Author Archives: Mike

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Cop Kills Handcuffed Man In Police Station Back On The Job, District Att. Makes No Ruling…

Look at this video of a police Seargent, Tyler Longman telling a hand­cuffed, men­tal­ly agi­tat­ed Michael Chad Breinholt, “you are about to die, my friend,” then shoot­ing Breinholt, killing him.
The killing of Breinholt was the third known killing by Sergeant Tyler Longman.
It may not sur­prise you that this killing hap­pened almost two years ago and that Longman is back on duty. But wait, there is more; those of you who fol­low my work also know that I con­tin­ue to make the case that cor­rupt pros­e­cu­tors and Corrupt and com­plic­it judges are a big part of the police cor­rup­tion scan­dal in the United States; so it sure­ly should not sur­prise you that the dis­trict attor­ney has not filed charges either has he said there is noth­ing here.
If there were noth­ing there, the dis­trict attor­ney would sure­ly have said it two years ago. The fact that noth­ing has been said or done by the DA’s office is a clear sign that they know that there can be no rea­son­able jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for mur­der­ing a mental/​inebriated man inside a police facility.
The obvi­ous con­clu­sion is that the dis­trict attor­ney’s office is aid­ing the police to see if this will blow over.
It is also impor­tant to under­stand that the media had to fight like hell to get this video from the police department.
So as we all know, Police Departments are laws unto themselves.
They make arrests, make deci­sions on life and death, exe­cute offend­ers and non-offend­ers alike, then decide if any­one sees or has the right to see what they did.

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These things hap­pen to peo­ple of col­or, and the major­i­ty of the white com­mu­ni­ty stares into space as if “oh well!” Here is the rub though, Michael Chad Breinholt was not black.
Michael Chad Breinholt was white„ but that did not stop them from esca­lat­ing this minor issue into a sit­u­a­tion that would jus­ti­fy them killing him.
Most impor­tant­ly, the cop who killed Michael Chad Breinholt had killed twice before while on duty.
Some peo­ple stu­pid­ly believe that these types of blood­thirsty killings will only be vis­it­ed on Black and Brown peo­ple„ which brings me back to a Michael Niemoller’s quote that I have come to use quite a bit these days; First they came for the social­ists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a social­ist. Then they came for the trade union­ists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade union­ist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.

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Unfortunately, the moth­er of Michael Chad Breinholt is left to grieve the loss of her son. Whether she was sym­pa­thet­ic to the tens of thou­sands of moth­ers and fathers who lost their chil­dren to police vio­lence is irrel­e­vant at this point.
The larg­er issue here is that this police vio­lence may dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly be affect­ing Black peo­ple at this point by virtue of Black’s per­cent­age in the wider soci­ety, but make no mis­take about it, these abu­sive psy­cho­path­ic killers are killing even more whites numer­i­cal­ly that they are killing Blacks.
It seems how­ev­er that the white soci­ety are pre­pared to accept these white vic­tims as col­lat­er­al dam­age in the larg­er war on black people.
It is kind of like drain­ing the pool and doing with­out pub­lic pools and suf­fer­ing in the sum­mer heat rather than share the pool with black cit­i­zens, some­thing that they are know for.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.

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Cops Beat Black Man With Handcuffs Like ‘Brass Knuckles’ And Pulled Down His Pants

One offi­cer has been fired and is fac­ing 99 years in prison.

By Trone Dowd

When Aundre Howard, a Black man, fled from Houston police dur­ing a traf­fic stop in 2019, one of the offi­cers was caught on body cam­era footage telling his part­ner to “shoot his ass” as they pur­sued. When that offi­cer final­ly caught up to Howard, he used a pair of hand­cuffs wrapped around his left hand like a pair of brass knuck­les to repeat­ed­ly punch the flee­ing man in the back of the head.
Now, the for­mer police offi­cer is fac­ing prison time.
Lucas Vieira, 31, a four-year-vet­er­an with the Houston Police Department, was indict­ed by a Harris County District Court grand jury on July 9. Two days lat­er, the Houston Police Department announced that it had fired Vieira months ago, in April. If con­vict­ed, he faces up to 99 years in prison as well as a $10,000 fine.

The indict­ment also comes just over three months after Howard, 34, filed a fed­er­al civ­il rights law­suit accus­ing Vieira of unjust­ly strik­ing him and of vio­lat­ing his right to unjust search and due process.

“Mr. Howard suf­fered great pain, con­tu­sions, humil­i­a­tion, anx­i­ety, fear, loss of sleep, headaches, and oth­er men­tal anguish as a result of the defendant’s actions,” accord­ing to the law­suit, which was pro­vid­ed to VICE News by Howard’s attor­ney, Randall Kallinen.

“My client is very pleased that the offi­cer was indict­ed because it val­i­dates what he’s been con­cerned about for a while,” Kallinen told VICE News. “He does feel bet­ter that when offi­cers injure peo­ple like him­self, they do have to face jus­tice just like any­body else would.”

The encounter with police occurred July 7, 2019, when Vieira ini­ti­at­ed a stop on Howard’s vehi­cle for a traf­fic vio­la­tion. According to Vieira’s attor­ney James Siscoe, police noticed mar­i­jua­na on Howard’s cen­ter con­sole when they first approached the car dur­ing the traf­fic stop, prompt­ing a search. Police placed Howard in hand­cuffs, but they found noth­ing. As Officer Serrano began to put on rub­ber gloves for a cav­i­ty search, Howard began to run from police toward a near­by free­way, accord­ing to the law­suit. Read the full sto­ry here; https://​www​.vice​.com/​e​n​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​4​a​v​7​a​b​/​c​o​p​s​-​b​e​a​t​-​b​l​a​c​k​-​m​a​n​-​w​i​t​h​-​h​a​n​d​c​u​f​f​s​-​l​i​k​e​-​b​r​a​s​s​-​k​n​u​c​k​l​e​s​-​a​n​d​-​p​u​l​l​e​d​-​d​o​w​n​-​h​i​s​-​p​a​nts

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Jamaica’s Murder Rate Increases Over Last Year’s Numbers

As Jamaicans, it seems that wher­ev­er we live out­side our native Jamaica, we tend to make par­al­lels with Jamaica on every issue we discuss.
Crime has been one of the most top­i­cal issues dis­cussed among Jamaicans in the dias­po­ra and at home. For mem­bers of the dias­po­ra who gen­uine­ly have an inter­est in a crime-free Jamaica, the steep­est hill to climb is the con­sis­tent push-back from our con­tem­po­raries at home who con­tin­ue to argue that (crime de every weh), trans­la­tion, crime is everywhere.
As such, the ever-increas­ing vio­lent crime sta­tis­tics have not engen­dered dis­gust, revul­sion, or the will to fight back. The pop­u­la­tion has set­tled into a dan­ger­ous state of accep­tance, a new nor­mal of how things are.
So much affects how we can bring this mon­ster under con­trol, includ­ing whether there is a desire to in the first place because there is mon­ey involved for the play­ers or whether the dias­po­ra has the stand­ing to demand change in our country.
I would posit that the dias­po­ra does have the stand­ing, con­sid­er­ing that it pours an incred­i­ble amount of finan­cial resources into the coun­try, mak­ing itself the num­ber two largest stream of for­eign mon­ey flow­ing into the country.
On that basis, the dias­po­ra does not only deserve a seat at the table; it needs to have sev­er­al seats at the table.
Money talks bull­shit walk! Those who think that because they were nev­er able to leave, left, and were sent back, or chose [not] to leave makes them patri­ots need to take sev­er­al seats to the side, not at the table.
Patriotism is not about where you live or whether you could leave, or whether or not you chose to leave.

Over the years, I have writ­ten sev­er­al arti­cles in which I said that a large part of the prob­lem Jamaica faces with crime comes from the nation’s high tol­er­ance for it.
As I said pre­vi­ous­ly, one of the more stri­dent argu­ments against my insis­tence that crime is far too high in Jamaica has been that.….…yup, “crime de every weh
Of course, they then com­pare the United States, crime sit­u­a­tion, which of course expos­es a sig­nif­i­cant mis­un­der­stand­ing of how crime sta­tis­tics are looked at, or even how mis­guid­ed that com­par­i­son is based on sev­er­al factors..”.
Two of the fac­tors that are not con­sid­ered are (a)the size of the American pop­u­la­tion of 320 mil­lion com­pared to its vio­lent crime sta­tis­tics when com­pared to ( Jamaica’s 2.8 mil­lion) and its vio­lent crime statistics.
(b)The size of the United States,3.8 mil­lion square miles (9.8 mil­lion square kilometers)compared to Jamaica,10,992 km² (4,244 sq mi).
When all of the data is tab­u­lat­ed in the United States and aver­aged among the American pop­u­la­tion of 320 mil­lion, it shows that though the United States is indeed a vio­lent coun­try, it is nowhere even remote­ly close to Jamaica when it comes to vio­lent crime.
Violent crime is expo­nen­tial­ly high in some areas of the United States while almost unheard of in some areas in the coun­try’s vast expans­es. Crime is indeed a top­ic of dis­cus­sion in America, not because it is an exis­ten­tial issue for the coun­try but because it makes good polit­i­cal fod­der for one side of the polit­i­cal divide, which would rather see the police have free rein to mur­der inno­cent black and brown Americans.

ACQUIESCENCE

Generally, when there is a high crime rate in a coun­try or parts of a coun­try, the root caus­es are that those who should stop it are com­plic­it in it. Nowhere is this more true than in the United States and Jamaica though not for the same reasons.
The high crime rate in both coun­tries may be attrib­uted to the same acqui­es­cence, lack of will, and com­plic­i­ty which I allud­ed to.
In Jamaica, though the present admin­is­tra­tion may be some­what bet­ter on crime than its pre­de­ces­sor, it is nowhere near where it should have been on this issue. Sure, they have upgrad­ed police sta­tions and changed oth­er ameni­ties; how­ev­er, the laws have not been strength­ened. Neither have the admin­is­tra­tion pledged the req­ui­site sup­port the secu­ri­ty forces need to do their jobs effectively.
It is near­ly impos­si­ble to explain just how impor­tant that sup­port is to the fight against vio­lent crim­i­nals and crime syndicates.
Jamaica’s nation­al mur­der toll of 755 is five per­cent high­er than the 716 tal­lied for the cor­re­spond­ing peri­od in 2020, one Jamaican dai­ly reports.

