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Tag Archives: police misconduct
October 9, 2021 by OUR COMMON GROUND
This Week at OUR COMMON GROUND
Our Guest: Kim Brown, Host, Burn It Down with Kim Brown
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Systemically oppressed survivors face tremendous, overwhelming barriers to seeking advocacy and justice. The challenges, and the history of institutional oppression of our people is often time met with lies, propaganda and obfuscation. There are historical underpinnings include events that took place in the past which impact how an individual or community perceives events or reacts to issues in the present. Additionally, the government, elected officials and mainstream organizations are not designed for or by systemically oppressed peoples and are often complicit or architects. Thus, it is critical that people who advocate on our behalf, analyze for us, comment or any other form of representation understand the historical trauma and its impact on Black people as a systemically oppressed people. We are told and offered illusionary idea of what will fix it. To some of these systemic and institutional impediments, traps and weapons, there is no fix. They must simply be "burned down".
We use history as a lens to provide a holistic approach and knowledge to claim our own liberation. Sometime, those who are unable to access relevant information may have blind spots, in places that are critical. We use others to "fill us in". Unfortunately, all opinion is not critical analysis. All talk is not critical examination or analysis. Cultural, economic and political relevant response requires a deep understanding of our story and how different every context is, paying close attention to where we are in our struggle and the multiplicity of our experiences and reality . We need people who are able to break through the BS and see clearly what is before us at every turn. Know the rules, the playlist and the players. People brave enough, smart enough and capable enough to show us the traps and tell us the truth. I have tried to be one of those. As I prepare to end my broadcast presence, I am on the hunt to recommend to the thousands of listeners who have depended on me over the last 34 years. Kim Brown is one of those people. We are grateful to have her share our microphone.
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Posted in Black and Race Blogs, Black Media, Black Talk Radio, Black Women, Community Activism and Action, OCG Broadcast Profiles, OCG LIVE, OCG Programs, This Week on OCG.	Tagged Black history, Civil Rights Movement, institutionalized racism, police brutality, police misconduct, politics, racism, white privilege, white supremacy
We Have To Stop Valorizing Black Cops | Black Agenda Report
January 28, 2021 by OUR COMMON GROUND
We Have To Stop Valorizing Black Cops
The purpose of policing––to jail and kill Black folks––remains the same regardless of the officers' race.
"Allowing Black people into inherently racist systems does not make those systems better, safer, or more equitable."
Policing in America is facing a PR crisis. Following the May 25th murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, the term "defund the police" has become a rallying cry for thousands across the country. Six months later, however, America has not defunded its police force––and in fact, has in some cases taken steps to give police departments even more money. Instead, police forces across America have taken an insidious approach: painting their departments in blackface.
After the January 6th Trump riot at the Capitol building , Yoganda Pittman, a Black woman, was named the new Chief of Capitol Police. Her appointment followed the resignation of former Chief Steven Sund and the arrest and firing of several white police officers who were found to be in attendance at the MAGA riot. Pittman's appointment appeased many liberals who falsely believe that allowing Black folks to infiltrate or run law enforcement agencies will lead to higher levels of safety for Black Americans. The termination of several officers who took part in the riot has convinced many that we are one step closer to "reforming" the police by weeding out the racist, bad apples within the department.
"Pittman's appointment appeased many liberals."
This is a nice narrative, but a false one; in order to understand why, we must look at the history of policing in this country. Modern policing in America was originally created as a replacement for America's slave patrol system wherein squadrons made up of white volunteers were empowered to use vigilante tactics to enforce laws related to slavery. These "enforcers" were in charge of locating and returning enslaved people who had escaped, crushing uprisings led by enslaved people, and punishing enslaved workers who were found or believed to have violated plantation rules. After slavery was legally abolished in 1865, America created its modern police force to do the exact thing under a different name: maintain the white supremacist hierarchy that is necessary under racial capitalism. The purpose of policing––to jail and kill Black folks––remains the same regardless of the officers' race.
Liberal media has also contributed to the recent valorization of Black cops. In the days after the January 6th riot, many news outlets aggressively pushed a story about Eugene Goodman, a Black capitol police officer who led several rioters away from the Congress people's hiding places while being chased by a white supremacist mob. Several news outlets published testimonials of Black police officers disclosing instances of racism within the department. A January 14th article in ProPublica notes that over 250 Black cops have sued the department for racism since 2001: some Black cops have alleged that white officers used racial slurs or hung nooses in Black officer's lockers, and one Black cop even claimed he heard a white officer say, "Obama monkey, go back to Africa."
"Modern policing in America was originally created as a replacement for America's slave patrol system."
These white officers' racism is unsurprising, and I am not denying any of these claims. But focusing on these singular, isolated moments of racism wherein white cops are painted as cruel and Black cops are the sympathetic victims grossly oversimplifies the narrative of structural racism that modern American policing was built upon. After hearing these slurs that they were allegedly so disgusted by, these Black cops still intentionally chose to put on their badge, don their guns, and work alongside these white police officers who insulted and demeaned them, laboring under a violent system with the sole purpose of harming and terrorizing Black and low-income communities. Similarly, while Goodman's actions most likely saved many lives during the riot, we cannot allow one moment of decency to erase centuries of racist violence.
The great Zora Neale Hurston once said: "All my skinfolk ain't kinfolk." Her words ring ever true today, and these Black police officers are an excellent example of why. It's tempting to believe that putting Black folks on the force will solve racial violence, but this is a liberal myth we must break free of. Allowing Black people into inherently racist systems does not make those systems better, safer, or more equitable: a quick look at many Black folks in power today, such as Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Lori Lightfoot, and Keisha Lance Bottoms immediately prove this to be the case. Everyone supporting racial capitalism must be scrutinized and held accountable, regardless of their identity. We cannot on the one hand say that 'all cops are bastards' and then suddenly feel sympathy when those cops are not white. If we want to defund and abolish the police, we must resist the narrative that Black cops have anything to offer us.
Mary Retta is a writer, virgo, cartoon enthusiast — a queer Black writer for sites like Teen Vogue, The Nation, Bitch Media, and Vice.
This article previously appeared in HoodCommunist .
Source: We Have To Stop Valorizing Black Cops | Black Agenda Report
Posted in American Politics, Black Media, Black Political Activism, Black Political Thought, Black Voices, Community Activism and Action, Critical Black Issues, Disparities in Law and Justice, Domestic Issues, Government Policies, Police Brutality and Abuse, police shootings, Policing, Race Politics, Racism and White Privilege, State and Local Issues, The New Jim Crow, US Justice System, Violence and Pubic Policy, White Supremacy and Terrorism, White Supremacy in America.	Tagged Black police officers, Blacks and police brutality, police authority policies, police misconduct, policing in America, The Black Agenda Report
"No One Took Us Seriously": Black Cops Warned About Racist Capitol Police Officers for Years
THE INSURRECTION
Allegations of racism against the Capitol Police are nothing new: Over 250 Black cops have sued the department since 2001. Some of those former officers now say it's no surprise white nationalists were able to storm the building.
by Joshua Kaplan and Joaquin Sapien
Jan. 14, 5:30 a.m. EST
U.S. Capitol Police officers scuffle with insurrectionists after they breached security fencing on Jan. 6. (Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
SERIES:THE INSURRECTION
The Effort to Overturn the Election
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When Kim Dine took over as the new chief of the U.S. Capitol Police in 2012, he knew he had a serious problem.
Since 2001, hundreds of Black officers had sued the department for racial discrimination. They alleged that white officers called Black colleagues slurs like the N-word and that one officer found a hangman's noose on his locker. White officers were called "huk lovers" or "FOGs" — short for "friends of gangsters" — if they were friendly with their Black colleagues. Black officers faced "unprovoked traffic stops" from fellow Capitol Police officers. One Black officer claimed he heard a colleague say, "Obama monkey, go back to Africa."
In case after case, agency lawyers denied wrongdoing. But in an interview, Dine said it was clear he had to address the department's charged racial climate. He said he promoted a Black officer to assistant chief, a first for the agency, and tried to increase diversity by changing the force's hiring practices. He also said he hired a Black woman to lead a diversity office and created a new disciplinary body within the department, promoting a Black woman to lead it.
"There is a problem with racism in this country, in pretty much every establishment that exists," said Dine, who left the agency in 2016. "You can always do more in retrospect."
Whether the Capitol Police managed to root out racist officers will be one of many issues raised as Congress investigates the agency's failure to prevent a mob of Trump supporters from attacking the Capitol while lawmakers inside voted to formalize the electoral victory of President-elect Joe Biden.
Already, officials have suspended several police officers for possible complicity with insurrectionists, one of whom was pictured waving a Confederate battle flag as he occupied the building. One cop was captured on tape seeming to take selfies with protesters, while another allegedly wore a red "Make America Great Again" hat as he directed protesters around the Capitol building. While many officers were filmed fighting off rioters, at least 12 others are under investigation for possibly assisting them.
Two current Black Capitol Police officers told BuzzFeed News that they were angered by leadership failures that they said put them at risk as racist members of the mob stormed the building. The Capitol Police force is only 29% Black in a city that's 46% Black. By contrast, as of 2018, 52% of Washington Metropolitan police officers were Black. The Capitol Police are comparable to the Metropolitan force in spending, employing more than 2,300 people and boasting an annual budget of about a half-billion dollars.
The Capitol Police did not immediately respond to questions for this story.
Sharon Blackmon-Malloy, a former Capitol Police officer who was the lead plaintiff in the 2001 discrimination lawsuit filed against the department, said she was not surprised that pro-Trump rioters burst into the Capitol last week.
