THE NAMES ARE FAMILIAR

MIKE BROWN

I mean Mike Brown was jaywalking and possibly involved in a strong arm robbery in a convenience store (which was never proven by the way).  The denizens of what is respectable deemed him as an undesirable thug so in their collective borg mind anything that happened to him was somehow his own fault.

JOHN CRAWFORD

Just like John Crawford, he had to know that a black man walking around with anything resembling a firearm real or not would invoke images of Nat Turner and the Black Panther Movement. His death at the hands of law enforcement was merely an unfortunate occurrence according to the spin.

TAMIR RICE

Of course Tamir Rice should have known or better yet his mother should have taught him never to play with a toy gun outside in a playground because of course that would be misconstrued as opposed to teens that go onto school premises with guns in an attempt to massacre students, clearly playing with a toy gun on a play ground is much more of a serious emergency and way more threatening.

MIRIAM CAREY

And of course a woman with a baby in her car who makes a wrong turn and winds up at a White House Checkpoint is the equivalent of a suicide bomber or could be – so of course law enforcement has no other options with regards to defusing that situation than to shoot the car with the baby in it full of holes. Heck for all they knew she could have been carrying rocket launchers in the trunk. Can’t take chances.

DARRIEN HUNT

It absolutely was way beyond acceptability for a black man to have an imagination that took him to carrying a play sword outside without bothering anyone or menacing anyone because my goodness the very idea of a black person with anything in their hands other than a broom or a dustpan is very scary stuff.

JONATHAN FERRELL

Hey let’s not forget that Scary black men who have just been involved in a car accident are even scarier and more deadly so we definitely don’t want to leave it to chance that he might use his laser eye beams to somehow stun or God forbid injure an officer called to the scene by an upstanding resident in fear of her life from said black man.

VICTOR WHITE

Of course one also cannot forget that black people are magical. So much so that we have the ability to conceal weapons even after two pat downs and that we can even when in handcuffs, seated in the backseat of a police car, pull out a gun and shoot ourselves in the CHEST – like Victor White III did. He was just one of those magical Negroes we keep hearing about.

The majority however are just society throwaways – those that the powers that be have decided are not of any value, like Walter Scott, or Eric Garner, or any number of blacks who have had any dealings with the justice system. Which of course automatically makes your life invalid and worth less than a plug nickel.

Those same powers that be that will define a productive member of society and will refuse to accept or realize that the current definition is not reflective of the entirety of the population and never has been. That a life is valuable and that people can make mistakes and still turn their lives around. Society especially in its current incarnation has no place determining whose life is worth more or worth less.

The same society and system that caused Kalief Browder to be incarcerated for a crime that he did not commit. Which included the guards that beat and tortured him while he sat, incarcerated for three years. During  which time, he was subjected to beatings by the guards, the inmates and was placed in solitary confinement – mind you he was 16 years old at the time. However clearly according to that upstanding upright mindset demographic if he was in jail he clearly needed to be there because he obviously did something wrong.

Actually not.  He did not a damn thing wrong. He suffered more than most of our minds can begin to comprehend. His suffering was documented and his battle with mental illness that can and will be argued onset by the cruelty and conditions he was forced to endure for THREE YEARS.

But what’s the big deal I mean it was just a mistake….indeed one that cost this young man his life. One that cost all these people their lives. Mistakes that are causing loss of life all across this country every day and not all are fortunate enough to make the national headlines. That does not mean its not happening.

Those of us in these cities and neighborhoods know this because we have seen it personally first hand in one form or another. We who have witnessed the continued injustice visited upon us by a broken system are beyond tired and beyond fed up.

The fuss – is that you cannot continue to uphold a system that seeks to give unfair advantage to one group of people over another. You cannot ostensibly continue to blindly support a system that inherently makes it  almost impossible for there to be equal footing.

A system that is built on standards exemplified by a certain demographic of people which does not allow for the myriad differences in people’s heritage, background lifestyle and choices is a system that cannot and will not last.

Those who continue to fight and seek justice for all will see all those ignorant and bigoted minds stripped bare of their racism and intolerance.

By the time they figure out what has folks mad and fed up change will already have taken place in spite of them.

Because change real change cannot be denied only delayed.

And the people are really and truly fed up.

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You probably wouldn’t know it, because the media hardly mentioned it. But, prisoners incarcerated across the state of Georgia held hunger strikes in protest of prison conditions. I;m not sure about the success of those protests because I can’t speak on any documented changes within the system. However, what I can speak to, is the fact that sweeping prison reform will soon take effect throughout the state of Georgia. Now whether said changes are a direct result of those hunger strikes I mentioned earlier is yet to be seen. But at any rate, from the looks of it, Georgia is currently moving in the right direction. Yes, and they’ve certainly come a long way since the days sentencing 17-year-old Genarlow Wilson to ten years in prison for being on the receiving end of an oral sexual encounter with a then 15-year-old girl who happened to be white.

