This man runs into his own front yard to confront suspected burglars and is shot to death by the police without them even telling him to “freeze” or anything.  The cop is put on paid leave for killing a man in cold blood, while me and you would get fired for being late to work too many times. 

 

Calif. man killed by police in mistaken identity

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081029/ap_on_re_us/front_yard_fatality

We have been taught to never resist a police officer’s actions, to trust in their righteousness.  However these words ring hollow when you experience the oppression of a society and the brutality it employs against the oppressed to keep them down.  What this 13 year old did was extremely courageous, even if it is reckless.  If an officer came upon a rich woman with a bat he would assume there was good reason for it and find out how to best protect her and her family.  But in this case, he immediately cuffs her and attempts to arrest her; thus we have both of her sons fighting backagainst the officer.  These kids stood up to the entire police state which was in essence trying to kidnap their mother, and Malcolm-Che saluts them for that.

 

HARTFORD: Teen Assaults Officer; Three Arrested

http://www.courant.com/news/local/hc-copdigbrf1024.art5oct24,0,5164851.story

Anyone who has studied social movements in Chicago has read about vicious police brutality committed there.  The most notable example – for myself – was the slaughter of Black Panther Party leader Chairman Fred Hampton and his young bodyguard, but that is just one instance in a long and brutal history.  Bringing a police officer to justice anywhere in America is almost totally unheard of and we know that even when “justice” is served, its a slap on the wrist compared to what you and I might get for a similar crime.  Typical of the nature of these type of situations we have this story, where a police officer is being accused of a crime far after he has retired and got to enjoy the bulk of his life.  And what, after all these years is he being charged with?  Is it the torture he committed?  Nope, sorry people, the bourgeois statute of limitations is expired (I’m sure the prosecutors feel real bad about that).  The only scrap they can throw us now is perjury and obstruction of justice charges.  We still support this though and its nice that the news called this illicit activity by its rightful name:  TORTURE. 

Ex-Chicago policeman charged in torture case

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE49K6I020081021?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=10112

CHICAGO (Reuters) – U.S. authorities on Tuesday charged a policeman accused of torturing suspects with perjury and obstruction of justice for allegedly lying in a civil suit brought by one of the tortured men.

 

Former Chicago Police Lt. Jon Burge, 60, whose activities were once called to the attention of the United Nations, was arrested at his home near Tampa, Florida. He could face up to 45 years in prison if convicted of the three criminal counts.

 

Burge was acquitted of brutality in a Chicago trial 20 years ago, but was subsequently fired by the police department in 1993. He still receives a $30,000 annual police pension.

 

Special prosecutors appointed in 2002 documented more than 100 cases of brutality involving Burge and other police officers who worked on Chicago’s South Side. While prosecutors claimed several officers elicited confessions from mostly black suspects through torture, they said the statute of limitations had run out and no one was charged.

 

The suspects were beaten by mostly white detectives with telephone books, suffocated with plastic typewriter covers, burned with cigarettes, threatened with mock executions, and suffered electric shocks to their genitals.

 

“There is no place for torture and abuse in a police station. There is no place for perjury and false statements in federal lawsuits,” U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said. “No person is above the law, and nobody — even a suspected murderer — is beneath its protection. The alleged criminal conduct by defendant Burge goes to the core principles of our criminal justice system.”

 

In a federal indictment, Burge was accused of lying about his knowledge of the torture in a 2003 deposition for a civil suit brought by Madison Hobley.

 

The torture allegations led former Illinois Gov. George Ryan to pardon four men, including Hobley, who confessed to murder after being tortured. Ryan also cleared the state’s death row because of a pattern of faulty prosecutions.

 

While he was a Illinois state legislator, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama helped pass a state law requiring videotaping of police interrogations.

Victims’ attorneys presented information about the brutality case to a United Nations commission on human rights in 2005, which called on the U.S. government to investigate.

