Tuesday, June 23, 2020

AMERICAN POLICE - A CONDONED, ABETTED AND ENABLED CRIMINAL CLASS - HERE'S HOW THEY WORK IT FOR THE MURDERERS


My Family Saw a Police Car Hit a Kid on Halloween. Then I Learned How NYPD Impunity Works.

ProPublica Deputy Managing Editor Eric Umansky’s family saw an unmarked NYPD cruiser hit a Black teenager. He tried to find out how it happened, and instead found all of the ways the NYPD is shielded from accountability.
by Eric Umansky

 June 23, 5 a.m. EDT

Lisa Larson-Walker/ProPublica

Last Halloween, my wife and then-6-year-old daughter were making their way home after trick-or-treating in Brooklyn. Suddenly, an unmarked NYPD car with sirens wailing began speeding against traffic up a one-way street, our neighborhood’s main thoroughfare. The officer seemed to be going after a few teenage boys.
Then, in an instant, the car hit one of the kids.
It was the first of many jarring things my family saw the NYPD do that night. Afterward, I tried to find out more about what exactly had happened and whether officers would be disciplined. There was footage and plenty of witnesses, and I happen to be an investigative journalist. I thought there was at least a chance I could get answers. Instead, the episode crystallized all of the ways in which the NYPD is shielded from accountability.
This happened in my neighborhood, Carroll Gardens, which is overwhelmingly white. Residents named it that in the 1960s to distinguish it from nearby Red Hook, where the population was largely Black. The area has changed enormously over the decades. But even now, it’s segregated almost block by block.
Halloween is the one day that it can seem like an integrated neighborhood. With lots of stoops and storefronts, there’s always plenty of candy to be had. Kids from the whole area come for the haul.
The police said a group of teenage boys that night had punched and kicked another teenager at a nearby playground and stolen his cellphone. The teen flagged down an officer and was driven around the neighborhood looking for the boys. He pointed out a group, and police descended from different directions. One car sped against traffic until it hit a kid; the boy slid over the hood, hit the ground, and then popped up and ran away along with the others.
My wife took a photo of the car right after:
The NYPD car that went against traffic and hit a teenage boy. (Courtesy of Sara Pekow)
The police then turned their attention to a different group of boys. My wife and others said they were younger and didn’t seem to have any connection to the ones who had been running. Except that in both groups, the boys were Black.
The police lined five of the younger boys against the wall of our neighborhood movie theater and questioned them, shining bright lights that made them wince and turn their heads. The smallest of the boys was crying, saying, “I didn’t do anything.”
My daughter took in the scene. “What did the boys do wrong?” she asked. The family members of a couple of the boys were there. They had all been trick-or-treating in the neighborhood.
The police eventually let the two boys with relatives go and arrested the three others: a 15-year-old, a 14-year-old and a 12-year-old.
My wife came home with my daughter and urged me to go back. I arrived about half an hour after everything started, a bit after 9 p.m., just as the handcuffed boys were put into a police car.
I watched the mom of one of the freed boys try to tell the ones being arrested to shout out their parents’ numbers, so somebody could tell them what was happening. An officer stood in front of the car window to block the boys from sharing their numbers. Another officer walked up close to the mom and started yelling at her to shut up. A senior officer backed him away.
I also watched another little girl take it all in. She was about the same age as my daughter. Except my daughter is white, as am I. The little girl is Black, and she had just watched her brother be put against the wall and her own mother being yelled at by a cop.
The boys were driven to our local precinct, the 76th. I eventually made my way there, too. The families of all the boys were there. The police are required to notify families when a minor is arrested. But the families told me that hadn’t happened. They’d learned about the boys’ arrests from friends. (The police later said the families showed up so quickly they didn’t have time to make notifications.)
The parents stood outside the precinct for the next four hours, waiting to be allowed to see their kids. One of the fathers, silent most of the time, said he was worried about how late the kids were being held because they still had school in the morning. A mother had to leave her 2-year-old with a neighbor. She paced around outside the station. “I blame myself,” she kept saying. “I never let him out on Halloween. A bunch of Black boys together. I shouldn’t have let him out. But he begged me.”
The police didn’t allow the parents into the station or let them see their kids. At one point, an officer came out, apologized and explained that the station was simply waiting for paperwork to go through. The boys were finally let out around 12:45 a.m.
They weren’t given any paperwork or records about what had happened or told the arresting officers’ names.
The next day, our daughter and her 8-year-old brother were full of questions: “Why did they arrest the boys if they didn’t do anything wrong?” “Is the boy that got hit OK?” I had questions, too. So I called the NYPD. What was the department’s understanding of what happened, I asked, and was it going to investigate any of the cops’ actions?
I felt a sense of kinship with the NYPD’s spokesman, Al Baker. He’s a former journalist. We followed each other on Twitter. Surely, he’d tell me the real deal.
Baker soon called me back. He had looked into it. The boys were being charged with something called “obstructing government administration,” which basically amounts to resisting arrest.
The police hadn’t done anything wrong, Baker said. I don’t know what your wife saw, he explained, but a police car did not hit a kid.
So I went back to my wife and asked her, “Are you sure?” She was sure. It happened right in front of her. Still, memories are fallible. So I went into nearby storefronts and asked if anyone had seen anything the night of Halloween.
“Yeah, I saw a cop car hit a kid,” a waiter told me. He said he had a clear view of it: A handful of kids were running. One of them jumped out into the street and got hit by the police car, “probably going faster than he should have been.” He saw the boy roll over the hood and fall to the ground: “It sounded like when people hit concrete. It made a horrible sound.”
I spoke to four witnesses, including my wife. All of them said they saw the same thing. When I called Baker back, he told me that my wife and the three others were mistaken. The car hadn’t hit the kid. The kid had hit the car.
As his statement put it: “One unknown male fled the scene and ran across the hood of a stationary police car.”
 Transcribed statement from New York Police Department spokesman Al Baker.
The NYPD has units devoted to investigating its own cops. The city’s district attorneys can also charge officers, of course. But there is supposed to be another check on abuse by police.
New York City has an agency dedicated to investigating civilians’ allegations against the police, the straightforwardly named Civilian Complaint Review Board. After reporters covered what happened on Halloween, the CCRB responded to a Twitter thread I had written, saying it was investigating. Once again, I assumed we’d get answers.
But the NYPD has long fought against truly independent civilian oversight. Seventy years ago, community groups banded together and pushed the city to address “police misconduct in their relations with Puerto Ricans and Negros.” The NYPD responded by creating the CCRB. But it didn’t have any actual civilians on it. The board originally consisted of three deputy police commissioners.
The first outsiders were appointed more than a decade later, by Mayor John Lindsay’s administration. The police unions fought it. “I’m sick and tired of giving in to minority groups with their whims and their gripes and shouting,” said the head of one.
Things have changed a lot over the years. The civilian board now has about 200 staffers, and its investigators dig deep into cases. My wife said a CCRB investigator who called her was incredibly thorough.
They have lots to do. In 2018, the latest year for which there’s complete data, the board logged 2,919 complaints against NYPD officers for punching, shoving, kicking or pushing people. Each complaint can contain multiple allegations and involve multiple officers. About 9% of the members of the force have had six or more complaints of some type made against them.
The names of all of those officers have long been kept secret, which is finally set to change after New York repealed the notorious “50-a” law that had barred disclosure of police discipline records.
 Source: Civilian Complaint Review Board 2018 Annual Report
A recent CCRB report focused on police abuse against Black and Latino boys: “Young teens or pre-teens of color were handcuffed, arrested, or held at gunpoint while participating in age-appropriate activities such as running, playing with friends, high-fiving, sitting on a stoop, or carrying a backpack.”
In one case, a few boys were walking home and throwing sticks when police swarmed them, drew guns and ordered the boys up against a wall. The kids were “compliant and cooperative,” the report says, but the commanding officer at the scene decided to arrest two of the boys, ages 8 and 14, for disorderly conduct for throwing the sticks. The report notes: “The children were transported to the stationhouse, handcuffed and in tears.”
The report flagged a few other troubling patterns. One was the NYPD not notifying parents of arrests. Another was children being held for running from plainclothes officers.
I asked the NYPD about the report and everything else in this story. They didn’t respond.
The CCRB assiduously logs all complaints it gets against the police, about 7,000 per year. But actually investigating them, let alone meting out discipline, is a different matter. The NYPD still has control of nearly every step of the process.
Take body cams, which are now standard equipment for NYPD officers. There’s almost certainly footage of exactly what happened on Halloween. But civilian investigators don’t have direct access to the footage. They email requests to the NYPD, which decides which footage is relevant. The department takes its time.
Read More