In her 25 years with the Capitol Police, Blackmon-Malloy spent decades trying to raise the alarm about what she saw as endemic racism within the force, even organizing demonstrations where Black officers would return to the Capitol off-duty, protesting outside the building they usually protect.
The 2001 case, which started with more than 250 plaintiffs, remains pending. As recently as 2016, a Black female officer filed a racial discrimination complaint against the department.
"Nothing ever really was resolved. Congress turned a blind eye to racism on the Hill," Blackmon-Malloy, who retired as a lieutenant in 2007, told ProPublica. She is now vice president of the U.S. Capitol Black Police Association, which held 16 demonstrations protesting alleged discrimination between 2013 and 2018. "We got Jan. 6 because no one took us seriously."
Retired Lt. Frank Adams sued the department in 2001 and again in 2012 for racial discrimination. A Black, 20-year veteran of the force, Adams supervised mostly white officers in the patrol division. He told ProPublica he endured or witnessed racism and sexism constantly. He said that before he joined the division, there was a policy he referred to as "meet and greet," where officers were directed to stop any Black person on the Hill. He also said that in another unit, he once found a cartoon on his desk of a Black man ascending to heaven only to be greeted by a Ku Klux Klan wizard. When he complained to his superior officers, he said he was denied promotions and training opportunities, and suffered other forms of retaliation.
In an interview, he drew a direct line between racism in the Capitol Police and the events that unfolded last week. He blamed Congress for not listening to Black members of the force years ago.
"They only become involved in oversight when it's in the news cycle," said Adams, who retired in 2011. "They ignored the racism happening in the department. They ignored the hate."
The department's record in other areas of policing have drawn criticism as well.
In 2015, a man landed a gyrocopter on the Capitol lawn — top officials didn't know the airborne activist was coming until minutes before he touched down. In 2013, when a lone gunman opened fire at the nearby Navy Yard, killing 12 people, the Capitol Police were criticized for standing on the sidelines. The force's leadership board later determined its actions were justified.
Last month, days after a bloody clash on Dec. 12 between militant Trump supporters and counterprotesters, Melissa Byrne and Chibundu Nnake were entering the Capitol when they saw a strangely dressed man just outside the building, carrying a spear.
He was a figure they would come to recognize — Jacob Chansley, the QAnon follower in a Viking outfit who was photographed last week shouting from the dais of the Senate chamber.
They alerted the Capitol Police at the time, as the spear seemed to violate the complex's weapons ban, but officers dismissed their concern, they said.
One officer told them that Chansley had been stopped earlier in the day, but that police "higher ups" had decided not to do anything about him.
We don't "perceive it as a weapon," Nnake recalled the officer saying of the spear.
Chansley told the Globe and Mail's Adrian Morrow that Capitol Police had allowed him in the building on Jan. 6, which would normally include passing through a metal detector, although he was later charged with entering a restricted building without lawful authority, violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds. As of Tuesday, he had not yet entered a plea.
QAnon follower Jacob Chansley screams "Freedom" inside the Senate chamber after the Capitol was breached by a mob on Jan. 6. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
For Byrne and Nnake, their interactions with the "QAnon Shaman" on Dec. 14 highlighted what they perceive as double standards in how the Capitol Police interact with the public.
Like many people who regularly encounter the force, Nnake and Byrne said they were accustomed to Capitol officers enforcing rules aggressively — later that day, Nnake was told that he would be tackled if he tried to advance beyond a certain point. "As a Black man, when I worked on the Hill, if I forgot a badge, I couldn't get access anywhere," he told ProPublica.
Congress, which controls the agency and its budget, has a mixed record of oversight. For the most part, Congress has been deferential toward the force, paying attention to its workings only after serious security failures, and even then, failing to meaningfully hold its leaders accountable.
Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat from D.C. who is a nonvoting member of Congress, told ProPublica she believes a national commission should be formed to investigate what occurred at the Capitol on Jan. 6, similar to what followed 9/11.
"Congress deserves some of the blame," she told ProPublica. "We have complete control over the Capitol Police. … Long-term concerns with security have been raised, and they've not been dealt with in the past."
The force has also suffered a spate of recent, internal scandals that may prove pertinent as Congress conducts its investigation.
Capitol Police officers accidently left several guns in bathrooms throughout the building in 2015 and 2019; in one instance, the loaded firearm was discovered by a small child.
The agency has been criticized for a lack of transparency for years. Capitol Police communications and documents are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act and, unlike many local law enforcement agencies, it has no external watchdog specifically assigned to investigate and respond to community complaints. The force has not formally addressed the public since the riot last week.
"All law enforcement is opaque," said Jonathan M. Smith, executive director of the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. "At least most local police departments are subject to some kind of civilian oversight, but federal police agencies are left to operate in the shadows."
The agency's past troubles have rarely resulted in reform, critics said.
After the April 2015 gyrocopter incident, Congress held a hearing to examine how 61-year-old postal worker and activist Doug Hughes managed to land his aircraft after he livestreamed his flight. Dozens of reporters and news cameras assembled in front of the Capitol to watch the stunt, which was designed to draw attention to the influence of money in politics. Capitol Police did not learn of the incoming flight until a reporter reached out to them for comment, minutes before Hughes landed.
Dine defended the force's response to the incident, pointing out that Hughes was promptly arrested and no one was hurt.
Former Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Republican from Utah, then the chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, harshly criticized the department and other federal agencies for what he perceived as an intelligence failure.
"The Capitol Police is terrible and pathetic when it comes to threat assessment," Chaffetz told ProPublica in an interview. "They have a couple people dedicated to it, but they're overwhelmed. Which drives me nuts. … It's not been a priority for leadership, on both sides of the aisle." He said he is not aware of any serious changes to the force's intelligence gathering following the debacle.
Norton, who also pressed Dine at the hearing, told ProPublica the intelligence lapses surrounding the gyrocopter landing should be considered a "forerunner" to last week's riot.
"For weeks, these people had been talking about coming to the Capitol to do as much harm as they can," Norton said. "Everyone knew it. Except the Capitol Police." Reports show the force had no contingency plan to deal with an escalation of violence and mayhem at last week's rally, even though the FBI and the New York Police Department had warned them it could happen.
Law enforcement experts said that the agency is in a difficult position. While it has sole responsibility for protecting the Capitol, it must work with other nearby federal law enforcement agencies, Washington's Metropolitan Police and the National Guard in case of emergencies.
In an interview, Nick Zotos, a former D.C. National Guard commander who now works for the Department of Homeland Security, said that the roughly two dozen agencies responsible for public safety in Washington can cause territorial disputes, finger-pointing and poor communication.
"This is not a D.C. thing, necessarily, although it's probably the worst in D.C.," Zotos said. "Police departments just don't play with each other nicely."
Blackmon-Malloy told ProPublica that divisions within the Capitol Police could be just as dangerous, not only for Congress but for Black officers themselves. "Now you got to go to work on the 20th," she told ProPublica, alluding to the inauguration. "And stand next to someone who you don't even know if they have your back."
Dara Lind, David McSwane and Kirsten Berg contributed reporting.
Joshua Kaplan
Josh was a Senior Reporting Fellow at ProPublica.
Source: "No One Took Us Seriously": Black Cops Warned About Racist Capitol Police Officers for Years
Posted in American Politics, cop watch, Disparities in Law and Justice, Entitlement Issues Public Policy, Government Policies, Guns, Gun Violence and Gun Policy, Hate Crimes, In the Trump Era, Law and Justice, National Issue, Police Brutality and Abuse, U. S. Politics, U.S. Politics Electoral, US Justice System, Violence and Pubic Policy, White Supremacy and Terrorism, White Supremacy in America.	Tagged American Insurrection, Insurrection at Capitol Building, mob violence, police misconduct, race and policing
How Lawmakers Failed Jacob Blake – Mother Jones
January 9, 2021 by OUR COMMON GROUND
How Lawmakers Failed Jacob Blake
The decision not to charge the officer who shot him stems in part from weak legislation.
Jacob Blake Sr., father of Jacob Blake, holds a candle at a rally Monday in Kenosha.Morry Gash/AP
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Jacob Blake, paralyzed and still suffering from injuries, got a phone call on Tuesday afternoon from Kenosha District Attorney Michael Graveley with some news: There would be no charges filed against the police officer who shot Blake seven times in August, sparking massive protests in the city.
"Based on the facts and the law, I have decided not to issue criminal charges against Officer Sheskey, Officer Meronek, or Officer Arenas. This decision was by no means easy," Graveley wrote in a report published later that day. In a press conference, he described the shooting as a "tragedy."
The video of the shooting has been viewed by millions of people, and is difficult to watch: Blake, who is Black, walks toward the driver's side of a parked car in a residential Kenosha neighborhood, with his children in the back seat. A white officer, Rusten Sheskey, follows behind him with a gun drawn. As Blake approaches the door, Sheskey grabs him by the shirt and then fires his weapon.
It can be hard to imagine how Sheskey's actions wouldn't warrant criminal charges, even considering the blatant racism of our criminal justice system. But District Attorney Graveley, in a roughly two-hour press conference, argued that pressing charges would be unethical because, given the state's law about when officers can use force, there was no way he could win at court
Even after atrocious policing, even after a man is paralyzed, use-of-force laws around the country often make it very, very difficult to punish cops. In Wisconsin and most states, police can legally fire their weapons against someone if they have "reasonable" fear the person will otherwise gravely harm them or someone in the vicinity. And here's the kicker: The law usually says police officers get to define what's reasonable.
At the press conference, Graveley explained why police could successfully argue that Sheskey's decision to shoot was reasonable under the circumstances, using evidence not visible in the viral video most of the country watched.
