Killed by the Cops

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator

:hmm: no allegation that the young man posed a threat of some kind to the officers or someone else . . .



:smh: WTF was going on here ???



Leaked police audio appears to DISPROVE official account
of the moment rookie Texas cop shot dead unarmed college
football player as there is NO evidence of supposed 'struggle'.



Four minutes and 22 seconds into the audio dispatch, an officer says: 'I just saw a guy
in the building that has a hat on, a straw hat.' Taylor had blond-dipped hair.

Within seconds, another officer exclaims: 'Whoa, we got shots fired!'

The next few seconds are filled with scuffling and mutters, then another officer shouts:
'Make sure they're called, make sure they're called!' Huffington Post surmises this was
the shooter speaking, Officer Brad Miller.

Taylor, who played football at Angelo State University in San Angelo, was fatally gunned
down by Miller, 49, at the Classic Buick GMC building in Arlington at around 1am on Friday.

He had reportedly driven an SUV through the dealership's metal gate before getting out of
the vehicle and damaging a car in the parking lot, prompting the firm's security company to
call 911.

He had then climbed back into the SUV and driven through the showroom glass, it is alleged.

Less than a year ago, the teen posted the now-poignant tweet: 'I don't wanna die too younggggg.'

Almost exactly a year ago, Taylor tweeted: 'I don't feel protected by the police.'

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Months later, the Mansfield Summit High School graduate would tweet: 'Police taking black lives
as easy as flippin a coin, with no consequences.'

Then came the tweet about not wanting to die young.


READ MORE: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...all-player-NO-evidence-supposed-struggle.html



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QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
19-Year-Old Unarmed College Student
Fatally Shot by Texas Police


Christian Taylor was all set to start his sophomore year at Angelo State
University when he was shot dead by police, who claim that he was
attempting to rob a car dealership, a claim his family finds hard to believe.

Autopsy: Christian Taylor, 19, who was fatally shot in August by a white Texas rookie police officer at a Dallas-area car dealership, reportedly had traces of synthetic psychedelic drugs and marijuana in his system, a combination that can cause hallucinations, according to the autopsy report, viewed by Reuters.

According to the report, a synthetic drug called NBOMe was found in Taylor's system. The drug, which goes by "N-bomb" or "25i" on the street, is "known to cause distorted perceptions, agitation and hallucinations" and has been "associated with random and bizarre behavior in users," according to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office.

The autopsy also revealed that Taylor was shot four times.

Taylor was unarmed when he was fatally shot by Arlington Police Officer Brad Miller, a rookie, who reportedly broke protocol by ignoring his supervisor's instructions and entering the dealership on his own. Miller was fired from the Arlington police force four days after the shooting.

Investigators are preparing a criminal case in the matter for prosecutors to present to a grand jury, which can decide whether to charge Miller.



http://www.theroot.com/articles/new...ealership_break_in_had.html?wpisrc=topstories

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/aut...psychedelic-drugs-in-his-system-when-he-died/



 

muckraker10021

Superstar *****
BGOL Investor

TAMIR RICE 12 year Old Murdered By Police,
Black District Attorney justifies the Murder

<img src="http://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/tamir_rice_protest_ap_img.jpg" width="900">

<iframe src="https://embed.theguardian.com/embed/video/us-news/video/2015/oct/13/tamir-rice-s-lamar-sims-reasonable-police-shootings-video" width="756" height="425" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Black expert S. Lamar Sims, the senior chief deputy district attorney for Denver, Colorado explains why murder of 12 year old Tamir Rice is legally justified

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...-lamar-sims-reasonable-police-shootings-video


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How Could Tamir Rice’s Death Be ‘Reasonable’?

Imaginative legal reasoning deals a real blow.




<img src="http://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/patriciawilliams_small1.jpg" width="150">
by Patricia J. Williams | October 14, 2015 | http://www.thenation.com/article/how-could-tamir-rices-death-be-reasonable/

In a world of complex and systemic violence, legal reason sometimes follows an imaginative narrative arc.

Take the case of Charles K. Goodridge, a computer programmer in Texas, who sued Hewlett-Packard, his employer of nearly a decade, for racial discrimination. He lost his job as part of a settlement in that case. Already in his late 40s, he was unable to find other regular work and was eventually evicted from his apartment. As Anand Jahi, Goodridge’s cousin and a graduate student at Princeton, wrote in YES! Magazine, “economic devastation turned him into a trespasser.” And so, early on the morning of July 9, 2014, Goodridge was discovered in the fitness center of his former building by Francisco Ruiz, an erstwhile neighbor and off-duty county constable who moonlighted as a security guard for the complex. Ruiz returned to his apartment to retrieve his gun and a set of handcuffs. He then chased Goodridge into the parking lot of the complex, where, according to the Harris County DA, he “became fearful that Goodridge was going to take his gun and kill him with it, so when he gained some distance from Goodridge, Ruiz pulled the gun and shot [him] twice” in the abdomen. A grand jury failed to indict Ruiz for this act.

This much of the story might never have become more widely known but for a recently circulated video, from the dashboard camera mounted on a responding police car. It shows the police failing to administer any first aid whatsoever, ignoring the injured Goodridge for nearly half an hour. What attention he does receive is brief but shocking: In what appears to be a much-delayed afterthought, an officer casually walks over and roughly yanks the limp, prostrate, gravely wounded man onto his side to be handcuffed. At another point, Goodridge raises his head, and a deputy uses his boot to press Goodridge’s face back onto the tarmac.

Goodridge bled to death from wounds that an independent pathologist said he might have survived if he’d made it to surgery sooner. As The New York Times reported in a masterpiece of understatement: “The treatment of Mr. Goodridge illustrates complicated issues of policing, compassion and medical care on which there is little consensus on proper police procedure.

This story came to light at about the same time that Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty released two reports by hired experts declaring that the shooting death of Tamir Rice was “objectively” and legally reasonable. Rice was the 12-year-old killed by Cleveland police after a passerby called to report a “juvenile” who appeared to be brandishing a gun that was “probably fake.”

In life, Rice was a jocular, good-natured kid who, though marked as a “special education” student, was deemed “no trouble.” He was well liked by his teachers and mentors, and hung out with his big sister every day after school at the rec center on whose grounds he was killed. Rice was overweight—at 5-foot-7, he weighed 195 pounds—and a bit shy, having been persistently bullied by some of his peers for wearing the same stained and dirty clothes day after day. Those who knew him said that he’d traded his cell phone for a friend’s airsoft-pellet “toy” as a way of pretending to be tougher than he was.

