago Police commander Jon Burge needed a confession, he would walk into the interrogation room and set down a little black box, his alleged victims would later tell prosecutors. The box had two wires and a crank. Burge, they alleged, would attach one wire to the suspect’s handcuffed ankles and the other to his manacled hands. Then, they said, Burge would place a plastic bag over the suspect’s head. Finally, he would crank his little black box and listen to the screams of pain as electricity coursed through the suspect’s body.

    “When he hit me with the voltage, that’s when I started gritting, crying, hollering. … It [felt] like a thousand needles going through my body,” Anthony Holmes told prosecutors during a 2006 investigation into Burge. “And then after that, it just [felt] like, you know—it [felt] like something just burning me from the inside, and, um, I shook, I gritted, I hollered, then I passed out.”

    Holmes, who eventually gave what he says was a false confession and was convicted of murder in 1973, is one of as many as 120 African-American men on Chicago’s South Side who were allegedly tortured by Burge between 1972 and 1991.

    Though prosecutors accumulated evidence against Burge they thought “sufficient to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,” the statute of limitations prevented prosecution. Burge instead went to jail for perjury later, for denying his role under oath.

    On Tuesday, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced the establishment of a $5.5 million fund for these victims. The compensation would “close this book, the Burge book on the city’s history,” Emanuel said according to the Chicago Tribune.

    Has it been mentioned, are all his cases being reviewed?

    Tasers used on more minority Guilford County students than whites

    School resource officers in Guilford County Schools have used Tasers on students 13 times since 2008.
    Click to learn more…

    Eleven of those students were black. Two of them were Hispanic.

    About a dozen protesters called on the Guilford County Board of Education this week to do to something to eliminate such disparities in student discipline as well as in graduation rates and achievement.

    The issue of removing the school resource officers, known as SROs, from schools was not on the board’s agenda Tuesday night.

    “But in the spirit of disrupting business as usual, I assert it should be,” said April Parker Mintz, a community organizer and mother. “And it is clearly on the people’s agenda.”

    The protesters, including some children, carried signs with such messages as “Black minds matter,” “Stop profiling our kids” and “Stop the Guilford County school to prison pipeline.”

    They also invoked the slogan “Black Lives Matter,” which is being used across the nation to protest police violence specifically against blacks.

    Some more at the link, but headline, seriously? ‘on more minorities than whites’? How about ‘only on minorities’, as per the information at your disposal? ANd 11 times is 11 times too many. I wonder what the guidelines say about tasing non-adult bodies, because I doubt tasers come in children’s and adult sizes.

  349. rq says

    Fight for $15 swells into largest protest by low-wage workers in US history

    Workers in more than 200 cities walked out on jobs or joined protests bankrolled by organized labor Wednesday in latest bid to raise minimum wage

    Steven Greenhouse and Jana Kasperkevic in New York

    Workers in Atlanta, Boston, New York, Los Angeles and more than 200 cities across the US walked out on their jobs or joined marches and protests on Wednesday during what organisers claimed was the largest protest by low-wage workers in US history.

    Some 60,000 workers took part in the Fight for $15 demonstrations, according to the organisers. The protests are calling for a minimum wage of $15 an hour in the US, more than twice the current federal minimum of $7.25.

    By late afternoon on the east coast no arrests had been reported, a marked contrast to last May’s action when more than 100 people were arrested during a protest outside McDonald’s Chicago headquarters.

    The demonstrations were the latest in a series of strikes that began with fast-food workers in New York in November 2012. The movement has since attracted groups outside the restaurant industry: Wednesday’s protesters included home-care assistants, Walmart workers, child-care aides, airport workers, adjunct professors and other low-wage workers. It also sparked international support, with people protesting low wages in Brazil, New Zealand and the UK.

    Oh, this one was good. In that ‘ungood’ sense of the word. Racist Posts on NY Cop Blog Raise Ire at Time of Tension

    Week after week, racist posts appear on Thee Rant, a blog for current or former New York City police officers: African Americans are called “apes;” a retired officer says one of the blessings of retirement is not having to work the Puerto Rican Day parade, with its “old obese tatted up women stuffed into outfits that they purchased or shoplifted at the local Kmart store; a Middle Eastern cab driver berated by an officer is termed a “third worlder” who should have his “head split open.”

    And week after week, the department’s top officials are, at once, embarrassed and powerless.

    “It’s very disturbing stuff. Outrageous stuff,” said Stephen Davis, the chief spokesman for the NYPD. “We see it. It’s a problem.”

    At the heart of the problem are the limits the department faces in what it can do.

    “Monitoring these things is challenging,” Davis said. “There are privacy issues involved. We can’t go and peel back email names and tags and try to find out who these people are.”

    The issue of the blog, started by former NYPD officer Ed Polstein in 1999, has gained notoriety most recently after a white South Carolina police officer shot a black man to death. Shortly after a video of the officer appearing to shoot the fleeing man in the back went viral on the Internet, Thee Rant blew up with comments.

    “Cop looked good in his stance,” read one post.

    Polstein, who did not respond to requests for an interview, has said previously that anyone wishing to post on the blog has to provide proof that they are a current or former member of the NYPD. But whether they are, and how many have signed up, are among the many mysteries surrounding Thee Rant. The blog says it garners 120,000 page views daily.

    Leonard Levitt, a respected former Newsday reporter who runs the website NYPD Confidential, said he has stopped assigning much significance to Thee Rant.

    “To be honest, I don’t read it,” Levitt said. “I’d say these guys represent the worst elements of the department. I don’t think they speak for the average cop. I have a feeling it’s four or five guys doing most of the yowling.”

    Incidents of officers being investigated or punished for their behavior online, in social media or on personal cell phones, have cropped up in Illinois, Missouri and Florida in recent weeks and months.

    … And yet monitoring protestors, as was commented on twitter, is so easy for them. Funny how they can’t seem to find all those bad apples in their own midst when they’re clearly not doing much to cover their own tracks. I sense a lack of effort.
    If you read that article to the end, some of the comments they describe are absolutely atrocious.

    Worrisome. And fatal. Volunteer police officers in the US overwhelmingly allowed to use guns

    According to a paper written by Ross Wolf, associate dean at the University of Central Florida and a member of the National Sheriff’s Association Reserve Law Enforcement Committee, 91 per cent of volunteer or part-time deputies have the authority to be armed.

    About 78 per cent of volunteer or part-time deputies are authorized to make arrests and 45 per cent can make arrests whether or not they are on-duty, according to the research.

    These statistics were compiled in a survey sent to the 3,080 US sheriffs who are members of the National Sheriff’s Association, to which 1,710 usable responses were received.

    The volunteer deputies spent about 9.6 hours per week on duty and took part in foot patrol, emergency response, security and other law-enforcement operations, the data shows. In the case of Mr Bates, the volunteer deputy was involved in an undercover sting operation.

    The research shows that nearly half – 43 per cent – of all sheriffs said that while the volunteers did receive similar training to full-time officers, they spent less time in training.

    Meet The White House’s New Chief Party Planner [Exclusive]

    Ever since White House Social Secretary Jeremy Bernard, the first openly gay man to hold the position, announced that he was stepping down in early April, Americans everywhere (okay, a few political nerds) have been wondering who would replace him. Now, we know: Deesha Dyer, 37, has been named to the position, where she’ll oversee all social functions at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, from simple meet-and-greets to entertaining heads of state. And, we have the very first interview with her!

    The news will be announced by the White House on Thursday afternoon.

    “From the day Deesha started in the Social Office nearly two years ago, she impressed me with her passion, creativity, public-mindedness and relentless competence,” First Lady Michelle Obama said in a statement. “Since then, whether helping flawlessly execute state dinners, or going the extra mile to open the White House to people who never dreamed they would walk through these doors, Deesha has worked tirelessly to truly make the White House the ‘People’s House.’ I am thrilled that she has agreed to continue her service as our Social Secretary.”

    Dyer’s career path is unusual — she started out as a hip-hop journalist and community advocate, before returning to school at age 29. After getting her degree in women’s studies, she was hired at the White House as an intern. From there, she quickly worked her way up. She was brought on full-time in 2010 to travel with the first family, overseeing lodging and logistics, and then promoted to Deputy Director and Deputy Social Secretary, a position she’s held for the last two years.

    “Deesha shares our commitment to a White House that reflects America’s history, highlights our culture, and celebrates all Americans. Michelle and I look forward to working with her in this new role as we welcome visitors from across the country and around the world to the People’s House,” the President said in a statement.

    Dyer is a Philadelphia native who attended the Milton Hershey School. We spoke with her just before the announcement.

    Yay! I hope she throws many a good bash during her time.

    “Whether you write about Ferguson or a flower, it is powerful and speaks to what we do in spite of a violent history.” – @ClintSmithIII That’s the man who wrote ‘What the cicada said to the brown boy’, linked to and I believe cited above.

    Cubans to open talks about US fugitives as ties warm . Uh-oh.

    The U.S. and Cuba will open talks about two of America’s most-wanted fugitives as part of a new dialogue about law-enforcement cooperation made possible by President Barack Obama’s decision to remove Cuba from a list of state sponsors of terror, the State Department announced Wednesday.

    Cuban officials and ordinary citizens alike hailed Obama’s action to remove the island from the list, saying it heals a decades-old insult to national pride and clears the way to swiftly restore diplomatic relations.

    State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke said Cuba had agreed to talks about fugitives including Joanne Chesimard, aka Assata Shakur, who was granted asylum by Fidel Castro after she escaped from a U.S. prison where she was serving a sentence for killing a New Jersey state trooper in 1973. The U.S. and Cuba will also discuss the case of William Morales, a Puerto Rican nationalist wanted in connection with bombings in New York in the 1970s.

    “We see the reestablishment of diplomatic relations and the reopening of an embassy in Havana as the means by which we’ll be able, more effectively, to press the Cuban government on law enforcement issues such as fugitives. And Cuba has agreed to enter into a law enforcement dialogue with the United States that will work to resolve these cases,” Rathke said. The dialogue is also expected to address cooperation on more routine crimes, officials said.

    SOme background and more info at the link.

  350. rq says

    25 Writers on the Importance of Libraries. Includes at least one black writer of note (Toni Morrison):

    “Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission. No committee decides who may enter, no crisis of body or spirit must accompany the entrant. No tuition is charged, no oath sworn, no visa demanded. Of the monuments humans build for themselves, very few say touch me, use me, my hush is not indifference, my space is not barrier. If I inspire awe, it is because I am in awe of you and the possibilities that dwell in you.”

    List of people died in police custody, by police department. Since 2005 – it was the oldest year I could find in the list.
    Some of those lists are disturbingly long.

    Researcher: ‘Police shootings are on the rise’, with video.

    Researcher and activist Sam Shinyangwe discusses the findings of his research on police violence, and how the numbers show marked differences based on race.

    I’ve posted informative tweets from him.

    40,000 Maryland Ex-Cons May Soon Get Their Voting Rights Back. Nice.

    A national, bipartisan effort to roll back restrictions on felon voting rights could soon take a big step forward in Maryland. Earlier this month, the Maryland legislature passed a bill that would restore the right to vote to felons immediately after release from prison. Currently, Maryland is one of 20 states that bars felons from voting until they have completed prison time, parole, and probation.

    The bill currently sits on the desk of Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican who has backed criminal justice reform. If enacted, the law would make it easier for 40,000 Maryland residents with past convictions to exercise their voting rights, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Myrna Pérez, the center’s deputy director, says that “We’re at a unique moment in time. The country recognizes that the criminal justice system needs reform.”

    Felon voting rights, Pérez says, should be a natural area of focus for improving the justice system. “There’s no law enforcement or deterrent justification for disenfranchising people after their release,” she explains. “Research and evidence shows that you’re less likely to recidivate if you can vote… In entire communities, when adults can’t vote, they raise children that can’t vote.” The law was introduced by first-term Delegate Cory V. McCray, a Baltimore Democrat who served ten months in a juvenile correctional facility after being arrested for drug dealing as a teenager.

    The conventional wisdom on the subject has held that Republicans are hurt by reforms like Maryland’s; many of the people who will have an easier path to the ballot box come from working-class and minority constituencies that skew Democratic. That likely will not stop Hogan from signing the bill, and it has not deterred other Republicans: GOP presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has pushed for voting rights restoration in Kentucky, and he introduced a bill that would ease voting restrictions on the federal level.

    Pérez is skeptical that expansion of voting rights would hand either party an advantage. She points out that in Florida, where reform was implemented under former Gov. Charlie Crist, the GOP has done just fine. “It’s very hard to say that a policy like Maryland’s would hand the state to Democrats,” she says. There is a “real openness among people of both parties to consider the issue.”

    Therefore, if the GOP is’nt harmed by more black voters, they shouldn’t worry about things like voter registration and fraud, too! Let them all vote! (Mwahahaha…)

    Kansas bans welfare recipients from seeing movies, going swimming on government’s dime. Ah, the old ‘you spend my money how I tell you to’ game.

    There’s nothing fun about being on welfare, and a new Kansas law aims to keep it that way.

    Republican Gov. Sam Brownback signed House Bill 2258 into law Thursday. The measure means Kansas families receiving government assistance will no longer be able to use those funds to visit swimming pools, see movies, go gambling or get tattoos on the state’s dime.

    Those are just a few of the restrictions contained within the law that aims to tighten regulations on how poor families spend their government aid. It will go into effect July 1.

    The measure — called the HOPE Act by supporters — “provides an opportunity for success,” Brownback said in a statement after signing the bill. “It’s about the dignity of work and helping families move from reliance on a government pittance to becoming self-sufficient by developing the skills to find a well-paying job and build a career.”

    State Sen. Michael O’Donnell, a Wichita Republican who has advocated for the bill, said the legislation was designed to pressure those receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families to spend “more responsibly.”

    So going swimming and trying to attempt a more healthy lifestyle through activity is irresponsible. Got it.
    Honestly, there’s going to be even more of) a health crisis among the poor, and the government will refuse any responsibility for pushing it that far.

    Injured by the Baltimore Police Department. #FreddieGray Double surgery on vertabrae and voicebox, still in a coma. It has been heard that it took the police van half an hour to travel the three blocks to the station.
    Why?

  351. rq says

    We are loving @Lupita_Nyongo on the Cover of Harpers Bazaar May issue/- we also remembered this quote ..

    Why police who shot Walter Scott won’t face death penalty.

    In the meantime, court documents show the case has been assigned to a black judge: Clifton Newman of Kingstree. [I hope there will be more info on this, because it also sounds promising]

    The Washington Post reported that police officers are given substantial leeway in the use of force under US law.

    A pair of Supreme Court rulings handed down in the 1980s govern when officers can use lethal or potentially excessive force.

    In 1985, the court ruled in Tennessee v. Garner that police could shoot at a violent felon who was fleeing and posed a significant threat to others. Four years later, the justices ruled in Graham v. Connor that officers can use force if they have an “objectively reasonable” belief that a suspect is a safety threat or is trying to evade arrest, as Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in the court’s opinion. This “reasonable” standard has to allow for the reality that police often have to make rapid decisions “in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving,” as Rehnquist put it.

    An analysis conducted by The Washington Post and researchers at Bowling Green Sate University found:

    While thousands of officers shot and killed someone over the last decade, a small fraction of them — 55 officers as of this week — faced criminal charges. (That number includes a Tulsa reserve deputy charged with manslaughter this week after he shot and killed an unarmed man.) Most of the officers who were charged and had their cases resolved were acquitted or had the charges dropped; the officers who are convicted or plead guilty average four years behind bars, while some serve just a number of weeks.

    How Chicago Is Finally Coming To Grips With Its Dark History Of Police Torture

    Cannon ultimately served 24 years for a crime he maintained he did not commit. While he has been out of prison for more than seven years, he has yet to see any compensation from the city for the torture and has not been issued an apology.

    But that could change under a settlement announced Tuesday that would make Chicago the first city in the country to offer reparations and an official apology to victims of police misconduct. Cannon is one of more than 100 torture victims who will be eligible for the $5.5 million reparations package proposed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and members of the Chicago City Council.

    Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge was fired from the police department in 1993 when a review board confirmed his decades-long scheme of torture, but it wasn’t until 13 years later that special prosecutors found evidence of widespread torture under his command. Under Burge, the prosecutors found, a team of detectives were alleged to have tortured more than 100 mostly black suspects into falsely confessing to crimes in the 1970s and 1980s.

    “All of us who are involved are gratified that survivors who had been locked out of being able to get anything will now be able to get some of their needs met,” Mariame Kaba, an advisory board member of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials — the group that proposed the settlement — told ThinkProgress. She added that the settlement is less than the $20 million originally requested, but will still provide some much needed assistance for torture victims.

    “The vast majority of the people were are considered documented survivors of Burge have no recourse at all,” she said. “Their statute of limitations has expired so they’re not going to ever get a cent of money from the state. So this is mainly for them.” […]

    Under the package, victims would be provided money for psychological and substance abuse counseling and victims’ immediate family members would be eligible for free city college tuition. The city would also establish a permanent memorial and lessons on Burge torture would be added to the Chicago Public Schools curriculum. Each victim who qualifies would receive an equal share of the fund.

    The ordinance would also call for rehearings for the torture survivors still in prison who claim they were coerced into confessions.

    Cannon said the settlement, which provides up to $100,000 for each victim, isn’t enough for him to feel like justice has been served, but it’s a step in the right direction.

    “Until I can get Burge’s pension taken away from him, justice can never be fully done,” Cannon said, referring to the $4,000-a-month pension Burge continues to collect. “But what they’re doing today is in fact a very good start… For too long now, this nasty, ugly, vicious secret has been swept under the rug but now it’s time to come to grips with the whole thing and to do something that would give us a measure of justice. Everything in the reparations does just that.”

    The ordinance would also likely set an example for other cities and states on how best to deal with police misconduct, Kaba said.

    “It offers an alternative view of what justice could look like for people who are harmed,” she said. […]

    The city has already spent almost $100 million on Burge-related settlements and legal fees. Mayor Emanuel said in a statement on Tuesday that the settlement is a way “to try and right those wrongs, and to bring this dark chapter of Chicago’s history to a close.”

    But while Emanuel would like to say the chapter has come to a close, a recent investigation by the Guardian found that the Chicago police department is running an interrogation facility in what lawyers have called the the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site. At the facility, officers beat suspects, keep them shackled for prolonged periods of time, deny attorneys and keep people out of official booking databases.

    The reparations ordinance is a historic moment that will also help to address the current situation of police abuse in Chicago, said Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago Law School professor who focuses on police brutality. The additions to the public school history curriculum will help to ensure that the dark chapters of the city’s history are never repeated, he said.

    Futterman pointed out that when when the Burge torture and other abuses were uncovered, the inclination has been to say, “That was then, this is now. This couldn’t happen again.” However, he said, “some of the same underlying conditions that allowed Burge and his henchmen to torture black prisoners with impunity, back into the 70s, 80s and even early 90s still exist today and haven’t been fixed. This is the kind of measure that goes toward meaningful redress, learning from history and beginning a conversation about present day reality.”

    And just to confirm how this could havegone down, Everything The Police Said About Walter Scott’s Death Before A Video Showed What Really Happened. Warning: big stinkin’ pile of bullshit within.

    And here, have a music: Watch Stromae’s Exclusive Performance of “Formidable”.

  352. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    about cops posting racist, violent, sexist bullshit with each other…

    NYPD says:

    At the heart of the problem are the limits the department faces in what it can do.
    “Monitoring these things is challenging,” Davis said. “There are privacy issues involved. We can’t go and peel back email names and tags and try to find out who these people are.”

    Wait – the NYPD who infiltrates mosques on the basis of religion rather than only after reasonable suspicion is raised? The NYPD that continues stop and frisk after it’s clearly found unconstitutional? Is it THAT NYPD that said they can’t find out the names of people posting threatening things online?

  353. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    I think a $4000/month lifetime pension for each and every survivor of Burge’s torture is fair.

    Oh, is that not what they mean by a $4000/month Burge pension?

  354. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    National Guard in Ferguson couldn’t tell the difference between enemy combatants and political protestors.

    Documents detailing the military mission divided the crowds that national guards would be likely to encounter into “friendly forces” and “enemy forces” – the latter apparently including “general protesters”.

    A briefing for commanders included details of the troops’ intelligence capabilities so that they could “deny adversaries the ability to identify Missouri national guard vulnerabilities”, which the “adversaries” might exploit, “causing embarrassment or harm” …

    …Two days after the guard was deployed, another email from Boyle warned of potential consequences from using language that could be “construed as potentially inflammatory”. A further notification was then sent to commanding officers stating that references to enemy had now been changed to “criminal elements” in guard communications. …

    …He explained that the term “enemy forces” would be better understood as “potential threats”. He then went on to explain that potential threats during national guard operations could include “inclement weather, heat, failing levees, etc”.

    No word on the number of documents relating to Ferguson that listed “rain showers, partly-cloudy skies, and a 10% chance of thunderstorms” among the “enemy forces”.

  355. chigau (違う) says

    nothing to see here
    .
    move along
    .
    these are not the [fill in blank] that you’re looking for

  356. rq says

    Sorry a bit behind.
    Color blind or color brave? It’s a TED talk, but it might be worth listening to.

    The subject of race can be very touchy. As finance executive Mellody Hobson says, it’s a “conversational third rail.” But, she says, that’s exactly why we need to start talking about it. In this engaging, persuasive talk, Hobson makes the case that speaking openly about race — and particularly about diversity in hiring — makes for better businesses and a better society.

    Woman armed with knife shot by Robbinsdale police, officials say – more on this intermittently, including the protest in her name, as the police wouldn’t let her family visit at the hospital.

    An armed woman who refused to comply with an officer’s commands was shot Thursday night by a Robbinsdale officer, authorities said.

    Investigators said the woman was taken to an area hospital, but they have not released information about her condition.

    The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office is now handling the investigation into the officer-involved shooting.

    She was 18, with a knife, because she called the fucking cops to protect her because three other people were threatening her. There you go. Let’s trust the police.

    New Music: Kanye West F/ Kendrick Lamar “All Day”

    Earlier last week a short clip of Kendrick Lamar on Kanye West “All Day” leaked via YeezyTalk. Then a few days after the full verse was released. This left many of us wondering was this a remix? An Old Kendrick scrapped verse? With the full mix finally on the internet you can be the judge. As many times as I’ve listened to “All Day” CDQ & live performance I can assure you this just isn’t some edit inserting Kendricks verse. Take a listen for yourself as we hopelessly await Kanye’s new album ‘So Help Me God’ to be released.

    Jussum musick.

    Mixed feelings. Fee to Be Charged for Video of South Carolina Shooting, Publicist Says

    The video of a North Charleston police officer shooting an unarmed man in the back will now cost news outlets that want to run it $10,000, according to a publicist representing the man who shot it.

    Cease-and-desist letters went out this week to news outlets around the world from Markson Sparks, a publicity and celebrity management company based in Sydney, Australia.

    The video, taken April 4, showed a North Charleston police officer, Michael T. Slager, shooting a man who ran from him after a traffic stop. A bystander, Feidin Santana, took the video and then turned it over to the family of the man who was killed, Walter L. Scott.

    The officer was charged with murder and remains jailed. The video, viewed more than one million times on YouTube alone, quickly came to represent the excessive use of force by the police.

    The announcement about the fee seemed to come as a surprise to Mr. Santana.

    He later recalled that his lawyer mentioned something about charging for it, but said he did not understand.

    The lawyer, Todd Rutherford, said it was only fair for Mr. Santana to start getting paid for something that news outlets benefited from.

    “The search for justice is served by turning the video over to law enforcement,” Mr. Rutherford said. The news media, he said, appeared to be in the “search for revenue.”

    Copyright experts agreed that although news agencies are allowed to use even copyrighted material under what is called “fair use” clauses in the law that time period has passed.

    Bob Bates, who killed #EricHarris took officers, including the head Sheriff on international cruises, fishing trips. Typical southern ol’ boys network, as the clipped attachment mentions. I think there’s more of an article later.

    Oklahoma Deputy Robert Bates Says He Had ‘No Desire to Take Anyone’s Life’. Yup, it’s a media apology, with his family in the background. Watch the video. It’s pathetic PR.

    The Oklahoma reserve sheriff’s deputy who says he mistook his gun for a Taser offered an apology on Friday to the family of the unarmed man he shot and killed last week.

    “I rate this as No. 1 on my list of things in my life that I regret,” the reserve deputy, Robert Bates, told TODAY in his first public remarks since the deadly encounter April 2.
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    Bates has been charged with second-degree manslaughter in the shooting death of Eric Harris, who bolted from a car after he allegedly tried to sell a semiautomatic pistol to an undercover cop during a sting operation in Tulsa.

    In a video of the encounter, Bates can be heard shouting, “Taser! Taser!” and later saying, “I shot him! I’m sorry!”

    Bates, an insurance executive who volunteered with the sheriff’s department, demonstrated on TODAY that he kept the two weapons in different places — the Taser tucked into his protective vest, the gun on his side. But he said: “You must believe me. This can happen to anyone.”

    He said that when he heard the shot that he fired, he thought, “Oh, my God, what has happened?”

    “The laser light is the same on each weapon,” he said. “I saw the light and I squeezed the trigger and then realized I dropped the gun. This was not an intentional thing, I had no desire to ever take anyone’s life.”

    Tulsa deputy: Shooting is ‘worst thing that’s ever happened’
    TODAY

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    Harris’ family released a statement Friday, saying: “We appreciate Bob Bates’ apology for shooting and killing Eric. Unfortunately, Mr. Bates’ apology will not bring Eric back.”

    “With each passing day, as the facts continue to unfold, we have become increasingly disturbed by Mr. Bates’ actions on Apil 2, 2015, as well as the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office’s acts and omissions, both before and after the shooting,” the family said. “We remain vigilant in seeking the truth and in our pursuit of justice.”

    Bates said that he has lost sleep and been unable to concentrate since it happened.

    Bates rejected as “unbelievably unfair” the suggestion that he has been allowed to be a reserve deputy and “play cop” because he has donated generously to the sheriff’s department and is a personal friend of the sheriff.

    The Tulsa World reported on Thursday that Bates was given credit for field training he never completed and firearms certifications he never received. Sheriff’s officials have dismissed it as rumor, and Bates denied it on Friday.

    “That is not correct,” he said. “That is absolutely the truth. I have it in writing.”

    I’m so sorry for him, so sad that he has trouble sleeping.

  357. rq says

    8 arrested after protest at U-M Board of Regents meeting

    A protest that featured police and protesters smashing into tables and wrestling on the ground is not the best way to get the University of Michigan to address diversity issues, university regents said.

    “It does a great disservice to this important cause,” Regent Mark Bernstein, a Democrat who has chaired the Michigan Civil Rights Commission, said. “It’s essential that students engage in this vital issue in a way that is civil and productive. These types of tactics don’t do that.”

    The regularly scheduled board meeting at the Michigan Union didn’t make it through its first minute before being disrupted by members of the group By Any Means Necessary, eight of whom were arrested. Only of one of those arrested was possibly a student, university officials said. Charges were unknown as of press time.

    The group is advocating for more diversity at the school.

    The issue of race has a long history of protests at U-M, including back to the 1970s. Two Supreme Court cases over the use of race in admissions have their genesis at U-M, as does a Michigan law banning the use of race in admissions.

    Last year, a group of students launched a Twitter campaign about being black at the University of Michigan that drew national attention.

    After those protests, the university agreed to a number of demands, including improving a campus multicultural building and working to improve transportation for black students living in more affordable housing outside Ann Arbor.

    Undergraduate black enrollment stood at 4.4% in the fall of 2014, according to U-M records. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 14.3% of Michigan residents identify themselves as African Americans.

    On Thursday, President Mark Schlissel hadn’t finished his first sentence starting the meeting when the group of more than 20 protesters rose from their seats about four rows back in the public area of the meeting. They rushed toward the front, chanting and waving signs.

    They plowed through a table where media and university staff were sitting, knocking the tables backward.

    The protesters were quickly met by uniformed and plainclothes university police, who started shoving back.

    Several police tackled protesters, who fought back, shoving and kicking.

    At least four tables went flying, along with multiple chairs. More police poured in from the hallway. Police used plastic zip ties to handcuff protesters as they were being held on the ground.

    The bulk of the protesters were pushed backward out of the large meeting room and shoved down a long hall, where a line of five or six police officers walled off access to the hallway and meeting.

    Those arrested were led into the back of the Michigan Union and eventually loaded into a police van to transport to jail.

    The rest of the protesters spent the rest of the meeting — at least an hour and a half — screaming in a hallway. Their chants for more diversity could be heard inside the meeting.

    They chanted, “Open it up or we’ll shut it down.”

    At one point in the demonstration, police walked into the small crowd, grabbed a female protester who was the loudest. They forced her to drop her sign and then arrested her.

    When other protesters tried to pick up the sign, the police grabbed it, ripped it in half and kicked the pieces behind them.

    Inside the meeting room, the regents continued to meet, with a heavy police presence outside.

    Toward the close of the meeting, regents on both sides of the political spectrum lashed out at the protesters.

    “It is so misguided and hurtful to the cause,” Bernstein said. “These tactics do a great disservice to an important cause. That is a great shame.”

    How kicking a trash can became criminal for a 6th grader. We’ve seen the story before.

    Kayleb Moon-Robinson — who is diagnosed as autistic — had barely started sixth grade last fall in Lynchburg, Virginia, when a school resource officer filed charges against him. Kayleb was charged with disorderly conduct for kicking over a trash can and then with felony assault on a police officer because he struggled to break free when the cop grabbed him. The Center for Public Integrity analyzed national data and found that Virginia schools refer more students to law enforcement than other states, and that nationally schools refer black and special-needs kids to cops and courts disproportionately.

    Audio at the link.

    Last night #TaniaHarris, an 18 yo black high school student, was shot twice by Robbinsdale, Minnesota police. Thankfully, she’s alive.

    Teachers More Likely to Label Black Students as Troublemakers – another repeating theme.

    Racial differences in school discipline are widely known, and black students across the United States are more than three times as likely as their white peers to be suspended or expelled, according to Stanford researchers.

    This is a photo of a black student sitting at a desk.Yet the psychological processes that contribute to those differences have not been clear — until now.

    “The fact that black children are disproportionately disciplined in school is beyond dispute,” said Stanford psychology Professor Jennifer Eberhardt in an interview. “What is less clear is why.”

    Eberhardt and Stanford psychology graduate student Jason Okonofua examined the psychological processes involved when teachers discipline black students more harshly than white students.

    In the studies, real-world primary and secondary school teachers were presented with school records describing two instances of misbehavior by a student. In one study, after reading about each infraction, the teachers were asked about their perception of its severity, about how irritated they would feel by the student’s misbehavior, about how severely the student should be punished, and about whether they viewed the student as a troublemaker.

    A second study followed the same protocol and asked teachers whether they thought the misbehavior was part of a pattern and whether they could imagine themselves suspending the student in the future.

    The researchers randomly assigned names to the files, suggesting in some cases that the student was black (with a name such as DeShawn or Darnell) and in other cases that the student was white (with a name such as Greg or Jake).

    Across both studies, the researchers found that racial stereotypes shaped teachers’ responses not after the first infraction but rather after the second. Teachers felt more troubled by a second infraction they believed was committed by a black student rather than by a white student.

    In fact, the stereotype of black students as “troublemakers” led teachers to want to discipline black students more harshly than white students after two infractions, Eberhardt and Okonofua said. They were more likely to see the misbehavior as part of a pattern, and to imagine themselves suspending that student in the future.

    “We see that stereotypes not only can be used to allow people to interpret a specific behavior in isolation, but also stereotypes can heighten our sensitivity to behavioral patterns across time. This pattern sensitivity is especially relevant in the schooling context,” Eberhardt said.

    These results have implications beyond the school setting as well.

    Parents of 8-year-old killed in Boston Marathon bombing want death penalty off the table. I just sort of wanted to put this here, too.

    Sheriff’s spokesman: Parts of reserve deputy’s training requirements might have been waived

    Whether a Tulsa County reserve deputy’s training records even exist — let alone whether they can be found — might be irrelevant due to an exemption Sheriff Stanley Glanz could have granted his friend, a Sheriff’s Office official said Thursday night.

    That reserve deputy, Robert Charles Bates, 73, thought he was holding a Taser when he fatally shot 44-year-old Eric Harris on April 2, according to a statement he gave the Sheriff’s Office four days after the shooting. Bates was charged Monday with second-degree manslaughter, turned himself in to authorities Tuesday morning, posted $25,000 bond, and was released.

    Sheriff’s Maj. Shannon Clark flatly denied allegations that training records for Bates, a longtime friend of Sheriff Stanley Glanz, had been falsified, but he said the records of Bates’ training could not be provided until a number of things happened.

    First, Clark said, the Sheriff’s Office would have to determine who trained Bates so they could be asked for the records. Clark said often those records are kept only by the trainee and the trainer.

    Secondly, the records, if they exist, were created before the Sheriff’s Office began filing records digitally, he said. That means it would take an unknown amount of time to find the paper records documenting Bates’ training — if they remain on file at the Sheriff’s Office.

    Thirdly, Clark said, it’s unclear how much of the supervised training Bates theoretically was required to have actually happened. That’s because Glanz can, as sheriff, waive any portion of Sheriff’s Office policy.

    “The policies within our organization are signed off by the sheriff, but there are also policies that give the sheriff the ability to waive any policy within our organization. That’s part of being a Sheriff’s Office,” Clark said.

    Since Bates graduated from the Council on Law Enforcement Education and Training in 1963 before spending one year as a Tulsa police officer, they said it’s possible that Glanz required him to have very little time with a supervisor as he was training to be an advanced reserve deputy.

    Glanz was not available for comment Thursday.

    Advanced reserves, who hold the highest rank within the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office’s reserve ranks, are required to have hundreds of training hours with a supervisor, according to Sheriff’s Office policy. That high number of training hours gives them the authority to act on their own essentially as a full-time deputy would, Clark said previously.

    “Two people take control of those documents: the FTO (field training officer) or the trainee,” Clark said. “(He either met) the FTO qualification to elevate to a certain level of reserve or he didn’t.

    “People keep wanting to know did we falsify certain documents. I guess we have to know who was his field training officers. That’s something that will be determined.”

    Yeah, and it doesn’t look good. For Bates.

  358. rq says

    I’m so sorry, Lucy. Let us know if we can do anything to support. Robbinsdale, Minnesota. #TaniaHarris. Apparently she recently gave birth. Which is (a) another child potentially without a mother (I hear they’re charging her for… something) and (b) will slow her recovery and possibly cause complications.
    Anyway.

    And despite laws preventing 1 in 8 black men from voting, Black men still voted at nearly the same rate as whites.

    Here’s something more medical: The Racial Gap in Cancer Mortality Is Closing, but It’s Still a Problem

    When it comes to cancer, there has been a significantly higher rate of related deaths among African Americans than among white Americans. One type of cancer for which blacks have a higher mortality rate, for example, is colon cancer. Much of this disparity correlates with socioeconomic issues such as discrepancies in income, education and access to health care. A new study, however, points to a significant narrowing of this racial health gap, Medical Daily reports.

    The study—done by Eileen O’Keefe, a clinical professor of health and science at Boston University College of Health and Rehabilitation, and her colleagues—shows that from 2000 to 2010, the death rates of black Americans went down faster than those of their white counterparts. O’Keefe and her partners found that the difference in cancer-mortality rates between the two groups decreased by 14.6 percent (from 16.4 to 14 percent) in women and 31.1 percent (from 40.2 to 27.7 percent) in men during this period.

    According to Medical Daily, the study, which was published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health, showed that in 2010 the total annual cancer-related deaths per 1,000 Americans also showed a significant decrease: 1.7 for black women (a 16 percent drop in comparison with 2000), 1.5 for white women (14 percent lower), 2.6 among black men (a 29 percent decrease) and 2.1 among white men (an 18 percent drop).

    It is believed, Medical Daily notes, that the narrowing gap could be due to the increased availability of good health care and better education regarding prevention.

    But while the study shows an improvement, more work still needs to be done, O’Keefe warned in a press release. “Despite significant gains in overall cancer mortality over this time period, persistent cancer disparities by race exist,” the clinical professor noted. “Policy solutions that address access to and quality of the health care system are certainly important toward narrowing disparities, but cannot fully redress broader societal inequities at the core of racial and ethnic health disparities.”

    Denied Medication by NYPD, Epileptic Man Has Two Seizures in Custody: Lawsuit I’m tellin’ ya, that NYPD, real community-relations builders!

    New York Police Department officers repeatedly denied an epileptic man his medication while detaining him in a holding cell, resulting in two seizures and hospitalizations before he could be taken to Brooklyn central booking more than a day later, a new federal lawsuit alleges. The man was never charged with a crime.

    The 26-hour ordeal began shortly after Ronaile Elianor was discharged from the hospital for an epileptic seizure, he claims. At about 1 p.m. on March 18, while traveling in a friend’s car to pick up his prescribed anticonvulsant medication, an unmarked NYPD sedan pulled over their vehicle. Two officers said they saw smoke coming out of the car windows, and asked the men to get out of the car. Elianor, the driver and another friend accompanying them complied with the officers’ request.

    Two more officers arrived at the scene and searched their car and “no contraband or illegal substances were recovered from the vehicle,” says the lawsuit, filed April 8 in the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York.

    Jonathan Bulzomi, identified in the lawsuit as an NYPD officer, also searched Elianor’s backpack–and didn’t find contraband. Bulzomi searched Elianor and found scissors, medication and money. The 23-year-old told Bulzomi he had scissors and money because he’s a barber, and he explained that the medications were Levetiracetam and Dilantin, prescribed for epilepsy.

    “They see the pills and they started making jokes and stuff,” Elianor tells Newsweek. “They say, ‘Oh, he’s a barber. Are you sure these are not drugs and you use these scissors to cut them up?’ And I’m like, ‘No.’” […]

    Elianor, who says he was wearing his hospital wristband at the time of the arrest, told officers his discharge papers and medical records were in the backpack–proving he needed the medication to prevent epileptic seizures, he says. But Bulzomi and another officer “refused to provide [him] with his medication,” the suit says, and at 10 p.m. Elianor had a seizure and was taken to the emergency room. When Elianor woke, he was handcuffed to the bed, he says. He did receive medication while in the hospital.

    The hospital discharged Elianor early March 19, and police took him back to the precinct. Elianor “once again requested that he be provided with his medication. The request was denied,” the suit says. Elianor had another seizure, and was hospitalized again, the suit charges.

    “I wake back up in the hospital, this time with scars…and a whole bunch of cuts on my tongue,” Elianor says, pointing to his left eyelid, knuckle, and arm during an interview this week. “They’re like, ‘Yeah, you had a seizure in that cell again.’”

    Police then took Elianor to central booking from the hospital. At about 3 p.m., Elianor learned the Kings County district attorney wouldn’t prosecute him, the suit says. (The Brooklyn D.A. wrote in an April 3 letter to Alexander M. Dudelson, Elianor’s lawyer, that “a review of the records…indicate that a prosecution arising out of this arrest has been declined.” Newsweek reviewed a copy of the letter at Dudelson’s office.)

    Elianor, who is seeking unspecified damages, says he is pursuing the lawsuit because he fears other epileptics might be subjected to similar situations.

    Here’s another look at that article posted by Crip Dyke above: Missouri National Guard Called Ferguson Protesters ‘Enemy Forces’

    In August, the state’s National Guard was called into aid local police agencies who were attempting to control demonstrators protesting the death of Brown, a black unarmed teenager, by Darren Wilson, a white police officer.

    The protests began as a demonstration against police use of force. But the response by law enforcement agencies, which mobilized armored vehicles and utilized tear gas and M4 rifles, spurred a national conversation over the militarization of police and prompted Congress to hold hearings over the flow of military gear to local police agencies.

    The documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request appears to support those who claim authorities used a excessively military-style approach in its response.

    “It’s disturbing when you have what amounts to American soldiers viewing American citizens somehow as the enemy,” Antonio French, a prominent alderman in St. Louis, told the network.

    PARKWAY NORTH REVOLUTIONARIES RT @TheOfficialSRE: our lives matter.

  359. rq says

    It’s absurd that they put Bob Bates on CNN with his entire family sitting behind him to humanize him. He “mistakenly” killed #EricHarris.

    TRIGGER WARNING: audio from @elonjames From the night the National Guard chased us down residential streets, youtube link within. Take a look back.

    CNN: National Guard Called Ferguson Protestors ‘Enemy Forces’ and ‘Adversaries’ – this again.

    “As the Missouri National Guard prepared to deploy to help quell riots in Ferguson, Missouri, that raged sporadically last year, the guard used highly militarized words such as “enemy forces” and “adversaries” to refer to protesters, according to documents obtained by CNN.
    The guard came to Ferguson to support law enforcement officers, whom many community leaders and civil rights activists accused of using excessive force and inflaming an already tense situation in protests that flared sporadically from August through the end of the year. […]

    “It’s disturbing when you have what amounts to American soldiers viewing American citizens somehow as the enemy,” said Antonio French, an alderman in St. Louis.”

    The weight of this revelation cannot be overstated.
    While any protestor in Ferguson would tell you that they certainly felt like they were viewed as “the enemy” by police and the military, it’s now a matter of official record and this is not okay. American protestors must never be viewed as adversaries, but as citizens to be protected.

    NYPD officials embarrassed and powerless as cop blog fills up with disturbing racist comments. Have some more reading on that. Wonderfully inadequate, their electronic tracking systems must be. I mean, honestly, it’s just so hrd to keep track of these things.

    Why Desmond Tutu Thinks Bryan Stevenson Is “Shaping the Moral Universe”

    Bryan Stevenson is a brilliant lawyer representing America’s conscience on a mission to guarantee equal justice for all.

    Over the millennia, people have asked, If God is on the side of justice, why do injustice and inequity abound on earth? When will discrimination and prejudice end?

    Not frivolous questions.

    In the United States of America, the land of the free, 2.3 million people are imprisoned, with one in three black male babies born this century expected to join them—together with 1 in 17 white boys.

    The U.S. is the only so-called Western country to still impose the death penalty; more than 3,000 prisoners currently await execution. Recent research indicates approximately 4 percent of them were wrongfully convicted!

    You might assume God is not paying attention. But God does not use strong-arm tactics to ensure that justice is done, nor directly intervene to stop injustice. God empowers us to identify the path of righteousness.

    When we make mistakes, meander, slip, and sometimes fall, we find the means to gather ourselves, reset our compasses, and continue the journey.

    Justice needs champions, and Bryan Stevenson is such a champion. His courage and commitment contributed to the abolition of the death penalty for juveniles, and he is working tirelessly to end life sentences for adults convicted of crimes committed in their youth.

    The Equal Justice Initiative, which Stevenson established to defend those denied fair and just treatment in court, represents death-row prisoners and children in adult prisons, and advocates for sentencing reform and an end to racial bias in the legal system.

    Stevenson’s book, Just Mercy, the story of an innocent black man sentenced to death for killing a white woman in Monroeville, Alabama, the hometown of Harper Lee, is as gripping as it is disturbing—as if America’s soul has been put on trial.

    We may not be capable of changing the world in one fell swoop on our own, but when we swim together in the same good direction, we become an unstoppable force.

    Good leadership is key …

    Good leaders with the ability to identify the challenges and the tenacity to act on them.

    Good leaders driven not by personal ambition but by an innate desire to improve the circumstances of the human family and the human condition.

    Good leaders such as our extraordinary Nelson Mandela, who chose reconciliation over vengeance, and epitomized the healing power of magnanimity, grace, and love.

    Good leaders such as our youthful Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai, who refused to accept her own victimization—or that of her sisters—and turned the spotlight on the abusers of women and children.

    Good leaders such as Bryan Stevenson, who has made it his business to sound the alarm about inequities in the criminal-justice system that reflect gaping fault lines in the social fabric of the land of Lady Liberty.

    From history: A Police Shot to a Boy’s Back in Queens, Echoing Since 1973

    It was 1973, long before anyone could imagine hashtag declarations of solidarity and protest, the kind of message to the world that today might read, #IamCliffordGloverInTheFourthGrade.

    No one could pull out a phone to make a video of Clifford Glover, a 10-year-old running from a plainclothes police officer with a gun who had just jumped out of a white Buick Skylark in Jamaica, Queens, on a spring morning in 1973.

    “I am sure a camera would have helped, but the ballistics were clear,” Albert Gaudelli, a former Queens prosecutor, said this week. “The bullet entered his lower back and came out at the top of his chest. He was shot T-square in the back, with his body leaning forward. He was running away.”

    That bullet killed Clifford Glover. Its trajectory — through a family, a neighborhood, a generation — can be traced to this day, in injuries that never healed, in a story with no final word. When a black man named Walter Scott was shot by a white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., on April 4, a cellphone video made by a passer-by showed that Mr. Scott was also running away when he was killed and that he was not, as the officer claimed, carrying a police Taser.

    “With all this killing and stuff,” said Pauline Armstead, a sister of the dead boy, “they need to go back to Cliffie Glover.”

    Clifford, a black boy, had been shot by Officer Thomas Shea, a white man, who said he had tried to question him and his stepfather because they fit the descriptions of cab robbers. They ran. The officer said he fired when Clifford, in flight, pointed a gun at him, which the mortally injured boy had then managed to toss or hand to his stepfather.

    In the hours and days that followed the shooting, armies of investigators scoured the streets and sewers, pored over court records and arrived, without warrants, to search the homes of Clifford’s family and relatives.

    “Guys were trying to help Shea, and coming up with all kinds of stuff,” said Mr. Gaudelli, who was the chief homicide prosecutor in Queens at the time. “Someone showed up with a starter’s pistol, but as soon as you pressed them on it, they folded. There was no gun.”

    People in Jamaica rose in protest; the streets were blocked with heavy construction equipment owned by a black contractor. Mr. Shea became the first police officer in nearly 50 years to be charged with committing murder while on duty.

    “Shea says that the kid turned and appeared to have a gun,” Mr. Gaudelli said. “That’s what got him indicted: The ballistics made Shea a liar.”

    But not, apparently, a murderer, at least in the eyes of the jury of 11 white men and one black woman who found him not guilty. Afterward, many of the jurors joined Mr. Shea and his lawyers at a Queens Boulevard restaurant to celebrate. They told reporters it was possible Mr. Shea had been telling the truth about seeing a gun. […]

    For his generation of black boys and girls, Mr. Adams said, the verdict “brought a lot of despair.”

    The year after Clifford Glover died, the number of shots fired by officers declined by nearly half. (In 2013, the number of shots fired was 248, the fewest since the Police Department began keeping detailed records in 1971; at the peak, in 1972, officers fired 2,510 bullets.)

    Because Mr. Shea had spoken freely with his superiors, the largest police union began a campaign urging its members not to talk after a shooting until a union lawyer had arrived.

    For Clifford’s family, his death changed everything. […]

    On the morning of April 28, 1973, a Saturday, Add Armstead woke Clifford before dawn so they could be at the yard to move cranes into place for a delivery. They walked a few blocks along New York Boulevard — known today as Guy R. Brewer Boulevard — when an unmarked car pulled alongside them. Mr. Armstead, carrying wages that he had been paid the day before, said he and Clifford ran, afraid that they were going to be robbed. Hearing shots, he flagged down a patrol car, not realizing that Clifford had been felled.
    Continue reading the main story
    Continue reading the main story
    Continue reading the main story

    Mr. Shea testified that he did not realize that Clifford, who stood just five feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds, was a child. After the shooting, prosecutors said, Mr. Shea’s partner, Walter Scott, was recorded on a radio transmission saying, “Die, you little,” adding an expletive. Mr. Scott — who by coincidence has the same name as the man killed in North Charleston — denied it was his voice.

    Clifford’s death sent his mother, Eloise Glover, into a tailspin.

    “My mother turned on my father — ‘Did you have a gun, they said you had a gun,’ ” Darlene Armstead said. “It caused them to break up. My mother lost her mind.”

    The family received a settlement from New York City that, in the memory of the children, came to about $50,000, most of which the mother lent to local churches but never got back.

    “My mother didn’t want no one to know when she going outside,” Ms. Armstead said. “She always used the back door.”

    Ms. Armstead recalled sleeping nights on chairs in hospital emergency rooms while her mother was being treated, and living off restaurant handouts. “She was going to pay this guy to board up the house and she would pay him to bring the food to us,” she said.

    The children went to foster care and group homes. One brother was in a psychiatric institution for about 10 years. Her mother, who had diabetes, died in 1990 at age 54.

    Add Armstead died in 2005, at 83. “They put guns on him; they said he had guns at work, at home,” Kenneth Armstead said. “To demonize him would help Shea’s story.”

    Mr. Shea, who moved out of the state after his marriage broke up, could not be reached. “I’ve lost it all,” he told the author Thomas Hauser, whose 1980 book, “The Trial of Patrolman Thomas Shea,” is a comprehensive account of the episode.

    The defense lawyer, Mr. Evseroff, said a video would have changed nothing. “The case was resolved as a result of a trial,” he said.

    For Mr. Adams, the quick termination of the South Carolina police officer in the shooting this month of Walter Scott was a positive step.

    “That mayor said: ‘You know what? It has just gone too far,’ ” Mr. Adams said. “The pathway of Shea’s bullet physically stopped when it hit Clifford Glover, but the emotional pathway probably still continues to this day.”

    So many things in that story have not changed at all over the years.

  360. rq says

    Residents air complaints about police at Justice Department forum

    Frustration spilled onto a gym floor Thursday night as hundreds of Baltimore residents gathered to air grievances over years of harassment, beatings and other mistreatment they say they have endured from city police.

    They turned out for a meeting convened by the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate, at the city’s request, complaints about Baltimore’s Police Department. When a former San Jose, Calif., police chief hired to lead the meeting told the crowd he wanted to know whether they “trust” the city’s police, a woman shouted “No.”

    From that point on, dozens of residents — most of them black — inundated federal officials with their assertions that city police have been brutalizing residents with impunity.

    “When are you all going to help us?” cried out Wayne Amon Ra, 35, who said he was assaulted by police after he called officers for help when he detained a man breaking into cars.

    About 300 people attended the town hall meeting at Coppin State University, which was part of a “collaborative review” between the Justice and city police departments into the agency’s history of misconduct claims, brutality allegations and excessive force complaints, including those that have resulted in injury or death. […]

    Rawlings-Blake released a statement before Thursday night’s meeting saying the number of lawsuits and discourtesy and misconduct complaints in Baltimore are decreasing while the numbers of officers “accepting punishment and found guilty at trial boards have increased.”

    As of February, Rawlings-Blake said, 21 Baltimore Police Department officers have accepted punishment outright. Five of the officers who decided to have their cases reviewed in trial board hearings were found guilty, she said.
    cComments

    I’m certain that the bright investigative minds at the Sun are aware of the real story here. Even now they are investigating the pattern of activity Anthony,”Create a villain n hide in plain sight,” Batts has established over the years. They certainly are aware of his ties to…
    ken217
    at 8:54 PM April 17, 2015

    Add a comment See all comments
    102

    The mayor did not specify how many of the officers were fired or the level of discipline they received. Her spokesman said she purposefully avoided Thursday’s meeting so she would not detract from residents’ ability to air their concerns openly.

    “We aggressively recruited this program to Baltimore because of its proven track record of working with departments to build greater trust and transparency between police and the community,” Rawlings-Blake said in her statement. “I am determined to not allow a small handful of bad actors tarnish the reputation of the overwhelming majority of police officers putting their lives in danger to make Baltimore a safer city.”

    Before the meeting Thursday, the group Baltimore Bloc, activists who have led several anti-brutality protests, told followers on Twitter that the meeting was theirs to take over.

    The group tweeted, “lets make sure that the grand standers, the camera seekers, the microphone fiends DO NOT take over The People’s Platform. NO ONE attempting to be an apologist for the police.”

    The notice did not appear needed as one by one, residents launched into complaints. Grace-Kelly Anoma, 21, a Coppin State student, said if officers aren’t going to be fired for multiple excessive use of force complaints, they should have to register on a website like is required of sex offenders to warn residents of their history.

    “Why don’t we have a registry for those officers who have too many excessive force complaints?” she asked.

    Residents said they were tired of “10 officers” converging on small groups of 13-year-olds, and of routinely being ignored when they tried to report crimes.

    Some complained not just about police but about the review, which they said was toothless because they view it as being too aligned with the Police Department. While the review was voluntarily requested by the city, Justice Department spokeswoman Mary Brandenberger said federal officials have the ability to refer significant violations or issues to its Civil Rights Division for possible sanctions.

    The DOJ has conducted similar reviews of police departments in Las Vegas, Philadelphia and Spokane, Wash.

    This is an absolutely wonderful first step in Baltimore, and I hope it yields good results and further work in actually improving relations with the community as well as officer training, and a good sorting of those worthy of being police officers and those not. And systems in place to monitor things.
    Of course, I’m not being too hopeful, but just a little bit.

    Man dies in police custody in Hagerstown, stun gun used during arrest

    Two responding officers found a man in front of the home “in an aggressive stance” and he “appeared to be highly agitated,” police said in a news release. Two more officers and a supervisor arrived a short time later. Since officers believed the man was under the influence of drugs, police said they requested an ambulance.

    While they waited for the ambulance, police said the man didn’t comply with officers and remained aggressive. During the arrest, police said a stun gun was used and the man was placed in handcuffs.

    The man was conscious and uncooperative when he was placed in an ambulance, police said, but “at some point” he suffered an unknown medical emergency. The man was pronounced dead after midnight at Meritus Medical Center, police said.

    The man’s identity hasn’t been confirmed, police said.

    If only he had complied… right? Right?

    Oh this is interesting… looking for votes? Jeb Bush calls on Republicans to confirm Loretta Lynch

    Jeb Bush says that the Senate should confirm the nomination of Loretta Lynch, President Barack Obama’s choice for attorney general. A number of Senate Republicans oppose her nomination.

    “I think presidents have the right to pick their team,” Bush said, according to reports of his stop at the “Politics and Pie” forum in Concord, New Hampshire, on Thursday night.

    The former Florida governor made sure to get in a few digs at current Attorney General Eric Holder, saying that Republicans should consider that the longer it takes to confirm Lynch, the longer Holder stays.

    A Senate fight over a sex-trafficking bill that includes a controversial abortion provision has held up Lynch’s nomination for 160 days since Obama announced his choice last Nov. 8, but Minority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is threatening to break protocol and force a vote on the Senate floor.

    “If someone is supportive of the president’s policies, whether you agree with them or not, there should be some deference to the executive,” Bush told reporters. “It should not always be partisan.”

    A bit late, but this happened: No child deserves to be struck down by bullets. Tonight we will make our stand. Please join us. #300MenMarch Addressing violence in the community, by the community.
    And people talk about how black-on-black crime is never discussed. And other types of crime. Heh.

    here’s another CNN on the NG in Missouri: Missouri National Guard’s term for Ferguson protesters: ‘Enemy forces’. Just want to say, I love this part:

    The document read: “Protesters have historically used Molotov cocktails, rocks, and other debris to throw at police. Several small arms fire incidents have occurred. Some elements may utilize militants [sic] tactics taught by USPER RgB Black Rebels.”

    A communication specifying the types of gear and dangers the soldiers were likely to face warned that, “rioters likely have constructed home-made protection like goggles, gas masks, and plywood shields. Further, select individuals may have bullet proof vests and may carry firearms.”

    It further noted that, “a possible method of attack is the use of Molotov cocktails against personnel and equipment. Also the possibility exists of the use of arson for destruction and disruption of the power grid through targeted attack.”

    In addition to analyzing the threat general protesters could pose to soldiers, the National Guard also briefed its commanders on their intelligence capabilities so they could “deny adversaries the ability to identify Missouri National Guard vulnerabilities upon which threat forces may exploit, causing embarrassment, or harm to the MONG,” the mission set states.

    “Adversaries are most likely to possess human intelligence (HUMINT), open source intelligence (OSINT), signals intelligence (SIGINT), technical intelligence (TECHINT), and counterintelligence capabilities,” states Appendix 3, which outlines Operations Security. But the ways the National Guard lists for how this information can be obtained are nothing more than open records, social media, and listening on conversations being carries out in public by civil authorities or law enforcement.

    That bit about ‘human intelligence’. Like what the hell does that even mean. Eh.

    Basketball! Kevin Durant Says ‘Hell No’ When Asked About Watching 2015 NBA Playoffs. Just a break from killing and other violence.

  361. rq says

    I’m told that Bob Bates paid just $2,500 to get out of jail and posted it almost immediately.

    Counter-terrorism police might be tracking your #BlackLivesMatter tweets

    The emails and other documents, released by the Bay Area’s East Bay Express, illustrate specific internal communications between the California Highway Patrol and its “Terrorism Liaison Officers.”

    “Reminder for Tonight and this week: Do Not Advise Protesters That We Are Following Them on Social Media,” read the subject line of an internal email obtained by the publication. “We want to continue tracking the protesters as much as possible. If they believe we are tracking them, they will go silent,” the note read in part.

    Other emails show that counter-terrorism officials were at times embedded with protesters in Oakland. Another shows Oakland police flagged a local church visit by Michael Brown Sr., father of the late Ferguson, Mo. teenager, with a “situational awareness” tag for state authorities to potentially monitor.

    The obvious should be stated. If you publish something on social media that is publicly viewable, then people will view it and take it into account, including officers of the law. The assassination of two police officers in Brooklyn last December was announced over social media before it occurred, and authorities took notice. “If you see something on social media that is a threat against a police officer, call 911 immediately,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said after the incident.

    “We cannot take this lightly,” he said.

    More at the link. This after saying well they can’t actually keep track of racist comments coming from officers. Whoops.

    The heartbreak of a mother who saw her son die during a televised high-speed chase

    On Wednesday morning, Cheryl Shephard got a phone call from her son, 41-year-old Frank “Trey” Shephard.

    “He said, ‘Bye, I love you.’ He just called to tell me he loved me,” she told KTRK. “I didn’t know what was going on at first. I told him I love him, what’s going on? And that’s when he told me that the police was chasing him, and then immediately I went to pray and said, stop please, stop.”

    By that time local new stations in Houston, Texas were tracking every moment of an unfolding high-speed police car chase.

    A dark colored Chrysler vehicle driven by 41-year old Shephard sped down Houston’s US-59 highway, with officers hot in pursuit.

    Minutes later, the chase did end. In a statement the Harris County Sheriff’s Department said that Shephard exited the vehicle surrounded by officers who ordered him to show his hands multiple times.

    But Shephard instead got back into his car. According to police, the officers thought he was reaching for a weapon, so they opened fire.

    As the drama unfolded on television, Cheryl Shephard, and thousands of others, watched as her son was shot and killed.

    Officers fired 10-12 rounds into the vehicle, according to the Houston Chronicle. All the while, news anchors breathlessly narrated the final, gruesome moments of his life.

    There’s more at the link. And it is heartbreaking. With video. And, of course, requisite troubled past. Of the victim, who else did you think??

    In 2012, Black women voted at the highest rate of any race or gender group. With graph.

    @deray: There Was Video. Police Violence. Cartoon picture of a graveyard called ‘Small Comfort Cemetery’, where each grave is engraved with “There was a video of the shooting”.

    Municipal courts ordered to turn over records to Post-Dispatch. Is that with or without the exorbitant fees?

    The secrecy of St. Louis County municipal courts was lifted slightly Friday by a state committee.

    The State Judicial Records Committee voted unanimously to order municipal courts to turn over records requested by the Post-Dispatch, including court dockets and citations. The courts have until May 15 to do so.

    Scotland County Associate Circuit Judge Karl DeMarce said Friday that he was very “concerned about the municipal courts limiting access to records that are manifestly public.”

    “I’m startled by the blanket denial” of the request for information, DeMarce said.

    The Post-Dispatch previously reported on the lack of transparency it encountered when investigating the region’s municipal courts. Court hearings are often conducted in whispers at the judge’s bench, and records are sparse.

    While the state and federal courts have electronic databases where the public can view case listings, most of the municipal courts in the St. Louis area keep their databases private.

    Even getting a court docket — something that is readily available in state and federal courts — proved difficult in many of the courts.

    The Office of State Courts Administrator will be required to issue a letter to all presiding circuit judges and municipal courts in the state reminding them of their obligations to maintain public and confidential case indexes and public judgment indexes.

    “Hopefully, this will be a preventative measure,” DeMarce said.

    And there was another shooting in Jennings, which is near Ferguson and Darren Wilson’s old PD location. And I will post more on that once I get through the tabs in between. There is video (bodycam) and it is not encouraging.
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  362. rq says

    Amnesty International USA Calls for Approval of Civilian Board to Oversee St. Louis Police

    Amnesty International USA calls for the St. Louis Board of Aldermen to establish a Civilian Oversight Board that would evaluate police shootings, as well as broader police practices.

    The civilian review board was proposed in the wake of the killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson and the subsequent Department of Justice investigation. While the DOJ did not press charges against Wilson, the report found that the Ferguson Police Department violated individuals’ Fourth Amendment rights and exhibited racial bias when it stopped people without reasonable suspicion, arrested them without probable cause, and used unreasonable force against them. Alderman Terry Kennedy filed Bill 208 calling for the formation of a police civilian oversight board.

    “The DOJ report showed that the Ferguson police force was more concerned about generating revenue through unfair fines and tickets than they were with protecting the lives of the people they were sworn to serve,” said Steven W. Hawkins, executive director of Amnesty International USA. “This legislation would be an important step in ensuring appropriate systems of oversight. It is critical that reforms at the national level follow suit, including guidelines for using deadly force in the U.S. that are in line with international standards.”

    If approved, the civilian review board would have the ability to investigate allegations of police misconduct; research and assess police policies, operations and procedures; and make findings and recommendations. The board could also independently review evidence and witness statements from investigations by police internal affairs. All findings will be reported to the city’s public safety director and police commissioner.

    Musician and director FKA Twigs talks ‘Glass and Patron,’ behind the scenes

    Vice’s The Creators Project published an extensive video interview with FKA Twigs today, as a part of The YouTube Music Awards.

    She discusses her creative process and directing her new music video for “Glass & Patron,” which was released last month as a part of the YTMAs.

    Ferguson Hires Lawyer to Negotiate with DOJ

    The city of Ferguson has hired a lawyer to help deal with the Department of Justice after its investigation found widespread racial discrimination by Ferguson police.

    Ferguson released only a brief statement confirming it has hired prominent Illinois attorney Daniel K. Webb to negotiate with the Justice Department on the consent decree.

    Cincinnati reporter Peter Bronson covered a similar fight Cincinnati waged with the DOJ after its riots.

    Bronson says the consent decree cost Cincinnati $10 million.

    “It’s money that should have been spent on training and hiring police,” he says. “It should have been something that we did locally without the federal middle men and monitors soaking up so much of it, and the lawyers who descended on the city.

    Bronson says for Ferguson, part of the goal will be to make reforms without bankrupting the city.

    Obama rips Senate over Lynch nomination: ‘This is embarrassing’

    President Barack Obama blasted the Senate Friday for stalling on the nomination of Loretta Lynch to be the next attorney general, the longest wait for a nominee to lead the Justice Department in three decades.

    “Enough. Enough. Call Loretta Lynch for a vote, get her confirmed, let her do her job. This is embarrassing,” Obama told reporters during a joint White House press conference with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.

    “There are times where the dysfunction in the Senate just goes too far,” the President added. “This is an example of it.”

    If confirmed, Lynch would be the first African-American woman to lead the Justice Department. It has been 160 days since Obama nominated her on Nov. 8, and the delay in her confirmation is the longest since Ronald Reagan tapped Edwin Meese for the post in 1984.

    Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is holding up Lynch’s nomination as leverage to push Democrats to drop a filibuster on an unrelated anti-human trafficking bill. Democrats object to that measure because it contains an abortion provision. McConnell has said he won’t bring up Lynch for a vote until the dispute is resolved.

    Obama called on Congress to move her nomination forward, saying that no one could articulate a reason beyond political gamesmanship as to why she has not been confirmed.

    Here’s more on the young woman shot in Robbinsdale: Robbinsdale woman shot by police is charged with assault

    A crowd protesting the shooting and wounding of an 18-year-old woman by Robbinsdale police Thursday night rallied Friday evening in North Commons Park in north Minneapolis, then marched to North Memorial Medical Center where they chanted outdoors, calling for police to grant access to the teen’s family.

    Shortly after, police allowed family members to enter the hospital to see Tania Harris. “Look at what we just did,” supporters chanted. “We are powerful!”

    Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek said that Harris’ parents were initially denied entrance Thursday night because she was in surgery and then recovery, where no visitors are allowed. And, he added, when someone is under arrest, they typically don’t receive visitors until they’ve been charged. Once that happens, officers have some discretion.

    In this case, Stanek said, an exception was made to allow Harris’ parents in because they made a request.

    Authorities expect to release the name of the officer involved in the shooting on Monday. […]

    As Harris remained at North Memorial in Robbinsdale in stable condition Friday, authorities charged her with second-degree assault, saying she chased another woman with the knife and threatened to kill her. Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman announced the charges Friday and set bail at $50,000.

    But Harris’ mother, Kim Tolbert, said her daughter, a senior at an alternative high school and the mother of an 8-month-old girl, was only trying to protect her family from three people who were threatening to fight her.

    “For police to have used such aggression … it was very tough,” added Harris’ father, Melik Tolbert. “She’s not a violent person. It could have took something else, something other than a bullet.”

    Kim Tolbert said she called police Thursday night after the trio, one male and two females, showed up at their apartment building in the 3700 block of Hubbard Avenue N. in Robbinsdale to “jump on” Harris. Tolbert said efforts to get the three to leave were unsuccessful and her daughter was holding the knife to defend herself. “She was really scared,” she said.

