“It’s the same statement I made before,” James said after the Cavaliers finished shootaround Thursday before a 90-87 win over the New York Knicks. “It’s a sensitive subject right now. Violence is not the answer and retaliation isn’t the solution. As a society we just have to do better. I pray for the families of the lost ones.
“Obviously anytime you lose someone, it’s a downer for the whole family, and I’m not going to get too far involved in the logistics of the things because I’m not a part of it, but you pray for the families.”
Less than two weeks ago, James said the decision not to indict Darren Wilson, the officer responsible for the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, “hit home for me,” and he lamented the rioting, looting and overall violent reaction to the news.
Amar’e Stoudemire, speaking after the Knicks’ loss, said he was “pretty upset” that he wasn’t involved in any of the protests in New York.
“I think it’s something that’s, it’s very alarming in our country as far as that’s concerned,” Stoudemire said. “We have to be more conscientious of what the law enforcement’s job is, and that’s to protect and serve. Those two words are very strong when you think about that.
“Your first job is to protect, and your second job is to serve. Obviously it’s not happening that way. So we’ve got to figure out a way to create a better economic unity for all of the have-nots.”
New York Jets defensive end Sheldon Richardson — a St. Louis native — reaffirmed his position, as well, while discussing the issue at the team’s facilities in Florham Park, N.J.
“Destroying Ferguson is not what I wanted to come from the verdict of the grand jury,” Richardson said. “I wanted my whole city to stay intact. I don’t think we’ll bounce back from that — the area of Ferguson, anyway. That’s just how I feel about it. I just want my hometown to stay as peaceful as possible, but I don’t blame them. I know where they’re coming from, but that’s not the solution.”
Candy Crowley, a staple at CNN is packing up and leaving the network after working with there for 27 years. CNN president Jeff Zucker announced in a memo to staff on Friday.
“[I]t is with mixed emotions, that I wanted to let you know that Candy has let us know that she has made the decision to move on, so she can embark on the next chapter of her already prolific career,” Zucker wrote. “As difficult as it is for us to imagine CNN without Candy, we know that she comes to this decision thoughtfully, and she has our full support.”
Zucker did not mention who would replace Crowley on State of the Union, the network’s Sunday public affairs program. The network will be keeping the show, a spokesperson confirmed
According to an investigation from Vocativ, chokeholds are apparently a happening thing with the NYPD.
Even though the chokehold is prohibited by the NYPD, there were 87 chokehold complaints filed against the NYPD in 2014. Vocativ looked at the complaints filed against the NYPD through the Civilian Complaints Board and discovered that civilians filed hundreds of “use of force” complaints, including the 87 for chokeholds.
Chokeholds were the second most common “use of force” complaints, after “officers pointing guns at people,” which took the top spot at 140 complaints. The most common “abuse of authority” complaints, meanwhile, included searching and entering as well as random searches, with 366 complaints each. But Vocativ notes that chokehold complaints are, unfortunately, “difficult to prove” — only one of the 87 complaints was “substantiated” and resulted in disciplinary action by the NYPD. – Meghan DeMaria
Now this is something you probably haven’t heard in, like forever! On Wednesday, the same day a New York grand jury refused to hold police accountable in the choking death of Eric Garner, another grand jury in South Carolina brought charges against a white cop who shot and kill a black man in 2011!
Richard Combs worked in Eutawville when 54-year-old Bernard Bailey came to Town Hall to argue about his daughter’s broken-taillight ticket. Combs and Bailey briefly fought, and the police chief shot Bailey twice in the chest.
A grand jury indicted Combs on Wednesday, the same day a New York grand jury refused to indict an officer in the chokehold death of an unarmed black man. It’s more than a week after a grand jury refused to indict an officer in the death of unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
Combs’ lawyer says the officer feared for his life. Prosecutors say he was the aggressor. He’s no longer with the police department.
(AP) — U.S. employers added a whopping 321,000 jobs in November, the biggest burst of hiring in nearly three years and the latest sign that the United States is outperforming other economies throughout the developed world.
The Labor Department also said Friday that 44,000 more jobs were added in September and October combined than the government had previously estimated. Job gains have averaged 241,000 a month this year, putting 2014 on track to be the strongest year for hiring since 1999.
The unemployment rate remained at a six-year low of 5.8 percent last month.
