Archive for the ‘Black Lives Matter’ Category

Hey Black Lives Matter, a Blonde Woman was Mistakenly Killed by Police – Townhall

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Posted: Jul 24, 2017 12:01 AM

Last week, a blonde, white woman from Australia was shot and killed by a Minneapolis police officer. Justine Ruszczyk, 40, was engaged to be married in a month. So far, it looks like the officer erred in shooting Ruszczyk, who had merely called 911 to report hearing a sexual assault. Officer Mohamed Noor, who is a Somali-American, responded to the scene with another officer, and apparently panicked when he heard noises, thinking he was being ambushed. It does not appear that Ruszczyk behaved in a threatening manner toward him, although unfortunately the officers did not have their body cameras or squad camera on to verify this.

Since Ruszczyk was a white woman, it is highly unlikely Noor shot her because he is racist. He most likely shot her because he became afraid for his life and overreacted. An erroneous reaction, which sadly can happen because people are flawed. Maybe Noor has aggressive tendencies. Maybe he didnt pay attention during law enforcement training. Maybe he was high on drugs. The internal investigation should reveal some answers. But the key lesson here? Police officers can make mistakes that are not due to racism.

Black Lives Matter claims that law enforcement killed several blacks in recent years because the officers were racist. However, some of the officers implicated were black or Hispanic. Furthermore, there has been virtually no evidence provided showing the officers have a history of racism. Many of the officers have been prosecuted and found not guilty by a jury. In most of these cases, the jury thought the officers were legitimately afraid for their lives.

Last years fatal police shooting of Philando Castile, who was black, shares some similarities to the shooting of Ruszczyk. Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez pulled Castile over while driving because he looked like a robbery suspect. Castile informed Yanez that he had a gun. Castile apparently reached for his license and registration, but Yanez thought he was reaching for his gun and shot him.

Yanez may have made a mistake by failing to perform a felony traffic stop, where the suspect is brought out of the car at gunpoint. Yanez was prosecuted and ultimately acquitted by a jury.

Based on the shooting of Ruszczyk, it is clear that officers can make fatal mistakes that have nothing to do with racism. Its been years since the Jim Crow era ended. This is no longer even the era of police officers like Mark Fuhrman, who investigated the O.J. Simpson murder case. Fuhrman admitted using a racial epithet toward blacks in the 1980s. Instead today, Americans are inundated with the promotion of diversity and multiculturalism. Theyre taught that its acceptable to look down on whites, but not other races or ethnicities. Young police officers have grown up with this mentality taught in school, not a racist mentality. During police training, theyre given racial sensitivity classes and taught to go out of their way to avoid the appearance of racism.

So it makes no sense that Yanez shot Castile because he was racist. Black Lives Matter ignores similar wrongful deaths like that of Ruszczyk because they go against their mantra. They dont want to allow for the possibility that something other than racism was responsible for the deaths of certain blacks by law enforcement. The radical group perpetuates these false accusations of racism in order to keep blacks and other minorities voting for Democrats. Barack Obama could have stopped this as the first black president, pointing to himself as proof that the U.S. has progressed far in the elimination of racism, but instead he stoked the fires.

Does anyone really believe that young black and Hispanic officers, as well as the white officers who serve alongside them every day, target black suspects because theyre racist? Watch an episode of COPS; it usually features a white officer and a minority officer jovially working together as partners.

The answer isnt rioting and labeling police officers as white supremacists. The answer is ensuring the police are properly trained, that they turn on their body cams when required and follow correct procedures. All the racism training in the world isnt going to fix fatal mistakes that were due to one of those factors.

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Hey Black Lives Matter, a Blonde Woman was Mistakenly Killed by Police - Townhall

Black Lives Matter activist accused of punching police horse …

Photo: Mark Mulligan, Houston Chronicle

Activist Shere Dore speaks at a press conference, Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2016, in Houston. Black Lives Matter activists are calling for a formal apology from Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman and District Attorney Devon Anderson for the comments they made regarding the Black Lives Matter movement after the death of Deputy Darron Goforth.