This from Think Progress:

Under two new laws signed Thursday, young offenders and adults arrested for minor offenses in Georgia will no longer be sent to prison. Instead, they will be directed into community-based rehabilitative programs meant to address underlying problems.

After January 1, young people arrested for minor offenses will enter social service programs, skipping the criminal justice system entirely. Those arrested for low-level crimes like drug possession will be diverted into community-based rehab programs. Teenagers who have committed felonies in which no one is hurt will face a maximum of 18 months in prison plus intensive probation for a year and a half. If someone is harmed, the juveniles could be sent to prison for up to 5 years.

The youth law is expected to save $85 million over five years and reduce the juvenile prison population by 640 teenagers, at a rate of $91,000 a year per bed. Currently, there are 1,820 minors in juvenile facilities in Georgia. The youth recidivism rate, now at 65 percent, is also supposed to drop.

Georgia’s school to prison pipeline is among the worst in the nation, with schools frequently using the criminal justice system to discipline kids for minor infractions. A juvenile court judge from Georgia testified last year that one-third of the cases before him were school-related minor offenders who had been arrested by campus police. He also noted an “appalling” racial disparity in the arrests, which were 80 percent African American. As arrests increase, high school graduation rates have plummeted.

The other new law establishes alternative program options for adults arrested for non-violent crimes. As of July 1, judges will be given more discretion over drug-related cases, which often have mandatory minimum prison sentences. Instead, expensive prison beds will be reserved for the most violent criminals, while less serious offenses like drug possession, burglary, forgery, or shoplifting will have less severe penalties depending on the scale of the crime.

Gov. Nathan Deal (R) has made a more humane and effective prison system a top priority. At the bill signing, Deal choked up as he described how families have “been cast aside by the system that was in place.” Now that he has signed these two cornerstone bills into law, the governor is already working with community groups on legislation to smooth the transition of inmates back into society and reduce recidivism rates. He has also pledged $10 million in funding for “accountability courts” to make sure defendants work, seek treatment and stay sober.

Sentencing reform has attracted rare bipartisan support all over the country, as conservativeslook for ways to cut costs while liberals oppose excessively harsh and ineffective sentencing. In the past two years, 35 prisons have shuttered in 15 states. However, other states have embraced the private prison industry, which has an abysmal record for security and inmate abuse, and may actually increase incarceration rates.

This is great news for Georgia residents. But as I mentioned, the state still has serious issues to address involving current prisoners houses across the state. As I mentioned, there has been a very long hunger strike in protest of the conditions and discrepancies associated with the treatment of prisoners. In the following video from last year, Bruce Dixon, the managing editor of Black Agenda Report fills us in via The Real News Network.

Watch the video below:

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Currently, there are 2.5 million individuals incarcerated, or under supervision of the justice system in America. Though there is debate as to how, and why it is this way (think: racism), it’s surprising to see that Wisconsin leads all fifty states when it comes to the incarceration of Black men. The truth is, I always thought it would’ve been a southern state. Heck, Louisiana has the dubious distinction of having the most people incarcerated per capita . At any rate, this information might be helpful to any Black man who plan to visit the state any time soon — yeah, watch ya’ back out there fellas; it’s ugly out there in the Badger State, fellas.

Story Below:

What is going on in Wisconsin?

A new study from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee that looked at the prison population there found that the state has the highest percentage of incarcerated black men in the country. About 1 in 8 black men of working age (13 percent) are in state prisons or jails. The national average is 6.7 percent.

According to census figures, African-Americans make up 6.5 percent of the state’s population.

Wisconsin also leads the nation in the percentage of Native men behind bars; 1 in 13 Indian men are incarcerated there.

Wisconsin, though? Really?

And Wisconsin’s lead on this count is pretty big: It beats the state with the next-highest rate of imprisoned black men by nearly 3 percentage points — a gap bigger than the total distance between the second- and 10th-place states.

A big chunk of the state’s black male prison population comes from Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s biggest city. According to the researchers, more than half of all black men in their 30s and 40s had been incarcerated at some point. That means there’s a large population of men in the state’s biggest city who are essentially unemployable, which puts a huge drag on the economy — and a big reason Milwaukee is one of the poorest big cities in the country. (Milwaukee’s metro area also boasts one of the biggest gaps in incomes between blacks and whites.)

And Milwaukee’s poor felons are concentrated in the same neighborhoods: The study also found that almost two-thirds of Milwaukee County’s incarcerated black men come from the city’s six poorest ZIP codes.

