Do you know what both­ers me the most with all of this police vio­lence toward peo­ple of col­or and African-Americans in particular?
The (“copol­o­gists”) do…
If only he fol­lowed the offi­cer’s com­mand. If only he stopped mov­ing. If only he stopped walk­ing. If only he stopped talking.
If only he rolled over. If only he did not rollover. If only he stopped breath­ing. It nev­er stops.
The white-splain­ing cou­pled with cop-splain­ing has become so nau­se­at­ing that I sum­mar­i­ly dis­miss any white per­son­’s per­spec­tives on police vio­lence, and that’s not fair because not all white peo­ple are racist jackasses.
The idea from these igno­ra­mus­es who make excus­es for the white race sol­diers, is that police are only vio­lent because the vic­tims of their vio­lence make them com­mit vio­lence on them by not bow­ing down in com­plete feal­ty to the peo­ple they hire to keep them safe.
Nowhere else in a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety are the ser­vants’ over­lords over the tax­pay­ing cit­i­zens except in the United States. Nowhere else in a civ­i­lized soci­ety are police allowed to oper­ate as American cops oper­ate as race sol­diers against the cit­i­zens who hire them.
The sad real­i­ty is that the acts of sav­agery that police com­mit against peo­ple of col­or and, in some cas­es, poor whites far exceed what the American soci­ety would tol­er­ate against a dog, cat, or any oth­er animal.
And so we must con­front the sem­i­nal ques­tion of ‘why are white Americans so tol­er­ant of police vio­lence against Black people?
https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​c​o​p​s​-​s​p​e​a​k​-​t​o​-​b​l​a​c​k​-​d​r​i​v​e​r​s​-​w​i​t​h​-​l​e​s​s​-​r​e​s​p​e​c​t​-​t​h​a​n​-​w​h​i​t​e​-​d​r​i​v​e​r​s​-​s​t​u​d​y​-​f​i​n​ds/

https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​c​o​p​-​k​i​l​l​s​-​h​a​n​d​c​u​f​f​e​d​-​m​a​n​-​i​n​-​p​o​l​i​c​e​-​s​t​a​t​i​o​n​-​b​a​c​k​-​o​n​-​t​h​e​-​j​o​b​-​d​i​s​t​r​i​c​t​-​a​t​t​-​m​a​k​e​s​-​n​o​-​r​u​l​i​ng/

https://mikebeckles.com/a‑glimpse-at-the-astonishing-amount-of-unarmed-black-people-police-have-been-killing/

NO NEED FOR RESPECT

Michael Vick was sen­tenced to prison for allow­ing dogs to fight. Vick him­self was not inti­mate­ly involved; nev­er­the­less, he was con­vict­ed and sent to prison.
Now, as a co-own­er with my wife of our beau­ti­ful Lab-Mix Bud, I can­not imag­ine ever kick­ing Bud under any cir­cum­stances. I can’t even bear the thought of step­ping on his tail by accident.
Why then would a police offi­cer kick a human being? Why would a police offi­cer kick anoth­er human being as offi­cers in Miami Beach, Florida, and Orangeburg, South Carolina, do it anyway?
But the so-called police offi­cers who kick and oth­er­wise phys­i­cal­ly assault Black peo­ple, repug­nant though they are, pale in com­par­i­son to the repug­nant sav­ages who get on social media to give suc­cor and sup­port to their repug­nant attacks on often­times hand­cuffed, unarmed and help­less people.

When pressed by the (lame stream media), peo­ple like Kamala Harris claim that America is not a racist coun­try out of polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy. They need to check that lie at the door and spend a few min­utes on social media plat­forms and read the com­ments com­ing from the sav­age crea­tures who dwell in the deep­est dark­est recess­es of the dark web.
There is no redemp­tion for those crea­tures; there is no rea­son­ing with them; their souls are of anoth­er world.
They are the imbe­ciles who stormed the Capitol on January 6th2021. They are those who sup­port those imbe­ciles. They are the ones who believed Donald Trump’s lie that he won the elec­tions of 2020. —-In that bunch, there is not a sin­gle one of those racist crea­tures who would not rel­ish see­ing the extinc­tion of the entire Black race and sees the police as the means to get to that outcome.

On March 6, 1857, the United States Supreme Court in a 7 – 2 deci­sion, ruled that an enslaved man who had lived in a free State and Territory where slav­ery was pro­hib­it­ed was not enti­tled to free­dom; that African ‑Americans were not, and could nev­er be cit­i­zens of the United States.
That the Missouri com­pro­mise of (1820) which declared free all ter­ri­to­ries west of Missouri and north of lat­i­tude 36º30,’
was unconstitutional.
That supreme court deci­sion added fuel to the sec­tion­al con­tro­ver­sy and pushed the coun­try clos­er to civ­il war.
That supreme court rul­ing was the deci­sion that would become known as the Dred Scott decision.
According to (Britannica)The court’s deci­sion in Scott v Sanford was wide­ly panned by Constitutional schol­ars and was wide­ly con­sid­ered to be the worst deci­sion ever ren­dered by the supreme court >
In par­tic­u­lar, it was cit­ed as the most egre­gious exam­ple in the court’s his­to­ry of wrong­ly impos­ing a judi­cial solu­tion on a polit­i­cal problem.
A lat­er chief jus­tice Charles Evans Hughes famous­ly char­ac­ter­ized the Dred Scott deci­sion as the court’s great self-inflict­ed wound.
Those con­sti­tu­tion­al schol­ars and the late Charles Evans Hughes must be turn­ing in their graves at what the John Roberts court has done to this nations’ sta­bil­i­ty in the Shelby coun­ty Alabama Versus Holder deci­sion in 2013..
The Dred Scott deci­sion was argued to have pushed the coun­try clos­er to the civ­il war, which began on April 12, 1861, result­ing in the loss of approx­i­mate­ly 750,000 sol­diers and an unde­ter­mined num­ber of civilians.

At the risk of get­ting too nerdy, I pull back, suf­fic­ing to say that the Dred Scott deci­sion still guides police actions today. The aver­age cop today is gen­er­al­ly a guy or girl that did not do too well in school.
I know we have heard that in anoth­er local­i­ty; this time, it is true. There are no short­ages of oppor­tu­ni­ties in the United States for white people.
The aver­age white cop was a fail­ure in school who grav­i­tat­ed to law enforce­ment to show that they are somebody.
I was shocked to see one depart­ment right here in New York show­cas­ing on their social media page offi­cers who were arrest­ed and con­vict­ed sev­er­al times and were still allowed to become police officers.
Police offi­cers still believe that they have no duty to respect­ful of African-Americans and the courts have sel­dom di=one any­thing to dis­suade them from that attitude.
If the Dred Scott deci­sion pushed the coun­try clos­er to the civ­il war, I won­der what Shelby County Alabama v Holder did?
Oh, wait-we have already begun to see. They stormed the Capitol in an attempt to over­throw the gov­ern­ment, and with no real con­se­quences for Trump and his white nation­al­ist army, this is just the beginning.
I hope the Roberts court is pleased with its work.
At this point, nev­er mind the court’s doc­trine of qual­i­fied immunity.

.

..

LIKE & SHARE, PLEASE

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

Wherever you read these arti­cles, that often­times gets buried by the main­stream media, unless pub­lic out­cry forces them to cov­er them, the offend­ers are usu­al­ly the same white police offi­cers egre­gious­ly assault­ing and mur­der­ing peo­ple of col­or, usu­al­ly Black Americans.
Regular Americans have become watch­dogs over police because their depart­ments, unions, and the polit­i­cal pow­er struc­ture that have author­i­ty over them refus­es stead­fast­ly to hold these racist mur­der­ers accountable.
Instead, they con­tin­ue with the false nar­ra­tive that police abus­es are iso­lat­ed inci­dents, or worse, do not exist at all.
Private CCTV cam­eras have become ene­mies of police crime to the extent that the body-worn cam­eras that tax­pay­ers pay for to hold them account­able gen­er­al­ly nev­er gets turned on when they are abus­ing mem­bers of the pub­lic, end up being manip­u­lat­ed, evi­dence removed, and the pub­lic told it has no right to those recordings.
It is a vast con­spir­a­cy between the police, their unions, pros­e­cu­tors and Judges, and polit­i­cal patrons.

