Tag Archives: race and ethnicity

Here Are the Contents of Governor Paul LePage’s Infamous Binder of Accused Drug Traffickers

by ImogeneBugg9 Posted on September 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last month, Maine Gov. Paul LePage came under fire for claiming 90 percent of the state’s out-of-state drug dealers are either black or Latino—an assertion the Republican governor said he could support with a 148-page binder he kept that cataloged mugshots and police reports for the alleged drug dealers. The remarks were widely condemned as racist, and contributed to mounting calls from both sides of the political aisle for LePage to step down from office.

On Monday, after much pressure, the contents of the embattled governor’s binder were finally released to the public. A cursory look at the material appears to paint a different picture from the one LePage previously described publicly.

After making the binder public, the governor’s office said it would make no further comment on its contents. The release comes just weeks after LePage left an expletive-laden voicemail on a state representative’s phone denying that he is a racist.

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Here Are the Contents of Governor Paul LePage’s Infamous Binder of Accused Drug Traffickers

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3 Key Facts About the Charlotte Police Shooting

by LilyCurrie Posted on September 21, 2016

Mother Jones

Violent protests erupted in Charlotte late Tuesday night after a police officer fatally shot Keith Lamont Scott, a 43-year-old black man, in the parking lot of an apartment complex earlier in the day. Sixteen police officers were injured during the protests, which included demonstrators blockading a busy highway and looting tractor trailers and a Walmart.

At a Wednesday news conference, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney said they’d been searching for a person with an outstanding warrant when they noticed Scott leaving his car with a gun in hand. After officers approached and gave him verbal warnings, police said that Scott left the car and posed “an imminent deadly threat.” He was then shot by a black officer named Brentley Vinson, who was not wearing a body camera at the time. In a video later posted on social media, a woman claiming to be Scott’s daughter said that he was unarmed and was instead holding a book. Putney rejected that claim, saying that officers recovered a gun at the scene, not a book. (Meanwhile, Vinson has been placed on administrative leave while the department investigates.)

The mood was quiet on Wednesday afternoon, though officials anticipated another tense evening. Scott’s shooting came just four days after Terrence Crutcher, a 40-year-old unarmed black man, was fatally shot outside his vehicle by a Tulsa police officer. The Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation into Crutcher’s death, and on Wednesday, US Attorney General Lorretta Lynch said in remarks at the International Bar Association annual conference that the department was “assessing” the incident surrounding Scott’s death.

Here are three things to know about the Scott shooting and the fallout on Wednesday:

Body cam footage: Last September, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police announced it would issue body cameras to all patrol officers in an attempt to increase transparency during confrontations. The directive granted exceptions for officers on the SWAT team and those in tactical units who apprehend violent criminals, citing cost and safety concerns. The Charlotte Observer reported that Charlotte-Mecklenburg officers had fatally shot four people between September 2015 and May 2016, yet only one of those incidents was caught on camera.

Putney told reporters at Wednesday’s press conference that dashcam footage was under review and had recorded parts of the police confrontation with Scott. Because it was part of the investigation, he said, the department wouldn’t release the footage at this time.

In July, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory signed into law a bill that made it more difficult to get public access to such footage. Local police departments can decide to release recordings if they want, but if they decline to do so a judge’s order is required. The American Civil Liberties Union’s North Carolina chapter has called on Charlotte police to release the footage from the scene, arguing that the new law doesn’t go into effect until October 1.

Charlotte police’s recent history: In September 2013, a white Charlotte police officer named Randall Kerrick shot and killed Jonathan Ferrell, a 24-year-old unarmed black man and former college football player, while he was looking for help after a car accident. Kerrick was charged with voluntary manslaughter. Last August, a North Carolina judge declared a mistrial after four days of jury deliberation, and authorities opted not to pursue a retrial.

Meanwhile, as my former colleague Jaeah Lee wrote in our May/June 2016 issue, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD has been part of a University of Chicago experiment that uses data to identify troublesome cops—those who are likely to abuse their power or break the law—and anticipate future police misconduct.