In the United States, with its 17,985 law enforce­ment agen­cies, the issue is not that there is the same kind of sup­port for crim­i­nal­i­ty through the var­i­ous lev­els of governance.
The issue for America is that the Constitution guar­an­tees in the sec­ond amend­ment that Americans have a right to bear arms. This is the only amend­ment to the con­sti­tu­tion that many Americans have feal­ty to.
Not the right to peace­ably protest, not the right to free speech, not the right to prac­tice one’s reli­gion, not the right not to have Government invade your pri­vate space with­out a war­rant, not the right not to have your prop­er­ty seized by the government.
None of that, only the right to bear arms applies-at least to the Republican party.
The right to bear arms for the Republicans is a gift that keeps on giv­ing because to its [fol­low­ers] (it is now a cult), it is their pro­tec­tion that will allow them to main­tain white suprema­cy, even if it means over­throw­ing the gov­ern­ment as they tried to do on January 6th, 2021.
In both coun­tries, it is the lack of will to address spe­cif­ic areas that gen­er­ate vio­lent crim­i­nal activ­i­ty that con­tin­ue to cause or aid vio­lent crime producers.
Stop the wan­ton sale of guns in America and, as for Jamaica, give the police the sup­port they need, and vio­lent crime begins to trend south.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

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19-Year-Old College Student Charged With A Hate Crime For Teasing A Cop

In another shocking iteration of how America has become a police state- police in Utah arrested a 19-year-old college student because she crumpled up a pathetic ‘back-the-blue’ sign, and threw it in the garbage as he abused her colleagues in a traffic stop in a backwoods town of fewer than 2’000 people.
Now check this out, even the people whose brainchild the law was, say that was not the intent of the law. It was designed to protect marginalized people who become victims of legitimate hate.
But this is exactly what these Republican-run states do wherever there is a national outcry against police violence they attach all kinds of police protections in legislation that would legitimately pass muster, effectively making police in America part of a national marginalized community.
If you are wondering why this is so, read up on how policing came into being in the United States from slave overseers to slave-catchers to what it is today.
They wear uniforms today but their functions remain as they did hundreds of years ago. Police still operate as foot soldiers for white supremacy.

Lauren Gibson was in a car­a­van of friends head­ing from their camp­ing spot in Panguitch, Utah, back to California last week when one of the cars was pulled over for speed­ing. The stop took place near a gas sta­tion in the small town of less than 2,000 people.
Before the day was over, the 19-year-old was on her way to fac­ing hate-crime charges in what crit­ics describe as one of the more absurd exam­ples yet of aggriev­ed cops undu­ly liken­ing them­selves to mar­gin­al­ized minor­i­ty groups in a coun­try rife with hate crimes.

Gibson said the Garfield County Sheriff’s Deputy who pulled over her friend’s car was aggres­sive and even­tu­al­ly wrote her friend a tick­et for speed­ing. After watch­ing the inter­ac­tion, she said, she was upset and picked up a rust­ed “Back the Blue” sign that she said her friends had found on the side of the road and kept in one of the cars. (The deputy would lat­er sus­pect that it had been stolen from the gas sta­tion and even went inside to check, but learned it had not been.) After the deputy fin­ished writ­ing his tick­et, she told The Daily Beast, she waved the sign at the offi­cer, stepped on it, and threw it in the trash.

Gibson, a California col­lege stu­dent, said she wouldn’t describe her­self as “anti-police,” even though she does believe some tend to abuse their pow­er. The dis­play of emo­tion, she said, was due to her anger over how her friend was treat­ed and the effect the traf­fic stop seemed to have on her. “I just want­ed to, I don’t know, make her feel bet­ter or some­thing or stand up for her,” Gibson told The Daily Beast.
Instead, Gibson was arrest­ed by a sheriff’s deputy and charged with dis­or­der­ly con­duct and crim­i­nal mis­chief with a hate-crime enhance­ment for her attempt to “intim­i­date law enforce­ment,” accord­ing to a prob­a­ble cause affi­davit obtained by The Daily Beast.
The charge was a shock to Gibson. And hate-crime experts famil­iar with Utah’s laws say they also believe it is a stretch at best.

“This doesn’t real­ly seem to meet the cri­te­ria for what we would gen­er­al­ly con­sid­er a hate crime, nor the spe­cif­ic lan­guage of the statute,” said Seth Brysk, a Utah region­al direc­tor with the Anti-Defamation League.
The Garland County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to repeat­ed requests for com­ment on Gibson’s arrest. The Garfield County Attorney’s Office also did not respond to repeat­ed requests about whether and how Gibson would be pros­e­cut­ed on the charges she faces.
In the affi­davit, the respond­ing deputy report­ed that Gibson stomped on the “Back the Blue” sign, crum­bled it up “in a destruc­tive man­ner” and threw it into a trash can — “all while smirk­ing in an intim­i­dat­ing manner.”
But Brysk, who helped advo­cate for Utah’s hate-crime enhance­ments, which passed into law in 2019, said the key phrase there is “intim­i­date” — which is lan­guage includ­ed in the statute. While the mod­el hate-crime statute that the ADL draft­ed for Utah was meant to pro­tect vic­tims of cer­tain races, reli­gions, or sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tions, he said the ver­sion that even­tu­al­ly passed in Utah also applies that pro­tect­ed sta­tus to law-enforce­ment offi­cers. Louisiana passed a sim­i­lar addi­tion to their hate crime statute in 2016, at a time when, as now, protests against police vio­lence were vis­i­ble in the state and nationally.

Although he believes that addi­tion was “unnec­es­sary” giv­en that there are already harsh­er laws on the books for peo­ple who attack law-enforce­ment offi­cers, Brysk said, he does believe there are instances where some­one may be seek­ing to ter­ror­ize or intim­i­date cops writ large.
According to a report by the National Law Enforcement Memorial and Museum, at least 264 cops were killed in 2020, a 96 per­cent increase from 2019 that was large­ly due to COVID. Nonetheless, the report claimed that at least six deaths were the result of an “ambush” attack on officers.
Still, Brysk added, a 19-year-old col­lege stu­dent rough­ing up a sign and smirk­ing doesn’t strike him as one of those instances. “That’s not the inten­tion and that’s not what’s going on here,” he told The Daily Beast.

Brian Levin, a pro­fes­sor of crim­i­nal jus­tice and direc­tor of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, said he could see how Utah’s law might “at its great­est elas­tic stretch” allow for a “mis­ap­pli­ca­tion” of the statute in the case of Gibson. But he was doubt­ful her case would go very far. “I think any decent pros­e­cu­tor would decline the charges,” he said.
Of course, that might not be the case in Garfield County, where just last year, a man was arrest­ed, charged, and con­vict­ed in a strik­ing­ly sim­i­lar incident.
In August 2020, Joseph Dawson, 32, was arrest­ed by Garfield County Sheriff’s Office deputies after pulling down a sim­i­lar “Back the Blue” sign at an Escalante, Utah, gas sta­tion. He spray-paint­ed it with pink let­ters, replac­ing the word blue with “bisex­u­al,” accord­ing to a prob­a­ble cause affi­davit obtained by The Daily Beast.

A man near the gas sta­tion report­ed­ly con­front­ed Dawson, ripped the sign down, and wiped paint on Dawson’s head before he was able to dri­ve off. Dawson — who did not respond to a request for com­ment — was lat­er found by deputies at a hik­ing trail­head and gave a “long expla­na­tion” of why he defaced the sign, “but the expla­na­tion wasn’t clear,” accord­ing to the affi­davit. He was arrest­ed and, after the Sheriff’s Office appealed to the Utah Attorney General’s Office, charged with a hate crime.
In December, Dawson was found guilty, accord­ing to court records, and was sen­tenced to two days in jail and a year of pro­ba­tion. The Utah Attorney General’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.
Gibson said she start­ed to glean the gist about Dawson’s case from the deputy who arrest­ed her last week. “He told me, ‘Do you want to know what hap­pened to the last per­son that got arrest­ed for this?’” she said. “He was kind of threat­en­ing me in that way.”
Gibson said she spent one night in jail after her arrest and has not yet filed a plea. She faces up to a year in prison, but she hopes to get things resolved with the prosecutor’s office.

“I don’t feel like I did any­thing wrong,” she said, adding that she does not believe that her actions jus­ti­fy a hate-crime charge in a coun­try where hor­rif­ic attacks on racial and reli­gious minori­ties have been inescapable in recent years.
“If it was a dentist’s sign or some­thing and I just crushed a den­tist sign or some­thing in front of them, like, noth­ing would have hap­pened,” she said. “It’s the same thing. it’s just an occupation.”(This sto­ry orig­i­nat­ed at Buzzfeed​.com)

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Where Is The Fraud Republicans Claimed Would Engulf New York If Undocumented Are Allowed Drivers Licenses?

It was­n’t long ago that Republicans in the New York State were up in arms about the dan­gers inher­ent in allow­ing undoc­u­ment­ed peo­ple to apply for dri­ver’s licens­es. I know some of you won’t pre­tend that you for­get already; the law took effect on December 14 of 2020. Even some skin folk were mak­ing a big issue about it just for the sake of join­ing the bandwagon.
Me, I would be for it as long as Republicans are against it, sim­ply because they are for noth­ing good, so the idea must have been a good idea? New York became the 13th state to pass the green­light law, an idea whose time was long overdue.
Ok, you don’t need to answer that rhetor­i­cal ques­tion; of course, it was a great idea!
Republicans in Erie, Monroe, and Rensselaer coun­ties tried to block the law from going ahead, a sign of just how wicked those peo­ple can be when they are allowed near power.
The hate­ful Republicans bitched against the law. Some clerks said they (will not) issue licens­es to undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants, say­ing their offices are not equipped to deter­mine the verac­i­ty of doc­u­ments that can soon be sub­mit­ted to obtain a license.

Oh, I want to sync up with some friends, one young so-called Democrat who have polit­i­cal aspi­ra­tions told men­he vot­ed for the local Republican Mayor in my city City, a for­mer cop, instead of the young African-American man who ran on the Democratic tick­et to defeat him.
He told me he was dis­sat­is­fied with his answer so he vot­ed for the Republican because the Democratic can­di­date’s answer to his ques­tion, “what he intends to do for the city”, was unsat­is­fac­to­ry to him. It will be a cold day in hades when a Republican votes for a Democrat.
I asked him what the Republican Mayor has done for the city since he has been in office? I’m still await­ing a response.
I had pre­vi­ous­ly told him that I would sup­port his can­di­da­cy in what­ev­er way I could if he ever decides to run for office; I am glad we had our lit­tle con­ver­sa­tion that may be out the door.
As the so-called “Greenlight” mea­sure picked up steam last year, the lying Republican hate­mon­gers all upstate whites, issued this statement.

“This ses­sion, Democrats have yield­ed to law­break­ers over and over again.” “We must put the brakes on this unfair pro­pos­al which ignores the over­whelm­ing oppo­si­tion of our cit­i­zens to grant this priv­i­lege to ille­gal immi­grants. We must Red Light the Green Light bill that sim­ply opens up our sys­tem to fraud and places a bur­den on County Clerks and DMV employ­ees to ver­i­fy the authen­tic­i­ty of for­eign doc­u­ments as proof of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion,” said Senate Republican Leader John J. Flanagan.

The neigh­bor­ing state of Connecticut passed the green light law before New York; accord­ing to the web­site democ​ratand​pol​i​cy​.com, the Migrant Policy Institute, a nation­al think tank on immi­gra­tion issues, esti­mat­ed there were 882,000 New Yorkers over the age of 16 with­out a legal pres­ence in the U.S. Four years after neigh­bor­ing Connecticut passed a sim­i­lar law, the DMV there said it had a reduc­tion in hit-and-run crash­es and a decline in unli­censed dri­ving tickets.
I was hit on a snowy day years ago by a bunch of Mexican guys in a car; through no fault of their own, they sim­ply slid into my stopped vehi­cle at a traf­fic light. Fearing I would call the police, they all exit­ed their vehi­cle and ran, leav­ing theirs.
But to under­stand the Republicans, you must under­stand that they do not care about data or facts. So the data from Connecticut, which bears out that there are few­er hit and runs, and a decline in unli­censed dri­ving tick­ets is exact­ly the oppo­site of what they crave. They crave con­fronta­tions with police and puni­tive out­comes from those encounters.
They do not care to have few­er unli­censed dri­ving sum­mons­es; they want the rev­enue; they do not care about the even greater rev­enue stream that comes from hav­ing all dri­vers licensed and the gen­er­al pub­lic safer when all dri­vers are insured.
We are still lis­ten­ing for the evi­dence of fraud that was so bla­tant­ly pre­dict­ed by New York’s upstate white Republicans.
Word of cau­tion to you Black and Brown vot­ers, there is no such thing as a good Republican, that ship has long sailed.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.

