What Happens when a Racist Suspect throws a banana peel at Dave Chappelle

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 From [HERE] Yes, you read that correctly. According to TMZ, during his show in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a racist suspect in the audience threw a banana peel at Dave Chappelle. [white folks always try to blame racist conduct on alcohol. It probably has more to do with "numerical inadequacy and color deficiency" MORE] 

The guy, Christian Englander was arrested for battery and disorderly conduct.

So, Chappelle being the consummate entertainer that he is, we have to know how he responded to this outrageous incident.

“Hey, who just threw a banana peel? Hey, would you guys like to see your favorite comedian beat the shit out of somebody?

First of all, I am not going to let White people ruin bananas for me *^&%&%*& they’re a good source of potassium. And I know my man– I see Corey just jumped off the stage. Corey is one of my Black friends from Harlem. Corey when you find that muthafucka, do not throw him out, bring him to me. First, I’m going to kill him with my comedy and then I’m going to kick him in his fucking face.

I can’t believe not only that someone threw a banana on stage; I can’t believe that they had a banana on them, this entire time. And he thought, ‘I’ll just throw the peel at Dave Chappelle.’ He knows I’m going to be mad. ‘Je’ suis Charlie.’ That’s what he said when he threw the banana peel. ‘Je suis Charlie Nigger. What a guy can’t draw a cartoon?’ …What a bitch.”

World’s oldest person Misao Okawa dies at 117

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Indian Express

The world’s oldest person has died nearly a month after celebrating her 117th birthday.

Her nursing home says Misao Okawa died of heart failure early Wednesday.

Okawa, born in Osaka on March 5, 1898, was recognized as the world’s oldest person by Guinness World Records in 2013

Her Osaka nursing home says she lost her appetite about 10 days ago. She stopped breathing as her grandson and nursing home officials attended.

Okawa, the daughter of a kimono maker, said at a birthday celebration last month that her life seemed rather short.

Okawa married her husband, Yukio, in 1919, and they had three children — two daughters and a son. She was survived by four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Her husband died in 1931.

 

The New American Order: 1% Elections, the Privatization of the State, a Fourth Branch of Government, and the Demobilization of “We the People”

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4th Media

Have you ever undertaken some task you felt less than qualified for, but knew that someone needed to do? Consider this piece my version of that, and let me put what I do understand about it in a nutshell: based on developments in our post-9/11 world, we could be watching the birth of a new American political system and way of governing for which, as yet, we have no name.

And here’s what I find strange: the evidence of this, however inchoate, is all around us and yet it’s as if we can’t bear to take it in or make sense of it or even say that it might be so.

Let me make my case, however minimally, based on five areas in which at least the faint outlines of that new system seem to be emerging: political campaigns and elections; the privatization of Washington through the marriage of the corporation and the state; the de-legitimization of our traditional system of governance; the empowerment of the national security state as an untouchable fourth branch of government; and the demobilization of “we the people.”

Whatever this may add up to, it seems to be based, at least in part, on the increasing concentration of wealth and power in a new plutocratic class and in that ever-expanding national security state. Certainly, something out of the ordinary is underway, and yet its birth pangs, while widely reported, are generally categorized as aspects of an exceedingly familiar American system somewhat in disarray.

1. 1% Elections

Check out the news about the 2016 presidential election and you’ll quickly feel a sense of been-there, done-that. As a start, the two names most associated with it, Bush and Clinton, couldn’t be more familiar, highlighting as they do the curiously dynastic quality of recent presidential contests. (If a Bush or Clinton should win in 2016 and again in 2020, a member of one of those families will have controlled the presidency for 28 of the last 36 years.)

Take, for instance, “Why 2016 Is Likely to Become a Close Race,” a recent piece Nate Cohn wrote for my hometown paper. A noted election statistician, Cohn points out that, despite Hillary Clinton’s historically staggering lead in Democratic primary polls (and lack of serious challengers), she could lose the general election. He bases this on what we know about her polling popularity from the Monica Lewinsky moment of the 1990s to the present. Cohn assures readers that Hillary will not “be a Democratic Eisenhower, a popular, senior statesperson who cruises to an easy victory.”

