The Chase

I will be gone for the next few days attending the Newport Jazz Festival and with that I rarely read or follow news as it is harder and harder to find an actual physical copy of a New York Times and with that I simply just headline read to see if there is an issue of import I should read when I get back to the hotel and can sit on my Ipad to do so. But with that I am also better off as I often want to discuss what I have read and since few if any people actually read anything, let alone newspapers, it enables me to find less to talk about and less inclined to talk at all. I wrote about the strange encounters with the couples in Saratoga Springs, which only confirmed what I had long known, MAGA people are white, educated, professionals and they are afraid of “others” taking what they have earned and in turn be “given” what they were not. So this is about self interest and self preservation and with that it is seeded in two factors – Racism and Elitism. So as they drive off in their Mercedes which they are paying for via credit that also discriminates, they will never have to worry about the traffic stop and being found dead by the side of the road. I can assure you I used to drive a Mercedes, was stopped in Arizona and the State Police Officer, a woman, threatened to shoot my dog who was barking and afraid as stepped out of the vehicle to make it so there was no risk to Emma. Emma was not outside of the car she was fine in the back seat just doing what dogs do but this woman wanted me to be complacent and afraid, it worked. I sat down on the road and begged her to not do this leading the other Officer to intervene and proceed with the infraction portion of the ticket. Which I never paid and never heard a thing from the Arizona State Police again. Nor ever will ever go back there. They can fuck themselves. But my encounters with Police to this day are still highly charged and in turn things I go out of my way to avoid. Even if I saw a crime committed I am not engaging or getting involved, I fear the Police more. They too can go fuck themselves.

So with that I leave you with this article from the Guardian with regards to the majority of Police Shootings and how they end up with the stats that show 1 out of 3 end up dead in such a similar encounter and that they were fleeing from the scene. I cannot understand that mentality as I could not nor would not in any encounter as I could not outrun a cop, let alone a gun and I have never felt compelled to do so. Lay prone in the street, fall down on hands and knees begging yes, but run no. That said, it does not excuse the slime bag Police from shooting and killing these individuals. I have again no respect for this profession as again I point to Uvalde or to the Highland Park shooter stopped in traffic, the Buffalo shooter or in fact Parkland who was also stopped by Police in a parking lot. Bitch please had these boys been not white, the outcome would have been very different.

‘Hunted’: one in three people killed by US police were fleeing, data reveals

In many cases, the encounters started as traffic stops or there were no allegations of violence or serious crimes

Sam Levin in Los Angeles The Guardian 28 Jul 2022

Nearly one third of people killed by US police since 2015 were running away, driving off or attempting to flee when the officer fatally shot or used lethal force against them, data rev

In the past seven years, police in America have killed more than 2,500 people who were fleeing, and those numbers have slightly increased in recent years, amounting to an average of roughly one killing a day of someone running or trying to escape, according to Mapping Police Violence, a research group that tracks lethal force cases.

In many cases, the encounters started as traffic stops, or there were no allegations of violence or serious crimes prompting police contact. Some were shot in the back while running and others were passengers in fleeing cars.

Two recent cases have sparked national outrage and protests. In Akron, Ohio, on 27 June, officers fired dozens of rounds at Jayland Walker, who was unarmed and running when he was killed. And last week, an officer in San Bernardino, California, exited an unmarked car and immediately fired at Robert Adams as he ran in the opposite direction.

Despite a decades-long push to hold officers accountable for killing civilians, prosecution remains exceedingly rare, the data shows. Of the 2,500 people killed while fleeing since 2015, only 50 or 2% have resulted in criminal charges. The majority of those charges were either dismissed or resulted in acquittals. Only nine officers were convicted, representing 0.35% of cases.

The data, advocates and experts say, highlights how the US legal system allows officers to kill with impunity and how reform efforts have not addressed fundamental flaws in police departments.

“In 2014 and 2015, at the beginning of this national conversation about racism in policing, the idea was, ‘There are bad apples in police departments, and if we just charged or fired those particularly bad officers, we could save lives and stop police violence,’” said Samuel Sinyangwe, data scientist and policy analyst who founded Mapping Police Violence, but “this data shows that this is much bigger than any individual officer.”

‘Hunted down’

US police kill more people in days than many countries do in years, with roughly 1,100 fatalities a year since 2013. The numbers haven’t changed since the start of the Black Lives Matter movement, and they haven’t budged since George Floyd’s murder inspired international protests in 2020.

People in Newark, New Jersey, march demanding justice for Jayland Walker in July 2022. Photograph: Michael M Santiago/Getty Images

The law has for years allowed police to kill civilians in a wide variety of circumstances. In 1985, the US supreme court ruled that officers can only use lethal force against a fleeing person if they reasonably believed that person was an imminent threat. But the court later said that an officer’s state of mind and fear in the moment was relevant to determining whether the shooting was warranted. That means a killing could be considered justified if the officer claimed he feared the person was armed or saw them gesturing toward their waistband – even if it turned out the victim was unarmed and the threat was nonexistent.

As a result, very few police officers get charged. Adante Pointer, a civil rights lawyer, said it was not hard for officers to prevail when the case boiled down to what was going through the minds of the officer and victim in the moment: “The only person left to tell the story is the cop.”

In 2022 through mid-July, officers have killed 633 people, including 202 who were fleeing. In 2021, 368 victims were fleeing (32% of all killings); in 2020, 380 were fleeing (33%); and in 2019, 325 were fleeing (30%), according to Mapping Police Violence. The data is based on media reports of people who were trying to escape when they were killed, and it is considered incomplete. In roughly 10% to 20% of all cases each year, the circumstances surrounding the shootings are unclear.

Black Americans are disproportionately affected, making up 32% of individuals killed by police while fleeing, but only accounting for 13% of the US population. Black victims were even more overrepresented in cases involving people fleeing on foot, making up 35% to 54% of those fatalities

“If a person is running away, there is no reason to chase them, hunt them down like an animal and shoot and kill them,” said Paula McGowan, whose son, Ronell Foster, was killed while fleeing in Vallejo, California, in February 2018. The officer, Ryan McMahon, said he was trying to stop Foster, a 33-year-old father of two, because he was riding his bike without a light. Within roughly one minute of trying to stop him, the officer engaged in a struggle and shot Foster in the back of the head. Officials later claimed that the unarmed man had grabbed his flashlight and presented it “in a threatening manner”.

“These officers are too amped up and ready to shoot,” said McGowan, who for years advocated that the officer be fired and prosecuted. Instead, the officer went on to shoot another Black man, Willie McCoy, one year later; he was one of six officers who fatally shot the 20-year-old who had been sleeping in his car. The officer was terminated in 2020 – not for killing McCoy or Foster, but because the department said he put other officers in danger during the shooting of McCoy.

The city paid Foster’s family $5.7m in a civil settlement in 2020, but did not admit wrongdoing. A lawyer for McMahon previously said the officer was attempting to “simply talk to Mr Foster” when he fled, adding that McMahon “believed his actions were reasonable under the circumstances”.Vallejo police did not respond to a request for comment.

“Not only do these officers get away with it, they get to move on to bigger and better jobs while we’re left shattered and are still trying to pick up the pieces,” said Miguel Minjares, whose niece, 16-year-old Elena “Ebbie” Mondragon, was killed by Fremont, California, police.

Elena “Ebbie” Mondragon was killed by Fremont police in March 2017. Photograph: courtesy of Miguel Minjares

In March 2017, undercover officers fired at a car that was fleeing, striking Mondragon, who was a passenger and pregnant at the time. The officers faced no criminal consequences. One sergeant went on to work as a sniper for the department, though has since retired, and another involved in the operation continued working as a training officer, records show.

“You shoot into a moving car, which you shouldn’t have done, and you weren’t even close to hitting the person you were trying to target. And now you’re a sniper?” said Minjares. “When I hear sniper, I think of precision. It boggles my mind. It shows the entitlement of officers and the police department, they just put people where they want them, it doesn’t matter what they did. It’s confusing and it’s heart wrenching.”

In June, five years after the killing, the family won $21m in a civil trial, but it’s unclear if Fremont has changed any of its policies or practices.

A Fremont spokesperson declined to comment on the Mondragon case and did not respond to questions about its policies.

The push to prevent the killings

In the rare cases when prosecutors do file criminal charges against police who killed fleeing people, the process often takes years and typically concludes with victory for the officer, either with judges or prosecutors themselves dismissing the charges or jury acquittals.

Robert Adams, 23, was fatally shot by police as he ran away Photograph: Courtesy of family

In one Florida case where an officer was investigating a shoplifting and fatally shot a man fleeing in a van, prosecutors filed charges and then dropped the case a week later, saying that after a review of evidence, it “became apparent it would be incredibly difficult to obtain a conviction”. In a Hawaii case where officers killed a 16-year-old in a car, a judge last year rejected all charges and prevented the case from going to trial.

For the nine fleeing cases where officers were found guilty or signed a plea deal, the conviction and sentence were much lighter than typical homicides. A Georgia officer who killed an unarmed man fleeing on foot was acquitted of manslaughter in 2019, for example, but found guilty of violating his oath and given one year in prison. A San Diego sheriff’s deputy pleaded guilty earlier this year to voluntary manslaughter after he killed a fleeing man, but he avoided state prison, instead getting one year in jail. And a Tennessee deputy, found guilty of criminally negligent homicide after shooting at a fleeing car and killing the passenger, a 20-year-old woman, was sentenced to community service.

Not only do these officers get away with it, they get to move on to bigger and better jobs while we’re left shattered and are still trying to pick up the pieces.

Miguel Minjares

With the criminal system deeming nearly all of these killings lawful, advocates have argued that cities should reduce the unnecessary police encounters that can turn deadly, such as ending traffic stops for minor violations and removing police from mental health calls. There’s also been a growing effort to ban officers from shooting at moving cars.

California passed a major law in 2019 meant to restrict use of deadly force to cases when it was “necessary” to defend human life, not just “reasonable”, and stating that an officer can only kill a fleeing person if they believe that person is going to imminently harm someone. The new law also dictated that prosecutors must consider the officer’s actions leading up to the killing, which police groups had arguedwere irrelevant under the previous standards.

But after its passage, police departments across the state refused to comply and update their policies, said Adrienna Wong, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of southern California, which backed the bill. That’s only now starting to change after years of legal disputes.

“I think we’re going to start to see prosecutors consider all the elements of the new law, but I’m frankly not holding my breath based on the track record of prosecutors in the state. We never thought this law was going to be a full solution.”

Assault on Voting

Well, we can firmly without issue say “Republicans hate Black people.” There is no way to couch or alter that belief and their never-ending assault on voting rights that have taken place of late to undo 56 years of history since the Voting Rights was signed into law proves it. The assault began in earnest once Barack Obama was elected into office in 2008. By 2013 the Supreme Court began to disassemble the act with the idea that times have changed and therefore aspects of the law are no longer needed. In the decision, Chief White Supremacist, Justice Robert’s wrote for the majority:

“Our country has changed, While any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.”

Well guess we can say, hmm no, wrong there. I guess the Black people shot by the Police might have something to say about that. The inordinate amount of Black people imprisoned, many for minor victimless crimes, and many for ones they never committed, and in turn lose their voting rights might feel different about that. And even Florida that was one of the first states to allow restoration of said rights, then immediately put in a hurdle, higher than the wall Trump wanted to build on the border, to make it possible. So that worked out well – for whom – Republicans.

Where are we with regards to the current crop of bills and laws to circumvent voting rights in America?

Georgia – the new Jim Crow

Texas – they do it bigger

Michigan – home of 25 white supremacist groups. Nothing stopping them to do what they gotta to do, intimidate voters and try to kidnap the Governor.

Pennsylvania – the home where Democracy began.