The fact that any American Police offi­cer is now being held account­able is a func­tion of decades of agi­ta­tion from Black People who decid­ed that they would no longer sit still while white race sol­diers in police uni­forms con­tin­ue to mur­der and oth­er­wise abuse them.

The events in 2020 in which Derek Chauvin open­ly mur­dered George Floyd in broad day­light in Minneapolis, Minnesota, have shone an unyield­ing spot­light on police crimes across America that can longer be denied and make an abject fool of cop apologist.
The rash of evi­dence that proves that most police offi­cers are racist bul­lies or weak-kneed cow­ards who refuse to step in and pre­vent crime can no longer be denied.
Recent laws in some munic­i­pal­i­ties that seek to pun­ish offi­cers for not stop­ping their col­leagues from assault­ing mem­bers of the pub­lic are still a work in progress.
It will be inter­est­ing to see how these cas­es are treat­ed by pro-police right-wing judges, to the extent that cas­es of that nature are brought before the court, con­sid­er­ing the pro-police abuse com­plic­i­ty of so many pros­e­cu­tor’s offices.
None of these atroc­i­ties would have come to light if the pub­lic still depend­ed on Police depart­ments to do the right thing, inves­ti­gate alle­ga­tions of abuse by their offi­cers, and take the appro­pri­ate cor­rec­tive mea­sures against cops who clear­ly are abus­ing their authority.
It too cit­i­zens jour­nal­ists to gath­er footage, some­times risk­ing life and limb on high­ways when they see police abus­ing oth­er citizens.

It is not with­out risk to film their crimes as we saw just days ago in a Miami Beach hotel lob­by where a swarm of those uni­formed thugs bru­tal­ly attacked a sin­gle Black man who had already sur­ren­dered and was hand­cuffed like rabid dogs and bru­tal­ly assault­ed him and a bystander who had the courage to film the encounter.
These kinds of events are not anom­alies; they are the norm. For as long as I can recall, the main­stream media glo­ri­fied police and ignored police abuse, in my mind, gra­tu­itous­ly por­tray­ing police as heroes to be thanked and wor­shipped above every oth­er cat­e­go­ry of workers.
As a for­mer police offi­cer, I nev­er under­stood the rea­son for that until lat­er, when I began to under­stand how these insti­tu­tions were set up and lion­ized and made to be pro­tec­tors of white supremacy.
Almost two decades after the FBI warned that white suprema­cists had invad­ed police depart­ments, nei­ther the depart­ments nor gov­ern­ment at any lev­el took any steps to root out these white ter­ror­ists from their midsts.
To begin with, these police depart­ments were a mere step up from the slave patrols from which they were gen­e­sis, so, under­stand­ably, no one would take the warn­ings seri­ous­ly or con­sid­er doing any­thing about them.

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S.C. officer fired and arrested after stomping man in head, authorities say…

Orangeburg Department of Public Safety Officer David Lance Dukes is charged with first-degree assault and battery in the July 26 attack, officials said

A police offi­cer in Orangeburg has been fired and arrest­ed after stomp­ing the head of a man who was on his hands and knees, caus­ing his head to hit the con­crete, South Carolina author­i­ties said. Orangeburg Department of Public Safety Officer David Lance Dukes is charged with first-degree assault and bat­tery in the attack on July 26, accord­ing to a war­rant from the State Law Enforcement Division. Dukes ordered a 58-year-old man who walks with a stick to the ground, but he moves care­ful­ly because he has pins and rods in his leg from a pre­vi­ous injury, attor­ney Justin Bamberg told The Times and Democrat of Orangeburg.

https://​www​.face​book​.com/​W​I​S​1​0​/​v​i​d​e​o​s​/​5​5​5​5​1​2​5​9​5​8​1​1​740

“Because of my client’s dis­abil­i­ty, he’s rel­a­tive­ly slow,” Bamberg said. The man suf­fered a bruise to his fore­head and was tak­en to the hos­pi­tal by para­medics, accord­ing to the arrest war­rant. Dukes’ lawyer said he ful­ly coop­er­at­ed with the state police and is tak­ing the case seri­ous­ly. “This is a dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion and an unfor­tu­nate sit­u­a­tion,” Jack Furse said. “He has absolute­ly no vio­lent his­to­ry, and he’s not a pro­cliv­i­ty to violence.”
Orangeburg Public Safety offi­cials said Dukes, 38, was fired after their own review of the inci­dent, which was cap­tured on a body camera.
Bamberg said he hopes the city will release that footage. (by the AP)

It is dif­fi­cult to advise any­one with­out com­ing off as preachy, con­de­scend­ing, or both.
When it comes to our peo­ple, the chal­lenge is even greater because we do not want to accept advice or guid­ance from our own.
So the advice is gen­er­al­ly greet­ed with a healthy dose of skep­ti­cism and dis­dain and even­tu­al­ly result in ad hominem attacks on the giver.
Whenever I think about this sub­ject, I tend to be rather hes­i­tant as Bill Cosby comes to mind. Bill Cosby spoke out about what he per­ceived to be some things we could change about our­selves. People turned on Cosby because it forced them to look inward, and we tend not to like to do that.

So even though Cosby had the suc­cess to back up his advice, peo­ple chose to grav­i­tate to the neg­a­tives that they per­ceived in the mes­sen­ger rather than use the mes­sage to their advantage.
What was so wrong about pulling up your damn pants that are show­ing the crack of your ass? What was wrong about say­ing that women must behave respect­ful­ly to get respect or choose who they have babies with wisely?

Like every­one else, Mister Cosby was human, and he made mis­takes like the rest of us but he had every right to speak on the sub­jects on which he spoke even as his own fail­ings and frail­ties were becom­ing evident.
I am nowhere near Bill Cosby’s suc­cess­es finan­cial­ly, but nei­ther am I car­ry­ing his shame at what he has been accused of doing. However, that does not pre­clude me from say­ing we can do some sim­ple things better.
Save some mon­ey for a rainy day and for­go spend­ing on shiny objects. Buy bur­ial insur­ance, par­tic­u­lar­ly for elders, so there will be no need to set up (Gofund me pages) that begs for mon­ey to bury a deceased loved one.

Invest a lit­tle mon­ey in stocks and bonds. Start our own busi­ness­es &, where pos­si­ble, sup­port Black-owned busi­ness­es to stop a lit­tle bit of the cash hem­or­rhag­ing out of our communities.
If you go into an estab­lish­ment and they refuse to serve you, please take your mon­ey some­place else. Sure it is impor­tant to let the pub­lic under­stand that a par­tic­u­lar estab­lish­ment refused to serve you.
I also get the need for the social media videos; racism needs to be uproot­ed and dis­card­ed, which requires that it be exposed.

Nevertheless, be advised that pri­vate estab­lish­ments have a right to refuse ser­vice to whomev­er they chose.
Your mon­ey is your pow­er, do not spend your time yelling and scream­ing at peo­ple; worse, why beg them to serve you. Do you know what they do to the food before they bring it to you, or don’t you care?
Why empow­er peo­ple who despise you?

Where pos­si­ble, grow some veg­eta­bles in your front, back, side yard, in pots, wood­en box­es, flower- pots on porch­es wher­ev­er. If you can grow flow­ers, you can grow veg­eta­bles and herbs that are good for you.
I hear the fan­cy term food deserts being bandied about these days, and I do get that based on the def­i­n­i­tion below, there are regions where poor peo­ple may find it hard to get health­i­er options in gro­cery shopping.
One def­i­n­i­tion for that ter­mi­nol­o­gy is’ regions where peo­ple have lim­it­ed access to healthy and afford­able food. This may be due to hav­ing a low income or hav­ing to trav­el far­ther to find healthy food options.
Traveling far­ther to find fresh fruits and veg­eta­bles can be a chal­lenge for peo­ple with lim­it­ed resources and no transportation.

One way to alle­vi­ate that prob­lem may be to find friends and asso­ciates who have a car and go gro­cery shop­ping where healthy foods are. Ask if you can trav­el with them and offer a few dol­lars toward their gas mon­ey. It is hard to imag­ine a friend or fam­i­ly mem­ber turn­ing down five dol­lars to pur­chase gas when they were going to go shop­ping anyway.
Essentially what I am say­ing is to build coali­tions around these events that are ben­e­fi­cial to you. Make it an out­ing to go gro­cery shop­ping, and this is also a great way for elder­ly res­i­dents to spend qual­i­ty time together.
And while you are at it, buy some veg­etable seed or seedlings; each per­son can plant two or three types of veg­eta­bles depend­ing on the space they have.