The Police Have Been Spying on Black Reporters and Activists for Years. I Know Because I’m One of Them.
Wendi C. Thomas is a black journalist who has covered police in Memphis. One officer admitted to spying on her. She’s on a long list of prominent black journalists and activists who have been subjected to police surveillance over decades.
The CCRB’s monthly report shows investigators have made nearly 1,000 requests for body cam footage that the NYPD hasn’t yet fulfilled. More than 40% of the requests have been pending for at least three months.
The CCRB and NYPD recently hashed out an agreement to marginally improve the process: CCRB investigators can now go to a room and watch footage. The agreement stipulates that CCRB staff can only take notes. They cannot record anything or use footage they see of abuse that happens to be different from the specific incident they’re investigating. They must sign a nondisclosure agreement. The deal runs nine pages.
It’s different elsewhere. Civilian oversight investigators in Washington, D.C., San Francisco and New Orleans all have direct access to the body cam footage. Unlike New York, police there can’t redact footage. “That type of behavior should have gone out about 50 years ago,” the head of Washington’s civilian oversight board told WNYC.
Here’s another glimpse into the leverage NYPD officers have: Since the pandemic started, officers haven’t allowed CCRB to interview them remotely, meaning investigations have effectively stalled. The police unions had objected to doing it over video.
“We won’t do Zoom,” one union spokesman told The City. The CCRB is re-starting in-person interviews soon. It noted 1,109 investigations are awaiting police officer interviews.
Most CCRB investigations aren’t completed, and not just because of police intransigence. The roughly 100 investigators can only handle so many cases at once. Each one is its own challenge; witnesses often don’t respond or are hesitant to say what they saw.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has increased the office’s budget in recent years to hire more investigators. But after the pandemic hit, de Blasio laid out a 6% cut for next year. (Asked for comment, the mayor’s office said the cuts are only for one year.) A city report recently noted that the CCRB’s staffing is already below the level mandated by a referendum passed last year to expand the agency.
If a complaint does end up being investigated, the police still get to decide what happens. The police commissioner can take the case back from the CCRB at any point. If the commissioner doesn’t interfere, and if the board — which still has some members chosen by the commissioner — finds that abuse occurred, then the CCRB can recommend discipline.
The CCRB has been able to get to that point and confirm plenty of cases. In 2018, again the most recent year for which there’s full data, the board calculated that the NYPD had 753 active officers who’ve had two or more substantiated complaints against them.
But even if the CCRB substantiates a case, the commissioner still has complete authority over what to do next. He can decide to simply ignore the recommended punishment. The commissioner can also let the case go before an internal NYPD judge (whose boss is the commissioner). If the judge decides punishment is merited, the commissioner can overturn or downgrade that, too.
The NYPD has rejected the CCRB’s proposed punishment on the most serious cases about two-thirds of the time.
So that’s how the system works. And this is what comes out of it: In 2018, the CCRB looked into about 3,000 allegations of misuse of force. It was able to substantiate 73 of those allegations. The biggest punishment? Nine officers who lost vacation days, according to CCRB records.(An additional five officers got a lower level of discipline left to the discretion of their commanding officer.) The most an officer lost was 30 vacation days, for a prohibited chokehold. Another officer wrongly pepper-sprayed someone. He lost one vacation day.
Last winter, I sat down with one of the boys my family saw arrested, Devrin. We were with his mom and the founder of the celebrated charter school he attends in Red Hook called Summit Academy.
Ellen DeGeneres gave college scholarships to the senior class a few years ago after the school founder, Natasha Campbell, wrote to her about the kids’ accomplishments. The vast majority of the students are Black or Latino.
Campbell told me her guess is that at least 40% have been stopped by police at some point. Students are stopped so often that the backs of their student IDs have instructions about what to do when that happens.
 Instructions on what to do when stopped by the police are on the back of student IDs at Summit Academy in Red Hook, Brooklyn. (Eric Umansky/ProPublica)
Devrin, who was in ninth grade and turned 14 the day before Halloween, sat with me and his mom in Campbell’s office. He’s about 5 feet tall and sat slightly hunched over. It was clear that sitting with a stranger and being asked questions about that night wasn’t his first choice. But his mom and Campbell had encouraged him to, so there he was.
Devrin answered a few questions I asked to try to break the ice. He loves basketball, is on the JV team and had practice in about an hour. Campbell pointed out that he’s never been suspended or disciplined at school.
“I don’t even get in trouble at home,” Devrin chimed in. And then he talked about his experience on Halloween.
Devrin said he was finishing up trick-or-treating when “I just saw a bunch of cops jumping out of their cars.” It was a confusing scene, particularly so because some of the police were in plainclothes, including one who started to go after Devrin. Devrin said he didn’t know the man was an officer.
“I was taught when I see danger to run,” Devrin said. He was starting to run home when he heard the plainclothes officer say he was following a suspect with a Tom & Jerry shirt. That’s what Devrin was wearing. “I turned,” Devrin recalled, “and he pointed a gun at me. He said, ‘Stop before I shoot.’ He was like this with both his hands” — Devrin mimicked holding a gun — “like he was about to pull the trigger.”
I spoke to another witness from that night who recalled the same scene but said the officer was pointing a Taser. Devrin and the witness, a law student named Zoe Bernstein, agreed on what happened next: The officer pushed Devrin to the ground and handcuffed him. “They tackled him,” Bernstein told me. “He just looked so young.”
Devrin was lined up against the wall. He’s the one who was crying, saying, “I didn’t do anything.”
After he was taken to the station, Devrin was handcuffed to a table along with the other boys, asked a few questions and mostly left alone. Then, they said, “You can leave now.”
“I didn’t really sleep that night,” Devrin told me.
He said he just wants to forget about what happened. His mother, Deveeka, wants to let him do that, “but I can’t sit in this thing and let it go. I want answers.” (I’m using only their first names at her request.) She was the mother at the station that night upset with herself that she had let him go.
She said she makes Devrin call her whenever he goes out, even to the corner store. “I’ll ask, ‘Dev, you OK?’ And he’ll say, ‘Yeah, you OK?’” She would seem to have a particular advantage in getting answers. At the end of our interview, she mentioned her job: She’s a school safety officer for a public school in Brooklyn. She works for the NYPD.
Deveeka said she was considering suing but said she’d had a hard time finding a lawyer because the police, her own agency, said they have no records to give her. And despite the NYPD announcing the boys had been charged with obstruction, they didn’t actually follow through with it. “All I have is a story,” she said.
Last week, facing enormous pressure after protests, de Blasio announced reforms. The city is going to post NYPD discipline records online, and police have to move quickly to investigate and release camera footage when there’s alleged abuse involving serious injuries or death. The police commissioner also said he’s disbanding a plainclothes unit that’s been involved in many shootings.
None of the changes limit the commissioner’s absolute discretion over discipline.
The CCRB said this month that it has received more than 750 complaints about NYPD abuse in less than two weeks involving the recent protests. There were 129 separate incidents reported. And the mayor’s office recently said there’s likely little bodycam footage of the incidents since the NYPD adheres carefully to an old civil rights agreement limiting the filming of protests.
I recently called the CCRB to ask the status of its investigation into the Halloween case.
It said the investigation is still open, along with 2,848 others.