The passerby’s call was reductively translated by a police dispatcher to the responding officers as a “black male” in the park “with gun.” Videos show that in under two seconds, Officer Timothy Loehmann, a rookie with less than a month on the job, pulled his gun and fired twice, striking Rice once in the abdomen.

From that moment on, Tamir Rice was referred to as “the suspect” in nearly all of the investigative documents except for the forensics report, where, at last, in the offices of death, he is listed as a “victim.”

The problem of translation haunts every aspect of the telling. Rice was generally described by neighborhood witnesses as a kid or a “little boy.” The responding officers, on the other hand, described a man of advanced years and exceeding size such that, when Rice arrived in the emergency room, the medical team was unable to intubate him: Based on “pre-hospital information” (or police descriptions), “tube selection was for an adult male” and was too large to bypass his vocal cords. “Rather than delay for a second attempt, decision made to transfer to OR”—where Rice hemorrhaged to death by early the next morning.

Regarding the much-asked question of why the police didn’t shoot to disable rather than kill, Kimberly Crawford, one of the hired experts and a former supervisory special agent for the FBI, dismisses such expectations as “Hollywood.” Besides, she adds, “whether Rice looked his age or not is irrelevant to the determination of reasonableness.” She quotes the Seventh Circuit case of Pena v. Leombruni: “Very little mentation is required for deadly action. A rattlesnake is deadly but could not form the mental state required for a conviction of murder.” This, Crawford says, “is not to suggest that law enforcement officers would shoot a toddler with a gun. Most law enforcement officers would rather take a bullet than shoot a toddler. However, Tamir Rice was…perfectly capable of inflicting death or serious physical injury.”

That perceived capability underwrites our repetitive American tragedy. The black superpredator. Our enchantment with guns. And, of course, the ubiquitous fear of rattlesnakes.

Crawford writes that “the question of whether [the officers] could have avoided the situation had they used better tactics is one that is worthy of consideration from the perspective of policy and training,” but warns against “armchair quarterbacking.” She quotes Smith v. Freeland, a Sixth Circuit case, for the proposition that “we must never allow the theoretical, sanitized world of our imagination to replace the dangerous and complex world that policemen face every day.” With Tamir Rice’s sunny, shortsighted, little-boy existence thus assigned to the realm of a sanitized imaginary, his death may be deemed “objectively reasonable.”









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QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator

After his car broke down, Florida church
drummer shot and killed by plainclothes officer​


CoreyJones.jpg




The Washington Post
October 19, 2015


Their band, Future Prezidents, had finished their gig almost an hour earlier, so bass player Mathew Huntsberger was surprised to get a call from drummer Corey Jones, 31, around 1:45 a.m. on Sunday.

Jones told Huntsberger that his SUV had broken down and asked if he could help, so Huntsberger drove to find his bandmate, who was stranded near Palm Beach, Fl. on Interstate 95. He brought along some oil, but when that didn’t work, the two decided to look up numbers for a tow truck.

“I tried to help him the best I could, but I’m not a mechanic or anything,” Huntsberger said in an interview with The Post on Monday afternoon.

Huntsberger said he called roadside assistance for his bandmate and then, about 2:30 a.m., left to head home while Jones waited for the tow truck.

About 45 minutes later, Jones was dead — shot and killed by a police officer.

“When I left him he was sitting in his car calling roadside assistance,” Huntsberger said. “I never would have thought that someone was going to come kill him.”

Few details have been released about the Oct. 18 shooting — which is one of more than 780 fatal police shootings so far in 2015, according to a Washington Post database of all deadly on-duty shootings by police officers in 2015.

In a statement issued Monday afternoon, the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department said that officer Nouman Raja was in plainclothes in an unmarked car when he stopped to investigate what he believed to be an abandoned vehicle on an Interstate 95 exit ramp.

“As the officer exited his vehicle, he was suddenly confronted by an armed subject,” the police department said in a statement. “As a result of the confrontation, the officer discharged his firearm, resulting in the death of the subject.”

Palm Beach Gardens is a roughly 50,000-resident city near Palm Beach, made up primarily of white residents. The Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office, which is investigating the shooting, referred requests for comment to the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department. Officials with the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“They’re saying he was armed, but I don’t know if I believe it,” said Huntsberger, who described Jones as a really mellow, church-going guy. “Of course they’re going to say that. If I was there, maybe it’s a different situation. I just don’t know what happened.”

Family members, several of whom are clergy members in the Palm Beach region, and friends have described Jones as a well-known and liked church drummer at Bible Church of God in Boynton Beach. Jones family plans to gather tonight at a local church to share memories of him, and are making funeral plans for Saturday.

“He was a good kid, just coming home from a gig,” said Jones’s cousin Frank Hearst, 36, of Nashville, Tenn. “He was just an all-around good guy who never got into any trouble, never had any record. It’s just an unfortunate situation.”

Hearst said family members are upset at how little information has been provided about the shooting. They want to know how many shots were fired, and what weapon he allegedly was carrying when he was killed. They say Jones never carried a firearm.

“They’re saying Corey approached him armed, which is a total lie,” Hearst said. “That don’t make sense.”

Benjamin Dixon said he met Jones because they were both church musicians, occasionally filling in for each other’s bands when a member had to miss a service.

“When you play with someone two or three times, they become friends. Two or three times more, and they become family,” Dixon said.

He remembered Jones as a laid-back guy, often found wielding his drumsticks behind a kit in a church sanctuary.

“He was a very hard worker who you could also find in his church,” Dixon said.​


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...mmer-shot-and-killed-by-plainclothes-officer/

 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator

After his car broke down, Florida church
drummer shot and killed by plainclothes officer​


CoreyJones.jpg



Police say Corey Jones was carrying gun he purchased
legally three days earlier when shot by officer



By Wesley Lowery
October 20, 2015
Washington Post


Officials in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., said Tuesday evening that 31-year-old Corey Jones, a well-known area musician,
was carrying a gun he had purchased legally just three days earlier when he was shot and killed by a police
officer early Sunday morning.