Another study done by a prestigious academic that could be filed in the “no shit, we already knew that” folder.  But suprise, suprise, the police chief thinks that the LAPD never engages in racial profiling.  He even has the nerve to say, “nobody investigates allegations of racial bias or racial profiling more aggressively than this department.”  You all might investigate them, that don’t mean you do shit about it other than bury anything that might upset people.  The fact that racial profiling is even defended in many parts of our society is a testament to the rampant racism that still exists in this country, but a denial that it exists is even more dangerous.  Malcolm told us that police are an occupying force in our communities, and how else could an occupying force be effective if it did not engage in over-handed techniques such as profiling, harassment, arrests, beatings, planting evidence, etc?  With unemployment skyrocketing, prisons will continue to be used to warehouse human beings which our economy has no place for.  What are the REAL unemployment figures in America when you count all the brothers and sisters locked up? 

Study finds LA police stop more blacks than whites

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081021/ap_on_re_us/racial_profiling

LOS ANGELES – A report by a civil liberties group has found that Los Angeles police officers are more likely to stop and search black and Hispanic residents than they are whites, even though whites are more often found carrying guns and contraband.

“The results of this study raise grave concerns that African-Americans and Hispanics are over-stopped, over-frisked, over-searched, and over-arrested,” said report author Ian Ayres, a Yale Law School economist and professor.

Ayres’ report, published Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, analyzed the Los Angeles Police Department’s own accounts of 810,000 pedestrian and motor vehicle stops in the year from July 2003 to June 2004.

Even after researchers controlled for demographics and neighborhood crime rates, they found significantly higher stop rates for black and Latino residents. For every 10,000 residents, blacks were nearly three times more likely to be stopped than white and other “non-minority” residents, facing 3,400 more stops. Hispanics were stopped on 350 more occasions.

Even though Ayres used the LAPD’s own data, his findings were at odds with an earlier analysis carried out for the department. The LAPD acknowledged racial disparities in some divisions but, after controlling for several variables, found “no consistent pattern of race effects.”

Ayres, however, said one officer stopped more than 100 blacks and 100 Hispanics but only one white. The professor did not include that officer in his analysis because it was an extreme situation and could skew results.

A summary of Ayres’ report states that during the past five years the LAPD has received nearly 1,200 citizen complaints alleging racial profiling, but the department hasn’t sustained a single one.

“Los Angeles officials have yet to acknowledge the scope of the problem of racially biased policing or to fully embrace solutions,” the summary stated.

Police Chief William Bratton said he disagrees strongly with the report’s findings and interpretation.

“This department does not engage in racial profiling, has not. We have significant safeguards built in to protect against that,” Bratton said Monday at a press conference. “Nobody investigates allegations of racial bias or racial profiling more aggressively than this department, this commission and this inspector general.”

Tim Sands, president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League union, strongly disputed the report’s findings and pointed out that the department mirrors the racial demographics of Los Angeles, with more Hispanic officers than white officers.

“Dr. Ayres is trying to manipulate existing data to prove what 9,700 individual officers are thinking when they make traffic stops — which is an exercise that might work on a spreadsheet at Yale, but doesn’t work on the streets of Los Angeles,” Sands said.

The district attorney insists race had nothing to do with McClelland’s death and police investigators are portraying the case as an apparent falling-out among friends.

But McClelland’s relatives and Paris civil rights leaders are less certain. Citing the violence done to McClelland’s body and reports that one of the alleged assailants, Shannon Finley, had white supremacist ties, they are demanding that Paris authorities investigate the case as a possible hate crime akin to the infamous 1998 lynching of James Byrd Jr., in Jasper, Texas, 250 miles south of here.

Byrd was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck by three white supremacists who were later convicted of murder. McClelland was walking in front of the pickup when Finley, 27, and a friend, Charles Ryan Crostley, 27, who was also arrested, allegedly ran him down and then dragged him 40 feet along the road until his mutilated body popped out from beneath the chassis, according to a police affidavit accompanying the warrant for Finley’s arrest.

