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President Obama Wants More Cops To Wear Body Cams

by donkorleone842 Posted on December 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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The White House wants Congress to spend $75 million on body cameras for law enforcement. The funding, which could pay for as many as 50,000 devices, comes as part of a larger proposal to provide $263 million in new funding to train and equip local police departments.

Calls for more body cams have increased in the wake of Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson. As we reported in August:

“I think body cameras are definitely a net good,” says David Harris, a law professor and police behavior expert at the University of Pittsburgh. “They are one of the most prominent technologies to come along in a long time in terms of accountability, evidence gathering, and in terms of, frankly, changing behavior on either side of the camera. Nothing is a silver bullet, but this has the potential to be a substantial advance.”

Harris, who consults for law enforcement agencies on the side, points to a study by police in Rialto, California. After introducing body-worn video cameras in February 2012, that department reported an 88 percent reduction over the previous year in complaints against officers—and the use of force by its officers fell by nearly 60 percent. A separate British study of one small police department looked at data collected in 2005 and 2006 and found a 14 percent drop in citizen complaints in the six months after cameras were introduced compared to same six-month period of the previous year.

Obama’s proposal could pay for as many as 50,000 body cams but, as the Verge points out, there are 750,000 police officers in the US—and even if each of them had a body cam on it still probably wouldn’t be a panacea for police abuse. A bad cop with a body cam is still a bad cop.

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President Obama Wants More Cops To Wear Body Cams

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Another Black Teenager Fatally Shot by Police, Just Miles from Ferguson

by JillianSnelling Posted on October 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Nearly two months to the day after 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, another black teenager was fatally shot by a white officer in nearby St. Louis on Wednesday.

According to police, the yet-to-be named off-duty officer was chasing the teenager, later identified by family as Vonderrick Myers Jr., when the two began firing at each other. Police say Myers got off at least three rounds before the officer returned fire. They also say that a weapon was recovered at the scene, but witnesses including Myers’ family are disputing the police account.

“He was unarmed,” said Teyonna Myers, apparently the victim’s cousin. “He had a sandwich in his hand, and they thought it was a gun. It’s like Michael Brown all over again.”

The officer, a 6-year veteran, fired at Myers 17 times.

The news triggered fresh riots in St. Louis, where roughly 200 people took to the streets overnight in protest. Police chief Samuel Dotson said several police cars were damaged.

The latest shooting comes as Ferguson prepares for renewed unrest in the case a grand jury chooses not to indict Darren Wilson, the officer who shot and killed Brown in early August.

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Another Black Teenager Fatally Shot by Police, Just Miles from Ferguson

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Listen to Some of Liberia’s Top Artists Sing about Ebola

by Augustu2586 Posted on September 22, 2014

Mother Jones

Since it started in March, West Africa’s Ebola outbreak has spread to five countries in the region. But its toll on the Liberian people—who account for more than half of the 5,700 cases—has been especially devastating. To instill a sense of unity amid the crisis, several Liberian organizations brought together some of the country’s top artists to make a song about the crisis. The result, called “Save Liberia,” debuted last week. You can listen to it below:

“It’s like ‘We Are the World‘ for Liberia,” says Lawrence Yealue, Liberia’s country director for Accountability Lab, an anti-corruption NGO that helped organize the project. “We Are the World” was a 1985 collaboration between more than 40 artists—from Michael Jackson to Bob Dylan—to raise money for famine relief in the Horn of Africa. This song, Yeaule says, will help spread a message about Ebola’s seriousness to “every village and town” in Liberia.

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Listen to Some of Liberia’s Top Artists Sing about Ebola

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Here’s the Data That Shows Cops Kill Black People at a Higher Rate Than White People

by DewayneEdmonson Posted on September 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Since a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, one month ago, reporters and researchers have scrambled to find detailed data on how often cops wound or kill civilians. What they’ve uncovered has been frustratingly incomplete: Perhaps not surprisingly, law enforcement agencies don’t keep very good stats on incidents that turn deadly. In short, it’s a mystery exactly how many Americans are shot by the police every year.