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Democracy Hangs In The Balance As Republicans Give Up On Democracy To Preserve White Supremacy

I don’t know if you are watch­ing, but [a] poi­son has been poured out in America that has so polar­ized the coun­try that the nation’s nation­al secu­ri­ty is great­ly compromised.
It has noth­ing to do with the two polit­i­cal par­ties and every­thing to do with one par­ty; the Republican party.
The Republican and the Democratic Parties in the lat­ter part of the 20th cen­tu­ry and the ear­ly years of the 21st cen­tu­ry basi­cal­ly could be viewed as only slight­ly dif­fer­ent in ideology.
That was up until Al Gore won the elec­tions in Florida and the Republican major­i­ty on the Supreme court under William Rehnquist stopped the count in Florida where George Bush’s younger Jeb was Governor and appoint­ed George Bush the 43rd President of the United States.

Josh Hawley, US Senator from Missouri, was the first to object to Biden’s win.

George Bush served two terms despite being a hor­ri­ble pres­i­dent; the events of September 11th, 2001, would have solid­i­fied in place any Republican in the White House. The Republican par­ty is about arro­gance, brava­do, and launch­ing for­eign wars; when they do, the entire Republican estab­lish­ment coa­lesces around the pres­i­dent — the Democrats march in lock­step like sheep being herd­ed to be slaughtered.
For Decades the Republicans wrapped them­selves in the American flag and claimed that they were the true patri­ots in the coun­try. They launched wars and made for­eign pol­i­cy their touch­stone; it worked as the bulk of the peo­ple liv­ing in rur­al states, many of whom have nev­er trav­eled out­side their coun­ty of birth, believed that peo­ple in oth­er coun­tries are there to be bombed into obliv­ion when they see fit.
Afraid of being labeled unpa­tri­ot­ic, the Democrats allowed them­selves to be herd­ed along, in a Republican-lite ide­o­log­i­cal no-man’s-land, luke­warm, nei­ther hot nor cold-prob­lem is that nobody likes lukewarm.

Donald Trump

The trag­ic irony of ironies is that the Republican par­ty that fraud­u­lent­ly claimed to be [patriots]is the par­ty that waged war on the American process to install a dement­ed old psy­chopath into the pres­i­den­cy for life.
L. Michael Tompkins, EdD. is a psy­chol­o­gist at the Sacramento County Mental Health Treatment Center, argues a key dif­fer­ence between a psy­chopath and a sociopath is whether he has a con­science, the lit­tle voice inside that lets us know when we’re doing some­thing wrong.
A psy­chopath doesn’t have a con­science. If he lies to you so he can steal your mon­ey, he won’t feel any moral qualms, though he may pre­tend to. He may observe oth­ers and then act the way they do, so he’s not “found out,” Dr. Tompkins said.
Hmm, seems all of the points to prove are in order. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a psy­cho­path­ic duck!

Sarah Palin

Notwithstanding where American is today, a mere two decades or so ago, the major­i­ty of Americans con­sid­ered them­selves patri­ot­ic cit­i­zens, and they were.
They would nev­er imag­ine them­selves storm­ing the Capitol build­ing to hang the vice-pres­i­dent of the United States so that they may over­turn the legit­i­mate results of an elec­tion, in order to install a psy­cho­path­ic dement­ed King.
No, they fun­da­men­tal­ly did not want a King; they believed, as George Washington did, that they should not have a King because those were the found­ing prin­ci­ples of indi­vid­ual lib­er­ty on which the United States was established.
But the dement­ed psy­cho­path­ic would-be king did not unleash the unpa­tri­ot­ic poi­son in America. Being the con­niv­ing oppor­tunist he is, he mere­ly took advan­tage of the hatred and ani­mus unleashed by Sarah Palin.
Sarah Palin came on the scene dur­ing the 2008 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, unleashed to bring life into the cam­paign of John McCain, who was run­ning against the first African-American to be nom­i­nat­ed by any polit­i­cal par­ty in the coun­try to be its stan­dard-bear­er. That man, Barack Hussien Obama, would become the 44th President of the United States.

Ronald Reagan

Sarah Palin is a racist dunce, much like Donald Trump. Still, the Republican Party did not care that they were lit­er­al­ly putting a total mis­fit a mere heart­beat from the nuclear codes; as far as Mitch McConnell and his cronies were con­cerned, they did not care who the pop­ulist was, as long as that per­son could win them the exec­u­tive Mansion.
It was enough that the per­son could draw breath to smear a mir­ror they would do to sign their poi­son pill legislations.
Truth be told, it start­ed with Ronald Reagan, a third-rate actor who was a smidge more con­strained with his racism than Donald Trump. The dumb­ing down of America was well on the way to becom­ing the strat­e­gy of the GOP.
A total feal­ty to guns and reli­gion, added to a bla­tant and idi­ot­ic dis­re­gard for sci­ence and the truth, cement­ed the par­ty as a back­wa­ter polit­i­cal move­ment that has no rel­e­vance in the 21st cen­tu­ry. It had ful­ly mor­phed into an all-out white suprema­cist polit­i­cal party…
They did not care too much about the intel­lec­tu­al Herbert Walker Bush, but the “aw-shucks” incom­pe­tence of his son George was right up their alley.
So George W Bush, Sarah Palin, and Donald Trump give us a bet­ter per­spec­tive on how Marjorie Taylor-Green, Lauren Bobert, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, and oth­ers could have joined the usu­al imbe­ciles like Mo Brooks, Louie Gohmert, and Steve King in the congress.

We do not have a Democratic nation when one of the two polit­i­cal par­ties is dead set on cheat­ing, chang­ing the rules to give itself unfair advan­tages-and the oth­er polit­i­cal par­ty is as feck­less as Barney Fyffe, the cop of the fic­tion­al Mayberry.
The unfor­tu­nate thing for the world’s old­est democ­ra­cy is that this is no Mayberry.
This is a house on fire seri­ous­ness. The Republican par­ty march­es in lock-step to over­turn vot­ing rights- the touch­stone of any democracy.
The minor­i­ty par­ty’s insis­tence on pre­vent­ing some peo­ple from vot­ing, aid­ed by the nation’s high­est court, places the nation’s social order in grave danger.
Whether the major­i­ty of the American peo­ple will sit idly by and allow a minor­i­ty of the pop­u­la­tion to push the nation into total­i­tar­i­an­ism is yet to unfold.
That is the great­est threat fac­ing America today, white racism encap­su­lat­ed and cocooned into the Republican party.

…Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.

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Egregious Incidences Of Police Violence Continue Amidst Public Outcry For Change.…

The tone-deaf­ness of police offi­cers across the United States in the use of force had one of its lat­est iter­a­tions in Rock Hill North Carolina, on June 23rd, 2021.
Officers of Rock Hill police pulled over a motorist who was obvi­ous­ly known to them to be a drug deal­er. The dri­ver Ricky Price was removed from the con­vert­ible after offi­cers told him he had made an ille­gal lane change.… a ruse they use to jus­ti­fy ille­gal stops and some­thing the pros­e­cu­tors and judges embrace.
In a well-cir­cu­lat­ed video on social media, the cops brought in a canine to sniff Price’s car, and true to form; there was a hit.
Another ruse police use to ille­gal­ly search peo­ple’s vehi­cles while claim­ing that their dog gave them a hit signal.

Former Rock Hill police offi­cer John Moreno, right, apol­o­gizes to Travis Price dur­ing a press con­fer­ence Thursday at Moss Justice Center as Sixteenth Circuit Solicitor Kevin Brackett stands by. TRACY KIMBALL TKIMBALL@​HERALDONLINE.​COM

Data col­lect­ed by inter­est­ed par­ties show that the vast major­i­ty of those hits end up with noth­ing ille­gal found. Still, it does not mat­ter because the point is to humil­i­ate and vio­late rights rather than enforce the laws.
Ricky Price was threat­ened with arrest by the undu­ly and over­ly aggres­sive offi­cers after he told them that he gave no con­sent to search his vehicle.
He com­plied, exit­ed the car and the cops com­menced to search his car. The cops claimed they found a gun and a small quan­ti­ty of mar­i­jua­na in a cylin­dri­cal container.
No one should shed any tears for a drug deal­er who dri­ves around with a weapon; how­ev­er, the police must do their jobs bet­ter and with­out the undue brava­do that con­tin­ues to bring shame and ridicule to police each day.
From the off­set, the cops were deter­mined to hem Price up on what­ev­er charge they could, begin­ning with the con­coct­ed excuse to ini­ti­ate the stop in the first place.
After alleged­ly find­ing the small quan­ti­ty of weed, one cop told Price that the minute quan­ti­ty did not mat­ter; it was dif­fer­ent for him, in response to Ricky Price’s ques­tion of whether the penal­ty for the lit­tle weed was­n’t just a fine?

Travis Price left, and his attor­ney Justin Price lis­ten dur­ing a press con­fer­ence Thursday out­side Moss Justice Center. Charges were dropped against Travis Price. TRACY KIMBALL TKIMBALL@​HERALDONLINE.​COM

Ricky Price asked if he could call his fam­i­ly mem­bers to come to col­lect his belong­ings, a clear sign that he had no inten­tion of fight­ing the cops; he knew he was going to jail. Throughout the whole inci­dent, the elder Price know­ing he was caught was calm and respectful.
They allowed him to make the call, anoth­er indi­ca­tion that he had sur­ren­dered to being arrest­ed peace­ably as borne out by the video record­ings. His younger broth­er Travis Price arrived and start­ed to ask the offi­cers what was going on when all hell broke loose.
It was then that Rambo cop Jonathan Moreno attacked the younger Price, knocked him to the ground, and begged him to fight. Moreno grabbed Travis Price around the throat even though he was not com­mit­ting a crime and was not under arrest and there­fore could not be resist­ing arrest.
Oh, in case you are unaware of the laws, cops across the coun­try are allowed to claim that cit­i­zens resist arrest, and just so you know, that is anoth­er felony charge.
When you hear Black peo­ple talk about reimag­in­ing polic­ing, these are the moun­tains they are forced to climb each day.
Seeing what was hap­pen­ing to his younger broth­er Ricky Price yelled at the cops that Travis was his broth­er who was there to col­lect his belong­ings; they ignored him and con­tin­ued to attack and choke Travis upon which the elder Price respond­ed in defense of his broth­er as I hope any nor­mal per­son would and should.
He was thrown to the ground, hand­cuffed, and beat­en, result­ing in his blood splat­tered all over the black­top where they had him handcuffed.
The inci­dent was record­ed by an onlook­er who live-streamed the entire inci­dent on Facebook. Because the entire inci­dent was out into the open, the Rock Hill police had no rea­son to claim that they would not release their record­ing because there was an active inves­ti­ga­tion in progress. The out­ra­geous inci­dent sparked sev­er­al nights of protest in the area.