Well-tend­ed veg­eta­bles will pro­duce a har­vest which may then be shared. Those who plant­ed toma­toes and pep­pers can share with those who plant­ed let­tuce and egg­plants, and so on.….
The ideas are not panaceas, but they offer health­i­er alter­na­tives to McDonald’s and fat­ty and processed foods.

This is fuck­ing outrageous.
If this does­n’t stop, there will be seri­ous con­se­quences; there is no way that this kind of crazi­ness can con­tin­ue with­out seri­ous blowback.
It is get­ting from bad to worse in America but don’t just take my word for it, view this video for your­self, and then decide.
Remember that nei­ther the young lady nor her moth­er com­mit­ted a crime.

https://​www​.face​book​.com/​1​0​2​0​2​3​0​6​2​1​0​4​1​2​1​/​v​i​d​e​o​s​/​8​1​4​8​5​5​1​8​9​2​1​2​4​19/

So as a father, I am won­der­ing if my daugh­ter was walk­ing down the road and some cop pulls up, grabs her, then throws her on the ground, and com­mences to choke her with his full weight on top of her in the swel­ter­ing heat, am I sup­posed to stand there until he kills her?
Before you answer the ques­tion, let me first say that even if she had com­mit­ted a crime, this would have been out­ra­geous as there are myr­i­ad ways that a real police offi­cer, not a race sol­dier, can deal with a sit­u­a­tion that does not include throw­ing some­one to the ground and lay­ing on top of them.

https://​www​.face​book​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​/​?​r​e​f​=​s​e​a​r​c​h​&​v​=​1​7​7​6​4​7​4​9​4​4​3​0​0​6​5​&​e​x​t​e​r​n​a​l​_​l​o​g​_​i​d​=​0​8​3​d​6​f​d​5​-​4​f​e​7​-​4​3​f​f​-​8​885 – 8519a169b75f&q=black%20filter%20with%20ana%20kasparin%20black%20teen%20wrongfully%20arrested%20and%20restrained

Now remem­ber that she com­mit­ted no crime, broke no ordi­nance, so as a father, what would you do if your daugh­ter was being treat­ed that way? Would you stand by and allow some thug piece of garbage to mur­der your child with­out tak­ing action?
Where is the out­rage while all of this mad­ness is going on? Where are the fathers that need to step up and make an exam­ple out of these mur­der­ers and ensure that before they pon­der com­mit­ting these atroc­i­ties, they think long and hard about doing so?

The facts are as fol­lows as report­ed by Newsweek​.com; Someone alleged­ly con­tact­ed the Kaufman County, Texas sher­if­f’s depart­ment to report that 18-year-old Nekia Trigg was jump­ing in front of cars in traf­fic. Trigg is a res­i­dent of Forney, TexasWhen the sev­en-minute video begins, an offi­cer, iden­ti­fied as Kaufman County Deputy Conner Martin, is lay­ing on top of Trigg as women around them scream. Trigg’s moth­er, 41-year-old Antanique Ray, tells Martin, “You don’t have to ever hit her, okay? She will stay down.
Martin tells Ray, “You need to back up. You need to back up.” As Ray light­ly touch­es Martin’s hand, grip­ping her daugh­ter’s wrist, Martin starts scream­ing, “Do not touch me! Back up! Back up!”
Ray responds, “Just calm down,” as the offi­cer lays back down on top of Trigg. Ray then begins hold­ing Trigg’s hand as Martin con­tin­ues pin­ning Trigg’s wrist to the ground.
One girl says Trigg’s name and keeps telling her, “Just calm down.” Another per­son exclaims, “It’s 102 degrees out here.“Trigg, still pinned under Martin, then says, “I can’t breathe.” At some point, she vom­its as Martin con­tin­ues hold­ing her down. The cam­era zooms in to find a stream of watery vom­it coat­ing her right cheek as she heaves with labored breath.

Martin and anoth­er offi­cer then instruct Trigg to roll over. They roll her over and hand­cuff her as she cries. Ray then screams at Martin, “I need your f*cking badge num­ber and your name.” She then notices Martin’s body cam­era dan­gling from his shirt. She asks him why his cam­era was­n’t on his shirt cor­rect­ly while he was pin­ning her daughter.
As the offi­cers walk Trigg towards a patrol car, the cam­era view gets blocked by the offi­cers’ bod­ies. Then, Martin yells, “Let go of her!” twice before tack­ling Ray to the ground in the mid­dle of the street.
An offi­cer with a Taser then threat­ens bystanders to get back as Ray is arrest­ed. The afore­men­tioned sec­ond Black girl begins repeat­ed­ly scream­ing, “Put your hands up!” as the offi­cer points his less-lethal weapon at them.
Now lay­ing on her front in the mid­dle of the road while hand­cuffed, Ray says, “All I did was ask you to loosen the hand­cuffs on her.” Ray tells the offi­cers that she did­n’t touch them at all.

Near the end of the video, the girl record­ing it says, “You got sev­en police out here, for three lit­tle Black girls.”
“Nekia was sim­ply walk­ing home and some­body called the police & said she was try­ing to jump in front of cars,” the woman who post­ed the video on Instagram wrote in the video’s caption.
Ray’s cousin, Teronica Williams, told the afore­men­tioned news out­let of Trigg, “Me and our oth­er fam­i­ly mem­bers are hurt this hap­pened to her because we know what type of per­son she is.”
“It takes one per­son to watch this video and deval­ue both her and Kia’s char­ac­ter and have the world think­ing they deserve this and that — and that’s not fair,” Williams continued.
Williams attests that police arrest­ed Trigg for no rea­son as there’s not much traf­fic to inter­fere with­in the neigh­bor­hood where Trigg was arrested.
“Kids are lit­er­al­ly always out­side in the street rid­ing bikes, play­ing bas­ket­ball, etc,” she said.
Ray has alleged police bru­tal­i­ty on the part of the offi­cers. The Kaufman Sheriff’s Office said on Facebook that peo­ple should stop call­ing their office about the inci­dent because the num­ber of calls has become “unman­age­able.”

You real­ly can­not make this stuff up; white racism is such degen­er­a­tive men­tal retar­da­tion that these mag­gots can­not help them­selves from being the degen­er­ate mag­gots that they are.
The Deputy Attorney General of the state of Texas, which has the high hon­or of being where Simone Biles choos­es to live-tweet­ed that the great­est gym­nast in the his­to­ry of the game is, get this, .….….. “A NATIONAL EMBARRASSMENT. ”
The low-life Trump-sup­port­ing, insur­rec­tion­ist bitch ass cow­ard has since delet­ed the tweet and issued anoth­er tweet.

No, you got caught, and now you fear the con­se­quences; that’s what’s hap­pen­ing here. Michael Phelps is the great­est swim­mer in American his­to­ry, Simone Biles is the great­est gym­nast of all times bar none. They have changed the rules of the game because she is that good. Michael Phelps stepped away from the game because of the pres­sure and returned.
Michael Jordon, arguably the great­est bas­ket­ball play­er of all time, stepped away from the game and returned to shine again. Michael Phelps is a white male; Simone Biles is a beau­ti­ful young Black woman who has brought 27 gold medals to America.
What has Aaron Reitz brought to America? Let see, sup­port­ing insur­rec­tion­ists who attacked the nation’s seat of demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nance to install a nar­cis­sis­tic psy­chopath King.
Simone Biles should wear this low-life’ com­ment as a badge of hon­or. Patriots like Aaron Reitz’s idea of patri­o­tism are peo­ple who try to over­turn their coun­tries gov­ern­ment. Simone Biles is not the kind of patri­ot that ris­es against her own country.
In the real world, we call the likes of the dirty dog Aaron Reit traitors.
I won’t even both­er with the oth­er incon­se­quen­tial white degen­er­ates who would crit­i­cize her, suf­fic­ing to say that they would not be able to car­ry all the medals she has won with­out break­ing down exhausted.

More pow­er to Simone Bies for step­ping away and look­ing out for her­self; she was out there rep­re­sent­ing a coun­try that does not val­ue her or her race to hell with all of them; let them all go to hell.