The Police Are Still Rioting



Police in riot gear.
Police in riot gear. Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images
The wave of protests that started with the May 25 police killing of George Floyd continued apace over the weekend, nearly a month after footage of his death went public. The furor that prompted some dissidents to riot during the early days of unrest has mostly settled. The rioting of police officers inflamed by ongoing challenges to their authority has not.
The latest examples are law-enforcement agencies in Compton, California; Columbus, Ohio; and Richmond, Virginia. A march on Sunday responding to the killing of Andres Guardado — an 18-year-old who was shot several times on Thursday while fleeing Los Angeles County sheriff deputies — saw dozens of protesters trek nearly four miles from Gardena, where Guardado died, to a sheriff’s station in Compton; they were ordered to disperse, and as they did, officers unleashed tear gas and fired rubber bullets into the retreating crowd. “They just wouldn’t stop shooting,” one protester told CNN. In Columbus, a group of protesters blocked a downtown intersection on Sunday; police deployed pepper spray and swung their bicycles at dissidents, ramming people toward the sidewalks in an effort to clear the road. And on Sunday night, police in Richmond broke up an effort to pull down a statue of Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart; officers declared an unlawful assembly shortly after 9 p.m. and sprayed the crowd with chemical irritants, a culmination of weeks of crackdowns in which local police have used tear gas and rubber bullets overwhelmingly to punish peaceful dissent.
The recent conduct of American law enforcement when dealing with protests has been characterized by a broad refusal to distinguish between nonviolent dissidents — who comprise the vast majority of people taking to the streets — and the scattered rioters against whom officers claim to be protecting themselves and others. They’ve undermined their own rationale by beating, clubbing, and using chemical agents, rubber bullets, and sometimes police vehicles to target not just peaceful demonstrators, but those actively trying to heed dispersal orders; in cities from Atlanta to New York, police have made a habit of creating chaos where orderly dissent existed before, hemming in crowds from all directions so people couldn’t escape and using the resulting crush as a pretense to assault and arrest them. Video footage of police shoving elderly people to the ground, beating unarmed demonstrators with nightsticks, and smashing car windows to use Tasers against random college students has lost much of its shock value. Brutal arrests, justified by citing their targets’ alleged violations of curfew orders, seem to correlate only sporadically with whether curfew orders are actually being violated. In many cases, police unions and their rank and file have responded to criticism by doubling down in support of offending behavior; suspensions, firings, arrests, and criminal charges filed against officers have been met with solidarity walkouts by entire policing shifts and supportive applause for comrades under fire.
As my colleague Ed Kilgore recently noted, the term “police riot” gained popular purchase after the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, when a commission formed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the event’s unrest used it to describe how police dealt with protesters. “Wild club swinging,” “cries of hatred,” “gratuitous beating” that far exceeded the “requisite force for crowd dispersal and arrest” — all pointed, in the view of report author Daniel Walker, to a pattern of unchecked misrule, a “riot” in its own right. Jamelle Bouie, in the New York Times opinion section, applied the term to how police across the country have responded to the latest protests, citing officers’ widespread use of “indiscriminate violence.” This behavior has not abated, even as its geographic concentration shifts. Overall, where public backlash might reasonably be expected to encourage introspection among law-enforcement officials, it has frequently provoked violence and indignant revanchism instead.
The persistence of this behavior dovetails neatly with recent analyses that undermine two key claims made by police and their defenders. The Associated Press reported on Sunday that since late May, 20 individuals, aged 16 to 59, have sustained eye damage or been blinded by rubber bullets or other police projectiles not intended to kill. This adds an important caveat to such weapons being characterized as “less than lethal”; that they’re not designed expressly to kill anyone is, surely, not very consoling for the journalist who can’t see anymore because Minneapolis police shot her in the face with foam bullets. A recent University of Chicago study, meanwhile, has found American police to be in violation of basic international human rights’ standards, despite routine insistence among officials that their current severity is needed. The 193 member states of the United Nations, including the U.S., have agreed to a range of principles governing when lethal force is justified, aimed at fulfilling four criteria: “legality, necessity, proportionality, and accountability.” Not a single U.S. state complies, according to the report, further delegitimizing conceptions of the police as guardians of safety.
These findings are all the more stark for emerging at a time when the excesses of American law enforcement are on abundant display — and as policing institutions, by and large, continue to insist that nothing is wrong with them, but rather that the problem is the people they’re tasked with protecting, who can only be kept “safe” by using wanton brutality and murder with impunity. Violence over the past weekend in Compton, Columbus, and Richmond, attests to the durability of this outlook. The defining features of the police response to protests asking them to do their jobs differently have been an imperviousness to criticism and insistence that their officers are under siege by an ungrateful public. The result has been — and will likely continue to be — repetition of the same methods for at least as long as protesters are in the streets. And the police will keep providing reasons to protest; Andres Guardado and Rayshard Brooks were both killed while demonstrators were still mourning George Floyd. But the enduring lesson from earlier civilian riots is that no one actually has to riot for the police to respond in kind. When you’re tasked with public safety but rarely asked to prove that you’re preserving it, there are few limits to what you can get away with in its name.

Nationwide protests against police violence continue as LA County sheriffs kill two more