YouTube player

Jonathan Moreno was ter­mi­nat­ed Wednesday, July 7th, and charged with assault, said Chief Chris Watts of the Rock Hill Police Department. Watts announced at a Thursday after­noon news conference.
According to the Herald online, Moreno stat­ed at the news con­fer­ence. He said he was sor­ry for what he did and apol­o­gized to Travis Price, who attend­ed the news con­fer­ence. “I am here to own it and make it right,” Moreno said.
Moreno said at the news con­fer­ence he made mis­takes and direct­ed his words at Travis Price, who attend­ed the con­fer­ence with his lawyer.
“I know now you were allowed to be in the area,” Moreno said to Travis Price. “I apol­o­gize for the mis­un­der­stand­ing. My mis­takes and meet­ing you in such a neg­a­tive way, I wish my emo­tions did not get the best of me. My choice of words does not define my char­ac­ter. I sin­cere­ly apol­o­gize for what you have experienced.”
In the police video released Thursday, Moreno can be heard chal­leng­ing Travis Price to “fight” while on the ground with Travis price dur­ing the arrest. Moreno also says to Travis Price, “It’s just you and me,” and “quit cry­ing.”

Police said Travis Price pushed Moreno and lat­er charged him with hin­der­ing police, but the videos show no push from Travis Price. On the video record­ing, Travis Price can clear­ly be heard telling Moreno that he did not touch him and it was Moreno who attacked him.
These tac­tics are used dai­ly by over­ly aggres­sive police offi­cers, who then arrest peo­ple they do not like on trumped-up assault and resid­ing charges.
Local pros­e­cu­tor Kevin Brackett claimed the charges against Ricky Price, Travis Price’s broth­er, remain pend­ing. Brackett said Thursday at the news con­fer­ence that Ricky Price clear­ly punched a police offi­cer in the face. Ricky Price start­ed the con­flict that turned into a vio­lent struggle.
A clear lie by Brackett, Moreno esca­lat­ed the inci­dent result­ing in the entire inci­dent get­ting out of con­trol. I won­der what this pros­e­cu­tor would have done if he wit­nessed the police attack and choke his broth­er, who had com­mit­ted no crime?
Of utmost impor­tance is the (poi­son fruit weapon) the police claimed to have recov­ered from Ricky Price’s vehi­cle; if the rea­son for the stop was illegal/​contrived, how can the evi­dence derived from it hold up in a just court of law?
Stay tuned, Ricky Price, though an un-sym­pa­thet­ic fig­ure is no less deserv­ing of jus­tice under the law than any oth­er citizen.
Ricky price has one neg­a­tive against him out­side of his crim­i­nal record, his black skin.

As these crim­i­nals are exposed by inde­pen­dent video record­ings done by patri­ot­ic cit­i­zens, look for their cohorts in state leg­is­la­tures to begin to clamp doing on the rights of cit­i­zens to video­tape their crimes.

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.Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.

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Zalia Avante Garde Wins Scripps Spelling Bee, Only Black To Win After Jody-Ann Foster Of Jamaica

Zalia Avant-garde after win­ning the spelling Bee competition

I can­not resist writ­ing this short sto­ry of Zaila Avant-garde, the four­teen-year-old teenag­er from Louisiana who recent­ly won the Scripps National spelling Bee competition.
In case you are won­der­ing why I said I could not resist this sto­ry? Here goes; young Zalia is only the first African-American to win the com­pe­ti­tion and only the sec­ond Black to win the com­pe­ti­tion in its 96-year history.
So who was the oth­er Black to win the competition?
Glad you asked.…. It was our very own Jamaican Jody-Anne Maxwell in 1998; where else would the oth­er stand­out come from?

19 Years Ago, JAMAICAN Jodi-Ann Maxwell Won The Scripps National Spelling Bee at the age of 12....She made history as the first non-American to win the competition and a cash prize of
Jamaica’s Jody-Anne Foster win­ning in 1998

Young Zalia’s dream is to play in the WNBA; she cur­rent­ly holds three Guinness world records for her bas­ket­ball skills, includ­ing a record for most bounce jug­gles in one minute with four basketballs.
We cer­tain­ly wish her well going forward.

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Randi Weingarten Rips CRT Critics For ‘Trying To Stop Us From Teaching Students Accurate History’

The polit­i­cal and media elites that are whip­ping up anger over Critical Race Theory are furi­ous with a teach­ers union leader for expos­ing their lies.

By John Nichols

The Republican Party’s cyn­i­cal assault on Critical Race Theory is a polit­i­cal strat­e­gy that relies on con­trol­ling the mes­sage going into the 2022 midterm elec­tions. So par­ti­san appa­ratchiks, along with the talk­ing heads that pop­u­late the GOP’s media echo cham­ber, have adopt­ed a rigid approach to any dis­sent from the par­ty line regard­ing what it hopes will be the new ortho­doxy on teach­ing — or, to be more pre­cise, not teach­ing—about his­toric and sys­temic racial injus­tice in America. If some­one dares to sug­gest that what Republicans like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are propos­ing is not just shame­less­ly anti-his­tor­i­cal but also threat­en­ing to free­dom of speech and hon­est dia­logue in the United States, the response is guar­an­teed to be rough.

Conservative strate­gists who see the assault on CRT as vital to their prospects for an elec­toral come­back are ter­ri­fied that the absur­di­ty of their argu­ments will be exposed. They want Democrats and pro­gres­sives to avoid the sub­ject so that Republican gov­er­nors and Fox News hosts can con­vince sub­ur­ban swing vot­ers that the issue that mat­ters most in their lives is the his­to­ry cur­ricu­lum at the local high school. It’s an old “cul­ture wars” strat­e­gy, but it only works if the GOP spin goes unquestioned.

So chal­lenges to the big lie du jour are treat­ed as threats. Efforts to explain CRT as an aca­d­e­m­ic project that seeks to expand think­ing about sys­tems that per­pet­u­ate racism are met with vit­ri­ol very near­ly as intense as what might tar­get a dis­si­dent call­ing out the false premis­es of an author­i­tar­i­an régime.
Read more @ https://​www​.then​ation​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​s​o​c​i​e​t​y​/​c​r​i​t​i​c​a​l​-​r​a​c​e​-​t​h​e​o​r​y​-​t​e​a​c​h​e​rs/

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Trump Reportedly Threw Stuff At Mike Pence In 2021

In what is a must-read arti­cle in the con­ser­v­a­tive Wall Street Journal, snip­pets from a report on a new book from reporter Michael Bender titled, “Frankly, We Did Win This Election,” tells of Donald Trump crum­pling up a news­pa­per and throw­ing it at Mike Pence dur­ing a heat­ed con­ver­sa­tion about the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elections.
According to the sto­ry, Pence was get­ting ready to pre­side over the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the vote in the con­gress Pence’s polit­i­cal com­mit­tee had just hired Trump’s advis­er Corey Lewandowski, prompt­ing Trump to report­ed­ly hold up an arti­cle about the news while com­plain­ing it made him look like “his team was aban­don­ing him.” Trump report­ed­ly then “crum­pled the arti­cle and threw it at his vice pres­i­dent,” say­ing, “So dis­loy­al.” That’s when Pence “lost it,” accord­ing to the book.“Pence picked up the arti­cle and threw it back at Trump,” Bender writes.”
He leaned toward the pres­i­dent and point­ed a fin­ger a few inch­es from his chest. ‘We walked you through every detail of this,’ Pence snarled. ‘We did this for you — as a favor. And this is how you respond? You need to get your facts straight.’ ”

Haha, ha, I guess that was the moment he decid­ed that Pence had to go. You all remem­ber that his syco­phants entered the Capitol grounds with a gal­lows and noos­es, chant­i­ng ‘hang Mike Pence”.
I shed no tears for Mike Pence, Mike Pence is every inch as bad as Donald Trump is nar­cis­sis­tic, patho­log­i­cal, and socio­path­ic, but I can­not help but won­der where exact­ly did his min­ions get the idea that Mike Pence should be hung?
The Journal went on to say that after Donald Trump was told by Jared Kushner in a phone call that the tele­vi­sion net­works had all called the elec­tion for Joe Biden, the Democrat, he went on to fin­ish play­ing his round of golf on the morn­ing of Nov. 7, 2020.
Trump calm­ly lis­tened to his son-in-law as he strolled across the man­i­cured grass under a clear blue sky. He hung up, non­cha­lant­ly hand­ed the phone back to an aide, and fin­ished the final 12 holes, as more than a dozen golf carts filled with gov­ern­ment aides and Secret Service agents trailed behind him.
When Mr. Trump final­ly pulled up to the club­house in his cus­tomized cart — com­plete with a pres­i­den­tial seal stitched into the seat — club mem­bers cheered him on the back patio. “Don’t wor­ry,” Mr. Trump told them. “It’s not over yet.”
“Let’s do all the things we didn’t get to do because of all of the dis­trac­tions, and have fun,” Hope Hicks, a long­time Trump aide, said to the president’s team gath­ered inside cam­paign head­quar­ters in Arlington, Va.
Mr. Trump had won far more votes than his team pro­ject­ed, with sur­pris­ing sup­port from Black and Hispanic men. He was imme­di­ate­ly the run­away favorite for the party’s 2024 nom­i­na­tion, and Ms. Hicks was express­ing that vibe with her sug­ges­tion for a jaun­ty cur­tain call.
The report went on to add that Trump’s two sons Donald Jnr. and Eric, told Hicks that what she was propos­ing was not even an option.

This is what I found not just objec­tion­able but remark­able. Both of the younger jack­ass­es knew that their moron­ic dad­dy had lost the elec­tions and that it was legal­ly over; nev­er­the­less, they told their father’s aide that mov­ing on was not an option.
How inher­ent­ly crim­i­nal? How inher­ent­ly dis­gust­ing and reprehensible?
If the United States were tru­ly a coun­try of laws in which every per­son is held to the same stan­dard of account­abil­i­ty under the law, Donald Trump, his two sons, and every sin­gle per­son who aid­ed and helped him to try to over­throw the United States Government on January 6th, 2021, would be locked away in jail hav­ing already been tried and con­vict­ed for treason.
But the United States is not a coun­try where the laws apply the same to everyone.
Donald Trump, his fam­i­ly, and friends all attempt­ed to over­throw the con­sti­tut­ed order of the American Government to make him­self an unelect­ed dic­ta­tor, and not a damn thing has been done about it.
Donald Trump’s attempt­ed coup de tat is now accept­ed prece­dent for a smarter despot to finess and end this experiment.

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.Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

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Eric Adams, The So-so Former Republican, A Former Cop, And The Brooklyn Borough President Will Become Mayor

As far as ‘pro­gres­sives’ go, the ques­tion remains in the sup­posed deep-blue New York City, how real­ly pro­gres­sive is New York City?
Emerging from the slew of can­di­dates run­ning on the Democratic tick­et to replace the term-lim­it­ed Mayor Bill de Blasio were three top-tiered can­di­dates, (1) for­mer san­i­ta­tion com­mis­sion­er Kathryn Garcia, (2) Eric Adams, for­mer NYPD cap­tain, for­mer Republican & (3) Maya Wiley Attorney, Activist and the true progressive.
In the end, it will be Eric Adams, the so-so for­mer Republican, a for­mer cop, and the Brooklyn Borough pres­i­dent, who will face off against Curtis Sliwa, the Republican can­di­date in November, to decide who will be Mayor of the city of 8 plus mil­lion peo­ple. Sliwa is best known for his red T‑shirt, beret-wear­ing guardian angels, a fix­ture in the city for decades.

