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Sadly, I can I remember the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. I also remember the news coverage in the immediate aftermath the pundits declared 2020 the year of racial reckoning.

Protests in the streets compelled mayors across the country specifically Black mayors and other mayors of color to action. They didnt defund the police or even reduce police officer presence in their cities. What they did was paint the words Black Lives Matter on a designated street or rename a major thoroughfare Black Lives Matter Way.

Sure, this pissed off some white people who saw it as racist. But the truth is that it was an empty gesture to feign solidarity when the reality is that those mayors had no intention of doing anything demanded of them by various Black Lives Matter organizations or by people asserting that Black lives actually matter.

There was hope that although a Black person experienced police brutality, their Black people would receive justice and relief because it happened in a city where the mayor was Black.

This was expected after the murder of Rayshard Brooks with Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. Bottoms tightened use-of-force rules for police, however, she added more officers to the force and chastised people recording police activity.

It was expected with the murder of Adam Toledo with Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. According to Lightfoots own words, Chicago authorities failed Toledo. The mayor initially agreed with calls to defund the police but backtracked, saying that Chicago residents wanted more police. Afterward, Lightfoot came up short again as seen in the unfortunate case of Anjanette Young, a Black woman whose apartment was wrongfully raided, leaving her naked and handcuffed for hours.

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Truth is, Lightfoots reputation concerning these matters is sketchy. What Lightfoot did do was step up the police presence around her, as other democratic mayors had done.

In San Francisco, a city with a history of police misconduct where Black men have been killed including Sean Moore and Keita ONeal, the new District Attorney Brooke Jenkins recently fired staff responsible for the prosecution of cops.

Jenkins was appointed by San Francisco Mayor London Breed to replace progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin. Breed recently declared her efforts to increase the number of police officers, reversing an earlier decision to defund police.

Washington, D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser was the first to paint Black Lives Matter on a street in her city. But D.C.s Black residents saw through the gesture, citing her reputation for siding with the police.

While Black representation in white spaces should be (and is) welcomed, that alone will not yield the results Black folks need for this country to honor Black humanity. A Black person leading in any branch of government at any level doesnt change the fact that government positions and organizations are white institutional spaces. The policies, procedures, postures, and positions of these institutions were formalized by white people. Black people, when in the role of leadership, fulfill the mission of the institution, since whiteness is so embedded.

As Dr. Greg Carr of Howard University says, individuals dont defeat institutions.

Its logical to think that a Black face in a white space will help Black folk. But a Black face in a white space often proves to be simply, blackface. What we, Black voters, must do is become more sophisticated and not necessarily look at the persons skin color to secure rights but rather inspect their mindset for the same goals. All skin folk aint kinfolk.

Photo: A Black Lives Matter mural is painted on Halsey Street in Newark, N.J., June 27, 2020. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Rann Miller is the director of anti-bias and DEI initiatives as well as a high school social studies teacher for a school district located in Southern New Jersey. Hes also afreelance writerand founder of theUrban Education Mixtape, supporting urban educators and parents of students in urban schools. He is the author of the upcoming book, Resistance Stories from Black History for Kids, with an anticipated release date of February 2023. You can follow him on Twitter@UrbanEdDJ.

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Opinion: Representation Can Only Go So Far Without Exercise Of Power For Black People - Moguldom

On Friday, Live PD returns to television. The show had been canceled two years ago at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, which was always more about hating police than racial justice.

Live PDs new name will be On Patrol: Live, and its new channel will be Reelz. The show had been canceled by A&E in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, with the network saying that it was a critical time in our nations history and that it didnt know if there was space to tell the stories of both the community and the police officers whose role it is to serve them. And so, the network tossed police officers aside because this is what the movement demanded.

With it went half of A&Es audience.

Live PD wasnt the only show to get the ax. Cops was also canceled by Paramount after 32 seasons across three different networks. It was brought back last year by Fox Nation.

