Monroe Anderson

Cops victim of Trigger Finger-itis epidemic

  

 

 

    A Black man who had suffered a stroke was shot with a Taser and pepper spray because he was unable to get out of his car as a Virginia cop ordered. A Cleveland cop was found not guilty in the 137 bullets trial. From coast to coast police are too quick to pull the trigger. Here's my Chicago Defender column on the situation. 

 

Lethal or nonlethal, same shoot, different day

By Monroe Anderson

 

 

When it comes to white cops shooting unarmed Blacks, the hits just keep on coming. So do the misses.

              A viral video-surfaced last week that featured David Washington’s turn at taking the hit. The 34-year-old Black man was shot by a Taser then hit by a stream of pepper spray for failing to get out of his car on demand.

Washington was both lucky and unlucky. Lucky because Fredericksburg Police Officer Shaun Jergens shot him with the Taser and pepper sprayed him, leaving him short of breath and with his eyelids swollen closed, instead of aiming a couple of lead slugs at his head. Not that he didn’t threaten to.

“Get out the car,” Jergens yelled after assaulting Washington,“ or I’m going to f--king smoke you.”

Washington was unlucky because he had just suffered a stroke and was in need of medical care not an instant application of tough policing for sitting in a car while Black.

             As for the miss, this time it was in Cleveland. In the hometown of Tamir Rice, who would have turned 13 years old next month if he hadn’t been shot to death by Officer Timothy Loehmann while playing cops and robbers in a city playground, justice was on the lam.

            Apparently, like Agent 007, America’s police have a license to kill. Michael Brelo, a Cleveland cop, was acquitted Saturday of charges of voluntary manslaughter in the “137 bullets” case for the shooting deaths Timothy Russell, 43, and Malissa Williams, 30.

            Why is it that cops tasked with serving and protecting routinely see Blacks as the usual suspects before rendering us the usual victims? Why are some police so prone to shoot first, before coming up with answers later? Is innocent until proven guilty a whites only right?

Both Officers Brelo and Jergens suffered from that epidemic that has stricken too many men in blue across the nation: Trigger Finger-itis.

             Jergens shot Washington with his Taser as the incapacitated driver sat in his car facing the wrong way on the street because he assumed the Black man was the perpetrator in a hit-and-run accident. The sick man mattered so little to Cleveland police that after he was assaulted by Jergens, he was thrown, handcuffed on the hot pavement while they allowed a police car to roll over one of his feet.

Of course, white cops abusing Black men is nothing new. But the Taser has become Officer-Not-So-Friendly’s high-tech billy club. Back in the day, many a cop’s knee-jerk reaction was to beat a Black man bloody before taking him to the station. In this modern age, rather than crack open their heads, the practice is to hit them with a 50,000 volts of electricity instead.    

In 2012, an American Heart Association report linked stun gun use to heart attacks and deaths. There are real-life tragedies to underscore those findings. Last year, 60 Americans died from Tasers. Since they’ve become the “nonlethal” weapon of choice for police worldwide more than 600 people have died from them in the past 14 years.

While Tasers may or may not amount to deadly force, bullets certainly do.

Both unarmed, Russell and Williams were killed on November 29, 2012 after officers mistook the sound of his 1979 Chevy Malibu backfiring as gunshots. Since dead men or women tell no tales, we will never know what led to the 62- police vehicle high speed chase across Cleveland. It is known that 137 bullets struck the Malibu that the two occupants were in. Forty-nine of those shots came from Officer Brelo’s Glock 17. He squeezed off 15 of the rounds as he stood on the car, both it and its passengers motionless, as if he was making his day in a sequel to Dirty Harry.

Ohio Judge John O'Donnell ruled Saturday that Officer Brelo acted within his constitutional rights. In his ruling, the judge explained that since 12 other Cleveland police--eleven white, one Hispanic--had fired shots as well, there was no evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that any of the 23 bullets in Russell’s body was the one fired by Brelo that took the Black man’s life.

So Officer Brelo will not see a day behind bars for the deaths of an unarmed Black man and woman although he remains on leave without pay. No charges have been filed against Jergens for his abuse. But he was forced to resign from the force.

             Who knows? Someday, maybe we’ll read about some cop actually doing the time for doing the crime.

Black-on-Black crime is KKK

    

    Director Spike Lee will shoot a movie about black-on-black crime this summer in Chicago. The working title is Chiraq. That's Chicago and Iraq truncated into one word. Get it? Here's my Chicago Defender column on what Spike's movie should use as its metaphor.

 

Spike Lee’s Chiraq could be KKK

By Monroe Anderson

Mayor Rahm Emanuel may not care for the title of Spike Lee’s movie slated to start shooting this summer in Englewood, but as an artist, an out-of-towner and a show business man, “Chiraq” makes perfectly good sense for America’s most iconic Black director.