    But the criminal complaint says Harris “burst” out the apartment door, chasing a woman with the knife and screaming, “I’m going to kill you, b*tch!” The complaint says that the police officer ordered Harris to stop and drop the knife — a command heard by at least two witnesses, investigators say — but she didn’t stop running or drop the weapon. An officer fired twice, wounding Harris, and then recovered the knife.

    The officer has been put on paid administrative leave, standard in such cases.

  363. rq says

    Judge grants $10,000 bond to man shot by Atlanta police. Generous, yeah?

    A Fulton County magistrate granted a $10,000 bond Thursday to a man who is charged with aggravated assault with a gun on two Atlanta police officers after his lawyer said police shot him seven times, primarily in the back, when he was fleeing.

    The man’s lawyer, Tawanna K. Morgan, noted it was “absolutely rare” for a magistrate to set such a low bond when police allege someone threatened or attacked them — which normally would be evidence the person was a danger to the community — and indicated a questionable shooting.

    “In these type of cases, there is always a concern about even receiving a bond,” she said.

    Yuric J. Ussery, 22, was shot while fleeing police April 8 after two officers, who were part of a crime-suppression unit, tried to stop him for jaywalking in the high-crime Mechanicsville neighborhood. Instead, Ussery fled and the pursing officers said they shot him after he pointed a gun at them.

    Morgan took issue with suggestion that her client pointed a pistol at police, noting his only arrest had been for being in possession of a stolen car when he was 17.

    “It is definitely disputed that he ever pulled out a gun,” Morgan told The Atlanta Journal Constitution on Thursday. “What is not in dispute is the physical evidence of him being shot in his back, which is consistent with him still running.”

    She contended her client fled the two plain-clothes officers after they confronted him aggressively for crossing McDaniel Street outside of a crosswalk without identifying themselves as police.

    The police report said the two officers identified themselves as police during the foot chase.

    “As the foot pursuit continued the suspect produced a pistol from his waistband and pointed the loaded weapon at the officers,” the report said. “The officers fearing for their lives and the safety of others discharged their City issued firearms striking the suspect. The suspect was then taken into custody and the suspect’s weapon was recovered.”

    The two officers involved are still on administrative leave and “will remain on non-enforcement status until the preliminary investigation is complete,” Sgt. Greg Lyon told The AJC on Thursday.

    I like how flexible and versatile black men are supposed to be – while running away from cops, they are still somehow capable of reaching into their waistbands and pointing (rather invisible) guns at police in a manner threatening enough to warrant (near-)deadly force.

    We’ll protest the Lantern Festival too. Don’t come to our neighborhood if you don’t want to see the memorial. Simple. Read the attached text – the community wants to take down the memorial to VonDerrit Myers because tourists may see it and find it… wanting.

    Ballet! Youtube video: Misty Copeland On Changing the Face of Ballet | TIME 100

    “I never thought I could make a career out of something I enjoyed doing something I was passionate about, something that gave me a voice,” says Misty Copeland, who is one of the first African Americans to be a soloist with American Ballet Theatre.

    Solidarity Rally & March for #TaniaHarris, facbeook event (no sign-in needed).

    Last night we received a disturbing report that Tania Harris, an 18 year old high school student, was the victim of a police shooting in Robbinsdale.

    Please join us for a rally and march at North Commons Park with Tania’s family to extend our support to them and stand in solidarity with their demands for accountability from an out of control police force.

    Thankfully, Tania is in stable condition at this time, in spite of being shot twice in the abdomen by police. However her family is still not being allowed to visit her.

    After being shot she was handcuffed and did not receive immediate medical attention.

    Police claimed that this 18 year old “adult woman” was shot because she was holding a knife, but that’s no excuse for shooting a high school student. If she was a young white student, it’s hard to believe lethal force would have been used against her based on countless examples of police applying a different set of standards for whites in similar situations.

    The police’s attempts to vilify Tania and immediately justify their unnecessary violence towards her in the media reflects a larger pattern in which black victims of police shootings around the country have been demonized. In this instance, as similar to the shooting death of 12 year old Tamir Rice by police in Cleveland, Ohio, we are witnessing a policing culture that insists on shooting first and asking questions later. We are also witnessing a policing culture that consistently overreacts and escalates conflict situations at disproportionate levels for black and brown communities that too often leads to tragedy.

    We call upon our government officials to conduct a rigorous investigation into the shooting of Tania Harris to ensure the officer who did this is held accountable. Enough is enough. State sanctioned violence against black people here in Minnesota and nationally must end.

    *We’re meeting on the North (pool) side of the park
    *Please bring signs if you’re able
    *Text @BlackLives to 23559 for text updates

    55 years ago, today, SNCC was formed in Raleigh, NC. April 17, 1960.

    Job opportunity! Work With BGD

    Part Time Bookkeeper

    BGD is a non-profit media project by and for people of color who are also LGBTQ. Read more about us here before applying.

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    Also available: part-time video content manager.

  364. rq says

    How Racial Injustice Is Now Driving the ‘Fight for $15’

    lmost two years ago, McDonald’s worker Nancy Salgado was arrested after calling out former McDonald’s USA President Jeff Stratton for the criminally low wages the corporation pays employees.

    Since that time, the #FightFor15 grassroots organization, which demands that the minimum wage be raised to $15 per hour and that a union be created for fast-food workers, has grown in scope to encompass home care and child care providers along with retail employees. Supported by several members of Congress, including Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), Rep. Yvette D. Clarke (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), these workers joined with allies from coast to coast Wednesday to shut down McDonald’s locations in protest.

    “It’s something different,” said Kendall Fells, organizing director of Fight for $15, which is funded by the Service Employees International Union. “This is much more of an economic and racial-justice movement than the fast-food workers strikes of the past two years.”

    According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics March 2014 report, “A Profile of the Working Poor, 2012” (pdf), the numbers are dismal: “Hispanics and blacks were more than twice as likely as whites and Asians to be among the working poor. In 2012, the working-poor rates of Hispanic[s] and blacks were 13.8 percent and 13.6 percent, respectively, compared with 6.2 percent for whites and 4.9 percent for Asians.”

    This movement is necessary to create a society where the working poor do not have to live on public assistance while simultaneously being stereotyped as lazy, ignorant and uneducated. It should not be controversial to expect to be compensated commensurate with your labor within a billion-dollar corporation and the rising cost of living; it should be a matter of course. This is why I’ve been appalled to see the opposition to #FightFor15.

    According to one survey conducted by USNews[dot]com, 77.44 percent of those queried are opposed to the movement, while 20.56 percent are in support of it. The debate on social media is steeped in racially charged undertones, including criticism from some card-carrying members of the so-called Talented Tenth who are apparently disgusted that less-educated people would demand respect. These are the people who will take their degree, head off to a minimum-wage-paying job that barely makes a dent in their student loans, and be proud as long as they can do it in a suit and tie. You know, that respectable intraracial classism that promulgates the “Black People vs. Niggas” fallacy.

    Wake-up call: It doesn’t matter if you’re answering your boss’s emails or making sure customers are having it their way and “lovin’ it”—you’re more than likely getting screwed over, too.

    I refer to the following quote from Malcolm X often: “You can’t have capitalism without racism.” This fight for livable wages, and McDonald’s tepid response to it, makes that abundantly clear. They sell workers the American dream and hide the nightmare in fine print, implicitly framing racism as a sound business decision. The con is that when rich white people are getting richer and poor people of color are getting poorer, it’s impossible to tell where capitalism ends and racism begins.

    “We believe that any minimum wage increase should be implemented over time so that the impact on owners and small and medium-sized businesses—like the ones who own and operate the majority of our restaurants—is manageable,” McDonald’s said in a statement.

    So, to be clear: They’ll put Calvin in commercials, sponsor Tavis Smiley’s Black State of the Union, proclaim themselves “deeply rooted in the community,” tout their diversity and even make an African American head brother in charge. But when it comes to paying black and brown people a livable wage? When it comes to black and brown people being able to feed their children or go to the doctor or maybe even enjoy themselves on occasion without having to worry about getting evicted?

    Well, in that case, they should just hold on a little bit longer so the lives of wealthy business owners won’t be disrupted and equality won’t be too jarring for them.

    More at the link.

    Man, 18, fatally shot by Chicago Police in South Shore. Note: man, 18. When it’s white college students, they’re boys.

    An 18-year-old man was shot to death by a Chicago Police officer Friday night in the South Shore neighborhood.

    About 10:10 p.m., Grand Crossing District officers on patrol near 71st Street and Paxton Avenue heard shots fired and saw a van speeding away from the area, according to a statement from Chicago Police.

    A pursuit ensued, and the officers watched someone jump from the vehicle with a gun in his hand, police Deputy Chief Dana Alexander told reporters at the scene.

    The officers chased the man — identified as Jeffery Kemp — to 74th Street and Merrill Avenue and ordered him to drop the weapon, but instead he turned around and pointed it at the officers, authorities said. An officer then fired two shots, striking the man.

    Kemp, who lived in the 7400 block of South Jeffery, was dead at the scene, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.

    Police said a gun was recovered at the scene. No officers were injured.

    Did he deserve to die? Did he?

    After demanding the family of Tania get let in, the police finally allow them in. Power of community. #TaniaHarris
    I know this is ‘old’ news, but see some photos.

    bail set at $50k for a girl in the hospital recovering from gun shot wounds at the hands of those who were supposed 2 protect #TaniaHarris

    We’re at the hospital demanding that the family of Tania Harris be able to see her.
    Robbinsdale PD made a blockade    . For the photo.

    African American Woman Who Received Pardon 60 Years After Execution. Oh gods, 60 years too late. Way too late.

    Lena Baker, an African American mother of three, was electrocuted at the Georgia State Prison in Reidsyille.

    She was convicted for the fatal shooting of E. B. Knight, a white Cuthbert, GA mill operator she was hired to care for after he broke his leg. She was 44 and the only woman ever executed in Georgia’s electric chair. For Baker, a Black maid in the segregated south in the 1940’s, her story was a tough sell to a jury of 12 white men. And rumors that she was romantically involved with victim E. B. Knight did not help.

    Her murder trial lasted just a day, without a single witness called by her court-appointed lawyer. She was convicted and sentenced to death. John Cole Vodicka, director of an Americus-based inmate advocacy program known as the Prison and Jail Project, said Knight had kept Ms. Baker as his “virtual sex slave.” She was his paramour, she was his mistress, and, among other things, his drinking partner. If you read the transcript and have any understanding of black-white relations, Black women were often subjected to the sexual whims of their white masters, their white bosses, or some white man who had control over their lives or the lives of their families. “Here is one who resisted and paid the price.”

    In 2005, The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles decided to pardon Lena Baker. Although the board did not find Baker innocent of the crime. It instead found the decision to deny her clemency in 1945 “was a grievous error, as this case called out for mercy.”

  365. rq says

    Mark Kirk: ‘We drive faster’ through black neighborhoods, “but we totally don’t have anything against those black folk”.

    Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk says he won’t talk about race anymore after his comments last week that “we drive faster” through black communities sparked criticism from Democrats.

    Kirk made the comments in an interview with the Peoria Journal-Star, when asked his thoughts on encouraging innovation in Illinois. Kirk touted his efforts to foster an “African-American entrepreneurial class,” and suggested Illinois could someday be home to a “class of African-American billionaires.”

    “That would really adjust income differentials and make the diversity and outcome of the state much better so that the black community is not the one we drive faster through,” he added.

    In a statement issued after Kirk’s comments were published, the senator’s spokeswoman underscored his work for the African American community.

    “Anyone watching network news in Chicago is aware of the frequent killings and violence that affects various communities in the state,” said spokeswoman Eleni Demertzis.

    “Senator Kirk is active in fighting gang violence, keeping assault weapons of the streets, and works within the African American community to find aspiring entrepreneurs. No one can question Senator Kirk’s commitment to the African-American community.”

    Kirk is seen as Republicans’ most vulnerable incumbent this cycle, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee wasted little time in pouncing on the comments, calling them “offensive.”

    “Panicked over his dismal reelection prospects, it appears that no bloc of Illinois voters is safe from the over-the-top and offensive rhetoric that seems to spew weekly from Mark Kirk’s mouth,” said Sadie Weiner, DSCC national press secretary.

    Weiner added that Kirk owes the state a “barrel of apologies.”

    On Wednesday, the senator told the Chicago Sun-Times that he’d avoid future controversy by avoiding discussions of race altogether.

    “I would say that whenever a targeted member talks about race or ethnicity, it is impossible for him to get it right. So I’ll leave it at that,” Kirk said.

    Apparently it’s not his first such offense.

    Drake Read All of Your Negative Coachella Reviews Already. For some fun.

    Adrien Broner Makes Uncomfortable Joke With Cop During DUI Arrest: “You Could Have Shot Me With My Hands Up”. Some dangerous fun.

    Back in January, about two days after he made a series of very disrespectful comments about Jay Z and Rihanna, Adrien Broner was arrested in Ohio for DUI. A police officer pulled him over after she witnessed him speeding and discovered that he was driving his vehicle while impaired. And now, TMZ Sports has obtained the dashcam video of Broner’s arrest.

    In the video, you can see that, initially, Broner refused to get out of his car for the cop. Then, after failing a field sobriety test and being told that he was going to be placed under arrest, Broner claimed he wasn’t drunk while taking off a bunch of jewelry that he was wearing and handing it to a cop for safekeeping. And finally, Broner is seen sitting in the back of a cop car cracking jokes and telling the arresting officer—who clearly doesn’t know who he is—about himself.

    “I’m blessed,” he says, before revealing that he has made more than $100 million in his boxing career. “I’m a multimillionaire.”

    But the craziest part of the video comes all the way at the end when the cop explains to him that things could have gone much differently that night.

    “You shouldn’t be driving,” she says. “I wouldn’t lie to you. Obviously, if I would have wanted to be a jerk, I could have been a lot meaner about everything.”

    “That’s fine,” Broner replies. “You could have shot me with my hands up.”

    Broner and the cop then exchange uncomfortable laughter before she says, “I would never do that.”

    Check out the full DUI arrest video in the clip above. Broner has pleaded not guilty to the DUI charge and, according to TMZ Sports, is planning on fighting it.

    Activists in jail: Black Lives Matter Raising $90,000 Bail for Jailed Activist

    Black Lives Matter (BLM) is mounting a campaign to crowdfund $90,000 for the bail of 28-year-old Jasmine Richards, a Pasadena-based activist who was arrested on a slew of charges related to a protest against police brutality that she helped organize. Richards was arrested on Monday, just as she was preparing to appear at a City Council meeting to talk about the death of Kendrec McDade, an unarmed black teenager who was shot seven times and killed by Pasadena police officers in 2012.

    “[Richards] has been working tirelessly to build a BLM Pasadena chapter, so black folks in Pasadena know their lives matter,” said BLM organizers in a statement. “Courageously, Jasmine reached out to Anya Slaughter, Kendrec McDade’s mother, making sure that she had a community supporting her in seeking justice for Kendrec.”

    Richards had been planning to show up at the City Council meeting with fellow activists this week to read details from a report which shows that the officers involved in McDade’s death made “tactical errors” in their pursuit. Instead, she was sitting in the city jail by late Monday afternoon, arrested on charges that include, “terrorist threats, assault, trespassing, failure to comply with orders of peace officers, disturbing the peace, not having a permit for amplified sound and petty theft.”

    These charges were apparently filed after a protest held less than a week earlier. Organizers with Black Lives Matter believe they were filed in retaliation for Richards’ persistent efforts to hold the Pasadena police officer accountable for McDade’s death. They launched a campaign this week calling for her release.

    More on that: Police say Black Lives Matter activist was not under surveillance prior to arrest

    A Pasadena police spokesperson denied the department was spying on a member of the Black Lives Matters movement who was arrested just before she was set to appear before the City Council to speak about the officer-involved shooting death of Kendrec McDade.

    Jasmine Richards, 28, was arrested before the council meeting but after a demonstration six days earlier in front of City Hall marking the three-year anniversary of the unarmed 19-year-old’s shooting death on Sunset Avenue.

    Organizers with the group said in a prepared statement that Richards was arrested prior to the March 30 council meeting in retaliation for her participation in the McDade demonstration on March 24.

    “As an active member of Black Lives Matter-Pasadena, Jasmine Richards’ activism against police brutality has made her a highly visible target for police harassment,” according to the statement. “These current charges are an attempt by law enforcement officials to mischaracterize Jasmine and undermine her work as a galvanizing force in the Black community of Pasadena.”

    “Ms. Richards was not targeted nor was there any surveillance by PPD,” said Pasadena police Lt. Tracey Ibarra. “She had a warrant for her arrest for larceny and a pending criminal charge being reviewed by the Pasadena city attorney for the disturbance she and others caused in Old Pasadena on March 30. When she was arrested for the warrant, the city attorney was advised and they chose to group the open case with the warrant.”

    Richards was being held on $90,000 bail, which was reduced to $36,000. Thanks to an online fundraising effort conducted by Melina Abdullah of Black Lives Matter, she was freed last week after posting bond. Richards was expected to appear Tuesday in Pasadena Superior Court.

    So yeah, the previous is outdated info, and some good news in there, too. Though I don’t believe the police.

    TONIGHT! Re-visions: Black & Brown Resisting State Violence art & round-table discussion. 401 26th St Oakland. 6-9PM.

  366. rq says

    I’m generally not a fan of people arming themselves. This time is no different – but I can understand the sentiment. West Memphis NAACP wants black families to arm themselves

    Although a call to arms in West Memphis sounds frightening, the NAACP wants to educate people about their constitutional rights.

    Leaders claim they can increase gun ownership without increasing crime.

    “Law enforcement has to understand, you cannot do what you please when you see us,” Crittenden County NAACP head, Shabaka Afrika said in a news conference. He feels black families should exercise their Second Amendment rights and arm themselves.

    However, he wants that to happen in a responsible, educated way.

    Hubert Bass, founder of the Crittenden County Justice Commission, joined Afrika in asking black people in Crittenden County to get educated and join a gun club.

    Bass said, “We’re going to study law. What our rights are. We also want to be looking at our constitutional rights in carrying weapons.”

    Bass wants officers and civilians to be ready to record. “All police encounters need to be recorded. It’s unfortunate, it has to be that way.

    4 Years After a Revolutionary New Approach to Drugs, Here’s What’s Happening in Seattle. Something rather positive.

    Count this as a case study on the benefits of keeping your enemies close.

    About 10 years ago, Lisa Daugaard and the Seattle police were at odds, according to a report by Saki Knafo at CityLab. As the director of a special team at the Seattle Public Defender Association, Daugaard was leading a crusade against Seattle’s criminal justice system. She had worked for years to expose and counteract racial discrimination in the way the city handled drug crimes. Like many other American cities, Seattle treated minorities quite a bit differently than the rest of its population. But one day things changed.

    According to CityLab, Steve Brown, former captain of the city police’s narcotics unit, agreed to sit down with Daugaard and think about some solutions — together. While Brown did not concede that racism was pervasive among the city’s police force, he was open to exploring alternative methods for dealing with drug crimes and addiction in Seattle. After several coffee shop conversations, they hatched the plans for what would eventually become Seattle’s Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program.

    The program, launched in 2011, operates from a premise essentially opposite that of the war on drugs. Instead of harsh punishments, LEAD focuses on bolstering addicts’ welfare in order to decrease crime and initiate rehabilitation. Four years in, there are already signs that the system works better in Seattle’s most deeply drug trade-afflicted neighborhoods than the usual path of deprivation.

    Social work instead of police work: LEAD provides a police officer with two choices for dealing with someone suspected of low-level drug crimes or prostitution. The first option is the usual route of booking and prosecution. The second is an option to “divert” — the suspect can be directed to harm reduction-oriented management if they agree to participate in a special program instead of facing criminal charges.

    Knafo reports on the starkly different experience that people who enter the program have compared to their peers:

    A social worker stops by the precinct, asks the offender some questions about her life, and produces paperwork for her to sign. From that point on, the offender is no longer an offender. The arrest is wiped from her record. She receives access to housing assistance, clean clothes, tuition for school, job referrals, health care, counseling, and many other benefits and services. All she has to do is meet with her social worker twice in the first month of signing up. She doesn’t even have to stop using drugs.

    Promising results: A new study from the University of Washington has found that, compared with a control group who went down the typical arrest-and-prosecution path, people who worked with LEAD were 34% to 58% less likely to have committed new crimes since their first arrest.

    “The stats are so robust, which took me by surprise,” study co-author Susan Collins told Vice News.

    Some of the program’s participants have reported life-changing experiences after LEAD helped them find housing and jobs.

    “They threw me a life preserver,” Wade Johnson, a 35-year-old Seattle resident who struggles with drug addiction, told Vice. “They helped me build bridges back with my family, I’m very employable now. I have a lot to live for. They put me on a platform.”

    Future studies fleshing out the ways LEAD has influenced participants will be essential to determining if the program can scale and be replicated. Declines in repeat criminal behavior are one metric for measuring its success, but drug policymakers will also want to know if LEAD can improve physical and mental health outcomes.

    Okay, and it has a fucking obscene opening sentence. Enemies? Seriously? The rest is much better. More at the link.

    1. RT @Yo_jonesy_: Pnh teachers in support of Black Lives Matter. Let the dialogue begin

    2. RT @evster_: Parkway North staff who have signs in their rooms/spaces. 18 classrooms, y’all. #BlackLivesMatter

    Fee to Be Charged for Video of South Carolina Shooting, Publicist Says. I know, we saw it above. But I like the addition of this part:

    Max Markson, chief executive of Markson Sparks, said by phone from Australia: “I think that the people who might be put off by this are the media outlets that had it for free. Now they will have to pay.”

    He said the fee amount would be negotiable, although another person familiar with the negotiations who was not authorized to speak publicly said news media outlets were being charged a one-time fee of $10,000.

    A lawyer for Mr. Scott’s family said the relatives remain grateful to Mr. Santana and have no problem with him receiving a financial benefit.

    “Without the video, we would not be where we are right now,” said Justin Bamberg, one of the family’s lawyers.

  367. rq says

    Broadway shut down as 100s march with #TaniaHarris’ family to the hospital to demand to see their 18yo daughter. Yeah, sorry I got all the Tania Harris tweets reversed.

    Die in in shutting down both lanes of broadway. #TaniaHarris

    Think some good thoughts! Kareem Abdul-Jabbar recovering after quadruple bypass surgery

    Kareem Abdul-Jabbar underwent quadruple coronary bypass surgery this week at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, the world-renowned hospital associated with the school where the now 68-year-old played college hoops before becoming the NBA’s all-time leading scorer.

    The operation took place Thursday, UCLA said in a statement, after Abdul-Jabbar was admitted earlier this week with cardiovascular disease.

    The chief of cardiac surgery at UCLA, Dr. Richard Shemin, performed the procedure, describing it as a success and predicting a full recovery.

    SEE ALSO: The golden voice: How announcer Jim Barnett sweetened an overdue NBA dream season

    UCLA health officials said Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had requested they release the following statement:

    At this time, Abdul-Jabbar would like to thank his surgical team and the medical staff at UCLA, his alma mater, for the excellent care he has received.

    He is looking forward to getting back to his normal activities soon. He asks that you keep him in your thoughts and, most importantly, cherish and live each day to its fullest.

    For those wanting to send well wishes, he thanks you in advance and asks that you support those in your own community who may be suffering from various health issues.

    Abdul-Jabbar played for the UCLA Bruins from 1966 to 1969 when he still went by his given name Lew Alcindor. UCLA won three consecutive national titles, and Abdul-Jabbar won the NCAA tournament MVP honors a record three years in a row.

    After six seasons in Milwaukee, he joined the Los Angeles Lakers, adopting the Muslim name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar after his first NBA championship in 1971. With his undefendable “sky hook” and an uncanny grace for a 7’2″ man, Abdul-Jabbar scored 38,387 points in his career — 1,459 points more than Karl Malone, who is second.

    FOr fucks’ sake… Cop in Aiyana Stanley-Jones shooting back on the job

    After nearly five years, the officer who accidentally killed 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones during a raid being filmed by a TV camera crew has been restored to active duty as a Detroit police officer.

    Officer Joseph Weekley has not been on active duty since shortly after the May 16, 2010, raid of a flat on Lillibridge Street on the city’s east side that ended in Aiyana’s death. Weekley led a Special Response Team crew into the flat, looking for a killer who’d gunned down a 17-year-old days earlier.

    Weekley was officially restored to active duty April 2, when he was transferred from the Special Response Team to the Criminal Investigations Bureau, although he won’t start work for a few weeks, Detroit Police Chief James Craig said Friday.

    “He’s on vacation now, but when he returns, he’ll be in a limited duty capacity,” Craig said. “He won’t be in the field.”

    Members of Aiyana’s family and Weekley’s attorney, Steve Fishman, could not be reached for comment Friday.

    Can’t get to this article, but it’s about eliminating racial income gaps in order to boost the GDP. It sounds good and it won’t load for me.

    Did he really have to open his mouth? Disgraced Chicago cop Jon Burge breaks silence, condemns $5.5 million reparations fund

    Former convicted Area 2 Police Commander Jon Burge says he finds it “hard to believe” that Chicago’s “political leadership” could “even contemplate giving reparations to human vermin” like the “guilty vicious criminals” he tried to take off the streets.

    Three days after Mayor Rahm Emanuel agreed to create a $5.5 million “reparations” fund to compensate torture victims, Burge unleashed a torrent of anger against plaintiffs’ attorneys, politicians, a “complicit” news media and two torture victims.

    Burge, who has long asserted his Fifth Amendment rights when placed under oath about the alleged torture, broke his silence in an interview with writer and Chicago Police officer Martin Preib posted on a blog titled “The Conviction Project.”

    In a brief telephone conversation Friday from his home in Tampa, Fla., Burge confirmed that the remarks were his. He refused to respond to similar questions from the Chicago Sun-Times.

    “I find it hard to believe that the city’s political leadership could even contemplate giving `Reparations’ to human vermin” like Anthony Holmes and Darrell Cannon, Burge was quoted as saying.

    Burge argued that plaintiffs’ attorney Flint Taylor and others with a “radical political agenda” have been “working to free guilty, vicious criminals” for years by filing specious lawsuits” against Chicago Police officers.

    The “cottage industry” has been created by the fact that, “99 percent of the time, the city will settle” instead of going to trial because “it’s cheaper,” Burge said.

    “These private attorneys grow rich because the city of Chicago is afraid to defend the lawsuits filed by these human vultures,” Burge was quoted as saying.

    “Ask the mayor and City Council members how many relatives of the victims of these crimes they spoke with before deciding on their `Reparations,’ ” Burge said.

    Taylor denounced Burge as a “convicted perjurer and liar.” He noted that, just a month ago, Burge took the Fifth Amendment once again rather than “tell these lies and commit this perjury under oath and run the risk of going back to jail where he truly belongs to spend the rest of his life.” […]

    In the interview with Preib, Burge claims that he and his cohorts would someday be “vindicated.” Already, he claimed that “evidence is slowly emerging that clearly shows what happened to the dedicated Chicago Police detectives who fought, as best we could, the worst, most violent predators on the South Side.”

    Burge also unleashed his anger at Holmes and Cannon, whom he calls “chief spokesmen for the reparations campaign.”

    Cannon was livid. He urged U.S. attorney Zach Fardon to “go back and find reason to indict” Burge again.

    “Jon Burge is a good-for-nothing . . . who doesn’t deserve to have one penny of city money [in his pension]. He’s a sick individual who’s been blessed to have only gotten four years in prison, which is a travesty in itself. I sure hope the feds will look at the fact that he came up off the Fifth,” Cannon said.

    “He talks about families [of crime victims]. What about all of our families who suffered while he was running free and rampant throughout the black community? And if I’m such a vermin or whatever he called me, look at my record since I’ve been home. Not one time have I had a negative encounter with the Police Department other than a traffic ticket.”

    Holmes was equally incensed that Burge would condemn reparations so long overdue.

    “He accuses us, but when you ask him to comment on what he did to us, he takes the Fifth. He’s trying to belittle us still to cover up for the fact that he was wrong. That’s sad. I feel sorry for him. I didn’t try to hurt him like he hurt me,” Holmes said.

    “The city is trying to help us because he put us in this position. If he hadn’t, we wouldn’t need no help. All of us are mentally unstable. We’re not ourselves. . . . He’s trying to cover up for himself and saying he did everything right. He didn’t do everything right. He tortured us. He’s saying what he did to us was justified to get information. We can’t stand torture. That’s how he broke all of us.”

    Some bits in between that really confirm that Burge is a terrible person.
    And it’s frightening that there are people out there who think like he does. For real and without questioning themselves.

  368. rq says

    The name #PinkFloyd was chosen by Syd Barrett,
    after 2 American blues musicians called Pink Anderson & Floyd Council.     Did not know this.

    Black Men Smile (by @blackmensmile) Cute shirts.

    Please read this. If a Cop Is Recorded Killing Me, You Have My Permission to Share the Video

    If a police officer kills me and someone is around to record what happened, I want the world to know that I’m fine with the video being shared.

    There is no need to ask my mother, father or any other surviving family members for their permission to tweet, Facebook, Instagram or broadcast the final moments of my life being shot, choked, kicked and punched out of me. I’m black, therefore, in America’s white supremacist society, if a cop kills me, the implication is that I had it coming. I want the world to see that I did nothing wrong.

    Share the video. Please. I fear the cop who would end up killing me won’t face prosecution without it. But I know my view isn’t shared by everyone.

    After the release of video last week showing Walter Scott, and even more recently, Eric Harris, being killed by police, many have taken to social media to express how such videos do nothing more than demean the lives of those who were brutally killed. Critics also argue that neither the victims nor their families are given the opportunity to consent to the videos’ release. Some even suggest that we should stop sharing such videos all together.

    I understand the mental health issue these videos can cause—they are traumatizing—but I think such commentary focuses too much over “share versus don’t share” and less on how we should more carefully handle such violent and triggering footage. These videos are essential for lawyers to use as evidence in court and to counter the narrative of cops supposedly “fearing for their lives.” […]

    As horrific as these videos of black people being killed by cops are, the footage is not the problem. Police officers who knowingly abuse their power, and the legal system that allows them to get away with it, are the real issues. If police officers were not so confident about getting off for killing black people, there would be fewer videos of our deaths in the first place. Shining a light on this abuse with video footage is, perhaps, the only way we can come close to forcing cops to change their behavior. Consequently, black people will also have to suffer the residual trauma that comes with enduring videos of our deaths being shared on social media. It’s one of the many sacrifices we will have to make to fight police brutality.

    Better to practice self-care to handle the videos that roll up on our Twitter and Facebook feeds than stop people from sharing them, which won’t work anyway.

    Unfortunately, it often takes the final product of anti-black savagery to evoke outrage in America— especially among white people. For example, the open casket funeral of Emmett Till, in 1955, was a moment that truly sparked outrage across the nation. Media coverage of the barbaric attacks by police officers against protesters on “Bloody Sunday,” in 1965, served as a crucial catalyst during the Civil Rights Movement. Black people endured racism for decades, but it took moments like those to wake the nation up. Fifty years later, very little has changed in that regard. Our words still mean little in America. Many people need to see the brutality we experience in order to take action. […]

    I wish black people didn’t have to make such decisions, but as long as we want to make America the home it is supposed to be, these are the choices we are forced to make. I don’t believe I am sacrificing my dignity in doing so, either. On the contrary, I would be giving The Movement permission to use the final moments of my life to fight for the liberation of black people.

    Uh… coach, spanking, first-grader? Georgia mom furious after coach’s ‘spanking’ chips first-grader’s tooth

    A mother in Albany, Georgia wants to know how her 8-year-old son ended up with a chipped tooth after what was allegedly a routine disciplining by a P.E. coach at Jackson Heights Elementary School.

    According to WALB Channel 10 News, Sadeirdra Canady said that her son Deonte Harris was attending an In School Suspension Program when the incident took place last month.

    The manner in which school officials handled the incident, Canady said, made it seem as if they were trying to hide something.

    “Any other time that Deontae Harris gets in trouble in school they call and report it, you know doing anything,” she told WALB. “No one called it was like they was trying to cover it up.”

    Harris said that the coach held him between his legs so that he could spank him, but that the blows drove the first grader face-first into the wall behind the teacher.

    “He put me between his legs and spanked me and after that he throwed me to the wall,” the boy said.

    Harris also told his mother that the school’s assistant principal struck him, but Canady said that she has only authorized the school principal to administer corporal punishment to her son.

    “I’m trying to figure out why was the ISS teacher punishing him anyway,” she said.

    Assistant Superintendent of Schools Jack Willis told Channel 10 that his office is investigating the matter.

    “At this point I received a call from her this morning telling me about this and then later in the morning I received a copy of the incident report and right now our folks are investigating it,” said Willis.

    “There has been no action taken at this point because we don’t know exactly what happened,” he said.

    Canady said that she does not feel the investigation has been handled in a timely manner.

    “This is what three four weeks later now and the investigator just now coming to interview me?” she said.

    The names of the coach and the assistant principal have not been released.

    Here’s a little good news. 2015 Commencement Speaker – Donna Brazile, at Spelman College.

    Donna Brazile, an academic, author, syndicated columnist, television political commentator, and political strategist, has been named commencement speaker for the Spelman College Class of 2015. Brazile will address more than 435 graduates on Sunday, May 17, 2015, at the Georgia International Convention Center.

    Brazile is Vice Chair of Voter Registration and Participation at the Democratic National Committee, and former interim National Chair of the Democratic National Committee as well as the former chair of the DNC’s Voting Rights Institute.

    Brazile first got involved in politics at the age of nine when she worked to elect a City Council candidate who had promised to build a playground in her neighborhood; the candidate won, the swing set was installed, and a lifelong passion for political progress was ignited. Brazile worked on every presidential campaign from 1976 through 2000, when she became the first African American to manage a presidential campaign.

    Author of the best-selling memoir Cooking with Grease: Stirring the Pots in American Politics, Brazile is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, a syndicated newspaper columnist for Universal Uclick, a columnist for Ms. Magazine, and O, The Oprah Magazine, and an on-air contributor to CNN, and ABC, where she regularly appears on This Week. In addition to her three cameo appearances on CBS’s The Good Wife, she has made two cameo appearances on Netflix’s House of Cards. Ask her and she’ll tell you that acting, after all, is the key to success in politics.

    In September 2014, Brazile received the WNBA’s Inspiration Award. In August 2009, O, The Oprah Magazine chose Brazile as one of its 20 “remarkable visionaries” for the magazine’s first-ever O Power List. In addition, she was named among the 100 Most Powerful Women by Washingtonian magazine, Top 50 Women in America by Essence magazine, and received the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s highest award for political achievement.

    Brazile remains active in her hometown of New Orleans, where she was recently appointed to serve on the executive committee of the Tricentennial Commission, responsible for the celebration of the city’s founding in 2018.

    She also serves on several corporate boards and boards of non-profit institutions. Last fall, President Obama appointed Brazile to the Fulbright Board – where she helps select candidates in the Caribbean and Latin America that will participate in the Fulbright Program. Brazile is the proud recipient of honorary doctorate degrees from Louisiana State University, North Carolina A&T State University, Grambling State University, Morehouse School of Medicine, Northeastern Illinois University, Thomas Jefferson School of Nursing, and Xavier University of Louisiana.

    Brazile is founder and managing director of Brazile & Associates LLC, a general consulting, grassroots advocacy, and training firm based in Washington, DC.

    Go black women!

    Sources: Supervisors told to falsify reserve deputy’s training records; department announces internal review. I think a repost. Ah well.

  369. rq says

    Some hurt fee-fees on the line: ‘Chiraq,’ Proposed Spike Lee Film Title, Draws Backlash From Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel

    The proposed project, which is reportedly set to highlight black-on-black gun violence in the city’s Englewood neighborhood, has caught the attention of the city’s alderman William Burns and Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Needless to say, they’re not all that pleased with the film’s title, which is a popular nickname coined by local rappers who compare the city’s crime rates to an Iraqi warzone.

    On Wednesday, Emanuel met with Lee at City Hall to discuss the filmmaker’s plans to film in the Windy City. “We had an honest, frank conversation,” Emanuel said during a press conference. “He said that while the movie is about the neighborhood of Englewood, I was clear that I was not happy about the title.” He added, “I told him also that there are very good people that live in Englewood who are raising their family and there’s a lot of positive things that are happening in Englewood mainly driven by the people that make up Englewood.”

    Burns echoed the Mayor’s sentiments, saying the film’s title is a “slap in the face” to residents who pay their taxes and work to clean up the city’s negative image. “South Siders and West Siders already walk around with a massive chip on their shoulders,” he said during a meeting with the Illinois Film Office. “There’s a sense the media only comes to cover dead bodies and not the positive things that happen every day. And why is this guy from New York coming to do a movie about Chicago?”

    While there’s no official word on Lee’s thoughts to reconsider the title, Burns seems to think the city’s residents should have a say in the film’s title, given Lee’s recent $3 million film industry tax credit request.

    CMPD officer enters not guilty plea in Jonathan Ferrell case

    A CMPD officer charged with voluntary manslaughter entered a not guilty plea on Friday, according to the officer’s lawyers.

    The plea is in relation to the death of 24-year-old Jonathan Ferrell in September 2013. Kerrick is claiming self defense in the shooting that killed Ferrell.

    The former FAMU football player had gotten into a wreck and ran to a home for help. The homeowner may have mistaken Ferrell for a burglar and called police. Officers confronted him. Kerrick fired 12 shots, striking Ferrell 10 times.

    Kerrick’s attorneys also filed 160 pages of paperwork Friday. In it was one significant request: a request for a location change, citing excessive and adverse publicity, making for an unfair trial.

    There’s also a request for jurors to visit the crime scene at the same time of day the shooting happened so they can get a feel of the conditions.

    Finally, lawyers hope the judge kicks out the charges because the first time a grand jury heard the case, they failed to indict. Kerrick’s attorneys accuse prosecutors of selective prosecution.

    Don’t be a black person looking for help. No indictment. I’m just hoping the trial will get somewhere.

    A response to the Missouri National Guard’s opinion on protestors. Black protesters are not ‘enemy forces’

    The latest revelation about emails within the Missouri National Guard that refer to those protesting the killing of a black teenager by a white police officer as “enemy forces” and “adversaries” is an appalling example of the kind of racial problems that exist in the relations between many police departments and communities, and which must be addressed immediately.

    Let’s be clear: The overwhelming majority of protesters and police are good, honest, law-abiding and patriotic Americans. But too many of the guys with guns, who often happen to be white and policemen, kill too many of the guys without guns, who often happen to be black and usually, but not always, young.

    These cases are proliferating almost daily, with new examples of bad deeds and racial tensions that could well bring a long hot summer.

    Let me repeat what I wrote last week: President Obama should convene a national summit meeting that include black community representatives and national civil rights leaders, police officers and police unions, religious leaders of all denominations, commanders of the National Guard and bipartisan members of Congress. They should all meet for two to three days and leave their meetings with a program to improve training for police, provide full camera capabilities for all police departments and begin an urgently needed reconciliation to restore mutual confidence and respect between the police and the community.

    Black protesters are not enemies of the state. Period. End of discussion. That kind of language should never be used and that kind of thinking should never be thought in the America that is a broad community based on mutual respect.

    And on the subject of mutual respect and civility, Republicans in the Senate should end their unconscionable obstruction and confirm Loretta Lynch to be the next attorney general of the United States.

    Love the rant.

    STL County PD killed #ThaddeusMcCarroll in Jennings, MO. Press release attached. Tried to talk him down, didn’t work, blah blah, mental illness, *BAMBAMBAM*.

    #ThaddeusMcCarroll had a knife. The horde of officers were all armed with guns. Knives and guns are not equivalent. Oh, and he ‘had access to’ a sword.

    More next comment.

  370. rq says

    And here is the released bodycam footage of last night’s police killing of #ThaddeusMcCarroll. THe youtube link there: Tact Officer Involved Shooting . Listen real careful to the audio. Really carefully.

    Man fatally shot by police in Jennings

    A Jennings man was shot and killed by police Friday night in what authorities describe as a response to a stand-off with a suspect armed with a knife.

    The dead man was identified as Thaddeus McCarroll, 23.

    St. Louis County Police said the incident unfolded after officers responded to a report of a man wielding a knife and a Samurai sword blockaded in a home in the 9200 block of Riverwood Drive.

    McCarroll’s mother told police her son was wandering the residence muttering about a “journey” and “mission.” The mother told police that McCarroll was also referring to a “black revolution.”

    Police said that McCarroll ended approximately an hour of negotiations with a county Tactical Operations Unit by emerging from the home about 11:30 p.m. with a knife in one hand and a Bible in the other.

    McCarroll, according to police, ignored verbal commands that he drop the weapon. He also dismissed attempts to re-establish a dialogue.

    Police said McCarroll was struck by a “less lethal” round as he continued to approach officers.

    The rubber bullet to the leg failed to deter the suspect. Officers then responded the “charging” McCarroll with a lethal round of shots.

    He died at the scene.

    That’s the official story.

    Jennings, the St. Louis suburb where the latest police killing happened, is where Darren Wilson originally worked #Ferguson #STL

    In July 2014, officers interacted with #ThaddeusMcCarroll and subdued him non-lethally as he experienced mental distress. Apparently this was impossible in April 2015.

    Video Shows St. Louis County Police Kill Man Allegedly Armed With Knife and Bible

    St. Louis County police shot and killed a man early Saturday morning after he allegedly charged at officers with a knife and a copy of the Bible.

    Police said a Tactical Operations Unit responded to a call from the mother of a man who had locked himself inside their house in the town of Jennings, Missouri, a suburb north of St. Louis, near Ferguson. After attempting to coerce the man outside, police shot him first with an “impact weapon” and then with live bullets after he emerged at around 12:55am carrying a knife, according to a statement from St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar.

    The man was identified as 23-year-old Thaddeus McCarroll.

    Police released a video of the event, which shows officers attempting to speak to McCarroll and convince him to come outside.

    “Do me a favor and just drop the knife and walk over here to tell me what’s going on,” says one officer. “We are not here to harm you.”

    Police then shoot what appear to be live bullets, although the video ends before it is clear exactly what happened. “Lets get CPR going!” an officer says soon after the round is shot. McCarroll cannot be seen or heard in the video.

    Again, listen to the entire audio, very carefully.

  371. rq says

    Some other things:
    Rayford Logan noted btwn 1878-1920 a Black person lynched every 41 hours. Today police kill us every 28 hours. #ThaddeusMcCarroll

    5PM Tonight
    MARCH FOR JUSTICE
    no signs, wear all black
    Nostrand & Church Aves.
    #Hoods4Justice     New York.

    Entered my home, no warrant, took my gun, TOLD ME IM NOT BEING DETAINED, then handcuffed me. Manassas City Police General police misbehaviour. More can be found at that person’s twitter account.

    RT @deray: Building A Movement Against Police Brutality. NYC. Today 4/18. Details at the poster at the link.

    Third funeral of an unarmed black boy I’ve been to. I don’t know how much longer I can do this. #NicholasThomas

    After Walter Scott Shooting, Scrutiny Turns to 2nd Officer

    He did not fire a shot. He is black, not white.

    But Clarence W. Habersham Jr., the first officer to arrive on the scene after the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man named Walter L. Scott, is drawing intense scrutiny both for the questions surrounding his response to the shooting and for what his role has illuminated about the pressures and expectations black officers face in largely white police departments.

    Critics of Officer Habersham, 37, including black leaders and lawyers, have called for him to be prosecuted for what they say was his failure to provide adequate aid to Mr. Scott, 50, and for appearing to go along with what many viewers of a video of the shooting believe was an attempt by Michael T. Slager, the white officer who fatally shot Mr. Scott in the back, to plant a Taser by his body.

    Officer Habersham later said in a brief police report that he tried to aid the victim by putting pressure on his wounds, but critics say the video does not show him performing CPR or acting with urgency in response to the shooting.

    Others, saying a complete investigation is needed, have called any conclusions wildly premature.

    The criticism of Officer Habersham by the Rev. Al Sharpton; the National Bar Association, a mostly African-American legal group; and others has complicated the typical racial dynamics in high-profile police killings. And it has touched off a debate among black officials, community leaders and residents about whether to support or denounce Officer Habersham, one of a handful of black officers in a largely white police force in a city that is 47 percent black, or to reserve judgment about him.

    “It’s hard,” said Charles P. Wilson, chairman of the National Association of Black Law Enforcement Officers and a lieutenant in a campus police force at Rhode Island College in Providence. He is among those who say it is too early to make any judgments about Officer Habersham’s conduct.

    “I’m the only black officer on my department, and it’s been that way for 20-something years,” Lieutenant Wilson said. “You often find yourself in a quandary, if you will, when situations like this come up. Do you speak out or do you remain silent? A lot of officers choose to be silent, unfortunately.”

    For all the ways Officer Habersham’s role in the case evokes the complicated tensions among black officers, their white counterparts and black communities, Officer Habersham has spent much of his life in a racially mixed and often majority-white world. Friends, acquaintances and a former coach, many of them white, described him as a quiet, compassionate and humble man who is protective of those close to him. As a result, some people here say, there is no simple way to assess the role race played in his response, or whether he was influenced more by loyalty to the department or to a fellow officer.

    Officer Habersham grew up in Mount Pleasant, a well-to-do Charleston suburb of 75,000 people, two rivers and an island away from North Charleston, that is 91 percent white. Darius Rucker, the black country-music singer, lives in Mount Pleasant, as does Scarlett A. Wilson, the white prosecutor overseeing any case against Mr. Slager and the responding officers.

  372. rq says

    #ThaddeusMcCarroll Comment on de-escalating abilities of de-escalating officer found within. Here’s another: Screaming “who are you going to stab tonight?” repeatedly is deescalation? It takes 2 min. before officer even tries to personally connect.

    Man, 18, fatally shot by Chicago Police in South Shore. Man, 18. Whatever happened to teenager?

    Controversial secret phone tracker figured in dropped St. Louis case

    Just one day before a city police officer was to face questions about a secret device used to locate suspects in a violent robbery spree, prosecutors dropped more than a dozen charges against the three defendants.

    The move this month freed the officer from having to testify about a highly controversial surveillance tool — one that is subject to a confidentiality agreement between the St. Louis police and the FBI.

    Prosecutors insist the charges’ dismissal was unrelated to the impending inquiry. But a public defender who intended to ask some of the questions believes otherwise.
    Advertisement: Story Continues Below

    Either way, the case has cast attention on use of “cell site simulators,” which can mimic a cell system tower, or screen data flowing through it, allowing a cellphone to be tracked to even a particular room.

    Local police using them have accepted FBI demands for secrecy, even though details about the devices are widely available on the Internet.

    Officials across the U.S. have been willing to drop cases rather than subject the technology to scrutiny by judges and defense lawyers. Civil libertarians complain that the hardware amounts to a warrantless search of countless properties.

    The FBI calls it a matter of national security.

    The FBI declined to say who is using cell site simulators in the area. St. Louis police wouldn’t answer questions about it. A spokeswoman for Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce’s office also declined to answer detailed questions but denied there was any connection between the charges’ dismissal and the officer’s impending deposition.

    Documents dismissing the three robbery cases say simply that “continuing investigation has disclosed evidence which diminishes the prosecutive merits of this case.”

    But Megan Beesley, the public defender, said she is convinced that prosecutors dropped the cases rather than allow defense lawyers to question a police Intelligence Unit officer about whether a simulator, often called by the brand name StingRay, was used here.

    I suppose one can assume that it was used. Because why else?

    Oprah’s Network Sues Man Accused of Posing as Celeb’s Nephew

    The Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) on Friday filed a lawsuit against a Florida man who allegedly pretended to be the star’s nephew to win jobs and gifts, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

    Justin Jackson allegedly created OWN stationery to send letters that appeared to be from Winfrey in an effort to obtain jobs with Perry Ellis and the Atlantic Hotel, the report says.

    The network was joined in the suit filed in federal court in Florida by other alleged victims including Reggie Love, a former college basketball player and personal aide to President Barack Obama, and Scott Garner, OWN’s executive vice president of scheduling and acquisitions, the report says.

    Among the allegations against Jackson is that he urged the hotel company Extended Stay America to hire him and a Florida woman named Angel Agarrat, also a defendant in the lawsuit, because Winfrey would like to visit them at the hotel in Miami.

    That’s not all.

    Jackson is accused of trying to obtain free stuff from Converse, the Carter’s clothing company, David Yurman, Pandora, Tacori and Tory Burch, and access to singer Trey Songz by claiming association with Winfrey and OWN. The suit also accuses Jackson of impersonating Johnny Depp’s manager to obtain tickets to Oprah’s show in Miami.

    In 2007, the suit claims, Jackson posed as Madonna’s manager to get $2.4 million in Chopard jewelry for a fake photo shoot. He was convicted of grand theft for selling the jewelry, the report says. And in 2010, he allegedly impersonated Love to obtain Juicy Couture clothing and handbags, and Cheesecake Factory gift certificates and was arrested on charges of fraud and impersonating a public officer, the report says. The suit says he jumped bail and has an arrest warrant in Georgia.

    The Hollywood Reporter says it sought comment from Agarrat. Jackson could not be reached.

    Velvet Wade cleans up the crime scene tape the morning after her neighbor was fatally shot by police in Jennings.

  373. rq says

    Here’s a good one: Exonerated Death Row Inmate Meets the Former Prosecutor Who Put Him There

    The person responsible for putting Ford behind bars is Marty Stroud, who prosecuted the original case back in 1984.

    Stroud has now apologized to Ford, writing in a letter to the editor of the Shreveport Times in Shreveport, Louisiana, “I was not as interested in justice as I was in winning. … I apologize to Glenn Ford for all the misery I have caused him and his family.”

    “That case, I’ll never be able to put it to rest,” Stroud told “Nightline.” […]

    At the time, Stroud said he was “very pleased” with the verdict and went out and celebrated. But now, he is saying it wasn’t a fair fight.

    “The deck was stacked on one end,” he said.

    Ford’s court-appointed defense team had almost no experience and no resources.

    “The lawyers had never even stepped foot in the courtroom before,” Clements said. “They never tried a case and here they are defending a capital case.”

    Stroud reluctantly admitted he further stacked the deck against Ford by ensuring that the jury was all white.

    “I knew I was excluding individuals we felt would not seriously consider the death penalty,” he said. “Looking back on it, I was not as sensitive to the issue of race as I am now.” […]

    Ford’s current attorney, William Most, said Ford’s case challenges people’s notion about how this nation works.

    “The guy who didn’t commit the murder is the one who is put in jail and sentenced the death,” Most said. “And the ones who were part of it were let free to commit other crimes.”

    Ford would still be on death row today if not for a confidential informant who told police in 2013 that Jake Robinson confessed to him regarding the killing of Isadore Rozeman.

    In Louisiana, exonerated former inmates like Ford are eligible for as much as $330,000 in compensation payments. But when Ford petitioned for the money a judge denied his request, saying that while Ford didn’t kill Rozeman, he was not completely innocent because he may have known about the shooting beforehand because of his communication with the brothers.

    It’s a claim Ford fiercely denies.

    So, his proponents argue, after being locked up for 30 years, the state turned its back on Ford and left him virtually penniless.

    “If we truly have a system of justice in this country, Glenn would be compensated for what was done to him,” Most said. “So the extent of whether we have a system of justice, we’ll see — but, you know, I see no justice in Glenn’s story.”

    Stroud admitted that he should have done more to help Ford, saying in his letter to the Shreveport Times that Ford “deserved every penny owed to him,” and that “to deny Mr. Ford any compensation for the horrors he suffered … is appalling.”

    “It’s an extremely big deal for Marty Stroud, the lead prosecutor to do this,” Clements said. “He could have just sent an apology to Glenn, but he put it out in his community.” […]

    Ford is now much frailer and easily fatigued, having lost half his body weight. He said he was shocked when Stroud published that letter apologizing to him and his family.

    When Stroud wanted to apologize to Ford in person, Ford had mixed feelings about seeing the man who put him away for 30 years. But he granted the meeting, and “Nightline” was there with cameras rolling.

    “I thought about this for a long, long time,” Stroud told him. “I want you to know that I am very sorry. It’s a stain on me that will be with me until I go to my grave, and I wasn’t a very good person at all. I apologize for that.”

    Ford said anger is not his driving force and he holds nothing against the former prosecutor. But after having 30 years taken away from him, Ford reluctantly told Stroud, “I’m sorry. I can’t forgive you.”

    I hope Stroud can accept that and use his own remorse to work and advocate for change within the system.

    Atlanta folk! Mising person! Sooo Twitter, my LB is missing. He was last seen a week ago in the downtown ATL area. PLEASE RT. We gotta find him. More specific info at the link.

    What does gun violence really cost?

    How much does gun violence cost our country? It’s a question we’ve been looking into at Mother Jones ever since the 2012 mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, left 58 injured and 12 dead. How much care would the survivors and the victims’ families need? What would be the effects on the broader community, and how far out would those costs ripple? As we’ve continued to investigate gun violence, one of our more startling discoveries is that nobody really knows.
    gun violence costs charts

    Jennifer Longdon was one of at least 750,000 Americans injured by gunshots over the last decade, and she was lucky not to be one of the more than 320,000 killed. Each year more than 11,000 people are murdered with a firearm, and more than 20,000 others commit suicide using one. Hundreds of children die annually in gun homicides, and each week seems to bring news of another toddler accidentally shooting himself or a sibling with an unsecured gun. And perhaps most disturbingly, even as violent crime overall has declined steadily in recent years, rates of gun injury and death are climbing (up 11 and 4 percent since 2011) and mass shootings have been on the rise.

    Yet, there is no definitive assessment of the costs for victims, their families, their employers, and the rest of us—including the major sums associated with criminal justice, long-term health care, and security and prevention. Our media is saturated with gun carnage practically 24/7. So why is the question of what we all pay for it barely part of the conversation? […]

    Nobody, save perhaps for the hardcore gun lobby, doubts that gun violence is a serious problem. In an editorial in the April 7 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, a team of doctors wrote: “It does not matter whether we believe that guns kill people or that people kill people with guns—the result is the same: a public health crisis.”

    And solving a crisis, as any expert will tell you, begins with data. That’s why the US government over the years has assessed the broad economic toll of a variety of major problems. Take motor vehicle crashes: Using statistical models to estimate a range of costs both tangible and more abstract—from property damage and traffic congestion to physical pain and lost quality of life—the Department of Transportation (DOT) published a 300-page study estimating the “total value of societal harm” from this problem in 2010 at $871 billion. Similar research has been produced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the impact of air pollution, by the Department of Health and Human Services on the costs of domestic violence, and so on. But the government has mostly been mute on the economic toll of gun violence. HHS has assessed firearm-related hospitalizations, but its data is incomplete because some states don’t require hospitals to track gunshot injuries among the larger pool of patients treated for open wounds. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has also periodically made estimates using hospital data, but based on narrow sample sizes and covering only the medical and lost-work costs of gun victims.

    Why the lack of solid data? A prime reason is that the National Rifle Association and other influential gun rights advocates have long pressured political leaders to shut down research related to firearms. The Annals of Internal Medicine editorial detailed this “suppression of science”:

    Two years ago, we called on physicians to focus on the public health threat of guns. The profession’s relative silence was disturbing but in part explicable by our inability to study the problem. Political forces had effectively banned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other scientific agencies from funding research on gun-related injury and death. The ban worked: A recent systematic review of studies evaluating access to guns and its association with suicide and homicide identified no relevant studies published since 2005.

    An executive order in 2013 from President Obama sought to free up the CDC via a new budget, but the purse strings remain in the grip of Congress, many of whose members have seen their campaigns backed by six- and even seven-figure sums from the NRA. “Compounding the lack of research funding,” the doctors added, “is the fear among some researchers that studying guns will make them political targets and threaten their future funding even for unrelated topics.”

    David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, describes the chill this way: “There are so many big issues in the world, and the question is: Do you want to do gun research? Because you’re going to get attacked. No one is attacking us when we do heart disease.”

    To begin to get a grasp on the economic toll, Mother Jones turned to Ted Miller at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, an independent nonprofit that studies public health, education, and safety issues. Miller has been one of the few researchers to delve deeply into guns, going back to the late 1980s when he began analyzing societal costs from violence, injury, and substance abuse, as well as the savings from prevention. Most of his 30-plus years of research has been funded by government grants and contracts; his work on guns in recent years has either been tucked into broader projects or done on the side. “I never take positions on legislation,” he notes. “Instead, I provide numbers to inform decision making.” […]

    Indirect costs amount to at least $221 billion, about $169 billion of which comes from what researchers consider to be the impact on victims’ quality of life. Victims’ lost wages, which account for $49 billion annually, are the other major factor. Miller’s calculation for indirect costs, based on jury awards, values the average “statistical life” harmed by gun violence at about $6.2 million. That’s toward the lower end of the range for this analytical method, which is used widely by industry and government. (The EPA, for example, currently values a statistical life at $7.9 million, and the DOT uses $9.2 million.)

    Our investigation also begins to illuminate the economic toll for individual states. Louisiana has the highest gun homicide rate in the nation, with costs per capita of more than $1,300. Wyoming has a small population but the highest overall rate of gun deaths—including the nation’s highest suicide rate—with costs working out to about $1,400 per resident. Among the four most populous states, the costs per capita in the gun rights strongholds of Florida and Texas outpace those in more strictly regulated California and New York. Hawaii and Massachusetts, with their relatively low gun ownership rates and tight gun laws, have the lowest gun death rates, and costs per capita roughly a fifth as much as those of the states that pay the most.

    At $229 billion, the toll from gun violence would have been $47 billion more than Apple’s 2014 worldwide revenue and $88 billion more than what the US government budgeted for education that year. Divvied up among every man, woman, and child in the United States, it would work out to more than $700 per person.

    But even the $229 billion figure ultimately doesn’t capture what gun violence costs us. For starters, there are gaps in what we know about long-term medical and disability expenses specifically from gunshots. Miller’s research accounts for about seven years of long-term care for victims, and for lifelong care for those with spinal-cord or traumatic brain injuries. But Kelly Bernado, a former police officer who now works as an ER nurse near Seattle, points out that survivors’ life spans and medical complications can exceed expectations. One of her patients was shot as a teenager: “He was paralyzed from the neck down and could not feed himself, toilet himself, dress himself, or turn over in bed. He will live the rest of his life in a nursing home, all paid for by the taxpayers, as he is a Medicaid patient.” She estimates that over the last two decades the price tag for this patient’s skilled nursing care alone has been upwards of $1.7 million. Even in less severe cases the consequences from gunshots can be profound, says Bernado, who joined the advocacy group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense not long after police killed a man who had been firing shots outside her son’s high school. “These people have long-term problems—bowel issues, arthritis problems, chronic pain. They’re on pain medication, and there are addiction issues. They keep returning to the hospital.” In August 2014, a medical examiner concluded that former presidential aide James Brady’s death in a nursing home at age 73 was due to complications from the bullet he took to his head during the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life almost 34 years earlier. […]

    Then there are the costs that the available research doesn’t capture at all. What about the trauma to entire communities, whether from mass shootings or chronic street violence? What about the steep societal cost of fear, which stunts economic development and provokes major spending on security and prevention? “This is what big-city mayors worry about,” says Duke University economist Philip Cook, who coauthored a study 16 years ago that asked people how much they’d be willing to pay to reduce gun violence where they live. “How can Camden get out of the profound slump it’s in? The first answer has to be, ‘We’ve got to do something about the gun violence.'”

    The fallout from mass shootings, which have been on the rise in recent years, includes outsize financial impact. Legal proceedings for the Aurora movie theater killer, for example, reached $5.5 million before the trial even got underway this spring, including expenses related to the pool of 9,000 prospective jurors called for the case. Most Americans probably don’t even recall a less lethal rampage that took place just a few months after the Aurora tragedy, at the Clackamas Town Center near Portland, Oregon. When a gunman killed two people, wounded another, and took his own life at the shopping complex in December 2012, more than 150 officers from at least 13 local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies responded—an investigation that lasted more than three months and culminated in a report nearly 1,000 pages long. To calm the public, make repairs, and beef up security, the 1.5-million-square-foot mall shut down for three days during the height of the holiday shopping season, depriving 188 retail businesses of revenue. […]

    Longdon is well aware that 2,000 unwanted guns melted down by the Phoenix PD is a tiny fraction of the firepower out there. But the cost of gun violence works out to more than $800 a year each for Arizona’s 6.7 million residents, and if she can start to chip away at that by keeping guns out of the wrong hands, it’s worth it to her. “Not one of those guns will ever be used in a suicide, an accidental discharge, or a crime,” she says, “and that is significant.”

    And maybe it will help save someone from having to pay what she has. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t give to go back to where life was before. On long nights, when I’m alone and my pain level is high, and maybe something has triggered the memories, I have to be really careful not to let that melancholy and grief overwhelm me,” she says. “It’s an ongoing battle every day—choosing to stay alive, and to continue to fight.”

    May the fight eventually turn into a vicctory for everyone.

    So moved by @AoctaviusW’s My Lens Our #Ferguson

    Thank you for doing your part by helping to preserve our history. I understand it’s a collection of photography – I’d love to get my hands on one.

    On October 20th, 2014, a dash cam filmed Laquan, who was walking away, being shot SIXTEEN TIMES by one officer. Attached: the autopsy sketch of his injuries. So many bullet holes.

  374. rq says

    Affleck demanded PBS program hide his slave-owning ancestor

    Ben Affleck insisted on censoring the fact that one of his ancestors owned slaves from PBS show “Finding Your Roots,” the Sony email hack has revealed.

    In a hacked Sony email from July 22, 2014, now available on WikiLeaks, the show’s host, Henry Louis Gates Jr., writes to Sony USA chief Michael Lynton asking for advice: “One of our guests has asked us to edit out something about one of his ancestors–the fact that he owned slaves. Now, four or five of our guests this season descend from slave owners, including Ken Burns. We’ve never had anyone ever try to censor or edit what we found. He’s a megastar. What do we do?”

    Lynton’s advice was to take Affleck’s family secret out of the show, as long as nobody would find out. The Sony chairman and CEO writes, “On the doc the big question is who knows that the material is in the doc and is being taken out. I would take it out if no one knows, but if it gets out that you are editing the material based on this kind of sensitivity then it gets tricky.”

    Gates, who is friends with Lynton and wrote “I need your advice,” goes on to admit that hiding facts would be a violation of PBS rules. “As for the doc: all my producers would know; his PR agency the same as mine, and everyone there has been involved trying to resolve this; my agent at CAA knows. And PBS would know. To do this would be a violation of PBS rules, actually, even for Batman.”

    When Lynton responds that “it is tricky because it may get out that you made the change and it comes down to editorial integrity,” Gates responds, “It would embarrass him and compromise our integrity.”

    How would history compromise integrity? And why should he be embarrassed? He should accept his own history, and own it, and be outraged by it. Not embarrassed.

    Charges against KC police officer in nonfatal shooting are dismissed

    Charges were dismissed Friday against a Kansas City police officer who had been indicted for assault in a nonfatal shooting last June.

    A Jackson County grand jury in February indicted Jacob Ramsey for shooting Anthony E. Contreras, who was a suspect in a series of thefts. Ramsey shot Contreras in the face as Contreras was exiting a house in the 6800 block of East 15th Terrace. Ramsey said he thought Contreras was reaching for a gun.

    Police on Friday evening released a finding from Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker, addressed to Police Chief Darryl Forté, saying her office had decided not to pursue the charges in the indictment because it would not be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer’s action was not justified under Missouri law.

    Baker’s office also released a statement.

    “In February, the grand jury determined probable cause existed to indict the … officer on assault and armed criminal action charges,” it said. “But a subsequent investigation and legal analysis has demonstrated that the evidence no longer supports the further pursuit of those criminal charges.

    “Like all prosecutors, we have a duty to be convinced that evidence supports a defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Our subsequent investigation convinced us that burden could not be met.”

    In a statement from the Police Department, Forté said, “We respect the judicial process, and we are pleased that process ended in the right outcome in this situation.”

    I have my doubts.

    ‘More than just child’s play’: University of Alabama SGA blocks new president from picking own staff. The significance? Here:

    Despite an historic election last month, the University of Alabama Student Government Association is currently stalled as Senate members refuse to allow its new president to choose his own chief of staff.

    SGA President Elliot Spillers garnered a record-breaking voter turnout in March to become the school’s second black president, but the SGA is now at a standstill after the Senate voted down two of his appointments and tried to force through their own pick.

    Spillers is also the first non-Machine candidate to hold the office since 1986 (when now-Secretary of State John Merrill won), and many at UA say the senators opposing Spillers’ appointments are taking Machine orders. […]

    Political parties are illegal under SGA rules, but the Machine, an underground but well-known group of traditionally white fraternities and sororities, is thought to have controlled campus institutions for decades.

    And though campus-level politics may not interest some outside of Tuscaloosa, former UA trustee Cleo Thomas said student politics shouldn’t be ignored.

    “It is the training ground for what we suffer now,” Thomas, UA’s first black SGA president, said in March after Spillers’ election. “What we learn here, at the University of Alabama, affects how we govern Alabama. It is predictive, it is a forecast. It is more than just child’s play.” […]

    Thomas and Spillers were both successful in large part due to their relationships within the Greek system while still maintaining their independence.

    “I don’t care if you’re [Machine] backed or not, just have freedom of thought. Think for yourselves,” Spillers said. “What it comes down to, a lot of the senators are very young. And they’re doing what they think is tradition, but it’s just the Machine in their ear.”

    Thomas was known for garnering support among sororities, who supported the Machine at the time but were given little to no access to political office in return.

