Tag Archives: black

Four Reasons Why the Freddie Gray Case Isn’t Going Away Any Time Soon

by SalvatoreForrest Posted on August 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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In late July, Baltimore state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby dropped all remaining charges against two officers awaiting trial in the Freddie Gray case and decided not to retry a third, after a judge acquitted three other officers on all counts related to Gray’s death. The decision closed a chapter on a case that was a focal point for the Black Lives Matter movement. But although the criminal case is over, both the state’s attorney’s office and Baltimore police officers are still grappling with the consequences of the failed prosecution. Here’s how:

The six officers charged in Gray’s death will now face an internal affairs review. Led by the Montgomery County Police Department, the reviews—which can move forward now that the criminal cases have been concluded—will determine whether the officers’ actions violated department policy, and whether the officers can return to patrol duty. Such reviews can take several months to complete, however, and an analysis of cases by the Baltimore Sun found that nine of ten misconduct allegations investigated by Montgomery County Police Department do not result in officers being reprimanded. The officers will remain on paid administrative duty until the reviews are complete.

Several officers have sued Mosby for defamation and false arrest. At least five of six officers charged in Gray’s death have filed civil lawsuits against Mosby and Major Sam Cogen, the Baltimore sheriff’s commander who signed the charging documents in the case. Collectively the lawsuits seek more than $3.5 million in damages for charges including defamation, false arrest, false imprisonment, and federal civil rights violations—among their allegations is that Mosby charged the officers in order to appease Black Lives Matter protesters. They also allege that Mosby did not investigate the case as thoroughly as she had initially claimed, and that she deliberately made false statements about officers’ culpability at the press conference where she announced the charges. (Legal observers have said the chances of the suits succeeding are slim because prosecutors generally enjoy immunity from being sued, and the bar the officers’ attorneys would have to meet—showing that Mosby acted with malice—is high.)

Some people want Mosby banned from practicing law in the state of Maryland. At least two complaints have been filed against Mosby with the Maryland Attorney Grievance Commission in an effort to have her disbarred. Ralph Jaffe, who ran for a Maryland democratic US senate seat earlier this year, wrote in a recent Baltimore Sun Op-Ed that he filed a complaint last May because Mosby’s decision to “placate the liberal agitators” reflected “recklessness and a lack of judicial responsibility” and had strained the relationship between the Baltimore police department and the state’s attorney’s office. (A George Washington University law professor who filed a separate complaint against Mosby in June was previously involved in a successful effort to have a North Carolina district attorney disbarred after the failed prosecution of three Duke University athletes in a 2006 rape case.)

The Baltimore police union nearly doubled its membership dues this year to cover legal expenses for the officers charged in Gray’s death. The local Fraternal Order of Police spent around $800,000 last year on legal fees—the vast majority on the Gray case—and was “quickly becoming insolvent” as a result, FOP president Gene Ryan said. Although charges have been dropped and related expenses are expected to fall sharply, according to Ryan the union will continue collecting the increased dues as a precaution against future “malicious prosecution” of other officers by Mosby’s office.

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Four Reasons Why the Freddie Gray Case Isn’t Going Away Any Time Soon

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Economic Anxiety Really Is (Part of) the Reason White Men Are So Pissed Off

by GreggLlewelyn99 Posted on August 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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I don’t have any special news hook for this chart, but it’s been in the back of my mind for a while. Roughly speaking, it’s an answer to why white men are so angry about the economy even though they generally earn more than any other gender or ethnic group.

It’s all about progress. Women may earn 79 percent of what men earn, but over the past 40 years their incomes have increased rapidly. Black and Hispanic men haven’t done quite as well, but they’ve still made progress—and most people are relatively happy as long as things are getting better over time. The only group that has stagnated for four straight decades is white men. That’s plenty all by itself to make them angry, but it’s even worse when they watch literally everyone else doing better at the same time.

