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Good to see you. I was thinking about you the other day on the train and then you appear! I love being magic!
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by 82_28 » Tue Dec 09, 2014 2:05 am
by Luther Blissett » Tue Dec 09, 2014 5:57 pm
Off-duty cop assaulted in Queen Village
Posted: Tuesday, December 9, 2014, 3:01 AM
A PHILADELPHIA police captain suffered a broken nose during a bizarre off-duty encounter with another man in Queen Village over the weekend.
The incident unfolded on a narrow stretch of Howard Street near Queen about 2 a.m. Saturday.
Ray Evers, the commander of the Police Department's Criminal Intelligence Unit, was talking with his girlfriend, who had just had $15,000 worth of jewelry stolen from her car, said Lt. John Stanford, a police spokesman.
Stanford said Evers claimed that a passer-by approached and began to film the couple with his cellphone, leading Evers to yell at the man.
"At some point, the gap closed between them, and the guy cold-cocked [Evers]. He punched him right in the face," Stanford said.
"The guy takes off running, and the captain goes after him," he said.
"At one point, the guy turns around and punches him again, breaking his nose."
The entire incident was recorded by a nearby camera, and is being reviewed by Internal Affairs.
Stanford said it is standard practice for Internal Affairs to investigate any incident involving an off-duty cop.
Evers, 45, was treated at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital for his injuries.
The assailant is described in police records as a thin, bearded man in his 40s who wore a dark jacket and red shirt.
Stanford said the man has a lawyer, and is expected to surrender to police to face criminal charges.
This is not the first time Evers was assaulted while off-duty.
In June 2012, Evers said he was attacked by several people inside the Princeton, a bar in Avalon, N.J.
Authorities in the Shore town later said surveillance footage from the bar and interviews with employees didn't confirm his version of the events.
An investigator wrote in his report that Evers questioned his sense of police "brotherhood."
Stanford said Evers was not available yesterday for comment.
by Laodicean » Tue Dec 09, 2014 7:48 pm
by Joe Hillshoist » Tue Dec 09, 2014 9:11 pm
by seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 10, 2014 10:51 pm
by elfismiles » Thu Dec 11, 2014 11:39 pm
by MayDay » Sat Dec 13, 2014 5:43 pm
by seemslikeadream » Sat Dec 13, 2014 8:25 pm
Black Agenda Report
Wilmer Leon's blog
We Must Look Back in Order to Move Forward
We Must Look Back in Order to Move Forward
by Dr. Wilmer J. Leon, III
“There is not a Black America and a White America …there's the United States of America.” – Senator Barack Obama 2004
“Americans must look back, examine and accept how its racist history has become a controlling element of its nationalist psyche.“
As Americans react to the Grand Jury decisions to “no-bill” in the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases and struggle to come to grips with the most recent shooting death of 12 year-old Tamir E. Rice in Cleveland, Ohio, the shooting death of John Crawford, III in Dayton, Ohio, and the shooting death of Victor White III in New Iberia, Louisiana, it is obvious that the system is failing. There are different Americas for ethnically different Americans.
The reasons that African Americans, other people of color and now whites from differing backgrounds are protesting these killings are very complex. Among the major factors are 1) the misperception of African American men as inherently threatening leads too many white police officers to engage in the extrajudicial killing of these unarmed citizens, and 2) America’s criminal justice system fails to hold these officers accountable.
Senator Obama’s assertion in 2004 that there is “One America” was wrong. The Kerner Commission was correct in 1968 when it opined, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal." We see this playing out in economic, health, education, mass incarceration statistics and the focus of this article: unarmed victims of police shootings.
Many are asking, “How has America come to this point?” I submit that this is not a new phenomenon. We are today where America has always been. These systemic failures must be examined within the context of a recent history that has become all too familiar.
“There are different Americas for ethnically different Americans.”