New Hampshire – guess they wont be treading on any white voters

Missouri – is sure showing me they hate Black people.

Mississippi – beat them to the ballot box first

Indiana – home of the Mike Pence project – ensuring white men stay in power also moves into voter restrictions.

And here in New Jersey there was an attempt to stop the movement towards expanding voting access.. and yet Kentucky beat us to it.

And Virginia once the Confederate bastion also moved forward in extending voting rights.

And only 12 states have made it easier to vote which means if you are poor, if you are Black, Brown or a Student, new resident, a former felon, you are not going to be able to exercise your right to vote as stated by the Constitution that Republicans seem to think is their equivalent to Mormon magical underwear and that they can channel the thoughts on the founding Fathers intent and dismiss any Amendments as well superfluous; the same way Fundamentalist’s view the New Testament, as an addendum to be disregarded when contradictions to the laws of the old are challenged.

Scary isn’t it? I am listening to varying “alt” churches ministries and preaching online and it is just that, the demonstration that whatever is new is wrong and whatever exists as an alternative to practice one’s faith, one’s beliefs or just life outside of their church and their teachings are wrong and therefore bad, to be condemned to hell. You can see why many of them take to Q as the leader of their delusions and then act upon them as they are afraid and ignorant. And they vote. And to keep the minority ruling over the majority the only way to do so is to prevent voter access and availability. Those two are the keys to economic equality and racial parity. And with the Republicans so hell bent on that I can conclude one thing: REPUBLICANS HATE BLACK PEOPLE.

Here is where we are with regards to the Federal plan to restore voting rights – House yes and the Senate is the death chamber of American Democracy. And we can thank the one white member of said Chamber, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky for ensuring White Power. Funny or ironic isn’t it when you see what Kentucky just did. Stand up, rise up for all those who have died by guns held in the hands wearing blue uniforms. This is for Breonna Taylor, a Louisville Resident who should be alive now to cast her vote in a free Democracy.

Didn’t Get the Memo

I have been only reading the daily reports on the Chauvin trial, I truly do not need to see the footage, the photo or hear endless recaps of what ostensibly has become a snuff film. The man was killed on the street at the knee of an officer who restrained him in a technique that has contributed to numerous deaths in the past and regardless of their health or drug use this is abuse regardless. And I never want to hear the expression “take a knee” again as that only serves to bring that image up and not the one Colin Kaepernick intended as an act of protest. Let’s go back to raise a fist that came of age in the Mexico Olympics in 1968 to show a gesture of protest and unanimity.

And with that one would think that Police across the country would at least attempt to show some attempt at a new kind of restraint, and try to lessen their need to pull out guns and other tools to demonstrate their power and position in society. Given that the Chauvin trial for the first time has demonstrated that the Thin Blue Line is now fracturing, I am sure the dog whistle is out on what to do in encounters with Black suspects. I would say pull out their dicks but today brings a new element to the debate – how women police. Well it appears they do the same as the male. We saw this in Texas last year when a Police Officer went to the wrong apartment and went ballistic thinking a black man was in her home. And we have some women Officers who have also used guns to shoot suspects as they have an inability to wrestle some suspect down to the ground and shove their knee into the windpipe of a suspect. So tase away or shoot whatever that works there lady. And in of all place Minneapolis a woman Cop did just that. She “thought” it was her taser but whoops it was her gun. And now Duante Wright is dead. They will blame that he crashed his car after driving off, after he was shot, so that is why he died. See how that works there?

Oh that taser thing was what led to the death of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta at Wendy’s where he was sleeping off his drunk; but when he took the Taster and took off running, I mean shit that could do what to whom where and when? Well nowhere as it was now out of commission but fuck it, that asshole needs to die! I get that way over the last piece of pizza so I get it, I really do. The Officers were fired and are pending trial. I am sure that the drunk thing, then running off with a stolen taser will be the defense, trust me it is always the victim’s fault. I get it, I really do.

And then we have the Cop in Virginia who went all mental head case over a young Reservist, Caron Nazario, temporary tags that he could not see on the vehicle he was driving, and because the man is of mixed race he did what we should all do really, drive to a well-lit area a couple of miles up the road to a gas station. Fuck this if a Cop is going to pull me over I am going to drive 5 miles an hour to the nearest Police Station to get cited. Again this was not a high-speed chase it was for safety and security, irony even for the Cop. But fuck that fuckers we are not having it. That was one video that I threw up my coffee watching. The Reservist had the sense to tape the encounter but the dash and body cams were actually running and this was as if I watching a bad Bruce Willis movie. Pepper sprayed then forced down to the ground with the threat of the electric chair. Okay, overreact much? Well with Duante it was for those absurd air fresheners that hang from the rearview mirror and then when she ran the plates there was the outstanding warrant and from that point on it was game on and guns out. A young kid with his girlfriend in the car is the next Bonnie and Clyde, only black. But then if you ever look at the photos of that scene you can see Cops love guns and love shooting the shit out of people. Just now they do it to more Black/Brown people. Times change.

And yes we can say that Police do have dangerous jobs and a recent shooting death OF a cop during a traffic stop in New Mexico demonstrates how highly charged these encounters can get; however, they are not as common place as one believes. If you are curious as to how many Officers are killed annually, the FBI keeps that data. They don’t with regards to civilian casualties. IN 2019 48 were killed. In 2019 civilians were killed at much higher rates as according to the Washington Post who have been accumulating that data for the last few years and it was holding at 1,000 with 985 last year. Wow, just wow.

Yeah I don’t like Police and I don’t want to have anything to do with them. But they can be trained and educated and in turn work to get guns off the street and in turn that will end the overall violence that has enabled if not permitted them to go into these encounters with guns up. Let’s raise arms, just not those kind.

Trial By Force

The idea that a Police Officer is being tried for murder of an individual who was either under arrest or identified as a suspect is a rare occasion and even rarer – a conviction. This goes back to Rodney King and even earlier when in the 60s during Lady Bird Johnson’s visit to San Francisco, a young black youth in Hunter’s Point that led to riots never led to any investigation into Police violence regarding the death Matthew Johnson, Jr. And that story has been pushed into a multitude of others at the time over the same issues that continue to this day, so what has changed? Well this. But Radley Balko who has written on the subject for decades is less optimistic about what the outcome will mean overall and there is this essay below that also weighs in on the subject.

When police kill people, they are rarely prosecuted and hard to convict

The Washington Post Mark Berman April 4 2021

The footage has played multiple times inside the downtown Minneapolis courtroom where Derek Chauvin is on trial for murder, showing George Floyd, a Black man, gasping for air under the White police officers knee.

That video is the centerpiece of the case against Chauvin, which prosecutors emphasized by urging jurors to “believe your eyes.”

But prosecutors face a steep legal challenge in winning a conviction against a police officer. Despite nationwide protests, police are rarely charged when they kill someone on duty. And even when they are, winning convictions is often difficult.

Between 2005 and 2015, more than 1,400 officers were arrested for a violence-related crime committed on duty, according to data tracked by Philip M. Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green State University. In 187 of those cases, victims were fatally injured in shootings or from other causes. The officers charged represent a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of police officers working for about 18,000 departments nationwide.

Police charged with committing violent crimes while on duty were convicted more than half the time during that period. In the most serious cases — those involving murder or manslaughter — the conviction rate was lower, hovering around 50 percent.

Chauvin’s case is different from many of the most high-profile police prosecutions in recent memory, in part because it centers on an officer who never fired his gun, experts say.

There are a few reasons it is hard to convict a police officer, according to legal experts and attorneys who have worked on such trials: Police have considerable leeway to use force, can cite their training and are typically trusted by juries and judges.

“The law favors the police, the law as it exists,” said David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert in policing.

“Most people, I think, believe that it’s a slam dunk,” Harris said of the case against Chauvin. But he said, “the reality of the law and the legal system is, it’s just not.”

Attorneys who have worked both sides of these cases say they invite heightened scrutiny and raise a host of issues about the authority police have, the force they are allowed to use and the dangers they could confront on the job.

“It’s fundamentally different than handling any other kind of case,” said Neil J. Bruntrager, a St. Louis-based attorney who has represented officers in high-profile cases.

A key element that experts say factors into many of the cases is the Supreme Court’s 1989 Graham v. Connor decision, which found that an officer’s actions must be judged against what a reasonable officer would do in the same situation.

“A police officer can use force, but it has to be justifiable,” Bruntrager said. “And what the Supreme Court has told us is we have to see it through the eyes of the police.”

Officers charged in fatal shootings

According to the Police Crime Database, 130 officers have been charged in a fatal shooting between 2005 and February 2021. About 46 percent of officers whose cases have been adjudicated have been convicted.

Chauvin’s case is unlike thosein key ways, experts say. “It’ll be much harder … for Mr. Chauvin to claim the usual justification of self-defense than it is when there are shooting deaths,” said Kate Levine, a professor at Cardozo Law. “It’s very hard for him to say, ‘I was in fear for my life when I knelt on this man’s neck.’ ”

When police shoot and kill someone, the officers’ descriptions of what they saw and felt — and accounts of the danger facing them or someone else — can be a major part of the defense, experts say.

“In many of the shooting cases, the officer will say, ‘I perceived a threat in the form of reaching for a gun, or an aggressive move towards me,’ ” said Rachel Harmon, a law professor at the University of Virginia. “It is difficult for the state to disprove the perception of that threat.”

In this case, Harmon said, “there’s not the same kind of ability to claim a perception of a threat.”

Chauvin’s attorney argued in his opening statement that the officers charged in Floyd’s death felt the “growing crowd” at the scene was threatening. But Chauvin’s core defense, as presented in legal filings and his attorney’s remarks in court, appears focused on something else: making a case that he didn’t actually kill Floyd.https://e7a44a9ff57a8c9a8deafd8753241cbf.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Debates over causation have come up in other cases not involving gunfire, including when people die behind bars or after being stunned by Tasers, said Craig B. Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor and director of the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project. In those cases, he said, the argument is often made that “other contributing factors,” such as drugs in someone’s system, played a role.

The invocations of Floyd’s drug use in Chauvin’s trial also echo previous cases in another way, Futterman said.

“One of the standard strategies in the playbook that I’ve seen, when police officers are accused of misconduct, are charged with killing someone, is putting the victim and the victim’s character on trial,” he said.

But it’s unclear how that might play out in an evolving environment, in which attitudes on how police use force have changed, Harmon said.

“One of the things that’s really shifted in the public debate over use of force is that many people think that there’s too much force even against people who committed crimes, and may use drugs, and may have problems in their lives,” Harmon said. “The public tolerance for the argument that the victim of misconduct or victim of police use of force has done something wrong is less broad than it once was.”

Another key shift observers said may impact these cases going forward is the changing way people mayview police officers.

Juries have typically been inclined to trust officers, who come to court with no criminal record and experience testifying, experts and attorneys said. But, they said, recent years might have chipped away at that, due to repeated viral videos of police shootings and other uses of force.

“It’s not an easy place to be in a position where you’re defending police officers who are charged these days,” said Bruntrager, the defense attorney, who represented former officer Jason Stockley in St. Louis and former officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Mo.

Wilson’s fatal shooting of Michael Brown, a Black 18-year-old, fueled widespread unrest in 2014 and helped lead to a years-long nationwide focus on how police use force. Before then, Bruntrager said, if police “had any kind of credible defense, people wanted to believe that … police were following the law.”

“Now it is the reverse,” he said. “Now it is a situation where you start out with the idea where people believe police officers are violating the trust.”

But prosecutors still worry about convincing juries to convict on the most serious charges.

When Joseph McMahon, the former Kane County state’s attorney in Illinois, was preparing to try a Chicago police officer for murder, his team contacted other prosecutors who had charged officers — often unsuccessfully.