Don’t get me wrong: the “angry white guy” syndrome has plenty of sexist and racist overtones too. After all, white men used to be at the top of the gender/race heap, and now they aren’t. They don’t get to feel superior to women or blacks or Hispanics anymore, and their incomes have gone nowhere for four decades. Rightly or wrongly, you’d be mad too if this described you.

POSTSCRIPT: One reason I haven’t posted this before is because the data is hard to get. It’s easy for most groups—the Census data works fine—but for Hispanics the Census data is heavily skewed by the very low incomes of illegal immigrants, who have increased over time. As a proxy for income gains among Hispanic men who were born in America (to match the demographics of the other groups) I’ve used Pew’s estimate of the income difference between 1st and 2nd generation Hispanics. Obviously this is far from ideal, but I’m not aware of a clean source of comparable data for all this.

ALSO: Asian men and women have also seen substantial income gains over the past 40 years, but the Census figures for Asians don’t go back that far. That’s why they aren’t included in the chart.

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Economic Anxiety Really Is (Part of) the Reason White Men Are So Pissed Off

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Clinton Emphasizes Racial Justice, But Some Black Activists Are Unconvinced

by IeshaQirvridew Posted on July 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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As she accepted the Democratic nomination on Thursday night, Hillary Clinton asked her audience to “put ourselves in the shoes of young black and Latino men and women who face the effects of systemic racism and are made to feel like their lives are disposable.” Coming one week after the harsh “law and order” tone struck by her opponent, Clinton’s statement was a powerful acknowledgement by a presidential candidate of the unfairness of the justice system for some minorities.

For the racial justice activists outside the Wells Fargo Arena, the feeling was different. On Tuesday, as the Black DNC Resistance March worked its way through Philadelphia, protesters chanted, “Stop killing black people,” and carried signs that said, “Hillary, Delete Yourself” and “Hillary, you’re not welcome here.” Hawk Newsome, an activist participating in the march, told USA Today, “Hillary Clinton has had a perfect opportunity in the last two or three weeks to say, ‘Hey, black lives matter to me, and here is my platform.’ She’s done nothing more than make some vague statements and tweets.”

Clinton’s racial justice platform has been a source of frustration for Black Lives Matter activists. During the Democratic primary, protesters called for the candidate to explain how she would help black communities. Clinton responded that activists needed to clearly define what they were asking for. “I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate,” she told a group of Black Lives Matter activists during a meeting last August. In October, Clinton met with activists from Campaign Zero, which had created a list of proposals for police reform, and she said her platform would take their concerns into account. The resulting platform did include some items on the activists’ wish list, such as the creation of a national standard for officers’ use of force and support for alternatives to incarceration, but it did not endorse Campaign Zero’s request to empower communities to hold officers accountable.

“One of the things Hillary said to us is she talked about the importance of communities being involved,” DeRay McKesson, a prominent activist and one of the Campaign Zero members at the meeting with Clinton, told BuzzFeed. “And we said, ‘Well, we don’t see that in your platform.’ Where are you giving communities any oversight or any authority?”

McKesson joined other leading figures in the Black Lives Matter movement in Philadelphia for the Democratic National Convention, but the activists have resisted openly supporting the party’s nominee. In June, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza told Elle magazine that although she would probably cast her vote for Clinton in November, she would “absolutely not” endorse her publicly, citing the former first lady’s public support of the 1994 crime bill and the tough-on-crime policies it instituted.

Garza’s lack of enthusiasm for Clinton is not uncommon among younger black voters. When Clinton campaigned during the South Carolina primary, she relied heavily on the Mothers of the Movement, a group of black mothers who have lost their children to gun and police violence, in an effort to shore up her support in black communities. But Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner, who died at the hands of New York police in July 2014, became a prominent surrogate for the Bernie Sanders campaign. Other activists, including Garza, said they had voted for Sanders during the Democratic primary. During the convention week, Sanders supporters and racial justice activists collaborated on protests. “She’s not performing where Obama was in 2012 with African American voters primarily because of younger blacks,” one pollster told BuzzFeed. “There is no progressive majority without this key component of the Obama coalition.”