    Popularized by Chief Keef, and other neo-gangster rappers in Chicago’s drill music set, the term Chiraq chronicles the violence in some of the city’s worst poverty pockets. Creating the phrase was a low-brainer, considering that when it comes to body count in Chitown’s most dangerous hoods- Fuller Park, Garfield Park and Englewood--more Blacks have been shot and killed on a year-to-year basis there than in war-torn Iraq.

Beyond that, Spike could certainly use a drive-by box office hit. In nearly a decade, the “Black Woody Allen” hasn’t able to do enough of the right thing to produce a feature film as relevant as director Ava Duvernay’s Selma or as entertaining as director Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. A convincing argument could be made that in the past 20 years, the New York--based director has made only one smack down feature film, the 2006 The Inside Man, that can hold its own against his earlier efforts like She’s Got to Have It and Malcolm X.

While he made some memorable documentaries over the years, including 4 Little Girls, and the TV mini-series, When the Levees Broke, Lee’s feature-film efforts, such as Miracle of Saint Anna, Red Hook Summer and Oldboy, had more fizzle than sizzle.    

A modern day Menace II Society might do the trick in reviving Lee’s career but I seriously doubt if Chiraq will do the trick partly because it’s based on a misleading premise.

Contrary to what gets reported on the nightly news or in screaming newspaper headlines, Chicago’s murder rate is on the decline. It’s the lowest it has been in more than four decades. According to rankings made by NeighborhoodScout.com, a website that markets itself as providing “Enterprise-grade data for every neighborhood and city in the U.S.” the Windy City isn’t even on its list of America’s Top 30 murder capitals. Downstate East St. Louis is number one. Two suburbs across state lines, Gary is number three and East Chicago is ranks number 15.

In making another stab at recapturing  the ‘90s when his films’ shocked and awed viewers, Spike may be bringing too little, too late to the reality of Chicago’s Bronzeville, which is already showing signs of turning into D.C. or Harlem. No longer the Chocolate City, gentrification and incoming white flight, the Black population in the District of Columbia has slipped below 50 percent. Nor are Blacks the majority in Harlem anymore.

You can see it unfolding before your very eyes in Bronzeville. The hipsters are salting the South Side. They can be spotted walking their dogs, jogging or pushing their baby strollers on streets their parents and grandparents had either avoided or had forgotten.

You can trace it back to Mayor Richard M. Daley and his not so grand plan to transform Chicago into Paris. It was obvious with the flowers and the fences and the fancy hand operated sidewalk vacuums. It was clandestine with the razing of Cabrini Green and Robert Taylor Homes, which diluted the power of the city’s Black voting bloc and exiled the poor to, among other places, Gary, East Chicago and Harvey.

You can see why Chiraq is not the best title for what’s really happening here. So, I’ve got a better suggestion. I think Spike should look at the artwork of visual artist James Pate and either beg, borrow or buy his cutting edge artistic vision. A couple of years ago, Pate had a three-month exhibition at the DuSable Museum. Its title was KKK--Kin Killin Kin.

The detailed black and white drawings, beautiful yet powerful, were of boys from the hood, wearing Ku Klux Klan-like headgear with their black faces exposed or basketball jerseys with the initials KKK on them while pointing guns at each other’s heads. The bullets they fired were artistically frozen just before they entered each other’s heads.

That unnerving reality would make a much more powerful movie than a sequel to the Hughes brothers 1993 hit.

If Spike doesn’t want pursue the KKK metaphor, he can always change his filming location. Killadelphia won’t do because, like Chicago, the City of Brother Love’s murder rate is down.  But Baltimore might work. It has killer cops and urban uprisings right now and, unfortunately, a high enough murder rate: Charm City ranks #13 on the Top Murder Capitols list.

Baltimore, courtesy of The Wire, has a controversial colloquialism just as good as Chiraq. That would be Bodymore, Murdaland.

 

 

Cops not ready for prime crime

 

    At some point, policemen everywhere are going to realize that there are cameras everywhere. That what they do in public will stay in public...forever. So far, there are too many cops who haven't gotten the point. They continue to perform as cops did back in the good old days when cameras were an inconvenience to carry around. The following is my Chicago Defender column on the subject.

 

Shoot, cops caught on candid camera

By Monroe Anderson

                 Michael Slager is the latest cop to get caught on camera starring in America’s most alarming reality TV series ever: Trigger happy cops playing judge and jury, publicly executing unarmed Black males.

                  Officer Slager was too arrogant, too cold-blooded or too stupid to realize that we now live in the Era of the Candid Camera. You virtually can’t do anything, in public or private, with absolute certainty that it won’t be recorded and that it won’t go public.

    There are porn sites dedicated to videos of ex-girlfriends performing some of the most intimate sexual acts imaginable posted by rejected men seeking revenge. There are spy cameras atop streetlight poles, speed cameras hanging out with overhead stop lights at street intersections and surveillance cameras in shops and stores, all aimed to capture and record anyone breaking the law. And there are heroes, like bystander Feidin Santana, who risk their safety to record cops, like Michael Slager, who choose to use living, breathing Black men, like Walter Scott, for target practice.