These prosecutors had spoken to the juries after their cases. Again and again, McMahon said, they reported hearing the same message about the officers from jurors: “‘We were convinced what he did was wrong. But we weren’t convinced what he did was murder.’”

McMahon and his team were preparing a case against Jason Van Dyke, who fatally shot Laquan McDonald, a Black 17-year-old. Video footage of the shooting, which showed the officer firing 16 shots at the teenager, set off intense unrest when it was released in 2015. Van Dyke was charged with murder the same day the video was released.

After speaking to other prosecutors who said jurors in their cases could not bring themselves to convict the officers of murder, McMahon said he had Van Dyke charged with another 16 counts of aggravated battery, one for each gunshot.

“I didn’t want my jury to be faced with an all or nothing decision,” said McMahon, who was named special prosecutor in the case.

If the only option facing jurors involved the word “murder” in it, McMahon said, he was worried one or two jurors might be unwilling to sign off on it. Jurors get instructions about the legal definitions of specific crimes, he said, but people might still walk in with preconceived notions of what murder is and not think an officer’s actions fit the bill.

It wound up being unnecessary, he said. The jury convicted Van Dyke on all counts in 2018, including second-degree murder.

Chauvin, who was fired after Floyd’s death, is charged with second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in Floyd’s death, and the judge in the case reinstated a third-degree murder charge during jury selection.

Attorneys representing police in controversial use-of-force cases have defended them by saying that they can use force and often have to make split-second decisions in tense, potentially dangerous moments.

Police officers are only human and can get “scared like everyone else” during stressful situations, said Dan Herbert, the Chicago attorney who represented Van Dyke. “The fact of the matter is that the law recognizes that police are allowed to use force, including deadly force, in a number of situations,” he said.

Herbert said it is “probably naive” for the defense in Chauvin’s case to hope it can convince a dozen jurors to vote to acquit.

Instead, Herbert said, Chauvin’s defense will likely aim to “pick off one or two of those jurors and possibly hang the case” by having the jury deadlock. The defense’s best chance heading into the trial, he said, was likely its attempt to break the chain of causation and argue Chauvin didn’t actually kill Floyd.

Prosecutors sought to combat the defense’s claims of an overdose by having Floyd’s girlfriend testify about his struggles with substance abuse, a testimony aimed at establishing his tolerance for opioids.

The defense’s argument on that front could potentially appeal to someone inclined to blame Floyd, rather than the police, for what happened, said Harris, the law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Chauvin’s team doesn’t have much else to work with, he added.

But while the prosecution must convince every juror to vote to convict him, the defense just needs “one juror who feels a little funny about convicting a police officer,” Harris said.

“You have the law leaning in the direction of, give police the benefit of the doubt,” he said. “That seems a difficult thing to do with this video. But if somebody had that inclination, deep down, here’s your way to exercise it.”

Frayed at the edges

Normally that describes a well worn fabric that has begun to show the age by the stitching coming apart or “fraying” at the seams. Well that describes our Warrior Police as they are starting to show their age and with that the inability to do the job needed.

Across America the civil unrest that resulted from the Floyd murder led in some situations to escalate into days long violence. What we have since come to know that much of it was exacerbated by the Police themselves. And yes while there were some individuals and groups that had no interest in peaceful protest and in turn used the opportunity to wreak havoc and commit crimes they were lumped in and placed in the same classification as many of the peaceful if not pointed protestors who had organized in a type of fashion to send a clear message that Black Lives Matter. Now true this is a collective organization with no clear established leadership and headquarters with the ability to generate not only donations, but a hierarchy and expectation of formation in which to conduct and structure the message and the march. With that it leaves critical gaps for “others” in which to exploit that and use that cover to do harm. But under the circumstances and due to Covid protocol this largely fell online to anyone to read and of course extrapolate whatever information they could in which to either join, add and contribute productively or again use to take advantage. Gosh had they had all the private messaging and other secretive tools that the January 6th freaks had then maybe they might have really been able to coordinate across the country and send a cohesive coherent message and possibly prevent any violence from occurring. I doubt it, but again understanding collective bargaining which this is to an extent to encourage and retain a vigilant plan and organized structure takes training and money. Unless you are Trump insurrectionists and then apparently Churches and others take on that role to fund the campaign. Again, follow the money.

But what also occurred across the country was a consistent Police message as warrior cop. This tattered concept is about appearances, much is the same way the Domestic Terrorists arm themselves, throw on furry costumes and carry bear spray. The only difference is that their zip tie handcuffs and homemade weaponry were better quality as it worked to both intimidate the Capitol Police and breach the building. The true tell that it was not Antifa as the right wing crazies like to claim, there was not one homemade Molotov Cocktail among them they were way better trained and coordinated and knew how to appropriate any item and convert it into a weapon/projectile. Flag poles, confiscating police equipment, using fire extinguishers are just such examples of those who have familiarity with that type of adaption. What we did see in Portland by the demonstrators there was co-opting what they had observed in Hong Kong with how the pro-democratic protestors used umbrellas and tennis rackets to lob back tear gas canisters and other makeshift gear in which to protect themselves. And our Police did just what the Chinese do in the same situation, round up protestors, throw them in unmarked black vans and take to an op-site. Wow and you think Trump learned some tricks from China too?

The Police are a group of frightened overarmed men with a badge and title not much different that the Domestic Terrorists frankly and we know that many of them were in fact there at the insurrection, in uniform or not. And when I read this article yesterday my first thought, “Well they should ask Zip-tie guy where he got his plastic handcuffs.” Again this is why communication, training and this thing called leadership and communication come in handy, on both sides. We have a real problem in this country with the idea of compromise. We don’t in any aspect and it shows.

In City After City, Police Mishandled Black Lives Matter Protests

Inquiries into law enforcement’s handling of the George Floyd protests last summer found insufficient training and militarized responses — a widespread failure in policing nationwide.

Protesters clashing with members of the Chicago Police Department in August.Credit…Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune, via Associated Press

By Kim Barker, Mike Baker and Ali Watkins

• March 20, 2021 The New York Times

For many long weeks last summer, protesters in American cities faced off against their own police forces in what proved to be, for major law enforcement agencies across the country, a startling display of violence and disarray.

In Philadelphia, police sprayed tear gas on a crowd of mainly peaceful protesters trapped on an interstate who had nowhere to go and no way to breathe. In Chicago, officers were given arrest kits so old that the plastic handcuffs were decayed or broken. Los Angeles officers were issued highly technical foam-projectile launchers for crowd control, but many of them had only two hours of training; one of the projectiles bloodied the eye of a homeless man in a wheelchair. Nationally, at least eight people were blinded after being hit with police projectiles.

Now, months after the demonstrations that followed the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police in May, the full scope of the country’s policing response is becoming clearer. More than a dozen after-action evaluations have been completed, looking at how police departments responded to the demonstrations — some of them chaotic and violent, most peaceful — that broke out in hundreds of cities between late May and the end of August.

A confrontation between protesters and the police in Brooklyn in May.Credit…Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

In city after city, the reports are a damning indictment of police forces that were poorly trained, heavily militarized and stunningly unprepared for the possibility that large numbers of people would surge into the streets, moved by the graphic images of Mr. Floyd’s death under a police officer’s knee.

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The mistakes transcended geography, staffing levels and financial resources. From midsize departments like the one in Indianapolis to big-city forces like New York City’s, from top commanders to officers on the beat, police officers nationwide were unprepared to calm the summer’s unrest, and their approaches consistently did the opposite. In many ways, the problems highlighted in the reports are fundamental to modern American policing, a demonstration of the aggressive tactics that had infuriated many of the protesters to begin with.Read the documentRead Document

The New York Times reviewed reports by outside investigators, watchdogs and consultants analyzing the police response to protests in nine major cities, including four of the nation’s largest. The Times also reviewed after-action examinations by police departments in five other major cities. Reports in some cities, such as Oakland and Seattle, are not yet completed. In Minneapolis, the city that sparked a national reckoning over policing, the City Council only agreed last month to hire a risk-management company to analyze the city’s response to the protests, despite months of pressure.

Almost uniformly, the reports said departments need more training in how to handle large protests. They also offered a range of recommendations to improve outcomes in the future: Departments need to better work with community organizers, including enlisting activists to participate in trainings or consulting with civil rights attorneys on protest-management policies. Leaders need to develop more restrictive guidelines and better supervision of crowd control munitions, such as tear gas. Officers need more training to manage their emotions and aggressions as part of de-escalation strategies.

A report from the New York City Department of Investigation noted that most officers had not been adequately trained for policing protests.

An after-action report from the City of Dallas cited poor training in the Dallas Police Department’s response to the protests there.

An examination of the police response to protests in Los Angeles noted a lack of command-level training for such events. 

Those first days of protest after Mr. Floyd’s killing presented an extraordinary law enforcement challenge, experts say, one that few departments were prepared to tackle. Demonstrations were large, constant and unpredictable, often springing up organically in several neighborhoods at once. While the vast majority of protests were peaceful, in cities like New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Portland, buildings were looted and fires were set, and demonstrators hurled firecrackers and Molotov cocktails at law enforcement officers. At least six people were killed; hundreds were injured; thousands were arrested.

The reports are strikingly similar, a point made by the Indianapolis review, which said that officers’ responses “were not dissimilar to what appears to have occurred in cities around the country.” Of the outside reviews, only the police department in Baltimore was credited with handling protests relatively well. The department deployed officers in ordinary uniforms and encouraged them “to calmly engage in discussion” with protesters, the report said.

Reviewers more often found that officers behaved aggressively, wearing riot gear and spraying tear gas or “less-lethal” projectiles in indiscriminate ways, appearing to target peaceful demonstrators and displaying little effort to de-escalate tensions. In places like Indianapolis and Philadelphia, reviewers found, the actions of the officers seemed to make things worse.

A Minneapolis police officer pointing a rubber-bullet gun at protesters in May.Credit…Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

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Departments also were criticized for not planning for protests, despite evidence that they would be large. In Los Angeles, “the lack of adequate planning and preparation caused the Department to be reactive, rather than proactive,” inhibiting the officers’ ability to control the violence committed by small groups of people.

As with the protests in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 that culminated in the Capitol riot, police also did not understand how angry people were, in some cases because they lacked resources devoted to intelligence and outreach that would have put them in better touch with their communities.

“American police simply were not prepared for the challenge that they faced in terms of planning, logistics, training and police command-and-control supervision,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit that advises departments on management and tactics.

Police departments in some cities have fought back against the findings, arguing that officers were asked to confront unruly crowds who lit fires, smashed shop windows and sometimes attacked the police. Business owners, downtown residents and elected leaders demanded a strong response against protesters who were often never held accountable, the police have said.

“Heaping blame on police departments while ignoring the criminals who used protests as cover for planned and coordinated violence almost guarantees a repeat of the chaos we saw last summer,” said Patrick J. Lynch, president of the Police Benevolent Association in New York City.

‘Warrior’ vs. ‘guardian’

On May 29, Indianapolis police showed up with helmets, face shields, reinforced vests and batons. Protesters told investigators this “made the police look militarized and ready for battle.”

At a largely peaceful Chicago protest on May 30, a demonstrator later told the inspector general’s office, the mood shifted when the police arrived. “They were dressed in riot gear,” the protester said. He added: “They had batons in their hands already.”

The Office of Inspector General in Chicago described a disconnect in how the police response was viewed by leadership and rank-and-file officers. 

The reports repeatedly blamed police departments for escalating violence instead of taming it. At times, police looked as if they were on the front lines of a war. They often treated all protesters the same, instead of differentiating between peaceful protesters and violent troublemakers. In part, the reports acknowledged, that was because of the chaos. But it was also because the protests pitted demonstrators against officers, who became defensive and emotional in the face of criticism, some reports said.

