Tag Archives: missouri

Under John Kasich, Ohio’s Charter Schools Became a "National Joke"

by Micheli84L Posted on August 24, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

When Leon Sinoff was asked to sign off on a building lease for Imagine Columbus Primary Academy in Columbus, Ohio, in the summer of 2013, he had little reason to be skeptical. Before Imagine Schools, one of the nation’s largest for-profit charter management companies, asked him to join the new charter school’s board, Sinoff, a public defender, had no education background or experience. “I relied on their expertise and thought to myself, ‘Well, who am I to say no to this proposal?'” Sinoff says.

But by the start of the second school year, he was having doubts. The school received an F grade for achievement on the 2013-14 state report card. Only three teachers had returned after the first summer break; within two years, two principals and one vice principal stepped down. The school—which serves a high-poverty, low-income community—lacked arts, music, and foreign language classes, and whenever the board inquired about adding them, Imagine said there wasn’t enough money. Then Sinoff discovered that the $58,000-a-month lease—consuming nearly half the school’s operating budget, compared with the national standard of 8 to 15 percent—was for a building owned by a subsidiary of Imagine, Schoolhouse Finance LLC.

“It clicked for me. Aha! This is self-dealing. That’s why we are massively overpaying for the lease,” says Sinoff, who resigned with the other board members this summer. He adds, “Imagine is perfectly happy cranking out low-quality schools and profiting off them. They don’t care particularly about the quality of the kids’ education.”

Before Imagine Columbus Primary Academy opened, a different Imagine school operated in the building for eight years. Its story was nearly identical: The struggling school was paying enormous sums to Schoolhouse Finance while languishing on the state’s “academic emergency” list—a designation reserved for F-rated schools—before its board voted to shut it down. One member of that board was David Hansen, who shortly after the school’s closing was appointed by Gov. John Kasich to a newly created position: executive director of Ohio’s Office of Quality School Choice and Funding. Kasich tasked Hansen with overseeing the expansion of the state’s charter schools and virtual schools, which are online charter schools typically used by homeschoolers.

In July, Hansen resigned after admitting he had rigged evaluations of the state’s charter school sponsors—the nonprofits that authorize and oversee the schools in exchange for a fee—by not including the failing grades of certain F-rated schools in his assessment. Specifically, he omitted failing virtual schools operated by for-profit management companies that are owned by major Republican donors in the state.

Kasich, now running for the Republican presidential nomination, has waved off the Hansen scandal. “I mean, the guy is gone. He’s gone,” Kasich told reporters on the campaign trail. “We don’t tolerate any sort of not open and direct communication about charter schools, and everybody gets it. So that’s kind of the end of it.”

But Kasich can’t distance himself from the problems so easily. He appointed Hansen to his role, and Hansen’s wife is Kasich’s current presidential campaign manager and former chief of staff. He presided over an expanded charter regime with loosened oversight. Troubled charter schools like those operated by Imagine, which had 17 schools in Ohio at its apex in the 2013-14 school year and 14 schools last year, have proliferated in this environment. Schools with D or F grades receive an estimated 90 percent of the state’s charter school funding. Virtual schools, which have an even worse academic track record and insufficient quality controls have been permitted to flourish.

In the four years that Kasich has been in office, funding for traditional public schools has declined by almost half a billion dollars, while charter schools have seen a funding increase of more than 25 percent. Much of that funding appears to have been misspent. When State Auditor David Yost visited 30 charter schools unannounced this past fall, he found that in more than half of them, attendance was drastically lower than the schools had reported to the Department of Education. Because the state typically dispenses funds based on student enrollment, inflated classroom numbers can mean extra dollars for a school.

It wasn’t until this winter, after Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes released a report finding that achievement in Ohio’s charter schools fell significantly below the state’s regular public schools, that Kasich began speaking about the need for reforms. “We want to clean up these charter schools that are not doing a good job,” he said in February. He laid out a plan to get serious about charter sponsor evaluations—the same evaluations Hansen was overseeing and later rigged.

“Kasich’s talked a good game about it,” says Stephen Dyer, a former Democratic state legislator and current education policy analyst at Innovation Ohio, a Columbus think tank. “He’s done some public posturing that’s been positive, but when you look at the actual results under his watch, our charter schools have become a national joke, and he hasn’t been able to get through any meaningful sort of broad-based reform.”

