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Policing

Lucy McBath speaking to a group of supporters in Atlanta early this month.

‘Democrat. Fighter. Mother.’ Lucy McBath Is Redefining Social Justice in Politics.

By News & Current Affairs

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…

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Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke was found guilty of 2nd-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery.

‘This Is Historic’: Why the Van Dyke Guilty Verdict Is a Victory For the Movement For Black Lives

By Commentaries/Opinions

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…

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In December 2016, Bobby Lewis, then 12, was detained and questioned by a Ville Platte detective without a parent or lawyer initially present.

How the Trump Administration Went Easy on Small-Town Police Abuses

By News & Current Affairs

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…

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Mourners attend a candlelight vigil in memory of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers Jr. on October 9, 2014, in St. Louis, Missouri. Meyers was shot and killed by an off-duty St. Louis police officer.

Research Shows Entire Black Communities Suffer Trauma After Police Shootings

By Editors' Choice

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…

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Calling 911

White People Have Been Dialing 911 On Black People Since 911 Was Invented

By Commentaries/Opinions

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…

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Police officers monitor activity outside as protesters demonstrate inside a Philadelphia Starbucks, where two men were arrested.

A Starbucks arrest shows how black Americans are robbed of their power

By Commentaries/Opinions

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.

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President Lyndon Johnson meets with Martin Luther King, Jr., in the White House, March 18, 1966

From “War on Crime” to War on the Black Community

By Commentaries/Opinions

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…

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Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba of Jackson, Mississippi; Ras Baraka, mayor of Newark, New Jersey; and Mayor Michael D. Tubbs of Stockton, California, have all sought to implement criminal justice reforms in their cities. (AP Photo / Rogelio V. Solis ; Reuters / Eduardo Munoz ; Courtesy of Michael Tubbs)

A Crop of Reform-Minded Mayors Trying to Fix Policing and Fight Mass Incarceration

By News & Current Affairs

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,…

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