Barack
Obama’s race hustling criminal coddling set the more recent tone where state
and local law-enforcement officers were routinely attacked, accused of serial
hate-inspired killings of suspects; where civilized norms were declared the
illicit fruit of white privilege; where the epidemic of black-on-black
homicides was either ignored or blamed on unresolved racial grievances. GEOFFREY P. HUNT
“Black
Christians should protest the Democrat party's anti-Christian agenda which has
led to the moral decay of the black community; fatherless households, gangs,
crime, generational poverty, incarceration, and record-high black on black
homicides.” LLOYD MARCUS
Blacks are only 13% of the population. White America
gifted its first black president two terms. And yet, far too many blacks
absurdly believe Democrats' and fake news media’s lie that white America did
not want a black man in the White House. If America is such a hellhole of
racism, how did Oprah Winfrey, a dark-complexioned stout black woman, become
one of the wealthiest and most influential persons on the planet? The myth of
America's racism is evil, destructive, and must end. LLOYD MARCUS
She never said it was the police, by the way (she
casually refused,
in an article about police killings, to place the blame anywhere), and we know
it wasn't, because the police killed about 19 unarmed black males in 2017, and black
people killed about 2,627 — a difference of over a
hundred times. In fact, in 2018, black people killed about 2,600 black
people, and whites in general — all of us, despite being 60% of
the populace — killed only 234, more than ten times fewer. The
greatest danger to black people in America today is always other black
people. Black lives matter to Black Lives Matter only when it gives
them an excuse to attack white people. JEREMY EGERER
13% of the
population in the USA is black BUT THEY COMMIT 85% of all violent interracial
crimes, 80% of all shootings, 79% of all robberies, 59% of all murders, 52% of
all violent juvenile crimes, 45% of all drug offenses..
49% of all murder victims are black. 42% of all cop killers are black.
99% of all major riots involving property damage, looting and civil disobedience are committed by blacks as opposed to ANY OTHER minority in America.
49% of all murder victims are black. 42% of all cop killers are black.
99% of all major riots involving property damage, looting and civil disobedience are committed by blacks as opposed to ANY OTHER minority in America.
93% of all
black murder victims are murdered by another black.
33% of all crimes in America are committed by 3% of the population; blacks
between the ages of 16 and 36
8% of America’s population are black men, yet they account for 40% of America’s total prison population.
8% of America’s population are black men, yet they account for 40% of America’s total prison population.
40% of
blacks are on welfare
Only 59%
blacks graduate high school (Detroit, only 20%)Over 60% of black
households have no fathers present
72% of black mothers are unwed!
72% of black mothers are unwed!
Blacks
account for 38% of abortions (only 13%
of population
and contraceptives are FREE)
(STATISTICS FROM Dept. of Justice, Dept.
of
Commerce, FBI and USA Census (ALL and
sect.5
Law Enforcement))
THE CLASSIC
BRIBE SUCKING DEMOCRAT!
The House Ethics Committee panel found that Rep. Bobby L. Rush has improperly accepted free office space in a Chicago shopping center over the course of two decades.
Rush has occupied the space since 1989, according to the Ethics report, but would only have to pay back rent for the years following before his election to Congress in
1992. The ethics committee requires Rush to pay $13,000 out-of-pocket since he was found of improperly receiving almost 27-years of free office space, according to Federal Election Commission records. Rush incorrectly told the committee he expected the City of Chicago to pay for his rent and added it had done so in the past, according to the ethics report. He began to miss payments starting in January 1990 and attempted to pay twice with two checks that later bounced.
A Cook County Circuit Court judge found him liable for more than $1 million on a delinquent loan he and others took out on a now-defunct church in Chicago. Judge Alexander White ordered $2,100 per month of Rush’s $174,000 annual congressional salary be garnished to repay the loan.
A 2018 report from the House Committee on Ethics shows Democratic Representative Bobby Rush is still utilizing the federal campaign finance system to benefit his family despite following a 2016 questioning by the Federal Election Committee.
Rush’s campaign committee gave a South Side church founded by Rush more than $196,000 since June 2004 and paid Rush's wife Carolyn Rush a year-round salary since 2007 totaling $404,000 as a consultant. The money represents nearly a quarter of the $1.6 million the congressman's campaign fund raised in that time.
Illinois Democrat Rips Police for Popping Popcorn While Rioters Loot Nearby Businesses
3:24
Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) — who has claimed that “we are living in a police state” in response to law enforcement quelling recent protests — berated the Chicago police on Thursday for “lounging” in his campaign office instead of stopping rioters from looting nearby businesses.
