The incident happened in France on Tuesday, right before a championship game between Chelsea and Paris Saint-Germain. The footage, obtained by The Guardian, shows a black man trying to board a train and being denied access by self admitted “racists.”
“We’re racist, we’re racist, and that’s the way we like it!”
Chelsea released a statement calling the incident “abhorrent” and had “no place in football or society”. And pledged to “support any criminal action against those involved, and should evidence point to involvement of Chelsea season-ticket holders or members, the club will take the strongest possible action against them, including banning orders.”
More police brutality anyone? This time, in New Jersey. The incident happened on December 30th but the dashboard-cam video was just released. It shows a motorist trying to peacefully exit his vehicle with his hands raised, then killed by what appears to be a couple of trigger happy officers who apparently thought the raised hands of the motorist were threatening.
Police in Bridgeton pulled over the car in which Jerame Reid was a passenger on December 30th. Prosecutors said that “during the course of the stop a handgun was revealed and later recovered,” but witnesses said that Officers Braheme Days and Roger Worley opened fire and killed Reid as he was peacefully exiting the vehicle.
Tahli Dawkins told the Press of Atlantic City that he watched the officers approaching the car yelling, “Don’t effing move!” and that they opened fire without provocation.
Denzel Mosley told KYW-TV that Reid’s hands were “in plain sight,” and that the officers “were telling him, ‘Get out [of] the car,’” then yelling “‘Stop!’ and they started shooting.”
Ben Mosley — a retired sheriff’s deputy — said that Reid may have attempted to get back into the car when the officers yelled the contradictory order to “Stop!” but that he did not believe that justified firing upon him.
“I saw a disarmed man go down to the ground and get shot,” Mosley said. “That’s exactly what I saw.”
The video — obtained by the Press of Atlantic City but not released to the public — confirmed these eye-witness accounts.
Yea, I know what you’re thinking – that’s just impossible. Well, no it’s not. Not in Florida!
A Florida family has contacted a lawyer after they said they discovered a photo one of their members was being used by the North Miami Beach Police Department in a series of images of black men for target practice, according to television station WTVJ.
“The picture actually has like bullet holes,” Woody Deant told WTVJ in an article published Thursday. “One in my forehead and one in my eye.”
Deant’s sister, who serves in the Florida Army National Guard, said she discovered her brother’s face last month among a set of black male mugshots that were being used for target practice when she attended a shooting range, the station reported. Members of the the North Miami Police Department had been practicing there earlier, she told the station.
The mugshot was 15 years old, according to the family.
“Now I’m being used as a target?” Woody Deant told the station. “I’m not even living that life according to how they portrayed me as. I’m a father. I’m a husband. I’m a career man. I work 9-to-5.”
Police Chief J. Scott Dennis told WTVJ that the practice of using images of actual people is standard. He also denied any evidence of racial profiling, saying that police also have white and Hispanic faces in its inventory.
After the shooting in France where 12 people were killed by Islamic extremists, Don Lemon brought a Muslim lawyer and activist on his CNN show to discuss the events. But something stood out in Lemon’s interview that had everyone talking – that fact that he asked his guest, Arsalan Iftikhar, if he supports ISIS. The question it seems was placed to Iftikhar simply because he was a Muslim.
Surprisingly, Iftikhar stayed on set and completed the interview, but he wasn’t done with Don Lemon. In an open letter written Monday, Iftikhar thanked Lemon for his “patently offensive racist dumb-ass question” that made him “famous!”
“Now to be completely honest with you, I totally thought that I had misheard him because surely there was no respectable journalist in the world who would ask a Muslim human rights lawyer whether he supports an organization which violates human rights each and every day,” Iftikhar wrote in the Islamic Monthly, where he is a senior editor.
“But then I remembered that I was dealing with Don Lemon,” he wrote.
Iftikhar — whose last piece for the magazine before Lemon invited him on was “Let’s Call ISIS The Un-Islamic State,” slamming the terror group — wrote that “such an obviously absurd question certainly deserves no response.”
He closed the letter with a flourish.
“It is a sincere honor to be added to the litany of famous ‘Malaysian-black-hole-penis-biting’ Don Lemon media gaffes which can be added to his audition tape for his next job at FOX News Channel,” Iftikhar wrote.
“So from the bottom of my heart,” he added, “I want to publicly thank Don Lemon for making me famous with his patently offensive racist dumb-ass question.”
The FBI is looking for a balding white man in his 40s who may be responsible for Tuesday’s bombing of an NAACP office building in Colorado Springs. The bombing happened on Tuesday before 11AM. According to FBI officials, a device was detonated against the wall of the building at 603 S. El Paso St.
