What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops.
Monday, February 17, 2020
Sunday, February 16, 2020
Opinion | The Equality That Wasn’t Enough - The New York Times
Please read this. Most Americans have little knowledge of American history. It is not sadly,taught in most schools, either in the North or the South.
"Shortly after acquitting President Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, Senate Republicans moved to confirm two nominees for the federal judiciary. The first, 38-year-old Andrew Brasher, was elevated from a Federal District Court in Alabama to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. The second, Cory Wilson, is a 49-year-old state appellate judge in Mississippi. He’s being considered for a federal district judgeship in the state.
Like all Trump nominees, they are conservatives. But they stand out for their hostility to voting rights. In 2013, Brasher filed a brief in support of Shelby County, Ala., in Shelby County v. Holder. Congress, he wrote, did not have the power to reimpose the “burden” of federal election supervision, as it did in its 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. “It is not a necessary and appropriate exercise of federal power under the different conditions present today,” he added. The Supreme Court agreed, ending federal “pre-clearance” for new voting laws in several states and allowing new forms of voter suppression.
Wilson also took a dim view of election oversight in his state, calling instead for strict regulations on voting. The federal government, he wrote in a 2013 op-ed, “might spend less time chasing agendas that aren’t there and more time investigating the voter fraud and other irregularities.”
There’s an irony to the fact that it was these two nominees who were on the docket. This month is the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution. The last of the three Reconstruction amendments, it gave black men the right to vote. It sparked a revolution and a backlash, as racist white politicians used loopholes in the amendment (as well as outright violence) to undermine and eliminate black political power in the 1870s and ’80s. By the end of the 19th century, the 15th Amendment was a dead letter throughout the South.
But it didn’t have to be. There was an alternative vision that would have created a far more expansive right to suffrage — an alternative that almost became law. Yes, there would still have been a backlash. And yes, none of the debated visions gave suffrage to women. But they still created a broader right to vote, which, because of its scope, would have been a more secure right to vote. The 15th Amendment, in short, could have been much more than it was.
The version we have says that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude” and that “the Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
This was close to the original language, introduced by Representative George S. Boutwell of Massachusetts, a Radical Republican and staunch proponent of civil rights for black Americans. But other Radicals thought the federal government could go further than enfranchising black men. Just a few weeks after Boutwell introduced his resolution, Representative Samuel Shellabarger offered an alternative, which went beyond race-based discrimination to essentially guarantee the franchise to all men:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall deny or abridge to any male citizen of the United States of the age of twenty-one years or over, and who is of sound mind, an equal vote at all elections in the State in which he shall have such actual residence as shall be prescribed by law, except to such as have engaged or may hereafter engage in insurrection or rebellion against the United States, and to such as shall be duly convicted of treason, felony, or other infamous crime.
This is still a negative conception of rights — restrictions on what the state can do versus entitlements for the people themselves. And yet, as the historian Alexander Keyssar notes in “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States,” Shellabarger’s amendment would essentially have ended “property, tax, nativity and literacy requirements” in addition to racial discrimination. This was the whole point. As Shellabarger noted, the Boutwell proposal still “leaves to the States the power to make discriminations as to who shall vote,” which could be turned against the formerly enslaved. “The body of this race, made ignorant and destitute by our wrong, may substantially all be now excluded from the elective franchise under a qualification of intelligence or property,” he continued. “Let it remain possible, under our amendment, to still disfranchise the body of the colored race in the late rebel States and I tell you it will be done.”
Shellabarger’s plea fell on deaf ears. Most Republicans favored black male suffrage, but still wanted restrictions on other groups, including European immigrants and Chinese laborers. A sweeping amendment for the “elective franchise” would have opened the door to a truly universal suffrage. It was too much. The House killed his amendment in favor of Boutwell’s.
Debate continued in the Senate, where Republicans split along the same lines. Senator William Stewart, a conservative Republican from Nevada, introduced a narrow amendment similar to Boutwell’s and urged immediate adoption. “This question can never rest until it is firmly disposed of,” he said. “It must be done. It is the only measure that will really abolish slavery. It is the only guarantee against peon laws and against oppression.”
On the other end was Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts (later vice president under Ulysses S. Grant), who, like Shellabarger, thought there was more to do than simply end racial restrictions. “Let us give to all citizens equal rights, and then protect everybody in the United States in the exercise of those rights,” Wilson said. “When we attain that position we shall have carried out logically the ideas that lie at the foundation of our institutions; we shall be in harmony with our professions; we shall have acted like a truly republican and Christian people.” Until we do that, he continued, “We are in a false position, an illogical position — a position that cannot be defended.”
