First, the Meh
#Sandra Bland
#Eric Garner (I can’t breathe!)
‘Sergeant at scene of Eric Garner death disciplined by NYPD; a supervising officer present during controversial killing of 43-year-old black man in summer 2014 gives up gun, badge;
“No one else in the case has yet to face departmental charges, and the internal disciplinary review is on hold pending a federal inquiry, at the request of the U.S. Attorney General for the Eastern District.”
The Hideous and the garden variety ugly
#CiaraMeyer
Jayzus; another baby hashtag.
Rest in the embrace of our loving thoughts, Ciara; may your family eventually find justice and some measure of peace.
#Michael Marshall
‘Denver inmate died from being restrained by deputies, death ruled homicide’; Denver coroner’s autopsy said jail inmate Michael Marshall had psychotic episode’
“A Denver jail inmate choked on his own vomit while being restrained on the floor by six deputies during a psychotic episode, and the coroner has ruled his death was a homicide.
The death of Michael Marshall at the Downtown Detention Center is hauntingly familiar to his family, attorneys and community activists who say the Denver Sheriff Department has not learned its lesson after the 2010 case of Marvin Booker, who also died after being restrained by deputies.
The autopsy report released Friday provides the first public insight into what happened Nov. 11 at the jail, where Marshall, 50, was being held on charges of trespassing and disturbing the peace. His bail was $100.
The autopsy found multiple blunt force injuries and abrasions on Marshall’s body, including his face, chest and back. The report also said heart and lung disease contributed to his death.”
Marvin Booker, you may remember, was a homeless street preacher who recite MLK’s speeches. He died for the audacity of trying to get his shoes before going to the booking desk. His only shoes, that is. The city settled with his family for $6 million in blood money in Nov. 2014. “A jury found the Denver Sheriff’s Department culpable in Booker’s death after a three-week trial. Booker, a street preacher, died in jail in 2010 after sheriff’s deputies subdued him with tasers, nunchucks and sleeper holds.”
Rest in Power, Michael Marshall and Marvin Booker.
#Bettie Jones, #Qunintonio LeGrier
‘Father of Quintonio LeGrier suing city of Chicago for police shooting that killed son and neighbor’
Ta-Nehisi Coates uses these two tragic and totally unnecessary murders to underpin his: ‘The Paranoid Style of American Policing; when officers take the lives of those they are sworn to protect and serve, they undermine their own legitimacy’
‘North Charleston officers’ support for Michael Slager seen as strain on police, community ties’ (with photo)
*Officers’ courtroom show of support this week for the North Charleston police officer who killed Walter Scott has stirred tensions among some people who interpreted it as an endorsement of the fatal shooting.
At least five members of the city’s police force, including two supervisors, stood when former officer Michael Slager’s attorney asked supporters to rise during a bail hearing Monday. They were not identified as officers. They wore no uniforms or badges. None of them spoke.
But to some who recognized the officers, the display served as a worrisome sign that others at the North Charleston Police Department agree with Slager, who fired eight times as Scott ran away after a traffic stop. Slager now stands charged with murder, largely as a result of a bystander’s video of the shooting.
Activists said the courtroom scene illustrated a need for an examination of whether civil rights abuses are rampant at the department.”
APD:
Killed by Police on Facebook have counted at least 1,202 people who were killed by U.S. police in 2015 according to corporate new; they don’t have a January tally up.
The good & potentially good
#Brendon Glenn
LA police chief recommends charges against officer who killed homeless man; Los Angeles police chief says an unarmed homeless man, Brendon Glenn, was on his stomach on the ground when officer Clifford Proctor shot him twice last May’
‘Georgia DA wants murder charges for officer who killed naked, unarmed Air Force vet’ (video included; it may jog your memories, sigh.)
“Officer Olsen, who is white, shot Anthony Hill, 27, who was black, on March 9, 2015, when responding to a call of a man behaving erratically outside a suburban Atlanta apartment complex. Witnesses said Hill, whose family said he struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder after a an Air Force deployment to Afghanistan, had raised his hands or placed them at this sides, and that he did not obey Officer Olsen’s instructions to halt. Police said Hill charged at Olsen before he was shot and killed.