A gas can had been placed next to the device but was not ignited by the explosion, officials said in a news release.
The explosion charred the exterior wall of the building, but no one was injured and no other damage was reported.
The FBI said it is looking for a person of interest, described as a balding white man in his 40s who may be driving a dirty, 2000 or older model white pickup truck with paneling, an open tailgate and a missing or covered license plate.
“Some neighbors came out and said they saw a Caucasian gentleman get into a white truck,” said Gene Southerland, who owns Mr. G’s Hair Design Studios, which shares the building with the NAACP office.
“It was such a beautiful day and everything, sunny. And in broad daylight, you hear this explosion. It’s frightening,” he said.
Southerland, a customer and a beautician were inside the business at the time of the explosion, which knocked down a few plastic bottles on a shelf in the northeast corner of the building, he said.
“I had a corrections officer in my chair, and he said it sounded like a shotgun blast,” Southerland said.
“Eric Garner, Mike Brown. Very sad situations. Very, very sad situations. Situations that left so much frustration in me, watching these injustices happen again,” Macklemore said. “It was one of those moments of ‘How is this happening again right now?’ If there’s anything positive that has come out of their deaths — if there’s anything positive — I believe it has brought attention to injustices that have been plaguing America since the jump. Racial profiling. Corrupt judicial system. Police brutality. These are things that now have attention. Now people are talking about these things. Which is great. People are mobilizing. I’ve been inspired by the mobilization.”
As for his place in the movement, Macklemore acknowledged that it was a bit complicated in a lengthy answer about race relations in America and his standing as a white male rapper within the discussion:
For me, as a white dude — as a white rapper — I’m like, how do I participate in this conversation? How do I participate? How do I get involved on a level where I’m not coopting the movement or I’m not making it about me, but also realizing the platform I have and the reach that I have, and doing it in an authentic and genuine way. Racism is uncomfortable to talk about. White people, we can just turn off the TV when we’re sick of talking about racism. We can be like, “Oops, I’m done.” It does not work that way for everybody, but that’s way we can do. White “liberal” people want to be nice. We don’t want to mess up. We don’t want to be racists. We want to be like, “We’re post-racial and we have a black president and we don’t need to talk about white privilege. It’s all good, right?” It’s not the case. I was talking to somebody the other day, and they said to me, “Silence is an action.” It is my privilege that I can be silent about this issue. And I’m tired of being silent about it. I’ve been silent for a long time about it. Because I didn’t want to mess up. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. I didn’t want to offend anybody. But it is so imperative right now that we have this race conversation in America. If we’re going to progress. If we’re going to move past this. If we’re going to work together — truly work together — we have to get past that awkward stage of the race conversation, step up and just have it. I don’t where that starts, other than just speaking about it. You just have to start talking about it. As a white person, we have to listen. We need to listen, direct the attention to people of color on the ground mobilizing, listen to those people, and take some direction on how we can actually make this conversation happen.
And now, your cup of Republican racism straight from your elected officials.
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the newly elected House majority whip, acknowledged Monday that he spoke at a gathering hosted by white nationalist leaders while serving as a state representative in 2002, thrusting a racial controversy into House Republican ranks days before the party assumes control of both congressional chambers.
The 48-year-old Scalise, who ascended to the House GOP’s third-ranking post earlier this year, confirmed through an adviser that he once appeared at a convention of the European-American Unity and Rights Organization.
That organization, founded by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, has been called a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“Beyond hosting a Web site, whitecivilrights.com, and staging an occasional conference, EURO is a paper tiger, serving primarily as a vehicle to publicize Duke’s writing and sell his books,” the SPLC writes on its Web site.
In a statement, Scalise’s spokesperson Moira Bagley emphasized that the then-state lawmaker was unaware at the time of the group’s ideology and its association with racists and neo-Nazi activists.
The racist over at Fox News expressed his solution to all the problems black people face here in America. According to Bill O’Reilly, black people should learn to not get pregnant at 14 and, oh yea, black people don’t take care of their kids, so they need to learn to do that too!
O’Reilly’s guest was Martin Luther King III, the son of civil rights icon, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And while discussing some of the problems faced by blacks, Martin Luther King III suggested that a unifying message is what America needs at this time of racial intolerance. But O’Reilly wasn’t about to preach a unifying message to anybody, he was more intent on proving how racist and ignorant he really is.