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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. 

Here is a sto­ry from NBC news that speaks for itself. It is just anoth­er iter­a­tion of the pat­terns and prac­tices that con­tin­ue to go on unabat­ed across the length and breadth of America as peo­ple who are sworn to pro­tect demon­strate that when they took the oath all they want­ed was the gun and pow­er but none of the respon­si­bil­i­ties that come with being a respectable police office, which is a noble profession.
They are race sol­diers and gang­sters in uni­form with full pow­ers to take life and that is what makes police vio­lence in America so dangerous.
“THIS IS NOT POLICE WORK,” said the Aurora Police chief. I con­cur, this is what I have said for a decade-plus as a for­mer police offi­cer, “this is not police work”.

Two Colorado officers arrested after arrest in which man was struck with gun, choked

A Colorado police offi­cer has been arrest­ed after video showed him using his pis­tol to beat a man he was try­ing to take into cus­tody, chok­ing him and threat­en­ing to kill him, police said Tuesday. Another offi­cer was accused of fail­ing to stop her col­league as required by a new police account­abil­i­ty law passed dur­ing racial injus­tice protests last year.

In a vio­lent and dis­turb­ing body-worn cam­era clip released Tuesday by the Aurora Police Department, Officer John Haubert is seen pis­tol-whip­ping and chok­ing the man.

“We’re dis­gust­ed. We’re angry. This is not police work,” Aurora Police Chief Vanessa Wilson said Tuesday at a news con­fer­ence announc­ing the charges. “We don’t train this. It is not acceptable.”

Haubert was charged with attempt­ed first-degree assault, sec­ond-degree assault, oppres­sion, felony men­ac­ing and first-degree offi­cial mis­con­duct, police said. He post­ed bail and was released after he turned him­self in Monday.

Officer Francine Martinez is accused of fail­ing to inter­vene and report use of force by a peace officer.

Police pub­lic infor­ma­tion offi­cer Chris Amsler said Martinez turned her­self in Tuesday morn­ing to the Glendale, Colorado, Police Department, post­ed a $1,000 bond and was released.

Attempts to reach Haubert at phone num­bers list­ed in pub­lic records that may be linked to him weren’t suc­cess­ful Tuesday evening. His attor­ney, Reid Elkus, said he could­n’t com­ment because it is ear­ly in the case. He said, “We will be zeal­ous­ly defend­ing Officer Haubert.”

Attempts to reach Martinez at phone num­bers list­ed in pub­lic records that may be linked to her weren’t suc­cess­ful Tuesday evening. It was­n’t clear whether she has an attorney.

Haubert and Martinez were sent to inves­ti­gate a tres­pass­ing report Thursday when they encoun­tered three peo­ple who had out­stand­ing felony war­rants and tried to arrest them, accord­ing to offi­cial doc­u­ments. Two ran away and haven’t been arrest­ed, Wilson said.

The vic­tim, Kyle Vinson, did­n’t suf­fer seri­ous injury in the inci­dent but was tak­en to a hos­pi­tal for welts and a cut on his head that required six stitch­es, police said. Authorities did­n’t say whether he will face charges for an out­stand­ing war­rant on a pro­ba­tion violation.

“We don’t believe he knew that he actu­al­ly had an exist­ing war­rant,” Wilson said.

Haubert used his “duty pis­tol to strike Mr. Vinson,” the affi­davit stat­ed, and Martinez was “involved in the use of force, but there was no knowl­edge of her using any weapons.”

“It does not appear … that Mr. Vinson had used any force against Officer Haubert or Officer Martinez,” an inves­ti­gat­ing offi­cer wrote in the affi­davit, adding that “Mr. Vinson com­plied with Officer Haubert’s orders.”

During the attempt­ed arrest, Haubert “pressed the muz­zle of his gun” into Vinson’s head and right neck area before pis­tol-whip­ping him mul­ti­ple times, the affi­davit says.

In the video, blood can be seen run­ning down Vinson’s face while he cries out and tells the offi­cer “you’re killing me” and tries to swat the gun away from his face.

Haubert’s body cam­era “was dis­lodged in the process” of the offi­cer’s grab­bing Vinson “by the neck” and forc­ing him “back­ward to the ground,” the affi­davit says

“If you move I will shoot you,” Haubert can be heard say­ing in the video as he begins to squeeze his hands around Vinson’s throat.

“Mr. Vinson appeared to be los­ing con­scious­ness. His mouth was open, and his eyes began to close,” the inves­ti­gat­ing offi­cer wrote in the affidavit,

About 39 sec­onds lat­er, Haubert “began to remove his hand from Mr. Vinson’s throat/​neck area” and anoth­er scuf­fle ensues, in which, the inves­ti­ga­tor said, author­i­ties “did not observe any punch­es, kicks or strikes being made by anyone.”

Vinson was thrown back onto the ground by Haubert and Martinez, and anoth­er arriv­ing offi­cer used a Taser on the man, who was then final­ly handcuffed.

“I did­n’t even run,” Vinson said as he “made a labored groan­ing sound,” the affi­davit states.

The Aurora Police Association did­n’t imme­di­ate­ly respond to a request for com­ment Tuesday evening.

Last year, the Colorado attor­ney gen­er­al opened an inves­ti­ga­tion into whether the Aurora Police Department per­mits “pat­terns and prac­tices … that might deprive indi­vid­u­als of their con­sti­tu­tion­al rights” after Elijah McClain, a young Black man, died in offi­cers’ custody.

Officers on Aug. 24, 2019, placed him in a choke­hold and para­medics inject­ed him with a large dose of ket­a­mine, a pow­er­ful seda­tive. McClain, 23, died days later.

A year lat­er, the police depart­ment drew addi­tion­al scruti­ny after a viral video showed offi­cers with guns drawn on a group of Black women and girls who had been ordered to lie face down in a park­ing lot while some of them were hand­cuffed. The group cried and screamed, with one young girl yelling, “I want my mother!”

The offi­cers had stopped their car on the belief that it was stolen because it shared the plate num­ber of a stolen motor­cy­cle, a police spokes­woman said. But after they deter­mined that the car had­n’t been stolen, police “unhand­cuffed every­one involved, made efforts to explain what hap­pened, and apol­o­gized,” offi­cials said.

Last year, Colorado leg­is­la­tors passed a bill that, among oth­er things, requires all offi­cers to use body cam­eras by July 2023, bans choke­holds, lim­its poten­tial­ly lethal uses of force, and removes qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty from police, poten­tial­ly expos­ing offi­cers to law­suits for their actions in use-of-force cases.

The law also requires offi­cers to inter­vene when they see col­leagues use exces­sive force and to report it to superiors.

Legislators strength­ened the law this year to encour­age more offi­cers to use their body cam­eras and pro­mote “de-esca­la­tion tech­niques” in police encounters.(Watch cop beat nbc news)

It is remark­able what peo­ple will do for mon­ey these days. Judas Iscariot saw Jesus heal the sick, raise the dead, and fed a mul­ti­tude with five loaves and two fish, and yet, he still sold him away to be crucified.
Some argue that Judas thought that Jesus would have saved him­self from his cap­tors. The tragedy inher­ent in that pre­sump­tion is that even if Jesus had saved him­self from being cru­ci­fied, Judas would still have com­mit­ted one of the most mon­u­men­tal acts of treach­ery ever.
So, where am I going with this? Well, to tell the truth, I am not writ­ing a reli­gious piece; it is sad to say that some of my read­ers are turned off by reli­gious writ­ings, and I get that, but I would rather please God than man, but with that said I would still like to bring my unsaved broth­ers and sis­ters along with me. What do you have to lose?
Anyway, as I said, this is not about reli­gion; I mere­ly broached the Judas sit­u­a­tion to reg­is­ter my dis­gust with what I see hap­pen­ing today in America. Some say it is because of social media, but I’m afraid I have to dis­agree. There were no social media when some black peo­ple sold out our Marcus Garvey. There were no social media when they spied on Dr. King for J Edgar Hoover. There were no social media when they assas­si­nat­ed Malcolm X on behalf of his white ene­mies. And there were no social media when they spied on set-up and lied on the host of oth­er black intel­lec­tu­als and activists on behalf of the ene­mies of Blackness.