It’s the sort of comparison that offers a certain implicit reassurance about the near future. (No, Virginia, we haven’t left the world of politics in which former general and president Dwight D. Eisenhower can still be a touchstone.)

Cohn may be right when it comes to Hillary’s electability, but this is not Dwight D. Eisenhower’s or even Al Gore’s America. If you want a measure of that, consider this year’s primaries. I mean, of course, the 2015 ones. Once upon a time, the campaign season started with candidates flocking to Iowa and New Hampshire early in the election year to establish their bona fides among party voters. These days, however, those are already late primaries.

The early primaries, the ones that count, take place among a small group of millionaires andbillionaires, a new caste flush with cash who will personally, or through complex networks of funders, pour multi-millions of dollars into the campaigns of candidates of their choice. So the early primaries — this year mainly a Republican affair — are taking place in resort spots like Las Vegas, Rancho Mirage, California, and Sea Island, Georgia, as has been widely reported.

These “contests” involve groveling politicians appearing at the beck and call of the rich and powerful, and so reflect our new 1% electoral system. (The main pro-Hillary super PAC, for instance, is aiming for a kitty of $500 million heading into 2016, while the Koch brothers network has already promised to drop almost $1 billion into the coming campaign season, doubling their efforts in the last presidential election year.)

Ever since the Supreme Court opened up the ultimate floodgates with its 2010 Citizens Uniteddecision, each subsequent election has seen record-breaking amounts of money donated and spent. The 2012 presidential campaign was the first $2 billion election; campaign 2016 isexpected to hit the $5 billion mark without breaking a sweat.

By comparison, according to Burton Abrams and Russell Settle in their study, “The Effect of Broadcasting on Political Campaign Spending,” Republicans and Democrats spent just under $13 million combined in 1956 when Eisenhower won his second term.

In the meantime, it’s still true that the 2016 primaries will involve actual voters, as will the election that follows. The previous election season, the midterms of 2014, cost almost $4 billion, a record despite the number of small donors continuing to drop.

It also represented the lowest midterm voterturnout since World War II. (See: demobilization of the public, below — and add in the demobilization of the Democrats as a real party, the breaking of organized labor, the fragmenting of the Republican Party, and the return of voter suppression laws visibly meant to limit the franchise.)

It hardly matters just what the flood of new money does in such elections, when you can feel the weight of inequality bearing down on the whole process in a way that is pushing us somewhere new. [MORE]

NYC Finally Drops Appeal of Stop and Frisk Ruling

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CCR

The landmark federal class action lawsuit, Floyd, et al v. City of New York, successfully challenged the NYPD’s practices of racial profiling and unconstitutional stops and frisks. In August 2013, a federal judge found that the NYPD had engaged in widespread constitutional violations, targeting people of color for suspicionless stops. The court appointed an independent monitor to assist in developing and overseeing a community-inclusive reform process.

 

US fights ISIS...while aiding ISIS

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RT

The media has been abuzz in recent months with numerous accounts of US weapons and other supplies falling directly into the hands of ISIS, providing the terror group with invaluable material support at a time when it had suffered heavy losses in both Syria and Iraq. As Naeem al-Uboudi, the spokesman for one of the main groups fighting ISIS in Tikrit told the NY Times, “We don’t trust the American-led coalition in combating ISIS... In the past, they have targeted our security forces and dropped aid to ISIS by mistake.”

Indeed, these allegations are supported dozens of accounts of airdropped US weapons being seized by ISIS. As Iraqi MP Majid al-Ghraoui noted in January, “The information that has reached us in the security and defense committee indicates that an American aircraft dropped a load of weapons and equipment to the ISIS group militants at the area of al-Dour in the province of Salahuddin... This incident is continuously happening and has also occurred in some other regions.”