22 June 2020
For the third week in row, multiracial protests against police violence have continued across the United States in large cities as well as rural communities. Initially triggered by the release of a cellphone video depicting the brutal murder of George Floyd on May 25, demonstrations against police violence have taken on an international character, with thousands continuing to march in London and Paris over the weekend.
On Sunday hundreds of protesters in Washington, D.C. briefly shut down a highway that led to the US capital. In Columbus, Ohio, at the behest of Democratic party Mayor Andrew Ginther, Columbus police were given the green light Sunday afternoon to assault and teargas peaceful protesters.
In a video posted by NBC journalist Eric Halperin, Columbus police are shown ramming protesters with their bicycles and pepper spraying them. Ginther justified the brutality on Twitter writing that in order to “keep the streets open” and “protect residents from lawlessness ... increased enforcement today has been necessary.”
In New York City over 10,000 cyclists took over Manhattan streets Saturday afternoon, riding a 20-mile loop from Times Square to Harlem and down a car-free West Side Highway to Battery Park, chanting the names of George Floyd and 26 year-old Louisville EMT Breonna Taylor, murdered in her sleep by police during an early morning no-knock raid on March 13, 2020.
Meanwhile, at a half-full arena in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Saturday night, President Donald Trump briefly railed against the protesters outside the venue branding them “very bad people” and “thugs.” In response to Trump’s characterization of the protesters Tulsa police were forced to admit that while there were “thousands” of people protesting outside the arena, “Overwhelmingly these encounters have been peaceful with everyone attempting to share their views.”
Over the weekend, two shootings, one in Minneapolis, the other in Seattle, have been hyped by the bourgeois press to paint the movement against police violence as more dangerous and violent than the police themselves.
In Minneapolis, one person is dead and eleven more were injured following an early Sunday morning shooting on the 2900 block of Hennepin Avenue South. Police have yet to release a description of the alleged shooters and no one has been arrested at this time.
Fred Hwang, a manager at Hoban Korean BBQ, who was working the front door when he heard the shots ring out at roughly 12:25 a.m., saw two groups of people firing at each other. Hwang helped usher people into the restaurant to avoid the gunfire as they waited for over 30 minutes for police to arrive.
In Seattle a 19-year-old man is dead and another critically injured after an argument escalated Saturday morning shooting in the area of downtown known as CHAZ for “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.” Police have stated that they were unable to assist after being, “met by a violent crowd that prevented officers safe access to the victims.” Video evidence filmed by protesters shows that police were allowed to enter the zone after the shooting and state investigators were in the zone gathering shell casings Saturday morning.
In Los Angeles, a rally for the recently murdered Andres Guardado exceeded expectations with thousands participating Sunday afternoon. The march began at 1 p.m. with roughly 100 people, but by the time the march reached the front of the Los Angeles County Compton Sheriff's (LASD) office, which was surrounded by riot police, the crowd had swelled into the thousands.
It has been over 72 hours since police gunned down the 18-year-old Guardado, who was working as a security guard at the Freeway auto body shop located on the 400 block of Redondo Beach Blvd. According to Captain Kent Wegener of the LASD, deputies were “observing Guardado,” who allegedly spotted the deputies looking at him. Upon seeing the police, Guardado supposedly “produced a gun” before running away from the police. Wegener stated that after a short foot-pursuit an as-yet unnamed deputy “fired six shots” into Guardado, killing him. No deputies were injured.
Police have stated they recovered a gun at the scene that had an illegal large capacity magazine and was devoid of any serial numbers of identifying marks. No video footage or pictures have been produced to corroborate the police allegations. The police have yet to state why they were “observing” Guardado to begin with, as there had been no calls placed for police assistance at that address.
Andrew Henney, the owner of the body shop, described Guardado as “a good friend” and disputed the police retelling of events. In a video interview with Memo Torres of LA Taco, Henney states that Guardado, “was standing near the curb ... talking to two girls and then the police approached him and right away drew their guns, pointing them at him, and he got scared and he ran.”
Gesturing down the alley, Henney states he saw Guardado, “on his knees with his hands behind his head, that’s when the cops shot him.” In a separate interview with CBS KCAL Henney noted that Guardado had “a clean background and everything. There’s no reason."
Henney also questioned police reports that Guardado was armed, “I don’t think so, I never knew him to be armed, he wasn’t a gang member, he had never been so much as arrested, he was the coolest kid.”
Notably, which has gone unreported in mainstream versions of the events, Henney states that investigators Thursday night locked down his store and proceeded to break and confiscate several security cameras Henney had installed at the shop. Police also took his DVR, all before obtaining a warrant, which Henney noted police produced several hours later.
Guardado’s cousin, Celina Avarca, in an interview with CBS, also disputed police accounts of Guardado being armed:“I’d never heard or seen him have any kind of weapons,” Avarca said. “He never talked about them.” Avarca also said her cousin was working two jobs and was in the process of applying to school to become a nurse
Jennifer Guardado, the slain man’s older sister, also speaking to CBS, noted the bright future the family saw for Andres, “He was gonna make it in life. He was gonna make it and become a good, professional man in life, but they took that away from my family and me.
“My parents are completely destroyed. We’re all dead already inside.”
“I lost a part of me, it’s empty, and I’m never gonna have him back,” his sister added. “I’m never gonna see him, he’s never gonna talk to me, I’m just, I can’t, I just can’t believe this happened to my brother. It really hurts me.”
In an interview with author Julissa Natzely Arce Raya, Guardado’s father, Cristobal, who works in the restaurant industry, noted that his son recently started the job to help his father pay for the bills: “He told me he wanted to help me. But this didn’t help me. He just came to meet his death.”
“He had just graduated high school. He didn’t deserve this. El era un buen hijo.” (He was a good son.)
Guardado was the second man shot to death by LA County sheriffs in a 48-hour period. Terron Jammal Boone, half-brother to Robert Fuller, who was found dead hanging from a tree last week in Southern California, was shot multiple times by deputies after an alleged traffic stop turned violent last Wednesday.
As was the case with Guardado, none of the detectives, deputies, or police cruisers were equipped with cameras.


Millions across the US 

mark twenty-fifth day of 

mass demonstrations 

against police violence

20 June 2020
Millions of people protested across the US on Friday, the twenty-fifth day in a row, against police violence and for equality in demonstrations, marches and rallies that also celebrated Juneteenth, the date in 1865 that the last slaves in the Confederacy were freed, nearly two-and-a-half years after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had gone into effect.
With hundreds more events scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, this weekend could see the largest demonstrations held yet in the more than three weeks of protests that erupted in cities and towns in the US following the murder of 46-year-old African American man George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer on Memorial Day.
Protesters march over the Brooklyn Bridge towards Manhattan following a Juneteenth rally in Cadman Plaza Park, June 19, 2020, in New York [Credit: AP Photo/John Minchillo]
The corporate media, the Democratic Party and organizations within the periphery of the Democrats are continuing to inject racial identity politics into the mass movement that has erupted in the US and around the world, insisting that the cause of police violence is anti-black racism within the majority white American population.
However, within the racially and ethnically integrated protests—many of which are made up of a majority of white people in small towns and rural areas in every corner of the country—the demand for universal equality continues to predominate.
Thousands of people marched and rallied in eighteen scheduled events in all five boroughs of New York City on Friday, beginning with a rally at Washington Square Park in Manhattan at 10:00 AM. According to the New York Times, “Other throngs, unswayed by the steamy summertime weather, stopped and gathered near City Hall, in Harlem and at Cadman Plaza Park in Brooklyn Heights.”
The gathering at Cadman Plaza was a convergence point for multiple crowds of thousands of people in Brooklyn, who then marched as one mass across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan, shutting down one of the roadways on the bridge.
The protesters converged in the evening in Central Park for a mass rally, the first time that all of the different protest groups have come together in New York City. The Times also reported, “In the early afternoon, a motorcade made up of dozens of vehicles, some scrawled with slogans like ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Happy Juneteenth,’ made its way from Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn across the East River to Manhattan.
“When the caravan reached City Hall, drivers of all races raised their fists and honked their horns at a crowd holding signs reading ‘Stop Police Crimes’ and listening to Nina Simone’s voice over a loudspeaker.”
In an effort to adapt themselves to the mass movement, Democratic Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order making Juneteenth a paid holiday for state employees and Democratic Mayor of New York City Bill de Blasio announced that June 19 will become an official holiday in the city.
The Juneteenth celebrations originated from the arrival of Union troops into the city of Galveston, Texas—near the Gulf Coast border with Louisiana—and the announcement on June 19, 1865 by General Gordon Granger of federal orders proclaiming that all slaves were free.
Although Lincoln had issued his presidential proclamation freeing slaves in the rebellious states on September 22, 1862, and it went into effect on January 1, 1863, Texas was the most remote of the Confederacy and it took Union troops two months after the end of the Civil War to arrive their and enforce the executive order.
In Washington, DC, numerous rallies and marches took place on Friday within the capital and in the surrounding communities to the northeast in Maryland and southwest in Virginia. With thousands of people converging on the capital, DC police have for the third weekend in a row shut down streets and announced restrictions on specific locations in the downtown area.