“If you take somebody out to the country like that in the middle of the night and do that to him in that way, that’s how they do black people around here,” said Brenda Cherry, a local activist working with McClelland’s family. “To me, it smells like Jasper.”

Paris’ race relations came under withering national scrutiny last year after the Tribune reported the case of Shaquanda Cotton, a 14-year-old African-American youth who was sentenced by a local judge to up to seven years in a youth prison for shoving a hall monitor at her high school. Just three months earlier, the same judge had sentenced a 14-year-old white girl to probation after convicting her of the more serious crime of arson for burning down her family’s house.

The discrepancy in the treatment of the two teenagers provoked protests from national civil rights groups and led to Cotton’s early release from prison. Now McClelland’s family fears that Paris officials, eager to protect their city of 26,000 from another round of negative publicity over race relations, are purposefully downplaying potential racial overtones in McClelland’s murder.

“At the crime scene, it looked like these boys went back and poured beer on my son’s body,” said Jacqueline McClelland, Brandon’s mother. “Two beer cans were lying out there, but the police didn’t even pick them up, they just left evidence out there. They won’t even consider the racial issues. That’s the way it is in Paris.”

Even the editor of the local newspaper, normally an impassioned defender of Paris’ reputation, has cautioned law enforcement officials to be thorough and “leave no stone unturned” in their investigation.

“Hopefully, this community has learned from its past,” Mary Madewell wrote in the Paris News. “… Even if our worst fears prove to be true, let us realize that the actions of single individuals should in no way bring condemnation to an entire community.”

Family members and other critics are also concerned about the impartiality of Lamar County District Atty. Gary Young, who five years ago, before he was elected prosecutor, served as Finley’s court-appointed defense attorney when Finley pleaded guilty to manslaughter for shooting a friend to death.

Young has declined to state whether he will recuse himself and other prosecutors in his office from handling the McClelland case.

Although the victim in Finley’s 2003 manslaughter case was white, race played a role in the incident. Finley told police he was sitting in a pickup with his friend in a park when two gun-wielding black men supposedly walked up alongside and tried to rob them. Finley said he grabbed his friend’s handgun and fired at the robbers, but instead shot his friend.

An autopsy determined that the victim suffered three gunshot wounds to the head, but the district attorney at the time accepted Finley’s contention that the shooting was an accident and offered him a plea bargain on a reduced manslaughter charge. Finley served three years of a 4-year prison sentence. The alleged robbers were never found.

That manslaughter case also tied Finley and McClelland closely together. McClelland furnished a false alibi for Finley, testifying before a grand jury that Finley was with him at the time the shooting occurred. That lie under oath earned McClelland a conviction for aggravated perjury, for which he served two years in prison.

Largely because of that connection between McClelland and Finley, police discount the possibility that race played a part in McClelland’s death. “I don’t see how it was racial, being as how they were good friends,” said Stacy McNeal, the Texas Ranger who is the lead investigator on the case.

But McClelland’s relatives say they have heard that Finley fell in with white supremacists while in prison and that he had grown upset over Brandon’s overtures to a white girl–factors they say the police ought to investigate.

“I always told Brandon that Finley was bad news and he should stay away from him,” said Ervin Barry, a friend of McClelland’s. “But Brandon thought they were good friends.”

Race relations in Paris, Texas: An update

SHAQUANDA COTTON: The black high school freshman whose sentence of up to seven years in prison for shoving a school hall monitor drew national scrutiny to the town’s justice system was released from prison in March 2007. Now 17, she is studying for her GED certificate and hopes to attend junior college.

TASK FORCE: Citizens concerned about racial fissures in town exposed by the Cotton case convened a local Diversity Task Force, which has held several meetings and last month hosted a community-wide block party attended by several hundred residents.

INVESTIGATION: The U.S. Department of Education last month concluded a two-year investigation of allegedly discriminatory disciplinary policies in the Paris public schools. The agency said it found “insufficient evidence to support a conclusion” that black students were being disciplined more harshly than whites.