Clinton has struggled to win over black activists, but she has also faced criticism when she embraces their message. When the list of speakers for the Democratic National Convention was first announced, police unions complained that widows of officers killed in recent police shootings in Dallas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had been left off the program, arguing that they should have been included alongside mothers of black victims of police and gun violence. On Thursday, family members of slain police officers addressed the convention, in a segment that had not been listed on the convention schedule until the day of their appearance.

As the campaign has progressed, Clinton has increasingly invoked the message of Black Lives Matter, most notably in her acceptance speech on Thursday. So far, however, her words of support haven’t been enough to win over many of the movement’s activists.

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Clinton Emphasizes Racial Justice, But Some Black Activists Are Unconvinced

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James Cameron has a new movie where everyone drowns at the end

by MaryjoStrempel Posted on July 27, 2016

It Is A Mathematical Certainty

James Cameron has a new movie where everyone drowns at the end

By on Jul 27, 2016Share

Academy Award–winning filmmaker James Cameron will premiere a short film, Not Reality TV, Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. And while Leonardo DiCaprio is noticeably absent from this Cameron film, disaster is certainly not: The subject of the short — which features scenes from the upcoming season of Years of Living Dangerously — is climate change.

“We made this film to show the reality of climate change — how it’s directly affecting millions of people each day,” Cameron said in a press release. “America just experienced its hottest year ever, rapidly rising sea levels are threatening coastal communities and causing migrations across the globe, and extreme weather events like wildfires and hurricanes continue to spiral out of control as temperatures rise. As I’ve said before, to save our planet we need to mobilize like we did during World War II — the threat to our country and children is that severe.”

A World War II-like mobilization to deal with the effects of climate change is, for the first time in history, written into the Democratic Party’s platform. The platform pledges that in the first 100 days of the Clinton administration, the president will hold a summit of engineers, climate scientists, policy experts, activists, and indigenous communities to devise a plan to solve the climate change crisis.

Not feeling the DNC? You can watch the film — narrated by Sigourney Weaver and featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jack Black, Don Cheadle, and America Ferrera — above.

Election Guide ★ 2016Making America Green AgainOur experts weigh in on the real issues at stake in this electionGet Grist in your inbox

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James Cameron has a new movie where everyone drowns at the end

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These WNBA Players Were Fined for Shirts Supporting Black Lives Matter—and They’re Not Going to Take It

by HungNewbigin Posted on July 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the locker room Thursday afternoon, following a home-court loss to the Indiana Fever, players from New York Liberty refused to answer questions about basketball. Same with the Fever.

That morning, the Women’s National Basketball Association fined the New York Liberty, Phoenix Mercury, and Indiana Fever $5,000 apiece, and their players $500 each. Their transgression? During warmups in recent games, they’ve donned black t-shirts in support of the Black Lives Matter Movement. (For one game, the Liberty’s shirts included hashtags for #blacklivesmatter and #Dallas5—recognizing the five police officers slain in Dallas.) Earlier this week, the league sent out a memo reminding players of its attire policy, and noting that players could not alter their uniforms in any way.

“We are proud of WNBA players’ engagement and passionate advocacy for non-violent solutions to difficult social issues,” league president Lisa Borders told the Associated Press on Wednesday, “but expect them to comply with the league’s uniform guidelines.”

The WNBA’s decision to fine the women was met with criticism, especially given that NBA players led by New York Knicks forward Carmelo Anthony and other superstars have been calling for renewed social activism among pro athletes. After the 2014 death of Eric Garner, who died after a police officer put him in a choke hold in Staten Island, New York, superstars Lebron James, Derrick Rose, and Kyrie Irving, and members of the Brooklyn Nets, wore “I Can’t Breathe” shirts during warmups—no one got a fine. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver supported the players while noting that he preferred they “abide by our on-court attire rules.” (Just yesterday the NBA, in an unprecedented act of social activism by a pro sports league, punished North Carolina for its controversial workplace discrimination and transgender bathroom law by moving its lucrative All-Star game away from Charlotte.)