    “You do not simply want to woo people by insinuating yourself into the Machine,” Thomas said. “If that’s what you’re seeking to do, what’s the point of it? You don’t want to just be someone that holds the office, but you want to advance the community and institution morally and make it more upright. You want to gain office through a majority of open-minded people, and that’s what Elliot was able to do.”

    Spillers said he knew the Machine would be an “obstacle” to deal with after the election, though he works closely with people within that system every day.

    “I’m willing to work with them, but not for them,” he said. “I’ve always said this, but not everyone in the Machine is as rumors say. But there is that small minority in there who want to keep this campus the way it’s been for the past 40 years.”

    And although it’s already been a contentious 10 days in office for Spillers, he said he’s not worried about the year to come for his administration.

    “I think this is the one thing they want to be adamant about, to use an iron fist on,” He said. “But I can use an iron fist as well. They have to go through me if they want to get a bill passed. We have to have a relationship at some point, and I’m a firm believer that you can change hearts before you can change minds.”

    All of that sounds pretty nuts. What, he might hire some more black people? More progressive people? I’m so scared for you, university of Alabama folk. :P

    Attorneys for Bob Bates in Tulsa now claim they believe his records from 2012-2013 were inadvertently destroyed. #EricHarris That story just gets better and better, don’t it?

    they want us #oppressed but we #staywoke RT @ArlisDoNotChill The parts of Africa they don’t show you. Pretty pictures of Africa.

    Around Easter, we saw some action under the hashtag #BlackChurch. Taking on Judaism next: To the #BlackShul, we need you. Statement attached; I hope it will come out in internet form soon so that I may bring it to you, but it’s the same sort of idea as before. Bringing the issues of Black America to the religious.

  376. rq says

    By any means necessary. In Florida, police are waging a war on black bicycle riders, investigators say

    For the past decade, Tampa police have enforced a “stop and frisk” style policy that aggressively and disproportionately targets the city’s poor, black residents who ride bicycles, according to a Tampa Bay Times investigation published Friday.

    Cyclists can be stopped and ticketed for having a missing tail light, baggy clothing, pedaling through a high-crime neighborhood or not having their hands on the handlebars, which is no longer illegal, according to the Times.

    “It’s always the light, or to run your VIN number,” said 31-year-old Anthony Gilbert told the Times. “‘Let’s have your ID. Just stand in front of my cruiser.’ Now you’re being humiliated. Your friend’s riding by. Your reverend might be riding by. Now, you’ve got to go to church. The pastor’s going to be like, ‘What happened, son?’ ”

    Of the 10,000 bicycle tickets issued by Tampa police in the past dozen years, the newspaper found that black cyclists received 79 percent of those citations, despite making up less than a quarter of the city’s population.

    Check those statistics there. 79% vs. less than 25%. And baggy clothes? Serious? More:

    In the last three years alone, the Times reported, police have issued 2,504 bike tickets, which is more than Jacksonville, Miami, St. Petersburg and Orlando combined.

    Police have stopped some riders, the paper reported, more than a dozen times and, at least one individual has been ticketed three times in a single day.

    “If it’s not racial profiling, what is it?” Joyce Hamilton Henry, director of advocacy for ACLU of Florida, told the Times.

    Critics might call it “biking while black,” but police, the paper reported, have another name for it: proactive policing.

    “Instead of waiting to respond to 911 calls, officers now look for ways to initiate contact with potential lawbreakers and head off crime before it happens,” the Times wrote.

    “This is not a coincidence,” said Police Chief Jane Castor told the Times. “Many individuals receiving bike citations are involved in criminal activity.”

    And yet, the paper found, the vast majority of bike stops that resulted in a ticket found no illegal activity and “only 20 percent of adults ticketed last year were arrested.” […]

    But some local officials, like Circuit Judge Rex Barbas, are openly questioning the policy, according to the Times. Barbas told the Times he spent three years hearing juvenile cases and could remember a single white kid being issued a bike citation.

    “We’d like to think we can all go about our lives without intrusion, without anybody looking in our pockets,” Judge Sheehan told the Times. “If we’re all going to take a hard approach on bike riding without lights, then let’s do it across the city and across the county.”

    Here’s the Tampa Bay news article on the same topic: How riding your bike can land you in trouble with the cops — if you’re black

    A Tampa Bay Times investigation has found that Tampa police are targeting poor, black neighborhoods with obscure subsections of a Florida statute that outlaws things most people have tried on a bike, like riding with no light or carrying a friend on the handlebars.

    Officers use these minor violations as an excuse to stop, question and search almost anyone on wheels. The department doesn’t just condone these stops, it encourages them, pushing officers who patrol high-crime neighborhoods to do as many as possible.

    There was the 56-year-old man who rode his bike through a stop sign while pulling a lawnmower. Police handcuffed him while verifying he had, indeed, borrowed the mower from a friend.

    There was the 54-year-old man whose bike was confiscated because he couldn’t produce a receipt to prove it was his.

    One woman was walking her bike home after cooking for an elderly neighbor. She said she was balancing a plate of fish and grits in one hand when an officer flagged her down and issued her a $51 ticket for not having a light. With late fees, it has since ballooned to $90. She doesn’t have the money to pay.

    The Times analyzed more than 10,000 bicycle tickets Tampa police issued in the past dozen years. The newspaper found that even though blacks make up about a quarter of the city’s population, they received 79 percent of the bike tickets.

    Some riders have been stopped more than a dozen times through the years, and issued as many as 17 tickets. Some have been ticketed three times in one day.

    It’s possible blacks in some areas use bicycles more than whites. But that’s not what’s driving the disparity.

    Police are targeting certain high-crime neighborhoods and nitpicking cyclists as a way to curb crime. They hope they will catch someone with a stolen bike or with drugs or that they will scare thieves away.

    “This is not a coincidence,” said Police Chief Jane Castor. “Many individuals receiving bike citations are involved in criminal activity.”

    She said her department has done such a good job curbing auto theft that bikes have “become the most common mode of transportation for criminals.”

    Many of the tickets did go to convicted criminals, including some people interviewed for this story. And there are cases where police stopped someone under suspicious circumstances and found a gun or caught a burglar.

    But most bike stops that led to a ticket turned up no illegal activity; only 20 percent of adults ticketed last year were arrested.

    When police did arrest someone, it was almost always for a small amount of drugs or a misdemeanor like trespassing.

    One man went to jail for refusing to sign a ticket.

    Protest. Jennings. #ThaddeusMcCarroll
    The Jennings officers have come out to say that we need to leave the street. #ThaddeusMcCarroll

    #ThaddeusMcCarroll Protest, Jennings

    Sather gate is shutdown to affirm the value of Black lives on this campus and worldwide.#BlackAtCalDay #Ferguson2Cal

  377. rq says

    The Guy Who Filmed Eric Garner’s Death Is Still Fighting To Get Out of Jail

    Update: Ramsey Orta was released from Rikers Island on Friday night and is now with his family, according to his lawyers. Earlier on Friday, the Staten Island district attorney’s office canceled Orta’s “bond source” hearing after reviewing paperwork submitted by the bail bondsman regarding the crowd-funded bail money. “We were satisfied that it met the requirements of the statute,” said Daniel Master, the chief assistant district attorney.

    The rest of the article is the story of arsenic in prison food and the like, we saw it before. Just for the update.

    Mother of Eric Garner: The Recurring Nightmare of My Son’s Death

    Good morning everyone,

    Giving honor to God, who is the head of my life, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Gwen Carr. I am the mother of Eric Garner, as you all know, the victim the police put in the chokehold and ultimately caused his death. We’ve all seen the video. It plays in my head over and over again. I guess I’ll be looking at it for the rest of my life.

    I have to live this every day of my life. It’s a recurring nightmare. In fact, it’s worse than a nightmare, because I never wake up. It has changed my life forever, the death of my son. It has changed my life forever. Normally, I’m a very low-key person that goes about my daily routine, minding my business, but the death of my son has really enhanced my awareness of the cruel and inhumane things that some police officers do to us, towards us as people of color and Latinos. We suffer the greatest impact of this injustice. At the hands of the police, they violate our civil rights, our human rights, and our equal rights. And there’s no accountability for their misconduct.

    My son, Eric, he was being held down on the ground with his head pressed against the pavement. The police was blatantly choking him to death. As he begged for his life, he said, “I can’t breathe.” Eleven times. Eleven times he said, “I can’t breathe.” But the uncaring officer chose to take my son’s life. And, not only that, five other officers jumped on him that day, as he lay dying on the hot pavement. And remember, my son was unarmed, he hadn’t committed any crime. He was breaking up a fight. But in all, I just say he was targeted. The police, they are supposed to protect, but instead they disconnect.

    My son — but you know I’m not only here to speak about the injustice and the wrongdoing against my son. I’m here to speak about the injustice throughout the world. We all suffer some sort of injustice, in some sort of some form, but I think that the people who are supposed to enforce the law, they should also be made to abide by those same laws. And remember, we have a video — full coverage video — showing the police misconduct, two medical examiners’ report that ruled my son’s death a homicide, and yet the grand jury failed to indict. This means they didn’t see probable cause. More injustice. What kind of world are we living in?

    If there’s a crime, there should be accountability, whether you wear blue jeans, a blue business suit, or a blue uniform. I would like to see more legislation that protects the people. Everyone has heard my son’s name Eric Garner, but Eric Garner, he was also a person. He was my first born. He had a wonderful personality. He was a husband, a father, and a friend.

    He was educated, loved his family, adored his mother, loved by all that knew him. He had a special connection with the Christmas season. He would go above and beyond to help someone if he thought they were his friend or just anyone on the street if he saw they needed help. And his death has left an enormous void in my life. And my heart has been ripped out. Literally. With this being said, I will walk, I will rally, and I will speak out until my voice is heard. I know all police aren’t bad, but there are some very vicious officers out there. They give the rest a bad name. Proper training will work for those out there to do their job, but the only thing that is going to help with the officers that have their own agenda is their superiors standing up for what’s right and holding those officers accountable. They know what’s going on in their precinct. You know your officers.

    And I’m here today because of police misconduct that caused the death of my loved one. There are so many others – mothers, wives, sisters, brothers, cousins who have all suffered also. And it’s not fair. We all share this pain.

    Bottom line: We need better policing and lawmakers who will be fair. Make a law that applies to everyone. We voted for them, and what do they give us in return? The goal is to get laws passed that will protect us, respect us against this ill treatment. It has got to stop. The abuse is in all races, but we as a people feel the greatest impact. We need executive order now.

    You know I put a piece together. I said, what does brutality mean to me? And I just said, spell it out. So I just took the word brutality, and I put a meaning that came from within me. And it’s like this:

    B, bestowing hurt and harm on people totally dismissing them as a human being;
    R, ruthless treatment. Racist and cruel insults;
    U, uncivilized and vicious attack on already helpless individuals;
    T, total disregard for one’s human rights, civil rights, and equal rights;
    A, aggressive and aggravated use of force unnecessarily;
    L, life threatening and needless beatings which shows the depraved mentality;
    I, inhuman, vulgar, and severe attacks that demoralize us as a people;
    T, torture just for the thrill of seeing people squirm;
    Y, your prime example of crazed individuals that supposed to protect and instead they disconnect.

    And you know, this is happening all over. In New York, in Ferguson, in South Carolina, Indiana, Louisiana, you name it. Every day we see a new case coming up, and we have to make sure that these people stand accountable for their actions. We can’t keep letting this go on because today it’s me, tomorrow it may be you. And we don’t want another head count.

    So I say to you today ladies and gentlemen, thank you for having me and God bless you.

    Wanted to put all of that up. There’s a 5 minute video at the link, too.

    For the mothers that we are fighting for. Looking for donations to provide transportation for Mothers Against Senseless Killing (M.A.S.K.) to get to the Mother’s March in May.

    Jennings Station rd 63136

    FBI overstated forensic hair matches in nearly all trials before 2000

    The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.

    Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.

    The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions.

    The FBI errors alone do not mean there was not other evidence of a convict’s guilt. Defendants and federal and state prosecutors in 46 states and the District are being notified to determine whether there are grounds for appeals. Four defendants were previously exonerated.

    The admissions mark a watershed in one of the country’s largest forensic scandals, highlighting the failure of the nation’s courts for decades to keep bogus scientific information from juries, legal analysts said. The question now, they said, is how state authorities and the courts will respond to findings that confirm long-suspected problems with subjective, pattern-based forensic techniques — like hair and bite-mark comparisons — that have contributed to wrongful convictions in more than one-quarter of 329 DNA-exoneration cases since 1989.

    There’s more at the link. The entire justice system is so fucking one-sided. Impartial? Not at all.

    Hundreds at Baltimore police station protest over man’s injuries during arrest.

    Hundreds of people raised their hands and turned their backs on officers outside the Baltimore Police Department’s Western District station Saturday evening, part of a protest over injuries a man suffered while being arrested earlier in the week.

    Just as the protest was wrapping up, an officer about a mile away shot a man who police said fled a traffic stop. Police said the suspect was armed with a loaded handgun, and praised the officer’s actions.

    The incidents continued a tense week that saw residents venting frustrations about the Police Department in a hearing called by the U.S. Department of Justice, which is conducting a review of the agency at Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts’ request. A series of police-involved deaths across the country have sparked demonstrations and prompted calls for reform.

    At the Western District, residents were upset about injuries to Freddie Gray, 27, who remains in a coma after being injured during an arrest. Police have released few details about the incident, and protesters said that has deepened their frustrations.

    Four bicycle officers tried to stop Gray about 9 a.m. on April 12 in the 1600 block of W. North Ave. for an alleged violation that police have not disclosed. He ran, police said, and the officers caught him and restrained him on the ground while awaiting backup.

    It’s unclear how Gray was injured. According to a police timeline, he was fine when he was loaded into a van to be taken to the district station, but was injured by the time he got out. He suffered a broken vertebra and an injured voice box, his family said.

    “What happened to Freddie was unnecessary and uncalled for,” the Rev. Jamal Harrison Bryant of the Empowerment Temple boomed to protesters who marched from Gilmor Homes to the police station. “All of those police officers involved need to be held accountable and answer for what they did, and need to be terminated from their positions.”

    Freddie Gray has since died.
    More on this later.

  378. rq says

    Context as Crisis: The Street is a Book, on gentrification and changing cities.

    A crisis is a turning point, a crossroads at which various power players and culture warriors clash and cohere. But like the chronic woes of our 911 frequent flyers, these crossroads moments often stretch over years, decades. Take the American City: Great White Flight and the resulting disenfranchisement left many urban centers in economic ruin, a historical trend that has been almost entirely reversed in the past decade as influxes of wealthy white people systematically displace and scatter neighborhoods of color.

    What does this look like, on the street level? How do every day moments within the everchanging crossroads that is the city tell us about larger histories? An elderly friend of mine once took me on a tour through the rapidly gentrifying Prospect Heights neighborhood. Here’s where they arrested Old Charlie for that string of bank robberies; this café used to be a barbershop, this bakery: a social club. Bill met his wife at that bodega, they’ve both been dead years now. In New York, the changing faces and storefronts reveal another chapter in the long ugly history of race and power. Layers of history and meaning unraveled themselves at each site. We paused at an intersection and my friend shook his head. Most of his friends had died or been displaced by rising rents. A real estate agent grinned and ushered gawking outsiders past a faded memorial mural, directing their attention to a shining highrise.

    I thought about the streets of Havana, where offerings lay like inanimate pilgrims at the feet of ceiba trees – fruits, flowers, pictures, the occasional beheaded chicken. Each offering, a prayer, each prayer a story. The nine eggplants decaying at the gates of Cristobal Colón cemetery are an offering to Oya, the warrior woman who rides into battle with a beard on and rules the graveyards. Candy and coins left at the crossroads placate Elegba, the wily gatekeeper of life’s decisions. All the small details, once eccentricities or simply invisible to me, came to unveil entire worlds of spirit and community, memories and mythologies.

    The street is a book; its pages are smudged with the fingerprints of history, the ever-changing currents of power and progress, oppression and survival. Humanity stirs amidst the paragraphs and pagebreaks of each corner and blinking streetlight.

    Setting as crisis — the street and its many offerings of knowledge and myth, the politics hidden in daily happenstance – is really a question of context. This is what we sci-fi/fantasy people call worldbuilding, but every genre has work to do in constructing layers of universe around a narrative. When we speak about context, we’re looking at something beyond the simple fact of setting. Setting is a place and a time, but when we add the complications of power, politics, privilege – then we are beginning to build a rich, nuanced environment to deploy our characters across. This is context.

    And we the writers, whether we admit it or not, are responsible for the always political act of contextualizing our stories. The art of contextualizing is inherently political because it defines what matters: what we place center stage, what we push to the margins, what we erase. A photographer makes this call in an instant – with a turn of a switch or the choice of an angle, a massacre can become a revolution and vice-a-versa. When crafting a story, it’s the writer’s job to let the world bleed through onto the page in a way that feels natural, unforced. What truths are told in the daily existence of each character? What secrets does the street reveal?

    When I write, New York’s ongoing saga of mass displacement and cultures in conflict figures largely into the worldbuilding. From where I sit, where moving vans come and go daily and racist police violence continues to destroy lives, it’s hard to imagine how that element of New York wouldn’t show up somehow in a book set here. I layered the supernatural elements of my stories – an ancient sisterhood of storycollectors, a half-dead hit man, a librarian ghost who takes up an entire brownstone, a plague of tiny imps on exercise bikes, and on and on – into this context of a city in throes of violent change and let the narrative unravel.

    A poem referencing the boat that went down in the Mediterranean today? yesterday? (timezones) with at least 700 people drowned. Hundreds of cockroaches drowned today.

    Hundreds of cockroaches drowned today.

    It was just as well they died at sea – no-one holds funerals for beetles,

    this way there’ll be less of a mess.

    In the old days, we used to buy the cockroaches,

    Bring them over the oceans in slightly safer ships,

    And we’d have them work in our fields,

    Snipping cotton for us as the sun seared their shells.

    Here’s a secret; the cockroaches have never swum too well.

    Back then, we’d throw the sick ones over the side

    but now money drowns them,

    And we smirk as their brown lungs fill with salt and silt,

    We sing as they sink.

    An article on that drowning: #DontLetThemDrown: This is not a border enforcement issue, it’s a humanitarian crisis

    It’s about the “pull” factor, apparently. In a political climate in which immigration is portrayed as a problem and a crude numbers game, keeping the numbers down is the only solution. Diverse migrant and refugee journeys get reduced to a simple equation of push and pull.

    Pull: explaining the government’s decision to no longer support search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean for thousands of refugees and migrants who have chanced a crossing from North Africa in unseaworthy and overcrowded vessels, Lady Anelay said that the rescues created “an unintended ‘pull factor’, encouraging more migrants to attempt the dangerous sea crossing and thereby leading to more tragic and unnecessary deaths.”

    She also said that the government will focus on countries of origin and the people traffickers who facilitate the crossings – which is all well and good – but in the meantime? Let them drown. How did we get here? Politicians of all parties parrot the well-worn line about Britain’s “proud tradition” of offering sanctuary to those fleeing persecution, but talk is cheap; it’s what you do that matters. And what Britain is proposing to do, in withdrawing financial support for the search and rescue operation in the Mediterranean, is to condemn thousands to a watery grave.

    Push: if saving people from danger is a pull factor, what about the push factors? What drives men, women and children to place their lives in the hands of traffickers and risk a journey that may cost them their lives? According to the UN, an estimated 150,000 people, primarily from the Horn of Africa and Middle East, have been rescued by Italian ships over the past 12 months. Most come from Eritrea, Syria and Mali, departing from North Africa -mainly Libya, in ever increasing numbers, fleeing oppressive regimes, war and poverty. By July this year, more than 75,000 refugees and migrants had arrived in Italy, Greece, Spain and Malta – compared to 60,000 who made the same journey in the whole of 2013 and 22,500 who arrived in all of 2012. Many of them are children.

    If there is a pull, it’s towards safety and freedom. The government’s decision to stop helping those in immediate danger may not necessarily be a vote winner, but the government certainly feels it won’t do it any harm to take such a hard line. This is small politics that diminishes us all. With every party rushing to ape UKIP, immigration is already a major theme of the election campaign. Meanwhile, the Conservatives are agitating to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights. It’s easy to denigrate human rights when by and large, yours are protected. The migrants and refugees in the Mediterranean risk death on the water in search of the freedoms that we take for granted. […]

    Campaigners are pushing back. On 6 November, campaigners, charities and concerned citizens protested outside the Home Office as part of the #Don’tLetThemDrown campaign.

    There are no exact figures for how many have died making the deadly crossing to Europe. Their names are unknown; there are no graves to mark their loss. When 300 migrants and refugees died off the coast of Lampedusa in October last year, there was collective horror, but nothing changed. Instead, the government wants to roll back the operation that is saving lives. Yes we do have to tackle the situations pushing people into such desperate circumstances, and the traffickers who profit from their misery – but in the meantime, we cannot let them drown to score political points. Valuing their lives so cheaply diminishes our collective humanity; it puts Britain to shame.

    Their lives should matter, too.

    Reform of Baltimore’s Civilian Review Board Passes Md. General Assembly – that’s a small bit of good news.

    The bill originally aimed to place all law enforcement agencies operating in Maryland under the jurisdiction of the review board, but the Maryland Transit Administration and the police agency of the University of Maryland system, both state agencies, were ultimately exempted from the bill, according to Dr. Marvin Cheatham, head of the coalition which sought to have the bill passed.

    “We would have preferred [those agencies] being in [the law], but as a result of that . . . the [Maryland Transit Administration] has agreed to meet with [our coalition] and get from them what are their guidelines for people filing complaints, where do people go, and we will be encouraging them to do a stronger public relations piece, so people will know what to do,” said Cheatham.

    The Civilian Review Board has been in danger of not reaching a quorum at its monthly meetings because four of the five seats on the board are not currently filled, said Cheatham. The two new members should help address this issue.

    Del. Nathaniel Oaks (D-Baltimore City), who sponsored the House version of the bill, said that, in an ideal world, he would have liked to see the University of Maryland police system placed under the jurisdiction of the Civilian Review Board, since they have arrest files in Baltimore City.

    “There were some things that we wanted that I got [in the bill] so I’m pleased with that,” said Oaks. “Not necessarily satisfied, but I’m pleased.”

    That’s a nice way of putting it: not satisfied, but pleased.

    #FreddieGray, 27, died today. He was killed by Baltimore City Police. A short synopsis of his detainment attached.

    Neighbors offer accounts of officer-involved fatal shooting of Thaddeus McCarroll

    It was the way all but one of more than a half-dozen neighbors – one after the other – started out with their account of what they saw last night in the unassuming pocket of houses just off Jennings Station Road and Halls Ferry.

    They didn’t want to identify themselves, but they were more than eager to share their side of the story regarding tragic turn of events that culminated with the death of Thaddeus McCarroll at the hands of police after a standoff.

    “It’s a damn shame I got to be scared to give my name because they done killed somebody I grew up with,” a young woman said before being overwhelmed with emotion.

    She had just walked around the corner from her home holding a toddler to see the memorial.

    “We give our names and we’re jeopardizing our lives,” another neighbor, a middle-aged black man, said after the young woman became too choked up to keep talking.

    “You don’t understand. You’re doing a report and you want everybody’s name for your story. We want to protect ourselves. We have to live out here.”

    They had already started telling their story before the self-imposed witness protection.

    “You see that. That’s his brains right there,” one neighbor said. “They had the nerve to hook up a EKG when his brains were all over the place.”

    They wanted to make sure that pictures of the brain matter, the blood and the holes where bullets were dug up from the front yard were taken to be distributed.

    “Can you put this on Facebook,” a man named Skip, the only one willing to identify himself, said. “I want everybody to see how they did that boy.”

    They returned to the scene to build a memorial for McCarroll around the tree in front of his house. A vigil will take place there at 7 p.m. tonight.

    Nearly all had been outside of their homes watching the incident unfold. […]

    They spoke of what they felt was a broken promise by the police – to McCarroll’s mother and to the neighborhood of people knew him – to keep him alive.

    “Even if they said that he was mentally disabled, then you knew the problem,” another neighbor said. “Why didn’t you have a psychologist or bring somebody like that out here who could handle a person with those types of problems.”

    They say they felt betrayed by police.

    “We stood right by the mother and said ‘you not gonna kill him are you?” a woman said. “They told us ‘we are going to get him out and make sure everyone is safe.’”

    The group said that they had been outside from 10:30 p.m. until 3:30 a.m. They said that they were urged by police to go inside their homes, but refused to go because they were afraid that McCarroll would be killed if no one was there to see.

    “Last night they really intimidated us with how they had the crime scene set up,” the young woman said. “They told us we couldn’t walk out here. My friend came across the street just to talk to us. The police told him, I don’t want y’all walking back and forth because you are making the police officers uneasy. What do you mean we are making you uneasy?

    We’re just sitting on the porch. This is our neighborhood.”

    The most painful part? That promise. This:

    “They promised us they weren’t going to shoot him and kill him,” an older woman said as tears rolled down her face. “They said we are going to get him out here, we’re gonna tase him. And when we tase him we are going to get him to DePaul Hospital where he can get some help. That’s what they told me and they told his mother – and all of us out here.”

  379. rq says

    And here is a recent newscast re: #FreddieGray’s arrest. In it, check the police response. Graphic. No excessive force, basically. Uh-huh.

    @deray Wait for it. “Mr. Gray’s injuries were caused by a pothole in the road during transport. Thankfully, the vehicle has been repaired.”

    I’m sensing a theme here. I wish Bill O’Reilly would just wake up black one day, probably wouldn’t even make it to lunch.
    @CerromeRussell @deray Arendt once asked her students what an appropriate punishment would be for Hitler. A: to be black in US for a day.

    At a predominantly white church, Assata’s words makes it into the bulletin & out the mouths of those in the pews. For a declaration of faith, it’s actually pretty excellent.

    So while media celebrates one cop who refused to kill a WHITE man begging to be shot to death: #FreddieGray #TaniaHarris #ThaddeusMcCarroll

  380. rq says

    Officers, city officials resign after new mayor elected – and PZ has already posted on this here, What is wrong with Missouri?

    Flawed contract to feed inmates draws scrutiny

    The three-member Board of Public Works voted unanimously to pay Crystal Enterprises Inc. $6.6 million through the end of August while state corrections officials scramble to put a new three-year contract out to bid. That would replace the one awarded to the Glenn Dale-based company in early January and abruptly canceled in February.

    Within weeks of taking over the Baltimore food service job, Crystal complained it had been misled about the number of many inmates it would be serving, and the company threatened to stop work within four days if it did not get paid more per meal. The company had bid to feed 22,500 inmates at $1.43 per meal, but found instead it was serving fewer than 16,000 prisoners at one point, which company officials said was jeopardizing their ability to keep the business going.
    lRelated
    Hogan again slams Busch over budget

    Maryland Politics blog
    Hogan again slams Busch over budget

    See all related
    8

    Stephen T. Moyer, the state secretary of public safety and corrections, said he “inherited” the problem from the O’Malley administration, noting that the state spending board had awarded Crystal the contract just before Republican Gov. Larry Hogan took office in January. Moyer’s procurement officer, Joselyn M. Hopkins, told the board the contract had been based on an erroneous estimate of the number of inmates housed daily in Baltimore facilities.

    Comptroller Peter Franchot, who frequently questions contracts during the spending board meetings, called this “probably the most troubling item I’ve seen in eight years.” He expressed dismay not only at the original contract award, but at the lack of a performance bond and the company’s threat to pull out within days if not paid more, leaving thousands of inmates without any food service.

    More on the Chicago reparations: Historic win for police torture survivors in Chicago

    Earlier this year I shared the story of a group of police torture survivors and their supporters who have been fighting for reparations from the City of Chicago. Over 100 black men and women were tortured by police interrogators during the reign of police commander Jon Burge in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Some spent decades in prison based on these coerced confessions.

    And now after years of fighting for justice, there is good news to report: The City of Chicago has settled on a reparations package for survivors. That means Chicago will become the first city in the country to provide reparations for law enforcement conduct. […]

    Although it provides less than the $20 million the ordinance originally requested, it’s still a historic win for activist groups like CTJM, Project NIA, Amnesty International, We Charge Genocide, Black Youth Project 100, Chicago Light Brigade, and the Chicago Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression. […]

    Activists hope this Chicago ordinance will inspire other cities to follow suit and push for meaningful reform throughout the country.

    I actually find it sad that they couldn’t get the full $20 million. But as was said before, pleased – but not satisfied.

    Baltimore. #FreddieGray. Must read. It requires a couple of extra clicks, but it leads to an attached email from a retired police van driver. In short, about the consequences of not seat-belting a person to be transported with the added factor of angry officers letting the transporting officer know that some ‘punishment’ is to be meted out via sudden starts and stops.

    Via Saad, it’s nothing so openly racist as using the word ‘n*gg*r’, but once again, someone questions Obama’s values and intentions towards America. Christie: ‘We don’t know’ whether Obama cares about the US

  381. rq says

    Godsdammit I hate it when I forget to remove those sidebar copypastas. Sorry.

    Let me know if this make sense to you #FreddieGray Highlighted bit from an article posted above, essentially- he got into the van uninjured, came out with an 80% severed spine. !!! (That 80% bit is later, not in that actual bit of information, but it’s important to know.)

    “The Police is the biggest gang in this city” #FreddieGray Live Now #Baltimore #March2Justice

    Photos from the funeral of #NicholasThomas yesterday. Unarmed. Shot & killed by police in Cobb County. via @ajc

    RISE UP! It’s our day/We doin this for #FreddieGray – outside Baltimore Police Dept demanding justice! #March2Justice

    The family of #FreddieGray has hired the lawyer Billy Murphy. If you know Baltimore, this is big. Statement attached.
    @deray With more than 42 years of practice, He has been successful in over 90% of his state cases and 40% of his federal cases–4x better

  382. rq says

    Underage Drinking White Girl Let Go After Rock-Paper-Scissor Game With Cop [ Video] #CrimingWhileWhite, youtube video within.

    Charleston police respond to Walter Scott protest during Sunday brunch at Hominy Grill

    A dozen protesters interrupted a crowded dining room with chants of “black lives matter” during Sunday brunch at Hominy Grill in downtown Charleston, a restaurant official said.

    Workers summoned Charleston police officers to the popular Rutledge Avenue eatery around 11:30 a.m. after the demonstrators walked in and started chanting in the main dining hall. As diners surveyed a specials menu that included oxtail and grits, the protesters passed out fliers that decried Walter L. Scott’s shooting death by a North Charleston officer and area policing tactics that they say unfairly target black communities.

    Black Lives Matter protesters distributed a flier Sunday at Hominy Grill in Charleston. (PROVIDED)
    Enlarge Black Lives Matter protesters distributed a flier Sunday at Hominy Grill in Charleston. (PROVIDED)
    “They were just trying to get a point across,” said Dave Uecke, the restaurant’s director of operations. “They carried on for about a minute, but they left without a problem.”

    None of the protesters were arrested, Charleston Police Department spokesman Charles Francis said.

    “They left when the manager asked them to,” Francis said. “This was a very short encounter, and they were leaving as the first officer arrived.”

    It’s the latest in a series of pop-up protests titled with the Twitter hashtag “#BlackBrunch.” Others have sprung up at the downtown Charleston restaurants High Cotton and Virginia’s on King.

    They have come in the wake of Scott’s April 4 killing in which Patrolman 1st Class Michael T. Slager faces a murder charge. A video showed the white officer shooting a fleeing Scott, who is black, in the back. But it’s the first demonstration in days by Black Lives Matter Charleston, whose members at times blocked traffic during rallies with other protest groups early last week on North Charleston streets.

    Their tactics, though, have drawn scrutiny from long-time civil rights activists and the city officials from whom they have asked for a change in policing policies.

    Vigil for #ThaddeusMcCarroll. 7pm. Tonight, April 19th. STL.

    9200 Block of Riverwood Drive, 63136. Jennings.

    Update: Teen Girl Recovering After Being Shot By Minnesota Police. There’s a gofundme link to her benefit in the comments, though I can’t confirm that it’s real.

    Saving California Parks — With New Ideas and Tech

    But conversations around minorities and nature are often misframed, according to Rue Mapp, the founder and CEO of Outdoor Afro, a social community dedicated to reconnecting African Americans with natural spaces and one another through recreational activities.

    “African Americans do go out to parks and love nature,” said Mapp. “But they just tend to go close to where they live and work.”

    Busy, working families don’t want to drive three hours simply to go to a park, or to places where there aren’t going to be any African Americans, she noted.

    Mapp, who has led thousands of visitors into parks, says that many African Americans who love outdoor activities aren’t accounted for in the numbers of visitors to parks.

    She adds that parks would do well to realize that the parks are not an end point.

    “Parks have to create [group] activities,” she said. “They have to realize people go to parks to meet people. Their motivation is to celebrate living and try new activities.”

    So what can be done to make people feel more connected to parks? One way, according to Mapp, is to tell a different story. For example, she recently took a group of African Americans to Marshall Gold Discovery Historic State Park, where they learned about a prominent African-American couple, Nancy and Peter Gooch, former slaves from Missouri who struck it rich and later bought freedom for their children. Her group was amazed.

    “We helped tell a different story — and it’s through those stories that people feel connected and welcome [at the parks],” she said.

    The sense of urgency in the report is palpable. The Parks Forward commission, which includes Bay Area investor Lance Conn, former state lawmaker Christine Kehoe, a county parks director and the CEO of Sony Entertainment, among many others, has deemed that the parks are indeed in trouble.

    “Now is the time to transform the Department into one that can collaboratively manage a vital system of parks used by a broader base visitors from both within and outside of California for decades to come,” concludes Parks Forward. But “accomplishing this mission requires a new paradigm for California parks — one that looks to the vast networks of parks and protected lands in our state, embraces the many partners in the state who share state parks’ goals, and attracts more people to visit and connect with parks.”

    “As difficult as the task may be, Californians’ dedication to their parks is greater,” and “a unified effort led by a transformed Department and a supporting coalition of public agencies, park professionals, nonprofit organizations, partners, volunteers, California Indian tribes, businesses, civic leaders and advocate is up to the task,” the report concludes.

    I think that idea is wonderful, tailoring the stories told to the audience – though I also believe that it would be important for white audiences to hear about the black people who share the history of the location. Extremely important.

  383. rq says

    Protesters are outside the Baltimore police Western District station demanding answers in Freddie Gray’s death.

    Freddie Gray dies a week after being injured during arrest, a good article summarizing all the key points.

    It’s unclear how Gray, 27, was injured, and police have not released any documents or reports relating to the case.

    At a news conference Sunday afternoon, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts said they are committed to providing the public with information about the circumstances of Gray’s death.

    “I understand the frustration of the community and I take very seriously my obligation of transparency,” Rawlings-Blake said. “However we also have to balance that with our obligation to ensure a proper and thorough investigation is undertaken. Therefore we have to move forward in a responsible way to determine all the facts of this incident so that we can provide the community with answers.”

    Gray’s family’s lawyer on Sunday said the city is trying to “absolve” itself of any wrongdoing.

    “We believe the police are keeping the circumstances of Freddie’s death secret until they develop a version of events that will absolve them of all responsibility,” William “Billy” Murphy Jr. said in a statement. “However, his family and the citizens of Baltimore deserve to know the real truth; and we will not stop until we get justice for Freddie.”
    Protestors outside Baltimore’s Western District police station

    Hundreds protested outside the Western District station over injuries a man suffered while being arrested. The few details released have deepened protestors’ frustrations. (Justin Fenton/Baltimore Sun video)

    The statement went on to say Gray was healthy at the time of the arrest, which Murphy said occurred “without any evidence he had committed a crime.” Murphy said Gray’s spine was “80 percent severed at his neck” when he was in custody. Murphy said Gray “lapsed into a coma, died, was resuscitated, stayed in a coma and on Monday, underwent extensive surgery at Shock Trauma to save his life.

    “He clung to life for seven days” before dying Sunday morning, Murphy said.

    Four bicycle officers tried to stop Gray about 9 a.m. on April 12 in the 1600 block of W. North Ave. for an alleged violation that police have not disclosed. He ran, police said, and the officers caught him and restrained him on the ground while awaiting backup.

    According to a police timeline he was fine when he was loaded into a van to be taken to the district station, but was injured by the time he got out. He suffered a broken vertebra and an injured voice box, his family said.

    “What happened to Freddie was unnecessary and uncalled for,” the Rev. Jamal Harrison Bryant of the Empowerment Temple boomed to protesters who marched from Gilmor Homes to the police station Saturday. “All of those police officers involved need to be held accountable and answer for what they did, and need to be terminated from their positions.”

    We Need You. #BlackShul
    #BlackShul, police officer calling for backup
    #BlackShul

  384. rq says

    And people stop to read the signs and to learn more. #BlackShul

    Pics from the solidarity rally for #TaniaHarris last night where we demanded that her family be allowed to see her.

    Baltimore Police Commissioner Batts offered to talk with #FreddieGray’s family. The family declined.

    Monday, April 20th. 9am. Baltimore City Hall.

    Tuesday, April 21st. 3:30pm. Presbury & N. Mount Street.

    Baltimore. Protest. #FreddieGray

    More on this: Police, Officials Resign After Missouri Town Elects First Black Mayor

    According to KFVS, The outgoing Mayor Randall Ramsey said that the city officials cited “safety concerns” in their letters of resignation. Mayor Byrd, who had previously served as the city clerk, won the election by 37 votes. (The population of Parma was 713 at the 2010 census.)

    Safety concerns. Okay.

    Something educational. NewsOne Now: How A Grand Jury Works [VIDEO].

    Mosby explained, “A grand jury will really go over and review the adequacy of evidence and that evidence is presented by a prosecutor, so it’s very different from a jury trial.”

    The prosecutor goes before a grand jury because there is “probable cause to issue charges against an individual. You’re asking the jury, which is kind of like checks and balances, to say yeah, you have enough evidence to proceed against an individual.”

    Mosby added, “As a prosecutor, ethically if you don’t believe there is probable cause, you should never even put it in front of a grand jury.”

    “As a prosecutor your duty is to seek justice, not just convictions,” Mosby said.

    In the instance of the Ferguson grand jury and St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch, Mosby said, “If you put evidence before a grand jury and you don’t believe the individual should be in front of a grand jury in the first place, then that is when it becomes problematic.”

    “What we saw (in Ferguson) was a questionable process, because we have to question the motives,” said Mosby.

    Video at the link.

  385. rq says

    city wide / city divide: a culture of division, an event, a forum on race relations in STL.

    The Ghost of Cornel West. There’s a great movie-like poster.

    Cornel West’s rage against President Barack Obama evokes that kind of venom. He has accused Obama of political minstrelsy, calling him a “Rockefeller Republican in blackface”; taunted him as a “brown-faced Clinton”; and derided him as a “neoliberal opportunist.” In 2011, West and I were both speakers at a black newspaper conference in Chicago. During a private conversation, West asked how I escaped being dubbed an “Obama hater” when I was just as critical of the president as he was. I shared my three-part formula for discussing Obama before black audiences: Start with love for the man and pride in his epic achievement; focus on the unprecedented acrimony he faces as the nation’s first black executive; and target his missteps and failures. No matter how vehemently I disagree with Obama, I respect him as a man wrestling with an incredibly difficult opportunity to shape history. West looked into my eyes, sighed, and said: “Well, I guess that’s the difference between me and you. I don’t respect the brother at all.” […]

    Despite West’s disapproval of Obama, he eventually embraced the political phenom, crossing the country as a surrogate and touting his Oval Office bona fides. The two publicly embraced at a 2007 Apollo Theater fundraiser in Harlem during which West christened Obama “my brother… companion and comrade.” Obama praised West as “a genius, a public intellectual, a preacher, an oracle,” and “a loving person.”

    Obama welcomed West’s support because he is a juggernaut of the academy and an intellectual icon among the black masses. If black American scholars are like prizefighters, then West is not the greatest ever; that title belongs to W.E.B. Du Bois. Not the most powerful ever; that’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. Not the most influential; that would include Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, Black History Week founder Carter G. Woodson, historian John Hope Franklin, feminist bell hooks, Afrocentricity pioneer Molefi Kete Asante—and undoubtedly William Julius Wilson, whose sociological research has profoundly shaped racial debate and the public policies of at least two presidents. West may be a heavyweight champ of controversy, but he has competition as the pound-for-pound greatest: sociologists Oliver Cox, E. Franklin Frazier, and Lawrence D. Bobo; historians Robin D.G. Kelley, Nell Irvin Painter, and David Levering Lewis; political scientists Cedric Robinson and Manning Marable; art historian Richard J. Powell; legal theorists Kimberlé Crenshaw and Randall Kennedy; cultural critic Tricia Rose; and the literary scholars Hortense Spillers and Farah Jasmine Griffin—all are worthy contenders. […]

    West’s early work was a marvel of rigor and imagination. He rode the beast of philosophy with linguistic panache as he snagged deep concepts and big thinkers in his theoretical lasso and then herded thousands of stalking students into Ivy League classrooms packed to the rafters. In Prophesy Deliverance!, West invited Foucault to sing the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges” in the black revolutionary choir. The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989) ingeniously pitched American pragmatism as a multiracial conversation that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Du Bois, and Richard Rorty. And in Keeping Faith (1993), West gathered a slew of seminal essays on subjects like social theory and the philosophy of religion—baptizing poststructuralist thought in American waters while translating the insight of its biggest European stars with analytical verve.

    At the age of 39, West catapulted to fame after struggling financially and became, deservedly, a far richer man with the publication of his best-known work, 1993’s Race Matters. It isn’t a scholarly book, per se, although its pages carry the weight of his formidable intellect as he traces the cultural dynamics of race with exquisite and uncharacteristic—for the time—lucidity. (Dense jargon was at its zenith in the postmodernist academy of the 1990s.) Race Matters changed how we speak of black identity in the United States. It gave our country a golden pun for matters of race that mattered more than they should and brought West the sort of celebrity that is intoxicating and distracting. West garnered glowing profiles in Newsweek and Time—in the same week—and explored his ideas on radio with Terry Gross and on television with Bill Moyers and Bill Maher. There was a certain satisfaction in West’s rise: One of the smartest men of his generation also became one of its most popular.

    The intellectual landscape had shifted dramatically beneath West’s feet by the time Obama went after the presidency. The Internet and social media ushered in new voices on the nation’s most vexing problems and made room for fresh thinking on race and identity. Even as the pace of West’s published scholarship slowed, he remained a powerful cultural presence. If West’s most notable book argued that race mattered, his celebrity and iconic status meant that his endorsement also mattered. […]

    Even a cursory survey of West’s recent work captures the noticeable diminishment of his intellectual force. Hope on a Tightrope (2008) is mostly a collection of West-ian wisdom spoken and then transcribed. The cover features West standing at a blackboard with the words “What Would West Say?” chalked again and again, like an after school punishment, a haunting hubris suggesting a parallel to “What Would Jesus Do?” His memoir Brother West (2009) is an embarrassing farrago of scholarly aspiration and breathless self-congratulation—West, for instance, deems his co-authored book The War Against Parents (1998) a “seminal text”; praises Race Matters as “the right book at the right time”; and brags that Democracy Matters sold over 100,000 copies, landed at No. 5 on TheNew York Times bestseller list, and “continues to influence many.” None of this competes with the description on West’s website of his first spoken word album, Sketches of My Culture, which claimed at the time of its release that in “all modesty, this project constitutes a watershed moment in musical history.”

    Brother West was co-written with David Ritz, a writer best known for album liner notes and ghostwriting entertainers’ biographies—a sure sign of West’s dramatic plummet from his perch as a world-class intellectual. It’s one thing for Ray Charles to turn to Ritz; another thing entirely for a top-shelf scholar to concede that he can’t write for himself, or is too busy to do so. It is akin to Du Bois hiring Truman Capote to fashion his autobiography. The journalist David Masciotra called The Rich and the Rest of Us (2012), which was also co-authored, this time by Tavis Smiley, “a cover version of a hit performed better by other singers—Barbara Ehrenreich, Joseph Stiglitz, and William Julius Wilson, to name a few.” West’s latest, Black Prophetic Fire, published last year, is another talk book, this one edited by Christa Buschendorf, a German scholar who interviewed West. Last October, Masciotra reviewed Fire for The Daily Beast, and called it “a strange and disappointing culmination of [West’s] metamorphosis from philosopher to celebrity,” one that is in keeping with “his pattern of not solely authoring any books in the past ten years.” If you’re counting: That’s two talk books and two co-authored ones across a decade—not quite up to the high scholarly standard West set for himself long ago.

    In Brother West, West admitted that he is “more a natural reader than natural writer,” adding that “writing requires a concerted effort and forced discipline,” but that he reads “as easily as I breathe.” I can say with certainty, as a college professor for the last quarter century, that most of my students feel the same way. What’s more, West’s off-the-cuff riffs and rants, spoken into a microphone and later transcribed to page, lack the discipline of the written word. West’s rhetorical genius is undeniable, but there are limits on what speaking can do for someone trying to wrestle angels or battle demons to the page. This is no biased preference for the written word over the spoken; I am far from a champion of a Eurocentric paradigm of literacy. This is about scholar versus talker. Improvisational speaking bears its wonders: the emergence on the spot of turns of thought and pathways of insight one hadn’t planned, and the rapturous discovery, in front of a live audience, of meanings that usually lie buried beneath the rubble of formal restrictions and literary conventions. Yet West’s inability to write is hugely confining. For scholars, there is a depth that can only be tapped through the rigorous reworking of the same sentences until the meaning comes clean—or as clean as one can make it. […]

    The model of the charismatic black male leader has come in for deserved drubbing since it overlooks the contributions of women and children that often went unheralded in the civil rights movement and earlier black freedom struggles. Queer activists sparked the #BlackLivesMatter movement, underscoring the unacknowledged sacrifice of black folk who are confined to the closets and corners of black existence. Even those who enjoy a direct relationship to King and to Malcolm X haven’t escaped scrutiny. Louis Farrakhan is faulted (and praised) for his distance from Malcolm’s racial politics, and Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have been pilloried for lacking King’s gravitas and grace. The truth of those assessments is not as important as the value of the comparison: It holds would-be prophets to account for standards of achievement both noble and nostalgic, real and imagined.

    Despite the profusion of prophecy in his texts and talks, West has never bothered to tell us in rich detail what makes a person a prophet. He doesn’t offer a theory of prophets so much as announce their virtues and functions while grieving over their lost art and practice. In Black Prophetic Fire, West offers a sweeping assessment of contemporary black life: “Black people once put a premium on serving the community, lifting others, and finding joy in empowering others,” he wrote. “Black people once had a strong prophetic tradition of lifting every voice.” Today, however, “Black people have succumbed to individualistic projects in pursuit of wealth, health, and status. … [They] engage in the petty practice of chasing dollars.”

    West offers no empirical proof for these claims; like so much of his recent work there are assertions without sustained and compelling arguments, and certainly no polls or studies that prove the increase in black materialism, or individualism, or the decline in black prophetic beliefs and behavior. West’s failure to carefully chart the history and ethical arc of prophecy leads him to wild overstatement. To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of pornography, West may not seek to define a prophet, but he knows one when he sees one, and quite often, they sound just like him. This limp understanding of prophecy plays to his advantage because he can bless or dismiss prophets without answering how we determine who prophets are, who gets to say so, how they are different from social critics, to whom they answer, if they have standing in religious communities, or if God calls them.

    West has never given us detailed comparative analyses of prophets in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or Zoroastrianism, nor has he distinguished between major and minor prophets. He hasn’t explored the differences between social and political prophecy; examined the fruitful connections between the biblical gift of prophecy and its cultural determinants; or linked his understanding of prophecy to secular expressions of the prophetic urge found in New Left radicalism, for example, which led to Jack Newfield’s notable analysis of the movement in A Prophetic Minority. (To be fair, Newfield didn’t spend a great deal of time exploring prophecy either; but then he didn’t fancy himself a prophet like West, nor did he viciously lambast those who fall short of his expectations or standards.)

    What makes West a prophet? Is it his willingness to call out corporate elites and assail the purveyors of injustice and inequality? The actor Russell Brand does that in his book Revolution. Is he a prophet? Is it West’s self-identification with the poor? Tupac Shakur had that on lock. Should we deem him a prophet? Is it West’s self-styled resistance to police brutality, evidenced by his occasional willingness to get arrested in highly staged and camera-ready gestures of civil disobedience, such as in Ferguson last fall? West sees King as a prophet, but Jackson and Sharpton, who have also courted arrest in public fashion, are “ontologically addicted to the camera,” according to West. King used cameras to gain attention for the movement, a fact West fails to mention in his attacks on Jackson, “the head house Negro on the Clinton plantation,” and Sharpton, “the head house Negro on the Obama plantation.”

    And there’s more and more and more at the link.

    @tanehisicoates Ta-Nehisi Coates, Talk, 18 March 2015. “They made us unto a race, we made ourselves into a people” – youtube link at the link. A talk worth listening to.

    Nothing to hide

    A pilot program that outfitted 165 officers with cameras has been underway in the District since October, and Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) wants to expand its reach to 2,800 officers over 18 months. In her proposed budget seeking $5.1 million for the program, Ms. Bowser also included a controversial provision that would exempt police videos from the Freedom of Information Act.

    There is no question, as administration officials point out, that there are complicated and valid issues about privacy and interference with criminal investigations as well as worries about the costs and logistics of making the material available. The District, as The Post’s Peter Hermann and Aaron C. Davis reported, is not alone in grappling with the question of who should get to see the videos; cities across the country are confronting the same issues. Indeed, the inability to come to agreement about the release of footage scuttled legislation in Maryland’s just-concluded General Assembly that would have set out rules for use of body cameras for state and local police.

    Nonetheless, there are police departments, Seattle being a prime example, that have made transparency a priority and are experimenting with ways to make footage immediately available, albeit with blurred images and no audio. Rather than taking the draconian step of exempting the video from the Freedom of Information Act, which already includes numerous exceptions to safeguard investigations and other valid interests, D.C. officials might want to take a look at best practices elsewhere.

    D.C. Council member Kenyon R. McDuffie (D-Ward 5), who chairs the judiciary committee, plans to hold a hearing; a spokesman for the mayor said she expects — and welcomes — debate. Ms. Bowser is on the right track wanting to equip more officers with cameras, but it’s equally important she takes steps to ensure that the public benefits from this effort.

    More on Freddie Gray, via Grauniad. Death in custody of Baltimore man Freddie Gray sparks call for independent inquiry

    The family of a man who died after being arrested in Baltimore has called for the inquiry into his death to be taken away from city authorities, whose police officers they accuse of fatally injuring him.

    Relatives of Freddie Gray told the Guardian on Sunday they want the US Department of Justice and FBI to take control of the investigation into how Gray’s neck was broken, apparently after he was detained by officers and loaded into a Baltimore police van.

    “The officers who did this need to be arrested now, locked in jail and charged with murder,” said Gray’s sister, Carolina, in her first interview. “And this all needs to be investigated by separate police. How can Baltimore police look into their own?”

    “The police are just going to look out for each other,” said Robert Darden, Gray’s uncle. “They need to get the federal government to investigate.” Protesters gathered on Sunday outside the police station in Baltimore where Gray was taken after his arrest.

    Baltimore’s mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, told a press conference on Sunday a criminal investigation into Gray’s death had been opened by city authorities. “I will ensure we will hold the right people accountable,” she said. The four officers involved in Gray’s arrest have also been placed on administrative leave pending an internal inquiry into their use of force.

    Gray’s death came less than three weeks after a white police officer in South Carolina was charged with murder for fatally shooting Walter Scott, 50, as he ran away from a confrontation over a traffic stop. Scott’s death was only the latest in a series of police killings of unarmed black men to have prompted protests since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last August.

    Gray, 25, died on Sunday morning, a week after he was chased and arrested by officers on bicycles on Baltimore’s west side. Police have refused to disclose the alleged violation for which Gray, who was black, was stopped. His family said he was not charged with any crime.
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    Cellphone video recorded at the scene showed Gray shouting and moving his head as he was carried into a police van. Yet he was later found to have suffered three broken vertebrae. Gray lapsed into a coma and was brought back from the verge of death, before undergoing extensive surgery and eventually being declared dead on Sunday.

    “While in police custody, his spine was 80% severed at his neck,” William Murphy Jr, an attorney for Gray’s family, said in a statement on Sunday. “We believe the police are keeping the circumstances of Freddie’s death a secret until they develop a version of events that will absolve them of all responsibility.” Relatives said Gray’s voice box was injured and he suffered swelling to his brain.

    A timeline of the arrest released by the police last week shows a half-hour gap between police departing a spot near the scene of the arrest with Gray in a prisoner van at 8.54am on 12 April, and paramedics being called to the western district police headquarters just three blocks away at 9.24am. Gray’s family alleges he must have been badly beaten during this time.

    “If someone has surrendered and you’ve put the handcuffs on him, what is the point of you beating them?,” said his sister, Carolina. […]

    Murphy, a powerful figure in Baltimore legal circles who appeared as himself as the attorney for state senator Clay Davis in HBO’s The Wire, did not respond to a request for comment on Sunday. Carolina Gray declined to comment on whether the attorney had already asked the Department of Justice to open a federal inquiry. Police said the Gray family had declined to speak with senior officers.

    The Baltimore fraternal order of police urged that there be “no rush to judgement” but welcomed the opening of the inquiry. “We take this incident very seriously and will work with all involved parties in order to assist wherever we are able,” the union said in a statement.

    Further protests over Gray’s death were being scheduled for Monday morning. “Too many people are being killed by these police officers,” said Darden. “Something is wrong.” Carolina said: “They’re killing us black people. They should be here to protect us, but they’re not protecting us – they’re beating us.”

    Some get hired, some get fired. Town waiting for an eruption found it after firing its first black police officer

    They were so preoccupied with the volcano shadowing their town, with forecasts and evacuation drills, that few people here noticed the other disaster taking shape around them. Life for Orting’s 8,000 residents depended on predicting what would one day come roaring down the slopes of Mount Rainier, 30 miles away. They had sirens for lava, sensors for earthquakes and alarms for the volcanic mudflow that geologists believed would one day bury the town. Tension was always building inside the volcano, considered the country’s most dangerous, a pressure that intensified with each foundational shift in the earth. The only question was when it would finally blow.

    So at first nobody paid much attention in the fall of 2013 when what came winding around the mountain and into the valley was another U-Haul carrying a new family into town. The truck was loaded down with a handmade crib, a living room set and a sign designed to hang on a front door. “Welcome to Our Love Story,” it read. Here came three more people into one of the state’s fastest-growing communities. Here, in the driver’s seat, came Orting’s newest employee, a police officer in a place where crime had begun to rise. Gerry Pickens stopped downtown to pick up his badge, and only then did it become obvious in Orting that this hire was unlike any the town had made before.

    The place once known as “The White City,” in part for its lack of diversity, had hired a black police officer, its first since the town’s founding in 1889. […]

    Eighteen months later, if Orting can still agree on anything about Pickens’s arrival, it is that his first day was also his best day — the one when questions of race and policing still felt like problems for bigger towns. Pickens, 28, had not yet been suspended for an allegation of stealing that was never substantiated. He had not yet been terminated shortly before the end of his standard probationary period. His car had not yet been spray-painted with a racial epithet and a threat. The NAACP hadn’t yet arrived for a news conference. Residents had not yet fractured into hostile groups as the pressure built, erupting onto hateful Internet message boards and petitions demanding the police chief’s resignation. Pickens had not yet made plans to file a lawsuit unless the town paid him $5 million in damages, nearly twice the annual budget, enough to bury the town.

    The one clear thing that first day was that there had been a subtle shift in the foundation, a change in Orting that marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. A local politician posted a message on Facebook: “Not a cow town anymore.” The city administrator called Pickens’s hiring “a proud moment for our modern, growing community.” The police chief said he had made “a tremendous value hire” by filling out his staff of 11 with an experienced officer. Pickens had spent three years policing on the midnight shift in Atlanta, where he had responded to hundreds of the drug crimes, break-ins and violent robberies that were only beginning to encroach on Orting as development spread south from Seattle into the valley. […]

    He was already aware of the town’s reputation — a conservative place, an insular place, a white place — and he had heard rumors in high school of police officers intimidating black drivers and of white supremacists meeting in the woods. But they were just stories, everything subterranean and easy to dismiss, because during his teenage years, Pickens had never felt discriminated against or even disliked.

    His parents had taught him some guidelines for living in a place that was almost entirely white: Don’t talk about being black. Act grateful. Get used to people staring and always smile back. “Gerry could fit in anywhere,” read an inscription in his high school yearbook, and it was a skill honed from necessity. […]

    Maybe it was because he had the least seniority that he had been given an older car, with a battery that occasionally went dead when he turned on his police lights. Maybe the police chief was only trying to be thoughtful when he mentioned, in Pickens’s memory at least three times, that Pickens should be vigilant about his self defense because Orting was an old-fashioned place that believed in the Second Amendment, where white supremacist groups remained active and well armed. And maybe Pickens had only himself to blame when his imagination began obsessing about those groups between 2 and 6 a.m., when he was the only officer on duty. He sometimes wondered: If one of those groups ambushed him, would anyone provide backup? How long before help would arrive?

    Only when the police chief suspended Pickens for a week in April 2014 did he become convinced that racism was the cause, and that it was no longer enough to act grateful and smile back. Another Orting officer had been able to stay at work while being investigated for using excessive force on a teenager; Pickens was sent home based on an accusation of lifting weights at a local gym without paying for the visit. Pickens decided not to complain directly to the chief or his supervising lieutenant. “I didn’t want to have the race talk with anyone I saw every day,” he said. Instead he called the mayor, Joachim “Joe” Pestinger, and they met at a park.

    “I keep saying to myself that this doesn’t have anything to do with my race, but something’s going on,” Pickens said he told the mayor that day. […]

    When Drake became police chief in 2007, the department was operating out of two classrooms in an abandoned school building, with no air conditioning or detention cell. Suspects were held in the back of police cars while officers went into the station to complete their case reports on a typewriter. Drake moved the department into a new building, fought for a budget increase and used some of his own money to modernize the department. He added tinted windows and computer systems to the police cars, rented night-vision equipment and bought a training simulator. He began tracking every 911 call, evaluating officers based on their number of stops and citations. “Going from the 19th century to the 20th, to the 21st,” was how Drake characterized those first years.

    But each week at the all-staff meeting, Drake delivered his orders to 11 white men, even as the city diversified. “This is a problem,” he remembered telling the city administrator, and together they advertised Orting’s police openings at job fairs in Tacoma and Seattle, hoping to attract minorities and women. They contracted with a hiring firm that specialized in finding diverse candidates, but by the time Orting conducted its interviews the best minority officers had gone to bigger departments that paid substantially more.

    “Everybody is looking for these same officers right now, and we’re always going to be left taking whatever’s left,” Drake said, so it seemed to him like remarkable luck when the city received an application from Pickens, an experienced minority officer who had applied specifically to Orting because he wanted to move home. Pickens nailed the interview. He passed the polygraph, the agility test and the psych evaluation. Drake sent his lieutenant to Atlanta to conduct a background investigation, and when everything checked out the city made its offer. Pickens accepted the same day. […]

    Then Pickens started — and so, in Drake’s accounting, did a succession of problems. According to a document Drake later provided to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Pickens disappeared from radio contact during his shift, approached a high-risk traffic stop with his hands in his pockets, ignored advice from his training officer and submitted sloppy accident reports that were left two-thirds empty. While Drake’s other officers averaged about eight citations a month, Drake reported that Pickens wrote one or two. Maybe he really was establishing trust with teenagers when he played basketball in his uniform, but in the monthly statistics, that added up to a lot of loafing around. “There are motivational issues,” an officer in charge of training Pickens told Drake, so the chief began devoting time to counseling Pickens himself.

    Drake had no children, no spouse and no relatives nearby. It had been months since he had ridden his motorcycle or taken off in his RV. His life was mostly his job, both a purpose and an identity. He came to work early to eat at the senior center — “The seniors here know everything,” he said — and he patrolled with pet treats in the cup holder of his cruiser to pacify dogs. He worked 60 or 70 hours each week, sometimes sleeping in his office, unwinding each night with the classical music he kept on his computer. “It can be a lonely life,” he said, and so for most of his career in policing and in the military, he had considered his subordinates his family — whether they were men or women, gay or straight, black or white. “I take care of my own,” he said. He counseled Pickens about his performance in March, wrote him a letter in April and spoke to him again in August. The two men never discussed race. Pickens never said what it was like to be the first black officer in Orting. Drake never asked.

    It all kind of goes downhill from there.

  386. rq says

    Neighbors say that the police had never come to the house for #ThaddeusMcCarroll before either. Media said the opposite.

    #ThaddeusMcCarroll died on the grass, in front of the house. And here is the memorial. It’s heartbreaking.

    We are here to say no more. #ThaddeusMcCaroll

    Raw Story on this: Black suspect dies after Baltimore cops break his spine in ‘brutal’ police beating.

    And one more on this: Officers, city officials resign after new mayor elected

    150 cops, population 300: pay-to-play policing, from Tulsa to Kid Rock’s town

    Oakley, Michigan, is not a hotbed of crime. But if that should change, it seems well placed to cope, because the village is believed to have a police force numbering almost 150 people, or one officer for every two residents.

    One, Robert James Ritchie, does not live in Oakley. A Detroit-area native better known as the rapper Kid Rock, he applied to join the village’s small army of reserve police officers, according to an attorney, along with many prominent Michigan professionals and businesspeople and a football player for the Miami Dolphins.

    “A small blip on the map, the little village of Oakley, with less than 300 residents, has got dozens and dozens of no-show secret police officers,” said Philip Ellison, a lawyer who is representing the family who own Oakley’s tavern in lawsuits attempting to force transparency from village leaders about the scheme.

    Ellison said the singer was one of the names on a document released to him which he is not allowed to make public in full.

    “None of the reservists, with the exception of one, live within an hour and a half of the village of Oakley,” said Ellison. He and others say the police force is in effect running a “pay to play” scheme with parallels to the controversy in Tulsa, Oklahoma that erupted after a wealthy white 73-year-old reserve deputy with close links to the sheriff shot dead a black man during a botched sting operation after apparently mistaking his gun for his Taser. […]

    “Untrained or low-trained individuals who made a donation are given a badge, allowed to exercise some sort of police authority, they’re armed and I think the Oklahoma case is a foreshadow of what could happen in any of these towns that have this type of reserve programme, including the village of Oakley. It just happened in Oklahoma first,” Ellison said.

    It often cost applicants more than a thousand dollars to become a reservist at the quiet settlement 30 miles west of Flint. The Saginaw News reported that last May the police department was sitting on more than $165,000 and there were 185 “receipts” ranging from $50 to $4,000 and totalling $245,510 between 2008 and 2014. The News reported that in 2013 the police department bought every home in the village a ham for Christmas.

    Oakley’s police chief, Robert Reznick, did not respond to a request for comment.

    Ellison said that in the first quarter of this year the police department received only four calls for help. He said the motivation for paying to become an Oakley reservist was likely to be enhanced rights to carry a firearm in the state.

    “By being a reserve officer they are exempted from those prohibited areas – schools, churches, casinos, stadiums, taverns and restaurants where alcohol is served. Essentially there are no prohibited areas whatsoever with this permit,” he said. […]

    Duties and requirements vary widely from state to state and department to department. In an era of tight budgets, many forces, even in major cities, bolster their ranks with free or cheap part-time labour and accept gifts from the public. In 2013, for example, the former Houston Texans NFL player Mario Williams donated five Dodge Chargers to the Houston police department, the fifth largest in the country.

    New York has 4,500 unarmed “auxiliary” officers. In Florida, Wolf said he was licensed to carry a weapon, had been in dangerous situations and underwent 40 hours of training a year. In Oklahoma, reserves are supposed to receive 240 hours of training.

    “When my neighbours are sleeping I’m out there patrolling their neighbourhoods and making sure that they’re safe. I see it as a community service,” Wolf said.

    Wolf said there was no reliable figure for the number of law enforcement volunteers nationwide but it is likely to be tens of thousands and the practice has been common for half a century. In 2013 he conducted a survey of sheriff’s reservists which found that 90% of respondents had “law enforcement authority to be armed, 69% while on- or off-duty”. […]

    Last month two auxiliary officers in New York City were arrested amid suspicions they were responsible for a crime spree and had used a fake unmarked police car with a flashing light they bought from a store. Also in March an Arkansas man was sentenced to life in prison for killing his wife and shooting himself in an attempt to disguise the murder as a robbery.

    Kid Rock is far from the only celebrity to be linked with the role. The former basketball star and serial reservist Shaquille O’Neal joined a Miami-area department last January. The action movie star Steven Seagal has been a reserve deputy of sorts in Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico and in Phoenix, Arizona, where volunteers are known as the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office Posse.

    In 2011, Seagal and the office were sued after a large-scale raid, filmed by his reality television show, saw the entrance to the property of a suspected cockfighting ringleader rammed with a tank.

  387. rq says

    The Senate’s shabby treatment of Loretta Lynch

    First, Republican lawmakers tied Ms. Lynch’s nomination to their anger over Mr. Obama’s executive actions on immigration enforcement. Unsurprisingly, Ms. Lynch declined to repudiate the Obama Justice Department’s position on the legality of those executive actions. That persuaded several Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to vote against her, including Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), the chairman. Her nomination proceeded with the support of a handful of Republicans, but more appear set to oppose her on the floor — if, that is, she ever gets a vote.

    For now, Ms. Lynch’s nomination remains stalled while senators fight a partisan war over abortion, a fight that has nothing to do with her. Democrats object to a human-trafficking bill that contains the so-called Hyde Amendment, which restricts government spending on abortion. Instead of passing by acclamation, as it would have done without the abortion controversy, the bill has been blocked by a Democratic filibuster. Lawmakers are looking for ways around the logjam that will placate the pressure groups up in arms over the Hyde language. Until that agreement is reached, Mr. McConnell won’t bring up the Lynch nomination.