Even Ohio organizations that support school choice, such as the Fordham Institute and the state chapter of StudentsFirst, founded by Michelle Rhee, have called for greater reforms. The National Association of Charter School Authorizers, a Chicago-based organization that coincidentally hired Hansen in 2009 to oversee external affairs, referred to Ohio as the “Wild, Wild West” of charter schools.

In his first year in office, Kasich lifted the state’s cap on the number of charter schools that could operate, and the following year he signed a bill ending a decade-long moratorium on new virtual schools. That same year, Kasich signed legislation that relieved virtual schools of any responsibility to report how much they spend on classroom instruction. The bill also stipulated that virtual-school students would be automatically re-enrolled each year so that there would be “no interruption in state funding.” Given that virtual schools have some of the highest attrition rates and funds are allocated on a per-pupil basis, the measure gave funds to virtual schools before they even knew what their true enrollment would be.

“It doesn’t make sense unless you look at it through a political prism,” says Dyer.

WHEN THE NATIONAL CHARTER school discussion began in the early 1990s, the conversation centered largely on the idea of small, innovative schools that matched the specific needs of a particular student demographic. Early advocates hoped charter schools would become laboratories for innovative teaching methods that would one day be integrated into traditional public schools. Terms like “competition” and “portfolio model,” associated today with charter schools, were in many ways the antithesis of the original design. But the model began to change in the late 1990s, when, according to National Education Policy Center researcher Gary Miron, people from the business sector decided they wanted to test market theories on education.

Ohio’s charter law went into effect in 1998, and corporate interests were all over the state’s school-choice blueprint. “It was a political movement, not an education movement,” says Dyer. “You have big political contributors who have really driven the school-choice movement in Ohio for a long time.”

The two central figures in Ohio’s corporate charter movement, David Brennan and Bill Lager, have donated a combined $6.4 million to state legislators and committees, more than 90 percent of which went to Republicans, who have dominated the state House and Senate. Their donations have paid off. Since 1998, the state has given $1.76 billion to schools run by Brennan’s White Hat Management and Lager’s Electronic Classrooms of Tomorrow, accounting for one-quarter of all state charter funds.

F-rated virtual schools run by White Hat Management were among the charters Hansen purposely omitted from sponsor evaluations this summer, resulting in an “exemplary” grade for the Ohio Council of Community Schools, which sponsors many White Hat virtual schools. Another sponsor that benefited from Hansen’s flawed math, Buckeye Community Hope Foundation, oversees 51 charter schools, including another struggling Imagine school on whose board Hansen previously sat.

The majority of the Ohio Department of Education’s elected board members—other members are appointed by the governor—have called for an investigation into Hansen’s manipulated evaluations and for the resignation of State Superintendent Robert Ross. Kasich has brushed off both requests, instead proposing a restructuring of the board to provide greater gubernatorial control. “I don’t like the structure of it,” Kasich told the Columbus Dispatch. “I don’t like the infighting.”

Tim Pingle, a former Imagine Columbus Primary Academy principal, is frustrated that schools like his old one are allowed to remain open. “Why do we accept this for our kids?” he asks, noting that Imagine Schools was kicked out of Missouri after years of financial and academic concerns. “It’s not good enough for the kids in Missouri, but it’s okay for kids in Ohio?”

In June, the Ohio Senate approved bipartisan legislation to reform the state’s charter schools, but the measure stalled in the state House. And so last week, Imagine Columbus Primary Academy opened its doors for its third year—with its third principal and second school board.

“I’m sure Imagine’s new board is even more oblivious than we were, given that we caused a lot of trouble in the end,” says Sinoff, who resigned after Imagine refused to re-negotiate the high-priced lease. “I think that they are not entirely happy that we squeaked through the filter to make life difficult. I’m sure they haven’t made that mistake again, and they have folks even more oblivious than we were.”

Link to original:  

Under John Kasich, Ohio’s Charter Schools Became a "National Joke"

Posted in Anchor, Cyber, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Under John Kasich, Ohio’s Charter Schools Became a "National Joke"

8 Reasons Joe Biden Is a Dream Candidate and a Disaster

by YasminWallis00 Posted on August 20, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

With the political class chattering about Hillary Clinton’s recent difficulties—the email controversy, the Bernie Sanders wave, a decline in some polls—Vice President Joe Biden seems to be closer to running for president. At least, there’s more talk about a Biden bid. Several of his former operatives have started a super-PAC in hopes of getting him to run, and the 72-year-old Biden is calling friends and political allies to discuss the possibility.