Republican can­di­date for Mayor Curtis Sliwa

In a city that is sup­posed to be heav­i­ly Democratic and pro­gres­sive, it is remark­able that an ex-cop, turn­coat Republican will most like­ly be the next may­or, black or not. No black per­son should feel that they will skate into elect­ed office by virtue of their skin color.
According to the Board of Elections, Eric Adams reg­is­tered as a Republican in 1997 before switch­ing back to the Democratic Party in 2001. We all know it is eas­i­er to gain polit­i­cal office if you have a “D” beside your name in New York City. Adams served as pres­i­dent of the Grand Council of Guardians, an African American patrolmen’s asso­ci­a­tion. In 1995, he co-found­ed 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, an advo­ca­cy group for black police offi­cers seek­ing crim­i­nal jus­tice reform, and often spoke out against police bru­tal­i­ty and racial profiling.
Adams was opposed to police stop and frisk but is now sup­port­ing the mea­sure that has caused untold agony and pain to count­less black and brown youth in the city. Adams came under intense racist ridicule from his white for­mer col­leagues dur­ing and after his career as a cop. He want­ed their sup­port; hence, he changed his posi­tion to cur­ry favor.

Eric Adams

The long and short of the Eric Adams sto­ry is that lib­er­als and pro­gres­sives failed once again to turn out and vote for the can­di­date that best rep­re­sents their interest.
White lib­er­als with skin in the game did, so Maya Wiley, the only true pro­gres­sive in the race, came in third in the city that is sup­posed to be the bluest of all in the nation.
It’s not that the city isn’t blue; Blacks and Latinos, the peo­ple with the most at stake, are too lazy to get up off the back­sides and vote for the can­di­dates that will best advance the poli­cies in their interest.

Maya Wiley

Eric Adams speaks from both cor­ners of his mouth, and I’m sure that most politi­cians who want to be elect­ed do that from time to time. However, New York City has been plagued by far too many inci­dences of mis­con­duct by mem­bers of the NYPD, which is a huge gang that is out of con­trol by all intents and purposes.
They try to run over law­ful demon­stra­tors with cruis­ers, engage in racist behav­ior, and com­mit all kinds of crimes against black and brown cit­i­zens of the city with almost absolute impunity.
They have zero fear they will be held account­able for what­ev­er crimes they com­mit. Take, for exam­ple; One New York City police offi­cer was accused of pep­per-spray­ing a woman, then deny­ing her med­ical treat­ment while she was hand­cuffed in a Bronx hold­ing cell. Another offi­cer slammed a 51-year-old man who had been argu­ing with some restau­rant work­ers onto the floor, knock­ing him uncon­scious, the man said. A third offi­cer was accused of tack­ling a gay man dur­ing a pride parade and using a homo­pho­bic slur. The city’s inde­pen­dent over­sight agency that inves­ti­gates police mis­con­duct found enough evi­dence in all three cas­es to con­clude that the offi­cers should face the most severe dis­ci­pline avail­able, includ­ing sus­pen­sion or dis­missal from the force. But in the end, senior police offi­cials down­grad­ed or out­right reject­ed those charges, and the offi­cers were giv­en less­er pun­ish­ments or none at all — the kind of rou­tine out­come that has left the Police Department fac­ing a cri­sis of trust in its abil­i­ty to dis­ci­pline its own. (The New York Times reported).
See that com­pre­hen­sive sto­ry here; https://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2​0​2​0​/​1​1​/​1​5​/​n​y​r​e​g​i​o​n​/​c​c​r​b​-​n​y​c​-​p​o​l​i​c​e​-​m​i​s​c​o​n​d​u​c​t​.​h​tml

NYPD offi­cer David Grieco in 2013. (David L. Pokress/​David L. Pokress)

One cop, Sgt. David Grieco, nick­named bul­let­head by his cohorts, who is now assigned to the 67th Precinct, has a raft of civil­ian com­plaints against him for abus­ing the cit­i­zens he is sup­posed to serve. In the east New York com­mu­ni­ty he is sta­tioned in, res­i­dents com­plain that he sum­mar­i­ly bru­tal­izes them and they have no avenue for redress.
That tough guy is one of the most-sued cops on the force and has cost the cit­i­zens of New York a whop­ping $600’000 to set­tle com­plaints against him.

According to the New York Daily News, he has been the sub­ject of at least 69 CCRB com­plaints, 12 of which have been sub­stan­ti­at­ed. Imagine that it’s next to impos­si­ble to file a com­plaint against a mem­ber of the NYPD, much less to have one deemed cred­i­ble or substantiated.
This guy has 12 sub­stan­ti­at­ed; he is still a cop in the NYPD. he was recent­ly docked a mere 10 days pay by Dermott Shea, the Commissioner after the CCRB rec­om­mend­ed a stiffer penal­ty against him for vio­lat­ing the rights of Uber dri­ver Nash Martin fol­low­ing a January 2018 car stop in Brownsville.
Even though he was iden­ti­fied in a cell phone video record­ing of the ille­gal stop and search of mis­ter Martin’s car Sgt David Grieco lied that he did not believe that the per­son in the video was he.
These are the kinds of char­ac­ters who are super­vi­sors in that mam­moth gang that Eric Adams was a part of.
These are the kinds of char­ac­ters that Eric Adams will unleash on black and brown cit­i­zens of New York City because these same peo­ple were too dumb or too lazy to get up off their ass­es and go vote for Maya Wiley.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

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Court Grants Qualified Immunity To Cops Who Set A Man On Fire By Tasing Him

WELCOME TO AMERICA

By Nick Sibilla…

Two Texas police offi­cers who ignit­ed a man by tas­ing him, even after they saw him douse him­self with gaso­line and were warned, “If we tase him, he’s going to light on fire,” were grant­ed legal immu­ni­ty last week when a fed­er­al court tossed the sur­viv­ing family’s civ­il rights law­suit against the offi­cers involved.

STEWART, CARL E.

On July 10, 2017, Gabriel Eduardo Olivas threat­ened to kill him­self. Panicked, his son dialed 911. Three offi­cers from the Arlington Police Department — Jeremias Guadarrama, Ebony Jefferson, and Caleb Elliott — respond­ed and quick­ly found Olivas in his bed­room, hold­ing a red gas can. Elliott warned the oth­er offi­cers: “If we tase him, he’s going to light on fire.” To try and immo­bi­lize Olivas, Elliott pep­per-sprayed him. It blind­ed but didn’t stop, Olivas. Instead, Olivas doused him­self in gaso­line and yelled that he’s going to burn the place to the ground.
Thinking he saw a lighter in Olivas’ hands, first Guadarrama, then Jefferson, fired their Tasers at the sui­ci­dal man now drenched in gaso­line. Olivas burst into flames, just as their fel­low offi­cer had warned.

JOLLY, E. GRADY

Several days lat­er, Olivas died in the hos­pi­tal, with more than 85% of his body cov­ered in burns. Outraged, his fam­i­ly filed a civ­il rights law­suit in fed­er­al court, assert­ing that Guadarrama and Jefferson vio­lat­ed Olivas’ rights when they tasered him amid con­sid­er­able explo­sive hazards.
The two offi­cers respond­ed that they were shield­ed by “qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty,” which pro­tects gov­ern­ment employ­ees from any legal lia­bil­i­ty, unless they vio­late “clear­ly estab­lished” rights. Last year, a fed­er­al judge denied qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty to Guadarrama and Jefferson, rul­ing that “more fac­tu­al evi­dence is need­ed.” It set the case for tri­al that spring, but those plans were quick­ly derailed by the offi­cers’ appeal to the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. As the Fifth Circuit explained, “qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty is an immu­ni­ty from suit, not mere­ly a defense to lia­bil­i­ty,” and so “it is effec­tive­ly lost if a case is erro­neous­ly per­mit­ted to go to trial.

OLDHAM, ANDREW “ANDY” S.

Unanimously sid­ing with the offi­cers, the Fifth Circuit declared that “nei­ther officer’s con­duct was unrea­son­able, nor was the force they employed clear­ly exces­sive,” and so, “there was no con­sti­tu­tion­al vio­la­tion.” In over­turn­ing the denial of qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty, the court empha­sized that Olivas was threat­en­ing felony arson and “posed a sub­stan­tial and imme­di­ate risk of death or seri­ous bod­i­ly injury to him­self and every­one in the house.” Tasing Olivas was to “pre­vent Olivas from light­ing him­self on fire,” the court added.
Read full sto­ry @https://​www​.forbes​.com/​s​i​t​e​s​/​n​i​c​k​s​i​b​i​l​l​a​/​2​0​2​1​/​0​2​/​1​9​/​c​o​u​r​t​-​g​r​a​n​t​s​-​q​u​a​l​i​f​i​e​d​-​i​m​m​u​n​i​t​y​-​t​o​-​c​o​p​s​-​w​h​o​-​s​e​t​-​a​-​m​a​n​-​o​n​-​f​i​r​e​-​b​y​-​t​a​s​i​n​g​-​h​i​m​/​?​s​h​=​2​d​b​c​b​a​c​f​c​ff7

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Am I The Only Person Who Finds The Sudden Focus On Crime Curious At A Time When The Nation Has Been Asked To Revisit How It Sees Policing”?

I have asked the ques­tion before in two sep­a­rate arti­cles, ” am the only per­son who finds the sud­den focus on crime curi­ous at best?
I’m not point­ing fin­gers; how­ev­er, it seems that there are fac­tions out there who are quite will­ing to see the sta­tus quo remain intact; they may not be active police offi­cers. Still, I do not put it beyond those who would like to see police con­tin­ue to oper­ate the way they are, con­tin­ue to oper­ate with impunity.
How bet­ter can it be for white suprema­cists and skin­heads to con­tin­ue infil­trat­ing and using police depart­ments to car­ry out their cen­turies-old cam­paign of ter­ror against African-Americans?
Almost two decades after the FBI warned of white suprema­cists infil­trat­ing [what were already racist police depart­ments], noth­ing has been done sub­stan­tive­ly to weed out those so taint­ed and put in place mea­sures to ensure that where racism rears, its ugly head it will be swift­ly chopped off.
For over three decades, vio­lent crime has trend­ed down across America, yet if you lis­ten to some peo­ple, you would think the sky is falling.
Fivethirtyeight​.com respond­ed in an arti­cle titled; ( Many Americans Are Convinced Crime Is Rising In The U.S. They’re Wrong).
It argues, “their fear makes every­one less safe.” I will briefly touch on the source of their fear in short order.
However, fivethir​tyeight​.com stat­ed, We are ter­ri­ble at esti­mat­ing our risk of crime — much worse than we are at guess­ing the dan­ger of oth­er bad things. Across that decade, respon­dents put their chance of being robbed in the com­ing year at about 15 per­cent. Looking back, the actu­al rate of rob­bery was 1.2 per­cent. In con­trast, when asked to rate their risk of upcom­ing job loss, peo­ple guessed it was about 14.5 per­cent — much clos­er to the actu­al job loss rate of 12.9 percent.
In oth­er words, we feel the risk of crime more acute­ly. We are cer­tain crime is ris­ing when it isn’t, con­vinced our risk of vic­tim­iza­tion is high­er than it actu­al­ly is.