Bystander videos and photos show Hill was naked, climbing on the sides of his apartment building prior to the shooting.”
And the very confusing, perhaps horrid (time will tell)
Hines’ is the least confusing legal article I’ve seen to date concerning the recent twists and turns of the case in the brutal and abject assassination of Freddie (I can’t breathe) Gray. Short version:
“The hung jury in December of William Porter’s trial raises critical issues for the prosecution in trying the van driver, Caesar Goodson, for the death of Freddie Gray. Goodson’s trial scheduled to start on January 11, was postponed on the same day by the Maryland Court of Special Appeals pending rulings on whether Porter must testify in the case. [snip]
The prosecution subpoenaed William Porter to testify against Goodson. A subpoena compels a witness to testify unless there are legal grounds to avoid the witness’s testimony. Porter filed a motion and asserted his 5th amendment rights against having to testify and give incriminating testimony against himself in his re-trial scheduled for June, 2016. Judge Barry Williams denied is motion. Porter’s lawyers appealed to the Maryland Court of Special Appeals. A decision has not been made as of this writing.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys could not have anticipated a hung jury. However, one did occur and it raises substantial issues about the prosecution’s case and the possibilities for convictions. Based on the hung jury and the need for Porter to testify in the van driver’s case, the state offered what is known as use and derivative immunity for Porter to testify. In essence, the state cannot use the testimony of Porter in his trial in June, 2016. Porter was not offered transaction immunity which would have given him full and complete immunity—thereby dropping the charges against him.”
Last weekend a conference was held in Philadelphia alluringly called ‘The Black Radical Tradition in Our Time’. An excerpt from the transcript of the interview with Glen Ford at TRNN announcing it:
“…we don’t believe that we can have such a successful movement if there is not a vibrant and self-aware black radical component to this movement. And that’s what the radical, the organizers were trying to do. They were concerned that this, this black radical tradition will have to be carried on not just by academics and not just by those of us like you and me, aging veterans of a previous movement, but by the activists who are stirring things up today, and especially by the youth.
And that’s why they’ve assembled a list of keynote speakers that’s very interesting, that go across those lines. We’ve got Angela Davis, Dr. Cornel West, Anthony Monteiro, Vijay Prashad, Steven Salaita, he’s with the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions against Israel movement. And Charlene Carruthers, who’s with the Black Youth 100 project in Chicago, and lots of other activists who are taking part in panels. I’m on a panel on war and peace and justice, and resistance to U.S. Empire, and another one on post-Obama realities. Where do black radicals go from here?” [snip]
“The black radical tradition is an internationalist tradition. It’s involved deeply in questions of self-determination. And not just black folks’ self-determination, but all people’s self-determination, all people’s struggle. And what will set this conference apart, what distinguishes it, is that it is an anti-capitalist conference. It’s about social transformation, and social transformation in our time means getting rid of this oppressive global capitalist system that sits like a dead weight on the right of self-determination of people all over the world.”
Tuesdays being Glen Ford’s spot on TRNN, he was interviewed on the conference, but it was not at all what I’d expected, or perhaps some of the attendees hadn’t gotten the memo. Please file again under: ‘better to know than to not know, and you decide what any of it means’.
(the transcript to ‘Liberation or “Asylum for Neoliberal Values?” Competing Visions of Black Politics’)
Garza’ guest invitation to the SOTU was courtesy of Barbara Lee (D-CA), I discovered.
Here is Eddie Conway interviewing conference attendees; no transcript yet, no terribly inspirational comments, imo.
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
and it keeps on… in chicago
Updated on thursday: turned out the cops lied and department and Rahmbo covered it up. i confess i can’t tell much, but apparently the kid never even turned around, just ran as hard as he could away from the trigger-happy Fry thug.
but wait! justice, chicago style!
“Satisfied with the police union’s version of events, leaders within the Chicago Police Department opted not to punish Fry.
Instead, Clarke and Odum — Cedrick’s accomplices in the carjacking — each were charged with first-degree murder. In the written charges, prosecutors allege that the men “set in motion a chain of events that caused the death of Cedrick Chatman,” despite being nowhere near the teen when he was killed.