To that end, Wilson’s amendment specified, “There shall be no discrimination in any State among the citizens of the United States in the exercise of the elective franchise in any election therein, or in the qualifications of office in any State, on account of race, color, nativity, property, education, or religious belief.” He, like virtually every other Radical Republican, allowed for discrimination by age and gender. But this amendment, unlike the alternative, would create a broad right to vote and hold office. It would also be inclusive of everyone who might come to the United States.
“I am in favor of the proposition of the senator from Massachusetts because it invites into our country everybody,” Senator Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania said, “the Negro, the Irishman, the German, the Frenchman, the Scotchman, the Englishman, and the Chinaman. I will welcome every man, whatever may be the country from which he comes, who by his industry can add to our national wealth.”
Wilson faced opposition. Democrats opposed any federal regulation of voting, while moderate and conservative Republicans still wanted restrictions on immigrants as well as literacy and property requirements. He prevailed, however, and the Senate approved his more sweeping amendment in revised form.
The House was less kind. It rejected the Senate resolution, beginning a tortured back-and-forth between the two chambers as they tried to accommodate each other. Eventually, congressional leadership appointed a conference committee to hash out the differences. The committee, which included Boutwell and Stewart, produced an amendment almost identical to their original proposals. Wilson and his allies were outraged. But time was running short — this was a lame duck session, scheduled to end the next month. The Radicals backed down and, on Feb. 26, 1869, Congress passed the conference report. The 15th Amendment was ready for ratification. A year later, it was on the books.
This was a narrow right to suffrage. Even still, as the historian Eric Foner argues in “The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution,” it was a “radical change in the political system.” It affirmed that black American men were now “equal members of the body politic” and opened the door to truly universal suffrage.
Unfortunately, that would have to wait. It’s not just that the 15th Amendment neglected women — setting off a schism in the women’s rights movement, between those who supported the amendment and those who didn’t — but that by rejecting the broad language favored by the more radical of the Republicans, Congress allowed restrictions based on property, literacy and native birth. And just as Shellabarger predicted, white Southerners rejected black enfranchisement at their first opportunity.
Through terror and violence, former Confederates toppled Reconstruction governments. With power in hand, they resurrected white supremacy and suppressed black voting. The Supreme Court could have been an obstacle to these efforts to reimpose the conditions of slavery. But it took a narrow view of the Reconstruction amendments, including the 15th. It allowed the white South to build impossibly high barriers to black voting, using the exact tools anticipated by proponents of a more extensive right to vote.
In 1890, Congress attempted to pass a law for federal supervision of congressional elections. However, Foner notes, “it fell victim to Republican infighting and a southern filibuster in the Senate.” As the new century dawned, voting rights for most African-Americans were dead, killed by white hostility in the South and white indifference in the North.
But this wasn’t inevitable. The Wilson amendment nearly became the 15th Amendment, and in that world, there might have been more energy for black rights — for voting rights writ large — in the face of Southern intransigence. Americans would not have had to wait until the 1960s to fully exercise their right to the franchise. We would still have anti-voting reactionaries, but they would have had to work harder to make their ideas a reality.
There’s a chance I’m thinking too small. An America that guarantees the right to vote and hold office for blacks and immigrants in 1870 develops very differently from the one that doesn’t. Women’s suffrage might have come quicker. The idea of using government to ameliorate economic divides might have caught on earlier — the inequality of the Gilded Age might have been tamed before it ran out of control.
“No matter how unpopular it is, no matter what it costs, no matter whether it brings victory or defeat, it is our duty to hope on and struggle on and work on until we make the humblest citizen of the United States the peer and the equal in rights and privileges of every other citizen of the United States,” Wilson declared in defense of his amendment. There’s always reaction — and there will always be backlash. But imagine if 150 years ago we had taken a longer step toward universal suffrage. It might have put us closer to, as Wilson put it, “the complete triumph of equality and justice” — or at least a lot closer than we are now."
Opinion | The Equality That Wasn’t Enough - The New York Times
Judge Rejects New York’s Stop-and-Frisk Policy- The New York Times
A federal judge ruled on Monday that the stop-and-frisk tactics of the New York Police Department violated the constitutional rights of minorities in the city, repudiating a major element in the Bloomberg administration’s crime-fighting legacy.
The use of police stops has been widely cited by city officials as a linchpin of New York’s success story in seeing murders and major crimes fall to historic lows. The police say the practice has saved the lives of thousands of young black and Hispanic men by removing thousands of guns from the streets.
