Six on Police Brutality Protests: This is why Colin Kaepernick took a knee; Trump’s use of the Bible was obscene. He should try reading the words inside it; Don’t send in the troops; De Blasio staffers demand ‘radical change from mayor’ in open lette
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And please don't forget to check out the pertinent images attached to every post
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As preachers in the South, one black and one white, we are painfully aware of the ways Christian faith has been used to justify slavery, white supremacy, legal segregation, corporate exploitation, the dominance of women and the dehumanization of LGBTQ people. As Frederick Douglass put it, “Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.”
Millions of Christians and other people of faith see and acknowledge this difference.
We read the prophet Isaiah’s cry, “Woe unto those who legislate evil … make women and children their prey,” and we know it is a challenge to this administration and any political leadership that neglects its responsibility to care for the poor and most vulnerable in our society.
We read Jesus saying, “Woe unto you … hypocrites … you have neglected the weightier matters of the law,” and we know that, at the very heart of our faith, we are called to challenge those who try to twist belief to use it for their own ends.
The Bible as a talisman has real political power. But we believe the words inside the book are more powerful. If we unite across lines of race, creed and culture to stand together on the moral vision of love, justice and truth that was proclaimed by Jesus and the prophets, we have the capacity to reclaim the heart of this democracy and work together for a more perfect union.
To do that, we need to read the Bible and live it, not wave it for the cameras."
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"Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) wrote an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “Send In the Troops,” the sole virtue of which is that the headline accurately captures his thesis. Cotton urges President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and use regular military forces to put down “rioters [who] have plunged many American cities into anarchy, recalling the widespread violence of the 1960s.”
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In case you are wondering what that overwhelming show of force would do, well … "
"And these past long days, as New Yorkers have taken to the streets demanding an end to the racist policing that humiliates, maims, and kills Black New Yorkers, he stood with the very police who perpetrate that violence.
Many of us marched at these protests. We’ve all seen the images and read the stories. Crowds of cops swarming over a single protestor, raining down blows with their batons. Protestors rammed with police cars. A rampaging cop throwing a protester to the curb, sending her to the hospital with seizures. A cop drawing his gun and pointing it into a crowd. A cop macing a defenseless young man with his hands in the air. Cops covering their badges so they could act with utter impunity.
What was the Mayor’s response? He said that the NYPD had “acted appropriately.” That police had “shown a lot of restraint.” That he “was not going to blame” officers who were trying to deal with an “impossible situation.”
And while the Mayor did attempt to walk back some of his comments on Sunday morning, by Tuesday he had implemented an 8:00 PM citywide curfew, an unprecedented attempt to silence New Yorkers’ cries for justice.
We have joined together in writing this letter because we could not remain silent while the Administration we served allows the NYPD to turn our City into an occupied territory. Our former boss might not hear the cries for justice from Black and brown New Yorkers, but we do.
We are demanding radical change from the Mayor, who is on the brink of losing all legitimacy in the eyes of New Yorkers.
1. Reduce the NYPD operating budget by $1 billion in Fiscal Year 2021, and reallocate that money to essential social services, including housing support and rental relief, food assistance, and health care, in alignment with the demands of the NYC Budget Justice campaign.
3. Release the names and official disciplinary records of all NYPD personnel who have been accused of using excessive force, covering their badge numbers, or other misconduct.
4. Appoint an independent commission, in the vein of the Knapp and Mollen Commissions, composed of civil rights attorneys, journalists, and activists, including abolitionist organizers, to investigate the response of the Mayor’s Office and the NYPD to the May and June 2020 protests against police violence.
We are also calling upon all former and current staffers of conscience to stand with us in our call for change.
We all chose to serve for a better New York. Stand with us now and demand justice—for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arbery. For Eric and Erica Garner. And for all Black and brown New Yorkers."
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"MINNEAPOLIS — Last Wednesday, Marcell Harris was hit by a rubber bullet. He had joined the second day of protests in this city over the killing of George Floyd, a black man who died after a police officer kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes while bystanders filmed. Though these protests began with peaceful demonstrations outside the city’s 3rd Precinct, interactions between police and protesters had escalated. Police unleashed pepper spray, projectiles and tear gas. Protesters threw water bottles, built barricades and destroyed nearby property.
Harris said he had used his backpack as a shield and maneuvered close enough to take the baton of the officer who shot him. On Thursday night, he returned to the same spot to watch the precinct burn. With no police presence to be seen, he and other protesters were celebrating a victory. “I’m nonviolent,” he said. “But this feels emotional. George Floyd popped the bubble. It feels like the beginning of the end.” The end of what? “What we’ve been going through,” he said, referring to heavy-handed and often deadly policing of African Americans. “All the bullshit.”