According to Graveley, the police had reason to be nervous off the bat: Three officers were called to the scene by Laquisha Booker, the mother of Blake's children, who told a 911 dispatcher that Blake had grabbed the keys to her rental car and was trying to take their kids away from her, according to a recording of the call played at the press conference. The officers knew that Blake had a felony warrant for alleged domestic abuse and sexual assault. When they arrived at the scene and tried to arrest him, a physical confrontation ensued—Blake says the officers punched him and dragged him to the ground, and the officers say he resisted their orders. At one point during the struggle, Blake was on top of Sheskey on the ground, according to a second video. Officers tried to stun him with a taser, but he tore the prongs out.
Blake admitted to investigators later that he was holding a knife in his hand after he stood up and began walking to the car. Sheskey says he followed Blake and then grabbed his tank top because he feared Blake would take the car with the children inside. (Booker had yelled that the children were hers.) According to a statement Sheskey gave later, he worried that if Blake drove away, it could result in a high-speed chase that could harm the kids, or they might be taken hostage. An independent police expert, former Madison Police Chief Noble Ray, concluded it was reasonable for Sheskey to grab Blake, according to the district attorney.
In the video footage, it looks like Sheskey then shot Blake seven times in the back. But according to the district attorney, two police officers and citizen witnesses told investigators that before the shooting began, Blake started turning toward Sheskey and made a motion with his knife hand; this allegation couldn't be confirmed in the video because the camera view was obstructed by the car door and another officer. A medical examiner later concluded that Blake was shot four times in the back but also three times on his left side, adding some corroboration to the allegation that he turned.
Ray, the independent police expert, concluded it was reasonable for Sheskey to fear that Blake was trying to stab him at that time. Blake denies this allegation and says he was simply trying to put the knife back into the car. "They didn't have to shoot me like that," he said in a statement later, published in the district attorney's report. "I was just trying to leave and he had options to shoot my tires and even punch me, tase me again, hit me with the night stick."
If you asked many people on the street, they'd probably say it's unreasonable for a cop to follow behind a man who is walking away, grab him by the shirt, and proceed to fire multiple shots into him at close range while his children watch from the back seat. But our laws are set up so that it doesn't really matter what most people think: It matters what a police officer decides is a reasonable fear. And in a racist society where Black people are too often viewed as threats, police will almost always be able to come up with some justification for why they were afraid and believed they had to shoot.
Prosecuting cases like this will require states to change their use-of-force laws, so that officers don't have so much power to define what's reasonable. Until that happens, law enforcement will regularly get away with shooting people, including those sleeping in a car or at home on a couch, when it might have been possible to deescalate the situation instead. Officers continue to get away with violence because it's not very hard to come up with a reason why they thought someone would harm them, especially when the law doesn't require them to prove that they were correct or that the person was actually a threat. "Without any new rules from the legislature, we're going to have this problem again and again," says Farhang Heydari executive director of the Policing Project at the NYU School of Law. "We saw it in Breonna Taylor's case, Eric Garner's case, with Tamir Rice. It will happen over and over again until legislators step up and enact clear rules around force."
It's possible to change these use-of-force laws, which often differ from state to state and even city to city. California recently amended its statute so that an officer can only legally shoot if it's "necessary," rather than "reasonable," to protect against an imminent threat of death or serious injury. But even there, it's hard to predict whether the statute will bring justice after future police shootings, because California lawmakers didn't define what "necessary" means in the law, again potentially leaving some room for discretion among police officers.
More than half of states considered legislation last year dealing at least in some way with police use of force, and at least several focused on deadly force. But many of the bills didn't go as far as some criminal justice reform activists would hope. Delaware's attorney general has pushed to reform her state's law, but her proposed changes wouldn't even go as far as California's did: Delaware's statute currently allows deadly force if an officer believes he or she is in danger. The attorney general wants to reform the law merely to specify that it must be a "reasonable" belief—which brings us back to the problem in Wisconsin and many other states.
The Policing Project's Heydari recommends that new laws require officers to take deescalative steps, and to only use force as a last resort, limiting the types of response depending on the situation. Fair and Just Prosecution, an advocacy group that works with district attorneys, recommends a ban on deadly force against suspects who are fleeing.
Under the Biden administration, the federal government could step in to encourage these changes. The Justice Department, which may soon be led by US Circuit Judge Merrick Garland, Joe Biden's nominee for attorney general, could set a national guidance on when it's acceptable for officers to use lethal force. The agency or Congress could also require states to follow this guidance in order to receive federal funding for training or other programs. Biden's pick to head the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, Kristen Clarke of the National Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, formerly prosecuted police brutality at the department. She supports efforts to scale back law enforcement and invest more in social services, and has encouraged the federal government to stop funding agencies with a long history of violence and racism.
In terms of Blake's case, federal prosecutors at the Justice Department and a US attorney's office are now conducting a civil rights investigation and could later decide to bring federal charges. The Justice Department could also launch an investigation into the Kenosha Police Department and push for a consent decree that would require reforms.
"Now our battle must go in front of the Congress, it must go in front of the Senate," Blake's father, Jacob Blake Sr., told reporters Tuesday after the district attorney's decision not to file charges locally. One of Blake's attorneys, Benjamin Crump, said they would press forward with a civil rights lawsuit. "It is now our duty to broaden the fight for justice on behalf of Jacob and the countless other Black men and women who are victims of racial injustice and police brutality in this country," he said in a statement.
"We're going to talk with the Speaker of the House, Speaker of the Senate," Blake Sr. added. "We're going to change some laws. Some laws have to be reckoned."
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Source: How Lawmakers Failed Jacob Blake – Mother Jones
Posted in American Politics, Black Men, cop watch, Critical Black Issues, Disparities in Law and Justice, Government Policies, Hate Crimes, Law and Justice, National Issue, Police Brutality and Abuse, police shootings, Policing, Race, Race and Violence and Crime, racial violence, Racism and White Privilege, Violence and Pubic Policy, White Supremacy and Terrorism.	Tagged Blacks and police brutality, government and race, Jacob Black, officer killings, police killing, police misconduct, race and local court systems, Race and prosecutions, white dissolution in criminal acts
How to Abolish the Police, According to Josie Duffy Rice | Vanity Fair
Long before the internet caught wind of him, Henry Earl was already a local legend. By the time the Charleston Gazette dubbed him a "cult-status hero" and Newsweek called him the "town drunk," Earl was already known around Lexington, Kentucky, as James Brown. He liked to dance, and he'd do a few moves in exchange for a couple bucks, money which he'd usually promptly spend on alcohol.
Earl was born in the Jim Crow South and adopted at age seven. Drinking was a habit he picked up as a teenager after his mother died, one he never could quite shake. By age 19 he was homeless, and by 20 he'd been arrested for the first time. That was back in 1970. Over the next several decades, Earl was arrested more than 1,500 times, almost always for alcohol intoxication. This is how he became known as the World's Most Arrested Man. Over the years, he spent a total of more than 16 years in jail, usually in couple-day spurts. He was never once charged with violence or theft. "I like to drink," he said once. "Alcoholic, that's what I am. Every police knows me on the force. They see me drunk; they pick me up; I get five days."
For almost 50 years, this was Earl's life. No home, no family, just alcohol and jail. He was a regular at the local bar scene, known for sometimes overstaying his welcome. The locals would see him at house parties sometimes; he'd go for the free beer. He tried court-mandated rehab a few times, but it didn't stick. "It's a weekly, if not every-two-or-three-days thing," said a police spokesperson in 2013. "He's never doing bad or illegal things purposely…. He's just so highly intoxicated that he's posing a danger to himself."
Interest in Earl peaked a few years back, with websites dedicated to his mug shots that amusedly tracked his arrests. Late-night TV cracked jokes at his expense. National outlets ran stories on him. Around town, people called him harmless and happy, a "lovable loser." But there were times Earl saw it differently. "It's a sad life, it ain't worth a dog," he said in 2003, tearing up. "I got more sense than some people think I do. I've seen what it's doing. It is ruining my life."
Over the past 10 years, the American public has been subjected to countless videos of civilians being killed, beaten, or tortured by law enforcement. Each new story is more documentation in the growing mountain of evidence, detailing how the state casually inflicts violence against its citizens. Henry Earl is not in any of those videos. He hasn't been tortured on the street. He hasn't been shot in the back. He has not been injected with a lethal dose of ketamine. But year after year he has been the victim of state violence—subject to arrest and the dangers of jail. But what Henry Earl shares with Walter Scott, George Floyd, and Elijah McClain is the problem of American policing—the consistent application of violent solutions to nonviolent, and often nonexistent, problems. The solution has been tried over a thousand times on Henry Earl, to no effect. Perhaps it's time for something new.
Last year Attorney General William Barr addressed the Fraternal Order of Police's biennial conference. "[W]hat stands between chaos and carnage on the one hand, and the civilized and tranquil society we all yearn for," Barr told his audience "is the thin blue line of law enforcement." Barr is a right-wing Republican who has for years advocated for a harsher and more robust police state. But his proclamation reflected a deeply held idea in American politics—that police are essential to an ordered and just country. Barr's worldview is time-honored and bipartisan. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden might not be the same politician he was when he championed the 1994 crime bill, but his belief in the necessity of American policing—Biden proposes to pump $300 million in federal dollars to the police—has not changed. And it's not just politicians who proselytize the necessity of policing. Boilerplate TV procedurals, true-crime podcasts, and the evening news sell us a world where the police, beleaguered and badgered, are ultimately all that stands between those of us who wish to live in society and the others who would choose savagery.