“I do think that a lot of it has to do with sentencing policy,” said Jeanne Geraci, who runs the Benedict Center, a Milwaukee-based organization that advocates for community-based responses to criminal justice. Geraci said that the state has a much more aggressive stance to incarceration; Minnesota, which has similar demographics and crime rates, has a prison population half the size of Wisconsin’s prison population. (Source:WBAA)

To learn more about mass incarceration, listen to Michelle Alexander speak below:

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Some of the poorest Brooklyn city blocks are also some of the priciest. You couldn’t tell by the surroundings or by the people who live there — mostly people of color most of whom live below the poverty line. They are called million dollarblocks by criminal-justice experts who study this phenomenon: In Brooklyn at one point, there were 35 blocks that fit this category — city blocks where so many residents were sent to state prison that the total cost of their incarceration exceeded more than $1 million.

At the same time, a quick look at the surrounding schools and other social institutions in these areas would bring shame to any right-thinking American, regardless of color. The following is an attempt to articulate a problem from a civil rights perspective with a street-smart sensibility.

In a relatively short period of time, we have moved from a nation that had the audacity to envision a Great Society to a nation that now incarcerates more people than any other. While the U.S. has 5% of the world’s population, it accounts for 25% of the world’s prison population (most of those in US prisons are people of color). At the same time, we remain the most violent and crime-ridden of all advanced democracies.

How did we get here? Well, it wasn’t by accident and it didn’t happen overnight. In order to understand how we became a nation of prisons we have to look at crime and punishment from a historical context. A task I couldn’t possibly hope to do in a one or two-page Word document. Still, before I move on, I have to at least try.

Sociologist Loic Wacquant (2002) maintains that historically not one but several institutions have been implemented to define, confine, and control African-Americans in the United States. The first was chattel slavery which made possible the plantation economy and the caste of racial division from colonial times to the Civil War. The second was the Jim Crow system of legally imposed discrimination and segregation that served as the foundation for the agricultural society of the South from the close of Reconstruction to the Civil Rights revolution which toppled it a full century after abolition. America’s third mechanism for containing the descendants of slaves in the Northern industrial metropolis was the ghetto. It happen along with the African-American Great Migration of 1914–30 to the 1960s, when it was rendered partly obsolete by the mounting protest of blacks against continued racism, culminating with the urban riots of the 1960s. The fourth, Wacquant contends, is the institutional complex formed by the leftovers of the black ghetto and the prison/ industrial complex with which it has become joined by a linked relationship with institutional racism.

What this suggests is that slavery and mass imprisonment are intrinsically linked and that we cannot understand one — its timing, composition, and inception as well as the silent ignorance and acceptance of its harmful effects on those it affects — without returning to the former as a starting point. In other words, from a historical viewpoint, the mass incarceration of mostly people of color in the United States is a direct offshoot from the roots of the institution of racism.

Now, you might be wondering what I mean by a “street-smart sensibility,” and if you bear with me, I’ll try to explain. I cannot, in all good conscience, profess to know much about present-day urban street culture. As a Nuyorican born and raised in the ghettos of New York City, however, I was raised during hip hop’s inception (an articulation of the street if there ever was one) long before MTV got hip to it, and long before hip-hop culture became mainstream. I will be honest and say I stopped listening to hip hop before it made its way to the mainstream of U.S. popular culture (via Yo! MTV Raps or BET). However, through the years I have maintained an interest in some groups that I felt offered a powerful social message — groups such as Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, and some others, but I don’t know jack about contemporary hip-hop, nor do I like much of it. For me, hip-hop was more than a musical genre; it was a ghetto scream calling out for recognition, combining several elements of modern and traditional culture, not the least of which was technology. Hip-hop was an urban folklore expressing the gritty reality of life in the mostly black and Puerto Rican ghettos of New York City.

I think hip-hop is relevant to a discussion of mass incarceration because its attitude and moral stance is often called into question and vilified by both black and white conservatives. I contend that hip-hop, as the main vehicle for a philosophy of the street, informs this discussion and has the potential to give it a proper philosophical framework.

Hip-hop as the dominant chosen form of entertainment and instruction of gifted young people, has both good and bad effects. If we look beyond the polemics, hip-hop also serves to resist (and sometimes reinforce) the effects of a postmodern world steeped in free-market fundamentalism, aggressive macho militarianism, and increasing privatization of the social sphere. The racial dimension of hip-hop is unavoidable, and it is here where hip-hop, if looked at as more than mere cultural expression, can inform and illuminate the present dialog.

If we view criminal justice as retribution, then we have to acknowledge that justice as retribution mirrors the sentiment that vengeance is sweet, redeeming those who have been wronged at the hands of others. It is a desire often expressed by rappers themselves. Yet their desire for retribution isn’t proposed as part of a legitimate system of punishment. For one, the situations they portray are oftentimes way outside the law. However, lurking under rappers’ desire to settle scores lies a steadfast belief that the law does not (and never did) protect them. If the law doesn’t protect you and won’t guarantee justice, then it follows that you may have to protect yourself from your enemies.