The cancellation of those two shows helped show exactly what the Black Lives Matter movement was about. Immediately after Floyds death, the movement pushed the idea of defunding the police to the forefront of the national debate. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) called on Minneapolis to abolish its police department, and the City Council initially agreed, requiring voters to vote the idea down. Other cities began cutting police funding, even as homicides and violent crime rose.

The Black Lives Matter movement did not just think that racism is an issue that must be addressed. Its most prominent activists, from Omar to Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) to washed-up former quarterback Colin Kaepernick, thought the entire institution of policing must be abolished. They demanded the police officers be removed from black neighborhoods, schools, and other areas of life. A&E and Paramount were happy to extend that anti-police sentiment to television, even if it meant losing viewers.

While On Patrol: Live looks to pick up where Live PD left off, the shows return should serve as a reminder of what the driving force of the Black Lives Matter movement always was. It was and is primarily a movement to demonize police officers, even at the expense of black lives. Its activists bludgeon those who dont support the movement into silence or compliance using accusations of racism.

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Live PD returns after Black Lives Matter forced it off the air - Washington Examiner

A far-left volunteer group in Portland, Oregon, is offering a free, radical social justice camp that has promoted Black Lives Matter-themed material, taught indigenous land maps and called for the abolishment of police in past summers.

Budding Roses is hosting the two-week camp that will explore social justice issues, youth leadership and arts activism for kids in fourth through eighth grades from July 25 to Aug. 5. The previous two years were held virtually as youngsters discussed race, gender and youth activism in the wake of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

The groups curriculum for the coming session is unclear, but its 2020 camp curriculum featured a Black Lives Matter At School coloring book and a What is Police Abolition section that imagined communities without cops.

How can we keep each other safe? the groups website reads. What does a world without police look like?

Budding Roses GoFundMe page says camp activities also include talk about racism, gentrification, student activism, gender, climate change, and mental health issues that Portland youth are already engaging with.

The camps website contains information from a Tear Gas for Portlanders publication and usage of the irritant by Portland cops during the fervent summer 2020 protests.

Learn about what tear gas is, how it was used in Portland, and ways to keep yourself safe if you get tear gassed, the site states.

The camps 2020 curriculum also contained a section on teaching budding anarchists how protest using songs and drum.

They are a way to express anger, our joy and our power, according to Budding Roses website. Write your own songs and make your own protest drum too!

Radio host Ari Hoffman said he was shocked they didnt offer a course on Molotov cocktails, but noted how the camps participants are being shaped into little activists, Fox News reported.

What they do learn is how to hate the police, Hoffman told the network Wednesday. Your child, if they go to this Antifa camp, will be taught how to be a little activist. Theyll be taught how to deal with tear gas, how to protest thats what parents are sending their kids to.

Campers were previously shown videos and materials detailing White Supremacy Reflection, an Indigenous Land Map and a history of radical organizing in Portland.

Our goal was to promote collective problem solving on issues of policing, abolition, and community safety by providing supplies and guidance to our campers, Budding Roses website reads.

The camp was founded as a project of Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Foundation, according to its website.

We believe in empowerment through education, while also understanding that mainstream education often reproduces structural oppression and disempowers youth, particularly low income and youth of color, the website continues.

Multiple messages seeking comment from Budding Roses were not returned Wednesday. The camps Facebook page, which was active earlier in the day, was no longer visible as of Wednesday afternoon.

Hoffman, an associate editor at The Post Millennial, claims Antifa and other far-left antifascist advocates have a firm grip on Portland since taking over the city during the BLM protests two summers ago.

Portland right now is controlled by Antifa, Hoffman told Fox News. They defunded their police, you still have riots on a regular basis, you still have protests on a regular basis. And these people think that theyve won.

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Portland camp imagines life without cops, features BLM coloring book - New York Post

Republican attempts to gain political support by promoting racist fear and hatred, reflexively siding with police in confrontations with African Americans and denouncing Black Lives Matter demonstrations are a prominent feature of our political landscape. But they're also nothing new. In many ways, the battle lines of 2022 can be seen forming in 1964. A letter published 58 years ago this week in the New York Times can help explain the underlying issues, both then and now.