The solution to these extrajudicial killings is not a matter of body cameras: it is a matter of psychoanalysis. It is not a matter of more training: it is a matter of psychotherapy. In order for America to move forward and correct its ongoing racist trajectory Americans must look back, examine and accept how its racist history has become a controlling element of its nationalist psyche.
Since the first Africans set foot on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, the lives and humanity of African Americans have never been respected by America. For example, a Virginia Slave Code from 1669 read – “if any slave resist his master…and by the extremity of the correction should chance to die, that his death shall not be acompted felony, but the master…be acquit from molestation, since it cannot be presumed that prepense malice…should induce any man to destroy his won estate.” Today’s translation: white police officers can shoot unarmed African American citizens with impunity.
Ask yourself this: If Eric Garner or Michael Brown had been white, would the police officers that shot or choked them have felt so threatened? Would the police officer’s patterns of perception, logic and symbol formation have been different reacting to a white suspect vs. a black/Hispanic suspect – perhaps resulting in their lives being spared?
America has a history of extrajudicial murders. In The Negro Holocaust Robert Gibson wrote, “According to the Tuskegee Institute figures, between the years 1882 and 1951, 4,730 people were lynched in the United States: 3,437 Negro and 1,293 white. The largest number of lynchings occurred in 1892. Of the 230 persons lynched that year, 161 were Negroes and sixty-nine whites.” Even though not all of these victims died at the hands of the police, it was not the practice of local law officials to arrest the perpetrators and bring them to trial. The message to African Americans was loud and clear: “The American system of justice does not apply to you.” Neither Michael Brown nor Eric Garner was afforded the opportunity to face a jury of their peers for their alleged crimes. “Justice” was dispensed on the street by law enforcement officials.
“The so-called “War on Terror” has now turned inward.”
It is ironic that as people fill the streets to protest these latest murders, December 4,th was the 45th commemoration of the murder of Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton and his comrade Mark Clark in 1969. Hampton and Clark were summarily executed by Chicago police officers during a predawn raid of the apartment that they shared… while they slept. America has a long history of extra-judicial killings.
The so-called “War on Terror” has now turned inward. Domestic forces are being militarized and trained in combat style tactics by and with Israeli security forces. Too many police forces and officers view the African American citizens that they have sworn to “Protect and Serve” as enemy combatants to be “Feared and Eliminated.”
The most recent grand jury “no-bills” have sent the very clear message that the lives of African American men are worthless. This is eerily reminiscent of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney’s Dred Scott decision in 1857. African Americans “were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.”
Those facing the oppressive forces in this country and being disaffected by the outcomes of its injustice system must engage the very system that oppresses them. They must engage in the streets, courts, and legislatures in concerted efforts to bring about substantive change.
Too many people have placed unrealistic expectations on the Obama Administration. There is no way that one man or one administration can undo 395 years of oppression and racial terrorism. With that being said, President Obama has failed to use his bully pulpit to forcefully articulate and advocate for the interests of the constituents that sent him to the White House.
As Americans react to the Grand Jury decisions to “no-bill” in the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases they must come to realize that we have to look back in order to move forward. Based on this racist history, America never was America to me.
"Teach For America" Trojan Horse Among Ferguson Activists?
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Some minor revisions and additional links have been inserted in this article since its Dece. 10 publication.
It's hard to imagine more ruthless, murderous and insanely wealthy corporate criminals than the Koch Bros. What if one of their executive vice presidents was black? What if she came from Florissant MO, only a few minutes from the spot where Michael Brown was murdered? What if the Koch VP had kicked it with some of the demonstrators and activists early on, maybe even taken an arrest or three, run around some corners and huffed some tear gas with them?
Now suppose that black Koch VP from Florissant got picked as one of the “young black leaders” who met with President Obama at the White House last week. The black Koch VP does not offer to resign her position or denounce her employer, and the Koch Bros empire certainly won't stop doing any of the reprehensible things it does in Richmond CA, in Louisiana, and everywhere else in the world.