What has been the source of that irra­tional fear in recent times? Two words Donald Trump.
An ego­ma­ni­a­cal, nar­cis­sis­tic, patho­log­i­cal liar. Trump dur­ing Obama’s pres­i­den­cy. Trump before he took that esca­la­tor in his gaudy Manhattan build­ing, Trump for all of the cam­paign sea­son of 2016. Trump today, a pathol­o­gy of lies and Russian ‑styled mis­in­for­ma­tion pumped into the nation­al blood­stream by FOX & and the pletho­ra of bot­tom-feed­ing race-bait­ing out­lets on behalf of the vilest most racist per­son to occu­py the White House in our lifetime.
Despots need fear to have peo­ple coa­lesce around them; Donald Trump is an unin­tel­li­gent, mind­less lunatic who has no idea how to gov­ern. Still, he loves the trap­pings of pow­er the American Presidency affords.
After tast­ing pow­er between 2017 & 2021, despite the shock, he expe­ri­enced after the Russians installed him in 2016 and the ini­tial, “oh shit,” I have no idea what to do, he decid­ed that he would burn the coun­try down if that’s what it took to keep power.
What’s not to like syco­phants bow down in idol­a­trous wor­ship of you. You can­not be pros­e­cut­ed regard­less of the crimes you com­mit, so says the Justice Department. You can steal all you want; after all, the pres­i­den­cy is yours to use as a tool of grift coer­cion and extortion.
Most of all, for the aver­age tyrant like Trump, it is the pow­er to kill whomev­er he hates, ask Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.
Nah.….….…. it was­n’t just Soleimani; he want­ed US troops to kill Black Americans who were demon­strat­ing against his police state that con­tin­ues to kill inno­cent unarmed African-Americans too, so there is that as well.
The pal­pa­bil­i­ty of fear allows weak-mind­ed peo­ple to cede their lib­er­ty to tyrants who claim they alone can pro­tect them.
In actu­al­i­ty, those tyrants care only about con­sol­i­dat­ing pow­er to enrich them­selves and those they care about, imme­di­ate fam­i­ly and friends.
That pret­ty much sums up who and what Donald Trump is.

The data below was released by Pew Research Center, which out­lined that crime is [not] going up as Trump and his syco­phants would have you believe. Property crime in the U.S. is much more com­mon than vio­lent crime. In 2019, the FBI report­ed a total of 2,109.9 prop­er­ty crimes per 100,000 peo­ple, com­pared with 379.4 vio­lent crimes per 100,000 peo­ple. By far, the most com­mon form of prop­er­ty crime in 2019 was larceny/​theft, fol­lowed by bur­glary and motor vehi­cle theft. Among vio­lent crimes, aggra­vat­ed assault was the most com­mon offense, fol­lowed by rob­bery, rape, and mur­der/non-neg­li­gent manslaugh­ter. Both the FBI and BJS data show dra­mat­ic declines in U.S. vio­lent and prop­er­ty crime rates since the ear­ly 1990s when crime spiked across much of the nation. Pew argues.

Theft is most common property crime, assault is most common violent crime

Keegan Casteel

So whose inter­est is served by these killings? We know that there have been white suprema­cists involved in Black Lives Matter Protests. We know that some have been exposed as they destroyed prop­er­ty in Portland, Oregon, in 2020 to lay blame on BLM.
We know that white suprema­cists have donned fake black skin as they com­mit crimes, again hop­ing to blame black activists.
This is true even as it is in no way an excuse for the moron­ic Black punks who con­tin­ue to shoot each oth­er and even small chil­dren in their reck­less crim­i­nal conduct.
For exam­ple, in the city of Chicago, Ilinois where gun crimes con­tin­ue to be a major prob­lem.…. and by the way, a city in which the Black & Brown com­mu­ni­ty has absolute­ly no trust or respect for their cor­rupt and abu­sive police depart­ment, an Iowa man was arrest­ed and charged after a rifle and ammu­ni­tion were found near a win­dow inside his hotel room in down­town Chicago on the Fourth of July, offi­cials said.
A mem­ber of the clean­ing staff at the W Hotel alert­ed author­i­ties about firearms he found “in a very sus­pi­cious posi­tion inside one of the rooms” on Sunday, Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown said Tuesday.
What was Keegan Casteel, 32, of Ankeny, Iowa, doing in Chicago with a rifle, hand­gun, and five mag­a­zines in a hotel room?
According to Prosecutors on Tuesday, the rifle had four mag­a­zines next to it and a live round in the cham­ber, Chicago ABC sta­tion WLS reported.
Police said Casteel does not have a crim­i­nal his­to­ry. He also did not have a Firearms Owner Identification Card in Illinois, Brown said, which is need­ed to have a gun in the state legal­ly. He is licensed to car­ry in the gun-crazy state of Iowa.
A judge, how­ev­er, grant­ed Casteel bail in the sum of $10,000 and allows him to return to Iowa if he can post bail.
Of course, as you all know, by now, if he can come up with a thou­sand dol­lars, he will walk out and head home to Iowa until his tri­al begins.
Chicago suf­fered a bloody hol­i­day week­end, with 100 peo­ple shot since Friday night, 18 fatal­ly, offi­cials said Tuesday.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

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No Real Accountability For Police Crimes, What We See Are Distractions…

As a black man with a black wife, I am con­cerned every time that my wife steps into her car to go out onto the streets.
I am not con­cerned about reg­u­lar crim­i­nals doing some­thing bad to her. I am con­cerned about the crim­i­nals who wear uni­forms and are vest­ed with the pow­er to abuse and take the lives of oth­ers under the col­or of law.
It does not mat­ter that my wife is a col­lege-edu­cat­ed woman or has giv­en decades of ser­vice to the Federal Government begin­ning in her ear­ly twen­ties. And it cer­tain­ly does not mat­ter that under most cir­cum­stances, she may be heads and shoul­ders intel­lec­tu­al­ly over any cop that would pull her over and seek to abuse her.
I have giv­en that ques­tion much thought, and I would­n’t say I like how the prospect of that hap­pen­ing makes me feel.
As the nation faces a reck­on­ing after the George Floyd killing, and as peo­ple begin to talk about reimag­in­ing polic­ing, all of a sud­den, the nation is fac­ing a nation­al upsurge in shootings.
Violent crimes have trend­ed down across America for over two decades. Is any­one skep­ti­cal about this crime surge as soon as some cities con­tem­plate mov­ing resources from police to areas where those dol­lars would be bet­ter spent?

Police across the United States con­tin­ue to use mun­dane traf­fic stops to esca­late minor and insignif­i­cant infrac­tions into major arrests fol­lowed by a litany of felony charges.
The laws give them the pow­er to man­u­fac­ture charges, and pros­e­cu­tors are all too hap­py to pros­e­cute those charges with vig­or befit­ting some­one who actu­al­ly saw the com­mis­sion of those offenses.
A sim­ple fail­ure to indi­cate before ini­ti­at­ing a turn can result in major felonies because the Ku-Klux-Klan mem­bers pos­tur­ing as police offi­cers make them so.
First off, they bark sev­er­al con­tra­dic­to­ry orders which no one can fol­low, [all part of their God-comlpex]. They bark those con­tra­dic­to­ry orders know­ing that no one can fol­low those com­mands, but that is exact­ly the point.
And so when the dri­ver refus­es to move out of fear of being gunned down in their own cars over what may have even been an ille­gal stop, they pro­ceed to break win­dows and destroy peo­ple’s cars, they then drag the dri­ver out of their car under the fraud­u­lent claim that the dri­ver refused to fol­low their commands.

God help the dri­ver if they are Black because if they are Black, the best that can come of that sit­u­a­tion is that they get bad­ly beat­en and hit with mul­ti­ple felony charges.….….… The upside is that the dri­ver escapes get­ting sev­er­al bul­lets to the back and a few to the head.
And if you believe the tax-pay­ers-fund­ed body-worn cam­eras make a dif­fer­ence, think again.
There are no hard and fast rules that man­date that these crim­i­nals must turn on the cam­eras. And so, even if they turn them on ini­tial­ly when they are about to com­mit crimes against the pub­lic, they either turn them off or cov­er them with their hands.
And of course, as you may imag­ine, there are no penal­ties for those clear acts lead­ing up to more seri­ous crim­i­nal conduct.
Even in the rare instance that they video­tape an encounter, their depart­ments insist that the footage is not pub­lic prop­er­ty, even though our tax dol­lars pay for them and pay the crim­i­nals who are parad­ing as cops.
A court-ordered release of cop videos to the pub­lic some­times ends up with dis­tort­ed, redact­ed, dis­turbed, and even tam­pered videos being released, and no one is held accountable.
Police offi­cers plant evi­dence and fab­ri­cate evi­dence to crim­i­nal­ize peo­ple of color.…..people they hate… Black people.

When they com­mit crimes, Prosecutors cov­ers for them, some judges nul­li­fy jury ver­dicts to pre­vent them from going to prison, and of course, the supreme court gives them blan­ket immu­ni­ty to do as they please with­out civ­il lia­bil­i­ty under a doc­trine the court cre­at­ed, not a con­sti­tu­tion­al con­struct, a court cre­at­ed one. (Qualified immunity).
There isn’t even a mech­a­nism to pun­ish cops who are caught lying under oath in court, even though the aver­age cit­i­zen who lies under oath faces prison time and is usu­al­ly pros­e­cut­ed and impris­oned for com­mit­ting perjury.
In case after case in which police encounter with Black res­i­dents are record­ed, it becomes clear­er that the police do every­thing in their pow­er to esca­late minor traf­fic infrac­tions and turns them into some­thing that seems to jus­ti­fy the use of force.
I see it as an across-the-board dis­re­spect for African-Americans, but I also see it as some­thing else.
The Klan is no longer inter­est­ed in wear­ing white sheets when they can wear black robes and police uni­forms. Why wear white hoods when a busi­ness suit and stilet­to pumps do the same trick.
My fear, in the end, is not about what they could do to a mem­ber of my fam­i­ly. My fear is about the reac­tion they could trig­ger if they ever used those racist tac­tics on a mem­ber of my family…

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

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What We Know About Rise Of The Moors, Group Engaged With Massachusetts State Police In Interstate 95 Shutdown

An hours-long stand­off between a group of heav­i­ly armed indi­vid­u­als and Massachusetts State Police on an inter­state end­ed with 11 tak­en into custody.
The sit­u­a­tion was resolved “through nego­ti­a­tion and tac­ti­cal maneu­vers,” Massachusetts State Police Colonel Christopher Mason told reporters on Saturday said, adding that the group mem­bers “sur­ren­dered with­out incident.”
The stand­off began nine hours pri­or when police said the group claimed to “not rec­og­nize our laws.

Video shot along the inter­state shows men in mil­i­tary-style gear hold­ing the Moroccan flag. Police com­mu­ni­cat­ed with the group through a hostage nego­ti­a­tion team.