The murder charges eventually were dropped, but the men were each sentenced to 10 years in prison for robbery and unlawful vehicular invasion, according to the Sun-Times.”
and becuz he’s such a tonic, and i dearly need one right now:
https://twitter.com/bscottmercer/status/685264028898320385
Umi Salah’s critique of social media as “an asylum of neoliberal values,” and his “devastating critique of those whose claim to leadership is based on the size of their Twitter followings, most notably DeRay McKesson, of Campaign Zero,” is available for listening here:
http://prn.fm/black-agenda-radio-01-11-16/%5D
welcome, halcyon, and thank you for the link. it didn’t work for me somehow, but i went through the archives and found this one. hope it takes in the comment box. it’s long, but i love his humor and message about ‘vicious individualism’. brilliant.
i’d forgotten to check twitter for the conference (duh), but umi’s provided the archived livestreams video coverage, woot! and some essays that look interesting as all-giddy-up. more soon; i want to listen as long as i can right now.
http://www.theblackradicaltradition.org/livestream
ah; umi was on fire! and turned the mic over to jamala rogers at 23 minutes. i confess i’d been waiting for him to remind us that deray had said once that ‘Twitter is the movement (or was it: ‘the revolution’?) no matter, he had the t-shirt. ;-)
watching some the key Tweeters in the movement tear each other apart has been ugly; watching so many mainly arguing over bernie/hillary has been hard to witness.
here’s saleh’s print version of what he’d said on radio, and i assume in the livestream of the conference below the text.
‘Blackout Reflection: No One Hand Should Have All That Power’
it almost reads as though the dream defenders had agreed to blackout on media for a time; his story is convincing, especially through the Truth he tells about himself.
Even the good news barely approaches the trial of Lyndie England in accountability.
but then: janis karpinski™, not that we truly know what was up with her ‘following orders’.
guess i’m at least a bit ♥ened by the philly conference, but as ever…time will tell. and #reclaim (I assume revolutionary) MLK is this week (may it matter in this milieu).
tryin’ to find some ella baker speeches that have transcripts for ya, but so far…i have failed.
Hideous.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/07/us/florida-woman-removed-hospital-dies/
While looking for this story I found this also. God damn.
(https://youtu.be/a0jL9fk1qWw)
both are hideous and unnecessary deaths, for certain. without knowing more, i’d say the hospital is far more culpable than the cops, though. including that they likely ‘shared’ with the cops that she had a history of ‘not obeying’ or whatever, and that she was ‘endangering other patients’. crump’s been pretty successful in civil cases, though.
now anna brown, my stars. how ugly. they kept her cuffed in the patrol car? then dragged her into a cell, left her lying on the cold cement floor…when a low bed was easily accessible? fuck them i poked around briefly, and found nothing about any charges or civil suits, even on the ‘justice for anna brown’ on facebook.
but this double-speak apparently by youtube from the hospital is messed up:
“”We want to assure the public that we did provide care for Ms. Brown. Unfortunately, even with appropriate testing using sophisticated technology blood clots can still be undetected in a small number of cases,” said Kate Becker, President of SSM St. Mary’s Health Center.”
note that she didn’t say they DID perform the tests, however. but see, she was homeless, on medicaid…hospitals don’t like medicaid, i think. not many docs take medicaid any longer, either.
my mind turned to so many other ‘death in custody’ issues and videos. i should have added a youtube search page (‘tased or beaten to death in custody or jail cells’), but sussing out recent ones would have been hard. so…i went to the guardian’s ‘the counted’ site, and i found 92 deaths in custody in 2015. that’s a hella obscene number, isn’t it?
they count 23 killed by US police so far in january.