Is this OK? Should the activists in motion over police murder of black people be good with this? Should they just look away and say well, the other stuff she's involved in, that her employer's involved in IS a concern but this here is about the police. Should they say that concern ain't THIS concern, that concern ain't OUR concern???? Is this the way a broad new social movement against injustice and oppression is supposed to act?
Can they really doubt that the Koch PR team will NOT use the black VP's participation in their movement to confuse and disadvantage oppressed people somewhere else?
And would it be right for those with misgivings and questions about whether the Koch VP really belongs at the table, numbered among movement activists, to keep their reservations private, restricted to personal and closely held conference phone calls, private emails and the like? Or is this everybody's movement and therefore everybody's business, not just the affair of the designated "leaders"?
Something much like this is actually occurring around Ferguson. One of the “young black activists” who met with President Obama last week was Brittney Packnett, a Florissant native who happens to be executive director for the St. Louis office of Teach For America.
TFA is a nonprofit organization backed to the tune of hundreds of millions per year by Wal-Mart, the Broad Foundation, Monsanto and a long list of corporate villains and hedge fund predators intent upon dismantling, destroying and privatizing public education in black and brown neighborhoods, turning public education into a private profit center. Privatizing public education is also the bipartisan aim of top Republicans and Democrats across the country, so the Obama Department of Education has also provided tens of millions per year in federal funding for Teach For America.
Teach For America recruits young, mostly white grads from elite colleges to undergo a 5 week training program which supposedly enables them to replace experienced, mostly black teachers in inner city schools. Although TFA used to claim it sends its recruits to “underserved” schools where experienced teachers don't want to go, the facts are that underprepared TFA temps have replaced tens of thousands of experienced teachers in Newark, Chicago, St. Louis, and dozens of other cities around the country. Teach For America contends that inner-city public schools are NOT underfunded, that chronic poverty, joblessness, homelessness and short staffing are merely “excuses” used to protect the "bad teachers" which its mostly white temps are replacing. This is precisely the opposite of what knowledgeable young activists like the Dream Defenders Phillip Agnew will tell you.
For those not up on the criminal role Teach For America plays in black communities around the country, here are a few links....
The Daily Dot did an extensive report on Teach For America you can find at http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/inside- ... r-america/
http://atthechalkface.com/…/why-teach-for-america-cannot-c…/
http://dianeravitch.net/…/mark-naison-how-tfa-is-destructi…/
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/teach-for-america/
http://www.thenation.com/…/what-happens-when-you-criticize-…
http://www.publicschoolshakedown.org/teach-for-america
In this context, the Teach For America rep sitting among the “young black activists” is a Trojan Horse.
No, it won't do any good to take Ms. Packnett aside and “talk to her” about this. That's naïve. She has a longstanding career she's spent her entire professional life building, and will not be turned aside any more than our imaginary Koch Bros VP. Likewise, Teach For America isn't about to stop doing what it gets more than $400 million a year to do, and its sizeable PR department will certainly use Ms. Pucknett's presence among Ferguson activists to confuse the unwary elsewhere. Packnett isn't even the only prominent TFA person in the Ferguson mix -- Richard McClure, a TFA national board member has been appointed to the "Ferguson Commission" by Missouri governor Jay Nixon.
Chicago just shut down 50 public schools, and Philly 40 public schools, nearly all in black neighborhoods. Many thousands of black people are in the streets in these and other cities fighting for the right to a quality public education, and the very survival of the communities around them. Often they are the same people in motion over police murders like that of Michael Brown. This is a terrible contradiction, but one with an easy solution. Ferguson activists ought to make it clear that Brittney Packnett is NOT one of them, that Ms. Packnett represents the people who fund her, not any definition of “young black activists.”
Young activists are quite right to reject the old civil rights zombies like Rev. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. But a key element of their old style “leadership” is keeping every real decision behind closed doors. That's one more reason why they are not leaders of real movements, and it's a style young activists would do well not to replicate. This isn't anything that can be handled behind closed doors.