In the past few days, we’ve all seen what is nothing less than a snuff flick of Slager firing eight shots at a fleeing Scott, hitting him in the back five times, then handcuffing the 50-year-old man’s motionless body before retrieving and dropping, what is suspected to be, a Taser gun next to it.

The North Charleston cop wasn’t the only shooter featured this week in a viral video.

We also saw a 44-year-old Black man shot to death by a 73-year-old white man in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Robert Bates, an insurance executive, who volunteers as a reserve Tulsa County deputy sheriff, claims he mistakenly shot Eric Harris with his handgun, when he meant to shoot him with his Taser gun.

As Harris is tackled, lying face-down on the ground with a deputy’s knee pinning his head, a gunshot rings out and Bates says: "Oh, I shot him. I'm sorry."

Harris screams: "He shot me. Oh, my God," and a deputy replies: "You f---ing ran. Shut the f--- up."

When Harris says he's losing his breath, another deputy replies, "F--- your breath."

Harris was pronounced dead an hour later in a Tulsa hospital.

             A sunglass camera worn by one of the deputies recorded the video of Harris’ April 2nd arrest. Against the wishes of the Tulsa County Sheriff’s department, prosecutors charged Bates, a pay-to-play cop, with second-degree manslaughter. Slager has been charged with first-degree murder.

            The Zion cop who shot and killed 17-year-old Justus Howell Easter weekend is on paid administrative leave. No cameras recorded the circumstances that resulted in Howell being shot twice in the back, allowing Zion police to come up with one of the usual explanations: The teenager had a handgun.

Eyewitnesses say they saw no weapon. An investigation is underway. No video has surfaced so the Zion police have caught a lucky break. Two-thirds of all Americans have smartphones, which means all but a third of us are now armed with cameras and dangerous to cops who still believe they can do what they’ve done to Black men for generations without notice or record.

             On December 4, 1968, Fred Hampton, 21, was murdered by while asleep in his West Side apartment during a Chicago police raid. Mark Clark, 22, was also killed during the predawn raid where police fired 90-99 shots.

In 1972, never quite able to get over the killing of Hampton and Clark and incensed because Chicago police were harassing two friends and supporters, who were both dentists, Rep. Ralph Metcalfe broke away from Mayor Richard J. Daley, assembling a blue ribbon panel and issuing a congressional study the next year entitled “The Misuse of Police Authority in Chicago.”

Not much resulted from that report. Between 1972 and 1991, Detective Commander Jon Burge and his midnight crew, tortured 110 Black criminal suspects, forcing false confessions. Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced yesterday (Tuesday) that he backs a $5.5 million reparations package for Burge’s victims. And an ACLU report released last month found that last summer, when the NYPD’s stop and frisk practices were all the rage, the CPD made more than a quarter of a million stops that did not result in arrests--four times that of people stopped in New York.

The CPD continues to be suspect. Two days ago, federal authorities confirmed that the FBI is investing the death of Lequan McDonald, a 17-year-old who was shot down in a barrage of bullets. The Chicago teen allegedly was wielding a knife. A dashboard camera from a squad car recorded the action and the shooter has been reassigned to desk duty.

If I were to tell you that neither the Scott nor McDonald shooting would be a case if there weren’t moving pictures, would you take my word for it?

Well, here are a few more words for the wise: Justice is beautiful, but blindfolded. So always keep your smartphone charged in case you need to show her what is or is not happening.

Sikh Slayings: White Anxiety Gone Extreme

Here's my Root commentary on the Sikh tragedy. No more commentary here. It speaks for itself.

 

Sikh Slayings: White Anxiety Gone Extreme

America's browning drives a backlash that found its most virulent strain in Wade Michael Page.

By: Monroe Anderson | Posted: August 10, 2012 at 12:26 AM

 

(The Root) -- When Wade Michael Page walked into a Wisconsin temple last wesek, murdering six Sikh worshippers and critically wounding three others, it was an incident waiting to happen.

As the neo-Nazi loser marched through the temple randomly shooting one Sikh after the next, perhaps the "14 words" motto of white supremacists was running through his warped mind: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

To the insecure and frightened haters in our nation, the end of white dominance in America is increasingly inevitable. Besides being red, white and blue, the good old US of A is steadily becoming brown, black and yellow -- a majority-minority nation.

During a 12-month period that ended July 2011, for the first time in America's modern history, more minority babies were born than white babies. Casually referred to by white supremacists as members of "the mud races," Hispanic, black and Asian newborns made up 50.4 percent of the nation's births during that period. Just 22 years ago, minority births accounted for a much lower figure -- 37 percent.

"White supremacist groups have been having a meltdown since the Census Bureau predicted that non-Hispanic whites would lose the majority by 2050," said Mark Potok, spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitored Wade Michael Page in particular for the past 12 years, and hate groups in general for much longer than that. "The demographic change in this country is the single-most-important driver in the growth of hate groups and extremist groups over the last few years," he told ABC News.

Last year Potok's organization reported that hate groups in America had exploded to more than 1,000 from 602 at the beginning of the millennium.

