Black Police Chief Resigns Amid Charges Of Racial Profiling by his White Cops

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NPR

The police chief of Miami Gardens is resigning, weeks after allegations arose that his officers stopped and searched customers of a convenience store as a matter of routine. Charges of racial profiling and civil rights abuses were bolstered by videos that showed police frisking and arresting people.

Miami Gardens Police Chief Matthew Boyd, who is black, had already planned to resign in January. He stepped down today, according to The Miami Herald, which published an expansive report on the allegations two weeks ago.

Here's some background from NPR's Greg Allen, whose report will air on Thursday's Morning Edition:

"The town just north of Miami has struggled with a string of deadly shootings in recent months.
"In response, the city began what it calls 'Zero Tolerance' operations — increasing police stops and arrests, even for misdemeanors.
"The police chief's resignation comes after a store owner and some residents filed a lawsuit against the city in federal court."

The resignation also comes one day after the NAACP asked the U.S. Justice Department to open a civil rights inquiry into what it said "may be the most pervasive, most invasive, and most unjustified pattern of police harassment in the nation."

Much of the troubling police activity centered on the Quickstop, a store whose owner had worked with police on security efforts — but who came to believe that officers were violating basic rights in searching customers and his store without a warrant, and questioning and arresting people with seemingly little or no cause.

"Some of the store's customers were questioned hundreds of times over the past four years for minor infractions, such as trespassing and violating liquor law ordinances," The Miami Herald reports. It adds that the store's owner, Alex Saleh, "was disturbed by how his customers were being treated."

The Herald highlighted an extreme example when it broke the story two weeks ago — that of Earl Sampson, a man who "has been stopped and questioned 258 times in the past four years," as Eyder reported for The Two-Way last month.

The kicker? Sampson, 28, was arrested for trespassing — but he works at the Quickstop, as a clerk. Some people were cited for minor violations as many as three times in a day, The Herald said.

The store's owner "set up a series of cameras not to protect his business from crime, but instead to capture the actions of police," Eyder wrote. "Now those videos will become the centerpiece of a federal civil rights lawsuit being filed by the store's owner."

According to The Herald's report today, "Miami Gardens is the third-largest city in Miami-Dade County and the largest predominantly black city in the state."

Boyd had been the city's first police chief, taking up the post after Miami Gardens decided to create its own police force instead of relying on Miami-Dade County officers.

The Herald also notes a racial disparity between the town's population and its police force.

"Records obtained by The Herald show that nearly all the commanders — and most of the officers in the squads — are white and Hispanic," the paper says. "The city's population is about 80 percent black. The police force is 30 percent black."

A state investigation into the Miami Gardens police force's practices is ongoing, The Herald says.

Don’t blame the victim [of white supremacy] for the effects of racism

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Posted on Inquireronline

Alejandro Ramos
December 11, 2013

When I was young, I had a pair of Nike Cortez sneakers that I loved. They were small, sleek, and just plain looked like they were made to run fast. I wore them everyday cause they made me feel like the coolest guy around.

One day, however, I stopped wearing them. They were still in decent condition and I could’ve gotten plenty of more use out of them. I didn’t want to wear them though, because I didn’t feel safe in them anymore.

Believe it or not, this scenario is common among minorities growing up in America. Society conditions us to believe that if we are attacked, it is through no one’s fault but our own. It is because of this that we have to make conscious decisions of how we walk, talk, and look because our safety and well-being depends on it.

You can argue against this point all you want, but it’s the truth. Minorities in this day and age still have to live according to outdated, oppressive rules just to get by day to day.

You might think that statement is an exaggeration, but it certainly wasn’t for Trayvon Martin. Several factors that were discussed following Trayvon’s death were the conditions by which it occurred, including his skin color, what he was wearing and the time of day.

The media had a field day for months deliberating this case. The discussions would, in some cases, devolve to blaming Trayvon for what happened to him because he looked like a “thug”.

Unfortunately, these type of comments always seem to come up for cases like these. With Trayvon Martin, it was because he looked like a “thug”. When a girl is raped, we hear people defend the assailant by saying she “asked for it”. When a gay man is attacked, it was because the assailant wasn’t comfortable with being flirted with.