Some black peo­ple have a cer­tain lev­el of coon­ery that goes way back, long before the black man was brought here. Let us be real about it; from as ear­ly as the first European from Portugal set foot on the African con­ti­nent, it was irre­versible that the con­ti­nent would be con­quered by force, dom­i­nat­ed, pil­laged, raped, and exploit­ed before they were done with it.
But it would have been a hell of a lot hard­er if African peo­ple were unit­ed against what they clear­ly must have known was a com­mon ene­my of the African continent.
If Africans were orga­nized and unit­ed, those ships bear­ing men with mus­kets would have been stopped, and not a sin­gle white man would have set foot on African soil. So it was the dis­uni­ty of the African peo­ple and the incom­pre­hen­si­ble naïveté of our ances­tors that allowed the rav­ages and the geno­cide that was vis­it­ed on our peo­ple not only to begin but thrive.
In addi­tion to that, African dis­uni­ty and trib­al­ism allowed for over five hun­dred years of the most bru­tal and bar­bar­ic geno­ci­dal actions ever to be imposed on one race of peo­ple by anoth­er in record­ed history.
Fast for­ward to 2021, and maybe you have missed it, but some black peo­ple in America would lay on their backs and allow white peo­ple to defe­cate in their mouths if they were guar­an­teed a pat on the back.
No, I will not name names; doing so ele­vates them; nam­ing them does exact­ly what they seek. I will not dig­ni­fy their exis­tence by nam­ing them, suf­fic­ing to say that I fun­da­men­tal­ly believe in the pow­er of the uni­verse tonex­act jus­tice; maybe what I want for those sell­outs is vengeance, but the Lord said that we should leave all vengeance to him.
Do they make a few bucks when they dis­re­spect and degrade black peo­ple? Sure they do; most clout-chasers on social media who do and say out­ra­geous things to make mon­ey do make a few coins. However it seems to me that what they are real­ly after is clout. To be laud­ed by a bunch of white peo­ple, to get on FOX noise, and by say­ing the most out­ra­geous things about the black com­mu­ni­ty while liv­ing in black skin seems to be a thing that is on the rise.

I will not lie, when I see black men say that America is not a racist coun­try, that cops are not racist, that black peo­ple com­mit a large per­cent­age of crimes with­out under­stand­ing the dynam­ics behind the data, I do wish that they have a vio­lent and fatal encounter with police. Judge me all you want, I feel it, and I said it, I am not a hypocrite.
But we live in an age of sound­bites, not facts. We are now in an age when melanat­ed skin-folk can get their face on social media and even on tele­vi­sion by say­ing out­ra­geous­ly igno­rant things, and that is all the haters and prop­a­ga­tors of lies want, they grab those sound bites and says, look, here is what real black peo­ple are saying.
Oh, I read some­where that Harriet Tubman car­ried a pis­tol for these kinds of coons who were always ready to run back to tell Massa where she was hid­ing, try­ing to get a pat on the back, or maybe to have mas­sa defe­cate in their mouths.
Nope, it has noth­ing to do with mon­ey, it may be called clout-chas­ing, but it is deep­er than that. It goes way , way back. I mean, how else could the last race that became civ­i­lized be giv­en such lever­age to do as it pleas­es to the point that they mis­ap­pro­pri­at­ed every­thing from us then called us niggers?
Yup, they must have expe­ri­enced the same unin­tel­li­gent coon­ery from back then, which allowed them to go all-in in try­ing to exter­mi­nate us.

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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. 

In 2013 the Supreme Court led by John Roberts destroyed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, effec­tive­ly set­ting in motion the raft of anti-vot­ing laws being enact­ed across the coun­try by Republican State Legislators.
In that infa­mous egre­gious rul­ing, the Roberts court argued that the vot­ing rights act was no longer nec­es­sary because the racism which exist­ed in the 1960s is a thing of the past.
Many may think that Roberts and the rest of his Republican cronies mere­ly live in a bub­ble, out of touch with reality.
Not so, John Roberts, a for­mer Reagan admin­is­tra­tion lawyer, is a life­long oppo­nent of the right of all Americans(people of col­or) to vote.
But as most peo­ple know, American Racism is so deeply entrenched and an inher­ent part of the DNA of some who nev­er left where they were born that it is going nowhere.
John Roberts’s life­long goal has been to destroy the law, and he has done just with the oth­er right-wing ide­olo­gies on the court.
Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the dis­sent­ing opin­ion for the minor­i­ty;Throwing out pre­clear­ance when it has worked and is con­tin­u­ing to work to stop dis­crim­i­na­to­ry changes is like throw­ing away your umbrel­la in a rain­storm because you are not get­ting wet.

Roberts, Kennedy, Alito, Scalia, and Uncle Tom-ass all knew that racism was alive and well in America much like it has always been; they mere­ly want­ed to make it eas­i­er to stop black and naïve peo­ple from voting.
Please do not ask me to explain uncle tom-ass; a gar­den­er does what his mas­ter tells him to do.
The fol­low­ing sto­ry is a real eye-open­er to those who are delu­sion­al about where America is today.
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Ade Onibada

When 30-year-old hik­er Marco Williams jour­neyed from his home in Prince George’s County, Maryland, to vis­it Devil’s Bathtub in deep Virginia in June of last year, the out­door enthu­si­ast nev­er imag­ined that a stop for gas would present him with a warn­ing that poten­tial­ly saved his life. In a TikTok that has now been viewed 2.5 mil­lion times, Williams told his fol­low­ers that on his return home, trav­el­ing along Route 119, he vis­it­ed a small ser­vice sta­tion in Kentucky to refu­el and grab some snacks.

“The cashier was like, ‘You best not be around here after dark. This is a sun­down town,’” he said.

A sun­down town as explained by James W. Loewen, a for­mer soci­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at the University of Vermont and author of Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, refers to a town, neigh­bor­hood, or com­mu­ni­ty with a whol­ly white pop­u­la­tion, cre­at­ed inten­tion­al­ly by sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly keep­ing out eth­nic minorities.

“You best not be around here after dark. This is a sun­down town.”

“A lot of African Americans don’t real­ly trav­el to cer­tain parts of the coun­try. I did not know this. I’m being naïve, trav­el­ing, but they don’t trav­el to cer­tain parts of the coun­try because cer­tain peo­ple have those mind­sets,” Williams told BuzzFeed News. “The racism and prej­u­dice is still in those towns, the mind­set from the Jim Crow era is passed down, and these peo­ple have no expo­sure because they don’t get out.”

According to Loewen’s rolling data­base, at least 60 of Kentucky’s 782 towns are believed to be or pre­vi­ous­ly have been con­sid­ered sun­down towns. But these towns aren’t just in the South. They are all over the US and con­cen­trat­ed par­tic­u­lar­ly in the Midwest, he says.

Despite the phe­nom­e­non, his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences to sun­down towns are few and often wrapped into tales of the expul­sion of Black com­mu­ni­ties in places like Forsyth Countyand Anna, Illinois, which is alleged­ly known col­lo­qui­al­ly to be an acronym for “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed.”

In her 1969 mem­oir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the late poet Maya Angelou describes Mississippi with the phrase, “Don’t Let the Sun Set on You Here, Nigger, Mississippi.” The same sen­ti­ment would appear on sig­nage post­ed at city bound­aries of sun­down towns, mak­ing clear that Black peo­ple were not wel­come and risked their lives if they dared to defy the decree. Last year the con­cept was por­trayed on the pre­mière episode of HBO’s Lovecraft Country in which the three pro­tag­o­nists are forced to flee a town while being stalked by a police officer.

Activist orga­ni­za­tions have used the term more recent­ly. In 2017, the NAACP issued a trav­el warn­ing for the entire state of Missouri, a first for the orga­ni­za­tion. The deci­sion was in response to a bill designed to lim­it dis­crim­i­na­tion law­suits by mak­ing changes to the Missouri Human Rights Act. Senate Bill No. 43 would require employ­ees prove that their pro­tect­ed char­ac­ter­is­tics were a “moti­vat­ing fac­tor” for being dis­crim­i­nat­ed against when pre­vi­ous­ly the require­ment was that sim­ply showed it was a “con­tribut­ing factor.”