After the shooting at the Orlando gay nightclub that killed 49 people, the WNBA distributed T-shirts bearing a rainbow heart with the words #OrlandoUnited on them for a night. The Minnesota Lynx wore shirts with the words “Change starts with us, justice and accountability” for one game—prompting four off-duty police officers working the game to walk out. (The women did not receive a fine in that case.)

Here’s what some of the fined players had to say about the whole affair:

Liberty guard Tanisha Wright: “We really feel like there’s still an issue still in America, and we want to be able to use our platforms. We want to be able to use our voices. We don’t want to let anybody silence us in what we want to talk about…It’s unfortunate that the WNBA has fined us and not supported its players.”

Liberty forward Tina Charles: (Charles wore her usual warmup shirt inside out while accepting the “Player of the Month” award prior to the game.) “I was just thinking, with what happened today in North Miami to the African-American male who was down just trying to help an autistic person out, when I heard about that news, I just couldn’t be silent. You know, just knowing my status, knowing the player I am representing this organization, if anybody was going to wear it, it had to be me. So for me, it’s just all about me continuing to raise awareness. I have no problem wearing this shirt inside out for the rest of the season until we’re able to have the WNBA support.”

Liberty guard Swin Cash: “We really would appreciate that people stop making our support of Black Lives Matter, an issue that is so critical in our society right now, as us not supporting the police officers. There’s a lot of women in this room right now, and in the WNBA, that have family members who are in law enforcement, family who are in the military…The fact of the matter is, there is an issue at hand is, and as much as we can grieve and feel sorry for those families who are losing those police officers, we also have the right and the ability to also have our voice be heard about an issue that goes back even further than the deaths that have been happening lately. And so I think people need to understand that it’s not mutually exclusive. You also can support both things, but at the same time, this issue is important to us.”

Tanisha Wright: “More than 70 percent of this league is made up of African-American women, so that affects us directly. We need the league to be just as supportive of this issue as they were with any other issue: Breast cancer awareness, they support that. Pride, they support that. Go Green initiative, they support. So we want them to stand with us and support this as well.”

Indiana Fever’s Briann January: “Race is tough, it’s very tough, but when you go about it the right way and attack that issue with information and statistics and support for those people, there is not a fight here. We’re not here to put up a fight. We’re here to support a certain group. We’re asking for change. Every race deserves the right to be treated with respect and not be treated based on the color of their skin.”

Tanisha Wright: “We feel like America has a problem with the police brutality that’s going on with black lives…And we want to just use our voices and use our platform to advocate for that. Just because someone says black lives matter, doesn’t mean that other lives don’t matter…What we say is black lives matter, too. Period.”

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These WNBA Players Were Fined for Shirts Supporting Black Lives Matter—and They’re Not Going to Take It

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North Carolina Doesn’t Want You to See Footage From Its Police Body Cameras

by ToniaR25ivfco Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Amid a resurgence of nationwide protests sparked by smartphone videos of police shootings of black men, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory signed into law on Monday a bill that will severely restrict public access to footage from police body camera and dash cams.

House Bill 972 requires a court order before any such footage may be released to journalists or members of the public, which also means that police departments cannot voluntarily release footage without a judge’s approval. Under the new law, police chiefs get the final say on whether or not people caught on camera—or their lawyers—will be allowed to view the relevant footage. If the chief says no, the subject will have to successfully sue the department to gain access.

The law’s passage is sure to rankle some Black Lives Matter activists, who have repeatedly called for even greater access to police video footage in the wake of disputed police shootings of black subjects. Gov. McCrory said he signed the bill to “ensure transparency,” and that while recordings of police interactions with the community could be helpful, they can also “mislead and misinform.” In drafting the bill, McCrory added, lawmakers grappled with how technology “can help us, and how can we work with it so it doesn’t also work against our police officers.”