Whether these incidents are simply honest mistakes by the vaunted US military with all its precision bombing capabilities, or they are indications of a more callous attempt to inflict casualties on all sides and prolong the regional war, either way they represent an abject failure of the US strategy against ISIS. But of course, the US policy failure goes much further than just mistakes on the battlefield. Rather, the entire policy of arming so-called “moderates” in Syria has led directly to the growth of ISIS into a regional power.

Since 2012, the US, primarily through the CIA, has been providing weapons and training to terrorists in Syria under the guise of arming “moderates.” Many of these allegedly moderate groups have in recent months been documented as having either disbanded or defected to ISIS, including the little publicized mass defections of former Free Syrian Army fighters. However it has happened, a vast arsenal of US-supplied weapons and other military hardware are now counted among the ISIS arsenal. So much for the US policy of ensuring the weapons don’t “fall into the wrong hands.”

So, while the US has proclaimed to be fighting ISIS and the al-Qaeda affiliated Nusra Front, they have been simultaneously arming and supporting many of the same forces which now make up much of the rank-and-file of these terror groups. With friends like these, who needs enemies? [MORE]

Justices Hear Arguments on Intellectual Disability in Death Penalty Case

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NY Times

The Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments in a death penalty case and issued decisions on the monitoring of sex offenders and on the significance of a lawyer’s brief absence from a criminal trial.

DEATH PENALTY Monday’s arguments, in Brumfield v. Cain, No. 13-1433, concerned Kevan Brumfield, a Louisiana man who was sentenced to death in 1995 for killing a Baton Rouge police officer. Seven years later, in Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court barred the execution of the intellectually disabled.

Mr. Brumfield sought to be spared on that ground, but was denied a hearing. A state judge reasoned that the evidence submitted at Mr. Brumfield’s trial was sufficient to resolve the issue against him even though he had not argued that his intellectual disability was a reason to bar his execution.

Supreme Ct. says: When the government places a gps location monitor on you or your stuff, it could be violating the Fourth Amendment.

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The Atlantic

If the government puts a GPS tracker on you, your car, or any of your personal effects, it counts as a search—and is therefore protected by the Fourth Amendment.

The Supreme Court clarified and affirmed that law on Monday, when it ruled on Torrey Dale Grady v. North Carolina, before sending the case back to that state’s high court. The Court’s short but unanimous opinion helps make sense of how the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure, interacts with the expanding technological powers of the U.S. government.

“It doesn’t matter what the context is, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a car or a person. Putting that tracking device on a car or a person is a search,” said Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF).

In this case, that context was punishment. Grady was twice convicted as a sex offender. In 2013, North Carolina ordered that, as a recidivist, he had to wear a GPS monitor at all times so that his location could be monitored. He challenged the court, saying that the tracking device qualified as an unreasonable search.

Despite the Decline in Food Security, the Food Stamp Program was Cut by $8.6 Billion and the Money Paid to Corporate Agriculture

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Inequality.org

There’s something perversely wrong with a society that creates $30 trillion in new wealth while putting six million more children on food stamps.

The mainstream media rarely publishes facts like this. The super rich keep building up their own numbers as quietly as possible. And our leading members of Congress have little need for numbers, except for budget cuts and the strings of zeroes at the end of their campaign contributions.

But numbers have the power to reveal the dramatic fall of the middle class over the past 35 years.

1. 138,000 Kids Were Homeless while 115,000 Households Were Each Making $10 Million Per Year

Recent data has shown that the richest .1% (115,000 households) have each increased their wealth by an astonishing $10 million per year. As they counted their money on a frigid night in January, 138,000 children, according to the U.S. Department of Housing, were without a place to call home.

2. The Average U.S. Household Pays $400 to Feed and Clothe Walmart, McDonalds, and Other Low-Wage Workers

The Economic Policy Institute reports that $45 billion per year in federal, state, and other safety net support is paid to workers earning less than $10.10 an hour. Thus the average U.S. household is paying about $400 to employees in low-wage industries such as food service, retail, and personal care.

Walmart’s well-advertised $1 raise will cost the company about $1 billion a year. Its profits last year were about $25 billion.