We say we’re living in a time of social and racial tolerance, but it certainly doesn’t show in the way we treat the victims of discrimination and violence. Things might not be as bad as they were 50 years ago, but these incidents definitely show that the same negative mentality is still around today. [MORE]

Racism Linked to Infant Mortality and Learning Disabilities

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TheRoot

On the long list of health disparities that vex and disproportionately affect the lives of African Americans—diabetes, cancer and obesity among them—one of the earliest and, it turns out, most significant, may be just when a black child is born.

 A pair of Emory University studies released this year have connected the large share of African-American children born before term with the biologically detectable effects of stress created in women’s bodies after decades of dealing with American racism. As shocking as that itself may sound, the studies’ findings don’t end there.

Racism, and its ability to increase the odds that a pregnant mother will deliver her child early, can kill. There is also evidence that racism can alter the capacity for a child to learn and distorts lives in ways that can reproduce inequality, poverty and long-term disadvantage, the studies found.

“Racism is an incredibly powerful force,” said Elizabeth Corwin, dean of research at Emory University’s Woodruff School of Nursing,

Bloomberg to Force Flu Vaccines for All NYC Children.

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BlackListedNews

On Wednesday, with just three weeks to go until he leaves office, Mr. Bloomberg’s controversial Board of Health is set to vote on new rules that would force children as young as six months old to be immunized each year before December 31 if they attend licensed day care or pre-school programs.

“Young children have a high risk of developing severe complications from influenza. One-third of children under five in New York City do not receive an annual influenza vaccination, even though the vaccine safely and effectively protects them against influenza illness,” the Health Department said in a statement. “This mandate will help protect the health of young children, while reducing the spread of influenza in New York City.”

The Board is stocked with mayoral appointees and controversial initiatives–from smoking bans to regulations on soda cup sizes–have sailed through with little opposition, angering a small, but passionate group of advocates who claim the vaccinations are potentially dangerous.

NYC will Spend $1.5 Million a year for Bodyguards and Flunkeys for NYPD Commissioner after he retires

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BlackListedNews

Ray Kelly's retiring, but he won't be doing it unaccompanied. According to police sources, Kelly will be taking a small battalion of personal bodyguards with him wherever he goes, post-employment.

The NYPD's Intelligence Division — with Kelly’s input — is recommending that Kelly take with him a 10-officer complement of taxpayer-funded bodyguards, up from the six-officer detail the commissioner had wanted last month.

The detail will now include a lieutenant, three sergeants and six detectives to chauffeur and protect Kelly and his family around-the-clock in the Big Apple and even out of town after he ends his 12-year run atop Police Headquarters — at an estimated cost of more than $1.5 million a year, sources estimate.

US government considered Nelson Mandela a terrorist until 2008

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CitizensforLegitgov

From the White House to the halls of Congress, U.S. government officials have responded to the death of Nelson Mandela with a hail of testimonials to the late South African president's leadership in the struggle for freedom and human rights. Until five years ago, however, the U.S. officially considered Mandela a terrorist. During the Cold War, both the State and Defense departments dubbed Mandela's political party, the African National Congress, a terrorist group, and Mandela's name remained on the U.S. terrorism watch list till 2008.

NYPD Orders Precincts to Deny Journalists Access to Crime Reports

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CitizensforLegitGov

The NYPD has ordered the city's 77 police precincts to stop giving out any information to the media about crimes taking place in their neighborhoods, cutting off a long-standing source of information for New Yorkers. According to a terse NYPD edict transmitted citywide, precinct commanders were instructed: "Any requests by media to view complaint reports be referred to the office of the Deputy Commissioner For Public Information." The move is the latest -- and perhaps not the last -- taken against the media by outgoing Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

DC's Non-Citizens Could Get Right To Vote

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ColorLines

More than a quarter of the District of Columbia's City Council members are said to support a newly resurfaced bill to grant voting rights to legal immigrants who are not citizens. Nationwide, at least seven municipalities--six of which are in neighboring Maryland--have already enacted similar laws. 

In order to vote in local elections, residents must be federally-recognized legal permanent residents and live in DC at least 30 days prior to the most recent election.

Bill co-sponsor David Grosso feels confident the bill will pass this time around, owing to a more favorable climate on immigration. A similar measure co-sponsored by then council member and former mayor Adrian Fenty was defeated in 2004. 

Why Don't Supreme Court Justices Ever Change Their Minds in Favor of the Death Penalty?