Jones was killed after his car broke down on an Interstate 95 off-ramp while he was driving home after his band
played a Saturday night gig. After calling his brother and a bandmate, who came to Jones and attempted to help
fix his car, Jones waited alone for a tow truck to arrive.

Around 3:15 a.m., Jones was encountered by Palm Beach Gardens police Officer Nouman Raja, who was in plain-
clothes in an unmarked car. Police say that Raja believed he was investigating an abandoned vehicle.

“As the officer investigated his vehicle he was suddenly confronted by an armed suspect,” Palm Beach Gardens
Police Chief Stephen Stepp told reporters on Tuesday evening.


BUT, details of what exactly occurred during that “confrontation” remain scarce.

It remains unclear:

  • if Raja identified himself as a police officer,

  • what if any words were exchanged between the two men and

  • how many shots were fired at Jones.

The vehicle Raja was driving was not outfitted with a dash camera, and officers with the Palm Beach Gardens Police
Department do not wear body cameras.

Stepp said that Jones was carrying a handgun, which was found outside of the vehicle, and that the gun’s box and
paperwork from its purchase just three days earlier were located inside of Jones’ vehicle.



https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ally-three-days-earlier-when-shot-by-officer/






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I believe it also remains unclear,

Whether departmental policy called for this "plainclothes" officer to radio in when he first made contact with Corey Jones, and whether he complied with that policy;

Whether protocol called for the officer to await back-up before approaching Corey Jones

Whether or at what point the plainclothes officer identified himself as a police officer

What, if any, evidence is there that Corey Jones KNEW or SHOULD HAVE KNOWN the plainclothes man was in fact police officer

AND, why have the local police been so slow to release these basic facts ? ? ?

Suppressing the facts lead to misunderstanding and mistrust between the people and the authorities.


 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator


After his car broke down, Florida church
drummer shot and killed by plainclothes officer​


CoreyJones.jpg


CNN
October 21, 2015

A source close to the investigation told CNN on condition of anonymity Wednesday that investigators believe the shooting was a result of Jones and Raja misidentifying each other.

The source said Raja felt he had to check the car because there had been burglaries in the area recently and that burglars had parked near the ramp where Jones' vehicle was.

Raja "was working as part of a detail related to a string of burglaries in the city," Stepp told reporters Tuesday.

The anonymous source told CNN on Wednesday that investigators believe Raja may not have made it sufficiently clear he was an officer and that Jones may not have heard what the officer said.

Palm Beach Gardens police have not said how or whether Raja identified himself to Jones.​
 

QueEx

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Super Moderator

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator

2 Louisiana police officers arrested in shooting death of 6-year-old


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staffordjpg-c5da7944697588a4.jpg


Louisiana investigators are combing through evidence in the shooting death earlier this week of a 6-year-old autistic boy after authorities charged two law enforcement officers in the shooting.

Col. Mike Edmonson, in a late night press conference Friday, said the two officers were being booked on charges of second-degree murder and attempted second-degree murder in the Tuesday shooting death of Jeremy Mardis and the wounding of his father, Chris Few, in the central Louisiana town of Marksville.

Edmonson vowed to continue the investigation wherever it leads.


"Let's make tonight about Jeremy Mardis. That little boy was buckled in the front seat of that vehicle and that is how he died," Edmonson said. "He didn't deserve to die like that."

Speaking of the body camera footage that was recovered from the officers, he said: "It is the most disturbing thing I've seen, and I will leave it at that."

The two officers are Norris J. Greenhouse Jr., 23, of Marksville and Derrick Stafford, 32, of Mansura, Louisiana. Both were working secondary jobs in Marksville as marshals when the shooting happened, Edmonson said.

State police have been investigating the Tuesday night shooting that raised questions almost from the start.

State police are combing through forensics evidence, 911 calls, conducting interviews and reviewing the body camera footage, Edmonson said.

Two other officers were involved in the incident. When Edmonson was asked whether he anticipated any more arrests, he said: "We'll see where it takes us."​


http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2015/11/2_louisiana_police_officers_ar.html


 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Two Officers Charged Second Degree Murder
5 Fast Facts You Need to Know


greenhousestafford1-e1446870805725.jpg

Lt. Derrick Stafford, left, and Officer Norris Greenhouse Jr. have been charged with second-
degree murder in the death of 6-year-old Jeremy Mardis, police say. (Louisiana State Police)



Two Louisiana police officers have been charged with second-degree murder in the death of 6-year-old Jeremy Mardis, an autistic boy who was fatally shot by the officers while they were chasing his father’s SUV Tuesday night, police say.

Marksville Police Lt. Derrick Stafford and reserve officer Norris Greenhouse Jr. were also charged with attempted murder. They were taken into custody Friday night, Louisiana State Police Colonel Michael Edmonson said at a press conference.

“Nothing is more important than this badge that we wear on our uniform,” Edmonson said at the press conference. “The integrity of why we wear it, because the public allows us to wear that. It’s not a right, it’s a privilege. And tonight that badge has been tarnished.”

Stafford, 32, and Greenhouse, 23, were moonlighting as marshals for Avoyelles Parish Ward 2 when they pursued Mardis’ father, Chris Few, and opened fire on his vehicle. Two other officers, Lt. Jason Brouillette and Sgt. Kenneth Parnell, were also involved in the shooting, but have not yet been charged.

Few, 25, who was not armed, was also wounded in the shooting and remains hospitalized. His son was shot multiple times and was pronounced dead at the scene.

Here’s what you need to know:


1. Edmonson Called the Body Cam Video of the Shooting ‘Disturbing’

jeremymardis3-e1446666645566.jpg

Chris Few, with his son, Jeremy Mardis. (Facebook)​

The arrests were made after investigators reviewed body camera footage from the scene. Investigators also interviewed witnesses and recovered forensic evidence from the scene.

At a press conference Friday night, State Police Colonel Michael Edmonson said the body camera video was “the most disturbing thing I’ve seen.”

Few’s fiancee, Megan Dixon, told The Guardian newspaper on Thursday she watched what led up to the shooting.

Dixon said she saw the two marshals’ black and white cars approaching Few’s vehicle from behind as he pulled away from a bar where they had been talking. She said she saw Few point toward his son, indicating he was in the car and didn’t know what to do.

Few was afraid of the marshals because he had a prior personal conflict with one of them, Dixon told The Guardian.