The sordid tale gets even worse, as told by a PBS report: Walmart has spent about $6.5 billion per year on stock buybacks to enrich investors, approximately the same total annual amount billed to taxpayers for food stamps, Medicaid, housing, and other safety net programs for the company’s underpaid employees.

3. As $30 Trillion in New Wealth was being Created, the Number of Kids on Food Stamps Increased 70%

Before the recession, 12 out of every 100 American children got food stamps. After the recession, 20 out of every 100 American children got food stamps.

That’s nearly a 70 percent increase, from 9.5 million kids in 2007 to 16 million kids in 2014, at the same time that U.S. wealth was growing by over $30 trillion. Even with that incomprehensible increase in wealth our nation was not able to ensure food security for millions of its most vulnerable citizens.

4. Despite the Decline in Food Security, the Food Stamp Program was Cut by $8.6 Billion and the Money Paid to Corporate Agriculture
As more and more children go hungry, the largest agricultural firms continue to take taxpayer money to supplement their billions in profits. The 2014 farm bill cut $8.6 billion (over the next ten years) from the food stamp program, of which nearly half of all participants are children. Meanwhile, $14 billion is annually paid out to the largest 10 percent of farm operators.

Beaten Up, Broken Down

The mainstream media highlights the resurgent economy, the booming stock market, and the drop in unemployment. But the stock market has enriched only about ten percent of America, handing them millions of dollars since the recession, while the newly available jobs are well below the skill levels of college-trained adults and often without health care and retirement benefits. Too many once-prosperous Americans are beaten up and broken down, waiting in vain for our elected leaders to stop the redistribution of our national wealth.

White Prosecutor Misquoted Hip Hop Lyrics to All White Jury to Convict Mac Phipps

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HuffPost

As he lies at night in his cell at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, McKinley "Mac" Phipps can hear the words of his best-known song echoing in his head:

Murda, murda (murder, murder)

Kill, kill (kill, kill)

S**t's real (s**t's real)

On the battlefield (on the battlefield)

In the late '90s, on the verge of stardom, the young hip-hop artist was known as "Mac the Camouflage Assassin." Master P had signed him to No Limit Records, alongside Snoop Dogg and Mystikal. He was a member of the 504 Boyz, and their 2000 album, "Goodfellas," went gold, reaching No. 2 on the Billboard 200.

Then, on Feb. 21, 2000, at a show just outside New Orleans, a concertgoer was shot, Phipps was charged with first-degree murder and everything slipped away. He was just 22 years old.

The prosecution had no forensic evidence. They didn't even bother to perform ballistics on what could have been the murder weapon. Five of the prosecution's witnesses told The Huffington Post in an exclusive report that they were bullied by authorities to lie.

But the prosecutors did have one great weapon to use against Phipps -- his words -- and they wielded them like a club, selectively misquoting his lyrics and taking them out of context, to incriminate the defendant.

In the cement room where Phipps now resides, he doesn't hear himself singing "Murda, Murda, Kill, Kill." He hears the botched version that Assistant District Attorney Bruce Dearing recited to jurors -- part of the closing argument to a case that leaves Phipps just halfway through a 30-year sentence.

"I didn’t have any criminal history for them to look into, so I guess they had to find some indication that [I have] a dark side," Phipps told HuffPost. "So that’s when they turned to the music." [MORE]

Peddle to the Metal in Death Belt: Texas prison agency replenishes execution drug supply to murder its offenders

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Aljazeera

Texas prison officials have acquired a small supply of pentobarbital to replenish their dwindling inventory of the execution drug so lethal injections set for next month in the nation's most active death penalty state can be carried out, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said Wednesday.

Four prisoners already have been put to death this year in Texas. That left enough pentobarbital in the state's inventory to conduct only one more lethal injection, the scheduled April 9 execution of Kent William Sprouse, convicted of the shooting deaths of a North Texas police officer and another man in 2002. Sprouse is the first of four Texas inmates set to die in April.