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TheAtlantic

If you spend any time at all studying the death penalty in America today you eventually come across an immutable truth:  No one who digs deeply into these grim cases ever seems to evolve from being a staunch opponent of capital punishment into being a fervent supporter of the practice. The movement, over the past 40 years anyway, has almost always been in the opposite direction: The closer one gets to capital punishment, the more dubious it appears to be.

This has been particularly true of Supreme Court justices since the death penalty was resurrected in America in 1976: The closer these esteemed jurists have gotten to "the machinery of death," the more flawed convictions and death sentences they were forced to review, the more racial inequality they saw in its application—and the more likely they were to recoil from the arbitrary imposition of capital punishment in those states that still practiced it.

This is just one of the many important takeaways from the book of the year about the death penalty, Evan Mandery's work titled "A Wild Justice: The Death And Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America." I will have more on the book—as well as an online interview with Mandery—in a related post tomorrow here at The Atlantic. But for now let us focus on four Republican-appointees to the Supreme Court and the impact their decades-long focus upon capital cases had upon their judicial philosophies toward executing condemned murderers.

Researchers say half of all renters spend more than 30 percent of income on rent; a quarter spend more than half

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Aljazeera

People renting apartments in the United States are facing the highest financial burden they have ever faced as a result of the economic recession, driving more people out of the housing market and into rentals, according to a new report from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS).

Half of all renters, about 20.6 million people, are spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent. A quarter, 11.3 million, are spending more than 50 percent of their income on rent, forcing them to spend less on food, transportation, entertainment and retirement savings.

“It has never been this bad, we are at record levels,” Chris Herbert, research director at JCHS, told Al Jazeera. "It puts low income people in a real bind. If you don’t have a lot of income to begin with and half of it is going to housing, you don’t have a lot of money left over for anything else.”

The report breaks down the findings across income levels and age groups. The group with the most renters facing a significant cost burden is comprised of renters who make below $15,000 — about the yearly amount of someone earning minimum wage — 83 percent of them are spending more than a third of their income on rent.

According to the report, someone making $15,000 a year would need to find housing that’s only $375 a month to keep costs at a manageable 30 percent of income, a challenge considering only 5 percent of new rental units in 2011 went for less than $400 a month and median rent was $1,000 a month.

Welfare ban for ex-drug offenders hurts Non-white women [and that's the point in a white supremacy system]

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SentencingProject

Sadly, thanks to a hastily added provision to the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) also known as the Welfare Reform Act, which aimed to reduce welfare dependence, women with drug convictions are not only unlikely to get the help they need before or during their incarceration, but many of them will also face being barred for life from receiving most forms of public benefits — from cash assistance to food stamps — after they serve their time.

A new report by the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit dedicated to reforming the U.S. criminal justice system, examined the impact of the PRWORA provision, which affects those convicted in state and federal courts of federal drug offenses. Titled A Lifetime of Punishment, the report found that an estimated 180,000 women were being subjected to a lifetime exclusion welfare benefits, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families.

The purpose of the prohibition, presumably, is to deter drug use and the criminal behavior that sometimes arises from it, by making it harder for addicts to trade food stamps or cash benefits for drugs. However, the report found no evidence that this goal was being achieved. On the contrary, by denying benefits to those most in need, the ill-conceived embargo, which is in full effect in 12 states (and in partial effect in 25 others), may be having a particularly devastating impact on women and children of color — and may be more likely to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and addiction that leads people to abuse or sell drugs in the first place.

But the provision was pushed through without any system in place to evaluate it, which, according to Marc Mauer, a co-author of The Sentencing Project’s report and an expert on criminal justice policy reform, was a major oversight.

Judge Approves Merrill Lynch's $160 Million Racial Bias Settlement

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BusinessWeek

After eight years of legal tussles, a federal judge today approved a record $160 million settlement in a racial bias suit against Merrill Lynch brought by black brokers. The settlement, in which Merrill denied any wrongdoing, marks the final resolution to the lengthy case brought by George McReynolds, a broker in Merrill’s Nashville office. McReynolds, as we described in a feature story last week, has continued to work at Merrill throughout the case, despite health troubles and what he describes as a “chilly” reception from co-workers.

The case was an eight-year battle over why black brokers composed fewer than 2 percent of Merrill’s full brokers and generally had smaller books of business. Merrill argued that, in essence, society was the problem—that white brokers had access to more wealth because they had larger social networks of well-to-do potential customers, who in turn were more likely to invest with brokers who are similar to themselves.