2. It’s Still Not Known Why the Officers Were Chasing Few

Several key details of what led to the shooting have still not been made public. The officers involved in the shooting have not yet been interviewed by investigators, police said.

The marshals initially said they were trying to serve a warrant on Few, but state police have not been able to find a warrant out for him.

The shooting happened at about 9:30 p.m. at the end of the chase. It’s also not yet known when the incident started.

According to the Acadiana Advocate, Few has several traffic violations and a recent DWI conviction, but there were no outstanding warrants or ongoing criminal cases in Marksville city court or the area district court. Police and the district attorney said they were not aware of any outstanding warrants for his arrest.

The shooting happened on Martin Luther King Drive in Marksville, a city of 5,700 in Avoyelles Parish.

Avoyelles Today initially reported the marshals cornered the suspect in his vehicle. Few then put his vehicle in reverse and struck the police vehicle, the news site reported. The officers exited their vehicle and fired their duty pistols through the driver’s side window.

But on Thursday, State Police Colonel Michael Edmonson, the head of the department, denied that Few had put the vehicle in reverse, saying “no, I didn’t say that. That didn’t come from me,” according to The Guardian.

On the night of the shooting, the officers were moonlighting as city marshals.

The marshals work for the city courts and serve warrants, according to the Associated Press. They carry firearms and have police powers. Their boss is Ward 2 Marshal Floyd Voinche Sr., a local bus driver who was recently re-elected.

He told the The Advocate two of the marshals were serving warrants Thursday and the third was working on traffic patrol. Marksville is in Ward 2, which also has its own police department and is patrolled by the state police.

John Lemoine, the city’s mayor, said Voinche hired deputies and bought patrol cars about three months ago, and they started issuing citations, including traffic tickets, in Marksville, which Lemoine told the Advocate is beyond the marshal’s normal role. He said city officials haven’t been able to get an explanation from Voinche.

“You can’t get in touch with him; he’s never come before us,” Lemoine told the newspaper. “There’s no communication.”

Lemoine wrote a letter to the state’s attorney general in September asking for a legal opinion on whether the marshals have the authority to write citations in the city. The attorney general has not yet responded.


3. Stafford & Greenhouse Are Both Named in an Ongoing Use of Force Lawsuit Against Marksville Police

https://www.scribd.com/embeds/288815510/content_inner?escape=false&start_page=1

The four officers involved in the shooting have been placed on administrative leave, The Advocate reports.

Lt. Derrick Stafford, Lt. Jason Brouillette and Sgt. Kenneth Parnell are full-time police officers for the city of Marksville, and Greenhouse is a reserve officer and deputy marshal with the Alexandria City Marshal’s Officer.

The Marksville Police Department does not have a use of force policy, according to The Advocate.

Stafford and Greenhouse are both named in a federal lawsuit filed against the Marksville police (you can read the lawsuit above). A man named Ian Fridge said he was tackled by officers and hit with a stun gun while he was at a Fourth of July event in Marksville.

Fridge, an open carry advocate, says in the lawsuit he was carrying a gun openly when the officers grabbed him from behind. Fridge said the officers took his cell phone and deleted the video he took of the incident. The case, filed in late July, is still pending.


4. Stafford Was Charged With Aggravated Rape in 2011

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Stafford was indicted on two counts of aggravated rape in 2011, while he was a Marksville police officer, according to the archives of the Alexandria Town Talk. The outcome of the case was not immediately available Friday night.

Then 28, Stafford, of Alexandria, was indicted by a Rapides Parish jury, the Town Talk reported at the time.


5. The First Grader at a Local Elementary School Was ‘Caught in the Line of Fire’

Jeremy Mardis was “caught in the line of fire,” Avoyelles Parish coroner Dr. L. J. Mayeux told the Associated Press.

The Acadiana Advocate reports the shots all came from outside the vehicle and through the driver’s side.

According to The Guardian, orange spray paint marked the orientation of Few’s car and three police vehicles on Thursday.

“The particular placement of the cars – and a spray of glass from the passenger’s side of Few’s car – seems to indicate Few was not backing toward the officers. His car was perpendicular to them, and the officers’ shots hit the driver’s side broadside,” the newspaper reports.

Jeremy was a student at Lafargue Elementary School in Effie, The Advocate reports.

Blaine Dauzat, the Avoyelles School District’s superintendent, told Avoyelles Today grief counselors were sent to the school Wednesday to assist students and school employees. He also expressed grief over the boy’s death.

“Tonight is about the death of Jeremy Mardis. Jeremy Mardis, 6 years old,” Colonel Michael Edmonson said at the press conference announcing the arrests. “He didn’t deserve to die like that and that’s what’s unfortunate.”​


http://heavy.com/news/2015/11/norri...hals-arrested-charged-mugshots-photos-murder/


 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator

After his car broke down, Florida church
drummer shot and killed by plainclothes officer


screen_shot_20151113_at_9.18.09_am.png.CROP.rtstoryvar-medium.18.09_am.png


coreyjones.jpg


Update:



Florida Police Officer Who Fatally Shot Musician
Waiting by Stranded Car Is Fired

Palm Beach Gardens Police Officer who had been on paid administrative
leave since the Oct. 18 shooting of Corey Jones, 31, has been fired.


In a statement reviewed by CNN, city officials said that Raja was on probation and could have been fired for any reason, citing the police-union contract. The city did not state whether Raja's firing was directly related to the shooting, noting only that the city had been "cautiously and methodically considering [Raja's] employment status."

"Without any facts of the case or the final investigation, how do you let him go?" countered John Kazanjian, president of the Palm Beach Police Benevolent Association, according to CNN.

Jones' family was pleased with Raja's firing but added that he "must be held criminally liable for his reckless actions that night," according to a statement released by the family's attorneys, CNN reports.​


http://www.theroot.com/articles/new...shot_musician_waiting_by_stranded_car_is.html


 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator

Chicago Cop Who Allegedly Shot Teen
Laquan McDonald 16 Times Charged With Murder​


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A Chicago police officer has been charged with murder after fatally shooting a teen in 2014, allegedly hitting the teen 16 times and firing shots after he had already hit the ground, authorities said today. He is being held without bond and will be back in court on Monday, Nov. 30, authorities said.

an Dyke is accused of shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald on Oct. 20, 2014. The white officer reportedly shot the black teen 16 times, and the Associated Press reported that the autopsy report found two of the shots were fired into his back.