    The majority leader argues that the Democrats are to blame for the holdup, attacking a bill they should be supporting. There’s some truth to that: Republicans offered compromise language weeks ago. Democrats should have pushed for a few reasonable adjustments and passed the trafficking bill then. Instead, the Senate is poised to vote Thursday on a GOP compromise measure that the Democratic leadership vows to oppose.

    But the Democrats’ irresponsibility doesn’t justify Mr. McConnell’s. There’s no principled reason to link Ms. Lynch’s nomination to the passage of the trafficking bill. Ms. Lynch should get immediate floor consideration, regardless of how Thursday’s trafficking vote goes, and on her merits she should be confirmed handily.

    The confirmation battles of the past several years have harmed the country. Some who should have been confirmed have instead become political victims and turned away from government service. We have no doubt that highly qualified potential nominees decided against pursuing or accepting government jobs because they did not want to subject themselves to the broken process. A return to good order in the Senate should mean that presidential nominees, particularly those who aren’t slated to serve lifetime judicial terms, obtain speedy confirmations except in rare and exceptional circumstances. That hasn’t happened, and the Republican majority has no one to blame but itself.

    Appropriation? Or just assholery? Dear Slate: Black grandmothers have been making hot water cornbread like forever. The article linked is here: How to Make Delicious Cornbread With Just Cornmeal and Water.

    In case anyone was wondering. Forget Steak and Seafood: Here’s How Welfare Recipients Actually Spend Their Money. WIth graphs.

    This is just heartbreaking. We can’t even mourn RT @steenfox: Come on RT @BlackInformant: Mike Brown tree dedicated yesterday, decimated today.

    Went back through my files found this picture of #ThaddeusMcCarroll from Aug. 17 on West Florissant Ave. He was a protestor.

  388. rq says

    Ben Affleck had slave owner censored from family tree in PBS’s ‘Finding Your Roots’: Sony emails

    Ben Affleck’s ancestors apparently owned slaves — but that’s something he didn’t want the public to know.

    The Academy Award-winning actor and director asked PBS executives to edit that detail out of his family tree after it was exposed during the filming of their program “Finding Your Roots,” hacked Sony emails have revealed.

    In an email exchange posted by WikiLeaks, the genealogy program’s host Henry Louis Gates Jr. nervously asked a top Sony executive for “advice” in handling Affleck’s special request.

    “. . . For the first time, one of our guests has asked us to edit out something about one of his ancestors — the fact that he owned slaves,” the Harvard scholar told Sony chief Michael Lynton in the email chain dated July 22, 2014.

    Gates suggested that the censoring could tarnish their branding if word got out and would ultimately be a violation of PBS rules, “even for Batman.”

    “Now, four or five of our guests this season descend from slave owners, including Ken Burns,” he went on while also suggesting that Affleck’s shunned relative “wasn’t even a bad guy.”

    “Now Anderson Cooper’s ancestor was a real s.o.b.; one of his slaves actually murdered him. Of course, the slave was promptly hanged. And Anderson didn’t miss a beat about that,” he wrote.

    When it came to Affleck, however, he found himself stumped.

    “We’ve never had anyone ever try to censor or edit what we found. He’s a megastar. What do we do?”

    Sony chief Lynton, responding to his “dilemma,” advised him to bow to the star’s wishes.

    “I would take it out if no one knows, but if it gets out that you are editing the material based on this kind of sensitivity then it gets tricky. Again, all things being equal I would definitely take it out,” he replied.

    Huh.

    One more on the same: Hacked emails indicate Ben Affleck asked PBS not to reveal his slave-owning ancestor.

    And just some sad news in general: KPFA Radio Host Wesley Burton Dies in Hit-and-Run.

  390. rq says

    I love graphs, too. Visual person here.
    I’ll be doing the usual catch up in a couple of hours, hopefully there will be less killing and more graphs.
    Ha. Doesn’t look good so far.

  391. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    From the NYTimes, by Dyson: Racial Terror, Fast and Slow

    The lived experience of race often feels like terror for black folk, whether that terror is fast or slow. Fast terror is explosive and explicit; it is the spectacle of unwarranted black death at the hands of the state, or displays of violence directed against defenseless bodies.

    Slow terror is masked yet malignant; it stalks black people in denied opportunities that others take for granted. Slow terror seeps into every nook and cranny of black existence: black boys and girls being expelled from school at higher rates than their white peers; being harassed by unjust fines by local municipalities; having billions of dollars of black wealth drained off because of shady financial instruments sold to blacks during the mortgage crisis; and being imprisoned out of proportion to our percentage in the population.

    The last moments of Mr. Scott’s life, captured on video and widely watched, are classic fast terror. Watching the video made me sick; it was, perhaps, the breathtaking indifference to moral consequence that seemed to grip Officer Slager as he fired at an unarmed black man in broad daylight. A frozen frame from the video shows a police officer, gun drawn, in pursuit. Fifty years earlier, a lawman, in pursuit, pulled his gun and shot dead the Selma protester Jimmie Lee Jackson, whom the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “a martyred hero of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity.”

    The failure to be seen as human unites black people across time in a fellowship of fear as we share black terror, at both speeds, in common.

    The way we see race plays a role in these terrors: Fast terror is often seen and serves as a warning; slow terror is often not seen and reinforces the invisibility of black suffering. Fast terror scares us; slow terror scars us.

  392. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    Ah, police immunity to accountability and the violent entitlement that breeds: not just for US anymore: Indian anti-smuggling cops killed day laborers employed by others to harvest wood from protected trees. The employers who actually knew that this was illegal, commissioned, and then ordered the work were not, however, among the slain.

    but it’s all good! The police were acting in self-defense!

    “How it is possible that you kill 20 people out of a group of hundreds and nobody else is injured or arrested?” said Chilka Chandra Shekar, who filed a public interest lawsuit in the high court of Andhra Pradesh, where the men were killed. A report filed by Mr. Shekar’s fact-finding committee also noted that “in the random firing, every single bullet seems to have found its mark — the upper body of the victim.”

    Aren’t you just tired of the hyper-skeptical denialism of those cop-haters? Always basing their conclusions off things like “evidence” and “logic” and “video” and demanding “proportionality”! Jeez, don’t they realize that you can never empirically measure the single most important factor: the terror inflicted upon a single, innocent officer’s sensitive heart!

  393. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    Why do cops fear Black men?

    They might become this guy.

    As a data scientist and activist, Sinyangwe wondered how advocates and policy makers could engage in any sort of meaningful conversation without those basic facts. On top of professional curiosity, Brown’s death hit home for Sinyangwe, who kicked around soccer balls growing up in the Florida neighborhood where Trayvon Martin was killed by gunfire.

    “As a young black man, I felt unsafe,” Sinyangwe told TakePart. “This was happening everywhere—not just in Ferguson. Yet we didn’t really have the data to show how widespread this issue was, and how black people in particular are being targeted by police violence.”

    Sinyangwe turned to the numbers that did exist. As a policy analyst at PolicyLink in Oakland, California, a research institute that works to advance economic and social justice, he is no stranger to data sets. He started with deaths tracked by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the FBI but found that they significantly undercounted the victims, excluded location, and didn’t always include race. He overlaid the two data sets and then turned to crowdsourced databases created by journalists and advocates who were disturbed by the lack of data collected by the government, such as Fatal Encounters and Killed by Police. While existing sites offered a richer variety of information than government sources, they didn’t encompass as many incidents as Sinyangwe hoped to track, and some of the sites weren’t coded by race.

    So he and fellow activists DeRay McKesson and Johnetta Elzie, whom he met on Twitter, took on the task of sifting through the combined records to recheck and code every entry. After a few months, Mapping Police Violence was born. The project covers “90 percent of the universe of police killings according to the best research available out there,” Sinyangwe said, including whether or not the victim was armed or unarmed. Last year, the project found, 304 black people were killed by the police; 101 of them were unarmed.

    Read the whole damn thing. Give that almost-great graphic some love (and hope that they fix the red-font text that concludes the left-justified factoids, which would make it perfect).

  394. rq says

    I can’t do this
    The cop who killed Rekia Boyd wasn’t just found Not Guilty – the charges against him were dismissed by the judge.
    Give me a minute. There’s more stuff to update, but that just came through.
    And this is why even when a cop is fucking charged no one’s holding their breath for justice.
    Slager? Damn sure he’ll get off on some minor thing with some minor punishment.
    Fuck the system.
    I don’t know how you USAnians do it, really.
    I really don’t.

  395. rq says

    Freddie Gray dies a week after being injured during arrest. Yep, yer gettin that one one more time – can you imagine, these things used to happen, but you didn’t know about it… I didn’t know… Can’t amke up for lost time, but at least the stories get out there now. Sort of.

    Memorial tree for Michael Brown cut in half, stone memorial missing. Like I said, this one’s just heartbreaking. It’s just a goddamn tree in a park with a small stone marker and they can’t let it be.

    a stone memorial was missing less than 24 hours after being dedicated.

    The tree was dedicated by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association on Saturday, but was found vandalized on Sunday morning.

    The memorial is along a walking trail in January-Wabash Park in Ferguson.

    While police said they are investigating the vandalism, they do not yet have any suspects.

    Officer refuses deadly force: ‘I wanted to be absolutely sure’

    A rookie Ohio cop is being praised for “great restraint and maturity” after he held off using deadly force against a double murder suspect who charged at him, his police chief said.

    In a confrontation Thursday with a man accused of killing his fiancee and his best friend, New Richmond police officer Jesse Kidder is heard on his body-camera video yelling, “No man, I’m not going to do it!” and ordering the suspect to get down on the ground.

    The suspect rushes toward him shouting, “Shoot me, shoot me!”

    “Back up!” screams Kidder, holding his gun out. The man finally crumples to the ground just feet away from the officer in the video taken in the Cincinnati suburb of Elsmere, Kentucky.

    Y’all want to take a guess at the suspect’s colour of skin? Go on.

    St. Louis County police losing officers at increasing rate – the good ones or bad ones, there’s no way to know, but maybe they can be replaced with people of integrity…

    St. Louis County police officers are quitting the force in what may be unprecedented numbers, leaving commanders scrambling to fill vacancies.

    The region’s largest department, in St. Louis, has long seen an even higher rate of departures. But it’s a new and alarming phenomenon in the county force, the second-largest, which is accustomed to more stability.

    And the loss of trained people comes as both agencies face major increases in reported crime, and their chiefs seek significant increases in staffing.

    County officers don’t have to explain their resignations. But since 2010, about half have blamed pay, officials said. There was no indication that anti-police sentiments following the Ferguson police shooting of Michael Brown last summer had a significant effect.

    Informally, it appears that many choose private security-oriented jobs or better-compensated positions with federal law enforcement over higher-paid local police forces, according to Sgt. Brian Schellman, spokesman for the county police.

    That agency, with an authorized strength of 857 officers, lost 34 last year, about 4 percent. Chief Jon Belmar said that’s twice the rate from 2013. And this year is on track to be worse.

    “That was the worst year of attrition I’ve ever seen,” Belmar recently told the county police board.

    The city police, with about 1,250 officers, loses about two to three each biweekly pay period, Chief Sam Dotson said. That would average about 65 a year, or more than 5 percent. Dotson said that’s been a long-term trend.

    Filling vacancies has not been easy. Nationally, various reports speculate that potential recruits are turned off by heightened criticism of police conduct, and turn instead to private sector security or the military.

    In the city, Dotson said the academy class that began in October had 35 recruits. The one that started in April had 25.

    Read more about it at the link.

    Deputy’s gun not on approved list or qualifying logs. Robert Bates, you lying asshole.

    Training records released Saturday do not show that Tulsa County Reserve Deputy Robert Bates qualified on a revolver he carried during a fatal shooting and his gun was not on the list of firearms deputies can carry on duty.

    New training records for Bates surfaced Saturday, when his attorney gave 65 pages of records to national media outlets.

    Many of the new training records are time sheets signed by Maj. Tom Huckeby, who supervises the Violent Crimes Task Force that Bates served on. Huckeby’s son, Deputy Michael Huckeby, can be seen kneeling on Eric Harris’ head after Bates shot Harris April 2 following an undercover gun buy.

    New training records released Saturday by Bates’ attorneys are missing three years of firearms qualification records and nearly all of his Field Training Officer records. Though the Tulsa World requested all of Bates’ training records days after the April 2 shooting, the sheriff’s office refused.

    Summary training records were later released during a press conference, but none showing his 480 hours of required training with officers in the field or any logs detailing his handgun qualifications. […]

    The sheriff’s office policy states: “A deputy or reserve deputy may only carry a weapon if they receive training on the weapon’s safe and proper usage and qualify with it.”

    The policy’s list of approved weapons does not include the .357 Smith & Wesson revolver that Bates used in the shooting. He has said the gun, which has a laser sight, is his personal weapon.

    The records show Bates’ firearms scores met or exceeded the score of 72 required to qualify, however no logs for 2008, 2012 and 2013 were included in the training records.

    In one qualifying test, Bates initially received a score of 16 before scoring a 64 and 72 on his last attempt.

    The new records also include a handwritten note on Bates’ corporate stationery in which he states that he has completed 507 hours of training. The note was written on March 23, 2009, though Bates said in his statement he was an advanced deputy in 2007.

    You rich, lying asshole.

    Worth contrasting Dyson’s piece on West with Wieseltier’s bombastic “Decline Of The Black Intellectual.” Makes a strong case for diversity. (Dyson’s piece can be found above and is a pretty harsh critique of West.

  396. rq says

    The #STL Board of Aldermen meets this morning at 10:00. We will finally pass the civilian oversight board bill. Been a long time coming.

    10 yrs ago, as a young reporter, I interviewed Alderman Kennedy about civilian review legislation. Today we pass it. Youtube video at the link.

    Have a good news. Teen Who Lost Home in Hurricane Sandy Accepted to 7 Ivy League Schools – a very good news indeed.

    After a tumultuous high school experience, Long Island senior Daria Rose has a bright future ahead of her: The 18-year-old applied to seven Ivy League colleges and has been accepted to each one of them.

    But when Rose was a sophomore, her world turned completely upside down.

    Hurricane Sandy hit in October 2012, forcing her family to evacuate their beloved home in Baldwin. The house was then completely destroyed by fire.

    After the storm, Rose’s family lived in several hotels as well as her grandmother’s house.

    She said the moves made finishing school work extremely difficult.

    “It was hard because it’s really unpredictable when you don’t have a stable place to live,” she told ABC News today. “[You] don’t know if you’re moving here next, or there.”

    Rose said she lost all of her belongings in the fire, including clothes, furniture, makeup, jewelry and pictures.

    “My mom and my dad and my family, they made me realize what was important,” she said. “Stuff is just stuff. What is important is your health, education, your family.”

    After about a year and a half, they finally moved into a new house in Baldwin.

    For a college application essay, Rose wrote about her Hurricane Sandy experience.

    Here’s another to sort of warm, sort of chill, the cockles of the heart. 7th graders find themselves, make sense of world through poetry

    “One day I looked into the mirror,” she said, “and saw a girl with dirty blonde hair, glasses and hazel eyes …” And then Sophia read the poem that bore her soul.

    Over three hours, about 200 people came and went as they listened to more than two dozen winners of the 2015 7th Grade Poetry Contest at a reading and book signing. They heard poems that reflected angst, joy, pain and passions. Some poems were humorous. Others showed the devastating impact that death, crime and larger social issues have on young lives.

    Sophia, who has autism, has been struggling with the stress of her mother’s upcoming heart transplant surgery, at a time when the seventh-grader is also struggling to find identity.

    “Who am I?” she said, reading her poem. “I saw flashbacks of the sketches I once drew/ some Japanese characters like Fukawa Touku … When I came back to reality/ the girl who was crying waterfalls in the mirror/ was actually me.” […]

    But over three hours, the crowd in the bookstore basement was moved to laughter, tears and contemplation.

    “Youth poetry is stronger than it’s ever been,” said Michael Castro, poet laureate for St. Louis, after hearing many of the poets. “The art has a very strong future.”

    Max Manalang of St. Stephen Protomartyr School in St. Louis read a rythmic poem about self revelation: “I am so lucky to be myself / Just as I am, not some puppet on a shelf.”

    Kelly Clever of Salem Lutheran School in the Affton area read a poem about her mother: “It was the last time I saw her face / I was scared to go in and see her.”

    Students who entered the contest were given no boundaries. They were free to write about any theme and in any style. Some said it took them five minutes to put thoughts to paper. Others said it took a week.

    Jaylin Britton of Westview Middle School in north St. Louis County said it took him three days to write about Ferguson. The protests and trauma there were on the top of his mind last fall.

    Chase Ray of Millstadt Consolidated School wrote about the pain that his older brother’s death had left on his family. His mother, in the front row, cried as he read it.

    After the readings, poets went upstairs for a book signing. Some said writing had given them an outlet — a way to make sense of things.

    It gave Mary Ann Saitta, Sophia’s mother, a window into her daughter’s world that she hadn’t had before. “It gave me insight about how she thinks others treat her and how it made her feel.”

    Freddy Gray’s charging documents – for reading and contemplating. Inconsistencies, strangeness, etc. … if it was all so simple, why is he dead?

    Police report says Freddie Gray had knife, arrested ‘without incident’. So like i said, how did his spine get nearly severed, why is he now dead? Why?

    The account is provided in charging documents filed in District Court, where officer Garrett Miller wrote that Gray was stopped because he “fled unprovoked upon noticing police presence.” When Gray, 25, was stopped, they found a knife clipped to the inside of his front pants pocket and placed him under arrest.

    “The defendant was arrested without force or incident,” Miller wrote. “During transport to Western District via wagon transport the defendant suffered a medical emergency and was immediately transported to Shock Trauma via medic.”

    City police have said that video of the incident — which shows a portion of the arrest — does not show use of force at the time of Gray’s arrest, and the cause of his injuries remains unclear.

    An attorney hired by Gray’s family said his spinal cord was severed. He underwent extensive surgery at Shock Trauma, but died Sunday morning, a week after the April 12 incident.

    The officers involved have been placed on administrative assignment pending the outcome of the investigation.

  397. rq says

    The lawyer for #FreddieGray’s family has said that all involved officers have pled the 5th & are not cooperating with police investigators.

    The former Baltimore City St. Atty fired a lawyer for prosecuting a police officer. The new St. Atty hired her back and made her a deputy. This is the environment within which we are calling on police officers to be held accountable.

    City Hall protest for Freddie Gray now marching to nearby police headquarters

    If youre curious abt the motivation for Dyson’s otherwise non sequitur knee-capping of @CornelWest. One word: access. Truth be told I don’t understnad 100% myself. But someone else might.

    Yep, once more, with feeling: Black Man Dies After Police Break His Spine.

    One officer charged, another cleared in video beatings – out of Detroit.

    Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy on Monday announced criminal charges against a former Inkster police officer involved in a high-profile case involving alleged brutality captured on video.

    In a separate videotaped police encounter, Worthy said she won’t charge a police sergeant who arrested Andrew Jackson, a Detroit man charged with carjacking and whose arrest by a multi-jurisdictional, anti-carjacking task force was videotaped by a citizen Jan. 12 in Detroit.

    In the Inkster case, former officer William Melendez was charged with misconduct in office and assault with intent to do great bodily harm. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison.

    The case involves Floyd Dent, a Detroit motorist who is seen being beaten by Melendez during a stop in late January in Inkster. Melendez said he found cocaine on Dent, and he was charged with drug possession, although Worthy on Monday dismissed the charge.

    “To many people in this region and across the country, police brutality appears to be out of control,” Worthy said during a press conference in her office Monday. “It eradicates the confidence that’s been built in those communities where good work has done (by police) to establish those relationships.

    “We cannot tolerate those who abuse their authority … and prey on citizens. We cannot turn our heads when law enforcement becomes the lawbreaker.”

    Ah, but the other guy…?

  398. rq says

    Speaking of Floyd Dent, New video shows bloody Floyd Dent in Inkster jail.

    There are new allegations, backed by new video, that Floyd Dent was mistreated while locked up in the Inkster Police Department.

    The new video, obtained by Local 4 Defenders, shows Dent being placed in a jail cell at the Inkster police station. He’s seen wiping blood from his head and appears to be in terrible pain. There’s no audio but Dent says he was pleading with officers for medical attention.

    “I kept telling them I needed to go to the hospital,” Dent said. “I begged them please call EMS.”

    Officers refused Dent any medical attention.

    “I’m just sittin there, and everyone is just looking at me like I’m a circus clown,” he said, recalling the experience. “[I’m] bleeding like a hog, and then they put me in the jail cell.”

    Earlier in the evening Dent was pulled over for rolling through a stop sign. During the stop, he was pulled from his car, placed in a chokehold, and punched 16 times by Officer William Melendez. Dent was also kicked and tased three times.
    Melendez has since been fired by Inkster Police.

    The video of the traffic stop does not show Dent fighting back, and a judge rejected the officers’ allegation that Dent resisted arrest or assaulted the officer by biting him. Police say they found drugs in Dent’s car and arrested him. Dent was put in a cell and claims police mocked and humiliated.

    “These officers just didn’t care, and the way they treated me in the police station, they had me stripped down, okay, to my shorts,” he said. “They had me lean up against the wall, on the bench on my knees. This is so terrible.”

    Dent was suffering from four broken ribs, a fractured orbital, and had blood on his brain. He claims, despite asking over and over to go to the hospital, he remained at the station as police took a mug shot and multiple photos to document injuries.

    “I’m not a mass murderer, I mean they treated me like I killed 100 people,” he said. “And that’s when I knew that this was some kind of cover up. They be trying to cover up what they did.”

    Dent was taken into a processing room where he sat handcuffed and waited patiently to be fingerprinted. The video shows him co-operating completely, but Dent says they were still treating him as a threat.

    “I don’t know what was wrong with them, to me it seemed like they was on drugs,” he said. “The black office told me: ‘Mr. Dent please stop resisting.’”

    Dent says it wasn’t until he was being taken back to his cell before anyone realized he needed immediate medical attention.

    So if it isn’t about compliance, what is it, smart folk who say black people just need to comply with the nice police officer?

    The prosecutor’s were notified of the #FloydDent beating on March 23rd. The beating occurred in January. Ho-hum, eh?

    Meanwhile, in STl – At the Civilian review board meeting @search4swag . A few of these will be intermittnet.

    In history: April 18, 1983: Alice Walker Becomes the First Woman of Color to Win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Yay! Is she also the last? I hope not.

    I wish Walker had let herself be carried along more by her language, with all its vivid figures of speech, Biblical cadences, distinctive grammar and true-to-life starts and stops. The pithy, direct black folk idiom of The Color Purple is in the end its greatest strength, reminding us that if Walker is sometimes an ideologue, she is also a poet. Despite its occasional preachiness, The Color Purple marks a major advance for Walker’s art. At its best, and at least half the book is superb, it places her in the company of Faulkner, from whom she appears to have learned a great deal: the use of a shifting first-person narrator, for instance, and the presentation of a complex story from a naive point of view, like that of 14-year-old Celie. Walker has not turned her back on the Southern fictional tradition. She has absorbed it and made it her own. By infusing the black experience into the Southern novel, she enriches both it and us.

    @deray #FreddieGray was not brandishing the knife or threatening officers. Instead they “noticed” a pocketknife clipped to his waistband.

    Oh, from Rekia Boyd’s trial. Judge about to make ruling on throwing out case against CPD detective. “This is a court of law it’s not a court of emotion” he warns crowd. More in a bit.

  399. rq says

    Rekia Boyd’s brother, Martinez Sutton, on trial being dismissed: youtube link: Rekia Boyd’s brother, Martinez Sutton, on trial being dismissed . Breaks the heart, it does.

    It’s not even that Dante Servin was found not guilty, but that the charges were DISMISSED. #RekiaBoyd

    Judge said his actions were beyond reckless. Then let him go. Not on first degree murder. A manslaughter charge. A word on that word ‘reckless’ in a moment.

    Officer Who Killed Rekia Boyd Not Guilty of All Charges, Judge Rules

    A Cook County judge ruled prosecutors didn’t prove their case — that a Chicago police detective acted recklessly when he fired into a crowd in 2012, killing 22-year-old Rekia Boyd.

    Judge Dennis Porter’s directed verdict means the legal team for Dante Servin didn’t have to put on a defense before he was acquitted of all charges, touching off an angry scene in the courtroom as Boyd’s family screamed.

    Porter handed down the verdict Monday afternoon amid heavy security in his courtroom, but not before asking anyone who might become emotional to leave.

    “I know this case has generated a lot of emotion … but this is a court of law, not a court of emotion,” Porter said before issuing a long ruling.

    Porter said while he had no doubt that Servin did indeed shoot Boyd, he said prosecutors didn’t prove Servin acted recklessly when he did so, a requirement for finding someone guilty of manslaughter.

    After the verdict was read, screaming members of Boyd’s family were dragged from the courtroom as Servin hugged relatives.

    There’s a ‘judge’s verdict explained’ link within the link, if anyone wants to read that, too.

    Watch The Official Trailer To Dame Dash & Kanye West’s New Documentary “The Secret to Ballin”.

    Dame Dash and Kanye West are executive producers of a new documentary-drama called The Secret To Ballin. With Snoop Dogg, RZA, Timbaland, and other industry heavy hitters, the documentary will serve as a huge informational tip. They detail how to stay ahead of the crowd and competition. Kanye West and Dame Dash may have had a fallen out over the last decade or so, but the two understand that together they can create magic. As we wait to see more come from this project, checkout the trailer below and let us know what you think.

    “They can no longer keep it from us.”

  400. rq says

    And for fun, Shoutout to carefree black boys, too. Celebrate diversity.

    The @stltoday Photography Staff really does deserve that Pulitzer. These images will likely be in history books. Check out those photos. *thumbs up*

    1.5 Million Missing Black Men – where are they?

    In New York, almost 120,000 black men between the ages of 25 and 54 are missing from everyday life. In Chicago, 45,000 are, and more than 30,000 are missing in Philadelphia. Across the South — from North Charleston, S.C., through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi and up into Ferguson, Mo. — hundreds of thousands more are missing.

    They are missing, largely because of early deaths or because they are behind bars. Remarkably, black women who are 25 to 54 and not in jail outnumber black men in that category by 1.5 million, according to an Upshot analysis. For every 100 black women in this age group living outside of jail, there are only 83 black men. Among whites, the equivalent number is 99, nearly parity.

    African-American men have long been more likely to be locked up and more likely to die young, but the scale of the combined toll is nonetheless jarring. It is a measure of the deep disparities that continue to afflict black men — disparities being debated after a recent spate of killings by the police — and the gender gap is itself a further cause of social ills, leaving many communities without enough men to be fathers and husbands.

    Perhaps the starkest description of the situation is this: More than one out of every six black men who today should be between 25 and 54 years old have disappeared from daily life.

    “The numbers are staggering,” said Becky Pettit, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas.

    And what is the city with at least 10,000 black residents that has the single largest proportion of missing black men? Ferguson, Mo., where a fatal police shooting last year led to nationwide protests and a Justice Department investigation that found widespread discrimination against black residents. Ferguson has 60 men for every 100 black women in the age group, Stephen Bronars, an economist, has noted.

    Graphs. But not happy-making graphs.
    Ferguson makes an appearance.

    ‘They Should All Go Down’: Eric Harris’ Son Seeks Justice for Dad oh and I hope so too.

    Aiden Fraley, Harris’ 16-year-old son, said that wasn’t good enough.

    “They should all go down,” Aiden told NBC News in an interview, speaking of other deputies who converged on Harris after he fell to the ground bleeding. “They were involved in it. One of the dudes had his knee on his head, and I feel like that played a part in his death after the shooting.”

    As for Bates, Aiden said: “He’s 73 years old. He should have been in a retirement home, not out there on the scene killing my dad.”

    But Aiden’s mother, Cathy Fraley, who had known Harris for almost 20 years and called him her “soulmate,” said she simply wanted a full explanation and “accountability,” telling NBC News that she was willing to forgive Bates.

    “The Lord has forgiven me for my sins, and who am I not to forgive him?” Fraley said in her first public comments on the case. “But I would just ask them: ‘Do you have children? How much did you love your children?’ Well, that’s how much Eric loved Aiden.”

    She added: “How would they feel if that was somebody they loved on the ground that had been shot?”

    Cook County DA just announced that after he was beaten, Floyd Dent was illegally strip searched and assaulted in jail as well.
    It’s absurd that the family of #RekiaBoyd was given $4.5 million for her wrongful death but NOBODY’s held accountable .

  401. rq says

    Police officers prosecuted for use of deadly force. More unhappy-making graphs.

    Since 2005, 54 officers nationwide have been criminally charged after they shot and killed someone in the line of duty, according to a review by The Washington Post and Bowling Green State University researchers. The Post analyzed the details of those prosecutions, which involved the killings of 49 people.

    Most of the officers white, most of the victims black.

    Judge dismisses case against Chicago cop Dante Servin; Courtroom explodes.

    Charges were dismissed against Chicago Police Officer Dante Servin in the 2012 shooting death of Rekia Boyd, 22.

    Servin, a decorated police officer who remained on the force but was stripped of his powers and assigned to desk duty during the proceedings, was charged with involuntary manslaughter. The judge ruled there was no evidence of reckless conduct in the case, which would have been required for the involuntary manslaughter charge and others, and dismissed the charges.

    “Simply put: The evidence presented in this case does not support the charges on which the defendant was indicted and tried. There being no evidence of recklessness as a matter of law, there is no evidence to which the state could sustain its burden of proof as to the fourth element of the charge of involuntary manslaughter,” Judge Dennis Porter said. “Therefore, there is a finding of not guilty on all counts and the defendant is discharged.”

    As soon as the verdict was announced, the courtroom exploded. Boyd’s brother, Martinez Sutton, shouted “that man killed my sister” as other family members cried out in disbelief.

    Guards escorted him out of the courtroom while Servin watched from the corner, blinking back tears. Servin, who spoke to cameras after the decision, maintains his innocence.

    They quote him, but by all the non-existent gods I’m not giving him platform until PZ expressly tells me so.

    The 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs from the Post-Dispatch – nice!

    The St. Louis Post-Dispatch photo staff was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for its coverage of the protests in Ferguson. The entry consists of 19 photographs and supplemental material that records the impact of the photographic coverage.

    On Aug. 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an 18-year-old unarmed African-American, was shot and killed by Darren Wilson. The photography staff covered the story nonstop from that first day through November’s grand jury decision not to indict Wilson. As the protests fueled a debate over race and policing tactics, the staff’s images from months of demonstrations and police actions were shared globally.

    Martinez told us that the officer who killed #RekiaBoyd told people he meant to shoot someone else. Today, he was found not guilty.

    Martinez, #RekiaBoyd’s brother, just exited the building, surrounded by cops as people weep.
    #DanteServin

  402. rq says

    As the not guilty verdict was announced re: the officer who killed #RekiaBoyd, a fight broke out. 4 arrests, including Rekia’s brother.
    A sympathetic legal rep is helping, trying to track arrestees, currently at 26th & California.

    I’m wondering if these are some crossed wires, as we saw her brother speak andthere don’t seem to be any arrests.

    Civilian oversight has been voted into existence. This is history. This feels amazing.
    History was just made. 17 yes 8 no votes for BB208. STL has a civilian oversight board!!!!!!!
    That really i some good news. A start, as it were.

    Use of ‘African-American’ Dates to Nation’s Early Days

    The term African-American may seem to be a product of recent decades, exploding into common usage in the 1990s after a push from advocates like Jesse Jackson, and only enshrined in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2001.

    The O.E.D.’s entry, revised in 2012, traces the first known occurrence to 1835, in an abolitionist newspaper. But now, a researcher has discovered a printed reference in an anti-British sermon from 1782 credited to an anonymous “African American,” pushing the origins of the term back to the earliest days of independence.

    “We think of it as a neutral alternative to older terms, one that resembles Italian-American or Irish-American,” said Fred Shapiro, an associate director at the Yale Law School Library, who found the reference. “It’s a very striking usage to see back in 1782.”

    Mr. Shapiro, a longtime contributor to the O.E.D. and the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, found the reference last month in one of his regular sweeps of various online databases that have transformed lexicographic research by gathering vast swaths of historical texts — once scattered across the collections of far-flung libraries and historical societies — in one easily searchable place.

    One day, Mr. Shapiro typed “African American” into a database of historical newspapers. Up popped an advertisement that appeared in The Pennsylvania Journal on May 15, 1782, announcing: “Two Sermons, written by the African American; one on the Capture of Lord Cornwallis, to be SOLD.”

    With the help of George Thompson, a retired librarian from New York University, Mr. Shapiro found one of the titles — “A Sermon on the Capture of Lord Cornwallis” — and located a copy of it, a 16-page pamphlet, at Houghton Library at Harvard University.

    The sermon, which crows about the surrender of the British Army at Yorktown the previous year, was acquired by Harvard in 1845 and seems to have been all but uncited in scholarly literature. Its author — listed on the title page as “an African American” — is anonymous, identified only as “not having the benefit of a liberal education.”

    “Was it a freeman?” Mr. Shapiro said. “A slave? We don’t know.”

    Black people in the Colonial period, whatever their legal status, were most commonly referred to as “Negro” or “African.”

    But in the years after the Revolution, various terms emphasizing their claim to being “American” — a label which was applied to people of European descent living in the colonies by the end of the 17th century — came into circulation.

    “Afro-American” has been documented as early as 1831, with “black American” (1818) and “Africo-American” (1788) going back even further.

    “We want dancing and raree-shows and ramadans to forget miseries and wretchedness as much as the Africo-americans want the Banjar” — banjo — “to digest with their Kuskus the hardships of their lives,” a correspondent wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1788. (“Kuskus” is a variant of “couscous.”)

    Katherine C. Martin, the editor of United States dictionaries at Oxford University Press, said the O.E.D.’s researchers were in the process of confirming Mr. Shapiro’s discovery.

    “It’s very exciting,” she said. “Once we have it nailed down, I would expect we’ll update our entry.”

    Just plain interesting, the things that happened in history, if you bother to look.

    St. Louis Courthouse.

    Slaves were sold on the steps at times, as part of estates and debt. Dred and Harriet Scott case was argued here. The Scott family was also freed here–by their owners after the 1857 Supreme Court decision. Dred died the next year. He died a free man.

  403. says

    (Oklahoma murderer) Bates got 16, 64, and 72? Perfect, just what the world needs, a 72-year-old Deputy Barney Fife who needs to rip off a few cylinders before he can get around to hitting what he’s shooting at. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be downrange of him. Seriously, imagine the whole encounter with Don Knotts playing Bates, and tell me you can’t see his part of it being perfectly Barney: accidentally shooting after drawing the wrong weapon, then shouting “Sorry!” and dropping the gun. It’s ridiculous.

    Speaking as a former small arms instructor, I’m willing to bet that that third “qualifying” round was scored as generously as the instructor could score it, given he just met the required amount, and only on his third attempt. This man shouldn’t have been anywhere near the job he was doing, armed as he was. He was dangerously unqualified, and it led him to murder a man.

  404. Pteryxx says

    There are so many victims of police violence that the press conferences are starting to overlap. America.

    (Twitter)

    Responses on that timeline from concerned folks who can’t even keep up with the news or the hashtags… so many names. And it’s only April.

    It’s already begun. #FreddieGray, framed as the suspect. The truth is that Freddie is the victim.

    (Twitter)

    Screenshot at the link shows CNN headline “Baltimore police comment on suspect’s death”

    Shaun King going on a rant that summarizes the dismissal of Rekia Boyd’s case Starts here: (Twitter)

    Give me a few tweets to explain to you just how outrageous it is that no officer was convicted in the murder of #RekiaBoyd

    1. In America, if a white officers simply imagines a black threat, I mean completely & totally makes it up, it’s more than enough to go free

    2. On March 21st, 2012 #RekiaBoyd was standing next to Antonio Cross. NO LAWS BEING BROKEN. Officer Dante Servin COMPLETELY IMAGINED A GUN.

    3. Off duty, Officer Dante Servin pulls out his gun and shoots Antonio Cross in the hand & #RekiaBoyd in the her head

    4. Antonio Cross DID NOT HAVE A GUN, but a damn cell phone. The officer IMAGINED the phone was a gun & KILLED A WOMAN b/c of his imagination

    5. Antonio Cross, who SURVIVED being shot TESTIFIED that he yelled at the officer “Why the fuck did you shoot us?”

    6. Yet, in spite of a LIVING BREATHING WITNESS and the fact that NO GUN EXISTED, Officer Servin was set free today.

    7. Mind you, they weren’t even trying to convict this officer for 1st or 2nd degree murder, but manslaughter. He wasn’t even on duty.

  405. Pteryxx says

    Also via Shaun King, bystander video of Freddie Gray’s arrest shows him screaming in pain as he’s being dragged with his feet dangling, suggesting he was already injured before being loaded into the van. Daily Kos, Twitter with video links at both. The same video appears in previously cited news articles such as the Baltimore Sun.

    Dear @BaltimorePolice.

    You LIED.

    You said #FreddieGray was arrested w/o force or incident.

    What’s THIS?

  406. Pteryxx says

    re rq’s #380, the email from a retired police officer/wagon driver, received and posted by Justin Fenton of the Baltimore Sun: (Link to Fenton’s tweet)

    Transcribing from the relevant portions of the screenshots:

    I drove the wagon while assigned to the NE District and, it is the wagon man who has complete control over a suspect once an arrest is made and he arrives to transport. Regardless of any circumstances involved with the arrest, to include Officer’s attitude toward the prisoner, or vice versa, it rest solely on the transporting officer to ensure the prisoner arrives where necessary. At times I’ve had to calm prisoners down and, in some instances, I had to get the officer to leave the prisoner alone. […]

    In the matter involving Gray, the wagon man SHOULD have belted Gray in and, he should have alerted KGA if there was any issue involving him once he started toward the station. YOU KNOW if a prisoner is loose within the rear area of the wagon. ABSENT being strapped down as required, a wagon man can cause you to be throw around within the rear cabin via rapid starts and sudden stops. The inside of a wagon is unforgiving when a person is deliberately thrown around inside. The question these officers must be asked is: Were they mad at Gray for “daring” to run from them and then, not finding anything, they would show him! Convey this attitude to the transporting officer and, the rest is history!

  407. Pteryxx says

    Also from Justin Fenton’s timeline, quotes from the Baltimore press conference earlier today about Freddie Gray’s death: (Twitter start)

    “I’m angry that we are here again. That we have to tell another mother that their child is dead .. And why we dont have answers” – @MayorSRB

    “We know that having a knife is not necessarily a crime, not necessarily probable cause to chase someone. So we have questions”

    Batts: “My goal is any interaction btwn police dept & community, the goal is to come home safe. Asking for calm,for process to be completed”

    Batts gives deadline for completion of investigation by next Friday

    “We’re being as transparent as we possibly can. We guarantee transparency and we guarantee accountability” – Batts

    From another reporter at the conference: (Twitter)

    “None of his limbs were broken; he did suffer a very tragic injury to his spinal cord, which resulted in his death.” BPD’s Rodriguez

    So when he was being dragged and bystanders were yelling about his legs, his legs were actually not broken. Well that’s just peachy.

  408. Pteryxx says

    Might be a repeat, but worth reviewing: Baltimore Sun investigation into police brutality, September 2014.

    Undue Force

    The beating Lyles received from Baltimore police officers — along with the resulting payout from city funds — is part of a disturbing pattern, a six-month investigation by The Baltimore Sun has found.

    Over the past four years, more than 100 people have won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil rights violations. Victims include a 15-year-old boy riding a dirt bike, a 26-year-old pregnant accountant who had witnessed a beating, a 50-year-old woman selling church raffle tickets, a 65-year-old church deacon rolling a cigarette and an 87-year-old grandmother aiding her wounded grandson.

    Those cases detail a frightful human toll. Officers have battered dozens of residents who suffered broken bones — jaws, noses, arms, legs, ankles — head trauma, organ failure, and even death, coming during questionable arrests. Some residents were beaten while handcuffed; others were thrown to the pavement.

    And in almost every case, prosecutors or judges dismissed the charges against the victims — if charges were filed at all. In an incident that drew headlines recently, charges against a South Baltimore man were dropped after a video showed an officer repeatedly punching him — a beating that led the police commissioner to say he was “shocked.”

    Such beatings, in which the victims are most often African-Americans, carry a hefty cost. They can poison relationships between police and the community, limiting cooperation in the fight against crime, the mayor and police officials say. They also divert money in the city budget — the $5.7 million in taxpayer funds paid out since January 2011 would cover the price of a state-of-the-art rec center or renovations at more than 30 playgrounds. And that doesn’t count the $5.8 million spent by the city on legal fees to defend these claims brought against police.

    […]

    City policies help to shield the scope and impact of beatings from the public, even though Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake acknowledges that police brutality was one of the main issues broached by residents in nine recent forums across Baltimore.

    The city’s settlement agreements contain a clause that prohibits injured residents from making any public statement — or talking to the news media — about the incidents. And when settlements are placed on the agenda at public meetings involving the mayor and other top officials, the cases are described using excerpts from police reports, with allegations of brutality routinely omitted. State law also helps to shield the details, by barring city officials from discussing internal disciplinary actions against the officers — even when a court has found them at fault.

    The Rev. Jamal-Harrison Bryant, a local pastor who has railed against police brutality, was surprised to hear that the city has spent millions to settle police misconduct allegations.

    “I am absolutely stunned,” said Bryant, who leads a Northwest Baltimore mega-church. “I had no idea it was this bad. I had no idea we had this volume in this city.”

    […]

    Many of the lawsuits stemmed from the now-disbanded Violent Crimes Impact Section, which used plainclothes officers to target high-crime areas. Officers frequently wrote in charging documents that they feared for their safety and that residents received the injuries when resisting arrest.

    Department officials said some officers were exonerated in internal force investigations, even though jurors and the city awarded thousands of dollars to battered residents in those incidents.

    For years, leaders in Baltimore’s Police Department, the nation’s eighth-largest, didn’t track or monitor the number of lawsuits filed against each officer. As a result, city officials were unaware that some officers were the target of as many as five lawsuits.

    The Sun’s findings include only lawsuits that have been settled or decided in court; dozens of similar cases are still pending. The city has faced 317 lawsuits over police conduct since 2011 — and recently budgeted an additional $4.2 million for legal fees, judgments and lawsuits, a $2.5 million increase from fiscal 2014.

    “This is not something I take lightly,” Rawlings-Blake said. “I’ve worked hard, very hard, to have a dialogue with the community about how do we build trust and send the message that law enforcement that acts outside of the law will not be tolerated.”

    Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts, who took over in late 2012, has publicly vowed to eliminate misconduct among the city’s 2,800 officers. Other police officials say the department has begun to track such allegations more closely to punish officers in the wrong.

    “I can’t speak to what was done before, but I can certainly tell you that’s what’s being done now, and we won’t deviate from that,” said Deputy Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez, who joined the agency in January 2013 to lead the new Professional Standards and Accountability Bureau.

    Rodriguez, who once worked in Internal Affairs at the Los Angeles Police Department, said the mandate is to provide policing in a professional manner that doesn’t violate constitutional rights.

    “We will not let officers get away with any wrongdoing,” Rodriguez said. “It will not be tolerated.”

    The department would not allow The Sun to interview officers named in the lawsuits, saying that would violate department policy. Annual base salaries for the officers ranged from $61,000 and $67,000.

    But Robert F. Cherry, president of the city’s Fraternal Order of Police lodge, cautioned that some people file frivolous lawsuits against officers who work to keep the city safe.

    “Our officers are not brutal,” he said. “The trial attorneys and criminal elements want to take advantage of the courts.”

    Most of the rest of the article details specific victims’ cases, including a browseable list of settlements and injuries inflicted by police.

  409. Pteryxx says

    even more text from the Baltimore Sun article Undue Force:

    Civil rights abuses can tarnish a police department’s image in any city, experts say. Strained relationships make it difficult for officers to gain trust on the streets — from getting tips to solving crimes to winning taxpayer support to hire more officers.

    “All of those things are put in jeopardy,” said David A. Harris, an expert at the University of Pittsburgh Law School on police misconduct and accountability. “People will tend to view [police] as illegitimate. This is a real problem for police departments.”

    Good, solid policing requires mutual respect between officers and residents, he added.

    Rawlings-Blake acknowledged the importance of that relationship in an interview about the costly settlements. “It is a sacred covenant that each officer makes with members of the community, and when it’s broken, it’s devastating for not just the victim, but it’s devastating for our ability to move forward as a city.”

    She said the relationship between the community and police has improved since Batts was hired, noting that residents are providing more tips to Crime Stoppers and making fewer complaints about discourteous officers.

    But more than a dozen bystanders who were named in court records or who testified in court declined to talk to The Sun about the arrests and altercations that they witnessed — saying, like Lyles, that they feared retaliation from police.

    City Councilman Brandon Scott, vice chairman of the council’s Public Safety Committee, said police leaders need to cleanse the force of bad officers.

    “We have to expedite the process,” Scott said. “We have to fire them. We can’t afford to keep paying these settlements. These folks that are beating people have to go.”

    Police Commissioner Batts, Deputy Commissioner Rodriguez and Mayor Rawlings-Blake all spoke at the press conference this afternoon. Before long we’ll find out if they back up their words.

  410. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    In history: April 18, 1983: Alice Walker Becomes the First Woman of Color to Win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Yay! Is she also the last? I hope not.

    Nope. There was Toni Morrison for “Beloved” in the late 80s, and Jumpah Lahari (sp? I’m not quite sure I’ve got the first name right either, but it’s something like that) who also won it, though I don’t know when. I only know about Lahari because of a friend up here in Canada who’s of Indian descent, but Beloved – everyone should know that. That was a big deal, almost as big a deal as The Color Purple, and the movie gave everyone a chance to know that, yes, this was a Pulitzer winner, pay attention!

    There might be other women of color winners as well, but I don’t know them.

    Of course, the Pulitzer is also a US award for US writers, so there’s not too many reasons for rq to know all that.

  411. rq says

    So some stuff that I didn’t get to last night because I thought it would be a good idea to fall asleep instead of finish the updates.
    Thanks, Crip Dyke, for that clarification re: Pulitzer, I confess I just didn’t bother to check because it was late and I was sincerely expressing a hope that more black women have won the prize since Walker. I am pleased to discover that this is true.

    +++

    Terry Kennedy is the alderman in the 18th and has been fighting for this civilian board for over a decade.
    He was the main sponsor of the Civilian Oversight board that @MayorSlay vetoed and then took language to make an executive order, so a congratulations to him on the tentative progress.

    The drug charges against #FloydDent have been dropped. That would be the ones absolutely unwarranted and most likely planted by officer Melendez, who has since been fired. Good.

    #FreddieGray protests are planned for the next 3 days. Join us tomorrow morning, at 9am, in front of #Baltimore City Hall #JusticeForFreddie – which means due to my failure to post this last night, you may have missed out on one day of protests. There’s two left. :)

    Video from yesterday’s #JusticeForFreddie protest; marching from Gilmor Homes to @BaltimorePolice Western District, youtube link at the link.

    This’ll keep popping up from various sources. Baltimore Man Dies From Injuries Sustained While In Police Detention . I’m glad it’s getting around.
    The current official story is that he was fine when they put him in the van and he was not fine when they took him out of the van, but some people have pointed out that he doesn’t look too fine in the video of the police putting him in the van – suggesting that he should have had medical attention at that point already, and that while not all of his injuries may have been caused by the (most charitably) negligent van ride, they were certainly aggravated to a life-threatening degree. Either way, these cops have got to pay.

  412. rq says

    Here’s another champion of the civilian review board in STL: @AntonioFrench rises to speak to civilan review legislation as a packed house looks on. Discussion underway.

    And there’s a STL press conference with @jamalhbryant and other church leaders re: economic empowerment.

    In Toronto, Mark Saunders, @TorontoPolice Union’s pick, has been named new chief. The beatings, racism, and killing will continue indefinitely. #topoli Just a note that things aren’t quite as rosy up north, either.

    The Rekia Boyd dismissal: @deray I’m still trying to understand what “beyond” actually means here. Murder? (Ref. ‘beyond reckless’ as explained by the judge for throwing out the case.)
    To which was replied, @Blueraydre @deray Yes murder. The judge is saying here that he is guilty of murder and the state should of charged it.
    I’m still not exactly sure what that means – that the judge was unwilling to hear the case and/or convict on the lesser charge of manslaughter? Can’t the judge upgrade somehow (or does the law only work in a downward direction)? Even if the judge thought the charge should be murder, I’m disappointed in the result. One more cop getting off scot-free, because it seems doubtful that he’ll be going back to court on a harsher charge – and can he go to court once again on the same charge?

    Detroit, Detroit… Detroit police officers seen beating suspect: Will they be charged? (+video)

    A prosecutor plans to announce whether charges will be filed against two Detroit-area police officers involved in separate beatings caught on video.

    In January, a driver was repeatedly punched in the head during a traffic stop in Inkster. That same month, a man suspected in a carjacking in Detroit was kicked and punched by officers who belonged to a regional car theft unit. Both incidents were recorded on video.

    Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy has scheduled a news conference for Monday morning to discuss the attacks and possible charges.

    Inkster Officer William Melendez has been fired, although his union is appealing. He told WXYZ-TV that “there are always two sides to every story.” Floyd Dent’s head was bleeding from his injuries after Melendez subdued and arrested him.

    So that’s Melendez, but funny, the article never mentions the other beating besides mentioning that it happened. So no, no word on the cahrges if any in the second case.
    That I have found.

  413. rq says

    ART: A discourse on beauty and representation – the work of visual artist Brianna McCarthy. For the beauty of the art.

    Explore the art of mixed media visual artist Brianna McCarthy. Living and working in Trinidad and Tobago, McCarthy – a self-taught artist – works through the mediums of masking, performance art, fabric collage, traditional media, and installation pieces; and, as stated on her site, she aims to create a new “discourse” examining issues of beauty, stereotypes, and representation. Check out her beautiful works of art below.

    Love her style, the lines… beautiful!

    Inside Ferguson With Photographers From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – these are the Pulitzer winners, the article – from August 2014. Worth another look.

    “When all the world’s media leaves, this is still our neighborhood,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s director of photography Lynden Steele recently told TIME. “We have to work knowing that what we do now will come back to us a month from now. We have to be able to stand by what we’re doing now because we’re going to be in that neighborhood weeks, months, years from now.”

    Over the past few weeks, the journalists at the Post-Dispatch, created by Joseph Pulitzer in 1878 from a merger of the St. Louis Dispatch and the St. Louis Evening Post, have been covering a national story unfolding on their doorstep. In the wake of Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson’s fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown on Aug. 9, and the turbulent protests that followed, the paper’s staff photographers went to work—and they haven’t stopped.

    “It’s a little bit surreal to see President Obama talking about a situation that you witnessed firsthand the night before,” says Post-Dispatch photographer David Carson. “That’s not something that happens every day.”

    “We’re prepared for spot news,” Lynden Steele adds. “But having an isolated war zone [in your own county], I don’t know how you prepare for that.”

    I completely understand why people become docile & stoic. It hurts too damn much to get up every morning believing the world will change.

    Kanye West: “I Am Not What I Would Consider Truly a Musician, I Am an Inventor, I Am an Innovator”

    Paper Mag, the same publication that Kim Kardashian posed nude for last year, just released an informative look at the life of Kanye West. As transcribed and told to Gabby Bess, Kanye speaks about his role as an artist today, and how he feels he needs to help the younger generations moving forward. “I think it’s so important for me, as an artist, to give Drake as much information as I can, A$AP, Kendrick, Taylor Swift, any of these younger artists as much information as I can to make better music in the future,” West said.

    He also revealed that it’s tougher for him to make music right now than it has ever been during his career because he doesn’t want to make something that people have seen or heard 1,000 times before. “It’s easier for people who focus on it all day and who are younger in their concept of what they want to do with it. I am not what I would consider truly a musician. I am an inventor. I am an innovator,” West revealed.

    ‘Ye also defended his fellow artists involved with Tidal, and said that’s he tired of people associating the Illuminati with musicians. “Fuck all of this sensationalism. We gave you our lives. We gave you our hearts. We gave you our opinions,” West said. The full feature can be read here.

    Chicagos west side shut down for over 2hrs in response to cop Dante Servin being let off for murdering #RekiaBoyd

    Justice For Tania Harris – Minneapolis, MN, vimeo video. She’s the 18-year-old that got shot twice in the pelvic area and is apparently recovering.

  414. rq says

    Missouri town elects first black mayor; 80% of the police, city attorney, water supervisor resign – DailyKos, Shaun King article.

    What in the world did they expect Mayor-Elect Byrd to do? While it’s deeply offensive, puzzling, and highly suspicious that so many elected officials scrambled the moment the first African-American mayor in the history of Parma, Missouri, was elected, it’s hard not to think they did her a favor.

    If the very presence of a black woman in power causes you to fear for your safety, you shouldn’t be a public servant.

    Oklahoma Sheriff Apologizes to Family of Man Shot By Reserve Deputy – so Bates apologized, and now his boss apologized. We’re all good now, right? Right?

    An Oklahoma sheriff offered an apology on Monday to the family of Eric Harris, the unarmed man who was shot and killed by a reserve deputy who says he confused his gun for a Taser.

    “We are sorry Eric was taken from you,” said Sheriff Stanley Glanz of Tulsa County. “My sympathy goes out to that family.”

    The sheriff said his department was still trying to find all the training records for the reserve deputy, Robert Bates, a 73-year-old former insurance executive who volunteered with the department.

    There’s a link to more.
    Note the wording: ‘taken from you’. Not killed, murdered or any other such ‘strong’ language. Nope, Eric Harris was ‘taken from his family’. Too little violence in that phrasing to represent the situation that occurred.

    A moment of silence for Rekia, right where she was killed
    #RekiaBoyd #DanteServin
    Shutting down intersection at Douglas
    #RekiaBoyd

    Watching this video on CNN and you can see that Freddie Gray couldn’t move his legs before he was put in the van. Fucking lying murderers. As I said, no conclusive stuff, but it’s been noticed.

    Man who police say attempted suicide in Jennings jail dies; family calls for investigation

    A man who police said tried to hang himself in the Jennings jail on Oct. 4 died on Tuesday, according to St. Louis County police.

    In a news conference outside the Jennings jail, the family of DeJuan Brison, 26, said Thursday they didn’t think the death was a suicide; their lawyer, Jerryl Christmas, called for a federal investigation into the death and called on St. Louis County police to take over operation of the jail.

    Brison, of the 5800 block of Page Boulevard in St. Louis, had been arrested by St. Louis police Oct. 1 on a domestic violence case, officials said.

    Lauren Trager, a spokeswoman for the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office, said “the matter was initially refused for insufficient evidence, yet remained under investigation.”

    It was not clear why Brison remained in jail for three days in St. Louis without charges. Representatives of the St. Louis Police Department and the city’s Department of Corrections did not respond to requests for comment.

    Mayor Francis Slay’s office said it was looking into the situation.

    This is from October 2014. Just another mark against the police in the STL area.

  415. rq says

    Family of Freddie Gray, fatally injured while in Baltimore police custody, demands answers

    On April 12, Freddie Gray, healthy and whole, was arrested by the Baltimore Police.

    According to his family and attorney Billy Murphy, when Freddie arrived at the hospital he had three broken vertebrae, his spinal cord was severed 80 percent, his voice box damaged, and his brain was swollen.

    He died a week later.

    The police thus far have refused to give any reasonable explanation of how Gray went from healthy to dead in their custody.

    New incident reports that were just released state that Gray “was arrested without force or incident” and that he “suffered a medical emergency” in the back of the police van after his arrest.

    Here’s the thing: spines don’t sever themselves.

    The video below, taken by a bystander as Gray was arrested, appears to show him with a severe leg injury. While this is speculative, it appears that legs may not have even been functioning because of a spinal injury at this moment.

    Whatever the case, the police report is grossly inaccurate. Either Gray suffered those catastrophic injuries during his arrest or he suffered them in the van.

    We need answers.

    The usual video at the link.

    The Rekia Boyd Verdict Explained: Expert Says Judge’s Decision ‘Unusual’ –

    A judge’s verdict clearing an off-duty Chicago Police detective in the shooting death of 22-year-old Rekia Boyd was “unusual, not rare,” according to an expert on Illinois criminal law.

    Monday’s ruling, by Judge Dennis Porter, cleared Chicago Police Det. Dante Servin on charges of involuntary manslaughter, reckless discharge of a firearm and reckless conduct when he shot and killed Boyd near Douglas Park three years ago.

    “It sounds like what Judge Porter did was come to the conclusion that … even if you take all the evidence in favor of the state, they haven’t proven what they need to,” said Professor Richard Kling of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent College of Law.

    The directed verdict came before defense attorneys would have presented their case. In effect, Porter’s directed verdict ruled they didn’t have to because prosecutors never made their case in the first place.

    Kling said that’s “more usual” in bench trials, like this one, than in jury trials, where the judge is usually more willing to let the jury make its own determination. He added that prosecutors might have opted for the wrong charges.

    “They charged him with reckless conduct, and what Judge Porter said was this wasn’t reckless, it was intentional,” Kling added. “And it ended up hurting them.”

    Some criticism on the charges was directed at Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, who has been criticized before for being soft on prosecuting police officers.

    #WJZ NOW: People marching have arrived at Western District @BaltimorePolice @cbsbaltimore #freddiegray

    Freedom from Religion Foundation Awards $10,000 to Black Skeptics Los Angeles’ First in the Family College Scholarship Fund – a small positive bit of news.

    Six Baltimore officers suspended over police-van death of Freddie Gray – with or without pay?

    Six Baltimore police officers have been suspended over the death of a man whose neck was broken after he was arrested and locked in a police van, as it emerged officers had delayed providing him with medical attention despite his requests.

    Freddie Gray died from a “significant spinal injury”, police confirmed on Monday, while claiming it remained unknown how he was hurt. Chiefs said Gray appeared to have been injured while locked alone in a compartment of their transportation wagon.

    “When Mr Gray was put in that van, he could talk, he was upset. And when he was taken out of that van, he could not talk and he could not breathe,” deputy police commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said at a press conference.

    “It’s clear that what happened happened inside the van,” said mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. “We don’t have any procedure that would have an officer riding in the back of the van with the suspect.”
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    Rodriguez said all officers involved who had been interviewed had denied using force against Gray. A criminal inquiry has been opened into Gray’s death. City officials said the investigation would be completed by Friday 1 May and then handed to state prosecutors, who would decide whether or not to bring criminal charges.

    Providing the most detailed timeline of events surrounding Gray’s arrest and detention on 12 April, senior city officials revealed he had asked officers for an asthma inhaler two minutes after he was apprehended, before he was placed inside the police van.

    Yet the van made two stops before medical assistance was radioed for, the officials said. During the second stop, another prisoner from a separate incident was placed inside the van in a compartment walled off from Gray.

    Rodriguez told reporters before this second stop, which occurred about 13 minutes after Gray was placed in the van, the driver had requested an additional unit to check on Gray, who had been placed in leg irons during the first stop after “acting irate in the back”.

    The 25-year-old eventually received medical attention half an hour after the police van departed, according to the police timeline of events.

    I wonder if that second passenger heard or saw anything, or would be willing to talk about it?

    Parma residents react to loss of police officers

    The loss in force comes as the newly elected mayor is sworn in.

    Of the six officers, two full-time and three part-time stepped down.

    Some say they’re not worried about their safety and it wasn’t necessary to have that many on staff for a city the size of Parma.

    Some say they’re relieved about the situation and that Parma doesn’t have that many problems in town to require so many officers.

    “I think it was pretty dirty the way they all quit without giving her a chance, but I don’t think they hurt the town with quitting because who needs six police for 740 people?” said Martha Miller of Parma.

    As for why the police and two city employees resigned, Mayor Tyrus Byrd is still trying to figure that out.

    The resignation letter could not be found, according to Mayor Byrd.

    “They say we have six cops on the payroll. How can we have six cops and we go days without cops patrolling and we have these recent break-ins?” asked one Parma resident.

    Former Mayor Randall Ramsey said it had to do with “safety concerns.”

    Mayor Tyrus Byrd began her first day in office with a clean slate. Literally.

    Mayor Byrd said the resignation letters cannot be found and that the computers were cleared.

    Now that is interesting. I’m very pleased with the residents’ reaction in general, though. But the computers? Whoa………….

  416. rq says

    Judge throws out charges against Chicago officer charged with involuntary manslaughter, facebook video of the judge’s decision.

    Chicagos west side shut down for over 2hrs in response to cop Dante Servin being let off for murdering #RekiaBoyd

    This past year, we’ve seen more American police execution videos than ISIS execution videos.

    Baltimore Suspends 6 Police Officers in Inquiry in Death of Freddie Gray

    “We have no evidence — physical, video or statements — of any use of force,” the deputy police commissioner, Jerry Rodriguez, said at the news conference. “He did suffer a very tragic injury to his spinal cord, which resulted in his death. What we don’t know, and what we need to get to, is how that injury occurred.”

    They don’t know shit. What a police force.

    Demand UNC hall named for KKK head be renamed #HurstonHall for Zora who studied there secretly, that tweet links here: Comments

    The UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees is asking the campus community to submit thoughts and ideas about a request to rename Saunders Hall and the larger question of fully understanding the University’s 221-year-old history.

    This outreach is part of the trustees’ months-long effort to seek input from the Carolina community. In May 2014, the board welcomed the opportunity to hear students’ concerns about Saunders Hall. Trustees explained the University’s current naming policy and committed to follow up that has since included researching the issues and gathering facts. Trustees have listened to a wide range of interested people – current and former campus leaders, alumni, student groups, faculty, historians and policy experts – during hundreds of conversations.

    All submissions are subject to disclosure since UNC-Chapel Hill is a public institution. Submissions will be accepted through April 25, 2015.

    Let’s get the KKK out.

  417. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    About the Oklahoma non-apology?

    Note the wording: ‘taken from you’. Not killed, murdered or any other such ‘strong’ language. Nope, Eric Harris was ‘taken from his family’. Too little violence in that phrasing to represent the situation that occurred.

    Yeah, there’s that. There’s also this other thing, a little thing, about the difference between

    “We are sorry Eric was taken from you,”

    and

    “We are sorry we took Eric from you,”

    But let’s not quibble about semantics…

  418. Pteryxx says

    From the Guardian article in #415, emphasis mine: (link)

    Rawlings-Blake said there was no footage recorded inside the van. Police said the other prisoner in the back of the van had been interviewed. An “independent review board” is to be convened by police chiefs to look into the incident and report back on whether procedures were followed.

    Knowing what “interviewed” can entail with this police department… I hope that other prisoner is all right. There’s no telling what sort of bargain may have been enforced on that person, whichever “side” they ended up taking.

  419. says

    I dug around and a found a list of African-American Pulitzer Prize winners:

    1950 Gwendolyn Brooks, Annie Allen, Poetry
    1969 Moneta Sleet, Jr., Deep Sorrow, Photography
    1970 Charles Gordone, No Place to be Somebody, Drama
    1976 Scott Joplin, (posthumous), Special Citation, Music
    1977 Alex Haley, Roots, Special Citation
    1978 James Alan McPherson, Elbow Room, Fiction
    1982 Charles Fuller, A Soldiers Play, Drama
    1982 John H. White, Journalism, Feature Photography
    1983 Alice Walker, The Color Purple, Fiction
    1984 Norman Lockman, Journalism (shared), Investigative Reporting
    1984 Kirk Scharfenberg, Journalism (shared), Investigative Reporting
    1987 Rita Dove, Thomas and Beulah, Poetry
    1987 August Wilson, Fences, Drama
    1988 Michel duCille, Journalism, Feature Photography
    1988 Toni Morrison, Beloved, Fiction
    1989 Clarence Page, Journalism, Commentary
    1990 August Wilson, The Piano Lesson, Drama
    1994 William Raspberry, Journalism, Commentary
    1994 Yusef Komunyakaa, Neon Vernacular, Poetry
    1994 Isabel Wilkerson, Journalism, Feature Writing
    1994 David Levering Lewis, W E B Du Bois: 1868-1919, Biography
    1996 E.R. Shipp, Journalism, Commentary
    1996 George Walker, Lilacs for…Orchestra, Music
    1997 Wynton Marsalis, Blood on the Fields, Music
    1998 Clarence Williams, Journalism, Feature Photography
    1999 Duke Ellington (posthumous), Special Citation, Music
    2001 David Levering Lewis, W E B Du Bois: 1919-1963, Biography
    2001 Gerald Boyd, Journalism (shared), National Reporting
    2002 Suzan-Lori Parks, Top Dog/Under Dog, Drama
    2003 Colbert I. King, Journalism (columnist), Commentary
    2004 Leonard Pitts, Journalism, Commentary
    2004 Edward P Jones, The Known World, Fiction
    2005 Dele Olojede, Journalism, International Reporting
    2006 Thelonius Monk, (posthumous), Special Citation
    2006 Trymaine Lee, Journalism (shared), Breaking News
    2006 Robin Givham, Journalism, Criticism
    2006 Irwin Thompson, Journalism (shared), Breaking News
    2007 Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard, Poetry
    2007 Ornette Coleman, Sound Grammar, Music
    2007 John Coltrane, (posthumous), Special Citation
    2007 Quinton Smith, Journalism (shared), Breaking News
    2007 Cynthia Tucker, Journalism, Commentary
    2009 Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello, History
    2009 Eugene Robinson, Journalism, Commentary
    2009 Lynn Nottage, Ruined, Drama
    2012 Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars, Poetry

    I don’t think the list is comprehensive.