Activist Shere Dore speaks at a press conference, Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2016, in Houston. Black Lives Matter activists are calling for a formal apology from Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman and District Attorney

Shere Dore was taken in on a warrant while on her way to the courthouse.

Shere Dore was taken in on a warrant while on her way to the courthouse.

Black Lives Matter activist accused of punching police horse returns to court

A Black Lives Matter activist accused of punching a police horse is free on $20,000 bail after spending two weeks in jail because she was arrested on her way to court.

Shere Dore, 41, appeared Thursday in state District Judge Jim Wallace's court after making bail late Tuesday.

Dore was a passenger in a car pulled over for an expired inspection sticker in her Fort Bend County neighborhood on July 6. She was on her way to a routine court hearing in downtown Houston.

She was arrested for a warrant because of an old speeding ticket and was able to pay the fine and fees within days.

However, because she missed court, she was held in the Harris County jail without bail until a judge could rule on whether she could have another bail.

(Story continues below ...)

Defendants in Harris County who are arrested while free on bail are generally denied a second chance at bail.

Her attorney, Brian Harrison, said a judge set her bail and she was released Tuesday evening. Dore did not speak in court or after her appearance Thursday.

brian.rogers@chron.com twitter.com/brianjrogers

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Black Lives Matter activist accused of punching police horse ...

NRA says white families will be ‘tortured and killed’ if Black Lives Matter succeeds – The Grio

Grant Stinchfield, who is a host at the NRAs online television network has made some questionable comments about Black Lives Matter activists and how they stoke racial hatred against white people.

He began a segment of his show by talking about how race relations are strained here in America after eight years of Barack Obama, though he is quick to point out they are nowhere near as bad as it is in South Africa where white families are being tortured and killed almost every day in racist violence.

His guest, however, pulled no punches. Chuck Holton warned those watching to be vigilant because BLM activists will work people up to the point that they lash out at white families in the US.

Right,you know the parallels between whats happening in South Africa and the blatant racism and violence were seeing from people like the Black Lives Matter crowd, he stated. If we continue to let this get out of control, to go down this path ofthis racial tension, this racial hatred that is being forced on the American culture by the Black Lives Matter crowd.

Gloria Steinem says Black women taught her feminism, praises Black LivesMatter

This has to stop, and if you want to see why it has to stop, you look at South Africa, he went on. Over between three and four thousand white South Africanshave been killed in the most horrific ways, brutalized, raped, tortured, drug behind cars, had drills takento them.Some really horrific things.

They arent the only two NRA hosts to go all in on Black Lives Matter. Coloin Noir blasted the group as well as liberal Democrats who were upset with a recent NRA video in which TheBlazes Dana Loesch starred.

Noir claims that with the latest BLM ad attacking the NRA and Loesch, Black Lives Matter has become a weaponized race-baiting machine, pushing the extreme liberal Democratic agenda, calling any and everything that doesnt fit that agenda white supremacy.

He also took issue with many peoples assertion that Loeschs ad was the equivalent of the NRA declaring war against black people. He said he had a hard time seeing where this NRA ad called for violence against anyone, much less against black people. If anything, the video was calling for fighting violence with truth. Hell, I saw more white people looting and being destructive in the NRA ad than I ever saw watching a Black Lives Matter protest on liberal cable news shows like CNN.

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NRA says white families will be 'tortured and killed' if Black Lives Matter succeeds - The Grio

Black Lives Matter shouldn’t be expected to protest bride-to-be’s shooting death – The Daily Dot

The shooting death of Justine Damond, an Australian bride-to-be, by Mohamed Noor, a Somali-American police officer, has turned the entire police brutality debate topsy-turvy and with good reason.