The NAACP also ref­er­enced anec­do­tal exam­ples of hate crimes, and data which showed Black motorists were 75% more like­ly to be pulled over and stopped and searched by police enforce­ment than their white coun­ter­parts. (The state of Missouri offered no pub­lic response to the NAACP but did make a Black woman the face of its tourism cam­paign last year.)

And in 2020, a group called the Defund San Antonio Police Department Coalition issued a trav­el warn­ing for San Antonio, label­ing the city as a sun­down town. “A trav­el advi­so­ry has been issued to warn that any Black peo­ple in or trav­el­ing to San Antonio use increased cau­tion when vis­it­ing the city due to the city’s polic­ing poli­cies that put Black Lives in dan­ger,” wrote orga­niz­ers in a press release.

Today, the lega­cy of sun­down towns con­tin­ues to cast a shad­ow on the tra­di­tion of the great American road trip, cre­at­ing addi­tion­al chal­lenges for Black motorists who dare to jour­ney off the beat­en path.

Williams took up hik­ing as a hob­by in response to the pan­dem­ic. In June 2020, he made the sev­en-hour jour­ney by road with a non-Black friend to vis­it Virginia’s hid­den gem, Devil’s Bathtub.

“When I usu­al­ly trav­el, I’m going to cities like New York, Miami, Atlanta, major pop­u­lat­ed cities. I want­ed to get in touch with my nature side and I want­ed to explore the rur­al American South,” said Williams.

In recent years, the angst of being a Black motorist has been cap­tured with the hash­tag #DrivingWhileBlack. As Americans flock to the open roads in a bid to reclaim their sum­mer after more than a year of restric­tions, the free­dom and excite­ment of the road trip isn’t with­out caveats for minori­ties look­ing to ven­ture to less diverse destinations.

“En route, there were a bunch of Confederate flags, a lot of ‘Make America Great Again’ flags, there’s even a few Klan lounges in South Carolina that we came across,” said Williams. “It’s when you veer off to the back roads that don’t con­nect to the high­way, that’s when you find your­self in trou­ble, and it sucks because the hik­ing spots [are] in these back wood­ed areas like West Virginia and Kentucky.”

Williams said he didn’t believe the cashier who sug­gest­ed he leave town before sun­down did so with mali­cious intent. “I don’t think she was being racist toward me. If any­thing I got the ener­gy that she was look­ing out for me so I believed her and got out of there,” he said.

Rather than chal­lenge the con­ven­tion and try his luck, Williams and his com­pan­ion quick­ly got on with their jour­ney back to Maryland, because “dead men tell no tales.” Despite the expe­ri­ence, he said he would be down to do it all again, but “would def­i­nite­ly be cautious.

Exercising cau­tion and trav­el­ing with inten­tion­al­i­ty is a key fea­ture for Black motorists, and is a phi­los­o­phy that trav­el blog­ger Sojourner White is guid­ed by.

Honoring the ety­mol­o­gy of her name, Sojourner, White dis­cov­ered her love for voy­ages on the road as a child trav­el­ing with her fam­i­ly from their home­town of Milwaukee.

“I trav­eled through­out my child­hood,” White, who runs a blog called Sojournies, told BuzzFeed News. “Milwaukee to Louisiana, St. Louis, Michigan, Atlanta, just because we have fam­i­ly spread out. We were always hop­ping in the van or the truck with me and my four broth­ers, explor­ing the US, and then it just kind of grew from there.”

White is famil­iar with sun­down towns. The lega­cy of fear about where Black trav­el­ers will not be wel­comed is some­thing that fre­quent­ly comes up in her net­work of bloggers.

“That’s the oth­er part of the pan­dem­ic: I have not inter­act­ed with white peo­ple as much, and so I find that I deal with racism less.”

“You hear peo­ple say, ‘My par­ents don’t want me to trav­el.’ They say it’s because of racism, and so it’s also a cul­tur­al thing with sun­down towns,” she said. “The after­ef­fects of it, even though they still do exist. As the younger gen­er­a­tion, I would say mil­len­ni­als, we’re the ones who are like, No, we’re gonna explore. We’re gonna kind of go out here. But it took a lot for peo­ple to get there.”

White, who is also a social work­er, said that when trav­el­ing on American roads, details like plan­ning where to stop made all the dif­fer­ence lest Black dri­vers unknow­ing­ly find them­selves “in the wrong spot.”

“It’s like, OK, we can stop in St. Louis, inten­tion­al­ly stop­ping in the big­ger cities to avoid any type of con­flict, grant­ed that even the cities have their issues, but it’s not like going to a space and being the only Black per­son for thou­sands of miles,” said White.

Like many trav­el con­tent cre­ators, the pan­dem­ic lim­it­ed her abil­i­ty to trav­el inter­na­tion­al­ly, so she focused on local excursions.

Because there were few­er trav­el­ers dur­ing the pan­dem­ic last sum­mer, White said she was able to indulge in the road trip expe­ri­ences she wouldn’t have oth­er­wise considered.

She drove to Oshkosh, a town in north­ern Wisconsin. “I’ve been doing a lot around Wisconsin recent­ly with the pan­dem­ic, and see­ing things I didn’t know were tourist attrac­tions. But the oth­er side of that is I didn’t real­ly explore Wisconsin a whole lot because of what I heard about being Black in oth­er areas,” said the 26-year-old.

“That’s the oth­er part of the pan­dem­ic: I have not inter­act­ed with white peo­ple as much, and so I find that I deal with racism less,” she said.

“When I was going up there last fall, all you saw was Trump signs, ‘All Lives Matter’ type of things, or ‘Blue Lives Matter.’ It wasn’t every­where, but that’s part of the rea­son why I don’t have a lot of road trips around the US to go see sights.”

In his book about sun­down towns, Loewen writes about how the social fab­ric of these towns remains very much steeped in the white suprema­cist val­ues they were found­ed on even if their pop­u­la­tions have become more diverse over time and sug­gests that res­i­dents are like­ly to hold a reverse atti­tude to travel.

“There’s all kinds of peo­ple who live in sun­down towns who do not want to, for exam­ple, go to Washington, DC, and vis­it the Smithsonian muse­ums and see the Capitol and do all the things that you do in Washington DC, because it’s too Black,” he told BuzzFeed News. “And the same thing, they real­ly don’t want to go to Atlanta, an actu­al tourist des­ti­na­tion, they don’t go. Chicago is also a prob­lem, all them Black folks.”

Loewen said the num­ber of sun­down towns is much high­er than the gen­er­al pub­lic would guess. But despite their preva­lence, lit­tle work has been done to inter­ro­gate the his­to­ry of these com­mu­ni­ties to rec­on­cile with the lega­cy of racism and the sec­ond-gen­er­a­tion sun­down issues that can present them­selves even where the pol­i­cy is no longer for­mal­ly enforced.

His web­site hosts a data­base and allows user-sub­mit­ted infor­ma­tion for bet­ter ver­i­fi­ca­tion. The project, he says, is the world’s “only reg­istry of sun­down towns,” and he hopes will dis­pel what he describes as the Hollywood myth that these towns exist almost exclu­sive­ly in the South.

“There are five Hollywood movies about sun­down towns and all of them are set in Mississippi, except one that’s out in Georgia. It sets us back in race rela­tions because the whole rest of the coun­try is like, Yeah, we’re all right. This is a good coun­try. Everything’s fine except those nasty white Southerners with all them sun­down towns, and they used to have slav­ery and all that. It’s a nation­al prob­lem. It’s more a Midwest prob­lem than it is a Southern prob­lem,” said Loewen.

The con­tentious mat­ter of where to stop and what areas are acces­si­ble for Black motorists is embod­ied by The Negro Motorist Green Book, writ­ten by postal work­er Victor Hugo Green and first pub­lished in 1936.

It was hailed as the Black trav­el bible and was con­sid­ered a quin­tes­sen­tial aid for Black peo­ple trav­el­ing across the US. The book would let motorists know what estab­lish­ments they could expect to receive ser­vice and also issued warn­ings about the towns where it was dan­ger­ous for Black peo­ple to stay after sunset.

In his pho­to book A Parallel Road, Boston author and pho­tog­ra­ph­er Amani Willett exam­ines the Black American road trip over the past 85 years and bor­rows from pages of The Green Book in telling that story.