Here’s what we know about the situation.

Police stop

A Massachusetts State Police troop­er was trav­el­ing north­bound on Interstate 95 in Wakefield when he came upon two vehi­cles stopped in the break­down lane around 1:30 a.m. on Saturday.

The men were attempt­ing to refu­el their vehicles.

The occu­pants of the vehi­cle were dressed in mil­i­tary-style tac­ti­cal gear. Some had long rifles, some pis­tols and “some had a com­bi­na­tion of both,” Massachusetts State Police Colonel Christopher Mason told reporters on Saturday.

The troop­er asked mem­bers of the group to pro­duce licens­es for the firearms and mem­bers of the group indi­cat­ed they weren’t licensed or didn’t have copies of licens­es on them.
“You can imag­ine 11 armed indi­vid­u­als stand­ing with long guns slung on an inter­state high­way at two in the morn­ing cer­tain­ly rais­es con­cerns and is not con­sis­tent with the firearms laws we have in Massachusetts,” Mason said.
A man who iden­ti­fied him­self to police as the leader of the group said on a video record­ed after the encounter that he “instruct­ed my men to get out peace­ful­ly. I greet­ed your man with a hand­shake,” he said, of speak­ing with the trooper.
He claims in a series of videos the group was fol­low­ing fed­er­al law and should be allowed to trav­el across state lines with their weapons.

The troop­er request­ed back­up and addi­tion­al state police as well as local police responded.
The head of state police applaud­ed the actions of the respond­ing troop­er who he said was “very patient, very under­stand­ing with them,” which kept the sit­u­a­tion from escalating.
Hostage nego­tia­tors were brought in to speak with the men and at about 10:15 a.m., police announced 11 indi­vid­u­als were tak­en into cus­tody. A pair of indi­vid­u­als were arrest­ed ear­li­er in the day and nine more were arrest­ed late morning.

Who are they?

The indi­vid­u­als are mem­bers of Rise of the Moors, a group who iden­ti­fy as Moorish Americans.

“The Moorish sov­er­eign cit­i­zen move­ment is a col­lec­tion of inde­pen­dent orga­ni­za­tions and lone indi­vid­u­als that emerged in the ear­ly 1990s as an off­shoot of the antigov­ern­ment sov­er­eign cit­i­zens move­ment, which believes that indi­vid­ual cit­i­zens hold sov­er­eign­ty over, and are inde­pen­dent of, the author­i­ty of fed­er­al and state gov­ern­ments,” the Southern Poverty Law Center says of the move­ment. “Moorish sov­er­eigns espouse an inter­pre­ta­tion of sov­er­eign doc­trine that African Americans con­sti­tute an élite class with­in American soci­ety with spe­cial rights and priv­i­leges that con­vey on them a sov­er­eign immu­ni­ty plac­ing them beyond fed­er­al and state authority.”

Jamhal Talib Abdullah Bey is iden­ti­fied on the group’s web­siteas the Moorish American Consular Post Head for the Rise of the Moors. His biog­ra­phy on the group’s web­site lists him as hav­ing served in the United States Marine Corps previously.

In a state­ment on the Rise of the Moors web­site, he wrote of his mil­i­tary service.

“I tru­ly believe that most of the skills that have been instilled in me through mil­i­tary train­ing can be used to uplift our nation and all Moorish Americans. Honor, Courage and Commitment are the Marine Corp Values. Those same val­ues that every Marine is held to, fit per­fect­ly with the High Principles of Love, Truth, Peace, Freedom and Justice that our Prophet, El Hajj Sheriff Abdul Ali instruct­ed us to live by. I joined the mil­i­tary think­ing I would be help­ing our peo­ple, who at that time I was trained to think we were ‘Black’. I now know of the ‘King Alfred Plan’ and its objec­tive to use our men as the tip of the spear for European World Domination and Imperialism. I will con­tin­ue as the Prophet did, to work day by day, in pub­lic and in pri­vate to con­tin­ue his great Missionary work to uplift fall­en human­i­ty and rein­force the foun­da­tion of the Moorish Movement — The minds of the People.”

State and local police declined to con­firm the name of the group to reporters. Mason said he was unaware of the group pri­or to this interaction.

Wakefield Police Department said the men claim “to be from a group that does not rec­og­nize our laws.”

The depart­ment added, in a state­ment. “No threats were made, but these men should be con­sid­ered armed and dan­ger­ous. We are ask­ing res­i­dents in these areas to lock their doors and remain inside their homes. A heavy police pres­ence will be in this area as well.”

The group dis­put­ed that they are “anti-gov­ern­ment” both in record­ed state­ments and con­ver­sa­tions with police.

“We’re not anti-gov­ern­ment, we’re not anti-police, we’re not sov­er­eign cit­i­zens, we’re not Black-iden­ti­ty extrem­ists,” Bey said dur­ing a livestreamed video post­ed to YouTube Saturday morning.
He believes the group is trav­el­ing legal­ly by abid­ing by fed­er­al laws, though not acknowl­edg­ing Massachusetts laws, which he does not believe apply to the group as they did not intend to stop in Massachusetts.

“Police seen us on the side of the road with our guns secured,” he said in the video. “We were afraid so we got out with our arms.”

While show­ing inside of one of the vehi­cles, he shows mul­ti­ple fuel can­is­ters which the group intend­ed to use to refu­el rather than stop­ping at a gas sta­tion off the interstate.

“We’re not U.S. cit­i­zens,” anoth­er mem­ber of the group is heard say­ing dur­ing one of their livestreamed videos. “We’re Americans, American nationals.”

Traveling through Massachusetts

The group was trav­el­ing from Rhode Island to Maine to train on “pri­vate land,” the group told police. In one of the videos record­ed dur­ing the stand­off with police, Bey said the vehi­cles con­tain camp­ing equipment.

The Rise of the Moors web­site list­ed the orga­ni­za­tion as being based from a mul­ti-fam­i­ly home in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

Gun ownership in Massachusetts

A gun own­er is allowed to trans­port a weapons under spe­cif­ic con­di­tions. For a loaded or unloaded hand­gun, it may be on a per­son or in a vehi­cle if under “direct control.”

Large-capac­i­ty rifles and shot­guns must be trans­port­ed unloaded and in a locked case, locked trunk or oth­er secure con­tain­er, accord­ing to state regulations.

State law con­sid­ers a large-capac­i­ty firearm to be any of the fol­low­ing: semi-auto­mat­ic hand­gun or rifle that is capa­ble of accept­ing more than ten rounds, a semi-auto­mat­ic shot­gun capa­ble of accept­ing more than five shot­gun shells or an assault weapon.

A rifle with a fixed tubu­lar mag­a­zine designed to accept, and capa­ble of oper­at­ing only with, .22 cal­iber ammu­ni­tion is not clas­si­fied as a large-capac­i­ty firearm.

A per­son can car­ry a loaded or unloaded rifle or shot­gun upon or across a pub­lic way if they are engaged in hunt­ing and hold a valid hunt­ing license.

Non-res­i­dents do not need a firearms license to trans­port their firearms in or through the com­mon­wealth, pro­vid­ed the firearms are unloaded and enclosed in a case while traveling.

Previous interactions with police

The Southern Poverty Law Center says Moorish Sovereign Citizens have come into con­flict with fed­er­al and state author­i­ties over their refusal to obey laws and gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions. “Recently, Moorish sov­er­eign cit­i­zens have engaged in vio­lent con­fronta­tions with law enforce­ment. They have also been known to retal­i­ate against gov­ern­ment author­i­ties through finan­cial means — a process called ‘paper terrorism.’”

The Rise of the Moors filed mul­ti­ple law­suits against Providence Police in 2019 claim­ing their right to bear arms and right to assem­ble were violated.

They accused police of inter­rupt­ing a lec­ture the orga­ni­za­tion was host­ing, which was being livestreamed. According to the law­suit, Bay was teach­ing the class while armed with a Glock 22 and a semi-auto­mat­ic weapon, the Providence Journal report­ed in 2019During the record­ed lec­ture, he read from the Koran and spoke of the group’s right to bear arms. “We’re teach­ing our peo­ple not to be crim­i­nals,” Bey said.
Thos sto­ry orig­i­nat­ed @ Masslive​.com

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Ohio Police Chief Resigns Immediately When Told He Had Minutes To Exit Building After Video Captured Him Leaving KKK Sign On Black Officer’s Desk

An Ohio police chief retired imme­di­ate­ly after he was placed under inves­ti­ga­tion for leav­ing a racial­ly intim­i­dat­ing note on the desk of a Black police offi­cer. Sheffield Lake Police Chief Anthony Campo retired from the depart­ment on June 29 after he became the sub­ject of an inter­nal inves­ti­ga­tion for leav­ing a note con­tain­ing the words “Ku Klux Klan” on the desk of the Black offi­cer. Campo had been with the depart­ment in the Cleveland sub­urb for 33 years and served as chief for eight.
Footage from June 25 shows Campo leav­ing the note on the officer’s coat in the book­ing room. Campo dis­played a jack­et intend­ed to look like the robes worn by KKK mem­bers, placed the KKK sign on the jack­et then wait­ed for the offi­cer to walk in and see the dis­play. The sur­veil­lance cam­era cap­tured the Black offi­cer read the offen­sive mes­sage and laugh. Other offi­cers can also be seen walk­ing by read­ing the note.

Sheffield Lake Police Chief Anthony Campo (above) retired from the depart­ment on June 29 after he became the sub­ject of an inter­nal inves­ti­ga­tion for leav­ing a note con­tain­ing the words “Ku Klux Klan” on the desk of the Black offi­cer. (Photo: Cleveland​.com screenshot)

Mayor Dennis Bring said he became aware of the note on June 30, when law direc­tor David Graves informed him of a “real bad” com­plaint from the police union “I just looked at it and said, what’s this all about?” the may­or told The Morning Journal. “And he goes, ‘you aren’t even going to believe this.’”The com­plaint said that Campo had retrieved the note from the copy machine, then walked over and put it on the officer’s desk. “It said Ku Klux Klan on the back,” Bring said. “I don’t know how much more offen­sive you can pos­si­bly get.” According to Bring, Campo believes the note is just a joke and doesn’t under­stand why peo­ple are upset, but the Black offi­cer was clear­ly made to feel uncom­fort­able by the note. “How can you pos­si­bly think that you can put some­thing on somebody’s jack­et like that, and espe­cial­ly if they were African-American, and think this is a joke? This is the most egre­gious and offen­sive thing you could pos­si­bly do. And it’s embar­rass­ing and dis­gust­ing.” Bring took steps right away to place Campo on leave and had plans to ter­mi­nate him. When Campo learned of the harass­ment com­plaint against him, he said, “So am I fired?” and began to type his res­ig­na­tion let­ter. “He says, ‘This is what I get up to 30 years,’” the may­or said. “I said what you’re going to get is 10 min­utes to get out of your office.” Bring ulti­mate­ly allowed Campo to sub­mit his retire­ment papers. Officials are look­ing through the chief’s com­put­er to see if there is any­thing else of con­cern on the device. Bring apol­o­gized to city staff and had a con­ver­sa­tion with the Black offi­cer who was the recip­i­ent of the note. The offi­cer expressed a desire to stay with the depart­ment and said that the laugh he let out upon see­ing the note was a gut reaction.