Black woman or no, Florissant resident or not, Packnett does not belong at the table, except as a representative of the forces that fund her career and Teach For America. She is a Trojan Horse, and should be shunned.
by 82_28 » Sat Dec 13, 2014 8:51 pm
by MayDay » Sun Dec 14, 2014 2:05 am
by Luther Blissett » Sun Dec 14, 2014 1:57 pm
MayDay » Sun Dec 14, 2014 1:05 am wrote:Ok, I'm overreacting. I do that sometimes when I've had to much to drink. But still, my fuckin twitter feed should not be more thought provoking than a session on RI, but that's how it is these days. Ho hum.
by Luther Blissett » Tue Dec 16, 2014 10:22 am
by Luther Blissett » Tue Dec 16, 2014 3:23 pm
Report: Darren Wilson's Key Witness Lied About Everything
In a damning new report by the Smoking Gun, a crucial witness in the grand jury deciding whether to indict former Ferguson, Mo. police officer Darren Wilson is revealed as having fabricated her eyewitness account of the altercation between Wilson and unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown on Aug. 9. "Witness 40," identified as 45-year-old Sandra McElroy, has a documented history of racist remarks, criminal behavior, and mental illness.
McElroy's testimony has been latched on to by Wilson defenders because of how closely her report matched the embattled police officer's. But as the Smoking Gun points out, the timing of McElroy's interviews with authorities is suspicious: Both her statement to St. Louis police on Sept. 11 and another to Justice Department prosecutors on Oct. 22 immediately followed stories detailing Wilson's account of the day:
McElroy provided the federal investigators with an account that neatly tracked with Wilson's version of the fatal confrontation. She claimed to have seen Brown and Johnson walking in the street before Wilson encountered them while seated in his patrol car. She said that the duo shoved the cruiser's door closed as Wilson sought to exit the vehicle, then watched as Brown leaned into the car and began raining punches on the cop. McElroy claimed that she heard gunfire from inside the car, which prompted Brown and Johnson to speed off. As Brown ran, McElroy said, he pulled up his sagging pants, from which "his rear end was hanging out."
But instead of continuing to flee, Brown stopped and turned around to face Wilson, McElroy said. The unarmed teenager, she recalled, gave Wilson a "What are you going to do about it look," and then "bent down in a football position…and began to charge at the officer." Brown, she added, "looked like he was on something." As Brown rushed Wilson, McElroy said, the cop began firing. The "grunting" teenager, McElroy recalled, was hit with a volley of shots, the last of which drove Brown "face first" into the roadway.
"I know what I seen," she apparently told skeptical investigators. "I know you don't believe me." Her story of how she wound up in Ferguson that day doesn't sound convincing, either:
When asked what she was doing in Ferguson—which is about 30 miles north of her home—McElroy explained that she was planning to "pop in" on a former high school classmate she had not seen in 26 years. Saddled with an incorrect address and no cell phone, McElroy claimed that she pulled over to smoke a cigarette and seek directions from a black man standing under a tree. In short order, the violent confrontation between Brown and Wilson purportedly played out in front of McElroy.
But when she testified before the grand jury charged with deciding whether to indict Wilson, her story changed:
McElroy, again under oath, explained to grand jurors that she was something of an amateur urban anthropologist. Every couple of weeks, McElroy testified, she likes to "go into all the African-American neighborhoods." During these weekend sojourns—apparently conducted when her ex has the kids—McElroy said she will "go in and have coffee and I will strike up a conversation with an African-American and I will try to talk to them because I'm trying to understand more."
McElroy also brought a highly-touted journal with alleged entries penned in the days surrounding Michael Brown's killing. The entry dated Aug. 9 starts, "Well Im gonna take my random drive to Florisant. Need to understand the Black race better so I stop calling Blacks Niggers and Start calling them People."