“The Green Book is an amaz­ing cul­tur­al arti­fact that oper­ates both as a con­dem­na­tion of the his­to­ry of America and its hor­rif­ic lega­cy of racial oppres­sion while at the same time being a pow­er­ful doc­u­ment illus­trat­ing the cre­ativ­i­ty and resilience of Black Americans,” said

Willett. “The guide shows how we as a peo­ple have always found ways to nav­i­gate a sys­tem and coun­try that is an oppres­sive force.”

The pho­tog­ra­phy pro­fes­sor told BuzzFeed News how ideas around free­dom and trav­el­ing had long been assumed by Americans as rights, rather than priv­i­leges, but that’s not the case for Black people.

“The Black American expe­ri­ence on American road­ways has negat­ed the myth of trav­el as an American free­dom avail­able to all. At best, Black Americans have expe­ri­enced less mobil­i­ty than White Americans and at worst they have been met with intim­i­da­tion, fear, pro­fil­ing, and phys­i­cal harm or death,” said Willett.

Beyond the obser­va­tions detailed in his pho­to­book and his own research into sun­down towns, Willett is cau­tious about divid­ing the coun­try into areas where Black peo­ple can and can’t go when recent events have high­light­ed that racism can be found every­where, mak­ing the real­i­ty much more sinister.

“There are cer­tain areas of the coun­try where Black peo­ple know they have to be more care­ful than oth­ers but the truth is, as we’ve seen through­out the social media era, injus­tices and racial pro­fil­ing exist in all cor­ners of our coun­try,” he said.

Martinique Lewis, pres­i­dent of the Black Travel Alliance and cre­ator of the new ABC Travel Greenbook, a mod­ern-day inter­pre­ta­tion of The Green Book, with a glob­al focus of con­nect­ing Black trav­el­ers with touch points any­where in the world, agrees.

“Black peo­ple are always alert, and it doesn’t mat­ter if that’s in Miami, Vegas, or if it’s Pigsty, Alabama, you know and feel when some­thing is not right,” she told BuzzFeed News. “The real­i­ty is we deal with racism on a dai­ly basis in America.”

With her pub­li­ca­tion, Lewis revives the Black busi­ness aspect of the orig­i­nal Green Bookwith the inten­tion of direct­ing Black trav­el dol­lars their way. She also pref­aces each des­ti­na­tion with a safe­ty assess­ment and encour­ages explor­ers to enjoy them­selves but to also remain alert.

Lewis’s log­ic is that “if you can find one Black busi­ness, you will find the rest of the Black peo­ple,” and con­nect­ing with peo­ple who look like you can make all the dif­fer­ence to your experience.

Willett agrees that access­ing a Black net­work is “crit­i­cal” for Black trav­el­ers to under­stand the his­tor­i­cal lega­cy of des­ti­na­tions and their routes in prepa­ra­tion for “poten­tial­ly dan­ger­ous encounters.”

“I’m very in tune with my ener­gy and sens­ing when I’m not wel­comed in an area or a room, so it’s like cer­tain areas, you do get that vibe and that feel­ing where you’re like, I prob­a­bly shouldn’t be here,” Williams said.

As the Black trav­el blog­ger com­mu­ni­ty begins to trav­el again, White believes that they rep­re­sent the mod­ern-day ambas­sadors for where to go and where to avoid.

A mem­ber of the white suprema­cist group Patriot Front was arrest­ed in Haverhill, Ma., Monday and charged with mul­ti­ple hate crimes relat­ed to prop­er­ty dam­age, harass­ment, armed threats and dis­tri­b­u­tion of white nation­al­ist pro­pa­gan­da. Among oth­er crimes, he’s accused of help­ing to dec­o­rate the city with white suprema­cist “Creativity Movement” stick­ers — which may or may not have been meant as invites to one hell of an arts and KKKrafts event — and tar­get­ing a Black flea mar­ket and a Unitarian Universalist Church.

According to the Eagle-Tribune, Justin Milaszewski, 18, was charged with mis­de­meanor counts of prop­er­ty dam­age for the pur­pose of intim­i­da­tion, destruction/​defacement of a place of wor­ship and defac­ing prop­er­ty. He was also hit with a felony charge of assault with a dan­ger­ous weapon.

Side note: News out­lets keep say­ing Milaszewski is 18 as if we can’t all see with our own eyes a 39-year-old vol­un­teer fire­fight­er from South Boston who recent­ly trimmed his han­dle­bar mus­tache because his now-estranged wife always told him it looked stu­pid. OK fine, he’s 18. I’m just say­ing, racism is like the reverse Lazarus Pit for white people.
Read the full sto­ry here:https://​www​.the​root​.com/​m​a​s​s​a​c​h​u​s​e​t​t​s​-​w​h​i​t​e​-​s​u​p​r​e​m​a​c​i​s​t​-​c​h​a​r​g​e​d​-​w​i​t​h​-​h​a​t​e​-​c​r​i​m​e​-​1​8​4​7​3​3​7​676

By Niara Savag

A fam­i­ly has filed a law­suit against the city of Baton Rouge and the city’s police depart­ment after a 16-year-old with asth­ma was pinned to the ground with an officer’s knee on his neck fol­low­ing a July 2020 traf­fic stop, accord­ing to the legal claim.
Dillion Cannon, ref­er­enced in the suit as “D.C.” was pinned to the ground as an officer’s knee “was press­ing on D.C.’s neck for close to 30 sec­onds, restrict­ing his abil­i­ty to breathe, before the arrest­ing offi­cers col­lec­tive­ly jerked him up off the ground, yank­ing his arms back­ward,” accord­ing to the law­suit obtained by Atlanta Black Star.
But accord­ing to BRPD offi­cials, necks are off-lim­its and the method wasn’t used to restrain the teen.
“A knee on a back is used as a con­trol method,” Sgt. Myron Daniels said at a press con­fer­ence last year, The Advocate report­ed. “But the neck is off-limits.

On July 6 last year, Cannon was a pas­sen­ger in a vehi­cle that failed to stop when an offi­cer attempt­ed to pull the car over for a seat belt vio­la­tion. About 50 min­utes into the pur­suit, and after the dri­ver ignored mul­ti­ple traf­fic lights and stop signs, the vehi­cle came to a stop. The legal claim says the dri­ver and pas­sen­ger both exit­ed next to the car and held their hands above their heads. The dri­ver was arrest­ed with­out inci­dent by one set of three offi­cers. According to the suit filed by Tenesha Cannon, the teen’s moth­er, even though Cannon was kneel­ing and com­plied with com­mands from anoth­er set of three offi­cers, he was held at gun­point and “force­ful­ly handcuffed.”
The family’s attor­ney Ron Haley agreed that the lev­el of force wasn’t nec­es­sary con­sid­er­ing the teen com­plied after exit­ing the vehi­cle. “Our client, her son, was a pas­sen­ger. He doesn’t con­trol the car.. he doesn’t dri­ve it, on his knees, in a sub­mis­sive posi­tion and yet he was han­dled as if he was a threat,” said Haley at a press con­fer­ence out­side of the police depart­ment days after the inci­dent. “When you are on your knees with your hands up, you don’t get much more sub­mis­sive than that. Why was he han­dled in such a rough man­ner? He was not armed. He was not pos­ing a threat to any­one for him to be treat­ed that way.”

The suit iden­ti­fies the offi­cers who drew their weapons on Cannon as Lorenzo Coleman, Travis Williams, and Douglas Schutz. Despite the fact that Cannon, who was prone on the ground, “did not resist at any time,” accord­ing to the suit, offi­cer Alvaro Alvarez “placed his left knee on the back of D.C.’s neck as he grabbed and pulled D.C.’s left wrist behind his back.”
According to the suit, Cannon told offi­cers he suf­fered from asth­ma, and an offi­cer respond­ed, “I don’t give a damn.” The knee remained on Canon’s neck for 30 sec­onds, the suit says. In addi­tion, while BRPD offi­cials claim Alvarez’s knee was on Cannon’s back, “the body cam­era footage, and the cell­phone videos tak­en by bystanders, clear­ly indi­cates that the knee was square­ly on D.C.’s neck and back,” the suit says.