  420. rq says

    … And there’s a standoff with SWAT in Ferguson right now. Want to take bets on the outcome and race of the victim?

  421. rq says

    Standoff in #Ferguson

    More armored trucks pulling on January. This is the second round #ferguson

    Ferguson standoff enters its military phase . More later.

    Activists: Bellefontaine Neighbors refusing to end ticket quota program

    Activists told News 4 they walked out of a meeting between Bellefontaine Neighbors and the Department of Justice after city officials refused to end a ticket quota program.

    The meeting was one of many off the record gatherings between Bellefontaine Neighbors officials, the DOJ, and community activists. After two hours of negotiations, activists walked out and refused to meet again.

    “They’re not willing to stop the predatory practice of stopping people and arresting people. That’s unacceptable,” said Rev. Phillip Duvall.

    State records indicate the number of traffic cases in Bellefontaine Neighbors increased by 130 percent over the past two years, the biggest increase in any of municipality in St. Louis County.

    Critics blame a quota system that uses spreadsheets identifying a number of activities that are required of police officers, including arrests and traffic tickets. News 4 first learned of the system after former Bellefontaine Neighbors officer Joe St. Clair provided News 4 with documentation of the policy. St. Clair also said officers were reprimanded if they did not meet their quota.

    Bellefontaine Neighbors Police Chief Robert Pruitt insisted the city does not have a quota, but defended city police. Activists said the city promised not to punish officers for failing to meet the quota. However, Pruitt said the department will continue to discipline officers who “do not reflect a commitment to meeting department expectations.”

    Duvall said a lawsuit may filed against Bellefontaine Neighbors.

    Trading football for teaching

    The NFL just wasn’t adding up for Ricardo Silva, so he decided to hang up his shoulder pads and head back to school — to teach high school geometry.

    Silva, 26, played two seasons in the NFL, earning more than $500,000 a year as safety for the Detroit Lions and then briefly with the Carolina Panthers. Now, he earns about $50,000 a year as recruit for Teach for America. Silva made a two year commitment to Washington’s Ballou High school starting back in September.

    It doesn’t seem like a fiscally responsible career move, but for Silva, leaving the NFL was just part of a bigger vision for his life.

    “My mission was to be able to play football as long as I can and then eventually I wanted to go into teaching which would be either math or social studies,” says Silva who was a political science major at Virginia’s Hampton University.

    Despite having a break out senior season and being named an HBCU All-American, Silva was undrafted in 2011. He signed to the Detroit Lions practice squad and then became a starting safety a few months later.

    “I wanted to get to college and start in the NFL. Play in the NFL, start in the NFL. It was not an easy road for me and this is how I can relate to students. I didn’t grow up being the fastest person or the strongest person, I had to work every way,” says Silva.

    I hope the teaching works out for him. And his students, obviously.

    And a hearty congratulations: 2015 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism – goes to Jelani Cobb!

    “The hazard of engaging with the history of race in the United States is the difficulty of distinguishing the past from the news of the day.” That was the mordantly ironic opening of one of Jelani Cobb’s first New Yorker dispatches on the events in Ferguson, Missouri.

    No one has done a better job of placing those events—and similar happenings in other places like Sanford, Florida, Cleveland, Ohio and Staten Island, New York—in their broader context than Jelani Cobb. Combining the strengths of an on-the-scene reporter, a public intellectual, a teacher, a vivid writer, a subtle moralist, and an accomplished professional historian, Cobb met the challenge of describing the turmoil in Ferguson in a way that cut through the frantic chaos of “breaking news” and deepened readers’ understanding of what they were seeing, hearing, and feeling. Ferguson was not an aberration, he showed, but a microcosm of race relations in the United States—organically connected to the complicated legacy of segregation and the unpaid debts of slavery itself. His work illustrates the truth of Faulkner’s famous insight that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

    Jelani Cobb’s writing exemplifies the virtues and values that the Opinion & Analysis category was created to celebrate.

    Jelani Cobb is a contributor to The New Yorker and Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. He also serves as Director of the Africana Studies Institute. His books include The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama & the Paradox of Progress, The Devil & Dave Chappelle and Other Essays and To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. Born and raised in Queens, NY, he was educated at Jamaica High School, Howard University in Washington, D.C. and Rutgers University where he received his doctorate in American History in May 2003.

  422. rq says

    Aldermen and staff across the street from City Hall preparing to swear in new and re-elected aldermen.

    Aldermen being sworn in.

    Aldermen sworn in. Poet laureate reads his poem on the 250th anniversary of the city. @kmoxnews

    Makeshift democracy in action.

    Breaking: @aclu_mo files suit against Pine Lawn for falsely arresting man critical of former Mayor Sylvester Caldwell.

    Science Fiction’s White Boys’ Club Strikes Back – a fusion of sad puppies and racism.

    “When I heard about this, I was sick at the thought of what they’d done and at all the damage they’d caused,” sci-fi author Connie Willis, who has won eleven Hugos, wrote on her blog. Willis had been asked to be a presenter at this year’s ceremony—Worldcon is scheduled for late August in Spokane, Washington—but has refused, in protest against what she sees as a subversion of the awards. Two writers have been so embarrassed to be on the ballot that they’ve withdrawn their nominations. And George R.R. Martin, author of Game of Thrones, responded to the fans’ demographic anxiety by writing on his blog, “We’re SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY FANS, we love to read about aliens and vampires, and elves. Are we really going to freak about Asians and Native Americans?” […]

    In early 1967, Delany, an ascendant star in the science fiction field, sent a manuscript of his novel Nova to Analog, the leading magazine in the genre, to see if they were interested in serializing the work. Although only 25 years old, Delany was already considered a prodigy, having already published eight novels, two of which had won the Nebula Award given by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Delany was also a black man in an overwhelmingly white literary community. Other science fiction writers, notably Robert Heinlein and Mack Reynolds, had tried to imagine a multi-racial future, but Delany brought an unusual level of real world experience to the idea of a diverse tomorrow (and not just because of his skin color: Delany was gay and married to the lesbian poet Marilyn Hacker). Delany’s fiction reflected the complexities of these experiences: The hero of Nova, Lorq Von Ray, has a father of Norwegian descent and a Senegalese mother.

    John W. Campbell, the contentious and influential editor of Analog, claimed he enjoyed shaking up his audience with outrageous ideas, but Nova proved too much for him. According to Delany, Campbell called the author’s agent and said that while he liked the novel “he didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character.” Campbell’s contention that fans weren’t ready for a book like Nova was belied by the fact that it was shortlisted for a Hugo in 1969.

    Campbell used his audience as cover for his own racism. In 1968, he penned an editorial endorsing the segregationist George Wallace for president. Earlier, he had published editorials arguing that slavery was a perfectly sensible system for pre-industrial societies, championing the racial theories of William Shockley and asserting, “One of the major reasons the Negro people are having so much trouble gaining acceptance is, simply, that the Negroes are not doing an adequate job of disciplining their own people, themselves.” Tellingly, among the few occasions that Campbell did allow fiction with black protagonists, it was in a series involving race war in Africa.

    In the universe of science fiction, Campbell was no fringe kook: He was the most influential science fiction editor of the last century, whose vision of rule-based, scientifically informed fiction shaped the careers of such canonical writers as Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, and Frank Herbert. For more than three decades, until his death in 1971, he was one of the pillars of American science fiction, a field which indulged his various pseudo-scientific enthusiasms, which included not just racism but Dianetics (he was a pivotal early promoter of L. Ron Hubbard’s claim to be a scientific innovator), a perpetual motion machine, and an ESP-enhancer.

    Amid the strife of the 1960s, which polarized science fiction no less than the rest of culture, it was easy to cast Campbell and Delany as diametric opposites: Campbell as the old reactionary apostle of heroic, manly tales of space cowboys, and Delany as the young subversive practitioner of cutting-edge speculative fiction that challenged certitudes about identity. Certainly this polemical divide can be seen in the many polemical battles of the late ’60s and early 1970s between partisans of New Wave science fiction and those who loved traditional Campbellian adventure fiction. Yet the contrast between the two men can be overdrawn. In his earliest and best years as an editor, Campbell was an innovator who published work that brought panache and literary technique to the genre and often displayed emotions more complex than the desire for conquest. And while Delany was a stylistic experimenter, he grew up loving such Campbell mainstays as Heinlein and Sturgeon and wrote works that were very much in dialogue with their fiction.

    Even Delany himself downplays the divide.

    “Today if something like that happened, I would probably give the information to those people who feel it their job to make such things as widely known as possible,” he wrote in 1998 in The New York Review of Science Fiction. “At the time, however, I swallowed it—a mark of both how the times, and I, have changed.” […]

    But the very recent upswing in female fiction nominees is tenuous and now has been reversed because of the backlash from conservative fans. This year, in reversion to historical norms, men make up more than 80 percent of fiction nominees. The Hugo gender backlash is a direct result of a conservative coalition that came together in 2013 under the satirical rubric Sad Puppies. [reminds me of the regression in the white Oscars this year, too]

    This year, the conservative backlash has been led by two overlapping factions, the supposedly moderate Sad Puppies 3 (the third iteration of the Sad Puppies) and the more right-wing Rabid Puppies. The leaders of the Sad Puppies 3 are Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen, who present themselves as reasonable conservatives redressing an unfair liberal bias. The leader of the Rabid Puppies is the noxious Theodore Beale (who often uses the pseudonym Vox Day). He makes no pretence to moderation. He has written that women should be deprived of the vote and refers to African Americans as “half-savages.” The Sad Puppies 3 and Rabid Puppies constructed overlapping slates for their followers to nominate. This sort of coordinated politicking has never been done before, although it technically does not violate any rules. And it worked: 71 percent of the Hugo ballot consists of nominees promoted by Sad Puppies 3 and/or Rabid Puppies, with the Rabid Puppies list actually doing better. The vile Beale personally has two nominations. One of the books nominated was published by a fringe house, tellingly called Patriarchy Press. […]

    Torgersen makes an error which is endemic to the Sad Puppies, conflating literary ambition with leftism and demographic diversity. It is simply untrue that ideology and entertainment are at odds in science fiction. Most major science fiction writers—including the ones who have won Hugo awards from the start—have had strong political convictions which have been reflected in their word. A genre that includes the socialist H.G. Wells, the libertarian Robert Heinlein, the Catholic conservative Gene Wolfe, the anarchist Ursula K. Le Guin, the feminist Margaret Atwood, and the Marxist China Miéville can hardly be thought of as essentially non-political entertainment.

    Nor is it the case, despite what the Puppies imagine, that literary ambition is the province only of the left. Much of the best literary science fiction has been written by writers whose politics are right-wing: aside from Gene Wolfe, this includes Jack Vance, R.A. Lafferty, Robert Silverberg, and Dan Simmons. To take one example: Robert Silverberg is a conservative but his best novel, Dying Inside, is a story of a telepath, rich with allusions to Kafka and Saul Bellow—writers Silverberg was emulating. The faux-populism of the Puppy brigade is actually insulting to the right, since it assumes that conservatives can’t be interested in high culture.

    If leftism shouldn’t be conflated with literary ambition, neither should it be confused with demographic diversity. Torgersen is assuming that stories by and/or about women and non-whites will automatically be left-wing propaganda. Again, this flies in the face of history. For decades, science fiction writers of both the left and the right, both popular entertainers and those writing more ambitious works, have made a point of trying to be inclusive. Heinlein started featuring non-white characters in his books from the very beginning of his career. His Starship Troopers (1959) can be read as right-wing paean to military virtue; the main character is a Filipino.

    Samuel Delany describes himself as a “boring old Marxist” but loves the right-wing fiction of Heinlein. “Well, Marx’s favorite novelist was Balzac—an avowed Royalist,” Delany once explained. “And Heinlein is one of mine.” The largeness of soul and curiosity about differing ideas that Delany brought to his appreciation of Heinlein is sadly missing from all the resentment and angst of the Sad and Rabid Puppies.

    I rather liked that.

  423. rq says

    Oh wait’ll you’ll hear this one, you’ll love it as much as I did: Think of all of the black folk who have bond denied for non-violent offenses. And Bob Bates kills #EricHarris on camera and is out for $25K. You ask, what?
    Bob Bates, who killed #EricHarris, pled not guilty to manslaughter today. The judge approved his Bahamas vacation request. July 2nd hearing. Article on that in a moment, please be outraged with me for a moment. My outrage meter has been broken for the past little while.

    Katie Hopkins and The Sun editor David Dinsmore reported to police for incitement to racial hatred following migrant boat column. Nice.

    The complaint was made by the Society of Black Lawyers directly to the Metropolitan Police Commissioners Office, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, at 4.05pm on 20 April.

    It reads:

    Dear Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe,

    I hope this email finds you well. You will recall that I was an independent member of the Metropolitan Police Authority (2000 to 2008) and Vice Chair for a period of two years during part of your earlier career at the MPS.

    As former Chair of the MPS Hate Crime Forum we did on occasions report incidents of incitement to racial hatred directly to the Commissioners Office for urgent action. More recently as SBL we have done so with anti-Semitic and/or racist comments in the football arena.

    The recent comments by the Sun journalist Katie Hopkins, authorised for publication by her Editor and senior staff, are sadly some of the most offensive, xenophobic and racist comments I have read in a British newspaper for some years. These comments comparing the African migrants fleeing Libya to “cockroaches” , almost certainly all “trafficked” persons facing intimidation, violence and extortion at the point of departure represent some of the most vulnerable people in international law at the present time. Many will have legitimate claims for asylum under the 1951 Geneva Convention.

    The use of this term employs a word used with devastating results to describe the Tutsi minority and Hutu moderates during the 1994 Rwanda genocide when they were referred to by those responsible for the genocide as “cockroaches”. This fact is well known to journalists and is a matter of historical record proved by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in several judgments.

    The Society of Black Lawyers (SBL) therefore requests that this matter is investigated as a matter of urgency under the Public Order Act 1986. I am aware that this section requires some intention but given the scale of the tragedy currently unfolding, the likelihood some some of these migrants may already be in the UK having fled during previous months or likely to land here in due course these comments can amount to incitement to racial hatred.

    We are in the process of writing formally to the International Criminal Court to petition for an investigation into these comments under the provisions of incitement to commit crimes against humanity.

    Given the huge circulation of these comments in the Sun and in the media generally, the propensity for racial violence against people of African descent in the UK is obvious. We request that these matters be investigated as a matter of urgency and the case file be passed to the CPS for a decision to be made as to the merits of a prosecution.

    We will submit a more detailed letter in the course of this evening but would request that your office makes a public statement about the need to avoid such comments being made by any in the media whilst this matter is the subject of a criminal investigation.

    Our complaint is against the journalist herself, the Editor of the Sun newspaper and other editorial staff involved in the publication of this commentary. We would request that you obtain a transcript of her interview that we understand was conducted on LBC radio on Sunday morning, 19th April 2015.

    The journalist concerned sought to justify her comments in that radio interview so may provide evidence of her state of mind.

    Yours sincerely,

    Peter

    D. Peter Herbert O.B.E.

    Chair Society of Black Lawyers

    Hopkins declined to comment on the allegations.

    Now, if you never understood white privilege, think about Bates going on vacation to the Bahamas after killing someone. #EricHarris

    AG Holder (@CivilRights), while you’re still around, please open and investigation into the Tulsa Sheriff’s Office. #EricHarris

    Health and wellness. Crisis: How Sickle Cell Made Me Confront My Mortality

    “Technically,” because I have a condition that should put me in the hospital every week from weariness and intense pain, and yet I’ve somehow been lucky enough to live life mostly free from these symptoms. I’ve seen people ravaged and worn down by this disease, going in and out of hospitals, hopped up on constant medication, a constant stream of pain being taxed onto their bodies. Plenty of progress has been made towards managing this disease, but since childhood, I’ve known that to make it beyond my 20s would be a blessing.

    I try to put this anxiety in context. As far as I knew, I’d never have to deal with it. I always believed I’d be safe and that time was on my side. Even at 11, when I made my first hospital visit, I never thought seriously about sickle cell affecting my life. I was extremely fatigued for a couple of days and it got to a point where I could barely walk. I then went to my primary doctor and found out I needed to go to the hospital for a blood transfusion.

    As I typed out those words, I realized that a blood transfusion is not a small thing for an 11-year-old. It was the first major medical procedure brought into my life by the disease, but at the time I saw it as a passing whim.

    Nothing else happened until a few years later when I had my first severe attack. I was in the most excruciating pain of my life. The pain hit me from every direction; my insides felt twisted and pulled. It was so bad that it started to play tricks on my mind. I was delirious, unfocused, trying desperately to disappear from the current reality.

    This was my first attack, but I didn’t yet know that. All I knew was the pain. I kept thinking, “Is this it? Is this when I die?” I thought of all the things I’d never gotten the chance to do, the things I’d never do and all the words unsaid; I truly didn’t know if I’d make it. I slowly pushed my body towards my parent’s room and with exasperated, clogged breath, explained what was happening. My parents drove me to the hospital around 3 am. While there, the doctors explained to me that what was happening was called a “sickle cell crisis”.

    My first thought, honestly, was that I had to make sure this never happened to me again. I needed to drink water regularly and take preventative measures to not go through this pain again.The doctor explained that sickle cell crises were prone to happen to people with sickle cell anemia, but despite this explanation, I thought of it more as a freak occurrence. But as I sat on that hospital bed with an IV in my arm–numb from drugs and lacking acknowledgement–that freak occurrence embedded itself as a part of my life.

    From then on, I was in the hospital at least once a year. In college, with the stress of classes and campus activities, it happened even more frequently. Significant, yet manageable, pain would strike my lower back, or abdomen, or groin. And I’d tough through it. These moments invaded my mind and my behavior. The thoughts of, “is this how it ends,” went from infrequent to weekly to daily. With every new attack, that brief moment of wondering whether this is the one that’ll end it all happened so often that it became part of the routine. Pop a painkiller, prop up a pillow and contemplate whether death is coming. […]

    Death is a constant. It is the only thing truly guaranteed in this life. The attitude towards death, though, is similar to taking out loans for college in your freshmen year: your day of payment is coming but it’s a ways off. When you have a disease that can take your life, that life now constantly feels like senior year with graduation coming any moment. My body gets weary and aches in ways it shouldn’t for another 10-or-so years. My friends and family are concerned about me in ways that, even if I wanted to act like I’m going to live forever, are reminders that there’s still a dark cloud over me. Again, I am around the age that people with this disease have been known to lose their lives. Thanks to modern medicine and luck, I’m still here. Death is on my mind when I go to work at a job I don’t particularly care for, but at least it comes with the health benefits necessary for me to care of myself when my body goes into crisis mode. I live a mundane life, and I spend my nights using any creative outlet as an escape from it. Sometimes I will research natural remedies and medical breakthroughs online.

    In movies, when people are told they’re going to die, they always use it as a means to do everything they’ve ever wanted to do before that fateful day comes. Every ache or strain I feel in my back or abdomen or groin is a reminder that death is always over my shoulder; you’d think that this would foster an attitude of “carpe diem” and always making the most out of each day, but it hasn’t. This is ,in part, due to my denial of being different from everyone else. When I tell people about my disease, I see that natural human reaction of concern wash over their face, and I promptly reject it. I run away from even the slightest indication that someone might feel sorry for me because I don’t feel sorry for myself.

    Additionally, I also fantasize about old age, not as a possibility, but as an eventuality. I envision myself living a long life the way anyone else would. I’ve convinced myself of my own longevity and mentally rejected the very real possibility that death in general is instant and can target anyone.

    While I know death is the only eventuality, and that mine could be much sooner than that of others, I’ve been clinging onto anything that reinforces the idea that I’m the same as a healthy person. My rejection of this disease being detrimental to my life has instilled in me a misguided feeling of complacency– as though things are guaranteed. Life and death are heavy on my mind but instead of using this to live a life worth leading no matter how short, I’ve chosen to still try and convince myself that I have time on my side.

  424. rq says

    3 suspicious packages were dropped at 3 entrances of STL City Hall today. The building is completely evacuated.

    Remember, the STL Metro Police made veiled threats about what they’d do if the Civilian Oversight Board passed. It passed yesterday.

    Yeah, the Feds are much better: Feds to NYPD: Don’t be Racist

    A federal monitor appointed to oversee NYPD reforms has common-sense advice for training new recruits: Don’t be assholes. Peter Zimroth’s training materials for new cops tell them not to imitate speech patterns in a racist way, and not to tell jokes that can be construed as racist—like, “He’s Irish but I’ve never seen him drunk!” Importantly, the new instructions also say that generic suspect descriptions—like the commonly used “young black male”—do not give cops reasonable suspicion.

    Here’s the link within: EXCLUSIVE: Proposed federal rules for NYPD training include Cop 101 advice like ‘don’t be racist’

    He included in filings more than 75 PowerPoint slides that delve into the nitty-gritty of police work, detail constitutional stop-and-frisk practices — and give remedial directions that, it is hoped, the officers already know.

    “Do not imitate the speech patterns of others: This will appear disingenuous, artificial and possibly racist,” reads another.

    “Avoid expressing stereotypical assumptions. ‘He’s Irish but I’ve never seen him drunk,’ ” reads another.

    Peter Zimroth, the federal monitor overseeing reforms to the NYPD, said the material was developed in collaboration with the NYPD and City Hall.

    NYPD training include Cop 101 advice such as “Don’t be racist,” in pdfs sent in April of 2015. NYPD training include Cop 101 advice such as “Don’t be racist,” in pdfs sent in April of 2015.

    The proposed instructional material is the result of Manhattan Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin’s 2013 ruling declaring the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices unconstitutional.

    Zimroth said the material was developed in collaboration with the NYPD and City Hall, and that the new instructions were quickly prepared for the recruits who started classes at the Police Academy in January.

    “It was essential that the materials be rewritten for the current class to reflect current law and policy,” Zimroth wrote to Torres about the crash course, noting that the instructions could change further for future classes.

    Last month, Torres affirmed the role of police unions in developing the reforms.

    A spokesman for the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association did not respond to an inquiry on whether the union was aware of the new material.

    Many of the new slides are dedicated to explaining when a cop can stop and frisk someone, and how it should be done.

    “Unless you tell a person why you stopped them, they are likely to believe that your actions were arbitrary,” a slide reads.

    “Keep in mind that, when you stop and question people, you are letting them know that (in your judgment) they look wrong,” another notes.

    “You need to expect the people you stop may resent it.”

    Sounds like good, basic knowledge that… well, that should be obvious as is. But as we have seen, is not. Eh. May it teach many a young recruit to not be racist and to do their job well.

    Two deputies reassigned in wake of fatal shooting by Tulsa county reserve deputy – but the article doesn’t seem to be available to me. From what I understand, though, the two officers were reassigned for their own safety.

    The Violent Legacy of Chicago’s Police

    Rahm Emanuel inherited a Police Department with a history of serious misconduct when he became mayor of Chicago four years ago. Mr. Emanuel tried to break with the past on Wednesday when he co-sponsored a proposal in City Council that would provide reparations to scores of people who were systematically tortured by the police during the 1970s and ’80s under the infamous police commander Jon Burge.

    On the same day, in a separate case that is still fresh in the public’s mind, the Council awarded $5 million to the family of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager who was shot 16 times by a police officer in October. The shooting spawned a federal investigation, rattled public trust and raised troubling accusations of a police cover-up. The Council’s decision to pay was made before a lawsuit was filed, but this cannot be the end of the case. The city needs to release a police dash-cam video of the shooting that it has withheld on grounds that releasing it might interfere with the federal investigation.

    The shooting of Mr. McDonald, who was 17, brought back bitter memories of the days when Mayor Richard J. Daley and the Police Department ruled Chicago with an iron hand. Between 1972 and 1991, lawyers say, about 120 mainly African-American men were picked up by Mr. Burge’s “midnight crew,” shocked with cattle prods, beaten with telephone books and suffocated with plastic bags until they confessed to crimes. Mr. Burge was ultimately fired in 1993 after he was linked to a torture case. Statutes of limitation protected him from charges of abuse, but, in 2010, he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for perjury and obstruction of justice.

    The reparations plan will provide substance abuse treatment, counseling and other services to Burge victims and their immediate family members, as well as free tuition at city colleges. The plan also includes a formal City Council apology and a permanent memorial recognizing the victims. The case will be included in eighth and 10th grade history classes in city public schools. In addition, a $5.5 million fund will be created to provide financial reparations to individuals with a credible claim.

    Settlements like these are necessary and justified, but they are also a serious drain on Chicago’s precarious finances at a time when the city is closing schools and mental health clinics. According to a 2014 study by the city’s Better Government Association, the government has spent more than $500 million on claims related to police misconduct in the last decade alone.

    These losses underscore the failings of a Police Department that cannot seem to shake its lamentable past and, to this day, is poorly trained, poorly managed and ruled by an ingrained culture of hair-trigger violence. Over the last seven years, Chicago police have killed more 120 people. Mr. Emanuel described the reparations plan as a way to bring a dark chapter of the city’s history to a close. But, even as he spoke, federal and state investigators were combing the city for information about the McDonald shooting.

  425. rq says

    Baltimore Police: Video Didn’t Capture Suspect’s Fatal Spine Injury

    Baltimore’s top police officials, mayor and prosecutor sought to calm a “community on edge” Monday while investigating how a man suffered a fatal spine injury while under arrest. Six officers have been suspended, but investigators say they still don’t know how it happened.

    A week after Freddie Gray was pulled off the street and into a police van, authorities don’t have any videos or other evidence explaining what happened to cause the “medical emergency” an arresting officer said Gray suffered while being taken to the local police station, Deputy Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said.

    The Gray family’s lawyer, Billy Murphy, had said that Gray’s “spine was 80 percent severed at his neck.”

    Autopsy results returned Monday show that Gray “did suffer a significant spinal injury that led to his death,” Rodriguez said. “What we don’t know is how he suffered that injury.”

    Police also released a more detailed timeline of how Gray was arrested and transported on April 12. It revealed that Gray was placed in leg irons after an officer felt he was becoming “irate,” and that the van stopped on its way to the police station, even picking up another prisoner in an unrelated case, while Gray repeatedly asked for medical attention.

    Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said that Gray asked first for an inhaler, and then several times during his transport for medical care.

    “There were several times he made a medical request,” Batts said. “He asked for an inhaler, and at one or two of the stops it was noticed that he was having trouble breathing and we probably should have asked for paramedics.”

    Something must have happened between the time Gray was videotaped by a bystander being dragged into the van, and the time he arrived at the station in deep distress, the deputy commissioner said.

    Should have called the paramedics, that’s for damn sure.

    Suspicious cylinders, bag outside St. Louis City Hall were harmless, chief says

    Two suspicious cylinders and a bag left outside St. Louis City Hall on Tuesday morning were deemed harmless, and investigators don’t know if they were left to cause a scare.

    Police Chief Sam Dotson said two of the items were Co2 cylinders, the third was a bag or backpack. They were found at about 7 a.m. outside the building, and City Hall was immediately evacuated.

    Bomb squad members x-rayed the items and determined they were safe. Dotson announced they were safe just after 11 a.m. Dotson said police were going to use dogs to continue a sweep of City Hall and the parking lot. They hope to finish their work by about 12:30 p.m.

    “In the post 9-11 world, we’re very vigilant to what goes on downtown,” Dotson said.

    Police are looking at surveillance footage to find who abandoned the items and if they were left to cause fear.

    “We want to make sure we get to the bottom of whoever did this, whether it’s a practical joke or something more sinister,” Dotson said.

    “The system worked today. What you see is a coordinated response,” the chief added.

    St. Louis City Hall evacuated after suspicious items discovered at entrances

    Police are investigating a bomb threat reported Tuesday morning at St. Louis City Hall. Three suspicious containers were found entrances at around 7:00a.m. Two of the items were metal cylinders one was a bag. All staff members were evacuated as a precaution.

    St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department officials say all three of the suspicious devices have been secured. City of St Louis Fire Chief Dennis Jenkerson confirms one cylinder is a CO2 tank. It has been rendered safe.

    Officers are working to ensure that the area around City Hall cleared of any foreign objects. The situation is being handled with an abundance of caution by city’s Bomb Squad, Canine Unit and Fire Department. Four blocks surrounding City Hall were closed as investigators worked on clearing the area.

    According to Mayor Slay’s Director of Communications Maggie Crane, cameras inside and outside of City Hall are being reviewed. St. Louis City Police Chief Sam Dotson says they are in the process of determining the contents of the bag. They are also scanning the building for more devices. Once secured, the building will re-open.

    St. Louis City Police Chief Sam Dotson says that they are operating in the light of the anniversaries of the Boston Marathon Bombing, Waco and the explosion at the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

    New and re-elected members of the Board of Aldermen were scheduled to be sworn in at 10a.m. Since it was unclear when or if City Hall will re-open, Board of Aldermen President Lewis Reed gathered with other city leaders and held the ceremony outside in the park, across the street.

    Developer McKee Owes St. Louis City for Unpaid Taxes – and he’ll probably cost the city a lot more in the long run.

    Some say this is linked to the bomb threat today: Board of Aldermen creates police oversight panel

    St. Louis’ governing board has approved a measure that will create a civilian oversight panel involving police.

    The St. Louis Board of Aldermen’s vote Monday was 17-8. Some members of the board said they oppose the measure because it did not go far enough, including the fact it will lack subpoena power.

    Members of the St. Louis Police Officers Association were critical of move. President Joe Steiger says the association does not oppose civilian oversight, but that the measure is flawed and ultimately will lead to a court review.

    John Chasnoff of the Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression calls the bill “a major step forward.”

    The new board will have oversight in St. Louis city only and will have no say in nearby Ferguson.

  426. rq says

    Back to the standoff, Swat team is taking position but won’t let the mother try to talk him down. Where is the training #ferguson

    I’ve not yet heard that a mental health professional is on the scene. Ferguson.

    More and more They head in by the truck loads of swat They are geared and ready @search4swag #Ferguson @JDKnowlse

    In other news, BREAKING: Justice Department opens civil rights investigation of police custody death in Baltimore. I believe that would be the death of Freddie Gray.

    Detroit police officer who shot 7-year-old girl in botched raid returns to duty. Yes.

    In 2010, Detroit police officer Joseph Weekley participated in a “no knock” raid on the home 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones shared with her grandmother. Police said they were looking for a suspect wanted in a murder and a 48 Hours film crew were on hand, filming for the A&E television show, when Officer Weekley accidentally fired his weapon as they entered the house, killing the 7-year-old as she slept on the couch with her grandmother.

    After five years and two trials that resulted in two deadlocked juries and eventual mistrials, prosecutors said they were not moving forward with a third trial due to an error by a judge that prevented them from doing so.

    After a 5-year absence, Officer Weekley is back on duty

    And if this doesn’t make you cry, you have to send out a search team for your heart. RETWEET. 8 Black Bodies. Single Father. 7 kids. $10/hr. Died bc power was shut off. 0 natl covrge. #ToddFamily
    He bought a generator to keep the family warm, but the electrical connection was illegal so they shut it off. And they all died of carbon monoxide poisoning. They don’t even know which day they died. 1200 people came to the funeral, but this is the first I’ve heard about it.

  427. rq says

    More from Ferguson: .@stlcountypd’s LtCol Troy Doyle prays with anxious relatives/friends of someone hurt related to #ferguson standoff

    SWAT team has the vehicle on the lawn of 420 and 422 warford

    Hearing the family is trying to get to him to talk him down but the police are not letting them in #ferguson

    SWAT team now in the backyard

    @Nettaaaaaaaa apparently they train their officers on how to deal with the mentally ill but DO NOT have the funding to hire such workers. Tragic.

    @Nettaaaaaaaa they are supposed to have CIT( Crisis intervention training) officer on site for situations like this and #Thaddeus McCarroll.

  428. rq says

    Grandmother ID’d brothers as Lorenzo, 40 and Dennis Foster, 38. Says Lorenzo shot Dennis shot in face but heard Dennis should be OK. (1/2)

    Bomb scare shifts Board of Aldermen meeting outdoors – which is kind of a nice idea anyway, to swear them in outside. But sad about the conditions for it this time.

    When Alderman Jack Coatar entered a hotly contested Board of Aldermen contest, his end goal was being sworn into office in the middle of April.

    But it’s unlikely that the 7th Ward Democrat expected his inauguration to take place in front of a statute across the street from City Hall.

    “I certainly didn’t expect to get sworn in park across the street from City Hall,” Coatar said.

    But that’s what happened after a bomb scare on Tuesday morning prompted an evacuation of City Hall. With a statue of a firefighter to the side, the Board held its first meeting of the new session at Poelker Park — which included a swearing-in ceremony for half of the chamber.

    “I’ve never seen this,” said Board of Aldermen President Lewis Reed. “This is a first. I’ve absolutely never seen this happen before.”

    Besides the swearing-in ceremony, aldermen took care of some procedural business before adjourning for the day. It marked the first official day in office for both Coatar and Alderman Cara Spencer, a 20th Ward Democrat who upended longtime incumbent Craig Schmid.

    “I guess you just kind of roll with the punches here,” Spencer said. “This is going to be obviously a very strangely historic swearing-in ceremony.”

    Police involved in standoff after Ferguson shooting; search in St. John finds nothing

    A standoff continued Tuesday afternoon between police and a man who allegedly shot his brother here earlier today, officials said.

    The victim was alert when he was taken to a hospital, according to police. The suspect was in the dwelling at 420 Warford Avenue. SWAT officers from St. Charles County were assisting Ferguson police because the St. Louis County police SWAT team was tied up in St. John.

    In that incident, tactical officers arrived about 12:45 p.m. at a house in the 2400 block of Brown Road to investigate a report of someone inside with a gun. They searched that dwelling and left without finding anyone.

    The Ritenour School District had put nearby Ritenour High School, Ritenour Middle School and Wyland Elementary on lockdown during that incident, and delayed some bus movements. The dsitrict notified parents via text messages, phone calls and e-mails.

    In Ferguson, the standoff on Warford caused a lockdown at Ferguson Middle School and Johnson-Wabash Elementary School.

    One more on post-racial Toronto: The Skin I’m In: I’ve been interrogated by police more than 50 times—all because I’m black

    The summer I was nine, my teenage cousin Sana came from England to visit my family in Oshawa. He was tall, handsome and obnoxious, the kind of guy who could palm a basketball like Michael Jordan. I was his shadow during his visit, totally in awe of his confidence—he was always saying something clever to knock me off balance.

    One day, we took Sana and his parents on a road trip to Niagara Falls. Just past St. Catharines, Sana tossed a dirty tissue out the window. Within seconds, we heard a siren: a cop had been driving behind us, and he immediately pulled us onto the shoulder. A hush came over the car as the stocky officer strode up to the window and asked my dad if he knew why we’d been stopped. “Yes,” my father answered, his voice shaky, like a child in the principal’s office. My dad isn’t a big man, but he always cut an imposing figure in our household. This was the first time I realized he could be afraid of something. “He’s going to pick it up right now,” he assured the officer nervously, as Sana exited the car to retrieve the garbage. The cop seemed casually uninterested, but everyone in the car thrummed with tension, as if they were bracing for something catastrophic. After Sana returned, the officer let us go. We drove off, overcome with silence until my father finally exploded. “You realize everyone in this car is black, right?” he thundered at Sana. “Yes, Uncle,” Sana whispered, his head down and shoulders slumped. That afternoon, my imposing father and cocky cousin had trembled in fear over a discarded Kleenex. […]

    At Queen’s, I was one of about 80 black undergrads out of 16,000. In second year, when I moved into the student village, I started noticing cops following me in my car. At first, I thought I was being paranoid—I began taking different roads to confirm my suspicions. No matter which route I took, there was usually a police cruiser in my rear-view mirror. Once I felt confident I was being followed, I became convinced that if I went home, the police would know where I lived and begin following me there too. I’d drive around aimlessly, taking streets I didn’t know.

    I had my first face-to-face interaction with the Kingston police a few months into second year, when I was walking my friend Sara, a white woman, back to her house after a party. An officer stopped us, then turned his back to me and addressed Sara directly. “Miss, do you need assistance?” he asked her. Sara was stunned into silence. “No,” she said twice—once to the officer, and once to reassure herself that everything was all right. As he walked away, we were both too shaken to discuss what had happened, but in the following days we recounted the incident many times over, as if grasping to remember if it had really occurred. The fact that my mere presence could cause an armed stranger to feel threatened on Sara’s behalf shocked me at first, but shock quickly gave way to bitterness and anger.

    As my encounters with police became more frequent, I began to see every uniformed officer as a threat. The cops stopped me anywhere they saw me, particularly at night. Once, as I was walking through the laneway behind my neighbourhood pizza parlour, two officers crept up on me in their cruiser. “Don’t move,” I whispered to myself, struggling to stay calm as they got out of their vehicle. When they asked me for identification, I told them it was in my pocket before daring to reach for my wallet. If they thought I had a weapon, I was convinced that I’d end up being beaten, or worse. I stood in the glare of the headlights, trying to imagine how I might call out for help if they attacked me. They left me standing for about 10 minutes before one of them—a white man who didn’t look much older than me—approached to return my identification. I summoned the courage to ask why he was doing this. “There’s been some suspicious activity in the area,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. Then he said I could go. Another time, an officer stopped me as I was walking home from a movie. When I told him I wasn’t carrying ID, he twisted his face in disbelief. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Sir, it’s important that you always carry identification,” he said, as if he was imparting friendly advice. Everywhere I went, he was saying, I should be prepared to prove I wasn’t a criminal, even though I later learned I was under no legal obligation to carry ID. When I told my white friends about these encounters with police, they’d often respond with skepticism and dismissal, or with a barrage of questions that made me doubt my own sanity. “But what were you doing?” they’d badger, as if I’d withheld some key part of the story that would justify the cops’ behaviour.

    When I was 22, I decided to move to Toronto. We’d visited often when I was a kid, driving into the city for festivals and fish markets and dinners with other families from Sierra Leone. In Toronto, I thought I could escape bigotry and profiling, and just blend into the crowd. By then, I had been stopped, questioned and followed by the police so many times I began to expect it. In Toronto, I saw diversity in the streets, in shops, on public transit. The idea that I might be singled out because of my race seemed ludicrous. My illusions were shattered immediately. […]

    I hate it when people ask me where I’m from, because my answer is often followed by, “But where are you really from?” When they ask that question, it’s as though they’re implying I don’t belong here. The black diaspora has rippled across Toronto: Somalis congregate in Rexdale, Jamaicans in Keelesdale, North Africans in Parkdale. We make up 8.5 per cent of the city’s population, but the very notion of a black Torontonian conflates hundreds of different languages, histories, traditions and stories. It could mean dark-skinned people who were born here or elsewhere, who might speak Arabic or Patois or Portuguese, whose ancestors may have come from anywhere in the world. In the National Household Survey, the term “black” is the only classification that identifies a skin colour rather than a nation or region.

    There’s this idea that Toronto is becoming a post-racial city, a multicultural utopia where the colour of your skin has no bearing on your prospects. That kind of thinking is ridiculously naïve in a city and country where racism contributes to a self-perpetuating cycle of criminalization and imprisonment. Areas where black people live are heavily policed in the name of crime prevention, which opens up everyone in that neighbourhood to disproportionate scrutiny. We account for 9.3 per cent of Canadian prisoners, even though we only make up 2.9 per cent of the populace at large. And anecdotal evidence suggests that more and more people under arrest are pleading guilty to avoid pretrial detention—which means they’re more likely to end up with a criminal record. Black people are also more frequently placed in maximum-security institutions, even if the justice system rates us as unlikely to be violent or to reoffend: between 2009 and 2013, 15 per cent of black male inmates were assigned to maximum-security, compared to 10 per cent overall. If we’re always presumed guilty, and if we receive harsher punishments for the same crimes, then it’s no surprise that many of us end up in poverty, dropping out of school and reoffending. […]

    In a recent report to the Toronto Police Services Board, residents in 31 Division, which includes several low-income and racialized neighbourhoods in northwest Toronto, were candid about their views of police. Many said our cops disrespect them, stop them without cause and promote a climate of constant surveillance in their neighbourhoods. Some respondents to the TPSB survey said they now avoid certain areas within their own neighbourhoods for fear of encountering police. Black respondents were most likely to report that police treated them disrespectfully, intimidated them or said they fit the description of a criminal suspect. “Police are supposed to serve and protect, but it always feels like a battle between us and them,” one survey participant said.

    I have been stopped, if not always carded, at least 50 times by the police in Toronto, Kingston and across southern Ontario. By now, I expect it could happen in any neighbourhood, day or night, whether I am alone or with friends. These interactions don’t scare me anymore. They make me angry. Because of that unwanted scrutiny, that discriminatory surveillance, I’m a prisoner in my own city. […]

    In Kingston, I was used to women crossing the street when they saw me approaching, but until I moved to Toronto, I’d never seen them run. One night, I stepped off a bus on Dufferin Street at the same time as a young woman in her 20s. She took a couple of steps, looked over her shoulder at me, and tore into a full sprint. I resisted the urge to call out in my own defence. In 2006, I ran for Toronto city council in Trinity-Spadina. As I canvassed houses along Bathurst Street, a teenage girl opened the door, took one look at me, and bolted down the hallway. She didn’t even close the door. When her mother appeared a moment later and apologized, I couldn’t tell which of us was more embarrassed.

    That same year, I was denied entry to a popular bar on College Street. The bouncer told me I couldn’t come in with the shoes I had on, a pair of sneakers that resembled those of countless other guys in the queue. Fuming, I began to object, but I quickly realized that a black guy causing a scene at a nightclub was unlikely to attract much sympathy. I didn’t want to embarrass the half-dozen friends I’d come with. We left quietly, and I’ve never gone back.

    Shortly after my (unsuccessful) election campaign, I went to a downtown pub to watch hockey with some friends and my girlfriend at the time, a white child-care worker named Heather. The Leafs won, and the place turned into a party. Heather and I were dancing, drinking and having a great time. On my way back from the washroom, two bouncers stopped me and said I had to leave. “We just can’t have that kind of stuff around here,” one of them informed me. I asked what “stuff” he meant, but he and his partner insisted I had to go. They followed closely behind me as I went back upstairs to inform Heather and my friends that I was being kicked out. My friends seemed confused and surprised, but none made a fuss or questioned the bouncers who stood behind me. People stopped dancing to see what was going on and, recognizing that security was involved, kept their distance. I tried not to make eye contact with anyone as the guards escorted me out of the bar.

    I have come to accept that some people will respond to me with fear or suspicion—no matter how irrational it may seem. After years of needless police scrutiny, I’ve developed habits to check my own behaviour. I no longer walk through upscale clothing stores like Holt Renfrew or Harry Rosen, because I’m usually tailed by over-attentive employees. If I’m paying cash at a restaurant, I will hand it to the server instead of leaving it on the table, to make sure no one accuses me of skipping out on the bill. If the cops approach, I immediately ask if I am being detained. Anyone who has ever travelled with me knows I experience serious anxiety when dealing with border officials—I’m terrified of anyone with a badge and a gun, since they always seem excessively interested in who I am and what I’m doing. My eyes follow every police car that passes me. It has become a matter of survival in a city where, despite all the talk of harmonious multi-culturalism, I continue to stand out.

  429. rq says

    Beaten by San Bernardino deputies, Francis Pusok to get $650,000 from county. That’s the guy who stole the horse.

    Less than two weeks after an Apple Valley was seen on video being beaten and kicked by sheriff’s deputies as he was apparently trying to surrender, San Bernardino County has negotiated a settlement with Francis Jared Pusok for $650,000, the county announced Tuesday.

    The settlement was negotiated between County Counsel, Pusok, and his attorney, Jim Terrell, on Friday. It was approved by the Board of Supervisors in a closed session meeting Tuesday, with neither a claim nor a lawsuit filed, county spokesman David Wert said.

    The speed at which the matter was resolved by all parties is unprecedented in county history.

    “We don’t keep records of how long it take to settle matters from the date of occurrence, but I can’t recall anything being resolved this quickly,” Wert said Tuesday, stressing that the speed of the settlement was not purely the county’s doing. “The potential plaintiff drives how long it takes to resolve a matter just as much as the county.”

    The settlement was not an admission of guilt or liability on the county’s part, Wert said.

    “The sole purpose of this settlement is to avoid the cost of litigation,” Wert said. “Even if a case never made it to trial, both sides would probably spend millions of dollars getting it to trial, so $650,000 is probably quite a bit of savings over what would have been spent had this gone to litigation.”

    Pusok and Terrell couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

    Suit says Pine Lawn police were used as a tool of political intimidation

    The American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri has sued the city of Pine Lawn for using its police department as a tool of political intimidation.

    The federal lawsuit filed Tuesday centers around the 2013 race for mayor between Sylvester Caldwell, who was the incumbent, and challenger Nakisha Ford, who was backed by former mayor and councilman Adrian Wright.

    In the suit, Wright alleges that Pine Lawn police arrested him several times on trumped-up charges stemming from an April 2012 traffic stop, then used the arrest to discredit his support for Ford.

    “I agree with a lot of the frustrations out there,” Wright said. “I get numerous phone calls from elderly citizens wanting to know if their tickets are real.”

    Though Wright is currently the case’s sole plaintiff, Adolphus Pruitt, a vice president with the Missouri NAACP, said the former mayor’s story isn’t unusual.

    “We have a minimum of 200-350 written complaints from citizens in Pine Lawn, ranging from being harassed at their homes, being harassed in the city, being harassed just walking down the street by police. And in each and most cases, it was by some direct order or policy by the mayor as the sole police commissioner,” Pruitt said. “Wright’s case is just an extreme example.”

    Pruitt said the NAACP began collecting complaints in July 2012. When a voluntary agreement between Pine Lawn and the U.S. Department of Justice did nothing to stop the harassment, the NAACP asked for help from the ACLU.

    Jeffrey Mittman, the ACLU executive director, made it clear that the organization was already considering legal action before Michael Brown was shot and killed last August in Ferguson.

    “Bringing this information to light is challenging,” he said. “We had started down that road when Ferguson blew up, when the indictment of Mayor [Sylvester] Caldwell came.”

    Caldwell pleaded guilty in federal court last week to extorting nearly $3,000 from a towing company and a Pine Lawn convenience store, which is also at the center of an allegation in the current lawsuit. He has resigned as mayor.

    More specific information on the allegations at the link.

    U.S. Department of Justice opens probe into death of Freddie Gray

    Amid the public outcry over the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, the U.S. Department of Justice is opening an investigation into the 25-year-old’s death.

    “The Department of Justice has been monitoring the developments in Baltimore, MD, regarding the death of Freddie Gray,” spokeswoman Dena Iverson said in a statement. “Based on preliminary information, the Department of Justice has officially opened this matter and is gathering information to determine whether any prosecutable civil rights violation occurred.”

    The announcement came minutes after several members of Maryland’s congressional delegation had asked the U.S. Justice Department to open a criminal and civil rights investigation into the death of Gray, who is African American.

    Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake speak to the media at a press conference on the death of Freddie Gray.

    Their request Tuesday comes amid growing public protests in Baltimore over Gray’s death, apparently from injuries he suffered while in police custody.

    His death Sunday, and the local demonstrations, have brought international attention to Baltimore at a time of increasing outrage about how police in the United States treat African American men.

    “Freddie Gray’s family and the residents of the City of Baltimore deserve to know what happened to him while he was in police custody. We need answers,” Sens. Barbara A. Mikulski and Ben Cardin and Reps. Elijah Cummings, C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger and John Sarbanes wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder.

    “While we support the efforts of the ongoing review into the policies and procedures of the Baltimore Police Department by the Community Oriented Policing Services Office, we request that the Department of Justice open a federal criminal and civil rights investigation into the death of Baltimore resident Freddie Gray.”

    Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake welcomes the added scrutiny, said mayoral spokesman Kevin Harris.

    “The mayor’s main focus is getting to the bottom of what happened to Mr. Gray in the most transparent way possible,” Harris said. “And in a way that the community has trust in.”

    Also more at the link.

    @FOX2now Standoff at Ferguson home ends without incident, shooting suspect taken into custody;
    Again the man police allege shot his brother has been found and on his way to the hospital for mental help according to family. @kmov
    Breathe a bit easier.

  431. rq says

    Tony – Agreed. They even used it in headlines after video of Slager shooting Scott came out – ‘Cop allegedly shoots man running away’, WELL IT’S RIGHT FUCKING THERE IN THE PICTURE. Annnyway.

    +++
    That Dog Won’t Hunt: Cops Can’t Keep You Waiting for K-9s, Supreme Court Says

    Cops can’t continue to hold a suspect without probable cause even for the few minutes they might need to wait for a drug-sniffing dog to show up, the Supreme Court said Tuesday.

    Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the 6-3 majority that if a traffic stop is otherwise completed, holding on to the suspect any longer violates the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.

    The case, Rodriguez v. United States, involves the valid traffic stop of Dennys Rodriguez after he swerved over a highway shoulder line in Valley, Nebraska, in March 2012. Once Officer Morgan Struble had completed writing a warning, he then kept Rodriguez by the side of the road for seven or eight minutes waiting for the dog to show up and sniff the car for possible drugs.

    The dog found meth, and Rodriguez was indicted and convicted. But Ginsburg wrote that Struble didn’t have probable cause to search the vehicle, and that by dallying long enough for the dog to arrive and provide probable case, he violated the Constitution.

    Justices Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy and Samuel Alito dissented on the grounds that such a brief stop “is hardly out of the ordinary for a traffic stop by a single officer of a vehicle containing multiple occupants even when no dog sniff is involved.”

    In an additional dissent, Alito warned that officers would quickly figure out a way to slow the process of checking a driver’s license and registration and writing up a ticket to give the K-9 unit time to arrive.

    “I would love to be the proverbial fly on the wall when police instructors teach this rule to officers who make traffic stops,” Alito wrote.

    Can somebody please isolate Keith Richards’ longevity gene and give it to Her Eminence of White Light, the Notorious RBG?
    Please?

  432. rq says

    “We are going to Shut City Hall Down Until All 6 Officers Are in Jail” Baltimore Now #FreddieGray

    And here is @MayorSRB on the DOJ investigation re: the murder of #FreddieGray. She supports a review, for transparency, builds community trust, etc.

    #WJZ NOW: What happened to #FreddieGray in police custody? Protestors and family want to know. What a crowd out there!

    “Hell No We Won’t Go!” #FreddieGray

    They’ve deleted all of the footage on @BmoreBloc’s camera. @BaltimorePolice are violating our 1st Amendment rights. Yah, that happened – surprise.

    Baltimore officer suspended in Freddie Gray case accused of domestic violence – history of violence? You don’t say!

    The Baltimore police officer who led the initial chase of Freddie Gray, the young man who died after being arrested and suffering a broken neck, has twice been accused of domestic violence and was temporarily ordered by a court to stay away from a second person.

    Lieutenant Brian Rice faced actions in Maryland’s civil courts over alleged domestic violence in 2008 and 2013, according to public filings. In both cases, requests for protective orders were denied by the judge. For a week in 2013, Rice was also ordered not to abuse, contact, nor go to the home or workplace of a second person who took him to court.

    Rice, 41, was one of six officers suspended over Gray’s death on Sunday. Gray, who was 25, was arrested a week earlier after being chased when he made eye contact with Rice and ran away, according to police chiefs. Gray’s neck was left “80% severed” by the breaking of three vertebrae and his voice box was almost crushed, according to his family’s attorney.

    According to the court filings, a judge in Baltimore county denied the first accuser’s request for a protective order against Rice in April 2008, ruling there was “no statutory basis” for it. A clerk in Carroll County said the accuser’s request for an emergency protective order there in January 2013 was denied by the court.

    A judge in another Carroll County court revoked a “peace order” that was implemented for a week in January 2013 in response an application by the second accuser, also ruling “no statutory basis” existed for it to continue.

    A ruling of “no statutory basis” does not necessarily mean the allegations were unfounded. It may mean the accuser could not meet the required burden of proof or that the nature of the alleged abuse was not covered by the order they requested under Maryland law.

  433. rq says

    On gentrification and white flight – with a nice opening picture of a white and a black Jesus (Jesii?) Gentrification Is Not a Solution to White Flight

    Actually, that’s a horrible way to put it. First, white flight didn’t just happen to Chicago and second “white flight” is a problematic label that doesn’t in the least describe what was and is (still) happening. What happened to neighborhoods like Wicker Park, Ukranian Village, Lincoln Park, Humboldt Park, Logan Square, and South Loop is what happened to Detroit – white people decided their areas were too tainted, too impure, too scary. And rather than invest in them to make room for all, rather than welcoming, rather than giving back to the very people they’ve (we’ve) stolen wages, labor and wealth from, white people en masse thought it more convenient to relocate.

    More to the point, not only did white people relocate to the suburbs and enclaves, but they took the resources, the investments, the capital, the wealth that was made for them by the bodies, the work and the below poverty-level wages and existence that black (and other POC) made for them. When they found that Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Black youth were enacting on the very violence that had been exacted through economic, political and housing segregation, the White patriarchy decided it important to sever ties with the city and retreat to the suburbs. All the better if they could continue to draw resources out of the city and back into the cul de sacs, of course.

    White flight, we must understand, is not a problem primarily because White people and their White solutions left the city. White flight is a problem because White people took the dues owed to Black people with them. They stole and then ran.

    After a generation of fleeing, they started coming back. In Chicago, they pushed Puerto Ricans east out of the lakefront territory of Lincoln Park and reclaimed it, all of it, for Whiteness. They also discovered that the beautiful buildings and centralized location of Wicker Park were too much to leave to poor black and Latin@ and even poor white folks, so they slowly reclaimed that too, beginning in the late 80’s. They brought in artists and young people, students. All white, all with a bit more disposable income than the current residents. All a little distant from the current community. All raising property value just enough to begin the displacement of the current population. The residents then begin to see their community erode as they lose grip on what they’ve worked so hard to stabilize – community organizations and resources that are mostly built in and through each other and relationships they’ve built over years, decades, generations.

    When you are poor, you rely on each other. When you and your neighbors are being forced out, you lose that support. That is what gentrification is: forcing out of black, brown and poor bodies and destroying their supportive networks. But yet gentrification is often approached as a solution, as a counter to White Flight. As if the problem was that middle class and upper class White people and their White ingenuity and work ethic were what was missing. As if the neighborhoods were deteriorating because White People weren’t here. And as if their presence and their example (yes, that is the argument. Yes, that is what they say) would fix what their theft caused.

    The main pro-gentrification argument is that the neighborhood improves and bringing in White people with their white money is the only viable solution to improving the neighborhood. What they mean by that is that the neighborhood wasn’t of value under black and brown management. That people of color and poor people don’t have any value to offer. That the crime and poverty is the fault of black and brown people – not their own theft. They are also assenting that property – that the buildings and lots they are referring to when they say “neighborhood” – is more important than humanity – what those of us being gentrified mean when we talk about the neighborhood. And particularly that property is more important than POC humanity.

    More protest pictures from Baltimore: After stop at Gilmor Homes, protesters are making their way from Presbury down N. Fulton.

    Huge police presence at Western District, where a protest is planned for 5 p.m. MTA police officers assisting.

    “No, the other one.” #BlackLivesMatter Read the attached. Basically, a reply to the question “Did you hear about the black man killed by police this month?” And it’s “No, the other one”. TOO MANY.

    Here’s a look at all the stops the police transport van made with Freddie Gray in the back. Very small distance.

    The protests continue. #FreddieGray

  434. rq says

    #FreddieGray

    Copy of letter read at #Ferguson city council meeting calling for a permanent #MikeBrown memorial on Canfield Dr. Global impact, gravity of the work, etc. I hope it happens.
    However:
    Apparently #Canfield Apt no longer want the Mike Brown memorial. Last week they requested that #Ferguson would help to get rid of it.
    The woman who talked about the removal of the Mike Brown say she have been in talks with #Ferguson #Canfield and #MikeBrown family about it.

    Protesters rally in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray

    In life, friends say, Freddie Gray was an easygoing, slender young man who liked girls and partying here in Sandtown, a section of west Baltimore pocked by boarded-up rowhouses and known to the police for drug dealing and crime.

    In death, Mr. Gray, 25, has become the latest symbol in the running national debate over police treatment of black men — all the more searing, people here say, in a city where the mayor and police commissioner are black.

    Questions are swirling around just what happened to Mr. Gray, who died here Sunday — a week after he was chased and restrained by police officers, and suffered a spine injury, which later killed him, in their custody. The police say they have no evidence that their officers used force. A lawyer for Mr. Gray’s family accuses the department of a cover-up, and on Tuesday the Justice Department opened a civil rights inquiry into his death.

    But as protests continued Tuesday night — with hundreds of angry residents, led by a prominent pastor and Mr. Gray’s grieving family, chanting and marching in the streets — the death has also fueled debate on whether African-American leadership here can better handle accusations of police brutality than cities like Ferguson, Mo., and North Charleston, S.C., with their white-dominated governments.

    “Unlike other places where incidents like this have happened, they understand what it means to be black in America,” said City Councilman Brandon Scott, an ally of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and a frequent critic of Police Commissioner Anthony Batts.

    “They understand how something like this can get out of hand very quickly,” Mr. Scott said. “They understand the community’s frustration more than anyone else. But at the same time they also understand the opposite — they understand the need to have law enforcement in neighborhoods. So it puts them in a bind.”

    This week the mayor and police commissioner have appeared repeatedly in public promising a full and transparent review of Mr. Gray’s death. On Tuesday, the police released the names of six officers who had been suspended with pay, including a lieutenant, a woman and three officers in their 20s who joined the force less than three years ago. Officers canvassed west Baltimore, looking for witnesses.

    Mr. Batts turned up in Mr. Gray’s neighborhood, chatting with residents and shaking hands. And Ms. Rawlings-Blake said in an interview that she had asked Gov. Larry Hogan for help in getting an autopsy on Mr. Gray performed by the state medical examiner made public, even piecemeal, as quickly as possible. The mayor said she supported the Justice Department inquiry.

  435. rq says

    Wow, that previous blockquote is from this article: Freddie Gray in Baltimore: Another City, Another Death in the Public Eye, not the CNN article linked. That one reads more like this:

    Chanting “No justice! No peace!” protesters rallied in Baltimore late Tuesday, the same day police released the names of the officers involved in the arrest of Freddie Gray.

    Gray died of a spinal injury Sunday, exactly one week after he was taken into custody.

    Demonstrators marched to a local police station that was protected by barricades. One man was arrested after crossing that barricade, but the protest was peaceful.

    Among the crowd were members of Gray’s family, including his mother. She held her head and cried. Many of the protesters clasped hands, and raised them in a show of support.

    “Make some noise for Freddie Gray,” one man shouted into a megaphone.

    “We won’t stop,” said another. “We have the power and, of course, today shows we have the numbers.”

    Speaking to CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said she understands where the protesters are coming from. She understands their frustration.

    “Mr. Gray’s family deserves justice, and our community deserves an opportunity to heal, to get better, and to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again,” she said.

    More at the link, sorry about the mixup!

    O’Malley urges transparency in investigation of Baltimore man’s death in police custody

    Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley (D) on Tuesday called the death of a Baltimore man in police custody “a tragic loss of life” and urged officials in the city where he lives to be “as transparent as they possibly can be” about an ongoing investigation.

    O’Malley, a former Baltimore mayor who is positioning himself for a White House bid, was asked about the death of Freddie Gray, who police said died from a severe spinal-cord injury on Sunday, one week after his arrest in West Baltimore.

    “I trust that the city with openness and transparency will conduct a thorough investigation as quickly as they can,” O’Malley said following an appearance in Washington. “It’s troubling whenever there’s a loss of life, and it’s particularly troubling if it’s in a custodial situation or a police-involved situation.”

    City officials have suspended six police officers as they investigate the circumstances surrounding Gray’s death. The investigation is focusing on what happened to Gray when he was in the back of a police van used to transport suspects.

    Speaking of the city’s current mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D), O’Malley said, “It certainly seems to me that the mayor understands the importance of this to public trust, which is essential to maintain for our city and officer safety.”

    “I think the key in any of these situations is for officials to be open and transparent and investigate fully these sorts of incidents and to be as transparent as they possibly can be about the facts of the investigation,” O’Malley said.

    He said his “heart and prayers go out to the Gray family.”

    This Unarmed Black Woman Was Shot by the Police, So Why Aren’t We Marching for Her? On Rekia Boyd.

    Chicago Police Detective Dante Servin had been off-duty when, around 1 a.m., he approached a group that included Boyd in his car. After one of the individuals present, 39-year-old Anthony Cross, walked toward Servin holding what the officer thought was a gun, Servin began firing and hit Boyd in the head. She died on March 22, and Servin was subsequently charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, reckless discharge of a weapon and reckless conduct.

    On Monday, Cook County Judge Dennis Porter dismissed all charges. Servin left the courtroom, surrounded by family and fellow officers, a free man. […]

    But most people don’t know Boyd’s name. They don’t know names like Shantel Davis (killed at age 23), Aiyana Stanley-Jones (killed at age 7) and Kendra James (killed at 21), either. When black men are killed, slogans like “hands up, don’t shoot” or “I can’t breathe” echo across the country. When black girls and women like Boyd are killed, there is comparative silence.

    “As a black woman, these moments remind me that I live in a society and work in a movement that insists on prioritizing the lives of black men over women,” Nakisha Lewis, a strategist and organizer with Black Lives Matter NYC, told Mic. “There is a special gut-wrenching pain that is present when the victim is a black woman, because their deaths will go unnoticed by the general public. And there will be no protests nor national vigils in their honor.”

    According to the Huffington Post, “early data indicates black women account for nearly 20% of those unarmed blacks killed by officers in the past 15 years.” And yet, we “don’t act, and some of us don’t even know who Rekia Boyd is, because the lives and deaths of black women and girls don’t move us in the same way as those of black boys and men,” said Aimee Meredith Cox, Fordham University professor and author of the forthcoming book Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship.

    One reason for this is because black boys and men are still seen as more endangered and at risk than black girls and women, despite the evidence against what scholar Paul D. Butler calls “black male exceptionalism.” Butler defines this as the idea that “black men fare more poorly than any other group in the U.S.,” including black women. While his research suggests racism affects genders in different ways — black men are more heavily incarcerated, for example, while black women and girls more deeply feel the effects of poverty — the fact remains that both are embattled by over-criminalization and deadly policing practices.

    Nevertheless, racial justice has often been imagined as liberation specifically for black (heterosexual) men for years, permeating movements from civil rights in the ’50s and ’60s to Black Lives Matter today, despite the presence and leadership of many black women in both movements. […]

    “We’ll extend the circle of our community to embrace black men who have been the victims of state violence — all in the name of racial solidarity — but we seem less likely to do so when it is black women who are victims, who are not our kin,” Mark Anthony Neal, Duke University professor and author of New Black Man, told Mic. “If I’m being honest, it’s only because I am the parent of two daughters that I began to have any real sense of the lived realities of black women in U.S. society.”

    How to fix this? First we must recognize that black women are not immune from violence, nor from pain. Thirty-six years ago, black feminist cultural critic Michelle Wallace addressed “the intricate web of mythology that surrounds the black woman” in her book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, writing, “[A] fundamental image emerges. It is of a woman with inordinate strength … This woman does not have the same fears, weaknesses and insecurities as other women … In other words, she is a superwoman.”

    Boyd was no superwoman. She was a living, breathing black woman, a human being, shot dead for no other reason than supposedly appearing suspicious. Now Servin’s actions have been justified by the court as an intentional act rather than a reckless one. Chicago has formally settled a wrongful-death lawsuit for $4.5 million with Boyd’s estate, but money cannot recover the life of a dead loved one. Organizations like the Chicago-based Black Youth Project and A Long Walk Home have partnered with Boyd’s family and other groups in protest of this killing and Servin’s exoneration, but local action must be matched by a national outcry.

    Rekia Boyd, like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, deserves our attention, because the value of black girls’ and women’s lives must not be up for debate. No longer can we allow black women to suffer multiple deaths — that result from the bullet of an officer’s gun, and from the public forgetting their names. Invisibility is a form of violence. So when we march, we must lift up Rekia Boyd’s name, and the names of all the black women who have been lost.

    Important to read.

    UNDUE FORCE – is this a repost? From Chicago, about compensation for families.

    Police shoot and kill man in Lakewood lumber yard – that’s the latest.

    Police shot and killed a man Tuesday afternoon in a Lakewood lumber yard.

    Officers were called to a lumber yard in the 3600 block of 108h St. SW around 1:15 p.m. for a report of a suspicious person, said Lt. Chris Lawler with Lakewood Police.

    He said multiple people called 911 to report the man was running through the parking lot carrying a hooded jacket as if he was running from police.

    The man jumped a fence into the lumber yard and climbed up 25 feet to hide in a pile of wood, Lawler said.

    Officers found him and told him to put his hands up, but he refused and reached into his pocket, Lawler said. Officers then opened fire and wounded the man.

    Officers got a ladder to climb up and reach the man and medics took him to St. Joseph’s Hospital in critical condition. He died later Tuesday night.

    Tahvia Adams was in the area Tuesday afternoon and witnessed the shooting.

    “It was pretty scary, because you don’t usually see it,” Adams said. “We see all the lights and sirens, but to actually see them up there. You don’t want to see anybody getting hurt, whether they were doing something wrong or not.”

    Lawler said the two officers involved were both 10-year veterans of the department and had been police officers since 1999 and 2001. Both have been placed on administrative leave as is standard procedure in officer-involved shootings.

    On Tuesday evening, detectives said they had come to the conclusion that the man was not running from police, but it’s still unclear why he was running.

    The investigation is ongoing.

    Same old story, same tragic result. ‘He reached for his pocket’.

    LAPD calls in the reinforcements. What could possibly go wrong?

    Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck “wants to swarm high-crime neighborhoods with more than 200 highly trained officers from the elite Metropolitan Division without undermining years of progress the department has made in building better relationships with those communities,” report Kate Mather, Richard Winton and Cindy Chang in The Times.

    Metro Division cops are the best of the best — the department’s elite. So what could go wrong?

    “Parachuting reinforcements into unfamiliar territory on this scale marks a change from the LAPD’s longtime community policing tactic of using beat cops to patrol neighborhoods. Metro officers are known more for their specialized tactical and weapons training than for their skills in building relationships with residents,” their report says.

    Oh.

    Civil rights lawyer Connie Rice told The Times that she’s concerned the Metro Division deployment may make things worse. “The Metro officers are a super paramilitary version of policing,” she said. “They are not the cops who have relationships and know the communities. They tend to be very aggressive, historically. They don’t get to know a community…. They don’t get to know the people they police or, for that matter, the local officers.”

    Today’s cartoon is centered around a rather hilarious quote by Los Angeles Police Commission President Steve Soboroff: Metro Division police “are not Ferguson-like. They are not South Carolina-like. Our training — sensitivity training, use of force training — is off the charts.”

    A California legislator is pushing a bill the would require police to get a warrant before searching smartphones or tablets
    Cartoonist Ted Rall on local and state politics.

    Really, truly … do these people ever stop and listen to themselves?

    I say, no.

  436. rq says

    Lakewood police fatally shoot man in lumberyard. Same info as above, no ID on the man yet. No name yet.

    People lining up to support consolidation of @oaklandpoliceca complaints under Citizen’s Police Review Board. #oakmtg

    Facing manslaughter charge, Tulsa reserve deputy heading to Bahamas. I know, I promised this article yesterday.

    A volunteer sheriff’s deputy plans to vacation in the Bahamas while facing a second-degree manslaughter charge in Oklahoma, his attorneys told a judge Tuesday, drawing immediate criticism from the family of the man he killed.

    Robert Bates pleaded not guilty during the hearing in Tulsa district court. The 73-year-old former insurance executive has said he confused his handgun for a stun gun when he shot Eric Harris after the suspect ran during a sting investigation involving gun sales.

    Bates’ lawyers told the judge that Bates, a reserve deputy with the Tulsa County sheriff’s office, and his family planned to take their previously planned vacation ahead of his next court date in July.

    “It’s really not an issue,” Corbin Brewster, one of Bates’ attorneys, said in an interview after the hearing.

    Harris’ family criticized the trip, saying it sends a message “of apathy with respect to the shooting and Eric’s life.”

    “At a time when we are still mourning the death of a loved one that he shot down in the street, Mr. Bates will be relaxing and enjoying his wealth and privilege,” the family said in a statement released Tuesday.

    Ye gods I kind of hate him right now.

    The guy the LAPD killed tonight had a knife, that he used on HIMSELF. The officers arrive and then kill him. America. “Suicide by cop”?

    LAPD: Officers fatally shoot man who charged at them with a knife. The official story seems to dispute the previous statement – but how trustworthy is it, really?

    Los Angeles police fatally shot a man Tuesday after he charged at them with a large hunting knife, authorities said.

    Police were called to the 3400 block of Manitou Avenue in Lincoln Heights after a woman reported that a relative had stabbed himself, LAPD Officer Mike Lopez said.

    Officers arrived about 4:30 p.m. and found the man holding a large knife, Lopez said.

    Officers told the man to drop the knife, but he continued advancing toward them. Police opened fire, Lopez said.

    The man was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Police did not release the name of the man but said his family had been notified of his death.

    It’s unclear how many officers opened fire or how many times he was shot.

    …

    N.J. trooper fatally shot suspect in Union as he drove towards him, authorities say

    A 35-year-old man from the Parlin section of Old Bridge and Sayreville was shot and killed Tuesday evening by State Police investigating a stolen Jeep, a spokesperson for the state Attorney General’s office said late Tuesday night.

    Troopers spotted a black Jeep reported stolen in Bloomfield on April 17 parked on Walker Avenue, spokesman Peter Aseltine said. Investigators were keeping an eye on the vehicle when a man entered it shortly before 6 p.m.

    When police attempted to stop him, the Jeep backed up into a parked vehicle, then accelerated towards the trooper, Aseltine said. Police then opened fire, striking the man. He was taken to University Hospital in Newark and was pronounced dead.

    Aseltine declined to release the name of the man, pending notification of his family.

    Stealing cars is now a capital offense, to be executed without trial. Good to know.
    May be discretionarily applied by police.

  437. Pteryxx says

    NYT today: Baltimore Officers Suspended Over Death of Freddie Gray Are Identified

    Lt. Brian Rice was the senior officer involved, and officials have said it was a lieutenant on the scene, part of a team of officers patrolling on bicycles, who made eye contact with two men — one of them Mr. Gray — before they fled on foot, prompting the officers to pursue them. Lieutenant Rice, 41, is an 18-year veteran of the department.

    Officer Garrett Miller filled out the “statement of charges” for arresting Mr. Gray, accusing him of carrying a switchblade knife, clipped to the inside of his pants pocket. Officer Miller, 26, a member of the department since 2012, wrote, “The defendant was arrested without force or incident.”

    The others suspended are Sgt. Alicia White, 30, who joined the department in 2010; Officer William Porter, 25, who joined in 2012; Officer Edward Nero, 29, who joined in 2012; and Officer Caesar Goodson, 45, who joined in 1999.

    Also in the NYT today: At Supreme Court, Eric Holder’s Justice Dept. Routinely Backs Officers’ Use of Force

    When police abuse cases make it to the Supreme Court, even if they have nothing to do with federal agents, the Justice Department often weighs in. Last year, the department sided with police officers in West Memphis, Ark., who shot a driver and passenger 15 times, killing them at the end of a chase.

    John F. Bash, a Justice Department lawyer in that case, told the justices that “there is some level of reckless driving in response to a police pursuit that authorizes the use of deadly force.” What was certain, he added, was that the officers were entitled to qualified immunity, which shields them from civil rights lawsuits. The Supreme Court unanimously agreed.

    Every such victory makes it harder for citizens to prevail when they believe they have been mistreated by police officers. It also adds obstacles for the Justice Department’s own civil rights investigators when alleging police misconduct. That has led to some tense debates inside the department, current and former officials say, as the government’s civil rights and appellate lawyers discussed when the department should weigh in, and on which side. Those debates have led the Justice Department to take more nuanced positions than government lawyers might have otherwise, the officials said.

    […]

    Private civil rights lawyers, though, have been frustrated that the Justice Department’s aggressive stance in civil rights reports does not extend to its positions before the Supreme Court. “A report can have an impact on a department for a time,” said Gary Smith, the lawyer for the driver in the Arkansas case. “But case law touches every officer in every department in the country.”

    Eventually, he predicted, police departments facing civil rights investigations will challenge the Justice Department on its apparently contradictory positions. “You’re telling the Supreme Court it’s O.K., and you’re doing this to us?” Mr. Smith said.

    When Justice Department lawyers argue before the Supreme Court, they typically draw fine distinctions and avoid outright contradictions. But such cases can send seemingly mixed messages. For example, the civil rights division said in December that police officers in Cleveland were too quick to use force against mentally ill people. For support, it cited the federal appeals court decision in the case of the mentally ill woman in San Francisco — the same decision that Justice Department lawyers would argue against a few months later.

    Advertisement

    Similarly, the Justice Department criticized the Sheriff’s Office in Franklin County, Ohio, in 2010 for using stun guns on inmates while they were handcuffed and posed no threat, or when they committed minor rule violations. In a Supreme Court case to be heard this month, the Justice Department has sided with Wisconsin jail officials who used a stun gun on an inmate after he was handcuffed and taken from his cell for refusing to remove a piece of paper covering a light fixture in his cell.

    The Justice Department sees those cases as evidence not of conflict but of how its lawyers strike a balance. In the Sheehan case from San Francisco, despite siding with the police, they argued that officers must make some accommodation for a person’s mental illness when making an arrest. And in the Wisconsin case, they agreed with the inmate about the legal standard needed to prove abuse, even as they again supported the police.

  438. Pteryxx says

    All I could find on Rodney Todd and his family (the eight who died of carbon monoxide poisoning in their home) are reposts of the original April 7 article in the Daily Mail. See #ToddFamily above. (Daily Mail link)

    Delmarva Power says it did not cut off power to a family of eight who died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning because they were behind on their utility bills.

    Spokesman Matt Likovich says the utility discovered a stolen electric meter had been illegally connected to the rental home where the family was living since November.

    The utility says the meter was disconnected for safety reasons on March 25.

    Rodney Todd and his two sons and five daughters then used a generator for power.

    They were last seen alive on March 28.

    Princess Anne Police Chief Scott Keller said earlier today the Delmarva Power company has been subpoenaed to document exactly when it shut off power to the rental home.

    Maryland law bars utilities from terminating electric service for nonpayment of bills from November 1 through March 31 without an affidavit filed to the Public Service Commission.

    ‘I’m just numb. I’m just numb. Like it’s a nightmare but it’s not,’ the children’s mother, Tyisha Luneice Chambers, told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

    ‘If I had known he was without electricity, I would have helped.’

    Court records identified the boys as Cameron and ZhiHeem, and the girls as Tyjuziana, Tykeria, Tynijuzia, TyNiah and Tybreyia.

    Bonnie Edwards said her grandsons were 13 and 7, and granddaughters were 15, 12, 10, 9 and 6, respectively.

    […]

    Bonnie Edwards said her son taught his children how to talk with elders and the value of education.

    He bought each a cake and a gift on their birthday, even though money was tight.

    ‘There was nothing he wouldn’t do for them,’ she said.

    ‘All he was trying to do was to keep his kids warm.’

    A co-worker at the nearby University of Maryland Eastern Shore, Brittney Hudson, said Todd ‘was always smiling and laughing.’

    ‘He’s the man you need to know and the man you want to be,’ said Bilel Smith, who lives nearby. ‘They were their own football team, their own basketball team. This is breaking our hearts.’

    While I haven’t (yet) seen anyone blaming the Todd family for the illegal electric meter, to forestall that, I can say they may not have known about it. Meter theft rings will strip newer-model meters off the outside of houses and replace them with cheaper models, unnoticed by the occupants until the utility company notices a problem.

  439. Pteryxx says

    More details, or rather the lack of them, on the non-investigation of Lennon Lacy, found hanging from a swing set last August.

    Daily Beast: Black Teen Hangs, Cops Shrug: No Evidence Collected on Lennon Lacy

    Police turned away the coroner, ordered no autopsy, and took no photos or measurements. No wonder the family doesn’t believe it was suicide.

    […]

    Coroner Hubert Kinlaw told Dr. Christena Roberts, a pathologist hired by the North Carolina NAACP to conduct her own investigation, that he was prevented from taking photos of the crime scene by police—and that cops even threatened to take away his camera.

    Furthermore, Kinlaw told Roberts as part of her investigation that police at the scene “didn’t want an autopsy performed,” and that Kinlaw took it upon himself to order one with the local district attorney. (Kinlaw has turned down repeated requests for comment.)

    However, an officer from the State Bureau of Investigation said in a report that no photographs were taken at the scene because the sole crime scene technician was at “another homicide.” (No other homicides could be found in news reports for that 24-hour period.) So the authorities don’t even agree why photographs weren’t taken.

    That omission alone could jeopardize any homicide investigation, but police apparently collected virtually no forensic evidence on the crime.

    The teenager’s hands weren’t bagged when his body reached the medical examiner, which is commonly done to preserve DNA evidence for retrieval by investigators.

    The shoes that Lacy’s family members says weren’t his never made it to the autopsy table.

    When Dr. Deborah Radisch of the North Carolina Medical Examiner’s Office asked the State Bureau of Investigation about this, they said the presence of the suspicious shoes had “been explained but did not elaborate further.”

    Hell, the noose wasn’t even measured.

    […]

    “What they should have simply said, at least until more information is available, is that the cause of death is undetermined,” said Kobilinsky. “There are some complicated cases where the question is suicide or homicide. These are difficult determinations and it requires a lot of expertise and good crime-scene work.”

    There was neither.

    If evidence was taken from the scene, that information is contained in police reports that aren’t subject to open records laws due to the FBI’s ongoing investigation, the police said. And since police and the local coroner had determined early on that Lacy had taken his own life, little was done to test how he would have done so.

  440. rq says

    New Ferguson City Council members sworn in; reform promised

    Three new members of Ferguson’s city council were sworn in Tuesday evening in a historic ceremony.

    The swearing in was historic because half of the council will now be made up of African American members. All three new members were elected after a Department of Justice report alleged the city used its municipal court and police department as a means of collecting revenue. The report also accused the police stopping African Americans at a higher rate than whites.

    All three new members, Ella James, Brian Fletcher, and Wesley Bell, spoke to News 4 about what they would do to move the North County city forward in a positive direction. James provided News 4 with some specifics.

    “Tomorrow morning, call and see when I have an opportunity to go in and visit the police during a shift change. I want to get to know them, I want them to know me,” said James.

    Both Bell and Fletcher spoke in the abstract. Both said they have a desire to reshape the city’s court and police department.

    “I think we need to have outside police meetings with our citizens. We need to get out of the car more, have bicycle patrols and walk the beat,” Fletcher said.

    “I want to reform our courts, not just Ferguson, but regionally. There are initiatives in place that I’ve been involved in. We have an opportunity with all the attention on our city to make some sustainable changes,” Bell said.

    All three said they believe Mayor James Knowles should not resign. The council is expected to hire a new police chief and city manager soon.

    Dunno, if Mayor Knowles isn’t going to get involved in reform, he definitely needs to resign.

    Open letter to Pennsylvania governor and corrections head urges independent medical care for Mumia Abu-Jamal – seeks more signers

    Internationally renowned political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal is seriously ill. He is currently suffering from life threatening diabetes, full body skin disease, weight loss – 80 pounds in the last two to three months – extreme dehydration, multiple neurological symptoms – uncontrollable shaking, slurred speech, loss of memory with fugue states – and is wheelchair bound.

    He was initially placed in the prison infirmary for the severe skin problem, released back into general population only to become sicker, very possibly as a result of inappropriate treatment for the skin problem. Most serious, despite three blood tests during his stay in the infirmary, he was not diagnosed for the diabetes he had developed, which only weeks later led to his going into diabetic shock.

    He was rushed to the ICU at the closest hospital and had his sugar level somewhat stabilized only to be returned to the prison two days later while still very sick, causing more medical crises. Mr. Abu-Jamal is in immediate need of medical help from outside the prison system as the neglect and malpractice of the Department of Corrections is directly responsible for the inadequately addressed and alarming deterioration of his health.

    We, the undersigned, call on Governor Thomas Wolf and Secretary John Wetzel to promptly authorize the independent doctors Mr. Abu-Jamal has chosen to coordinate his diagnosis and treatment plan, and to involve the specialists needed to address his many medical challenges. This would require allowing those doctors 1) to have regular phone access with Mr. Abu-Jamal while he is in the infirmary, 2) to be able to communicate freely and regularly with the prison infirmary physicians who are overseeing Mr. Abu-Jamal’s care, and 3) to schedule an immediate independent medical examination.

    The horrific medical care Mr. Abu-Jamal has received at SCI Mahanoy with life threatening consequences is by no means unique to him. The epidemic level of diabetes throughout Pennsylvania’s prisons and the skin problems and hepatitis infections many of the prisoners experience speak volumes about the vulnerability to serious disease that simply entering the prison system causes.

    We, therefore, call for an independent investigation of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections medical system. In particular, this investigation must focus on profit-making organizations hired by the Department of Corrections that place priority on cost cutting rather than the quality of care provided to prisoners, resulting in fewer referrals to hospitals when needed and more deaths.

    Finally, given the extensive evidence of Mr. Abu-Jamal’s innocence, long prevented from being addressed fairly in the courts, and now the evidence that Mr. Abu-Jamal’s very life is in danger while in the prison system, we call for his immediate release from prison.

    Anti-Police Brutality Activists Demand Answers To Freddie Gray’s Death

    A week after he was arrested under suspicious circumstances by Baltimore police officers, 25-year old Freddie Gray died in the hospital. He had been in a coma after 80% of his neck vertebrae were severed. Despite extensive surgeries to revive him he died. Before his April 12th encounter with police, the young African American man had been in perfect health.

    Cell phone footage of the arrest shows officers bending over him while Gray screamed. He continued screaming while being escorted into a police vehicle while handcuffed, suggesting he was in deep pain.

    Depute Commission Jerry Rodriguez said of the footage, “At no time, and I’ve seen the video a number of times, did I see a use of force at that moment.” But instead of providing him with medical treatment that he clearly needed, police put him in additional restraints and took him to the station. Half an hour later he was taken to the hospital.

    Now, Gray’s family and anti-police brutality activists want answers. They want to know why there is a gap in the police time line where it is not clear what exactly happened to Gray. They also want to know why Gray was arrested in the first place. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Police Commissioner Anthony Batts have announced an internal investigation into the matter. Six officers have been suspended with pay in connection to the case.

    Audio also available at the link.

    This is almost funny. F**K You, F**K That, and F**k CNN! Baltimore Protester Grabs Reporter Mic

    While CNN attempted to cover the growing protests in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray, a protester grabbed the mic of a CNN reporter Miguel Marquez and went off.

    Warning: This video is raw and the language is not bleeped out

    ACLU Sues City of Pine Lawn for Police Corruption and Harassment, I think that’s a repost – here’s HuffPo on the subject: Tiny St. Louis County Town Used Police Force As ‘Bullies,’ Former Mayor Claims

    Pine Lawn, a tiny St. Louis County town notorious for corruption and predatory ticketing practices, is being sued by its 80-year-old former mayor, who alleges a successor used the police department to falsely arrest him and portray him as a criminal.

    Adrian Wright, Pine Lawn mayor from 1993 until 2005, says in a federal lawsuit that ex-Mayor Sylvester Caldwell was the town’s de facto police chief and used the force as a political weapon. Caldwell resigned last week when he pleaded guilty to federal extortion charges.

    Pine Lawn, just over one-half square mile, has about 3,000 residents and shares a reputation with nearby Ferguson for relying on fines and fees to fund local government. The mostly African-American city puts out thousands of arrest warrants for minor code violations, including a ban on saggy pants, that can lead residents into insurmountable debt. […]

    During the campaign, Wright said, police wrongly accused him of running a stop sign near his home, then arrested him on false assault charges. When he was freed two hours later, he was greeted by a television news crew from station KMOV.

    Caldwell was with the journalists, Wright said. Later, when Wright endorsed Caldwell’s mayoral opponent in 2013, Caldwell allegedly published Wright’s mugshot in a newspaper he created called The Pine Lawn Evening World, which mimics the region’s weekly crime newspaper, The Evening Whirl.

    “The campaign literature falsified me and portrayed me as a criminal,” Wright said Tuesday. “They discredited me for running for office because I wouldn’t endorse Caldwell. I hope the police department would rather serve and protect than serve and oppress.”

    The charges against Wright were dropped because the city failed to prosecute. He was later arrested twice more on the same charges, which were dismissed in August 2013.

    A Pine Lawn spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment. Caldwell couldn’t immediately be reached.

    1) Saggy pants, it’s the criminal fashion.
    2) Publishing a mugshot in a fake newspaper? … What can I say?

  441. rq says

    Thanks for that bit on Lennon Lacy, Pteryxx. So little investigation. How little that life was worth to them…

  442. rq says

    Tangentially related, on how elite education remains out of the reach of some: How the Rich Get Into Ivies: Behind the Scenes of Elite Admissions

    A million-dollar full-ride scholarship endowment to an Ivy League school is a good deed. But it doesn’t just earn you karma—it nets you fawning emails from the school’s development officials, customized campus tours for your kids, and private meetings with the school’s president, leaked Sony emails show.
    Sony Hack – Everything you need to know about the Sony hack in one place

    Everything you need to know about the Sony hack in one place
    Read more sonyhack.​gawker.​com

    The dump of tens of thousands of emails from Sony Pictures’ upper ranks, now conveniently indexed on WikiLeaks, lays bare the inner workings of one of the world’s most powerful corporate properties. But it also shows how the rich, powerful, and connected navigate the world: with rolodexes and billfolds of equal thickness.

    Newly surfaced emails from Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton provide a schematic for how millions of dollars in Adam Sandler grosses can yield immensely preferential treatment for your children, not only providing access to a college admissions process that’s out of reach for virtually all other Americans, but giving them better opportunities both in college and in internships and job opportunities afterward.

    An email from Lynton’s sister, noticed by the London Review of Books, is an admirably succinct summary of elite strategy:

    He writes to his sister: ‘David… called me. he is obsessed with getting his eldest in Harvard next year.’ She replies: ‘If David wants to get his daughter in he should obviously start giving money.’ Obviously.

    It’s apparent to everyone that munificent donors have a leg up in the admissions process. But it’s rare to see the actual behind-the-scenes workings of the elite and connected. The emails below give a sense of how much more smoothly the gears of power move when you’ve got a superrich and well-connected elite cranking the wheel—and make it even more clear that how you got into college isn’t how Hollywood aristocracy does it.

    More at the link.

    America. Cop viewed from the back, and on his belt hang: a hammer, labelled judge; a phone, labelled jury; and a gun, labelled excutioner.

    Cop Can’t Park Confederate Flag Car At Washington Heights Precinct

    A police officer with the NYPD’s 34th Precinct has been told he or she can drive a hot rod with a Confederate flag painted across the roof to work, but can’t park it in the staff lot. The directive came in response to a report by CBS2 on the presence of the car at the station house.

    The car is a replica of General Lee, the 1969 Dodge Charger that jumped its way through dozens of episodes of The Dukes of Hazzard.

    The car, the report notes, is “prominently decorated with a symbol some equate with racism,” which hedges the issue to the point of non-recognition. It’s true that not everybody equates the flag with racism—Lynyrd Skynyrd and, for some reason, Kid Rock are in this camp—but most of those nonbelievers also happen to be white. What bothers black people about the flag, and what should bother white people, as Ta-Nehisi Coates argued in a post for The Atlantic, is “that it is the chosen symbol of slaveholders and those who wanted to live in a republic rooted in slaveholding.”

    In any case, the flag remains a signature of the Dukes franchise, and in 2012, rumors that it would be stripped from merchandise and a possible sequel were shot down by Warner Brothers.

    This is not the first time the General Lee has made an appearance in connection with the NYPD. The car, or one like it, was photographed at the now-closed New York City Police Museum’s vintage car show in 2010 and 2011. And an Instagram user spotted a half-General Lee rolling through Harlem back in 2013.

    Back in 2009, The Brooklyn Paper reported on a Bay Ridge man flying the stars and bars from his balcony as a “one-man protest” against political correctness.

    The CBS team on the General Lee story didn’t find any Washington Heights residents who are too bent out of shape about the muscle car, though a reporter did have one fellow passing by do a weird thought exercise in which he imagined himself as a cop, driving the car. The result:

    “I would feel uncomfortable driving that,” said Michael Wynn, of Washington Heights. “If I was a cop, I would feel very uncomfortable.”

    “Sorry if we are not drowned” #Lampedusa #refugeestruggle

    DAY 5. TODAY. EVERYDAY. 5PM. MOUNT & PRESBURY. #BALTIMORE STAND UP! #JUSTICEFORFREDDIE #FREDDIEGRAY Waiting for justice in Baltimore.

    Down and out in Beverly Hills, Missouri: the tiny town that runs on police tickets – I think that’s the third definitive one about which articles have been written (Ferguson, Pine Lawn, Beverly Hills…). And several others have been mentioned. It’s not just one town, folks. It’s not.

    “Everything you need to know about Beverly Hills is in that building,” the woman said, pointing across the street.

    “Which building?” I asked. There were two: a ramshackle center housing a combined pharmacy, city hall and police station, and a Payday Loans outlet decorated with neon lights, promising $10,000 on the spot.

    “I was talking about the police station,” she said. “But both. That whole street. Either way, someone’s taking your money. Now excuse me, but I can’t talk. I’ve got to get the bus.”

    “Where are you headed?”

    “I’m going to work. There’s no work in Beverly Hills.”

    A far cry from its California counterpart, Beverly Hills, Missouri, is a 10-minute drive from Ferguson, the city synonymous with racial strife. At first glance, Beverly Hills is one of many St Louis suburbs that makes Ferguson seem comparatively fair and functional.

    Less than 600 people live in Beverly Hills, which is 0.09 square miles. Blink and you miss it, unless you are pulled over by one of their 13 police officers – that is, one for each of its 13 blocks – and become incorporated into its system of human currency. In 2013, the town’s municipal court generated $221,164 (or $387 for each of its residents), with much of the fees coming from ticketing non-residents. […]

    Beverly Hills is one of many tiny St Louis County towns whose right to existence has come into question after the Ferguson fallout. Civic groups like Better Together STL have called to incorporate St Louis’s 90 municipalities into a larger whole, and national news organizations have singled out the town as an example of aggressive policing.

    But there is more to Beverly Hills than rapacious officials and suffering citizens. In fact, to hear city officials tell it, that is not the story at all.

    “Beverly Hills is getting a bad rap,” says John Buchannan, the town’s chief of police. “Why focus on us when other places have the same problems? Because we’re in North County.”

    “Let’s be clear,” says Brian Jackson, the head of the town’s board of alderpersons. “We’re getting it because our community is African American, low-income, and run by African Americans.”

    Ferguson’s white mayor, mostly white council, majority white police force and majority black population made it a national symbol of racial discrimination. The same cannot be said for Beverly Hills. Every town official is black; nearly all of its police force, including Chief Buchannan, is black; and 94% of the population is black. Both Buchannan and Jackson describe Beverly Hills as a peaceful and friendly community – and put the police at the center of that description.

    “We really engage the community,” says Buchannan of his department. “We have basketball teams, we have the police explorer program, where young people can learn about law enforcement. We do citizen police academies. We do any event we can, Easter egg hunts. Anything to get the community involved.”

    On a warm spring day, Buchannan drove me through the streets of Beverly Hills to make his case. “Look at these houses,” he marveled. “Look how peaceful and quiet it is. Look how clean it is. You see people cutting their grass and cleaning it up afterwards. You don’t see condemned houses or high grass. We’re surrounded by places with a lot of incidents. But we don’t have them in Beverly Hills.”

    From Buchannan’s perspective, Beverly Hills is an African American oasis in a region marred by urban blight and violent crime. To venture into neighboring towns like Pine Lawn and Wellston is to encounter an entirely different landscape of rotting homes and empty lots.

    In a town like Beverly Hills, with almost no industry and a minuscule tax base, what makes civic initiatives possible is also what denies many people their freedom: tickets, and lots of them.

    In 2014, Beverly Hills police officers wrote 3,818 tickets. The number seems immense given the town’s size, but according to Buchannan, it is not notable. “Some communities write that in a month,” he protests, noting that towns like Kirkwood, the majority white middle-class suburb where he grew up, have written a high number to little media scrutiny. […]

    Every business Buchannan mentions was a major St Louis factory that went out of business in the 1980s or 1990s. Their closure destroyed the American Dream for many of the black St Louis County residents who had come to suburbs like Beverly Hills seeking a middle-class life. The other stories Jackson and Buchannan tell – of Beverly Hills’ community garden, which he hopes will be used by locals who otherwise rely on food pantries – similarly convey the region’s deprivation after decades of hard times, and the strategies the town has taken to stave off their own downfall.

    At heart, Beverly Hills is a story of survival. Beyond the shuttered stores and the predatory lenders are people scrambling to make tough decisions as resources run dry. Whether it survives, and how the complicated questions of money, policing and race that surround its survival are resolved, remains to be seen.

    I take issue with their ‘right to existence’ being questioned – the right to ticket so much, yes, and in one respect it’s an understandable reaction, trying to find finances in a crumbling economy. But is their right to existence, as such, really being questioned? And if not directly, does it come down to much the same thing?

    At least three people were killed by police yesterday: in Lakewood, WA, Newark, NJ, and Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles. 4/21.
    Yuh. Three. In one day.

  443. rq says

    Oy. Ran into a wall of moderation. Please look for a new comment 442 shortly.

    Baltimore’s @MayorSRB reached out to #FreddieGray’s family to meet. The family declined.

    Man shot and killed by police at Wal-Mart in Portsmouth. The appearance of Wal-Mart in police violence cases seems statistically relevant. Analysis, anyone?

    A man was shot and killed by a police officer this morning in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart at 1098 Frederick Blvd.

    The shooting was reported about 7:35 a.m. by the officer who radioed that he had been involved in a shooting and medics were needed, said Detective Misty Holley, police spokeswoman. The man who was shot – whose name hasn’t been released – was pronounced dead at 7:45 a.m.

    The shooting happened near the store’s sign at Frederick Boulevard. Police cars surrounded the scene this morning and a black barrier was erected where the man died.

    A construction crew worked nearby to build a Wawa near the Wal-Mart. Leroy Woodman, 27, who was working for Scorpion Steel of Delaware, said he and a co-worker were standing on top of the Wawa structure when they saw the police officer and a man.

    The officer had the man against a car and appeared to be trying to put handcuffs on him, Woodman said.

    “He and the officer started tussling,” Woodman said. The officer pulled out his Taser. Woodman said he could not see if the officer shocked the suspect. The man knocked the Taser out of the officer’s hand.

    ”The officer pulled his gun and stepped back,” Woodman said. “You could tell they were talking.”

    But Woodman could not hear what they were saying over the machines and trucks on the work site.

    Then, Woodman said, the man charged the officer, who fired.

    “As soon as the guy dropped, the officer put his gun away and dropped to the ground to give him CPR,” Woodman said.

    Medics arrived soon after.

    So he charged? Oh, then shooting him was definitely the one and only true answer for this well-trained unemotional officer.

    White people have been banned from an ‘anti-racism’ event at a British university | @laraprendergast Okay? So? There’s a linked article: White people have been banned from an ‘anti-racism’ event at a British university

    Bahar Mustafa, the Welfare and Diversity officer for Goldsmiths Students’ Union, must have a strong sense of irony. You’d have to, to run an ‘anti-racism’ event which states that ‘if you’re a man and/or white PLEASE DON’T COME. As the student publication the Tab reports, the event claims to be ‘challenging the white-centric culture of occupations’, ‘diversifying our curriculum’ and building a ‘cross campus campaign that puts liberation at the heart of the movement’.

    Back in February, Mustafa, who describes herself on Twitter as a ‘queer, anti-racist feminist killjoy’, came to my attention when she helped organise a ‘BME ONLY social’ before a screening of the film Dear White People. For those not acquainted with the lingo, this means for Black and Minority Ethnic only.

    And now this, essentially the proposition of racial segregation in a British university. And yes, it’s trussed up in the language of the new PC – ‘non-binary’, ‘safe-space’, ‘BME Women’, ‘OUR liberation’ – but there are no two ways about this: this is division along racial lines, and it is astonishing that this is deemed acceptable. It wouldn’t be tolerated anywhere else in Britain – so why on earth is it being tolerated at a British university?

    So providing a space where those less heard can actually have a hope of being heard is now… reverse racism and a bunch of other reverse -isms? Or am I missing something here? Seriously, am I missing something here? I applaud Mustafa and I hope the event is successful.

    Police union accuses clergy of “crucifying” officers. Excuse me, #FreddieGray is the one w/ injuries more like crucifixion @deray
    That is a response to this: Man protecting cops who nearly severed #FreddieGray’s spinal cord off says not to “crucify” said cops. Via @deray, wherein the attached text quotes the union president saying, “I don’t know how leaders of a religious institution can crucify these officers without knowing all the facts of the case”, referring to the six officers involved in Freddie Gray’s arrest and… subsequent injuries. Because a pastor called for all six to be charged with first degree murder (they’ve got kidnapping and confinement, so why not, eh?).

    Here’s the wreckless, out-of-control body camera bill that the mayor bravely protected the city from. I sense sarcasm, because the attached text simply says that all officers would have to wear body cameras.

  444. rq says

    That’s a second wall of moderation! What have I done? New comments 442 and 443 forthcoming.
    Kind of random, but it seems appropriate here and other spaces: David Hume on, essentially, devil’s advocates: David Hume, in 1777, on randos. The tweet says randos, but the text within reads like it’s about devil’s advocates. Anyway, it looks like trolls have been around for ages.

    Mural for Jennings School District by the late Thaddeus McCarroll, signed 8/7/2010.

    Make This Crucial Call Today to Help Unseal the Truth on Torture, via Amnesty International.

    The America I believe in does not torture. If you agree please join me in calling on the United States to ensure this never happens again by undertaking investigations and ensuring accountability for the crimes of torture and enforced disappearances.

    This is the American Torture Story—and you can stop the United States from torturing again, today!

    For years, a Senate Committee worked to collect evidence of these human rights abuses for a 6,700 page report known as “the Senate Torture Report.” The only version accessible to the public is a 500-page summary, but even this small window contains details that are truly horrifying.

    The Justice Department has the full report, but apparently won’t even read it, let alone act on any new evidence it contains of criminal wrongdoing.

    5 minutes of your day could help prevent the US from burying the truth on torture!

    Today I used my voice to make a crucial phone call to the Justice Department. So can you!

    I am calling today in memory of Gul Rahman, who was stripped naked, wrapped in tape, immersed in cold water and shackled. He froze to death in custody.

    I am calling today for Majid Khan, who was subjected to rectal feeding during a three and a half year enforced disappearance. Then he was sent to Guantánamo Bay, where he remains today.

    I am calling today for Hambali, whose interrogator said, “we can never let the world know what I have done to you.” Hambali remains imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay today, without charge or trial.

    Join me in making sure that these stories, and many more in Amnesty’s brand-new report, “Crimes and Impunity,” are investigated by the Justice Department immediately.

    I was scared to call at first. Who was going to answer? What if they asked me questions?

    I thought about Gul, Majid and Hambali and decided to put my fears aside to speak with them. I read the script below and added my own personal story about how it felt to read the horrific details.

    They’re trying to bury the truth. You can stop them.

    It is our responsibility to shine a light on abuses and uphold dignity for all by demanding the truth on torture in the United States.

    They have a call-in script at the link, with phone numbers.

    We filed an affidavit 2 oust McCulloch. The hearing is 9am Friday Apr 24 w/ Judge Walsh @ STL County Court. #Ferguson Link within: LAWSUIT FILED TO OUST FERGUSON PROSECUTOR. Anyone need a reminder about who McCullogh is? Here, have one anyway:

    After the grand jury failed to indict Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson over his killing of Michael Brown, many emotions came to the fore within our community, including anger and sadness. Perhaps most importantly, we felt the continuity of a grave injustice. But what to do? Like all Guild attorneys, we turned to action. On January 15, 2015, we filed a case designed both to obtain some semblance of justice and to send a warning shot to other prosecutors—one meant to convey that there are consequences when a prosecutor treats police officers as if they are above the law.

    In Missouri, “any person” may file an affidavit with the clerk of court asserting that an elected public officer has “knowingly or willfully” failed to fulfill her duties of office. Normally, the court clerk would refer the affidavit to the prosecuting attorney for investigation; if the investigation found that the official failed to fulfill her office’s duties, the prosecutor could file a writ of quo warranto action in circuit court seeking her ouster from office. When the elected official is a prosecuting attorney, however, a Missouri court may appoint a special prosecutor to subsume those responsibilities normally attributed to the prosecuting attorney, including investigation and the bringing of an ouster suit.

    In January, Guild lawyers filed four affidavits, along with an accompanying memorandum of law and proposed order, on behalf of community activists alleging that St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch failed to fulfill his duties of office by acting arbitrarily and in bad faith during the grand jury proceedings investigating Officer Wilson.

    We have alleged that McCulloch acted arbitrarily by providing the grand jury with all the available evidence, not just evidence of probable cause for Darren Wilson’s indictment. This is contrary to how Missouri prosecutors act in other cases, resulting in widespread media condemnation of the grand jury process as “unusual.”

    We also alleged that McCulloch acted in bad faith by allowing the grand jury to hear testimony he knew was perjured; treating witnesses favoring a probable-cause finding hostilely, and those favoring Officer Wilson’s story favorably; failing to address inconsistencies between Officer Wilson’s prior statements and physical evidence with his grand jury testimony; using an unconstitutional instruction on Officer Wilson’s defense for the entirety of the grand jury proceedings (prosecutors changed the instruction upon the close of evidence, but it has not been disclosed to the public); focusing on Mr. Brown’s marijuana use with speculative questions, including whether he used “wax,” but not mentioning Officer Wilson’s likely steroid use; and evincing a bias in favor of police in other police shootings and private life.

    The court has set a hearing date of April 24. Importantly, all we can do is ask the court to appoint a special prosecutor; once done, the special prosecutor will investigate our allegations and then determine whether filing an ouster suit is appropriate.

    Here’s to success.

  445. rq says

    So. This is a satire site in Canada. … Is it still satire if it sounds utterly true? New Toronto police chief carded on way to swearing in ceremony. Or maybe I’m just gullible.
    Anyway, the good news is, the new Toronto chief of police is black. But apparently the bad news is (as mentioned via tweet yesterday, see above) that he has union support, which… weeelllll, I’m inclined to think it’s not always the best support.

    The married father of four was “crept up on” by two officers in a cruiser as he walked towards City Hall, who were advised there had been some suspicious activity in the area and asked for his ID.

    “Sir, calm down! Calm down sir!,” said one of the Officers to a completely stationary, silent Saunders. “Just let us do our jobs!” he then yelled.

    Saunders said he didn’t have his identification on him. When the officers asked why he replied “because I’m the chief of police. Look at my uniform.”

    The two constables radioed their supervisor, who showed up in another cruiser a few minutes later. He proceeded to frisk the police chief.

    “I was really scared,” said Saunders. “Even though I knew I could refuse the search, I just couldn’t get the courage to say no. There were no witnesses around, it was just me and these three officers. I was worried that something could happen and I could end up in jail or worse and nobody would see it.”

    After a fifteen minute wait as one of the officers pretended to use the computer in his cruiser, Saunders was told curtly that his story “checked out” and he was allowed to go.

    According to Saunders this is the tenth time this year he was carded by police.

    “I expect it,” he said. “I’ve been stopped so much without cause it’s more irritating now than scary. I’m tired of feeling constantly under suspicion and tired of being treated with disrespect from the fine men and women that I am so proud to lead.”

    Adding: “Now if only I could get a fucking cab.”

    Also, I noted the description regarding his status as married, and with children – random observation, but… and I know women get that a lot… do black men get described in media articles via marital status and absence/presence of children more than white men? This is an honest question, because it’s the first it has sort of stood out to me, mostly in comparison with women… and thinking back on other actual cases, black men having children (whether within marriage or not) seems to be a thing that gets mentioned. Is it a thing? Or am I seeing things again?

  447. rq says

    Probably the last link for tonight:
    The Disturbing Way America’s Legal System Turns People’s Bodies Into Weapons

    In and out of jail, 23-year old Michael Johnson feels targeted. His body and blood are seen as weapons.

    Johnson, a former college wrestler who went by the nickname “Tiger Mandingo” on social media and in the black LGBT ballroom scene, faces a triple blow of discrimination in the U.S.: He is black, gay and HIV-positive.

    Arrested in October 2013 and charged with “recklessly infecting” a white student with HIV, Johnson now spends 23 hours a day in a jail cell under “administrative segregation” — the term the St. Charles County Department of Corrections in Missouri uses to describe solitary confinement. He is allowed out of his cell, alone, for just one hour each day.

    “I’m HIV-positive and they feel like I could harm someone, or they feel like because people don’t want to be around me, they have to isolate me,” he told Mic. “Certain people feel like they can mistreat me just because I’m a little different, I guess.”

    Johnson is a victim of an alarming, growing set of laws across the country that criminalize HIV. Critics have targeted these laws, ostensibly instituted for protection, as ineffective at best and deeply harmful to an already stigmatized, vulnerable population.

    They also raise a serious, though rarely discussed, ethical dilemma: Should the American legal system be able to recast a public health crisis — one that disproportionately affects black individuals — as a weapon? […]

    “Scary” black men: HIV criminalization also reflects public fears of sex, same-sex desire and racial anxieties that loom throughout the U.S.; it cannot be ignored that Johnson is a black man whose time in jail began with an allegation of harm made by a white student. In some ways, this particular case surfaces the long-held image of the black male in the U.S. as a violent and sexually-potent threat.

    “The moral salience of HIV in criminal law cannot be separated from the homophobia, racism, and gender stereotyping that shape exaggerated fears and moral judgments about AIDS and HIV in the broader society,” writes legal scholar Kim Shayo Buchanan in an article, shared with Mic, soon to be published in the Minnesota Law Review. “The gender, sexual orientation, and social status of the complainant (much more than that of the accused) tends to shape perceptions of whether and when sex is a crime.”

    More than 1.2 million people live with HIV in the U.S., and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men, particularly young black/African American MSM, are most seriously affected by HIV.” Nearly one in seven people with HIV in the U.S. don’t know they’re infected.

    Threat of court intervention and prison time are not effective responses to this public health epidemic. Yet, “although the federal government has recently questioned the utility of HIV criminalization, no state has repealed its HIV criminal law,” Buchanan writes. “Nor do prosecutions seem to be slowing down: rather, since the mid-2000s, they seem to be on the rise worldwide.” […]

    Johnson’s case may set a precedent in Missouri, and in other states across the country, that casting blood and bodies as menacing weapons is an appropriate way to fight a public health epidemic. It’s not. By increasing fear of and stigma against people living with HIV, criminalization will just make it harder for people living with HIV to disclose their status or even get tested.

    “Maintaining these laws just further puts stigma and shame on those individuals living with HIV, and makes already challenging medical, dating and social situations even that much more traumatic,” Malebranche said.

    He’s right. The red ribbon must not become a scarlet letter.

    So many dimensions to being black in America – how can a colour of skin seem so terribly threatening to some people? I know racism exists, I know it, but I don’t think I’ll ever understand, consciously, how it works, even as I fully admit that I definitely have unconscious racial biases of which I am not aware.
    Sometimes it’s confusing. But I do know one thing: the world would be a better place without it. 100% convinced of that.
    Anyway.

    They identified the man shot in the lumberyard last night/yesterday. Man fatally shot by Lakewood police suffered hallucinations, family said. He had seven children. And he was harming himself. And then they shot him.

    Daniel Covarrubias was suffering from hallucinations in the hours prior to his deadly confrontation with Lakewood police, his family said Wednesday.

    The 37-year-old man was evaluated at St. Clare Hospital Tuesday and then released.

    Within hours, he was shot by two Lakewood police officers at a lumberyard.

    Police said the officers opened fire when Covarrubias reached into his pocket. They have not yet said whether Covarrubias had a weapon.

    Ygnacio Covarrubias believes his son was walking home from the hospital when the deadly encounter took place.

    A suspicious person had been reported at Pinnacle Lumber & Plywood in the 3600 block of 108th Street Southwest.

    Several callers reported seeing a man running before he climbed a fence into the lumberyard, prompting employees to call 911.

    Lt. Chris Lawler said officers weren’t pursuing Covarrubias.

    “No police agencies in the area were chasing him or actively looking for him prior to the lumberyard employees calling 911,” according to a news release.

    Two officers found Covarrubias hiding atop a 25-foot-tall stack of lumber. They fired after Covarrubias allegedly reached into his pocket.

    It’s unclear how many times Covarrubias was shot. He later died at the hospital. […]

    His family said Covarrubias struggled for years with mental problems, alcoholism and an addiction to methamphetamine.

    But they said he was trying to clean up and had enrolled at Bates Technical College in hopes of becoming a mechanic.

    “He was a good person when he wasn’t using,” his father said.

    Covarrubias had seven children who range in age from 13 to 22, and he loved to spend time outside with them, often taking them camping.

    “He was a great father. He was very patient and kind to them,” Ygnacio Covarrubias said.

    The drugs and mental problems sometimes took hold, though.

    He was involuntarily committed once in the last two years after calling 911 for help. On another occasion, Tacoma police were called to Sixth Avenue when Covarrubias was behaving erratically.

    And he also had a criminal record, so what? Did anyone care enough to see that he got the professional mental health support that he needed? I mean besides his family – I mean trained professionals with whom he had contact (and he did, considering his encounters with police and health workers…). How did his life have so little value to those people?

    The real possibility that Prosecutor Anita Alvarez deliberately tanked the Rekia Boyd murder case

    This is the type of blog post that really won’t make much sense unless you watch the video below the fold. It’s the most important video I’ve shared in months and masterfully illustrates just why Chicago prosecutor Anita Alvarez is not to be trusted when it comes to prosecuting police officers. It’s a recent segment from 60 Minutes.

    Please watch it, then join me below the video for a discussion on why it’s absolutely possible that she deliberately tanked the case against Chicago PD Officer Dante Servin in the shooting death of Rekia Boyd. [… everyone watched video …]

    If you are here I am assuming you watched the video. What the Chicago Police Department and Cook County prosecutors did to those young men is an American travesty. Just kids, they were ripped from their homes, forced into false confessions for rapes and murders they didn’t commit, and then sent off to prison to die.

    Twenty years later, DNA not only proved them to be completely innocent, but directly implicated the other fully grown career criminals who actually raped and murdered people but never paid the price for it.

    In spite of overwhelming DNA evidence, in spite of a dozen attorneys from The Innocence Project who took these cases on pro-bono, in spite of judges setting these men free and giving them certificates of innocence, Anita Alvarez absolutely refused to let go of them being guilty. She refused to accept that officers forced confessions. She even went so far as to say that even though NO DNA from any of the six kids who were sent to prison was ever found on or even near any victims, that the DNA that was found INSIDE of the victims could’ve gotten there after they died. She literally suggested that career rapists found randomly found dead bodies in fields and had sex with them, but was completely unwilling to implicate any officers or imply that these men were done wrong.

    In what many people across the country thought was an open and shut case of a police officer clearly murdering a completely innocent, unarmed person, Anita Alvarez was the lead prosecutor in the case against Officer Dante Servin in the shooting death of Rekia Boyd. […]

    All of the people who witnessed the shooting testified to these facts, but on Monday Judge Dennis Porter shocked the country and dismissed all charges against Dante Servin. In his ruling, Judge Porter blasted Prosecutor Alvarez for under-charging Officer Servin.

    Judge Dennis Porter ruled that prosecutors failed to prove that Dante Servin acted recklessly, saying that Illinois courts have consistently held that anytime an individual points a gun at an intended victim and shoots, it is an intentional act, not a reckless one. He all but said prosecutors should have charged Servin with murder, not involuntary manslaughter.

    Servin cannot be retried on a murder charge because of double-jeopardy protections, according to his attorney, Darren O’Brien.

    Are you following what Judge Porter said?

    Rekia Boyd was shot in the head and killed by Officer Servin three entire years ago. Judge Porter said that it is widely known that if someone intentionally points and shoots a gun, it’s not reckless, but intentional, yet somehow this was lost on the prosecutor? She had three whole years to get this charge right.

    Are we to believe that Anita Alvarez was unaware of this legal interpretation? She’s a lifelong prosecutor! She knew. It is my belief that she deliberately undercharged Officer Dante Servin in this case. A police officer has not been charged in a shooting death in Chicago in over two decades and any prosecutor who becomes the first attorney to convict one could’ve never remained in power.

    If Anita Alvarez lacked the moral courage to speak honestly about six young men who had their lives ruined by her office, I sincerely don’t put anything past her.

    She tanked this case.

    And preparing for protest in Baltimore: The police have set up barriers trying to keep people out…only letting people who live there to pass. #FreddieGray

    Sleep easy, my friends – as easy as possible.

  449. Saad: Openly Feminist Gamer says

    Police calls Baltimore protest a “lynch mob”

    As protesters decrying Freddie Gray’s death plan more rallies in Baltimore on Thursday, anger is mounting over a police union’s comparison of the protest to a “lynch mob.”

    “While we appreciate the right of our citizens to protest and applaud the fact that, to date, the protests have been peaceful, we are very concerned about the rhetoric of the protests,” Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3 said in a statement.

    “In fact, the images seen on television look and sound much like a lynch mob in that they are calling for the immediate imprisonment of these officers without them ever receiving the due process that is the constitutional right of every citizen, including law enforcement officers.”

    John Cotton: “Which one is the #LynchMob again?”

  450. rq says

    Updates will continue tomorrow, so there will be a bit of a gap. Sorry about that, travel is not conducive to maintaining a thread. :)

  452. says

    Police officers can be killers, but they can also be rapists

    On Feb. 10, 2013, 31-year-old sheriff’s deputy Cory Cooper pulled over a 19-year-old woman and her boyfriend in Omaha, Nebraska. After finding marijuana in the vehicle, Cooper ordered the boyfriend to toss the drug in the nearby Zorinsky Lake, according to the Omaha World-Herald. While the man was away, Cooper allegedly told the young woman to follow him back to his cruiser, where he asked her to remove her shirt.

    The request was reportedly an ultimatum presented to the young woman to keep her boyfriend out of trouble. Cooper then exposed himself.

    “All I could think was, ‘What am I going to do to get out of this?’ Nobody’s going to believe me over the police,” the victim told the World-Herald.

    On April 15 of this year, Cooper took a plea deal that will allow him to escape a felony conviction. Despite the traumatizing nature of his crime, he will be served with misdemeanor charges of assault and attempted evidence tampering. He will serve a year in jail but won’t have to register as a sexual offender. He still has law enforcement certification, though the World-Herald reports that will likely be stripped soon.

    This type of sexual violence by police is more common than it would seem. In fact, though now-familiar scenes of civilians, mostly black men, being beaten, shot or choked by law enforcement have rightly provoked the ire of the American public, sexual misconduct is the nation’s second most reported allegation of officer misconduct, according to a 2013 report by the Cato Institute. Nevertheless, broad narratives of police brutality tend to ignore both female victims and the often specific nature of the violence leveled against them in favor of focusing on the highly visible use of weapons to kill men.

    “Safety, in light of police brutality, means organizing against racial-sexual violence,” community organizer Ahmad Greene-Hayes, who works with Black Lives Matter: NYC and Black Women’s Blueprint, told Mic. “Police officers can be killers, but they can also be rapists.”

    Women are subject not only to differential forms of violence by police, but also to entrenched stereotypes surrounding sexual assault, which may further inhibit their seeking justice for this abuse. Anti-sexual assault advocates have long argued law enforcement fails to adequately protect and serve survivors of assault. As such, “women too often find themselves at the mercy of police agencies that neglect women’s safety, whether by ignoring women’s allegations of abuse by an officer or making light of crimes reported by women,” Deborah Jacobs, a consultant in gender and race policy and police practices, told Mic via email.

    This issue may be multiplied for “black women with the least [economic and social] privilege, who live in the most dangerous situations,” University of Illinois professor Beth E. Ritchie writes in her book Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation. Instead, these women “are criminalized instead of being are supported.”

  453. rq says

    Just as info. The QT has already been removed (or at least, what’s left of it – but there was talk of preserving ti. Can We Preserve the Ferguson QuikTrip?

    For nine days after Michael Brown’s death, the Ferguson QuikTrip on West Florissant Avenue served as an unlikely public square — what one graffiti tag declared the “QT People’s Park.”

    “It’s all we have,” an early protest organizer declared. Yet its brief political life has ended, and it may now disappear from public memory altogether.

    The iconic Ferguson QT may be the most photographed structure in St. Louis aside from the Gateway Arch. Thousands of images have been circulated worldwide: photos of looters tripping over upturned shelving and merchandise, or eying the camera defiantly on their way out; photos of the flaming roof and the half-burned shell; photos of a sagging roof line and graffiti-marked walls; photos showing the building’s guts splayed out onto the pavement; photos of residents staring in disbelief. These are expressions of a world upended, of suffering made plain.

    Other QT photos express a sense of the flowering of new democratic life. Even as parts of the building caved in, the site served as a stage of public grief, commemoration and political resistance. People gathered in the parking lot or near gas pumps, some holding signs and chanting. Others paid tribute through prayers, silence, the simple act of being present in community. And many inscribed their views directly onto the QT structure: “RIP Mike,” “Snitches get stitches,” “County police” (crossed-out), and a list of historic episodes of civil unrest starting with Spain ‘36, including Watts ‘65, L.A. ’92, Cairo ‘11, and Ferguson ‘14.

    QuikTrip officials understandably saw liability instead of liberation in all of this, and set upon managing the physical site as well as its messages. On August 19, workers erected a chain-link fence around the property, dismantled remaining signage, drained gas pumps, and shuttered a second QT store nearby. These were predictable measures: there was concern for “public safety,” and police could not contain the site by means of force night after night.

    In fact even before it was enclosed, members of the public sought to manage the site. Some shooed protestors away from the unsafe building and underground gas tanks. Others painted over graffiti and cleared debris. The day after the firebombing, a local resident taped a handwritten note to the side of the burned-out building which implored her “Corporate neighbor” to rebuild the QT: “I am sorry this act of robbery & violence happened. Please return soon. I stop in 2-3 times per week. A 15-yr. customer of QT.” Many took photos of themselves in front of the wreckage, including “selfies for peace.”

    When the QT was accessible, protesters knew where to go when they arrived, where to start marches and where to post information. Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson legitimized this function when he chose to release Officer Darren Wilson’s name at the site, beneath the canopy sheltering the dormant gas pumps. As the week wore on, new protests and acts of resistance originated there. Outsiders made pilgrimages to the site. Its significance was clear. […]

    Some sites attain cultural landmark status through the official designation. Others acquire it instantly, through mass action. These sites are precious. While it seems an unlikely landmark, the QT has achieved cultural significance. Its varied and complex meanings should be preserved even if it the building is not. We lose too many sites of struggle and social change before their stories are recognized, let alone understood. Let us not erase the QT as quickly and quietly as the media seems to be turning away from the ongoing Ferguson demonstrations.

    With the Rekia Boyd trial just ended, this has been a theme (actually, it’s been a theme throughout): Silence on Black Female Victims Weakens Fight Against Police Brutality

    No one can deny black men’s vulnerability in this society and the recent killings of Walter Scott and Eric Harris are painful reminders, but the fact is black women suffer the same injustices. Silence, motivated by sexism and patriarchy, in mainstream and black America is the only reason why it isn’t widely acknowledged. And it’s holding the fight for justice back.

    Including black women and girls only strengthens the national case against racist police brutality — not only does it reinforce the aim to stop deadly police violence but also by virtue of our race and gender, black women’s and girls’ experiences highlight otherwise overlooked abuses in the legal system.

    For starters, early data indicates black women account for nearly 20 percent of those unarmed blacks killed by officers in the past 15 years. Adding the cases of unarmed black women, women such as Tanisha Anderson, Yvette Smith, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Rekia Boyd, and, the most recent, Natasha McKenna does not detract from crimes against black men, instead it broadcasts the extreme and unacceptable scope of homicidal police violence.

    It also raises awareness about other cases that deserve justice, particularly as the trial of Rekia Boyd’s alleged murderer, Dante Servin, is currently underway.

    On Thursday, the Cook County Medical examiner testified that Boyd, 22, an unarmed bystander allegedly gunned down by the off-duty Chicago police detective, “was shot in the back of the head.” Her longtime friend Ikca Beamon testified, “I seen her brains coming out of her head… I just lost it.”

    Natasha McKenna, 37, and battling mental illness, was likely tasered to death in police custody while in restraints in February. This Fairfax County, Virginia, incident was also captured on video.

    Acknowledging black female victims also demonstrates criminal profiling isn’t just happening to black men, and it isn’t only occurring during police stops. A recent African American Policy Forum report showed black girls who were late or absent from school ended up with criminal warrants. Black girls were also arrested for things like having a tantrum in school at age six.

    Even as victims, black girls run the risk of incarceration — such was the case for an 11-year-old rape victim in D.C. Police failed to believe her despite corroborating evidence from the rape kit. Instead she was imprisoned for making a false report. These violations are motivated by the same brand of sexism and misogyny that keeps the brutality against black women and girls hidden in the fight for criminal justice reform.

    Sexual violence in police custody is brought into high relief when black women are included. The alleged rape and sexual assault of at least 13 black women by former Oklahoma City Police Officer, Daniel Holtzclaw, serves as the most recent, heinous instance.

    The politicized nature of protection also becomes visible, black women’s cases can explicitly show how the justice system fails to protect us at the same time that it egregiously condemns black women. Marissa Alexander’s case is a recent example, but so, too, is the case of CeCe McDonald, 24. As an African-American trans woman, McDonald served 19 months in solitary in a male facility for fighting back against a racist, transphobic attack in Minneapolis in 2011.

    These outcomes showcase a pattern of bias that is not localized to places like South Carolina, Alabama, and New York, but we need to get past the patriarchy and misogyny to put these nationwide systemic inequalities on display.

    If we want institutional and structural change, then activists, policymakers, pundits, scholars, and everyday folk must examine black women’s and girl’s treatment in every facet of the justice system — from how their bodies are profiled, to their vulnerability to sexual assault and harassment in custody, to sentencing disparities with respect to race, gender, and sexual orientation. It also means including black women in all reform platforms, whether it’s community-based organizing or on-air TV news discussions or federal initiatives.

    It means saying the names of black female victims alongside those of black men.

    And another along the same lines, No One Showed Up to March for Rekia Boyd Last Night

    Last night in New York City’s Union Square, a modest crowd of about 100 people (depending on who you ask) showed up to rally for Rekia Boyd and Black women and girls who’ve been killed by police. The rally, organized by #BlackLivesMatterNYC, reflects much of what we already know about the value placed on Black women’s lives.

    The narrative on deadly police violence continues to exclude women, and precious few are willing to fight for justice both within the community and outside of it. A judge, this week, acquitted Rekia’s killer, Dante Servin, of all charges. But Rekia’s name will not spark a mass movement.

    In the same city where thousands flooded the frigid streets months ago in the name of Eric Garner, few could be seen. We sent a photographer to capture the crowd. The images are a somber, moving reminder that the work is ongoing. Thanks to Marino Mauricette.

    Photos at the link, too.

    Oh, regarding terminology used by police unions, etc. (previously an article both on officers being ‘crucified’ and ‘lynched’). “Maybe I need to reword that,” FOP President Gene Ryan, says re: likening protesters to a “lynch mob.” Yes, maybe.

    Freddie Gray’s lawyer just wants to get his case closed

    In a decade working as a public defender, Anne Stewart-Hill said she’s had more than a dozen clients die.

    Her latest was Freddie Gray.

    Now she’s trying to get a drug case against him closed. That typically means taking a death certificate to court and telling a judge that the defendant has died.

    Or prosecutors can drop the case themselves. And the state’s attorney’s office says that’s what it intends to do.

    But in Gray’s case it might not happen anytime soon. The next scheduled court date is May 21. And so at least as far as the file for case No. 115014015 in Baltimore Circuit Court is concerned, Freddie Gray is not yet dead.

    Stewart-Hill said the typical process seems redundant in this case.

    “In this case, I don’t think anyone disputes that Mr. Gray is deceased,” she said.

    The allegations in the drug case are straightforward, according to Stewart-Hill. In late December, an officer in a covert spot watched what looked to him like a drug deal involving Gray. But when officers searched him they found only money, no drugs.

    Police linked a stash in a nearby alley to Gray and brought a felony charge. Stewart-Hill said the case looked weak, and she was eager to fight for Gray.

    “He just wanted his day in court,” she said. She said Gray always came across to her as polite and helpful.

    “He just seemed like a perfectly normal young guy, didn’t have an attitude about anything,” she said.

    Now Gray, who died in police custody Sunday, a week after he was arrested in West Baltimore, won’t have the chance to have the allegations tried before a jury. So Stewart-Hill said she wants the case closed.

    “I’d like to help in whatever way I can and just to do something for him,” she said. “This is the only thing I can do.”

    ‘By Blood’ Tackles the Untold Legacy of Slave-Owning Cherokees

    It’s an obscure part of antebellum history, but members of no fewer than five Native American tribes participated in chattel slavery. Before they were driven from their lands in what’s now known as the U.S. South, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole nations all had members who bought and sold black people as property.

    In 1838 and 1839, when the U.S. government forced the Cherokee, the largest tribe, to relocate from their land east of the Mississippi River to what is now known as Oklahoma, enslaved black people, black spouses of Natives and mixed children joined them.

    Some 30 years after this forced march that Natives called the Trail of Tears, the Cherokee Nation was divided by the Civil War. Some supported and even fought for the Confederacy, while others sided with the Union.

    The Cherokee eventually signed the Treaty of 1866, an agreement with the federal government that granted enslaved black people who were freed voluntarily or by law “all the rights of the Native Cherokee.” In addition, “all free colored persons” and their descendants who were living on Cherokee land or set to return in six months received these rights.

    With a population about 300,000 members, the Cherokee Nation determines its citizenship not by blood quantum, but by whether an ancestor is on what’s called the Dawes Rolls. In those records black Cherokees were designated as Freedmen without consideration of their lineage. As a result, the tribe has always questioned their membership. In a 2007 special election that resulted in a change to the Cherokee constitution, a majority of voters chose to strip some 30,000 Cherokee Freedmen of their tribal citizenship. These Freedmen have lost access to the healthcare, education and housing benefits funded by the billion-dollar Cherokee casino industry.

    The Cherokee Freedmen are the topic of a new documentary,“By Blood,” which is on the festival circuit and due to hit select theaters in August. Colorlines spoke with Marcos Burbery who co-directed the film with Sam Russell.* Below is the interview condensed and edited for clarity.

  454. rq says

    how Watermelon became a stereotype of Black ppl. I never knew where it came from. Short version: free black people grew and sold watermelons, which became a symbol of freedom. White people used the symbol to say free black people are lazy because they don’t work as hard as slaves.

    Days of protest after Freddie Gray’s death – days and days.

    Freddie Gray, 25, died on April 19 — a week after he was injured while being arrested by Baltimore police. Video of the arrest surfaced, protests have broken out and an investigation into his death is under way. And now, the city is reacting.

    There’s a day-by-day recap with picture and short video.

    Meet the 79-Year-Old fighting to save her St. Louis home, neighborhood from possible bulldozing

    A 79-year-old woman is spearheading a campaign to save her home and over 45 others in her St. Louis neighborhood from possibly being taken by the city through eminent domain.

    Charlesetta Taylor has lived in her red-brick, three-storied home for over 70 years, ever since her father bought it in 1945, she told ABC News today.

    But the St. Louis Economic Development Corp. offered Taylor’s home and neighborhood to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) in January as a possible site for a new campus, a city development spokeswoman and an NGA public relations officer told ABC News today.

    Though the NGA said it was considering three other sites that wouldn’t involve having to bulldoze occupied homes and relocate families, the city said it offered the North Side St. Louis neighborhood hoping to get the NGA to stay in the city and keep the 3,000 jobs it provides there. The U.S. military and intelligence communities use analyses from the NGA that are based on maps and satellite imagery.

    “Eminent domain is, indeed, a possibility, but it’s a last resort,” the St. Louis development spokeswoman said. “If people do need to be relocated, we will have real estate people that will meet with the residents and negotiate a solution.”
    Charlesetta Taylor, 79, is pictured inside her three-story

    Charlesetta Taylor, 79, is pictured inside her three-story red brick home in St. Louis, Mo. (Photo: Karen Taylor)

    But Taylor doesn’t want negotiation, and over 90,000 people have supported and signed her Change.org petition. She said she wants to save her neighborhood and maintain her home nicknamed “The Big House,” which has housed generations of her family, including her eight siblings.

    “We were the first African-American family I know on this block and several other blocks around us,” Taylor said. “It was 1945, and there was a restrictive covenant restricting where African-Americans could live. But, nonetheless, my father was successful in buying this house for our large family.”

    Taylor added she went to an African-American grade school and high school since the area was segregated at the time and that she’s attempting to get her home on the city’s historic registry.

    “The Big House” has five bedrooms, two full bathrooms, two “lovely” fireplaces, a dining room with a “gorgeous hand-laid hardwood floor,” two staircases and plenty of unforgettable memories, she said.

    “We celebrated everything in here, and there was always something going on,” Taylor said. “During Christmas, dozens of kids would be here: all my siblings, cousins and, later on, their children and children’s children.”

    Taylor added that the house hosted many of their large family’s reunions, including its 50th one last year, which they called “The Fish Fry,” in honor of an old tradition Taylor’s mother used to maintain, eating fish on Fridays.

    Though Taylor is the only one living in the big house now, she said it’s still a sort of “hotel,” where relatives look forward to staying when they’re in town. “Not only do I want to maintain it, but many, many of us do,” Taylor said. “Even today’s generation loves it here. We give them a tour of the house and tell them old stories such as how my sister was a seamstress and even kept a shop up in here at one point.”

    Taylor added that many of her neighbors are also elderly and that their houses have a lot of history that they would like to preserve as well.

    The NGA said it is aware of Taylor’s petition, and it “does do not expect to make a final site selection until March 2016.”

    Taylor said she hopes the NGA will drop her neighborhood from site consideration, adding, “Our homes are not for sale.”

    But it’s a ‘bad’ neighbourhood, lots of abandoned lots, much better to redevelop it into… something else! Yeessss,,, that’s right.

    Racist caricatures of black people exists beyond Europe and was also dominant in Mexico’s past. This is Memin Pingiin. “Cultural context” and all that. Eh.

    Gregory Pardlo, Pulitzer Winner for Poetry, on His Sudden Fame

    On an unabashedly glorious afternoon this week, the poet and essayist Phillip Lopate stood in front of a small group of graduate students in Columbia University’s creative writing program. He took attendance, noting a few absences, before turning to a discussion about the German filmmaker Harun Farocki.

    But first he singled out a student sitting at the lecture table, who was fiddling with his pen and notebook, with a backpack stuffed full of library books at his feet.

    “I just want to embarrass Greg and make an announcement,” Mr. Lopate said. “He just won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.”