In Portland, where protests continued nightly, police officers used force more than 6,000 times during six months, according to lawyers with the U.S. Department of Justice, which reviewed officers’ actions as part of a previous settlement agreement. The review found that the force sometimes deviated from policy; one officer justified firing a “less-lethal impact munition” at someone who had engaged in “furtive conversation” and then ran away.

In Denver, officers used similar “less lethal” weapons against people who yelled about officers’ behavior. Officers also improperly fired projectiles that hit or nearly hit heads and faces, according to the report by the city’s independent police monitor. In Raleigh, N.C., a consulting firm that reviewed body cameras and other footage said videos appeared to show officers using pepper spray indiscriminately.

None of these findings were new.

Police officers using pepper spray on protesters near the Colorado State Capitol in Denver in May.Credit…Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images

For decades, criminal justice experts have warned that warrior-like police tactics escalate conflict at protests instead of defusing it. Between 1967 and 1976, three federal commissions investigated protests and riots. All found that police wearing so-called “riot gear” or deploying military-style weapons and tear gas led to the same kind of violence police were supposed to prevent.

In 2015, after national protests over the killing by police of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., another presidential task force said police should promote a “guardian” mind-set instead of that of a “warrior,” and avoid visible riot gear and military-style formations at protests.

U. Reneé Hall, who resigned as the chief of the Dallas Police Department in the aftermath of protests, said the recent assessments have provided a learning opportunity for departments nationwide.

Understand the George Floyd Case

• On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police officers arrested George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, after a convenience store clerk claimed he used a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes.
• Mr. Floyd died after Derek Chauvin, one of the police officers, handcuffed him and pinned him to the ground with a knee, an episode that was captured on video.
• Mr. Floyd’s death set off a series of nationwide protests against police brutality.
• Mr. Chauvin was fired from the Minneapolis police force, along with three other officers. He has been charged with both second- and third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. He now faces trial. Opening statements are scheduled for March 29.
• Here is what we know up to this point in the case, and how the trial is expected to unfold.

“We did the same things and made a lot of the same mistakes,” Ms. Hall said.

‘To be precise takes practice’

For years, only Los Angeles police who were certified and frequently trained to use a 40-millimeter “less lethal” weapon — usually loaded with hard-foam projectiles — could use it to control crowds.

In 2017, the weapon’s use was expanded to other officers. But the new training lasted only two hours. It consisted of learning how to manipulate the weapon and firing it a few times at a stationary target.Read the documentRead Document

The independent report on the Los Angeles police, commissioned by the City Council, said officers who may have had insufficient training in how to use the weapons fired into dynamic crowds. “To be precise takes practice,” it said.

Multiple reports said these projectiles injured people, including the homeless man in a wheelchair.

Several reports faulted departments for failing to train officers to de-escalate conflict, control crowds and arrest large numbers of people. In Raleigh, N.C., officers said they were supposed to be trained to manage crowds annually, but those trainings were often canceled. Most Portland police officers had not received “any recent skills training in crowd management, de-escalation, procedural justice, crisis prevention, or other critical skills for preventing or minimizing the use of force,” the city’s report found.

In Chicago, investigators could not even determine the last time that officers had been trained in mass arrests, but the most recent possible time was likely before a NATO summit meeting in 2012.

In Chicago, reviewers noted that the police force was not adequately trained to conduct mass arrests.

No one knew who was in charge

The Chicago police response on the night of May 29, when hundreds of people marched through the streets, “was marked by poor coordination, inconsistency, and confusion,” the city’s Office of Inspector General found.

The next day, police intelligence suggested that a few hundred protesters would attend a planned demonstration; 30,000 people showed up. Senior police officials in Chicago, when interviewed after the protests ended, still did not know who was in charge of responding to the demonstrations that day. “The accounts of senior leadership on this point were sharply conflicting and profoundly confused,” the report said.

The police were supposed to have “mass arrest” kits to take large numbers of people into custody, but many kits were from 2012, the report found.Read the documentRead Document

The arrest cards inside the kits were sometimes outdated; the plastic handcuffs in many kits were decayed or broken, a senior police officer later told investigators. Early on May 30, the department’s deputy chief of operations emailed another command staff member requesting 3,000 flex cuffs for the following day.

The email recipient gave no indication that the department “could not supply that number of flex cuffs, simply replying ‘[o]kay, will do,’” the report found, describing this as a signal of “a widespread, multi-faceted system failure from beginning to end.”

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Chicago police also did not have enough computers to process large numbers of arrestees. In Los Angeles, police did not have enough buses to transport arrested people — a problem the department has had for a decade — and did not plan appropriately for field jails.

Senior law enforcement officers in Cleveland developed plans to manage a large protest but did not share the details with patrol supervisors. Dallas officials said the department had trouble figuring out how to get water to officers on the front lines.

The reviews did not examine protesters’ complaints of racial bias in policing. But activists in Indianapolis told reviewers they wanted an acknowledgment by the department that systemic racism exists. The Portland Police Bureau said it was planning anti-racism training for all officers.

All told, the reports suggest the likelihood of problems in the event of future protests. The trial now underway in Minneapolis of the officer facing the most serious charges in Mr. Floyd’s death, Derek Chauvin, is one potential trigger.

“What we’ve been doing needs to be acknowledged as a failure,” said Norm Stamper, a former police chief in Seattle, who said he made some of the same missteps while trying to contain the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999, when tear gas unleashed by officers triggered an escalating backlash.

Now, he looks back on that moment as one of his greatest regrets in decades in law enforcement. “We continue to make the same mistakes,” Mr. Stamper said. “We’ll be doing this time and time again in the years ahead, unless we are ready for a hard assessment.”

The Invisible

Tomorrow is Labor Day and I plan on putting up a post about the state of labor in America but today is Sunday, a date of rest and there are many faces being put to permanent states of rest thanks again to the endless killings by Police. I am going to actually say that Police in Los Angeles qualify as a serial killer. They seem to go to kill one victim to the next without any repercussions or guilt. Serial killers do just that and listen to some podcasts about them and well tell me Police don’t fit the profile. HOWEVER (note capitalized for import), is that unless a police killing draws the attention of mass media and again fits a narrative like serial killers do, you know, young blonde, a child, then they are ignored. 

There was a serial killer in the 80s in Compton who killed numerous black women, called the Grim Reaper, and largely due to the color of their skin, a time when they were often sex workers in a middle of another “epidemic” only of drugs the killer was not caught nor were they even publicized. I cannot believe Netflix brought back Unsolved Mysteries and well no time like the present to examine deaths of people who are often forgotten and became invisible. Had the endless work by Michelle McNamara and her cohorts not drawn attention to the Golden State Killer (including rebranding him with that name) I am sure that fucking asswipe would be sitting at home right now jacking off to his collectibles of over 30 years of terror. 

Note the title of this article from the Guardian, Reign of Terror. It is the type we give to serial killers/rapists/criminals who prey on communities and seemingly go into the night invisible, leaving death and mayhem in their wake. Well this is about another kind, Death by Cop. These cases are not starring on the nightly news as they are not solely black males, they are not young and they are well just too fucking many. The Guardian with the Washington Post had been accounting Police shootings and deaths for the last five years, which totaled to 1000 a year or averaging 3 a day. Now we have vigilante shootings, the most infamous was George Zimmerman when he killed Trayvon Martin, which like many mass shootings, imitated with Ahmed Arbury and his death. And there are many more, the Kenosha Teen killer, there was the incident in Portland (that was two white guys and they are in a massive profile, Antifa and Trumpsters) and I go back even further in history with Bernard Goetz, the Subway Vigilante. Or just back to the days of Katrina and the media tha exaggerated crime, just ask Brian Williams or Oprah about that, no doubt contributing to Vigilantes killing black peoople while Police did nothing. 

When you seize upon a narrative to profile and fuel the general pubilc you get what we have now, Trump ranting on, two white morons on their porch with guns and others standing their ground. And with that more bodies to clean up. I am still waiting to hear about what happened in Seattle when the young Ethiopian man drove a car into protesters killing one girl. That does not work in the current state of hysterics where only white supremacists have anger and are prone to violence. Yesterday I got an email from a friend explaining that people who don’t wear masks have psychopatic tendencies. Okay. For the record I only wear a mask in confined spaces and when I cannot physically distant, and I have been doing so since March going in and out of the city doing my “essentials.” And yes you still need to physically distance folks going to the Whitney, the MOMA or other stores and businesses. New Yorkers have issues with personal space but the day trip to the High Line I had no problem nor on Subways so it must be the Museum fuckwits who have not figured that out yet. They will when they get Covid and die.

 So we are in the middle of a pandemic and despite all the supposed quarantining and sheltering in place the Cops are up to full speed to make their quota for kills this year. Good to know. So when you are marching and protesting make a note of the names below they deserve a place to be remembered. They died for no reason and there is no reason good enough frankly in any of the scenarios described. Even with guns or knifes you don’t need to kill. But then Police kill dogs in yards and in cars and homes and they don’t have any weapons. Oh that is right, a dog can bite. Wow Cops are pussy’s that explains that. 

 ‘Reign of terror’: A summer of police violence in Los Angeles Since the end of May, when mass protests erupted in LA, officers have fatally shot 11 people. Despite protests and a pandemic, law enforcement are killing people at a rate consistent with previous years 

 Sam Levin in Los Angeles| Guardian Sun 6 Sep 2020

 Los Angeles police officers have continued to kill civilians at alarming rates and under questionable circumstances in the last three months, despite a summer of unprecedented activism and growing political pressure from lawmakers. Most recently, two deputies with the Los Angeles sheriff’s department (LASD) fatally shot a bicyclist, 29-year-old Dijon Kizzee, who was fleeing after officers tried to stop him for an alleged “vehicle code” violation. 

The killing on Monday of yet another Black man in South LA was one of more than 10 fatal police shootings in the LA region since the George Floyd protests erupted at the end of May. ‘I’m still hurting’: encounter with Phoenix police leaves teenage girl with permanent burn scars

“If they are killing in this climate, even with the light that has been shined on this, then it’s obvious that it’s their intent,” said Myesha Lopez, 35, whose father was killed by LASD in June. “I think the protests are only making them more agitated, more trigger-happy, more volatile, more unstable. I don’t believe these officers have the ability to reform themselves.” Police leaders have put forward accounts of each killing that they say justify the use of force. 

But civil rights activists and victims’ families say the repeated bloodshed is a sign that police continue to escalate conflicts and resort to violence, even in the most routine of encounters – and that a more radical response is needed to prevent the next tragedy. Steady killings during protests and pandemic Police shoot an average of three to four people in LA county each month, or roughly 45 victims each year, according to an analysis by the LA Times. 

In the last two decades, officers have killed more than 1,000 people in the county, according to Youth Justice Coalition (YJC), an activist group. Despite the pandemic shutdowns and heightened attention to police brutality, LA law enforcement is killing civilians at a rate that appears to be fairly consistent with previous years. 

From the start of 2020 through June, police in the county have killed at least 23 people, YJC says. “It’s like there’s no end to it, it just keeps happening,” said Lupita Carballo, a 21-year YJC organizer who lives in South LA, near the site of the latest killing. Since the end of May, when mass protests erupted in LA, officers have fatally shot 11 people, according to Black Lives Matter LA, which also tracks killings. The sheriff’s department, which is separate from the LA police department (LAPD) and patrols areas outside of the city, was responsible for seven of these deaths.

 If they are killing in this climate, even with the light that has been shined on this, then it’s obvious that it’s their intent LASD is the largest county police agency in the US, with jurisdiction in nearly 200 different towns and cities, and has a track record of brutality and controversial killings, racial profiling and corruption cases. LASD scandals have piled up this summer at a dizzying pace. 

