True Left

OLD CONTENT contd.

Meanwhile, another walks:

www.news4jax.com/news/georgia/jury-finds-ex-kingsland-officer-not-guilty-of-manslaughter-in-killing-of-black-motorist

WOODBINE, Ga. - A former Georgia police officer who fatally shot a fleeing, unarmed black man was acquitted Saturday of voluntary manslaughter and involuntary manslaughter charges.
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"My son was murdered," Anderson said. "The man that murdered my son gets to go home to his sons ... and can only possibly serve 1 to 5 (years) for murder. This ought to serve notice to a lot of our young black men and black men, period, that you can run up and down the football field, you can run on down the courts, you can hit baseballs, you can do it. But at the end of the day, when I see you, they see a black man."

Pastor Mack De’Von Knight, whose church Green attended, denounced the acquittals outside the courthouse, saying the evidence was “open and shut.”

“He admitted that he killed Tony Green in cold blood,” Knight said. “To me, it’s hunting season for the young black man and we’re being gunned down in the streets and there’s no repercussions, there’s no consequences for these officers.”

There can be consequences. All it requires is for you to pick up a firearm. Will you?

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www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-montreal-police-have-deep-problem-with-systemic-discrimination/

The Montreal police force engages in systemic racial profiling that targets Arab, black and Indigenous people, a report by independent academics and commissioned by the city has found.

The standout finding in the report, released on Monday, is that Indigenous women are 11 times more likely than white women to be stopped by Montreal police. Overall, black people are four times more likely to be stopped than a white person, while Indigenous people over all are 4.61 times more likely. Police were twice as likely to stop an Arab person than a white person.

Even the release of the report itself produced an ugly incident of alleged racist exclusion. Montreal police officers blocked Abdelhaq Sari, a city councillor and vice-chair of the board that supervises the police, from attending the event.
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In 2018, an Ontario Human Rights Commission report found police were far more likely to kill and injure black people than white people.
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“All the way through these years, the Montreal police have taken no measures to reduce the number of people profiled. The opposite happened. This surprises me and worries me a lot.”

The report by sociologists Victor Armory and Mariam Hassaoui and criminologist Massimiliano Mulone found police stops increased 143 per cent from 2014 to 2017, even though the level of crime in the city remained constant. Indigenous people and Arabs were particularly targeted by the increase.

And some people think Canada is leftist.....

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news.yahoo.com/questions-intensify-texas-officer-kills-120647544.html

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — A white Fort Worth police officer who shot and killed a black woman through a back window of her home while responding to a call about an open front door was charged with murder on Monday after resigning from the force.

Aaron Dean, 34, was jailed Monday evening on $200,000 bond after the police chief said he acted without justification would have been fired if he hadn't quit.

Police bodycam video showed Dean approaching the door of the home where Atatiana Jefferson, 28, was caring for her 8-year-old nephew early Saturday. He then walked around the side of the house, pushed through a gate into the fenced-off backyard and fired through the glass a split-second after shouting at Jefferson to show her hands.

Dean was not heard identifying himself as police on the video, and Interim Police Chief Ed Kraus said there was no sign Dean or the other officer who responded even knocked on the front door.
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Police went to Jefferson's home about 2:25 a.m. after a neighbor called a non-emergency line to report a door ajar. In a statement over the weekend, the department said officers saw someone near a window inside the home and that one of them drew his gun and fired after "perceiving a threat."

The video showed Dean shouting, "Put your hands up! Show me your hands!" and immediately firing.

Jefferson was staying up late, playing video games with her nephew, when she was killed, according to the family's attorney.
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Of the nine officer-involved shootings so far this year in Fort Worth, five targeted African Americans and six resulted in death, according to department data.

Nearly two-thirds of the department's 1,100 officers are white, just over 20% are Hispanic, and about 10% are black. The city of nearly 900,000 people is about 40% white, 35% Hispanic and 19% black.

Maybe he did it because he thought there was a good chance he could get away with it, as so many others have.