    Gregory Pardlo smiled broadly, muttered his thanks and did not look terribly embarrassed.

    The day had already been a surreal blur, beginning with congratulatory emails, texts, and messages on Facebook and Twitter, then hugs and handshakes as Mr. Pardlo made his way to class at Columbia, where he is a teaching fellow and earning an M.F.A. in nonfiction. “I was going to get a slow clap going for you in the hallway,” one student teasingly told him.

    Mr. Pardlo, 46, laughed and shook his head at how odd it all seemed. “I feel like I’m following around another guy who everyone is congratulating,” he said.

    Mr. Pardlo, who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, wasn’t just being coy. “Digest,” his second volume of poetry, was rejected by all of the major publishers when he first sent it out in 2010. When it was finally published last fall, by the small literary press Four Way Books, it sold modestly. While most of the critical attention last year went to widely celebrated poets like Claudia Rankine, Edward Hirsch and Louise Glück, “Digest” made Slate’s list of Overlooked Books of 2014. It has sold around 1,500 copies to date, according to Martha Rhodes, the director of Four Way Books, which is now printing another 5,000.

    Congratulations! More on him and his poetry at the link.

    Hundreds in Baltimore protest Freddie Gray’s death in police custody

    Hundreds of protesters gathered in Baltimore to demand justice for a man who died in police custody. 25 year-old Freddie Gray suffered a severed spine while being transported in a police vehicle. He later died from his injuries on April 19.

    Crowds are gathering in front of a police department calling for those involved to be punished.

  455. rq says

    And more: Protests grow after Baltimore man’s death in police custody

    Protests in Baltimore continued Wednesday over the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray. At some point during his arrest Gray suffered a spinal injury. But police haven’t said how it happened. Chip Reid reports on the growing tensions on Baltimore’s streets.

    Video.

    The importance of being represented: I’m so grateful to see @Nettaaaaaaaa at #AAG2015. Black women like her keep me going. Even when I want to quit.

    I may miss the article on this: Editor’s note:

    CBS News reports that Robert Bates, the Tulsa sheriff’s officer charged in the shooting death of Eric Harris, was the subject of a 2009 investigation in his training.

    It happened to journalists in AMerica, too, at a similar convention: Counterterrorism Conference Kicks Out Intercept Journalist

    The event, the Counter Terror Expo, is held in a large conference hall in Kensington (pictured above) on the west side of London. Hundreds of companies and government officials come together there every year to discuss the latest developments in the broad field of national security.

    It was an unexpected situation at a gathering I had covered several times in the past. As in previous years, I registered in advance for press accreditation and, as normal, had my application approved. “Please bring your badge reference number and photo ID,” I was told in an email. “Hope you have a great show.”

    The event, supported by the U.K. government, regularly attracts big multinational defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics. It is also attended by many smaller, lower-profile companies offering up a variety of controversial covert surveillance tools, biometric technologies, drones and other security equipment.

    This year, a host of talks were scheduled, including one about domestic extremism from a top London police officer, and another from a NATO official about “the changing nature of international terror.”

    But problems began as soon as I arrived. At the media registration desk, I handed over my badge reference information, and a woman named Georgia entered the details onto a computer. She frowned, looked at me, and said she would have to make a couple of phone calls.

    A few minutes later, her colleague arrived on the scene. There was a quiet discussion between them behind the desk, and then he too made a few calls. I heard him asking on the phone: “What is The Intercept?”

    It was interesting and surprising to hear the employees talking about my association with The Intercept while considering whether to let me in — I had registered to attend as a freelancer and had not included mention of the site in my application.

    Eventually, Georgia turned to me and explained that my pass had been rejected because of a decision made by someone “higher up.” She wouldn’t tell me any other details. I asked for an explanation, since I’d attended in previous years without any problems.

    She said she was going to have to call the head of security.

    A few minutes later, Oldknow, the security chief, arrived. He wore a dark suit and swaggered up toward the media desk, flanked by several tall, angry-looking security guards.

    Oldknow ushered me over to the side of the room. I pressed the red button on the voice recorder I was holding and asked why my pass had been suddenly revoked.

    “I don’t have a reason, I’m just in charge of security,” he said. “I enforce the rules; I don’t make them.”

    He explained that the event’s media partner had approved the registration.

    “But someone else has overruled that,” he said. “And on the system it says you are rejected as press.”

    So who is kicking me out and why?

    “I can only assume it’s because you’re not what they would deem … well, I wouldn’t use the word professional … but there are journalists that are focused on defense and security and they are the people that they invite to this event.”

    I told him I was focused on defense and security, that I had received an invite, and that I’d attended in previous years without any issues. He had no answer.

    “I hope you’re not recording this?” he asked, glancing down at my voice recorder.

    I told him I was.

    He looked a bit startled, refused to utter another word, and pointed me to the door. […]

    Welcomed with open arms are the journalists who write puff pieces about the latest counterterror technology for defense industry magazines. But veer too far from that script, expose the industry to some proper scrutiny, and you can expect to be kicked out the door.

    Michael Brown’s Family Suing Ferguson City for Teenager’s Wrongful Death

    The family of Michael Brown, a black teen who was killed last year by a white policeman in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, are about to file a wrongful death lawsuit against the Missouri city, the Browns’ lawyers said.

    Adner Marcelin, the spokesman for Parks & Crump law firm, said the filing of the intended civil lawsuit will be formally announced at a media conference due 10:30 a.m. CST (15:30 GMT) on Thursday.

    The Florida-based law firm, which is also handling the case of Trayvon Martin’s 2012 shooting in a similar police incident, has been working with the Browns since Michael’s killing in August 2014.

  456. rq says

    The next couple of comments from the protests in Baltimore on Wednesday. With pictures.
    Like in NYC, there are uniformed officers in the protest crowd. Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    Nearly all of the officers out here are black. It’s a different feel, for sure. Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    Scene outside the West District police station. Barriers erected today. Heavier police presence #freddiegray

    More plastic bottles being thrown police bulking up the line:

    Police got bored and callled in the cavalry. #FreddieGray

    RT @CFPalerts: Baltimore, MD *Protests* crowd continuing to gather, MLK and Penna Ave #FreddieGray

  457. rq says

    Baltimore protestors shut down Inner Harbor. #FreddieGray #Justice via @AntTheKing

    And there is apparently another protest happening right now in Baltimore blocking traffic downtown. #FreddieGray

    Protestors make it to police station and shut down street. #FreddieGray #Baltimore

    Protestors make it to City Hall. #FreddieGray #Baltimore

    No Sign of the #FreddieGray Rally Subsiding at 7:45pm EDIT

    Baltimore Staying Strong for #Justice

    Police are ready positioned to block entrance to 83: (They wanted to march out onto the highway.)

    mtc

  458. rq says

    Malik Shabazz of National Black Lawyers for Justice calling for 10,000 to show up Saturday #FreddieGray #Baltimore

    5 of the 6 officers involved re: #FreddieGray have provided statements. There is one lone officer not cooperating. Baltimore.

    Now marching through the neighborhood. #FreddieGray

    Moment of Silence. Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    I’ve been to many cities in protest. And I’ve never seen 3 helicopters like this before. Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    And now I’m going to go see what happened while I was in transit.

  459. Pteryxx says

    (Have a bucket handy.) Full text of the Baltimore Police Union “lynch mob” statement re the death of Freddie Gray. Text from a diarist at DailyKos, and image of the press release on Twitter.

    BALTIMORE CITY LODGE No. 3 [FOP LODGE 3]
    GENE S. RYAN President
    LISA M. RIHA Secretary
    Phone: (410} 243-9141
    Fax: {410) 487-1643
    Twitter: @FOP3

    For Immediate Release

    Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge #3 extends our most sincere sympathy to the family of Mr. Freddie Gray. Anytime a young person’s life is lost, the community grieves and Mr. Gray’s death is no exception. We also commend Commissioner Batts for the measured steps that are being taken to complete the investigation into the circumstances of Mr. Gray’s death.

    We fully support the Officers involved in this matter as we know them to be well trained, respected members of the Baltimore Police Department and our union. There is, at this time, no indication of any criminal activity whatsoever but our support will not waiver for any reason. We are, by nature of our profession, a proud group of men and women and our pride is unshakeable.

    While we appreciate the right of our citizens to protest and applaud the fact that, to date, the protests have been peaceful, we are very concerned about the rhetoric of the protests. In fact, the images seen on television look and sound much like a lynch mob in that they are calling for the immediate imprisonment of these officers without them ever receiving the due process that is the Constitutional right of every citizen, including law enforcement officers. We are reminded of the number of times that some of these same citizens argued their own innocence when confronted by their personal issues with law enforcement. Just as they expect due process so, too, do our officers. We are not concerned with the community’s confidence in the investigation; only that the investigation is handled without bias and that it is given the appropriate diligence.

    Also, time and time again we hear commentary related to the number of times that Baltimore City has settled claims in cases of police brutality. Let us be clear, we completely disagree with this policy as many of these cases are settled without concern for the facts but, rather, to avoid the high cost of defending a potential Lawsuit. We believe that these cases should be decided in Court where proper time and attention can be given. The ease of settlement, and substantial award amount, has led to the unjustified perception of an increase in brutality complaints.

    We have full faith in the actions of the Officers involved and look forward to the results of the investigation as we are confident that they will be vindicated.

    REPRESENTING THE PROFESSIONAL POLICE OFFICERS OF BALTIMORE CITY

    Ryan’s absolutely right in saying maybe he needed to “reword that” lynch mob reference. It’s the iceberg’s peak of clear racism poking through an otherwise civil-and-polite sea of minimizing, dogwhistling, cop-worshiping, power-tripping contempt.

    Briefly fisking some of this pile:

    There is, at this time, no indication of any criminal activity whatsoever but our support will not waiver for any reason.

    Even if there *were* evidence of criminal activity (such as Freddie Gray’s broken neck, say) they’d still support criminal officers.

    We are, by nature of our profession, a proud group of men and women and our pride is unshakeable.

    They are literally shameless.

    While we appreciate the right of our citizens to protest and applaud the fact that, to date, the protests have been peaceful,

    Protests have been peaceful *to date*. But those protests could mysteriously turn violent at any moment, because protests are just so darned volatile, while police *at* protests are just a neutral uninvolved part of the landscape.

    we are very concerned about the rhetoric of the protests.

    Oh no not the rhetoric, anything but that.

    In fact, the images seen on television look and sound much like a lynch mob in that they are calling for the immediate imprisonment of these officers without them ever receiving the due process that is the Constitutional right of every citizen, including law enforcement officers.

    All citizens matter, redux (see first paragraph). Folks on Twitter are pointing out that Freddie Gray was being hauled off and imprisoned before getting a chance at due process.

    We are reminded of the number of times that some of these same citizens argued their own innocence when confronted by their personal issues with law enforcement.

    Because when *those* citizens claim to be innocent, *they* can’t be trusted, unlike those law enforcement officers who humbly remind us that they are citizens too. Nope, *those* citizens have “personal issues” with law enforcement harassing, brutalizing, and killing them. Personal. Issues.

    We are not concerned with the community’s confidence in the investigation;

    *headdesk*

    only that the investigation is handled without bias and that it is given the appropriate diligence.

    Not full diligence… appropriate diligence. Where “appropriate” has about as much meaning as “without bias” in this statement.

    Also, time and time again we hear commentary related to the number of times that Baltimore City has settled claims in cases of police brutality.

    And they think *they’re* tired of hearing it “time and time again”.

    Let us be clear, we completely disagree with this policy as many of these cases are settled without concern for the facts but, rather, to avoid the high cost of defending a potential Lawsuit.

    Defending. Not the cost incurred by the victims and their families in bringing these fact-free, lying cases.

    We believe that these cases should be decided in Court where proper time and attention can be given.

    For “proper” see “appropriate” and “without bias” above.

    The ease of settlement, and substantial award amount, has led to the unjustified perception of an increase in brutality complaints.

    Perhaps instead of “lynch mob” he could have used the phrase “gold digging”.

    Note that this is a backhanded diss at the Baltimore Sun’s investigation of brutality cases, cited in #408 above. Excerpts:

    The beating Lyles received from Baltimore police officers — along with the resulting payout from city funds — is part of a disturbing pattern, a six-month investigation by The Baltimore Sun has found.

    Over the past four years, more than 100 people have won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil rights violations. […]

    City policies help to shield the scope and impact of beatings from the public, even though Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake acknowledges that police brutality was one of the main issues broached by residents in nine recent forums across Baltimore. […]

    Department officials said some officers were exonerated in internal force investigations, even though jurors and the city awarded thousands of dollars to battered residents in those incidents.

    For years, leaders in Baltimore’s Police Department, the nation’s eighth-largest, didn’t track or monitor the number of lawsuits filed against each officer. As a result, city officials were unaware that some officers were the target of as many as five lawsuits.

    And the close of the press release:

    We have full faith in the actions of the Officers involved and look forward to the results of the investigation as we are confident that they will be vindicated.

    Given how often their internal investigations exonerate officers, and how rare it is for police anywhere in the US to face any charges at all or even discipline beyond a token wrist slap, they have every reason to be confident. They just had to rub it in.

  460. rq says

    “Full faith in the actions of the Officers involved” (note capitalization). Sure gives me faith in the Baltimore PD, that line.

  461. rq says

    This is kind of going to be reverse chronological order (the tweety bits) for some of the time, just more photos of protest in Baltimore. For Freddie Gray.
    But I won’t be sorting too much, so they’ll show up randomly amongst everything else.

    +++

    Whenever city officials declare “This is not Ferguson” the fuckery is not far behind. Watch what is happening in #Baltimore #FreddieGray

    Occupying space. United States Courthouse. Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    Everybody at City Hall. Just one man at Baltimore PD right now. #FreddieGray

    Someone at NYPD HQ is frantically editing the @Wikipedia page for Douglaston, Queens right now. @NYPDedits: See attached edit record.

    Even the Baltimore City Public Defenders are here protesting. #FreddieGray

    The president of the Baltimore City Council is here. Protest. #FreddieGray

  462. rq says

    Well, that was definitely a random showing. :P

    Grand Jury Clears Dallas Officers in Fatal Shooting of Mentally Ill Man Armed With a Screwdriver

    A Dallas County grand jury has declined to indict two Dallas police officers who fatally shot 39-year-old Jason Harrison, a mentally ill man holding a screwdriver.

    The grand jury no billed the officers during a hearing Thursday.

    “We appreciate the grand jury’s consideration of all the evidence in the matter. The City is currently defending the civil lawsuit. Our thoughts and prayers are with all those struggling with mental illness,” said Chris Livingston, an attorney for both officers.

    Harrison’s family is disappointed and frustrated. Harrison’s brother says the family hopes this case will initiate change in the way deadly officer-involved shootings are handled.

    “We’re not headed in the right direction for change – to try to taper off the activities these guys are doing and getting away with,” said Sean Harrison. “This is not the way to correct it.”

    In March the attorney for Harrison’s family released video of the June 2014 shooting to the media and said it raised questions about the use of force by Dallas police officers John Rodgers and Andrew Hutchins.

    The video shows an officer knocking on the front door of a home in the 200 block of Glencairn Drive. Harrison’s mother opens the door and calmly walks outside, inaudibly telling officers something then saying her son was schizophrenic and bipolar.

    When Harrison appears in the doorway holding a screwdriver in his hand, Rodgers and Hutchins instruct him to drop the screwdriver. According to the officers, Harrison then made an aggressive or threatening move, reportedly lunging toward an officer, before they opened fire.

    Harrison’s mother Shirley spoke exclusively to NBC 5 and said she called 911 that day after her son stopped taking his medication and made violent threats.

    “We maintain the footage shows him not stabbing, not thrusting, not lunging in a way that would jeopardize the lives of these officer,” said the family’s attorney, Geoff Henley. “He never leaves the front porch and he’s gunned down.” […]

    “This is not the end, this is the beginning,” Harrison said, “And, we will fight to get people in place in office that we need – we need people to address these issues and make the accountability be there so we can have a great city.”

    After the Dallas Police Department completed their investigation, the officers were placed back on duty as the case was handed over to the Dallas County district attorney for referral to the grand jury.

    5 Ways To Support An Ex-Offender. 1) Listen; 2) Share your own story; 3) Don’t assume you know their struggle; 4) Help identify skills and passions; 5) TREAT THEM AS HUMAN BEINGS. My paraphrasing.

    These officers are blocking another street that leads to the police headquarters & Legal Aid. Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    The police presence at this rally is obscene. Like, this is crazy. Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    Saturday. Protest. Baltimore. #FreddieGray – 1PM at hte police station.

    How the NYPD Is More Humane to Coyotes Than African-Americans. Funny how this kind of comparison can be made. Yeah, funny, that’s exactly the word I’m looking for.

    This morning I saw a weird headline in the New York Times that really piqued my interest: “Coyote Roams Upper West Side, With Officers in Pursuit.” Of course, I had to click it and see if it was a joke. It wasn’t. A wild coyote had somehow found its way into Manhattan and was roaming the streets.

    I almost didn’t read the entire article. It was short, but I was in a hurry to get my day going. Then my eyes spotted a few words that surprised me even more. At first I was surprised, then I laughed a little, then I grew angry. Here’s the sentence that got me:

    Earlier this month, the police captured a coyote in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan by shooting it with a tranquilizer dart after a pursuit.

    Immediately I googled the words “Chelsea” and “coyote” and learned more:

    “There was a lot of cops running around with Tasers; with those long sticks,” said witness Maciej Magier.

    Witnesses who saw the coyote said it was the size of a German shepherd. The coyote played cat and mouse with New York’s Finest – bobbing and weaving away from officers from the Emergency Unit toting tranquilizer guns.

    It all lasted about an hour before the coyote was tranquilized with a dart and captured.

    And more below the fold:

    “When we felt it was safe enough, we used our animal noose to capture the animal, and then we placed him in an animal containment box and had him taken out to the center for animal control so they could, I guess, evaluate his health and his future,” said Detective Robert Mirfield, who helped rescue the animal.

    “He didn’t want to get captured,” he added.

    Eventually the wild coyote is scheduled to be released back into the wild.

    Who knew the NYPD had dart guns and Tasers?

    Claiming that they thought unarmed teenager Ramarley Graham had a gun, the NYPD chased him down on the street and shot him in his own house in front of his family. He died because dart guns and Tasers weren’t used, but lethal firearms. His family was just paid $3.9 million for his wrongful death.

    Too bad the NYPD didn’t “accidentally” shoot and kill Akai Gurley with a dart gun instead of a pistol in his Brooklyn stairwell.

    I wonder if Amadou Diallo would’ve survived 41 tranquilizer shots from the NYPD instead of the 41 bullets they fired at him in his doorstep?

  463. rq says

    Senate Makes History By Confirming Loretta Lynch As U.S. Attorney General, which is nice. First African-American woman to be US Attorney General! She’s not perfect (her opinions on drugs have been cited), but I think overall a good thing.

    Loretta Lynch was confirmed as U.S. attorney general on Thursday after months of GOP delays, making history by becoming the first African-American woman to hold the post.

    Lynch was confirmed in the Senate 56 to 43. All Democrats voted for her, along with 10 Republicans: Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), Thad Cochran (Miss.), Susan Collins (Maine), Jeff Flake (Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Orrin Hatch (Utah), Ron Johnson (Wis.), Mark Kirk (Ill.), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.).

    Sen Ted Cruz (R-Texas), one of Lynch’s loudest critics, was the only senator to miss the vote. Hours earlier, he railed against Lynch for being “unfit” for the job.

    “Today, the Senate finally confirmed Loretta Lynch to be America’s next Attorney General – and America will be better off for it,” President Barack Obama said in a statement. “Loretta’s confirmation ensures that we are better positioned to keep our communities safe, keep our nation secure, and ensure that every American experiences justice under the law.”

    Republicans who opposed Lynch, who until now was the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, conceded they didn’t doubt she was qualified for the job. Instead, they voted against her because of their anger over Obama’s recent executive action on immigration, which would provide deportation relief for up to 1.8 million undocumented immigrants. The matter is currently tied up in a lawsuit. Lynch will defend the policy in her new role.

    “We are deeply concerned in this country about the president’s executive amnesty. The unlawfulness of it, the breadth of it, the arrogance of it to the point that it’s a direct assault on congressional power,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). “We do not have to confirm someone to the highest law enforcement position in America if that someone has publicly committed to denigrating Congress.”

    Obama took the executive action in November after Congress failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform. He’s hardly the first president to use his executive authority on immigration matters. Every U.S. president since 1956 has used executive authority to grant various types of temporary immigration relief.

    Not just Adam Sandler movies. Actors quit L.A. ‘Ferguson’ play, question writer’s motives

    Veteran actor Philip Casnoff hadn’t read the full script yet when he arrived for the first rehearsal of “Ferguson,” a play chronicling the shooting of Michael Brown by a Missouri police officer.

    Casnoff thought he knew what the play, set for a four-day staged reading starting Sunday at the Odyssey Theater, would be about: the wilderness of testimony the grand jury navigated while investigating the day Officer Darren Wilson fatally shot the unarmed 18-year-old. Casnoff presumed a variety of viewpoints, the fog of truth.

    Then he read the script, which tells the story that Brown didn’t have his hands up and that he charged at Wilson.
    It felt like the purpose of the piece was to show, ‘Of course he was not indicted — here’s why.’ – Philip Casnoff, former ‘Ferguson’ cast member

    Now, in a case of art imitating life, the play is experiencing the kind of ill will and mistrust that erupted from the city it attempts to portray. Part of the 13-member cast is in revolt — Casnoff and four others have quit — as the playwright and actors are locked in a fundamental disagreement over how to tell the story of Brown’s death.

    Though the grand jury declined to indict Wilson after some witnesses and physical evidence supported his account of events, the tone of the play shocked some actors.

    “It felt like the purpose of the piece was to show, ‘Of course he was not indicted — here’s why,'” Casnoff said. He said that after he learned who the play’s author was, Casnoff, who describes himself as “very liberal, left-wing-leaning,” thought, “Whoa, this is not the place for me to be.”

    Through testimony taken from grand jury transcripts, the play ends with a witness telling a prosecutor that Wilson was justified in killing Brown. The audience is then supposed to vote on whether Wilson should have been indicted.

    The cast members who quit questioned the motivations of the playwright, Phelim McAleer. […]

    Several members requested changes to the script that would include adding another account more sympathetic to Brown to balance out the final witness’ dramatic testimony. McAleer has rejected those requests, spurring some of the actors’ departures.

    “He claims that he wrote this to try to get to the truth of it, but everybody’s truth is totally subjective,” said Veralyn Jones, an African American cast member who resigned. “When you come to the matter of what really happened, nobody really knows for sure, because everybody has a different take on it. … It just didn’t feel right to me.”

    One of the script’s most heated critics has been Abernathy, who is the daughter of civil rights movement leader Ralph David Abernathy, who was with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. when he died. Abernathy, who is black, has not decided to leave the cast yet — at least not before she has the chance to meet McAleer at a cast meeting scheduled for Thursday night.

    “I want to hear what he has to say face to face. I actually want to know, on a moral level, how can you do something like this that you know will divide America?” Abernathy asked. “Does it make you feel good? Obviously he has a personal agenda. What is his personal agenda?”

    McAleer was unapologetic, and waved away criticism.

    “These are people who claim to love diversity, and they don’t love diversity — they just want people to agree with them,” he said.

    So with or without his cast, McAleer said, the show will go on.

    But he just wants to tell the truth. Of some kind.

    Brown family files 44-page lawsuit against Darren Wilson, the police chief, and the city of Ferguson

    Nothing can bring Ferguson teenager Michael Brown back, but this new lawsuit filed by his family is one step toward justice for his family and friends. See the entire lawsuit, in full, below the fold.

    Michael Brown’s parents filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the city of Ferguson on Thursday, opening a new chapter in the legal battle over the fatal shooting by a white police officer that sparked a national protest movement.

    Attorneys for Brown’s parents promised the case would bring to light new forensic evidence that would raise doubts about the police version of events. Some of that evidence, they said, had been overlooked in previous investigations.

    “The narrative of the law enforcement all across the country for shooting unarmed people of color is the same: That they had no other choice,” attorney Benjamin Crump said. “But time and time again, the objective evidence contradicts the standard police narrative.”

    A more detailed analysis of the lawsuit is forthcoming.

    BREAKING: City workers sent home early today ahead of Freddie Gray demonstration

    In an email blast, Baltimore’s Labor Commissioner has told non-essential downtown employees they can leave their jobs at 2 p.m. today in anticipation of a large demonstration by Freddie Gray protesters.

    “Due to expected heavy traffic and possible public transportation delays this afternoon, liberal leave will be in effect starting at 2:00 p.m. for non-essential employees working in downtown buildings,” says Commissioner Deborah F. Moore-Carter in a memo obtained by The Brew.

    Marchers who have been demonstrating daily over the fatal arrest of Freddie Gray are headed for a 3 p.m. demonstration at City Hall and police headquarters two blocks away. Rev. Jamal H. Bryant, of the Empowerment Temple, is leading the march.

    “Tell everyone u know TODAY we are meeting at City Hall,” says a tweet from Bryant’s church, @EmpowermentTem2.

    A demonstration also will take place – as it has for several days – at 3 p.m. at the Western Police District on North Mount Street.

    Baltimore City has implemented its liberal leave policy today to allow city staff to get home before the #FreddieGray protests begin.

    One more for Loretta Lynch: Senate Confirms Loretta Lynch as Attorney General After Long Delay.

  464. rq says

    There are 2 Baltimore protests at 3pm today: City Hall and N. Mount/Presbury. #FreddieGray

    Art: Look at this powerful image. “@deray: This Stops Today by Erik Ruin. ”

    Explosive 2009 report from Tulsa reveals deep corruption concerning Deputy Bob Bates

    This is a smoking gun concerning the millionaire Tulsa Reserve Deputy Bob Bates who shot and killed Eric Harris in March:

    CBS News learned that in 2009, the Tulsa Sheriff’s Office launched an internal investigation to find out if Bates received special treatment during training and while working as a reserve deputy. They also investigated whether supervisors pressured training officers on Bates’ behalf.

    The investigation concluded Bates’ training was questionable and that he was given preferential treatment.

    The investigation found that deputies voiced concerns about Bates’ behavior in the field, almost from the very beginning. Bates reportedly used his personal car while on duty and made unauthorized vehicle stops. When confronted Bates said that he could do what he wanted, and that anyone who had a problem with him should go see the sheriff.

    See the CBS News video on the newly revealed report below. It’s clearly no longer speculation about whether or not Bob Bates and the Tulsa Sheriff’s Department were abusing the system. Now it’s a proven fact.

    From March, an interview with two protestors: Citizen Journalism and Documenting the Ferguson Protests . It’s an hour and 23 minutes, but I think worth a look.

    And here’s one that says black transwomen posing nude is not empowering, specifically re.: Laverne Cox. Laverne Cox’s objectified body ‘empowers’ no one. I don’t want to cite much from that article, as it is full of transphobia and, more subtly, racism, but honestly? The photo is pretty darned hot, and Cox herself was a full participant in the photoshoot with agency, and apparently had a great time doing it. Here’s an excerpt from the writing:

    Cox explained that she decided to do the shoot because she felt it “could be really powerful for the communities that [she] represents,” adding, “Seeing a black transgender woman embracing and loving everything about herself might be inspiring to some other folks.”

    This statement strikes me as all kinds of backwards. Is it really a sign that we “love everything about ourselves” (which, for the record, I hardly expect anyone to do. Women, especially, are taught to hate their bodies and work to alter them to suit the expectations of a misogynist society. Trans people have received the message that, if they don’t properly fit into the limiting and oppressive gender binary, there is something wrong with them that can only be resolved by embracing the opposite end of the gender spectrum) if we alter our bodies through surgery and hormones? It seems clear that “radical self-acceptance” is not at all what Cox is experiencing or conveying to her audience.

    “There’s beauty in the things we think are imperfect. That sounds very cliché, but it’s true,” Cox said. But where, in this image, are the “imperfections”? She and Allure seem to have done everything in their power to create and present a “perfect” female body, offered up to the male gaze for consumption, but sold as “radical” and emblematic of “self-love.”

    Really, fuck you, author of that piece, you don’t get to define transwomen and how they allow themselves to be portrayed if their other choice is to abide by media portrayals and society’s disapproval. Go, Laverne. I think it really is radical and awesome and all those other wonderful bits that let others identify with Laverne and see a positive image.

  465. rq says

    Welcome to @MayorBartlett ‘s town. #Tulsa – come for the oil, but stay at your own peril.

    Is the online surveillance of black teenagers the new stop-and-frisk?

    Starting in January 2010, the community’s children and young adults had been closely watched by police officers – both online and off. The investigation had involved listening in to 40,000 calls from correctional facilities, watching hours of surveillance video, and reviewing over 1m online social media pages.

    For Murphy, the revelation of these details was choking: the NYPD had been attentively surveilling both communities for over one and a half years before his daughter was murdered, patiently waiting and observing as the rivalry between crew members escalated.

    Online surveillance: the new stop-and-frisk?

    In 2013, stop-and-frisk was found unconstitutional by a federal judge for its use of racial profiling. Since then, logged instances have dropped from an astonishing 685,000 in 2011 to just 46,000 in 2014. But celebrations may be premature, with local policing increasingly moving off the streets and migrating online.

    In 2012, the NYPD declared a war on gangs across the city with Operation Crew Cut. The linchpin of the operation’s activities is the sweeping online surveillance of individuals as young as 10 years old deemed to be members of crews and gangs.

    This move is being criticized by an increasing number of community members and legal scholars, who see it as an insidious way of justifying the monitoring of young men and boys of color in low-income communities.

    These days, crews are understood geographically (“turf-based”). They’re no longer “entrepreneurial” – that is, heavily within the organized crime world, like LA gangs were in the 1990s. In other words, New York City crew membership, which mostly appeals to teenagers, is simply related to the block you grew up on, your community and family ties, and perhaps even your interest in partying, dance or graffiti.
    Advertisement

    Mostly, being a member of a gang or a crew is a fleeting moment of adolescence, and something that people grow out of, explains Jeffrey Lane, a professor in communication at Rutgers University whose research has looked at the way in which adolescent street life is lived online.

    What is unquestionably worrying – and what the NYPD is using to justify broad monitoring of large swaths of people – is when these crews turn on each other, and rivalries between crews become violent, or even deadly. And while some of the humiliation and potential violence is avoided by diverting resources away from the physical practice of stop-and-frisk, online surveillance raises a vast series of questions tied to the civil liberties of young men of color.

    More at the link.

    The Christian Pastors just joined the Muslims at the protest! #FreddieGray #blacklivesmatter #baltimore

    And the Maryland Transportation Police are here. Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    Protesters now walking through traffic down S.Calvert st #FreddieGray

    The Mine-Sniffing Rats of Africa –

    Nicholas Kristof follows a large rodent as it searches a minefield in northern Angola.

  466. rq says

    #Baltimore PD – no lynch mob ever called for justice and imprisonment – lynch mobs called for murder and death. #FreddieGray
    Indeed: Sick irony clearly lost on Baltimore Police Union as it calls peaceful protestors a ‘lynch mob’

    Your police severed a young man’s spine and you have the nerve to call peaceful protestors a lynch mob?

    As protesters decrying Freddie Gray’s death plan more rallies in Baltimore Thursday, anger is mounting over a police union’s comparison of the protest to a “lynch mob.”

    “While we appreciate the right of our citizens to protest and applaud the fact that, to date, the protests have been peaceful, we are very concerned about the rhetoric of the protests,” the Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3 said in a statement.

    “In fact, the images seen on television look and sound much like a lynch mob.”

    Nah. They don’t look like a lynch mob at all.

    You—who kill us by the thousands and rarely pay a price—look like the lynch mob.

    You—who shoot our young people, our sisters, our brothers, our fathers, our mothers, and heartlessly leave us there to die while we fight to live—look like the lynch mob.

    In fact, you are the lynch mob and we are your victims.

    We will protest, with passion and fervor, and your characterization of us only reveals how deeply disturbed you truly are.

    I want that flag ! “@deray: Out For Justice. #FreddieGray “ – it’s an American flag in the colours of Africa.

    Police Chief #VickiYost Resigns Following Officer’s Beating Of #FloydDent! #BlackLivesMatter – there’s a link in that tweet that seems somewhat disconnected: Why I Disbelieve @MzzzMariah and the White Castle Incident Narrative. It’s another troll-post, and it’s interesting to read but the post really, really misses the point towards the end. See here:

    To fully reiterate and break it down further: We are to believe that the Huffington Post reporter on the ground in the middle of one of the most racially divided areas in the United States of America, who had literally just left a meeting about race relations with a group of city officials and protesters, would be too afraid to call the cops due to the prospect they might be construed to be the guilty party despite everything just proceeding in this very sentence? Call me cynical, but in the end it seems it is much more valuable to create clickbait headlines on shady-likely-false events than to actually do your civic duty–including at the VERY VERY LEAST providing a license plate number to law enforcement to remove a potentially catastrophically dangerous driver from the road.

    Person involved in work on racism hesitant to call the police? Yah, I can see how that works. If you understand how race and policing are intertwined.

    The Police Homicide Rate for black men is higher than the U.S. homicide rate in 17 of the 100 largest cities. Wild.

  467. rq says

    I just ran into @SenBillFerg, State Senator for the 46th district. He’s talking to @sincerelycrys_, a resident. It’s good to see politicians engaging with protest – as long as it’s not just PR, and that good work comes from it. Also understanding.

    Los Angeles: The Police Chief and His Case of Convenient Integrity

    They say when you see something, say something.

    Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck wants you to believe that after viewing the video he doesn’t want you to see of his officers beating, punching, and stomping 22-year-old Clinton Alford in South Los Angeles, that he was deeply concerned. In fact, he was so concerned that nine days after the incident happened and after the LAPD had time to swoop in and seize the raw footage of the beating, that he personally called Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey to express his desire for her office to investigate the incident and to file criminal charges.

    This is what I like to call convenient integrity.

    In order to deflect criticism of the department, but really his leadership, Chief Beck is now attempting to align himself, using the media, with an America that’s outraged and disgusted with all of the numerous cases of police brutality happening from coast to coast.

    It wasn’t that long ago that Chief Beck had the audacity to speak on the South Carolina police officer who fatally shot and killed Walter Scott and the video footage that captured the awful incident.

    Beck said the video footage showed a “criminal act,” and said he also would have arrested the officer.

    He then went on to say that “based on what I have seen, based on the video … it is a criminal act. It is well beyond any policies of the Los Angeles Police Department, and I would have done exactly what the chief in Charleston did. I would have arrested the officer.”

    But remember. This is the same police chief that can’t ever open his mouth in a timely manner to speak intelligently on the numerous officer-involved-shootings and blatant cases of police brutality that take place on his watch and in his own backyard. But when it’s convenient, as in, this incident happened in another police department in another state, he decided to slither on into the news cycle with his two cents. Some of us saw it for exactly what it was.

    Anybody with a pulse and who pays any attention at all to the shenanigans of those on the 10th floor of LAPDHQs knows that come rain or come shine, Chief Beck’s standard and consistent statements about anything controversial involving any of his officers has always been something to the tune of not being able to comment on it until the investigation is concluded. Always!

    So, what IS different about this case?

    The street is opened today, and the vibe is less tense as a result. Yesterday was a bottleneck. #FreddieGray

    In fear of the protestors, the police blocked the I-83 on ramp. Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    Heavy police presence by City Hall and in front of the police headquarters. No protestors. Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    Baltimore Police wrestle down John Patterson b4 arresting. Couldn’t make out what happened. #FreddieGray

  468. rq says

    A recurring theme – sexism: everybody does it. Your hypocrisy is showing. TL be up in arms when BM get popped by the cops. BW allege sexual assault, “she did something wrong?” Fuck you.

    Native Actors Walk off Set of Adam Sandler Movie After Insults to Women, Elders. Just wow. ANd yeah, I’m glad they’re speaking out and I’m surprised at the production team’s reaction – basically, stop being so sensitive. o.o

    There will be a special meeting of the Anti-Racist Collective tonight at 7pm at Yeyo Arts at 2907 S. Jefferson.
    Well, it happened, sorry for the late notice.

    #FreddieGray march on Pratt. Many honking in support. Dare I say most. BMore knows what this is bigger than traffic.

    Fox News bypasses many enthused ppl in cars to stoic man. His answer disappoints: “They have a cause.” #FreddieGray Haha, take that, Fox News.

    And here is the latest press release from the Baltimore Police Dept. 4/23. #FreddieGray See attached. Basically, nobody gets to see or photograph the inside of the police van until… well, until a full and complete investigation (and probably an update to appropriate standards) is complete.

  469. rq says

    Officers block the entrances to all Harbor stores. Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    Bassey Ikpi, famous poet and Nigeria’s best-kept secret.

    A follow-up to an earlier article on the same: Smoking Gun: Prosecutor Anita Alvarez deliberately undercharged officer who killed Rekia Boyd

    In other words, States Attorney Anita Alvarez undercharged Dante Servin with a lesser crime that could not be proven whereas every bit of evidence and multiple eyewitnesses could prove first or second degree murder.

    Rekia’s family consistently asked Prosecutor Alvarez for this. Her brother, Martinez Sutton stated

    “We asked for first-degree charges. We asked for second-degree charges and they said no. So we went with what they thought was best.”

    Attorney Sam Adam, Jr. came out and stated that he believed Anita Alvarez deliberately tanked the case.

    “To charge that as reckless conduct and not first-degree murder — either you’re doing it because you want to curry favor with the police department or you’re completely inept,” Adam said. “I think there’s no question it was deliberate. She wants to curry favor with the FOP. It took a $4.5 million settlement to get charges in this case. She was stuck in a hard place. If you charge first-degree murder, the FOP is mad at her. If you don’t charge anything, the community is upset. So you play the odds. That says you’re thinking about your job, not about what’s right.”

    Another Chicago attorney, Bruce Mosbacher, said the same thing,

    “The State’s Attorney of Cook County did something very unusual, which is to charge an individual who shot a gun into a crowd with something less than first-degree murder. I haven’t seen that happen,” he said. “That’s very disturbing here, and it should be disturbing, and I can’t say that they were giving this officer a break, but it certainly looks like it.”

    Now, we have proof that States Attorney Anita Alvarez knew full well what she was doing when undercharged Officer Dante Servin. […]

    In other words, the state argued that it would be wrong to charge Miguel Adorno with anything less than a murder charge since he knowingly fired his gun into a crowd. His appeal was denied and he is in prison to this very day serving 15 years for shooting someone in the arm.

    Yet, States Attorney Anita Alvarez, who willfully charged Miguel Adorno with attempted murder and cited case after case in his appeal, for why shooting his gun into a crowd required a felony murder charge, then contradicted her very own legal precedent by charging Officer Dante Servin with recklessness in a case in which he not only shot someone in their arm, but also shot Rekia Boyd in the head and killed her.

    Are you following me here?

    Anita Alvarez not only knew it was wrong to charge Officer Servin with the lesser crime of recklessness, she has a documented history of making the case that shooting into a crowd requires one to be charged with murder.

    See the full case below.

    New Kinloch mayor blocked by police from entering city hall

    Our Fox 2 cameras were the only ones there as the newly-elected Kinloch mayor was greeted by police for her first day on the job.

    Betty McCray was not only prevented from entering city hall, she was also told she’d been impeached before she got a chance to start.

    McCray ran for mayor in the April 7 election and won.

    “I won. The people spoke,” McCray said. “I was sworn in by the St. Louis County. Today I take office. I want them out, I want the keys.”

    After the election results were certified earlier this week by the St. Louis County Board of Elections, Kinloch’s outgoing administration refused to allow the city clerk to give McCray the oath of office, claiming voter fraud.

    “Today is the first day that that the city hall door has been unlocked. They keep it locked,” McCray said. “You got to beat and you got to bang (to get in). They have an officer police sitting right at the door.”

    On Thursday, McCray was ready to start on the job, but was met with strong resistance. Fox 2 was there with McCray when she showed up at city hall, where she was greeted by more than 20 Kinloch police officers.

    One officer attempted to prevent himself from being filmed by pushing a camera away. No one was being allowed inside city hall, including the elected mayor.

    Kinloch city attorney James Robinson informed McCray she had been impeached. However, the city refused to tell the new mayor the articles of impeachment.

    “You have been served with articles of impeachment that were put in the mail,” said attorney James Robinson.

    Mayor McCray said she will file an injunction with St. Louis County courts and return to Kinloch City Hall Friday and try to enter the building again.

    Just wow…

    It is now being reported that #FreddieGray was not seat belted when placed in the back of the Baltimore police transport can. More on this later, I think.

    EVERYONE! Watch my boy @ClintSmithIII deliver his amazing poem :

    “How to raise a black son in America” The youtube link within: Clint Smith: How to raise a black son in America

    As kids, we all get advice from parents and teachers that seems strange, even confusing. This was crystallized one night for a young Clint Smith, who was playing with water guns in a dark parking lot with his white friends. In a heartfelt piece, the poet paints the scene of his father’s furious and fearful response.

    Five-minute TED video worth watching.

  470. rq says

    #WJZ NOW: City Hall packed with media as @MayorSRB is scheduled to meet with faith-based leaders. @cbsbaltimore

    Disposition issued today in knife charge against #FreddieGray from morning of arrest: “ABATED BY DEATH.” (document attached)

    BREAKING: Baltimore mayor: ‘I want answers’ to why police policies not followed in Freddie Gray death. She doesn’t seem to be particularly trusted by activists and protestors so far, though.

    .@mayorsrb calls police’s handling of #FreddieGray “unacceptable”

    Oh and this. Something that (a certain type of) white people do respond to: This is the all white crowd gathering in Valdosta to protest #EricSheppard & black organizers in Valdosta. Y’all.
    HOLD UP! A Black man (#EricSheppard) walks on a replaceable flag & all these white folks show up to protest it?! #vsu
    But black men and girls and boys and women shot down by police, no, no outrage there.

  471. rq says

    Some heartbreak ahead. Boy who gave toy gun to Tamir Rice: ‘It feels as if I’m the one to blame’

    Devin Mims is caught up in the federal lawsuit between the family of 12-year-old Tamir Rice and the police officers who shot and killed him.

    The 16-year-old boy who gave Tamir the replica Colt airsoft-type gun that Tamir took to Cudell Commons park Nov. 22 talked at-length for an article published Wednesday by The New York Times.

    Devin said he blames himself for the death that often gets Cleveland mentioned in the same breath as Ferguson, New York and South Carolina, after police killings of black males sparked protests.

    Mims, who has obtained an attorney, was named by the city of Cleveland in its amended response to the Rice family’s federal lawsuit.

    Northeast Ohio Media Group interviewed Samaria Rice, who was also interviewed by The New York Times, and Mildretta Warner-Davis, Tamir’s grandmother, in late March.

    The Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department took over the investigation in January. The case remains open.

    Wait, the city is suing him? For giving a friend a toy gun? There’s video at the link –
    Here’s the NYT article mentioned: The Hole Left by Tamir Rice’s Death

    Five months after a Cleveland police officer shot and killed Tamir Rice, 12, his family and friends are still struggling to make sense of their loss. This video captures an intimate portrait of the lives upended by Tamir’s death.

    Samaria Rice, Tamir’s mother, reflects on her experience with guns, and for the first time, Tamir’s friend Devin Mims, 16, talks openly about the toy gun he gave to Tamir the day of the shooting, explaining that he removed its orange safety tip because it was broken.

    The Cuyahoga County sheriff’s office continues to investigate the shooting, and a grand jury is unlikely to convene until the inquiry is complete.

    Video at that link, too.

    Dash-cam video shows unarmed man on bike shot by Fla. deputy

    A video obtained by The Palm Beach Post and WPTV in Florida shows a Palm Beach County Sheriff’s deputy shooting an unarmed man on a bicycle in 2013, paralyzing him.

    The video, recorded by the deputy’s dash-cam, shows Dontrell Stephens, 20, riding a bike and talking on a cellphone. Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Deputy Adams Lin was following him. He later said he was suspicious of Stephens because he hadn’t seen him in the neighborhood before, the Post reported.

    Lin, who is of Asian descent, said he was not racially profiling Stephens, who is black.

    After Stephens realizes he’s being followed, WPTV reported, he pulls over, gets off his bike and walks toward the deputy. For about four seconds, Stephens is off-camera, only to be seen again when being shot four times.

    Stephens, who has a criminal record for cocaine possession, is seen running from the officer, then
    dropping to the ground. He was paralyzed from the waist down.

    An internal investigation and the State Attorney’s Office cleared Lin in the case, ruling that the shooting
    was justified.

    The video came to light as part of a yearlong joint investigation of the Post and WPTV, examining every officer-involved shooting in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast since 2000.

    And for something more positive:
    The Ava DuVernay doll, by Barbie.
    Lip gloss. eyebrows. clothes. confident expression. They even got her cheeks right!
    SHE LOOKS LIKE ME. DEADASS I MIGHT CRY. THIS IS WHY REPRESENTATION MATTERS.

  472. rq says

    Someon’es blockquote is broken.
    #FreddieGray Funeral Arrangements. Baltimore. Monday, April 27, New Shiloh Baptist Church. 10 – 11 AM are public hours. Hour.

    When you hear about the killing of #WalterScott in North Carolina, think about #CaryBallJr. #JusticeForCaryBallJr – honour student, emerging scholar, shot by police with his hands up. At least 25 shots fired at him.

    Background check. Yep. Background check: Looking at McCulloch’s prosecution history

    As critics continue to call for St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch to step aside from a grand jury investigation into the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, a detailed review of his record in office provides a complex history.

    To back up the contention that McCulloch has a record of supporting police, critics have cited his disapproval of Gov. Jay Nixon’s decision to displace St. Louis County police from command at Ferguson protests. They also point to McCulloch’s father, a St. Louis police officer fatally shot in the line of duty, as a reason McCulloch could not be impartial in the shooting of Brown. Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson police officer, on Aug. 9 shot Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old.

    But in addition to his family ties to police, McCulloch also has a background of prosecuting dozens of officers for alleged wrongdoing. He has a reputation for dealing fairly with criminal defense attorneys and their clients — and for offending with outspokenness.

    Some key findings from a review of McCulloch’s record:

    – McCulloch’s office has prosecuted at least 33 police officers or former police officers, according to a list provided by McCulloch’s executive assistant, Edward Magee. McCulloch has been prosecutor since 1991.
    – McCulloch’s office also has at least four times presented information to a grand jury about police officers who shot suspects to death while on the job, according to a search of St. Louis Post-Dispatch archives. None of those grand juries indicted the officers.
    – After a grand jury and a federal investigation exonerated a federal agent and a police officer in the fatal 2000 shooting of two black men during an attempted drug arrest, McCulloch called the shooting victims “bums.”

    It’s an article from last September, worth a re-read, esp. with the new suit against him. More on that later.

    Protesters take to Baltimore’s streets for a fifth day. They did say at least five days.

    Hundreds of protesters poured onto the streets of downtown Baltimore on Thursday, halting rush-hour traffic as they marched on the fifth consecutive day of demonstrations since Freddie Gray died after being severely injured in police custody.

    After rallying outside City Hall, protesters made their way through the Inner Harbor to Federal Hill and then to the Western District police station, where Gray was pulled unconscious from a prisoner transport van after his arrest on April 12. Gray, 25, died a week later.

    Tensions remained high, with angry demonstrators yelling and swearing at mostly stoic police officers. Two protesters were arrested for disorderly conduct and destruction of property at Pennsylvania Avenue and Pitcher Street, causing a commotion in the street as the group made its way back to the police station.

    But most of the protesters expressed their anger peacefully, blowing whistles and holding signs as they marched several miles from the City Hall event to the police station in Sandtown-Winchester. They high-fived people in their cars who honked their horns and others leaning out of buses.

    A few confronted a taxi driver on Light Street who rolled down his window to voice his anger at the protests, but others pulled them away, encouraging them to keep moving and keep the demonstration nonviolent.

    Before the march, the Rev. Jamal H. Bryant, of the Empowerment Temple, prayed with protesters and led chants of “No justice, no peace!” outside City Hall.

    Protesters applauded the U.S. Senate for confirming Loretta Lynch as the first black woman as U.S. attorney general.

    Bryant, one of several speakers who addressed the crowd, called for supporters of the Gray family to wear gray to church on Sunday in solidarity with them.

    “We are not calling for revenge,” he said. “We are calling for justice.”

    A black sgt responds to protester asking why he’s a cop: “Shooting on Harlem Ave? Someone’s gotta be there for that family too” #FreddieGray

    White supremacy and policing, an article from 2003: The Avant-garde of White Supremacy

    In 1998, Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex, a national conference and strategy-session, reposed the question of the relations between white supremacy and state violence. Fascism was the concept often used to link these two terms and the prison industrial complex was considered to be its quintessential practice. The political-intellectual discourse generated at and around Critical Resistance shattered the narrow definitions of racism that characterize many conventional (even leftist) accounts and produced instead a space for rethinking radical alternatives.

    This sort of shift in the political landscape has been imperative for a long time now. The police murder of Amadou Diallo comes to mind as an event requiring such re-conceptualization. The Diallo killing was really plural since it involved other police murders as imminent in the same event. Diallo’s killing was plural beyond his own many deaths in those few seconds, a killing that took place in the eyes of his friends and family from as far away as Guinea. In the immediate wake of his killers’ acquittals, the NYPD murdered Malcolm Ferguson, a community organizer who had been active in attempting to get justice for Diallo. (The police harassed Ferguson’s within the next year and arrested his brother on trumped up charges). Two weeks after Ferguson’s murder, the police killed Patrick Dorismund because he refused to buy drugs from an undercover cop, because he fought back when the cop attacked. The police then harassed and attacked Dorismund’s funeral procession in Brooklyn a week later, hospitalizing several in attendance. (The police took the vendetta all the way to the grave). Tyisha Miller was murdered in her car in Riverside, California by four cops who knocked on the window of her car and found that she simply didn’t respond. Angela Davis tells the story of “Tanya Haggerty in Chicago, whose cell phone was the potential weapon that allowed police to justify her killing,” just as Daillo’s wallet was the “gun” at which four cops fired in unison. To the police, a wallet in the hand of black man is a gun whereas that same wallet in the hand of a white man is just a wallet. A cell phone in the hands of a black woman is a gun; that same phone in a white woman’s hand is a cell phone.

    There were local movements in each of these cities to protest acts of police murder and in each case the respective city governments were solicited to take appropriate action. Under conventional definitions of the government, we seem to be restricted to calling upon it for protection from its own agents. But what are we doing when we demonstrate against police brutality, and find ourselves tacitly calling upon the government to help us do so? These notions of the state as the arbiter of justice and the police as the unaccountable arbiters of lethal violence are two sides of the same coin. Narrow understandings of mere racism are proving themselves impoverished because they cannot see this fundamental relationship. What is needed is the development of a radical critique of the structure of the coin.

    There are two possibilities: first, police violence is a deviation from the rules governing police procedures in general. Second, these various forms of violence (e.g., racial profiling, street murders, terrorism) are the rule itself as standard operation procedure. For instance, when the protest movements made public statements they expressed an understanding of police violence as the rule of the day and not as a shocking exception. However, when it came time to formulate practical proposals to change the fundamental nature of policing, all they could come up with concretely were more oversight committees, litigation, and civilian review boards (“with teeth”), none of which lived up to the collective intuition about what the police were actually doing. The protest movements’ readings of these events didn’t seem able to bridge the gap to the programmatic. The language in which we articulate our analyses doesn’t seem to allow for alternatives in practice. Even those who take seriously the second possibility (violence as a rule) find that the language of alternatives and the terms of relevance are constantly dragged into the political discourse they seek to oppose, namely, that the system works and is capable of reform.

    After the exposure of the LAPD’s videotaped beating of Rodney King, after the rebellions of 1992, police violence only became more rampant and more brazen across the country. After the “Justice for Diallo” movement in NYC, the police murders multiplied, and police arrogance increased. It was as if the anti-racist campaigns (or uprisings) against police violence were co-opted by the police to augment their violence, rather than effectively closing it down as they had explicitly intended. In the wake of countless exposés, the prison industrial complex has only expanded; the reportage on the racist operations of capital punishment and the legal system more generally have become absorbed in the acceleration of execution rates. Why do things get worse after each hard fought revelation? Where do we locate the genius of the system? Something is left out of the account; it runs through our fingers, escaping our grasp.

    If the spectacle of police violence does, in fact, operate according to a rule of its own (as the anti-violence movements argue), what does this suggest about the social institutions that generate it and which it represents despite persistent official disavowals? First, the relationship between police violence and the social institution of policing is structural, rather than incidental or contingent (i.e., an unfortunate but minor part of the job). Second, the cultural content of the actual policing that we face is to be a law unto itself, not the socially responsible institution it claims to be in its disavowals. Third, a question: is this paradigm of policing a methodology for a form of social organization? If so, of what are the police the avant-garde? […]

    The dichotomy between white ethics and its irrelevance to the violence of police profiling is not dialectical; the two are incommensurable. Whenever one attempts to speak about the paradigm of policing, one is forced back into a discussion of particular events—high-profile police homicides and their related courtroom battles, for instance. The spectacular event camouflages the operation of police law as contempt, as terror, its occupation of neighborhoods; the secret of police law is the fact that there is no recourse to the disruption of people’s lives by these activities. In fact, to focus on the spectacular event of police violence is to deploy (and thereby reaffirm) the logic of police profiling itself. Yet, we can’t avoid this logic once we submit to the demand to provide examples or images of the paradigm. As a result, the attempt to articulate the paradigm of policing renders itself non-paradigmatic, reaffirms the logic of police profiling, and thereby reduces itself to the fraudulent ethics by which white civil society rationalizes its existence.

    Examples cannot represent the spectrum of contemporary white supremacy from the subtle (e.g., the inability to get a taxi) to the extreme (e.g. the de facto martial law occupation of many black and brown neighborhoods), all of which has become structural and everyday. As in the case of spectacular police violence, producing examples of more subtle (if obvious) forms of “institutional racism” (e.g., continuing discriminatory trends in housing, education, employment, etc.) has the same effect of reducing the paradigm to the non-paradigmatic. The logic of this journalistic approach generates nonchalance in contemporary race talk such that sensational reportage about the supposedly hidden residues of a persistent racism disables analysis. Both the spectacular and the subtle, against which people can unite in their desire for justice, remain the masks behind which the daily operations of white supremacist terror proceed.

    Most theories of white supremacy seek to plumb the depths of its excessiveness, beyond the ordinary; they miss the fact that racism is a mundane affair. The fundamental excess of the paradigm of policing which infuses this culture is wholly banal. Those theories overlook that fact in favor of extant extravagance, spectacle, or the ‘deep psychology’ of rogue elements and become complicit in perpetuating white supremacy. The reality is an invidious ethos of excess that, instead, constitutes the surface of everything in this society. For some time now, the intellectual quest for racism’s supposedly hidden meaning has afforded a refuge from confrontations with this banality, even its possible acknowledgement. The most egregious aspect of this banality is our tacit acquiescence to the rules of race and power, to the legitimacy white supremacy says it has, regardless of their total violation of reason and comprehensibility. Our “tacit acquiescence” is the real silent source of white supremacist tenacity and power. As William C. Harris, II wrote in the aftermath of Tyisha Miller’s murder by the police:

    It is heartbreaking to be an American citizen and have to say this, but I do have to say this. We have almost, and I stress almost, become accustomed to police shooting innocent, unarmed, young, black males. That in itself is bad enough, and one was at one time inclined to think it couldn’t get any worse, but it gets worse…. Now we have police killing our young black females. It can’t get any worse than that.

    Harris is right; yet he also sells himself out because he acquiesces in the process of decrying acquiescence. He does not draw the line between respect for persons and impunity. He continues: “Even if she grabbed a gun, was it necessary to shoot at her twenty-seven times? I know it’s less than 41, but that’s still too many times to shoot at a sleeping female—black, brown, yellow or white” (emphasis added). Why isn’t one bullet too many times to shoot anybody? It is the job of the spectacular (and sensational reports about the subtle) to draw attention away from the banality of police murder as standard operating procedure.

    Spectacle is a form of camouflage. It does not conceal anything; it simply renders it unrecognizable. One looks at it and does not see it. It appears in disguise. Harris, for example, looks at acquiescence and cannot see it. Camouflage is a relationship between the one dissimulating their appearance and the one who is fooled, who looks and cannot see. Like racialization as a system of meanings assigned to the body, police spectacle is itself the form of appearance of this banality. Their endless assault reflects the idea that race is a social envelope, a system of social categorization dropped over the heads of people like clothes. Police impunity serves to distinguish between the racial uniform itself and the elsewhere that mandates it. They constitute the distinction between those whose human being is put permanently in question and those for whom it goes without saying. Police spectacle is not the effect of the racial uniform; rather, it is the police uniform that is producing re-racialization. […]

    Indeed, the state has even invented a structural grammar to organize these transformations. Take the legal concept of “vicarious liability.” A man drives away from a traffic stop and a cop fires into the car to stop it (already an arrogation of impunity). He kills the passenger in the car. The driver is charged with murder instead of the cop; not only does impunity means the cop cannot do wrong, but the driver is actually made responsible for bullets that had his name on it. The police become a machine for killing and incarcerating while the personhood of those they stop or notice or profile is conscripted into the role of perpetrator, the finger on the trigger of that machine. Vicarious liability is the inversion of responsibility by the police. When the police break up a peaceful demonstration, those who have been beaten bloody with their nightsticks are arrested and charged with assaulting an officer. In its stridency, the impunity machine claims that those people killed by the cops were only committing suicide. The existence of a victim of police abuse is transformed into the cause for the abuse, a victim of self-abuse through the machinery of the police…. There is no way to say that this makes sense.

    What keeps getting repeated here? It is not just the repetition of derogation or acts of police impunity. While the police wreak havoc on the lives of those they assault, exercising a license implicit in and extending racial profiling, they engage in a vital cultural labor. On the one hand, racial profiling enables those unprofiled (the average white man and white women who are linked to one) to ignore the experience of social dislocation that profiling produces. They may recognize the fact of profiling itself, but they are free from the feeling of dread. Indeed, profiling creates insouciance in an atmosphere of organized violence. Official discourse seeks to accustom us to thinking about state violence as a warranted part of the social order. For them the security of belonging accompanies the re-racialization of whiteness as the intensification of anti-blackness. The police elaborate the grounds for the extension of a renewed and reconfigured white supremacist political economic order. On the other hand, there is terror and the police are its vanguard. The law, clothed in the ethic of impunity, is simply contingent on the repetition of its violence. One cannot master it, regardless of the intimacy or longevity of one’s experience with it. One can only sense its frightening closeness as a probability, as serial states of brutality or derogation. The dread and suffering of those in the way of these repeated spasms of violence is always here and always on the horizon. In the face of racial profiling by the police, however prepared those profiled may be for that aggression, it always appears unexpectedly.

    This confluence of repetition and transformation, participation and subjection gets conjugated inversely so that the target becomes the aggressor and the uniformed aggressors become a priesthood, engineering a political culture whose construction is the practice of whiteness. What are wholly and essentially immanent are the structures of racist reason that produce practices without motive. “Police procedures” become pure form because they are at once both self-defined and subordinated to the implicit prerogatives of this political culture. They empty the law of any content that could be called justice, substituting murderousness and impunity. The “social procedures” that burgeon in the wake of this engineering also become pure form, emptying social exchange as the condition of white social cohesion. It flattens all ideals of political life to a Manichean structure that it depicts as whiteness versus evil. It is a double economy. On the one hand, there is an economy of clearly identifiable injustices, spectacular flash points of terror, expressing the excesses of the state-sanctioned system of racial categorization. On the other, there is the structure of inarticulability itself and its imposed unintelligibility, an economy of the loss of meaning, a hyper-economy. It is this hyper-economy that appears in its excess as banal; a hyper-injustice that is reduced and dissolved in the quotidian as an aura, while it is refracted in the images of the spectacular economy itself. Between the spectacular as the rule and the banal as excess, in each of the moment of its reconstruction, the law of white supremacist attack signifies that there is no law.

    This hyper-economy, with its hyper-injustice, is the problem we confront. The intractability of racism lies in its hidden and unspeakable terror, an implicate ethic of impunity. A repetition of violence as standard operating (police) procedure, an insidious common sense, renders any real notion of justice or democracy on the map of white supremacy wholly alien and inarticulable. […]

    The pervasiveness of state-sanctioned terror, police brutality, mass incarceration, and the endless ambushes of white populism is where we must begin our theorizing. Though state practices create and reproduce the subjects, discourses, and places that are inseparable from them, we can no longer presuppose the subjects and subject positions nor the ideologies and empiricisms of political and class forces. Rather, the analysis of a contingent yet comprehensive state terror becomes primary. This is not to debate the traditional concerns of radical leftist politics that presuppose (and close off) the question of structure, its tenacity, its systematic and inexplicable gratuitousness. The problem here is how to dwell on the structures of pervasiveness, terror, and gratuitousness themselves rather than simply the state as an apparatus. It is to ask how the state exists as a formation or confluence of processes with de-centered agency, how the subjects of state authority—its agents, citizens, and captives—are produced in the crucible of its ritualistic violence.

    What is at stake is how to mark the outlines of white supremacist excess within its banality, to map out the dimensions of its landscape as pervasive and ordinary. The following essays are offered as only preliminary articulations in this lethal milieu. In order to engage this problematic, we construct a collective enunciation, a theoretical assemblage of diverse investigations. The four arenas addressed here—the militarization of police, the proliferating prison-industrial complex, New World slavery, and the history of anti-miscegenation—do not subsume the situation in which we find ourselves. This project strives toward neither completeness, nor a definitive articulation. What unites these essays is an attention to the shadows and living legacies of racial despotism, the direct relations of force that are often occluded in analyses of hegemony and its quotidian institutions. We seek to displace without dispensing with the institutional rationalizations of US white supremacy in order to see its own vigorous reconstitution. This will ultimately mean addressing every social motif (a task we only begin here) as entailing a paradoxical or even incomprehensible scandal, something beyond the rules of society yet pawned off on us as proper and legitimate.

    Read all of it.

  473. rq says

    I promised more McCullogh. Here’s a twitter commentary on the upcoming case against him (not really a suit, sorry for the bad vocab upstream).
    Members of @OBS_STL have filed a case in circuit court to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate grand jury proceedings.
    McCulloch failed to fulfill his duties by acting arbitrarily and in bad faith during the grand jury proceedings investigation Darren Wilson.
    Two judges who were appointed this case recused themselves because of named plaintiff-Bob McCulloch.
    The law is the law but TWO judges don’t want to do what is right by the law so they have stepped down. THAT IS NOT ACCOUNTABILITY!

    tbc…

  474. Pteryxx says

    More on the suspicious non-prosecution of the officer who shot down an alley and killed Rekia Boyd, from Shaun King at Daily Kos.

    In his statement, Judge Porter stated,

    That prosecutors failed to prove that Dante Servin acted recklessly, saying that Illinois courts have consistently held that anytime an individual points a gun at an intended victim and shoots, it is an intentional act, not a reckless one. He all but said prosecutors should have charged Servin with murder, not involuntary manslaughter.

    Servin cannot be retried on a murder charge because of double-jeopardy protections, according to his attorney, Darren O’Brien.

    Rekia’s family asked for first-degree or second-degree charges and were refused. Several voices, including attorneys, have suggested that prosecutor Anita Alvarez intentionally botched the case by undercharging Officer Servin. Chicago Sun-Times:

    Meanwhile, Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez is stubbornly defending her decision to charge Servin with involuntary manslaughter rather than charge him with murder.

    But days before a judge stopped the trial, the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression — which monitored the Servin trial — hand-delivered a letter to Alvarez that was highly critical of the way her office was handling the prosecution.

    “[W]e believe the state’s prosecutors are deliberately trying to engineer a verdict of ‘not guilty’. . . . Perhaps our sophistication does not rise to the level of a trained attorney but as professionals, we cannot discern the subtle nuances in your strategy and believe your offices are failing the family of Rekia Boyd,” according to the letter dated April 16.

    Attorney Sam Adam Jr. speaking to the Sun-Times:

    “To charge that as reckless conduct and not first-degree murder — either you’re doing it because you want to curry favor with the police department or you’re completely inept,” Adam said. “I think there’s no question it was deliberate. She wants to curry favor with the FOP. It took a $4.5 million settlement to get charges in this case. She was stuck in a hard place. If you charge first-degree murder, the FOP is mad at her. If you don’t charge anything, the community is upset. So you play the odds. That says you’re thinking about your job, not about what’s right.”

    Shaun King points out a recent, similar case in which Alvarez argued *against* recklessness, exactly as she should have done for Rekia Boyd.

    On January 23rd, 2010 Miguel Adorno fired his gun under his arm, much like Dante Servin claimed to, at a party in Chicago. A bullet from Adorno hit Shannon Fanning in the arm. Nobody died, but Miguel Adorno was charged and convicted with attempted murder and given a mandatory 15 year sentence in prison.

    On June 14th, 2013, Miguel Adorno appealed this decision stating that he was overcharged and over sentenced for something was purely reckless. When you see what the state argued, it’ll blow your mind.

    According to defendant’s testimony, the people chasing him were right on his heels, therefore defendant knew he was firing the weapon in their direction when he reached into the trunk and fired the gun under his arm without looking.

    Illinois courts have clearly and consistently held that when a defendant points a firearm in the direction of an intended victim and fires the weapon, he has not acted recklessly.

    People v. Sipp, 378 Ill. App. 3d 157, 166 (2007). Because defendant knowingly fired his gun in the direction of the crowd, a reckless conduct instruction was not appropriate. We do not find the court abused its discretion in refusing to instruct the jury on reckless conduct….