The agency now has a sufficient amount of the powerful sedative for the other three, spokesman Jason Clark confirmed. At least two more prisoners face punishment in May and June and would require yet another drug acquisition.

Pharmaceutical companies, under pressure from death penalty opponents, have stopped selling drugs for lethal injections to U.S. prisons. So Texas and other states have turned to less regulated compounding pharmacies for made-to-order drugs. States also are exploring other methods of execution.

As in the past, Texas prison officials Wednesday refused to identify the provider of the new supply.

Officials have insisted the drug supplier's identity should remain secret to keep the provider from harm and threats of retaliation.

Texas prison officials could change the drug used for executions but Texas lawmakers would have to enact any change of method. No measures to do so have been proposed, although two identical bills in the Texas Senate and House would allow the identity of execution drug suppliers to remain confidential.

A state judge last year ordered the Department of Criminal Justice to divulge the source. That ruling is on hold pending the outcome of an appeal by the Texas Attorney General's Office. An appeals court this week granted the state's request and put off until late next month the deadline for the state to file its arguments in the case.

The use and availability of drugs for executions has come under heightened scrutiny after lethal injections last year went awry in Oklahoma, Arizona and Ohio.

This week, Utah's governor signed a law allowing that state to use firing squads if drugs for lethal injection can't be acquired. In Oklahoma, where the state's injection method is under review, lawmakers gave preliminary approval to a measure that would allow use of nitrogen gas for executions if drugs for lethal injection were not available.

An execution earlier this month in Georgia was put off when prison authorities questioned the appearance of the compounded pentobarbital they planned to use.

Texas has executed a nation-leading 522 inmates since 1982, when it became the first state to use lethal injection.

Justice Dept., Criticizing Philadelphia Police, Finds Shootings by Officers Are Common

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NY Times

Roughly once a week, 390 times over the past eight years, Philadelphia police officers opened fire at a suspect. The shootings involved 454 officers, most of them on patrol. Almost always, the suspects were black. Often, the officers were, too.

Fifty-nine suspects were unarmed. Officers frequently said they thought the men — and they were almost always men — were reaching for a weapon, when they were actually doing something like holding a cellphone.

The statistics were laid out in a Justice Department report on Monday, which does not allege racial discrimination but offers an unusually deep look at the use of lethal force inside a major city police department, including information on the race of officers and suspects. It is the kind of data that has been nearly absent from the debate over police tactics that began last summer with a deadly shooting in Ferguson, Mo.

Republicans Dismiss Netanyahu’s Anti-Arab Remarks As ‘Election Rhetoric’

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ThinkProgress

Republicans continue to excuse Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s anti-Arab remarks and open repudiation of the two-state solution, despite decades of bipartisan agreement that an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel is the only way to resolve the Israel/Palestinian conflict.

Netanyahu’s election day video warning supporters that “Arab voters are going to the polls in droves” and his comments from earlier in the week admitting that he would not work to establish a Palestinian state, caused outrage around the world, including strong criticism from the Obama administration. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest characterized Netanyahu’s rhetoric as “deeply concerning and it is divisive” and Obama himself told the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein on Saturday that the Arab remarks undermines Israeli democracy.

But Republicans are rushing to congratulate the Israeli leader’s historic re-election while brushing away the consequences of his remarks.

“The president should get over it,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union. “Get over your temper tantrum, Mr. President,” he continued, “The least of your problems are what Bibi Netanyahu said in a political campaign. If every politician was held to what they said in a political campaign obviously that would be a topic of long discussion.” Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) advised Obama to build on America’s special relationship with Israel “rather than try to make it personal.”

On ABC’s This Week, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) claimed “the peace process seemed like it was in a halt long before Netanyahu ran for re-election.” “Look, it’s always surprising to me when the president is upset about election rhetoric because it always happens,” he added.

