By Astead W. Herndon, The New York Times — An air of solemnity hangs over Lucy McBath’s bid for Congress. It is present in her campaign stump speech, when she recounts the 2012 murder of her son, Jordan Davis, a black teenager who was shot and killed by a white man at a gas station when the 17-year-old refused to lower the volume of the rap music playing in his…
Baltimore is going through the same policing pangs as the rest of the nation, but worse. By Nick Fouriezos, OZY — This is a homecoming for Gary Tuggle, only going…
By Miles Kampf-Lassin, In These Times — “We are far from done. This is the beginning and we should use this momentum to keep going forward.” Chicago has long been a city on the brink. Decades of racial stratification, disinvestment, segregation and endemic poverty have left large swaths of the population struggling to survive, while new development has disproportionately favored wealthier residents. The communities left behind by this process are…
The Obama Justice Department thought Ville Platte, Louisiana — where officers jail witnesses to crimes — could become a model of how to erase policing abuses that plague small towns across the nation. Jeff Sessions decided not to bother. By Ian MacDougall, ProPublica — On a chilly morning in December 2016, 12-year-old Bobby Lewis found himself sitting in a little room at the police station in Ville Platte, a town…
Police killings of unarmed African Americans have created a mental health crisis of enormous proportions. By Tasha Williams, YES! Magazine — Following several nationally publicized police killings of unarmed Black Americans in the United States, Eva L., a fitness instructor who identifies as Black, started to experience what she describes as “immense paranoia.” She would often call in sick, because she feared risking an encounter with police upon leaving her…
By Neil J. Young, HuffPost — It was his first day on the job. A 12-year-old kid with a newspaper route, that rite of passage for so many American boys and girls. Uriah Sharp gathered the pile of newspapers he was to deliver and set out with his mother and older brother to their assigned neighborhood of Upper Arlington, Ohio, an affluent Columbus suburb. That’s where Sharp, a young African-American boy…
Mohammed Nurhussein, Black Star News — The legacy of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s 1857 Dred Scott ruling (and opinion) endures today: “[Black Africans imported as slaves] had for more…
April 23rd Edition of Vantage Point Topics A New Book: Ronald W. Walters and the Fight for Black Power, 1969 – 2010 Is “Stop and Frisk” Still a Problem in…
Men arrested for ‘loitering’ had no choice but to keep their heads down, out of fear for their lives. For black people, it’s a familiar situation. By Rochaun Meadows-Fernandez — After video footage went viral of two black men being arrested in Starbucks for “loitering”, many were outraged. The two men had entered Starbucks for a meeting and were instead faced with the profiling and discrimination black people experience on a daily basis.
The Enduring Impact of President Johnson’s Crime Commission Elizabeth Hinton, Boston Review — In his televised speech following five days of civil unrest in Detroit during the summer of 1967, President Lyndon Johnson announced the creation of the Kerner Commission to evaluate the uprisings there and in other cities, and to prescribe policies to suppress future disorder. The American public also demanded insight into why cities burned and what drove…
In their choice of a police chief and through other local initiatives, mayors can make major strides in improving the way their constituents interact with police and the criminal justice system. By Collier Meyerson — “It angers me how we keep going down the same path expecting a different result. We believe over-incarceration and over-policing leads to less crime, yet we have more crime,” Chokwe Lumumba, the mayor of Jackson,…
By Ronald E Hampton — Critics of community policing say that the idea of a friendly beat officer acting as some magic bullet solution for serious crimes such as murders,…