Susanna Birdsong, director of the North Carolina ACLU, believes the new law will hurt—not help—transparency in policing. “There really should be some minimum guarantee of access to the recordings by someone other than the police,” she told me.

People involved in incidents recorded by the police, as well as their attorneys, should be able to view the footage without exception, Birdsong says. And law enforcement agencies should have protocols in place for the timely release of footage when it’s in the public interest—for example, in cases in which officers use physical force to subdue a person. The process, she adds, should not require any court’s approval.

The law, Birdsong adds, could have consequences for reporting on law enforcement. Before, a news organization could go directly to a local police department to request access to footage or put pressure on city officials to make it happen, but now “that avenue is foreclosed.”

The bill’s primary sponsors were Reps. John Faircloth, Allen McNeil, and Pat Hurley. (Faircloth is a former police chief while McNeil was once a sheriff’s deputy.) The legislation was crafted at the urging of the Legislative Committee on Justice and Public Safety, a bipartisan panel convened earlier this year to consider criminal justice issues. The committee heard from civil rights groups, community organizers, and law enforcement before announcing its findings in June. Among the recommendations: The state should pass an act providing that police camera footage is not part of the public record.

The bill’s authors, according to Birdsong, were lobbied by law enforcement groups, including the North Carolina Sheriffs Association and the North Carolina Association of Chiefs of Police. And while the advisory committee heard from the ACLU and others who opposed such a recommendation, the authors consulted with few nonpolice stakeholders on their bill’s language. “The language in the bill very much reflects that,” Birdsong says. (None of the bill’s key sponsors responded to requests for comment.)

New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Louisiana also recently passed laws restricting public access to police body-cam footage. But many jurisdictions provide reasonable access to such recordings, Birdsong told me. Consider Chicago’s new effort in transparent policing, created in the wake of heavy criticism of city officials for their handling of police videos. In May, the city’s police review board launched a database of audio and video recordings, police reports, and other documents related to more than 100 open investigations into misconduct by officers. The database, which is accessible to the public, includes more than 300 videos from body cameras, police dash cams, and cellphones.

At least one North Carolina police chief thinks his state’s new law is a bad idea. “I would rather let our video tell the story—good, bad or indifferent—than someone who has a cellphone who has the opportunity to edit it,” Fayettevile police chief Harold Medlock told the Charlotte Observer. “Sometimes we do ourselves a great disservice by not disclosing as much information as we can.”

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North Carolina Doesn’t Want You to See Footage From Its Police Body Cameras

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Trump’s Racist Appeal Becomes More Explicit Every Day

by BennettWertheim Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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I can’t believe I missed this, but I did:

During two separate discussions of Black Lives Matters protests on Tuesday, Donald Trump claimed that people have called for moments of silence for Micah Johnson, the gunman who killed five police officers in Dallas and injured nine others, without specifying who or where.

On an O’Reilly Factor segment….“I saw what they’ve said about police at various marches and rallies,” said Trump. “I’ve seen moments of silence called for for this horrible human being who shot the policemen.”

Trump repeated the claim Tuesday night, saying at a rally in Indiana, “The other night you had 11 cities potentially in a blow-up stage. Marches all over the United States—and tough marches. Anger. Hatred. Hatred! Started by a maniac! And some people ask for a moment of silence for him. For the killer!”

Josh Marshall:

This isn’t getting a lot of attention. But it should….There is no evidence this ever happened. Searches of the web and social media showed no evidence. Even Trump’s campaign co-chair said today that he can’t come up with any evidence that it happened.

….A would-be strong man, an authoritarian personality, isn’t just against disorder and violence. They need disorder and violence. That is their raison d’etre, it is the problem that they are purportedly there to solve. The point bears repeating: authoritarian figures require violence and disorder. Look at the language. “11 cities potentially in a blow up stage” … “Anger. Hatred. Hatred! Started by a maniac!” … “And some people ask for a moment of silence for him. For the killer.”