Since Black Lives Matter brought the issue of police violence to the national stage, cases that typically headline the news have involved black victims and white police officersand the publics response to such cases has become expected: Officer kills unarmed black citizen; short-lived to no media attention is paid; protests erupt in support of or against police; punishment is light, if at all. Wash, rinse, repeat.

This most recent case in Minneapolis involving a white civilian and a black cop has, however, garnered quite a different reaction. Damonds death has dominated network morning shows and evening newscasts all week, the same photo of the beautiful, smiling blonde spread across the screen. Headlines focused on her status as a bride-to-be and a yoga teacher. We heard about her fiancs outrage and her familys distress. Newspapers continue to break stories of every new detail, like a mystery that will only end when Noor is punished.

But that isnt the same as social media outcry and activism, which, to be honest, are usually sparked when mainstream media ignores an injustice. For CNN, Doug Criss writes, A vigil was held for Ruszczyk [Damond], but there werent widespread protest marches, like the ones Black Lives Matter held last year after Philando Castiles shooting death at the hands of an officer in nearby Falcon Heights. (After a vigil outside her home on Thursday, hundreds marched to a nearby park in her remembrance.)

While people have every right to be outraged at what seems like a very questionable reason (Noor says he was startled by a loud noise) to shoot an unarmed human, does Damonds shooting death garner a widespread movement? Is there a larger pattern of injustice for the masses to galvanize over?

Untrained, trigger-happy police officers, perhaps. But this is not on par with why movements like Black Lives Matter were created. BLM gets mentioned at times like this because it is the most prominent group in America to address police brutality, so some might think it makes sense to call on the movement to be at the frontlines of the battle for Justice for Justine.

But that expectation shows how little people understand about the movement for black lives. It also shows the hypocrisy, and long-standing history, of expecting black people to do the uncomfortable work that white people dont want to do.

Black Lives Matter was never established to advocate on behalf of white people, nor has it ever had support from the general white public. Though the movement was initiated to address police brutality, from its advent BLM made it clear that its goal was to raise awareness about police brutality and its impact on the black community. Not advocate for all individuals impacted by police violence.

Per the movements website:

#BlackLivesMatter was created in 2012 after Trayvon Martins murderer, George Zimmerman, was acquitted for his crime, and dead 17-year old Trayvon was posthumously placed on trial for his own murder. Rooted in the experiences of Black people in this country who actively resist our dehumanization, #BlackLivesMatter is a call to action and a response to the virulent anti-Black racism that permeates our society. Black Lives Matter is a unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of Black people by police and vigilantes.

The racial specificity with which Black Lives Matter approached the issue of police violence is completely sensible, especially when we consider the fact that black people are 2.5 times more likely to die at the hands of police than white people. Not to mention, since 2005, only 35 percent of officers were convicted for fatal on-duty shootings, according to a study by longtime researcher Philip Stinson. A movement that specifically addresses the disproportionate rate at which black people are killed by police is not only justified, but necessary.

The black community has used the Black Lives Matter platform to bring awareness to its causes, organize marches, advocate for police reform, and collect donations for victims. Among many other initiatives, the movement launched Campaign Zero, a project that lists proposals for police reform, detailing ways to reduce racial bias and mandating that officers undergo better training and always wear body cams so that they are held accountable for their interactions with black Americans. The Say Her Name Campaign specifically shed light on the violence endured by black women at the hands of police, which often goes unreported in the media. Under the banner of #BLM, students at the University of California pressured the school to pull out from its $30 million prison investment. The movement has even had a huge impact on politics, prompting 2016 Democratic nominees like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton to actually address gun control and the need for prison reform as a part of their national campaigns.

Insisting Black Lives Matter owes Damondits advocacy is re-centering the narrative to say that police brutality is a problem for black people to fix, and that violence is only worth getting worked up about if a pretty white woman is victimized. If your rebuttal to this is Well, dont #AllLivesMatter? then I hope to see you in the streets the next time a pregnant black woman like Charleena Lyles gets shot in front of her children.