Domestic terrorist Page, a 40-year-old U.S. Army reject, who died from a self-inflicted wound during the Oak Creek massacre, could take credit for some of that growth. For more than a decade, Page had been playing hate music. He played with white-power heavy-metal bands affiliated with Hammerskins Nation, and he led a couple of bands of his own, Definite Hate and End Apathy. His music appealed to other young white losers, creating new haters every day. It also raised money to help bankroll other hate groups like the National Alliance, the violent hate group that inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up a Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, which also monitors America's white supremacy groups, the names of these racists bands reveal what's on their minds and in their hearts, names like Grinded Nig, Jew Slaughter and Aggravated Assault. "In keeping with its attempts to reach out to young people, one label, named Resistance Records, even markets a white supremacist video game, 'Ethnic Cleansing,' " the ADL reports on its website. "The game is a first-person-shooter in which the player takes on the role of a white warrior in a future 'Race War,' who must kill all nonwhites to ensure 'the survival of your kind.' "

Although these virulent, malicious white supremacists, who wear their hate on their tattoo sleeves and everywhere else, are more or less a limited group of bigots, they may merely be the underbelly of a larger phenomenon.

When the Tea Party and other conservatives cry, "We want our country back," it doesn't take much imagination to translate what that means as the nation's demographics and culture continue their colorful shift.

Mainstream conservatives have been spewing coded, dog-whistle racist messages since Ronald Reagan's "Welfare Queen" speech in 1976 and the Willie Horton ad employed in the George H.W. Bush 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis. More recently, the billionaire Koch brothers and their right-wing organization, Americans for Prosperity, were accused of buying a North Carolina school board in an effort to resegregate the Wake County school system.

So I wasn't exactly shocked when conservatives attacked Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano when she issued a report in April 2009 warning that right-wing extremists threaten American security. The nine-page report, titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," documented the smoldering hate among the nation's extreme right-wing groups, warning that some individuals might commit violent acts. "If such violence were to occur," the report said, "it likely would be isolated, small-scale, and directed at specific immigration-related targets."

Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin posted a blog with this headline: "Confirmed: The Obama DHS Hit Job on Conservatives Is Real."

Another conservative website, Alex Jones' Prison Planet, is headlined, "Homeland Security Report Lists 'Liberty Lovers' as Terrorists."

And then-top Republican of the House Intelligence committee, former Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra, charged "unsubstantiated conclusions and political bias," worthy of a House investigation.

I would like to attribute all this hate to good old-fashioned American exceptionalism, but I would be wrong.

A year ago, Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik went on a shooting and bombing spree that left 77 people dead, many of them teenagers, almost all of them Muslims. Like his brethren in the U.S., he hated Muslims, he hated people who didn't look like him and he hated cultural diversity.

I fear this is just the beginning. Not only are some white Americans threatened by the encroaching "mud races," but there is a quickening recognition around the planet that the world is yellow, brown and black.

Less than a quarter of the world's population is white. By 2060, fears conservative Pat Buchanan, that percentage may dip into the single digits.

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

The Chickens Come Home to Roost on Right's Hate Spews

    The blame game started Saturday within hours after reports of the Gabrielle Giffords assassination attempt in Tucson. The left correctly blamed the right for all the hate speech and political vitriol that may have fed the madness of accused murdered Jared Loughner. The right defensively played the moral equivalency card much like a bunch grade schoolers on the play ground, whining that while they got caught name calling, the other kids were doing it too.

What the right and left have done may be the same thing but was done at different times. In the late 1960's the left was almost as bad then as the right is now. I say almost because the left’s political leadership wasn’t behaving as badly back then as the right’s political leadership is right now. The Left’s extremist talk and actions some four decades back helped swing the nation to center right. My sense is that the right's extremism will surely move the pendulum back.

But while talking about bad talk is satisfying, we need to talk more about the pink elephant in the room: gun control.

A mentally ill, hate-filled 22-year-old armed with a butcher knife may have killed and maimed, but his toll would have been a lot less than six dead and 20 wounded. Here's a column I wrote four and a half years ago for the Chicago Sun-Times. It's painfully personal.

 

We're killing ourselves more effectively than terrorists

Chicago Sun-Times

July 30, 2006

by Monroe Anderson

 

My kid brother, Dariek, gave me the only handgun I've ever owned: a target gray, stainless steel .357 Magnum. This gun was the not-so- little cousin to the .44 that co-starred in "Sudden Impact," when Clint Eastwood, as "Dirty Harry," told a bad guy: "Go ahead, make my day."

The weapon came into my possession right after Dariek had a bad night. Voices from his stereo speakers had kept him awake, talking to him, telling him to blow his girlfriend's brains out. He had fought valiantly to ignore the voices but feared the next time he heard them he might not be as strong.

"Are you taking your medicine?" I asked.

"No," he grunted. "I stopped taking it. That stuff is poison."

"You've got to take your medicine," I said, worried but grateful he had managed not to become another statistic in one more tragic news story.