On 18 June, during the height of protests, an LASD Compton deputy killed Andres Guardado, an 18-year-old security guard who was fleeing and shot five times in the back. Recently, a deputy whistleblower alleged that Compton was home to a gang of violent deputies who have violated civilians’ rights and used excessive force. In another LASD unit, more than two dozen deputies faced discipline in August for their links to a gang of tattooed officers, and a high-ranking official was reassigned after he said Guardado “chose his fate”. 

One lawsuit filed last month further accused LASD of fabricating a story and withholding evidence. “It’s a reign of terror,” said Paula Minor, a BLM activist in LA. “The sheriff’s department does whatever they want to do, and they know that no one will be held accountable.” Advertisement In LASD’s initial account of Dijon Kizzee’s killing this week, a spokesperson alleged that he had dropped a bundle of clothes while fleeing and the deputies spotted a handgun. The agency later claimed he “made a motion” toward the gun, and also accused the man of punching a deputy, though the officers did not sustain any injuries. Witnesses disputed the police account, and a family attorney said it appeared police shot at him 15 to 20 times. There was no body-camera footage. 

 “People run because of their innate fear of police,” said Marina Vergara, a South LA resident whose brother, Daniel Hernandez, was killed by police in April. She noted that some neighborhood residents arm themselves for protection: “When you are in South LA, you are not afforded the second amendment. We’re not seen as citizens who are protecting ourselves. We are seen as criminals.” 

 The forgotten victims: 

‘We have no answers’ Most of the summer’s killings received almost no news coverage, with the limited information released about them coming from police. In a 27 May killing of a Latino man in North Hollywood, an officer was called to a “neighbor dispute” and killed a man with a “sword”. In a 29 May killing in north LA county, police said they approached a man who was “walking on the sidewalk”, and when they saw he had a firearm, ended up taking him to the ground and killing him. In an East LA suburb on 7 June, police killed a 38-year-old who had reportedly been hit by a train; police said when they approached him he had a knife. 

 One victim who did not become a hashtag is Michael Thomas, a 61-year-old grandfather killed by LASD deputies on 11 June inside his home in Lancaster, north of the city. LASD alleged that the officers were responding to a suspected domestic violence call and that Thomas, who was unarmed, reached for the officer’s gun. But Thomas’ girlfriend said the two were only having an argument, and that he was trying to stop the officers from unlawfully entering his home, citing the fourth amendment. Michael Thomas, who was killed by police in June, and his sister. Myesha Lopez, one of Thomas’ five daughters, said her father had watched a special on George Floyd the previous night and was terrified police would shoot him: “He said, ‘I know if I open this door, you’re going to kill me.’” 

 The officers, it appears, did just that, fatally shooting him in the chest. Lopez said she believed that the “fact that he knew his rights incited the officer’s rage”, adding that she was devastated to learn that his girlfriend couldn’t even hold his hand or comfort her father as he lay dying. “They didn’t value his life. They didn’t care.” 

 In the Guardado case, authorities released key documents under intense public pressure. But Lopez said she has struggled to get the most basic information from LASD, including the names of the officers, or an incident report. 

She said she has even begged the department to allow the officer who killed her father to speak with her anonymously, just so she can understand what happened in the final moments: “We have no answers.” Even a simple acknowledgment of the family’s pain would go a long way, she said: “We charge these people with authority over our lives, and they are unwilling to even say, ‘I’m sorry.’”

 The sheriff’s office did not respond to inquiries about the case. ‘The system isn’t broken’ Los Angeles’ elected leaders have responded to the calls for police accountability this summer with a range of proposals – more community policing, minor cuts to police budgets, legislative efforts to prevent brutality and more.

 But Kizzee’s killing this week has reignited calls for a more radical and urgent response – the dismantling of the embattled sheriff’s department. Regardless of Kizzee’s final moments, activists said a suspected bike violation should never end in death, and that police can’t be trusted as first responders given how quickly they resort to lethal force. 

“We don’t want to pay for more training. The culture is not going to change,” said Vergara, noting that the bloodshed will stop only when officers lose the many protections that give them license to kill with impunity. And she fears that might not happen until the public in LA sees a video akin to George Floyd’s death, one that captures an entire interaction from start to finish and clearly demonstrates an officer’s disregard for human life. Lopez, Thomas’s daughter, also argued that the police should be disbanded, noting that LASD doesn’t provide safety for communities like hers, and that they often only engage in harmful acts when they are called to assist people in crisis or with other challenges.

 “Officers are trained to think someone is trying to take their lives, so they are trained to kill,” said Lopez, noting she has never called police. “You can’t say that the system is broken. It’s doing what it was intended to do. It’s operating at optimum level.” Lopez knew she wanted to get in engaged in local activism after watching George Floyd’s death. In June, she wrote to the mayor of Ontario, the southern California city where she lives, and outlined her own experiences with police over the years and the ways officers mistreat Black families like hers. She called on city leaders to stand up to systemic racism: “I tell you about us so that you are convinced that we matter.” 

On 10 June, a police official responded to her email, thanking her for her words, but suggesting the George Floyd tragedy was unique and did not represent officers’ behavior. The following day, police killed her father.

Union Brothers

Growing up in a union family and being a member of a union most of my professional life I have a fairly good concept of what works and what doesn’t with regards to organized labor. It is not perfect but much like the electorate you get what you vote and engage with and unions are no different.  Union Presidents are highly political and highly corrupt or not as just like any business or industry you have that mix and when you are an engaged active member of any group you keep apprised of the finances and the overall health of the organization in which you belong.  Or should.  We don’t do shit.  We have such a laissez faire attitude about it all, well until it affects us personally or directly we don’t give one two or three flying fucks about anything.  We are pre-occupied with our own self interests yet seem also to care what other people think….about you.   Again the self, fuck the rest of it.

Every day the social media cause du jour is  targeting some individual seen as a source of a problem and should be shamed, degraded and mocked.   Remember boycotts of businesses? Fuck that we need Target or Shinola or whatever despite their own role in many injustices.  Nope, find a person, usually a woman which has no elements of misogyny at all right? After that day of dog piling is done then onto the next day and so on and so on.  Nothing gets accomplished, someone gets fired, someone issues an apology and is contrite and then its lather, rinse, repeat, the dance moves of the Millennial. Not that oldsters are any less guilty but no one perfected this hate crime and drive by better than this group.  What they will do in the face of real change is yet to be seen and more importantly done.  To effect real change it will mean dropping the signs and actually engaging with local individuals who want to run for office, open a business, join the Chamber of Commerce or other local orgs that will enable them more access and in turn offer some availability to hear more voices to a largely singular male white choir.  Getting voices into banks, the SBA and other agencies that fund and assist small business owners of color are the key and in turn that means making friends with the Karens and their male husbands in ways that will of course be traumatizing and full of micro aggressions that you can list and compile in your daily journal to later write about and make a movie about how you could of been a better person if only they hadn’t hurt your feelings.

Advice: Get tougher skin and arm yourself like the Police, not literally, metaphorically as you are going into battle everyday to change hearts, minds and more importantly ways.  This will be the long hard haul and you are a long haul trucker who will have to go without sleep, decent food and some sense of belonging to a club that is just like you. You will have to learn to get along with those not like you and in turn learn what they do, how they do it and why they do it. Then promptly do the same only in your way or what I call the work around.  Come in by the back door and leave by the front but you are still in the room regardless.

Now the structures of unions, of established organizations and groups with the paperwork, the tax exemptions, the rolodex and the ability to contact and effect change exist already and need fresh blood and there will be resistance but from that comes change.

The Police Unions are still one of the most well established and organized unions that exist.  They are the most resistant to change and most obstinate about it.   Funny we had no problem disbanding unions when they established equal wages, hiring targets, safe working environments all under the idea of free enterprise and a right to work mantra, yet that doesn’t seem to apply to the Cops. Why is that?

Understand the history, the structure and the organization you understand the members.  The reality is that this is not going to happen.  Or it can but how you choose to do that is the key. Good luck, kids you don’t have the staying power.  Its sort of like Millennials and sex and Covid you are afraid and you can’t take the pressure.  Its so hard daddy!

Police chiefs and mayors push for reform. Then they run into veteran officers, unions and ‘how culture is created.’

The Washington Post
By Kimberly Kindy and Mark Berman
June 28, 2020

The push to rethink American policing since George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis in May has quickly gained traction. Cities and states have banned chokeholds and certain other uses of force, Congress is considering legislation to do the same, and some local officials have moved to reduce police funding.

But issues central to this ongoing debate — including how officers should police communities and how departments police their officers — may prove to be insulated from these policy proposals.

Police and city leaders have repeatedly adopted changes, only for these efforts to run headlong into two formidable and interconnected forces: veteran officers who resist these efforts and the powerful unions fighting discipline. This combination can make it difficult for departments to evolve, even after they publicly pledge increased training and greater accountability, former law enforcement officials and experts say.

Minneapolis’s experience shows how difficult it can be to change a police department.

Last year, after police there used fatal force in two high-profile encounters that led to protests, Mayor Jacob Frey felt he had to do something bold. Frey announced the nation’s first-ever ban on “fear-based” and “warrior-style” police training, which teaches officers that every encounter with a citizen is fraught with danger and could be fatal.

The rebellion from the police union was immediate. The group’s brash president, Lt. Robert Kroll, said he wanted officers with “ice in their veins” and was “proud to embrace” warrior training. Kroll made his own announcement: Free lessons in the aggressive, military-style policing methods were available for every Minneapolis police officer who wanted them.

Kroll’s formal training never came to pass, but around that time, warrior-style training videos were shared among the force to blunt reforms, said two officers who asked not to be named for fear of retribution.

The response highlighted what experts say are pivotal barriers to improving policing across the country, even as momentum grows for rethinking and reforming law enforcement practices.

It begins when new officers, fresh out of the academy, get some version of “the talk” when they get to a department, former police chiefs and other experts said in interviews.

“They go out on the streets with their field training officer, and the first thing they hear, and I heard the same thing: ‘That’s the academy, this is the street, kid, the real world, and things are different here,’ ” said Janee Harteau, a former Minneapolis police chief who pushed reforms when she led the department.

“That’s how culture is created,” said Harteau, who was ousted in 2017 amid an outcry after a Minneapolis police officer shot and killed a woman who had called 911.

Police union officials argue the fault is not with the officers. Jim Michels, a lawyer for the Minneapolis union, said there is no follow-through from supervisors after training. “Unless supervisors hold officers to the standards to which they have been trained, the training itself is meaningless,” he said.

Influence on rookies

When now-former officer Derek Chauvin was captured on video kneeling on Floyd’s neck for minute after minute, three other officers were present — including Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng, who both graduated from the Minneapolis Police Department’s academy last year.

They were supposed to be part of a transformative movement. Years of training changes meant Lane and Kueng would bring a guardian-style approach to their work with the community. They were supposed to be equipped with de-escalation techniques and methods to intervene when another officer used excessive force.

The rookie officers — and Tou Thao, an eight-year veteran of the force — did not stop Chauvin as he drove his knee into Floyd’s neck.

Experts said the newer style of “guardian-style” training, which has gained traction in police academies over the past five years, can be quickly superseded by the words and actions of an experienced officer showing a rookie the ropes.

They pointed to Chauvin, a 19-year veteran of the Minneapolis police and a field training officer, and his encounter with Floyd as an example.

“You can spend eight months training someone, then you put them in this situation. That’s at the heart of reform,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which works with police departments. “You can get everything right in training, then you have this guy.”

A newer officer out with their field training officer is “supposed to respect what he’s doing,” Wexler said. “A 19-year veteran is revered.”

It was Lane’s fourth shift patrolling the streets of Minneapolis and Kueng’s third. The officers were all fired and face criminal charges.

Kueng’s attorney declined to comment, and attorneys for the other three men did not return calls and emails seeking comment. Kroll, the union president, initially defended all four ex-officers but condemned Chauvin’s actions in media interviews last week. He did not respond to interview requests for this story.