Calls for an economic boycott: At a press conference on Wednesday, a group of civil rights activists questioned the police’s narrative of events. B.J. Murphy, a representative of the Nation of Islam and longtime Charlotte resident, called on black Charlotte residents to boycott local businesses to “let everybody feel the pain economically of what we feel physically when you kill us.”

“Since black lives do not matter for this city, then our black dollars shouldn’t matter,” Murphy said. “We’re watching a modern-day lynching on social media, on television, and it is affecting the psyche of black people. That’s what you saw last night.”

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3 Key Facts About the Charlotte Police Shooting

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Here’s How Ferguson Has Kept Blacks off the Local School Board

by FrancisChungGon Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Black students make up more than 75 percent of students in the Ferguson-Florissant School District in Missouri, but only three of the seven school board members are black. On Monday, a federal district judge in the state ruled that the at-large election system used to choose the school board representatives violated the Voting Rights Act.

“It is my finding that the cumulative effects of historical discrimination, current political practices, and the socioeconomic conditions present in the District impact the ability of African Americans in Ferguson-Florissant School District to participate equally in Board elections,” District Judge Rodney Sippel wrote in an opinion. He added that the process “deprives African American voters of an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice” and that no elections could be conducted until a new system was put in place.

Voters in Ferguson had elected school board representatives every year in two or three at-large races, instead of voting for candidates representing specific subdistricts. The case, filed in December 2014 by the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri and the Missouri chapter of the NAACP, alleged that this practice diluted black voter strength, leaving them “all but locked out of the political process.”

ACLU attorney Julie Ebenstein explained in April 2015 that since black voters in the district as a whole made up less than half the voting-age population, they were “systematically unable to elect” board members of their choice when casting ballots across all board seats. In 12 elections that took place between 2000 and 2015, five black candidates won school board seats out of 24 potential candidates, the judge noted in his opinion. Over that period, 22 white candidates won seats out of 37 potential contenders.

Cindy Ormsby, the school district’s attorney, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the district was “very disappointed in the court’s decision.”

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NAACP vs Fegurson Florissant Voting Rights Decision (PDF)

NAACP vs Fegurson Florissant Voting Rights Decision (Text)

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Here’s How Ferguson Has Kept Blacks off the Local School Board

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These Stats Show Why Milwaukee Was Primed to Explode

by FredricSkeats Posted on August 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Milwaukee’s mayor imposed a 10 p.m. curfew on Monday and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker activated the National Guard in response to weekend rioting sparked by Saturday’s fatal police shooting of an armed black man, 23-year-old Sylville Smith. The unrest, in which protesters torched multiple businesses and police cars and at least one person was shot, was the second wave of major protests since December 2014, when a county prosecutor declined to file charges against police in the fatal shooting of another black man, Dontre Hamilton. But while anger over such police shootings may have set off the mayhem, decades of unemployment, segregated housing, substandard schools, and racist policing set the stage for Milwaukee to blow. Indeed, the city has earned itself a reputation as the worst place to be black in America. Here’s why:

Concentrated poverty: Milwaukee is one of the nation’s most segregated cities, with black residents—40 percent of the population—living almost exclusively on the city’s north side. Milwaukee is also America’s second poorest major city, in a state that in 2014 had the nation’s highest black unemployment rate. A third of its black residents live in “extreme poverty,” defined as a household with an income less than half that deemed appropriate by the federal government for a family of its size—and 40 percent live below the poverty line. This is partly because the region’s jobs are concentrated in three white suburbs that are all but inaccessible by public transportation. The WOW counties, as these suburbs are known, are at least 94 percent white, and just 1 to 2 percent black.

Failing schools: Milwaukee’s public schools are doing a poor job of educating their students. During the 2013-14 academic year, Milwaukee had the nation’s largest black-white gap in graduation rates, and K-12 test scores were abysmal.

Most black kids in Milwaukee attend highly segregated public schools. According to University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Mark Levine, roughly three out of four attends a high-poverty institution where 90 percent of the students are black. And when those kids misbehave, schools are quick to dole out suspensions. In 2011-12, Wisconsin led the nation in suspending black high schoolers, thanks largely to excessive suspension rates in Milwaukee. (If you want to understand why suspensions are bad, and how children can be disciplined more effectively, read this piece.)