Back in 1977, Dariek dropped out of Indiana University to be all that he could be in the Army. About a year and a half into his tour of duty, he was yanked out of the American nuclear missile silo he was guarding in Germany after he suddenly suffered a mental breakdown. He was flown to an Army hospital in New York where he was diagnosed as schizophrenic, then given a medical discharge.

By the time the voices in the stereo speakers were telling Dariek to shoot to kill, he had been in and out of the hospital and on and off medications designed to treat his delusions of grandeur, paranoia and schizophrenia several times. His nervous condition, as my mother always referred to it, had proved not to be a barrier to legally buying the .357 from an Indiana gun shop.

"I need to borrow the gun," I said, with all the authority a brother 11 years older can wield.

"Why?" he asked, distracted from repeating his descriptions of what the speaker voices had to say.

Knowing that Dariek kept up with the news daily and that there was yet another Lincoln Park rapist running loose, I told him we needed it so that my wife, Joyce, could carry it for protection. He understood. The next day, I drove to my parents' home in Gary, where he handed over the gun and the Indiana gun permit.

I recalled that unsettling episode last week as reports of sniper fire in Indiana hit newspaper headlines and broadcast news. Zachariah Blanton, 17, confessed to the series of Downstate Indiana highway shootings that killed one man, wounded another and left four vehicles shot up. He allegedly went on a shooting rampage after arguing with family members over gutting a deer during a hunting trip. Two days later, after the alleged Blanton sniping, a copycat sniper was reportedly taking potshots at vehicles in Northwest Indiana.

Gunplay in our nation is almost as much a national pastime as baseball. And, with the never-ending, inadequately controlled abundant supply of firearms, we're killing ourselves more effectively than any terrorist organization could. In 2003, the most recent year that data is available, there were 30,136 gun deaths in the United States. Forty percent were homicides; 56 percent were suicides.

When the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, stating that "a well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed," was ratified in 1791, the good citizens were worried about the Indians successfully stopping the theft of their land and the African slaves rebelling, violently reclaiming their freedom. Those are all dead issues now. And yet, even as tens of thousands of Americans die year in and year out from firearms, conservatives carp and babble about Second Amendment rights whenever any lifesaving gun control proposal rears its logical head. As the National Rifle Association likes to sloganeer, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."

But had the angry Indiana teenager bore stones instead of a firearm, he'd be charged with vandalism, not murder.

 

Black power and reality in the 21st Century

I've been getting this viral email from white friends, black friends, even one of my Indian friends. It's one of these truths that's been hiding in plain site: Black is In!

I'm old enough to remember the '60s when we were last in. It turned out to be short and sweet. By the 1970s, there was talk of our being treated with benign neglect. In the 1980s, under the Reagan regime, it was no longer benign. And then it got worse.

But I digress. Reportedly, we're the new "it" ethnic group. To make it more palatable to the ignorance-is-bliss crowd, the truth is often packaged as a joke. The fact that black people are now the new black is no exception. Check it out.

"Black is in!" 

The most powerful politician in the world is Black.

The head of the Republican National Committee is Black.

The best known media mogul on earth is Black.

 

The greatest golfer in the world is Black.

 

The top female tennis players in the world are Black. 

The highest grossing actor worldwide is Black.

 

The fastest racing driver in the world is Black.

The brightest Astrophysicist under the sun is Black.

 

The Superbowl-winning Head Coach is Black.

 

The most successful brain surgeon in the world is Black. 

The fastest human on the planet is Black. ... 

Michael Jackson must be kicking himself.

Seriously, folks.  We've got a Dickensonian development--best of times, worst of times--in black America that has created a false reality. Because there is an Obama, Oprah and Tiger, white Americans believe that the playing field is level and that all's fair and square.

It is not.

These monumental achievements by individuals--who happen to be black--aside, depressing disparities between blacks and whites persist.

Consider:

*For the last 25 years, murder has been the leading cause of death among African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34.

*In Chicago, President Barack Obama's hometown, only six out of 100 of the students in Chicago Public Schools, will graduate from college.

*For every dollar of wealth held by a white household, the typical black household has 10 cents.

*While the national unemployment rate was 8.1%, for blacks that figure was 13.4% … and for black males, 16.3%.

*Black males are incarcerated at a per capita rate six times that of white males. Nearly 11 percent of all black men ages 30 to 34 were behind bars as of June 30, 2007.

I could go on and on with the alarming stats but I won't. Reading them makes it easy to understand why Michael Jackson has paid big money to turn himself into something he's not and why the individual accomplishments of the Williams sisters, Steelers' coach Mike Tomlin, Neurosurgeon Ben Carson, and Astrophysicist Neil Tyson are so impressive.

(This post was also published on AgoraVox.com.)

Cop killing is a bad political cause

With only one exception, when it comes to police, the "we protect and serve" has meant nothing more than a motto stenciled on the side of a squad car to me. 

