Dancing. Yes, dancing. That was all it took for the NYPD to “protect and serve” this man, who committed the unthinkable crime of dancing on a public New York street.
The man, a YouTuber named Alexander BOK, took up the #DanceDares challenge by TV personality Ellen Degeneres, who dares ordinary people to dance behind a perfect stranger without touching them. After accepting his challenge, Alexander BOK did his criminal dance routine behind a New York police officer. That is when all hell broke loose!
“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.
Reuters interviewed 25 African American male officers on the NYPD, 15 of whom are retired and 10 of whom are still serving. All but one said that they had been victims of racial profiling, which refers to using race or ethnicity as grounds for suspecting someone of having committed a crime.
The officers said this included being pulled over for no reason, having their heads slammed against their cars, getting guns brandished in their faces, being thrown into prison vans and experiencing stop and frisks while shopping. The majority of the officers said they had been pulled over multiple times while driving. Five had had guns pulled on them.
Desmond Blaize (pictured above), who retired two years ago as a sergeant in the 41st Precinct in the Bronx, said he once got stopped while taking a jog through Brooklyn’s upmarket Prospect Park. “I had my ID on me so it didn’t escalate,” said Blaize, who has sued the department alleging he was racially harassed on the job. “But what’s suspicious about a jogger? In jogging clothes?”
The NYPD and the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the police officers’ union, declined requests for comment. However, defenders of the NYPD credit its policing methods with transforming New York from the former murder capital of the world into the safest big city in the United States.
Ex-Police Chief Skeptical.
“It makes good headlines to say this is occurring, but I don’t think you can validate it until you look into the circumstances they were stopped in,” said Bernard Parks, the former chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, who is African American.
“Now if you want to get into the essence of why certain groups are stopped more than others, then you only need to go to the crime reports and see which ethnic groups are listed more as suspects. That’s the crime data the officers are living with.”
Rudy Giuliani is a ham. He is a political bad actor who uses unfortunate situations to further his own political ambitions. The man went on television all weekend criticizing the present mayor for allowing the protesters to “take over” the city and “blocking the Brooklyn bridge” during recent protests. But as it turns out, Giuliani is known for doing just that – taking over the city through protests even blocking the Brooklyn Bridge… and in Giuliani’s case, he literally took it over!
The protest in question happened during the Dinkins administration and it featured Rudy Giuliani who used the protest as an opportunity to launch a successful campaign for New York City against Dave Dinkins.
Below is an excerpt from an article written by The New York Times, as it detailed the events that unfolds in 1990’s. Balloon Juice dug this up.
Thousands of off-duty police officers thronged around City Hall yesterday, swarming through police barricades to rally on the steps of the hall and blocking traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge for nearly an hour in the most unruly and angry police demonstration in recent memory.
The 300 uniformed officers who were supposed to control the crowd did little or nothing to stop the protesters from jumping barricades, tramping on automobiles, mobbing the steps of City Hall or taking over the bridge. In some cases, the on-duty officers encouraged the protesters.
While the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association had called the rally to protest Mayor David N. Dinkins’s proposal to create an independent civilian agency that would look into police misconduct, the huge turnout — estimated by the Police Department at 10,000 protesters — and the harsh emotional pitch reflected widespread anger among rank-and-file officers toward the Mayor for his handling of riots against the police in Washington Heights last July, his refusal to give them semiautomatic weapons and his appointment of an outside panel to investigate corruption.
“He never supports us on anything,” said Officer Tara Fanning of the Midtown South Precinct, echoing the view of many in the crowd. “A cop shoots someone with a gun who’s a drug dealer, and he goes and visits the family.”
Mayor Dinkins, who was not at City Hall during the demonstration, denounced the protest as “bordering on hooliganism” and said he held the P.B.A. president, Phil Caruso, responsible for what happened. He accused Mr. Caruso of inciting his members’ passions and suggested the union leader was motivated in part by contract negotiations.
The Mayor also assailed Rudolph W. Giuliani, the probable Republican mayoral candidate, who spoke out against the Mayor at the union rally. Mr. Dinkins said Mr. Giuliani had egged on the protest irresponsibly for political reasons. “He’s clearly, clearly an opportunist,” Mr. Dinkins said. “He’s seizing upon a fragile circumstance in our city for his own political gain.”
Appearing on Fox News on Sunday, Rudy Giuliani did what he does best, divide people with his dumb, ignorant rhetoric.
Giuliani was brought on Fox to talk about the recent unfortunate shooting of two police officers in Brooklyn New York on Saturday, when he chose instead to cast blame on the president of the United States for apparently inciting Americans to protest the killings of black men like Eric Garner and Mike Brown.
Giuliani, for what it’s worth, disagreed with the police union’s mouthpiece, who claimed that New York’s mayor has “blood on his hands.” Giuliani instead offered this;
“I think it goes to far to blame the mayor for the murder or to ask for the mayor’s resignation,” Giuliani said.
He continued: “We’ve had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police,” Giuliani said. “The protests are being embraced, the protests are being encouraged. The protests, even the ones that don’t lead to violence, a lot of them lead to violence, all lead to a conclusion. The police are bad, the police are racist. That is completely wrong.”
Giuliani added that leaders like Obama and Al Sharpton “have created an atmosphere of severe, strong, anti-police hatred in certain communities.”
You got that? When police shoot or kill unarmed men, no one should have anything to say about that. Don’t voice your opinion, don’t exercise your constitutional right to protest because if you do, then you “hate the police.”
I was getting worried there. The silence coming from the Hillary camp in regards to the nationwide protects going on these days, was deafening. But on Tuesday, Speaking to an audience after receiving an award from The Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights in New York, Hillary declared, “yes, black lives matter.”