The GOP is also rejecting Obama’s argument that Netanyahu’s disavowal of the two-state solution could change America’s approach toward achieving lasting peace in the region. Despite Netanyahu’s efforts to walk-back the comments, the administration believes that the loss of Netanyahu as a negotiating partner to any bilateral talks with the Palestinians could push it to involve multilateral organizations like the United Nations in resolving the conflict. Officials are reportedly considering introducing or backing a U.N. resolution that establishes the parameters and definitions for a two-state solution, a move that will be mightily opposed by the Israeli government and their allies in Congress.

“Of course [Obama] shouldn’t be considering it and second of all, if he does that, it would be approved by the United Nations, then the United States Congress would have to examine our funding for the United Nations,” McCain said. “It would contradict American policy for the last at least ten presidents of the United States.”

McCain’s comments were echoed by Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to the United States. Dermer told NBC’s Meet The Press that any such resolution will undermine peace by hardening Palestinian positions. “It will prevent us from not only having peace today, it could prevent us from having peace for decades to come because no Palestinian leader will move from those positions that have been put forward at the United Nations,” he said.

The Palestinians have recently pursued a strategy of internationalizing the conflict in hopes of putting greater pressure on Israel to recommit to the goal of establishing an independent Palestinian state and possibly set the stage for imposing punitive measures against Israel for its violations of international consensus and the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.

On Sunday, Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) sought to downplay the growing partisan rift over Israel in the United States. “Everybody just needs to take a big breath and step back,” he told CNN. “What counts is the substance and on the substance the relationship between Israel and the United States has never been closer on military and strategic intel issues… What counts, and what we need to do, is get back to the fundamentals and stop with all the drama,” he said

Oregon adopts automatic voter registration

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JURIST

Oregon Governor Kate Brown [official profile] on Monday signed a new law that makes Oregon the first state in the nation to institute automatic voter registration. House Bill 2177 [text, PDF], informally called the Motor Voter legislation, will use data from the state Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to automatically register eligible voters in the DMV system. The name, age, citizenship and residency data of all eligible voters will be sent to the Secretary of State, who will then complete the registration process from this information. The new voters will be sent a postcard detailing their new registered status and will explain how to take advantage of the 21-day opt-out period if the voter wishes to do so. The voters will be registered as unaffiliated, but the postcard will also tell voters how to register for a political party. This legislation is expected to add 300,000 new voters [AP report]. Some members of the Oregon state legislature are concerned about the ongoing privacy of DMV information and the cost of implementing the law. Oregon has one of the highest voter registration rates in the nation with 73 percent of its citizens registered to vote and 70 percent casting ballots in the 2014 general election.

Former state attorneys general ask Supreme Court to ban Oklahoma execution drug cocktail

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Jurist

More than a dozen former state attorneys general on Tuesday asked [press release] the US Supreme Court to rule Oklahoma's use of the three-drug execution cocktail unconstitutional. The attorneys general argue that this type of execution violates the constitutional rights of three death row inmates scheduled for execution. In an amicus brief [text, PDF] organized by the Constitution Project [advocacy website], the former state officials argued that Oklahoma's use of midazolam, a sedation drug, as a part of its lethal injection protocol does not properly induce unconsciousness. Officials claim that this may result in an extremely painful death, which would be a violation of the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The officials claim that there are other alternatives that can be used instead of the three-drug cocktail. On January 28, the court blocked Oklahoma from using midazolam until it can decide the case of the inmates, Richard Glossip, John Grant and Benjamin Cole Sr.

New Mexico passes bill ending civil asset forfeiture

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Jurist

The New Mexico legislature on Saturday passed a bill [text] that will end civil asset forfeiture in the state. The bill, HB 560, was passed in the senate by a vote of 37-0. Civil asset forfeiture is a police practice in which authorities can take an individual's property without charging that person for a crime. The bill abolishes this practice, and now before police may seize an individual's property they must convict that person of a crime.

The bill abolishes this practice, and now before police may seize an individual's property they must convict that person of a crime and prove that the property being seized was used in the commission of that crime. Additionally, the bill directs any monetary gains from the seizure of property to the state's general fund instead of the police budget. This is thought to remove any incentive police may have to seek out opportunities to seize property. The bill will now move to Republican Governor Susana Martinez's [official website] for a final signature.