But the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, found that the Police Department resorted to a “policy of indirect racial profiling” as it increased the number of stops in minority communities. That has led to officers’ routinely stopping “blacks and Hispanics who would not have been stopped if they were white.”
The judge called for a federal monitor to oversee broad reforms, including the use of body-worn cameras for some patrol officers, though she was “not ordering an end to the practice of stop-and-frisk.”
In her 195-page decision, Judge Scheindlin concluded that the stops, which soared in number over the last decade as crime continued to decline, demonstrated a widespread disregard for the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, as well as the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg angrily accused the judge of deliberately denying the city “a fair trial” and said the city would file an appeal.
Striking a defiant tone, Mr. Bloomberg said, “You’re not going to see any change in tactics overnight.” He said he hoped the appeal process would allow the current stop-and-frisk practices to continue through the end of his administration because “I wouldn’t want to be responsible for a lot of people dying.”
The judge found that for much of the last decade, patrol officers had stopped innocent people without any objective reason to suspect them of wrongdoing. But her criticism went beyond the conduct of police officers.
“I also conclude that the city’s highest officials have turned a blind eye to the evidence that officers are conducting stops in a racially discriminatory manner,” she wrote, citing statements that Mr. Bloomberg and the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, have made in defending the policy.
Judge Scheindlin ordered a number of remedies, including a pilot program in which officers in at least five precincts across the city will wear cameras on their bodies to record street encounters. She also ordered a “joint remedial process” — in essence, a series of community meetings — to solicit public comments on how to reform the department’s tactics.
The judge named Peter L. Zimroth, a partner in Arnold & Porter L.L.P., and a former corporation counsel and prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, to monitor the Police Department’s compliance with the United States Constitution. The installation of a monitor will leave the department under a degree of judicial control that is certain to shape the policing strategies under the next mayor.
Judge Scheindlin’s decision grapples with the legacy of Terry v. Ohio, a 1968 ruling by the Supreme Court, which held that stopping and frisking was constitutionally permissible under certain conditions. But she said that changes to the way the New York Police Department employed the practice were needed to ensure that the street stops were carried out in a manner that “protects the rights and liberties of all New Yorkers, while still providing much needed police protection.”
The judge found that the New York police were too quick to deem suspicious behavior that was perfectly innocent, in effect watering down the legal standard required for a stop.
“Blacks are likely targeted for stops based on a lesser degree of objectively founded suspicion than whites,” she wrote.
She noted that officers routinely stopped people partly on the basis of “furtive movements,” a category that officers have testified might encompass any of the following: being fidgety, changing directions, walking in a certain way, grabbing at a pocket or looking over one’s shoulder.
“If officers believe that the behavior described above constitutes furtive movement that justifies a stop, then it is no surprise that stops so rarely produce evidence of criminal activity,” Judge Scheindlin wrote.
She found that in their zeal to identify concealed weapons, officers sometimes stopped people on the grounds that the officer observed a bulge in the person’s pocket; often it turned out that the bulge was caused not by a gun but by a wallet.
“The outline of a commonly carried object such as a wallet or cellphone does not justify a stop or frisk, nor does feeling such an object during a frisk justify a search,” she ruled.
She emphasized what she called the “human toll of unconstitutional stops,” noting that some of the plaintiffs testified that their encounters with the police left them feeling that they did not belong in certain areas of the city. She characterized each stop as “a demeaning and humiliating experience.”
“No one should live in fear of being stopped whenever he leaves his home to go about the activities of daily life,” she wrote.
One of the plaintiffs in the case, Lalit Clarkson, 31, a union organizer, said after the ruling that “the stop-and-frisk policy criminalizes a whole race and community of people, just for going to work, going to get some food, going on a train to go downtown.”
The decision, he said, represents the legal system’s validation of what the black community has known for a long time: that the stop-and-frisk tactics rely on racial profiling.
“What we know, in our community, to be the truth, has never before gone through a massive legal process” and been “shown, point by point, step by step” to be true, he said.
The judge’s ruling, in Floyd v. City of New York, a 2008 class-action lawsuit that represents the broadest legal challenge to the department’s practices, follows a two-month nonjury trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan earlier this year. Her decision cites testimony of about a dozen black or biracial men and one woman who described being stopped, as well as the conclusions of statistical experts who studied police paperwork describing some 4.43 million stops between 2004 and the middle of 2012.
But the stops were not the end of the problem, Judge Scheindlin found. After officers stopped people, they often conducted frisks for weapons, or searched the subjects’ pockets for contraband, like drugs, without any legal grounds for doing so. Also, she found that during police stops, blacks and Hispanics “were more likely to be subjected to the use of force than whites, despite the fact that whites are more likely to be found with weapons or contraband.”