This is a myth. Despite much reporting of a spike in murder this year, the long-term trend still shows the murder rate hovering roughly in the same place it was in the 1960s, half of what it was in 1980. And while procedurals may paint a picture of cops chasing serial killers weekly, the actual face of police is more mundane. In June, the New York Times culled available data and estimated that police spend roughly 4 percent of their time addressing "violent crime." Most of their time is spent dealing with noncriminal matters. And yet no matter the call—the loud party next door, the permit for a parade, the expired car tags, the escort for a funeral procession, the elderly welfare check, the frolickers barbecuing in the park, the schoolyard fight, the opioid overdose, the homeless person outside in the cold, the stray dog—the state's answer is to respond with armed agents blessed with the near unimpeachable right to kill. The impact is not theoretical. After James Smith noticed the door of his neighbor's home was open and the lights were on, Smith called the police, hoping an officer would conduct "a wellness check" on his neighbor. Instead, Officer Aaron Dean shot and killed Atatiana Jefferson in her own home as she played video games with her young nephew. Smith was left to draw a grim conclusion. "We don't have a relationship with the police because we don't trust the police," Smith recently told the BBC.
Even the impact of policing on violent crime is debatable. "We are fighting an unrelenting, never-ending fight against criminal predators in our society," Barr claimed at the FOP conference in New Orleans. But the "never-ending fight" in the very city in which Barr was speaking is not going well. New Orleans has the fourth highest murder rate in the nation but clears only 35 percent of homicide cases. In 2018, the city's police cleared only 2 percent of all rapes. The country at large isn't much better. Last year, the Washington Post launched an investigation into murder clearance rates in 50 cities over the course of 10 years. The results were bracing. "Despite a nationwide drop in violence to historic lows," the Post reported, "34 of the 50 cities have a lower homicide arrest rate than a decade ago." In St. Louis, during the period the Post studied, it calculated that 54 percent of all homicides resulted in no arrest. In Baltimore, during the period it studied, the Post calculated that only 35 percent of all homicides resulted in an arrest. In Chicago the rate was 26 percent. The "line" isn't just thin and blue—it's porous and arbitrary.
One argument for policing holds that while police may not solve much violent crime, their very presence helps ensure safety. In a survey of research, the National Institute of Justice concludes that "hot spot policing" was "associated with reductions in violent crime relative to control areas." What is "hot spot policing"? According to the survey, it includes "order maintenance and drug enforcement crackdowns, increased gun searches and seizures and zero tolerance policing." This isn't just a list of policing tactics; it's a list of prerequisites for the present moment. For "order maintenance," Eric Garner was suffocated on a New York sidewalk. For "drug enforcement crackdowns," Breonna Taylor was killed in her own home. For "gun search and seizure," the Black neighborhoods of New York endured Stop and Frisk. For "zero tolerance policing," George Floyd was choked on a Minneapolis street.
It would be at least honest if we said that enduring arbitrary harassing, beating, tasing, and strangulation by the state was the price of being "associated with reduction in violent crime relative to control areas." That we don't say this, and that we only imply it for certain classes of people, exposes the assumptions built into American policing. It's those assumptions that, on the one hand, allow Henry Earl to be arrested more than a thousand times, and on the other offer a sporting chance for anyone who'd like to try their hand at murder or rape. Policing accomplishes this dubious feat by imposing costs on innocent people who happen to live in proximity to crime, and others who simply happen to resemble in skin color those we think of as criminal. This is a system begging for reform, and the best way to reform an institution as compromised as American policing is by abolishing it.
It is impossible to imagine American policing without the institution foundational to America itself—enslavement. Indeed, from colonial times up through the Civil War, the largest police force in the country wasn't primarily found in the early towns or the bustling metropolises, but in the slave societies of the South, where to be a white man was to be deputized. Enslavement, where the enslaver is both the maker and enforcer of law, was the first experience of policing for Black people. But through the invention of slave patrols, militias charged with enforcing the law against the enslaved, the policing powers were expanded. "All white persons were permitted and in some regards required to exercise a police power over slaves," the white supremacist historian U.B. Phillips noted. In many states, white people were not only allowed but required to whip, capture, and jail enslaved people they encountered. They had a mandate to "prevent all caballings amongst negros [sic], by dispersing of them when drumming or playing," meaning they could punish any enslaved people for simply interacting with each other. The patrollers operated, as one of their number put it, "without warrant and at my own discretion." The shadows of American policing are here—in the prisons, we find the absolute mastery once enjoyed by the planter class; in the wide discrepancy granted the slave patrol, one sees the echoes of broken windows policing; and the bodies of Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery reflect the extension of police powers far beyond official police.
Slave patrols were born of the propertied interests of white people seeking to maximally exploit Black labor, an endeavor that did not fade with emancipation. In many ways, it was reinforced. Planters may no longer have owned their labor force, but that didn't stop them from seeking out means of preventing the formerly enslaved from freely selling their labor. Policing was key to this effort, which saw control lost through slavery regained through a panoply of laws that threatened arrest for everything from not having an annual work contract to "malicious mischief" and criminalized "persons who led idle or disorderly lives." Depending on the state, the arresting officers could consist of urban police, militias drawn from former Confederate soldiers, or merely any white man. While there was a brief reprieve during Reconstruction, after federal troops departed the South in 1877, white Southerners employed policing to ensure a permanent and pliable source of labor. When Blacks tried to go north for jobs during the Great Migration, "the South resorted to coercion and interception worthy of the Soviet Union," writes Isabel Wilkerson in The Warmth of Other Suns. "In Brookhaven, Mississippi, authorities stopped a train with 50 colored migrants on it and sidetracked it for three days. In Albany, Georgia, the police tore up tickets of colored passengers as they stood, waiting to board, dashing their hopes of escape. A minister in South Carolina, having seen his parishioners off, was arrested at the station on the charge of helping colored people get out."
It is tempting to think the Northern police departments unsullied by white supremacy. The assumption would be wrong. Throughout the entirety of Jim Crow, Northern police often parroted their Southern counterparts. "From the moment the emigrants set foot in the North and West," writes Wilkerson, "they were blamed for the troubles of the cities they fled to." Indeed, police departments took the cue and regarded Blacks much as the broader society had—as outcasts and threats. In 1917, in East St. Louis, Illinois, white workers angered by Blacks brought in to replace them during a strike rioted and "fired shots into colored homes," writes Wilkerson. "The police, charged with quelling the riot, in some cases joined in, as did some in the state militia." In 1943, during the Detroit race riot, "Police openly sympathized with the white rioters," writes historian Thomas J. Sugrue; "17 blacks were shot to death by the police, no whites were." Ten years later, as Black families tried to integrate Chicago's Trumbull Park Homes, they were granted minimal protection from the police who sympathized with the whites who terrorized the families. Still, the greatest indicator of the role law enforcement in the North played in suppressing their Black populations lay in the prison population. Even in an era of relatively low incarceration, the rate in the Northern cities stood at seven to one—exactly the same as today.
That the police were not concerned with neutrality nor "law enforcement" was always clear to Black people. In 1967, after a series of riots, President Lyndon Johnson convened the Kerner Commission to report on the riot's origins and recommend a series of reforms. Read today, the report is bracing for a haunting quality—its timelessness. Just like the countless commissions that have followed it, the Kerner Commission found a police department with too many responsibilities, filling in for the defunding and decline of societal institutions. Just as today, the Kerner Commission found Black communities complaining of "stop and frisk" tactics. And then, as now, voices of authority blamed police violence on the inherent pathologies of the Black population instead of the learned brutality of the police. Among the commission's recommendations: an intolerance for police brutality, "a clear and enforced policy…of law enforcement in ghetto areas as is the same as in other communities," and eliminating a focus on smaller crimes such as "gambling or loitering" in favor of crimes that threaten "life and property." After the report was published, it became a best seller, but Johnson quickly scuttled it, and the era of "law and order" commenced.
White safety is cancer prevention. Black safety is all-day chemotherapy. Abolition seeks to eradicate this Jim Crow system.
It is common to note, as the Kerner report does, that Black communities frequently complain of crime right alongside police brutality. This is not surprising. Black communities are on every level less safe than white communities. And yet it is curious the ease with which police, who never fail to note this safety gap, abandon these vulnerable neighborhoods. Calls for accountability are often met with indignance and threats to desert those most affected by crime. The practice of officers, at the slightest sign of public critique, calling in sick en masse and refusing to do their jobs has long been called "blue flu."
At times, retaliation is even uglier. After becoming the New York City's first Black mayor in 1990, David Dinkins angered the union by calling for police reform. The response was open defiance of the law. Police officers derided Dinkins as a "janitor" and a crack addict, drank openly, blocked traffic, and assaulted journalists. A photographer seeking the protection of a lieutenant after being assaulted by an officer was essentially told to flee. "I can't protect you up here," the lieutenant said. In 2011, after the NYPD was investigated for corruption, officers again rallied at the courthouse, blocking the cameras of journalists, mocking poor people by chanting "EBT" at people attempting to collect their benefits. In 2014, in the midst of a conflict with Mayor Bill de Blasio, the NYPD largely stopped policing, at the behest of the union.
This is all very strange behavior for a group which takes an oath "to serve and protect." But policing is often revealed to be about something muddier. In June, the Times asked Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot her opinion on the effort to "defund the police." Lightfoot, a former prosecutor, didn't even bother to defend her department—probably because a department with a history of torture, black sites, framing innocent people, and child killing is not easily defensible. Instead Lightfoot seemingly deflected to the lack of opportunity for Black and brown people in Chicago. Defunding "means you are eliminating one of the few tools that the city has to create middle class incomes for Black and brown folks." That America's second largest police department can only be defended as a kind of violent jobs program is a clear indictment of policing as an act of public safety. Furthermore, the fact that policing is one of the few tools available to bolster a racially diverse middle class is yet another indicator that police have far too much responsibility.