Michels, the Minneapolis police union lawyer, said Chauvin’s actions were “disgusting and outrageous.”

Field training officers can also be promoted despite complaints about how they police. Chauvin had at least 17 prior complaints filed against him, with just one that resulted in disciplinary action, according to department records.

“Doesn’t it seem logical that you would not put someone with that kind of record in a supervisory position?” said Timothy Bildsoe, a member of the Minnesota Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training, which sets training requirements for police departments in the state.

The only complaint that resulted in disciplinary actions against Chauvin came from a 30-year-old woman he pulled over in 2007, who was yanked from her vehicle and placed in the back of a patrol car for going 10 mph over the speed limit, records show.

The woman filed a complaint the next day. Investigators said Chauvin “did not have to remove the complainant from car” and that the interview could have been done “outside the vehicle,” records show.

His discipline: a letter of reprimand.

More than a decade later, Chauvin was a field training officer on the streets with rookies. Spokesmen for Medaria Arradondo, the Minneapolis police chief, declined multiple interview requests.

Police officers can get worn down by the change in police chiefs — who are often out of the job in just a few years — and a parade of new policies, said Hassan Aden, the former police chief in Greenville, N.C.

“Officers in departments that have constant change in leadership get fatigued and at some point, they develop the attitude that I’m going to outlast this,” Aden said.
Unions criticized

Since Floyd’s death, advocates for reform have taken aim at police unions and described them as obstructing change. Top police officials across the country signed an open letter this month saying “contracts and labor laws hamstring efforts to swiftly rid departments of problematic behavior.”

These unions can hinder attempts at reform, current and former police chiefs say, because they undermine attempts at accountability, including disciplining or getting rid of the “bad apples” on the force.

In Minneapolis, Kroll’s proposed warrior training last year was part of a broader pattern of pushing back against changes and critics, including denouncing Minnesota officials as “despicable” in a recent letter.

“It was open insubordination that continues,” Andrew Johnson, a city councilman, said of Kroll’s push for the warrior training. “If that’s the culture, you have to wonder how effective new training and reforms are going to be.”

In Minneapolis, Arradondo announced two weeks after Floyd’s death that he was walking away from contract negotiations with the police union. Arradondo said he’d return to the table with outside experts to help him strip away provisions allowing rogue officers to remain on the force. His biggest gripe: binding third-party arbitration.

“There is nothing more debilitating to a chief . . . than when you have grounds to terminate an officer for misconduct and you are dealing with a third-party mechanism that allows for that employee to not only be back on your department but to be patrolling in your communities,” Arrandondo said recently.

Michels, the lawyer for the police union, responded on Facebook that the laws that govern arbitration for officers are no different than they are for any other public employee in the state.

Through arbitration, when police chiefs seek to fire or discipline an officer, the union can appeal that decision — which leads to an arbitrator being picked to make the final call. Former police chiefs say this dilutes their authority and weakens their ability to improve departments.

“They don’t stand up and support you when you fired the bad cop,” Harteau said of the police union in Minneapolis. “Instead they grieve it, get his job back, praise themselves and tell the officers, ‘We’re the only ones who care about you . . . we’ve got your back.’ That’s a huge hurdle.”

In Minneapolis, arbitration can be a lengthy process.

Two Minneapolis police officers who work in a majority black community were fired last year for decorating a Christmas tree in 2018 with a malt liquor can, a cup from Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen and a pack of Newport cigarettes.

The day after images surfaced on social media, Frey, the Democratic mayor, condemned the incident as “racist” and “despicable” and said the officers would be fired within the day. Instead, the firings took months. A year and a half later, the case is still tied up in arbitration.

In nearly half of the cases in Minneapolis, firings are overturned, the police union and city officials said.

A 2017 Washington Post investigation found that dozens of the country’s largest police departments were forced to rehire nearly one-quarter of officers who were fired for misconduct and appealed.

Stephen Rushin, an associate law professor at Loyola University Chicago, reviewed more than 650 police union contracts.

Rushin found that most departments let officers facing discipline have multiple levels of review, including an appeal to an arbitrator — who then had “significant authority to re-litigate the factual and legal grounds for disciplinary action,” he wrote in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review last year.

Each layer of review given to officers might be defensible on its own, but “may combine to create a formidable barrier to officer accountability,” he wrote.

“If you’re ordered to rehire an officer who’s dangerous, who’s dishonest, who can’t testify as a witness . . . that’s a danger to the entire public,” Rushin, whose father was a police officer, said in an interview.

Michels, the union lawyer, defended arbitration. “It’s easier to blame arbitration than to look in the mirror,” Michels said. “When management loses a case, it’s because they either failed to prove their case or they have failed to adequately discipline the employee before it was raised to the situation that is being arbitrated.”

Because of state labor laws, arbitrators must also look at past disciplinary measures that were taken when officers committed similar offenses, said Peter Ginder, a former Minneapolis deputy city attorney who negotiated contracts with the police union. The purpose is to make sure discipline is meted out evenly, and not used as a weapon against an employee a boss doesn’t like, or is discriminating against due to their race, gender or sexual orientation.

That makes it difficult for a new police chief, who wants to turn around the department, to take more aggressive action.

“The city can’t discipline because it has never disciplined,” said Dave Bicking with the Minneapolis-based Communities United Against Police Brutality. “It’s a Catch-22.”

Fool Me Once

When I read the below editorial piece I had to agree wholeheartedly.  Seattle has some type of nirvana belief that has dominated the landscape of Sound and Mountains all my life.  I lived there most of my life and the only place that does not have any of that is here in Jersey City.  There are racists here, idiots here, foreign born, white folks, brown folks, black folks, more languages than even I recognize and in turn we don’t all get along but we get along enough to prove that over the last few weeks as unrest rose, we chose to be vocal but civil and that is the point.  A five minute train ride and I am in Newark a city plagued with massive problems and a history of going down with flames and yet they too rose which means something when even just a little voice can add to a larger one to drown out the hate.

I did not realize I was in fact a Racist until I went to Nashville and then as I sat there horrified at what I witnessed, experienced and felt it was then I knew it was all to familiar. I do want to say that the focus on Religion there is an additional issue that further contributes to many, as in many of the problems that plague that city in ways Seattle has managed to avoid.  But besides that the two cities could be bookend as Nashville aspires to be Seattle and Seattle aspired to be San Francisco, the two cities never wore their monikers well and still don’t.

Seattle elected the name, The Emerald City, reference to the faux city of Oz or in fact the idea that we were so green due to the rain we were shiny as the jewel itself. Either/or the reality is that again it shows that we like to create a false face like the city of Oz run by a sad little man behind a curtain who had none of the powers and terror that Dorothy and her motley crew believed.  And that defines the people who migrated there over the years as they were in search of the elusive magic and jewels that they believed would give them the persona they identified with.   And today that is not just Billionaire but that is Binary, Cisgendered, Liberal, Gay, whatever you choose. And the idea that it is live and let live is ludicrous as Capitol Hill where CHOP/CHAZ (proving that even picking a name is a very Seattle thing) is located is the most gentrified and expensive area in the city itself and none of those people could afford to live in any of the apartments that align the very streets they are camped out in. And largely I suspect most have been doing so long before the zone was created.  For if there is one thing Seattle shares with San Francisco is an immense homeless problem.   And it is a problem that existed for decades long before the Bezos ship sailed into the Port of Seattle.

Seattle was working class and union organized. There was strong philanthropic roots and even characters that defined the Seattle persona but that too was a false hold as the KBO movement (Keep the Bastards Out) firmly established the us against all the “others” who wanted to live in the city of Emeralds.   The Seattle Freeze became a badge of honor and it marks the character and quality of life in that city that if anyone questions or comments on is immediately further denigrated or ostracized and the joke is that few if any are in fact actual born and raised Seattleites as over 60% of the population is from elsewhere and that any one born and raised there doesn’t give a flying fuck as they have theirs and that is what matters. I have mine is a motto my friends that should be the motto of the United States, as that is the state of our country today. Austin has its keep it weird mantra,  and that has not been true for decades either, as when I lived there it was neither weird nor much different than Portland, their sister city in concept.  A city that is so white and so racist its history speaks for itself.  But in today’s politicized world we believe that being “liberal” means one is not racist.   So wrong.  The only place that lives up to its hype or its truth as we like to say is Massachusetts. Masshole is a name well deserved and again that many long term famous Liberals came from that state is that they are outliers, even Elizabeth Warren is not from there, she just lives there.  Point proven.   Again look to their history over race and the Busing issues in the 70s.  Then the scandal of the Catholic Church the past decade.  Yeah, they are trash bags there in ways that again make me laugh.  A city that revolves around Harvard and where half the people there could never set foot inside their racist legacy walls.

And that brings me to Nashville. I have never once felt it was anything but what it was, a shithole.  And it was after walking into their public schools I knew immediately there was  massive problem. Then a book came out, Making the Unequal Metropolis, and its history about their schools and segregation that confirmed the reality that in the South education is for the rich and the rest can well go fuck themselves.  I heard it openly and it was public the racism, the loathing for the “outsider” and of course the arrogance that accompanies that level of rage and hate.  It was across the board regardless of color and it was the most divisive city I have ever lived in or visited in my entire life.  And then I read, How to be an Anti Racist, and went oh yeah I get it.   The idea is that we all carry conceptions, biases and beliefs that we act upon either directly or subliminally that affect our perceptions and attitudes about the “other.”  And we all do it.  We all hate anyone who is not like us despite the fact that we may share many commonalities we seize upon the most obvious, the most extrinsic and in turn we embrace that as a way of validating our “beliefs.”

I looked at the schools in Seattle and realized how so bad they were it explains why I never went back to full time Teaching. I really hated being a part of it.  I never verbalized it out loud nor cared enough to actually do anything but try to keep my head above water.  You can pick and choose schools so I quit going to the troubled ones, the Rainier Beaches, the Aki Kurose’s and the rest of them that had so many issues, from turnover of Principals and Staff to massive discipline and other issues that plagued the district.  There was a Native American school and it closed, there was an African American school closed, Alternative schools with a independent streak closed.  All of them run by faces of color who were committed or just misguided but wanted to try, but they had no political clout.   Superintendents who were hired and fired, quit and moved on.  Teachers who taught about Social Justice, disciplined or fired. Problems with field trips from sexual abuse to other issues, and on and on and on.   I never worked for a school that had not had a vote of no confidence regarding the Principal, and I never worked or knew of one that was capable. They were deck chairs on the Titantic, and the ones that were good were at high achievement schools, aka, white.

 Two local bloggers exposed many of the problems and they too were harassed and goaded to finally shut shop. True they were very Seattle in that you either agreed with them or did not and if not you were ostracized and shamed, it is the liberal version of sheep,   but they were lauded and placed on magazine covers; however, when one attempted to get elected to the School Board openings it did not happen as that is the last person they want on a board. Curmudgeons are popular in the press there but not in any position of influence and that goes across the boards from the City to the County, they elect and place people regardless of their race or gender or sexual identity who quickly tow the line to prove that they are doing well for the community, when all they are doing is maintaining the status quo. And as they did that they did that with Mayors in the same way and there have been few who ever made it past the state line for importance of note. That is not the Seattle  persona, you never do more than what you said you would and what more importantly given permission to do.  Anyone who does  try to do more are worried in reality about their agenda than that of the those they represent, as you will see in the article below. That is Seattle and that is everywhere. I got mine.