About 83 percent of the stops between 2004 and 2012 involved blacks and Hispanics, even though those two demographics make up just slightly more than 50 percent of the city’s residents. Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Kelly have explained that disparity by saying it mirrored the disproportionate percentage of crimes committed by young minority men. But Judge Scheindlin dismissed the Police Department’s rationale.
“This might be a valid comparison if the people stopped were criminals,” she wrote, explaining that there was significant evidence that the people being stopped were not criminals. “To the contrary, nearly 90 percent of the people stopped are released without the officer finding any basis for a summons or arrest.”
Rather, Judge Scheindlin found, the stops overwhelmingly involved minority men because police commanders had come to see them as “the right people” to stop.
“It is impermissible to subject all members of a racially defined group to heightened police enforcement because some members of that group are criminals,” she wrote.
Mr. Bloomberg pledged that lawyers for the city, in appealing to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, would argue that the judge was biased against the police. As evidence, he cited the fact that the judge, who has overseen numerous stop-and-frisk cases over the last decade, had encouraged the plaintiffs to steer the Floyd case into her courtroom by marking it as related to an earlier case she had overseen.
The mayor said the judge did “not understand how policing works” and had misinterpreted what the Constitution allowed. "
Saturday, February 15, 2020
Friday, February 14, 2020
Thursday, February 13, 2020
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
Mike Bloomberg panders to win black vote - New York Daily News. Bloomberg is a racist liar.
"Mike Bloomberg is pandering.
Everybody knows Mike Bloomberg is pandering. Even Mike Bloomberg knows that everybody knows that Mike Bloomberg is pandering. Yet he panders anyway. Why?
Because he’s the Pander Man.
He was pandering last year when he stood in the pulpit of a Brooklyn church and said “I’m sorry” for a racially offensive and unconstitutional policy of stopping and frisking black and brown men in every borough when he was mayor of New York.
He was pandering two weeks ago when he opened a campaign satellite office in the heart of Harlem where his own police officers routinely harassed people of color because his misguided policy told them to.
He was pandering a few days ago when he met with Stacey Abrams, who almost became the nation’s first black woman governor, in Georgia to discuss voting rights, years after he manipulated himself into a third term as mayor.
And he’s pandering now.
After stopping and frisking the black community for more than a decade, Bloomberg suddenly loves black men more than Kim Kardashian.
This summer he will be at your family reunion and every black family reunion in America. He is bringing the potato salad and it will be the best thing you ever tasted.
Mike Bloomberg is Jerry Maguire. He is on the phone behind his desk and he is shouting at the top of his lungs: “I love black people!”
Why? Because the road to the Democratic nomination for president goes through America’s black community, and every Democrat running for the White House knows it.
But no one in the race, no one, is trying harder to win — or buy — the black vote than Mike Bloomberg.
And sadly he has been able to get away with the shameless pandering because black people are on board with his end goal, which is to remove Donald Trump from the White House.
In other words, keep your eyes on the prize.
And to be honest, I was no more interested in what Bloomberg had to say about black people than I was about Bill Cosby on the subject. But I listened anyway, and I like some of what I heard.
“You don’t reverse hundreds of years of theft and exploitation only with modern-day attempts to legislate equal rights, especially when those rights are routinely undermined by racism and inequalities that still exist,” Bloomberg said Sunday during a major speech on race relations and black empowerment ahead of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday on Monday.
“The 14th Amendment that gave citizenship to black Americans and overturned the Dred Scott decision was a historic milestone for America, but it was also a dead letter for many of the very people it was meant to protect and empower.”
Bloomberg delivered the speech in Tulsa, Okla., where, in 1921, America witnessed the deadliest and most destructive act of racial violence in U.S. history. During the riot that broke out, white mobs destroyed a thriving black Tulsa business district, killing between 100 and 300 people.
Bloomberg, a billionaire many times over, admits that he took advantage of opportunities that have been denied to black people “for hundreds of years.”
To help make amends, the candidate is proposing a $70 billion investment in the country’s “100 most disadvantaged neighborhoods,” along with steps to create 1 million new black homeowners and 100,000 new black-owned businesses.
“I believe that this is a country where anything is possible,” Bloomberg said. “And I believe that we have the power to build a future where color and capital are no longer related.”
Bloomberg, 77, may have just changed the game, even if he is late to the party. He is still the Pander Man, but at least he is pandering with ideas and money."
Mike Bloomberg panders to win black vote - New York Daily News
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