Many rappers are skeptical about justice in America and alarmed by our criminal justice system. Hip-hop lyrics strongly suggest that racial bias in our criminal justice system undermines the notion of equal protection under the law. They also strenuously question whether the historically unprecedented massive effort to incarcerate black men serves the purpose of public safety. For them, the notion of the public good and retribution appears as a facade for an unjust form of social control that helps maintain a system of privilege for whites. Rap music often aims to strip away the veneer of justice from a system that unfairly targets youth of color.

Circle the block where the beef’s at / and park in front of my enemy’s eyes/ They see that it’s war we life-stealers, hollow-tip busters. — Nas, Every Ghetto

The popular idea of retribution as a legally sanctioned form of punishment is based on the assumption that criminal acts call for punishment — separate from the consequences of punishment, such as permanent disenfranchisement and the enduring collateral consequences of imprisonment. From this perspective, the ends (in this case, retribution) justify the means at whatever societal cost. The point being that justice is served only when wrongdoers suffer.

In a lawless context, the line between retribution and self-defense is not so clear, but advocates of retribution (“retributivists”) are not interested in retaliation as a reaction to a perceived threat. They advocate retaliation for wrongdoing as a matter of justice. This led one of the most famous retributivists, Immanuel Kant, to stress the difference between vengeance and retribution (a persistent theme in the western and film noir genres, by the way). In Kant’s view, vengeance is emotional and personal, reckless and often disproportionate to the crime.

A civilized society, Kant argued, would replace vengeance with retribution. Yet the ideal of retribution carries more than a trace of vengeance, as the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, emphasized in Discipline and Punish: The Birthof the Prison (1995). Some recent retributivists, as in Jeffrie Murphy’s Getting Even, urge us to embrace the emotional and the personal value of punishment as retribution. These philosophers accept the connection between vengeance and the justification of punishment. They offer us four conditions that vengeance must meet in order to be considered justice:

• Communication. The penalty must communicate what the offender did wrong.
• Desert. The punishment must be deserved.
• Proportionality. The punishment must fit the crime.
• Authority. A legitimate authority must administer the punishment.

When these conditions are met, it is claimed, vengeance leads us to justice. However, rappers and street poets tell us a cautionary tale — the retributivist’s conditions aren’t met. For many people living in marginalized communities, the overriding sentiment is that the authority of a government that doesn’t care about some of its people can’t claim legitimacy. A legitimate government serves the interests of all its people, including minority groups. A government that fails to provide equal protection for all manages only to exercise power, not legitimate authority. In other words, might does not make right.

The most basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution and associated with our criminal justice system are the following: people should not be subjected to unreasonable searches and seizures (Fourth Amendment); people are innocent until proven guilty through due process of the law (Fifth Amendment); people should not be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment (Eight Amendment); people should be equally protected by the law (Fourteenth Amendment).

Many street artists and activists correctly point out violations of these basic constitutional rights — police and prosecutorial misconduct, lack of access to legal counsel, unfair sentencing policies, and inhumane prison conditions. These are well documented and disproportionately affect African Americans and Latino/as.

Consider the ongong trail regarding the racially inspired stop and frisk policies of the NYPD. Racial profiling is a policing strategy that is strongly correlated with excessive force and the disproportionate incarceration of minorities (Amnesty International, 2004). Problems such as these undermine not just rights in the U.S., but international rights as well. In addition, they call into question whether many punishments have been fairly implemented.

Grounds for doubt about punishment as retribution extend beyond racial bias in its application. How could we know whether the desert condition or the proportionality condition for justice as retribution has been justified? Consider the following articulation from a leading retributivist on fitting the punishment to the crime:

Tailoring the fit appears to depend on the moral sensitivity or intuitions of the punishers. When is the fit right? When does a suit of clothes fit? When it feels right? Yes, but also when it looks right to the wearers and others… Morality is an art, not a science.

Statements such as this should give us cause for alarm. The lack of a shared basis for moral judgment in a multicultural, multiethnic, multi-religious America dooms the justification of punishment. In the U.S. the system of punishment costs about 60 billion dollars per year. It destroys families and communities, and it deprives those caught in its maws their most basic liberties, often for a lifetime. Biblical references to the scales of justice, “an eye for an eye,” or the art of morality are woefully inadequate as a justification for a system of punishment.

The main justification or rationale for punishment is in actuality about social control, not desert. Many artists, activists and just plain people from besieged communities know this all too well through often humiliating personal experience. The philosophical roots of punishment as social control come from what is known as the “consequentialist” school who argued that punishment can only be justified when it has good consequences for society. Particularly, punishment is rationalized by considerations of deterrence, rehabilitation, or incapacitation.

Deterrence is achieved when, through punishment, people who commit crimes or might potentially commit crimes are discouraged from doing so. Rehabilitation is achieved when a person who has committed a crime no longer has the desire to commit crimes and that desire is replaced by a respect for the social contract. Incapacitation is achieved when those who have committed crimes can no longer do so because they are incarcerated. Artists, activists, and people from the streets rightfully express skepticism about whether anything but incapacitation is achieved by punishment.