    The evidence elicited in this case shows that defendant knew the victim and others were present in the general vicinity of the apartment building, and defendant fired his weapon multiple times in their direction….

    Furthermore, specific intent to take a human life is a material element of the offense of attempted murder, but the very fact of firing a gun at a person supports the conclusion that the person doing so acted with the intent to kill.

    In other words, the state argued that it would be wrong to charge Miguel Adorno with anything less than a murder charge since he knowingly fired his gun into a crowd. His appeal was denied and he is in prison to this very day serving 15 years for shooting someone in the arm.

    Yet, States Attorney Anita Alvarez, who willfully charged Miguel Adorno with attempted murder and cited case after case in his appeal, for why shooting his gun into a crowd required a felony murder charge, then contradicted her very own legal precedent by charging Officer Dante Servin with recklessness in a case in which he not only shot someone in their arm, but also shot Rekia Boyd in the head and killed her.

    The full case is here on Scribd: 1110028_R23-2

  475. rq says

    Attorneys have filed a motion to dismiss this case but there is precedence and proof the allegations made in the complaint are valid.
    Remember witness 41. It was proven she was not on the scene but she was still allowed to testify before the grand jury.
    McCulloch explained the rules of the grand jury based on a law that had been overturned by the Missouri Supreme Court.
    If a special prosecutor confirms misconduct, McCulloch will be removed from his office. That is what accountability looks like.

  476. rq says

    … And the article against Laverne Cox was debunked beautifully in Playboy: Laverne Cox Gets Naked, Exposes Radical Feminist Exclusionism. Absolutely brilliant.

    “When the image of the perfect woman is coded from childhood as Snow White, the fairest and most sunburned in all the land, the idea becomes that all the rest of us are just donning costumes to imitate true beauty,” says black trans women writer Shaadi Devereaux. Cox, in taking off her clothes and costumes and posing au natural, as herself, dares the viewer to see her as not just beautiful but natural.

    She also, as I’m sure she knows, invites a backlash from those who see black trans women’s bodies as innately false. The backlash was not slow in coming.

    Feminist Meghan Murphy reacted to the photo just as Cox suggests that people often react to black and trans women — with disgust, prejudice and horror. In a short but impressively cruel post, Murphy sneers at Cox for attempting to achieve a “‘perfect’ body as defined by a patriarchal/porn culture, through plastic surgery, and then presenting it as a sexualized object for public consumption.”

    She scoffs at the idea that trans women who take hormones or have surgery are accepting themselves. Murphy suggests that trans women are “spending thousands and thousands of dollars sculpting their bodies in order to look like some cartoonish version of ‘woman,’ as defined by the porn industry and pop culture.”

    Cox, for Murphy, is a cartoon: a plastic-surgery-constructed thing, unreal and, in its parody of beauty, ugly. The loathing and contempt are palpable. With black feminist activist Sojourner Truth, Cox, in her nakedness, asks, “Ain’t I a woman?” And Murphy with cold glee, replies, “No.”

    That coldness isn’t new. Ideally, you’d hope, feminism would be about fighting for the rights of all women and trying to free all people from oppressive gender stereotypes. In practice, though, the radical feminist tradition of Andrea Dworkin and Janice Raymond, who Murphy champions, has often built itself on exclusion rather than inclusion. Radical feminism’s radicalism is often defined by smearing other women — trans women, sex workers, women of color — as deluded dupes of men and patriarchy.

    “These radical feminisms, in my opinion, don’t even feign inclusivity,” researcher and activist Zoe Samudzi, a project assistant at UCSF, told me. “There’s a very prescriptive understanding of what emancipation and liberation looks like … White women have historically been perpetrators of violence against black women’s bodies, and the same entitlement and identity-centeredness in feminism has enabled them to proclaim themselves as the arbiters of womanhood.”

    The logic that led 19th century white feminists to push for votes for white women alone is still, painfully, visible in Murphy’s attack on Cox. Some women are not worthy of kindness, of love or of sisterhood.

    Just as black women have been defined as outside femininity, so have trans women. The Michigan Womyn’s Festival has spent four decades refusing to admit trans women; the organizers appear to have decided to close it down after this year rather than move towards trans inclusion. […]

    Part of what defines Cox’s experience of gender is, as she says, that black women and trans women are not seen as beautiful. They can be, and often are, hyper-sexualized — and in seeing Cox as overly sexual, and only sexual, Murphy participates in that stereotype. But while they can be sexual things, trans women and black women are not allowed to be glamorous or lovable.

    “One of the most powerful things you can do for a trans woman is to make her feel wanted, touchable and worthy of affection,” queer trans writer Mari Brighe posted on Twitter.

    P. Marie, a former sex worker told me that, “It helps me as an individual when I see any black woman feeling beautiful and sharing that with the world – reminding people we ARE beautiful, desirable, feminine and strong, which is exactly, thankfully, what Laverne Cox has done for us.” […]

    Murphy sees no humanity in Cox’s picture; only a trans, black woman who, by the very fact of being trans, can have no agency. But if you look at the picture, what’s most striking about the image is its distinctness and individuality. Murphy claims that the image is too perfect; in fact, though, the picture is remarkable, as a fashion photo, for it’s willingness to let its subject own and celebrate, her “imperfections.”

    Cox is not fashion-model-thin. She’s not fashion-model-petite or willowy, either. She has very large hands, which are not hidden, boldly displayed. In the photo, Cox lies on a blanket; her body taut rather than relaxed, her head in one big, strong hand, eyes closed, a slight smile on her face — like she’s a little embarrassed and amused at being embarrassed. She’s voluptuous and awkward and sweet all at once. In her simultaneous enjoyment of and discomfort before the camera, she seems, in the frankly staged pose, startlingly natural — and beautiful.

    It really is a beautiful, beautiful photo.

    Updates continue tomorrow. That’s a rather nice-ish (nice because of that article and response, -ish because of what led to it) note with which to end.

  477. rq says

    Ferguson interim city manager resigns for permanent position – article on this later, but she’s the one who took over from the previous manager (Shaw?) who was in charge during all the racist emailing that got dug up (which isn’t to say that was the only racist emailing, etc.). Anyway, the press release is attached.

    Baltimore police official: #FreddieGray should have received medical attention before he was ever put in the van;
    ‘There are gaps where there are no witnesses & no CCTV coverage,’ of #FreddieGray arrest, police commissioner says. Which means excuses will be made for those time periods, where some self-inflicted or accidental injury may have occurred. Great.

    White activists to hold #BlackLivesMatter demonstration in downtown STL as response to white supremacist rally, document link: Anti Racist Collective Press Release

    Earlier this week, local activists received a tip that a white supremacist organization is expected to hold a march and/or rally in downtown St. Louis on Saturday, April 25th. As a response to this disturbing development, the Anti-Racist Collective (ARC) and other white activists will gather at Kiener Plaza at 11:30am this Saturday to silently protest the presence of the hate group and to reinforce that BLACK LIVES MATTER.

    “While the anticipated demonstration by white supremacists is deeply disturbing, it is not an isolated incident of white supremacy– we can see white supremacy in systems of criminal justice, education, healthcare, public policy, and housing, just to name a few,” says Emily Bland, a member of the collective.

    The Anti-Racist Collective (ARC) is an organization made up of white activists who have come together to further anti-racist organizing among progressive whites in St. Louis and has seen its membership grow exponentially in the wake of the murder of Michael Brown in early August 2014. ARC believes that racism is broader and runs much deeper than blatant hate groups. We encourage white people to do the necessary work of educating fellow white people about white supremacy, white privilege, and how the two connect to the global systemic oppression of people of color, particularly people of color that are the most marginalized.

    We also encourage white people to recognize their own privilege, educate themselves, and continue to engage in the intentional work of understanding their own place in white supremacy and how this affects marginalized and oppressed individuals and communities around them, as well as how white supremacy prevents our own liberation.

    “As white people, we continue to assert that BLACK LIVES MATTER. We urge others who look like we do to examine the ways in which society has systematically devalued Black lives in an attempt to maintain a system of white supremacy. We do not believe that by asserting Black lives matter we in turn assert that other identities and people do not matter,” Bland notes.

    Bland continues: “We do this kind of work out of a deep love for our fellow white people, for we know that racism hurts us all. Liberation is only possible when we come together.”

    White people must identify our mutual interest with people of color and what our stake is to make deep and systemic change. Racism divides people of color and white working class people, who have every reason to stand together for better wages, better air, affordable housing, and an end to war, among many other important social issues. We need to stand together with marginalized communities, because otherwise, we cannot build the unity we need to move forward. It is in the interest of white people to stand against race-based repression for our own lives and those of people we love.

    So proud to announce that every high school in the U.S. will receive a FREE copy of Selma. Go team Selma! @AVAETC A great idea. Now if only there was a way to ensure that they play it to all students at some point in time.

  478. rq says

    No ‘lynch mobs’ here

    What’s been remarkable to this point is not that there have been protests, but that to date those demonstrations have been civil and peaceful. No acts of violence or vandalism. No reprisals against officers or vice versa. One can almost sense the disappointment of network cable news crews: Baltimore is no Ferguson, Mo. The city is not in flames.

    Yet it wouldn’t take a great deal for that to change. And one way to goad the protesters — if one was so inclined — would be for someone in a position of authority to describe this reasonable public behavior as sounding potentially criminal and murderous. And worse, to do so with terminology associated primarily with public hangings of black men in the South. that’s what happened this week when Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 3 President Gene Ryan issued a statement that the rhetoric of the protests he’s seen through television “look and sound much like a lynch mob.”

    In what way might a group of predominantly African-American men and women concerned about the treatment of an African-American man by police be construed as a lynch mob? To Mr. Ryan, it was because some involved in the protests had apparently called for police officers to be jailed without due process. Well, here’s someone who might have been perfectly happy to be jailed during a criminal investigation: George Armwood. He was the last black man killed by an actual lynch mob in Maryland, a 28-year-old dragged out of a Somerset County jail and hanged from an oak tree in Princess Anne on Oct. 18, 1933.

    To be fair to Mr. Ryan, his statement also acknowledged that protests have been peaceful, and he suggested at a subsequent news conference that the lynch mob description “maybe” deserved “rewording.” His heightened sensitivity to lynch mobs perhaps was provided by William “Billy” Murphy, the Gray family’s attorney who not only possesses a greater awareness of Maryland’s civil rights history but a better facility with words. He called Mr. Ryan’s lapse an illustration of “why black people and police don’t get along.” Sadly, he may be right.

    Police union leaders aren’t normally given to restraint when it comes to backing their members — just listen to them on the touchy subject of pension benefits and contract negotiations — but this is one example of where they should be. Not because it’s in the public interest (although it would be a better world if all were driven by the greater good) but because it’s in the interests of police officers Mr. Ryan claims to represent, including those now under possible suspicion. If the public doesn’t believe that Baltimore is conducting an impartial, fair and thorough investigation in the death of Freddie Gray, serious damage will be done to the already-strained relationship between police and the residents of Baltimore.

    Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake clearly understands this. So does Commissioner Anthony W. Batts who has acknowledged that there are historic and legitimate reasons for distrust. So has Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby who told The Sun’s editorial board today that the minority community’s distrust of police and the criminal justice system is shared by many living in urban centers. “It’s real, and we’re seeing that,” she said. For that matter, so does Gov. Larry Hogan, who was criticized last fall for a dismissive response to the Ferguson protests but who has been spot-on in his reaction to the demonstrations in Baltimore, acknowledging the legitimate concerns of the protesters and thanking those involved for expressing them peacefully.

    Ministerial alliance says Batts should resign in wake of Freddie Gray case. Batts disagrees, of course.

    The president of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance of Baltimore on Friday called for the resignation of Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray, saying the city’s police department is “in disarray.”

    Rev. Alvin Gwynn Sr., head of the coalition of Baltimore ministers, said Batts has shown a “lack of viable leadership capabilities,” and said the alliance believes Batts should “tender his resignation immediately.”

    Gwynn held a news conference Friday morning at Friendship Baptist Church to discuss the Gray case. Gray, 25, was arrested April 12 in the area of Gilmor Homes, and died a week later after suffering a severe spinal cord injury while in police custody.

    “We can no longer distinguish who is in charge of the police department’s day-to-day operations,” said Gwynn, who called Gray’s death “untimely an unnecessary.”

    “It seems that no one in the police department can explain what happened,” he said.

    Gwynn also had criticism for Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 3 President Gene Ryan, who earlier this week issued a statement comparing the rhetoric of protests as sounding “much like a lynch mob.”

    Gwynn expressed “shock and dismay” at those comments, and said they warranted a written and public apology.

    (Protest tweets will once again be reverse chronological or no particularly logical order, FYI.) Now at #LexingtonMarket #FreddieGray

    Thank you, Eric Holder. History will be very kind to you.

    Ferguson’s interim city manager is stepping down

    Ferguson is back in the hunt for an interim city manager, after its current interim announced she is resigning to take a permanent job in Richmond Heights.

    Pam Hylton has been the interim city manager since John Shaw resigned in March. Shaw’s departure came just after a Justice Department report that was critical of city operations before and during the unrest following the Aug. 9 police shooting that killed 18-year-old Michael Brown.

    Hylton most recently had been Shaw’s assistant and had been with the Ferguson government for four years.

    Hylton’s last day in Ferguson will be May 15. In her new job, she will be Richmond Heights’ assistant city manager.

    “After much thought and discussion with my family, we determined this is the best decision for me at this time,’’ Hylton said in a statement. “…Ferguson is a great community and I am glad I was part of it.”

    Her announcement comes just weeks after Ferguson voters elected three new members of the six-person city council.

    Ferguson Mayor James Knowles praised Hylton, and said in a statement that her departure was a surprise. “We appreciate her contributions and accomplishments during her tenure here in Ferguson,” the mayor said.

    “But I have no doubt that the dedicated employees of the city of Ferguson will continue to provide great service to our residents in an efficient manner.”

    The city now plans to hire a firm that specializes in interim staffing for municipal governments. The aim is to hire an interim city manager and an interim assistant.

    A separate firm is to be hired to conduct a nationwide search for a new city manager.

    Baltimore. Protest. Today.

  479. rq says

    Ferguson’s interim city manager resigns. Same story.

    I wish there were more black reporters at local MSM newspapers. I’ve met so many reporters that write only from a lens of privilege.

    Are you a Black photographer? @visualg_nius has started BlackStock, a Black stock image company. See him for details.

    I’m disappointed in the Baltimore NAACP jumping on the “outsider agitator” bandwagon. Perhaps they’ll disown the outsider MLK soon, too.

    The only outside agitators we’ve seen are the BPD cops who commute from Carroll Co. & PA. Oh and the Feds taking pics at the Western.

    Greeting business in the harbor #JusticeForFreddieGray #FreddieGray #ShutItDown

  480. rq says

    Did these four vacationing Swedish police officers just school the NYPD? Interesting to watch – very calm officers. No undue piling on. It’s possible they could have released the man on the floor to let him sit up, but many details about the situation are lacking. All I know is nobody got killed. :/

    Anthony Batts of @BaltimorePolice says demonstrators will have their rights protected, city has experience with protests #FreddieGray

    Attention #stl the white power rally is Saturday (today) at noon at the Old Courthouse downtown – response of anti-racist groups can be seen above.

    Missing woman in Baltimore – Please Please yall. RT this. Anything could help. With contact information within.

    Video from 2013 shows biking man shot four times in the back by Florida police

    This is a national epidemic. In cities and states all across America, police are using lethal force on unarmed men and women.

    Exclusively-obtained dash-cam video shows Dontrell Stephens, 20, talking on a cellphone while riding his bike on a Friday morning in September 2013. He can be seen turning onto Norma Elaine Road near Haverhill Road and Okeechobee Boulevard as PBSO deputy Adams Lin trails him.

    Moments later, Stephens realizes he’s being followed. He pulls over, gets off his bike with a cellphone in his right hand.

    And then, right there, Officer Lin begins to unload his gun into Dontrell Stephens. With nowhere to go, he gets shot in the back over and over and over again. Immediately, Officer Lin lies and says that he told Dontrell to get on the ground multiple times, but nothing of the sort happened. In this unedited video of the shooting, which includes sound, it’s clear that Officer Lin made no such commands. According to Stephens’ attorney, Jack Scarola:

    “There are no records of any commands ever made to Dontrell Stephens,” explained Scarola.

    “The deputy’s recorded statements following the shooting were absolutely false. Internal affairs completely ignored that evidence,” he said.

    Amazingly, Dontrell survived the shooting, but is now paralyzed from the waist down. See the video below the fold.

    How Slavery Gave Capitalism Its Start – big article.

    Perhaps the most durable myth about slavery is that it was utterly incompatible with capitalism. Well before historians in the twentieth century began legitimating the idea, abolitionists suggested the disconnect themselves. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe portrayed slave-traders as underfinanced, disreputable fools—the furthest thing from competent, successful businessmen. Even Karl Marx, no friend of capitalism, believed that wage labor would destroy slavery. But in recent years, scholars have begun to demolish this myth, arguing not only that slavery was compatible with capitalism, but that the emergence of modern capitalism made slavery’s growth possible.

    The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 establishes its author, Calvin Schermerhorn, as among the best practitioners within this new group of historians. While Walter Johnson, Seth Rockman, Edward Baptist, and Sven Beckert have recently made the same core argument, Schermerhorn exposes the links between capitalism and slavery with remarkable clarity, economy, and force. By focusing on the most successful firms involved in the domestic slave trade, Schermerhorn shows how the building blocks of modern capitalism—from innovations in marketing and technology, to the development of sophisticated financial instruments—fueled slavery’s expansion throughout the South. The possibility of bloodless abstraction is saved by his emphasis on the devastating human cost.

    The closing of the African slave trade in 1807 posed a major challenge to slavery’s expansion. Yet it wasn’t a challenge that creative entrepreneurs could not overcome. Schermerhorn shows how one slave trader, Austin Woolfolk, turned this setback into an opportunity, becoming extraordinarily rich in the process. Based in Baltimore, Woolfolk saw that slaveholders in Maryland and bordering states were desperate to get rid of excess slaves. He also knew that would-be planters in the lower South—Louisiana, especially—were hungry for them. But sellers and buyers had no way of communicating with each other; there was no Craigslist.

    Woolfolk’s genius was to build such an exchange, using the newspaper advertisement business as his medium. Woolfolk’s particular gift was in creating eye-grabbing ads: by the 1820s, seemingly every newspaper in the South featured a clear, simple, all-caps ad written by Woolfolk: “CASH FOR NEGROES.” Schermerhorn argues that the actual market for slave sales may have been far smaller than the ubiquity of Woolfolk’s ads suggests. Yet in simply printing his ads over and over, Woolfolk conjured a market into being. In the wake of his advertisement scheme, everyone seemed to want a hand in the slave-owning business.

    But the paper money needed to buy and sell slaves was in short supply in the early nineteenth century. Woolfolk’s slave-trading business might have ended with him had not forward-thinking southern bankers devised a way for potential slave owners to access credit markets. How southern bankers devised new financial instruments that enabled would-be slave owners to access credit was recently described in Edward Baptist’s much-discussed book, The Half Has Never Been Told. But Schermerhorn brings this process to life through detailed portraits of a few men—“slavery’s bankers,” he calls them—who were instrumental in financing slavery’s expansion.

    In order for cotton and sugar production to expand, planters just starting out needed loans to buy slaves and land. To get planters credit, Louisiana bankers Hugues Lavergne and Edmond Jean Forstall allowed slaveholders to use what few slaves they had as collateral for loans. Lavergne and Forstall then repackaged these loans into financial instruments that their banks sold to creditors in New York and Europe. Working with powerful bankers like the London-based firm Baring Brothers and Company, they pressured the Louisiana state government to “secure” these financial instruments with public money, in effect committing taxpayer dollars to pay off these loans in case slaveholders defaulted. […]

    Schermerhorn is excellent on several other ways in which entrepreneurial creativity turned the slave trading business into a lucrative enterprise. Some are intended to show how modern business concepts like “vertical integration” and “start-up costs” existed at least as early as the slave trade. Firms like Franklin and Armfield saved money by gaining control of many aspects of the domestic slave trade: they not only owned the jail cells used to house slaves in transit, they also created an internal financial firm, akin to what General Motors had done a century later. Other traders cut start-up costs by cheating: John Craig Marsh, a struggling New York dry goods merchant, entered the slave trading business in the 1820s by smuggling slaves from New Jersey to Louisiana, despite laws in New Jersey that made out of state slave sales illegal.

    Another dominant theme in the new books on slavery and capitalism is the extent to which slavery’s capitalists depended on government aid. Despite capitalist proselytizers who insist that government only gets in the way of free enterprise—a refrain perhaps as common in the nineteenth century as it is today—slavery’s most successful entrepreneurs knew that government, when working in their favor, was their greatest ally.

    Schermerhorn describes how exclusive government contracts catapulted the New York-based steamship owner Charles Morgan beyond his competition. During the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-48, Morgan’s Gulf Coast steamship line won an exclusive contract to transport troops, supplies and mail to the Texan frontier. The contract not only helped Morgan put his competitors out of business; the war itself opened new lands for cotton cultivation. Nearly 100,000 slaves were sold to Texan cotton planters in the 1850s, forty percent of them from out of state. Morgan’s ships became the dominant carrier for those slaves, his only competition coming from a rising young capitalist emerging on the scene: Cornelius Vanderbilt.

    Yet Schermerhorn’s book raises a question that isn’t sufficiently answered. If capitalism was so entwined with slavery, why was slavery destroyed yet capitalism continued to flourish? Schermerhorn sometimes gives the impression that capitalism depended on slavery, which would make that outcome seem unlikely. Schermerhorn gestures toward an answer in the last few pages of his book, suggesting that part of the reason slavery died, in the American context at least, has to do with the poor decisions made by the short-lived Confederate government: They tried to punish British officials for not recognizing their government by withholding cotton exports. Little did they know that the British had stockpiled cotton just before the Civil War, and could wait out the fighting. In addition, he argues that abolitionist writers won the ideological battle, turning slavery into a moral evil that most northerners believed they could do without.

    Yet if the northern economy was so entwined with southern slavery, wouldn’t northern capitalists put up a stronger fight—perhaps financing a public campaign at least as strong as the one by the abolitionists? We can’t know the what-ifs. And it’s likely that most northerners didn’t quite grasp how much their economy depended on slavery, as Schermerhorn suggests.

    But I suspect that a more convincing answer requires that historians get the nature of relationship between slavery and capitalism right. Perhaps slavery needed capitalism to survive in a way that capitalism didn’t need slavery. After all, Charles Morgan’s steamship line, once so dependent on the slave shipping business, did just fine once the war was over. And as Beckert has argued, cotton production continued to thrive long after slavery was abolished. British capitalists found a way to exploit peasant labor in new colonial lands like India, Asia and the Middle East, without raising a similar public outrage. The marriage between capitalism and slavery, in short, doesn’t seem to have been an equal one. Capitalism found slave labor useful for a time, but could easily move on without looking back.

  481. Pteryxx says

    Storify of Shaun King about the Rekia Boyd lack-of-case: Storify link

    23. Anita Alvarez, in 2013, argued that FIRING A GUN INTO A CROWD warrants a MURDER CHARGE. She knew these laws forward & backward.

    24. Alvarez charged a man who shot someone in the arm w/ ATTEMPTED MURDER but then charged Officer Servin who killed a woman w/ manslaughter

    […]

    29. So, Anita Alvarez sent a MAN TO JAIL for attempted murder for shooting into a crowd & hitting someones arm, but set Officer Servin FREE

    30. The injustice that States Attorney Anita Alvarez did to the family of #RekiaBoyd is unfathomable, tragic, infuriating, and criminal.

    Twitter conversation on deray’s stream about the names they just can’t forget. (Deray’s tweet)

    I continue to think of #NatashaMcKenna, her death weighs heavy on my heart. Tased to death while cuffed in police custody.

    Responses, all from different people:

    @deray For me it’s #TamirRice that keeps me up nites

    @deray Kajieme Powell weighs on me. Black, poor, and mentally ill – poor kid never stood a chance in this world.

    @deray #TamirRice for me. It felt (feels) like the whole damn world was (is) crazy.

    @deray #AiyanaJones brings me to tears if I think to long about what happened to her! Whoa!!

    @deray #EricHarris burns me up the most, because his killer gets to enjoy a vacation while the Harris family mourns.

    @deray For me, it’s Aiyana Stanley-Jones. So young and still so very new to this world. Oblivious to its evils yet still cut down.

    #MikeBrown image of his death on TV is still so clear to me. I am still in awe at the shooting, its reason, & treatment of his body

    @deray Trayvon Martin story really got to me, innocent teen just walking down the street gets stereotype for no reason.

    @deray It’s so many cases I can’t keep track. The news haven’t been carrying this story…It’s out of control.

  482. rq says

    Eric Holder bids final farewell, heralds ‘Golden Age’ at Justice Dept.

    Attorney General Eric Holder bid a final farewell to what he predicts will be recognized in the next half-century as a new “Golden Age” at the Department of Justice, leaving behind a historic six-year tenure as the first African-American man to serve as the nation’s top attorney.

    “This is something that has meant the world to me, it has helped define me as an individual and as a lawyer, as a man,” Holder said in his final send-off Friday with the department employees who served under him.

    Holder thanked the department for its work in the many issues that will likely define his legacy. He has sought to reform a criminal justice system too reliant on incarceration by reducing the harsh sentences doled out to low-level drug offenders. He restored the department’s civil rights division and made aggressively enforcing those laws a priority. Meanwhile he’s waded into addressing fraught issues of race and worked to help young people of color avoid being pulled and entangled with the law.

    Pointing to the issue that he said animated him most, Holder urged the department to continue challenging state-led efforts to restrict voting after he said the Voting Rights Act was “wrongly gutted.”

    “The notion that we would somehow go back and put in place things that make it more difficult for our fellow citizens to vote is simply inconsistent with all that is good about this country and something that I was bound and determined to fight,” Holder said.

    Calling LGBT equality the “civil rights issue of our time,” Holder said he hoped the same-sex marriage case being argued before the Supreme Court next week will “go in a way that I think is consistent with who we say we are as a people.”

    In a nod to his historic achievements, the Justice Department released a video earlier in the day featuring prominent politicians from President Bill Clinton to Rep. John Lewis to Sen. Patrick Leahy, describing Holder’s legacy as “the people’s lawyer.” […]

    Slipping off his wrist a black band with the inscription “Free Eric Holder” – a fashion statement among his supporters in the Justice Department during the months-long stand-off over Lynch’s confirmation – Holder tossed the rubber bracelet into the crowd in his final act as attorney general.

    “I think we can officially say now that Eric Holder is free,” he said.

    Good-bye, Eric. Stay in touch.

    Not a precedent. 10 Years Before Freddie Gray, Baltimore Police ‘Accidentally’ Snapped a Perp’s Spine

    “Something happened in that van,” Michael Davey, lawyer for the Baltimore police union, said at a press conference on Wednesday.

    Something like what happened in 2005 to another Baltimore man, who also suffered ultimately fatal spinal injuries after being placed in a police van.

    In the earlier spinal injury death, 42-year-old Dondi Johnson was arrested for public urination and loaded into a police van similar to the one that would later be used to transport Gray.

    “Mr. Johnson got into the back of the van without assistance,” court papers say. “He obeyed the officers’ commands and did not threaten any of the officers or act violently.”

    Johnson gave no sign that he was in physical distress when he was locked in the van with his hands cuffed behind his back. Police Officer Nicole Leake would later testify that she failed to put him in a seatbelt as required by Department General Order K-14 because the nature of the charge against him suggested he had a full bladder.

    Leake would deny that she gave him what is known in Baltimore as a “rough ride,” where the van is driven in such a fashion as to jounce and jangle the prisoners. She did estimate that she reached a nearby police station in less than half the time it would have taken at the speed limit.

    “When she arrived at the District and opened the back door of the van, Mr. Johnson was lying on the floor of the van and could not move,” court papers say.

    Leake asked two other officers to take Johnson from the van.

    “She did not call for medical assistance because Mr. Johnson did not ask for it, and she thought he was lying,” court papers say.

    Police Officer Michael Riser asked Johnson to get up.

    “[T]he b*tch was driving like an a–hole,” Johnson replied, according to court papers. “I fell and I can’t move.”

    Riser would testify that he knew from his training and from responding to car accidents that “if someone has a suspected neck injury, the first thing you do is stabilize that patient…you don’t move that patient.”

    But Riser would insist that he also thought Johnson was faking.

    “Officer Riser asked Mr. Johnson if he wanted ‘a medic,’ or if he wanted the officers to take him to the hospital,” court papers say. “Mr. Johnson replied: ‘Just take me to the hospital.’ Officer Riser testified that a prisoner faking an injury usually asks to be taken to the hospital.”

    Riser and another cop carried Johnson from a van to a radio car. They secured Johnson with a seatbelt, as he had not been secured in the van.

    “[Riser] stated that he did not intend to injure Mr. Johnson when he took him out of the transport van and drove him to the hospital,” court papers say.

    After his arrival at the hospital, Johnson was interviewed about how he came to be injured. Records say he reported “that he was handcuffed and the wagon made a sharp turn, [he] fell, hitting face first and [heard] a pop and blacked out.’”

    Johnson underwent surgery for a serious spinal injury. He died two weeks later, and his family filed suit. […]

    The cops were found civilly liable. No criminal charges were brought. And the incident was largely lost to public memory by 8:39 a.m. on April 12. […]

    The police union would later allow that Gray was not placed in a seatbelt, despite the lesson that should have been learned from Johnson’s death a decade before. Gray was reportedly loaded in headfirst and face down on the floor.

    The van set off but pulled over minutes later, reportedly so one of the cops could finish some paperwork. Perhaps it was the report that The Baltimore Sun would later obtain, which says Gray had been arrested “without force or incident.”

    At this point, Gray is said to have been “irate,” though he may have simply been in dire distress, thrashing because he was in pain and not getting enough oxygen. The police response was to place him in leg irons, but apparently still no seatbelt.

    Less than 10 minutes later, the van started up again. The cop at the wheel then radioed for backup to take a look at Gray.

    Why exactly that might have been needed is not yet clear. What is known is the driver was notified during the next few minutes that a second prisoner needed transporting. The van reportedly arrived at the appropriate stationhouse with two prisoners in the back.

    Gray was found to be in such serious condition that an ambulance was summoned. The paramedics presumably demobilized his head and neck before rushing him to the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center, one of the very best in the country.

    He underwent two surgeries for multiple fractures near where the spine meets the head and for damage to his larynx. That would suggest that he suffered trauma to both the front and back of his neck.

    “What we don’t know, and what we need to get to, is how that injury occurred,” Deputy Police Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez told the press. “When Mr. Gray was put in that van, he could talk, he was upset, and when he was taken out of that van, he could not talk and he could not breathe.”

    Six cops have been suspended with pay. Four investigations are under way. And a whole city is demanding to know how a second Baltimore man had come to die from spinal injuries after being picked up for a minor offense and loaded into a police van.

    And we still have the question of why there was a first one.

    #FreeAmerica. Another unique flag, this one with the stripes turned vertical like prison bars.

    Whose street OUR STREET #JusticeForFreddieGray #FreddieGray

    Great-Great-Grandfather Sues Maryland Sheriff’s Deputy for Backyard Attack

    Robert A. Jones alleges in his lawsuit that former sheriff’s deputy Michael Armstrong not only used excessive force, but that his actions were maliciously motivated.

    On October 31, 2012, Jones says he was burning leaves in his fire pit, something he claims to have been doing for the last 50 years. Jones has lived in the same home for over 56 years and has been on social security disability since 1982.

    He says there was more smoke than usual because the leaves we a bit damp. As the fire began to die down, Jones says he went to the front of his house to meet people who wanted to buy a car that he had for sale.

    He was then approached by Armstrong, who claimed that he “saw a fire about two miles away.” Jones insisted that this was not possible, and that the deputy was simply seeing smoke due to the wetness of the leaves.

    Armstrong reportedly interrogated Jones about fire safety, to which Jones explained that he had hoses as well as other options to douse the fire.

    At this point Jones asked the officer why his white neighbors could burn leaves before 4 pm without receiving “this type of treatment.” The question reportedly outraged the deputy, who insisted it was not a black and white thing.

    The officer began to demand ID and told Jones that he had three seconds to get his identification before he would be arrested. Jones alleges that as he was pulling it out of his pocket the officer quickly counted to three and shoved him.

    The complaint states that after pushing Jones, Armstrong continued to punch him in the face, knee him in the sides of his body and back, and spray him in the face with pepper spray six times as he was on the ground, SoMD News reported.

    The disabled man says that he believed that he was going to die and could not breathe.

    Jones was ultimately charged with six crimes, including two counts of assault on a police officer, but the only count on which he was found guilty was failure to obey an order, which he appealed and won.

    A statement released from the department regarding the lawsuit states that the incident occurred prior to the current administration and that the deputy involved was no longer employed at the department. They also claim that no formal complaint was filed other than a notice that a lawsuit may be filed in April of 2013.

    “The Charles County sheriff’s department is going to learn through this lawsuit,” Jones’ attorney Jimmy A. Bell told SoMD News. “Hunting is not fun when the rabbit has the gun, and the gun we’re using is the legal process and the bullets are going to be the jury verdict.”

    Oh, just listen to that violent rhetoric!!! Just like a lynch mob! Innit.

  483. rq says

    Freddie Gray police backtrack over possible explanation for death. Ah, the good ol’ ‘changing-the-story’ line.

    Police chiefs in Baltimore retreated on Friday from earlier claims that Freddie Gray, whose death has caused an outcry, must have been injured inside the van carrying him after his arrest.

    They said they were investigating what happened during one of the stops made by the vehicle.

    Asked whether Gray was fatally hurt by a so-called “rough ride” without a seatbelt in the back of the vehicle, or could have been injured outside the van, police commissioner Anthony Batts said at a press conference there were “potentials for both of those”.

    “If someone harmed Freddie Gray, we will have to prosecute him,” said Batts.

    Deputy commissioner Kevin Davis said officials were looking into the second of three stops the van’s driver made after Gray was arrested on the morning of 12 April. “The facts of that interaction are under investigation,” said Davis. […]

    Video of Gray’s arrest, which showed him being dragged into the police van by officers, has been cited by protesters as reason to doubt police claims that Gray was healthy when first placed in the van. While he was shouting in apparent pain and moving his head, one of his legs appeared limp. The video did not show his initial treatment by police.
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    In a cryptic section of his remarks on Friday, Batts suggested investigators were concentrating on a specific event that occurred between Gray’s arrest and his collection by an ambulance at the western district police headquarters about 40 minutes later.

    “We’re focusing in,” he said. “There is, and I’m not going to give you all the information, there’s an incident, or not ‘incident’, because I’ll get you off on the right path. There’s something that we have to look at, that we have to have further investigation on.”

    Batts confirmed that Gray, who was in leg irons, was not wearing a seatbelt in the vehicle as required by the department’s policy. “There are no excuses for that. Period,” he said. Past prisoners in Baltimore have died from injuries sustained when they were thrown around the back of police vehicles due to fast or erratic driving and abrupt stops.

    The police commissioner reiterated that his officers “failed to get medical attention” for Gray despite his requests for an asthma inhaler and other complaints. Batts said medics should have been called to the scene of Gray’s arrest.

    Davis said Gray said he needed a medic during a third stop by the van, made to pick up a second prisoner, but an ambulance was not called until 25 minutes later, after the vehicle arrived at police headquarters. Batts told reporters that during the third stop, officers “picked him up off the floor and placed him on a seat”.

    Batts said on Thursday that the second prisoner, who was separated from Gray by a metal wall, told investigators that Gray was “was still moving around, that he was kicking and making noises” until the van arrived at the station. Police are declining to identify the man due to his status as a witness in the criminal inquiry.

    Yup, a touch worried for that man…

    Out of the annals of history: Police Killing of Unarmed Man Agitated New York … in the 1850s

    Officer Robert Cairnes was on patrol in the old First Ward when he was summoned to a ship at the foot of Wall Street to search for a one-eyed longshoreman known as Sailor Jack, accused of threatening to murder the captain.

    Officer Cairnes, a relative rookie of two years, arrested the longshoreman on South Street. What happened next on Nov. 10, 1858, became the stuff of legend — an early police killing of an unarmed man running away, with the officer locked up on suspicion of murder.

    The case convulsed New York at the time, just as this month’s phone video of a white police officer fatally shooting a fleeing black driver in South Carolina has provoked widespread outrage.

    The victim in 1858, Robert Hollis, 28, an Irish-born father of four, had slugged Officer Cairnes and run. The officer, 40, also Irish-born and a father of six, gave chase, pulling his pistol and firing into the crowd until, catching up to his fugitive, he fired a fatal shot into the man’s back — at such close range that Mr. Hollis’s coat caught fire.

    “A policeman has no right to shoot a man for running away from him,” editorialized The New-York Times (as the name was then punctuated), citing a rash of such cases and questioning whether officers should be armed at all. […]

    With the state takeover came a policy that officers carry guns, although some captains urged their men to ignore it, according to Thomas Reppetto and James Lardner in their 2000 book, “N.Y.P.D.: A City and Its Police.” Police shootings of unarmed civilians invariably followed, including, the authors said, an innocent German killed while walking with his wife during violent protests against enforced Sunday closings of beer halls.

    The subsequent killing of Mr. Hollis by Officer Cairnes, though both were Irish, established the victimhood of minorities in police shootings, said Mr. Reppetto, a former police commander in Chicago.

    The 1858 killing remains relevant, said Leo Hershkowitz, a longtime Queens College and New York University history professor who came across the case in the archives of The Times while researching a revisionist history of the widely reviled William M. Tweed, the boss of the Tammany Hall political organization.

    “Cairnes was so mad,” said Mr. Hershkowitz, 90 and now retired, who saw parallels to the fatal shooting of Walter L. Scott by Officer Michael T. Slager in North Charleston, S.C., on April 4. A witness’s video recorded Mr. Scott running away from a traffic stop and the officer firing eight shots at his back. Officer Slager has been charged with murder.

    The killing of Mr. Hollis, according to a transcript of the coroner’s inquisition, stemmed from a dispute on Nov. 9, 1858, when the longshoreman and a mate visited the St. Charles, a ship sailing between New York and Le Havre, France, and asked to work as crewmen.

    Mr. Hollis was later described in The Times as a ruffian with arrests for assaults and other “atrocious violence,” including a fight that cost him an eye. […]

    Officer Cairnes, in pursuit, fired two shots, the first ball rattling among the barrels where a cooper, John Thrall, worked. The second whizzed past the ear of a passer-by, William Gage, who objected, “For God’s sake, don’t fire, or you will kill someone,” according to a transcript of a coroner’s inquisition.

    By this time, the cooper had seized Mr. Hollis, but, suddenly afraid, let go. Charles W. Degendorf, a cartman at Fulton Market, grabbed Mr. Hollis’s collar and held him.

    Officer Cairnes, Mr. Degendorf testified, ran up, exclaiming, “You will get away from me, will you?,” and fired into Mr. Hollis’s back — “so near that the back of the man’s coat was scorched.”

    Drawn by the shots, a Second Ward officer, Joseph A. Perkins, saw Mr. Hollis’s coat actually ablaze and put out the fire, demanding of Officer Cairnes, “Are you crazy?”

    As Officer Perkins later testified, “I thought it very singular that he should shoot in the reckless manner he did, when there were so many about who would have assisted him.”

    With the dying Mr. Hollis on a cart to the hospital, Officer Perkins said Officer Cairnes admitted “that if he had the thing to do over again, he would not do as he had done.”

    Officer Perkins, meanwhile, struggled to rescue Officer Cairnes from a lynch mob bent on avenging the executed longshoreman. “Swing him over the awning,” some shouted, according to The Times. “Hang him to the lamppost.”

    Officer Cairnes was extricated from the mob but was locked up pending a coroner’s inquisition. The officer, as was his right, did not testify and never seemed to claim self-defense.

    The following day, a coroner’s jury ruled that Mr. Hollis died from a pistol ball in the heart, discharged “in close contact with the body.” It ruled the shooting “not justifiable” and ordered Officer Cairnes held for a grand jury. On Nov. 16, 1858, his bail was set at $10,000 (equal to about $270,000 today). He made bail the next day — the same day a grand jury declined to indict him. Without elaboration, a handwritten court record in the Municipal Archives notes: “Dismissed by grand jury.”

    Note the amazing parallels with similar incidents occurring today. History, repetition, etc.

    The “Black Israelites” in Chinatown, Washington, DC., are #HotepTwitter in real life. “Hotep Twitter” is a term I have become familiar with, though I don’t claim to understand the full depth of the term. Amongst other things, the biggest proponents of hotep twitter seem to be black men full of misogyny, stereotypical gender roles, homo- and transphobia… so kind of like black MRAs with the added factor that to them, African (black) history begins and ends with Egypt (hence the ‘hotep’). This is probably an incomplete and flawed understanding, but the online definition of the term wasn’t too clear and I’m working from my observations of the application of the term (to whom and why). Too scared to ask about it directly. :/

  484. Pteryxx says

    re slavery and capitalism article quoted in #480:

    Yet Schermerhorn’s book raises a question that isn’t sufficiently answered. If capitalism was so entwined with slavery, why was slavery destroyed yet capitalism continued to flourish?

    According to another book, Slavery by Another Name, slave labor didn’t end with formal emancipation, but just transitioned into forced labor and convict labor with basically the same financial benefits. Many “self-made” businessmen of the south made their fortunes by renting black laborers who’d been conveniently collected by local police whenever demand was high.

    The 90-minute documentary version can be watched for free at PBS: Slavery by Another Name

    Slavery by Another Name is a 90-minute documentary that challenges one of Americans’ most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. The film tells how even as chattel slavery came to an end in the South in 1865, thousands of African Americans were pulled back into forced labor with shocking force and brutality. It was a system in which men, often guilty of no crime at all, were arrested, compelled to work without pay, repeatedly bought and sold, and coerced to do the bidding of masters. Tolerated by both the North and South, forced labor lasted well into the 20th century.

    For most Americans this is entirely new history. Slavery by Another Name gives voice to the largely forgotten victims and perpetrators of forced labor and features their descendants living today.

    and the About page:

    Slavery by Another Name “resets” our national clock with a singular astonishing fact: Slavery in America didn’t end 150 years ago, with Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. Based on Douglas A. Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, the film illuminates how in the years following the Civil War, insidious new forms of forced labor emerged in the American South, persisting until the onset of World War II.

    “It is rare to have the opportunity to bring to television a story that, outside of academic circles, is virtually unknown,” says tpt National Productions’ Catherine Allan, executive producer of the 90 minute documentary for PBS. “In telling the story of what happened to African Americans over the 80 year period of “neo-slavery”, we hope to add a significant new facet to America’s ongoing discussion about race.”

    So capitalism needn’t have suffered greatly from the end of slavery, if slavery for all practical purposes didn’t end.

  486. rq says

    The Mellow Monkey
    Thanks for that, that was extremely helpful. :)

    +++

    Politico event we worked so hard to put together w Bryan Stevenson, Celia Munoz, John Legend & Michelle Alexander, and a couple of tweet-quotes about the panel:
    “We are more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” – Bryan Stevenson
    I hope to learn more about the #FreeAmerica initiative that @JohnLegend is leading. (Turns out he’s been doing a lot of research about mass incarceration.)
    “The uprising in Ferguson shows the power of young people.” – Michelle Alexander #FREEAMERICA

    They just won’t give up: Nine Months After He Filmed Eric Garner’s Killing, the Cops Are Trying to Put Ramsey Orta Behind Bars

    “At first I didn’t think it would blow up this big,” Ramsey Orta told me. He was describing the video he took of his friend Eric Garner being killed by the NYPD. His voice was nearly too soft to hear.

    I interviewed Orta on April 10, nine months after Officer Daniel Pantaleo had choked Eric Garner to death in front of Staten Island’s Bay Beauty Supply. In December, a grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo, but Orta, his supporters say, has been the target of a police campaign to destroy his life ever since.

    When I spoke to him, he was at the tail end of a two-month stint on Rikers Island, locked up on $100,000 bail and awaiting trial for drug charges. Orta is 23 years old and slight, with sharp cheekbones that his time in Rikers had made almost disturbingly prominent. Terrified of being poisoned, he’d been living off of pre-packaged commissary food since he entered jail. The fear is better founded than you might think—19 prisoners in Orta’s unit are suing the city over pellets of rat poison they allege guards planted in their meatloaf.

    Rikers seems an unlikely destination for perhaps the most important citizen journalist of the last year. But though the video Orta shot was shared around the world, he stayed right where he was, a young, working-class Latino man in Staten Island. Anyone in circumstances like those would be vulnerable to police harassment—and doubly so when you make it your business to watch and record the cops and their abuses. […]

    Around 2010, Orta became friendly with Eric Garner. Garner was, in Orta’s words, “a neighborhood dad,” a 40-something grandfather who sold loose cigarettes after his health problems forced him to stop working as a landscaper. A generous, protective, and well-liked man, Garner loved to buy treats for Orta’s kid. But Garner’s informal cigarette business, illegal under state law, made him an easy target for police, and he had been arrested dozens of times. In 2007, he filed a handwritten complaint from Rikers, alleging he’d been sexually assaulted by police during a strip search.

    Though a judge later dismissed Garner’s lawsuit, accusations of sexual violence on the part of NYPD officers during arrests are disturbingly common. Pantaleo has been the subject of multiple lawsuits for misconduct, and in January 2014 the city paid a total of $30,000 to two men who said they had been strip-searched and had their genitals slapped in the middle of the street by Pantaleo and other officers. […]

    On July 17, Orta was hanging out outside of Bay Beauty Supply, where Eric Garner had just broken up a fight. When police approached Garner, Orta remembered the beating he had witnessed just days earlier, and took out his cell phone camera.

    As he filmed, Pantaelo choked Garner into unconsciousness as the larger man cried out “I can’t breathe!” 11 times. After being denied immediate medical attention, he was carried to an ambulance on a stretcher and died in a hospital shortly afterward.

    Orta recorded the key moments of the encounter, and though he had no way of knowing it then, Orta’s footage would become among the most important political videos of 2014.

    “Ramsey had naturally strong journalistic instincts to record what was happening in his community and share on YouTube,” Paul Moakley, TIME’s photo editor, told me in an email. “The video is one of the most shocking images of police brutality I’ve seen in the United States.”

    In the week after the chokehold incident, Moakley recut Orta’s footage into a short and interspersed Garner’s killing with an interview with Orta. In his quiet voice, Orta expressed hope in the truth-telling power of video. “Just pull out a camera. That’s all people need,” he told Moakley. “Once we have proof nothing can go against that.” The short won Moakley the prestigious World Press Photo award. Orta did not share the honor. […]

    Orta publicly mourned his friend’s death, throwing memorials and speaking at vigils. He also testified at the grand jury for Pantaleo. At the same time, according to Orta, the police began to follow him. They drove by his mom’s house, where he lived, late at night, shining floodlights into the windows. Orta told me cops stopped by the place where his then girlfriend, Chrissie Ortiz, worked, demanding a copy of the video. (They later arrested Ortiz, allegedly for fighting.) Orta told me his friends were searched after leaving his home. Orta’s aunt, Lisa Mercado, who has become his chief supporter and a spokesperson of sorts, told me that she was followed by police whenever she visited Staten Island from her home in New Jersey.

    Orta wasn’t the only witness to suffer this sort of attention. Taisha Allen filmed officers refusing Garner medical attention as he lay dying. In March 2015, police arrested Allen for being in a park after closing time. Allen alleges they beat her, leaving her covered in bruises and with an injured arm; she told Pix11 that cops recognized her and said, “You’re that little girl from the Eric Garner case.”

    On August 2, 2014, one day after the medical examiner ruled Garner’s death a homicide, the cops arrested Orta for illegally possessing a handgun. According to the charge, police saw him place a gun in the waistband of a 17-year-old girl—who according to both his and her families, he barely knew.

    Orta’s supporters saw this as an act of retaliation on the NYPD’s part. “Even the dumbest criminal would know not to be doing something like that outside. So the whole story doesn’t fit at all,” Ortiz told the Staten Island Advance.

    “We need to move to the moon so we can be safe,” she added. [..].]

    In the days following the arrest, anonymous law enforcement used tabloids like he New York Post to smear Orta as a hardened criminal. The Post quoted a claim from one unnamed cop who said that Orta had “24 previous arrests including for rape, assault and robbery with a boxcutter.” But when his attorneys ran through the rap sheet with me, I found that Orta had far fewer arrests then this cop had stated—and that he’d never been charged with rape. (The lawyers would not go on the record with specifics about their client’s past charges or convictions.)

    “Statements have been made in both open court and to the media by “anonymous law enforcement sources, which are demonstrably false and simply misleading.” Orta’s attorney William Aronin told me. “We believe these are obvious attempts to prejudice the potential jury pool and the online comments to these articles seem to suggest that it may be working.”

    After Orta’s release, the harassment continued. Orta told me police accused him of armed robbery three times, once even drawing a gun on him in the deli where he worked. He has documented his interactions with cops in two videos posted to his YouTube channel. In one, from December 2014, Orta, dressed in a white hoodie, incredulously asks an officer why he’s being hassled when the robbery suspect they’re pursuing was described as being dressed in black. […]

    The prosecution’s case hinges on nine videos of Orta or his family members allegedly interacting with undercover police. “He took the video,” an anonymous police source gloated to the New York Daily News . “Now we took the video.” But Orta’s lawyers claim the videos are heavily edited, show no drugs being exchanged, and even have altered time stamps.

    Lisa Mercado started a GoFundMe campaign to raise the $16,000 needed to pay a bail bondsman and get Orta out. But despite the fame of Orta’s video, his cause attracted little attention until early April, when lawyer William Aronin, of Perry & Aronin, came across it through contacts in the Black Lives Matter movement. Orta’s family soon hired the pair. The two lawyers are an odd couple—Aronin is in his early 30s, exceedingly proper in dapper suits, whereas the 65-year-old Perry wears a battered motorcycle jacket to court and leans on a silver topped cane he nicknamed “the rod of rightous indignation.”

    By this time, Orta had been languishing in Rikers for nearly two months, but with new lawyers his fortunes seemed to change. On April 6, the Free Thought Project published a post about Orta’s imprisonment. His case went viral, and soon the GoFundMe campaign had brought in to over $54,000. The office of District Attorney Dan Donovan—now running for Congress in Staten Island as a Republican—requested a hearing to look into the sources of the money, a move Orta’s supporters decried as being just another step in the campaign against him. After the media picked up the story, the DA’s office withdrew its demands. Orta was released on April 10. […]

    After Santana came forward as the man who filmed Scott’s killing, his mother told Fox News she feared for his safety. Orta’s fate shows why. Filming the police is a right, but it is also a subversive act—and power has historically little tolerance for subversion.

    Subversive as it is, filming the police alone won’t stop police killing. Police are part the legal machine, which has little impetus to turn against them. Prosecutors refuse to charge cops, grand juries refuse to indict them, police unions back cops who kill not just with money and legal help, but with public passion. Despite a well-documented history of cops lying, juries still mostly believe they tell the truth. To large segments of white America, a police officer’s fear or anger is seen as more legitimate than a black person’s life. A policeman in Indiana even made T-shirts reading: “Breathe Easy. Don’t Break the Law,” mocking Garner’s dying words.

    In the face of this, the videotaped killings of Scott and Garner can seem like little more than endlessly replayed traumatic records of black death. Yet they threaten police deeply—as you can see from all the cases of law enforcement officers deleting cell phone videos and even smashing the devices citizens use to record them.

    Before we ended our conversation, I asked Orta how the other prisoners were treating him in Rikers. “The ones who know what I did respect me,” he answered. “They say I’ve done a good thing.”

    This one only barely touches on race (as it focusses on gender), but the small mention (cited below) is quite telling. Contingency and Gender

    Marisa Alison, a researcher at the New Faculty Majority Foundation, noted a disturbing trend: The rise in contingent faculty coincides with the rise of women enrolled in, and graduating from, doctoral-degree programs. There’s a similar argument to made about race. Tressie McMillan Cottom, an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, writes that African-American scholars are 50 percent more likely to end up off the tenure track. Cottom supported the growing concern about “adjunctification,” but pointed out that black faculty and students had been protesting the “ghettofication of black scholars in adjunct roles” since the 1960s. (The American Association of University Professors only started issuing reports on adjuncts in the 1980s.)

    We’ve heard much talk about fixing the “leaky pipeline” that runs from graduate school to tenure, but less attention is paid to the fact that women are actually staying in higher ed but working off track in contingent positions. As I’ve written elsewhere, the pipeline is not really leaky, but broken.

    There’s a couple of links within that paragraph examining the race aspect a bit closer.

  487. rq says

    Baltimore Protest Details 4/25:

    1pm – City Hall
    3pm – Gilmor Homes
    4pm – Marching
    5pm – City Hall
    #FreddieGray

    When you hear: “What about black on black crime?”, a flashcard with information to explain away that myth. Addresses several issues like white-on-white crime, overcriminalization of blakc-on-black crime, and its dissimilarity to police brutality. That’s a very badly worded synopsis.

    The 45-minute mystery of Freddie Gray’s death

    Investigators with the city police and other agencies are still trying to recreate the events of the next 45 minutes, when Gray sustained a severe and ultimately fatal spinal cord injury while in police custody.

    But in its own investigation, The Baltimore Sun found that police missed the opportunity to examine some evidence that could have shed light on events. For example, by the time police canvassed one neighborhood looking for video from security cameras, a convenience store camera pointed at a key intersection had already taped over its recordings of that morning.

    The Sun also found that accounts from residents conflicted with the official version of events, including a police account that Gray’s arrest was made “without force or incident.”

    City officials have released a partial timeline of the events of April 12, and investigators have focused on his stop-and-go, roundabout trip through the city in the metal cage of a police transport van. A lieutenant, a sergeant and four other officers involved in Gray’s arrest and transport have been suspended with pay pending the results of the police investigation.

    Still, much of what happened to Gray on the cool, partly cloudy and breezeless morning of April 12 remains a mystery.

    Officials have declined to provide 911 call recordings related to Gray’s arrest or injury, citing the open investigation, and police have declined to provide dispatch recordings that would contain any conversations between officers and dispatchers while Gray was in custody. The timeline for when and where the van stopped remains incomplete, and no time has been provided for the van’s last stop, back on North Avenue for another pickup before its arrival at the Western District police station.

    Insights into the critical minutes between Gray’s arrest and the call for paramedics can be gleaned from residents who said they observed several interactions the police had with him.

    Taken collectively, they make clear that Gray’s arrest and transport were perceived as being wholly out of the ordinary — even in an area where the drug trade makes an arrest a common occurrence.

    There’s an interactive version of that article here: THE 45-MINUTE MYSTERY OF FREDDIE GRAY’S DEATH.

    Isaiah Washington: A Silicon Valley Hotel Racially Profiled Me ‘For Being An Uppity Negro With A Cigar’

    Isaiah Washington told HuffPost Live on Thursday that he was “racially profiled in Silicon Valley” on Saturday, April 18.

    Washington explained to HuffPost Live’s Marc Lamont Hill that he was at a “very nice hotel, just last Saturday, smoking a cigar,” when a security guard approached and asked for his name. Washington said he had “fallen asleep at 1 o’clock in the morning” — presumably in a public area of the hotel, though he did not elaborate — but he felt he was targeted solely because of his race.

    “[Security] just wanted my black behind out of the hotel for being an uppity negro with a cigar,” Washington said. “He didn’t like the way I looked.”

    After much discussion, conflict was eventually sorted out and Washington was allowed to stay.

    Washington appeared on HuffPost Live along with Mo’Nique and Julian Walker to discuss “Blackbird,” their film about a young African-American man coming to terms with his sexuality in the deep South.

    It isn’t enough to be respectable and famous. You gotta act the part, too, apparently. :P

    Billboard in Baltimore. Black lives matter. #FreddieGray

  488. rq says

    There’s an art action at Baltimore City Hall from 4-5pm, too. #FreddieGray

    Faith communities: are you willing to be led? are you willing to tell the truth about faith and justice? – @deray #CTSselma

    ARC standing on the steps of the Old Courthouse (that’s the anti-racism folks in STL).

    Protestors chanting: “Tell the truth and stop the lies. Freddie Gray didn’t have to die.” #Baltimore #FreddieGray
    Jail Support Number (443) 814-9160 #FreddieGray @Bmore_United @BmoreBloc @LBSBaltimore
    (More pics and tweets from this event in a bit.)

    3 mile #BlackLivesMatter march in Dallas, Tx. #JusticeForJasonHarrison @deray @YourAnonNews

  489. rq says

    More from STL:
    Anti Racist Collective Downtown Saint Louis Old Courthouse
    Police prepping to evict white #BlackLivesMatter activists to make room for Aryan brotherhood. #whitefolkswork
    Wonder how that black cop feels knowin that they are kickin #BlackLivesMatter protesters out so the Aryans can take up space #whitefolkswork

    It’s was nice having @handsupunited_ on @North_Campus today. #collaboration

    “Sometimes you have to stand, when everyone else is sitting. Sometimes you have to speak, when everyone else is quiet.” -Bryan Stevenson

    Here, have a music: Kwabs – Perfect Ruin [Official Video] To be honest, I didn’t see much of the video, as I was clicking through twitter pics of the Nepal earthquake while listening. The title was very appropriate.

  490. rq says

    Collection of photos mostly from Baltimore, some from STL (tried to sort) but then I’m clocking out for tonight. I hope the police remain calm and peaceful and don’t instigate any violence.

    .@CNN & @BaltimorePolice, w/ local kid walking by. Says he’s been arrested for running from cops. he’s 11.

    And the Legal Observers are here. Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    The intense police presence out here will only serve to provoke everyone. Baltimore learned nothing from the recent past. #FreddieGray

    Baltimore PD. no name tags. #FreddieGray

    Barricades, cement blocks and way more police then protesters. #FreddieGray

    Riggs. #FreddieGray police and police buses.

  491. rq says

    And the Baltimore County Police are present too. #FreddieGray

    I am disgusted by the display the police are putting on today. So excessive for black people simply STANDING by each other #FreddieGray

    And the Bloods and Crips are walking side-by-side today at the protest. Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    And with every street shutdown, the drivers were chill. They, too, are outraged by this corrupt police. Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    Protest. Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    If this isn’t a visual. The dreamers (word to @tanehisicoates) The police state. And the people. #FreddieGray

  492. rq says

    Protest. Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    Pennsylvania Avenue. Protest. Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    And here’s the STIL bit:
    White supremacy group held a protest in Downtown STL today. City police removed anti racist white protesters.

    That natl parks dept is evicting #BlackLivesMatter demonstration in favor of white supremacists. Happening now downtown STL

    They yell “Hail Darren Wilson” and “Black lives don’t matter!” White anti racists counter with chants mail horns. I can’t fucking EVEN. Can you??

    @Nettaaaaaaaa damn we had the a similar situation in Bloomington in March smh. They just need to gtfoh

  493. rq says

    Ah, the pen-final comment of the night ended up in moderation, how fitting. Eh. ‘Night.

  494. rq says

    It’s true. This little girl made this sign on her own. Was her idea. More accountability, less power.

    I think there are approximately 4,000 people here today in protest. Baltimore. #FreddieGray Other estimates at 2500. In other words, a lot.

    In my opinion, one of the best descriptions of privilege: “Privilege isn’t wealth or having it easy: it’s what you don’t have to deal with”

    @JustSlyRed #AlterConf

    Baltimore Police. Riot Gear Ready. #FreddieGray

    I’ve been told that the Nation of Islam facilitated the gang truce today.

    This shutdown in Baltimore may just be the most artfully executed organic protest I’ve seen since August. #FreddieGray
    And then it went bad – so be prepared.

  495. rq says

    Here’s a preview: #Baltimore

    But before that.
    Baltimore City Hall. #FreddieGray

    From Above the
    #JusticeForFreddieGray Rally

    Live
    by @rousseau_ist of @DCMediaGroup
    #FreddieGray

    Overheard someone say that ppl hacked the police lights. And by the looks of the traffic, believable. #FreddieGray * Traffic lights, not police lights.

    Long row of cops at the western district while protesters are downtown. Gearing up for? #freddiegrey @deray

    Baltimore. #FreddieGray police in riot gear.

  496. rq says

    State Troopers escort people across the street. Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    Standoff. Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    Police in helicopter just announced dispersion order. #FreddieGray #Baltimore

    Police have us surrounded on all sides. Bus just pulled up. Think they’re about to gas. (As far as twitter is concerned, there was no tear gas. As far as mainstream media is concerned, nothing at all happened – Lost the tweet, but on CNN they said anyone who wants to know more about the protest should check the internet. Journalism at its finest.)

    You begging blacks to respect private property but not begging cops and courts to respect black lives and black humanity. Some windows on cop cars were broken – not hearing any news about anything else, but there may be other property damage. Does it matter, in context?

    Yall worried about how we “look”. We are laid out in the street dead then handcuffed in cold blood. That’s how we look.

  497. rq says

    Police made push, some protesters ran, others held. Now another line between the two in intersection. #FreddieGray

    Still more police back up arriving. There aren’t that many protesters now, but they’re still holding Light and Pratt.

    On the corner it’s getting heated again, with protesters yelling and pointing at cop line. #Baltimore #FreddieGray

    #FreddieGray protests have completely shut down #Baltimore #BlackLivesMatter

    Standoff. Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    Baltimore City right now feels like Ferguson felt in the fall. Mourn your idea of America. #FreddieGray

  498. rq says

    As protestors smash cop car windows in Baltimore, remember: they’re protesting cops who severed a man’s spine, killed him. That came first.

    The concept of outside agitators is ironic because less than 30% of Baltimore police officer live in the city – the linked article: More than 40 percent of city employees live outside Baltimore. Ha.

    Apartheid was “legal”
    Slavery was “legal”
    Colonialism was “legal”

    Legality is a construct of the powerful

    Not of justice

    And notice how the language is always “riot” when it’s black people. Last month? The white college kids? “Upset fans”

    I just want my people to be free. Free to be angry. Free to be safe. Free to fight back. I don’t care about property.

  499. rq says

    Horses. Baltimore. #FreddieGray

    @Nettaaaaaaaa is [100]: “Every unmentioned black body ever killed on American soil by state violence?” #BlackLivesMatter The attached is a reply to those comments that tell protestors to remain ‘peaceful’ and to practice non-violence.

    White People Rioting for No Reason – an illustrative article for comparison.

    There was a baseball game in Baltimiore last night. After the game, the told people to remain inside due to protest outside. This announcement on the Camden Yards scoreboard just now. #Orioles #RedSox #FreddieGray protest;
    Fans are not being allowed out of Camden Yards. #Orioles #RedSox #FreddieGray
    Gates at Camden Yards just reopened for fans to exit. #orioles #Redsox #FreddieGray

  500. rq says

    Baltimore is 64% black. 100% of people killed by Baltimore police department last year were black. #FreddieGray

    Re-read In Defense of Looting.

    Tonight I stood with Fredricka Gray, twin sister of #FreddieGray, calling 4 peaceful protests w/@jamalhbryant – I understand the protests Were peaceful…

    Freddie Gray death: Protesters damage cars; 12 arrested

    Protesters angry over the death of Freddie Gray got into physical altercations with police Saturday night in downtown Baltimore near the city’s famed baseball stadium.

    Some of the hundreds who confronted lines of police officers got into shoving matches with helmeted cops while other demonstrators threw objects. At least five police cars were damaged by people who smashed windows and jumped on them.

    Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said she was profoundly disappointed by the violence, adding that 95% of the protesters were respectful but a “small group of agitators intervened.”

    Twelve people were arrested, Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said.

    “We continue to have a few isolated pockets of individuals causing disturbances. We are deploying resources to keep everyone safe,” the Baltimore Police Department tweeted.

    Fredericka Gray, the twin sister of Freddie Gray, made a statement: “My family wants to say, ‘Can y’all please, please stop the violence? Freddie Gray would not want this.’ Freddie’s father and mother do not want any violence. Violence does not get justice.”

    Vandals broke and damaged storefront windows and trashed one 7-Eleven, police said. CNN crews observed a window damaged at a Michael Kors store and holes in one at a Subway restaurant.

    The skirmishes followed a planned demonstration over how police handled the arrest of Gray, a 25-year-old Baltimore man who suffered a spinal injury at some point after he was detained by police on April 12. He died a week later.

    The numbers of protesters dissipated substantially just before sunset, though some people were still walking in the streets near Oriole Park at Camden Yards, causing some traffic problems.

    Earlier, demonstrators had marched through the streets until they arrived at City Hall. Along the way, whenever it appeared the protest might get out of control, organizers reined the marchers back in.

    The event ended after speeches at Baltimore City Hall on Saturday evening, but many protesters continued to vent their anger by marching down to Inner Harbor.

    Vaguelycomic interlude: Obama jokes about his fourth-quarter ‘bucket list’ at WHCD

    President Obama came out swinging in his speech at this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night, mocking his critics and taking various shots at Republicans and members of the media.

    Obama took the mic at the packed Washington Hilton hotel as a video mashup played to the synth-pop hit “I Love It,” joking he was feeling looser in his final two years in office, the so-called “fourth quarter” of his presidency.

    “Those Joe Biden shoulder massages are like magic. You should try one. Oh, you have?” Obama said.

    Obama mocked critics of his recent unilateral moves, saying he maintains “something that rhymes with ‘bucket list.’ ”

    “Executive action on immigration? Bucket,” Obama said to laughs. “New climate regulations? Bucket. It’s the right thing to do. My new attitude is paying off. Look at my Cuba policy. The Castro brothers are here tonight.”

    Don’t just RT the one photo it was a positive week despite today :::: #BaltimoreProtest #ripfreddiegray #DVNLLN