Trump’s explicit race baiting has been so normalized by now that we hardly notice this stuff. This kind of talk from a major-party candidate for president should be front-page news everywhere. Instead, it warrants a few words in various campaign roundups.

Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, foreigners of all stripes: they’re all grist for Trump’s crusade to convince white voters that they’re surrounded by rapists, murderers, terrorists, and assorted other predators who want to take their jobs away and impoverish them. It’s his whole campaign.

This is loathsome. For years it’s been clear that the Republican Party could only win by turning out an ever greater share of the white vote. But by 2012 they seemed to have done everything they possibly could: Fox News stoked the xenophobia, Republican legislatures passed voter ID laws, and outreach to white evangelicals had reached saturation levels. What more did they have on their plate? Now we know the answer: nominate a guy who doesn’t play around with dog whistles anymore. Instead he comes out and flatly runs as the candidate of white America, overtly attacking every minority group he can think of. That shouldn’t work. In the year 2016, it should alienate at least as many white voters as it captures. But so far it seems to be doing at least moderately well.

President Obama was right yesterday: America is not nearly as divided as the media makes it seem. But the only way for Donald Trump to win is to make it seem otherwise. That’s what he’s been doing for the past year, and the media has been playing along the whole time, exaggerating existing grievances where they can and inventing them where they can’t.

I’m not scared that America is such a hotbed of racial resentment that it’s about to implode. But I’m increasingly scared that Donald Trump can make it seem that way, and that the press—always in search of a dramatic narrative—will go off in search of ways to leverage this into more eyeballs, more clicks, and more paid subscriptions. There’s still time for us all to decide we should handle this differently. But that time is running out.

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Trump’s Racist Appeal Becomes More Explicit Every Day

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The Attorney General Just Gave the GOP in Congress a Nervous Breakdown

by Edgardo67D Posted on July 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Attorney General Loretta Lynch frustrated House Republicans Tuesday when she repeatedly said that when it came to the decision about prosecuting Hillary Clinton over her mishandling of classified information on a private email server, she deferred to the FBI and career Justice Department prosecutors and wouldn’t share her own opinion on whether Clinton broke the law.

Lynch’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee comes a day after House Republicans formally asked the Department of Justice and the FBI to investigate whether Clinton had lied to Congress last fall when she said she did not have classified information on her server. Last week, FBI Director James Comey testified before the House Oversight Committee about his recommendation to the DOJ to not prosecute Clinton in the matter.

House Republicans asked Lynch if she thought Clinton had broken the law when she set up a private home email system and passed classified information through it during her tenure as secretary of state. Instead, the attorney general repeatedly said her role was to take advice from the career prosecutors and the FBI before making a decision about pursuing charges. Rep. Dave Trott (R-Mich.), said his staff counted more than 70 times during Tuesday’s hearing that Lynch said she couldn’t answer or avoided a direct response to questions.

“Your refusal to answer questions regarding one of the most important investigations of someone who seeks to serve in the highest office in this land is an abdication of your responsibility,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said about halfway through the hearing. “This is a very important issue of whether or not the Justice Department is going to uphold the rule of law in this country, and I hope that with the questions that will be forthcoming now, you will be more forthcoming with answers.”

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) asked just one question before giving up, noting that other members of the committee “have summarily failed, as I just did, to get you to answer even the most reasonable and relevant question.”

The tone of the dynamic between Lynch and the Republicans was captured during questioning from Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.). He said he missed former Attorney General Eric Holder because “at least when he came here he gave us answers.” Then Collins tried to get Lynch to discuss speeding violations:

At the end of the hearing, Lynch said the DOJ had “provided unprecedented access into the thinking of the investigative team in this case. I have provided access into the process by which the department was resolving this matter, things we rarely do.”

Republicans repeatedly brought up Lynch’s June 27 meeting with former President Bill Clinton at a Phoenix, Arizona, airport that occurred just days before the FBI announced its findings and the DOJ formally moved to close the case. Lynch said the meeting led her to state publicly that she’d act on the FBI recommendations regardless of what they were, something she says she was already planning to do.