If McElroy's testimony in Darren Wilson's grand jury proves to have been made up, this will not have been the first eyewitness report she fabricated:
McElroy's devotion to the truth—lacking during her appearances before the Ferguson grand jury—was also absent in early-2007 when she fabricated a bizarre story in the wake of the rescue of Shawn Hornbeck, a St. Louis boy who had been held captive for more than four years by Michael Devlin, a resident of Kirkwood, a city just outside St. Louis.
McElroy, who also lived in Kirkwood, told KMOV-TV that she had known Devlin for 20 years. She also claimed to have gone to the police months after the child's October 2002 disappearance to report that she had seen Devlin with Hornbeck. The police, McElroy said, checked out her tip and determined that the boy with Devlin was not Hornbeck.
In the face of McElroy's allegations, the Kirkwood Police Department fired back at her. Cops reported that they investigated her claim and determined that "we have no record of any contact with Mrs. McElroy in regards to Shawn Hornbeck." The police statement concluded, "We have found that this story is a complete fabrication."
According to the Smoking Gun, McElroy was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age 16 and has gone untreated for the condition for 25 years. She also has a history of posting racist comments on social media:
An examination of McElroy's YouTube page, which she apparently shares with one of her daughters, reveals other evidence of racial animus. Next to a clip about the disappearance of a white woman who had a baby with a black man is the comment, "see what happens when you bed down with a monkey have ape babies and party with them." A clip about the sentencing of two black women for murder is captioned, "put them monkeys in a cage."
McElroy's YouTube page is also filled with a variety of anti-Barack Obama videos, including a clip purporting to show Michelle Obama admitting that the president was born in Kenya. Over the past year, McElroy has subscribed to three channels devoted to mystery and real crime shows, as well as a "We Are Darren Wilson" video channel.
McElroy has rarely used her Twitter account, though she did post a message in late-October in response to a news report that several Ferguson drug cases had to be dropped because Darren Wilson failed to show up for court hearings. "drug thug will be arrested again who cares," wrote McElroy.
And her behavior on Facebook indicates a bias toward Wilson's story:
In the weeks after Brown's shooting—but before she contacted police—McElroy used her Facebook account to comment on the case. On August 15, she "liked' a Facebook comment reporting that Johnson had admitted that he and Brown stole cigars before the confrontation with Wilson. On August 17, a Facebook commenter wrote that Johnson and others should be arrested for inciting riots and giving false statements to police in connection with their claims that Brown had his hands up when shot by Wilson. "The report and autopsy are in so YES they were false," McElroy wrote of the "hands-up" claims. This appears to be an odd comment from someone who claims to have been present during the shooting. In response to the posting of a news report about a rally in support of Wilson, McElroy wrote on August 17, "Prayers, support God Bless Officer Wilson."
Multiple attempts by the Smoking Gun to contact McElroy—including her three Facebook pages—were left unanswered.
by stickdog99 » Wed Dec 17, 2014 4:31 pm
by Belligerent Savant » Wed Dec 17, 2014 4:45 pm
Typically both prosecutors and defense attorneys vet eye witnesses for credibility because they want to win their cases. Consequently, they will bar eye witnesses from sitting in the witness stand if they discover that their potential witnesses were never at the scene of the crime or that they were not in a position to observe anything that happened. Prosecutor Robert McCulloch invited all witnesses who wished to testify to participate as eye witnesses in front of the grand jurors without any vetting which made it easy for him to explain to the media and the public that there were too many confusing and contradictory eye witness accounts, so that the grand jury had no option but to not render an indictment against Police Officer Darren Wilson. This outcome was very predictable by Prosecutor McCulloch.
The eye witnesses who verified Police Officer Darren Wilson’s tale were not cross examined but those whose accounts differed were subject to vigorous cross examination. There was no vetting out those eye witnesses who were not present at the crime scene and who did not see anything to avoid confusing the jurors with extraneous, and obviously erroneous statements. This shows that the intent of the prosecutors was to direst a play that portrays their actions as being impartial and above board while accomplishing their goal of having the jurors grant them their wish of no charges against Police Officer, Darren Wilson.
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