However, as I and others have reported, there is some national data out there. It’s not complete, but it provides a general idea of how many people die at the hands of the police—and the significant racial disparity among them:

• The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting program records that 410 people were killed in justifiable homicides by police in 2012. While the FBI collects information on the victims’ race, it does not publish the overall racial breakdown.

• The Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that between 2003 and 2009 there were more than 2,900 arrest-related deaths involving law enforcement. Averaged over seven years, that’s about 420 deaths a year. While BJS does not provide the annual number of arrest-related deaths by race or ethnicity, a rough calculation based on its data shows that black people were about four times as likely to die in custody or while being arrested than whites.

Note: Most arrest-related deaths by homicide are by law enforcement, not private citizens. Rate calculated by dividing deaths by the average Census population for each race in 2003-09. “Other” includes American Indians, Alaska Natives, Asians, Native Hawaiians, other Pacific Islander, and persons of two or more races.

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Vital Statistics System offers another view into officers’ use of deadly force. In 2011, the CDC counted 460 people who died by “legal intervention” involving a firearm discharge. In theory, this includes any death caused by a law enforcement or state agent (it does not include legal executions).

The CDC’s cause-of-death data, based on death certificates collected at the state level, also reveals a profound racial disparity among the victims of police shootings. Between 1968 and 2011, black people were between two to eight times more likely to die at the hands of law enforcement than whites. Annually, over those 40 years, a black person was on average 4.2 times as likely to get shot and killed by a cop than a white person. The disparity dropped to 2 to 1 between 2003 and 2009, lower than the 4-to-1 disparity shown in the BJS data over those same years. The CDC’s database of emergency room records also shows similar racial disparities among those injured by police.

However, these numbers provide an extremely limited view of the lethal use of force by law enforcement. For reasons that have been outlined by USA Today, Vox, FiveThirtyEight, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and others, the FBI data is pretty unreliable and represents a conservative estimate. Some 18,000 agencies contribute to the FBI’s broader crime reporting program, but only about 750 reported their justifiable homicide figures in 2012. New York state, for example, does not report justifiable homicides to the FBI, according to bureau spokesperson Stephen G. Fischer, Jr.

It’s also not clear that Brown’s death—the circumstances of which remain in dispute—would show up in the FBI’s data in the first place. (Ferguson reported two homicides to the 2012 Uniform Crime Report, but neither were justifiable homicides, according to Fischer.) The FBI’s justifiable homicide data only counts “felons,” but its definition of a felon differs from the common legal understanding of a felon as someone who has been convicted of a felony. “A felon in this case is someone who is committing a felony criminal offense at the time of the justifiable homicide,” according to a statement provided by Uniform Crime Reporting staff. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook describes the following scenario to illustrate what constitutes the justifiable killing of a criminal caught in the act:

A police officer answered a bank alarm and surprised the robber coming out of the bank. The robber saw the responding officer and fired at him. The officer returned fire, killing the robber. The officer was charged in a court of record as a matter of routine in such cases.

And since the classification of felonies—usually serious criminal offenses such as murder and assault—may vary by jurisdiction, UCR staff states, there is no standard definition of the word.

This leaves much room for interpretation. Was Michael Brown committing a felony at the time Officer Darren Wilson shot him? Local authorities in Ferguson have claimed that Brown was a robbery suspect and that he assaulted Wilson prior to the shooting. Whether Brown’s case might be classified as a justifiable homicide hinges on the details of what happened in the moments before his death and whether local investigations determine that Wilson was justified to shoot. The FBI’s records ultimately rely on police departments’ word and the assumption that the victim was a criminal.

BJS, meanwhile, collects its data from state-level coordinators that identify arrest-related deaths in part by surveying law enforcement agencies. But the majority of these coordinators do not contact each law enforcement agency in their states, so BJS has no way of telling how many deaths have gone unidentified, according to spokesperson Kara McCarthy. BJS collects some details about each reported death, such as how the victims died, whether they were armed, whether they were intoxicated or displayed signs of mental illness, and whether charges had been filed against them at the time of death. It does not collect information about whether the victims had any prior convictions.