Dash cam footage of the incident shows that McDonald was on the ground for 13 of the 14 to 15 seconds that Van Dyke was shooting, prosecutors said today.

A judge has ordered that the video be released by the end of the day Wednesday, and the judge at Van Dyke's bond hearing today said that the footage should be shown in court at Van Dyke's Nov. 30 hearing.

Chicago to Release Fatal Shooting Video of Black Teen by Police: What We Know About the Footage

The release of the video will likely prompt public outrage, Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez said this afternoon.


"To watch a 17-year-old young man die in such a violent manner is deeply disturbing and I have absolutely no doubt that this video will tear at the hearts of all Chicagoans," Alvarez said at a news conference.

Court documents released today detail how officers saw "puffs of smoke" when bullets hit McDonald's body while he was on the ground.

"These clouds of smoke were later identified as clouds of debris caused by fired bullets," the document reads.


SOURCE: http://news.yahoo.com/chicago-cop-a...donald-16-183023026--abc-news-topstories.html


 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Chicago police kill emotionally disturbed college student and 55-year-old mother




A Chicago police officer arriving at the scene of a domestic disturbance fatally shot two people on Saturday, including a 55-year-old mother of five who authorities said was “accidentally struck and tragically killed.”

In a statement released Saturday offering scant detail, Chicago police said they “were confronted by a combative subject” that resulted in “the discharging of the officer’s weapon.”


But the families of Bettie Jones, who had just hosted relatives for Christmas, and Quintonio LeGrier, 19, a college student home for holiday break, say police violently overreacted to a controllable situation, according to CBS-affiliate WBBM-TV.

[A year of reckoning: Police fatally shoot nearly 1,000]

Both individuals were pronounced dead at hospitals within an hour of being shot, according to the Associated Press.

“He wasn’t just a thug on the street, he was an honor student in college and high school,” LeGrier’s mother, Janet Cooksey, told WBBM-TV. “Seven bullets were put in my son. Seven.”

“Eight shots were fired,” she added tearfully. “One hit an innocent lady who was just opening her door. Something is wrong with this picture.”

The deaths arrive while the Chicago Police Department is being scrutinized by the Justice Department, which has opened a wide-ranging investigation into whether the department’s practices contribute to civil rights violations. The investigation was launched after the release of video last month showing white officer Jason Van Dyke shooting 17-year-old Laquan Macdonald, who was black. The footage led to murder charges for Van Dyke and the resignation of the city’s police chief.

The medical examiner’s office confirmed that Jones and LeGrier were black, but police have not revealed the race of the officer, according to the AP. The statement released by the department said the officers involved will be placed on administrative duties for 30 days while “training and fitness for duty requirements can be conducted.”

“The 55 year old female victim was accidentally struck and tragically killed,” the statement noted. “The department extends it’s deepest condolences to the victim’s family and friends.”

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office released a statement after the shooting as well.

“Anytime an officer uses force the public deserves answers, and regardless of the circumstances, we all grieve anytime there is a loss of life in our city,” the statement read.

“All evidence will be shared with the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office for additional review in the days ahead.”

[Chicago police commander accused of shoving gun down a man’s throat acquitted on abuse charges]

Relatives told the Chicago Tribune that the incident began when LeGrier — who had suffered from severe mood swings in recent months — grew agitated and picked up an aluminum bat while he was in his father’s upstairs apartment. Hoping to defuse the situation, LeGrier’s father called police.

“His father was scared because that’s not his character,” Cooksey, 49, who was not present at the shooting, told the paper. She told WBBM-TV that she thought her son would be transported to a hospital for a mental health evaluation, a standard practice at police departments across the country.


Before authorities arrived, LeGrier’s father told Jones, his downstairs neighbor, to stay away from his son and keep an eye out for police, family members told the Tribune.

As officers arrived, a relative told the paper, LeGrier came to the front door downstairs. Relatives said they believe Jones was behind the 19-year-old and by the entrance to her apartment when the shooting began.


ABC-affiliate WLS reported that it’s unclear whether Jones had finished opening the door when one or more officers shot at LeGrier, “who was charging down the stairs still carrying the bat.”

Latisha Jones, 19, told the paper that she was awakened by gunfire and saw her mother on the floor of her apartment with a bullet wound in her neck.

“She wasn’t saying anything,” Jones said. “I had to keep checking for a pulse.”

Antonio LeGrier told the AP that moments earlier he heard Jones yell, “Whoa, Whoa Whoa!” Gunshots followed, he said, and by the time he arrived on the first floor, he found his son and Jones lying in the foyer.

“I identified myself as the father and I held my hands out,” he said.

According to the Tribune:

The Police Department did not say where the victims were standing when they were shot, but blood could be seen in the small vestibule and just inside Jones’ apartment. At least one bullet appeared to have traveled through Jones’ apartment, hitting at least two walls.

“He didn’t have a gun,” Cooksey told the paper. “He had a bat. One or two times would have brought him down.”

She added: “You call the police, you try to get help and you lose a loved one. What are they trained for? Just to kill? I thought that we were supposed to get service and protection. I mean, my son was an honor student. He’s here for Christmas break, and now I’ve lost him.”

LeGrier told the AP that his son was a student at Northern Illinois University, where he was majoring in electrical engineering technology. He described him as a whiz kid, the AP reported. He was a high school graduate of a prep school on the South Side of Chicago.

At a news conference on Sunday, LeGrier’s mother told reporters that her son was not violent or troubled.


“He ran a marathon last year for a charity,” Cooksey said.


Her son was shot in the buttocks, proving that he was turning away from officers when he was shot, she said.


“What happened to tasers?” she asked.

[Justice Department will investigate practices of Chicago police]

At the same press conference, friends and relatives of Jones said they were equally furious that police didn’t use a taser to deescalate the situation.

“Why you got to shoot first and ask questions later?” Jaqueline Walker, a childhood friend of Jones, asked before breaking into tears. “Don’t start shooting people — innocent people.”

A GoFundMe page has been created to raise money for Jones’s funeral.

Jones’s brother told the Tribune that his sister — a mother of four daughters and one son — lived with her boyfriend. Only a day earlier, he told the paper, a large group of relatives had gathered in the apartment to celebrate Christmas with food and card games.