I have shown that the moral standing of a criminal justice system becomes precarious when the rights of members of groups that are considered outsiders are not protected. This makes it difficult to secure respect for the law, which lessens the prospects for rehabilitation. Deterrence is similarly undermined when the conditions outside of prisons resemble a jungle. When people are poor, unemployed, without hope, locked out of educational and economic opportunities, and subjected to the trauma of violence and police abuse, prison becomes something less foreboding. I would submit that the separation between prisons and the largely black and brown communities that feed them is a delusion. People move from medium and maximum-security communities to medium and maximum-security prisons and back again. And we call this “reentry (another fallacy).

Of course, prison is in many ways worse than life on the streets, but the point here is that people in difficult social circumstances are more willing to take risks, especially when, to paraphrase Langston Hughes, the “dream explodes.” This fact, which is part of the trauma of living in the ghetto, weakens the effectiveness of punishment as a deterrent.

What we’re left with here is incapacitation and it is the wholesale incapacitation of mostly black and brown men…

Notes:
“The Bing” is slang for prison and/ or solitary confinement
Unless otherwise noted, all statistics are from the Bureau of justice Statistics
Resources
Amnesty International. (2004). Threat and humiliation: Racial profiling, domestic security, and human rights in the United States. New York: Amnesty International, USA.
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans. 2nd ed.). New York: Vintage Books.
Wacquant, L. (2002). From slavery to mass incarceration: Rethinking the race question in the US. New Left Review, 13(January-February ), 41-60.

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Sadly, there are many people who are of the belief that the system works perfectly On Law & Order, everything makes sense: the police chase after violent bad guys, the accused get a fair trial, and justice is blind. But is that the reality in the United States? Watch this video to have your mind blown about how unjust our system truly is.

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 More than 40 years later, I can still remember the incident as if it happened yesterday. It was my first real interaction with a NYC police officer. A few of us were headed home after being let out of school, waiting for the “M” train on the elevated Wyckoff & Myrtle platform. It was a rainy, drizzly early spring day. My friends and I were all “A” students — the talented tenth — at the (even then) notorious Bushwick High School. We were just standing around cracking jokes on one another, talking about girls — the usual fare of masculine adolescence. We weren’t being loud, weren’t breaking any laws. We were, well, breathing while Latino (we were all of Puerto Rican descent).

As we stood there bonding, a police officer approached us and demanded to know what we were doing. He was tall — over six feet — and towered over my then 5 feet fio-inch, 125-lb frame. I had never had any bad experiences with the police; maybe it was because I looked white. My friends would always tease me that I often got a free pass. This time, however, everyone immediately became quiet and the tension was palpable.

I informed the officer that were all going home, that we had just left school. I wasn’t being confrontational, just merely stating a fact as I would if I had commented on the weather. He then asked for ID, or our “program cards.” What I remember most was that he unnecessarily was rude and abrupt.

We all showed him our school IDs and then he looked at me and said, “Get the fuck off this platform.”

We were all taken aback since we had to be on the platform in order to catch our train home. When we didn’t react, he looked straight at me but said to everyone, “Didn’t you hear what I said you little spics. Get the FUCK off this platform.” Now, the “spic” part was uncalled for, I felt. In a nice way, I informed the officer that we were all headed home and we had to take the train. Up to that point, I wasn’t arguing with him, I was trying to reason, even though he had used profanity and a racial slur. We were standing by the stairs leading down to the street.

“If you don’t get the fuck off of this platform now you little prick, I will kick your spic ass down those stairs.”

And that’s when I became argumentative and things took a turn for the worse. I stated that we all had a right to stand on the platform and that we hadn’t done anything wrong to provoke him. I asked him by what authority could he speak to us in that manner and violate our basic rights.

I’ll never forget his response. He said, in a low, threatening growl, “If you don’t get off this station by the time I count to three, I will kick you down those stairs.”

I stood there, staring at him defiantly, determined not to move. By then, my friends all of whom were intimidated, advised me, “C’mon, Eddie, let’s go, don’t get into any trouble, man, it’s not worth it.” I said I wasn’t moving.

The police officer counted:

One…

Two…

And I don’t know why, perhaps it was the look of pure hatred on the man’s face, but I decided to move right before he counted to three. I turned around and started walking down the steps and that’s when I felt his foot slam into my back. I don’t know how I did it, maybe it was instinct, but somehow, as my body began its propulsion head first down the metal stairs, I reached out and grabbed on to the only thing available — the officer’s foot.