Police officers lounged in Rush’s Chicago campaign office, where they drank coffee and made popcorn for themselves while rioters looted from nearby businesses in the wake of the death of George Floyd, according to the congressman.
“They even had the unmitigated gall to go and make coffee for themselves, and to pop popcorn — my popcorn — in my microwave while looters were tearing apart businesses within their sight and within their reach,” said Rush of the police officers at a press conference on Thursday.
ANNOUNCEMENT: Mayor Lightfoot joins the Chicago Police Department and U.S. Representative Bobby Rush to make an announcement. https://t.co/hDk80Rd8e9— Mayor Lori Lightfoot (@chicagosmayor) June 11, 2020
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) — who also spoke at the press conference — said that she and Rush “haven’t always agreed on every issue” but that they are now “in total alignment in righteous anger” over the incident at the congressman’s campaign office.
“Eight or more police officers [were] lounging in my office as, when I assume, looters were breaking [into] stores in this shopping center where my office is located at,” said Rush.
But ironically, the congressman has also referred to law enforcement taking action against protesters as equivalent to “living in a police state.”
We are living in a police state. https://t.co/YjO8x7QZjt— Bobby L. Rush (@RepBobbyRush) June 2, 2020
“These individuals were lounging in a congressman’s office, having a little hang out for themselves while small businesses on the South Side were looted and burned,” insisted Lightfoot, while images caught on a surveillance camera of the officers lounging were displayed in the background.
Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara acknowledged that the photo of an officer sleeping on a couch in Rush’s office “looks bad” but argued that the looting was already over by then, and that officers had been told to stand down, according to a report by Chicago Sun-Times.
“This was 1 a.m. They destroyed that mall all afternoon. There was nothing left to loot there,” said Catanzara.
“She’s lying,” added Catanzara of the Chicago mayor. “Every store in that strip mall was destroyed and emptied out. The jewelry store was set afire — the police were told to stand down and let it happen.”
Catanzara went on to accuse Lightfoot of staging a “Hollywood production” to advance a political agenda, adding that the congressman’s staff had actually invited the officers into the office, where they told the police to “make themselves at home.”
“They make it sound like the police went there and were looting the office,” said Catanzara to Chicago Sun-Times. “I mean — it was absolutely ridiculous what she was trying to spin this into.”
“She has an agenda. She has motives,” added Catanzara of Lightfoot. “The riots are over — the protests are pretty much over for now, which means the anti-police rhetoric has pretty much died down for the most part. That just doesn’t work for her.”
Meanwhile, Lightfoot suggested that if the police officers who drank coffee and made popcorn in Rush’s office do not turn themselves in, she will find them.
“You know who you are. You know what you did,” she said. “Don’t make us come find you.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
IF BLACK LIVES MATTERED TO BLACKS WHY IS BLACK ON BLACK MURDER A WEEKEND SPORT IN CHICAGO?
EYE ON THE NEWS
Stigmatize Gang Culture
We won’t get the law enforcement that we want until we have less violent communities. June 9, 2020
Public safety
The Social Order
Many groups bear some responsibility for the recent chaos in American cities, including the rioters themselves, police departments and unions that fail to discipline bad cops, politicians at all levels of government who deliberately enflame anger and resentment, and social media influencers. Add another group to the mix: gangsters, who for decades have turned many inner-city, mostly black neighborhoods into warzones.
As the evidence indicates, though white men are killed more often by cops, it’s statistically more likely for a black man to be killed by a police officer than a white man—a reality that might be explained by the fact that cops interact with black men far more often than they do with white men. The gangsters help explain that difference.
The likes of the Bloods, Crips, Gangster Disciples, Vice Lords, and their factions draw cops into black neighborhoods—often at the urging of black citizens—because these gangs commit such a large share of the thousands of gun crimes in U.S. cities. Even during the Covid-19 pandemic, gangsters have continued to kill black men across the country. Though gangs make up a small minority of urban America’s young men, they have an outsize influence over the relationship between cops and black communities.
Of course, Derek Chauvin, and his accompanying Minneapolis police officers, not gangsters, caused the death of George Floyd. But gangsters helped create the environment and cultural context that allow police violence to thrive. And that reality is relevant to any efforts to improve American policing, from reform to revolution.