Some of the gaps in the FBI and BJS data can be filled in by the CDC data, but there are limitations here, too. The CDC data does not evaluate whether these killings were justified or not. The agency categorizes fatalities by International Classification of Diseases codes, which are used by coroners and medical examiners to record the medical cause, not the legal justification, of death. And death certificates aren’t immune to reporting problems, explains Robert Anderson, chief of the CDC’s Mortality Statistics Branch. This data is still “at the mercy of the medical examiner and coroner,” who often write death certificates and may not include details about officer involvement. Anderson says those details are necessary in order for the CDC to categorize a death as a legal intervention.

Better data, and the will to collect it, is necessary to get the full picture of how many criminals and law-abiding citizens are killed by police every year. Until then Michael Brown—and others like him—may never even become a statistic.

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Here’s the Data That Shows Cops Kill Black People at a Higher Rate Than White People

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Fundraising Effort for Ferguson Cop Who Shot Michael Brown Gets Ugly

by LacyVachon Posted on August 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Comments left on a GoFundMe crowdfunding page in support of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. Compiled by Jon Hendren

The comments seen in the image above were written by donors to the online fund set up to support Darren Wilson, the cop who shot Michael Brown six times in Ferguson, Missouri, last week. Wilson has since been placed on paid administrative leave and is in an undisclosed location. The GoFundMe campaign to assist him was set up earlier this week by an unnamed supporter. “We stand behind Officer Darren Wilson and his family during this trying time in their lives,” the page reads. It has since raised nearly $150,000.

Among the comments left by donors:

“Ofc. Wilson did his duty. Michael Brown was just a common street thug.”

“Waste of good ammo. It’s my privilege to buy you a replacement box.”

“Black people can be their own enemy and I am not white…He was shot 6 times cause the giant wouldn’t stop or die. Evil people don’t die quick”

“All self-respecting whites have a moral responsibility to support our growing number of martyrs to the failed experiment called diversity.”

“I am so sick of the blacks using every excuse in the book to loot and riot.”

“I support officer Wilson and he did a great job removing an unnecessary thing from the public!”

The collection of comments above was compiled by Jon Hendren, a comedy writer in San Jose, California. Hendren told Mother Jones that he took screenshots of the comments on the page that seemed especially offensive and compiled them into one image using Photoshop. “There were maaaany more that were borderline or ambiguous or a small dollar amount that I would’ve also captured, but I got so annoyed that I began to get a headache, so I stopped when I did,” he explains.

“A couple folks have asked me to wait until we know all the facts before passing judgment, which is kind of absurd,” says Hendren. “People are donating money with racist sentiment and to celebrate a killing—I’m not sure what other facts I should be waiting for. The vast majority expressed disgust and revulsion though.”

I’ve asked the creator of the GoFundMe page to comment. I’ll update this post if I hear back; she told The Daily Beast earlier this week that she is not speaking with the press.

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Fundraising Effort for Ferguson Cop Who Shot Michael Brown Gets Ugly

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What Do We Know So Far From Mike Brown’s Autopsies?

by DamienVxmvkqoot Posted on August 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Normally, it takes weeks to get the results of an autopsy. But today, St. Louis County medical examiner Mary Case announced that Michael Brown, the unarmed teenager who was killed by a policeman last weekend in Ferguson, Missouri, was shot in the head and chest multiple times. Here’s the information we know about Michael Brown’s death, and a little background on why autopsies usually take so much longer.

What have the autopsies found so far?

Three separate autopsies are in various stages of completion. The St. Louis County medical examiner’s office announced on Monday that Brown was killed by multiple bullets to the chest and head. The office has not yet released information about the number or location of the bullets or their toxicology report. According to a confidential source reporting to the Washington Post, Brown’s toxicology test found that he tested positive for marijuana.

The preliminary results of an independent autopsy arranged by the Brown family and performed on Sunday by former New York City medical examiner Michael Baden found that Brown was shot six times: four times in his right arm, and twice in the head. One of the bullets entered the top of Brown’s skull, indicating that his head was tilted forward when the bullet struck him and caused a fatal injury. According to Benjamin Crump, the attorney representing the Browns, the family wanted “an autopsy done by somebody who is objective and who does not have a relationship with the Ferguson police.”