Here we have a very interesting story about people making ends meet.  Time and time again I’ve seen people resort to selling poison to make ends meet and it is sad.  But I don’t support demonizing these people.  Is the small amoung of crack sales that this youth committed equally as bad as the Wall Street traders who just ran our entire economy into the ground?  The judge says that in the quest for money this youth didn’t think about anyone else’s mom… what about the Wall Street people, what about the politicians that sent the youths to war on false pretenses? But in a society where we commonly blame the victim, we can only expect that this judge and this justice system would have no sympathy for this youth. 

He had best reasons for selling crack; judge is unswayed by tale or apology

http://www.newbritainherald.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=20158986&BRD=1641&PAG=461&dept_id=10109&rfi=6

Gregory Walker stood neatly dressed Thursday before New Britain Superior Court Judge Joan K. Alexander. He politely answered her questions and helped his mother, who used a cane, to walk to the podium to address the court.

He is the father of two daughters, ages 4 and 5. He’s never missed a child-support payment. He helps support his mother, attended college and earned compliments for being a good worker.

Despite his apparent success, the 24-year-old East Hartford man will spend the next four years in prison for selling crack cocaine in Rocky Hill because he said he wanted to supplement his income to meet his obligations.

Walker was on already on seven years’ probation for a narcotics sale conviction in 2004 – when he was 20 years old.

“You got a break and you made an agreement that you would knock off this behavior,” Alexander said. “By 2007, you sold enough drugs to get on the radar because police were able to set you up with a confidential informant. This isn’t stupid behavior, it’s calculated behavior.”

His attorney said he had put the 2004 arrest behind him and continued to go to work and college while supporting his children and his mother. But he was laid off in April 2007 and his mother had surgery that required nine weeks of hospitalization and rehabilitation. He had to take care of the family, including a 15-year-old sister.

He had no other problems with the law until he became known as “Greg,” the guy who was bringing crack to Rocky Hill.

“He did a stupid thing,” his attorney told the court minutes before his sentencing. “He sold narcotics to make up for the income lost with his mother’s surgery. He’s never denied he sold the drugs. He’s willing to take the consequences of his actions.”

A warrant for his arrest, obtained by the Mid-State Narcotics Task Force – made up of officers from Rocky Hill, Wethersfield, Newington, Berlin and Cromwell – said he sold crack cocaine twice to an informant in the summer of 2007.

He pleaded guilty to a charge of possession with intent to sell narcotics and to a charge of violation of probation. His mother was hoping he’d be spared jail yet again. “He was the kid the neighbors called to shovel their snow and rake their leaves,” she told the court. “He has a heart of gold.”

During his sentencing, Walker apologized to the judge and his family. “I’m deeply sorry for my actions, I’m sorry I wasted your time,” he said to Alexander. “And I’m sorry I brought shame on my family.”

“What’s truly shameful about your conduct is that you’re not an addict trying to make your next score,” Alexander said. “You did it for money. It’s a real waste that you decided to help your family this way. This time you won’t receive a suspended sentence.”

She gave him four years in prison with four years of special parole for the narcotics charge and a three-year sentence for violation of probation, to be served concurrently.

“Did you think about the families of the people you sold to who have to deal with drug addiction?” she said. “You sought to help your own family, but didn’t care about anyone else’s.”

This is pretty unsympathtic towards the peace effort but it does have some good parts: 

Believe it or not: Gang peace effort continues, amid hope and skepticism

http://www.news-record.com/content/2008/10/03/article/believe_it_or_not_gang_peace_effort_continues_amid_hope_and_skepticism

It was well past midnight three Saturdays ago on High Point Road. A car slipped alongside mine as I idled at a red light, its windows tinted too darkly to see inside.

One intersection later the car had changed lanes from my right to my left. Again, we idled side-by-side at a red light.