For reformers, gangsters undermine efforts to address what many regard as the over-policing of black communities or institute community-policing strategies. Spikes in violent crime increase public support for more aggressive policing. More aggressive policing requires government budgets to pay for more cops in the police force, rather than investing in new police-accountability measures, like body cameras or improved procedures for investigating police shootings.
Revolutionaries speak of disbanding police forces, but even when such notions gain some community or political support—as in Minneapolis, where the city council is pursuing it—the reality goes only so far because of the persistence of urban crime. And the model that many point to—Camden, New Jersey—is instructive. In 2013, the city disbanded its police force but replaced it with a larger county force, which grew the number of police in the city from 250 to 411 and gave Camden “the highest police presence of any larger-sized city in America” and the lowest homicide rate that the city has had since the 1980s. The reality of crime will ultimately bring cities back to stronger law enforcement. Even Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, described by President Obama as having the “most progressive platform” in history, has made clear that he does not support disarming or defunding police.
Americans who want to improve policing should recognize that gangsters make it harder to change policy or culture. Reformers and revolutionaries alike often struggle to accept the reality of persistent hardcore criminality among a minority segment of the black community. Not wanting to play into racist stereotypes, they refuse to distinguish the gangsters who terrorize black communities from the vast majority of law-abiding black people.
Many well-intentioned people, moreover, argue that reducing gang violence requires long-term investments in community programs or economic development. These are worthwhile goals, and I support them enthusiastically. But, in the meantime, most people—concerned for their personal safety—will justifiably favor investing in law enforcement, since police officers can make an immediate, positive impact in reducing homicides in black communities, as Harvard economist Roland Fryer has documented.
Is there a step that we can take to reduce gang violence that’s also an alternative to putting more cops in black communities? Yes: changing the culture that young black men in urban America are raised in. That means aggressively calling out the glorification of violence, and stigmatizing those who tolerate or celebrate gang violence, the same way we stigmatize incidents of police brutality against blacks.
This is not a “What about Chicago?” argument in the face of police violence. It’s a challenge to apply the same assumptions about cultural influence that propel social media activism about police violence to another form of violence that kills black men. If it’s valuable for Jay-Z to speak about George Floyd, then why can’t he also apologize for glorifying drug dealing? If ESPN and the athletes it does business with believe that they have a responsibility to talk about racism, then why can’t they also recognize how harmful it is to feature gangsta rap songs like “N*ggas Bleed” on their platforms? If Republic Records, home of Drake and Taylor Swift, chooses to ban the term “urban” out of respect for black people, then can it also stop publishing lyrics like “gun on my hip, just lower your tone, ‘cause you could get hit,” which clearly normalize violence among young men? (Note: the man who rapped these lyrics, Pop Smoke, was shot and killed earlier this year by ski-mask-wearing home invaders.)
Those who believe their voices make a difference on police violence should also use their voices to help reduce gang violence. Whether we like it or not, we won’t have the kind of law enforcement that we want until we also have less violent communities.
Why Can’t Big-City Democrats Reform the Police?
Accusations of police brutality have persisted in our bluest cities for decades.June 12, 2020
Politics and law
Public safety
The Social Order
The death of George Floyd, an African-American, at the hands of a white Minneapolis police officer has sparked weeks of urban protests—some marked by looting and violence—across the United States. It has also brought fierce condemnations of President Donald Trump. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio partly blamed the president for the unrest, noting “there’s been an uptick in tension and hatred and division since he came along,” while Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot said that she had a message for the president: “It’s two words. It begins with F and it ends with U.” The New York Times, meantime, excoriated Trump for what the paper described as a “violent ultimatum” issued to unruly protestors, and former vice president Joe Biden charged Trump with “calling for violence against American citizens during a moment of pain.”
Less anger, though, was directed at Minneapolis’s political establishment. The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (a merger of Minnesota’s Democrats and the state’s Farmer-Labor Party) has run the city since 1975. Instead, the New York Times ran a mild piece observing that, for Democratic leaders of Minneapolis and other cities, the violent events were “testing their campaign promises and principles.” The protests, the paper opined judiciously, necessitated “careful calibration of liberal leaders, between projecting empathy for the protesters and denouncing property destruction and theft.” (The Times did acknowledge that the Minneapolis police department, currently run by a black police chief, has a “long history of accusations of abuse.”)