Just once, in all my years, did the police come to my rescue. That was nearly 30 years ago when a doped-out burglar was wondering around in my home at the break of dawn. I let the intruder know that I knew he was someplace he had no business and he fled. I dialed 911 and two minutes later, they showed up at my door with the bad guy in hand. 

My other experiences were not so reassuring. I was clubbed by the Chicago police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention for doing my job as a Newsweek Magazine intern. I was stopped and frisked by Chicago police as a young teen because I and a couple of my friends were running along the Lakeshore. I am periodically stopped while driving black.

I am not what you'd exactly call a cop lover. But, when I surfed into an post on the Hinterland Gazette blog that left me shaking my head. The headline says it all: 

Dozens March in Protest Organized by Uhuru Movement to Honor Lovelle Mixon who Shot and Killed Four Police

That any organization, black nationalist or whatever else, would try to make a political martyr out of a cold-blooded cop killer is deadly dumb and terminally stupid.

The Hinterland Gazette said as much in its post:

It is unconscionable to me that people could march and rally to honor cop killer Lovelle Mixon, who was shot by Oakland police after he fatally shot four officers last Saturday. What is the message that the organizer, the Uhuru Movement, is sending? That they are condoning the horrific actions of a career criminal. Sorry, but had that been a white man who shot and killed four black cops, they would be throwing the kitchen sink and everything else that they could find. Heck, they might have even ended up in Washington D.C. at the Capitol in protest. How do you honor someone who has deliberately killed four police officers or anyone, for that matter? This sets a terrible precedent in Oakland and around the country. The shootings were by far the deadliest incident for U.S. law enforcement since Sept. 11, 2001, and the deadliest in California in nearly four decades, according to media reports.

"OPD you can't hide - we charge you with genocide," chanted the demonstrators as they marched along MacArthur Boulevard, near the intersection with 74th Avenue where Mixon, 26, a fugitive parolee, gunned down two motorcycle officers who had pulled him over in a traffic stop. He killed two more officers who tried to capture him where he was hiding in his sister's apartment nearby.

The protest was organized by the Oakland branch of the Uhuru Movement, whose flyers for the march declared, "Stop Police Terror." Many marchers wore T-shirts featuring Mixon's photo, including a woman identified by march organizers as Mixon's mother. The woman declined to comment and gave her name only as Athena. Lolo Darnell, one of Mixon's cousins at the demonstration, said, "He needs sympathy too. If he's a criminal, everybody's a criminal." Asked about police allegations that Mixon was suspected in several rapes, including that of a 12-year-old girl, marcher Mandingo Hayes said, "He wasn't a rapist. I don't believe that."

If I try real hard I can almost understand the twisted rationale behind the Uhuru Movement's thinking. Oakland's black community is still outraged from the murder of 22-year-old Oscar Grant who was fatally shot by a transit cop. In one black community after the next, the police represent and act like an occupying army rather than like guardian angels. It's easy to understand the personal and collective resentment that exists from that constant and predictable treatment. 

Being rich and famous is no shield from police arrogance as Houston Texans running back Ryan Moats discovered when he was detained and lectured by Robert Powell, a Dallas cop, while his mother-in-law lay dying just steps away in the hospital. 

It's the Moats-like incidents that give cover to the anger and resentment that can give rise to the Mixon-like protests. It's unsettling that something as simple as a traffic stop was the beginning that led to both bad endings in the Mixon and Moats stories.

      We'd all be better served if the police took care to treat blacks in America not like suspects but like human beings--and if blacks in America took care to remember that murdered cops were human beings too.

(This post was also published on UK/EU Progressive, Newsvine.com and AgoraVox.)

What President Obama represents for Dr. King's legacy

For nearly half of my life, Black History Month was Black History Week. In 1976, after Carter G. Woodson's initiative had been celebrated during the second week in February for 50 years, it became a month-long observance.  

Although it's not official, not even announced, the Black History Month has quietly become Black History Season. It starts the day after Christmas, with Kwanzaa and runs through the end of February.

Dr. Martin Luther King's national holiday serves as the midway point for this season of recognizing Black History. So, it's befitting that Barack Obama would be sworn in as POTUS this year the day after MLK Day. 

To mark that historical occurrence in these historical times, I was the keynote speaker at the King Day celebration a week ago today in Chicago Heights, thanks to an invitation from Mayor Anthony DeLuca and City Clerk Ethel Taylor invited to speak to their theme, "A Dream Achieved," which tied in Dr. King's dream to the Obama reality.

I don't believe we're quite there on the achievement piece, so here's the text to the speech I gave to to audience at Chicago Miracle Temple Church in Chicago Heights, Illinois:

The Dream Achieved

It was just a few months ago, when one of those opinion poll crews was canvassing Western Pennsylvania—you know, that area between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh that may as well be Alabama?
Anyway, one of the pollsters knocked on the front door of one of those western Pennsylvania homes. A woman came to the door. The pollster asked her if she was voting for John McCain or Barack Obama. The woman turned around and yelled, “Honey, who are we gonna vote for?” A male voice yelled out from the back of the house, “We’re votin for the nigger. The woman calmly turned and repeated to the pollster, “we’re voting for the nigger.”
When I first told my wife, Joyce, this story, she thought that I was joking. I wasn’t. It happened. It was reported in newspapers. It was posted on the Internet.
And, in a backhanded true-life sort of way, it lets us know that what Dr. King was addressing two score and six years ago is actually a dream half done.  