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news.yahoo.com/chief-officers-proud-boys-membership-200748878.html

A Connecticut police officer's membership in the Proud Boys, a far-right group known for engaging in violent clashes at political rallies, didn't violate department policies, the town's police chief has concluded in response to a civil rights group's concerns.

The East Hampton officer, Kevin P. Wilcox, "stopped his association" with the Proud Boys in February, about five months before the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law inquired about his social media connections with other group members, Police Chief Dennis Woessner said.

In a letter to the Washington-based civil rights group, the police chief acknowledged that Wilcox had been a Proud Boys member and made online payments to a group leader. The rights group described those publicly visible, online transactions as monthly dues that helped fund the Proud Boys' "violent or otherwise illegal" activities.

But the chief said he reviewed the matter, received an "explanatory report" from Wilcox and closed the department's inquiry as being "unfounded," with no evidence to support a policy violation.
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Kristen Clarke, the civil rights group's president and executive director, said she was "astounded" by the police chief's refusal to take action against the officer.

"In an era where we are seeing a spike in white supremacist activity, this should sound an alarm. It should not be business as usual," Clarke said during an interview Tuesday.

Being astounded does not solve the problem. Solving problems to which the state turns a blind eye requires being willing to use a firearm (which is the reason why the Second Amendment allowed firearm ownership in the first place).

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qz.com/1724590/colorism-influences-probability-of-going-to-jail-new-study-finds/

The average rate of imprisonment of African Americans in state prisons is more than 5 times (pdf, p.5) that of white people. In some states (Iowa, Minnesota, New Jersey, Vermont, and Wisconsin), there are 10 times the number of black people in prison compared to white people.

Now, a new study breaks down this problem of prejudice in the American judicial system in even more disturbing detail. According to the study, it isn’t just being black that makes a person more likely to be sentenced to jail in the US, it’s how black they are. A person’s lifetime chance of having been arrested, the study found, is directly proportional with the darkness of their skin.
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“Put bluntly, while being black (and poor) may already predispose one to have a higher probability of contact with the criminal justice system and harsher treatment…being perceived as blacker intensifies this contact further and may increase the harshness of one’s treatment by the [criminal justice system] as an institution,” Monk writes in the study.

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news.yahoo.com/indiana-officer-fired-suspicious-black-profiling-115229905.html

Lawrence Township Deputy Constable Daryl Jones approached cousins Aaron Blackwell and Durell Cunningham as they were driving out of the parking lot of a Nordstrom Rack store, as seen in a clip posted to YouTube by Blackwell last week.
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The two men began filming the Nov. 12 incident as their vehicle approached Jones, who they said watched them make their purchases inside the store and then followed them outside. In the video, Jones approaches the car, and demands to see the driver’s license. When the men questioned why they were being asked for ID, Jones replied: “Because I told you to.”

As the exchange became heated, the men insisted that Jones call his supervisor, while he repeatedly demanded to see their ID.

“I got my rights to do anything I want to do, I’m a police officer,” he said. When asked what reason he had for asking, Jones said that they had been acting “suspicious.”

After Jones called for backup, an Indianapolis police officer arrived and spoke with Jones near the car. After a short conversation, Jones told the men they were free to go, but refused to give his name and walked away. The Indianapolis officer told the men he didn’t know Jones, but that he saw no reason why they had been stopped, and that Jones was required to identify himself.

Jones was reportedly off duty at the time and had been working security at Nordstrom Rack.

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It was going to happen eventually:

news.yahoo.com/white-officer-shoots-black-colleague-131113382.html

On the night Green was shot, he said, he did what he thought he had to: He sprang into action when he saw an armed man on the run. As he confronted the suspect, though, he heard someone order him to drop his weapon. Green tossed down his gun and belly-flopped onto the grass. A white detective recognized him a few moments later and warned the others that Green was a police officer, too.