I used to think something was very wrong with me and in turn I became a loner and isolated myself from others to avoid this shit.  I occasionally emerged and then quickly realized that I was not safe and in turn I got mine was the mantra I had to live by.  I had to protect myself at all costs and to finally land in New Jersey with a pandemic on my ass and civil unrest just above it I knew I was finally safe.  Funny how that worked out as I feel safer here dealing with the idiots here than I ever did in Seattle or Nashville. Denial does not to seem to be a problem here it is out there with every other person who is just doing their best to make it work however they choose.  Politicians come and go here, corruption is everywhere and yet look to Camden,  a city that disbanded its Police a decade ago. Funny how that worked out and it is not perfect but its better than it was.  It all happens here but in oblivion, that is New Jersey, an afterthought.  It is a perfect fit for me.  It is the butt of the joke it is the land of the Shore and of the failed Trump casinos, of loudmouths and of the Sopranos and it is all here and very much just a part of a large state that has it all.  Let’s not tell anyone.

Seattle is a shithole like Nashville and that Nashville aspires to be it, I have news for you, you are just not as well educated and more religious but you worship the same thing, being rich and white.

Don’t Be Fooled by Seattle’s Police-Free Zone

The city looks progressive but has a history of racism and exclusion. This could be a turning point.

By Margaret O’Mara
Contributing Opinion Writer
The New York Times
June 24, 2020

SEATTLE — Seattle’s police-free “autonomous zone” is coming to an end.

After two largely peaceful weeks, shootings over the last several days near the Capitol Hill Organized Protest area, CHOP for short, left a 19-year-old man dead and three others wounded. Mayor Jenny Durkan announced on Monday that the city would retake the abandoned police precinct at the heart of the zone and wind down the occupation.

In its brief life, CHOP has reinforced Seattle’s reputation as a quirky left-coast bastion of strong coffee and strong progressive politics. Many white Seattleites like to think of their city that way too. But Seattle’s progressive appearance is deceiving.

It is a city and region with a long history of racism, of violent marginalization, and of pushing back against more radical movements for social change. It is, in short, much like the rest of America.

The global protests of the last few weeks have rightly generated the feeling that the world is at a turning point on redressing racial inequities. This moment has great possibilities, but the history of Seattle and other seemingly progressive places should make us realize that change is not that simple.

A 2008 report found that black people make up less than 10 percent of Seattle’s population but well over half of the drug-related arrests. The police department was placed under federal oversight in 2011 after incidents of excessive use of force on nonwhite residents. The public schools here are more segregated than they were three decades ago. Less than three weeks ago, the police sprayed protesters with tear gas on the same streets now given over to the teach-ins and community gardens of CHOP.

There is, to be sure, a radical streak in the city’s history. In 1919, Seattle shut down for five days as 60,000 unionized workers walked off the job in a general strike. In the 1930s, the Communist Party was so ascendant here that James Farley, a close adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt, said that “there are 47 states in the Union, and the Soviet of Washington.”

Huge anti-globalization marches greeted delegates to the World Trade Organization meeting here in 1999, causing a partial shutdown of the conference and such a ferociously violent police response that the chief was forced to retire.

But these movements often have been squelched by pushback from political leaders, even those who once were allies. Mayor Ole Hanson, who led Seattle during the 1919 general strike, once had been a labor-friendly moderate but quickly turned into an implacable union foe.

“The Soviet government of Russia, duplicated here, was their plan,” he wrote in an essay published on the front page of The New York Times shortly after the strike’s end. Now, he assured anxious readers, “law and order are supreme in our city.”

Paul Schell, who was mayor during the 1999 protests, was less pugnacious in his analysis but remained reluctant to condemn the police. “I wish everybody had behaved themselves,” Mr. Schell later reflected. “And that it would have been more civilized.”

But the story here goes beyond political leadership. It involves deep, systemic racial inequalities baked into the fabric of this overwhelmingly white city.

“For most of its history,” James Gregory, a historian, observes, “Seattle was a segregated city, as committed to white supremacy as any location in America.”

Discriminatory mortgage lending and racially restrictive covenants limited Seattle’s nonwhite population to a single neighborhood, the Central District. Fair housing laws opened up new parts of the city and suburbs to minority homeowners and renters after the 1960s, but Seattle’s overwhelmingly single-family zoning limited the housing available to new buyers.

Such zoning has been remarkably difficult to change. The region’s homeowners may vote Democratic and plant racial solidarity signs in their front yards, but often resist higher densities that can increase the affordable housing supply.

Civil rights issues, particularly measures to combat anti-black racism, can be subsumed by broader social justice agendas. The city’s most prominent voice on the left in recent years is Kshama Sawant, a socialist elected to the City Council in 2013. She has focused much of her ire on Seattle’s high-tech employers and the politicians who support them.

As protests escalated in recent weeks, Ms. Sawant frustrated some allies by renewing her push for an “Amazon tax” on large employers to bolster homelessness initiatives. After the tax became a rallying cry at a recent Sawant-led demonstration at City Hall, one protester asked in exasperation, “I want to tax Amazon too, but can we please for once focus on black lives?”

Similar patterns have shaped politics and opportunity in other seemingly progressive cities. In Minneapolis, the poverty and police violence that killed George Floyd are legacies of a century of racial segregation, enforced by restrictive covenants, zoning and an Interstate highway that sliced through the city’s largest black neighborhood. A comparable mix of public policies and local prejudice have maintained segregation and inequality in Oakland and San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, Los Angeles and New York.

Nevertheless, this looks like a moment when Seattle and other cities like it might move past their histories of racism and exclusion.

Almost every day for weeks, Seattle has seen peaceful marches organized and led by black and minority activists but drawing heavily white crowds. Silent marches organized by Black Lives Matter brought nearly 85,000 people to the region’s streets one recent, rain-drenched Friday. “B.L.M.” and “Silence=Violence” signs have sprouted along the roads in affluent suburbs. Similar scenes are playing out across the country.

This extraordinary swell of activism is happening in Seattle for many of the same reasons it is happening elsewhere: horror at police violence, anger at Covid-19’s inequities, the pent-up energy created by months of lockdown. Another factor is the energy unleashed during the Trump era. From the Women’s Marches to March for Our Lives to Black Lives Matter, progressives have gotten familiar with inking up protest signs and putting on their marching shoes.

What comes next? Will Seattle and other cities embrace the changes necessary to end racist policing? Will citizens change their everyday lives to match the ideals that propelled them out into the streets?

Clearly something remarkable is blooming in this season of pandemic and protest. It is forcing our city to reckon with truths that can and should make white citizens like me uncomfortable, and that remind us just how much Seattle is like the rest of America: impossibly divided, and impossibly full of hope.

Cleaning House

Well the house cleaning continues from tearing down statues that two years ago led to a girls death on the streets to firing reality TV stars one wonders if this is the turning point for real and more importantly lasting change?

Well let’s review all the bullshit of the past 50 years when most of this began in earnest and ended where we are today.  And on that note no.

I have read the book, seen the movie and bought the T-shirt and this time while I commend and appreciate all of it, I am staying Switzerland for no other reason than keeping my health and sanity during what has already been a trying past seven years.  And as I embrace the seven year cycle of life I have every intent on making my next seven years, in what I suspect is the last act in the play of life, to work for me in a way that finally gives me the things I need and want.

Life is like that, reconciling wants and needs.  You compromise with yourself, you compromise with others in both life and business.  It is a series of tradeoffs with ultimately the goal being happiness, satisfaction and overall personal gain.  That can come through one’s professional goals and ambitions, to one’s personal desires in both material and physical terms.  What that means morons as most of you have no fucking clue is that we all want shit, we want to be the hottest, the smartest, the richest, to have the most toys, to fuck the hottest person, live in the coolest house and be well the bestest in everything and anything.   Few summed it up more than the morons on Vanderpump Rules who seem to perpetuate the stereotype to the nth degree. How they found that washed up crew is still the most amazing casting secrets of legend as few reality shows can top that group of idiots.

When one of them writes a garbage book and it makes the bestseller list of the New York Times that again only proves the fact that Americans don’t read and may I remind you many of Trump’s books did as well and look where we are.  We are all stars when social media enables the idiots access to share their random thought. **Note singular as few have more than one

I know not a single person who reads the news, reads books, magazines or even watches the national news or listens to NPR.  Few seem to know facts and repeat many bizarre stories and tales either told to them by friends or read on the Facebook News of the World. Ah the Tabloid that brought scandal to the impenetrable Murdoch clan.  I remember that when it too was global news.  What I always loved the Weekly World News where Bat Baby/ Martian that predicted the Presidency, clearly he called that as this is now alien land.  Explains Covid now doesn’t it?

As Protests rage on, in Seattle they actually did accomplish something by establishing an autonomous zone and closing a Police Precinct.  At one point they had posted a printed up list demands which would end their long lasting sit in and then a different more lengthy list showed up online with naturally 6 times more demands.  This is Seattle, herding cats.

As per the New York Times:

The demonstrators have also been trying to figure it out, with various factions voicing different priorities. A list of three demands was posted prominently on a wall: One, defund the police department; two, fund community health; and three, drop all criminal charges against protesters. But on a nearby fence, there was a list of five demands. Online was a list of 30.

I saw this pan out in Occupy Wall Street and the debacle that led to the collapse of the Women’s March with digging up more old news and not allowing people to move forward from what was the past and this too happened with the Gun Violence Movement so powerful post the Florida shooting, but then children grow up and on with life and of course can we ever forget the Tea Party. Lord that was a sad group but they made a lasting mark.  In the interim we have had massive Climate Change protests and there are clear leaders and organizers but the waning interest of the public ebbs and flows like the floods, tornados and other climate related disasters so it is onto the next. Is this too another?

This is much like a relay race where you pass the baton to the next and they have to jump hurdles, run faster to the next and finally to the finish.  So much in these two weeks have happened and yet I think the race is still ongoing, the Olympics may be cancelled but this is by far more important.  I wish them all luck as I have no dog in this one.

After 15 stunning days of anti-racist protests … what happens next?

Can the phenomenal response to the police killing of George Floyd be channeled to secure lasting political change?

by Ed Pilkington
The Guardian
Wed 10 Jun 2020

The New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb captured best the sense of wonder at what is happening on the streets of America. He posted a tweet from Mitt Romney, the Republican senator from Utah, which showed the former presidential candidate marching alongside demonstrators under the banner Black Lives Matter.

“Ladies and gentleman,” Cobb remarked. “This is what you call uncharted territory.”

Fifteen days and nights into this nationwide conflagration, the protests following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis are truly navigating the unknown.

Enormous crowds, overwhelmingly peaceful and highly diverse, have erupted in cities across the country; a movement against police brutality has been met with police brutality; the US president has responded with one of the most memorable – and violent – photo ops of the modern era.

“The popular reaction to the gruesome Floyd murder has been astonishing in its national scope, fervent commitment and interracial solidarity,” observed the philosopher and social critic Noam Chomsky. “The malignancy that infects the White House has been exposed in all its ugliness.”

But as the demonstrations tear through their third week, with no apparent loss of momentum, the little voice that inevitably arises with all such public outbursts begins to be heard. As it grows louder, the question it poses intensifies: what happens next?

Where does all the energy unleashed by the protests go? What happens to “Defund the police” when the chanting fades? When the day comes – as presumably, eventually, it must – what will be left on the empty streets to show for it?

“Marches are a tactic,” Chomsky told the Guardian. “Not much has emerged about strategy, or even specific articulated goals, beyond major reform of police practices and responsibilities.”

A potential cautionary tale for the present-day protests is offered by Occupy Wall Street. Like the current maelstrom, those protests burst on to the public stage in September 2011 quite unexpectedly, with a thousand or so people cramming themselves into New York City’s Zuccotti Park under the rubric: “We are the 99%.”

Also in an echo of today, the Occupy protesters were met with violent police shutdowns leading to hundreds of arrests. The park was finally brutally cleared two months later.

Nobody could doubt the success of Occupy in changing the nature of the national political and social debate. It put concepts of income inequality, of the “1%”, firmly and permanently on the map.