And in that way we tumbled down those long, cement-and-metal stairs, tangled in a ball, for I was holding on to dear life. After what seemed like an eternity, we landed and I immediately noted the unnatural position of the officer’s leg and his banshee howls of pain. I remember two elderly white ladies shouting and a crowd gathering. At that very moment, taking in everything, I realized I was fucked… and I ran.

After, my friends told me that the police officer rounded them up and tried to get them to tell him who I was. To their credit never ratted on me. For over two years, I was unable to take the train to school; I had to walk to school (a 45-minute walk each way) rain, cold, snow, or shine.

I was a 14-year-old honors student who never did anything wrong and my life could’ve have easily been destroyed by that one chance encounter.

The problem is that these chance encounters have (and continue to) destroyed lives and the fabric of mostly communities of color. Growing up, my experience wasn’t outside the norm. My close friend, Michael, had his penis almost shot off by a police officer. It was a Saturday night, one of our acquaintances was running from the police, passed by us, and when we heard gunshots, we all ran. My companion, Michael, who was not the target, was shot and the bullet passed through his thigh and through his penis. When we picked him up, we saw the blood flowing from his groin area. He was lucky, the main “dick vein” (as Michael explained it) wasn’t destroyed, and the doctors were able to stitch it all back together again. He did have the ugliest penis I ever saw. Accustomed to experiencing trauma, we used the time-worn urban coping skill of the macabre wit to kid him and called his penis Frankenstein Dick.

My friend Shadow, one of the blackest Puerto Ricans I ever met (hence the nickname), was a Golden Gloves champion with a promising boxing career. He was going to box for the Air Force after high school. He was “accidentally” shot dead in the flower of his youth by a stray police bullet. Another stray police bullet left a friend paralyzed at 17 — for life. Both incidents were termed as “mistaken shootings” or something like that. And those were only the most egregious infractions. I can’t even begin to enumerate all the little infractions, the almost daily “minor” humiliations and indignities, at the hands of the police. I can’t begin to enumerate the countless times parents, grandmothers even, were rounded up like common criminals during drug “sweeps” — periodic lockdowns of whole city blocks in which the police ran roughshod, with total disregard for all basic human rights.

This is not to say all police are brutal or even corrupt. I am, however, trying to offer the insight that the relationship between communities of color and the police are strained at best. Oftentimes, structural racism is expressed through the vehicle of law enforcement. It isn’t that there are a few bad apples; the true issue is that the barrel itself is rotten.

Today, when I hold workshops teaching children how to protect themselves from those who are supposed to protect us, I hear the same stories. Stories of young people of color being thrown against a wall, or with a boot on their neck. I continue to hear stories of young men literally being undressed in broad daylight. I still hear about the humiliations and of a police force that resembles more of an occupying force than a beneficent social institution. So, whenever I hear justifications for racial profiling, such as the ones in use in major urban areas such as New York and Los Angeles, I am not surprised, for I know the drill. However, it doesn’t mean that I am not outraged.

You should be too.

Racial profiling leads to very real and harmful consequences, one of which includes police brutality and the curtailing of basic American freedoms. Yet, you will hear high-level officials defend it in the same manner one acquaintance put it to me:

Police deployment these days is determined almost strictly by rates of relative violence/crime in each police district. The rate of violence is not some subjective quotient created by a racist cop, but is determined by counting citizens reporting that they were shot, stabbed, beat up and otherwise assaulted, this is combined with citizen reports of burglary, robbery, theft, etc. You see, your racist conspiracy theory is illogical when you know that police resources are deployed based on crime as reported by citizens and not some racist plot to destroy minorities. That is logical.

The problem with this line of thinking, aside from its moral bankruptcy, is that it is not based on fact nor reason. Racial conservatives — both black and white — maintain that racial profiling isn’t racist. They argue, like the individual above, that racial profiling is justified since we all know blacks and Latino/as are criminally predisposed! As Heather MacDonald of the conservative think tank, the Manhattan Institute, puts it, “Judging by arrest rates, minorities are overly represented among drug traffickers” (MacDonald, 2001) . Black conservative, Randall Kennedy agrees. He goes so far as to say that arrest rates present a “sad reality” and justifies racial profiling on those grounds (Kennedy, 1999). Well, if this is true, scientific examinations of racial profiling should yield results that back up the claims of racial conservatives.

They don’t…

For example, a New York Attorney General’s study of stops and frisks in New York City, issued in 1999, recorded 175,000 encounters between officers and citizens over fifteen months. The study tracked hit rates by analyzing the percentage of stops and frisks that ended in an arrest. The data is damning. The study found that police arrested 12.6 percent of the whites they stopped, only 11.5 percent of the Latino/as, and only 10.5 percent of the blacks (Spitzer, 1999). This is exactly the opposite of what defenders of racial profiling would predict. When New York City police officers utilized racial profiling intensively, they found what they wanted less often on blacks and Latino/as than they did on whites.