Watching a peaceful protest turn into something much less palatable is hard. There has been a lot of hard the past few days, as people in dozens of cities have released pent-up anger against discriminatory police tactics. Cars and buildings have burned. Store windows have been smashed. Protesters and police have been hurt. When protests take a turn like this we naturally wonder … why? Was this preventable? Does anyone know how to stop it from happening?
Turns out, we do know some of these answers. Researchers have spent 50 years studying the way crowds of protesters and crowds of police behave — and what happens when the two interact. One thing they will tell you is that when the police respond by escalating force — wearing riot gear from the start, or using tear gas on protesters — it doesn’t work. In fact, disproportionate police force is one of the things that can make a peaceful protest not so peaceful. But if we know that (and have known that for decades), why are police still doing it?
“There’s this failed mindset of ‘if we show force, immediately we will deter criminal activity or unruly activity’ and show me where that has worked,” said Scott Thomson, the former chief of police in Camden, New Jersey.
“That’s the primal response,” he said. “The adrenaline starts to pump, the temperature in the room is rising, and you want to go one step higher. But what we need to know as professionals is that there are times, if we go one step higher, we are forcing them to go one step higher.”
Interactions between police and protesters are, by their very nature, tough to study. Even when researchers get a good vantage point to observe protests in the real world — for example, by embedding within a crowd — the data that comes out is more descriptive and narrative as opposed to quantitative. Some kinds of protests are highly organized with top-down plans that are months in the making. Others, like many of the events across America this past week, are spontaneous outpourings of grief and anger. The social and political context of the time and place also affect what happens. Even a single protest isn’t really a single protest. “You have lots of mini protests happening in many places,” said Edward Maguire, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona State University. “There’s different dynamics. Some peaceful. Some not. And different police tactics.” In Baltimore on Saturday, for example, a police lieutenant mollified a crowd by reading out loud the names of victims of police brutality, while protesters outside City Hall threw bottles at police in riot gear and police used tear gas on the crowd, WBFF-TV reported."
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"While it took two and a half months for the authorities to finally make arrests in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, corporate media were much quicker to follow the time-honored practice of besmirching victims of racist violence (FAIR.org, 3/22/17).
First they kill your body. Then they kill your reputation. When white supremacy is the foundation of the US’s media, political, legal and corporate system, victims of racist violence are often killed twice in this way.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation on May 7 arrested former cop Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son Travis McMichael, 34, for the murder of Arbery, an unarmed 25-year old African American out for a jog—only after a widely circulated video of the lynching became too difficult to ignore. The man who filmed the shooting, William Bryan Jr., 50, was arrested on May 21 on charges of felony murder and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment after Arbery’s family and civil rights activists pressed that Bryan wasn’t a mere witness, but an active participant in the murder.
But it only took a few weeks for corporate media to dig up and publish irrelevant dirt on Arbery.
Media outlets sometimes offer the excuse that they have to investigate victims’ pasts to fill up column inches, because the identities of police officers who perpetrate racist violence are often concealed. But in this case, the video and police reports made it very clear who the shooters were: On February 23, Travis and Gregory McMichael pursued and shot Arbery for the apparent “crime” of running while black, ostensibly because they assumed, based on the color of his skin, that he was behind a series of break-ins more than seven weeks before.
The New York Times headline (4/26/20) has “two weapons, a chase, a killing”—and no killers. In the subhead, Ahmaud Arbery “ended up dead”—and the people who shot him to death are described as “pursuers.”
The New York Times report (4/26/20), with the vague headline “Two Weapons, a Chase, a Killing and No Charges,” cited activists and family members pointing out that even if Arbery had committed a property crime, that still wouldn’t have justified lethal violence. But the Times nevertheless saw fit to include:
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But others contend that Mr. Arbery was up to no good. On the day of the shooting, and apparently moments before the chase, a neighbor in Satilla Shores called 911, telling the dispatcher that a black man in a white T-shirt was inside a house that was under construction and only partially closed in.
“And he’s running right now,” the man told the dispatcher. “There he goes right now!”
In his letter to the police, Mr. Barnhill, the prosecutor, noted that Mr. Arbery had a criminal past. Court records show that Mr. Arbery was convicted of shoplifting and of violating probation in 2018. Five years earlier, according to the Brunswick News, he was indicted on charges that he took a handgun to a high school basketball game."