Floyd’s death was only the latest in a series of disturbing incidents that have fed a growing belief among African-Americans that they’re a target of abusive cops. For many, today’s tragic events evoke the experiences of the 1960s, when blacks who had moved into northern cities clashed with hostile police departments, setting off similar destructive riots. “To some Negroes police have come to symbolize white power, white racism and white repression,” the Kerner Commission’s 1968 report on the upheavals of that era declared. Nearly 50 years later, the Justice Department, in a report on the Baltimore Police Department in the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s death in police custody in 2015, concluded that “the relationship between the Baltimore Police Department and many of the communities it serves is broken.”
Though both reports’ conclusions were hotly contested, it’s indisputable that in each period, the principal controversies largely revolved around police departments in Democrat-controlled cities, with a few notable exceptions, like Ferguson, Missouri. Despite decades of Democratic Party governance and numerous promises of reform, these cities—Baltimore, Chicago, and Minneapolis are notable cases—continue to struggle with relations between the police and minority communities; in some cases, those relations have even regressed. The media rarely acknowledge this monumental failing of the party, and it seems to evoke little self-reflection among urban Democrats themselves.
The Democratic Party of the late 1950s and 1960s was principally a blue-collar political movement. It dominated northeastern and midwestern cities through powerful local political machines dispensing patronage to supporters—including plum positions in police departments. Corruption was endemic, and it often occurred at the expense of black residents.
Those conditions set the stage for some of the most explosive riots of that period. In July 1967, two Newark police officers arrested a black cab driver and dragged him into a precinct house, where he was beaten. Protests erupted and swiftly turned violent, lasting four days and costing 26 lives. Investigations in the aftermath uncovered widespread corruption. Newark’s mayor, Hugh Addonizio, had returned from serving in Congress to run the city because, he reportedly said, “There’s no money in Washington, but you can make a million bucks as mayor of Newark.” The city’s police department was tied to organized crime; mob bosses had helped elect Addonizio, and directly picked his police commissioner, a man widely disliked in the black community. That same summer, a Detroit police raid on an after-hours club hosting a homecoming party for two African-American Vietnam vets sparked five days of rioting that saw 43 people die in the city. As in Newark, black residents complained that the police were corrupt—for example, taking bribes to ignore street crime. Reports issued after the riots showed that the department had strong ties to local organized crime.
The Newark and Detroit riots, and riots in more than 150 other cities, that summer brought sweeping political changes, including the election of a generation of new black urban Democratic leaders. But policing remained a glaring problem. In Detroit, voters elected radical labor organizer Coleman Young, an African-American, as mayor in 1974. He went to war with his own police department, slashing its ranks by 20 percent and installing a black police commissioner, with instructions to reduce enforcement in the city radically. Both strategies—hiring more black police leaders (and officers, generally) and reducing police presence—became common in major cities. Crime exploded in Detroit, and in most American urban areas; as middle-class residents, predominantly white, left for safer suburbs, poorer blacks, living in increasingly dangerous city neighborhoods, were the biggest victims.
The story only changed when a few criminologists, led by the Manhattan Institute’s George Kelling, and visionary police leaders, like William J. Bratton, began to advocate for community-based policing, including enforcement of quality-of-life offenses, and the deployment of more sophisticated data to target crime hot spots, to bring order back to urban neighborhoods. After Bratton became New York’s police chief under Republican mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 1994, crime started to fall dramatically—including violent felonies, which fell by 70 percent.
As crime declined, so did some key indicators of police misconduct. The New York Police Department keeps extensive records on how often officers fire their guns, and the numbers tell a powerful story. In 1991, at the peak of the city’s crime wave under Mayor David Dinkins, officers discharged their guns 307 times. Ten years ago, in a much safer city, police fired their guns fewer than 100 times—and last year, they did so just 52 times, representing a greater than 80 percent decline from 1991.
About a decade ago, a narrative reemerged in America that police departments are deeply racist and single out minority residents disproportionately. The timing seemed unusual. America had just elected its first black president, which might have signaled that the country’s racist past was firmly behind it—certainly in the sense of systemic or institutional racism. And yet, with Barack Obama in the White House, individual conflicts between the police and African-Americans were not downplayed but amplified, at times by the president himself. Speaking about the case of Eric Garner, a New Yorker arrested for selling contraband cigarettes who died in police custody after resisting arrest, Obama said that the incident spoke to “larger issues that we’ve been talking about now for the last week, the last month, the last year, and, sadly, for decades, and that is the concern on the part of too many minority communities that law enforcement is not working with them and dealing with them in a fair way.”