“She had an excellent Christmas. Family was over,” Melvin Jones said. “And then to wake up to this.”
 

olly1969

Star
Registered
blacks are to passive, forget praying

stop buying shit, stop supporting the system that don't support you

VOTE FOR TRUMP then sit back and laugh
 

COINTELPRO

Transnational Member
Registered
Louisiana is a fucked up state with its high incarceration rate, let alone this police murder.
 

MASTERBAKER

༺ S❤️PER❤️ ᗰOD ༻
Super Moderator
He Will Not Be The Last.
Just Another N----r has die.
So What Are We Going to Do About It?





I'm not usually speechless. And while I'm not surprised that this has happened to another black man, I'm devastated for his children. We have to stop believing that this system can be fixed... When it's actually working just the way "they" want it to
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Woman streams aftermath of fatal officer-involved shooting




(CNN)As Philando Castile's head slumps backward while he lies dying next to her, Diamond Reynolds looks directly into the camera and explains that a Minnesota police officer just shot her fiancé four times.
The nation is, by now, accustomed to grainy cell phone videos of officer-involved shootings, but this footage from Falcon Heights, outside Minneapolis, is something different, more visceral: a woman live-streaming a shooting's aftermath with the police officer a few feet away, his gun still trained on her bloody fiancé.

"He let the officer know that he had a firearm and he was reaching for his wallet and the officer just shot him in his arm," Reynolds said as she broadcast the Wednesday evening shooting on Facebook.

Philando Castile, an African-American, was a school nutrition services supervisor who was popular among his colleagues and students, according to his employer.

He had been pulled over for a busted tail light, Reynolds explained on the Facebook video. He told the officer he was armed and had a concealed carry permit, she said. Her daughter, 4, is in the back seat.


As she speaks, Castile's wrists are crossed. Blood covers the bottom of his white T-shirt sleeve and a large area around his sternum and left rib cage. Perhaps in shock or agony, he peers emptily upward.

SOURCE: http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/07/us/falcon-heights-shooting-minnesota/

.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
"You Shot Four Bullets Into Him, Sir":
Girlfriend Livestreams Philando Castile’s Death by Police

 

muckraker10021

Superstar *****
BGOL Investor




http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/30/us/police-videos-race.html?_r=0

The Raw Videos That Have Sparked
Outrage Over Police Treatment of Blacks

By DAMIEN CAVE and ROCHELLE OLIVER UPDATED - JULY 6, 2016

Raw video has thoroughly shaken American policing. Grainy images of questionable police behavior, spread through social media, have led to nationwide protests, federal investigations and changes in policy and attitudes on race.

“A lot of white people are truly shocked by what these videos depict; I know very few African-Americans who are surprised,” said Paul D. Butler, a law professor at Georgetown University and a former prosecutor. “The videos are smoking-gun evidence,” he added, “both literally because they are very graphic, which generates outrage, and figuratively, because people believe their own eyes.”

These videos include graphic scenes of violence.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/30/us/police-videos-race.html?_r=0

__________________________________________________________________


Bronx Man Beaten & arrested by NYPD after asking female officer who searched him, why she searched him??
Her search of him came up with Nothing
http://abc7ny.com/news/exclusive-bronx-man-claims-police-brutality-caught-on-camera/296032/


<iframe width="476" height="267" src="http://abc7ny.com/video/embed/?pid=296032" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 
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QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Aren’t more white people than black people killed by police?
Yes,
but no.




imrs.php

Members of Black Lives Matter participate in the annual Martin Luther King Holiday Peace Walk and Parade in Washington, D.C. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Dylan Noble died on the last Saturday of June.

Police in Fresno, Calif., received a report of a man walking a downtown street with a rifle, but when they arrived, they instead found Noble speeding by in his pickup truck.

When they tried to pull him over, the 19-year-old led police to a nearby gas station and then exited his car.

“The driver then turned towards officers with one hand concealed behind his back, and told officers he hated his life,” the Fresno police department said in a statement. “As he continued to advance towards officers, an officer-involved shooting occurred.”

The department framed it as a “suicide by cop.” His family insisted that could not be the case, urged federal officials to investigate and demanded that video from the body cameras worn by both officers involved be released.

“I am outraged that the police would shoot my son and say that it is his fault,” Veronica Nelson, Noble’s mother, told reporters at a news conference not long after the shooting. “So please join me as I’m demanding justice for Dylan.”

Noble’s friends and family gathered for days at the gas station parking lot where he was killed — some waving Confederate flags and others chanting, “White lives matter.”

And soon, they were angry at their inability to garner more attention. At a time when dozens of police killings have prompted outrage, why hadn’t this one? Was it because Noble was white?

Many across the nation find themselves this week asking a similar question in the days since two recent police shootings of black men — in Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights, Minn. — have sparked nationwide protests:

Doesn’t the available data show more white Americans are being killed by police officers? Where is the outrage for them?

“If we have a shooting, we end up assuming that it had to be racial,” former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R) said Saturday during an interview with Fox News, in which he argued that national concerns about police killings of black men are overblown.

“When in fact, as we know … more white people have been shot by police officers this year than minorities,” he said.

Huckabee is not, factually, incorrect.

In 2015, The Washington Post launched a real-time database to track fatal police shootings, and the project continues this year. As of Sunday, 1,502 people have been shot and killed by on-duty police officers since Jan. 1, 2015. Of them, 732 were white, and 381 were black (and 382 were of another or unknown race).

But as data scientists and policing experts often note, comparing how many or how often white people are killed by police to how many or how often black people are killed by the police is statistically dubious unless you first adjust for population.

According to the most recent census data, there are nearly 160 million more white people in America than there are black people. White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers.

U.S. police officers have shot and killed the exact same number of unarmed white people as they have unarmed black people: 50 each. But because the white population is approximately five times larger than the black population, that means unarmed black Americans were five times as likely as unarmed white Americans to be shot and killed by a police officer.

Police have shot and killed a young black man (ages 18 to 29) — such as Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. —175 times since January 2015; 24 of them were unarmed. Over that same period, police have shot and killed 172 young white men, 18 of whom were unarmed. Once again, while in raw numbers there were similar totals of white and black victims, blacks were killed at rates disproportionate to their percentage of the U.S. population. Of all of the unarmed people shot and killed by police in 2015, 40 percent of them were black men, even though black men make up just 6 percent of the nation’s population.