Suddenly, the front passenger door opened and a slender young man stepped outside. He looked at me, his cornrows dangling. Then he formed a mock pistol with his right hand, pointed it my way and pretended to shoot.

He smiled and returned to his car.

I don’t know what it meant — a prank, a threat, a ritual? But whatever the intent, it was unnerving.

My first thought, rightly or wrongly, was that this could be gang-related. When the car door had opened, I could see several other young men inside. But it just as well could have been a carload of bored teenagers.

The incident came to mind, eight days later, as I attended a community meeting at St. James Baptist Church, about the ongoing push for a truce among gangs. At least a dozen members of the Latin Kings were there, including their state leader, Jorge Cornell. They wore yellow T-shirts with black lettering, some with matching hats and bandanas. One of the young men held a cooing toddler against his chest.

They were joined by an unlikely audience of about 100 in the pews, mostly African American folks, the kinds you’d see at St. James on a typical Sunday morning. Some were aunts, uncles and grandparents with neatly trimmed, gray-flecked hair. Others were teens who appeared to be ninth- or 10th-graders.

They listened quietly as Latin King members, and a group of black ministers, made their case for peace.

Cornell seemed to be recovering well from a pair of gunshot wounds he suffered in August. No one knows who shot him or why. But he has maintained his earlier call for gangs to lay down arms against one another. Even if it turns out a rival gang member shot him.

The primary thrust of the meeting, which consisted mainly of recorded video interviews with gang members, was that some Greensboro police officers are using heavy-handed tactics to intimidate gang members. One Latin King said an officer had told him he hoped Cornell would die from his gunshot wounds. Others cited rough treatment by police, harassment and being jailed on flimsy charges when they hadn’t broken the law.

Police Chief Tim Bellamy disputes those allegations, although there have been several meetings to discuss them. But Capt. John E. Wolfe, whose command includes the gang unit, said Thursday that the squad has, in fact, “targeted” the Latin Kings “based on intelligence.” “I would love to believe Jorge and I’d like to support him,” Wolfe said. “But you’ve got to give me some tangible evidence that you are going to do what you say you are going to do. I cannot put my trust in him at the expense of the safety of the public.”

For its part, the audience at St. James seemed more willing to give the Latin Kings the benefit of the doubt.

And Cornell repeated his intent to stage a graffiti clean-up day among different gangs. Bellamy, by the way, said he would welcome such a gesture and suggested that the gangs team with the Greensboro Merchants Association, when it holds its next clean-up day.

Some of the Latin Kings also said they were looking for jobs and would appreciate help finding them. Others said the gang’s origins were community empowerment, not crime and violence.

One fiftysomething man stood and asked, “How do I join?”

Everyone laughed.

A woman stood and thanked the Latin Kings for offering “another side of the story.” But if she saw gang members loitering near properties she managed, she said, “I will call the police.” The audience chuckled again.

As for me, I don’t know what to think, especially in light of the conflicting accounts of police and gang members. But, like anyone else, I want to feel safe in my hometown, on High Point Road or anywhere else.

And if other gang members buy into the peace plan, why haven’t any of their leaders spoken up?

Then again, it shouldn’t flatter the rest of us that the most resonant call for closer ties between Latinos and African Americans locally has come from a gang leader.

After the program, Cornell talked to a man who was struggling to find a job. The man, one of a handful of white audience members, let slip an F-bomb while expressing his frustration. Cornell winced, his eyes glancing upward at the sanctuary’s ceiling.

“Hey, man,” he reminded softly, “you’re in a church.”

Some of you might remember Aqeela from the American Gangster episode (from BET) about Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams.  Both of these activists are doing great work to promote peace among “gangs.” Note that the name of their organization conjures up Malcolm and that Aqeela is a former revolutionary black nationalist. 

Rival Gang Members Join Together in Peace

http://www.independent.com/news/2008/oct/02/rival-gang-members-join-together-peace/

Thursday, October 2, 2008