New York’s progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio, found larger meaning in the confrontation, explaining that he told his son Dante, who is half-black, that he faced extra danger when interacting with the police. “With Dante, very early on, we said, ‘Look, if a police officer stops you, do everything he tells you to do. Don’t move suddenly. Don’t reach for your cellphone,’” said de Blasio. “Because we knew, sadly, there’s a greater chance it might be misinterpreted if it was a young man of color.” Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, used his bully pulpit to argue repeatedly that police and public school officials disproportionately and unfairly targeted young blacks. Holder led federal investigations of several police departments and used the Department of Justice to force teachers and administrators to reduce suspensions of African-Americans students.
Though statistical evidence showed no disproportionate targeting of blacks, it’s clear that many African-Americans believed this narrative of the Obama years. And the rhetoric surrounding the 2020 unrest suggests that many still do. So why did so little change under a Democratic president, and in typically Democratic-run cities? The answers might lie in looking closely at some of the most egregious confrontations that occurred in blue cities over the last few years.
In October 2014, 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was shot at least 16 times by a police officer on a Chicago street and killed. Initial reports claimed that he was walking erratically down the street, carried a knife, and lunged at the police. Testimony from witnesses and other evidence, however, cast doubt on the official version of events. The city turned down numerous requests to release video of the incident, which took place in the middle of a difficult reelection campaign for then-mayor Rahm Emanuel, who eventually won a run-off for a second term in April 2015. When the city, under pressure, eventually provided access to several videos, the evidence showed that McDonald was walking away from the cop when shot. The release provoked widespread protests, and the officer was eventually convicted of second-degree murder.
Emanuel refused calls to resign, despite emails obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request showing that he and members of his administration were aware that the videos existed. Instead, he established a review board headed by Lori Lightfoot, then president of the Chicago Police Board, to recommend police reforms, which a Justice Department report deemed essential to restore trust between the force and the community. While Chicago, governed by Democrats since 1931, made some changes, such as providing officers with tasers, which they could use as an alternative to their guns, no sweeping reforms or reorganization of the force took place. Lightfoot ran for mayor three years later, promising that she would finish the job of reform. In office for a year, with violence spiking in the city, she came under fire in minority communities for not being tough on crime. She has resorted to some of the same strategies that Emanuel was criticized for, including flooding crime-plagued neighborhoods with extra cops.
While the McDonald case festered in Chicago, in April 2015, Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who had been arrested for carrying a knife, sustained head injuries while riding in the back of a Baltimore Police Department van and died in the hospital. Protests broke out shortly after, and some were violent, involving looting and arson, prompting Maryland governor Larry Hogan to declare a state of emergency and send in the National Guard. During the riot, the city’s mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, was criticized for declaring, “While we tried to make sure that (protesters) were protected from the cars and the other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.”
Under intense criticism for her role during the riots, she decided not to run for reelection. A subsequent Department of Justice investigation accused the city police, headed by an African-American commissioner, of making unconstitutional stops and searches and of using excessive force. The task of reform fell to Rawlings-Blake’s successor, Catherine Pugh, the eighth consecutive Democrat elected mayor since 1971, who ran on a platform of restraining the police. Like many of her Democratic predecessors, her strategy revolved around reducing policing—but as police withdrew, crime and disorder spread. Murders, which had declined to as low as 197 annually, spiked to more than 300. Pugh had to resign after just two and a half years in office for pressuring groups to buy a book she had written. She eventually pled guilty to conspiracy and tax evasion and was sentenced to three years in prison.
Though no such postmortems have taken place yet on the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, we can already see the likely direction they will take. The Minneapolis Police Department hired a black police chief in 2017, and he pledged to institute broad reforms, but he’s faced resistance. One problem typical of Democratic-controlled cities is that public-sector unions are powerful, and the Minneapolis police union has apparently stymied efforts by the new chief to discipline and suspend officers accused of misconduct. “During recessions [the city] would give the union management rights in lieu of money,” Robert Olson, former chief of police in Minneapolis, told Reuters two years ago. “We’re not talking about just one union contract. We’re talking about incremental changes in contracts over years that cumulatively, suddenly, there’s all of these hoops, which makes it far more difficult for chiefs to sustain discipline.” It’s an old obstacle that the city’s political leaders haven’t rushed to fix, despite years of complaints from minorities, because unions are deeply embedded in the political landscape. Minneapolis has one of the highest rates of unionization of public employees of any metro area in the country.
Speaking on TV during the recent unrest, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden promised, if elected, to make police brutality a key issue for his administration. It was the latest in a long line of promises by leading Democrats to address what they see as police misconduct toward African-Americans. One wonders when they will be called to account for their repeated failures to do something about it.
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