But America has never truly had a system of "public safety," if only because Black "safety" has historically been imagined as being secured by more policing, whereas white "safety" is ensured by altogether different means. America does not flood the dorms of Harvard with cops because they are areas of "known drug activity." It does not station armed officers in the cubicles of Wells Fargo. The white parents of Westchester do not generally have to subject their teenagers to The Talk. White safety, itself built on a foundation of enslavement and segregation, is ensured through familial wealth, home ownership, well-funded public schools, stable employment, and health care. Black safety is ensured by "zero tolerance policing" and "stop and frisk." White safety is cancer prevention. Black safety is all-day chemotherapy.
Abolition seeks to eradicate this Jim Crow system of public safety—not merely a two-tiered system, but a system where one tier benefits by extracting from the other. To "reform" policing, to subject it to bias training of dubious import, to push for the return to an illusory past where Officer Friendly provided sanctuary, is to attempt to patch up the more nefarious features of a system that should be obsolete. Without the history of policies and practices that make up white supremacy, without enslavement and slave patrols, without black codes and miscegenation laws, without poll taxes and courthouse lynchings, without redlining and housing segregation, without mass incarceration, policing as we know it would not exist.
The outlines of the possible are already upon us. Defunding the police—divesting money from the back-end solution of policing and investing it on the front end—is a first step along the path. To meet the very real concerns about neighborhood violence, we could look to preventative programs like Cure Violence and Save Our Streets in cities like New York. These organizations view gun violence as a public health question rather than evidence of community moral rot. Both have been able to successfully reduce and prevent gun violence without inflicting more violence on communities they claim to protect.
Nowhere is the extra layer of unnecessary violence more reflected than in our insistence on sending men with guns to resolve mental health crises. In Eugene, Oregon, CAHOOTS, a crisis intervention program, was able to respond to 20 percent of the area's 911 calls last year. Through the program, teams of medics and experienced mental health professionals are dispatched to handle certain emergencies instead of the police. For people suffering from mental health crises, addiction, and homelessness, introducing law enforcement in moments of desperation is an invitation for disaster. CAHOOTS reduces the risk of unnecessary violence and criminalization.
And removing police from our long and futile war against drug abuse is essential to abolition. This requires us to consider the role of harm reduction, rather than abstinence, as a possible avenue toward reducing the associated drug use. This solution is not theoretical. In countries such as Norway, Germany, and Canada, drug users can go to a safe injection site and use in regulated, medically supervised, and sanitary conditions. These facilities avoid relying on the stigma and shame that trails many of those suffering from addiction. And it works. When people have access to a safe environment for drug use, they are more likely to seek treatment on their own.
Abolition looks like justice for domestic violence and sexual assault survivors. According to RAINN, for every 1,000 sexual assaults, only about 230 are reported to law enforcement. Of those, less than five result in incarceration. In other words, 75 percent of sexual assaults go unreported and 99 percent go unpunished. Policing does not protect women from sexual assault, it facilitates it. Prison sexual violence, not only at the hands of other incarcerated people but also from correctional officers, is a persistent problem across the gender spectrum, including the thousands of juveniles housed in adult prisons. In place of our current system, abolition envisions providing domestic abuse survivors with crisis counselors and violence intervention teams trained to specifically navigate intimate relationships, available at a moment's notice. What would a future look like for rape survivors if there were professionals or organizations that could provide not just physical safety but mental, emotional, and financial resources as well?
But more than an array of solutions to discrete, isolated issues, abolition envisions something more fundamental—entirely different values. A world where the resources put into not just policing but our robust system of prisons and jails is invested in the people to eventually render the present justice system obsolete. This is a world focused on the reduction of violence and harm. Certainly you would still need professionals responsible with holding accountable those who violate the social contract in the extreme—rape or murder—and an improved investigative system to catch the perpetrators. But even in that case, ensuring society's protection should look very different. Even in the most extreme circumstances, it would demand an end to the conflation of public safety with public vengeance. Removing someone from society to stop them from enacting violence does not require subjecting someone to the current prison system, where solitary confinement, assault, sickness, torture, and rape are par for the course.
This is the world I imagine when I picture what I want for my children—a world where social consequences are weighted along with criminal consequences, where incapacitation is not conflated with torture, and murder and rape are taken so seriously that we do all we can to prevent either from happening in the first place. But ultimately abolition is not about a suite of options imposed by someone else—even me. The promise of abolition is the promise of democracy itself—one long denied Black people: the promise inherent in constructing an order of public safety originating in the needs and desires of a community, and not those who have, for so long, exploited them.
MORE STORIES FROM V.F.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates Guest-Edits THE GREAT FIRE, a Special Issue
— Breonna Taylor's Beautiful Life, in the Words of Her Mother
— An Oral History of the Protest Movement's First Days
— Celebrating 22 Activists and Visionaries on the Forefront of Change
— Novelist Jesmyn Ward on Witnessing Death Through a Pandemic and Protests
— Angela Davis and Ava DuVernay on Black Lives Matter
— How America's Brotherhood of Police Officers Stifles Reform
Josie Duffy Rice is a journalist and lawyer whose work often explores the intersection of policy and justice. She is president of the news and commentary site The Appeal. See more from V.F.'s THE GREAT FIRE project here.
Source: How to Abolish the Police, According to Josie Duffy Rice | Vanity Fair
Posted in Black Political Activism, Commentary and Opinion Pieces, Critical Black Issues, Disparities in Law and Justice, Government Policies, Hate Crimes, Police Brutality and Abuse, Policing, Prison Industrial Complex, Prisons and Incarceration, Race, Race and Violence and Crime, Race Politics, racial violence, Racism and White Privilege, school to prison pipeline, U. S. Politics, Violence and Pubic Policy, White Supremacy and Terrorism, White Supremacy in America.	Tagged Blacks and police brutality, militarization of police, police authority policies, police misconduct
Black Radical Activists and the Dangers of the Police State – AAIHS
Black Radical Activists and the Dangers of the Police State
During recent anti-police brutality protests and marches across the United States, American police forces have displayed the very behavior that brought people to the streets in protest. Activists have been harassed, beaten, arrested, shot at with rubber bullets and tear gas, and shot and killed by white vigilantes encouraged by police. Critics have focused their blame on the largely peaceful protestors rather than the violent police forces whose actions have been caught on camera. The police have also used their arrest power to try and stifle protest including, in one incident, arresting the only Black state legislator in Kentucky during a protest against the police violence that killed Breonna Taylor. Police abuse during social justice protests has a long history and has been part of the resistance to the kind of radical political change needed for racial justice. Angelo Herndon's activism in the 1930s, his frequent arrests, and his unjust imprisonment is part of this long tradition of using police to prevent racial justice and stifle dissent.
In 1937, Herndon published his memoirs titled Let Me Live, where he related his family's poverty, his employment struggles, and most importantly his radicalization in the Communist Party. The book is sometimes considered one of the first prison memoirs, but some scholars have recently argued that it is a poignant critique of racial capitalism. Herndon's story of growing up in poverty and facing racial discrimination and police harassment demonstrate what Charisse Burden-Stelly has described as the "mutually constitutive nature of racialization and capitalism."
In Let Me Live, Herndon describes his growing awareness of capitalist exploitation as well as the use of police as capitalist agents to control Black bodies. Herndon was born in Wyoming, Ohio in 1913, one of eight children. His family's precarious financial position declined further after his father died from miner's pneumonia when he was nine years old. At only thirteen, Herndon and his older brother Leo left home and traveled to Lexington, Kentucky to find work as miners. His first job as a miner, working and living in a segregated community, was a wake-up call. His wages, which were meant to help his whole family, were often consumed by company fees leaving him and his brother barely able to support themselves. Frustrated, the Herndon's left Kentucky and went to their father's birthplace, Birmingham, Alabama. Leo found a job, but Angelo remained unemployed. In the process of trying to find work, Herndon met a labor agent who convinced him to leave town for work on a bridge. When he arrived, he realized that he and other Black laborers had been lured to work as slave laborers policed by armed guards and given no wages. Herndon and a few other workers managed to escape, despite being chased by dogs.
Herndon's time in Birmingham radicalized him further. When he finally found work with a mining company, he was disgusted with the company union that failed to advocate for workers. He witnessed a coworker's death after management failed to make necessary repairs to the machinery he worked on; he and other employees moved his body out of the way to continue work. While traveling through town he witnessed a conductor beat a Black man who did not defend himself; his frustrations mounted until one day he refused to move on a Jim Crow car, he was left alone after the conductor told people he was crazy. In June 1930 he happened upon an Unemployed Council (UC) leaflet announcing a meeting, this was Herndon's introduction to political organization and the Communist Party (CPUSA).
Herndon became a UC organizer and began attending meetings, organizing events, and traveling to UC conferences. He respected the UC and CPUSA for embracing an antiracist position and calling for working-class unity and he came to believe that communism was the "only philosophy of living worthy of a thinking civilized man." Unfortunately for Herndon, the police did not take kindly to communist organizing and especially to a Black communist. As Marion Ross argues, Herndon's "redness" and "Blackness" made him a criminal in the eyes of the law. His first arrest came when he tried to organize his fellow miners into the United Mine Workers, he was charged with vagrancy, though he was employed, and held in solitary confinement for seven days.
At his trial, the prosecutor focused on the threat Black men posed to white women's virtue; this was enough for a guilty sentence and twelve months imprisonment and a $500 fine. When the prosecutor painted Herndon as a sexual predator, he was alerting the all-white jury to the belief that the Black body had to be controlled to secure white supremacy. His conviction was eventually overturned in the circuit court, but it was enough to move Herndon to officially join the CPUSA. Soon after he was arrested again walking to a CPUSA Labor Day rally; he was held for eleven days with other prisoners detained for mental illness. After his second arrest, Herndon's memoir pivots from a story of radicalization to one of fascist police abusing him and his fellow organizers with impunity.