Attorney General announced on Sunday that the Justice Department would conduct a third autopsy, because of “the extraordinary circumstances involved in this case and at the request of the Brown family.” A department representative said the autopsy would take place “as soon as possible.”

Why does it usually take so long to get autopsy results?

An autopsy itself usually doesn’t take too long, but often, medical examiners will wait to release the results until toxicology tests, which analyze the presence of drugs, are also complete. Toxicology tests usually take several weeks, in part due to the chemistry involved and in part because there’s often a backlog of tests. Coupling the release of the toxicology and autopsy results is standard practice because it gives a more complete picture of what may have happened during the shooting, says Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist and the author of Working Stiff: The Making of a Medical Examiner. Determining whether or not a person was under the influence of drugs “may help interpret a person’s behavior and reaction time,” she says.

What do toxicology tests entail?

A basic screening often involves using immunoassays to test blood and urine (from inside the body) for drugs, including alcohol, marijuana, and opiates. If a test comes back positive, then a lab will run more complex tests, like mass spectrometry, to determine the exact concentration of the drug. Melinek says that “negative results come back faster,” and “the more drugs found in a person’s system, the longer it takes because each has to be verified and quantitated.” If Brown only tested positive for marijuana, the tests would only take a few days.

Was Brown’s case slowed down by an autopsy backlog?

Autopsy backlogs do exist—last year in Massachusetts, for example, there were nearly 1,000 unfinished death certificates due to lack of qualified pathologists and state funding for toxicology testing. According to Suzanne Picayune, a representative of the St. Louis County medical examiner’s office, Brown’s case was expedited through the system, as often happens for cases involving officers.

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What Do We Know So Far From Mike Brown’s Autopsies?

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Meet the St. Louis Alderman Who’s Keeping an Eye on Ferguson’s Cops

by AlannahVKGC Posted on August 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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If you watched some truly jaw-dropping Vines of tear-gassing and smoke-bomb-throwing from Ferguson this week, chances are they came from Antonio French, the social-media-loving St. Louis alderman who’s been spending lots of time with the protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, since the shooting of Michael Brown. He also spent a night in jail after Ferguson police arrested him late Wednesday, initially without giving a reason and later saying it was for “unlawful assembly.” (He captured the moment of his arrest in a Vine, naturally.) French still hasn’t been given any documents related to his arrest, but he’s back to keeping his Twitter followers—there are now nearly 80,000 of them—up to speed on what’s happening on the ground.

We asked him about his arrest, what happens next in Ferguson, and his secret to keeping his phone charged while documenting the protests.

What’s the No. 1 question you want answered right now?

Right now the thing that we still don’t know is the physical evidence in the case. Specifically, autopsy results will be able to answer a lot of questions. At least two witnesses have come forward to date, and both have described almost an execution style murder on the streets. Location of gun wounds, number of gun wounds—any of those would really give some more info about exactly what happened.

The fact that police in Ferguson arrested an elected local official is pretty stunning. Has anyone at any level of law enforcement there reached out to you to talk about why this happened?

Oh, absolutely not. When I was released from jail, I was still outside as I bailed out some of my staff who were also arrested. While I was waiting, the chief of police just walked past me.

Are you expecting anyone to reach out to you?

Expecting anyone from Ferguson? No.

How did you think the press conference by the Ferguson Police chief this morning went?

Let me be very clear about this: they need to take the microphone away from that Ferguson police chief. All he does is make things worse. The captain from the Missouri Highway Patrol made clear after the press conference that he was not consulted about it, and in no way we would he have released negative or insinuating information about Michael Brown at the same time as you’re releasing the name of this police officer. The mishandling of this whole situation continues. The governor was right to take the security out of the hands of the local authorities and now somebody needs to shut the mics off and let the adults handle it.

The press conference ends, and the crowd has a negative, angry mood again when we should be there celebrating what was a peaceful night. The first hour from the Ferguson police chief now has everybody pissed off again!

What were you doing right before you were arrested?