Not surprisingly, the response among Democrats has been mixed. Some commentators wonder whether Biden could actually help Clinton by leaping into the fray. But one Democratic source told CNN that White House insiders are concerned a Biden run could hurt the veep’s reputation as the elder statesman of the Democratic Party who has spent more than four decades in public life.

Biden was a six-term US senator from Delaware before becoming vice president, and he earned respect from many for both his legislative work and his grace in the face of tragedy. In 1972, a few weeks after Biden was elected to the Senate for the first time, his wife and one-year-old daughter were killed in a car crash, and his two sons were injured. Biden considered resigning to care for his sons. Instead, he commuted on Amtrak from his Delaware home to Washington every day, so he could be with his kids for dinner. He continued this practice for years into his political career. (In May, one of those sons, Beau, died of brain cancer at the age of 46.)

Biden, who has been President Barack Obama’s go-to guy for breaking deadlocks with obstructionist GOPers on Capitol Hill on the budget, the debt ceiling, and tax deals, unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and 2008. (His first time out, he left the race after the Michael Dukakis campaign leaked information showing Biden had cribbed part of his stump speech from a British politician. On his second try, Biden, who survived a brain aneurysm in 1988, performed well in the debates but on the campaign trail was eclipsed by Obama and Clinton.) His career has covered extremes. He helped confirm one conservative Supreme Court justice but opposed several others. He long supported arms control and diplomatic efforts, but he also voted to allow President George W. Bush to invade Iraq. He has worked to protect women, but he sometimes gets a little too close.

So with a deadline for a final decision approaching—Biden probably cannot wait much longer—here’s a partial rundown of high points and low points in the vice president’s story:

the good

Ahead of the pack on marriage equality: In May of 2012, while appearing on Meet the Press during Obama’s reelection campaign, Biden came out in favor of same-sex marriage. At the time, the White House had only officially endorsed civil unions. Some speculate that Biden’s unambiguous support helped push Obama from “evolving” on the issue to a full-fledged, official endorsement of gay marriage.

Changing the treatment of victims of sexual assault and domestic violence: In 1990, Biden introduced the Violence Against Women Act, which improved law enforcement practices for investigating and prosecuting domestic violence and sexual assault. Once he became vice president, he continued to advocate on behalf of women and girls. He appointed the first ever White House adviser on violence against women, launched an initiative to decrease dating violence among teens, and worked to clamp down on campus sexual assault.

Foreign policy chops: From the beginning of US involvement in Iraq, Biden strenuously advocated the use of diplomacy before military action. In 2002, while the Bush administration was heading toward the Iraq invasion, Biden, who was then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, proposed ways to curtail Saddam Hussein’s weapons program diplomatically and held several hearings to discuss the potential challenges of stabilizing the country after an invasion. Most notably, he worked with Leslie Gelb, then president of the Council on Foreign Relations, to propose a system for stabilizing Iraq, modeled off the Dayton Accords in Bosnia. Biden called for a federalist system that would separate Iraq into three regions, along ethno-religious lines—Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia—allowing each group to control its own affairs, with a central government remaining in Baghdad. Some Middle East scholars have since wondered whether Biden’s proposal could have prevented some of the ongoing unrest in Iraq. A longtime advocate of arms control and nuclear nonproliferation efforts, he was an essential player in Obama’s successful 2010 push to win congressional approval of the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty. And he was a crucial voice within the Obama administration for decreasing the US military presence in Afghanistan and shifting US policy from a counterinsurgency perspective to a counterterrorism approach.

Supreme Court savvy: As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee for three decades, Biden was involved in the nomination and confirmation of seven of the nine sitting Supreme Court justices. Biden opposed the confirmation of several conservative Supreme Court justices. His opposition to the nomination of Robert Bork was successful. In the case of Samuel Alito, Biden voted with other Democratic senators to filibuster the nomination vote, in part because of his concerns over Alito’s disapproval of a landmark Supreme Court ruling on voting rights. Biden’s stance when confirming Justice Clarence Thomas wasn’t quite so clear-cut. (See: Anita Hill.)

the NOT SO GOOD

Exacerbating America’s mass incarceration problem: As my colleague Pat Caldwell reported, Biden played a key role in getting the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act passed during the Clinton era. The bill implemented a host of policies that would ensure more severe incarceration of inmates, such as expanding death penalty crimes, criminalizing gang membership, and reducing opportunities for parole. Many, including Bill Clinton himself, now point to this piece of legislation as having contributed to the severe overcrowding of prisons and forced judges to impose harsher, longer sentences that have led to a problem with mass incarceration.