As President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on July 2, 1964, he called upon Americans to "close the springs of racial poison." Two weeks later, on the same night that Sen. Barry Goldwater accepted the Republican presidential nomination with an explicit endorsement of extremism, a 15-year-old African American was shot and killed in Harlem by a New York City police officer. The incident began after the white superintendent of a group of apartments turned a hose on a group of Black kids who often sat on the steps to the buildings. According to them, the superintendent shouted at them, "Dirty n***ers, I'll wash you clean." They responded by throwing bottles and garbage-can lids at the super, who retreated inside one of the buildings. A boy not involved in the original incident, James Powell, pursued him, and when Powell exited the building he was shot and killed by an off-duty policeman.

That led to an almost immediate confrontation between neighborhood young people and police. Over the following days, these clashes escalated into the first major urban "riot," or "uprising," of the 1960s. (Those two nouns were used by different sides to describe the same phenomena, the former by most white people, the latter by Black people and, as the decade went on, a growing number of whites on the left.)

By the night of July 18, thousands of Black people were in the streets of Harlem, breaking windows, looting stores and shouting at police, "Killers! Killers!" When a police officer tried to disperse one of the crowds by yelling, "Go home, go home," people in the crowd responded, "We are home, baby."

Over the next few weeks, northern urban uprisings spread to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn (then largely Black and low-income, today a zone of intense gentrification) to Rochester, New York; to Jersey City, Paterson and Elizabeth in New Jersey; and then to Chicago. At the end of August, immediately following the Democratic convention in Atlantic City, serious disorder erupted less than 60 miles west, in Philadelphia. As in the other cases, the underlying cause was a series of charges of police brutality, and the fraught or openly hostile relationship between cops and the African-American community. White policemen beating and killing Black people with impunity was, to be sure, nothing new in 1964. Nor was it unprecedented for such incidents to spark rebellion in the Black community, including property destruction and sometimes violence.

But street-level resistance by Black residents became much more common in 1964 and throughout the ensuing years of the '60s. As historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in her 2021 book, "America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s," the vicious policing that remains a principal battle line today has been the cause of many outbursts of rebellion by African Americans. White police officers are almost never convicted of murdering a Black person, more than a half-century later. The 2021 murder conviction of the Minneapolis cop who killed George Floyd provides hope for change on this front, but the police killings of Black people have continued, during and after that trial.

The 1964 hopes of Republicans and fears of Democrats about the political effects of racial conflict are also strikingly familiar. President Johnson feared the riots could help Goldwater win the November election. "If we aren't careful, we're gonna be presiding over a country that's so badly split up that they'll vote for anybody who isn't us," White House press secretary George Reedy said to Johnson after the Harlem riot had been going on for a couple of days.

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Much as Democrats do today, Johnson felt the need to condemn the riots while simultaneously emphasizing the centrality of the pursuit of racial equality and justice. On July 20, he issued a statement on the situation in Harlem in which he declared: "In the preservation of law and order there can be no compromise just as there can be no compromise in securing equal and exact justice for all Americans."

The hopes of Republicans and fears of Democrats from 1964 are strikingly familiar. Lyndon Johnson feared the urban riots could elect Goldwater, and felt the need to condemn them while calling for racial justice.

The prospect that white "backlash" might turn the nation against Johnson and to Goldwater did not materialize in 1964 and Johnson was elected in one of the biggest landslides of American political history. It was to be the much larger uprising in the Watts district of Los Angeles in August 1965 which began five days after Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law that would wind up producing the sort of dramatic political backlash that Johnson had feared in 1964.

The causes of the 1964 rioting were brilliantly explained by a Black woman in Brooklyn named Barbara Benson, who wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times after the outbreak. Benson wrote that she wept "at the damage done to this city and the world by the Harlem riots" and was especially concerned that "this rioting may have made a Goldwater victory more likely." But she felt the need to try to explain what leads to rioting. Her words sound all too contemporary more than a half century later:

All minorities recognizable by the color of their skin have experienced the irrational quality of the police force evident in the slaying of the 15-year-old boy. Many of us have been stopped by police and, yes, many frisked for no other reason than that a Negro in a certain neighborhood "seems suspicious."