You are amazing! I just wanted to bring that one to your attention. Now I know what to call it. ‘death in custody’. Not quite police killing? Maybe a subcategory of. And yeah the role of the hospital is scary. What lack of compassion (and racism).
sure, if one is killed by security in a cop-shop, it’s indeed by Killer Kops. ‘not quite human’: hmmmm. i need to think about that, because who gets killed by cops is certainly by class, not just race, and to critics of the larger BLM movement, the ingredient too many are apt to skate right by…in order to avoid even more discomfort, i reckon.
i’m struggling to picture in my mind what sort of inverse pecking order seems to be at play among the various subsets of ‘the other’ (humans who deserve killing or that it’s okay to kill, whether by kop, prosecutor, or jury), but they can get tangled up. i mean, sure, you have the obvious black, first american, latino/a, homeless, but then so many times it’s the mentally ill, even when cop KNOW a *subject’s* history of mental illness, as with a few stories above.
one of the key topics of discussions at the black radical tradition in philly was announced to be capitalism itself, which many say can’t exist without a slave/underclass. the livestreams i’d linked to represent hours and hours of listening, butthey must have spawned umi saleh’s talk about ‘the social networking movement being too hooked to neoliberal values.
but this will slay you, and remind you of cliven bundy’s little racist hissy fits:
Your life in the hands of people who don’t think you are quite human. (Shudder).
The example’s set by bully Puppet ‘Flip’ 0bama:
instead, can’t We ALL have Moar Of THIS:
?
This from a supposed community organizer.
“Perhaps the simplest way to describe community organizing is to say it is the practice of identifying a specific aggrieved population, say unemployed steelworkers, or itinerant fruit-pickers, or residents of a particularly bad neighborhood, and agitating them until they become so upset about their condition that they take collective action to put pressure on local, state, or federal officials to fix the problem…”
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/225564/what-did-obama-do-community-organizer-byron-york
This alleged community organizer had no empathy for the protesters? Something don’t add up.
Who was Barack Obama?
well, ‘community organizing’ is also an effective road to gaining personal power. but byron york is a mental midget Elite blatherer. sorry i can’t really do more than scan what i did. ;-)
oh, the ‘tell’ in this case was something like “we got us an ISSUE!”
Wendy. I am not advocating the guy’s politics. Come on! It is just a definition of community activist. I’ll try to find one by someone with suitable politics.
i guess i’m not seeing a reason for it. the term is quite broad, and O was a certain kind, likely with goals of catapulting himself into a sphere with more personal power and allies. a (then) local journalist described a new man in our community by way of this:
“some are taught that they should imagine parachuting into a town, looking around, and spot what really needs doing (within acceptable community rules and popular desires), then….go for it, build a power base. it turned out he was quite right, and the fellow has wangled his way to being ceo of a major public concern, making er…plenty of money. some might call is cynical, others might call it…brilliant.
on edit: come on, nomad. i waded through it far enough to grab the quote, and i never mentioned his (crap) politics, either. ;-)
but it’s like NGOs: some are powerful with very hidden agendas their names belie, other local organizations are just fine.
O wangled his way into a wide christian community of course, then was shocked that anyone minded that he doled out federal dollars for churches to distribute, his claim being that churches knew where the $ needed to go. pfffft.
yeah; O tried to be ‘diplomatic’. some of what he said was even true, wasn’t it? if we wanted to collectively stop it…, and tra la la. thing is, ‘the riots by thugs’ were what woke the nation up, and the protestors, too. ‘a riot is the voice of the unheard’, MLK, and others.
how wonderful to hear pop and mavis. i’d never heard that one, thanks, bruce. what would sam cooke say now, besides: “when?!?”
seal owns the song now for me.
Et SOTU, P.S. : Now, we see what Rude BEAST $louchs toward Dubai:
http://www.thedailysheeple.com/the-state-of-the-union-speech-obama-wont-give_012016
with brief “fantasy” stopover in Damascus:
http://rinf.com/alt-news/editorials/imprisoned-al-qaeda-fighters-freed-by-u-s-allies-to-rejoin-fight-against-assad/
to final destination in the good ol’ U.A. of E. ! :
http://whatson.ae/dubai/knowledge/37702/barack-obama-buying-dubai-mansion/
What W … W … Willie Wonkish vengeance upon US ALL :
YOYO (Y’all On Your Own), Indeed.
sorry, bruce. 2 much bogus yellow journalism.