Saying the wrong thing at the wrong time: Biden has the gift of gab or, perhaps, a tendency toward verbosity. And he not infrequently puts his foot in his mouth. A few examples: Speaking at a 2008 campaign rally in Columbia, Missouri, he accidentally asked Missouri state Sen. Chuck Graham, who is wheelchair-bound, to “stand up.” Also during the 2008 presidential campaign, he called Obama the first “articulate and bright and clean” African American man to run for president. Biden also botched Obama’s last name, introducing him as “Barack America,” at his first rally as Obama’s running mate. Later he handed John McCain one of his main anti-Obama talking points when he suggested that Obama would face an international crisis in the beginning of his presidency. During a 2010 St. Patrick’s Day celebration at the White House, Biden asked for God’s blessing for the Irish prime minister’s late mother—even though she was very much alive.

Creeping on women: Biden is known for his enthusiasm for campaigning and pressing the flesh. This has occasionally been a problem when it comes to women. For example:

Carolyn Kaster/AP

Anita Hill and the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings: In 1991, Biden, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, presided over the controversial confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, nominated by President George H.W. Bush to sit on the Supreme Court. Law professor Anita Hill alleged that Thomas sexually harassed her when she was one of his employees, and this charge became a central focus of those hearings. Biden was widely criticized for his treatment of Hill during the sessions. He allowed three male senators to aggressively question Hill, but he never called three women to testify who had been subpoenaed to discuss other instances of alleged inappropriate behavior by Thomas. These women presumably could have buttressed Hill’s claims. (Biden ultimately voted against Thomas.)

View article:  

8 Reasons Joe Biden Is a Dream Candidate and a Disaster

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 8 Reasons Joe Biden Is a Dream Candidate and a Disaster

Black Lives Matter Organizers Labeled as "Threat Actors" by Cybersecurity Firm

by Daisy09Jmt Posted on August 3, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
The cover of a report by a cybersecurity firm that identified Black Lives Matter organizers as “threat actors.” ZeroFox

Documents from a “crisis management” report produced by the cybersecurity firm ZeroFox indicate that the firm monitored Black Lives Matter protesters during the Freddie Gray protests in Baltimore earlier this year. The documents, which surfaced online last Wednesday, also state that the firm “protected” the online accounts of Maryland and Baltimore officials and members of the Baltimore Police Department and Maryland National Guard.

The report identifies DeRay McKesson and Johnetta Elzie, two prominent Black Lives Matter organizers who took part in the Baltimore protests, as “threat actors” for whom “immediate response is recommended.” It describes McKesson and Elzie as “high” severity, “physical,” and “#mostwanted” threats and notes both have a “massive following” on social media. It says that ZeroFox was engaged in “continuous monitoring” of their social media accounts and specifies their geographical locations at the time of the report. The report does not suggest that the pair were suspected of criminal activity but were “main coordinators of the protests.”

ZeroFox

McKesson and Elzie both tell Mother Jones they were “not surprised” that they were being watched. “It confirms that us telling the truth about police violence is seen as a threat,” McKesson says. Both activists say they do not know why they were identified as physical threats. McKesson and Elzie live in Missouri, where they helped organize the Ferguson protests. They traveled together to Baltimore for a week and a half during the Freddie Gray protests.

A link to the ZeroFox report first circulated on Twitter last Wednesday. ZeroFox did not respond to a request to confirm the authenticity of the documents. The Baltimore Police Department and the mayor’s chief of staff did not respond to request for comment. The Maryland governor’s office says that the state does not have a contract with ZeroFox.

In emails exchanged in April, ZeroFox’s CEO, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlins-Blake’s chief of staff, and the president of the Maryland chapter of an FBI intelligence partnership program discussed ZeroFox’s potential surveillance “help” for Baltimore. These emails were released to the Baltimore Sun last week following a public records request. The emails also indicate that ZeroFox “briefed our classified partners” at the Fort Meade Army base in Maryland on “intelligence” it had collected during the Gray protests. Other emails from the Baltimore Police Department indicate the department had collected “intelligence regarding potentially violent agitators.”

