Six on Police: Surest Way to Face Marijuana Charges in New York: Be Black or Hispanic; The first step in finding Golden State
philip panaritis
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"They sit in courtroom pews, almost all of them young black men, waiting their turn before a New York City judge to face a charge that no longer exists in some states: possessing marijuana. They tell of smoking in a housing project hallway, or of being in a car with a friend who was smoking, or of lighting up a Black & Mild cigar the police mistake for a blunt.
There are many ways to get arrested on marijuana charges, but one pattern has remained true through years of piecemeal policy changes in New York City: The primary targets are black and Hispanic people.
Across the city, black people were arrested on low-level marijuana charges at eight times the rate of white, non-Hispanic people over the last three years, The New York Times found. Hispanic people were arrested at five times the rate of white people. In Manhattan, the gap is even starker: Black people there were arrested at 15 times the rate of white people. ..."
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"The Washington Post has been collecting data on documented fatal police shootings of civilians since 2015, and they recently released an update to the data set with incidents through the beginning of 2018. Over at Sociology Toolbox, Todd Beer has a great summary of the data set and a number of charts on how these shootings break down by race.
One of the main policy reforms suggested to address this problem is body cameras—the idea being that video evidence will reduce the number of killings by monitoring police behavior. Of course, not all police departments implement these cameras and their impact may be quite small. One small way to address these problems is public visibility and pressure.
So, how often are body cameras incorporated into incident reporting? Not that often, it turns out. I looked at all the shootings of unarmed civilians in The Washington Post’s dataset, flagging the ones where news reports indicated a body camera was in use. The measure isn’t perfect, but it lends some important context."
How the media smears black victims
"On St. Patrick’s Day, Maryland white supremacist James Harris Jackson drove to New York City for the express purpose of killing black men, authorities say. After wandering around the city for a few days, he did just that, approaching Timothy Caughman, a 66-year-old African American, and repeatedly stabbing him in the chest with a 26-inch katana sword, according to police reports. As revelations about Jackson’s motives broke, two major New York outlets chose not to dig into the past of the 28-year-old suspect, but to smear the victim.
“[Caughman] has 11 prior arrests, including for marijuana, assault, resisting arrest and menacing,” the New York Daily News reported of the victim, after describing the assailant as “dapper.”
How the media smears black victims
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Conn. Bill Would Allow Weaponized Drones For Police. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Conn. Bill Would Allow Weaponized Drones For Police. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
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C.O.P.
Committee on Poetry
We believe LeRoi Jones, not the Newark Police, that the poet carried no revolvers in his car, no revolvers in the car at all; that the police beat Jones up and then had to find a reason, thus found phony guns; that after the double-whammy of his beating and rabbit-in-hat guns, his trial before an all-white jury was triple-whammy. Lo & behold, fourth execrable whammy! — the Judge recited LeRoi’s visionary poem to the court (a butchered version) … and gave him a long 2½-3 year sentence because of it.
Mr. Jones’ whitekind is that self-same demon we call tyranny, injustice, dictatorship. As poet he champions the black imagination; as revolutionary poet his revolution is fought with words. He scribes that the police carried the guns. Lyres tell the Truth!
We herald to literary persons: get on the ball for LeRoi Jones, or else get off the poetic pot. LeRoi Jones is not only a black man, a Newark man, a revolutionary, he is a conspicuous American artist imprisoned for his poetry during a crisis of Authoritarianism in these States.
Signed:
John Ashbery
Gregory Corso
Robert Creeley
Diane di Prima
Robert Duncan
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Allen Ginsberg
Kenneth Koch
Denise Levertov
Michael McClure
Charles Olson
Joel Oppenheimer
Peter Orlovsky
Gil Sorrentino
Philip Whalen
John Wieners
Baraka didn’t serve the sentence, and perhaps these sentences served his case — over the months that followed, public awareness of and outrage over his fate continued to gain momentum; a different judge overturned the verdict for lack of evidence in 1969.