Mass incarceration: Black men in Milwaukee are incarcerated at the highest rate in the nation. In 2013, according to UW researchers, one in eight were locked up, and by the time the men hit their 30s and 40s, more than half have served time. Two-thirds of the incarcerated men came from six of the city’s poorest zip codes, including those for Sherman Park, the neighborhood where the most recent police killing took place. Another of the zip codes (53206) has the highest black male incarceration rate in America—62 percent, according to another UW study. (A documentary on that community is due out later this year.) So many Milwaukeeans have criminal records, one ex-offender told NPR, that police routinely ask the people they pull over whether they’re on probation. Wisconsin spends more on corrections than on higher education. And to top it off, just 10 percent of black men with a criminal record in Wisconsin have a valid drivers license—which makes it tough to secure jobs and services. (The sheriff of Milwaukee County recently called the Black Lives Matter movement a terrorist organization.)

How it got this bad: Black people moved to Milwaukee in large numbers beginning in the 1960s—later than many blacks who left the South inhabited other Rust Belt cities such as Chicago and Detroit during the Great Migration. White immigrant communities in Milwaukee fiercely resisted integration in housing and schools, and when the city’s manufacturing industry collapsed shortly after blacks arrived, massive racial disparities sprang up in employment, housing, and education. Milwaukee also was hit harder by globalization and by the disappearance of manufacturing jobs than other major urban centers, an analysis by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found. Black men suffered a drop in employment during this period that was more than twice what the nation endured during the Great Depression. White residents fled to the suburbs, taking their resources with them, and little has improved since. Decades of tensions between police and the city’s black communities helped fuel this latest flareup.

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These Stats Show Why Milwaukee Was Primed to Explode

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Chicago Police Brace for "Civil Unrest" After Releasing Video of Black Man Shot in Back

by FrancesNgabidj Posted on August 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Chicago Police Department released video footage Friday morning of the death of 18-year-old Paul O’Neal, who was fatally shot in the back by police during a chase on July 28. In a nationwide conference call and bulletin, the police department warned of “civil unrest” following the video’s release.

The recording shows O’Neal running a stop sign in a stolen Jaguar before hitting a police cruiser. Officers chase O’Neal, who is unarmed, through a yard in the city’s South Shore neighborhood while shots are fired. Officers can then be heard swearing at O’Neal, face down with a bloodied shirt, while handcuffing his limp hands.

The officer who fatally shot O’Neal was in the cruiser that was hit. His body camera didn’t record when he opened fire; police investigators are looking into whether it was turned on.

Sharon Fairley, head of Chicago’s police oversight board, called the video “shocking and disturbing.” The board is in the process of investigating the incident, but three officers were stripped of their policing powers after a preliminary investigation found that they had violated department policy. Fairley says the video was released because it didn’t jeopardize the investigation.

The O’Neal family has filed a lawsuit against the officers, alleging that they fired “without lawful justification or excuse.”

The Independent Police Review Authority released nine videos of the incident, including the one below.

Warning: This video features graphic content.

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Chicago Police Brace for "Civil Unrest" After Releasing Video of Black Man Shot in Back

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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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Comic Phoebe Robinson Is Tired of Being the Token Black Girl

by JosetteOneil Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Perhaps you know and love her from 2 Dope Queens, the comedy podcast she co-hosts every week with Jessica Williams of Daily Show fame. Perhaps you don’t know her yet. But Phoebe Robinson is someone you’ll want to familiarize yourself with if you like funny interviews about race, gender, and the struggle of being a young adult. Now you’ll have more ways to listen to her: Robinson’s new podcast, Sooo Many White Guys, launches today on WNYC.

In each episode, Robinson says she will talk to people who are “killing it”—whether in music, TV, comedy, books, or anything in between. The first show’s guest is hip-hop artist and vocal Black Lives Matter supporter, Lizzo. Upcoming guests include actress Nia Long (known for her role as Lisa on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air), trans-rights activist Janet Mock, and Broad City‘s Ilana Glazer, the executive producer of the podcast. “I’m picking them because they’re talented, but also because…they’re not just straight up white dudes,” Robinson says in the show’s trailer.