Herndon's every movement in Birmingham was followed by police who arrested him on any pretense; it became such a frequent occurrence that he claimed it drove him further into the arms of the CPUSA. But it also became too difficult to live there, so in 1931 he took a job with the Trade Union Unity League to help organize longshoremen in New Orleans. Even in Louisiana the police dogged his every move, and he was arrested again. He also became active in the campaign to free the Scottsboro boys, nine Black youths arrested for allegedly raping two white women on a train.
Herndon returned to Alabama to organize for the Scottsboro defense and to try and help with the organization of sharecroppers in Camden County, but he was chased out of town by the threats of a lynch mob. When he arrived back in Birmingham he was arrested right off the train. Herndon did not stay long, he was sent to organize for the UC in Atlanta, GA in 1932. When the city announced it was going to drop over 20,000 people from the relief rolls, Herndon sprung into action. He began producing leaflets and organizing marches, all of which brought law enforcement attention. While picking up mail at the post office he was arrested and charged under an 1861 law to prevent slave insurrections; the place where he was staying was raided and all of his pamphlets and books were seized, later to be used against him in court.
Herndon described his subsequent imprisonment, trials, and conviction as being "crucified by capitalist law and order." He was held incommunicado until a fellow inmate smuggled out a letter to the International Labor Defense, an organization devoted to defending workers. It was this arrest that prompted Herndon to write Let Me Live; in it he described his months in solitary, then on death row, the "kangaroo court" trial in which the prosecutor went into a "lynch frenzy," and his conviction and sentence of 18-20 years on a chain gang, a death by labor sentence. This arrest would make Angelo Herndon a household name for radicals raising awareness about the dangers of the police state and its concerted efforts to quash social justice. All told, Herndon would spend two and a half years in jail while his appeals were heard. After the CPUSA mobilized a global defense around Herndon, the charges would eventually be dropped, and he would be free. He later described his imprisonment as an "apprenticeship in the revolutionary struggle."
Herndon recognized what even today some Americans are only just realizing: that the police are not public servants meant to keep the peace, that they are agents of social control. While speaking to other prisoners, Herndon told them that if there was a "decent government" who cared for people's needs, rather than protecting capitalist profits, fewer people would be imprisoned. Herndon was arrested so many times as a known UC organizer that he lost count; he recruited others to the UC and CPUSA by arguing that they had to make change because we are all "in the same leaky boat." His memoirs have been described as prison literature, a critique of racial capitalism, communist propaganda, and in the tradition of slave narratives — it is also a book about police abuse and control and policing as a tool to control Black America and working people. It is a narrative that is all too familiar to today's activists, that policing is a barrier rather than a path to social justice.
Source: Black Radical Activists and the Dangers of the Police State – AAIHS
Posted in #Blacklivesmatter, American Politics, Black Political Activism, Black Power, Community Activism and Action, cop watch, Critical Black Issues, Disparities in Law and Justice, Law and Justice, Police Brutality and Abuse, police shootings, State and Local Issues.	Tagged militarization of police, police misconduct, radical Black activism, self-defense and police
Adam Serwer: A Nation Without Law, Order, or Justice – The Atlantic
June 4, 2020 by OUR COMMON GROUND
Trump Gave Police Permission to Be Brutal
The president didn't cause America's policing crisis, but he deliberately made it worse.
Staff writer at The Atlantic
GETTY / ARSH RAZIUDDIN / THE ATLANTIC
When the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin dug his knee into the back of George Floyd's neck for nine minutes while Floyd pleaded for help, he was merely following the president's advice.
"Please don't be too nice," Donald Trump told an audience of police officers on Long Island in 2017, in a speech largely focused on the MS-13 gang. The audience laughed. "When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough. I said, 'Please don't be too nice.'"
Floyd's killing has sparked nationwide protests, despite the fact that the coronavirus outbreak, which has killed more than 100,000 Americans and left 40 million without work, is still killing about 1,000 people a day in the United States. Those Americans who were disproportionately dying from a plague came out in force to protest being murdered by their government. Trump, who ran as the "law and order" candidate, now presides over the very "American carnage" he vowed to end.
A different president might have tried to quell the unrest and unify the nation, but Trump is incapable of that. He cannot rally Americans around a common identity or interest, because his presidency is a rejection of the concept, an affirmation of the conviction that America's traditional social hierarchies are good and just. He is hardly the first president to embrace those hierarchies as unassailably virtuous, but he is the first in decades to do so openly. Law and order, for this president, simply means that he and his ideological allies are above the law, while others, such as Floyd, are merely subject to it. The chaos sweeping across the United States has many causes, but the one over which the president has the most control is the culture of lawlessness and impunity he has cultivated and embraced. When you attempt to impose "law and order" without justice, you get chaos.
More from ADAM SERWER
Read: The double standard of the American riot
The moral core of the protests is a simple demand: that police who abuse their authority be held accountable, that black Americans be able to live free lives without fearing that they will be cut short by a chance encounter with law enforcement. This demand clashes with the history of the United States, in which the ideal of equal justice coexists uneasily with the tacit understanding of many Americans that guarding the color line is one of law enforcement's obligations, a commitment that has existed from slavery to the beating of marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Ronald Reagan blamed the activist for his own murder, hissing that King's death was the kind of "great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order."
When a white dog-walker in Central Park threatened to call the police on a black bird-watcher and tell them that "an African American man is threatening my life," she was leveraging their mutual understanding that the police exist to protect white people from black people. This is why Chauvin and his fellow officers thought nothing of him being videotaped as he dug his knee into Floyd's neck, and why authorities in Georgia saw no crime in the stalking and killing of Ahmaud Arbery. Integrating police departments was meant to help align law enforcement with its stated ideals, but as in every other area of public policy, correcting centuries of tradition is an arduous task, even if one is sincerely committed to it.
The president, a man who once called for the execution of five black and Hispanic teenagers for a crime they did not commit, is not just skeptical of reform. He views the violent enforcement of the color line as an honorable calling, and one that police officers should embrace rather than reject. Decades after taking out a newspaper ad demanding that New York "Bring back the death penalty and bring back our police!" the president still refuses to acknowledge the innocence of the Central Park Five. If they were not guilty of the actual crime, they were guilty of being the kind of people he wanted the police to crack down on.
Trump has few ideological convictions as consistent as his belief in the redemptive power of state violence against religious and ethnic minorities. During the 2016 campaign, Trump regaled audiences with tales of apocryphal war crimes against Muslims by American service members, then he pardoned service members who engaged in actual war crimes. He vowed to disregard the constitutional rights of anyone suspected of being an undocumented immigrant, then he pardoned Joe Arpaio, an Arizona sheriff famous for violating those rights.
Remarks like those the president made on Long Island are often dismissed by the president's defenders as just an artifact of his brash personality. Hardly. The Trump administration has worked diligently to turn the president's affection for extralegal cruelty against religious and ethnic minorities into public policy, from the Trump-era toddler jails for migrants to his anti-Muslim travel ban. As with the prior examples, Trump's encouragement of police brutality is far more than bluster.
One of the first things Jeff Sessions did after being confirmed as Trump's attorney general was end the Justice Department's oversight of local police departments, declaring that such investigations "undermine the respect for police officers and create an impression that the entire department is not doing their work consistent with fidelity to law and fairness." This is akin to a doctor declaring that cancer can only kill you if you discover you have it, and then canceling your screening.
During the Obama administration, the civil-rights division of the Justice Department undertook an aggressive effort to root out unconstitutional policing practices, initiating more such investigations than any prior administration. The authority it relied on was authored by police reformers and tucked into the now-disfavored 1994 crime bill, drafted in part by the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden. Its inclusion in the bill was a response to the beating of Rodney King and the riots that followed the acquittal of the officers who attacked him. In other words, in 2017, the Trump administration took a provision of the law passed to prevent police brutality and the unrest it sparks, crumpled it up, and threw it in the trash.
In Miami, Obama-era investigators found "egregiously long delays in concluding administrative investigations of officer-involved shootings." In Chicago, they found a widespread pattern of abuses hidden by "police officers' code of silence," which included lying and "affirmative efforts to conceal evidence." In Baltimore, which was rocked by riots following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in 2015, investigators discovered "repeated violations of … constitutional and statutory rights, further eroding the community's trust in the police." In Ferguson, Missouri, an investigation following the protests and riots sparked by the killing of Michael Brown found that local police had set "maximizing revenue as the priority," not solving crime, leading to officers crushing the town's impoverished black residents with fines and fees designed to finance the local government. If the Trump administration had not abandoned any effort at police oversight, it might have discovered that Minnesota police had rendered dozens of suspects unconscious with the same knee restraint that killed Floyd.
Among the police forces investigated was the Suffolk County Police Department, the jurisdiction where Trump gave his speech extolling the virtues of police brutality. The department entered into a federal-supervision agreement in 2014 to take measures to avoid discriminating against Hispanic residents.
The Justice Department's probes were not criminal investigations. Their purpose was to curb police abuses and, by doing so, to improve local law-enforcement agencies' relationships with their communities and reduce crime. When a local community lives in fear of the police, its members will minimize their interactions with cops as much as possible, lest they end up like Floyd.
Despite violent-crime rates falling nationwide, solving murders in big cities in America is a coin toss, because the communities most likely to suffer from violent crime do not trust the police enough to seek their aid. When a casual encounter with law-enforcement officers can lead to your death, you are unlikely to seek or accept their protection. These investigations were no panacea for discrimination or police abuses, nor were they a guarantee against unrest. but they were a good-faith attempt to align policing with equal treatment under the law.