O’Reilly offered his solution for blacks in America – “Don’t abandon your children. Don’t get pregnant at 14. Don’t allow your neighborhoods to deteriorate into free-fire zones. That’s what the African American community should have on their T-shirts,” he said. You know, cause abandoning children and getting pregnant at 14 is definitely a black thing.
Why anyone goes on this idiot’s show is something I’ll never understand. But they go on anyway, and they sit through the idiocy as O’Reilly strokes his own… racist ego!
On her Facebook post, Mary Kate Blankenburg, the Counselor at the Central Bucks West High School in Pennsylvania, threatened to kill all the protesters who were protesting the death of Eric Garner. Blankenburg wrote to “personally shoot every one of them!”
Her Facebook post has since been deleted, but of course screenshots of it was captured before the deletion occurred. Blankenburg wrote, “If my child cannot get to the Eagles game due to protesters, I will personally SHOOT every one of them. You’ve been warned idiots!!”
Blankenburg has since been suspended and an investigation is on the way. Central Bucks School District Superintendent David Weitzel in a statement said;
“We will take appropriate action once we learn all of the facts. I also notified the District Attorney’s Office on Sunday and we are working with them as they investigate this incident,” he said.
“The content of the post does not in any way reflect the beliefs or values of the Central Bucks School District.”
A classic case of the blame the victim mentality. We will be foolish to expect anything more from Fox News.
In light of all the protests going on these days with people speaking out against police brutality throughout this country, Fox has decided to take a different look at the reason minority communities are being victimized and murdered by some police officers and according to Fox host Jeanine Pirro, minorities are to blamed.
Reading a question from a poll conducted by Fox News to her viewers on her television program, Justice with Judge Jeanine, Pirro asked the question? “Do police need to be retrained on how to be sensitive to the minority community.” Pirro said the response from Fox viewers was “overwhelmingly in favor of law enforcement,” and she also read some of those results to her audience.
Pirro quoted Fox viewer ‘Jeff’ who wrote, “Why is it always necessary to tip toe around the minority community,” with ‘Larry’ writing, “No. Enough is enough. The general public needs to be more sensitive to the police and show them the respect they deserve.”
Pirro added, “I agree.”
Viewer ‘Jordan’ disagreed, saying.”Yes. Those cops were racially profiling,” setting off a condescending Pirro who said, “Hey Jordan, you don’t even know what racial profiling is.”
Is it just me, or does it still not feel like the holidays yet? Perhaps the warmish, wet weather we’ve had here in the Northeast is partly to blame, or maybe it’s that the calendar has jammed the buying season into one less week this year because of a late Thanksgiving. Yes, yes, Chanukah, for once, is neither early nor late, which is rare for a Jewish holiday, but I think there’s something more than this going on in the country that’s partly clouding the season.
We have other things on our minds. Ferguson. Staten Island. ISIS. Oil prices. Wages. Equality issues relating to gender, age, sexual preference and orientation. Supreme Court arguments over worker disability rights and whether someone can post noxious, threatening dreck on Facebook, call it rap, and never mind the effect on the intended target. Even sports won’t let us relax and enjoy, what with players being suspended, unsuspended, arrested, concussed and, heaven forbid, involved in some of the aforementioned social issues. Why can’t they just be like Mike and play the game?
It seems as if the country is a bit more serious than normal this holiday season, weighing the price of our freedoms against the responsibilities that come with them. We’re looking at race and wondering why we still have problems and why whites and African-Americans still have such differing perspectives on how they are treated by police, the courts, storekeepers and mall security. We’re looking at income inequality and wondering why companies that make billions can’t lead by example and pay workers what they are worth, which is a wage that allows them to live a decent life. We’re looking at who is an American and how we can make sure that people who live here and contribute to their families and communities can stay here without the fear that the government is going to deport them because of a long-ago action. In short, we’re looking at justice and trying to make sure that everyone gets it because more than any other freedom afforded us, justice must be applied equally at all times.
In the end, I think this makes us stronger, and makes the season of giving that much more important. When we discuss, protest and even engage in some civil disobedience, we are reminded that we have given ourselves the greatest gifts of all: to live in a free society where we can air our concerns and make others realize that many groups in the United States are uncomfortable and unwealthy and insecure, and that each of us is responsible to make sure that every citizen is safe. That way, we can give other gifts, the material ones, knowing that we have done our part to make this a better country. The holidays we are about to celebrate are religious, but we need to remember that our national religion is democracy, and as such, we must all practice it.
So although it might not feel like the holidays just yet, I’m a little more optimistic that this season will see us do more good for ourselves and our neighbors.
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.
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