The Pennsylvania couple may not have gotten past the color of Obama’s skin but they were able to see the content of his character.
       Speaking of seeing, I see puzzled looks on some of your faces. Wasn’t this supposed to be a speech about The Dream Achieved?  Where’s this man going with this?  Stay with me, okay?
The original title of Dr. King’s 1963 speech was “Normalcy—Never Again.” That wasn’t exactly a title that would flow off anybody’s tongue or stir anyone’s soul.  So, it didn’t take long or much imagination for Dr. King’s wonderful words to become the “I have a Dream” speech.  Nor did it take long for his speech to get white washed by the mainstream media.
         In his speech, which was delivered at the March on Washington for jobs and freedom, Dr. King talked a little about his dream but a lot more about the American nightmare.  He spoke less about what he hoped our nation would do and much more about what our nation had not done. That’s the part of the speech that gets little play on TV or radio.  So, I’m going to read a key part of what Dr. King had to say.  Before I say what Dr. King said, let me caution you: I’m going to say it without the wonderful flow or rhythm you’re used to hearing in Dr. King’s speech. I want you to hear the words stripped of the passion and flavor.
"In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men - yes, black men as well as white men - would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'"
When Obama takes his oath of office tomorrow I want you to think of it as earnest money…not that we’ve been paid in full. There are still some matters that need to be cleared from the books.
Right now, there are one million black men unemployed.  That’s what Dr. King was talking about.
Right now, half our children drop out city high schools before they graduate. That’s what Dr. King was talking about.
Right now, there are a million black men locked up behind bars. That’s what Dr. King was talking about.
And here’s something he said in his Dream speech that could have been a sound bite from him after Oscar Grant was murdered by an Oakland transit cop two weeks ago: “We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.”
I’m hoping that President Obama will be hearing Dr. King.
Since he launched his presidential campaign, Barack Obama has been talking Lincoln but I suspect, that he was thinking King.  

Yesterday, when Obama spoke in Washington, he stood in front of the Lincoln Monument but it was at the very spot Dr. King spoke 46 years ago. When I was on the Obama press bus last winter covering his campaign in the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, I heard him quote from the Dream speech.  At every campaign stop, Sen. Obama would explain to his overflow crowds that he was running for office because of what Dr. King called “the fierce urgency of now.”
       Well, come tomorrow, the time will be now, for President Obama to cash and carry some of that urgency.
       When he swears in tomorrow, the time will be now for President Obama to also pay some old dues to those African American giants that shed blood, sweat and tears to make his presidential dream come true.  

You know the names all too well. Frederick Douglass. W.E.B. DuBois. Booker T. Washington. Thurgood Marshall. Malcolm X. Rev. Jesse Jackson. Harold Washington. Colin Powell.  And then there are the strong black women whose contributions were critical.  Harriet Tubman. Sojourner Truth.  Rosa Parks. Fannie Lou Hammer. Shirley Chisholm. Barbara Jordan. And even, let me see if I can get this out my mouth, Condoleezza Rice.
If these men and women hadn’t done what they did, Barack Obama wouldn’t have been able to do what he has done—or what he will have to start doing beginning tomorrow.
       Thanks to his predecessor, Obama has a lot of doing—and undoing--to do.  

After all the galas and parties are over and the celebrating has ended, we will still have some difficult days ahead. George W. Bush has left us in one big mess. 

There are two wars waging. There’s the deep recession.  There are tens of thousands of Americans losing their homes. There are nearly 50 million of us without health insurance. And nobody knows where the money is coming from or going to.
       And there’s a lot more that we can’t expect a President Obama to take on.  Some of it is on us. Before the Dream can really be achieved, we’ve got to take care of our own business.
       Right now, only 25 percent of black children have a father in the house. That wasn’t Dr. King’s dream.
       Right now, our youth are killing our youth in record numbers. That wasn’t Dr. King’s dream.
       Right now, our senior citizens are afraid to leave their homes at night; afraid they’ll be mugged or murdered. That was not Dr. King’s dream.
       So, right now, I say that when President Obama is sworn in, that we flip the script.  

In our public schools, rather than having the thugs in the in crowd and the brainiacs isolated and ignored, let’s make it hip to be smart.  

Let’s see if our daughters can just say no to knuckleheads who want to see how many babies they can father but not bother to raise.  

Let’s see if we can’t take Dr. King’s wise words and President Obama’s string of accomplishments and make them the new dream for the new generation and the generations to come.
       Let me remind you of the prophetic words in Dr. King’s Memphis speech, he spoke these words the night before he was murdered.
       “I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain top. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the Promised Land.”
       Obama, obviously, is there. A lot of us are there with him. But there’s still some dreaming to do and work that must be done. None of us can afford to forget about those we’ve left behind. We owe it to Dr. King’s vision.
       Thanks and God bless.