The robust job gains come after the economy expanded from April through September at its fastest pace in 11 years. The additional jobs should support steady growth in coming months.
“Turn to Leviticus 20:13,” he says in the video, “because I actually discovered the cure for AIDS.”
“If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them,” Anderson read aloud.
“And that, my friend, is the cure for AIDS,” he said. “It was right there in the Bible all along — and they’re out spending billions of dollars in research and testing. It’s curable — right there. Because if you executed the homos like God recommends, you wouldn’t have all this AIDS running rampant.”
According to Sgt. Trent Crump, spokesman for the Phoenix Police, the officer who has not been identified, “was doing exactly what we want him to do” when he shot and killed 34-year-old Rumain Brisbon. Friends and family said Brisbon was simply delivering dinner to his children on Tuesday night when the deadly encounter with police happened.
Crump told reporters that the officer and his partner were responding to a burglary call about 6 p.m. Tuesday (8 p.m. ET) when a local resident told them that men in a black sport-utility vehicle were dealing drugs. The license plate number given by the resident matched a vehicle owned by a resident of a block where police were already investigating a report of loud music, Crump said, so the officer approached the SUV, whose driver got out.
When the officer told the driver, later identified as Brisbon, to show his hands, the driver instead put his hands into the waistband of his pants, at which point the officer drew his gun, Crump said. Brisbon began to run away, but the officer chased him down, and they began struggling, Crump said.
“The officer believed he felt the handle of a gun while holding the suspect’s hand in his pocket,” Crump said. Unable to keep his grip on Brisbon’s hand, the officer fired two shots, Crump said. The object in Brisbon’s pocket was later discovered to be a bottle of pain pills.
I’m so tired of writing about this crap. I’m sure you are tired of reading about it. None of us are surprised another grand jury didn’t indict a cop. Grand juries indict 99.9 percent of time. The .1 percent of the time they don’t is because a cop is on trial. The entire grand jury system needs to be scrapped. There is simply no need for it. They do exactly what the prosecutors want. If they want an indictment, they hand it down, if they don’t, they vote “no true” bill, whatever the hell that means or meant back in 1787 when maybe the grand jury system was necessary. They are now worthless, chocked with people who don’t think on their own, and just march in lock step with the orders they are given. They are just slaves to their prosecutor masters. It is time for the entire system to go.
In the Eric Garner case we have a video. Much like in the Ray Rice case. Before we had the Rice video many people were saying his punching out his fiancee wasn’t a big deal. After the video many wanted to hang Rice. Same case, same offense, but there was video. In the Michael Brown case there is no video. Imagine the difference if there had been. Now I don’t mean a difference in the outcome of the grand jury. We have all seen Eric Garner choked to death. It’s clear to see and it didn’t make a difference. Therefore there is data now that tells us police wearing cameras will not make much of a difference. Yes like with Garner, there would be a difference with public opinion but not where it counts most, in the justice system. Because a grand jury simply will not indict a police officer.
We all saw what happened. There really is no excuse to not get an indictment for probable cause. Which brings up another issue. An issue which is so glaringly unfair, such an obvious conflict of interest that the fact it had not been remedied decades ago proves that our justice system is not the best in the world. People can scream and yell about how it’s the best as much as they want, just like they scream and yell that everything in this country is the best, it still doesn’t make it a fact. In this case I’m talking about having an ordinary prosecutor take cases involving police shootings or misconduct. The same prosecutors who are on the side of the police, who work with them daily and need them to make their cases. The same prosecutors who are buddy buddy with cops, who go out and drink with them and socialize with them. This is the greatest injustice of all injustices. Any case which involves law enforcement needs to be assigned immediately to a special prosecutor that has NO connection with the cops involved. If the federal government needs to be involved then so be it. Any country that is serious about its judicial system being the best and most fair would have had this in place already. It’s that simple.
I have to love those right wingers who are now feigning bewilderment at the Garner case. Because there is a video they cannot dispute. Well, most of them. I’m not talking about the disgusting Rudy Giuliani or abhorrent Peter King. They both have enough white ethnic cop apologists (some who are indeed racists) among their followers and constituents that they can be as grotesque as they want with no consequences. The others are, all of a sudden, shocked and amazed that a grand jury didn’t indict. As though this was the first injustice ever. Even though we just had one before this. Of course they still won’t admit any kind of racism was involved. You see it’s all just a coincidence that these are white cops killing blacks, time after time.