The Washington Post reported, “Police said intermittent closures are possible Friday, Saturday and Sunday as needed, although day-long closures weren’t expected. In the downtown area, street closures are possible south of L Street NW, roughly between 18th and 12th streets NW. South of E Street on and near the Mall, the closures roughly extend to Independence Avenue SW between 17th and Third streets.”
Despite storm clouds and rain, the protests went ahead with hundreds marching down 14th Street NW and protesters assembling at the Lincoln Memorial to mark “Freedom Day”, another popular name for Juneteenth. Hundreds also gathered at Meridian Hill Park, also known as Malcom X Park, and marched down 15th Street NW and then turned onto U Street and went to the office of Democratic DC Mayor Muriel Bowser.
Early in the morning, a longstanding monument to the segregationist and founding owner of the Washington Redskins NFL football team, George Preston Marshall, was dismantled and removed from the grounds of RFK Stadium. The Post reported, “The action followed years of lobbying by local residents who objected to memorializing an owner who opposed desegregation. It was taken down by Events DC, the city’s convention and sports authority that manages and is currently redeveloping the 190-acre RFK campus that served as the Redskins’ game-day home from 1961 to 1996.”
On the west coast, thousands of protesters marched and were joined by longshoremen in the San Francisco Bay Area, shutting down the Port of Oakland, as part of the closure of 29 West Coast ports.
An indication of the concern within the official American political establishment about the racially integrated, spontaneous protests made up largely of young people, the Port of Oakland rally was addressed by the former Communist Party USA leader Angela Davis with the support of union bureaucrats. The “stop work meeting” by the longshoremen had been carried out with the support of the corporate Pacific Maritime Association and was included in the ILWU-PMA contract.
As reported by the San Jose Mercury News, “Addressing a crowd of a few thousand from her dark grey Mini Cooper, activist, college professor and philosopher Angela Davis praised the International Longshore and Warehouse Union for their port work stoppage. She spoke from her car wearing a mask to maintain social distance, and union leaders monitored the crowd to make sure participants kept on their masks. ‘We are still on the long road to freedom,’ she said. ‘Whenever the ILWU takes a stand, the world feels the reverberations.’”
Many other protests took place in the Bay Area, including a youth rally outside the Santa Clara County building against the incarceration of young people, a march by a crowd of protesters down Broadway to city hall in Oakland and a rally in front of city hall in San Jose.
In Louisville, Kentucky, Democratic Mayor Greg Fischer was eager to participate in a virtual panel discussion on Friday morning with activists to mark Juneteenth, given the growing anger of residents and protesters nationally over the brutal murder of Breonna Taylor more than three months ago by three police officers.
By noon Mayor Fischer had announced that one of the three Louisville Metropolitan Police Department officers, Brett Hankison, was being fired. The Louisville Courier-Journal reported, “Hankison is accused by the department's interim chief, Robert Schroeder, of ‘blindly’ firing 10 rounds into Taylor's apartment, creating a substantial danger of death and serious injury.”
The other two LMPD officers—Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Officer Myles Cosgrove—also fired their weapons into Taylor’s apartment, but remain on administrative reassignment.
Sam Aguiar, attorney for the family of Taylor, told the Courier Journal, “It’s about damn time,” that Hankison was fired and that the characterization of the officer “blindly” firing into her apartment is accurate. “In fact, the ten rounds you fired were into a patio door and window which were covered with material that completely prevented you from verifying any person as an immediate threat or more importantly any innocent persons present,” Aguiar said.
Taylor, who was 26 years old and a front line emergency medical tech worker when she was killed on March 13, was shot eight times and died on the floor of her apartment after the three officers serving a “no-knock” warrant broke down her door and started shooting.
Multiple protests also took place on Friday in Dallas, Texas to mark Juneteenth and protest police violence. A group of protesters demanding equality rallied outside of City Hall while carrying 239 yellow umbrellas, each one with the name of an individual killed by police violence. The marchers were met on the city hall plaza by over 400 bikers from dozens of North Texas motorcycle clubs.
The Dallas Morning News also reported, “Soon after, about 350 protesters representing nine Greek Life organizations commenced a 2 1/2-mile march from Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. to City Hall, collecting additional marchers joining along the way despite 90-degree temps.”
Marches, rallies, sit-ins and a “virtual gamer gathering” were organized in Atlanta, Georgia on Friday with thousands taking to the streets in the metropolitan area. Protesters gathered at Centennial Olympic Park and at the Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks was shot and killed by an Atlanta police officer last Friday.
The officer who shot Brooks, Garrett David Rolfe, was fired and then charged with felony murder and other charges on Thursday. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that Rolfe, who faces charges which could bring the death penalty or life in prison, will have a bond hearing on Tuesday.
A CNN report said that a majority of Atlanta police officers scheduled to work in two of the city’s six police zones, did not report to work on Friday to protest the charges against Rolfe. CNN reported, “The Atlanta Police Department denied officers weren’t showing up for their shifts, but a police union director backed the accounts by CNN sources. In some instances, officers were refusing to leave their precincts unless a fellow officer required backup.”

LOS ANGELES CITY COUNCILMAN JOSE HUIZAR - ANOTHER BRIBES SUCKING DEMOCRAT POLITICIAN - WHEN WILL THEY GO AFTER WAR PROFITEER DIANNE FEINSTEIN AND HER PIMP HUSBAND RICHARD BLUM?


Los Angeles councilman arrested on pay-for-play corruption charges

A Los Angeles councilman was arrested in connection to a federal investigation into corruption in the city.
Jose Huizar, a Democrat who has been on the City Council since 2005, was arrested Tuesday because federal agents believe he oversaw a pay-for-play scheme in which he extorted real estate investors for campaign donations in exchange for his assistance in navigating the city's approval process for high-rise construction permits.
Huizar is accused of accepting campaign donations, extravagant dinners, free flights, poker chips, and other financial incentives totaling more than $1.5 million, according to his arrest warrant. The councilman's arrest was expected by many as the investigation has haunted Huizer for several years, including a 2018 FBI raid of his home in Los Angeles. Several of his associates have also been charged in recent months.
Los Angeles Council President Nury Martinez condemned Huizar's alleged behavior and announced plans to remove him from office.
"While today’s announcement on the arrest of Councilmember Huizar is not unexpected, the horrendous and disgusting allegations leveled against him and others have painted a dark cloud over our city government for a long time now,” Martinez said. “Effective today, I will begin the process of removing him from office so that the good people of Council District 14 and the City of Los Angeles will be fairly and honorably represented. That is our duty, and we must do it.”
Huizar was the chairman of the council's Planning and Land Use Management Committee. Richelle Huizar, the councilman's wife, was running to fill his seat in the next election cycle, but she suspended her campaign after the FBI raided their home.
Former City Councilman Mitchell Englander, a Democrat, pleaded guilty earlier this year in a related corruption case. Englander admitted to accepting tens of thousands of dollars in envelopes of cash and other bribes, including a female escort service, from businesses pushing permits through the city.
George Esparza, a former aid to Huizar, also pleaded guilty to helping a Chinese billionaire facilitate his bribes for the councilman by arranging trips to Las Vegas, complete with chips and other bribes. The same Chinese billionaire had previously given Huizar $600,000 to help him reach a settlement in a sexual harassment lawsuit just before his reelection in 2015, according to documents from the investigation into Esparza.
Law enforcement officials plan to announce official charges later in the day. Court documents from the investigation revealed that Huizar has been accused of extortion, money laundering, and other crimes.