And, when considering shootings confined within a single race, a black person shot and killed by police is more likely to have been unarmed than a white person. About 13 percent of all black people who have been fatally shot by police since January 2015 were unarmed, compared with 7 percent of all white people.

In response to these statistics, critics of police reform — often political conservatives and police unions — typically argue that the reason more black men and women are shot and killed by police is that black Americans commit more violent crime.

“There’s too much violence in the black community,” former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani said Sunday on CBS’s “Face The Nation.” “If you want to deal with this on the black side, you’ve got to teach your children to be respectful to the police, and you’ve got to teach your children that the real danger to them is not the police; the real danger to them, 99 out of 100 times, 9,900 out of 10,000 times, are other black kids who are going to kill them. That’s the way they’re gonna die.”

Giuliani: Black parents should teach children to respect police
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Responding to the wave of demonstrations across the country that have been triggered by recent police shootings of black men, Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said black parents should teach their children to be respectful to police. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani says the "real danger" black children face is not the police but "other black kids who are gonna kill them." (Reuters)
Responding to the wave of demonstrations across the country that have been triggered by recent police shootings of black men, Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said black parents should teach their children to be respectful to police. (Reuters)
As the New York Daily News noted: Giuliani is wrong about the so-called black-on-black crime rate. According to FBI numbers from 2014, about 90 percent of black homicide victims were killed by other black people. The “white-on-white” murder rate that same year — homicides in which a white person was killed by another white person — was 82 percent of all murders of white people.

[How Philando Castile’s killing changed the way blacks talk about traffic stops]

But it is true that a disproportionate amount of murders and other violent crimes are committed by black Americans.

Because detailed FBI data on crime can lag by several years, the most-cited statistics on this point refer to 2009 data. According to that data, out of all violent crimes in which someone was charged, black Americans were charged with 62 percent of robberies, 57 percent of murders and 45 percent of assaults in the country’s 75 biggest counties — despite the fact that black Americans made up just 15 percent of the population in those places.

“Such a concentration of criminal violence in minority communities means that officers will be disproportionately confronting armed and often resisting suspects in those communities, raising officers’ own risk of using lethal force,” wrote Heather Mac Donald, a conservative researcher, in a Wall Street Journal column headlined “The Myths of Black Lives Matter” that was originally published in February and re-published this weekend. The assertion that the black men and women killed by police are primarily violent criminals and the explanation for racial disparities in who gets killed by law enforcement is the premise of Mac Donald’s new book, “The War on Cops.
A 2015 study by a University of California at Davis researcher concluded there was “no relationship” between crime rates by race and racial bias in police killings. A report released last week by the Center for Policing Equity, which reviewed arrest and use-of-force data from 12 police departments, concluded that black residents were more often targeted for use of police force than white residents, even when adjusting for whether the person was a violent criminal.

“We’ve been hearing these arguments going around without any data or any evidence from folks who are saying that police are killing so many people — particularly black people — because they say black people are in high-crime communities and potentially involved in criminal activity,” Samuel Sinyangwe, a data analyst and activist with Campaign Zero — a policy-oriented activist collective associated with the Black Lives Matter protest movement — told the Huffington Post in December.

armed with a weapon and attempting to attack the officer or someone else.

But an independent analysis of The Post’sdata conducted by a team of criminal-justice researchers concluded that, when factoring in threat level, black Americans who are fatally shot by police are no more likely to be posing an imminent lethal threat to the officers at the moment they are killed than white Americans fatally shot by police.

[Study finds police fatally shoot unarmed black men at disproportionate rates]

The study also sought to answer whether officers were more likely to shoot and kill someone who is unarmed if the shooting happened to occur in a high-crime area. They concluded that is not the case.

“The only thing that was significant in predicting whether someone shot and killed by police was unarmed was whether or not they were black,” said Justin Nix, a criminal-justice researcher at the University of Louisville and one of the report’s authors, said in April. “Crime variables did not matter in terms of predicting whether the person killed was unarmed.”

“This just bolsters our confidence that there is some sort of implicit bias going on,” Nix said. “Officers are perceiving a greater threat when encountered by unarmed black citizens.”


The phrase Black Lives Matter first received national attention in summer 2014 and, since then, has become part of conversations on race in America. Here's how the phrase became a movement. The phrase Black Lives Matter got national attention in summer 2014. Here's how the phrase became a movement. (Claritza Jimenez, Julio Negron/The Washington Post)

The phrase Black Lives Matter first received national attention in summer 2014 and, since then, has become part of conversations on race in America. Here's how the phrase became a movement. (Claritza Jimenez,Julio Negron/The Washington Post)
Racial disparities in the rate of police shootings do not mean, though, that criminal-justice experts are not concerned about how many people are being killed by police officers — including white people.

Statistics kept by the FBI have never counted more than 460 police shootings in a single year. However, The Post’sdatabase chronicled 990 fatal police shootings in 2015, and 494 of those people were white.

Among them are several cases that drew national headlines. Two officers will face trial for the shooting of 6-year-old Jeremy Mardis, 2015’s youngest police-shooting victim. The family of Zachary Hammond, who was shot and killed by officers in Seneca, S.C., received a $2.15 million settlement.

[Inside small-town Louisiana feud that led to a 6-year-old boy’s police killing]

And the civil suit is still pending in the case of Deven Guilford, a white 17-year-old who was killed during a traffic stop. Guilford flashed his headlights on a snowy Michigan night in February 2015 to signal to an oncoming driver to turn off his high beams. The driver turned out to be an officer, who did a U-turn and pulled Guilford over. In a confrontation captured on several cameras the two argued, then fought.

Guilford voluntarily exited the car and lay on the ground when commanded — but he refused to set down his cellphone. Sheriff’s Department Sgt. Jonathan Frost shocked him with a stun gun. The video goes black. Then, the sound of gunshots.

“Deven went from flashing his lights to being dead six minutes later,” Hugh Davis, an attorney for Guilford’s family, told The Post in December. “And there is no explanation for it.”

[The Washington Post’s 2015 database of fatal police shootings]

In Fresno, Noble was at least the seventh person shot and killed by city police since 2015, and one of three white men (the other four were Hispanic men), according to The Post’sdatabase.