Green got up and ambled toward the detective who knew him, his gun pointed down in his right hand. He held out his badge so there would be no confusion. He had grown up on the city’s North Side and had been stopped plenty of times by police for no good reason before he had gotten his badge, he said.

He took a few steps and then again heard a voice yell for him to drop his weapon, followed almost immediately, he said, by a gunshot. He clutched his right forearm and looked over at the white officer who had shot him.
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“Me being black with a gun, you never gave me the chance,” Green said of Tanner. “You wouldn’t have walked up to a white guy and just shot him like that.”
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Opinions in the department have been split over an encounter that happened a few months after Green was shot: A black officer working undercover at a protest was beaten by white officers so badly that the injured officer told a commander, using an expletive, that they beat him “like Rodney King.”

That officer, Luther Hall, had been monitoring a demonstration held in downtown St. Louis to protest the acquittal of a white officer who had fatally shot a black resident. While Hall’s face was bloodied, his partner, who was white, was not beaten, according to a lawsuit.
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The department is investigating nearly two dozen officers for a series of incendiary Facebook posts, some of them racist and bigoted, uncovered by the Plain View Project.

One of those officers was Michael J. Calcaterra. One meme he posted in 2013 said, “Britain should not bend over backwards to accommodate Islam.” Another one shows a white officer throwing a punch and says “I’m going to protect and serve,” adding an expletive.

In July, after the posts had been made public, Leviya Graham, a black officer, filed a complaint with the department. She asked officials to transfer Calcaterra, who is white, out of her unit because she had concerns for her well-being and safety.

Three months after filing her complaint, Graham accused Calcaterra of striking her with a police vehicle while they were on duty. Calcaterra did not respond to a phone message.

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news.yahoo.com/got-tired-hunting-black-hispanic-165530610.html

NEW YORK — At a police station tucked into an end-of-the-line subway terminal in South Brooklyn, the new commander instructed officers to think of white and Asian people as “soft targets” and urged them to instead go after blacks and Latinos for minor offenses like jumping the turnstile, a half-dozen officers said in sworn statements.

“You are stopping too many Russian and Chinese,” one of the officers, Daniel Perez, recalled the commander telling him earlier this decade.

Another officer, Aaron Diaz, recalled the same commander saying in 2012, “You should write more black and Hispanic people.”
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The commander, Constantin Tsachas, was in charge of more than 100 officers who patrolled a swath of the subway system in Brooklyn, his first major command. Since then, he has been promoted to the second-in-command of policing the subway system throughout Brooklyn. Along the way, more than half a dozen subordinates claim, he gave them explicit directives about whom to arrest based on race.
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Six officers said in their affidavits that Tsachas, now a deputy inspector, pressured them to enforce low-level violations against black and Hispanic people, while discouraging them from doing the same to white or Asian people.
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“The focus of black and brown people, even if other people were doing the same crime, points to what many of us have been saying for a while,” the city’s public advocate, Jumaane Williams, said. “The same actions lead to different results, unfortunately, depending on where you live and an overlay of what you look like.”
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“Tsachas would get angry if you tried to patrol subway stations in predominantly white or Asian neighborhoods” LaForce said in his affidavit. He added that the commander would redirect officers to stations in neighborhoods with larger black and Hispanic populations.

Diaz, who retired from the Police Department last year, described in his affidavit how on one occasion Tsachas seemed irritated at him for having stopped several Asian people for fare evasion and told him he should be issuing tickets to “more black and Hispanic people.”
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Other officers described similar experiences. Some of the officers claimed in affidavits that Tsachas urged his officers to come up with reasons to stop black men, especially those with tattoos, and check them for warrants.
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The allegations in the affidavits were bolstered by a police union official, Corey Grable, who gave a deposition in June in the same lawsuit that recounted his interactions with Tsachas. He recalled Tsachas had once complained about a subordinate who Tsachas said seemed to go for “soft targets.”

Unsure what that meant, Grable asked if the officer was ticketing old ladies for minor offenses? Tsachas responded: “No, Asian.”