While we're at it, here's the full length version of Dr. King's 1963 speech in Washington.

Martin Luther King - I Have A Dream @ Yahoo! Video

Obama's no joke to Al Qaida, KKK and other haters

 

         A little more than a year ago, I went to The Second City Theatre to enjoy its side-splitting hit revue at the time, "Between Barack and a Hard Place." The famed improv comedy ensemble, which is the comedic mother of Saturday Night Live, had put together a show that was all about Barack Obama, his candidacy and his political appeal.
    I was reminded of the series of satirical skits today when Al Qaida's mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, released an audiotape calling our President-elect a House Negro.
    "You were born to a Muslim father, but you chose to stand in the ranks of the enemies of the Muslims, and pray the prayer of the Jews, although you claim to be Christian, in order to climb the rungs of leadership in America," observed bin Laden's sidekick in the recording.
    Has The Second City gone international with its satire? Is Al Qaida giving up on being a bunch of murderous religious zealots for stand-up comedy? What is going on here? And, where the hell is Osama bin Laden? Is he dead or simply too chicken to play straight man his deputy-villain's new routine?

    As it turns out, Obama's historic election as the first black leader of the free world has haters all over the planet in a bind. Right after the election, Thomas Robb, a grand poo-pa-pa in the Ku Klux Klan attributed Obama's success to his being only half black. Apparently Obama's Kansas mother's white, superior blood contributed to all the positive qualities that got him where he is going.
    And before our homegrown, historical terrorist group could finish explaining this inexplicable phenomenon, that terrorist group abroad figured it had some 'plaining to do as well.
    If America was as evil, racist and anti-Muslim as Al Qaida would have its followers believe, then what was the rationale behind Barack HUSSEIN Obama's popular, un-Saddam-like landslide election victory?
    Hmmm. Maybe the K.K.K. was on to something, sort of.
    The Al-Qaida tape definitely had a racial edge to it. Obama isn't a black man or anything the world's majority population--colored people--should relate to. He's a tool of the white man. The House Negro that Brother Malcolm tongue-lashed. Al-Zawahiri's audiotape features snippets from Malcolm X's 1965 speech in Selma, Alabama where he compared the "house negro," who Uncle Tommed for favors from the slave master to the "field negro," who picked cotton and would rather see the plantation owner dead. Malcolm X, the spokesman for the Nation of Islam who later became a convert to a more orthodox Muslim faith.
    Federal surveillance of both Al Qaida and the K.K.K. made it too difficult for note comparison so the Muslim haters left out the white mother part that the Christian haters promoted so prominently.
    Apparently, hiding in the cave lands of Pakistan is not the best place to keep abreast of current events or the latest trends in humanity. If bin Laden is still alive, then al-Zawahiri might want to slip him into Chicago to check out Second City's latest show so the two terrorists, like their counterparts in America the Klan and the neo-Nazis, can work on updating their hateful passions and pronouncements.
    Their work is cut out for them. Two weeks before the November 4 election, an Al Qaida website backed John McCain, not understanding that America was in the process of changing.
    The Second City, on the other hand, was right on it. The comedy theatre's current hit revue is "No Country for Old White Men." I don't hear the haters laughing.

           (This post is also on Huffingtonpost.com.)

Obama's stab at out-McBushing McCain

    I’m no constitutional scholar. And unlike Barack Obama, I certainly haven’t taught a course on constitutional law at anybody’s college, particularly one as prestigious as the University of Chicago. Still, I couldn’t disagree more with the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for president when he says he disagrees with the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing executions of convicted child rapists.
    Like the right-wing political activist Supremes, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Samuel A. Alito, Jr. and Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., Obama fell in line with the murder-the-bastards side of the ruling.  Predictably, so did Obama’s presumptive political opponent, John McCain.
    "Today's Supreme Court ruling is an assault on law enforcement's efforts to punish these heinous felons for the most despicable crime," McCain said. "That there is a judge anywhere in America who does not believe that the rape of a child represents the most heinous of crimes, which is deserving of the most serious of punishments, is profoundly disturbing."
    "I have said repeatedly that I think that the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstances for the most egregious of crimes," Obama said in his made-to-order statement for the nation’s conservatives.  "I think that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime, and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances, the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that does not violate our Constitution."
    Who’s going to argue about whether or not raping a small child is a heinous crime? Who would argue that those who committed this particular crime aren’t sick mfs? But do we really want state sanctioned murder of these sickos? What does that accomplish? Is anybody sick enough to rape a 6 or 8 year old is not going to be deterred by the prospect of pulling down the death penalty? So, how do you stop them before they rape again? Wouldn’t locking them up for life, keeping them away from any other children, in and of itself, make for a safer society?
    And one last question while I’m at it: In his methodical march from the left to the middle, is Obama trying to out-McBush John McCain?