TRUMP'S BULLSHIT - CUTS IMMIGRATION BY '525K' SOMETHING HE COULD HAVE DONE FOUR YEARS AGO!

ONLY NANCY PELOSI HAS ASSAULTED THE AMERICAN WORKER MORE THA TRUMP!

Trump to cut immigration by 525,000 in effort to open jobs for unemployed Americans

President Trump is suspending five classes of visas through the end of the year in an effort to open more than a half-million jobs to Americans, according to three senior administration officials.
Trump will extend the 60-day halt he issued on April 22 for incoming green-card recipients or those who have been approved to live and work in the United States as permanent legal residents. Trump will further expand the bans to additional types of visas.
"That is being extended to the end of the year, and the president is expanding that measure in light of the, frankly, the expanding unemployment and the number of Americans out of work," a senior administration official told reporters in a call Monday afternoon. "He's going to include a number of nonimmigrant visas."
In all, the visas being suspended would prevent approximately 525,000 immigrants from entering the U.S. through the end of 2020. The officials did not say when the president would take action, though the existing visa limitations were slated to expire Monday.
Immigrant visas are given to foreigners who seek to live permanently in the U.S. Nonimmigrant visas are for those who wish to enter the U.S. for a limited period of time for tourism, medical treatment, business, temporary work, school, and other reasons.
The White House will restrict most, if not all, H-1B, H-4, H-2B, J, and L visas. Trump previously limited H-1B visas in April with exceptions for workers in essential industries, including the food industry. H-2B visa restrictions affect those who work seasonal jobs, including the hotel and construction sectors. H-4 visas are for immediately family members of H-1B recipients, J visas go to students in study- and work-based programs, and L visas are for company employees in managerial or executive positions who move within the company to the U.S.
The Trump administration in January, February, and March suspended the admittance of foreigners from a number of countries but continued to allow foreign workers on temporary and long-term visas to enter. Republican Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Ted Cruz of Texas, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, and Josh Hawley of Missouri urged Trump to pause the guest worker programs as unemployment rates began creeping up to 13%.
Peter Boogaard, a DHS spokesman in the Obama administration, said the executive action limiting immigration levels, which are to be determined by Congress, was ironic in light of Trump's efforts to undo an Obama-era executive action on the basis that it was an executive overreach.
"As the White House prepares to unveil new EO to massively cut legal immigration, they are also simultaneously saying that it was illegal for Obama to use an EO to protect DACA, after losing at SCOTUS," Boogaard wrote on Twitter.
A senior administration official on the call said the White House was "hopeful" about getting bipartisan support for its move.

BLACK LIVES MURDER, MAYHEM, LOOT AND STEAL - 'Shocking' video shows NYC man lighting fireworks and tossing them on sleeping homeless man


WE NEED TO DEAL WITH THE REALITY THAT MOST OF THE VIOLENT CRIMES IN AMERICA ARE COMMITTED BY BLACK MEN! AND WHITEY DIDN’T MAKE THEM DO IT!


'Shocking' video shows NYC man lighting fireworks and tossing them on sleeping homeless man




“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

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

 

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.
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.
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!
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 No. 1 cause of preventable death for young white men is

 

accidents, like car accidents and drownings. The No. 1 

 

reason for death, preventable or otherwise for young black 

 

men, is homicide, almost always at the hands of another 

 

young black man. In 2018, there were approximately 7,400 

 

black homicide victims, more than half of the nation's total 

 

number of homicides, out of a black population of 13%. Of 

 

that number, the police killed a little over 200 blacks, and 

 

nearly all of them had a weapon or violently resisted arrest.



The Manhattan Institute's Heather MacDonald writes: "Regarding threats to blacks from the police: A police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer."

 

Why Don’t These #BlackLivesMatter?



Black Lives Matter is a political advocacy group, “[f]ounded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer,” according to the group’s website. Never mind that the George Zimmerman trial was a complete fraud, as Joel Gilbert brilliantly explained in his recent book and movie, “The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America.”
BLM is a self-described global network, which explains why protests and riots sprang up seemingly spontaneously all over the world after George Floyd’s death. Starting in Minneapolis, protests quickly spread to far off locales including New ZealandSouth Korea, and the United Kingdom.
On their website, BLM states that they, “practice empathy.” Yet in 2017 this happened.
A white teenager cowers in a corner, his hands bound with orange cords and his mouth covered with tape. Four African Americans kick and hit him and slash at his scalp. As a cellphone camera captures their blurry images and broadcasts the ordeal on Facebook, the attackers hurl racial insults and denounce President-elect Donald J. Trump.
As reported by the New York Times: “A hashtag linking the assault to the Black Lives Matter movement exploded on social media.”  Were the four attackers card-carrying members of BLM? Does it matter? After all, every police officer is a white supremacist and racist based on the actions of four cops in Minneapolis. Generalizing can work both ways.
BLM claims these noble goals: “We embody and practice justice, liberation, and peace in our engagements with one another.” They are, “huided by the fact that all Black lives matter.” Do they walk the walk, or just talk the talk?
Do the lives of Gregory Lewis, Teyonna Lofton, or Angelo Bronson matter? These are not and never will be household names like George Floyd. The Obama Foundation website won’t feature their faces. Michelle Obama won’t show pictures of any of them on her Instagram page. The justice brothers, Jesse and Al, won’t be hustling their deaths. Benjamin Crump won’t be representing any of their families. Dr. Michael Baden won’t be reviewing their autopsies. Members of Congress won’t take a knee for any of them. And there certainly won’t be widespread protests and riots over their deaths.
Why not? All three are black. Don’t their lives matter, too?
YouTube screen grab
These poor souls were victims of another weekend in the killing fields of Chicago. As the Chicago Sun Times reported: “18 murders in 24 hours: Inside the most violent day in 60 years in Chicago.” This was last weekend while millions were proclaiming around the world that black lives matter.
“We’ve never seen anything like it, at all,” said Max Kapustin, the senior research director at the University of Chicago Crime Lab.
Yet I don’t hear Democrats, the DNC media, woke celebrities and athletes, or any race hustlers showing the least bit of concern. Where are the Obamas? This carnage occurred in their home city. Will any cable news networks be live streaming the funerals? Will Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot ban funeral gatherings of more than ten for these individuals while encouraging gatherings of thousands of looters on Michigan Avenue?
Why don’t these black lives matter? These aren’t simply statistics but real people leaving lives, dreams and families behind.
A hardworking father killed just before 1 a.m.
A West Side high school student murdered two hours later.
A man killed amid South Side looting at a cellphone store at 12:30 p.m.
A college freshman who hoped to become a correctional officer, gunned down at 4:25 p.m. after getting into an argument in Englewood.
Chicago was home to 653 murders in 2016, more than the total in New York City and Los Angeles combined. Who was president in 2016? Who had eight years to “fundamentally transform America” when he wasn’t busy lowering the sea levels?
Interestingly CNN reported, “Chicago's homicide rate decreases for the third straight year.” Who has been president the past 3 years? Obviously, CNN won’t notice that association because Orange Man Bad. In their reporting, President Trump is a racist and white supremacist. The declining murder rate must be due to Obama, despite it being much higher when he was in office. CNN made the same claims crediting Trump’s economy to Obama.
It’s not just Chicago where black lives don’t seem to matter. Look at the last hundred homicides in Baltimore. One only has to go back to mid-February of this year to hit the 100 mark. The race of most victims was listed as “unknown” yet 29 of the 100 were blacks.
Antwan Phillips, Jared Hill, and Tyrone Henderson were among the victims, but no one will be wearing a T-shirt showing their names or faces. Jesse and Al won’t be at their funerals. Nancy Pelosi won’t take a knee on their behalf. Why don’t their lives matter?
Last January, 14 were killed by a roadside bomb in Burkina Faso, including seven children.  A week earlier, 35 people, mostly women were killed in a terrorist attack. Did any of these black lives matter? Where were the protests? Or kneeling? Where was Michelle Obama’s #BringBackOurGirls hashtag she used as first lady, long before Donald Trump was a presidential candidate?
YouTube screen grab
The woke kneeling liberals sing the praises of Planned Parenthood, founded by eugenicist Margaret Sanger whose goal was “to exterminate the Negro population.” Their abortion clinics are disproportionately “located in ZIP codes with higher percentages of blacks and/or Hispanics than the state’s overall percentage.”
In New York City, home to some of the worst rioting, while blacks make up 25 percent of the NYC population, 46 percent of abortions were black babies. Shockingly more black babies were killed by abortion in NYC than were born alive. By contrast, Whites make up 44 percent of the NYC population but only account for 12 percent of abortions. Why don’t the lives of aborted black babies matter?
Will these protests cause a surge in Chinese coronavirus cases? Where are the protests occurring and who will be most affected? According to CNN,
Black Americans represent 13.4% of the American population, according to the US Census Bureau, but counties with higher black populations account for more than half of all Covid-19 cases and almost 60% of deaths, the study found.
Social justice warriors are happy to congregate in urban areas, ignoring the social distancing and mask mandates that the rest of us have been clubbed with for the past three months, potentially spreading the Wuhan virus to blacks, many of whom live in the protest zones. It is almost as bad as protesting in a nursing home. Don’t those black lives matter?
Liberal do-gooders are hijacking George Floyd’s death for their personal quest for power, money, and furthering their Marxist agenda. From defunding police departments to saying, “Some white people may have to die”, as a University of Georgia graduate student recommended.
If black lives truly mattered, there would be calls for more school choice and fewer abortions, more emphasis on intact nuclear families and less on reparations for events hundreds of years ago. But those are not part of the BLM political platform, contradicting their supposed message.
From a true advocate for social justice, Martin Luther King, Jr, “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” If black lives truly mattered, that would be the emphasis of BLM and their liberal sycophants. Otherwise America will become a balkanized country, populated by fools who let our once shining city on a hill crumble into the ash heap of ruin.

Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a Denver-based physician and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in American Thinker, Daily Caller, Rasmussen Reports, and other publications. Follow him on Facebook,  LinkedInTwitter, and QuodVerum.





EYE ON THE NEWS

Racism Is An Empty Thesis

An African-American professor says that blacks hold their fate in their own hands.
June 11, 2020 
The Social Order
Loury: Blacks make up an average of around 40 
percent of inmates in prisons and jails, but they 
make up no more than 15 percent of the 
population. If you look at the statistics, there is no
evidence to support the hypothesis that this 
overrepresentation can be explained by racist 
prejudices of the police or the courts. Rather, the 
numbers show that this is due to an 
overrepresentation of blacks who violate the law.

Turmoil in the United States over police violence is the result of a distorted representation of the problem, says Brown University economist Glenn C. Loury. According to Loury, an African-American, the “empty thesis of racism” distracts us from the real problems of black Americans. Below is an edited and translated conversation that Loury had with Peter Winkler, U.S. correspondent for the Swiss daily newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung (NZZ).
Peter Winkler: Professor Loury, hundreds of thousands of people in American cities have been protesting that police treat black people more harshly than other populations. The reason, they say, is systemic racism. What do you think?
Glenn Loury: This is a representation that has developed a life of its own. The claim is: the police are hunting black people, black people are at risk, there is an epidemic of violence against black people—unarmed, innocent black people.
There is a problem, but I think its scale is exaggerated. There are approximately 330 million people in the United States, and there are many tens of thousands of encounters between citizens and the police every day. We take half a dozen, maybe a dozen, admittedly outrageous, disturbing incidents of police violence, and we form this into a general account of how people are treated. I think that’s dangerous.
Winkler: But wasn’t the incident in Minneapolis extraordinary in its nonchalant brutality?
Loury: I don’t want to understate it: the case is terrible. It is difficult to look at the images. There was nothing good about it; it’s certainly not good policing. But you still don’t know what exactly happened. This requires an in-depth investigation. Even so, people have started to call it a lynching, and to say that it characterizes the nature of racial relationships in America today. This is a kind of collective hysteria.
I am aware that millions of people are horrified by what they see as systemic racism in this case. But I repeat: I am waiting for the investigation to be completed. This applies to all such incidents. That they happen is nothing to dismiss, but I deny that these incidents are representative of the everyday experience of African-Americans.
I am a contrarian, and I have refused to follow the mob opinion that led to the recent turmoil. And I’m also convinced that this is about more than what happened to George Floyd. That event was a catalyst, and I hope we can finally talk about the broader framework and the circumstances in which racial charges are made in the United States.
Winkler: Even a superficial look at the statistics confirms that there are more confrontations, including violent ones, between blacks and the police. Isn’t that evidence of racist prejudice?
Loury: Not necessarily. Every year, more whites than blacks are shot by the police in the U.S. But it is true that the number of blacks killed by police, relative to population, is higher. However, the problem of police violence affects all ethnic groups.
Moreover, the likelihood that an individual will come into conflict with the police depends on the frequency with which that individual behaves in a manner that attracts police attention. Criminal behavior is not equally distributed across all population groups. African-Americans are overrepresented in prison because they commit more acts that can be punished with prison.
Winkler: Can you elaborate?
Loury: Blacks make up an average of around 40 
percent of inmates in prisons and jails, but they 
make up no more than 15 percent of the 
population. If you look at the statistics, there is no
evidence to support the hypothesis that this 
overrepresentation can be explained by racist 
prejudices of the police or the courts. Rather, the 
numbers show that this is due to an 
overrepresentation of blacks who violate the law.
It’s legitimate to ask why black men commit more crimes than whites. But it is a fact that they commit massively more homicides; almost 50 percent of homicides, while representing maybe 6 percent or 7 percent of the U.S. population. Or consider robbery: many more whites are victimized by blacks than vice versa, speaking in absolute numbers, not per capita.
Part of the reason why the police have had so many difficult encounters with black people is because the crime rate in black areas is much higher. For example: If the police want to arrest a driver in a black neighborhood, they must be prepared for the possibility that the driver might have a gun on him. Statistically speaking, this is generally not the case—but experience has shown the likelihood that such a dangerous situation will arise is higher in black areas.
Winkler: But you yourself admit that what happened in Minneapolis was bad police work. Is anger at the police understandable?
Loury: The main threat to the quality of life of people living in black areas is the criminal behavior of their fellow citizens, most of whom happen to be black. Black people in American cities are victims of rape, robbery, and murder to a very significant degree, and the perpetrators are almost always black. The protection of life and property is the most important task of the state, and many African-Americans cannot feel safe in their homes. The police are part of the solution to this problem. Black people need the police more than other people do.
Of course, the police must treat all citizens with respect. Racist officers must be disciplined and fired. I don’t want to apologize for anything here: bad policing is bad policing, and you have to do something about it. But depriving the police of resources, making them an enemy, vilifying them, violently assaulting them, or hindering them when they are trying to arrest someone who committed a crime is destructive to black communities. Blacks would suffer the most if police pulled out of their neighborhoods.
Winkler: So you would say that African-Americans just have to take responsibility, get their act together—and then things will get better?
Loury: I wouldn’t say it in these words, though I think that’s true in a way. But if we just tell black people: “Get it together and everything will be fine!”, that would be a crude and ineffective way to start a conversation.
I don’t know the situation in Switzerland, but I assume that there is no racism there; and that Germany and France are flawless, too. I’m being sarcastic, of course. What I want to say is this: racism is a fact of human culture. Racism is also a fact in the United States. But the nature of formal legislation and informal social custom on racial matters has changed radically in America over the past 50 years. I’m 72 years old, and I know what things were like in the 1950s and 1960s. The United States has become a completely different country.
Whites can lose their jobs today if they talk to blacks in the wrong tone. Institutions at all levels of government work full-time against racism. Every university and major corporation has a powerful executive position that monitors and strives for diversity and inclusion. Affirmative-action measures have even penetrated Silicon Valley.