I was in my vehicle, as the officers there had thrown smoke bombs, flashbang bombs, and they tear gassed. When the tear gas started, I rolled up my windows. Because I went through this a couple days ago, I know that the best way to be was inside your car with the windows up and closing the vents. So that’s what I did. My car was surrounded by officers in riot gear and assault rifles. One opened my door and asked me to step out. Before he arrests me, I was actually recording all the way up to that moment, then my phone died and I wasn’t able to post or even view the video until the next day when I was released. and when I viewed it, the Vine was incredible, it recorded exactly that moment as the officers were in my car and pulled me out. If you ever shoot Vine videos, you know how difficult it is to get like, the moment within that six seconds! It was pure luck.

What are you up to today?

Man, I’m very thankful of the new guy in charge Captain Ron Johnson of the Missouri State Highway Patrol. He gets it. He’s doing a great job. What a difference 24 hours makes. It went from horrific to beautiful in 24 hours. And so now that peace is restored I’m gonna be out there with the youth as they continue to demonstrate again.

I think one of my roles now is to kind of articulate to the greater community and even to white America what it is they’re seeing. Explain the young people’s point of view. This is really a youth-led movement. I’m not old—I’m 36, so not necessarily young anymore—so my role is to be out there and to lead when necessary, intervene if things get out of control one way or another, and really just to be there to support. And at times, to protect these young people from more well-off people who are very aggressive and do not love these young people like we do.

If there was one thing you hope people outside of Ferguson take away from this…

For me, this is a very personal situation, a very local situation. These are issues that I’ve been talking about with great frustration myself for as long as I’ve been an elected official and even before that when I was just an activist-journalist. And it has just been so frustrating here in St. Louis. We talk about these issues and they are clear to those of us that are in the community, and they go completely unheard outside of our community. It’s almost like you have two St. Louises here, and getting the one to care about the other has been so frustrating. I hope that this invisible St. Louis is now visible, and that it starts the conversations between the two that have to happen if we’re ever going to become one St. Louis.

Where can these conversations happen?

There’s kind of two levels. You have the top level, which is that in media outlets, your roundtable discussions, even conversations on the local radio about the future of our city, very often these are all the same demographics: these are a table of white St. Louisans, young or old but all white, talking about the future of our city, which is majority black. Those conversations have to become more diverse. And then, on a more personal one-on-one level, people have to start being around each other. We’re such a segregated city that it is possible for people to go from the time they wake to the time they go to sleep and not interact with anyone, on any significant level, of another race.

In my life I’ve been blessed in that because of what I do, I bounce between so many different worlds. It’s very comfortable for me to be sitting at a table with a millionaire for lunch, and then out on the street with gangbangers at midnight. But that’s not typical. I get to see firsthand how these folks don’t know anything about each other. Zilch. It’s troubling.

A news outlet took the angle of going to interview white people in St. Louis County who live within five or six miles of ground zero of this protest movement, to hear what they have to say about it. It broke my heart. They just have a very negative feeling about it. Dismissed it as “thuggery.” I think a great percentage of white St. Louisans right now are still not getting it.

The first part was to stop the violence. And we have: we had our first peaceful night yesterday, and it was beautiful. So the next phase now is to initiate the difficult conversations. Part of my media schedule this week is going on some outlets that aren’t really friendly territory for me to talk to that audience. KMLX, the biggest talk radio station in town, has probably a 90 percent white audience. Going on Fox News with Sean Hannity later tonight. You gotta talk directly to those folks, and explain what’s happening here.

What do you say to folks asking “where is the black leadership” right now?

I would say that’s a good and fair question. What this thing has brought out is not only a division between black community and white community, or even between young people and the people who police the neighborhood, but also between black youth and their elected leaders. There’s a disconnect. I by no means went out there to be directly involved or to be a voice for this thing. I went down there to observe, and I was expecting local leaders to be taking the lead. That didn’t happen. I personally called an old friend of mine who is a state senator, Maria Chapelle Nadal, and told her she needs to get her butt over there. To her credit, she’s been there ever since.

That first night, when it got very violent and the riots happened and the looting happened, I was out there and that was the first time I put my camera down and got involved. That was when the young guys were first starting to come up to that line of police in riot gear. I was trying to calm them down, pushing them back. There were a couple young men who were angry and I had to physically constrain and try to talk to them and they weren’t trying to hear it. And later, they may have been involved in the violence. But fast forward 48 hours and these same men, the same exact boys, were leading the youth non-violent protests. And then last night they were out there and I hugged one of them and I said “Man, I am very proud of you.” And he said he was proud of me too. What’s happening is we’re having rapid maturity right now. We gotta put these guys on the fast track to becoming the leaders I know they can be.