Ideally, overseeing police misconduct would be the job of local elected officials. But what appears to be a public-policy problem is also a problem of political power. Local leaders cower in fear of the power of police unions, whose political interests include not just securing higher wages and benefits or better equipment and overtime pay, but impunity for criminal behavior.
"Many of these unions have pushed collective bargaining agreements that make it all but impossible for departments to punish, much less fire, officers," as BuzzFeed News' Melissa Segura has written. "These agreements defang civilian review boards and police internal affairs departments, and they even prevent police chiefs from providing meaningful oversight, according to community activists and civil rights lawyers. Meanwhile, the unions have set up legal slush funds to defend officers sued for misconduct."
Read: How to actually fix America's police
The approach of many police unions both reinforces the code of silence for police abuse and makes officers whose consciences are troubled less likely to intervene, because the social costs of speaking out are so much greater than the possibility that a corrupt officer will face justice for breaking the law.
"It's tough when somebody witnesses something and they want to speak up against it. You feel like if you do speak up, you'll end up looking like the bad guy. Now people don't want to talk to you," Michael Baysmore, a black former cop in Baltimore, told BuzzFeed News in 2016. "And if nothing even happens to the person you spoke up against, it's almost like, what's the point?"
The extent of police unions' power was illustrated this weekend, when New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, elected as a police reformer, defended cops plowing through protesters with cars even as the local sergeants' union doxxed his daughter for participating in the protests.
The Obama administration's reform efforts, although ultimately aimed at improving policing, were seen by the police unions as a "war on cops," because they threatened the impunity to which their organizations aspired. By 2015, the ubiquity of cellphone cameras and their ability to document for white audiences the shocking regularity of lethal encounters between police and black Americans had led some police-union officials to reconsider their approach. But the rise of Donald Trump, and his unqualified embrace of both racial discrimination and official impunity for law enforcement, offered new political possibilities.
In 2016, the Fraternal Order of Police—the nation's largest police union, with more than 330,000 members—endorsed Trump, while many of its black members dissented. The goodwill and benign intentions of individual police officers cannot override the focus of their political organizations, which, with some notable exceptions, are intently focused on ensuring that their worst members are exempt from the law. "Between 1996 and 2015," Segura noted, "newly unionized law enforcement agencies saw a 27% uptick in misconduct complaints—a phenomenon the researchers tied largely to protections afforded by union contracts."
Police departments themselves are not monolithic—some actually rejected Sessions's offer to rescind federal-oversight agreements—and some law-enforcement organizations, those run by black officers in particular, have tried to rectify the profession's history of discrimination. But the political power of police unions, the impunity granted by police contracts, and the culture of silence enforced by both leave little room for dissent, with isolation and ignominy as a reward for those who do. The entrenched legal doctrine of qualified immunity ensures that the most egregious violations of the Constitution cannot be addressed in civil court. A system that so efficiently stifles accountability cannot be overcome by the good intentions of individual officers. It is a system that ensures, as a matter of design, that bad apples remain to spoil the batch. And that was before the president encouraged police to engage in brutality for its own sake.
The head of the police union in Minneapolis, Bob Kroll, decried the Obama administration's "handcuffing and oppression of the police" at a Trump rally in 2019. On Monday, Kroll released a letter complaining that the four police officers who had been fired over Floyd's death had been denied "due process." Floyd, who was being detained on suspicion of forgery, was to blame for his own death, because of his "violent criminal history." This is a worldview that is consonant with Trumpism, in that it imagines being democratically accountable to those you regard as beneath you as tyranny, and the unquestioned authority to impose your will on those people as freedom. But amidst the president's vocal encouragement of police brutality, his administration's conscious abdication of oversight, and the police unions' fanatical resistance to accountability, the condemnations of Floyd's killing from Trump and his allies ring hollow.
This agenda of impunity for police who break the law has merged flawlessly with President Trump's belief in impunity for himself and his allies. Both political philosophies envision a line drawn between those who are protected by the law and those who are subject to it. As Trump's second attorney general, William Barr, articulated with chilling clarity, communities that protest police abuses "might find themselves without the police protection they need." This principle does not apply to the president or other members of the ruling party in good standing—merely to Americans whose rights have historically been easily revocable, and occasionally to those who express solidarity with them.
Trump borrowed law and order from Richard Nixon, a president whose lawlessness Trump consciously imitates. Viewed with the clarity of history, Nixon's appeals to law and order were a euphemism for brutality against black Americans seeking equality. But in 1968, Nixon's law-and-order campaign was an effort at triangulation between the explicit white-supremacist cruelty of George Wallace and what Nixon framed as the permissiveness of liberal Democrats such as Hubert Humphrey.
Anne Applebaum: History will judge the complicit
As the historian Rick Perlstein recounts in Nixonland, when asked by a black reporter what law and order meant, Nixon replied, "To me law and order must be combined with justice. Now that's what I want for America. I want the kind of law and order that deserves respect." Reporters today do not bother asking Trump what law and order means, because everyone already understands that it simply means violence.
Trump has dispensed with any pretense of seeking justice, and the Trump-era Republican Party has closed every possible path for reforming the police. Federal oversight of police is oppression. Elected officials who seek police reform have "blood on their hands." The exercise of prosecutorial discretion by district attorneys is "anti-law enforcement" when it involves "seeking sentences that are pathetically lenient," in the words of Barr, who has meanwhile busied himself with bailing out the president's criminal associates. Those who challenge police abuses are not even allowed the dignity of protesting in silence. This is not the rule of law; it is the rule of might, and it is devoid of anything resembling justice.
After Floyd's death, Minneapolis erupted in protests, including riots that began last Wednesday night and lasted through the weekend. The protests spread across the country, and in some cases so did the violence. In an atmosphere of lawlessness, opportunists looking to harm others, cause destruction, vandalize, or steal will attach themselves to whatever legitimate cause they can find. Those acting out of rage or grief may do the same. But whether motivated by rage, greed, or outright malice, such criminal acts cannot discredit demands for police accountability, or justify police brutality. They cannot repeal the Constitution.
Many police departments across the country seem determined to escalate rather than prevent violence. Videos of protests have shown "police officers in recent nights using batons, tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets on protesters, bystanders and journalists, often without warning or seemingly unprovoked," as The New York Times reported. This was Barr's prophecy: an ungrateful public, protesting the unjust taking of human lives by law enforcement, punished for the foolish belief that their rights were inalienable. A First Amendment that guarantees the freedom to criticize the government only when you do not criticize the government is meaningless.
Read: The headlines that are covering up police violence
For a century, such riots in America have followed a familiar script—there is an incident of police brutality that goes unpunished, a protest, an escalation by police, and then a riot. These incidents are icebergs—the precipitating event and the destruction that follows are merely what can be seen above the surface. Underneath lie years of anger, abuse, and neglect. We do not know how the president's encouragement of such abuse has shaped policing in the cities now rocked by protests, because his Justice Department has willingly blinded itself to the answer.
There is no romance in the destruction. Riots are, for the communities in which they occur, desperate acts of self-immolation, with consequences that can last for decades. Yet the historical record shows that the authorities often avoid taking the grievances of such communities seriously until buildings start burning. Only then do those who previously dismissed nonviolent protests against police brutality, or participated in belittling or silencing them, begin to pay attention and ask what would move such people to violence.
Such riots are, in the long run, devastating for all involved. But a legal and political system that sees no crime in the murder of black Americans by police until things are set on fire leaves black Americans with two terrible options: acquiescing to a system in which your life does not matter, or engaging in acts of destruction and self-destruction that persuade authorities to treat the needless taking of a life by police officers as a crime worth investigating, let alone punishing.
To say that a grievance is justified is not to justify every action taken by the aggrieved. But as a nation, we bear particular responsibility for the violence committed by police. We do not pay civilian rioters and looters with taxpayer dollars and empower them with the authority to use lethal force to protect our rights and our persons, as we do with police officers. That authority is a power granted by the people, and if it is abused, it must be withdrawn.
Most of Trump's predecessors in the 20th century, including Nixon, who believed black people unfit for self-government, preoccupied themselves with preserving the credibility of an unequal justice system. By forswearing even that, by publicly reveling in the idea that state violence should be used to affirm America's traditional social hierarchies, by denying the very legitimacy of both private protest and social reform, the Trump administration has undermined respect for the law more than any radical left-wing professor or hotheaded activist. The president sees the law as a thing of mere violence, a matter of who has enough guns to enforce their will. You can make people fear the law at gunpoint, but you cannot make them respect it.
Just as his supporters mistake cruelty for honesty and bluster for courage, Trump has mistaken bloodlust for leadership. The bombast hides the fundamental truth that the president is a coward, so crippled by the fear of appearing weak that he screams for blood from the safety of his darkened White House, emerging only to gas peaceful protesters and clergymen in an attempt to look strong. He is incapable of understanding how further brutality fuels the unrest he has proved incompetent at confronting.
Donald Trump proclaimed himself the law-and-order candidate. This is what law and order without justice looks like: a nation without law, order, or justice.
ADAM SERWER is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics.