Yes, racism is real, but as a crucial factor that enables or prevents social advancement, it has lost a lot of force in the past half century. I am sure that there are deep-seated inequality problems in America that affect everyone, and black people in particular. Some are institutional, but many have to do with the culture and behavior of black people themselves. I’m talking about lack of educational achievement, and about the higher crime rate; I’m talking about the collapse of the black family. Seven out of ten black children are born outside of marriage. It is a plausible surmise that households where a mother is present, but no father, are more likely to produce adolescent males with behavioral problems.
People are frustrated that conventional political solutions, such as expanding anti-discrimination and welfare programs, have not worked. That’s why they take refuge in the empty thesis of racism. They speak of 1619, when the first blacks landed in America, and they speak of slavery, which was abolished more than 150 years ago. They talk of “centuries of oppression.” But, they don’t talk about how the social condition of blacks in America well may have been healthier in 1950 than it is today—the integrity of family structure, the level of the crime rate, the relationship to work of the poorly educated, and the values with which many children are raised. Summarized in one sentence: racism exists, of course, but it does not sufficiently explain what is going on here.
Winkler: Then what does explain it?
Loury: We need to focus much more on the means through which people acquire the techniques, skills, and behaviors that make them productive members of society. I call that development. It can be about education but also about behavioral, emotional, psychological, and social development. You learn restraint, patience, postponing reward, and things like that. When I look at statistics and find high rates of school failure, the low percentage of blacks in the professions—lawyer, doctor, engineer, or scientist—when I see the high rate of criminality and violence that is endemic in black communities, I see a failure in development, in people reaching their full human potential.
Please understand, that’s not just a question of mistakes or poor choices by these individuals or their families. It’s also about schools that are far less good in areas where many black people live. It is undoubtedly partly related to discrimination and the legacy of that discrimination. Blacks, for example, started with significantly less wealth.
Still, it’s a common mistake to think that we are still in the middle of the twentieth century and that the decisive obstacle to the successful inclusion of blacks in society is racial prejudice. Many people insist that we debate racism, face the injustices of history, and so on. Instead, they should be looking at our children and asking: Can they do math? Can they read a text and understand it? Can they cooperatively get involved in social groups? And when I see that this is sadly not the case with many black children, I believe I am seeing not simply “racism,” but something that is more specific and that is remediable—the obviously insufficient development of their human potential.
We find that immigrants, wherever they come from, have much better success rates than certain African-Americans. One of the main reasons for this is that these groups arrive here with a different culture; they have different, value-oriented expectations of the behavior of their fellows.
Winkler: Are you talking about the fact that violence is sometimes glorified in African-American culture—for example, in certain music styles?
Loury: No, that’s not what I mean. What I mean is: How much am I willing to sacrifice so that my children get the support they need to develop the skills that will help them succeed? It’s also about which values are respected in the social environment and which are not. And violence—that’s culture, too, the willingness to kill, which is astronomical in certain African-American communities. I’m not referring to the entirety of black Americans, but to some black enclaves in big cities.
How many black people start their own businesses? Is it utopian for me to imagine that the income and wealth gap between blacks and other groups would be more quickly closed by more blacks starting their own businesses than by demanding reparations for slavery?
Winkler: Some banks have announced that they will make larger amounts available as loans for business start-ups, especially from African-Americans. Would that be the better approach?
Loury: If the people to whom this is directed are able to benefit from such offers, I think so.
Winkler: Would you admit, however, that there is a correlation between cultural incentives and the very painful history of African-Americans?
Loury: It would be foolish to suggest that the history of slavery and the long years of oppression that followed are unrelated to the current traits of African-American society. We are all, to some extent, products of our history.
I also don’t want to give the impression that I’m castigating those affected by these cultural issues. I’m not saying, “This is all your fault!” On the contrary, I insist that society as a whole is at some level responsible even for the unfavorable behavior patterns in some black communities. These communities are the product of historical dynamics of American society. But again: I don’t think that fact of historical influence is very relevant to the challenges black people face today.
If anyone wants to blame the history of racism as the culprit for the failures of modern black society in the United States, go ahead. I won’t argue the point. But I insist that, despite everything, we African-Americans are free actors who can shape our lives according to our ideas and convictions. We are not determined by the weight of historical disadvantage. That disadvantage was real and to some extent remains an obstacle, but it is not our fate. Our fate is not fixed by the fact that our ancestors were enslaved, or that racism still exists. Our fate is in our hands. One can believe this—indeed, if we are ever to enjoy equal dignity in this society, black people must believe this, I would hold—even while also recognizing that what we see today is in part a product of our past.
Winkler: Your ideas go against arguments that are currently very popular. In fact, the apparent consensus about racial guilt makes me slightly suspicious. What do you think?
Loury: I think we do not live in a really free space where we can discuss these questions. Pressure to conform is intense because nobody wants to give the impression that they stand on the wrong side of the great moral questions of our time. Ironically, this reticence undermines the possibility of genuine and effective moral reasoning. Instead, everyone follows the other, spouting platitudes, as in a herd. Everyone wants to underline their virtue by showing the world: I stand for “justice” and against “racism.” Part of it is simply a tacit agreement about what a truly virtuous person simply does and does not say—which we can also call political correctness.
To make matters worse, real racists still exist in America—people convinced of the superiority of whites and the inferiority of blacks. They believe that the problems we are discussing are proof of supposed black inferiority. Though this is a small minority, these voices do exist, and when you make arguments such as I am doing here, you want to avoid being connected to them or strengthening them in any way.
Because you want as much space as possible between yourself and real racists, you are tempted to avoid hot-button debates about black crime or related topics. Because racists say that black crime is terrible, you are afraid even to address the issue and admit that it may be part of the problem. For example, you are afraid to say that in certain cities police officers fear young black men because those men are too often armed and known to be willing to use their weapons. These are facts—but you are afraid to acknowledge them because these are exactly the things that white racists also say. So you’d rather be silent. And that gets us nowhere—or rather, it gets us to where we are today.