Grable, who is black, asked, “Would you have been more comfortable if these guys were black or Hispanic?”

“Yes,” Tsachas replied, according to Grable’s recollection.
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Raymond said he believed Tsachas should not have been promoted. “It’s a spit in the face of communities of color that this man is given more power after being exposed as a bigot,” he said.

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www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/17/muslim-woman-forced-remove-hijab-mugshot-minnesota

Al-Kadi, 57, said her treatment at the Ramsey county jail in August 2013 was “one of the most humiliating and harmful experiences” of her life.

“I knew that I did not want any other Muslim woman to experience what I did,” she said.

A judge had issued a warrant for Al-Kadi’s arrest after she missed a court hearing over a traffic offense while taking her daughter to the hospital, the Star Tribune reported.

In her lawsuit, Al-Kadi argued that the county violated her constitutional rights and discriminated against her for her religious beliefs.

Al-Kadi was born and raised in Ohio. She moved to Minnesota in 2005 so her daughter could receive specialized medical care.

When Al-Kadi turned herself in, she said, she was told to remove her hijab and abaya, a long dress that covered her body, in front of male jailers. When she objected, she said, she was removed from the area and taken to a holding cell, where she removed her hijab in front of a male jailer.

She said she agreed to remove her headscarf for her booking photo after being told that the photo would never be released to the public. But months later, she found it on a third-party website that charges users to take down the photos.

After taking the photo, officers gave her a bedsheet to use as a hijab. Al-Kadi eventually was told to remove her abaya and change into a jail uniform, while two female officers watched her. Ramsey county policy says that misdemeanor inmates such as Al-Kadi “will not be viewed without clothing”, according to court records.
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The settlement does not require the county to admit wrongdoing.

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www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/white-terrorists-help-other-people-deny-their-prejudice/586198/

https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/296342-nations-largest-police-union-endorses-trump

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www.nytimes.com/2019/12/31/nyregion/nypd-officer-jail-nashville-home.html

Michael J. Reynolds, a New York City police officer, landed in Nashville on a Sunday morning in July 2018, court records show. He and six other men, two of whom he later identified as New York City officers, were on what was supposed to be a three-night bachelor-party junket.

About 18 hours later, Officer Reynolds, who is white, kicked in a black woman’s door in a drunken rage, threatening her and her sons with a racist slur and obscenities.

“I’ll break every bone in your neck,” he said in a rant that included two expletives. He then fled to his nearby Airbnb rental just before the police arrived.
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Officer Reynolds said he had gone into the home by mistake, thinking that it was their rental.

But Ms. Halliburton and the neighbors also testified that the officers were laughing at the same time, saying that they had “immunity” because they were law enforcement officers.

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www.al.com/news/2020/02/alabama-cop-posts-online-about-roadside-bomb-for-nancy-pelosi-other-dumbocrats.html

Jeff Buckles, the assistant chief of the Geraldine police department, took to Facebook after Pelosi, the Democratic House leader, ripped apart a copy of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday night.

“Pelosi just ripped up his speach (sic),” Buckles wrote in the public post, which since appears to have been deleted or removed from public view. “Road Side bomb on her way home and any other Dumbocrats.”
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Buckles wasn’t at work on Thursday and will also be off Friday, Ables said. The assistant chief has not been suspended, the mayor said, rather both off days were already scheduled before Buckles made the Facebook post.

www.yahoo.com/huffpost/police-union-officers-declaring-war-nyc-mayor-042739661.html

A police union made a threatening statement on Sunday to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, saying that members of the New York Police Department are “declaring war” on the mayor after two officers were separately attacked in a span of 12 hours.

“Mayor DeBlasio, the members of the NYPD are declaring war on you,” read a tweet from the Sergeants Benevolent Association, which has a long history of posting inflammatory and sometimes extreme messages on Twitter. It added: “This isn’t over, Game on!”

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Are MAGA hat wearers a gang?