From a personal perspective, I have a sneaking suspicion that those who champion racial profiling don’t do so because they actually believe it’s statistically “sound policing.” I submit they support such practices because they want to justify racist practices. They are comfortable with such practices because, for the most part, it doesn’t affect them. They are not the ones being dragged handcuffed from their homes, or suffering humiliation while driving or even walking down a city street. They think it’s acceptable to commit such acts on certain Americans because they just don’t give a good goddamn — until it happens to them…

There’s a price we all pay for racial profiling, the least of which it makes all of us less safe, as police are more determined to bust low-level black drug dealers in the streets while the big drug game is taking place somewhere in a sleepy suburban enclave or high roller penthouse loft.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

Update: Recently, our local station NY1, aired a piece on our efforts (click here). If you look real close and don’t blink, you’ll see yours truly for a hot second around the 54-second mark LOL.

The post Police State: Racial Profiling, The Po-Po, & Me appeared first on Madness & Reality.

 Look, it’s no secret that the involuntary manslaughter conviction and potential 2-4 year sentence of Johanness Merhsele in the Oscar Grant trial presents itself to be yet another injustice face by African Americans. I suppose that anything short of a public flogging and subsequent beheading as punishment in this case isn’t justice in the minds of many, who just so happen to be black. Well I say, though understandable, it’s a misguided and ill-formed opinion. Moreover, much of it lies in the assumption that justice wasn’t served because the victim in this case died at the hands of a white man, who happened to be a police officer.

NOTE: Black folks kill each other senselessly everyday and nobody riots.

Now I understand quite clearly the historical context of “justice” as it applies to minorities here in the US of A. But the automatic assumption that justice wasn’t served in this case, I find to be be sadly shrouded in tribal knee-jerked reactions. Sure I know this is hard to accept coming from me the ever present and always on the job racism ambulance chaser that I am. But, being a habitual line stepper and free thinker, I would be remiss if I didn’t call bullshit, or keep it real as I do on this site as I do.

Over the last few days I’ve communicated with people on and offline on the subject of this verdict. The one thing that remains consistent is that people are of the opinion that an “involuntary manslaughter” conviction wasn’t good enough, because the cop in this case deliberately shot and killed an unarmed black man. A black man who at the time was laying face down on the pavement. Yes, like you I saw the video clip; but what amazes me, is the absolute deafening silence when I ask people to prove that officer Merhsele intentionally, willfully, and deliberately pulled the trigger to execute Oscar Grant.

Even more troubling, is the lack of understanding of involuntary manslaughter, voluntary manslaughter, or second-degree murder as legally defined in California; or the choices the jury had to make in this case. With that said, let’s take a look at the breakdown of said definitions as it applied to a conviction of Merhsele:

SECOND-DEGREE MURDER: An intentional killing that was neither planned or premeditated. The jury had to be convinced that Merhsele fired his gun deliberately.

VOLUNTARY MANSLAUGHTER: Oscar Grant was killed in the “heat of passion” without intent. The jury had to believe that Merhsele’s fear of danger from Grant and his friends was unreasonable

INVOLUNTARY MANSLAUGHTER: Killing of another person with “criminal negligence”. The jury had to believe that Merhsele’s deviations from training were so profound that it was criminal.

ACQUITTAL: Accused not found guilty. The jury would conclude and accept  that Merhsele used appropriate level of force for the level of threat he perceived.

So now I ask, after reading the four choices they were given above, just which outcome or verdict is acceptable. Better yet, if you were on the jury, which one would you argue or vote for? Further, just exactly what evidence or testimony would you use to press your argument? Yep, make your case; I’m listening…

Now, before you do, assuming that you’re one of those second-degree murder advocates. It is important to understand that the jury was instructed on the legal definition of second-degree murder as it applied to the defendant. Their instructions stipulated that second-degree murder occurred if, “When the defendant acted, he had a state of mind called malice aforethought.” Which is a state of mind that was clearly defined for jurors as “a mental state that must be formed before the act that causes death is committed.”

Now, if you can prove to me just what was in Merhsele’s head right before he pulled the trigger, I’d love to see you do just that; if you can I’d kiss your ass on Main Street with a camera crew in tow. You see, that’s just it; the prosecution was unable to convince the jury that he had said mental state. In layman’s terms, there was not sufficient evidence presented to substantiate that claim, hence their inability to find consensus on the decision of second-degree murder.

Yeah I know it’s clear on tape what happened, but it wasn’t enough. And fortunately, serving on a jury requires individuals to think, rather than react when one’s life hangs in the balance; in the court of public opinion, there’s no such requirement, and that’s the difference. See in court, unlike out in the streets, it’s not about what you know, it’s what you can prove. And fortunately for the defendant in this case, his “taser defense” created enough reasonable doubt for the jury to buy into; enough so to toss out a second-degree murder conviction.