The plaintiffs claimed that whatever inequities existed in society were compounded by Merrill’s policies. They focused on two programs: how brokers formed teams to boost their books of business, and how Merrill distributed accounts from new clients and brokers who left the firm. The plaintiffs said that black brokers were less likely to be asked to join teams, which they said deprived them of a key way to get more and larger clients. They also said Merrill transferred more and better accounts to white brokers, even in the very first months of the training program for new brokers.

More GOP (white party) Racist Outreach: Tweet Announces, "Today we remember Rosa Parks' bold stand and her role in ending racism"

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"Today we remember Rosa Parks' bold stand and her role in ending racism," tweeted the Republican National Committee's official account on Sunday. Whoops. [MORE]

Racism is one of the most powerful motivating forces in the universe.  Above, provocative racist suspects at the RNC throw out red meat to their "victimized" white people base to get them motivated. (Is this really yet another accidental misstatement in a seemingly endless string of other accidental racist "gaffes" and miscues  - all accompanied by subsequent super-sorry apologies - or do they just want to make racialized statements or buzzwords like "racist", "Black President" and "racism is over" to get the party started?  - this is the only program the White Party (republicans) is running.)

Italian court rules to Kick David Duke out of Country for racism - attempted to create group to exterminate Blacks

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Times of Israel and TelegraphUK

An Italian court ruled Sunday to expel former Ku Klux Klan leader and ex-US state congressman David Duke from the country, after the white supremacist violated a travel ban and allegedly planned to establish a pan-European neo-Nazi group.

Duke, 63, had been the subject of a 2009 travel and residence ban issued by Switzerland that was valid in all 26 countries in the Schengen area, including Italy. Upon receiving an order from the Italian police to leave the country, Duke filed an appeal with the Belluno administrative court. Duke had been living in the Northern Italian province of Belluno for a year-and-a-half, prior to the order, under a false name. His appeal was denied by the court Sunday, who lambasted his “socially dangerous racist and anti-Semitic views.”

According to his lawyer, Duke left the country immediately following the ruling, Haaretz reported.

“Official reliable sources have revealed [Duke] plans to establish an organization aiming to exterminate the black and Jewish races in Europe,” the sentence read, according to the International Business Times.

Duke, a noted Holocaust denier and virulent racist, ran for US presidency in 1988 and 1992. He served in Louisiana’s state house.

In 1980 he left the Klan and founded the National Association for the Advancement of White People.

Over 20% of young boys labeled ‘ADHD’ [no racial breakdown provided]

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BlackListedNews

It’s no secret that, increasingly, Big Pharma, in cahoots with traditional medicinal practitioners, have created a society of near-zombies with all of the mood altering medications they push on the public. But even these figures are shocking.

According to recently published information from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an astounding 20-plus percent of all 14-year-old boys in the United States have been diagnosed, at one time or another over the course of their lives, with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) – a condition that is, of course, treated with dangerous medications.

As reported by CNSNews.com:

The study also said more than 20 percent of 11-year-old boys had been diagnosed with ADHD at some point in their lives.

The study indicated that American boys were 125 percent more likely than girls to be diagnosed with ADHD, and that boys were 127 percent more likely than girls to be medicated for it.

13.3 percent of American 11-year-old boys are being medicated for ADHD, said the study.

That’s incredible; one in five American teenaged boys have been “diagnosed” with this “disorder.

Over 20% of young boys labeled ‘ADHD’ [no racial breakdown provided]

/

BlackListedNews

It’s no secret that, increasingly, Big Pharma, in cahoots with traditional medicinal practitioners, have created a society of near-zombies with all of the mood altering medications they push on the public. But even these figures are shocking.

According to recently published information from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an astounding 20-plus percent of all 14-year-old boys in the United States have been diagnosed, at one time or another over the course of their lives, with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) – a condition that is, of course, treated with dangerous medications.

As reported by CNSNews.com:

The study also said more than 20 percent of 11-year-old boys had been diagnosed with ADHD at some point in their lives.

The study indicated that American boys were 125 percent more likely than girls to be diagnosed with ADHD, and that boys were 127 percent more likely than girls to be medicated for it.

13.3 percent of American 11-year-old boys are being medicated for ADHD, said the study.

That’s incredible; one in five American teenaged boys have been “diagnosed” with this “disorder.