The inci­dent hap­pened just six weeks after the high­ly pub­li­cized death of George Floyd, who was killed after for­mer Minneapolis offi­cer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck, the suit notes.
The suit also says that no oth­er offi­cers inter­vened as Alvarez kneeled on Cannon and that the teen had to wear a neck brace after the inci­dent “It is uncon­scionable and rep­re­hen­si­ble that less than two months after George Floyd was mur­dered by an ille­gal police tac­tic, the Baton Rouge Police would use that maneu­ver against a child,” Christoper Murrell, an attor­ney rep­re­sent­ing the Cannon fam­i­ly, told VICE News.

The fam­i­ly is seek­ing dam­ages for injuries sus­tained as a result of the defendant’s actions, as well as attor­neys’ fees.

Whether it is Critical Race the­o­ry today or pre­vent­ing Enslaved African People brought to the Americas in chains from learn­ing to read, the objec­tive has always been the same.
Look, Black peo­ple, your future rests with you and no one else; under­stand that they are try­ing to stop you from vot­ing because vot­ing is pow­er, a pow­er that was hard-earned but many of you who are cit­i­zens of this great coun­try fail to appreciate.
Whatever you are going to have or get will be giv­en to you by you .…… not by any­one else. There is no they.…. only you.
At the pin­na­cle of the Federal Judiciary sits a man who was vehe­ment­ly opposed to the idea of one man one vote as a young Reagan admin­is­tra­tion lawyer.
Today the John Roberts Supreme court has all but destroyed the 1965 Voting Rights Law set­ting in motion the slate of anti-vot­ing laws that have been tabled across the coun­try, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Republican Run states and in states in which they hold pow­er in the legislature.
There is no appeal­ing to this Supreme court for Justice with its 6 – 3 Republican major­i­ty. Truth be told, the Supreme court has nev­er been a friend of Black peo­ple. It thought Slavery was Constitutional. It thought that African peo­ple were ³⁄₅ human beings. It thought Segregation was constitutional.
The Klan does not need to wear sheets any­more; they are wear­ing black robes on high courts, pros­e­cu­tors’ suits, and stilet­to heels, and they are damn sure wear­ing police uniforms.

If you are opposed to crit­i­cal race the­o­ry, it is because you know that what you did was not just shame­ful; you know that it is rep­re­hen­si­ble. You know that it was heinous; you know that your actions were not only inhu­mane, you know they made you sub-human.
Modern-day Racist want to keep you from learn­ing the truth; Arkansas Tom cot­ton, the wannabe cau­casian US Senator from Texas-no, not the corny one, I am refer­ring to Raphael Cruz, and oth­ers want you to for­get because igno­rance is bliss for them.
They would love for you to shut up, and they use all kinds of means to try to shut you up. ‘shut up and drib­ble’ by threat­en­ing to pull fund­ing from the University Of North Carolina.
Big shout out to the bril­liant Nikole Hanna-Jones, for telling UNC where to stick their tenure.
They tried lynch­ings as a means of ter­ror, arson, intim­i­da­tion, and the omnipresent shame­ful and cow­ard­ly hid­ing behind badges as police officers.

Real badass!!!

Civil rights activist Gloria Richardson, whose fear­less­ness was famous­ly immor­tal­ized in a pho­to of her push­ing away a National Guardsman’s bay­o­net dur­ing a 1963 protest, has died at age 99.
Tya Young, her grand­daugh­ter, told the Associated Press that Richardson died in her sleep Thursday. She was one of the few women with lead­er­ship roles dur­ing the civ­il rights move­ment, and as The Root report­ed back in 2015, her actions con­tin­ue to inspire var­i­ous Black activists to this day.
Richardson was born in Baltimore. Her fam­i­ly lat­er moved to Cambridge, Md., when she was six. She attend­ed Howard University at 16 and grad­u­at­ed with a soci­ol­o­gy degree in 1942. In the ear­ly 1960s, Richardson joined the Student Nonviolent Coördinating Committee and lat­er worked with oth­er com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers to start the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee in 1962.
This orga­ni­za­tion focused on pub­lic-hous­ing dis­crim­i­na­tion health care access.

“Cambridge was built on the SNCC mod­el,” Richardson says. “It may have been 400 – 500 peo­ple who helped with the movement.”
But CNAC did dif­fer from SNCC in one key area: “We weren’t non­vi­o­lent,” Richardson says. “White folks would come there shoot­ing at your hous­es, and peo­ple responded.”
As the black com­mu­ni­ty became more vocal in demand­ing equal rights, ten­sion began to esca­late. In June 1963, busi­ness­es went up in flames as both blacks and whites took up arms, Richardson says. “It was like a lit­tle war, real­ly,” she says. “In a cer­tain peri­od of time, it was almost every night.”

The National Guard was even­tu­al­ly called in as a result of the vio­lence. Richardson met with then‑U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy and oth­er lead­ers to bro­ker the “Treaty of Cambridge” in July 1963, which ordered equal access to pub­lic facil­i­ties in the city. Richardson signed it but nev­er agreed to end the protests in Cambridge. The treaty ulti­mate­ly failed after the local gov­ern­ment demand­ed that a local ref­er­en­dum pass it.
That same year, Richardson was also on stage at the March on Washington as one of six women list­ed on the pro­gram. She was not allowed to speak.
The pas­sage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 slowed down the Cambridge move­ments, and even­tu­al­ly, the National Guard left the city. Richardson resigned from the CNAC in 1964, mar­ried her sec­ond hus­band, and moved to New York City – where she con­tin­ued to work out of the spotlight.

Richardson’s grand­daugh­ter Young told the AP that she didn’t seek recog­ni­tion for her actions in Cambridge.
This sto­ry orig­i­nat­ed @ the root.

Among the most heart­break­ing exam­ples of struc­tur­al racism’s sub­tle effects are accounts shared by black chil­dren. In the late 1970s, when Lebert F. Lester II was 8 or 9 years old, he start­ed build­ing a sand­cas­tle dur­ing a trip to the Connecticut shore. A young white girl joined him but was quick­ly tak­en away by her father. Lester recalled the girl return­ing, only to ask him, “Why don’t [you] just go in the water and wash it off?” Lester says., “I was so con­fused — I only fig­ured out lat­er she meant my com­plex­ion.” Two decades ear­li­er, in 1957, 15-year-old Minnijean Brown had arrived at Little Rock Central High School with high hopes of “mak­ing friends, going to dances and singing in the cho­rus.” Instead, she and the rest of the Little Rock Nine—a group of black stu­dents select­ed to attend the for­mer­ly all-white acad­e­my after Brown v. Board of Education deseg­re­gat­ed pub­lic schools — were sub­ject­ed to dai­ly ver­bal and phys­i­cal assaults. Around the same time, pho­tog­ra­ph­er John G. Zimmerman cap­tured snap­shots of racial pol­i­tics in the South that includ­ed com­par­isons of black fam­i­lies wait­ing in long lines for polio inoc­u­la­tions as white chil­dren received speedy treat­ment. This infor­ma­tion orig­i­nat­ed from @the Smithsonian.

Over half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, not only has American Police con­tin­ued to be the sin­gle great­est organ of oppres­sion of African-Americans and Native peo­ple, but they are also worse than what they were then.
Today Police are mil­i­ta­rized, ful­ly out­fit­ted with the lat­est state-of-the-art weapons of sur­veil­lance and warfare.
It is instruc­tive to under­stand that police are local mili­tias that oper­ate out­side the bound­aries of the laws and, in worse cas­es, are a law unto themselves.
Despite their abil­i­ties to kill and com­mit all kinds of atroc­i­ties, cit­i­zens in the Black and Native American com­mu­ni­ties have no say in how their tax dol­lars are dis­persed to pay for these ele­ments of oppres­sion that oper­ate in their com­mu­ni­ties against them…

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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.

How is sur­prised by the result of this study? One does not need stud­ies to bear out these facts that we have long been privy to. They do not tell us any­thing new, they val­i­date what we know to those who are wil­ful­ly blind.
If I have writ­ten one I must have writ­ten a dozen arti­cles in which I stat­ed that the prob­lems in America between Black cit­i­zens and Police stems from one issue and one issue only.
That issue is the lack of respect that Police have for Black Americans. This is not nec­es­sar­i­ly because of any­thing Black Americans did to deserve this dis­re­spect, it derives from white police offi­cers and their bias­es that have been passed down to them for generations…
Here is the result of a study done by The American Psychological Association, pub­lished days ago.

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

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 13^th 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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 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