At the end of the season, Robinson plans to speak to one white man (“the token”), who will have to speak on behalf of white people everywhere. Sound familiar?

“Coming from a comedy background where cis straight white dudes are the norm and everyone else is the ‘Other’ or the token, it feels great to flip that and have the majority of the guests on SMWG be women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ folks and not reduce them to what they identify as on a census form,” Robinson said.

Before 2 Dope Queens, Robinson served as a staff writer for MTV’s Girl Code and performed stand-up comedy in New York, particularly at famed improv theater the Upright Citizens Brigade. She also recently finished her first book, You Can’t Touch My Hair, which will hit shelves this coming October.

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Comic Phoebe Robinson Is Tired of Being the Token Black Girl

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The Congressional Black Caucus Just Issued a Passionate Call for Gun Control

by Dann4778eehk Posted on July 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Two weeks ago, a group of House Democrats led a 26-hour sit-in, after Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), and civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) peacefully occupied the House floor to force a vote on two pieces of gun control legislation that the GOP had refused to consider. Congress returned to Washington this week just as three firearms-related tragedies rocked the nation: The police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and the fatal shooting of five police officers in Dallas on Thursday night. Friday afternoon, members of the Congressional Black Caucus renewed calls for the GOP to pass gun control legislation.

“We don’t need to leave the Hill this week, or any week, without assuring the American people that we understand the problem of police misconduct in America. We understand the murders of innocent black Americans. We get it,” said Rep. G. K. Butterfield (D-N.C.), chair of the caucus. “We understand the problems faced by law enforcement officers, most of whom put on the uniform every day and serve and protect our communities. Republicans, what on earth? Why are you recoiling and not giving us a debate on gun violence?”

Other members of Congress reacted earlier in the day with additional calls for peace and a solution on gun control. Rep. John Lewis, another member of the Congressional Black Caucus who marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 to demand voting rights, reacted to Thursday’s police deaths in Dallas on Twitter:

Rep. Chris Murphy, whose district includes Newtown, Connecticut, where the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School took place in December 2012, wrote:

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The Congressional Black Caucus Just Issued a Passionate Call for Gun Control

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Attorney General Loretta Lynch Urges Americans to Reject Violence After Dallas Police Ambush

by MarjoriDiq Posted on July 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Friday called on Americans to come together and reject violence in the wake of the “unfathomable tragedy” that occurred overnight in Dallas, where five police officers were killed and six wounded in a police ambush.

“Americans across our country are feeling a sense of helplessness and uncertainly and fear,” Lynch said in a press conference. “These feelings are understandable and they are justified, but the answer must not be violence. The answer is never violence.”

She encouraged Americans to take “peaceful and collaborative” steps towards building trust between law enforcement officials and communities. Echoing President Obama’s remarks on the tragedy just hours earlier, Lynch said the attack should spark a serious consideration about the easy access with which individuals seeking to inflict harm are able to obtain weapons.

Throughout her address, she urged Americans not to allow the events of this week, which included the police shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, to become the “new normal in America.”

“May we turn toward each other, not against another.”

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Attorney General Loretta Lynch Urges Americans to Reject Violence After Dallas Police Ambush

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First Officer Killed in Dallas Police Ambush Identified as Brent Thompson

by DamianSpivakovs Posted on July 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Dallas police have identified the first of the five police officers who were killed Thursday night, after gunmen opened fire near an anti-violence protest in Dallas, an event that marks the deadliest attack on American law enforcement since September 11th.

According to James Spiller, chief of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit, 43-year-old Brent Thompson was identified as one of the five police officers killed in the ambush. Thompson had gotten married to a fellow officer in the last two weeks, and was the first officer from the transit police ever killed in the line of duty.

“Brent was a great officer,” Spiller said. “We will definitely miss him. But we are also making sure that his family is taken care of.”

Six other officers were wounded in the attack. Read DART’s statement on Thompson’s death here.

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First Officer Killed in Dallas Police Ambush Identified as Brent Thompson

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