If there is no "irrational" fear of the black man operating within many on the police force, why is it that intelligent, collegeeducated Negroes like myself simultaneously fear any possible involvement with the police, even for our own protection?

Let no one be deceived. Many Harlem police are sadistic in their administration of the law, insatiable in their beatings, unable to discern men from children, and irrational in their fear of the black man, as well as incapable of telling one black man from another.

There was really no need for the various commissions set up from 1964 through the end of the decade most notably the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders, popularly called the "Kerner Commission," set up by Johnson in 1967 to earnestly search for the underlying causes of urban uprisings. Benson's letter, then as now, pretty much said it all.

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Racism, policing, politics and violence: How America in 2022 was shaped by 1964 - Salon

The Michigan Department of Civil Rights (MDCR) filed 'Racial Discrimination - Unequal Service' charges in two separate cases, one of which got national attention.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. We're taking a closer look at the racial discrimination complaints filed against the Grand Rapids Police Department.

The Michigan Department of Civil Rights (MDCR) filed 'Racial Discrimination - Unequal Service' charges in two separate cases: one of which got national attention back in 2017.

Honestie Hodges was 11-years-old when GPRD pointed their weapons at her, handcuffed her and put her in the back of a patrol car.

The incident led to a new "Youth Interaction Policy" at the department.

Honestie died from COVID-19 in 2020.

In the complaint, filed by Honestie's mother, Whitney Hodges, it alleges on Dec. 6, 2017, GRPD was pursuing a middle-aged white woman who was an attempted murder suspect.

Honestie clearly did not match the description as she was a juvenile and was African-American.

After the MDCR held a news conference Monday morning announcing the charges, Honestie's grandmother, Alisa Niemeyer, said she has been patiently waiting for the department to charge GRPD.

She's thankful and grateful steps are now being taken.

"Change," said Niemeyer. "Change has to come. No one has to be treated the way Honestie and the twins were or all of the other people involved in this investigation. None of them deserved it."

An African-American woman by the name of Melissa Mason filed the second complaint.

The traffic stop incident related to the complaint happened on Jan. 20, 2020 at Eastern Ave. SE and Hall St.

According to the complaint, Mason was stopped by GRPD for an alleged expired registration plate. She was wearing a shirt that said, "Black Lives Matter" and she also stated "Black Lives Matter" to the officers on scene.

"Even though reports show Mason was compliant with officers [and she was not under arrest], she was removed from her car, handcuffed and held in a police cruiser for approximately 20 minutes," said John Johnson, Executive Director of MDCR.

An officer stated to Mason when she was in the cruiser, "Well, since you stopped running your mouth, we'll let you go."

The officer gave Mason a citation for driving with an expired driver's license, a misdemeanor, and an expired registration, a civil infraction.

In both cases, Johnson claims GRPD was unable to demonstrate people of another race were treated in the same manner in similar incidents.

The Hodges family attorney wants there to be accountability and serious policy changes.

"Guns pulled on traffic stops when there's no reason to pull a gun. The way this affected Honestie for the rest of her life... the way it has affected two 11-year-old boys for the rest of their life is significant," said Stephen Drew, the attorney representing the Hodges family.

Both complainants are requesting monetary compensation.

The City of Grand Rapids stated it has received two matters from MDCR and a hearing has been requested.

Going forward, an administrative law judge will hold a proceeding and recommend if discriminatory action occurred and what penalties should be implemented.

The Michigan Civil Rights Commission will also do their own hearing to make their own findings which could include monetary damages or policy changes.

MDCR is currently investigating 28 complaints of discrimination filed against GRPD and more charges may be issued.

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A look at the racial discrimination complaints filed against the Grand Rapids Police Department - WZZM13.com