The report on the Black Lives Matter organizers is dated the day after the Fort Meade briefing. It states that ZeroFox intended to “alert Baltimore PD on all monitoring threat actors and influencers.”

According to the leaked report, ZeroFox monitored 62 “threat actors” and 187 “threat influencers,” including a Twitter user who was “a main local protest organizer” and another who was “sending supplies from New Jersey.” The report also identifies people, organizations, and systems for “asset protection,” including Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlins-Blake, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, Baltimore Police Department Captain Eric Kowalczyk, and other members of the Baltimore police and Maryland National Guard.

ZeroFox

This report has emerged amid growing evidence of federal, state, and local government monitoring of Black Lives Matter protests. Last month, the Intercept published Department of Homeland Security emails showing that the department had closely tracked Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington, DC in April. Since protests started in Ferguson, Missouri, last August, the department has also monitored non-protest events such as cultural events and prayer vigils in DC, Atlanta, Oakland, Chicago, Baltimore, New York City, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.

The emails obtained by the Baltimore Sun also say that ZeroFox performed surveillance for the New York Police Department during protests over the death of Eric Garner. ZeroFox also has a contract to provide equipment to the State Department.

McKesson says that during last year’s protests in Ferguson, he and other prominent organizers became suspicious that they were being monitored by local police officials there as well. On numerous occasions, he says, they interacted with police officers that knew their names and Twitter accounts. “The police officers in St. Louis knew us. They knew many of us by Twitter handle. It was clear they read our Twitter feed. It was clear they watched the live streams of protests,” he says. But the ZeroFox documents mark the first time he has seen written evidence that his activity was being tracked.

Elzie, too, says she already knew she was being watched. “I never needed a paper confirmation. But I guess it made it real for other people who just didn’t think that it was possible.”

Original article:  

Black Lives Matter Organizers Labeled as "Threat Actors" by Cybersecurity Firm

Posted in Anchor, Casio, Cyber, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Black Lives Matter Organizers Labeled as "Threat Actors" by Cybersecurity Firm

The Vast Majority of America’s Elected Prosecutors Are White Men

by JudyGearynnn Posted on July 7, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A study released on Tuesday reveals a glaring lack of diversity among America’s elected prosecutors. The data, gathered by the Center for Technology and Civil Life and published by the Women’s Donors Network, examines the racial and gender makeup of the more than 2,400 elected city, county and district prosecutors, as well as state attorneys general, serving in office during the summer of 2014. Here are the key findings:

95 percent of all elected prosecutors were white.
79 percent of all elected prosecutors were white men.
In 14 states, all elected prosecutors were white.
Just 1 percent of the 2,437 elected prosecutors serving were women of color.

The study comes amid stark questions about race and the American criminal justice system, an issue thrust into the spotlight after a string of high-profile police killings of black Americans. Most of the nation’s police forces are disproportionately white. And while a high-profile prosecution in Baltimore is being led by a black woman, other controversial cases in Cleveland, Ohio, and most famously in Ferguson, Missouri, have been in the hands of white men.

See the full dataset on elected prosecutors here.

Continued here:  

The Vast Majority of America’s Elected Prosecutors Are White Men

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Vast Majority of America’s Elected Prosecutors Are White Men

If Black People Lived As Long As White People, Election Results Would Be Very Different

by DaniellSpringer Posted on May 1, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

With the mortality rate for black Americans about 18 percent higher than it is for white Americans, premature black deaths have affected the results of US elections, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Oxford.

The study, published in Social Science & Medicine and highlighted on Friday by the UK-based New Scientist, shows how the outcomes of elections between 1970 and 2004—including the presidential race between John Kerry and George W. Bush—might have been affected if there hadn’t been such a disparity in the death rate. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 8.5 million black people died during that 35-year period. But if the mortality rates had been comparable, an additional 2.7 million black people would have been alive, and of those, an estimated 1 million would have cast votes in the 2004 election. Bush likely still would have won that race. But some state-level races might have turned out differently: The results would have been reversed in an estimated seven US Senate elections and 11 gubernatorial elections during the 35-year period, the researchers found, assuming that the hypothetical additional voters had cast their ballots in line with actual black voters, who tend to overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates.