What else can the young people in Ferguson be doing now?

One of these guys that’s been very involved down here who I’m also very proud of is a local rapper by the name of Tef Poe. He has a unique opportunity through music. He brings people of a lot of different races together. He’s been tweeting about this constantly, and he’s been down on the ground. It’s brought a lot of young white people down. Last night was one of the most diverse groups we’ve ever seen here. I posted a picture last night on Twitter, there’s a beautiful blonde white woman walking through the crowd holding a sign that says, “I support the black youth of St. Louis.” That’s what it takes. By reaching her, she can then convey the message to her community when she goes back.

What do you say to police who claim that if Eric Garner and some of the other black men who’ve been killed by police recently hadn’t allegedly resisted arrest, they would be alive today?

I think the statistics show that American police kill black people too often. The use of deadly force should be avoided by all means, and only used when absolutely necessary. If a police officer is in fear of being hit, that is not in fear of your life. If you think somebody’s gonna hit you that does not give you the right to take their life. That trigger is pulled a little bit too often. There’s a scale. If a child walks up to a police officer and hits him, he’s not gonna pull gun out and shoot him. If a white woman slaps a police officer in the face, she’s probably not gonna be shot. But if a black man rubs up against a police officer in the wrong way, he is in fear for his life.

African-American men are taught this at a very early age. You have be on guard, be careful around police. So if that’s what you’re taught to survive, then you’re not being taught that these are the good guys, these are the people who will protect you and serve you. You’re being taught that this is somebody who will probably kill you under certain circumstances. We have to change that relationship.

The first thing police always say is, “well, community doesn’t cooperate, they don’t tell us.” Well, they don’t trust you! When there is a crime, I make it a point as an elected official to go to the crime scene. I’ve seen too many crime scenes. I’ve seen dozens of young men’s bodies on the street. I go because people in the community will talk to me before they’ll talk to the police. If we wanna catch the person who killed somebody, it’s important for someone to be there who they trust.

Do you have some kind of secret industrial grade battery pack on your phone? How were you able to take so many Vines!?

My secret is that I park my car kind of strategically and keep coming back during breaks charging a little bit and charging a little bit. But I’ll tell you I have not seen 100 percent on my iPhone in like 5 days (laughs). I’m constantly living with 25 percent. I’m gonna recharge it fully today and I’m gonna post a picture of the 100 percent.

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Meet the St. Louis Alderman Who’s Keeping an Eye on Ferguson’s Cops

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Watch President Obama Deliver Remarks About the Violence In Ferguson, Missouri

by GeorgiannaChewi Posted on August 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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President Obama just delivered remarks on the deteriorating situation in Ferguson, Missouri, where Wednesday night St. Louis law enforcement officials fired tear gas on peaceful demonstrators protesting the killing of Michael Brown.

Here are his remarks, transcript courtesy of the Washington Post:

I want to address something that’s been in the news over the last couple of days, and that’s the last situation in Ferguson, Missouri. I know that many Americans have been deeply disturbed by the images we’ve seen in the heartland of our country as police have clashed with people protesting, today I’d like us all to take a step back and think about how we’re going to be moving forward.

This morning, I received a thorough update on the situation from Attorney General Eric Holder, who’s been following and been in communication with his team. I’ve already tasked the Department of Justice and the FBI to independently investigate the death of Michael Brown, along with local officials on the ground. The Department of Justice is also consulting with local authorities about ways that they can maintain public safety without restricting the right of peaceful protest and while avoiding unnecessary escalation. I made clear to the attorney general that we should do what is necessary to help determine exactly what happened and to see that justice is done.

I also just spoke with Governor Jay Nixon of Missouri. I expressed my concern over the violent turn that events have taken on the ground, and underscored that now’s the time for all of us to reflect on what’s happened and to find a way to come together going forward. He is going to be traveling to Ferguson. He is a good man and a fine governor, and I’m confident that working together, he’s going to be able to communicate his desire to make sure that justice is done and his desire to make sure that public safety is maintained in an appropriate way.