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Source: Adam Serwer: A Nation Without Law, Order, or Justice – The Atlantic
Posted in #Blacklivesmatter, 2020 Election, American Politics, Black History, Black political action, cop watch, Critical Black Issues, Police Brutality and Abuse, police shootings, Prison Industrial Complex, Race, Race and Violence and Crime, Race Consciousness, Race Politics, racial violence, Racism and White Privilege, State and Local Issues, US Justice System.	Tagged American policing crisis, Blacks andd police brutality, Donald J. Trump, militarization of police, police brutality, police killing, police misconduct, police shootings
The Multiple, Unfolding Crises for African-Americans in Minneapolis | The New Yorker
A Minneapolis police officer knelt on the neck of an African-American man named George Floyd for several minutes on Monday, as Floyd begged the officer to stop, said, "I can't breathe," and eventually lost consciousness. Floyd, who was forty-six, was pronounced dead at a hospital that evening. After video footage of Floyd's asphyxiation, which was taken by bystanders, circulated online, the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, announced on Tuesday that the four officers who had been at the scene had been fired. "This is the right call," Frey said on Twitter. "Being Black in America should not be a death sentence." The police had responded to a call that Floyd had used a forged check at a nearby deli and, in their first statement about the incident, noted only that he appeared to be "suffering medical distress."
On Tuesday, the F.B.I. joined Minnesota's criminal investigation of the incident, as Floyd's family called for the four officers to be charged with murder. That afternoon, thousands of people gathered for protests in the streets of Minneapolis, which were followed that evening by clashes between riot police and protesters outside a precinct station. Protesters chanted "I can't breathe," which became a Black Lives Matter slogan after the death of Eric Garner, in New York, in 2014. The Minneapolis area has been the site of several contested police shootings and Black Lives Matter protests—most notably, after Philando Castile was pulled over and fatally shot by police in a suburb of Saint Paul, in 2016. The officer who killed Castile was fired from the police department but acquitted of manslaughter.
On Wednesday, I spoke by phone with Leslie Redmond, who, at twenty-eight, is an attorney and the president of the Minneapolis chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we talked about racial inequities in Minneapolis, how activists are thinking about protests in the midst of a pandemic, and what steps she wants authorities to take regarding Floyd's death.
What have the past couple days been like in the Minneapolis area?
It has been crazy. People on the ground are very upset and sad and disheartened, and rightfully so. I think about our young people, and how hard they are taking this. If people put it into perspective, for young people, they have grown up their entire lives watching black bodies murdered on social media, in real time, with no grief counsellors, with no therapy, with no one to help them make sense of it. And, to be honest, I don't even know if we could make sense of it if we wanted to, because we are all just outraged and trying to figure it out.
What I have also seen, though, is black leaders coming together, and I am super thankful for Medaria Arradondo, who is the first African-American police chief we have ever had in Minneapolis. The way that he stepped up and brought us together during this time is just so honorable, and I know we wouldn't be having the progress we are having if he wasn't the police chief. And I think about five years ago—in the fall before Philando Castile, there was Jamar Clark, who was killed by police officers in Minneapolis. We had a completely different police chief, a woman named Janeé Harteau, and it was horrible. It was a completely different response. You didn't see any action or accountability. [The Minneapolis Police Department conducted an internal investigation of Clark's shooting and determined that the officers had not violated its use-of-force policy.] So for Chief Arradondo to do the right thing and fire all four of those officers, and for the mayor to support him, was a major step in the right direction. It doesn't take away from the pain and hurt people are feeling on the ground, but it moves us in the right direction of getting some justice for Mr. Floyd.
What is your level of trust in the mayor on these issues?
I am thankful for Mayor Frey. I think he has been showing good leadership. But it is not just about what happens in this specific situation and this moment. It is about what follows it. Minnesota has some of the worst racial disparities in the nation. I tell people that even before covid-19 we were in a state of emergency, and then that put us into a state of emergency times two. And now imagine having to deal with a black man being murdered by the government, by police officers, during this global pandemic. And so the burden has just been added to African-American communities, but the resources and the support have not been added. There has been no big lump sum that was poured into the community for us to pour into ourselves. And so that's what I mean about it not just being about this moment—it's about the moment that will follow, and the resources and communication that will follow this moment.
There were some demonstrations last night, but how do you think about organizing and marching and protests when there is a pandemic going on?
Protests are essential, and they have always been a part of the strategy. They are a tactic. But we are protesting to build power, and that is what people have to understand. A lot of people don't really understand what goes on before and after. Black leadership was in communication with Chief Arradondo and in physical meetings with Chief Arradondo since 10 a.m. that morning. The protests didn't start until 5 p.m. And so there was a lot of work being done before and after.
At the protests, for people who were on the ground originally, there was a really good effort and intent to push people back. And not only did most of the people in the crowd have masks on, but there were community organizations passing out masks, as they were already doing because of covid-19. People asked why I didn't have one on. Because of the tear gas, a lot of us had to remove our masks, but it wasn't people blatantly trying to not social-distance and protect themselves.
Protesting feels generally like a much harder thing to do, with so many additional complications now.
It's very complicated, and the reality of the situation is that we shouldn't be in it. That is the biggest issue here. Had even one of these officers stepped up to say, "Hey, this man is in handcuffs already. He is down on the ground. He doesn't need officers on his neck and back for over three minutes, with bystanders pleading, and telling you he is bleeding and that he can't breathe."
And, you know, Isaac, one of my biggest things is that this is not just a civil-rights issue—this is a human-rights issue, and the fact is that black people's humanity is being denied constantly. And I worry about the humanity of individuals, and not just the police, because we know a lot of black people are dying at the hands of non-police officers. But specifically police officers—how can they turn off their humanity and kill black people in cold blood for what a lot of the time seems like nothing? It reminds you of much of the history of lynching in America. And now we are just being lynched without the ropes.
Source: The Multiple, Unfolding Crises for African-Americans in Minneapolis | The New Yorker
Posted in #Blacklivesmatter, 2020 Election, American Politics, cop watch, Critical Black Issues, Disparities in Law and Justice, Government Policies, Law and Justice, National Issue, Police Brutality and Abuse, police shootings, Policing, Race, Race and Violence and Crime, racial violence, Racism and White Privilege, school to prison pipeline, State and Local Issues, The New Jim Crow, US Justice System, Violence and Pubic Policy, White Supremacy and Terrorism.	Tagged George Floyd, militarization of local police, Minneapolis MN, police misconduct, police shootings
Freedom Rider: Botham Jean, Joshua Brown and Antonio Williams | Black Agenda Report
October 10, 2019 by OUR COMMON GROUND
"Black lives don't matter in New York, Dallas or anywhere else."
"The psychological damage done to black people reverberates. So much so that a family would not stand in righteous and uncompromised indignation against the person who killed their loved one. Black elected officials are silent cowards and neither speak nor act on behalf of their people. The rest of us must be watchful and prevent ourselves from falling under the spell of insanity and treachery. Let us begin by remembering Botham Jean, Joshua Brown and Antonio Williams. No one will if we do not. Black lives don't matter in New York, Dallas or anywhere else."
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Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com . Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.
Source: Freedom Rider: Botham Jean, Joshua Brown and Antonio Williams | Black Agenda Report
Posted in Black and Race Blogs, Black Media, Black Political Thought, Black Power, Black Voices, Commentary and Opinion Pieces, cop watch, Critical Black Issues, Disparities in Law and Justice, Law and Justice, Police Brutality and Abuse, police shootings, Race and Violence and Crime, Race Politics, US Justice System.	Tagged Amber Guyger, Antonio Williams, Botham Jean killing, Dallas Police Dept., Freedom Rider, Joshua Brown, Margaret Kimberley, NYCPD, police killing, police misconduct, police misfeasance, police shootings, The Black Agenda Report
This Week on OUR COMMON GROUND φ "40 Years, $1 Trillion, 45 Million Arrests Later: "The Truth About the War Against Us" φ LIVE
September 12, 2015 by OUR COMMON GROUND
"The Truth About the War Against Us"
40 Years, $1 Trillion, 45 Million Arrests – the war still rages against our community. IT WAS NEVER ABOUT DRUGS
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This week on OUR COMMON GROUND, we review and examine the truth about the policies and intent of the "War on Drugs". We need to talk about the money making behind the politics; how the drug war can be considered slow Nazi policy on the poor and the racial profiling used. We look at these destructive and failed policy and manipulation in its historical context and destructive outcomes. We will present audio clips for our discussion which will assist us in understanding just how much the "War on Drugs" was really never about drugs.
For sheer government absurdity, the War on Drugs is hard to beat. After three decades of increasingly punitive policies, illicit drugs are more easily available, drug potencies are greater, drug killings are more common, and drug barons are richer than ever. The War on Drugs costs Washington more than the Commerce, Interior, and State departments combined – and it's the one budget item whose growth is never questioned. A strangled court system, exploding prisons, and wasted lives push the cost beyond measure. What began as a flourish of campaign rhetoric in 1968 has grown into a monster. And while nobody claims that the War on Drugs is a success, nobody suggests an alternative. Because to do so, as Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders learned, is political suicide.
As a community we need to understand how Drug War fever has been escalated; who has benefited along the way; and how the mounting price in dollars, lives, and liberties has been willfully ignored. Where are the policy maker offices where each new stage was planned and executed? What happened in the streets where policies have produced bloody warfare. This is a tale of the nation run amok – in a way the American people are not yet ready to confront. Are you?
You are invited to bring your thoughts about the pressing issues facing our community. Come listen and learn. SHARE please.
OUR COMMON GROUND where friends come to confer with allies.
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Saturday, September 12, 2015 10 pm ET
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Posted in Critical Black Issues, Disparities in Law and Justice, Economic Policy and the American Economy, Government Policies, Guns, Gun Violence and Gun Policy, Information for Activism, Law and Justice, National Issue, OCG LIVE, OCG Programs, Policing, Prison Industrial Complex, Prisons and Incarceration, Race, Race and Violence and Crime, Reparations, The War on Drugs, Violence and Pubic Policy.	Tagged Black talk radio, Boggs amendment, institutionalized racism, mass incarceration, police brutality, police misconduct, prison, prison industrial complex, racism, War on Drugs