And that’s before even getting to incarceration. Additional elections potentially would have turned out differently if voting-age black Americans who were previously convicted of felonies had been able to cast a ballot. As New Scientist explains:

Accounting for people disenfranchised by felony convictions would have likely reversed three other senate seats. In at least one state, Missouri, accounting for just excess deaths or felony disenfranchisement would not have been sufficient to reverse the senate election – but both sources of lost votes taken together would have.

While everyone’s attention right now is on racial injustice in the context of policing, one of the study’s authors, Arline Geronimus, noted that most premature black deaths were linked to chronic health conditions that afflict black people more than white people. “If you’re losing a voting population, you’re losing the support for the policies that would help that population,” she told New Scientist. “As long as there’s this huge inequality in health and mortality, there’s a diminished voice to speak out against the problem.”

See more here: 

If Black People Lived As Long As White People, Election Results Would Be Very Different

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on If Black People Lived As Long As White People, Election Results Would Be Very Different

How Many Like Baltimore’s Freddie Gray Have Been Killed in Police Custody?

by DarwinMcintire Posted on April 29, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

For many in Baltimore, Freddie Gray’s death was shocking but came as little surprise. It was only a matter of time, some said, before Baltimore erupted the way Ferguson, Missouri, did last summer. While no one knows exactly how many Americans die in police custody each year, limited data gathered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics starts to give some sense of scale: At least 4,813 people died while in custody of local and state law enforcement between 2003 and 2009, according to the latest available report, published in 2011. Sixty-one percent of those deaths were classified as homicides.

As I reported last August in Mother Jones, the BJS collects data on what it calls “arrest-related deaths” that occur either during or shortly after police officers “engage in an arrest or restraint process.” The agency reports that 41.7 percent of those who were deemed to have been killed by police while in custody were white, 31.7 percent were black, and 20.3 percent were Hispanic. (Others died from intoxication, suicide, or by accidental, natural, or unknown causes.)

But you could be forgiven for suspecting that’s not the full picture: There were an estimated 98 million arrests in the United States by local, state, and federal law enforcement from 2003 to 2009, according to FBI statistics. Fifteen states, plus the District of Columbia, did not consistently report deaths in police custody during that period—and Maryland, along with Georgia and Montana, didn’t submit any records at all.

In other words, as the turmoil in Baltimore continues, what the data seems to tell us at this point is just how much we still don’t know.

Taken from:  

How Many Like Baltimore’s Freddie Gray Have Been Killed in Police Custody?

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Many Like Baltimore’s Freddie Gray Have Been Killed in Police Custody?

5 Death Penalty Cases Tainted by Racism

by AYZShantell Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The intersection of race and justice on the street has loomed in the headlines this past year or two, with racially charged killings—Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, among others—sparking widespread protests and highlighting stark police biases: A recent Justice Department investigation, for instance, found that blacks in Ferguson, Missouri, accounted for an overwhelming majority of traffic stops, traffic tickets, and arrests over a two-year period—nearly everyone who got a jaywalking ticket was black. When black drivers were pulled over in Ferguson, the DOJ found, they were searched at twice the rate of white drivers.

Continue Reading »

Link:  

5 Death Penalty Cases Tainted by Racism

Posted in Anchor, Bunn, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Sterling, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 5 Death Penalty Cases Tainted by Racism

Two Police Officers Shot During Ferguson Protest After Police Chief Resigns

by BillyEUHsodb Posted on March 12, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Two police officers were shot near a protest outside the Ferguson Police Department on Wednesday night, according to St Louis police officials. In a press briefing just before 2 a.m. local time Thursday morning, St. Louis County police chief Jon Belmar confirmed that one officer was wounded in the shoulder, and another officer was shot in the face. Who fired the shots remains unclear. A spokesperson for the St. Louis County Police said the two officers sustained “very serious,” but non-life threatening injuries.

The protests came after Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III announced earlier on Wednesday that Police Chief Thomas Jackson would resign with one year’s salary and health insurance.

Jackson resigned a week after the US Department of Justice issued a scathing report about systemic race-based problems within the Ferguson, Missouri police department and court system. This comes the day after City Manager John Shaw resigned. Both will receive a year’s salary as severance ($96,000 for Jackson, $120,000 for Shaw), and a year’s worth of health insurance—a fact that was met with outrage both in Ferguson and on social media.