Timothy Loehmann, the cop in Cleveland who killed 12 year old Tamir Rice was rejected by the NYPD. The same department that allowed Daniel Pantaleo, the cop who killed Eric Garner, (and who already had one civil case against him settled for tens of thousands of dollars), onto the force, rejected this guy. That’s how bad he is. He was also thrown off a previous police force due to emotional and other issues. He has been reported to have said that he wanted to join the Cleveland police department because he wanted “action.” Action? I thought cops just wanted to go home at night? Oh, and by the way, citizens deserve to go home at night as well. Even more so actually because they aren’t willingly taking a job that can be dangerous and getting money and a pension for it. But this cop was obviously nuts, so why was he hired? Because they never checked into his background. Disgraceful. And the police unions, willing to defend everything and anything a bad cop might do, make this liberal want to hate unions.
Police departments not checking backgrounds before they hire. Cops with no ability to relate on a human, emotional level to another person. When a child puts a chokehold on another, when they are just doing horseplay, and the other child screams or says they can’t breathe, the other child releases. Why? Because human nature kicks in and makes them care about the other kid, to understand that causing distress is bad and wrong. But our cops seem to lack this most basic human ability. Time after time. Whether it’s someone with their hands up or someone who has already been shot two or three times, or a child with a toy gun, or a guy gasping for air, saying 11 times, “I can’t breathe.” Several cops just stood around while Garner was choked to death, both during and after the act.
Too often these cops have no emotional or ethical conscience. There is something sociopathic about it and that’s frightening. Not only do we need police departments to do the BASIC operations of checking backgrounds but we also need better psychological screenings or people wanting to be cops. We need police officers with true concern for the lives and well being of the citizens they are sworn to serve and protect. Not just the old deli owner who serves them lunch, that’s easy, but the people they encounter daily who might be breaking the law as well. That the lives of these people are as important as their own. That they have families they want to go home to as well.
The mentality of the warrior cop must be expunged from the police force. It must be replaced by the human cop.
Two former Jasper police officers won’t face criminal charges for assaulting a woman in their custody last year, the last chapter in an incident that became a flashpoint for racial tension in the East Texas town.
The Beaumont Enterprise reported in November that a grand jury had cleared officers Ricky Grissom and Ryan Cunningham, who are white, for a violent encounter with a black woman named Keyarika Diggles inside the Jasper City Jail. Overhead cameras caught the officers grabbing Diggles by the hair, slamming her face onto a counter and pinning her to the floor, before dragging Diggles, by the feet, into a holding cell. According to her lawyers, Diggles spent hours in the dark “detox” cell before being strip-searched by police dispatcher Lindsey Davenport.
Along with the damning video footage, the case was troubling because Cunningham and Grissom had arrested Diggles at home that morning for nothing more than an unpaid traffic ticket. And the ticket wasn’t quite unpaid—the single mother of two had been paying down her debt in monthly installments. Even after those payments, she still owed $100 at the time Grissom and Cunningham knocked on her door—but it’s still not clear why they’d chosen to arrest her that day.
While the family of Eric Garner and other decent human beings mourned Ericsson senseless loss and the grand jury’s decision, some people were rejoicing. This couple could not contain their excitement.
Rep. Peter King has said some dumb things in the past, so who do you go to if you want to hear dumb things about the Eric Garner murder? You go to Peter King of course.
After the grand jury decided not to indict any of the police officers involved in Garner’s murder, Peter King went on CNN and praised the officers for a job will done, and at the same time, the Republican managed to cast blame on the victim for the victim’s death.
“You had a 350-pound person who was resisting arrest. The police were trying to bring him down as quickly as possible,” King said in an appearance on CNN’s “The Situation Room.” “If he had not had asthma and a heart condition and was so obese, almost definitely he would not have died from this. The police had no reason to know he was in serious condition.”
The confrontation between Pantaleo and Garner was also caught on video that showed Garner repeatedly telling the officer he couldn’t breathe. King said police hear that kind of thing all the time.
“But if you can’t breathe, you can’t talk,” he argued.
The Long Island congressman also dismissed the idea that any racial animus played into Garner’s death.
“I have no doubt, if that were a 350-pound white guy, he would have been treated the same,” King told CNN.
Earlier Wednesday, the congressman tweeted his thanks to the grand jury for not indicting Pantaleo.
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