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Black Lives Matter shouldn't be expected to protest bride-to-be's shooting death - The Daily Dot

Shots Fired: is this Black Lives Matter, the TV show? – The Guardian

... Sanaa Lathan and Stephan James; Lathan and Stephen Moyer; Helen Hunt; DeWanda Wise; and Tristan Mack Wilds in Shots Fired. Composite: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

A year and three weeks ago in the Saint Paul suburb of Falcon Heights, Minnesota, a 32-year-old man by the name of Philando Castile was shot and killed by a police officer after his car was pulled over. The footage of the shootings immediate aftermath, live-streamed on Facebook by Castiles horrified girlfriend who had been travelling with him, ensured media coverage, but by this point the scenario was tragically familiar. Castile was one of 258 black men killed by police officers in the US in 2016.

That same 6 July, near Kannapolis, North Carolina, the cast and crew of a new TV show, Shots Fired, were preparing to film the pivotal scene in their 10-part drama about race and justice. This was the scene in which black police officer, Deputy Joshua Beck, shoots dead a white teenager at a traffic stop. If you remember, I think the day before Philando was shot, there was another shooting [of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge], recalls Tristan Mack Wilds, who plays Beck. So you know, Im coming on the set and Im breathing heavily and watching [Castiles] girlfriend on Facebook, like, as its going on, and its just hitting me like: Yo, this is ridiculous. When is this going to end? I remember walking into my trailer and the first thing I see is my characters police uniform and everything hit me like a tidal wave. Just hit me. I was overcome with just emotion.

That feeling, of loyalties colliding and prejudices challenged, will be familiar, to some extent, to any viewer of Shots Fired, now mid-season on Fox. Even given the charged nature of its subject matter, this is an exceptionally intense television show. Created and exec-produced by husband-and-wife team Gina Prince-Bythewood and Reggie Rock Bythewood, it tells the story of Gate Station, a small US city a city like Ferguson or Charlotte, or Saint Paul where centuries -long community tensions are brought to a head by the police-involved killings of two teenage boys, one black and one white. Sanaa Lathan and Stephan James star as an ex-cop-turned-expert investigator and a lawyer teamed by the Department of Justice to investigate. They are, by turns, aided and frustrated by the local political establishment, played by an impressive ensemble cast including Helen Hunt as the state governor and Richard Dreyfuss as a local real estate mogul.

Since August 2014, when protests in Ferguson, Missouri made Black Lives Matter international news, television has tried to depict the movement, with varying degrees of sensitivity and success. The last series of Scandal improved on reality with spoilers ahead a frankly fantastical ending in which the racist officer was prosecuted and anti-corruption legislation was introduced. The Good Wife wasnt so much criticised as pitied for a cringingly tone-deaf episode in which two wealthy white characters debated racial injustice in a hotel kitchen, surrounded by mostly black staff who later broke into applause. Law & Order characteristically used it as another ripped from the headlines plot. Shots Fired is palpably something different.

It was extremely emotional for all of us, recalls Wilds who, prior to being cast as Adeles love interest in her Hello video, was best known in the UK as Michael the soft-spoken corner boy from The Wire. On other sets, you can go home, decompress, watch cartoons or whatever, to just take your mind off it. The greatest and the worst part with this was you turn on your television, you open your phone up and you see another kid shot. You see another police officer getting off; you see another incident and another incident and another incident, damn near every day.

Lathan who plays investigator Ashe Akino, describes a similar on-set experience: After Philando got killed, we came in the next day and our first AD [assistant director] was in tears. We did kind of a prayer circle because it was just too close to home. She says it was coming to understand acting as a kind of activism that kept the cast going. We want to entertain people, and it is very entertaining, but we also want to inspire people to address the issue.