Municipal Judge Ronald J. Brockmeyer also resigned in the wake of the DOJ’s report, which accused the city administration of using police ticketing and court fines, imposed on the city’s largely African American population, as a means to raise money for the city budget. That context set the stage for violent police crackdowns in the city last August as people protested in the wake of Officer Darren Wilson shooting and killing Michael Brown. Wilson wasn’t indicted by a local grand jury, and the DOJ announced last week that it wouldn’t bring federal civil rights charges against him either. Many in the city want others to resign as well, including Knowles III and the city council.

The DOJ’s report highlighted the glaring disproportionate police ticketing of the city’s black population, and highlighted several racist emails sent by city and police administration officials. Two officers involved with the emails resigned last week, and the city’s top court clerk was fired.

The Department of Justice issued a statement shortly after Jackson’s press conference saying that it will continue working for a court-enforceable agreement to reform the city and police department’s “unconstitutional practices in a comprehensive manner.”

Protesters gathered at the city’s police department headquarters Wednesday night after the announcement, with police arresting at least one man and some accusing the police of provoking confrontations.

Excerpt from:

Two Police Officers Shot During Ferguson Protest After Police Chief Resigns

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Two Police Officers Shot During Ferguson Protest After Police Chief Resigns

Here Are the Justice Department’s Full Reports on Darren Wilson and the Ferguson Police Department

by AurelioSowell Posted on March 4, 2015

Mother Jones

On Wednesday, the Justice Department released its highly anticipated report unveiling patterns of racial discrimination among officers and officials from Ferguson, Missouri.

Here is the full report on the police department:

DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1681210-doj-report-on-ferguson-police-department.js”,
width: 630,
height: 540,
sidebar: false,
text: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-1681210-doj-report-on-ferguson-police-department”
);

DOJ Report on Ferguson Police Department (PDF)

DOJ Report on Ferguson Police Department (Text)

The department also chose not to pursue charges against Officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed Michael Brown last August.

Here’s the full report on the Michael Brown shooting investigation:

DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1681211-doj-report-on-shooting-of-michael-brown.js”,
width: 630,
height: 540,
sidebar: false,
text: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-1681211-doj-report-on-shooting-of-michael-brown”
);

DOJ Report on Shooting of Michael Brown (PDF)

DOJ Report on Shooting of Michael Brown (Text)

Read some of our previous coverage here and here.

View this article:

Here Are the Justice Department’s Full Reports on Darren Wilson and the Ferguson Police Department

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here Are the Justice Department’s Full Reports on Darren Wilson and the Ferguson Police Department

Report: Justice Department to Condemn Racially Biased Policing in Ferguson

by DeniseLoymlz Posted on March 2, 2015

Mother Jones

The US Department of Justice may have passed on filing federal charges against former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson after he shot and killed Michael Brown in the St. Louis suburb last summer, but the department isn’t letting the city’s police force totally off the hook. According to the New York Times, the DOJ is about to release a report that accuses the Ferguson Police Department—and the city itself—of systemically mistreating the community’s African American population with discriminatory traffic stops; disproportionate ticketing, arrests, and court fines; and physical abuse at the hands of police officers.

According to the Times‘ Matt Apuzzo, the DOJ will recommend a series of changes at the department. If the city doesn’t agree, the DOJ could sue to force reforms. The DOJ has court-backed agreements with nearly two dozen police departments around the country (including the island-wide force in Puerto Rico), and is fighting four other departments in court over proposed changes.

If the Times is right, the report will bolster and likely add to information that has been documented in the past by activists, advocates, and at least one state-level agency in Missouri. As Mother Jones reported in September 2014, fines and court fees are Ferguson’s second-larges revenue source, and warrants were issued in 2013 at a rate of three per household (25,000 in a city of 21,000 people).

Another Mother Jones report—based off findings from the Missouri Attorney General’s office—noted that in 2013 in Ferguson, 86 percent of traffic stops and 92 percent of searches of individuals involved African American. That’s in a city that’s around 60% black (and one that had, at the time of Brown’s death, just three black police officers). Despite the cops’ focus on Ferguson’s black residents, just one in five black people police searched were found to be carrying contraband. For white people, that number was one in three.

Excerpt from:  

Report: Justice Department to Condemn Racially Biased Policing in Ferguson

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Report: Justice Department to Condemn Racially Biased Policing in Ferguson