But once the protest had been broken up, its resolutely anti-hierarchical nature, combined with the distrust of many of its activists towards institutions and infrastructure, meant that it had nowhere else to go. It dissipated into the downtown Manhattan air.

“Occupy was also a tactic, not a strategy, and one that could not continue,” Chomsky said. “It had an impact: focusing on extreme inequality that is poisoning the society under the neoliberal regime. But from that point on other forms of activism have to take over, and to some extent have.”

Nelini Stamp, the director of strategy for the Working Families party, is well-placed to comment on the “what next?” conundrum, having been deeply involved in Occupy and now being immersed as an organizer of the George Floyd protests in New York. Though she agrees that Occupy didn’t directly change America – income inequality in the US has increased steadily every year since 2011 – it did spawn a number of powerful campaigns to long-term effect.

She points to the fight for a higher minimum wage and union representation for fast-food workers. She also credits Occupy with giving Vermont’s democratic socialist senator Bernie Sanders the opening through which he burst on to the stage as a presidential candidate – twice.

“We created the space so that Bernie could do his run in 2016 and 2020, and for Elizabeth Warren running for president with her economic populist message.”

Stamp disagrees with Chomsky that the current wave of protests has failed to articulate a specific way forward. “I think the demands have been fairly clear: defunding police, reimagining public safety, and we are slowly winning.”

Certainly, today’s protesters can point to the first blossoming of change on a local level. The city council in Minneapolis, where the 46-year-old African American was killed by police on 25 May, has vowed to disband the police department and start over.

New York City lawmakers have moved to ban the use of chokeholds of the sort that killed Eric Garner. The Portland police chief is resigning amid calls for “bold reform”, and on a national level, Democrats who control the House of Representatives have unveiled the most ambitious plan for law enforcement reform in years.

In perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing signal of change, a street within spitting distance of Donald Trump in the White House has been renamed “Black Lives Matter Plaza”.

In the grand scheme of things, these individual victories may amount to no more than pointillist dots on the vast canvas of America’s woes. But to the protesters they are vital oxygen.

“To maintain activism on the streets you need little successes,” said Dana R Fisher, a professor of sociology specializing in protest movements at the University of Maryland. “Think about the civil rights movement – it was a long, arduous, painful process to get the black vote, but it was sustained by these little successes along the way.”

Fisher believes that the huge sweep of protests in more than 750 cities and towns all across America holds out a golden opportunity for dramatic change to be achieved through the ballot box in November. Her recent book, American Resistance, tracked the impact of the 2017 Women’s March held the day after Trump’s inauguration.

Studying the data, she found that much of the energy released on that day – the largest day of protest in American history – was channeled back into local communities and their congressional races. The result was that Democrats took back the House in 2018 in the so-called “Blue Wave”.

She sees a repeat of that potential today. “We are seeing amazing opportunities for people to channel what’s going on in the streets into political activism, especially with such a crucial election looming.”

The question remains, though, is there a need for some structured vehicle that could absorb the positive radiation of the current protests without which the movement risks fragmenting and dissipating just like Occupy? Fisher thinks there is.

“I’m sure it will be unpopular to say this, but I think there is a need for some professionalized organizational ecosystem to support this movement. There is a void forming, and we need to fill it.”

Noam Chomsky also sees a need for greater strategic direction. He wonders whether popular movements will emerge “that seek to deal with the brutal legacy of 400 years of vicious racism, that extends far beyond police violence”.

Nelini Stamp is resolutely optimistic. She reminds us that Black Lives Matter was founded in 2013, took off the following year during the Ferguson, Missouri, protests over the police killing of Michael Brown, and has been beavering away at effecting change ever since.

“There has been a movement for black lives over the past six years that has never stopped. We have more infrastructure now for people to land and go places than we did then – we’ve built more muscle.”

Is she not anxious that the euphoria of the current protests could fade over time into disappointment?

“I mean, I’m always anxious about that,” she said. “But I’ve never seen a multiracial uprising in my life like we’re seeing right now, and for all the anxiety I have every morning about what happens next, that gives me hope.”

Whoa There Nelly!

As the protests continue they are abutting against the gradual reopening of New York City effective tomorrow and I suspect given the slight uptick in employment numbers the protests will also gradually abate as while the issue is one of import the real reason behind the whole taking it to the streets was the frustration with being in lockdown for three months with little income, social and political segregation that when watching a black man cry I can’t breathe once again resonated with those who felt the same way.  Watching daily the White Daddy preach endlessly about keeping people safe it was no loss in irony that at the same time people were not actually safe.   The sudden wokeness of the white population was and is largely due to the daily grind of living and securing that safety through economic wellness and pursuing largely segregated pursuits while espousing the language of equality and acceptance as a way of proving they were not racist.  But the reality is there is no way to prove one is not racist as unless you are fully living and integrated into the black community and accepted as a member there you are always perceived as racist.  I learned that teaching in the public schools as just my being white, having largely faces of color in front of me the children had little way to know if I was hard on them because they were black or I was just a bitch.  The concept of race card is something I certainly am familiar with; however, unless I showed kids pictures of me with an ankle bracelet on, being subject to humiliation and degradation in the criminal courts for a crime I did not commit, or a photo of me sucking black dick I was not sure what I could do to prove I was not.  Oh give them a free pass to act insane in a classroom, to not write and read at a standard that would be expected of them to integrate and assimilate in white world and move up the economic ladder to at least get some higher education and in turn higher paying jobs, no, then I would have to accept being called racist and I was fine with that.  It is why I have little to say to the same white or brown faces that are taking to the streets who have never had anything ever happen to them ever and this is just to belong for a moment in time but will have no ownership or engagement beyond that.   Yes put that on your resume and tell us every time you need to pull out your own type of race card.

Right now the PTSD I have fought is manageable, as funny how the Covid lockdown for what began to me as forced house arrest (again of which I am personally familiar) is something I now embrace.  And as the city across the river opens I am excited to move outward at my own discretion and walk in the same streets that up until a week ago were empty.  I suspect they still will be but oddly safer as until the protests there were already an underclass of petty thieves and others using that as an opportunity, the same cohort doing so now in the shadow of protests.  Sadly they are almost all faces of color and that will be the next issue as they try to resolve and integrate back into their community. Ask these shopkeepers in the Bronx about that.   The same with the Korean/Asian population back in Los Angeles during Rodney King. That divide will not heal and more calls by them when a face of color comes into their shop and does “something” and that is what propelled the 911 call  in Ferguson, in Staten Island and in Minnesota.  All of those shopkeepers in those scenarios were not white.

I am a Libra and from this I try to find balance and clearly the wake up call to the history of systemic police violence has finally been embraced in a larger scale. When the NFL suddenly embraces the take a knee we have come a long way baby. And as we watch polls across the country there are true signs that this is now an issue of import so as we move forward in an election year there is still time to hold candidates accountable, to move forward to finding intiatives that can be added to the agenda when the Congress emerges from their homes to act upon legislation and make laws.

Well that brings me to this shocking truth – there is no anti lynching laws in federal books.  Truly that was a WTF moment having been through the 60s and just assumed that it had been handled and addressed. Well wrong again.   The best part of this that once again Kentucky home of the chief enabler of Trump, closet racist Mitch McConnell and his equally disruptive moron co Senator, Rand Paul.  No wonder they have such magnificent horse races there as you need anything to get the hell out of Kentucky.  Seriously people in Kentucky why?   I loved it there and its time you move into the 21st Century as I know you can, again I have been there and know you know better.

Emotions Run High as Anti-Lynching Bill Stalls in Senate
By The Associated Press
June 4, 2020
WASHINGTON — A Senate impasse over a widely backed bill to designate lynching as a federal hate crime boiled over on Thursday in an emotional debate cast against a backdrop of widespread protests over police treatment of African Americans. 

Raw feelings were evident as Sen. Rand Paul — who is single-handedly holding up the bill despite letting it pass last year — sought changes to the legislation as a condition of allowing it to pass. 

But the Senate’s two black Democrats, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California, protested, saying the measure should pass as is. The debate occurred as a memorial service was taking place for George Floyd, a Minneapolis man who died after a police officer kneeled on his neck for almost nine minutes, sparking the protests that have convulsed the nation. 

The legislative effort to make lynching a federal hate crime punishable by up to life in prison comes 65 years after 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi, and follows dozens of failed attempts to pass anti-lynching legislation. 

The Senate unanimously passed virtually identical legislation last year. The House then passed it by a sweeping 410-4 vote in February but renamed the legislation for Till — the sole change that returned the measure to the Senate. 

“Black lives have not been taken seriously as being fully human and deserving of dignity, and it should not require a maiming or torture in order for us to recognize a lynching when we see it,” said Harris. 

Paul, who has a history of rankling colleagues by slowing down bills, said the legislation was drafted too broadly and could define minor assaults as lynching. He also noted that murdering someone because of their race is already a hate crime. He said the Senate should make other reforms, such as easing “qualified immunity” rules that shield police officers from being sued. 

“Rather than consider a good-intentioned but symbolic bill, the Senate could immediately consider addressing qualified immunity and ending police militarization,” Paul said. He sought to offer an amendment to weaken the measure, and Booker blocked it. 

The conflict had been kept relatively quiet as Booker and Paul sought an agreement, but media reports recently pegged Paul as the reason the measure is stalled. 

“Tell me another time when 500-plus Congress people, Democrats, Republicans, House members and senators come together in a chorus of conviction and say, ‘Now is the time in America that we condemn the dark history of our past and actually pass anti-lynching legislation,’” Booker said.

The next stage is employment and again that faces of color are the most affected by this and are the lowest on the pay scale and often the last hired/first fired this now is the tine to address the same companies that sent massive emails, made PSA announcements and declared their support to Black Lives Matter to actually do so. Let’s talk about organizing Unions and collective bargaining to restore the equity of pay, of benefits, to build seniority and training to enable all workers to have better job security is the next most essential issue that needs to be moved forward.  I watched in Tennessee not once but three times attempts by Unions to organize auto workers to unionize at the German auto makers located in Chattanooga and funny it was all faces of color that voted no.  Again the fear put into you by the powers that be – the then current but now former Senator Bob Corker – to stop said organizing led to its failures. Again and again the right to work states that have hideous labor policies are all located in the South, with low wages and low protections for workers (think Texas and the oil and gas industry) have contributed to higher health problems and other significant social ones (Boeing’s lack of engagement and planes crashing) are largely due to the failure by workers to have the ability to bring to management’s attention problems.   So this thing about VOTING matters and electing individuals who will work to eliminate such bullshit and fund better health care, better education that all contributed to some of the problems that are about Covid, you know the same issue that hurt faces of color more than any other demographic group.  But sure black lives matter in only one scenario? Really?

Then the letter writing, the demanding meetings, attending local council hearings, even virtually with an agenda, going to every single hearing on building permits (believe it or not that is critical), school board meetings and getting together to go to Congress and visit such charming folks as Rand Paul and others who seem to have problems hearing from those who matter and the issues that matter. Seriously against Anti Lynching are you fucking kidding me?

So carry on. I will be walking in the park and yes there are Rangers there, Police there and I have seen nothing enforced including banning chairs, having time constraints or enforcing masks.  And yes  I see faces of color but then again I choose to not see many things much like I choose to. In other words I have this personal responsibility that I now advocate and encourage which means treat yourself, your body, your mind how you want to be treated and in turn model that.  You may not succeed but when it comes down to it at least I know who I am and what I can do to make a difference if I choose to.  So call me any name you want but I can do nothing from a hospital bed and as my Mother used to say, “Sticks and Stones can break your bones but names can never hurt you.”  So don’t be a victim be victorious and figure out how the white male power brokers do it and then work around it but do it so they don’t see it coming and it do it their way.