Lynch said Tuesday that she “felt it was important to do in order to make it clear to the American people that my role in this matter had been decided before I had a conversation with the former president, the conversation did not have any impact on it, and, in fact, as with every case, the team of experienced prosecutors and investigators who reviewed this diligently, thoroughly, and at great length had gone to great lengths and come up with a thorough, concise, and exhaustive recommendation, which I then accepted.”

Lynch compared the frustration of those who wanted charges against Clinton to the “frustration of people who may have a situation where they’re the victim of a crime and they’re not able to bring a case,” but she said it does not change the facts of Clinton’s case that the FBI and DOJ prosecutors determined didn’t merit criminal charges.

Democrats focused their time asking Lynch about gun violence, police killings of African Americans, the government’s surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists, immigration, and prisoner transport problems. But several also blasted their Republican colleagues’ use of the hearing to continue to talk about Clinton’s emails.

“Rome is burning, there’s blood on the street of many American cities, and we are beating this email horse to death,” said Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.), before he asked a series of questions about police killings of African Americans and asked for an investigation into the Baton Rouge Police Department.

Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) said he would pose a series of questions about how the decision not to prosecute was made when Comey appears before the House Homeland Security Committee next week.

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The Attorney General Just Gave the GOP in Congress a Nervous Breakdown

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The City Of Dallas Is Coming Together To Mourn Last Night’s Tragedy

by HarleyHunger Posted on July 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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The shooting attack that killed five police officers and injured seven others in Dallas after a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest Thursday night sparked a torrent of angry recriminations from politicians and pundits on television and social media. But the tragedy also led to an outpouring of support for the Dallas Police Department, the officers who were killed, and their families.

Many protesters were quick to remind the public that the demonstration had been peaceful leading up to the attack, and that police officers and bystanders rushed to protect people throughout the chaos. People began bringing flowers to the Dallas police department the same night of the attack, and on Friday came out in support for the slain officers, placing bouquets on top of two squad cars that had been set up as a memorial.

Here is a snapshot of how people responded to last night’s shooting:

On Friday morning, President Obama condemned the attack as a “vicious, calculated, and despicable attack on law enforcement.”

“We are horrified over these events, and we stand united with the people and police department in Dallas,” he said.

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The City Of Dallas Is Coming Together To Mourn Last Night’s Tragedy

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Civil Rights Groups Move to Expose Government Spying on Black Lives Matter

by AudreaDEIhfkzevp Posted on July 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Against a backdrop of surveillance of the Black Lives Matters movement ahead of the Republican National Convention, two civil rights organizations are aiming to further expose government tracking of the movement’s members. On Tuesday, New York City-based groups Color of Change and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a joint Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security seeking documents, video and audio recordings, and other information on policies and protocols related to the surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists.

The request covers surveillance conducted in 11 cities that have seen large-scale protests over the police shooting or in-custody deaths of black people, including Baltimore, Chicago, New York City, Oakland, Cleveland, and St. Louis, where protests erupted in Ferguson after the killing of black teenager Michael Brown in August 2014. (The request cites Mother Jones‘ reports on the Department of Homeland Security tracking protesters at a Freddie Gray-related rally, and the monitoring of social media activity by prominent Black Lives Matter activists Deray McKesson and Johnetta Elzie by a private cyber security firm.)

The groups filed the request because they believe surveillance of Black Lives Matter is more systematic than is currently understood and jeopardizes the activists’ First Amendment rights, says Rashad Robinson, the director of Color of Change. “The government has done a real coordinated effort about what’s happening among activists, but nobody is monitoring what the government is doing,” Robinson says. “The more information we have, the better we can go about the kind of pushback and systemic change necessary to stop it.”

You can read the full FOIA request here.

Excerpt from:  

Civil Rights Groups Move to Expose Government Spying on Black Lives Matter

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