She wondered what Robert Kennedy would say about “the thousands of Americans marching in our streets demanding justice for all,” and “the mothers who’ve lost their sons.”
“What would he say to all those who have lost trust in our government and our other institutions, who shudder at images of excessive force, who read reports about torture done in the name of our country, who see too many representatives in Washington quick to protect a big bank from regulation but slow to take action to help working families facing ever greater pressure,” Clinton said, pivoting to the release of a Senate report last week investigating the CIA’s interrogation techniques after 9/11.
Clinton said that recent world events, including the mass murder of children in Pakistan and the siege in Sydney, Australia, “should steel our resolve and underscore that our values are what set us apart from our adversaries.”
As a kid, I got used to being stopped by the police. I grew up in an inner-ring suburb of St. Louis. It was the kind of place where officers routinely roughed up my friends and family for no good reason.
Ihated the way cops treated me.
But I knew police weren’t all bad. One of my father’s closest friends was a cop. He became a mentor to me and encouraged me to join the force. He told me that I could use the police’s power and resources to help my community.
So in 1994, I joined the St. Louis Police Department. I quickly realized how naive I’d been. I was floored by the dysfunctional culture I encountered.
I won’t say all, but many of my peers were deeply racist.
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
Yes, he carried a toy sword in the streets of Utah. But was that a crime punishable by death? Wait. Lemme ask that question this way. Was carrying a toy sword a crime punishable by an execution squad, firing and killing the victim, hitting him in the back as he ran for his life?
That was the outcome for Darrien Hunt when he walked a street in Utah with the sword – in Utah, that is not a crime – and the Utah police disposed of Mr. Hunt as if he were a rabid animal.
And now this: It was ruled that the officers who took Darrien’s life, did nothing wrong.
Back in September, two Saratoga Springs police officers fired a total of seven shots, Utah County Attorney Jeff R. Buhman told reporters, hitting Darrien Hunt, 22, six times — at least once in the back as he ran away. Buhman’s office investigated the Sept. 10 incident for nearly two months.
Buhman told reporters in a televised news conference that the officers had stopped to talk to Hunt, who was carrying the sword in public — which is not a crime in Utah — and that Hunt lunged “abruptly and without apparent provocation.”
The officers opened fire and may have wounded Hunt, who fled with the officers in pursuit. One of them, Cpl. Matthew Schauerhamer, shot Hunt from behind because he feared that Hunt would attack other people, Buhman said.
The shooting, Buhman decided, “was reasonable given Mr. Hunt’s prior unreasonable” attack on the officers.
Hunt was a resident of Saratoga Springs, which is about 35 miles south of Salt Lake City.
Hunt’s family rejected the county attorney’s decision and promised to file a civil lawsuit over the shooting.
Way to get your name in the news guys, because doing your job and peacefully transporting a psychiatric prisoner to the hospital is too mundane, no excitement and no one knows your name. But pulling over your patrol car and killing the prisoner? Excitement, people know your name and you get a paid vacation.
More about Sgt. Scott Cullen and Adam Daniel Lopp.
Sgt. Scott Culler, a Davidson County deputy, said he shot and killed Lopp on the side of Interstate 40 because he was under attack. Lopp, a 41-year-old patient who was involuntarily committed, has no known criminal history — not even an arrest, and other deputies did not report any other trouble with Lopp, according to local reporting by NBC Charlotte.
The Iredell County Sheriff’s office said there was a confrontation betwen Culler and Lopp after Culler pulled over, and that it’s not clear whether the exchange started in the vehicle, which did not contain a partition sometimes used for transport in police cars. Culler called for back-up, but he shot Lopp before other officers reported to the scene. Culler had no injuries. A spokesman for the department declined to comment to ThinkProgress on whether Lopp was armed or was restrained during transport, but there is no indication that Lopp had access to a weapon.
The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation is assessing whether criminal charges will be filed, and Culler is on administrative leave.
CNN is reporting that Ferguson’s Police Chief, Thomas Jackson, is about to resign. The chief however, along with the mayor, are denying the report.
Under the proposed plan, after Jackson leaves, city leadership would ask the St. Louis County police chief to take over management of Ferguson’s police force.
The announcement could come as soon as next week.
It would be one step in what local officials hope will help reduce tensions in the city as the public awaits a decision on whether the St. Louis County grand jury will bring charges against Officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.
“The animosity that existed in Ferguson were way before Mike Brown’s shooting, justified or not. So, unfortunately, the leadership in the police department has to change,” said CNN legal analyst Mark O’ Mara. “And if he’s sort of a sacrificial lamb to get this started, it’s going to have to be. Ferguson’s going to have to more forward. And it doesn’t seem they can move forward with this police chief in place.”
The man was shot dead, but not before swinging his weapon and striking one officer in the arm and another in the head. The incident happened in Jamaica Queens around 2 pm today.
The officers, all recent graduates of the Police Academy assigned to the 103rd Precinct in Jamaica, were asked to pose for a picture by a freelance photographer at the intersection of 162nd Street and Jamaica Avenue shortly before 2 p.m. when the man attacked them from behind, Police Commissioner William Bratton said.
The suspect “charged at the officers with a hatchet in his hand,” Bratton said. “Unprovoked and not speaking a word, the male then swung at one of the officers with a hatchet, striking his right arm. After striking that officer, the suspect continuing swinging the hatchet, striking a second officer in the head.”
It wasn’t clear what provoked the attack, Bratton. Authorities were working to confirm the identity of the assailant, Bratton said.
The 25-year-old officer, who was struck in the head, is in surgery and his family, which also has members of the NYPD, was keeping vigil at Jamaica Hospital, Bratton said. The 24-year-old officer, who was struck in the arm, was expected to be released from the hospital this evening.
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