I know in your mind you’re probably of the opinion that if there were black people on the jury that the outcome would have been different. As for me, I don’t buy into that; irrespective of race and the racial subtext  of this case, given the presentation by both sides, I think the outcome would be the same (my wife thinks it would have been a mistrial). Hell, if the jury were majority black and they ruled in favor against a white cop with a second-degree murder conviction based on emotion and nothing else like the idiots who were rioting Oakland, would that be justice?

In closing, I wanna say that I’m glad that Merhsele was not acquitted; and I believe it was due in large part to the collective activism (on and offline) of concerned individuals who champion for justice. Sure it might not seem right that a cop can kill an unarmed black man and only serve a 2-4 year sentence. And yes you may be of the opinion that this is yet another example of just how black bodies are valued in America. If that’s what you wanna do then by all means do so. However, at least know the facts of this specific case before doing so. I say that because it sure would be nice to hear just who dropped the ball and how, rather than age old empty rhetoric. If you think this is an injustice? There’s a family with the last name Bell who would say differently.

The post The Oscar Grant Verdict: So Where Exactly is the Injustice? appeared first on Madness & Reality.

Not too long ago, I attended a conference in which one of the panelists related a story that to me was more horrifying than any slasher movie. A child in kindergarten class was asked to draw a picture showing how he saw himself in the future. It’s an innocent enough exercise, one I am sure is given in kindergarten classes across the nation. The child drew an elaborate diagram. In it he drew his school. From his school, he drew a tunnel that wound its way through a rather sophisticated landscape. That tunnel led to a prison.

Now, the teacher was horrified. She called in her superiors, who called the parents, and so on. When asked why he would draw such a picture, he responded in the typical honesty only children can muster. He said he drew it because it was true.

And he’s right…

The spectacle of conservatives pontificating about morals has become a bad joke. For example, watching that morally-challenged fool, William Bennett, on CNN spinning a report on the US prison population is the height of hypocrisy (or at least it was back then). As a society, we incarcerate more people than any other nation in the world. We have 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prison population. There are currently 2.3 million men and women behind bars in the USA right now. Add to that the 5 million on probation and parole and you have an epidemic.

The vast majority of those in prison are young people of color. You might say that this is so because people of color are more prone to crime, but you would be wrong. Reams of studies, such as those published by the Sentencing Project, have shown that, all other factors controlled, a black youth is 1.5 times more likely to be sentenced to prison than his white peer — even when the crime and criminal histories are the same.

You might say that, hey, prison is fucked up, but we need to lock up criminals in order to stem the tidal wave of crime. Again, you would be wrong. There is no correlation between incarceration and crime rates. In fact, New York City’s record crime drops occurred during a decade in which the prison population was decreasing.

You might say that the collateral damage inflicted on these individuals is justified if it keeps dangerous criminals off the street and again, you would be wrong. The majority of those currently incarcerated are non-violent, first time offenders — often low level drug dealers with drug histories. Our criminal justice system is so overburdened, that if everyone currently fighting a case would choose to go to trial, the system would implode. As a result, plea-bargaining — giving up the right to a fair trial in exchange for a more lenient sentence — is the norm rather than the exception. In other words, the vast majority or people in prison didn’t even have the benefit of a fair trail.

Finally, you might not give a fuck because you think this doesn’t affect you, but, again you would be wrong. Where do you think our government gets the money to build and maintain these prisons?

They get if from money that would’ve otherwise gone to education, health care, and community revitalization projects that, in the long run, do more to prevent crime than anything else we could think of. The money comes from your child’s school, from your community, from your pockets. In other words, we have transformed ourselves from a nation that envisioned a Great Society, to a prison nation. Our responses to addiction, poverty, lack of opportunity are all rolled into one response: incarceration.

And for what? For an expensive way to destroy a life? Here in NYC, we would rather spend over $70,000 a year to lock up a black youth, than to spend a fraction of that to send him to a decent school.

You also might say, especially if you are a conservative (or one of their black/ brown enablers) that people of color are more criminally inclined, so it follows more of them should be incarcerated. But that too is a lie. Research shows that blacks comprise 62.7 percent and whites 36.7 percent of all drug offenders admitted to state prison, though research clearly demonstrates this racial disparity bears little resemblance to the reality of racial differences in drug offending. There are, for example, five times more white drug users than black. Despite this fact, black men are admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is 13.4 times greater than that of white men. In large part because of the extraordinary racial disparities in incarceration for drug offenses, blacks are incarcerated for all offenses at 8.2 times the rate of whites. One in every 20 black men over the age of 18 in the United States is in state or federal prison, compared to one in 180 white men.

So, considering the above, how wrong was that child at the beginning of this post? Those of us who study such things call it the school-to-prison pipeline. In the coming days, I’m going to tie all this together and putting to rest, once and for all, the notion that we live in a post-racial anything. It’s all connected, folks…

Love,

Eddie

Read more at [un]Common Sense

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