Of course, it’s important to remember how this started. We lost a young man, Michael Brown, in heartbreaking and tragic circumstances. He was 18 years old, and his family will never hold Michael in their arms again. And when something like this happens, the local authorities, including the police, have a responsibility to be open and transparent about how they are investigating that death and how they are protecting the people in their communities. There is never an excuse for violence against police or for those who would use this tragedy as a cover for vandalism or looting. There’s also no excuse for police to use excessive force against peaceful protests or to throw protesters in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights. And here in the United States of America, police should not be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs and report to the American people on what they see on the ground.

Put simply, we all need to hold ourselves to a high standard, particularly those of us in positions of authority. I know that emotions are raw right now in Ferguson and there are certainly passionate differences about what has happened. There are going to be different accounts of how this tragedy occurred. There are going to be differences in terms of what needs to happen going forward. That’s part of our democracy. But let’s remember that we’re all part of one American family. We are united in common values, and that includes belief in equality under the law, basic respect for public order and the right to peaceful public protest, a reverence for the dignity of every single man, woman and child among us, and the need for accountability when it comes to our government.

So now is the time for healing. Now is the time for peace and calm on the streets of Ferguson. Now is the time for an open and transparent process to see that justice is done. And I’ve asked that the attorney general and the U.S. attorney on the scene continue to work with local officials to move that process forward. They will be reporting to me in the coming days about what’s being done to make sure that happens.

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Watch President Obama Deliver Remarks About the Violence In Ferguson, Missouri

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Arizona State’s Chip Sarafin Just Became the First Publicly Gay Player in Major College Football

by Roderic2845 Posted on August 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Arizona State University offensive lineman Edward “Chip” Sarafin revealed he is gay in a newly published magazine profile, making him the first active player in major college football to come out publicly.

Although his conversation with Compete—a Tempe-based LGBT sports magazine—marks the first time Sarafin has told his story to the media, he said he came out to his teammates last spring. “It was really personal to me,” he said, “and it benefited by peace of mind greatly.”

Sarafin, who is a fifth-year senior earning a master’s degree in biomedical engineering, has not played in a game in his four years as a Sun Devil. With his announcement, he follows in the steps of current St. Louis Rams linebacker Michael Sam, who came out to the media after completing his college football career at the University of Missouri, and the University of Massachusetts’ Derrick Gordon, who became the first openly gay men’s college basketball player just months ago. Sam tweeted his support shortly after the news broke:

Arizona State football coach Todd Graham had this to say about Sarafin in a statement Wednesday:

We are a brotherhood that is not defined by cultural and personal differences, but rather an individual’s commitment to the Sun Devil Way. Chip is a fifth-year senior and a Scholar Baller, a graduate and a master’s student. His commitment to service is unmatched and it is clear he is on his way to leading a successful life after his playing career, a goal that I have for every student-athlete. Diversity and acceptance are two of the pillars of our program, and he has full support from his teammates and the coaching staff.

Sarafin, who plans to become a neurologist, is currently helping develop a lightweight, sturdy carbon-fiber football helmet. He does outreach with younger athletes, educating them on the dangers of playing through concussions. He says he strives to be the type of person who “gives back to everyone and loves his family.”

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Arizona State’s Chip Sarafin Just Became the First Publicly Gay Player in Major College Football

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These Maps Show How Many Brutally Hot Days You Will Suffer When You’re Old

by KristopherMgw Posted on June 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Risky Business

One of the main difficulties in getting people to care about climate change is that it can be hard to notice on a daily basis. But the prospect of sweating profusely through your golden years? That’s more arresting.

If you’re aged 4-33 right now, the map above shows you how many very hot days—those with temperatures over 95 degrees Fahrenheit—you’re likely to experience by the time you’re elderly. It comes from a new report by the economics research firm Rhodium Group, which was commissioned by former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg; Henry Paulson, the Republican Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush; and Tom Steyer, the billionaire Bay Area entrepreneur and environmentalist.

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These Maps Show How Many Brutally Hot Days You Will Suffer When You’re Old

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