Yet cop dramas and police procedurals are not traditionally the locus of fiery, thought-provoking challenges to the status quo. In fact, several studies suggest that genre viewers are more likely to have positive attitudes towards the police, as well as supporting punitive policies such as capital punishment. And since the majority of people have little personal contact with the criminal justice system in their daily lives, these dramas can become a key source of public information. Kathleen Donovan, a political science professor at St John Fisher College, New York and researcher in this field, perceives an anti-civil liberties message in most cop shows. [On TV] the typical criminal is a bad person who very consciously and deliberately decides to commit crime, she says. The typical cop is married to the job and though he or she may need to break a few rules from time to time, the ends justify the means because they are the good guys.

The mechanism for delivering this message is not so blatant as the straightforward racial stereotyping of young black men a recent study of Law & Order found that the show actually over-represents whites and females as both victims and perpetrators but this may also be a part of the problem. In an effort to be unbiased and post-racial, there is a tendency to focus on the crime and the process of solving it, with little consideration of the social factors involved, says Alex Vitale, author of forthcoming book The End of Policing. In fact, the history of crime, police, courts and prisons is a history of race relations. By glossing over that history, [police dramas] perpetuate the illusion that racism is not at the centre of American social relations.

So while the real-world racial bias of the criminal justice system is well documented (black Americans are no more likely than white Americans to use or sell drugs, but are arrested at twice the rate, to give one example), the criminal justice system, as seen on television, is devoid of all such context. No doubt the reasons why juries nearly always acquit in cases of police-involved shootings are complex, but it seems likely that the TV-promoted image of the always-benevolent copper might have something to do with it.

What would a radical, change-promoting police procedural look like? Probably a lot like Shots Fired, which not only features a range of prominent non-white characters but crucially also challenges the liberal erasure of race, gender and class by fully exploring how these characters backgrounds impact on their experience. So, Lathans Ashe Akino is not a law-enforcement agent who just happens to be a black women; shes a law-enforcement agent whose experience of systemic discrimination has forced her to develop a finesse in dealing with people in positions of power that her male, Ivy League-educated partner lacks.

I love that whole paradigm shift with the partners, says Lathan. You usually see two men, and with this being a woman and a man and the woman being the older one, its new. She the veteran and hes the green one. In many ways, Akino is the closest Shots Fired gets to that old TV staple, the maverick cop. Shes got the troubled home life, the low-level drinking problem and the passion for justice, but she cant afford to cut corners in quite the same way that white men such as The Wires McNulty or The Shields Vic Mackey do. Its a subtle subversion which reminds us of the ways in which privilege works, both in criminal justice and TV representation.

Many of Shots Fireds viewers will need no reminding, however, as Wilds points out. I think theres enough going on in our communities where no matter how many cop shows we see, its not gonna change the way that we feel just walking outside, he says. He was raised in a pretty poor neighbourhood in New York, at the height of the stop-and-frisk era. So, Ive definitely had my own run-ins with police officers. It had me grow up with the mindset of not necessarily NWA the police, but very, very close to it, yknow?

As well as literally stepping into a policemans shoes to play Officer Beck, Wildss research involved spending time with real officers, observing their work and hearing their points of view. Did it make him feel more sympathetic? I dont want to say sympathetic. I think its more of just an understanding thing. I dont condone anything that these police officers are doing out here; its ugly, its disgusting, but I come from a place now of understanding their training and understanding a lot of police officers mindsets.

Its this same kind of understanding-not-sympathy that Shots Fired affords all its viewers. Its also this exploration of several perspectives black, white, male, female, rich, poor, police, civilian that means it could never be simply Black Lives Matter: The Show. As much as I would want to say that it is, I cant, says Wilds. I am very much pro-Black Lives Matter, but this is a show thats for all of us, not just one race, not just one person. This is for us all to look at each other and understand that were all human in this.

Shots Fired continues 23 July, 9pm, Fox

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Shots Fired: is this Black Lives Matter, the TV show? - The Guardian