New York and San Diego Police Departments Edit Wikipedia Entries on Alleged Police Brutality Cases

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All Gov

Employees of at least two police departments have tried to make their fellow officers look better by editing the Wikipedia entries on police brutality in their agencies.

Notably, someone at New York Police Department (NYPD) headquarters edited the entry on Eric Garner, who died when placed in a chokehold by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, making numerous changes, such as:

  • “Garner raised both his arms in the air” was changed to “Garner flailed his arms about as he spoke.”
  • “Use of the chokehold has been prohibited” was changed to “Use of the chokehold is legal, but has been prohibited.”
  • Instances of the word “chokehold” were replaced twice, once to “chokehold or headlock,” and once to “respiratory distress.”

Kelly Weill of Capital New York also reported that someone at NYPD headquarters altered the entry relating to Sean Bell, an unarmed man shot to death by police officers, and that of Alexien Lien, who was tracked down by bikers and an undercover NYPD officer and beaten. In all, 85 IP addresses registered to NYPD headquarters were used to edit Wikipedia articles, Capital New York reported.

The NYPD has identified two officers who made edits, but said they’ll be lightly reprimanded for using city equipment for private business or face no sanctions at all.

Across the country in San Diego, a department employee has also altered Wikipedia entries to put a more police-friendly slant on articles. Daniel Weiss, listed as a dispatcher in San Diego police records, deleted whole sections of articles on brutality committed by members of his department using computer connections controlled by the city.

“Anything that was deleted was due to inaccuracies as stated in the comments,” Weiss told U-T San Diego. “Especially the ‘misconduct’ section, which had bad information and was not linked to the department in many circumstances.” Other changes were made anonymously, but Weiss claims not to have made those edits.

US Refuses to Seriously Tackle Police Brutality and Racism

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CounterPunch 

The report released in early March by a panel President Obama appointed to examine serious shortcomings in police practices across America, including the shooting of unarmed people, mostly non-white, listed problems and proposed solutions that are hauntingly similar to those found in a report on police abuses released 47 years ago by another presidential panel.

The March 1968 report of the presidential panel popularly known as the Kerner Commission noted with dismay that many minorities nationwide regarded police as “an occupying force” – a presence that generated fear not feelings of security.

The March 2015 report from President Obama’s panel made a similar finding, noting that perceptions of police as an “occupying force coming in from the outside to rule and control the community” had sabotaged the ability of law enforcement to build trust in many communities.

Reactions to police brutality, particularly fatal encounters, triggered protests and riots that sparked both President Barack Obama and President Lyndon Johnson almost two generations earlier to appoint these two panels.

Sadly, the recommendations from President Obama’s panel could sink under the weight of the same forces that sank full implementation of the Kerner Commission proposals: systemic recalcitrance from all sectors of American society to reforms devised to remediate festering race-based inequities.

The Obama panel recommended “civilian oversight of law enforcement,” calling this step essential to “strengthen trust with the community.” The Kerner Commission report had similarly called for the establishment of “fair mechanisms to redress grievances” against police.

However, for decades, police unions, backed by “law-and-order” politicians, in city councils, state legislatures and Congress, have vigorously opposed independent oversight by civilians and even oversight from governmental entities.

Such opposition mounted by America’s national police union – the Fraternal Order of Police – early last year killed Obama’s nomination of a civil rights lawyer to head the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. The national FOP in that case made it clear it resented any Justice Department monitoring of state and local police practices. Despite patterns of police misconduct that had led to what was at best only infrequent Justice Department monitoring, U.S. Senators – Republicans and Democrats – backed the national police union’s opposition to Obama’s nominee.

The Kerner Commission, which had examined race-based inequities beyond police brutality, called for a massive influx of resources to tackle poverty and discrimination.

That proposal from President Johnson’s panel, formally titled The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders because it was a wave of riots and uprisings in cities across the country in the 1960s that led to its creation, prompted immediate opposition from conservatives. Resources being poured into the war in Vietnam further crippled that proposal. [MORE]