And cellphone video obtained by the Fresno Bee raises new questions about the police account of the shooting.

In the video, Noble can be seen lying on the ground next to his pickup truck as officers yell at him to keep his hands up. One officer fires one shot. Noble can be seen raising his arm and heard saying, “I’ve been shot.” Then another shot can be heard.

Late last, week the FBI said it would open an investigation.

Steven Rich contributed to this report, which has been updated.


Protests in Minnesota and D.C. after a black man was fatally shot during a traffic stop

DCMarch10C1468184413.jpg

Protesters gather in Falcon Heights, a St. Paul suburb, after the killing of 32-year-old Philando
Castile.




https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-by-police-yes-but-no/?utm_term=.39742cd86f02



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muckraker10021

Superstar *****
BGOL Investor


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Bryan Stevenson is a widely acclaimed public interest lawyer, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and the author of Just Mercy. He has spent his career advocating for the poor, the incarcerated, and the condemned, including successfully arguing several cases before the United States Supreme Court. Stevenson and his staff have won reversals, relief, or release for over 115 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row.

by BRYAN STEVENSON

Late one night several years ago, I was getting out of my car on an empty midtown Atlanta street when a man standing fifteen feet away pointed a gun at me and threatened to “blow my head off.” I had just moved to the neighborhood, which I didn’t consider to be a high-crime area. Panicked thoughts raced through my mind as the threat was repeated. I quickly realized that my first instinct to run was misguided and dangerous, so I fearfully raised my hands in helpless, terrifying submission to the barrel of a handgun. I tried to stay calm and begged the man not to shoot me, repeating over and over again, “It’s alright, it’s okay.”

As a young attorney working on criminal cases, I knew that my survival required careful, strategic thinking. I had to stay calm. I’d just returned home from my office with a car filled with legal papers, but I knew the man holding the gun wasn’t targeting me because he thought I was a young professional. A young, bearded black man dressed casually in jeans, I didn’t look like a lawyer with a Harvard Law School degree to most people; I just looked like a black man in America. I had spent much of my life in the church. I graduated from a Christian college and was steeped in Dr. King’s teachings of nonviolence, but none of that mattered to the Atlanta police officer threatening to kill me. To that officer, I looked like a criminal, dangerous and guilty.

People of color in the United States, particularly young black men, are burdened with a presumption of guilt and dangerousness. Some version of what happened to me has been unfairly experienced by hundreds of thousands of black and brown people throughout this country. As a consequence of our nation’s historical failure to address the legacy of racial inequality, the presumption of guilt and the racial narrative that created it have significantly shaped every institution in American society, especially our criminal justice system.

While the mainstream church has been largely silent or worse, our nation has rationalized racial injustice ever since we first ignored the claims and rights of Native people, who were subjected to genocide and forced displacement.

Millions of African people were brought to America in chains, enslaved by a narrative of racial difference that was crafted to justify captivity and domination. Involuntary servitude was banned by the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, but nothing was done to confront the ideology of white supremacy. Slavery didn’t end in 1865; it just evolved. Until the 1950s, thousands of black people were routinely lynched in acts of racial terror, often while many in the white community stood by and cheered. Throughout much of the twentieth century, African Americans were marginalized by racial segregation and silenced by humiliating Jim Crow laws that denied basic economic, social, and political rights.

The country made progress dismantling the most obvious forms of racial bigotry in the 1960s, but we refused to commit ourselves to a process of truth and reconciliation. Consequently, new forms of racial subordination have emerged. The complicity of the church continues to haunt us and undermine the credibility of too many faith leaders.

We are currently in an era of mass incarceration and excessive punishment in which the politics of fear and anger reinforce the narrative of racial difference. We imprison people of color at record levels by making up new crimes, which are disproportionately enforced against those who are black or brown. We are the nation with the highest rate of incarceration in the world, a phenomenon that is inexorably linked to our history of racial inequality.

The Justice Department projects that one in three black males born in the twenty-first century is expected to go to jail or prison at some point during his lifetime. Only in a country where we have learned to tolerate evidence of racial injustice would this be seen as something other than a national crisis.

That night in Atlanta, I was sitting in front of my apartment, in my parked, beat-up Honda Civic for ten or fifteen minutes listening to music after a long day of work. I had apparently attracted someone’s attention simply by sitting in the car too long, and the police were summoned.

Getting out of my car to explain to the police officer that this was my home and that everything was okay is what prompted him to pull his weapon and threaten to shoot me. Having drawn his weapon, the officer and his partner justified their overreaction by dramatizing their fears and suspicions about me. They threw me on the back of the vehicle, searched my car illegally, and kept me on the street for nearly fifteen humiliating minutes while neighbors got a look at the dangerous black man in their midst. When no crime could be discovered, I was told by the police officers to consider myself lucky. Although it was said as a taunt and threat, they were right: I was lucky; I survived. Sometimes the presumption of guilt results in young black men being killed.

From Ferguson, Missouri, to Charleston, South Carolina, communities are suffering the lethal consequences of our collective silence about racial injustice. The church should be a source of truth in a nation that has lost its way. As the dominant religion in the United States, Christianity is directly implicated when we Christians fail to speak more honestly about the legacy of racial inequality. Evangelicals, in particular, have much to overcome, given our tolerance of racial bias over the years.

This is a critically important time, when leaders of faith need to address issues of race more thoughtfully, prayerfully, and courageously. As the visionary and prophetic leader of Sojourners, Jim Wallis has been speaking truth to power for decades. This new work is timely, urgent, and necessary.

We expect too little of law enforcement officials when we fail to hold them accountable for the misjudgments represented by the shooting deaths of so many unarmed people of color. We expect too little of the church when we accept its silence in the face of these tragedies.

We expect too much of the poor and people of color, who have carried the burden of presumptive dangerousness for far too long. We expect too much of the marginalized and menaced when we ask them to stay calm and quiet in the face of persistent threats and abuse created by our history of racial inequality.

No historic presidential election, no athlete or entertainer’s success, no silent tolerance of one another is enough to create the truth and reconciliation needed to eliminate racial inequality or the presumption of guilt. We’re going to have to collectively acknowledge our failures at dealing with racial bias. People of faith are going to have to raise their voices and take action........


the above is from the book below


Original_Sin.jpg




 
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