A Black offi­cer dis­cov­ers a scene staged by his Sheffield Lake police chief that includes a note with the words Ku Klux Klan. (Photo: Cleveland​.com screenshot)

The Black offi­cer has been with the depart­ment for less than a year. He has since retained an attor­ney, and Bring said he would back the offi­cer if he decides to take fur­ther action against Campo Campo said the note was meant to be fun­ny. “That’s all it was,” Campo said. “I had a jok­ing back-and-forth ban­ter with that offi­cer since I hired him,” he said. But Cleveland NAACP President James Hardiman believes the note is no laugh­ing mat­ter. “It’s sig­nif­i­cant because it’s indica­tive of a much big­ger prob­lem. For a per­son in a posi­tion of respon­si­bil­i­ty to assume that he can get away with that, it’s trag­ic. Is this an iso­lat­ed instance? Or, was this accept­ed pro­to­col until he got caught?” James Hardiman told Fox8.

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Roberts Court Did What Roberts The Reagan Admin Lawyer Wanted All Along, Destroy Voting Rights…

On Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld two elec­tion laws in the 2020 bat­tle­ground state of Arizona that chal­lengers said make it hard­er for minori­ties to vote.
In a 6 ‑3 deci­sion, all of the Conservative hacks, includ­ing three appoint­ed by Donald Trump, vot­ed to uphold Arizona’s restric­tive vot­ing rights laws.….…..Laws that were passed, mind you, after the big Trump lie after the twice impeached sociopath lied that he won the 2020 elec­tions and goad­ed his syco­phants to try to over­throw the American Government and install him, King.

Writing for the major­i­ty, Samuel Alito, yes, the same Alito who dur­ing a state of the Union address by President Barack Obama dis­re­spect­ful­ly mouthed the words,” not true,” and shook his head as the pres­i­dent spoke.
Alito said the law requires “equal open­ness” to the vot­ing process. “Mere incon­ve­nience can­not be enough to demon­strate a vio­la­tion” of the law, he wrote.
Voting law changes may have a dif­fer­ent impact on minor­i­ty and non-minor­i­ty groups, Alito said, “but the mere fact there is some dis­par­i­ty in impact does not nec­es­sar­i­ly mean that a sys­tem is not equal­ly open or does not give every­one an equal oppor­tu­ni­ty to vote.”
We are now eyes wide open, see­ing the destruc­tive nature of what Mitch McConnell’s block­ade of Merrick Garland’s appoint­ment in 2016 means. It allowed a crim­i­nal in the white house to appoint three ide­o­logues to the court, tilt­ing the ide­o­log­i­cal bal­ance so far to the right that it places the Republic in grave peril.
The most nau­se­at­ing thing about John Roberts is the smug smirk on his face when he infa­mous­ly stat­ed there are no Republican or Democratic Judges. “Judges like umpires, call balls and strikes,” Roberts lied.
So much for balls and strikes.
Democrats mean­while are stuck pathet­i­cal­ly pan­der­ing to a (wannabe pres­i­dent) Joe Manchin, who nobody elect­ed pres­i­dent of the United States, who con­tin­ue to oppose get­ting rid of the Senate fil­i­buster, a Jim crow era rel­ic, and is opposed to appoint­ing addi­tion­al jus­tices to bal­ance the injus­tice of what Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump did to the Federal Judiciary.

What Alito and the oth­er Republicans on the court failed to take into account is the intent of the law; if the new law intends to dis­en­fran­chise some, then even though there may not be any­one stand­ing at polling places with guns pre­vent­ing Blacks from voting.….….….yet, the peo­ple who do not have the req­ui­site resources to meet the more strin­gent vot­ing require­ments, à la minori­ties, are dis­en­fran­chised by default. This is exact­ly what the restric­tive law intended…
This is exact­ly what John Roberts fought for all of his pro­fes­sion­al life, to restrict vot­ing rights.
It is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine that despite the racist nature of those who craft­ed this Republic, they envi­sioned that the very court that was is sup­posed to steady the ship of state con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly would be the very cor­ner­stone that is work­ing assid­u­ous­ly to decon­struct the Republic on ide­o­log­i­cal grounds.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

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Florida Man Charged With Hate Crime, Admitted Black Family Did ‘Nothing’ To Him

A 21-year-old man is cur­rent­ly being held with­out bond in a Volusia County jail after he was arrest­ed for point­ing a gun at a Black fam­i­ly in traf­fic, unprovoked.

The vic­tims, a Black moth­er, father, and their two chil­dren under the age of 12, told Volusia County deputies that on Sunday, June 27, a stranger fit­ting the descrip­tion of Nicholas J. Gordon in a 4‑door yel­low hatch­back pulled up to the family’s car and pro­ceed­ed to ter­ror­ize them. According to CBS 12, the man jumped out of the pas­sen­ger seat, pulled a gun on them, and threat­ened “I will kill you n — -s.” Three oth­er peo­ple were in the vehi­cle with the sus­pect at the time

No phys­i­cal harm came to the fam­i­ly, which attempt­ed to dri­ve away, afraid for their lives, but was pur­sued by the sus­pect. When the pur­su­ing vehi­cle caught up to the fam­i­ly, “the dri­ver stepped out of the car and yelled more obscen­i­ties at them before get­ting back in, turn­ing around and flee­ing,” accord­ing to the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office press release.
The vic­tims drove away from the inter­sec­tion try­ing to get to safe­ty, but the sus­pect vehi­cle chased after them and caught up with the fam­i­ly again when they got stopped in traf­fic at the inter­sec­tion of International Speedway Boulevard. The vic­tims told deputies the dri­ver stepped out of the car and yelled more obscen­i­ties at them before get­ting back in, turn­ing around and fleeing.

The Volusia County Sheriff’s Office iden­ti­fied Gordon’s vehi­cle via busi­ness sur­veil­lance videos, which show it fol­low­ing the victim’s car. He was pulled over when offi­cers spot­ted him not far from the scene of the inci­dent. Initially, he told offi­cers that he hadn’t been in town and that he didn’t have any weapons in the vehi­cle, before lat­er admit­ting that there was a gun in his lunch­box. Gordon assumed he was stopped because “that Black lady that brake-checked me, and then she start­ed try­ing to fol­low me…”

Volusia County offi­cers then told him that he and his vehi­cle fit the exact descrip­tion giv­en by the vic­tims who alleged: “a firearm being used in the vehi­cle.” Only after being shown sur­veil­lance footage by detec­tives did Gordon admit to his involve­ment in the inci­dent and blamed the fam­i­ly for attempt­ing to dri­ve off after hit­ting his car and attempt­ing to run. According to Gordon, he and his friends were chas­ing them “to try and exchange infor­ma­tion,” how­ev­er no reports of an acci­dent were filed and there was no vis­i­ble dam­age to Gordon’s vehicle.

When asked why he armed him­self dur­ing the sup­posed inno­cent exchange of infor­ma­tion, Gordon admit­ted that “he knew (the vic­tims) were African-American and he knew from past expe­ri­ences African-Americans can be vio­lent.” He also admit­ted that the fam­i­ly did “noth­ing” to him to make him feel threat­ened enough to draw a weapon, oth­er than being Black. Detectives con­clud­ed that the inci­dent was “clear­ly” a hate crime and that the fam­i­ly was tar­get­ed sim­ply because of the col­or of their skin. “At the con­clu­sion of the inves­ti­ga­tion, all evi­dence indi­cat­ed this inci­dent was clear­ly just a vio­lent hate crime where the sus­pect point­ed a firearm direct­ly at the vic­tims, a fam­i­ly in their car with chil­dren, who were sole­ly tar­get­ed for being African-American,” they wrote in closing

According to his Volusia County Corrections pub­lic record, Gordon has been brought up on two counts of aggra­vat­ed assault with a firearm, child abuse, and car­ry­ing a con­cealed weapon. His case has been clas­si­fied as a hate crime, which enhances the charges.
Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood has pub­licly decried racist behav­ior in the com­mu­ni­ty and vowed to pur­sue any and every­one who com­mits “an abhor­rent act of hate.”
Chitwood said, “This type of behav­ior will not be tol­er­at­ed in Volusia County. I want every­one to know the Volusia Sheriff’s Office will do every­thing pos­si­ble to track down and arrest any­one who com­mits such an abhor­rent act of hate in this community.

MEANWHILE IN MASSACHUSETTS

2 shot dead in Massachusetts may have been targeted because they were Black, district attorney says

An Air Force vet­er­an and a retired Massachusetts state troop­er who were fatal­ly shot near Boston over the week­end may have been tar­get­ed because they were Black, a dis­trict attor­ney said. The vic­tims were iden­ti­fied as retired Massachusetts State Police Trooper Dave Green and Ramona Cooper, a 60-year-old staff sergeant in the Air Force.
Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins iden­ti­fied the shoot­er as a 28-year-old White man, Nathan Allen, and said inves­ti­ga­tors found “trou­bling” anti­se­mit­ic and racist state­ments in his writings.
Rollins said Allen stole a box truck and was dri­ving at a high rate of speed when it crashed into anoth­er vehi­cle and a home in Winthrop on Saturday. While his motive remains unclear, Rollins said Allen walked away from the wreck past sev­er­al peo­ple who were not Black before open­ing fire on bystanders Green and Cooper, Rollins said.

Ramona Cooper and David Green were shot and killed in Winthrop on Saturday.

Cooper was shot three times in the back and died, Rollins said. Green was shot four times in the head and three times in the tor­so. Allen was then fatal­ly shot by police.
Rollins said the inves­ti­ga­tion was in the pre­lim­i­nary stages but vowed to uncov­er Allen’s motive. She said his writ­ings con­tained state­ments that were anti-Semitic and racist against Black indi­vid­u­als, but she did not pro­vide fur­ther detail. Rollins’ office lat­er said in a state­ment Allen “wrote about the supe­ri­or­i­ty of the white race” and “about whites being ‘apex preda­tors,” and drew swastikas.
The office said Allen was mar­ried and employed, had a Ph.D., and no crim­i­nal his­to­ry. Rollins said Allen was legal­ly licensed to car­ry a gun

She said it was a “sad day” for the community.

“These two peo­ple pro­tect­ed our rights — they fought for us to be safe and to have the opin­ions that we have, and they were exe­cut­ed yes­ter­day,” Rollins said. “We will find out why and find out more about the man that did this.”

Winthrop Police Chief Terrance Delahanty said “we have no tol­er­ance for hate in this community.”

Green served as a state troop­er for 36 years, Rollins said. Green retired from the state police in 2016, Massachusetts State Police Col. Christopher Mason told The Associated Press. He was out­side his home when he was fatal­ly shot, Mason said. A state police spokesper­son said Saturday that offi­cials are inves­ti­gat­ing whether the male vic­tim “may have been try­ing to engage the sus­pect to end the threat,” the AP reports.“Trooper Green was wide­ly respect­ed and well-liked by his fel­low Troopers, sev­er­al of whom yes­ter­day described him as a ‘true gen­tle­man’ and always cour­te­ous to the pub­lic and metic­u­lous in his duties,” Mason told the AP in an emailed state­ment. “From what we learned yes­ter­day, he was held in equal­ly-high regard by his neigh­bors and friends in Winthrop.”

By Erin Donaghue.